Wisp of a Thing: A Novel of the Tufa (Tufa Novels) (20 page)

The music picked up as if it had never stopped. Rob turned to Bliss. “They had her husband’s tombstone rubbings in—”

She took his hand and yanked him away from Vanover and the other men, all of whom stared at him as if he’d grown a second nose. When she had him back in the shadows out of earshot, she grabbed him by the throat. He was astounded at her strength.

“If you ever do anything like that again, Rob, I swear to God, I’ll kill you,” she roared, although her voice was barely a whisper. “I’m not exaggerating for effect, I mean it. I’ll physically
kill
you, and no one will ever find your body.”

“You people take your epitaphs mighty seriously,” he croaked, trying to get free of her grip. Maybe this was why she frightened Tiffany Gwinn.

“You just presumed to be something you most definitely are not. You represented yourself as something you can’t possibly be.” She yanked him close. “And your mouth wrote a check that I
guarantee
your ass can’t cash. And that makes it
my
problem.”

She released him and stepped away. He took a moment to catch his breath, and wondered if she’d done any permanent damage to his voice. “Okay, that was seriously messed up,” he gasped. “Here’s a hint—if something’s supposed to be secret, you shouldn’t carve it on your damn tombstones.”

“What the hell do you know about it?” she snapped.
Calm down, Bliss,
she told herself,
you don’t have the luxury of a temper.

“You threatened to kill me,” he said.

“No, I
promised
to kill you. I’m sorry about that. Just give me a minute, all right?” She turned her back and lowered her head. She’d completely blown everything, thanks to Rockhouse’s unexpected appearance. Rob had seen the truth, but she’d had no time to explain it, to tell him what words and songs and stories really meant to her people, and why the wrong thing quoted at the wrong time could do irreparable harm.

He started to reply, but didn’t. Despite the attack and her demonstration of an almost super-human strength, he was moved by the way she suddenly seemed small and fragile. He started to reach for her, when movement in the corner of his eye stopped him.

Curnen peered around a tree at the very edge of the forest. It was the first time he’d seen her standing fully upright. She wore a different tattered dress, this one a couple of sizes too big that fell off one shoulder, and her hair was haphazardly brushed back from her face. It was both comical and touching, as if she’d wanted to dress up and look nice but literally had no idea how.

She put her finger to her lips, then nodded that he should come closer. Bliss, still turned away, did not notice. Curnen repeated the gesture, and playfully smiled. She stretched one six-fingered hand toward him, tentative and shy, and he couldn’t help himself. He reached toward her.

Her long, supple fingers closed around his hand, and she yanked him after her into the woods.

Bliss whirled. Rob had vanished, and only the vibration of the tree branches showed evidence of his passage. She caught a whiff of Curnen’s distinctive odor. No doubt she’d appeared demure, and helpless, and like a lost little girl to him. And now he was gone.

The images from that first dream before she’d met Rob sprang unbidden to her mind: a white hand clawing out of a grave, and the two figures fighting, one in a blood-spattered dress. She felt a chill, and heard the wind rustle the trees far above. The bonfire flared, and the conversation outside the barn died down. Even the music paused. When the night wind spoke, the Tufa listened, but only a few could hear it clearly. She was one of them.

Bliss bit her lip, clenched her fists, and plunged into the forest after her sister and Rob. For a Tufa, the woods were as vast as the seas, and she was looking for a lone man adrift in them. But she had to try. At least she had a pretty good idea where they’d gone.

*   *   *

Curnen’s grip was as powerful as her sister’s, and Rob barely kept his feet under him as she pulled him through the dark forest. He deflected branches from his face with his free hand and yelled, “Hey, stop!
Hey!
” His mind flashed to the song Rockhouse had sung on the post office porch:
Young women they’ll run / Like hares on the mountain.

Then they burst into the open and her hand slipped away. He almost fell from the loss of momentum.

They’d reached a wide clearing. He looked back, but saw no sign of their passage through the forest.

The air around him felt warmer than at the barn. A stream trickled through the nearby woods, and he heard a glorious chorus of frogs. Above him, the full moon shone down so brightly, it was like silver-tinted daylight. Fireflies drifted through the air, hot gold against cool moonlight.

Curnen watched him silently from the far side of the open space. She swayed on her bare feet, with the same motion as her sister when she sang. Rob got a little nervous, wondering why she’d brought him here. He felt a pang of real panic.

“So, ah … what happens now?” he asked, trying to sound nonchalant.

As she’d done in his dream, Curnen leaped onto him. Her arms and legs wrapped around him, and he sat down heavily under her impact. She pressed her lips against his, and it took all his strength to push her away. He held her by the shoulders, and felt bones and wiry muscle beneath the dress. He wiped her excess spittle from his face and said, “Whoa, no, wait a minute, hold on.”

Her big eyes looked hurt.

“Just—look, can we talk first?
Can
you talk?”

She looked down and shook her head.

“But you can understand me, right?”

Again she shook her head. Then she laughed, giddy and simian-like. Was she joking, or just insane?

She felt amazingly strong and solid in his arms, and as she wriggled on his lap, he tried to banish his unexpected physical response. “Okay, look, I think you’re very, ah …
interesting,
but this really isn’t the best way to get a guy to like you.” He brushed some hair out of her face. Her big eyes seemed even larger as the moonlight glinted off them. “And anyway, you don’t know anything about me.”

She touched his chest over his heart, then mimed breaking a stick. Then she put her palm over her own heart.

Rob choked on unexpected emotion. “Well, I can’t argue with that,” he said, his voice ragged.

This girl was as beautiful as her sister, although in a wild way he’d never experienced. And she definitely aroused him. He hadn’t been with anyone since Anna, and now all those denied feelings surged to the surface. His hand shook as he cupped her cheek. “Have you ever really kissed anyone before?”

She ignored the question, nuzzling into his hand. The moonlight shone off her full, moist lips.

The desire had grown too strong to resist. “Okay, just trust me,” he said as he leaned up and kissed her again, with just his lips. She tasted of wild berries, and her breath smelled of fresh apples. When he pulled away, she whimpered very softly.

A tiny rational voice in his mind screamed variations of
What the
hell
are you doing?
but he was too entranced to acknowledge it. “Did you like that?” he said, moving his hands to her waist.

She nodded.

“Sometimes when people who really like each other kiss, they touch their tongues together.” It was like explaining something to a child, which was totally at odds with the urgency he felt in his body. “Do you think you might like that?”

She nodded again.

“Okay. Now close your eyes, relax, and do what I do.”

With her eyes closed, her body trembling, she looked impossibly young. But he’d passed the point of resisting his own impulses, and was motivated by both raging lust and overwhelming tenderness as he put his hand on the back of her head, drew her down, and touched his lips to hers. Their mouths opened and she tentatively met his tongue with her own.

Her hands brushed his face with light, fluttering fingertips, careful around his swollen cheek and eyelid. She shivered all over, making faint delicious sighs, and he let his hands move up her slender torso until his thumbs felt the swell of her breasts beneath the old, worn dress. When he stroked her lightly, she moaned into his mouth.

Her kisses turned into little nibbles that covered his chin and cheeks before returning to engulf his mouth. He let her dictate the pace, enjoying the way she delighted in each sensation. When she finally stopped and looked into his eyes, the simplicity of the tenderness he saw in them almost brought him to tears. He’d forgotten that look, and the feelings it inspired. “Hey,” he said hoarsely, not wanting to cry, “maybe we should slow down a li—”

She jumped to her feet and pulled the dress off over her head. Beneath it, she was naked. She tossed it aside and then fell on him again. Straddling his body, she kissed him hard and urgently. His hands slid to her back, down to her hips, then up to her breasts. Her body felt more voluptuous than it had moments earlier; were her breasts now somehow larger? He took off his own shirt, holding her soft, warm, slippery skin against him, feeling her nipples slide deliciously over his chest.

Finally it was too intense for him, and he reached for the clasp of his jeans.

“I won’t hurt you,” he whispered. “Other people may have, but I won’t.”

A tear dropped silently from her eye to his cheek.

“That’s not really her, you know,” a voice said from behind them.

18

Curnen leaped off him, and he jumped to his feet. Bliss stood at the edge of the clearing.

Curnen crouched on the grass nearby, clutching the dress against her. Her limbs trembled as she tensed to either flee or attack. She
growled.

“She’s making you see what you want to see,” Bliss continued. “We can all do that, to one extent or another. Look at her now.”

He did. Now Curnen
was
the same girl he’d seen in his room, with long limbs, strange toes, and too-big eyes. In her gaze, he saw only animal wariness.

“The common term is ‘glamour,’” Bliss said.

Rob got to his feet and moved away so he could keep an eye on both women. “Glamour,” he repeated. “Like fairies use?”

“Rob, please, catch a clue here. Remember what I told you before? We were here long before the Europeans, even before the so-called Native Americans. How do you think that can be true?”

“So you’re saying you two are
fairies
?”

With an impatient sigh, she nodded.

He remembered the dancing teenage girl. “That’s what I saw back at the fire. A fairy.”

“Yes.”

“That’s what all the Tufa are?”

She wanted to slap him. How many ways did he need to hear it?
“Yes.”
And there it was: the secret known only to the night wind and her riders, spoken plainly in inadequate human words to a man she’d known three whole days. Mandalay and the other First Daughters would be so proud of her.

“But … you drive trucks, and work, and—”

“Yes, I drive a truck, and go to work, and watch TV and worry about the economy and terrorism. We don’t live in a storybook, you know. We live in the world, just like you. We’re just not …
of
it.”

Curnen, back in her dress, slipped under his arm and pressed possessively against him. He was too startled by all this new information to resist. She reached for his face and tried to turn it down so she could kiss him.

“Curnen!” Bliss scolded. “Stop that. Not now!”

Curnen glared at Bliss and bared her teeth. She released Rob and moved toward her sister, but Bliss wasn’t intimidated. “Don’t mess with me, Curnen. Now, get out of here.”

Curnen stopped, threw back her head, and howled. It was the same sound Rob had heard that first night outside his room, and again at Doyle’s trailer. This close, it gave him goose bumps.

“Oh, stop it,” Bliss said. She fingered the fabric of the dress. “Whose garbage did you raid to get this, huh?”

Curnen
slithered
away—no other word described the quick, sinuous motion—and vanished into the darkness.

In the silence, Rob realized he heard nothing except insects and animals—no music, or traffic, or even airplanes overhead. No songs from the barn dance. Could he and Curnen have really run that far? Finally he asked, “So she got that dress from someone’s trash?”

“Yes. She’s mostly like a wild animal. She digs things up, buries things, thinks only in immediate sensation.”

“Because she’s inbred?”

Bliss’s eyes flashed with anger. “No. She’s my baby sister, I helped raise her and she was as normal as anyone once, she just—”

Then suddenly Bliss began to sob. She turned away and leaned against the nearest tree. Just like Rob at the picnic, things she’d kept under tight control burst out with no warning, all the pain and misery and loneliness.

Rob went to her, and she fell into his arms. He felt her tears against his still-bare chest, and she let him hold her up as her legs collapsed. “I’m sorry,” she said between cries, “I’m so sorry. I’m normally tougher than this, I just—”

“Shh, it’s okay,” Rob said. “Cry as long as you need to. You were there for me, I’m here for you.” He looked around the clearing for a sign of Curnen, but the other girl was gone. Above him, several of the kitelike objects flitted across the face of the full moon. The brief glimpse told him nothing, although he swore they had human legs and arms as well as big blurry wings.

Bliss was a dead weight now, her arms around his neck. He lowered her slowly to the ground and knelt beside her, trying to gently disentangle her. “Shh, it’s okay,” he said, stroking her hair. It was soft and deliciously smooth beneath his hand.

“It’s not okay!” she said fiercely, wrenching free to glare at him. “That was once a beautiful girl, with a voice like an angel! Now look at her!”

“Why do you let her live like this?” he asked. “What happened to her?”

“She lives like this because she has to,” Bliss said, wiping furiously at her eyes. “She’s the victim of someone’s hatred, the worst kind of curse.”

“Who?”

Bliss started to answer, but caught herself.