Wondrous Strange (12 page)

“You mean the Winslows.”

“Don’t be angry with them, Kelley,” Emma pleaded. “They loved you. And they tried their best to do right by you. By both of us. When they died in the car accident, I was heart-broken.”

“How…how did…” She didn’t even know how to phrase such a question.

But Emma knew what she asked. “They found me wandering, half out of my mind, in the middle of that great bloody park with you tucked in my coat, and they offered to take me in—back to their place in the country.”

“Why? Why didn’t they call you an ambulance? Or the cops?”

“I wouldn’t let them. I was confused. Frightened. Thousands of miles and a hundred years away from my own home…”

“I don’t understand.”

“That place. The
Otherworld
…” Emma’s voice went soft with remembered wonder. “It isn’t like it is here, Kelley. It’s beautiful there…
too
beautiful, somehow. Such a strange,
dreaming place, and—just like in a dream—time is meaningless there. You see, once I had crossed over to steal you and then crossed back again, well…the world—
this
world—had changed. Decades had passed. I wasn’t even in my own country anymore. Dr. and Mrs. Winslow, I’m sure they thought I was just some poor unfortunate soul gone clear out of my head. But they told me they’d help me.” Emma’s laugh was a weary, battered sound in Kelley’s ear. “They’d been wanting a child themselves, you see. Desperately. But it was not to be. Until they found me. And you. We…made an arrangement.”

“I see.”

“They would take care of us, keep you as their own. With me close by to help raise you. I didn’t know what else to do, so of course I said yes. And it worked out all right. We were happy. You were happy.” She sighed. “But I see now that we were just selfish. We were all so selfish. You, poor thing, were the only one that no one seemed to give much of a thought to. I see that now.” There was another long, crackling pause. “Kelley…I’m so sorry.”

“It’s all right, Em,” Kelley said. “I’m all right. Really.”

“I hoped you’d never have to know. Never have to remember.”

But it seemed as though she was going to have to start remembering, even though it was the last thing she wanted to do. Although she loved her dearly, Kelley had never wanted to
grow up to be like her sweet, crazy Aunt Emma who believed in fairies.

And who, it turned out, maybe wasn’t so crazy after all.

Kelley needed time to process the enormity of what she now knew and told her aunt so. But before she hung up, Em stopped her to ask, “Who told you these things, Kelley?”

“A friend. I think.” Kelley hated the thought that Sonny could be something unfriendly.

“Oh, be careful, my girl,” Emma said. “Promise me.”

“I will, Em. I promise.”

“Your necklace, dear, the amber clover—you do still wear it, don’t you?”

“Yes. Why?”

“Don’t take it off, Kelley. Please. For…luck.”

“I gotta go, Em.”

“We’ll talk later?”

“I think we’ll probably have to. Yeah,” she said, and snapped her cell phone shut. She heaved a shuddering sigh and looked at her reflection in her dressing-room mirror, letting numbness take over. It was strange that she looked exactly the same as she had the day before. How could that be? Surely, if she wasn’t who she thought she was—and never had been—shouldn’t she look different?…Wait. Hands shaking, Kelley lifted her hair back from her face and examined her reflection.

The tips of her ears were ever-so-slightly pointed.

“Oh God,” she whispered. “It’s really true.”

The makeup lights glinted off her four-leaf-clover necklace. The green amber glowed warmly. Emma had told her when she was a little girl that amber was really “the blood of very old trees,” and Kelley had thought that a lovely idea.

She frowned at herself in the mirror and reached up under her hair. Before she could unfasten the clasp, Bob appeared—still dressed all in green—in the reflection, standing close behind her. She didn’t move as he reached for her hands and gently plucked her fingers away from the catch on the chain.

“Best listen to your auntie, luv,” he whispered in her ear, “and keep that on.”

“Why?” Kelley stared at Bob in the mirror, somehow unsurprised to see him there.

“Because…” He stared back at her, intense, and answered her question with a line from Shakespeare. “‘Light thickens, and the crow makes wing to th’ rooky wood. Good things of day begin to droop and drowse, whiles night’s black agents to their preys do rouse.’”

She blinked. “You are the second person I’ve heard quote
Macbeth
in two days. Why do I keep getting the feeling I’m in the wrong play?”

“Oh…you’re not. Quite the contrary—you’re in exactly the right play,” he murmured. “It’s just that there aren’t really
any turns of phrase in
Midsummer
quite so poetic that I could think of, off the top of my head, to warn you with.”

“Warn me?”

“Watch your back in the days to come, girl. And the
nights
.”

Kelley swallowed a sudden lump of fear in her throat.

“You could have just said
that
,” she whispered.

“‘Thou marvell’st at my words; but hold thee still.’” Bob smiled mirthlessly, finishing the ominous quote. “‘Things bad begun make strong themselves by ill.’”

And then he was gone.

As long as she lived, Kelley would never know how she made it through to the end of rehearsal without crying or screaming. Emma’s words, and Sonny’s, ricocheted around her skull as the company went through Oberon and Titania’s argument scene again.

Titania’s lines tumbled from her with a ferocity that her previous rehearsals had only hinted at. As she ripped into Oberon, Kelley felt as though, somewhere deep inside her, there was thunder stirring.

“The seasons alter,” she cried, an impassioned plea. Her arms spread wide in a gesture that encompassed the wrongness of it all, her Titania despairing that their conflict had sent nature itself into a perilous spin. “The spring, the summer, the childing autumn, angry winter change…”

She leveled a devastating sadness at Oberon, whom Titania loved, but whom she could no longer bear to keep company with. “And this same progeny of evils comes from our debate, from our dissension; we are their parents and original.”

Her voice cracked only a little on the word
parents
.

S
onny walked back to his apartment from the Avalon, head down, shoulders hunched. Along the way, he spotted several Lost Fae: a dryad in an empty lot offering encouragement to a sickly-looking juniper bush; a winged boy crouched atop a fire hydrant who watched him pass with big, glistening eyes; the fruit seller at a corner market who hid his taloned, feathered feet beneath an impressive glamour and a long white apron….

Where Sonny went, reputation preceded him. As he passed the Fae on the streets, they gave him a wide berth, even though Sonny had no quarrel with them. Most had already
had to fight against the Janus to cross over, and it wasn’t an experience any of them wanted to repeat. There were also those of the Otherworld who had been trapped in the mortal realm more than a century ago through no fault of their own. Some would even have gone back, were it not for Auberon’s harsh decree of banishment that had accompanied his closure of the Gates: If a Faerie had gotten caught—consorting with humans in the human world—then they could stay there.

Still, not wanting to appear to his remaining loyal subjects in the Otherworld as overly vengeful, Auberon had left it to his Janus to decide whether or not a Lost Fae would go on to pose an actual threat to the mortal realm. Most of them didn’t, and so the Janus left them in peace.

Even so, the Lost Fae remained almost universal in their passionate hatred for Sonny’s kind. He felt a familiar twinge of regret about that as he stood in the swiftly ascending elevator to his floor.

At the entrance to the penthouse, he sensed a presence even before he’d turned the handle on the door. It was warm inside, almost oppressively so. Sonny could feel the hair raise up on his arms as he stepped cautiously through the doorway.

A Storm Hag hovered a foot and a half off the floor in the middle of his living room.

“Hag,” he hailed her blandly.

“Watch thy mouth, fleshling,” she hissed. Tiny spears of lightning sparked from her fingertips, and her dusky robes billowed around her like gathering thunderheads. Servants of Mabh, the Storm Hags had long ago been chained to the mortal realm by their harsh mistress to carry out her commands. The hags communicated with Mabh, herself confined to her own grim realm, through enchanted mirrors. They were malicious creatures but—because they were Queen Mabh’s direct emissaries, answerable only to her and not to Auberon or any of the other Courts—they were untouchable; the Janus were forced to leave them in peace.

Which made it particularly frustrating when one showed up uninvited in the middle of your living room, Sonny thought.

“Queen Mabh sends a greeting.”

“Queen Mabh sent her ravens first.” Sonny crossed his arms and leaned against the bar, not in the mood for this. “A greeting might have been welcome
before
an attack.”

The Storm Hag’s gray lips stretched in a ghastly parody of a smile. “Be thou lucky Mabh turns any attention on such a crawly worm as you. She is mighty as she is merciless. She is the Darkling Queen, the Queen of Air and Darkness, bringer of storm and war—”

“I don’t need to hear her resume. Just tell me what she wants and get out.”

“An alliance,” the creature snarled. “This realm hides something that belongs to Mabh. You know this?”

The kelpie
. Sonny went cold despite the room’s temperature.
Auberon was right! It was Mabh
. He nodded slowly.

“She wants it back. It should never have been sent here. It was a mistake. Find it. Return it. And the queen will grant you a boon.”

Sonny wasn’t entirely sure he wanted Mabh’s favor. But still, a boon granted by a queen of Faerie…that was a valuable thing. And Sonny had a feeling that such a gift might come in handy. He had to consider Mabh’s offer carefully.

“What say you, fleshling?” the Hag hissed wetly.

“I say call me that again and Mabh will have another minion to put back together with her magicks.”

Sonny walked a few steps away, thinking hard. Bargaining with the Faerie was always bad business. If a deal was ever broken, the consequences could be dire. An unfulfilled agreement was considered an unforgivable transgression by Faerie laws. If you wanted to break a bargain with the Fae—and couldn’t find a loophole by which to do it—then you risked granting the wronged party unlimited power to seek redress. It was always best never to enter into a deal with the Faerie in the first place, but here was an opportunity to not only eliminate the threat of the Wild Hunt waking—by getting the kelpie back to the Otherworld—but also earn a favor of a Faerie queen.

“All right,” he said. “I’ll get Mabh what she wants—but
only because it’s for the greater good. She can send me word of time and place.”

He turned away.

“Now get out of here and stop drooling on my rug.”

S
he had to talk to Sonny.

Kelley waited on a bench by the carousel, wondering how long it would take for him to appear. She’d fled the Avalon the moment rehearsal ended, heading for the park. It wasn’t even ten minutes before Sonny stepped out from beneath the trees and walked toward her.

Kelley stood. “That was fast.”

“I was…hoping.” He shrugged.

Kelley walked a few steps away and said, “Okay. So. It wasn’t a dog that attacked me.”

“You can call it a dog if you want to,” Sonny said encouragingly. “Some people call them demon dogs, or the hounds of Herne. I call them Black—”

“Black Shuck. I know,” Kelley interrupted him. “So what exactly is this Herne, then? Is it a person? Did he send that thing? Is he a…Faerie?”

“Herne? No. Herne is…” Sonny paused. “Are you
sure
you want to hear all this stuff right now?”

“No time like the present.”

“All right.” Sonny sat down on the bench and waited until Kelley relented and joined him. “Herne was once a man. He became…something else. You would probably call him a god.”

“A…god.”

“But he wouldn’t have sent the shuck,” Sonny assured her. “They are only called
his
hounds because they run with the Wild Hunt. And a very long time ago, Herne used to lead the Hunt.”

“I see.” Kelley crossed her arms and chewed on her bottom lip, trying very hard to follow what Sonny was saying. She vaguely remembered something about a Wild Hunt from the web entry on the shuck. “The Wild Hunt. Sounds like some kind of party.”

“A war band, really,” Sonny said. “They are an old power. Very dangerous.”

“I see,” she said again.

“You do?”

“I really don’t.” She sighed, giving up.

“We could start with the basics,” Sonny suggested.

“Okay,” Kelley agreed. That might be a good idea. “Let’s just say—for the moment—that I buy into this whole I’m-a-Faerie-princess thing.”

“You are.”

“So what are you, then? Like a Faerie prince or something?” She frowned. “That sounds
so
wrong….”

“I’m not Faerie.” Sonny didn’t look at her, but his mouth quirked up at the corner. “I’m certainly not a prince.”

“Then what are you?”

“I’m what’s called a changeling.” He kept his eyes focused on the ground as he spoke. “I was…I was taken by the Faerie from the human world as a baby and raised in the Otherworld.”

“Taken?” Kelley looked at him sharply. “You mean
stolen
?”

“I…Yes. I suppose so.”

So I’m not the only one
, Kelley thought. It made her feel a bit queasy. “So they just come and go as they please?” she asked finally. “These Faerie?”

“They used to,” Sonny said. “You see, the Celts, the Elizabethans, the Victorians…they all believed in the existence of the Faerie. More than believed—they shared their world with them.”

“But not by choice.” Kelley tried, but she couldn’t keep
the disdain from her voice.

“No. Since the earliest days, the Faerie had always been there. And they had always
taken
.”

“Creeping across thresholds to steal children away from their families.”

Sonny looked uncomfortable with the way the conversation was going. “Taking them away to live forever, yes!” he said. “In a place of beauty and majesty where time has no meaning and dreams come true…”

“Even the bad ones?” Kelley watched him for a moment. “Yeah. That’s kind of what I thought. Go on.”

Sonny avoided Kelley’s gaze. “By the beginning of the twentieth century, as the Victorian age was coming to a close, the human world began to stop taking an interest in the Faerie world.”

“But not the other way around?”

“No. The Faeries still came. They still…took. And then, one day, a mortal woman took something back.”

“Me.”

“Yes.”

Sonny told her that after she’d been spirited away from the Unseelie Court, her father, Auberon, in grief and fury, had tried to cast an enchantment that would seal the passageways between the worlds. “But Auberon’s enchantment was flawed. And so, for one night every year, the Samhain Gate—for that is what this park is—swings open.”

“When?” Kelley asked.

“From sundown on October thirty-first to sunrise November first.”

“Halloween, huh? Cute.”

“It used to be called Samhain,” Sonny said quietly. “Back in my day.”

Kelley looked at her watch. “Timing’s off. It’s only October twenty-sixth.”

“That’s the thing about magic, Kelley. It’s tricky stuff, even for a Faerie king. Part of the flaw in Auberon’s spell casting means that once every nine years, the Gate stands open for the nine nights leading up to Samhain. We call it the Nine-Night.”

“That’s original. So, nine whole nights, huh? That sounds like it was a pretty
big
flaw on dear old Dad’s part, wouldn’t you say?” Kelley snapped.

Sonny grimaced but remained silent.

Kelley closed her eyes, shaking off the brief flare of anger. “Okay. Moving along. What’s your part in all of this?”

“I work for your father.”

Stiffening, Kelley pulled away from him.

“I told you the other night that I am a guard, and that was the truth. Auberon decreed that there would always be thirteen changelings—Janus, we are called—whose duty it is to guard the passage and keep the Faerie from crossing through the Gate.”

“How do you do that?”

“By any means necessary.”

“So you’re like, what, enforcers? Auberon’s gang of hired thugs?”

“That is unkind,” Sonny said, looking at her finally. “I didn’t ask for this, Kelley. I don’t belong in this world, your world. Only now, because of what I have become, I am no longer welcome in the place I called home.”

For a brief moment, a naked look of homesickness crossed Sonny’s face. It made Kelley wonder just what the Otherworld was
really
like. It certainly seemed to hold a powerful attraction for Sonny, even if he couldn’t return there.

“Because I am a Janus, I am hated and feared among the Fair Folk,” he continued. “But I would have thought
you’d
be a bit more understanding.”

Kelley dropped her gaze, shame burning in her cheeks.

“Especially considering last night’s little adventure.” Sonny stood and looked as though he would leave. “Do you really want that kind of creature roaming free in New York City?”

“I’m sorry. You’re right.” She put a hand on his arm. “I am sorry. This is all just…”

“I know.”

Kelley looked up at him, wishing he would sit back down. “That thing,” she said. “The Black Shuck—did
it
come through the Gate?”

“It would have had to, yes.” Reluctantly, Sonny sat beside her on the bench.

“And Lucky?” Kelley asked.

“I wouldn’t exactly call a Black Shuck ‘lucky.’…”

“No, no.” She waved a hand in the vague direction of the Upper East Side. “I mean the horse. In my tub.”

“The kelpie? It’s not exactly a horse. Actually…it really is a very dangerous creature—”

“Oh, he is not!” Kelley laughed, amused for the first time.

“Listen to me, Kelley—your new pet may look like just any other pretty little pony, but he’s not. He’s dangerous. He’s dangerous all by himself and he’s even more dangerous because of an enchantment cast upon him. You can be as cavalier about the situation as you want, but by doing so, you put not only yourself but every living soul in this city at terrible risk.”

Kelley fell silent, shocked. “What do you mean?”

Sonny reached into his messenger bag and pulled out three glittering black beads. “You asked me about Herne and the Wild Hunt,” he said. “Let me ask you this: Do you recognize these?”

She leaned over and nodded. “Lucky’s got dozens of them braided all through his mane and tail.”

He returned the onyx charms to his bag, his expression grim. “They are talismans, charms used by one of the queens of Faerie to cast a spell. Once upon a time.”

Kelley watched as Sonny’s gaze drifted over to the carousel. He looked as though he had never noticed it until that moment. It was open for business, although only a lone ticket-taker was to be seen. Most children were still in school. Kelley looked back and forth from the carousel to Sonny’s face.

“‘Once upon a time’?” she asked warily.

Suddenly Sonny stood and, without waiting to see if she would follow, started in the direction of the cheerful calliope music. “Come with me,” he called over his shoulder.

Flustered, Kelley caught up to him as he paid for two tickets. He held out a hand, helping her up onto the wooden platform where the brightly painted steeds awaited. Kelley felt a little foolish, undecided about which of the horses she should choose, although it wasn’t for lack of selection; they were the only two people on the ride. Eventually Sonny just grabbed her around the waist and lifted her effortlessly up onto the back of a prancing pony. Then he leaped up onto the steed beside hers.

The carousel groaned and the platform began to slowly spin. Kelley stared at Sonny, who sat easily on his mount, like a knight in shining armor on the back of his charger.

“Let me show you something, Kelley,” he said, reaching up to touch the iron medallion at his throat. “Let me show you the story of the Wild Hunt.”

“
Show
me?” Kelley asked, bewildered.

Sonny fixed her with his piercing gaze, the expression in his gray eyes wild and a little frightening. He said, “Don’t be afraid.”

The merry-go-round whirled and spun, and Kelley’s heart galloped in her chest. The music spiraled around her, dizzying; the carousel horse shivered beneath her, rising up in a slow leap.

Sonny’s eyes went from that extraordinary silver-gray to
almost black. Kelley felt, for a brief, disorienting moment, as if they rode through a mist-filled tunnel…and then everything cleared. She glanced around.

The carousel was gone. New York was gone.

The horse beneath her, no longer a painted wooden thing, tossed its head, and she could feel its muscles bunch beneath the saddle. Kelley gasped and scrambled to grab on to the horse’s reins as, all around her, visions of a lush green forest rushed past at breakneck speed. The sounds of bird and beast filled her ears. She could smell the freshly rain-washed leaves of the trees as they whipped past and she felt the wind on her cheeks. In the distance the sound of a horn rang through the air like the chiming of church bells. She heard the frantic baying of hunting hounds.

Sonny’s mount thundered along beside hers through the trees and, over the sound of the wind in her ears, she heard him speak—telling her the story of Herne and the Wild Hunt even as she herself rode right into it.