“And about time,” the younger said. Her face looked backward and
forward, lingering in the mellow season of beauty between young and old. “You
’ve lived so quietly up here, you must have thought we had forgotten you
entirely. But we have never for a moment forgotten. The wolf recognized you.
He called us until we finally heard him.”
The youngest of them, slight and ethereally slender, gazed at him curiously
out of his own rich, fay eyes. “You stole our cauldron, that feeds anyone,
everyone, and is never empty. Yet you made these machines. You make hate with
them, and you feed it to humans. You hated your own world; you hate this one
as much. What a strange existence. You never used what you had stolen. What
did you do with it?”
Behind the creature that was Stillwater, Carrie lowered the machine she held
over him. She set it very quietly on the table and backed away from the
impending storm. Leith, his eyes never leaving the three, held out his hand to
her, helped her down. The wolf, turning restively on the table, shoved against
the trapped cook once or twice, knocking his body out of its precarious huddle
over the knife, its compromise with pain. His mouth opened again; the
anguished word that came out was incomprehensible. Then the wolf flowed
carelessly down onto the tangle of shadows and turned human.
He turned his back to Stillwater, asked the three tersely, “You? Or me?”
“He might prefer you,” the oldest said, her silvery eyes as cold as the
metallic machines around the cook. “You are powerful, Merle, and you might
find a way to give him oblivion. We can take him back to the place he fled so
long ago, the place where he was born. He has something that belongs to us; he
will not die before he tells us where it is.”
Another word came out of the cook, a wild bird cry, echoing itself again and
again. He pulled frantically at the knife, his hands growing slick; the
kitchen blade seemed rooted in the table, oblivious to any power but its own.
He spoke again to the women, words entwined with the sounds of birds and
insects, frogs and snakes, creatures that ran on four legs and named
themselves with other than language.
“Promises,” the youngest said, the one who had his eyes. “Promises. I am
only part fay, the tiniest breath left from those days when human and fay
crossed paths, and yet I feel I know you. What have you done to yourself?”
“Time to go,” the third said, her pale eyes pitiless. “Time to go home.”
“I don’t know!” he shouted, finding one final way to say what he needed. “
I don’t know where it is! It vanished from my sight years ago. Maybe decades,
maybe centuries—I don’t remember! It was useless to me—I stopped seeing it,
and it was gone.”
They had no faces suddenly; they had no substance; three shadows stood
together, hollows of air and space. On the floor, the path of their true
shadows deepened, took on dimension. The thing that had been Stillwater was
losing its shape, blurring into a slurry not unlike one of his strange
culinary inventions. So were the walls and ceiling of the kitchen; the
machines, the table, everything that was not human dissolved. Colors ran,
whirled, shed light, as though, Pierce thought, the world itself had gotten
snagged in one of the machines and was turning into something only almost
familiar. Then, for the briefest, most exquisite moment, he saw the world that
engulfed the fay: such a wealth, a treasure of beauty, of scents and sounds,
air as fine as silk, heavy gold light falling extravagantly everywhere, free
for the taking, loveliness wherever he looked, as though he had never fully
opened his eyes before, and now he could see what he had missed, what had
always been there, all along, if only he had looked.
Then all he saw was that long stretch of shadow, opening like a door. The cry
of loss that came out of it as it closed sounded completely human.
25
Daimon, stopped at a light on the highway running along the water in Chimera
Bay, saw a sign ahead of him, swaying from the scaffolding covering much of a
dilapidated old hotel. ALL YOU CAN EAT, it said, FRIDAY NITE FISH FRY.
The light changed; he started forward. He angled across the next lane and
pulled into the parking lot, sat idling, gazing at the extremely unlikely
sign, and the even more improbable Kingfisher Bar and Grill, whose customers
all seemed to own one version or another of the same dented, rackety pickup.
He heard another bike turn in behind him. In that same moment, the world began
to ripple around him. His inarticulate protest was echoed by a sudden shift of
gears behind him. The stranger’s bike roared; the town vanished into mist and
trees, and he heard another voice raised in a cry of complete astonishment.
He turned, found Dame Scotia Malory, pale and breathless, searching the air
for whatever was left of Chimera Bay.
“What— Where— What just happened?”
“Dame Scotia,” he said, astounded. “What are you doing here?”
“Following you.”
“Here?”