Authors: Lucy A. Snyder
“Well, that helped a bit, but only a bit.” She poked my cheek. “The scar tissue is better, but these scaly patches really just don’t seem to want to go back to normal.”
“Do you think it’s some kind of curse?” I asked.
“It’s possible.” She wrung out the cloth. “Honestly, this is a bit beyond anything I’ve had to deal with as a healer.”
She glanced down at her watch. “We better start getting dressed. Please wash the rest of that off your face and then come up to the attic; I think I have a formal gown that will fit you.”
I did as she asked, and a few minutes later found her in the gigantic cedar closet she’d installed beneath the eaves.
“Hmm,” she said, shuffling through a rack of dresses and gowns. She pulled out a long strapless dress made of dark green satin with a poofy underskirt of black crinoline. “I think this would fit you. Here, try it on.”
I slipped out of my jeans, T-shirt, and sports bra and wriggled into the dress. Karen zipped me up. I had to do some gyrations and tugging to get the bodice comfortably into place, but it was indeed a passable fit. I hadn’t worn anything like that since Aunt Vicky talked me into going to the senior prom with some friends. The DJ mostly played a bunch of crappy love songs you couldn’t really dance to, so after a while we ditched and went to someone’s house. We played Texas hold ’em and got trashed on peach schnapps. I lost all my pocket money on a bad bluff and somehow ended up having to kiss a cheerleader named Brittany. She was too pretty and rich and stuck-up for me to have wanted to have anything to do with her normally, but I was drunk enough to feel like everybody in the room was made of awesome. At first I thought the two of us were just putting on a little show for the guys, but she got into it like she was trying to find the secret answers to our algebra final in my tonsils.
Over the next couple of weeks, she kept sending me text messages, asking me out. I told her as nicely as I could that I was straight, but she kept pestering me. After that, I began to suspect some kind of setup. You know the deal: she’d lure me to some seemingly private location, get me naked or close to it, and then somebody hiding in the bushes or closet would take a bunch of photos that would show up all over the Web five minutes later. Good times. So finally I just started replying to her texts with animated GIFs of volcanic porn cocks and she got the hint.
So anyhow, now I inevitably associate ball gowns with sickly sweet liquor and suspiciously enthusiastic cheerleaders. I suppose it could be worse.
“Do you think you’re going to come out of that bodice?” Mother Karen asked.
“If a troll runs up to me yelling, ‘Whoo boobies!’ and yanks the front, yes. Otherwise, no, the puppies are safely kenneled.”
Mother Karen laughed. “I doubt that would happen. Unseelies aren’t usually allowed into the tavern.” She paused, scrutinizing the outfit. “I can give you the other opera glove; that will look nice. I think I have some dark heels in your size—”
“Heels? Nuh-uh.”
She frowned. “Heels would look very pretty with this dress.”
“I am not wearing anything I can’t run in. This meet could be a big ol’ trap for all I know, and I want to be prepared.”
She looked over her shoe rack. “All my flats are too small, unless you want Cooper to resize them, and you can’t very well wear sneakers.”
“I’ll just wear the dragon boots. Nobody can say those aren’t expensive enough,” I pointed out.
She made a face, which I suppose was only natural since the last time she’d seen the boots, they’d been on the back porch tarred in dried devil ichor. “Those filthy things? They won’t really match.”
“So I’ll get Cooper to clean them up and put some dark polish on them. The dress will mostly cover them, and anyway, who’s really going to be looking at my feet?”
A couple of hours later, the emergency babysitters had arrived and we were on the road toward Winesburg in the Warlock’s Land Rover. Pal cruised along overhead, hidden by an invisibility charm, although I could hear the weird calliope music of his flying spell over the engine noise. Cooper had done a great job shining up the boots, and he’d cleaned off the rest of my dragonskins, which I’d stashed in a black JanSport backpack I’d borrowed from one of the teens along with my street clothes, my Leatherman tool, a bottle of water, a couple of PowerBars, a small medical kit, hand sanitizer, and some stray spell ingredients in translucent plastic Fuji film canisters.
Mother Karen had done my makeup—doing her best to camouflage the scars—and had put my hair up in a French braid. I’d gotten wolf whistles from both Cooper and the Warlock when I came downstairs. Still, with my shoulders bare, I felt uncomfortably exposed, and also weirdly felt like I was in drag. I envied the guys being able to wear pants. The Warlock had gone back to his place and found tuxedos for both him and Cooper. Apparently the Warlock had been considerably slimmer in his early twenties, and the old tux wasn’t even that far out of style. The Faeries, I supposed, cared almost nothing about current human fashion and mainly wanted to feel that we’d paid proper respect in our attire.
I also hoped that none of the seelies would take an inordinate interest in Cooper. He looked absolutely delicious in the hand-me-down tuxedo. The satiny jacket accented his broad shoulders and narrow waist, and the pants were just snug enough to nicely show off his buns and package. My inner Old Lady Mabel hated the saggy pants fashion that had reigned over American males seemingly my entire life.
A little while later, the Warlock pulled off the highway onto a dirt road running between two cornfields.
“This should be it,” he said, glancing down at the magic compass he’d brought along. “Karen, you got Riviera’s token?”
“Right here,” she replied, patting the small beaded purse in her lap. She was wearing a long-sleeved sea-green silk gown and long strings of pearls; the outfit must have dated from the 1930s, and it looked good on her.
We got out of the Rover. The ground was soft and damp, so I was glad I wasn’t in high heels. Pal’s calliope was loud overhead. I slung my backpack over my shoulder and began to follow Mother Karen and the Warlock down a corn row.
Cooper nudged my backpack. “You could leave that in the car, you know.”
“If something happens, it’s not going to do me a lot of good if it’s locked in the car a mile away.”
“The seelies are probably just going to make you check it at the door.”
I shrugged. “Checked at the door is still closer than locked in the car.”
We came to a clearing where a battered old scarecrow hung crucified on a couple of rake handles. A cloud of dust rose as Pal touched down, and Cooper spoke an ancient word to turn off his invisibility.
A tin cup had been tied to the straw fingers of the scarecrow’s left hand. When we got within ten feet of the scarecrow, my stone ocularis started to itch in my skull. I blinked through to the gemview that had shown me the invisible door to the drug stash. I saw an odd double image of the scarecrow and a set of bronze-reinforced oak doors big enough to admit an elephant.
Mother Karen dug the token—a small golden coin—out of her purse and stepped up to the scarecrow. She dropped it into the tin cup. The scarecrow shuddered, the tattered old black suit expanding as it filled with ogrish bone and muscle. The creature broke the rake handles like straws and leapt to the ground, glowering at us with coal-black eyes. It dumped the token out into a mottled, callused gray palm.
“Who seeks entry to our realm?” Its voice rolled like thunder.
Mother Karen stepped forward. “Karen Mercedes Sebastián, daughter of Magus Carlos Sebastián and Mistress Beatrice Brumecroft. And associates. We come at the invitation of Maga Riviera Jordan to dine with her at the tavern.”
He turned his baleful face toward me and pointed a long black claw at my ocularis. “We don’t like spies.”
“What? I’m not a spy.” My voice shook.
“Don’t try to be clever with that sight-stone, or someone will pluck it right out of your pretty head.”
I quickly blinked back to the gemview that showed the world simply as my flesh eye did. “Is this better?”
“It is acceptable.”
Still scowling, the scarecrow reached into the air where I had seen the bronze handles on the great oak doors. He pulled, and suddenly the doors were visible to the naked eye, swinging wide to reveal a twilight-dimmed forest lit by a huge harvest moon. A road of ancient silver coins sunk in the damp earth glittered before us. The evergreen trees swayed gently in a brush of night wind, and tiny glowing creatures flitted through the branches.
The air from the forest smelled of midnight’s denizens, deep dark earth, and night blooms headier than any liquor.
“Follow the silver path to the tavern,” the ogrish guardian ordered. “Stray from it at your own peril.”
“We better hold hands,” Cooper said. “Things can get pretty weird in Faery.”
We followed Mother Karen and the Warlock inside; Pal followed along behind us. The scarecrow shut the door after my familiar stepped onto the path, and almost instantly, the darkness seemed to solidify around us like a crush of unseen bodies just beyond arm’s reach, the breeze like soft cold fingers brushing across my shoulders and the nape of my neck. Cooper’s hand tightened around mine; I could tell he felt it, too.
“Girl …” a voice whispered.
I turned toward the sound, the will to simply not look somehow beyond me. A golden-haired young man stood in the trees, slender and pale, dressed only in a kilt of sheer material that left just enough to my imagination. I felt a dizzying, primal lust for him; he was everything I found physically sexy about Cooper amplified and intensified a dozen times over.
“Come here,” Golden-Hair said with a smile that made my legs turn to water. He knelt and plucked a dandelion and blew the feathery seeds at me. “I’ve got something to show you.”
Cooper’s hand was growing slick with sweat. I glanced at his face; he was turning red as he stared at Golden-Hair, looking equally embarrassed and angry. “Don’t listen to her,” he whispered, pulling me along.
“Don’t,” echoed Golden-Hair, suddenly appearing from behind a tree in front of us, his voice like wind-chimes. “Don’t just walk away … don’t you want to see what your man sees? Don’t you want to see what delightful things we could be doing, the three of us? All you have to do is take a little peek.”
“Don’t listen to it,” Pal warned inside my head. “It’s a trick. Stick to the path, no matter what.”
What are you seeing when you look at it?
I asked Pal.
“I’d rather not say,” he replied.
Golden-Hair popped up in the wildflowers a few feet away from me, sitting cross-legged. “Boots? You wore nasty ol’ boots!” he cackled. “Who dressed you this morning, your
father?
He should have tied a bell around your neck, because you lumber like a dimwitted cow. I’ll bet your mother was some plow-pulling beast of burden your father turned into the shape of a woman after he couldn’t stop himself from rutting on her in the barn. I bet the Virtus Regnum cut her into steaks and ate her after they killed her.”
He paused, staring intently at the trails of smoke curling from my opera glove. My pulse was pounding in my head despite my attempt to breathe slowly and stay calm.
“Ooh, everyone hide, the cowgirl’s angry now! Stop chewing your cud and come over here! Show me who’s boss, Bossie. Come over and try to shut me up.”
For a long second, I thought about taking him up on his offer. My ocularis was itching like mad, but the scarecrow’s warning stopped me from blinking for a better look, stopped me from leaving the path. We weren’t here for me to get into a fight and endanger everyone else.
Golden-Hair kept after me, whispering seductions one moment and mockeries the next. I kept my gaze focused on the lost treasures embedded in the path: ancient drachms of Hermaeus and Menander, shining argentus nummus, Ottoman akçe and Indian rupees, mottled Liberty dollars, plus dozens of exotic coins stamped with the pale faces of dead kings I’d never seen in any book.
Finally, the path ended at what at first looked like vine-covered walls, but then I realized that the vines
were
the walls. The front door was a tall, thick oval mat of purple-flowered clematis lianas hinged on living tendrils; it swung open with a swish of leaves and a creak of green wood, and we filed into the tavern, everyone looking relieved to be free of Golden-Hair.
I quickly realized that the entire tavern was built from still-living plants enchanted or artfully cultivated to form a functional architecture, although certainly not one that had much use for straight lines and ninety-degree angles. The interior walls and floor were formed by smooth, densely woven strangler figs. Ivory-barked trees rose like support columns for the leafy ceiling high above us, and luminous bracket fungi growing on the trunks cast a soft golden light throughout the rooms and passageways. Redwood-size tree stumps served as tables, and the woody figs rose from the floor to form trestle benches and stools.
The patrons seated at the nearby tables were dressed in antique finery from various eras; they scarcely gave us a second glance. Viewed straight on, they appeared perfectly human; glimpsed from the corner of my flesh eye, some became large insects, creatures of twisted bone, or strange fungal conglomerations. It was just a little unnerving.
A tall, beautiful woman in a diaphanous Aegean-blue chiton stepped toward us. Maybe she floated; I couldn’t really see her feet. She was like a nymph straight out of Greek mythology: her glossy black hair was piled in ringlets atop her head, and her skin was sun-bronzed. Her eyes were the color of storm clouds rolling over the ocean. She glanced briefly at my backpack, but didn’t seem the least bit concerned about it.
“Please follow me,” she said, her voice a rush of sea breeze through a mountain olive grove. “Your party awaits.”
She led us through a winding passage to a room with an enormous tree-table. Riviera Jordan, dressed in a silver gown and shawl, sat on the opposite side of the table, flanked by six Governing Circle agents in crisp black tuxedos.