Dance By Midnight (6 page)

Given the reverence Sam used when she talked about all this, I expected someone to pass the donation plate around. Geez…she believed this stuff. I don't know why I didn't. I just…it wasn't what Nona had told me. "Sam—" I held out my hand. "That changeling called
me
a Sentinel. She said she didn't like having two Sentinels in the same place. I've been called a Guardian until I met you."

"You were
supposed
to be a Sentinel. You have that blood inside of you and I'm betting it came from your mom. But your course went off track somewhere." She sat forward. "I'm guessing the moment you allowed the
Cruorem
to brand you with those portals is when it happened." She nodded to my hands. "And I'll bet you Bonville didn't come after you because you were a tool in his little cog-work of magical mayhem. I bet he went after you because he knew what you were and he wanted to harness your power."

I rubbed at my face and glanced at Mike. "You got all this?"

"Sort of. I just want Brendi back. And after the shit I've seen, I'm willing to believe anything that proves to me she's not dead."

"Brendi is also a Sentinel," Sam said and I looked back at her. "And I'm more sure than ever that's why Maab fashioned a changeling to take her."

"What for?"

"Think about it. We can manipulate the Mental plane on the Physical. We can manifest events, items, and we can bend them. We are part of the Creatrix. Planars aren't able to do that. For a Faerie to create a Cairn takes over a hundred human souls. For an Ethereal or Angel to create a Power, they kill a human. For an Abysmal creature, or Demon, to obtain physical form, they have to kill their host, and don't tell me the Revenants aren't dead. Once those creatures are attached to those humans the humans can't survive without them. They're as good as dead. Do you see the pattern?"

She leaned forward and put her elbows on the table. "If a Planar being can take control of a Sentinel, they would have the ability to create multiple openings between the planes with no restrictions. The very things we can close, we can open. As it is now, how easy do you think it is to make a Coyote Flame to enter another plane? I can see in your eyes you know the difficulty, but the real danger is
placing
it. There's no guarantee the flame is going to take you where you want to go. Planars want
fixed
gates,
fixed
doors to come and go as they please."

"But aren't Cairns fixed?" I leaned forward as well, even though my stomach protested. I was really full. "The one I just came out of is always there, right? It's Maab's Cairn?"

"Yes. The Faeries can make a
fixed
Cairn, but the problem for them are the Cairns themselves. As they are now, without the magic of a Sentinel, they trap the Faerie. The Cairn is the closest they can come to the Physical, our Material World, because of the safety protocols in place. But the Cairns are just as much of a trap to them as they are to us. What happened to you physically is just a shadow of what would happen to them if they entered those Cairns, and then returned home."

"The shakes, the fever, the sickness?"

"Much worse for them. Some of them die if they return to where they come from. And as for stepping through that gate to the Material World?" Sam snapped her fingers. "Ash."

"But no ash if they make it using a Sentinel."

"Right."

"But, it's been what, months since Brendi vanished?" I looked at Mike. "Why hasn't she used your daughter to make one of these gates? Or has she?"

Sam answered. "She hasn't. We're not sure why that is. Might be the changeling has to kill off everyone that knew her. Could be Brendi doesn't want to do it. I just don't have those answers."

"You think Brendi's in a Cairn, or in…" I put my elbows on the table and folded my arms. "Where exactly do they come from? Are they Ethereal? Abysmal? Astral? What plane is Faerie in?"

When neither of them answered me, I looked at the food cooling on my plate and realized why they hadn't been able to find Brendi.

They had no idea where the actual land of Faerie was.

THE BiG BOOK OF EVERYTHiNG

After they retold my kidnapping from their point of view, I felt awful. Apparently Mike waited for me to come back in from the SUV. When I didn't, he ran outside, thinking I drove off.

But the vehicle was still there, the door open and my gym bag on the ground. They locked the car, took the stuff in and started their own search. Sam tried scrying for me, having plenty of my hair to use.

Nothing.

And as the days went on and my body didn't turn up, Sam worried I'd been taken to the Faerie realm. Though they couldn't tell me what plane the Faeries lived in, she did know they called it Alfheim. Sam feared I'd been taken there and forced into servitude.

"I had this nasty idea that if Brendi refused to help them, they'd take you and then threaten her life to force you to build the Cairn for them."

We were cleaning up the dishes, still talking. It was just after seven in the evening and the garden in the back rested in shadows. She washed, I dried and Mike put things away, dishes and leftovers. The whole scene felt so surreal, given my past…year. I lowered the plate and towel in my hand. "Why didn't they?"

Sam paused and looked at me. "Why didn't she what?"

"Force me to build a Cairn like you said? She sensed the same thing about me that she apparently sensed in Brendi. She called me Uncle Dags so I assume she knew that much about mine and Brendi's relationship. So, why not take me further in than the Cairn? Why not try and use me if I'm one of the Sentinels?"

Sam's expression was hard to read as she stared at me. "That's a very good question. But I don't have an answer. She took you to a crossroads and tied you to a chair."

"Yeah."

When she grabbed a towel and dried her hands, I set the plate I was drying on the counter as Mike stood to her right.

"What is it?" Mike asked.

"It's just that…the symbol of the crossroad has an almost universal meaning. In most religions and faith based practices around the world, a crossroad represents a place where several worlds connect. Not so much like a Cairn door or gate, but more of a junction. Four paths converging at a single point."

I looked past her to Mike, who shrugged.

Sam caught the gesture and held out her hands. "It's symbolic meaning is that someone is standing on the threshold. They've come to a middle, a place where a decision must be made. It's not as eloquent say, as crossing the Rubicon, but the meaning's the same."

I wasn't sure I knew what a Rubicon was. "I get the symbology—but why put me there?" I leaned against the counter. "You think the changeling did it on her own? Or was it something Maab told her to do?"

"Changelings carry the essence of both their creator and the subject they're created from. Maybe…" Sam shrugged. "Maybe she sensed you're undecided. That you've not actually chosen one path over the other. Some call you a Guardian, I called you a Sentinel…the
Grimoire
inside of you might be causing interference. On a base level the changeling didn't know what you were so she placed you in the crossroads."

I arched an eyebrow at her. "For?"

She gave a long sigh. "I don't know. I'm not sure the actions of a changeling are relevant to finding Brendi. What we have to know more about is the Cairn you were in." Sam looked at me. "Are you familiar with Cairns?"

"I know a little about them because of my mother."

"She liked Faeries?"

I snorted and handed Mike a plate. "She was more like terrified of them. She always had me spell the word differently. F. A. E. R. I. E. Said the other way, the F. A. I. R. Y. was just the laymen's understanding of them. I remember gardeners coming to the house every day to make sure there weren't any Cairns that popped up overnight. I think at first they all humored her, but then after a while I noticed a few of them stopped coming and the others were a bit less jovial."

"What does that mean?" Mike set a plate in the cabinet.

"Oh, like I said, at first they used to kid with me about my mom. Crazy woman. Scared of little Faeries. That kind of thing. But they stopped doing that and started whispering to themselves before they stopped coming period."

Sam turned back to the sink. "What kind of garden did your mom have?"

"An English garden—a lot like the one Mike's got out back." I stared at the window. I tried to call up those old images of mine, the ones of me playing ball around the fountain. I always liked the fountain because it had Koi in it. I said as much to Sam and Mike. "I never saw mom buy the fish, and I never saw the gardeners bring them either. They just multiplied."

"They call that sex, Dags."

I gave Mike a foul look. "That's not what I mean. Something my mom said stuck with me when I asked about them having babies. She said all the fish were male. We could tell that because the males were the prettiest."

Sam looked at the murky water in the sink. "You ever noticed a correlation between the increase in fish and decrease in gardeners?"

"No." And then I jumped on her train of thought. I snapped my head around and stared at her. "You think the gardeners turned into fish?"

"Depends on what Faerie claimed that garden."

"I thought you said they couldn't come into the Material World or it's ash?"

She pushed her hand into the water and retrieved the wash towel. "They can't. But they can send out little minions. Creatures loyal to them. Sort of like…"

"Fetches?" I asked.

Sam gave me a smirk as she looked at me. "Yeah. Only in my opinion, they're more insidious. The usual fetches, the ones made by Ethereals or Abysmals, seem a little brain dead. You know, they got one mission and that's all they got? Well, try coming up on a slug, or a purblind, and not to mention…." She made a face. "A redcap."

I looked over at Mike. He shook his head. "Don't look at me. I have no idea what she's talking about."

"You both need to read that book Dags brought. It's one hell of a book of knowledge. In fact, I need to look up crossroads. But," she said and pointed to the clock over the stove before she dried her now wet hand again. "We've got very little time if we're going to make work of the full moon."

Again, Mike and I glanced at each other before we followed Sam out of the kitchen. She stopped at the dining room table where the BBOE lay open. "I found a book a lot like this one, but not as well kept or indexed, in New Orleans, which is where I live, by the way." She moved a few of the pages. "It had a spell in it that rose above the rest. A spell to trap and hold a Fae."

Again, Mike and I shared glances. "Sam," I said. "Fae? Fairy? Same thing?"

"No. A Faerie is what Maab is. They're the indigenous whatsis of their race. But their creations, the ones I was just telling you about, the ones that can manifest and move about in the Material World, are what we call Fae. They're like aberrations of their creators." She paused. "Like the changeling."

"Ah," Mike nodded. "I get it."

I didn't but…meh.

"Dags, all those names I just said? Those are fae. Compare them to the Revenants or Powers. They possess the same cognitive power of thought as a living creature."

How did she know I wasn't following? Was it written on my face? "And you know the difference because they're here in this world."

"Hon." She put a hand on my shoulder. The touch was electrical. I felt it all over my body. If it affected her the same way, she didn't show. "Fae creature aren't like anything you've ever seen in this world. Changelings are the closest to something…
normal
looking."

Mike sat down near the book. "Why are you wanting to trap one?"

"Just as a defensive maneuver. So far they've been relatively dormant or invisible. It's only been in the past year my coven and I started noticing them. And given their nature as being something created by planar beings, and given our nature of what we are and our purpose, keeping them out of this world still applies."

She has a coven?

My second thought was,
do they all look like her?
"And you want to see if any of them know where Brendi is?"

"They wouldn't tell us even if they knew." She turned the book to face Mike and myself. "In order to get Brendi from Maab, we're going to need something to trade. I'm not sure it'll work, but I thought if we had something Maab really wanted…" She looked at each of us. "I looked into this wonderful book of yours and found some information about a mantle, a simple piece of cloth, given to Maab by Oberon when they were lovers. Legend says it was made of the stars and woven by spiders—which sort of creeps me out."

Me too.

"The mantle was stolen not long after Oberon replaced Maab with Titania. Maab vowed a wish to whomever found her mantle."

"No one's found it?" Mike leaned back in the chair.

"Nope. It's slipped into legend. I've never heard about it. And I'm sure no one else has either."

"So…." He raised his arms and tucked his hands behind his head. "How exactly do we find a mantle spun by spiders?"

I nearly choked when she turned and pointed at me. "Him."