Faerie Blood (11 page)

“Allow me, girlie. Here, hold this,” the old woman interjected, thrusting her gun at me before turning to my friend. “Millicent Merriweather,” she introduced herself, holding out a gnarled hand.

Automatically Jude took the hand and shook it, replying, “Jude Lawrence.” But her voice was quite small.

That little exchange of amenities seemed to improve Millicent Merriweather’s mood dramatically, for she pushed her fedora back on her head and gave the far younger woman a kindly maternal smile. “Tell old Millie what happened to you just now, dear.”

“Um, I came out to look for Kendis. That singer guy came out after me, and the next thing I knew things got a little hazy….” Jude trailed off and glanced at me for help. Gingerly holding the shotgun away from my body, I gave her a weary shrug. “Then those two guys and that woman were hassling Kendis and Christopher.” She frowned uneasily. “I’m not sure what happened. I didn’t have that much to drink.”

“Now honey, don’t fret about that,” said Millicent, patting Jude’s shoulder. “Hazing out like that happens all the time to mortals who cross paths with the Sidhe. It’s a magic thing.”

That didn’t ease Jude’s frown in the slightest; she peered sidelong at the old woman as if still unconvinced she wasn’t drunk or hallucinating. “What?”

“It happened to me, too,” I murmured at her. “I’m still trying to figure it out.”

“You’re just confusin’ the lasses, Gran! That one has no eyes to see, and this other doesn’t know,” Christopher snapped, gesturing sharply between Jude and me. But his outburst lost steam fast as he tottered where he stood. I seized his arm to prop him up; the second I touched him, both my palms stung all over again.

Magic?

His eyes caught and held mine, and for an instant I could think of nothing but how the red-haired Sidhe had commanded my will. But this was different. The prickling was warmer now, and my mind remained clear. And while Christopher’s green-golden stare was intimidating, it was unmistakably human.

But the old Warder, taking charge of us as though we were three errant schoolchildren, gave us no time for anything but a glance. Undeterred by Christopher’s observation, Millicent waggled a finger at him. “Give me a little credit, son, I
am
better prepared than that,” she chastised, while her other hand darted bird-like in under her vest, presumably into a pocket. It came up with what at first glance looked like a bottle of eye drops. But it bore no label, and I saw a strange silvery gleam within it as the old Warder held it out to Jude. “You’d best have a couple of drops of this in each eye, dearie, if you want to understand what’s going on with your friend.”

“It’ll sting.” Christopher was trying to scowl, but neither his expression nor his warning carried much force. He shook off my hands and raised one of his to his head, looking as though he were doing everything in his power to keep from heaving all over the parking lot.

Jude shot me an uncertain look. Weakly I hedged, “Well, if it’ll help…” It didn’t seem to comfort her, but I couldn’t manage much in the reassurance department. Like Christopher, I was running out of steam and fast.

Pursing her lips and tilting her head back, Jude squeezed two drops of the bottle’s contents into each of her eyes—and promptly squeaked, slammed her eyes shut, and rubbed at them hard with the heel of her hand. “Ow! Ow! Hey, what is this stuff?”

“Doesn’t have a name, dearie. It opens mortal eyes to anything that comes out of Faerie, though. Here, use this if you need it; the stinging will pass in a second.” Millicent dipped a hand beneath her vest a second time to fetch out a neatly folded handkerchief, which she passed to Jude, plucking the bottle and dropper from Jude’s unresisting fingers at the same time. A third foray into her pockets returned the bottle, and produced a sleek little smartphone. This she thrust into my face as she plucked the gun back out of my hand, crisply ordering, “And since your eyes look like you’re already seeing plenty, honey, you call home. Your aunt’s going to need to be brought up to speed on the situation.”

I gaped. “Wait a minute! You know my aunt?”

“Aggie Deveaux, lives in Fremont, owns a boutique,” Millicent promptly and correctly replied, making me gape more. “Long story. Short form, known her for twenty-seven years, and she’s had me keeping an eye on you all this time, Kendis Thompson. C’mon, now, call her. If you don’t I will, but you’ll feel better if you hear it from her yourself.”

She not only knew my aunt, she knew
me
. Who in the name of God was this woman? I stared at her long and hard, but she stared complacently back without offering any answers to the questions rampaging through my head. And as I thought about it, I realized she was right. If Aunt Aggie could provide an explanation to all the weird things that had been happening to me lately, I wanted to hear it from her a lot more than I wanted to hear it from two total strangers. I tapped her number onto the phone’s touchscreen, aware of Christopher and Jude both watching me, he with a concern his obvious pain couldn’t quite hide, she through first one teary eye and then the other as she dabbed at them with Millicent’s handkerchief. Both her eyes still looked normal. Whatever was in that bottle hadn’t changed them as far as I could see.

My aunt picked up on the second ring.

“Hello?” The phone’s tiny speaker was good; it clearly conveyed her lush, low voice, the voice I’d loved as a mother’s for as long as I could remember, into my ear. I teared up again at the sound of it.

“Aunt Aggie, it’s me. I didn’t wake you up or anything, did I?”

The phone must have relayed my voice just as strongly back to my aunt, for her tone of late-evening relaxed weariness vanished instantly. “No, baby, it’s all right. What’s wrong?”

I nearly choked at the question, and couldn’t begin to describe everything that had happened to me in the last two nights and some of the hours in between. So I settled for blurting the first thing that came to mind: “Does the name Millicent Merriweather mean anything to you?”

The line went significantly quieter for two seconds, and when she finally answered me, so had my aunt’s voice. “Is she there with you now, Kendis baby?”

That was a yes. “This is her phone I’m on,” I admitted, swallowing hard. “We’re in Capitol Hill and some stuff’s been happening, Aunt Aggie, really weird stuff. She said I should call you…?” My own voice crept up higher in pitch on those last few words, threatening to crack.

A soft, resigned sigh sounded through the phone. “If you’ve met Millicent, she was right to have you call me. Get over here, sweetie, and bring her with you. You’ll be safe if she’s with you.”

“I’ve got a couple of friends with me too. Jude from work, and a guy named Christopher. Uh, Millicent says he’s a Warder. Like her.” As I said this, I glanced at the old woman in the fedora for confirmation. Millie beamed. Christopher jerked his gaze down and off to the side, scowling in earnest now. Troubled by the scowl, I added into the phone, “He saved my life last night, Aunt Aggie.” That lessened the scowl, but only a little. Somewhere underneath it, pain that I suspected had nothing to do with his bruised head stirred in Christopher’s face.

Quietly my aunt said, “Then he’s welcome in my house. Bring both your friends with you. And remember, baby: I love you.”

“I love you too,” I answered, trying not to sniffle. “Be there in a bit.”

We hung up; I handed the phone back to Millicent. The Warder squirreled it away back under her vest, then retrieved her handkerchief and put that away too. “So,” she said briskly, “which of you youngsters has a car?”

“My truck’s parked six blocks away,” Jude spoke up, but with a tremulous sort of tone that matched the look she was giving me. The same sort of thunderstruck look that Christopher had given me the first time he’d laid eyes on me.

“Good!” Millicent tilted her shotgun along her shoulder, looking like an extremely old member of an extremely oddly uniformed militia. “You get to drive. Can your truck hold four?”

Christopher gave the rest of us an obstreperous glare and corrected, “Three. You don’t need me in this.”

“Son, even if you could walk two feet under your own power, you won’t get out of the city limits,” Millie chided. “Did you even try to learn the lore of the lineage? Your magic’s awake, and the city knows it. You’re in this up to your pretty neck, whether you like it or not.”

He might have argued further, but I grabbed Christopher’s shoulder, pulling his attention back to me. “Please come with us,” I pleaded, worried about his condition, and oddly fascinated by that current that kept tingling between us. Every other time I’d felt it so far, from the hedge-creatures and the Sidhe, scared the hell out of me. But from Christopher, it didn’t. And that was strangely consoling. “I know you don’t want to be involved,” I plaintively went on, “But you did save me, and you stuck up for me to the, um, Sidhe.” The word rolled uncomfortably off my tongue. “And I don’t want anything else to happen to you. So you should stay with us and rest somewhere where it’s safe. Safety in numbers, y’know?”

Christopher stared down at me again, his eyes dark amber now under the glare of the parking lot lights, conflicted and angry. I hoped I wasn’t imagining the panic underneath the anger. After the way the last two nights had gone, I still wasn’t about to make any assumptions.

Then his gaze lowered, and so did his voice. “I’ll come,” he whispered, much to my relief.

And, it seemed, Millicent’s satisfaction. “Then get a move on,” she ordered, poking him with her gun and then poking Jude for good measure. “And let’s get to this girlie’s truck. One of you children get my things, would you?”

We got a move on, Jude leading the way, and I fetched the old Warder’s belongings off the sidewalk as we went. But as we headed off to where she had parked, my friend pulled me to her and gave me another long, baffled stare.

“Ken… since when have your eyes been yellow?”

Fremont has a longstanding reputation as the artsy bohemian district of Seattle.
This isn’t so much the case anymore, not since another big software company moved in and started yuppifying the place, but the reality behind that reputation still prevails in certain of its corners. Like the Aurora Bridge on 36th Street, under which lurks a huge stone sculpture of a troll with a Volkswagen pinned under its mighty paw. I was six years old when the Troll was erected, and as a teen, I’d played live-action sessions of
Dungeons & Dragons
on it with gamer friends. Every day through high school and college, I’d biked past it; now that I’m an adult, I still attend the yearly Halloween parties in its honor.

Tonight, as Jude drove past it en route to my aunt’s, I took one look at the Troll and screamed.

Jude ran off the road in her startled reaction, her truck’s wheels skidding on the wide expanse of gravel next to the road beneath the bridge. Christopher, exiled to the back seat with me in deference to Millicent’s age, threw a protective arm across me while he shot alarmed looks in all directions, trying to find what must have set me off. But the old Warder glanced back at me from her spot up front and then out her window at the looming stone sculpture, and chortled.

“It’s not real, dearie,” she assured me. “Never was. Trolls don’t get that big.”

“Y-you sure about that?”

Millicent chortled louder. “Sure as tornadoes in Oklahoma! Believe me, troll gets even close to that size, it’ll cause a city a lot more headache than that one’s ever done, and you’ll need a tank with armor-piercing shells to take him out. That one’s a fake. He’s for scaring off real trolls.”

Jude looked out to check the truck’s blind spot before pulling back onto the road, and peeked in my direction as she did. More or less. She didn’t manage to look straight at me. “Warn me next time you’re about to do that,” she said, sounding rattled. I guiltily wondered if my altered eyes had spooked her. They still spooked me, and I’d pointedly avoided the truck’s mirrors as we’d left Capitol Hill.

“Sorry,” I mumbled. Jude shot me a small fleeting smile over her shoulder, and I took that as a promising sign. Summoning a nervous smile of my own, I looked back to Millicent. “Trolls buy it?”

“Oh yeah. Doesn’t take much to fool a troll.”

I giggled a little, pulled in a long breath, and tried to calm down. “And here I thought it was just a quirky piece of art. Who knew?”

Then Christopher’s arm shifted against me. I started and found him studying first me, and then his own limb, as if only just realizing he’d flung it across my chest. He carefully withdrew it. But his hand stopped at my shoulder, long enough to give it a brief squeeze. “Trolls,” he said, one corner of his mouth curling up, “are wicked stupid.”

Certain I must have imagined that momentary glimmer of better humor, I peered at him, but he turned and slumped wearily against the window. Bracketed above by the gauze on his brow and below by the beard that lined his jaw, his profile showed me nothing else except stoic resignation and a barely suppressed, powerful need for sleep.

But all the rest of the way to Aunt Aggie’s, my own mood grew oddly lighter.

My aunt is the most unflappable person I’ve ever seen. Not a single thing throughout my childhood surprised her, from the challenges a single African-American woman of her generation with a child to feed had to face to the vagaries of politics and the eternal gray wetness of Seattle winters. She met trends in popular culture or advances in science and technology with a wry serenity. Not even the Inauguration Day windstorm back when I was seven threw her off her stride, even though she spent weeks afterwards promising me that our house wasn’t going to blow away.

When we arrived on her doorstep, two rattled young women, one injured young man, and an elderly lady who had more bubbling vigor than the rest of us combined, Aggie was more agitated than I’d ever seen her. Oh, she didn’t blink as she waved us into the house, saying dryly, “Twenty-eight years I’ve been waiting for a night like this. You’d have thought I’d have been better prepared.” But old grief and sober determination churned within her dark eyes behind her habitual calm, especially when she got a good look at me.