Faerie Blood (8 page)

It was almost impossible to follow a performance like that. The next three entrants didn’t even try. One of the staff had to coax the fourth contestant after Alex to come on up and take his turn, and the poor guy swallowed hard as he stepped up to quaver his way through “It’s Now or Never”. His voice wasn’t bad, but either stage fright or the realization that Alex had just blown anyone unlucky enough to follow him out of the water made him keep flubbing his pitch.

As Jude had predicted, the entire affair got funnier with alcohol factored in, and by my second daiquiri I’d started joining in on the laughter. But while Alex’s successor struggled his way through his chosen song my attention wandered, drifting around the room to read the print on the movie posters and idly take in the other details of the décor. I was pondering whether the penguin logo on the sign outside would have come out the same if the bar owners had been Debian users instead of RedHat when something prickled through my flesh and along my skin.

The feeling was starting to get familiar. I’d had it last night on the Burke-Gilman trail, this morning by the hedge, and on the way into the bar—and each time it had accompanied things that should not have had any place in actual, three-dimensional life. It cut through the mellow glow of the rum I’d downed, stirring up the panic I’d been doing my damnedest all evening to bury. I thought disjointedly of pricking thumbs and Scottish plays while my gaze, without my willing it, jerked over to the door. It opened, and Christopher MacSimidh walked in.

I blinked. Twice. Two daiquiris weren’t anywhere near enough to make me see things—under normal circumstances. But the last twenty-four hours had been anything but normal, and between the drinks and the impact of everything I’d seen since last night, I wasn’t certain of anything unfamiliar crossing my path. Christopher, though, I recognized in an instant. His features burned—in my memory and in my line of sight—like a brand: honey-brown hair in a ponytail, short beard lining his jaw, pale and weary features punctuated by the bandage on his brow.

He’s real
. The shocked fragment of a thought shot across my brain at the sight of him. And then, borne up on a surge of rising dread, another one followed.
Does that mean everything else was, too
?

Christopher paused at the door, uncertainty darkening his eyes; for just a moment or two, I felt those prickles along my skin grow sharper. I wondered if he would turn his head, if he would see me—but then the moment broke as he shut his eyes and drew in a long, steadying breath. Then he looked up again, and with the single-minded focus of a man stepping across a bed of hot coals, he stalked towards the bar.

Before I’d fully registered what I was doing, I mumbled in Jude’s direction, “Be right back.” I didn’t wait to see if she heard me; I was up and moving to intercept Christopher before the words had finished leaving my mouth.

He beat me to the bar, leaning across it when he got there and waving to catch the eye of the young man mixing drinks behind it. “Jeremy,” he called out, rough and low, “I need a moment.”

The bartender blinked with almost as much surprise as I’d felt seeing Christopher at the door. “Holy crap, Chris, what happened to you? You get hit by a truck?”

“Somethin’ like that. Is Margie about, then? I need a word with her—”

“You look like you need to sit down, if you don’t mind my saying so, man!”

“And those of us at the back table,” put in a customer further along the bar, with just enough sardonic emphasis to get attention, “need a round of White Russians. Tonight. If that wouldn’t be, you know, inconvenient or anything.”

Jeremy started, blurted a quick “sit tight” to Christopher, and then whirled apologetically around to fill the patron’s order.

That left Christopher alone—and left me an opening to get to him.

I stepped up just as he frowned tightly to himself and closed his eyes once more, leaning against the wall on his other side. He had on the same jeans and hiking boots I’d last seen him in, though he’d replaced his lost black flannel shirt with a blue one just as rumpled as its predecessor, sleeves rolled up haphazardly along his forearms, collar undone and shirttails out. My heart rate accelerated as I reached him, and I couldn’t tell if it came from anxiety over his haggard features, a sudden urgent desire for him to explain the weirdness that had engulfed my life, or the way the prickling increased through every one of my nerves at his close proximity. I tried to avoid thinking about any of it too closely as I tapped him on the arm.

“Hey, big guy… Christopher? Remember me? You okay?”

He jolted, straightened, and went a little paler as he saw me. His gaze was exhausted, but far more alert than they’d been when I’d left him at the hospital the night before. “You,” he whispered.

That didn’t seem at all promising. Neither did the prickling, because I didn’t want to know why I was feeling it around a perfectly normal-looking guy as well as all the subjects of the Big Book of the Weird. But Christopher’s attention was on me now—and I was desperate to know exactly what had been going on all around me and within me. “I’ve got to talk to you,” I blurted, ignoring his failure to answer either of my questions. Either the alcohol or the general stress of the day loosened my tongue; more words tumbled out of me before I could stop them. “Do you remember what you said to me, at my place? About seeing… them? I’ve been seeing—I don’t know what I’ve been seeing but you’ve got to tell me—”

“Jesus Christ, girl, not here,” Christopher hissed.

He thrust up a hand as though to ward me off, but I darted forward and grabbed him by the front of his shirt. “What color are my eyes?” I hissed back, high-pitched, scared. To my chagrin, tears I couldn’t suppress welled up across my vision, but I hung on to Christopher’s shirt and stared pleadingly up at him. He had to tell me. He understood. He
knew
.

The question must have thrown him, or maybe it was my crying. His brow furrowed just beneath the bandage; his expression turned awkward. For a couple of seconds I didn’t think he would answer me, but then he pulled in a breath and let it out again, heavily. “Yellow,” he breathed, too soft for anyone but me to hear, and the prickling stabbed up sharply through my ears at the sound of it. “Yellow as nothin’ I’ve ever seen on this earth.”

I felt a wail threatening to creep up out of my throat. But it didn’t get the opportunity to escape—or if it did, I didn’t hear it. A guitar cut across every other noise in the bar, an actual guitar rather than the karaoke machine, sending intricate, liquidly played arpeggios out into the room. A stir of startled anticipation rose up in response, but Christopher abruptly tensed, his attention shooting over and past me to the stage where the contest was going on.

This can’t be good
. Too unsettled to think anything but that at the palpably wary expression on Christopher’s face, I looked over my shoulder. And felt another wail building up fast on the heels of the first, along with a wave of the prickling so strong that it felt like a torrent of needles all over me.

I didn’t recognize the words—something about wild country roses, and trees as tall as the sky. The voice that sang them, though, did so with a rich, fluid sweetness that blended so thoroughly with the guitar that the two seemed intertwined, different strands of one unified skein of music. As for the singer, he uncannily called a young Elvis Presley to mind. His hair was jet black, cut in a fetchingly disheveled pompadour. He wore a simple blue cotton shirt a few shades lighter than Christopher’s flannel and a pair of old jeans, and even his battered guitar looked the part.

But Elvis had never had skin that subtly shone as though bathed in moonlight, even under the glare of stage lights in a bar. Or ears that slanted up to points like a pair of uplifted wings. Or eyes as blue and dark as midnight, that even across the room glimmered as though carrying a sky’s worth of stars within them.

Eyes that gleamed like gemstones.

Like mine.

For fuck’s sake, you’ve got to be kidding me!

The objection sprang up somewhere in the back of my brain, and it should have been right. Looking like the official Elvis impersonator of the cast of
The Lord of the Rings
should have made the newest figure on the stage ridiculous. That he was singing to a bar full of half-drunk computer geeks should have had us all in stitches.

But it didn’t. His gaze swung round the room as he sang, ironic arrogance glittering in its depths, hinting at both awareness of and sublime indifference to his own potential inanity. The arrogance seemed warranted, for he carried himself with an inhuman grace for which Elvis or any other performer, past or present, would have gleefully killed. Sung by anyone else, the song would have been a sweet, simple country ballad; from him, it became crystalline perfection. It bypassed my sense of hearing and went straight for my blood, stirring it with a haunting, compelling power.

An absolute hush fell over the bar. Faces that had been convulsed with merriment went reverent, awed. One or two women and one of the boys in drag let out astonished—and genuine—squeals. Jeremy, the bartender Christopher had tried to hail, stopped what he was doing. So did the two waiters carrying pitchers of beer to their intended destinations. One of the gamers emerged from the server room, only to stop dead in his tracks and turn to pay respectful attention to the stage.

My blood churned. My own thoughts dizzied me. Something I could not name deep in my bones wanted the singer to look my way, more than I had wanted anything before in my life, and acknowledge—

What?

I didn’t know. And even as I began to shake with unhappy longing at my own ignorance, I went cold at the thought that those midnight eyes, all too like the eyes I’d seen in my reflection, might find me—

Might know me—

I shook harder, torn between the need to approach the stage and the urge to flee out into the night. Before either impulse could win over the other, Christopher’s hand clamped down hard on my arm. “Sidhe,” he barked into my ear, the low whisper grating across the painful beauty of the singing as he yanked me towards the door. “Let’s go, lass, before he sees you!”

Half of me wanted to argue, and that half kept my attention mercilessly riveted on the singer. Tears began to blur my view of him, throwing a watery, dreamlike cast across his face and form, but they couldn’t block out his song. The longer I listened the more it flowed into me like wine, whispering of how easy it would be to go closer. To listen for as long as he might care to sing, and hope that he would notice me when he was done.

The rest of me rebelled. Spooked by the eerie, hypnotic song rolling through the room, I seized at the distraction of Christopher’s grip. He held onto me with enough strength to hurt, and the current that kept crackling between us shorted out my unnatural thrall. Five minutes ago, I’d been leery of that current; I welcomed it now. It cleared my head. It reminded me that Christopher, for whatever reason, seemed to be the only one who saw and understood the impossibilities that had entered my world. And he was the only escape at hand from the figure on the stage. Dazed, half-blinded by my own tears, I let him pull me out the door.

Fleeing into the parking lot struck me with a physical shock, like diving into a swimming pool after you’ve been soaking in a hot tub. I reeled, for the air that hit my skin, which should have felt warm on a summer night in Seattle when I’d just bolted out of an air-conditioned bar, seemed far too cold. It ached against my cheeks, throat, and hands, as though I ran headlong into ice. Every inch of me tingled. The farther away I got from the bar’s front door, though, the more the sensation narrowed in on my ears, my shoulder where Christopher’s head had lain, and his hand tight around my arm.

All else eluded my notice until we were three quarters of the way across the parking lot, almost to the sidewalk, where without warning Christopher stumbled mid-stride. Aghast, I grabbed at his arm this time rather than the other way around. He pressed a hand to his head, hauled a labored gulp of air into his lungs, and scowled in what would have been fierce disgust if queasiness obvious enough to jolt me out of my mindless flight hadn’t overridden it.

The man had a concussion, I remembered in a rush. My face went hot with shame. How could I have forgotten?

“Shit,” I gasped, pulling his arm around my shoulders so that he wouldn’t fall, even though that only made me all the more aware of the erratic buzz coursing through me everywhere my body touched his own. “Please don’t faint! Not now!”

“I’ll. Be. All. Right.” Each syllable came out of him as a hoarse little grunt. I got the feeling it was more a mantra for himself, a declaration of what he would make reality by his own bullheaded determination, than it was reassurance for me. Then he opened his eyes and added brusquely, shoving me onward towards the sidewalk, “Keep goin’, and don’t wait for me. If you know what’s good for you you’ll keep goin’ till you’re out of this city entirely, as I plan to be!”

“What? Wait a minute, I just can’t up and run away!” Shock at the idea splashed like water across the heat of my alarm, and I dug in my heels, balking at Christopher’s attempt to push me off. “I’ve got a job, and I
don’t
have a car. I can’t just leave my Aunt Aggie. And for God’s sake, you’re hurt, I’m not going to leave you either!”

All traces of dizziness vanished from Christopher’s face. “Goddamnit, girl,” he exploded, “do you think a troll cares how you commute when it’s about to rip off your head? Do you think the Daoine Sidhe value your mortal kith and kin?”

Concussion or no concussion, I hammered my fists against his chest. “How the hell am I supposed to know?” I howled. The confusion and panic of the last many hours crashed over me in a wave, threatening to pull me under, threatening to drown.

“Don’t do that!” His big hands grabbed mine in self-defense before I could get in more than a blow or two, and another pained grimace tightened his features. “Settle down! I’m tellin’ you this for your own good!”

Neither his bellowed order nor his hands upon my wrists stemmed the flood of frantic, angry words that erupted out of me. “I don’t know what you’re talking about! Or when the Sidhe stopped being fictional, or why the fuck a real live troll attacked me! Everything got all… since last night… I don’t know what’s going on!”