Moonlight & Vines (51 page)

She shivered, but didn't go back inside right away. She looked out across the rooftops, a checkerboard of white squares and black streets
and yards. There was a sort of magic, she supposed, about the city this late at night. The stillness, the dark, the sensation that time seemed to have stopped. The knowing that she was one of a select few who were awake and outside at this hour. If you were going to discover a secret, if you were going to get the chance to peer under the skin of the world, if only for a moment, this was the time for it.

Are you out there? she wondered, addressing the mysterious man Angela had met in a church long before Hannah had even thought of moving to the city herself. Will you show yourself to me? Because I could use a piece of magic right about now, a piece of something impossible that shouldn't exist, but does, if only for this moment.

Her straits weren't as desperate as Angela's had been. And compared to how so many people had to live—out of work, on the streets, cadging spare change just to get a bowl of soup or a cup of coffee—what she had was luxury. But she still had a deficit, a kind of hollow in her heart from which bits and pieces of her spirit trickled away, like coins will from a hole in your pocket. Nothing she couldn't live without, but she missed them all the same.

She wasn't sure that magic could change that. She wasn't sure anything could, because what she really needed to find was a sense of peace. Within herself. With the choices she'd made that had brought her here. Magic would probably confuse the issue. She imagined it would be like an instant addiction—having tasted it once, you'd never be satisfied not tasting it again. She didn't know how Angela did it.

Except, not having tasted it created just as much yearning. This wanting to believe it was real. This asking for the smallest, slightest tangible proof.

She remembered what Angela had said. Visualize it.

Okay. She'd pretend she was thinking up a painting—a made-up landscape. She closed her eyes and tried to ignore the cold air. It wasn't winter, but a summer's night, somewhere near the Mediterranean. This wasn't a tenement rooftop, but a hilltop with olive trees and grape vines and . . . the details got a little vague after that.

Oh, just try, she told herself.

Some white buildings with terra-cotta roofs in the distance, like stairs going down to the sea. Maybe some goats, or sheep. A stone wall. It's night. The sky's like velvet and the stars feel as though they're no more than an elbow-length away.

Where would he be?

Under one of the olive trees, she decided. Right at the top of the hill. Starlight caught on the curve of his goat horns. And he'd be playing those reed pipes of his. A low breathy sound like . . . like . . . She had to use her father's old Zamfir records for a reference, stripping away the sappy accompaniment and imagining the melody to be more mysterious. Older. No, timeless.

For a moment there, she could almost believe it. Could almost smell the sea, could feel the day's heat still trapped in the dirt under her feet. But then a cold gust of wind made her shiver and took it away. The warm night, olive trees and all.

Except . . . except . . .

She blinked in confusion. She
was
on a hilltop, only it was in the middle of the city. The familiar roofs of the tenements surrounding her apartment were all still there, but her own building was gone, replaced by a snowy hilltop, cleared near the top where she stood, skirted with pine and cedar as it fell away to the street.

She shook her head slowly. This couldn't . . .

The sound she heard was nothing like the one she'd been trying to imagine. It still originated from a wind instrument, was still breathy and low, but it held an undefinable quality that she couldn't have begun to imagine. It was like a heartbeat, the hoot of an owl, the taste of red wine and olives, all braided together and drawn out into long, resonating notes. In counterpoint she heard footsteps, the crunch of snow and the soft sound of shells clacking together.

“Dance with me,” a voice said from behind her.

When she turned, he was there. Ellen Wentworth's forest spirit, horns and goat legs, the hair entwined with feathers, beads and shells. She seemed to fall into his eyes, tumbling down into the deep mystery of them and unable to look away. He was a northern spirit, as much a part of the winter and the hills north of the city as a wolf or a jack pine, but the Mediterranean goatman was there, too, the sense of him growing sharper and clearer, the further she was drawn into his gaze.

“You . . . I . . .”

Her throat couldn't shape the words. Truth was, she had no idea what she was trying to say. Perhaps his name—the name Jilly had given him.

She let him take her in his warm arms and felt ridiculous in her tatty housecoat, cowboy boots, and jeans. He smelled of pine sap and cedar
boughs, and then of something else, a compelling musky scent she couldn't place, old and dark and secret. His biceps were corded and hard under her hands, but his touch was light, gentle as she remembered the brush of wildflowers to be against her legs when she crossed a summer meadow.

The music had acquired a rhythm, a slow waltz time. His music. He was dancing with her, but somehow he was still making that music.

“How . . . ?” she began.

His smile made her voice falter. The question grew tattered in her head and came apart, drifted away. Magic, she decided. Pure and simple. Visualized. Made real. A piece of impossible, a couldn't-be, but here it was all the same and what did it matter where it came from, or how it worked?

He led beautifully, and she was content to let everything else fall away and simply dance with him.

She woke to find that she'd spent the night sleeping on the landing outside the door that led out onto the roof of her building. She was stiff from having slept on the hard floor, cold from the draft coming in from under the door. But none of that seemed to matter. Deep in her chest she could still feel the rhythm of that mysterious music she'd heard last night, heard while she danced on a hilltop that didn't exist, danced with a creature that couldn't possibly exist.

She remembered one of the things that Angela had said last night.

Jilly's always saying that magic's never what you expect it to be, but it's often what you need
.

Lord knows she had needed this.

“Hey,
chica
. You drink a little too much last night?”

Mercedes Muñoz, her upstairs neighbor, was standing on the stairs leading up to where Hannah lay. Hand on her hip, Mercedes wore her usual smile, but worry had taken up residence in her dark eyes.

“You okay?” she added when Hannah didn't respond.

Hannah slowly sat up and drew her housecoat close around her throat.

“I've never felt better in my life,” she assured Mercedes. It was true. She didn't even have a hangover. “For the first time since I've moved to this city, I finally feel like I belong.”

It made no sense. How could it make her feel this way? A dream of dancing with some North American version of a small Greek god, on a hilltop that resembled the hills that rose up behind the farm where she'd grown up. But it had all the same. Maybe it was simply the idea of the experience—wonderful, impossible, exhilarating.

But she preferred to believe it hadn't been a dream. That like Angela, she'd met a piece of old-world magic, however improbable it might seem. That the music she was still carrying around inside her had been his. That the experience had been real. Because if something like that could happen, then other dreams could come true as well. She could make it here, on her own, away from the farm. It hadn't been a mistake to come.

Mercedes offered her a hand up.

“And now what?” Mercedes asked. “You going to try sleeping in a cardboard house in some alley next?”

Hannah smiled. “If that's what it takes, maybe I will.”

. . . and then there are the pennymen, linked to the trembling aspens, or penny trees, so called because their leaves, when moving in a breeze, seem like so many twinkling coins.

—Christy Riddell, from
Fairy Myths of North America

It's a Sunday morning in January and there's a tree outside my window, full of birds. I'm not exactly sure what kind. They look like starlings with their winter-dark feathers and speckled breasts and heads, but I could be wrong. I've never been much good at identifying birds. Pigeon, crow, robin, seagull, sparrow . . . after that, I'm pretty much guessing. But the tree's a rowan, a mountain ash. I know that because Jilly named it for me when she helped the boy and me first move into this apartment.

Jilly says they're also called wicken, or quicken trees, an old name that seems both quaint and evocative to me. She claims they're a magic tree—real magic, she insists, like faeries dancing on hilltops, Rhine maidens rising up from the river bottom, little hobgoblins scurrying down the street that you might glimpse from the corner of your eye. As if. All I can do when she starts in on that sort of thing is smile and nod and try not to roll my eyes. Jilly's sweet, but she does take some things way too seriously. I mean, you can have all the romantic notions in the world, but just because
you think you feel a tickle of enchantment, like you're peeking through a loose board in the fence that divides what we know from what could be, doesn't mean it's real.

Magic belongs in stories, it's that simple. Real life and that kind of story don't mix.

Except lying here in bed this morning, pillows propped up on the headboard and looking out the window, for some reason I feel as though I'm in a story. Nothing overly dramatic, mind you. It's not like I expect spies to come crashing in through the front door, or to find a body in the bathtub when I get up to have a pee. It's more like an establishing shot in a movie, something glimpsed in passing, a scene to set the mood of what's to come.

So if this is a movie, here's what the audience would see: It's a blustery day, the sky thick with fat snow that blurs the world outside the glass panes. Against a backdrop of a Crowsea street, there are the birds and the tree, or more properly the stand of trees, since the rowans are growing in a bunch, trunks no thicker than my forearms. The berries are orange, not the bright orange of autumn. They're a deeper color this time of year, but they still stand out against the white snow, the dark lines of the branches, and those birds. Tiny splashes of color. The ground under the tree is littered with them, though the snow's covering them up now.

I can't hear the starlings through the glass. They're probably not making any noise. Too busy chowing down on the berries and keeping their perches as the wind makes the branches sway wildly in sudden snowy gusts. I should get up, but I don't want to lose this moment. I want to lie here and let it stretch out as far as it can go.

I wish the boy were home. I'd ask her to bring me some tea, only she's off working at the gallery this morning. Commerce stops for no one, not even on Sunday anymore.

Have I confused you? Sorry. I started calling Eliza “the boy” after she got her hair cut. The longest she lets it grow anymore is about the length of my pinky finger. It used to fall to the middle of her back like mine still does and then we really looked like the sisters some people think we are.

The boy and I aren't really a couple, like we don't sleep together or anything, but we're closer than friends and don't date, which tends to confuse people when they first meet us and try to fit us into an appropriate mental pigeonhole. Sorry, I don't have one that really works any better myself. You could call us soul mates, I guess, though that's not much clearer, is it?

We met when we were both going through a particularly rough time. Neither of us had friends or family or any kind of support system to fall back on. We were solitary sadnesses until we literally bumped into each other at a La-La-La Human Steps performance and acquired each other. I can't explain it, but things just clicked between us, right there in the foyer of the Standish, and we've been pretty much inseparable ever since.

The boy's the creative one. Long before we met, she was always drawing and painting and making something out of nothing—an amazing ability if you ask me. Forget fairy-tale stuff; that's the only real magic we're going to find in this world. The creative impulse, and the way that people can connect—you know, we might be separate islands of muscle, bone, and flesh, but something in our souls is still able to bridge that impossible gap.

Okay, that's two magics. So sue me.

It's through the boy that we got involved with the Crowsea arts crowd and met Jilly, Sophie, and the others. Me? Well, when I was younger, the only thing I was any good at was being a troublemaker. These days my claim to fame is that I've cleaned up my act and don't cause problems for people anymore.

The boy and I opened the gallery about a year and a half ago, now. The Bone Circus Gallery—don't ask where we got the name. It was just there waiting for us when we decided this was what we wanted to do. We have a different artist showcased every month as well as a general selection of miscellaneous artists' work, postcards, posters, and prints. We carry art supplies, too, and the boy has a studio in back. The art supplies really pay the rent some months, plus it's a way for the boy to get a deep discount on the stuff she needs for her own work.

So life's been treating us well. Maybe we're not rich, and the boy's not famous—yet—but we pay the bills. Better still, she gets to work at what she loves and I've discovered that not only do I like running this little shop and gallery of ours, but I'm good at it, too. It's the first time I've ever been good at anything.

Of course the way the world works is, you don't ever get too comfortable with what you've got, because if you do, something'll come along to pull the rug out from under you. In our case, it's how the boy got co-opted into this fairyland of Jilly's.