Oddest of All

  Only when it was gone did she turn toward me. Her arms were still outstretched, as if she wanted me to take her back, even after what I had done. And her eyes were filled with such anguish that I had my own foot on the sill and was ready to leap into her embrace, heedless of my own life. But before I could make that plunge Melusine was caught as if by an invisible hand and snatched away, vanishing from my sight.

  That was the last time I ever saw her. But I heard her again, many times. We all heard her. For she always returned the night before death came to take one of our family. In the midnight darkness she would fly around the castle towers, wailing her warning, until those of us inside were nearly mad with grief.

  My grandmother’s hooded eyes gazed up at me, the strange vertical pupils only making her beauty more exotic. Then her forked tongue flicked from between her shapely lips, and my fascination turned to horror. Why that one thing above all else should have disgusted me I am not certain. Perhaps it was because in other ways her human and serpent parts were clearly distinct. But that slender tongue darting lightning-like from those human lips made shudderingly real the curse that lay upon her.

  “Why have you come here?” she asked. “Why now, after all these years?”

  “I have a gift for you.”

  Eagerness flashed in her strange eyes. But I saw fear as well. As if to hold off the coming moment she turned the conversation, asking softly, “You’re Geoffroi’s son, aren’t you?”

  I smiled and nodded, feeling I had reclaimed some pride in my father. “I carry his name, too.” I paused, then added shyly, “I heard you, the night you came to wail your dirge for him around our cottage; the night before he died.”

  She closed her eyes, as if the memory pained her. “Geoffroi was the last of my children,” she whispered. “Even so, what I sang was no dirge. It was a cry of desire.”

  Relief rippled through me, for these words confirmed that I was doing the right thing. After a moment I said, “While he was waiting to die, Father told me the story of our family. All but a small part of it.”

  “What part was that?” she asked, her forked tongue darting out again.

  “About your mother.”

  Melusine looked away, as if gazing into the past, then said softly, “How much do you know? Are you aware that Mother was one of the Earthly Fallen?”

  I had learned some about the Earthly Fallen during the years of my quest. Even so, I said nothing, leaving the silence for her to fill, if she was willing.

  Pulling herself from the water, Melusine coiled her tail beneath her. Perhaps a foot of her serpent self rose from that coil, its muscular blue gray thickness holding her torso upright, so that her head was actually slightly above mine.

  “Mother’s name was Pressina. Her downfall came when she refused to choose sides in that most ancient of all wars, the battle that sundered heaven when Lucifer took arms against his creator and shook the foundations of the world.” Melusine sighed. “Mother’s neutrality provided her no safety. In fact, it proved her downfall, for the Creator demanded absolute obedience and could not stand to look upon those who had refused to take his side. Once the war was over and Lucifer and his rebels had been hurled into Hades, the Creator decided that those who, like Mother, had stayed apart from the battle should be punished as well.”

  “Why did she stay apart from it?” I asked.

  My grandmother shrugged, creating a disturbing movement in the wings that arched behind her. “She understood Lucifer’s discontent; indeed, she had felt it herself. But she was unwilling, or perhaps unable, to bring herself to rise against the one who made her. As were many of her fellow angels. In punishment for their neutrality, for not loving him enough, their wrathful creator flung them down to earth. They were oddly out of place in this world, where mortality rules but they themselves could not die.”

  My grandmother was silent for a time. Though I burned to know her thoughts, I let her sit in peace. At last she said, “They were dangerously beautiful. In time they came to realize that it was safer—safer for them, but even more so for the mortals who surrounded them—to live at the edge of reality as most humans knew it. They drew apart and eventually came to be known as the folk of Faerie. Yet though they kept to themselves, they could not end their fascination with humans.”

  “Why not?”

  She stretched her wings above herself like a dark canopy. “Many reasons, I think. But the most compelling one was that the Fallen—trapped here forever—were fascinated by the ability of mortals to die.”

  I laughed. “Most of us do not think of that as a gift.”

  “You have lived far longer than most of your kind, Geoffroi. Even so, you are young. Very young. You mortals think it would be fine to live forever. But there comes a time when it is time to go, when one would welcome death’s cold embrace. That’s why the Earthly Fallen so often sought to marry mortals, so they could bless their children with mortality.” She sighed. “That was the gift Mother tried to give me and that I forfeited.”

  We sat in silence for a time. Finally I said, “What happened?”

  “After many centuries in the mortal realm, Mother married the king of Scotland. She set only one condition upon their marriage: If and when she bore him children, he must not intrude upon the birthing—a condition, one of many, that had been imposed on her kind when they were ejected from heaven.

  “Alas, when my sisters and I were being born—all three of us at once—Father was so excited by the news that he broke his vow. He did this not out of jealousy or anger or pettiness, but driven only by his joy, which was our doom. Snatching up the three of us, Mother fled back to Avalon, the island at the edge of the world we know.”

  My grandmother let the tip of her tail slide into the water. She stirred the pool for a moment then said, “We could have been happy there, if not for the fact that island life feels like a prison when you are young and longing to know the world. When we were fifteen years old, and aflame with restless energy, my sisters and I first learned the story of the life we had lost when our father broke his vow. I was furious at being trapped on that island when we should have been princesses, with all the world to roam in. In my rage I vowed to punish the father I had never known—punish him for his foolishness, and even more for his faithlessness. So with the help of my sisters I locked him away in the heart of a mountain, in a cell that could not be broken.”

  She sighed. “Alas, I cast my spells all too well. Though I later repented that rash action, my father spent the rest of his life locked in that darkness.

  “Mother, who still loved him despite his broken oath, called us unnatural and vicious children. Her greatest anger was for me, since I was the one who had instigated the act. With flashing eyes she laid her curse upon me.”

  Melusine paused, and I could tell she was drawing deep from the well of memory. When she spoke again her voice was low, angry, and very powerful.

  “‘For one full day of every week, from Friday midnight until Saturday midnight, you shall be half serpent. This curse will last until you find a man who proves throughout his whole mortal life that he can do what you punished your father for failing to do: He must never seek to learn your secret. If ever you find such a man, you will be happy, Melusine. But if you wed and that man fails, all happiness will end, and you must take your serpent form forever!’”

  Turning away again, Melusine whispered, “That, you see, was the second and crueler part of her curse—crueler even than this hideous shape. For if it came to pass, the mortality she had gained for me by marrying a human would be taken, and I would be doomed to live forever in this beastly form, shunned and feared by all.”

  I ached for the sorrow in her voice as she told me this, and felt more than ever that I had done the right thing in coming here. Even so, I sensed it was not yet time for my gift. So we continued to talk as the moon rose above the still waters of her pool. Much of what we said then was about my father, last of her children to die, and of his many attempts to redeem him
self in the centuries that followed his burning of the monastery.

  Finally, as the night was waning, Melusine asked the question I had been waiting for. Putting a hand on my knee she whispered, “Why have you sought me out, Geoffroi? Why now, after all these years?”

  “I have brought you something.”

  Reaching into my pack, I withdrew the glass cube I had worked so hard to find. I unwrapped it slowly, still wondering, despite all she had said, if I was doing the right thing. But my grandmother had seen it, and the hungry look in her eyes reassured me. She extended her hands. Her tongue—which she had tried to keep under control after she realized how it bothered me—flicked eagerly in and out of her mouth.

  “Do you know what this is?” she asked, scarcely able to contain her longing.

  “It is the thing that was lost to you in the final moment of your transformation.”

  She loomed above me on the thick muscle of her serpent half, smiling with a sad, brave look that nearly broke my heart.

  Inside the glass cube fluttered the small, lost part of her that I had spent so many years tracking down.

  Its tiny face was the image of hers.

  Without another word Melusine lifted the box and smashed it against a rock.

  The glass shattered, freeing her death, which had been born with her, as it is with all mortals. Stretching its lacy black wings, it fluttered up and attached itself to her face.

  My grandmother’s eyes widened in fear, but only for a moment. Gasping, she breathed in—and in death went. A last cry escaped her lips, a mingled sound of pain and relief, and she toppled to the ground. Her tail straightened, extending far into the pool. It began to thrash, beating the water into a foam.

  Like my grandfather before me, I watched in fascinated horror as Melusine transformed—though this was a far different transformation. Her skin withered and wrinkled. The golden hair turned the color of ashes. Her wings crumbled like dry leather, dropping in brittle flakes to the water’s surface.

  Finally the great tail ceased its lashing.

  Soon there was nothing left of Melusine but a scattering of dust—dust, and a blue diaphanous sheath, like that which is left behind when a snake sheds its skin.

  Tears falling freely, I carefully rolled up that sheath and tucked it into my pack.

  When I finished that task and looked up once more, I was not entirely surprised to see that my grandmother’s pool had disappeared. All that was left of our encounter, scattered among the dried leaves at my feet, were sparkling shards of broken glass—the remains of the fragile case that had held the hardest, kindest gift I ever gave.

  I thought it was over.

  I was wrong. I was still staring at the place where the pool had been when a light appeared in the forest beyond it, moving toward me. From the trees stepped a woman so beautiful that the very sight of her made it impossible to breathe. Her face was young and ancient all at once, and something in her eyes made me look away, for I knew that if I gazed into them for too long I would be lost forever.

  A long silence hung between us. I yearned to break it but dared not speak until the woman said, “Do you know who I am?”

  As if the question had freed my frozen tongue, I whispered, “You are my great-grandmother, Pressina.”

  “And do you know why I am here?”

  “I do not.”

  “Look at me, Great-grandson.”

  I turned my face to her once more and felt a flood of warmth.

  “I have come to thank you, as the last thing I do before I leave this realm. I am ancient, Geoffroi—more ancient than you can imagine. And though I am powerful, I am bound by rules more powerful still, rules laid down by the one who created me. Not just rules. Who I am was shaped by who he was, a creator torn between the desire to give freedom and the desire to control—and then, when some of his creations dared to claim that freedom, torn between love and anger.” She shuddered. “It was a mighty anger indeed, an anger stronger than love. But love lasts longer than anger, and time changes things, thank heavens. Mountains crumble, continents shift. Even that massive anger, vaster than oceans, harder than granite, has faded with the millennia. Now forgiveness rises in tiny freshets, like the start of a mountain stream. With time and love, ancient curses can be ended, Geoffroi. Time, love, and acts of compassion.”

  She looked straight into my eyes. “Do you know what you have done for me this night?”

  When I shook my head she smiled; I felt as if in doing so she had somehow placed a blessing on my heart.

  “I was bound as tightly as Melusine, bound by my own angry act against her—the anger I learned from the one who made me. Parent to child, creator to creation, these things are passed on. As Melusine’s mother I wanted—demanded—that she do my bidding, just as my creator had demanded unquestioning obedience from we, his angels. And when she did not obey, I foolishly did just as he had done unto me, and cast her out and cursed her.”

  Pressina gazed around at the forest. In her look I could see a kind of farewell. Turning back to me she said softly, “The stars move. The heavens shift. Anger fades. Slowly, slowly, the need to be all, have all, dominate all begins to fade as well.”

  She extended a hand, not quite touching me yet somehow spreading warmth through every part of my being.

  “You have broken not only Melusine’s curse, Geoffroi, but mine. Like my daughter, I was bound to this mortal realm until one of my blood was willing to act with courage and love to free me. Now my time here is over at last. Thank you for that, Geoffroi. Thank you.”

  In less time than the space between breaths, she was gone.

  I was alone in the wood.

  As are we all.

  The Mask of Eamonn Tiyado

  HARLEY BURTON stood on the sidewalk at the edge of town, staring along the path that led into the forest. His grandmother had forbidden him to go down there when he was little, and he had never quite gotten over his fear of the narrow, winding trail. Which was why he liked to look at it and imagine what it might lead to. It was a nice piece of mystery in his life.

  He was about to turn away and continue toward home when a creaky voice whispered in his ear, “That’s where he went, the night he disappeared.”

  Harley spun to see who had spoken. He found himself facing an old woman whose face was so pinched with pain and loss that it almost hurt to look at her. “Who are you?” he asked, backing away.

  “Just someone who doesn’t want to see you get into trouble.” She leaned closer. “I wouldn’t go down there if I were you, boy. You might run into . . . him.”

  “Him?”

  She hesitated, as if the words were painful to her, then said, “Eamonn Tiyado.”

  A prickle of fear rippled over Harley’s skin. Every kid in Oak Grove knew about Eamonn Tiyado, the boy who had vanished on Halloween night. It had happened fifty years ago, before most of their parents had even been born. That didn’t stop them from using his mysterious disappearance to frighten kids into behaving when they went out trick-or-treating, of course. Grown-ups loved to point to the crumbling mansion at the top of Tiyado Lane and whisper, “That’s where Eamonn lived . . . before he got careless.” But Harley had never heard that this path was part of the story. He glanced at it and shivered, then turned back to tell the old woman he had had no intention of going into the woods.

  She was gone.

  Moves pretty fast for an old lady, thought Harley, puzzled. And what the heck was she talking about, anyway? Crazy old bat.

  He turned to walk on but spotted Annie Dexter heading toward him. She was still a long way off. Even so, there was no mistaking that waist-length, amber-colored hair. Harley sighed. The very sight of Annie made his heart feel like it was twisting inside him. But much as he longed to talk to her, he was all too aware that she was—as his friend Gary phrased it—out of his league. Harley wasn’t ugly, he knew that. But he wasn’t handsome, either. He was just . . . average. Way too average to get a girl as drop-dead gorgeous as Annie to loo
k at him.

  He glanced back at the path, which now seemed more like an escape route. There was no real reason not to go down there. The old woman had clearly been a nutter. And even if there was something scary lurking in the woods, it couldn’t be more terrifying than the thought of facing Annie after the way he had made a fool of himself at school today.

  He stepped off the sidewalk, onto the path that led down into the forest. He hadn’t gone far when he waded into a patch of fog. The mist was lying close to the ground when he first entered it, but before long traces of it swirled as high as his knees, then his waist.

  Harley glanced around.

  The forest seemed darker than when he had first entered.

  “It’s just because there are more trees to block the light,” he told himself, swallowing nervously. He wondered if he should go back. Annie would certainly have passed the entrance to the path by now, so he could get home without having to face her. On the other hand, for years he had wanted to see what was down here; now that he had finally started along the path he might as well go on for a way. Gary had told him it led to a small lake where the teenagers sometimes went skinny-dipping. Of course, it was too cold for that now. Even so, it would be interesting to see the lake. Harley wondered how far it was.

  Fifteen minutes of walking brought him out of the woods and onto a broad shelf of rock that did indeed border a small and quite beautiful lake. To Harley’s surprise, on the far side of the lake he saw a cluster of buildings, almost like a little town. It made sense, in a way. Most of the lakes he had been to had had places for tourists to shop. But why had he never seen or even heard of this town, which was so close to home?

  He spotted a faint path leading around the lake, and decided to follow it.

  The water was still and quiet in the late October afternoon. Brilliantly colored leaves drifted on its surface, touched to fiery brightness by the sun’s rays, which came slanting in under a clouded gray sky. The sight should have been lovely. Yet something about it made Harley nervous, as if he sensed currents in the lake that he could not see, much less understand.