So in a way, these occasional liaisons with Galfreya—no strings attached, be together when it felt right, no hard feelings when it didn’t—should have been perfect. But I, at least, am human and we’re never satisfied, are we? What I had with Galfreya wasn’t true love. It had no future. It had only the here and the now, and while that’s obviously enough for fairy, who seem to live the whole of their lives ever in the moment, it wasn’t enough for me.
“I’m sorry you can’t stay,” Galfreya said, then leaned close to kiss me. “Say hello to Christy for me,” she added.
“I will.”
I was halfway to the car when I heard the door close behind her. I reached the car, then paused, cocking my head. If I listened hard I could hear a fiddle playing—low and lonesome, coming from some far distance. I almost recognized the tune, but then the sound was gone.
I looked around, but I was alone in the parking lot with my brother’s car. Or so I thought.
I opened the back door and laid my fiddlecase on the seat. As I was straightening up, my gaze became level with that of one of the small twig and leaf fairies that were regulars at the mall revels. She was lying on the roof of the car, pixie-featured and grinning, head propped on her elbows, her vine-like hair pulled back into a thick Rasta ponytail. She wasn’t really made of twigs and leaves and vines—or at least I didn’t think so—but her skin was the mottled colour of a forest, all greens and browns.
“Hello, Hazel,” I said.
“Hello, your own self.” She got up, tucking her ankles under her knees so that she was sitting cross-legged. “Can I get a lift into town?”
“Sure. What’re you up to?”
She shrugged. “Oh, you know. A little of this, a little of that.”
“In other words, some kind of mischief.”
She made her features go very serious and said, “I don’t think so,” but she couldn’t hold it. Laughing, she fell back onto the roof and then kicked her feet in the air.
“Well, come on,” I said.
She jumped to the ground when I shut the back door. Standing, she came up to about my waist, a skinny little gamine in baggy cropped blue jeans, a sleeveless T-shirt, and a yellow bandana tied loosely at her neck. Her feet were bare on the pavement.
“You’re not cold?” I asked.
She shook her head. “But I could pretend to be, if you like.”
I laughed and opened the driver’s door, standing aside so that she could climb in and scramble to the passenger’s side of the bench seat.
“Buckle up,” I told her after I got in.
“It’s okay,” she said. “You won’t get a ticket. I won’t let the policemen see me.”
Handy thing, being a fairy and only being seen when you wanted to be. Unless you had the gift of the Sight, or had it given to you as I had by Galfreya, so that none of the more impish fairies could play tricks on me.
“That won’t help if I have to brake suddenly,” I said, “and you go flying up against the windshield.”
Hazel sighed theatrically, but she already knew that I wouldn’t start driving until she did as I’d asked. It was an old argument, but that didn’t stop her from trying every time I gave her a lift.
“How did you get so boring?” she asked. “Did you have to practice?”
“I was just born that way.”
“Boring.”
I laughed. “Yes, sad isn’t it?”
Once Hazel was buckled in, I started the car and pulled out of my parking spot. With the lot empty, I ignored the designated lanes and drove straight for the exit. There was already traffic as we pulled out onto the highway—commuters driving in from rural communities. They came in early to beat the rush, and subsequently were able to leave early as well, but all it really did was spread the traffic congestion over a longer space of time. Rush hour in the city was now three to four hours long, depending on the weather.
“How come you didn’t stay with herself?” Hazel asked.
I shrugged. “I’m just tired. I’ve been up all night. I had a gig before tonight’s revel, remember, and I don’t exactly have a fairy’s stamina. I don’t think you people ever need to sleep.”
“Of course we do. If we didn’t sleep, how could we dream?”
I didn’t see the logic of that—there were many other, and I’d say far more pressing, reasons to get one’s sleep, starting with how exhausted and stupid you end up feeling when you don’t get enough—but there was no point in arguing logic with fairies.
“She really does like you, you know,” Hazel said.
“I know.”
“It’s just she—”
“I know,” I repeated.
“Grouch.”
“Moxie.”
“I don’t even know what that means,” she said.
“It means you’re annoyingly full of verve and pep.”
She smiled. “Oh, well, that’s true.”
We had to slow down for a light that had turned green ahead of us, but the line of cars was just getting back up to speed.
“Oh, look,” Hazel said. “Damn pluikers. Don’t they just make you sick?”
I had time to note a line of three or four fairies sitting on a fence watching the traffic go by. They looked and dressed like Native Americans—jeans and buckskin, checkered shirts—but I could see hare ears and antlers, which is how I knew they were fairies. And naturally, they were invisible to everyone except for me and Hazel.
She raised her middle finger and waved it at them, sticking out her tongue.
“Why did you do that?” I asked.
She gave me a look that asked how did you ever get to be so dim.
“Because they’re green-brees,” she said. “Duh.”
“But what does that mean?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. That’s just what we call them. I think it means stagnant water—or the slime you find in stagnant water.”
“So why don’t you like them?”
I could still see the line of little figures in my rearview mirror. They seemed perfectly normal—in fairy terms, I mean.
“Why should we?” Hazel said. “They don’t like us.”
“They just looked like fairies to me.”
“Well, they’re not. They didn’t have to come across the water to get here. They were already here when we arrived.”
“So they’re native fairies.”
“They’re not fairies. We’re fairies. They’re just pluikers.”
“And what does that mean?”
Hazel grinned at me. “That they’re great big fat pimples on the arse of the world.”
“You’re beginning to sound like a racist.”
“I’m not a racist. I just don’t like them. They keep us in the cities—right from the start they have, back when the cities were no more than a few shacks at the edge of the water. We rode those high seas for long, long weeks and looked to replenish ourselves from the green and the wild, but they kept it all for themselves and they still do.”
“Well, it was their land.”
Hazel sniffed. “There’s so much. Did they need it all?”
“How would you feel if someone took something that was yours, and you didn’t want to give it up?”
“I suppose. Except on the one hand they say that the wild and the green belongs to no one, it just is. Then on the other, they keep us out of what they claim are their territories. So what’s that supposed to mean?”
“Maybe they don’t want what you call the wild and the green to be spoiled the way the cities already are.”
Hazel shot me a frown.
“This is a boring conversation,” she told me.
She reached over and turned on the radio, stopping at a station that was playing a 50 Cent song. We listened to rap and hip-hop for the rest of the drive in, all the way to where she had me let her off downtown.
Our conversation was still bothering me after I’d dropped the car off at the garage Christy rented for it and got back to Jilly’s loft. I
don’t know why I still called it that. After her accident, Jilly moved into the Professor’s house and I took over her loft, but it’s been a couple of years now. And it wasn’t just me—everybody still referred to it as Jilly’s place. I guess it was because we didn’t want to give up the hope that one day she’d be able to manage the steep stairs of the building and move back in.
When I got upstairs, I laid my fiddlecase on the kitchen table, shed my clothes, and got into the Murphy bed that I almost never bothered to fold back into the wall. It wasn’t like I ever had anybody over.
I lay there, tired, trying to figure out this enmity between the local fairies and those that had started to come over when the first Europeans landed on these shores. I didn’t actually want to be thinking about this, but I couldn’t get it out of my head.
I don’t know how long I would have lain there, unable to sleep, but something else came to me then, the memory of that elusive snatch of fiddle music I’d heard in the parking lot, just before Hazel showed up. It teased me with its familiarity. I felt I knew it, but in a different setting, maybe at a quicker pace. But instead of keeping me awake, the memory of the music lulled me into a feeling of great peace and sadness, and I drifted off.
Galfreya
It took a moment for Galfreya to realize she wasn’t alone in the central courtyard of the mall. She turned slowly to look down both of the long halls that ran east and west and south from where she stood before focusing her attention on the displays of stuffed animals that had been set up in the courtyard by the Newford Museum of Natural History. They were a sorry collection of creatures . . . wolves, bears, a bison, foxes, deer, falcons, hawks, owls, a family of raccoons . . . skin and horns, hooves and feathers commandeered to re-create a semblance of life that was betrayed by glass eyes and stances that were not quite natural. The birds fared best—at least their fur wasn’t worn in places from the touch of a thousand hands—but they were still nailed to their perches.
The poor dead creatures were just as they’d been since the display had been installed earlier in the week. There were no additions. One or more of the dead hadn’t suddenly become animated. She could still see no one in the halls, nor outside the front doors of the mall, nor in the shop windows closest to hand. But the presence she felt was close all the same.
“Okay,” she finally said. “You’re good. I’ll give you that. But even if I can’t see you, I still know you’re here.”
“What, a big shot seer like you can’t find one itty-bitty me?”
The disembodied voice seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere. It was a woman’s voice, smoky and low, and not one Galfreya recognized.
“I’m hardly a big shot,” she replied. “Would I be living in a shopping mall if I was?”
“Who knows? The ways of a seer are mysterious. And you do have your own fairy court.”
“They’re not my court. This just happens to be a handy place to hold our revels. Once the cleaning staff is gone, we have the place to ourselves. And why am I telling you all of this?” she added as an afterthought.
“Guilt?” the voice asked. “To show off how important you are?”
“I don’t have the need to feel one or do the other.”
“Whatever. I’m curious, though. How do you keep your images from showing up on the security cameras?”
“The same way you become invisible: magic.”
“Oh, I’m not magic,” the voice said. “I’m just a shadow.”
And then there she was, lounging on the back of the bison, a small woman in her twenties with curly dark red hair and glittering eyes, dressed in a sweater the colour of Old World heather and a pair of faded blue jeans.
“I didn’t think to look for you between,” Galfreya said.
Between was the border country separating this world from the spiritworld. Standing in it, you could look out on either, but not be seen if you so chose.
“Being a shadow,” she added, “still makes you more than human.”
“Some would say less than human, considering I’m made up of all the bits of a person that they didn’t want and threw away.”
“I wouldn’t.”
“No, of course you wouldn’t,” the stranger said. “You’re a good fairy. So very Seelie Court and all.”
“I’ve seen you before,” Galfreya said. “But not here.”
“I don’t exactly haunt the malls, looking for a bargain.”
“I meant in this world.” She studied the stranger for a moment, then nodded. “It was at some of the parties in Hinterdale. You’re one of Maxie Rose’s friends.”
The stranger smiled. “You see? I have a claim to fame as well.”
“I don’t claim any fame.”
“Whatever.”
The stranger slid down from the back of the bison, her walking boots making a soft thump when she landed on the fake ground of the display.
“So what’s with all the dead cousins?” she asked, running her hand along the bison’s flank before she stepped down onto the marble floor of the courtyard.
Galfreya shrugged. “The mall just does this kind of thing. One week it’s an antique show, the next it’s a display of power boats. I think it’s supposed to be educational.”
“It gives me the creeps.”
“Me, too,” Galfreya said.
The red-haired stranger frowned at her.
“Oh no, you don’t,” she said. “That’s twice you’ve tried to get chummy with me and find some kind of common ground. Just be yourself.”
Galfreya knew that danger came in all sizes, so the fact that she topped the stranger by at least a head meant little, but the red-haired woman’s attitude was starting to seriously annoy her.
“What is your problem?” she asked, not even pretending to be friendly any more.
“You,” the stranger said. “At least, it starts with you. I mean look at yourself. You’ve got to be a couple hundred years old—”
“Give or take a thousand.”
“So there’s a reason your speaking name is Mother Crone. You should dress your age—you know, robes or something instead of this skateboarder look, which is way pathetic for a woman your age, even if you do wear a glamour that makes you seem twenty-something.”
Galfreya hadn’t changed clothes since she’d seen Geordie off.
“What makes you think it’s a glamour?”
“Oh, come on. Everybody knows that fairies go for the sleek, young look, no matter how many years they’ve piled on.”
“Unlike shadows who are always what they seem.”
The stranger looked uncomfortable for a moment, then shrugged. “Whatever.”
“So the way I dress is what’s troubling you,” Galfreya said. “Why should that be any of your business?”
“Well, that’s not all,” the stranger replied. “What’s with you fairies and your enchantments and how you need to have humans amuse you, no matter what havoc it might play in their own life?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Your fiddler,” the stranger said. “The one you keep drawing back here, week after week, with your music and your revels and your oh-so sweet talk. Why can’t you leave him alone?”
“Why do you care? If you’re in love with him, you’re not doing a very good job of showing it because he’s never said word one to me about you or anyone else.”
“Oh, please. I’m not into incest. He’s my brother.”
“Your brother.”
The stranger nodded, a challenge in her eyes. Galfreya met her gaze with a look as steady, then slowly nodded.
“Yes,” she said. “I see that he is.”
“So tell me, why won’t you leave him alone? I know you don’t have a long-term interest in him because your kind never does. You just use people up and move on to the next.”
“That’s neither fair nor true.”
“So, do you love him? Are you ready to give up immortality to be with him? That’s how it works for your kind, right? There
has to be a sacrifice. Or maybe you’re trying to get him to give up his world to be a puppet fiddler in yours, always ready at your beck and call.”
“Do you have to work at being so annoying?” Galfreya asked.
“You haven’t seen me annoyed yet, sweetheart. And you didn’t answer my question.”
Galfreya stared at her, trying to keep her anger in check. The stranger was infuriating, but she was Geordie’s sister, her own anger obviously born out of love. So Galfreya was willing to cut her a little more slack. But only a little.
“I love him as you do,” she said finally. “As a sister.”
The stranger raised her eyebrows. “Do fairies usually sleep with their siblings?”
“Fine,” Galfreya said. “Then as a friend.”
Now it was the stranger’s turn to study her.
“Okay,” she said after a moment. “Maybe you do. So then, why are you doing this? You know he’ll never have a chance at a normal relationship so long as you’ve got your hooks in him. It might already be too late. All the glamours and magic might have already spoiled him for an ordinary woman.”
“I’m hardly such a catch.”
“What, are you a vampire, too? You can’t look in a mirror? You’re gorgeous.”
Galfreya shrugged. “It’s all in the eye of the beholder.”
“I suppose. Is that why you dress down with the skateboarder gear?”
“I dress to be comfortable.”
“And you’re still not answering my question.”
“I know,” Galfreya said. “I don’t really want to. Sometimes, speaking a foretelling aloud is the very thing that gives it life.”
“Oh, please,” the stranger said.
Her tone was easy, but she couldn’t hide her worry.
“Very well,” Galfreya told her. “This is what I saw: If I don’t keep him close to me, to my court, he will be terribly hurt. Perhaps he’ll even die.”
The stranger swallowed, but the look in her eyes went from worried to determined. “So, what’s the danger? What’s supposed to hurt him?”
“I don’t know. I couldn’t see that. I can only see what I’ve told you.”