Wondrous Strange

  “What? Trust him? He’s not some guy your wacko aunt hired to follow you around or something, is he?”

  “Like a detective?” Kelley blinked away the sting of unshed tears. It hurt her somehow to know that the random act of kindness he’d presented her with in the form of that beautiful flower might, in fact, have been just a calculated move to get close to her. It had seemed such a lovely gesture at the time.

  “Yeah, or some kind of bodyguard,” Tyff said. “We all know how deeply unenthusiastic dear old Auntie Em was about you moving here.”

  Kelley thought about that for a moment. “Maybe…,” she said. Emma could be freakishly overprotective.

  Tyff sighed, checking the time on her watch. “I have to go. I have a date and, thanks to your heroic horse-rescue efforts, I’m going to have to shower at the gym. Are you going to be okay by yourself?”

  “I’ll be fine,” Kelley said. She was feeling a bit better now that she was home and had told someone about her encounter. It didn’t seem quite like such a big deal anymore. Just Big City Weirdness, and she could handle that.

  “Look—just do me a favor and don’t do anything stupid?” Tyff said, swinging a pashmina over her shoulders and heading for the door. “Our little buddy in there might be well-behaved, but so far, he hasn’t contributed to the rent, so I still need you around.”

  Kelley grinned and nodded. She couldn’t believe how understanding Tyff had been so far, but she was grateful.

  “Maybe you could spend the evening trying to figure out a way to get Mr. Ed out of the tub,” Tyff suggested as she opened the door and stepped into the hall. “But if you do go out, watch your back, okay?”

  “I will. I promise. Have fun tonight.”

  The door closed behind Tyff, and Kelley went into the kitchen. She picked up the box of Lucky Charms and shook it. It was half empty. At the sound of the cereal rattling, she heard an answering whinny. She headed toward the bathroom, poking her head around the door. The horse flicked his ears in her direction. He snorted, and a large, iridescent bubble appeared, inflating from his left nostril to the size of a small balloon before popping loudly. Kelley laughed out loud at the surprised expression on the animal’s face, and he answered her back with a whinny that sounded distinctly like a bashful chuckle.

  “Come on, horse.”

  Kelley felt stupid.

  For one thing, the horse seemed as if he might be smarter than she was. He refused to fall for her trick of moving the handful of cereal farther and farther away in an attempt to get him out of the tub. He just stretched out his neck until she was out of reach and then tilted his head, looking at her with big sad eyes, until she relented and sat on the edge of the tub, feeding him marshmallow moons, horseshoes, and clovers.

  For another thing, she couldn’t just keep calling the horse “horse.” It felt…well, rude somehow.

  Kelley poured out another handful of Lucky Charms, holding them up to the velvety-soft muzzle. The animal’s eyes seemed to brighten with enthusiasm, and he nuzzled around in her palm. It tickled and Kelley laughed. A name occurred to her.

  “Lucky,” she murmured.

  The horse lifted his head as though responding and gazed at her, munching placidly on the sugary treat. Well, it kind of fit. He was lucky that she’d been in the park that night, and he was lucky that Mrs. Madsen in the apartment next door hadn’t heard all the commotion and called the cops. He was lucky that the landlord hadn’t paid a visit. And he was extremely lucky in that Tyff, for some unfathomable reason, hadn’t killed either of them yet. Lucky.

  Kelley scratched behind his left ear, and Lucky whickered softly with pleasure. Kelley got the impression that if he were a cat instead of a horse, he would’ve started to purr.

  I just hope for both our sakes that you’re a “Good” Lucky, Kelley thought, and not a “Bad” Lucky. She was perfectly well aware that luck could go either way.

  XIV

  S onny dropped painfully to one knee to avoid having his head bitten off.

  The boggart he was fighting had burst forth from a rift in Strawberry Fields. It was covered in venomous thorns and had a prominent set of gnashy teeth. Hissing at him, the boggart hurtled off into the dark. Sonny swore and broke into a sprint to chase it, trying hard to concentrate—and forget about that strange, infuriating girl.

  The boggart snarled, bounding through a thicket, and Sonny cursed and followed. The clearing beyond was empty, but Sonny could smell it—like the stench of milkweed. The thing was hiding, but it was still close.

  There was a rustling in the trees above his head. Sonny glanced up, only to realize too late that the boggart had led him straight into a trap.

  A cloud of ravens swirled in the air overhead, and Sonny went cold with apprehension. These were no ordinary ravens. They were creatures of Mabh, the Autumn Queen of the shadowy Faerie Borderlands. Huge birds with oily black feathers, they had red eyes and claws like scythes, and a terrible hunger for human flesh.

  The boggart must have been one of Mabh’s minions as well, Sonny thought as he frantically pulled out the bundled branches from his satchel. At his incantation, they transformed once again into the silver-bladed sword.

  On the other side of the clearing, the boggart emerged, lifting its gnarled hands into the air as though signaling troops. The ravens attacked.

  Sonny’s sword flashed through the air as he whacked two of the murderous birds out of the sky. He cut through several, but others followed, and he thrust sharply, impaling them on the end of the blade. He ducked away from another attack, narrowly missing losing an eye.

  Kelley’s face appeared before him in his mind. This time Sonny didn’t try to fight it. Thinking of her smile, he redoubled his efforts. The ravens came at him again, and his sword whirled, a shining arc in the darkness.

  The light from the rising sun was pouring through his windows when Sonny stepped through the door into his apartment. Out on the balcony, the elegant figure of the Unseelie king sat on a lounge chair. Sonny wearily threw his jacket and satchel on the settee and went onto the terrace.

  “Mabh is mightily annoyed with you, young man,” Auberon said, his words colored with a chilly merriment. “She is very fond of her pets.”

  “Next time tell her to keep them home. Or, if she really wants to test me, to send bigger birds.” Sonny stretched his tired back. In truth, the murderous ravens had taken a great deal of skill to handle, but Sonny was pleased with the outcome. Not a single one had gotten past him.

  When she had roamed the mortal world freely, Queen Mabh had been the stuff of nightmares. Her transgressions against mortals had grown so terrible that Auberon and Titania had been forced to join together and imprison Mabh within the confines of the Borderlands, her own darkling realm. But Mabh had still relished the pleasure of sending her minions through the Gates to wreak chaos—which she would track with her scrying glass, as though watching horror films.

  The thought of Mabh’s creatures being loosed upon the world again made Sonny take his duties as a Janus very seriously. He might not want to live in this world, but he did not wish it harm. Especially not when it had such creatures in it as his Firecracker….

  Sonny felt Auberon staring at him. He had a disjointed sensation that the king had asked him a question and he hadn’t even heard it.

  “My lord?” Distracted, Sonny looked up. Into the eyes of his king.

  “Tell me of the girl,” Auberon said.

  Sonny had not meant to think of her. He had certainly not planned to mention her to Auberon. But his mind, it seemed, was a problem in that respect. And he had made the dangerous mistake of exchanging glances with the Unseelie lord.

  “I can see her. In your eyes.” Auberon’s dark gaze held Sonny like a fly trapped in amber. He could not look away, even as he felt Auberon’s mind stabbing into his own. “Who is she?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do not lie to me, lad.” The king’s voice remained easy, but Sonny knew that, Janus or no, h
e was in a great deal of peril in that moment.

  “It is no lie. She is…an actress. Just a girl from the park, really.” Sonny expected that at any moment Auberon would shred through his formidable mental defenses as if they were paper and learn everything he knew about her. Even though that wasn’t much, Sonny unaccountably did not want the Faerie king to take any sudden great interest in finding out about his Firecracker.

  “Hmm,” Auberon murmured.

  Sonny felt the pressure inside his skull lessen. He raised himself up off his knees—he hadn’t been aware that he had fallen to them—and shook the tension from his shoulders.

  “I cannot gather her from your mind,” the Faerie king mused, sounding intrigued. “And yet, you hold her image there.”

  “She is pretty.” Sonny shrugged with what he hoped was an appropriately casual air. “For a mortal.”

  After a long, weighty moment, the king’s lips twitched in the ghost of a smile. “Not so pretty, I hope, as to make you forget yourself, Sonny Flannery. Or your duties.”

  Sonny bowed his head slightly in deference. “Of course not, my lord.”

  “Good. Because I have an unsettling sense that Mabh’s harbingers are simply that—heralds of things to come. There is a great deal of unrest in the Faerie realms, Sonny. And the closing of the Gates, while I deemed it necessary, has become a thing of contention and a rallying point around which my enemies gather. If my Janus Guard falters, it will go hard.”

  “We will not, my lord.”

  “That would be best,” Auberon said. “And what news, else?”

  Sonny hesitated for an instant, but only for an instant. Auberon was his king. His very purpose as a Janus was to serve him. Why was he even thinking about dissembling? Bob the boucca’s words were a tiny echo in the back of his mind, and Sonny pushed them away.

  He told Auberon about his encounters at the Gate. The king already knew about the boggart and the birds from Mabh, so Sonny told him, instead, of the swarm of piskies, mildly chagrined by his amusement at the tale—much like Maddox’s. Then, swallowing nervousness at the thought of his failure, Sonny told Auberon of the Lake and of the creature that he—and, indeed, all the Janus—had somehow missed entirely: the kelpie that had escaped through the Gate and disappeared into the night.

  “Kelpie are dangerous, surely.” Auberon shrugged, unconcerned. “But not smart enough to evade my entire Janus Guard for long, I wouldn’t think.”

  “I’m not sure that it was just any kelpie, my lord,” Sonny said. He stood and went back into the apartment to retrieve his messenger bag. He drew the three onyx gems from the inner pocket of the bag and, returning, placed them in Auberon’s upturned palm. A few coppery strands of horsehair were still tangled in the beads. “I found these talismans in the mud by the Lake. I don’t think I’ve ever seen their like before.”

  “I have,” the king murmured.

  Sonny wouldn’t have thought it possible for Auberon’s face to turn a paler shade than it already was, but it did. The tall brow remained smooth, the regal face impassive. But the air on Sonny’s balcony plummeted to glacial temperatures.

  “The Hunt…”

  Sonny had to strain to catch the words. “My lord?” he asked.

  “These are charms of making.” The king’s eyes were midnight pools. “They can call the Roan Horse into being.”

  Sonny’s blood froze in his veins. He knew, suddenly, what the glittering black jewels meant. “But…the Roan Horse leads the Wild Hunt.” His voice came out in a rasping whisper.

  “Yes. It does.” Auberon’s hand clenched into a fist around the beads, then he dropped them to bounce along the flagstones at his feet.

  He stood and stepped to the edge of the terrace, looking down on the park, and it seemed to Sonny that the Faerie king had forgotten that he was even there.

  “Oh, Mabh,” Auberon whispered, his expression stricken. “Is this what your folly has brought us to now?”

  There was a blur of motion, and Sonny threw a hand up in front of his face to shield it from the sudden ice-sharp wind. When he lowered it, the king was gone, his cry melting into the keening of a falcon.

  XV

  T he Avalon was on fire, and there was nothing Kelley could do about it.

  All of Manhattan was on fire.

  Brighter than day, the night sky was orange with the light of the flames, leaping to singe the clouds. Terrible music thundered; pipes and drums and skirling voices clawed the air with triumphant, horrific noise. There was the sound of hooves. She looked down at the ground, far, far below, and saw that the streets of the city ran red with blood.

  She could not stop it.

  She didn’t want to.

  A savage glee filled the space where her heart should have been, and Kelley opened her mouth wide to add her voice to the sounds of the war cries ringing through the air all around her.

  “Hey, Winslow—get some sleep last night?”

  Kelley looked up, jolted from the remembrance of her disturbing dreams. “Hey, Alec,” she sighed. Scenes of carnage had paraded through her head all night. “Yeah, I slept. A ton. Wish I hadn’t.”

  Alec regarded her with a grin. “You are an odd, odd girl.”

  Kelley smiled back. “That’s what I was thinking of writing for my bio in the show program. You know, that and only playing this part ’cause the real actress went snap…”

  “Hey! Don’t kid yourself—I think you’re a smokin’ Titania. And just between you and me? Before she went snap? I shuddered at the thought of having to do the bower scene with Crazy Babs every night. With you it’ll be fun!” Alec leaned beside her against the wall. “Wanna go practice? It’ll only take a second to grab my ass…uh…head. My ass head.”

  Kelley threw back her head and laughed, her mood brightened. It was becoming pretty obvious that, bad jokes notwithstanding, Alec would have cheerfully run off to a darkened corner of the theater to “rehearse” with her. She chose to ignore that and punched him lightly on the shoulder. “You know I’m still the only hired help around here, right?” She waved one hand in an airy gesture, intoning imperiously, “I, Titania, Queen of the Fairy Realm…had better go mop the stage before Mindi sets my wings on fire.”

  With that, she made her escape, surprised to find that her heart was pounding a little too fast in her chest. He was cute…but it wasn’t the thought of rehearsing in dark corners with Alec Oakland that set her heart racing.

  She ducked Alec after the end of rehearsal, too. Another day of having Lucky stuck in her tub had led Kelley to the conclusion that the only way she was going to get rid of him was if she could find out to whom he actually belonged. She had spent the morning on her computer, printing up fliers on hot-pink paper with a picture of Lucky (taken with her camera phone) and just enough information to hopefully get someone to call her without calling the police or a mental institution. After rehearsal, armed with the fliers, a stapler, and a roll of tape, she hit the park and headed toward the few scattered public bulletin boards so that she could post her notice. She started at the south end of the park and sneaked a look at her watch, wondering despite herself whether…

  Cue actor—enter stage left.

  Sure enough, she’d been in the park only about five minutes when an increasingly familiar reflection appeared over her shoulder in the glass-cased bulletin board.

  Kelley didn’t even turn around.

  “Don’t you have a home?” she asked, awash in studied nonchalance. She opened the glass and stapled a pink flier over a free-concert notice from last summer on the corkboard.

  He answered her question with a question: “What are you doing here?”

  “I’m posting information fliers,” she replied, waving the little sheaf of paper she held. “Not that it’s any of your business.”

  “You shouldn’t be here.”

  Kelley glanced back to where he stood behind her, brooding.

  “Nice to see you again, too,” she said as she walked away.

 
He’d caught up to her before she’d taken five full steps. “That wasn’t what I meant,” he said, a note of frustration in his voice.

  She couldn’t tell whether he was frustrated with her or with himself. She realized she felt almost exactly the same way. The crisp fallen leaves crunched under their feet as they walked side by side in what, under any other circumstances and with any other guy, would have felt like companionable silence.

  “I’m sorry about yesterday,” he said at last.

  “What, exactly, are you sorry about?” Kelley didn’t slow down, and didn’t look at him.

  “Uh…I’m sorry that I frightened you.” His voice was gruff, awkward, as though he was unused to having to apologize.

  Kelley was determined not to make this easy. After all, he had frightened her—badly. Why was she even talking to him? “Apology not accepted.”

  Beside her his steps faltered, and he fell a bit behind as he said, “Oh. All right. I…understand.”

  “No, you don’t!” she called over her shoulder, and kept up her pace.

  A moment later and he was back at her side, his long stride having made up the difference without effort. He walked silently beside her for another moment. “You’re right,” he said finally. “I really don’t.”

  Kelley sighed. “I don’t see any reason to accept an apology of that kind from a total stranger, under these particular circumstances. I can accept ‘sorry about that’ from the guy who bumps into me on the subway car. That is entirely appropriate.” She shot him another brief glance. “However,” she continued, “‘sorry about that’ from some mysterious guy who gives me a gift, then disappears, then shows up at my place of work, then disappears, then shows up lurking in the alley beside my place of work, then disappears—”

  “You ran away that time!”

  “Don’t interrupt.”