Changeling (25 page)

I decided to ignore her dig. “What does he do when something really bad happens?”

“He morphs into the Bear.”

“He what?”

“You deaf or something? When things get tough, the Bull turns into the Bear. The Bear—”

“Let me guess,” I interrupted. “The Bear believes everything is terrible and can only get worse. He thinks too much and never takes risks. Like you,” I couldn't help adding.

“Jerk,” Fleet said, and covered her face with her hands. The tiny braids fell forward like a black curtain. “We're doomed.”

Changeling, who had gone back to her self-imposed task of organizing Fleet's books, stopped and looked at her. “What is wrong with Fleet?”

“She's a bear,” I said.

“I thought she was a mortal changeling, like you.”

“Well, she's
like
a bear, then.” I turned to Fleet. “Cheer up. Don't you know that things always look worst right before the happy ending? Don't you know there's no such thing as a totally impossible task?”

Fleet lifted her head and glared at me. “Don't you know that real life isn't like a fairy tale?”

“Hello,” I said. “Dragons? Giants? Maidens in doorless towers? In New York Between, fairy tales
are
real life.”

“Not on Wall Street, they're not,” Fleet said stubbornly.

“Wall Street is all about deals and markets and gold. Wall Street is about power.”

“So is ‘Jack and the Extension Ladder.' ”

Changeling said, “Sometimes Mom says Strumble is laughing, but Dad says she is just anthropomorphizing.”

Fleet looked at me. “What did she just say?”

I shrugged. “Strumble is Changeling's dog, that's all I know.”

“ ‘Anthropomorphize,' ” Changeling explained patiently, “is from the Greek. ‘Anthropos' means ‘man, human being. ' ‘Morphosis' means ‘giving shape to.' ‘Anthropomorphize' is when you treat something that is not human as if it were.”

“I think she's telling us that Outside animals don't laugh,” I told Fleet. “Which is totally beside the point, because we're not Outside. I've seen Astris laugh—the Pooka, too, even when he's being a dog or a horse.”

Fleet shook her braids gloomily. “So they laugh. Big deal. Have you ever seen a supernatural cry?”

“Banshees!” I said triumphantly. “Listen to me, Fleet. I may not know anything about brokers and investors, but I know this is going to work. Making things cry is easy. All we need is an onion and a handkerchief.”

“Just shut up for a minute and let me think.” Fleet started to worry her thumbnail with her teeth.

Changeling put the last book in place, got up and took the Mirror out of Satchel, and carried it back to her corner.

“Okay,” said Fleet. “If this works, I'll be out of here; if it doesn't, I'm already cleaning the coffeemaker for life. I suppose he could eat me, but at this point, I don't care. We can buy an onion on Canal, and a handkerchief, too. I'm not letting you stink up one of mine.”

I grinned at her. “You're a princess, Fleet,” I said. “I'm sorry I called you a bear. Come on, Changeling. We're going back to Chinatown.”

Changeling, absorbed in the Mirror, said, “I need more data. It is possible that the Bull lacks tear ducts.”

Fleet and I left her to it and went to Canal alone.

Now that we had a plan, Fleet was totally bullish. It was the end of the morning Rush Hour, and the streets were clogged with gold-blind brokers and investors. Fleet taught me this game the younger Wall Street changelings liked, where you had to zigzag through a crowd of brokers as fast as you could. Of course, I kept bumping into Folk, which made them roar and take blind swipes at the ground. Mostly they hit another broker; sometimes they came pretty close to taking my head off. But they didn't catch me, and by the time Fleet and I got to Chinatown, all sweaty and laughing, we were friends.

Our first order of business, as Fleet said, was to find the largest and stinkiest onion in Chinatown. At the third food stand we went to, we found one that made my eyes water from about three feet away. The shinseën shopkeeper wrapped it in some newspaper, gave it to me, smiled, and held out his hand. I smiled back and shook the hand and thanked him for his generosity in my best Mandarin.

This was not the right thing to do. The shinseën jerked his hand away and launched into a long and violent speech about round-eyed tricksters and onion thieves, while Fleet laughed helplessly.

“How do you pay for things in the Park?” Fleet asked when she'd paid him for the onion. “Enchanted leaves and dog poop?”

“Pay for things? You mean with money? We don't. We trade.”

Fleet shook her head. “Are you telling me you've never been shopping?”

“What's that?”

For some reason, this made her give me a hug. “Neef girl, shopping is the most fun you can have without magic. Come on, I'll show you.”

Shopping turned out to be a little like questing, only safer. Instead of trading for things with fresh meat or favors or songs or magic talismans, Fleet gave the shop-keepers silver coins out of a magic purse. It seemed to work kind of like Satchel, only Fleet said that it would give her only so many coins a day. She called it Budget, and grumbled a lot about how small it was.

Budget seemed pretty generous to me. Besides the onion, it bought us a red silk handkerchief with mysterious-looking signs on it, some poison-green mesh slippers decorated with sparkly flowers, some buns with red bean paste in the middle, and, most wonderful of all, the jade frog with ruby eyes that had winked at me. The shopkeeper knocked down the price when I told him how I'd seen it the day before, and threaded it on a black silk cord so I could hang it around my neck. We also bought four silver hair clips, two for Changeling and two for me.

While we shopped, Fleet talked. She told me about the mortal changelings she knew and how they all hung out at a café called the Wannabe in Midtown, when they were off duty, and traded gossip about the Folk.

“I know mortal changelings from Midtown and the Village and the Upper West Side and even Park Avenue,” she said. “But none from Central Park. None of my friends has ever met a Park changeling. I didn't know there were any.”

“There's only one at a time,” I said. “Usually they get eaten by the Wild Hunt. I managed to escape them, but the Lady got mad and threw me out. I can't go back until I get all this stuff for her.”

“It doesn't sound like a lot of fun,” Fleet said. “Why do you want to go back?”

“It's home.”

“So's my apartment in Maiden Lane,” Fleet said. “But I know if I get out of Wall Street—I mean really out, not just on a field trip—I'm not ever coming back.”

“It's not the same. You hate Wall Street. I love Central Park. It's not all bright lights and bustle like Broadway or Chinatown, but there's plenty going on. The Folk are fun to be around, mostly, and I've got some good friends.”

“Friends!” Fleet rolled her eyes. “I don't believe you, Park girl. Changelings don't make friends with Folk. They love them, they hate them, they go on dates and get their hearts broken. But they don't hang out.”

This sounded very weird to me, but I didn't feel like arguing. “If you say so.” I took another bite out of the red bean bun we'd been sharing. “Speaking of places to live, where are you going to go when I've rescued you from the Dragon?”

Fleet snatched the last bit of bun out of my hand. “Someplace where nobody expects me to keep track of appointments and make coffee, that's where. Somewhere I can learn to be an artist. I was thinking the Village—there are lots of artists there. But it's awfully close to the Maze.” She sighed and popped the soft dough into her mouth.

“What about the Metropolitan Museum?” I asked.

“I'd do anything to live there,” she said passionately. “But they don't take changelings either, or at least that's what I heard.”

I didn't know what the Curator's policy on changelings was. As far as I knew, I was the only mortal regular at the Museum, but that didn't mean anything. “Maybe he just forgot to ask for one. The Old Market Woman told me he's horribly absentminded.”

Fleet turned to me, her deep brown eyes aglow. “You know the Old Market Woman? Personally?”

“Sure. She teaches me classical languages.”

“Wow. She was the docent I got for my field trip to the Museum. I thought she was awesome. Scary, but cool, you know what I mean?”

I didn't. The Old Market Woman was my teacher and my friend, and I'd never thought of her as either scary or particularly cool. But I nodded anyway.

“Do you know Rembrandt's
Self-Portrait
?” she asked shyly.

I did, and she asked me excited questions about it all the way through the Financial Maze. It felt good to be talking about the Museum. The fact that Fleet was jealous of the time I spent there didn't hurt either.

“I wasn't kidding,” she said as we approached the tower's invisible door. “I'd do
anything
to be able to live there.”

“Help me get through this thing with the Bull and the Bear, and I'll see what I can do.”

Up in the apartment, Changeling was still where we'd left her, muttering over the Mirror. Fleet put on her green sparkly slippers and got a cup of tea from Microwave. “I'm pooped,” she said. “Wake me if she turns up something useful.”

She disappeared into an inner room and closed the door.

I sat down, I got up. I unpacked Satchel. I found a knife and chopped the onion and wrapped it in the handkerchief, I scrubbed my stinky hands with soap, I paced around Fleet's piles of papers, I stroked my jade frog. I thought about how I could make the Bear laugh.

The fact that it was his nature to be gloomy wasn't such a big deal: Kelpies are gloomy, and they laugh—mostly when they're trying to drown somebody. Almost any supernatural will laugh when a mortal falls down, and if the mortal rips their pants or breaks an arm, that's even funnier. I considered tripping Changeling or Fleet, but not for long. I was the hero of this quest—making a fool of myself was
my
job.

I was wondering if Satchel would give me a banana with the peel still on it when Changeling snapped out of her Mirror trance. “I have data,” she announced.

“Great. Hang on a minute, so I can call Fleet. She needs to hear this, too.”

Waking Fleet almost counted as an extra impossible task, and when she was finally awake, she wasn't exactly happy about it. She was even unhappier when Changeling made her report.

“According to WallStreetLore.nyb, the Bull and the Bear are mutually exclusive,” Changeling told us from her nest by the bookcase. “They cannot exist in the same reality. The Bull's reality is all hope, and the Bear's reality is all despair. The Bull cannot cry without becoming the Bear. The Bear cannot laugh without becoming the Bull.”

“Impossible,” Fleet said bearishly. “I knew it. Can I go back to bed now?”

Changeling and I both glared at her. “Do not interrupt me,” Changeling said. “On Magicanimals.nyb, I read that the Brahmin Bulls of East Sixth Street are known to weep whenever a cockroach is exterminated, indicating that some mythical Bulls do indeed have tear ducts. If the Wall Street Bull is similarly equipped, and if the trigger for its transformation into the Bear is genuine grief rather than simple lachrymation, your onion may very well make the Bull weep without calling up the Bear.”

“See?” I asked Fleet. “I told you. Changeling, you rock. Now, what's up with the Bear?”

“I thought you might apply nitrous oxide, on the same principle.”

Fleet clutched at her braids. “What is she
talking
about?”

Changeling scowled at her. “It is very rude of you to speak about me as if I were not here. Nitrous oxide is a gas used for anesthetic purposes, most commonly by dentists. It causes euphoria and disinhibition. In other words, laughter. Or at least, the appearance of laughter.”

“Perfect!” I said. “Where can we get some?”

“I have failed to find a reference to it anywhere online,” Changeling said. “I have therefore concluded that nitrous oxide is unknown in New York Between.”

I was disappointed, but Fleet pitched something very close to a fairy fit. We had to listen to a lot of ranting before she calmed down enough to listen to my idea about taking a fall and maybe splitting my jeans.

“That's not funny,” she said. “Now DowJones falling off her high heels and splitting her skirt—
that
would be funny.”

Changeling agreed, or at least she laughed for the first time since I'd met her. Fleet and I agreed that Changeling laughing was a good sign and settled down with the rest of the buns to plan.

The best idea—it was Fleet's—was to push DowJones over backwards into the Dragon's coffee bowl, but we couldn't figure out how we could get her to take one of us up on the tower with her. For maximum effect, we should time it for when DowJones was carrying the coffeepot. Just talking about it made Fleet and Changeling laugh so hard they cried. I hoped the Bear shared their sense of humor.

Still chuckling, Fleet went back to bed. Changeling curled up by her beloved bookcase with some cushions. I lay on the sofa and tried not to think of all the things that could go wrong. Eventually I fell asleep and dreamed of giants and the Wild Hunt and the Dragon piling gold over Central Park. I was almost glad when Fleet woke me and said I just had time for a shower and breakfast before our appointment with the Dragon.