Fairy Thief (4 page)

Oh, that’s just great!

“
Oh, that’s just great!”

“
A
shack
is not quite like a mansion, Ny! Try again! And — I cut my hair for a reason — and that reason certainly wasn’t so I could make
you
happy!”

No answer.

Food appeared before her on a small, dark table etched with dancing figures that looked very Balinese. She ate, and felt soothed. The bright colors, the different textures, the smell of spices and seared meat lulled her just like a Christmas meal at home. When she grew bored of sitting around in the little house, she took walks on the shore. On one particularly long hike, she walked for what seemed like miles, looking at shells and bits of sea glass. She enjoyed the warm water on her feet and the warm sun on her back. Suddenly, she stopped and turned to face the ocean.

What if I jumped in right now? What if I jumped in and swam away?

As soon as the words came to mind, she heard them in the space around her. Suddenly, the sea grew turbulent. The waves no longer rolled to shore, but crashed upon the sand with such force that it looked as though the sand had been bombed. More and more waves were forming out at sea – some of them built to one-hundred foot swells. One monster tidal wave kept growing and, as she ran down the beach to escape, it paralleled her movement. Her ragged screams were drowned out by the thunder of the water. She spun to the left and tripped up the beach towards the jungle and the little shack – both had suddenly appeared and were a hundred feet away. She was too terrified to wonder how they just appeared there. She stomped onto the front porch and grabbed one of the roof support beams. She looked back at the ocean as she struggled for breath.

The water was calm. A fiery sunset lit up the back of the lime-green, jellowy sea as it silently quivered.

“
NY!” she screamed. “Where are you?” Her throat was raw from screaming, her nerves frayed by panic. She sat on the little porch in a heap and cried long into the night. At one point, when it was almost dawn, she crawled inside and nestled into a low bed that was piled high with soft, down-stuffed pillows. Several feathered and furred blankets kept the damp, night air at bay.

The first thing she was aware of when she woke up was the sound of the jungle. Then came the muffled crash of the sea, then came the soft kisses that were being placed on her forehead, each temple, her ears, and her eyelids. She longed for the kisses to reach her lips, and with her eyes still closed, she turned her head towards the kisser. He sighed and traced his fingers down her arm. Her blood began to boil and her skin tingled with exquisite, electric pain.

“
I love you. I love you.” She moaned and refused to open her eyes.

“
I know. Now tell me you want me. Tell me you want me to kiss your lips.” His fingers traced farther down, and around one of her jutting pelvic bones. Her eyes rolled back under her closed lids.

He whispered. “Let go of all of your thoughts. Come back to me and I will take you in such a way, no one on earth has ever quite fathomed.” His finger traveled beneath her camisole to circle her belly button. “I can help you let go. Tell me you want me.”

Saffron’s eyes shot open. All at once, she sat up and gathered the blankets to cover herself. Her thoughts came in rapid fire, piecing together a puzzle that should have been so obvious. “Oh, my God. You tried to kill me.”

Ny smiled. “I couldn’t kill you Saffron. Come, come now, what is this?” He lay alongside her, balanced on his side, his long powerful thighs close to hers.

“
The full moon…me sleepwalking towards cliffs…all those times.
I
wasn’t a nut! It was you! You were trying to kill me!”

His eyes flashed with glee. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

She shriveled away from him and his predatory finger. “You tried to kill me!”

One of Ny’s eyebrows shot up in acute irritation. “Yes, yes. Must you be so melodramatic? You’re not dead after all.”

Saffron backed off the bed and stood on shaky legs. She held one hand out before her, blocking Ny’s face, and smooshed the blanket to her chest with the other hand, as if that were enough to keep him away from her.

Something was strange….

She slapped her other hand to the back of her neck and the blanket fell away, leaving her exposed in a shift of filmy lawn. No long hair. She panicked momentarily as her mind drew a compulsive, frightening conclusion. Had he taken her hair away to punish her now? She slapped all around her head and breathed a sigh of relief. No, her hair was still there — all of it — including the couple of feet he had added. It was all just piled on top of her head. Her neck was left exposed, of course. A swift rage flew through her, which made the hairs on her neck stand on end. Immediately, she started pulling at her hair, releasing it, and letting it fall over her shoulders and down her back.

“
You like my hair up, do you?
That’s
why I hacked it off, Ny! That’s why I’ll never, as long as I live,
never,
style my hair in any way remotely resembling that! “And what the hell am I wearing? If you want a nympho maiden from King Arthur’s court, go get one! I don’t wear this kinda shit!” This was said through gritted teeth as she continued to free the rest of her hair. It was no small attempt — it was
a lot
of hair. There was silence between them until finally, Saffron had released every single, little strand of red. She sat glaring at Ny in a pool of ravaged hair, pristine white sheets, and her gauzy see-through top.

“
You can’t keep me here forever, Ny.” Her eyes skittered sideways. “Wherever we are.”

“
You are right.” He seemed a little deflated now. He stared at her hair as if someone had just died. Then he perked up. “If you will not die, then we will have plenty of time here, alone, together. Then, when your human body expires, we will go back to the fairyland and be together there. After
a while,
we will choose new human lives,
together,
this time,” he waggled his finger at her as if she had been a naughty girl, “and things will go back to normal. We will live our lives as we once did. How could you have done this to me, Saffron? I have been in agony without you!”

She ignored his question. “What do you mean, ‘we have plenty of time here’?”

“
Nobody can reach us. I can hardly believe my luck. Who knew this would happen when I slipped inside your mind?” He wiggled his eyebrows mischievously and tapped his temple. “Who knew? Your body was empty — you were visiting your grandmother — so I hopped right in. It is the very reason astral projection is not recommended.” He stretched his arms wide, “This is fabulous!” Do you know I can feel you here?” He licked his lips as his eyes traveled all over her. “It’s not like being human…but I can use your dream senses to feel you….” He grinned like a schoolboy, his big eyes blazing like blue fire under the fringe of tossled black bangs.

“
How can we exist in my mind for ‘plenty of time’? If I were dead, we couldn’t be in my mind. But I’m obviously not alive because this sure isn’t Earth!”

Ny smiled slyly. “Surely you can figure what is happening here, Saffron. Surely you can tell what it is that is giving us this, the greatest chance of all time, to be alone and become the lovers we once were.”

Saffron narrowed her eyes and frowned. She stared at Ny.

“
You are in a coma, Saffron! We can just lounge around in your mind for the next fifty years! Fifty years is but a drop in the well compared to our fairy lives, but we will just call this a vacation, shall we? A small escape from the daily humdrum and nagging voices of our peers.”

Comprehension dawned. A coma. She pictured her body lying in the hospital for the next fifty years, being cared for, washed, by hospital staff. She pictured her mother…. She saw her mother coming in, week after week, her condition unchanged, until eventually Audrey would die, and then what? Saffron blinked. They pulled the plug.

“
MONSTER!”

Saffron launched herself at him, her fingers rigid and ready to scratch his eyes out. She just wanted to get her hands on him. She gritted her teeth and followed him as he ran out of the hut and flew into a tree.

“
Stop that, Saffron. You just stop that now!” He was greatly miffed with her and embarrassed by the way he had to flee into tree limbs to escape attack. What a shrew she had become in this life! She was almost nothing like the girl he had known for the last several millennia. Why, when she was Rosemary, he was allowed to do anything he wanted — anything! At one point, he even started bringing women back to their country home. It took him forever to encourage Rosemary/Saffron to join in the romps, if not with a little morbid docility. Still, she did it. He smiled at the fond memories. Yes, she was still, most definitely, his girl in the most important ways.

Even now, as she stood grunting and screeching, trying to climb the palm to reach him, he saw passion flaring in her eyes. It excited him. He imagined a hammock for himself right there, high in the tree, and swung lazily as Saffron gathered coconuts to fling at him. When her pile was big enough, she commenced firing. But, alas, she was far from strong enough to throw the husk so high. She flung one up. It reached its zenith, then made a quick downward trip — straight for her face. She let out a small squeak of fright, and dove for cover in the bushes. With a plop, it landed in the sand where she had just stood. She came tripping out of the bushes, twigs in her impossibly long, red hair, and stood beneath the tree. She glared up at her former lover. “Come down here, Ny, so I can kill you.”

Ny was munching on a slice of pineapple. He took several moments to clean his teeth of the stringy fruit with his tongue. “Do you know? I can actually taste this! I can feel this on my tongue while we’re here together. Come on, let me touch you. I cannot believe I can actually feel you here, without resorting to eating living creatures!”

“
I want to feel your windpipe under my thumbs.”

Ny frowned. One of the pineapple strings just wouldn’t come out. He picked at it with his neatly trimmed fingernail. “You can’t kill me. How long do you plan on keeping this act up? However long, I can pursue you longer.”

“
Come down here, Ny, so I can at least try and kill you.”

Ny shrugged. “Time will tell what you will do when you finally lay your hands on my body.” He guffawed. “I can actually feel now!” He stroked himself. He actually ran his hands down his thighs, cupped his groin, then stretched lazily and yawned. He drifted off to sleep.

For three days and three nights, Ny stayed at the top of the palm tree and Saffron sat by the trunk. Sometimes they slept. Sometimes they were awake and having a conversation, and sometimes they were awake and looking silently out to sea. He begged her to come back to him — she raged at him. He ordered her to come back to him — she begged him to let her go. He raged at her to come back to him — she firmly told him that it would never happen — she was done with him. And the conversation went on.

She cried.

He wept dramatically. “Why do you do this, Saffron? You must know I love you. I wouldn’t chase you to the ends of your mind if I didn’t love you….”

“
Ny, you freak. Whatever you feel for me…you’re always feeling
for a million other women.… And I hate that! No thanks!”

“
But I love
you,
Saffron — doesn’t that mean anything to you?”

“
What? You saying that? ‘I love you….’ What does that even mean, Ny? Like you can just walk around saying that and it makes everything okay? You can screw a million women but say you love me, and that makes everything okay?” She was gouging at the bottom of his palm tree with a sharp stone. She figured it would only take her three weeks of monotonous hacking to get the thing down.

On the fourth day, at dawn, Ny was sleeping when Saffron decided to run down the beach and swim for it again. That had to be the way out, because the sea began to thrash whenever she went near it with thoughts of escaping.

Saffron got up and sprinted for the shore. She raced so fast down the beach that a plume of sand rose behind her feet. She raced even faster, stomped through the shallow beginnings of waves, then dove into the warm, salty water. She swam as fast as she could. When she broke the surface, she could hear the gurgle of water in her ear, and Ny yelling for her to come back. The waves had already begun to roar, as she figured they would, but she plunged on — stroke after stroke, breath after metered breath. She looked back over her shoulder, couldn’t see Ny, and looked straight ahead. She stopped swimming. She choked on some water that had slipped into her gaping mouth. Her face went gunmetal grey, and her eyes bulged from their sockets. She was in a wave, a wave so big that, when she turned herself awkwardly in the water, she realized she was about four stories over the beach of the deserted island. She began to panic as the wave pushed her higher and faster. She became tangled in her long hair. By the time she started screaming, it was already too late. Far to her right she saw the wave begin to curl and come for her. She screamed again as the curl scooped her up, and the water roared in her ears. She was dragged under, then BOOM – she was spit out. Falling, falling, falling towards the perfect, white sugar beach. She smacked down face-first in the sand, every bone in her body crunching on impact. The wave retreated and left her body like a sack of blown glass.