Mulberry Wands (17 page)

“Defense Attorney,” he said.

She stopped moving. “What?”

“That’s why you have to live with us, to
become one of our family, so I can defend you as one of my own. If
you don’t live with us, if we don’t get to know and like you, we
have no reason to defend you.”

“I didn’t kill him. Felia already figured out
that Sphinx was the one who did it, and you can tell that cat
doesn’t obey me.”

“You have a strong case,” he said. He was
still on top of her, but he supported some of his own weight.

“Defense Attorney? You expect me to believe
that? Why would you agree to defend me? What do you get out of
it?”

“So far, I have two broken javelins and a
nasty scratch on my thigh,” he said, sardonically. When she didn’t
reply, he continued. “I’m doing it because I’m a liberal. Because I
don’t hate humans as much as others of our kind do. Because I think
that learning more about each other is good for both of our
peoples. I believe in this so firmly that I’m willing to risk my
family by having a human mage live with us.”

“You’re a liberal.” She ladled a lot of
sarcasm into that sentence.

“Yes.”

She could probably get back into the house.
She might be able to. She could knock on the door or just wait
there until Zoë or Darius left to go to work. Could she make
herself big again before Sphinx ate her? She didn’t know. Could she
keep the translators from attacking her again? If they had the
ability to get to her once, they could probably do it a second
time.

“If … when I’m found innocent, can you make
me big again?”

He paused, like he was thinking out how
likely that was, or maybe like he was crafting a good lie. “We’ll
have to bargain for the spellwork, as we did with the javelin
poison that made you small, but we can make it happen.”

She couldn’t see his face, so she didn’t know
if he was telling the truth or not, but she was too tired to do
anything but agree at this point.

“Okay, I’ll come with you. Let me up.”

He didn’t budge. “You’re going to run.”

“No, really this time.”

He let her up, but didn’t let go of her
wrist. They started walking, and after a while she was glad that he
held her wrist because it got even darker when the moon set, and
she began to stumble more and more until he had to half-carry her.
She was so cold and aching that all she wanted to do was sleep.

When they got to the cinderblock wall, some
of the women woke up and helped her clean her wounds. They gave her
some teas and bound her deeper punctures with bandages soaked in an
astringent ointment. Their foreheads were all furrowed with
concern, and they spoke to each other in low voices, cutting off
and smiling when Susan asked what they were talking about.

It was a testament to their skill as healers
that they thoroughly cleaned seven scratches and five puncture
wounds so well that they healed with only faint scars. It was a
testament to the nature of cat scratches that one scratch became
infected anyway.

The next morning, she woke up with a fever
that addled her brain more than the hexelmoth meat had. She burned
and froze in alternating cycles, shaking and aching and losing all
sense of time.

She asked if she was going to die.

The women told her she’d be fine, with smiles
frozen on their faces, and when they turned away from her their
smiles fled, and they spoke to one another in worried whispers.

Paul called Susan again on Saturday, but, as
with the past three weeks since she had given her drugged-psychic
message to Fox, she didn’t answer. He was worried that the owls had
gotten her, but she hadn’t said anything about the owls, which
meant that the parliament may have decided that she was innocent of
whatever crime they wanted her for.

What if it was something else? Sometimes
women got mad for the strangest reasons, and you had to play the
guessing game to figure out what it was.

It was rude to call every hour, especially if
the person was mad at you, but maybe that’s what she wanted.
Sometimes when a woman ran away, she wanted you to chase her.
Sometimes when she said “leave me alone” she wanted you to tap on
her door and beg to talk to her. You couldn’t really tell which
time it was until you tried.

He really wanted to see her again. He’d just
gotten paid, and he’d found a new restaurant in downtown Hayden’s
Ferry where they served raw fish, on rice, and it sounded weird but
it was actually really delicious. He wanted to invite her. And if
she wasn’t really angry at him, maybe he’d get lucky and she’d stay
the night.

Paul sat on his tiny balcony, watching the
bats catch moths fluttering around the streetlight. An owl was
coming to see him. He touched the scratches on his cheeks,
remembering the last time. He still hated himself for his
cowardice. He thought about pretending he wasn’t there, but they
could probably sense him the same way he could sense them.

It was Fallon, in her own owl shape. She held
a translator in one claw, and set him down on the metal bistro
table. The translator looked young, barely more than a boy. His
hair stuck up in a cowlick on the back of his head.

“Hello, Fallon. Good to see you.”

“Good to see me?” Fallon asked, through the
translator. The translator’s voice hadn’t changed yet. “I know you
aren’t happy to see me. Humans are supposed to be better at lying
than that.”

Paul didn’t say anything. He was still angry.
It wasn’t Fallon who had clawed him, but still, she was an owl.

“No glib remarks? Perhaps our sister cowed
you properly,” Fallon said. The translator didn’t duplicate
Fallon’s fluting accent, since he didn’t have the same trouble with
vowels that she had. He did get her smug confidence down.

“What are you here for?”

“I bring you good news,” Fallon said. “The
mage no longer concerns us,” she said, ruffling her feathers. “She
has been taken care of.”

“What have you done with Susan?” Paul
asked.

“Nothing,” Fallon said. “We determined that
she isn’t the one killing our prey. Your work in the darkness is
done. The parliament has no further need of you at this time.”

“What? You can’t be serious.”

“Did the translator translate poorly?” the
translator said, cringing as Fallon lifted a claw at him. She
didn’t touch him with it, but he didn’t speak again until she
gripped the metal railing. “I said that the parliament has decreed
that you may return to the light. I will continue this
investigation.”

“I fell back into society!” he yelled. “I
called in a favor, because the parliament said it was important,
and now they are saying it doesn’t matter?”

“Yes,” the translator said, showing an
emotion Fallon did not. “We don’t need you anymore.”

“Well what the hell was I doing then, anyway?
No one even told me!”

“The mage is unharmed. I thought you would be
pleased.” Fallon ruffled her feathers again, and held out a claw
for the translator to climb into. “I can see there’s no pleasing a
human.”

She flew off, the translator clinging
desperately to her leg and talons.

“Damn owls,” he muttered.

At least Susan was safe. That did please him.
He touched his wounded face. He was glad he hadn’t lost his eye for
nothing, but he didn’t regret standing up to the owl. They had to
figure out they couldn’t push him around like that.

He heard a raspy bark from below, and looked
down to see his friend the kit fox in the ivy underneath his
balcony. “Let me into your den,” she asked. She had something in
her mouth, but foxes don’t speak with their mouths, so he
understood her just fine.

He opened the door for her without saying
anything. His jaw was tense and aching, and he had to concentrate
to keep from grinding his teeth.

The kit fox took a moment to pee in the ivy
bed beside the door, then slipped inside. The thing in her mouth
turned out to be the corpses of two garden fey. She dropped them
onto the marble floor of his tiny foyer, then pushed them aside
with her nose as though she’d deal with them later. She sat on her
haunches and regarded him.

“What?” he said. He was too furious to be
friendly.

“You want to bite the parliament.”

“Damn right I do! They treat me like a stupid
chick, just because I’m not an owl.” He paced in the foyer,
swinging his arms to keep himself from punching the wall. “And
that’s not the worst of it. They’ve done something to Susan and
they won’t even tell me what.”

“You’re fond of her.”

“They told me to investigate her, so I did. I
got to know her and you know what? She’s really nice. She never did
anything to us. She doesn’t even know about the parliament, and
she’d never heard of Sunwards before I told her. I didn’t even have
to lie to her. She would have told us anything we needed to know,
except they never told me what that was.”

“And they made you betray her.”

“I hate the way they jerk me around. They
claw me, threaten me, boss me around, and then tell me nothing I do
matters,” Paul said. He was still pacing, still furious enough to
punch something. “I don’t want to even be a Sunward, if this is
what it means.”

“The parliament is not the lady,” Fox said.
“The paws don’t always know what the tail is doing.”

“I don’t even know what I’m doing here.” Paul
paced into the living room and plopped down on the couch. He sighed
and ran his hand over his face. “I should never have left the light
in the first place. The parliament can only bully me if I’m solid
in the dark. I should just step into the headlights of a car and be
done with it. I don’t ever have to come back. There’s nothing here
for me.”

“There is now. You have fallen into society
already.” Fox leapt onto the arm of the couch. She looked pointedly
at the ceiling of his apartment. “If you stay in the light, I can’t
see you, and neither can your human friends. Being a Sunward means
not staying in the darkness, nor staying in the light, but in going
from one to the other.”

“Why are you doing this?”

She licked him, gently, across the scabs on
his stubbly cheek.

“You told me the same thing, when I needed to
hear it. Maybe you don’t remember that, but I do. You’re my senpai,
and yet you don’t treat me like prey the way the owls do. I thought
about going back in the light forever when years had passed and all
my littermates had died, when I hadn’t gotten the power I was
promised.”

“Why didn’t you?” he said, though he was glad
she hadn’t. Among Sunwards, she was his best friend. Actually,
except for Carlos and Susan, she was his only friend.

“The parliament is full of selfish owls. But
the parliament is not the lady. The lady chose us so we could tell
her what happened in the darkness. So find out. What happened in
the darkness? Every member of the parliament belongs to her, but
the parliament is not hers. Report on them. Avenge your would-be
mate with the truth. Maybe that is why not all Sunwards are owls.
She needs another opinion.”

“I don’t think the parliament hurt Susan.
They just said that they didn’t need to investigate her anymore.
They could be lying, but owls don’t lie as well as foxes can.”

The fox grinned at the compliment. “They
can’t lie, but they obscure the truth. That’s why we have to hunt
it down on our own. Come, see what I’ve brought.”

She leapt gracefully off the couch and padded
back to the foyer to where she had dropped the dead garden fey.
Paul followed her.

Most of the time, Paul had difficulty seeing
gnosti clearly, but when they were dead they came into perfect
view. He crouched down to get a good look.

The two garden fey were larger than mice but
smaller than rats, with short tails, spines, and faces that looked
like a Muppet version of a dog. Bite marks on their undersides (and
spines sticking out of the fox’s whiskers) showed how they had
died.

“What’s this?” He reached up and pulled one
of the spines out of her face fur.

“I was thinking about what your mage friend
said, about the hexelmoths giving her strength in mage-craft,” the
fox said. “So I followed an owl around for a few days, trying to
figure out what they eat that I do not. She was our kouhai, newer
to the light than us, but she changed into a bat. I saw her.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Haven’t we been practicing shapeshifting for
years with no success? What if it’s something we’re eating that
makes us unable to do what the owls can do? What if it has nothing
to do with how long we’ve been in the light, or how loyal to the
parliament we are, but with our diet?”

“So you’re saying that owls eat garden
fey?”

“I eat everything else an owl eats. I would
have eaten these too, as they’re slow and easy to catch, but I
don’t like spines in my mouth.”

“You brought them here so I could take the
spines off?”

“If you would, please.”

Paul got a paper towel so he could pick them
up without touching them. He took them to the kitchen and set them
down on the counter. He didn’t have a cutting board, but he had one
knife. It was dull and serrated, a steak knife that had been left
behind from the last tenant. (A blender, four coffee cups, and a
package of plastic spoons were the only other kitchen utensils.) It
didn’t cut very well, but Paul didn’t cook very well either, so
they suited each other.

He stared at the dead gnosti. He had never
been hunting, and didn’t know how to field strip an animal. He
touched it gingerly. It was slightly warm, either because it was
freshly dead or because it had been in Fox’s mouth. “Am I supposed
to get rid of the guts?”

“No, the guts are the best part. Just get rid
of the spines.”

He pinched the creature’s forehead, where the
spines had shortened to coarse fur. When the skin puckered up, he
stuck the knife in and started cutting. It made a disgusting sound,
and sticky blood oozed through the cut. He wrinkled his lip and
kept cutting, roughly hacking off the skin on the back that had the
spines attached.