Nicole Peeler - [Jane True 01] (6 page)

I made a bizarre strangled sound, like a wounded hare, and scrabbled at
my snared coat liner. It wouldn’t budge. Then my brain reminded me I was an
idiot and I shrugged out of my jacket, leaving it hanging from the rock.
Turning around I dashed into the cove, to get my second profound shock in as
many days.

Sitting on a little rocking chair that stood on a colorful quilt draped
over the pristine sand of my cove sat a little woman. She couldn’t have been
more than two feet tall when standing. Dressed in rustic-looking clothes of
blue and green, with long gray hair pinned up into a preposterously large bun,
she was smiling at me with as kindly an expression as one could imagine.

“Hello, child,” she said, as behind me I heard a series of low pants and
a funny little whine.

I didn’t want to look away from the kindly old lady, convinced she would
pull a knife the minute my back was turned. Nor did I particularly want to see
the true face of whatever had been chasing me. And yet I couldn’t let it take
me down while my back was turned; I had to face my enemy.

Very, very slowly I swiveled, clenching my hands into fists, ready to
fight. Not that I’d ever been in a real fight in my life. Although they’d
caused their fair share of damage, my antagonists had always used words as
their weapons.

In front of me stood the biggest dog I’d ever seen. It didn’t look like
a wolf; it looked more like some sort of black-furred saber-toothed hellhound.
My stunned gaze traveled up from its enormous clawed paws, over its powerful
shoulders, and to its oversized jaws—which were filled with the largest fangs
I’d ever seen outside of a prehistoric-mammal exhibit.

Its slavering mouth opened wider as a low whine emerged out of its
belly. Its ears pricked up at me, as if to fix me in its sights. I felt a wave
of absolute terror rise up from the pit of my being and threaten to overwhelm
me.

But the Trues were made of tougher stuff than that, and I behaved with
as much bravery and resolve as I’d shown the night before when turning over
Peter’s body.

I fainted dead away.

CHAPTER FOUR

I
woke
up to the sensation of something warm and wet lapping at my face and I was
overwhelmed by the smell of fresh toothpaste. My eyes weren’t quite functioning
and all I could see was a large, fuzzy shape looming above my head. As my
pupils slowly started to focus, I figured out that something was licking my cut
clean. It felt incredibly soothing, until my brain restarted and I realized
that the tongue in question was attached to the fanged mouth of the black hound
of hell that had just been chasing me through my woods. I moaned with fear,
trying to sit up and scramble backward at the same time. All I succeeded in
doing was to bring my face closer to the dog’s enormous teeth and to make my
head bleed again.

Good strategy, Jane
, I thought as my world spun and I
collapsed back down with a thump.

Another face swam into my vision. This wasn’t the dog, or the kindly old
lady with the bun. This face had mud-brown eyes and thick tendrils of green
hair, like seaweed. Her skin—for I thought it was a her—was a luminous pearl
gray and she had a strange, flat nose that barely rose off the surface of her
face.

Whatever she was, she wasn’t human.

But she was talking.

“Let him heal your wound,” she said, in an oily, unpleasant voice that did
little to quell my fears.

The sound made me freeze, even if I didn’t really want to follow her
instructions, and I again felt the rough tongue of the big black dog lapping at
my eyebrow.

I lay there, feeling as uncomfortable and on edge as I’ve ever felt,
while the dog gently continued to lick. The gray-faced being was making a
strange, leering expression at me, and then she reached out and patted my hand.

That isn’t a leer,
I realized.
That is a smile.
The
strange woman was trying to comfort me, which was about as effective as a bear
hug from the steely arms of an iron maiden.

The dog had stopped licking my brow, which, I had to admit, felt much
better. But it was now licking off the blood that had streamed down my face,
and then it leaned in to lick the blood that had dripped over my neck and into
the top of my shirt.

“Okay,” I said, in what I hoped was a commanding voice. “Off.”

I raised my arms and pushed weakly. The big dog did back away slightly,
wagging its tail in what I assumed was hellhound for “Don’t worry, I’m satiated
by your delicious blood and therefore won’t eat you… tonight.”

The gray girl took a firm hold of one of my upraised hands and helped me
to sit up.
Hel-lo Dolly
, I thought, as I got a gander of her. She was
very naked, and very obviously female. And that strange gray skin continued the
whole way down to her webbed feet with their thick black toenails.

She
definitely
wasn’t human.

“Can you sit up?” came that oily voice, again; she didn’t release her
grip.

“Yes, I think so.” I’d say anything to get my hand back.

She leered—no, smiled at me again—and trotted over to the little old
lady’s stool. Where, with no modesty whatsoever, she plopped down Indian-style,
airing her bits for the world to see.

She has seaweed pubes
, observed my brain, unhelpfully, as I
blinked and looked around at my little cove.

My secret strip of beach that had once been as familiar as my own
childhood bedroom had become an alien realm. If the enormous devil-dog, the
eensy cartoon grandmother, and old barnacle crotch weren’t enough, there was a
large globe of light suspended about eight feet above the old lady’s head.
There were no wires that I could see, but it hung like a chandelier, bathing my
little cove in an eerie luminescence.

I felt a chill run down my spine, and I looked at the plump old woman
sitting on the stool.

She smiled beatifically, which didn’t make me feel one bit better.

“It’s so nice finally to meet you, Jane,” she said. “Anyan has told us
so much about you.”

The dog whined and lay down uncomfortably close to me while the old lady
kept on smiling, clearly waiting for a response.

“It’s nice to meet you, too?” I queried, not really sure of my role
here. Were we going to have tea and chicken salad sandwiches like ladies who
lunch or were they going to sacrifice me to their dark god of chaos? If they’d
been banking on me being a virgin, they were plumb out of luck…

“I realize you are at a disadvantage here, and that you are unsure of
what is happening, but you are perfectly safe. I am Nell and this,” she
gestured toward the gray girl, “is Trill.” Trill gave me that horrible grin
again, but now that the grin had a name, it wasn’t quite as scarifying.

“You’ve already met Anyan,” she said, indicating the giant dog.

She again seemed to be waiting for some sort of response. “He’s got very
fresh breath,” I said, the first thing that popped into my mind. “For a dog,” I
clarified.

“Yes,” she smiled even wider, if that were possible. “He’s very
hygienic. And he’s done a good job on your head.”

I raised my hand to my brow and felt absolutely nothing. There was no
cut at all, and only the slightest tenderness when I pressed down on where my
hurt had been.
What the fuck?
I thought, shooting a sharp glance at the
canine. In response, Anyan wagged his tail and stretched his back paws out
behind him so he was lying with his stomach embedded in the sand. It was such a
doggy thing to do, for a hellhound, that I nearly smiled. He looked over at me
and for a second I could have sworn he winked. But I guess I just hit my head
harder than I thought. Speaking of which…

“Why did he chase me?” I said, remembering the awful run through the
woods. If they were so friendly, why scare the shit out of me and make me
nearly brain myself in the process?

“We’re sorry about that,” came Trill’s slippery voice. “It’s just that
first contact is always difficult, even when it doesn’t have to be rushed like
this. We couldn’t wait; we had to get you here tonight. And there were all
sorts wandering the woods today so we had to meet you under a glamour.”

She was looking at me like I was supposed to understand what she’d said.
So I just stared right back, beginning to tire of this game.

“Look, I have no idea what you’re talking about. You’ve gotta throw me a
bone, here. What’s first contact? And I assume you’re not talking about a
fashion magazine when you say glamour.” Now that I was asking questions, the
most obvious one popped into my head. “And what the hell are you people,
anyway?”

Nell and Trill exchanged looks, and Nell said, “How much did your mother
tell you about her… family?”

I was taken aback. The last direction I thought this conversation would
go was toward my mystery mother and her unknown origins.

“Her family? Nothing at all. She was apparently too busy planning her
abandonment of me to bother filling in a family tree.” Okay, fine, I’m bitter.

Nell sighed. “This always makes it harder.” She got that same look of
concentration on her face that my college professors had when we couldn’t grasp
a particularly difficult concept and they knew they were going to have to
reduce it down all the way to idiot speak.

“Your mother, like us, wasn’t really… human,” Nell said, finally. “She
was… more like Trill here.”

I made a face. I’d been six when my mother disappeared, but I could remember
she wasn’t gray and clammy and seaweedy. She’d been beautiful. And what did
they mean, not human? Fine, Trill was obviously not human, but my mom was
obviously not like her, ergo my mom was
not
not human. Yes, I minored in
rhetoric.

“Well, not really,” Trill interrupted. “I’m a kelpie. Your mom’s a
selkie. We’re pretty different.”

Oh,
I thought, frustrated to the point of screaming.
Of
course!
I finally met people who claimed to know something about my mother
and they insisted on speaking in riddles.

“From the beginning,
please
,” I said through gritted teeth.

Nell took over, the voice of reason. “Kelpies,” she explained, in her
professorial manner, “are two-formed, as are selkies. They have a human, or in
the case of kelpies, a humanoid form and an animal form. Trill, here, changes
into a sort of sea-pony. Your mother was a selkie; her other form is that of a
seal.”

Oh shit
, I thought. I’d seen
The Secret of Roan Inish
.
If
what this little person is saying is true, so much would be explained
…

The thought that I’d finally have my mother’s desertion made
understandable pulled at my heart, but then the weight of reality crushed my
hopes. How could I have been such an idiot to get sucked into this shit?

“Okay, that’s enough,” I said. “I’m sure that Linda, or Stuart, or
whoever, paid you good money to come down here and make me look like an idiot.
I’m sure they gave you a great excuse for hurting me by telling you what a
monster I am, and how I deserve this sort of treatment. And they’re right. But
I can’t be hurt anymore. I’ve been hurt as bad as I’m gonna get, and nothing
you or they can do will ever be as painful to me as losing Jason. So, just take
your fake fangs off your dog, wash off the makeup, and go back to your circus.
And don’t forget your big light. I’d like my cove put back the way it was, not
that I’ll ever use it again.”

I started to get up, my already-cramping legs wobbly, but I registered
with more than a little pride the stunned expressions that “Trill” and “Nell”
were exchanging.

My momma may have walked out on us, but she didn’t nearly halfway raise
no fools
, I thought smugly.

But that thought, along with my very slow upward momentum, was cut short
as the air around Trill began to shimmer. An iridescent bubble the same color
as her skin but more transparent encircled her. It looked like it was made of
energy and it pulsated slightly, just like the light above Nell’s head.
Underneath the surface of the ball something was happening that looked like the
shadowy development of a fetus played in fast-forward.