Roadside Magic (10 page)

T
he house reeked of death; he didn’t bother traipsing upstairs to see what foulness lay in wait. Gallow arrived in the kitchen just as Crenn nipped through the back door, and the thought that the man might get to Robin first spurred him to even more speed. He hit the door, shivering the glass and bursting wood into shrapnel, and skidded to a halt.

Crenn whirled, going down into a crouch, his hand blurring up for the hilt on his left shoulder. Gallow’s lance was already solid, lengthening, the point leafshaped now and wicked-sharp, dipping to rest at the hollow of the assassin’s throat. “Don’t,” Jeremiah said softly. “Don’t make me.”

There was a patio table, smashed under a canvas cover, and the smell of chantment hung heavy in the air. A thin thread of Robin’s scent, that spice and woman he hadn’t realized he was missing until now.

Liar. You knew you were missing it, all along.

Crenn snarled, and the ruin of his face was clearly visible under strings of mossy hair. The boiling tar had done horrible things to flesh, and even for a Half the damage was a long time healing. His eyes glowed, bright coal-burning glimmers
through the seamed and pitted flesh, and the most horrible thing was the shadows of sidhe gloss on the scars. A hideous beauty, one that Gallow might have called a lie if he didn’t know the depth of the damage behind the blemishes.

He’d thought Robin’s loveliness a lie once, too.

The assassin tensed. Gallow didn’t, the lance humming sweetly against his palms. It had fed well last night, but there was no end to the thing’s hunger.

The old Armormaster had never warned him of
that
. Would it have mattered, if he had?

“She’s not here,” Crenn said. It was almost obscene, how the tar poured over what the attackers had thought was a dead body had left his lips untouched. Chiseled and perfect, you could see a ghost of what he’d been before they used the cudgels on him, and the bubbling-hot liquid as well.

Jeremiah didn’t let his gaze lift to scan the backyard. The locket throbbed under his T-shirt, a secret heartbeat.
Close. Very close.
Still running, too. A canny girl, his Robin.

Not yours yet, Gallow
. He kept the lance steady. “You gave me a warning, Crenn. I’ll give one in return: Stop chasing my lady Robin. She’s not for you,
or
for Summer.”

Stillness. The sun was falling, afternoon waning, and this backyard was full of chantment echoes. What had Robin done? Her song could kill, but he didn’t think it likely that she’d harm a houseful of mortals.

Anyone on her trail might not be so kind, though.

“Your lady Robin?” On that scar-wrinkled face, the sneer was even uglier. “I do not think she welcomes your suit,
Gallowglass
.”

What would you know of it?
Just like dealing with one of the touchy mortals on a jobsite. “Just as I’m sure she won’t welcome yours, if you get lucky enough to catch her.”

“Oh, and now he knows the Ragged’s mind as well.” It would be difficult for the assassin to sound more disdainful. He straightened slowly, the lance rising in line with his throat and Gallow’s weight shifting to keep it steady. “
And
mine. Why bother with dancing, Glassgallow, if you know the music so well?”

“The Ragged is
mine
. Go back to your swamp and nurse your scars.”
Way to go, Jer
. Still, he needed this dealt with, and if he could provoke the man . . .

“Oh, they need no nursing.” A wide, white, sharp smile, his shoulders loose and easy under the brown leather.

That brought up another troubling thought. Where was Puck? He had been underfoot all through the last few days, and with his hold on Robin . . . was he with her now?

A flash, a spat curse, the lance rasping against his palms, a propeller-movement tossing one of Crenn’s blades wide. Gallow skipped back, batting the curse away with a single word, the Veil shimmering around them both, sensitized by whatever had happened before two Half started flinging violence and curses around.

Crenn was still abominably quick. Two blades and that lightfoot grace, the tar hadn’t robbed him of the beauty and precision of sidhe movement. Gallow fell back, feinting,
watch that left hand, he’s
 . . . A muscle-tearing effort, blades chiming, the lance
bending
, impossibly fluid, shifting through shape and unshape to batter aside one sword, blinking aside to smack the flat of the other one and drive the assassin back. The deck groaned beneath them, glass and metal jittering under the torn canvas cover. The grill, under another cover, toppled over, and Jeremiah caught a flash of a propane tank.

Ah
. Two steps to the side, the lance lengthening, Crenn pushed off the deck and landing catfoot on wet grass. His right
sleeve flopped a little, high up—the lance’s kiss. A thin trickle of blood slid warm down Jeremiah’s temple, the initial curse having brushed him with a razor wing.

Nobody mowed
, Jeremiah realized.
Whoever’s upstairs was well dead before Robin arrived here. Coincidence?

Not with the saplings in front and backyard greening like they were. “Crenn.” His breath coming hard but regular. “The Ragged needs no protection from me.”

A single shrug, moss greening along Crenn’s forehead where salt sweat moistened the strands. One blade held
au coeur
, the other high in blackbird’s-rise, the sunlight failing again behind a screen of rain-heavy cloud. He was so goddamn
fast
, and if he got inside the lance’s reach Jeremiah might be forced into something other than knightly sparring.

Crenn’s eyes glittered. He straightened still more, his gaze flicking across the deck and Jeremiah in a smooth, controlled arc. “And yet Summer granted you her life.”

“She did.” He weighed adding more. “The situation is . . . complex.”

“It always is.” Crenn’s blades lowered, slowly. “Your lady Robin, hm?”

She doesn’t know it yet
. “Yes.” He didn’t relax. This was altogether too easy.

The smile widened. Crenn actually laughed, a short, bitter mouthful that might have been merry as a pixie if not for the grotesquerie his face twisted into.

He was still laughing when he vaulted the back fence, disappearing due west, and the only thing that stopped Gallow from chasing him was the sudden sharp tug on the necklace in his pocket. North and east, and fading quickly.

Priorities, Jer. How fast can she move, after all this?

“Not fast enough,” he murmured, and the lance disappeared
as he bent, one ear pricked for a new arrival to muddy the situation.

Tangled in the canvas, a curve of broken glass. Rusted-red along its sharp edge, and clinging to it, three fine, curling, coppergold hairs.

Had she been forced to defend herself with this? The blood on it . . .

His heart, like one of Unwinter’s treacherous night-mares, dropped sharply away, then returned to pound in his wrists and throat. Jeremiah sucked in a breath, glancing at the sky again.

Robin. Oh, God.

What if she’d been caught? Summer would not send only one erstwhile assassin to gather up her wayward little Half bird. Seelie had been here, the entire yard shouted it.

Jeremiah wrapped the hairs into the dried blood, hoping they’d hold. Shoved the glass in his coat’s miraculously unshredded left breast pocket, and headed for the fence.

S
he tumbled, boneless, from the hound’s back, with barely enough strength to keep herself from falling face-first onto blown-down chainlink fencing. Blinking, pushing her hair back, Robin staggered, and couldn’t find her balance until Pepperbuckle slid along her right side, for all the world like a cat stropping a beloved human, and whined deep in his chest. Her fingers tangled in his fur again, and she limped along with him. Her shoes slipped, her calves aching savagely as the chantment in the heels fought against her mortal heaviness.

Where am I?
Metal shapes rose and blurred, and she bit back a scream, thinking the dog had dragged her to the Unseelie after all.

A huge glaring white face, the size of her entire body, loomed before her with its lips rusted with old blood and its nose a crimson bulb, and terror almost robbed her of the ability to read mortal writing. Peeling paint on cheap pasteboard, and with a jolt, she realized where she was.

“Oh,” she whispered. Her heart hammered, and for a moment the place glimmered, the shape of something underneath wearing through. There was iron, though, in the tilting Ferris wheel, and also in the bigtop’s skeleton full of shredded ribbons fluttering on the spring-chill, freshening breeze. Rain-scent filled her nose and eyes, her hair tangling, no longer as silky. The pins shifted, and she had to clap them to her head while she struggled to walk alongside Pepperbuckle, who patiently guided them both down the central arcade.

I wonder what happened. It looks like everyone just . . . left
. She shivered, shut her eyes. Some things could turn a place sideways—and some could wrench a place out of the stream of both mortal and sidhe, a crack between door and jamb. It was usually a disastrous occurrence, without any merriment to attract sidhe attention.
Never mind, I don’t want to know
.

Pepperbuckle whined. Now they were past the arcade—there were still electrical cables, sagging on posts, buried in leaf mulch and sandy soil to trip the unwary. She hung on grimly, the creature’s warmth a welcome shield. Small trailers stood on either side, the shells carnies dragged from town to town. A screen door banged, hesitated, opened under the wind’s persistent fingering, banged again, the screen loose and flopping in long ribbons, as if it had been clawed.

The hound seemed to know where he was going. Robin’s arm was a solid bar of pain by the time he walked her to a trailer just like all the others, turning so she could grab at a rickety railing above handmade, portable, dry-rotten steps. She climbed one, then another, clinging to the wobbling balustrade. Splinters poking her palms, she hauled herself up the third step and half-fell against the door.

When she turned, blinking against a stinging, dust-laden
wind—funny, but it seemed like the rain hadn’t fallen here—Pepperbuckle was gone.

Debt repaid, I guess. I’m probably safe here for a little while.
It was like thinking through mud. She tried the door; it was unlocked, and that was a good thing, because she couldn’t even whisper a lock open in her current state.

Inside, more dust. It was an ancient Airstream, with a half-kitchenette and a porta-john closet of a bathroom. That didn’t matter, because there was a bed, and Robin staggered across cracked, humped flooring and collapsed. The wind moaned, and the foggy idea that perhaps she wasn’t in a mortal
or
sidhe space would have been frightening, but she was too tired to care.

Bang. Hiss-whine. Bang. Creak.

She woke to the entire trailer rocking on its dead, airless tires, and a wet nose in her face. Somehow the hound had squeezed through the door, its jaws clamped on a glass bottle. It nosed at her, liquid sloshing inside the glass, and she tried to push its snout away before it blew a warm, hay-scented breath over her and she realized the sloshing was something good.

She pushed herself up, wedging her back against the trailer’s thin, rust-spotted wall. Had she slept? For how long? It was dark outside, but time in a between-space like this could warp in strange ways.

The bottle was milk. Full-cream, with a foil cap, and her hands shook as she managed to peel the topper off. The canine shape barely fit inside the trailer—how on
earth
had it gotten through the door?

Doesn’t matter.
Cu sith
can change size, a little, maybe this one can.

She tipped the bottle to her lips, and the balm poured down her throat in long swallows. Thin trickles kissed the outside of her mouth, her chin, dotted her dress, but she didn’t care. The dog whined, a high-pitched, yearning sound.

She tore the bottle away, gasping, and the world roared around her, spinning and taking on its accustomed color and depth. The Veil flexed, flexed again, unseen shapes ghosting just at the edge of her vision. A moment’s worth of concentration, the music under her thoughts dipping and arrowing along at its usual volume, and she winced at the thought that she’d been afraid of losing it, even as she hated what her voice could do.

What it
had
done.

She offered the hound the bottle, but it shook its lean, graceful head, its eyes darkening a shade. It backed up, its rear ramming the kitchenette’s cabinet, and the look of agonized surprise crossing its long, intelligent face wrung a tiny, betraying laugh out of her.

Pepperbuckle chuffed, a small chortling sound, as if he tried to chuckle as well. She tipped the bottle to her mouth again. Full-cream. She could taste the sun and the grass in it. Where on earth had he found such a thing?

“Good,” she said, when she could breathe again for drinking. “Good boy. Good,
good
boy.”

The hound wriggled again, the entire trailer rocking and groaning. He thrust his face at her again, and Robin found herself scratching behind his floppy ears, just where she’d always seen Daisy rub stray dogs. Those eyes half lidded, and now she could see the pupils were oval instead of round like a
cu sith
’s vertical slits. More like a gytrash then, those good-natured dogsprites who guarded travelers in need—or led them into a bog and feasted on their still-writhing flesh, like kelpies, depending on their mood.

“Best boy,” she whispered. A few more swallows finished the bottle, and the hound tensed. “No. No more.” Robin coughed and took a closer look at her surroundings.

Nobody had been in here for quite some time. The bed she huddled on was a tiny, mildewed cot, and the walls were papered with fading photographs and once-glossy ads from old, old magazines. Flappers stared from water-spotted paper, handbills for the carnival’s appearances in other cities with florid illustrations, a strongman with a waxed mustache holding up inflatable barbells, and several pictures of a solemn, dark-eyed girl on postcards stuck to the wall with creeping mold.

It was filthy, and her skin crawled, but the trembling and rippling in the fabric between the real and the more-than-real would hide her for a while. At least this particular trailer was relatively solid, and the shape shimmering underneath it didn’t seem to be Summer. Perhaps part of the Low Counties, there were dry places there where the free sidhe were all dust-dancers and pixies, connaughts and
il de mus
, scatterbrained flitters and closemouth earthsalt sidhe. The interference would make tracking her difficult.

Which was good. Her legs still shook, but at least her shoes were glossy again. Her dress was the same deep blue as ever, the needle-chantments repairing themselves as her strength returned.

The hound wriggled with delight again, rocking the entire sorry heap. “Maybe we should find a more solid place to sleep, huh?”

He cocked his head and tried to sit, whacking his rear on the cabinet again. The trailer shuddered, and Robin let out another thin, half-screaming laugh. His form crackled and shimmered, and when the stretching and grinding and growling was done, he was smaller. Not by much, but just enough.

In the end, Pepperbuckle wedged himself onto the cot with her, with a long-suffering sigh, his nose planted firmly in her chest. Robin might have minded, especially the slobber, but he was warm, and she felt curiously safe, even though the dust-wind outside whispered and slithered against every surface. The milk bottle rolled on the floor, and she fell again into a thin troubled sleep, hugging a creature who smelled not of animal but of salt-sweet child, dust, and appleblossom.