Tapping the Dream Tree (29 page)

But I didn't get the unread book bit.

“Do you mean a brand new book?” I asked. “A particular copy that nobody might have opened yet, or one that's so bad that no one's actually made their way all the way through it?”

“Though someone would have had to,” Dick said, “for it to have been published in the first place. I meant the way books were made in the old days, with the pages still sealed. You had to cut them apart as you read them.”

“Oh, I remember those,” Meran said.

Like she was there. I took another look at her and sighed. Maybe she had been.

“Do you have any like that?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said slowly, unable to hide my reluctance.

I didn't particularly like the idea of putting a collector's item like that out in the middle of the road.

But in the end, that's what we did.

The only book I had that passed Dick's inspection was
The Trembling of the Veil
by William Butler Yeats, number seventy-one of a thousand-copy edition privately printed by T. Werner Laurie, Ltd. in 1922. All the pages were still sealed at the top. It was currently listing on the Internet in the $450 to $500 range and I kept it safely stowed away in the glass-doored bookcase that held my first editions.

The other two items were easier to deal with. I had a lovely brass bell that my friend Tatiana had given me for Christmas last year and a whole box of fat white candles just because I liked to burn them. But it broke my heart to go out onto the street around two
A.M.,
and place the Yeats on the pavement.

We left the front door to the store ajar, the computer on. I wasn't entirely sure how we were supposed to lure the pixies back into the store and then onto the Internet once more, but Meran took a flute out of her bag and fit the wooden pieces of it together. She spoke of a calling-on music and Dick nodded sagely, so I simply went along with their better experience. Mind you, I also wasn't all that sure that my Yeats would actually draw the pixies back in the first place, but what did I know?

We all hid in the alleyway running between my store and the futon shop, except for Snippet, who was locked up in my apartment. She hadn't been very pleased by that. After an hour of crouching in the cold in the alley, I wasn't feeling very pleased myself. What if the pixies didn't come? What if they did, but they approached from the fields behind the store and came traipsing up this very alleyway?

By three-thirty we all had a terrible chill. Looking up at my apartment, I could see Snippet lying in the window of the dining room, looking down at us. She didn't appear to have forgiven me yet and I would happily have changed places with her.

“Maybe we should just—”

I didn't get to finish with “call it a night.” Meran put a finger to her lips and hugged the wall. I looked past her to the street.

At first I didn't see anything. There was just my Yeats, lying there on the pavement, waiting for a car to come and run over it. But then I saw the little man, not even half the size of Dick, come creeping up from the sewer grating. He was followed by two more. Another pair came down the brick wall of the temporary office help building across the street. Small dancing lights that I remembered too clearly from last night dipped and wove their way from the other end of the block, descending to the pavement and becoming more of the little men when they drew near to the book. One of them poked at it with his foot and I had visions of them tearing it apart.

Meran glanced at Dick and he nodded, mouthing the words, “That's the lot of them.”

She nodded back and took her flute out from under her coat where she'd been keeping it warm.

At this point I wasn't really thinking of how the calling music would work. I'm sure my mouth hung agape as I stared at the pixies. I felt light-headed, a big grin tugging at my lips. Yes, they were pranksters, and mean-spirited ones at that. But they were also magical. The way they'd changed from little lights to little men ... I'd never seen anything like it before. The hob who lived in my bookstore was magical, too, of course, but somehow it wasn't the same thing. He was already familiar, so down-to-earth. Sitting around during the afternoon and evening while we waited, I'd had a delightful time talking books with him, as though he were an old friend. I'd completely forgotten that he was a little magic man himself.

The pixies were truly puzzled by the book. I suppose it would be odd from any perspective, a book that old, never once having been opened or read. It defeated the whole purpose of why it had been made.

I'm not sure when Meran began to play her flute. The soft breathy sound of it seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere, all at once, a resonant wave of slow, stately notes, one falling after the other, rolling into a melody that was at once hauntingly strange and heartachingly familiar.

The pixies lifted their heads at the sound. I wasn't sure what I'd expected, but when they began to dance, I almost clapped my hands. They were so funny. Their bodies kept perfect time to the music, but their little eyes glared at Meran as she stepped out of the alley and Pied-Pipered them into the store.

Dick fetched the Yeats and then he and I followed after, arriving in time to see the music make the little men dance up onto my chair, onto the desk, until they began to vanish, one by one, into the screen of my monitor, a fat candle sitting on top of it, its flame flickering with their movement. Dick opened the book and I took the bell out of my pocket.

Meran brought the flute down from her lips.

“Now,” she said.

Dick slapped the book closed, she leaned forward and blew out the candle while I began to chime the bell, the clear brass notes ringing in the silence left behind by the flute. We saw a horde of little faces staring out at us from the screen, eyes glaring. One of the little men actually popped back through, but Dick caught him by the leg and tossed him back into the screen.

Meran laid her flute down on the desk and brought out a garland she'd made earlier of rowan twigs, green leaves and red berry sprigs still attached in places. When she laid it on top of the monitor, we heard the modem dial up my Internet service. When the connection was made, the little men vanished from the screen. The last turned his bum toward us and let out a loud fart before he, too, was gone.

The three of us couldn't help it. We all broke up.

“That went rather well,” Meran said when we finally caught our breath. “My husband Cerin is usually the one to handle this sort of thing, but it's nice to know I haven't forgotten how to deal with such rascals myself. And it's probably best he didn't come along this evening. He can seem rather fierce and I don't doubt poor Dick here would have thought him far too menacing.”

I looked around the store.

“Where
is
Dick?” I asked.

But the little man was gone. I couldn't believe it. Surely he hadn't just up and left us like in the stories.

“Hobs and brownies,” Meran said when I asked, her voice gentle, “they tend to take their leave rather abruptly when the tale is done.”

“I thought you had to leave them a suit of clothes or something.”

Meran shrugged. “Sometimes simply being identified is enough to make them go.”

“Why does it have to be like that?”

“I'm not really sure. I suppose it's a rule or something, or a geas—a thing that has to happen. Or perhaps it's no more than a simple habit they've handed down from one generation to the next.”

“But I
loved
the idea of him living here,” I said. “I thought it would be so much fun. With all the work he's been doing, I'd have been happy to make him a partner.”

Meran smiled. “Faerie and commerce don't usually go hand in hand.”

“But you and your husband play music for money.”

Her smile grew wider, her eyes enigmatic, but also amused.

“What makes you think we're faerie?” she asked.

“Well, you... that is...”

“I'll tell you a secret,” she said, relenting. “We're something else again, but what exactly that might be, even we have no idea anymore. Mostly we're the same as you. Where we differ is that Cerin and I always live with half a foot in the otherworld that you've only visited these past few days.”

“And only the borders of it, I'm sure.”

She shrugged. “Faerie is everywhere. It just
seems
closer at certain times, in certain places.”

She began to take her flute apart and stow the wooden pieces away in the instrument's carrying case.

“Your hob will be fine,” she said. “The kindly ones such as he always find a good household to live in.”

“I hope so,” I said. “But all the same, I was really looking forward to getting to know him better.”

Dick Bobbins got an odd feeling listening to the two of them talk, his mistress and the oak king's daughter. Neither was quite what he'd expected. Mistress Holly was far kinder and not at all the brusque, rather self-centered human that figured in so many old hob fireside tales. And her ladyship … well, who would have thought that one of the highborn would treat a simple hob as though they stood on equal footing? It was all very unexpected.

But it was time for him to go. He could feel it in his blood and in his bones.

He waited while they said their good-byes. Waited while Mistress Holly took the dog out for a last quick pee before the pair of them retired to their apartment. Then he had the store completely to himself, with no chance of unexpected company. He fetched his little leather carpetbag from his hobhole behind the furnace and came back upstairs to say good-bye to the books, to the store, to his home.

Finally all there was left to do was to spell the door open, step outside and go. He hesitated on the welcoming carpet, thinking of what Mistress Holly had asked, what her ladyship had answered. Was the leaving song that ran in his blood and rumbled in his bones truly a geas, or only habit? How was a poor hob to know? If it was a rule, then who had made it and what would happen if he broke it?

He took a step away from the door, back into the store and paused, waiting for he didn't know what. Some force to propel him out the door. A flash of light to burn down from the sky and strike him where he stood. Instead all he felt was the heaviness in his heart and the funny tingling warmth he'd known when he'd heard the mistress say how she'd been looking forward to getting to know him. That she wanted him to be a partner in her store. Him. Dick Bobbins, of all things.

He looked at the stairs leading up to her apartment.

Just as an experiment, he made his way over to them, then up the risers, one by one, until he stood at her door.

Oh, did he dare, did he dare?

He took a deep breath and squared his shoulders. Then, setting down his carpetbag, he twisted his cloth cap in his hands for a long moment before he finally lifted an arm and rapped a knuckle against the wood panel of Mistress Holly's door.

CHERISH EACH DAY

Single male, professional, 30ish, wants more

ep1out of life. Likes the outdoors, animals. Seek

ing single female with similar attributes and

aspirations. Ad# 6592

The problem is expectations.

We all buy so heavily into how we hope things will turn out, how society and our friends say it should be, that by the time we actually have a date, we're locked into those particular hopes and expectations and miss everything that could be. We end up stumbling our way through the forest, never seeing all the unexpected and wonderful possibilities and potentials because we're looking for the idea of a tree, instead of appreciating the actual trees in front of us.

At least that's the way it seems to me.

“You already tried that dress on,” Sue told me.

“With these shoes?”

Sue nodded. “As well as the red boots.”

“And?”

“It's not a first date dress,” Sue said. “Unless you wear it with the green boots and that black jacket with the braided cuffs. And you don't take the jacket off.”

“Too much cleavage?”

“It's not a matter of cleavage, so much as the cleavage combined with those little spaghetti straps. You're just so
there.
And it's pretty short.”

I checked my reflection. She was right, of course. I looked a bit like a tart, and not in a good way. At least Sue had managed to tame my usually unruly hair so that it looked as though it had an actual style instead of the head topped with blonde spikes I normally saw looking back at me from the mirror.

“But the boots would definitely punk it up a little,” Sue said. “You know, so it's not quite so ‘come hither.' “

“This is hopeless,” I said. “How late is it?”

Sue smiled. “Twenty minutes to showtime.”

“Oh god. And I haven't even started on my makeup.”

“With that dress and those heels, he won't be looking at your makeup.”

“Wonderful.”

I don't know how I'd gotten talked into this in the first place. Two years without a steady boyfriend, I guess, though by that criteria it should
still
have been Sue agonizing over what to wear and me lending the moral support. She's been much longer without a steady. Mind you, after Pete moved out, the longest relationship I'd been in was with this grotty little troll of a dwarf, and you had to lose points for that. Not that Nacky Wilde had been boyfriend material, but he
had
moved in on me for a few weeks.

“I think you should wear your lucky dress,” Sue said.

“I met Pete in that dress.”

“True. But only the ending was bad. You had a lot of good times together, too.”

“I suppose …”

Sue grinned at me. “Eighteen minutes and counting.”

“Will you stop with the Cape Canaveral bit already?”

“Just don't do the teeth thing and you'll be all right,” Tyrone said.

“Teeth thing? What teeth thing?”

“You know, how when you get nervous, your teeth start to protrude like your muzzle's pushing out and you're about to shift your skin. It's not so pretty.”

“Thanks for adding to the tension,” I told him. “Now I've got that to worry about as well.”

I stepped closer to the mirror and ran a finger across my teeth. Were they already pushing out?

“I don't even know why you're going through all of this,” Tyrone said.

“I want to meet someone normal.”

“You mean not like us.”

“I mean someone who isn't as jaded as we are. Someone with a conventional life span for whom each day is important. And I know I'm not going to meet her when the clans gather, or in some bar.”

Tyrone shook his head. “I still think it's like dating barnyard animals. Or getting a pet.”

“Whatever made you so bitter?”

But Tyrone only grinned. “Just remember what Mama said. Don't eat a girl on the first date.”

“Now don't forget,” Sue said. “Build yourself up a little.”

“You mean lie.”

“Of course not. Well, not a lot. And it might help if you don't seem quite so bohemian right off the bat.”

“Pete liked it.”

Sue nodded. “And see where that got you. The bohemian artist type has this mysterious allure, especially to straight guys, but it wears off. So you have to show you have the corporate chops as well.”

I had to laugh.

“I'm being serious here,” Sue said.

“So who am I supposed to be?” I asked.

Sue started to tick the items off on her fingers. “Okay. To start with, you can't go wrong just getting him to talk about himself. You know, act sort of shy and listen a lot.”

“I
am
shy.”

“When it does come to what you do, don't bring up the fact that you write and draw a comic book for a living. Make it more like art's a hobby. Focus on the fact that you're involved in the publishing field—editing, proofing, book design. Everybody says they like bold and mysterious women, but the truth is, most of them like them from a distance. They like to dream about them. Actually having them sitting at a table with them is way too scary.”

Sue had been reading a book on dating called
The Rules
recently, and she was full of all sorts of advice on how to make a relationship work. Maybe that was how they did it in the fifties, but it all seemed so demeaning to me entering the twenty-first century. I thought we'd come further than that.

“In other words, lie,” I repeated and turned back to the mirror to finish applying my mascara.

I couldn't remember the last time I'd worn any. On some other date gone awry, I supposed, then I mentally corrected myself. I should be more positive.

“Think of it as bending the truth,” Sue said. “It's not like you're going to be pretending forever. It's just a little bit of manipulation for that all-important first impression. Once he realizes he likes you, he won't mind when it turns out you're this little boho comic book gal.”

“Your uptown roots are showing,” I told her.

“You know what I mean.”

Unfortunately, I did. Everybody wanted to seem normal and to meet somebody normal, so first dates became these rather strained, staged affairs with both of you hoping that none of your little hangups and oddities were hanging out like an errant shirttail or a drooping slip.

“Ready?” Sue asked.

“No.”

“Well, it's time to go anyway.”

“So what are you going to tell her you do for a living?” Tyrone asked as we walked to the Café. “The old hunter/gatherer line?”

“Which worked real well in Cro-Magnon times.”

“Hey, some things never change.”

“Like you.”

Tyrone shrugged. “What can I say? If it works, don't fix it.”

We stopped in front of the Half Kaffe. It was five minutes to.

“I'm of half a mind to sit in a corner,” Tyrone said. “Just to see how things work out.”

“You got the half a mind part right.”

Tyrone shook his head with mock sadness. “Sometimes I find it hard to believe we came from the same litter,” he said, then grinned.

When he reached over to straighten my tie, I gave him a little push to move him on his way.

“Give ‘em hell,” he told me. “Girl doesn't like you, she's not worth knowing.”

“So now you've got a high opinion of me.”

“Hey, you may be feeble-minded, but you're still my brother. That makes you prime.”

I had to return that smile of his. Tyrone was just so … Tyrone. Always the wolf.

He headed off down the block before I could give him another shove. I checked my teeth in the reflection of the window—still normal—then opened the door and went inside.

We were ten minutes late pulling up in front of the Half Kaffe.

“This is good,” Sue said as I opened my door. “It doesn't make you look too eager.”

“Another one of the ‘Rules'?”

“Probably.”

“Only probably?”

“Well, it's not like I've memorized them or done that well with them myself. You're the one with the date tonight.”

I cut her some slack. If push came to shove, I knew she wouldn't take any grief from anyone, no matter what the rule book said.

I got out of the car. “Thanks for the ride, Sue.”

“Remember,” she said, holding up her phone. Folded up, it wasn't much bigger than a compact. “If things get uncomfortable or just plain weird, I'm only a cell phone call away.”

“I'll remember.”

I closed the door before she could give me more advice. I'd already decided I was just going to be myself—a dolled-up version of myself, mind you, but it actually felt kind of fun being all dressed up. I just wasn't going to pretend to be someone I wasn't.

Easy to promise to myself on the ride over, listening to Sue, but then my date had to be gorgeous, didn't he? I spotted him as soon as I opened the door, pausing in the threshold.

(“I'll be holding a single rose,” he'd told me.

(“That is
so
romantic,” Sue had said.)

Even with him sitting down, I knew he was tall. He had this shock of blue-black hair, brushed back from his forehead, and skin the color of espresso. He was wearing a suit that reminded me of the sky just as the dusk is fading and the single red rose lay on the table in front of him. He looked up when I came in—if it had been me, I'd have looked up every time the door opened, too—and I could have gone swimming in those dark, dark eyes of his.

I took a steadying breath. Walking over to his table, I held out my hand.

“You must be Lyle,” I said. “I'm Mona.”

She was cute as a button.

(“Here's my prediction,” Tyrone had said. “She'll be three hundred pounds on a five-foot frame. Or ugly as sin. Hell, maybe both.”

(“I don't care how much she weighs or what she looks like,” I told him. “Just so long as she's got a good heart.”

(Tyrone smiled. “You're so pathetic,” he said.)

And naturally I made a mess of trying to stand up, shake her hand and give her the rose, all at the same time. My chair fell down behind me. The sound of it startled me and I almost pulled her off her feet, but we managed to get it all straightened without anybody getting hurt.

I wanted to check my teeth, and forced myself not to run my tongue over them.

We were here for the obligatory before-dinner drink, having mutually decided earlier on a Café rather than a bar, with the unspoken assumption that if things didn't go well here, we could call the dinner off, no hard feelings. After asking what she wanted, I went and got us each a latté.

“Look,” she said when I got back. “I know this isn't the way it's supposed to go, first date and everything, but I decided that I'm not going to pretend to be more or different than I am. So here goes.

“I write and draw a comic book for a living. I usually have ink stains on my fingers and you're more likely to see me in overalls, or jeans and a T-shirt. I know I told you I like the outdoors like you said you did in your ad, but I've never spent a night outside of a city. I've never had a regular job either, I don't like being anybody's pet boho girlfriend, and I'm way more shy than this is making me sound.”

She was blushing as she spoke and looked a little breathless.

“Oh boy,” she said. “That was really endearing, wasn't it?”

It actually was, but I didn't think she wanted to hear that. Searching for something to match her candor, I surprised myself as much as her.

“I'm sort of a werewolf myself,” I told her.

“A werewolf,” she repeated.

I nodded. “But only sort of. Not like in the movies with the full moon and hair sprouting all over my body. I'm just… they used to call us skinwalkers.”

“Who did?”

I shrugged. “The first people to live here. Like the Kickaha, up on the rez. We're descended from what they call the animal people—the ones that were here when the world was made.”

“Immortal wolves,” she said.

I was surprised that she was taking this all so calmly. Surprised to be even talking about it in the first place, because it's never a good idea. Maybe Tyrone was right. We weren't supposed to mingle. But it was too late now and I felt I at least owed her a little more explanation.

“Not just wolves, but all kinds of animals,” I said. “And we're not immortal. Only the first ones were and there aren't so many of them left anymore.”

“And you can all take the shapes of animals.”

I shook my head. “Usually it's only the ones who were born in their animal shape. The human genes are so strong that the change is easier. Those born human have some animal tributes, but most of them aren't skinwalkers.”