The Trouble with Fate (3 page)

Fae gold is not to be confused with mortal gold. Fae gold snickers at titanium’s relative
weakness. It isn’t some dumb inanimate thing that just sits there, forever frozen
in the shape that the artist had hammered it into. It’s alive. It can remold itself.
It could, powered by the wrong Asrai’s spite, literally twine itself around your neck
and choke you.

That bore remembering when you were talking to an Asrai-powered amulet.

And as much as Merry sometimes pissed me off—say, like when she tried to burn a layer
of skin off me—she and Lou were it. One crazy-ass Fae named Lou, and one amber-colored
stone, mounted in a swirl of baroque gold, named Merry. That was my world.

“You can cool down right now,” I said, flattening my shirt so that she could hang
in the cool night air. I lowered my voice to a soothing tone. “My hand barely hurts.
It’s not red, well, not red like my freakin’ boob is. You know, you’ve got to control
your temper.” One of Merry’s unique attributes was the ability to heal my payback
pain.

The red light turned a fraction purple.

“Okay, maybe I’m not the one to be talking about holding on to my temper. Trowbridge
was in the shop tonight, Merry. And I quit, and so yeah, I may have used some magic.
Just a little bit. I was feeling stressed.” I rubbed the soot off my finger against
the rough grain of my khaki pants. “Look,” I said, pulling my finger up so that she
could see it. “It’s barely red. I don’t need healing. It hardly hurts.” I was lying
like hell, my finger was throbbing like someone had slammed it with a car door, but
I held it up straight so that she could see.

“You don’t need to heal me, and you don’t need to have a hissy fit.”

She knew as well as I that payback pain would get worse before it got better. Her
color cooled to a stubborn claret. I don’t know what claret is, but that’s what the
bored heroes in my Regencies always drank, and I always figured it was red wine. And
sometimes when I was feeling mellow, a furious Merry reminded me of a glass of something
vintage, held up to the golden dancing flames of a lit fire.

I kept walking, passing the last car parked in the lot, so engrossed, and still, admittedly,
somewhat high with adrenaline, that I didn’t even notice the red van idling against
the metal fence until I was too close to avoid it. The vehicle smelled of hamburgers,
Febreze, and car wash. The sweet bubble-gum smell of the latter twigged a scent recall.
I looked, and saw Robson Trowbridge in the driver’s seat talking to Geezer-Were. Eyes
averted, I walked past the rear of the van, Merry tight in my fist.

Geezer-Were opened the window.

Were scent, fragrant as the woods that I was heading to, reached out to me. Silence
as I passed. I don’t know who would screw around with a pause, but this one struck
me as pregnant. I held my breath, kept my gait casual, and wondered how fast I could
run. As fast as a full-blood Were? I skipped over the barrier between this parking
lot and the next, and made it onto the gas station’s patched asphalt. I didn’t change
my speed until I had made it around the repair shop, then I broke into a light trot.

Lou’s next flood of pictures came with no warning.
An aisle in the bookstore. A path with trees, leaves whipping out in the wind. A dark
uniform. Something glinting gold. An arm with a sword, raised high. Then bushes, and
ground. Lou’s hand reaching for a rock. Booted feet passing the vegetation.

As abruptly as they came, they were gone. No visions, no pictures, no fear. I was
back in the “here.” I took another lungful of air.

The entry to the ravine was another half block ahead. I tightened the straps on my
backpack and picked up the tempo. Lou would be waiting for me at home. So would my
bed, and my dreams. I found my feet slowing. I was early anyhow. If I came home too
early, she’d ask why. I walked twelve feet along the ravine path thinking about that
before I stepped off the trail to find a tree for Merry.

*   *   *

If anyone passed, it looked like I was just leaning against the tree, thinking up
poetry, and really that’s what I was doing. The tree-leaning bit; not the poetry.

I don’t have to do much to feed Merry—there’s no can-opening, or big bags to lug—so
I have plenty of time to think. Once I find a tree and plop her on a limb, all I have
to do is stand guard as she chows down. True, I have to be particular about the type
of tree. It has to be green, preferably wild. She prefers hardwoods. Pines and spruces
make her turn an unattractive yellow-brown. In a pinch, flowers at a grocery store
will do, but they really fall into the fast food category. She doesn’t get much juice
from them. Not enough to last more than a few days, anyhow. Don’t ask me to explain
the mechanics. She doesn’t watch me when I’m soaping up in the shower, and I don’t
observe her too closely as she sucks down some tree essence. It gives me a chance
to think, that half hour while she’s eating. Some of my best thoughts happen then.
Some of my worst too.

I’d cried for three hours the day Robson Trowbridge married Candace Temple. I might
have gone longer, but my twin Lexi bartered two of his
X-Men
comics for one hour of silence. So I stopped, but felt tragic and misunderstood,
even as I turned the pages and ate a brownie. But then of course, I’d been twelve,
and I’d thought marriages were eternal honeymoons. Since then, I’ve seen enough human
unions to know that’s just another myth. Sort of sucks for Weres though. When they
say “I do,” they’re saying it for life. If one mate dies, the other follows. Sometimes
right away, sometimes it takes a few grieving months. I didn’t need to be told that.
I’d listened to my dad’s heart stop, and then my mum’s. That’s the deal; the sour
side of having a true mate.

“How am I going to keep Lou’s dreams out of my head now, Merry?” I used the rough
tree bark to scratch a spot between my shoulder blades, as I worried the problem.
Without a job, I had no distraction from Lou. “I wish I knew how to keep her out.”

The constant dribble of Lou’s thought pictures and dreams was wearing me thin. I couldn’t
sleep without being overwhelmed by them, and the problem had grown intolerable since
she’d taken to napping during the day. Thought-pictures I could handle. But when her
nighttime dreams became my daytime terrors? I can’t explain how equally repugnant
and fascinating I found it. Prior to this, I’d needed no defense against Lou’s fragmenting
mind. We’d been two separate beings with a whole bunch of white space between us.
We didn’t even exchange thought-pictures like I used to with Mum and Lexi.

Handy things, thought-pictures. You can get a lot across with two well-selected ones.
For example, imagine a picture of one twin batting the other over the head with something
hard. See? Bet you have an immediate opinion about that. If you don’t like your sibling,
you may think, “Hah, good.” But if you’re one of those humans with delicate sensibilities—you
know, one of those manual-reading mums who believe in naughty corners—well, your first
thought might be, “That’s terrible.”

Now here’s where the skill comes in. It’s all about the next image. Pair the picture
of Helen hitting Lexi with her shoe, followed immediately by an image of Helen’s mother
frowning fiercely. Neat, huh? You have an opinion
and
a lesson delivered in two quick images.

Merry signaled that she was finished with the tree by rolling off the branch. “You
done already?” She pointed to another tree; one with different-shaped leaves. “You
know, you’re getting as fussy as a cat.” I picked my way through the knee-high vegetation
and reached up to place her on the lowest limb.

I could live with Lou’s thought-pictures, but increasingly, the images were melting
into dream fragments and that just scared the shit out of me. The first act was considered
nonthreatening; it was common practice among the Fae to share a static mental snapshot
or two with their blood relatives. But sharing dreams? Those are dangerous things,
aren’t they? Your unconscious is at the controls, and he’s that bad relative that
gets drunk at the wedding, and tells
all
the family secrets.

Anyhow, for most Fae-born, the issue was moot. They simply weren’t born with the ability
to send or receive another’s dreams.

Most
of them.

The first non-Hedi dream I ever experienced was Lexi’s. For want of a better word,
I was dream-napped. My conscious self was caught and dragged into my twin’s unconscious
mind, as if it were something sticky on the aural plane that got tangled in the trawling
hooks of his dream. That’s what it feels like. Nothing at all like a thought-picture’s
discreet knock. A slip, a slide backward, and then, that feeling, that awful, dreadful
wrongness, as if you’d taken off your skin, and squirmed into another’s. Once in,
there was no out. You were forced to stay in it until the dream ended—an unwilling
spectator to what they saw, an unwilling receptor for what they felt.

Merry tugged her chain to get my attention. I opened my palm and as my fingers closed
over her, I felt soothing warmth seep into my skin. “Let’s go home, Merry.”

I started walking again, following the trail through the woods, but my mind was still
on the first time I heard mention of Threall.

The morning after my first dream-walk, I told Mum that Lexi had slid his dream into
my head. Absolute horror twisted her features. “Threall.” She grabbed my hand, yanking
me out of the kitchen faster than you could say, “Lexi stole the last macaroon.” Next
thing I knew, I was sitting on the edge of my parents’ bed watching her shut the door
softly behind us. She rested her ear against it for a moment and then turned to ask
me questions in that low, tense un-Mum-like voice, and when I was done answering,
she was silent for a long time.

She sat down. Without looking, she pointed to the coins on their dresser. A penny
lifted from its surface and floated gracefully to me. I reached for it.

“No, Helen, listen and watch.” She waited until my hands were back in my lap, and
then said slowly, “You know that there are two different realms. The world to which
you were born.” She made the penny jiggle. “And another, in which the Fae live, called—”

“Merenwyn.”

A quarter flew across the air, and hovered above the penny. “Yes, Merenwyn.” She made
it spin so its bright silver surface caught the early morning light. Her eyes softened
as she watched it. “I wish you could see it.”

“Why can’t you take us there?” I tucked my hair behind my ear. “You used a portal
to come here, why can’t we open one and go there?”

“I made an oath that I would never cross a portal again. It’s an oath I cannot break.”
She touched my hair. “Even if I could return home, I couldn’t bring you with me. The
mages keyed the gates to open only for those with Fae blood.”

“I have Fae blood.” I fingered the bedspread.

“But you also have Were.” She gave me a slight smile. “The gates would sense that
and might not let you pass. I don’t want you to ever try it, okay? Promise me?” When
I didn’t respond, her voice got sharper. “Helen, using one is not like walking through
a doorway. Even for a full-blooded Fae, it’s disorienting and dangerous.”

“I could do it.”

“Could you? When the gate is open, you see right to the other world, like you’re looking
through a round window. It tricks your mind. You expect to cross a flat plateau, but
instead your body is pulled upward at a great speed. It’s terrifying the first time,
even if you’ve been told to expect it. If you lose focus of where you need to go,
you can be pulled into the wind, and killed. They train your mind for weeks before
you’re allowed to even think of stepping into a portal.”

“Who trains you?” I asked, my mind already wandering.

“There’s something more important for us to talk about.” She turned her head, and
levitated all the coins sitting on the dresser into the air, squinting at them until
she spotted the flat washer that Dad had put in his pocket and never returned to the
jar in the garage.

“There is a third realm called Threall. It lies between this world and Merenwyn.”
The flat disk floated across the room. It slipped into the empty place between the
Merenwyn quarter and the earthly penny. I studied the stacked coins floating in space.

“Threall looks like a washer stuck between a penny and quarter?”

The coins dropped to the bedspread. “No, Helen. It does not look like that.”

“Then what does it look like?”

She sighed, but didn’t squeeze the bridge of her nose like she usually did after some
of my questions. Instead, she picked up the quarter and the penny. “It’s said to be
a land of mists and bad things. They say a part of every Fae lives in Threall, the
dreaming portion of us.” She pressed her hand to her heart. “It should be sacred,
not a place anyone can visit.”

I gazed dubiously at the dull piece of metal lying on the quilt. “How do you know
Threall exists if no one has ever seen it?”

“There are some who can travel there.”

I gave her the “aha” look. “So there’s a portal.”

“No, Helen. There is no portal. Only mystwalkers can travel to Threall.”

“How?”

“With their mind. Once trained, a mystwalker can create a second body in the world
of mists, and walk on two feet, just as she does in Merenwyn.”

“Cool,” I said.

“No. Not cool. Mystwalkers search for people’s souls in Threall, Helen, and once they
find them, they can do great harm.”

“Huh.” There were a few Weres I felt like harming.

“Don’t look like that.” Her fingers gripped mine. “There’s a reason I’m telling you
this. Look at me.” Her eyes were so fierce. “Do you know how they find mystwalkers?
They search for children born with the gift of walking into others’ dreams. Those
children are brought to the King’s Court. Their gifts are tested. If they don’t have
enough raw talent, they’re killed, and if they’re not killed, they become wards of
the court. The King’s Court is not a place for any child. Those children, the ones
who make it to adulthood, they become…”