The Trouble with Fate (5 page)

*   *   *

There is always someone who has control over the button. It’s never wise to piss that
person off.

In this case, it was a fat forty-something woman seated behind the reception desk
at Beacon Memorial. I made the mistake of going straight for the doors to the treatment
rooms, which messed up protocol in all sorts of ways, and ignored her importance as
the guardian of the open-sesame button.

She made me wait. And wait. People went in, people came out. Two weary policemen escorted
an agitated man cuffed to a gurney into the treatment rooms. For a moment, as the
doors swung open, I thought about slipping in via their wake but she was watching
me, so I sat, and waited and tried to look like every other person waiting in the
waiting room. Bored. Inside I was contemplating flattening the receptionist with her
own computer screen. I was fretting over metal handcuffs, and I was thinking about
ties. Not the ties that handcuff you to a gurney, but the ties that handcuff you to
a past, present, and future.

Finally, after forty minutes, she pressed the button and let me in.

“My aunt was brought in,” I said to a nurse in the hall.

“And she is?”

“Louise Rogers.”

“Ah.” I was handed down the line like an explosive package, until her case nurse escorted
me to a curtained cubicle. A note had been taped to the curtain:
Gloves only.

The curtains rattled as she pulled them open. They’d taken Lou’s clothes and put her
into a blue hospital gown. The white sheet was pulled up to her waist. The hospital
gown gaped at the neck. Her eyes were half open, half closed, exposing unfocused dead
gray pupils. Up and down her left arm were burns, some livid red and some liquid filled.
Someone had tied her wrists to the sides of the bed with white gauze. A needle had
been inserted in one blue vein. A drip bag hung from a metal stand.

“What’s in the bag?”

“She’s dehydrated, so we’ve got her on fluids. She was given a sedative as well. It
affected her more than we anticipated.” She checked the fluid level and reached for
Lou’s chart. “Is there any immediate family we can call?”

“I am her family.”

“She’s your guardian?”

I shrugged my shoulders. “No, I’m hers.”

“How old are you?” she asked, frowning down at me.

What
is
it? Is it because I’m short? Or because my face is baby-shaped? I’m going to be carded
until I’m forty.
I added a year. “Twenty-three.”

She didn’t look like she believed me, but she didn’t ask for the fake driver’s license
I’d been forced to spend two hundred bucks on—it’s impossible to get a job or even
a bus pass in Deerfield without some sort of ID—which was too bad, because the new
card was a beauty and I hadn’t had a chance to air it yet. There was another piece
of gauze taped to the inside of Lou’s elbow. I tilted my head toward it inquiringly.

“We had to take some blood tests. We’re waiting on the results. The sedative really
knocked her out. Is she on any medication?”

“No.” Except for the slow rise of her chest, Lou looked dead.

“We’re concerned about her burns. Do you know how she got them?”

“I was at work.”

“Hmm.” The nurse made a note on her chart. “There are some older burns too. Maybe
she got them a couple of weeks ago? Do you know anything about them?”

They just
looked
older. She got all her wounds at the same time, a couple of hours ago when the cop
tried to subdue her. The touch from a mortal male burns a female Fae—the result of
some Mage spell that kicks in at birth—all because some ninny on the Royal Court started
worrying that humans might foul their gene pool. The truth was, she didn’t heal very
well anymore. The mechanism was still inside her, trying to heal her, but it was weak
and fitful like her moods. It had healed some, already, but was slowing down on others,
making it seem like she had a long history of being burned. Try explaining that to
a human. Try explaining anything about my life to a human.

The Fae don’t fade out in a logical fashion, as if someone had a checklist and a panel
of switches. Do they all fade like that? I don’t know. I’ve never seen one do it before
Lou. And as far as I knew, Lou was the last Fae on this side of the portal to Merenwyn.

She hadn’t been able to Call to the Seven in months. That was her talent—calling metals.
In Merenwyn she was known as the Collector. She was able to call to precious metal
with her voice and hands, and it would melt and roll right to her, to collect in a
puddle by her feet. She could do that with all the seven: gold, copper, silver, lead,
tin, mercury, and—this is where her talent came in real value for Merenwyn’s royal
family—iron. Gold was valuable, silver was pretty, but iron was deadly. Enough of
it could render a strong ruler as weak as a drooling infant.

She told me she was one of only two living Fae who had the talent. I could never understand
why they let her stay on this side of the portal, after my parents died, if her skills
were so prized. Before they closed the portals that night, they must have sounded
some sort of retreat before they slammed the doors. Humans blamed the horrific sound
of the barricades coming down on a minor earthquake, but they were wrong. That loud
earth-trembling boom was the sound of gates closing simultaneously, forever ensuring
that this world and the other would never touch again.

Lou’s hands were curled like claws on the white sheet. The skin on them was thin,
but her nails still grew long and diamond-hard. “Where is her ring?” I asked.

“I beg your pardon?”

My voice was sharp. “She wears a small green ring on her baby finger. It’s missing.”

“Oh, that thing,” the nurse said. “She scratched one of our nurses during admissions
with it. We locked it away for safekeeping.”

“I want it returned right now.”

“Fine. The receptionist has the key. When she comes back from break, I’ll get it from
her.” Her tone was cool. “In the meantime, maybe we can get your information. And
later, someone from social services will need to talk with you.” She pulled the curtains
wide and bustled out.

There was one blue plastic chair, jammed under the shelf with the box of gloves. I
pulled it out and sat down. And then I leaned back to pull the curtains closed again.
My last remaining relative was tied to a bed in a human hospital. I didn’t have the
right to feel sorry for myself. Not one bit.

As I worked at the knot on her restraint, I studied Lou. She was too thin, too yellow.
I was losing her. I’d been losing her for the last half year. A year ago Lou could
have passed for a thirty-five-year-old. Now, her scalp played peekaboo with what was
left of her long hair. If you stared hard at her, hard enough to ignore the slack
skin, you’d realize that her features were still handsome. But the fading was relentless.
The fat had melted away from her face as fast as her muscles withered, leaving crepe
skin and jowls. Without that padding to soften her edges, her nose appeared sharper
and predatory, her mouth a thin, pale gash.

She wasn’t an old lady. She was just a Fae on the wrong side of the portal, without
a key to get back. There wasn’t enough magic and maple syrup to keep her here.

Would I wither like her one day? I have my own measure of Fae blood, but it’s diluted—poisoned,
Lou once said—by the Were blood running in my veins. Sometimes I find myself thinking
too long about whether I’ll fade like Lou, or live long like a Were.

The nurse jerked the curtains wide. “Do you have her health card?”

I stepped outside the cubicle, pulled the curtains all the way until one edge met
the other snugly, and then followed the nurse.

After some creative form-filling, I took a slow stroll through the hallways. The nurse
still had me in her sights, so the best thing to do was to map out our escape. As
far as I could tell, there were only two ways to get in; through the swinging doors
at reception and through the back hall that lead to the imaging department. At first
glance, the back hall seemed like the best way of moving her out of the hospital,
but there was a long corridor leading to it, and leaning against the wall were the
two cops, their belts bristling with things that could do serious harm. Talking to
them was a couple of paramedics.

The cops’ eyes flicked to me as I passed. There was a door ahead for the women’s washroom,
and I took it. I closed the door and locked it.

“Merry?” I pressed my hand to my chest. “I need to talk.” Fae Stars. The washroom
smelled even worse than the hallways. I pulled my white blouse away from my chest,
looked down and tried again. “Merry?” Nestled between my breasts, Merry remained stiff
and unyielding.

“Stop sulking.”

Merry didn’t stir, unwind, or even change color. That was the measure of her hatred
for Lou. She was in her usual place, the inside curve of my left breast, tucked warm
between the lace of my bra and my skin, pretending to be asleep. Somewhere during
that anxious jog to the hospital, she’d reverted back to her original design. Golden
strands of elegantly entwined ivy formed a protective basketwork around the cloudy
amber of her stone. “Gone baroque, huh?” I gave her a disgusted prod. “You know, sometimes
I feel like taking you off my neck, and leaving you hanging in a rack of costume jewelery
at Zellers. All I wanted you to do was listen while I worked out a plan.”

No response. No pulse of heat, no change in color. When she wanted, my Asrai could
look as dumb as a rock.

I emerged from the washroom, pausing on the threshold to fastidiously dry my hands.
The tally had swollen to two cops and three paramedics. All of them looked like they
worked out.

The nurse stopped me on the way back to Lou’s bedside. “Here’s her ring.”

I tore open the envelope and shook into my palm the only piece of jewelry I’d ever
seen Lou wear. As befitting a ring designed to go on a woman’s baby finger, the design
was simple. A narrow strip of gold had been fashioned into a serpentine cradle for
one dull, irregularly shaped green stone. Uncut and unpolished, the gem was unlovely,
except for one little perk. With the emerald on her finger, Lou could lie—breathtakingly
huge whoppers—and do so without a flicker of her eyelash to betray her deception.
Which was a bonus as Lou was pure Fae, and was born handicapped by their natural inability
to tell an untruth, something that could have posed a huge problem to us, considering
that we lived a life on the margins of the criminal world.

Possibly we might have limped along without her needing it. Faes can’t lie, but they
can do wonders with misdirection. Still, I was grateful for the fact that somehow,
somewhere, Lou had charmed a mage out of his ring. It made life easier. When I wasn’t
around to lie for her, she could do so on her own, providing she rubbed the gem before
she spoke. Once, for payment to the ring’s dark magic. The second time, to seal the
lie. Sort of like a compound fib tax.

I slipped the ring over her knuckle and sat down beside her with a sigh.

I hate thinking. I hate that whole, contemplate your life, find your inner self, hug
your tree, kiss your neighbor mind trap that comes from watching too much daytime
TV. I’d rather be entertained. Give me a book. Show me a movie. Be a human. That’s
comedy enough. Don’t ask me to sit and think. Don’t ask me to come up with a plan.

Step one. Wake up Lou. From my backpack, I pulled out the maple syrup I’d bought on
the way to work. I smeared some on my finger and put it to her lips. Her mouth softened,
and the tip of her tongue reached out for it. Her thin lips opened wider. After the
second mouthful, she shut her eyes against the artificial light. I was so damn grateful,
I forgot myself and put my hand to her face.

There was no warning, no slow slip into her head: I was just suddenly in there, experiencing
one of her memories. The colors hit me first. All of them were supersaturated, as
if gray didn’t belong in the palette. I couldn’t have pulled my hand off her face
for the life of me, for she was in Merenwyn, and she rarely allowed herself to think
of home.

*   *   *

Lou is outdoors, looking at a man standing with his back turned to us. It’s a nice,
well-developed back in a gray T-shirt that has gone through the spin cycle enough
times to get thin and tight on the shoulders. There’s a painting of Champlain in the
same pose, staring at the river that he probably thought was going to be called Champlain,
but ended up being called the St. Lawrence. Change the boots for sneakers, and it’s
essentially the same guy. This guy’s tawny hair is shorter, but he has one foot propped
on a stony outcrop. Like the French explorer, his hand rests on his thigh, while the
other sits on his hip. Even without seeing his face, you know this man understands
his own attraction. It’s something in the pose, something in the arrogance of that
straight back.

Predator.

Beyond him, impossibly green trees grow upside down into a fluffy bank of clouds above
a layer of brilliant blue. A breeze picks up a lock of his hair. A fish jumps in the
pool, its scales glittering in the sun. Suddenly, it all made sense: the upside-down
trees, the reversal of clouds and sky. The smooth surface of the natural pond is catching
the reflection of the surrounding trees and sky.

Don’t let him despoil that pool,
I think. But in Lou’s thoughts, the breeze plays with his hair like a lover, while
the clouds slide across the brilliant sky.

*   *   *

“Don’t touch me,” Lou said peevishly, as her dream abruptly disappeared from my vision.
My chair screeched as I bolted backward. For a second I gaped at her, horrified at
my thoughts.
She could have dragged me to Threall and back again, and I wouldn’t have tried to
fight her. Fae Stars, I’d been so Fae-struck by Merenwyn, my only worry had been whether
the dream would end.
I breathed carefully, willing my racing heart to settle. It had been running in my
head, like the chorus to a ballad
. Stay, stay in the dream
. Damn, Mum was right: those dreams were dangerous.