War for the Oaks (25 page)

"I lost you," Carla said accusingly.

"What?"

"I lost you. Somewhere below Forty-second Street. What happened?"

Eddi finally understood. "You
followed
me?"

"No, I tried to follow you. Dammit, girl, if you don't tell me what happened and whether you're all right, I'm gonna come over there and see for myself."

"Ah . . . I don't think you should come over just now." The phouka was watching her, his head cocked. Willy was pacing the living room, or rather limping it. Eddi put her hand over the mouthpiece and hissed at him, "Sit down, for godsake! If you stayed off it, it wouldn't hurt!"

"What?" said Carla ominously.

"Listen, I'm fine. I'm just really beat. And I'd tell you the rest of it, but I can't just now. I'll call you tomorrow, okay?"

"Eddi! No, it is not okay. I was going crazy all afternoon, trying to figure out what to do. And I knew there wasn't any point in asking you about it, because you wouldn't tell me—"

"I wondered why you didn't mention it."

"Anyway, I decided I'd follow you. You couldn't do anything about it if I just showed up. So we sat in the car and waited 'til you left—"

"Wait a minute. What do you mean, 'we'?"

There was a long silence on the other end. "I brought Danny."

"You brought Danny. How much does Danny know?"

Carla made an impatient noise. "What could I do? Tell him, 'Hey, you wanna stake out Eddi's place? Just for fun?' I had to tell him what I was doing."

Eddi sighed. "I suppose he thinks I'm out of my mind."

"No, he thinks I am."

"He's right."

Willy had begun a low-voiced conversation with the phouka, full of half-audible distracting phrases. "Listen, kiddo," she said at last to Carla. "Willy and the phouka are both here, and I have to keep them from eating each other. I
will
call you back tomorrow, I promise."

"Willy?" Carla said.

"Oh, hell. Tomorrow, okay?"

"Sheesh." Carla hung up.

". . . it's not as if it was easy under normal circumstances," Willy was saying fiercely as Eddi replaced the receiver.

The phouka looked smug. "You were warned. The glaistig learned that first night that she was . . . less than susceptible."

"You'll forgive me," Willy said, his voice brimming with sarcasm, "if I point out that I'm rather better than a
glaistig."

Eddi could see the phouka mastering his anger. "Humility does come to you slowly, doesn't it?" he said at last, deceptively mild.

"What are you talking about?" Eddi asked.

Willy turned away. "Nothing you should know."

"Oh, yeah? That usually means exactly the opposite." She switched her glare to the phouka.

"It's not mine to tell, sweet. But I don't think you should stop asking." And he grinned fiendishly at Willy.

"Well?" she said, when Willy glowered at her.

"We were talking about your resistance to glamour."

She stared at him. "You've tried it on me?"

"Yes."

"And failed?"

"Not entirely."

Of course not. She'd thought him human, hadn't she? But she had a dreadful, growing suspicion that he'd done more than disguise his appearance. "What did you do?" she asked, barely above a whisper.

He wore the haughty little smile that she was quickly coming to associate with the Sidhe. "I made you a little easier to deal with."

"I told you once tonight, say what you mean."

"When you objected to something I did or said, I blunted that objection. When you might have thought I was behaving strangely, I clouded your mind, and you accepted whatever I was doing."

She felt grimy, and she didn't think a shower would take care of it. "You made me fall in love with you."

"I did not."

"The hell you didn't! You pretended to be a different kind of person entirely, and you forced me to believe it. The man I thought I was with when I was with you doesn't exist! What do you think falling in love is?"

"What does that have to do with it?" Willy frowned.

He honestly didn't know. Sadness took a little of the edge off her anger. "So," she said heavily, "what was the problem? Everything you did seems to have worked."

Willy ignored her distress—or perhaps he didn't notice it. "It was damn difficult to keep it up. You didn't stay pacified, and after a while I realized that though I could make the glamour work on you, it never worked as thoroughly as it should." He looked thoughtful. "I'd love to know why."

Eddi shook her head. He'd toyed with reality, bent her perceptions, and showed not the least guilt at the admission. She felt a lingering desire to punch his exquisite nose.

The phouka laughed softly, and Eddi and Willy both looked at him. "A lad so widely traveled as yourself, and you don't know the answer to that?"

Willy's expression was eloquent, even for Willy.

"A great pity," said the phouka. "You'd do well to read Yeats. But I suppose you haven't time, just now."

"Are you going to say anything useful, or are you going to pat yourself on the back?" Willy snapped.

"Both. She has her own glamour, Willy lad. All poets do, all the bards and artists, all the musicians who truly take the music into their hearts. They all straddle the border of Faerie, and they see into both worlds. Not dependably into either, perhaps, but that uncertainty keeps them honest and at a distance."

Eddi found all this uncomfortable to hear. It wasn't that she was being described in the third person; more that someone else was being described, and called by her name.

"Does this sound familiar yet?" the phouka asked Willy, in his sweetest voice.

"Oh, I'd stop you if it did," Willy muttered. "Trust me."

"I am surrounded by people with no appreciation for history. Ah, well. In a time when we were stronger and more numerous, we sought out mortal men and women with that dual vision, kept company with them, and sometimes carried them away with us."

"I know
that"
Willy said.

"We usually did badly by them, in the end." The phouka glanced at Eddi then, and she saw regret or sorrow in his face. "But we cannot
resist the lure of that mortal brilliance. It is its own kind of glamour, that dazzles the senses. And once we have found it, we cannot turn away."

It was explanation and apology at once, and Eddi realized that it was meant mostly for her. She wanted to tell the phouka that it was all right, but Willy was there, and she couldn't do it in front of him.

"So I can't work magic on her because she already has magic of her own?" Willy was asking the phouka.

"For the sake of brevity, more or less."

Willy squinted as if with a headache. "Oak and Ash. And you've . . . what she heard tonight . . . Oak and Ash."

The phouka leaned back, cradling his coffee cup and smiling.

Willy looked up at him sharply. "Did you plan all this from the beginning?"

The phouka's smile turned bitter. "All the parts of it that you're asking about, yes."

For a long moment, Willy gnawed his lower lip and glared. "And it's all gone just the way you wanted, hasn't it?"

The phouka's only answer was a crack of harsh laughter.

"I could gag you," Willy said.

"You wouldn't . . . ah, yes, I suppose you would dare. Who would teach her, then?"

"No one," Willy replied, soft-voiced and precise.

"All my work for naught?"

"If I knew what you were working
toward
, you might get a little sympathy out of me!"

"I work toward a victory for the Seelie Court."

"Why do I think that's only half an answer? Never mind. I'm too tired to go around in circles with you now."

"Pity." The phouka sighed. "I was just about to offer you first watch."

Willy shrugged. "I can handle it."

"Good. I very much doubt I could. Wake me at sunrise." And he set his coffee cup on the trunk, stretched out on the couch with his back to the room, and appeared to fall instantly asleep.

"Lucky bastard," Willy muttered.

Eddi got up from her chair. "Very interesting," she said. "Teach me what?"

"I'd forgotten you were there," Willy said.

"I thought you had. Answer the question."

"Teach you—oh." He laughed weakly. "No. If I answer you, you'll have had your first lesson, and I won't be responsible for that. But ask him when he wakes up. I've left him free to tell you. Try not to make me regret that, all right?"

Eddi unfolded the afghan from the back of the armchair and threw it over the phouka. He didn't stir. "No promises," she said. "If you want promises, I have to know what the hell you're talking about. And you don't want that, do you?" She headed for the bathroom door. "Practice tomorrow at 4:30. See you there."

"Eddi." His voice stopped her on the threshold. "About the band . . ."

"Yeah?" She held her breath.

The silence went on for long enough that she turned to look at him.

"Hedge," he said, "is one of us."

Us. It took an instant for her to understand. Then she stepped into the bathroom and closed the door behind her. What, after all, could she say to that?

Her denim jacket was mended and clean. Eddi stood in the living room with the thing hanging from her fingers, and squinted at the phouka through a deluge of noon sun.

"It wasn't me," he told her.

"Well, it sure wasn't
me
."

The phouka leaned in the kitchen doorway. He was wearing navy chalk-stripe pleated trousers with cuffs, a pink band-collared shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and suspenders embroidered with—were they? Yes, they were. Palm trees.

"The Godfather
meets
Miami Vice,"
Eddi muttered. "How's your head?"

"Perfect, of course," he said. He swept his hair back from his forehead to show her a short, pink scar.

She felt comforted. "It's more than you deserve. Well, if neither of us did this"—she flourished her mended jacket—"who did? Willy?"

The phouka made a dismissing gesture with his coffee cup. "Once you're fully awake, I trust you'll recognize the folly inherent in that suggestion."

"I wasn't serious."

"I also trust you'll observe that it's not just your jacket."

Eddi looked around. The sun streamed uncommonly bright through the blinds. That held her attention for a moment. "The windows are clean," she said at last, wondering.

"Very good. Don't stop there, sweet."

In fact, everything was clean. And the apartment smelled of fresh bread, which, she realized belatedly, was what had awakened her in the first place. "You made bread?"

"No."

"Then what do I smell?"

"Bread."

She pushed past him to look in the kitchen. There were two round
brown loaves cooling on the counter. There was a pot of coffee made, as well. She drew back and looked him in the eye. "And you didn't do any of this."

"None, I'm ashamed to say."

"So?"

He sucked in his cheeks and looked thoughtful. "If I were required to be forthright, which, thank earth and air, is rarely necessary, I would have to say that you've acquired a brownie."

Eddi stared at him. "That's silly," she said after a bit.

"Possibly. But just in case, don't offer up any thanks for all this. I don't really enjoy washing dishes."

Eddi paced the apartment, touching things. Perhaps she'd had so many intrusions into her life lately that she'd gone beyond resenting any more. Or perhaps the nature of this intrusion was different—its character was so clearly a smoothing of the waters of daily routine. Whoever had come and gone had left nothing in the way, nothing that wasn't useful, nothing that Eddi had to rearrange her life around. The message of the clean apartment, the bread, the mended jacket, was, "The irritants are gone, the mundane details are taken care of. The important matters are left to you."

She couldn't say thank you. But she remembered how pleased the phouka had been at praise. "This is great," she said softly. "The place never looked so good."

Eddi stood at the window, not really seeing the rooftops and the waving trees of Loring Park. It was more than just clean windows and mending. She felt as if her future was back in her hands. She was not just baggage for the Seelie Court, an amulet that brought death but had no life of its own. She had allies, however uncertain. And she had knowledge, and would get more.

So she had her own glamour, did she? And Willy had found that alarming. He'd made a great fuss, also, over her unbedazzled state during the binding ceremony, and over the Queen of Faerie speaking English. . . . All pieces of the same puzzle. The clearest part of it was that she shouldn't have understood the ceremony. The bread-and-blood of it tended to overshadow the words—what were they?

Mortal flesh, and doom, and something else, there were three things mortal. Spirit in flesh, spirit in doom—no, that was wrong, the other way around. And all of them under . . . will? Yes, that was the third mortal thing. It sounded like heavy metal lyrics, or imitation Aleister
Crowley. Flesh, the body. Will, the mind. Doom? Mortality, fear of death? That made sense. It was, after all, what the Seelie Court wanted her for: to bring death to the battlefield.

Why had the Seelie Court supplied the mortal? Did the Unseelie Court not want their enemies dead? Or was it just the good guys' turn to bring the party supplies? But that was a digression; one thing at a time.

Spirit—the soul? But then the whole thing became metaphysical, and hardly dangerous for her to know. Spirit, spirit. . .

"Magic," the phouka said behind her, and she realized she'd spoken her last thought out loud.

"Spirit is magic?"

"Or more exactly, the power of Faerie. If, as I think you are, you're quoting the Lady."

Then Eddi remembered the context of the quote, and another puzzle piece came to her hand. This was the price of Eddi's services as Angel of Death, this was the risk worth taking.

"Damn," she said. "What were her exact words?"

The phouka watched her as he spoke, something eager in his expression. " 'Mortal flesh and mortal doom be one, and mortal will may rule them. Spirit shall reside in flesh, doom reside in spirit, and all shall bow before will.' "