Wondrous Strange (4 page)

“S
onny!”

He turned at the sound of his name to see a fellow Janus emerging from the trees.

“Maddox.” He held out a hand and they clasped forearms, smiling.

“How goes the day, Sonn?” Maddox asked, a slight warm lilt to his voice.

Sonny shrugged. “Does it feel different to you yet?”

“Nah.” Maddox shook his head. “Feels just like every other year. Calm, serene, peaceful…well. That’ll soon change. In less than an hour’s time, the cracks will start to show in the
Gate. And every night after this one, for the next eight, there will be more cracks. Bigger ones. Until Samhain, when all hell breaks loose. Face it, Sonn.” Maddox lowered his voice, even though there was no one who could possibly overhear them. “Nine nights of the Gate opening wider and wider, and only a handful of Janus to guard it. There’s a lot of Folk—mostly the nastier ones—who are willing to take that risk.”

Sonny grimaced. He didn’t understand why any of the Fair Folk would want to live in this world.
He
certainly didn’t. The noise alone was almost enough to drive him mad.

“Do you ever get used to it, Maddox?” Sonny asked, a bit hesitantly. “This place, I mean.”

“I’m the wrong lad to ask,” Maddox grunted. “For one thing, I don’t think I’ve been here long enough. Even just the
concept
of electricity still gives me the willies.”

“After three years?” Sonny asked, surprised.

“Aye, well. We may have both been, you know…
taken
…when gaslight was still in vogue, Sonn, but
I
was old enough when I was—when it happened that I actually remember that world. That time. I just try not to think about it now.”

Sonny thought about that for a moment. He had been a baby when he’d been taken. The only life he’d ever known had been the one that the Fair Folk had given him. It must have been difficult for those like Maddox…to have known right from the start that the shining, glorious people who raised you were not your own. That you weren’t one of theirs. And worse, knowing that your own world was no
longer—could never again be—yours…Sonny felt uncomfortable. It wasn’t something he had ever liked giving deep thought to, though he couldn’t have explained why.

They stopped near the park’s Bow Bridge, which spanned the Lake just west of Bethesda Terrace, linking the relative wilderness of the Ramble to the more formal, manicured gardens of Cherry Hill. The bridge struck Sonny as an apt metaphor for the Gate itself. They stood silently, gazing out over the water for a long moment.

“And after all”—Maddox shrugged off the suddenly somber mood and waved a hand at the beauty before them—“this place
does
have its charms.” He clapped Sonny on the back. “Come on, then. We don’t want to be late for the opening.”

All around Sonny and Maddox, the air thrummed with tense anticipation as they reached the summit of the Great Hill and were welcomed into a loose circle of their Janus brethren. There were thirteen of them, changelings all.

There was the Fennrys Wolf, legendary for his berserker-like rages and sullen temperament. According to Maddox, the cradle Fenn had been stolen from sometime in the ninth century had been that of a Viking prince. War craft was in his blood—or so he declared almost every time Sonny saw him.

Camina and Bellamy were twins, sister and brother. Slender, graceful, and quiet, they’d been Janus Guards since almost the beginning and were notoriously efficient.

There was Godwyn, genial, handsome…ruthless.

Bryan and Beni—one light, one dark, different as night and day. Insanely competitive, and utterly inseparable, “the lads” could usually be found engaged in some sort of contest, be it darts or pool or just punching each other in the arm to see who could take it the longest.

There was Ghost. Thin and silent, with dark eyes in a pale face—more haunted than haunting, Sonny had always thought. He didn’t know Ghost’s real name, or even what part of the world he’d been taken from. An odd young man, but then…he’d been taken by Queen Mabh.

Beside Ghost stood Aaneel—the oldest, who had ages since left his home in India and was one of only a handful of changelings to have lived long enough in the Otherworld to have aged well into adulthood. His black hair had begun to silver at the temples, contrasting with his deep coppery complexion.

Next to Aaneel was Perry—Percival—the youngest, save for Sonny. Perry had been taken in 1719 from a tiny hamlet in the north of France that had suffered failed crops year after year. In exchange for Perry, Titania had granted the place mild weather and fertile soil, and so a town that had almost died didn’t.

Finally, Selene, pale and pretty, with fox-brown hair and a smattering of freckles, and absolutely lethal aim with a long-bow; and Cait, skilled in more forms of hand-to-hand combat than anyone else in the group, she much preferred to cast
spells and warding enchantments instead.

Together they watched as the sun finally dipped completely below the horizon and Central Park slipped into darkness. The first night of the Nine had begun. With a singular purpose, the Janus moved, spreading out to cover the four corners of the park.

Splitting off from the others to travel south, Sonny ran along the treacherously rocky terrain of the Ravine, reaching deep into his mind, feeling past the delicate, obscuring mists of Auberon’s flawed enchantment to where the walls between the worlds were so thin they became doors. He felt for which of those doors might just open that night….

There
.

Thirty yards east—maybe thirty-five. Sonny crept up the path and stood, loose limbed and ready, his blood warmed from running and anticipation of the coming fight. Some of the Faerie that tried to cross would retreat back to the Otherworld at the very first hint of a Janus in the vicinity. But the timid among the Fair Folk were also less likely to try and cross in the first place.

Sonny reached into the leather messenger bag slung across his body and drew forth a bundle of three short, straight sticks, tied with a red leather cord: a branch each of oak, ash, and thorn. Sonny murmured an ancient secret incantation, and a silver-bladed sword appeared in his hand in their place. He held it ready at his side.

Suddenly the granite wall in front of Sonny began to waver
like a mirage, and then cracked. A ghostly, iridescent light seeped through the split in the stone, and Sonny could see diminutive figures silhouetted in the glow. A tiny, wizened face peered out at him. When the creature saw the Janus standing there, it did not turn and run back to the Faerie lands. Instead it gave a nasty, high-pitched giggle.

A piskie-fae.

Sonny tried not to roll his eyes as he reached back into his satchel and withdrew a handful of rock salt. He threw the salt into the piskie’s leering face. The thing squealed and disappeared back into the rift.

That was far too easy!
he thought, grinning. He might not even need to use his blade at all.

His reflection was interrupted by an angry buzzing. It was as though Sonny had just thrown a stone at a nest of hornets. Scrabbling at one another and the edges of the rift, a swarm of tiny, blood-lusting piskies came rushing at him, pale thin bodies glimmering like knives in the darkness.

It took Sonny the better part of an hour, and the carnage, even on a piskie-sized scale, was considerable.

As he cleaned the green, glowing piskie blood from the blade of his sword and veiled it once more, Sonny felt no remorse. The piskie-fae that had attacked him had got what they’d deserved. Piskie weren’t all nasty. Some, back home, were even occasionally useful, although their malicious pranks
made them annoying as hell.

But these had been positively homicidal, and in far greater numbers than Sonny had ever been warned about.

Maddox would give him a very hard time about how long it had taken Sonny to defeat such minor fae. Sonny wondered how Maddox himself was doing. Or any of the others, for that matter. Because there were only thirteen Janus, it was unlikely that their paths would cross much over the next nine nights. They had the entire park to cover.

The ground at Sonny’s feet was littered with rock-salt crystals and flattened by his own boot prints in a rough circle that spread about three yards wide all around him. He hadn’t, in the frenzy, realized just how big the swarm had been. He paced the diameter of the circle.
Really
big. Especially for creatures with an outside height of only six or seven inches.

Sonny stared at the trampled earth and frowned. It didn’t make a ton of sense.

Piskie weren’t necessarily the smartest fae, but they were usually pretty crafty. He would have expected them to have spread out. Come at him in staggered waves. Find more than just that one rift. Instead it looked as if they had launched a massed assault at this spot to keep him busy and anchored to one position.

Sonny swore explosively and spun in a circle on his heel, casting out with his Janus perception, so heavily preoccupied until now. A sudden, blinding crimson light shot through his
mind. His insides went cold. Something was terribly wrong somewhere south. He struggled to focus, to pinpoint the blazing light on the map in his mind….

There it was. Or, rather, there it
had been
.

Sonny started to run.

But he knew, in his heart, that he was already much too late.

Crouching near the edge of the Lake, Sonny put his cheek to the cold ground and peered along the surface of the water, still swirling with iridescence—evidence of recent passage through the Samhain Gate to this realm from the Otherworld.

Something other than piskies had come through the Gate, very recently. Maybe half an hour earlier. Sonny lay with his cheek to the ground for a better view and stared eye-level out over the obsidian surface of the Lake.

There
.

There was a faintly glowing trail leading out of the water. Sonny sprang to his feet and ran over to investigate.

The soft ground at the edge of the Lake was churned to mud. It looked as if there had been some kind of struggle, or as if something had been dragged out of the water and onto the path. Here and there Sonny saw the elongated circular impressions of what could only have been hoofprints. He crouched on the path for a closer look.

It was Central Park, after all. Horses pulled carriages through
the park, and wealthy equestrians rode their mounts along the bridle paths. But these prints had come from unshod hooves. And the water that pooled in the impressions had the same telltale iridescent sheen.

A kelpie?
Sonny turned over the clues in his mind.

In one of the prints, Sonny found strands of coarse red horsehair and three glittering black onyx beads carved in the shapes of tiny stags’ heads.

He pocketed the hair and beads and stood, looking around. From the corner of his eye, Sonny saw something pale hidden in the reeds. He retrieved the object, brushing damp vegetation from its surface. It was a script, held together with brass fasteners through the punch holes. The front cover was gone, but the
Dramatis Personae
page was mostly intact, although marred by a hoofprint that looked as though its edges were very slightly scorched. Handwritten notes were scribbled in the margins, and at the top of the page a note in marker said
Kelley’s Script
. Sonny frowned, fanning through the play, until a smattering of dialogue caught his eye.

“Out of this wood do not desire to go,” began the speech, and Sonny almost dropped the pages in surprise.

He’d heard those very words not long before.

Sonny scanned the lakeshore one last time and knelt at the edge of the path.

Buried almost completely in the mud lay the trampled
remains of a single peach-colored rose. Sonny plucked a bruised petal and held it up before his eyes. The script. The girl from the Shakespeare Garden.

His firecracker.

Kelley
…

E
xhausted, muddy, and soaked to the skin, Kelley kicked the apartment door closed behind her and yelled out for her roommate. There was no answer—
Tyff must be out,
she thought. Just as well. At that moment she didn’t really feel like launching into a recap of her strange adventure in the park. The cold of the Lake still gripped her bones, even though she’d jogged the last few blocks home. It made her thought processes slow and sluggish.

Shivering hard enough that her teeth rattled, Kelley shed clothing in a trailing heap on the floor, tugged the afghan off the back of the couch, and wrapped it around herself as
she stumbled to the bathroom and turned the shower taps on, setting the temperature as hot as it would go. She knew that the only thing that was going to drive away impending hypothermia was the longest, hottest shower she’d ever taken, followed by a large mug of even hotter cocoa.

The shower was about as close to heaven as she could imagine. Steam billowed in clouds around her, and eventually the chattering of her teeth stopped and her muscles unclenched enough to let her stand upright. Once the heat had restored her mental faculties sufficiently, Kelley allowed herself to mull over the evening’s bizarre turn of events.

She’d come to her senses lying facedown on the lakeside path, retching out murky water, with the horse nuzzling at her shoulder. By the time she’d regained her bearings and struggled to her feet, the creature had vanished into the darkness, and Kelley was left with nothing but a few strands of long, reddish horsehair clutched in her fist. Sodden and shivering, she had gathered up shoes and coat and all the stuff that had spilled from her bag and headed for home.

That was what she remembered.

Only…

There was confusion in Kelley’s mind. She could recall, from the moments before she’d blacked out, a jumble of images. Fleeting impressions of lights and sound—strange, beautiful music…

Or, to use the technical term, oxygen deprivation
.

Kelley leaned her head against the tiled wall. At least she
hadn’t actually drowned. What was that old cliché? Right: “Fortune favors the foolish.” Stupid horse. She hoped it had found its way home. With the water starting to run lukewarm, Kelley reluctantly turned off the taps and slid aside the shower curtain.

And screamed.

The “stupid horse” was standing right in front of her, filling almost every available inch of her tiny bathroom with its big, lanky frame. The horse’s back feet—in fact its entire back half—was still outside, as it stood half in her bathroom, half out on the landing of the fire escape. Kelley could see steam rising up from the horse, dissipating into the cold night air. It whickered softly and pushed at her shoulder with its velvet muzzle.

Kelley scrambled for something to cover herself and tried not to panic.

When she’d hoped that the creature had found its way home, Kelley hadn’t meant
her
home! She wrapped herself in a towel and edged around the horse, out of the little room. As soon as she could, she shut the door with a bang and leaned against it, her heart pounding.

This is impossible
, she thought.
This is
not
happening
.

She was imagining things. She had brain freeze.
Über
brain freeze—not just the kind you got from drinking a Slurpee too fast. No. The kind that you got from jumping into a lake in late October. The kind that made you hallucinate wildly.

The horse whinnied softly.

“Stop that!” Kelley clapped her hands over her ears. “You’re not real! I can’t hear you because you’re
not
real!”

There was another little burble of equine noise from behind the door, followed by shuffling and thumping sounds. Then nothing. Kelley sank down to the floor and sat with her back to the door. This really wasn’t happening. Because if it
was
happening, Kelley was in for a world of trouble.

Her roommate was going to kill her. Or kick her out.

Oh, God—if Tyff kicked her out, she might have to move back home! It wasn’t as if her aunt Emma had wanted Kelley to move to New York in the first place, and it was only the fact that Kelley’d found such a great place to stay that made her agree. Tyff Meyers was a model—more than a little high-strung—and Kelley could recall the wording of her craigslist ad with absolute clarity:

A horse in the bathroom would pretty much violate both the
NO CRAZIES
and
NO PETS
, Kelley thought, still trying desperately not to panic.

She stayed crouched against the door for a long time, her mind racing like a runaway train. This couldn’t possibly be happening. After a long few minutes of silence, she dared to hope her fit of hallucination had run its course.

Then she heard the sound of water running.

Kneeling, she put an eye to the antique keyhole in the door and, feeling dazed, noted that the horse had climbed entirely—impossibly—through the small casement window and was now standing in the tub.

It also seemed to be running itself a bath.

“No, ma’am, I’m not drunk,” Kelley said for the third time.

This, after the eighty-five minutes she had spent trying to get a real person to talk to at NYC Animal Control. “Like I said, he must’ve come up the fire escape—”

The receiver clicked in her ear.

“Hello? Hel
lo
?”

Exasperated almost to the point of tears, Kelley hung up the phone and began to pace. Maybe the Animal Control lady was right. Maybe she
was
drunk. Okay, so she hadn’t had anything
to
drink, but that made about as much sense as a full-grown horse following her home from Central Park like a lost puppy, climbing up the fire escape, and squeezing itself through a tiny window into her bathroom, didn’t it? She stopped pacing
and went to check on it. Still hoping beyond hope that she
had
, in fact, been hallucinating, she cracked open the door. The horse rolled a big, brown eye at her inquiringly.

Kelley sighed in weary frustration and decided to attempt to physically remove the creature from the tub herself. She tried pushing from behind, pulling from in front, poking, prodding, enticing with a withered carrot she’d found in the back of the refrigerator vegetable drawer….

The horse remained sweet-tempered throughout—and stubborn as a mule.

It—
he
, she noticed—affectionately snuffled her shoulder, nuzzled at her fingers, and remained entirely disinclined to budge from the half-full tub. Kelley leaned on the edge of the sink and dropped her head into her hands, still dully disbelieving that any of this could actually be happening.

Then she caught a whiff of lavender and jerked her head up to see a glistening white froth swirling around the horse’s legs.

It was only
then
that Kelley’s state of shock evaporated, and the panic set in for real.

Never mind the fact that there was a horse in her bathtub. The only thing that mattered to Kelley in that particular moment was that the horse had tipped over a bottle of her roommate’s
insanely
expensive bath oil, emptying its shiny purple contents into the water. The bottle with its elegant gold-lettered label bobbed on the surface.

Tyff was definitely going to kill her.

At around four in the morning, Kelley resigned herself to her fate and went out into the living room to wait for Tyff to come home from her date. At the very least, maybe she could try and get some script work done. But, to top it all off, she couldn’t find her damned script.

The only thing on TV at that time of night was infomercials, so she finally drifted off to sleep on the couch during a sales pitch for “Eighties HIT-SPLOSIONS.” Deep within her sleepy brain, the bubblegum refrains of Wham! twisted and spiraled into minor keys, flowing seamlessly into the darkly alluring music that Kelley had heard as the world had disappeared around her under the waters of the Lake. The music enthralled her, leading her through a series of fantastic, strange dreamscapes.

But when she woke up late the next morning, she couldn’t remember the tune.