Blood & Flowers (11 page)

“It hasn't happened for a long time.” He sounded encouraging.

“Oh, great. Like ‘the volcano hasn't erupted for a long time.'” I stood up. “I'm a little nervous now, just in case you want to know that.”

“Floss has a very strong connection with your place in the world.”

“Um.”

He nodded and patted my hand.

I wasn't all that reassured by the pat, but I couldn't think of anything to do to feel more confident of my chances of getting home. Then I thought that since I was already nervous, I might as well get all the rest of the scary stuff out of the way too. “And the corner-of-the-eye creatures? How do they play in?”

Bron blinked, then said, “Just how safe is your world, Persia?”

He had me there. “Point,” I said, because it surely was. “So I just shouldn't worry?”

He laughed. “No. You should always worry, at least enough to be safe. It's just like where you came from. Blood and flowers. Dragons and windigos.”

“That's not quite how I would have described things.”

“Every place has its challenges.”

It was my turn to laugh. “I guess so. Me, I'm just a bookbinder and an actor who sometimes helps put puppets together.”

His ears perked up. Literally. I saw the points rise. “Bookbinder?”

I explained about the Outlaw programs and my periodic forays into box-making, embossing, and other paper arts.

“Mmm.” He looked excited, the way he might look after tasting a particularly good flan. Then he said, “Menus.”

“Menus?”

“Something substantial, with a way to keep updating specials and drinks and such. I find some very amazing drinks on your side of the world.” When I didn't say anything he added, “I'd pay you, of course. And I swear it wouldn't be in Faerie gold.”

“Are you offering me a job?”

“Well, yes. Didn't I just say?”

I grinned. “Sort of, I guess. And yes, I'd love to
try my hand at that.”

“At what?” Floss rattled down the steps, followed by Nicholas and Tonio. They all looked so easy, so carefree, that I almost had to look twice to make sure they were my friends.

“Persia, that's great,” Nicholas said after I'd explained. But his eyes were more on my empty plate than they were on me. Bron noticed. “Anyone else hungry?” he asked, and after that there was a flurry of activity as more Outlaws and one griffin (everyone was here by now) made an ever-changing amoeba of people and food.

The plates had almost been licked clean when Rohan came in, apron slung over his shoulder. He stopped in the doorway, took in the mess in the dining room, and sighed, huge and heavy. It was the sound I imagined a weary dragon would make. He said, “Lunch crowd due soon,” and sighed again.

Bron patted Rohan's shoulder and looked sympathetic. “I'll take care of it. Don't worry.”

Rohan widened his eyes. “All by yourself?”

Bron laughed. “Well…”

So close on Bron's words that he almost crushed them under his boots came a male version of Floss.

“Freddy,” Lucia said on an exhale that sounded like a soft spring breeze shuffling through new daffodils.

Floss's eyes snapped up, and then her body followed her eyes. She made it across the floor of the inn in three huge steps and flung her arms around that male version of herself. Even if Lucia hadn't said his name, I would have guessed that this was Fred. He even had Floss's dandelion fluff hair.

“Missed me, then?” he asked.

“I always do.”

“You could stay home.” Fred sounded a little wistful, but Floss must not have heard that. She pulled back like she'd been licked by a fireplace flame, stiff and ramrod straight.

“I didn't come back to tread old ground.”

Fred held up both hands, palms out. “Peace, peace. I'm not asking you to. It was only an observation.”

“And a really low-key one, Floss.” Lucia was standing next to the two of them, throwing dagger glances at Floss while Nicholas and I watched, eyes wide
open, so we wouldn't miss a thing.

“Hello, Lucia,” Fred said. There was a tone in his voice that hadn't been there when he'd talked to Floss, a gentleness, almost a caress. Apparently Lucia wasn't the only one who was interested.

But now Tonio and Max were on their feet, shaking hands with Fred. Nicholas and I made sure we were part of the introductions too, and soon the room took on the atmosphere of a closing-night party—which it sort of was, because we'd certainly closed ourselves down the night before.

Bits and pieces of sentences kept drifting my way. I let them wash over me, almost like words from a poem. Bicycles, bridges, troll, titanium, feathers, kites, gloss, clown white, manor, fighting, explosions, sheep. If I could put it all together, I could write a haiku, or some little stream-of-conciousness couplets.

I sat, the words swirled, and I was content, so content that it almost felt illegal, just like a pink drink. I was fed. I was warm and dry. I had my friends. It all seemed like just enough. I thought, So this is Faerie. Why didn't we come a long time ago?

T
he troll came just before the lunch rush. By sheer will and, I was sure, pieces of magic, Bron and Rohan had cleaned the place after our breakfast only to have it start to fill up almost immediately with a new group of hungry, thirsty people. I'd been staying in the background, studying the early lunch crowd. I thought they were amazing. For the first time in my life I was seeing people with six-fingered hands, people with iridescent wings tucked beneath bright orange backpacks, people that stood as tall as my knee and no taller. I watched surreptitiously as they filtered in, and I saw something else, too. They all seemed like decent people, people trying to get
through life. Just like us. Just like most of the people back home.

Then in came the troll.

He was short and broad, and he smelled vaguely of river water and dried blood. When he said, “Lucia,” he sounded like a cave would sound if it could talk.

Nicholas said, low-voiced, “Um, remember those eye-corner creatures? Do you think that's one? Because even though I can see him straight on, he's scary as hell.”

“I don't know,” I said, my voice as quiet as his, “but you're right about scary. Maybe even terrifying.” I looked for someone to ask, but there was no one, because they were all too busy with their own troll reactions.

Lucia had frozen. Completely. Her eyes didn't even blink. I saw Floss jump to her feet, saw El Jeffery lumber up, his beak snapping. I saw Rohan start to move across the room in a fast walk, still carrying a tray of deep brown beers. I saw early lunchers look around, nervous and unsure. What I didn't see was how Fred got to the door before anyone else.

“Reginald,” he said. The word sounded bitter and barely civil.

The troll stepped to one side. Fred might as well have been invisible for all the attention Reginald paid to him.

Fred stepped back into the troll's path. “Reginald,” he repeated. “What brings you here?”

“Flautas? Haggis?” asked Bron. He must have moved like Fred. Not there one second, there the next. The two of them stood shoulder to shoulder. Together like that, they looked massive. I was glad I wasn't on the receiving end of the glares on their respective faces.

Two must have been too much to ignore. Reginald stopped, and Fred nodded. “Thank you. May I repeat, what are you doing here?”

All of us seemed to be carefully pretending that we hadn't heard Lucia's name being mentioned in that cavernous voice. Even Reginald. He just said, in flat words that made the room shake, “It's lunchtime. I'm hungry.”

“Tacos? Shepherd's pie?” suggested Bron.

“To go,” added Fred.

“You can't make me.” Reginald's words sounded like they belonged to a whiny six-year-old. A big, probably dangerous, whiny six-year-old.

“I'm not making you do anything,” Fred said. “I'm only suggesting. To go?” But the question had a hard, clean edge.

Reginald had to have felt it, because I could feel it. The room wasn't on his side. If he moved the wrong way, I had the feeling a lot of other people were going to move too, and they'd all converge on the same spot—the spot where Reginald was standing.

Apparently even trolls have their moments of brightness. Reginald let his wide, dark eyes scan the room. They were deep, those eyes, with long lashes, and unaccountably pretty. I remembered Floss's comment about trolls and bad eyesight, but Reginald's eyes were good enough to let him find Lucia. He settled his sight on her for a long time and finally said, “Fish tacos. Crisps. Two tankards of Summer's Rest Weiss.” Then he shifted his gaze right onto Fred and added, “To go.”

Fred smiled. Bron walked to the kitchen, toe-heel, facing forward, while moving backward. Reginald simply stood and took up a large amount of floor space.

Bron was back so fast it almost felt like he hadn't been gone. The to-go bag he held was decorated with the Dau Hermanos logo—the same one that was on my shirt. The bag was huge. I thought it was because of the tankards of beer. But when Bron said, “I put in a few extras. I know how hungry trolls can get,” and Rohan came up behind him with a second bag colored silver and with a different logo that said “Keep It Cold,” I knew the first bag was all food.

“Whoa,” I mumbled.

“Yeah,” Nicholas agreed. He was so close to me that his breath tickled my ear.

Reginald must have heard, and he must have understood just what we were implying. He swung his head around and looked straight at us. I understood then why Lucia had frozen. Those beautiful eyes were also cold and hard and blank. Nicholas stepped in front of me, maybe to block the look in those eyes, maybe
to keep Reginald from really seeing me. Whatever it was for, I was glad it had happened. I leaned in to Nicholas's back for support and felt him steady himself against me. Double moral support.

At any other time I would have enjoyed that feeling, his body next to mine. Right then all I felt was a huge sense of relief that I wasn't standing there with those eyes of Reginald's focused on me.

The troll dropped money on a nearby table. He didn't ask the price and neither Bron nor Rohan named it. Then he took his food and walked out. The floor shook beneath his cement-heavy footsteps.

Once he was gone, the room itself seemed to exhale and to expand. Conversations started up again. I saw someone with ear points wave her hands in what looked like a Reginald shape, and shake her head. Her companions, one gnarled as a tree trunk and one with the same see-through presence as Floss, nodded. I heard all three of them sigh just the way kids in a lunchroom sigh when the class problem walks in and out of their view.

Tonio and Floss both turned to Lucia, but it was
Fred who got to her first, crossing the room again in that way I couldn't see. His arm was around her shoulders, and she clung to him like a lifeline. Floss moved to intercept them as Fred started Lucia on a slow walk toward the kitchen, but Fred shook his head, and Bron dropped one hand on Floss's arm. Floss stopped, and Bron tugged her toward an empty table.

“Aren't trolls supposed to turn people into stone?” Nicholas's breath moved my hair and tickled my ear.

I looked up, to my left. “I think it's that they turn into stone themselves. That one certainly could.”

“No, he couldn't. For all the emotion I'd ever seen from him before Lucia, I'd have thought he might be able to,” said Rohan. “But he can't. I know for a fact. He used to practice, you know. When he was a trolling. He could never get it.”

“What would be the point of that exercise, anyway?” Nicholas asked.

Rohan shrugged. “Fear factor. And strength. It's very hard to hurt stone.”

“I would think he'd be hard to hurt just the way he is,” I said.

Rohan glanced toward the kitchen. “Not really. Lucia managed it without ever trying.”

“Different kind of hurt,” I said.

“But just as lethal,” said Rohan. “Reginald is very enamored of your friend.”

“I don't think she's too thrilled about that,” I said, in what I considered a dramatic understatement.

“Trolls often take what they can't get,” said Rohan.

I looked at him. “You don't have a brother or a cousin or something who runs a stationery store, do you? He's the only other person I know who speaks in one-offs.”

Rohan grinned again, wide and wicked. “Fey blood runs everywhere,” he said grandly.

Nicholas shook his head. “You're saying we should watch out for Lucia.”

“We should all watch out for one another,” he said, and followed Fred's path to the kitchen.

 

Floss and Bron must have discussed the Reginald situation in more depth than Nicholas, Rohan, and I had. They actually had a plan.

“Fabulous,” said Tonio. “Let's hear it. Reginald seems to have all too much in common with Major. What works with one might work with the other. I'm all ears.”

We were sitting around a very large, disc-shaped table the color of old putty. It took up a good portion of floor in the middle of the Dau Hermanos dining room.

“Like the Knights of the Round Table,” Nicholas said, looking pleased.

“I,” said El Jeffery, “shall be King Arthur.”

Floss sighed. I could feel it in my feet, it was so deep. “Could we move on?”

“Spoilsport,” the griffin murmured.

She just grinned. “When you decide to play someone other than the king I won't say a word.”

“Snap,” he said, and she patted his paw.

“Tonio's right about Reginald and Major,” Floss said, “but Reginald's dangerous in a different way. Major's subtle. He has finesse.”

“Reginald's a boor, a bully. The kind who works on sheer strength and no brain,” Max said, sounding sure
of himself. “I've met a lot of people like him. They're actually much harder to deal with than people who think. It's almost like they're looking for pain.”

I saw Lucia shiver. I saw Fred's arm slide around her. I thought that stupid old adage, “out of the fire” blah, blah, blah, wasn't so stupid, after all. And I asked, “Are we in more trouble than we were before?”

“Not more. Different,” Max said.

“Right. Exactly,” said Bron. “The thing on our side is that Reginald is a known entity. He's big. He's easy to spot. And he's just not that bright. We keep Lucia close to one of us at all times, preferably with someone who's more fey than not.”

Fred snuggled Lucia close to him. “I volunteer.”

“My, what a surprise,” Bron said, but he smiled when he said it. “You Outlaws,” he continued, “just keep doing whatever it is you do, or planned to do while you were here. You don't need to be trapped in nothingness because of one troll.”

“And if things progress any further,” said Fred, “Bron and I will have a small chat with him. I'm sure he'll listen, aren't you?” The glance he cast at Bron
glittered like a finely honed blade.

I actually pulled back a bit, but by the time my shoulders had shifted, Fred's look was gone. I'd just managed to convince myself that it didn't mean what I thought it meant when Max reached toward Bron and said, “I could help talk to him.” Bron and Fred clasped hands with Max, their arms like wheel spikes around that big disc table, and I knew my first impression had been the right one. The three of them were like crossed swords, ready for battle.

I almost felt sorry for Reginald.