Roadside Magic (17 page)

D
usk came with a cold wind, and he tried not to lean too hard on Robin’s slenderness. She was stronger than she looked, but it irked him nonetheless. Out a side door and down a flight of moss-cornered steps, Robin freezing as footsteps echoed. It was the priest, a corpulent blackbird with a reddened nose, swaying heavily down an indifferently paved path between laurel bushes. He heaved along, humming as his black shoes squeaked, and Robin looked up at Jeremiah. Her lips parted, just a little—was she thinking of unloosing that wall of noise on the mortal?

He shook his head.
Don’t
.

The footsteps passed them, a slow, majestic treading. “Lord,” the man said, “have mercy. Have mercy on all of us.” A thick drawl, maybe Texan, slowed the words and gave them a rhythm.

What would be the reaction, Gallow wondered, if one of them said
amen
? Causing a heart attack in one of the Pale God’s followers might be something the Unseelie would count as sport.

“Especially all those in need of sanctuary.” The priest paused
on the other side of the laurels. “May they be welcome here, O Lord, and should they need supper or a friendly ear, why, let them know the parsonage is just a few steps down this path, here. Thank you, Lord. Amen.”

The crunching continued, and the priest’s head did not turn. He rocked past, patting at his well-cushioned belly, and disappeared between more rustling laurels.

Robin’s blue, blue gaze met his again, and her lips were still slightly apart. She looked almost stunned, and if the scar on his side hadn’t chosen that moment to twitch again, sending a bolt of pain through his middle, he might have tucked his chin and bent down, and found out if her mouth was as soft as it looked. Maybe she would make the slight humming noise Daisy did when he kissed her, a satisfied little purr, or . . .

Jesus, Jeremiah.

Did she read it on his face? No way to tell, because she immediately glanced away, a worried frown aimed at the priest’s retreating back. “Can’t even chantment,” she whispered, and urged him forward.

“Why would you?” he whispered back.

“To ease his pains. He’s old.” She steadied him, his armor silent now, the marks on his arms and chest strangely quiescent.

The graveyard was well maintained. Had the priest been walking among his less-active parishioners? How had the man known?

He’d been careful, dammit. Or as careful as he could be hiding under pews and sniffing the dust of so many shuffling, sanctified feet. Headstones leaned into umbrous dusk, this way and that, dewed with mineral-smelling sprinkler water. His boots didn’t slip in the muddy wetness, neither did her heels sink in.

At least the lightfoot hadn’t deserted him. Yet.

He felt the edge of the consecration approaching, the ground sloping down to an empty lot. The scar heated up, a phantom blade digging in. “Where’s your dog?” The breathlessness was returning, too.

“I told him to hide, and hunt. He’s safer away from me.”

Of course you did
. “Jesus, Robin. How did you survive Court?”

“Better than
you
, apparently.” She halted, which meant he was forced to. “Stay here. Do you hear me? Do
not
do what you did last time. I could have escaped Unwinter handily enough, but for your little display.”

“Could you? Puck helped, you know.”

Her shoulders tensed. “Did he?”

“Yes.” His arm tightened as she tried to pull away. “What hold does he have on you, Robin?”

“None.” She pulled away, and he had to let her. He swayed.
Christ. I’ll have enough trouble keeping upright.
“None, now. Gallow?”

“For God’s sake, Robin. It’s Jer, to you.”

“Is that what Daisy called you?”

“Daisy’s
dead
.” It didn’t hurt to say it this time.

She half-turned, looking over her velvet-draped shoulder at him. Black didn’t blend at night; it was
too
dark. A long pause, her tongue darting out to nervously wet her lips. “I wish I’d drawn all the poison out.”

“You did all you could.” He searched for something else to say, something to ease her mind or keep her from this last desperate gamble.

Another shake of her russet head, and she turned away, drawing the hood up as if to hide her hair. She walked, straight and slim and graceful as a ghilliedhu girl, toward the shifting border between graveyard and empty lot. The stone wall had
been partly pulled down, maybe by age or maybe by coincidence, and a chainlink patch stretched from one edge of the hole to the other, to keep out kids and the curious, not to mention desecrators masquerading as thrillseekers. It was like looking through a different hole, maybe, into the days when the Folk ruled every place the churches didn’t rise, their green fields dangerous at night for every mortal outside the circle of firelight and iron.

A pale flash was her right hand, her fingers closing around chainlink. The sun dipped fully below the rim of the earth, a subtle thrill running along every inch of Jeremiah’s sweating body, and the scar flamed again, almost driving him to his knees.

“Unwinter,” she said clearly. “Lord of the Hunt, lord of the Unhallowed, Lord of Unseelie, I name thee. I am Robin Ragged, and I invoke thy presence. Lord Harne of Unwinter, a handmaiden calls.”

Silence. Even the faraway urban blur of traffic faded. A faint soundless wind began, and in the distance, the first high ultrasonic thrill of a huntwhistle rose.

F
ather Ernest McKenzie had once been a boxer, and he could, he supposed, still slug a sinner if need be. He’d thought about it when he realized there was someone else in the church this morning. Who knows what had alerted him—a faint scuffling noise, the warmth of another breathing body, or perhaps he was going crazy. But when you spent so many hours in a building, you got a sense of its fullness, and its emptiness, too.

He had almost called the police, too, but then . . . well, it was God’s house, wasn’t it? If someone would steal from God, there was likely to be a damn good reason, and one old, asthmatic priest was not hero material.

What the intruder didn’t know was that there was a second entrance, and even a man as large as the good Father assigned to this slowly dying parish could creep silently into the choirloft. It was there he heard their voices in the afternoon—a man and a woman. Most of what they said was nonsense, of course, but the tones—soft, caring, a pretty contralto voice and a man’s baritone—oh, the tones reminded him of so much. Like Amelia, who could have had him instead of God, if she’d accepted his ring. But she hadn’t, and the polio took her, and a few years later he was
ordained. Surely the Blessed Virgin would forgive a poor sinner who prayed to Her but saw a dead woman’s face in Her place?

“I would do anything for you,” the man said, quiet as if he were in the confessional, and it sounded true. You could tell, after a while, what truth sounded like—or you thought you could, in those close confines.

The rest of it was . . . odd. He didn’t dare peek through the screens, knowing the choirloft had a few squeaky boards in its floor. He stood in the door and strained his ears; it sounded like they were on the run. Criminals, perhaps . . . but that was God’s business, wasn’t it? Or the Devil’s. Either way, not Father McKenzie’s.

He retreated softly as they did, taking the back passages until he could slip out through the locked southern door, and he skirted the entire front of the church to give them time. His heart beat, fast and thin, as he tried not to hurry down the gravel path at the side. The prayers became audible as he approached the side door in the laurels, but he didn’t look. Let him imagine them, both young, the man and the woman relying on each other in an uncertain world. How had they slipped through locked doors? Who knew? He would call a locksmith tomorrow morning.

Or maybe not. It was God’s house, not his. Surely the Lord would keep the locks or not, as it suited him.

The good Father did, however, lock the parsonage doors and made sure every window was locked as well. That done, he retreated to his bedroom window, and with the lights off he could see two shadows in the graveyard, leaning on each other. The smaller shadow left the taller one and walked to the chainlink fence. Halted. There were no graves along that strip—maybe the smaller shape had bolt cutters, and the cost of repairing the fence would no doubt make little difference to God, but Father
McKenzie was just a sinner, and he had just started to berate himself for not calling the police, because even if it was God’s house McKenzie was the steward and a good steward was responsible . . .

The fear began. It crawled down Ernest McKenzie’s back, a cold prickling sweat, his useless balls drawing up under his skivvies and his hands beginning to shake. Was it delayed reaction, or—

A foxfire glimmer in the wastefield beyond the fence. That land nominally belonged to Our Lady of Perpetual Heart, but even the faithful were choosing cemeteries over the hallowed earth now. The Father gripped the windowsill, watching the shimmer coalesce. It was a cold glow, and he remembered the stories they had scared one another with in summer camp. Corpseglow and will o’wisps, ghost tumbleweeds and pale riders, childhood fears crowding rank and thick through the cracking carapace of adulthood.

“Hail Mary,” his dry lips whispered, “full of grace. Look over this sinner, please. Look over this sinner.”

A shadow in the glow, a
wrongness
, and he went to his knees in front of the window, his heart thunder-straining. He rested his sweating forehead against the sill, and even if it was God’s house, even if he had offered sanctuary and a hot meal, he knew he would not be opening his doors this night. He squeezed his eyes shut, but he could still see the corpseglow. Was it his sins coming for him? Had they been demons, thumbing their nose at God, hiding in his very church?

“Hail Mary, full of grace . . . pray for this sinner, now and at the hour of . . .”

The glow burned behind his eyelids. Ernest McKenzie thought of Amelia, her buckteeth and fair blond face, her faded gingham dress and the torrid, hot-biscuit odor of her sweat, and he wept. His heart kept hammering, filling his ears and throat and wrists,
and he spilled over onto the floor, his head hitting hardwood with a faraway
thunk
.

There was one mercy, probably from whomever he prayed to. The heart attack was swift, and he felt no pain, sliding quickly from his large mortal shell.

His last, semiconscious thought was of the space between Amelia’s neck and her shoulder, a tender hollow he had always wanted to kiss . . .

A
single point of greenish foxfire, at the height of a tall rider. The darkness closed around it, and her breath puffed out in a white cloud. Sere winter grass, just barely greening underneath its cold-blasted coat, flattened and flash-froze as the clawed hooves of a creature from the black-sanded shores touching Unwinter’s ash-choked country spread against a cushion of screaming, frigid air.

The light shivered over a high-crowned helm, over the spikes of armored shoulders, down the tattered, thick velvet of a heartsblood cloak, the red so deep it was almost black. Under the helm, two vicious, bloodred sparks; the sable armor flowed with him as Unwinter tightened his gauntleted fists, each one bearing an extra finger, each finger bearing extra joints. Dwarf-made and beautiful, the blackened metal ran with chill brilliance as the un-horse, a night-mare birthed from the Dreaming Sea and grown large on choice meats and struggling prey, caracoled with beautiful, awful grace.

The hounds came next, the mucus-yellow lamps of their eyes firing first, their bodies piling through the rift in the Veil Unwinter had torn. Should she feel special, because he’d
appeared as soon as the words left her mouth? For once, a fullblood highborn had done the bidding of a Half.

Don’t get cocky
. Her mouth was dry. She kept breathing, four in, four out, watching those cold gleams above the helm’s visor. The reins, neatly dressed, hung with that same heartsblood velvet; the destrier’s caparison was pretty enough, she supposed, if you hadn’t ever seen the knights of Summer go riding on a moonlit evening, over the rolling hills on a snow-white path.

All the same, there was a certain grace in the refusal to sugar the deadliness, to put a candy shell upon his cruelty.

The metal under her fingers burned. Enough cold iron to keep the hounds back, and the consecration, though weakening here at the edge of the graveyard, was still solid enough to hold an Unseelie at bay.

Even this one.

Unwinter’s head lifted slightly. A faint noise behind Robin—she suppressed a sigh of irritation. Would the man never
listen
?

“
Little dove
.” A deep voice, its edges sharp-cold enough to numb while they sliced. Like a clear-running Arctic stream, jagged rocks along the bottom. “
You are foolhardy, to invoke me thus
.”

I hope not
. “Milord. I am grateful for your company.”

“
Little liar
.” A slight note of amusement, perhaps. “
I abide by your father’s terms
.”

For a lunatic moment she thought he meant Daddy Snowe. Then she remembered Puck, standing on the concrete at the edge of Amberline Park, and her own betrayal of Summer.

Could you call it betrayal, though? There had been Sean, the changeling child begged as a boon, and stolen from
her
as well, encased in amber and shattered on the marble floor. Sean was dead, and it was Summer’s fault—except, deep down, Robin
knew it was her own, as well.
Just one more day, just let me keep him one more day
.

Well, she had, one day too long. Now there was the bitter price to pay, over and over, for the rest of the life she was scrambling so hard to retain.

“I have something that will interest you, milord.” Very careful, her hand knotted in the fence though the metal threatened to ice itself to her skin. “You are a fair and generous lord, I have heard, and I would ask—”

“
You want the Half hiding behind you not to burn, little dove. It is not so hard to guess.
” A low, grinding chuckle. “
What will you give me in exchange, Ragged?
”

“She’ll give you this, Harne of Unwinter,” Jeremiah Gallow said from behind her. He was much closer now. “Your Horn, in exchange for your protection of the Ragged. In every possible way, with all standard and extraordinary provisions, for eternity.”

A long silence. Ragged’s fingers tingled. Tucked in the pipes, a secret cargo, lay another thing she could trade. Was Gallow silly or feverish enough to think it would be that easy?

“And what of yourself, Gallow-my-glass? You challenged me to a duel. Dare you decline now?”

“Oh no.” Gallow actually laughed, a short, bitter sound. He sounded, in fact, almost exactly like Crenn the assassin. “I shall fight you, and welcome. Will you give your word, Unwinter?”

The bloody glimmers in the helm’s depths narrowed slightly.
“The Ragged is welcome in my dominions. Those who hold fealty to me shall extend her welcome, and protect such a precious bauble.”

“Why have your hounds been hunting her?”

“
Where else shall I find my challenger, but by dogging his lady’s footsteps? Come now.
” The sparks under his rimed helm
intensified. The hounds wove about his destrier’s feet as the nightmare-beast pawed. A chunk of frozen sod lifted. “
I long to test your mettle again, Armormaster. Did you find
her
embraces palled, and sought one closer your station?
”

The way he said
her
made the word a curse, and there was no question of whom he meant. Just as, when Summer said
him
when she spoke of her erstwhile lord, there was none.

“No more than you did, sirrah.” Gallow’s hand closed around Robin’s shoulder, fever-warm, slightly sweating. She almost gasped—it was
madness
to speak this way to Unwinter. Her knees were suspiciously rubbery.

Silence greeted this sally. The destrier pawed again, and the hounds darted forward, a living, liquid wave. The chainlink snapped, crackling as sidhe flesh touched threads tainted with cold iron, and Gallow’s hand became a vise, dragging her away.

“Hasty, hasty,” Gallow said as the hounds squealed, cringing back and smoking.

“
You cannot stay there forever.
” Unwinter, equally fey.

“STOP!” Robin yelled, and the song trembled under the surface of the word. The chainlink rattled again, flushing with gold for a brief moment, and the squealing intensified. She shook Gallow’s hand from her shoulder, and clutched her fists in the long, draggled velvet. Who was the fortune-teller who had worn this coat before her?

I hope she had better luck, whoever she was.
She cleared her throat, inhaled—and Unwinter’s destrier stepped mincingly aside. Perhaps the song had hurt him, last time. “I would trade too, Unwinter.”

“
Careful, little dove.
” Unwinter pulled the reins tight, and the destrier’s neck arched painfully. “
You amuse me, but my patience grows thin.
”

“What would you give me, Unwinter, for the cure to the plague? And for knowledge I hold of its cursed source?”

For now she knew, beyond a doubt, precisely who had loosed the blackboil upon the sidhe. Had Summer tried one of the ampoules yet?

“Robin?” Jeremiah’s whisper, hot and fierce, in her ear.

Unwinter considered her. Her knees were definitely trembling now. To throw away such an advantage, to let one such as this know what she carried . . .

Who was mad, now? They were all moontouched.

A low groaning sound rose. The chain rattled, invisible hands pulling at it. It wasn’t her knees.

“Give me the thing about his neck, little dove, and I shall honor you—”

Whatever the lord of the Hunt wished to honor her with remained unspoken. The ground tilted, and Robin screamed, a short curlew cry flaring with desperate gold. Jeremiah’s own yell, rougher and less sonorous, rose, too. The stone walls holding the graveyard in quivered, jelly-shaken, and the chainlink rattled venomously. Solid earth fell away underfoot, cracks widening in the graveyard’s surface, a crazyquilt of crevices. Headstones tilted, Robin’s shoes scrabbled for purchase as she leapt, the chantments Morische the Cobbler had wedded to them snapping and crackling as they fought gravity itself. Earth crumbling, the stink of ground hallowed by dead and blessing rising—the nightmare of every sidhe, mortal clay suddenly animate again, and hungry for revenge against its tormenters.

More noise, over the groaning of riven earth. Battle-cries, the clashing of sword, shield, and lance. Elfhorses and Unseelie steeds trumpeting, familiar barking and howling, snapping and growling.
Summer knights? Attacking here? How did they—

Robin fell into blackness, and fell deeper. Every solidity vanished, and she barely felt the small, horn-hard hands catching her, slowing her descent. Rock groaned, cradling her, and she tumbled, breathless, through space and the Veil itself, unable even to find a four-count of air to loose the song, her only weapon.

Her second-to-last thought was of Gallow. Had he fallen, too?

And her last, frankly more worrisome:

Why on earth are the dwarves interfering?