by R. Lee Smith
The Lords of Arcadia Series:
The Care and Feeding of Griffins
The Wizard in the Woods
The Roads of Taryn MacTavish
The Army of Mab
Also by R. LEE SMITH:
Heat
Olivia
The Scholomance
Cottonwood
The Last Hour of Gann
Land of the Beautiful Dead
A Lords of Arcadia Novel:
TOOTH AND CLAW
This book is dedicated to the Redmond Library.
The real one.
Copyright © 2017 by R. Lee Smith
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including, but not limited to, photocopying or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the author.
[email protected]
This book is a work of fiction. Names, places, locales and events are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, places or events are purely coincidental.
A BRIEF WORD ABOUT HOME…
To begin with, it is necessary to understand that a house is not necessarily a home.
A house is a manifest thing, with physical dimensions constructed from solid materials. A house may have pipes and wires, perhaps beds and books and locks on doors, one room or many, but whatever shape it takes, it is a fixed, definable shape. A house separates those who live there from the world at large, ideally offering an element of privacy and protection from other physical things. Some of us may be lucky enough to make our house a home, but in its most basic form, a house is merely that place where a person resides. Home is where we belong.
Before all else, what makes a home is magic, magic in its oldest and truest form. Its walls are memories and emotions, smells and sounds. Its foundation is family, the one that made us and the one we make. It is calm and chaos, hugs and tears, resentment and remorse and forgiveness. It’s where you don’t have to wear shoes or happy masks or even pants. It’s where you rest instead of just sleep. It is that place where you perfectly fit, just as you are.
We are not all so fortunate as to have grown up in a strong home. Those that do frequently possess the ability to bring home with them wherever they go, as Taryn MacTavish did when she left her home and family on Earth to make a home and a family on Arcadia. But for most of us, homes, like houses, must be built.
It can be a struggle to separate oneself wholly from one’s childhood home where, for good or ill, our ideas of what home should be are first developed. Nostalgia has a way of making the past seem brighter than it ever was and the future seem bleak. Those who remember a better home than they ever had may spend years hopelessly trying to recreate a child’s fantasy, or worse, blaming others for failing to live up to their impossible expectations. Those from damaged homes may attempt to recreate what they remember too; nostalgia comes in many kinds and even hurt can feel like comfort when it’s old and familiar. But even they are still looking for their belonging-place, still building rooms and still daring to open doors and welcome others in.
Not everyone does. After all, anyone we invite in could do anything at all to the place we’ve built. Rooms get cluttered. Things get broken. Even the strongest homes burn down. For some, it’s safer to just have an address and if you have to build something, build walls.
But homes are magic before all else, and magic is willful and unpredictable. Sometimes, even when we are not looking for something, it finds us.
1. The End
Nona would always remember that it was a perfectly normal Saturday afternoon to begin with. She’d had no prophetic dreams the night before. She saw no omens of doom on the bus or during her walk from the station. She had no idea she’d drunk her last cup of coffee, seen her last grey Seattle sunrise. It was a normal Saturday afternoon right up until it wasn’t.
She had been standing on a street corner waiting for the light to change when the van abruptly stopped in front of her. It did not alarm her. She was looking across the street at the mall, at the movie multiplex in particular, still trying to decide if anything showing there was worth the cost of the ticket. Just one ticket, which was depressing enough on its own. She had lived here for three years now and still knew no one well enough to invite to the movies with her. As a child, dragged along behind her mother from city to city and man to man, she had never seen the point of making friends she’d only have to lose. Now that she was grown, she saw the point, but lacked the skill. Most of the time, it didn’t bother her, but now and then, she got restless—not lonely, just restless—and she would set aimlessly off from her apartment, among people but apart from them, until she got cold or tired and went home.
Later, she would think she didn’t have much of a life to lose, relatively speaking.
As she stood on the street corner, waiting for the light and staring at the movies on the marquee, her phone rang. She answered out of a sense of social obligation; there were other people next to her and it was rude to make them listen to a stranger’s ringtone. If she’d been alone, she would have let it ring. She knew who it was.
Her mother had found her three weeks ago. Nona knew from experience that changing the number would only stall her for so long and money was tight (too tight for frivolous trips to the movies, she should really go home). She’d need every penny to move, which was also just a stalling tactic, but a more effective one.
She declined the call, blocked the number and shut off the ringtone, a process that took enough time and attention that she didn’t immediately notice the van stopping when it had a green light, not even when the side door slid open. Then the two people beside her fell over and her ears belatedly informed her that she’d heard some flat pops. She looked around and saw men crouching in the van’s dark interior. Men with guns. Specifically, men shooting the guns.
Panic does strange things to people and she supposed she must have panicked at that point, although it didn’t feel like panic at the time. Looking back, she couldn’t remember feeling anything at all apart from stony resignation, a kind of internal buckling down and bracing against this unforeseen event and what was certain to be unpleasant consequences. She felt no fear, no confusion, and absolutely no instinctive urge to flee. She simply dropped the phone, balled up her fist and punched the nearest gunman in the face as hard and fast as she could.
Her last fistfight had been in high school, six years gone, and she was badly out of practice. She’d been aiming for his nose, which experience had taught her was the quickest way to end a fight, but she missed. The glancing blow she managed to land hardly fazed him, while the blade of his cheekbone drove painfully up between her knuckles.
Before she could move (even a single step back might have changed everything), another man in the van grabbed her by the hair and hauled her inside. Her arms were caught, wrenched behind her back and taped together. She was thrown to the bottom of the van. Another kicking, screaming woman was thrown on top of her. And another. And the last. Then more gunshots, deafeningly loud within the confines of the vehicle, and screaming tires as the van lurched away.
The next thing Nona heard was laughter. Huge, rolling waves of manly laughter. The sort that often came with heavy drinking, except that she couldn’t smell any booze, just smoke and sweat. And they were shouting and slapping each other on the back and the knees and punching each other’s shoulders and generally helling it up in a celebratory fashion. “Anyone we want!” one of them was saying. “Jesus fucking Christ, what are we doing here? We could have gone to fucking L.A! We could have got Angelina fucking Jolie! Fucking anyone!”
At which point the screaming woman piled onto No
na’s back slammed her elbow into Nona’s head, which in turn slammed her temple into the van’s uncarpeted floor, and Nona blacked out. She’d never been knocked unconscious before. It was a sliding sort of sensation and it took just long enough for her to be aware it was happening and that she couldn’t stop it. She was annoyed. And then she was nothing at all.
2. Sir
Nona didn’t think she was out long. She couldn’t even be sure she went all the way under, but the sound of the engine warped and distorted, so even if she wasn’t fully unconscious, she was definitely dreaming. While she dreamed, someone put her wrists together and wrapped them tightly with duct tape, then rolled her over, pulled her legs back and taped her ankles together too. Someone searched her pockets, taking her keys, her wallet and the change from the coffee shop. Someone squeezed her breast. It was all a dream.
The van bumped hard, all the way off the road. She heard soft sand kicked up by the tires, then the van bumped again onto hard uneven ground, then again, and finally slowed and stopped. The van door opened.
Nona blinked fuzzily around through one hell of a headache and saw what seemed to her eyes like hundreds of men. There were also tents and crates and campfires and a few other trucks or vans, but mostly men with guns. They didn’t look like soldiers to her, not even the kind of whackjob militia-men-in-the-backwoods kind of soldier she imagined might be willing to team up and kidnap innocent people off street corners on ordinary Saturday afternoons. They looked too normal and way too young, and too many of them wore their guns with such aggressive nonchalance that it was a wonder they hadn’t all shot their nuts off already. There didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to their little army’s headquarters, if that was what this was. Heaps of the most random provisions had simply been strewn over a snowy, muddy valley in the middle of absolutely nowhere—she could see no other lights, none, not in any direction—and left for these gun-loving men to trip over.
She had forgotten she was bound until she tried to move. The tape was still there. If it was a dream, she hadn’t woken up yet.
As Nona struggled to sit up, someone caught her by her legs and pulled her sideways out of the van. She was thrown over a shoulder and carried like a bag of potatoes. As her carrier turned away from the van, she saw other men taking boxes and jugs of water and kegs of beer and groceries, including actual bags of potatoes.
Not a targeted attack, in other words. Just a supply run. They didn’t know her, weren’t punishing her or holding her for ransom. She was just one of the supplies, conveniently in reach at exactly the right moment. If she’d misplaced her keys before leaving the apartment, if she hadn’t stopped for coffee, if she’d just been able to make up her goddamn mind about the movies and start walking—one way or the other, it literally made no difference—then she wouldn’t be here now. The supply run would have still happened. The soldier carrying her would have some other girl slung over his shoulder, but he wouldn’t have her. She would have read about a brazen daylight abduction with shots fired in tomorrow’s paper and it would have been nothing but a blip on her consciousness. But she had done none of those things and so here she was and now this nightmare was her whole world.
Nona shivered. The man carrying her gave her a slap to the ass and told her to shut up and stop crying without even bothering to look and see that she wasn’t crying. She should be, but she wasn’t. She was just cold. It was September back in Seattle, cool but not too cold, and she’d left the house feeling comfortable in just a sweater and jeans. She didn’t know how long she’d been unconscious in the van, but wherever this was, it was a whole lot colder. The air smelled different, not like dying leaves but dead ones, not like rain but snow.
She couldn’t see where they were going. The sun had gone down and she could see little beyond what the van’s headlights chose to show her, but her ears worked fine. Music was playing, banging out of unseen radios, and the sound of men shouting and laughing and fighting and slogging around through the mud went on and on for what sounded like miles in every direction. She hung over the man’s shoulder, her cheek banging monotonously against his bony back, until he swung her off and onto the ground. Now she was in a corral with more women, most of whom had the thousand-yard stare of trauma stamped onto their bruised faces. The corral was made of rope and branches, the sort of thing that couldn’t hold a crippled cow, but it held a dozen full-grown women just fine. They’d hung a tarp overhead to keep off some of the weather, but the wind blew cold underneath and the ground was still muddy. The stink of smoke and shit and human sweat was everywhere.
Nona looked up into the face of the man who had carried her here. He wasn’t looking back at her. He was rubbing his back and rolling his head to pop the stiff kinks in his neck. It had been a long drive for him and she was no lightweight, apparently. Then he turned around and trudged back out of the corral. The van was empty and the men were drawing off into smaller camps around their own little fires, talking and drinking and congratulating each other on another fine job picking up supplies.
There was another man guarding the gate of the corral. He closed it and leaned on it, looking Nona over with an impersonal eye. He looked bored. He was chewing gum. Eventually, he looked away, watching the fun stuff going on in the rest of the camp. Somewhere, the same fellow who had been so gung-ho about going after Angelina Jolie was now crowing to his unseen brethren about how easy it all was, how neat, how fucking number one. They couldn’t be caught. They could do anything, take anything, kill anyone, fuck any bitch they wanted, because they couldn’t be caught. Too real, was this gentleman’s final word. Too fucking real.
It was real, wasn’t it? It would have been nice to think she was dreaming or had suddenly developed a tumor that could give her horrifying hallucinations while she convalesced in some safe hospital room somewhere, but Nona knew better. It was real, all right. Too fucking real.
She couldn’t understand why she was being so calm. She wasn’t a calm person under ordinary circumstances. She was…well, the kindest word was ‘defensive’ and everyone knew the best defense was a good offense. She’d spent the first part of her life being beaten up, the second part beating on others, and as much as she’d tried to leave all that behind and just grow the hell up, she had to admit, if only to herself, that she was still awfully quick to retaliate, whether or not she was actually under attack. This qualified as an attack as nothing else in her entire life did and what was she doing about it? Nothing. She supposed she might be in shock, but she doubted it. She felt too lucid.
Nona rolled over and knee-walked to the side of the corral while the gate-keeper watched her idly. Stars spilled across a winter sky, more than she’d ever seen before, in patterns she could not recognize. No Big Dipper up there. No North Star. The moon was not quite full, but there was easily enough of it to see that it wasn’t the right moon. This wasn’t Earth, and there was really no point in freaking out about it.
One of the men got up and moseyed over, provoking a rush of pleas and tears and carrying-on from the other new girls and watchful silence from the girls who’d already been here. Nona just looked at him. Not an ogre, not a demon. Just a guy wearing fake-soldier pants and too many earrings. Just a regular guy with a regular gun. On some weird level, it was a bit of a disappointment.
He looked back at her, this regular guy, smirking as he fingered the butt of his gun. Didn’t get much more phallic than that, short of unzipping and showing her the real goods. God, she was calm. This was the traditional ‘fate worse than’, after all. And she was a virgin, due more to her complete lack of social skills than any pious sense of womanly virtue, but still. She’d always thought there’d be a guy eventually, that she’d get to be in love, or at least in lust. But apparently, she’d been saving herself for this. How infuriating was that? Infuriating was probably the wrong way to feel about it, but Nona couldn’t help herself. She really ought to be half out of her mind, but no. She could sit here and watch him debate about which girl to rape like he was tryi
ng to pick a burger off a fast food menu (or a movie off the marquee), like it meant nothing, and all she felt about it was pissed.
“Good afternoon, ladies,” this man called. “May I have your attention please?”
The clamor of the crying girls subsided slightly. Some of them stood up or even came a few steps toward him. Most pressed themselves into a tighter huddle at the furthest end of the corral. Either way, he had their full attention, even Nona’s.
“Welcome to the new world order,” he said, broadly smiling. “You lucky ladies have been conscripted into service under the Smoking Banner.”
This meant nothing to Nona and she could see the rest of the ‘conscripts’ were as confused as she was.
“My name is Sir,” the man continued. “This is my camp and these—” He waved an arm at the watching, leering, laughing boys surrounding the corral. “—are my men. Their names are also Sir. Your job is to make those men happy. Do your job well and you get to eat, sleep and live to see another day. Or don’t.” He pointed with his gun across the tops of the tents to a few lumpy shapes at the very edge of camp, swaying where they hung from the lowest branches of these winter-barren trees.
Bodies. Nona couldn’t make out features, couldn’t even tell if they were male or female, but they were people and they were dead.
“You may not have noticed, but this is not Earth,” said Sir. “I need you to get that through your stupid skulls now. There is no rescue. There is no escape.” He gave that a few extra moments to sink in, then pointed his gun at one of the new recruits, who screamed. “Shut up or I’ll shoot you,” he said politely.