by Perry, D. R.
Once I emptied my satchel of everything and slung it over my shoulder, I was ready to go. My hand on the doorknob was the only thing that kept me from jumping a mile. The whip-snap sound of a Gnome vanishing startled me at first, then the anger set in.
“You watched me, Gee. Unwise.” I turned to look at the Gnome, then rushed across the room to their side and dropped to one knee. “Hoo, boy! What happened?”
“We vanish. Now.” Blue blood ran from the corner of one of the poor creature’s eyes. Until then, I hadn’t known they bled any differently than mortal people. Gee pressed one hand over their belly, where more blood leaked. The Gnome raised their left hand and snapped their fingers.
This time, nothing happened. I gathered Gee-Nome into my arms, cradling the small faerie against my chest with no idea of what to do. Something crashed into the door. Not a knock, not a thud, a single strike. Thunder. I stood and backed toward the window. The boom came again. When the frame cracked and split, my back touched the glass.
The door fell inward, clanging against the steel headboard of my dormitory bed. The man attached to the brawny olive-toned fist snarled but stepped aside, revealing a face I wished wasn’t so familiar. I could only see about two-thirds of his body since the rest was on the other side of the wall beside the broken-in door.
“Come along quietly, Miss Adler.” The warm tenor and cultured accent reminded me that Gino wasn’t anything like his son despite their direct relation. He flexed his hand open, and I saw something shiny up his sleeve. A projectile made of iron, perhaps?
“No.” I moved one arm protectively over Gee’s head. Most regular weapons bounced off Gnomes. Whatever Gino had literally up his sleeve might finish my poor friend off.
“You haven’t got much choice now.” He jerked his chin at the Gnome in my arms. After that, he smiled, all teeth and no warmth.
“Okay, then. Why?”
“We heard you’re planning to go on the lam in the Under and figured there must be a very good reason.” Gino’s grin stretched as eerily as a corpse’s. “You’ll tell us where you’re going, of course, so we can send our own people. The king gives certain…benefits…to his champions that we don’t want to miss out on.”
“I’m afraid you’ll miss them, then.” I stared at him. “The Goblin King can tell the difference between a cat shifter and an owl shifter.”
“That doesn’t matter.” Mr. Gitano’s smile went from creepy to gleeful in under a second. Somehow, that was worse. “Unseelie rules bend. I hear he has you hunting something, and all that matters is who gets the prize first.”
“Then I’ll win whatever race you have planned.” I felt the truth in my statement, even though I’d intended the words as a bluff. “Besides, the king clearly favors me. Rules bend in more than one way.”
“But you won’t even make it into the Under.” The smile faded from Gino’s face, displaced by stone-cold anger. “Not alive, anyway.”
Gino might be right, but I wouldn’t let him kill me. I opened my mouth to sass him one last time, but all that came out was a single piercing note of music. I blinked, torn between pondering what my voice box had done and getting my tailfeathers out of there. When I heard a gun cocking, I decided on the latter.
Turning my shoulder, I flung myself at the window. It cracked with only the slightest push, something entirely unexpected. Had that weird note weakened the glass like some kind of stereotypical soprano? I’d never had that happen before. Then again, I’d never willingly defenestrated myself while fleeing a man who might have been my father-in-law under different circumstances. Strange times.
There I was, plummeting five stories through the night sky without enough time to shift. I knew no glamoured trampoline was hidden below to break my fall. Tony was dead, and I’d soon join him, along with the poor Gnome who could have lived forever if the Goblin King hadn’t gotten them mixed up in my business. At least we might all be together as ghosts.
“I’m sorry, Gee.” I owed them an apology just in case Gnomes couldn’t become ghosts after they died.
Gee groaned and stirred against my chest. I closed my eyes and waited for impact.
Chapter Seven
Olivia
I kept my mouth shut because I had no idea how high up we were after Gee vanished us from outside my dorm window. I hadn’t flipped around or tumbled through the air, so the ground was at my back. The twilit sky told me it was either dawn or dusk wherever we’d gone, which was a good thing since I didn’t want to be sun-blind.
The air felt strange as though I wore a backpack made of cotton candy. I couldn’t figure out why my shoulders itched either. It was like I’d just finished shifting back from owl form. One look down at my arms, my Gnome friend enfolded in them, told me I was still shaped like a law student. So why did I sense the air like I was flying instead of falling?
I twisted, flipping myself over so I could try to shift in time to save Gee and me. But when I moved, the last thing I expected happened.
My wings opened, slowing our fall. I struggled to tilt them, unaccustomed to how they attached on my back with my human shoulder blades instead of without them. I screeched at the uneven drag. In girl form, my left side was stronger than my right. My owl form didn’t have that problem, but these strange in-between wings sure did.
An updraft saved me. I thought for a moment I heard a song on it, but when I listened harder, the rush of air hissed and fizzled like static on an old radio. The next moment, I scanned the earth below, seeking a safe place to land. And I found a clearing with a dusty brown patch at its center and a black speck at one side. It’d do. It had to.
I wish I could say I landed on my feet on the bare earthen patch as I’d intended. I didn’t. Instead, I rolled down the hill, straight for the black speck which was actually a person. Sort of. But I couldn’t look closer to see whether the figure was friend or foe. Gee coughed up more of their blue blood.
“Hang in there, Gee. I’m trying to get help for you. If I only knew what you needed.”
“Home.” The Gnome managed that one word, but I had a problem. “Get me there.”
“I wish I knew where you lived, Gee.” My throat felt full of cotton and my eyes like the lake side of a dam.
“Um, not that I know anything, but maybe they live in the Gnomehill.”
“What?” I didn’t dare look up. The voice sounded exactly like Tony’s. Could it be him, alive? Or was he a ghost? I stared at my hands then at Gee. Would my hopes be dashed to bits like Icarus on the rocks?
My knees rested on the ground, the dry autumn grass itching through the thin fabric of my dress. I didn’t want to look, wasn’t sure I could bear seeing Tony’s ghost right now. If I didn’t look, maybe I could pretend it wasn’t him.
“I said, maybe the Gnomehill you’re sitting on is Gee-Nome’s actual house. In which case, we want to get them in there so their clan can help them heal from whatever’s killing them right now.”
“Right.” I stood and walked toward the hole in the bare earth on the other side of the toadstools. I stepped right in, trusting my wings to slow my fall, and landed with barely a jostle.
My eyes adjusted to the darkness quickly. I was in a round chamber and could see two sets of footprints in a coating of thick dust, meaning that some other people had been in here recently. Passageways led off in two directions. Both had those footprints, but one of them gave me the creeps. I was about to head down the less shadowy hallway when Gee groaned.
“Ahead.” The Gnome gasped, shuddering against my arm. “The wall.”
I nodded, then walked forward until I got to the far side of the chamber. With my owl vision, I saw a small doorway in the stonework at the height of my head. I reached up and knocked because I couldn’t think of anything else a sane person would do in a situation like this.
The little door opened, swinging silently outward on nothing I could see. No voice greeted Gee or challenged me. A sullen glow came from the other side of the tiny threshold.
&nb
sp; “In.” Gee’s voice sounded faint and strained. I set them just inside the door, and it swung shut just as quietly as it had opened. After that, I heard the stamp of diminutive feet from where they were.
“It won’t kill you to look at me, Olivia.” I couldn’t pretend any longer. That was definitely Tony talking.
“Maybe, but I don’t want to see you dead and trapped in the Under.” I shuddered. “That’s got to be where we are since Gnomehills don’t exist in the mortal world.”
“I’m not dead.” Tony’s gruff chuckle made my breath catch in my chest. It came from above me. “I’m getting better.”
“No, you’re not.” The lines from the old British movie poured from my mouth as inevitably as rain. “You’ve been stone-dead all week.” I froze as I heard the patter of falling earth, canvas rustle, and a scraping thud behind me. Ghosts didn't make noises like that.
“I feel fine.” Tony’s voice echoed in the chamber. Did ghostly voices make echoes? Three steps sounded behind me. “I think I’ll go for a walk. Come on, Olivia, turn around already. You can’t avoid looking at me forever.”
I couldn’t answer. The only way I could be sure of anything was to turn around and face him as he asked. But now, I didn’t want to for a completely different reason. My face was dirt-smudged and tear-stained, and I knew from long experience that I was an ugly crier.
“I don’t want you to see me like this.”
“Like what?”
“I’m a mess.”
“Like hell. I thought you looked like something while you fell out of the sky, and a mess wasn’t it. Anyway, you can’t be more of a wreck than the time you smacked into the side of a building on Camp Street, and I had to carry you home. And there’s no way you’re ickier than when Hopewell’s construct slimed you in Water Place Park. I outgrew the idea that girls have cooties a long time ago, too.”
“Um, well. It’s just—”
“Okay. So, maybe you don’t want to look at me. I don’t blame you. After all the run around I’ve given you, I wouldn’t want to look at me—”
“Hoo, boy.” I turned on my heel and flung myself at him.
Most people would expect physical grace from two people who shifted into stealthy predators. They might think meeting the man you secretly love after thinking he was dead automatically blossoms into some sort of grand romantic scene. Most people would be wrong on both counts.
He swept me off my feet, but only because I tripped over his. We tumbled together, but not in a swooning, sexy, or even roughhousing fun way. Tony ended up on his back with the wind knocked out of him, and one arm twisted behind him. I sprawled across his chest, my lower lip somehow busted from smacking his chin. The Notebook, it was not.
“You’re alive, Tony Gitano.” I turned my head and set my ear against his chest just to be sure. “Yup. Heartbeat and everything. I bet you were only mostly dead.”
“Heh. Because mostly dead is slightly alive.” Tony hacked out a cough. “Don’t go through my clothes looking for loose change, now.”
I lifted my head so I could see his face. He smirked with the left side of his mouth and his right eyebrow lifted. I had to put my hands over my own mouth to muffle my impending laughter. That expression, combined with the ears sticking up on top of his head, would have looked at home in an anime. He tilted his head, reminding me that he’d ultimately turned down my most direct advances.
“Never mind.” I rolled off of him, then shook my head. “You sound way too lively for me to make that kind of mistake.” I stood and dusted myself off, then leaned down to give him a hand up.
“Good call.” Tony pushed himself up on his elbows. He didn’t try to get up or reach for my hand. Instead, he just sort of half sat there, looking up at me. “Olivia Adler, you’re the last person I expected to see in a place like this. I’m not complaining because you’re a sight for sore eyes. But what’s a nice owl like you doing in a place like the king’s side of the Under?”
“I’m supposed to be at the heart of it, actually.” I peered down the less creepy of the two passageways. “His hunting lodge, to be more specific.”
“You can’t get into that club without an invitation.”
“Oh, I had one.”
“Wow.” Tony blinked. “I mean, even Duke Ismail can’t get his mitts on one of those unless it’s a full-court occasion.”
“He said he had a Quest for me.” I shrugged, looking at the floor. I made my way down the less creepy hallway.
“A Quest.” Tony padded along behind me. “Faeries don’t usually give Quests to shifters.”
“Well, the king gave one to me.”
“How in the name of all things holy did you get to meet the Goblin King?”
“At your memorial service.”
“Huh.” Tony didn’t bump into me when I stopped at the end of the hall, so that must have meant he’d stopped, too. “You’re supposed to be at the hunting lodge, but you ended up on a Gnomehill. Weird.”
“Well, that’s what happens when a mortally injured Gnome has to vanish someone at gunpoint.”
“Whoever threatened you is getting a faceful of claws from yours truly.” I heard his knuckles crack behind me. Who was it?”
“Your dad.”
I didn’t want to have a conversation as serious as this one was shaping up to be in the dark, even if we could both sort of see in it. I stepped ahead into what I hoped was a chamber with some torches I could light. The room did me one better. Magical braziers flickered on, apparently sensing my presence. I stopped and stared.
The first thing I felt was nostalgia like I’d been in this room before. Déjà vu was too weak a term for the way this place moved me. Something in the air ruffled my feathers, familiarity in a foreign place. I paced across to one of the dusty tapestries, noting that the floor’s own dust had a single set of footprints in it, unmistakably the imprint of Converse All-Stars in Tony’s size.
I would have asked Tony what he’d been doing in here before, or what he might know about the place. But though my mind teemed with questions, I couldn’t give them a voice until I’d checked this one panel of fabric draped over the wall. That’s how much the muted images and ambiance of that room had gotten its hooks into me.
With one hand, I brushed the surface in slow-motion, clearing part of the image woven into the fabric. After that, I worked faster, uncovering the whole thing.
A woman with prismatic wings faced east as she soared over a nest strewn with shards of eggs. Another ran into the west on the ground below, a bundle under her arms. The running woman was all dressed in red with a scarf tied around the top of her head. Long red hair and waves that might have been scarves or tails streamed out behind her like comets. The flying woman held a green bow, strung and nocked with arrows. She pointed them at a line of figures on the horizon, possibly an advancing army.
“This tapestry shows a story I’ve heard before.” I scratched my head. “But I don’t know which one.”
“I didn’t even know there were pictures on these things.” Tony gazed at the image along with me, his eyes lingering on the lady in red. They widened as he looked more closely at the flying woman’s weapon. “That lady with the wings is one of the legendary birds of the Under. And I can tell by the rainbow wings that she’s the Alkonost.”
“I’ve never heard of them.” I studied the woman’s face, wishing the image had been done in a clearer medium than needlepoint on fabric.
“There are three. The Alkonost is Seelie, the Sirin is Unseelie, and the Gamayun is Switzerland.”
I chuckled, but the mirth his quip inspired faded quickly. Standing on my toes, I stretched up to reach the embroidered wings. I had to know more but didn’t know where to start asking.
“They’re even more extinct than Kitsune.” Tony stepped beside me, peering up at the fabric under my hand. “In order to have a shot at becoming one of the birds, you have to be born in the Under. None of the PPC professors has even seen one, and some of them are faeries with
long lives.”
“But this only looks like a couple of decades of dust.” I glanced sideways at him, a shiver of certainty starting in my gut and working its way out through the rest of my body. “Who’d have stitched something like this twenty some odd years ago?”
“Whoever hid this, I guess.” He held out a burlap-wrapped parcel. “I didn’t understand when I came in here before. This place gave me the heebie-jeebies, like a goose walking over my grave. But I think I get it now.” He glanced at my wings, their monochrome tones nothing like the embroidered Alkonost’s rainbow-hued ones. His smile startled me with the implication that he might like mine better. “I think this crazy artifact is meant for you, not me.”
“Um, thanks, I guess.”
“Aren’t you going to open it?”
“I already know it’s a bow, arrows too.”
“Gotta love the smart chicks.”
I turned to look at him, smiling, and our eyes met. Something about being in this room with Tony felt familiar, too. Right, somehow. Like we were home, in a sense, even though I thought we’d never been alone in a Gnomehill before. I wasn’t sure what to say or do or whether I needed to do or say anything. The moment hung like a Rembrandt, and then, Tony decided the art show was over. He closed one of his hands around my upper arm and headed for the exit.
“We should get out of here.” Tony faced the door, his whiskers twitching.
“Why?”
“The non-Gnomish residents of this place are due to wake up soon.” He wrinkled his nose. “They’re Grims.”
“Plural?” I blinked at his nod. “That sucks.”
“We’ll have to sneak past them, too. They’ve infested the other tunnel, and the only exit’s at the end of it.” He stopped, pulling on my arm to hold me back. “Crap on a crap cracker. It’s too late for that.”
There, right in the middle of the Gnomehill’s main chamber, stood a pack of Grims.
“Don’t worry.” I turned, pressing the wrapped bow between us so I could hold Tony in a secure grip. “I’ve got this.”