by P. C. Cast
The doctor was screaming because the nurse had dropped a tray full of sterilized instruments on his foot, and a scalpel was sticking out of his little toe. The nurse was screaming because he knew his clumsiness was going to cost him his job. Derisive, Scornful, and Withering just stared at the hysteria greeting their first moments out of the womb, then obligingly yowled when the cold air bit their fair skin and they were poked and prodded and (finally) swaddled in warm blankets. (The janitor went away, presumably to mop something; ditto the superfluous personnel.)
Of course, even in a town like Mysteria, natural triplets (that is, triplets born without the aid of artificial means like IVF or a really good splitting spell) were rare, and triplets that brought about screaming fits from qualified medical personnel were rarer still.
So it wasn’t long before stories began to spring up about the Desdaine triplets. The why behind the stories became blurred over time, but the plain truth behind the stories—the triplets were weird—never shaded much one way or the other.
On their second birthday, the girls discovered they could do magic.
On their third birthday, they discovered if they cooperated, they could do more magic.
On their fifth birthday, they decided being good guys was for suckers.
And on their sixth, they decided they could count on no one but themselves, but that was perfectly all right. Mom was scolding and loving and superb at not noticing things; Dad had died a month before they were born.
And so time passed, probably the only magic those who don’t live in Mysteria are aware of or care about. And the triplets grew older, but not fast enough to suit them or their mother.
One
“Ho-ho,” Derisive chortled. “Here he comes.”
The triplets were sunning themselves by the wishing well, a charming stone well shaded by trees in the center of town. They had chased the night mare away for the sixth night in a row with a combination of charms and spit spells and were celebrating by torturing the mailman, who was a drunk, a kicker of cats, and unpleasant besides.
The girls, who were beautiful and knew it (bad) but attached no importance to it (not so bad), were identically dressed in denim shorts, red tank tops, and white flip-flops. Although most twins and triplets outgrew the dressing-in-the-same-outfit stage by, oh, sixteen months, the Desdaines liked it. The better to fool you with, my dear.
“Mom alert?” Withering asked, squinting. Their mother, thank all the devils, was nowhere in sight.
Scornful waved her hand in the direction of the Begorra Irish Emporium. “Still looking at those tacky little leprechauns.”
“Not so tacky,” Withering reminded her sister. “They do grant one wish.”
“Yawn,” Scornful replied. “Little silly wishes, like not overdoing the turkey. Nothing significant.”
“Do-gooder alert?”
Derisive also waved a hand. “Do-gooder” encompassed three-fourths of the town; there were so few really evil people around these days. That would change when they grew up. As it was, at fourteen, they were formidable. If a Mysteria resident wasn’t a do-gooder, they were neutral, and stayed out of things. This suited the triplets fine. “No problems. Everybody’s at lunch.”
“Here he comes,” Withering said, her nails sinking into Scornful’s arm like talons. She ignored her sister’s yelp of pain. Her conscience was clear, but then, it usually was. Besides, Mr. Raggle, the postal carrier, wouldn’t be the focus of their wrath if he hadn’t called their mother That Name. And in front of the whole pizza parlor, too. “Jerkweed,” she added.
“Now,” Derisive said, and all three girls made the sign of a V with their fingers, spat through the Vs, then stomped on the spit. They visualized Mr. Raggle coming to harm and, before the thought had barely formed in their treacherous teenaged minds—
“Hey! Help! Aaaagggghhh!”
“Scared of heights,” Scornful said thoughtfully, eyeing the postal carrier who had been picked up by unseen forces and flung into the highest branch of the closest maple tree.
“Probably shouldn’t have mentioned that where you could hear,” Withering said, smiling with approval. She rarely smiled, and both her sisters took it as a gift, and not without astonishment.
“Teach him to call our mother names,” Derisive added, and spat again for good measure.
“Girls!”
“Uh-oh.”
Derisive craned to look. “Must have run out of leprechauns to look at.”
“You girls!” Their mother was running toward them at full speed, black curly hair bobbing all over the place. The triplets knew they took after their late father; their mother was petite, while they already had two inches on her; she was dark-eyed, while their eyes were sky-colored; and they had straight blond hair that hardly moved in gale-force winds. “Girls! I swear, I can’t turn my back on you for five seconds!”
“That’s true,” Withering said. “You can’t.”
“Get him down! Right . . . now!”
The triplets studied their mother, whom they loved but did not like, and tried to gauge the seriousness of her mood. A grounding, they did not need. Not with Halloween only three months away.
“Girls!” Panting, shoving her hair out of her eyes, even wheezing a little, Giselle Desdaine staggered up to her girls and glared at them so hard her eyeballs actually bulged. That was enough for the triplets, who, as one, made the V with their fingers, said, “Extant,” in unison, and spat.
Mr. Raggle shot out of the tree just as their mother said, “Why don’t you just grow up?!?” He plowed into Withering, knocking them both back into the wishing well.
Two
Thad Wilson was back in Mysteria, and not at all happy about it. Unfortunately, he had been born here, lived the first twelve years of his life here, and had taken fifteen years to realize that Mysteria got into your blood like a poison. The kind that wouldn’t kill you but just kept you generally miserable.
An air force brat, his father had re-upped the spring he was in seventh grade (Thad, not his father), and around and around the country they went: Boston, Minot, Ellsworth, San Antonio, Vance, Nellis, Cannon. No wishing wells that really worked, no werewolves who disappeared during the full moon. No witches, no horses that brought nightmares. No wish-granting knickknacks. Just missile silos and PXs.
He’d been so bored he thought he’d puke. And as if bouncing around with his folks hadn’t been enough, once he was of legal age, he’d moved to six cities in five years. Finally, he’d given up and come back to Mysteria. He’d had no doubts about finding it. Once you lived there, you could always get back.
As it happened, the local river nymph (what had her name been? Pat? Pit?) had sold the building, and he’d bought it, turning it into a pizza place. Living in Chicago and Boston had taught him what real pizza was supposed to taste like, and by God, he’d show the other Mysteria residents just what—
He heard shrieking, dropped the dough, and bolted out the door. Lettering in track in both high school and college stood him in good stead now; his long legs took him to the scene of the crime (because, since the Desdaine triplets were involved, what else could it be?) in no time.
“You girls!” Mrs. Desdaine was yelling. The girls—whom Thad had very studiously avoided since getting back to town, they just reeked of trouble and were way too cute for jailbait—looked uncomfortable and unrepentant. “Get him down right now! Girls!”
That’s when he noticed the mailman, an unpleasant drunk named—what? Ragman? Raggle?—come sailing out of the tree and slam one of the triplets into the wishing well.
“Oh, shit,” he said, screeching to a halt before he could topple into the well himself.
Three
Mrs. Desdaine had helped the wet and enraged postal employee out of the fountain, and the man had run off without so much as a thank-you, which surprised Thad not at all.
Almost immediately after that, a creature shockingly ugly popped up out of the fountain. It smelled, if possible, worse than it
looked: like rotten eggs marinating in vomit. It was about five feet tall, squat, with four arms and a long, balancing tail. It was poison green and had what appeared to be a thousand teeth.
Then Thad noticed that the creature turned the exact same shade of gray as the blocks making up the well. Ugly as hell, and a chameleon, too. Terrific.
Mrs. Desdaine was screaming. The two (dry) triplets were screaming. People were starting to come out of their stores, much too slowly, and he put on speed.
He was, in the language of the fey, naragai, which literally translated to “no will.”
What it actually meant was that he had inherited nothing from his fairy mother: not the immortality, not the strength, not the wings, not even the height (at six feet four inches, his mother was five inches taller than he was). Human genes, he had decided long ago, must be super dominant, because he took after his father in every way.
But he could run like a bastard, which he did now.
“Watch out, watch out!” he yelled, nearly toppling into the fountain himself as he tried to put on the brakes.
“That thing ate Withering!” one of the triplets wailed.
“My baby!” Mrs. Desdaine yowled.
The thing—it looked like a cross between a man and a velociraptor—climbed out of the fountain and stood on the brick walk, dripping and growling and slashing its tail back and forth like a whip.
Thad had no idea what he was going to do to it. Kick it? Breathe on it? Try to drown it without getting his face bitten off?
Then another figure rose from the water, this one a tall, luscious blonde dressed in tattered leathers and armed to the teeth; he counted two daggers and one sword, and those were just the ones he could immediately see.
“Wha?” was all he could manage.
She looked like she was in her early twenties, and he was amazed she’d come out of the fountain, which was only eighteen inches deep. Of course, the lizard man had come out of the fountain, too.
She smiled at Lizard Guy. “This will not end well for you.”
Lizard Guy snapped and snarled and wiggled all four arms at her. Its thighs were as big as tree trunks.
The gorgeous blonde did something with her sword; she was so quick he didn’t quite catch it. It was almost like she’d flipped it out of her back sheath and was now holding it easily in her left hand. She saluted the monster with it, smiling a little. Great smile.
“Dakan eei verdant,” she said, trilling her r. “Compara denara.”
Lizard Guy lunged at her. She ducked easily under the swing and parried with one of her own. “I’ve chased you across three worlds and ten years,” she said, almost conversationally. “Did you think I would let you get away now?”
Thad wasn’t sure if this was in addition to what she had said, or if she was translating what she had said. What was interesting was that she wasn’t out of breath, didn’t look excited or flushed . . . just businesslike.
Her backswing lopped off Lizard Guy’s head.
“Cantaka et nu,” she said, saluting the headless (gushing . . . purple blood, ech!) body. “Deren va.”
The other two girls had stopped screaming, and Scornful (or was it Derisive?) kicked Lizard Guy’s head out of the way. Thad had to give her props for her rapid recovery. He was still having trouble following the events of the last forty seconds.
“Are you—are you Withering?” Scornful asked in a tentative voice Thad would not have believed any of the triplets capable of.
The grown woman looked around and frowned. “Cander va iee—I just left, did I not?”
“I—I wished you’d grow up,” Mrs. Desdaine said faintly, looking like she might swoon into the water. “And then you were gone. But you came right back.”
At once the woman went to Mrs. Desdaine and knelt, the point of her sword hitting the bricks with a clunk and actually chipping off a piece. “O my mother, when this woman was a girl, she caused you many trials. This woman would ask forgiveness and would spend her life making things right for thee.”
“What?” the other three Desdaines gasped in unison.
“Please, this woman asks most humbly,” the tall blonde said, her gaze fixed on the bricks.
“That’s not Withering,” the other two said in unison.
“This woman certainly is.”
“Honey, get up off the ground,” Mrs. Desdaine said, pushing back matted dark curls. “It’s fine, everything’s fine. I’m just glad you’re—you’re back.” She choked a bit on that last, but Thad thought she did a fine job of pretending she didn’t mind missing the entire adolescence of one of her children.
“Hi,” Thad said, utterly dazzled. “I’m Thad Wilson; I run the pizza place across the street.”
Slowly, she rose until she was at exact eye level. Her blond hair was matted to her head, and she was dripping all over everything; her sword was stained purple, and he still couldn’t take his eyes off her. “Sir, this woman is pleased to meet you.”
“Look at you!” Derisive (or was it Scornful?) said, circling the woman. “You’re all grown-up and bulgy. And you’re talking with a seriously weird accent.”
“It took many years to find my way back.”
“Let’s talk about it,” Thad suggested, “over a pizza.”
The woman—Withering—cracked a grin. “This woman has not had a pizza in some time. This woman would be delighted.”
And so they trooped across the street.
Four
Withering ate as if someone was going to take it away from her. Given the state of her clothing (clearly homemade from animal skins) and the way her collarbones jutted, Thad guessed her meals were hard to come by.
And where had she been in the five seconds—fifteen years?—she’d been gone? Someplace demanding . . . even unforgiving.
Scornful and Derisive weren’t at all happy with the new development, it was obvious to see. Normally you couldn’t shut them up. But now the girls picked at their lunch and couldn’t stop staring at their sister, then at each other, then at Withering.
Thad couldn’t help staring at Withering, either, but for an entirely different reason.
“Honey, I’m so sorry,” Mrs. Desdaine was saying, mournfully sprinkling red pepper flakes on her pizza slice. “I never should have said something like that around the wishing well. I’ve lived in this town my entire life, and I can’t believe I was so careless—and at my own daughter’s expense!”
“You meant no harm. And, if this woman’s memory is correct, we were causing trouble in the first place.”
“Traitor,” Scornful muttered, picking another slice of pepperoni off her pizza.
“Wicked tall traitor,” Derisive added, pushing her plate away.
“I don’t care!” their mother cried. “You obviously were sent somewhere awful and forced to grow up there. Your clothes—and your weapons—and you’re so thin.”
Withering looked surprised, as if she wasn’t used to anyone worrying about her. Probably she wasn’t. “This woman adapted.”
“Can you use some pronouns now?” Derisive snapped. “The whole ‘this woman’ bit is getting real old.”
“You shush, Derisive,” their mother ordered. “Tell me, Withering, dear. How long were you—were you wherever you were?”
Withering shrugged. “This wom—I didn’t keep count. Long enough to survive and take over the realm.”
“Realm?” Thad said, speaking for the first time.
“The demonic realm I fell into. I learned to fight by killing demons. And when the time was right, I killed the leader and took over. The one you saw in the water—that was someone trying to snatch back the crown.”
“So you’re like a queen in that other place?” Scornful said, finally sounding a little—just a little—impressed.
Withering shrugged. “I lead. But now . . .” She looked around the nearly deserted pizza parlor. “I know not where my place is.”
“It’s with your family, of course,” her mother said firmly.
“Well, why not?” Thad asked.
Withering looked uncomfortable. “It may not be . . . safe. For me to remain here.”
“Of course you’re going to remain here,” her mother said sharply.
“Yes,” Scornful added, then giggled. “This woman will stay.”
“You don’t have to decide anything right this minute,” Thad pointed out and was rewarded with one of her rare, rich smiles.
Five
KELLMANND DIMENSION, EARTH PRIME
TWELVE YEARS AGO
Withering landed in black dust with a skull-rattling thud. The breath whooshed out of her lungs, and for a moment she just lay there, gasping and inhaling that strange dust.
She painfully climbed to her feet, looking around in bewilderment. She was in an utterly strange, utterly alien place. The colors and textures were all wrong; they actually hurt her eyes. She was in a large circle of black dust, beyond which was bright blue grass. It appeared to be an oasis of some kind, because beyond the grass was a waterfall gushing purple water over green rocks.
What had happened? Where the hell was she?
She remembered her mother shouting, she remembered that nasty postal worker knocking her into the—
Oh, no.
No, no, no.
“Mother! Please come get me!” In her extremity of terror, she was screaming. “Please don’t leave me here!”
“This man . . . is pleased . . . to see this girl.”
Her head snapped around, and she saw a grievously wounded man lying about ten feet away, on the edge of the blue grass. He had blood all over him, and every time he gasped for breath, blood bubbles foamed across his lips.
She scrambled over to him. “Where am I? What happened to you?”
His pupils were blown, actually bleeding into the whites of his eyes. She was awfully afraid she was going to barf. Never had she seen someone so hurt. And everything was happening so fast, she couldn’t—