Mountains of Dreams

by Bevill, C. L.

  Meka giggled when one of the firefly pixies tried to yank at his eyebrow. Meka had very bushy eyebrows, and the girls were fascinated with them.

  Horse loped toward the hotel, moving faster than I could have. I would have stolen a steam car if one had been nearby, but I’m not sure if I could have driven it without mangling the gears.

  Dismayed, I said, “Famous.” I didn’t want to be famous. I wanted to be normal. But hey, that ship had sailed.

  “You’re her,” Horse said mysteriously. “Her,” he repeated. Not all the words that came out of the beast’s mouth were exactly like they should be. An un-horse’s mouth wasn’t exactly meant for human language.

  “Her,” I repeated like I couldn’t say anything else. I sounded stupid. “Why would I be famous?”

  “You can talk to those who belong here now,” Horse said. Peachy. Horse should have a conversation with the firefly pixies. They’d get along hugely. They could say enigmatic and oblique things to each other until the cows came home, or in this case, until the horse came home.

  We cantered up to the hotel and I slid off. “Yes, I can talk to new animals,” I said, “but why would that make me famous?” I knew humans were interested in what I could do. It was just an odd job skill. I made things easier. People were happy they could go through Constitutional Gardens without getting pelted with wood chips. C.J. in southeast Virginia was pleased that the hydra wasn’t going to eat any more of his people and that the hydra loved to trade cows for various stuff. In fact, the last note I got from that direction indicated that the hydra absolutely loved peanut butter cookies, and C.J.’s people could make peanut butter cookies ad nauseam.

  Meka slid off and landed beside me. He brushed a little un-horse hair off my skirt. “There you go. All pretty again. Do you always dress up in the city?”

  “There’s a thing tonight,” I said impatiently. “Horse, why? Please answer me.”

  Horse nickered again. He might have not have been a horse, but he sounded like a horse. “You’re going to save us,” he said and then someone tackled me.

  * * *

  I threw my attacker off me with a growl. Firefly pixies were dancing around us in a flurry of green luminescent fury. They had their weapons out, and the miniature silver toothpicks twinkled in the late afternoon sun. Flowers was shrieking her most insulting epithets at the person who had attacked me. “Two-legged, wingless stupid one! Flightless male! The sisters hope your eggs shrivel up and rot!”

  I bounced to my feet, and the handle of the Japanese broadsword abruptly was in my hand. I carefully watched the boy who had flattened me while my back was turned. I knew him. I had met him before. He had been friendly and eager to meet others like him. At the moment, he was chock-a-block with infuriated vehemence. His name was Prosper, and he had come from Maine with a new animal.

  Horse was snuffling and prancing in place while Meka said, “Hey, hey, hey, there’s no need for any of that!” He started to step in between us, and I waved him back.

  Prosper followed closely and lunged at me, disregarding the sword with impunity. “You! You’re not going to save us! You’re one of them!” he shrieked at me. I shoved at him with my free hand and got him back from me. His face was red with fury, and tears spilled down his cheek. He rubbed at his eyes with the back of his hand even while he tried to find a gap in my defense.

  The boy with the hippogriff was missing something. Oh yes, he was missing his hippogriff, the animal called Oki. It was like that other girl I had seen in the lobby of this very hotel. The girl with the black puma mark on her cheek in the same place I had a firefly pixie mark. She sat all alone, and she shouldn’t have been.

  “Calm down,” I warned him. “I can’t help you when you’re like this. Where’s Landers?”

  People and animals began to come outside, curious to see what was happening.

  The green-haired girl with the snake called, “They took him away last month. Didn’t you know?”

  Coldness began to develop deep within myself. I knew something was wrong, but I had my mind on other things, and it would have had to slap me in the face before I would do anything about it. Dear God, I’d been blind. I wanted normal. I didn’t want to look past what wasn’t normal. What else had I missed? “Who took him away?”

  “The soldiers,” the snake girl said. “You didn’t know.”

  “How could she not know?” another woman asked. She glared at me. Several of them looked at me in the same manner.

  Prosper seemed to melt on the sidewalk. “Landers wasn’t the only thing they took,” he whispered hoarsely.

  Horror intensified in my heart like a blackened lump that grew and grew and grew. “They took your hippogriff? They took Oki?”

  Another man said, “We’re not supposed to talk about that.”

  “They won’t tell me where she is,” Prosper said. He sank to his knees, and his hands fisted at his temples. He looked so young and defenseless at the moment, and I couldn’t do anything to help him. The black circles under his eyes spoke of sleepless nights and days where he didn’t know what he was supposed to do.

  “They took Noelle, too,” the snake girl said. The man who had said they weren’t supposed to talk about it snapped, “No, don’t, Leya! They’ll come back and take the other new animals!”

  Leya snapped back, “I don’t care! This can’t go on anymore. They want us to perform like trained monkeys for them. When we don’t tell them exactly what they want to know, then they turn on us. They tell us we can’t leave or it will be treason. Treason in this brand new world with a brand new administration! It’s crap, is what it is.”

  I suspected Noelle was the girl with the puma mark. “The soldiers took some people and some of the new animals,” I said, more for my own clarification. They’d taken the animals to coerce the humans into doing things. They’d taken the humans for other reasons.

  Horse nickered loudly behind me. “If you mean those humans with the funny clothes, there’s one now.”

  I turned and saw one of McCurdy’s troops watching us from across the street. He was a young man with a spear and an alarmed expression on his face. He’d been in the building across the street, and he held a cup of something steaming in his hand. He was here to watch the people with the special connections to new animals. His urban camouflage uniform didn’t fit him very well, and his combat boots looked oversized. His soft cap fell awkwardly around his ears. He looked like a little kid in his daddy’s work clothes.

  Another soldier came out from behind him carrying another steaming cup. She was just about my age with short brown hair. She stopped behind the first one and said, “What the hell, Henry? What’s—”

  I crossed the street before they could blink. I’m not sure if my feet even actually hit the ground. One hand snatched the spear out of Henry’s hand, and I snapped it in half using my knee and the ground. Henry stepped back. His cup fell away from his hand. The girl dropped her cup and scrambled for the knife in the sheath at her side. A half-second later, the tip of my broadsword rested at the jugular notch at the base of her throat. She froze in place, warily staring at me.

  I fought to compress the anger welling up in me. Whatever had been done, whoever had been transgressed against, it wasn’t likely by these two people, and I had to remember that no matter what. “You’re Henry,” I said to the young man. He wasn’t above twenty. I looked at the girl who had very big brown eyes. “And your name is—?”

  “Ela,” she said, standing very still, pulling her neck back incrementally from the sword. They weren’t really soldiers. All the marching around in the world couldn’t teach them how to be soldiers.

  “What are your orders?” I asked.

  “We don’t report to you,” Henry snapped. “It’s that girl,” he muttered to Ela, “the one we’re supposed to immediately report if she shows up. Sophie.”

  “Henry,” I said calmly, “I’m not in a good mood today. You can see, I’ve ripped my new dress.” I pointed down to where th
e lace had separated at the skirt. “My friend, Lulu, is going to be pissed at me. I’m missing the man I love terribly. I want things to be normal. They aren’t, in case you haven’t noticed. And people are messing with the universe in a way that isn’t proper. Do you understand me?”

  I could hear the group of humans and animals slowly moving behind me.

  “What are your orders?” I repeated.

  “Watch the people with the weird animals,” Henry whispered. “Make sure they don’t start a fuss or something.” Something. I liked that. Not. Something. Like start a riot or protest that they were being discriminated against. “Make sure you don’t show up.”

  “What are you supposed to do if they fuss or I show up?”

  “Write down names of those who do, report them to the petty officer who comes around twice a day. Then we’re supposed to report to the Naval Observatory by full dark tonight.” Henry gazed apprehensively over my shoulder at the group gathering there. I gathered without looking, that they didn’t appear too happy.

  “And your superior officers come around and collect the people who do make fusses?” I asked politely. I was more polite than I thought I was capable of being. Fury boiled inside me and fought with cold wrath. The two close cousins mingling together made me want to explode. I wanted to beat Henry’s face in for being so dense. But then I would have to beat my own head after his for being equally dense.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “Where did they take them? Where did they take Landers? Noelle, wasn’t it? The animals?” I forced the questions out because my arms and shoulders were trembling with the effort to simply act.

  “I don’t know,” Henry said. He took an abrupt step backwards and bumped into Ela. She said, “Swear to God, we don’t know! They didn’t tell us!” And the unspoken part was that they didn’t dare ask.

  I stared at them. The tip of my sword dropped.

  Prosper stepped to my side. In about two minutes, he had calmed remarkably. He reached out and grasped Ela’s arm and dragged her forward. His fingers gripped her arm, and she couldn’t shake him loose. “Ask them again, Sophie.”

  I didn’t hesitate. There was something in Prosper’s demand. “Tell us where they are,” I said instead of asking.

  “We don’t know,” Ela said again.

  Prosper threw her arm away from him. “She’s telling the truth.” His young face turned to me. “That’s what I do. I can touch people and tell if they’re telling the truth or lying. That’s what those people wanted me to do. When I refused, they took Oki. They said—” his voice cracked and he paused for a second, “— they would kill her if I didn’t.”

  “And that’s what they did to Noelle, too?” I asked, without looking away from Prosper. “She’s the one with the cat mark on her face, right?” Perhaps I should have asked what Noelle’s special skill was, but it didn’t really matter.

  Leya, the snake girl, called, “That’s right. They want us to work for them, whether we want to or not.”

  I had to think about my next actions. My natural inclination was to find the next person in charge and ask them nicely where the people and animals were located. But why muck around with the chain of command when I could go straight to the top. In about an hour, the President and Captain McCurdy would be having dinner on the outside lawn of the Naval Observatory. Many locals had been invited.

  I didn’t think this group of people had received their invites, but that was okay. I would invite them.

  I had to get to Lulu before she went to the party alone. I had to make sure that she was safe enough.

  I looked at Henry and Ela again. “Lock them in a room,” I said to the people behind me. “Don’t hurt them unless they resist. They’re not to blame. They didn’t know.”

  Grumbling protests filled the air.

  “We’re going to find out who’s responsible, and I’m going to take care of this,” I said clearly and my voice carried.

  Meka said from behind me, “I guess we could have come at a better time, huh?”

  “I need another ride, Horse,” I said.

  Horse nickered. “This is very exciting,” he said. “I like all this human interaction. Is it always like this?”

  “All too often,” I said.

  Flowers landed in my hair with a loud shriek. She yanked on a lock with all of her might. “Soophee!” she cried. “Soophee needs to go back to the other place! The place with many windows and other humans without animals! Now!” The hotel, I thought. She means the hotel where Lulu is, where the rest of the girls are.

  Flowers couldn’t tell me anything else so we went.

  * * *

  I made it back to the hotel with only a few instructions to the group of humans and new animals that I had left. We would be rendezvousing near the Naval Observatory. They knew that crossing into the observatory proper would be dangerous to them and to their companions. I didn’t have time to explain why it was. All I could see in my head was the way that McCurdy had looked the first time I had passed through the gate of the post. He’d been gleefully anticipatory. He’d been waiting and then he had been disappointed.

  I didn’t have all the information at the time. McCurdy had expected something to happen that hadn’t happened. He’d expected it because he’d seen it happen before.

  McCurdy was a total jerkface.

  Horse and Meka waited for me. I warned the pair that we were wading into deep doo-doo, and they weren’t involved yet. Meka had shrugged. Horse had nickered laughingly again. “We have to pick a side sometimes,” Horse said knowingly. “I’d rather stick with the ones that don’t hide behind other humans.”

  I zipped off the back of the un-horse, or maybe I should have called it a non-horse. For a change, the firefly pixies streamed out behind me. I had to make myself pause long enough for the swarm to make it through the doors. Then I dashed through the lobby, making people look up in surprise. Most of them were in evening wear. Some were sipping wine from glasses. It all looked very normal. They were waiting on transport to the Naval Observatory.

  Ignatius leapt to his feet and followed me as I ran past. A honking big broadsword in my hand was always a good clue that something was going on.

  The stairs didn’t hold me back, and I made the floor my room was on without pausing once. I was huffing and puffing when I burst through the door of my room.

  I saw several things at once. Lulu lay on the floor at the foot of the bed. She moaned once, and her hand came up to rub at her jaw. “Good Christ,” she muttered, “my head hurts.” She’d already changed into her evening gown, and she brushed at the material in front as if that would fix everything.

  The other thing I noticed was that the gerbil cage was gone. It wouldn’t have been a simple matter of a soldier picking up a cage and carrying it out. They would have had to incapacitate the firefly pixies somehow.

  “They had some kind of gas,” Lulu said. She draped her arm over the end of the bed and tried to move.

  Ignatius came in and knelt by Lulu. “What happened?”

  “They wore gasmasks,” Lulu said hoarsely. “They sprayed something in the room. My room and yours. I heard the girls screaming…”

  Flowers and the firefly pixies that came with me circled over our heads in a mass of angered confusion. “What do the sisters do, Soophee?” Flowers sang, and her voice bespoke of both sorrow and rage.

  “Did you see who it was, Lulu?” I asked, amazed at how calm I sounded.

  “It was McCurdy,” she whispered.

  Ignatius stood up suddenly and went to the side of the bed. He held up a canister of something. It had been discarded when it was used up. “SWAT teams use this in some extreme cases. It’s something that knocks people unconscious. Sometimes it even kills them. I don’t know what it would do to your little friends.”

  I closed my eyes.

  “Is Lulu all right, Ignatius?”

  Ignatius knelt by Lulu again. He asked her some questions. She nodded or shook her head. After a min
ute, he said, “She should be fine in a few hours. She needs to drink as much water as possible. She shouldn’t operate any heavy equipment or vehicles, however.” He winced as he realized what he had said. “Of course, she won’t.”

  I sang to the firefly pixies. “Tell the animals you can speak with that the ones in the uniforms aren’t to be trusted any longer. Any negotiations they’ve made are null and void. They won’t honor them. Sophie says that they can no longer be trusted and should be treated thusly.”

  All the work I had done in the past months had vanished in the blink of an eye. Everything that I believed in, even while I was being tricked, was gone, as well.

  Worse, sentient beings were being held prisoners. Even more worse, they had Spring and the other pixies.

  “I’m so sorry, Sophie,” Lulu said numbly. “I couldn’t stop them.”

  I pointed at a bag on the table. It was from the shop that I had broken into near George Washington University. “That’s for you,” I said. “If you’re going to come with me, you’ll need to put it on.”

  Lulu glanced at the table and then back at me. “What are you going to do, Sophie?”

  I laughed grimly. “I’m going to a party.”

  Chapter 19

  Life Might Not Be the Party

  We Hoped for, but While We’re Here

  We Might As Well Dance…

  Premonitions were still like building a precarious house of cards, but sometimes they were a house of cards that I couldn’t see. Why hadn’t I foreseen that McCurdy had come for the firefly pixies? It might have been because they weren’t hurt or killed. It might have been that it would turn out okay in the long run without psychic interference. It might have been that I couldn’t see everything all the time, and the rules to this game were still being written. But it still bugged me.

  Horse cantered by other wagons drawn by a variety of animals and filled with people on their way to the President’s shindig. He made a comment about the few regular horses he saw. “They don’t talk much, do they?” he asked.