Hot Lead, Cold Iron

by Ari Marmell

If she decided she had any reason whatsoever to want to.

  “It sounds beautiful,” she said softly, still talking to the ground, not to me. “But awful. I don’t think I could stand it.”

  “Chicago’s pretty rough,” I admitted. “But there are other places, better places. You think what I’ve described is beautiful, you should see the old lands.” I know my voice drifted, as though I was floating away, and I couldn’t help it, ’cause in a way I was. “The Old Elphame I knew, over in Europe and the Isles? Oh, it’d take your breath away, make you weep in your soul. Avalon, Tír na nÓg… Nothing in this world compares, Adalina. Nothing.”

  “And those… the Courts? The, uh, Unseelie? They aren’t there?”

  “They are,” I admitted. “You go to any city or kingdom in Elphame, you’ll find the Seelie and the Unseelie squabbling. It’s bad in some places, very bad, but a lot of others ain’t as rough as Chicago. Sometimes, where one Court or the other’s dominant, it’s almost peaceful…”

  “Except for the political bullshit and them snatching children!” she snapped, the chains of the swing set clinking in her clenching fingers.

  “Uh… yeah.” What else could I say? “It ain’t perfect, Adalina. But it’s good, a lot of it. Very, very good.”

  “And what about me?” She finally looked up at me, tears rolling down her slightly misshapen cheeks. I couldn’t help but notice that those tears were grey. “Am I going to be ‘good’? What am I?”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t—”

  “Will I be like you? An, uh, aes sidhe? You look pretty regular, except for the ears.”

  I wasn’t at all surprised that she could see ’em at that point. “On the square, Adalina, I don’t know. I’d tell you if I did. How you look now? That could be moving in the direction you’re gonna look, or it could be your body trying to cope with the changes and you’ll be completely different, or it could be a reaction to some magics they used to keep you looking human longer’n normal. I just can’t say.”

  “But if you had to!” she pressed. Those chains were practically vibrating now; I almost thought she was gonna lunge at me.

  I probably shoulda lied to her, but after everything she’d been through already… “I never heard of an aes sidhe going through a change the way you are,” I admitted. Then, as she started to twist away, “But that don’t mean anything! I told you, it could be the breaking down of a spell, or—”

  “Or I could be turning into a monster,” she said, barely whispering.

  “There’s a lot of Fae that don’t look human who ain’t monsters,” I said. “Lots.”

  “It doesn’t matter anyway. People already think I’m some horrible creature. Those kids, my friends, my parents—”

  I whipped out a hand to snag the chain of her swing and twisted, forcing her to face me. “Your mother has been hunting for you since you bolted. She’s worried sick over you; she only let me out of Fino’s glyph so I could find you!

  “And your father? You were eavesdropping all evening, but how much did you listen to? Fino arranged the swap. He’s known from day one that you weren’t his blood, that you weren’t human. Has he ever treated you badly? Has he ever made you feel unwanted or unwelcome? Ever?”

  She shook her head, sobbing openly now. Her hair was sticking to her face, caught fast in the moisture of her tears.

  “I ain’t saying your parents did everything the way they should,” I told her. “And I ain’t saying your father’s exactly a good man. But they tried to do right by you. And right now? This thing with Celia? This ain’t about replacing you, even if maybe for a minute they thought it was. Right now is when they need you most.

  “You don’t wanna grow into a monster? Let’s go show ’em how human you are.”

  I found myself holding my breath, waiting for an answer in a face that’d suddenly gone so blank that even I couldn’t begin to read it. And then, with nothing more than a nod, Adalina slid from the swing and began a steady march across the playground, heading stubbornly for home.

  * * *

  I didn’t think Bianca would ever let go of Adalina, or ever say anything more’n “I’m sorry, piccola mia,” over and over, but finally she unwrapped her arms and led the girl and me into the sitting room. And if Adalina spent the whole hug stiff as a railroad tie, and wouldn’t look her “mother” in the eye, well, I can’t say I didn’t understand.

  Adalina took a seat, while Bianca poured herself a cup of fresh tea. Even from across the room, I could smell that it’d been, uh, flavored with something a whole lot stronger. “What now, Mr. Oberon?” Adalina asked.

  What now? “I been thinking about that,” I said, lurking in the doorway. “We still don’t know what Orsola’s got cooking, not exactly. Just that it’s nasty. We don’t know exactly what she needs Celia for, either—” the girl flinched at that name, but didn’t interrupt “—but we can bet it ain’t pleasant, not given all the steps Fino took to protect her after learning just part of it.”

  “Would Nonna really hurt her, do you think? Her own granddaughter?”

  “Yeah, I think she really would.” Then, to Bianca, “I’m not completely sure she wouldn’t have used Fino, if he’d been a firstborn. But then, it was partly losing her firstborn that pushed her over the edge, so who knows?

  “So we don’t know what she’s doing, and we don’t know where. We ain’t doing too well here. What we need to do is find her materials. Her grimoires, her notes, and all that.”

  “Donna Orsola keeps a footlocker full of books in her bedroom—” Bianca began.

  “Which is exactly where they won’t be. No way she’s keeping anything this powerful in plain sight.”

  “Wouldn’t she have taken those things with her, then? To use in…” She swallowed around the words that were obviously caught in her throat, and reached into her pocket. I heard the click of rosaries from within. “In casting her spell?”

  “Nope. She’s knows every detail backward and forward, you can take that to the bank. Probably dreams about it by now. She wouldn’t want to be distracted, having to juggle the tome along with everything else, or risk making a mistake ’cause of some last-minute misunderstanding.”

  Long as she’d been planning this, she’d had plenty of time to study it, too. I, on the other hand, had maybe a few more hours. Only thing I had working for me is that a rite of this power probably required a hefty amount of time. Well, that, and I had…

  “Adalina.”

  Even though she’d been listening this whole time, peering right at me, she jumped. “Yes?”

  “I need you to find ’em.”

  “M-me?” I hadn’t thought those big dark peepers could get any wider. Wrong.

  “You.” I walked over, squatted down in front of the sofa where she sat. “We don’t have time to tear this place apart looking. I could try finding ’em with magic, but they’re gonna be real well protected from that sorta thing. And this house is lousy with mystic emanations—from the wards she had up ’til recently, a bunch of other protections, every spell she ever cast here, and, well, you. You been leaking like a sieve for months. I might manage eventually, but too late to do any good.

  “You, though? You may not realize it, but you’re pretty sensitive to this stuff, too. And you already know how this house is supposed to feel.”

  “But…” She was actually squirming; I couldn’t help but think she wanted to get up and run again. “But I don’t know what I’m looking for! And—and even if I can ‘feel’ this stuff, if she’s been protecting her books all this time, the house is just going to feel the way it always does to me! And—”

  “It’s gonna be hard,” I said. “But if we work together on it, we can do it.”

  “I don’t think I can…”

  I wish I’d had time to coddle her, to do it different. I didn’t. “Then Celia’s on her own,” I said simply.

  Bianca gasped, and then started to cry. “Adalina, please…”

  The girl stared at me, a single tear
of her own tracing a grey line down her face.

  “Human or monster?” I whispered, as quiet as I could while still being sure she’d hear. And yeah, maybe pushing her that way was a little monstrous on my own part.

  But me, I’ve never claimed to be human.

  Adalina sucked in her breath, and nodded at me. “What do I do?”

  “Remember everything you can about this house,” I began. “Not how it looks, or smells, or any of that. How it feels. How you feel, in every room. Emotions that come over you with no obvious reason. These are old and ugly magics, so depression, fear… A sense of confusion, or age, or loss…”

  “I don’t… I don’t remember anything like that! I’m trying, but—”

  “Shh. It’s okay.” I stood, held out a hand. “Don’t worry about whether you’re managing it or not. Just keep trying.”

  “All right…” She took my hand.

  “Walk with me,” I said.

  So we walked. I had Adalina’s fingers in one hand, the Luchtaine & Goodfellow in the other, Bianca trailing behind, winding the rosary through her own fingers over and over again. I wanted to shout at her to stop—the constant click wasn’t doing my concentration any favors—but I figure she needed it more’n I didn’t need it.

  Everywhere we went, I kept whispering, working to shape perceptions Adalina shoulda already had for years. I tried to slowly, gently, draw off some of her emotions and mystic emanations through the wand, wind ’em through my own aura, infuse ’em with some sense of how our goal should feel, and then feed ’em back to her along with an extra dollop of luck to help us find ’em.

  And if you think that sounds confusing, try doing it.

  But it worked. It took us over an hour that we didn’t have to spare, but it worked.

  We’d started with Orsola’s room, of course, ’cause that was the obvious place to start. Adalina had felt a few “weird spots,” as she called ’em, but they turned out to be simple wards or the—well, I won’t say the “public” collection of witchy tomes and texts, but the ones the family knew about.

  The rest of the upstairs had proved even more a waste of time, and we’d gone through most of the ground floor when Adalina had started to shake, whimpering at a pitch I’m not sure Bianca could even hear. She yanked her hand from mine and took a trembling step back.

  “I…” She answered the look I tossed her. “I felt like I was falling. Like I was stumbling at the edge of a gaping hole…”

  “It’s just an old linen closet,” Bianca protested. “We don’t use it much, since we rearranged the house to have all the bedrooms upstairs.”

  Hmm… “Go ahead and open it.”

  She took a step, then stopped. “I don’t want to. What if it’s cursed or something?”

  “It’s perfectly safe. Open it.”

  “I… No. The books we’re looking for are unholy! I won’t endanger my soul by—”

  “So don’t read ’em. Don’t even touch. Just open the door.”

  “No!” Bianca actually raised her hands, ready to claw my blinkers out if I asked again.

  “Mother?” Adalina whispered.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “I just wanted to test a theory.” I moved to open the door and yeah, even I felt it: a fierce compulsion to leave the closet the hell alone. It started in my senses, a persistent nudge urging me not even to notice the door was there, to forget all about it, but soon as I tried anyway, it migrated into the back of my mind, where nightmares slumber during daylight.

  And for a minute, I couldn’t twist the knob. But only a minute.

  I have been a prince of the aes sidhe, Donna Orsola. And I have seen nightmares in my waking hours the likes of which your most vivid dreams of Hell could not match!

  I threw myself at the door—my will, my pride, and yes, my disdain. Magic burst from my hands, my eyes, and through the L&G. A pulse traveled back through my mind and my soul, a faint echo of the dark spell Orsola had chucked at me back in my office, and the twin gasps from behind told me Adalina and Bianca had felt it, too. The door still hung sullenly in its frame, but that’s all it was now: a door.

  I yanked it open without hesitation. The shelves were filled with old, folded sheets, just as they shoulda been. But the padlocked chest on the floor, that was probably something of a later addition.

  Grinning, I turned back to the others, ready to make some wisecrack or other, and stopped short. I wasn’t horrified or anything—I’ve seen much worse, sometimes on creatures I’ve called friends—but it was startling, right enough. Bianca pivoted to follow my shocked stare before I could recover, and she couldn’t quite repress a scream.

  I think she’d probably regret that for the rest of her life.

  “What? Oh, God, what’s wrong?” Wilting beneath our gaze, the thing Bianca had named Adalina—that had once looked at least mostly human—stared imploringly, waiting for an explanation that neither of us could offer.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  We were back, again, in that damn garishly decorated sitting room, breathing in the scent of hooch-flavored tea and enough tears to drown a Norwegian rat. I was starting to feel like the rest of that house was just a dream, slowly fading away as I was sucked again and again into this one cramped chamber. The heart of a lingering nightmare.

  Yeah, I was feeling a little dramatic at the time. I think it was justified.

  I’d pulled a chair up to the small table, shoved a few saucers out of my way, and dropped the old tome and stack of stiff, ratty papers in front of me. For the past few minutes I’d been flipping through, my skin crawling at the touch of the old maledictions, hunting for any sign of what Orsola was up to.

  It didn’t help that over half this stuff was written in languages I couldn’t begin to read. I could piece together some of the Latin and the Greek, but the Hebrew, the Ancient Egyptian, and what I think was even some Sanskrit was way the hell beyond me. (That trick of mine, where I listen to someone jawing for a few minutes and start to understand what they’re saying? Yeah, that don’t work with writing. No thoughts to pick up on.) Orsola had done a whole mess of scribbling in the margins and between lines, which might prove useful. Her notes were in Italian, which I also don’t read—though I was starting to think I probably oughta learn—but I was carefully copying ’em down so I could get Bianca to translate. I coulda just given her the book, but I didn’t think she’d be comfortable with that, and I wanted to make sure there wasn’t anything in here that’d hurt her if she read it.

  It also didn’t help that the dame in question was constantly making sniffling or gasping noises as she slumped in her chair, twitching every minute or two like she was about to get up, or reaching out as if to stretch across the whole room. Or that Adalina was curled into a ball on the far end of the sofa, rocking in place and whimpering, well beyond her “mother’s” reach. Every few minutes she’d twist around, despite herself, stare at her reflection in the darkened window, and look to me for answers she already knew I couldn’t offer.

  I couldn’t even tell her why it’d happened now, not for sure, anyway. Some kinda backlash from breaking Orsola’s ward? A side-effect of my pumping magics through her to improve her senses? Hell, it coulda just happened on its own, I guess, but even I have trouble accepting that degree of coincidence. No, I was pretty sure it was ’cause of something we’d just done—and that kinda made it my fault.

  But I think she coulda handled not knowing “why now” if I could at least have told her “what.” I couldn’t even do that for her. Her eyes’d moved even farther apart, ’til she damn near had one on each side of her head, and her lips gone so thin they were almost invisible, giving her a sorta fishy look. Her skin was pale as a waterlogged corpse, and so tight I could trace the contours in her knuckles with a casual glance. She was starting to smell of some foul concoction of salmon oils and fruit juice, but just a little, only noticeable if you were right beside her.

  Whatever she was, she wouldn’t be passing for human anymore. And she still
didn’t much resemble any Fae I’d ever seen or heard of, not really. Either I’d been right when I suggested they’d put a spell on her to keep her looking human longer, and her body was twisting itself into taffy as it tried to fight those magics, or…

  Well, I hadn’t told her “or.” She was having enough trouble with option number one. See, option two is that, sometimes, the changelings we leave behind ain’t Fae at all. They ain’t even alive in any traditional sense. Just dolls or old logs, enchanted to resemble sickly little babies. Most of the time they die after a few weeks, but if one was made to last longer, could this be the result when it started to fall apart? I couldn’t say; never heard of it happening.

  Either way, if Adalina didn’t finish turning into whatever she was turning into sooner rather’n later—and maybe even if she did, if this proved to be more’n a passing stage of metamorphosis—she’d have serious problems trying to live any kinda life.

  The dried pages rustled under my fingertips as I jotted down a few more lines, and thrust the pad toward Bianca. “Start with these,” I said, as I carefully flipped back to the beginning of the book. See, I hadn’t been copying the strega’s notes in order, but instead I’d begun with the pages that appeared most important. Either they had diagrams of glyphs and runic circles, or had a larger number of notes, or just fell open more easily like the book’d often been propped open at that point.

  I’d recognized enough, in those sections alone, to know that however bad we’d thought our situation was, we’d underestimated it. These were ugly, ugly magics; just from the phrases I could make out, some of those symbols and diagrams, and even the feel of the words on the paper, I could tell this was hellish, soul-shriveling, bloody stuff. Even your average Unseelie witch or warlock wouldn’t casually mess with this kinda—

  Bianca took the pad, her movements stiff, mechanical, and began to read aloud. The first few lines she translated weren’t too useful; just a collection of various ritual materials, herbs and symbols and whatnot. I waved a hand in a “keep going” sort of way. She kept going.