Cass stole a glance up at their court-appointed elf again, comparing his features with those of the fairies that passed them on either side. The fairies looked like a bunch of snobby supermodels with wings. In contrast, O’Shea’s blunt features looked almost rough.
Once again she thought it looked like his nose had been broken at some point, but who would or could break this particular elf’s nose? She knew she certainly wouldn’t want to try, as much as she might enjoy the moment of satisfaction when her fist connected with his annoying face.
Abruptly O’Shea looked down at her, his pale leaf green eyes seeming to pierce right through her.
Cass’s cheeks grew hot with a blush but she refused to drop her gaze even though she felt like he could see right through her thin night shirt with that penetrating gaze. His expression was smooth and deliberately blank but his eyes had an intensity she wished she could capture on canvas.
“Was there something you wanted, Miss Swann?” he asked at last. “Some reason you feel the need to study me?”
“I don’t want anything from you except for you to let go of my arm,” Cass said defiantly. There was no way she was going to tell him she’d been wishing she could paint him—he was already insufferably full of himself.
“I’m afraid that’s quite impossible.” He gave a quick shake of his head.
“Why?” Cass demanded. “Because you don’t trust me? Do you really think I’d be stupid enough to risk running away when I don’t even know how to get back to my own world without help?”
O’Shea’s lips twitched in what might have been the beginning of a smile.
“Not at all, Miss Swann. It’s just that I don’t trust this crowd.” He faced forward again and she had to be content to study the passing faces and wonder what he meant as they continued walking.
O’Shea’s hand on her arm remained firm but every once in a while, when he shifted his grip, his warm knuckles brushed against the side of her right breast, sending a strange shiver down her spine.
Cass didn’t think it was on purpose or she would have stopped right there on the sidewalk and slapped him no matter how scary he was, but it was still an uncomfortable, confusing feeling.
Wish I’d had time to put on a bra! she thought uneasily.
There was one good thing about being led by their court-appointed elf instead of walking by herself, though. Glancing over her shoulder, Cass could see that Phil and Rory and her Nana were getting jostled by some of the other pedestrians on the sidewalk. But no one so much as touched either her or O’Shea. He walked confidently forward as though he owned the sidewalk and the crowd parted before him in invisible waves.
Arrogant prick, she thought, glaring up at him. He just expects everyone to get out of his way. But her attention was soon drawn away from the irritating elf to the other pedestrians around them.
The full-blooded fairies weren’t the only people worth looking at—if the rest of the citizens crowding the streets could be called people. Cass saw a couple that looked like giants holding hands as they crossed the busy street in three large strides. She estimated the woman was as much as eight feet tall and the man who was holding her frying-pan sized hand was more like ten feet. He ducked absentmindedly as a flying couch-car, which looked like it was on a collision course with his watermelon-sized head, narrowly missed him.
Not far behind the giant couple was a group of what looked like construction workers. They were wearing pale orange safety vests and hard-hats. But their hard-hats were the size of thimbles and the workers that wore them were about as tall as the length of her palm.
They were riding in what looked like a chariot harnessed to a large crow that cawed raucously around the reins attached to its beak as it flew. There were other people of all different sizes, some even stranger than the giants or the tiny workers, all hurrying about their business with distracted looks on what passed for their faces, but Cass couldn’t take them all in. After a while it was a massive brain overload.
Man, this is some weird shit, she thought, trying to see everything and everyone without looking like a gawking tourist.
Despite being an artist, she’d never been much into experimental drugs. But seeing all the strange and colorful people around her reminded her of the one time she’d allowed a friend to talk her into dropping acid. The colors in the Realm looked more vibrant somehow, more alive than those of the world she was used to.
With all the strange people and creatures surrounding her, she felt like she’d somehow gotten dumped into an urban version of The Chronicles of Narnia. All she needed to make the scene complete was one of those sentient, talking animals C.S. Lewis had written about.
As if in answer to her thought, she saw a huge black horse without a rider suddenly step into the road across from them and start to cross the street. It seemed like a bad idea with the crazy traffic but the horse had made it most of the way across before disaster struck.
A multi-passenger vehicle Cass would have called a bus, except for the stumpy rhinoceros legs where its tires should have been and the wicked looking horn attached to its grille, was suddenly in the horse’s way.
The horse snorted and tried to go around the rhino-bus, but the bus seemed to take offense. Grunting fiercely, it charged forward and before the huge horse could dodge out of the way, the evil looking horn had gored deep into its shiny black flank.
Cass watched in horrified fascination as the horse threw up its head and screamed—not a shrill whinny but an actual human-sounding scream—staggered a few steps to the curb not three yards from their feet and collapsed.
Behind her, she heard Nana and Phil exclaim in surprise and then a red blur was rushing past her to get to the fallen horse. It was Rory, her deep red hair flying like a flag in the wind as she ran.
“Rory, no!” she heard Nana shout as her little sister fell to her knees beside the huge black animal and cradled its long bullet shaped head on her lap.
O’Shea cursed under his breath again and suddenly dropped Cass’s arm, racing to get to Rory who was completely absorbed in the wounded horse.
Cass ran forward too, jostling through the crowd that was beginning to gather.
“Don’t touch it!” she heard Nana, who had somehow gotten ahead of her, shrieking. Phil was jammed beside their grandmother, also shouting at Rory to come away and Cass watched over their shoulders as O’Shea dropped to his knees beside her younger sister and said something in a low voice she didn’t quite catch.
“But why?” she heard Rory ask. She was sobbing by now, her pale skin blotched and her green eyes red-rimmed with tears. “Why shouldn’t I touch it? It’s hurt. He’s hurt. Don’t you have vets in your world? We need to get him to the animal hospital now!”
Peering over the shoulders of her sister and grandmother, Cass could see that the immense black horse had stopped struggling and was lying quietly now, its dark liquid eye rolled up to regard Rory with what she could have sworn was complete confidence.
“It’s a phooka,” she heard O’Shea saying in a remarkably patient voice. “You need to step away from it now, Aurora. It’s not safe.”
“I don’t care what he is—he’s hurt! And I don’t care about your damn court date either. I’m staying right here until he gets medical attention,” Rory yelled, tears dripping down her cheeks. “He’s probably dying right now!” She stroked the horse’s long, velvety nose and the large apple-bright eye looking up at her began to glaze, as though confirming her fears.
Cass watched the scene, wishing she could get in through the crowd to put an arm around her sister and offer support. She considered herself something of a cynical bitch but Rory saw the world through rose colored glasses which made it hard on her littler sister whenever her optimistic view of life was shattered.
“Excuse me, do you mind?” she said, trying to push through the crowd of people and creatures that had gathered. “I need to get in there. She’s my sister! Nana? Phil? Hey!” But her sister and grandmother were far ahead of
her now and various strange people were separating her from her family.
“Rude much, ssssweetheart?” someone muttered. It appeared to be a woman to her right that looked like she had grayish-yellow scales instead of skin. She bumped Cass impatiently and shot her a nasty look from slotted yellow eyes when Cass tried to push ahead of her.
“She’s my sister,” Cass protested but the snake-skinned woman didn’t reply.
“Phooka down. Big one, too. That’s what they said,” someone else was saying.
To Cass’s left, several people with long white beards that might have been dwarves pushed against her hip, trying to see. Behind her, someone was tugging on the hem of her night shirt and someone else stepped on her toe, smashing it through the thin Bert slipper. What a circus!
Cass swore and hopped as well as she could, trying to get a better view of her sister and get away from the toe-smasher at the same time.
Just as she wanted to scream with impatience, Cass caught another look at Rory over the shoulders of the people in front of her. Her little sister was still crying but strangely, the horse she was holding no longer looked like it was on the edge of death. As she watched, Rory’s abundant tears fell down her cheeks to wet the black velvet of the horse’s long nose. Suddenly the large liquid eye which had been glazing in death blinked and looked up searchingly into Rory’s face.
Cass frowned. What the hell is going on? Is she healing it or something?
O’Shea and Nana were still urging Rory to get up and leave the horse alone but she had eyes only for the animal in her lap. As Cass watched, the wounded flank heaved and the blood that had been flowing in a red rush onto the pink marble sidewalk slowed and then stopped entirely. In a moment more, the gaping wound the rhino-bus had caused actually began to close.
“She is!” Cass said out loud, too excited to stop herself. “She is healing it!”
“Yes, but at what pricssse?” the snake-skinned woman asked, a forked tongue flickering briefly from between her thin lips. “Healing a phooka—that will cosst a piece of her sssoul.”
“But I…she…” Cass protested and then she felt something tugging on the back of her night shirt again.
“Hey lady,” said a voice in her ear. “Are you human?”
Five
Cass turned to see several men staring at her with narrow, interested yellow eyes. At least, she thought they were men. None of them stood higher than her shoulder and since she was only five foot six and a half, it meant that they weren’t very tall. They were short and squat with rough brownish skin that looked a little like tree bark and their arms were too long for their bodies. They were wearing denim workpants and stained white shirts that pulled tight over their round potbellies. She could scarcely imagine stranger looking people but Cass supposed she looked strange to them too which was probably what had prompted their question.
“You human?” one of them, presumably the leader of the three, repeated, looking up at her with squint-eyed interest.
“Yes and I’m not ashamed of it either, all right?” Cass crossed her arms over her chest and frowned down at the strange looking men.
The three of them muttered among themselves and Cass heard one of them say, “Dizzle was right—a genuine human right here in the Realm. Wonder how he knew?”
“Look, I don’t have all day,” she said impatiently. “What…er who are you, anyway?”
“Don’t matter what we are, girly. Matters what a fine price a pure human’ll fetch at Market,” the squinty-eyed leader replied.
“What market? What are you talking about?” Cass started to back away into the crowd behind her but the too-long arm reached out quick as lightening and suddenly there were seven knobby fingers wrapped around her wrist. Seven? Cass thought disjointedly, staring at the weird sight. Some of the fingers were so long they wrapped around her wrist twice. What the hell?
“Come on now. Come quiet-like and we might not have to bite you.” The little man grinned, showing a mouthful of jagged yellow teeth like dirty icicles. He dragged her and his two companions got behind her and started herding her away from the crowd, away from her sisters and Nana, away from O’Shea and safety.
“Hey, wait a minute! What are you doing? Let me go!” Cass wanted to shout at the top of her lungs but somehow nothing but a hoarse whisper came out of her throat. What was wrong with her voice? The little brown man who was dragging her forward chuckled.
“What’za matter, girly? Cat got yer tongue?”
“Don’t need no cat with you around, Zeke,” one of the men behind her said. “Yer the best at voice losin’ charms, you are.”
Cass felt their sharp, knobby fingers pressing and poking at the small of her back as they maneuvered her away from the crowd that was still hovering around Rory and the phooka horse.
“’Magine the gold she’ll fetch,” growled the other one. “Just think, a human wanderin’ around the Realm not expectin’ to be caught. Wonder how she got in?”
The leader shrugged carelessly, a movement that loosened his seven fingered grip on her wrist not at all. “Dunno. Mayhap she wandered in through one o’ the willow doors or a sprite led her astray. Doesn’t matter now though. She’s ours. We got to give Dizzle a cut since he put us on the trail once we sell her, though.”
“I’m not yours! Let me go!”
Once more her scream came out as a whisper. Cass shook her head. What the hell was going on? And where were the three men taking her? Up ahead she could see the entrance to an alley between two of the huge pastel buildings looming like an open mouth.
It was dark in the alley—a darkness that couldn’t be explained by the shadows in the narrow black space or the sudden clouds overhead. There was something in there, she suddenly thought. Something her brain had no name for. But nameless or not, her stomach clenched like a fist with sudden dread and she began to fight the three little men in earnest.
“Let me go! Get your hands off of me!” she whisper-screamed, kicking and flailing. A full-blooded fairy passed them on the street and Cass threw an appealing glance over her shoulder at the tall blond man with silver blue wings that rose higher than his head.
“Pay no attention, boss,” Cass’s captor said, giving the fairy a big cheesy smile. “Just a troublesome slave that ran away from home. We’re takin’ her back where she belongs.”
“He’s lying!” Cass whispered at the top of her lungs. She was fairly sure by the way the tall, slender fairy man looked at her that he had understood what she was trying to say. But he only shrugged and kept moving along the pink marble sidewalk, leaving her to her fate.
Thanks a lot, asshole! Cass thought furiously. Apparently there was no such thing as helping your fellow man, or in this case woman, in the Realm of the Fae.
“None of that now,” the leader said, frowning.
“Who knew humans was so feisty?” remarked one of the men behind her. “I allus thought they were kinder stupid—like sheep.”
“She won’t be feisty much longer once the sucker gets hold.” The leader nodded over his shoulder to where the dark entity Cass had no name for was waiting in the blackness of the alley. It was getting closer and closer.
“Let…me…go!” She kicked out suddenly as the man who was dragging her—planting one slippered foot in his perfectly round potbelly. He grunted and doubled over, losing his grip on her wrist for a moment and Cass thought she was going to be able to break free.
But before she could turn to run away from him, his long fingers caught in the neck of her lady bug night shirt and yanked her back, pulling her face down to his.
“Here now! Catch ‘er! Don’t let ‘er go!” he gasped. His breath smelled like stale dirt. Out of the corner of her eye, Cass could see the other two men reaching for her with equally long fingers.
She threw herself backward with all her might, feeling the neck of her nightshirt saw against the back of her neck. The shirt, which was old and soft from repeated trips through the washer and dryer, suddenly ripped at t
he neck where the little man was holding it.
Suddenly Cass was falling backwards, expecting to feel the cold hard marble of the sidewalk beneath her back, knocking the wind out of her at any second.
Large warm hands caught her instead and set her on her feet again. Cass looked up in shock to see O’Shea standing behind her with a murderous look on his face. The small brown men who had been trying to abduct her plainly saw it too because they huddled together in a group, clutching at each other in fright.
“A Spell-singer!” Cass heard one of them mutter. “Dizzle din’t say nothin’ about no Spell-singer bein’ around.” They turned as one to run but O’Shea held out a hand.
“Stop!” he said in a voice like thunder.
Or at least, that was the word Cass heard in her head. What actually came out of his mouth sounded like something in Gaelic. There was a strange vibration in the air as though an invisible force, like an icy blast of power, had gone out of him.
In response and clearly against their will, all three of the small brown men turned to face him. Looks of terror were plastered across their brown, knobby faces.
They had, Cass thought, plenty of reason to look terrified. As she watched, O’Shea seemed to grow larger and even more menacing, looming over her three would- be abductors with a fierce light in his pale leaf-green eyes.
“What do you think you’re doing?” he asked them in a calm, deadly voice. “This human woman is under my protection—she’s mine. Where did you think you were taking her?”
“Oh, now, boss, there’s nothin’ to get too excited about,” the leader of the three quavered holding out a seven fingered hand in a warding off gesture. “Me and my boys, we just saw this pretty little human wanderin’ around loose-like and we thought we’d try an’ help her get back home.”
“Help her back by way of the Market, I suppose,” O’Shea growled, seeming to grow even larger. His black eyebrows were pulled low over the pale and deadly eyes.
Be Careful What You Wish For Page 4