With a Kiss

by Stephanie Fowers

  Chapter Seven

  Scarce set on shore but therewithal

  He meeteth Puck, which most men call

  Hobgoblin, and on him doth fall

  With words from frenzy spoken.

  "Ho, Ho!" quoth Hob,

  "God save thy grace,

  Who dressed thee in this piteous case?"

  —Michael Drayton, Nymphedia

  "I'm babysitting, Mom." I slipped over the polished checkered floor in our kitchen and quickly righted myself so I wouldn't drop the baby. My parents weren't the kind to ask questions where cute, fat babies were concerned. They loved babies. But I couldn't act like I was babysitting all the time. My senior year was starting in a few months. It would be too strange.

  Hobs dropped the groceries on the flowered tablecloth. I stared at him. It was one thing to hide a baby and my shadow's unusual behavior, but now I had to hide an invisible hobgoblin too. You'd think invisibility wouldn't be a problem, but it was.

  Hobs roamed around the kitchen, opening the fridge and then all the cupboards. I didn't know what he was looking for, but he flipped over our cute little strawberry-and-lemon-covered dishtowels to search under them too. I sat the baby on the floor. The kitchen tiles were relatively free of crumbs, and it left me free to follow Hobs around, slamming everything shut after him.

  This weird sleepy disease would be hard to keep from my already concerned parents. I felt like I was trudging through thick honey. And buying diapers? How long would my allowance last before it ran out, especially after buying all that candy?

  "Hey, Halley." Daphne wandered into the kitchen, wearing her pink shirt and flannel pajama bottoms. She was pretending to get a glass of water, but I knew it was just an excuse. Kolby must've gone home tonight. Daphne heard me drive in and wanted to talk. She always wanted to talk, and I never had anything to say. I mean, now I did, but it wasn't very believable. "Where did you go?" she asked.

  I attempted a smile. "I had to get diapers. I'm a new mom."

  The moment Daphne saw the baby on the floor, she let out a squeal and plopped down next to the kid, smoothing back her fuzzy hair. The baby was like one of those Troll dolls. No one could resist the hair. "For how long?"

  "I'm not sure, actually." Daphne looked concerned, the glass of water motionless in her hand. "There was an emergency," I tried to repair the damage my story had caused, but it wasn't working. "The mom's sick," I said. Daphne looked even more concerned and I knew I had to get rid of the suspense and fast. I always had to spoil the ending when we were watching an episode of the Hot Club, too. "She'll be okay, the doctor said. Just a few days or so."

  Her face relaxed. "I hope so. Poor baby. What did Mom and Dad say?"

  "Uh . . . nothing yet."

  She let out a giggle. "They won't be able to say no. She's adorable. What's her name?"

  I hesitated. I was never good at twenty questions. "Baby." Daphne's face registered surprise. "We actually didn't get to that part," I admitted.

  She choked on her glass of water, laughing again. "Only you would do something like that, Halley. Well, we have to call her something, huh, sweetie?" She gathered the baby from the floor, and instead of choosing a chair like any normal person would, she sat on the table instead. Giving the baby her biggest, googliest eyes, she set her on her lap to bounce her. The little girl shook the swirly toy at her, looking very grave. "How about Babs? It's short for baby, huh baby girl?"

  "No, that's short for Barbara," I said.

  "Is it?"

  "I like it." Hobs sat next to them both. The table groaned under their combined weights. I watched the three nervously. Daphne took Babs' hands and played patty cake into the air. Hobs met Babs' hands gamely. "How about it, Babs?" he asked. "You want that to be your name?" She blinked up at him and tried to grab the medallion around his neck with her chubby fingers. My sister just smiled. Babies always stared off into space. I had no idea they could actually be looking at something.

  Hobs tilted his head at the two girls. "Babs has your eyes."

  What? My forehead wrinkled. I had gray eyes. "No, she doesn't. She has my sister's . . ." I said it without thinking, and Hobs chuckled when Daphne looked up at me. He had gotten me to talk to myself again. Daphne watched me expectantly. "Babs," I tried to explain, "has your eyes."

  Daphne leaned her forehead against the baby's, and the baby hit her on the shoulder with that crazy swirly toy. "Oh yeah, I see it," she humored me.

  And that's when my shadow slipped away from me to get a closer look. I gawked, but I couldn't call out a warning as I watched it sneak up on Daphne. Nothing that would make any sense would come out of my mouth anyway, so I closed it firmly. I tensed and got ready to tackle my shadow. It peered over Daphne's shoulder, staring at Babs. No wonder Peter Pan had been so upset with his wandering shadow. Sure, it was just curious now, but what would happen if Daphne noticed it was moving? Or if it tried to attack?

  I tried to follow it, completely reversing our roles to make my shadow look somewhat attached to me. When that failed, I pulled Babs from Daphne, trying to distract my sister. "She needs a diaper change." I closed the fridge door on my way out of the kitchen. "Stay out of the food," I growled low to Hobs.

  Daphne stood up in a rush. "Hey Halley, I was wondering . . . uh, have you seen my purse?"

  I held Babs close to me and gave the living room a quick scan as I walked through. Just like usual, everything was perfectly in place. The TV had been pushed out of sight, letting the fireplace take center stage. The only thing a tad unsightly was the weekly paper scattered across the couches. The wall was covered with the miniature clocks my mother had collected from Leavenworth a few cities away from us. I listened to the ticking sound, and gasped when I saw something from the corner of my eye. It was the last time I looked too closely at anything in our house. Some weird slimy thing scurried across the grandfather clock, dragging Daphne's purse behind him. It looked like a rat man. I teetered backwards, screaming.

  Daphne rushed over to me. "Oh, there it is. Thanks." She tugged her purse from the sinister looking creature. Its mouth and fangs blew up to abnormal size, and it hissed at her, but Daphne wasn't scrambling into the nearest corner to suck her thumb—the lucky girl couldn't see it. Rat man finally had to give up her purse. How frustrating to be beaten by such a sweet little thing.

  "I was looking for that . . ." Her voice trailed off when she saw how scared I was. I tried to shrug it off and stepped closer to Hobs for protection, all the while forcing out my most casual smile. "What's the matter?" Daphne asked.

  My mom came out from one of the back rooms in her checkered pajamas. "Halley?"

  "Yeah," I said. "I thought I saw a . . . a . . ." Monster? ". . . some sort of . . . pest." I glanced at Hobs.

  "Gremlins," he said with a careless lift of his shoulders. "Your house is infested with them; that and brownies."

  My sister looked revolted. "Oh, I hope not. What was it? A mouse?"

  "Get used to it. You've got faery vision now," Hobs told me. "You can see everything." Another gift from the faery queen.

  "Halley," my mom said. "You still have the baby!"

  I heard more grumbling from behind the couches and noticed my shadow take off to go check it out. I turned tail, rushing for my room before I became completely unglued.

  "Wait," Daphne shouted after me. "Are you okay?"

  "Fine, fine." I ran down the plush-carpeted hallway past my surprised dad, knocking the remote from his hand on his way to the living room. "Sorry, Dad!"

  "Hi honey. Still in character, huh?" He patted his head where my tiara would be.

  "Yes!"

  His eyes went to the baby. Before he could ask me about her, I turned and saw my shadow chasing after me. I wasn't sure if that was a good thing. I ripped open the door to escape it. Well, I tried to, but there were a lot of clothes in the way. They covered the ground like leaves in the fall. I kicked them free with some difficulty and managed to get the door shut. I listened to the creaks in the
house—I hadn't been aware of them before. We were surrounded.

  "I think you need to clean up in here . . . or rake or something." Hobs glanced around, gingerly lifting a plaid jacket off the ground with his foot. I hadn't seen him come into my room.

  "What's the matter?" my dad asked through the door.

  "Fine, fine, I'm fine!"

  "Are you sure?"

  I shook my head, watching my shadow skip across my dirty room. It knocked into my bead curtains over the window, then tripped over the pink fur rug. It really wasn't one for brains, was it? And yet it was a part of me; just this afternoon I had been tripping over those too. I took a deep breath. "Please tell me that's just my shadow," I whispered to Hobs.

  He sat heavily on the end of my unmade bed. "It's a Fylgia, a sprite formed from your membrane."

  I couldn't even pretend to know what he was saying. "What's wrong with it?"

  "It's fine, just fine. Pretty hot, actually." He was mocking me.

  "Are you alright, honey?" My mom jiggled the door handle.

  Great, the whole family brigade was outside. "Just getting dressed," I sang.

  "With me in here?" Hobs gave me an arch look. I shrugged. He took Babs from me and smiled brightly at her. "Scandalous."

  I cast him an annoyed look. "They're a little protective. I was sick, um . . . when I was a kid, and they can't leave me alone. Even the twins think they have to take care of me."

  "Were you cursed as a child?"

  "No!" I remembered the hands, and shook my head. "I'm over it."

  Dad wasn't through with me yet. "Why do you still have that baby from the play, honey?"

  "I . . . I'm babysitting."

  "Still? It's a little late for that, isn't it?"

  I took the baby from Hobs and ripped open the door to see my concerned dad in the hallway. His eyes moved to the baby, and I gave him my most pleading expression. "Dad, it's a huge emergency. The parents are in the hospital. Nobody else can take care of her. I have to take her overnight."

  My dad looked at my mother. They let me get away with murder—that's what I was banking on. They wouldn't with Daphne, but then again she was normal, and they wanted so badly for me to be normal. I waited breathlessly for the verdict and tried to look motherly. Having a baby under my wing would only make me more human.

  Just as I thought, my parents broke into a smile and nodded. Psychologists. They left, murmuring something about finding blankets for my new charge. I slammed the door shut again.

  "Halley?" Daphne called through the door. Oops. She was still out there and the most dogged of the bunch. "I just want to talk to you. It's been so long since we've done anything together."

  Daphne just wanted an excuse to spend time with me. I shoved the baby at Hobs and slid down the flimsy door onto a pile of clothes. I put my hands over my ears the more she talked. I couldn't understand why this was affecting me so much. For some reason, I really wanted to have some girl time with her too. I heard loneliness in her voice that I never understood before, and now? It hurt really bad not to go to her. "Not right now," I said, "okay?"

  I heard her shuffle away and felt a sense of loss, but I wasn't sure why. She had something she wanted to tell me, something important to her . . . and I actually cared. My hand went over my heart where the faery queen had touched me. I had to fix this. I got up and swiped all the junk off my chair so I could sit down at the computer. I needed to figure out where the faeries were and how to get the baby there . . . and hopefully break this curse they had over me. I couldn't take being normal anymore. It hurt too much. Pulling the year-old Post-it Notes from my screen, I brought up the Internet and typed in fairies with an i. I got more than a million links.

  Hobs dragged a chair one-handed from my vanity to sit down next to my computer. He stared at me. Babs did too, and I had a hard time concentrating on the information on the computer screen. "Do you have a shard of ice in your heart? Is that what happened to you when you got sick?"

  "What's that supposed to mean?"

  "Can you feel?"

  I snorted. More than ever. I didn't want to admit that my heart had been virtually dead before this. Just who were these faeries anyway? And why did they have so much control over me? "The queen sent you to help me," I said, "so help me already. Why don't you tell me how to get this baby back home?"

  "Wait three days. You heard the queen."

  "I can't wait three days!" I skimmed through the sites like my life depended on it, which it did. Even now I could feel my eyes water over with exhaustion. Besides the threat of drowning with these new emotions that washed over me, I felt like I was swimming through heavy water . . . slower than a zombie. Or maybe more like a Banshee? A drowning mermaid?

  Forget it.

  "And you think an Internet search will tell you what you need to know? Such faith."

  "Well, you won't tell me!" I clicked on the first site, and then to the next and the next. "I need to figure out how to get to the Otherworld—the sooner, the better. If you won't help me, then quit bugging me."

  Hobs leaned his chin against Babs' bobble head. She shook her swirly toy at me. "Baby, this is the Otherworld."

  I refused to believe it, and skimmed through the pages, site after site: faeries were a race of the gods. I glanced over at Hobs. Doubtful. Babs dropped her swirly toy and tugged a stuffed yellow chick from a shelf, trying to gnaw on it. She must be teething. Hobs tugged it teasingly from her and played keep-away with it. She didn't participate, just watched. He threw the stuffed animal, then rolled it down his arm and bounced it off the faint stripes of his jeans like it was a Hacky Sack. Yeah. I checked the deity theory right off the list and read through some others.

  After the defeat of the sons of Mil, the faeries escaped underground or to a different dimension or across the ocean to the west. America? Well, I sure hoped so. That would make things a lot more convenient, since I wouldn't have to travel across the ocean to get these two back home. I only had three days to do it—talk about incentive. My gaze darted across the screen. The faeries called their land the Sidhe, pronounced she. Or it was called Tuatha or land of the young or . . . I leaned my head back. "I'll never figure this out!"

  Hobs grinned, and I uneasily ignored it. The more I learned, the more I realized how impossible it was to pinpoint where to find the faeries' domain. Everyone had a theory. Scandinavians, Celts, Germans. I had no doubt my newfound friends caused a ruckus everywhere they went. But I had nothing to go on, except rumors passed down from the ancients. It seemed the Celts had a pretty good superstitious handle on these things, which meant they probably had direct contact with faeries, but where were all their records? The stuffed chick hit me square in the face, and I swiveled on Hobs. "So what about you? Did someone curse you to be annoying?"

  He shrugged. "Sorry. I'm not used to sitting and doing nothing."

  Yeah? I stole the stuffed animal from him. The guy couldn't keep still. He was more a baby than Babs was. I turned back to the screen. What was the connection? Faeries seemed to have a need for babies and women and young lovers and midwives . . . and why? What was the appeal of humans? Namely happy ones? Did faeries suck blood or something? Or people's happy juice? Were they envious of our souls? I didn't buy any of it. They took humans as slaves? Maybe.

  I glanced back at Hobs, and with a start, caught him reading the site over my shoulder. His chin grazed against mine. "They got it wrong," he murmured at length. "Faeries could care less about humans." He turned a devilish look on me. "Unless they get in the way, of course."

  "Then what am I doing here?"

  He laughed. "Good question." He wasn't about to answer it either. I went back to the computer for a clue. Faeries needed nature and music and dancing and moonlight. How dumb. They needed to be appeased with offerings. Hobs snorted at that, and I pushed his face away from my shoulder, trying to concentrate. "They make us look really stupid, don't they?" he said. "Maybe it stops mortals from being afraid."

  If that was the plan, it
wasn't working. I was very afraid, especially when I read about the dangers of a faery touch. It disfigured. It maimed. My heart lurched at the gory Celtic paintings on my screen. A faery hand over a human head caused madness, the hand over the heart caused sickness . . . and a kiss? Death. The faery queen had really done a number on me. I rubbed at my eyes, resolved to never touch Hobs again. "The queen did everything to me that she shouldn't have done," I said.

  Hobs didn't look concerned. "How else could she give you faery vision?"

  "Well, for starters, she didn't have to kill me!" Your days are numbered here. The queen had even given me a time limit and then I was dead. One, two, three the sun circles. Another world you'll see. Three days and I was out of this world. My first day was almost gone. I had to figure this out before my time was up. "I have to break the curse," I whispered.

  Hobs scooted even closer to me, warmth emanating from him. I tried to pull away and knocked my elbow against the wall behind me. The baby tugged the stuffed Peep off the desk and started to gum it to death. "You want to try?" Hobs asked.

  "Try what?"

  "To break the curse. It only takes a kiss." He looked at me like he wanted to go for it, and I scowled at him. His lips turned up and his eyes probed mine as if he were trying to figure me out.

  I refused to move, knowing exactly what would happen if he tried to kiss me. I'd smack him a good one. I’d had enough of faery kisses. "Oh, no you don't. Kisses are deadly."

  "Not all the time. I'd say the kiss of the faery queen brought you back to life."

  "I wasn't dead." My voice cracked when he gave me that smile of his, and I groaned. Of all the people to tug at my heart strings, he shouldn't be the one.

  "You were dead," he said, "in a matter of speaking."

  The baby lost interest in the stuffed animal and grabbed at the chain around Hobs' neck. Maybe it would choke him; but of course, it didn't. He stuffed the toy back into Babs' hands to keep her busy, but it was too late. My attention had been drawn to the medallion. It looked like a charm or a talisman. Is that where he held his power? I was close enough to find out, and without asking, I tugged it my way so I could inspect it. He got into my personal space, I'd get into his. Only he didn't resist. I turned the medallion over in my hand. It was round and silver and still warm from his skin. There was writing engraved on it. It wasn't just warm—it was hot. I yelped and dropped it. "That burned me!"

  He smirked wryly. "Try wearing it."

  I swiveled back to my computer, typing Hobs in the search engine and got kitchen hobs. My nose wrinkled. C'mon, who was he? After a moment of hesitation, I put in Puck. A huge number of complaints popped up. Devil, Pan, imp, pagan trickster. Hmmm, apparently Shakespeare wasn't the only who had trouble with him—the Germans and the Swedish couldn't stand him. I raised an eyebrow at him. "You get around," I turned back to read his online record, ". . . in more ways than one. You blow out candles and kiss girls in the darkness?" After reading that, I snickered, "Who would think it of you?" He didn't have the grace to flush, and I smiled, feeling tired. He was crazy like me. Was that why I liked him? Maybe there was something to say for the bad boys—as long as they weren't real.

  "Yeah, but look what a good protector I am." He lifted his chin, indicating the screen. It was clear by his calm look that he didn't agree with anything that was written about him, though according to the latest site, he was a good faery to have around . . . when it suited him.

  I didn't know what to believe anymore. I just wished I could find something more reliable than these foggy rumors lost in biased history. "If I could get hold of some old Irish manuscripts," I said. Of course, no matter how speedy the delivery, I'd be dead by the time it got here. Three days' time was nothing.

  "What do the Irish have to do with this?" Hobs asked.

  I felt like stomping my foot. "How else are we going to travel to . . . uh," for lack of a better word, ". . . to faeryland?"

  "Faeryland?" Just as I expected, he laughed. "That sounds as dumb as people-land. It's the Sidhe. Get it right. You're going to be spending a lot of time there." He plopped Babs on the floor with a blanket, and after reading the tabloid headlines about the suspected Skinwalker peeling off his face at a golf course, he chucked that aside. "Useless, but this . . ." He pulled out the faerytales he’d made me buy. "This is all about the Cloan ny Moyrn." His eyes sought mine. "Children of Pride," he explained. "Don't worry. It's just a euphemism. If I used the name of our real race, you'd invoke all the faeries down here at once. Then you'd see a real battle."

  I sucked in my breath at the thought. "I wouldn't wish that on anyone."

  "Ah, so you do have a heart. Here ya go, person." He handed the book of faerytales to me, and I flipped through it, listening to him narrate. "These are the faery prophecies. The book of the ancients."

  It was just a regular children's book: Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, Snow White, Jack and the Beanstalk, Rumpelstiltskin. I gave him a look of disbelief. He just shrugged. "A lot of these records get lost in translation, of course. The pagans liked to put their spin on everything: Easter Bunny, Christmas trees, Valentine's Day. Wow. Now that used to be a day."

  I had a hard time ignoring that. "So, this is essentially your people's history?"

  "Not really. These are prophecies. Big bad wolves? Girls getting stuck in towers. Gold spinning faeries stealing firstborns? What if I told you that faerytales were real, they just haven't happened yet? And the happy endings? I'm sorry to tell you, but that's just wishful thinking."

  It figured.