Black Swan Rising

by Lee Carroll

  “So you’re from Haiti?” I asked, looking him straight in the eye. I remembered from the fairy tales that my mother read me that fairies couldn’t lie to a direct question.

  “My people came to the islands from abroad,” he said, smiling slyly.

  “But you really knew Santé Leone? You look young to have been much more than a kid in the seventies when Santé lived in Haiti.”

  “I’m older than I look. I came to New York right around the time Santé did. In fact, I was just telling your father that Santé stayed at my place for a while. Just before he died he left a painting in my apartment. It’s of a beautiful dark-haired woman standing in front of a stone tower. It’s called Marguerite.”

  “It must be of your mother,” Zach said. “Santé thought the world of her . . . of course we all did.”

  I looked over at Zach. He had swept up the playing cards, his big rawboned hands deftly shuffling them. There was something different about him. I hadn’t noticed my father’s or Zach’s aura since I’d walked in because Oberon’s green glow overwhelmed every other color in the room, but now I noticed that there was a lighter green glow around Zach. It was the color of new leaves in the spring and was only about a quarter inch thick, but even though I’d never consciously seen Zach’s aura before, I was sure this hadn’t been its color . . . at least not for a long time.

  The other thing I noticed was that Zach’s hands weren’t shaking. I don’t think I had ever seen them this steady. Certainly not when he talked about my mother.

  “Of course it’s of Margot,” my father said. “He always called her Marguerite. ‘Marguerite, my tower of strength,’ he’d say, ‘watch over me.’ It does me good to think he painted her near the end, that he hadn’t forgotten her.” I looked at my father, surprised that he’d remembered that Santé was dead. He didn’t seem upset, though.

  “I’d like to see that painting,” I said, looking up at Oberon Smith.

  “I told your father that I would bring it to him, but perhaps you’ll come with me and bring it back yourself. I’m going off my shift now. If you’re not busy, you could come with me. I don’t live far.”

  “I only just got here, I want to spend some time with my father . . .” But before I could finish my sentence I heard a low gurgling sound. I glanced at my father and saw that he had fallen asleep and was snoring peacefully.

  “I’m afraid we’ve tired him out telling stories all night,” Oberon said in a low, musical voice. He laid a hand on Zach’s shoulder, and the big man slumped down in his chair and instantly fell asleep. The leaf-green glow around Zach’s skin pulsed and thickened another quarter inch. “Why don’t you come with me. We’ve got much to talk about.”

  I got up and followed Oberon out of the room. There were a million things I wanted to ask. Were there more creatures like him? Was he really the same Oberon that Shakespeare wrote about in A Midsummer Night’s Dream? Could he fly with those wings? Or were they an illusion, a trick? Was it all a trick? Was I going crazy? But instead I found myself asking a rather mundane question about his profession. “So,” I asked when we were in the hallway, “what’s the King of Moonshine, Prince of Dreams, doing working in a hospital?”

  He tilted his head back and deep, rumbling laughter flowed out into the hospital corridor. A wave of green-gold light cascaded in front of him washing over an orderly and a shrunken, desiccated man in a wheelchair, who looked up and lifted a trembling hand to his own face as if he’d just remembered who he was.

  “That old scoundrel Horace Walpole! I told him his flowery praise would embarrass me someday. Well, to answer your question, darling, things are rough all over. And they’re about to get rougher.”

  Gone to Earth

  I followed Oberon to the nurses’ fifth-floor locker room so he could get his coat and watched as he swung it over his shoulders. It slid between his shoulder blades and wings without ruffling his wings at all.

  “The first thing you have to learn,” he said, taking in where my gaze rested, “is that magic and reality—what you’re used to thinking of as reality—are layered. It’s not always so clear where the one leaves off and the other begins.”

  “I thought my job as a Watchtower was to guard the door between the two,” I said as we took the elevator down to the lobby.

  He gave me a long assessing look, but instead of saying anything he took out a Sharpie pen from one pocket and a pack of multicolored Post-it notes from the other. He scribbled something on the top green note—a sort of spiral doodle—then flipped to the next sheet and scribbled the same mark on that.

  We didn’t speak for the rest of the ride down or as he strode through the lobby so fast that the tails of his long coat snapped at his heels. Outside, he crossed Twelfth Street in the middle of the block. I had to dodge a car to keep up with him. Had I said something to make him angry? Maybe I wasn’t supposed to talk about being a watchtower.

  Halfway down the block he abruptly stopped, his wings beating the air as he turned, grabbed me, and pulled me into a doorway framed by two columns. He pushed me behind him and spread out his arms, a Post-it note affixed to the palm of each hand. The symbols he had drawn began to glow green, then blue, then white—like heating metal—and then began to smoke. The inside of the spiral glowed like an eye. Then he wrapped his hands around the columns on either side of the doorway. I heard a sizzling sound and smelled singed flesh. When he moved his hands away, the spiral eyes were imprinted on the columns, glowing silver. A skein of light, like a spiderweb made up of silver threads, sprung up between the two columns.

  I wanted to ask him if it had hurt his hands, but when he turned to me, his eyes were blazing gold and green with anger. He pulled my scarf down away from my throat, revealing the marks on my neck.

  “Tell me everything that happened between you and the vampire,” he said, his voice stern, all trace of that lovely West Indies accent gone now. “And everything he told you about the Watchtower.”

  I told him everything that happened from the time Will Hughes’s driver picked me up until the moment Will Hughes vanished from the park. While we talked, two people approached the doorway—one a woman with grocery bags in her arms who clearly lived there, the other a UPS deliveryman carrying a package and clipboard. Each time their eyes became cloudy when they approached the doorway. They stopped, appeared to remember something they had forgotten, turned around, and left. The deliveryman had been so close to me that I had looked straight into his eyes, but I couldn’t see my own reflection in them, only an empty doorway.

  When I was done, Oberon asked one question. “You say he told you Fenodoree’s name?”

  I nodded.

  “All right,” he said after a moment. “We’d better go talk to Puck.”

  He peeled the two Post-it notes off the doorway. The two spiral eyes blinked and then vanished. The silver web sizzled and dissolved into a shower of sparks, which Oberon stirred with his hands and then walked through. At Seventh Avenue he crossed against the light. A yellow cab screeched to a halt inches from us. Oberon glared at the driver and the man stammered an apology. We continued west on Greenwich Avenue. Oberon’s green aura had dwindled to a hard malachite shell, but it glowed with a fiercer light, like a banked fire. People on the street got out of his way. Three car alarms went off as he passed. A Great Dane whimpered and pulled his owner into the gutter.

  “I don’t understand what’s so bad,” I said. “Will Hughes saved me from the manticore. He told me to seek out a fey guide. He seemed . . . nice.”

  “That’s what’s so bad,” Oberon roared, turning on me. “You thinking a four-hundred-year-old bloodsucking vampire—a creature of the darkness—seems nice. You . . . the descendant of the Watchtower.”

  “According to the story he told me, the original Marguerite was in love with him. She’s the reason he became a vampire in the first place.”

  “And did you believe everything he told you?”

  I considered the question. I found that when I though
t about Will Hughes, I felt a prickling sensation in my neck where he had bitten me. The sensation traveled down my throat, into my chest, made my heart beat faster, then spread lower. I remembered his body pressed against mine, his mouth on my throat, the tug of a silver thread that traveled from his lips to the core of my being. I could feel it now. I lifted my hand in front of my face and saw a silver glow surrounding my fingers. We’re connected, he’d said. Could he have lied to me after that?

  “I believe that he believed everything he told me,” I said.

  Oberon reached out and touched my hand. The silver light flared. Sparks flew into the air—silver and gold—then swirled up into the sky like a miniature tornado. “Okay,” Oberon said, nodding. “I think you’re right about that part—and you’re not so far gone that you can’t question what he says. I think he tied himself as much to you as he tied you to him . . . and that might come in handy. But don’t forget, he’s a thing of the dark. He may not be on Dee’s side, but he’s not on ours either.”

  We’d come to the corner of Cordelia and Hudson, to the door of Puck’s tea shop. Oberon stopped and looked up Cordelia Street toward the river.

  “What did Hughes say about the demons Dee would raise?” he asked me.

  I closed my eyes to remember exactly what Will Hughes had said. I could hear his voice so clearly that when I opened my eyes, I half expected to find him standing in front of me. In broad daylight. The thought that he hadn’t stood outside in the sunlight for four hundred years brought tears to my eyes.

  “He said that Dee would use the box to summon the ‘demons of Despair and Discord.’ ”

  “Despair and Discord? Those were his exact words?”

  “Yes.”

  “I just want to look at something.” He took off down the street. This time I couldn’t begin to keep up with him. I found him standing in front of 121½ Cordelia Street, staring at the glass door with its faded gilt lettering. Air & Mist, it had read before, I was sure of it. But now other letters had appeared. A d, an e, and an s on the line above the word air, and a d above the word mist—only the t in mist had disappeared and part of the ampersand had rubbed off, leaving something that looked like a letter d. The letters c o r and d had appeared in the bottom line where you would expect the street address to be. I knew they hadn’t been there before because I hadn’t been able to see an address on the door. I looked at the whole door, sounding out the letters until they made sense.

  “ ‘Despair,’ ” I read out loud. “ ‘Discord.’ ”

  Oberon turned to me. “We’re too late. He’s summoned the demons already.”

  “Will Hughes said that the box had to be opened for seven days to summon the demons,” I said as we walked back to Puck’s.

  Oberon shook his head. “He’s managed to bring the demons into the world in an incorporeal form as a fog. They can still be banished if we close the box before seven days have passed, but in order for him to have done this much Dee must have grown even more powerful than any of us realized—or the box has grown more powerful during the years it remained closed. I told Marguerite at the time that you can’t seal up magic without some repercussions.”

  “You knew the first Marguerite—?” I began to ask as Oberon opened the door to Puck’s, but he put a finger to his lips.

  “Shh,” he said. “Puck is still a trifle jealous of Marguerite. Best not to bring her up.”

  “It’s too late,” a voice came from the back of the shop. I looked for the baker, but the space behind the counter was empty. In fact, the whole tearoom was empty even though it was packed at exactly the same time yesterday. I wondered what thought had intruded itself into all those mothers’ heads to send them off somewhere other than their favorite hangout.

  “Puck gave all the children a rash,” the baker said as she straightened up behind the counter holding a tray of pink petits fours in her hands. “Every pediatrician will be scratching his head. Literally. It doesn’t bother the children any, but it makes any adult within two feet itch.”

  “That’s awful,” I said.

  Fen shrugged. “It’s perfectly harmless and will go away by tomorrow. We’re lucky he didn’t give them nits. I haven’t seen him this upset for a while.”

  “I hope it’s not because of me,” I said. “Oh, and by the way, thank—”

  She held up both hands and Oberon whispered in my ear, “Brownies don’t like to be thanked. And whatever you do, never give one clothes.”

  “So you’re a brownie?” I asked coming closer. Of all the revelations I’d heard in the last twelve hours, this one was the least surprising. I’d known there was something otherworldly about the baker the minute I’d seen her, and now I could clearly perceive that a warm butter-yellow glow—the color of buttercream frosting—filled the air around her. I could also see that beneath her corduroy tam her ears were pointed.

  “A Manx brownie,” she said, “or rather, a fenodoree, as we’re called on the Isle of Man.”

  “Garet has regards for you from a friend,” Oberon said, coming up beside me.

  “I do?” I asked. “Oh . . . you mean Will Hughes. He did ask how you were doing.”

  Fen turned as pink as the icing on the petits fours. “Oh, I can’t imagine why he’d ask after me,” she said, turning to punch down a lump of dough in a blue bowl. “Why it must be years since I saw him . . . decades . . .” She turned the dough out onto a floured board and began kneading it vigorously. “Centuries even.”

  “When exactly did you see him last?” Oberon asked.

  She looked up. Her round glasses flashed green from the reflection of the light blazing off Oberon. “Last week,” she answered meekly. “I happened to run into him at a lecture at the Ninety-second Street Y.”

  “What was the lecture on?” Oberon asked.

  “ ‘The Mysteries of Science,’ ” Fen recited, tilting her chin up defiantly as if remembering the exact name of the lecture proved the meeting with Will Hughes had been accidental. “ ‘Nanotechnology in the Twenty-first Century.’ ”

  Oberon tilted his head and looked skeptically at her.

  “The science lectures get the most men,” she added, now more defensive than defiant. “You try meeting a nice single man in New York! And I found it quite interesting. All those wee atoms remind me of the ferrishyn.”

  “And Will Hughes frequents the Ninety-second Street Y?”

  “He might have known I’d be there,” she said in a very low voice.

  “How long have you been meeting him?”

  A bell chimed in the back room before Fen had to answer. “That’s my sponge cake,” she said, scurrying through the doorway.

  “Come on,” Oberon told me, lifting the counter up to pass behind it. “She’s gone to earth.”

  “Gone to earth?” I repeated. “What—?” But he was already in the back room, a tiny space dominated by a huge cast-iron oven. A yellow sponge cake sat on a cooling rack, steam rising from it, but there was no sign of Fen. Oberon glanced around the diminutive kitchen—I half expected him to check the oven, but instead he moved a rush mat on the floor, uncovering a round wooden door with a bronze handle set into it. He lifted the door, revealing the top steps of a spiral staircase that twisted down into the gloom. “Come on,” he said.

  “Down there?” I croaked, unable to disguise the fear in my voice as I looked down into the dark hole. In the last twenty-four hours I’d defended myself against a mythological beast and walked through a fairy-ridden park with a vampire, but there was no way I was going into a dark pit below the streets of New York City. Who knew what nightmares out of urban legend might be lurking down there—albino crocodiles, giant rat people, mutant cockroaches . . . the possibilities seemed endless. No, I’d had enough. It was time to put my foot down. “I’ll wait up here. It’s too dark down there for me.”

  In answer he snapped his fingers and a small yellow-green flame appeared at the tip of his thumb. “Here,” he said, “you might as well begin your lessons. You work w
ith fire every day, so it shouldn’t be so hard for you to conjure it. Hold your hand up . . . palm facing you.” He turned my hand around so that my palm was about five inches from my face. “Now, focus on your aura.”

  I’d seen the silver glow around my hand earlier on the street, but that had been when I was thinking of Will Hughes. I found myself a little worried about what color my aura would be when I wasn’t thinking about him. I’d been through a lot lately. I’d blurted that concern about paying Maia to Roman in the hospital without any real concern for his condition, which was so unlike me—

  “Focus!” Oberon’s booming voice crashed through what was sure to become yet another self-pity session. I stared at my hand, freeing my mind of everything but the task at hand: seeing my aura. After a few seconds I began to see a bluish white glow limning my hands. The glow came to a point at the end of each fingertip and trailed off into the air like streamers.

  “I see it!”

  “Good.” Oberon’s voice was warm with the lilt of the West Indian islands again, and I felt a warmth in the air that hadn’t been there a second ago. I wondered if he was deliberately using his voice to literally heat things up. “Now touch your thumb and middle finger together, concentrating on the heat your aura produces. When you can feel a spark, snap your fingers together.”

  I snapped my fingers together. Nothing happened.

  “Too soon,” he said. “You have to wait until you feel the spark.”

  I tried again. This time I waited until I felt the spark—a tiny charge like static electricity—but when I snapped my fingers, the spark flew off into the air and sizzled to the ground.

  “Hold your thumb straight up after you snap your fingers to keep the flame steady.”