Shifting Shadows: Stories from the World of Mercy Thompson

by Patricia Briggs

  I ran until the moon set, then I curled up in the shelter of an overhang where the last autumn’s leaves were dry. I awoke human and naked as the day I was born, with the scent of Ariana in my nose and snow on the ground. I had expected her to come. She was not a coward; she would feel it necessary to face the consequences of last night.

  I rose from my bed and went out barefoot in the weeks-old crusty snow to meet her.

  She looked different. Her waist-length hair had been shorn to a finger’s length, and she wore a gown of white, something that might have been worn in a king’s court.

  “Samuel Moon Called,” she said, not meeting my eyes. I could smell her grief. “Well have I loved you.”

  “And I you, lady,” I told her, sounding surprisingly steady for a man whose heart was bleeding with grief. Haida was worthy of mourning, and so was the future that Ariana and I had lost.

  “And yet,” she said, “and yet I would have killed you had not Haida sacrificed herself for you.”

  “Haida whom you also loved,” I said. “It was not your fault, Ariana. She would not blame you.”

  She nodded and looked away. “I cannot risk destroying anyone else I love.”

  I wanted to drop to my knees and plead with her. I had no pack, they were all dead. My da was dead. He took with him the name I had been born with. He had kept the names of my lost family and their faces safe for me. And he was gone. Ariana was the only person I had left.

  And without me, who would keep her safe? Who would hold her when the evil of what her father had done to her overwhelmed her dreams?

  Yet between us lay the death of Haida, forming an impenetrable barrier between us.

  “I will carry you in my heart until it beats no more,” I told her, giving her the only thing I could think of that would not hurt her more.

  Her eyes welled, and her mouth tried to smile, and still she did not look at me. Her eyes were fixed at my feet. “Spoken like a poet and singer, my dear Samuel. You’ll forget things, forget me—this world does not easily hold the things best left Underhill.” Her mouth trembled. “I need the chain I gave you.”

  I unwound the silver chain and held it out to her.

  She took a half step closer, then closed her eyes and swallowed. When her eyes opened, black was trying to consume the green. She took a full step back. She stretched out her arm, and I felt her magic burn my hand.

  “If you ever need me,” I told her, “I will come.”

  The silver chain unmade itself and fell to the ground from my hand, now a small pile of pebbles. She took out a small pouch and took out some of the hair inside, burning it as it nestled in her palm. When nothing except ashes were in her hand, she stepped closer, so that when she turned her hand over, the ashes fell onto the pebbles that had been her silver chain.

  “Fare thee well, Samuel Silverheart,” she said, turning away.

  I waited until she had gone before I made my answer. I threw back my head and let the wolf sing our grief to the unkind moon.

  FOURTEEN

  Samuel

  After a day of aimless wandering in my wolf’s skin, I found a task to turn my hand to and headed for the remains of the witch’s hut. I no longer knew which direction Ariana’s home was, but my wolf knew exactly where the witch had lived. The burnt hut looked just as it had when I’d last seen it. It smelled the same, too. Though weeks had passed in Ariana’s world, here it was still the same winter that my da had died. I could smell my own scent as clearly as if I’d only been gone a few days.

  I headed to the oak, driven by the need to destroy or be destroyed—and I didn’t much care which. My grandmother had been staying somewhere nearby, or she would not have come out the last time I had been there. If it had only been days, then I could trail her and confront her. She could not reach Ariana through me anymore. If I could, I would kill her. If not, she would kill me, then die slowly for want of the power of fae pain and suffering anyway. Even dead, I would win.

  As I approached the meadow, I smelled rotting flesh. I paused because it did not smell like wolf. It smelled like—

  Pinning my ears I crept cautiously toward the source of the foul smell—and found the witch’s body.

  She had been savaged and half-eaten, but I would have known her if only a finger bone had been left. It had snowed once and melted since she died, but I knew wolf kill when I saw it.

  My father was not dead.

  I howled, calling for him, and the woods went still, recognizing a predator’s voice. But my father gave me no answer, and gradually, the usual denizens of the winter forest went about their lives.

  I slept near the hut that night and spent the next day building a fire hot enough to turn the witch’s body to bits and pieces of bone, which I put in a sack with salt and buried under cold running water. My wife, whose name I had lost, had told me once that running water turns away evil.

  I would wait for Ariana to call me, I thought, as I put a heavy boulder on top of the sack of the witch’s ashes. Even if it took a very long time, I would wait for her. I would wait for her, and I would look for my da.

  When I went to sleep that night, alone in the shelter of a downed tree, hope lived in my heart.

  *dpgroup.org*

  FAIRY GIFTS

  I grew up in Butte, Montana. It is a town of about thirty-four thousand people that once had a population far greater—most of whom came to work the mines that started as gold mines, shifted to silver mines, and finally produced high-quality copper just as the country (and the world) began stringing copper wires for electricity. Butte was the third city in the world to have electricity—Paris, France, and New York City being the first two. The mining town once had a large Chinese population as well as Cornish, Irish, Welsh, Finnish, Italian, Serbian, and Greek.

  When I was a child, the old tunnel mines had all been shut down, and the copper came from an open-pit mine that had eaten the suburbs of Meaderville, McQueen, and East Butte—and continued to grow until it ate the old amusement park Columbia Gardens. But there were all sorts of stories that were told about the “old days.” Stories about the racetrack that had stood where East Junior High (now East Middle School) had been built. I heard tales of Shoestring Annie, Dirty-Mouth Jean, and the old madame who beat up Carrie Nation when she took her temperance crusade to the wrong bar.

  So I just had to set a story in Butte.

  The events in this story all happen before Moon Called.

  Butte, Montana, present day, mid-December

  Cold didn’t bother him anymore, but he remembered how it felt: the sharp bite of winter on toes, fingers, nose, and ears. Even with modern adaptations, ten degrees below zero wouldn’t be pleasant. Neither the temperature nor falling snow kept people out of the streets for the Christmas stroll, however. Hot apple cider, freshly made sausages, and abundant cookies under the streetlights strove to make up for the nasty weather—none of which were useful sustenance for him. He passed them by with scarcely a glance.

  Well, then, he thought, impatient with himself, what are you doing here? He had no more answer now than he’d had two nights ago when he’d arrived.

  The people who lived in the old mining town had always known how to party. In a hundred years that hadn’t changed. Brutal climate, hard and dangerous work brought a certain clarity to the need for pleasure.

  His Chinese face garnered a few looks—curiosity, no more. A century ago, Butte had had a large Chinese population. Then, the looks he’d garnered had been dismissive up on the street level but full of eagerness or fear down in his father’s opium den in the mining tunnels where Thomas had been both guide and enforcer.

  It was not just the looks that had changed. The streets were not cobbled, there were no trolleys, no horses. Steep streets had been somewhat tamed, and the town—once a bustling place—had a desolate air, despite the festive decorations. Buildings he remembered were
abandoned or gone altogether, replaced by parking lots or parks. The few restored or well-kept buildings only made the rest look worse.

  Some of the changes were vast improvements. The smelters and ore-processing plants now long closed meant that the sulfurous fog that had made it difficult to see across the street was gone. The air was immensely more pleasant to breathe. The night was free of the constant noise of the machinery that churned day and night.

  The crowd that moved beside him on the sidewalks was a respectable size, though much smaller than those that had filled the streets of his memories. He hadn’t decided whether to count that on the good side or the bad side of the changes.

  He put his hands in front of his mouth and blew, a gesture to blend in, no more. Even had his hands been frozen, his breath wouldn’t warm them.

  He didn’t know why he’d come back here. Just in time for the Christmas stroll, no less. He wasn’t a Christian, despite the nuns who had ensured he could read and write: an education for her children was the only thing his quiet, obedient mother had ever stood up to his father for.

  If . . . if he did believe, he’d have to believe he was damned, and had been since his father had brought him to the old man.

  • • •

  Butte, Montana, 1892, April

  “Here is the son,” his father said, his voice less clear than usual. It was hard to talk with a mouth that had been hit so many times.

  Last night his father had been set upon by a group of miners who wanted opium and had not wanted to pay for it. They had beaten Father and tied him up. It had been Thomas’s day to protect the shop; his older brother, Tao, was away on other business. Thomas had been shot in the arm, and while he tried to stanch the blood, one of the miners had cracked his skull with a beer bottle.

  When Thomas awoke, his mother had bandaged his hurts and was crying silently as she sometimes did. From Tao, because his father would not look at him nor talk to him, he learned that his father had given the men what they wanted and more: arsenic in the opium would ensure that they thieved from no one again. But despite the ultimate victory in the fight, his father felt that his honor and that of his family had been impinged. He made it clear that he blamed Thomas for the shame.

  The next morning his father had left Tao in charge of the laundry and gone out to speak with friends. He’d been gone most of the day, and Thomas had worked hard despite his aching arm, seeking to assuage his disgrace with diligence. His uncles, his father’s brothers, had stopped in with gifts of herbs, whiskey, and his grandmother’s ginger cookies. They spoke to his mother in hushed whispers.

  His father returned after the sun was down and the laundry storefront was closed. He hadn’t said anything to the rest of the family gathered there. He’d only looked at Thomas.

  “You,” he’d said in English, which was the language he used when he was displeased with Thomas, because, to his father’s horror, Thomas, born in America, was as fluent in English as in Cantonese. “You come.”

  According to his brother Tao, when Thomas was born a few weeks after his family had come to the New World, his father had given him an American name in a fit of optimism. It must have been true, but Thomas could never imagine his father being optimistic or excited about anything American.

  Obediently, Thomas followed his father up the steep streets to a single-story house nestled between two new apartment buildings. There was a dead tree in the yard. Maybe it had been planted in a fit of optimism.

  His father entered the unpainted door without knocking and left it to Thomas to close it behind them. The incense burning on a small table didn’t quite cover a sour, charnel-house smell. Thomas followed his father through a partially furnished front room and down the narrow and uneven stairs to the basement, where the odor of dead things was replaced by the scent of the dynamite that had been used to blast the basement into the granite that underlay the hillside.

  The stairs ended in a small room lit only by a small beeswax candle. The floor beneath his feet was polished and well laid, a light-colored wood ringed by a pattern of darker. It seemed an expensive luxury to find in a basement room of a nondescript little house.

  While he’d been looking at the floor, his father had continued on through a doorway, and Thomas hurried to follow. There was something odd about this place that made his stomach clench and the hair on the back of his neck stand up. He didn’t want to be left alone here.

  He darted through the doorway and almost bumped into his father, who had stopped at a small entryway that dropped down a single stair and then opened up to a cavernous room. It too had only a single candle lighting it. Thomas couldn’t make out the face of the man ensconced in some sort of big chair.

  His father bent over with a pained grunt and set three twenty-dollar gold pieces on the floor.

  “Here is the son,” he said.

  He put the flat of his hand on Thomas’s back and thrust him toward the other man.

  Not expecting the push, Thomas stumbled down the step, then turned to look at his father—only to see his sandaled feet disappear up the stairway.

  “The son,” said the man he’d been left with. His accent was Eastern European—Slavic, Thomas thought. The Slavs were among the latest immigrant wave that had washed over the mining town since Thomas Edison’s electricity had made copper king. “Pretty boy. Come here.”

  • • •

  Butte, Montana, present day

  Though the sounds of the Christmas carols were pleasant enough, Thomas felt restless, impatient—the same feeling that had sent him driving here from San Francisco when he’d intended only an evening’s drive.

  Something was calling him here, and it certainly wasn’t nostalgia. There wasn’t much left of the town of his childhood. The last of the old whorehouses in the red-light district was falling down, and only a few buildings were left of the Chinatown where he’d grown up and died and been reborn a monster. No, he wasn’t nostalgic for Butte.

  This wasn’t his home. He had a condo in San Francisco and another in Boston. None of his family remained here. There was nothing here for him—so why had it seemed so imperative to come?

  “Hello, Tom.”

  He froze. It had been almost a century since he’d been in Butte. There weren’t that many people who lived eighty years and still sounded so hale and hearty.

  Fae.

  That’s why he’d had to come. He’d been called here by magic. If he hadn’t been walking in the middle of a crowd, he would have snarled.

  He didn’t see anyone who looked familiar; the fae were like that. But he did find someone who was looking at him.

  Leaning up against an empty storefront where a tobacco shop had once been was a balding man with an oddly fragile air about him. He was several inches shorter than Thomas—who wasn’t exactly tall himself. The man’s forehead was too large for the rest of him in the manner of some people who were born simple. Young blue eyes smiled at Thomas out of an old face. He wore new winter boots, red mittens and scarf, and a thick down jacket.

  A couple, passing by, noticed Thomas’s interest and stopped.

  “Nick?” The woman half ducked her head toward the little man. “Are you warm enough? There are cookies and hot chocolate in the old Miner’s Bank building at the end of the block.”

  The male half of the couple glared suspiciously at Thomas.

  “I have good new gloves,” said Nick in the voice of a man but with a child’s intonations. “I’m warm. I had cookies. I think I’m going to talk with my friend Tom.” He darted across the sidewalk and took Thomas’s hand.

  Thomas managed not to hiss or jerk his hand free. Nick, was it? His scent—at this close range—told Thomas that Nick was a hobgoblin.

  “Do you live here? Or are you just visiting?” asked the man suspiciously.

  “I’m visiting,” said Thomas. He could have lied. Butte was smaller than
it used to be, but, according to the lady who checked him into his hotel, it still had thirty thousand people living here.

  His answer didn’t please the man. “Nick’s one of ours,” he said, rocking forward on the balls of his feet like a man who’d been in a few real fights. “We watch out for him.”

  Ah, Tom thought. Butte’s ties to Ireland had always been strong. In his day, the Irish here had set out cream in saucers outside their back doors to appease the fairies. Apparently the traditions of taking care of the Little People, changelings, and those who might be changelings were adhered to still—even if, as they clearly believed, the one they watched over was entirely human, just simpleminded.

  “This is Ron,” Nick the Hobgoblin said to Thomas. “He gives me rides in his yellow truck. I like yellow.”

  Ron who drove a yellow truck narrowed his eyes at Thomas, clearly telling him to go away, something Thomas was happy to comply with. He started to free himself.

  “Tom likes tea,” Nick informed them, his eyes as innocent as he was not. Not if he were a hobgoblin. “Tom likes the nighttime.” He paused and with a sly smile added, “Tom likes Maggie.”

  Thomas’s hand clenched on Nick’s at hearing her name. He gave the hobgoblin a sharp look. How did the little man know about Margaret? Was Margaret the reason he’d been called here?

  “Does he?” said the woman, with a sharp glance at Thomas. “Nick, why don’t you come with us to see the singer at the old YMCA?”

  Margaret.

  Thomas decided that he would see what the hobgoblin wanted—and to that end, he’d have to allay the suspicions of Nick’s protectors. He inclined his head respectfully toward Ron.

  “Nick and I know one another,” he said. “I went to school here.” A long, long time ago.

  “Oh,” said the woman, relaxing. “Not a tourist, then.”