by Emma Bull
She pushed open the second door. “Mm. That’s Roberta, the caretaker.”
“Oho—a threat worthy of your guard dog! I shall go for her throat—GRRAAHRRR!” He bolted snarling down the hall and up the stairs, toenails clattering on the wood floors.
“Shut up!” she hissed, and ran after him. She caught up with him on the third floor, outside her apartment door. “God damn you! If she heard that, I am screwed to the wall!”
He cocked his head and looked doggily innocent. “Have I. . . done something?”
“This is a ‘no pets’ building, you . . .” Something about his voice lit her suspicions. “You knew that, didn’t you?”
Eddi wondered if, had he been in human form, he would have pressed a hand to his breast. “You could believe that of me? Oh, I am wounded to the quick!”
She unlocked the door. “Get in there.”
He loped into her tiny blind-alley kitchen, through the living room, into the bedroom. His voice drifted back, hollow from bouncing off the bathroom tiles. “Charming! A bit cramped for two, but I don’t regard it in the least! What’s for breakfast?”
“Chew off one of your hind legs.” She sank down on the couch and rubbed her temples. Then she heard the sound she dreaded: the clack-clack of a woman’s shoes on the stairs.
Eddi opened the door to the firm knock. Roberta stood before her in a robe of salmon velour and white eyelet, and little heeled slippers. “Miss McCandry,” she intoned, “I heard a dog.”
“You did?” said Eddi stupidly.
“I did. And I heard you, as well.”
“You did?”
“Miss McCandry, we do not allow pets here. I wish to inspect your apartment.”
“You d—ah, right.” But she didn’t move.
Roberta frowned. “As stated in the lease, which you signed—”
“I know, I know. Come in.”
As if she could smell the trail the phouka had left, Roberta stalked into the kitchen and out, into the living room, where she looked behind all the furniture, and across to the bedroom door. “May I?” she asked as if the answer didn’t matter.
With a sigh, Eddi flung open the door.
Roberta gasped in horror, and Eddi followed her transfixed gaze. There on the bed was the phouka. He was lying on his stomach, propped up on his elbows, facing the door. His brown skin was a shocking contrast to the rumpled white sheets, which were drawn across him to barely cover his buttocks. He wore absolutely nothing.
“Good morning,” he said with sleepy charm.
Roberta slammed the door.
“Uh, I’m sorry,” Eddi began. “He’s, uh . . . I mean . . .”
Roberta walked unsteadily to the apartment door, said, “Good day,” without turning, and left.
Eddi locked the door behind her and ran to the bedroom. “You get out of my bed and get your clothes on,” she hissed through the door.
“Aww . . .”
“I mean it! Right now!”
The door opened, and he stood before her, dressed as he had been on the mall.
“What are you trying to do?” she wailed. “This is a nice apartment! You think I want Roberta running to the owners with stories about my entertaining strange men?”
“I’m only one strange man.”
“God give me strength. I should never have come out of that damn phone booth.”
He sighed and said, “I am a phouka, my sweet, and by nature a tricksy wight. I cannot be otherwise.”
She scrubbed at her tired eyes. “Oh, hell. Will you get out of there? I want to go to sleep.” She squeezed past him and pushed him out into the living room.
“But where will I sleep?” he asked plaintively.
Eddi gave him a sweet smile. “Why don’t you turn into a dog and curl up on the rug?”
And she slammed the door on him.
chapter 3 – My Boyfriend’s Back
Eddi woke up staring at the bedroom ceiling, wondering why she knew that the sky had fallen. Then she heard someone in the living room, and remembered. There was no moment of self-delusion, of believing that it was Stuart who’d come home with her. For one thing, Stuart didn’t know how to whistle.
She slid into her robe and opened the door between the bedroom and the bathroom. The other bathroom door, the one that opened onto the living room, was closed. She dashed in and locked it, then locked the one to the bedroom as well. “Of course,” she muttered to her reflection in the mirror, “for all I know, he can walk through walls.”
Eddi turned on the shower. The rumble of the water covered the clamor that had started in the kitchen, a rattling of dishes and pans and the banging of cupboard doors. She pulled back the shower curtain—and hesitated. All that water reminded her of the Peavey Plaza fountain, and the glaistig with her cold voice and ominous little fangs. What if she could pop up wherever there was water?
It was an uneventful shower. She took the time to dry her hair, and the noise of the blow-dryer shielded her from any sounds from the front of the apartment. It didn’t drown out the thunderous knocking on the bathroom door. Eddi jumped.
“Halloo, the pokey hostess! If you want me to eat your share, too, you’ve only to say so!”
“I’ll . . . be right out,” Eddi croaked. She made a great business out of putting away the hair dryer before she finally opened the door.
Yes, it was true. There was a dark-skinned man in her kitchen, who wasn’t really a man at all, and he was proof that everything she remembered of last night had happened.
This morning he was wearing a bronze-colored jacket, broad-shouldered, that stopped at his waist, and a tight pair of pants to match. Eddi wondered what had happened to the clothes he’d worn the night before. He gave her a huge smile.
“That,” said the phouka, in his reverberating low voice, “is a very fetching costume.”
It was a secondhand silk kimono from Ragstock, embroidered with green willow leaves on a rust background. She had always thought it rather fetching herself, but she was irritated that he thought so. She said, “What’re you doing?”
“Making breakfast. A job usually best left to the likes of hobs and brownies, but I fancy I do it well enough.”
She peered past him to the stove top. There were what looked like pancakes in her largest frying pan. “What are they?” she asked.
“Flapjacks.” He rolled the word off his tongue, clearly pleased with it.
She scowled suspiciously. “Anything in ‘em?”
“Why no, they’re made of air and dew. Of course there’s something in them, or they wouldn’t be there.” He shot her a disgusted look and flipped pancakes onto one of her plates. It irked her to see him handling her things with such confidence.
The secondhand kitchen table that was her dining room was set neatly for two, with silverware, placemats, and two wine glasses (she only had two) filled with orange juice. It looked cozy and conjugal. Or was she being too sensitive? How was a . . . fairy . . . to know how she would view all this? Then again, where did he learn to set the table in the first place, from reading Miss Manners?
There were butter and syrup on the table; she sat down and applied them to her pancakes. The phouka brought his plate out and sat down across from her.
“You’re supposed to eat them hot, you know,” he said.
Eddi took a bite.
“Well?” he studied her. “How are they?”
She made a noise, grudgingly.
“Now don’t say thank you, my flowerlet; we are all made terribly uncomfortable by thanks.” He took a bite himself. “Passable, certainly, but not brownie work. Now with a little forethought and a bowl of milk, a lass like you could have had a stack of brownie cakes thin as leaves and light as air waiting for you when you woke. Sink scrubbed and the floor swept as well, likely. But there, you couldn’t know, could you?”
Eddi was doing her best to follow this monologue. She remembered faintly, from her days as a Girl-Scouts sort of Brownie, that the fairytale brownie did chores for people.
Eddi would have preferred to help fight forest fires. “If you wanted a brownie,” she said at last, “why didn’t you call one?”
He beamed at her. “Bless you, sweet, they won’t come for a commoner like me.”
She shook her head. “Last night you said you belonged to a Court. . . .”
He sighed and raked his hands through his hair. “You must learn to pay no mind to the glaistig. Or at least, you must learn when to pay her any mind. She has delusions of rank, but it’s not true. Rowan and Thorn, my dear, she has goat feet!”
Eddi thought about that for a moment. “Goat feet. Is that some kind of fairy insult?”
The phouka blew through his lips like a horse. “You don’t know anything, do you?”
“No. I know absolutely nothing.” She rapped her knuckles on the side of her head. “Solid clear through, see? I don’t know how to call brownies, ignore glaistigs, or accept insults from a dog!”
“I am not a—”
“And if you’re so disgusted with me, you can damn well leave.” She stuffed another bite into her mouth and chewed furiously. Then she remembered that he’d made breakfast. “Thank you,” she said sweetly.
He did look uncomfortable. More, he looked angry. He wrapped her wrist with his first finger and thumb, and pulled her arm down to the table with no visible effort.
“There’s no profit in trying my patience, Eddi,” he said. His voice was soft, but his slanting dark eyes were narrowed.
“If somebody wants to blow me away,” she said, trying to keep her voice even and failing, “he has to get you first. I’m sure to die happy.”
An expression flicked across his face, and was gone before she could identify it. He released her. She started to say thank you, then remembered and bit it off.
“I. . . forgot myself.” The phouka was looking out the window. Eddi doubted, since the view was of the backside of the building across the alley, that he was really looking at anything.
She finished her pancakes in silence, while the phouka continued to stare at nothing and look thoughtful. They were very good pancakes, even at room temperature. Would it be safe, Eddi wondered, to say so? Wouldn’t that be the same as thanking him?
“How long are you . . . staying here?” she asked.
He started a little and blinked at her. “Until you go out,” he said, and smiled.
She took a deep breath and tried again. “How long are you going to guard me?”
“For as long as you need it, my primrose, nor shall I count the cost.”
“I can stand the dodging around,” Eddi muttered. “It’s the smug tone of voice that gets me.”
“Thank you,” he said. But he relented at last. “We fight a war, Eddi, and wars go on for as long as they will. But among the Folk, warfare is something of a recreation, and has as a consequence more rules, more ritual. The campaign will begin on May Eve, and end no later than the eve of All Hallows. If by then neither side has the victory, both will withdraw and lick their wounds until next May Eve. I will be with you until the business is done, win or lose.”
“I take it May Eve is the last day of April. All Hallows is . . . Halloween?” Eddi counted, horrified. “That’s six months.”
The phouka looked uncomfortable. “We, or they, might well prevail before All Hallows.”
“Six months?”
He spread his fingers on the tabletop and looked at them. “And the time until May Eve.”
“Oh, God.”
“It’s no trouble, really,” he beamed.
Eddi put her hands over her face and moaned.
The phone rang then. Before Eddi could do more than uncover her eyes, the phouka bounded out of his chair and snatched up the receiver.
“Don’t!” Eddi cried, too late.
“McCandry residence,” he said pleasantly. “May I help you?” By this time Eddi was trying to pull the receiver away from his ear. It didn’t budge. “A very good friend of Miss McCandry’s,” he continued. “Who wants to know? . . . Ah.”
“Dammit, give me the phone!” Eddi said through clenched teeth, but the phouka only planted his free hand on her chest and held her at arm’s length. Eddi could hear an agitated voice from the earpiece.
“Splendid!” said the phouka brightly. “Eddi has told me about you. We’ll be waiting.” And he hung up the phone.
“You—you—you son of a bitch!”
“Bow-wow,” he said, smiling.
“Who was that?”
“Who was what?”
“On the phone!”
“Oh, that. That was your boyfriend.”
“That. . . was Stuart?” Her stomach gave a nervous clench.
“B’lieve that’s his name. The ornamental fellow with no talent?”
Eddi reviewed the phouka’s half of the phone call. “Shit. Oh, boy.”
“Come now, sweet. Do you really want to spend your time pandering to that spoiled boy’s vanity?” He cleared the table briskly, and called back from the kitchen, “Now, thanks to me, you can dismiss him from your life. Poof. Simplest thing in the world.”
Eddi felt rooted to the floor, rage and confusion fighting for control of her. “Simple? What’s simple about it? He’s going to think I’ve been sleeping with you!” She’d planned to break off with Stuart, yes, but sadly, quietly, trying not to hurt him. Not like this. . . .
The phouka stuck his head around the doorway into the living room, his large tilted-up eyes wide. “Oh, my primrose, are you so innocent? Lads like that can only be replaced. Anything else is too subtle for them. If you told the boy that your love had faded, he’d think you were only being difficult. He won’t go away until you show him a rival and tell him he’s been supplanted.”
“This is none of your business.”
He rolled his eyes and disappeared back into her corridor of a kitchen. “I should let you try it your way and prove it to you,” he called back. “But it would take too much time. This way he’ll be out from underfoot, and you’ll be the better for it.”
“I hope I get the chance to do you a favor someday,” Eddi said at last, when she could trust herself to speak without screaming.
“I feel obliged to point out, sweet, that greeting the boy in your dressing gown will not, in this case, improve his temper.”
“Get stuffed!” Eddi growled, and stomped back to the bedroom.
Sometimes, she reflected, she dressed for courage, sometimes for success, and sometimes for the consolation of knowing that whatever else went wrong, at least she liked her clothes. This promised to be one of the latter times. She dug through her closet for the long pink pleated skirt she’d found at Tatters. She added her favorite lace blouse and a man’s gray suit vest, pink socks and white sneakers. “Better,” she said to the mirror over the chest of drawers, and bounced a little to get the feel of the sneakers.
If she could get the damn phouka to go away and let her handle Stuart. . . But perhaps it was true; this was a sharp, short pain, a little misunderstanding to prevent a larger one. Stuart’s hurt pride—and there was so much of it to hurt—would drive him away.
She felt the ache in the back of her throat that was the first warning of tears. She wasn’t in love with Stuart, not anymore, not really. They’d been together a year, and what was love had turned, unnoticed, into habit. But she could remember being in love with him. They had shared words and phrases that made them laugh because of how or where they’d heard them. He’d sent her dumb cards, for no reason . . . no. Better not to remember. She found herself sitting on the end of the bed, and wasn’t sure how long she’d been there. Stuart would arrive soon; she ought to be collecting her wits, not scattering them. And she ought to be doing something about the phouka—
Her door buzzer bleated from the living room, twice, three times. Eddi dashed out of the bedroom and pressed the button that unlocked the front door. The phouka was slouched in her only upholstered chair, looking pained.
“Hideous noise,” he said.
“Then
why didn’t you get it?”
“Get what?”
“The door!”
“Was that what it was?” he said with an air of academic interest. “I wonder that anyone could welcome company, if it’s always announced so.”
“It’s not welcome this time,” Eddi muttered, but the phouka ignored her. His feet were propped on the trunk that served as her coffee table, and he seemed to be engrossed in a copy of The Face. He looked entirely at home. Eddi suspected that he was setting a tableau for Stuart’s benefit, but there was nothing she could do about it now. She heard Stuart running up the stairs.
She opened the door before he could knock. Stuart was breathing a little hard from the climb, and one lock of brown hair, longer than the rest, had fallen forward over his forehead. He looked pale, his eyes wide and unguarded. Eddi felt the ache again in her throat. Damn you, Stuart, she wailed inside, please be angry. But it was too late. He would be angry, he would say cruel things, but she would remember his cut-adrift look and be unable to hate him.
“Come in,” she said finally, and then, as if that had unstoppered her voice, “I was going to call you, this morning, but you beat me to it. I wanted to—I’d like to talk, Stuart, about. . . the band . . . and . . . oh, shit.”
As she ran down, his gaze went past her and hardened. She sighed and turned.
The phouka was unfolding himself gracefully, propping his elbows on the chair back and his chin in his palms. “Stuart Kline, yes?” he said with a drowsy smile. “Please to meet you.”
“Get out of here,” Stuart said tightly. “This is private.”
“On the contrary,” said the phouka, “I believe it concerns me . . . intimately.”
“Get the fuck out.”
“You’re being impolite, my little fighting cock. Why should I leave? You’re the visitor.”
Stuart went paler still. “Is that true?” he said to Eddi. “Has he moved in already?”
“No!” Out of the corner of her eyes, she saw the phouka cock his head. “Oh hell—yes, but not like that!”
Stuart’s jaw went a little crooked, and Eddi knew he was grinding his teeth. “Like what, then?” he said, looking at the phouka.