"I'm not concerned with the drugs, per se. Yes, they killed the humans. And yes, you were in the same house, but—"
Marbann interrupted, "The humans are not our concern. We are their superiors in every way," he said. The comment brought strange, accusing looks from all assembled.
"We have lived among the humans for some time," Spence said. He seemed visibly angered by Marbann's statements, but appeared to be holding it in. "We have even become humans, to a degree. It has been five human years since we Gated here. You have only arrived today."
"The humans are very much a part of our world now, Marbann," Sammi said. "It has been many years since I arrived here, but I do remember what my first impressions of this race are. I didn't much care for them. They enslaved their own kind, the ones with dark skin, though they later fought a great war over it. Slavery ended. The race improved. They are far from perfect, mind you, but . . ."
Sammi's words trailed off, as if she were seeking the right words to express herself.
"What I think Samantha is trying to say," Moira said, "is that humans are not the lesser race we once thought them to be."
Marbann didn't look convinced. "Are you telling me they are our equals?" he said, and looked around, seeking support for his side. He found none. "They only a live about hundred years. They have no possession of magic. They scoff at our existence, or anything else that doesn't fit neatly into their narrow sciences. They are cattle, so far as I am concerned." Marbann folded his arms resolutely.
"You forget, my dear Marbann," Sammi said ominously, "that King Aedham Tuiereann has lived among, and believed himself to be one of, these cattle, as you so indelicately call them. Where does that leave our new ruler?"
Flustered, Marbann replied hastily, "I meant no insult, Your Majesty. It's just that . . ."
"It's just that you're repeating the same line of caca we were taught in Underhill," Moira said. "We've been here long enough to know there is much to this race, which our kind has ignored for too long. Now we have been forced to learn about them, and we have even learned to appreciate them, in the course of our own preservation. Tell me, Marbann of Avalon, have you ever met a human? Have you even seen one?"
Marbann said nothing for a long moment and looked down at the carpet, avoiding everyone's eyes. "No, I have not," he said grudgingly. "I've only just arrived here." Then, "I have much to learn."
Adam remained quiet during the discussion, his mind returning to the previous evening at the Wintons' mansion. It was Moira, Spence and I. Daryl was having a birthday party. The place felt wrong from the beginning, but we stayed anyway. I had a wine cooler. As the evening progressed, the human children starting acting stupid, which often happens at such parties, but there was something else underlying the stupidity. I knew then something bad was about to happen. Today when I talked to Daryl, who couldn't find his ass with both hands if he had to, I knew something bad had happened.
He regarded the Polaroids as if they were some sort of time machine; they had nothing like photography in Underhill, and even though he'd been in the human realm a few years, and photography and video had become commonplace in his human life, the technology seemed alien now. All those humans dead. No, there's more to it than just an overdose of recreational drugs.
As he reviewed the events, he recalled some other strange occurrences the last few days, aside from his raging hormones and his lust for Moira. There was that stoned kid in the mall, and that black feeling he got from him. And then the experience in the vacant store. The lost time. What happened back there? What else happened that I don't remember?
While Adam's thoughts trailed off, the conversation became chaotic, with everyone speaking at once. But he heard through the chaos something which seized his attention.
"Is it any surprise that the Unseleighe followed us here?" Samantha said loudly, clearly.
All conversation ceased.
"Go on," Adam said, intrigued. "I think you now have our ears."
Moira groaned, as if in response to a bad pun. But Adam had intended none.
"You do not know Zeldan Dhu as I do," Samantha said acidly. "Before our late King died, he told me of Zeldan and his family. Our ancestor killed his ancestor long ago. Our great-great-grandfather fought against his. They had been plotting the invasion for centuries. Zeldan Dhu had vowed to kill every last one of the Tuiereann family and will not hesitate to come here, to the human realm, to do it."
Marbann didn't seem convinced. "They could not have traced us back to this human city in this human time. The spell our late King and I wove was not detectable. It left no trails for our enemy to follow." He stubbornly folded his arms again, an action which was becoming irritating to Adam.
Is he forgetting who's King here? Adam thought, holding his tongue and temper.
Spence said, "If the Unseleighe have pursued us here, what evidence have you?"
Again, that terrible silence fell in the room. Adam wondered if he should attempt to exert some royal influence to calm things down, assume a leadership role, but at the moment he didn't feel much like a leader. The transition to his true self left him a bit muddled, and he still didn't feel, well, royal. Not yet. His only link to royalty was his family, who were all dead except for Samantha. Things were so much easier when I was a human kid. . . .
Samantha continued, "At the Wintons' mansion I felt Unseleighe magic."
Marbann stood up, his height towering over the others. "Certainly not here, milady . . ." he said, amid gasps of disbelief in the room. "We have only just arrived. I doubt the Unseleighe's ability to find us in a year, much less a day."
"We don't need Unseleighe to have evil around here," Moira said haughtily. "Humans do just fine all by themselves! Besides, there were enough bad boys and girls at the party last night to fill a prison. Losers. Troublemakers . . ."
Samantha calmly held a hand up, gently urging all to be silent and listen. Once the gesture restored order, she continued, "Granted, evil forces exist in abundance in the human world, but these forces are of a different flavor from Unseleighe evil. They are . . . human. For all the good humans do, they have their evil as well. As a human, I am an officer of the law, a profession I have chosen so that I can study the humans. With my authority, I have access to records that most humans do not. I can use this access to cover my elven identity should I need to. In this profession, I investigate crimes, murder mostly, and I am very good at it." She gestured toward the room, the house in general. "This is an above-average human abode. And none of this has been raised by magic. I earned it all, the old-fashioned human way."
" 'Abode'?" Marbann said, clearly confused.
"This home. This . . . elfhame. Our new one, for now. While I was at the Winton mansion, the magic I sensed was not human. It was Unseleighe."
"Zeldan?" Moira whispered.
"I don't think so. More likely a minion. I doubt he would have the courage to show himself, though I don't know how long they've been here in the humans' world."
Last night's close call made Adam shudder. Not only had he been a defenseless human, he was an oblivious one as well.
Perhaps they would have discovered me, perhaps not. The risk is still too great to repeat. But then, that was the whole idea of hiding my elven identity under a wrapping of humanity.
"Where are they?" Spence asked. "Among us?"
Then, it all became clear to the new King. "They're here, all right. In Dallas."
Samantha stared at him. "Do tell, young King," she said. "Have you encountered them already?"
Adam straightened himself up in the chair; he had begun to slouch. While he did this, he gathered his thoughts. How to put this?
"I think that what I encountered was their results," Adam said. "First, I ran across a young human, stoned on some drug, in the Marketplace. He said, and I think I have this down correctly: 'It's like, the sky opened up, and Gabriel tore loose with horns of brass,' " Adam began, feeling his voice change to match that of the stoned boy's, a pitch higher, and slur
red. " 'And Armageddon was here. And the black Eagle saw the ruined castle, and all the dead within waited for the mighty to take the palace.'
"Then he looked at me, and said, 'And you were there. And you did not die.' "
Adam considered this, remembering something now that he didn't before . . . because it hadn't happened yet.
The black Eagle. Ruined palace . . .
Fear rippled through him. He couldn't have known!
Adam leaped to his feet.
"Gods, Samantha. That boy described the Dream. The Dream I just had! How did he—?"
Marbann said, "Do not confuse time, young King. What is before and after, here in the human realm, does not fall necessarily in that order in Underhill."
"He's right," Sammi said softly. "Was he Unseleighe? Would you have known?"
"No, I . . . don't think so." The boy was Cory, and I've known him for years. But I guess that doesn't really mean much.
Samantha looked uncomfortable, as if a disturbing thought just came to her. "You said the boy was stoned. On what?"
Adam returned to his seat, feeling reassured, though he did not quite grasp the time concept Marbann was trying to explain.
"Black Dream," Adam said. The black-stoppered vial. "The boy was on Black Dream."
Samantha exhaled loudly. When Adam looked up, she had her face in her hands.
"That's the drug you warned me about," Adam said. "Was that the drug that killed all those humans last night?" It was a wild guess, but his hunch was unusually strong. I knew there was something different, evil and magical, about that envelope.
"So that's why," Samantha said cryptically. "It's been on the street for a year, but it has to be."
"My dear lady, you are making little sense," Marbann said. "If this is a human drug, it is a human problem."
Samantha glared at him. "There lies the problem. It isn't a human drug."
"The Unseleighe," Moira said. "Zeldan. That's his style, all right. A year, you say?"
"At least. Narco has been going crazy lately with a new wave of the stuff, particularly after last night at the Wintons'. I think Black Dream is responsible for the deaths. And Black Dream has been around since last summer."
Marbann of Avalon yawned.
"A year," Adam said. "The time—"
"—doesn't matter here," Moira said. "The human realm doesn't intersect with Underhill on any level. Five human years ago, relative to you, you Gated. Marbann has only just arrived, but left immediately after you and Samantha did, am I correct?"
Marbann nodded. "You are. For me, the King . . . died only moments ago."
"So it is possible," Adam said, "that the Unseleighe have been here not only a year, but perhaps longer."
"The Unseleighe," Samantha corrected, "have been here for centuries. Zeldan is the newcomer. He may have arrived shortly after you did, young King. Or a month ago."
"What matters is that they are here now," Moira said. "Gods, I didn't think it had already happened."
"Moira," Adam said, approaching this from a new angle, "did you notice anything odd last night about the party?"
Moira considered this carefully, taking a several moments to respond. "I wasn't particularly aware of anything Unseleighelike, though I always sense evil when I see humans abusing their minds, souls and bodies. But then, I'm not a mage."
Samantha hissed, her ears quivered, and her slitted eyes widened and glowed momentarily with an energy of their own. Her elfing-out totally like that was a frightening sight. Adam curled up into the chair like a cat, protectively.
"What? What did I say?" Moira asked, but she sounded like she knew she'd let something vital slip out.
"Samantha, what's a mage?" Adam asked. He had an idea. He wanted to be sure.
Samantha sighed in resignation. "I suppose it is well past the time we should keep anything from you, Adam," Samantha said.
Adam realized he preferred to be addressed as Adam instead of King, or young King, or even Your Majesty, but now was not the moment to bring that up. Later.
"A Mage is an elf with exceptional magical abilities. Humans occasionally have mages sprout up randomly, but the occurrence is so rare it is not worth concerning ourselves with right now. Or, maybe, ever. Zeldan Dhu is our problem. Not mages."
"I see," Adam said, uncertain if he did. "Let me adjust to being an elf, first. That's . . . taking some getting used to. I've been a human a long time." He reached up and touched his ears. "These still feel weird."
"Our plan precisely," Samantha said, casting a warning look at Moira. "But I suppose no harm is done."
"There was something else," Adam said, hoping to break up the awkward moment by changing the subject, "that happened after this incident I described. Now this was weird."
Even Marbann sat up attentively.
"The boy I mentioned, he gave me a vial of—you guessed it—Black Dream. And walked off. Security cameras are all over the place there, so I thought, 'Hey, this looks like a drug deal,' so I started looking for a place to ditch it before I got busted. I went straight to the men's room and flushed it. It went all the way down."
"You flushed twice. Good boy," Samantha said. Marbann grimaced. He is the King, not a child! his look seemed to say.
Adam continued, "After I left the rest room, there was this unleased space to the left. And I was like, I dunno, hypnotized by something. The room filled up with fog. Lights appeared under the fog. I must have zoned out or something."
Moira seemed delighted. "So you were Dreaming, even under the spell." She turned to Samantha. "You felt it too, didn't you?"
"But what happened there?" Adam asked. He felt like he'd been excluded from yet another secret, and they were teasing him with it. "What were those lights under the fog?"
"Don't you know?" Moira taunted.
Adam held his tongue.
"Those were the nodes," Samantha said. "Powerful ones, too. Deep underground, at the very spot they manifested. The human realm has them as well. Only, they're wasted here, unless an elf comes along and puts them to use. Why else do you think our kind would bother coming to this chaotic place?"
Moira seemed to be enjoying this. She said, "The Marketplace was built on the site of three power nodes, long ago. Originally the building was a cookie and cracker factory."
Adam groaned as cookie-making cartoon elves flashed through his mind. "Give me a break," he said, smiling just a bit in amusement.
"It's for real. Well, most buildings would have been knocked down when they outlived their original usefulness, but someone decided this one was worth saving. Maybe it was the nodes, influencing the humans subconsciously. Anyway, the presence of the nodes is one of the reasons we were drawn to the Marketplace. It's a natural place for us to be."
"The Marketplace," Adam said, bemused. Then a dark thought came to him: "If the nodes attract us, won't they attract the Unseleighe as well?"
No one said anything for quite a while. Then Samantha spoke up, "Most likely they would be as unappealing as the prospect is."
Hunger was not among the physiological differences between humans and elves. At some point during the dark discussion, Adam realized he hadn't eaten much that day and now had a craving for pizza.
In Avalon, of course, there was no pizza or any of the processed foods humans enjoyed. Fruits and vegetables grew abundantly on the palace grounds, with the aid of magic. In his particular elfhame, Adam had learned that to create food, or ken it from nothing, was not polite. Kenning food was something the Unseleighe did, Adam had been told while growing up, but he knew that other Seleighe elf clans kenned regularly. It was just a matter of etiquette. While it was acceptable to urge the natural growth of vegetables along with spells, "acceptable" food went through the stages of normal growth, more or less.
Game was also in abundance, though servants hunted it for the royal family instead of raising it in pens, as Adam had grown accustomed to seeing out in the country in Texas. Servants did most of the hunting, but occasionally the royal
family would indulge in a bit of sport, hunting deer with the crudest of bows and arrows, and no magic whatsoever. Neither Adam, nor anyone else in Avalon, had never been hungry. Food was always available, in one form or another. There had never been a drought, a famine, or a flood.
The Unseleighe were the only scourge in Avalon, and in less than a day they had taken everything from the rightful owners.
Adam found himself in a quandary. While it had been five years since his last experience with the war, Marbann had just stepped out of it, and was no doubt famished. Moira, who'd mentioned she'd eaten no breakfast or lunch, was probably starving, too. Other elves were on the way as well, and might arrive anytime. But this was the human realm, with no elven food to speak of; food here was all grown without spells, and was highly processed, seasoned, and garnished.
On the floor was a stack of newspaper with the coupon section on the top. "Unexpected Guests? Order a Two For One from Dominique's Pizza," one ad announced. Dominique's makes the best pizza in the universe. And I'm King. That's what we're having.
"Anyone hungry?" Adam asked. Everyone was.
While the new King called in the order, Samantha went scavenging in the kitchen for other eatables. Since she wasn't expecting out of town guests either, at least on this particular day, she came up empty-handed.
"Looks like it's pizza tonight," she said from the kitchen doorway. "Time for a shopping trip to SAM'S."
Marbann looked puzzled. "What manner of beast is a pizza?"
Adam stifled a smirk and said, "Several kinds," he said. Samantha brought in a pitcher of lemonade and five glasses. "You're all probably parched," Samantha said. After filling the five glasses, Adam noticed the pitcher was still nearly full.
I guess a little kenning is acceptable, if done surreptitiously, noted Adam as he downed his drink.
Presently, the pizza arrived, and Adam went to the door to pay for it.
"Ah, wait a minute," Moira said, following him to the door. "Aren't you forgetting something?"
Adam paused, with his hand on the doorknob. "Like . . . what?"
"Are we having a costume party here, or are you trying to pass yourself off as a Vulcan?"
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