“Another human has managed to...” Pepper’s voice trailed off. “Hish,” he said, still facing the twin mountains and shocked that neither of them had come up with this idea before, “is it possible that realm we’re meant to find is the human realm?”
He heard a smash of glass breaking on the floor behind him. He spun to see Hish, standing, the brandy glass shattered on the floor in front of him, his usually dark skin pale as linen.
Pepper frowned. “Nobody has ever crossed into the material Realm, the human Realm. It’s not possible,” he and Hish both said simultaneously, harmonizing. Pepper had seen this before. When they were completely synchronized like this, it meant they had discovered a moment of truth.
“We’ll find a way,” they both said. “We will bridge the Realms and avert this threat to my life.”
Hish fell to his knees and Pepper rushed to his side. “Hish,” he said, his voice alone once again, “Hey, friend, it’s okay.”
Hish looked up at him, the color still drained from his face. He shook his head, eyes wide. “I don’t think it’s okay. The material plane, this is a place of science, a place of humans, a place of danger.”
“I know,” Pepper said. He helped Hish back to his feet. “I know, but we have some time to figure it out. First,” he glanced back toward the mountains, “we have to greet our new arrival.”
Hish stood up and steadied himself. He nodded to Pepper. “Thank you.”
Pepper nodded back at him and together, they flew off toward the mountain.
chapter 3
Glenview, IL
September 20, 1988
It had been another long and terrible day, and Andi was not looking forward to the fast food she was bringing home for dinner. Waiting for the traffic light to change, she stared off into space. A honk behind her alerted her that the light was now green. She tried to set off quickly, let the clutch out too fast, and stalled the car.
The horn blared behind her again while Andi tried to start her car. “Of course,” she muttered. The car wouldn’t start. The driver behind her continued to honk while she tried to get her little MG going again. It fired up just as the light turned yellow. She sped off and crossed the intersection as the light turned red, leaving the frustrated driver stuck at the light behind her.
“Serves you right, you prick. Sorry my shitty car is too old for you.” She continued to grumble as she drove. In truth, she was getting more and more frustrated with this car. It hadn’t been entirely reliable since she bought it new almost eleven years ago. It was a sporty, white 1977 MGB convertible. She had bought it as a present to herself when she was promoted to Manager of the Actuarial Group in the life insurance division at Great Lakes Casualty. She had been exceedingly proud of herself for getting the job. She had worked at GLC for years, since she was in high school, and finally, when her boss had been discovered embezzling money due to an anonymous tip, the manager position was hers.
A decade later, she still hadn’t told anyone that she had sent the anonymous tip.
Andrea Leeds was nearing forty, had been stuck in that middle management position for the last ten years, detested everyone she worked with, and had long ago given up the urge to make life better for anyone until life got better for her.
Her apartment’s reserved parking spot was occupied when she got home to the Cooper Park Luxury Apartment Complex. She swore under her breath, parked in one of the visitor spots, and dragged her door key along the passenger side of the obviously quite new, metallic brown Lincoln coupe, which had invaded her space. For good measure, she spit on the windshield as she passed it.
Andi could never figure out where the “Luxury” in her “Luxury Apartment Complex” came from. The carpet in the hallway outside her apartment was worn and stained, and the carpet inside her apartment was marginally worse. She kept incense burning constantly when she was home to mask the smell of mildew and unpleasantly foreign food being cooked in other units.
She sat down heavily on her worn, orange corduroy sofa and put her feet up on the coffee table, then was incredibly frustrated with herself for not having turned the television on before she sat down. She often thought about buying a new television with a remote control, but this old Zenith TV had suited her just fine for all this time.
Andi sighed heavily, stood up, walked over to the TV and flipped it on. She was happy not to have to fiddle with the antennae anymore, since her building had recently had cable TV installed. She did a few “favors” for the maintenance guy and he hooked her up with the premium channels like The Movie Channel and HBO. La Bamba was on HBO. She’d seen it before, but she didn’t hate it, so she sat down and opened her Styrofoam box and started eating her burger.
She shook her head in distaste. “Hot side hot and cool side cool, my ass,” she said, and kept eating.
-
Hope slammed the door behind her and shook the snow from her hair. Her day of hunting had been a waste. The only other living things she saw all day were fish swimming in the water, separated from her by three feet of crystal clear ice. The molebear burrow she found was long abandoned, and the sparrows’ nest was empty of anything except a few shards of broken eggshell.
Seventy two hours more daylight, and then a full week of darkness. Creatures would venture forth into the cold, dark night, looking for food, themselves. Hope knew hunting would be better then.
She had enough food for several more days. A week, certainly, if she was careful. But she didn’t like coming home empty handed, and she took her failure very personally. She took a little comfort in knowing she didn’t have to answer to anyone anymore. She’d been on her own for the last seven years, after her partner, her lover, her best friend had betrayed her - betrayed all of them, really. She liked to tell herself that she’d moved on, but she was still alone, and she had never welcomed another into her home since.
She tried to avoid becoming a hermit. She flew to town often, skated with her friends up and down the Frost River, and, even though Frost River Falls was an hour away and she didn’t get any sort of benefit from helping keep the pantries stocked, she often brought food she had hunted to help feed the village.
Hope had been given the option to leave the Winter Kingdom when Pepper was banished, but she was terrified of leaving the realm, and she was furious with him, hated him, for what he’d done. She still didn’t know which one of those reasons was the true reason she didn’t go. Since he was sent away, she had lived here alone.
She knew nobody blamed her for what happened. Still, she tended to keep everyone at arm’s length. Pepper had been caught with several of the village’s magical relics in his possession, and he commanded one of the dark minions under his control to kill the mayor and take the power of his spirit. The tribunal had taken a week to decide Pepper’s fate, and they had settled on banishment.
They strongly considered executing him, and nobody would have blamed them, since he had used the mayor’s essence for dark purposes. But the intentional killing of a fairy was a heinous act, even in the name of justice. Nobody could be certain that the human connected to that fairy also deserved to die. It was a terrible burden to take two lives, with one potentially innocent, in punishment. Execution was very rare.
Murder was also rare, for the same reason. Even those less pure of heart weren’t often willing to shoulder the weight of taking an extra life, especially when they couldn’t know the consequences that would bring in the human realm. Everyone had heard stories of hundreds of fairies who suddenly died because of the death of a single, murdered fairy who was responsible somehow for their safety.
Hope sighed. She had long since grown tired of these memories, but she knew these scars would never go away. She was getting hungry, so she stood up and went to the back of her house and opened the half-door there to the snowed-in larder outside. She brought the stewpot to the fire and waited for it to warm up.
She gazed out the window at the setting sun. It made the unmarked, virgin snow plain around Hope’s house
shine a fiery, sparkling orange. Soon, it would be dark, and the moon would trace the same, slow, lonely path as the sun. The moon would make everything pale blue, as opposed to dark orange, but at least it would bring enough nocturnal beasts out of their slumber for her to feed herself and Frost River Falls for a while.
Her heart skipped a beat when she saw a family of molebears in the distance, trodding slowly across the plain. She glanced at her bow and arrows, then back out the window, debating with herself whether the wanted to go back out. She did have some food left, after all.
She sighed again, grabbed her bow and her quiver of arrows and flew through the door. “At least you’ll keep food on the table for a good long while,” she whispered. Her voice was hoarse, and she realized those were the first words she’d said aloud in days.
chapter 4
Jim closed his locker and watched the other kids in the hall. They were talking and laughing and having fun. He wondered how long it had been since he hung out with them. He couldn’t remember.
“Hey, Jimmy-with-a-J,” Genevieve called. Jimmy-with-a-J had been her nickname for him ever since she could talk. She walked up to him, then turned to see what he’d been looking at. “Why don’t you go over there and say hi?”
“I don’t really feel like it,” Jim said. “Plus, they’re busy having fun. They don’t need me bringing them down.”
“I don’t think you’d bring them down. They still wonder why you don’t hang out with them anymore.” She looked back at him, then leaned against the lockers next to him. “Just go over there. You don’t even have to say anything. Just go and be there with your friends.”
“They’re not really my friends. Not anymore.”
“Yes, they are. And if they’re not, you’re pushing them away. You don’t have to do that.”
Jim sighed and looked at his watch. “It’s time for homeroom. I gotta go.”
“There’s still five minutes—” Gen started, but Jim pushed off from the wall and walked toward the boy’s room.
He felt bad for being rude to Gen, so he stopped and turned halfway around. “Sorry,” he said. “I just don’t think I’m ready yet.”
He went into the boys’ bathroom without waiting for her to answer. She’d probably just say something to try to cheer him up or tell him nobody thought he was an emotional freak or that people missed him. He didn’t really want to hear any of that. He wanted to be left alone.
He stared at himself in the mirror, hating himself. The bell rang. He ran to homeroom, sitting down late. Ms. Gates glared at him, but didn’t say anything. He should have been marked tardy for being late. He was angry again — angry at being treated differently. How long would this go on? It had been all through junior high, and now followed him all through high school. He couldn’t understand why. He wasn’t the only kid in school who’d lost a parent.
He coasted through his day, not really paying attention in class. At lunch, he sat by himself, away from, but close enough to hear, his old friends. They were talking about the same stuff they talked about every day: the Bears, girls, Saturday Night Live and Dennis Miller making fun of the presidential candidates. He listened to them and he thought about sitting with them, but he chickened out and stayed put. He picked at his lunch, barely eating anything. As usual.
When he got home after school, he had a large bowl of Frosted Flakes, flipped on the TV, and got to work on his homework. When he finished, he turned on his Nintendo and played Legend of Zelda until he realized it was getting late. His dad had bought him the Nintendo last year for his birthday. Another toy that could occupy him so that his father wouldn’t have to. His Commodore 64 computer had come before that, and was up in Jim’s room. He started learning how to program it with all the time he had, and he took more comfort in video games than in other people. Since his dad was never around, he didn’t have anyone to tell him to go outside.
The phone rang. Jim let it ring ten or eleven times before sighing in aggravation and pausing his game to answer it.
“Hello?”
“Hey, Jimmy.” It was Gen.
“Hey.”
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“I was just playing a game,” he said.
“You really should get out and socialize with actual people,” she teased.
“I’m fine. Besides, you talk to people in the game. You solve their quests and help them.”
“You could help real people.”
“I don’t know how to talk to real people anymore,” Jim said.
“You’re talking to me.”
“Yeah.” Jim thought for a moment.
Gen said. “Hey, remember, that Great Gatsby paper is due tomorrow.”
“Yeah, I already did it,” Jim said. “I finished it when Ms. Gates assigned it.”
Gen harrumphed over the phone. “Well, I haven’t even started it yet. I guess I need to read the book.”
Jim was mortified. “You haven’t even read the book yet?”
Gen laughed. “Of course I have, silly. I was just kidding. I’m done, too. I did only finish today, though.”
Jim sighed in relief.
“Listen to you,” Gen teased him again. “You sounded like you were really worried about me.”
They were quiet for a while. Jim was just wondering whether he should say something when Gen broke the silence.
“Hey, I know it’s cheesy and mushy and everything, and I’m not trying to make you feel bad, so don’t get mad or anything. But I know you don’t have a lot of friends these days, and I’m really glad that I’m still one of them.”
Jim didn’t answer right away. He had a thick lump in his throat. He took a deep breath and cleared his throat. “You’re my only friend. You’re the only one who stuck with me after...”
“There were plenty of others who would have, too, if you’d have let them.”
“Maybe. Gen?”
“Yeah?”
“I hope I don’t sound like a little kid, but... I miss my mom.”
“I know, Jimmy. I miss her, too. I’m sure it’s a billion times worse for you.”
He felt a sob bubbling up in his chest. He covered the receiver just before it came out. He felt tears in his eyes, but he swallowed hard and tried to keep his voice level. “I gotta go.”
Gen said, “Okay. It was good talking to you. Don’t be a stranger, okay?”
“Okay. Goodnight.” He started to hang up, then brought the phone back to his ear. “Gen?”
“Yeah?”
“Thanks for calling.”
“Any time,” she said, and he could hear the smile in her voice. “I’ll call you again tomorrow night.”
“Good. Now, for real, good night.”
“Night, Jimmy,” she said, and then she hung up.
Jim held the receiver against his chest for a minute and then hung it up.
A while later when he was laying in bed, he saw the headlights of his dad’s car race across the ceiling, heard the front door open and slam shut, and listened as his dad rummaged through the kitchen. It was then that Jimmy realized the only person he’d spoken to that entire day had been Genny-with-a-G.
chapter 5
Ivy floated in the bath and stretched out every limb as far as she could make them go. It had been an exhausting day, and she wanted to shed both the dust from the fields and the aches from working them.
Her bathtub was made from a horseshoe crab shell, smoothed flat and level in several places on the outside, now the bottom of the tub, so that it could rest upon some heatstones, which both stabilized the bowl-shaped shell and kept the water pleasantly hot. A drain hole, drilled into the bottom, was plugged with a cork stopper and sat above a wooden half-pipe that led through a hole in the wall outside to Ivy’s small personal garden. Ivy had built this addition to her house herself when she came across the crab shell.
Ivy floated on her back, gently treading water with her wings. She let herself start to sink, then took a deep breath and floated back to
the surface of her deep bathtub. She closed her eyes and enjoyed the effortless weightlessness that came from floating rather than flying.
She was trying to keep herself from dozing off, but felt herself drifting nearer and nearer to sleeping. She was considering leaving the warmth of the bath, but continued to float lazily. She had almost made up her mind when a knock at the door snapped her awake again. She maneuvered her feet underneath her and kneeled on the floor of the tub, bringing the water level to just beneath her collarbone. There was another knock, and before Ivy could answer, she heard the door open.
“Ivy?” Nai called. “Are you home?”
Ivy shook her head in mild irritation, but her lips formed half a smile on their own. “Yes,” she said, and then emphasized, “I’m in the bath.”
“Oh, wonderful,” Nai said, and Ivy heard Nai walking through the house to the bathroom.
Ivy wasn’t especially bashful, but Nai’s gaze was so knowing and piercing that Ivy felt like Nai could see her nakedness right through the water and the steam. She pulled her arms under the water, making a slight effort to cover herself, although she knew Nai probably couldn’t see through the water anyway.
“You know why I’m here,” Nai said.
Ivy frowned, but didn’t say anything.
“Have you thought about it?” Nai asked.
“Of course I’ve thought about it. It’s all I can think about! It’s ludicrous.”
“It’s not ludicrous. You’re the best one for the job.”
Ivy shook her head. “That’s not… I’m… No. I’m not. There are plenty of others who actually want this. Rommy’s been trying to butter you up for ages. Or what about Tate? He’s smart and people seem to trust him.”
“Tate is not true of heart. You don’t really expect me to trust either of them with the future of The Meadows, do you?”
Realmwalker Page 2