On the Edge te-1

by Ilona Andrews

  He looked at her for a long moment and raised his arms, palms out. “Okay. Maybe we’ll run into each other again sometime.” He made it sound like a promise.

  “Maybe,” she said.

  THREE

  WEDNESDAY rolled around way too fast.

  A white truck sped by her, its horn blaring. Rose didn’t even spare a glance. The needle on her fuel gauge had rolled to the left of the yellow “E.”

  “Just make it to the Edge,” she murmured. “That’s all I ask.”

  The old Ford rumbled on, creaking. She kept the speed at thirty miles an hour to save the gas. In the distance, the sun set slowly, threatening the sky with red. She was so late.

  She had to stay overtime—at the regular seven-bucks-an-hour rate as usual. The T-shirt printer had an emergency. Some disgruntled employee had sprayed the floor with the tacky liquid they used to keep the T-shirts in place while the designs were inked into them. By the time the owners realized what had happened and called Clean-n-Bright, the floor was a horrid mess of every type of dirt imaginable. Only one thing removed the tacky spray—turpentine. She and Latoya had spent the last two hours crawling on their hands and knees drenching the tile in it. Her fingers smelled like turpentine. It was everywhere, on her skin, in her hair, on her shoes . . . Her back ached. She needed to get home and take a shower. True, she was a cleaning lady, but that didn’t mean she had to smell like one.

  A small part of her regretted not accepting William’s offer. He wasn’t boyfriend material, but he could’ve been a friend. Someone outside the Edge to talk to. Water under the bridge, she told herself. She said no, and she’d live with it.

  Ahead the familiar curve of Potter Road appeared from the greenery. Finally.

  The truck sneezed.

  “Come on, boy. You can do it.”

  The Ford sneezed again. She took her foot off the gas, guiding the old truck into a turn, and let it roll up the road into the trees. They were down to ten miles per hour now. A bit more gas. A bit more . . .

  They crossed the boundary, and the magic flared within her, filling her with warmth. The engine died with a soft murmur, and Rose let the truck glide off the road into the tangled brush. The greenery snapped shut behind her. She parked, got out, locking the Ford, and patted the hot hood. “Thanks.”

  It was the first day of school, and she was out of gas. At least Grandma had agreed to pick the kids up at the end of the road and watch them until Rose got home from work. Usually they walked by themselves, but today had to be special. They’d be bursting at the seams with earth-shattering revelations about going back to school.

  Rose started up the road. Around her the Wood crowded the dirt path: huge trees braided their dark twisted limbs, the ground between their trunks soft with centuries of autumn. Pale blue horsetail vines tinseled the branches. Twilight crouched among the trees. The blanket of kudzu that swallowed trees whole in the Broken stopped at the boundary, and here the Edge moss had taken over, hugging the tree trunks like a velvet sleeve and sending forth tiny flowers on thin stalks that looked like overturned lady shoes: bright purple, mint green, lavender, pink. The scents of a dozen herbs mixed into an earthy, slightly bitter spice in the air.

  Sinister noises came from the gloomy depths of the Wood, and occasionally a glowing pair of eyes ignited in the canopy. Rose paid it little mind. The Wood was the Wood; most things around these parts knew who she was and let her be.

  Two miles separated her from the turnoff to the house, and Rose fell into a familiar, comfortable stride. It lasted until the third turn of the road. She halted. This was the spot where the man with two swords had leaped onto her truck.

  Rose looked at the dirt tracks. Now that had been something else. As far as she could remember, the truck hood came to a little above her waist. She rocked experimentally on her toes and jumped as high as she could. Not even close. If she took a running start, she could maybe get one leg up on the hood. But he had leaped onto the moving truck, landed on his feet, and kept going like it was nothing.

  A tiny high-pitched noise from above made her raise her head. To the left a tall tree spread its branches over the path, leaning to the road. About nine feet off the ground, just before the tree trunk forked in two, a skinny shape hugged the bark. Kenny Jo Ogletree.

  Kenny stood pretty far down on her favorite people list, only a step above his mother, Leanne, who had been best friends with Sarah Walton during high school and whose chief achievement was scrawling WHORES BITCH on Rose’s locker with a permanent marker. Grammar wasn’t among Leanne’s strengths, but bullying she had raised to an art form.

  The apple didn’t fall far from the tree—at nine, Kenny was a bully and a loudmouth. About a month ago he and Georgie ran into a misunderstanding over a softball game and had to have words. If it wasn’t for Jack, Kenny would’ve beaten Georgie bloody, but all the kids were afraid of Jack. Jack fought like every fight was his last, and he didn’t always stop when he won.

  Kenny clutched at the tree, standing absolutely still. His hands had gone white-knuckled with desperation. Grime stained his shirt and threadbare khaki shorts, and a long scratch along his thigh slowly dripped blood onto his calf. Kenny stared at her. His eyes were glassy, the whites starkly pale. Whatever problems she had with Leanne paled when faced with a nine-year-old boy terrified out of his wits.

  “Are you okay, Kenny?”

  He just stared.

  The bushes on her left rustled. It was a purposeful, predatory sort of rustling. Rose backed away slowly.

  A shiver ran through the thin stems. The branches bent, dark triangular leaves parted, and a creature stepped onto the road. Four feet tall, it stood upright, its body a mess of rotting, putrescent tissue clumped together in a grotesque patchwork. Rose saw the scales of a forest snake on the left leg, reddish fox fur on the shoulder, matted gray squirrel fuzz on the chest, brown stripes of a pig on the lower stomach . . . Part of its gut was missing, and a rotting mass of intestines glared through the hole just under a narrow flash of ribs.

  Its face was horrible. Two pale baleful eyes stared at her from deep sockets. They brimmed with intense, focused hatred. Under them a wide mouth gaped, armed with sharp triangular teeth, sprouting from the jaws in several rows.

  A ragged, whispery wheezing came from the creature, heavy and wet. A wold. A thing of hate and magic, a living curse that drew power from its creator’s rage. Someone had cursed some land or a house nearby, and the Wood gave the curse a form and a purpose: to kill everything it came across.

  In the tree, Kenny whimpered like a kitten.

  The wold opened its mouth wider and stepped forward, menace radiating from it like a foul corona. It wanted to murder her, to take a piece of her flesh and make it its own.

  Rose raised her right hand.

  The wold hissed. Its twisted limbs opened wide, releasing yellow claws.

  A light sheen of magic coated Rose’s fingers. The magic vibrated in her, straining to break free.

  The wold ran at her, its black maw gaping, teeth and claws ready to rend.

  Rose flashed. Magic shot from her hand in a glowing whip of white and struck the creature in the chest. The wold’s momentum carried it another step, but the icy white flame of the flash burned it, burrowing into its chest, seeking its malice-coated core. Dismembering it wouldn’t be enough. She had to kill the curse itself.

  Chunks of flesh rained from the wold. Rose advanced, keeping the whip of light fixed on the creature. Her arm throbbed with tension.

  The wold fell apart, revealing a small mote of darkness churning with violent red and purple flashes. Rose squeezed her fist. The white whip clutched at the darkness. She strained, squeezing tighter, her nails biting into her palm. With a sound like a cracked walnut, the mote collapsed in on itself in a shower of white sparks and vanished.

  Rose let out a deep breath, stepped over the carrion littering the path, and walked up to the tree. “Come on,” she said, holding out her hands.

  Kenny
stood frozen. For a moment she thought she’d have to go get his mother, but suddenly he let go and slid down the trunk, scraping himself against bark and all but falling into her arms. She had to drop him on his feet—he was too heavy.

  “It’s gone,” she said and hugged him. “Dead and done. Understand?”

  He nodded.

  “It won’t come back. If you ever see another one like that, you run to my house as fast as you can. I’ll kill it. Go home now.”

  He peeled down the road at a dead run, veering left, toward the Ogletree house.

  Rose looked back at the carrion strewn in the dirt. Only a handful of families could claim a magic user strong enough to create a wold, and all of those capable were older people and supposedly knew better. A wold couldn’t be stopped. It was the kind of weapon that killed everything it came across. She hadn’t seen one for years. The last time one popped up, it took a full-blown posse to hunt it down with gasoline and torches.

  Something had to have gone seriously wrong for one of the locals to curse a wold into life. Something dire was happening. Cold dread settled in the base of her neck. For a moment she considered following Kenny Jo to find out if Leanne knew anything about it, but decided against it. Shortly after high school, Sarah had married well and moved to a nice house in the Broken. Rumor said, Leanne wasn’t welcome at Sarah’s new dream home, and it made her only madder at life than she already was. She and Rose hadn’t spoken to each other since high school. She seriously doubted Leanne would suddenly open up to her.

  Rose started up the road at a brisk pace. The faster she got home, the sooner she’d make sure that the boys were safe.

  Few things happened in East Laporte without Grandma Éléonore’s knowledge. She would just have to ask her about it.

  “MÉMÈRE?”

  Éléonore glanced at Georgie’s face. She never could get him to explain how he knew to call her that. She had never spoken a word of French to either of them. But Georgie started saying it when he was two, with a light Provençal overlay. She had a feeling he didn’t know himself why he did it, but every time he said the word, it brought her back to dry, warm hills, where she sat in the sunshine next to her own grandmère , nibbling on fougasse that left a faint orange taste on her tongue and watching the men down in the village play la longue with the grace of ballet dancers.

  She smiled at him. “What is it?”

  “Can we go outside?”

  Two pairs of eyes blinked at her from angelic faces: Georgie’s blue and Jack’s amber. Hooligans, both of them. “Is it dark?”

  “We won’t go past the ward stones.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Oh, and you think I was born yesterday, no?”

  “Pleeease.” Georgie’s eyes would’ve done any puppy proud. Behind him Jack nodded earnestly.

  “All right.” She gave in before her heart melted. Rose would be none too pleased if she found out, but what Rose didn’t know, she couldn’t fuss about. “I don’t trust the two of you. I’m coming out on the porch.”

  They were out the door before she got up off her chair.

  Éléonore took her teacup to the porch. The old rocking chair creaked under her weight. The boys dashed into the yard.

  Beyond the lines of the ward stones, the Wood shivered with life. The sky had darkened to deep soothing purple, and the leaves of the upper branches stood out, nearly black against it, rustling gently in the cool whisper of the night breeze. Here and there the white spires of nightneedle bloomed between the trees. Their stems, no more than green shoots during the day, released a cascade of delicate, bell-shaped blossoms with the first touch of darkness, sending a mimosa perfume into the night. Éléonore breathed it in and smiled.

  So peaceful . . .

  Unease flared at the base of her neck and rolled down her spine in a viscous wintry rush. She felt the press of someone’s gaze pin her, as if she had a bull’s-eye between her shoulder blades. Éléonore turned, scanning the ward line.

  There. A dark spot hovered at the outer edge on her left. It stood on all fours, dense and impenetrable, like a hole cut in the fabric of the night to reveal primordial darkness. She could barely see it in the gloom, its silhouette more of a guess than a certainty.

  Éléonore’s fingers found the small wooden charm hanging from her neck. She gripped it tight and whispered, “Sight.”

  Magic pulsed from her in a flat horizontal fan, pulling the landscape and the creature to her eyes in a rush. She saw darkness and within it a narrow slit of the eye: pale, weakly luminescent gray without an iris or a pupil. She tried to reach past it and glimpsed a hint of a form, churning with unfamiliar violence. Her senses screamed in alarm. The eye jerked out of sight. She released the charm in time to catch a blur of darkness as the creature vanished into the underbrush without a sound.

  The Wood was home to many things, but Éléonore had never seen one so disturbingly alien. She glanced to the kids on the lawn. Safe behind the protective stones. It will be fine, she told herself. The wards around Rose’s house were strong and old. The spells had rooted deep into the soil. Besides, Rose would be coming up the road any minute now, and Éléonore pitied any beast that tried to stand between her and the boys.

  It was probably just some odd creature the Wood had disgorged. The forest stretched west of East Laporte and all the way into the Weird. Perhaps some Weird beast had crossed the boundary into the Edge. Stranger things had happened. No need to tell Rose about it, Éléonore decided. The poor child was paranoid enough as it was.

  ROSE made the final turn and paused at the edge of the lawn. Grandma Éléonore sat on the porch, sipping hot tea from a teacup. Some time ago Grandma had decided she was old enough to cultivate a hedge witch look. Her gray hair was teased into a semblance of a crazy matted mess randomly decorated with feathers, twigs, and charms. Her clothes would’ve given any deconstruction-oriented designer a run for his money: they were artfully ripped and layered, until she resembled a half-plucked chicken with bits and tatters of fabric fluttering about her as she moved.

  The authenticity of her costume was slightly ruined by the fact that both her rags and her hair were very clean and smelled faintly of lavender, and by a decidedly unwitchy teacup with a fluffy gray kitten on it.

  “Were the boys any trouble?” Rose asked, coming to sit next to her.

  Grandma rolled her eyes. “Please. I’m a hundred and seven years old. I think I can handle two hooligans.”

  The magic kept most Edge families alive and well long past their Broken peers, and Grandma didn’t look a day older than fifty-five. It wasn’t her age that was the problem, Rose reflected. It was that the moment the boys made their puppy eyes at her, all the rules and discipline flew out the window.

  Behind Grandma the boys chased each other on the grass: Jack, nimble and lightning quick, and Georgie, a pale golden-haired shadow. Paler than usual today. One of them was impersonating InuYasha, the half-demon boy from the comic book; the other was probably Lord Sesshomaru, InuYasha’s older and stronger demon half-brother. But which was which, she couldn’t tell from here.

  Rose did not regret buying the comics. The boys had latched onto them, and the precious volumes now occupied the treasured spot of honor on the top shelf in their bedroom.

  Georgie ran out of breath and sat on the grass, slumping forward. Rose caught a sigh. He looked about to be sick.

  Grandma pursed her lips. “What was it this time?”

  “A baby bird.” He’d raised it this morning, before she dropped them off at the school bus stop.

  Georgie coughed and bent over on the grass. Jack stopped in midstride. He looked at Georgie for a long moment, his face blank and lost, then trotted over and sat next to him.

  “If George keeps this up, it will kill him.” Grandma shook her head.

  Rose sighed. When Georgie resurrected something, he sacrificed a bit of his vitality to give it life. The stronger his power grew, the weaker his body became, as if his mind was the flame of a candle that bu
rned too bright, destroying the wax too fast. They tried explaining. They tried talking. They tried threats and punishments and pleading, but nothing helped. Georgie breathed life into things that made him sad with their passing and simply didn’t know how to let them go.

  “What a pair.” Grandma sighed. “A cat with a death wish and his brother who’s trying to keep half of the Wood alive.” Her voice broke a bit. “How’s Cletus?” she said, making an obvious effort to sound nonchalant and failing.

  “Same,” Rose said.

  A shadow clouded Grandma’s eyes. She frowned and poured Rose a cup of tea. “The boys told me about this William. What does he do?”

  Traitors. “He’s a floorer.”

  “He sells flowers?” Grandma’s eyebrows crept up.

  “No. You know how roofers work on roofs? Well, he works on floors.”

  “Are you sure he isn’t a child molester? Because that’s what they do, they sidle up to the woman in the family, woo her, and then next thing you know they’ve got their di—”

  Rose gave her an indignant stare. “He isn’t a child molester.”

  “How do you know?”

  Rose spread her arms helplessly. “He has honest eyes?”

  “Is he handsome?”

  Rose frowned. “He’s a fine figure of a man. Dark hair, dark eyes. Handsome, I suppose.”

  “If he looks that good, why didn’t you let him court you?”

  “It didn’t feel right,” she said shortly.

  Grandma looked at her, her blue eyes vivid on her wrinkled tan face, like two violets on a freshly plowed field. “I see.”

  “I saw a wold today,” Rose said to change the subject.

  Grandma raised her eyebrows. “Oh? How big?”

  Rose lifted her hand to show about four feet.

  “My. He was a big one.” A flicker of worry mudded the clear blue of Grandma’s eyes.

  Rose nodded. “It chased Kenny Jo up a tree.”

  “Kenny Jo deserves it. Did you kill it?”

  They shared a small private smile. A couple of weeks after Rose had flashed white, Grandma had made a small wold for her to kill. Practice, she had said. It was more than that— it was a test. Grandma wanted to see how hot she could flash. Rose had blown the wold to pieces in the first ten seconds. Grandma didn’t speak for a full half a day after that. Grandpa had called it a record of some sort and predicted Apocalypse.