Then a movement in my periphery caught my attention, and I gasped. The heather was growing. Visibly growing, the slender stems pushing up from the ground and filling out with delicate purple blooms. It was like watching a time-lapsed video. I glanced at Joe, agape. He beamed at me.
The dark earth between the plants twinkled faintly. The air filled with a soft, very subtle scent that was more herbal than floral, the kind of smell that makes you want to draw closer to its source and bury your nose in it. In the center of the circle, the lone heather Joe had planted there grew up taller and thicker than the rest, and its flowers were white.
There was a moment of stillness, as though the entire forest around us held its breath, and then the white heather fronds stirred. Another moment, and they parted. A figure came through.
The fae looked up at us. It was short but not tiny, the size of a fifth-grade child. It was humanoid in shape, slender in a soft way with a sunken chest and sloping shoulders, long willowy arms, plump-thighed legs like a deer’s rear legs, but froglike toes that splayed out on the ground. It had a long, snaking neck and a head covered in floaty, feathery hairs and long whiskers, its features animal in shape but human in expression. Its smooth skin took on the colors of the forest. It had shimmering motes tangled in its hairs, and I thought it had wings at first, but then realized it was wearing a cape or cloak of some sort hanging down its back. My heels dug into the dead leaves and loam, my back pressing into the boulder. I realized I was digging my nails into Joe’s arm.
The fronds twitched again, and two more figures crawled out from beneath it. These fae were round and birdlike, with slanting eyes of a completely mahogany hue and tangled clouds of hair that looked like dingy spun sugar. Their fingers were long and bony and they had only three on each hand. They wore clothes in an overlapping design that looked sort of like feathers or scales or perhaps leaves, and not entirely like any of those things.
All of us stared at each other for a long moment. I couldn’t tear my eyes away; I couldn’t move. I leaned closer to Joe. “They don’t speak English, do they?”
“Not a lick of it.” He didn’t seem the least bit concerned.
“Okay,” I said, and we all resumed staring at each other.
They took tentative steps around our dishes of offerings, sniffing and examining them and plunging fingers in to feel them. They tasted everything, at first just the tiniest lick, and then diving in, scuffling over the treats and sniping at each other in strange sounds that I presumed were some kind of language.
And then they discovered the masks, and it seemed like they were delighted by them, if completely unable to pick one and stick with it--they’d examine one, drop it for another, snatch the first back from one of their fellows, lose interest at the sight of a third. The long-necked one finally put the blank face mask on, and when it looked at us, the mask seemed like it was alive. That was more than a little creepy. But then it said, in a rather resonant deep voice, “I suppose you want something in exchange for all these gifts.”
I jumped. “I thought you said--”
“Part of the advantage of giving them human guises,” said Joe. “Makes communication a lot easier.” He addressed the masked spirit. “You bet your bippy we do, friend.”
“Wagering is unnecessary. Just make your request.”
I noticed that Joe made no move to get any closer to them, so I stayed put too. “There’s an intruder here on the land,” he said. “Might be from one of the lands of the dead. Thought you might want to do something about that.”
One of?
The taller of the birdlike creatures donned the rubber mask. Oh, joy. How had I not noticed it was a clown? “We cannot kill a death spirit,” said the clown face with more than a trace of condescension. “And certainly not for a half-stale pastry if we could.”
“Oh, well, sorry to waste your time then,” said Joe. “Or, wait, no, I’m not a complete rube. I know you guys are small potatoes.”
They all bristled, and I wondered if it was wise to smart off to capricious wild spirits whose help we needed. But this was his show, so I put a cork in it and hoped for the best.
“This is your problem as much as ours,” he went on, “so you might want to think about being helpful here. I gave you a gate and a way to move safely among the humans here. Feel free to come out and play as long as the circle lasts, and hey, bring a few more friends. But while you’re at it, how about sniffing around to help us find the demon’s taint?”
“Eeyew,” I muttered, unable to stifle a hysterical little giggle.
Joe elbowed me hard in the ribs. “We know he’s here. We know he’s tailing a human here, but we don’t know who. We know that the link between them may have created a vulture egregore that sometimes hovers around that mortal. Use your senses while we use ours, and we can help each other find him and deal with him before he poisons your land or steals one of our kind.”
The spirits exchanged looks. It was impossible for me to tell what they thought of this whole thing.
“Fine,” said Longneck Blankface. “We will spread the word and see who wants to come through and look around. But what comes of it, may come at a price.”
“I’d expect no less,” said Joe.
“Can you give us any trace of this demon to follow?” asked Longneck. “It will make it much easier to find him among all your energies.”
Joe looked at me. “Anything?” he said. “If there’s anything left over, a phrase, a gesture, a mark--they’re right, it really would help them.”
“I don’t...” I began, then trailed off. A thousand thoughts, memories, feelings warred in my head. My heart beat faster. “Okay.” It took me a long moment to force the word out.
He stared at me with a deep, penetrating look. “Go on,” he said, gentle. “Just don’t step inside the circle.”
I got closer to the circle without getting too near the perimeter. Longneck stepped between the purple heather plants toward me and the air rippled around him. As he crossed the line, he seemed to pass through a membrane, and emerged as an ageless-looking but smooth-skinned masculine person, sturdy and naked, with a mop of unruly dark hair and features that had a slight otherworldly cast to them. I held out my arm to him. With one fingertip I traced the length of the white scar down the inside of my wrist, and a few smaller, fainter, finer scars along the tender flesh of my inner arm. They were hardly visible anymore unless you were very close, or knew to look.
The spirit took my arm lightly in his hands and held it up close to his face. He studied the marks, and then closed his eyes and put his face close to them, staying very still. Behind him, I saw the other two spirits emerge from the circle as well. Like him, they took on human appearances, though theirs were clothed. Both were feminine, busty and stout with long thick tangled hair. They, too, put their faces up close to my arm and closed their eyes. I felt a tiny pulsing along the scars, almost an itch, almost a twinge of pain, and my heart hurt with ancient shame and a remembered misery that throbbed in my gut. I wrapped my other arm around my waist and looked away, steeling myself.
When they let go, they all looked at me and I knew that they knew. “We will help,” said Longneck.
One of the stout sisters stood on tiptoe and smelled my neck. I jerked back, startled, but she smiled in rapture. “Ocean salt and roses,” she sighed. “It is a wonderful aura. Someone has blessed you with great love.”
They retreated into the circle, resuming their masked-fae appearances, took off the masks with some reluctance, and vanished back into the white heather.
Joe scrambled up beside me. He stood facing me, and I lifted my eyes. He looked sorry and sad and kind and I looked away because I was afraid I’d cry again. “Come on.” The undertone of sympathy said all that needed to be said. “They’ll all come back when they’re ready, and there’s nothing else we can do here right now.”
We set off back
through the dense brush, picking our way out to the edge of the forest and back into camp. The sun was high overhead now and I realized I was desperately hungry.
In silence, we strode across the grass of the field. At last Joe glanced at me and clicked his tongue. “Demon’s taint,” he said, and slung an arm around my shoulders. “You asshole.”
We burst out laughing. “Fucking hippie,” I said, and draped my arm around his waist.
CHAPTER NINE
I was hungry, hot, tired, and frustrated. It was late in the afternoon, I’d been at the same picnic table in the pavilion for a few hours, I never had gotten around to having any lunch, and so far it was all for nothing. So far, no one had stood out as a likely candidate for the demon’s target, I hadn’t smelled any ozone, and it seemed like this might have been a waste of time. It wasn’t good. Who knew how much time we had to find them?
I glanced over at Cherry at the other end of the table. She was waiting for her latest querent to finish cutting her tarot deck, and in that moment she looked as worn out as me. Past her, Tamar was engrossed in a reading and seemed wrapped up in what she was doing, but surely she was feeling drained as well. It was almost the end of the time we’d designated for our impromptu event, and the shade hadn’t shielded us from the stifling thick air of the hottest part of the day.
Since I had a moment’s break, I put down my cards, stretched my cramped fingers and shook out my hands, and wearily rubbed my eyes. I bumped the frames of my glasses. Right. I’d almost forgotten I was even wearing them. I took them off and tossed them down. That was what Tamar was cooking up when Joe and I went to deal with the fairy circle. She and Cherry and Sara had scared up a few pairs of sunglasses and costume glasses with plastic lenses, and she’d gone to work crafting some sympathetic magic that was supposed to help us see otherwise-invisible things around people. Funky auras, dark spots in their etheric bodies, shadows or ghosts hanging around them, that kind of thing.
“You mean like that movie They Live?” I’d asked, not without skepticism. “Can we tell which ones are our alien overlords, too?”
Tamar had looked at me with that deadpan face. “I’m here to chew bubblegum and defeat demons. And I’m all out of bubblegum.”
I’d put on the glasses.
But they weren’t working. Mostly. We could see smeary blurs around people, like heat rising off pavement, but that was about it. Either no one here had any etheric garbage--which was hard to believe--or the magic on the glasses wasn’t strong enough.
Tamar picked the glasses up off the table. “I haven’t gotten a damn thing so far. I’m going back to camp, see if I can figure out what I did wrong with these. Meet you two back here?”
“Sure,” I said. “I’m about ready to wrap up.”
She put a hand on my shoulder. “We’ll find them. No way we all got such strong calls to be here just to wander around lost all weekend.”
I was about to get up and go take a drink of water straight from the spigot when an older guy with a ring of white hair sat down opposite me. He was wearing a long-sleeved white shirt unbuttoned over a t-shirt and didn’t seem at all overheated, which I supposed qualified him as a prospect by my sketchy standards. “So you’re doing readings, huh?”
“That’s me.” I forced a tired smile. “You squeaked in under the wire.”
His question had something to do with his spiritual awakenings while backpacking through India. Join the club, buddy, I thought as I shuffled the deck. He was about the fifth person I’d talked to that day who had been to India, or Thailand, or Tibet, in search of some kind of enlightenment that I guess only non-white-people countries possess. Ah, cynicism, my old friend. I tried to sneak in a leading question or two, but I was clearly going to need to let him wind down some before he would let himself be distracted from his tale. I wondered if he wanted a reading, or just an audience.
Maybe it was because he was rambling on about things that weren’t going to tell me what I needed to know, that I was able to get distracted. I noticed that Cherry had started a new reading, and the girl she was talking to was zipped up into a hoodie. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but I hoped Cherry was getting somewhere with this.
My gaze wandered off in the other direction. I noticed Vivi, Dove and Chris’s friend from Science Faction, sitting a few tables away. She had a huge plate of barbecue in front of her and was absolutely going to town on it in a way that women are usually too self-conscious to do.
My first thought was Good for you. Following on the heels of that, I realized that a few people had taken over one of the pavilion’s grills and were the source of her food, and it smelled heavenly, and I thought that I could die from hunger in that moment. Barbecue could save me. Pulled pork, the ambrosia of the gods.
“Hey,” said my subject, annoyed. “Do you want to hear this or not?”
Not really, I thought. “Of course,” I forced myself to say, putting the cards down in front of him to cut. “Please, go on.”
I tried to make myself pay attention, but once or twice my longing gaze snuck back to Vivi and her barbecue. After a couple of times, she noticed me looking, and smiled at me, one hand raised in a wave as the other self-consciously reached up to the corners of her mouth to wipe her lips.
Mr. Eat Pray Love didn’t seem to have much to share beyond a fair amount of self-congratulation for his designer-label wisdom, so when he finally wrapped it up, I didn’t try to draw him out with any more questions. Instead I just made impressed-sounding noises and sped through the reading so he’d go away happy.
As I stood to get that drink of water, I stared with intense lust at the grill, where meat was still cooking and people were standing around eating. One of them, who was still wearing an apron that said “Grillmaster”, noticed me watching them. “Come, join us, eat!” he called out. “There’s plenty to share.”
There’s a lot to love about MetamorphosUS.
Glancing back, I saw that Cherry was still doing readings for people. I left her to finish up while I went over to the grill and Grillmaster handed me a paper plate with a couple split links of sausage, a chicken thigh, and a well-sauced pile of pulled pork. Someone else put a beer in my hand. I’m not really a beer person, but it was cold and it was there and I was hardly going to refuse the gift. I kissed all the cooks on the cheek, so great was my gratitude. “Come back for seconds,” one of them teased me with a wink.
Vivi was still eating, and she gestured to the seat across from her. “Thanks,” I said. “Gods, this all looks amazing.”
“I can’t stop eating.” She grinned. “I’m making such a pig of myself.”
“I’ll join you.” I picked up a clump of shredded meat in my fingers since I had no utensils with me, and took a huge bite. “Being ladylike is overrated,” I added. With my mouth full, of course.
She laughed. “Agreed.”
We fell silent for a minute as we ate. I thought about how awkward I’d felt when I left Science Faction that morning. Had I overreacted?
“I think we’ve proved that intense hunger can’t generate ozone.” She winked at me.
Dammit. I looked down at my plate. “It was a stupid idea.”
“Hey. Hey, I’m just teasing. It was for a story, right? You’re creative.”
I tried to smile. “I shouldn’t ask a bunch of hard-science people about woo stuff.”
She licked sauce off her fingertip. “I guess we’re a little cynical. Hang around in these circles long enough, and you get tired of people proclaiming that chemotherapy can be replaced by juice cleanses, or trying to impress you by waving their hands around you and telling you they’re giving you energy healing.”
“Fair enough.”
“So what were you up to over there?” She gestured with her chin toward the table I’d been at.
“Um. Doing tarot readings. As it turns out.”
She kept
her face polite and composed, with a little nod. “Oh, awesome.”
“Don’t worry. I won’t try to do chiropractic on your chakras or anything. I haven’t been to chakra chiropractic school yet.”
She laughed, and I grinned. I was feeling better with every bite; I hadn’t realized there was a dull thrum of pain in my head and neck until the presence of food started to relieve it.
She looked down at her empty plate. “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I’m going to see if I can sweet-talk some seconds out of the grillmasters.”
“I think if you kiss them you get special treatment. I’ve got to check in with my friends, anyway. See you around?”
“Definitely.” She was already out of her seat and headed to the grill. Tamar was heading back toward us, carrying towels. Yes. A swim break sounded perfect right about now.
Cherry and Tamar were sitting together, heads inclined and talking low by the time I tossed my plate and bottle. I took the seat opposite them and leaned over the table. “So? Anything?”
“Hard to say,” said Cherry. “Nobody jumped out at me as the person we’re looking for.”
“I had two or three people who sent up a flag for me,” said Tamar, “but nothing clear-cut.”
I slipped my cards back into their drawstring bag. “Nothing obvious for me, either.”
“So what do we do now?” said Cherry.
“We should cool off.” Tamar stood up. “We’re no use to anyone if we’re suffering from heat exhaustion.”
“What about the glasses?” I asked.
“After the break. I can’t think anymore in this heat. Let’s put on some oxygen masks, hey?” She was giving Cherry a pointed look as she said it.
As we took off for the pond, I dropped back a step or two from Tamar’s brisk strides and fell in beside Cherry. “What was that all about?” I asked her, low.
“Nothing.” She shrugged, flicked a glance at me, sighed. “I...might have a little teensy bit of a problem going out of my way to try to rescue and fix people.”
MetamorphosUS: Book 1 of the Mythfit Witch Mysteries Page 13