by Mel Sterling
He slept on peacefully. She gathered a warm robe from the floor at the foot of the bed where it had slithered as the two of them made love. Belting it around her, she padded down the stairs, headed for the kitchen and a glass of water.
The floral fragrance seemed more intense in the stairwell. Tess paused for a moment, wondering where it was coming from. It didn't smell like any of her soaps or lotions, and she didn't use air freshener in the house. She hadn't lit any scented candles, so what was it? Anything seemed possible with a magical creature in the house.
Anything was possible, she realized, as her hand brushed over the light switch into the kitchen, and she saw the source of the fragrance.
Her kitchen floor was no longer there. The black and white vinyl tile was gone, and in its place was a garden filled with flowers.
Bluebells, to be exact.
Hundreds of them, perhaps thousands.
Their drooping heads nodded as she turned on the light, almost as if they were hiding sensitive eyes. The perfume of them filled the room. As she watched, more and more blossoms opened, delicate wands of bells emerging from green sheaths, as if photographed in slow motion and then sped up into real time.
The beauty was breathtaking. A smile of delighted surprise parted her lips. She bent and plucked a nodding stem of blossom and held it to her nose. The fragrance of that single stem was faint, but in such concentration, even faint perfume became overwhelming.
If this was what having a fae in her house wrought, she thought she could live with it. Still smiling, Tess picked her way through the bluebells to the sink, where she filled a glass with water. Green ivy seemed to have followed the bluebells in from Forest Park, for hairy-footed tendrils were groping their green, leafy way along the edges of the cabinets and twining attractively through the ladder backs of the kitchen chairs. Spring had come to her kitchen.
She turned as she gulped down half the glass, intending to return to the bedroom and waken Thomas, to thank him for this magical beauty with a kiss. Did he dream the bluebells into existence? Had he worked a spell as she slept?
With a smile, she paused to fill a glass with milk for Thomas. She walked back to the hallway, careful not to step on any of the blooms, but hardly able to avoid the clusters of arching green stems and leaves. The blossom heads seemed to turn to watch her progress through the room.
At her feet, the bluebells were colonizing the carpet of the hallway, heading for the living room and the front of the house. Soon the entire ground floor would be a forest glade! As she stood for a moment, watching, a tendril of ivy crept up the doorjamb and reached out for the curtain rod of the window next to the front door. The doorjamb itself took on a woody look, the silver and white roughness of birch or aspen. A dark spot on—Tess could only think of it as bark—what used to be paint swelled gently, and a bud with delicate baby leaves worked its way out of the wood, for all the world like a questing fingertip testing the air. Tess drew a slow, amazed breath and went up the stairs, looking back at the miracle with each step. The susurrus of spring growth, thousands of leaves and blossoms unfurling, followed her up the stairs.
In her room again, she put a knee on the bed and set her water glass on the nightstand. The clink of glass on wood woke Thomas instantly, and in his blocky trow face, his beautiful murky blue eyes flicked open. Tess spoke softly, reaching for the lamp.
"It's just me. I brought you some milk."
Thomas sat up, the blankets falling to his waist. In the warm bedside light she watched him glamour himself, pulling a fully human appearance out of the ether to mask his trow features. She waited until he seemed to be settled, then offered him the glass.
"I love what you've done downstairs," she told him, sitting on the side of the bed and watching while he drained the milk in just a gulp or two. "It's amazing. I've never seen anything so beautiful in my life."
He blinked, looking at her in confusion. "What are you talking about? What's downstairs?"
"The flowers! Can't you smell them? The fragrance is what woke me, and when I went downstairs to get a glass of water, I found them. They're incredible. Thank you." She leaned forward and kissed his bemused mouth softly, feeling a little shy. "How do you work the magic? Does it happen while you dream? Will they still be there, now that you're awake?"
"You're not making sense, Te—" She heard him stop himself from saying her name, and felt a little bereft. He'd only said it for the first time last night as she met him on the front walk. She hungered to hear it again. He reached past her to put the empty glass on the table, and took up her water glass, draining it as well. "What magic? I have very little."
"Come and look." She stood, holding out her hand. The robe gaped open a little, and Thomas's gaze went to where the silky lapels revealed the swell of her breast.
"It's warm here," he countered, lifting the blanket invitingly. "You come here instead."
"Can't you smell them? They're incredible, and they've filled the kitchen! You have to explain how you do this. Come on!" She waggled her hand at him, and watched his expression change as he saw she was serious. He took a deep breath of the air, then his gaze flicked to hers, their drowsy expression changing. He flung back the quilt and leapt from the bed, heading for the stairs and taking them in only a few strides. Tess, surprised, followed him more slowly, distracted by the view his naked, muscular body provided.
He stood in the center of the kitchen, turning slowly, bluebells all around him.
"Look how beautiful—" Tess began, but Thomas interrupted.
"I didn't do this. This isn't the sort of magic trows have. They—I—can work with stone and earth, it's why I was able to build my home in the bridge pier, those things speak with me. But this is not my work. This is something deeper, something stronger." His gaze lifted to hers as he paused in his rotation. There was a long moment as he appeared to be lost in thought. An ivy tendril stroked tentatively at his ankle, then more firmly, and began to climb his naked calf. Thomas looked down at it, an expression of horror in his eyes. "Oh, fuck, no." He sprinted from the kitchen into the next room, where he stood in front of the curio cabinet.
Thomas yanked open the glass door, even though Tess knew he must see the cabinet was mostly empty. "Where are they? Where are her things?"
Tess pointed. "In the kitchen, in a bag. I should have told you earlier, I have this idea that your Queen has somehow magicked my clients'...er, essence...maybe their souls...something...into her little things. Drained them, and made her things into...I don't know, batteries? Something like that? She stored them away. Because last week when I went to Ridge Manor, Rory—"
"Who is Rory?" Thomas interrupted. "Be quick. And show me where you put the things."
Tess led him into the kitchen and pointed at the grocery tote, which was slumped in the corner where she had put it when she got home from the failure at Aaron's house. Or, rather, what had been the grocery tote. The black cloth was now a stunning mound of emerald moss, with ghostly mushrooms decorating it like fancy drink umbrellas. Tess groped at her breast, but the seeing stone was on her bedside table along with her wristwatch and the other small things she and Thomas had removed as they undressed. "I think they're in there, under all that moss."
Thomas strode to the bag and opened it slowly, peering inside.
A flurry of autumn leaves burst out, six or seven of the things flapping around the kitchen like trapped birds. She supposed they had gotten in the tote when the leaves attacked her at the Eisley house, and she'd brought them home with her in the car. She shuddered. There was something very, very wrong about self-directed dead leaves. These smacked against walls, cupboards and appliances with noises that sounded like tiny screams.
Cursing, Thomas went after them, catching two and gripping them tightly. "Catch them! Don't let them escape! If they get out, we're done for."
"What?" she exclaimed, confused. Thomas dashed about the kitchen like a madman, naked as a forest god and equally well-endowed, chasing fluttering leaves. Fo
r an insane moment she wondered if Thomas would string them like fig leaves over his manly parts, but his next words jerked her back to what passed for reality in her life at the moment.
"They're pixies, and if they get out of the house, the first thing they'll do is fly back to whoever sent them and tattle like the wretched little gossips they are. Catch them, don't let them get away!"
Tess snatched up a kitchen towel and started after the nearest leaves, but they were quick.
They were vicious, too. She swatted one out of the air with the towel, but when she grabbed the leaf, the thing twisted in her hand and sank tiny, razor-sharp teeth into the fleshy pad of her thumb, drawing blood. Tess shrieked in pain, the pixie shrieked back, its thin, sharp noise splitting her skull, and Thomas leapt across the kitchen to jerk the creature out of her hand and pinch its head between his fingertips.
With a small but sickening pop, the pixie stopped screaming, and Thomas dropped it in the sink, where it lay still.
"You...killed it?"
"Te—just...help me catch them. How many were there?"
"I don't know!" She tried to obey him, but her stomach was turning flips. It didn't seem right, catching the little things only to kill them.
"Then where did they come from, if you don't know how many there are?"
"I..." She lunged for one that had rocketed into the hallway, circled the light like a witless moth, and zoomed back into the kitchen. "I went out today, and there was a—a swarm of them, someplace I was. I thought they were just leaves, maybe under a spell because of the way they behaved. I didn't know they were fairies! I guess a few of them got into the bag. But why did they wait until now to come out?"
Thomas's face was dark. He had seven of the pixies in his hand, and one by one he held them over the sink and twisted their stem-thin necks. Their tiny shrill screaming diminished one dead leaf at a time until the sink was littered with crimson and flame yellow and orange and brown, and streaky fluids that might be blood or stains from old leaves. She turned away, sickened.
Thomas spoke and she peered at him carefully, avoiding the sink. "We'll never know if we got them all. One or more of them might have got out of the bag before now. They might be hiding, or they may already have gone back to the mound."
"But why did you have to kill them?"
Thomas shook his head as he washed the remains of the pixies off his hands. "Because if I didn't, they'd betray us. They may already have done so."
"But—"
"This is Allantide. Halloween. Do you know what that means?"
She folded her arms, feeling her face stiffen. "Obviously not. So why don't you tell me."
"We'll talk while we get ready. Come on, back upstairs."
"Get ready for what?"
"What will surely come. This is just the first stage, and unless I'm wrong, we won't want to be here much longer." He went back to the mossy heap and fished until he found the tote bag handles, which looked like roots, thick and brown and sturdy. He lifted the bag, holding it open and studying the contents. "You took these out of the house today, didn't you?"
"I...yes. I had an idea they might help Aaron. One of them helped Rory."
Thomas knotted the handles together tightly. "You need to explain about this Rory person, but for now, get up the stairs. We've got to get ready."
"Thomas, what will surely come?"
Thomas paused, looking at her with his beautiful eyes, and she saw the blurring at his edges that signaled the advent of his trow-form. He took a long, slow inhale and the blurring stopped, leaving him a very naked human male. A sweep of his hand indicated the bluebells, now much trampled. "This is my Queen's work. And at last I know why she was hiding her trinkets in the Underbridge. She's growing the mound. But you've thwarted her. All these months, you've been finding her things and bringing them home with you, keeping her from marking out new space for the fairy mound to grow. No wonder she wanted them found, and you stopped. And tonight of all nights, she's begun the process of turning a part of human Portland into fairy earth. She would have used the trinkets to mark where the mound should grow—she'd have filled the Underbridge, taken control of the goblin market and maybe even the Burnside Bridge, and managed to cross the river that way, perhaps. But instead, they're here. And when she finds out..."
Tess tried very hard to make sense of Thomas's words. "But they're not all here," she objected. "I have two or three at my office, east of the river. What's happening there, do you think?"
"The same thing, I'd guess, only not so much of it. Underbridge, too, because I'll bet you didn't find them all."
Tess's eyebrows crawled up into her hair. The idea that in the morning her co-workers would unlock the office door and find the place had turned into a bluebell wood...
"Come on. There's not time for this." Thomas caught her unresisting hand and towed her up the stairs. Under ordinary circumstances she'd have been quite taken by the bunch and slide of the muscles under his skin as he climbed the risers, but now she could only fight down a dire sense of dread and nausea.
In her room, Thomas began to dress swiftly. Tess, feeling a little shy, turned her back as she unbelted her robe. Her bitten thumb twinged and she muttered at it.
"You should wash," Thomas told her. "I've had infected pixie bites. They're not pleasant. Go and do it."
"Thomas, I—" She didn't know what she was about to say, only that she felt herself fraying away, one thread of reality at a time, despite the growing urgency to flee as Thomas suggested. "Are they poisonous? Will I die from their bites?"
"Neither." His voice was curt, and he was already dressed and belting himself into his oilskin. "Come on. Bathroom. Sink."
Just as she had done for him the day before, scrubbing and cleaning the rusty iron from his hands, now he cleaned the bite under a stream of hot water. While he scrubbed, he quizzed her. "Why did you go out today? Why didn't you stay in like I told you?"
"It was because of Rory."
"Yes. Rory. Tell me about Rory." He lathered her hands and rubbed them vigorously, water splashing unheeded on the cuffs of his coat. The soapy scent warred with the fragrance of the bluebells wafting up the stairs, and the green scent of the trampled plants. And another strange odor, which Tess decided was the pixies, dead in the kitchen sink.
"He was a client of mine. Just like Aaron. Same symptoms, only he was almost non-responsive, whereas Aaron still has a little of Aaron left in him." She began to shiver, despite the warmth of the water, and wondered if she was going into shock.
"Go on." Thomas pressed on the pad of her thumb, and a thin streamer of bright blood mixed with the water in the sink and spiraled down the drain. She heard him take a deep, shaky breath, and remembered how he had licked his claw clean of her blood only the night before. Blood. Salt. Milk. Bread. I've got it all in one stupid human package, she thought dizzily.
"It's like Rory was nowhere in his body. Just...gone. But one day I went to see him, to see if I could reach him and maybe get him to tell me where Aaron might be getting his drugs, and while I was there I had one of your Queen's little things in my shoulder bag. Rory got hold of it."
Thomas, apparently satisfied with the cleanliness of her hands, turned off the water and dried them one finger at a time. "Go on," he urged again. "What happened to Rory?"
"I just thought he'd taken it, hidden it somewhere. A little silver hazelnut, tied up with ribbon. But the aide and I looked and looked, and couldn't find it anywhere. In the end I left—because it was just a thing, after all, nothing important."
"But you were wrong."
"Yes. A few days later I checked on Rory, and he'd been released from the hospital. Because he was better, you see—like magic. All well. They never found the thing he took." She looked up from where the towel wrapped around her hands, and met his gaze.
"Like magic," he repeated.
"This morning, after you'd gone, I put all the pieces together and decided to try taking the...her things...to Aaron's house. Maybe i
f he touched one, it would fix him. And if it fixed him, I could fix the others. God knows...there are more than a dozen in that bag, and more at my office. And how many others that I didn't find in Underbridge?"
Thomas nodded slowly. "It might have worked. Come on, let's get you dressed."
From downstairs, they heard a creaking noise, like wood under stress. Something popped.
"Hurry," Thomas said, and now there was a new note in his voice, urgency, and maybe even a little fear. Tess went cold. Her teeth began to chatter. Thomas hustled her into the bedroom, where she hurriedly opened and closed drawers. Out came socks and jeans and a sweater, and pieces of practical lingerie, things suitable for running away from home on Halloween night with a trow. She tried not to laugh hysterically.
While she dressed, Thomas ran down the stairs, returning with a grim expression on his face. She was just hooking her bra behind her back. Thomas, like any man mystified by the processes involved with feminine undergarments, seemed amazed she could hook herself into the bra without looking.
"Oh, T—" he stopped himself, then shook his head and went on, as if somehow he could now permit himself to say her name. "Tess. This is not what I wanted for us." He pressed a hard kiss on her mouth, his hands warm on her bare shoulders. "You're almost ready. Good. Come on. We've got to go. Where's your jacket? You need warm things."
"Where are we going?" Her voice was muffled as she pulled the sweater over her head and then stepped to the dresser, where a fast pass through her hair with a brush untangled it enough to drag into a ponytail.
"I don't know yet."
"Your house?"
"First place they'll look."
"Why do we have to leave? Why can't we just lock the doors and—"
"When we go downstairs again, you'll understand. Just...come on, Tess, hurry!" As he spoke, there was another creaking noise—more of a groan, this time, and she felt the vibration in her feet. Her eyes flicked to his. She dived for the light switch, staring down the staircase.