Kris went on: “And politics do much more than influence the aesthetics of our lives. Humans think that because there is no body count on the nightly news that there is no war between the goblins and the humans—but they couldn’t be more wrong.” He shook his head, and Adora knew that he was searching for a way to explain how large the problem was, and how it was growing into something nearly impossible to control. He finally said, “The odds of confrontation have grown astronomically. I have watched through the ages as human political agendas have left thrones and oval offices and climbed into pulpits, both in the old churches and now in the secular church of the media. There it puts words into the mouths of priests and newsmen. Thus are rich men’s political ambitions implanted in the hearts of society. The resulting abuses are often small, petty bigotries, and go unnoticed. The more spectacular ones make headlines. Often there is an element of evil. Think of all those zealous reformers who kill to save lives.”
Adora nodded, recalling all the hypocrisy she’d witnessed. There were the many forms of religious terrorism that plagued the world. There were always people killing for Christ, or for Muhammad, or for someone. . . .
“The goblins have watched and learned,” Kris continued. “And the effect is more than double in the lutin world, where goblin masses have never been allowed to think for themselves and where no dissenting view is offered. You don’t see it, but lutin leaders—especially in the United States, though there are new movements in Japan and Europe too—are taking advantage of the common lutin anger over at what has happened to them. They have been ghettoized and believe they have never been offered a seat at the American political table. If goblins have shared in the capitalist bounty, it is because they have taken their prosperity by trickery or force. None was offered willingly. And like their greediest human counterparts, the goblin leaders believe completely that the end justifies the means, and they will lie and lie and lie—and worse—if that’s what it takes to get what they deserve. They will no longer tolerate being second-class—” Kris stopped abruptly. “I was going to say second-class citizens. But they aren’t citizens. Lutins have been born in this country for hundreds of years, yet none has the right to vote. And humans are stone blind to this injustice and the anger it has caused.” Kris’s gaze was hot. “Think about it, Adora: The goblins are here in the hundreds of thousands, yet they are nearly invisible in daily human life. Even you, an educated woman, never saw a goblin until two days ago.”
There was a scattering of applause from nearby tables, causing Kris to blink and then sit down abruptly. The applauders all looked human, Adora thought, but they might not be. They could be species-reassigned goblins. The thought made her squirm.
Yet, Kris had a point. She had always shied away from stories about faeries and goblins. It had been easy, because there was no mention of the fey in the news and hardly ever anything about goblins.
It goes deeper than that. There’s stuff on the Internet, but you never ever look up anything about it.
Joy was right. Adora’s avoidance had bordered on the pathological; she saw that now. She wondered how many other humans reacted the same way. The thought made her frown.
“ ‘Therefore submit thy ways unto his will,’ ” she murmured, earning a surprised glance from Kris and Mugshottz. “It’s Spencer’s The Faerie Queene,” she explained.
Kris nodded but said nothing. Apparently he was actually expecting her to think about this and to answer his questions.
Adora exhaled slowly, doing as he asked and considering the situation for the first time—and then wondering why she had never thought of it before. Was she so influenced by the media? Was she so blind? The notion chilled her. She had always believed that she could rise above cultural conditioning, that she was a seeker of truth and understanding and a champion of downtrodden people and animals. Yet here was this massive blind spot in her view of the world—an entire species ignored. She had fought to save timber wolves and mountain lions and panda bears in other states but had done nothing—thought nothing—about the goblins next door.
And what of the fey? If they were still here, where did they fit in this political landscape? If Kris was right and they really existed, were they angry too? Because they would have cause. No one had been suggesting that what the U.S. needed was a faery president. There weren’t any voter drives to register elves. She’d seen no suggestion that they needed a few good pixies on Capitol Hill.
“Kris . . . I don’t know what to say,” she finally admitted. “It’s weird. Scary.”
Kris nodded. “I’m not saying that we should discount everything we hear in the media and from politicians,” he went on after a moment, his voice softer. “Their information—and misinformation— can help guide us. And I’m not railing against human politics and politicians per se. They can be tools for change. But they need supervision from the people, and they cannot be ignored. Not if you are a person of conscience. As goes the leader, so goes the country. It’s about survival.”
“Kris?” Adora said, her voice troubled.
“Too much lecture?” he asked, smiling quickly. His eyes warmed, and even began to dance. “My apologies. The situation troubles me, and has for centuries. But there is no need for me to thrust all this on you on your second day in the city.”
“No. It isn’t that,” Adora said. “I want to know. But I was just wondering . . .”
“What?” His head cocked. “Ask me anything. Wait—you want to know if I’m running for political office here in L.A.”
“No. Uh—you aren’t, are you?” she asked. The thought dismayed her.
“Not at the moment—though it is one of the few places where a fey might participate legally. So, if it isn’t that, what’s troubling you?”
Adora hesitated. Asking her next question would be taking the next step to acknowledging that Kris might be what he claimed. Part of her was afraid to follow where the line of inquiry led. Still, she heard herself ask, “What do the fey think of all this—the humans and goblins and stuff? Are they mad at humans too? We talk about them even less frequently than we do goblins. I mean, at least people know goblins are real. Fey are just . . . stories. Fairy tales.”
“The fey . . .” Kris sighed. “No, the fey aren’t angry. The fey barely are. We are hovering near the edge of extinction, and are doing what we can to avert disaster for all races. When our leaders were still alive they had their political agendas—the Seelie and Unseelie Courts barely got along. Things are different these days, thanks largely to my nephew Jack.”
“Seelie? Unseelie? Oh—that’s right. The good faeries and the bad ones.”
“Sort of. It’s more a case of light and darkness.” He smiled a little. “It’s also more political history, I’m afraid. You see, the Seelie Court was ruled by the clan Finvarra. They are the ‘creatures of light’ that you read about in happy faerie stories, though those are gross simplifications and distortions of reality—old Finvarra could be as perverse as anyone. The Unseelie are creatures of night.”
“And you’re Seelie?” she asked.
“No.” Kris shook his head. He looked at his clasped hands and then back up. “As I said before, I am a death fey. Had I a political allegiance, I would have belonged to Queen Mabigon and the army of darkness. But I ignored her and the goblin kings, not paying attention to their machinations because I was pursuing other goals—good goals, I thought. It was a mistake, though. I thought that if I did not participate in their power struggles that I would be left alone, a noncombatant who could go out and do good deeds unmolested. After all, why should they care about my efforts to bring peace to humans? It was a laudable objective that would benefit all races.” His tone was full of self-mockery that was clearly new. Adora didn’t like it. And it was clear that Mugshottz didn’t either.
Adora swallowed and steeled herself to ask her next question. “Okay—let’s talk about this now. What happened to you? Were you really at the North Pole while the goblins and merchandisers were hijacking Christmas and putting
your face on soda pop?”
“Yes, I really was. I was drugged out of my head, my insanity caused by a clever curse, courtesy of my dark queen, who hated humans, and was jealous of what she saw as the Goddess’s favoritism.” He paused. “I wish that I could tell you more, Adora, explain everything logically and linearly. But though the memories of that time are there, they are badly disarranged. I rummage around in the cupboard for the bits and pieces, but it takes time to reassemble the story, and there are gaps. And I have many other irons in the fire these days. It is, after all, only one hundred and ninety-eight days until Christmas.” The last was said as a joke.
Adora took this all in, not believing but not disbelieving either. She suspected that there was more— much more—to the explanation. A part of her sympathized with Kris and believed him. Looking at her own childhood was difficult. Her memories were just outlines, like the bones of structures mostly burned away in some mental fire. She could see the foundations where memories should be but could not reconstruct them. Something had been there, of course—she had been a child once—but whatever it was, it was gone now.
Drug use could explain a lot. And the rich are not immune to addiction, Joy pointed out, trying to explain Kris’s lack.
This isn’t about pill-popping turning into hallucinations. Something else happened to him. Maybe the goblins really did drug him.
And that made him eccentric? Joy scoffed.
“Why didn’t she just kill you? Wouldn’t it have been easier?” Adora asked, managing to sound cool and collected.
Is this for the book? Joy teased.
Yes, and maybe for herself.
“Ah. Well, I have been killed many times,” Kris answered. “And I always come back. Admittedly, my deaths are always sacrificial, and plain old murder without ritual might have prevented my resurrection. But she couldn’t risk it. She needed me gone, out of the game. So she set out to destroy my mind and hide my body where no one would find it. It accomplished the same thing as murder, yet didn’t risk provoking the Goddess’s wrath.”
Goosebumps arose on Adora’s arms—arms that had Kris’s prints on them.
“So, you’re saying that you’re the shaman in those texts you gave me to read. You’re the one who was sacrificed every seven years?” she asked, tearing her eyes away from the strange bruises.
“Yes.” Kris for once looked serious and a little sad. “I am—or was—that Niklas.”
“Kris?” Adora closed her little notebook—she hadn’t been writing in it anyway.
“Yes?”
“Are you sure you’re Niklas?”
For some reason, her question made the lines of tension in his face ease, and Kris began to smile.
“Quite sure. Why?”
“Because I don’t think I can be friends with a sacrifice,” she said plaintively. “The whole Green Man thing is creepy. Surely you see that. It’s like cooperative suicide.”
Her employer began to laugh, and the sound dispelled the gloom that had been building around them.
“My dear! I haven’t been a sacrifice for many years. Drug-abused and insane, yes. Not a burnt offering. Those days are over. I have found a better way to help the world.”
Why didn’t that news make her happier?
Because zealots are scary and make bad partners, was Joy’s reply.
“You have?” she asked Kris, trying to sound upbeat and encouraging.
“Man doesn’t realize it, but he is very fragile— one ice age, one comet strike, one nuclear winter away from extinction. The goblins are just as fragile in their own way, but they don’t realize it either. The fey—sadly—do know how precarious life can be, but the others haven’t learned from our experiences. We must find a way to bring peace to all races before it’s too late. One can’t learn a lesson if one is dead.” He added, “At least, not as a rule. Abrial and Nyssa have sometimes seen it, of course. They talk to ghosts.”
“I think I’m getting a headache again,” Adora warned. “My limit is one arcane lecture per day. Education of the dead is a little too out-there.”
Kris stood again and offered his hand. “Okay, no more lessons, lectures or political plots. Maybe I can write some of this out for you. Or get Thomas or Abrial to supply a chronology with human parallels. Perhaps seeing things in context to your history would help you.”
“Okay,” Adora said, leveling a pen at Kris before she stuffed it and her notebook back in her purse. “But let’s get something else straight here. I’m the interviewer. You are the interviewee. Your job is to be the straight man and supply facts to my questions. My job is to write the homey witticisms and make you epic. You’re the engine, but I’m the driver.”
“Is that how it works?” Kris asked, amused. “You’re the new king maker?”
“Certainly. Don’t you know Oscar Wilde? ‘Any man can make history—only a great one can write it.’ Best leave this to the professionals.”
“You clearly haven’t heard that ‘A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.’ ”
“Don’t start with Emerson. I don’t like to get mean before noon, but I’ll drag out the Shakespeare if I have to,” Adora warned him.
“Oddly enough, I was reading some essays of a contemporary of good old Bill this morning.”
“Really?” Adora asked. “Did you know this guy too?”
“No, actually. It was by a Michel de Montaigne. He was a rationalist in an era of religious hysteria and intolerance. My favorite quotation I read was, ‘After all, it is setting a high value on our opinions to roast people alive on account of them.’ It seems apropos now. In his day, saying something like that could indeed get you roasted alive. He was a courageous man. There have been many of them, the reasonable men, the peacemakers . . . just not enough—”
He was cut off as Adora reached up and stuffed the last of her cinnamon roll into his mouth. She couldn’t swear to it, but she thought maybe Mugshottz smiled.
“No more. Not another word about Shakespeare or politics. Honest to God, Kris, you need to relax or you’ll get an ulcer. And no one will want to date you, even if you are Santa Claus and richer than God.” She wasn’t sure why she said the last.
He seemed unaffected. “Ha! It has been my experience that a man can be a cannibal with tentacles and still get a date—if he has enough money.” His voice was sticky.
“Hmph. Not with me.”
Kris’s eyes twinkled. He looked wonderful. Worth just about anything she could think of.
But, what was his angle? He definitely had politics on the brain, it seemed. Could this whole book thing be a con—a way of setting up a campaign to appeal to goblins? Or to humans? The mood the world was in, people might just vote for Santa Claus. They’d elected stranger.
Or did he truly believe all that he was saying? And if he did believe it, was it because he was . . . because there was something in his psyche that needed him to believe it?
You just can’t say the word ‘crazy,’ can you?
But can it be real? Can everything he’s told me be absolutely true? Can he be a fey who has reincarnated many times?
Get thee to a therapist! her inner voice advised. It’s called a Messiah complex, and you don’t want anything to do with it.
But Adora did want something to do with it. Damn it, she did. And Kris’s—not delusions, but rather beliefs—were swallowing her whole. She was truly in danger of slipping into the bowels of the fantastic beast that was the Bishop S. Nicholas machine.
Ugh. Bowels? Joy said.
Okay, that was gross. No bowels. And Adora hadn’t been swallowed. But she was being rapidly enveloped in the story of feys and goblins. And she was definitely part of Kris’s group. Everyone had accepted her. Even Mugshottz.
Adora glanced up at Kris and felt her heart stutter. There was no one like him—no one at all. And she had never been so attracted to anyone in her life. In that moment, she wanted him almost as much as she wanted her next breath.
But what to do
? He’d made no overtures—or, for that matter, no effort to push her away. And she was not the kind to march up to a strange man and offer to be his mattress, even when she wanted. But he was fascinating and she certainly was tempted to offer. Those, black, black lashes and the silver striations in those eerie blue eyes that could be so kind! They made her shiver.
Adora groaned softly. She had a thing for Santa Claus. How warped was that? Even her salivary glands were worked up. Damn! She was all but drooling. Worse, whenever she was with him, she actually felt inclined to believe everything he said without question.
Kris broke their gaze. He looked back at Mugshottz and said something in a language Adora didn’t know but wished passionately that she did. Whatever the words meant, they were filled with warmth and joy, and she wanted him to whisper them in her ear—preferably right before kissing her.
Eat my heart. Drink my soul. Love me to death.
The words were not loud enough to be a whisper, just a shadow that slipped through her mind.
That wasn’t me! Joy said. She sounded a little scared. Adora? That wasn’t me.
If it wasn’t Joy, where had that come from—and what did it mean? And what the hell was she going to do about this growing attraction?
Then it came to pass that the Rich Worshippers grew wroth with the Saint, who was more beloved by the others than their human king. Thus hunters were sent out to find the shaman, and to put him to death for the glory of the new god made in that king’s image.
—Niklas 4:8
“Mommy?” Cyra’s daughter Meriel asked in a grumpy voice as she rubbed her eyes.
“Yes, sweetie?” Cyra put her parchment aside and reached for the child.
“When is Uncle Kris coming home?” The girl snuggled into her mother’s lap. There was less of it than there used to be, because Cyra and Thomas were expecting their second child. They were fairly certain that it was a boy, because Thomas’s jinn had taken to making spontaneous appearances whenever Cyra slept. Jinn were drawn to male children.
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