“God?”
“Gaia. Yes. We can merge with part of it. Use it.” Kris paused again, then went on with some reluctance. “It uses us too. Sometimes. We are its anchor to this world. We are its love, the last line of defense against loneliness. The Goddess, the part of Gaia we are hooked into, has an agenda, and that is to do whatever makes for the greatest good for our species—at whatever cost. Usually that means our individual good as well. But it doesn’t always feel that way—not when she hijacks our will and forces us into certain courses of action.”
“Does that happen often?” Adora asked, sensing Kris’s unease.
“No. Not often. But believe me, once is enough.” He straightened and peered ahead. “Okay, time to put this baby down. Jack’s left a car for us out here.”
“Are we just going to leave the airplane?” Adora asked.
“Yes, it’ll be retrieved later. If the goblins don’t destroy it. They can be so petty and destructive.”
It sounded extremely wasteful, but since she really didn’t want to remain any longer in the contraption than was absolutely necessary, Adora silenced the responsible part of her that protested leaving a valuable piece of machinery unattended in the desert. She peered out the window, not really expecting to see landing lights and therefore not surprised when all that greeted her was darkness. She was a lot calmer now—not happy, exactly—but Kris seemed to know what he was doing. Maybe they wouldn’t die after all.
“Look at those weird lights!” she exclaimed suddenly. “Over there, near the horizon. I’ve never seen anything like them.”
“I’ve seen them before.” Kris’s voice went flat as he looked where she pointed. “The last and most powerful of the solar flares that took the lives of the pureblood feys were actually rather beautiful. We had the aurora borealis all the way to Mexico. There were nightly magnetic rainbows all over the northern hemisphere. Scientists talked later about the shifts in the magnetosphere, which we are having now, but the poetic part of me wants to believe that the heavenly lights were caused by the thousands of fleeing souls leaving their earthly bodies.”
Adora turned stricken eyes on him. “Souls can become disturbances in the magnetic field? How?”
“Fey souls do. Lutins too—in large enough numbers. I think there was a huge goblin slaughter tonight in L.A. In fact, I know there was. It would take thousands of deaths to light up the sky that way. We’ll have to wait and see who’s won. For the sake of all the races, I pray Molybdenum came out on top.”
His words numbed her brain. There had been a slaughter. Real death. Many real deaths. And it had happened while she whined about flying to safety in an airplane. In spite of everything Kris had said during the day, she hadn’t really thought this would happen.
“I . . . Kris, this is awful. How could it happen? Here? This is America. California. We don’t have revolutions and slaughters.” She felt suddenly weak, and slumped in her seat.
“Of course we do—though humans don’t see what we do. They’ll never know what happened. They’ll see the lights and blame it on UFOs or magnetic atmospheric fluctuations. A few psychics may feel the mass lutin death, but they’ll dismiss it as an aberration, perhaps even as perseverations from some other war.”
“But you feel it?” Adora’s voice was small. “You know it’s real?”
“Of course. As do you—though it affects us differently since I am Unseelie.”
“I . . . Shit. This is terrible. I don’t want to feel this.”
“No. I don’t imagine you do. In so many ways, we fey are the canaries down in the coal mine. Changes of climate affect us first—as you’ve seen, photosensitivity has run amok. We’re hardy in so many ways. Viruses, bacteria, extremes of temperature—these we can fight off without effort. But the constant solar flares? I don’t know. Those bursts of radiation are deadly and they make us—and to a lesser degree, the goblins—temporarily insane. When they don’t kill us outright. And our condition grows worse as more of us die. It’s odd, because day to day we aren’t as affected by sunlight as the lutins, and we aren’t hydrophilic either, so we can live in dry climates without getting heatstroke. But I greatly fear the loss of our ozone layer will eventually be the undoing of any fey not living underground. And we are hypersensitive to the deaths of others who are like us. Others with magic. And as it continues, our magic will dwindle until one day as a group we simply won’t want to live.”
We simply won’t want to live. Adora thought about this.
“That’s what you think is wrong with me?” Adora asked. “What’s been wrong with me? I have some sort of sunstroke that makes me half-suicidal . . . ?”
Kris was slow to answer. “Yes. I believe that you have solar poisoning. Can’t you feel the influence of those lights, the energy in flux around us? It affects many mixed-bloods like yourself. Fortunately, your case isn’t that advanced. There’s treatment.”
“You’re saying that I’m fey too? You really believe this?” She was truly taken aback.
You shouldn’t believe it, Joy said urgently. Really, you don’t want to go here. Just say no.
But why not think about it, Joy? It’s just an idea. Why are you so frightened? Adora was intrigued.
Look, I can’t help you if you won’t take my advice. You don’t want to start down this path. You don’t want to know about being fey.
Why, Joy? Why? If he can make me well . . .
“You’re part fey. Yes, I believe that you have fey blood running around in you and it . . . it hasn’t been cared for.” Kris smiled encouragingly and then focused on the ground before them, which was coming up quickly. “The good news is that—if I’m right—there is medicine that can make you well very quickly.”
Adora thought about this. A part of her believed him. Until this weird sickness came on her and her father, she had never been ill—no colds, no flu, no chicken pox. And no one in her family had ever been sick, either.
She truly hated being ill, but she wasn’t certain what she should hope for. She wanted to be well, but a cure would mean she was inhuman.
You’re not inhuman! Joy insisted.
“I don’t know about taking drugs,” she began, then closed her eyes so that she wouldn’t see the plane land. Her conviction that blindness was bliss didn’t last long—not looking was worse, so her lids popped back open. Shadows rushed at her through the window.
“It isn’t a drug, exactly. You wouldn’t be popping pills for the rest of your life,” Kris assured her. “It’s just something that can give a boost to your immune system. It’s a combination of vitamins and antihistamines that exist in fey living places. It’s in the water and air.”
“And I’ll be . . . exposed to this when we go to— where are we going?” she asked.
“Yes. And we’re going to Cadalach.”
“So, if I don’t get better, will that mean that I’m not fey?”
Kris frowned. He answered slowly. “I’m not sure. Maybe.”
Adora nodded. “Then I guess we’ll find out soon enough which of us is right about what I am.”
“I have a question for you—if you don’t mind me being personal,” Kris said, turning the plane sharply. “Who is this Joy you keep talking to?”
Joy gasped. I told you he heard you, Big Mouth.
“My evil twin,” Adora admitted without thinking. The plane’s wheels touched the ground and it began losing speed. She was finally able to relax.
Hey! Who’s the evil one? I didn’t start this, you know, Joy snapped.
“Or maybe I mean she’s my imaginary friend.” When Kris glanced at her, Adora found herself explaining: “She’s the voice in my head that I talk things out with. Like my subconscious. Or a muse. Lots of writers have those.”
Boy; that was an understatement, but at least it wasn’t a lie. Lying to Kris would be very hard. Adora wasn’t actually sure that she could do it.
“I see. Does it make you nervous to have this voice?” he asked. Then, he added with a second qu
ick glance, “It probably shouldn’t. Many feys . . . well, we have the normal five senses and some others besides—a sort of ancestral memory, I guess you could call it. Quite often that manifests itself as a voice. I know two people who can talk to mountains and caves—or rather, the caves talk to them. They are quite normal otherwise. Even I hear voices— prayers, mostly. As I’ve said, it’s nothing to be upset about. It’s the magic protecting us, giving our brains information in a way they can understand.”
Kris’s speech, though ridiculous when she listened with practical human ears, was still somehow reassuring. Possibly it was his matter-of-factness. He was the first person she had ever told about Joy, and he didn’t think she was a freak.
Yeah, well, he hears voices too—just like the Son of Sam, Joy commented. That’s real reassuring. And I want you to know that I’m not buying the whole souls-as-magnets thing, either. It could just be weather phenomena. Her words were tart, but she seemed more relaxed. Maybe Kris had reassured her too.
No? But I do believe it, Joy. Heaven help me! I do.
You poor fool. You always were gullible.
The plane stopped and Kris switched off the engine. “We get out here. Do you see the car?” he asked.
Adora peered into the night. “Yes! It’s a Jaguar!”
“Good. I know it isn’t the usual choice for desert travel, but it’s been modifled. We’ll make great time.”
Adora pushed open the plane door and stepped out eagerly into the night. If she never saw another aircraft again, it would still be too soon.
Kris drove like there was a hanging posse on their trail—and maybe there was. Adora couldn’t see anything through their back trail of dust. They weren’t traveling on any sort of regularly paved surface, and the markers out there were few and far between. They had passed only one town and it was deserted, a cemetery of crowded old shacks abandoned long ago.
“Travel is an education, but this is more education than I signed up for this semester,” Adora complained through clenched teeth. The Jaguar had excellent suspension but the ride was still very rough. She was beginning to miss the airplane.
Kris glanced her way, but only for a second. The road, if one could call it that, was uneven and required his full attention. “No desire for an advanced degree?” he laughed.
“Not if it’s on this road. Didn’t you promise me San Francisco and New York? I swear that’s where you said we would be heading next.”
“Just a bit farther now,” Kris assured her. “And we’ll get to the big cities, never fear. When we do, I’ll show you sides of them you’ve never imagined.”
Kris, when he wanted to be, was something of a Scheherazade, but only a woman who was completely besotted would believe him. Cities of any sort were far, far away, and there was nothing but stunted manzanita as far as the eye could see. The desert was beautiful though, now that the moon was up. The land shone like a snowscape, and no sky had ever been as bright with stars.
“How about some music?” Kris asked.
“Sure.” Adora was curious about what he liked. She was betting on Mozart.
Kris pushed a disc into the CD player and out poured Ian Hunter’s Rant. Adora gave him a shocked look.
“Brother Ian is pissed about things too,” Kris said. “Jack knew I’d want some cruising tunes. He’s a very thoughtful boy.”
“Sorry, I just . . . When did you have time to acquire a taste for Ian Hunter? I would think there would be more important things to catch up on in the last century and a half.”
“Music is important—good for the soul. My nephew likes Ian, and I do too. Actually, a lot of today’s music is invigorating. And I appreciate the directness, the questioning of authority.” Kris’s brow furrowed. “I wonder if Ian would like to do an Xmas album for me. I think it’s time for some new kinds of carols.”
Adora could only shake her head. Kris laughed, his spirits apparently restored by their journey so far.
“I don’t think that someone born into this age can understand how miraculous it is—how possible everything feels,” he explained. “When I was last in the world of Men, there were still places—in fact, most places—where people were born and lived out their entire lives in one small town, without ever reading a foreign newspaper or seeing a stranger’s face. They were like oxen yoked to a plow, tied to the land or a village that they couldn’t—and didn’t wish to—escape. I would return every century or so, and the same closed faces would look back at me from the same village windows and the same tilled fields. The baker’s son became a baker, the farmer’s son a farmer. Innovation was something to be suspicious of—if not greeted with actual fear. . . . But it’s different today. People are still people, of course, but their minds have been wedged open by television and radio. They’ve seen other races, seen wars, watched men walk on the moon. Our communities are larger—even global. . . . I think that perhaps, this time, they will be ready and able to hear and do the right thing.”
Adora wasn’t sure exactly what he was talking about, but she hoped he was correct. The global community had her rather worried.
“Damn,” Kris said suddenly, and put on the brakes. The car spun sideways, kicking up a cloud of dust. Adora’s seat belt bit into her shoulder.
“What’s wrong?” she asked, but could already see why he was stopping. The car’s headlights had picked out a pile of rags. On top of it was the body of a large white animal, lying half-hidden by dead scrub, sucked dry as a spider’s dinner.
Kris jumped out of the car and knelt by the dessicated remains. He took the body’s face in his hand and turned it toward the moon. It was human, Adora saw with a shock.
She was slower to approach now that she knew what it was. The smell of the poor creature’s wretched carcass was a barrier she had to force her self to cross. Behind her, Ian sang on about Purgatory.
Staring at the broken body in the dirt, Adora was prepared for blood and perhaps some broken bones. But what waited there was more horrible, more terrible than she had imagined. The woman— Adora thought it was a woman because the body had no visible external genitalia—looked shriveled, like her tissues and organs had been sucked dry. Her features were dilapidated, something that belonged on a mummy. Her red hair was filled with oil and dirt, though there wasn’t much left on her scalp; most had been pulled away in bloody clumps.
The emaciated creature convulsed suddenly, the muscles under the skin contorting in a constant stream of ripples. Adora watched, horrified, morbidly afraid that the body might rip itself open.
Kris held the body through its spasm. As the violent contractions ceased, the woman turned her head away and vomited up something pink and lumpy that looked like a mix of red fruit and liver. She rolled onto her back and gave a choked, staccato cry that barely escaped her constricting throat. Adora saw tattoos on her chest and belly. The poor creature had been into boy bands.
Understanding hit her, made her dizzy and sick.
“She’s not very old, is she?” Adora asked in a cracked voice. “This . . . this woman is just a teenager.”
Kris leaned over and inhaled, his face pained. “No. She is not old chronologically. But she has squandered all her physical and spiritual resources as goblin-fruit addicts always do.”
“My God. Why?” Adora whispered, seeking comfort in his gaze but finding none. “Why would anyone do this to themselves?”
“They have no notion of what the consequences will be. Damn it! We tell the children about heroin and cocaine and cigarettes—but not about goblin fruit. The FDA doesn’t even list it as an addictive substance.”
Kris turned back to the shuddering husk. Clouds sprang up out of nowhere and a light rain began to fall around them. This reminded Adora of something, but it took her a minute to place the memory—it had rained in just this way her first night at the Beverly Wilshire.
It’s Kris. He’s causing the rain, she thought stupidly, staring at her wilting cuffs, the marabou matting under the rain’s increasingly harsh l
ash. He was making the heavens weep.
“Let go, sister,” Kris said softly to the girl, pulling her gaze up to him.
His voice was the gentlest thing Adora had ever heard. It was like the tone he used on the hostess at Caveman Joe’s, yet different. Adora understood that he was coaxing a soul someplace much darker and, for the dying woman, more frightening. The battered face stared up at him. Only one eye seemed able to focus. The chest heaved as she tried to draw in more air. He said again, “Let go, my sister.”
“My . . . baby?” the girl gasped, gulping air that seemed to do her no good. She was strangling like a hanged man at the end of an amateur noose. The rain slowly covered her face with tears.
Adora touched her own cheeks. Some of the moisture there was hot. She wanted to plead with Kris to do something—anything—to end this woman’s suffering, but something held her back. She couldn’t really ask him to kill, could she?
In answer, the wind swirled around them. It gusted so hard that it blew back her eyelashes and eyebrows, and seemed to force any words back inside of her. Almost, she thought she heard, Thou shalt not kill.
Joy?
It’s not me. And it’s not Kris, she answered, and the small hairs on Adora’s nape stood on end. Adora turned around quickly, looking for a physical enemy, though she knew none was there.
Kris ignored the storm. “All will be well, sister.” He leaned closer and whispered something in a language Adora didn’t know, but the words raised the hair on the rest of her body. She was fascinated by the long liquid string of vowels that sounded like . . . Gaelic music? That wasn’t quite right, but it was the closest description she could think of.
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