by Karen Chance
“They don’t die as we do. It is more of a . . . a merging with their world. Their bodies are reabsorbed, and so is their spirit. The prevailing belief is that, just as the bodies rejoin the soil whence they sprang, to be reformed into something new—to be reborn, as it were—the soul does as well.”
“Because it does not leave the body.”
“Yes.”
“And this . . .” Jonas paused, searching for the right word. He didn’t find it. “This is what results?”
“Not in Faerie, no. But this fey died on Earth. But for some reason, no one returned to look for him.”
“And that is unusual?”
“Very. The fey always retrieve their dead. Even in time of war, they make provision for it. Particularly when that fey is outside of their world.”
“And if they do not?” Jonas asked, kneeling on the other side of the creature, fascination and repulsion warring on his face.
“This,” John said simply. “Or so it would seem.” He felt like pointing out that he was hardly an expert on the subject, but it didn’t seem like a good time.
“And what precisely is this?”
“I can only guess, based on what you see. He should have been returned to Faerie, where his spirit and body would have been reabsorbed by the world that gave him life, to someday live again. But that didn’t happen. And when it did not . . .”
“He tried to merge with our world,” Jonas said, catching up.
Sometimes John forgot how very quick the man could be.
“Yes.”
Jonas surveyed the scene in front of him. “I take it that was not a great success.”
“I don’t understand it,” John said, frowning. “The fey have a great deal of facility with nature, more in their own world, of course, but it should have been possible—”
He cut off at a warbling cry, which he belatedly recognized as from the fence outside. It cut through the deadly quiet like the alarm it was, but before he or Jonas could react, there were new silhouettes in the doorway. Familiar ones.
“Bollocks!” John threw himself at his superior, tackling him and rolling both of them through a connecting door—right before a wave of venom slashed through the space where they’d been standing.
“What are you doing?” Jonas spluttered. “We have to fight, man!”
“Those are Velos!”
“I know what they are!”
“Then stay the hell down,” John hissed, pushing the man behind the flood of roots gushing down some stairs. “And don’t raise a shield,” he added, as he felt Jonas’ power gather in the air once more.
“What the—have you gone mad?”
“Velos’ venom eats through shields,” John explained curtly, as all hell broke loose next door. “And anything else it comes in contact with. Shields won’t help you.”
“Then what do you suggest we do?” Jonas demanded, getting back to his feet and trying to peer over John’s shoulder.
“Nothing.”
“Nothing? And how is—” Jonas cut off, having finally managed to maneuver into a view of the vine-draped door. And of the kitchen beyond, where half a dozen Velos were making the acquaintance of an ancient, infuriated fey.
“Well,” Jonas said, watching as the room came alive, and the Velos came apart. Vines surged down from the ceiling like boa constrictors, grabbing two of the more or less man-shaped Velos and squeezing for all they were worth. Another surged out from a wall and grabbed a third demon’s legs, and then went wild, thrashing him back and forth across the room, slamming him between the rock-covered face of the fireplace and the old, hard wood of the opposite wall, over and over and over again.
The other three had already realized that their would-be ambush of the mages had gone somehow, hideously wrong, and were trying to get back out the door. Only to be met with a positive hail of apples from the trees outside, causing them to slip and slide and duck and fall, straight into the embrace of the roots reaching out from the floor. Roots that wrapped them up like mummies, or more correctly, like victims in a spider’s web. And then pulled their thrashing prey down, down, down, churning up the broken boards and the underlying soil until not even the creatures’ grasping hands were visible any longer.
And suddenly, all was still again.
John had been watching the show that the roots had put on, and so hadn’t seen the fate of the other three demons. But they weren’t there when he glanced around the room. Only a single shoe was left, sitting atop a gnarled old root like a trophy.
He swallowed.
“Yes. Yes indeed,” Jonas said, apropos of nothing. But then, John didn’t have anything more eloquent to offer himself. He sat down on a step, pulled a flask out of his coat and belted back a long one. Then he handed it to Jonas.
“Always carry my own, old boy,” Jonas said, pulling a bottle out of his sock.
For a while, they just sat, letting the alcohol sooth jangled nerves and blur memories that were too new and too stark to process. But before long, Jonas got around to the point. “We can’t simply leave it,” he pointed out. “It’s an ambush waiting to happen for anyone who wanders in here. And sooner or later, someone will.”
“I’ve no intention of leaving it,” John said, draining his flask. Because he needed it. And because this might be one of those things that was easier when drunk off his ass.
He made his way into the next room.
The fey was still there, of course. And still as intimidating as hell. But for some reason, despite the scene that he’d just witnessed, John didn’t find it as terrible as before. Maybe it was the alcohol, or maybe just the time he’d had to adjust, but all he could see now was a being stranded far from hearth and home, with no hope of getting back.
Forgotten, by friends and foes alike. Left to molder here, on distant shores. Left to rot.
He didn’t blame it for being angry, this solitary trapped soul. Didn’t blame it for anything. He just wanted to help.
“To get you home,” he murmured, and something in the air shifted.
John sat down, and then glanced up at Jonas. “You should go. In case this goes wrong.”
Jonas regarded him for a moment, and then perched his plump bottom on a conveniently bench-shaped root. He didn’t say anything, and John gave up. It wasn’t like the cat wasn’t already very much out of the bag.
He turned his attention back to the fey.
Like the fence, its magic carried a song, one that John had been determinedly blocking out. He let it flow over him now, and for one, brief moment, he panicked. It was so dense and layered, with notes piling on top of notes and chords resonating off every surface. And the rich, varied and impossibly complex melody was made infinitely more so by all the other songs running through it: the sweet trills of air, the surging lilt of river, the chorus of plants, the deep boom of earth.
John had no idea how to start singing with it at all.
So he just sat there for a while, feeling overwhelmed and dizzy and quite, quite useless. As it must have sat, possibly for centuries. Alone and running wild, like an untended vine—
He stopped in sudden comprehension. It was like a vine. It was exactly like one, in fact, or like the fence outside, which had twined around any and every source of life that it could find, melding its song with the strange melodies of this new world. But unlike the fence, the fey hadn’t fully committed, hadn’t fully surrendered. It had taken enough energy to retain consciousness, to retain memory, to remain. But not enough to become one with this strange new world.
Not enough to live again.
But time had done what it wouldn’t. As its real body decayed, it had stubbornly built another out of whatever was available, and in doing so, fused with the earth and the wood and the house itself. It was the same way rocks and grass and weeds in a long-overgrown stone wall come together, into one, almost symbiotic whole.
There was no way to separate them. Not after so long. There was no way to send him home.
And what w
as left of the fey knew that, John realized, as acknowledgment thrummed through the melody, dark and dense and hopeless. It had always known. The reason it hadn’t released into the Earth was less about ability than stubbornness, refusing to accept this new world, refusing to let go and discover what it might offer because it was too busy remembering all that it had left behind.
John knew the feeling.
But it was listening now, for whatever reason. Possibly because it was tired of this, too. Or possibly because it had recognized something in this strange visitor that felt eerily familiar.
And so he sang, not with it, because that was far beyond his gifts. But to it. And the subject wasn’t the fey and his circumstances, because John didn’t know anything about those. But rather the only thing he did know that might be relevant.
He sang about himself.
He sang about being lost, too, for most of his life: fey but not, human but not, demon but not. He sang about being an odd fusion of all three, and of therefore fitting in nowhere. About being rejected by his birth family, by his fey visitors, by everyone but his demon father, who only accepted him in order to use him.
And the fey was listening. He had been rejected, too. John couldn’t understand all of it, or even most of it, but he had been young, hotheaded, reckless, and he had done something . . . the song became so loud, so discordant there, that John was forced to block it out for a time. And when he listened again, it was quieter. Exiled, unwanted, anathema.
John understood this.
And so he sang to it the rest of the story, because his was not yet done. He sang of finding a place in a world, one that wasn’t his, no, not entirely. But one he hoped would someday become his. He sang about letting go of old dreams and dead hopes, of disappointments and failures, and of looking to the future with, if not optimism, not yet, then something edging cautiously up to it.
He sang about not going home, but making one.
And then he opened his eyes.
Postscript
J ohn flipped over another page, and was confronted with another derelict cottage, this one wedged between a bakery and a green grocer. It was advertised as “picturesque ambiance,” which apparently was estate agent-ese for cracks in the walls and stains on the ceiling. He leaned forward. He was fairly sure he smelled mildew.
Bugger.
And then something obscured the sad little sight, something big and legal-looking that half disappeared into the flat before him. He looked up, confused, only to get a face full of dandelion fluff. “Sorry,” Jonas said, shuffling back a step. “Demmed cramped in here.”
“The corridor is more spacious,” Edwards noted acidly.
“Good point,” Jonas said, and pulled John out the door.
The corridor was not, in fact, more spacious, being one of the older parts of the rabbit warren of tiny halls that connected the various areas of HQ. Most were narrow and all were higgledy piggledy, with this particular bit also boasting a sloping ceiling that made it impossible to stand up straight. But right then, John didn’t care.
“What is this?” he demanded, thrusting the paper at Jonas.
Jonas rocked back on his heels, looking pleased—until he bumped his head. He glanced up at the ceiling resentfully, and then back at John. “Well, what does it look like?”
“It looks like a deed.”
“And so it is.” Jonas smiled beneficently.
“To what?” John asked suspiciously.
“Well, what do you think? We can’t put just anyone in a haunted house—”
“It isn’t haunted. It was never haunted.”
“—and in any case, you did clean it up, so to speak. Although I must say, you’re still going to have some work ahead of you. The, er, former tenant may be gone, but there’s no proper kitchen or bath, and those vines—”
“Jonas—”
“—may be better in the not-attacking-anyone sense of the word, but they’re still wafting about in a way that makes a man nervous—”
“Jonas—”
“—and then there’s the fact that you were owed a commission for cleaning out the rest of those nasty Velos, and the Corps would vastly prefer to pay in the form of a dilapidated property no one else will touch with a ten-foot pole than to have to actually pony up—”
“Jonas!”
“Hm?” The almost shout seemed to finally get through, and his superior blinked at him myopically. “What’s that?”
“Are you trying to tell me that I now own Cobb End?”
“Well, yes, of course. What else have we been talking about?”
“I’m . . . never quite sure,” John admitted, feeling stunned and a little giddy.
He’d been avoiding Jonas since that night, when he’d opened his eyes on starlight glimmering through windows that were no longer clogged with vines, but open and clear. Like the walls and ceiling. And the floor, where he had found himself staring at bare boards as whole and smooth as they had been when some hand planed them long ago. There had followed an almost entirely silent flight home, each man lost in his thoughts.
Thoughts which John had assumed must have included some deductive reasoning on Jonas’s part about a mage who was part fey, part demon and in possession of magic he should never have had.
He had been braced for an inconvenient revelation, or at least a quick ouster from the service.
He certainly hadn’t expected a gift.
He looked up to find his superior watching him, blue eyes keener than he normally allowed. “I thought it was fitting,” he said simply. And then he was off, in a bustle of tweed and a waft of fluff, leaving John staring down at his own name in someone’s cramped handwriting.
And what do you know, he thought, feeling a grin breaking out across his face.
He had a house.
Shitty Beer
Author’s Note: “Shitty Beer” is a short story/missing scene from the second Cassie Palmer novel, Claimed by Shadow, and should be read after that book to avoid spoilers.
I , for one, like a good cheap beer,” Mac said, tilting his chair back against the wall behind his shop, careful not to let his skin touch the burning brick. The sun had been on it for hours, until finally sliding off to torment some cacti around the corner, assuming the cacti minded. John didn’t know. He found the flora in Nevada as strange as that in some of the hell regions, which was fair considering the average temperature of the place. He wiped some sweat off his temple, before it could roll down the side of his neck, and took a swig from the bottle Mac had provided.
“Water,” he said, because there was no discernible difference.
But Mac didn’t seem to take offense. “It’s not water, it’s beer. It’s just shitty beer.”
“And you drink this why? Have they suddenly stopped paying your pension?”
“Like I’d notice if they did,” Mac said dryly. War mages, especially ex-war mages, were not over paid.
It was probably why his friend had turned a hobby into a second profession. John watched as a painted snake that had been hiding in Mac’s long mustache suddenly dropped out of sight, only to reappear on his chest and upset an eagle tat, which pecked at it savagely. The snake slithered off under Mac’s stringy bicep, and his friend took another swig, as if he hadn’t noticed.
Maybe he hadn’t. He only had about a hundred of the things, magical tats of all types and descriptions, covering his body in colorful perfusion to compensate for his inability to shield. He’d once been a war mage, as spit polished and disciplined as any. But ever since a curse stripped away his shields, and thus his career, he’d been looking more and more like a man with no purpose, doing tats for the magical community and waiting . . .
For what John didn’t know.
Maybe for better beer.
“There’s a liquor store around the corner,” he offered idly. “I could make a run–”
“You’re not listening,” Mac told him, squinting against the sun, which was now behind John’s head. “I like shitty bee
r.”
“You like shitty beer.”
“Yes.”
“So, if I were to go get, say, a Newcastle, or a Black Sheep, or that damned chocolate stout you used to favor–”
“Then you could drink it yourself.”
“Since when do you champion fizzy, ice cold, tasteless crap?”
“Since I moved to Nevada,” Mac said, shooting him an amused look. “Climate changes a man. A good, strong lager and a warm fire pair up nicely when your bollocks are about to freeze off. But here,” he waved a hand from the heat shimmering off the nearby road and the dry as dust desert, “not so much. I used to laugh at American beers, too, until I realized why they brew them like they do.”
“They brew them?” Pritkin said dourly, and drank his slightly sour soda pop.
“Laugh all you want. But I have learned to appreciate paying a fiver for a six pack, less if I get it on sale. I’ve learned that, sometimes, I want to sit back with some carbonated barley water and watch the sun set, rather than have my taste buds assaulted by hops, or feel like I’m drinking a bottle of syrup with some of the imperial stouts. I’ve learned to appreciate grabbing a shitty beer when I’m out at the bars, because it doesn’t make me feel like a pretentious SOB, and I’m not paying fifty bucks to get drunk.”
“You’ve thought about this,” John said dryly.
“I have.” Mac held up his brew, which had started out ice cold, but was now sweating as much as they were. “I salute you, shitty beer! You serve a purpose, and a damn noble one. Give the people something they can enjoy while doing chores or at a barbeque. Give people something they can share with their friends and not worry about the budget. Give people something they can buy at every grocery store, jiffy stop, and gas station to quench their thirst and get a slight buzz. There are better beers, but none dearer to my heart.” He drank deeply.
John sighed and did likewise.
It was still shit.
“So, did you just come by to insult my beer, or is there something else?” Mac asked, while fishing them a chaser out of a cooler filled with ice.