Mulberry Wands (27 page)

“And what happened?” Susan asked, though she
had a sick sense that she knew.

“His family found an owl pellet near the
entrance to their home. They took it apart, and inside they found a
skull, bones, and part of a chain.”

“Eww.”

“They will kill humans too. They’ve already
killed one mage this year.”

“They have?” Susan asked. She looked up, as
though there might be an owl circling overhead.

“I didn’t mean to frighten you.” He kissed
the top of her head, then stood up and stretched. “Come inside,
where it’s warmer and safer.”

“I’d never heard of the Sunwards before I met
Paul. I didn’t know they could kill mages.” Her back felt chilly
where she’d been touching him, and she started shivering again. “I
have to warn my mother and the other mages I know.”

“If they haven’t made wands before now, why
would they be likely to start? The cat is enough to worry about.”
He swung his body over the side of the wall and climbed down to
where only his head peeked above the edge. “Come get some
sleep.”

“Sure,” Susan said. He was probably right.
Maggie didn’t even know that making wands was possible, and even if
she did make one, she wasn’t likely to start killing rumblers
wholesale.

Darius was right about Zoë. She started
working longer hours, and never seemed to be around when Griff was.
Not only was Darius right, but he was smug about it. It didn’t make
any sense. What had he done, really, except give her a present on
her birthday? She’d left the pomegranate on the mantel over the
fireplace, with a saucer underneath to keep the juice off the wood.
He saw it every time he went into the living room. It looked less
golden by the day. At the end of the week it was only a third
golden. By the end of the month, it would be nothing more than a
rotten pomegranate. No wonder Alex wanted to sell the seed pod to a
pawn shop.

Still, it was the thought that counted,
right? Maybe Zoë didn’t think so.

Why did he have such bad luck with women? He
had a girlfriend in college, an anthropology major named Amy. She
was great, not just attractive, but smart and funny: a good
companion. He’d known all along that she’d planned on going to law
school after she graduated, but it had still hit him hard when she
packed her car two days after commencement. She just said goodbye
and walked away as though the twenty months or so they’d spent
together didn’t mean anything.

He couldn’t even have fantasies about getting
back together with her, because they were still friends on
Facebook, and he knew she was dating someone else. It was evident
that Amy had created a perfectly good life for herself in Boston.
She called now and then, or forwarded a funny email, but it didn’t
seem like she missed him very much.

He knew he was pretty good looking, and he
wasn’t fat or a drinker. He didn’t even smoke. Amy had always said
he treated her right, so it must have been something else, like
maybe the fact that he didn’t have any money. He and Amy had a
debate about that once, when he’d complained that all women cared
about was money. She said women cared more about status and
kindness than money. He said that wasn’t true, and had what he
thought was a good argument, but Amy cited reference books and case
studies, using examples from many different cultures, until he had
to just say she’d won, as he’d inadvertently stumbled onto the
subject of her undergraduate honors thesis. She’d kissed him then,
and called him beautiful. Griff had asked her to buy him dinner.
She’d laughed and put a sock on the door so his roommate would know
they wanted to be private.

He sighed. He really missed having a
girlfriend.

Griff grabbed his motorcycle helmet and went
to the Game DeSpot. He didn’t think there’d be any girls there, but
at least he could hang out with guys who were worse off than he
was. It was late afternoon, so anyone with a real job would be at
work or just now driving home rather than hanging out at a game
store. It was getting dark already, and the air was redolent with
exhaust and dust. The Christmas traffic was pretty bad, but since
he moved in with Darius and Zoë, he didn’t have to go down any
major streets to get to the Game DeSpot.

To his surprise, Fallon was there. She was
squatting backwards on the seat of a metal chair, her arms folded
up with her fingertips lightly touching the back. She looked like a
gargoyle, but of course a woman like Fallon could do anything she
wanted and still be hot. She wore what looked like a leather
jacket, except that it was thin, and blue jeans that were perfectly
normal jeans except that they were shiny. Griff saw her before she
noticed him, so he checked her out, matching the image of her with
his memory. Yes, she was strange. Her eyes were bigger than they
ought to be. And the way she held perfectly still, watching the
game of D&D like a velociraptor watching a schoolyard; that
wasn’t natural either.

He pushed the door open, rattling the old
Warhammer figurines that were tied to the door handle as bells.

Fallon’s head twisted, just her head, so that
she watched him while the rest of her remained perfectly still.
Yeah, predatory. That was the right word for it. He ignored her and
went to the back of the store like he was interested in a chess
set. She was just a creepy girl, she couldn’t do anything to
him.

He didn’t hear her approach, and when she
laid her hand on his shoulder, he just about jumped out of his
skin.

“Oh hey, Fallon, what’s up?” he said, trying
for casual except that his voice squeaked.

“I have come to warn you,” she said, in her
fluting accent. I have cume tue warn yuuu. The accent didn’t sound
cute anymore. Now it just sounded weird.

“Warn me?” he said, casually again, as though
his heart weren’t racing. Shit, and now she was threatening him?
Not cool. “About what?”

“My people will kill you if they discover you
are the cause of the fey death.”

“I don’t follow,” Griff said. “What fey
death?”

“The fey, the ones that look like hedgehogs.
They are dying. You are not the cause, are you? You are not the
mage who is taking their essence?”

“No,” Griff said. “What are you talking
about?” Maggie. Maggie and Alex. Something about the hedgehog-like
garden fey?

“We know there is a mage who has been
harvesting these creatures, and we know that you have been helping
her.”

“I don’t see why that would be any business
of yours, even if it were true. You’ll have to explain it to me,”
Griff said, somewhat perversely. Fallon hated to talk.

She frowned, briefly, then continued. “We
share the mice and lizards with the cats, and we share snakes with
the coati and songbirds with the falcons, but we do not wish to
share this prey with anyone. These fey are rare, and the ones in
this area are stronger than any to be found for many, many miles.
We will kill any who take them from us.”

“That’s hardly fair.”

“Fair?” She raised an eyebrow. He used to
think it was adorable when Amy did it, but on Fallon it made him
think of Leonard Nimoy, which wasn’t as sexy. “We are many, and you
are few. There is no fair or unfair, only strength of might.”

He scoffed and curled his lip. He wasn’t sure
if he felt more angry or afraid, but he was shaking. “You’re
threatening me? I thought we were friends.” He was aware of how
appropriate the word ‘friend’ was in this situation. ‘Friend’ is
what you called a girl after she broke up with you. Publicly,
anyway.

She tilted her head at a seventy degree
angle, not shifting the rest of her body. “Friends. Yes. We are
friends. You are my man-friend. That is why I am loyal to you,
because I like you.” She hesitated over the word loyal, as though
she’d never used it before but thought it sounded cool. “This is
why I did not tell the other owls in the desert where you had fled
to, when some of them wanted your bones to mingle with the
mage’s.”

Griff felt a cold tingliness overcome him, as
though his body were losing circulation. He knew, without a doubt,
that she wasn’t just bullshitting him. Alex was dead, and it had
almost happened to him. It wasn’t quick thinking that had saved
him, only luck, and the mercy of a very weird girl.

Fallon tilted her head back up to ninety
degrees. “Now you understand.”

She’d used him to get to Alex. Was he
partially responsible for Alex’s death? God, he hoped not. Poor
Alex. He was a loser, but he didn’t deserve to die.

“I could still tell the parliament that you
were involved. You could still feel our claws. Some of the
parliament want to kill any human involved, not just the mage.” She
tilted her head again, and looked up at the corner of the room.

“I see how it is. You’re blackmailing
me.”

“Blackmail.” She tasted the word, like she
knew what it was but didn’t know its name before. “Yes. I will keep
silent, and you will do me a favor, some day in the future.”

“Fine,” Griff said.

She tilted her head back up to ninety
degrees. The head-tilt thing was sweetly eccentric when she was
just a hot girl he thought might like him, but now that he knew she
was a cold-hearted psychopath, it was just creepy and annoying.

“You are angry? Is this not a good bargain?”
She tsked. “There’s no pleasing a human.”

“I don’t want to see you again,” Griff said.
He wondered, belatedly, if the others were listening. He hoped none
of them were stupid enough to get involved with Fallon. “Stay away
from me.”

He turned and left, knowing full well he was
being dramatic. He heard the D&D game stop as he pushed open
the door. He pushed the door too hard, and it locked open instead
of shutting. As he turned back to close it, he saw Fallon slink
out. She was watching him.

She was tailing him.

He was pretty sure she didn’t want to have
make-up sex, and he was also pretty sure she was done with the
conversation. The only reason he could think of for her to follow
him was that ‘her people’ didn’t know where Maggie lived, and they
hoped he would lead them to her.

No, that was ridiculous. She couldn’t follow
him on foot, could she?

But what about the others?

He got on his motorcycle and rode slowly
through the parking lot. With his helmet on, they couldn’t see
where he was looking. He scanned the rooflines. It was pretty dark,
and he couldn’t see much, but the Taco Bell across the way had a
string of blinking Christmas lights along its roof, and in the
flash of red and green he thought he saw the oval outline of an
owl.

He wasn’t being ridiculous, he was being
smart. They really were following him.

He pulled into the parking lot of an
apartment complex, finding an empty spot as though he were going to
visit someone there. The complex had a line of wispy mesquite trees
separating it from the street, and some bushy grass-like shrubs
underneath. He listened for the sound of owls in the trees near
him, but of course, he heard nothing.

He listened more carefully.

He heard birdsong, but not in the trees
around the parking lot, only in the surrounding neighborhoods. Near
him they were silent. They knew there were predators here. He
looked up at the yellow streetlight through the branches overhead.
He saw the outline of an owl.

And then he looked across the walk to the
management office, and he saw something even stranger: a phone
booth.

Griff tried not to run as he walked across
the open space to the phone booth. It had a light which worked, and
a phone book which appeared to be intact, and the phone didn’t even
have graffiti on it, though of course he didn’t use it because he
had his own phone. He called Maggie.

“Yeah?” she said. Music was blaring in the
background. “Hang on.” She turned it down. “Yeah?”

“Maggie, it’s Griff. We’re in trouble.”
Actually, Maggie was the one in trouble but he thought it would
sound better if he didn’t point that out.

“Shit,” she drawled, as though she had a
cigarette in her mouth. She exhaled. “The MIB?”

“No. You’re going to think this is weird but
it’s, um, it’s owls.”

“Oh, them.” She made a grunt of disapproval,
not unlike the sound someone made when they couldn’t open a pickle
jar. “Damn owls.”

“We can’t do the wands anymore. I’ll pay you
for the other ones,” (even terrified, Griff realized that being the
only owner of magic wands in a buyer’s market was a good business
strategy) “but they said they were going to kill the mage who was
de-magicking the rumblers.”

Griff waited for this to sink in.

Maggie exhaled again. “Okay.”

“I don’t think they know where you live, but
they’re looking for you. You might want to get out of town.”

“I’m not going to let Sunwards tell me what I
can and can’t do. Come over in a couple days.”

“You don’t understand, I think they’re
trailing me. If they find out where you live, they’ll ambush you. I
think …” no, he didn’t think, he knew, “they killed Alex.”

“He musta been stupid. They’re not normal
owls, they’re Sunwards. Stay where the lights are really bright and
they can’t hurt you.”

“What about at night?”

“Sleep with the light on if you’re
scared.”

“You don’t understand. They’re coming for
you. They want to kill you.”

“Don’t worry about me. I’m mage enough to
take care of a bunch of owls,” Maggie said. “And, hey, can you
bring me a couple packs of smokes next time you drop by? I’m
getting a little low.”

Across the street, a soccer field abutted a
parking lot. Three large birds perched on the back of the goal
post, watching. That tree next to the alley, were there owls
perched in it? Were they watching him?

“You listening?” Maggie asked. “Relax, man,
it’s going to be okay.”