The Modern Fae's Guide to Surviving Humanity (30 page)

She approached the silver-bound ebon doors of the Lady's presence chamber just in time to hear the rising babble of voices from within. The frog-faced footmen waiting there, each in his peacock feathered clawhammer coat, tugged at the great, heavy handles and let her pass through onto the pietra dura floor of the room beyond.

The tableau she met there was a feast to the eyes of Hestia ai Morning Glory ten'Amber, High Lady of the Goldhelm Family of the Westernmost Fae.

The russet-haired Lady of the Ferrishyn clan had her hands clasped upon the cheeks of the boy so lately brought from the human world by her favorite, Iannon. The boy himself was shedding glamour like a dandelion sheds seeds, to reveal beneath the withered visage of a barghest—one of the mindless old ones who still trapped and consumed unwary fae in the darker regions of the backlands where no one sensible ever went. An ancient horror of their people, long since hunted nearly to extinction, barghests lived on now in the cracks of the world, or as the twisted pets of the powerful. They could not be slain with either silver or iron, though one who knew the right word could call a barghest to heel.

Simply by entering the dwelling of the Lady in this moment, Hestia proclaimed that she knew the right word. She was one of the few with the power to glamour a barghest so that not even so powerful a fool as Iannon could see the difference.

The Lady should have known better, but she'd been
caught up in the moment. At her side, the changeling Loretta's mouth formed into a shriek of horrified terror. The Lady's own face was a study in concentrated hatred.

She'd fought the barghest to a stop, but was unable to repel it. The dark-furred questing fingers were so close to those copper eyes, that perfect mouth. No one around her had moved close, for fear of breaking the stalemate in the wrong fashion.

“A word with you, Lady,” said Hestia just a little too loudly.

Even some Ferrishyn courtiers smirked at the jest.

The Lady's eyes promised bloody retribution, likely with heated iron hooks and starveling ferrets. No one else moved, even to draw breath, except the barghest, who growled.

Hestia continued. “Each of us might call off our dogs, do you not think?”

A blink, then another, that beautiful face still set in terrible concentration.

“I think it best if your dog take mine for a walk in the park above our realm. I am sure a full cycle of the moon in human form, without his glamour, only my poor black dog to look after him, will do Iannon a wondrous amount of good.” Hestia could not hope to banish the Lady to the world above, but the embarrassment of being caught out so foolishly would do the Ferrishyn mother great harm in the theater of fae politics. King Goren would be sure to note this …
misstep
.

Another blink. It was assent, clearly witnessed by the dozens of her faction.

Hestia uttered a word in the oldest language, that spoken by the rivers of fire and the roots of the mountains before the waters first came and brought with them
every green and growing thing. The barghest released the Lady and dropped back to all fours, nothing now but a rangy black dog with a bit of blood on his muzzle.

Iannon leapt to speak. “Lady, I—”

His liege-mother cut him off. “I believe you have a dog to walk, cur.” The Lady's eyes when she looked back at Hestia were hooded once more, even the threat veiled. “You have made your point, madam. For now.”

Stiffly she rose from her throne of oaken heartwood and dragonbone to leave the presence chamber.

Hestia knew that this was ultimately a petty victory. King Goren would not allow them to settle the score further, for such vengeance might promote kinstrife. Not now, with the problems of time and living space and population that bedeviled Faerie. Petty or not, it was
her
victory.

She smiled sweetly at Iannon. “Don't forget to eat while you're up there,” she said in her kindliest voice. “Not to mention what comes after.”

The barghest licked his hand as Iannon stared at her. He couldn't summon the threat of heated iron in his gaze, Hestia realized, but give him a few more centuries of serious mischief and he might.

For that, she could wait. Good enemies were even harder to find than good friends.

Loretta followed the strange old fairy out of the presence chamber and away from the blighted home of the Lady. “Ma'am,” she said. “Please …”

The old fairy beckoned the girl to her side. “We must away, before even the laws of guesting are tempted to be broken.”

She could see the glamour on this one. So much
deeper than Iannon's, it was like comparing a pine forest to a blackberry bush. “I would go back.”

That was met with a small smile. “With that foolish boy of the Lady's on the loose over there?”

“You're sending him as human. He won't know what to do.” She giggled, an inappropriate thought popping into her head. “He probably doesn't even know what toilet paper is.”

“You plan to watch him suffer?” The old fairy sounded curious. “That is very … unusual … for one in your stage of development. A vice usually reserved to us old ones.”

“No,” Loretta said stubbornly. “I'll help him. I have a month to show that beautiful fool what it was he tried to take away from me. I'd like him to learn what it takes to survive up there.”

Hestia threw back her head and laughed. It was the mirth of wind and storm, the amusement of water thundering down a mountain. “Oh, you are a subtle one. You already know the lesson of enemies.”

“I know the lesson of being human,” Loretta said. “We are an uncertain folk. I may not be one of them anymore, but you cannot take my past from me.”

“What do you think you can take from Iannon?”

She grinned, knowing how wicked she must seem. “His certainty. That is who the fae are. A people who always
know
. I will break him of that.”

Elizabeth Bear

T
he smell of the greasepaint was getting to Edie.

“Oh my
god
, sweetheart, and then she says to me, ‘Honey, I think you'd look fabulous with dreads,' and I swear I stared at her for ten whole seconds before I managed to ask, ‘Do you think I'm a fucking Jamaican, bitch?' I mean, can you believe the gall of …”

Nor the mouths on some others
, Edie thought tiredly, pressing a thumb into the arch of her foot and trying to massage away the cramp you got from a two-hour burlesque in four-inch stilettos. They were worth the pain, though:
hot
little boots with the last two inches of the dagger heel clad in ferrules of shining metal. When you took them down the runway, they glittered like walking on stars.

She looked in her makeup mirror, still trying to tune out Paige Turner's fucking tirade about fucking Jamaicans, which wasn't getting any more interesting for its intricacy. Edie's vision was shimmering with migraine
aura—full moon tonight—and the smell of makeup and scorched hair was making her nauseated. The fucking cramp wasn't coming out of her fucking foot. No way she could walk in flats like this.

She didn't want to go home: there was nothing in her apartment except three annoying flatmates—one of whom had an incontinent cat—and a telephone that wasn't going to ring. Not for her, anyway.

She wanted a boyfriend. A family. Somebody who would help her get rid of this fucking headache, and treat her like a person rather than a side-show. Somebody who wouldn't spout bigoted shit at her. She didn't get that from her father's family, and she certainly didn't get it here.

“Fuck.” She dropped her foot to the floor, arching it up so only the ball and toes touched. “I'm fucking fucked.”

“Aw, sweetie,” somebody said in her ear—a lower voice than Paige's, and a much more welcome one. “What's wrong?”

Somebody was trying to distract Paige by asking her if she was staying up for the lunar eclipse. It wasn't working. Edie wondered if a punch in the kisser would do it.

She looked up to see Mama Janeece leaning over her, spilling out of her corset in the most convincing manner imaginable.

“I gotta get out of here,” Edie said. “You know, I'm just gonna walk to the subway now.”

She jammed her foot back into the boot. The support eased the cramp temporarily, but she knew there'd be hell to pay all night.
So be it.

“It's fifteen degrees,” Janeece said. “You're going to go out there in high heels and a wig and four inches of fabric?”

“I've got a coat. And a bottle of schnapps back at my
place.” Edie stood. She smiled to take the sting out of it, then made sure her voice was loud enough for Paige to overhear as she gathered her coat. “Besides, if I have to listen to any more racist bullshit from Miss Thing over there, I'm going to be even colder in a jail cell all night. Somebody ought to tell her that it ain't drag if you look like Annie Lennox.”

She sashayed out, letting the door swing shut behind her. Not quite fast enough to cut short the cackles of outraged queens.

Halfway down the corridor, she realized she'd left her cellphone behind. It wasn't worth ruining a good exit for. She would get it tomorrow. Anyway, she didn't have anybody to call.

The coat wasn't long enough to cover her knees and the cold burned through those hot little boots. After ten steps, Edie regretted her decision. But going back now would be a sure way to convert triumph into ignominy, so she soldiered on, sequined spandex stretching around her thighs with each swinging stride as she click-clacked up Jane Street toward Eighth Ave. Sure, it was cold, but she could take it. Sure, her feet hurt—but she could take that, too. She was probably less miserable than the gaunt black hound with his hide tented over his hip-bones that she glimpsed slinking aside at the first intersection.

The cold deadened her sense of smell. Manhattan's rich panoply of scents gave way to ice, cold concrete, and leaden midwinter. The good news was, it deadened her incipient migraine, too. And in the freezing dark of the longest night of the year, there weren't many people hanging around to hassle her.

Of course, she'd no sooner thought that than the purr
of an eight-cylinder engine alerted her—seconds before the car glided up beside her. Somebody rolled down the window, releasing warm air and the scent of greasy bodies. A simpering catcall floated through the icy night. A male voice, pitched sing-song. “Hey lady. Hey lady. I like your big legs, lady. You want a ride?”

The car was a beige American land yacht from the 1980s, rusty around the wheel wells. There were four guys in it, and the one in the front passenger seat was the one purring out the window. From the look on his face, his friends had put him up to it, and he was a little horrified by his own daring.

Edie turned, flipped the skirts of her coat out, and planted both hands on her snake-slender hips. She drew herself up to her full six-foot-eight in those stilettos. Something smelled mushroomy; she hoped it wasn't the interior of that car.

“I ain't no lady,” she said definitively. “I'm a
queen
.”

The car slowed, easing up to the curb. The front and rear passenger doors opened before it had coasted to a stop. Three men climbed out—one must have slid across the rear bucket seat to do so—and then the driver's door opened and the fourth man stood up behind the car.

Edie brazened it out with a laugh, but her hand was in her purse. She didn't have a gun—this was New York City—but she had a pair of brass knuckles and a can of pepper spray. And other advantages, but she'd hate to have to use those. For one thing, she'd ruin her blouse.

The throbbing behind her eyes intensified. She kept her hand in her purse, and was obvious about it.
They
wouldn't know she didn't have a gun. And now that they were standing up beside the car, it was obvious that she had a foot on the tallest of them.

I'm not easy prey
, she thought fiercely, and tried to carry herself the way her father would have—all squared shoulders and Make-My-Day. Thinking of him made her angry, which was good: being angry made her feel
big
. The car was still running. That was a good sign they weren't really committed to a fight, and she could pick out the pong of fear on at least two of them.

She smiled through the blood-red lipstick and said, “What say we part friends, boys?”

They grumbled and shifted. One of them looked at the driver. The driver rolled his eyes and slid back behind the wheel—and that was the signal for the other three to pile back into the car with a great slamming of doors. Predators preferred to deal from a position of strength.

“Fucking faggot,” one shouted before leaning forward to crank the window up. Edie didn't quite relax, but her fingers eased their deathgrip on her mace.

Oh, bad boys
, she thought.
You never got beat up enough to make you learn to get tough.

She hadn't had time to come down off the adrenaline high when a shimmering veil of colors wavered across the width of the street, right before the beige Buick. The car nosed down as the driver braked hard; that mushroomy smell intensified. The veil of light had depth—beyond it, Edie glimpsed a woodland track, the green shadows of beech leaves, the broken rays of a brilliant sun. She heard a staccato, as of drumbeats, echoing down the street. She took an involuntary step forward and then two back as something within the aurora lunged.

A tall pale horse, half-dissolved in light, lurched through the unreal curtain. It stumbled as its hooves struck sparks from the pavement, reins swinging freely
from a golden bridle, then gathered itself and leaped. Its hooves beat a steel-drum tattoo on the hood and roof of the Buick. The men within cringed, but though the windshield starred and spiderwebbed, the roof held. It smelled of panicked animal, sweat, and—incongruously—lily of the valley, with overtones of hungry girlchild.