The Modern Fae's Guide to Surviving Humanity (8 page)

She needed to talk to Martin Jack.

“They're trying to explain the world.” Martin Jack sprawled on the edge of the towpath, the remains of a fish supper that he had dragged out of some litter bin spread out on the gravel beside him. “They want to know how everything works.”

Head and shoulders out of the canal, Jenny propped her elbows on the top of the cement surround and let herself float. She said, “That's what the monks did and the priests with their churches.”

“Yes… .” Martin Jack sounded unsure. “This is different. They call it science. They make things, measure things. It's called experimentation. I hear about it from students, sometimes. The girls talk to me when I walk them home.”

Jenny shook her head. He did not change. For all his fearsome reputation as a harbinger of doom, the black shuck still felt the need from time to time to accompany lone women through the streets until they reached their homes, trotting beside them like the meekest pet dog and wagging his tail in delight at the attention. She had suggested once that he lead them to her instead. She could use the nourishment. He hadn't spoken to her for seven years. She had never understood his affection for humans. It served no purpose.

Now, however, was no time to twit him about it. She needed what he had learnt from his regular contacts with humans. He said, “There are all sorts of different kinds of experiment. Sometimes they explode.”

“This isn't about explosions. This is about memory and needles and blood.”

“Ah. That's called psychology.” Martin Jack's jaw dropped in a grin. “The porter at the big gray round building told me about it. He said they study how people go mad till they go mad themselves.”

The hunter might well be mad, if Jenny was any judge of human insanity. The bodies of the two victims still lay in her mud: she could feel them like a sore that she could not quite reach. She said, “We have to stop it.”

He nodded. She went on, “You could go to the room, scare them like you used to. Curse them to die soon.”

“They have to believe.” His ears drooped. “These days they just chase me out with a broom or throw things at me.”

Jenny belonged to the water. That was where her strength lay. Away from the core of it, the canal, she was weak. But Martin Jack didn't do human-shaped. He was a dog, pure and simple. She shifted, sending ripples rocking into the far bank. She didn't like where her thoughts were taking her. She said, “One of your people, the drunks …”

“No.” There was a growl to that.

“We need bait. I can't do anything to the hunter unless he comes here. And he comes here with bodies.”

Martin Jack snapped his teeth at her and despite herself she pushed back from the canal's edge. The shuck's eyes glowed wild and red. She said, “Someone has to go …”

“You go.” He rose to his full height, heavy head hanging down toward her. Backlit by the moon, his shadow stretched out over the canal, long and sinister. Jenny shivered.

The drunks were not her problem. They were flotsam,
nothing more. She tolerated them in the hope, one day, of a good meal.

It was not for humans to hunt on her territory or deprive her of her prey. She sighed. “All right. I'll go.”

“Would you like tea?” The hunter cleared a heap of papers off a chair and offered it to Jenny. “I can fetch some from the tearoom. There are biscuits, too.” She smiled as she took a stool beside one of her flashing machines. “They should be pretty fresh.”

Jenny did not want to take anything from her, however it was offered. Her earlier offerings had been more than enough. The taint of them was still within her, would remain until they rotted away to bone. This room reeked of that wrongness and of the tang of human fanaticism. She sat down, straight-spined and said, “No. I don't want those.”

She had pictured the hunter as a man, someone broad and muscular and marked by the chase, like the villagers who had lived in her marsh long centuries before, who had fought and killed one another in their wars over cattle and fresh water and cast their enemies into her embrace. She had expected a warrior, an adversary out of human legend. Instead … The hunter was an angular young woman with lank brown hair and a pinched face. The bones of her wrists stood out below the grubby cuffs of her white coat. From time to time, she rubbed at an angry-looking mark on the side of her neck. Her shoulders hunched: even on the tall stool, she did not seem menacing.

Now, leaning forward, she said, “You know what my research is about, yes? You saw my notice in the free paper?”

Jenny had no idea about that. But she nodded anyway. The hunter went on, “I'm exploring the nature of emotional response at a very basic level. I'm listening intently to your feelings, if you like.” She rubbed again at the cut on her neck. “It's really very simple and very, very safe. I'll insert a micro-chip into you, near to a major nerve clump. It's linked to one I have myself—you see, it's really safe, I've been chipped for months. And then I'll be able to feel what you feel. Do you see?”

It was more human talk, like the chants and mumblings of the monks. Her words thrummed through Jenny with the same disquieting rhythm as church bells. The room was full of it. Her fingers quivered, yearned toward the safe damp space within the walls. The hunter was still talking, chattering on about vital knowledge and medical breakthroughs. Jenny rubbed at her own throat, feeling the fine skin begin to heat and tingle. The hunter's voice droned on, “… of course, there is a payment, but the contribution you'll be making to science by itself is something—”

Jenny interrupted her. “Just do it.”

“What?” The hunter stared, her eyes too big in her thin face.

“I don't care about that.” It was hard to talk, the stench of belief in the room was so strong. “Just do whatever it is.”

“You have to sign the waiver.”

“Yes.” Jenny swallowed. “Whatever you say.”

“Are you taking something?” The hunter's brows drew down. “Drugs can interfere with my results. I thought I made that clear in my advert.”

“No drugs.” Jenny licked her dry lips. “It's too hot. I don't like that.”

The frown remained, but the hunter slid from her stool and opened a crowded drawer. She thrust a sheaf of papers into Jenny's hands. “You need to sign this at the bottom, and then on the next page.” She fished a pen from a pocket and handed it over. “Here.” Jenny made a mark where she was told, imitating the smears that the water made of newsprint. The hunter took the papers back without looking at them and dropped them onto one of her piles. She crossed to the metal trolley. “It's a really simple process. You won't feel a thing.” She turned, a wedge of cotton in her hand. “I'll just clean up the site and then I'll inject you.” Something cold dabbed at Jenny's neck, just to one side of her spinal column. She fought not to flinch at the closeness of the hunter. Next, surely, would come the blood and then …

Something darted into her neck, thin and bitter and burning hot. She tasted hunger and excitement and a violent sense of righteousness. Her eyes blurred: for an instant she was two Jennys, the one on the chair and another, an awkward earthy self filled with need and ambition. Images flashed by, men smirking as they passed, laughing behind their hands.

And then there was only the darkness.

The car engine woke Martin Jack, coughing to a halt scant feet from where he slept under a bench. He opened his eyes. It was maybe two hours before dawn: the orange street lamps still burned, but the windows of the houses were dark and silent. A door opened and closed with a slam, wafting that thick sense of wrongness towards him. He whimpered, pressed himself hard into the comfort of the ground beneath him. Wrong and wrong. Almost twelve hours since Jenny had gone on her
mission and now this. He could smell the canal, thin and empty without the familiar green scent of her. His street people had come late and left early, huddling together over a bottle of ginger wine and half a pack of cheap cigarettes. He had wanted to follow them back into the center of the city and sleep curled against warm flesh.

He had promised Jenny. He had promised to help. But Jenny had gone away and not come back and the waters held no trace of her. The footsteps grew louder. They were heavy and uneven, counterpointed by a thick low drag and the catch of ragged breathing. He pulled back into the darkest part of the shadows. Along the towpath came a scant figure, bent over and laboring, with something lumpy wallowing in its wake. The wrongness billowed out from it in rich waves. Martin Jack gagged, felt his body tremble. Too much belief, grown sour through frustration and need. He pulled his ears down and peered out. There was only him, now, to defend what was left.

The figure came to a halt by the side of the canal, seven or eight feet away. Martin Jack fought back a whine that wanted to surge from his throat. The figure straightened, wriggling its shoulders and rubbing at its back, then bent again to pull at the lump at its feet. A waft of dampness rose, damping down the wrongness for a moment. Damp and green and familiar.

Jenny?

Slowly, unwillingly, Martin Jack began to creep forward toward the two shapes. The figure—it was a human woman—tugged and prodded at Jenny, who lay limp and crumpled on the towpath. Martin Jack froze. Jenny was strong and cunning. Nothing had ever caught her, not the ancient warriors, not the monks, not the men who
drained the marsh. Jenny was the waters; she had been here before all those others and she would be here long after they had turned to ash.

Huffing and straining, the woman pushed Jenny's limp form forward over the gravel. Toward the concrete lip of the canal. Toward the waters … The whimper forced its way out, loud in the still night. The woman turned, something glittering in her hand. Released suddenly, Jenny's body slumped back and one of her arms flopped over the edge into the water. Ripples jounced and scurried. Out in the center, the water began to churn.

Martin Jack growled low in his throat and jumped.

Water rushed through Jenny, ran cold through her veins, beneath her skin, surging and grumbling, driving the heat back and back. Her body hung heavy, flaccid, unresponsive to her commands. Her spine ached: at the base her skull something burned, blinding her with pain. She coughed and felt the water fill her lungs. Her arms thrashed out and the water welcomed her, pulling her down and down. Its long chill fingers pried her apart, flushed out the fear, tightened on the flame in her throat. Her body bent and she toppled sideways. The water—her water—caught her and held on, tight and close and homely. It wrapped her, gripped her as it dug deep under her flesh to tug away the taint the hunter had left under her skin. She cried out, and the waters echoed her. She uncurled and found herself home.

Her waters were angry. She wound herself through them and let that fill her to her limit. In the midst of them—in the midst of her—something thrashed and flailed and flapped. She swam up slowly to investigate. A mouthful of dog hair, stale and chewy: she spat that out
and swam on. A long pale limb, thin and bony, wrapped in dirty cotton. The rush and thunder of a heart beating too fast in panic and alarm. The tang of fear and the sweet, sweet flow of living memory. In the heart of her waters, Jenny smiled as she wrapped herself about the hunter and drew her down and down and down.

She was very hungry.

Juliet E. McKenna

“M
ora is late with her leaves again.” Gamella stood with her arms folded tight across her bosom.

Fraina longed to ask what exactly Gamella expected her to do about it. But of course, she knew the answer. Go and talk to her. But why was she always the one expected to go and talk to Mora? She knew the answer to that as well. Because hers was the closest oak tree to Mora's own, out here on the edge of the grove.

“Where is she?” Fraina stroked her own tree's rough bark and felt the deep thrum of his irritation. He didn't much like Gamella at the best of times and definitely didn't welcome her agitation when he was settling down for winter's sleep.

As usual, the other dryad seemed oblivious to the oak tree's mood. “Up aloft. Where else?”

Where else indeed? Fraina need not have asked that question either. After so many uncounted seasons living together in this grove, there was little that the dryads
didn't know about one another. There were no quirks or foibles among their little group that didn't rub someone up the wrong way. Mostly annoying Gamella, if truth were told.

“I'll go and talk to her.” Fraina stepped inside her tree and rode the surge of life-giving water to his topmost twigs. She walked out onto the coppery leaves gently swaying in the wind to see Mora sitting in her own tree's crown staring up at the sky.

“May I join you?” Fraina called out.

“What?” Mora looked around, startled. “Oh, yes, of course.”

Fraina stepped across the emptiness separating the two trees. Mora's tree welcomed her with a shiver of affection. There was no sign of him sinking into an autumnal doze, as was evident from his bright green leaves.

Mora grinned at her. “I take it Gamella's been nagging you to come and nag me?”

Fraina reflected, not for the first time, that Mora had a fine instinct for tension and who was causing it, notable in a dryad who spent so little of her time associating with the others.

“He is the only tree still in summer foliage.” Fraina patted the nearest sprig and smiled as Mora's tree creaked amiably at her touch.

“We'll get round to changing that soon.” Mora was unconcerned.

As ever, Fraina was baffled that any dryad could have so little apparent interest in managing her tree in accord with the seasons and the weather. Fraina loved taking care of her oak and of every living thing that enjoyed his shelter, from the tiniest insects to the biggest birds.