The Shape Stealer (22 page)

“They must have heard of us through Zach’s show,” Roman said, “a most exotic bunch. A West African prince, a young Welsh woman whose father made a fortune in baked goods—”

“The biscuit heiress,” Maia broke in, “very shy and she wears the most adorable homemade caps.”

“—a diamond dealer who had a sudden yen to collect art, a homeless man who found a winning lottery ticket…”

As my father and Maia listed off the new clientele, I began to get an uneasy feeling. These patrons sounded familiar.

“And the best thing is the effect they’ve been having on our painters,” Roman crowed. “The biscuit heiress visited Zach’s studio a few weeks ago and made a chance comment that started him on a whole new series.”

“I think it was the scones she left,” Zach said, patting his belly. “They brought back memories of my childhood.”

I exchanged a glance with Becky. We had experience with some magic scones last fall, baked by a Manx brownie named Fenodoree. Was she the one visiting Zach? And the West African Prince … could that be Oberon, king of the fairies? All the fey I had met last fall had disappeared after I’d banished Dee from the city. Oberon had abandoned me in Van Cortlandt Park. I hadn’t seen him since. I remembered, though, something he’d told me once:
The humans we touch bloom in our company. They do their best work while we drink of their dreams.
Were the fey visiting Zach and our other artists, playing muse to them? Were the fey back in New York?

“We’ve had the same kind of luck with our band,” Jay said. “Remember that DJ Ariel Earhart on WROX? Well, she started an indie label and has offered us a great contract. After we met with her last month I haven’t stopped writing songs.”

Ariel Earhart was definitely a fey—although I’d never known exactly what kind. Some kind of wind spirit. She’d taught me to fly and how to listen to people’s thoughts. I took a peek into Jay’s head now and found it was full of song lyrics … and his new girlfriend, Gisela … and song lyrics
about
his new girlfriend Gisela. Maybe she was fey as well.

My friends did, indeed, seem to be blooming, but I wasn’t sure I liked the idea that the fey had been lurking around my friends and family while I was gone. I gave Becky our long-established “we need to talk” look, and within minutes Roman had been deputized to show Will to his room in Roman’s apartment on the second floor, Maia and Zach had been reminded that they had a client coming into the gallery in ten minutes who wanted to meet Zach, and Joe (a police detective), clearly used to Becky’s efficient mode, said he had to report in to the station. Jay put on another pot of coffee.

“How long have the fey been hanging around?”

“It started a week or two after you left,” Becky said. “We weren’t sure at first, but then I caught that Welsh chick leaving a bag of rugelac for Roman one day…”

“You
caught
Fenodoree leaving baked goods?” From what I recalled of the Manx brownie, she was extremely shy and furtive. “You didn’t thank her, did you?”

“Hell no! I threatened to get my policeman boyfriend to haul her in for questioning and get a cease and desist order.”

I laughed. I knew brownies hated to be thanked, but I didn’t know how they felt about cease and desist orders. “What did she say?”

“Nothing. She vanished. I mean literally. In a poof of flour and glitter. It took me a week to get the stuff out of my hair.” Becky rubbed her curly hair, which was as tightly wound as herself.

“Poor Fen,” I said. “I don’t think she’s used to any humans being faster than herself.”

“Poor Fen, my ass! A week later I came home from tour and found my apartment had been cleaned.”

“You mean cleaned out? As in robbed?”

“No, I mean
cleaned
, as in straightened, dusted, and polished.”

Becky lived in the one-bedroom East Village walk-up she’d inherited from her grandmother. She’d never had the heart to throw out anything her grandmother owned—including her two cats—and so had simply added her own stuff to the mix. So although Becky was an energetic cleaner of other people’s homes, her own had layers of grime going back to the Eisenhower administration.

“Huh. Brownies usually clean up for people they like. Fen must have taken a shine to you.”

“Ha, ha,” Becky said humorlessly. “I bought new locks and put a security gate over the window. The next day I came home and found a pie cooling on my stovetop, and all my clothes had been washed and ironed.”

“You should have seen her,” Jay said, grinning. “She was fit to be tied.”

“Finally I pretended to go out and hid in the dumbwaiter. I jumped her as she was sneaking in from the fire escape and handcuffed her to the radiator.”

“You handcuffed a brownie? God, Becky, these are dangerous supernatural creatures. You could have gotten hurt.”

“Pshaw, I’d gotten a book out from the library and read up on fairies. I drew a circle of salt around her and threatened her with an iron poker until she told me what she was up to. She told me she was taking care of me because I was a loyal friend to ‘The Watchtower’ and you were going to need me.”

“Need you for what?” I asked, suddenly sobered.

“She said she had heard from her French counterparts that you were in danger and would need our help when you came back to New York.”

“Did she say how you were supposed to help me?”

“No, she honestly didn’t seem to know,” Becky admitted reluctantly. “But right after that we were contacted by Ariel Earhart and offered a deal from Prospero Records.”

“Prospero Records?”

“Yeah, it’s a major indie. They offered us a sweet deal. The only catch was they said they needed us to come up with new material by August. I thought it was too tight a turnaround for Jay…”

“But I thought I could write the songs by then,” Jay said. “In fact, sitting there in Ariel Earhart’s studio, I just knew I’d be able to do it. I felt this tremendous surge … like I was flying, and I started to hear stuff. Like voices and snatches of song on the air, like the whole city was singing to me.”

Jay’s face was lit up as if the lights of nighttime Manhattan were reflected in his face. I knew exactly what he was talking about. Ariel had taken me for a flight over the city and taught me to hear the myriad voices on the wind. It sounded as if she’d given Jay a taste of that magic.

“And since then I’ve been writing nonstop. It doesn’t even feel like writing. It feels like I’m taking dictation from God.”

I don’t think I’d ever heard Jay utter a mystical view in his life, outside of his veneration for the Elder Gods of H. P. Lovecraft. I studied him, searching for signs of mania. The problem with the inspiration granted by the fey was that it became addictive. I’d seen what had happened to artists when that inspiration suddenly abandoned them.

“They’re really good songs,” Becky was saying. “The best Jay’s ever written. We recorded them last month, and Ariel got us booked on a West Coast tour that starts in two days. We’ve got to be in San Francisco the day after tomorrow.”

“San Francisco?” I asked, feeling a prickling at the back of my neck. Was it just a coincidence?

“Yeah.” Becky beamed at me. “We’re playing the Fillmore. How cool is that?”

“Pretty cool,” I said, taking out three of the tickets we’d found at Pere Lachaise (Jules, Annick, and Kepler had kept the other three) and laying them on the table. Jay’s eyes widened as he looked at them.

“The Doors in 1967! Man, I’d give my eyeteeth to have been at that show!”

“You may get your chance,” I told him. “No tooth extraction necessary.”

*   *   *

By the time I’d explained to Becky and Jay the
chronologistes
’ theory that the tickets were the key to a time portal, I was ready to pass out from fatigue. Talking with Jay about time travel wasn’t helping.

“You mean these people travel back in time and change things? Man, haven’t they ever heard of the butterfly effect? What if we go back and change something that keeps my parents from meeting? Would I vanish? What if we come back to the present and everything is different? What if the country’s been taken over by Nazis or people have three eyes…”

“You’ll have to talk to Jules and Annick about all that,” I said, yawning. “I’m going to get some sleep.”

I left Becky and Jay in the kitchen positing alternate universes and time lines, and I climbed the stairs to my third-floor studio. Perhaps because of the jet lag, or the length of time I’d been away, or all the talk about time travel, when I got to my door I hesitated to open it. I had the queasy sensation that when I opened it my studio and bedroom would be gone. Who knew what changes I might have caused by going back in time to 1602? What if the life I’d left behind in New York was altered? I felt as if my old self lay behind this door. What if I no longer recognized that self?

I opened the door. Morning sunlight streamed through the windows and skylight at the south end of the room, reflecting off polished metal surfaces. In addition to my jewelry business I made metal sculptures and mobiles that hung from hooks in the ceiling. The most impressive of these was a six-foot-long metal dragon welded (and rewelded after I’d removed the head last year) from chain links and spare automobile parts, with a hydraulic spreader—the so-called Jaws of Life—as its menacing long-nosed snout. I’d made it in my senior year at FIT after finding the jaws in a dump. They were a reminder of the horrible car accident that had taken my mother’s life, which I’d later discovered had been caused by John Dee. I’d met a real dragon last year—Ddraik, who lived beneath the abandoned City Hall subway station—who had taken me back to that moment and made me relive it again and again, forced me to watch my mother die over and over again until finally I was able to get a message through to her—too late to save her, but in time to let her know that I would survive the accident and grow up. She had told me that was all she needed. And she had told me one other thing.

You can’t change the past.

And yet I’d gone back into the past and brought a piece of it back with me.

“That looks like something out of my worst nightmare.”

I turned around and found that “piece of the past” standing in my studio. His hair was tousled from sleep, making him look even younger than his nineteen years. But when he stepped closer to the dragon sculpture and narrowed his eyes at its rusty jaws, I saw a flicker of hard-won experience in his eyes. After all, in the last week he’d faced a monstrous vampire, an evil sorcerer, ghostly time wraiths, and his own future self. He wasn’t quite the callow youth I’d met a week ago, and if he wasn’t
my
Will yet, I could see the foundations of the man I would fall in love with.

“It
is
something out of my worst nightmare,” I said, sitting down at my work stool in front of my drafting table and pulling over a stool for him. “Or, at least, I made it to confront my worst nightmare.” I told him how my mother had died. Because he didn’t know much about cars I had to explain what happened to metal at high-speed impact and how gasoline combusted.

When I was done he didn’t say anything for a few minutes. Then he told me how his mother had died in a carriage accident when he was seven. “I was waiting for her arrival in the courtyard of Swan Hall. I saw the coach round the corner of the drive. My father was driving. I could tell by the way he was beating the horses that he was angry. He was often angry at my mother. She was much younger than he and she liked to laugh and sing…”

His voice, grown wistful, trailed off. When he began again, it was husky. “The carriage wheel struck the stone border of the drive and cracked. My father was thrown clear, but my mother … when I reached her, she was still alive. She’d been crushed beneath the iron wheel.”

I winced and touched his arm. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know…”

He snapped his head around. “You mean he—my older self—never told you?”

“No,” I admitted, feeling somehow embarrassed.

“Well,” he said, smiling faintly, “perhaps after four hundred years I’ll have forgotten it. That, at least, is something to look forward to.”

I was about to tell him that he wouldn’t have to live those four hundred years because we’d cured him of his vampirism, but then I noticed the way he’d positioned himself out of the direct sunlight and how pale and wan he’d become. He was turning into a vampire before my very eyes while
my
Will was becoming human. Even if we did find the portal and send him back to 1602, we might very well be sending him back as a vampire, doomed to live over another four hundred years battling his lust for blood.

You can’t change the past
, my mother had said.

I was beginning to think that she might have been right.

*   *   *

I was so exhausted that I must have slept through the entire day and well into the night, because when I woke up it was dark and the alarm by the side of my bed read 3:33 a.m. The sound that had awakened me was the rattle of chains. But I didn’t think I was being visited by Marley’s ghost. I’d made a few arrangements before going to bed, on a hunch.

I sprang out of bed, dressed in the sweatpants and T-shirt I’d gone to bed in, rushed into my studio and flipped the light switch. My hunch had been right. There on the studio floor, tangled in an iron chain and cursing a blue streak, sat Fenodoree. I grabbed the box of Morton salt I’d left on my drafting table and drew a circle around the irate brownie, even though I was pretty sure that the iron chain I’d rigged to ensnare her as she came through my skylight was enough to keep her in place. Every time she tried to pluck the chain off her ankles she drew her hand back as though burnt and uttered a string of Welsh expletives. When I had completed the salt circle I stood with my hands on my hips glaring at her. She looked much the same as when I first saw her working at Puck’s Tea Shop in the West Village a year ago—a plump woman with sandy hair wearing a corduroy jumper, fingerless wool gloves, round gold-rimmed glasses, and a green corduroy tam-o’-shanter. It looked like I had snared Betty Crocker.

“If you stay still and promise not to try to escape, I’ll take the chain off your feet.”