Tithe (15 page)

“No. Why don’t you just come by my job?” She tried to wrest back control of the conversation.

“By the entrance, then. The big one. I have to see you.”

She hesitated, but she had no real reason not to meet him there. After all, removing the enchantment would only take a moment. What happened after, well, maybe it would be better if she was somewhere she could leave. “Okay.”

“Good.” With that, the phone hung up, leaving her feeling as though she had drunk two-day-old coffee on an empty stomach. Her nerves were fried. When she lifted a hand, she was unsurprised to find it vibrating slightly, like a struck guitar string. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, then shucked off Corny’s butchered clothes and put on some of her own. They fit over the illusion of a smooth back easily, but her dual senses could feel the soft cotton of the T-shirt against her wings.

It was weird to be standing outside a school that she should have been going to, but didn’t. Some of the kids looked familiar, people she had known from grade school. Mostly they all just looked like the strangers they were.

Human,
her mind whispered.
They’re all human and you’re not
.

She shook her head. She didn’t like where those thoughts took her. It was alien enough that she hadn’t been in a high school in years. Sometimes, like now, she missed it. She’d hated elementary school. She and Janet had been friends by default. Kids teased Janet for her secondhand clothes and Kaye for her
stories. But in the city no one had known Kaye, and besides, there were lots of weird kids. But just when things in school had gotten better, she’d left.

“Hey,” Kenny said. He was wearing sunglasses and a gray T-shirt under a heavy navy flannel. He took off the glasses when he got close to her. Dark circles ringed his eyes. “Why didn’t you call me yesterday? I left a million messages at your house. Your mother said that you were at Janet’s, but I checked. You weren’t there.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I was out.” He looked so serious that there was something suddenly funny about it. The magic came easily now, rushing to her fingers and spiking along her tongue, but she made no move to lift the enchantment.

“Kaye, I … ,” he started, then seemed to think better of whatever it was he was going to say. “I can’t sleep. I can’t eat. All I can do is think about you.”

“I know,” she said sweetly. Kids passing by them gave Kenny sidelong glances. She suddenly understood why she had let him kiss her in the diner, why she had wanted him at all.

She wanted to control him.

He was every arrogant boyfriend that had treated her mother badly. He was every boy that told her she was too freaky, who had
laughed at her, or just wanted her to shut up and make out. He was a thousand times less real than Roiben.

Her face split in a wide grin. She had no desire to play pretend anymore, no need to prove her worth by Kenny’s regard, no desire to know how different the lips of a popular boy were from any other boy.

“Please, Kaye,” he said, reaching for her wrist, holding it tightly, pulling her to him.

This time she pulled away abruptly, not letting him crush her to him, his lips nowhere near close enough to take another kiss. Instead, she twisted her hand out of his grip and sprung up onto the cement edge of the steps.

“Something you want?” Kaye taunted. Kids had stopped along the path, watching.

“You,” Kenny said, reaching for her again, but she was far too quick. Dancing out of his grasp, she laughed.

“You can’t have what you can’t catch,” she goaded, cocking her head to one side. Madness made the blood dance in her veins. How dare he make her feel awkward? How dare he make her measure her words?

He snatched for her hand, but she pulled it away easily, spinning along the cement wall.

“Kaye!” he said.

She squatted down, legs wide, chin thrust toward him. “Do you adore me, Kenny?”

“Yes,” he said frantically.

“Are you besotted with me? Would you die to have me?”

“Yes!” Kenny’s eyes were dark with desire and fury. Behind him, students were laughing and whispering to one another.

Kaye laughed too. She didn’t care in the least.

“Tell me again what you would do to have me.”

“Anything,” he said, without hesitation. “Give me a chance. Make me do something.”

The laughter died in her throat. She tossed the magic off him, dispersing the threads of it with a sweep of her hand, as one would brush aside cobwebs.

“Never mind,” she said, angry without being sure of why. Angry and suddenly ashamed.

Kenny looked around him, the school apparently coming into focus for the first time. She could see the blush creep up his tattooed neck. He looked at her with something like horror in his eyes.

“What the fuck did you do to me?”

“Tell Janet to call me,” she said, not caring that that made no sense, not caring about anything except that she needed to get out of there, needed to get away before she careened totally out of control. She didn’t even spare him a glance as she crossed the student parking lot, heading home.

***

Jimmy was waiting for her in the office of the gas station. He handed her a blue jacket with an Amoco logo in the corner that Kaye had never seen Corny wear. She put it on dutifully while he explained what she had to do.

A few cars had come through, and she had handled the pump gingerly, careful of the metal.

Her head swam with the noxious fumes of the gasoline and the terrible thoughts of what she had done. It had felt so good, so absolutely right to taunt Kenny as she had. And now, knowing what she could do, was it possible to unlearn it, or just a matter of time before she used it again?

There was a rustling sound nearby, and Kaye looked toward the woods warily. It was Mischief Night, and Jimmy had already warned her that kids might try to toilet-paper the place.

But the figure that emerged had hair as black as oil, and the cloak on his shoulders blew back to reveal thorns on the inside, set like a bed of nails. Other than the white of his skin, the only pale thing he wore was a single white stone swinging on a long chain.

“You?” she said. “You’re the Seelie Spike told me about?” She’d seen him talking to Nicnevin at the ball. He had seemed loyal to the Queen. Was that part of the plan?

“You’re in good hands now,” Nephamael said.

“You made the marks on Corny’s arms.”

“Indeed I did. He is exquisite.”

Up close his eyes were yellow. Looking into those eyes, she suddenly knew why they seemed familiar. She’d seen them in the bar the night that Lloyd had lost it.

“You,” Kaye said. “You did something to Lloyd, didn’t you?”

“We needed you to come home, Kaye.”

The knight touched the stone around his neck, and Kaye felt magic sweep around her, settling on her body with an oppressive weight. She felt smothered for a moment as scents became vague and her vision dulled.

“Remember, we have to make it look real,” he said as she choked.

“What are you doing to me?” Kaye managed to say. Everything felt numb and strange.

“That glamour you were wearing would fool no one. I am simply restoring the one you should have been wearing.”

“But Halloween isn’t till tomorrow,” Kaye protested. There was a strange prickling all along her arms. This time it didn’t seem as though it came from inside her. Something was happening. Her heart sped, and she could feel … something, a strangeness. And then a dark shape hurtled out of the clouds.

Something roared over them.

Kaye threw her arms up over her face. She
tried to scream, but when she opened her mouth, it was filled with wind.

Hands clutched her shirt and legs and hair, lifting her and passing her up into a mass of creatures. She kicked and bit, tearing their long cornsilk hair and ripping their powdery wings. Pointed, catlike faces hissed, and fingers pinched her, but they flew on in a long train of monsters and she was with them.

“You whom I could not save
Listen to me.”

—CZESLAW MILOSZ, “Dedication”

Kaye’s throat was raw with screaming. Sharp claws bit into her wrists while bat and bird and insect wings moved with less noise than sheets drying on a line. They flew through the streets invisibly. She screamed, but it seemed that they moved between this world and the next because no one looked up and no one spoke and no one did more than shiver, maybe, or twitch a little as a horde of monsters vaulted through the skies above them. Kaye bit and scratched and squirmed and tore, till the feathery dander of her wings shimmered all over her captors. Not once did they loosen their hold. They were one sinuous being of which she was only a tiny, unwilling part, and all she could do was scream.

Then they swooped down, dropping through the sky so fast it stopped her breath. Cemetery Hill vaulted up to meet her. The air forced her screams back down her throat, and she swallowed them.

Her ankle twisted as she fell forward onto her hands and knees. For a moment she couldn’t breathe. The monsters dropped easily around her, skittering and jumping on the ground. Every cut and bruise seemed to come alive, throbbing with vigor. Her bones felt loose in their sockets.

Black, shiny eyes like her own stared back from the dozen or so creatures that glanced at her. Something grabbed hold of Kaye’s hair and pulled her head back so that she was staring up into gold-flecked owl eyes.

“Tasty mousie.” The creature’s thick, dark lips moved slowly over the words. Its voice was like dried leaves being crushed.

Kaye shut her mouth. Others were crowding in, their faces pressing too close. Their hungry heat dizzied her. She flailed her hands to keep them away. Little winged creatures flitted around and showed their teeth.

“Grab-snatch great fun,” the owl-eyed woman said, jerking Kaye’s hair hard enough to pull her whole body with it, “such a fine, fine treat.” The creature let go of her, and she fell on already raw knees.

“Let her be,” Nephamael said, jerking her to her feet.

It was as if something had sawed the hill off at the base and raised it on fat pillars. Mushrooms, corpse-pale and each the size of her fist, ringed the grounds. Beneath that earthen ceiling, marvelous folk feasted as though it were a tent.

Nephamael’s fingers pressed into her shoulder as though determined to bruise. The thorns that capped each gloved finger scraped across her skin with each stumbling step.

He brought her to the raised earthen dais, and she had to take several deep breaths to keep back the terror that was threatening to overwhelm her. The Queen sat on her throne; twin boys with goat feet knelt on either side of her, one absently playing a flute. Roiben stood on her left side, his clothes all of a dark silver fabric that managed to look like cloth and metal at the same time. Jagged freshwater pearls circled his collar and cuffs, reminding her of teeth. He looked magnificent, shining like the moon herself.

He was as distant as the moon too, expressionless and grim.

On the Queen’s right side, there were two more knights, one dressed in a red so dark it was almost brown and the other in smoky blue. Farther back on the dais, mostly hidden by the throne itself, a fox-faced creature wearing an oddly shaped skullcap paused, one claw holding a brush over a long curling sheet of
white birch bark that it was using as parchment.

Kaye was pushed roughly to her knees. She could feel Nephamael sinking down behind her.

The Queen of the Unseelie Court looked down on her, lips quirking into a smile. Her blood-red hair was pulled back into thick, jeweled braids, and the dusky gray of her dress made her skin all the more pale and creamy by comparison. She was inhumanly beautiful, but her smile held no fondness. Kaye was disturbed to find herself smiling back into those cruel blue eyes nonetheless, longing for them to light with approval.

The air was thick with a sweet-smelling pollen that made Kaye feel giddy and unfocused. It was hard to get a real breath. The Queen’s eyes were too clear, too blue, Kaye thought. They looked fake. Then the vertigo hit.

“Kaye Fierch, the Unseelie Court would bestow a great honor on you.” The Queen’s words dropped into her mind, each one echoing separately, the words making no sense when put together. “Will you submit to it?”

Kaye knew she had been asked a question and that it was very important she answer it. She tried to gather her scattered thoughts. Blue eyes held hers. She wanted to close her eyes. She wanted to stop the chill that was unfolding
inside her, spreading from her chest, filling her with trembling longing. The most she could do was blink slowly.

“Perhaps her silence is answer enough.” Kaye heard Roiben’s voice as from a great distance. There was some laughter after he spoke.

“Come closer, little mortal.” The Queen leaned forward, stretching out one lily-white hand, and before Kaye had time to consider it further, she was crawling forward to touch it. The Queen ran her fingers through Kaye’s hair, mussing and then smoothing it down again.

“You want to please us, do you not, little one?”

“Yes.” She did. She had never wanted anything more.

Nicnevin smiled at that, a smile that curled up at the ends.

“In fact, your only desire is to please us, is it not?”

“Yes.” She shivered with delight as the Queen’s hand stroked her cheek.

“You will please us greatly, child, if you are obedient and merry and do not question those things that you find strange. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“We ask that you honor us with your participation in the Tithe. Will you accept the burden of this honor?”

Something in the phrasing of the question
seemed strange, but Kaye knew what answer to give. “Yes.”

The Queen’s smile was dazzling. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Roiben scowl, and she wondered at that. Wasn’t he pleased that his Lady was pleased?

“My knight will have you groomed and properly attired. You mustn’t try too hard to please him. It’s a hopeless task.” The Queen gave an almost imperceptible nod.

Roiben was beside Kaye then, drawing her to her feet. He smelled of burning cloves.

Rath Roiben Rye stood on his Lady’s left-hand side, in his place of honor, his fists clenched so tightly he could feel the half-moon incisions his nails made in his palms. The girl was answering fatally in her soft-as-ash voice. She had made no move to say his name, and now it was far too late for that.