Two and Twenty Dark Tales (3 page)

She watched him go, the photos an itch behind her eyes. She reached for her backpack and felt for the outline of the knife it held. Maybe now it could serve another purpose.

In the distance, Matthew opened the scuffed door to the motel room and bowed low to her. His arm swept in a wide arc toward the blackness of the room beyond.

She hadn’t wanted to know anything in so long. Weariness had weighed too much upon her. But now she remembered how it felt to want something. She had to know what he and those photographs could tell her. She hopped out of the car, hefting the backpack, and swept over the asphalt and past him into the motel room.

The door clicked shut. Neither of them saw the man in the yellow car pull into the parking lot.

***

“We don’t have long,” Matthew said, taking off his coat and throwing it onto the bed. “I must have you before he gets here.”

The words jarred her, but she was sadly not surprised. She swung the backpack around, unzipped the top, and laid her hand on the hilt of the knife inside. “He?”

“Your master.” Matthew smiled. The old blue eyes in that handsome young face were not kind. “The one I stole you from.”

“Stole me?” she repeated. She wanted to keep him talking as long as she could before she had to use the knife. “I don’t belong to anyone.”

“Well, he stole you first.” Matthew undid the buckle on his belt. “From the earth. He took the three of you, and you lived many long years with him. Then I stole you back.”

“The three of us—do you mean me and the other girls in those photos?” It still made no sense.

He undid a button of his shirt. Silver winked there again. “But he keeps tracking me down, before I can make you completely mine. Don’t you see? I brought you back up to this world, but he came after us. In the battle that followed, the three of you fled. So we continue to hunt you.”

He took a step toward her and she didn’t back up, hoping the light would fall upon the silver near his collar. He said, “Each time I come closer to total possession. If you just let me have you here and now, this endless dance around the maypole can stop.”

He undid another button. “I’d rather have you willing.” Another step closer. “But it’s not required.”

At last, she saw the silver thing on his shirt in full. The dusty light from the bedside lamp gleamed briefly on a long silver stickpin decorated with the form of a bird in flight.

Her heart stopped beating and a small, mournful sound came from her throat.

“What?” He followed her gaze to the pin on his shirt. “Oh, this? Yes.”

He lifted a hand to stroke the wings of the bird, then drew the fingers away fast, as if the touch burned. “I’m a thief, you know. After I hit her on the street, I couldn’t just go without taking something, even though it was silver. It reminded me of you.”

“Why?” Aderyn never cried, but her throat was almost too tight to speak. She never trembled, but her fingers on the knife hilt shook. “Why would you kill Mrs. Davis?”

“Because you mattered to her, of course.” He undid the remaining buttons on his shirt and let it slide down his arms to the floor. His torso was lean and supple with muscle. Several deep scars marked his chest. “If I can’t have you, I’ve got to be sure he doesn’t either, and your Mrs. Davis would have gone looking for you. She might have caused trouble.”

“He…” She shook her head to make herself think. “Who is
he
?”

“Arawn, of course.” He unbuttoned the top of his pants, stepping very near her now. “King of the Otherworld, master of the hounds of Annwn, he who lost the
Cad Goddeau
and his precious beasts to me.”

Arawn. The word and his descriptions stirred in her memory. It could only be nonsense, yet she knew somehow it was not. Next to the knife lay the books of myth and nursery rhymes Mrs. Davis had loaned her. Aderyn felt sure she had read the name Arawn in one of them.

“And who are you?” she asked, gripping the knife hilt.

“What have you got there?” he said, and moved like quicksilver, lashing toward the backpack. Her hold on the knife was tight, so she kept it as he jerked the pack away.

He looked down at her holding the long, sharp blade, his gaze a dismissal. “Is that your plan?”

He emptied her backpack onto the bed. Everything spilled out—the books, her precious iPod, sheet music, dream journal, spare change.

He pounced on the books. “We’re both in here. Do you remember yet? They even wrote a silly rhyme about us.”

He sat down on the bed, leafing rapidly through the book of nursery rhymes, unconcerned that she was standing there with a large knife. “Here it is. Everyone gets the name wrong:

“Taffy was a Welshman, Taffy was a thief,

Taffy came to my house and stole a piece of beef;

“Should be venison, but that doesn’t rhyme with ‘thief.’ They mean the roebuck, of course. I stole her first.”

And he continued:

“I went to Taffy’s house, Taffy was not home;

Taffy came to my house and stole a marrow-bone.

“Arawn used to give the hound a meaty marrowbone after a good day’s hunt, so I stole one for her the same time I stole her. Oh, but here you are, my dear girl.”

“I went to Taffy’s house, Taffy was not in;

Taffy came to my house and stole a silver pin;”

He closed his eyes, picturing something from long ago. “You were in a silver cage. Over the years, somehow that became a pin in the rhyme. Which is why I had to take your friend’s pin when I saw it, even though it burned my hand. Arawn thought the silver cage would deter me from taking you. He had no idea what I was willing to endure. For he loved you best. He hasn’t slept since I took you.”

He read on.

“I went to Taffy’s house, Taffy was in bed,

I took up the marrow-bone and flung it at his head.”

He slammed the book shut and gave her a wolfish smile. “That might work for the hound, but it won’t work for you.”

A bird, a roebuck (that was a kind of deer, wasn’t it?), and a hound. The book of Welsh myths held a vague tale about a hero stealing those same three prized possessions from the King of the Otherworld in order to start a war. The humans had won, ending the King’s rule over this world and banishing him forever to the Otherworld.

“But the name of the thief wasn’t Taffy,” she said aloud. “And it wasn’t Matthew.”

He shrugged, tossing the books back onto the bed. “They called me Amaethon then, one of the Children of Don, brother to Gwydion the magician, cleverest of thieves who stole the secrets of the King of the Otherworld.”

He stood up and paced away, then restlessly back again, as if the memory had bloodied an old wound. “I had to get him to fight a war with us somehow, didn’t I? I saw how your songs lulled him to sleep, how possessively he stroked the red ears of his best hound, how he delighted in hunting the great white stag. If I hadn’t taken what he loved, he never would have thought us worthy of battle. He never would have left his own world to array his forces against us. And he never would have lost. I won this world away from him! I saved humanity from enslavement and what thanks do I get? My own enslavement—to hunt the three of you over and over, dying only to be reborn to the chase again. It’s as if I never left the Otherworld. Do you remember how it was? No one dies or ages there, and you would have stayed forever singing mournful songs in that cage had I not stolen you back.”

Like a dragon in its cave, a memory stirred within her. Of a bright silver cage, of an angry man sent into peaceful slumber by her songs, of a blond head and blue eyes peering at her with a covetous smile. A flurry of movement in the dark, a dog’s bark, the hooves of a stag brushing through the grass.

“He kept us for so very long to serve him,” she said, unsure where that thought had come from. “You promised us freedom if we came with you.”

“You would have roused the guards if I hadn’t.” He ceased pacing and returned his gaze, still angry and affronted, back to her. “After Gwydion changed you all into girls, the only way to keep you out of Arawn’s hands forever is for a human man to taste you.” He reached for her. “As I will taste you now.”

She backed up toward the door and nearly tripped over the shirt he’d left on the floor, but righted herself just in time. “Where are the other two?” she asked. “The hound and the deer?”

He shrugged. “Helgi’s down in Lima, and Cara’s somewhere in Bengal. I’ll get them next. Your locations change every time. That and the fashions are the only things that do.”

Helgi and Cara,
she thought.
Lima and Bengal.
There were two others, like her yet not alike. Helgi and Cara. Lima and Bengal. “You are going to rape us.”

“Only if you say no. Don’t you see?” He opened his arms wide, as if making her the most generous offer in the world. “One time with me and you can never be his again. One time with me and this endless cycle of hunting and dying will end. I told you all as much that very first night, my sweet lapwing, hound, and deer. One time with me and then you will be free.”

He dropped his hands and shook his head. “Yet each hunt is like the first. Arawn finds us too soon.”

“We got away that first time.” She looked up and up at him. She was so small, and there was no silver cage between them. Another memory stirred. Of his hands fumbling with the catch on the cage, the skin burning and falling off his fingers from touching the silver. The scars on his chest… “He killed you with a silver sword.”

“Damn him,” Matthew said without heat. “We know each other’s weaknesses too well. He can’t stay in this world for long, lest he freeze. But each time he stays long enough to kill me. And so I am reborn. And so we hunt. He from the Otherworld, me from this, until we find you again.”

“We three are reborn, too,” she said, remembering Mrs. Davis’s words. “Over and over. Bad things cycle round and round.”

“This time it can be different,” he said brightly, and reached for her. “If you just let me have you…”

She stabbed him with the knife.

Or she tried. The blade slid right off him as if his skin was made of stone.

He tweaked it right out of her hand. “Silly bird,” he said. “Pretty lapwing, sing to me now.”

A fist slammed into the door from the outside, startling them both.

“Arawn!” Fury took Matthew. He threw the knife at the door. It thunked point first into the wood. “Always he comes too soon!”

“Always you talk too much,” she said. Under the soft sole of her boot, she felt something small and hard. A quick glance down showed her Mrs. Davis’s long silver pin.

Matthew’s blue eyes were glacier cold. “Always I must kill you.”

The door shuddered under another blow, then another, and another. Wood cracked, and the frame around the door split from the wall.

“Just let me go,” she said.

“Oh no,” said he. “For if he gets you first, then he gets me too. I’ll be singing next to you in that cage, or hunting with his hounds… or fleeing them, at his pleasure.” He eyed her neck and flexed his hands. “It won’t hurt. I’m quite good at snapping your neck by now. If you just stand still. You know you don’t want to live anyway…”

But she did. The driving need to live now flashed through her like lightning in a thunderstorm. Mrs. Davis’s death could not go un-avenged, and now she knew: there were two other girls out there, somewhere, lost like her.

She had thought there was no one. But there was, and had been, and would be. Maybe the warmth that kindled inside her earlier hadn’t been for nothing.

Another thunderous blow on the door shook the room. Then a fist splintered through the door, blood streaming from the knuckles.

Matthew grabbed for her, but she had already dropped to the floor. He fumbled with the air where she had been, then looked down to see her rip the silver stickpin from his abandoned shirt.

“Wait, no!” He tried to step back. But not fast enough, for she stabbed the pin into his foot. It slid easily through the leather of his boot and between the bones beneath.

He cried out in pain. His foot hissed and smoked. She ignored the flying bits of wood coming from the door behind her, yanked the pin out, and stood up.

His old blue eyes were wide with fear. “No, I’m supposed to kill you,” he said. “That’s how it’s always been.”

“Well, it’s like
this
now,” she said, and pierced his blue left eye with the pin. It sank deep, up to the outstretched wings of the bird in flight, and into his brain. Flesh sizzled. Blood and viscous jelly oozed out. She wrenched the pin out, and Matthew toppled to the floor.

The door blew inward. She turned to see a hulking figure in a long scarf and cape-like coat looming there. His long dark hair was wild around his face, his gray eyes alight with fury. She knew him now.

“Your Majesty,” she said.

He halted in mid-stride, for what he saw made him pause. He took in the form of the golden-haired young man lying motionless on the floor, the left side of his head a mass of burning crimson gore, and did not know what to make of it.

“Hir yw’r dydd a hir yw’r nos, a hir yw aros Arawn,”
he said.

She understood what she heard, for he had said it countless times before.
Long is the day and long is the night, and long is the waiting of Arawn.

“You will wait no longer,” she said. “For this time I have killed him. Instead of, you know, the other way around.”

His eyes ran over her, realizing, and though they were gray, they held the same covetous look she had seen in Matthew’s face. “At last. I will take you back to my world, out of this cold. Six thousand years it is since I slept, since I last heard you sing. Now you will be my sweet songbird forever.”

“No,” she said. “I will sing to you only once more.”

“Wait!” His face grew pale. “Not yet, not here…” He strode toward her, hand outstretched to cover her mouth.

But she had already begun to sing the words of the old lullaby he had taught her long ago.

“Holl amrantau’r sêr ddywedant

Ar hyd y nos.”

The furious gray eyes fluttered. He halted mere inches away. “Six thousand years since…” he said, trailing off as her voice hushed low, soft, drowsy, irresistible, whether in Welsh or English.