We Will All Go Down Together (35 page)

(Now, however, Mac had to wonder: had he met that nun again since, in his short-lived capacity as liaison to the Order? Mother Eulalia, before she’d lost her eye? One of Blandina’s trainers?)

Blood will ever out
, as Lady Glauce liked to say. And as an adult, whenever he looked in a mirror, it was always the Wizard who looked back at him, making a mockery of collar and cassock alike. A Roke warlock face set with the Druirs’ Fae gaze, blue-shimmering opaque, all the way down to the bottom.

Each night before bed, Miliner would tell Mac the story of the Five-Family Coven in installments, a series of literal fairy tales. How
once upon a time, there was a girl who came from nowhere, from nothing . . . none knew her people, not even she herself. And though she was beautiful, she was different as well, which made some take fright by her; the small-minded, the fools. But Scotland was full of many such at the time, a fearful place indeed. A place of great burning.

Here she would pause a moment, looking Army’s way for reassurance. Then continue, cheered on by his loving grin—

Yet she married a laird in the end, too great to care that she was anything but the woman he loved, and to him she brought her dowry, a stane of power the like of which had never been seen before or since. So with both of them protected from ill-wishers at last—she with his name and gold, he with her luck—there was a family. . . .

Like ours, Mommy?

Aye, my lad. Exactly like.

Mac couldn’t even begin to think how it must have been for her, in hindsight—youngest of Lady Glauce’s brood, a mere toddler when she’d seen the Three Betrayed burn. She’d made the sickening headlong magical leap from Dourvale, Scotland to Dourvale, Ontario, 1593 to 1904, along with her mother, her father, Enzemblance, and Minion—the eldest, least-seen of all surviving Druir children, who few ever glimpsed outside of the
brugh
, and no unwary trespasser ever heard coming.

Why even pretend you could make a life for yourself here, outside the
brugh
’s walls, let alone for me?
he’d wanted to ask Miliner, sometimes. But Army
could
talk his way into (or out of) almost anything, after all—and having been to Dourvale himself once or twice in the intervening years, Mac also understood there was only so long a girl of any sort could be expected to squat in the dark, eating bugs and making dresses out of leaves, before a desperate urge to escape into that bright, strange world seen only in teasing, two-hour slices down at the Overdeere Old Highway Drive-In might take hold. . . .

Unless you were like Saracen, that is—Enzemblance’s chick, knowing nothing else and not much
wanting
to know, either.
Born and BRED in a briar patch, coz Fox.

It had never occurred to Mac to wonder what his cozy little corner of the whole Roke-Druir-Sidderstane mess might be running
from
, though looking back now, he could guess: the entire natural world, to which they all—himself very much included—constituted a living affront. Miliner’s presence anywhere outside Dourvale couldn’t fail to be seen as a potential incursion, infectiously impinging on reality’s agreed-upon structure. So they were forced to live as though the world itself might be their enemy, for the simple reason that it probably
was
—everything and anything.

Mac was five, for example, the first time a tree spoke to him. It was late summer or early fall, blackberry season; they’d stopped for water and a pee break, somewhere near Come-by-Chance, and he’d wandered away into the brush with his sandbox bucket, looking for a free lunch.

But as he paused to rummage through the bushes, he’d heard a weary, sighing voice from somewhere nearby, which said: “Aaah, little lord, I did not think to see
you
here. You honour an old woman with your presence. Come close, now; come yet closer. Be not afraid. I only wish to do you fealty. . . .”

Of course, he looked around. Of course, he saw nothing. Until—

Three thorn-trees, growing promiscuously together in an acutely angled clump, their lower branches hung with weather-stripped colourless ribbons and knots of rag. And a brass bell tied someplace higher, tinkling with the wind, in one of them—whitethorn? Blackthorn? Mac was still crap at identifying phylae, but he thought the blackthorn, its triple trunk forked like a mutant serpent’s tongue, roots twisting ropily to pinion its neighbours’. Seeing how
that
was the one which creaked as it bent to meet him, a sort of membrane nictitating across one of his eyes bringing it abruptly even closer, a dim face forming fuzzily where its branches rubbed against each other, their thorns a million pixel-points of varying greyish darkness.

Wheedling, as it did: “Mmm, do not deny me, precious boy. I know full well whose fruit you be. Your blood is powerful yet, though mine is almost extinct. Let me but touch your hand, only once, and take some faint share in it. . . .”

“Ye will do no such thing, dryad,” came his mother’s voice, cold and commanding in a way Mac had never heard before, from behind them. “Bark-bound trickster! Dinna think tae lay a single finger upon
my
child and live!”

As Mac froze, Miliner swooped in, grabbed him up and stepped back, throwing her hand out towards the tree—all six fingers hooked upwards, like claws. The blackthorn rippled away from her gesture, stop-motion fast; the “face” contorted, baring jagged, broken-twig teeth. “I meant only to bless him, lady,” it insisted.

Miliner snorted at that, head held high—but Mac, clutched to her chest, could hear her heart thump and skid beneath her open sheepskin vest. “Oh, aye? Do ye but try, I’ll find where yuir roots meet and burn them to their last length.”

The tree exhaled, a cruelly curt gust, almost a huffing laugh. “You think yourself very high and mighty, Druir of Roke, for one so far from home,” it told her. “But we both know the truth. You have strayed over-far from your own holdings for any true sense of safety; you are not welcome here, or anywhere else. Run now, and keep on running, little lady.”

Miliner turned her back instead, deliberately, and walked, while the tree laughed on.

And later, when they thought he was asleep, Mac listened as she and Army discussed the afternoon’s events in careful murmurs—Miliner first, her voice thinned near to breaking—“He has it, Army—the taint. Mine and yuirs too, of that I’m almost certain. . . .”

“The sight, you mean? ’Course he does, gal—sight, maybe glamer, maybe even an inclination to hexation, in his time. Wouldn’t make much sense otherwise, would it?”

Mac cracked his lids just a bit, enough to see Miliner’s red-tinged silhouette look away, eyes downcast. “. . . I’d just hoped he might be . . . spared,” she said, finally. “The curse of it . . . my mother’s legacy, Euwphaim Glouwer’s ill-workings. . . .”

Army shrugged. “Ah, now, gal: No point to that. ’Cause—”

(
—that’s even less likely. Isn’t it?
)

As it turned out, that whole conversation marked the beginning of the end, not that Mac had known it, then. Not that he ever could have been expected to.

Some string of evenings after, with Mac lying on the backseat reading a
Son of Satan
comic book, watching the green shadows of leaves chase each other across the roof’s quilted underside while his parents teased each other in front, bantering back and forth, their voices blending so that they half-talked, half-sang along with the car radio . . . 

Oh, do ye turn this one up, Army. Reminds me of home.

And then Neil Young’s ghost-whine voice, stripped of everything but purest yearning.

Singing:
There is a town in North Ontario. . . .

The collision, a cube van coming at them head-on, killed Miliner and Army, immediately—a sick joke of a death, which made their wedding vows literal by compacting them into the one flesh they’d eagerly pledged themselves to remain, so long as they both should live. Mac was thrown free, landing creepily well; exploded from the back window as the car up-ended and rolled off the bumper in a breakaway spray of glass to hit the ground softly, fall muffled by a “fortunate” combination of shrubbery, grass, and compost.

He lost time, along with everything else. And when he came to, he was already in hospital, already an orphan. Already alone, as he would be for the rest of his too-long life; unwounded, yet hurt to the very core and aching in every last remaining part of him, both inside and out.

. . . helpless, helpless, heh-ehlp-less . . . 

It was after that he began to see things directly, instead of just out the corners of his eyes. Vaguely, he recalled a huge hand cupping his head while he slept, ridiculously long fingers spanning his face, gently; the cold softness of fingertips smoothing some sort of ointment over his eyes—weird, musty, apple-smelling. Preparing the way for him to meet his new family.

It was the sort of baptism Lady Glauce no doubt had expected his mother to have already given him, the ability to see through others’ glamer, to plumb the ugly truth beneath the pretty lie: sort foul from fair; leaves from gold; a dark, cold, earthen-walled hole full of mulch from the welcome illusion of light and warmth and safety. To know what
was
from what was not, little as that might ever get him, in the end.

But sometimes, Mac thought, the lie itself could seem better than the truth, in context; easier, anyhow. Easier to tell. Easier to take.

Two days of saline and sympathy later, his clock still turned around by years of nocturnal living, he’d been lying awake, staring at the static-laced television set in the corner of his room, when he’d thought he heard something under his bed, knelt to look—and saw Enzemblance staring back at him for the very first time, grinning, from the shadow-space between blanket-tail and floor.

Which was bad enough, but only compounded when, even as Mac fell ass-backwards and scuttled as far away as the wall would allow, the closet suddenly opened to disgorge Lady Glauce herself: eight feet tall and perfectly proportioned, so beautiful (she being in the Maiden phase of her hag-dom, that night) it hurt to look at her directly, a mantilla of fresh leaves growing straight from her frost-white hair to shade her wintry silver gaze with chlorophyll-green.

Bending down to greet him much like the blackthorn tree had, in sections; folding herself to his level, skirts spreading about her with a scrapey, peeled birch-bark rustle.

And saying, as she did, with a terrible gentleness:
I am thy grandam, Maccabee; this thy aunt, thy mother’s sister. Th’art in my charge now—I’ll see thee safe and look’d tae for my daughter’s sake, as well as the compact between us Druirs and yuir father’s kin. For we be of ane blood, thee and I. . . .

One blood, yes. And blood will ever out.

Enzemblance joined her mother, humping herself up from under the bed in a single boneless strike; shorter, but not by much. Her face, sly and oblique under a fall of dull red hair, seemed far less distinct in light than it had in shadow—blurred even when viewed straight-on, a barely featured lacuna.

I mark ye also, nephew,
she whispered.
My ane lad’s in sore need of cousins; we shall all be guid friends, since my mother wills it. And by yuir father’s measure I’ve nae doubt but ye’ll grow a guidly man too, in time.

(
What is’t ye dream of?
)

Even considering how few he’d received since, it really did remain the only compliment Mac wished he’d never gotten.

That first night, that first meeting, had changed everything. That first hideous surge of fear, immediately giving way to an almost-as-bad rush of revulsion and kinship admixed—a voice in his head, stammering, in quick succession—

You . . . 

What are you?

I am not like you. But . . . 

 . . . no, I
am
.

(
Oh God. What am I?
)

From hospital to foster care, a scholarship to a high school run by Franciscan Brothers, four years of university (Education minor, Religious Studies major), eight years of seminary studies, and then ordination straight into the priesthood, after that—and in all that time, the only thing he’d ever found powerful enough to make them
leave him alone
was when he’d actually taken his vows, lain face-down on the floor in front of the cross in a freezing-cold cathedral for hours, before eventually rising back up again as a dues-paid member in the Society of Jesus. When he’d sworn himself away to a power he frankly still wasn’t certain actually existed, in order to escape powers he knew damn well did.

Yes, the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost had been pretty good to him all this time, all things considered; God’s love
was
infinite and unconditional, if the PR material was to be believed. But Mac knew the feeling had never really been reciprocated, and that nothing good could be built on a lie—not even a comforting one.

And now, the further he went from the Church’s diffident protection, the more the world around him seemed to pick up his scent again, afresh. To know him for the well-intentioned mistake he was, and turn against him.

Anything and everything. A redcap on the corner, jaw hinged to the ears like a muppet’s; an ogre out for a walk, ill-fitting human-suit askew in ways only another variety of Fae would twig to. The dying city trees whispering behind him, spitting cross-species curses whenever he passed them by.

Sr. Blandina, spotting him at a distance only to immediately turn the other way, all righteous—and then Enzemblance, moving widdershins under plaster in the opposite direction, just a faint reddish circling hint. A shark, half-masked by chum.

Yet for all he came from monsters, had lived amongst them, he couldn’t ever quite bear to think he might
be
one. Even Saracen and the others didn’t seem like
monsters
to him, exactly—not in the same way as a soucouyant, say, or a penanggalan. Not even Lady Glauce, the most alien creature with whom he’d personally sat down to dinner—a true changeling, imprinted on humanity like an adopted swan, yet kin to things so absolutely, immutably
other,
a mongrel like him’d never be able to approach them, except from a very careful distance.