Deep magic second coll.., p.16
Deep Magic - Second Collection, page 16
part #2 of Deep Magic Collection Series
A bit of surprise flashes in his black eyes as he latches on. I’d coated my sleeves and pants with Tabasco sauce. Useful for keeping pups from chewing things. In this case, not so smart as the burn makes Tawny angrier. The pressure increases in my forearm and I’m convinced my bone’s about to snap in two when the brute is knocked off.
Logan and Tawny roll together. And the fight’s no longer silent as they growl and snarl. I worry about Logan’s shoulder as I dive for the tranquilizer gun. Lily showed me how to wrap up his leg to support his weight, but it’s not much.
I’m outta darts. With Logan injured, the fight isn't fair. Most things aren’t. And I guess that’s the only way Tawny can win.
I spot a glint just when Tawny pins Logan. Sweeping up the knife, I lunge toward Tawny and bury the blade in his hindquarters. Up to the hilt.
He yelps and bucks. Logan presses his advantage and regains his feet. In a blur, Logan strikes and silences Tawny. Logan’s muzzle is dripping with blood. I meet his gaze and can tell by his expression that he’s sickened and sad. He’s not a killer, but Tawny forced him to be one. Why couldn’t he just leave Logan alone?
I’d asked my foster father the same thing. He said I was too irresistible so I ran away when I turned sixteen, removing the temptation. I’d thought I was smart, but no one knows about his inability to resist. It’s been two years. What if he has a new foster child? Staring at Tawny’s ripped throat, I realize a person has to stay and fight until there’s a clear winner and loser or else your problems don’t ever go away.
The burning pain in my arm snaps me back to my current problems. I inspect the damage. Ragged, bleeding flesh too mangled for eighty-proof and Band Aids, but I don’t have another option. Once Logan’s cleaned up—his stitches have ripped again—and hidden under the blanket, I hurry to the Humane Shelter.
Lily’s working late and I suspect she’s there for me. She sends a couple volunteers to pick up the sleeping Wolfhounds. I return the tranquilizer gun.
“A pack of wild dogs that are all the same breed is so unusual,” she says. “Usually they’re a bunch of mongrels.” She slaps her hand over her mouth. “I didn’t mean—”
I smile. “I know. Nothing wrong with mongrels.”
Lily sees my arm and insists I go to the emergency room. I almost laugh. Invisible on the streets, I’m nonexistent in an ER. No money. No insurance. They’d fix a cockroach’s broken leg before attending to me. I lie and say I’ll go, but she sees right through me. Despite my protests, she escorts me to the ER and stays until I’m seen. The ER doctor gives me thirty-two stitches. Funny how the number of stitches is always reported like it’s a source of pride.
* * *
By the next day, my life returns to; well, not normal, but back to the same—taking care of the pups. Logan is healing faster than me and eating like a horse. I feed him my share most days. Don’t matter to me, my stomach’s upset anyways. Tomorrow—one week after I found Logan—I’m gonna tell the authorities about my foster father.
I’d rather face a pack of wild dogs, but I’m determined to grab the man by the throat and not let go, finally doing what I should have done two years ago.
* * *
Five days later, Logan takes off and doesn’t return. The hurt cuts deep and reminds me of how I’d felt moving from one foster home to another. Crazy lady that I am, I’d been talking to him about the police and the lawyers and the questions. No one is quick to believe me, and I don’t have much proof so it’s been rougher than I thought. Somehow telling my problems to Logan made the whole ordeal bearable.
But he’s gone, and my resolve to go after my foster father wavers. But there is also a tiny bit of relief inside me. Keeping the Wolfhound fed was hard. And with one of life’s little twists of fate and timing, I find the missing black lab after Logan left. Lily handles the reward money. Without Logan to feed, there’s plenty of money to keep my pups in Science Diet.
Three—maybe four weeks after the night I helped Logan, a stranger enters the parking lot. Wearing blue jeans and a leather motorcycle jacket, he doesn’t hesitate, heading right for my bridge. His black hair hangs in layers to his shoulders, and his stride is familiar.
I’m searching my memories to place him when my pups race toward him. Good. Except they don’t bite him. They dance around, tails wagging and yipping in excitement. He crouches down and pets them! I grab my bat.
He glances up as I swing and dodges the bat with ease. Strike one. I pull back for another.
“Mongrel, stop,” he says. “It’s me.”
I freeze and study him. He’s a few years older than I am, about six feet tall and lean. Good looking enough to attract the girls. His gray eyes don’t belong in the face of a man though.
He opens his jacket, and pulls his collar down, showing me an almost healed scar on his right shoulder. “Fifteen stitches.”
I lower the bat. “Logan.”
“Yep.”
He moves closer and I back up. Logan pauses. “You weren’t afraid of five werewolves, but you’re scared of me?”
Werewolves. Saying the word out loud made it real. Before I could explain them away as really smart mixed breeds.
“Guess I’m better at trusting...werewolves than men,” I say.
“One man dooms the whole species?”
“What about the guy...wolf after you?”
“He wanted to be in charge.”
“And that’s my point. Dogs...or wolves’ll fight it out. One dominates and the other slinks away. The human side of him tried to cheat. Right?”
Logan says nothing.
“He used a knife and then returned with a gun. Very un-wolf like behavior.”
“Let me prove to you we’re not all bad.”
“Why?”
“You saved my life three times.”
I tap the bat against my leg. “So buy me a couple bags of Science Diet and we’ll call it even.”
“No. I owe you much more than that.”
He’s serious and I suspect stubborn as well. “Go away, Logan. You don’t belong here,” I say.
“Neither do you.”
I huff and squash the sudden desire to take another swing at his head. He thinks my silence is an agreement ‘cause he’s now standing a foot away. And my heart’s acting like it’s scared. I expect him to crinkle his nose at the smell of dog on my clothes or for him to try to hide his disgust at my unkempt appearance.
Instead he takes my hand in his and pushes my right sleeve up with his other one, exposing the jagged purple scars on my wrist and forearm. I didn’t heal as fast nor as well as he did. Logan traces them with a finger.
A strange teeter totter of emotions fills me. My first impulse is to flinch away from his touch, but his familiar scent triggers fond memories of the big Wolfhound I cared for.
Logan taps his thumb on my arm. “You’ve been bitten by a werewolf deep enough for his saliva to mix with your blood.”
“So?”
He quirks a smile. “You accepted our existence with ease, yet you don’t know the legends.”
I gesture to his shoulder. “I believe what I see.”
“You’ve been infected, but one bite isn’t enough to change you into a werewolf.” All humor is gone as he stares at me with a sharp intensity. “For you to become one of us, a bite from two different werewolves within a month is required.”
He turns my arm over, revealing the light underside. His canines elongate. “I’ve never offered this to anyone, and it’s a hell of a way to repay your kindness, but it seemed...right. Interested?”
My mind races. He’s giving me a choice. “What about my pups?”
Another smile. “Only you would think of them first. They can stay with you.”
“Here?”
“No. My pack has a network of places. We try and keep a low profile, but we’ll support you in going after your foster father.”
“Why?”
“Because you’ll be part of mine and I protect mine.”
I grin at the familiar words.
Logan adds, “It’s not an easy life, and there is no cure. No going back. We don’t belong to the human world or the wolf world.”
“So you’re a bunch of mongrels?”
“Yep.”
“Then I’ll fit right in.” I raise my arm to his mouth, and he sinks his teeth into my flesh.
MARIA V. SNYDER
Meteorologist turned novelist, Maria’s been writing fantasy and science fiction stories since she was bored at work and needed something creative to do (shhh…don’t tell!). Fifteen novels and numerous short stories later, Maria's learned a thing or three about writing. She’s been on the New York Times bestseller list, won a half-dozen awards, and has earned her Masters of Arts degree in Writing from Seton Hill University where she's been happily teaching and mentoring students in the MFA program.
Website: www.mariavsnyder.com
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Email: maria@mariavsnyder.com
THE MOST REASONABLE HOUSE IN FAERIE
By Dafydd McKimm | 7,000 words
“TOBIAS,” MY DEAR friend Loosestrife said to me one afternoon as I perched on his drawing-room mantelpiece contentedly smoking my pipe. “I have, of late, as you well know, gone up in the world. My investments are yielding excellent returns, the cloud-mining venture alone has brought me enough wealth to build this magnificent stately brugh, and my trousers have never been finer—look you here at these new breeches that I purchased only yesterday at Honeysuckle and Garlic’s.” I peered over the bowl of my pipe to appraise them. “Do you remember that particularly clear evening back in June? Well sir, these breeches are sewn with the starlight from that very night! Mr. Honeysuckle assures me that they are the finest he has ever made, and therefore, it follows that they must be the finest that you—or indeed anyone—has ever seen.”
I do not, as a rule, encourage Loosestrife with too many compliments—he is quite self-assured enough as it is. But I did have to admit that they were indeed a magnificent pair of trousers.
“I have a brugh to rival anything within a thousand leagues (even Baron Vetchling’s Citadel of Midnight pales in comparison to my abode), fine clothes, and even a friend who rides my coattails—everything a man of station is meant to have.”
I balked a little at the last remark, but my face was sufficiently obscured by my pipe, allowing Loosestrife to continue unhindered.
“The one thing I lack,” he said, assuming a pose that accentuated his trousers to their fullest glory, “the one thing that will secure my position for good, is a servant—a human servant!”
My response to this particular remark was far less easy to obscure and resulted in the spilling of hot tobacco (in no trivial amount) onto my second-best smoking jacket.
“Why, my dear Loosestrife!” I cried, hastily brushing the tobacco away. “The last human servant in Faerie died a decade ago, and you know as well as I do that the paths between their world and ours have been sealed since the debacle at Cottingley.”
“Then how, if I do not have a human servant, am I to show myself of equal station with all the barons, earls, marquesses, viscounts, and dukes of Faerie, when even a lowly squire was expected to have at the very least a basic serving staff of changelings?”
“Times change, dear friend,” I said, giving my pipe a philosophical series of puffs. “I’d put it out of mind if I were you.”
But my friend would not—indeed, could not—put it out of mind. He thought about the problem night and day. He dreamed of it when he should have been dreaming of more genial things—dawnlight-trimmed jerkins or suits of the finest gossamer or obtaining a more articulate horse, to name a few. He pondered over the problem at breakfast, leaving his honeycomb all but untouched; he hardly danced at all at parties, preferring to mope pensively in corners; and he was constantly distracted at the gaming table, a state of mind that caused him and his unlucky partner (yours truly) to lose a not insubstantial sum (as well as nearly several limbs) to some very unforgiving gentlemen of the trollish persuasion.
One day, however, when I was again installed on his drawing-room mantelpiece and enjoying immensely the pleasures of my pipe, Loosestrife exclaimed “Ah-ha! I have it!” so loudly that I almost set myself ablaze.
“What do you have, sir,” I shouted, “that has almost burned me to a cinder!”
“The answer to my servant problem!” he cried.
I listened as intently as a man who has twice only narrowly escaped ruining his second-best smoking jacket could, before replying that, though I was sure the plan would have some amusing results, I thought it follysome and best left unrealised. Loosestrife replied that my lack of encouragement was making his ears ring, and I should either desist or find another house in which to smoke my pipe.
* * *
“This,” Loosestrife explained to me, several days later while pointing to an illustration in an ungainly, leather-bound tome that he had bought at some cost from the septennial market at Fool’s Errand, “is what the anatomists call the osseus. I believe I have made a fair representation of it out of these twigs and branches, do you not think?”
“Indeed,” I replied, “though the artist seems to have omitted this nest of song thrushes in his representation.”
Loosestrife waved my objection away. “Details, Tobias. Mere details.”
“And for the head I see you have procured one of Widow Darkrain’s turnips.”
“Not just any turnip, my friend. This turnip has won first prize at the Lammas fair three hundred years in a row. It cost me a pretty penny, I can tell you. And as you can see, I have carved all the requisite holes for the various sensory organs.”
“And what about the musculi, and the arteriae?” I asked, flipping now myself through the book.
“A good question, my dear Tobias,” he said. “For the musculi, I have these mice, freshly collected from the pantry, and for the arteriae, I have used a mixture of ivy from the front of the brugh, while for the finer vessels, these bulrushes from the stream at the bottom of the garden.”
“And the skin . . . the corium?”
“Offa’s Dyke! I had not thought of it. What does human skin look like?”
“Well, it is all wrinkled and grey, like an old pear, or a walnut,” I answered. “Or so I remember being the case when last I saw a changeling servant at one of Tom Thistletop’s solstice soirees.”
Loosestrife raised the more hirsute of his eyebrows. “Very well,” I said, unable to suffer such bushy disbelief, “or so I have been told by people who attended Tom Thistletop’s soirees. In any case, I’ve been told their skin has a distinct droopiness about it and is mottled and veined like a well-aged cheese.”
“Cheese, you say?” Loosestrife now raised the lesser of his eyebrows, which, joining its brother high on my friend’s brow, transformed his expression to one of glee. “Now that is fortunate, as I just so happen to have a wheel of Old Cob Deadnettle’s cheese maturing in the dairy (from the time he insisted on going everywhere as a goat, remember?)”
He hurried off and in a moment came back with a great wheel of pungent blue cheese.
“Poof!” I cried, wondering what Old Cob Deadnettle must have been eating during his time as a goat. “Yes, that’s the type of thing.”
Several minutes and much smeared cheese later, we surveyed the creature. “A fine specimen!” said Loosestrife, wiping the cheese from his hands.
“But it is completely immobile, my dear Loosestrife,” I observed. “It lies there like a dead toad! How is it to perform its duties in this state?”
“You are right, Tobias,” he replied. “We must animate it with what humans call a soul! An anima! How shall we do it, do you think?”
“Does this book of anatomy not mention where one can find a soul?”
“No, it is all joints and vertebrae and cartilages—it makes no mention of souls. Indeed it is quite dull and, if I may say, painfully lacking in anything ineffable.”
It was now my turn to have a moment of enlightenment. “My dear Loosestrife,” I cried, “I think I have it. Humans are known for prizing reason above all things, are they not?” He nodded most vehemently. “Then let us imbue this creature with reason!”
“Well said, my friend! But where to get this reason that the humans possess in droves? I see very little of it around here. Indeed it strikes me that in Faerie it is practically nonexistent!”
“I have the answer to that too.”
“You do?”
“Yes, indeed! Books!”
“Books?”
“Books are where humans get their reason—all their strange ideas and punctilious sciences, their anatomy and philosophy, and empirical geography—books!”
“But where shall we find such books? No respectable Faerie would have such drivel in his library. Why, my library practically overflows with grimoires, gramaryes, and cantripædiæ. But the books you speak of? Not one, sir!”
I pondered for a moment, taking several puffs of my pipe. Eventually I said:
“The fairer sex are known to dally in reasonable things, are they not? I know a lady who delights in all things reason and logic. Quite a splendid creature, though she does tend to be a little too levelheaded at times.”
“Her name?”
“Miss Marjory Greenteeth who lives over the hill at Wit’s End. She, I know, has a large collection of thoroughly pragmatic books.”
“Then let us visit her at once!” my friend exclaimed. “There is not a moment to lose!”
* * *
Marjory Greenteeth lived in a large, once-grand château of moss-covered stone at the rear of a windswept estate overgrown with thin, dreary hawthorn trees.
