Stranger Magics Read online

  “The half-fae heir,” I protested. “That counts for something, right?”

  “Yes, but all things considered . . .”

  “Paul.” The priest had a point, but it was a point that hurt coming from him. As far as I knew, he was the one person in the mortal realm who was aware of the whole truth about me, yet still considered me a friend.

  A roar of air heralded the opening of his freezer, followed by the clink of ice on glass. “I thought I’d start with broad strokes, then get to the nitty-gritty if he can hack it. Try not to overwhelm him, you know?”

  “I suppose this is all slightly overwhelming,” I muttered.

  “By now, I would imagine that you’ve dealt with enough mundanes to know the answer to that,” he replied. “Now, I’ve been working from the assumption that you’re not getting out of this game anytime soon, but have I been hasty?”

  I snorted. “No. What else am I going to do? Take up golf?”

  “Well, personally, I’ve given some thought to requesting a transfer to a place that doesn’t get blizzards—”

  “Not Arizona again,” I interrupted as my stomach clenched with sudden unease.

  “Not Arizona,” he assured me. “And anyway, by that point, it’ll be you and Joseph. Maybe you two can start fresh somewhere more exciting.”

  The idea of a move, though an unavoidable eventuality, always left me a little depressed. I’d been following priests across the country for nearly two centuries, and seaside Rigby wasn’t the worst place I’d landed, not by a long shot. There were always new and distant backwaters where a priest on the outs with his superiors might wind up, and since the ones who worked with me leaned toward the rogue end of the spectrum, I’d seen my share of charming one-horse towns. But more important, the transfers prevented me from giving in to the temptation to put down roots.

  I couldn’t stay anywhere permanently due to one tiny complication: mortals age and die. Even if I glamoured myself to look older than my natural mid-twenties appearance, I’d have to fake my death eventually if I stayed in one place long enough. So, sooner or later, I always started over. Getting the timing right just meant less paperwork.

  “I’ll put in a list of transfer suggestions with the bishop,” I joked.

  “Good luck with that.” Paul’s chair creaked as he returned to his desk. “You said the culprit tonight was one of Oberon’s, yes?”

  “Yeah.” My liquor level was getting low again, and I topped up my glass. “Benatin likes pushing buttons. Mortals are amusing.”

  “Sounds about par for the course. Uh . . .” He paused, and I waited in silence while he collected his thoughts. “Listen, Colin, before I bring the boy in on this, there’s something that’s been worrying me for a while.”

  I sipped again, watching the amber liquid slosh in the glass and feeling slightly ashamed of myself for drinking decent scotch like it was nothing more than soda. “What’s on your mind?”

  “Well, to be blunt, when’s Oberon going to tell you to knock it off, and how forceful is he going to be when he delivers the message?”

  “He’s not going to get involved. His court’s been in this realm since the eighteenth century. If he were going to do something about me, he would have done so at the start.” With a final slurp, I finished my drink and sent the leavings into the ether. “I’ve put the two of them in a tough position. Oberon can’t come after me directly because that would be stepping on Mother’s toes. Regardless of her feelings toward me, an attack on one of her own would be an attack on her. He’s not about to start that fight. You can tell Joey not to lose any sleep over that possibility.”

  “All right. In that case, when is she going to tell you to cease and desist?”

  I smiled to myself in the dark apartment. “We haven’t spoken in seven hundred years—why ruin a good thing?”

  “That’s not a real answer.”

  “Then let me put your mind at ease. Mother hasn’t left Faerie in ages, and she’s not going anywhere now that she rules it alone. She won’t risk giving Oberon a chance to sidle back home. Besides, she has her own ways of making my life miserable,” I said, closing my eyes as the liquor did its job. “You’ve seen that.”

  Paul hesitated. “You haven’t had to mercy-kill anyone in a few years.”

  “Maybe not, but she’ll send someone my way again soon enough. I’m sure she knows where I am—she’ll rectify the oversight, trust me. So, no, she’s not going to stop me from helping you. I think she has more fun making me suffer than she would in killing me outright.”

  “Mm. And if my seminarian asks me whether he’s going to be murdered in his sleep by one of the Three?”

  “Occupational hazard, but unlikely.”

  “Then I suppose I’ll take what I can get,” he said with a sigh. “And you, get some rest. Go to bed. There’s no sense in passing out on the couch again.”

  My smile returned for a moment. “Have you been hiding cameras in here, Paul?”

  “Don’t need them. I know you too well, old boy.”

  We said our brief good nights, and I dropped the handset onto the coffee table as I peeled myself off the couch and headed for my bedroom. Surely, I thought, I’d had enough to drink that night to keep the worst of the dreams at bay. But as I lay there, staring at the ceiling and listening to the feral cats yowl in the alley, I couldn’t seem to turn my mind off.

  I remembered my first meeting alone with Paul when he was still wet behind the ears, a seminarian with a conspiracy theorist’s thirst for hidden knowledge and a pocketknife up his sleeve, just in case. He’d been nervous sitting in my study, and he’d drunk the bourbon I offered him like it was apple juice. I’d told him the full truth of the courts that night. How the Three had partitioned their followers and Faerie eons ago to stop their endless war for power. How Mab had then risen against the others, lost, and been exiled a millennium before Paul was born, cast out with her court. How Oberon and Titania had split the spoils until Oberon—whether from spite or ennui, I couldn’t say—took his court on forced walkabout in the mortal realm, leading to the bulk of my clients’ faerie problems.

  “There are forces in this universe beyond my ken,” I’d told Paul, “but nine times out of ten, if you’re called to cleanse a house or stop a haunting, it’s nothing but a faerie making a nuisance of himself.”

  “But why?” he’d pressed. “What’s the point?”

  I could only shrug. “Entertainment. You’re fun because you’re incomprehensible. Faeries are amoral—they recognize power, and they’ll act when their pride is on the line because suffering insults makes them look weaker. You, now, you act out of altruism, duty, love. They can’t understand your motivations, so you’re interesting. And when you prove inscrutable, they can always provoke you to blind terror and have a good laugh.”

  Unsettled, Paul had knocked back his drink in one burning shot, and I’d poured again while he coughed and caught his breath. “So, what are you gaining, then?” he’d managed to choke out. “You keep saying they and you—where do you fall in all of this?”

  “I’m half fae. We get the perks—magic, immortality, youth—but with mortal sensibilities like guilt thrown in. Makes us unpopular over there because we’re killjoys. I’m not the first to flee the asylum, if you follow.”

  “So . . . there are others like you? Here?”

  “Some, but not many. The fae population is low to begin with, and the half fae don’t always last that long. We don’t play well at court politics.” I smirked. “Plus, think about the ones born in this realm. What do you do if the furniture flies around every time your child throws a tantrum? Call a priest? Worse?”

  Paul had grimaced and raised his tumbler. “I get the picture.”

  “You’re beginning to. Listen closely.” I’d leaned toward him, and Paul, emboldened by the bourbon, met me in the middle. “Forget everything you think you know about us. Most of it is wrong, if not dangerously wrong. I’ll do my best to protect you, but you’ll have to trus
t me.”

  He’d nodded. “So, hypothetically speaking, the odds of my being kidnapped into Faerie and returned in a hundred years’ time are what, exactly?”

  “Low.”

  “Low?” His voice had cracked as he’d leaned back into his chair. “It’s possible?”

  I’d held out my hand and willed a blue fireball into being in my palm. “You’re dealing with magic, boy. Almost everything is possible. Focus on probability.” The flame vanished as quickly as it had appeared, and I’d looked into his wide, worried eyes. “Yes, changelings are still taken. Not as often these days, so you’re probably safe. And if you were to be taken and kept for a hundred years, you wouldn’t want to leave.”

  “I’d like the place that much?”

  “No. Coming home would be suicide. There’s enough magic in Faerie to keep mortals from aging past a certain point, but once you’re dropped on this side of the border again, the years you’ve postponed hit you at once. Take a two-hundred-year-old changeling and push him through a gate, and he’ll be dust before he hits the ground. I’ve seen it happen,” I’d told him, refilling my glass. “A group of faeries having fun with their longtime servants. They made a dinner party out of the affair.”

  “My God,” he’d whispered.

  “It was horrifying,” I said grimly. “So, this is what I do, in a nutshell: I try to protect people like you from people like me. Are you in?”

  And Paul, scared and slightly drunk as he had been, had nodded.

  I hadn’t told him everything that night, of course. I’d neglected to mention that I had by then become Mother’s eldest living child, her heir, and quite probably a target. I could have discussed with him the third realm, the Gray Lands, where even I feared to tread. And I could have told him the real reason why I’d left Faerie, and why I was in no rush to see Mother again. Paul had a right to know who and what he was trusting with his life. But he was barely twenty-four, and I’ve done so much more than I care to remember.

  Still, as I stepped outside into the fog to get my newspaper the morning after my visit to Harrow, the only thing on my mind was the coffee percolating back on the kitchen counter. It was going to turn into a lovely day, I thought, warm for March, with the promise of several hours of uninterrupted sunshine against the eternal sea breeze. I ran through my mental checklist, making a note to call a few book dealers once I opened the store, but otherwise began to settle in to another routine day.

  And then Mrs. Cooper called my name.

  Chapter 2

  “Mr. Leffee! Oh, Mr. Leffee!”

  I groaned internally before straightening, mist-damp newspaper in one hand, and tightened my robe against the chill. “Morning, Mrs. Cooper,” I replied, keeping my voice low even as the echoes of her call rang down the deserted street. We weren’t the only two people who lived above our shops in this town, and most of the others didn’t open until late morning. Since our nearest neighbor ran a tattoo parlor and answered to “Spike,” I tried to stay on his good side and keep quiet before ten. “Everything all right?”

  She fluttered across the street, her quilted pink housecoat flapping in her wake, and clasped my free hand. “I’m so glad you’re up,” she rushed, crushing my fingers in her moist fist. “I didn’t want to wake you—I know how late you got in last night . . .”

  Her surveillance was nothing new. She was notorious for spying on the neighborhood through her yellow lace curtains, but at least that made her a reliable source of information. “What’s going on?”

  Her lips, pale and lined with age, briefly thinned into a tight, nearly white line. “You’d better come across and see,” she replied, then half dragged me into her shop.

  It wasn’t the first time that I’d darkened the doorway of Tea for Two, not by a long shot, but it was certainly the first time I’d done so less than fully dressed. That alone gave me cause for concern, even without my host’s nervous sweating.

  Eunice Cooper was the closest thing to a friend I had in Rigby, though the casual observer would see nothing in common between us. Mrs. Cooper—there was no longer a Mr. Cooper, though she spoke of him frequently enough, and never by his first name—had to be close to eighty. Her manners were quite nearly Victorian. She was the kind of person who stops by, finds that you’re away, and leaves a calling card—then gets miffed if you don’t return the courtesy.

  But she liked me because I was quiet, kept to myself, and never attracted the wrong sort of customers. Once a week or so, when custom was low—in other words, when Rigby’s senior population was either at bridge or Bunco—she invited me into her tea house, poured a pot of Lipton, and, between telling me stories about dear Mr. Cooper, tried to figure out why I hadn’t found a nice young lady yet.

  Mrs. Cooper believed I was gay, but she was too polite to ask, and I wasn’t about to disabuse her of the notion. Weak tea I could handle, off-brand cookies and slightly stale tea sandwiches I could stomach, but the thought of Mrs. Cooper trying to set me up was beyond imagining.

  The thing is, though, despite her frumpiness and love of doilies, Mrs. Cooper was still remarkably sharp. And as far as I could have said before that day, she had only two moods: prim and grandmotherly, and prim and displeased. But that morning, I noticed that her face was naked but for a greenish film. Her nightly face cream, I realized after a second’s contemplation—which meant she had yet to fix herself up with her usual shellacking of heavy cosmetics and was anxious enough that she wasn’t giving it a second thought.

  My guts knotted.

  Mrs. Cooper guided me into a corner of the tea room, and we hunched together beneath a cinnamon broom that had long ago given off its final whiff of spice. “Last night,” she whispered, “about midnight, I woke up. I won’t bore you with the details—”

  I nodded, relieved to be spared another trip through her gastrointestinal maladies.

  “—and I looked outside to see if you were back yet. You took off in such a hurry . . .” She paused, waiting for an explanation.

  “Seminarian. Works with a priest I know—you’ve seen him, the one who comes by every few weeks. The kid was in town and got word of a family emergency, but his car’s in the shop, and he needed a lift.”

  Her grip on my hand momentarily relaxed into a soft pat, and she offered me a strained smile. “You’re a nice young man, Mr. Leffee. But I’m pretty sure you were speeding.” She clucked twice, then cut her eyes toward the back wall and the closed door to her apartment. “Anyway, I was up, and I happened to look outside, and there was this young thing wandering around in the street, crying her eyes out. Well, I went out to see what the matter was—”

  I tried to imagine the poor kid having her private moment interrupted by Mrs. Cooper and her green rejuvenating masque.

  “—and she wouldn’t tell me!” she concluded, seemingly befuddled. “Not a word!”

  “Is she from around here?”

  “I have no idea, the little thing won’t talk to me. Maybe she’s foreign?”

  I shrugged. “Where is she now?”

  Mrs. Cooper pointed to the door. “I gave her a cup of tea and put her to bed, but she was up an hour ago. Won’t eat. Still won’t talk to me,” she huffed, then squeezed my hand again. “Won’t you go up and try to talk to her?”

  “Well, sure, if you like,” I replied, slightly confused. I carefully freed myself from her grip once the pressure abated. “But I’m not really sure how I can help . . .”

  Mrs. Cooper was already leading the way toward the door. “She’s about your age, I think,” she said over her shoulder. “Maybe she’ll be more willing to talk to you. I just don’t understand young people, Mr. Leffee,” she added, almost muttering. “So rude these days. Present company excluded, naturally.”

  “Likewise,” I said, following her up the staircase. She turned around with a look of bemusement, and I explained, “Young people these days. You’re all impossible.”

  “Oh, you flirt,” she replied, beaming, and tramped upstairs in a blaze o
f pink.

  Those of us sensitive to magic sense it in different ways. Most perceive it as a swirling, colorful mass. Some hear it, usually a high tone like a television in a distant room. We can all feel it to one extent, either as a pressure or a tingle along the skin. And then there are a few of us unlucky ones who smell it. For me, the scent is difficult to describe—the only thing magic really smells like is magic—but if I were approximating, I’d say it smells like charred citronella, the odor of a lit mosquito candle. And the girl huddled on Mrs. Cooper’s antique love seat reeked like a midsummer evening picnic.

  From what I could tell in the dimness of the shaded sitting room, she was pale, thin framed, and either brunette or unwashed blonde. When Mrs. Cooper turned on the faux Tiffany sitting on the end table, I could see that she was dressed like a Ren Faire reject, her bodiced gown slightly ragged and, in a punkish touch, solid black. She had tucked her feet up on the cushions and hugged her knees, regarding the two of us with suspicion. Her pale blue eyes, puffy and black-smudged, squinted against the sudden illumination, and her full lips remained pressed closed.

  It didn’t take a genius to see that we were dealing with a changeling, though oddly enough, a teenager. Mrs. Cooper’s guess about her age had been off by perhaps a decade, but then again, she regarded anyone under forty as a child.

  I thought quickly, then patted Mrs. Cooper’s shoulder and whispered, “Let me try something. I might have an idea.” She nodded and stepped back to the wall, and I approached the girl with my palms outstretched and empty.

  “Don’t show any emotional reaction,” I began in Fae, keeping my voice low. “I know you understand me. Nod.”

  Her eyes widened, and her mouth began to open.

  “What did I just say?”

  It snapped shut, and she nodded frantically.

  “Good.” I sighed. “Just do as I say, and I’ll get you out of here. Agreed?”