Dance By Midnight (9 page)

I stood. I felt great. Especially after having torched a whole bunch of fear deang or whatever. Mike joined us as I lead the way into the mausoleum. It was cramped inside, with very little room for much more than a sideways slide along the sides. Sam created one of those little mini-suns like she had in the other cemetery and sent it up so the light would illuminate the small area.

The center of the space held a coffin on a stand. The top of it came to my waist and it looked new. Along the walls on either side were concrete squares with names and dates engraved on them. The wall opposite the opening was blank, except for a portrait of a man and a woman. A small gold nameplate below it had something etched on it, but I couldn't see it. I figured they were the great grandparents of the family in the tomb.

"You guys ready to lift the lid?" Mike looked at each of us.

"This is creepy." I glanced at the opening where I heard Grey barking outside and I hoped the pentagram holding that changeling held. I also assumed the wolf would let us know. "But okay." Mike and I found the hinges and positioned ourselves on the opposite side of the casket while Sam continued holding the light. "One…two…three…"

We lifted the lid.

"Mrs. Jessica Reinhold looks good," Mike said. "So…where's the shroud?"

"Shroud really is a figure of speech," Sam said as she produced a white handled knife. She leaned inside the coffin and cut off a square of the woman's dress.

"That's so wrong." Mike made a face.

"A shroud is historically known as the cloth or linen a body is interned in. Since we dress bodies nowadays and we don't burry them in cloth, this is the closest to a shroud we're gonna get." She pulled a baggie from her back pocket, dropped the square in, closed it and shoved it back in her pocket.

"That's just…" Mike and I closed the casket. "Anti-climactic."

"Oh I don't know." I lead the way out of the mausoleum. "I think near-death is climactic enough for me." Three times I'd gotten myself into some serious shit and three times Sam pulled my ass out of the fire. My ego owed her big time.

Grey guarded the little changeling. I hadn't really gotten a good look at it since it blitz attacked me. From a distance it was hideous, like a random caricature of what a burned little girl would look like. The raincoat was half melted to her body. I glanced over at Mike to see how he was taking it. His jaws were clenched but otherwise I couldn't read him. I looked at Sam. "Can a changeling create Fae?"

She shrugged. "A changeling is a type of Fae, but I don't think they can create themselves."

I pointed at the pentagram on the ground holding the creature. "This that spell you were talking about? The one that holds them?"

Sam nodded.

I moved up beside Grey and directed my words to the crispy changeling. "How did you know we'd be here?"

"Guardian, Witch, Sentinel, Speaker of Spells…." The thing kept repeating the words as if it were rattling off a list. "All those things…so many names you have. But the last…the last is the road that will choose you."

I knelt down to its level, Grey's muzzle even with my head. I wasn't paying much attention to its little litany. "Your queen sent you here?"

The thing stopped muttering and looked at me. Well…it really didn't have eyes. More like black sockets. But those sockets could have bored a hole through me. "Oh no…. No, no, no."

"She didn't make the killer plants?" I pointed to the piles of ash. "The ones I burned?"

Brendi Monster moved as close as she could to me. "I made them. I listened to you and made an army to take you again. I wanted to punish you."

Sam spoke up. "I didn't know changelings could make Fae."

Brendi Monster laughed.

"You wanted to punish me because I escaped?" I wanted her to focus on me.

"You burned our Cairn! You destroyed so many. So many… She was so angry at me and I didn't have an answer." Its voice was strained too. Maybe I'd singed the vocal chords? "I listened yes, yes. My purpose is to kill the family of Brendi Ross. Kill the mother. Kill the father. Kill the uncle—but you're not a real uncle. So very different…"

I glanced at Grey. She glanced at me. I wanted to ask her out loud what she thought, but I knew she didn't want Mike and Sam knowing she could talk. So I tried it another way.
You have any idea what she's talking about?

She licked her muzzle.
You did some serious damage to the Cairn. Maab got mad and punished her. You can see that for yourself.

"So I didn't do
that
?" I goofed and said it out loud. Grey hung her head.

"Didn't do what, Dags?" Sam stepped forward.

"I didn't burn her like that. Maab did."

The changeling screamed out and charged at me again but something stopped it. A flash of blue-white light and the thing was popped back against the tree. "Your fault…how were we supposed to know you weren't human? Not Sentinel but you smell like one. Not Planar but you have such power…"

"What did you tell Maab?"

"Nothing!" The thing shrieked. "She not listen! So I bring you back to her. I show her you isn't right. She used me to see you. She knows you…" It laughed softly, and sounded eerily like a little girl. "But she can't remember you. Magic…so much magic in you…" She reached out with fingers half burned to the bone. "You could fix us."

"Fix you?"

"You can heal us. I can smell the indecision." She laughed and turned her head toward Sam. "You think the queen is your enemy and yet you work along side…" She turned her eye-less face to me. "Death."

I stood and backed away. "I am not death."

"Four choices! Four roads!" She pointed at me with a finger missing most of its flesh. "I see you now. Hidden inside this man's flesh. You think you can hide from all of them and live as a normal person. The day will come when you will be feared most among all creatures, in all worlds, and no place, no one will give you sanctuary."

"Stop it." I didn't know why her words terrified me, but they did. "Stop saying that."

"Dags—"

Brendi Monster laughed again. "You will choose the wrong road!"

"No I won't!"

"You already have!"

I held up my hand and
thought
the word this time. To my surprise my right hand caught fire…but it didn't burn. I heard the whisper of pages turning, felt the flutter in my chest. The book knew a spell…but a spell for what?

The changeling howled and tried to climb the tree to escape what it saw. "Guardian! Harbinger! Sentinel!
Alal! Ina Alal alaka!
"

"
Taru Anna Epru
." The words flowed easily enough. The fire flamed up before it zeroed in on the changeling. It moved through Sam's barrier as if it wasn't there and consumed the screaming creature.

"Wait!" Mike moved forward. "We could've kept questioning it."

"No." I lowered my hand as the fire evaporated and the remaining husk became ash. "It didn't know anything else. It only knew what Maab wanted it to." I didn't want to tell him what I suspected, that I would make a better bargaining chip than the mantle.

It wasn't that I was afraid Mike would betray me and use me that way. I kept quiet because I wanted to keep that knowledge as my own, in case I had to use it myself. That and the changeling had spoken Sumerian at the end. I was pretty sure it sounded like jabber to Mike and Sam, but to me…

Ina Alal alaka.
The Destroyer comes.

Mike frowned at me and I could see the war in his eyes. He didn't believe me, but he wanted to trust me. I didn't wait for him to say anything else before I headed back down the road off the footpath and Grey bounded out in front of me, back the way we came. "Don't forget to shut the door."

I really wanted a burger.

THE SPELL

We got back to the townhouse just before eleven. We made the deadline for the three-day dead requirement. I jogged upstairs to change out of my now destroyed t-shirt and take a quick shower. I still had blood all over me, even though the wounds were gone. Grey was resting on my bed when I stepped back in from the bathroom.

Why did she call you the Destroyer?

After I closed the door, I looked at her. "I don't know." I rubbed at my hair with a towel. "Why don't you want them to know you can talk? Did you make me forget earlier?"

Yes
.
I will change your memory again if you try to tell them.

"Why?"

It's not necessary they know I can talk.

I stood in the middle of the room, towel around my waist, one in my hand, talking to a wolf. "You're Fae?"

Laugher in my mind. It tickled.
Hardly. But I am now a part of that world
.

"
Now
a part of it? You weren't before?"

No. I was like you once. Not a Guardian, but a Sentinel. You're looking at what Maab does to the Sentinels she traps and tries to force to do her bidding.

Son of a bitch. "She turns you into wolves?"

She put her head down between her outstretched paws.
She has six of us total. But I'm the only one that found my way out of her world.

I sat on the bed beside her, mindful my towel stayed in place. "Then you know for sure if Brendi's with Maab, or in a Cairn?"

Grey turned her face away.
I know where she is.

"She's alive?"

Yes
.

"That's great! Then why can't I tell Mike? He needs to know she's at least alive."

You can't.

"Why all the secrecy? And if I hadn't of been in the Cairn and not been able to hear you—"

Then you wouldn't have to keep my secret either.

"The secret that you can talk? That you were human once?"

Finally she lifted her head and looked at me. And for the first time I saw her eyes weren't that of a wolf's, but a human's. A single tear slid down her eye and she put a paw on my thigh.
You can't tell them, Darren Gregory. If you do, I'll die.

First I was surprised she knew my middle name. I rarely ever confessed to that one, be it my dad's name or not. But the dying thing? "I don't understand. How does that work? I mean I know you're not really a wolf. Why can't they?"

Close your eyes.

I did as she asked and felt a pressure in the room. My ears popped and I smelled something sweet, like floral perfume.

Orange blossoms.

"Open your eyes."

That time I heard Grey's voice in my ears and not my mind. I opened them and immediately jumped off the bed because there wasn't a wolf there anymore, but a woman. A naked woman. Her hair was the color of Grey's white undercoat and the roots of it were gray like her upper coat. But the eyes…the eyes told me so much more. This woman was the wolf. "You're…"

"Remember how I said I escaped Maab's land? I did this by making a bargain with the queen's jailor. He has possession of my true form. What you see before you is only illusion, Darren. I am still a wolf with the mind of a woman."

As if to test this for myself, I reached out and touched her arm. My fingers felt soft fur. "Is this who you were?"

"Yes. But now the jailor keeps my physical likeness in a jar on his shelf. He has many of them in his collection. I can only show you an illlusion."

"So… how does it work if we tell Sam and Mike…"

"Because that's the price. I can walk in the Material world, interact as a beast, only as long as no one knows my true form. If you tell them I can speak, that I was human, my wolf will shatter like a mirror."

"But
I
know what you are."

"You're not fully human. And you've been inside a Cairn."

I didn't really ignore the comment about my not being fully human. It just wasn't news to me. Nona had said as much. Hell, the fact I had a physical book inside of me and wasn't dead attested to the fact my physiology wasn't exactly normal by
Grey's Anatomy
. I licked my lips and lowered my hand. "So why Sam and Mike? Why are you hanging around them?"

"Hey Dags! We're ready to get this ritual started!" Sam called up from downstairs. I glanced over at the clock on the nightstand. It was eleven forty.

I clutched at my towel, waiting on an answer.

The woman looked down and in that gesture I saw it. It wasn't obvious at first, and if I hadn't of spent time with Sam, I wouldn't have seen it now. The resemblance nearly took my breath away. "You're Sam's mother."

"Yes."

I put a hand to my face. "Oh hell this sucks. So you can be around your daughter but you can't tell her you're alive?"

"She still believes I abandoned her and her father twenty years ago. She was such a small child then. I knew what she would grow up to be and I sheltered her as best as I could. But a Faerie ring grew out of sight in our garden and before the queen's Fae could take her, I went in her stead. And I've been under the queen's service ever since."

"Then won't the queen be mad to know you're here?"

"Do you really think she cares, Darren? The queen is little more than a child herself; a very spoiled child whose station and existence are an afterthought of an idea, born out of a drunken stupor. The queen cares for very little, except for a way to move about on the Physical plane, in our world. It's her obsession. And she believes using a Sentinel is the only way to make that happen."