The Trouble with Fate Read online

  Fourteen minutes later, my beautiful silver coffee maker started to shimmer. I squeezed hard on the steamer’s shiny silver handle, and concentrated on my fingers curled around it. Small hands, the knuckles four white sharp stones under soft skin. I could feel the pull, the sick slip of melting into Lou’s thought-pictures.

  A big fat red apple flashed through my brain.

  “Easy, Lou,” I said under my breath as I slid a bold one to a short guy. Fae tears, my aunt was lost today. This was the third time.

  Concentrate. My hand. This handle, shiny, and silver bright. Concentrate on the sounds in the background. Someone was jiggling his keys. Use that as an anchor, cling to the sound, stay in the here. There was a sickening flutter of images as she overwhelmed my resistance. A red apple, something flying through the air, a face angry and distorted.

  “Stay in the here, stay in the here,” I whispered. I tried to focus on the feel of my hand on the handle, the distinctive reek of coffee, and the murmur of human voices in the background. Lou’s telegraphed images started to get thin to transparent. For an instant I could see the lineup of cups on top of my machine.

  Another flash, another push, and suddenly, she’d started to tow me helplessly back into the current of her thought-pictures. The same freakin’ red apple. A gravel path. A tree line, dark and somehow horrifying. The inside of Bob’s bookstore, with midday light streaming weakly through the open space of glass. A natural pool. The water dark, but the trees so green, and the light so bright. A dark uniform, bulky and foreign. Lou’s hand, her ornate ring too loose on her finger.

  The “here” was gone.

  “Ow,” I squeaked as sharp pain broke through my haze and shattered Lou’s thought-pictures. I was back, staring at my hand on the knob again, with the smell of coffee pungent in my nostrils. Saved by Merry, once again. When all else fails, a well-timed pinch works just dandy.

  Lou had never pulled me so quickly into the broken puzzle of her deteriorating brain, except when I was asleep. When I was inside her head that deep, I couldn’t spit out the fear that lay heavy on my tongue.

  “Hedi,” my manager said carefully. “You’re off the line.”

  The next customer had stopped jiggling his keys. I bit my lip at his carefully neutral face, and turned with a sense of inevitability. Mark was standing halfway between the cash register and my machine.

  “Work the cash register for the rest of your shift.” He didn’t have the balls to come any closer. Jennifer was behind him, her brows pulled together. One day she’ll be Botoxing the crap out of that vertical line.

  Humans all around me.

  “You know what, Mark?” I pulled the apron over my head and tossed it. It caught the milk container, ghosted over it, and slid to the wet ground. “I’m not feeling well. I think I need to punch out early.” I pulled my backpack out from the cabinet storing the vanilla bottles.

  “Wait a minute. I haven’t given you permission to leave.” He lifted a hand as if to catch my arm. “I’d like to look through your bag before you go.”

  “Kiss my ass, Mark.” I shouldered past him, shrugging on my backpack.

  “You walk out that door and you’re fired. You’ve broken your last machine, and stolen your last sandwich,” Mark snapped.

  I searched for a good retort, couldn’t come up with one, and threaded my way through the tables. I kept my head high even when I heard Mark claim I was the worst barista ever. A patent lie. My foam was the best ever. Period.

  “She’s on drugs,” Mark said in a low voice to Jennifer.

  “Crack,” she said.

  I paused, one shoulder holding the door open. The cool wind slid past me but it did nothing for my temper. I took my time, eyeing targets, before settling on the coffee machines. Affixed to the top of each machine was a plastic bowl. Inside the bowls were the coffee beans, waiting to be fed into the grinder. Two machines, two bowls each holding two pounds. Four pounds total.

  Mark stood with one possessive hand on my favorite machine, his eyes all puffy as he narrowed them into a squint. That’s what made it so easy. They never saw it coming.

  I felt my lip curl.

  I cocked my fingers backward, smiled, and with a flick sent my magic streaking through the air. Invisible to humans, its progress left a bright fluorescent-green trail to my Fae eyes. It hit the first bowl and stuck. I parted my fingers into a V. The stream separated into two trails. The second trail streaked toward the next bowl. “Weave,” I said, tracing an O with my fingers.

  “Grow.” I fed a little more energy down the invisible cord. I did four rotations with my hand until the rope of magic was swollen and hot and then I snipped the line.

  I put one foot out of the door, and waited.

  You know how you’re not supposed to hold a lit firecracker in your hand? So what do you think happens when you tell magic to grow and send it to a place it can’t expand? Uh-huh. Kaboom.

  The lines around the base of each bowl swelled, until the contained magic looked like a sausage hooked too long on the meat grinder. The bowls began to creak with the pressure around their bases. The plastic lids began to shiver.

  Jennifer backed up.

  Abruptly, the lids shot up, hitting the ceiling-mounted water pipes with enough force to make them shatter. And then the fireworks.

  Sweet to my soul was the Vesuvius of magically powered coffee beans spewing in one long sweet eruption of caffeinated hail to the ceiling. The stunned silence of the café was punctuated by Mark’s strangled, inarticulate, “Ack, ack, ack,” and the rat-tat-tat of the beans hitting the water pipes.

  I waited for the last bean to fall. It clinked on the ground and then rolled until it hit the back heel of a suit.

  Silence.

  “Huh,” I said. “That was strange.” I smiled again, baring all my teeth, and let the door close behind me.

  * * *

  Merry, being Merry, was pissed. I hadn’t taken six long jubilant steps out of the café before she struck in a fury of searing heat that just about took a strip off the tender skin of my left breast.

  “Shit, Merry-mine, not now,” I said, speeding up toward the corner of the building. “Cool down. Please, just cool down.”

  She was so red that the front of my white blouse glowed as if I’d tucked a flare into my bra. I hunched my shoulder protectively, shielding my chest from the customer who was staring at us through the front window, his mug of coffee suspended halfway to his mouth.

  I rounded the corner of the building at a good clip. The dusk had already deepened into urban night, the sort of leached-out gray that passes for a night sky in the city. Immediately on breaking the corner, I bent over at my waist, pulled my blouse away from my skin so that I could jerk Merry out by her chain. I let her dangle from it, red, gold, and glowing.

  Merry hung from a long length of Fae-wrought gold necklace that my mother had placed around my neck the night she died. You’d need a magnifying glass to see it, but Merry was more than just a smudge in a piece of amber. She was an Asrai. I knew that at least, even if I didn’t know precisely what an Asrai was. I knew that she once had form: two legs, two arms, long hair. She belonged to the Fae world, but Lou had trapped her inside the amulet long before I was born. A horrible fate, I agree, but she wasn’t completely powerless.

  Fae gold is not to be confused with mortal gold. Fae gold snickers at titanium’s relative weakness. It isn’t some dumb inanimate thing that just sits there, forever frozen in the shape that the artist had hammered it into. It’s alive. It can remold itself. It could, powered by the wrong Asrai’s spite, literally twine itself around your neck and choke you.

  That bore remembering when you were talking to an Asrai-powered amulet.

  And as much as Merry sometimes pissed me off—say, like when she tried to burn a layer of skin off me—she and Lou were it. One crazy-ass Fae named Lou, and one amber-colored stone, mounted in a swirl of baroque gold, named Merry. That was my world.

  “You can cool down right
now,” I said, flattening my shirt so that she could hang in the cool night air. I lowered my voice to a soothing tone. “My hand barely hurts. It’s not red, well, not red like my freakin’ boob is. You know, you’ve got to control your temper.” One of Merry’s unique attributes was the ability to heal my payback pain.

  The red light turned a fraction purple.

  “Okay, maybe I’m not the one to be talking about holding on to my temper. Trowbridge was in the shop tonight, Merry. And I quit, and so yeah, I may have used some magic. Just a little bit. I was feeling stressed.” I rubbed the soot off my finger against the rough grain of my khaki pants. “Look,” I said, pulling my finger up so that she could see it. “It’s barely red. I don’t need healing. It hardly hurts.” I was lying like hell, my finger was throbbing like someone had slammed it with a car door, but I held it up straight so that she could see.

  “You don’t need to heal me, and you don’t need to have a hissy fit.”

  She knew as well as I that payback pain would get worse before it got better. Her color cooled to a stubborn claret. I don’t know what claret is, but that’s what the bored heroes in my Regencies always drank, and I always figured it was red wine. And sometimes when I was feeling mellow, a furious Merry reminded me of a glass of something vintage, held up to the golden dancing flames of a lit fire.

  I kept walking, passing the last car parked in the lot, so engrossed, and still, admittedly, somewhat high with adrenaline, that I didn’t even notice the red van idling against the metal fence until I was too close to avoid it. The vehicle smelled of hamburgers, Febreze, and car wash. The sweet bubble-gum smell of the latter twigged a scent recall. I looked, and saw Robson Trowbridge in the driver’s seat talking to Geezer-Were. Eyes averted, I walked past the rear of the van, Merry tight in my fist.

  Geezer-Were opened the window.

  Were scent, fragrant as the woods that I was heading to, reached out to me. Silence as I passed. I don’t know who would screw around with a pause, but this one struck me as pregnant. I held my breath, kept my gait casual, and wondered how fast I could run. As fast as a full-blood Were? I skipped over the barrier between this parking lot and the next, and made it onto the gas station’s patched asphalt. I didn’t change my speed until I had made it around the repair shop, then I broke into a light trot.

  Lou’s next flood of pictures came with no warning. An aisle in the bookstore. A path with trees, leaves whipping out in the wind. A dark uniform. Something glinting gold. An arm with a sword, raised high. Then bushes, and ground. Lou’s hand reaching for a rock. Booted feet passing the vegetation.

  As abruptly as they came, they were gone. No visions, no pictures, no fear. I was back in the “here.” I took another lungful of air.

  The entry to the ravine was another half block ahead. I tightened the straps on my backpack and picked up the tempo. Lou would be waiting for me at home. So would my bed, and my dreams. I found my feet slowing. I was early anyhow. If I came home too early, she’d ask why. I walked twelve feet along the ravine path thinking about that before I stepped off the trail to find a tree for Merry.

  * * *

  If anyone passed, it looked like I was just leaning against the tree, thinking up poetry, and really that’s what I was doing. The tree-leaning bit; not the poetry.

  I don’t have to do much to feed Merry—there’s no can-opening, or big bags to lug—so I have plenty of time to think. Once I find a tree and plop her on a limb, all I have to do is stand guard as she chows down. True, I have to be particular about the type of tree. It has to be green, preferably wild. She prefers hardwoods. Pines and spruces make her turn an unattractive yellow-brown. In a pinch, flowers at a grocery store will do, but they really fall into the fast food category. She doesn’t get much juice from them. Not enough to last more than a few days, anyhow. Don’t ask me to explain the mechanics. She doesn’t watch me when I’m soaping up in the shower, and I don’t observe her too closely as she sucks down some tree essence. It gives me a chance to think, that half hour while she’s eating. Some of my best thoughts happen then. Some of my worst too.

  I’d cried for three hours the day Robson Trowbridge married Candace Temple. I might have gone longer, but my twin Lexi bartered two of his X-Men comics for one hour of silence. So I stopped, but felt tragic and misunderstood, even as I turned the pages and ate a brownie. But then of course, I’d been twelve, and I’d thought marriages were eternal honeymoons. Since then, I’ve seen enough human unions to know that’s just another myth. Sort of sucks for Weres though. When they say “I do,” they’re saying it for life. If one mate dies, the other follows. Sometimes right away, sometimes it takes a few grieving months. I didn’t need to be told that. I’d listened to my dad’s heart stop, and then my mum’s. That’s the deal; the sour side of having a true mate.

  “How am I going to keep Lou’s dreams out of my head now, Merry?” I used the rough tree bark to scratch a spot between my shoulder blades, as I worried the problem. Without a job, I had no distraction from Lou. “I wish I knew how to keep her out.”

  The constant dribble of Lou’s thought pictures and dreams was wearing me thin. I couldn’t sleep without being overwhelmed by them, and the problem had grown intolerable since she’d taken to napping during the day. Thought-pictures I could handle. But when her nighttime dreams became my daytime terrors? I can’t explain how equally repugnant and fascinating I found it. Prior to this, I’d needed no defense against Lou’s fragmenting mind. We’d been two separate beings with a whole bunch of white space between us. We didn’t even exchange thought-pictures like I used to with Mum and Lexi.

  Handy things, thought-pictures. You can get a lot across with two well-selected ones. For example, imagine a picture of one twin batting the other over the head with something hard. See? Bet you have an immediate opinion about that. If you don’t like your sibling, you may think, “Hah, good.” But if you’re one of those humans with delicate sensibilities—you know, one of those manual-reading mums who believe in naughty corners—well, your first thought might be, “That’s terrible.”

  Now here’s where the skill comes in. It’s all about the next image. Pair the picture of Helen hitting Lexi with her shoe, followed immediately by an image of Helen’s mother frowning fiercely. Neat, huh? You have an opinion and a lesson delivered in two quick images.

  Merry signaled that she was finished with the tree by rolling off the branch. “You done already?” She pointed to another tree; one with different-shaped leaves. “You know, you’re getting as fussy as a cat.” I picked my way through the knee-high vegetation and reached up to place her on the lowest limb.

  I could live with Lou’s thought-pictures, but increasingly, the images were melting into dream fragments and that just scared the shit out of me. The first act was considered nonthreatening; it was common practice among the Fae to share a static mental snapshot or two with their blood relatives. But sharing dreams? Those are dangerous things, aren’t they? Your unconscious is at the controls, and he’s that bad relative that gets drunk at the wedding, and tells all the family secrets.

  Anyhow, for most Fae-born, the issue was moot. They simply weren’t born with the ability to send or receive another’s dreams.

  Most of them.

  The first non-Hedi dream I ever experienced was Lexi’s. For want of a better word, I was dream-napped. My conscious self was caught and dragged into my twin’s unconscious mind, as if it were something sticky on the aural plane that got tangled in the trawling hooks of his dream. That’s what it feels like. Nothing at all like a thought-picture’s discreet knock. A slip, a slide backward, and then, that feeling, that awful, dreadful wrongness, as if you’d taken off your skin, and squirmed into another’s. Once in, there was no out. You were forced to stay in it until the dream ended—an unwilling spectator to what they saw, an unwilling receptor for what they felt.

  Merry tugged her chain to get my attention. I opened my palm and as my fingers closed over her, I felt soothing warmth seep
into my skin. “Let’s go home, Merry.”

  I started walking again, following the trail through the woods, but my mind was still on the first time I heard mention of Threall.

  The morning after my first dream-walk, I told Mum that Lexi had slid his dream into my head. Absolute horror twisted her features. “Threall.” She grabbed my hand, yanking me out of the kitchen faster than you could say, “Lexi stole the last macaroon.” Next thing I knew, I was sitting on the edge of my parents’ bed watching her shut the door softly behind us. She rested her ear against it for a moment and then turned to ask me questions in that low, tense un-Mum-like voice, and when I was done answering, she was silent for a long time.

  She sat down. Without looking, she pointed to the coins on their dresser. A penny lifted from its surface and floated gracefully to me. I reached for it.

  “No, Helen, listen and watch.” She waited until my hands were back in my lap, and then said slowly, “You know that there are two different realms. The world to which you were born.” She made the penny jiggle. “And another, in which the Fae live, called—”

  “Merenwyn.”

  A quarter flew across the air, and hovered above the penny. “Yes, Merenwyn.” She made it spin so its bright silver surface caught the early morning light. Her eyes softened as she watched it. “I wish you could see it.”

  “Why can’t you take us there?” I tucked my hair behind my ear. “You used a portal to come here, why can’t we open one and go there?”

  “I made an oath that I would never cross a portal again. It’s an oath I cannot break.” She touched my hair. “Even if I could return home, I couldn’t bring you with me. The mages keyed the gates to open only for those with Fae blood.”

  “I have Fae blood.” I fingered the bedspread.