Текст книги "Home Improvement: Undead Edition"

Автор книги: Сьюзан Маклеод

Соавторы: Seanan McGuire,Rochelle Krich,Toni Kelner,Simon R. Green,E. e. Knight,S. J. Rozan,Charlaine Harris,Melissa Marr,Stacia Kane
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Текущая страница: 15 (всего у книги 25 страниц)

“How could I forget? But how do youremember? You weren’t there.”

“I told him,” said May. I raised an eyebrow. “What? It was funny.”

“No, listen—the cliff exit didn’t have a door on it. The pixies probably got in that way and decided this was a good place to stay. No one was killing them. That’s sort of an improvement over the way things worked before.” Quentin paused before adding, reluctantly, “Maybe they even saw it as a sort of victory over the Countess Winterrose. She’s gone, and they’re still here.”

“Which also explains why they reacted so badly to us. They think we’re going to start killing them again.” I glanced at the door. “Anybody feel equipped to explain the lightbulb to a swarm of feral, pissed-off pixies?”

“Not it,” said May.

Danny’s Barghests paced the edges of the room as we spoke, their semicanine muzzles pressed low to the ground and their scorpion-like tails wagging. They abruptly stopped, muzzles swinging toward the same patch of wall as they began growling.

When a Barghest growls, smart people pay attention. I straightened, to face them. “Danny . . . ?”

“Iggy! Lou! Daisy! You stop that right this second!” Danny pushed away from the door, striding toward the Barghests. “Behave, or Toby’s not gonna want to take you guys for guard dogs!”

“What—” I began.

I didn’t have time to finish. A spider easily the size of a goat lunged out of the shadows between the hanging tapestries, where it must have been pressed practically two-dimensional in order to stay out of sight. The Barghests yelped, the smallest cutting and running to hide behind Danny while the others held their ground and began to bark cacophonously.

May shot me a look. “Remind me to neverstart another home improvement project with you.”

I didn’t dignify that with a response. I was too busy pulling the knife from my belt and charging forward, toward the massive spider.

The folks at Home Depot definitely didn’t have any pamphlets for this sort of thing.

IF THERE’S ANart to fighting enormous spiders, I somehow managed to live to adulthood without learning it. The creature seemed to consist entirely of lashing limbs and fangs the size of my forearm, which was enough to give even the Barghests pause. Danny grabbed one of them by the tail, jerking it clear just before it would have been impaled on one massive, hooked forelimb. I darted forward, slashing at the spider’s leg. It responded by hissing and scuttling backward, looking for a new angle of attack.

“We need an exit!” I said, taking up a defensive posture while Danny pulled the other Barghest to safety.

“The pixies are still out there,” said Quentin. He sounded dismayingly calm, given that we were sharing the room with the sort of thing that inspires arachnophobia. Maybe it was the fact that he had a Bridge Troll between him and the giant spider.

“Have you ever heard the phrase the lesser of two evils?” I asked, jumping back as the spider took another swing at me. It seemed to realize that this approach wasn’t working as well as it could have, because it turned and raced six feet up the wall, hissing at us. “Open the damn door!”

“It’s your funeral,” said May. She grabbed the door handle, pulling as hard as she could. It didn’t budge. “Quentin? A little help here?”

“On it.”

The spider hissed again, spitting a long stream of something sticky-looking in my direction. I dodged to the side. The sticky substance splattered against the floor instead of against my legs. “Danny! Help them with the door!”

“This day just gets better and better,” said Danny, and leaned over to yank the door open. May and Quentin were swept along with it, the wood shielding them as the tide of pissed-off pixies came boiling into the room. They stopped when they saw the spider, chattering rapidly among themselves in high-pitched voices. They weren’t attacking; that was something, anyway.

I was so distracted by the pixies that I didn’t notice the second spider until it dropped from the ceiling and grabbed me. Then I was being jerked into the air, so rapidly that I lost my grip on both my knives. Something pierced the skin at the back of my neck, sending what felt like liquid fire pumping into my veins. May screamed.

After that, everything went black.

I’VE WOKEN UPin a lot of strange situations, including “in the Court of Cats” and “halfway to being transformed into a tree.” That probably says something about how much time I spend unconscious. Waking up wrapped from feet to shoulders in a silk cocoon and dangling upside down from the rafters of Goldengreen’s throne room was a new one on me, though.

I blinked, trying to get my eyes to adjust as I strained to see what was around me. More cocoons hung to either side, the heads of my companions poking out the ends. Danny was to my left, with the Barghests behind him, and Quentin was hanging to my right. That just left—“May?” I tried to whisper. My voice still echoed in the empty room. I would have winced, but the cocoon didn’t leave me with that much freedom of motion.

“Worst knowe ever,” whispered May angrily. It sounded like she was hanging to my right, somewhere on the other side of Quentin. “I realize that your memory isn’t always totally reliable, but couldn’t you have at least triedto remember the giant spiders? That seems like the sort of thing you’d want to mention beforeyou came for a visit.”

“They weren’t here before!” The puncture wounds at the back of my neck were a dull, distant throb. I could really get used to this whole accelerated healing thing. “Neither were the pixies.”

“Well, they’re here now,” replied May. “Quentin and Danny are still out.”

“Swell.” I heal fast; May’s functionally indestructible. In this case, that just meant we got to be awake when the giant spiders came back and decided to liquefy our insides for breakfast. I wasn’t sure either of us would survive that. “What did I miss?”

“The spider grabbed you, and then two more grabbed Danny, while the pixies herded Quentin and me into the first one. We never had a chance.”

“Hold on—the pixies are working with the spiders?”

“Maybe it’s a tribute thing? They feed us to the spiders, the spiders leave them alone.”

“No, really, hold on.” The spiders couldn’tbe eating the pixies. Their fangs were too big for that. Any spider trying to eat a pixie would just wind up with a skewered pixie, and no breakfast to speak of. “They’re working together. They have to be.”

“What, we managed to blunder into the middle of the great pixie-spider alliance? Oh, that’s just fantastic. This place gets more entertaining by the minute.”

I tried squirming again. I still couldn’t get any real purchase against the silk, and I gave up after a few seconds, letting myself hang limp. The answer was obvious. It was all but staring me in the face the whole time. I’d just been distracted by its many, many teeth. “They’re not spiders.”

“Eight legs, fangs, wrapping us up in giant snack-pack cocoons—if they’re not spiders, what are they? Pretty pink ponies?”

“They’re bogies.”

There was a moment of silence as May considered my words. Then she groaned. “Oh, crud.”

“My thoughts exactly.”

Bogies, like pixies, bridge the gap between the intelligent and bestial fae. They’re shapeshifters. Shapeshifters are pretty common in Faerie, but most shapeshifting fae have a limit to the number of forms they can assume. Bogies don’t. They can take the shapes of a thousand types of creeping, crawling things: spiders and centipedes, scurrying beetles, and even, occasionally, really big frogs. They’re territorial, like their pixie cousins, and they tend to live in large family groups, defending each other to the death.

Danny made a grumbling sound, like rocks grinding together, and the cocoon to my left shifted. “Anybody get the number of that dump truck?” he asked, sounding woozy.

“We found a bogie nest,” I said, without preamble. Best to rip the bandage off cleanly.

Danny was still swearing when Quentin woke up a few minutes later. “Hello?”

“Hey, Quentin,” I said. “Don’t bother to struggle. We’re bogie-caught.”

“. . . Oh,” he said. “That’s new.”

“Yeah, I know.” A distant humming sound was filtering into the room, like the beating of a hundred tiny wings. “Danny, shush. I think the pixies are coming back.”

“Oh, that’s exactlywhat I wanted,” muttered Danny, and went silent.

The pixies brought light with them when they came pouring into the room, their tiny bodies glowing like low-watt Christmas lights. There were at least fifty of them. They swarmed to surround us, jabbing tiny spears and daggers at our faces—but not, I noticed, actually making contact. In fact, except for the bites from the bogies, we hadn’t taken nearly as much damage from the knowe’s inhabitants as we could have.

Maybe the Goldengreen’s new denizens were trying to play nicely. Sort of.

I cleared my throat. “Uh, hi,” I said, to the pixie that was flying back and forth in front of my nose. Pixies don’t hover well. It was a male, maybe four inches tall, glowing with a rich, royal blue tint that didn’t quite go with the scrap of buttercup-yellow sheeting that he was using as a loincloth. “I’m Toby Daye.”

“And now she’s talking to pixies,” said Danny, in a long-suffering tone. “We’re all gonna die here.”

“Danny, shush,” hissed May.

I did my best to ignore them, focusing instead on the pixie. “I think we may have managed to get off on the wrong foot.”

The pixie eyed me suspiciously, not saying anything. That made a certain amount of sense. The language barrier between the small folk and the human-sized fae meant that while he might have been able to understand me, I had no real way of understanding him.

“I’m starting to get an idea of what used to go on here, and I’m sorry. I had no idea. The things that Evening—”

That answered one question: the pixies definitely understood at least a little English. The flock went nuts when I said Evening’s name, shrieking in high-pitched voices as they all started flying wildly around us. Almost all. The blue pixie continued flitting back and forth, eyes narrowing with suspicion.

“I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” I said, hurriedly. “It’s okay, really! We’re not here to do the things she did. Do you understand me? We’re not here for that at all!”

The blue pixie swooped a little closer, wings buzzing into a blur behind him as he aimed his spear at the tip of my nose. It was difficult to resist the urge to go cross-eyed looking at it.

“My name is October Daye. I’m supposed to be the new Countess here. The Queen sent me.” The pixie shook his spear. “Hey! It wasn’t my idea, okay? She didn’t ask me. But as far as she’s concerned, this knowe is my problem now, and she’s not going to take it well if we never come back out. Do you understand? If we disappear, more big ones will come looking for us.” There was something charmingly perverse about the idea that I was counting on the Queen of the Mists to avenge my potential death; she hates me, after all, and would probably be thrilled if I conveniently disappeared. But form would still insist she send someone into Goldengreen to look for us, and once whoever that was found our bones—and the homicidal local ecosystem—a mass extermination would follow.

“Sweet Maeve, I don’t believe I’m worried about the pixies getting in trouble for killing us,” I muttered. More loudly, I said, “Do you understand? We aren’t here to hurt you, but if you hurt us, the people who come after us won’t be this nice.”

“What is she doin’?” whispered Danny. Hearing a Bridge Troll whisper was something like hearing a gravel truck trying to be quiet. It would have been funny under most circumstances.

“She’s trying to reason with the pixies,” said Quentin.

“Can she even dothat?” asked Danny, abandoning his attempts at whispering. “Pixies aren’t that smart—hey! Ow!” Pixies swarmed around him, stabbing out with their tiny weapons. Bridge Trolls have thick skin, but even thick skin can be punctured if the attacker is dedicated enough.

May laughed. “Looks like they’re smart enough.”

“Guys, can we settle down? Please?” The blue pixie was still hanging in front of me, a wary, quizzical expression on his face. I sighed, focusing on him. “Sorry about my friends. All the blood’s going to their heads, and it’s probably messing with their brains.”

“Hey!” said May.

“So please. Let us down. We can talk about this rationally, once we have our feet on solid ground.” The pixie didn’t look convinced. I took a deep breath. “All right, you want me to swear? I’ll swear. I swear by oak and ash and rowan and thorn that we did not come here intending harm. I swear by root and branch and rose and tree that none will raise a hand against you, unless hands are raised against us.”

The pixie hesitated before turning and jabbing his spear at the rest of the flock. The pixies abandoned their swarming to come and circle around him, their various glows blending into a single off-white glow. A flurry of high-pitched exchanges followed. It seemed like every pixie had an opinion on the matter—that, or they just really enjoyed yelling at each other.

“Toby? What’s happening?” asked Quentin.

“The pixies are deciding whether to let us go,” I said. “I think.”

“Or maybe they’re getting ready to eat us,” said May dolefully.

“Oh, swell,” said Danny.

The pixies seemed to come to an agreement. Most of the flock flew toward the far wall, getting clear of our cocoons. The blue pixie turned to point his spear at the doorway, barking something that sounded very much like a command.

“Okay, he’s doing something . . .” I said.

The sound of feet running along the ceiling heralded the return of the bogies—conveniently still shaped like giant spiders. They were smaller now, only about the size of terriers, which wasn’t all that much of an improvement. Two of them ran down the length of my body, waving their serrated forelimbs at my face. I took a sharp breath, willing myself not to scream. I think of myself as pretty tough. That doesn’t mean I appreciate having giant spiders clinging to me while I’m tied up and helpless to get away from them.

“He’s calling his spider buddies to come and eat us,” said May. “Good job, Toby.”

The pixie barked another long string of squeaky commands . . . and the bogies started chewing through the cocoons. I let out a slow breath, closing my eyes. “Oh, good,” I said. “It worked.”

Danny was still swearing when we began dropping toward the floor.

THE BARGHESTS PRESSEDthemselves against Danny’s legs, growling deep in their throats. Danny wasn’t actually growling, but he didn’t look much happier than the Barghests did. That was understandable. We were completely surrounded by bogies—most still shaped like giant spiders, although a few had transformed into less mentionable things—while the pixies zipped around us in an ever-shifting circle. The blue pixie remained stationary, hovering in front of me with his arms folded across his chest.

I brushed some stray cobwebs out of my hair, offering the pixie a respectful nod. “It’s good to be back on the ground.” I didn’t know for sure that the prohibition against giving thanks applied to pixies, but I was trying to be polite, and that meant I wasn’t going to risk it.

“Now what?” muttered May.

“I’ll let you know when I figure it out,” I replied. The pixie glared at me. “Sorry! Sorry. We don’t negotiate with pixies very often.”

He unfolded his arms, chattering rapidly at me.

I sighed. “I’m sorry. I don’t understand you.”

The pixie repeated himself, more slowly. He was clearly making an effort to be understood.

“None of us speak . . . uh, pixie,” I said. “How about this? I’ll try to guess what you’re asking for, and you’ll let me know when I get it right. Is that okay?”

The pixie nodded.

“Good enough. I, uh . . . Do you want us to leave?” The pixie didn’t react. “Do you want us to let you leave?” The pixie scowled.

“Ask him if he wants to know how you’re going to keep your promise,” said Quentin.

I turned to blink at him. “Good call.” Looking back to the pixie, I asked, “Is that what you want?”

The pixie nodded again, more vigorously. The motion of the swarm slowed, all their eyes focusing in on me at once. This was clearly important to them . . . and really, I couldn’t blame them. It’s hard for people that small to find places where they can let their guard down—and the longer I spoke to the pixies, the easier it became to think of them as people. I didn’t understand a word he said, but he understood me, and in Faerie, that’s better than you sometimes get.

“I’m supposed to be in charge here,” I said, slowly. “That means this knowe is mine. I have my own people to protect, and they need to be here if they’re going to receive that protection. Another promise. If you’ll let me claim this place, I will do my best to give you the same protection that I give to them. No one will hurt you here. No one who comes here will be allowed to hurt you. Not on my watch.” The bogies chittered. “That means allof you, as long as you can extend the same courtesy to my subjects. You don’t attack them, and they won’t attack you.”

The pixie dipped a little lower in the air, glow brightening. Then, abruptly, he turned and zipped out of the room, leaving me staring dumbly at the spot where he’d been.

“Either you just messed up bad, or . . . actually, I don’t got an or,” said Danny. “Should we be running?”

“I’m considering it,” I said. “Give it a minute.”

The four of us stepped closer together as the seconds ticked by, the majority of the pixies still circling. May was indestructible and Danny was tough as a rock; Quentin and I didn’t share those advantages. If the pixies and the bogies decided to attack in earnest, we were going to have problems.

I was getting ready to suggest we start moving when the pixie returned, clutching a chunk of rose quartz the size of a duck’s egg to his chest. He flew to a stop in front of me, holding out the rock. It glistened, gleaming from within and putting out a silent sound that somehow managed to serve the purpose of a spell’s magical signature. It was the knowe. He was trying to hand me the knowe.

There was only one response to that offering. “Okay,” I said, and took it.

Goldengreen shuddered around us again, the motion still feeling very much like a dog trying to shake off a flea. May yelped, staggering backward into Danny, who caught her casually and held her in place with one massive hand. I barely noticed. I was too busy trying to sort through the sensations that were crashing through me, flowing first through the stone, and then—in a moment of transition that was barely a transition at all—through the entire knowe.

Goldengreen was one of the first knowes opened in San Francisco. Evening didn’t open it. A red-haired woman I didn’t recognize did the opening . . . working in tandem with a blonde woman I didrecognize. Amandine. My mother. No wonder the Queen was willing to give the knowe to me. She knew it would talk to me, even if it wouldn’t take me. Fae law says that changelings can’t inherit, but a knowe knows the bloodline that pried it open in the first place. The realization only had a moment to register. Then the shape of the knowe as a whole was slamming into me, sending me to my knees. The stone rolled free of my hand. The images flashing through my head didn’t stop.

Amandine didn’t stay with the knowe. She helped the red-haired woman open it, and then she left, leaving Goldengreen to grow under a single custodianship. The redhead left, replaced by an unfamiliar Daoine Sidhe who was replaced, in turn, by Evening Winterrose. Her arrival signaled the descent of the knowe. It was thriving before she came, filled with people and with life. All that ended after Evening, and the knowe fell into a long twilight that ended only when she died and it was sealed away, forbidden to Faerie.

And then the pixies came, and the bogies, and made the knowe their home. It likedthem. It liked that it was needed, that it was wanted. For the first time in over a hundred years, Goldengreen had something to protect. That was why it was fighting us. It wanted its inhabitants to be safe.

I bit my lip, hard enough to draw blood. It was a moment’s work to raise my hand and wipe the blood away, touching it to the floor. The pressure of the memories decreased, even as I felt my connection to the knowe grow stronger. “I promise,” I whispered. “I am not Evening. I promise.”

There was a momentary pause, as if the knowe were holding its breath. Then two things happened at the same time: The images stopped coming.

And the lights came on.

“THAT WAS Anice trick,” said May, sitting next to me on the edge of the broken fountain in the main courtyard. Danny leaned against the wall, while Quentin sat to my other side. It was a comfortable moment, even with all the cleaning that we knew was waiting just ahead.

The pixies swarmed around us, picking up bits of broken cobblestone and whisking away cobwebs with quick sweeps of their wings. The bogies were nowhere in evidence; probably lurking in the shadows, waiting for someone they could jump out at and terrify. They were going to be waiting for a long time. After the day I’d had, my threshold for terror was very, very high.

At least the lights that were burning now were powered by magic, and not captive pixies. The pixie-power lights must have been purely decorative. Which didn’t make them any less horrible, but meant we weren’t going to be forced to deal with installing a new lighting system while we were doing everything else.

“It worked, didn’t it?” I asked. I could still feel Goldengreen at the back of my head, but it was fading quickly. The knowe was willing to talk to me, even willing to tolerate me—that didn’t mean that it was mine. The Queen had given me these lands. The lands themselves were still reserving judgment.

“Next time, risk somebody else’s neck,” suggested Danny amiably. “Like, I dunno, the Queen’s. Bring her next time.”

“Yeah, there’s a real life-extender.” I snorted, leaning over to ruffle Quentin’s hair. “Besides, now we have a built-in workforce to get all the crap down from the ceilings.”

“You’re going to make us clean, aren’t you?” asked Danny.

“And repair, and replace, and probably paint.” I stood. “Now that we have the doors open, let’s go beg the local nobles to lend us all their Hobs and Bannicks.”

“I’ll go for beer and pizza,” said May.

“I’ll drive her,” said Danny.

Quentin sighed. “I’ll get a mop.”

“Good call,” I said, and grinned before I started for the nearest exit. The bogies slipped out of the shadows, joining the pixies as they followed me all the way to the door, wings buzzing and legs tapping against the floor. Reclaiming Goldengreen was going to take a lot of work, and a lot of favors from the local hearth-fae community, but it was going to be worth it. Changelings and pixies have at least one thing in common: it’s rare that we have places where we’re safe. Goldengreen was an opportunity to change that.

With all the time I’ve spent feeling like I was on the outside, looking in, it was going to be nice to finally have a place I could say, with absolute conviction, was my home. The giant horror movie spiders, well . . .

Those were just a bonus.