Tithe

Chapter 6

Kaye sat down gingerly at the edge of the couch, so that her new wings hung off the edge and wouldn't get crushed if she moved suddenly or leaned back.

She was wearing a pair of Corny's jeans, belted and rolled at the cuffs, and a black, hooded sweatshirt. Corny had taken a pair of scissors and cut a large section out of the back of it so that they could feed her wings through. Her skin was so sensitive that she imagined she could feel particles as they drifted through the air.

Corny poured himself a glass of Mountain Dew. "Can you drink soda?"

"I think so," Kaye said. "I could before."

He poured some in a mug and handed it over to her. She didn't sip it—it was the same color as her skin.

She could smell the soda, smell the green dyes and the chemical carbonation. She could smell Corny, the acid of his excited sweating and sourness of his breath. The air she breathed tasted of cigarettes and cats and plastic and iron in a way she had never noticed before—it nearly made her gag with each breath.

"It's starting to sink in," Corny said. "I can almost look at you without wanting to bang my head against the wall."

"I'm not sure how to explain. It started a long time ago. I'm not sure I remember important things."

"Recently, then." Corny sat down on the couch. He was staring at her with what looked like a combination of fascination and repulsion.

"I rolled in some clover." She gave a short laugh at the absurdity of it.

"Why?" Corny didn't laugh at all. He was totally serious.

"Because the Thistlewitch told me that that was one of the ways I could see myself the way I really am. See—I told you that it gets ridiculous."

"This is the way you really are, then?"

Kaye nodded carefully. "I guess so."

"And this thimble witch? Who is she?"

"Thistlewitch," Kaye corrected. And she told him. Told him how she'd known faeries for as long as she could remember, how Spike would perch on the footboard of her bed when she was small and tell her stories about goblins and giants while Lutie darted around the room like a manic nightlight. She told him how Gristle taught her how to make a piercing whistle with a blade of grass and described the Thistlewitch divining with eggshells.

All the while, Corny stared with greedy eyes.

"Who knew about these friends?"

Kaye shrugged. "My mom, my grandmother—I guess I'm not really related to them at all…" She stopped suddenly. Her voice sounded unsteady, even to herself, and she took a deep breath. "Everyone in my first-grade class. You. Janet."

"Did any of these people see the faeries? Ever?"

Kaye shook her head.

Corny turned his gaze toward the wall, frowning in concentration. "And you can't call them?"

Kaye shook her head again. "They find me when they want to—that's the way it always was. Right now, that's the problem. I can't stay like this, and I don't know how to get reglamoured."

"There isn't anywhere you can look?"

"No," Kaye said vehemently. "I already told you no. The swamp was the only place, and I was there all night."

"But you're a faerie too. Don't you have any abilities?"

"I don't know," Kaye said, thinking of Kenny. That was definitely not something she really wanted to discuss right now. Her head hurt enough already.

"Can you cast any spells?"

"I don't know, I don't know, I don't know! Can't you understand that I don't know anything at all?"

"Come on in the back. Let's go online."

They went into Corny's room, and he flicked on his computer. The screen went blue, and then his background picture loaded. It was a wizard hunched over a chess table while the two queen pieces battled, one all black and the other all white.

Kaye flopped onto the tangled sheets of his bed, stomach down, wings up.

Corny tapped a few keys, and his modem groaned.

"Okay. F-a-e-r-i-e. Let's see. Hmmm. Gay stuff—don't go there."

She snickered anyway.

"Here we go. German changelings. Pictures. Yeats poetry."

"Apparently, I'm a pixie," Kaye supplied. "Click on the changeling thing, though."

"Interesting."

He scrolled through it, and she tried to read it from her slightly-too-distant vantage point. "What?"

"Says you throw 'em in the fire to get your own kid back… that or stick a hot poker down their throats."

"Great. Next."

"Here we go. Pixie. Can detect good and evil, hate orcs, and are about one to two feet tall…" He started to laugh. "Makes pixie dust."

"Orcs?" Kaye inquired. She shifted her position, suddenly aware that it was hard to separate which muscles caused her wings to twitch. They seemed to move independently of her will and of each other, like two soft insects alighting on her back.

Corny couldn't stop laughing. "Pixie dust. Like angels make angel dust. International drug cartels grab seraphim and shake 'em. Priests who sweep up churches put that stuff in Ziploc baggies."

She snorted. "You're an idiot, you know that?"

"I try," he said, still laughing.

"Well, try 'Unseelie Court.'"

A few clicks of his mouse and he said, "Looks like that's where all the bad guys hang out in Faeryland. What does this have to do with you?"

"There's this knight there who may or may not be wanting to kill me. My friends want me to pretend to be human because there's this thing called the Tithe… it's complicated."

Corny sat up again. "Why didn't you tell me?"

"I just told you the part that made sense."

"Okay." Corny nodded. "Now tell me the part that doesn't make sense."

"I don't understand it all exactly, but basically there are solitary faeries and court faeries. Roiben is one of the court faeries, and I met him in the woods after he got shot. He's from the Unseelie Court."

"Okay. I'm still with you, if barely."

"Spike and Lutie-loo sent me an acorn message to tell me that he was dangerous. He killed my other friend, Gristle."

"An acorn message?"

"The top came off. It was hollow."

"Right. Of course."

"Ha-ha. Look for 'Tithe' next, okay? As far as I know, it's this sacrifice that makes the faeries that aren't part of any court still do what the court people say. I have to pretend to be human so they can pretend to sacrifice me."

He typed in the keyword. "I'm just getting Jesus Crispy shit. Give-me-ten-percent-of-your-cash-to-me-so-I-can-buy-an-air-conditioned-doghouse kind of thing. This sacrifice—how safe is that? I mean, how well do you know these people?"

"I trust them absolutely…"

"But," Corny prompted.

She smiled ruefully. "But they never told me. They knew all this time, and nothing—not one hint." Kaye looked pensively at the joints of her fingers. Why should one extra joint make them horrifying? It did, though—flexing them bothered her.

Corny steepled his palms, cracking his knuckles like a villain. "Tell me the whole story again, slowly, and from the beginning."

Kaye woke up muzzily, not sure where she was. She shifted until she felt a solid shape that groaned and pushed at her. Corny. She squinted at him and rubbed at her eyes. It was dark in the room, the only streaks of light sneaking around the edges of the heavy brown curtains. She heard voices from somewhere in the trailer over the distant sound of canned television laughter.

She turned over again, trying to go back to sleep. The bedside table was in front of her line of vision. A book, Vintage, a bottle of ibuprofen, an alarm clock with flames on the clock face, and a black plastic chess knight.

"Corny," she said, shaking what she thought was the shoulder of the lump. "Wake up. I know what to do. I know what we can do."

He pushed the covers back from over his head. His eyes were slits of wet in the piles of comforter. "This better be good," he groaned.

"The kelpie. I know how to call the kelpie."

He pushed back the covers and sat up, suddenly awake. "Right. That's right." He slid out of bed, scratching his balls through once-white briefs, and sat down in front of the computer. The screensaver dispersed as he shook the mouse.

In the hallway, Kaye could hear Janet's voice distinctly, complaining to her mother about the fact that she wasn't going to get her license if Corny didn't let her borrow his car.

"What time is it?" Kaye asked.

Corny looked at the clock on the screen. "After five."

"Can I use your phone?"

He nodded. "Do it now. You can't use it while I'm signed on. We only have the one line."

Corny's bedroom phone was a copy of the emergency bat-phone, bright red and sitting under a plastic dome on the floor. It even had a little bulb in it that she imagined might blink when a call came in. Kaye sat down cross-legged on the floor, took off the dome, and dialed her house.

"Hello?" Kaye's grandmother answered.

"Grandma?" She dragged her fingers over the synthetic loops of the rug she was sitting on. Her eyes fell on her long green toes with chipped red nail polish on the jagged, untrimmed toenails.

"Where are you?"

"I'm at Janet's," Kaye said, wiggling the toes, willing herself to realize they belonged to her. It was hard talking to her grandmother now. The only reason her grandmother put up with her and Ellen was because they were family and you always took care of family. "I just wanted to tell you where I am."

"Where were you this morning?"

"I got up early," Kaye said. "I had to meet some friends before school started." That was true enough, in a way.

"Well, when are you coming home then? Oh, and I have two messages for you. Joe from the Amoco called about some job—I hope you're not thinking of working at a gas station—and some boy named Kenny called twice."

"Twice?" Kaye couldn't help the smile that was pushing up the corners of a mouth she was determined to keep grim.

"Yes. Are you coming home for dinner?"

"No, I'll eat here," Kaye said. "'Bye, Gram, I love you."

"I think your mother would like it if you came home for dinner. She wants to talk to you about New York."

"I've got to go. 'Bye, Gram."

Kaye hung up the phone before her grandmother could start another sentence. "You can sign on now," she said.

A few minutes later, Corny made a noise.

She looked up.

"Your plan has one little problem."

"Don't they all… no, tell me, what is it?"

"Kelpies basically like to drown people and then eat most of them—all but their guts. You're not supposed to get on their backs, yadda, yadda, yadda, they're fucking evil as hell, yadda, yadda, yadda, not to mention they shapeshift. Oh, yeah, you can tame them if you happen to manage to get a bridle on them. Fat chance of that."

"Oh."

"Did you ever wonder if some of these sites were designed by faeries? I wonder if I kept looking if I could find a newsgroup or a hub page or something."

"So, if we don't sit on its back, are we safe?"

"Huh? Oh… I don't know."

"Well, are there instances there where it drowns people without them getting on its back?"

"No, but then it's not all that comprehensive."

"I'm going to try it. I'm going to talk to it."

He looked up from the computer desk. "You're not going without me."

"Okay," Kaye said. "I just thought that it might be dangerous."

"This is the real thing," he said, voice dropping low, "and I don't want to miss even one little bit of it. Don't even think of running off."

She held up both hands in mock surrender. "I want you to go with me. Really, okay?"

"I don't want to wake up someplace with a screwed-up memory and nobody ever believing me. Do you understand?" Corny's face was flushed.

"C'mon, Corny, either your mom or Janet is going to hear you and come in here. I'm not leaving you."

Kaye watched as he calmed somewhat, thinking that she should stop trying to anticipate what was going to happen next. After all, when you were already in a slippery place, reality-wise, you couldn't afford to assume that things would be straightforward from here on in.

The metal of the car made her feel heavy and drowsy and sick, the way that carbon monoxide poisoning was supposed to make you feel before it killed you. Kaye rested her cheek against the cool glass of the window. Her throat was dry and her head was pounding. It had something to do with the air in the car, which seemed to scald her lungs as she breathed it. It was a short drive, and she was glad of it, practically tumbling out of the car when Corny opened the door for her.

In the daylight, it was easy to see rows of houses beyond the trees, and Kaye wondered how it could have seemed like a great woods when she had stumbled through here. The stream, when they found it, was thick with garbage. Corny leaned down and smeared dirt off a brown bottle that didn't look like it was for beer. It looked like it should be holding some snake-oil salesman's hair tonic or something.

"Vaseline glass," he said. "Some of this stuff is really old. I bet you could sell some of these." He pushed another bottle with his toe. "So, how do we call this thing?"

Kaye picked up a brown leaf. "Do you have anything sharp?"

He reached into his back pocket and pulled out a pocketknife, flicking it open with a deft movement of his thumb. "Just remember what the site said—no getting on its back, no way, no day, no matter what."

"I saw the page, okay? You don't have to keep reminding me. Kelpie equals evil water horse that drowns people for fun. I get it."

"Well, just so you're sure."

He let her take the knife. She slid the tip of it into the pad of her thumb. A bright dot of blood welled up, and she smeared it on the leaf.

"Now what?" he asked, but for all that the words sounded cynical, he was barely breathing as he spoke them.

She dropped the leaf into the stream, blood side down, as she had done before. "I'm Kaye," she said, trying to remember the words. "I'm not from any court but I need your help. Please hear me."

There was a long moment of silence after that when Corny let out his breath. She could see him start to believe that nothing was going to happen and she was torn between the desire to prove that she knew what she was doing and the fear of what was coming.

A moment later, there was no more doubt as a black horse rose from the water.

Either because it was day or with Kaye's new sight, the creature looked different. Its color was not so much black, but an emerald so deep that it looked black. And the nacreous eyes were gleaming like pearls. Still, when it regarded Kaye, she was forced to think of the research Corny had done. That was chilling enough.

The kelpie strode onto the shore and shook its great mane, spraying her and Corny with glittering droplets of swamp water. Kaye held up her hands, but it hardly helped.

"What do you seek?" the horse spoke, its voice soft but deep.

Kaye took a deep breath. "I need to know how to glamour myself and I need to know how to control my magic. Can you teach me?"

"What will you give me, girl-child?"

"What do you want?"

"Perhaps that one would like to ride on my back. I would teach you if you let him ride with me."

"So that you can kill him? No way."

"I wonder about death, I who may never know it. It looks much like ecstasy, the way they open their mouths as they drown, the way their fingers dig into your skin. Their eyes are wide and startled and they thrash in your hands as though with an excess of passion."

Kaye shook her head, horrified.

"You can hardly blame me. It is my nature. And it has been a very long time."

"I'm not going to help you kill people."

"There might be something else that would tempt me, but I can't think what. I'll give you the opportunity to think up something."

Kaye sighed.

"You know where to find me."

With that, the kelpie waded back into the water.

Corny was still sitting stunned on the bank. "That thing wanted to kill me."

Kaye nodded.

"Are you going to try to find something it wants?"

Kaye nodded again. "Yeah."

"I don't know how I feel about that."

"You read the site. You knew it would be like this."

"I guess. It's different to see it… to hear it."

"Do you want us to leave?"

"Hell, no."

"Any ideas what it might want that doesn't walk on two feet?"

"Well," he said, after a moment's consideration, "actually there are a whole lot of people I wouldn't mind feeding to that thing."

She laughed.

"No, really," he said.

"What do you mean?"

"I mean that there are a whole lot of people that I wouldn't mind seeing drowned. Really. I think that we should go for it."

Kaye looked up at him. He didn't look particularly fazed by what he had just proposed.

"No way," she said.

Corny shrugged. "Janet's boyfriend, for example. What a prick."

"Kenny?" Kaye squeaked.

"Look, it doesn't have to be him. I could think of a dozen people. The best thing is that they're all so dumb I'm sure I would have no problem convincing them to come down here and ride the horse. I'm thinking that stupidity should have consequences. C'mon, we can do a little weeding of the human race." He waggled his eyebrows.

"No," she said. "Think of something other than people we can give it."

"Oats?" he said vaguely. "A huge box of instant oatmeal? A subscription to Equestrian's Digest? Hay and lots of it?"

"We're not getting people killed, so just give it up, okay?"

She was getting sick of listening to Corny's sighs.

She bet that Roiben's name would be a fair price. After all, this thing was probably not part of any court, being tied to the stream here. She bet that he would be counted as a fair price indeed. And it wouldn't change the fact that she knew the name too.

It would be a fine revenge on him for killing Gristle.

But then, she imagined that the kelpie would just order him to bring people for it to drown. And he would do it.

What else was there to bargain with that a kelpie might like?

She thought about the dolls in her room, but all she could picture was a little girl following a trail of them to the shore of the stream. Ditto with any musical instrument. She had to think about something that the kelpie could enjoy alone… clothing? Food?

Then she thought of it… a companion. A companion that it could never drown. Something that it could talk to and admire. The merry-go-round horse.

"Oh, Corny," Kaye said, "I know just the thing."

Getting back in the car was the last thing that Kaye wanted to do, but she did, sliding into the backseat, pressing her shirt over her mouth as though the fabric could filter the iron out of the air.

"You know where you're going, right?" she asked, wondering if he could understand the words, muffled as they were by the cloth.

"Yeah."

She let her head slide down to the plastic seat, one wing twitched just out of her vision, sending scattered luminescent rainbows through the thin membrane to dance on her leg under each passed light. Everything narrowed to those rainbows. There was no Corny in the front seat, no scratchy radio song, no passing cars, no houses, no malls, no real things to protect her from the glittering patterns on her grass-green thighs.

There were no words for what she felt, no sounds, nothing. There was no word for what she was, no explanation that would keep back the numb, dumb dark. She felt the dizziness threaten to overwhelm her.

"Can you please open your window?" she asked. "I can't breathe."

"What's wrong with yours?"

She crouched on the edge of the seat and reached her hands into the front of the car, palms up like a supplicant. "Every time I touch the handle, it burns. Look." She held her hand out to him, and he could see that part of it was flushed. Her fingers wiggled. "That's from the door handle."

"Shit." Corny took a breath, but he could not seem to let it go. He rolled down his window.

The salt in the air cleaned her throat with each lungful from the open window, but it wasn't enough to battle the rising nausea. "I have to get out of this car."

"We're almost there." Corny stopped at the red light.

Corny parked the car outside the big building. It was strange to see it in the daytime. The overcast sky made the outside of the building look even dingier.

"Are you okay?" Corny asked, and turned his head to see her in the backseat.

Kaye shook her head. She was going to vomit, right there, right on top of the empty soda cans and mashed fast-food boxes. She put her hand in the pocket of the sweatshirt and opened the door.

"Kaye! What are you doing?"

Kaye half fell, half crawled onto the asphalt of the parking lot and dragged herself to the edge of the grass before she started vomiting. There was little in her stomach, and most of what she coughed up was stomach acid and spittle.

"Jesus!" Corny crouched down next to her.

"I'm okay," Kaye said, rising dizzily to her feet. "It's all the metal."

He nodded, looking back at the car and then looking around skeptically. "Maybe we should forget about this."

Kaye took a deep breath. "No. Come on."

She ran around the back, following the path she had walked with Janet. "Give me your jacket," she said. "There's glass."

Everything was different in daylight.

Up the stairs and there it was, dingier now that she got a good look at it, but still beautiful. The cream of its flanks was closer to a brown, and the gilt trim was mostly rubbed off. Its lips were carved in what she thought was a slight sneer, and Kaye grinned to see it.

Together, they dragged the horse over the floor toward the stairs. Leaning forward, the weight of it was resting on Corny as they eased it down step after step. It barely fit.

Downstairs, Kaye climbed out through the window as Corny pushed it carefully through.

Outside, Corny started to panic. There was no way it was going to fit in the back of the car. Worse, the trunk was filled with boxes of used books and oddball tools.

"Someone is going to see us!"

"We've got to find a way to tie it to the roof."

"Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!" Corny dug around in the trunk of the car and came up with a single bungee cord, two plastic bags, and some twine.

"That string is very thin," Kaye said skeptically.

Corny twisted it around the wooden creature's neck and body and then through the inside of the car. "Get on the other side. Someone's going to see us. Hurry."

He tossed her the twine, and she looped it over the horse and threw it back to him. Corny knotted it.

"Okay. Good enough. We gotta go."

Corny hopped in on his side, and Kaye walked around and got in, wrapping Corny's jacket around her hand to close the door. He took off, stepping on the pedal so hard that the tires screeched as they pulled out.

Kaye was sure that each car that pulled up behind them was going be a cop or that the horse was going to fly off onto the road or hit another car. But they got back in one piece.

Pulling over, they hauled the merry-go-round horse down into the forest and to the stream.

"That thing better like this. I'm going to have splinters for a week."

"It will."

"And I'm going to have to pop the hood of the car back up in the center."

"I know. I would help you if I could touch it, okay?"

"I'm just saying. That thing better like it."

"It will."

They set the legless horse down on the muddy bank, angling it so that it sat relatively upright without their holding it. Kaye looked around for another leaf, and Corny took the knife out of his pocket without being asked.

"'S okay. I'm just going to pick the scab."

He made a face but didn't say anything.

"Kelpie," Kaye said, dropping the leaf into the water, "I have something I think you might like."

The horse rose up from the deep and stared at the crippled merry-go-round horse.

Whinnying, it clopped up onto the shore. "It has no legs," the kelpie said.

"It's beautiful anyway," Kaye said.

The kelpie circled the wooden thing, snuffling appraisingly. "More, I think. Crippled things are always more beautiful. It's the flaw that brings out beauty."

Kaye grinned. She'd done it. She'd actually done it. "So you'll teach me?"

The creature looked at Kaye and shifted, and where it had been now stood a young man, nude and still dripping, hair tangled with rushes. It looked from Kaye to Corny. "She I will teach, but you must make it worth my while if you want me to teach you too. Come and sit near me."

"Nothing's worth that," Kaye said.

The kelpie-man smiled, but his eyes were on Corny as he traced a pattern on his chest. Corny's breathing went shallow.

"No," Corny said, so softly that it was hard to hear his voice.

Then the creature transformed again, sinuous energy coiling until Kaye was looking at herself.

"Are you ready to begin then?" the kelpie said in Kaye's voice with Kaye's mouth. And then the smile, not at all Kaye's, curled slyly. "I have much to teach you. And the boy would do well to listen. Magic is not the sole province of the fey."

"I thought you said he had to make it worth your while."

"His fear is worth something, for now. I am allowed so little consolation." The kelpie looked at her with her own black eyes, and she watched those lips, so like her own, whisper, "So long since I have known what it was to hunt."

"How come?" Kaye asked, despite herself.

"We, who are not the rulers, we must obey those that are. Mortals are a treat for the Gentry, and not for the likes of you and me. Unless, of course, they are willing."

Kaye nodded, pondering that.

"Do you know how it feels to build magical energy?" the kelpie asked. "It is a prickling feeling. Cup your hand and concentrate on building the energy in it. What does it feel like?"

Kaye cupped her hand and imagined the air in her hand thickening and shimmering with energy. After a moment, she looked up in surprise. "It feels like when your hand falls asleep and then you move it. Prickly, like you said, like little shocks of energy shooting through it. It hurts a little."

"Move it back and forth between your hands. There you feel magic in its raw state, ready to become whatever you want it to be."

Kaye nodded, cradling the energy that was like a handful of nettles, letting some of it trickle through her open fingers. It was a feeling she remembered, sometimes coiling in her gut or pricking over her lips before some strange thing happened.

"Now, how did you accomplish raising the energy? What did you do?"

Kaye shook her head slightly. "I don't know… I just pictured it and stared at my hand."

"You pictured it. That is the easiest of the senses. Now you must learn to hear it, to smell it, to taste it. Only then will your magic become real. And be careful; sometimes a simple glamour can be seen through out of the corner of another's eye." The creature winked.

Kaye nodded.

"When you do magic, there are two stages: focus and surrender. Surrender is the part that so many do not understand.

"To do magic, you must focus on what it is you want to do, then let go of the energy and trust it to do your bidding.

"Close your eyes. Now picture the energy surrounding you. Imagine, for example, a ring on one of your fingers. Add detail to it. Imagine the gold of the band, then imagine the gem, its color, its clarity, how it will reflect the light… that's right. Exactly like that."

Her eyes fluttered open as Corny gasped. "Kaye! There really is a ring on your finger. A real, imaginary ring. I can see it."

Kaye opened her eyes, and there it was, on her index finger, just as she had imagined it, the silver carved into the shape of a girl and the glittering emerald set in her open mouth. She turned it against the light, but even knowing that she had magicked it into being, the ring was as solid as a stone.

"What about undoing… things?" Kaye asked.

The kelpie threw back its head and laughed, white teeth shining even in the gloom. "What have you done?"

"Enchanted someone to… like me," Kaye said, in a low voice. Corny looked at her, surprised and a little annoyed. He wasn't going to be happy that there was another part of the story she'd left out.

The kelpie grinned and clucked its tongue. "You must remove the enchantment on him in the same way that you would take off a glamour. Feel the web of your magic, reach out and tear it. Practice with the ring."

Kaye concentrated, letting the energy swirl around her, feeling it run through her. It seemed to ebb and flow with each beat of her heart.

They were driving back when Kaye pointed to the hill. "Look at those lights. Wonder who's up there."

"I don't see anything." He looked at her sharply in the rearview mirror.

Cemetery Hill was a large sloping hill with a steep incline on the side that faced the highway. That side had neither graves nor tombs, and in the winter kids would blithely go sledding, piling spare mittens and scarves on the monuments. An abandoned, half-built mausoleum stood at the base of one gently sloping side. With two levels but no roof, the top was overgrown with smallish trees and vines. There were dozens upon dozens of monuments, tombs, and gravestones erected around it.

"Think that's where the Unseelie Court is?" she asked softly.

"I want to see it."

He drove into the graveyard.

They parked along the tumbled-stone path. She stared through the rear windshield at the darting lights as she waited for Corny to walk around and open her door.

"Those are definitely faeries," Kaye said.

"I can't see anything." There was an edge of panic in Corny's voice.

Kaye followed the lights, saw them dazzle and turn, keeping just enough ahead of her that she could not see them clearly. She sped up her pace, boots crunching the frost-stiffened grass. They were so close she could just snatch one out of the air…

"Kaye!" Corny called, and she turned. "Don't fucking leave me behind and make me have to wonder if I'm a goddamn nutcase for the rest of my life."

"I'm not leaving you! I'm trying to catch one of these things."

Suddenly there was an impossible explosion of fireflies, darting in and out of the trees. It must be well past midnight and too late in the season for fireflies anyway, the chill of autumn and recent rain stiffening the grass beneath their feet with frost. But the insects darted around them, each blinking for a long moment, then gone, then blinking again. Then she looked at them carefully. They were little winged creatures, even smaller than those she had snatched at. One flitted close to her and showed its teeth.

Kaye made a shrill sound.

"What?" Corny said.

"Not bugs… they're tiny, nasty faeries."

He dropped Kaye's hand and snatched at one, although it darted out of his grip. "I can't see anything. Are those the things… what you saw from the road?"

She shook her head. "No. Those lights were bigger."

He squatted down, his breath rising from his lips in puffs of white vapor. "Can you see them now?"

She shook her head. "Lutie said something about the opening being in a brown patch of grass, but practically the whole hill is covered with brown grass."

"Maybe the patch is bare by now."

Kaye knelt down next to Corny and cupped her ear to the ground. There was faint music. "Listen. You can hear it."

He moved to her side and pressed his ear to the ground as well. "Music," he said. "Sounds like pipes."

"It's beautiful," she said, the smile on her face before she remembered that this was not a good place they were trying to enter.

"Let's walk a circuit around the hill. We'll both look for any patch that seems weird." Corny stretched from his squat and waited for her to start walking.

The graveyard was unnaturally quiet. The moon was, if anything, fuller and fatter than it had been when she last saw it. It seemed unnatural; the thing looked bloated in the sky, and she thought again about the sun bleeding to death while the moon grew tumescent with devoured light.

The newer, granite gravestones were all polished to an unnatural mirror shine that reflected her and Corny as they passed. The older markers were a pale, milky marble, grass stains and dirt washed out by the moonlight. Pale as Roiben's hair.

"Hey, what about that?" Corny pointed to a patch of grass that did seem a different shade of brown.

Kneeling down beside it, Corny pulled back a corner as though it were the flap of a sod tent. Corny leaned in.

"No," Kaye said. "I have to go in there alone."

"I want this," Corny said. "You said you wouldn't leave me behind."

"It's probably not safe for me to go. I'll be back as soon as I can." Kaye shimmied into the entrance. "I promise."

The music seemed louder now, pipes and laughter swelling in the quiet night. Kaye heard Corny say "You get to have all the fun" as she followed the song inside.