Shifting Shadows: Stories from the World of Mercy Thompson(23)

Her eyes welled, and her mouth tried to smile, and still she did not look at me. Her eyes were fixed at my feet. “Spoken like a poet and singer, my dear Samuel. You’ll forget things, forget me—this world does not easily hold the things best left Underhill.” Her mouth trembled. “I need the chain I gave you.”

I unwound the silver chain and held it out to her.

She took a half step closer, then closed her eyes and swallowed. When her eyes opened, black was trying to consume the green. She took a full step back. She stretched out her arm, and I felt her magic burn my hand.

“If you ever need me,” I told her, “I will come.”

The silver chain unmade itself and fell to the ground from my hand, now a small pile of pebbles. She took out a small pouch and took out some of the hair inside, burning it as it nestled in her palm. When nothing except ashes were in her hand, she stepped closer, so that when she turned her hand over, the ashes fell onto the pebbles that had been her silver chain.

“Fare thee well, Samuel Silverheart,” she said, turning away.

I waited until she had gone before I made my answer. I threw back my head and let the wolf sing our grief to the unkind moon.

FOURTEEN

Samuel

After a day of aimless wandering in my wolf’s skin, I found a task to turn my hand to and headed for the remains of the witch’s hut. I no longer knew which direction Ariana’s home was, but my wolf knew exactly where the witch had lived. The burnt hut looked just as it had when I’d last seen it. It smelled the same, too. Though weeks had passed in Ariana’s world, here it was still the same winter that my da had died. I could smell my own scent as clearly as if I’d only been gone a few days.

I headed to the oak, driven by the need to destroy or be destroyed—and I didn’t much care which. My grandmother had been staying somewhere nearby, or she would not have come out the last time I had been there. If it had only been days, then I could trail her and confront her. She could not reach Ariana through me anymore. If I could, I would kill her. If not, she would kill me, then die slowly for want of the power of fae pain and suffering anyway. Even dead, I would win.

As I approached the meadow, I smelled rotting flesh. I paused because it did not smell like wolf. It smelled like—

Pinning my ears I crept cautiously toward the source of the foul smell—and found the witch’s body.

She had been savaged and half-eaten, but I would have known her if only a finger bone had been left. It had snowed once and melted since she died, but I knew wolf kill when I saw it.

My father was not dead.

I howled, calling for him, and the woods went still, recognizing a predator’s voice. But my father gave me no answer, and gradually, the usual denizens of the winter forest went about their lives.

I slept near the hut that night and spent the next day building a fire hot enough to turn the witch’s body to bits and pieces of bone, which I put in a sack with salt and buried under cold running water. My wife, whose name I had lost, had told me once that running water turns away evil.

I would wait for Ariana to call me, I thought, as I put a heavy boulder on top of the sack of the witch’s ashes. Even if it took a very long time, I would wait for her. I would wait for her, and I would look for my da.

When I went to sleep that night, alone in the shelter of a downed tree, hope lived in my heart.

FAIRY GIFTS

I grew up in Butte, Montana. It is a town of about thirty-four thousand people that once had a population far greater—most of whom came to work the mines that started as gold mines, shifted to silver mines, and finally produced high-quality copper just as the country (and the world) began stringing copper wires for electricity. Butte was the third city in the world to have electricity—Paris, France, and New York City being the first two. The mining town once had a large Chinese population as well as Cornish, Irish, Welsh, Finnish, Italian, Serbian, and Greek.

When I was a child, the old tunnel mines had all been shut down, and the copper came from an open-pit mine that had eaten the suburbs of Meaderville, McQueen, and East Butte—and continued to grow until it ate the old amusement park Columbia Gardens. But there were all sorts of stories that were told about the “old days.” Stories about the racetrack that had stood where East Junior High (now East Middle School) had been built. I heard tales of Shoestring Annie, Dirty-Mouth Jean, and the old madame who beat up Carrie Nation when she took her temperance crusade to the wrong bar.

So I just had to set a story in Butte.

The events in this story all happen before Moon Called.

Butte, Montana, present day, mid-December

Cold didn’t bother him anymore, but he remembered how it felt: the sharp bite of winter on toes, fingers, nose, and ears. Even with modern adaptations, ten degrees below zero wouldn’t be pleasant. Neither the temperature nor falling snow kept people out of the streets for the Christmas stroll, however. Hot apple cider, freshly made sausages, and abundant cookies under the streetlights strove to make up for the nasty weather—none of which were useful sustenance for him. He passed them by with scarcely a glance.

Well, then, he thought, impatient with himself, what are you doing here? He had no more answer now than he’d had two nights ago when he’d arrived.

The people who lived in the old mining town had always known how to party. In a hundred years that hadn’t changed. Brutal climate, hard and dangerous work brought a certain clarity to the need for pleasure.