Things the huldra had showed me come back to me sometimes. I’ll look at the light streaming through the clouds, and I’ll briefly see a way to hurl lightning. A candle will flicker, just so, and I’ll see tiny, scurrying manikins, darting away from the wavering light, but each at my beck and call if I could just remember those long, strange words.
Three-leg Cat leaped suddenly into my lap, and I spilled hot tea. Three-leg scampered away hissing, and I rose cussing. Then Mama’s shadow fell over my door.
“Boy,” she said, turning my latch. “You in there?”
I mopped tea, took a deep breath, thought about Mama’s question. Am I? Was I? Will I be?
Another shadow joined Mama’s. This one was tall and slender.
“Are you alone in there, Markhat?” asked Darla, and I could hear the impish grin she wore in her tone, though I could see only shadows through my cheap and bubbled glass.
“Time will tell,” I said. I drained the cup of its last sip of dark bitter tea. “Come on in, ladies,” I added, sitting up straight and hiding Mama’s cup in a drawer. The fancy chocolate cake Martha had dropped off earlier sat untouched on my desk. “I’ve baked us all a cake.”
Mama flung my door open, grinning, and all but dragged Darla inside.
Darla eyed Martha’s cake as though it might conceal Trolls or haunts.
“You did not,” she announced, “bake that cake.”
“I beg to differ, Miss Tomas,” I replied. “I have baked thousands of cakes in my day. In fact, I’m scraping the finder’s eye off my door and painting a baker’s rolling pin on it tomorrow.”
Darla laughed. Then she glided around my desk and dropped into my lap.
“Cakes and shirts,” she said. “Do I have reason to be jealous, Markhat?”
“Not at all,” I replied. I lifted an eyebrow, as if pondering. “Unless, of course, it’s an unusually good cake.”
We kissed.
We kissed again.
“Well I reckon I’ll be heading on,” gruffed Mama. She dropped a brown-wrapped parcel on my desk-more bitter tea leaves, no doubt-and waddled out my door.
“Alone at last,” said Darla. Her eyes twinkled. “And I know just what to-”
Knock, knock, knock. Not Mama’s knock, either.
Darla sighed and stood.
“I’ll wait for a while at Mama’s-” she began.
I pulled her back down. She giggled and kicked.
“Come back tomorrow,” I yelled, at the door. “I’m busy right now.”
“But-”
“I said come back tomorrow,” I yelled, putting some bellow into it. “No buts. No more knocking. Come. Back. Tomorrow.”
Silence.
Darla touched the Angel Malan I wore around my neck, the one she’d left for me, all those nights ago. I caught her searching my eyes, just for an instant, looking to see what might still be in there with me. I didn’t ask what she saw. I doubted the answer would please either of us.
Darla took my hand.
“It’s losing its grip, a little every day,” she said. How do women do that?
I just nodded. I wasn’t so sure. She didn’t see the things I dreamed of.
“Mama says you’ve already been through the worst.”
“Mama’s tea has been the most frightening part of the whole ordeal. I’m terrified she’s just feeding me her laundry water.”
Darla tweaked my nose.
“She spends hours brewing that…tea, Markhat, I was there when a package came all the way from that place she calls home-Pot Lock, something like that?”
“Pot Lockney. I hear they eat vampires whole there, dressed and snarling.”
Darla giggled. “Well, Mama is going to a lot of trouble and you, Mister Markhat, could be a little more appreciative.”
“Oh, I’m very appreciative of all my womenfolk. Why, I bought a middling expensive bottle of wine just for you this very day.”
Darla beamed. “I’m flattered. Does it have a cork, or do we twist something off the top?”
I sat Darla on the edge of my desk. She swung her long legs back and forth at the knees and watched expectantly as I rose, went to my bunkroom, and came back with a blood-red bottle of ten-year-old wine in my hand.
“Cork and a label,” I said. I offered Darla a pair of glasses-real glasses, not mugs, and clean.
She smiled.
I pulled corks and filled glasses. We resumed our preferred seating arrangement of my chair and my lap. I held my glass beneath my nose and made a show of sloshing it around in the glass and sniffing it.
“You have before you a slightly warm Rethmarch Red,” I said. “Bottled at the height of the summer in ninety-one, from grapes grown on the slopes of the famed Rethmarch Vineyard itself. I believe Madame will find it at once hearty and ethereal. Or is it fruity and redolent of oak? I can never keep my fancy wines straight.”
“You talk too much, Mister Markhat,” said Darla, making herself comfortable in my lap with an intriguing series of wiggles and twists. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were in love with the sound of your own voice.”
“It’s a good voice. At once throaty and redolent of tenor.”
She interrupted me with a kiss.
And if anything-anyone-ever lays the huldra left inside me to rest, I think it shall be Darla.