My voice came out in a whisper, somewhat less certain than I’d have liked: “How do you do, Brer Rabbit.” Less certain and more Southern, which surprised me. Mostly I sounded like I was from Nowhere, U.S.A, due to having grown up Everywhere, U.S.A. as my father drove us around. Once in a while, though, the years in North Carolina came through, and for all that the storybooks spelled it br’er, I couldn’t help just swallowing most of the letters and turning the word to bruh, Brother, the way it was supposed to be.
“Won’t you sit down and have some tea, Detective Walker?” Ashley poured me a cup without waiting on my answer, and put two small cookies onto a plate for me. I sat down, not so much because I wanted to break bread with Brer Rabbit as I had no idea what he might do with Allison Hampton’s daughter if I didn’t. Every story I knew about him danced through my mind, and the rabbit managed to smile at me.
“Now, it won’t be the Tar Baby nor the briar patch that looses you of me today, Officer Walker. Nor will it be the tortoise and the hare, nor the scarecrow. We know those tales, you and I, and we will not tell them again here and now.” He sounded like that certain style of old Southern gentleman, the ones who say every syllable in slow concentration, though even so, “Tar Baby” was a rolled-out luxurious, “Taah Baybeh”.
I picked up my teacup to give my hands something to do. “What is it that you want?”
Affront came into the rabbit’s brown eyes. “How can you think I want anything, Officer Walker?”
“You’re Brer Rabbit. You always want something.” A fragile smile worked its way past the edge of my teacup. “Usually something you shouldn’t have.”
It took everything I had not to look at Ashley. Brother Rabbit didn’t have that same restraint, and glanced her way before smiling at me.
“Did you know it’s my birthday?” Ashley beamed at Brer Rabbit, at me, and at the birthday cake which hadn’t previously been on the table. “I’m seven today,” she added self-importantly. “How old are you?”
“Why, I’m as old as the very hills, Miss Ashley. I’m as old as human dreams. And I did know it was your birthday. If it weren’t, you might never have seen that rabbit hole I dug just for you.”
“My mommy couldn’t see it. Sometimes grown-ups don’t see what’s there. Except Detective Walker. She sees things. She’s a superhero!”
Brer Rabbit looked from Ashley to me and back again. “Is she, now. Well, I have an idea, Miss Ashley. If Officer Walker is so much a hero, perhaps she’ll play a little game with me. If she wins, you go home with her, back to the place you call home. If I win, you’ll stay with me, here in this magical land.”
Ashley chirruped, “Sure!” before I could stuff half the cake into her mouth and silence her. Some superhero I was. She turned her bright little smile on me and lifted a china pot. “Would you like some honey in your tea, Detective Walker?”
“Um.” I looked into my undrunk tea. “No, thanks, sweetie. Not right now.” Not until after I’d rescued her from a chaos elemental. Ashley shrugged and began cutting pieces of her cake, though she didn’t go so far as to offer any to me or Brother Rabbit. I supposed there were limits to what you could expect of a seven-year-old left with a cake and no parental supervision. I turned my attention back to Rabbit, warily asking, “What game?”
“A game of chance,” Rabbit said, and it struck me maybe a little too late that for a creature dredged out of Ashley’s imagination, he was awfully well-spoken.
“It’s not just her imagination I spring from, Officer Walker. She may be hearing something very different from what you hear. Tricks,” Brer Rabbit said with a shake of his head. “They’re terrible things.”
What was terrible in my mind was that one, he appeared to be reading my thoughts, and two, Brer Rabbit generally came out ahead of the other animals in his stories. Being out-smarted by a rabbit didn’t seem like a good way to build my shamanic confidence.
Well, said my ever-present sarcastic voice, you could try remembering your mental shields.
Glimmering approval turned Brer Rabbit’s brown eyes to amber as I belatedly constructed the Enterprise-like shields that Coyote had taught me to build. I really needed to get in the habit of maintaining those things twenty-four/seven. “I do come out ahead,” Rabbit agreed, “but so would you, if you were the hero of your own stories.”
I stared at him a long moment, unable to stop myself from looking back over the last seven months of my life in that light. Technically, I’d come out ahead, in that I wasn’t dead. On the other hand, quite a few other people were. I wasn’t all that sure I qualified as the hero of anything.
“Ooh,” Ashley said happily. “Carrot cake.”
Brer Rabbit sat up, paws tucked to his chest, nose a-quiver, just like the most rabbity rabbit there ever was. He looked avariciously at Ashley, who had managed to smear cream cheese frosting all the way from her eyebrows to her chin. I checked the cake, but there was no face-sized imprint in it. I had to admire the kid’s tenacity, in that case.
“Tell you what,” I said dryly. “You can have a piece of carrot cake if you let Ashley go. In fact, you can have the whole carrot cake. A nice full round tummy and a nice warm sun to sleep under. What could be better than that?”
Brer Rabbit’s nose twitched again and for about a millisecond, I thought it was actually going to work. Then he sank back into his seat, whiskers drooping. “I’m afraid keeping the girl is more important.”
“Why?” Nerves suddenly cramped my hands and I was glad I’d remembered to shield my thoughts. None of the stories I’d heard talked about Brer Rabbit stealing children. That was more of an Irish fairy tale.
A thunderous cloud rolled over the sky, cutting out all the light. The Lower World stretched flatter and thinner, like it was trying to hide from something, or, it came to me, as if it was trying to hide something. Me, maybe. Me, or Ashley. My own voice came from far away, pulled into discordant tones by the distorted world: “Who sent you, Bro’ Rabbit?”
He wouldn’t tell me, but I knew the answer already; knew it as though it had been burned into my bones. There was a creature out there, something the banshee had called Master, and he had haunted me since the day my shamanic powers awakened. I didn’t know what he was or what he wanted besides a piece of me, but all of a sudden Ashley Hampton looked like a very tempting piece of bait. I’d followed her into the rabbit hole without a second thought. I’d go anywhere to keep the kid safe. Little girls didn’t deserve to get mixed up in my weird-ass world.
Ashley, miserably, said, “I want to go home.”
“Oh, but not yet.” Brer Rabbit threw off the gloom—literally: the sky lightened again, darkness fleeing before his smooth Southern voice—and I put an arm around Ashley’s shoulders protective. “We haven’t had our cake yet,” he said.
Ashley sniffled. “Okay. But it was more fun before, when we were playing.”
“We can play as long as you like,” Brer Rabbit promised.
Kids were amazing. Mercurial little monsters, in the depths of despair one moment and happy as larks the next. Ashley brightened right up. “Will you dance with me?”
For a rabbit, he did a surprisingly good job of looking non-plussed. Then he stood, came around the table, and swept Ashley up in his rabbity arms.
The child I had my arm around stayed right where she was.
Carrot cake and honey and a pink table cloth stuck to Brer Rabbit’s face and chest and paws.
Ashley grabbed my hand and whispered, “Run!”