My eyes were on a patch of darkness. If memory served, the area was a stretch of parkland. Too marshy to do much with, maybe, being so close to Hillsglade, they’d put a shack on it, and there was a sports field. Behind both were trees, and highway.
If I reached that point, I’d skip ahead, create some distance.
I quickened my pace.
“Don’t be in such a rush, handsome rose,” Ev said. “We’ll accompany you. Watch.”
I glanced back.
A scraping sound, a flash of orange-yellow light.
A lighter?
The light was strongest around one side-view mirror.
Ev moved the lighter until it was behind her, impossibly bright, the only light available, casting her in silhouette.
“Lighters don’t work that way,” I said, challenging any glamour she was using.
But the shadow was now something that extended the opposite way, until it came to rest on the side view mirror. If I followed the head of the shadow to the shoulders, now cast on the side of the car, the torso, stretching long across the ground, and finally the legs, attached to a Faerie…
She’d gone from silhouette to shadow, and the shadow extended to her, on my side of the mirror.
I heard footsteps, and realized they belonged to Keller.
Also on my side of the mirror.
Ev wore a long jacket with a shawl that hid her arms when they weren’t straight down at her sides, her straight black hair looked liquid, like the post-effects in a shampoo commercial. Her eye was as dead as a doll’s.
“Neat trick with the lighter,” I told Ev. “I don’t suppose you could teach it to me?”
“I could,” she said. “Will you give me your company for twenty year’s time?”
I pretended to consider, then shook my head.
“You’re falling to pieces, artificial flower,” Keller said, behind me. He was so fine boned he looked like he’d had a bird skeleton before his flesh had been put on. His jacket was short, the collar fluffy, and he had a choker on his neck. I could see his belt, glittering with tools that were discreetly concealed, but not entirely hidden.
My heart pounded.
I wasn’t a practitioner anymore. I knew stuff, but there would be no drawing runes on the ground and commanding spirits. It didn’t help that the spirits didn’t follow the same rules here.
I drew the Hyena from the holster I’d once made for June.
What I wouldn’t do for your company, June, I thought.
“Well,” Ev said, “That’s as hideous as weapons get.”
“Yeah,” I said.
The shawl fluttered, moved by a wind that wasn’t here, and I saw her holding a short knife. It was curved like a bird’s talon.
Then the shawl moved back into place, and I couldn’t see it.
“I thought a Faerie would have something fancier,” I said. “A twelve foot sword or something.”
“Letita? Pah,” Ev said. “Her sword broke, she’ll settle on something else. Last I heard, she was making a trident that could come apart in a cat o’ nine.”
“Crude, as torture devices go,” Keller said.
He was two steps closer than he had been a moment ago. I hadn’t noticed him draw closer.
I shifted position to try and keep them both in my sight, and saw that Ev was closer still, an iron thread stretched between hands, knife clamped in her teeth.
Keller held the other end of the thread. The thread then extended from him to… the mirror Ev had used to enter. I had little doubt it was sharp enough to cut to bone, if I happened to walk into it.
Magicians used sleight of hand. Move one hand, while the other took your watch. Then while you looked at the watch, they’d palm a card. One thing after another, and while you were watching their hands, somewhere along the line, they changed their clothes.
Faerie, as I understood it, could do something very similar, but in this case, they were moving people, not individual hands.
These two were a working pair, they’d spent centuries together, learning tricks that had nothing at all to do with glamour, and they’d tested those tricks against Faerie who’d been watching out for those same tricks for just as long.
Damn it, damn it, damn it.
“Rather than a whip,” Ev said -she held the knife-, “We’ve caged you in with finer string. No slipping away, artificial flower.”
Not wanting to move, I tilted my head instead. I could see light from the mirrors touch the string, making it glow.
“You can run,” she said. “But you’d get caught by a thread you can’t even see. It’d cut deep, at just the right place to avoid killing. Most keep running at that point, thread scraping bone, and they keep going even after they realize it’s a maze, and they’re carving themselves to pieces on the walls.”
“If it goes that far,” Keller said, three paces behind me, “I’ll use the thread to sew you back together. There won’t even be a scar. Promise.”
“What’s the alternative?” I asked, “To the wire?”
Ev revealed her knife again. “I can cut your skin and lift your nerves free. Play them with the knife’s edge as a musician might plays his fiddle.”
“She’s really very good,” Keller murmured, “The very first time I met her, she was conducting a melody with a Faerie’s gasping cries. Music made by pain and pleasure alone. Ethereal.”
I hate Faerie so fucking much.
“The real challenge,” Ev said, “The art, is to make the music something special for the instrument. Something so beautiful that it trumps the pain and wins the instrument’s heart over to me.”
“I believe she’s only managed it twice,” Keller said.
“Practice makes perfect,” Ev admitted.
I looked between them. The way they alternated off one another was almost hypnotic. On a level, I suspected I knew how this went. They drew my focus, taking turns. Ev, Keller, Ev, Keller, Ev, Keller, captivating my attention with the horrible stuff they’d do to me, and when I was used to the pattern, they’d change it up. I’d turn my attention to the next, expecting the next explanation, but no, I’d have a Faerie enacting the horrible things, while my attention wasn’t all there.
“What do you think?” Keller asked, “Where to start?”
“There’s something beautiful about a man on his knees, face turned skyward, suspended like a puppet by the strings that are meant to be inside that face.”
“A pious sort of beautiful.”
I needed to do something to take control of this, but if I attacked, I’d be leaving myself open.
I thought of Hillsglade House. The wounds that had been delivered to me hadn’t been physical, not entirely.
Words hurt.
“That’s the fucking stupidest thing I’ve ever heard of,” I said.
I saw Ev’s expression go cold.
“Nerves don’t work that way. They work by ion channels or something like that. And music of moans and groans? The only way you’d make that work in the slightest is if you caked it full of glamour. That’s not beautiful, that sounds like a five year old getting into her mom’s makeup kit for the first time.”
Okay, from cold to pissed off. Her anger distorted her expression.
Good. Nice to finally get a rise out of someone, after Rose being all smug and condescending.
“Don’t fuck with me,” I said. “Not today. You don’t want to cross me. I’ve got very few reasons to hold back, and an awful lot of negativity to vent. What I wind up doing probably won’t be anything near some nervous violin-playing or whatever that garbage you were spitting out was.”