Lesley Livingston - Wondrous Strange

Suddenly the granite wall in front of Sonny began to waver like a mirage, and then cracked. A ghostly, iridescent light seeped through the split in the stone, and Sonny could see diminutive figures silhouetted in the glow. A tiny, wizened face peered out at him. When the creature saw the Janus standing there, it did not turn and run back to the Faerie lands. Instead it gave a nasty, high-pitched giggle.

A piskie-fae.

Sonny tried not to roll his eyes as he reached back into his satchel and withdrew a handful of rock salt. He threw the salt into the piskie’s leering face. The thing squealed and disappeared back into the rift.

That was far too easy! he thought, grinning. He might not even need to use his blade at all.

His reflection was interrupted by an angry buzzing. It was as though Sonny had just thrown a stone at a nest of hornets. Scrabbling at one another and the edges of the rift, a swarm of tiny, blood-lusting piskies came rushing at him, pale thin bodies glimmering like knives in the darkness.

It took Sonny the better part of an hour, and the carnage, even on a piskie-sized scale, was considerable.

As he cleaned the green, glowing piskie blood from the blade of his sword and veiled it once more, Sonny felt no remorse. The piskie-fae that had attacked him had got what they’d deserved. Piskie weren’t all nasty. Some, back home, were even occasionally useful, although their malicious pranks made them annoying as hell.

But these had been positively homicidal, and in far greater numbers than Sonny had ever been warned about.

Maddox would give him a very hard time about how long it had taken Sonny to defeat such minor fae. Sonny wondered how Maddox himself was doing. Or any of the others, for that matter. Because there were only thirteen Janus, it was unlikely that their paths would cross much over the next nine nights. They had the entire park to cover.

The ground at Sonny’s feet was littered with rock-salt crystals and flattened by his own boot prints in a rough circle that spread about three yards wide all around him. He hadn’t, in the frenzy, realized just how big the swarm had been. He paced the diameter of the circle. Really big. Especially for creatures with an outside height of only six or seven inches.

Sonny stared at the trampled earth and frowned. It didn’t make a ton of sense.

Piskie weren’t necessarily the smartest fae, but they were usually pretty crafty. He would have expected them to have spread out. Come at him in staggered waves. Find more than just that one rift. Instead it looked as if they had launched a massed assault at this spot to keep him busy and anchored to one position.

Sonny swore explosively and spun in a circle on his heel, casting out with his Janus perception, so heavily preoccupied until now. A sudden, blinding crimson light shot through his mind. His insides went cold. Something was terribly wrong somewhere south. He struggled to focus, to pinpoint the blazing light on the map in his mind…

There it was. Or, rather, there it had been .

Sonny started to run.

But he knew, in his heart, that he was already much too late.

Crouching near the edge of the Lake, Sonny put his cheek to the cold ground and peered along the surface of the water, still swirling with iridescence-evidence of recent passage through the Samhain Gate to this realm from the Otherworld.

Something other than piskies had come through the Gate, very recently. Maybe half an hour earlier. Sonny lay with his cheek to the ground for a better view and stared eye-level out over the obsidian surface of the Lake.

There .

There was a faintly glowing trail leading out of the water. Sonny sprang to his feet and ran over to investigate.

The soft ground at the edge of the Lake was churned to mud. It looked as if there had been some kind of struggle, or as if something had been dragged out of the water and onto the path. Here and there Sonny saw the elongated circular impressions of what could only have been hoofprints. He crouched on the path for a closer look.

It was Central Park, after all. Horses pulled carriages through the park, and wealthy equestrians rode their mounts along the bridle paths. But these prints had come from unshod hooves. And the water that pooled in the impressions had the same telltale iridescent sheen.

A kelpie? Sonny turned over the clues in his mind.

In one of the prints, Sonny found strands of coarse red horsehair and three glittering black onyx beads carved in the shapes of tiny stags’ heads.

He pocketed the hair and beads and stood, looking around. From the corner of his eye, Sonny saw something pale hidden in the reeds. He retrieved the object, brushing damp vegetation from its surface. It was a script, held together with brass fasteners through the punch holes. The front cover was gone, but the Dramatis Personae page was mostly intact, although marred by a hoofprint that looked as though its edges were very slightly scorched. Handwritten notes were scribbled in the margins, and at the top of the page a note in marker said Kelley’s Script . Sonny frowned, fanning through the play, until a smattering of dialogue caught his eye.

“Out of this wood do not desire to go,” began the speech, and Sonny almost dropped the pages in surprise.

He’d heard those very words not long before.

Sonny scanned the lakeshore one last time and knelt at the edge of the path.

Buried almost completely in the mud lay the trampled remains of a single peach-colored rose. Sonny plucked a bruised petal and held it up before his eyes. The script. The girl from the Shakespeare Garden.

His firecracker.

Kelley …

Exhausted, muddy, and soaked to the skin, Kelley kicked the apartment door closed behind her and yelled out for her roommate. There was no answer- Tyff must be out, she thought. Just as well. At that moment she didn’t really feel like launching into a recap of her strange adventure in the park. The cold of the Lake still gripped her bones, even though she’d jogged the last few blocks home. It made her thought processes slow and sluggish.

Shivering hard enough that her teeth rattled, Kelley shed clothing in a trailing heap on the floor, tugged the afghan off the back of the couch, and wrapped it around herself as she stumbled to the bathroom and turned the shower taps on, setting the temperature as hot as it would go. She knew that the only thing that was going to drive away impending hypothermia was the longest, hottest shower she’d ever taken, followed by a large mug of even hotter cocoa.

The shower was about as close to heaven as she could imagine. Steam billowed in clouds around her, and eventually the chattering of her teeth stopped and her muscles unclenched enough to let her stand upright. Once the heat had restored her mental faculties sufficiently, Kelley allowed herself to mull over the evening’s bizarre turn of events.

She’d come to her senses lying facedown on the lakeside path, retching out murky water, with the horse nuzzling at her shoulder. By the time she’d regained her bearings and struggled to her feet, the creature had vanished into the darkness, and Kelley was left with nothing but a few strands of long, reddish horsehair clutched in her fist. Sodden and shivering, she had gathered up shoes and coat and all the stuff that had spilled from her bag and headed for home.

That was what she remembered.

Only…

There was confusion in Kelley’s mind. She could recall, from the moments before she’d blacked out, a jumble of images. Fleeting impressions of lights and sound-strange, beautiful music…

Or, to use the technical term, oxygen deprivation .