Ilona Andrews: On the Edge

“Now remember,” she said as they joined the herd of evening shoppers. “Shoes and that’s it. I mean it.”

NOBODY said anything until a pair of small black and blue shoes perched on Jack’s feet. They weren’t Skechers, but they looked similar enough. To get the real thing, she’d have to go to the mall in Savannah, and she had to save every drop of gas or she couldn’t get to work. Rose crouched and mashed the top of the shoe with her finger, looking for Jack’s toes. Ample room. He grew like a weed, and she always tried to buy shoes a little bigger than he needed. “Do they feel too big?”

Jack shook his head.

“Do you like them?”

Jack nodded.

“Okay,” she said, glancing at the price tag. Twenty-seven ninety-nine. She would’ve bought them even if it said fifty.

The boys watched her very quietly, standing in the aisle like a pair of frightened rabbit kittens. Rose sighed. “Would you like to look at toys?”

“Look” being the operative word. The boys stared at the action figures, transfixed by armor and muscles of colored plastic. Rose lingered by the end shelf. The stranger on the road kept popping back into her head. He wasn’t local; she was sure of it.

The Edge was narrow here, only about twelve miles across. They didn’t even have a real town, just a handful of houses randomly sprinkled on the outskirts of the Wood and grandly termed East Laporte. She knew all the local Edgers by sight, and she’d never come across anyone like the king of the road before. Those eyes weren’t something she would forget.

If he wasn’t from East Laporte, then he was probably from the Weird. People from the Broken favored guns, not swords.

Rose bit her lip. The Edgers like her passed freely between the worlds, but crossing from the Broken or the Weird into the Edge was a different matter for those not born to it.

First, most people from the Weird and the Broken couldn’t see past their respective boundary. If someone from the Broken tried to follow her into the Edge, she would vanish from their sight when she crossed. One moment she’d be there, and then she’d be gone, and they would keep right on driving in their own world. Because they couldn’t sense the boundary, for them the Edge simply wasn’t there. It didn’t exist, like a room behind a door that forever remained closed. On the other side, most people of the Weird couldn’t sense their boundary either and missed it as well, going about their regular lives, never knowing about the odd place next door that led to an even odder world.

Of course, there were always exceptions to the rule. Some people in the Broken were born with a magic talent. It lay dormant until one day they stumbled onto an unfamiliar road and decided to take it to see where it led. Some people in the Weird managed to discover the other dimension as well. And that brought the second problem: crossing the boundaries hurt.

There was nothing to be done about that. People like her lived in the Edge, because it was the only place they could retain their magic, and they worked and studied in the Broken, because that’s where they made their living. But while they experienced aches and discomfort and a brief stab of pain during the crossing, a person native to the Broken or the Edge would endure agony.

Still, a few determined enough did make it through. Caravans from the Weird stopped by East Laporte every three months or so. Like most Edgers, she sank every spare dollar into buying junk from the Broken. Pepsi. Panty hose. Fancy pens. When the caravans arrived, she would carry her loot out and sell it to the caravan master at a markup or trade for the goods from the Weird, mostly odd jewelry and exotic trinkets, and then unload those goods at a couple of dealers in the Broken. A little extra money.

The caravans didn’t stay long. The worlds were greedy. Too much time in the Broken, and you’d lose your magic. Too much time in the Weird, and the magic would infect you and the Broken wouldn’t let you back in. The Edgers had some immunity—they could last in either world longer than other people, but even they eventually succumbed. Peter Padrake, one of the most famous people from the Weird to have crossed into the Broken, had lost his magic years ago. He couldn’t even enter the Edge anymore.

What would cause a man from the Weird to risk pain and the loss of his magic by traveling to the Edge? He didn’t come with any caravan—those weren’t due for another couple of weeks. It had to be some sort of emergency. Perhaps he was here for her.

That thought made her stop. No, she decided. She’d been left alone for the last three years. Most likely he hadn’t come from the Weird at all. The Edge was narrow but very long, as long as the worlds themselves. It ran into the ocean in the East, but in the West it stretched for thousands of miles. True, the Wood usually kept the visitors out, but they did get travelers once in a while. They said that in the West, the Edge widened. Rumor had it that a chunk of a large Western city sat right in the Edge. Perhaps he’d come from there. Yes, that must be it.

Who cared where he’d come from anyway?

Rose sighed and picked up a big jug of bubble fluid, equipped with four wands. Georgie liked bubbles. He could keep them very still in the air for almost twenty seconds. She had already plunked down the money for the shoes. In for a penny, in for a pound. After all, Georgie hadn’t done anything wrong, and Jack kind of got rewarded for ripping his new shoes. Might as well get the bubbles. It was good practice for Georgie. It would help him learn to flash . . .

It dawned on her that Jack got new shoes and Georgie would only get some lousy bubbles. It wasn’t fair. No matter what she did, she just couldn’t win. Gahh, what would be the right thing to do? To buy the bubbles or to buy nothing but the shoes? She wished she had a manual or something, some kind of instruction sheet that would clearly spell out what a responsible parent did in this sort of situation. Her imagination painted Georgie twenty years later, sitting in leg irons before some Broken psychiatrist. “Well, you see, it all started with bubbles . . .”

In the aisle, Georgie said something, and a deeper male voice answered. An alarm went off in her head. Rose leaned over, peeking around the bubble display. A man stood next to the boys, talking. She put down the bubbles and marched over to the newcomer.

He stood with his back to her. It was a broad, muscled back, covered with a faded green T-shirt that was tight across the shoulders and loose around his waist. The T-shirt had seen better days. His jeans fared no better: old, worn-out, gray from permanent dirt embedded in the weave. His hair was dark and worn on the longer side, not quite reaching his shoulders.

He wasn’t a local Edger, and Jack would’ve smelled him if he was fresh from the Edge or the Weird. Magic didn’t work past the boundary, but Jack’s sense of smell was still keener than normal, and people with magic in their blood gave off a specific scent. She never smelled it herself, but Jack maintained they smelled like pies, whatever that meant. And he was under strict orders to tell her immediately if they encountered an unfamiliar pie-smelling person in the Broken.

As she neared them, she heard the man’s voice. “. . . yeah, but his arms don’t move. He’s stuck like that. You can’t make him fight.”

He didn’t sound like a child molester, but child molesters never sounded like child molesters. They sounded like your law-abiding, churchgoing, nice next-door neighbor. And they were very good with children.

Georgie saw her. “Rose, he likes the guys, too.”

“I see,” she said. If they were back in the Edge, and if she had the knowledge to convert her power into an environmental effect, her voice would have frozen everything in a twenty-yard radius. “And does he usually hang out in the toy aisle talking to little boys?”