Tithe mtof-1 Page 8

  "There isn't anywhere you can look?"

  "No," Kaye said vehemently. "I already told you no. The swamp was the only place, and I was there all night."

  "But you're a faerie too. Don't you have any abilities?"

  "I don't know," Kaye said, thinking of Kenny. That was definitely not something she really wanted to discuss right now. Her head hurt enough already.

  "Can you cast any spells?"

  "I don't know, I don't know, I don't know! Can't you understand that I don't know anything at all?"

  "Come on in the back. Let's go online."

  They went into Corny's room, and he flicked on his computer. The screen went blue, and then his background picture loaded. It was a wizard hunched over a chess table while the two queen pieces battled, one all black and the other all white.

  Kaye flopped onto the tangled sheets of his bed, stomach down, wings up.

  Corny tapped a few keys, and his modem groaned.

  "Okay. F-a-e-r-i-e. Let's see. Hmmm. Gay stuff—don't go there."

  She snickered anyway.

  "Here we go. German changelings. Pictures. Yeats poetry."

  "Apparently, I'm a pixie," Kaye supplied. "Click on the changeling thing, though."

  "Interesting."

  He scrolled through it, and she tried to read it from her slightly-too-distant vantage point. "What?"

  "Says you throw 'em in the fire to get your own kid back… that or stick a hot poker down their throats."

  "Great. Next."

  "Here we go. Pixie. Can detect good and evil, hate orcs, and are about one to two feet tall…" He started to laugh. "Makes pixie dust."

  "Orcs?" Kaye inquired. She shifted her position, suddenly aware that it was hard to separate which muscles caused her wings to twitch. They seemed to move independently of her will and of each other, like two soft insects alighting on her back.

  Corny couldn't stop laughing. "Pixie dust. Like angels make angel dust. International drug cartels grab seraphim and shake 'em. Priests who sweep up churches put that stuff in Ziploc baggies."

  She snorted. "You're an idiot, you know that?"

  "I try," he said, still laughing.

  "Well, try 'Unseelie Court.'"

  A few clicks of his mouse and he said, "Looks like that's where all the bad guys hang out in Faeryland. What does this have to do with you?"

  "There's this knight there who may or may not be wanting to kill me. My friends want me to pretend to be human because there's this thing called the Tithe… it's complicated."

  Corny sat up again. "Why didn't you tell me?"

  "I just told you the part that made sense."

  "Okay." Corny nodded. "Now tell me the part that doesn't make sense."

  "I don't understand it all exactly, but basically there are solitary faeries and court faeries. Roiben is one of the court faeries, and I met him in the woods after he got shot. He's from the Unseelie Court."

  "Okay. I'm still with you, if barely."

  "Spike and Lutie-loo sent me an acorn message to tell me that he was dangerous. He killed my other friend, Gristle."

  "An acorn message?"

  "The top came off. It was hollow."

  "Right. Of course."

  "Ha-ha. Look for 'Tithe' next, okay? As far as I know, it's this sacrifice that makes the faeries that aren't part of any court still do what the court people say. I have to pretend to be human so they can pretend to sacrifice me."

  He typed in the keyword. "I'm just getting Jesus Crispy shit. Give-me-ten-percent-of-your-cash-to-me-so-I-can-buy-an-air-conditioned-doghouse kind of thing. This sacrifice—how safe is that? I mean, how well do you know these people?"

  "I trust them absolutely…"

  "But," Corny prompted.

  She smiled ruefully. "But they never told me. They knew all this time, and nothing—not one hint." Kaye looked pensively at the joints of her fingers. Why should one extra joint make them horrifying? It did, though—flexing them bothered her.

  Corny steepled his palms, cracking his knuckles like a villain. "Tell me the whole story again, slowly, and from the beginning."

  Kaye woke up muzzily, not sure where she was. She shifted until she felt a solid shape that groaned and pushed at her. Corny. She squinted at him and rubbed at her eyes. It was dark in the room, the only streaks of light sneaking around the edges of the heavy brown curtains. She heard voices from somewhere in the trailer over the distant sound of canned television laughter.

  She turned over again, trying to go back to sleep. The bedside table was in front of her line of vision. A book, Vintage, a bottle of ibuprofen, an alarm clock with flames on the clock face, and a black plastic chess knight.

  "Corny," she said, shaking what she thought was the shoulder of the lump. "Wake up. I know what to do. I know what we can do."

  He pushed the covers back from over his head. His eyes were slits of wet in the piles of comforter. "This better be good," he groaned.

  "The kelpie. I know how to call the kelpie."

  He pushed back the covers and sat up, suddenly awake. "Right. That's right." He slid out of bed, scratching his balls through once-white briefs, and sat down in front of the computer. The screensaver dispersed as he shook the mouse.

  In the hallway, Kaye could hear Janet's voice distinctly, complaining to her mother about the fact that she wasn't going to get her license if Corny didn't let her borrow his car.

  "What time is it?" Kaye asked.

  Corny looked at the clock on the screen. "After five."

  "Can I use your phone?"

  He nodded. "Do it now. You can't use it while I'm signed on. We only have the one line."

  Corny's bedroom phone was a copy of the emergency bat-phone, bright red and sitting under a plastic dome on the floor. It even had a little bulb in it that she imagined might blink when a call came in. Kaye sat down cross-legged on the floor, took off the dome, and dialed her house.

  "Hello?" Kaye's grandmother answered.

  "Grandma?" She dragged her fingers over the synthetic loops of the rug she was sitting on. Her eyes fell on her long green toes with chipped red nail polish on the jagged, untrimmed toenails.

  "Where are you?"

  "I'm at Janet's," Kaye said, wiggling the toes, willing herself to realize they belonged to her. It was hard talking to her grandmother now. The only reason her grandmother put up with her and Ellen was because they were family and you always took care of family. "I just wanted to tell you where I am."

  "Where were you this morning?"

  "I got up early," Kaye said. "I had to meet some friends before school started." That was true enough, in a way.

  "Well, when are you coming home then? Oh, and I have two messages for you. Joe from the Amoco called about some job—I hope you're not thinking of working at a gas station—and some boy named Kenny called twice."

  "Twice?" Kaye couldn't help the smile that was pushing up the corners of a mouth she was determined to keep grim.

  "Yes. Are you coming home for dinner?"

  "No, I'll eat here," Kaye said. "'Bye, Gram, I love you."

  "I think your mother would like it if you came home for dinner. She wants to talk to you about New York."

  "I've got to go. 'Bye, Gram."

  Kaye hung up the phone before her grandmother could start another sentence. "You can sign on now," she said.

  A few minutes later, Corny made a noise.

  She looked up.

  "Your plan has one little problem."

  "Don't they all… no, tell me, what is it?"

  "Kelpies basically like to drown people and then eat most of them—all but their guts. You're not supposed to get on their backs, yadda, yadda, yadda, they're fucking evil as hell, yadda, yadda, yadda, not to mention they shapeshift. Oh, yeah, you can tame them if you happen to manage to get a bridle on them. Fat chance of that."

  "Oh."

  "Did you ever wonder if some of these sites were designed by faeries? I wonder if I kept looking if I could find a n
ewsgroup or a hub page or something."

  "So, if we don't sit on its back, are we safe?"

  "Huh? Oh… I don't know."

  "Well, are there instances there where it drowns people without them getting on its back?"

  "No, but then it's not all that comprehensive."

  "I'm going to try it. I'm going to talk to it."

  He looked up from the computer desk. "You're not going without me."

  "Okay," Kaye said. "I just thought that it might be dangerous."

  "This is the real thing," he said, voice dropping low, "and I don't want to miss even one little bit of it. Don't even think of running off."

  She held up both hands in mock surrender. "I want you to go with me. Really, okay?"

  "I don't want to wake up someplace with a screwed-up memory and nobody ever believing me. Do you understand?" Corny's face was flushed.

  "C'mon, Corny, either your mom or Janet is going to hear you and come in here. I'm not leaving you."

  Kaye watched as he calmed somewhat, thinking that she should stop trying to anticipate what was going to happen next. After all, when you were already in a slippery place, reality-wise, you couldn't afford to assume that things would be straightforward from here on in.

  The metal of the car made her feel heavy and drowsy and sick, the way that carbon monoxide poisoning was supposed to make you feel before it killed you. Kaye rested her cheek against the cool glass of the window. Her throat was dry and her head was pounding. It had something to do with the air in the car, which seemed to scald her lungs as she breathed it. It was a short drive, and she was glad of it, practically tumbling out of the car when Corny opened the door for her.

  In the daylight, it was easy to see rows of houses beyond the trees, and Kaye wondered how it could have seemed like a great woods when she had stumbled through here. The stream, when they found it, was thick with garbage. Corny leaned down and smeared dirt off a brown bottle that didn't look like it was for beer. It looked like it should be holding some snake-oil salesman's hair tonic or something.

  "Vaseline glass," he said. "Some of this stuff is really old. I bet you could sell some of these." He pushed another bottle with his toe. "So, how do we call this thing?"

  Kaye picked up a brown leaf. "Do you have anything sharp?"

  He reached into his back pocket and pulled out a pocketknife, flicking it open with a deft movement of his thumb. "Just remember what the site said—no getting on its back, no way, no day, no matter what."

  "I saw the page, okay? You don't have to keep reminding me. Kelpie equals evil water horse that drowns people for fun. I get it."

  "Well, just so you're sure."

  He let her take the knife. She slid the tip of it into the pad of her thumb. A bright dot of blood welled up, and she smeared it on the leaf.

  "Now what?" he asked, but for all that the words sounded cynical, he was barely breathing as he spoke them.

  She dropped the leaf into the stream, blood side down, as she had done before. "I'm Kaye," she said, trying to remember the words. "I'm not from any court but I need your help. Please hear me."

  There was a long moment of silence after that when Corny let out his breath. She could see him start to believe that nothing was going to happen and she was torn between the desire to prove that she knew what she was doing and the fear of what was coming.

  A moment later, there was no more doubt as a black horse rose from the water.

  Either because it was day or with Kaye's new sight, the creature looked different. Its color was not so much black, but an emerald so deep that it looked black. And the nacreous eyes were gleaming like pearls. Still, when it regarded Kaye, she was forced to think of the research Corny had done. That was chilling enough.

  The kelpie strode onto the shore and shook its great mane, spraying her and Corny with glittering droplets of swamp water. Kaye held up her hands, but it hardly helped.

  "What do you seek?" the horse spoke, its voice soft but deep.

  Kaye took a deep breath. "I need to know how to glamour myself and I need to know how to control my magic. Can you teach me?"

  "What will you give me, girl-child?"

  "What do you want?"

  "Perhaps that one would like to ride on my back. I would teach you if you let him ride with me."

  "So that you can kill him? No way."

  "I wonder about death, I who may never know it. It looks much like ecstasy, the way they open their mouths as they drown, the way their fingers dig into your skin. Their eyes are wide and startled and they thrash in your hands as though with an excess of passion."

  Kaye shook her head, horrified.

  "You can hardly blame me. It is my nature. And it has been a very long time."

  "I'm not going to help you kill people."

  "There might be something else that would tempt me, but I can't think what. I'll give you the opportunity to think up something."

  Kaye sighed.

  "You know where to find me."

  With that, the kelpie waded back into the water.

  Corny was still sitting stunned on the bank. "That thing wanted to kill me."

  Kaye nodded.

  "Are you going to try to find something it wants?"

  Kaye nodded again. "Yeah."

  "I don't know how I feel about that."

  "You read the site. You knew it would be like this."

  "I guess. It's different to see it… to hear it."

  "Do you want us to leave?"

  "Hell, no."

  "Any ideas what it might want that doesn't walk on two feet?"

  "Well," he said, after a moment's consideration, "actually there are a whole lot of people I wouldn't mind feeding to that thing."

  She laughed.

  "No, really," he said.

  "What do you mean?"

  "I mean that there are a whole lot of people that I wouldn't mind seeing drowned. Really. I think that we should go for it."

  Kaye looked up at him. He didn't look particularly fazed by what he had just proposed.

  "No way," she said.

  Corny shrugged. "Janet's boyfriend, for example. What a prick."

  "Kenny?" Kaye squeaked.

  "Look, it doesn't have to be him. I could think of a dozen people. The best thing is that they're all so dumb I'm sure I would have no problem convincing them to come down here and ride the horse. I'm thinking that stupidity should have consequences. C'mon, we can do a little weeding of the human race." He waggled his eyebrows.

  "No," she said. "Think of something other than people we can give it."

  "Oats?" he said vaguely. "A huge box of instant oatmeal? A subscription to Equestrian's Digest? Hay and lots of it?"

  "We're not getting people killed, so just give it up, okay?"

  She was getting sick of listening to Corny's sighs.

  She bet that Roiben's name would be a fair price. After all, this thing was probably not part of any court, being tied to the stream here. She bet that he would be counted as a fair price indeed. And it wouldn't change the fact that she knew the name too.

  It would be a fine revenge on him for killing Gristle.

  But then, she imagined that the kelpie would just order him to bring people for it to drown. And he would do it.

  What else was there to bargain with that a kelpie might like?

  She thought about the dolls in her room, but all she could picture was a little girl following a trail of them to the shore of the stream. Ditto with any musical instrument. She had to think about something that the kelpie could enjoy alone… clothing? Food?

  Then she thought of it… a companion. A companion that it could never drown. Something that it could talk to and admire. The merry-go-round horse.

  "Oh, Corny," Kaye said, "I know just the thing."

  Getting back in the car was the last thing that Kaye wanted to do, but she did, sliding into the backseat, pressing her shirt over her mouth as though the fabric could filter the iron out of the air.

&nb
sp; "You know where you're going, right?" she asked, wondering if he could understand the words, muffled as they were by the cloth.

  "Yeah."

  She let her head slide down to the plastic seat, one wing twitched just out of her vision, sending scattered luminescent rainbows through the thin membrane to dance on her leg under each passed light. Everything narrowed to those rainbows. There was no Corny in the front seat, no scratchy radio song, no passing cars, no houses, no malls, no real things to protect her from the glittering patterns on her grass-green thighs.

  There were no words for what she felt, no sounds, nothing. There was no word for what she was, no explanation that would keep back the numb, dumb dark. She felt the dizziness threaten to overwhelm her.

  "Can you please open your window?" she asked. "I can't breathe."

  "What's wrong with yours?"

  She crouched on the edge of the seat and reached her hands into the front of the car, palms up like a supplicant. "Every time I touch the handle, it burns. Look." She held her hand out to him, and he could see that part of it was flushed. Her fingers wiggled. "That's from the door handle."

  "Shit." Corny took a breath, but he could not seem to let it go. He rolled down his window.

  The salt in the air cleaned her throat with each lungful from the open window, but it wasn't enough to battle the rising nausea. "I have to get out of this car."

  "We're almost there." Corny stopped at the red light.

  Corny parked the car outside the big building. It was strange to see it in the daytime. The overcast sky made the outside of the building look even dingier.

  "Are you okay?" Corny asked, and turned his head to see her in the backseat.

  Kaye shook her head. She was going to vomit, right there, right on top of the empty soda cans and mashed fast-food boxes. She put her hand in the pocket of the sweatshirt and opened the door.

  "Kaye! What are you doing?"

  Kaye half fell, half crawled onto the asphalt of the parking lot and dragged herself to the edge of the grass before she started vomiting. There was little in her stomach, and most of what she coughed up was stomach acid and spittle.

  "Jesus!" Corny crouched down next to her.

  "I'm okay," Kaye said, rising dizzily to her feet. "It's all the metal."

  He nodded, looking back at the car and then looking around skeptically. "Maybe we should forget about this."