Shifting Shadows

Haida stepped between us and let it hit her instead of me. She hung in the air for a moment, while the magic knocked me through the doorway and into the hall.

“My lady,” she said and then the only thing left of the little fae who taught me to cook and gained such joy in music was a whiff of foul-smelling smoke.

The beast who had replaced my Ariana screamed hoarsely. I hesitated, caught by grief and unwilling to leave Ariana alone in her pain, but the wolf knew better than I. He bolted for the front door, which opened before us. A glance over our shoulder showed only a battered lean-to that collapsed as I watched.

I ran until the moon set, then I curled up in the shelter of an overhang where the last autumn’s leaves were dry. I awoke human and na**d as the day I was born, with the scent of Ariana in my nose and snow on the ground. I had expected her to come. She was not a coward; she would feel it necessary to face the consequences of last night.

I rose from my bed and went out barefoot in the weeks-old crusty snow to meet her.

She looked different. Her waist-length hair had been shorn to a finger’s length, and she wore a gown of white, something that might have been worn in a king’s court.

“Samuel Moon Called,” she said, not meeting my eyes. I could smell her grief. “Well have I loved you.”

“And I you, lady,” I told her, sounding surprisingly steady for a man whose heart was bleeding with grief. Haida was worthy of mourning, and so was the future that Ariana and I had lost.

“And yet,” she said, “and yet I would have killed you had not Haida sacrificed herself for you.”

“Haida whom you also loved,” I said. “It was not your fault, Ariana. She would not blame you.”

She nodded and looked away. “I cannot risk destroying anyone else I love.”

I wanted to drop to my knees and plead with her. I had no pack, they were all dead. My da was dead. He took with him the name I had been born with. He had kept the names of my lost family and their faces safe for me. And he was gone. Ariana was the only person I had left.

And without me, who would keep her safe? Who would hold her when the evil of what her father had done to her overwhelmed her dreams?

Yet between us lay the death of Haida, forming an impenetrable barrier between us.

“I will carry you in my heart until it beats no more,” I told her, giving her the only thing I could think of that would not hurt her more.

Her eyes welled, and her mouth tried to smile, and still she did not look at me. Her eyes were fixed at my feet. “Spoken like a poet and singer, my dear Samuel. You’ll forget things, forget me—this world does not easily hold the things best left Underhill.” Her mouth trembled. “I need the chain I gave you.”

I unwound the silver chain and held it out to her.

She took a half step closer, then closed her eyes and swallowed. When her eyes opened, black was trying to consume the green. She took a full step back. She stretched out her arm, and I felt her magic burn my hand.

“If you ever need me,” I told her, “I will come.”

The silver chain unmade itself and fell to the ground from my hand, now a small pile of pebbles. She took out a small pouch and took out some of the hair inside, burning it as it nestled in her palm. When nothing except ashes were in her hand, she stepped closer, so that when she turned her hand over, the ashes fell onto the pebbles that had been her silver chain.

“Fare thee well, Samuel Silverheart,” she said, turning away.

I waited until she had gone before I made my answer. I threw back my head and let the wolf sing our grief to the unkind moon.

FOURTEEN

Samuel

After a day of aimless wandering in my wolf’s skin, I found a task to turn my hand to and headed for the remains of the witch’s hut. I no longer knew which direction Ariana’s home was, but my wolf knew exactly where the witch had lived. The burnt hut looked just as it had when I’d last seen it. It smelled the same, too. Though weeks had passed in Ariana’s world, here it was still the same winter that my da had died. I could smell my own scent as clearly as if I’d only been gone a few days.

I headed to the oak, driven by the need to destroy or be destroyed—and I didn’t much care which. My grandmother had been staying somewhere nearby, or she would not have come out the last time I had been there. If it had only been days, then I could trail her and confront her. She could not reach Ariana through me anymore. If I could, I would kill her. If not, she would kill me, then die slowly for want of the power of fae pain and suffering anyway. Even dead, I would win.

As I approached the meadow, I smelled rotting flesh. I paused because it did not smell like wolf. It smelled like—

Pinning my ears I crept cautiously toward the source of the foul smell—and found the witch’s body.

She had been savaged and half-eaten, but I would have known her if only a finger bone had been left. It had snowed once and melted since she died, but I knew wolf kill when I saw it.

My father was not dead.

I howled, calling for him, and the woods went still, recognizing a predator’s voice. But my father gave me no answer, and gradually, the usual denizens of the winter forest went about their lives.

I slept near the hut that night and spent the next day building a fire hot enough to turn the witch’s body to bits and pieces of bone, which I put in a sack with salt and buried under cold running water. My wife, whose name I had lost, had told me once that running water turns away evil.

I would wait for Ariana to call me, I thought, as I put a heavy boulder on top of the sack of the witch’s ashes. Even if it took a very long time, I would wait for her. I would wait for her, and I would look for my da.

When I went to sleep that night, alone in the shelter of a downed tree, hope lived in my heart.

FAIRY GIFTS

I grew up in Butte, Montana. It is a town of about thirty-four thousand people that once had a population far greater—most of whom came to work the mines that started as gold mines, shifted to silver mines, and finally produced high-quality copper just as the country (and the world) began stringing copper wires for electricity. Butte was the third city in the world to have electricity—Paris, France, and New York City being the first two. The mining town once had a large Chinese population as well as Cornish, Irish, Welsh, Finnish, Italian, Serbian, and Greek.

When I was a child, the old tunnel mines had all been shut down, and the copper came from an open-pit mine that had eaten the suburbs of Meaderville, McQueen, and East Butte—and continued to grow until it ate the old amusement park Columbia Gardens. But there were all sorts of stories that were told about the “old days.” Stories about the racetrack that had stood where East Junior High (now East Middle School) had been built. I heard tales of Shoestring Annie, Dirty-Mouth Jean, and the old madame who beat up Carrie Nation when she took her temperance crusade to the wrong bar.