Courts of the Fey Page 12

He then took me from my father and led me to the Unseelie queen, where I was greeted by Sir Black Shuck. He gave me his arm and I smiled. He looked very nice: still all in black but in fancy court leathers and wearing a peace tied sword.

  I curtsied to the queen and she nodded to me.

  “Welcome, Galadria, I place you with the Lady Oleander, our best healer to be fostered until you come of age. Do you accept your fate as I decree it?”

  “I do.”

  “Then, sir knight, please escort our new hostage to her foster home and entrust her with the royal gift.”

  “My thanks, Queen Tatiana; I can only hope to be of service.”

  And with that, Sir Black led me out of the courtroom and to a very lovely woman with long grey hair twisted back into a braid. She wore the robes of a royal healer and I nearly skipped to meet her.

  “Lady Oleander, this is Galadria Pennyroyal.”

  She smiled at me and I bowed. I nearly stuttered my greeting. “ I, I am very pleased to meet you.”

  “I have a gift for you.”

  She nodded to someone beside her and a page brought out a white Cu Sith, a treasured fey dog of the royal court. He was beautiful. I looked at Lady Oleander and then at Black.

  “He’s mine?”

  “Indeed he is.”

  I dropped to my knees and the dog came forward and licked my face.

  I was never gladder to be me.

  UNLOCKED GATE

  Dean Wesley Smith

  Cindy Kemp would have sworn on her dead uncle’s favorite Chevy, even bet that she wouldn’t go shopping for an entire week, that the color green couldn’t be drained from anything. Especially beer.

  Okay, she would have been wrong, so it was damn lucky no one thought to bet her before all the green draining started.

  “Incoming!” she shouted over the nasty beat of someone doing ugly things to a Neil Diamond song, not that she liked Neil Diamond.

  She slid the glass of green beer down the polished oak bar like a puck in a shuffleboard game. Ben and Wolf-boy, two regulars sitting at the bar, quickly got their beers out of the way as the new one slid past. She held the pose of an expert beer-slider, her hand high over her head, her wrist twisted slightly to the left, as the glass with the perfect head of green foam stopped exactly in front of the goofy-looking guy with thick hair and a long nose.

  Not a drop spilled.

  Man, she was good!

  The customers crowded against the bar applauded. Wolf-boy gave her his famous wolf-whistle, which even turned heads on the dance floor. Every time he did that, she expected bottles on the back bar to shatter like in a bad television commercial.

  She bowed and then winked at the other bartender, Judy, who just shook her head, her long red hair flapping around in a ponytail behind her back.

  The guy with the long nose gave her a beaming smile that made Cindy’s stomach queasy and his nose seem even longer, if that was possible. The guy’s father must have been a cobbler.

  She turned quickly to the well and began work on a drink using crème de menthe and rum for the trashy blonde woman beside him. The bar went through gallons of the smelly green crème de menthe once a year. The rest of the time the bottle just sat on the back bar growing mold, as if anyone would even notice with the green color.

  God, she loved St. Patrick’s Day in Chicago. It was still early in the evening, yet Peter’s Place was jamming. The music hugged her like her best winter coat, its bass beat rattling the bottles. The music was the party; all she did was push things along with tons of green beer and ugly green drinks.

  With the music so loud, she could barely hear drink orders unless she bent forward, giving the guys at the bar the perfect hint of the tops of her breasts. She figured it never hurt to tease a little, toss out a little bait just to see who might take the hook. Of course, if someone like the guy with the long nose took the bait, she would toss him back. She had her standards after all, even though she was damned horny and had been for weeks now.

  St. Patrick’s Day brought more than just the regulars out to play, especially since Peter’s Place was so close to the University of Chicago and tucked in the middle of a street of shops that stretched for blocks. Students jammed the long bar three deep, covering just about every foot of Peter’s Place’s hardwood floors. Some of the regulars had gotten in early and claimed the dozen stools. Everyone else stood, drinking, eating peanuts, and shouting over the music.

  Huge barrels of salted-in-the-shell peanuts were scattered around the room. She had a hunch that some of the poorer students used a glass of beer and a few bowls of peanuts for dinner more often than not. Peter, the owner, didn’t seem to care or notice. The salty peanuts kept the floor a white dusty color and people drinking. On New Year’s Eve, right at the tick of midnight, everyone threw peanuts. So far no one had been seriously hurt. She just kept thanking the workforce gods that her job didn’t include sweeping the place.

  She pulled her blouse away from her chest a couple of quick times, letting cooler air inside her shirt. The fans hanging down from the tall ceiling tried their best to keep the air moving, but she had no doubt that by midnight, she would be sweating like after a good workout. The music already had a good thirty people on the small dance floor in the right corner, which wasn’t helping the heating factor either, especially the way some of them were jumping around.

  She glanced over at the goofy guy with the nose. There was just something about that nose that kept her staring at it. Maybe it promised other large body parts. She tried to imagine a wild night with that nose and the idea just made her laugh. If there was ever an argument for plastic surgery, the poor guy had it sticking to the front of his face. He should offer to do ads for a plastic surgeon. The before and after pictures would be enough to convince anyone.

  Again she fanned her blouse open and closed a few times. Maybe she shouldn’t have worn silk tonight. She had bought the green blouse two days before in the thrift shop off the Loop. The rich from the Lake Shore area gave away some of the best designer clothes, and she wasn’t above buying them at a tiny fraction of the price. Even though she was a working student, that didn’t mean she couldn’t dress in the style. It just took a little more creativity and patience in the thrift stores.

  Tonight, she had on a sexy green skirt with the light-green silk blouse, unbuttoned two buttons down, and a dark green silk tie that she kept loose and tossed over her shoulder when dealing with dirty glasses. The green shamrock post earrings and the green ribbon holding her long brown hair in place added a put-together touch to the outfit.

  She was “hot green” and she knew it.

  She finished the crème de menthe drink that smelled like Listerine and glanced at the guy with the nose. He had turned and was talking to the blonde who had ordered the drink.

  The woman had no sense of taste in clothing. She wore a thin green cotton blouse tucked into Levi’s two sizes too small. Rolls of fat flopped over the tops of her jeans, straining the poor blouse, pulling it tight against her tits, which sagged some and needed to have a bra covering them.

  Cindy almost felt sorry for the blouse. On the right woman, with the right stuff under it, the blouse would look nice.

  Mr. Long Nose was sure interested in what that poor blouse was straining to hold in. He stared at the blonde’s chest like her eyes were there. Cindy sat the drink down in front of the blonde and waited for Mr. Long Nose to turn away from the peep show long enough to pay for it.

  If he bought two more of those drinks for that blonde, he was going to be very sorry later. Crème de menthe tasted like mouthwash going down. Cindy couldn’t imagine what it tasted like coming back up, but she knew for a fact it smelled horrid. She had seen a few too many women in the bathroom realize just how bad that green stuff really was for them. Every St. Patrick’s Day she thanked the workforce gods that her job didn’t include cleaning up the bathrooms either.

  In front of Cindy, a large guy with a football jersey shoved his way through the crow
d and slammed his half-full glass on the bar between Wolf-boy and Ben. Wolf-boy and Ben were math majors who loved to drink. And they often kept her entertained with fast one-liners and catty looks at others.

  Now, both looked at him over their glasses, giving Jock-Boy the annoyed look the two had perfected for jerks at the bar. But the big jock wasn’t into noticing anything but himself.

  “How come I didn’t get a green beer?” he shouted over the music.

  “You’re too tall,” Wolf-boy said, just loud enough for Cindy to barely hear.

  “Too stupid,” Ben said.

  Jock-Boy ignored them and held up his glass for her to see.

  It was full of regular-colored beer, or something that looked like it. Whatever it was, it hadn’t come from any of their taps, since every keg they had on line had been filled with green food coloring.

  No doubt the guy was pulling some sort of scam on her to get a free beer, but it didn’t matter. Nothing was going to ruin her good mood tonight. It was St. Patrick’s Day and if she was lucky, she would cut out a prime candidate out of the crowd and get laid before breakfast.

  Jock-Boy sat the glass down again and said, “Well?”

  “Don’t touch that!” Wolf-boy said, leaning away from the yellow beer in mock horror, like it might blow up.

  Ben leaned the other way, also showing mock horror. “It’s been . . . recycled.”

  She laughed and then pretending to be very careful, took Jock-Boy’s glass between two fingers like she was holding a dead frog and poured out whatever was in there. She got him a clean glass and pulled him a green beer, again making sure the head was perfect on the top.

  She placed the beer in front of him. Before he could pick it up and turn away, the green vanished like it had never been there.

  “Not funny!” the guy shouted over the loud music at her.

  Both Wolf-boy and Ben were now very seriously studying the golden-filled glass, clearly as stunned as she was feeling.

  Jock-Boy hadn’t touched it. No one had but her. Something must be going wrong with the food coloring Peter had put in the kegs.

  She glanced down at Judy, but her partner behind the bar was busy at the second well and hadn’t noticed anything going wrong. Typical. The woman could ignore a fight, a fire in a garbage can, and two women slapping each other at the bar all at the same time. And had.

  Suddenly, the green beer Wolf-Boy had been sipping on lost its green. Then Ben’s did the same.

  “Okay, now that’s something!” Wolf-Boy said, bending down and studying up close his glass.

  Ben looked almost afraid of his beer. Maybe this would be what they both needed to slow down the drinking. Two math majors who were so damned smart that they were bored with school, so they drank and ate peanuts and kept her entertained every night.

  Maybe this was a joke they were pulling? They could do such a thing. Maybe they had set up Jock-Boy. That was possible, too.

  “Nice trick, guys,” she said, smiling at the three of them.

  All of them looked at her with far better poker faces than any three college boys could ever have.

  Oh, shit, they hadn’t done it.

  Suddenly, the green vanished from the crème de menthe the blonde was drinking, leaving an ugly white liquid in her glass.

  Okay, this was going beyond funny, beyond a trick. She didn’t like this and she had no idea what was happening. She hated not being in control and knowing what was happening.

  Color just didn’t drain out of drinks like that. Either someone was playing a really great prank or she had just stepped into an old Twilight Zone episode. If Burgess Meredith walked up to the bar, she was going to run for the back door, right down the top of the bar if she had to. She had watched far too many of those old episodes while dating Danny, a Star Trek geek majoring in physics.

  If he hadn’t been so damn good in bed and so damn good-looking, she would have left him after about the thirtieth episode in a row of The Twilight Zone, followed by the tenth time she had had to watch Men in Black, the first movie, not the second one. But not even the good sex had been enough for her to stay after the night he came to bed wearing pointed ears, a blue shirt, and no pants, muttering about his need to pon farr, or prom fart, or something like that.

  That had been two months ago, and now she asked every man she met if he was a Trekkie before ever thinking of jumping into bed with him. Sometimes even great sex wasn’t worth pointed ears.

  Cindy made herself take a deep breath and just stop, taking stock of all the regular colored drinks in front of her. Even the jerk in the football shirt wasn’t doing anything but staring.

  Suddenly, the blonde’s green blouse turned clear, as if the light green color had been sucked out through the edge of her sleeve. Her blouse was now completely see-through. Mr. Long Nose almost dropped his glass of now golden beer as he stared at the blonde’s tits.

  The blonde, who clearly already had one-too-many crème de menthes, didn’t seem to even notice, but Cindy and everyone else along the bar sure did. Now it was clear the woman needed to lose a lot more than twenty pounds. Through the clear shirt, you could now see her butt crack and thong underwear.

  Shit, those things had to hurt, especially sitting on a bar stool for hours.

  Cindy shuddered and turned away as fast as she could, but she knew that image was going to haunt her. A butt crack ghost, more frightening than any real ghost.

  Out of the corner of her eye, she caught a glimpse of something on top of the bar, moving back toward her well.

  Mist.

  An odd-shaped cloud of green mist moved over the golden beers and then past her well, sucking the green out of all the limes in her fruit tray.

  She rubbed her eyes and the green mist seemed to vanish.

  “I think I need a drink,” she said.

  “I need a green beer, with no tricks,” Jock-Boy shouted.

  She grabbed another glass and poured him a green beer, not caring that it really didn’t have a good head on it.

  It was simply too damn early in the night to lose it. She wasn’t even tired yet. Hot, yes. But tired, no. So this couldn’t be happening.

  But it was.

  Along the bar on the other side of her well, the customers’ beers and drinks started losing their green color. And a guy wearing a green hat with a big “O” on it suddenly found himself with a pure white hat on his head.

  Damn, this would be funny if it wasn’t so damn scary.

  She could feel her heart pounding like a dozen muggers were coming after her trying to get her cell phone and purse.

  She stepped back away from the bar, hoping that her wonderful green outfit kept its color. She had never been one to wear white, except as an accent to some bright color or another. And she had paid thirty bucks for the green silk blouse and the color fit with two of her other outfits, so she sure didn’t want it ruined.

  “Squeeze the pimple,” she said to herself softly. “Squeeze the pimple.”

  She relaxed.

  It always worked, cleared her head. She had taken almost two years of self-defense classes and another year of martial arts training, and the one thing her instructor had taught her was that fear never helped in any situation. If she started feeling afraid, staring feeling her heart race, she needed to drain that fear out of mind like draining a big old whitehead pimple.

  From that moment on, every time Cindy had felt afraid, she just muttered “Squeeze the pimple” and the fear just went away.

  “It’s the drainin’ of the green!” one short woman shouted over the music, her eyes wide. She dropped her golden-colored beer and the glass shattered on the floor. Beer and salt and peanut shells always made for a nice mess for the bouncers to clean up.

  Cindy stared at the woman as the poor thing, clearly two drinks beyond reason, backed away from the bar with a horror-movie look on her face.

  Now Cindy was sure she was in a Twilight Zone episode. Or a really nifty hidden camera show.

  T
hat had to be it.

  She made sure her hair was out of her face, that her blouse was adjusted, her tie down and in place, and looked around for the hidden cameras. There were none that she could see, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there.

  Again, out of the corner of her eye, Cindy caught a glimpse of some “thing” that was green on the bar. This time it looked like more than just a cloud. It had a human shape. A green mist-filled human shape.

  And was very short.

  And that short, green-mist thing was going from person-to-person along the bar, draining the green from everything.

  Suddenly, as if coming out of thin air, an old guy with a white beard and balding head appeared near the bar in front of Green Mist Man. He had on a long gray trench coat that made him look like a flasher. He carried a staff-like stick in one hand and moved through the crowd like it didn’t exist.

  “Let’s go,” the old guy said to Green Mist Man.

  None of the other patrons around the old guy seemed to notice anything different. They were either holding up their drinks, or pointing to something that had been green and was now a pale color.

  Cindy stared at the old guy as the music changed to a punked-up version of “Greensleeves” that actually had a danceable beat. Every year the DJ played that song and every year now she had hated it. At the moment, she was too weirded-out to even think about hating it.

  The old guy ignored her and the music and all the people around him and kept his attention on Green Mist Man standing on the bar.

  Cindy moved over closer to the old guy in the trench coat, ignoring the complaints of the customers. She needed to hear what he was saying over the loud music.

  Cindy stared at his eyes. They were a deep blue, and seemed to show an intellect and intensity she didn’t see much in the college guys she dated. He would have made a great Gandalf if he were about six inches taller, tossed out the ugly trench coat for a white robe, and let his beard grow just a little longer.

  “No arguments,” the old guy said, again to Green Mist Man on the bar. “You’ve already caused enough problems here.”