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.
So I just had to set a story in Butte.
The events in this story all happen before Moon Called.
Cold didn’t bother him anymore, but he remembered how it felt: the sharp bite of winter on toes, fingers, nose, and ears. Even with modern adaptations, ten degrees below zero wouldn’t be pleasant. Neither the temperature nor falling snow kept people out of the streets for the Christmas stroll, however. Hot apple cider, freshly made sausages, and abundant cookies under the streetlights strove to make up for the nasty weather—none of which were useful sustenance for him. He passed them by with scarcely a glance.
Well, then, he thought, impatient with himself, what are you doing here? He had no more answer now than he’d had two nights ago when he’d arrived.
The people who lived in the old mining town had always known how to party. In a hundred years that hadn’t changed. Brutal climate, hard and dangerous work brought a certain clarity to the need for pleasure.
His Chinese face garnered a few looks—curiosity, no more. A century ago, Butte had had a large Chinese population. Then, the looks he’d garnered had been dismissive up on the street level but full of eagerness or fear down in his father’s opium den in the mining tunnels where Thomas had been both guide and enforcer.
It was not just the looks that had changed. The streets were not cobbled, there were no trolleys, no horses. Steep streets had been somewhat tamed, and the town—once a bustling place—had a desolate air, despite the festive decorations. Buildings he remembered were abandoned or gone altogether, replaced by parking lots or parks. The few restored or well-kept buildings only made the rest look worse.
Some of the changes were vast improvements. The smelters and ore-processing plants now long closed meant that the sulfurous fog that had made it difficult to see across the street was gone. The air was immensely more pleasant to breathe. The night was free of the constant noise of the machinery that churned day and night.
The crowd that moved beside him on the sidewalks was a respectable size, though much smaller than those that had filled the streets of his memories. He hadn’t decided whether to count that on the good side or the bad side of the changes.
He put his hands in front of his mouth and blew, a gesture to blend in, no more. Even had his hands been frozen, his breath wouldn’t warm them.
He didn’t know why he’d come back here. Just in time for the Christmas stroll, no less. He wasn’t a Christian, despite the nuns who had ensured he could read and write: an education for her children was the only thing his quiet, obedient mother had ever stood up to his father for.
If . . . if he did believe, he’d have to believe he was damned, and had been since his father had brought him to the old man.
“Here is the son,” his father said, his voice less clear than usual. It was hard to talk with a mouth that had been hit so many times.
Last night his father had been set upon by a group of miners who wanted opium and had not wanted to pay for it. They had beaten Father and tied him up. It had been Thomas’s day to protect the shop; his older brother, Tao, was away on other business. Thomas had been shot in the arm, and while he tried to stanch the blood, one of the miners had cracked his skull with a beer bottle.
When Thomas awoke, his mother had bandaged his hurts and was crying silently as she sometimes did. From Tao, because his father would not look at him nor talk to him, he learned that his father had given the men what they wanted and more: arsenic in the opium would ensure that they thieved from no one again. But despite the ultimate victory in the fight, his father felt that his honor and that of his family had been impinged. He made it clear that he blamed Thomas for the shame.
The next morning his father had left Tao in charge of the laundry and gone out to speak with friends. He’d been gone most of the day, and Thomas had worked hard despite his aching arm, seeking to assuage his disgrace with diligence. His uncles, his father’s brothers, had stopped in with gifts of herbs, whiskey, and his grandmother’s ginger cookies. They spoke to his mother in hushed whispers.
His father returned after the sun was down and the laundry storefront was closed. He hadn’t said anything to the rest of the family gathered there. He’d only looked at Thomas.