Theo's stammering was interrupted by the return of Applecore. "Right," she said. "Me kidneys have sighted land again. Should we get going?"
Outside the station it was early evening and the lights were coming on all over Starlightshire, streetlamps and advertising signs, but they all seemed fainter than the electric lights Theo knew, even the simplest more silvery than ordinary white light and also more… witchy, was the only word he could summon. Thus, when the huge fog-colored car rolled up to the sidewalk in front of the station, silent as Charon's barge, he jumped a little. The driver stepped out and Theo was startled by what at first seemed like a familiar horselike face.
No, he realized, it's not Heath, just another doonie. He said a lot of them were drivers.
"Are you the parties wanting a ride to the City?" the driver asked. His greenish skin was heavily mottled with white — Theo wondered if he might be from something like the pinto branch of the family — and he wore a gray uniform whose sheen was only a little less pearlescent under the station's flood lamps than the car itself. "I need someone to signify, please."
Poppy bristled. "I told them who I was!"
"No offense, Mistress Thornapple. It's just the way things are these days. It's a shame, but there you go." He wagged his eyeless head apologetically and produced a small leather-bound book from the pocket of his coat. "A formality." He opened it to what seemed to Theo a pair of blank pages and held it out. Poppy held her small hand over it for a moment; the driver nodded and put it away again. The whole thing was so much like ceremonial magic and yet so similar to using a bar code reader that Theo was suddenly struck not by the strangeness of the Fairie world but by the previously unremarked strangeness of his own.
When they were seated in the deep and spacious passenger compartment with all Poppy's luggage stowed in the trunk, the car slid out of the station parking lot. Theo looked anxiously out the tinted windows for signs of someone watching them, but the crowd hurrying in and out of Starlightshire Station's lunar light seemed oblivious to them.
"It's about three hours to the City from here," said the driver. "Would you like to hear some music?"
"Oh, yes, please," said Poppy. From out of nowhere — or more likely from hidden speakers, but Theo couldn't simply dismiss the "from nowhere" theory after what he'd seen lately — a mournful air filled the car. The music seemed to occupy the center of a previously unimagined triangle whose three sides were Arab flutes, quiet polka changes played backward on the glockenspiel with a lot of reverb, and the noise of running water. Theo listened with fascinated attention. It was enchanting, almost literally so, like being hypnotized in the nicest possible fashion. At last the tune ended and a new one began, an even more improbable combination that was something like "Danny Boy" played at one-tenth normal speed and arranged for gong and sitar. This one had a vocal, a helium whisper like something sending back its last transmission as it drifted away into the void of space. The only words Theo could make out were "… far far far the mirror we are, the nearer star…"
"I love this tune," Poppy said happily. "Whatever happened to these people?"
"One-hit wonders?" Theo guessed.
Despite the fact that the third passenger was no larger than a parakeet, Poppy had squeezed herself against Theo and showed no signs of moving away. He was having a hard time not reacting to her; the feeling of a woman's firm leg pressed against his own was exactly as distracting in Fairyland as it would have been back in good old Mortalia.
But she's a hundred and five years old! Old enough to be a great-great grandmother — no, old enough to be dead! The mere thought of her in a romantic light should have felt like that film Harold and Maude, but it didn't, quite. Or what was that other one with Ursula Andress, where she's really like a million years old and turns into a mummy at the end… ? But that was bullshit, he told himself — she wasn't some really old woman who looked young by magic. She was young. Just not by the standards of his own world.
The real, seriously bad problem is that she's some important rich guy's daughter, and as far as they're concerned, she's just a schoolgirl. Like they don't have enough reasons to want to kill me already.
He looked over to Applecore, feeling guilty about the fact that he had somehow come to be holding one of Poppy Thornapple's hands again, and equally guilty that after realizing it he still hadn't disengaged, but the sprite had made herself a sort of nest in the corner of the seat, curled on Poppy's cloche hat, and was apparently sound asleep.
Thanks, he thought bitterly. Leave me here to figure out this weird-ass stuff by myself. Thanks a lot.
Poppy stirred beside him. "Can you open the roof?"
He only realized she wasn't talking to him but to the invisible driver when a panel opened in the ceiling of the car. Above them hung a sky full of huge stars like jellied fire, like Van Gogh's maddest visions made real.
"It's always nice in this part of the world," she said. "I can't wait until we're outside of town."
Theo was still catching his breath, staring at the stellar fireworks. "Why?" he croaked.
"Because it's so built-up around here these days and so bright, all the streetlights and everything make it hard to see the sky properly." She snuggled in close against him. "Do you like me just a little, Theo? Tell the truth."
"Yes. Yes, of course. You're a very nice… young woman."
He could hear the pout in her tone of voice. "That's the kind of thing people say about girls in the Young Blossoms — the girls that put together cobweb drives and bake sales to relieve starving goblins in Alder Head."
"All right, you're beautiful, too. But you know that."
"Really?" She rubbed her face against his upper arm, slow and comfortable as a fire-warmed cat. "That's better. Will you make love to me, then?"
He took a breath. "I don't think it's a good idea, Poppy. I'm…" He couldn't think of a way to say it that didn't sound like the worst kind of letting-someone-down-easy cliché. But it was true! It was actually true! "I'm not a very good person to be involved with right now. But you're lovely. I'm really glad I met you."
She raised her head a bit and regarded him with those huge eyes, the purple so dark that they seemed pools of total shadow even underneath the fierce starlight. "Truly? You wouldn't be lying to me just because I'm a hundred and five, would you?"
He nodded. "Truly."
"All right." She nestled into him once more. "Perhaps we shouldn't rush things, anyway. I don't want you just to go away like the others always do. Well, the ones I didn't want to go away. Some of the rest I couldn't chase away with black iron." Her eyes remained closed, but she smiled and covered her mouth with her fingers; she was still a little tipsy. "Sorry. Everyone says I have a shocking vocabulary." She yawned. "I think I'm going to sleep for a little while. It's been such a busy day…"
There was no sense of transition, but after a while he could tell by the limp heaviness of her body against him that she was asleep. The music played on, a long tapestry of soft flute-noises and droning chords that made him think of the wind moaning around mountaintops, but with a strange little backbeat that kept surfacing and then fading down into the mix again. Theo was reluctant to move or in any way break the spell. He felt as though he had stepped out of the tumultuous events of the past days into some dreamlike pocket of his own past, an eddy of time from his teenage days — a girl, a quiet car, the countryside sliding past the windows. But this girl's a century old and the countryside is full of unicorns and monsters.