Shattered glass littered the floor of Viv’s kitchen. Nothing stirred among the exposed wires in the wall. Viv set her house keys and knife down on the counter. “Hello?” she tried, but there was no answer.
Duane broke the silence. “So—what’s a tomte?”
“It’s a fat naked fairy,” Raven said, when Viv didn’t answer.
“Hunh. Not the dangerous kind?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Hush,” said Viv, “we need to get her to come out. Gosh, I hope I have more oatmeal.” And she began to rifle through her cabinets, but then—distantly, echoing from somewhere within the wall, a little voice:
“There are three packets of porridge left. Are the redcaps gone?”
“They’re gone,” Viv said soothingly, “Irusan’s after them and they won’t be back. But I need to know a way into Avalon without my sword. By wind, is all that Irusan said. What does that mean?”
Silence.
“Oh look,” Viv observed, laying hands on the Quaker Instant Oatmeal packets. “Here, I found them. Which shall I make? I think maple syrup flavor.”
A pale round face emerged from the darkness behind the wall. “No porridge,” said the tomte, still hovering in the shadows behind a group of wires. “Your question is very dangerous. I need more than porridge. I need aquavit.” And she smacked the last word as if she could taste it.
“What’s that?” Duane asked.
“Scandinavian booze,” said Viv. “I’ve no idea where to buy it around here, but maybe you’d take vodka? They’re pretty much the same thing.”
But the tomte shook her head, sending her thick blond braids swinging from side to side. “Not vodka,” she said dismissively. “And not whisky. But aqua vitae, eeshkya beaha, the water of life.”
Duane looked at Viv, and she shrugged her shoulders in response. “I don’t know,” she said. “We have aquavit on Christmas Eve. I’m telling you, it’s just like vodka.”
“Water of life? Does she mean—like—water?” Duane ventured.
“Blood,” said Raven, sudden and decisive. “She means blood.”
Viv glanced, disbelieving, at the tomte, expecting the plump and motherly little creature to deny it: but she smacked her lips again, nodding and smiling. “Aquavit,” she said. “The water in your veins.”
“Ugh!” Viv burst out in revulsion. “You’re just as bad as the rest of them! I grew up on stories of tomtes, and now you’re some kind of, some kind of vampire? You’re sick, all of you, I hate you all.”
But as she spoke—concentrating on the words, and the strength of her disgust, so that her hands could act on their own—she slammed her smallest bowl down on the counter and picked up her Swiss army knife. By the end of her impassioned speech she’d flicked it open, and then the only thing to do was to draw the blade sharply across the pad of her thumb.
Red blood welled up along the gash. “Viv!” Raven protested.
“No, it’s fine,” she muttered, and pressed her hand to make the blood flow more freely. It spattered into the dish, drop by drop, and by the seventh splash the tomte crept out from her hidey-hole to approach the dish on the counter. She had no concern for modesty: it was impossible to escape the fact that the thatches of hair underneath her arms and between her legs were also blond, while her thighs jiggled with every step.
“Is that enough?” Viv asked grimly.
“Let us taste,” the tomte answered, and Viv stepped back, pressing down against the cut to contain the bleeding.
The naked little woman in her peaked red cap crept closer and closer to the dish, finally swiping her tiny hand into the saucer. It came up dripping blood, and she brought it to her mouth, a pink tongue lapping out to wipe it clean. She repeated the gesture several times. When she finally spoke—with a smile—her teeth were outlined in crimson stain.
“It’s enough,” she said generously. “I will tell you. To go by wind you must go as the redcaps do, underground—the old tunnels, the way the iron dragons used to and do no longer. If you go far enough the wind will come for you, and you must ride it, if you can.”
And with that she set to sucking each finger clean.
“That’s not an answer,” Raven protested, “it’s a riddle. Viv paid enough, she deserves the whole truth.”
But the tomte paid him no mind, only sucking and smacking at her fingers with noisy relish. “It’s okay,” Viv said, “I know what she means. There’s an abandoned station—Noah told me about it. I think it’s near the Castro stop.”
Raven looked at her with concern. “Do you really mean to go alone? Because I’m not going to break into any ghost station. My boundaries, let me show you them. But you could come back with me instead, stay the night at my place, if you wanted.”
“No,” said Viv, “I have to go.”
“Well, someone has to file a police report, or we’ll totally be on the hook for the damages,” Duane observed. “What should I do with the—uh—the bodies?”
“Sunlight will burn them away,” the tomte piped up.
“Hunh,” said Duane. “That’s cool.”
Viv cocked her head. “You, um, seem to be taking all this very much in stride?”
“Yeah, you know, sometimes, shit gets weird,” Duane shrugged. “Anyway, I can’t go with you either, I have some stuff. But do you want me to cat-sit until you get back?”
“If you would,” Viv said anxiously. “And if I don’t come back—”
“I like cats,” he said gently.
“Okay then,” Viv said, with what really sounded like brave and heroic finality, but the words were hardly out of her mouth before she thought: “Can I—um. Can I borrow your katana?”
Duane hesitated. “It has sentimental value,” he said finally.
“I wouldn’t ask,” Viv said, “except...”
She trailed off. “True love and all,” Duane supplied. “Yeah, all right. Take care of it.”
“I will. Thanks.”
After that, there wasn’t much more to say. Raven walked her to the 24th Street BART stop. “I won’t try and talk you out of this,” he said, as she paused by the top of the escalator, “because I probably would have done something just as dumb for Piper once: but I will say that from my experience of men, he probably isn’t worth it.”
“He probably isn’t,” Viv agreed, and stepped down onto the escalator. She looked back at Raven as it carried her down: she had just enough time for a little shrug.
The night was still fairly young; the station was busy with young people headed out to the Mission street bars. Viv suddenly became aware that she was attracting a number of stares. Maybe it was her ridiculous dress, or maybe it was the katana hanging at her hip, rattling about in the scabbard Noah had given her: she remembered, then, that Duane’s sword wouldn’t have Excalibur’s ability to pass unnoticed. It probably didn’t help that she’d jammed her keys and her transit pass into the scabbard as well, not wanting to be burdened with a purse or waste the time to change into something with pockets.
She met the eyes of the nearest guy staring, thinking fiercely: I’m a goshdarned princess, want to make something of it? He looked away, and Viv twitched a fold of pink satin over the scabbard and swept through the fare gates with her head held high.
She took BART to Civic Center and transferred there to the upper line, the older Muni trains that would take her down to the Castro. It was forty minutes later by the time she arrived at the Castro street station, and most of the passengers left the train at that station. Viv hesitated. She’d meant to get off too, but the heavy foot traffic would make it much harder for her to sneak into the tunnels. She ducked back into the near-empty train and let it carry her to the next station.
She craned her neck as they went, looking for a glimpse of the abandoned station, but she wasn’t sure on which side of the train she should be watching. Out of the corner of her eye she thought she saw something pale blur by the left-hand windows, but when she made her way to that side of the train it was gone. A few minutes later the train slowed for Forest Hill station.
Forest Hill served the quieter, residential areas on the city’s western side: Twin Peaks and the Sunset. Viv had only the vaguest idea about the layout of those neighborhoods—she’d never had any reason to go there. But surely, she hoped, the partying kinds of people would already be downtown, and the homebodies would already be at home.
When the train doors opened she saw a nearly empty platform. Her calculation was right. Only a few people got off the train with her, and it was easy to loiter while they made their way to the elevators.
The station was old, Viv could tell that at once. In contrast to the sweeping concrete of Civic Center or the stolid brick of the Mission stations, Forest Hill was low, narrow, and lined with old fashioned ceramic tile. Fluorescent lights hummed a few feet above her head. Viv walked down to the edge of the platform, where a waist-high gate barred entry to a narrow iron walkway leading into the tunnel. A sign on the gate warned: DANGER HIGH VOLTAGE. KEEP OUT.
Viv took a deep breath, placed her palm on the gate, and vaulted over. Her skirts got caught on something as she landed on the other side. With her heart pounding in her ears, she tugged sharply until the satin ripped, and set out running down the walkway. She imagined that she must have been seen, that pursuit would be coming. She ran as quickly as she dared. The old iron walkway clanged with her rapid footfalls.
Orange lights hung at intervals along the tunnel, dimly illuminating her way. They reminded her of the eyes of the redcaps. She hiked up her skirts and ran on, back beneath the earth towards the heart of the city.
After a while her breathing came more raggedly, and a stitch was blooming in her side. The trip that had only taken five minutes on the train seemed endless on foot. Viv hadn’t heard any shouts behind her, but she was fairly certain something was following behind her. Maybe it was only the echoes of her own feet—certainly sound seemed distorted in the close tunnel—but that would be lucky, and with the day she’d had she wasn’t much trusting her luck. She kept running as quickly as she dared in the dark.
Then, in front of her, instead of the endless curving tunnel wall, she saw—just darkness. Open space. The iron-grated walkway ended at another set of steps, and Viv hurried up them. This time there was no gate, just the unlit platform stretching out in the dark. She glimpsed an old bench and tiled wall covered in graffiti. The smell of human urine and desperation hung heavy in the air.
Fresh air blew on her face, from somewhere. Viv paced down the narrow platform. Yes, there at the end, she could just make it out: a second set of tracks split off from the main tunnel, heading up at a steep grade. There was outside access, and if she’d known about it she probably could have gotten here much more easily.
Movement out of the corner of her eye made her startle and yelp. She fumbled wildly for her sword. But it was only a stray newspaper page caught briefly by the wind, floating up and settling down. “Hah,” Viv breathed, relaxing her grip on the hilt of the katana—
—and then, every muscle tensed, and she pivoted back, yanking the blade free. Maybe it was a change in the air, or a sound so faint she only heard it subconsciously. Maybe it was all the luck she’d missed that day. She moved and drew the sword just in time to place its edge between herself and the lantern-eyed redcap dropping down on her from above.
The katana sliced him from belly to throat, and he fell to the platform with a sound like rotten fruit falling from a tree. There were more. There were many more of them, crawling along the ceiling and climbing up from the tracks, coming for her.
Viv leapt up on the bench and put her back to the wall. She bent her knees and held the sword up in its ready position. From somewhere in the distance she heard the roar of a train: doesn’t make sense, she thought dimly, this time of night they only come once an hour...
...but it didn’t matter. The redcaps were on her. Viv’s world contracted to the point of a sword. She had the high ground of the bench, and that gave her something of an advantage: they were small and could not reach her from the platform floor, so although they were agile and came leaping up at her they couldn’t mob her all at once. They came from all sides and even from above, but the katana was a much lighter sword than she was used to, easy to sweep in deadly arcs that could take out many redcaps in one swing. That would help her. Maybe. For a short while.
Still this sword didn’t guide her as Excalibur could, and all it would take was one false move. She tried not to think of that as she fought.
The roaring noise came louder and the wind picked up, whipping Viv’s hair into her eyes and whirling her tattered skirts in the air. She cursed: but it seemed to distract the redcaps too. They clawed at the fabric instead of her legs. She made a low sweep to catch the ones climbing up on the bench, and ended up slicing the legs off a redcap that had just dropped down from above. It hissed and writhed on the bench until she kicked it off.
She became aware that she would lose this fight. There were too many, and she was too slow, and the wind...The wind was everywhere.
Then, one of them sprang for her, and when she swung the katana the wind twisted it in her hand: instead of slicing through the redcap, she only managed to bat it aside with the flat of the blade. The goblin clung to the sword with its yellow-taloned hands even as the edge bit into its fingers and made black blood seep down the steel. The redcap opened its terrible mouth and bit down onto the sword.
She heard, over the roaring of the wind, the sharp crack as metal splintered. The katana shivered in her hand, then shattered, bits of steel flashing everywhere as they whirled into the darkness of the tunnel. The redcap grinned a bloody grin, and then he too was lifted up and blown away.
The tomte’s words came back to her then. The wind will come for you, and you must ride it, if you can.
The roar that was not a train filled her ears. The redcaps clawing at the bench seemed, now, not to be trying to get up so much as they were holding on for dear life. As she gripped the hilt of her broken sword she saw a few more of them lifted up and blown into the black.
How to ride the wind? There was nothing to grasp, nothing to bear her. It could not be ridden like a horse.
But to ride it like a train...she would only need to board.
On that instinct, and before she could think better of it, Viv flung herself into the raging wind.