Her nose felt as if it had been slammed in a door a dozen times. She could barely touch it. Even the anticipation of a touch made it hurt. So, instead of touching her nose, she touched the cheeks around it. She’d had broken noses before and she could feel this one radiating right through her cheek bones. She looked at her hands. In the dim light she could see the bindings were made of vine. She pried at them, but they tightened on their own as if they were alive.
“Those won’t be coming off anytime soon,” came a voice out of the darkness.
She peered into the gloom. The floor was made of dirt. Her back appeared to be against something wooden. “Who’s there?”
“Nobody.”
She sneered and in the doing of it pain lanced her face. “Does nobody have a name?”
“A friend. At least I think I am. If the enemy of your enemy is a friend.”
She closed her eyes to parse the meaning of the words. It was a man’s voice, the words easy, almost like he was southern but not quite. He was definitely American and she said so.
“You’re American,” she said.
“As are you.” After a moment, “Do you have a name?”
She was well aware this could be some sort of interrogation technique. “You can call me Preacher’s Daughter.”
Laughter from the darkness. “Sounds like code.”
“Oh yeah, then what’s your name?”
“Francis Scott Key Catches the Enemy.”
“That’s a mouthful.” Then she understood the man’s speech pattern. She’d heard it before. “You’re Indian, aren’t you?”
Again laughter. “If you mean the ones with feathers and not dots, then yes.”
She tried to move her legs, but they were bound at the ankles and just above the knees, the vines tightening as she squirmed. “Alright already. You can ease up. I’m not going anywhere.” And the vines loosened.
“Took me two days to figure that one out. Took you less than five minutes.”
“Let’s just say this isn’t my first supernatural rodeo.”
“You’ve done this before? Been captured by fairies?”
She thought of the way they’d been tricked back in Afghanistan—more than six months of their lives wasted as they squatted in an ancient cistern beside a captured supernatural entity. “Not by fairies, but it’s close enough, I suppose.”
“Looks like they worked you over,” said the voice in the darkness.
“Face-planted. Pixies shot me full of arrows. Some sort of paralytic.”
She heard the sound of the man scooting forward along the ground. He growled at his bindings, then complained to them. The vines must have thought he was trying to get away. A face materialized through the darkness. Black hair long enough to make her jealous hung raggedly over a broad chest. His reddish skin was wrinkled by both the sun and age. He wore a blue flannel shirt opened to reveal a yellow and blue stylized jackrabbit with the words SD STATE above it and JACKRABBITS below. He had contemplative eyes and the curl of a lip that seemed ready to laugh in an instant. He wore old jeans and had red Jordan basketball shoes on his feet.
“Pixies got me too,” he said grinning. “It’s been a long time, Ms. May. Or do they just call you Laurie.”
Her jaw dropped. How did he knew her? But then she looked closer. He looked familiar as well. She knew him, but from where? From the television. She’d seen his report. Was that it?
“I helped your dad out, Ms. May. Back when you were in Iron Hat.”
“I’ve never been to—” but she knew she had. Poe had shown her the evidence. Still, if she could only remember.
“You used to follow me around when I was working. You called me Chief Frankie Scotty.”
Chief Frankie Scotty. Of course. She grinned. She hadn’t heard those words in twenty years. Francis Scott Key. She’d loved it because he’d had two first names. He’d also been in the Army. Desert Storm if she remembered correctly. And her father had been livid when he found out she was calling the young Indian man chief.
“My father was so mad I called you that,” she said.
“You were only twelve years old. You didn’t know any better.” He paused, glanced at her, then clasped his hands. “How are your parents?”
“Dead,” she said, simply.
“You don’t seem too broken up about it.”
“A lot of water has gone under that bridge.”
“Was it placid water or tumultuous water?”
She eyed the Indian man, his face half in shadow. “You seem unusually interested.”
He shrugged. “I never thought I’d see that young girl grown up. I was just wondering about her life.”
“It all seems too perfect. My hypothesis is correct in that there’s a pathway between the two missing towns.”
His face disappeared and she heard a slight snoring coming from the darkness.
“Francis Scott Key?” Had he fallen asleep? “Chief Frankie Scotty?”
The snoring was soft and regular. He’d fallen asleep. How strange. Still, his presence brought back a lot of the memories she’d forgotten. Her father hadn’t been the normal missionary, building churches and proselytizing whenever he could. Instead, he’d build gymnasiums so that the kids would have some place to congregate. Everyone liked to play basketball and it was in coming together that they could achieve fellowship. Of course, the gyms were multiuse and could also be houses of worship.
They also drilled for wells, the aquifer sometimes four-hundred feet down. Summers on the Great Plains could be as forsaken as summers in the desert. Water was a necessity that was becoming increasingly hard to come by.
“Ms. May,” came the Indian’s voice.
“You fell asleep.”
“Narcolepsy. I hit my head in Desert Storm and sometimes get tired. How long was I out?”
“Maybe five minutes.”
“I saw your TV interview, but didn’t recognize you from that,” she said. “How is it that you were able to remember the missing town and no one else was?”
“That is a fine question, Ms. May. I wish I knew.” He tapped the side of his head. “Perhaps it’s because I’m broken.”
“That’s a definite possibility.”
Then why was she able to enter? Perhaps her interaction with the daeva and living in the White for so long had somehow reconfigured the way she perceived things.
“Was there anyone else you knew who realized Iron Hat had gone missing?” she asked.
He shook his head. “Only me. They thought I was crazy. But they were my best friends so they trusted me.”
“A lot of blind trust.”
“When it’s you against the world, it’s easy to trust.” He glanced at her, then back down at his hands. “How did your mother die?”
“I don’t know.”
He looked up sharply. “You don’t know? I thought you said she was dead.”
Preacher’s Daughter shrugged. “She’s dead to me. She left us—my father and me. One day she was there, the next she left, never to be seen again.” She changed the subject. “How’d you get to England?”
His eyes narrowed. “Is that where you think we are?”
She glanced around but there was no evidence to support her assertion, just wooden walls and a dirt floor. “Of course it is.”
He scratched the side of his face. “I wouldn’t be so sure.”
“Why? Where were—They captured you in Iron Hat, didn’t they?”
He nodded. “I pushed through some sort of barrier. Got far enough to notice a bunch of new trees in the middle of town, then it was lights out.” He chuckled. “Woke up here.”
“How long has it been?”
“A day. Maybe two. They feed me fruit and seeds. They also leave me water.”
“Have they shown any indication of what they are doing?” she asked.
He shook his head. “Nothing. They just stole the town.” He paused. “You say you’re from England? Did they steal one there as well?”
She nodded. “And other places too. Something is going on with the Fae and I don’t know what.”
He grinned again. “Ever consider asking them?”
“We tried once, but an invisible giant Formori killed her before we had the chance.”
He seemed about to say something, when his eyes rolled up in his head and he began to shudder. Five seconds later, he fell forward onto the side of his face. For a moment she was worried be might have had a stroke or worse, but then he began to snore softly. Fast asleep like a baby who’d been kept awake too long.
She leaned back and knocked her head against the wood softly a few times in frustration. Her ignoble attempt to enter the town without being seen had been a complete failure. Then again, she hadn’t thought she’d have been up against such powerful magic. It occurred to her that Maeve could probably have just frozen her in place like she’d done the rest of the people in the pub, but the Fae-woman had wanted to listen to her—had wanted information. They were just too powerful. What would it take to stop them short of a nuclear bomb?
She shook her head. She couldn’t think that way. The Black Dragoons had been working with the fairies for centuries. They had to have information that would help her. That is if she could get free. Here she was stuck somewhere she did not know with a man she hadn’t seen in twenty years. What were the odds that she was back in America? Could she be in South Dakota?
Her head whipped around. She heard momentary scratching from the other side of the wall. It was miniscule, but was just there above the silence. She strained to hear it again. She closed her eyes to better focus her senses. And there it was again. Scratching. There was definitely a rhythm there. It couldn’t be organic. What was the rhythm?
When it came again, she had it. She let the scratching finish, then she added her own, finishing the intro beats of Jan Hammer to the theme song for Miami Vice.
Crockett materialized through the wood.
He glanced around, noted the sleeping Indian, then turned to her.
“Couldn’t be sure where they kept you. This was the fourth place I tried. I was about to give up.” He sniffed at her. “You smell different.”
She grinned so wide she thought her face might crack. She threw her arms around him and hugged the boggart to her chest. He smelled of pine, earth, and sweat and she didn’t care. “I can’t believe you came back for me.”
“I couldn’t leave without you. The shimmer. It won’t let me through.”
“Whatever. Are we still in England?”
He gave her a look. “Of course, we are.”
She let him go and held out her arms. “Can you do anything about this?”
He touched the vines and they writhed away into the corner like terrified snakes. He did the same to the ones on her legs, which tightened momentarily, cutting off her circulation, then unfurled and fled after the others.
“Seelie magic doesn’t like the touch of unseelie,” he said.
“What sort of guards are outside?”
“No guards. Everyone is passed out or sleeping.”
“What about the seelie? What about Maeve?” she asked.
“There was a disturbance in the shimmer. A Marrow. Tried to follow us in.”
She nodded. “I bet that got them riled.”
“I must be dreaming,” came a voice from the other side of the room. “I see an Ewok speaking English.”
Francis Scott Key was awake. He rolled over and sat up, wiping the side of his face with his bound hands. His eyes had narrowed, then he looked at Preacher’s Daughter.
“What’s going on?”
“We’re going to escape,” she said. “We’re taking you with us.”
“You’re going to have to explain this to me. Especially how Ewoks are real.”
“No time for that.” She directed Crockett to remove his vines. Then she began searching the room. They’d brought her in, so there had to be a way out. She’d checked the walls but the seams between the boards seemed too tight. She couldn’t see anyway of escaping.
Francis Scott Key was a head taller than her and lean like an elm. He gently pushed her aside and began tapping on the area beside her. “This is where they came in to give me food and water.”
She turned to Crockett.
The bogie was already ahead of her. He melted through the wall and within ten seconds, they heard a click from the other side of the wood and a door opened. She and the Indian slid through and found themselves in the cool hours of a new morning. When Crockett had said that everyone was either passed out or sleeping, he hadn’t been joking. It seemed as if no one had gone home. Then she remembered that there had to be a certain number of people who were from other places and had been trapped in the village. Then again, everyone thought it was the end of the world because that’s what they’d been told, so they were living a last chance bacchanalian existence.
People slept on stoops and on benches.
Five slept in a tangle on a square of grass.
One had passed out with her head inside a trash can and by the smell, it was no wonder why.
They saw all this and more as they ran-walked down the street, heading towards the nearest shimmer. They reached it without intrigue. She and Francis Scott Key each grabbed Crockett’s hand and pushed their way through.
The moment they touched the shimmer, Crockett began to scream. His hair began to sizzle.
An alarm went up from somewhere behind them.
She smelled lavender and ducked, the arrows flying into the shimmer.
She pushed through as hard as she could, screaming as she did.
Francis Scott Key screamed as well.
And they didn’t stop screaming until they pushed free into the cool Leicester night.
Crockett slumped between them. He’d lost all of his hair and looked like a giant bipedal weasel. He started to talk, coughed once, then sagged to the ground. She knew then that he needed help or he was going to die.