Prologue The Tale of Ben and Valeria 1980-81

ONCE UPON A TIME THERE WAS A MAN WHO FELL in love with a fairy and took her for his wife.

That’s how fairy tales are supposed to start and the story I am going to tell really is a fairy tale—although it is really a tale about fairies. I’m not a fairy, but I married one. My son is half-fairy and his friends are fairies in smaller fractions.

But they all come much later in this tale. I want to start at the very beginning, the root of the matter. I need to trace all that happened that brought me to here, this place with this open book and its broad, blank pages, and this bottle of ink. I have kept a journal since I was in high school; my art teacher required it. He wanted us to make the connection between seeing and thinking. But I was never consistent with it until after Malachi was born, so when I try to remember all that happened between Valeria and me, I find myself uncertain and wondering if I am really remembering or conjuring up the gaps between memories. I did jot down bits and pieces, images, but not enough. I never even took her picture. Now I want to remember and I can’t—not all that I want to remember.

Some things I remember all too well.

My son has asked me to tell him this story of his mother and his father countless times—so much so that I feel I know all of it, every detail. I don’t. But any story is an interpretation of a memory of an experience. This story I tell my son is just that. Sometimes it is a revision, sometimes I remember something I have forgotten, or I forget what I thought I knew. He is only ten. I do not tell him the things a man and a woman can fight about. I do not tell him that his mother loved other humans before me, that she was a “human lover,” a scandalous thing in some fairy families. I do not tell him she could be patronizing of less-educated humans. After all, she was a fairy, not an angel. I do not tell him—or anyone—everything. There are parts I will not tell; there are parts I cannot tell. Instead, I would rather skim the waters of our lives for only some of the bright leaves of memory. I did not even begin telling him this story until he was ten.

So, let me begin again as I begin each night that I tell this story to Malachi: the story of a man and a woman, his father and his mother. It’s a love story, I tell him: husband and wife, father and son, friend for friend, just love. I think there may not be any other kind of story.

 

Once upon a time there was a man who fell in love with a fairy and took her for his wife. The man, Ben, did not know Valeria was a fairy, a Daoine Sidhe from the Irish stories, the first time he saw her. He only knew her name by accident. The mail carrier had delivered 1411 Beichler Road’s mail to his house, 1413. He had called to her from his porch the third afternoon after her arrival—in a taxi, laden with suitcases: Lana Carter? No, Valeria she had called back. Valeria what, he had wanted to ask her, Carter? But he hadn’t. Her voice was beautiful, fair and sweet, and she was beautiful. Her hair was the color of light, a finely spun light of gold and white, a light that seemed to glow, as if her head was bathed in a living, non-burning fire. At first whenever Ben saw her, he thought of his dead first wife, Emma. Emma’s hair was red and long and frothy and he would wrap it around his arms in bed. He felt guilty about Valeria at first: it had only been two years since Emma had died. It had been a hot June afternoon and he had been in the kitchen, his head in the refrigerator, rummaging for a beer. Emma had gone to get the mail. He heard her call out—but it was only a sound, not his name. Something fell. Ben ran, dropping the beer, and found Emma, crumpled on the flagstone walk, an odd dent in the side of her head. The doctors later told him it was a freak accident, she had fallen just so, cracked her skull, broken her neck. She had tripped on a loose flagstone. There was nothing he could have done.

The doctor, Ben knew, was wrong. He could have fixed that flagstone. Emma had asked and asked and he had put it off. His laziness had killed Emma.

Ben had sat there by her, waiting for the ambulance, fanning her; June gets so hot in North Carolina. While his guilt still lingered, now he could remember it all, and not cry, and his heart no longer ached as it had and the woman next door was so very beautiful and her hair glowed and when she looked at him, he could see her eyes were an intense deep green, viridian, emerald, jade, spring light in the forest after a sudden storm. And his body had ached when it remembered.

So Ben watched her, casually at first—he didn’t want her to think he was stalking her. Besides, he saw very little of her, as she was rarely up or out when he went to work at the library in Garner, North Carolina, the little town where he lived, just south of a bigger city, Raleigh. He began to think he would never do more than that, until one afternoon three weeks after the golden-haired woman had become his neighbor. Ben had left the library, hurrying to miss the rain. The sky was dark and heavy with clouds. As he walked home, across the field, across the parking lot, past the shopping center, lightning crackled across the sky and the wind began to rise, the leaves turning over, as the trees’ whispering grew louder and louder. The rain got him as he crossed the road between the shopping center and his street: hard, quick rain. He ran to his house, and as he fumbled for his key on his front porch, he glanced over at the house of the golden-haired woman. And he saw her: not in the yard, or getting in or out of her car, but in the sky, flying on the winds of the thunderstorm.

Ben stared. He slapped his cheek, rubbed his eyes, felt his forehead, glad of the porch and its box of dryness. He kept looking: yes, it was she, the golden-haired woman, flying in the storm.

By the next morning, Ben had, however, managed to convince himself he had been imagining things. What he had seen was not possible. People did not fly. They didn’t disappear, either, he told himself after breakfast as he started his walk to work. There she was, in her backyard, her hair shining in the early morning sun, and then, a sudden flicker of light and she wasn’t there.

The next afternoon, late, at twilight, Ben was in his own backyard, ostensibly to pick up branches knocked off by the storm from his willow oaks and pines. He made sure he picked up each branch one at a time, and he kept watching her house. A half-hour after Ben started his cleanup, there was another flicker of light, and she was there, standing where no one had been standing before.

Ben knew he wasn’t crazy. He remembered, from years ago, when he read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, what the professor had told Susan and Peter when they asked him if Lucy was crazy for telling them she had gone through the wardrobe into Namia and insisting her story true. Either Lucy was mad or lying or telling the truth, the professor said. One only has to look at her and see she is not mad and they knew she was not a liar, so she had to be telling the truth. I am not mad, Ben told himself, nor am I sick, with some sort of fever and delirium. Someone at work would have told me. So what he had seen had to be real. The golden-haired woman was magic—a magical being, a witch, or a fairy.

Ben didn’t know what to do, so he did what he knew how to do. He collected books from all over the library: Celtic and Irish mythology and folklore, Irish fairy tales of the Daoine Sidhe, Scottish tales, The Blue Fairy Book, and the red, the yellow, the green. Anthropology, psychology. He scribbled notes on a yellow legal pad, tucked leftover catalog cards in book after book, and again he felt guilty because of Emma and he kept telling himself: she is two years dead. But, if Valeria is a real fairy—well, they were dangerous, weren’t they?

Ben read and read.

He might have read for a lot longer if Jack hadn’t caught him at it.

Jack Ruggles was a writer and an English professor at NC State University and Ben’s friend. His dark brown hair seemed to have never known a comb and stuck up in odd tufts all over Jack’s head. He then lived across the street from the Garner Public Library and he haunted the place, taking home stacks of novels, browsing through the magazines, and asking Ben endless reference questions. For his novel, he told Ben; he had to get the facts straight. Fiction had to make sense; real life didn’t.

Jack’s real life sure didn’t.

Jack’s wife had, one morning early in the spring, gotten up, dressed, eaten, drank, and gotten in her car and drove away, with Jack’s son, Thomas. She had never come back. Jack was in his first year of a custody fight.

Ben was at the reference desk one late May morning, surrounded by his fairy books when someone’s question had taken him into the stacks. When he came back, Jack was standing there, reading his yellow legal pad. Jack looked up when Ben cleared his throat.

“Who’s Valeria, Ben? Can she really fly?”

At first, Ben didn’t know what to say to Jack. To say anything would be to give up this special and beautiful secret, this golden pleasure he had had and no one else. Yet, he needed to talk and Jack was his best friend.

“She’s my neighbor, the blond I told you about. I think she’s a fairy.”

“A dyke?”

“No, you idiot: a fairy. You know, like in The Blue Fairy Book,” he said and held up the book. “You know, with wings and fairy gold and—”

“She has wings?” Jack asked, as he flipped through Ben’s legal pad.

“You know what I mean. I’ve been watching her—and I think she may be watching me, too.” The last part he wasn’t sure about—maybe he had imagined her glances over the fence, her quick head turns at the door. Imagining it? Maybe he was imagining everything: the fairy flights, the disappearances, and this was just one more thing, surely he was going crazy—

Jack waved his hand to cut Ben off “Well, my reference question for you today is what is Ben Tyson going to do about his fairy babe? Don’t stew over all that stuff, find out.”

So, if it hadn’t been for Jack, Ben might have never met Valeria. He would have never found the courage; he would have talked himself out of it; he would have convinced himself it was hopeless—he was hopeless. Ben argued; Jack insisted. And one hot, early June night, Ben knocked on Valeria’s door, carrying a Food Lion bag with an Angel Food cake and a bottle of white wine. (And five ten-penny nails in his pants pocket—just to be on the safe side, Jack had said. Iron’s poisonous to fairies.)

Valeria, laughing, let Ben into what looked first like an ordinary living room, like any other living room he had ever been in: couch, chairs, lamps, pictures on the walls, bric-a-brac on the shelves. Then he looked around again. The TV was on without sound and he couldn’t remember ever seeing any program like the one on. The lamps weren’t electric. They were lit candles inside glass globes, yellow flames flickering and cutting away the darkness with yellow shadows. He looked back at the TV: it wasn’t. It was a terrarium with a very strange-looking lizard perched on a rock in the middle. Smoke trailed out of its nostrils. And one of the pictures: a deep black pool, surrounded by white trees with silver and golden leaves. He stared, stepped closer: yes, the trees were swaying to an invisible wind. He looked back at Valeria, who sat in the armchair, her hands in her lap.

“I shouldn’t have looked back at you,” she said. “But I think I wanted you to catch me.”

The next night they went out to dinner in Raleigh, to Swain’s, a steak house. She walked around the car three times, muttering under her breath, as Ben stared. Safe-travel charms, she explained, and protective wards—like an alarm and a force field—just in case the Fomorii tried something while they were in the restaurant. The Fomorii, she explained, as they drove, were dark elves, black elves, evil fairies. The shadow lords. Princes of darkness. The bad guys her people were fighting back home. (Thesaurus, she added, was one of her favorite games. She had memorized whole sections of Roget’s.)

“They shouldn’t be able to get to this universe, not anymore, but we can’t take the chance.”

“The princes of darkness?” Ben grumbled, shaking his head. He reminded himself he had asked for this, he had to believe her, no matter how fantastic any of it sounded. He had really seen her flying in a thunderstorm, and there was the picture and the little dragon and she had been looking at him. He looked over at her as he drove: for the first time, he could see points on her ears. She looked back and laughed and shook that bright hair and her ears were round.

“I let the glamour slip,” she said. “Wouldn’t do to not have it in the restaurant, now, would it?”

“Glamour?”

“An illusion I cast to hide things ...”

 

I did not learn this entire story in one smooth, continuous flow. Rather it came in chunks and odd pieces, as Valeria and I came to know each other. But what I will tell you is the story assembled, the chunks connected. Valeria’s people, who really are the Daoine Sidhe, and the Fomorii, have been at war for all of Valeria’s life, and for years before that. Compromise and negotiation had been tried and failed. Truces had been made and broken too many times to count. Now, there was only war. The Fomorii came from another room. Creation, she told me, is like a huge, old rambling Victorian house, with different wings everywhere, rooms, towers, stairs, and causeways. The universe of humanity, the Earth, the Sun, the solar system, the galaxy—everything—was in one room. Faerie, the home of the Daoine Sidhe, was in another, next door. And next door to theirs was the universe of the Fomorii. The Daoine Sidhe believe the Fomorii fouled theirs and had come seeking another. How? Through the doors between rooms, between universes. That was how she had come to ours. Remember, she said, all those Irish stories about doors into the hills, warnings about stepping into fairy rings, that time ran in different ways here and there? I remembered. On certain days—Halloween or Samhain—the doors can be opened. May 1 or Beltaine is another day. And so she had come here.

Fairies, Ben learned at their first dinner, had particular diets. No salt, no spices, and no meat.

“But, Valeria, this is a steak house. Why didn’t you tell me?” Ben hissed across the table, trying to ignore the waiter who, fortunately, seemed mesmerized by the light, which had been blinking ever since they had sat down.

“You didn’t ask, Ben. There are Talking Beasts in Faerie and out of respect to them, no one ever eats meat. No salt and no spices, either—bad for our digestion. Do you have any wooden knives, forks, and spoons?” she asked the waiter, who quickly looked down. “And could you light our candles, please?”

“Wood? I can find some plastic,” the waiter said, as he lit the candles, as if beautiful women asked him for wooden cutlery every day.

“How did you manage to ride in my steel car?” Ben asked, feeling guilty about the ten-penny nails now in his jacket pocket. They had been jabbing his leg.

“Skingloves,” she told him and slowly pulled off one. The glove was transparent and soft, yet tough. “Leggings, too. Besides, I like humans, always have.” Much later, Ben would learn just what she meant by that, of the human lovers she had had in the past and in another land. Loving humans had caused no end of grief with her parents. And he would learn her past was a lot farther away than his.

They learned from each other, at that dinner, in a coffeehouse after a movie another night, on walks around the neighborhood, sitting on each other’ porches . . . Ben learned the Daoine Sidhe had few machines and a longstanding misunderstanding with the Catholic Church over what was a good and a bad fairy. The Daoine Sidhe had visited the human universe often—before the war. They had come to teach. What? Oh, all sorts of things. They were the First-born in their world; dwarves, swimmers, and the wood-folk were the Second- and Third-born ...

Ben, when pressed by Jack years later, could not say exactly when he fell in love with her or when he knew she was in love with him. He tried to remember when he fell in love with Emma and he couldn’t. Love came slowly for Ben—no magic glances across the room, no bolts of lightning—but rather like a glass beneath a dripping faucet, filling one drop at a time. There was no one movie or dinner or late-night swim, but at some time during that summer the drop fell that over-flowed the glass and they were in love. Everyone else knew before Ben did: Jack, Mrs. Carmichael, the head librarian, even the volunteers who came in to shelf books.

Jack wanted to know what it was like to sleep with a woman who could do a little magic—not that she ever did much; the wards, lights, teleporting hither and yon, small stuff. All that I told him and all that I am going to tell here is that it happened inside a white flame that rippled around, between, and through us. The flame changed colors, becoming a living kaleidoscope. And that when I woke, later, the lights still lingered in her, rippling across her back like moonlight through a venetian blind someone was opening and closing. I walked around her house, in its warm and close dark, just to touch her things, straighten the magazines she had brought back from her jaunts around the Earth. I walked in her kitchen, a somewhat bare room, as she tended to short out small appliances and when we ate at home, I cooked, in my kitchen. I walked back to her bedroom and straightened the things on her dresser: a brush, a comb, a tiny bottle of perfume. I looked at the perfume for the longest time, trying to read the fine, italic words on the label, but they were in a language and an alphabet I didn’t recognize. Then I lay back down in her warmth and went to sleep.

I told Jack nothing else. I have told Malachi nothing at all of that night. And this is all I will tell you of it.

 

Ben and Valeria went to Ocracoke the first of August, for two weeks. There they stayed in the Crews Inn, tucked away on Back Road, and every day they rented bicycles and rode up NC 12 to the beach. The sea reminded Valeria of home and as they walked on the white sand she told him about the sea that had been in front of the house in which she had grown up, a multi-colored sea: gold, silver, green, white, blue, and grey. Dolphins and whales, along with the merfolk, the swimmers, lived in her ocean, and, yes, of course, dolphins and whales were intelligent and could speak—or rather were telepathic. Ben remembered thinking then that all the fairy tales he had ever read or ever heard: good fairies and bad fairies, talking animals, and mermaids, and all the rest, were true. All the stories were true.

Two nights before they were to go back home, as they had lain in bed together, Ben braiding her long, golden hair through his fingers, Valeria told him she was expecting, gravid, in the family way—

“Pregnant?” he had said and she had said yes, and told him other things he needed to know.

She was fifteen days pregnant and a Daoine Sidhe pregnancy was eight months long. In two-and-a-half months Valeria wouldn’t be able to teleport anywhere, as the baby might be left behind. In three-and-a-half months Valeria wouldn’t be able to leave the house. She would be glowing and exuding light from practically every orifice in her body and would no longer be able to control it as she usually could.

And after the baby was born—a boy—she would have to go back to Faerie, without the baby, without Ben.

Ben could not understand why. Why hadn’t she told him this from the very beginning? Because she had decided not to go back, ever—furlough or no furlough, she was going to go AWOL, desert, go walkabout. Then she had seen him and met him and fallen in love. Then she had decided to take him back with her, war or no war—she wasn’t going to leave her human lover behind, not this time. But the baby had changed everything. Why? A half-human baby would be very vulnerable to the Fomorii for too long a time, not until he is trained into his powers, powers a fairy child would learn to use the way he learns to walk and talk. The baby needed to be human first, then a fairy. And Ben would have to stay and raise the boy until the war was over and she could come for them both.

Besides, she said, as they argued and walked the beach and argued and packed and drove to the ferry and argued and rode the ferry over Pamlico Sound to Cedar Island, the gulls diving for bits of bread, she was needed in Faerie. There was one more thing she hadn’t yet told him: she was on the Dodecagon, the ruling council, one of the twelve most important people in Faerie. Valeria was the Prime Mover, the head of the council. She had been foolish to think she could escape her responsibilities, that she could abandon the cause of the Light beyond the Light, which would go out on both worlds if the Daoine Sidhe lost.

 

She showed me my light once, the light that is part of the Light beyond the Light.

“I have a light, too?”

“Yes, but it’s really hard for humans to see their light, their aura—at least it used to be.”

We stood naked in front of a mirror and slowly the light in the room dimmed and the light around me became visible. A pale blue-grey light outlined my flesh. Another layer, rainbow-colored, enclosed the blue-grey. On the top of my head, at my throat, my heart, my solar plexus, my stomach, and my groin, there seemed to be inner fires of different colors. Just beyond the rainbow layer, beginning at my head and spreading down was yet another layer, bright yellow.

“A halo,” I murmured. “Does everybody have a halo and all these layers of light?”

“Yes.”

I lifted my hand and the layers of light moved with me, sparking and shooting off tiny falling stars.

 

The trip home to Garner was in silence. For a week we stumbled around each other, muttering and grumbling. Mrs. Carmichael asked me if I was sick; she told me she hadn’t seen me so despondent since Emma died. I wanted to talk to Jack, but he was out of town, so, to my surprise, I drove into Raleigh to St. Anthony’s, to Father Mark, the same priest who had come to see me when Emma died, the same priest I told to go to hell, punctuating my command with a slammed door. I was afraid he would do the same; instead he listened. At the end of my haphazard story, a melange of generalities and specifics (I just couldn’t tell him Valeria was a Daoine Sidhe), we were well in late summer twilight and the light in his office was changing and moving, as it burnished his white hair, outlined the gold of his glasses. He looked hard at me and told me I had left parts of the story out, and so he didn’t quite understand it all. But, he said, leaning into his desk, to love another is to accept them as they are, and not to try and make them into what we would want them to be. My love for Valeria couldn’t be based on her promising not to die like Emma, on her promising to be what she wasn’t, to do what would make her what she wasn’t. Did I understand? Yes, but what do I do? Go home and love her, he told me. Believe that she loves you. Believe in your love for each other. Go home, Ben.

So I did.

 

There were times that fall when Ben almost forgot Valeria had to leave. He almost forgot at Halloween—Samhain—when his house—their house, now—was the closest to being haunted as it had ever been. Green witch-lights glowed in pumpkins all over the yard and, no matter how hard the neighborhood kids tried, they couldn’t get near one. What looked like ghosts drifted and moaned in the trees. Banshees wailed in the darkness, sending kids screaming down the street.

In Faerie, Valeria told him, Samhain was not disguises or loud noises or scary stories. Samhain was a festival of lights. Great bonfires lit the mountaintops. Valeria remembered seeing the flames from her home by the sea. At midnight there were prayers, songs, poems, or simply conversations with the Good God and Goddess wherever one was: on the beach, in a forest glade, or the Great Temple in the White City. To remember the dead, to say good-bye to the old year, to welcome the new. It was a night when you could see another’s soul, plain and visible.

She made Christmas a festival of lights as well. The tree was filled with multi-colored, shimmering lights drifting in and out of the branches. Outside she sent more lights to roam the eaves, porch railings, weaving a shining net over the house. By then she was showing and she was luminous—the light grew as the baby grew, she said. Her mother had told her it was to light the way for the baby’s soul. Daoine Sidhe mothers couldn’t stop the glowing at five months—all their energy was spent in the baby. Ben had been able to deflect the neighbors’ questions about Valeria’s absence: bed rest, doctor’s orders, at her mother’s, where he went every weekend. He had to park his car at the library on weekends and sneak in his house to make that story work. To answer questions about the decorations: experimental special effects, like the movies—a friend worked for Industrial Light and Magic, really, no, trade secret, but be on the lookout at the theatre. One of his neighbors, months later, swore he saw the same lights in a film. Ben had just nodded and said, “See, I told you so.”

There would have been still more questions about the fey crèche Valeria sat beneath the tree. Fortunately no one, except for Jack, ever saw it. The crèche had three babies inside, the Three Sons sent by the Good God and Goddess: Oberon, Pan, and Triton. Then, she set four candles in the window, for the Four Teachers, one of Earth, one of Air, one of Water, one of Fire.

And Ben started going back to mass. He stuffed dollars in the votive offering box each time and carefully lit the tiny candles in the blue and green glass jars with one of the long sticks stuck in a sand pot. He argued with himself as he lit each candle: this was a superstition, this was a prayer to keep her, this was the Catholic magic he laughed at, this was all he could do to keep her here.

 

In the first week of March the baby was born.

“The baby’s coming. Ben, wake up, wake up. My water broke; I’m in labor.”

Ben turned over groggily and looked up into Valeria’s face. He had never seen her radiating so much light before. He could barely look at her. The room was filled with light.

“The baby? Now?”

“Yes. Do you remember the things I need for you to do? Are you awake?”

“Wide awake.”

“Remember, this isn’t an ordinary human birth. Close all the curtains and blinds—otherwise the neighbors will think the house is on fire ...” Valeria went on, giving Ben a detailed list of things to gather, what temperature the room should be, how far apart her contractions were, how much time that meant, and so on. He didn’t tell her she had given him almost the same list two months ago, and a month ago, and a slightly revised version last week. He just nodded at each item as he twisted the bed sheets with his hands, telling himself to be calm, just be calm, take slow, deep breaths, count to ten, be calm . . .

“Well, Ben? Get busy!”

He got busy.

 

Our son, Malachi Lucius Tyson, was born four hours later, just before dawn. When he came out, head first, there was a tremendous explosion of light. He slid into my hands all wet and slippery and hot. I had never felt (and have yet to) a healthy baby so hot before. I cut the cord and wrapped him in a wet towel, steam rising into my face.

He was the most beautiful baby I have ever seen.

 

Ben thought it was Malachi’s crying the next night that woke him. He sat up quickly and rolled out of bed. The baby was fast sleep. Ben stood, one hand on the crib, listening. He could hear Malachi breathing, and then softer, yet in the same rhythm, Valeria. He heard the faint tick of the clock on the dresser. And a thump in the living room that shouldn’t be there, followed quickly by another, dull and heavy on the floor. A bird—a bat against the window—could he have possibly left the window open?

 

I still remember what I was thinking, trying to make sense out of an impossible noise. I still remember wishing I had a baseball bat or a tennis racquet as I went down the hall to check, feeling foolish.

 

They stood by a picture of Faerie Valeria had hung in Ben’s living room, right above the table where she had set the terrarium with the little dragon. There were two of them, shadows blacker and darker than anything Ben had ever seen. Their shadows swallowed light. Ben watched as the moonlight was sucked up into their darknesses. The nearer one sniffed and turned, and looked directly at Ben, its eyes dark red fires. It took one step forward, its claws scratching on the wood. Ben stepped backward. The Fomorii had come; they had gotten through after all. And it was in the middle of the night and Ben was stark naked.

The nearest Fomorii took another step toward Ben and spat on the floor. The spit hissed like water tossed into a frying pan. Then it cracked a whip. Sparks flew and Ben felt the air in the room suddenly grow hotter and closer. A few more steps closer and he knew the whip would have left a burn on his chest. The monster cracked its whip again and this time caught Ben on his leg. He screamed and the two Fomorii started walking slowly toward him, one behind the other, backing him down the hall. Why should they be afraid of one naked human when they were winning battles against the lords of Faerie?

Faerie. Nails, iron, the blood metal. He knew they were from yet another universe, but maybe, just maybe. The ten-penny nails were still in his jacket pocket, right where he had left them months ago. Behind Ben, about six feet away, was the bedroom door, a white rectangle, the light contained inside the doorframe, as if someone had caged the light. Had Valeria set the wards? But he had been able to go out—did the wards know him, let him come and go? Could they keep out the darkness? The jacket—where was it?—his closet.

The Fomorii were less than five feet away. He saw them clearly: crests erect, black scales, yellow fangs, yellow claws, those red eyes. He took another step backward; the Fomorii matched it. The bedroom was less than three feet away. Ben could hear Malachi screaming. He took another step backward, felt something give, and he was inside. The Fomorii stood at the door, stopped by the light. He glanced to be sure Valeria had the baby and he bolted for the closet and the jacket and the nails.

“I forgot to set all the wards. I was too tired; I forgot; I thought we were safe. I can’t hold them much longer—I just don’t have the strength ...”

He didn’t even look at her as he frantically searched for the nails. When Ben found them in his jacket pocket, he yanked them out and turned as the Fomorii snarled, in one fluid motion. The air and the light in the door shimmered and for a very brief moment he saw what looked like a very fine spider web crack in a windshield. Both Fomorii cracked their whips and hissing fireballs the size of basketballs flew through the shimmering air that now seemed to fill the room. Valeria matched the fireballs with her own lightning bolts, exploding them like fireworks. The air in the door shook again, vibrating, and broken, bits of shattered light cascading to the floor. The first Fomorii steeped into the room, the darkness coming with him, a living, silent, foulsmelling storm cloud. It ate the light, breaking it into firefly-sized pieces. With the nails tight in his hand, wishing they were longer, Ben ran straight for the monster and stabbed at him, slashing open one scaly, black arm.

The darkness froze. The second Fomorii froze. The wounded one screamed and moaned and then it began to melt, its crest drooping and oozing, the scales blurring, everything blurring into a dark, vile, smelly mess on the floor. The second Fomorii ran and Ben could hear another shattering of the air. The darkness vanished at the shattering and there was only the grey-blue dawn light. Ben could see the sky and a few stars out the window. The only other lights in the room were the baby and Valeria. She looked at him and he looked at her, the nails still in his hand. At Ben’s feet were tiny bits of darkness, like black soot on the floor.

 

We never really talked about what happened. I wish we had. Jack tried to make me talk to her, but I couldn’t.

“You haven’t talked about it at all? Ben, you fought off the Forces of Evil and saved your woman and your child and you can’t talk to her about it? Ben!”

“You don’t understand. I had nails, iron nails, in my jacket pocket in our bedroom, the room our son was born in. Yes, those nails saved her and Malachi, but I got them to protect myself against her. Remember?”

“She must have said something,” Jack muttered, as he carefully mixed the gravy and mashed potatoes on his plate together. We were in the Kuntry Kitchen for our regular Friday lunch.

“She told me why the Fomorii came. They were assassins.” And I told him the rest: that she was not just one of the Twelve on the Dodecagon. She was the Prime Mover, the head, the focal point. If they got her, the tide of the war would change. That they even got through was a sign she was desperately needed back home.

“Tell her I told you to get those nails. Geez, Ben, she’s leaving. You gotta talk to her.”

I shook my head and asked Danielle, our waitress, for more sweet iced tea. I didn’t want to talk about it anymore.

Valeria and I never mentioned the nails.

 

Valeria left April 30, Beltaine Eve.

“Are you just going to draw a pentagram on the floor at midnight and step through it?” Ben asked a few days before. He wasn’t angry; he was just sad; they both were. They were in the bedroom and Valeria had just put Malachi to bed. They stood by the crib and watched as he dreamed, his breathing slow, easy, the sheet rising, falling, his fists by his face. The floor was still speckled with the black soot. Ben had tried every cleanser he could think of—Murphy’s Oil Soap, Pinesol, Formula 409—nothing had worked. Valeria had finally made him stop: the soot had bonded with the wood. He would have to replace the entire floor, she had told him, and destroy the wood. She had given him instructions how. Floors made of oak, holly, elder, thorn, ash, hawthorn, and apple wood were going to take some doing.

“No, I have to go to the nearest gate,” Valeria said and made some imperceptible adjustment to Malachi’s covers. “I’ll take a taxi. Let’s go in the living room or we will wake him up.”

“Take a taxi? You can fly, or teleport, can’t you?” Ben asked, following her down the hall. He would have to replace the floor in the hall, too, and the living room. The embedded black spots were everywhere. Valeria had told him the longer they remained in the wood, the weaker it would be until the floors just collapsed. And that sometimes the black spots could make anyone that walked on them for too long sick of heart, and eventually, of the body. They sat down on the couch, and Valeria leaned into Ben, her head on his shoulder.

“I don’t have the strength for it, not so soon after delivery. Ben, I really don’t want to go. You know, if the Fomorii hadn’t found me, tried to kill me—I would have stayed, Dodecagon or no. But there is just too much at stake, and I need you both to be safe. Without me, you’re safe. With me, you’re not.”

“Can’t I go with you to the gate?”

No, she told him, it wouldn’t be safe. She didn’t even want him to know where it was. Besides, it would make leaving all the harder.

 

I needed to hear that: she would have stayed. She had forgiven me the nails.

 

I said I told my son almost nothing about his mother until he was ten. I think now I was wrong to do that. He needed to know who and what she was, if for no other reason, to know who and what he was and was becoming. If I had, I think it would have made the first part of his puberty, when his fairyness started to manifest, so much more bearable for the both of us—much less scary for him. But I would have denied him that, if I could. That was wrong, too, I know. But I was so afraid of losing him as I lost her.

Now, I know there are worst things to be scared of than losing someone you love.

I have told him this story now I don’t know how many times. Malachi knows it by heart. And no matter how many times I tell it, the ending is always the hardest: I have to tell him how his mother died and that there was nothing I could have done to save her and that she died so that he and I would not die, that she loved us that much. I do not tell him that there seems to be no limit on how many times a heart can break, or that when I grieved for his mother, I grieved again for Emma, for loose flagstones, for human weakness, for not being enough, for feeling that I had failed again. I do not tell him I was angry with both women, with myself.

 

It hurt to watch the taxi turn into the driveway, Val gather her things, kiss and hug Malachi. When she turned to kiss Ben, they were both crying. Neither of them could say anything. Valeria touched Ben one more time, lightly, just the tip of her glowing fingers on his cheek, and turned to go down the front steps onto the flagstone path to the waiting red taxi.

Valeria was halfway between the steps and the car when the air shimmered, broke, falling in a rain of broken light, freeing the other Fomorii. It snapped its fire whip when its foot touched the earth, a snap so hard the whip broke, releasing a huge fireball, a miniature comet, with a tail of flames. The fireball was aimed at Ben. He could see it coming, smell and feel the approaching heat, and he knew there was no time and nowhere to go. Then Valeria threw herself in front of the fireball. Ben screamed: Noooo, don’t, don’t, nooo. The fireball exploded on impact.

Or did she explode? Ben was never sure. The resulting white fire burned away the night, the dark, the stars, the Fomorii, and the fire whip, Valeria, and part of the yard, the flagstones, the shrubbery. The shock wave, a sudden rippling, an airborne tide, hit Ben in the chest, throwing him back, into the flowerbeds, into the pansies and daffodils. The living room windows all shattered, the taxi flipped over, once, twice, three times, slamming into the fence. Ben never knew what happened to the driver; he was gone when Ben, some time later, remembered to check. The flagstones melted, as did a good part of the asphalt, driveway. And there was nothing left, except the melted glassy earth, the burnt grass, and a fine ash, of either Valeria or the Fomorii. The police and fire department arrived to find Ben still lying in the flowerbed, the grass still on fire, the gravel and asphalt, molten. At least, Ben thought, they had something to do. A paramedic helped him up into a barrage of questions. All he could think to say, since the taxi hadn’t been considerate enough to explode, was ball lightning. The police, at least, kept the neighbors at bay.

“There’s not a cloud in the sky. Ball lightning?” a sergeant asked, one eyebrow raised.

Ben nodded, and repeated his story and told them again and again he had no idea where the taxi driver had gone. Finally they left, and Ben repeated his story to the handful of neighbors still up, and then, shaking his head, no more, enough, went back into the house, and sat down on the couch. He couldn’t do anything else. He couldn’t think, talk; he could barely breath. When Malachi started crying, he was finally able to move. The clock on the dresser said three-thirty. He didn’t turn on a light; he didn’t need to. The baby glowed. Something new hung from the crib mobile Jack had given them, a slender, silver-grey necklace with one dangling charm. Putting Malachi on his shoulder, Ben held the charm in his hand. It was also silver-grey, heavy, and shaped like a star, a small star with twelve points.

By then Malachi was yelling so loud, Ben could have used him to guide in airplanes at RDU. Leaving the charm to dangle on the mobile and rubbing the boy’s back, Ben went into the kitchen. There, on the table, inside what looked like a nest of light, was a bottle. Ben carefully put his hand through the light-nest and it faded away, as if someone had blown it out, as he pricked up the still-warm bottle. He knew it was Valeria’s own milk—one from the precious few bottles she had left. He went back into the bedroom to the rocking chair and sat down, yawning, with Malachi in the crook of his arm. He looked up at Ben as he sucked noisily, with golden eyes, from her mother’s family, Valeria had said.

“I think you have my nose,” Ben whispered.

Ben knew that eventually he would have to cry. He knew it wasn’t going to be easy to raise an infant alone. For the first time he was glad Emma had left him money. Mrs. Carmichael was going to be shocked when he asked for paternity leave.

Father Mark would help; so would Jack.

Malachi was asleep. Ben gently slid the nipple out of his mouth and wiped the milk off his chin. He stood up very slowly and carried the baby back to the crib. He put him down and, after covering him, stepped back, and in the early morning shadows of the room, Ben watched his son sleep. As Malachi breathed, the light around him vibrated, contracting and expanding. Ben moved closer and put his hand on the baby’s head and curled his golden hair around his fingers: warm ribbons of light. In a month or so, Valeria had told him, Malachi would stop glowing. He would be like any human baby then, at least until puberty. Ben wished then that he had thought to have a family picture made, to put on his desk, where Emma’s had sat. With his free hand, he flipped his fingers at the charm and started it swinging back and forth over his son’s head.

Ben did weep, eventually.

And Ben raised his son as best he knew how, with the help of those friends who loved him, and Malachi, who was always small, was a good boy, and he and his father lived happily together for ten years.

Then everything changed.