The City: New York City—more exactly: Greenwich Village in Lower Manhattan.
The Magic: A Faerie Wild Hunt leaves frightened mortals, flattened cars, and pavement glowing with hoofprints in its path. It’s up to the Archmage of New York and a few others—including a werewolf drag queen—to stop the Hunt.
The smell of the greasepaint was getting to Edie.
“Oh my god, sweetheart, and then she says to me, ‘Honey, I think you’d look fabulous with dreads,’ and I swear I stared at her for ten whole seconds before I managed to ask, ‘Do you think I’m a fucking Jamaican, bitch?’ I mean, can you believe the gall of . . . ”
Nor the mouths on some others, Edie thought tiredly, pressing a thumb into the arch of her foot and trying to massage away the cramp you got from a two-hour burlesque in four-inch stilettos. They were worth the pain, though: hot little boots with the last two inches of the dagger heel clad in ferrules of shining metal. When you took them down the runway, they glittered like walking on stars.
She looked in her makeup mirror, still trying to tune out Paige Turner’s fucking tirade about fucking Jamaicans, which wasn’t getting any more interesting for its intricacy. Edie’s vision was shimmering with migraine aura—full moon tonight—and the smell of makeup and scorched hair was making her nauseated. The fucking cramp wasn’t coming out of her fucking foot. No way she could walk in flats like this.
She didn’t want to go home: there was nothing in her apartment except three annoying flatmates—one of whom had an incontinent cat—and a telephone that wasn’t going to ring. Not for her, anyway.
She wanted a boyfriend. A family. Somebody who would help her get rid of this fucking headache, and treat her like a person rather than a sideshow. Somebody who wouldn’t spout bigoted shit at her. She didn’t get that from her father’s family, and she certainly didn’t get it here.
“Fuck.” She dropped her foot to the floor, arching it up so only the ball and toes touched. “I’m fucking fucked.”
“Aw, sweetie,” somebody said in her ear—a lower voice than Paige’s, and a much more welcome one. “What’s wrong?”
Somebody was trying to distract Paige by asking her if she was staying up for the lunar eclipse. It wasn’t working. Edie wondered if a punch in the kisser would do it.
She looked up to see Mama Janeece leaning over her, spilling out of her corset in the most convincing manner imaginable.
“I gotta get out of here,” Edie said. “You know, I’m just gonna walk to the subway now.”
She jammed her foot back into the boot. The support eased the cramp temporarily, but she knew there’d be hell to pay all night. So be it.
“It’s fifteen degrees,” Janeece said. “You’re going to go out there in high heels and a wig and four inches of fabric?”
“I’ve got a coat. And a bottle of schnapps back at my place.” Edie stood. She smiled to take the sting out of it, then made sure her voice was loud enough for Paige to overhear as she gathered her coat. “Besides, if I have to listen to any more racist bullshit from Miss Thing over there, I’m going to be even colder in a jail cell all night. Somebody ought to tell her that it ain’t drag if you look like Annie Lennox.”
She sashayed out, letting the door swing shut behind her. Not quite fast enough to cut short the cackles of outraged queens.
Halfway down the corridor, she realized she’d left her cellphone behind. It wasn’t worth ruining a good exit for. She would get it tomorrow. Anyway, she didn’t have anybody to call.
The coat wasn’t long enough to cover her knees and the cold burned through those hot little boots. After ten steps, Edie regretted her decision. But going back now would be a sure way to convert triumph into ignominy, so she soldiered on, sequined spandex stretching around her thighs with each swinging stride as she click-clacked up Jane Street toward 8th Avenue. Sure, it was cold, but she could take it. Sure, her feet hurt—but she could take that, too. She was probably less miserable than the gaunt black hound with his hide tented over his hipbones that she glimpsed slinking aside at the first intersection.
The cold deadened her sense of smell. Manhattan’s rich panoply of scents gave way to ice, cold concrete, and leaden midwinter. The good news was it deadened her incipient migraine, too. And in the freezing dark of the longest night of the year, there weren’t many people hanging around to hassle her.
Of course, she’d no sooner thought that than the purr of an eight-cylinder engine alerted her—seconds before the car glided up beside her. Somebody rolled down the window, releasing warm air and the scent of greasy bodies. A simpering catcall floated through the icy night. A male voice, pitched singsong. “Hey lady. Hey lady. I like your big legs, lady. You want a ride?”
The car was a beige American land yacht from the 1980s, rusty around the wheel wells. There were four guys in it, and the one in the front passenger seat was the one purring out the window. From the look on his face, his friends had put him up to it, and he was a little horrified by his own daring.
Edie turned, flipped the skirts of her coat out, and planted both hands on her snake-slender hips. She drew herself up to her full six-foot-eight in those stilettos. Something smelled mushroomy; she hoped it wasn’t the interior of that car.
“I ain’t no lady,” she said definitively. “I’m a queen.”
The car slowed, easing up to the curb. The front and rear passenger doors opened before it had coasted to a stop. Three men climbed out—one must have slid across the rear bucket seat to do so—and then the driver’s door opened and the fourth man stood up on the far side of the car.
Edie brazened it out with a laugh, but her hand was in her purse. She didn’t have a gun—this was New York City—but she had a pair of brass knuckles and a can of pepper spray. And other advantages, but she’d hate to have to use those. For one thing, she’d ruin her blouse.
The throbbing behind her eyes intensified. She kept her hand in her purse, and was obvious about it. They wouldn’t know she didn’t have a gun. And now that they were standing up beside the car, it was obvious that she had a foot on the tallest of them.
I’m not easy prey, she thought fiercely, and tried to carry herself the way her father would have—all squared shoulders and Make-My-Day. Thinking of him made her angry, which was good: being angry made her feel big. The car was still running, albeit in “park.” That was a good sign they weren’t really committed to a fight, and she could pick out the pong of fear on at least two of them.
She smiled through the blood-red lipstick and said, “What say we part friends, boys?”
They grumbled and shifted. One of them looked at the driver. The driver rolled his eyes and slid back behind the wheel—and that was the signal for the other three to pile back into the car with a great slamming of doors. Predators preferred to deal from a position of strength.
“Fucking faggot,” one shouted before leaning forward to crank the window up. Edie didn’t quite relax, but her fingers eased their deathgrip on her mace.
Oh, bad boys, she thought. You never got beat up enough to make you learn to get tough.
She hadn’t had time to come down off the adrenaline high when a shimmering veil of colors wavered across the width of the street, right in front of the beige Buick. The car nosed down as the driver braked hard; that mushroomy smell intensified. The veil of light had depth—beyond it, Edie glimpsed a woodland track, the green shadows of beech leaves, the broken ways of a brilliant sun. She heard a staccato sound, as of drumbeats, echoing down the street. She took an involuntary step forward and then two back as something within the aurora lunged.
A tall pale horse, half-dissolved in light, lurched through the unreal curtain. It stumbled as its hooves struck sparks from the pavement, reins swinging freely from a golden bridle, then gathered itself and leaped. Its hooves beat a steel-drum tattoo on the hood and roof of the Buick. The men within cringed, but though the windshield starred and spiderwebbed, the roof held. It smelled of panicked animal, sweat, and—incongruously—lily of the valley, with overtones of hungry girlchild.
The horse pelted down the street, leaving Edie with a blurred impression of quivering nostrils, ears red as if blood-dipped, and white-rimmed eyes—and of something small and delicate clinging to its back with inhumanly elongated limbs.
The veil still hung there, rippling in the darkness between streetlamp pools. Edie could see the full moon riding high beyond it, and the sight made her migraine come back in waves. She wanted nothing so much as to put her head down to her knees and puke all over the gutter. That sweetly fungal aroma was almost oppressive now, clinging, reminding Edie of stepping in a giant puffball in the Connecticut woods as a boy. The drumming of hooves had faded as the white horse vanished down the street. Now it multiplied, echoing, and over it rang a sound like the mad pealing of a carillon in a hurricane.
Edie dropped her purse and sprinted into the street, so hasty even she tottered on her heels. She yanked open the front passenger door and pulled the abusive one out by his wrist, shouting to the others to get out and run. Run.
The thunder of hooves, the clangor of bells, redoubled.
The driver listened, and one of the passengers in the rear—and he had the presence of mind to drag his friend after. The man she was hauling out of the car looked at her wild-eyed and seemed about to struggle. She grabbed the doorframe with one hand and threw him behind her with the other, sending him stumbling to his knees on the sidewalk when he fell over the curb. When she turned to throw herself after him, her heel skittered out from under her. She only saved herself from falling by clutching the car’s frame and door.
Edie had half an instant during which to doubt her decision. Then she dropped to the ground and wriggled under the car, aware that she’d never wear these stockings again. She just made it; her coat snagged on the undercarriage a moment before the clatter of dog nails on pavement reached her ears, and she tore it loose with a wince. Then the swarming feet of hounds were everywhere around her, their noses thrust under the car, their voices raised in excited yips. Some were black, a dusty black like weathered coal. Some were white as milk, with red, red ears hung soft along their jowls and pink, sniffing noses. But they sniffed for only a moment before moving on, baying in renewed vigor. Edie was not their prey.
Close behind them came the crescendo of that hoofbeat thunder. Edie cringed from the judder of the car she sheltered beneath as horse after horse struck it, hurtled over, and landed on the far side. The horses also ran to the left and the right, and all their legs, too, were black as coal or white as milk. The car shook brutally under the abuse, a tire hissing flat. The undercarriage pressed her spine. She was realizing that maybe this hadn’t been her best idea ever when she heard human voices shouting. Something broke the wave of horses before her, so now they thundered only to the left and the right. The belling of the hounds was not lessened, except in that it receded, and nor was the pounding of hooves—but the stampede flowed around her now, rather than over. It felt like minutes, but Edie was sure only seconds had passed when the sounds faded away, leaving behind the raucous yelps of car alarms and the distant wail of a police siren.
She wriggled against the undercarriage like a worm between stones. The pavement smelled of old oil, vomit, and gasoline, so cold it burned against her cheek. She pressed against it with her elbows, inching forward, kicking with her feet. So much for the hot boots.
Doc Martens appeared at street level, followed by a young olive-skinned woman’s inverted face. She was crowned in a crest of black-and-blond streaks and framed by the sagging teeth of a leather jacket’s zipper.
“Hi,” she said. “I’m Lily Wakeman. You look like you could use a hand.”
“Or two,” Edie said, extending hers gratefully.
The woman and a slight white guy wearing a sword pulled her from beneath the car. It was pancaked—the roof crushed in, the suspension broken.
Edie shook herself with wonder that she hadn’t been smashed underneath. She turned to her rescuers—the punky girl, that slight man, who had medium-dark hair and eyes that looked brown by streetlight, except the right one seemed to catch sparkles inside it in a way that made Edie think it might be glass—and a second man: a butchy little number with his slick blond hair pulled back into a stubby ponytail, who wore a tattered velvet tailcoat straight out of Labyrinth.
“Oh, my shoes. Do you know what these cost?”
“Matthew Szczgielniak,” said the bigger and butcher of the two white guys. She didn’t miss his nervous glance in the direction the hunt had run, or the way his weight shifted.
“Edith Moorcock,” she said haughtily, smoothing her torn coat.
He stared at her, eyebrows rising. He wasn’t bad, actually, if you liked ’em covered in muscles and not too tall. She was waiting for—she didn’t know what. Scorn, dismissal.
Instead, the corners of his mouth curved up just a little. “That’s rather good.”
Edie sniffed. “Thank you.”
Then she realized why his face seemed so familiar. “You’re that guy. The Mage.” He’d been all over the news for a while, after the magic finally burst through in big ways as well as small, enchanting all of New York City. He was supposed to be some sort of liaison between the real world and the otherwise one; the one Edie’s people came from. The one she couldn’t go back to unless she was willing to lie about who she was.
She tried to remember details. There’d been a murder . . . But if this was Matthew Magus, that meant his companions were people Edie should have recognized too. The woman was supposed to be Morgan le Fey’s apprentice. And that meant the little guy was . . . oh shit.
Edie stole a glance at Matthew’s right hand, but he was wearing black leather gloves.
“From the comic book,” she said.
Matthew covered half his face with the left hand, then let it drop. “Guilty. And you’re my responsibility, aren’t you? You’re a werewolf.”
“Don’t be silly,” Edie said, swallowing a surge of bitterness. She dismissed the whole thing with a calculated hand-flip. “Werewolf is an all-boys club. Queens need not apply. Besides, since when was the rest of Faerie ready to write us a certificate of admission?”
Lily and the other man—who Edie also recognized, now that she had context—were already jogging away down Jane Street after the vanished Faerie hunt. Matthew turned to follow, and Edie trotted after him in her ruined shoes.
She couldn’t let it go. “How did you know I was a werewolf?”
Matthew shrugged. “I’ve met a few. Never a drag queen before, I admit—” He waved back at the flattened Buick. “That was very brave. Did you stop to think you could have shifted? It’s a full moon; it would have been easy.”
Edie tossed her wig away, since it was a mess anyway. She wasn’t going to tell them that it had been a dozen years since she’d used her wolf-shape. That lupines were pack-beasts, and it hurt too much being alone in that form.
She said, “Turn back into a wolf? Are you kidding? You know we regenerate when we do that? You know how long it takes to wax this shit?”
They were catching up to the others quickly now. “Did you call up that hunt?”
“Just happened to be standing by when it broke through,” Edie admitted between breaths. “Lunar eclipse on Solstice night. Is it any wonder if the walls of the world get a little thin?”
“That’s why we’re on patrol,” Matthew said. “Solstice night. Full moon. And a lunar eclipse. Let’s catch them before they flatten any pedestrians.”
They caught up to the others. The little guy favored them with a sideways glance as they all slacked stride for a moment. “You brought the wolf along.”
“The wolf brought herself,” Edie said.
Lily chuckled.
“Welcome to the party. I’m Kit,” the little guy said.
Edie snorted to cover exactly how impressed she was. Him, she still cringed with embarrassment for not having recognized immediately: Christopher Marlowe, late of London, late of Faerie, late of Hell. “Hel-lo, Mister Queer Icon. I know who you are. Don’t you?”
“Oh, he knows,” said Matthew, breathing deeply. “He just likes the fussing. Edith, I don’t suppose you got a look at what they were after, did you?”
Edie remembered the first white horse, the thing wadded up on its shoulders, face buried in its flowing mane. “A little girl,” she said. “On an elven charger. She looked terrified.”
“Shit!” Matthew broke into a jouncing, limping run. The other three fell in behind him.
The cramp in her foot was back, and now her toes were jammed up against the toes of her boots with every stride. She started to run with a hitching limp of her own, accompanied by a breathy litany of curses.
Here, there were no destroyed vehicles or shattered pavement. It was as still and dark as Manhattan ever gets—the streets quiet and cold, if not quite deserted. The scent pulled her down Washington to West 10th Street, and then she tottered to a stop beneath a denuded tree.
“My feet,” she said, leaning on a wall.
“Let me see,” said Matthew. He crouched awkwardly, one leg thrust off at an angle like an outrigger, and put his hands on her ankle. She could feel through the soft leather that one of them was misshapen, and did not grip.
“Hey,” Edie said. “No peeking up my skirt.” She gave him the foot as if she were a horse and he the farrier. When she felt him pressing his hands together over her anklebone, she glanced back over her shoulder. “You can’t see anything with the boot on.”
“Hush,” he said. “I’m talking to your shoes.”
When he put the foot down, it did feel easier. The incipient blood blisters on her soles hadn’t healed, but something was easing the cramp in her instep, and the toes felt like they fit better. Matthew touched the other ankle, and Edie lifted the foot for him.
A moment later, and she was offering him a hand up. As he pushed himself to his feet she saw him grope his own knee, revealing the outline of metal and padding through the leg of his cargo pants.
She blurted, “You’re kicking ass in a knee brace? Hardcore.”
“If the team needs you, you play through the injury,” he said. “Ow!”
That last because Lily had thumped him with the back of her hand.
“I need a new knee,” Matthew said apologetically, as they limped along a street lined with parked cars and brick-faced buildings. “I’m trying to put it off as long as possible. The replacements are only good for fifteen years or so.”
“Ouch,” Edie said, even as he picked up the pace. “Ever consider a less physical line of work?”
“Every day,” he said.
It wasn’t too hard to follow the hunters—the flattened cars and glowing hoofprints pounded in pavement were a clear trail, and there was always the wail of car alarms and police sirens to orient by. The sounding of the hounds carried in the cold night as perfectly as the distant ring of a ship’s bell over water. The air still reeked with the scents of hunters and hunted. Before long, Edie was running at the front of the pack, directing the others.
Matthew limped up beside her, the chains and baubles hung from his coat jangling merrily. Despite the awkwardness of his stride, his breath still wreathed him in easy clouds.
He reached out one hand and tugged her sleeve, slowing her. “Can we get ahead of them? Being where they’ve been isn’t helping us at all.”
“It’s been a long time since I hunted, sugar, and the rest of the pack never thought me much of a wolf.” Edie skimmed her hands down her sides and hips as explanation.
Drawing up beside them, Kit said, “You should talk to the Sire of the Pack. Things have changed in Faerie—”
“How much can they have possibly changed? The Pack doesn’t want me, and I don’t want them.” Edie made a gesture with her left hand that was meant to cut off discussion.
A prowl car swept past, its spotlight briefly illuminating their faces, but they must not have looked like trouble—at least by Village standards—because the car rolled by without hesitation. Distant sirens still shattered the night, a sort of a directional beacon if you could pick the original out of the echoes.
Edie saw Matthew’s crippled hand move in the air as if he were conducting music—or, more, actually, as if he were plucking falling strands of out of the air. He frowned with concentration. Magi, she thought tiredly.
Just out of range of a kicked-over hydrant spouting water that splashed and rimed on the street, Edie paused to consult her mental map of the Village’s tangle of streets. The middle and northern parts of Manhattan were a regular grid, but this was the old part of the city, where the roads crossed each other like jackstraws.
Edie raised her head and sniffed to the four directions. “Let’s double back and head south on Washington. I think they’ve headed that way.”
“I’m pushing them that way.” Matthew fell in behind her, and Kit and Lily followed. Edie’s palms were wet inside her gloves: nervousness. The nose didn’t lie, but it could be tricked—and it had been a long time since Edie ran with a pack.
Off to the left, Kit cried “Hark!” and slowed his pace to a walk. Edie cupped her hands to her ears. The scent was strong again, and growing stronger. At the end of the block, Hudson was still moderately busy with cars, and the noise could have confounded her. But there was the trembling of hooves through the street—
The first horse and rider burst into sight around the oblique corner of West 10th and Hudson. Sparks flew from beneath the hooves. Matthew’s hand moved again, and down the street, a pedestrian, distracted by her phone, chose that minute to jaywalk. A panel van swerved to avoid her, cutting off the horse and rider. Edie found herself slowing as the animal raced toward her, running against traffic. She could smell its sweat, its exhaustion and terror.
From behind it, she heard the baying of the hounds.
“Stand aside,” Kit said, and took Edie by the wrist to pull her onto the sidewalk, amid the shelter of trees and light poles. Matthew stood firmly in the middle of the street, his back to traffic, his velvet coat catching winey highlights off the streetlamps. Edie pulled against Kit’s grip; Lily was suddenly there beside her, restraining her as well.
“He’s the Archmage,” Kit said. “If he doesn’t know what he’s doing, it’s his own fool fault.”
The Faerie steed bore down on him, and Matthew drew himself up tall. At the corner of a red brick building whose ground floor façade was comprised of grilled Roman arches, the horse reached him. She was going to run him down, Edie saw. She reached out a futile hand—
The horse gathered itself to leap, and as it did, Matthew threw out his arms. “Hold!” he cried, in a voice that shook the windows and rattled the fire escapes against the brick faces of the buildings. “In the names of the City that Never Sleeps—New York, New Orange, New Amsterdam, Gotham, the Big Apple, and the Island of Manhattan—I bid you stand fast!”
Edie would have expected flares of light, shivers of energy running across the pavement—something from a movie or a comic book. But it wasn’t there: all she saw was the man in the tatterdemalion dark red coat, his hands upraised.
And the lather-dripping mare planting her heels and stopping short before him. Her head hung low, her throat and barrel swelling with each great heaving gasp of air. She swayed, and for a moment, Edie thought she would collapse.
The girl on her back, all snarled pale hair and twig-limbs, raised her head painfully from where it had rested, face pressed into the mare’s mane. Edie gasped.
Here was no elf-child, moving as stiffly as an old woman: just a human girl of eleven years, or twelve.
The hounds rounded the corner in full cry, surging like a sea around the knees of the running horses. Matthew sprinted forward, arms still outstretched, and put himself between the hunt and the girl. Edie shook off Kit’s hand and ran to stand beside him, aware that Kit and Lily were only a step or two back—and that only because Edie’s legs were longer. When she drew up, Matthew snaked out a hand and clasped hers, and then she was grabbing Lily’s hand on the other side while Lily linked arms with Kit. They stood so, four abreast, and Matthew again raised his voice and shouted, “Hold!”
Edie felt the power through her fingertips, this time, like a static charge. She imagined a barrier sweeping across West 10th from building to building, towering high overhead. She imagined it thick and strong, and hoped somehow she was helping.
Whether she had any effect on it or not, the hounds quit running. They circled back into the pack, their belling turned to whining, a churn of black bodies and white ones dotted with red. The horses drew up among them, harness-bells shivering and hooves a-clatter. At the forefront, on a tall gelding, sat an elf-lord who smelled of primroses and prickles. He had cropped hair as red as his white horse’s ears, shot through with streaks of black where a mortal man would show graying. He wore a blousy silken shirt, heavily embroidered, and a pair of skinny black jeans stuffed into cowboy boots.
“Matthew Magus,” he said, casting a green-gray eye that seemed to gather light across Edie, Kit, and Lily. His harness did not creak as he shifted his weight, but the bells tinkled faintly—rain against a glass wind-chime. “And companions.”
“I do not know you,” Matthew said. “How are you styled?”
“I am a lord of the Unseelie Court, and I would not extend my calling to one so ill-met.”
Matthew sighed. “Must we be ill-met?”
“Aye,” said the anonymous lord, “if you would keep a thief from me.”
Now police cars were filling the intersection, and both ends of the block. Edie looked nervously one way and another, waiting for men and women with guns to start piling out of the vehicles and charging forward, but for now they seemed content to wait.
New York’s Finest knew better than to get between a magician and an elf-lord.
“A thief?” Matthew asked, with an elaborate glance over his shoulder. Edie could still hear the heaving breaths of the horse, smell the sweat and fear of the girl. “I see someone who has sought sanctuary in my city. And as you owe fealty to King Ian, you are bound by my treaty with him. What is she accused of stealing . . . Sir Knight?”
“What’s there before your eyes,” the Faerie answered, as his companions of the hunt—men and women both—ranged themselves around him. “That common brat has stolen the great mare Embarr from my stables, and I will have her back. And the thief punished.”
The mare snorted behind them, her harness jangling fiercely as she shook out her mane. “He lies!”
At first, Edie thought the child had spoken, and admired her spunk. But when she turned, she realized that the high, clear voice had come from the horse, who pricked her ears and continued speaking. “If anything, t’was I stole the child Alicia. And my reasons I had, mortal Magus.”
“The mare,” said the elf-lord, “is mine.”
Matthew did not lower his hands. “Be that as it may,” he said. “I cannot have you tearing my city apart—and it is my city, and in it I decree that no one can own another. The girl and the horse are under my protection, and if you wish to have King Ian seek their extradition, he is welcome to do so through official channels. Which do not—” Matthew waved his hands wide “—include a hunt through Greenwich Village.”
The Faerie Lord sniffed. “I have come here, where iron abounds, and where your mortal poisons burn inside my breast with every breath, to reclaim what is rightfully mine. By what authority do you deny me?”
He stood up in his stirrups. His gelding took a prancing, curveting step or two, crowding the horses and hounds on his right. They danced out of the way, but not before Edie had time to wrinkle her nose in the human answer to a snarl. “This is going to come to a fight,” she whispered, too low for anyone but Lily and Matthew to hear. The whisk of metal on leather told her that Kit had drawn his sword.
“Why doesn’t the girl speak for herself?” Matthew asked.
“Because,” the mare answered, “His Grace had her caned and stole her voice from her when one of his mares miscarried. But it wasn’t the girl’s fault. And I’ll not see my stablehands mistreated.”
Lily squeezed Edie’s hand and leaned close to whisper. “Edith? Shift to wolf form.”
Edie shook her head. “I told you, it’s been—”
“Do it,” she said, and gave her a little push forward from the elbow.
Edie toed out of her boots and stood in stocking-feet on the icy pavement. She ripped her blouse off over her head and kicked down the stockings and the sequined skirt.
Everyone was staring, most especially the Faerie lord. Lily, though, stepped forward to help Edie with her corselet and gaff. She handled the confining underclothes with the professionalism of a seasoned performer, folding them over her arm before stepping back. Edie stood there for a moment, naked skin prickling out everywhere, and raised her eyes to the Faerie lord.
“Well, I’ll be a codfish,” he said callously. He looked not at Edie, but at Matthew. “The bitch has a prick. Is that meant to upset me?”
“The bitch has teeth, too,” Edie said, and let the transformation take her.
She’d thought it would be hard. So many years, so many years of enduring the pain, of resisting, of petulant self-denial. Of telling herself that if she wasn’t good enough for the Pack to see her as a wolf, then she didn’t want to be one.
Once she managed to release her death-grip on the self-denial, though, her human form just fell away, sheeting from the purity of the wolf like filth from ice. Edie’s hands dropped toward the pavement and were hard, furred paws before they touched. Her muzzle lengthened; what had been freezing cold became cool comfort as the warmth of her pelt enfolded her. The migraine fell away as if somebody had removed a clamp from her temples, and the rich smells of the city—and the horse manure and dog piss of the hunt—flooded her sinuses.
She snarled, stalking forward, and saw the Faerie hounds whine and mill and cringe back among the legs of the horses. She knew the light rippled in her coat, red as rust and tipped smoke-black, and she knew the light glared in her yellow eyes. She knew from the look the Faerie lord shot her—fear masked with scorn—that the threat was working.
“So you have a wolf,” the Faerie lord said, though his horse lowered his head to protect his neck and backed several steps.
“And your high king is a wolf,” Matthew said. “You know how the pack sticks together.”
This time, the gelding backed and circled because the Faerie lord reined him around. When he faced Edie and the others again, he was ten feet further back, and his pack had fallen back with him.
“I don’t understand why the horse didn’t kill you,” he called to the girl, over Matthew’s head. “They don’t let slaves ride.”
He yanked his horse’s mouth so Edie could smell the blood that sprang up, wheeling away.
“Oh,” said the mare, “is that why you never dared get up on me?”
As the lord rode off, spine stiff, the rest of the hunt fell in behind him. Edie was warm and at ease, and with the slow ebb of adrenaline, swept up in a rush of fellow-feeling for those with whom she had just withstood a threat.
A veil opened in the night as before, shimmering across the pavement before the phalanx of squad cars. Edie and her new allies stood waiting warily until the Faerie lord and his entourage vanished back behind it. The mare eyed Matthew quite cunningly. She planned this, the wolf thought. But the mare said nothing, and Edie would have had to come back to human form to say it—and what good would it do at this point, anyway?
“Well, I guess that’s that,” Matthew said, when they were gone.
He made a hand-dusting gesture and turned away, leaving Kit to handle the girl and the mare who had stolen each other while he walked, whistling, up the road to speak with the assembled police. Edie went and sat beside Lily, tail thumping the road. Lily reached down and scruffled her ruff and ears with gloved fingers.
“Good wolf,” she cooed. “Good girl.”
In New York City’s storied Greenwich Village, on the Island of Manhattan, there is a tavern called the Slaughtered Lamb. A wolf howls on its signboard. In one corner lurks a framed photo of Lon Chaney as the Wolf Man. The tavern is cramped and dark and the mailbox-sized bathroom—beside the grilled-off stair with a sign proclaiming the route to The Dungeon closed for daily tortures—is not particularly clean.
The Slaughtered Lamb (of course) is the favored hangout of Lower Manhattan’s more ironic werewolves. Edie hadn’t been there even once since she came to New York City. She’d been an outcast even then.
Now she strode west on 4th Street from Washington Square, her high-heeled boots clicking on the preternaturally level sidewalks of Manhattan. Her feet still hurt across the pads, but the worst was healed. She wore trousers to hide her unshaven legs. A cold wind curled the edges of damp leaves, not strong enough to lift them from the pavement.
Fourth was wider and less tree-shaded than most of the streets in the famously labyrinthine Village, but still quiet—by Manhattan standards—as she made her way past the sex shops, crossing Jones in a hurry. An FDL Express truck waited impatiently behind the stop sign, rolling gently forward as if stretching an invisible barrier when the driver feathered the clutch.
She hopped lightly up one of the better curb cuts in the Village and crossed the sidewalk to the Slaughtered Lamb’s black-and-white faux-Tudor exterior. Horns blared as she let herself inside. A reflexive glance at her watch showed 4:59.
Rush hour.
“And so it begins,” she muttered to no one in particular, and let the heavy brown nine-panel door fall between her and the noise.
There was noise inside, too, but it was of a more welcoming quality. Speakers mounted over the door blared Chumbawamba; two silent televisions shimmered with the sports highlights of the day. A gas fire roared in the unscreened hearth behind the only open table. Edie picked her way through the darkness to claim it quickly, sighing in relief. It might roast her on one side, but at least it would be a place to sit.
She slung her damp leather coat over the high back of a bar stool and jumped up. She was barely settled, a cider before her, when the door opened again, revealing Matthew Magus and a tall, slender young man with pale skin and black hair that touched his collar in easy curls.
They sat down across from Edie. She shifted a little further away from the fire. “Edith Moorcock,” Matthew said, “His Majesty Ian MacNeill, Sire of the Pack and High King of Faerie.”
“Charmed,” Edie said, offering the king a glove. To her surprise, he took it.
“Edie is a New World wolf,” Matthew said. “Apparently, your grandfather did not find her . . . acceptable . . . to the Pack.”
“Oh, yes,” Ian said tiredly. “It’s about time the Pack got itself out of the twelfth century.” He steepled his fingers as the server came over, and both he and Matthew ordered what Edie had. “I can’t imagine what you would want with us at this point, though—”
Edie’s heart fluttered with nervousness. “An end to exile?”
“Consider it done. Do you plan to remain in New York?”
Edie nodded.
“Good. The Mage here needs somebody to look after him. Somebody with some teeth.” Ian paused as his cider arrived, then sipped it thoughtfully. Matthew coughed into the cupped palm of his glove. “The better to eat you with, my dear,” he muttered.
The king regarded him, eyebrows rising as he tilted his head. “I beg your pardon?”
“Nothing, your Majesty.”
Ian smiled, showing teeth. If Edie’s were anything to go by, he had very good ears. He drank another swallow of cider, wiped his mouth on the back of his hand, and said, “Now, about that changeling girl and the horse that stole her—”
Elizabeth Bear was born on the same day as Frodo and Bilbo Baggins, but in a different year. When coupled with a childhood tendency to read the dictionary for fun, this led her inevitably to penury, intransigence, and the writing of speculative fiction. She is the Hugo, Sturgeon, Locus, and Campbell Award winning author of twenty-five novels (The most recent is Steles of the Sky, from Tor) and almost a hundred short stories. Her dog lives in Massachusetts; her partner, writer Scott Lynch, lives in Wisconsin. She spends a lot of time on planes.