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The box was fastened by a silver hinge, and I flipped it open, gently raising the lid. A small peridot cabochon, inset on the underside of the lid, flashed as the sound of tinkling notes fluttered out. Not panpipes, but a silver flute, sounding the song of woodland birds at the close of sunset.
Iris closed her eyes, listening to the melody. After a moment, it stopped, and she bit her lip. “That’s beautiful.”
“Yes, it is.” I examined the contents of the music box. “My mother had a box similar to this one. Father gave it to her. I don’t know what happened to it, though. Camille would know, if anybody does. The tune’s a common one, used to lull children to sleep.”
The inside of the music box had been lined with a rich, velvety brocade. I’d seen it used in the skirts of women who belonged to the Court and Crown. A deep plum, the cloth had absorbed the scent of the arnikcah wood.
I shuddered, finding myself unaccountably sad as I touched the glowing gem fastened to the underside of the lid. Once more, the melody began to play, lightly trilling through the dusty room. I closed my eyes, transported back to the long summer nights of my youth when I would dance in a meadow as Camille sang her spells to the Moon, and Delilah chased fireflies in her kitten form. We’d come a long way from those days.
Iris peered into the box. “There’s a locket inside.”
I gently set the box onto the floor and picked up the heart-shaped locket. Silver, embossed with a scrollwork of roses and vines, the heart sprang open as I touched the hinge, revealing a picture and a lock of hair. The photo was definitely Earthside in nature, and was of an elf. A man. The lock of hair was so pale it was platinum. No dye had ever touched these tresses. I held it out to Iris.
She closed her fist around the hair and squinted. “Elf, by the feel. What a pretty pendant. I wonder who it belongs to.”
“I haven’t the faintest idea,” I said. “What else is in the trunk?”
Iris lifted out the books and the pile of clothes. The books were obviously written Earthside: The Idiot’s Guide to Living Earthside and American English for Elves.
The clothing had belonged to a woman. A tunic, several pair of leggings, a belt and jacket, a brassiere. I held up the undergarment. Whoever owned this had small breasts. The cloth was elf-weave, that much I recognized.
Beneath the clothes, in the bottom of the trunk, we found a journal. I opened it to the first page. The inscription read “Sabele,” written in a scrolling hand. The name was in English, but the rest of the journal was in Melosealfôr, a rare and beautiful Crypto language from Otherworld. I could recognize it but not read it. But Camille could.
“This looks like a diary,” Iris said, flipping through it. “I wonder . . .” She stood up and poked around the room, rooting under the towering piles of debris. “Hey! There’s a bed here, and a dresser in the corner. Want to make a bet this was a bedroom, perhaps for whoever owned this locket and diary?”
I stared at the piles of old magazines, newspapers, and faded liquor boxes. “Let’s clear away all this trash. Just haul it into the next room for now. We’ll see what we find beneath it.” As I replaced the music box and clothes within the trunk, laughter echoed down the hall from the stairs, and within seconds, my sister Camille stood at the door, two of her men in tow.
“Pizza!” Camille entered the room, gingerly stepping over a rolled-up rug. As usual, she was dressed to impress, in a black velvet skirt, a plum bustier, and stilettos. Morio was right behind her, carrying five pizza boxes, and behind him, Smoky towered over everybody, looking bemused but not entirely thrilled to be tagging along.
Iris jumped up and wiped her hands on her shorts. “I’m so hungry I could eat a horse.”
“Hush, or Smoky might oblige,” Camille said, wrinkling her nose as she gave the dragon a playful look.
He might look like six foot four of man flesh with silver hair down to his ankles, but when he transformed, he was all dragon under that snow white veneer. He ate horses, cows, and the occasional goat. On the hoof. He joked about eating humans, too, but none of us took him seriously, although I suspected there might be the occasional missing person we could attribute to him. Whatever the case, Smoky wasn’t just a dragon who could take human form. He was also my sister’s husband. One of her husbands.
Morio, a Japanese youkai-kitsune—fox demon, loosely translated—was her other husband. He wasn’t nearly as tall as Smoky, but he was good-looking in a sleek, lithe way, with a ponytail that hung to his shoulders and the faintest hint of a goatee and thin mustache.
Camille had a third lover. Trillian, a Svartan, had been missing too long for comfort, and I knew she was worried about him.
“You just hush about my eating habits, woman,” Smoky said, gently patting her shoulder. He indulged behaviors in her that would earn most people a one-way ticket to crispy critter land. Love was supposed to be blind, but I had the feeling in Smoky’s case, he’d come to accept that he’d better develop patience with my sister or end up miserable.
I frowned at the pizzas. I’d give a lot to be able to eat pizza. Or anything, actually. My ever-present diet of blood kept me going, but I wasn’t particularly thrilled with it. All salt, no sweets.
Morio’s eyes gleamed as he pulled out a thermos and handed it to me.
“I’m not thirsty,” I said. Bottled blood wasn’t exactly a taste treat. Kind of like generic beer. It did the trick, but in no way or form could you call it haute cuisine. When I wasn’t hungry, I left it alone.
“Just drink,” he said.
I cocked my head. “What are you up to?” But when I opened the thermos, the blood didn’t smell like blood. Instead it smelled like . . . pineapple? I hesitantly took a sip. If I ingested anything but blood, I’d get horrible cramps.
But to my shock and delight, though it was blood that flowed down my throat, all I could taste were coconut milk and pineapple juice. I stared at the thermos, then at him. “By the gods, you did it!”
“Yes, I did,” he said, a victorious grin spreading across his face. “I finally figured out the spell. I thought piña colada might be a nice change for a first try.”
Morio had been working on a spell for some time that would allow me to taste foods I’d left behind when I died.
“Well, it worked!” I laughed and perched on the open windowsill, one knee pulled up to my chest as I leaned back against the frame. As I drank, my taste buds doing a Snoopy dance, it occurred to me that this was the first time in over twelve years that I’d tasted something other than blood.
