AllFreeNovel
Share Us
NINETEEN
Paul never made it to Fairwick that weekend. He made it as far as West Thalia and called to tell me that the road leading into Fairwick (one of only two) was blocked by fallen trees. Suspecting that might be the case I had gotten up early (after a sterile, dreamless sleep) and started hiking toward the West Thalia road. When I’d reached the outskirts of town I’d found something that looked like a logjam. Trees lay like pickup sticks across the highway for miles. When I asked one of the road crew clearing the debris how far the wreckage went he told me more than ten miles.
“The bridge is out here and on the southbound road,” he told me. “No one’s coming into or getting out of Fairwick until the middle of next week.”
I stayed on the edge of town for another hour, talking to Paul on the phone, unable to believe that there wasn’t any way to bridge the short gap between us. But Fairwick was wedged into a valley between steep, impassable mountains like some medieval fortress town built to keep out plague and marauding Vikings. After all, its founders—fairy and daemon—probably remembered both threats well enough. Now one of those demons had lifted the drawbridge and flooded the moats, cutting the town off from the world. Had that been his intention? I’d thought at first that the storm and the destruction left in its wake had been the outcome of his temper, but now, looking at this swath of mown-down trees, I wondered if the incubus had purposely cut me off from Paul—
And purposely set out to kill him by bringing down his plane.
“I could start walking and maybe I’d be there by tomorrow morning,” Paul gallantly offered in our last phone conversation that day.
I imagined Paul alone on the West Thalia road as night fell, the deep woods on either side full of otherworldly creatures, possibly including an insanely jealous incubus.
“That’s sweet, Paul, but it’s supposed to go down into the teens tonight. You don’t have to freeze yourself to see me.”
“Yeah, maybe you’re right. I did forgot to pack my boots and the shoes I’m wearing are pretty thin. I guess I’ll go visit Adam in Binghamton.” Adam was a friend of Paul’s from high school who was in the graduate writing program at Binghamton University. “Rita’s driving there anyway.”
“Tell Adam I say hi,” I said, and then, glancing down at a particularly savaged tree trunk, added, “And be careful driving there, okay? The weather up here is…unpredictable.”
It was dusk by the time I got back home, and I was frozen and exhausted. I found Phoenix pacing the house like a caged panther.
“I can’t believe we’re stuck here,” she said when I told her both roads out of town were impassable “What if there’s an emergency?”
“There’s a hospital here in town and they could still medevac any bad cases out to Cooperstown,” I pointed out.
“What if there were too many fires for the local fire department to put out…or a serial killer struck…or gangs started looting? This is just like that Stephen King book where a small town is trapped under an invisible dome. The whole town goes to hell in a handbasket!”
It was my fault Phoenix had read that particular Stephen King book, which I’d gleefully devoured a few weeks before. I’d been thinking about it, too, on my walk back through town, but Fairwick didn’t seem to be going the way of King’s smalltown. Main Street had been bustling with cheerful people strolling on the cleared and salted sidewalks, and congregating at corners to compare storm survival stories. A hot-apple-cider-and-donut hut had been set up in a little kiosk in the park. Ice-skaters were gliding on the pond. I glimpsed Ike skating with a woman who looked like she was one of Dory Browne’s relatives and Nicky Ballard huddled on a bench with a boy in a community college sweatshirt who must have been her boyfriend, Ben. The houses I passed on my way up the hill either had generators on or lanterns in their windows. Many homeowners had put up their Christmas decorations. There were the usual plastic reindeer and inflatable Santas, but also a type of decoration I’d never seen before. Among the branches of the light-trimmed trees hung crystal bells, pinecones, doves, and angels. When I got closer I saw that they weren’t made of crystal; they were molded out of ice. Trapped within the shapes were tiny objects—natural things like real pinecones and red berries, but also gold charms, children’s toys (I saw a pink-haired troll doll and a blue Power Ranger), keys, and tiny scrolls of paper tied with red string.
“Ice gifts,” Brock told me when I got home and found him hanging an ice dove from a holly bush near my front door. He showed me the baking mold he was using to make a frozen angel and explained that there was a local tradition of putting small objects inside as offerings to the spirits of the woods. “Where I came from,” Brock told me as he poured water into more molds, “it was believed that an object left over winter in the ice would gain power. Humans would leave offerings to the gods inside the ice shapes and the gods, in turn, would leave presents for the humans they loved in them. My father courted my mother Freya so. Each year he made a trinket for her—a pair of earrings, a bracelet, a necklace—and encased it in an ice dove. ‘I will wait for you as long as it takes the ice fields of Jotunheim to melt,’ he told her each year. In the fifth year he made her a wedding ring. That year Freya built a fire beneaththe tree where the ice dove hung. When the dove melted, Freya held out her hand to catch the ring, crying, ‘Jotunheim is melted. Come to me now!’ When my father arrived the fire leapt up to meet him and it burnt Freya’s little finger.”
He held out his hand. “My brothers and I were all born missing the tip of our little fingers—testament to the love our human mother felt for our father. Since she was human she died very long ago, but…” Brock looked up at me, his ugly face transformed by tenderness. “I remember her as if she had just left the room, so powerful is the love you humans possess.”
I blushed, remembering what Dory had told me about the relations between fey and human, but clearly Brock’s mother hadn’t been trading sex for magic and Brock’s father must have loved her for his sons to hold her memory so dear. I dug in my pocket and found the fairy stone I’d been carrying since we’d performed the incubus banishment two nights ago.
“Here,” I said, dropping the stone into the water. “My father gave this to me. He told me that it would keep me from having nightmares. Maybe it will do more good out here than in my pocket.”
Brock looked at the hollow stone. “It might just,” he said, dropping it into the mold. “Sometimes giving something away gives it more power.”
After Brock left I tried distracting Phoenix from her doom-laden scenarios by taking her outside and showing her the ice sculptures Brock had hung in the shrubbery—in addition to the dove there were ice deer and ice angels, or maybe they were ice fairies—but she only shivered and retreated back inside to a nest she’d made on the library couch of blankets, magazines, and newspapers. She spent the rest of the holiday weekend there, sipping cognac and reading aloud from favorable reviews of her book. Maybe it was her way of coping with the supernatural revelations of the last few days, or maybe herSouthern blood really was too thin for the cold. I figured she would snap out of it when classes started on Monday.
But classes didn’t start on Monday. The roads were finally clear and the bridge on the southbound road was working, but the Trailways bus that ran from New York City was too heavy for that bridge. Dean Book postponed the first day of classes to Wednesday.
I used the time to read up on the history of Fairwick in the town library, especially on the Ballard family. In addition to what Dory had told me, I learned that Ballard’s partner, Hiram Scudder, had left town after his wife had killed herself and gone out west to remake his life. I read a graphic description of the collision, along with a heroic account of a track worker named Ernesto Fortino who had crawled into a train car hanging off a bridge. He got all the occupants to safety before the train car crashed into the river, killing him. I looked long at a heartbreaking picture of corpses wrapped in burlap sacks, lined up like cordwood at the side of the mangled train track. I read the lists of the dead and then the lists of people who went bankrupt after the railroad and ironworks went out of business. The number of people who might have wanted to curse Bertram Ballard was vast. No wonder the witches of Fairwick hadn’t been able to identify who had cast the curse.
At night in bed I read a Dahlia LaMotte manuscript calledThe Viking Raider, in which a ruggedly handsome Norseman kidnaps an Irish princess and holds her for ransom. One particular passage caught my eye.
The brute tore my tunic away and fondled my breasts. Because my hands were tied I could do nothing but endure the sensation of his rough, calloused hands squeezing my nipples, cupping my breasts, stroking my belly, and pushing his hard blunt fingers between my legs. When I cried out he clamped his hand over my mouth…and I sank my teeth into his little finger. I bit so hard I took the tip off. He screamed in pain, butrather than strike me he held up his injured hand and exclaimed, “What spirits you Irish lasses possess! I will treasure this as a keepsake of our courtship for all the years of our long marriage.”
I wondered if Dahlia had been thinking of Brock when she wrote this scene—and if so, what it said about her feelings for him.
When I wasn’t indulging in Dahlia LaMotte’s bodice-ripping tales, I set to work reorganizing my closets. Something was rustling in there and I’d begun to suspect that I had mice. Small holes had been gnawed in my cardboard shoeboxes, and my favorite pair of Christian Louboutin silver patent leather sling-backs had been chewed into Swiss cheese. I went to the dollar store in town and bought plastic shoeboxes and mousetraps—which I couldn’t bring myself to set.
Phoenix used the time to drink and make a scrapbook of her reviews. On Wednesday morning, determined to get her up early enough that she’d make it sober to her afternoon class, I made a big pot of coffee and a stack of banana-walnut pancakes. I brought it all into the library on a tray along with theNew York Times.
“Look,” I said, brandishing the paper. “Proof we are once again connected to the civilized world! Tiffany ads! Gail Collins! A recipe for vegan banana–chocolate chip cookies! And hey, here’s an article by that woman Jen Davies…”
“Is it,” Phoenix asked in a very small voice, which held no trace of a Southern accent, “about me?”
