The Urban Fantasy Anthology Part 2

"I thought you'd be back tonight," I said.

"Maybe that's why I came back. Because you thought it so hard." He didn't smile, but he was relaxed and cheerful. After making music with him almost every day for a month, I could tell. He dropped loose-limbed onto the bottom step and stretched his legs out in front of him.

"So. Have you told her? What you are?"

He looked over his shoulder at me with a sort of stunned disbelief. "Do you mean Lisa? Of course not."

"Why not?" All my words sounded to me like little lead fis.h.i.+ng weights. .h.i.tting the water: plunk, plunk.

"Why should I? Either she'd believe me or she wouldn't. Either one is about equally tedious."

"Tedious."

He smiled, that wicked, charming, conspiratorial smile. "John, you can't think I care if Lisa believes in fairies."

"What do you care about?"

"John..." he began, wary and a little irritable.

"Do you care about her?"

And for the second time, I saw it: his temper on a leash. "What the h.e.l.l does it matter to you?" He leaned back on his elbows and exhaled loudly. "Oh, right. You want her for yourself. But you're too scared to do anything about it."

That hurt. I said, a little too quickly, "It matters to me that she's happy. I just want to know if she's going to be happy with you."

"No," he snapped. "And whether she's going to be happy without me is entirely her lookout. Rowan and Thorn, John, I'm tired of her. And if you're not careful, I'll be tired of you, too."

I looked down at his scornful face, and remembered Lisa's: pale, red-eyed. I described w.i.l.l.y Silver, aloud, with words my father had forbidden in his house.

He unfolded from the step, his eyes narrowed. "Explain to me, before I paint the back of the building with you. I've always been nice to you. Isn't that enough?" He said "nice" through his teeth.

"Why are you nice to me?"

"You're the only one who wants something important from me."

"Music?"

"Of course, music."

The rug fuzz had been blown from my head by his anger and mine. "Is that why you sing that way?"

"What the devil is wrong with the way I sing?"

"Nothing. Except you don't sound as if any of the songs ever happened to you."

"Of course they haven't." He was turning stiff and cold, withdrawing. That seemed worse than when he was threatening me.

The poster for the protest march still fluttered in the doorway. I grabbed it and held it out. "See her?" I asked, jabbing a finger at the picture of the woman kneeling over the student's body. "Maybe she knew that guy. Maybe she didn't. But she cares that he's dead. And I look at this picture, and I care about her. And all those people who marched past you in the street tonight? They did it because they care about a lot of people that they're never even going to see."

He looked fascinated and horrified at once. "Don't you all suffer enough as it is?"

"Huh?"

"Why would you take someone else's suffering on yourself?"

I didn't know how to answer that. I said finally, "We take on each other's happiness, too."

He shook his head, slowly. He was gathering the pieces of himself together, putting all his emotional armour back on. "This is too strange even for me. And among my people, I'm notoriously fond of strange things." He turned and walked away, as if I'd ceased to exist.

"What about tonight?" I said. He'd taken about a half-dozen steps. "Why did you bother to scare off those guys who were beating me up?"

He stopped. After a long moment he half-turned and looked at me, wild-eyed and...frightened? Then he went on, stiffly, across the parking lot, and disappeared into the dark.

The next night, when I came in, w.i.l.l.y's guitar and fiddle were gone. But Steve said he hadn't seen him.

Lisa was clearing tables at closing, her hair falling across her face and hiding it. From behind that veil, she said, "I think you should give up. He's not coming."

I jumped. "Was I that obvious?"

"Yeah." She swept the hair back and showed a wry little smile. "You looked just like me."

"I feel lousy," I told her. "I helped drive him away, I think."

She sat down next to me. "I wanted to jump off the bridge last night. But the whole time I was saying, 'Then he'll be sorry, the rat.'"

"He wouldn't have been."

"Nope, not a bit," she said.

"But I would have."

She raised her grey cat-eyes to my face. "I'm not going to fall in love with you, John."

"I know. It's okay. I still would have been sorry if you jumped off the bridge."

"Me, too," Lisa said. "Hey, let's make a pact. We won't talk about The Rat to anybody but each other."

"Why?"

"Well..." She frowned at the empty lighted s.p.a.ce of the stage. "I don't think anybody else would understand."

So we shared each other's suffering, as he put it. And maybe that's why we wouldn't have called it that.

I did see him again, though.

State Street had been gentrified, and Orpheus, the building, even the parking lot, had fallen to a downtown mall where there was no place for shabbiness or magic-any of the kinds of magic that were made that Fourth of July. These things happen in twice seven long years. But there are lots more places like that, if you care to look.

I was playing at the Greenbriar Bluegra.s.s Festival in Pocahontas County, West Virginia. Or rather, my band was. A columnist in Folk Roots magazine described us so: Bird That Whistles drives traditional bluegra.s.s fans crazy. They have the right instrumentation, the right licks-and they're likely to apply them to Glenn Miller's "In the Mood," or The Who's "Magic Bus." If you go to see them, leave your preconceptions at home.

I was sitting in the cookhouse tent that served as the musicians' green room, drinking coffee and watching the chaos that is thirty-some traditional musicians all tuning and talking and eating at once. Then I saw, over the heads, a raven's-wing black one with a white streak.

In a few minutes, he stood in front of me. He didn't look five minutes older than he had at Orpheus. He wasn't nervous, exactly, but he wasn't at ease, either.

"Hi," I said. "How'd you find me?"

"With this," he answered, smiling a little. He held out an article clipped from a Richmond, Virginia paper. It was about the festival, and the photo was of Bird That Whistles.

"I'm glad you did."

He glanced down suddenly. "I wanted you to know that I've been thinking over what you told me."

I knew what he was talking about. "All this time?"

Now it was the real thing, his appealing grin. "It's a d.a.m.ned big subject. But I thought you'd like to know...well, sometimes I understand it."

"Only sometimes?"

"Rowan and Thorn, John, have mercy! I'm a slow learner."

"The h.e.l.l you are. Can you stick around? You could meet the band, do some tunes."

"I wish I could," he said, and I think he meant it.

"Hey, wait a minute." I pulled a paper napkin out of the holder on the table and rummaged in my banjo case for a pen.

"What's that?" he asked, as I wrote.

"My address. I'm living in Detroit now, G.o.d help me. If you ever need anything-or even if you just want to jam-let me know, will you?" And I slid the napkin across the table to him.

He reached out, hesitated, traced the edges of the paper with one long, thin finger. "Why are you giving me this?"

I studied that bent black-and-white head, the green eyes half-veiled with his lids and following the motion of his finger. "You decide," I told him.

"All right," he said softly, "I will." If there wasn't something suspiciously like a quaver in his voice, then I've never heard one. He picked up the napkin. "I won't lose this," he said, with an odd intensity. He put out his right hand, and I shook it. Then he turned and pushed through the crowd. I saw his head at the door of the tent; then he was gone.

I stared at the top of the table for a long time, where the napkin had been, where his finger had traced. Then I took the banjo out of its case and put it into mountain minor tuning.

Make a Joyful Noise.

Charles de Lint.

Every one thinks we're sisters, but it's not as simple as that. If I let my thoughts drift far enough back into the long ago-the long long ago, before Raven stirred that old pot of his and poured out the stew of the world-we were there. The two of us. Separate, but so much the same that I suppose we could have been sisters. But neither of us remember parents, and don't you need them to be siblings? So what exactly our relations.h.i.+p is, I don't know. We've never known. We just are. Two little mysteries that remain unchanged while the world changes all around us.

But that doesn't stop everyone from thinking they know us. In the Kickaha tradition we're the tricksters of their crow story cycles, but we're not really tricksters. We don't play tricks. Unless our trick is to look like we'd play tricks, and then we don't.

Before the Kickaha, the cousins had stories about us, too, though they were only gossip. Cousins don't buy into mythic archetypes because we all know how easy it is to have one attached to your name. Just ask Raven. Or Cody.

But gossip, stories, anecdotes...everybody seems to have something to pa.s.s on when it comes to us.

These days it's people like Christy Riddell that tell the stories. He puts us in his books-the way his mentor Professor Dapple used to do, except Christy's books are actually popular. I suppose we don't mind so much. It's kind of fun to be in a story that anyone can read. But if we have to have a Riddell brother in our lives, we'd much prefer it to be Geordie. There's nothing wrong with Christy. It's just that he's always been a bit stiff. Geordie's the one who knows how to have fun and that's why we get along with him so well, because we certainly like to have fun.

But we're not only about mad gallivanting and cartwheels and sugar.

And we're not some single ent.i.ty, either.

That's another thing that people get wrong. They see the two of us as halves of one thing. Most of the time they don't even recognize us when they meet us on our own. Apart, we're just like anybody else, except we live in trees and can change into birds. But when you put the two of us together, everything changes. We get all giddy and incoherence rules. It's like our being near each other causes a sudden chemical imbalance in our systems and it's almost impossible to be anything but silly.

We don't particularly mind being that way, but it does make people think they know just who and what and why we are, and they're wrong. Well, they're not wrong when the two of us are together. They're just wrong for who we are when we're on our own.

And then there are the people who only see us as who they want us to be, rather than who we really are-though that happens to everybody, I suppose. We all carry around other people's expectations of who we are, and sometimes we end up growing into those expectations.

It was a spring day, late in the season, so the oaks were filled with fresh green foliage, the gardens blooming with colour and scent, and most days the weather was balmy. Today was no exception. The sun shone in a gloriously blue sky and we were all out taking in the weather. Zia and I lounged on the roof of the coach house behind the Rookery, black-winged cousins perched in the trees all around us, and up on the roof of the Rookery, we could see Lucius's girlfriend Chloe standing on the peak, staring off into the distance. That meant that Lucius was deep in his books again. Whenever he got lost in their pages, Chloe came up on the roof and did her wind-vane impression. She was very good at it.

"What are you looking at?" we asked her one day.

It took her a moment to focus on us and our question.

"I'm watching a wren build a nest," she finally said.

"Where?" Zia asked, standing on her tip toes and trying to see.

"There," Chloe said and pointed, "in that hedge on the edge of Dartmoor."

Neither of us were ever particularly good with geography, but even we knew that at least half a continent and an ocean lay between us and Dartmoor.

"Um, right," I said.

Other times she said she was watching ice melt in Greenland. Or bees swarming a new queen above a clover field somewhere in Florida. Or a tawny frogmouth sleeping in an Australian rainforest.

After a while we stopped asking. And we certainly didn't fly over and ask her what she was looking at today. We were too busy lounging-which is harder to do on a sloped roof than you might think-until Zia suddenly sat up.

"I," she announced, "have an astonis.h.i.+ngly good idea."

I'd just gotten my lounging position down to an absolute perfection of casualness, so I only lifted a questioning eyebrow.

"We should open a store," she said.

"Selling what?"

"That's just it. It will be a store where people bring us things and we put them in the store."

"And when it gets all filled up?"