Page 22 of Spring's Arcana
For a moment Nat was mortally sure he was going to pull out a weapon.
Instead, he produced a battered white pack of cigarettes with red-and-black Cyrillic splashed across dingy cardboard, the letters crumpling when she tried to read them. He tapped up a black-wrapped cylinder with a gold band, offered it in her general direction.
“No thanks.”And it’s rude to smoke in a car with someone else.She refrained from adding as much with an almost physical effort.
Were his tailored jacket or well-hemmed trousers made by invisible fingers, too?
He shrugged, stuck the filtered end in his mouth, and the smokes disappeared into their dark little home. “Baba’s old,da.” The snarl vanished, and his sensitive fingers flicked again. A red-hot spot dilated on the end of the cigarette and he inhaled, deeply. “She is Winter, and a grandmother to many. But I tell you something.”
Nat braced herself for acrid smoke and started looking for the window controls. Instead, a heavy, almost spicy scent filled the air when Dmitri inhaled, and the white vapor from burning tip and exhalation vanished almost immediately. It didn’t sting her eyes, and she didn’t immediately feel like an asthma attack followed by lung cancer was inevitable.
“She endures, and they all fear a northern winter,” Dmitri continued, each word accompanied with a faint smoky puff. The heavy accent changed, became almost lilting. “But me? I was born the first moment some bastard took what they shouldn’t. And that was long, long before the monkeys walked upright.”
Uh, okay. Nat punched the window button and privacy-tinted glass rolled down. Cold air poured in; the SUV slowed. A blank concrete wall loomed on her side, veined with cables of ancient ivy, leaves glittering in icy filigree. The brakes grabbed, and when she looked back, there was a concrete wall carefully shaped to resemble masonry out Dmitri’s window too. He examined her, the mocking smile in place and the red tip of the cigarette bobbing.
“You’re all nuts,” she muttered. But what could you expect fromfairy tales and magic? The normal world Mama was so insistent on had weighed anchor and sailed away; Nat was stranded… here, whereverherewas.
The worst thing was the feeling of complete familiarity. But why would her mother keep saying, all those years—
The car slowed further, banking to the left like a small plane. Nat leaned forward, peering at their destination.
A pair of giant metal gates stood invitingly wide, sparkling like the icy ivy. Giant ornate initials—J G—were tangled in the bars, but the lower right chunk of theGhad been chipped away. The wound looked fresh, which was the only reason you could tell it wasn’t another letter, anOor aC. There was a slight bump, and the faint vibration of packed, ridged ice under the tires turned smooth as glass. A wide black driveway cut between snow-crusted bushes clipped into fantastical shapes, recessed floodlights dyeing them brilliant colors. The effect was a candy-shaded wonderland, blue and green and pink and yellow, splashes of vivid red at intervals just frequent enough to be not quite random.
The driveway seemed to go on forever, and no snow clung to its ruler-crisp edges. Finally, it broadened into a swooping circle around a vast, glittering pile of confectionary sugar and lacy metal—a frozen fountain, or the skeleton of one that had been misted with a hose and left to shiver into lacework. More colored light played over its dry arms, throbbed in its heart, and the glow strangely didn’t look like floodlights.
Maybe it was waterproof LEDs, caught in the ice like tiny sugared fireflies.
The house was three stories and lit like the trees hauled yearly into Times Square, every window golden-aglow. The architect—assuming there was one and not just a collection of coked-up Hollywood producers whipping set designers into a frenzy—clearly couldn’t decide between French château, rococo revival, Seven Gables, or Italianate whatever. Still, the structure managed to retain a coherent message, and it was one Leo would have translated asmore money than sense,with some swear words thrown in between syllables to really get the point across.
Shadows moved against the gold. The massive double front doors were wide open too, a glittering throng crowding up red-carpeted stairs—actualred carpeton a short but very wide swoop of granite steps. Between every massive ground floor window, ice-frosted topiaries jeweled with those confectionary lights reared in whimsical shapes, some animal, others geometric. Starbursts of white flashbulb came from somewhere, a seizure-inducing imitation of paparazzi.
“Shiny, eh?” More white vapor curled through Dmitri’s nose, a dragon contemplating a treasure pile. The cigarette didn’t seem to ash, though it shrank and the baleful red gleam at its end moved closer to his mouth when he inhaled. He pursed his lips and a perfect smoke ring bloomed, right before his words distorted it. “You like?”
“My God,” she managed. “It’s obscene.”
Dmitri found that funny. At least he laughed, producing far more of that incense-scented smoke than he could have possibly drawn lungward, and the SUV joined the end of a slowly moving line—cars of every description, a stretch limousine the exact color of the strawberry stripe in Neapolitan ice cream, a carriage that looked like a silver pumpkin drawn by four champing, stamping white horses who shouldn’t have been out on a night like this, an actual honest-to-goshsleigh,its runners resting against the black driveway in absolute defiance of rationality. She couldn’t quite see what was pulling it, and part of Nat was very, very glad about that when she glimpsed the mass of heaped furs it carried, a somber triangular white face with a coal-black, burning-vivid gaze swiveling atop a scrawny pale neck.
Nat sank back into the seat and shut her own aching, smarting eyes.It’s all true,she thought again, deliriously.All of it. Everything I ever saw.
It was a relief to find out she wasn’t crazy. What wasnota relief was wondering why her mother had lied all Nat’s life. And what, exactly, Baba de Winter was sending her to fetch.
Dmitri’s laughter trailed off in fits and starts. The SUV crept forward, but Nat kept her eyes shut until the steady motion stoppedand the smell of his strange cigarette was cut off between one moment and the next.
“Time to play,zaika.” Maybe he sounded kind, or merely, savagely indifferent. “Come meet the family.”
COMPLIMENTARY
A throb-driving tune she couldn’t quite place poured through the foyer. The immediate effect was dangerous lunacy—a crush of riotous color atop black and white marble squares, a haze of sweet-smelling smoke with only the faintest acridity of burning tobacco or skunk-edged weed, stairs leading up, a giant grandfather clock complete with ponderous, polished pendulum crouched at the far end, any tick, tock, or chime lost in the babble.
The long-legged woman who took Nat’s wrap was tall, blonde, and dressed in what looked like a black swimsuit and stringy fishnets, black four-inch stilettos like Coco’s, and was also wearing the best set of soft brownish costume rabbit ears Nat had ever seen. Or they werereal,because they twitched as she handed Nat a small brass tab with a strange symbol etched on its burnished face. Even the inside of the ears—bright pink, with tiny dark veins—looked absolutely solid, detailed, and legitimate.
A swimming sense of must-be-dreaming threatened to tip Nat off her own shoes and onto the tessellated floor.
“Thank you, ma’am,” the bunny-girl chirped with a twitch of her pert little freckled nose, and took off into the crowd. Perfectly perched on the swell of her buttocks was a fluffy cotton tail, just where you’d expect.
Several more bunny-girls circulated through the crush of fantastical costumes, but they were a minority compared to the ones wearing soft triangular cat ears in couth shades just a bit off their hair colors, long lithe tails twitching as they stalked on heels sharp enough to qualify as weapons.
Dmitri shrugged out of his long coat and gave it, plus a meaningful look, to a cadaverous gray-haired man in a butler’s funereal suit. “Jeeves. You’re looking well.”
