Page 28 of Spring's Arcana
“No explanations, I see.” The old woman fixed Dmitri with a dark glare. The hammer was gone, but her right hand was still loosely curled.
As if it still felt the handle, and liked the sensation.
“More fun that way.” Dmitri sounded like he was at a garden party, instead of watching a man get murdered.
Nat tugged hopelessly at his hand on her arm. There was a deep thrumming sound; Jay’s belly swelled as he slumped against raw-splintered lumber. Next came a queer, awfulstretchingnoise, his linen suit creak-bulging, and the little girl in overalls appeared near the bottom of the torture device, puffing serenely on an honest-to-gosh corncob pipe.
“Beautiful little fools, both of ya,” she said in her high, clear, piping drawl. “Even my daddy would say so.”
Fabric ripped, flesh tore; there was a spray of bright red tinted at its edges with golden coruscation. Jay threw his head back and screamed, his throat vibrating, and a venomous green glitter poured from his split belly. It hit the dance floor with a double click, staggering on low heels very much like Nat’s. The shapeless mass stretched, becoming ever more bipedal, strings of bright verdant glass beads dripping from a boy-slim but definitely not male figure. She stretched, her arms streaked with that gold-laced blood, and Nat choked, gagging.
It wasimpossible. Especially when the woman—delicate and slim, wide blue eyes very much like Jay’s, a snub nose, a smattering of golden freckles, and a bright headband sporting a viridian-dyed ostrich feather plumping and fluffing as it dried—stretched, spread her rapidly lengthening fingers, and turned to regard the ruined, deflating body on the X.
“What’s that thing?” she asked, in a bright contralto very much like Jay’s voice. “Has anyone seen Jay?”
“Every damn time,” Dmitri muttered. “See,zaika? It’s not so—”
But Nat had torn free, her arm giving a livid flare of pain as his fingernails dug furrows in bare skin. She bolted past the cop in blue who made a halfhearted grab for her, but she was quick enough to evade that big knob-knuckled hand and spilled through a knot of costumed motherfuckers straight off a bad ’70s album cover, complete with bell-bottoms and furry chests under shirts unbuttoned to the waist; Nat pelted for the keyhole doorway.
“Don’t let her—” Baba de Winter began, and Dmitri’s curse rode a swelling wave of bright laughter.
“Oh dear,” the newborn woman said, stretching lithely as Jay’s body deflated still further, shrinking on itself like any spent cocoon. She brushed at her bare arms, stamped her dainty green-clad feet; her wrists cracked as she rotated them. “Where’s the music? I want toCharleston.”
A few throbbing notes began, and the assembly cheered the nightly marvel. Daisy accepted her accolade, a disbelieving smilespread over her fair, innocent, hungry little face, and a passing butler handed her a tall slim glass of amber champagne.
The cocoon kept shrinking, the crowd surged forward, and the crowd began to dance once more as unpainted, splintering lumber crumbled into creosote-smelling ash. Eventually the particles, working themselves smaller and smaller, would vanish entirely.
Nat was, however, out the front door, her heels clattering and her hair streaming free of Coco’s magisterial efforts.
Running flat out, she almost reached the end of the driveway before a large dirty-white van with a red racing stripe skidded to a stop right next to her, black shapes with strange heft and quite unshadowlike solidity springing from its side door, and she was bundled into darkness.
A TASTY REASON
The van heaved left as it cleared the gate, its taillights laughing little ruby mouths.
Dmitri dug his heels in, leaving long smoking furrows in the slick black driveway. Behind him, Baba drifted to a stop, a tall gray glass tumbler in her skeletal, sticklike right hand steaming against the chill. “Oh,” she said, softly, a singsong of sarcasm. “How surprising. How very, very surprising.”
He rounded on her. “Bring her to Jay’s,you said. I should carve your face off and eat it.”
“Did you expect him not to find out? The girl has to be taught what she is.” She shrugged, her pointed shoulders lifting and dropping with clockwork jerks. “Besides, I’d like to see you try.”
“One of these days,Grandmother.” His face contorted. “Just when it was getting interesting, too.”
“Well?” She took a long draft of whatever was in the tumbler and exhaled with deep satisfaction at the end, her black eyes closed, her lips smeared with cherry-red. “He can’t really hurt her, but he might strike a bargain. What are you going to do about it?”
“Bitch.” He turned sharply away, his breath pluming on chilly, sharp, very clear air. Snow-silence hung over the hills and fields; the music spilling from golden-lit windows didn’t reach this far. “She took it well, though. Girl has some guts.” Another language trembled behind the words, struggling for freedom, but he denied it, snapping his teeth together like any wolf with the hunt before him and the night fading fast.
“She survived Maschka.” Baba sounded thoughtful. “She’ll be all right.”
“Your precious Maria didn’t tell her what she is.”
“I guessed as much.” Baba took another long drink. “I suspect she had a very tasty reason for refraining.”
It had been a long time since he felt anything approaching loathing, but Dmitri Konets felt it now. “It’s amazing.” He coiled himself. “Maschka’s just like you after all.” There was a soft sound, a cough like an owl’s wings as it exploded into hunting flight, and Baba blinked slowly as a puff of stinging-fine snow was thrown into the air.
“So are you,” she said softly, and stepped aside. Headlights swelled behind her. An old Cadillac roadster, coal-black, its tires somehow making a herd-galloping racket, whooshed past on a wind that was, for a moment, redolent of rotting cypress and desert spice-sand all at once.
Baba de Winter’s empty gray glass hovered in midair for a moment, then fell into a snowdrift as a black bird lifted from the field, winging hard for a bright confusion of spilled gems upon the skyline, a nighttime city studying its own reflection in the black mirror of the sound.
