Chapter 25

  At five minutes to two, I was waiting for my guest by the Hall's front gates. It was a pleasant day, not quite autumn yet, but with summer on the wane, so I'd dressed in a lightweight knee-length dark green circle skirt with a high waist, over a matching short-sleeved, scoop-necked bodysuit. Just to spiff the outfit up a little, I'd put a black vest on over it, and finished the outfit with a pair of flat-heeled black ankle boots that were good for walking.

  Sparkle was perched on my shoulder in her usual frilly little purple dress, and Penny sat beside me in her natural form. I wanted to introduce them both formally before we did anything else. I felt it was only polite, since they'd had to go largely un-introduced during my initial meeting with Jessie Rhodes.

  Here, at least, we could be ourselves, without artifice. At least until we arrived in town.

  Precisely at the stroke of two o'clock, there was a rustle in the woods across the street from the gate, and Jessie Rhodes emerged from them.

  To my amusement, she was dressed almost exactly the same way I was, just with the colors reversed: Her skirt and top were black, and the vest was green. Her skirt was a bit shorter than mine, she was wearing black leggings under it, and she wore green trainers with scrunched-down socks instead of ankle boots. Otherwise we could've been cut from the same mold.

  She trotted lightly across the street and stopped in front of me, giving me an amused once-over. "Have you been raidin' my closet somehow?"

  "I was going to ask you the same thing," I said with a laugh, then gestured. "Jessie Rhodes, allow me to properly introduce you to Sparkle and Penny."

  "Hello!" Sparkle said cheerfully from my shoulder.

  "It is very good to make your acquaintance," Penny said politely.

  "Yes it is," Jessie replied, bobbing a little curtsy. "And you've both bound yourselves to Caley here?"

  "I served her mother first," Sparkle replied. "But she planned to give me to Caley before…" She stopped and went silent.

  "Before she died," I finished for her. "It's okay to say it, Sparkle."

  "Sorry," she said softly, with a little sniffle. "It just hits me sometimes."

  "Me too," I agreed.

  "And my family," Penny said to fill the slightly awkward silence that followed, "were in service to - and under the protection of - Caley's family for centuries before wizards of the ICOA stole us away. I am the first to return to her service properly, so it's only right that I bind myself to her."

  Jessie nodded seriously. "I agree. It's very honorable of you." She smiled at me. "I can see that you have devoted friends rather than followers."

  I shrugged uncomfortably, making Sparkle giggle. "I wasn't comfortable 'owning' them and insisted they be my friends instead."

  Jessie smiled a bit more. "Speaks highly for you." She walked around us to the gates and looked through them, carefully not touching them. I thought I saw the outline of something under the back of her vest as she leaned forward a little and sniffed the air. "Thought so. I could feel these wards long before I got here." She turned to face me again. "Some serious defenses y'all have here."

  She wasn't asking about them…her tone of voice was matter of fact, rather than curious. So I just nodded. "Thank you."

  "Lovely grounds, too," she added, smiling at me. "Once we know one another a bit better, maybe y'all will give me a tour."

  "I'd like that," I said honestly. I already liked her…I just wasn't entirely sure I could trust her yet. "If you don't mind my asking, how did you get here?"

  She gestured behind her toward the woods across the street. "There's a ley line that runs straight here from London. It was a ten minute walk for me."

  "You know how to walk the Ways well enough to do that?" Penny asked, astonished. "I didn't think mortals could learn to do that."

  Jessie smirked. "My granny taught me the basics, and had me trade the secrets of doin' it real well with a member of the Wild Hunt." She took on a bemused look. "He had me teach him how to make pizza. Never did understand that trade, but spend enough time in Faerie and you stop tryin' to understand it and just roll with it. Or go insane. Some of both, maybe."

  I raised my left hand. "For the novices present, that means what?"

  Jessie laughed. "Sorry, I forget myself sometimes. I learned how to walk the Ways in Faerie…they're the paths that lead from the mortal world into and through the Otherworld. Most mortals can never follow 'em, because they're constantly shiftin' and changin'. Ley lines…" she paused and smiled uncertainly. "You know what ley lines are, right?"

  I smiled and nodded. "I've absorbed an awful lot of magical theory over the past year."

  Jessie looked curious about that, but didn't ask. "All right, then. Well, ley lines are kinda the mortal world equivalent of the Ways," she said. "Except they don't move around none, like the Ways tend to. If you know how, you can draw energy from them - which nobody with any amount of sanity tries to do with the Ways - and use 'em to travel quickly from one point to another."

  "I knew you could draw energy from them," I said, "though I've been warned not to until I have a lot more experience under my belt."

  Jessie laughed. "Y'all got smart teachers. It's like stickin' your finger into an electric outlet t' see if it's live or not."

  "But I didn't know they could be used for travel," I said, interested in the idea.

  Jessie smirked and laid a finger alongside her nose. "There's a secret to it, of course. Maybe once I know you better, we can work out a trade and I can teach you."

  "Once she has a better idea of what that kind of trade entails," Sparkle said firmly. "She's still learning about dealing with the Sidhe, which you seem to have mastered."

  "Long since," Jessie agreed comfortably. "Ain't no rush. Hopefully I'll be around a while and we'll all be good friends."

  "Hopefully," I said, then gestured down the road toward town. "Shall we?"

  "Let's," Jessie said. Then, as we started walking, she looked down at Penny padding along between us. "Do your friends here stay in plain sight when you're in town?"

  "Sometimes Penny does," I said. "She's mastered shape-shifting into the form of an all-black Husky. Sparkle still hides most of the time. Though I have a growing impression that more people in town are familiar with the supernatural world than I was originally led to believe."

  "World's gettin' weirder," Jessie said. "Far as I can tell, it's always been weird. Maybe it's just that the filters mortals put on to ignore the weird stuff are gettin' worn down. I know my bosses at the UNSDI are concerned that it's gettin' harder to hide the weirdness from normal folks."

  "You said as much," I replied with a little nod. "Father Hill, the local Roman Catholic priest, said something similar. The ICOA reps I've spoken with came perilously close to actually threatening me if I risked breaking the masquerade, for lack of a better term."

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  Jessie huffed. "Y'all wouldn't believe what they think o' the UNSDI." She chuckled. "Mika - that's Mika O'Connell, who's kinda my mentor there - had me sit in on a meetin' she and her husband Gabriel had with some higher-ups in the ICOA. I ain't never seen words used like weapons the way the ICOA did durin' that meetin', and I grew up around the Sidhe. Thought Gabe was gonna pick that peckerwood Cuthbert up by the collar and physically throw him outta the buildin'."

  There was a familiar name. "Edwin Cuthbert?" I asked.

  "Yeah, that was him," Jessie said, looking at me curiously.

  "Older gentleman, thinning white hair and a full beard?" I asked.

  Jessie nodded. "Take it you've met."

  I grimaced. "He was the first person from the ICOA to make contact with me," I confirmed. "It didn't go terribly well. We did some verbal fencing. Cuthbert carefully avoided admitting that they knew anything about what Bellinus von Einhardt had been up to, then tried to avoid admitting that they had Penny's family enslaved."

  "Ain't never heard nobody lie the way that man did," Jessie agreed.

  When she was silent for a moment after that, I glanced over and that she was frowning a little. She caught me looking and gave me a rueful little thin-lipped smile. "Ya gotta understand, Caley," she said, her accent getting thicker, "one of the hardest things Ah've had to adjust to comin' back to the mortal world is wrestlin' with people lyin'. Ah'm used to the Sidhe - residents of Faerie in general, really - not tellin' lies. They'll twist the truth into knots that'd make the saltiest seaman's jaw drop at their complexity, but they just don't lie. Ah dunno if they can't - like they say - or just don't for some reason, but Ah'm not used to dealin' with straight-up lyin'. Grinds mah gears a bit."

  She cleared her throat, and when she spoke again her accent wasn't as pronounced. "That and gettin' my accent curbed."

  "If it's any consolation," I said, both surprised by and appreciating the trust and vulnerability she was showing me, "I'm having similar trouble getting my head wrapped around the twisty logic the Sidhe use to avoid lying. And I like your accent."

  Jessie gave me a pretty smile, showing just a hint of teeth. "Thank ya kindly, Caley. But I feel better 'round people when I've got it mostly under control. Nothin's gonna stop me from usin' 'ain't' though." Her smile grew just a little. "I love seein' Gabe wince whenever I use it."

  "Oh?"

  "Among other things, he's a teacher," Jessie said, her smile distinctly turning into a smirk.

  I laughed. "Ah. Yes, I can see how 'ain't' might make him wince."

  We've broken the ice, I thought. We're feeling each other out, wondering if we can be friends and not just colleagues. I found myself hoping I'd have a chance to introduce her to D.T., and wondering what they'd make of each other.

  "If you don't mind my asking," I said after a minute, "you said you thought you'd go crazy if you didn't get out of London for a while. Why? There's so much to see and do there."

  Jessie snorted a little laugh. "Oh, there surely is. Do you know how crazy it feels to realize that the city of London is about ten times older than the oldest part of my country?"

  I smiled. "It's a lot to absorb."

  "Y'all ain't got no idea," she said. "Again, it's a problem of me growin' up in Faerie. I'm super sensitive to the…the magical aura of a place, if you will. I thought New Orleans was burstin' with magic, but London…this whole country so far…makes even the most magical places I've been in America feel like bein' back in Faerie. But way more chaotic."

  She shook her head. "London was gettin' to me. The sheer volume of ghosts in the city, and the number of ley lines runnin' through it…I just needed to breathe, you know?"

  "I hope it's better out here," I said, thinking of Oakwood Hall's wards and the ambient energy of the area that had been mentioned to me a few times now. Clearly, Jessie was a lot more sensitive to such things than I was.

  "Oh, it's loads better here," she said earnestly. "Like night an' day." She nodded back toward the Hall. "Whoever raised your wards originally, they worked hard t' make sure they blended into the…the background noise, I suppose is as good a way of puttin' it as any. There's a pile of energy here, but it doesn't have the nerve-janglin' hard edges that a city's energy has."

  "Will it be a problem for you in London?" I asked, concerned.

  She shook her head. "The energy of every city I've been to had its own flavor," she said thoughtfully. "It'll just take me some time t' get used to it. I do like it better here, mind you. I could get comfortable here with no problem."

  I smiled. "I'll keep that in mind."

  We reached the edge of the woods and fields which marked the edge of the land my family owned and stopped as Jessie got her first good look at the town of Oakwood. She stood with her hands on her hips, smiling a thin-lipped but curiously gentle smile as she breathed in deeply and let it out slowly.

  "Yeah," she said softly, "feels like a place where a body could make a home." Then she gave me a bit of side-eye. "Y'all don't have a model village or nothin', do ya?"

  I laughed. "No, nothing like that. And we don't try out for village of the year."

  "No weird cults doin' stupid shit for the greater good?" She was smiling more widely now, showing just a glimpse of white, even teeth.

  I wondered if she ever grinned as I laughed a bit harder. "No…nothing like that, I swear."

  She nodded. "Good. Gimme the ten cent tour, then."

  Immediately, Sparkle hopped off my shoulder, shrank down and connected to the Master Key hanging from my choker. I'd grown so used to her doing it that I hardly noticed it anymore, but Jessie watched with interest. Her eyebrows actually went up in surprise a moment later when Penny shifted into her all-black Husky form instead of disappearing into my shadow.

  "Okay, now that is really cool," she said. "Is that shape-shiftin' or illusion?"

  "Shape shifting," Penny said proudly, then added modestly, "I can only change into one other form, and that one manifested after I bound myself to Caley."

  "Still damn cool, and super useful," Jessie said appreciatively.

  Penny gave herself a little shake and didn't reply, but I could tell that she was pleased at both the praise of her ability, and at having impressed Jessie with it. I reached down and ruffled her ears affectionately, then gestured toward town. "Come on, I'll show you around."

  We strolled through town lazily with Penny padding along between us, and as I answered her idle questions about this shop or that building, I slowly realized that something was changing in Jessie. She was relaxing. I could actually see the tension leaching out of her muscles as we walked.

  The third or fourth time someone greeted me - Laurie Harris, closing up the library for the day - Jessie seemed more curious than tense. When Laurie had just smiled at Jessie, and I'd introduced her as 'an American friend of mine up from London for the day', Jessie had found herself simply being accepted. A warm handshake and a brief tour of the library (of which Laurie was rightly proud, for such a small town) later, and we stepped back out into the late afternoon sunlight and started up the street again.

  "Is…everybody here that…accepting?" Jessie asked, clearly trying to digest what had just happened. "I mean, she even let Penny in. No offense, Penny."

  Penny laughed quietly to let Jessie know she wasn't offended.

  I chuckled softly. "I can't honestly say I've met everybody…but so far, just about everybody I've met has been. It's kind of wild, isn't it?"

  "Do you think they'd be this accepting of…complete outsiders?" She asked.

  We stopped and I turned to look at her. "What do you mean?"

  She looked down at the sidewalk for a moment, then her weirdly iridescent green eyes met mine. "Well, right now at least I'm 'Caley's American friend from London.' Would they be that accepting of me if I weren't attached to you in their minds?"

  I crossed my arms and lowered my chin a little. She wasn't wrong to ask…being associated with me probably did soften any natural suspicion they might've had about a stranger. "I honestly don't know, Jessie. You're thinking about what we discussed at lunch the other day, right?"

  She nodded and we started walking again. "The UNSDI really is looking for safe, friendly places to settle people of an…uncanny nature who're just lookin' to live peaceful lives. You'd be amazed how hard it is to find places like that."

  "Not really," I said. "Even just since I was a little girl, people have become less likely to trust and welcome strangers, and things were already pretty ragged twenty years ago." I looked at her profile. "I can't imagine how different it is from what you remember in…what, 1984?"

  She made a face. "Hardly remember a thing from those days," she said, "and most of what I do recall is filtered through my parents. That and brightly colored spandex." She laughed. "Gotta admit, I was a bit shocked t' find myself in a 2017 where y'all weren't wearin' spandex and mylar jumpsuits. I was all set to dress up like Judy Jetson or Wilma Deering."

  "Sci-Fi fan, huh?" I asked, smiling.

  "My daddy was. Is," she corrected herself. "And o' course Granny tried t' keep me abreast of human culture as she raised me. Which mostly meant cartoons, Sci-Fi and Fantasy novels and movies, and the like. And lots o' folk music." She smiled. "Granny thought John Denver was just the greatest thing ever."

  "Hard to disagree," I said. "He had a beautiful voice."

  "Yes he did," she agreed. "Point bein', my view of human culture was filtered through a weird lens. Distorted, like everythin' about the Sidhe relative to us."

  "So you're not sure which of your childhood memories are real," I began, following her train of thought.

  "An' which was fantasies and illusions," she finished, then shrugged a little. "So to speak. I might be exaggeratin' a little, but it's close to the truth. As close as I can get with either sixteen or thirty-six years between me and my childhood, dependin' on how ya wanna look at it. Faerie…changed me. Hard. And I know it."

  I glanced at her, and saw that her expression was distant and pensive. As much as I was pleased that she was letting me see behind her defenses, I didn't want her feeling she'd said too much. So I gently redirected the conversation. "You think Oakwood could be a good place to resettle a few…friendly uncanny folk?"?

  She gave herself a little shake and nodded. "Yeah, I really do think it could be. We oughta talk to that…mayor equivalent?"

  I smiled. "Town clerk."

  "Yeah, him," she said, giving me one of her warm little smiles. "If'n ya don't mind."