Two and Twenty Dark Tales Read online

She’d eaten that book whole and moved on to more poetry, history, and mythology. She’d discovered that her name meant “bird” in Welsh, and that the old Welsh myths were like dangerous bedtime stories left unfinished, to loom over her dreams at night.

  She never remembered her dreams before, but now she started to write them down. Dreams of black and white wings flying over green hills. Most of the time she flew only to be caught in a net and held in a silver cage. But a few joyous times she took someone by the hand and taught her to fly too. That was the best dream.

  She still had two of the books. One contained old nursery rhymes, the other Welsh history and myth. The subjects often seemed to intertwine. Mrs. Davis had loaned them to her after Aderyn had come to a session sporting a black eye, still smarting after a girl in the group home punched her in her sleep. When asked why, the puncher—who sported a black eye herself—said it was Aderyn’s turn. Aderyn hadn’t really understood that, since she barely knew the girl.

  Mrs. Davis had a long silver stickpin in the shape of a bird she always wore on the neck of her favorite pink cardigan, the one starting to pill at the elbows. She’d run her fingers over the pin thoughtfully and let Aderyn cry and talk and yell. Then she’d looked over her black-rimmed glasses and said, “Bad things cycle round and round. Those who were harmed seek to harm. Those who were blamed seek to blame. If we all choose to do otherwise, maybe someday it will stop.”

  Aderyn had found strange comfort in those words. It was then she’d started planning how to stop the cycle without blaming or harming anyone but herself.

  ***

  Now Mrs. Davis was dead, killed in a hit-and-run. There was no one left to speak to. No one to give the books to. No one to make smelly tea and read her words that sent the world reeling.

  Aderyn did not cry, but she stood there staring at nothing for a long time. Then she opened up her backpack. Mrs. Davis’s books lay next to the stolen knife. It was ready.

  She didn’t see the boy approach at first, so focused was she. He made no sound as he got near; no shadow loomed. He was suddenly very solidly there, standing by her locker, smiling. He had to be new. She would have remembered him otherwise.

  His hair was the gold of sunshine on a wheat field. His skin was smooth and young, but his eyes were as blue as the sky and just as old. They pierced her, and an ache began in her bones that made her want to fly, fly into those eyes.

  He looked at her and took her hand away from the stolen knife to kiss. His lips were soft and warm. His shoulders were broad and strong. In his ancient blue eyes she saw herself reflected, beautiful and desired.

  “Aderyn,” he said. “I’m Matthew, and I’d like to take you out.”

  “Hi,” she said, for she was only seventeen, and life in a series of foster homes had not prepared her for his formal tone, his firm touch, his bemused gaze. “How did you know my name?”

  “I saw a girl, delicate, clever, and kind. So I asked around.” Self-assurance emanated from him like cologne. She envisioned herself pressing against him and some of that warm scent rubbing off on her. “Let’s sneak out now,” he said. “I’ll drive.”

  She said, “Yes,” and he didn’t let go of her hand as they walked down the corridor. She hoisted her backpack over her shoulder. The knife could wait.

  ***

  His car was big and black with opaque windows, like something going to a funeral. He opened her door and saw that she was safely bestowed on the shiny leather seat before shutting it with a gentle thump.

  As he settled in next to her, she asked, “Did your parents give you this car?”

  “I stole it,” he said, and turned the key so that the engine revved. “I’m a thief.”

  She asked, “Are you stealing me?”

  His laugh was a delighted shout. “Yes,” he said, and peeled out into the street.

  She was too captivated to see the mustachioed man in the tracksuit turn his yellow car to follow them.

  At the drive-thru, Matthew bought her a chocolate shake and French fries without asking, just as she always did for herself. All the while he blasted a song she loved on the car stereo. He listed off her favorite colors (black and white), her sign (Aquarius), and her dreams (of flying). He seemed to understand what she meant before the words left her lips. And each time she confirmed these things, he drew closer to her, as if she had passed some kind of test. When he again intertwined his fingers with hers, and took her photo with his phone; warmth she had never felt before was kindling in the center of her chest.

  The car purred down the boulevards toward the ocean. He rolled aside the moon roof so she could stick her head and shoulders out and pretend she was flying.

  When he pulled up to the motel near the beach, she saw the rolling silver ocean first, and the dreary neon motel sign second. Disappointment tugged at her as he, still in the driver’s seat, grabbed her legs and pulled her back down where he could run his hands up into her hair, freeing it to pour like black water around her face.

  “Always so beautiful,” he said, his blue eyes gazing on her as if remembering another time. “That’s why I stole you. That and because he loved your song so.”

  “He?” she said, pushing away from him a little. His nearness made her heart beat fast as a baby bird’s.

  He cocked a smile at her, the way a cowboy cocks a gun. “Come inside, and I’ll tell you what I mean.”

  “A motel?” she asked, and shook her head. “If you knew me as well as you claim, you’d know better than that.”

  “Aderyn Adain?” He leaned in close and touched his nose to hers. “I’d know that beak anywhere. For I have known you over many lifetimes. And if my luck goes badly, I will know you for many more. Here.” He pulled from his coat pocket a bundle of papers tied with a string. He tugged the string free, and photos spilled onto the seat.

  “But that’s me!” She picked up a square black and white photo with a thick white border around the edges. Her own dark eyes looked back at her from under the brim of a black cloche hat with a white ribbon around the brim, her thick black hair in a bob with bangs cut straight across. “It can’t be me.”

  “Neither can this,” Matthew said, pointing to a photo of Aderyn in a black poodle skirt and white sweater, books tucked under arm. “Or this.”

  Aderyn stared at herself, this time with her hair in a teased black bouffant, eyes limned in winged eyeliner. Strange recognition stirred, and with it, hazy alarm. Aderyn had never known her parents. A homeless man had found her, newly born, in a Dumpster. No one looked like her. No one till this, till now.

  “How’d you get these?” she asked. There were other unlikely photos of her, and of two other girls that looked familiar: a redhead and a blonde. There were drawings too, in colored pencil, of a black and white bird in a blue sky, of a white hound with red ears, and of a great white stag emerging from the forest, antlers pointed like daggers at the sky. Something about them nudged her memory too. “Do you know my mother or grandmother or something?”

  Matthew gathered up the photos, tying them together again. As he tucked them into his pocket, the lapel of his coat slid aside to show a flash of silver in a winged shape. She leaned in, trying to see more, but he turned and opened his car door. “Come inside,” he said. “I’ll tell you about yourself.”

  Then he was up and striding toward the motel room door, the last rays of sunset gracing his head like a gold crown.

  She watched him go, the photos an itch behind her eyes. She reached for her backpack and felt for the outline of the knife it held. Maybe now it could serve another purpose.

  In the distance, Matthew opened the scuffed door to the motel room and bowed low to her. His arm swept in a wide arc toward the blackness of the room beyond.

  She hadn’t wanted to know anything in so long. Weariness had weighed too much upon her. But now she remembered how it felt to want something. She had to know what he and those photographs could tell her. She hopped out of the car, hefting the backpack, and swept over the asphal
t and past him into the motel room.

  The door clicked shut. Neither of them saw the man in the yellow car pull into the parking lot.

  ***

  “We don’t have long,” Matthew said, taking off his coat and throwing it onto the bed. “I must have you before he gets here.”

  The words jarred her, but she was sadly not surprised. She swung the backpack around, unzipped the top, and laid her hand on the hilt of the knife inside. “He?”

  “Your master.” Matthew smiled. The old blue eyes in that handsome young face were not kind. “The one I stole you from.”

  “Stole me?” she repeated. She wanted to keep him talking as long as she could before she had to use the knife. “I don’t belong to anyone.”

  “Well, he stole you first.” Matthew undid the buckle on his belt. “From the earth. He took the three of you, and you lived many long years with him. Then I stole you back.”

  “The three of us—do you mean me and the other girls in those photos?” It still made no sense.

  He undid a button of his shirt. Silver winked there again. “But he keeps tracking me down, before I can make you completely mine. Don’t you see? I brought you back up to this world, but he came after us. In the battle that followed, the three of you fled. So we continue to hunt you.”

  He took a step toward her and she didn’t back up, hoping the light would fall upon the silver near his collar. He said, “Each time I come closer to total possession. If you just let me have you here and now, this endless dance around the maypole can stop.”

  He undid another button. “I’d rather have you willing.” Another step closer. “But it’s not required.”

  At last, she saw the silver thing on his shirt in full. The dusty light from the bedside lamp gleamed briefly on a long silver stickpin decorated with the form of a bird in flight.

  Her heart stopped beating and a small, mournful sound came from her throat.

  “What?” He followed her gaze to the pin on his shirt. “Oh, this? Yes.”

  He lifted a hand to stroke the wings of the bird, then drew the fingers away fast, as if the touch burned. “I’m a thief, you know. After I hit her on the street, I couldn’t just go without taking something, even though it was silver. It reminded me of you.”

  “Why?” Aderyn never cried, but her throat was almost too tight to speak. She never trembled, but her fingers on the knife hilt shook. “Why would you kill Mrs. Davis?”

  “Because you mattered to her, of course.” He undid the remaining buttons on his shirt and let it slide down his arms to the floor. His torso was lean and supple with muscle. Several deep scars marked his chest. “If I can’t have you, I’ve got to be sure he doesn’t either, and your Mrs. Davis would have gone looking for you. She might have caused trouble.”

  “He…” She shook her head to make herself think. “Who is he?”

  “Arawn, of course.” He unbuttoned the top of his pants, stepping very near her now. “King of the Otherworld, master of the hounds of Annwn, he who lost the Cad Goddeau and his precious beasts to me.”

  Arawn. The word and his descriptions stirred in her memory. It could only be nonsense, yet she knew somehow it was not. Next to the knife lay the books of myth and nursery rhymes Mrs. Davis had loaned her. Aderyn felt sure she had read the name Arawn in one of them.

  “And who are you?” she asked, gripping the knife hilt.

  “What have you got there?” he said, and moved like quicksilver, lashing toward the backpack. Her hold on the knife was tight, so she kept it as he jerked the pack away.

  He looked down at her holding the long, sharp blade, his gaze a dismissal. “Is that your plan?”

  He emptied her backpack onto the bed. Everything spilled out—the books, her precious iPod, sheet music, dream journal, spare change.

  He pounced on the books. “We’re both in here. Do you remember yet? They even wrote a silly rhyme about us.”

  He sat down on the bed, leafing rapidly through the book of nursery rhymes, unconcerned that she was standing there with a large knife. “Here it is. Everyone gets the name wrong:

  “Taffy was a Welshman, Taffy was a thief,

  Taffy came to my house and stole a piece of beef;

  “Should be venison, but that doesn’t rhyme with ‘thief.’ They mean the roebuck, of course. I stole her first.”

  And he continued:

  “I went to Taffy’s house, Taffy was not home;

  Taffy came to my house and stole a marrow-bone.

  “Arawn used to give the hound a meaty marrowbone after a good day’s hunt, so I stole one for her the same time I stole her. Oh, but here you are, my dear girl.”

  “I went to Taffy’s house, Taffy was not in;

  Taffy came to my house and stole a silver pin;”

  He closed his eyes, picturing something from long ago. “You were in a silver cage. Over the years, somehow that became a pin in the rhyme. Which is why I had to take your friend’s pin when I saw it, even though it burned my hand. Arawn thought the silver cage would deter me from taking you. He had no idea what I was willing to endure. For he loved you best. He hasn’t slept since I took you.”

  He read on.

  “I went to Taffy’s house, Taffy was in bed,

  I took up the marrow-bone and flung it at his head.”

  He slammed the book shut and gave her a wolfish smile. “That might work for the hound, but it won’t work for you.”

  A bird, a roebuck (that was a kind of deer, wasn’t it?), and a hound. The book of Welsh myths held a vague tale about a hero stealing those same three prized possessions from the King of the Otherworld in order to start a war. The humans had won, ending the King’s rule over this world and banishing him forever to the Otherworld.

  “But the name of the thief wasn’t Taffy,” she said aloud. “And it wasn’t Matthew.”

  He shrugged, tossing the books back onto the bed. “They called me Amaethon then, one of the Children of Don, brother to Gwydion the magician, cleverest of thieves who stole the secrets of the King of the Otherworld.”

  He stood up and paced away, then restlessly back again, as if the memory had bloodied an old wound. “I had to get him to fight a war with us somehow, didn’t I? I saw how your songs lulled him to sleep, how possessively he stroked the red ears of his best hound, how he delighted in hunting the great white stag. If I hadn’t taken what he loved, he never would have thought us worthy of battle. He never would have left his own world to array his forces against us. And he never would have lost. I won this world away from him! I saved humanity from enslavement and what thanks do I get? My own enslavement—to hunt the three of you over and over, dying only to be reborn to the chase again. It’s as if I never left the Otherworld. Do you remember how it was? No one dies or ages there, and you would have stayed forever singing mournful songs in that cage had I not stolen you back.”

  Like a dragon in its cave, a memory stirred within her. Of a bright silver cage, of an angry man sent into peaceful slumber by her songs, of a blond head and blue eyes peering at her with a covetous smile. A flurry of movement in the dark, a dog’s bark, the hooves of a stag brushing through the grass.

  “He kept us for so very long to serve him,” she said, unsure where that thought had come from. “You promised us freedom if we came with you.”

  “You would have roused the guards if I hadn’t.” He ceased pacing and returned his gaze, still angry and affronted, back to her. “After Gwydion changed you all into girls, the only way to keep you out of Arawn’s hands forever is for a human man to taste you.” He reached for her. “As I will taste you now.”

  She backed up toward the door and nearly tripped over the shirt he’d left on the floor, but righted herself just in time. “Where are the other two?” she asked. “The hound and the deer?”

  He shrugged. “Helgi’s down in Lima, and Cara’s somewhere in Bengal. I’ll get them next. Your locations change every time. That and the fashions are the only things that do.”

&
nbsp; Helgi and Cara, she thought. Lima and Bengal. There were two others, like her yet not alike. Helgi and Cara. Lima and Bengal. “You are going to rape us.”

  “Only if you say no. Don’t you see?” He opened his arms wide, as if making her the most generous offer in the world. “One time with me and you can never be his again. One time with me and this endless cycle of hunting and dying will end. I told you all as much that very first night, my sweet lapwing, hound, and deer. One time with me and then you will be free.”

  He dropped his hands and shook his head. “Yet each hunt is like the first. Arawn finds us too soon.”

  “We got away that first time.” She looked up and up at him. She was so small, and there was no silver cage between them. Another memory stirred. Of his hands fumbling with the catch on the cage, the skin burning and falling off his fingers from touching the silver. The scars on his chest… “He killed you with a silver sword.”

  “Damn him,” Matthew said without heat. “We know each other’s weaknesses too well. He can’t stay in this world for long, lest he freeze. But each time he stays long enough to kill me. And so I am reborn. And so we hunt. He from the Otherworld, me from this, until we find you again.”

  “We three are reborn, too,” she said, remembering Mrs. Davis’s words. “Over and over. Bad things cycle round and round.”

  “This time it can be different,” he said brightly, and reached for her. “If you just let me have you…”

  She stabbed him with the knife.

  Or she tried. The blade slid right off him as if his skin was made of stone.

  He tweaked it right out of her hand. “Silly bird,” he said. “Pretty lapwing, sing to me now.”

  A fist slammed into the door from the outside, startling them both.

  “Arawn!” Fury took Matthew. He threw the knife at the door. It thunked point first into the wood. “Always he comes too soon!”

  “Always you talk too much,” she said. Under the soft sole of her boot, she felt something small and hard. A quick glance down showed her Mrs. Davis’s long silver pin.

  Matthew’s blue eyes were glacier cold. “Always I must kill you.”