What was the alternative? Had someone stolen his iPod from his knapsack, put some new music on his deck, then put the iPod back?
“Just another weird thing on the weirdest day ever,” he mumbled.
He clicked on the entry and the album cover came up on the screen.
The picture arrested his attention. She was just as beautiful as he remembered from the hall that night. The picture was so vivid. She seemed to stare out at him from the tiny screen. The title of the CD was traced in the vines: THE FAERIE BANQUET.
Brendan frowned. You should just wipe it. Get rid of it. You know what the music did to you. Mum and Dad are downstairs right now discussing the possibility that you might need a lobotomy. Erase it, fool.
“Well, I might as well give it a listen.” He slotted the iPod into the dock and pushed play. He lay back on the bed and waited.
A harp rippled softly in the dark. The lilting harmonics of the strings were joined by Deirdre’s voice. Clear and strong but completely controlled, the notes soared, sending shivers across Brendan’s skin. He closed his eyes to let the sound wash over him.
Throbbing with emotion, the harp was lush and vibrant. And when Deirdre D’Anaan sang, her voice was so personal, as if she were singing for him alone. The woman’s face filled his mind’s eye. She looked so familiar.
Then it hit him. Those eyes. They were just like Greenleaf’s! The more he looked, the more he felt that this woman and Greenleaf could almost be related-cousins or even brother and sister.
The music was soothing. As he changed into his pyjamas, he looked over at the single gable window that filled the end of the room. Moonlight angled in low across the floor. Trees, their leaves backlit by the moon, swept like dark shadows back and forth with the wind. Their movement was restful, hypnotic. He was safe here in his little world. He could relax. So he did. In a few minutes, his breathing deepened and he fell asleep.
Something in the music tugged him out of his slumber. Brendan opened his eyes and saw that the ceiling above him was no longer made of plaster and wooden beams. The poster of a space marine firing a laser cannon at swarming aliens was obscured by a mass of dense vines. Brendan sat up, his head brushing the trailing leaves. The whole room had changed. The centre of the roof was gone. Overhead the stars shone down, cold and densely packed.
“Hello, this is weird,” Brendan said out loud. His breath came out in a frosty cloud. He realized he was cold. “Is this a dream?” He looked at his hands. They glowed softly white in the pale light of the moon. He looked down to see he was still wearing his pyjamas-a pair of flannel plaid trousers and a T-shirt.
He stood up and stepped to the centre of the room. He found himself on a stone parapet. The wooden floorboards were gone and in their place were heavy stones crusted with moss. A low wall surrounded him. The trapdoor remained in the same place, the top of the ladder poking up. The music seemed to be coming from below. Shivering, he descended the ladder.
The music was louder here. The hall had undergone a similar transformation, plaster walls replaced by stone, and framed pictures replaced with woven tapestries. Brendan passed his sister’s room. The door was open. Looking in, he was shocked to see the green vines woven throughout the room, twined through the mass of clothing on the floor, tangled around his sister’s bed. A half-eaten sandwich was oddly cradled in a nest of leaves. Delia lay beneath a blanket of dense vines, her face pale and peaceful in the moonlight. If left to their own devices, the vines would soon cover her face and smother her. Brendan felt alarm but the music beckoned him, urging him toward the living room.
The familiar room was utterly altered. He recognized the richly carved hall from the artwork on his iPod. His parents’ comfortable, overstuffed furniture was barely visible under a carpet of vines. Where the TV usually occupied the corner, a large wooden chair loomed. In the chair, so real, more real than she could possibly be, sat Deirdre D’Anaan.
In the picture, she had been beautiful. Onstage, she had been incandescent. In person, she was breathtaking, terrifyingly radiant. In the eerie light, her pale skin glowed with a cold fire. Her long, nimble fingers, each decorated with golden rings, caressed achingly beautiful music drawn from the harp she held on her lap. The harp was exquisitely carved, inlaid with woods of many different hues, its surface polished and smooth. On her shoulder perched the tiny creature from the CD cover and the show that night. The little wings, veined and transparent like an insect’s wings, fluttered once, twice. The little eyes glittered in the pale glow of the moon streaming through the broad front window. It glared warily at Brendan as he came to stand in front of the woman’s chair.
“Is this a dream?” Brendan asked. His voice sounded so loud, a jarring contrast to the rich sound of the harp.
She didn’t stop playing. She raised her eyes to his, and he felt a shiver of delight that she should waste a gaze upon him. “A dream? No. I have wrought a Sending. Such are my gifts: I am a Weaver. I pass the thread through the loom and make tapestries for the mind’s eye. But I have no time to waste. What I do is exhausting.”
“What do you mean?” Brendan frowned. He felt like a child, an infant in front of her. Looking directly into her shining eyes was like looking into the sun. He wanted to hide his face but he made himself hold her gaze.
“You left the hall tonight before I could accomplish my goal. I rarely perform for the People of Metal. 40 I had to see you for myself.” The woman raised a hand and pointed a long, elegant finger at his chest. His scar flared in agony. “I have come to dispel the glamour that has hidden you for so long. The Ward is failing. Soon, you will come to understand who and what you are. Enemies search for you. Soon, they will be able to see you.”
“Enemies,” Brendan gasped, clawing at his chest. The pain was deepening. “I don’t understand.”
“No. You were hidden among Humans until you were old enough to defend yourself, choose for yourself. You cannot possibly understand. You must learn your true heritage and find your true strength before you are destroyed or turned to darkness.”
“Turned to darkness? I’m a high school student! What darkness?” Brendan shook his head. “I must be dreaming. This is some kind of post-concussion thing. I’m going to wake up and everything will be back to normal.”
“Foolish boy!” The woman frowned, and for the first time, Brendan sensed something dark and dangerous behind her beautiful eyes. The mark on his chest ignited with fresh, crippling pain. As he fell to his knees, gasping, she said, “You have no idea of the danger you are in. I am trying to save you!”
“You have a funny way of showing it!”
“Breandan! You have a destiny. There is no use trying to escape it.” Her voice was impossible to deny. The tone was fell 41 and it throbbed with power.
Brendan staggered to his feet. He had to get away from the music, from the power of her voice. The strange way she said his name, like Mr. Greenleaf. The thought that they were related came back, stronger than ever. “Who are you, exactly? Why should I trust you?”
“There is no time,” Deirdre said. “This Sending is exhausting to maintain.” Indeed, lines of strain creased her brow. “Listen to me.”
“No!” Brendan cried. He staggered across the floor and through the door that led to the hall.
The walls, the carpet crawled with vines that coiled around his ankles and wrists, making him stumble. Something buzzed past his ear. The little creature had left Deirdre’s shoulder and zipped about his head, shrieking. The whir of its tiny insect-like wings was maddening. Brendan batted at the creature but it ducked away easily. Suddenly, the thing dove at his chest, scuttling under his T-shirt. The feel of its tiny hands scrabbling across his skin filled him with revulsion.
“Get away!” Brendan shouted, slapping at the thing with both hands. “Get off me!” He was starting to panic. He banged into the wall and fell on his hands and knees. Instantly, the vines clutched at his hands. A sharp pain in his chest made him cry out. The little creature had bitten or clawed him!
Then the creature, having slithered out from the shirt, flew up and hovered in front of him, holding something in its hands. Brendan’s eyes went wide. It held a glowing spiral shape in its tiny fingers. While Brendan looked on in fascination, it opened its jaws to reveal rows of minute, needle-sharp teeth and began to devour the glowing shape, shredding it like a pastry and popping the pieces in its mouth with relish. 42
The shape was somehow familiar. “My scar,” Brendan whispered in horror. “It’s eating my scar!” He looked down at his bare chest, exposed by the rent in the cotton shirt. In place of the scar there was merely an empty patch of reddened skin. “That is so gross!” He swatted at the creature, but it darted out of reach and continued its
