Wondrous Strange

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The boucca had Sonny by the throat.

Sonny was furious with himself for allowing his guard to drop-Maddox had warned him about the boucca and not getting too close. But he’d been distracted by the boy with the ridiculous donkey head under his arm, and the uncomfortable surge of emotion that had washed over him when he saw him take the girl by the hand.

The boucca wrinkled his nose, an expression of grim delight on his pale-green face. “I smell a Faerie killer.”

“And I smell a pook,” Sonny ground out between clenched teeth. “Which of us is more pungent, I wonder?”

A long, tense silence passed between them, and then the boucca threw back his head and laughed, releasing his punishing grip on Sonny’s larynx. “What’s a Janus doing down in Hell’s Kitchen on a day o’ the Nine?”

Sonny rubbed at his neck, wincing. Sizing the boucca up, he dug into his messenger bag and tossed one of the onyx beads at him. “Where is it? What is it?”

The boucca caught the bead out of the air, stared at it flatly for a long moment, and then tossed it back. “Not a clue.”

“All right, then.” If Sonny was going to get any answers at all, he thought, he was going to have to play rough. A Faerie could be compelled to obey commands if one knew the secret of its true name. Sonny stared the boucca in the eyes and said gravely, “I do compel thee-”

The boucca covered his pointed ears and began keening.

Sonny pushed on, relentless. “By thy truest of names, I do compel thee, and thou shalt obey my commands, for I do call thee Robin Goodfellow.”

The boucca’s shrieks suddenly turned to peals of laughter. “Oh, please!” he said finally, gasping in mirth. “That name’s not exactly the earth-shattering secret it once was, you know.” He wiped a tear from his eye, chortling. “You stupid great yob-you should get out to see more theater!”

Sonny stood there, chagrined, the heat of embarrassment creeping up his cheeks.

“Shakespeare spilled those beans quite some time ago. How do you expect me to go onstage night after night if every time someone chirps ‘Robin Goodfellow’ I fall to the ground in mindless submission?” The boucca shook his head in amused disgust. “I warned old Willie-gave him a scorching case of fleas, even. Bah-writers! Stubborn lot. Well, after that, the name sort of lost its potency, you know? Same with ‘Puck,’ so don’t bother trying. I can no more be compelled by those names than if you had just hallooed ‘Hey, buddy!’ at me.” He snorted and gave a parting shot. “Auberon’s breeding ’em up stupid these days, I see.”

Sonny’s hands clenched into fists at the insult. Then he remembered the script he’d found, with the scribbled words: Kelley’s Script-Please Return (this means YOU, Bob!)

Bouccas were notorious thieves.

“Let’s try this, then,” he said. “I do compel thee by the name of…Bob.”

The boucca stiffened and stopped in his tracks. He turned and pegged Sonny with a shrewd gaze.

“Will you help me?” Sonny implored.

Relenting, Bob the boucca said, “I’ve not a clue as to where it is. But…I do know what it is.”

“It’s a kelpie, isn’t it?”

“If you already know what it is, then why do you need me?”

That seemed to confirm Sonny’s suspicions. He could press the boucca further on the matter of the kelpie, but there were other things he needed to understand now, and he didn’t know how far he could push his luck. “All right,” he said. “Another question, then.”

Bob waited.

“That girl. The actress playing Titania.” He nodded in the direction of the dressing rooms where she’d gone. “She saw me just now.”

“I noticed that.”

Sonny was beginning to lose patience. “I was veiled and she saw me.”

Bob tilted his head, his expression maddeningly inscrutable, and said, “How is that possible for a mortal?”

“That is my question to you. How is it possible for a mortal to have seen through my veil?”

“It isn’t.”

“What are you saying?” Sonny’s wariness of the ancient, powerful boucca warred with his absolute need to know.

“You ask a lot of questions.”

Sonny took a deep breath. If he angered Bob, the boucca was likely to just vanish without another word. “Please. It is…important to me.”

Bob cocked his head to one side, considering that. He seemed to shift and change in size and proportion ever so slightly as Sonny spoke to him. It was subtle, hard to notice unless you were only looking at him sideways-as if his appearance mirrored the slipperiness of what he said.

“Do you know why Auberon shut the Gates, young Sonny Flannery?” the boucca asked.

“Of course I do.” Sonny barely contained his frustration. “I’m a bloody Janus.”

“You’re a Janus, certainly. And I’m sure you’re a fine one, at that,” Bob said, almost without sarcasm. He put up a hand to forestall any interruption. “And you’re a changeling-cradle-took from a mortal home to the Otherworld, just like the rest of your kind. But, unlike the rest of them…I happen to know that you’re also the only Janus that Auberon handpicked to raise under his own roof, at the very center of the Unseelie Court, almost as if you were a son.”

“Do you have a point to make?”

“Aye. I do.” Bob nodded slowly, returning Sonny’s steady gaze. “But not about you. About him.”

Sonny knew well how Auberon was regarded by the majority of changelings and also by a good portion of the Faerie Folk: with suspicion and with fear.

But the king had treated Sonny like family and, despite an arrogance that could border on casual cruelty, he had never given the young mortal a reason not to trust him. If Sonny was to be honest, Auberon had his loyalty and respect.

“What tale did the mighty Auberon spin by the fire for his panting Janus pup about the closing of the Gates?” Bob asked, his voice thick with mockery.

Sonny glared at him. “He closed the Gates to protect us.”

“Which ‘us,’ little changeling boy?” Bob cocked his head, his tone quizzical. “The mortal us or the Faerie us?”

“Both. He did it to protect both worlds-each from the other.”

“What you call ‘protection,’ a goodly portion of the Fair Folk call ‘imprisonment.’ What else did good king Auberon tell you? What dire threat from the mortal world was our benevolent lord and master keeping his loyal subjects safe and sound from?”

Sonny frowned. He failed to see what this had to do with him or the kelpie or the girl or anything he actually wanted to learn from the boucca. But he obviously had no choice but to play along with Bob’s game of questions. “He told me that, around the turn of the last century, as the mortal world measures time, a human woman found a way through one of the Gates to the Otherworld. And that she stole a Faerie child right from out of the cradle and escaped back to the mortal realm. So the king closed the Gates to keep it from happening again.”

“And there’s thundering great hypocrisy for you!” Bob did a little jig and swung himself effortlessly up onto the landing of a set of escape stairs. His eyes glowed fiercely. “Putting aside for the moment the fact that stealing children in the other direction was-up until that time-a sort of national pastime for the Fair Folk…don’t you think that whole story is a bit odd? Pretty drastic measures for one wee bairn gone missing, wouldn’t you say?”

“It wasn’t just any Faerie child that mortal stole!” Sonny protested. “Granted it may