Wondrous Strange

“I remember voices. Outside my bedroom window.”

“You used to tell me that.” Emma’s voice was choked with memory. “When you were young, you told me that. And it scared me half to death. I knew that you could see…them. Hear them. I could too-after I’d been to their world.”

“Faeries.”

“Yes, dear. The ones that came around the house were harmless, really. Only curious because they knew you were different. They just didn’t know why, exactly. We tried so hard to keep you hidden. Safe.”

“We?”

“Me. And your mum and dad…”

“You mean the Winslows.”

“Don’t be angry with them, Kelley,” Emma pleaded. “They loved you. And they tried their best to do right by you. By both of us. When they died in the car accident, I was heart-broken.”

“How…how did…” She didn’t even know how to phrase such a question.

But Emma knew what she asked. “They found me wandering, half out of my mind, in the middle of that great bloody park with you tucked in my coat, and they offered to take me in-back to their place in the country.”

“Why? Why didn’t they call you an ambulance? Or the cops?”

“I wouldn’t let them. I was confused. Frightened. Thousands of miles and a hundred years away from my own home…”

“I don’t understand.”

“That place. The Otherworld…” Emma’s voice went soft with remembered wonder. “It isn’t like it is here, Kelley. It’s beautiful there…too beautiful, somehow. Such a strange, dreaming place, and-just like in a dream-time is meaningless there. You see, once I had crossed over to steal you and then crossed back again, well…the world-this world-had changed. Decades had passed. I wasn’t even in my own country anymore. Dr. and Mrs. Winslow, I’m sure they thought I was just some poor unfortunate soul gone clear out of my head. But they told me they’d help me.” Emma’s laugh was a weary, battered sound in Kelley’s ear. “They’d been wanting a child themselves, you see. Desperately. But it was not to be. Until they found me. And you. We…made an arrangement.”

“I see.”

“They would take care of us, keep you as their own. With me close by to help raise you. I didn’t know what else to do, so of course I said yes. And it worked out all right. We were happy. You were happy.” She sighed. “But I see now that we were just selfish. We were all so selfish. You, poor thing, were the only one that no one seemed to give much of a thought to. I see that now.” There was another long, crackling pause. “Kelley…I’m so sorry.”

“It’s all right, Em,” Kelley said. “I’m all right. Really.”

“I hoped you’d never have to know. Never have to remember.”

But it seemed as though she was going to have to start remembering, even though it was the last thing she wanted to do. Although she loved her dearly, Kelley had never wanted to grow up to be like her sweet, crazy Aunt Emma who believed in fairies.

And who, it turned out, maybe wasn’t so crazy after all.

Kelley needed time to process the enormity of what she now knew and told her aunt so. But before she hung up, Em stopped her to ask, “Who told you these things, Kelley?”

“A friend. I think.” Kelley hated the thought that Sonny could be something unfriendly.

“Oh, be careful, my girl,” Emma said. “Promise me.”

“I will, Em. I promise.”

“Your necklace, dear, the amber clover-you do still wear it, don’t you?”

“Yes. Why?”

“Don’t take it off, Kelley. Please. For…luck.”

“I gotta go, Em.”

“We’ll talk later?”

“I think we’ll probably have to. Yeah,” she said, and snapped her cell phone shut. She heaved a shuddering sigh and looked at her reflection in her dressing-room mirror, letting numbness take over. It was strange that she looked exactly the same as she had the day before. How could that be? Surely, if she wasn’t who she thought she was-and never had been-shouldn’t she look different?…Wait. Hands shaking, Kelley lifted her hair back from her face and examined her reflection.

The tips of her ears were ever-so-slightly pointed.

“Oh God,” she whispered. “It’s really true.”

The makeup lights glinted off her four-leaf-clover necklace. The green amber glowed warmly. Emma had told her when she was a little girl that amber was really “the blood of very old trees,” and Kelley had thought that a lovely idea.

She frowned at herself in the mirror and reached up under her hair. Before she could unfasten the clasp, Bob appeared-still dressed all in green-in the reflection, standing close behind her. She didn’t move as he reached for her hands and gently plucked her fingers away from the catch on the chain.

“Best listen to your auntie, luv,” he whispered in her ear, “and keep that on.”

“Why?” Kelley stared at Bob in the mirror, somehow unsurprised to see him there.

“Because…” He stared back at her, intense, and answered her question with a line from Shakespeare. “‘Light thickens, and the crow makes wing to th’ rooky wood. Good things of day begin to droop and drowse, whiles night’s black agents to their preys do rouse.’”

She blinked. “You are the second person I’ve heard quote Macbeth in two days. Why do I keep getting the feeling I’m in the wrong play?”

“Oh…you’re not. Quite the contrary-you’re in exactly the right play,” he murmured. “It’s just that there aren’t really any turns of phrase in Midsummer quite so poetic that I could think of, off the top of my head, to warn you with.”

“Warn me?”

“Watch your back in the days to come, girl. And the nights.”

Kelley swallowed a sudden lump of fear in her throat.

“You could have just said that,” she whispered.

“‘Thou marvell’st at my words; but hold thee still.’” Bob smiled mirthlessly, finishing the ominous quote. “‘Things bad begun make strong themselves by ill.’”

And then he was gone.

As long as she lived, Kelley would never know how she made it through to the end of rehearsal without crying or screaming. Emma’s words, and Sonny’s, ricocheted around her skull as the company went through Oberon and Titania’s argument scene again.

Titania’s lines tumbled from her with a ferocity that her previous rehearsals had only hinted at. As she ripped into Oberon, Kelley felt as though, somewhere deep inside her, there was thunder stirring.

“The seasons alter,” she cried, an impassioned plea. Her arms spread wide in a gesture that encompassed the wrongness of it all, her Titania despairing that their conflict had sent nature itself into a perilous spin. “The spring, the summer, the childing autumn, angry winter change…”

She leveled a devastating sadness at Oberon, whom Titania loved, but whom she could no longer bear to keep company with. “And this same progeny of evils comes from our debate, from our dissension; we are their parents and original.”

Her voice cracked only a little on the word parents.

XX

Sonny walked back to his apartment from the Avalon, head down, shoulders hunched. Along the way, he spotted several Lost Fae: a dryad in an empty lot offering encouragement to a sickly-looking juniper bush; a winged boy crouched atop a fire hydrant who watched him pass with big, glistening eyes; the fruit seller at a corner market who hid his taloned, feathered feet beneath an impressive glamour and a long white