The Books of Fae - Chapter 2

I dreamed that night of crows. This is not as strange a dream as it could have been, because that seemed to be the metaphor that my brain used when it was out “sampling”. It may have been literal – Grandmother hinted more than once that I had an unusual affinity for them, and when I had been in the smoky long hut at the time of my first menses, it was the crow that I saw in my dreams then. I suppose that's odd – ravens figure more extensively in Pacific Northwest stories, while crows were imports from Europe, but there was no question then that my totem was the crow, probably due to the influence of Morai Babs.

Morai Babs was my father's mother, an ancient Scottish woman with storm gray eyes, who was apparently quite the beauty in her youth. I only met her a few times – dad was not young when he married – but he did tell me that at their wedding Grandmother and Morai Babs carried themselves like two queen cats sizing up territory. Afterwards they disappeared into the woods, to be found later in a clearing, nursing a couple of flasks of homemade whiskey and talking up a storm.

Last night, those crows had been … bothered. They flew around me, then settled in a great flock – a murder of crows; they were all looking at me, or perhaps to me. When I tried to tell them I didn't understand, they took off all at once, in a blur of wings, and there was Morai Babs staring at me, her eyes as black and hard as any crow's.

“The Darkness is coming, seeking to obliterate the names,” she said, her voice almost a croak. “The Darkness will eat at the names,.”

“I don't understand?”

“You must stop them!” she said again, then with a blur of wings, she too was gone.

God, I hate dreams like that.

The alarm blared awake a moment after I opened my eyes, and I practically jumped out of my skin in surprise. It was 6:15am, the sky was still dark, and while the heavens hadn't opened into its normal downpoor, the day was still young.

I ran through the shower, scrubbing the sleep from my eyes and the funk of too many hours of sweating through compilation runs, then pulled together the ensemble I'd gathered last night before stripping down to my bunny jammas. I threw on layers – striped leggings, black skirt that reached down just above my knees, t-shirt with “Born to Code” emblazened on it, striped shirt, dark gray polartek jacket and a little black beret. I stepped into my heavy duty stomping boots, a little thin in the soles, but longtime companions in walks in the woods. It was ostensibly early fall, but early fall here got cold, especially when rain was in the offing (in Autumn, that was pretty much a given) and perhaps even more once you got up to the islands.

Okay, so I may have been going after cute Northwest Goth for a reason. It wasn't that I found Matt all that attractive – he was pretty enough, I'll admit, especially when he wasn't in his deep brooding angsty mode, but he just did nothing for me. Not that I swung the other way; I'd had the obligatory college “roommate fling”, and while she was definitely interested – and she was Blood to boot – I just didn't resonate. I think it was just the fact that we were going to “rescue” a literal wet dream, and I was more than a little bit miffed about it. I wasn't about to let some aquatic bint tell me what kind of government system we should use – no, that was too Monty Pythonish – but more to the point, I did not like being upstaged. That should probably have said something bad about me, but I didn't care.

I was to meet Matt at The Sadie Mochaist at 7am for our trek north, so wanted to get there early to make sure I get my own coffee. Something I've learned, that tends to piss me off, and I was definitely feeling pissy: when a guy meets a girl at a coffeeshop, he insists on buying her drink. It's inevitable; the guy thinks its romantic, the girl just thinks its bloody rude. No one gets between me and my coffee. Money's tight, but it's never that tight.

So I made my way into S&M's by 6:30, scanned the community posted ads again – I've found some of my more interesting jobs from the ads posted here, and not all of them were for programming help. Jeremy was looking for a new roommate, must like large dogs. He went all hairy and sharp teeth about the same time I did every month, save that for me that was just normal mood swings. In his case, it usually involved a sudden inordinate fondness for Milk Bone Dog Biscuits and rolly balls.

The local Unitarian Universalists were now opening up their worship to adherents of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. I suspected it made for rather bizarre liturgies but the after services lunch must have been fantastic. One card caught my eye. It was hand lettered, in a style I recognized.

Storm crow,

I've seen you. Call me after you get back.

Cassie

Furgh ... I undid the pin and stick it into the wallet in my pouch. Cassie was a close friend, and an artist of no small talent. She was also a seer, disturbingly accurate, and if she had seen me, it was likely not just in passing. It was bad enough that I was getting bad dreams – now I seem to be factoring into other people's bad dreams too. I decided I'd get in touch with here after we took care of the business to the north – as she had no doubt foreseen.

Karen was on the till. She also owned the shop (purchased from the eponymous Sadie who had apparently decided to go full time as a dominatrix), as well as the herbal shop next door. Karen was short, early-30s, built like an earth-witch, which was not that odd considering that was precisely what she was. Between grandmother's tutelage and Karen's I had learned to be a passable healer, but both of them despaired about me ever having much skill with earth magic.

“Good morning, Bree. You're in early … your usual?”

I nodded, and Karen wrote my order from memory on the cup – one “ginormous” (medium) mocha cappuccino, with a kiss of peppermint. The shortest cup was “goodly-sized” and the tallest was “just … wow”. Karen has little patience with pretentious Italian sounding names. She handed it off to Barry, the Barista, who was the world's hottest man.

Seriously. Imagine a Jewish Clark Kent with glasses that you really want to just reach out and pull off, knowing that Superman's underneath. His real name is Baruch, but Barry was just too good a moniker for him to pass up, given his current vocation. He also makes absolutely heavenly mocha cappuccinos, with a kiss of peppermint in them. I could have gotten into all kinds of entirely too kinky fantasies involving Barry and peppermint mocha, but then he smiled at me, so I took my drink and a small sweet role, then sat, perhaps a shade too happy for the moment, at one of the corner tables, and sipped my ecstasy while waiting for the man with the van.

Sadie's had a different vibe than a lot of coffee shops in the area, especially the big chain stores that were rapidly gaining a stranglehold on the region. A real wood fire flickered away merrily in one corner. The walls held spirit catchers and dampening wards, designd to defuse rather than block harmful energies. More than a few of the Blood, especially the earth types, made it a semi-permanent home away from home. For instance, Katya, an oread who taught yoga at the community center, sipped coffee and kept an eye on her two girl fawns, three and two, who were attacking Cheerios with abandon. A faint glamour would make the humans see kids in hard shoes, though I could clearly see their cloven hooves. Like a lot of the urban fae, they were halflings – Kat had human and dryad blood from her mother's side, the kid's dad was a half-blood satyr that worked for the Forestry service, usually battling fires.

Over in another corner a handful of Wood Elves were apparently recapping an early (or very late night) game of Dungeons and Dragons. My eyes were drawn to a very young girl among them, appearing maybe fifteen, though with Elves it was always hard to tell, who apparently had been relegated to the role of Healer. Newbies, especially newbie girls, tended to get assigned the role a lot. If I ran into her again, I'd chat her up – there are advantages to being the healer, in gaming as well as real life, but you need to assert yourself some to take advantage of them.

I turned back to the door as the chime above it rang, expecting to see Matt, but it was only a man in a business suit that … caught my attention again. The business suit itself wasn't that unusual here – we were close enough to the more upscale areas of Wallingford that business people did come in occasionally.

However, there was something … disturbing about the man who wore it. Definitely Blood, not Vampyr, but he set off a vibe that clashed with the the Earth Magic around him. Karen picked it up as well; she bowed when she talked with him, but from here I could also see that her hand behind the bar was strengthening the wards. I consciously strengthened my own wards, which included a charm to disappear into the background, and watched as he passed her a picture. She tensed, unintentionally, but then shook her head. She didn't fool me. She probably didn't fool him.

The man definitely wore glamour around him, but I wasn't about to try to see through it; that I couldn't do it passively definitely indicated a level of talent that would notice me in an instant. He scanned the lobby of the coffee shop, passing me by once before returning, puzzled, in my general direction. Then he looked away.

The guy was handsome, in a superficial professional way, dark hair, smooth features, he wouldn't be out of place on a movie set about stock traders, or those stock photographs you see in so many investment prospectus portfolios. Middle management, sales or recruiting, they're the ones that fill the bars at trade shows. For some reason my skin was crawling.

After a couple of minutes, he turned to leave, just as Matt walked in.

It was very much like watching two male lions meeting with a female in heat near by. Matt liked to play at being a programmer, and truth to tell, he was actually quite accomplished, but here, in this environment, it suddenly became obvious that he was the son of one of the most ruthless software magnates in the country and that he had acquired at least a few of those genes. Matt started to snarl, of all things, then brought it under control, assuming a supercilious expression that said that he couldn't be bothered with dominance games.

The other man eyed him warily, pasting a smile on his face even as he fought slouching before her friend. Finally, he bowed his head subtly, and without another word left, though not before Matt glanced down and saw the photograph on Karen’s counter. He turned back, but the man was gone.

“Dominance games much?” a voice whispered in her ear, as Barry swept the now empty sweet role plate into his waiting bus tray.

“Hush,” I whispered back. Something had happened here, and I was a bit put out that I was missing some critical information. “Whose picture was that?”

“Yours,” he replied, one eyebrow raised.

Oh.

Crap.

I waited until Karen had clearly made sure that the man had left before making my way back up to the front of the shop, where Matt was ordering a coffee.

“Hi. Sorry I’m running late. Traffic across 520 was at a standstill.”

“No problem,” I responded, before turning to Karen. “Who was that?”

“I’m not quite sure. He felt like an elf, not a good one. He asked for you by name, said he was looking for you for a job, that you’d come highly recommended. He left his card. You may want to get a Hazmat suit or something before you handle it.”

She looked at the card he’d placed carefully on the counter, and Bree got the subtext. Matt was, at least in her eyes, a mundane, the card felt like it had some kind of spell on it, and she didn’t want “the mundane to know”. I almost assured her - then I thought about the display of power, and what I knew about Matt, and decided that caution here might be warranted.

“Matt, I’ll be out in just a minute,” I said, subtly shooing him out the door, and he took the cue with no obvious anger on his part. If anything he seemed somewhat confused, like a side of him had surfaced that he’d not even really realized was there. When he too was out the door, I turned back to the card on the counter.

The universe, the most profound of theoretical physicists say, is a hologram, a shadow of sets of symbols viewed through different projections upon a four dimensional membrane. The Blood, for the most part, understand this instinctively, but not necessarily at a conscious level. Many of them, creatures of myth and fantasy, are in fact manifestations of those symbols, and through them can do things that could be construed as “magick”. These were often small magicks - wards and cantrips, the ability to make things grow or hasten their death, to confuse or clarify - and in a world where computers and similar devices allowed people to communicate over great distances, make things happen at a distance, controlled vehicles capable of flying through the air or landing on the moon, these small magicks could seem remarkably … prosaic, I suppose. I studied semiotics for several years under Dr. Theopolis, which was a convenient cover for what it really was: Computational Magic: combining the power of the Blood with the ability to manipulate symbols at the virtual level. We weren’t the only ones, of course, but even as computers have become more powerful, so too has the understanding of these semiotic witches and wizards.

In my mind I started visualizing the code, a simple enough algorithm that I didn’t need a computer to track the magical buffer for, then flicked out a small pen knife and pricked my finger. A singled drop of blood fell onto the card, and as it hit just above the surface, it flared into patterns, lines of light and darkness, weird spinning geometric shapes that rotated in six dimensions, flickering through patterns that I recognized in their shadowy presentations. Compulsions, an easing of suspicion, a willingness to give way in bargaining for an easier deal, a hint that perhaps principles were simply inconvenient limitations. One by one I wrote in the anti-patterns, the glyphs that would cancel out effects, at the last capturing the binding signature of the Unseelie Court.

Damn.

“Do you have a glass jar or something like that?”

Karen thought. “Yeah, I have a couple of canning jars. I’ll be right back.”

A few moment later, she returned with a jar and a pair of tweezers. Taking those, I carefully edged one tong underneath the edge of the card, then clamped the tongs together to lift the card over to the jar and drop it in. Then I spoke the final word that dispelled the signature, and the card flashed into flame, leaving only an ash residue.

“You’ll have to bury the ash in some place protected, then rinse that out thoroughly with hot blessed water before you can use the jar again.”

Karen nodded. “What’d you see?”

I forget sometimes that even those of the Blood can’t necessarily visualize the magick. They knew that when they did certain things, other things happened, but as to the mechanics … it was largely guesswork. Part of the reason I wasn’t really great with Earth Magick - I was always trying to figure out why things worked, and got too caught up in the theory. However, this … Forensic Magick, that was my strength.

“It wasn’t a simple geas. Too many moving parts. It was an enchanted Business Card, designed to get to one individual, me, I’d guess on the evidence, then compel me to take a job whether I previously wanted to or not. Unseelie Court, I think. Thanks for the warning.”

“De nada,” she replied nonchalantly, taking the jar off to purify it. “Just stay safe.”

“I will. You too. I got a bad vibe off that guy.”

“Hey, Bree?” Barry said, handing me a cup over the bar. “For the trip.”

He’d served up a large Chamomile Tea, then went back to the bar, starting up a new brew as his next regular customers sidled up to the bar. I tipped my beret, went to get my gear, and headed out the side door to where Matt waited in his van, my brain going a thousand directions at once.