Drink Down the Moon (5 page)

“Wow,” Jemi said. “I’m still buzzing.”

Johnny nodded. He felt that way himself when a gig went well— all wound up with excess energy.

“What happens now?” he asked.

“Let’s walk a bit and take it as it comes— okay?”

“Sure.”

Jemi was wearing a silver-buttoned piper’s jacket over her dress now, carrying her sax in its case. She refused his offer to carry it for her. Looking at her, Johnny had to shake his head. She certainly knew how to catch the eye. Her whole look— from pink hair to what she was wearing— made him smile, though not in any superior sense. He found himself liking the look, liking her. He’d never known anyone quite the same before.

“Are you hungry?” she asked as they reached Bank Street.

“Some.”

She nodded to a Chinese restaurant on their left. “Want to grab a few egg rolls?”

“Sure.”

Fifteen minutes later they were sitting inside the South Garden, munching egg rolls that they washed down with Chinese tea. Jemi ate with great gusto, dipping her egg roll first in the little pool of soya sauce on her plate, then in the plum sauce, before each bite. Johnny followed her example at a slower pace. At last he had to ask her as she finished her sixth egg roll.

“How do you stay so small—”

“When I eat so much?” she finished for him. She shook a finger in his face. “That’s not very polite, Johnny Faw.”

“I guess not,” he said with a smile.

She grinned back. “I’ve just got a quick metabolism— I burn it all off before it has a chance to settle.”

They had the restaurant to themselves. Chinese pop songs, sung by a woman with an incredibly high-pitched voice, issued softly from the ceiling speakers in each corner of the room.

“So where do we start?” Jemi asked as she finished her seventh and final egg roll.

She replenished both their teacups from the pot on the center of the table.

The enjoyment in Johnny’s eyes clouded as he remembered why he’d looked her up in the first place. He’d been having such a good time, listening to her band, and she was so full of lighthearted energy, that he’d just let the reason fade away.

“Maybe you should tell me just what happened last night,” Jemi said softly, seeing the look in his eyes.

She put the teapot down and patted his hand, before picking up her cup and taking a sip.

So Johnny went through the story again. Jemi was a good listener and didn’t interrupt. She waited until he was done to ask a few questions.

“That was Jenna,” she said when Johnny again described the woman he’d met.

“So what’s going on?” Johnny asked.

“I knew Old Tom— he used to bring me sweets, but that was a long time ago.” There was a far-off look in her eyes. “I’ve always had a sweet tooth.”

“But,” Johnny began, then he paused, deciding on a different tack. “Are you twins— you and Jenna?”

“Oh, no. She’s much older than I am.”

“Well, how old are you?”

“How old do I look?”

“About twenty-one, twenty-two.”

“That’s close enough.”

Johnny sighed. “Look. She said she knew Tom before he met my grandmother. That’s a long time ago. And now I’m getting the feeling that you knew him back then as well. But that’s impossible. You’d have to be in your forties at least.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that,” Jemi said.

“I’m really not trying to pry,” Johnny said. “It’s just that I’d like to know what’s going on. Why would Tom tell me to play that tune in Vincent Massey Park? Why would your sister come when I played it?” He took out the bone fiddle and laid it on the table beside the teapot. “What’s this thing mean? What did she mean by saying she was a fairy?”

“You’ve got so many questions,” Jemi said, “and it’s most unfair not to answer them.”

She shook her head.

“C’mon,” she said, and stood up.

“Why? Where are we going?”

“To Puxill.”

Johnny remained seated. “I’m not going anywhere. I don’t know what you and your sister are playing at, but I don’t like it. I think I’ll bow out now.”

“I’m not playing at anything,” Jemi said.

“Well, I don’t believe in fairies. I suppose you’re going to tell me that you’re one, too?”

Jemi laughed. “Of course not!”

“Well, then, where are you planning to take me? Where’s Puxill? What’s Puxill?”

“It’s what the— it’s what Jenna calls Vincent Massey Park.”

“And what are we going to do there? Play ‘The King of the Fairies’ again?”

Jemi shook her head. “No. We’re going to talk to Jenna. Now, c’mon.”

Johnny stared at her for a long moment, then slowly got to his feet.

“You’re not much of a one for whimsy and wonder, are you?” Jemi said.

“It’s not been a good week.”

Jemi touched his cheek with the backs of her fingers. The gesture reminded him of her sister.

“I know,” she said. “I’m sorry about your grandfather. Everybody liked him.”

“How come I’ve never heard of all these everyones before?”

“Maybe your grandfather just liked to keep a secret or two.”

“He’s not alone in that,” Johnny said.

“That’s true. Poor Johnny Faw. Did you never have a secret to keep?”

“It’s not that. It’s just

“

He shook his head. He didn’t seem able to frame what he wanted to say.

“It all came at a bad time, didn’t it?” Jemi said.

Johnny nodded. “And I don’t even know what ‘it’ is.”

“Let’s find out what Jenna has to say.”

They paid their bill and left the restaurant. Outside, the traffic was sparse on Bank Street. They followed the street down to Billings Bridge, weaving their way through the construction on the bridge as they crossed the river, then turned right to follow the water west. Here there was even less traffic on Riverside Drive, just the occasional car. They kept to the bicycle path, with the river and its reeds and its slow-moving water on one side, neatly-kept lawns on the other. Overhead, the sky was thick with stars.

“Does she do this kind of thing often?” Johnny asked.

Jemi shook her head. “But she likes tricks. I don’t think she meant you any harm. It’s hard to know sometimes— don’t you think? I mean the way things can go. You might mean one thing, but somebody might take it otherwise. She probably did just want to see you for old times’ sake, to see you and leave it at that. Instead, she just filled you up with questions. I don’t think she planned that. You were supposed to just forget about her.”

“It’s hard to forget someone who comes at the call of a tune and then vanishes into thin air.”

“It depends on what sort of a person you are.” Jemi glanced at him, a smile touching her lips. “And just how used to that sort of thing you are.”

Johnny sighed, but didn’t rise to the bait. He was tired of questions, tired of puzzles, tired of not really knowing what was going on.

“Don’t be glum,” Jemi said. She took his free hand. “Enjoy the night for itself, if nothing else.”

With that small hand warm in his, Johnny didn’t reply. He kept hold of her hand, almost afraid that if he didn’t, she would disappear on him just as her sister had. He tried not to think of what the familiarity meant. There was no denying to himself that he was attracted to her; he got the feeling that she liked him as well. What he wasn’t sure of was how he felt about it all.

There was something going on, some undercurrent that lifted goosebumps on his arms when he considered it. He tried to follow her advice and not think about it. He tried to just enjoy the night and her company.

Just when he was beginning to have some success, Jemi began to hum a fiddle tune, very quietly. At least it wasn’t “The King of the Fairies,” Johnny thought. Then he recognized the tune. It was “The Fairies’ Hornpipe.” He shot her a quick glance. In the vague lighting, she looked back at him, a guileless look on her face.

“Whatever you’re thinking, Johnny Faw,” she said, breaking off the tune, “remember this: I don’t mean you any harm.”

As she spoke, Johnny got the impression that he was walking through some fairyland, hand in hand with a diminutive princess. He blinked, and the moment was gone. The bicycle path was back, Ottawa’s night around them. Jemi Pook was still holding his hand, walking at his side, in her pink and grey dress with the piper’s jacket overtop and her hair all spiked.

A warmth and closeness grew up between them as they walked, and the empty feeling inside that Johnny had known since Tom’s death lost some of its grip. Right then he was happy that he’d gone out with his fiddle last night and called up the sister of the woman who walked at his side.

He wondered, looking at Jemi, if there was such a thing as punk elves. If he ever did put together a collection of city folklore, he didn’t doubt that they’d have a place in it.

They listened to the hob’s story over herb tea, sitting around the table in the kitchen nook, Dunrobin Mull perched in his seat, sitting arrow-straight, not touching its back, Jacky slouched in hers, only Kate using her chair in the way it was designed to be used.

“What I don’t understand,” Jacky said when Mull was done with his tale, “is why you’ve come to us. Shouldn’t you go to the Court with this?”

“I’ve been to the Court,” Mull said, “but the Laird wasn’t there to see. No one was. Hay of Kelldee sent me to put the matter in your hands.”

Jacky remembered then. The Laird and most of his Court had left yesterday afternoon for the Harvest Fair in Ballymoresk. Hay of Kelldee, a Brown Man who was the Court’s seneschal, was looking after things in the Laird’s absence.

“But still,” she said, “isn’t this something you foresters should handle? Who’s the Chief for that area?”

“What area’s that?” Kate asked. “Avon Learg?”

Jacky nodded. That was the faerie name for the whole strip of land along the Ottawa River that ran from the headland of Kinrowan where the Court was kept, all the way west to Britannia Beach.

“Then Shon Buie’s the Chief,” Kate said.

“And he’s gone, too,” Mull said. “They’re all gone. It’s been so peaceful of late since you killed all those giants—”

“Two giants,” Jacky corrected, though she couldn’t help feeling a little pride still.

“There’s been no trouble,” Mull continued, “not for all the year. This is the first time in a long while that the Court could go to the Fair, so most of them went.”

The Harvest Fair was one of the two big yearly gatherings of the Seelie Courts— one for the harvest, one for the sowing and winter’s end. The closest Fair to Kinrowan was in Toronto, what faerie called Ballymoresk, Big Town by the Water.

“Howsoever,” Mull said, being how things are, this is the sort of problem that the Laird would have brought to the Gruagagh anyway.”

But I’m not a gruagagh, Jacky wanted to say.

And it was true, even if she had accepted a gruagagh’s responsibilities and done well enough so far. But that might only be, she admitted in moments of honesty, because a real challenge hadn’t come up yet.

She caught Kate’s gaze, but Kate only shrugged as if to say, We’re stuck with it, kiddo.

“The victim,” Jacky asked. “She wasn’t a Seelie fey?”

Mull shook his head. “She was the Pook of Puxill. One of the fiaina sidhe. Her name was Jenna.”

“Do they fight amongst themselves?”

Jacky didn’t know as much about the solitary faerie as she’d like to. She didn’t know enough about a lot of things, really. Every day something came up to remind her of how much there was still to learn.

“Oh, they’d quarrel— the same as we,” Mull replied. “But not like this. She was butchered, Missus Jack. I’d say it was a bogan or some other Unseelie creature did the deed, only the tracks are all wrong. Whatever she fought, whatever butchered her, it left no sign.”

“But you saw footprints

“

“Walking up, bending down for a look, walking away again. I didn’t know that track, but I do know this: Whoever made it didn’t kill the Pook.”

“This doesn’t make sense,” Kate said. “There had to be tracks.”

“I saw what I saw,” Mull replied somewhat huffily.

“Oh, we believe you— don’t we, Kate?” Jacky said. “It’s just

strange, that’s all.”

Kate nodded and the hob looked mollified.

“That’s why the Hay of Kelldee sent me to you,” he said.

The two women regarded him blankly.

“Don’t you see?” he said. “It was a magic that killed her. So this isn’t a matter for foresters— it’s for gruagaghs and skillyfolk.”

“But

” Jacky shook her head as the hob turned to her. “Never mind,” she said.

She wasn’t about to tell him that she couldn’t help him. She might not be a gruagagh, but she was the Jack of Kinrowan. She’d taken on the Unseelie Court and won.

“Will you be wanting to see the body?” Mull asked.

“Uh, no. No, that won’t be necessary.”

She felt a queasiness in her stomach just at the thought of it. Glancing at Kate’s blanched features, she knew she wasn’t alone.

“You did a real good job describing it,” she added.

“Hay of Kelldee was keeping it in case you did. We should see about finding someone from the fiaina to claim it.” A bleak look came into his eyes and both Jacky and Kate knew he was seeing the body again. “She’ll need a proper cairn, to be laid to rest by her own people

“

None of them spoke for a long time. Faerie aged at a different rate from humans. Their birthrate was much, much lower as well. Deaths diminished their ranks far more quickly than they could be replenished.

“I’ll have to look at the spot where you found her,” Jacky said after a while. “To see if there are any

“

She looked at Kate for help.

“Residual emanations,” Kate filled in. “Of a magical nature.”

Jacky shot her a quick smile of thanks.

“Can you take us there?” she asked Mull.

When the hob nodded, the two women left him to change and fetch jackets.

“Are we getting in over our heads?” Jacky asked.

She stood in the doorway to Kate’s bedroom, putting on her jacket while Kate changed into a pair of jeans.

“We pulled out okay the last time,” Kate said. She paused, one leg in, the other out, to look at Jacky. “We accepted the responsibility from Bhruic. We can’t just back out the first time things start to get a little rough.”