Tithe

"Oh, God," Corny said. "You have wings."



The damp things moved feebly.



The sight of it sent a thrill through him, despite the fear. This was the real thing.



"C'mon," he said. "My house."



Chapter 6



"Down the hill I went, and then,



I forgot the ways of men



For night-scents, heady, and damp and cool



Wakened ecstasy in me."



—Sara Teasdale "August Moonrise," Flame and Shadow



Kaye sat down gingerly at the edge of the couch, so that her new wings hung off the edge and wouldn't get crushed if she moved suddenly or leaned back.



She was wearing a pair of Corny's jeans, belted and rolled at the cuffs, and a black, hooded sweatshirt. Corny had taken a pair of scissors and cut a large section out of the back of it so that they could feed her wings through. Her skin was so sensitive that she imagined she could feel particles as they drifted through the air.



Corny poured himself a glass of Mountain Dew. "Can you drink soda?"



"I think so," Kaye said. "I could before."



He poured some in a mug and handed it over to her. She didn't sip it—it was the same color as her skin.



She could smell the soda, smell the green dyes and the chemical carbonation. She could smell Corny, the acid of his excited sweating and sourness of his breath. The air she breathed tasted of cigarettes and cats and plastic and iron in a way she had never noticed before—it nearly made her gag with each breath.



"It's starting to sink in," Corny said. "I can almost look at you without wanting to bang my head against the wall."



"I'm not sure how to explain. It started a long time ago. I'm not sure I remember important things."



"Recently, then." Corny sat down on the couch. He was staring at her with what looked like a combination of fascination and repulsion.



"I rolled in some clover." She gave a short laugh at the absurdity of it.



"Why?" Corny didn't laugh at all. He was totally serious.



"Because the Thistlewitch told me that that was one of the ways I could see myself the way I really am. See—I told you that it gets ridiculous."



"This is the way you really are, then?"



Kaye nodded carefully. "I guess so."



"And this thimble witch? Who is she?"



"Thistlewitch," Kaye corrected. And she told him. Told him how she'd known faeries for as long as she could remember, how Spike would perch on the footboard of her bed when she was small and tell her stories about goblins and giants while Lutie darted around the room like a manic nightlight. She told him how Gristle taught her how to make a piercing whistle with a blade of grass and described the Thistlewitch divining with eggshells.



All the while, Corny stared with greedy eyes.



"Who knew about these friends?"



Kaye shrugged. "My mom, my grandmother—I guess I'm not really related to them at all…" She stopped suddenly. Her voice sounded unsteady, even to herself, and she took a deep breath. "Everyone in my first-grade class. You. Janet."



"Did any of these people see the faeries? Ever?"



Kaye shook her head.



Corny turned his gaze toward the wall, frowning in concentration. "And you can't call them?"



Kaye shook her head again. "They find me when they want to—that's the way it always was. Right now, that's the problem. I can't stay like this, and I don't know how to get reglamoured."



"There isn't anywhere you can look?"



"No," Kaye said vehemently. "I already told you no. The swamp was the only place, and I was there all night."



"But you're a faerie too. Don't you have any abilities?"



"I don't know," Kaye said, thinking of Kenny. That was definitely not something she really wanted to discuss right now. Her head hurt enough already.



"Can you cast any spells?"



"I don't know, I don't know, I don't know! Can't you understand that I don't know anything at all?"



"Come on in the back. Let's go online."



They went into Corny's room, and he flicked on his computer. The screen went blue, and then his background picture loaded. It was a wizard hunched over a chess table while the two queen pieces battled, one all black and the other all white.



Kaye flopped onto the tangled sheets of his bed, stomach down, wings up.



Corny tapped a few keys, and his modem groaned.



"Okay. F-a-e-r-i-e. Let's see. Hmmm. Gay stuff—don't go there."



She snickered anyway.



"Here we go. German changelings. Pictures. Yeats poetry."



"Apparently, I'm a pixie," Kaye supplied. "Click on the changeling thing, though."



"Interesting."



He scrolled through it, and she tried to read it from her slightly-too-distant vantage point. "What?"



"Says you throw 'em in the fire to get your own kid back… that or stick a hot poker down their throats."



"Great. Next."



"Here we go. Pixie. Can detect good and evil, hate orcs, and are about one to two feet tall…" He started to laugh. "Makes pixie dust."



"Orcs?" Kaye inquired. She shifted her position, suddenly aware that it was hard to separate which muscles caused her wings to twitch. They seemed to move independently of her will and of each other, like two soft insects alighting on her back.



Corny couldn't stop laughing. "Pixie dust. Like angels make angel dust. International drug cartels grab seraphim and shake 'em. Priests who sweep up churches put that stuff in Ziploc baggies."



She snorted. "You're an idiot, you know that?"



"I try," he said, still laughing.



"Well, try 'Unseelie Court.'"



A few clicks of his mouse and he said, "Looks like that's where all the bad guys hang out in Faeryland. What does this have to do with you?"



"There's this knight there who may or may not be wanting to kill me. My friends want me to pretend to be human because there's this thing called the Tithe… it's complicated."



Corny sat up again. "Why didn't you tell me?"



"I just told you the part that made sense."



"Okay." Corny nodded. "Now tell me the part that doesn't make sense."



"I don't understand it all exactly, but basically there are solitary faeries and court faeries. Roiben is one of the court faeries, and I met him in the woods after he got shot. He's from the Unseelie Court."



"Okay. I'm still with you, if barely."



"Spike and Lutie-loo sent me an acorn message to tell me that he was dangerous. He killed my other friend, Gristle."



"An acorn message?"



"The top came off. It was hollow."



"Right. Of course."



"Ha-ha. Look for 'Tithe' next, okay? As far as I know, it's this sacrifice that makes the faeries that aren't part of any court still do what the court people say. I have to pretend to be human so they can pretend to sacrifice me."



He typed in the keyword. "I'm just getting Jesus Crispy shit. Give-me-ten-percent-of-your-cash-to-me-so-I-can-buy-an-air-conditioned-doghouse kind of thing. This sacrifice—how safe is that? I mean, how well do you know these people?"



"I trust them absolutely…"



"But," Corny prompted.



She smiled ruefully. "But they never told me. They knew all this time, and nothing—not one hint." Kaye looked pensively at the joints of her fingers. Why should one extra joint make them horrifying? It did, though—flexing them bothered her.



Corny steepled his palms, cracking his knuckles like a villain. "Tell me the whole story again, slowly, and from the beginning."



Kaye woke up muzzily, not sure where she was. She shifted until she felt a solid shape that groaned and pushed at her. Corny. She squinted at him and rubbed at her eyes. It was dark in the room, the only streaks of light sneaking around the edges of the heavy brown curtains. She heard voices from somewhere in the trailer over the distant sound of canned television laughter.



She turned over again, trying to go back to sleep. The bedside table was in front of her line of vision. A book, Vintage, a bottle of ibuprofen, an alarm clock with flames on the clock face, and a black plastic chess knight.



"Corny," she said, shaking what she thought was the shoulder of the lump. "Wake up. I know what to do. I know what we can do."



He pushed the covers back from over his head. His eyes were slits of wet in the piles of comforter. "This better be good," he groaned.



"The kelpie. I know how to call the kelpie."



He pushed back the covers and sat up, suddenly awake. "Right. That's right." He slid out of bed, scratching his balls through once-white briefs, and sat down in front of the computer. The screensaver dispersed as he shook the mouse.



In the hallway, Kaye could hear Janet's voice distinctly, complaining to her mother about the fact that she wasn't going to get her license if Corny didn't let her borrow his car.



"What time is it?" Kaye asked.



Corny looked at the clock on the screen. "After five."



"Can I use your phone?"



He nodded. "Do it now. You can't use it while I'm signed on. We only have the one line."



Corny's bedroom phone was a copy of the emergency bat-phone, bright red and sitting under a plastic dome on the floor. It even had a little bulb in it that she imagined might blink when a call came in. Kaye sat down cross-legged on the floor, took off the dome, and dialed her house.



"Hello?" Kaye's grandmother answered.



"Grandma?" She dragged her fingers over the synthetic loops of the rug she was sitting on. Her eyes fell on her long green toes with chipped red nail polish on the jagged, untrimmed toenails.



"Where are you?"



"I'm at Janet's," Kaye said, wiggling the toes, willing herself to realize they belonged to her. It was hard talking to her grandmother now. The only reason her grandmother put up with her and Ellen was because they were family and you always took care of family. "I just wanted to tell you where I am."



"Where were you this morning?"



"I got up early," Kaye said. "I had to meet some friends before school started." That was true enough, in a way.



"Well, when are you coming home then? Oh, and I have two messages for you. Joe from the Amoco called about some job—I hope you're not thinking of working at a gas station—and some boy named Kenny called twice."



"Twice?" Kaye couldn't help the smile that was pushing up the corners of a mouth she was determined to keep grim.



"Yes. Are you coming home for dinner?"



"No, I'll eat here," Kaye said. "'Bye, Gram, I love you."



"I think your mother would like it if you came home for dinner. She wants to talk to you about New York."



"I've got to go. 'Bye, Gram."



Kaye hung up the phone before her grandmother could start another sentence. "You can sign on now," she said.



A few minutes later, Corny made a noise.



She looked up.



"Your plan has one little problem."



"Don't they all… no, tell me, what is it?"



"Kelpies basically like to drown people and then eat most of them—all but their guts. You're not supposed to get on their backs, yadda, yadda, yadda, they're fucking evil as hell, yadda, yadda, yadda, not to mention they shapeshift. Oh, yeah, you can tame them if you happen to manage to get a bridle on them. Fat chance of that."



"Oh."



"Did you ever wonder if some of these sites were designed by faeries? I wonder if I kept looking if I could find a newsgroup or a hub page or something."



"So, if we don't sit on its back, are we safe?"



"Huh? Oh… I don't know."



"Well, are there instances there where it drowns people without them getting on its back?"



"No, but then it's not all that comprehensive."



"I'm going to try it. I'm going to talk to it."



He looked up from the computer desk. "You're not going without me."



"Okay," Kaye said. "I just thought that it might be dangerous."



"This is the real thing," he said, voice dropping low, "and I don't want to miss even one little bit of it. Don't even think of running off."



She held up both hands in mock surrender. "I want you to go with me. Really, okay?"



"I don't want to wake up someplace with a screwed-up memory and nobody ever believing me. Do you understand?" Corny's face was flushed.



"C'mon, Corny, either your mom or Janet is going to hear you and come in here. I'm not leaving you."



Kaye watched as he calmed somewhat, thinking that she should stop trying to anticipate what was going to happen next. After all, when you were already in a slippery place, reality-wise, you couldn't afford to assume that things would be straightforward from here on in.



The metal of the car made her feel heavy and drowsy and sick, the way that carbon monoxide poisoning was supposed to make you feel before it killed you. Kaye rested her cheek against the cool glass of the window. Her throat was dry and her head was pounding. It had something to do with the air in the car, which seemed to scald her lungs as she breathed it. It was a short drive, and she was glad of it, practically tumbling out of the car when Corny opened the door for her.



In the daylight, it was easy to see rows of houses beyond the trees, and Kaye wondered how it could have seemed like a great woods when she had stumbled through here. The stream, when they found it, was thick with garbage. Corny leaned down and smeared dirt off a brown bottle that didn't look like it was for beer. It looked like it should be holding some snake-oil salesman's hair tonic or something.