Tithe

"Guys, I was… what the hell?"



Kenny pushed back from Kaye at the sound of Janet's voice. Several strands of long blond hair were still caught on his hand, shimmering like spiderwebs.



He drew himself up. "Don't give me more of your insecure girlfriend bullshit."



Janet had tears in her eyes. "You were kissing her!"



"Calm the fuck down!"



Kaye fled to the bathroom, locking herself in a stall and sliding into a sitting position on the dirty floor.



Her heart was beating so fast, she thought it might beat its way out of her chest. The space was too small for pacing, but she wanted to pace, wanted to do something that would work answers out of her tangled mind. Magic, if there was such a thing, should not work like this. She should not be able to enchant someone she barely knew without even deciding to do it.



The delight was the worst part, the part of her that could overlook the guilt and see the poetic justice in making Kenny unable to stop thinking about her freaky self. It would be easy to like him, she thought, cute and cool and wanting her. And unlike an unattainable faerie knight, he was someone she could really have.



Taking a deep breath, she left the stall. She went to the sinks and splashed her face with water from the tap. Looking up, she saw her own reflection in the mirror, faded red Chow Fat T-shirt spattered with dark droplets of water, eye makeup smudgy and indistinct, blond hair hanging in tangled strands.



Something caught her eye as she turned away, though. Approaching the mirror, she looked at her face again, closely. She looked the same as ever. Kaye shook her head and walked to the door. For a moment, she had thought that the face she saw in the mirror was green.



More coffees were on the table when she got back, and she sipped at the one in front of where she had been sitting. Her cigarette had burned down to ash in the glass tray. Doughboy was telling Kenny about the new car he was restoring, and Janet was glaring at Kaye.



"Your pardon, Kaye," said a voice that was both familiar and strange.



There was a moment when Kaye just froze. Her mind was screaming that this was impossible. It was against the rules. They never did this. It was one thing to believe in faeries; it was totally another thing if you weren't allowed to even have a choice about it. If they could just walk into your normal life, then they were a part of normal life, and she could no longer separate the two in her head.



But Roiben was indeed standing beside their booth. His hair was white as salt under the fluorescent lights and was pulled back in a ponytail. He was wearing a long black wool coat that hid whatever he was wearing underneath all the way down to his thoroughly modern leather boots. There was so little color in his face that he seemed to be entirely monochromatic, a picture shot in black-and-white film.



"Who's the goth?" Kaye heard Doughboy say.



"Robin, I think his name is," Janet replied glumly.



Roiben raised an eyebrow when he heard that, but he went on. "May I speak with you a moment?"



She felt incapable of doing more than nodding her head. Getting up from the booth, she walked with him to an empty table. Neither one sat down.



"I came to give you this." Roiben reached into his coat and took out a lump of black cloth from some well-hidden pocket. And smiled, the same smile she remembered from the forest, the one that was just for her. "It's your shirt, back from the dead."



"Like you," she said.



He nodded slightly. "Indeed."



"My friends told me not to talk to you." She hadn't known she was going to say that till it came out of her mouth. The words felt like thorns falling from her tongue.



He looked down and took a breath. "Your friends? Not, I assume, those friends." His eyes flickered toward the booth, and she shook her head.



"Lutie and Spike," she said.



His eyes were dark when he looked at her again, and the smile was gone. "I killed a friend of theirs. Perhaps a friend of yours."



Around her, people were eating and laughing and talking, but those normal sounds felt as far away and out of place as a laugh track. "You killed Gristle."



He nodded.



She stared at him, as though things might somehow reshuffle to make sense. "How? Why? Why are you telling me this?"



Roiben didn't meet her gaze as he spoke. "Is there some excuse that I could give you that would make it better? Some explanation that you would find acceptable?"



"That's your answer? Don't you even care?"



"You have the shirt. I have done what I came here to do."



She grabbed his arm and moved around to face him. "You owe me three questions."



He stiffened, but his face remained blank. "Very well."



Anger surged up in her, a bitter helpless feeling. "Why did you kill Gristle?"



"My mistress bade me do so. I have little choice in my obedience." Roiben tucked his long fingers into the pockets of the coat. He spoke matter-of-factly, as though he was bored by his own answers.



"Right," Kaye said. "So if she told you to jump off a bridge…?"



"Exactly." There was no irony in his tone. "Shall I consider that your second question?"



Kaye stopped and took a breath, her face filling with heat. She was so angry that she was shaking.



"Why don't you…" she began, and stopped herself. She had to think. Anger was making her careless and stupid. She had one more question, and she was determined that she would use it to piss him off, if nothing else. She thought about the note she'd gotten in the acorn and the warning she'd been given. "What's your full name?"



He looked like he would choke on the air he breathed. "What?"



"That's my third question: What is your full name?" She didn't know what she had done, not really. She only knew that she was forcing him to do something he didn't want to do, and that suited her fine.



Roiben's eyes darkened with fury. "Rath Roiben Rye, much may the knowledge please you."



Her eyes narrowed. "It's a nice name."



"You are too clever by half. Too clever for your own good, I think."



"Kiss my ass, Rath Roiben Rye."



He grabbed her by the arm before she even saw him move. She raised her hand to ward off the coming blow. He threw her forward. She shrieked. Her hand and knee connected hard with the stone floor. She looked up, half expecting to see the gleam of a sword, but instead he pulled her jeans hard at the waistband and pressed his mouth against the exposed swell of her hip.



Time seemed to slow as she slipped on the slick floor, as he rose easily to his feet, as diner patrons stared, as Kenny struggled out from the booth.



Roiben stood over her. He spoke tonelessly. "That is the nature of servitude, Kaye. It is literal-minded and not at all clever. Be careful with your epithets."



"Who the fuck do you think you are?" Kenny said, finally there, bending down to help Kaye up.



"Ask her," Roiben said, indicating Kaye with his chin. "Now she knows exactly who I am." He turned and walked out of the diner.



Tears welled up in Kaye's eyes.



"Come on," Fatima was saying, although Kaye was barely paying attention. "Let's take her outside. Just us girls."



Fatima and Janet led her outside and sat down on the hood of one of the parked cars. Kaye dimly hoped it belonged to one of them as she sat down, wiping tears from her cheeks. Already she'd stopped crying; the tears were more from shock than anything else.



Fatima lit a cigarette and handed it to Kaye. She took a deep drag, but her throat felt thick and the smoke just made her cough.



"I had a boyfriend like that once. Used to beat the shit out of me." Fatima sat next to Kaye and patted her back.



"Maybe he saw you with Kenny," Janet said without looking at her. She was leaning against a headlight, staring out across the highway at the military base opposite the diner.



"I'm sorry," Kaye said miserably.



"Give her a break," Fatima said. "It's not like you didn't do the same thing to me."



Janet turned to look at Kaye then. "You're not going to get him, you know. He might want to fuck you, but he'd never go out with you."



Kaye just nodded, bringing the cigarette to her mouth with trembling hands. It would have been a better idea, she decided, if she had sworn off boys entirely.



"Is that Robin guy going to come after you?" Fatima asked. Kaye almost wanted to laugh at her concern. If he did, no one could do anything to stop him. He'd moved faster than Kaye could even see. She'd been very stupid not to be afraid of him.



"I don't think so," she said finally.



Kenny and Doughboy walked out of the diner, swaggering in tandem toward the girls.



"Everything okay?" Kenny asked.



"Just a couple of bruises," Kaye said. "No big deal."



"Damn," Doughboy said. "Between the other night and tonight, you're going to be too paranoid to hang out with us."



Kaye tried to smile, but she couldn't help wondering how double-edged those words were.



"Want me to drive you home?" Kenny asked.



Kaye looked up, about to thank him, when Fatima interrupted. "Why don't you take Janet home, and I'll drop off Dough and Kaye."



Kenny looked down at the scuffed tops of his Doc Martens and sighed. "Right."



Fatima drove Kaye home in relative silence, and she was grateful. The radio was on, and she just sat in the passenger seat and pretended to listen. When Fatima pulled up in front of Kaye's grandmother's house, she cut the lights.



"I don't know what happened with you and Kenny," Fatima began.



"Me neither," Kaye said with a short laugh.



The other girl smiled and bit one of her manicured nails. "Look, I don't know about Robin and you or anything, but if you are just looking for some way to piss off your boyfriend, don't do it. Janet really loves Kenny, y'know? She's devoted."



Kaye opened the door and got out of the car. "Thanks for the ride."



"No problem." Fatima flicked the car lights back on.



Kaye slammed the door of the blue Honda and went inside.



When Kaye walked into the kitchen, her mother was on the phone, sitting at the kitchen table with a spiral notebook in front of her. When she saw Kaye come in, she gestured toward the stove. There was a pot of cold spaghetti and sausages. Kaye took a fork and picked at some of the spaghetti.



"So you think you can get Charlotte?" her mother said into the phone as she doodled band names on the pad.



"All right, call me when you know. Absolutely. 'Bye, chickadee."



Ellen hung up the phone, and Kaye looked over at her expectantly.



Her mother smiled and took a sip from a mug on the table. "We're going to New York!"



Kaye just stared. "What?"



"Well, it's not totally definite, but Rhonda wants me to front her new all-girl group, Meow Factory, and she thinks she can get Charlotte Charlie. I said that if they can get her, I'm in. There are so many more clubs in New York."



"I don't want to move," Kaye said.



"We can crash with Rhonda until we can find another place to live. You'll love New York."



"I love it here."



"We can't impose on my mother forever," Ellen said. "Besides, she's a pain in your ass as much as mine."



"I applied for a job today. Grandma will be a lot happier once I'm bringing home money. You could join a band around here."



"Nothing's set in stone," Ellen said, "but I think you should really get used to the idea of New York, honey. If I'd wanted to stay in Jersey, I would have done it years ago."

* * *



A hundred matchbooks, from a hundred bars that her mother played one gig in, or from restaurants that they got a meal in, or from men that they lived with. A hundred match-books, all on fire.



She was on fire too, aflame in a way she was not sure she understood. Adrenaline turned her fingers to ice, drawing her heat inward to dance in her head, anger and a strange sense of possibility thrumming through her veins.



Kaye looked around her dark bedroom, lit only by the flickering orange light. The glassy eyes of the dolls danced with flames. The rats curled up on one another in the far corner of the cage. Kaye breathed in the sharp smell of sulfur as she struck another matchbook, watching the flame catch across the rows of white match heads, the cardboard covering exploding into fire. She turned the paper in her hands, watching it burn.



Chapter 5



"I ate the mythology & dreamt."



—Yusef Komunyakaa, "Blackberries"



Kaye awoke to a scratching at the window. The room was dark and the house was silent.



Something peered in at her. Tiny black eyes blinked beneath heavy eyebrows, and long ears rose up from either side of a bare head.



"Spike?" Kaye whispered, crawling up off the mattress on the floor where she had been sleeping. The covers tangled with her legs.



He tapped again, eyebrows furrowing. He was smaller than she remembered him and clad only in a thin bark that ran over his waist and down part of his legs. At his elbows, points extended into the shape of thorns.



Behind him, she could make out Lutie-loo's thin form, incandescent against the dark tiles of the roof. Her wings were so translucent as to be nearly invisible.



Kaye pushed on the window, but it took several tries to get it unstuck from the old, swollen sill. Two white moths fluttered in.



"Spike!" Kaye said. "Lutie! Where have you been? I've been back for days and days. I left milk out for you, but I think one of the cats got it."



The little man cocked one eye toward her, like a sparrow. "The Thistlewitch is waiting," Spike said. "Hurry."