was a way to repolish it. “Oh aye, she sent word. You are fortunate, indeed.”
The mortal leapt to his feet with surprising speed. His scarecrow limbs trembled, and he bounced two paces toward Puck, kicking glass out of his way with abandon. Part of a container rolled and shattered, but he paid it no mind. “What? What did she say?”
Puck did not move. He observed the man’s trembling fists, his knobbed knees. “She’s ill, and not expected to live past sundown. She sends her regard, and does not know you made the rot that killed her, with your glass baubles and spinning-machines.”
Silence, broken only by the faint tinkling drip of sweet narcotic resin. The mortal’s thin mouth trembled and fell open. So fragile, and so easily wounded.
Yes, that sweetened his pleasure nicely. Puck’s mouth had filled with its own juice, anticipating. His wide V-shaped grin gleamed, a flash in the ruddy glow, and the mortal lunged for him.
Desperation made them strong, and quick. Puck leapt aside, his left hand sinking into the wall, claws slicing effortlessly as he folded in half, bringing his legs up. A cat-flexible spine twisted, crackling, and he propelled himself across the trailer. The cot crumbled underneath him, its legs shattering, and he hissed, again like a cat—they were such elegant creatures, after all.
The mortal stumbled for him, shrieking blindly, and perhaps the moontouch insanity was like the plague in its own way, for it made him quick. Clasped in one shriveled hand was a wicked curve of mortal glass, its edge ground fine-sharp and its handle wrapped with black electrical tape. It whistled as it clove the air, and Puck leapt nimbly again—but the crumbling metal and fabric of the mortal’s sleeping-couch pitched, and the glass-edge striped the sidhe’s arm.
One lean brown fist flashed in return, a crystalline dagger singing, but the mortal had skipped nimbly back. The luck of the moontouched was on him, too, for he did not grind his bare feet on broken glass.
“You killed her!” the mortal roared, and Puck hissed, a grinding, serpentine noise too big for such a narrow chest.
The sidhe darted forward. Any of his kind, facing him, might have retreated, for when Goodfellow drew his wicked, glittering little knife, green venom collected on its pinpoint tip.
Dying of wyrmsting was a thing to be feared.
The mortal scientist, however, had another piece of blind luck. His hip struck one of the tables, and its legs screeched. His arm, windmilling wildly, struck a tiny glass bottle full of colorless liquid, with a wick protruding from its top. It flew in an insanely perfect arc—
—and hit Puck Goodfellow’s snarling, twisted boyface with a shattering crunch. The boy-sidhe howled, and the mortal, perhaps understanding that not even luck would save him now, blundered for the door. His free hand, sweat-slick and shaking, pawed at the knob.
Puck howled afresh as colorless alcohol mixed with thick, dark ichor, stinging and blinding. He was barely aware of the mortal flinging the thin door open and scampering out into weak, cloud-choked daylight. He rolled on the floor of the hovel, shrieking, pawing at his face with his free hand.
Henzler blundered down a rotting, cracked pavement strip, tearing two toenails loose as he ran. His throat burned with screaming, his eyes blinded by daylight he hadn’t seen for quite some time, and his feet slapped both concrete and thistles threading their way through cracks with equal force.
Behind him, the cries from the trailer ceased. It took much more than a few shards of glass and some mortal solution to damage the Fatherless.
Puck bounced out of the trailer, landing soft as a whisper on the steps, loping in Henzler’s wake. He was utterly silent now, his grin no longer pleased but instead grim good cheer, his soft boyface striped with swiftly healing cuts bleeding thick sapphire-blue ichor. He did not hurry, for the boundaries of this dilapidated village were his to command.
The mortal would not get far, and there would be no mercy in his end, now.
NO SMALL PROPOSITION
21
It was late afternoon, and she was weary. Robin moved among the mortals with her head down, seeking cover, if not comfort, in their mass of gray salt and sourness. When night fell, she would have to find a hole to hide in, or…
Perhaps she should have stayed at Gallow’s abode, and not sought him elsewhere? Yet if barrow-wights could find the same job-building she had, would his burrow be safer at all? Could she risk returning to the knight’s