“I’m not telling you anything right now.”
“Saffy!”
“Look, you’ve had a shock,” she said, not unkindly. “I should have thought. But you needed to see this. We need you to see this. We’ve stayed apart from the world for so long, but we can’t keep doing it. Not and win the war, which looks like it’s headed to Faerie, which we know better than anyone!”
I glanced around the room. “I can see that,” I said, my mind going a hundred miles a minute.
“But the Mothers don’t see that,” she said. “They won’t have anything to do with the Circle, much less fight alongside it, not even with the world at stake! I’ve talked till I’m blue in the face, and when you asked to see them . . . well, I may have rushed things a bit. I’m sorry.”
I wasn’t. I was flabbergasted. And still way, way
behind.
I also wasn’t exactly sure what she was telling me. But it sounded like there were little towns like this scattered all over the world where humans and fey mingled like it was no big thing. Like there was this whole underground community that no one knew about if they weren’t a member, one that defied pretty much every magical law there was.
“Saffy! You can’t just hide a whole community from the rest of the world!” I told her. “It’s nuts!”
One blond eyebrow went up. “Really? We’ve been doing it to the humans for years.”
And then someone called her name again, and she was off, disappearing into the steadily growing crowd. I just stayed there, caught flat-footed like I’d been all day, and resenting it. Because every time I thought I had a grip on the magical world, it did something like this.
No, it did something like that, I thought, staring out the window some more, at the bustling crowd below.
In less than a minute, I counted humans; dwarves; trolls; satyrs; a werewolf in full transformation, prowling along with its fur gleaming with reflected colors; several members of the light fey, standing a foot or more above the rest of the crowd and faintly glowing; and a flock of tiny pixies, who zoomed around shoppers’ heads before flying into a row of exquisite little stores set into the rock above a tea shop.
There are pixie-sized shops, I thought.
Of course there are.
It was enough to make me dizzy. Literally. I’d sat on the floor by the window, because it was easier to see down that way, and now I rested my head on the smooth wood of the wall for extra support, feeling like I might pass out.
Because it just kept coming.
Like the magical 3-D graffiti gleaming over and around the shops in ever-changing enticements. A tea shop, which I guessed was where Hilde had gone, had a pot that tipped over every so often, sending a flood of steaming liquid down onto the crowd that dissipated in the air above their heads before it scalded anybody. A sewing shop, likewise, had a needle that embroidered the rock face in beautiful patterns, creating rolling hills and 3-D flowers out of magical thread, which disappeared after a few moments to leave a blank canvas for new creations. A bakery was positively ringed by graffitied pastries of all kinds, topped off by a grandmotherly figure that kept throwing dirty looks and napkins at the passionately embracing couple above an erotic bookstore next door.
And then there was the cleanup crew.
I got back on my hands and knees to see them better. But, no, I wasn’t imagining things. A squad of animated mops was weaving through the crowd, attempting to clear up the alarming amount of elephant guts, or at least to corral it into a pile. There had to be fifty of them. It looked like The Sorcerer’s Apprentice down there.
You know, except for all the blood.
I’d seen magic before, even magical creatures. But that was in a world where the different species stayed apart, in their own little enclaves. The vamps had their courts, where they occasionally brought in a mage or two to help with warding, or a handful of weres for daytime muscle. Likewise, the mages stayed mostly to themselves, occasionally mixing with a few fey, although nothing like this.
Nothing close to this!
“Did you hear me?” someone demanded.
I looked up to see the impressive-looking woman again. She appeared even more incensed than before, although I had no idea why. It was all over now.
Well, except for the mopping up.
“I need some of those,” I told her.
“What?”
“The mops.” I turned to look at them again in fascination. My bodyguards thought that cleaning was beneath them, but they were also seriously suspicious of any hotel personnel they didn’t know. Things got a little odorous on the days that their approved cleaners were off.
But the mops seemed to know what to do on their own, with no custodian in sight. They were currently trying to chase off some fey—little dark things in robes that seemed to disappear when I looked directly at them—who were attempting to carve a slab off the fallen beast’s giant haunch.