If Amethyst wasn’t the one who was talking to them, there was only one thing a creature who looked and spoke like Amethyst could be. The reason he could not smell the fae was that there was only magic here.
“Riddle me questions,” Charles said, chanting the old words slowly. “Riddle me rhymes. Riddle me swiftly, I’ve said it three times. By threes and by custom you dare not deny. I bind you to answer and compel your reply.”
“Riddle say, riddle say,” it said, as it had to, being what it was. “Riddle say me, and I will answer thee.” Fae magic and the fae themselves were constrained by rules that allowed magic to exist in a world where magic was a rare thing. Riddles needed to be answered.
“What walks like a child and talks like a child and is left by the fae in the child’s right place?” Charles asked in a singsong voice that was part of the draw of the riddle. “What curdles cream, makes sick the cows, what makes a mother moan? What hides like poison and rots away family and home?”
“A fetch! A fetch! A fetch!” it answered, and as soon as the third response had left its lips, the child disappeared and a bundle of sticks fell to the ground. Worn ribbons tied the sticks in a semblance of a human figure, arms and legs and head. There was a scrap of hair banded top and bottom and shoved into the body of the thing.
The smell of brimstone and vinegar overwhelmed his nose and sent him into a paroxysm of coughing. Behind him he could hear Anna doing the same thing. The smell didn’t bother the human, though.
“Amethyst? Amethyst?” Miss Baird hurried over to the board and then looked back at Charles. “What happened to Amethyst?”
“When did you last talk to her parents?” Anna asked hoarsely. He turned to see that she had covered her nose with her arm.
“This morning,” Miss Baird said. “Not her parents, though. Her mother dropped her off and is supposed to pick her up. Her parents are in the middle of a nasty divorce. After the third incident, we have this list to tell us who is to pick her up on which day.” Her voice trailed off.
“Where is she?” Miss Baird asked very quietly. “What happened to her?”
Anna looked at him, and he pulled out his cell phone. “I think this has gone beyond my sphere of authority,” Charles said. He hit the button that dialed his father.
To say that the police were displeased with them when Charles and Anna refused to talk was an understatement. Miss Baird talked to them until she was hoarse while Amethyst’s parents watched in unrelieved apathy. Miss Baird, who knew about werewolf secrets, didn’t tell them anything about werewolves, just that Charles and Anna were there interviewing the teachers at the day care.
“It’s a fetch,” Miss Baird told the police officer for the fifth or sixth time. “Not a child all. He didn’t turn a child into a bundle of sticks, he just made it admit that’s what it was. No. I don’t know why it worked or what he did.”
Anna didn’t know why she and Charles weren’t talking to the police. Except perhaps the obvious reason, which was that Miss Baird was not having any effect on their disbelief. Why should their reaction to what Charles or Anna had to say be any different? If no one would believe the truth, then why say anything at all? But that didn’t seem very Charles-like. Bran hadn’t told them to maintain silence when Charles had called him.
Bran had listened to Charles’s careful recital of the exact events from the moment they walked into Miss Baird’s classroom. When Charles was finished he told them to call the police. They were to wait at the school until help arrived, with the implication that help would be a while in coming.
Then Bran had ended the call and they’d spent most of the afternoon waiting. First with Miss Baird, then the police arrived. Eventually, Ms. Edison had wandered in; finally Amethyst’s parents, the Millers, who had arrived separately, joined them.
The Millers were pretty subdued for people whose only child had turned into a pile of broken sticks. From Miss Baird’s description of warring parents, Anna had sort of expected more hostility. More energy. They sat near each other, not touching—or communicating in any other way, either. They hadn’t said much when Miss Baird tried to explain to them what had happened. Unlike the police, they hadn’t tried to argue with her, though they hadn’t seemed to believe, either.
They looked … faded. She thought they waited with the rest of them because no one told them to go home, rather than out of any curiosity. They hadn’t been angry, or disbelieving, or any of the things they should have been. Either children made you as crazy as Anna’s own father claimed, or the changeling had been doing something to them. She thought about Charles’s riddle and how poison could be spiritual rather than just physical.
The police officers were officially skeptical that a child had turned into a bundle of sticks. They were inclined to write Miss Baird off as a stupid mark willing to believe anything. Either Charles and Anna were con artists in the middle of some muddled game that involved kidnapping Amethyst, or they were stupid marks, like Miss Baird, who had the bad luck to witness some flimflam trick. That she and Charles weren’t talking to the police made them more inclined to believe the first than the last.
The police officers in Scottsdale were evidently not used to dealing with the supernatural. They would have dismissed everyone and gone home themselves if it weren’t for a call they received from someone they “yes, sir”ed who had asked them to hold the witnesses at the day care and wait for an investigator who was coming.
Ms. Edison could have gone home after the children had cleared out, but she was “disinclined” to leave Miss Baird to fend for herself. That made Anna like her better, and she’d been inclined to like her in the first place.
The Cantrip agents came next, Marsden and Leeds. Cantrip was the federal agency that dealt with the supernatural. It surprised her, given the attitude of the police, that there was a Cantrip presence in the greater Phoenix area.
Anna didn’t recognize either of them, but her experience with Cantrip was not vast. Nor was it a happy experience, either. She couldn’t tell from his reaction if Charles knew who they were, though he had extensive files on Cantrip, since Bran viewed it as a danger. The Cantrip agents weren’t, she was pretty sure, the help that Bran had promised.
“So you are Mr. and Mrs. Smith,” said the Cantrip officer to Charles. She was pretty sure it was the one named Marsden, not Leeds. Whichever one he was, he managed a credible sneer. “And you were here when the child turned into a pile of sticks?”
Cantrip seemed to attract a variety of people, from the true-believer geek to the rabid “kill ’em all and let God sort ’em out” kook and most everyone else in between. Leeds, Anna thought, was of the geek variety, but Marsden seemed to be a disbeliever. That didn’t make sense. Why would someone who didn’t want to believe in magic become an agent of Cantrip?
No one had touched the sticks so far. Anna thought it hadn’t been Charles’s soft-voiced warning that it wasn’t always safe to deal with fae magic, even spent fae magic, that had kept the police from messing with it. She thought it was because no one wanted to be the one who collected the bundle as evidence, and thereby also collect harassment from everyone in the department for listening to a bunch of crazy people.
To date, the fae had been too good at appearing powerless and telling people that the stories of Tuatha Dé Danann, who could level mountains and raise lakes, were make-believe.
The truth was, humans wanted them to be stories. They didn’t want to be afraid, didn’t want to believe that their ancestors who huddled in stone crofts and wooden huts had been right to hide. So they listened to the fae weave a fictional story out of truths and the people believed.
The sole exception to that image was the day Beauclaire had beheaded the son of a US senator in front of a Boston courthouse several months ago. And that had been more a show of strength rather than a show of power, really.
She was sort of surprised that a Cantrip agent would take that attitude, though.
Charles looked at Marsden and said, as he had to the police, “We only want to tell the story once. We’re waiting for the proper authority to tell it to.”