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BACK TO FRASER'S FRACTURED FICTION Follow That Falcon!by A. Fraser
© Copyright 2004 A. Fraser. All rights reserved.
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Follow That Falcon!
Copyright 2004
by Anne Fraser
The carnival had moved on. For one last day, things had spun rides, wheels of
fortune, cotton candy then the great packing-up and moving-on had begun. The
Ferris wheel had been taken apart, piece by piece, and laid in its flatbed truck.
The kiddie rides had their circular bases folded up, the various cars, boats or
horses stowed in special compartments. The tire ruts in the field were two feet
deep in places from the big trucks heading out with their loads of mirth and
nausea. Soon all that remained were the ruts, a few peg holes where tents had
been erected, and a lingering smell of popcorn and excitement.
And then there was not even that. Work crews had come in to smooth out the
tire marks, replace divots, and clean up the garbage. The local children once
again played soccer in the field, only occasionally pausing to remark on how
much fun the fair had been.
The carnival had moved on, but one trailer had not followed them to the next
town, the next field, the next gig. Mistress Estella, the wicked good fortune
teller, had stayed behind in Fletcherville. She had seen the future. Her own
future. And oddly enough, it came in the shape of a thin, craggy-featured man
with curly brown hair, an earring, a truly astonishing collection of scars, and a
rarely seen smile that made her knees feel like rubber. So although the carnival
had moved on, she had stayed. Stayed because she loved Ray Griffin.
Estella wasn't quite certain when she had realized that. When he had first come
into her tent, followed by a vampire, she'd been slightly afraid of him. To those
with the eyes to see, Ray gave off an aura of occult power that was almost
overwhelming. And there was his staggering collection of scars to consider not
all of them visible. He had enough emotional baggage for an entire around the
world trip, including carry-ons. He had a falcon, made of a magic that Estella
didn't understand, who thought that earrings were appetizers. Reading his palm
had been one of the hardest things she had ever done, because the future she had
seen there had been... well, no future. Not that he was going to die, but that his
life was stalled.
He was a witch. He preferred the word "mage", but power was power. He was
a killer, and a witch, and had once tried to commit suicide. His best friend was a
smart-ass punk vampire, and almost all his friends were immortal, undead, or had
the power to some extent. He worked part-time as a mechanic in town when they
needed him, and was always broke. Not exactly the man she had dreamed of
catching.
But then, she was a half-gypsy telling carnival fortunes to the gadje, a profession
that her own people looked upon as virtual treason. It wasn't her fault that she'd
inherited Second Sight. Her other unwelcome inheritance had been a vampire.
Really, she and Ray had been practically destined for each other, if you wanted
to look at things that way.
But love? When had she fallen in love? When he'd kissed her the first time, in
that dusty warehouse in north Bangor, the Penobscot River flowing just outside,
with two amused vampires, a whatever it was Evan was, and a slightly
bewildered Archdruid as an audience? It had been an awkward kiss, at best, and
both of them had blushed, but it had definitely not been love.
She hadn't, she realized, precisely _fallen_ in love. She hadn't woken up one
morning with little pink cherubs fluttering over her bed, firing arrows into her
heart. It was more like going swimming in a strange lake of chilly water. First
you get your toes wet, then your knees, then the edge of your suit so that the
water creeps up it and it clings to you and you get goosebumps.
She had the distinct feeling that Ray was still at the knees stage. It would take
him a long time to get up the nerve to dive under the surface of the lake.
Meanwhile, she had to keep her head above water. Fletcherville was a very small
town and jobs were scarce, especially off-season, but she had managed to find a
part-time niche serving drinks in the nightclub (and she highly suspected that the
fact the nightclub owner was a member of the Brotherhood of Darkness had
something to do with her finding employment) and did readings for the
townspeople in her off hours. As most of them had already come to her at the
fair, or were highly suspicious of fortune tellers, this wasn't a particularly
lucrative pastime. She lived in the trailer, which was now in the mostly deserted
trailer park.
Dating a mage was an experience, especially considering he'd never really dated
anyone before. Neither had Estella, when it came to that. Rigo had always
scared off anybody who'd started to get serious. She and Ray were a bit old for
the movies and pizza routine, but Fletcherville didn't offer much in the way of
activities, especially in the fall. Still, they'd managed to have something
resembling a relationship.
She was meeting him tonight, in fact, for dinner. He didn't cook much, so he'd
offered to take her out. Off-season, it was either the club or the Fletcherville Inn,
or the Lobster Trap if you wanted to go upscale. They were going to the Inn...
and if she didn't stop staring at the field, gathering moonbeams, she was going to
be late.
It would be nice, Estella thought a bit wistfully, to see Ray in something besides
black. He'd dressed up tonight, though he'd worn a black jacket, and black
pants that weren't jeans, and a button-down shirt. Black, of course. Other than
the omnipresent gold earring and his watch, he never wore jewellery, not even a
ring. He would look nice in blue, she thought, to match his eyes. Or red. Or
even brown.
She'd asked him why he only wore black. He'd shrugged.
"It goes with everything," he answered, and that was that.
He kissed her, though, without any prompting. He was learning; it wasn't
awkward at all.
Conversation at dinner was the usual; work, the town hall meeting, the various
ups and downs of life in a small town, the doings of the Brotherhood. Estella was
making a few friends in town, and talked about them. They ate and shared half a
bottle of wine (Ray was driving) and talked and laughed. It was good to hear Ray
laugh.
"Coffee and dessert?"
Where had that waiter come from? Estella blinked at him. Surely dinner couldn't
already be over? She opened her mouth to ask for coffee, but Ray squeezed her
hand.
"We can have coffee at my place," he said. "Mary dropped me off some cookies
and date squares today, too."
It was a long haul out to the Cliff Road just for coffee and cookies. Then Estella
mentally kicked herself. This wasn't an invitation for coffee.
"Sounds good to me," she smiled.
"Just the bill then, please," Ray told the waiter.
There was coffee. And date squares. Andrei had been firmly put to bed on his
perch, hooded and jessed to keep him quiet. The house was quiet; the radio was
turned to soft jazz that barely intruded on their senses. Suddenly shy, Ray turned
to look out the window of the kitchen towards the ocean, simply a dark blot
below the cliff's edge at this time of night.
Estella came up behind Ray and draped her arms around his shoulders. She could
feel him fighting his automatic reaction, which was to flinch away from the
contact. At least he was fighting it. Maybe in another twenty years, he wouldn't
have to.
"You should let me give you a massage," she said, running her hands over the
sharp lines of his shoulder bones.
He turned his head to look at her. She returned the look calmly.
"I'd have to take my shirt off," he objected.
"Ray," Estella answered, "sooner or later, I'm going to see what's under your
shirt."
He snorted, trying not to laugh. "I know," he admitted, sheepishly. "I just
wish..." He shrugged, unable to finish the thought.
She put a hand on one side of his face, gently. "Don't," she said. "There is
nothing to be gained by wishing."
Ray's lips twitched as he recalled a certain fairy godmother problem experienced
by a friend, but he didn't say anything about it.
Estella took his unresisting hand, ignoring the flush of psychic insight the contact
gave her, and led Ray into his bedroom.
There was an awkward moment when they stood there, looking at each other.
Then, with another shrug, Ray unbuttoned his shirt.
It was all Estella could do not to gasp at the random patterning of scar tissue thus
revealed. She had known it would be bad. His hands, wrists, neck and face all
had their souvenirs of violence, but they were minor compared to his back. There
were the unmistakable scars left by a whip. There were cigarette burns, welts,
and harder-to-read marks that might have been left by a belt buckle or some other
hard metal object. Worst of all was the shiny, melted mess across his left
shoulder-blade, as if he had been caught in a very localized, very hot fire.
Her hand shaking, Estella touched this ugliest scar. Searing pain... a concentrated
jet of fire... a man screaming that all witches must burn... Her hand dropped.
"Someone really hated you," she said.
"My father," Ray answered. There was no bitterness in his tone. There was
nothing at all. "He hated both me and my mother for having the power when he
didn't."
"What happened to your mother?" Estella asked, although she had a fairly good
idea what the answer was.
"He killed her," Ray answered, still in that awful emotionless voice. "He pushed
her down the stairs, and she broke her neck. He said it was an accident. Just like
turning the blow torch on me was an accident. I must have had the highest
number of 'accidents' of any kid in Chicago, but nobody ever caught on or
investigated. My father was a very plausible liar."
"And the whip marks?" Estella wondered, not quite touching those, not wanting
to feel that pain. "Surely even your father wouldn't explain those as accidents."
"Ah, well," Ray said, some emotion that she couldn't identify creeping into his
voice, "Those aren't from my father. Those are from Matthew."
"Matthew?" The name was unfamiliar, at least in this context. She had at least
two cousins named Matthew, but something in the way Ray pronounced the name
made her think that this Matthew was not a cousin.
Ray sat down on the bed, and patted the space beside him. She joined him,
wondering what she'd let herself in for.
"I ran away from home when I was thirteen," Ray said. "All I took with me were
my clothes and my grandfather's pocket knife. Somehow, I had managed to save
that from all of my father's raids on my room. I had no idea where to go or who
to turn to my father had estranged himself from everyone else in his own family,
and I didn't know any of my mother's family. So I wandered the streets, just
another runaway kid, and fell in with a gang. The power was growing steadily,
and I think I scared the rest of the gang, because even though I was pretty bad at
being a street kid, they let me hang with them. I learned fast, though. But when I
was fourteen, they had a purge of the streets, rounded up the gangs, and sent
those of us under eighteen to Juvenile Hall.
"I wasn't there very long when I was taken out. Not by my father, who
reportedly had told them to let me rot when he found out where I was. A smooth-
talking lawyer representing a philanthropic gentleman who wanted to make me his
legal ward got me out. I doubt if they'd get away with that these days, but this
was almost thirty years ago; child protection laws and so forth were much less
strict than they are now. I was released into the lawyer's custody."
"Were you excited?" Estella asked, hoping that asking questions wouldn't
interrupt the flow. He'd never really talked about his past before.
"I didn't know what to think. The only truly happy moments I'd ever had in my
life had been with my mother, and they were marred by memories of my father
beating the crap out of both of us for being happy. I was a pretty cynical fourteen
year old. I wondered what this philanthropic gentleman really wanted. I wasn't
worried about rape or anything; first of all, it didn't even occur to me, and even if
it had, I was no great beauty even then. There are easier ways to procure young
boys than taking them out of Juvie Hall, after all. I just figured that he wanted me
for something else, maybe because I was a witch.
"And I was right. The lawyer worked for Matthew. I never knew Matthew's last
name, he hid it to keep himself safe. Probably Matthew wasn't even his real first
name. He was a master sorcerer, what in some circles is called a ceremonial
magician; a powerful magic worker on the Left Hand Path."
"Not a Satanist?" Estella inquired.
Ray shook his head, but not impatiently, just resignedly. "Most definitely not,"
he replied. "First, true Satanism is a lot rarer than people think it is; a lot of
pagans get tarred with the Satanism label but they aren't Satanists. People just
don't understand witchcraft... call it what you will. Words are so misleading
when it comes to the power. Satanists are just the obverse of Christians.
Satanism is a Judeo-Christian religion; like it or not. No witch of any path or craft
or colour or what have you would have anything to do with Satanism. Matthew
was a lot of things, but he did not worship the Father of Lies. No, he just wanted
the power that comes with darkness and followed the appropriate path."
"And he wanted you," Estella put her arm around him. She could feel his heart
beating inside his chest.
"Power calls to power," Ray said simply. "When I walked into your tent, I knew
you had the Sight. I could sense Matthew myself, dimly, without knowing what it
was I sensed. It was like the echo of a toothache. But I must have been like a
whole mouth full of rotten teeth, to extend the metaphor, to anyone with the
power. He got to me first."
"And he was evil." Estella hugged him to her.
He briefly put his head on her shoulder. "Evil seems such a trite word," he said.
"It's overused and has lost its true meaning. I can't really think of a better one,
though. Matthew was ambitious and self-centred and didn't give a damn about
the consequences to anyone or anything as long as he got the results he wanted.
He wanted to make me his star pupil, to groom me to be his successor.
Ultimately, I think he wanted to steal my power from me to make it his own, but
he wasn't strong enough to do that. He couldn't find the key that would make the
transfer without killing him. Killing me, he didn't care about as long as my power
went to him. But he couldn't figure out how to do it. He sure tried hard enough."
"Would there have been a way?" Estella asked.
"Oh, certainly," Ray told her. "I've known of at least two ways for years. Both
unfortunately leave the original possessor of the power quite dead. But Matthew,
luckily, never found them out. So he tried, instead, to make me be what he
wanted me to be... as evil as he was."
"And when you wouldn't, he beat you."
"As you can see," he nodded. "And that's just the physical beatings. Magic
leaves no marks, but trust me, it still hurts."
"When did he whip you?"
"When I got this," he touched the gold earring in his left ear. "Oh, that made him
furious."
"I'm amazed he let you keep it."
"The earring, or the ear?" Ray smiled. "He calmed down after I'd bled enough,
and said it would damn well serve me right if it got infected. It never did."
"How did you finally get free of him?" Estella asked.
"I killed him."
Estella remembered when he and Francis had come into her tent, and she had read
his palm. "There is blood on these hands," she murmured, taking his scarred right
hand and kissing it in the exact centre.
"These hands have done evil," he nodded solemnly, shuddering slightly as she
kissed him. Even he could not tell if it was from pain or pleasure.
Her dark eyes raised from his hand to his face. "But their owner is not evil," she
said. "He died hard, Matthew."
"Can you See that?" Ray asked.
"Flashes," she answered, not letting go of his hand. "But I know it, because I
know you, and it would not have been easy."
"We duelled," Ray said, aware of her lips, now nuzzling the sensitive spot on the
inside of his wrist. "He wasn't the first person I killed, Matthew. Or the last."
She stopped what she was doing ("Damn," said an inner part of Ray) and put her
arms around his too-thin body. "Don't live in the past, Ray," she said, smiling a
little, because she'd told him that at their first meeting, too. "I won't say it
doesn't matter, because of course it does, but the present matters, too."
"But I'm a ..." he started to protest.
Her lips closed over his, preventing him from finishing the sentence. He
admittedly didn't try very hard. His arms went around her, and then suddenly
they were both on the bed and the kissing had an added dimension of urgency to
it. Ray looked down into Estella's eyes, and knew that he wanted her very much,
wanted to lose his pain inside her.
With a slow, shy smile, she took his hands and guided them to the zipper of her
dress.
He started to speak, but she put a finger on his lips.
Clothing was always the most awkward part. There's just something inherently
ridiculous about getting undressed in front of another person, especially when it's
for the first time.
And it really was the first time, for them both. Ray had seen naked women
before, but he had never been permitted to _do_ anything about it, not even to
touch them except in a very impersonal way. Matthew, while he had controlled
Ray's life, had wanted his protege kept virginal. He had believed it would
increase Ray's magical aura; and while Ray had noted bitterly that Matthew
himself screwed whatever woman would lie still long enough, he had held to the
prohibition about sex. And after he had killed Matthew and fled to the protection
of the Brotherhood, he just simply hadn't felt the desire. There was not a huge
supply of available women in Fletcherville to begin with, and most of them were
slightly afraid of him. In the Brotherhood itself, there was only Maggie, and while
she wasn't uninteresting, there'd never been any particular spark between the two
of them.
There' d been sparks almost the moment he'd set eyes on Estella; they'd both just
been too preoccupied to see them.
He had more scars, revealed when he took off his jeans and underwear. Estella
had almost none at all, except for a small knobbly one on her left knee that she
said was a souvenir of falling off her bicycle at eight.
"You're beautiful," Ray said.
"So are you," she smiled.
For once, he didn't argue. They fell back on the bed, and explored each other's
bodies, hands and lips discovering the ticklish spots, the tender areas, the little
secret hollows and places that made the other one gasp.
There was very little speaking. Eye movements, gestures, nods... these were
enough. Neither of them had ever done this before, but some things are
instinctual. When she felt she was ready, Estella cupped his erection and guided
him in.
Out in the kitchen, Andrei, hooded and jessed on his perch, shrieked.
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