Wondrous Strange by Lesley Livingston Read Free Book Online Page B

his bottom lip. “A kelpie, huh?” he asked finally.
    “I think so,” Sonny said. “Horsehair and hoofprints would seem to indicate that.”
    “You know, I’ve never seen one?”
    “I did once—from a great distance—when I accompaniedAuberon on a visit to Queen Mabh’s Borderlands. They mostly lurk in the swamps thereabouts. Vicious things.” Back in the days when the Gates had all stood open, kelpie were known to appear near sources of water. They’d take on the guise of beautiful horses to lure unwary mortals. Once a person was mounted, the kelpie would plunge below the surface of the lake or river, dragging its hapless victim away to the Otherworld, or down to a watery death. Some kelpie even ate their victims.
    “When I was a kid,” Maddox said, “you know, before I was taken, I used to hear stories. The old village wives would screech something fierce if any of us kids went too close to the riverbanks. Said the kelpie’d come for us and take us away to drown.”
    “Well, this one was gone by the time I got there, and there wasn’t a whole lot of forensic evidence left behind.”
    “In other words, no blood or body parts strewn about.”
    “Right. None of that. Just trampled rushes and these.” Sonny pulled the black stone beads out of his satchel and put them on the table. Strands of horsehair, bright as copper filaments, remained knotted on the beads.
    Maddox reached for one and examined it minutely. “Hmm. Strange…What are they?”
    “I don’t know.”
    He handed the bead back to Sonny. “Of course, no body parts strewn about does not necessarily preclude abduction….”
    Sonny nodded mutely. He thought uneasily of the trampled script he’d found and the notion that something terrible might have happened to the girl he’d gotten used to thinking of as Firecracker. After a moment he decided to solicit Maddox’s help in a little detective work. “There was something else in the park yesterday too, Madd. Or, maybe, some one else.”
    Maddox settled back, crossing his arms over his chest, and waited.
    Sonny pulled the tattered copy of the script out of his messenger bag and pushed it across the table. He told Maddox of the “anomaly” he’d sensed in the Shakespeare Garden—the girl—and about finding her script later on the lakeside. As Janus, neither of them was terribly prone to believing in coincidence, and Maddox was intrigued.
    “You did have a busy day yesterday,” he said.
    “Not bad for the new kid on the job, right? Listen, we’ve got plenty of time before sundown—d’you want to come do a bit of nosing around with me? See if we can’t track down my little stray.”
    “What, the kelpie? Or the girl?”
    “The way I see it is this: Find the one…and we just might find the other.”
    “And how do you propose we do that?”
    Sonny pointed to a note scrawled on the script: Rehearsals @ Avalon Grande on 52 nd . “We start by paying this place a visit”—Sonny pointed again, at the letters indicating it was Kelley’s Script—“ and asking this girl some questions.”

VII
    “D on’t go in there!” Tyff screeched at Kelley as she shuffled groggily in the direction of the bathroom.
    Hand on the doorknob, Kelley turned to peer blearily at her roommate standing in the far corner of the living room—as far away from the bathroom as one could get in their apartment.
    “Step away from the door, Kelley!” Tyff was just this side of wild-eyed.
    Kelley did as she was told, trying as she did so to kick-start her brain into gear.
    Tyff must have gotten in really late—or really early—and Kelley hadn’t heard her, having fallen into a deep, exhausted sleep on the couch. The remnants of tumbled dreams swam through her brain—weird music that she couldn’t quite remember and dancing lights, the pale perfect face of a woman with golden eyes and hair spread out behind her like seaweed floating in a watery current. And something else. Something about a…
    “Horse!