Fair Peril Read online

  When it was permissible to turn and walk, Adamus walked by her side. “That went not badly at all,” he whispered when they had achieved a safe distance from her Majesty. “She could just as readily have turned you into a black toad turd.”

  Buffy nodded. She knew it was true but no longer cared, she felt so exhausted. “I guess I’ll go home and get some rest—no, dammit, the cops are looking for me.” It was hard to remember what was happening in that world out there. “I guess I’d better stay here. Take LeeVon and—”

  Adamus, she noticed, was looking around anxiously. All the tables were empty, the great hall nearly empty.

  “LeeVon?” Buffy asked the hall.

  Nobody answered.

  “LeeVon? Addie, do you know where he is?”

  Adamus shook his head, his fair face pale.

  Eleven

  The prince in the periwinkle tunic with the tushie slits was standing in a secluded bower, watering the trunk of a tree, when Buffy and Adamus finally found him after several hours of searching. He shrieked and cowered away when he saw Buffy, but it was hard to tell whether his reaction was because of a guilty conscience, because she was a great and fearsome conjuror, or because his weewee was sticking out.

  “Have you seen LeeVon?” Buffy demanded.

  “Hu-hu-who?”

  “LeeVon! My frog!”

  “Superlative librarian,” Adamus put in. “Green face, tattoos, rings—”

  The person in periwinkle had his equipment tucked away now, and turned on them with unexpected vehemence. “I’d dance in hot iron shoes first,” he burst out. “I’d roll down a hill in a spiked barrel before I’d kiss that—that slime-pated devil-belch spawn of—”

  “So you have seen him! He did ask you!”

  “That ringle-jingle serpent on legs! He didn’t just ask. He pursued me. He stalked me. He harried me like a green demon. He would not hear me say no. He said—” Periwinkle’s voice began to quiver with horror. “He said, Awright, you don’t want to kiss me, howsabout I kiss you?”

  It sounded as if LeeVon was getting a wee bit tad desperate. “You’re lucky he didn’t ask you to lay eggs so he could make milt,” Buffy said.

  “Milady, have mercy,” whispered Adamus.

  “I guess it’s a hetero thing.”

  “I’m afraid to go to sleep,” the courtier whined.

  “My sympathies. Where is LeeVon now?”

  “He infuriated me.” The courtier flushed with defiance, inflated his narrow chest, and glared. “I seized him and hurled him above the treetops.”

  Buffy saw everything go gray and start to sway. “You—you killed him?”

  Hands supported her—Adamus. “Gently, gently,” that quiet voice said. “Remember, this is Fair Peril. He may not be killed. Just as likely that he is back in human form.”

  It was true. It was the insane truth of it that made her want to faint. There was no logic to things—or rather, any probability in this place violated all common sense. Mushrooms might grow wings and fly here, and gold rings turn to rainwater.

  “We should be searching for Emily,” Adamus said.

  But shock still ran through Buffy. She had to get out of this nutty place. She had to. Gray, lavender, periwinkle swam before her eyes; she could not see anything properly … then vague whiteness took form around her. Walls. There was a loud, bellicose sound in her ears.

  Cops? Buffy cowered.

  No. The ranting one was just a large, perturbed man in a plaid flannel shirt and a clashing bandanna. “Lady, would you get the hell out of here?”

  “She ain’t got a firm hold of her kite string,” another voice said. “We oughta call security.”

  Urinals on the wall. Three distressingly normal-looking males faced her. Adamus was nowhere to be seen. “I’m back in the mall?” Buffy whispered.

  “This is the men’s room, for God’s sake. Would you get the hell out?”

  She exited hastily, noticing that something stank—it was, she realized, her. There she stood wrapped in smelly black plastic in the main concourse of the Mall Tifarious, with quite a few people looking at her.

  She ditched the plastic in a trash container and scuttled in her nightgown toward the nearest exit and outside. Amazing, the energy jolt a good rush of adrenaline can produce, even in a person who hasn’t eaten or slept. Flannel flapping, clutching wallet and keys in one hand, Buffy ran for her car—

  It wasn’t there.

  Yes, this was the right parking lot. Yes, this was the right row. No, the car wasn’t there.

  Buffy wondered briefly whether her Escort could have kissed a frog-eyed Sprite and run off. Then she started giggling. Actually, the cops probably had her car, giggle, giggle, giggle. Here she was wandering around the mall parking lot in her nightgown; her daughter, who did a damn good statue imitation, was missing somewhere in Fair Peril; she had contributed to making her favorite librarian first an amphibian and then a guided missile; now her car was gone? It seemed hilarious. Giggle giggle GIGGLE at the thought of calling the cops to report her vehicle missing, along with LeeVon. Damn cops had probably grabbed the car because they were looking for her. Crazy woman in nightgown giggling in the parking lot at ten in the morning, giggle giggle ye ha ha snort. Emily’s Probe was gone too. They had probably towed it—

  Emily’s—car—was—gone?

  Buffy stopped giggling with a gasp, about-faced, and thundered back into the mall to find a phone. She dialed Prentis’s number. The Trophy Wife answered.

  “Hi, Pestt, this is Buffy. Has—”

  “You have the colossal nerve calling here!” Tempestt sounded just a teensy smidgen overwrought. “After what you’ve done!”

  “Yeah, well, has Emily—”

  “Big wet frog tracks all over the carpeting!” Tempestt yelled, tearful. “I don’t know how I’m ever supposed to get them out.”

  Prentis was home, evidently. “Did you kiss him?”

  Tempestt’s voice shrilled to a new level of hysteria. “That’s personal! Why do you want to know?”

  “Just curious.”

  “That’s incredibly rude!”

  In other words, she hadn’t kissed him. She couldn’t deal with it. Prentis would have to take his pickle-puss elsewhere. “Has Emily come home?”

  “Emily? Who cares about Emily!”

  Nobody but me, evidently. “Is she home?”

  “NO, she’s not home. How can you ask such things when my husband—”

  Buffy hung up and stalked down the mall and bought herself a cup of coffee and a soft pretzel. There was nothing like complete nutrition to keep a person going, and evidently she was going to have to keep going for a while longer. She headed toward the mall office, passing all three fountains and all three pedestals on her way. The winged stag, she noticed, was gone—interesting but unsurprising, as she herself had seen it fly. The princess with the garland of golden roses and the star on her forehead was still missing. But the frog king was still squatting sullenly up there.

  “’Scuse me,” Buffy bespoke the horse-faced woman at the mall-office desk. “Can you tell me what’s happened to two of the statues?”

  The woman was staring at her instead of answering her. The people at the pretzel stand had stared at her too. People she had passed as she was walking, likewise. Buffy concluded that her nightgown was not being perceived as a fashion statement.

  “The statues on the pedestals in the fountains,” she said in read-my-lips tones. “Where are they?”

  “Missing,” the woman said.

  “Missing? As in, somebody stole them?”

  “Looks like.” Only the woman’s mouth had moved. The rest of her equine personage was still rigid with staring.

  Next question. “Is there a place around here where I can grab a nap?” There had to be a quiet corner somewhere.

  The woman’s glassy eyes widened to the limit of their sockets. “You’re not to sleep in the mall! There’s a homeless shelter—”

  “I’m not hom
eless!” Why would this appearance-challenged person think she was homeless? Just because she was dressed rather casually? Hadn’t shampooed her hair in a few days? Was getting a bit skanky?

  “Then you should go home and get a bath and some sleep, shouldn’t you?”

  Buffy expressed her exasperation with a sigh and headed out. As she paused outside the door, trying to think what to do next, she heard the woman call to somebody else in the office, “It’s getting screwier around here every day. Did you see the woman with the monster frog on a leash?”

  Homeless, baloney. But phew, Buffy had to admit that Essence of Body Odor was going to linger on the air after she was gone. She headed toward a john to take a sponge bath. Make that a paper-towel bath. The plan, insofar as she had one, was to stay at the Mall Tifarious, get some sleep somehow—there had to be storage areas where they kept the naked and dismembered mannequins, the seasonal displays; Buffy pictured herself napping with the Easter Bunny—and then she would start looking for Emily again. But as she walked toward the rest rooms, her tired brain farted out a notion and she veered into one of those nature-and-ecology whoa-green-is-expensive stores. Her nightgown, aside from being overdue for a wash, was not suitable garb for public places. But she needed a starry, starry garment in order to do transfrogrifications. Maybe there would be one in here.

  There wasn’t. There were jigsaw puzzles depicting the constellations, but no starry T-shirts. The T-shirts had koalas and flamingos and coatimundis on them. So much for that idea. Very tired, too tired to think, Buffy stood and stared dazedly around the store.

  Something on one of the display tables caught her eye; she toddled over there. Under garish wooden parrots hanging from the ceiling, amid hand-up-the-ass endangered-species puppets, amid rubber moose and plastic mongooses and metal make-a-noise cicadas, amid all the tacky envirokitsch reared a carved snake made out of some sort of white stone, alabaster or white jade or something, a museum-quality sculpture with graceful lines and a lifted head, a white snake looking back at her.

  Carved stone, yet its golden eyes seemed alive.

  “You were there,” Buffy whispered to it.

  She was tired, so tired, exhausted, drifting. The cloth on the display table fluttered like leaves. “There! There!” a parrot squawked from overhead.

  Buffy whispered. “You were there that day. Do you know where my daughter is?”

  Yes, the white snake did. The white snake knew. Except that his forked black tongue flickered out, his mouth did not move, but Buffy heard as if he had spoken inside her head. Or rather, she did not hear—the snake’s preverbal reptilian language was not her language—but she sensed a wordless affirmation. Yes, certainly, I am the white snake. Of course I know.

  “Tell me! Where is she?”

  Barely changing position, nevertheless the snake was slowly gathering, coiling, rippling, flexing, clenching his muscle in the lazy way of a strong, confident serpent. His upraised head swayed in languid negation. Nah. No. Don’t feel like it.

  Like a child who has been hauled around a shopping mall way too long, Buffy could have cried. “Tell me!” Her whisper flipped into a yell. “Why won’t you tell me?”

  Why should I? I am the white snake. How have you deserved my help?

  She knew she had been unmannerly. She knew the tales and their number-one rule: speak politely to everyone and everything until you know for sure who or what it is. The arrogant older son, the bitchy stepmother, the haughty queen, they always forgot the rule and always got the business. But Buffy could not stop. She danced in red-hot-iron frustration, she writhed in spiked-barrel despair. She screamed. Her hands shot out to seize the white snake and wring the truth out of him.

  She never touched him, of course. He bit her.

  The ballista that had hurled frightened young Adamus from the battlements could not have been more spring-loaded, more sudden. Before Buffy knew what was happening, fangs pierced her hand and withdrew. She looked down on two ruby-red pearls of blood. Tiny pearls—but within her she could feel the bite slithering its way through her veins, chill, huge, an enormity.

  Punissshment, the white snake told her, turning his lithe, indifferent back and sliding away.

  Buffy knew she was supposed to die. She just did not know how or how soon.

  Everything changed very quickly.

  Everything was moving. Wooden parrots flew up with frightened cries and disappeared—quite literally disappeared. The mall was disappearing—or transmallgrifying. Instead of glass-domed ceiling and glass storefronts, Buffy saw glass walls closing in. Fountains puddled around her feet. To get out of the water she jumped up an oversized step and stood on top of a large, dank, reddish-brown platform—brick?

  Before she could think, her footing shook and there was a sound like mountains grinding together. Cowering, she looked up as the roof, or top, whatever it was, lifted off. A giant face peered down, seemingly from the sky, a face gargantuan beyond anything she had ever seen or imagined. If God had nose hair and wore a dirty baseball hat, then this was God.

  A hand the size of fate came down. Buffy wanted to run yet froze like a terrified rabbit; the only parts of her that seemed able to move were her bladder and her bowels, spewing away her self-respect as the hand seized her between thumb and forefinger and lifted her right up through where the roof should have been. Close to fainting, Buffy shut her eyes and hung in that coarse-skinned grip, much too far above the ground, dripping. “Now, here’s a fat little stinker,” the voice of the God-ogre said, booming and distant, so huge that she could barely catch the words between the deep echoes in the dome of the sky. “Good for bass. You put the hook in here—” A fingertip threatened to cave in her face. “—and you bring it out here.” He nudged her side; Buffy felt ribs scream. “Tie one leg to the shank but let the other one loose so she keeps wiggling.”

  “Wait,” Buffy whispered. Then she managed to open her eyes and say it louder. “WAIT!” she yelled. “I’m not bait!” She looked down at herself—yes, it was her, all right, feet kicking in wet sneakers, legs sticking out pale and unlovely from under her soiled nightgown, wallet and keys, those apodictic proofs of her sanity and humanity, clutched so tightly that her hand was going white. “You’re making a mistake!”

  The baseball-hatted giant did not seem to hear her at all. “Uh-huh,” the other one was saying, his voice flat, uninterested in being taught how to bait a hook for bass. “I’ll take her. Box her up.”

  The—other—one?

  That flat, quaking voice—no. It couldn’t be. Panicked, Buffy looked—it was hard to make sense of the immensity of these personages as big as sky, it was like finding coherence in the clouds, but—the inside of the little white box felt awfully familiar, though Buffy had never been imprisoned in a Chinese takeout container before. Funny, how the inside of a pristinely white box could look black in the absence of light. It was him, all right.

  “Prentis!” she cried.

  The box swayed, throwing her from side to side, as he carried it by the wire handle. Either he didn’t hear her or he wasn’t hearing her.

  “Prentis, please! What are you doing with me?”

  No answer, only a jarring thunk as he set the box down, then vehicular vibrations. They were in his car now. Going somewhere.

  It was like one of those Mafia movies. Where are you taking me?

  No. It was worse. Far worse. On her hands and knees in the corner of the box, Buffy puked up her soft pretzel, she felt so sick with fear, carsick, seasick, airsick, nauseated in zero gravity; which way was up? How/when had she become fish bait while remaining the same size? Did Prentis know the prisoner in his little white box was her? Did he have plans specifically for her, maybe to sink the hook a bit more viciously than necessary? Or did he think she was a bug or something? Everything would have been more bearable if she had just understood what was going on. Whether she was going to live or die.

  No, actually, it might not have been more bearable.

  She tried sh
outing again. “Where are you taking me?”

  No answer. Trying to stand up, she was thrown to her belly as he veered into a driveway or something. The car stopped.

  Buffy stayed where she was, lying down. A good move—the box swayed wildly as he carried it. She heard the snick of a doorknob turning, felt the lurch as he stepped inside. Thunk, the box shook again as he set it down.

  “Did you get a nice one, honey?” asked an older woman’s throaty voice.

  “Sure, Mom.” Prentis sounded weary and supercilious.

  Mom? Fay? Once more Buffy’s bowels spasmed, but there was nothing left in her to let go.

  Fay said, “Prentis, dear, your tone of voice. I’m only trying to help.”

  “Yeah, whatever.”

  “Better put it in the aquarium so it doesn’t die before we’re ready. This may take a while.”

  The box swooped up, opened to let in a glare of disorienting light, careened over, and dumped Buffy with a splash into shallow, stale water. Did Prentis know it was his ex-wife he was dumping—again? Moot point. A shock worse than the chill of the water kept Buffy sitting where she was, mouth open but not functioning to speak: she was in her own aquarium, looking out at the interior of her own messy bungalow, her own kitchen, where Fay and Prentis were sitting at her plastic-covered table.

  “Coffee, hon?” Fay offered. Fay was always so sweet to Prentis that it made Buffy’s teeth hurt. And the more his mother courted him, the more he closed her out.

  “No thanks.”

  Fay rose to get herself a cup, banging cupboard doors one after another. “Can’t find anything but dirt. This place is a swamp.” Splendiferously aureate as always, Fay provided enough reflective surface to light up every speck—okay, in Buffy’s case, it was more like clumps—every lurking lump of filth. Finally locating a coffee mug, she eyed it suspiciously and made a sour face. “That Murphy person never did keep anything clean.”

  Being called “that Murphy person” roused Buffy from her waterlogged daze. “Hey!” She struggled to stand up, her nightgown sodden and streaming. “Get your claws off my stuff!”