This had been his last class before the Thanksgiving break, and why all the odd gods of scheduling had put it on a Monday was going to have to remain a mystery, because nobody he'd been able to ask had been able to explain things to Eric's satisfaction.
Even with all the makeups and takeover classes he'd had to do to compensate for missed coursework and failed exams (he'd been off saving the world, but sometimes the best excuses were the ones you couldn't use), he was finally going to do it. After an almost twenty-year interregnum, Eric Banyon was finally going to graduate from the Juilliard School of Music this spring.
And what then?
What did he want to do with his life here in the World Above?
He'd already rejected one life—that of a Human Bard at the Elven Courts of Underhill—and come back to finish Juilliard, just to see if he could. Well, it turned out he could. With his Juilliard degree, he could now get a legitimate high-class professional music gig just about anywhere, but that really wouldn't fit the life that had grown up around him in the last couple of years, and the need he'd discovered to be ready to deal with Evil when it showed up and had to be fought.
It sounded awfully melodramatic when he put it that way—as if he might have a cape and tights hanging in his closet—and as a matter of fact, he did, since they were common articles of apparel Underhill, where he still made frequent visits—but how else was he supposed to describe things like Threshold and Aerune, or Perenor, or the powers behind the Poseidon Project? Cranky? Bad-mannered? Socially unacceptable? No. They were Evil. Each of them, in their own ways, had been out to hurt or kill a large number of people for nothing more than their own personal gain, and if there was a better definition of Evil, Eric hadn't found it yet.
He wasn't going to waste his time on the differently social who just needed a little time to work out their personal adjustments. They might be really loud and hurt a lot of feelings, and maybe even leave a few bruises behind, but nobody was going to die. And for the average run-of-the-mill villain who killed by accident or design, there were a whole lot of people and agencies better trained than Eric was to take them down. Call 911, leak information to the FBI, but don't ring up Call-A-Bard.
But they couldn't go after people like Aerune. When people like that showed up (and if someone like Aerune never showed up again, Eric would be just as glad), even finding out about them was a job in itself, let alone stopping them. The police, the FBI, the CIA, even the Marines weren't the right people to call when someone like that appeared on the scene.
Which still left the question: what was he going to do with his life? Because while taking out weird villains might be a mission, and a necessary job, it was hardly a career. You couldn't tell when or where—or if—those kinds of problems were going to happen, for one thing. What did you do with the rest of your time? Even Batman had a social life. Sort of.
Though Eric could spend the rest of his life living off kenned gold with the best wishes of Prince Arvin of Elfhame Misthold—who was, as the Seleighe Sidhe understood things, his patron—that wouldn't satisfy him either. He'd discovered in himself a need to be useful, odd as that would have seemed to him at twenty.
So what was he going to do after he left Juilliard, in between bouts of saving the world? Which—he devoutly hoped—might never need to happen again.
In front of Lincoln Center, he caught the bus and, after a series of transfers, reached Museum Mile.
It was like stepping into another world. Even though the Upper West Side, where Juilliard was, could hardly be said to be an area of New York lacking in money and class, Museum Mile was so different that by rights there ought to be a high wall around it. Museum Mile was old money, Edith Wharton money, and it showed. Even in an unseasonably cold November, everything was still green, and the air positively reeked of the kind of wealth that had nannies and live-in servants, that summered on Fire Island or Martha's Vineyard, that took its limousines for walks and thought that shopping at Bloomingdale's was slumming. Apartments in these buildings almost never came up for sale—they were handed down through the generations, like the Renoirs and Monets and the Limoges services for forty-eight.
His shrink lived up here.
Eric had seriously resisted the whole idea of professional counseling for too long. His parents had dragged him to far too many of them when he'd been a child, and he'd quickly realized that every single one of those professional "helpers" had been interested in only one thing: getting inside his head and turning him inside out, to get a handle on what would control him. And once they did, no matter what they said, no matter how many times they promised they'd keep everything confidential, they'd take back whatever they found to his parents to use against him.
Bitter much? Eric thought with a rueful smile.
This time, he'd nearly drowned in his own problems before he'd been willing to admit that they were bigger than he was. But the fact that he'd been seriously considering going back to drinking—had been standing outside a liquor store last September with money in his pocket, thinking about walking in the door—had finally scared him enough to take the problem to Hosea.
Hosea had listened and come back with a name and address. Eric had been furious—terrified, he was willing to admit now. But Hosea had been just plain stubborn. Eric had asked for help. This was help, the Ozark Bard had said implacably. What would it cost him to simply go and see the woman? He'd faced Nightflyers and Unseleighe Lords, after all.
Eric hadn't been willing—hadn't been able, really—to explain. So he'd gone, sure that all he'd find when he arrived would be one more clueless psychotherapist, probably with a specialization in substance abuse telling him things he already knew too well.
But this time, it had turned out to be a whole different gig.
For one thing, he was paying the shrink. For another, there were no secrets, because Oriana Dunaway was a magician herself, though Eric knew little more about her than that.
"You don't need to know about me, Eric, or about what I do," she'd told him at their first meeting. "All you need to know is that you can trust me. And that whatever you tell me, no matter how unbelievable it is by the standards of the Worldlings, I will believe that it is so, though I may require an explanation of it, should it lie outside my own experience. And so, shall we begin?"
He was a Bard. He knew the truth when he heard it. Together, the two of them had begun to try to make sense of a life that had been twisted and damaged long before the events of last autumn. He slowly came to realize that he had to get his head straight before trying to get on with his life, lest the past reach out and drag him under when he least expected it. He was a Bard, gifted with the power to make or mar. He had to be able to use it wisely. Sanely. Because, if he couldn't get his own psyche in order, as the power within him grew stronger, so would it find the weakest places in him.
And to his surprise, Oriana's specialty was not substance abuse at all, but the problems of magicians, Talents, and nonhumans living in the World Above. That much she had been willing to tell him, though she would not otherwise discuss her patients.
"And I tell you this because it is important for you to know that you are not alone, either in your strengths or your weaknesses, Eric. It is a small community—often it is not a community at all—but you are not unique."
He reached the door of her building—after almost a year of Mondays, the doorman knew him by sight—and went inside. He passed through the exquisitely tasteful lobby—it had always rather reminded Eric of a high-class mortuary, with its dark heavy furniture, gilt mirrors, and oriental carpets over parquet marble floors. All that was missing were the vases of funereal lilies; fortunately the flowers here ran to something more cheerful. Shrugging his gig bag higher onto his shoulder, he went down the hall to the bank of elevators.
If the lobby was a mortuary, then the elevators were surely top of the line sarcophagi, all highly polished, heavily ornamented bronze, lined with more mirrors, so the building's inhabitants could give themselves one last once-over before hitting the street. The infinite number of reflected Erics always made him faintly uneasy; he stared fixedly at the doors as the car made its leisurely way to his floor.
The doors opened. He stepped out onto the thick carpet of the corridor and headed down the hall. Right on time. Maybe even a minute or two early. He opened the door into Oriana's apartment.
As always, the wards she had set tingled faintly over his skin when he crossed the threshold. They were a necessary part of her work, given the people she saw. It wouldn't do to disturb any of the other tenants of the building with anything that happened in her sessions, or leave any psychic detritus lying around from one appointment to contaminate the next.
What would have been the foyer if Oriana had not chosen to see her patients in her own home had been set up as a waiting room. There were a couple of comfortable couches and a low coffee table, covered with the sort of bland, inoffensive, upscale magazines that filled any professional's waiting room, occupying the space now. Eric picked up a copy of Architectural Digest and sat down.
A few moments later, Oriana's previous patient walked out. Eric had seen him a few times, but had never spoken to him. He didn't even know his name. He was a spare, slender man, closer to fifty than to forty. His dark hair was several weeks late (always! How did he manage it?) for a haircut, shot with early silver, and his eyes were a curious light amber color, nearly gold, making Eric wonder if he might be one of Oriana's nonhuman patients. He was dressed for Wall Street, in a completely unremarkable business suit that would blend in anywhere in New York. The only thing at all out of the ordinary about his appearance was the scarab pendant in bright blue faience that hung from a silver chain about his neck, resting against the sober institutional necktie. He nodded slightly to Eric, recognizing him as well, then walked out.
Oriana poked her head through the inner door a moment later.
"Ah, good. You're here. A moment, please." She withdrew.
Eric occupied himself until her return looking at pictures of gold faucets and hand-painted French porcelain bathroom sinks, not to mention Jacuzzis big enough to seat the entire Elven High Court, and made a mental note to give Kory and Beth a subscription to this thing. The elves could find some way to get this stuff shipped Underhill, and both his friends were bonkers for bathroom gadgets of every kind. Hell, actually all things considered, the elves could probably make every bit of it. If they hadn't already—hadn't Kory said something about there being an Elven casino in Vegas?
Still, the last time he'd been on a visit, all that he'd seen was an old claw-foot bathtub (okay, it was solid alabaster, but still) straight out of a Victorian mansion. Most of the time the Underhill crowd seemed to go for hot springs in grottos—nice for atmosphere, but not exactly Jacuzzis. I'll be remembered throughout history as the man who brought modern plumbing to Underhill.
A few moments later Oriana was back. "I'm ready for you now."
Eric got up and followed her down the hall to her study.
The room was small and intimate and even more heavily shielded than the rest of the apartment. The walls were fully paneled in red pecan, and folding shutters covered the windows. Eric preferred them closed, and so Oriana always shut them before he arrived.
Between the shuttered windows was a range of shallow shelves, on which were a variety of enticing knickknacks for nervous patients to fidget with: glass globes, small toys, seashells, ornamental boxes—the sort of souvenirs any traveler might acquire. There was a chair for Oriana, with a small table beside it that held a clock, her notepad, and a box of Kleenex. There was a wastebasket, and a dimmable torchiere in the corner to provide light if the shutters were closed. Aside from that, the only furniture in the room was a large grey couch—"a non-directive couch," she'd said once, making a rare joke, "as you may sit, lie, sprawl upon it. Whatever you like. The couch does not care. And neither do I."
As always when he arrived, the room held a strong indefinable spicy smell. It seemed to fade during his session—though whether it faded, or whether he got used to it, was something Eric had never quite decided.
He took his place on the couch. Oriana followed him in, closing the door behind him, and seated herself in the chair, picking up her pad and pen and waiting for him to begin.
She was somewhere in her late sixties, Eric supposed, one of those lucky blondes whose hair simply went silver with age. She was wearing an expensive, nubbly, cowl-neck sweater in ash-taupe shades that flattered her complexion—nobody who had spent any time at all Underhill could help having a good eye for clothes—paired with a pencil-thin tweed skirt and designer pumps. She looked like a psychiatrist in a movie, down to the half-glasses she wore on a chain around her neck, and he was pretty sure that she consciously dressed to play up the image.
"Do I pass muster?" she asked.
Eric grinned, refusing to feel guilty for checking her out.
"And how are you feeling this week?" she asked, prodding him to begin their session.
"I'm realizing that I have decisions to make," Eric admitted. "I graduate in the Spring. I could just coast. The money's there. But it feels dishonest."
"Good," Oriana said noncommittally.
"I know that I want to do something. Something worthwhile. But I know that whatever it is, it has to be something that will leave me the freedom to do the things that need to be done—as a Bard. And those things show up on awfully short notice."
Oriana pursed her lips, and absently tapped once on her notebook with her pencil. "Yes, they do. And they're things that can't always be explained to Worldlings, even when they find themselves involved. And, reasonably enough, you don't want to put yourself into a position where you might have to let someone down who depended on you, or hurt their feelings, even if that were necessary for the greater good."
Eric nodded ruefully. "And I know there has to be a way to do both—to do something meaningful and still have that freedom . . ."
For a few minutes he discussed all the various alternatives he'd considered—going back on the RenFaire circuit; playing solo freelance gigs in the New York area; finding work as a session musician; working as a tutor. All of them sounded attractive as he spoke of them, and all of them would give him the freedom he needed.
Oriana raised her hand, silencing him.
"Eric, I am not a placement counselor at Juilliard. I have no interest in your future employment opportunities. You're blowing smoke at me. Stop it, and tell me what's bothering you."
Eric sighed, feeling guilty and relieved all at once.
"I have no idea what I'm going to do when I graduate," he admitted. "I try to feel drawn to some particular course of action, but I don't. There must be something that's right—but I just can't see it. Am I ever going to be able to see it?"
Oriana took a moment to page through her notes.
"Eric, you've been coming to me for almost a year now. And you've made a great deal of progress in dealing with your emotional baggage in that time. But you're still holding back. Oh, not consciously. But let's review your background a bit.
"You were born with the gift of Bardic magic, into a family that had no understanding of your Talent and no idea of what magic is. Since Bardic magic is linked to music, you presented as a musical prodigy. Since your parents were ambitious, they perhaps placed too much pressure on you to excel in an arena that was not entirely suited to your actual Gifts. Yes, you're a talented musician, perhaps even a gifted one, but talent and Talent are two very different things, and young magicians should not be forced into the public eye. However, what's done is done.
"When your Talents made an explicit presentation of themselves at puberty, you began seeing Otherrealm creatures, which were drawn by your magic. Naturally, you had no idea of what was occurring. Your parents were . . . not supportive, insisting that you continue with your course of studies. Eventually, you had what amounted to a nervous breakdown upon seeing the Nightflyers at your recital at age eighteen."
"I ran away from home," Eric said sourly.
"Certainly we could see it in those terms," Oriana said, looking up from her notes. "It is equally valid to suggest that you ran toward your own self-preservation in the only way you knew to do it. However, you continued to make bad life choices. You became an alcoholic, a drug abuser, and a drifter, in an attempt to shut out your perception of the Otherworld."
Eric winced. It was an accurate, if very unflattering, assessment of his life before he'd met Kory.
"When you met Korendil and were forced by circumstances both to acknowledge and to take up the use of your magical Gifts, a great deal changed for you. For one thing, you received external validation of your world view—in layman's terms, you discovered you weren't crazy, and never had been. You received proper magical training from an Elven Bard. You acquired a replacement family, one that loves and supports you. You terminated your addictive and avoidance behaviors, which is a very important step in the healing process.
"But the damaged child created during the first eighteen years of your life, when our first perceptions and assumptions about the nature of the world are being formed, is still within you, and he is not lightly set aside. You have acknowledged in our previous sessions that your parents saw you less as a child to be nurtured than as an accessory to their own life-style: a trophy that would enhance their own consequence. A child derives his first image of self through his parents' image of him, and your parents, as you have told me on several occasions, never saw you as anything more than an object and a playing piece.
"I do not believe you will ever truly be able to understand what it is that you, Eric Banyon, actually want out of life, until you have fully externalized this image of yourself and set it aside once and for all."
"You mean I have to stop believing them?" Eric said.
Oriana nodded.
"But I don't!" he protested.
She said nothing, forcing Eric to think.
Was it true? He hated to think so. He hadn't thought about his parents—or his childhood—for years.
But, as she'd warned him, there were ways of not thinking about a thing that were just as poisonously obsessive as thinking about it constantly. From the moment he'd walked out of that concert hall with nothing more than his flute and the clothes on his back, he'd built a wall between himself and his past, one that he'd allowed nothing to breach. He bit his lip, feeling himself start to shake.
In silence, Oriana passed him the box of Kleenex.
"I hate this," Eric said thickly, around a wad of tissues.
"Nobody said this would be either easy or fun," she answered quietly. "We defend the damaged parts of ourselves fiercely. It takes courage to confront our scars, and bring the shadowed parts of our deepest selves into the light so that they can be healed. Until you no longer see yourself as an object and a playing piece, you will not be able to accurately identify what you are feeling now."
He hated it, but he knew she was right. Because an object couldn't feel. A playing piece couldn't make decisions. And he had to do both. Right now he didn't know what he felt about so many things—Aerete's death, Aerune's imprisonment, Jimmie's death, Jeanette's transfiguration—there was so much to think about and get straight in his mind before he could move on. And he had responsibilities. There was Hosea to teach, and Kayla to keep an eye on, just for two. He was managing both of those responsibilities adequately so far, but if there was one thing Eric knew about any situation, it was that nothing ever stayed the same. Things always got better . . . or worse. And if he didn't deal with this ticking time bomb in his past, he knew which direction he was going to put his money on. And he had his own future to plan for.
"I think we've made some progress today," Oriana said gently. "And now, our hour is up. Call me if you need me sooner, and we'll set something up. Otherwise, I'll see you next week."
Back home, Eric paced his apartment, a cup of tea in his hand. He felt restless and agitated, the way he always did after a particularly good—or bad—session with Oriana.
It was as if she'd opened a door in a wall, and things he hadn't thought about in years were boiling out. Sick, bad, frightening things.
But they had only as much power as he was willing to give them. Oriana had taught him that, had proved it to him over and over. Confront them; drag them into the light—painful as that was—and most of them would simply wither away.
He could do that now.
Inspiration struck, with a force that nearly made Eric drop his mug. So his past—his long-entombed image of his parents—was the root of his present problems, was it? Well, they'd just see about that. He'd confront his problem directly.
He'd confront his parents.
He'd been tying up all the loose ends of his life, hadn't he? Finishing up at Juilliard? Well, he'd been working his way backward to the beginning of his problems. That made sense, in a way. But now it was time to deal with the beginning.
Boston wasn't that far away—especially on his elvensteed Lady Day. He could get up there and back tomorrow, and it would be a good run for both of them.
Even though it had been twenty years by the world's time since he'd left, he was sure they were still in the same place. You didn't give up a house in Cambridge lightly, and they were both undoubtedly still at Harvard.
And if they had—unthinkably—moved, they wouldn't be that hard to find. Not with magic to help.
Determined on a course of action—if not in the least settled in his mind about it—Eric was about to go in search of another cup of tea when he heard a knock at his door.
He went to open it, without bothering to first perform the New York ritual dance of peering through the peephole. For that matter, his door had far fewer locks on it than the usual door in even the best neighborhoods. Eric lived in Guardian House, and the House had its own unique security systems.
Hosea was standing on the doorstep, which was pretty much whom Eric had expected to be there, given the time of day and day of the week it was. Everyone else he knew was either at their mundane jobs or in class.
"Come in," Eric said, stepping back. He knew Hosea wouldn't come around on a Monday unless it was for something important. Everyone who knew about his sessions with Oriana—and that was everyone close to him—knew to give him a little breathing room after them. Though from the look of him—Hosea was still dressed for the outside, and still had Jeanette slung over his shoulder—Hosea had come straight from the shelter with something serious on his mind.
"Tea?" Eric asked.
"If it's no trouble," Hosea said, and Eric went to get him a cup.
Hosea was sitting on the couch when Eric came back with two mugs of fresh tea. He was frowning at nothing, Jeanette propped against his knee, still in her case. Hosea was normally as sunny as a spring morning; this must be something bad, or at least pretty complicated.
The last thing in the world Eric wanted to do right now was think about somebody else's problems, but he forced himself to take a deep mental breath and turn his thoughts outward, away from his own troubles. Hosea was his apprentice. That meant Eric had responsibilities toward him.
Responsibilities. There was that word again. Life had been so much less complicated when he'd been irresponsible—
"Want to tell me about it?" he said, handing over the mug.
"It might be nothin' but a bag o' moonshine," Hosea said, after a long hesitation. "Ah don't rightly know."
But whatever it is, it was important enough for you to come by on a Monday, wasn't it?
"Well, maybe we can figure it out together," Eric said. "Right?"
Hosea grimaced, and took a deep breath, preparing to begin. Slowly he explained to Eric all that he'd pieced together about the Secret Stories that the children in the shelter told—and that it wasn't just the kids at Jacob Riis telling them, but children in every shelter Hosea visited, and that all the children seemed to know them. He explained about Bloody Mary, and how belief in her extended far beyond the very young children who believed in the Secret Stories—that, in fact, Hosea feared she might almost have an independent reality.
"So . . . one of the things Ah was wondering, Eric, was . . . is that possible?"
Eric considered, choosing his words carefully.
"Well, I know that belief can compel magic—or a creature of magic—to take a particular form. From what little Master Dharniel told me about the way humans and elves used to get along—or not get along, more to the point—together in the old days—the really old days—there used to be a whole school of human magic, now mostly lost, that could actually compel the Sidhe not only to appear, but to appear in certain forms. That's one thing. But it's not too likely that there's a Sidhe running around New York that somebody's twisted into a knot. Too much Cold Iron here—it weakens their magic, and makes it go all funny. They'd have to be seriously crazy in the first place—like Aerune was—to come here at all. And the creatures of magic that can stand up to Cold Iron aren't quite as vulnerable to the power of human belief.
"The other possibility is, if there's a pool of untapped power out there—and belief is power, if enough people believe hard enough, and you throw a few Talents into the mix—that much belief could take form and become what magicians call an Artificial Elemental."
"A mythago," Hosea said.
"You've been listening to Paul," Eric said with a faint grin. Paul Kern was the Guardians' researcher who, like Giles on Buffy, knew the pedigree and history of most of the Otherworldly threats the Guardians faced. "The label—ghost, mythago, Artificial Elemental—doesn't matter. What does matter is that as soon as it has any kind of a defined shape at all, it becomes a lot more efficient at absorbing belief energy and using it to define itself. It can begin to appear—manifest—and that, of course, encourages more and stronger belief, and sets up a whole feeding cycle. Hard to break, if it turns out to be something you don't happen to want around.
"So . . . yes, if your shelter kids are believing in something hard enough, it might start showing up. Might," Eric said firmly.
"Well . . . Ah'm not quite sure whether she is, or whether the gangs are jest ridin' on her coattails, so to speak. Either way, Ah'd like to do something about it. And it wouldn't hurt none to give the little'uns a hopeful spark in their lives," Hosea said thoughtfully.
"By making Bloody Mary a little less . . . bloody?" Eric suggested, thinking carefully. "That way she wouldn't be any more use to the gangs, and the children wouldn't have to be afraid of her any more. It would be a delicate task." He thought about it carefully. "In fact, it would be a Bardic sort of task. A perfect apprentice piece for you, in fact." Eric grinned wickedly, enjoying himself now as he thought the matter over more thoroughly.
"Why don't you write some songs—the kind that kids would sing themselves—that shape the Bloody Mary story toward a happy sort of ending? When you've got some that you think will work, show them to me so I can approve them as your great and powerful Bardic Master. Then you can start sneaking them out into the shelters and let them work their way out among the kids on their own."
Hosea thought about it for a moment and then smiled slowly.
"Now that's a right sneaky plan, Master Bard. And if it works, Bloody Mary will dry up and blow away on her own, and maybe the little'un's'll be able to conjure themselves up a bit o' help now and then," Hosea said thoughtfully.
"It's worth a try," Eric agreed.
Hosea finished his tea and set the cup down. "If you don't mind mah bringin' it up, Eric, you look like a feller with more'n usual on your mind tonight," he said hesitantly.
"And here I thought I was doing such a great job of being the original Great Stone Face," Eric said, with a rueful sigh.
Hosea raised an eyebrow and said nothing.
"Yeah, well," Eric said after a pause. There wasn't any reason not to tell Hosea where he was going, and several good reasons to come clean. "You know I saw Oriana today . . . and, well, I just realized I've got some major unfinished personal business to take care of, and school's over for a few weeks, so . . . tomorrow I'm going to go up to Boston. To see my parents."
There was a silence while Hosea digested this. "Don't they think you're dead?" he asked at last.
"Probably," Eric admitted. "Think what a great surprise it will be for them when I show up, then."
The anger in his voice surprised even him. And there it was, out in the open: at least part of his reason for going was the desire, still not dealt with or satisfied, to balance the pain of his childhood with hurting his parents back. It was something he'd have to keep an eye on. He couldn't afford to act out of either anger or malice. No Bard could.
Hosea said nothing. Eric had never talked about his family before; Hosea knew nothing of his past before his time as a street musician. For his part, Eric knew that Hosea had never known his own parents; they'd died when he was very young, but he'd been raised by his grandparents with a great deal of love. Eric wondered if Hosea could even imagine having parents who didn't love you.
Hosea let the moment pass without further comment, and moved on to practical matters. "Won't seeing them be a tad awkward? Won't they expect you to look older'n you do?"
Eric frowned. That was a detail he did have to work out.
"I'm not actually sure I expect them to notice, frankly. And if they do, a little glamourie will take care of that while I'm there, and afterward, they'll remember seeing what they expected to see. I walked out on them when I was eighteen. That was almost twenty years ago by the World's time. If I'd stayed in the World Above all that time I'd be—let me see—about thirty-six or seven by now? I look like I'm still in my twenties, and there are days when I feel like I'm about a thousand years old. . . ." Eric shrugged.
"Ah guess Ah'm not the man to change yore mind," Hosea said, getting to his feet, "but . . . are you sure you know what you're doing?" he asked.
That's a question I ask myself every day. "No," Eric admitted. "But I still think it's something I have to do."
"Well then," Hosea said, and he still didn't sound very certain about matters, "Ah guess Ah'll wish you good luck. And Ah'll see you when you get back?"
"Count on it," Eric said, feigning a cheerfulness he did not feel. "We'll go out and grab a couple of pizzas or something."
He wasn't all that surprised to receive another visitor as soon as it was fully dark. There was a tapping at the window, and then the sound of the casement being raised, and the clicking of stone hooves as his visitor clambered daintily over the sill.
"Eric me lad, are you quite sure you haven't lost the few marbles you still have rattling around in that pretty skull of yours?" Greystone said.
Greystone was an actual, genuine, medieval-style gargoyle, one of four that decorated the top of Guardian House. He had a fanged doglike face and curling horns, long apelike arms, and hindquarters like a satyr's, right down to the cloven hooves. Great bat wings lay against his back like furled umbrellas, and in defiance of all aerodynamic principles, they could actually be used for flight. Except for his big dark eyes, he was a uniform, textured grey all over, right down to the soot smudges and patches of lichen that came from being exposed to all the wind and weather of New York City since the day he'd been carved. And despite the fact that he lived and moved and talked, and certainly ate and drank with every evidence of enjoyment, Greystone, as his name implied, seemed to be made of solid stone. He'd been Eric's first friend in Guardian House, coming that first night to Eric's tentative Bardic request for a friend. And Greystone had been a good one ever since.
He was also an inveterate busybody, being privy to all the conversations that went on in Guardian House, as well as most of the surface thoughts of the inhabitants, though he never gossiped, and didn't abuse the privilege that went with his power.
"Pretty sure," Eric said. "Popcorn and a movie?" Both were good ways to distract Greystone, he'd found; though the gargoyle could hear any movie the inhabitants ran anywhere in Guardian House, until Eric had invited him inside on his first night here, Greystone had never had a chance to watch any of them, and the chance to see the movies at last that he'd only heard for so long fascinated him.
"If that's what you're offering, laddybuck, I'll be pleased to accept. But I'll choose the movie."
Pleased to have gotten off so easily from what had looked to be shaping up to be a stern lecture, Eric went off to pop some popcorn while Greystone inspected Eric's daily-growing DVD collection.
But Eric was not to escape so easily. Halfway through The Thomas Crown Affair, Greystone returned to the subject he wanted to discuss.
"And that lady alienist. What does she think of this daft notion of yours?"
Sometimes Greystone's terminology was decades out of date—intentionally so, Eric was sure. Psychiatrists hadn't been called "alienists" for at least eighty years. "I haven't mentioned it to her."
Greystone snorted. "Nae doot she'd think it a fine idea."
"You're accent's slipping. And as a matter of fact, she would," Eric said, mentally crossing his fingers. She'd said he needed to deal with the issues of his childhood. She hadn't necessarily said he should pay his parents a visit.
Greystone made a rude face, something the gargoyle's carven apelike face was wonderfully well designed to do. "The young! Have they no respect for tradition, then? It's cruising for a bruising, plain and simple—and you of all people, Underhill's Bard, should know that!"
Eric turned to Greystone, studying him in puzzlement. He knew that going home again—not that it had ever been home, not really—was fraught with hidden land mines, but Greystone seemed to have something specific in mind.
Greystone sighed, and seemed to resign himself to putting all his cards on the table and speaking plainly.
"Going home. Going back to your mortal family. Seeing your parents again, after a sojourn in Elven Lands. It never turns out well, at least according to all the old songs."
Eric regarded Greystone. That aspect of things hadn't occurred to him.
What if the old ballads were right?