Roadside Magic Read Online Free

hunters she would have to worry about.
    More scritch-scratching, and a desire to laugh rose in Robin’s throat, killed a-borning by the discipline of breath. The music under her thoughts took on a sonorous dissonance.
Who is that nibbling at my house?
    Only the wind
, she replied silently,
the child of heaven
. Mortals never realized how much truth was in the old tales. Sometimes they slipped through into the sideways realms—mostly children, but also adults who had not lost the habit of seeing. Usually a swift death awaited them, or a return to the mortal world full of slow, lingering illness, not realizing what they pined for. A few survived somewhat unscathed, and their stories passed into myth and child’s tale, warning and dream.
    Her gaze traveled across the bedroom, to the neat dresser and the invitation-card with its tinsel. She ghosted across cheap carpet, still listening to the scratches. Mortals did not bury iron under their doorsteps anymore, or nail up horseshoes to bar ill-wishing. There was salt in the kitchen; she could have poured thin lines over every windowsill and doorstep, but that would simply tell any passerby that someone wished to guard something of value.
    Sidhe were a curious, curious folk. Always peering and poking, prying and noticing.
    Soft padding footsteps. More scratching. How many of them? Why had they not broken in already to lay waste to flesh and trailer alike? She was an ill guest indeed, bringing destruction to such a neat, humble home.
    The wedding invitation was heavy paper, and inside, written with purple ink under the printed date and time, was a round childish hand:
Uncle Eddie, you’d better be there to give me away! Love, Kara.
The moonglow tinsel on the card unraveled under Robin’s quick fingers, whispered chantment dropping from her lips. The Old Language slipped and slithered between the strands, the pins and needles of Realmaking spreading into her palms.
    Realmaking was precious, but it required something to begin with. She could not simply spin chantment out of empty air; that was a fullblood’s trick. When given something, though, she could make something
else
, something that wouldn’t fade into leaf and twig come daybreak. It was strange that a tinge of perishable mortal in one’s blood was necessary for Realmaking. They were rare, those architects of the fully real, and no fullblood, highborn or low, had ever been among their number.
    A flick of the wrist, another, silver glitters attaching to her fingertips. A full complement of ten, and a swift lance of pain through her temples as a jolting impact crashed into the side of the trailer, rocking it on its foundations.
    What in Stone’s name is that?
She skipped down the hall, past the tiny scrubbed-clean bathroom with its strangely unsmelly litter box. Her shoes lightened, their chantments waking, too, as she called upon speed and lightfoot, and by the time the living room window shattered she was in the kitchen, her fingernails throwing hard, sharp darts of hungry moonlight as she tweezed open the cabinet near the oven. A blue canister of salt was tucked behind other spices. Her hand darted in and thesmall bottles and cans holding pepper, garlic, onion salt, oregano, thyme, all swept out in a jumbled mass, falling like rain, shattering and spilling their fragrant cargo. She whirled, and it was not as bad as it could have been.
    Not barrow-wights, with their subtly wrong, noseless faces and their strangler’s fingers dripping with gold leached of its daylight luster. Not fullborn knights, either, or Unwinter’s narrow-nosed, leaping dogs with their needle-teeth. Instead, it was two lean, graceful drow and a woodwight, accompanied by a looming silver-necklaced shadow that chilled her clear through until she realized it was a stonetroll on a moonfire leash, making a low, unhappy grumbling sound as one of the drow poked it with a silvertipped stick.
    None of them were familiar from song or rumor, or known to her.