“You managed to get those?” I asked, incredulously.
“Hey, it’s what we went for. I don’t know if I grabbed the right sizes, though.”
We both looked at the fey, whose grin widened. But he only said: “There are enchantments for that. And in any case, the ladies appear to have…come prepared.”
“Well, have fun,” I told him.
His smile was blinding. “I shall.”
He left and Ray dragged his two-inch captive over to the chessboard. “They creep me out,” he told me in a low voice, after a moment.
“Who?”
“The fey. Always did. ‘New personality’ my ass.”
“They’re okay,” I said, because it was true, and because I wouldn’t put it past those ears to still be able to hear us. “What are you doing?” I asked, watching him struggle to stuff his prisoner into the felt-lined indentation.
“Putting him back!” he said, as the wild man popped up again, mad as hell. Ray had confiscated the sword, but his prisoner was resourceful. And bit the end of his thumb.
“Son of a—”
“That won’t work,” I told him, as Ray pushed the squirming thing down again and fitted the plastic cover on top. It was clear and molded to the shape of the pieces, which left the little guy effectively trapped. Until he wormed a knife out of his boot and started sawing away at it.
“Why is he doing that?” Ray demanded.
“He doesn’t turn off anymore.”
“What? Not at all?”
I shook my head. “It’s why we usually leave the game out. The boys like for him to have company.”
“Then why didn’t you say so?” he demanded.
Because I didn’t think you’d care about a child’s toy, I didn’t say, helping Ray remove my dishes so he could set the game up again on the table.
We finished and he went to nurse his wounds on the swing. The pieces were back to exploring their little world, which I guess was what Faerie looked like. Or at least the part Olga was from. The board had started out a plain old chess type, if oversize
d. But the familiar checkerboard was invisible now, overgrown by grass and trees and caves and a miniature stream.
The whole setting was too big to fit on the board, so the scenery changed as they moved around, setting up ambushes and defensive positions, polishing armor and weapons, or just squatting on a rock, in the case of the wild man. Some of the other little ogres were starting a campfire over by a copse of trees, and they kept shooting him looks, but he didn’t appear to notice. He was too busy staring at the sky.
“They don’t seem like much company to me,” Ray said, watching the scene. “Look—they don’t like him now.”
“I don’t think that’s the problem,” I murmured.
What was it Plato had said? Something about a bunch of guys born in a cave, who had never seen the outside world. Just shadows of things reflected on the walls sometimes, distorted and unreal. Until one of them broke out one day, and started exploring a larger world. He could go back to his old life, but he wasn’t the same person anymore.
His world had gotten bigger, and things were never going to be quite the same again.
But Ray didn’t agree. “Naw, he’s different now,” he told me. “People don’t like different.”
There was something in his tone that made me look up. He was draped over the seat, wrapped in gloom since the porch light wasn’t on and the light from the house had diminished, thanks to someone shutting off the fixture in the hall. The main illumination came from the lanterns the fey had lit around camp, just little pinpricks in the darkness, and the flickering blue-white of the cartoon channel from the living room that nobody had bothered to turn off.
He’d lit a cigarette, and with just the reddened end lighting up his face, he should have looked sinister. But Ray’s features just didn’t run to it. The eyes were too big and too blue and too oddly guileless. The cheeks were too round, and the chin was tilted just a bit too defiantly outward. Like he expected to get belted at any moment, but wasn’t going to duck his head anyway.
It was the face of a guy who’d been beaten up before and who had every expectation of being beaten up again, but who wasn’t going to cower. And he’d had plenty of opportunities to learn. I didn’t know a lot about his background, but I knew enough to guess that he hadn’t found the vampire lifestyle to be all fun and games.
He’d been born the half-breed son of a Dutch sailor and an Indonesian village woman during the bad old days of colonialism. The sailor had decamped before Ray made an appearance and his mother had died when he was a teenager. Leaving him a blue-eyed freak among the villagers, and one who reminded people a bit too much of their hated colonial masters.