Radioman (A 2/19th Spinoff) - Complete

A Leather Pouch

She stood there, staring at me in the rain, her eyes slightly too large for her angular face, her jawbone slightly too long, her chin a little too pointed. Her face was inhuman, close enough that my brain recognized her as a person, could tell her features, but it was still inhuman.

Aine's mother. Tauth du Aine.

"Of course, mother of the love of my heart," I said softly. Hannah had been careful to tell me how to address her mother in case we met her in the woods someday. I stepped aside and she moved slowly into the room. Her walk was sinuous, like her spine was made of something far more flexible than bone. Her hips swiveled as she walked, making her bare buttocks lift and dance, flexing and relaxing. I shut the door quietly, ignoring the green eyes of hounds on my lawn that I could see nothing more than shadows of.

...be very very careful, my Paul...

The voice gave me an unneeded warning, since the sight of Matron Aine walking over to the kitchen table made my mouth go dry, my balls try to pull back up into my abdomen, and my hands tremble slightly.

...Stillwater, you mad-man...

He'd released her, an ancient forest-fey dreaming she was a mortal woman, into the wilds of North America, and now she was here, in Kansas, in my kitchen.

She waited by the chair and I hurried over to pull it out from the table.

Matron Aine's movements were regal as she sat down and relaxed, letting me push her chair in at the table. She was light, as if she weighed no more than some berry brambles.

It made the fear bubble inside that dark emptiness that normally filled me.

"Some tea, if you would, Paul," She said gently, her long fingers, with an extra joint in them, reached out and tapped a leather bag stitched with patterns and decorated with beads. "Just dump it into the cup, young one."

The pouch was warm in my hand and I ignored the feeling that the leather was alien.

Or maybe not as alien as I'd hoped.

The water rushed into the teapot before I set it on the stove and turned the burner on high. I turned around and looked at Matron Aine, who was staring at me, the hair that framed her face moving slightly as if a breeze was tickling it.

"You are not what I expected," Matron Aine said softly, reaching up with her fingers to take a lock of hair and move it to her mouth so she could nibble on the ends, "I am surprised."

"By what?" I asked, my stomach clenching at the challenging tone that entered my voice.

Matron Aine laughed out loud at that, a rich thick thing that held the laughs of other people, or maybe just other versions of her, laughter that filled the kitchen and made it smell of huckleberries.

"Perhaps I should not have been. I can feel Aodan all over you, see where he has tempered the iron that had been rusting inside of you into bright sharp steel," She grew serious. "I can feel my willful and defiant daughter on you, taste her soul twining with yours, and see her perfume on your skin."

The sound of her voice had gone from one woman to that of a chorus of women. Some old, impossibly ancient, others young and prepubescent, still others mature women.

...never run from an immortal, it only attracts their attention...

Stillwater's voice, and Cromwell's strangely enough.

"She resides within my heart," I said carefully. "Love blossomed on the foundation of the blood we shared in a cold dark place."

"A place she should not have been," Tauth du Aine answered, her voice still choral. Her hands reached out over the table, the extra finger joint very obvious, her fingernails more like razor sharp talons.