The Changeling Bride Read online

  She had kept her, though, and rearranged her life to suit Tatiana. She had found an apartment she could barely afford, one that not only allowed dogs but was right next to a forested park where Tatiana could run off the leash. Her consequently reduced finances had meant taking the bus to work and no cable television, but she admitted those changes were probably for the best. She also now got exercise whether she wanted it or not; mornings and late afternoons found her outside with a Frisbee or ball, doing anything to help Tatiana burn off energy.

  She shed her parka and shoes, and walked through the apartment to the sliding glass doors that looked out on the forested park. Tatiana shoved rudely at her legs, wanting out, and when Elle slid open the door the dog squeezed past her, zipping off down the narrow apartment complex lawn and back again. Elle stood and watched, a smile on her lips that had been in absence most of the day.

  The phone just inside the door rang, making her jump. Her face scrunched in annoyance as she went back inside to answer it. It was probably either Jeff or a telemarketer, neither of whom she wanted to talk to.

  “Hello?”

  “Ellie! Glad I caught you,” Jeff’s persistently cheerful voice was dulled by the buzz of a car phone. “Tina wanted me to call and ask you over to dinner tonight. I can pick you up on my way—I’m about fifteen minutes from your place as I speak.”

  “I was just going to give Tatiana her walk. Can we make it some other time? She hasn’t been out all day.”

  “No problem, bring her along. You can walk her before dinner. After, too, if you eat too much, ha ha. Can’t let you get fat on us, or we’ll never find you a husband.”

  “Yeah, right. Look, Jeff, I’m just in a really bad mood tonight.” She watched Tatiana through the door, sniffing around, hot on the trail of some rodent. The rain had lightened to a soft drizzle, and although the woods were gloomy beneath the trees, they still called to her.

  “That’s because you don’t get out enough. What’s the matter, you forget how to be sociable? It won’t kill you to make an effort. Tina’s feelings will be hurt if you don’t come, and you know the kids adore you.”

  “Jeff . . .”

  “C’mon, Ellie. For me?”

  “Oh, fine. I’ll come, but you have to promise to have me home by nine.”

  “No problemo.”

  Elle hung up and gave a snort of frustration with herself. When would she learn to say no? Giving in seemed to be what she did best.

  Forty minutes later she and Tatiana unloaded themselves from Jeff’s Ford Taurus in the driveway of his suburban home. The house was a variation on the same theme as all the others in the development: white plastic-latticed windows and neutral-colored siding, and a bay window beside the front door looking out on a patch of too-green lawn lined with bark dust and azaleas.

  An unfamiliar car—an Escort with alloy wheels and a spoiler on its hatchback—was parked along the curb in front.

  “Another guest?” Elle asked.

  “Just Toby from work. You’ve heard me talk about him, haven’t you?”

  “Toby, as in single Toby? As in, ‘Elle, why don’t you go out with this great guy I know’ Toby?”

  “That’s the one.” Jeff gave his trademark grin.

  Elle felt her stomach go hollow. Not again. “Jeff, what did I say last time? I thought you agreed to stop doing this.”

  “But maybe you’ll like this one.” He put his arm around her shoulders. “I just want to see you happy, you know that.”

  The front door opened and Tina came out onto the top step, the newest addition to the horde nestled against her shoulder.

  “Ellie, how nice to see you. We have a special guest tonight, who came just to meet you.” She paused, taking in Elle’s apparel. “I wish you’d dressed a little more attractively. . . . We’ll just have to tell Toby you clean up good,” she said, smiling.

  Elle cringed, aware that her makeup was creased and oily on her face and that the grubby comfort clothes she had changed into were covered in dog hair and gave her the shape of a coffee can. The sweatshirt ended at her hips, and the leggings she wore beneath showed every pound of rump and thigh.

  “Toby!” Tina called back into the house. “Toby! Come out and meet Jeff’s little sister, Ellie.”

  The day was not improving with age.

  Three hours later, with one of Tina’s hamburger casseroles burbling unhappily in her stomach, Elle decided it was past time to go home. Toby was not bad-looking, but he took her quiet for an invitation to spout opinions on the Way Life Ought to Be, opinions with all the depth of thought, compassion, and factual accuracy of a Rush Limbaugh broadcast.

  She made a show of looking at her watch, then sucked in her breath in false dismay. “Jeff, it’s past nine. God, I’d really love to stay longer and chat, but I’ve got to get up early tomorrow.”

  “I could give you a lift home,” Toby offered.

  “Oh, really, that isn’t necessary. I wouldn’t want to make you go out of your way.”

  Toby pooh-poohed her protestations, seconded by Jeff, and minutes later Elle found herself out the door and on the way to the Escort, Tatiana trotting ahead onto the lawn, there to do her part in altering the uniform verdancy of the grass.

  She felt a moment of malicious delight when she saw it dawn on Toby that Tatiana—fluffy, white, shedding Tatiana—would be riding in his precious car. She waited on the curb as he hastily flung borrowed newspapers over the small backseat in a desperate attempt to save his upholstery.

  Toby’s verbosity died a slow death on the ride home as Tatiana repeatedly attempted to crawl between them into the front seat, panted hotly in his ear, and drooled on his shoulder, and then, when forced to stay in back, drowned out his voice with the loud rustling and tearing of newspaper as she tore up and rearranged his improvised upholstery covers. She eventually settled down with a sigh and a final scrunching of paper, resting her muzzle on her paws and regarding the back of the seat with what Elle was sure was a profound disappointment at this sorry state of affairs.

  Moments later the car filled with the stench of canine intestinal gas.

  “Jesus H. Christ!” Toby swore, furiously rolling down his window. “Can’t you teach that friggin’ mutt some manners?”

  “Tatiana is a perfectly well-mannered dog,” Elle replied haughtily, her chin lifted. Insult her dog, would he? “She is not a mutt, either: She’s a purebred Samoyed, and some would consider it an honor to be in her presence, flatulent or not.”

  Toby turned to glare at her incredulously, finally at a loss for words, then turned back to watching the road, his shoulders hunched in anger.

  He did not so much as wish her a good night when he dropped her off outside her apartment, and then drove off with an unnecessary squeal of tires. Despite how little she had liked him, she felt a sense of depression descend on her as the car’s taillights disappeared around the corner.

  “Maybe there’s something wrong with me,” she said to Tatiana. “The problem can’t always be with the guy, can it?”

  She let herself into her apartment, too distracted to feel the green eyes that followed her every movement from the shadows beyond the parking lot. She would not have slept as well as she had that night if she had known how long those eyes kept watch.

  Chapter Two

  Elle lay in bed Saturday morning, staring at the ceiling and wondering if she should get up. A splatter of rain hit the window, and she turned to gaze out at skies dark with clouds.

  It had been four days since the surprise blind date with toady Toby. Jeff had given him her number, and much to her distress, he had called twice, apparently finding no need to apologize for his behavior in the car. Maybe he was waiting for her to apologize.

  She wanted to strangle Jeff for giving out her number, but she knew that her brother just wanted for her what he had—a spouse and kids and a two-car garage. She wondered sometimes, though, if she would ever find happiness through conventional routes.

  “It’s a m
alaise of the spirit, Tatiana, that’s what it is.”

  Tatiana lifted her head off the bed and thumped her tail once uncertainly.

  “Shall I expire of ennui? Is that how I’ll go?” She pressed the back of her wrist against her forehead in a fainting pose. “Alone, nothing to show for my twenty-five years, in a dim little apartment I can’t afford, with no one to mourn my loss? Do I sound melodramatic?”

  Tatiana’s tail thumped more rapidly, and her jaws opened in a soft pant.

  Elle rolled out of bed and went to take a shower, scratching at her scalp on the way. When she was a child her hair had been the color of a bright new penny, but by the time she began to come to terms with that misfortune, nature had dulled the shade, as if hair, like copper, could tarnish. Her freckles, too, had faded with age, although perhaps that was a result of sunscreen, and summers spent indoors rather than out in the fields chasing crickets and dragonflies. Her eyes tilted up a bit at the corners and were a deep rich hazel, a striated mix of green and brown.

  She soaped up in the shower and wondered for the thousandth time if she should start that diet she was always planning. It was only when trying on new clothes in the hideous glare of dressing-room lights that her weight truly bothered her. It was depressing to stand in one’s underwear, getting that unfamiliar backside view, noticing anew the way her bottom and hips were padded with fat. Her bustline was unremarkable, usually set to disadvantage by a bra turned gray with age, the little satin bow between her breasts hanging crookedly by a final thread.

  If she stayed away from fashion magazines, she could almost believe what a friend had once told her—and even take it as a compliment—that she had the figure of a Greek statue, symmetrical and proportionate, devoid of the overstated breasts and starved hips that populated advertisements. The friend had gone on to say that her face fit that description as well, for surely a strong nose such as hers was not fashionable today, but perhaps a few millennia ago, it and the rest of her face would have served as a model for Athena or Aphrodite. Elle liked to think so, but knew it wouldn’t do her much good until she met a man who, upon setting eyes upon a museum statue of a Greek goddess, refrained from commenting on what a cow the goddess was.

  She dried her celestial frame and dressed in mundane jeans and T-shirt, a goddess masquerading as merely mortal. She found a half-stale bagel and toasted it for breakfast, then ate it while standing at the kitchen counter contemplating the bunch of overripe bananas in her fruit bowl. Another Saturday, she mused, in the thrilling life of Wilhelmina March.

  Elle pulled her parka hood over her head and stepped off her patio onto the squishy wet grass. Tatiana raced ahead, her white fur the only spot of brightness in the rain-drenched landscape.

  Elle trudged along behind her, following her up the path that led into the woods. Mud sucked at her hiking boots and slid underfoot, and her breath was loud in her ears. If it weren’t for Tatiana, she’d spend the day under a quilt on the couch, a book in one hand, a bowl of Hershey’s Kisses in the other, banana bread in the oven.

  Once under the canopy of evergreens, her mood lightened. There was nothing here to remind her that her student loan payments had doubled last month, or that it would be another ten years before she could even start to think about saving money to buy the bed-and-breakfast that was her vague dream for the future. No reminders of her dismal romantic life, either.

  Tatiana crashed and bounded through the low-growing Oregon grape, collecting burrs in her long fur, her paws black with mud. Elle wished she could be equally as enthusiastic about exercise.

  After trudging uphill through the mud for another ten minutes, she stopped to catch her breath, breathing heavily in the quiet. The hairs on the back of her neck started to rise, the feeling of being watched suddenly overwhelming her. She spun around, her heart in her throat, but all that faced her were trees and undergrowth, dripping and silent. Tatiana had disappeared.

  “Tatiana! Here, girl!” she called, slapping her thigh with one hand. “Tatiana!”

  She heard a “woof” from somewhere above her on the hill, followed by a chain of excited barks. There was a crashing in the undergrowth, then more barking. Elle felt a chill of adrenaline wash over her, her heart beating hard. Someone or something was watching her, she could feel it.

  “Tatiana!” she called again, her voice quavering up a half octave. A squirrel suddenly chittered angrily from the branches of a tree up the hill, and then Tatiana bounded into view.

  Elle let out a shaky breath. Just a squirrel. There was no one here, nothing to be afraid of. She tried to shrug off the sense of being observed, of not being alone. “Don’t disappear again, okay?” she told the dog. As lousy a bodyguard as Tatiana was, she did make Elle feel safe in the woods. She trusted Tatiana’s ears and nose, and was less likely to talk herself into believing she was being stalked by a mountain lion, or that a gang of teenage boys was waiting around the next bend to attack her, if she had Tatiana romping along beside her, unconcerned.

  The path continued up the hill in a series of long switchbacks, then meandered over and around the connecting hills. Elle gradually relaxed as she walked, squishing contentedly through the mud. She shoved her hands into her parka pockets, her fingers encountering loose coins and Kleenex. In her right pocket was a stiff piece of paper. She pulled it out.

  The bright pink color stirred her memory. The old woman on the bus. Idly curious, she unfolded it as she walked, then stood still to read it. There were hearts drawn around the border, and in the middle was written: COUPON GOOD FOR: ONE FREE HUSBAND. And in small print on the bottom, REDEEM AT WILL. The cheap black ink had worn off in the folds.

  So much for no reminders of her romantic life. She turned the coupon over. The back was blank. It sounded like one of those 1-900 chat lines where women talk for free, only the idiots who’d made the coupon had forgotten to include the phone number. She laughed at the absurdity of it.

  She resumed trudging along the trail, fiddling with the paper as she walked. It had been three years since her last serious relationship had ended in a glorious blaze of agony, and it was beginning to seem possible that she might never marry. She didn’t want to be a spinster aunt, though, devoted to her dog, invited over to Jeff’s house for Easter and Thanksgiving and Christmas, the family being careful to include her so she wouldn’t feel as lonely and pathetic as she was.

  She was also, she admitted to herself, getting tired of doing everything alone, and getting tired of hoping that she might meet the right man. There were times at the grocery store when she would pass by the bridal magazines and be unable to resist thumbing through the pages, imagining a fairy-tale wedding of her own. Maybe that was why she wasn’t more adamant with Jeff about the blind dates.

  The perfect marriage, she mused, was an arranged marriage. No emotional agonies, just a commitment to a partnership with a firm basis in financial stability. The divorce rate was proof enough that marriages based solely on love led primarily to misery.

  She stopped again and thrust the coupon into the air. “I’m redeeming my coupon!” she said to the towering Douglas firs. “I want my free husband. Give me a man who is civilized, owns a very big house, and doesn’t expect me to dote on him.” The trees dripped in response. She tilted her head back, looking up into the dark, greenish-black branches, the hood of her parka sliding off. “Do you hear me?”

  Drops plopped on her face, making her blink. She lowered her head and pulled the hood back up. She gave the paper another little shake at the forested gloom. Nothing happened. Quiet and solitude surrounded her. The trees appeared unimpressed.

  “See, Tatiana? Nothing.” She turned to look up the side of the hill, to where Tatiana had been digging near a fern, and gasped. A human face was staring back at her. He was no more than fifteen feet away, perched on the hillside, dressed in rags, his hair wild. Tatiana was beside him, sniffing curiously at his sleeve. Elle felt the panic flush through her, her skin tingling, her ears pricking in an atavistic response
to danger.

  His eyes met and held hers, and then she felt a tingle in the fingertips that held the coupon. She glanced down and saw the paper dissolve into shimmering pinpricks of light. Her eyes raised quickly to his, her lips open, her body cold with fright.

  “She wants him,” the man pronounced.

  “Oh, yes,” came a high voice off to Elle’s left.

  “Indeed, she’s willing; she agreed!” came another from behind her.

  She turned quickly to each of the voices, finding herself surrounded by derelicts, male and female, filthy and decayed. Her glance skipped from one to the other. With a sense of unreality she recognized the old woman from the bus, and then the man who’d followed her on the street. Their eyes were all the same glowing yellow-green.

  “She agrees,” one said, the phrase repeated by another, and then yet another.

  “She agrees, agrees, agrees,” they chorused, their voices filling her head—echoing, ringing—dizzying her. She couldn’t focus her eyes, her sense of balance was failing . . . and then the voices stopped.

  Elle staggered, and her eyes cleared. She was alone in the forest. She took a deep breath, quivering. Tatiana sniffed at the space where the man had been.

  A rumbling roar sounded from the hill that rose above her. She snapped her head up. Trees shifted. The hillside looked like it was coming towards her for a moment, trees and ferns and all, and then it stumbled, turning over on itself, becoming a wave of dirt and rock and falling trees, and she screamed. The wave washed over Tatiana, pulled her under in a flash of white, then hit Elle with such force that she knew only blackness.

  Chapter Three

  Elle woke to hands tugging at her clothes, stripping her. Her eyes opened to dim phosphorescent light glowing from the walls of a narrow cave. The hands belonged to dainty, fairylike men and women, their hair wild and uncombed, wearing filmy shifts that floated about them in the cool draft than blew through the cave.