She ran, clanking. Ping, grind, huff of breath. Muscles popped and stretched in her legs. She ran, unknowing to nowhere with a tickle of fear fading in the back of her brain and an exhilaration pounding up from pounding feet. She only stopped because she reached the edge. A skidding grind to a hault and her body teetered over the rooftop. Below there was a receding line of windows and slapping laundry hung to dry strung out between the brick-slab buildings.
Now what?
After much confusion with the law, a doctor brought in, and a sorcerer consulted, a place was found to send her to.The carriage let her out at 156 East Street. A hedged-in walk lead up to a black iron fence, and the black iron fence lead onto a stone path which lead right up to the front door. It had a knocker that was brass. She gave it two good slams and waited, shifting her feet on the walkway with little metallic tappings.
The butler directed her into the center of the building, huge as a church, with rainbow glass and arched ceilings. An old woman knitted in a chair before two wide open doors that led to a garden. She was dressed in a housecoat and slippers and, at the sight of the girl with her wind-crazy hair, began tattering on about taking a seat and getting the poor girl a glass of tea and a sandwich.
Seated, munching, sipping, the girl finally got the words out that were waiting to be spoken. “Is this my home, then?”
Well, no it wasn’t—but it would be for the time being as the old woman (name—Mindy Warrant) had experience with such people as herself.
“Constable told me they found you running on rooftops, trapeze’ing it across laundry lines, risking life and limb. Why, those are odd shoes!”
This is what led to her finally having them off. It took harking and carrying on. Eventually three big boys, men if you were being generous, came stomping down the great stairs, then scattered off left and right for tools. There were sparks and curses and hair flopped over brows brushing at her legs, before the first shoe fell off with an angry squeal, cracking the pretty tile of the floor into shards.
“Would you look at that? It’s metal through and through! Heavier than a bowling ball,” said one of them, holding up the shoe— black as sin, pointed of toe, slim as a lady’s evening slipper.
“However did she walk in these?”
“Walk? I heard she ran. I heard she jumped, even.”
The boys, all three of them, turned and regarded her with wondering expressions.
“Stop staring and have the other one off her!” snapped Mindy, slapping at all three and sending the loose skin of her underarm flapping.
The other shoe came off more gently. When they snatched it from her naked foot, one brother stayed behind and gently examined her, but the foot itself was nothing special. She looked from boy to boy as they debated, gestured with her black boots as heavy as stones, shoved wiggling fingers inside, and cast their eyes suspiciously in her direction. Her foot remained hung across two pieces of furniture in warm hands.
“Do you remember anything?” Mindy’s smile was kind but disappeared quickly when she caught sight of the girl’s tawny foot held, still, in a gentle grip. She slapped at the boy’s arm till he came to from some distant thoughts and let her go. Then with her owl eyes blinking behind spectacles, the old woman asked again, “Do you remember, girl?”
“I remember running,” Her bare feet, free now of all touch but the air, twitched on the tiles fast as a flash. “I remember running towards the sun.”
Her name, then or now, was Katherine. The boys called her Kate. They were Peter, Jasper, and Lore. Not brothers by blood, but orphans scooped up and brought to the old woman at 156 East Street for keeping. Peter was a grown-up changeling—found out by his parents and put out on the streets with no way of getting home to the forest. His skin was tinged with a shade of mint, his ears like arrow points, and his words often jumped into song. He and Kate would race up and down the stairs till one grew tired. Kate, fast as a whiplash, beat him every time.
Jasper was undead. He was cold, pale as milk, and the flesh had worn off his fingers at the tips, so he went about in gloves. Besides that, he seemed almost alive. He had no fancy of the afterlife. An accident when his father was messing about in his laboratory made it so he never had to go.
Lore had probably come about the same as she, yanked out of the farther lands and tossed onto some ship to spice up circus acts. At least, that was the current theory. There wasn’t much special about him that she could tell, except that he asked to have her metal shoes. Having no liking of them herself, she let them go.
When they went out on market day they wore robes and hoods to hide in. Kate’s golden hued skin did not draw much attention, but she felt badly that Jasper and Peter had to wear the hot, stuffy robes so she wore one also. Mindy said that most folk couldn’t make sense of such interesting people and that not making sense drove many to anger. They were whispered about while their backs were turned.
They didn’t much mind having to hide under the heavy robes and made games of it. Maybe they were assassins today, or pirates from the further land. Maybe they were bandits, thieves, folk of great renown hiding from adoring fans.
Lore, like Kate, never had to cover up. Though he wore the robes, he kept his head out and his hair in the wind. They thought him quite full of himself and made faces when his back was turned until, becoming angry, he looked less than human and had to hide his face, just like the rest of them.
Time passed. Peter took to asking Kate to pose for the shudder click of the camera. She did so barebacked, her brown spotted skin cast in shades of grey before a fountain in the garden. Peter wondered if the spots followed her spine to her buttocks and slipped down her muscled thighs.
Jasper wanted to see just how fast Kate could run and suggested she do so with no clothing on up and down the carpeted halls of the west wing. She said she’d only do it the night of the new moon and he’d know she’d reached the end because she’d tap her hand twice on the far wall. This done, he knew it took her only three count: faster than a bird swoop, faster than a trolley car on the tracks, faster than anything he knew. He also found that his undead eyes were horrible in the dark. He caught nothing but the white blur of her front and the puzzle piece pattern of her tawny skin around the tea stain spotting of her back.
Lore turned his face away from her when she spoke and took to walking apart from them without his market day robes when they went out into the streets. Kate began to want what she could not have.
“Do you still have those metal boots of mine?” Kate asked one day over breakfast.
“Somewhere,” Lore growled with a glare.
“If he can even find it in that mess!” snapped Peter.
“Boys,” cautioned Mindy.
“I thought I told you to stay out of my room, Pete.” Lore’s nostrils flared and smoke seethed out. He always did have a rotten temper.
Kate had never been in his room—had never been in the wing where the boys stayed, actually. The house was big enough that they had plenty of room to roam without hiding away in bed chambers.
“Lore’s room is a mess?” Kate was incredulous. Lore was always a tidy person, his hair and face immaculate, his clothing without a wrinkle.
“Yes, and the loon keeps everything,” Jasper added with a smirk.
“I must see this.”
“No, Kate. Stay out of my room.”
But she was already gone—a blur of movement, a waving door slamming shut, a burst of wind that sent papers sailing through the air and pulled the rollers out of Mindy’s hair,.
Which door was it? She opened and shut them quick as a blink and ran lightly down the hall almost flying. Ah, this must be it. Why, it was a junkyard! She tripped and went sailing into the air, arms pinwheeling, launched over old lamps, marble busts, pillows covered in jewelry, jewels, coins. He must be rich! One naked foot settled down and she spun lightly, leapt up and over paintings and books in towering piles.
Did he still have those nasty boots? The ones that had slowed her down? Pulled at her flashing, quick fire feet like rocks melded to her heels. She would find them before he could say boo. Once they had popped into her mind, she knew she had to have them fierce as an itch in the center of her back just out of reach. She couldn’t explain it to herself any better than that. Her head jerked around like a hummingbird in flight searching for a wink of metal, a familiar steel curve, a ruddy hint of copper.
There was a roar that shook the very walls and she froze, hair standing on end, perched on her tip toes upon the bed. The door slammed open and shut, cutting off a frightening squeak that must be Peter. Lore stood against it shaking with rage. Smoke poured out of his ears and mouth like he was on fire inside.
“I’m sorry, Lore. I was just curious. I shouldn’t have come into your room. I understand. I was wrong.” She hopped in place with nervous energy.
“You’ve made a mistake, Kate.” He leapt, books crashing down with fluttering pages. Some knocked into the plaster with such force that cracks ran up and down the walls.
She shrieked and took off to his right, tripping in a pile of coins that sprayed out in a tinkle, crashing down on jewels that bruised her shins. She heard him grunt and land behind her, felt a hand scrabble at her back, and she was off towards the door skipping around towering piles. Then he had her ankle, strong. She was caught, pulled back, dragged over a painting that she tore at with her nails, cutting a garden scene to shreds. She bumped over bolts of cloth and rolled over scroll cases.
“Lore? Kate? What is going on in there? You both come out this instant!” Mindy pounded at the door.
“He’s gone mad, completely loony!” It was Peter’s frustrated voice. “He punched me square in the chest!”
“Maybe now you will believe me. I told you, Pete. I told you he almost ripped off my arm when I went in to see if he had a nice coat I could borrow. Two more seconds and I would have been Jasper One-arm. You know I don’t heal at all now.”
“Lore. Kate. You both come out this instant. It isn’t proper for a girl and boy your age to be alone like this.”
Lore had pulled her halfway across the room and with a heave, tossed her onto the bed. He crouched over her, holding her in place with his eyes gone red as fire and stinking like a blaze. His clothes were starting to blacken.
It was then she felt them—cold metal, layered and bent. The metal boots propped toe to heel on the end table under the lamp. She snatched them up with one hand, clanging like cymbals, rolled quick as a breath, darted, leapt, and was slowed only by opening the door. It took Lore in the shoulder and shattered into kindling. She was down the hall clutching the heavy weight of the metal shoes to her chest and remembering, remembering running back and back and on.
“You run too fast. You’ll run right into trouble.” Two boots red as flame with sparks shooting off plucked out of the fire and the hiss-spat of the bellows. Hiss and a thick steam spewing up from the water and out they came, wet. “It’s the curse you were given, miss, and a blessing too besides. You’ll need your fast feet to take your far, but not too fast mind, or you’ll run yourself east and splat off the edge of the world into the beyond.”
A rag was dipped in oil and rubbed, with slow strokes, over the layered iron, the copper tongues, the dimples of silver and gold. The tips were sharp as blades, winking light. The whole was banded with steel.
“Did mama outrun the demoni?”
A pause. A grimace like a kick. Ah, she shouldn’t have asked.
“She must have now, yeah? Or else why would the signs be saying he’s coming next for you? Why did my old hands remember the making of the metal boots? ‘Cause your Momma knew she might do it. Knew she might have to skip away again over sea and mountain top when his ice touch came slinking into the valley looking for her. She knew she’d be running till he caught her up, she died or you came of age. And now it’s time my daughter, time for you to ready for your run and your momma to come home from hers.”
A gulp as he held them up, the muscles in his arms all a-strain, stained black up to his elbows.
“Will I get to see her again before I have to go?”
“I don’t think you’d better wait around, my love. The ice grows long in the mountains, the blue bells bloom in winter, and three nights running the wolves have howled to the moon without cease. He’s coming, chasing in your momma’s wake, and when she gets home he’ll be right after you. Now give me your foot, little one, and we’ll lock these tight in place.”
Kate sat at her window with the boots crushing her thighs as her memory settled back in place. She had to lock them on. How long had she stayed here without her memory? Too long. He’d be coming, skating around the seas from the further land.
She’d caught sight of him on the ocean once riding a shark in the wave foam with his black horns scrapping the sky and snow blurring down behind. She ran over salt water faster than fast with sea between her toes. The boots became dulled, black as hell, but not a trace of rust. She oiled them each night.
In a shipyard, this past fly-thick spring, she caught sick. Lungs filled with sea, head heavy, skin on fire, but she dare not rest. Dare not let the demoni catch her up. If she ran fast enough, if she ran far, she could go on home for a few years. She’d waited too long, took too many breaks, and he was right on her cackling at the moon. She ran and ran, through her fever, through daydream delusion, through fever dream fancies until it burned the mind right out of her and left her running blind, running crazed, running like a bird up in the rooftops. She must have lost him or he would have had her. Must have drawn twisty lines of footsteps around the belly of the globe till he ended up chasing his own tail, else she wouldn’t have been so long at 156 East Street, safe and still.
But now that she knew, now that she held the boots in her hand, she had to get on.
Kate had some money, a stipend from Mindy, that she took downtown market day. It was hard to find reason to leave the boys and Mindy, but she feigned embarrassment at needing womanly things, then ran quick as she could through throngs of startled passersby to the nearest blacksmith. It took some explaining, some looks, but she did it well enough. And for a tale, the truth of what such contraptions were for, he fixed them up that very afternoon. She ran circles around him just to prove how fast she was as he welded the tops with buckles that would lock them tight in place again.
“And the longer I run, the faster I go. So fast, said my mother, that without these weights, I’d run right off the world into the beyond.”
“How could such a curse come about?”
“Easy. My grammy stole his wings, gobbled them up while the demoni was sleeping, and ran away fast as the west wind. He’d taken her sister as his one-night bride and killed her with his embrace. So my grammy took his wings as revenge. Now he chases and can’t ever catch us—unless, that is, we stay still too long. He’s half in love with the women of my line. We’re not sure what he would do if he caught one of us. No one ever stayed still long enough to find out.”
The blacksmith forked the evil eye and gave her back the metal shoes. “Well, good luck with it. I’ve heard strange enough tales from off the sea, but this one about beats them all to the beyond.”
At dinner that night she decided she would have to tell them, Mindy especially. She couldn’t just up and run off without word of why. Slicing up the steaks, in a moment of silence, she blurted out that she’d be leaving. Jasper knocked over his wine, Peter laughed as if it were a joke, and Lore met her eyes for the first time since she had gone, forbidden, into his room. Mindy blinked. Kate said it again and waited for the conviction of it to sink in.
“But why, Kate?” Peter asked, scratching his nose.
“Aren’t you happy here with me? I mean, us?” Jasper questioned.
“You can’t just go off with nothing at all. You are much too young.” Mindy crossed her arms over her chest.
Lore glared, his eyes flashing red as fire. “You aren’t going anywhere, Katherine. I won’t let you.”
She saw that he meant it and she felt a tickle of panic. If they kept her here, somehow, the demoni would get her. He’d bring frost to coat the glass, hang ice daggers from the eves, maybe freeze the flowers open to the sun. She couldn’t let it happen. “I’m sorry,” she said. And then she was gone. They chased, but they couldn’t hope to catch her. She ran circles and twists down the halls and up and down the stairs till even Peter, quick and spry, collapsed in a heap. Still she kept running till the air shrieked with her speed and she was so fast the carpet began to go bald in the pattern of her feet. She couldn’t keep on like this. She needed the boots to ground her.
Buzzing and filled up with speed, she ran into her room, tore open the wardrobe, and ripped out the heavy metal shoes.
A slap and her foot was in the layers of steel. A slinky chime and she snapped the buckle in place tight over the bone of her shin, pinching up her calf. Snap, chime, stomp—both boots on her feet and she was standing, ready to run, run off to the east, to the burning heat of the sun, over marsh, mud, sand, rock and sea and on. She cocked her elbows, bent her knees and went.
The shock took her from toes to teeth, like running into stone. Her metal shod feet clashed together as she was caught tight in the vice of Lore’s arms. “You can’t go, Kate. I can’t let you.”
She squirmed, pinching, slapped fast as hummingbird wings. It was useless. “You don’t understand. I have to. I have to.”
“Tell me what you are running from. I won’t let it have you.”
“What?” She was shocked into stillness.
“There’s word of you in everywhere, in all places. The running girl with the metal feet. The cold comes after freezing crowds, blowing snow around the eves in summer sun. For five generations back, tawny, spotted women breezing through villages, cities, seafronts, fields.”
“How do you—”
“I don’t know much, just hearsay.”
“Why?”
He twisted her around, face to face, hot as a bellows’ breath. “You know Mindy takes us in—the freaks, the spell-craft castaways, the orphaned magics from the farther lands that have no right this side of the sea. Didn’t you ever think to ask what I am? Or even wonder? Isn’t it obvious?”
She shook her head, mute. Twitched so her heels rattled on the floor and scraped grooves into the fine wood.
“You’ve heard of me, of mine. We hatch from eggs, we guard our horde, spit fire, burn like flame. We are chameleons of sights. I was taken up from the nest by a foolish man, hatched out in fire, took on his shape as my skin, and here I am. Too human to go home, not human enough to live a human life. So tell me, Kate.”
She spit it out in one breath—demoni, mother, heavy boots, sick, forgetting, to this time and place. His skin cooled, his grip loosened, footsteps paced and muffled voices spoke outside the door, were shushed, moved away and on. She squirmed. “Now let me go. You have all the story. You know I have to get to running. I can come back, you know, for a visit sometime.”
“Didn’t you hear me before?” He leaned close, his eyes leaking into red and back and red again. “I am a dragon. I guard my horde to death and beyond. It is my nature, fixed as your need to run. I tried hard not to claim you, not to even look your way, but you were here and you’re mine. I can’t let you go.”
She laughed, shoved, and turned her back to him as he gripped her arm. “I’m no one’s. You can’t hold onto me all day and night. I’ll be away before you can say my name and twice around the world.”
He laughed too, head tossed back, holding tighter to her arm. “Wouldn’t you stay if you could? Would you stay—with me?”
Their eyes met, he trembled, and she felt more still than she ever had, as if even her heart couldn’t find strength to beat.
There was no ice in the window. The birds sang, the air shimmered with heat, and he waited, his pupils gone to slits in a sea of red and his nose leaking twin lines of steam.
“I would stay.” The metal boots left bruises through shoe and sock, all along the tops of his feet, when she pushed up close against him.
They pretended nothing had happened. The family spent a quite night around the fire, Mindy knitting, Peter and Jasper bickering over a game of chess, Kate and Lore trying not to stare, overmuch and obviously, into one another’s eyes. That night, after an hour count staring at the ceiling in her room, she snuck down the hall, quite as a whisper, fast as she could from shadow to shadow, up stairs, past doors to his room over and around his treasures and junk, his horde, to perch on the end of his bed. A growl and he pulled her down. They rubbed their lips to bruise with kisses and tangled hands up under shirt and nightgown—not quite brave or foolish enough to take it further than that the first night. They fell asleep with tangled arms and sheets and legs.
In the moonglow slant through the open window, a cold wind like a death-note slunk over Lore’s naked back to his cheek and slapped his eyes awake. His other self rolled with rage beneath his human skin.
The demoni—coming, coming. Coming for his Kate. His laughing, quicksilver, spotted girl. She’d run and true to her word, he’d have no way to stop her and no heart to prison her up. Not that Mindy, Pete, or Jasper would allow such treatment of their Katherine. But it would break all their heart to have her gone, her room left to dust and moths and time passed.
Lore had shed his skin before, flown rounds about and far, following her footsteps and marks in spiral-swirls over the world. He had rolled the boots in his hands and saw their jagged bottoms, filed on rocks, dented and waiting for rust to bloom. A dragon was not, it seemed, so different from a demoni. Like kissing cousins, or neighbors on one parcel of land.
Careful, careful, he peeled back his human skin with a talon to show a muscled peek of scales hot as fire. It didn’t hurt, much, to loosen a scale, to leave a patch on his foreleg white as bone, fragile as glass. His protection forever diminished. The size of a coin, the scale sat in his human palm between the lines marked into his skin. It steamed with magic, pulsed like a heart, stank like ciders and hell’s fire.
He brought her to wake with kisses, offered her a glass of wine that she took down in a gulp, and his magic scale, slippery as oil, slid on down her throat and burned into her belly without her even knowing. He’d tell her in the morning.
“Follow,” she said, and was gone with a boom of sound and the clouds in the sky bending towards her. The icy air puffed up with winter snow and whirled in her wake. The demoni came shrieking through the sky, caught on her trail, coming after the spotted girl in her metal boots. This would be her last run.
Lore stepped from his human skin outside the house at 156 East Street. He stretched his cramped legs, wings, and serpent neck with a grumble and growl. Mindy darted forward, folded the skin up for safekeeping and slipped it into her knitting bag amidst a knot of purple yarn. The shock worn off, people screamed, ran terror stricken, mad, or stood slack-jawed, staring. Mindy shushed them with a wave of her hand. “It’s just my boy Lore. Stop being so silly.”
Peter and Jasper waited by his rear legs, squinting up. Gentle as he could, Lore lifted them in the cage of his claws, gripping lighting. He felt their cool little hands cling and grip. His left arm was too weak to hold them, so he was unbalanced. Carefully, he gathered strength in his wings and rear legs, launching himself into the swirling clouds and following the chiming clang of metal boots on cobbled streets, then the parting line of grass to a field outside the city on a hill overlooking the sea. Behind the sky lashed out with freezing rain and the dark clouds rolled in with the demoni’s blue eyes glaring out- aglow. They waited by the girl in the metal boots, with the red fire hair, the reptile eyes, and one strong left arm, hammer hard and hot.
It was not long before the demoni came, swooping down in a blizzard of snow. Jasper, perched atop a hill, laying flat and hidden in the grass, called out warning. Below, the others turned to face the threat.
Where the demoni’s feet touched, the earth froze and cracked—slick with a skin of ice. He howled with triumph and lunged towards them. Claws slashed left and right to rend the quick-darting Peter that drove the demoni to frustrated howls with his mocking songs. Kate ran in circles, hop-skipped up his back, tore at his horns with her strong left arm till they snapped, and poked him full of holes with the steel tips of her boots that shot sparks off his bones. It was the dragon breath that ultimately did him in. Fire and ice meeting with a screaming hiss and a slap of steam. The air was thick with smoke and silence.
Kate sat down hard in the smoldering piles of ash, iron boots glowing red with heat along the toe and heel. A scaled neck curled around her body, a viper head settled in her lap, and two coils of steam moved past her face from slit nostrils. She placed a kiss between the red, reptilian eyes and smiled.