Wondrous Strange by Lesley Livingston

wind. When he lowered it, the king was gone, his cry melting into the keening of a falcon.

XV
    T he Avalon was on fire, and there was nothing Kelley could do about it.
    All of Manhattan was on fire.
    Brighter than day, the night sky was orange with the light of the flames, leaping to singe the clouds. Terrible music thundered; pipes and drums and skirling voices clawed the air with triumphant, horrific noise. There was the sound of hooves. She looked down at the ground, far, far below, and saw that the streets of the city ran red with blood.
    She could not stop it.
    She didn’t want to.
    A savage glee filled the space where her heart should have been, and Kelley opened her mouth wide to add her voice to the sounds of the war cries ringing through the air all around her.
     
    “Hey, Winslow—get some sleep last night?”
    Kelley looked up, jolted from the remembrance of her disturbing dreams. “Hey, Alec,” she sighed. Scenes of carnage had paraded through her head all night. “Yeah, I slept. A ton. Wish I hadn’t.”
    Alec regarded her with a grin. “You are an odd, odd girl.”
    Kelley smiled back. “That’s what I was thinking of writing for my bio in the show program. You know, that and only playing this part ’cause the real actress went snap …”
    “Hey! Don’t kid yourself—I think you’re a smokin’ Titania. And just between you and me? Before she went snap ? I shuddered at the thought of having to do the bower scene with Crazy Babs every night. With you it’ll be fun!” Alec leaned beside her against the wall. “Wanna go practice? It’ll only take a second to grab my ass…uh…head. My ass head.”
    Kelley threw back her head and laughed, her mood brightened. It was becoming pretty obvious that, bad jokes notwithstanding, Alec would have cheerfully run off to a darkened corner of the theater to “rehearse” with her. She chose to ignore that and punched him lightly on the shoulder. “You know I’m still the only hired help around here, right?” She waved one hand in an airy gesture, intoning imperiously, “I,Titania, Queen of the Fairy Realm…had better go mop the stage before Mindi sets my wings on fire.”
    With that, she made her escape, surprised to find that her heart was pounding a little too fast in her chest. He was cute…but it wasn’t the thought of rehearsing in dark corners with Alec Oakland that set her heart racing.
     
    She ducked Alec after the end of rehearsal, too. Another day of having Lucky stuck in her tub had led Kelley to the conclusion that the only way she was going to get rid of him was if she could find out to whom he actually belonged. She had spent the morning on her computer, printing up fliers on hot-pink paper with a picture of Lucky (taken with her camera phone) and just enough information to hopefully get someone to call her without calling the police or a mental institution. After rehearsal, armed with the fliers, a stapler, and a roll of tape, she hit the park and headed toward the few scattered public bulletin boards so that she could post her notice. She started at the south end of the park and sneaked a look at her watch, wondering despite herself whether…
    Cue actor—enter stage left .
    Sure enough, she’d been in the park only about five minutes when an increasingly familiar reflection appeared over her shoulder in the glass-cased bulletin board.
    Kelley didn’t even turn around.
    “Don’t you have a home?” she asked, awash in studied nonchalance. She opened the glass and stapled a pink flier over afree-concert notice from last summer on the corkboard.
    He answered her question with a question: “What are you doing here?”
    “I’m posting information fliers,” she replied, waving the little sheaf of paper she held. “Not that it’s any of your business.”
    “You shouldn’t be here.”
    Kelley glanced back to where he stood behind her, brooding.
    “Nice to see you again, too,” she said as she walked away.
    He’d caught up to