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again, and that was when he opened his eyes and saw… them. The little people, some naked and others in tiny rags of fluttering clothing, their delicate insect-veined wings, their sharp noses and the wicked merriment of their sweet, chiming pinprick voices as they chorused.
    They darted at him, but the woman said, “No,” again, firmly, even as they piped indignantly at her. “Leave him alone. He’s just a kid.”
    They winked out. The door closed with a whoosh, and he lay there in his own urine, quivering. Her footsteps were light tiptaps on the tarmac outside before they were swallowed up by the hum of air-conditioning.
    And a faint, low, deadly chiming. Little pinpricks of light bloomed around him again, and he began to scream.
    Not long afterward Matt Grogan got up, tiny teethmarks pressed into his flesh on his face and hands, bloody pinpricks decking every inch of exposed skin. He bolted through the door without waiting for it to open, shattering glass into the parking lot.
    He ran into the sagebrush wilderness, and nobody in Barton ever saw him again.

MISLAID
3

    S ummerhome rose upon its green hill, its pennants in wind-driven tatters. The walls should have been gloss-white and greenstone, the towers strong and fair like the slim necks of ghilliedhu girls, and around its pearly sword-shapes the green hills and shaded dells should have rippled rich and verdant. The Road should have dipped and swayed easily, describing crest and hollow with a lover’s caress; there were many paths, but they all led Home.
    The hills and valleys were green and fragrant, copse and meadow drowsing under a golden sun. They were not as rich and fair as they had been before, nor did they recline under their own vivid dreams as in Unwinter’s half of the year. The ghilliedhu girls did not dance as they were wont to do from morning to dusk in their shady damp homes; the pixies did not flit from flower to flower gathering crystal dewdrops. The air shimmered, but not with enticement or promise. Strange patches spread over the landscape of the more-than-real, oddly bleached, a fraying paper screen losing its color.
    The trees themselves drew back into the hollows, the shade under their branches full of strange whispers, passing rumor from bole to branch.
    Rumor—and something else.
    Occasionally, a tree would begin to shake. Its spirit, a dryad slim or stocky, hair tangling and fingers knotting, would go into convulsions, black boils bursting from almost-ageless flesh. First there were the spots and streaks of leprous green, then the blackboil, then the convulsions.
    And then, a sidhe died, the tree withering into a rotting stump oozing brackish filth.
    The dwarven doors were shut tight, admitting neither friend nor foe, and the free sidhe hid elsewhere, perhaps hoping the cold iron of the mortal world would provide an inoculation just as mortal blood did. Some whispered the plague was an invention of the mortals, jealous of the sidhe’s frolicsome immortality, but it was always answered with the lament that no mortal believed in the Good Folk anymore, so that was impossible.
    Summerhome’s towers were bleached bone, and the greenstone upon them had paled to pastel instead of forest. A pall hung over the heart of Summer, the fount the Seelie held all Danu’s folk flowed from. The vapor carried an unfamiliar reek of burning, perhaps left over from the disposal of quick-rotting bodies, both from Unwinter’s recent raid and from the plague itself.
    Sparse though the latter was, there was no real hope of it abating. Not now that Summer’s borders had been breached, and the sickness brought in.
    From the sugarwhite shores of the Dreaming Sea to the green stillness of Marrowdowne, from the high moors where the giants strode and those of the trollfolk allied to Summer crouched and ruminated in their slow bass grumbles to the grottos where naiads peered anxiously into still water to reassure themselves