Page 2 of Threadbound

He’d never seen any fairies, of course, but his mother had insisted that they were real and he should always be on the lookout for them—and that if they ever did him a good turn, he had to do them one in return.

“Never owe a fairy, Jamie,” she’d warned him. “And never make one owe you. They don’t like it.”

He’d asked her why, when he was little, and she’d simply said that’s the way things were.

He didn’t actually think fairies were real, but Jamie liked the idea of his mother’s naturalistic paganism a whole lot better than the rhetoric of punishment and damnation preached by the pastor on a wave of sour breath and spittle on Sunday mornings from the pulpit at Bill Eckel’s church.

So Jamie didn’t like girls and he didn’t like church, and, on top of that, he wasn’t into sports or hunting or hitting things with his fists, and he most definitely wasn’t into the whole idea of replicating the patriarchal household run by his step-father.

Since Jamie was also rather more intellectually than athletically inclined—although he did enjoy running the mountain trails when it wasn’t hunting season—he’d taken the first chance that presented itself to get the hell out of Cumberland and Tennessee.

About the only thing he didn’t mind was the apple moonshine, but he couldn’t bring that with him on an international flight, since it most definitely wasn’t going to make it through customs.

At least Scotland had good whisky.

With a soft, mostly internal sigh, Jamie shifted in his seat, trying very hard not to knee the woman next to him and wake her up.

He wished he could sleep on planes. It would make this trip much less awful, although it pretty much always was that. Between his constant anxiety about his step-father suddenly showing up at his mother’s grave—however unlikely that was—and his overall discomfort in Maynardville, Jamie detested these visits home. If he could even call it home anymore.

He’d stayed for two nights at a Super 8 in Knoxville, driving out on July 8thto place the thistle and rose beside his mother’s small, plain marking stone in the old family cemetery off Highway 61 past the auto shop.

Nell Eckeland the dates of her birth and death. Nothing more. Nobeloved wife and mother, no line of scripture or poetry. No hint of her identity as Nelly Weaver, pagan, knitter, giver of kisses, and fairy-lover.

No other flowers, either.

Just the ones Jamie brought and the overgrown grass that needed mowing far more often than it got it.

With a sigh, he leaned forward to peer out the airplane window, watching the vast sweep of sky begin to shade toward pink and dawn.

Chapter

Two

Jamie had gotten pretty good at running on cobblestones over his three years of living in Edinburgh. When he’d first arrived, he’d twisted three ankles in as many weeks—and considering the fact that, like most humans, he only had two ankles, that was both bad and sadly impressive.

Practice and lots of toe-raises had made it not just possible, but almost effortless for him to navigate the rippled, twisting, and dramatically uneven sidewalks, streets, and alleys that made up the old part of the city where he lived, worked, and studied.

Jamie’s favorite route took him down the back streets parallel to the Royal Mile and out to Salisbury Crag—and then up to Arthur’s Seat and back down again. He liked to go early enough in the morning that he wasn’t dodging too many puffing tourists on the way, but he didn’t really mind as long as they didn’t scream or jump in front of him. It was a long way down if you went over the edge, and Scotland—unlike so many parts of the US—didn’t bother putting safety rails on its mountains. Jamie honestly preferred it that way, at least until some excitable tourist accidentally sent him careening to his death. But that hadn’t happened yet, and he hoped it never would.

As he made his way up the Crag, a shadow of dark wings flitted overhead, and Jamie smiled. He liked birds, particularly the crows and ravens of Edinburgh, who were so used to tourists that they were practically—although not actually—tame.

Tame enough that they’d eye you up for your french fries—chips, he reminded himself, although he’d yet to successfully train himself to think in Scots English—when you ate outside on a bench at George Square or the Meadows, although no matter how many times he’d tried to feed the birds directly, he’d never gotten one to come take a fry from his fingers.

When he was little, there had been a crow, or maybe a raven, he wasn’t sure, that had hung out once by the school playground. He’d started feeding it crackers, and it had flown off and brought back a shiny pebble, dropping it near the crackers.

And then it became a game. Jamie shared a few crackers, and the bird brought him a couple shiny pebbles and a single brass bead shaped like a star. Jamie had always thought that the bird had been thanking him for sharing his crackers.

He’d kept the stones and the tiny star-shaped bead—every time he thought about throwing them away, he just couldn’t make himself do it, silly as it seemed. So there was a small box in his tiny apartment that held a few shiny stones and a small gold star, along with a couple other odds and ends that reminded him of happy memories. A small knotted ring made of yarn his mother had made for him when he was little. A movie stub from the first date he’d been on with a guy—a date that had ended with Jamie’s nose bloody because some homophobes had seen Christopher kiss him on the cheek in public. The seat card from his first flight to Edinburgh.

His asshole step-father had called him sentimental for keeping things like that. Well, not exactly. Bill Eckel had called him apansy-ass, crybaby sissy, but that’s what he’d meant.

Jamie pushed his muscles harder, increasing his pace up the hill to drive away the unpleasant thoughts, chasing the shadow of whatever bird had flown overhead. He’d always wanted to be a bird. Be able to fly, to soar free from the ugliness that had been such a fundamental part of his childhood.

But now he was half a world away from Bill Eckel’s fists and drunken, spittle-laced insults, and if Jamie wanted to collect beads and baubles from birds or movie tickets and kisses from boys, he could do so without a second thought.

When he got to the top of the crag, Jamie paused, the air rushing in and out of his lungs, Edinburgh spread out below like a tattered, but still beautiful, old quilt, the kind that smelled like dried lavender and years of laundry soap.

Except that Edinburgh definitely didn’t smell like lavender and laundry soap, especially not if you happened to be walking through the streets at bar time. Edinburgh smelled like pretty much any other city—car exhaust, the occasional whiff of sour garbage, and the mingled aromas of whatever was cooking or brewing in the hundreds of restaurants, cafés, and distilleries that dotted the streets. But she was still damn beautiful, even if she did occasionally smell a little funny.

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