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Chapter 2 Liz
Liz Bathor sat staring out of her high turret window. She liked to pretend she was a Fey princess, trapped in the turret, rewarded with glorious views of the rooftops around her, of the treetops, and the sunrise and sunset. She was 14, with pale, almost white skin, and naturally coal black hair that she wore long in unruly tendrils, no matter the weather. She loved the tower room in this old Victorian house, that was at least 100 years old, but that was brand new to her family.
They had only moved in two weeks ago. As if anything could be new to them. “We’re in a supernatural witness protection program her mother laughed.” Her mother, Lily Bathor, had a laugh that made her eyes sparkle, even if the jokes that provoked that laugh were a little grim.
Liz, her 12-year-old brother Frankie, and her 10-year-old sister Nan, were used to their mother’s gallows humor. In this century alone, Lily, and their father Quentin Bathor, had faced a major scandal when their mother, who had been a successful attorney to the non-Fey around them, was disbarred for not observing client confidentiality. Lily had revealed the location of a dog and cat, left alone in a locked house, when their owner, a client of Lily’s, was sent to prison. The client, delusional and mentally challenged from childhood, doted on her pets. She had made a good living as a drug mule so she could keep her rundown home, and her animals, so she could feed them and herself. She had no one but Lily, and had begged Lilly not to tell anyone where the animals were.
In her insane delusion, the poor woman thought she was going home from prison that same day. Lily knew better. Lily called animal welfare, trying to fit into the nonFey world she still couldn’t understand, even after more than 5000 years of trying to assimilate. Lily led the animal control officers to the client’s shabby home, but balked when she saw them approach with choke chains, cages, and tranquilizer guns. She stopped them, took the animals home, and paid for licenses. So, Emma-cat, named for Jane Austen’s heroine, and Diabolo, the grey, shaggy terrier, joined their preternatural family. When the client found out, from Lily, she was livid with anger and jealously. She filed a complaint against Lily with the disciplinary commission.
Lilly, never one to keep her mouth shut, not even after perilous incidents during the Boudiccan Revolt and later, The French Revolution, told the disciplinary committee of the state bar exactly what she thought of them. She lost her license and fell into a terrible depression, even worse than the fun she had gone into when Lady Jane Grey was beheaded, and was only able to console herself with horrific murder fantasies of what she wanted to do as revenge to the members of the bar, her client, Attila, who millennia earlier had jilted her for Honoria, that simpering fool of Caesar’s sister, her cousin Vlad, and that uppity Eleanor of Aquitane who embarrassed her so badly at the annual joust. After awhile, Lily wrote the terrible, bloody tales down, got them published, and now she had a lucrative career as a novelist of horror fiction. She was much happier than she had been as an attorney, and the entire disbarment proceeding had just been another source of amusement for her. “Little do they know,” she thought. “I faced down the stake, the guillotine, Casanova, and the Black Death. These silly little nonFey robots are nothing.”
Quentin was stoic about his wife’s outspokenness; after all, he had endured it for thousands of years. And, he loved her. Lily was a beautiful, kind women, intelligent, generous, witty. He only wished she didn’t try so hard to be nonFey. As true faere, or fey, Lily could have spirited the animals away, for that matter, spirited the client away, turned the Disciplinary Committee into the ignorant toads they were, but, no… She believed in playing by the rules, “When in Rome, do as the Romans, . .” she was fond of saying, and she loved the nonFey ideas of fairness and justice. Quentin didn’t like to remind her what had happened in Rome right before the great revolt in the British colonies, but he just signed, and loaded them all into whatever home they inhabited during the time period, pushed a door hidden just above every mantel they even owned, and drove them to the next century.
Liz had lost count of how many centuries they had escaped. Her earliest memories were of the Celtic, thatched hut they inhabited during the time of Boadicea. She knew that the hut, with all their possessions, rose into the sky, and through some great quantum leap, traveled time into the next era, and landed as a dwelling, contemporary, not auspicious, to the time period. The Celtic hut on landing became a small Medieval castle in La Mancha, narrow, but cozy. Small chests held their possessions form other eras, but these were ordinary, and carefully hidden. No one ever suspected. The interior of the castle looked like any other, as their old Celtic furnishings changed . They had lived in Tudor manor houses, Italian villas, adobe houses, French chateaux, log cabins, and now, a restored Victorian Queen Anne in a quiet, Victorian neighborhood in a small 21st century Midwestern city. As with all of their other dwellings, the interior was much larger than the exterior promised it would be.
Liz sighed as she looked around her room . She really loved it, of all the rooms she had inhabited in the last 5000 years, the Turret Room was her favorite, and she wanted to stay. She had memories of another tower room, over 400 years ago, when she had been Countess Elizabeth, or Erzebet, but those memories were far more painful. She had had to wait a long time for THAT scandal to settle down, and it took her parents a long time to get her out of that mess. She was an older version of herself then, and she had children and was even widowed. Now, she was her 14-year-old self, one she was the most comfortable with. Her room was circular, and in the middle was an old canopy bed with long, white lacy drapes she could close for privacy. There was a window seat, where she now sat and mused, and the walls were surrounded with books, scrolls, small figurines, little boxes containing jewels, and her doll collection, her legendary doll collection. Her oldest was a Venus/Goddess figure carved of limestone; her room had been nothing more than a chamber with in a subterranean cave when her mother gave it to her. She couldn’t even remember the actual day, or the cave. There were dolls of every century, and miniatures where appropriate. She had a 17th c dollhouse that she played and her friend Ann Sharp played with; Ann’s godmother was Queen Anne of England; they had great fun with the little silver and copper dishes. There were French porcelain dolls with elaborate wardrobes, funny carved dolls from around the world, wax dolls, European Costume dolls, and a whole set of Hina or Girls Day dolls from Japan representing the empress and emperor.
Liz could read her book of shadows here in peace; she could look through her closet and pick out her black outfits and favorite jewelry without anyone making fun of her, or trying to grab the braided ribbons in her hair. No one questioned her here for the amulets she wore, and she could build a small fire and watch it reflect the mirror on her wall without some nasty reflection turning up behind her.
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