Sprite

“I won’t hear of it!” John Hanan wheeled around, striking his cane forcefully on the floor. “The Sprite will stay in the home I made for it, and that’s final!

Miriam pouted, and folded her arms, tapping one foot impatiently. “Why not?” she asked. “You said I could have a pet when I came back from school.”

“The Sprite is not a pet!” Her grandfather shouted, earning smirks from two of the three employees who stood in the back of the room. He glared at them. “Don’t you have somewhere to be?” he asked angrily. Bill and Dave, still grinning, made their way out, leaving the third employee to face John Hanan’s wrath.

“I’ll keep him on a leash. Please?” Miriam begged. “It’s just for the summer. You can have him back when I go to school.”

“What do you think, James?” John Hanan put a lot of faith in Jim, who was a researcher, not a hunter like the other two. “If she uses a chain with iron in the links, will that be enough to hold him?”

Jim bit his tongue before he said something he would regret. The old man was obsessed with the idea that the kid in the pond was a mythological creature. Jim had not seen any evidence to support that theory. According to the mythology, iron would bind the creature. It didn’t seem to stop him from grabbing on to the metal fence that confined him to his pond. “I don’t know,” he hedged.

“There, you see? Jim doesn’t think it’s a good idea, either,” John Hanan said with satisfaction.

“Oh, Jim,” Miriam said disparagingly. “He never thinks anything’s a good idea.” She stomped out of the room, leaving Jim looking a little lost.

“I’ll order a chain made with iron,” he said in resignation. “We can let Miriam try to tame him. It will be an experiment. Isn’t that what you wanted? For her to make friends with the creature?”

The old man nodded thoughtfully. He really hated to disappoint his granddaughter. All his efforts were for her, after all. If she truly wanted the Sprite as a pet, he would not object, as long as it was safe. “I’m counting on you to protect her, James,” he said.

“Come,” Miriam said much later. “Come, my pet.” She stood at the fence, and waited for Jim to open the gate. Neistah frowned, but came. Miriam snapped a thick metal collar around Neistah’s neck, and he jerked back, nearly jerking her along with him. He hissed in anger, and Jim reached out with his wooden prod and poked him in the ribs. Neistah settled for glaring at them both.

“Just a short walk today, remember?” Jim said, as Miriam shook out the short metallic chain to its full length and gave it an experimental tug. “We don’t know how he will react away from the water.”

Neistah glanced at the pond before Miriam pulled him forward, but he went willingly enough, curious to see something else besides the watery home they had relegated him to. Miriam brought him right up the front stairs and into the big white house, with Jim trailing behind still carrying his stick. Neistah gazed around at the cool, polished wood floor and the contrasting wainscoting along the walls. The house was dark, yet airy. Miriam tugged him up yet another flight of stairs, these polished and curving slightly to the left. Her bedroom was on this second level, a sugary little girl’s room, stuffed with dolls and lace and gleaming white furniture. A canopy bed took up the center of the room.

She chained his arm to the bedpost before she unhooked it from the collar, then firmly shooed Jim out of her room and closed the door. She flounced onto the bed, the motion jarring Neistah’s wrist where the chain rubbed a little too tightly. He did not like being bound.

“This is where Rothschild slept,” she explained, patting the bed next to her. To his raised eyebrows she added, “my cat.”

Angrily, Neistah turned his back on her. All his thought probes bounced back from her blank brain and he considered speaking to her when she addressed him once more.

“You can talk, can’t you?” Her braid was becoming undone, so she took her hair down as she spoke. “I mean, with my grandfather and those other men you put on an act. It was quite well done, in fact. But I . . . .” She smiled mysteriously. “Come on, speak to me!” she wheedled.

Neistah got down on his hands and knees and licked her hand.

“All right, animal, have it your way.” She stamped out of the room, slamming the door behind her. Neistah looked at the door expectantly.

Almost immediately, the door opened and Miriam stuck her coppery head in. “And I think I’ll call you ‘Sprite.’”

The door slammed. Neistah howled with laughter. “I am called Neistah!” he yelled after her in a peculiarly mocking, low-pitched voice. He laughed harder.

The door opened a crack.

“Meow,” Neistah said.

The door opened wider.

“I am called Neistah.” His slanted eyes narrowed.

“You can speak,” she whispered. Her own green eyes lit with curiosity. “Tell me about yourself, where you’re from, what you are.”

His grin was not a friendly one. “Do not trust me, little girl, or you may find yourself one day in my hands.” He lifted his webbed fingers to show her.

“Sprite!” He heard himself say. He laughed at her, at himself for being caught. “I am a man, little girl, just man enough.”

“What do you mean?” she asked, more of a child now than the adult of a few minutes ago.

“What would you like me to mean?” His questions weren’t answers, and he wasn’t honest. He held her eyes with his own, still grinning knowingly.

After a minute, Miriam blushed and looked away. “Papa will let me keep you if you’re my pet, so that’s what you are. Like Rothschild. He died.”

Neistah laughed softly at her attempt to intimidate him. “I’m not a cat,” he observed, shaking his wrist. “Even your cat was allowed to sleep in your bed, wasn’t he?” he added. “Free me.”

“I can’t. Not yet. Those are the rules. But you can come with me now. We can talk and take walks and—“

“You won’t unchain me?”

“I can’t.”

Neistah sank to the floor. His arm, still chained to the bedpost, was raised above his head. He had had enough. “I need the water,” he told her plaintively. “I need to swim now.”

She stared at him, not sure whether to believe him, but at last, she opened her door and called, “Jim!” While she waited, she unhooked the chain from her bed and fastened it back onto his collar. “Neistah?” she whispered hesitantly. They could both hear footsteps on the stairs.

“Shh,” he told her, giving her a secret smile which he boosted with a mental command. Miriam nodded, relieved. She would not mention to anyone that Neistah could speak. It would be their little secret.

“Well, that wasn’t bad for a first outing,” Miriam commented to Jim as they led Neistah back to his pond. The Sprite waited impatiently as she snapped his collar loose. As soon as he was free he melted into the water and sulked underneath the roots of the big tree until even Jim gave up and went away.

Over the next few weeks, Miriam took him for ‘walks’ on a daily basis. Jim followed at a discreet distance most of the time, far enough back that he never heard the whispered conversations between the Sprite and the girl. Occasionally, however, Bill or Dave would take over that duty. On those occasions, Neistah refused to speak at all. Those two would just as soon kill him and take his body for bounty. In some places, mutants were prized catches which brought wealth to the hunters, dead or alive. Neistah had come across hunters like them before.

Neistah was not human. He had none of their frailties or sensibilities, nor would he pretend to them. He was so far outside of their frame of reference that his real feelings were incomprehensible to them, and the humans at the house tended to project their own responses onto Neistah.

Let them, he thought savagely. The girl Miriam tried to control Neistah. Now that she knew he could communicate, she flaunted her knowledge and her position both to her grandfather’s men and to Neistah himself.

“I think the Sprite should have some proper clothes,” she announced one morning as Jim scribbled notes in his pad by the pond while Neistah obliged him by hanging lazily just below the surface, occasionally flicking a wrist to maintain position.

Jim grunted, considering. “He seems to wear some sort of garment already.”

Both humans turned to stare at Neistah’s so-called ‘garment.’ It was gold, faintly green like the rest of him, and definitely woven around his hips and partway down his legs. It gave him a finished appearance, smooth and metallic where the garment was, smooth and muscular elsewhere, with long black hair halfway down his back, and all of it, the hair and the skin and the garment, with undertones of green.

If he had horns, he’d look like a satyr, thought Miriam. Neistah suddenly looked directly at her and grinned.

“I meant proper clothes,” said Miriam quickly. He couldn’t have known what she was thinking! Could he?

“You could try, I suppose,” replied Jim. “I don’t know how you’d get him to put them on.”

“Of course he’ll put them on. He’s my pet, isn’t he?” Miriam glanced challengingly at Neistah

but he just smiled blandly back at her, not rising to the bait.

Jim looked doubtful. “Whatever you say, as long as your grandfather approves.”

Smiling in satisfaction, Miriam crossed the dirt road and went back into the house. Neistah paid little attention. Jim continued to scribble his notes until Miriam reappeared wearing a bathing suit. Then he sat up straight, finally setting his pencil down. “I thought you were getting clothes for him,” he commented.

“Tomorrow,” Miriam replied airily. “Today, I’m going swimming.”

Neistah stopped swimming in lazy circles and slid up to his favorite perch on the old maple tree. His eyes fastened on Miriam in her decidedly unchildlike swimming costume.

“That’s not a good idea,” Jim said, coming to his feet as Miriam unlocked the gate that led down to Neistah’s pond. “Does your grandfather know about this?”

Miriam slipped through the gate and shut it behind her before she replied. “You can ask him yourself,” she said, walking down to put her feet in the water, as she had done every day this last week. The only difference was her clothing, or lack of it.

Nothing stopped Jim from opening the gate and following Miriam inside, for her own protection, but he hesitated. The Boss had said she could go inside the fence with the Sprite if she chose. Over the last several weeks, Miriam had been with the Sprite daily, and nothing had ever happened. Jim had taken copious notes as he followed them on their jaunts around the Hanan property. Why, then, did Miriam’s bathing attire disturb him so?

“Do not go into the water,” he cautioned her. “I’ll be right back.” He would ask John Hanan if it was all right for his granddaughter to swim in the pond with the Sprite. “I mean it!”

Miriam laughed, barely waiting until he had crossed the dirt road to the house before she dove neatly into the water. Neistah was at her side in a flash.

“Teach me to swim like you do,” she demanded imperiously, and Neistah’s eyes narrowed.

She tried to imitate his effortless movements, but only ended up sinking beneath the surface. Neistah shot around her faster and faster, creating a whirlpool in the normally placid water. “Stop!” Miriam cried, and Neistah stopped instantly. “Why are you being like this?” she asked petulantly.

“I don’t want new clothes,” replied Neistah, beginning to move lazily around her again, much to Miriam’s annoyance.

“Too bad,” she said, striking out for the shore, arm over arm as she had learned to swim when she was a child. “You’re getting them.”

Neistah grinned suddenly and shot out his arm. Webbed fingers encircled her neck, dragging her back into the pond. Frightened, Miriam glanced up at Neistah’s teasing, youthful face. He laughed at her, but his eyes were hard.

His grip loosened, but he did not remove his hand. “Do I frighten you?” His voice was soft, caressing.

There was an awkward silence. Just as suddenly, Neistah darted away, leaving her in the shallows. Breathing hard, Miriam climbed out of the water. She glanced at the pond behind her, but couldn’t see Neistah at all, even though she knew he had to be there, watching her.

Jim came running back with her grandfather following more slowly behind. “Miriam!” he cried out.

She was at the gate when he got there. “I’m fine. You see? I just went for a quick swim to cool off. The Sprite is over there somewhere. He didn’t bother me.” She tossed her head in the general direction of the pond.

“You didn’t tell me you were going into the water with him,” John Hanan admonished, finally catching up to Jim. “You only asked me if you could buy your Sprite some modern clothes.”

“Oh, that,” said Miriam. “I changed my mind. He doesn’t need any clothes. He’s just a pet, after all.”

Across the pond, Neistah gave a low laugh. Miriam was going to pay for that remark very soon.