Bad, Dad, and Dangerous

by Rhys Ford

  There was probably some sort of rule that said Bell couldn’t lie to the people he was meant to work for. Conri wasn’t under any such obligation. The bitter taste in the back of his throat at the idea of this soft, spoiled brat telling Finn he didn’t belong? That made the lie slip out smoother.

  “That’s the law,” he said earnestly. “Whatever you did, Iron Door can’t do anything about it now. Goddammit.”

  Bell gave him a dry look over the table but let it stand as Jamie exhaled in relief.

  “I figured,” he said. “But it’s good to know. I missed what started it, but Keith and one of the kids from the camp, the blond one, had gotten into it over something. That’s when we all realized that they shouldn’t be there, and it got a bit….”

  Conri remembered the broken boards in the barn walls and the smashed bottles in a new light.

  “Violent,” he said.

  “Not our fault, though,” Jamie said quickly. “They used magic on us, right? We weren’t in our right minds. And we were drunk. No one got hurt, not really hurt, that I saw. The fey gave as good as they got. Then they got the point and left. My mom is going to kill me when she sees what they did to the barn, and they were laughing as they drove off.”

  “Not all of them,” Bell said. He pulled his phone out and slid it over the table in front of Jamie. “Robin. Thistle. Shanko….”

  He flicked through the photos of the missing kids. Conri craned his neck to watch the images, upside down, as they skimmed over the screen. He didn’t know any of them. That wasn’t a surprise. Even if the families were from LA, Conri didn’t hang out with other changelings much. Shanko was a changeling—almost human for now, with acne and dark circles under his eyes—while the others were foundlings a few years down the “not looking like a goblin” from Finn.

  Except for Thistle, who seemed to have stuck.

  “You might not like them,” Bell said. “But they have parents, families who’ll miss them. What happened after the others left? What happened to Nora? You already told us you didn’t know, so now tell us what you do remember. Did she leave with them?”

  “No. Maybe,” Jamie stumbled over his words. “I wanted everyone to leave, okay? I didn’t care where they went. But… Keith went after them. With iron.”

  Chapter Four

  “KEITH RAWLINS,” Bell said into the phone as he walked down the steps off the Treva’s porch. Back at the camp, he heard his colleague mutter the name under her breath as she wrote it down. Technically Agent Jayne outranked him, but seniority didn’t matter when the case involved the Otherworld. She couldn’t cross, so Bell took point on the investigation. “Find out if he made it home last night.”

  “You think they took him too?” she asked, a sour note in her voice. Jayne didn’t like anything that came across the border, not even changelings. It didn’t impact her work—and she was a hero like Felix, so it didn’t matter if it did—but she enjoyed it when they screwed up. “That won’t be something that the government can massage out of existence.”

  “Find out if he’s sleeping off some hard cider at home first,” Bell told her. “Then we’ll know if we need to worry about him or not.”

  Behind them, the dog, which had been sacked out in the shade at the side of the house, exploded into a frenzy of snarled barks. The chain it was hooked to rattled noisily as it was yanked tight.

  “Hounds?” Jayne asked with a flicker of concern in her voice.

  Bell turned around and saw Conri at the bottom of the steps. Slabber dripped from the dog’s jowls as it snapped the air in front of his worn T-shirt. He stared it down for a second until the dog gave up, snapped the air one last time, and flopped down on its stomach in the dirt.

  “Just dogs,” he said dryly. “Don’t worry about it. Text me when you know anything. I’ll get back when I can.”

  “Safe travels,” she wished him.

  The line went dead, and Bell tucked the phone into his jacket and watched as the dog, a low, angry growl rattling between her chest and the dirt, glared up at Conri with doleful, resentful eyes. Bell was surprised. He would have expected dogs would like the man, considering…. He glanced at Conri’s mottled hair and mismatched dog eyes and supposed a lot of people made that assumption.

  He didn’t ask. Conri’s relationship with dogs wasn’t his business, unlike his relationship to this case.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked.

  “Same thing as you,” Conri said. He left the dog to growl and walked over to Bell. “Trying to find out what happened to Nora and the other kids.”

  “That’s my job.”

  Conri shrugged and grinned. It was a warm, easy smile that creased his face around it and made him look—despite everything—very human. And smug.

  “Mine too,” he said as he handed over his wallet. Bell flicked it open and frowned at the skip tracer license tucked in next to his driver’s license. “I guess this is where we team up, huh?”

  “You watch a lot of TV, huh?” Bell said. He tossed the wallet back, and Conri caught it out of the air. “That’s not how the real world works. You’re the father of a person of interest in this case—in fact, with everything riding on this, you probably are a person of interest—and you’re going to stay out of my way.”

  “Or?” he asked with a hint of a smile.

  Bell sighed. Changelings could be frustrating. Whatever physical changes their stay in the Otherworld had made on them were nothing to the ones under the skin. Even people who’d returned, more or less, to the world they left, didn’t always remember the right ways to react.

  Or care about them, which Bell suspected was more Conri’s problem. He was out of luck that Bell wasn’t fey and didn’t need someone to play the fool.

  “This isn’t a negotiation. I don’t need to threaten you, Conri. I’ve told you what’s going to happen, and now you’re going to do it. Next time I won’t be there to stop you getting shot. Understood?”

  There was a pause, and then Conri nodded and glanced away from Bell and across the farm. It should have been satisfying, but Bell felt a brief, selfish twitch of regret. He might not need a partner, but he wouldn’t have objected to at least a token protest. It would have given him something to daydream about later.

  Not—he gave himself a mental slap on the back of the head—that he was going to have time for that anyhow. He had a job to do, and he’d always been better at that than relationships anyhow. Between what he did and what he was? One or the other of those had wrecked all of his relationships—not just romantic—over the years. Most people found it hard enough to know someone they cared about might be put in harm’s way every day, never mind that harm would be on the other side of a border they’d never cross and he might never cross back. Would, one day, never cross back over.

  Walkers didn’t die, they disappeared. Everyone understood that was pretty much the same thing.

  Conri shouldn’t be on Bell’s radar to be anything other than a distraction. He might want someone to be… something… but not today. Not Conri. That was too complicated even for someone who wasn’t anything but a fun night on a motel mattress.

  “Stay out of Kessel’s way,” Bell told him. “Once I find out what happened, things will settle down.”

  Conri scratched his cheek under his water-blue eye. He looked, for a moment, bone-tired under the easygoing charm. “That depends on what happened, doesn’t it?”

  He wasn’t wrong. Bell grimaced to himself. Most of the time, he didn’t have to deal with the aftercare side of the job. He’d always assumed that was how the responsibilities were divided—he crossed into the Otherworld and fought monsters, and agents like Jayne held hands and soothed fevered brows—but maybe he was bad at it.

  “Go back to town, stay out of trouble,” he repeated the order and turned away.

  He headed back toward the Iron Door–issued black SUV parked behind Conri’s Toyota. His mind was already occupied with a plan of attack for the search—grid patterns and bleak calc
ulations of how much ground one man could cover—so he got halfway before he felt the prickle on the back of his neck. He looked around and into Conri’s face, right by his shoulder.

  “What the fuck?” he blurted in surprise. No one got that close to him without him being aware of it. Humans didn’t, never mind a changeling who wore the Otherworld like a tattoo. He’d spent too long alone on the far side of the border, where if you dropped your guard even once, something would feel obliged to take advantage of it. “Where do you think you’re going?”

  “I said I understood,” Conri pointed out. “Not that I agreed.”

  He detoured around Bell and headed for the passenger side of the car. The back of his T-shirt was damp, plastered to the thick muscles of his back, and blood splattered a dingy pattern against the faded gray fabric.

  “I don’t need help,” Bell said roughly, caught on an uncomfortable fork of reluctant attraction and equally unwelcome concern. His job was to get Nora back, not worry over some cheerful idiot who was probably more resilient than Bell.

  Conri stood on the frame of the car, one arm hooked over the door he’d already opened. The wind ruffled his shaggy cropped hair and made him squint one eye shut. It should have made him look more human, blurred the edges of the changes the fey had wrought, but somehow it didn’t. Some things were more than skin deep.

  “Liar.”

  “I was grateful for your help earlier,” Bell said. “Don’t push it and don’t forget I can still charge you for illegally going to the Otherworld. You have the same choice as Treva—stay out of my way or wait this out in a cell.”

  “Okay, I guess it’s the cell.” Conri dropped down into the passenger seat and made himself comfortable. He waited for Bell to yank the driver’s side door open and grinned at him as he slotted the seat belt in place. “So, what’s it going to be, Agent? You can spend some of Nora’s precious minutes taking me all the way back to town to find a cell I can’t get out of. Or you can accept my help.”

  Bell braced his arms against the roof of the car and scowled at Conri.

  “I could drag you out of the car and leave you cuffed to the fence.”

  Something moved murkily under Conri’s charm, a hint of something dark that cut the sunshine and easy smiles. It should have made Bell pull back, warned him off. Instead it made his tongue curl for more—like a shot of whiskey in hot chocolate.

  “Either we work together or we work at odds,” Conri said flatly. He leaned back in the seat and crossed his arms. “I’m not going to sit this out, and where are you going to find someone else in Elwood who can cross into the Otherworld, illegally or not?”

  He wasn’t, and Iron Door wasn’t going to get someone to Elwood in time to be of any use.

  “What’s the price?” he asked.

  Most changelings couldn’t cross on their own—the Otherworld wouldn’t be much of a trap if you could wander home—but those who could paid a price in blood or time or some esoteric item that the fey who’d given them the gift counted their debts in. Bell wasn’t going to run Conri as an asset, even an aggressively willing one, if it would kill or maim him.

  Conri looked away from him. “There isn’t one,” he said. “It’s none of your business why.”

  “There’s always a price,” Bell said. “Have you already paid it?”

  “Twice.”

  A bitter note to Conri’s voice sold that claim. Most Walkers were cocky and arrogant. The ones who joined Iron Door were dangerous to know—in a lot of ways—and the ones who hadn’t were out for themselves. The one thing they all had in common was that, when they talked about how they’d gotten their gift? None of them sounded sure they’d come out ahead.

  Bell thought about it and then swore under his breath. The odds weren’t much better with two people on the hunt, but they were better. With the entire, tenuous peace with the fey on his shoulders, Bell would take any advantage he could get.

  Even one he maybe couldn’t trust.

  “Okay, you’re so useful,” he said. “Prove it. There’s only one ford into the Otherworld here. How the hell did a couple of kids get from here to where we met? It’s a good eight miles and it’s the only ford in and out of the slough. Can you tell me that?”

  Conri shed his brief, dour mood like a too-heavy coat as he unleashed a wide, crooked smile.

  “I can do better than that,” he said. “I can show you.”

  Bell had already given in. He climbed into the car, slammed the door, and started the engine. Then he bumped the car over the ruts and turned out onto the road.

  “Probably,” Conri hedged as he braced one black-sneakered foot against the dash and slouched down. “You’ll see.”

  “IT’S A tree,” Bell said as he leaned his hips against the side of the SUV and crossed his arms. His head throbbed with frustration and pressure. There wasn’t exactly a Golden Hour where you could be sure you’d get back who, and what, had crossed over into the Otherworld, but sunrise or sunset was when you had a chance. He should be looking for Nora, and Keith now, since his parents had confirmed the other teenager hadn’t made his way home last night, not following Conri’s vague directions along backroads.

  Conri put his hand on the tree, fingers spread, and then pulled it back. He showed Bell his palm, the skin welted with itchy-looking red hives.

  “It’s a lock,” he said.

  Surprise pulled Bell up off the car and forward. He took Conri’s hand to check the marks, a prickle of interest sharp and ignored in the back of his throat as he rubbed his thumb over the broad, callused palm. No corresponding tingle on his skin, so he turned to the tree. It took him a minute to find the first one, the head half-buried under scabs of overgrown bark. Once he did, though, the others were easier.

  Four old iron nails driven deep into the bark of the tree and left to rust. Bell pulled a knife and dug the bark away from one until he could get a better look at it. Under the rough plaque of rust and dirt, it looked homemade, roughly forged and clumsy. He picked at it with his nails, but there was no give. The wood around the nails was stained red and gray, as if it had bled.

  “The tree at Treva’s house,” he said as he stepped back and wiped his hands. “That chain was older than the dog was.”

  Conri nodded. “Older than the house probably,” he said. “We—me and Finn—passed a rock on the way into town that was covered in horseshoes. I thought it was just another unfriendly town. It’s been a… while… since I saw anyone try anything like this.”

  “They closed off the Otherworld,” Bell said. The idea felt… strange. It would close every single case that Iron Door had on the books—past, present, and future—but the idea didn’t have the appeal it should. The Otherworld was his enemy, but it had been his enemy his whole life. He couldn’t imagine it gone. “I didn’t know that was possible.”

  “It isn’t,” Conri said. “Usually. Anywhere but a slough and the movement of the Otherworld would have either burst the locks or worn itself a new route. Even here, there’s one ford left. They probably tried to lock that off too, but it would only have lasted until the first solstice. Then it would burst like a cyst. That would have been a bad year for Elwood.”

  Bell walked around the tree. There were four nails on the other side too, lower down and hammered in hard enough to flatten the heads. He ran his thumb over the rough metal and closed his eyes.

  It was hard to explain what it felt like to cross into the Otherworld. Bell had tried over the years, but he’d eventually given up. People always thought he kept something back, some trick or gadget that would explain how it worked. He hadn’t. The border… felt like a threshold, that feeling you had when you were about to knock on a door you knew would be answered.

  This felt like the opposite. The broody emptiness of a house you knew was abandoned and the tight expectation of a knock that echoed. It made his chest tighten and the back of his neck itch.

  “Interesting,” he said as he opened his eyes. Conri had gotten too close again, his
shoulder propped against the tree next to Bell’s hand and his long body hipshot and angled. Bell resisted the temptation to be charmed and stepped back. “How does it help us? If the ford is locked—”

  “An old lock,” Conri said. He slapped the tree. “On old doors. Push it hard enough from either side and it would crack open. Not far, not yet, but enough for a few kids to squeeze through. Especially if their blood was up and emotions running high from the scene at the barn. That would have rattled the slough back to life. For a while.”

  Bell swore under his breath and walked around the tree to run his eye along the skyline. They’d taken the long way around, on rutted country roads with crumbled edges and faded paint, but as the crow flies…. There it was. Bell could see the peaked roof of the Treva barn from here. It would take him ten minutes to reach it if he cut through the fields, probably less for a scared teenage girl who ran track and had enough cider that she wasn’t feeling any pain.

  “How did they find it?” he asked over his shoulder.

  “Local legends,” Conri said. “Kids around here probably dare one another to go to the boarded-up doors of the haunted house they made the Otherworld into. Knock, run away, and tell everyone you saw the fey. The kids from camp… you ever get into so much trouble that you run and only realize where you’re going when you hit your own front door?”

  … his arm throbbed, a hot, sickly pulse of pain that kept time with the slap of his wet sneakers on the road. There was blood—not all of it his, but some of it—and he could taste his own panic with each breath he took. Fear of what was behind him, fear of what would happen if anyone found out, and a rattling cant of every bad thing anyone had ever said between his ears.