by Rhys Ford
“What didn’t you tell us?” Bell asked. He showed his teeth in a humorless smile as Conri glanced sidelong at him. “Someone told you once that your eyes made you hard to read, right? They didn’t spend enough time watching your face.”
It wasn’t the time, but the words slipped out of Conri anyhow. “And you have?”
“I like your mouth,” Bell said calmly. He slowed down so he could maneuver through a tight passage between the briars, turned sideways and with his head canted back. “At least now I can pretend it was for the job.”
Heat stung Conri’s face unexpectedly at the confession. The memory of Bell’s elegant hands on his face, that mouth soft against Conri’s, did nothing to cool the sting of it. He swallowed and tried to come up with a good cover story through the flush of lust.
Neither of them made much noise, but the sudden absence of it jarred Conri. He plucked a knot of thorns and hair from behind his ear and turned to look at Bell.
“I might have kissed you, but I’m not a damsel in distress. I’m an Iron Door agent, a Walker, and I have no misconceptions about the Otherworld or faerie lovers,” Bell said. “I don’t need protection from the truth, so whatever you’re hiding, you need to spit it out.”
Conri looked away at one of the great, white betraying roses. It smelled like salt and faintly off meat. “What makes you think I’m protecting you?”
“It can’t be as bad as what I’m imagining.”
“You’d be surprised,” Conri said. He grimaced at Bell’s glare and gave in. Why should he be the only one with this squashed into his brain. “Or maybe it’s not. We don’t talk about it.”
“We being….”
“Changelings. Stables are… what happens when a Changeling’s mortality runs out and the Otherworld has no particular idea what it wants for them,” Conri said. He turned his back on Bell and kept walking. After a moment he heard Bell follow suit. “What’s left is a shell that an ambitious young fey lordling can upcycle into a semicoherent court, as long as they don’t expect too much. Under normal circumstances they’re a bit more sophisticated than these guys, but not by much. Places like this? Stables? They were secondhand stores for broken-down changelings, spare part skeleton keys for any job someone needs half-assedly filled.”
Bell grunted softly, as if someone had punched him in the gut. “So Keith was right?”
The answer was yes, but Conri struggled to find a different answer.
“He’s not wrong,” he admitted reluctantly. “But they weren’t murdered. They just… did the closest thing to dying you can do here, at least without iron to ease your passage. Most of the courts frown on it, and few of the lords would pass their changelings on like that. My old master never did.”
That had been from arrogance rather than kindness. Like a rich man who’d burn his clothes rather than donate them to charity, he didn’t want to see any down-at-heels fey with his castoffs. It devalued what he kept.
“They frown on it,” Bell said, his lip curled in contempt. “I’m glad they took a stand.”
“A frown from the Lord of Mag Mell has more weight here than your highest courts have there,” Conri said. He didn’t know why he felt defensive. He’d tried to escape the Otherworld enough times back when he thought he could. “That’s probably why the blank stock were left behind here when whatever fey claimed this place abandoned it. Whatever court he belonged to would have punished him for making them.”
“Doesn’t do them much good,” Bell said as he started walking again. He waited for a second and then asked, “Could we save them? If we take them back across the border, back to the mortal world?”
The details wouldn’t take the bite of distaste out of Bell’s voice when he talked about the Otherworld. Conri flicked a delicate, jewel-colored butterfly off his bare arm, the delicate veins in its wings flushed to pink threads with his blood.
“No,” he said. “Sleeping Beauty is a fairy tale. You can’t kiss stock back to life. People have tried. They are more or less dead here, and dead when you take them back.”
“At least they’d be able to lie down and rest,” Bell said.
Conri growled under his breath. He didn’t like thinking about this at the best of times, which this wasn’t.
“Rescue the people we’re sent for first,” he snapped. “Let your boss worry about burying the dead afterward. That’s his job. Mine is to make sure my son doesn’t end up collateral damage from two horny teenagers.”
The silence was strung tight between them, ready to snap into real anger if either said the wrong thing.
“They’re in love,” Bell said after a second, his voice ripe with rueful mockery. “Like Romeo and Juliet, only with more hounds and zombies. Remember when you thought love was all you needed?”
Conri thought about it for a second.
“No,” he said.
Bell’s laugh was a rough, chopped-off snort of amusement. “Yeah, me neither,” he said. There was a pause, and when he spoke again, he’d slipped back into Special Agent Bellamy’s brisk professionalism. “Okay, you said you had a way in. What is it?”
It was a hunch and one that could be wrong. Conri didn’t particularly want to commit to the plan until he knew it was going to work. Not that he had any backup options he could swap it out for on the fly. Still.
“There’s one thing that every fey residence has, be it summer palace or hunting lodge,” he said as they finally pushed their way out of the overgrown briars and into the shadows behind the weatherworn gray barn. Conri paused to catch his breath and run his eye along the back of the building. His shoulders relaxed when he picked out what he was looking for against the battered wood. They might still fail and start a war or get themselves killed, but at least Conri wouldn’t look like an idiot. He gestured grandly at it for Bell. “The servant’s entrance.”
Bell wiped sweat off his forehead and squinted one eye shut against the thin light. “So your big plan is a back door?” he asked. “I suppose it’s better than going in the front.”
That wasn’t exactly the reaction Conri had anticipated. He cleared his throat and tried not to let his ears droop in disappointment. Or think about whether he wanted Bell’s approval because he wanted the man or because dogs lived for a “good boy.”
Of course, it could be both.
“It’s not a back door,” Conri said softly. He could hear the stock—Keith’s shabby attempt at conjuring up his own court of mirror images—parroting their lines back and forth to each other from inside the building. “Back doors are locked, guarded, checked to see if the dog wants in. Whoever lives in the building thinks about it, even if it is to complain about who tracked in the mud and mess from outside. The servant’s entrance is there so no one who matters has to think about it, so the cleaners and shit-collectors and greasy, scalded cooks can get on with their jobs without spoiling the aesthetic. So that means no locks, no wards, nothing that would make the lords and ladies have to deal with the unpleasantness of it all.”
Conri glanced around to make sure none of the stock had ventured out—they weren’t quite people, Nora was right about that, but they could be set to guard and raise the alarm—and then loped across the narrow alley of barren dirt to the hatch half-buried in the dead grass. He grabbed the knotted rope handle and tried his best to remember being his master’s favorite dog—the gnaw of worry about what his master might want next, the barely buried resentment, and the bitter smugness that, while he was a servant, at least he was more favored than some. It came back far too easily for his peace of mind, but when he yanked the rope, the hatch lifted out of the dirt.
“So all the fey have an open door in the back of their castles?” Bell asked as he skidded up to the wall next to Conri. He sounded prickly, as if the hole in security irked him despite how useful it was about to be. “They never thought that an assassin might sneak in through it? Or a thief?”
Conri hooked the rope handle in place to prop the hatch open. “Even if hired to do a job of work
, they’re mercenaries,” he said. “The servant’s entrance is only for servants, and the Otherworld knows who that is. It won’t let anyone else in and out.”
He jumped down into the shallow, low-ceilinged larder. Dusty bottles of wine and moldy legs of ham were still laid out on shelves, next to rows of once-shiny copper pots and pans. Conri could almost see his face in the verdigris-scabbed metal, the memory of a hundred other similar moments overriding this particular one. He let it pass and stuck his head back up out of the hatch to gesture the all clear to Bell.
It took a second—Conri could almost hear the grind of paranoia as Bell wondered if this was a trap after all—but Bell scrambled in after him. He bumped his head on the roof and cursed softly as he bent his knees and hunched over to fit.
“Now all we need to do is find where Keith is keeping Robin and the others,” Bell said. He paused as he heard his voice against the narrow walls and adjusted the volume. “Any ideas?”
Conri grimaced. “One,” he admitted. “But maybe Keith is less of an evil little shit than I think.”
Bell took his sap off his belt and extended it with a sharp flick of his wrist. He held it down and slightly out from his side, the handle of it gripped loosely in his hand.
“Let’s assume he’s exactly what you think,” Bell said. “Where do we go?”
Conri sighed and reached for the door. Before he pulled it open, he leaned over and, when Bell didn’t pull away, stole a quick kiss. It was a quick, crooked scrape of his mouth over Bell’s, enough for a reminder of sweetness and a mingled breath on both their lips.
“For luck,” he said. It was a lie. He wanted to chase away the old bitter taste of servitude from his tongue and replace it with the taste of Bell and the promise of later. But it could be for luck too. He wouldn’t turn it away if they got some. “And stay behind me unless it comes to a fight. I look like I belong here.”
“You don’t, though,” Bell said, his voice unexpectedly sharp. He cleared his throat and pushed Conri toward the door when Conri looked at him curiously. “You left. Don’t let this place make you forget that.”
Chapter Ten
OF COURSE.
Bell gave in to the bile that stung the back of his throat and pulled his jacket up to cover his mouth and nose. The stink of the slaughterhouse still filtered through it, but at least offal and shit mixed with leather, clean sweat, and yesterday’s cologne was better than the stink of offal alone.
He leaned against the back wall of the narrow passage that was a part of the maze constructed inside the walls of the Stables. The surface was unfinished, studded with cheap bronze nails and splinters, and was wide enough for Bell to walk through but too tight for Conri. He had to go sideways or else it scraped his broad shoulders.
“I don’t want to ask what this was for, do I?” he said.
Conri glanced at him. Somehow a couple of days and a few fantasies had normalized the alien, canine eyes set in his human face. Bell’s opinion of them had shifted from odd to striking, from alien to Conri’s. People always wondered how humans could fall for the more alien-looking fey, the trow and the redcaps instead of the sidhe and the selkies. But it was amazing what you got used to when you really wanted to kiss someone.
Again, if not right now, under these circumstances….
“You can see what it’s for,” Conri said. “What you don’t want to ask about are the details.”
The one saving grace was that the room—probably—hadn’t been in active use recently. The hooks buried into the low, tarred rafters were tarnished, the knives were laid out on dusty rolls of leather, and the bloodstains had soaked into the wood and dried into black scabs. The only things in the room that had been dusted off and used recently were the slaughtering pens. All the missing kids were there, filthy and miserable, in torn jeans and stained designer T-shirts. Collars had been padlocked around their necks, the chains strung up to rings buried in the rafters, and their hands were cuffed to the bars with cord that rubbed blisters into their thin, fey skin.
“No,” Bell said grimly. “I don’t need details. How do we get them out?”
Conri shrugged. “Quickly?” he suggested as he pressed his thumb to a knot in the wood. A hidden panel popped out into the room—the kids flinched at the noise and straightened up in their chains—and he ducked through.
The first thing Robin saw must have been the piebald hair and dog’s ears, because he clutched the slats and pressed his face against them as he asked hopefully. “Did my father send you?”
The “No” from Conri was uncharacteristically flat. Bell glanced at him curiously as he squeezed past him into the room. The sight of him made Robin and the others flinch back as far as the narrow pen let them.
“We didn’t steal anyone,” Robin blurted out. “We just couldn’t get back.”
“You,” the sole changeling of the group said bluntly. Shanko. He looked almost human, except for the shimmer of silver freckles on his nose and cheekbones. “You didn’t steal anyone. This had nothing to do with me. I didn’t start a fight over some lanky human girl. I was only there to get a drink. That might be illegal, but it ain’t Iron Door’s problem.”
The last of the three, Annie Boot, covered her face with her hands and muttered into her palms, “I wanna go home. I just wanna go home.” The picture in her file at camp had shown a pretty, round girl with big brown eyes and big brown curls, probably a commoner compared to Robin’s gilt-and-ivory blue-blood genetics. Time in the Otherworld had left her skinny and less human-looking, with a deer’s huge, liquid black eyes and the soft brown dapples of a fawn instead of freckles.
Bell had never considered that the Otherworld could make over the fey the same way it did changelings.
“We’re going to get you all home,” he said as he stepped over a particularly large and scabbed stain on the floorboards. That hadn’t exactly been his orders, but he wouldn’t leave anyone to this. How long, he thought grimly, would it be until Keith worked himself up to use the knives he had on show? “But first we need to get out of here.”
“And we have to find Nora,” Robin said. He stretched his hand out between the bars to pluck at Bell’s arm on the way past. “She’s out in the woods, alone.”
Shanko contorted his face into a grim scowl. “She’s dead,” he said gruffly, as if none of them could see the tears in his ears. “Humans aren’t meant to be here. The Otherworld doesn’t want us. Without us to keep her safe, and with Keith chasing her? She’s dead.”
The statement made Annie dissolve into tears. Robin looked stubborn as he shook his head. “We don’t know that.”
“She’s fine,” Conri said dryly as he grabbed a thick pair of shears from the table. The blades were thick and notched, for bone, Bell supposed, but they snapped easily enough through the heavy brass chains that sealed the pens. The length of metal links clattered to the ground. “Better than you three are, anyhow.”
Robin looked like something you’d see in an old picture book about the fey—tall and blond and pretty in that narrow, fox way the elf knights always were. He grinned like a goofy teenager with his first crush, huge and unselfconscious.
“Ha!” he said. “I told you she’d be okay. Nora’s awesome.”
Shanko looked relieved too, but quickly dragged up a grumble to hide it. “Sure, and she’s kind and pretty and smells like the end of summer and—” His voice cracked, and he clenched his jaw as he pressed his face against the slats. “Are we really going to go home? I want my mom and my dad. I wanna say sorry. I didn’t know what it was like here.”
“It’s not all like this.” Bell was a bit surprised to hear those words come out of his mouth. He’d have expected it—admired it—from Conri, but it wasn’t exactly his job to make the Otherworld seem like a good tourist destination. But it was part of these kids, part of Conri, and it didn’t do any good to hate bits of them. Bell knew that from hard experience. He used his knife to saw through the thorn shackles and peel them off. The dense, woody ru
nners didn’t writhe under the blade or in his grip, but they felt like they might. “Some of it is beautiful, and some of it is weird. This slough is….”
“Sour,” Conri supplied. “It was cut off from the mortal world and barely touched the rest of the Otherworld. It was grown for dark deeds—”
“A hunting preserve,” Robin said. “Like Annwn’s dark forests.”
“Close enough,” Conri said. “Right now, though, it wants to survive. Unfortunately, that would mean eating you, slowly, and that isn’t going to happen.”
It was the cooperative work of a few minutes to free all three of them. The collars were last, the heavy locks picked with a thin-bladed knife and a long needle-pick that made Bell’s eye itch to look at it.
“What now?” Robin said. He tried to pull himself up to his full height, but that only made him about the same height as Bell. It was as impressive as he probably meant it to be. “How do we get out of here?”
Bell raised his eyebrows at Conri as he gestured back to the narrow corridor they’d exited. The door had swung shut, camouflaged in along the knotholes and splinters of the wall, but Bell could pick it out if he squinted.
“Go back the way we came?” he suggested.
Conri shook his head and scrubbed his hand through his hair as he thought. “You weren’t a problem,” he said. “The Otherworld hasn’t got enough of a taste of you yet to decide that you’re one or the other. You might be a servant or you might not, but since you were with me, it was easiest to lump you in with me and let us through. This group? No, the Otherworld knows what they are and where they belong. It’s not the servant’s quarters.”
Robin tilted his chin arrogantly at the idea. “I’d hope not,” he said. “My father’s a king in Mag Mell.”
“No, he’s not,” Conri corrected him. “There’s one king in Mag Mell, and you aren’t of his blood. Don’t tell lies, not here. It will come back on you.”