“Did they find his body? Or Bismarck’s? Or the barghest’s? Or, well, anything left of the basement?” The blast had been so powerful, anyone inside would’ve likely been vaporized if they hadn’t put up one hell of a shield. Or bailed into the Otherworld at the last second.
“We did not,” said a voice from the doorway. Saoirse. Decked out in snow boots and a thick coat, hair and clothes dusted with snowflakes. Her right arm was in a sling, and she had a few cuts and bruises on her face and neck, but otherwise, she looked to be in good shape. Better shape than me, at any rate. “Everything in a one-block radius of the house was completely destroyed,” she continued, “and what little intact debris we found contained no traces of organic matter. No blood. No tissue. So there’s no way to tell who—or what—died in the explosion, and who, if anyone, managed to escape in time.”
“Abarta got fucked up by the harp,” I said, taking another sip of tea, “but I seriously doubt he let it blow up in his face. He probably jumped through a portal beforehand.”
Which meant he’d be back at some point to once more try and raise the Tuatha Dé Danann from their eternal sleep, using a method far more obscure and challenging than the magic of an ancient power object like the harp. He’d also be back, I knew without a doubt, to get revenge on the impertinent half-fae who’d deprived him of a much easier victory. Me, a thirty-two-year-old former cop with a few magic tricks up my sleeve, versus Abarta, a millennia-old trickster god of the Tuatha Dé Danann.
I had made a poor choice for an archenemy.
Christ. Why do I always have to be the underdog?
“What about the mob lady?” asked Christie as she topped up my teacup even though it was still half full. “Shouldn’t you be able to tell if she survived or not, based on the behavior of her underlings? Won’t there be a power struggle if she’s dead, to decide who takes over as the head honcho?”
“That’s the thing,” Saoirse said warily, scratching at a scabbed cut on her chin, “Bismarck’s operations have gone dark. I’ve had guys checking out all the usual haunts, the restaurants and pawn shops, and all the other money-washing businesses. Most of them haven’t opened since Bismarck’s disappearance. I don’t know whether that means she’s dead and there’s infighting among her captains behind the scenes, or whether they’ve been ordered to go underground to obscure the fact she’s still alive. Regardless, the fae are now aware of her connection to Abarta. So if she resurfaces, either here in Kinsale or in another protected city…”
“They’ll snuff her out, no questions asked,” I finished. “The fae don’t take kindly to such slights.”
“Who do you think’s going to fill the power vacuum,” Christie asked, “if she’s gone for good? One of the other big-name mobsters? Some new kid on the block?”
“Remains to be seen,” Saoirse said, “but rest assured, I’ll be watching. Oh, and you should also expect some announcements about increased border security and more extensive entry/exit checks. Our dear faerie mayor has decided it would be a good idea to stop people from importing dangerous objects into the city, particularly objects of Otherworld origin.”
I let out a dry laugh. “Of course. I prevent another war between the fae and their most powerful ancient enemies, and I get repaid by the faerie bureaucracy with a new set of rules that’ll make my day job harder. Can’t wait for those bone-shaking dullahan pat-downs in search of contraband hidden in my pants.”
Saoirse held up her hands in mock surrender. “If you want to make a harassment complaint, you’re out of luck. The PD doesn’t have jurisdiction over the horsemen.”
“The PD doesn’t have jurisdiction over much of anything,” I pointed out.
She frowned. “We’re doing the best we can.”
“Didn’t say you weren’t. Just highlighting the sad state of affairs.”
Somewhere below us, a doorbell rang.
Christie jumped. “Oh, damn. My lunch break is over. I need to reopen the store. If you need anything, Vince, just shout.” She scuttled out of the room and trundled down a staircase, heading into the teashop that made up the bottom floor of her building.
Now that we were alone, Saoirse sat on the mattress beside me, openly examining the marks on my face. The ones I had weren’t nearly as intricate as those of the full-blooded sídhe, but they were still rather pretty. A series of delicate curving lines around my eyes and across my cheeks that both marked my blood lineage and signified my inherited power. A high scion of the Unseelie court, winter in my veins. Saoirse traced them with her gaze, her fingers twitching like she wanted to touch. She refrained because she respected my boundaries, my sensitivity on this issue I had lied to her, to everyone, about.
She finally made eye contact. If my eyes as blue as icebergs overturned, with frosty rings around the pupils, intimidated her in any way, Saoirse did not let it show. Instead, she said, “You know, before the collapse, when we worked together day in and day out, I always had this feeling, in the back of my mind, that you were hiding something. At first, before I knew about the paranormals, I thought you were just another private person suppressing personal ghosts. After I found out you were half fae, that day at the precinct where…” She bit her lip. “When I found out you were a paranormal, I thought then I really knew what you’d been hiding all that time. But still, I wasn’t quite there yet, was I? I still didn’t know the real Vincent Whelan.”
“What makes you think you know him now?” I replied wistfully.
“I didn’t say I know you now. In fact, I’m pretty sure this”—she brought her fingers close to my cheek but still didn’t touch me, drawing the shapes of my marks in the air—“is just the beginning of a long and complicated story you’re not ready to tell. My point is that I don’t expect you to tell that story, not if you’re uncomfortable with it, and that until you’re ready, I won’t pry. Because I know that’ll drive you away.”
She sighed. “I really do want to know you though, Vince, for real this time, no secrets. I want us to be friends without heavy curtains hanging between us, keeping the whole truth from getting through. And I don’t want you to feel like you have to be a certain way, be a certain kind of person, to have a relationship with me.”
She smiled the way that people did when they recounted all the things they’d lost. “I don’t care if you’re one of the sídhe. I don’t care if you’re something else entirely.” Her hand drifted lower and brushed my shirt, ghosting over the bandages beneath. “You don’t have to hide from me.”
Of all the things Saoirse could’ve said, she had to say the one thing that made me cry.
Because I’d been hiding from people my entire life. Humans. Paranormals. Other fae. Because in each case, revealing the whole truth would have had consequences I couldn’t bear to face. Revulsion. Fear. Panic. Betrayal. I’d spent my life standing on a glass floor, waiting for one of those great weights to drop and shatter the ground beneath my feet and send me tumbling into an abyss I couldn’t escape from. And it had almost happened once, the day I’d been discovered at the precinct, the day I’d been left to die in an alley, wrapped in iron. The only reason I hadn’t fallen into that hole was because Saoirse had been there to save me.
And here she was again. Offering another helping hand.
“Vince…” she said. “You okay?”
I planted my face against her good shoulder and just let it out, faint sobs and fat tears, years of pain dripping out, one streak down my cheek at a time. I had wounds that wouldn’t heal no matter who offered me kindness or how much, but the fact someone was willing to help me at all, in this scarred and broken world of scared and broken people—that was a miracle I hadn’t expected. I thought I’d left Saoirse behind with the rest of my ruined past.
She embraced me, gentle as always, one hand rubbing my back. “Hey now, don’t forget you owe me that date.”
I didn’t quite let out a genuine laugh, but it was close enough. “One fancy dinner, coming right up. As soon as I can walk again without
tripping over my own two feet.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Two days later, Christie released me from her care with a warning that she would drown me with tea if I ever made her help carry my bleeding body across Kinsale again. I was tempted to point out it was Saoirse who’d called her, and that she hadn’t been forced to do anything, but I had already pressed my luck enough by dropping out of this week’s Scrabble match so I could recuperate. As such, I left her shop through the back door and headed home with my head hung low and a box of teabags tucked under one arm.
It had kept on snowing in spurts and fits during my time lying prone in Christie’s guest bedroom, and without working snowplows, the drifts were growing high across the streets. Some valiant citizens were shoveling sections of sidewalk outside the more popular businesses, like grocery stores and convenience stores and other places you’d buy necessary supplies. But for the most part, another short stretch of deep winter had taken over the city. Though the wind didn’t chill me like it did most, I still shuddered when a frigid gale blew by.
Snowstorms meant Mab was focusing her power on your region. Usually, it was because the radiation was beginning to leak beyond the containment zones she’d erected, and she needed to use some extra magic to scrub that leakage from the air and the earth and the water before it traveled too close to any protected cities. But I had an odd feeling in my chest as I crunched along through the snow today, a feeling that Mab was focusing not on the Raleigh radiation zone, but on Kinsale itself. Word of Abarta’s attempted coup must have reached her ears.
Had Abarta still been here, that would’ve meant grave danger for Kinsale. But there had been no sign of him since the harp went up in smoke.
As I closed in on my neighborhood, that shiver in my spine grew stronger. I had the sudden urge to take an alternate route and come up the narrow street behind my house, enter via the fenced-in back yard, instead of using the front entrance like I usually did. I paused, wondering why a dozen dull alarms were going off in my head, vague warnings whispered in dark corners. I was peering straight down the main street, and there wasn’t a soul for three blocks down. There could’ve, however, been someone hiding under a veil. Like one of Abarta’s perfect veils.
Now you’re being paranoid, Whelan. No way he’d show his face here with the fae looking for him. He’s not stupid, I tried to reassure myself. And he can’t send the barghest after you either, because if it gets caught, it’ll give him away.
But the compulsion to turn left and cut through my neighbor’s yard to reach the back street didn’t dissipate. It grew stronger. So strong, in fact, that I was already moving that direction before I registered my brain giving my legs the command. I quickly trudged through the knee-deep snow and made a wide arc around a half-collapsed shed to reach my fence.
The fence was decorative, not a security measure. It was half my height, and the latch didn’t have a lock. But that didn’t matter because my house was warded to the teeth, so I’d left it as it was, all peeling white paint and bloated boards. Now, I glared at the ground before the fence in annoyance as I kicked the thick layer of snow away from the gate—I had to be slow and methodical about it, because the pain-reducing spell in my shoulder had lost most of its power—then brushed more snow from the latch, which was of course frozen shut. I broke the ice with a couple raps of my knuckles, finally pulled the gate open, and looked up toward my porch…
There were fifty fucking cats in my back yard.
And they hadn’t been there a minute ago, when I first looked down to work on the gate.
I shuffled into my yard, scanning the cats from left to right. They were all colors and sizes, pure white to pure black to calico, young kittens to fully grown adults. Every last one of them was sitting the exact same way. Turned at the precise angle so it could stare at me with a fixed expression, eyes wide, pupils narrow. I looked side to side several times, waiting for one of them to do something, attack me maybe, driven by a spell. But they didn’t budge. They just sat there silently, unmoving, exactly the same, except…except for the orange tabby in the middle.
He stood out from the rest because he was holding something in his mouth. A tie.
No. Not a tie. My tie. The tie I’d taken off and let float down the flood tunnel when I was fleeing the barghest.
I rewound to the night of the fight with Abarta, a hazy memory half melded to all the rest, scratched and blurred by the pain of an iron wound. Out of nowhere, an orange tabby had run through the basement, with my tie around its neck, being pursued by the barghest. The interruption of the barghest crashing through the door and into the wall had been the critical factor that allowed Saoirse to get her gun back and shoot Bismarck, and had allowed me to toss the conflagration charm at the harp while Abarta was distracted. If it hadn’t been for that cat, the cat now sitting in my yard, still holding my tie, Abarta would’ve won.
But the cat wasn’t a paranormal creature. It was a regular cat. They all were. So were they being controlled, or…?
The hairs on the back of my neck bristled.
Someone was behind me.
I broke my third glamour to release my magic, but I didn’t turn around. Not yet.
Answers were beginning to slide into empty slots in the mental puzzle I’d been assembling since I first realized I’d been baited into hunting for a magical object instead of the mundane variety.
I flipped further back through my memories, to my arrival at home after handing off Walter Johnson’s scrapbook. Tom had shown up less than a minute after I walked through the door, like he’d been waiting for me—or following me. And the things he’d said, his oh-so-careful conversation, framed like that of a frazzled boy yet constructed precisely so he didn’t need to lie. (An aunt, he’d said. Not my aunt.) Because he couldn’t lie. It wasn’t in his nature.
I jumped forward to the next morning, when I started working on Tom’s case. As I’d walked to Mo’s, an orange tabby walked alongside me for some time, almost as if it was watching my progress. And, of course, it had been. It had been watching me the whole time. Right up until the moment I’d hopelessly lost the fight with Abarta, paralyzed by iron, and needed a helping hand to turn the tables.
From the moment I stepped back across the boundary into Kinsale the other day, I’d had eyes on my back. And not just any eyes. How could I have been so stupid? I should’ve realized sooner.
“It’s impolite,” I said, words buffeted by the gusting wind, “to step onto someone’s property without permission, even for a free-roaming faerie like a cat sídhe.”
“But I’m not stepping,” said a voice smooth as torn silk, a voice that vaguely resembled the one he’d used when pretending to be a human named Tom. “I’m sitting. Is that also impolite, Vincent Whelan?”
Finally, I gathered the courage to turn around.
Perched on the fence gate was a creature that resembled Tom the human. Same height. Same weight. Same build. But the hair that had been a rich brown was now streaked with patches of black and red. And the face that had been smooth and round was now angular and severe. And the eyes that had been a soft hazel, wide and watery, were now an acid green, the pupils within them the same thin slits as the cats sitting cozy in my yard. And his smile, that horrible smile, a wound slashed across his face, revealed a set of prominent fangs where shorter canines should’ve been.
I remembered this creature, a brief flash of him, a memory hidden somewhere in the murky sea of my forgotten childhood. His unmistakable smiling face cutting through the fog, clear as crystal, even though the rest of the memory was as faint as ink left to fade under a harsh sun. I had met this creature, however briefly, maybe even spoken to him, young as I had been, unable to comprehend the weight of interacting with such an ancient, awesome force.
My lips parted, and I breathed out, “Tom Tildrum. King of the Cats.”
Not just a cat sídhe. The cat sídhe.
He bent forward and threw his arm across his waist—a bow. “So fun to speak with
you again, Vincent Whelan, without wearing a necessary mask.”
“Don’t you mean ‘nice’ to speak with me?” I said, unable to come up with anything better.
Tildrum blinked. He had a third eyelid. “No, I do not. I mean fun.”
I licked my chapped lips. “Fun isn’t also nice?”
“Not in the way that faeries use ‘fun’ and humans use ‘nice.’”
“Oh.” I swallowed, throat like sandpaper. “I see.”
“No need for such a nervous look. I am not here to lecture, but rather to congratulate.” He clapped. Twice. Loudly. “Queen Mab sends her regards for a job well done in preventing Abarta of the Tuatha Dé Danann from waking his kin with Daur Dá Bláo.”
The gears in my brain ground to a halt. “What?”
“Do you not understand?” He dropped his hands, interlocked, into his lap. “I can provide a more in-depth explanation, if you wish.”
“Yes,” I choked out. “I need one.”
“Very well.” He ran a rough tongue across his lips. “Queen Mab was recently made privy to intelligence that suggested a rogue member of the Tuatha Dé Danann was in the process of acquiring the harp of the Dagda for purposes that ran counter to the goals of the Unseelie Court. I was sent to recover, or destroy if necessary, the harp, as the cat sídhe were responsible for its security up until it was stolen two hundred forty-seven Earth years ago, and Queen Mab preferred that I redeem myself.”
For a fraction of a second, his smile morphed into something so mindbendingly demonic that I couldn’t even describe it using human words. And then the regular wicked smile was back. Just like that. And he continued, “However, I arrived too late to stop the harp from being smuggled into Kinsale, and my initial covert attempt at uncovering its exact whereabouts within the city limits were rebuffed by Agatha Bismarck’s employees. At which point I was instructed by Queen Mab to change tactics and instead seek to thwart the Tuatha rogue through an appropriate proxy.” His smile grew crooked. “You.”
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