Sweet Poison Wine

by Seanan McGuire

  “Ah, you know...”

  “Is your supplier Arturo Gucciard?”

  Sudden silence fell over the table, confirming the answer to Jonathan’s question. Every head turned to face the pair—every head. Not a single snake was sleeping, and most of them looked agitated.

  “You tread in matters that are not your concern, Johnny,” said Hector, his words underscored by the hissing of his snakes.

  “Arturo doesn’t know what he’s importing,” said Jonathan. “He thinks you’re just a hotel with a fondness for a certain unusual brand of good red wine. You’re lucky he’s never tried to steal a bottle.”

  Hector scoffed, seeming to relax into his chair. His snakes settled back against his head. “He’d be dead before the bottom of his first glass.”

  “Well, then, it seems to me that you’d have had good reason to warn him about that, to keep him from trying to sneak a sip and find out what it was about this specific wine that made it worth the risk.” Jonathan put down his fork. “How many bottles do you have in reserve, Hector?”

  “That’s none of your concern.”

  “Someone killed two of Arturo’s men tonight. They tried to make it look like a river hag attack, but they didn’t do a very good job.”

  Layna paled. “Tonight?”

  “Yes, tonight.” Jonathan switched his gaze to her. “There were no cases with their boat when we arrived, yet Arturo was sure that the boys had been out on the lake to collect your shipment. There’s a case of Medusa somewhere in Chicago, and I don’t know who has it. So the question becomes, Hector, Layna...do you?”

  Hector swore in Greek. Layna put her hands over her face, her snakes curling down to wrap around her palms. The other gorgons murmured distress, some hiding their faces like Layna, others turning to embrace their neighbors.

  “Uh, I don’t mean to interrupt your portents of doom and gloom and...oom and all, but does someone want to explain?” asked Fran. “I thought Medusa was the first gorgon, not something that came in a bottle.”

  “Medusa is the patron saint of gorgons—lesser, greater, and Pliny’s. She’s the only thing they all agree on,” said Jonathan, sliding easily into what Fran thought of as his lecturing professor tone. “Gorgon-owned vineyards produce a special variety of wine, mulled with venom extracted from their snakes. They call the wine ‘Medusa,’ to honor her. It’s fatal to humans, naturally.”

  “...naturally,” echoed Fran. “Because poisoned wine, that’s a swell idea.”

  “It is if you’re a gorgon,” said Jonathan. “Medusa is an important part of their culture. Without it, they can’t complete many simple social contracts, such as marriage.” He focused on Hector. “Why were you stocking up on Medusa, Hector?”

  “Our oldest boy,” said Hector, slowly. “He’s gone courting.”

  “Ah. New York, I assume?”

  Hector nodded silently.

  “You’ve been gathering the wedding wine.”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you change suppliers recently?”

  “A few months back,” said Hector. “The old ones, they were arrogant. Kept trying to up the prices on me, kept threatening to keep back a bottle or two for themselves. I was tempted—let them find out what happens to men who drink the gorgon wine—but I didn’t want to waste the Medusa, or deal with the police investigating a poisoning.”

  “So you went looking for an independent who could do your smuggling for you.” Jonathan sighed. “I’m willing to fix this, Hector, but there’s something that I’m going to need from you.”

  “Anything.” Hector reached out and took Layna’s hand, pulling it gently away from her face. “Whatever you want.”

  “I need the name of your former supplier.”

  Hector blinked. “Is that all?”

  “We don’t do this for profit,” said Jonathan. He shook his head. “You should know that by now. The name?”

  “Francesco Russo.”

  “Excellent.” Jonathan picked up his fork. “Pass the lamb?”

  The rest of dinner was unremarkable, if awkward. Fran ate until she felt like she would burst. Jonathan ate even more. Layna insisted on wrapping up some honey and almond pastries after they begged off dessert, and they walked back to their room slowly, like survivors of a shipwreck.

  “Please, please tell me we’re not goin’ looking for their missing wine now,” groaned Fran, collapsing onto the bed. “I feel like I’m going to die.”

  “At least you had the courtesy to wait until after our wedding night.” Jonathan sat down beside her. “I never wanted to be one of those lovelorn gentlemen from the ballads.”

  “You didn’t answer my question,” said Fran suspiciously.

  “Ah. Well, in that case: no, we’re not going looking for the missing Medusa now.”

  “Oh, thank—”

  “We’re going to wait until midnight, which means we have two hours to take a nap and get ready to face the city.” Jonathan raised his hands defensively when Fran turned to glare at him. “I’m sorry, dear, but it would be better if we recovered the Medusa before those poor criminals could drink it and condemn themselves to a singularly unpleasant death.”

  “I’ll condemn you to a singularly unpleasant death.”

  “You don’t mean that.”

  “Don’t test me,” Fran grumbled, and rolled onto her side, not bothering to undress. “Fine. Wake me when we’re going to go do something stupid.”

  “All right, sweetheart.” Jonathan leaned over to kiss her on the cheek before standing. “Sleep well.”

  Her only answer was a grumpy mumble.

  Jonathan chuckled as he moved away from the bed and began gathering weapons for the night ahead. Truth be told, he really had no idea how he was going to pull this off. What he knew about the criminal organizations in Chicago was minimal, at best, and mostly boiled down to “avoid them whenever possible.” There was the distinct chance that he were about to offend a group of people who were better armed and more irritable than he was. But his position in the delicate balance between the human and inhuman worlds meant that he had to at least try if he wanted to be able to live with himself.

  The Medusa was key to gorgon culture: that much was true. What he hadn’t explained yet—largely because he was sure Layna would have started to weep, and he hated to make a woman cry—was that without it, there would be no wedding. It was against their religion. Hector and Layna’s son would be forced to wait until more Medusa could be procured, and depending on the size of the vineyard, that could be a year or more. To say nothing of the fate of any thieves foolish enough to drink the stuff. Jonathan shuddered. He sometimes felt as if his mind had become a repository of horrible ways to die, and death by gorgon venom still ranked among the worst.

  Fran slept on, occasionally mumbling to herself, as he gathered weapons, checked the edges on knives, and generally prepared for what was ahead of him. Finally, he kissed her on the cheek and slipped out of the room, easing the door carefully shut behind himself.

  It was the silence that woke her. Jonathan didn’t snore, but he had a charmingly irritating tendency to steal all the covers in the middle of the night, which would wake her up. The sound of his breathing always lulled her down again. Well, this time when she got cold, there was no one breathing in the room.

  “Johnny?” Fran sat up, scrubbing at her eyes with the heel of her hand. “Is it time yet?” When there was no answer she looked around the room, still with only mild alarm. “Johnny?”

  He didn’t answer. He wasn’t there.

  Fran’s eyes widened, as much with shock as fear. “Oh, you didn’t really do what I think you did, did you, city boy?”

  Five minutes later, dressed in jeans, a workman’s shirt, and a scowl, Fran came storming down the stairs to the lobby. Asta was behind the desk. She started to say something; Fran cut her off with a wave of her hand.

  “Unless you’re tellin’ me where he went, I don’t want to hear it,” Fran snapped.

 
; “He’s by the fireplace,” Asta said meekly, and pointed across the lobby. Fran turned to see Jonathan waving at her from the loveseat where he was sitting. Arturo was sitting across from him, looking faintly thunderstruck.

  “Thank you kindly, and I apologize for what’s about to happen,” said Fran, before turning and storming across the room toward her husband. Jonathan started to rise when she reached him, and fell back into his seat as her palm met his cheek with a resounding crack. “Don’t you scare me like that!” Fran snapped. “I thought you’d gone off huntin’ bad things without me!”

  “I would never dream of it,” lied Jonathan. He rubbed his cheek, wincing. “You have a remarkably strong swing, dearest. Now please, have a seat.”

  “Not sure I want to be sitting with you right now. And what’s he doing here?” She pointed at Arturo. “I thought he wasn’t allowed all the way inside.”

  “I’m right here, you know,” said Arturo.

  “Hector sent two of his sons to collect Mr. Gucciard as soon as dinner was finished,” said Jonathan. “He felt that perhaps a discussion could confirm that Mr. Russo was actually behind the disappearance of the wine.”

  “I still don’t understand how I didn’t know this was here,” said Arturo. “Who has a place like this and doesn’t share it? Heck, even if they don’t want to be a big hotel, they could be running the biggest speakeasy in the world. Nobody’d ever think to look for a nice joint inside the Carmichael.”

  Fran blinked before giving Jonathan a sidelong look. He shook his head.

  “I’ve been trying to explain, but Mr. Gucciard seems to be intentionally pig-headed in this regard. I say ‘monster,’ and he defaults to ‘man.’”

  “Well, that’s pretty easily solved,” said Fran. “Remember tryin’ to explain things to me? It took talking religious mice.”

  “Yes, dear, but we left the mice at home.”

  Arturo looked between them. “Ah, finally, I see why you married him. You’re both mental cases.”

  “Not quite.” Jonathan twisted in his seat, signaling for Asta to come over to them. “Fran, please be prepared to restrain our guest.”

  “On it,” said Fran, moving to stand behind Arturo’s chair.

  Asta walked over, looking puzzled. “Yes?”

  “Asta, your father said I could do whatever it took to ensure Mr. Gucciard’s cooperation,” said Jonathan. “With that in mind, will you please remove your kerchief?”

  Asta blinked. Then, a wicked smile sliding across her face, she said, “I’d be happy to oblige,” and pulled her kerchief off. Her serpentine hair uncurled and slithered into a new arrangement, dozens of tongues flicking out to taste the air. Arturo gasped, the sound devolving into a wheeze as the snakes all turned to study him, tongues still flicking. He began muttering to himself in Italian.

  “Please put the kerchief back on, Asta, we don’t want Mr. Gucciard to drop dead in your father’s lobby.”

  “If you insist,” said Asta, and tied her kerchief back into place, clucking at the fussier snakes as they tried to resist her efforts to smooth them down. “Do you need anything else, or did you just want to taunt my hair?”

  “I’ll let you know,” said Jonathan, smiling warmly. “Thank you, Asta.”

  “Only for you, Johnny.” The young gorgon turned and walked pertly back to the registration desk, leaving the three humans alone.

  Arturo was still wheezing, but at least he was breathing again. Jonathan and Fran waited until his breathing had steadied before exchanging a look. Jonathan nodded, and Fran said, “Well? Do you believe in monsters now, Mr. Gucciard?”

  “That woman—her hair—she was—”

  “You should really have researched your clientele better,” said Jonathan. “Asta is a gorgon, as is her entire family. It was their wine your competitors stole. They’re quite anxious to have it returned to them.”

  Arturo paled. “You’re not going to hand me to the monsters, are you?”

  “Now, don’t be silly. They’re quite nice people, really. They just want what they’ve paid you for. As they’re not the ones who tied you up and threw you to the river hags, it would befit you to be a bit more open-minded.”

  “We just need to know if it was really this Mr. Russo who took their wine,” interjected Fran, before Jonathan could fully commit to scolding the bootlegger. “Once we know that, we can take steps to recover it.”

  Arturo blinked. And then, to both of their surprise, he laughed. “You think you’re getting it back? You really are both touched in the head. I don’t care how many monsters you’ve got on your side. Francesco Russo doesn’t let go of what’s his.”

  “Anyone who drinks that wine will die. Horribly, if the reports are accurate.” Jonathan’s tone was calm. His eyes, however, were blazing. “It will begin with numbness of the extremities and an odd dryness of the eyes and throat. From there, the symptoms will progress to light-headedness, difficulty breathing, and finally, hardening of the epidermis, growing progressively worse until it becomes apparent that the foolish individual who drank the gorgon wine is, in fact, transforming into stone. I can describe the process in more detail. I think you would prefer that I not do so.”

  “Mother of God, what are you people?” whispered Arturo.

  “Honeymooners,” said Fran. The sweetness of her tone somehow made it worse, although Jonathan couldn’t have said how. Making perfectly reasonable things sound horrific was a talent of hers.

  “Where do we find Mr. Russo?” asked Jonathan.

  “What do I get if I tell you?”

  Jonathan snorted. “Are you genuinely trying to bargain with us when you’re sitting in a hotel for monsters, having lost their wine to a man without the common sense to simply shoot his opponents? Using river hags to do your dirty work isn’t just inappropriate; it’s inefficient. He should have known better.”

  “What if I am?” Arturo shrugged. His eyes were cold. “My boys are dead, and some of my best customers ain’t even human. I may as well come out of this with something.”

  “I like him,” said Fran.

  “Oddly, so do I,” said Jonathan. “All right, Mr. Gucciard: you help us with this, and I’ll put in a good word for you with the owners of the Carmichael. You could wind up supplying this city’s entire inhuman community—a group which is not inconsiderable in size—with their alcoholic beverages.”

  “Also, we won’t feed you to the river hags,” added Fran. Jonathan and Arturo both turned to look at her. She frowned. “What, I don’t get to play?”

  “Not until you become somewhat less menacing at it, dear.” Jonathan turned back to Arturo. “Where do we find Mr. Russo?”

  Arturo looked from Jonathan to Fran. Took a breath.

  And told them.

  Francesco Russo was not a man who was accustomed to being woken in the middle of the night. He was even less accustomed to being woken for idiotic reasons, such as, quote, “there’s two tourists in your warehouse with a bucket of liver, looking for their dog.” No one seemed to really understand how the tourists had been able to get into the warehouse, or why they couldn’t be removed. Two men had tried. Neither of them had come back out again. It thus fell to Francesco, as the head of the operation, to put his trousers on and make an example for the natives.

  By the time his car pulled up in front of the open warehouse door, his mood had gone from confused to purely murderous. The three men he’d brought along to assist in proving his point climbed out on his signal, following him inside. The car creaked and groaned, resting higher on its tires once all four passengers were out.

  “We don’t kill them until we know how they got in here,” he instructed, keeping his voice low.

  Not low enough, although to be fair, he hadn’t been expecting the female of the two to be standing next to the door. “That’s mighty sportsmanlike of you!” she said happily, her words accompanied by the small, terrible sound of the hammer cocking on a gun. “Why don’t y’all just keep walking? My husband has som
e questions for you.”

  “Madame, I assure you, I have not seen your dog.” Years of fighting to keep his place in Chicago had left Francesco difficult to fluster. It was a skill he hoped would one day lead to him moving past simple bootlegging, and into the real money.

  “We’re not looking for a dog,” said the woman. “We did bring liver, though. We like to share.”

  Francesco narrowed his eyes and kept walking. He knew better than to argue with a gun at his back. Once he had a target he could see, on the other hand...

  The husband came into view up ahead, a slender man in a brown suit with spectacles and sandy brown hair. He looked unassuming, the sort of man who’d never do anything illegal, either intentionally or by mistake. Francesco could have broken him with one hand. Only the bucket of raw liver spoiled the impression, as out of place as a Christmas tree in a synagogue.

  “Can I help you folks?” asked Francesco, through gritted teeth.

  “You intercepted a shipment of wine from Canada earlier this evening,” said the man. He reached up with his free hand, adjusting his glasses. “We’d like it back, please. This doesn’t need to go any further than that.”

  “Mister, I don’t know who you are, but the implication that I would have something to do with running illegal beverages—”

  “We found six cases of vodka,” said the woman amiably. “Oh, and some gin I don’t think I’d give to an elephant with a toothache. That stuff could strip paint.”

  “Ah.” Francesco straightened, abandoning the pretense of civility. “Am I to assume you’re a particularly strange new variety of contract killer?”

  “No,” said the man. “We’d just like the wine returned. It’s of great importance to some friends of ours.”

  “I don’t think I can do that, friend,” said Francesco.

  “Frannie?” The man looked past him, presumably to the woman with the gun. “These nice men don’t need kneecaps to tell us where to look.”

  “Seems like a waste of bullets,” said the woman—Frannie. Francesco flexed his fingers, thinking about how it would feel to wring her neck. “I’ve got a better idea.”