by Ari Marmell
So yeah, that’s where my noggin was during all this, why I was only halfway there at best when I returned the Marsters’ dingus to ’em, and why I only got dragged back to myself in that fancy sitting room when the old lady started getting deep into the “effusive gratitude” part of the visit.
I hate that part.
“…thank you enough, Mr. Oberon! My grandfather had to leave all his glassworking tools behind when he came to this country. This figurine was the first thing he made once he could finally afford a new set.”
Of course it was. And I assume he left it to you on his deathbed?
“It was the last thing he gave to me before the tuberculosis took…”
We were all damn lucky in that moment that I basically can’t vomit.
“You’re welcome,” I said. Or interrupted? I dunno; I’d stopped listening, mostly in self-defense. “If I could just get the rest of my fee, I’ll be outta your hair.”
It was Mr. Marsters who answered this time. “Of course, of course! Barry, if you’d be so good as to fetch my checkbook? And a bottle of the Avize Grand Cru, while you’re at it.”
“Of course, Mr. Marsters.” I’m not even sure how, but I’d swear the butler reached the door without actually turning around first. The magic of the domestic servant, I guess.
“Kind of you, Mr. Marsters,” I told him, “but really not—”
“It’s quite legal, I assure you. Everything in our wine cellar was purchased prior to Prohibition.”
“I’m sure it was, but it ain’t necessary. I—”
“Nonsense!” You ever hear a guy actually harumph? Marsters harumphed. I think it actually requires a certain amount of wealth before you’re legally permitted to do it. “I insist!”
So how exactly was I gonna tell the man that if it wasn’t milk or cream, I not only wasn’t interested but actively revolted.
“Look—”
“I insist!” he again, uh, insisted.
He’d also gotten himself good’n riled up in his determination, so that he tried to lean forward and thump a fist on the table in emphasis, all at once. The lunge outta his chair drove his hip into the furniture with a hollow thump, an impact that managed to lift the two nearest legs off the carpet and set the whole contraption to rocking.
Not a lot. Just enough.
If he’d hit the table just a few inches to one side or the other, it wouldn’t have jolted up that way. If the cushions on the sofa had been a little less deep, or the couch itself a couple feet closer, or I’d been a touch less preoccupied, I mighta reacted fast enough to save it. If the thing itself had been a bit farther from the edge, or landed base-down on the thick carpeting instead of at an angle…
If, if, if. “If” and a dollar are worth about 90 cents.
There was a muted crack and then silence as we all stared at the scattering of chunks and slivers and powder that had just been a crystal wren and now made the carpet glitter like a starry night.
Not that it was a long silence. Mrs. Marsters began to wail like a deflating zeppelin, her husband gawped and gasped like an asthmatic grouper, and I cursed and mumbled under my breath as it occurred to me that, through no fault of my own, I probably wasn’t gonna see the remainder of my fee.
CHAPTER TWO
Goddamn it, there it was again!
Wasn’t too long a walk from my clients’—uh, former clients’—place to the L, but I was in no hurry to get much of anywhere, so I’d been takin’ it slow, eyeballing the homes of the well-to-do and mentally cataloging all the wonders I’d seen that were much more impressive than they could ever hope to be.
Whaddaya want from me? I was feelin’ petty.
The city was just startin’ to get dim as we slid on into the evening. Flivvers grumbled by in the street; radios crackled out Ethel Waters (no, thanks) or Handel’s Organ Concerto in D Minor (that’s music, thanks very much) or, mostly in the houses with kids, a new episode of some serial about the twenty-fifth century. All of it was quick enough, or far enough back, that the technology only gave me a mild itch insteada screaming, spike-through-the-conk pain.
It was distracting, though, which is partly why it took me a few blocks to realize I mighta picked up a tail. Again.
Wasn’t anything obviously hinky about her. Middle-aged dame in a purple skirt-suit and glasses so big’n round you coulda served a cuppa joe on each of the lenses. She’d been a few dozen paces behind me for a while, which didn’t prove anything in itself, but… It just tasted like I was bein’ followed, you know?
Well, no, you don’t. Just take my word for it.
Of course, I’d felt that way a lot lately, and I’d managed to prove bupkis, to identify exactly nobody shadowing me. So now that I’d spotted the broad, it was time for a little test.
I kept on goin’ my way without a care in the world (though I did decide that whistling would probably be pushin’ it a bit). Kept right on, keepin’ a slant on her in the reflection of every darkened window and every time crossin’ a street gave me an excuse to crane my neck around to watch for oncoming traffic.
Houses gave way to stores as we got closer to the elevated, and I decided I wanted to deal with this one way or the other before I actually reached the station. I’d tried bein’ patient, but it was taking too long.
Funny how often that happens.
Anyway, some kinda big delivery truck rumbled on by right after I’d crossed the street, and I used the opportunity to duck into the doorway of a flower shop that’d already closed for the night. Gave me a good slant on the whole block and anyone comin’ up the sidewalk while keepin’ me outta view. If Glasses was followin’ me, it should prove real interesting to see what she did now.
Except she didn’t do a thing. She wasn’t there anymore.
I just stood there like a lump.
What the hell? The street wasn’t empty or anything—I counted a couple dozen pedestrians just at a quick glance—but she sure wasn’t one of ’em. Had she ducked into a shop, same as me? Wasn’t impossible, but she must have done it soon as the truck came between us; if she’d waited until she noticed I’d “vanished,” she wouldn’t have had the time without me seeing it. And I couldn’t figure why she’d do that before she knew I’d tumbled to her.
All right, then. Loitering in the doorway, bathed in a mixed bouquet of florals from one side and clouds of car exhaust from the other, I tried to think. What I came up with was three possibilities.
One, I’d just gone completely crazy. Totally off the track. But given all the shit I’d seen over more centuries than I’m completely comfortable admitting, it didn’t seem too probable that Chicago’d finally driven me outta my noggin.
Two, I was barkin’ at shadows again. Glasses hadn’t been following me, she was just some skirt who’d been walking the same sidewalk. She’d stepped into one of the shops, not because I’d made her, but to do some shopping. It was just coincidence it’d happened right about the same time I’d made my own break for it. Not real likely, no, but possible, especially given how fond random chance is of makin’ Fae dance to tunes we can’t even hear.
Or three, magic.
You know, one of the reasons I’d been avoiding Elphame for so long was because I’d been lookin’ to live a normal life. What’s it say about my level of success for the past year or so that “magic” was up there with “some dame went shopping” on the list of probable explanations?
Any number of ways someone—or something—coulda disappeared, even with a whole swarm of mortals on the same street. You people are real good about not noticin’ what’s happening around you, especially if it don’t fit your slim view of the world. Goin’ invisible was one possibility. Lotta different sorts of Fae can do that. A rare few might’ve actually vanished, stepping Sideways or teleporting; not many of us can do it without the proper prep or the right surroundings (like the mildewed refrigerator niche in my office), but it ain’t unheard of. And of course any number of Fae and related entities are shapeshifters. I coul
da been staring right at the bim who’d been tailing me, and I’d never have known it was…
Was…
Shapeshifting. Aw, shit.
Goswythe.
I mean, I had no proof this was Goswythe, or even that it was a shapeshifter. It fit, sure, but I hadda lotta enemies from a lotta different time periods. But it was a solid working theory; something to think about, anyway.
It’d been over a year now since I’d last encountered the phouka who’d raised Celia, Fino Ottati’s daughter, after she’d been stolen away and replaced by the changeling Adalina. He’d up and taken the run-out some time after I’d gotten my keister handed to me by the not-so-dearly departed witch Orsola Maldera, may she rot in pieces. We’d been trying to beat the stuffing outta each other, me’n Goswythe, before Orsola interfered, and I had every reason to figure the gink still held a grudge. I’d poked around some, trying to find him, now and again—partly for my own sake, partly to put the Ottatis’ minds at ease. I’d never dug anything up, though, and between my own affairs and tryin’ to find some way of waking Adalina from her coma, I hadn’t put as much elbow grease into it as maybe I should.
Might be about time that changed.
* * *
It was in the stairwell down to the basement level of Mr. Soucek’s building, where I keep my office and hang my hat (on those rare occasions I can stand to wear one), that I came real near to killing a buddy of mine.
Well, “buddy” may be too strong a word.
“Jesus Christ, Mick!” Mashed up against the wall with my wand pressed tight under his chin, Franky looked paler and just generally more pathetic even than usual. I dunno how he got that nasal whine into his voice when he was hackin’ and gaggin’ around the pressure on his throat, but he pulled it off. “All I did was say ‘Hello!’”
“You shouldn’t sneak up on a fella like that.” I stuck the L&G—that’s the wand, a Luchtaine & Goodfellow 1592—back in the holster under my coat and unwrapped my fist from around his collar. “It ain’t healthy.”
“I wasn’t sneaking! I was just waiting!”
“Yeah, well… Wait louder.”
Wasn’t his fault, really. I’d been preoccupied and on edge the whole way across town, and I’d make the mistake of relaxing when home came into view. I shoulda known better, really. Wasn’t as though I hadn’t had more’n a few people waiting for me here now and again who weren’t near as harmless as old Four-Leaf Franky.
Dammit. “Sorry, Franky. Been a bit outta sorts.” Then, since the fact that I’d apologized had him pretty well stunned, I had a breath or two to give him an up-and-down. “Looks like I ain’t the only one, either.”
His shirt and his coat had more wrinkles between ’em than the firstborn of a basset hound and a raisin, but that was nothing hinky in and of itself. Franky’d never met a suit too cheap, and his apparent allergy to clothes irons went far beyond the usual Fae distaste for the metal. Nah, what was off about him was the gold, or lack of it. Sure, he wore a couple of gleaming rings, and he was using a fifty-dollar tie clip to hold a five-cent tie. But for Franky, who had more’n a little leprechaun blood mixed into his aes sidhe ancestry, that was positively understated. In fact, I think the only time I’d ever seen him with less gold on him was after he’d been robbed.
Which wasn’t uncommon, but that’s what happens to guys who wear gold out in the open, ain’t it?
Point is, he didn’t look banged up at all. Only other reason I could come up with for him goin’ out and about without his jewelry was that he was tryin’ to be inconspicuous.
I moved back a pace, down a couple steps, and leaned against the banister.
“So who’s gunning for you, Franky?”
“Nah, you got it wrong this time, Mick. Or, well, mostly wrong, anyway. Nobody’s after me, least not personally. I’m here to do you a favor.”
“Uh-huh.”
Last few times me’n Franky’d crossed paths, things hadn’t been going too well for either of us. I’d seen him on a couple or three occasions since the whole Spear of Lugh fiasco, and we were good—no beefs, so far as I knew—but we hadn’t exactly been drinking outta the same bottle since then.
Whatever “favor” he was hoping to do me, he was looking to get something out of it, too. But just bulling through and asking him directly wasn’t going to get me anything, and while I could probably beat a song out of him, that would be a good way to make him an enemy.
Instead, I asked, “So why the play at goin’ incognito, then?”
He didn’t pretend not to know what I meant; that was something, anyway.
“Look, Mick, I’m here on behalf of the others. None of ’em really wants to be seen with you given what’s going down. I don’t really, either, so this seemed a good compromise.”
By “the others,” I assumed he meant the chunk of Chicago’s supernatural community who I sometimes palled around with. Not friends, really, but contacts, informants, people I’d helped and people who helped me—for the right price. Franky himself, of course, but also Lenai; Pink Paddy; the “L King,” this strange old entity who lives in one of the tunnel portions of the rail system; Gaullman, when he wasn’t committing himself to one asylum or another (for everyone else’s protection, he always said); a few others. Colorful characters, and mostly not the bravest sort, so them being too afraid to come to me in person if there was a problem was no big surprise.
Two issues with that, though. First, Franky was no braver’n any one of ’em. And second, given that what was going down?
So I asked him about both.
“Hey! I’m no coward!”
I just looked at him.
“I just have a healthy sense of self-preservation,” he finished, limp as wet yarn.
I looked at him some more.
Franky sighed. “Okay, so I figured, we all try to ignore this until it goes away and God only knows how long that’ll take, or who gets hurt in the process. I get you to suss out what’s happening, you solve the problem same way you always do, everything’s done with and we can all go back to the everyday.”
That… tasted of truth, but it wasn’t filling. He wasn’t lying to me, but he wasn’t spilling everything, either.
So, hey, I kept looking at him. Why not? It’d worked out pretty well so far.
“There’s people asking around about you,” he finally admitted.
A-ha! Now we were gettin’ somewhere.
And now it made sense he’d come to me. If I sussed out whatever was goin’ down, great. If I got involved but didn’t wrap things up neat’n tidy, well, I woulda found whoever was nosing around. They wouldn’t have any cause to keep pestering Franky or Paddy or the others. Either way was good for Franky.
But… “I get that it’s maybe worrying for people to come to you about me,” I said, “but this ain’t exactly the first time any of you been grilled about something you didn’t want to talk about. And I suspect that if the mugs asking the questions were anyone or anything real dangerous, you’da started off with that, or at least be a lot more frightened than you are. You’re worried, not terrified. So what’s the skinny?”
Since I know you’re wondering, yeah, it woulda been a lot more comfortable and maybe even safer if we’d taken this to my office for a proper sit-down. I’d gotten Franky talking, though, and I didn’t wanna risk losing the momentum.
“Well… Part of it, Mick, is still the whole Spear of Lugh thing. After what happened last year, everybody’s jumpy thinking about the kinda people we might have wandering around Chicago poking into things. You can’t really blame them for that, can you?”
I’d have sighed, then, if I, you know, sighed.
“The spear’s gone, Franky. And so’s everyone who was here hunting for it. All we’ve got now are the usual, run-of-the-mill Fae.” As if there were such a thing. “Same sorta people and not-quite-people you been dealin’ with your whole life.”
“Sure, sure, but nerves is still nerves.”
“Whatever.”
<
br /> “Anyway, it might not be too big a deal if it was just a few guys. But Mick, there’s been a whole lot of folks asking a whole lot of questions about you. Me’n the others, we’re getting jittery precisely because there’s so many. There shouldn’t be this many people that we don’t know but who know about us. At all, let alone that we all know you.”
“Wait, wait, wait. None of you know who these people are? Any of ’em?”
“Not a one.”
Okay, I hadda give him that one. That was reason to start worrying.
“What have they been asking about, exactly?”
“All kindsa stuff. Who you pal around with. Where you go to take a load off. What we know about your cases. Sometimes sorta asking around the edges of what types of magic you can throw, though they’ve never come out and dug into that directly. Oh! And a lot of questions about that lady you were chumming it up with back during the whole spear affair.”
My blood ran cold, and I don’t mean I felt a chill. When the aes sidhe say our blood “ran cold,” we mean it. You coulda wrung out an artery to cool a fifth of Scotch.
“Ramona?”
“Yeah, that’s her. Whatever happened with her, anyway?”
Who the hell knew? I hadn’t seen her since she’d swished her way outta the Field Museum of Natural History, and I still didn’t know if I even wanted to.
No, that ain’t true. I definitely wanted to. I just didn’t know how much of me wanting to see her was actually me wanting to see her. I never had figured out if there was anything more’n her own mojo behind how dizzy I got over her.