by Ari Marmell
“Thank you for mentioning it,” he continued. A tilt of his noggin, not really a nod but not really not a nod, and Herne the Hunter leaped into the branches above. I didn’t even bother tryin’ to follow his progress, and after only a few seconds, the rustling and scraping stopped.
Which left, not counting the sorta shell-shocked Pete’n Ramona, just one last bunch.
Bumpy’s crew’d waited on the sidelines, kept their yaps shut tight for the whole affair. Probably the wisest move they’d ever made. Or not made, really.
I thought Gina might up’n faint on me as I got close. The lead trouble boy aimed his piece at me, but his hands were none too steady.
I wasn’t much in the mood to deal with bullet holes in my flogger. I gathered my will, just so he could feel the power roiling around me.
“That Tommy gun can be a lawn ornament, bo,” I informed him, “or a suppository. You got a preference?”
Took a couple breaths for him to work out what I meant, and under most circumstances, I think his pride woulda made him do something jangle-brained. As it was, though, his heater hit the grass and mud with a combination of sounds similar to those I imagined a basilisk’s digestive tract might make.
“Sharp move,” I said. Now that I was less likely to catch a ribcage full of lead, “You’ll go far in this racket.” Then, peering around the headstones, “Well, not too far—maybe just a few plots over.
“So… you.” I turned my attention to the blonde.
Gina flinched, almost stumbled. Man, witches used to be made of sterner stuff’n this.
Then I thought of Orsola, and decided I preferred ’em yellow-bellied.
I leaned in real close, until I almost choked on the cloying scent of her emotions.
“You got a look tonight—just a look, mind—at what’s really out here. And, trust me, you ain’t ready for it. Whatever you told Bumpy, however you think you’ve warded him, he ain’t ready for it. None of you ever will be. You stick your schnozzola into our world again, it ain’t gonna be pretty. Mosta this lot ain’t as patient as me. At best, you’ll get yourselves dead. Mess with the wrong thing at the wrong time, you’ll get a lot of other people dead, or worse.
“So listen good, baby-witch. You’re gonna make Bumpy understand he needs to stick to his own underworld. Be real persuasive. Because if I decide it’s up to me to keep him outta this stuff, I’m gonna start by taking away his ability to detect it—and you’n me both know who that means. Savvy?”
Gina’s throat bulged as she swallowed, as if she was tryin’ to suck down a whole orange.
“Yes. Yes, I… I understand.”
“Good. Now get the hell outta here. You bother me.”
If they’d scampered off any quicker, in any more of a barely controlled panic, they’d hadda literally grow tails to tuck between their legs.
The breeze kicked up, washin’ away the scent of fear and confusion—and blood—with the perfume of Lake Michigan. And I was alone again with Ramona.
Yeah, Pete was there, too, awkwardly clamberin’ down the mausoleum wall. But for a minute or so, it was just me’n her in all ways that mattered. She was still standing on the roof of the Fuller family tomb, lookin’ slack-jawed and confused and dizzyingly beautiful.
“Sorry you gotta give your boss such bad news,” I called up to her.
She eased herself down, slow’n careful so she wouldn’t fall, until she was perched on the edge, legs dangling over. Then she just shook her head, again and again.
“If you like,” I continued, “I can help you explain it to him.”
With that, a small grin broke through her bewilderment.
“Nice try.”
“Hey, figured it couldn’t hurt. You wanna at least tell me if you’re human or not?”
It bugged me not knowin’, especially since it ain’t that easy to hide that kinda thing from me. I’d have thought damn near impossible, but… I’d been off about a lotta what’s possible, lately.
“What do you want me to be, Mick?”
She wasn’t serious, wasn’t tryin’ to make me think she was serious; just tiredly kidding around, takin’ her next turn in the game we’d been playing for days now.
She wasn’t serious.
I couldn’t afford to let myself believe she might be serious.
“A bed.”
I couldn’t help but chuckle at her expression. I think she was actually shocked. I heard my cop buddy tryin’ to stifle a coughing fit somewhere back behind the low building.
“Did… you just say you wanted me in bed?” Her voice’d gone higher but quieter, but I couldn’t tell if it was outrage or—something else.
“Nah. I said I wanted you to be a bed. I’m friggin’ all-in, and I’m going home to catch at least eight hours of doss. G’nite, Ramona.”
“You’re… What? Wait! Wait a minute! Mick! You get back here!”
I waved and kept goin’, until her voice was lost behind me and the cemetery gates drew near up ahead.
Pete caught me up before I reached ’em.
“What’d she do to make you so steamed at her?”
What’d she do? Ha! You don’t have that kinda time, bo…
The short answers, the curt goodbye, though… I wasn’t just bein’ irritable with her. If I’d given her more of a chance to talk, hung around for a longer farewell, I still wasn’t sure I coulda left at all.
Apparently Pete figured out I had no want or plan to talk about this, ’cause he changed tack.
“You are gonna explain all this to me, right?”
“Bad guys work up big hoax to keep everyone busy while they kill a bunch of people.”
“Gee, thank you so much. Yeah, I got that. I was lookin’ for something a bit more specific.”
“You want more detail, it’s gonna have to wait. I’m headed home. I have got to get some bunk time.”
“Oh?” Pete reached past me, pushed open the gate so I wouldn’t have to touch the iron. It’s the little things I’m grateful for. “Why?” he continued, more’n a touch sarcastic. “You got a big day tomorrow after takin’ it easy all week?”
“Well,” I answered, stepping past him, “I still gotta recover the spear, see?”
With one foot still in the cemetery and one out, Pete—if you’ll excuse the expression—stopped dead in his tracks.
“What? But you just said—”
“I know what I said. I was there, and actually payin’ attention to most of it.”
“But… you… they… You lied to everyone!”
“Lower your voice some. You’re about to break windows. No, Pete. Every word I said back there was true. It just wasn’t the whole truth.”
I hadda smile, even laugh out loud, at his expression.
“It’s the reason I couldn’t get the pieces to fit nicely. Whether the spear was here or not, some things didn’t add up. But it does all fit if someone used the Unseelie hoax to cover the real deal. It’s a thing of beauty in its own way, pal. The Unfit got hoodwinked as bad as the rest of us. Damn dingus really was here, and the guys tellin’ everyone else it was here never even knew it.”
“But… But…”
I don’t think he was this taken aback even the day I told him he was gonna start turning hairy and quadrupedal every full moon.
“Who? How?”
The who, I hadn’t actually sussed out yet. Was the only part of this whole Rube Goldberg scheme I hadn’t figured.
It was gonna be real interesting to finally find out.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
“What? What?”
Lydecker’s voice shot up high enough to shatter glass—or maybe concrete. If he’d looked like a dandelion before, now he was more a dandelion after a short, sharp storm. His hair was mussed, standing out in cowlicks here, plastered to his skin there, and his suit was rumpled as though he hadn’t just slept, but bathed in it.
“What do you mean ‘no’?” he squeaked.
Raighallan, apparently not-so-devoted upholder o
f the law for the Seelie Court, sneered at the curator from across a worktable covered in brushes, small chisels, old bones, and some pretty spiral-shaped fossils. The overhead lighting was weak, flickering, casting ’em both in some pretty sickly shades. If Raighallan’s contempt’d been any thicker, it probably woulda darkened the whole table in its shadow.
“What do you suppose I mean?” the aes sidhe demanded. “The word only really has the one definition.”
“But the police are investigating me!” Lydecker wailed. He’d picked up one of the smaller fossils and was rolling it between thumb and fingers. Figure his situation hadda be upsetting if Mr. Fastidious was willing to play with the gewgaws that way. “They’ve been looking into my accounts!”
“Since I warned you of that a few days ago, it’s a fact I’m well aware of. So?”
“So I need your help, damn it! Letting others learn of my complicity in this was never part of the deal!”
“Not my problem,” Raighallan informed him coldly. “Now, if you’d kindly—”
“I did everything! Everything you asked.”
“For which you were well paid, Lydecker. I owe you nothing. You, however, have still not completed your end.”
The desperation on the curator’s mug turned sly.
“You’re right, I haven’t. And I’ll be happy to do so, once you’ve helped me come up with a way—”
“Don’t. Even. Think about it.”
Raighallan leaned over the table, knuckles pressed hard on the surface. He showed no emotion, no change in his expression at all, and his voice was harder’n deader than the fossils beside his fists.
“Renege on your word to me now, stand between me and what is mine, and I will lay you out on this table and peel you. Inch by slow, meticulous inch, until you beg to be allowed to hand it over, beg to die. And if you’re truly fortunate, if my ire has cooled by then, I might just let you.”
“I…”
You wouldn’t figure Lydecker could get any more pallid, but he pulled it off with room to spare. He wasn’t too far from glowing in the dark.
“I’ll just go fetch it, I think.”
“Wise decision.”
The old man vanished into the winding maze of cluttered shelves, full of forgotten, half-finished or abandoned projects.
Raighallan fidgeted about as much as I did, of course, so for a while the place was more or less silent, ’cept for the occasional fumbling clatter from back in the darkness, or the irritating buzz of the cheap bulbs overhead.
When Lydecker reappeared he was staggering, sidling sideways between the shelves so he’n his burden would both fit. Clutched to his chest was a long, narrow box; taller’n me, if it’d been set upright, but less than a foot in its other dimensions. Carved from a dark hardwood, it was absolutely covered in symbols, runes, and hieroglyphs from a dozen different ancient languages. Celtic, Norse, Greek, Egyptian, Minoan, Sanskrit, something outta the proto-Sino-Tibetan grouping… And all of ’em icons of power, all of ’em directed at whatever lay inside.
Not that it was all that tough to guess what lay inside. With that sorta mojo, was no wonder most of us hadn’t managed to sense it.
I realized something else when I saw that box, too, but I’ll get to that. For the moment, I decided this was my cue.
You shoulda seen Raighallan’s mug.
He’d gone almost rapturous at the sight of the box, a religious fanatic receiving divine revelation—and from that straight to slack-jawed, chin-twitching, bug-eyed shock when I appeared across the room.
Lydecker just about passed out.
Hadn’t exactly been eggs in the coffee to keep hidden, not from a fellow aes sidhe. It’d taken everything I could manage, a deep pocket of natural shadow and layer after layer of hallucinatory darkness laid over me with nerve-wracking care and slowness, knowin’ that any tiny hiccup would’ve shrieked out to any nearby Fae like a siren. I’ve told you I don’t perspire, but doing that even once, let alone for three nights in a row, sure made me feel as though I was about to break out in a cold sweat.
Yeah. Three nights. I’d figured somebody’d show eventually, but I had no way of knowing when. (Or who, for that matter.)
I gotta say, though, even if it hadn’t been something this damn important, that look on Raighallan’s face woulda made the whole thing worthwhile.
“Oberon! What… How could… Why are…?”
“Whoa, slow down, Raiggy. One question at a time. I ain’t as quick as I used to be.”
I moved fully into the light, making real sure they both got a good slant on the wand I pointed at ’em. Figure with my flogger hanging open, they probably both saw the rapier at my waist, too, but I do wonder what they thought of the dingus in my other mitt, hanging at my side.
I saw Raighallan tense, saw his gaze flicker toward Lydecker—and the box.
“As you just said, bo: don’t even think about it,” I said.
His shoulders sagged. I think he wanted to be angry, but still couldn’t gather his wits enough to get there.
“How?” he asked me. “How could you possibly be here?”
“So, you see that hinged slab over there in the wall? That’s called a door…”
He snarled.
I snickered.
“I gotta hand it to you,” I said. “This whole thing was brilliant. Seriously. I’d almost be tempted to let you walk away with the spear, just outta respect for how you pulled this off.” Raighallan started to perk up a bit. “’Cept, well, I don’t want you to have it.”
Less perking.
I kept on jawing. “Sorry, though, it wasn’t quite brilliant enough. I didn’t know it was gonna be you, until you walked in here—I had a whole list of possibilities—but I’ve known it was a double-blind for a while now.”
“How?”
“First off, don’t even take another step.”
Lydecker, who I guess’d thought I was too wrapped up with his partner, froze in his tracks.
“In fact, why don’tcha move back a few paces? Yeah, good. Raiggy, your rumors and false auras mighta fooled almost anyone, but I don’t figure it too probable that you coulda snowed the Wild Hunt. They slide right on through concealment and deception easier’n Santa through a greased chimney.”
“That’s it? That’s what convinced you?” Raighallan sounded almost affronted.
And actually, he was right. Sealgaire bein’ here in the Windy City? That just helped me confirm what I knew. Same with the stories that’d come to Hruotlundt from across the pond: evidence, but not proof. No, it’d been Adalina Ottati—restless, confused Adalina, who’d somehow sensed the thing through all its concealing magics, who’d talked to me in a language she couldn’t know about a relic she’d no good cause to have ever heard of—who’d convinced me it was genuinely here. But I wasn’t gonna mention her to Raighallan, dig?
“Well, that’n Mr. Lydecker here gettin’ multiple payments. Ongoing ‘gift’ says ongoing job to me. If all he hadda do was stage the break-in, that woulda been a one-time thing, over and done. But if he was actually holdin’ the spear for you, that makes ongoing payout fit. And it’s a wise choice. Spear’s less obvious in human hands, partly masked by the other gewgaws in the museum, and nobody’s gonna look for it too close in the one place they ‘know’ it was stolen from.
“Didn’t come to me until late—it really was a sharp scheme—but that was it.”
Most of that wasn’t even a lie: I’d only tumbled to the significance of Adalina’s mutterings, and how they went against the whole rest of my theory, when I was settin’ up the meet at the cemetery.
So, right. I had most of it figured. Raighallan’d gone about it all pretty brilliantly. Most mugs, they’da tried to set up a distraction somewhere else, get the Fae outta Chicago. But that wouldn’ta cut it. You ain’t ever gonna get everyone outta here, see? especially not any of the bigwigs. And long as they’re around… well, something like Gáe Assail can’t stay hidden forever.
But you get everyo
ne riled up, running around here looking for it, and then reveal it was all a fake? That’s got potential. Store Gáe Assail at the museum until the Unfit are done with their game, pattin’ themselves on the back for an ornate lie that was accidentally true. (And don’t think for one second that I didn’t know how impossible a coincidence all this woulda been—if I thought for even half a second it was coincidence.) Move it a few days later, and if anybody hears about it or senses it, they’ll figure it’s rumor or false magic left behind by the hoax. Nobody looks too close, and Raighallan gets to spring his new toy on everyone as a Yuletide surprise.
Wasn’t too hard to work out why, either—with the kinda power the Spear of Lugh offered, it wouldn’t be tough at all for Raighallan to work his way up in the Seelie Court, grab himself some titles and authority he’d never’ve gotten anywhere near otherwise.
But that still left me hangin’ on two big questions.
“Your turn, Raiggy. How the hell’d the Spear of Lugh end up with Lydecker here in the first place? Damn dingus’s been missing for centuries.”
“I have friends and connections,” he said stiffly. “I learned it’d been dug up and… called in a few markers to get it here. Wasn’t too hard keeping it hidden in the wilds, where we’re scattered. In the city, though? Where there’s a whole population of Fae in Elphame, just a whisper away? Figured if I just marched in with the thing, I’d have half of the other Chicago on me in two minutes. This…”
I jerked a nod. “This buys you time and doubt. You might even be able to use it a time or two, let alone open it, before anyone starts really paying attention again. Right. Got that.”
He was leaving an awful lot unsaid: I really wanted to know who in God’s name’d managed to find the thing after all these years, and keep it secret to boot. And what sorta debts Raighallan coulda held that would be worth that trade. But I didn’t guess he was gonna spill on that topic anytime soon, and the Seelie could work at getting it outta him after I handed him over.
But me, I was more concerned with the local than the global. I’d walked away from most of those concerns when I came to the New World and left the Courts behind. So I had a much bigger question—bigger to me, anyway—than who’d dug it up or gotten it as far as Chicago.