by Rhys Ford
But I didn’t have a lot of hope for that.
Most urban centers in SoCal had retained their expansive boundaries after the violence of the Merge, but San Diego’s downtown hadn’t been very large to begin with. If anything, the split-level design of the new city created a larger metropolitan area than had been there before.
And it made the divide between the haves and the have-nots even more visible.
I never knew San Diego before the Merge, but I liked the one that hugged the SoCal coast below Pendle’s dragon mating grounds. There were some rumblings about fixing the Coronado Bridge because its span was patchy and missing in places. The north part of the island was practically useless, taken over by walrus and unicorn seals, but the south end, with its aging hotels and quaint village shops, was a good source of revenue. Problem was, there were only two ways to get there—one was lengthy and the other was dangerous.
Much like getting to Duffy’s place.
She’d lived in the upper district for a while, but a couple years ago, she went underground. At the time she told me she wanted to get back in touch with where she came from. I offered her money so she didn’t have to live below, but she laughed and told me currency wasn’t a problem. I then asked her for a loan because currency is always a problem. She laughed at me then too, knowing I wasn’t serious.
But I really didn’t like where she lived. The old Golden Hill district was a patchwork quilt of craftsman homes woven into a landscape filled with tattoo shops, gambling dens, and the occasional brothel. The homes were beautiful but caked with the level’s incessant grime. Nothing escaped the soot, and the artificial rain programmed by the weather department did little to wash it from the air and the streets.
“You’re going the long way in, then, yes?” Ryder broke my silence. We’d navigated through the tunnels until I veered the truck over to an exit ramp and came out near Broadway. “The map I programmed in had a different route.”
“Yeah, probably the route that you had programmed in is the one that would’ve taken you right next to the Ironworks. Let’s just say, even in a hermetically sealed mayonnaise jar left on a porch, you’d have sucked iron filings into your lungs, and I would’ve had to make a U-turn toward Balboa and hoped we made it to a healer.” I called the understreets map up on the truck’s flickering display. “Remind me to forward the patch I had to build. It’ll warn you off areas you shouldn’t go and give you the police feed so you can avoid things like shootouts and nutria stampedes.”
He lifted an eyebrow, which gave him a devilish air. His face resembled some propaganda posters I’d seen in some old shops, their stark, flat-colored images twisting an elfin’s features into demonic proportions. “Nutria are not something to be feared, Kai. Even I know that.”
“They are rodents of unusual size, Ryder.” I spared him a quick glance as I pulled the truck to the left of the lane to avoid an out-of-control chicken take-away scooter careening into my path. “They’re just biding their time, and one day they’ll rise up and attack us, starting the great rodent revolution.”
“It is times like these that I wonder if you are serious or if they neglected to give you a sense of humor when they raised you.” He widened his eyes when I pulled onto the main drag, and the tiny gasp he gave was just icing on the cake. “By the gods, how does anyone live in this?”
“Careful there, Your Lordship,” I cautioned with a chuckle. “Your bourgeois roots are showing.”
Still, seeing the glittering but dingy district through Ryder’s eyes drove home how far apart we really were.
I was comfortable there. The shops and stalls were busy that late in the afternoon, filled with people coming home from work or those about to go on shift. A tofu-dog vendor shouted out toward the crowd, his Singlish accented heavily with the round, golden tones of his native Thai. An explosion of light from the screen above his head advertised the services of a breast enhancer down the street, the before-and-after pictures of his clients splashing their pixilated chests next to a billboard that welcomed people to attend a new church being built at the end of the block. I rolled down the truck’s windows to let the scents of the street into the cab.
It was a sushi burrito of everything right and wrong with the world, delivered hot through my nose.
“What is that smell?” Ryder sniffed audibly as I eased the truck to a stop. We were caught at a light that I knew wouldn’t turn green for a good minute or two—a dangerous span of time to be sitting at a dead stop during some times of the night, but for right then we were okay. “It smells like… someone wrapped a flower around vomit.”
“Yeah, that’s the durian truck over there.” I pointed it out. The cook working the grill had a pincher over his nostrils and a mesh filter taped across his mouth. He would be able to breathe and talk through it, but for the most part, the acrid smoke coming off of the cookers couldn’t penetrate the barrier. It made speech sound like you were underwater, but he probably preferred sounding like a cartoon prawn to choking on a day’s worth of cooking durian. “Normally it’s in something sweet, but lately people are eating it like chips—deep-fried and with curry on top.”
“Do you want to stop and grab some?” I caught Ryder scraping his tongue against his teeth. It was a noble gesture, offering to sit in a cab with me as I ate durian, and I appreciated it, but it wasn’t necessary.
“I would rather suck the egg mucus out of our niece’s nose again than eat that, but thanks for asking.” The light turned green, and I pulled the truck forward, taking us deeper into the brightly lit streets. “But if you see a street cart serving lau-lau, give me a shout-out, and I’ll show you what really good food tastes like.”
No matter how hard San Diego’s local government tried to normalize living under tons of concrete and steel, they couldn’t replicate the sky or actual sunlight. They made attempts with tracks of brightening and dimming bulbs able to throw off a diffused light that closely replicates the outside, but they often fell to disrepair or were stolen. Considering the so-called ceiling was more than twenty stories high in most places, I had to give those thieves credit.
That part of the understreets didn’t need sunlight. If anything, it could have used a dose of darkness, because half a block out of the exit, the air burned with a kaleidoscope of colors bright enough to burn a man’s eyes out.
Everything was lit up. The sides of buildings abounded with banners and LED lights, all of them shouting for attention. Nudity was big, but it was so commonplace that no one seemed to notice. People scurried by, holding the hands of their children as they dodged through puddles left over from the morning’s scheduled rain. But no one looked up. They were intent on getting to where they needed to be and out of the glorified consumerism shower they’d been forced to bathe in.
Tik-tiks dove up and down between cars, grabbing passengers from the street and then climbing up the thick cables that connected them to the overhead trolley lines. A monorail train loaded with people rumbled past us on the right as it climbed its creaking steel track and gained speed to barrel through tightly packed apartment buildings. Traffic was thick and hampered by a couple of cop cars with flashing lights that blocked in a tiny red roadster. The police were huge and towered over the sports-car owner, a twitchy, skinny guy in an ill-fitting suit. I don’t know what he did, but from the looks of things, he was about four words away from wearing a pair of cuffs and eating jailhouse sandwiches for dinner.
The taller of the cops spotted us, and he narrowed his eyes as he tracked the truck. Elfin were rare in human cities and not often seen underground. I’d been the only one of my species in San Diego for a long time, but now there were more, and Ryder’s face was often seen on their screens when they caught him on a charitable junket or attending some dinner with little food and a high price tag.
Two of us in a truck cruising the brothel strip was not only unprecedented, it would probably get us pulled over eventually.
“There are some times when I really wish we could mak
e you look more human,” I muttered as I turned onto a side street. “If the cops come after us, please let me do the talking.”
“I have diplomatic immunity for anything that I do in the city and the state.” Ryder frowned at me, and a very familiar look of confusion formed over his handsome face. “And we’ve done nothing wrong. We’re simply driving. Just like the people next to us.”
“See, that’s the difference. Right there.” I nodded at the couple staring at us from their SUV in the next lane over. “Those are actually people. We are elfin. Try to remember that.”
“How can I forget?” he drawled. “You remind me every five minutes or so.”
“There. Right there. That.” I stabbed at the air to emphasize my point. “That’s why people don’t like you. Because you’re sarcastic when they try to help you.”
“I would make a remark about a pot and a kettle, but I don’t think they’ve invented a color darker than black just yet.” Ryder leaned forward and studied the map on the screen. The heat of his body was welcome against my arm, and his breath ghosted over the back of my hand as I shifted. “We should be there shortly if I am reading this right.”
“Actually, we’re there now.” I turned left into a narrow alleyway between a row of tightly packed-in houses. “She’s got a garage in the back we can park in.”
“So we could have brought my car, and it would’ve been safe.” Ryder shot me a hot look. “Admit it. You just don’t want me driving.”
“You bet your sweet ass I don’t want you driving.” I counted out the houses as we passed, since the lane’s tall cedar-plank fences and detached garages all looked alike. “And if you haven’t figured that out by now, you are dumber than you look.”
“Well, at least you like my ass,” he muttered under his breath.
The area was mostly houses for a block and a half—beautiful two- and three-story structures built in a time when television sets were barely a blip on the technological horizon. In many ways the area was experiencing a renaissance. New families were moving into the slightly dilapidated large homes and refurbishing them over long weekends with a lot of sweat equity and pizza parties to pay their friends for their help in retiling floors and painting ceilings.
Duffy purchased a near-mansion of a house. Its sloping roof extended out to cover its wraparound porch, and it promised to cost a fortune to replace its ancient glass windows with newer panes. I questioned her sanity when she moved in, more than slightly horrified by the falling plaster walls and whatever used to live underneath one of the bathtubs. I helped out a couple of times with her renovations, mostly because some of the quotes she got from contractors gave me heartburn, and while she’d been willing to cough up that kind of cash, it just didn’t sit right by me.
But I did take the nail gun away from her the one time she tried to help us, and it took Jonas four minutes to pull out all the spikes she’d shot into my upper arm.
“It’s later than I thought it was,” Ryder commented as he peered out at the glowing canopy above us. “Is your clock right?”
“Yeah, the environmental system on the site is glitchy. I think someone has it set for a time zone or two ahead, because there are seasons when the sun gets up a lot earlier than the rest of the city, and it goes dark by about five o’clock in the afternoon.” I grimaced when the streetlamps began to flare on. “You think somebody would be able to get at least that straight.”
“I am grateful that she’s willing to meet with me.” His smile was warm and oddly reassuring as the sun lamps began to dim quickly toward a dusk the outside world wouldn’t experience for another hour or so. “I know that she has given you all the particulars for our rendezvous, but I wanted to thank her personally for all the help she’s given our kind.”
“She’s probably got to stop after this, but I think she’s hoping you pick up the banner. Mostly she does it to make sure they end up someplace safe. The area the Unsidhe cross is dangerous, and if the land doesn’t kill them, the people living on that side of the river might.” I shook my head, recalling the times we’d stumbled across an encampment of old soldiers hidden in New Tijuana’s twisted canyons. “A lot of folks out there are still fighting the war in their heads. They see an Unsidhe, and things go bad really fast.”
We got to the tenth lot, and every alarm, siren, and klaxon attached to my senses went off. The garage’s rolling door was up, and the door connecting it to the backyard was wide open. The neighborhood itself was fairly safe despite the surrounding area, and it was still the kind of place where neighbors took in each other’s garbage bins and the nosy neighbor next door baked apple pies on holidays and left one on everyone’s porch. I knew that last one was certainly true, because I’d been there when she dropped off the pastry and startled her when I opened the front door.
But Duffy never would have left the house wide open.
“I’m going to grab my guns from behind my seat.” I parked the truck sideways on the cement pad in front of the garage and gestured toward the glove compartment. “There’s a Glock in there with two clips. I’m not going to say that you need it, but I also know I won’t be able to stop you from following me. Whatever you do, just don’t shoot me in the back… or the front either, for that matter.”
“Do you think this is really necessary?” Ryder asked even as he unlatched the compartment. “She knew you were coming. Perhaps she—”
The sound of gunfire was all I needed to get me out of the truck. I quickly grabbed my weapons and strapped them on as I ran. It was something I could do in the dark, something I’ve done tens of thousands of times before—going into a fight fully loaded and primed without knowing what was waiting for me on the other side of the wall.
It didn’t matter. Duffy was in trouble, and all I’d brought with me to the fight was a Sidhe lordling and a handful of weapons. It was going to have to be enough.
But I couldn’t help smiling when I heard Ryder fall in behind me.
Eight
TEN STEPS into the backyard and the ground was black beneath my feet. Something was driving the light away from the house, drowning it in shadows. My brain fought to make sense of the dimness, especially since I could see the light touching the rest of the world beyond the tall wooden fence. It made no sense, but there was a line of smoky darkness cutting through the yard, a clear demarcation that circled the house itself.
The lower level of the city was far from silent. Even in the depths of the deepest sections, life existed. Birds still sang and bees built hives wherever they could find a cool spot. The fluctuating environment was a struggle, but nature always adapted and filled in the crevices of an artificial environment as easily as it did an open field or a riverbank.
Despite the sound of gunfire—if it even was gunfire—I stopped dead in my tracks to try to make sense of my surroundings.
It was magic. That much I knew. But at a scale I’d never seen before in a human city.
Humans had magic. It was either awakened by the Merge and the shove of the elfin world into theirs, or perhaps it had always been there, simmering beneath the surface and unacknowledged by a species driven forward by science and technology. Cari came from a long line of witches, and their power blossomed following the cataclysm of the Merge, but it took them a while to harness their magic. Still, they were nowhere near as powerful as the elfin.
Whatever engulfed Duffy’s house was not human in any way, shape, or form.
The grounds were deafeningly muted, as though sealed off behind tight glass. I heard nothing from the house, and then a crash of something being toppled over. The sound rolled out from an open window upstairs but whispered away into nothing nearly as soon as I heard it. That was the one thing about living beneath the underbelly of a city—sounds echoed and bounced in the strangest of ways.
Then I heard a whisper of Unsidhe. Its velvet crackle ribboned through the air, a sibilant Möbius strip that strengthened the surrounding shadows.
“Fuck,” I ground out. “Duffy!”
I mounted the back steps at a full sprint and slammed into something I couldn’t see. My face stung, and my forehead throbbed where I’d struck it, but when I reached my arms out and pressed against the invisible barrier, it didn’t give. A few feet down the porch got me the same results—an impenetrable obstruction I couldn’t get past.
“Shielding spell.” Ryder finally caught up with me. I was relieved to see he kept his weapon pointed down, his hands loose around its grip. The grayness around us enveloped him and muted the brilliance of his hair and eyes. “The trick is to ease in slowly. Like it is quicksand.”
“I’ve got a better idea. Cover me.” I put my gun back into its holster and secured it on my thigh. “I’ll be back.”
Taking the steps in a few short leaps, I was suddenly immensely grateful for Duffy’s old-fashioned taste. She’d styled her garden in an old California fashion and left it alone after she discovered I couldn’t use any of the wrought-iron lawn furniture without getting sick to my stomach with prolonged exposure.
Rich plump falls of bougainvillea cascaded down the left side of the yard from old shrubs trained to follow the line of the planks. A three-tiered fountain splashed merrily despite the shadows that drowned the yard. It was a plaster-and-concrete tea-tree-looking lawn ornament I’d brought up with me after a run through San Diego’s buried underground. At some point those fountains were a dime a dozen, but they had become difficult to find. I’d gotten a lot of shit from Cari about loading it into the back of the truck with the black dog carcasses, but the smile on Duffy’s face when I rolled up with it was worth every bruise and scrape.
She’d designed her entire Spanish-SoCal-influenced gardens around it and set the three-foot-high fountain into the middle of a larger pool. Then she coaxed a bunch of lilies to grow around its base, planted what looked like a thousand rosebushes, and she found the perfect piece to finish off her dream sanctuary—a vintage wrought-iron table set with six chairs, each heavy enough to kill a cow or bring one elfin chimera from zero to puke in less than half an hour.