by Z. J. Cannon
“Breathe, Lara,” Carroll murmured.
Delaney didn’t take his advice. She kept going. “And of course, we’ll need a strategy for how to sell this to the public. Are you still working with that PR firm? Before any of that, though, we’ll need protection for both of us, as well as anyone else we bring in. I suggest finding better security than the people you brought with you tonight.” She managed to look at me long enough to nod toward the pocket where I was keeping the stolen phones.
Carroll shook his head slowly, in admiration this time. “You really haven’t changed, have you?”
“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. I’m the same person you’ve always known.” In the pause before she asked her next question, I had a feeling we were all holding our breath. “So what do you say? Want to work together one more time?”
Carroll answered with a long sigh. “You always could talk me into anything.” With a mutter under his breath, something that sounded like, “I’m going to regret this,” he walked back over to the now-soaked bench and sat down. “Tell me the story from the beginning. Slowly, this time.”
Chapter 4
It might have been the middle of June, but the Drunken Scarecrow in downtown Hawthorne was ready for Halloween, just like it was every day of the year. Construction-paper bats and pumpkins decorated the windows. The soundtrack to The Nightmare Before Christmas blared out the open door. Inside, the crowd parted just enough for me to see a waitress dressed as a witch, complete with pointy hat and oversized wart on her nose, juggling a platter of appetizers in one hand and a tray of drinks in the other.
The town of Hawthorne, Massachusetts had been founded on top of a Faerie portal, the strongest and most stable on the North American continent. Living in such close proximity to a tear in the veil was bound to have some side effects. From its earliest recorded history, Hawthorne had been plagued by everything from hauntings, to Bigfoot sightings, to wild swings of luck both good and bad. Whether the hauntings and Bigfoots—Bigfeet?—were real was anyone’s guess. Other stories, like someone disappearing for a hundred years and coming back without having aged a day, were consistent enough with the legends from my homeland about people unfortunate enough to stumble into Faerie that I believed them. As for the luck, it was real enough, as proven by the many businesses here that had made a fortune overnight and lost it just as quickly.
Everyone who spent any length of time in Hawthorne knew it wasn’t a normal place. But most people preferred not to talk about it. At night they locked their doors and closed their shutters… and if they sprinkled a little salt across the threshold to keep away unwelcome visitors, they never mentioned it to anyone. During the day, they let in the sunshine and went about their business, and never said a word about what they might have seen in the night.
At least, that was the approach most people took. People who had been here long enough to get used to the strangeness of the place—as much as anyone could—and to have internalized the unspoken message that we don’t talk about the weird stuff. But then there were the new arrivals. People drawn by the cheap rent and the plentiful job openings, or the ones who had heard this was a good place for entrepreneurs to get their start. They hadn’t joined the private social media groups yet, where people traded stories like children around a campfire. They hadn’t yet had a neighbor take them aside to tell them, Don’t try to talk to old Mrs. Winthrop if you see her walking down by the river; she hasn’t been the same since she died a hundred years ago.
A few years back, a man struggling to keep his newly-opened bar afloat had realized these people needed an outlet for the unease they couldn’t put a name to. They needed a place that would bring their fear out into the open, and transform it into something campy and ridiculous. And so the Drunken Scarecrow had been born.
Normally, I felt out of place here. I tried to keep my own strangeness under wraps as much as possible, for obvious reasons. Seeing the supernatural—even a cartoon version of it—out in public like this invariably made my heart start racing. Tonight was no different. But outwardly, I fit right in. I wore a top hat, a thrift-store suit, and a rubber skull mask. I carried a wooden cane, painted black, which I twirled between my fingers as I stepped sideways through the door.
I drew more than a few glances as I entered. Each pair of eyes felt like a spotlight glaring down on me, exposing the half-fae in their midst. Or maybe the wanted criminal Kieran Thorne. I wasn’t sure which would be worse.
But of course, they didn’t see either one. All they saw was someone getting a little too into the Halloween spirit. Mostly, only the people who worked here bothered to get dressed up, but there were always one or two visitors who decided to go all-in. Tonight, that was me.
I tipped my hat to my admirers, careful not to let my hair fall away from my ears. Satisfied, they smiled and turned back to their conversations. I breathed a silent sigh of relief. Even though it went against all my instincts to do it, sometimes the best way to hide was in plain sight. And right now, this was the only way I could make it inside…. given that, technically speaking, I was banned for life from this fine establishment. Something about the whole wanted-criminal thing. The owner had a lucrative—and, though he would never admit it, personally meaningful—side business in helping fae newly arrived from the other side of the portal get on their feet. Attracting too much attention wouldn’t be good for either them or him. I had snuck past him a few times, but after the last time, he had handed out pieces of paper with my face on it to all his employees and threatened to dock their pay if they let me through the doors. Hence the mask.
The harried witch waved me toward an open booth in the corner. I sat down and scanned the room. Maybe my contact wasn’t even working today, in which case, I had made the trip for nothing. I hoped Hawthorne’s luck wasn’t against me tonight. I didn’t know when I would get another chance to come here.
I had given Delaney privacy for the rest of last night’s meeting, but from what she had told me, it had gone well—well enough that she was planning a celebratory dinner for tonight, just the two of us. A dinner at which I assumed she planned to give me the names of her Arkanica contacts and send me on my way. I couldn’t think of any reason she would willingly put herself in the same room as me when it wasn’t necessary, unless it was to shove me out the door that much quicker.
And I was hardly going to object. I had already waited too long to get those names and continue my fight. My skin itched every time I combed through the business news and found small, obscure references to an unnamed clean-energy company buying up property or receiving millions of dollars in investments. But it did mean that, if all went well, after tonight I would be leaving. I didn’t know where, or for how long. Up until now, Arkanica had preferred to keep most of their operations close to the Hawthorne area, for its proximity to the portal. But all those small news items I had been collecting told me they were branching out. At the very least, they had operations in DC now—that was where Delaney had always met with them when she had been trying to gain their trust as Lucien’s double agent.
Which meant that if my contact had news for me, I had to talk to her tonight, or it was anyone’s guess when I would be in town to meet with her again. And she had to have news for me. It had been three months. She had to have something.
Although I wasn’t sure if I actually wanted her to know anything. Because chances were, if she had news, it wouldn’t be good.
There were four men in clown costumes sitting at the bar. Good—maybe my getup wouldn’t be overly conspicuous. But when someone sitting at the bar turned around to shoot me a curious look, I realized I had started tapping the cane restlessly against the floor. I forced myself to stop, and concentrated on searching the crowd.
It didn’t take me long to see her, once a gaggle of what looked like college students on a summer road trip shifted out of the way. When Arkanica had been abducting newly-arrived fae from Hawthorne for their experiments, Jimmy had done his best to keep them hidden,
including having them work for him in full-body costumes that served as convenient disguises. Now that Arkanica’s headquartered was gone, the building reduced to rubble, he had decided the disguises weren’t necessary anymore. Every time I had come here, Nikla had worn her white-blond hair swept back to show off the points of her ears. The sharp lines of her makeup, all deep blacks and rich blues, accentuated the alien angles of her features.
The dress she wore was the only thing that didn’t fit the look, at least to my eye—it looked more like it belonged on an aristocrat from the seventeenth century than one of the fae. Whoever had prepared her for her mission had been going off old knowledge of the human world. They should have taken advantage of the fact that Faerie got cable, and equipped her with something a bit more modern-looking.
But of course, I could only tell the difference because I had been around in the seventeenth century. To most of the humans here, it was probably all of a piece. Rubber ears, a few makeup tricks, a dress bought from the costume shop.
Her look never failed to set me on edge. Intellectually, I knew any human who looked at her would only see a cheap Halloween costume. But something deeper always reminded me how dangerous it was to where one’s true face in public. Or be seen with someone who was doing the same.
I took a deep breath, tried with middling success to let go of my tension, and waved her over to me as soon as I caught her eye. She sauntered over to me, unhurried. The other waitress might have been struggling to manage the crowd, but it took a lot to shake a scion of the Winter Court. The possibility of her losing her patience with a demanding customer and slitting their throat from ear to ear was probably more of a concern. But that was for Jimmy to worry about, not me.
She gave my outfit a once-over and raised her eyebrows. Her lips quirked up in an amused smile. She shook her head and muttered something that might have been, “Humans.” In a more normal tone, she asked, “What can I get for you tonight?”
She didn’t recognize me. “The usual,” I said in a low voice. “Information.”
Her eyebrows lifted. She leaned in, hands on the table, so she could lower her voice and still be heard over the crowd. “I didn’t expect you to come dressed as…” She left the sentence open, a question.
“Death, I think,” I answered. “Or maybe just an exceptionally well-dressed skeleton. It was the best I could do on short notice, and with limited funds.” The “limited funds” part still stuck in my craw. Just months ago, I had been living very well on the sales of historical artifacts from my seven centuries of life. That had been before Arkanica had taken exception to what I had done to their headquarters, and had decided to send me a warning by freezing my assets and destroying my reputation. The stories about my criminal activities hadn’t begun with Delaney’s supposed death. That was only when the national news had started taking an interest.
She fingered the cuff of the suit and wrinkled her nose. “If this is what passes for well-dressed among the humans, Mab should be sending an army of tailors through the portal. We wouldn’t have to fight a single battle. The entire world would fall at our feet in gratitude.”
Nikla thought I was a fellow spy for Mab, collecting information on the human world to prepare for Mab’s war of annihilation. That was what I had told her the first time I had snuck into Jimmy’s to make contact with one of the fae. And since full-blooded fae couldn’t lie—and she apparently wasn’t familiar enough with the legends of the only living half-fae to recognize my face on sight—it had never occurred to her to doubt me.
“Well-dressed for a skeleton,” I amended, allowing myself a brief moment of levity. “Normally they go naked.”
She couldn’t see my smile under the mask, but she returned it anyway. Just a brief flicker, but for one of the Winter fae, even that much was noteworthy. Normally the only things that could make one of them smile involved blood and pain.
She slid into the seat across from me. “Speaking of limited funds,” she said, holding out her hand, “payment first. As always.”
I reached for my wallet, but didn’t pull it out yet. “Do you have anything useful for me this time?”
“This again.” Her eyes flicked toward the ceiling. “As I told you last time, and the time before that, that is not our arrangement. You don’t pay me for information. You pay me to keep my ears open when I cross over into Winter territory, or meet with someone who has visited Mab’s realm recently. In return, when I hear something, I will give it to you free of charge.”
A subscription service for information. Great. Grinding my teeth, I dug in my wallet for the money Delaney had given me. She didn’t begrudge me the funds—she wanted news about Lucien almost as badly as I did—but I still felt a pang every time I had to ask. I had gotten a look recently at the dwindling pile of cash I had managed to get from her bank after her death by pretending to be her son. I knew how little she had left.
I set the five hundred-dollar bills on the table in front of her, one by one. She looked at them, but made no move to take them. “I’ve been ordered to New York City,” she said. “Mab wants me there as soon as possible. The rent isn’t cheap.”
“This is all I brought.” It wasn’t a lie. I didn’t even have enough on me for a drink.
“In theory,” she pointed out, pursing her blue-painted lips, “the two of us are on the same side. A loyal agent of Winter would give me however much I needed for the next phase of my mission, and count himself grateful for the opportunity to serve the Queen of Air and Darkness.”
I raised an eyebrow. “A loyal agent of Winter,” I pointed out, “would give me any information I asked for, without extorting money from me in return.”
“And if you’d had the proper passcodes at our first meeting, I would have done just that.” Unexpectedly, she laughed. It was a harsh sound, full of sharp glass and bitter wind. “As it is, I wouldn’t talk too much about loyalty, if I were you. Seeing as we both know your own relationship to the Winter crown is… not exactly as described.”
I barely stopped myself from visibly tensing. “What do you mean by that?”
“I mean that when you told me you wanted to know about any new prisoners who were brought to Queen Mab’s stronghold, you neglected to tell me the reason you wanted to know.” She flashed him a smile, showing her teeth. “Son of Oberon.”
Chapter 5
This time, I couldn’t hide my reaction. My head jerked up; my blood pounded in my ears. Reflexively, I reached for my watch. I spread my hands out flat on the table, palms down, to keep myself from grabbing it. I kept my eyes on Nikla’s own hands, waiting for her to reach for a weapon or call on her magic.
The fae didn’t allow half-fae to live. They claimed it was because of how dangerous we could be, with fae magic trapped inside a body incapable of controlling it. There was something to that, I had to admit, although I hardly thought possessing a power I had never asked for was worthy of a death sentence. But in my more cynical moments, I was convinced it had less to do with the danger we presented, and more with a sense of superiority that sent the fae into spasms of disgust at the thought of any part of them mingled with anything human. Which was a strange place to draw the line, considering they didn’t seem to have any qualms about the process of creating half-fae.
As far as I knew, I was the only half-fae who had made it past childhood. At least if I didn’t count my son, who had been born after the fae had retreated to Faerie and banned almost all travel to the human world. He had escaped the notice of the fae for most of his life. I hadn’t been so lucky. My father’s people had been sending assassins after me since I was six years old.
Nikla took in my splayed hands and the tense lines of my body. Her smile narrowed into a smirk. “Don’t worry. I have no intention of fighting you. I made a deal, after all, and I’m bound to honor it.” She gave a low chuckle. “Of course, I could honor our agreement by giving the information you requested to your bleeding corpse. But I have more of a sense of self-preservation than that. I’ve
heard about what’s happened to the assassins the Courts have sent after you over the centuries. I want to live long enough to be granted a noble title—or at least to see the end of Mab’s war, and watch with my own eyes as the last human is slaughtered.”
I didn’t take my eyes off her hands. She spread them out on the table in front of me, mirroring my own. Showing me she wasn’t holding any weapons. Not that that meant anything, with one of the fae. Every one of them had magic, and with very few exceptions, they all knew how to use it to kill.
“How did you figure out who I was?” I asked tightly.
“Oh, it wasn’t hard to guess, at least once I learned the last bit of information that tied it all together. After all, who else would be interested in that particular prisoner?”
I had to fight to draw a breath into my suddenly-tight lungs. “What prisoner?”
Nikla patted the small stack of bills in front of her. “You know, I’ve been thinking I should raise my price. It’s not just the rent that’s expensive in New York. I have to consider the cost of living.” She gave a little frown. “Cost of living. An interesting phrase. Jimmy was the one who introduced it to me. He said I should watch out for it, when I told him I would be leaving for New York. In the Winter Court, the cost of our lives is paid in blood.”
“Don’t play games.” I surged up from my seat before I realized I was doing it. Only the glances my movement drew from across the room stopped me from lunging across the table and shaking the answers out of her. “What prisoner?”
Amusement danced in Nikla’s pale blue eyes. “I’m beginning to think it isn’t a good idea to be giving you information. You’re hardly a loyal ally of the Winter Court, which means these meetings could be considered treason. And you don’t want to know how Mab punishes treason.”