No Sanctuary

by Z. J. Cannon

  I met Engstrom’s sunken gaze. “I’m all ears.”

  If he heard the hostility in my voice, it didn’t seem to bother him. Then again, it didn’t look like much of anything him one way or the other. “As a child, I always had lofty goals,” he began. “My father worked in a microchip plant, before we started outsourcing all that to China. He always told me that if I studied hard, I could own the plant someday. I didn’t understand why I would stop there. I wanted to own the city.”

  I was less interested in his childhood dreams, and more in one specific detail that had caught my attention. “Microchips?” I repeated. It took me a second to realize why the detail had pinged wrong. After what had happened outside, I had been unconsciously assuming Engstrom was like me. An immortal worn down by centuries of life. It would have explained the weary look in his eyes, and his eclectic array of furnishings.

  He seemed to know what I was thinking. “I’m forty-five years old, give or take,” he said with a slight smile. “Surprised? So am I, some days. When every day is an endless march of empty moments, each day can feel like a hundred years. By my own internal clock, I imagine I’m a couple of thousand years older than you.”

  I motioned for him to get on with the story. He nodded, and obliged. “Most ambitious children channeled their energies into getting into the best colleges,” he said. “But I had always been a strange child, obsessed with stories of myth and magic. And I confess, I liked the thought of taking the easy path. So I went hunting for the fae, to ask them for riches and eternal life. Luck was against me. I found them.”

  He let out a long sigh, and reached for the plate of food without looking at it. He grabbed a pickled onion, took a bite, and chewed mechanically.

  “They gave me ten times the money I had asked for,” he said. “And not in fairy gold, either. It was real modern currency—stacks and stacks of crisp new hundred-dollar bills.” His smile turned cynical. “Of course, ‘real’ is a matter of perspective. Counterfeit, every one of them. Not a single one of those bills would spend, and I had to think fast to avoid an investigation.”

  I hoped he didn’t expect sympathy. “I didn’t know the Courts’ sense of humor had kept up with the times.”

  “They didn’t stop there. They gave me the mansion I asked for, and the private island. Then they tucked them both into a pocket of space between the worlds, and set a magical guardian in place so I could never leave. I still have contact with the outside world—television, phone, internet… and don’t ask me how that works, because I don’t know any better than you do. But every time I try to swim out of sight of the island, I wash up on shore again. Usually with my lungs full of water. And unlike you, I remember every second of the time I spend dead.”

  I shook away the image of his empty eye sockets staring at me, and replaced it with the memory of the nightmare room underneath Arkanica headquarters. He still wasn’t getting any sympathy from me. “I’m guessing that was the final part of their gift.”

  “Immortality. An eternity spent trapped in a cursed body that refuses to die. They stole my body’s capacity for pleasure. Everything I look at, I see in black and white. All food tastes like sand… but I still feel the pain of hunger, if I don’t eat.” He looked at the onion in his hand, and set it down on the table. “The softest touch feels like sandpaper. All music sounds like the screech of metal on metal. The only pleasures left to me are those of the mind, and those grow hollow surprisingly quickly without the body’s animal joys.”

  It sounded to me like he had gotten exactly what people normally got when they were stupid enough to go looking for the fae. And while normally, I felt for the hapless victims in those stories—it wasn’t as if most of them had known any better, especially after the old warnings about the fae had faded into legend—what I knew of Engstrom told me he had more than deserved it.

  Speaking of which, this story was missing a few things. “You still haven’t told me how Arkanica comes into this.”

  “I’m getting there, I’m getting there. This is a conversation between immortals, remember—there’s no rush.” He cleared his throat and dropped his gaze to the table. “Before they left me here, they told me that someday they would demand a favor as payment for their gifts. Several years ago—I’ve lost track of the exact number, what with the way time works here—they called in that favor. A fae woman calling herself the Lady of the Balance showed up at my front door, and told me she was calling in the debt I owed the Summer Court. She said I would be their envoy to humanity, and solve the climate crisis for both worlds by convincing the humans to use the magic within fae blood as an energy source. I would need human scientists to refine the basic concept, she said, as well as a distribution system, and a way to sell it to the public. I told her I didn’t know how I was supposed to get any of that, especially not trapped on this island. But she promised… unspeakable things… if I failed her.”

  A shiver ran through him. Even that looked halfhearted, like his body had forgotten how to react to fear properly.

  “But if I succeeded…” He raised his eyes to mine. “She promised me that if I gave her what she wanted, she would remove the curse.” At those words, all the life that had been missing from his face lit up his eyes. For a second, I could see the old Engstrom in there, trapped and raging against his fate.

  Then he took a long, slow breath. The life faded out of him again. “I got in touch with an expert on the fae. I was looking for a way to remove the curse and break my connection to the Summer Court. Everything I had found on my own told me it was impossible, but I knew I couldn’t do what the Lady of the Balance was asking, and her threats gave me more than enough motivation to start looking for an alternate way out. But Rina had… other ideas.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “Are you trying to tell me that despite all your ambition, it never occurred to you to use faelight get rich and rule the world until a mythology professor suggested it?”

  “That’s exactly what I’m saying. I lost my taste for ambition somewhere around the third time I failed to die. Tell me, what would I do with money? What would I want with power? But her ideas showed me a path to giving the Lady of the Balance what she wanted, and she had promised to break the curse if I did. You know what a promise means to the fae. And that… that, I wanted very much.” Again, that brief flash of life.

  “And how does Ellison come into the story?” I asked.

  “That was all Rina’s doing. She made a list of the top technology companies, researched the founders, and chose the most ruthless of the bunch. Eddie was skeptical at first, of course, but the Lady of the Balance was kind enough to provide a brief demonstration. You should have seen him after that. It was nothing but more more more, faster faster faster. I don’t think he slept a wink, that first year. Not that I would know. All I know is that I would get emails from him at all hours of the night, asking me to confirm details like the exact number of blood donors the Lady had promised.”

  “You know the Lady of the Balance is dead.” Maybe I should have been more tactful about it. But we couldn’t have a real conversation if he was still laboring under the illusion that she was going to free him.

  “I told you, I stayed in close contact with the Hawthorne office. When I heard about her death, I knew my last hope was gone. But I thought at least it meant we could finally stop now. No such luck. Less than two weeks after her death, I started getting orders again. From whom, I don’t know. He—or she—has never come to my front door the way the Lady did. I’ve never seen his face. When he has something to say, his shadow shows up in the nearest surface of water—the glass I’m drinking from, a puddle outside, my bathwater.” He gave another halfhearted shudder. “He won’t tell me whether he’ll break my curse once my job is done, which is enough of an answer for me. All I know is that the Summer Court isn’t willing to let me go yet.”

  I had a suspicion that if Ashante were to get a look at whoever was behind these mysterious messages, she would think his face looked awfully fa
miliar. But since she wasn’t here, and Engstrom had never gotten a look at this person’s face anyway, that thought didn’t give me anything but the feeling that I was pushing a boulder uphill.

  I had found Engstrom. I had set my magic loose on him. That was supposed to have been the end of it.

  My fingers ached. I looked down to see that I was gripping the end of the rusted chain in both hands. I let go, but my fingers still ached from the smears of rust the chain had left behind.

  “Eddie, Rina, and I have been…” Engstrom took a quick, furtive look around the room—maybe to make sure there was no water nearby. He leaned in toward me and lowered his voice. “We’ve been doing everything we can to distance Arkanica from the fae, and get out from under their thumb. We’re still dependent on them for blood donors for now, but that doesn’t mean we have to be their puppets forever. But it’s not easy when I know they could be watching me, listening to me, at any time.” He leaned back, and slumped in his chair. “But in the end, what does it matter anyway? No matter how much we convince ourselves we’re free of them, we’ll still be dancing to their tune, as long as we’re pushing faelight as an energy source. And as long as the curse lasts, as long as I’m trapped in a place they control, they will always have their hooks in me.”

  He met my gaze. His eyes blazed with a sudden intensity.

  “Which is where you come in,” he said.

  I shook my head. “I’m not following.”

  “I don’t want to be their puppet anymore. I don’t care about anything the fae or Arkanica can give me. All I want is the curse broken, so I can be done with all this. I want to leave this island, and live the simple life I could never appreciate before, and grow old in a body that can see color and hear music.”

  “I still don’t see what this has to do with me.”

  “You want to stop Arkanica,” said Engstrom. “And now you know you can’t do it by killing me. So I’m offering you an alternative solution. Break my curse. Free me from this place. And give me your promise that once the curse is broken, you won’t bring my newly-mortal life to a premature end. Once I’m free, I can hide somewhere the fae can never find me. With me gone, Eddie dead, and Rina scurrying to ground like the coward she is, I have full control of the company now. I can shut it down, and there won’t be anything they can do to stop me. I’ll be free, and so will you.”

  “Even if I wanted to help you,” I said—and I wasn’t at all sure I did, whether his story was true or not—“there’s nothing I can do. You understand how my magic works, don’t you? There’s no nuance. No control. I set it free, and it does what it wants. And you’ve already seen what it wants to do to you.”

  “Be that as it may,” Engstrom said, “you’re the best option I have. Rina can’t help me—and if she can’t, there’s no human on earth who can. The Summer Court could help, but they won’t. But you… you’re human enough to hate the fae, but fae enough to understand their magic.”

  “That may be overstating things.” Fae magic could be a deadly precision instrument in the hands of those who could control it, but that didn’t give me the ability to break his curse any more than the knowledge that astronauts existed could put me on the moon. I had tried to learn the theory behind fae magic once. My ex-wife, the former fae assassin, had tried to teach me. After a few weeks, we had both given up in frustration. My human brain was missing whatever it was that let the fae understand the complexities behind what magic was and what it could do. Or maybe I just didn’t have the patience for it.

  Engstrom didn’t look worried. “You found me,” he pointed out. “If you could do that, you can find a way to break the curse.”

  “What makes you so sure of that?”

  He answered with a small shrug. “Maybe the fact that I have no other options.”

  I stood. “I’m sorry. I can’t help you.”

  “You haven’t even tried.”

  “All right, then. I won’t help you.” The deal I had made with Ashante, promising to leave her unharmed for the rest of her life, was bad enough. Engstrom was the key to the whole thing. He had said it himself—without him, there was no Arkanica. The Summer Court had used his greed as their bridge into the human world, and countless fae had already suffered for it. Maybe he had been an innocent victim once. But he had lost his innocence a long time ago.

  I expected Engstrom to keep trying to convince me. Instead, he gestured to the door. “You can’t kill me. You won’t help me. There’s nothing else you can do here.”

  I looked at the open door, but didn’t walk through. Engstrom had known I wouldn’t. That was why he didn’t look worried, or even disappointed. If I left, nothing would change. Arkanica would keep on rebuilding—and while it would be hard for them to recover from the loss of Ellison, it wouldn’t be like back when Engstrom had been trying to fulfill Lady Iliana’s demands on his own. Ellison might be gone, but the corporate machinery he had built still existed. And Engstrom knew I couldn’t let him take control of it.

  I had to kill him. I couldn’t kill him.

  I clenched my teeth.

  If freeing Enstrom from his curse was really the only way to stop Arkanica, was I prepared to let my own desire for justice stand in the way? Was it more important to stop Arkanica, or to make Engstrom pay for what he had done?

  When I had lectured Delaney about making compromises, I had meant being willing to kill when necessary. But maybe this was the final, and hardest, compromise I had to make. Letting my enemies live, even knowing what they had done.

  It didn’t matter whether helping him was the right choice, I reminded myself. I had no idea how to break a fae curse.

  But there were a lot of things I hadn’t been able to do until I had been forced to learn. I hadn’t known how to defend myself against the fae at six years old, but I had figured it out, or I wouldn’t be here. When Vicantha had accused me of abducting those missing Winter Court agents, I had saved my own skin by promising to help her find them, even though I had never done anything like that before. I had not only survived, I had found the missing agents, and discovered Arkanica in the process.

  “How do I know I can trust you?” I asked, even as a voice inside me screamed that I couldn’t let myself entertain this idea even enough to ask that question.

  Instead of answering, Engstrom placed a hand on the table, palm down. “Restrain our guest, please,” he said calmly.

  Twin barkless branches shot out from the table. Before I could dodge, they wrapped themselves around my wrists. When I tried to pull away, they only got tighter, until the tips of my fingers tingled from lack of circulation. The wood was as strong as any metal. Maybe I had been right not to touch the table.

  Engstrom still had his hand on the table. “A weapon, if you would.” The wood under his fingers rose and sharpened into a blade the length of his palm. He curled his fingers around the hilt. It might have been made of wood, but that knife looked sharp enough to do some serious damage.

  Even if I could have reached the chain around my waist, I wouldn’t have had time to undo the knot. All I could do was stand where I was as Engstrom walked slowly up to me, knife raised.

  He rested the tip of the knife against my throat. I could feel my pulse beating against it. The wooden blade dug into my skin just enough to confirm my impression that what it was made of didn’t matter—it would open my skin effortlessly if Engstrom wanted it to.

  “If you’re trying to convince me to trust you,” I managed to say, “you chose an interesting strategy.”

  Engstrom stayed where he was for another few seconds. Then he lowered the knife. “You see how easily I could be rid of you, if I chose. It should mean something, then, when I tell you I don’t want you dead.” He tapped the table. “Release him, if you would be so kind.”

  The restraints disappeared back into the table. I rubbed my wrists.

  “All my cards are on the table,” said Engstrom. “I could kill you if I wanted to. Or keep you locked in my dungeon for the rest o
f our immortal lives. Yes, this mansion has a dungeon, although I can’t imagine what use they thought I would have for it. But I don’t want that. I want your help. I need your help.” His hollow voice roughened. “Would it make a difference if I got down on my knees and begged? Because I will.”

  “Please don’t.” I studied his eyes. The life had gone out of them again. “I still don’t trust you.”

  “That isn’t a no.”

  “It isn’t a yes, either. I’ll think about it. That’s the best I can give you right now.” I held up a hand before he could react. “Two things. First, even if I decide to help you, that doesn’t mean I’ll be able to break the curse. I don’t know the first thing about fae curses. I wouldn’t even know where to start looking.”

  Engstrom nodded. But I wasn’t sure whether the message had gotten through.

  “Second,” I said, “I want to meet this ‘dear companion’ of yours before I make any decisions. If you want me to stay here for any length of time, I need to know who I’ll be sharing a house with.” Besides the spirit of whatever ‘magical guardian’ was keeping him trapped here. The thought of sleeping anywhere near that thing made me wonder if staying awake for as long as I was here might be preferable.

  If I decided to stay.

  “Of course, of course,” said Engstrom easily. “I was just getting to that. I’ll have her show you around. The two of you can have a talk. If you aren’t willing to trust me when I say removing the curse is the best option for both of us, maybe you’ll trust an old friend.” He gave the table another gentle tap. “Please let my companion know we’re ready for her.”

  “There’s no need for that,” came a woman’s warm voice from the hallway. “I’m already here.”

  A tiny strangled sound left my mouth as my breath stopped.

  I knew that voice. And I knew, as surely as I knew who it belonged to, that I couldn’t be hearing it here.

  A woman stepped into the room. An impossible woman, to match the impossible voice. She was fae-tall, with a frame delicate enough to camouflage her terrifying strength. Her hair was the red of a summer sunset, hanging in loose curls down to her waist. She had eyes the warm blue-green of the Hawaiian ocean, dotted with yellow flecks like tiny sparks. Like the ocean, those eyes could drown someone before they understood the danger enough to call for help. I knew that from experience.