Enchantment Emporium

by Tanya Huff

  And then a few notes went missing.

  Shadows began to gather…

  The path began to shift.

  “Excuse me?” Charlie touched the old woman gently on the shoulder, hoping her breath didn’t smell liked she’d just puked up her last three meals against the rough bark of what looked like a coconut palm. “Can you tell me where I am?”

  The old woman frowned, mahogany skin pleating. “Oh, merveilleux. Un autre Amйricain touriste perdu.”

  Not exactly a hard translation, even with Canadian high school French. “Je ne suis pas Amйricain. Je suis Canadien. Mais vous avez raison, je suis peu un perdu. Quelle ville est-ce que je suis dedans?”

  The frown didn’t change significantly. So much for Canadians being universally loved abroad. “ Port-au-Prince.”

  “ Haiti?”

  “Oui. Haiti.” The old woman rolled her eyes, and walked away along the cracked sidewalk, muttering under her breath.

  What the hell was she doing in Haiti? The last thing Charlie remembered before the puking was Allie’s song spiraling out of her control and the shadows gathering under the trees. Or maybe shadow, singular. She was pretty sure she’d felt focused intent, and that was new. And terrifying. The aunties could kiss her ass if they didn’t believe her this time.

  Carefully setting her guitar down, ignoring the way her fingers trembled, she pulled the duffel bag around and unzipped the small end pocket. Empty.

  Not in the duffel bag. Not in the gig bag.

  Where the hell was her phone?

  FOUR

  “I mean, you’ve got to wonder, who’d ever buy one of these in the first place, right?” Graham was smiling as he slid open the back of the case. His fingers were actually over the monkey’s paw when Allie grabbed his wrist and pulled his hand back.

  “It’s old,” she said quickly, as his smile slipped. “I’m afraid it’ll fall apart if it’s handled.”

  “Sorry.”

  “It’s okay. You couldn’t have known.” But it was interesting that he’d gone straight for the artifact. Was he testing to see if she knew what it was? She wondered what he’d have done if she hadn’t stopped him. How would he have reacted when the severed paw squirmed in his grip? Not that it mattered because she’d have stopped him regardless. Allie had no idea who’d made those first two wishes, had no idea what they’d wished for, but she knew it had ended in horror and regret. It always ended in horror and regret. “If I had a choice, I’d lock it away out of sight.”

  “Don’t you have a choice?” That was the reporter asking. Just a little too emphatic for a polite inquiry.

  “I don’t think my grandmother would like that much.”

  “Ah.” When he nodded, Allie wasted a moment thinking about brushing his hair back off his face. Would it feel as silky sliding through her fingers as it looked? “She’s coming back, then. Is she all right?”

  The aunties’ opinion aside, it seemed safest to stick to the party line. “She’s dead.”

  His face blanked for a moment before sympathy took over, but she couldn’t tell for certain if his reaction was to the news or the way she’d delivered it. “I didn’t know.” Not exactly the truth but his lies were better hidden than they had been. “It must’ve been sudden.”

  He said he’d been talking to her last week. “It was.”

  “Forgive me for saying this…” Head dipped slightly, he studied her through the shield of his lashes. “… but you don’t seem too upset.”

  “I don’t think I’ve really accepted it yet.” And that, at least, had the benefit of being the absolute truth.

  Outside the store, thunder rolled, gentled by distance, and while the rain continued to fall, it was now possible to actually see the other side of the street. The storm had moved east, heading for the prairies.

  “Uh, Ms. Gale.”

  “Allie.”

  “Okay.” He didn’t step away from her smile this time. Good for him. “You’re still holding my wrist.”

  Oh.

  They were standing close enough that fabric touched-his open suit jacket brushing against her sweater. Close enough shared body heat had warmed the air between them.

  His pulse beat strong and fast under her fingertips. A little faster than it should given it was the pulse of an apparently healthy young man just standing and dripping rainwater onto a hardwood floor. Allie suddenly realized she’d actually traced most of a charm onto the smooth skin of his inner wrist without thinking and swiped it clear as she released him, her fingers lingering just a moment longer than necessary. Gale girls took what they wanted…

  Down at the other end of the counter, her phone rang. Long distance, but not one of the family rings.

  “Are you going to get that?”

  He expected her to say no. Which, to be fair, was her intention. She opened her mouth to say, let it ring. What she actually heard herself say was, “I’ll just be a moment.”

  Telemarketers did not call Gale phones and she could count the number of non-family members who had the number on the fingers of one hand. When an anonymous voice asked if she’d accept a collect call from Charlie Gale, muscles she didn’t remember tensing relaxed.

  “Charlie?” Allie mouthed my cousin at Graham. “Did you lose your phone again?”

  “I think I left it in Halifax.”

  “Left it? Where are you?”

  “ Brazil.”

  “What are you doing in Brazil?”

  “I got pushed out of the Wood. Four times now.”

  “Shit.” She turned, her back to the reporter, her body curled protectively around the phone as though she could send that protection through to Charlie. With her free hand, she traced a charm against the countertop, and her voice slid sideways, out of eavesdropping range. “By what?”

  “I couldn’t tell. Shadows.” Charlie sighed, bone-deep weariness apparent in the sound. “Well, shadow, singular, probably… I think it was the same fucking thing every time.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “I’m tired and I’m angry and I’ve puked up everything I’ve eaten for the last six years, but yeah, I’m all right. I’m just in Brazil. Rio. I think it’s trying to keep me from you.”

  “What?”

  “For fucksake, Allie, pay attention. I said, I think…”

  “I heard you.” Fear, not for herself but for Charlie, sharpened her tone. “That was an exclamation of surprise, not a request for you to repeat yourself. If you can’t get to me, go home!”

  “Oh, stupid me, not to think of that!”

  She gentled her tone, pulled Charlie back from the edge. “You tried?”

  “I tried. Every time I go in, fucking shadow bounces me out. Doesn’t matter where I’m pointed.”

  “Then why do you think it has to do with me?”

  “I just… I can hear your song in the way the Wood changes, okay? And yeah, I know that doesn’t make sense to you, but it does to me, so be careful. Don’t trust anyone outside the family. I’m on my way.”

  “How…?”

  “They have these things called planes.”

  “Yeah, but they smell like ass and they make you check your guitar.” Allie could hear Charlie smiling in the silence. “Have you got the cash to…?”

  “Credit card. I’m on a flight that’s boarding in about forty-five minutes. It’s going to take a while, though.” She could hear paper rustling and maybe, now she knew what to listen for, a distant security announcement. “It’s Rio to San Paulo to O’Hare to Denver to Calgary. Thirty-six hours and fifty minutes. I’ll get in about six thirty in the morning on Saturday if there’s no delays… except that I’m going through O’Hare, so delays are fucking inevitable.”

  The layout of the runways at O’Hare meant that two or three times a day, planes heading east sketched a dark charm on the airport. Had the family needed to fly into Chicago with any regularity, they’d have done something about it. As it was, it was easier to just to avoid the city.

  �
��Wait a minute, O’Hare to Denver to Calgary?” Allie mapped it out against the counter. “That’s going back south before you go north.”

  “Beggars and choosers, babe.At least I’ll get caught up on some sleep.”

  Charlie didn’t have her phone; she’d have thirty-two hours and twenty minutes of peace and quiet. “You haven’t called the aunties yet, have you?”

  “Figured you should get a heads up first.”

  “You’re too good to me.”

  “I know it.”

  “Charlie…”

  Charlie’s interruption was more of a snort than a snicker. “I’ll be careful if you keep from doing anything stupid.”

  “Define stupid?”

  “Bite me.”

  “Love you, too.”

  She pressed a kiss to the phone before she closed it and turned back to Graham. His brows rose, and questions about why he suddenly couldn’t understand a word she’d said swam just under the surface of his expression. “Problem?”

  “Unexpected travel screwup.” She still needed to know what he knew, but she really didn’t need the distraction of his eyes and his scent and his smile and his hands and all the lovely that cheap suit was covering while dealing with the inevitable calls from the aunties.

  “Family member?”

  Interesting phrasing.

  “Cousin.”

  “In Brazil?”

  “Yes.” But that much he’d overheard. “She’s a musician.”

  “I should go.” He didn’t want to, and he wasn’t bothering to hide it. Easy enough to see that his desire to stay mostly had to do with wanting confirmation of whatever he thought was going on. With the store. With her grandmother. With a cousin in Brazil. She could almost see him drawing lines, connecting dots he thought he had. But that wasn’t the part he let her see; she took a look at that all on her own. The part he let her see had more to do with her, personally, and she really wished she had the time to appreciate the sentiment.

  “Yeah, you should go.” Her fingers tightened around the phone. “It’s going to get very… family around here soon.”

  Graham smiled at that, like he understood what she meant. He really didn’t. He really couldn’t, but she appreciated the thought and caught herself wondering about his family as he said, “I’d like to see you again. To talk about the store. For my article.”

  Nice save. She wondered why he felt he had to make it. He wasn’t wearing a ring, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t a significant other attached. “How about coffee tomorrow?”

  “Coffee’s good.”

  “I’ll see you around eleven, then.”

  “Great.”

  Graham hadn’t expected to have quite so visceral a reaction to Alysha Gale. He stepped wide off the curb avoiding a puddle, ignored the shouted, Watch where the fuck you’re going! from a passing truck, tried to stop thinking of her as everything he’d ever looked for in a woman-news to him he’d been looking-and tried to start thinking.

  He could do this. He could do his job and keep it from getting personal.

  If his watch was right, and the cheap piece of shit hadn’t been ruined in the rain, it was only a little better than seventeen hours until he could talk to her again.

  Lying flat on the roof, holding a directional microphone instead of his rifle, he watched Alysha Gale walk down 9th to the twenty-four hour convenience store at 11th Street. She’d headed out to shop almost immediately after she’d closed the store and received two phone calls on the way down the street-two liters of milk, a pound of butter, a dozen eggs, and three lemons-three calls on the way back. This particular microphone could pick up fly farts at three kilometers, but he had no doubt she could block it if she cared to.

  Strangely, she didn’t care to.

  “I’m fine. Everything’s fine. You know as much as I do. No, no sign of her. I’d rather you didn’t, I can manage.”

  And around again. And again. Her end of the conversation barely changed there and back.

  Maybe her lack of concern for eavesdroppers wasn’t that strange after all.

  The sound cut off when she reentered the store; before she’d disappeared, the old woman had put security in place even his boss couldn’t crack. The boss had upped his own security the moment Catherine Gale showed up on the radar. Given the security he’d already put in place, that was saying something.

  “She obviously doesn’t know I’m here, and I’m fucking well going to keep it that way.”

  Given what he’d been told about the Gales, the youth of this newest family member to show up in the city had come as a bit of a surprise. Gale females of any age had the potential to be dangerous adversaries, but in the older women, all that potential had been realized and they were apparently borderline bugfuck besides. Was the girl a trap? Was her function to lull them into a false sense of security? Distract them while the others gathered?

  He could wait here and hope she left the building again, or he could be more productive and have a few words with the changeling.

  Six aunties, her mother, Charlie’s mother, and two of Charlie’s sisters later, Allie got the one call she wasn’t expecting.

  “Do I need to come out there?”

  “David?”

  “I’ll be finished with the job I’m doing currently in seventy-two hours, but I can be there in forty-eight if you need me.”

  Phone trapped between ear and shoulder, Allie broke the third and final egg onto the third and final cup of flour. “To do what?”

  “Mom says you’re in trouble.”

  “Me? Charlie’s the one who got bounced.”

  “Four times. Trying to get to you.”

  “It didn’t matter where she was going.”

  “But she said it had to do with you.”

  “Nothing’s happening here.” As the ancient, upright mixer struggled to fold air into the thick batter, she glanced over at the window, opened her mouth to tell David about the shadow, and closed it again. She didn’t need to bring big brother all the way to Calgary to chase shadows. “There’s no sign of Gran, and I hired a leprechaun to work in the store.”

  “A leprechaun?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Full-blood?”

  “Changeling.”

  “The family doesn’t mess with the Fey, Allie.”

  “I’m not messing with him.” Hadn’t even occurred to her actually, and that was a bit weird; he was cute in a scruffy sort of way. “He needed a job and, if I’m going to figure out what’s going on, I needed part-time help.”

  “So you hired a leprechaun?”

  “Let it go, David.”

  “What’s a leprechaun doing in Calgary anyway?”

  “He tells me that things are happening here.” She hadn’t been able to find a tube pan, but a bundt pan would do.

  “I’ll be there in forty-eight hours.”

  “Not those kind of things.”

  “You sure?”

  And she convinced him that she was. For all his power, David was still a Gale boy, and they took Gale girls at face value. It was safer that way.

  The traditional way to catch leprechauns was to sneak up behind them while they worked on their shoes. Count on them being particularly obsessed if they’re whistling. People in his line of work who relied on folklore rather than more mundane skills tended to die young. Or wish they had.

  He stared at Joe through the night vision goggles-the changeling had one foot up on the park bench, tunelessly whistling “Mime Abduction” as he struggled with a knot in one bootlace-thought about irony, and hit him with the Taser. The current theory among those in the know was that, as well as overwhelming the nervous system and causing temporary paralysis, a Taser could be used to disrupt the more exotic abilities of the Fey. He hadn’t actually seen Joe use any of those exotic abilities, but the redundantly careful lived longer.

  Cable ties were in place around grimy wrists before the paralysis wore off, even given the Fey’s accelerated recovery time. Under the b
aggy clothes, the boy-Not a boy, he reminded himself-was surprisingly thin. Maybe he’d swapped bulk for height. Didn’t matter. Facedown on the asphalt path, hands secured in the small of his back, a knee between his shoulder blades and the end of the silencer tucked under one pointed ear, Joe O’Hallan wasn’t going anywhere.

  “Blessed rounds,” he growled as Joe tried to twist his head far enough to see his attacker. “Stay still.”

  The changeling froze, his muscles spasming as they finished throwing off the effect of the Taser. From this point on, it was the threat of a true death and the belief that his captor would pull the trigger that held him. A full-blood just up from the UnderRealm wouldn’t believe the threat-it would take a certain kind of scary crazy to go up against the Courts-but Joe had been living Human long enough he probably had no idea he was protected.

  “We talk, then you can go.” Using his free hand to pull the back of the sweater down, he pressed the pendant against the damp, pale skin just under the hairline and watched goose bumps rise at the touch of the cool metal. “What do you know about what’s happening in the city?”

  As the silence extended, he thought maybe he’d been a bit too obscure. He hadn’t wanted to give away any answers, but perhaps what’s happening hadn’t been specific enough. Then the changeling shivered as though he’d worked his way through to the actual question, snorted, and said, “I know what’s come through, don’t I? I’m not blind, and they don’t give a fuck who sees them.”

  “Have you told anyone?”

  “No! I’m not fucking stupid either! Best way to deal with them is to keep your head down.”

  The pendant forced the truth. Anger added the flourishes-the Fey hated being bested by Humans. Anger usually added the flourishes. In this case, it sounded a lot more like fear.

  “Have you had word from the UnderRealm?” If he had, he’d know why as well as what.

  “No. They don’t give a fuck about me, and I wouldn’t listen to the fuck ers if they did!”

  It seemed the changeling hadn’t learned not to let sentiment stand in the way of survival. Good. And Alysha Gale hadn’t been given even the minimal information he had about their visitors. Better.