by Rhys Ford
It was hard to imagine the older short-haired stocky woman who ran the Post as a loving fiancée to the man who raised me, especially since his taste ran to floozies and mean-spirited bitches, but Sarah didn’t seem to be lying, and Jonas sure as hell didn’t contradict her. She’d left off wearing her typical uniform of cargo shorts and a loud Hawaiian button-up shirt for the funeral. The shapeless black dress she’d pulled over her square body did her no favors, but her steely, honest gaze was firm, fixing me in place with a sternness I’d never truly challenged before.
I wasn’t sure I wanted to now, but Jonas threw down first, and it didn’t look like I was going to be able to walk away from the years we’d piled up beneath us. I just hadn’t known about all of the shit being churned up, festering beneath my friendships, a bubbling poison growing more potent with every day of lies going by.
I’d spent the last couple of days in a blur, turning over everything Dempsey told me, picking through the bits I thought were the drugs talking and the half-truths he’d always been known to spin. There hadn’t been time to examine everything. Or at least not until Jonas called me son and the dam I’d built to hold back my conflicted emotions surged forward, an unstoppable destructive force I would never be able to get back in.
“That’s how you saw me? As one of Tanic’s fucked-up creations?” Sarah wasn’t wrong. Pele knew she probably spoke more of a truth than I wanted to admit, but it still stung. “Is that why you told him he might want to leave the iron in me? You remember that conversation, Jonas? Because he did. And he was at least honest about thinking you might have been right. Or at least back then. Because he wasn’t sure what I would do to him if I weren’t in constant pain, having that metal bleed into me, rusting through my bones and leaking into my blood. Did he tell you that part of it? About how I threw up most of what I could get down into me? Because I was that iron-sick, I couldn’t even digest food. It’s how Tanic kept me beaten down, leashed in tight and broken. I was a kid, Jonas. The man I thought you were would never have let anyone suffer through that, least of all a kid.”
“You weren’t a kid. You were a monster.” Sarah shrugged off Jonas’s hand when it settled on her shoulder. “As dangerous as one of those things whose skins we bring in for cash. And yes, Dempsey told you the truth. Because that’s how we all saw you then. It didn’t matter that you were as stupid as a brain-damaged turtle or that your back looked like a rusted chandelier with bits and pieces sticking out of it. You weren’t… aren’t… human.”
“Kai!” Ryder shoved his way through the gathering at the edge of the lot. There was a bit of panic in his voice, a brilliant strident silver flash in the golden syrup of his Sidhe accent. He spoke my name with a familiarity I couldn’t take at the moment—another complication in my already tangled life. “Sparky, let me go.”
She’d grabbed hold of his arm, twisting it around to keep him back. They began arguing, but I couldn’t hear much beyond the rumble of thunder breaking over the Presidio. The promise of rain thickened in the air, an earthy note to the sluggish wind ambling over the hillside. Ryder could take care of himself, and at the moment, I didn’t want to add him into the mix. He was everything I’d run from, a clear symbol of the bloodlines and past I’d tried so hard to outrun, to hide from. I thought I’d been successful. After all, how many times had one of them cursed the elfin in front of me only to apologize and reassure me they didn’t mean me? I wasn’t one of those cat bastards, not one of the pointy-eared, fanged demons who’d poured over their fractured world, bringing with them horrific predators and unspeakable magics the humans had no way of fighting.
“I love you like you’re one of my own, Kai,” Jonas whispered, his face wet with tears. I couldn’t look at him. Not and hold on to my anger. “And yes, it took me a long time to… understand you. Najiri and I prayed over my troubles, trying to find some place in me where I could stand to look at you. I expected one day to find myself across the table from an elfin, but to have one thrust on me so soon was difficult, and I’m going to be honest with you and say I thought you’d be better off with your own. We all did.
“You’ve got to see this as how it was. Back then,” he continued, “you were a blacklisted job. One that would have set Dempsey up for a long time. He could have retired, set up a new life with Sarah and quit living on the edge. He threw that all away. For an elfin kid he pulled out of a shithole and didn’t know one thing about. Everything about you was… you bit and fought, even when he was trying to help you. You kicked the shit out of him. Some part of that asshole respected that, and yeah, he said he had a bad feeling about things. Because why would a retrieval contract be blacklisted? We did them all the time. Just not for elfin. And not so far away. He knew he was bringing danger down on his head, and he was asking us to shoulder that with him. I’d just gotten married. Wanted to have kids. I knew what the elfin could do, and I didn’t want that coming down on me because I’d gotten conned into protecting someone’s stolen pet.”
“That’s what Dempsey was asking of us. Because I bet you he didn’t tell you about the black dogs he had to kill along the way,” Sarah said. “How many pelts did he rack up, Jonas? Thirty? Forty? The Wild Hunts were looking for you, and if we want to be all honest and shit, I’m going to say what I’ve thought all along—that you’re the reason we have so many infestations.
“These packs are too far from their masters, gotten loose from their hold, and now they’re breeding up as far as they can before their magics fall apart.” Sarah’s mouth tightened into a dark twisted line. “And then there’s the Sidhe who contracted the job. Dempsey blew that exchange point, and they were looking for him, and it wasn’t because they owed him money. Someone up there was… probably still is… hunting for you. I know. I helped him bury three Sidhe who’d come for us one night. That was the end for me. I wasn’t going to be a part of hiding you. You weren’t worth the risk.”
“It’s different now, Kai. Things are… we all are… different.” Jonas stepped in close, edging in past Sarah, who snorted and eased away, throwing her hands up. “We know you. Know who you are. Just like I know after you sit and think about this, after giving yourself some time to deal with Dempsey’s passing, you’ll see the truth in all of this and know I’ve got your back. That I still hold you in my heart. We’re your family, kid. Through thick and thin, we’re tighter than blood in a lot of ways, and I count you as one of the best people I know. Just give it some time. Give yourself some time and I’m hoping you understand.”
“Any time I’ve got right now is going to be put into getting drunk.” Spotting my keys a few inches from Jonas’s right foot, I bent down and grabbed them up. “Funny thing is, all my life with you guys… well, what I remember… everyone’s always going on about how shitty of a person Dempsey is. Because as I see it, he was the only one of you with a heart and soul. He might have been a fucking bastard, but from pretty close to the beginning, he did right by me. And I’m sorry to say, it seems like he was the only one.”
Four
DESPITE THE guns and gear I had in its trunk, my Mustang bucked and swerved in the unrelenting pound of rain. San Diego’s streets weren’t made for a ’69 muscle car, especially not the tight turns near Balboa, and I was running out of gas, too drunk to change over the engine but not so trashed that I couldn’t find my way to the one place no one from Dempsey’s world could get ahold of me. The buzz I’d worked myself into back at my warehouse was gone, leaving behind the brain-numbing stillness I’d been filled with since the machines in Dempsey’s hospital room chirped their final beat, dropping down to a keening, screeching flatline.
I shouldn’t have been driving. Not in the rain. Not in a car the size of a rhino. And especially not with my cat, Newt, sitting in a plastic carrier strapped down to the passenger seat. But I had to leave the warehouse with its memories of Dempsey and the others living in every shadow pooled in the corners of my life. There was some kind of sick irony in Dempsey’s steadfast reluctance to come down t
o the shoreline where I lived while Jonas spent hours there, helping me rebuild the Mustang and complaining he couldn’t get an ounce of peace and quiet at his own house because his family was too loud and happy.
I didn’t know what to do with myself. To make matters worse, I wasn’t even sure who I was anymore. Everyone who had a hand in shaping my character had lied to me. I’d been so desperate for any scrap of affection, any hint of kindness after decades of torture and pain, that I’d taken their lack of physical violence as being welcomed into their hearts.
“Do you know what it’s like, Newt?” I asked my cat, who was screaming his displeasure at being trapped in a beige plastic kennel. “It’s like I am the pig they brought into the house to raise among the dogs so it grows up thinking it’s a pet, and then one day they slaughter it for bacon.”
I’d like to think he stopped meowing long enough to hear me, but I knew he was just taking a breath for another course. Still I took the brief silence as a thoughtful reflection on my words, but I knew better. Another deep inhale and his furry little chest was refueled, a brace of breath to power the siren pouring out of his tiny little mouth.
After the first ten messages from Jonas and Sparky, I turned off my link without answering their calls as I’d gotten Newt all packed up. When Cari’s number flashed across the wristband screen, I waited until her message was done recording before listening to it, not trusting myself not to break apart if I answered. Instead of her smoky voice scolding me for letting the call go to voicemail, I heard Jonas’s deep rumble telling me he was coming down to talk to me. Pissed off Cari let him use her link, I packed up the cat and left, hoping to go to the one place I knew I could find sanctuary.
And I hated like hell that I had to go there.
The darkness surrounding Balboa was a milky veil, the towering forest poured over the hilly mesa throwing up a coy barrier between the Southern Rise Court and the sprawling human city surrounding it. Before the Merge, the area had been a verdant park dotted with a constellation of museums set with a sparkling star of a conservation zoo. Now all that remained of San Diego’s former crown jewel were the sweeping historic Exposition buildings built for several long-ago expositions and a scatter of wandering pandas cared for by a wild-eyed hermit named Crazy Gertrude.
The Court’s towers were crystalline white stone spears nestled into the older human structures, taking on some of the Spanish and Mission Revival forms as if struggling to blend into the city’s bones while maintaining their Sidhe essence. They were visible through the thicket as I crossed over the bridge to the cobblestone courtyards laid down by long-dead human craftsmen. The Exposition structures were ivory weathered, stone holding a bit of the sun in its façade, and even in the cloud-draped moonlight, it was easy to see where the Sidhe buildings were beginning to shift to match—a slowly encroaching tide of color washing over the too-bright walls pulled up from the land beneath the Court.
Southern Rise was very different from Elfhaine. The city against the white mountains to the north of San Diego was as ethereally foreign to me as the cloud dragons I’d seen the bones of. The towers in Balboa Forest were building themselves off of the remains of human structures, blending their newly risen edifices into what was already there, embellished by elfin forms and broad windows to soak in every bit of sunlight the city had to offer. The Court was far enough away to be safe from the sheer ravines to the east, a steep drop-off where a raging river cut the upper part of the city, yet the air was moist from the nearby waters, a filmy mist often rising up into the skyscraper-tall trees to pearl the elfin commune in glistening dew.
I didn’t understand how the elfin built their cities. Or rather how the Court built itself. Ryder tried to explain to me. So did the stone crafters who spoke to the construction to guide it along its way. There were Sidhe stone-magics involved, but more importantly—or so the Sidhe told me—the Court decided for itself who spoke for it and its people and guided evolving and shifting structures to accommodate its inhabitants. Ryder, Clan Sebac, Third in the House of Devon and bane of my existence was the current High Lord of the Southern Rise Court, and I was tangled up with him in ways I also didn’t understand.
The Court did. Or at least that’s what it seemed like, because the bristling brace of new towers to the north of the main structure began to thrust up from the ground after we’d shared a single kiss.
Scared the hell out of me to think of what would happen if we ever went further than a kiss, and I sure as hell wasn’t in any state of mind to contemplate that. Not when I was coming in hot and torn open as if I were still carrying weeping iron in my bones.
At some point the living stone decided I needed a place for myself, or at least that’s what everyone told me, because not long after Ryder punched his way into my life, the Southern Rise Court began to shape a spire for me to live in, connecting it to Ryder’s suite in the main structure. I tried to deny use at first, but I was drawn to its wide-open balconies and the curling metal dragon shapes the Court somehow pulled out of the earth to accent the broad spaces it made for me.
After parking the Mustang near the base of my tower, I wrestled with Newt’s kennel and the supplies I’d brought with me. Whiskey still numbed my face and kept my legs a little shaky, but it was only four flights up from the side entrance, which kept me from having to speak to anyone in the main building. Some elfin rarely slept—usually the older ones—and I wasn’t up to talking. I’d carried bigger kits while on runs, but never halfway drunk and dragging a screaming cat in a plastic box with me, but eventually I made it to the top. The door to my space opened easily, the knob practically turning when I reached for it.
The one thing the Court didn’t provide was furniture or a litter box, so I was surprised to discover a bed the size of an ocean at the far end of the open space I’d claimed as my own, as well as a sectional couch that looked as soft as the bed and was about as large.
“Ryder,” I muttered to my cat. “Hold on, bastard. Let me make sure all of the doors are closed. Last thing I want is for you to go roaming through the Court. I don’t want to have to go pull your teeth out of someone’s leg just because they’ve pissed you off.”
Letting the small mottled gray ball of fury I’d found chewing on one of my kills out of his kennel earned me that bite on the leg I was trying to save others from, and after the damned cat got his bit of blood from my flesh, he sauntered over to the cat dish I’d put down for him and noisily chewed through the bits of tuna I’d dumped into his wet-food bowl. The litter box was his next stop, but by that time I was done with dealing with his needs and the last thing I wanted to do was remain upright.
I also needed to take care of the sobriety I seemed to be developing while making sure Newt was comfortable.
The cat had food and a place to shit, pretty much all he needed to keep himself happy, so I shucked off my boots, pulled off my shirt, and climbed into the middle of the humongous bed. The sheets were cool and smooth on my skin, and when I lay back against the pillows, my shoulders and back sank into their soft cradle, propping me up so I could stare out the open doors and on to the city beyond the Court’s boundaries. Reaching for the bottle of whiskey I’d tossed onto the bed before I took care of the cat, I watched the lightning tear across the sky, and I tore off the black wrapper, then twisted off the cap and inhaled the sweet-perfumed sting wafting up from the open bottle.
“I’m going to miss you, old man,” I murmured, saluting the roiling skies. “Thanks for saving my life and fucking it up at the same time.”
There was half a bottle of Jack in me when I heard the suite door open and a golden light from the outer passage sliced through the dim shadows I’d pulled over me after dousing most of the sconces in the loft-like space. I didn’t need to hear the silhouette framed in the door speak to know who it was. My body responded eagerly to Ryder’s presence, invigorated by some uncontrollable genetically connected threads stitching us together, and for once I didn’t fight the pull. Lying in a wealth of p
illows on a bed soft enough to sculpt itself around my weight, I stared at him, drops of charcoal-rich whiskey sitting on my tongue as the city’s lights sparkled across the horizon beyond the balcony and glass doors I’d left wide open to pull the rain-scented air into the nearly empty space.
He carried in with him a hint of popped-rice green tea and vanilla, his Sidhe skin whispering its scent through the metallic flavor the city storm left with its electrical splatters across the night sky. There had to be an open window somewhere at his back, sweeping a brisk gust through the open door. Silence hung between us, broken only by the clatter of thunder at the edge of the city. The clouds were churning toward us, their gray underbellies tinted tangerine and puce from the upper streets’ lights. I knew I would eventually have to close the balcony doors to keep the rain out, but at that moment, I couldn’t find my damned tongue, much less my legs.
“Hello, Newt,” Ryder said, bending down to scoop my cat to cradle Newt’s wiggling fuzzy body against his chest. “Let’s go see how your daddy is doing.”
Closing the door behind him, Ryder cut off the too-bright light from the outside hall, letting the shadows back in to creep across the floor. His feet were bare, and they made no sound crossing over the hardwood floors to the bed, where I lay sprawled, my half-empty fifth of whiskey propped up against my side, my fingers lightly gripping its ribbed neck as if it were a lover I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to hug or strangle.