by Rhys Ford
Someone was definitely aiming—however badly—to kill me or Kenny, but I wasn’t sure which. I couldn’t see where the shooter was and actually had hoped it’d been circumstantial gunfire, an unfortunate but way too frequent occurrence down in the back part of the understreets, but the wall hit next to my head put that theory to rest. Putting the building between me and the asshole lurking somewhere down the alley would do the trick, or so I thought, because as soon as I took the same sharp turn Kenny did, I found myself in a tight alley, staring at a nine-foot-tall wooden fence covered with warning signs that promised impending doom.
“No way in hell he went over that.” The dumpster against the brick wall across of the shot-up building was open and had enough garbage in it to drown a cow. “And he sure as heck wouldn’t fit in there. So….”
The brick building with the crumbling walls was an old throwback to a time when San Diego didn’t have an underground—a pre-Merge dinosaur waiting to be crumbled to dust. Most of its upper windows were blown out, either removed for the glass or picked off by someone with a gun. Bits of pebbled glass littered the ground by my feet, crunching under my boots as I carefully picked my way across the front of the building.
It was a prime pick-off spot, much better than the alley, by my reckoning. Glass shards hung from off-kilter window frames, pieces of plywood hammered across some of the gaping holes in a halfhearted attempt to keep out looters or squatters. They needn’t have bothered. There was nothing but the shaky brick walls to offer anyone more than a cairn to be buried under should a heavy truck decide to tap the alley-side face. The building was held together by a lick and a prayer, or at least that’s what it looked like. But something or someone was moving inside, someone large enough to kick something metal, hard enough to make it sing a lolling sound and send a pair of rats scrambling for the partially unhinged steel-mesh door.
I kept my weapon up, wary of being ambushed. I didn’t know if Kenny was armed, and with someone else taking potshots at me from their position above the alley, I couldn’t be sure if I was walking into a trap or just after an incompetent scared man trying to outrun karma.
“Too many damned players on the board,” I muttered under my breath, ducking beneath the pried-back mesh. My shoulders nearly brushed the rusted filthy orange metal, and its proximity sent shivers down my spine and bile running up my throat as if I’d spent five days drinking rotgut gin. A bit of peeling paint on the remains of a sign lying near the front door informed me that, at some point, a man named Mike Carillo ran an ironworks business in the now-abandoned building.
Iron.
“Might as well just drink a damned cup of belladonna and wait for the pink elephants to come dancing across my eyes.” I sighed, moving as carefully as I could to avoid snagging any part of my skin on the flaking door. “Why iron, Mike? What was wrong with steel? Or even ceramics? Why the hell did you decide to dance with the elfin devil and make my life even shittier today?”
The interior of the building had no inner walls, or at least nothing whole enough to count. Girders and beams held up what was left of the second floor, but even that was more sieve than ceiling. The sunspot above the alley let in enough light through the broken exterior to give me some illumination to see into the space, and what I found was disheartening.
Because other than the few rodents scurrying about, there wasn’t anyone in the damned place but me.
Then I looked up and was caught in the wonder of pixie fireflies swirling off the steel beams. Petite slashes of yellow and blue light danced about the air, their glow beginning to brighten as their internal clocks shook them from their slumber. Despite being buried underground, beneath a massive city, the sylphlike insects woke to the rise of the moons, their slender bodies rolling through different light patterns, signaling hunger, lust, and whatever else a bug needed to tell its swarm. With delicate rainbow-flecked wings, they swooped about, each nearly as long as one of my fingers, then dove down toward the middle of the building, dipping into a dark gash between two girders.
“Huh.” I stepped carefully, feeling the scrape of airborne iron against my skin. Kenny either knew what he was doing or was just damned lucky. Since he was Dempsey’s brother and an asshole at the best of times, I figured he knew exactly how the building’s rusting artifacts would pull and tug at my elfin flesh. “Had to have planned this. Probably seeded the rumors. Got to hand it to you, Kenny. You always play every side you can.”
The urge to scratch my exposed skin was strong, but my hands were busy, one holding a Glock while I had the other ready to pull a knife in case I needed to do some up-close work. There was no doubt in my mind that I was walking into a trap, but I couldn’t figure out Kenny’s angle.
“Unless he’s got someone like Gibbons in his back pocket.” Mulling over that possibility, I followed the fireflies’ trail, carefully stepping around as much of the debris on the uneven floor as I could. I kept my attention on my surroundings, checking every shadow for a heavy-breathing man who probably smelled of canned sardines and cigarettes. “And that’s definitely something ole Kenny would pull.”
My suspicions about where the sparkling insects had gone proved to be right when I stepped around a leaning cubicle wall and stared down into a wide sinkhole filled on one side with a pile of fallen brick, moldy drywall, and boulders. The tumble of rocks formed a natural staircase down into one of the many caverns below the city, pockets of Earth trapped beneath understreets from the Merge.
The pixie fireflies’ egress left a trail of faintly glowing dust scattered around the hole with a single trail of footsteps clearly stamped into the layers of fine powder. Judging by the smear of a handprint against the wall of the toppled cube, someone recently came around the stained fabric-upholstered partition and used it to balance himself for a moment while he stepped down into the hole. I’d gone down quite a few of the pre-Merge subterranean caverns, often chasing a creature down to its lair for a contract, and knew from experience they were problematic at best. There was never any rhyme or reason to their size, and the chunks of pre-Merge Earth moldering in those dark depths held surprises both good and bad. I’d found Oketsu in one while chasing a monster bent on chewing its way through a nursery school, but I’d also fallen into a pit of black-hooded scorpions that did their damnedest to puncture past the leathers I’d been wearing so they could dissolve my flesh and eat the liquefied goo.
A bit of the floor crumbled off and bounced down into the hole when I stepped closer. I didn’t like the way the ground seemed stretched to nearly its breaking point at the edges, pulled too thin by either the worlds buckling and expanding to shape around each other or worse, some idiot decided on having an underground hidey-hole and dug the pit out before the Merge without thinking about the mass above it.
“Hole got here somehow,” I reminded myself, taking a careful step down to the largest embedded rock I could see. Keeping one hand free to balance myself, I tightened my grip on my Glock. Going in blind wasn’t smart, but the cavern probably connected to another one, or even to the nest of tunnels and crevices leading back up to the surface outside of San Diego proper. Snorting to myself, I took another step down. “Right, like Kenny’s going to last that long of a trek without water or food. He’d get eaten by a muddle of guinea pigs before he got a mile in.”
The pixies were still swirling about me when my foot touched the floor of the cavern, their minute sparks dimmed by the presence of luminescent ivy vines threading over the cavern’s uneven walls and some of its rocky outcroppings. If anything, the cavern seemed to be brighter than the building above me, but I still had to move carefully, letting my vision adjust.
“Damned place looks like it took a shelling,” I muttered to myself.
There were boulders and stalagmites everywhere, and the fireflies seemed to be interested in a constellation of algae-clogged puddles to the right of the rock pile I’d climbed down. The insects dipped and swirled, their long prawn-like bodies flashing gods-knew-what to the swarm
, celebrating their water-drenched salad or perhaps adding me to the list of people they’d drawn down to their deaths. Kenny’s path through their dusting faded off to the left, heading toward a thick copse of columns covered with more ivy, the spires stretching up to connect with the cavern’s ceiling nearly twenty feet above. A trail of sparkling yellow footprints led off clearly at first, but then grew fainter as his shoes sloughed off the fireflies’ powder.
“Hold up.” I frowned, glancing at the ground, then at the fireflies. The glowing motes were everywhere, illuminated circles surrounding each puddle, with a fine layer of dust floating on the surface where the bugs dove down to snatch up whatever it was they found in the stagnant water. “What the hell am I stepping in? Is this bug shit? Is that what this is?”
I sniffed at the gold glitter stuck to my hands, prepared to recoil or gag at the smell.
Nothing.
Still didn’t mean it wasn’t shit, so I wiped my hands on the nearest rock before plunging deeper into the cavern, following the trail of unevenly paced footprints Kenny had left in his wake.
The bubble of space only extended a few feet behind the rock pile but stretched out into the shimmering depths past the columns. There were signs of pre-Merge Earth scattered about the ground below the hole in the building’s floor, bits and pieces of a broken-apart restaurant dotting the rocks near the pools. A small fryer basket stuck out of a stalagmite near me, its mesh nearly rusted through and thick with pixie dung.
More evidence of forgotten Earth cropped up as I walked, the ivy wrapping around not only the rock but also half a car and what looked like a collection of dead-eyed dolls dressed in frilly age-filthy frocks made of lace and tulle. I kept my eye on the toys as I stalked by, braced for one of their cracked legs to move or for one to sit up and lunge for me to drink me dry of my blood.
Oddly enough, the remains of a tik-tik lying against an elephant-sized boulder gave me pause, the blue taxi’s battered body covered with hangul and SoCal Mexican graffiti, with a pair of snapped rail cables draped over its corpse like a gift bow. Lying close to the part of the cavern where the walls tucked in closer, I only had myself to blame when an elfin male stepped out from behind the boulder, his hands stretched out in front of him, a crackling magic playing over his fingers with a delicate ease.
There was no sign of Kenny, but I knew the fat bastard had to be lurking around somewhere. The cavern closed in a hundred yards past where I stood, and there were enough large rock formations to hide him, a handful of walruses, and maybe even a bus or two.
The airborne iron dust didn’t reach down into the cavern, but it felt as if its poison was still working through my lungs, making it difficult for me to breathe. He still wore my face, and the time since I’d last seen him hadn’t been good to it. I imagined he looked more like me than ever before. The polished aristocratic smugness he’d always drawn about himself was gone, replaced by a grittier, more damaged appearance. His hair was longer, more the length of mine now, and streaked thick with purple and silver, muting the black around his lean face. I couldn’t imagine what could have made the scar running from his right eyebrow down to the rise of his cheek, but it flashed white against his sun-kissed skin, going deep down into his flesh. He was lucky he hadn’t lost the eye, but then again, I’d been surprised to find he’d survived the fall into the raging river to the east of the Southern Rise Court when his poorly crafted ainmhi dubh attacked me on my recent run down to the Mexican Unsidhe border.
“Ciméara cuid Anbhás.” Valin’s voice rolled around my name, its tones melodically accented with a thick Unsidhe purr and so hauntingly familiar my marrow quivered in response, anticipating the agonizing pain that normally followed those words. “It’s so good to see you, brother. Especially since the time’s come for me to even the score between us.”
Seventeen
“LET ME guess, you’re the one who put the contract out on me,” I said, keeping an eye on my brother’s hands while I circled him. Like our father, he was a flesh-shaper, and my body wore more than a few scars from their experiments on my flesh and bones.
“Seemed like the easiest way to get my hands on you,” Valin replied with a smirk. “It’s the only thing these animals really understand. Their one true god is Avarice. Why should I spend my life chasing after you when I can have one of them bring you to me? The irony of your savior’s brother dragging you to my feet isn’t lost on me. It has a delicious poetic justice to it.”
I regretted not having an iron-tipped blade on me, but what was poison to my brother was doubly so to me. He wasn’t walking around with shards of rusted rebar under his skin, its sour kiss leaching into my blood and guts. One of Ryder’s healers speculated this made me more immune to the deadly human metal, but the others thought she was off her rocker. It didn’t matter much what any of them thought, because none of them were willing to try to get the crap out of me and there wasn’t anything a human medic could do. Still, the thought of cutting my arm open and pouring a cupful of my blood into Valin’s mouth just to see if it did something to the bastard crossed my mind as I stood there under the ivy strands’ soft glow.
It was eerie to see the face I only caught sight of in a mirror. I recoiled then, mostly astonished to find an elfin staring back at me, but then the memories resurfaced, foggy with pain and red with blood. His face… Tanic’s and Valin’s hovered over me, the stuff spun from nightmares and lurking in every shadow. I knew those hands intimately, having those long fingers work themselves under my skin to separate large expanses of it from my flesh. The things they poured into me—shoved into me—lingered. He and my father were the reason I wore the Wild Hunt clan’s mark on my back, why my shirts sometimes caught on the ripple of scars flowing down from my shoulder blades toward my hips.
“Are you ready to go home, little brother?” Valin’s words were laden with magic, Unsidhe fluid and powerful, calling to my blood and ordering my will to bend to his. Old commands were woven into his cadence, pounding through my mind to grab at my soul, seeking out the cracks I’d healed over since I’d escaped their grip. “Hopefully there’ll be enough of you for Father to play with, but I can’t make any promises. It’s a long trip, and, well, we have a lot to catch up on. So, make it easier on yourself and come here. You won’t like it if I have to come get you.”
The net of his words stung—verbal barbs meant to hook me in—but I’d broken free of his hold—of their hold—since we’d first tangled. The Unsidhe magic slithered off of me, coursing down my spine and whispering off into the nothingness behind me. Only a slight smarting of the binding remained, coupled with a bit of sickness threatening to close my throat. I swallowed hard and it was gone, washed away with a bit of spit and laughter.
“Didn’t you learn last time you tried that crap?” I cocked my head, returning my brother’s smirk. “You have no power over me.”
Valin did another sweeping arc, keeping his back to the rock columns I’d spotted in the main chamber. His eyes narrowed, a bit of fire lighting their depths, and the sulfurous scent of his intensifying magic crept across to tickle my nose. He was going for flash, hoping to cow me into some kind of submission with a bit of light and crackle, but most of that was for show. I’d felt the real thing, seen and felt it worked on me with little more than a crook of Tanic’s fingernail into a part of my body, my bones tearing out of my flesh inch by inch until I screamed myself raw.
“Why haven’t you gone crawling back to Tanic?” I studied his expression, wondering if I wore my anger as openly as he did. “Or tried to have an alliance with Bannon? You didn’t mind being second-in-command to Tanic, so why not her? Or won’t she let you feed her people to your ainmhi dubh?”
“Your mouth’s gotten smart. I can’t wait to break you of that.” He cocked his head, studying me much like Newt did right before he tried to bite my nose off. “I think I liked you better when you could only mewl and whine like a dog. Maybe that’s the first thing I’ll do with you. Cut out your tongue.”
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“I’d say one of you should grow a beard so I know which side of the mirror you’re from, but since both of you are pieces of crap, it wouldn’t do any good.” Kenny’s voice—Dempsey’s voice—rang out through the caverns, the crenulated walls catching his words and echoing them back at me. “I got him here. Now pay up.”
“As soon as I’m done here,” Valin murmured, shooting me an unreadable look. “Your wants aren’t as important as my needs.”
“Pick this shit up later. Right now, I want to know where my money is.” Kenny limped out from behind one of the columns. I brought my Glock up, steadying my aim to his center mass. Startled, he took a step back, hiding behind one of the larger rocks, but I could still see his head. “Can’t believe my brother ruined his life for you. Jesus, if you weren’t worth a hell of a lot of cash, I’d pop you myself, but your brother here wants to skin you himself. Waste of meat, that’s what you are.”
“Humans.” Valin strolled closer to Kenny, putting himself between me and the man I’d followed down the rabbit hole. “They bleat and squeal so much. Almost makes you wish you could turn them off.” He turned slowly, laying his hand on Kenny’s shoulder, squeezing down hard. “But then again, I can.”
I couldn’t have stopped him if I tried, and I knew better. I’d seen what the Unsidhe flesh shapers could do to their own, what they could do to a human, and I’d still let him get close to Kenny. Pulling my aim off of Dempsey’s brother, I angled it toward mine. Kenny’s eyes went blank, staring out into nothing, and he slumped under Valin’s touch, weaving back and forth on his feet.
“Get your hand off of him, Valin,” I warned. “This is between you and me.”
“Nothing is just between us, brother.” His smile returned my warning, a threat woven heavy with pain and agony. “This one needs to be shoved aside for now, because I think it’s going to take a long time to break you, Ciméara, because you have forgotten where you belong—beneath my foot and writhing on the floor.”