by Lee Carroll
A trill of laughter sounded in my ear; Lol was still clinging to my hair. Fen gave me a patient smile. “Oh, you’ll see him again,” she said. “I don’t think either of you has much choice in the matter.”
We took a different stairway up to the street. This one was more utilitarian, made of rusted steel corroded in places. The whole thing groaned with every step I took. When I paused, though, I noticed that Oberon, who was at least six feet tall and must have weighed close to two hundred pounds, made no noise at all. As if he were lighter than air.
We came out in a parking garage on Bethune Street. I was shocked to see that it was nearly dark. I’d been underground all day! I remembered my mother saying that a person could lose track of time in the Summer Country. I was beginning to suspect that might be true of any time spent with the fairies.
We were only a couple of blocks from my home, but we walked west and north to the corner of West Street and Jane Street where there was an old SRO hotel I’d passed a dozen times. I’d always admired the turret on one corner and wondered whether someone got to live there. In the lobby Oberon waved at a light-skinned, gray-haired man behind a Plexiglas-barricaded counter, then curled his hand into a fist and bumped the glass barrier. The man responded by tapping his own clenched fist against the glass.
“What up, mon?” Oberon asked, his West Indies accent back in full.
“Same ole, same ole,” the desk clerk replied, sliding several envelopes and catalogs through a narrow slit in the glass. “Elevator’s on the fritz again.”
“Tell me something new, brother.” Oberon picked up his mail. He leafed through it as we walked up the stairs. I noticed a Sports Illustrated and a Con Edison bill.
“So you pay your bills like everyone else?” I asked. “Can’t you just”—I snapped my fingers, but no flame appeared. I must have been too tired—“use your magical powers for light and heat?”
“I could,” he said, glancing over his shoulder to give me a doleful look, “but I’d probably knock out the power grid for the whole eastern seaboard.”
We came to a door on the top floor. There was a glowing silver symbol, similar to the ones Oberon had placed with Post-it notes in the doorway across from St. Vincent’s, only this one was made of concentric circles. He touched it and the circles rippled and swelled into a silver disk about the size of a salad plate. A face appeared in it—that of an old woman in hair curlers and a tattered floral bathrobe. She lifted her hand and knocked on the door, waited, then scowled and left when no one answered.
“My neighbor, Mrs. Mazole,” he said.
Another face appeared in the silver mirror, this time a man in dark sunglasses and a nose ring. He also scowled at the door, but then spoke. “Call me when you get in, O. There’s something weird going on.”
“Wow, it’s like video messaging.” It also reminded me of something else. “The lines on the silver box—they moved just like that.”
“That’s right.” He waved his hand over the silver circle and it shrank back to its original size. “It’s a scrying mirror. This one records images, but the box actually contains a portal between the worlds. It fell into Dee’s hands in the sixteenth century and he learned how to communicate with spirits from other realms.”
Oberon unlocked two locks and a dead bolt and opened the door. We walked into a large room that ended in the rounded apse of the corner turret with four floor-to-ceiling windows. The room was dark except for the orange light of the setting sun coming through the windows. I stepped toward them and saw that they overlooked the Hudson, a view oddly similar to the one from Will Hughes’s Washington Heights apartment. Did all these supernatural types like to keep an eye on the river? Or did they just use their magic to score prime real estate?
“Nice place,” I said.
“Thanks.” He tossed his keys into a ceramic bowl on a desk in front of one of the windows, then flicked on a light switch. The rest of the room leapt into light and I saw that the walls were hung from ceiling to floor with framed photographs, drawings, watercolors, pastels, and oils. A simple line drawing of a man’s face morphing into a butterfly wing caught my attention. It was definitely Oberon’s face—and it was definitely Picasso’s signature. There were other portraits of Oberon: an oil painting of him wearing a turban and a pearl earring, his face emerging from a backdrop of rich tapestries; a silk screen of him in dreadlocks reproduced four times in different Day-Glo colors, a pencil sketch of him reclining on a cloud stretching out one finger, a black-and-white photograph of him nude curled around a long-stemmed, white lily.
“You knew all these artists?” I asked, awed, and more cowed by this evidence of Oberon’s great age and acquaintanceship than by all his magic tricks.
“Like I told you before, the relationship between artist and fey is a mutually beneficial one. These were all”—he waved his hand at the dozens of priceless artworks—“tokens of appreciation.”
I came to the painting by Santé Leone. I’d know his color palette anywhere. A woman in a shell-pink dress stood on a hill covered with purple flowers, her waist-length black hair reflecting the colors of the sun setting behind the stone tower in the background. I took a step closer. Yes, it looked like my mother—but when had Santé Leone ever seen my mother standing in a field of flowers beneath a stone tower?
“He told me it was something he dreamed,” Oberon said as if in response to my unvoiced question.
“There’s one thing I don’t understand.” My voice sounded angry, but that was because I didn’t want to give away how close I was to tears. “If you knew Santé—and saw this picture of my mother—then you must have known about me. I mean, you live only a few blocks from me! You must have known my mother died before she could tell me about this watchtower thing. So why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you try to begin my training?”
“Because your mother made me promise I wouldn’t. She didn’t want you to assume the role of guardian.”
For a moment I couldn’t think. I recalled that drive home from RISD, my mother telling me I could be anything I wanted to be, that she didn’t want me held back. That I had to be free to choose. It was the sort of speech that liberated mothers gave to their daughters. How could I have known that she meant me to be free of a four-hundred-year-old promise?
“So why have you changed your mind now?” I asked.
“I didn’t change my mind; it was changed for me by Will Hughes . . . and that.” He tilted his chin toward the window and I followed his gaze out to the river, which glittered now in the last rays of the sunset. The sky above New Jersey was clear—stars were just coming out—but to the south, where I should have been able to see the Statue of Liberty, the harbor was covered by a dirty yellow fog that was creeping north up the river . . . not creeping, actually, but bulging and writhing as if the fog were a sack and whatever was in it was trying to get out.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Despair and Discord,” Oberon said, his smooth, melodious voice revealing for the first time since I met him the tremors of fear. “The demons are in the fog.”
A Wandering Eye
Oberon gave me Santé’s painting to bring to my father, but he told me to go home first. “I’ll look after your father tonight,” he said to me. “You have to get some rest. Tomorrow we’ll start your training in earnest.”
I didn’t have the strength to argue. I just wanted to take a long shower and sleep for twelve hours. The minute I walked into the town house, though, I saw that wasn’t going to happen.
“Where have you been?” Becky shrieked as she came tearing out of the kitchen. Her aura was a blazing orange. I wondered how I could possibly have missed seeing it all these years. “We’ve been going out of our minds with worry!”
“I said you probably just needed some downtime.” Jay sauntered out of the kitchen, hands tucked into the pockets of his skinny jeans. Only the hunch in his shoulders and the skittery look in his eyes told me how worried he’d been too . . . also his aura, which
was a smoky gray-blue.
“You haven’t been answering your cell!”
“Damn! I turned it off when I went into—” I was about to say “when I went into the Cloisters library” when someone else came out of the kitchen: Detective Joe Kiernan.
“Went into where?” he asked.
“What are you doing here?” I demanded. “Has something happened to my father?” Then I took off my coat and slipped it over the back of a chair, but I left my scarf on. The kitchen was chilly and drafty enough to make that reasonable, and I didn’t think it was a great idea to let the detective—or anyone—catch sight of my bite marks.
“Not at all,” he answered quickly, “but I’m surprised that you’d turn off your cell phone while he’s in the hospital.”
“The battery was getting low, so I turned it off when I went into the subway.”
“I see.” He crossed his arms and leaned against the wall. He looked like he was going to embark on a thorough cross-examination, but Becky—God bless her—burst in.
“Can’t you see the poor girl is exhausted! We shouldn’t keep her standing in the hallway.” She pulled me into the kitchen. “We were so worried about you that we called Detective Kiernan. We were afraid you’d been kidnapped by those awful men who robbed you.”
“But of course I explained to Miss Jones that those men are in custody.” Kiernan had followed us into the kitchen and was trying to gain control of the situation while Jay put on the kettle and lit the burner under a large soup pot. The detective had never had to deal with Becky Jones before, though.
“As I explained to Detective Kiernan,” Becky said, “those men are obviously just hired muscle. What you’ve got to do is find the kingpin, the capo, the ringleader. And don’t you try to tell me Mr. James hired them. That’s just absurd.” Kiernan opened his mouth to respond to Becky’s assessment of his case, but Becky interrupted him again. This time, though, it wasn’t to my advantage. “But if you weren’t kidnapped, where were you? We were worried sick, weren’t we, Jay?”
Jay, who’d just put down a steaming bowl of soup in front of me, grunted.
“You couldn’t have been with Will Hughes the whole time.” I must have blushed because Becky clasped her hand over her mouth and then squeaked. “Or were you?”
I caught Jay staring at me. He muttered something about needing to go out for milk and fled the kitchen. What was going on with him? I wondered.
“Were you?” Kiernan asked, using Becky’s astonishment as a chance to get in a question. “Ms. Jones here told me that you were driven uptown to Mr. Hughes’s residence in Washington Heights yesterday afternoon—”
“And then Detective Kiernan told us that there was a murder at the Cloisters. And it was Edgar Tolbert, whom I know is the medieval scholar who helped you research your senior project.”
I glanced at Detective Kiernan before saying anything. He was watching me carefully. I wasn’t exactly thrilled with Becky’s apparent chattiness with him, but his seeming mistrust of me bothered me more. “Edgar Tolbert is dead?” I asked. “That’s awful. What happened?”
“He had a heart attack. We think he surprised an art thief at the museum. A stone arch was badly damaged and two museum guards were killed. When was the last time you saw him?”
“I’m not sure,” I said, trying desperately to banish the image of Edgar Tolbert’s stricken face from my mind. I glanced down at my hand and saw that the light blue glow around my fingers was stippled with flecks of smoky gray—the manifestation of my lies, I felt sure. I could only hope that Joe Kiernan couldn’t read auras. “Not for months. I researched some jewelry designs last summer—”
“So you didn’t take advantage of your proximity to the museum last night to visit Dr. Tolbert?”
“I thought of it,” I said, hoping that the injection of a grain of honesty would fortify my lies, “but then I stayed too long at Will Hughes’s.” I felt the blood rush to my face and hoped that Kiernan would assume I’d spent the night with Hughes and that I was embarrassed to be caught in promiscuous behavior. He couldn’t, I assured myself, know that the blush came from recalling the feel of Will’s teeth on my neck.
“We’ll have to contact Mr. Hughes and have him corroborate your story—”
“I can do that right now,” a voice announced from the hallway. I turned and saw Will Hughes filling the kitchen doorway. He looked larger in my small kitchen than he had in his own spacious apartment—or the park—last night. Perhaps it was the long, black overcoat he wore. In the kitchen light the slightly damp cashmere gleamed like an animal’s pelt. When he stepped into the room I felt a spark in the air—a silver thread that leapt from him to me. It was hard to believe that Becky and Kiernan didn’t see it, but when I glanced at them, I saw that Kiernan was scowling and Becky was gazing up at Will Hughes in awed silence—a state I’d never before seen her in. The first one to speak was Jay, who had trailed in behind Hughes.
“I found this dude standing on the doorstep so I told him he could come in.”
The corners of Will’s mouth quirked up into a crooked smile when he met my gaze. I felt sure it was because he knew what I was thinking—that the old superstition that a vampire can’t come into a private home without being invited was true. I had a feeling he knew everything I was thinking and feeling.
“You’re willing to swear that Garet James was with you all of last night?” Detective Kiernan asked, shifting his weight so that the bulge of his gun holster became visible under his coat. I looked from man to man and noticed they were about the same height. Hughes was slimmer than Kiernan, more finely built, but he radiated a certain power that had the detective bristling. I could sense that Kiernan’s nerves were on edge, but I couldn’t see his aura at all.
“Yes,” Will said, coming to stand by my side. “From dusk to dawn.” He smiled down at me—smirked actually—and I wasn’t sure if I should be grateful for the alibi or pissed off at how thickly he was laying it on, especially since I was pretty sure it was mostly for Detective Kiernan’s benefit. But then Will grinned and added, “The poor woman fell sound asleep on my couch and I didn’t have the heart to wake her after all she has been through.”
“How very gallant of you,” Kiernan remarked. “And how very convenient for you, Ms. James, to have such an impeccable alibi. It was lucky you went to see Mr. Hughes last night, wasn’t it?”
I could see Becky open her mouth—no doubt to tell the detective off—but Will beat her to it. “She came to me because she found my name—or rather my ancestor’s name—inside a box she was hired to open. She thought I could help lead her to the man who she believed was behind the burglary and who has set up her father to assume the guilt. And she was right. I knew right away that the man she described meeting yesterday was John Dee—an internationally known art thief.”
“I’ve never heard of him,” Kiernan growled.
“He goes by many aliases,” Hughes replied. “You are perhaps familiar with the Nîmes burglary several years ago?”
Detective Kiernan blanched. Everyone in the art world knew about the Nîmes burglary. A half dozen paintings—a Rubens and a Boucher among them—and some priceless antiquities had been stolen from the Nîmes Musée des Beaux-Arts and never recovered.
“Yes, of course, but I’ve never heard that a man named Dee was connected to it.”
Will shrugged. “You might want to check with your superiors on that. In the meantime, perhaps you’ll be interested in searching Dee’s last known place of business just in case there are any clues about the burglary of the James Gallery.” Will Hughes withdrew a card from his pocket and handed it to Detective Kiernan, who held it out in front of me so I could see it. Engraved on heavy cream-colored stock were the words John Dee, Watch Repair & Alchemist. 121½ Cordelia Street, New York, New York, 10014. Beneath the address was a triangle with an eye in it.
Kiernan snickered. “Alchemist? What kind of crackpot is this guy?”
“An eccentric,” Will replied. “B
ut don’t let that make you underestimate him.”
“Is this the address of the shop you visited the day of the burglary?” Kiernan asked me.
“Yes, I think it is,” I answered.
“Okay,” he said briskly. “That’s good enough for me. Let’s go see it.”
“Now?” I asked, remembering that Dee’s store was covered in cobwebs and dust.
“No time like the present. If Mr. Hughes here thinks there might be evidence that will exonerate your father, then I won’t waste a minute . . . unless you have a more pressing engagement.”
With my bed, I wanted to say, but didn’t. For one thing I no longer felt so tired. Maybe it was the electricity coursing between Will Hughes and me. “Okay, but I need to go change. I’ve been in the same clothes for twenty-four hours.”
“By all means,” Kiernan said, opening wide his arms. “Take your time. I’ve got all night. How ’bout you, Mr. Hughes?”
Will Hughes smiled at the detective, but I had a feeling he was talking to me. “Oh, yes. I definitely have all night.”
As well as a much needed change of clothes, including a turtleneck so I didn’t have to keep my scarf on, I was hoping for a few moments of privacy, but Becky followed me upstairs and into my studio. When I tried to get past her into the bathroom, she planted herself in front of the door, arms crossed, all four feet eleven and a half inches of her bristling with barely controlled energy.
“All right, Margaret Eleanor James, I’m not budging until you tell me the truth.”
“The truth?” I asked, trying to look innocent.
Becky punched me in the arm. “Do you honestly expect me to believe that you spent the entire night with that stunning man sleeping?”
“Oh,” I said, relieved that Becky suspected me of first-date sex, not collusion with vampires and fairies. “Well, not exactly sleeping.”
“I knew it! There’s so much chemistry between you two I thought someone’s head was going to go up in flames!”