by Rhys Ford
The unsidhe guard never reached my mother’s family, or maybe he had and they’d spat in his face. Either way, Tanic wasn’t the only one who’d lost me. The guard did too. In a poker game to a foulmouthed, cigar-smoking Stalker named Dempsey.
And knowing Dempsey, he’d probably cheated.
“Actually, I consider myself more human than elfin,” I interjected before Ryder made me a card-carrying member of the growing cult he was establishing in the sidhe-owned lands of Balboa Park. “I was raised by a human, another Stalker.”
“If one can call what Dempsey did raised,” Ryder grumbled. “Let us get to why I brought Professor Marshall here so you can go do… whatever it is you do in this… place.”
“He just doesn’t like me not being under his thumb and living with the rest of the sheep he thinks he owns,” I explained to Marshall. “Which is why he dragged you out here instead of his crystal palace covered in panda shit. Now, why are you guys here?”
I’d made the coffee strong, but it wasn’t as bitter as the look on the professor’s face when she put the twisted rebar back down on the table. Clearing her throat, she then took a few seconds to wring her hands and shift about on the couch cushions. I shot Ryder an exasperated look while Marshall took her time thinking up an explanation for nearly getting her head blown off at my front door.
“Anytime, lady,” I offered. “I’ve got the evening open until about midnight. Then I’m going to go crash. It’s been a long damned day.”
“Kai, show some respect,” Ryder hissed at me. “Professor, anything you say to Kai will be kept in confidence. He might look like a thug, but he’s a good man. Your secrets are safe with him. Just tell him what you told me.”
I tried to reassure her. “There’s nothing you can say that—”
“The elfin are dying, Stalker Gracen. At the rate of their population growth, they will not have enough of a genetic pool to draw upon to produce viable, healthy children,” Marshall said softly. “I—and most of my colleagues—are dedicated to preventing this from happening.”
“So your lot has moved on from saving whales and trees to the elfin?” I crooked an eyebrow at Ryder. “Can’t say most of the humans I’ve run into would agree with you there, Professor.”
“They don’t,” she replied. “But hating someone for the color of their skin or the pointedness of their ears only lessens our humanity, not reassures it. The elfin must survive. Thrive, even. We cannot lose their culture or their contributions to our combined societies. They have so much to teach us. And so much to learn from us.”
“What do you need me for?” I wanted the professor to get to the point so I could shower crusting ink off my leg. “Not like I’d be any good at going door-to-door and selling cookies for the cause.”
“I know where the ancient elfin once cast fertility spells. Someone I use to courier artifacts stumbled across it and documented its location. There is a powerful magic written there, a world-altering magic, and it is buried in the middle of a very dangerous, Merge-tangled zone.” Marshall lifted her chin, and a fierce zealotry burned in her intense gaze. “And we would like you to help us get it.”
SCREW THE coffee. I was moving on to whiskey.
Ryder was hot on my ass when I left the couch to go look for something hard to drink. What Marshall unloaded was insane, and the damned thorn in my side wanted to pay me to go look for what was going to turn out to be a crazy woman’s rainbow dodo.
The biggest problem with Ryder of the Clan Sebac, Third in the House of Devon and High Lord of the Southern Rise Court, San Diego, was his unwillingness to let me have some space to think. Well, that and he fired up every nerve in my body so I wanted to quench myself in him, but that was something I had a handle on. His shadowing me every time I needed to walk off wasn’t.
“Look, she’s crazy. You’ve wasted five minutes of my life talking to a crazy woman. Did you hear where she wants us to go? She’s old. She’s going to die of a heart attack at the first sign of trouble. Then what are we going to do?” I couldn’t find the bottle of Jack Daniel’s I’d opened a few weeks ago, and I had to stop and try to remember if we’d drank it all the night Jonas and I took down the nest of medusa salamanders with some of the Brent brothers. I reopened a cabinet I’d just checked, and there it was, acting like it hadn’t been hiding behind a fifth of gin. I took a step back and found Ryder in the space I needed. Elbowing him, I said, “Move.”
“Hear her out. It’s important.”
He moved only enough to let me past, and even then I had to shove up against him to get by. Ryder grabbed at the bottle’s neck, tightening his hand over mine and refusing to let go when I tugged.
“Please. Kai, I wouldn’t have brought her here if I didn’t think it was worth your time.”
The money was good, but what she was asking—where she wanted to go—was insane. There was no coming back from where she wanted to go, and Ryder was pretty much asking me to commit suicide over a maybe. Then he said the one thing that could get me to change my mind.
“I’ll pay you more,” he beseeched me in the roiling golden sidhe of his bloodline. “Anything you want. If it is within my power, I will give it to you. It’s important.”
Or at least that’s what I thought he said. I wasn’t fluent in the sidhe tongue. Mostly it and any unsidhe I heard triggered some part of my brain most people had connected to the stomach flu, but the hows and whys of it didn’t matter. It made my skin crawl, and I wanted to vomit everything I’d ever eaten in the past week just at the sound of it.
“Repeat that in Singlish.” I gulped down my belly’s tossings. “I want to make sure I know what you’re offering me.”
“Anything,” he repeated, sliding his hand down the neck of the bottle then wrapping his fingers around my wrist. “This is very important, Kai. More important than bringing the twins to San Diego, more important than anything I’ve ever dreamed of doing. We lost a lot of people—humans and elfin—in the Merge and the wars afterwards. Does that not matter to you?”
“Not really. Those people are long dead, Ryder. Killed in the crash between both worlds. There’s nothing left of them. Folded into dead space and gone.” I shook my head. “The Merge just happened, and the wars, those were just stupid, driven by fear and ego.”
“This jaunt isn’t simply a whim. I was chasing down a rumor I’ve heard about that area and then found out about the professor’s work.” He stepped closer, pressing the bottle between us. “When Professor Marshall approached me, her research only strengthened my belief there is something there.”
“But you don’t know what that is? That something. Other than it’s a spell of some kind.”
“I’m not entirely sure yet. What she has to show for proof isn’t definitive.” He shot me a rueful grin. “And I know you. Without evidence you believe nothing, but in this case, we won’t know for sure unless we actually go there. Can’t you trust me? Believe I wouldn’t ask you to do something unless there was a very good reason?”
“What’s your reason for going?” I asked, poking at Ryder’s words. “I don’t need you to retrieve a bunch of… whatever it is out there. I need a damned good reason to drag you and that old woman along for the ride.”
“Because I’m not going to ask anyone to do for me what I won’t do myself. I don’t know if it’s even viable. It could be nothing out there or everything. Kai, the world… this new world… we are all in changed the where of everything.” Ryder shook his head. “I have a rumor of an abandoned Court—one not meant to be in that place—but Marshall has evidence of fertility magic being practiced there. If those records still exist—”
“You’re bound and determined to get people knocked up, lordling.” I shook my head. “And throwing a lot of money away just to do it.”
“Whatever you need, I will supply,” Ryder promised. “You’re the only one I trust to do this. I’m betting my life and our people on this, Kai.”
There was only one thing I wanted—besides more mo
ney—and if I asked for it, I’d know how serious Ryder was about getting me to help Marshall on her snipe hunt.
“Tell the museum to hang the dragon back up,” I countered. “That, you pay me more and fund the trip. Then I’ll do it.”
“I can do that. It goes against everything in me, but for you, Kai, I will do this. Now will you go listen to what Professor Marshall has to say?” He didn’t even hesitate. There was no wavering or even a blink. Instead Ryder conceded with a slight nod and a straightening of his shoulders as if he were going into battle. “Please?”
His eyes were emerald facets strung with gold, normal bland coloration for a sidhe, common really among his people, but I’d not grown up in the Dawn Court. He was the first sidhe I’d been around for any length of time ever, and even after I’d met a few more, Ryder still did something to me inside.
I’d have given in to his slap-and-tickle flirting if I didn’t think he’d use it to own me. Ryder liked owning people. Or at least saying he was responsible for them. I didn’t want to be anyone’s responsibility but my own. Depending on someone else was a losing proposition, even if they meant every silver-tipped word dripping off their tongues. People couldn’t be depended on, not like a machine or a gun, but Ryder’s pleases always did me in because they made me want him to trust me—to depend on me—and that wasn’t good in anyone’s book.
“Okay, I’ll do it,” I heard myself agree. “But I’m drinking while I listen to her. That way I can at least say I was partially hammered when I threw my life away.”
“DO YOU know where Groom Lake is, Stalker Gracen?” The professor’d tossed back the shot I’d given her and held her glass out for another.
“Yeah, it’s above Old Vegas, at the far end of the Wastelands.” I poured her the shot. She was going to need it to tell her story if the bleached-out look on her face was anything to go by. “Might as well ask me to take you to one of the moons on a dragon’s back. And for what? Anything worth something was probably stripped out of there ages ago if the nightmares didn’t get everyone. And since you’re planning on getting me killed, you might as well call me Kai.”
“The nightmares are the least of my worries, Kai.” She lifted the glass to her lips, taking a delicate sip instead of slamming it back. “Remember, what I am after is information, not anything of value to looters.”
I’d already encountered more than my share of nightmares. A nightmare stallion was my first real kill. Dempsey’d been three sheets to the wind, relatively sober for him, and we’d been lost on the edge of the plains, on a dirt road he swore would take us back to camp. It hadn’t been much of a road to begin with. Little more than an old tank path the locals used to cart groceries in and out of the hills and, on cool autumn evenings, home to one of the largest nightmare herds I’d ever seen.
When the human world broke through the elfin Underhill—or the other way around, no one was really sure—the Merge ripped apart the land then knitted it back together into a patchwork of cities and landscapes. San Diego survived the cataclysmic shake-up pretty well, stretching out to absorb the sudden introduction of long stretches of unfamiliar mountains and rivers.
But the Merge didn’t just blow out the Earth’s crust and stitch in pieces of the Underhill;it also dumped the sidhe and unsidhe as well, the two fractious elfin races and their towering cities. And if that fuckery wasn’t enough, the capricious gods who diced and sliced the two worlds together tossed in Underhill’s monsters for good measure.
And they thrived in their new world.
The creatures bore a sketchy resemblance to human horses. There were legs, broad chests, triangular heads, and certainly equine-like noses. Long whipping strands ran down the middle of their necks and spines, cresting into streaming tangles behind their rounded haunches, giving them thick, coarse manes, but their nostrils flared red and blue, jetting out smoke and shallow, hot flames. Most of them were a bluish-black, mottled in dark gray weeping spots, but a few were pale, nearly translucent, equine jellyfish scoring the ground with broad, plate-shaped hooves. But unlike earthly horses, their teeth were the stuff of bad dreams and savagery, rows and rows of sharklike points jutting up from wet, glistening black gums.
And to make matters worse, they smiled.
The same fucking gods who brought them into existence also gave them mouths deep enough to wrap up their jaws and curl up at the edges, as if they were happy dogs grinning at the sight of their masters.
Happy. Fucking. Dogs.
Who liked the taste of human and elfin meat.
That was what Professor Violet Marshall wanted to serve me up to. Probably with a side of cranberry dressing and whatever wine went well with elfin-hybrid monsters.
“So once I get you past all the monsters, what do you think you’re going to find at Groom Lake?” I filled my glass nearly to the brim, mindful of Ryder’s eyes on me. “You and His Lordship are looking for what? Records? Paper would have been to dust by now.”
“Not paper.” She slurped noisily at her cup, swallowing before continuing. “I have pictures taken by someone traveling through of a Court there, well what’s left of one, but Lord Ryder seems to think it has some merit for the sidhe…”
“All elfin, but that area had no Court in the Underhill, or maybe it was nearby and that’s where it ended up when our worlds… folded together,” Ryder commented. He’d refused the whiskey but poured himself another cup of coffee, adding enough milk and sugar to hurt my teeth just at the thought of it. “In the human world, there was a laboratory of sorts.”
“A research facility. One that dealt with technologies to rival any magics the elfin brought to life. You can’t even begin to imagine,” the professor expounded.
Ryder and I exchanged rueful glances at Marshall’s words. I gave her a quick grin and said, “Oh, I can imagine what the elfin can bring to life. You think something survived our worlds getting twisted together like carnival taffy?”
“Yes, based on the photos I was given, but it’s not enough information. We need more. The Elfin Studies Department—that’s the scientists and researchers at San Diego university—we have our arguments, but this time, in this, we’re in agreement. If there is a way to perpetuate the elfin people, we must act.” Her gaze flicked over to Ryder. “That’s where Lord Ryder comes into play. The museum and university lack the funds to mount an expedition to Groom Lake to look for evidence to support my fertility studies, so I petitioned the Court for assistance. It’s an archaeological treasure, right within our grasp. We’d be fools not to study it.”
“So you’re in it for the Court stuff, and that’s enough to round up elephants and trek through the desert?” I asked Ryder. “Suppose you get there and it’s nothing you can use?”
“Knowing that can help us move forward,” he countered. “Eliminating what doesn’t work helps as much as discovering what will.”
Marshall murmured something, but I was too busy shaking my head at Ryder to listen. I tossed a bit of whiskey over my tongue, then swallowed its burn. “You’re both insane. You’re chasing after… nothings.”
“Perhaps, but maybe not. What the professor has found so far says otherwise. If it’s possible, we have to try, Kai.”
“No offense to Professor Marshall, but humans breed like fleas. You’re just scared they’re going to overrun you.” I smirked.
“We can’t afford to lose the elfin, Stalker Gracen.” The professor set her empty glass down and pierced me with a look sharp enough to stab me in the chest. “Our world has changed since the Merge, but one thing remains the same—all lives are important, as are all cultures, even those alien to us. We can give one another so much—elfin and humans alike—but first we must truly understand what has happened. We must understand history or are doomed to repeat it, so the saying goes.”
“And Groom Lake might hold some answers,” Ryder added. “Isn’t that worth a run up there?”
“Not like I’m picking up eggs from the farm there, Lordship. It’s several days up
and then back again,” I reminded him. “More if we run into trouble.”
“With you, there’s always trouble, Kai,” Ryder replied. “But whatever you run into, you won’t be alone. I’ll be going with you and Professor Marshall.”
“Yeah, I know. I’m beginning to wonder if they’ve got babysitting listed under my Stalker license.” I refilled my glass then saluted them both, hoping my next gulp of whiskey would somehow set me on fire, or perhaps I would choke to death on my own tongue. “Well, here’s to a short, profitable ride. Hope we all live to see the end of it, and may I not succumb to any urge to kill the lot of you.”
Five
“YOU’RE GOING to need big.” Sparky scratched under her long braided hair. “And badass enough no one’s going to want to pry it open. That kind of thing’s going to cost you something pretty, like your left nut.”
“I do not want to know why you think my left anything would be pretty enough to buy a long-distance rig.” I jerked my thumb back at the blond sidhe behind me. “But he says he’s paying, so load me up.”
There were a lot of things to do before gallivanting off into the wilds of Nevada, things to minimize my impending death, and Sparky was my best bet to make it happen. A former petrochemical engineer, she’d hightailed it off to the outer edges of San Diego’s borders, setting up a refuel outpost for Stalkers and travelers needing gasoline and a place to store their city-banned vehicles. In a lot of ways, Sparky resembled Professor Marshall, lean and wiry with a calculating gleam in her pale gray eyes, except with a lot less crazy.
Sparky was as wrinkled, windblown, and heat baked as the hills she’d found sanctuary in, both toasted brown from the glaring sun and bleached white from age. Scrawls of mesquite clotted the upper ranges surrounding Sparky’s Landing, the trees’ tangled branches thick with small wind-tossed tumbleweeds and the occasional condor. Tall broken-spine pines were a break from the warm breeze kicking up dust devils at our feet, while also providing long stretches of shade for Sparky’s dog pack to lounge in.