by Rhys Ford
I wasn’t sure who looked worse, Dempsey or Jonas. Both were various shades of gray, and their chins sported a bit of uneven scruff, but Dempsey’s was scraggly and unkempt, more silver than brown, and his years dragged his skin down, pouching out bags under his tired eyes.
He also was leaning forward in the chair and dressed in one of those damned hospital gowns, so I got a full view of his pasty, blue-veined back and ass when I shuffled past. Not exactly something I wanted to see on an empty stomach. Or a full stomach for that matter.
“You’re supposed to be laid up, boy. Heard they put you in a fancy room downstairs.” Dempsey’s hands shook while he tugged a blanket up over Jonas’s chest. He eyed me again. “Where’d you get the pants? All they gave me was this damned bib.”
“Stole them,” I lied.
“That’s my boy,” Dempsey muttered as I dragged over another chair.
“They could have at least left you your underwear. Bastards took mine,” I grumbled.
“What makes you think I was wearing any when I came in?”
Moving the chair hurt like hell despite its light weight, and I collapsed into the seat, exhausted from the effort. If anyone’d asked I’d have said I was brand-spanking-new, but I’d overdone it. Or it could have been the shock of seeing Dempsey and hearing him call me his boy. I expected that from Jonas, not from Dempsey.
“Docs say he’ll be fine. Or so everyone keeps telling me. So you hear that, old man?” I slid my hand over Jonas’s wrist, thankful for the strong, steady beat I felt under his skin. “You’re probably going to be chasing nurses around the station in the morning.” I turned slightly to glance at Dempsey. “Why are you here?”
“Visiting.”
“They don’t strip visitors and put hospital gowns on them for shits and giggles.” I nodded at his arm, where a gauze wrap was coming undone from its knot. “And that’s an IV catheter you’ve got sticking out there. They put you in for tests or something more serious?”
“If it were more serious, I’d have told you, so yeah, it’s tests,” Dempsey grumped. “Sylvia dropped off in the chair, so I thought I’d come down and take a look at Jonas. Make sure they’ve got him done up right.”
“They will,” I promised softly. “I’ll cover it.”
He cleared his throat then asked, “You went down there for a run, didn’t you? A run for that cat-bastard lord in Balboa Park?”
I didn’t like the softness in Dempsey’s voice. He’d always been a snarling man, rough and hard. It was unsettling to hear—to see—the change in him, and it scared me more than nearly any run I’d ever been on.
“Yeah. I got a transport off of Sparky, but it’s not loaded for bear—or anything else for that matter. Suddenly she’s anti mounting guns, so I had to make some deals. We were going to make a pickup of something, but those assholes hit us before we could make the deal. Seller probably thinks we flaked, but he wasn’t there when we showed up.”
“I’ll reach out and touch base with him. If he fucked you over….” Dempsey’s mouth twisted around a cigar that wasn’t there, and his nicotine-stained fingers brushed over the seam of his lips. “Can’t let something like this go past without a response, you know?”
“Yeah, I know.” I nodded in agreement. “Someone killed the old professor who was coming with us. Some expert on digging up elfin artifacts. Ryder thinks it was the same guys or knows them. I need to know why they jumped us and who sent them, so if that guns guy knows something—”
“That can probably be done.” Dempsey chewed on the end of his overgrown mustache. “I’ll put the word out. Shouldn’t take long to find them. Hanging a price on a Stalker brings some huge-ass karma.”
“I just need one of them alive, Dempsey,” I reiterated. “Okay?”
Pulling a hit on a Stalker was a good way to end up dead. In the eyes of a lot of cops, I was just another elfin many of them would sooner see dead, but my badge meant something to anyone else carrying a SoCalGov license. And Jonas—hell, he walked on water and through fire for most of us. Whoever sent Scooter, Ferret, and the rocket launcher after us probably wouldn’t live long enough to see in the inside of a jail cell once word got out.
“Got it. One. One we can probably do.” He chuckled. “Considering you’ve already killed one of them, you’re one to talk.”
“I didn’t kill him. He just ended up dead.” The room was growing cold or I was. Either way, I shivered, cursing my bruises for not keeping me warm. “I’ve got to make this run work, don’t I?”
“Probably. They—the doctors—don’t like the odds. Hell, I don’t like them much either,” Dempsey replied, his voice low and thick with emotion. “I don’t want to die, kid. I mean I keep telling myself I’ve had a long run and I should be happy with what I’ve got, but….”
“Yeah, I don’t want you to die too.” I closed my fingers over his trembling hand. We rarely touched. I could count on one hand the times we’d actually made contact for something other than patching one another up or brawling, but now—especially now—I needed to feel him on my skin.
Guess I was more sidhe than I thought, because touching him… comforted me… much like the sidhe sought one another out, a weave of strokes and glances I usually found disturbing. Touching Dempsey felt… right.
“I’m not going to let you die, old man. Not without a fight.” I sighed. “So yeah, while I know it might be too much to ask you to turn those two over to the cops, I’d like you to make sure at least one of them can talk. Because someone’s killed Ryder’s prize pigeon, and I need to find him another reason to make this run happen.”
“Just don’t sleep with him for the money,” Dempsey teased. “Didn’t raise you to be a damned good Stalker just for you to go sell yourself out to the sidhe. Didn’t feed and train you so you’d end up on your belly and being a whore.”
“If that’s what it takes to keep you alive, old man,” I whispered, squeezing his hand once more. “Then that’s exactly what I’m going to be.”
“YOU ARE not going, Ryder,” Alexa growled, pacing across my living room, her hands slicing at the air as she walked. I’d fought off vampire pigeons with less fervor, and considering they were literally after my blood, that was saying a lot. “It is stupid to go now that the human is dead.”
Alexa was far from the stereotype of a sidhe woman trotted out in every human telecast and drama. If she owned anything wispy and revealing, I’d never seen it. Lean and muscled, she towered over most sidhe women, and her features were too strong to be considered elfin pretty, but I loved the power in her walk and the strength in her face. She’d softened up a bit since moving down to San Diego, letting her sunset-streaked magenta curls fall loose to her shoulders, but that was as far as Alexa was going to go. Her ocean-blue eyes were still hard and alert, and the heavy gun she wore on her hip was smooth hilted from practice. As the head of the local Court’s security, she often put her foot down about Ryder going off on wild goose chases.
She wasn’t hard on the eyes and was Cari’s sometimes Stalker apprentice and frequently hit on me, mostly to get a rise out of Ryder. Or so I hoped. But there were times when I would gladly let her tumble me into a soft bed, and not just because it would piss Ryder off.
Unfortunately, Alexa being his cousin, he ignored her as easily as most people disregarded their younger siblings giving them good advice.
The night bled inside—darkening the warehouse as the rolling fog veiled any ambient light coming off of the city outside. Ryder’s presence was playing with my nerves. I wanted to sleep, but it hurt to climb the stairs, and he’d refused to sleep in my bed—citing a laundry list of excuses about why he needed to be close to me in case I needed something in the middle of the night—so he wasn’t going away any time soon.
I didn’t want to admit it—especially not to him—but I hurt. Every inch of me felt bruised or broken, and I crackled when I walked. His offer to bring in one of his sidhe healers was a nice one, but I made their skin crawl. Touching m
e—delving into my hybrid, iniquitous body—was too much to ask. I’d been cooked up in a circle of blood and bone, knitted to life by an unsidhe Wild Hunt Master whose main hobbies were bringing about death and devastation. In order to heal what Tanic cuid Anbhas created, a sidhe healer had to become what I was made of.
That wasn’t something I’d wish on anyone.
So the painkillers Ryder brought with him were looking mighty good. He must have sensed I needed something to take the edge off because I heard the rattle of a pill jar come from the kitchen and then liquid being poured.
“You can’t expect Kai to go back out, Ryder.” Cari poked at a sore spot on my ribs. “This run almost got him killed, and you guys haven’t even left the city yet.”
“Hey, I don’t go out, I don’t get paid,” I pointed out. “And living’s expensive.”
Dying was too. In between me going down to lower stretches of San Diego and being brought back home, I’d gotten Dempsey’s first bill from Central Medical, and the amount made my teeth ache. The way things were looking, I was going to have to scavenge a dragon egg every day to play catch-up. I needed the trip out to Groom Lake. Hell, I’d even taken insurance out to pay off Dempsey’s doctors in case I didn’t come back, but one way or another, the grumpy old asshole was going to be taken care of.
Even if I hadn’t done so well with Jonas.
After only a day I was sick of being on the couch, but Cari, Ryder, and Alexa were determined I stay stretched out and under their watchful eyes as I knitted back together. Coddling wasn’t going to make me heal any faster, but Dalia’d taken one look at me and ordered the other three Horsemen of the Apocalypse to keep me contained.
Newt was highly amused by all of this and pleased, because he spent most of his time lounging across my belly or begging for food.
“Jonas still doing okay?” I asked. “No one’s heard anything else, right?”
“He is fine, Kai. You spoke with Angus just half an hour ago. Nothing has changed. He is still under the sedatives and in good hands, resting and healing. Like you should be.”
Ryder pressed the steaming mug of coffee he’d brought out with him from the kitchen into my hands. It smelled suspiciously of cinnamon, vanilla, and cream. Tasted that way too, but I eyed him anyway.
“It’s not drugged. If I was going to drug you, I would just have Alexa press against your jaw and we would pill you like a cat. It’s just coffee.”
I was determined not to enjoy it, purely out of spite, but I might have moaned a little bit with pleasure when it hit my tongue.
“The drugs, however, are here,” he said, balancing them on my thigh. “Take them or I will get Alexa to help me pry that pretty mouth of yours open.”
I hurt too much to argue, but I gave him a weak glower while I washed them down with a mouthful of scalding coffee. I swallowed, then said, “One problem with going, Marshall was our subject matter expert, because apparently none of the elfin actually dig up their own shit. Now that we know someone else is looking for whatever perked her brain up, we’re going to have competition, and we don’t have a damned clue what we’re looking for.”
“Competition that knows more than we do.” Cari took the cup from my hand, sipped at it, then handed it back. She was oblivious to Ryder’s scowl, or quite possibly she didn’t give a shit. Either way, she licked the drops off of her full mouth with the end of her tongue, then said, “If you’re serious about going out there, I’m coming with you.”
“I’m contracted for one Stalker. Not two.” Ryder jerked his thumb at me. “The one I have is very expensive, and he is going to say no.”
“No, it makes sense. You’ll need more fighting power than just Kai,” Alexa interrupted. “Since you insist on going yourself, I can—”
“Yes, my other option was to send you, and right now, you’re more important to the Court than I am.” He perched on the couch arm by my side, putting his hand on my shoulder when I shifted to give him room. “Stay. You are fine. Cousin, Kaia and Rhianna need you right now. As does your daughter. Southern Rise is building, and its defenses aren’t complete. I can be lost. You cannot.”
“I don’t like it. It is stupid and wasteful,” his cousin snapped back, making another circuit of the rug. “And for what? You don’t know what you are looking for. You don’t even know where you need to look.”
“Marshall had an assistant. He’s the one who found the body. The police would not let me talk to him, but I plan to once he’s released. I’m hoping she shared what she knew with him.” He shrugged. “If not, then perhaps someone on the university board.”
“For all we know, her assistant’s the one who killed her”—I hated to point out the obvious, but Ryder tended to go glass half-full even when it was leaking—“and sent those assholes after us.”
“Weren’t very competent,” Cari grumbled. “You’re still alive.”
“Thanks, I’ll be sure to tell them to work harder next time I see them.” I took another sip from my mug, handing it back to Cari when she reached for it. Either Ryder or Newt growled, but I wasn’t sure. “Point is, do we make the run with the assistant and hope he wasn’t the one who screwed us or head up there and just take everything we can find?”
Cari licked a bit of foam from the lip of the mug. “What exactly is it you were hoping to find?”
“There is evidence of an old city there,” Ryder explained. He intercepted my coffee mug when Cari passed it back over, reaching across my shoulders to take it from her hands. “From what I saw in the photos Marshall was given, there are rituals engraved into some of the walls—fertility rituals. Perhaps they will help shore up the elfin birth rate.”
“And here I was all rooting for you. Then you threw in that last perhaps,” I grumbled. “With our luck, we’ll set something off and we’ll end up in some paradox, like maybe there’s a world like this one but made up of all the missing bits.”
“This other world… so, where old Anaheim would be… instead of Elfhaime?” Alexa pursed her lips when we all looked up at her. “What? I am studying Earth history and geography. Much of the anger in the conflicts stemmed from the loss of entire regions and their people. It’s important to understand that.”
“Learning about people dressing up as giant rats isn’t going to help anyone,” I scoffed. “I’m more worried about why Marshall was killed and what’s there that someone else wants. If it’s just elfin knickknacks, why would a human be interested? There a market for elfin arcane?”
“If there’s one for dragon eggs, why not sidhe stuff?” Cari pointed out. “It’s all speculation. We could be heading out there for nothing but a handful of beans and not a magic cow in sight.”
“I think the beans were magical. Not the cow.” I sighed when Ryder tilted my mug back, drinking down the rest. “You’re not coming with us, Cari. Your mother would kick my ass, and there’s not much left of it to kick.”
“My mother’s going to kick your ass anyway once she finds out you got blown up by a guy on a scooter.” Cari smiled at me, a Cheshire hint of trouble on her lips.
“Someone else had the launcher. Scooter had a machine gun or something.” I frowned. “And no. I’m not getting you killed somewhere off in Nevada. The less people who die on this trip, the better.”
“I’m hoping no one gets killed,” Ryder interjected. “The point of us going isn’t to die. I have no intention of dying. I’m concerned you all think I’m dragging you out on some kind of suicide mission.”
“Yeah, road to hell paved and all that.” I waved away his complaint.
“Look, culero, if I don’t go and Alexa doesn’t go, who’s going to cover your ass?” She blew a raspberry at me. “Besides, you need someone who can shoot—because no offense, but His Lordship here, he isn’t exactly Annie Oakley.”
“I don’t think that’s going to be a problem,” Ryder replied. “Marshall’s assistant? He used to be a Stalker.”
Eight
I DIDN’T know what San Diego felt l
ike before the Merge. Sure, I’d seen pictures, but there was something about putting my feet down on a piece of ground and feeling the world stretch out around me. I’d sat on the edges of the Imperial crest and watched sea faerie dragons turn the moonlit ocean into spangles of icy blue and gold light, seen a thunderbird scream through a valley filled with wildebeest and zebra for the sheer joy of feeling their terror, and bathed in the icy kiss of La Jolla’s tide pools after having sex on the beach with a pretty girl and beautiful boy whose names I’d never gotten.
When Dempsey’s knees gave out on him and he’d finally admitted he couldn’t hold his license any longer, I was surprised he’d chosen San Diego as the spot he wanted to rest his bones. It made some sense, I guess. Jonas was there, and we’d used San Diego as a sort of safe house for a few years before, but I’d have bet he’d want some place more… human and less elfin.
Because while the city remained pretty much intact following the knitting of the worlds, San Diego’s slate blue skies and serrated canyons practically burst with all creatures great and small… and mostly Underhill.
There were earth-born animals. Cats, dogs, rats, and raccoons as well as the occasional possum. The valleys and corridors below Pendle were filled with generations of escaped wild animals from an old safari park, and there were definitely descendants from the Balboa zoo wandering around—I’d gotten many a call to remove an overgrown fire salamander, only to find myself facing down a bloat-bellied crocodile. The Murphy caverns were home to lion prides who fed off the giraffe and zebra herds coming to drink from Kearny Lake. There was an occasional jaguar slipping into a car’s headlights on the winding road up to Kensington Flats and scaring a driver off the road, and camels roamed the flat plains near San Ysidro.
But they were merely specks of human existence compared to the teeming Underhill flora and fauna the city fought to hold off from consuming its gleaming metal spires and winding concrete freeways.