by Rhys Ford
The wonder of Pendle’s dragons would never cease to amaze. Even with the very real danger of being eaten, people flocked to see them, paying countless thousands a year to be brought up to the mountain peaks to watch the air fill with wings, talons, and blood. Flame-feathered peacocks danced along the San Diego River’s delta once a year, its crystalline sands melting into slag beneath their fiery plumage as the fan-tailed birds turned deadly when the females came into season. Quartz roses bloomed along the remains of the 163 corridor, their leaves stripped clean by the wild giant pandas roaming freely through creaking bamboo forests. Swarms of blue glass butterflies settled on the unattended dead, scooping out tiny divots of rotting flesh with their curled tongues, their wings chiming a melodic warning if anything threatened their feed.
Then the sidhe had come to Balboa, and the human Underhill scholars who studied and argued at San Diego’s universities lost their freaking minds.
So the only words I could use to describe Ryder and I walking into the Old Spanish–style building housing the Underhill Studies department were batshit fucking nuts.
The squeaking and staring was enough to make me want to turn around and walk right back out.
Ryder’s hand on my upper arm was the only reason I kept walking.
I wasn’t exactly sure what to think of the sweeping adobe building with its arches and swarms of baby-faced scholars.
“It is different… humans and school… from what I am used to.” Ryder slowed his pace, taking in the open courtyard just beyond the front door. People glanced our way, some even paused to stare, but no one stopped either of us from crossing onto the grassy circles set among the paving stones.
The courtyard was enormous, nearly as big as my warehouse floor, and quite pretty. It reminded me of Elfhaime, twisted small trees and monochromatic blooms ranging from bleach-white to vivid crimson and every shade of pink in between. Water features kept the area cool, with a fall running down a slab of rough black granite set at one corner of the square. An open walkway ran around the outer paved area, and archways off the courtyard led to hallways and more doors. Curved padded seating dotted some of the grassy areas, but the streams of people scurrying in and out of the arches didn’t seem inclined to stop and navel gaze.
Until they spotted us. Ryder was oblivious to their stares, or he was entranced by the sudden appearance of a sidhe garden in the middle of a human compound. Either way, he stepped onto the paving and took a deep breath. He was a handsome sculpt of bone and gold amid the darks, pinks, and greens. I didn’t deny wanting him. My skin sang with the want of him, but surrendering to that desire meant handing myself over to Ryder, and I wasn’t quite ready—or willing—to do that.
“You see, for the sidhe—and maybe for the unsidhe as well—the teachers come to us, sometimes spending entire weeks with one child if what they knew interested the student. My historical studies instructor lived with us for nearly half a year.” He scratched his nose, hiding a smirk. “Although to be honest, I think my mothers were considering asking him to join their marriage. But this… gathering together into classrooms and being amongst other students, that is how your schooling was, yes?”
“Nope. Never went to school. It wasn’t… practical. Not for how we lived. We moved about more than the wind, and schooling required sitting still.”
“Are you serious?” Ryder sounded shocked, or at least stunned to silence, and stopped in midsniff of a blush-pink cabbage rose beginning to bloom. “None? At all?”
“Nothing formal. Dempsey’d put a gun in my hand nearly at the moment after I’d wiped myself clean for the first time so I could work.” I shrugged, touching one of the open roses, smearing pollen on my finger. “Mathematics I mostly did through some link courses, because somebody had to do the books and Dempsey is shit for saving money. It’s a bitch once they tossed letters into the mix, but I could plot trajectories like a demon vole digging for worms. Knowing how to blast a shotgun near a vortex helps with those kinds of things.”
I had no comparison to hold up to the university. Reading was something I’d learned out of desperation and boredom, only spurred on by a desire to please Cari’s mother when she asked how I was doing with Jonas’s instruction. The words came easily enough, simple patterns suddenly becoming drops of ink or pixels strong enough to create images in my head. I’d been afraid the first time I’d seen a cat in my mind at the invocation of three letters written on a page. It was spell craft and profane, changing my thoughts with a few passes of graphite and paper.
The words became sentences and then turned into stories, whispers of someone’s imagination reaching out to touch mine, hanging stars in the darkness of my mind until I possessed a milky universe of worlds where there’d only been a void before.
But judging from the look on Ryder’s face, he didn’t quite see it the same way.
“That’s almost criminal.” His mouth worked around the words, and I tried not to laugh.
“That statement there is practically my entire life up until this very moment,” I replied. “Now how about if we go chase down this ex-Stalker of the professor’s?”
“Are you sure you are up to it?” He’d been eyeing me—more than usual—since we’d met up at the warehouse.
“This? Today?” I stepped onto a paving path, smiling at a pack of students slowly wandering by. “Or this chasing our deaths in Nevada?”
They’d wandered by three times since Ryder veered off to look at the courtyard, and making eye contact seemed like the best way to move them along. If anything they slowed down, and one of them—a curly-haired, round-hipped girl who looked barely old enough to order her own bao—waggled her fingers at me.
I felt very old.
The students were young and naïve, unaware I had weapons on me and could kill at least twenty of them before anyone could react. They smiled and laughed, untouched by any grit and filth I’d had smeared into my skin since birth. My back hurt a bit, and there were still twinges in my joints, because being blown half a block by ruptured fuel cells and a rocket was never good for the body. And I was stuck with a sidhe lord who probably was lying to me about something.
So very, very old.
“I am glad you are doing this,” he replied in a low voice, startling me back to the oasis. “The Court ruins—”
“So you said, and here I am, still ignorant of what’s really there. Wait, no. It’s because Marshall had some shots of sidhe porn and you’re all hot and bothered to go see it in person. Something got her dead, Ryder. Something or someone, and we don’t know the why of it.” I jerked my head toward one of the openings. “Let’s get to where we’re going. I feel like a bird in a damned cage standing here, and we’ve got cats circling us, waiting for the door to open so they can eat one of us.”
“This way. The right corridor is where we need to go. It looks private enough.” He cast a glance over his shoulder. “And yes, I agree. We are definitely the birds here.”
The archway led to a zigzag of hallways, but the signs posted on the wall led us easily enough. We turned a corner, distancing ourselves from the gaggle of students we’d found in the main corridor, but I could still hear their voices chattering away, a rapid fire click-click-click of questions and speculation. The archway led to a wide span, cool and softly lit.
“Here.” He stopped suddenly, jerking me nearly off my feet into a niche. I hit a potted plant, its leaves ruffling over my shoulder. “I want to talk to you. About this trip. About you.”
I’d like to say a cold chill ran up my spine when Ryder’s whisper hit me, but if there was one thing I knew about Ryder, he’d inherited his grandmother’s arachnid ways. Every bit of information was spun slowly—and much like a spider, out of his ass—but his web was never clear until I stepped away. And only then did I see I’d been trapped.
I gave myself half a minute before my temper was flailing about as if I’d walked into a nest of spinners and got spider-ass floss on my face.
“I’ve said this bef
ore to you, and I will say it again, since our people are dying out—”
“Your people are dying out.” I cut him off. It was the same old argument, again and again. “They’re not my people.”
“We are your people. I am your people,” he insisted. “I am trying to make you understand this. Understand why I am doing this. Let me ask you this. Don’t you care about your legacy? Leaving something of yourself behind? A child? Something? Don’t you ever think about that, Kai?”
I used to. Especially after seeing Jonas with his children, cradling his babies in his massive hands, their pink faces wet from birth and holding the stars in their eyes. I’d thought about it a lot. Then reality kicked in and I was reminded of where I came from—the evil I’d come from—and what he’d made me.
“No. Not one fucking bit. I’m a mule, Ryder. A goddamned mule. I can’t have kids. There’s not going to be any purple-eyed babies who call me Daddy,” I spat back. “I’m unnatural. A fucking chimera. It’s not just a damned nickname they gave me. It’s what I am, Your Lordship.”
“Do you know that for certain? Has anyone ever checked?”
He could see on my face the answer was no, but I didn’t need someone to tear me apart to tell me what I knew in my gut.
“My healers—”
“Your healers can barely touch me long enough to cure a damned paper cut, Ryder.” Snarling, I tried to shake him off, but he held on. “And when they do lay hands on me, they’re trying too hard not to puke. What do you think I’m going to say? Hey, while you’re down there, can you check to see if my junk works? You know, reroute the plumbing? So no, I’m not thinking about kids, about a legacy. There’s not going to be anyone after me. And I’m fine with that. Totally one-hundred percent fine.”
“You’re a good… man, Kai. You’d be a good father—”
“Give it a rest, Ryder.” This time I did break loose, sliding away a step. “What kind of child do you think I’d raise? Given the father I had?”
“You wouldn’t shove iron bars and slats under your child’s skin to make a sigil. You’d not starve them and beat them until they become animals in a cage.”
Ryder touched my shoulder, and my awareness of him set me aflame.
“Everything you are—while a bit rough—that is who I’d want my child to be. I do not want to lose you to time. That is what I want you to understand. Yes, the elfin have to change. More and more, I see that. I understand that. And maybe you are what we need to change to.”
I sighed, tired of the argument. “Well, then, if that’s the truth, princeling, may Morrígan have mercy on all your souls.”
WE FOUND Marshall’s office and her assistant. He looked like no Stalker I’d ever seen. Didn’t sound like one either. With the barest of blond scruffs on his chin and an Adam’s apple more mobile than a balloon caught on the wind, the man was about my height, freckled, slender as a reed, and constantly pushed his corn-silk bangs out of his light brown eyes. He looked more like one of the students wandering about the campus, sucking in its rarefied air, than someone I’d expect to have my back on a run, and that instinct hardened as he stuck his bony hand out and introduced himself to Ryder.
“It’s so good to finally meet you, Lord Ryder.” His voice wavered, dropping an octave as he spoke. “I’m Crickets Malone.”
The only response my brain could come up with after hearing that was Huh.
I must have said it out loud, because both Ryder and Crickets looked my way.
“It’s my Stalker name. We all have them. Kind of like a… Stalker thing.”
He bumbled the last bit, and my eyebrows scraped my hairline.
“Well, a lot of us do. Not everyone. They’re kind of given to you.”
“Huh.” It slipped out again, and Ryder’s sharp elbow gouged into my bruised ribs. I grunted and returned the hard stare he tossed my way. “And how did you get this… nickname?”
“It’s because I’m stealthy, quiet on a run.” He skimmed a flattened hand through the air, making a slight whooshing sound. “When I’m stalking, all you hear are crickets.”
I choked on a laugh, smothering it with a cough before Ryder flat out punched me in the face to keep me quiet. He shoved his hand out again, this time in my direction.
“So you were a Stalker?” I asked. For the life of me, his face tugged something in my memories, but I couldn’t come up with a time when I’d met him. “And you quit?”
“I got injured.” He rubbed his right shoulder. “Broke it straight through on a run, but for what we need, I can do the job. It’s not like we’re going to hunt dragons or anything, right?”
“Right,” I murmured. “No dragons where we’re going. Maybe.”
“I’m sorry.” His grin curled up over his narrow face, teeth wide and white. “I didn’t catch your name.”
I gave his hand a short, curt shake, then let go. “Kai Gracen.”
The pink drained from Malone’s face, his smile dimmed, and he began to suck on his teeth. “Oh… um. Hello. I’ve… heard of you. It’s good to finally meet you.”
“Bet you say that to all the elfin,” I said, looking for some place to sit. “Kind of cramped in here, isn’t it?”
I’d seen cleaner junkyards. More organized too. From the looks of things, we didn’t have to go to Groom Lake to find the lost sidhe Court or pre-Merge tech. It could have been buried under the piles of books and papers without anyone being the wiser.
The office wasn’t big enough for what Marshall and Malone had crammed into it. A worktable intersected the long, windowless space, with two rolling desk chairs on either side. Only one of the chairs was empty of paper stacks, and the desk was littered with everything from maps to rocks. Two walls were mostly shelving burdened with more books shoved haphazardly into whatever space they’d fit. Most of the softbound books were old with spines that were cracked, and my heart died a little bit with each crease, but I knew how it was. Time battered everything, especially glue and paper.
And nearly all of them about Nevada, Old Vegas, and the surrounding area.
“Sorry to hear about Marshall.” I searched for words of condolence but came up empty, other than the standards. I didn’t know what to say about someone’s boss being murdered. “Ryder said she was killed here, on campus.”
“Someone shot her and left her on the quad’s lawn, but the police said there were signs someone beat her first.” Malone began shifting papers around, clearing off the chairs. “I’m kind of in shock. I mean, I’ve only known her a few months, but she was nice enough. Mostly I graded papers and did research for the museum. She had a dual position, part-time curator there and independent studies here. There aren’t a lot of pre-Merge researchers. Not a lot of universities have the money to sponsor that line of research, but San Diego’s dovetailed it into Underhill Studies so she could continue what she started in New Vegas.”
“Do the police have any idea about her murder?” Ryder prodded gently. “Who would attack a professor? Especially on campus.”
“You’ve got to forgive His Lordship.” I nudged Ryder toward one of the open chairs. “He doesn’t seem to understand there’s people out there who’d kill for a pair of clean shoelaces.”
“They do think it’s a robbery.”
Malone wheeled one of the chairs around for me, but I ignored it… and him.
“All of her things were taken, including her link and satchel. They also took her car. The cops believe they caught her in the parking lot when security wasn’t around and were probably trying to force her to let them into the building and something went wrong. That’s why they killed her where they did.”
More maps of Nevada were pinned to the wall behind the desk, some circled with a thick blue marker, and I went around the table to take a look at them. Malone’s eyes followed, shifting between me and Ryder. Unlike the books, the maps were fairly recent, composited photos taken of vast expanses of nothing and dry mountains. The region looked innocuous enough, but I knew better. Hot and
scoured by sharp winds, the area was mostly scrub, desert, and large animals with teeth. People were few and far between and usually crazy. There were a couple of tour companies I knew who’d take small groups of tourists into Old Vegas, but those were thrill seekers who spent most of their time in armored buses and were out before the sun fell.
From what I could gather from the maps, Marshall intended for us to go straight up Polka Dot Valley, across the dry salt lake bed, and into the bowels of Bald Mountain. I pulled down one of the maps and put it on the table between them.
“Is this right? These markers?” Ryder and Malone both stopped talking and looked at me. “Sorry, um….” I turned one of the larger maps around, tapping the areas marked off in blue. “Is this where Marshall wanted us to go?”
“One of them, yes,” Malone replied. “That’s an old map. I’ve got a few newer coordinates based on some data she ran. She compiled them herself a few days ago.”
Ryder met my gaze and cocked his head, a silent question on his face. “Is there a problem getting there?”
“Lots of problems. I thought she wanted us closer to the lake, but some of these are past that. Ground up by the mountain’s supposed to be unstable. No one heads out there. It’s pretty much unmapped.” I shrugged, trying to remember what I knew of the area beyond. “If we’ve got solid coordinates, the transport can get us there, but I don’t know what we’ll find once we’re there.”
“I have almost everything she documented for the run, including the site specs she built up.” He scrambled to find something under a pile and came up with sheets of photos. “Mostly everything she gathered isn’t digital. That’s the biggest problem with researching some pre-Merge sites. There were restricted areas, and after the Merge, some of them became inaccessible. It took the professor years to get to a point where she believed she would find something useful. And then… someone killed her.”
“These are of the Court she found near Groom Lake? She only showed me a few.” Ryder took the photos from Malone. I looked over his shoulder, trying to make some sense of the shapes. Most were of fallen walls, but a few showed scrawled writing—possibly on a floor—symbols I couldn’t make any sense out of. “Old elfin. It’s hard to read. The sidhe and the unsidhe share so much of the same language, I couldn’t even tell you if this is Dawn or Dusk, but most of the ones I can make out are fertility glyphs.”