by Various
“I know it’s my fault, okay? I know you can’t go half-assed, have a kid on the fringes, can’t play Auntie and assume it’ll go your way, but it’s so hard….”
Pathetic, Jude. Up on the dining room table, all self-pity, who’s really the basket case here? The kid padded into the living room with a triumphant look in his adorable cartoon eyes. I’d thought he’d have the ball, or what was left of it, in his jaws. But no, he’d found my oven mitts.
I started bawling like an old drunk, because it was too late. I was caught again, the hooks deep as ever they’d been, barbed through all the scar tissue and old hurt, and as he lifted his tiny leg and damn well made widdle on my oven mitt, I swear it was the sweetest thing I’d ever seen.
* * *
At about two thirty, Paige got to a phone.
She was panicking. “Can you hide the door to the basement? Make a secret panel or something?”
“A secret—”
“Deenie’s befriended some police who think lycanthropes are dangerous. They’re going for a grow op warrant on the house. They’ll say they’re looking for pot and then—”
“Let ’em search, Paige. We’re not there.”
“Oh! Good. Is he okay?”
“Getting up his second wind. In fact, his little ears have pricked up. Say hello to Mommy, kid.”
Chase struggled to his paws. “Arrooo?” It came out a question; then he flopped again.
Her voice came through the speaker. “Hi, baby, hi, baby. Thank God.”
“Who told you about the raid?”
“One of the guards. Gloating.”
I’d been on the table for hours. Now I stood and stretched. Hell, Chase was torpid, and I had my boots on. I stepped down to a chair, then the floor. The littlest werewolf didn’t move.
“So where are you?”
“My place.”
“You took him home?”
“What could I do, take a pet suite at the Hilton?” I splashed water onto my face, ran a comb through my hair.
“What if they go there next?”
“They can’t get a warrant to search for pot here, in the dead of night, on the grounds that I’m your…”
“My what?”
Weighted pause. “Your friend, Paige.”
“All they have to do is shove their way in and bag him. They can apologize to the skies once they have video of him changing back at dawn.”
Bust in first, consequences later. She was right. “It’s not gonna happen. Paige…”
“Shit, my time’s up.”
“It’ll be okay.”
“Don’t screw this up, Jude.” She was gone before I could promise anything.
A scritch. I opened the bathroom door. The kid was there, tail thumping, couch upholstery dangling from his fang. He tried out a growl on me.
“Don’t even think it,” I said. Stomping past him, I found my work gloves. He wobbled a step behind, exhausted but game. “Tearing around takes it out of you, huh kid?”
Bink-bink. Cartoon puppy eyes. Cuddle me; I’m not dangerous at all.
“You’re not gonna bite me,” I told him.
Bending, I extended my gloved hands. He growled.
“No!” Deep voice: he did me the honor of looking awed.
I got him by the scruff and under his chest, holding him arms-out away from me. His body was hot, and I could feel the wham-wham of his heart through the leather as I carried him upstairs.
Then he shocked a bit, twisting.
The smart thing would’ve been to drop him; instead, my arms pulled inward, protecting. I felt hot puppy breath on my neck, a touch of nose. He was alert, almost quivering.
“Easy. Easy.” My mouth was cottony. I turned sideways, checking the mirror. He was staring bug-eyed up over my shoulder, through the skylight in my bedroom…
…at the moon.
“Aroo?”
“Aroo,” I agreed. For some reason I was near tears.
I set him down like a bomb, leaving him in the shaft of moonlight, up on my bed, in my loft with all my good stuff, everything I’d pulled off the ground floor that afternoon. I rescued the urn with my mom’s ashes, threw a last apologetic look at the fish tank. “Enjoy the change of locale, kid.”
Weak-kneed, I stumbled downstairs and started making calls.
* * *
The police didn’t turn up until four.
By then, I had thirty people downstairs. Saffron had awakened most of the local women’s chorus, and there was a big ol’ overtired koombaya going on in the remains of my living room. Alison was shooting the gathering in Super-8, while a baby dyke named Kathleen Ph34rless exhorted her to get into the digital age, man. Jennifer was doing henna tattoos on Freddie May, who was bare-chested and on his back on the table. Helena had swept the shreds of Camille Paglia off my floor. Raquel lay by the hearth with her one-year-old, Abby, and the baby’s father, the three of them half asleep, watching a Disney movie on an iPad.
Upstairs you could hear the occasional thunk, awoo, smash—Chase had gotten his second wind.
Long as he’s happy, I thought, as I answered the bang-bang-bang of the front door.
“Judith Walker?”
Showtime.
“Hey, Officers,” I said, not too smartass, not too perky. Through the chain, I saw the female constable I’d seen that afternoon.
“We have a report of screams at this address.”
“Just a party.”
“Mind if we look around?”
“I do mind, yeah.” I spoke clearly, for the pick-up mike.
“I hear another scream now.” She gave me a push, trying to swing my door wide, only to get hung up on the steel-toed boot I’d accidentally-on-purpose jammed in it.
Her partner helped. The boot and the chain both gave, and I stumbled backward into my foyer.
One of the leather kids, Roman, caught me.
“Hey there, Officer,” he swished. “This a bust? Wanna borrow my cuffs?”
“What’s going on here?”
“Full moon party,” I said. “In honor of Pam Adolpha.”
She scowled. “Where’s the kid?”
“Do I look like a babysitter?”
Junior chose that moment to let go with a little “Aroo!”
“What the hell was that?” The female officer’s hand drifted to her pepper spray. Then she paused; Alison had moved in with her camera. The choir broke into four-part harmony, drawing her eye. They were parked on a couch I’d propped in front of the door to the stairwell. At their soprano edge, singing along while giving her best glower from a scary high-tech wheelchair, was the city’s best-known civil rights lawyer.
You stay in one place for a while, you make friends. They make friends. They’ll dissect your love life and your dietary habits behind your back, but some days it pays off. That’s how it works in my neighbourhood. Most of my guests lived walking distance from here.
An “Aroo!” upstairs ruined the otherwise golden moment.
“I asked you…” The constable kept her voice calm. “What is that?”
“It’s the dog,” I said, straight-faced. “What do you think?”
She spent another second thumbing her pepper spray, weighing her odds—the film crew, the legal lioness, the sheer number of witnesses. Little Kathleen Ph34rless had her phone out, no doubt Tweeting events in real time.
The constable slumped. “Keep the noise down.”
Nobody was so dumb as to start cheering before they were gone. But we spent the next few hours giving each other sleepy high-fives, carrying on like we’d faced down the armies of Rome.
* * *
Paige showed up at my place about two hours after dawn.
“Your kitchen ceiling is dripping,” she said.
I’d just put down a bucket to catch the leak. “Baby boy got to my fish tank. You should’ve heard it.”
“And there are twenty women in your living room.”
“That many?”
“They’re semi-nake
d.”
“It’s hot out, Paige. By the way, you officially owe favours to every cool person in East Van.”
“Just tell me you haven’t slept with all of them.”
I pretended to count heads. “Only five. Well, six.”
She chose—conspicuously, I thought—to ignore my attempt at charm. “Where’s my son, Jude?”
“Follow me.”
Baby Chase was snoring in the wreckage of my bedroom. Paige squelched across the carpet, crunching broken aquarium glass, and scooped him into her arms.
“Oh, Jude. All your stuff,” she murmured, head down against his.
“It’s what they do, right?”
“Werewolves?”
“Children.”
“You never wanted to be a mom,” she said.
“That was kind of a half-truth.”
“You weren’t wrong. He is a monster, and I am a basket case.”
“A victorious basket case.”
“Excuse me?”
“By next month they’ll have convicted that fucker Deenie, right? The sidekick’ll go off home and make trouble for someone else?”
“What are you saying? All’s well that ends well?”
“You’re not damaged goods, Paige. When you bit Robb yesterday, I realized. You’re anything but fragile. You’re tough. And that’s…”
“Yes?”
“It’s your strength I’m attracted to.”
She stirred the dampened shreds of my buckwheat pillow with her toe. “So no more bullshit?”
“There’s always more,” I said. “But not that flavour.”
“Your sales pitch could use some work.” She patted the empty space on my bed.
“You dig honesty.” I slipped into the nook, curled around the baby, and kissed her properly.
The kid waved a fist, belching fish.
“Da,” he said to me. Bink-bink. The hook sank deeper.
I faked a cringe. “Tell me he’s already said Mumma, once at least.”
“Nope.” She twinkled. “Gonna tell him to cut it out?”
“Da!”
“I’m gonna say keep it up, Chase,” I told them both, and planted a kiss on his little feral head as my hand wound into hers.
Copyright 2010 AM Dellamonica
Art copyright 2010 Marcos Chin
Acquired and edited for Tor.com by Stacy Hague-Hill.
Books by A.M. Dellamonica
Indigo Springs
Blue Magic
The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you without Digital Rights Management software (DRM) applied so that you can enjoy reading it on your personal devices. This e-book is for your personal use only. You may not print or post this e-book, or make this e-book publicly available in any way. You may not copy, reproduce or upload this e-book, other than to read it on one of your personal devices.
Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.
Contents
Begin Reading
“You’re not firing the first mate for being easy on the eye,” Captain Sloot told Gale as they dropped anchor in the harbor of Redcap Island. He sounded put out, but it was an act: they fit together like oar and lock, she and he, and they both knew he was going to win this one.
Still… “Nightjar is my ship.”
“Aye, so say her papers.”
“Have you looked at him, Royl? He’s still teething.”
“He’s grown, if only just, and a good sailor too. It’s been six first mates this year!”
“Fortune smiles on the number seven.”
“You aren’t superstitious,” Sloot said. “We’re keeping Garland Parrish, and if people think you hired him to keep you up nights—“
“And they will.”
“He can’t help the pretty face, Gale.”
“Well, what about that? People will be courting him wherever we land. He’ll marry into the first good situation he finds, or someone’ll grab him for a harem.”
“In which case, you’re free of him,” Sloot said. “Take him with you today.”
“Take the young stud to see the horned studs?”
“See if you like him, that’s all.”
“You never cared if I liked his predecessors.” She pulled her most frightful riding coat out of a big wardrobe in the cabin they shared. It was red, floppy, and thoroughly ridiculous. It was also warm and rainproof.
“Ragin’ seas, woman, you’re not wearing that?”
“This is a job for the Dotty Aunt coat.”
“That, beg your pardon, is an Awful Woman coat.”
A tap at the door, and the first mate bounded in. “Rowers are ready, Cap’n…oh. Forgive me. I forgot—“
“That I had a woman here?” Sloot asked.
He looked fuddled but didn’t deny it.
“Sit, Parrish. This woman is your employer, and it’s time the two of you met. Properly.”
Parrish, visibly surprised, took the offered seat.
“Well? Gale?”
“Properly? You want—Royl, you’re serious?”
“I’m insistin’.”
What was going on? Reluctantly, Gale opened her government-issue courier’s satchel and removed a dried chrysanthemum, pale gold in color. “Royl—”
Sloot folded his arms. “I can’t have him thinking you’re the cook’s helper, Gale.”
“Kirs, if I’ve offended—” Parrish’s skin was oak brown and utterly smooth, his hair a black cap of wind-tossed curls. But it was the lips that made him so ravishing. They were full, plummy in color, and wantonly lush. They begged for biting—more so, perhaps, because he wore them with an air of innocence, of having no idea of their effect.
Over the years, about a fifth of the dried chrysanthemum’s petals had been plucked. Now Gale removed another. “My name is Gale Feliachild, Kir Parrish.”
“That’s…a Verdanii name?”
“Important one, as things are reckoned there,” Sloot put in.
If her alleged nobility impressed him, it didn’t show. “Go on, Kir.”
“When I was young,” she told Parrish, “Our All mother ordered a divination. The priestess said that I would enjoy good health and a useful life. Then she said my life would end suddenly, in violence.”
“Murder, in other words,” Sloot clarified.
A ripple of concern she’d seen before: the boy thought she needed him to save her. Gale crushed the flower petal in her palm, rolling it to fine yellow dust.
“My parents knew better than to defy fate outright, but couldn’t resist a small enchantment. Lean forward, please.”
Parrish complied with instant, soldierly obedience, and she blew petal dust into his eyes. It was the gentlest way to weaken the spell. There were others. She could injure him, rouse him to a fury…
…seduce him, a sly inner voice suggested.
Parrish straightened, blinking. He looked at Gale more closely.
“I was scripped unmemorable, young man. I’ve one of those hard-to-remember faces, a name that rarely comes to mind—“
“Why?”
“Harder to imagine killing someone if you’ve forgotten them, isn’t it?” She rose, donning the floppy coat. “Well, Sloot? You happy now?”
“Delirious, Kir.” But it was relief stamped on the aging face, not joy.
Minutes later, she and Parrish were aboard the rowboat, cloaked in uncomfortable silence.
It was always thus: she’d tell someone the truth and they’d start worrying she was about to get stabbed. To distract him, she asked: “What do you know of Redcap Island?”
“It’s a kingdom,” he said promptly. “Government is stable, king’s rule is absolute. The crown passes to the eldest son upon the death of the king or his sixtieth birthday, whichever comes first. Elder kings go into a kind of ceremonial exile, along with any other sons…”
“Yes?�
��
“There’s usually just one other son. They must use magic to affect the succession.”
Gale nodded. “Once there’s a healthy heir and a second son, the king’s consorts bear only daughters. The Blossoms Majestic—the princesses—run the government.”
“Have you been here before?”
“No.” A stir of excitement. “It’s supposed to be wondrous.”
Parrish beamed: “I heard there’s a kind of deer…”
“Greystag.”
“Yes. Their horns are used in a spell that makes people…charming?”
“Compelling, yes. Charismatic. Fleet officers buy them, and politicians.”
The enthusiasm in his face winked out, leaving him unreadable.
“Are you political, Kir Parrish?”
“Just a sailor.”
“Call me Gale, Parrish—I’m nobody, remember?”
Her gaze fell on his lips, her thoughts turning to the taste of ripe fruit. Stop it, you ridiculous old woman!
A young woman waited on the beach, flanked by six heavily muscled guards: three male and three female. Now the guards waded out to meet them. They marched alongside the rowboat as Gale’s sailors withdrew their oars. Then, suddenly, they lifted it. There was no jolt, no reduction in speed: they were borne aloft, from hip to shoulder—Gale had a fleeting thought of pallbearers—gliding to the beach. With no evidence of effort, they eased the boat into a drydock decorated with streamers.
“Mind that frown, Parrish,” Gale said.
“They’re not slaves?” he asked, sotto voce.
“No, Redcap is a free island. The pulvers are court appointees. They compete for the honor.”
“I see.”
“Bright skies, it’s good to be on dry land!” Gale brayed, bustling off the platform and folding the princess into a surprise hug. “Sapira, innit? Good to see you again! This is a lovely beach. Ever go clamming here?”
The girl pulled free, dazed. Then she caught on: this was no official visit, just two women chumming it up. “In summer, yes. I’m glad you remember me. When we met, I was a child.”