Black Dog Blues

by Rhys Ford

  I grabbed the jar and filtered the tequila between my teeth, keeping the chewed mushrooms I had on my tongue in and the rest of the jar’s contents out. Someone gagged behind me, either Alexa or Ryder. I couldn’t guess which. The first time I’d seen the ritual, I emptied my stomach on a pair of new Converses and swore I’d never watch again.

  Yet here I was, again chewing up a psychotropic tequila puree.

  Spitting the mix into the lid of the jar, I squeezed out a few more drops of blood and lit a lucifer. Setting the flame to the drenched mushrooms and blood, I turned my head as it flared up, bright yellow flames cooking through the chew.

  I took the tequila from Cari. I extinguished the flames, then carefully lifted the jar lid from the carpet. Tilting the lid, I poured the still hot fluid, mushrooms, and cooked blood into Cari’s mouth, steadying myself when the concoction took her over the edge.

  Cari’s eyes rolled back, and a film seeped from her lids, covering her corneas with a red-threaded milk. Lifting her arms, she spread her hands out, fingers stiff and bent at the first joint. Bubbling sounds emanated from her open lips, guttural, coarse noises that fought to escape her too-human throat. Her voice settled, changing into a Singlish I could understand. Still accented heavily with her native tongue, it took me a while to focus on what Cari was saying, parsing out the slang into something comprehensible.

  “Oso del chino,” she growled, snapping the words off. “Blanco y negro. Black and white bears. They are going to the Towers. Vasco Núñez de Balboa—his towers. They are going to meet a Hunter. One who keeps the madness of the dogs at bay. The human—she is angry—she doesn’t believe when the other says that he will pay her. She does not trust him.”

  “Shannon didn’t trust him?” I scoffed. “Who the hell trusted her?”

  “Do you know the place she is speaking of?” Alexa shoved past her cousin, her long legs bringing her quickly into the main room. She reeled back when Cari turned her white eyes toward her. Alexa grabbed at the knife hanging from her belt, but Ryder’s fingers on her wrist stopped her drawing her weapon.

  “Easy, cousin,” he rumbled, stroking the inside of her wrist. “The human’s gone with an unsidhe?”

  “Yes,” Cari mumbled, rolling the S until it flattened. The white was beginning to bleed from her gaze, returning her eyes to blue. “He killed the unsidhe wet nurse when she tried to stab Shannon—the surrogate. The dead woman was angry, her word challenged. She wanted recompense… from someone. I don’t know who.”

  “And instead she got a knife to the throat,” I said, handing Cari a bottle of water. She drank slowly, rinsing the drugs and alcohol from her mouth before swallowing. The numbness was passing from my system, and the edges of my vision were no longer purple-speckled. I couldn’t begin to imagine how Cari’s smaller body was holding up under the influence of the peyote and mushrooms, but she looked none the worse for wear when she held her hand out for me to help her up. “Balboa’s Towers and bears. She’s talking about old Balboa Park.”

  “That’s where the Court is going to be established,” Ryder said with a nod. “Bears? Was she talking about the pandas?”

  “Pandas?” Alexa made a face. “The round, furry cute bears?”

  “They are round and furry.” Cari wobbled her hand back and forth. “But not so cute; they’re very vicious.”

  “What does this have to do with pandas?” Alexa asked, her bright eyes clouded with confusion. “Are those towers not ours? Where our Court is. Or will be, yes?”

  “There are wild pandas roaming through part of the sidhe territory,” Ryder explained. “They’re from an old pre-Merge conservation program. I agreed to let them remain there. A human woman lives near them. She documents their progress and breeding.”

  “She’s nuts.” I snorted. “They don’t call her Crazy Gertie because she wears mismatched socks. She’ll shoot you if you get near the area.”

  “I’ve asked her to stop doing that. The Court will provide protection for her and the animals.” Ryder bit his lip, thinking.

  “She might have a thing or two to say about that.” Stretching my arms out, I shook them, trying to get all the feeling back into my fingers. “Want us to go in and get them, or are you and your great security up to it?”

  Ryder didn’t answer me. I had no right to care about the babies. Other than sucking out some egg white from one of the girls’ nostrils and mouth, I wasn’t related to them. Considering the Sebac was their grandmother, the Dusk Court couldn’t be that bad in comparison, but I’d be damned if I didn’t want them where I could watch them grow up a bit.

  “I am very good security. The man before me, we will have to talk to him. Maybe string him up for this, but I am very good,” Alexa responded, hitting me lightly on the shoulder. “Besides, you two are Stalkers. This is not your business.”

  “Kind of is. Shannon is human, and like Kai said, she’s ours,” Cari admitted with a wry grin. “And the unsidhe bastards have been raiding the indios again. Arturo’s had his hands full going in to get the kids back. This bitch had a hand in the raids.”

  “That word—indios?” Alexa frowned. “What are those?”

  “They are the people who live in the areas outside Tijuana.” Cari looked up at Alexa. They were an odd contrast, a tall, muscular flame-headed sidhe and a short, voluptuous brunette, but they both resonated with strength. I pursed my mouth, wondering if bringing them together wasn’t the smartest idea I’d ever had. “The Dusk steal indio babies and kill the parents. My brothers and father make runs into the sucio to bring them back. Sometimes they have too much of a head start and are too deep into their own territory.”

  “If the Dusk Court steal human children, it is to have a changeling,” Alexa growled. “There must be a market for them down there. All the more reason to have a Dawn Court here, cousin.”

  “Changelings?” Cari cocked her head. “You think the girls were stolen for that?”

  “Changelings are more like pets than servants,” Ryder said softly, circling us. “Before our worlds collided, the unsidhe stole our children if they could. Some became changelings, while others were raised as unsidhe. They could have taken the twins for either purpose.”

  I knew all about pets. I didn’t need Ryder to fill me in on that little unsidhe tradition.

  Most people were motivated by money, regardless of race. Shannon might have carried the girls, but she did it for cash. It wasn’t a far stretch for me to think she’d hand them over to someone else for even more.

  “I get raising the kids as unsidhe, but why the indios? Humans don’t live that long, not by elfin standards. Why would you want something that died off quickly?” I shook my head.

  “Like he said, pets,” Cari replied, crouching back over the dead woman’s body. She began going through the woman’s clothes, digging into pockets. “You own a cat. He’s going to die before you do, but you still own him.”

  “I’ve met the cat,” Ryder commented darkly. “I would challenge the particulars of who owned whom.”

  “The Dusk Courts don’t just steal children, little Cari,” Alexa said, watching Cari thoroughly work over the body for anything else of use. “They take grown sidhe too, make them produce children. It was a way to fund their Courts. A House would give anything to have one of their blood back. Even if the kidnapped sidhe never came back to them, they carried on in their children.”

  “So elfin can breed? With each other?”

  “They can have children, but the child will be either sidhe or unsidhe. Our genes… choose which way to go. There are no mingled elfin,” Alexa replied.

  I said nothing to contradict her. Sometimes keeping my mouth shut was the best course of action.

  “Okay, so they’re either one or the other.” Cari shook her head. “When their sidhe pets got pregnant, they’d ransom those kids back? Like some sort of puppy mill? Why not just keep the kids?”

  “If the child was born sidhe, it would be smarter to ransom the child back to the si
dhe House,” Ryder interjected, crossing his arms and frowning. “Too many sidhe in a Dusk Court would be a problem, especially if they decided to overthrow the adopting House. The House and its properties become a sidhe stronghold, and the Dawn gains in power. That’s happened before.”

  “So they took the girls to be pets or a part of their Court?” I wanted to get the conversation back on track. “That’s what we’re going with?”

  “Their hair is light enough to be turned white if a healer did it,” Alexa said. “They could be raised thinking they were unsidhe, especially if that was all they knew. With twins, there would be a problem because they would resonate, bond with each other. If the unsidhe who arranged this is smart, he will separate them. They would be weaker apart and easily controlled.”

  “They’re our bloodline,” Ryder reminded his cousin. “They carry the fertility gene. It’s as good a reason as any to steal them.”

  They continued to talk as I walked to the window, avoiding the dead woman in the middle of the room. Outside the glass, San Diego basked under the setting sun. The fading light turned the surrounding towers orange, changing steel and glass into gem monoliths. From where I stood, I could see down the coast and into the fog-drenched shoreline where Tijuana fell to the Merge. It was getting too dark to see more than the misty outline, but beyond it lay a Dusk Court I’d basically ignored.

  Cari ran her hand down my back, joining me to stare out the window. She remained silent as the cousins bickered behind us. Others came in, the conversation swaying to sidhe then back to Singlish with a sharp word from Ryder. Her fingers played at the ridges on my shoulder blades, tracing the metacarpal rises under my T-shirt.

  “I didn’t want to say anything,” she whispered, pressing against my back, “but the woman, Shannon, told them about you. The man was very excited, but the dead woman was scared. She thought that you would come after them.”

  “She’s right,” I said softly, sparing a glance at the unsidhe’s cold body. “Pity her companion got to her before I did.”

  “She was more frightened of what you were and who you belong to,” Cari said, coming around to lean on the windowsill, her fingers wrapping into my shirt. “They’re going to meet someone who knows you, someone from before your time with that ampulla, Dempsey.”

  “I don’t know why Dempsey rubs people the wrong way,” I said, a tight smile on my mouth. “He did fine by me.”

  “The only reason people give Dempsey half a word is because of you, Kai.” She brushed my stomach with her fingers, touching my skin with the heat of her hand. “I’m telling you not to go with the sidhe. Don’t chase after those babies. The man they are meeting—they were sure he would give them a lot of money for you, and that’s not someone I want you to meet, bonito.”

  “I have to go, Caridad.” Murmuring, I kissed the top of her head, resting my chin there for a moment. “It’s the right thing to do. I have to go.”

  “See?” Cari shook her head, slapping my chest with the flat of her hand. “That is why people put up with Dempsey’s shit. Somehow he raised you right. I don’t know how, because it wouldn’t be in him to go after those babies. He wouldn’t put himself out that way.”

  “No, he’d send me.” I grinned at her, not ashamed to admit to Dempsey’s failings. “But it would still be the right thing to do.”

  I hugged her as she wrapped her arms around my waist, feeling the strength in her shoulders as she gave me a gentle kiss on the cheek. Letting go, she sighed and found her balance against the windowsill, staring up at me with her large, deep blue eyes.

  “Do not get stolen from us,” Cari said, waving a finger under my nose. “If you get taken, I will have to go and storm some idiot unsidhe castle and kill everyone inside it. I just had my nails done. I would be very mad.”

  “Promise. No getting taken or killed,” I said, crossing my heart. “Besides, I can’t think of anything that would scare a Dusk Court more than a pissed-off Caridad Brent.”

  “Hah,” she snorted, punching my arm. “I am nothing. You get taken from us, and then they will have to deal with Mama. Let us see the unsidhe survive that.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  NOT MANY people ventured into the Balboa area, and certainly no one sane. The Merge had cracked apart the mesa, filling it in with an ancient sidhe forest while leaving pieces of the old park standing intact. The top of the bell tower crept through the trees, but the area was vast, crowding back the skyscrapers around it. A wide paved road cut through a part of the forest, seeming to start and stop without any rhyme or reason, and several graceful bridges had survived, some spanning the gaps while others rose up from solid ground.

  The park used to span a little less than two miles, but the sidhe lands changed all that. Now more than triple its original size, the area was declared sidhe territory following the SoCalGov-Elfin negotiations, but until recently, the Dawn Court from the Underhill left the place alone.

  Various animals had taken up residence in the woodlands, mostly fugitives from an old zoo, and a few humans known for having irregular personalities lived at the forest’s edges. Crazy Gertie lived somewhere near the 163, a self-appointed caretaker of the giant pandas inhabiting the lower canyons of Balboa, and there was talk of an unwashed hairy man in the south end who ran around naked except for a tinfoil sailor hat—but I didn’t know anyone who’d seen him.

  Despite all those interesting attractions, I avoided Balboa. The place made my spine shiver every time I went near it.

  Standing at the end of old Olive Street looking into the tree line, I didn’t see or hear anything to give me the outright creeps. Nothing looked out of place to me. It was the kind of place someone would expect to find a gingerbread house nibbled on by two little children or a lost little girl dressed in a red hooded cape. All perfectly safe and pretty, except for the witch and the wolf lurking just off the page.

  “So how exactly are we going to do this?” I asked Ryder, who was also staring into the dark forest.

  “How well do you know the place?” He spread a clearcoat sheet over the truck’s hood, pressing the activation spot. A map of the territory lit up, distinct areas color coded and annotated with menu bars to zoom in or out for information. “I had the land traced out so we could determine where we wanted to establish the Court, but if you’ve been inside, that would be helpful.”

  “I know enough to avoid this place like I’d avoid a diseased hooker,” I replied.

  “I’ve noticed a lot of your life is determined by the state or worth of prostitutes.”

  “It’s something I know. Like converting everything into how much rice I can buy,” I said, shrugging. “And no, I don’t know the place at all. Either the trees will get you or the crazy old panda lady will. There’s nothing in there that I’d want to see that badly.”

  “I’d never have thought of you as cowardly,” Ryder commented, poring over his map.

  “Low, your lordship.” I whistled. “Calling me chicken. What’s next? Throwing my cat into Gertie’s yard?”

  “I wouldn’t do that, Ryder,” Cari said, tucking a knife into her boot. “He’d just shoot you. He’s fond of that mangy cat.”

  “Thank you,” he replied, giving Cari a small bow of his head. “I’ve been around Kai long enough to witness his problem-solving techniques. It’s hard to argue with shoot first then shoot again.”

  “Do I have to stab my cousin for you, Kai?” Alexa bumped my stomach with her hip, craning over Ryder’s shoulder to look at the map. “He has always been a problem. Ever since we were young. If you were mine, I would be honor bound to stab him. It is something to think about.”

  “Ah, how quickly family turns on me because of a pretty ass.” Ryder snorted at the small shrug Alexa gave him and pointed out a trail on the flexible sheet. “The river cuts across the end of the old promenade near the towers and curves toward the shore. We can head in through the trees at different points until we reach the river.”

  “How clear is the gr
ound through there? Can we walk without telling them we’re coming?” Cari asked.

  “It’s sporadic,” Ryder said, tapping the map to zoom in. The ground cover seemed minimal, although there appeared to be a few brambles that would cause some trouble. “We’ll spread out and walk a line through the area.”

  “What about link communication?” Cari leaned over the map, tracing a southern route into the promenade. “Still clogged up in there, or did you guys have a chance to clean up the EMI coming from Gertie’s jammers?”

  “There’s too much interference still,” Ryder admitted. “I haven’t convinced her to shut them all down yet.”

  “I do not like going in with so few,” Alexa grumbled. “If they have more than five, we will run into problems. We should send someone in to scout for numbers.”

  “No choice. We can’t wait for any more help. Jonas is in La Mesa, and everyone else I know is on a run.” I pointed at the map, tapping out several spots. “We’re talking too much. I’ve got a full load of ammo. Let’s go in.”

  “Try not to shoot the place up,” Cari replied. The sidhe cousins looked at me. “I’ll bring in a Glock, but I’m not as good a shot as he is.”

  “Well then, it’s decided. We’re going in,” Ryder said grimly. “Pray to whichever human god you want to, Kai. We’ll need the help.”

  “Hell, I whore myself out to whatever god is listening,” I said, sliding clips into my rig and checking the Ka-Bar I’d fitted into the sheath. “I’ll take whatever help I can get.”

  COMPARED TO Elfhaine’s forest, Balboa’s woods weren’t as bad. I didn’t feel like skinning myself the moment I stepped into the deep shadows, and even with the others somewhere nearby, I felt alone when I lost sight of the city streets and was left with the tiny glow on my now useless link. I turned off the light, and the black leather band went matte. I didn’t need someone to spot a bobbing blue orb walking through the woods and tag me with a shot.