Breaking Ties

by Vaughn R. Demont

  “Because Hades personally collects the souls of dead Ra’keth?”

  Ras chortles. “That is his privilege, his preference, not his right. One last bit of vindictiveness before sending us off to whatever cruelly ironic punishment he has in mind.”

  “The Recluse was sent to…” I remain quiet, as that’s not for me to share. “Well, he slew a god and he didn’t get anything terrible. The Frozen River, he deserves whatever he got.”

  Weird, usually even mentioning Cale and Heath in the same train of thought has a definite effect. It still does, just not as strong, like seeing an old scar and remembering how you got it. A dull, far-off ache.

  I think it might be the first time in weeks that Heath’s actively crossed my mind.

  “You have been given a marvelous tool, the words that command reality, and you refrain from using them.” Ras sighs, disappointed. “Even my least-talented students did not struggle this much with khrazet.”

  “I don’t know the words—”

  “Yes you do!” His voice thunders through the hall, his eyes serpentine again. “Yet you croon and whine like a hatchling, eager for your broodmother to do it for you.”

  I back off a step, and he quickly takes the given ground. “When you could change the world to your vision, you choose to be lazy. When you could be strong and protect yourself, you choose to be weak and hope you can sink beneath notice. We are Ra’keth. We are never beneath notice, we are Marked.” He yanks on my hair. “This will never be hidden.”

  My eyes bore straight into his, static starting to crackle along my skin. “Take your fucking hands off me.”

  He only smiles. “Make—”

  “Force.” I imagine a great fist socking him in the chest, and that’s exactly what happens—a spectral hand, clenched tightly, colliding with his torso and knocking him across the room, my scalp screaming with agony as he takes a chunk of my hair with him. The pain fuels my conviction, and I move my hand, the disembodied fist rocketing across the room to hit him again.

  And again.

  And again.

  I need to stop.

  And again.

  No, no, I need to stop this.

  And again.

  “No!” The fist hovers just above Ras, trembling. I gingerly step toward him, blood spattered on the floor, his breath coming in wheezes. Oh God, what have I done?

  I move more quickly, his eyes shut and his face locked in a grimace. I know how to heal myself, but not someone else. Then again, I’ve never tried it before, so maybe the rules work different?

  I place my hands on his ribs, sniffling, searching for the words. “You is no hurt now. You is are go heal time now yes.”

  God damn it! Why can’t I have a better fucking vocabulary. What did I do, what the hell happened? It just came out, the anger and the pain, and it pushed itself through memories of Dungeons & Dragons and Bigby’s Multitalented Hand.

  If this didn’t work, if I didn’t heal him, I don’t know what I’m going to do.

  But his breathing calms, the swelling recedes, color returning to his face as his eyes crack open. “Your pronunciation is atrocious. You speak like…” he coughs, a little blood marking his lips, “…like a…” He rests his head on the floor and chuckles to himself, then extends his hand. “Tyras, the Dragon King. It is an honor to finally meet James Black, the Lightning Rod.”

  Chapter Twenty

  Spencer

  December 20, 11:30 am

  I figured that being buried alive would be a little scarier.

  Oh, don’t get me wrong, I must say this whole situation has me rather concerned. But generally when you think “buried alive” you imagine some terrified actor shot from the side, meekly holding a lit match to discover they can barely move, and you find yourself being short of breath while watching it. Instead, we’ve got a “Cask of Amontillado” thing going on, only with more space.

  Granted, there isn’t any food or water, so I have to suspect we’re expected to suffocate. Not that I’m worrying about suffocating, or breathing heavily, or holding my breath, or wondering if I’m lightheaded. My fellow captive, though, he’s totally been falling to pieces over the last couple hours. Yep, completely him. Not me at all.

  The weird thing is the bricks. I know we haven’t been trapped down here long, but I wouldn’t think that the mortar would have set by now if they just walled us in. In fact, the bricks look rather old, which begs the question of…

  “How did they get us down here?” I motion to the boxes in the hallway. “And what’s with the storage if we’re walled in?”

  Searching them yields no fruit, like a chisel or a sledgehammer or anything. Instead, the boxes are filled with old musty clothes. My fellow prisoner seems more interested in them than I am.

  “I have no answers, I’m afraid.” He inspects a large blue shirt with short sleeves. “Interesting. The heraldry is familiar.”

  “The what, now?” I come over to inspect the shirt as well, but as far as I know it’s a blue shirt.

  He points out varying shades of blue, a single black stripe through them all. “It is simpler than a coat of arms. This was used to show allegiance.”

  “Will that help us get out of here, or be useful in the third act when I have to provide evidence of someone’s betrayal?”

  He gapes at me a few seconds. “What on earth are you talking about?”

  I sigh. “Not a fan of procedural shows, I see.”

  “To answer your more sensible question, no, I am not knowledgeable enough in the local heraldry to discern which House it represents. Knowing that would give us an educated guess as to our location. This appears to be from the Old Houses across the sea, before the days of the kingdom.” He glares at me. “I do despise Bards. A trickster is the last sort of person who should hear this information.”

  “I don’t bother conning Fae. You guys already have Phouka to make you look foolish, and they can do it without telling one lie.” I shrug. “Besides, there’s no money in it, and Fae are the last people who’d take a long look at their lives and consider a different direction. Then again, you’re all walking dreams, and a Coyote has no business telling dreams what they should and shouldn’t be doing.” I stretch, leaning against the wall. “We stick to humans, and stick it to humans, and more often than not stick it in humans. That’s the job Fate gave us, and we’ve got no complaints. Also, as I might’ve mentioned, no money in conning Fae.”

  He rolls his eyes. “I take it Coyotes like money.”

  “Like it? Hell, we love it! What else but money has such…such raw potential, affects lives in such major swings, influences every aspect of someone’s self-image and life path, and in the end, it’s just strips of treated linen that only have value because people believe it does. Money is by far the greatest ongoing trick in the history of everything. We love money more than sex. Hell, we’d take money to a strip club and throw naked ladies at it.” I glance at him. “What’s your net worth, by the way?”

  He huffs. “Service is its own reward.”

  “Yeah, just keep telling yourself that while I’m getting a lap dance and drinking Grande Cuvée.” I drum my fingers on the walls, examining the ceiling a moment when…

  There’s a vent.

  “Check this out.” I get under it and look up. It’s more like a grate, several feet up, and the boxes don’t look sturdy enough to stand on. “Give me a boost?”

  Ceasing his grumbling, he hoists me upward, the grate heavy iron, which is likely to dissuade Fae from touching it, but I guess that’s where our captors made an error. All that’s left to do is lift it, push it out of the way, and Mission: Impossible our asses out of…

  Okay, when I say “vent” apparently I have little idea what an air shaft is supposed to be. It’s thin, compact, and if I tried to crawl in there, it’d take a hell of a lot of work and I’d quite quickly g
et stuck, thanks to the broad shoulders my Nordic ancestry provided. (Swedish on my Mom’s side, her maiden name is Jensen.) Plus, the smell ain’t too great.

  Still, no water or soot on the walls, so it appears that it could be traversed if I were the size of a ten-year-old.

  Or…

  I drop down and examine my cellmate, a little too closely I guess, as he shoves me back in a not-too-playful fashion. “Are all Coyotes this lecherous?”

  “Yes.” I finish walking around him. “But strangely enough, I’m not checking you out for that reason. I’m wondering if you’d fit the shaft.” I grin. “Well, the shaft up there too. I’ve got experience with Fae, and you guys can definitely take a shaft.” I waggle my eyebrows to punctuate it, and when he makes an aggravated sound, I notch a little tally mark in my head.

  “Would you please take this seriously? Who knows when a cadre of heavily armed knights might come back and discover we’re free?” He inspects the opening in the ceiling and crinkles his nose. “What an awful stench. Perhaps we are near a sewer line.”

  He then effortlessly jumps upward (seriously, that’s a hell of a vertical. I wonder how many Fae play basketball?), grabbing the rim of the opening and lifting himself up to poke his head through, and then almost immediately drops, his face reddened and pocked as he coughs heavily. I support him as he clears his lungs in a series of violent coughing fits. “Iron shavings… Not too far down the shaft, but too far even for me. We’re trapped. Were you a Phouk, well, the iron would kill you, but at least you could fit.”

  Wait…

  Phouka can turn themselves into dogs and horses so long as no one’s looking. I managed to swipe that trick from the King of the Phouka himself, and luckily for me, no Fae blood in my system. (I’ve had a couple other Fae bodily fluids in my system, but never blood.) Hence…

  “Close your eyes?”

  When he does, it’s all I need. It’s a simple trick, really, just sliding under the door of disbelief. What’s to say that I didn’t hide or something, and an actual coyote happened to show up and stand in my place?

  Going from biped to quadruped takes a few seconds to get used to. Once it’s done, I bark, getting his attention, and god damn he wasn’t kidding about the stink. I know that with a more sensitive schnozz I should be able to pick out exactly what everything is, but I’ve got a human mind and no interest in practicing my heightened senses on…ugh… I whine, I’m man or, well, coyote enough to admit that.

  I look at him, then up at the hole, then him again, waiting for him to get the idea, as it’s not like I can talk. After almost a minute of going between him and the vent like I’ve got a bad nervous tic, he finally gets the idea and picks me up, lifting me toward the opening and shoving at my butt until I’m able to scrabble my way in.

  Not the most comfortable space, but I should be able to crawl and shimmy my way around.

  “Good luck. Be careful.” I hear him wheeze. “I’ll stay here, recover.” Another coughing fit and a sound that I’d guess would be him slumping against the wall to catch his breath.

  Now it’s just a long trek toward God knows what.

  I try breathing through my mouth, but then I taste the air and somehow it’s even worse than it smells. How did we not smell this before? I doubt that if the Fae were using this place as a storage unit, they’d link it to a sewer line.

  This is what I don’t get. Why would they bother doing all of this? It doesn’t make any sense to leave us a way out, not tie me up. They knew when they picked me up that I’m not Fae, so why put me in a place that a non-Fae could escape? Plus, there’s this shaft, which I could only fit in if I were a coyote or a Phouk, and there’s no guarantee I’ll find help, plus I leave that guy behind who knows about Bards and…

  Clank.

  That came from behind me.

  It sounded like a grate being yanked back into place.

  While no one’s looking at me, I can’t really go human again, considering it’s a bit of a tight fit in here as a ’Yote. So I bark to see if he’ll tell me what’s going on.

  “Figure it out yet, Bard? The Riordan’s stories of you painted you as quite clever.”

  Well, I’m figuring it out now.

  With half-sidhe, from the couple I’ve seen at Under the Bridge, it’s practically impossible to tell them apart from actual sidhe. Not all sidhe have weird skin tones, mostly it’s in the attitude and (I speak from personal experience here) half-Fae men tend to be, ah, bigger than full-blooded Fae. I just figured he was small for a twin-blood during my inspection (of course I looked there).

  But why the iron? To sell it, of course. I’d be more immediately trusting of a fellow prisoner. It’s a classic con. To understand how Fae work, you have to remember that truth-telling is a scary weapon. They’ll rarely tell you anything directly, even if you’re a Bard. Instead they let you infer a lot, let you assume and give you enough rope to hang yourself. So he leads me to believe he’s a half-Fae prisoner (though thinking back, he never outright said he was, or why he was in there) and takes one for the team with the iron to get me into this tiny shaft.

  But it begs the question, what was the point of all of it?

  Why not just leave me in the room I was originally in or stuff me into the shaft in the first place?

  Because I had to confirm that not only was I a Bard and Rourke’s consort, but also everything I told them at the accident site was bullshit. I had to give demonstrations of my abilities and then willingly put myself in here where I’d be trapped, unable to speak and scared.

  Now they can leverage this into getting Rourke to do whatever they want.

  And I walked right into it.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Ozzie

  December 20, 11:00 am

  “Where are we going, Riordan?”

  Finding a true cold-iron sword is difficult in this day and age, since Fae-steel has been the alloy of choice for centuries among the Fae. There’s just not much of a point to using plain iron, cold-forged or not, for anything anymore.

  We’re driving, weaving through traffic in a Corvette I wouldn’t mind taking a look at. I wouldn’t have pegged the Riordan as a Chevy guy, especially considering that he’s wearing a Jaguar shirt and that his dealership (when he ran it) sold mostly high-end Jags and Astons.

  “To find where Spencer is being held, of course.” His fingers are gripped tightly about the wheel.

  “I hadn’t figured he still meant that much to you, sir. I was under the impression things between you two had changed.”

  “That doesn’t mean I don’t have concern for his well-being.” I catch him smiling, a devious edge to it. “Tell me, how has he been these last few weeks?”

  Normally, I’d take issue with divulging information about someone, even the Coyote, but this is the Riordan, and his authority is almost tangible. “He’s been hanging around the Ra’keth, probably trying to trick him.”

  He glances at me. “You’re certain of that?”

  “He’s a Coyote, what else would he be doing?” Besides falling for my boyfriend, but I’m not going to share that. If finding out that someone’s in love with your boyfriend is tough on you, I imagine finding out your ex-boyfriend has truly moved on isn’t the best of news either.

  “You have a lot of experience with Coyotes, then, Dwarf?”

  I shrug. “Got tricked by one last year.” I could’ve sworn he was James, even though I should’ve known, given how…forward he was. In the months since, I’ve learned that James isn’t the best at instigating, but he definitely gets in the mood after a few minutes of attention. When you have total control over reality it’s probably nice to have someone else be in charge for a…

  And now I have to obscure a sudden issue from view.

  “You get a name on that one?”

  “I guess he was Spencer’s brother. So Spencer claims.” T
hough if it was actually him, then…

  I shudder. That did a good job at calming things down there.

  The Riordan nods, and we don’t seem to be driving toward anything in particular, taking turns almost at random. “That one can be a handful, yes. I’ve had dealings with him. He’s quite wily when he needs to be, but all too often fails to take the long view.”

  “I thought Coyotes were forbidden from doing that?” The Coyote had proudly defended his clan’s spontaneity, something about how Foxes and Dogs are too wrapped up in a game fifteen moves ahead to notice you’re wrecking their game plan right now.

  I look at the passing streets. We’re heading into South Allora. “Where are we going? I don’t know where we can find a cold-iron blade in this country, much less the City, and I must apologize, sir, but I’m not forging such a blade for you.”

  “And why not?”

  “To start, I’m not an officially recognized smith, as I’ve forged nothing of note. I only have experience with car parts, and the closest I can come to making a weapon is a quarterstaff. I believe you’d agree that an iron staff would be a bit unwieldy, if you’ll pardon the pun. Most importantly, though, I won’t be known as the forger of a blade that cut down some nobles, no matter what I think of them.”

  “Do not worry yourself, Dwarf, the matter is already handled.” He reaches across to the glove compartment and retrieves a semiautomatic pistol. “Fae fall to bullets as easily as blades.” His face shimmers a moment, the barrel of the gun training on me as the Riordan seems to vanish, replaced by a man in his early forties with short, messy black hair, golden eyes, a complexion that implies native ancestry, an easy smile crossing his face that reminds me of the Coyote. He’s wearing a dark suit with a loose tie and an expression that implies no bullshit. “Now, Dwarf, you’re going to tell me everything you know about this Cobalt Order.”

  I consider jumping out, but even being half-Dwarf doesn’t mean I can make a fast exit from a moving car. I’ve cheated death once in the last twenty-four hours. I don’t want to give it another shot at me. “Who are you? What’d you do with the Riordan?”