J.L. Doty - Dead Among Us 01 - When Dead Ain’t Dead Enough
Page 15
Her eyes remained angry, but her lips curled up into a smile. He was about to tell her the story of the conversation he’d overheard between McGowan and the old hippie, but over her shoulder he caught a glimpse of a rather tall man who stood staring directly at him and seemed oddly out of place, one of those passing glances that didn’t register on conscious thought until a moment after it was over. It made Paul hesitate and look back toward the fellow. But as his eyes settled on the spot where he knew the man was standing, his gaze slipped to one side and his attention was drawn to a young woman nearby. Now that was odd.
He tried again, swung his eyes back toward the man, but they shifted past him to an older couple struggling up Nob Hill. It was like trying to take hold of something greased and slippery. Paul tried twice more to look at the fellow, and each time he found it impossible to do so, found his gaze sliding unerringly away from the tall figure. But always, he was left with the impression the man stood there staring directly at him.
Katherine had been saying something about how he could trust her father, and he cut her off abruptly. “There’s something weird going on here.”
He had to give her credit. She shifted gears instantly. Her eyes narrowed, she hesitated for a moment, then asked, “What?”
Paul purposefully looked away from the tall guy, closed his eyes and tried to reconstruct what he thought he’d seen. “There’s this tall guy standing about fifty feet behind you up the street. Distinguished looking, handsome, fortyish, stands a head taller than everyone around him. He’s wearing a dark business suit that seems a little out of place here. And he’s carrying a walking stick as if he’s stepped out of Savile Row in London. All he needs now is a bowler hat to complete the image.”
Paul concentrated on the image in his mind’s eye. The distance was too great for him to be certain, but . . . “And I think he has fucking pointed ears.”
Only a few days ago he would’ve shrugged the incident off, chalked it up to inattention, or his imagination, or any of a hundred things real people dealt with every day. But not today, not the new Paul. He’d learned the hard way not to shrug off anything strange, unusual or out-of-place.
Her eyes narrowed suspiciously, but she didn’t dismiss him out-of-hand. “Try to look at him again. Try to focus hard on him.”
Paul slid his eyes toward the fellow and tried, and his gaze slid off him as if he wasn’t there. “I can’t. I know he’s there, but when I try to look directly at him I find myself looking at something nearby.”
Katherine leaned toward Paul, put her arms around his neck, leaned forward so her lips were close to his ear. “Pretend we’re lovers,” she whispered.
He thought he might like pretending that, so he put his hands around her waist and pulled her close, knew full well he was using the subterfuge as an excuse to do so. She didn’t resist, but she didn’t really respond either. She continued in a whisper, “This is scary. You’re describing a Sidhe, probably a high mage. He’s using a glamour that turns your eyes away, a compulsion that forces you to look at something nearby, but never him. And you say he’s looking straight at you.”
He leaned back a bit so they were face-to-face, their lips a fraction of an inch apart, and he looked into her eyes. “Staring at me like no normal person, like some crazy stalker.”
She moved a little closer so that, as she spoke, her lips were brushing lightly against his. “He can get away with that since no one can see past the glamour. And the fact that you can . . .
“Shit!” She started and pulled away from him. “Don’t try to look directly at him. If he realizes you can see through his glamour it might piss him off. He might even kill you. We have to get out of here.”
He regretted that their little moment of intimacy had ended so abruptly. “I’m headed for the BART station.” He took her by the arm and turned down Powell. She walked beside him, both of them limping.
When he glanced over his shoulder and confirmed that pointy-ears was following them, she said, “Don’t be too obvious.”
When they got to Post Street he leaned toward her as if he was kissing her on the neck and hissed, “Crowds in Union Square. Let’s try to lose him there.” They cut diagonally through the Square.
There were quite a few people taking advantage of a warm summer evening, listening to street musicians, kids gawking at the guy painted head-to-foot in silver and pretending to be a statue. Paul purposefully sought out thick clusters of people through which he and Katherine edged their way carefully. And as he did so he looked repeatedly over his shoulder. He didn’t see the tall man again, but several times someone in the crowd appeared to be jostled aside almost rudely. And more than once the victim stopped and turned indignantly to confront the jerk who’d shoved them, but there was never anyone there, never a culprit upon which to blame such rudeness. But Paul had learned if he allowed his gaze to slide past the disruption, he was left with the unmistakable impression of the tall man in the dark suit. And now he was certain the fellow had pointed ears.
He took Katherine’s hand and leaned toward her. “The fucker definitely has pointy ears,” he whispered, “and he’s definitely following us. Let’s head for the Montgomery Street BART Station.”
At the far corner of Union Square they turned down Geary Street. He’d learned he could keep track of the fellow following him by never trying to look directly at him. Instead he’d look at something nearby, then let his gaze drift past where he thought the fellow might be, which left a strange, ghostlike impression.
After a couple of blocks they turned east on Market Street, conscious of the wraithlike being following them.
Anogh’s excitement grew as he followed the Seelie mage and Paul and Katherine. The mage had cast a powerful spell that made one’s eyes turn away from him, even more powerful because of its subtlety. And yet the young man had seen through the glamour, a feat few mortals could achieve, which led Anogh to the conclusion Paul was a wizard of unusual talent. Perhaps not powerful in the sense of wielding arcane magics, but certainly unusually strong in his ability to see through the magics of others.
Anogh followed them down Powell Street, then through Union Square, watched as Paul grew steadily more aware of the pursuit behind him, watched as the Seelie mage arrogantly shoved mortal’s aside to keep up with them. This could be a most interesting confrontation. Then they turned down Market Street.
Market Street! A Boundary!
Anogh felt almost weary as he watched the mage follow the two mortals onto the busy thoroughfare. An old boundary, a street that had existed for more than a hundred years, a main route that separated two old sections of the city. The poor fellow was making it rather easy for the mage, choosing a path down a Boundary where the separation between the Three Realms was thin and tenuous. While the Sidhe might pass freely from one Realm to another, it was difficult, sometimes near impossible, to bring a mortal across without the use of an old boundary. And Paul had now made it easy for the mage following him.
How could such a wizard be so stupid?
Paul glanced over his shoulder at the apparition following them. As the sun slipped toward the horizon the sky in the west was turning a deep-purple, the kind of sunset that didn’t happen in San Francisco, more like something one might see farther up the coast on a summer night in Seattle. The crowds were thinning as he and Katherine hurried down the street. And farther down Market Paul spotted some sort of street entertainer wearing medieval garb and leading a donkey pulling a two wheeled cart piled with thatch, or hay, or something like that. The guy was going to get arrested. San Francisco didn’t let anyone lead a live donkey down the street.
Katherine tugged on his arm, pulled him to a stop and forced him to face her. “This is all wrong, Paul. Something’s really wrong here.”
As dusk settled over the city the buildings around them had turned tenuous and indistinct, and between buildings he caught glimpses of a green and verdant, rolling countryside. “This is more of your weird shit, isn’t it?”
Paul glanced back up Market, saw no sign of pointy-ears. “Well we still gotta worry about your elf friend.” He grabbed her elbow, turned and continued east down Market.
At Montgomery Street they stepped off the curb, though they had to skip over a lot of dirt in the gutter. They crossed the street against the light, though, oddly enough, there was no traffic, and he almost slipped in a large stretch of grass in the middle of the street. They both danced around a small shrub, and he wondered for a moment what grass and a shrub were doing in the middle of the street. Katherine stopped and looked at the shrub. “This is not good, Paul.”
“Ya!” he said. “You just figured that out? Maybe some delivery truck from some nursery accidentally dropped part of its load, didn’t bother to stop and clean up the mess.”
She turned and continued across the street, grumbled over her shoulder, “You don’t believe that crap any more than I do.”
He followed close on her heels, dared not slow down, really didn’t want to find out what would happen if pointy-ears caught up with them. But reality shifted, twisted out of control down a strange spiral track, and when they got to the other side of Montgomery there was no curb, just a muddy track and deep grass.
Katherine stopped abruptly and Paul almost ran into her. The sky in the east had taken on the same deep-purple hue as the western horizon where the sun had set. From one heartbeat to the next the street had emptied of all traffic and people, and Paul and Katherine now stood alone on the muddy corner of Market and Montgomery. The buildings around them had grown almost translucent, were now really just shadows of what they’d once been.
Katherine whispered, “We’re in deep shit.”
“Yuh think?”
Paul turned around and looked back up Market, which wasn’t Market anymore. It was just a long dirt road in the middle of a green countryside. And Paul could see pointy-ears clearly now, alone, no crowds in Union Square, no Union Square for that matter, just pointy-ears marching toward them purposefully.
Paul turned full circle. San Francisco was just plain gone. The entire sky had taken on that deep-purple hue, and he and Katherine now stood on a dirt road in the middle of a vast moor. The dirt road snaked into the distance, passing near a stone hut with a thatched roof, where the fellow with the donkey and cart had stopped. The road led to some sort of large medieval structure on the far horizon. It was too distant to make out details, but it appeared to be a castle.
Paul turned back to pointy-ears, and as the man strode up to them, Paul stepped in front of Katherine protectively. The fellow stopped a few paces away and smiled, and in the fading light Paul noticed the pupils of his eyes were vertically slit like those of a cat.
Reality blinked and Paul felt a strange shift in his guts; and now the fellow wore armor brightly enameled in a myriad of colors, with a dangerous looking sword strapped to his side, his face partially hidden behind a masked helm, his cat-eyes peering through narrow slits, his mouth and chin visible below an ornate nose-guard.
Paul took a step back and bumped into Katherine. “Who are you? What do you want?”
The fellow’s smile turned into an unfriendly grin. “I have what I want.”
“And what’s that?” Paul demanded, thankful the fellow hadn’t drawn that sword.
“You, mortal,” the man said, and his grin turned absolutely cheesy. “Welcome to Faerie.”
Anogh watched the mage use the Boundary to manipulate the probability of Paul’s existence on the Mortal Plane, watched Katherine sucked into the vortex the mage had created about Paul, watched the two of them slowly grow more indistinct and intangible as they hurried down Market Street. And then reality shifted and they no longer existed in the here and now.
“What say ya, Boo?”
Anogh turned toward the sound of the voice. Boo’Diddle stood leaning against the pole of a streetlight, while Jim’Jiminie sat atop a post office box cleaning his fingernails with the tip of a small dagger. Boo’Diddle said, “Tis a sad day, Jimmie me boy. Sad indeed when a fine Sidhe warrior such as this boy-oh . . .” He indicated Anogh with a nod of his head. “ . . . stands idly by and allows such injustice to be perpetrated on a poor mortal.”
“Injustice?” Anogh asked. “The young man is a wizard and the young woman a witch. They should’ve known better, but instead were easily—almost foolishly—trapped by a mage. Where’s the injustice in that? And why should I intervene?”
Jim’Jiminie finished working on one of his fingernails and examined it carefully as he said, “You’ll not want the wrath of the old man when he learns of the abduction of his daughter.”
“No one abducted the daughter. She was merely in the way.”
The leprechaun looked at Anogh and grinned. “Do you really think he’ll see it that way?”
The leprechaun was not incorrect in that. “You do have a valid point there, little man.”
Jim’Jiminie cocked his head. “And don’t forget the young wizard is yet unaware of his own powers.”
Now that was something Anogh had not known. And it explained the fellow’s ignorance.
A large black crow fluttered out of the sky and landed on the streetlight above. The triple goddess often appeared in the form of a crow, and Anogh eyed it warily. At the moment he didn’t sense the presence of the Morrigan, but then he couldn’t sense her if she didn’t want him to. And she certainly was in play in this, had awakened after centuries of silence and taken interest in this Paul Conklin fellow.
Boo’Diddle looked up at the crow and grinned. “And the Morrigan will frown upon anyone who prevents him from realizing his full potential.”
Anogh approached the little man and demanded, “And what’s the Morrigan’s interest in this?”
The little man shrugged. “The old hag has not chosen to enlighten me humble self.”
The little fellow pointed a gnarled finger at Anogh. “But take care, knight. Ignore her summons at your own peril. Ignore her summons at the peril of all Faerie.”
The crow squawked angrily, leapt from the top of the streetlight and dove straight for Anogh. He ducked, wary of its talons, but at the last instant it unfurled its wings and pulled out of the dive just above his head, shrieking as it gained altitude. With its wings hammering at the air it screeched and cawed, and as it dwindled in the distance its cries sounded like the insane, diabolical laughter of a madwoman.
Jim’Jiminie waggled his dagger in Anogh’s direction. “The old hag has made her wishes known, knight.”
“And you,” Anogh demanded, looking from one little man to the other. “Why such interest from the non-aligned fey? What game are you playing?”
The two leprechauns looked at each other, grinned, then disappeared.
When Colleen found Paul’s bed empty she used the arcane voice to call McGowan. Walter, the young man is gone.
She heard McGowan coming up the stairway, taking the steps two at a time. When he burst into the room he stopped just inside the door and snarled. “He broke my sleep spell.”
“Maybe he’s just immune to it.”
McGowan shook his head. “He broke my locator spells too.”
“But how do you break a sleep spell when you’re not conscious to break it.”
McGowan reached into his coat pocket and retrieved a couple of fetishes. “Nothing about this young man adds up.”
As he studied the charms carefully she asked, “What have you got there?”
“Used some blood-soaked threads from his bandages to make it easy to locate him.” He took one fetish in each hand and separated them, looked carefully from one to the other. “Made one for Katherine too. They’re both not far away.”
He turned and strode out of the room, saying over his shoulder, “Let’s go.”
Colleen followed him down the stairs and out onto
the street. The old man moved quickly and she had trouble keeping up with him. “Slow down,” she shouted.
He stopped, turned and waited for her to catch up, though he vibrated with impatience. “There’s something wrong about that young man. And if Katherine’s anywhere near him, she might be in danger.”
Colleen walked by his side as he marched down the street. When he turned onto Powell and headed down Nob Hill, she sensed something else of the arcane, something in play she couldn’t quite identify. A few blocks above Union Square McGowan stopped at an ATM, sniffed around it like a hound on the scent. “They met here, then continued on together.”
When he turned to follow she snarled, “Wait.”
He stopped and turned to face her, frowning.
She stepped a few paces away from him to lessen the scent of his arcane influence. Trying to understand the undercurrent she sensed, she turned about slowly, and then she had it. “I sense a Summer Court mage in this—two of them actually—though one of them reeks of the Winter Court.”
At that moment McGowan started, lifted the two fetishes and looked at them carefully. “They’re gone. Both of them. They’re no longer on the Mortal Plane.”
“The Netherworld again.”
He shook his head. “I don’t know. We’ll have to follow their trail. Maybe we can find out.”
She walked with him down Powell, then diagonally across Union Square, then down Geary and onto Market. “Faerie,” she said as they hit Market. She could feel the influence of the fey in her bones.
“Ya,” he said as he stopped on the corner of Montgomery. “Seelie Court. Magreth is going to answer for this.”
Chapter 10: Down the Drain
“Welcome to Faerie, mortal,” the Sidhe mage said. “And you brought a friend. How quaint.”
Standing behind Paul, and keeping her eyes on the Sidhe mage, Katherine leaned forward and whispered in Paul’s ear. “Let me handle this.”
He turned his head slightly. “Do you know what you’re doing?”