Ryan chuckled and exchanged one glass for another. “The Royal Guard were nothing like the palace guards, my father explained, after the flogging. They were more like Manlings, creatures to be feared, without question.” Ryan winked at me, but then his expression grew distant. “Apparently, he’d seen one. Came across it by accident one night. A nightmarish creature which scared him so much that he forbade me from speaking for a year rather than risk me enlisting to serve alongside it.”
“Hold on. You’re sayin’,” I said, keeping my voice low, my expression earnest, “that there’s a spell out there to get ye to shut up for a whole year?”
Ryan flung his dishrag at my face, ignoring my laughter. “I’m saying, Quinn, that my father saw a creature that horrified him that night. And that soon you’ll have the same opportunity.”
Well, shit, when he put it like that…
Maybe “little guy” wasn’t the best nickname.
Chapter 13
Except, damnit, he was a little guy.
Really not much taller than a small child, the spriggan had a comically large head perched on a slender neck—the physics of which would have excited quite a few biologists. His skin was flabby and wrinkled, his eyes dopey, lips thin. His earlobes dangled down to his shoulders and his nose was a bulbous protrusion. He looked like, I kid you not, a sock-loving house-elf.
“I’d introduce you,” Ryan was saying, “but he hasn’t told me his name.”
“Dobby,” I said, immediately.
“What?” Ryan asked.
The spriggan’s eyes shot over to me and a slow, languid smile spread across his face. He ambled over, completely ignoring Ryan, who had inadvertently tried to corral the little creature and stop him from approaching, and halted a few feet away.
“Uh, hello there,” I said, unsure what else to do or say. Frankly, I was always this awkward around tiny humans; I’d given up altogether on making friends with people who had children, lest they try and introduce me.
“Seems like he likes you,” Ryan said, his brows knitted together.
How the hell could he tell? Did he have a tail wagging back there that I couldn’t see? I leaned around to look, then jerked back guiltily as the spriggan tested the air with his hands, like a mime. His eyes were closed. Finally, he grunted, and—in the most masculine, leonine voice I have ever heard—said, “Well, hello there, my lady.”
Ryan laughed at the expression on my face, but shut up immediately when the spriggan spun to face him. I realized the creature was wearing clothes from the children’s department. His Avengers sneakers lit up, spewing tiny flashes of red and blue as he marched towards Ryan, pointing at him. “You, little Fae, shall call me Dobby.” The spriggan glanced coyly over his shoulder at me. “The lady has spoken.”
“Um, I’m not sure if you even know what that name even means,” Ryan began, “besides—”
“The lady has spoken.”
Ryan’s mouth gaped for a moment, then snapped shut.
“Excellent work, Dobby,” I said, grinning. “I can never get him to shut that trap of his.”
“Trap?!” Dobby yelled, eyes wild, teeth gnashing together. The lights of the warehouse dimmed and then suddenly went out. I could feel movement in the oppressive darkness—something massive skulking just a few feet away. Boxes thumped together as an immense weight settled atop them, their boards cracking beneath the strain.
“It’s not a trap,” Ryan said, his voice oddly calm. “That’s an expression Manlings use.”
Dobby’s voice rumbled in response, echoing from the rafters, “Expression?”
“Yes. Think about it, what comes out of a mouth can be a trap, yes?” Ryan asked.
The silence was broken by a horrible, lumbering sound, like logs careening down a hillside. A moment later, as the lights flickered back on, I realized that the sound was Dobby’s laughter.
“Mouth! Trap!” Dobby—having transformed back to his tiny, vaguely hideous self the instant the lights returned—said, pointing at his mouth, grinning. He sauntered off, singing, “It’s a trap!” in a thick baritone before slipping on the Ring of Gyges and disappearing from sight.
Chapter 14
I plopped down, pressed my forehead against the wood of Christoff’s desk, and tracked the swirling pattern of the office’s large area rug with my eyes.
Eventually, I shut them entirely.
“Please tell me ye didn’t give a batshit shadow monster a ring to make himself invisible?” I groaned, a moment later.
“I didn’t give a batshit shadow monster a ring to make himself invisible,” Ryan replied immediately, as if he’d been waiting for my reaction.
I glanced up in surprise.
“We gave a batshit shadow monster a ring to make himself invisible,” Ryan equivocated, grinning at me. “Except, he isn’t batshit. He’s—”
“Got the temperament of a wee child?” I accused.
“Excitable,” Ryan finished, with emphasis. “But so far it hasn’t been a problem. I don’t let him go out alone at night and, in daylight, he’s harmless. Just a quirky little old man who happens to be invisible.”
“And if he decides he wants to go out for a night on the town without supervision?” I asked.
“It’s Boston,” Ryan said, clearly amused by my reaction to the situation. “The city is well lit at night, and smart people stay away from the places that aren’t. At worst, someone sees something they can’t quite explain, and it gets chalked up to local superstition.”
“No,” I said, “at worst, Dobby, the Big-as-a-House Elf, goes and murders half the city while invisible.” It probably should have reassured me that Ryan was acting so calm, but frankly I couldn’t trust him to be impartial; both Faelings and Freaks tended to underestimate the danger they represented to society. It was a matter of perspective.
And Ryan was too close to see the writing on the wall.
Ryan shook his head, laughing. “Well, apparently he doesn’t mind listening to the lady,” Ryan pointed out, “so maybe you could use that to keep him from eating people.”
“He eats people?!” My eyes widened.
Ryan waved that off before I could freak out too much. “It was an expression, Quinn.”
I breathed a sigh of relief, then scowled at him. “Do ye know how many Freaks I’ve met, personally, that eat people?”
“Oh,” he replied, “Yeah, that’s fair. My bad.”
“Ye know what…I need a drink,” I admitted, stretching. Between this morning’s interrogation, my filling brunch, my brief stint as a second-rate Sensei, and meeting a spriggan, I’d had a pretty full day; a little nightcap before heading home would be ideal—anything to avoid dwelling on the shadow monster living in Christoff’s warehouse.
I had enough nightmares to worry about.
“Sure thing,” Ryan said, hopping up off the couch, “I’ll run on down and make you a—”
“If ye even t’ink the word ‘Horseman’,” I growled, “I will tell Dobby to eat ye.”
Ryan raised his hands in surrender, but couldn’t suppress a chuckle. He was about to ask what I wanted when my phone rang, Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” dun-dunning loud enough to attract the attention of a few of the bar staff downstairs. Ryan glanced over my shoulder at the caller ID and laughed.
“Saved by the bell,” he said before heading downstairs.
“Hey, Dez,” I said as I picked up the phone.
Her screams were the first thing I heard.
Chapter 15
Gunshots were the second.
“Dez?” I said, too shocked to be panicked. “Dez! Are ye there?!”
I felt more than saw Ryan run back up the stairs and stand beside me—so focused on what I could hear that I’d shut my eyes. It sounded as if the receiver were colliding with something, like a microphone tumbling down a flight of stairs. Eventually even that stopped, and I heard someone pick up the phone.
“’Ello, is this Quinn MacKenna?” A man’s voice asked. He ha
d a Londoner’s accent, a garbled Cockney dialect that sounded like he was trying to swallow his words whole as he spoke them.
“Put Dez on the phone,” I growled.
“Oh, I’m afraid Desdemona—it is Desdemona innit? Right. I’m afraid Desdemona is indisposed. Now, please tell me this is Miss MacKenna? I’d hate to have to ask this nice lady to give me your number a second time.”
“What do ye want?” I asked, grinding my teeth to stop myself from lashing out.
“Straight to the point, no threats? How refreshing,” he said. “So, it seems last night you took somefin that didn’t belong to you. From what I understand, there was some miscommunication involved…but I’m sure you can imagine how very unhappy I was to find out that my ring had been promised to someone else, not to mention the fact that it had been taken. Now, I dealt with the double-dipping bloodsuckers last night, but that still leaves me short a ring.”
The ring. The bloodsuckers. I felt a pit open up in my stomach as I realized I was talking to the man who’d murdered Mike and his band, the man Jimmy was looking for.
And he had my aunt.
How had he even found her?
“She doesn’t know anythin’,” I said. “She’s an old lady. Just let her go.”
“Well, now, I don’t think I want to do that. Besides, she seemed awful spry when she shot at me a minute ago.”
I frowned. Since when did Dez have a gun? Dez hated guns, almost as much as I loved them—that, along with my taste in music, had been our sole points of contention. I shook my head, deciding I could dwell on that later.
I needed to focus.
“You’ll be wanting your ring back, then?” I asked, after taking a few steadying breaths. I shot a warning glance at Ryan—whose expression had turned murderous—to stop him from speaking. I couldn’t risk giving the Englishman an excuse to hurt Dez. Playing along was my only option.
For now.
“Oh no. No need for that, Miss MacKenna,” the Englishman replied. “See, there’s some merchandise here in Boston that I’d hoped to get my hands on, and a ring like that could come in very handy indeed. But then, lucky for me, I found out about you. Seems you’re quite the expert in getting your hands on things that don’t belong to you. So I had me an idea. It goes like this. You use that ring you nicked to fetch what I need, bring it to me, and I’ll let this lovely lady go without a scratch, no questions asked. What do you say?”
I ground my teeth. He’d taken Dez hostage to blackmail me into stealing something for him? Talk about taking things to the next level for no reason. “I have a phone, ye know,” I said, finally. “If ye wanted me to get somethin’ for ye, all ye had to do was reach out like everyone else.”
“Oh, but I’m not like everyone else,” the man said, chuckling. “See, I’m not a fan of asking, dearie. Leaves too much room for a misunderstanding. Asking implies that you could say no, which really isn’t how things stand. So, what’ll it be? From one professional to another, I think you should take the deal.”
I heard Dez’s muffled scream in the background.
“Fine,” I hissed. “What is it ye want me to steal?”
He talked. I listened.
Chapter 16
The next morning I found myself following a man carrying a steel briefcase down Beacon Street in the middle of the afternoon. Fortunately, he wasn’t moving quickly; tailing someone is much harder when they are moving significantly faster than everyone else on the street.
Everyone knows when they are being chased.
The briefcase I’d been told to steal was handcuffed to his left arm, which you’d think would draw attention—I mean, how often do you see men sporting handcuffs as jewelry—but didn’t. I figured there was some sort of spell involved; if I took my eyes off him, even for a second, he became almost impossible to relocate. A nifty trick for evading unwanted attention.
Fortunately, I wasn’t the only one keeping tabs on him.
“The mark is on the move,” Ryan said, his voice a tinny buzz in my right ear.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Ryan, do ye have to keep callin’ him ‘the mark’?” I asked. Ryan had been in my ear for a couple hours now, clearly embracing his role as lookout. I swore to myself that if he made one more spy movie reference, I was going to shoot him.
“The mark is headed towards the park,” Ryan said, ignoring me entirely.
And now he’s rhyming.
“I see that, ye silly bastard,” I grumbled.
Despite my reservations, the Faeling had insisted on coming. My guess is he felt guilty for sending me after the ring in the first place. I considered letting him off the hook and claiming it was all part of the job, but that wasn’t strictly true.
This was Dez we were talking about. Family. I’d worked hard to make sure no one could ever trace me back to her or use her as leverage like this. That’s part of why I rarely visited, these days, if I was being honest; I preferred to think of her safe and sound, tucked away in her guest room, doing charity work.
“You sure you don’t want me to call in reinforcements?” Ryan asked, for perhaps the seventh time. He meant the Chancery, or at least a few of its members. It was tempting; I could only imagine what sort of resources they had at their disposal to hunt down blackmailers. But I couldn’t risk it.
“Has he made me?” I asked, ignoring the Faeling as I pretended to window shop, doing my best to appear inconspicuous. I strolled along the opposite side of the street, glancing sidelong at the man, letting him control the pace.
I’d opted for the bored, trophy wife look: a slim beige overcoat, a black turtleneck tucked into a pair of black leather pants, knee-high boots, and a pair of Burberry sunglasses I’d bought for the occasion, the frames and lenses comically large. I looked ridiculous in them—like some kind of freckled alien—but I was certain no one could see my eyes beneath, least of all the person I was tailing.
“Now look who’s using the lingo,” Ryan quipped. “But no, I don’t think so. As far as I can tell he’s making his way to the Amtrak station, which would be consistent with what the English guy said.”
The Englishman, the kidnapper, had given me the relevant details the night before: follow the man with the briefcase from his Riverside hotel to the Back Bay Station and, at the first available opportunity, steal the briefcase.
According to him, how I went about stealing the briefcase was entirely up to me. When I asked what the man was doing with a briefcase handcuffed to his arm and what was in that briefcase, I’d been politely told to mind my fucking business. I got the same answer when asking about who else might also want the briefcase and what the man might do to stop me from taking the briefcase.
Basically, I was going into this blind.
“Did ye check the train departure times?” I asked.
“Yeah, pretty sure he’s taking the train to St. Louis. It’s the only one departing that makes any sense.”
“Wait,” I stumbled a little, the heel of my boot catching a break in the pavement, “ye mean the man with the briefcase permanently attached to his wrist is headed to the most recent terrorist capitol of the United States?”
“Oh…shit,” Ryan said. “Quinn, please tell me we aren’t about to try and steal a bomb?”
“We aren’t,” I replied.
Ryan sighed in relief.
“We’re about to steal a briefcase…that might have a bomb in it,” I said, using Ryan’s tone from the night before. Frankly, the possibility bothered me at least as much as it did him; he wasn’t the one standing thirty feet from the guy with the briefcase attached to his arm.
“I hate you sometimes, you know that?” Ryan said, finally.
“Get in line.”
A large Greyhound bus pulled up to the light, momentarily blocking my view. I hurried up the street, hoping he’d pop out in front of the bus. “Ryan, I’ve lost visual.”
“He’s still there…wait, no, he ducked down an alley on that side. I can’t see him from up here.”
“I’m coming down,” Ryan said. I could hear him retrieving the fold-up lawn chair and preparing to leave the roof, cursing.
“Don’t,” I said. “Stay there and keep an eye out in case he pops back up. If I need ye, I’ll let ye know.”
More curses from Ryan followed, but I was already moving. I jogged across the intersection as soon as the walk sign flashed, hands burrowed in my pockets, shoulders hunched, as if I were cold and hurrying to find the nearest boutique and get warm.
I couldn’t afford to blow my cover.
I saw the alley as soon as I made it to the other side of the street. It was one of those service alleyways, the ones you always see trucks pull into to drop off food and such, which meant it was wide but—with tall buildings on either side—not particularly well lit. I had just poked my head around the corner when I heard Ryan’s voice in my ear.
“Quinn! He’s behind—”
I didn’t bother listening to the rest, what with the metal barrel of the man’s gun pressed into my spine hard enough that I could feel it through my coat.
“Get inside alley,” the man said with an accent I couldn’t quite place. Something Slavic that would turn all his w’s into v’s, from what I could tell.
“Don’t you dare go down that alley, Quinn!” Ryan yelled, his voice loud enough in my ear to make me cringe.
“Listen,” I said, “I don’t know who ye are, but I’m sure ye know it’s not polite to tell people what to do at gunpoint.” I began to turn, hoping to catch a glimpse of his face, but he jabbed me with the gun before I could get a good look. I heard the sound of footsteps on metal stairs and Ryan’s labored breathing before he hung up, probably by accident. Either way, it seemed like I was on my own.
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