Or maybe he’s too busy being Santa Claus to notice you. You know, making his lists and checking them twice?
Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!
Fine, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Adora exhaled again, counting slowly to ten. Joy, I mean it. Go away. I have to work now.
“This must be a tough dilemma you’re contemplating,” Kris said, glancing up and smiling in ready sympathy. “I’ve seen men marching off to war who haven’t looked half so grim.”
“You have no idea,” Adora muttered, returning her gaze to the bulging file Pennywyse had supplied. The diverse and unorganized information wasn’t helping her get to know Kris, and there was so much of it to read, much of it in stilted English. She couldn’t quite repress another sigh. “Beginnings are always hard.”
“Well, let’s not rush into work this morning,” Kris said suddenly, and he reached for the phone. “I’ll have Morrison bring the Silver Cloud around— you’ll love that—and we’ll go out to the farmers’ market. There’s nothing quite like starting your morning with fresh croissants and raspberries.”
Adora didn’t need her arm twisted. She happily put the file aside, keeping only a small notebook.
“Give me just a minute. I need to get my purse,” she said. And a hat, and to put on some sunscreen. The late morning sunlight would be harsh. At that moment she desperately wanted to go out with Kris in the light of day. Perhaps the sunlight would reveal something new to her.
“Don’t rush. I need to send for Mugshottz. He fusses if I go out without him. Poor fellow, he sees goblin assassins under every bush.”
“Then by all means, let’s have him along,” Adora said agreeably—but she was less than pleased. Her fantasy of a day out with Kris didn’t include a bodyguard.
“Look!” she said a little while later; pointing out the car window at the small billboard on the side of the city bus. The ad was for a new documentary about Saint Nicholas. She murmured: “ ‘Funding for this program is supplied by the Bishop S. Nicholas Foundation, and from contributors like you. . . .’ This is part of your PR campaign?”
“Yes. It will air Thanksgiving weekend. It doesn’t tell my whole story—just the parts about Bishop Nicholas.”
“I’d like to see it, if I may,” she said. Maybe the director had managed to put some order to the chaos of Kris’s life—even if only for the last several hundred years. If she could borrow his files . . .
“Of course. I’ll arrange it as soon as the final cuts are made,” Kris agreed.
The car rolled to a stop at the end of the parking lot, and Mugshottz leaped out to get the door. He could move quickly when the impulse was on him, and Adora found it a bit unnerving to see him hovering like a dark angel. But it wasn’t for long; Kris was there immediately, offering his hand, helping her out of the car and guiding her toward the largest market she’d ever seen.
“Will the car be okay?” she asked. She loved old cars, and Kris’s were particularly wonderful. She had supposedly inherited the fixation from her paternal grandfather, whose car collection had been added to Harrah’s Car Museum in Reno. While she was too practical and poor to keep an automobile that needed constant care and whose replacement parts were scarcer than human donor organs, that didn’t prevent her from enjoying Kris’s.
“Morrison will watch it,” he assured her. “Come on. You have to see things before they get picked over.”
“Wow. What a sight!” Adora stared gleefully at the carnival of colors under the acres of gay-striped awnings. There were pyramids of citrus, tomatoes and grapes. Other tables held crates of cherries and berries of blue and purple, scarlet and pink. It would be at least another month before they had this kind of produce on the coast.
Flowers abounded, sweetening the air with soft scents of flox and hyacinth and lilac. Everything glistened, washed clean by the rain, and the hues were so vivid and shiny that everything might have been covered with fresh paint.
Most seductive of all were the loaves of bread and pastries stacked like cord wood, and the smell of roasting coffee beans that slyly wrapped about her. Buoying up the scents that floated toward them— come hither, they called. Come hither and eat! Adora’s stomach rumbled loudly.
“Where would you like to begin?” Kris asked.
“Coffee, strawberries—and cinnamon rolls,” she answered promptly.
“That sounds perfect. Can you manage the coffee if I get the rest?”
“Definitely,” Adora agreed. “There are still some vacant tables under those umbrellas. Let’s meet there.”
Kris nodded and started for the bakers’ tables. Mugshottz followed at a distance, his face hidden under a hat and his body enveloped in a large coat. A few people stared at the troll-cross, and all gave him wide berth, but no one seemed particularly alarmed.
They all met up a few minutes later at one of the small picnic tables. Though she was still uncomfortable with the crossbreed, Adora forced herself to smile at Mugshottz as she handed him a coffee. “I didn’t know how you took it,” she said, “so I brought some sugars and a packet of creamer.”
“Thanks, but I take it black,” Mugshottz answered.
The tall cup completely disappeared in his massive and scarred hands. His forearms had also been to the wars, and they were a tapestry of interlaced marks that looked for all the world like they had come from a chisel. Adora thought about asking what had caused them, but she held her tongue. It was beyond the scope of her book, and anyway, she wouldn’t care to discuss her own less visible scars. There was no reason to suppose that Mugshottz would be any more enthused than she.
The bodyguard regarded her for a moment out of his flat stony eyes; then, perhaps sensing her discomfort at the attention, retreated about five feet and started scanning the crowd.
Kris spoke up. “Sit on this side. There’s more shade. Forgive my speaking plainly, but you’ve clearly been ill, and I don’t think the sun agrees with you.” He pushed a basket of strawberries her way. “Eat up. They’re good for you. Lots of vitamins.”
Adora blinked at his commanding tone but answered without heat.
“I look like reheated tuna casserole, don’t I? It’s some exotic virus, they think, though they’ve never been sure what kind. The sun makes it worse,” she added, for some reason unoffended by the personal observation. Maybe it was because she had been doing a lot of prying into Kris’s life, and this exchange of information seemed fair. And maybe she just liked the attention. Still, her next words were harder. “It’s worrying, because my dad died of some undiagnosed viral disease. Only, he was more affected than I am. He got weaker and weaker and . . . well, his immune system just failed. He died very quickly. From first episode to last, it was only three months.”
“When was this? What precisely happened?” Maybe it was the sun, but a nimbus surrounded Kris’s hair, reminding her of Renaissance paintings of saints and angels. She wanted desperately to touch him. Or maybe she wanted desperately to not answer his questions about her father, and was building a normal phenomenon into something unworldly to avoid that.
“What an expression!” Kris’s tone was teasing, but his eyes were serious. “I’m not suggesting that you drop peyote and then go to a bullfight—just tell me a little about yourself.”
“I’d probably like peyote and bullfights better,” Adora replied. “That might be more fun too. This isn’t . . . It isn’t a nice story.”
“I want to hear it anyway. Please.”
“It happened about three years ago,” she answered at last. “It was a horrible summer. Everything was so dry. The drought went on and on out west. Mom and I were sick too—but not like Dad.”
“Are you getting worse?” Kris asked. There was no overt sympathy in his voice, but his eyes were warm and compassionate. Again, though she had never willingly discussed the matter with anyone, Adora felt compelled to tell him the truth.
“No. I seem to have plateaued. As long as I stay out of the noon sun, I’m fine. I
live at the coast now, and we have a lot of fog in the summer. It’s just that I’m not getting any better, either.”
“And your mother? Is she still alive?”
Adora looked away. This was tougher. She had been lonely before, but her mother’s death had made that aloneness so final. There was no hope now of ever winning the woman’s love, and nearly everyone who recalled her childhood was dead. If Adora died tomorrow, other than a few scholars who had read her work, no one would know she had ever existed. It made her feel very small and lonely. And that was pathetic: not the way she wanted Kris to see her.
Adora made an effort to pull herself together. “No, Mom is . . . Mom was a pilot—usually a careful one. But after Dad was gone, she . . .” She swallowed and blinked hard, upset to find she had tears in her eyes. “She was broken inside. I’ve often thought that their relationship wasn’t so much a love affair as a love addiction. She hung on for a couple of years, waiting for me to finish graduate school and get settled in a career, but it was like watching a ghost haunt the house.” Adora took a drink of her coffee. It was hot enough to burn her tongue, but she welcomed the distraction of physical pain. “Officially, the crash was listed as an accident, but those who saw her said that the engine was fine and that she just dove that Piper Cub into the ground.”
Kris made a noise of sympathy. Adora flinched, but once started, the horrible words continued to bubble out.
“I dropped her off at the airport that day, and went into town to choose a dress to wear to a friend’s wedding. I was going to Hawaii at the end of the week and was feeling as carefree as a little lamb going off to nibble spring pastures. Hawaii in the spring—what could be better? I think of it now and cringe at how stupid I was. I should have had some premonition; she was too quiet. . . . But I didn’t. Not one little bit of worry clouded my horizon. Lambs aren’t real bright, you know. They can gambol right by the slaughterhouse and not even notice.” Her voice was full of self-contempt.
“I’m sorry.” Kris’s hand covered hers fleetingly. Too fleetingly, she thought. “You’ve had more than your fair share of losses. I do hope you know that neither of your parents’ deaths were your fault.”
The hand had been nice—so warm—but his eyes! She wanted to crawl into his eyes and roll around in the kindness she saw there. The thought disturbed her. She had made the mistake—far too often of late—of seeking relief from her grief in relationships with men. They always ended disastrously.
And she didn’t really want Kris’s pity.
Adora let out a long breath and tried to smile reassuringly. “Yes, I know. And there’s no need to worry about me, okay? I’ve never been that in love, and I don’t suffer from suicidal tendencies. You’ll never find me wearing a rope cravat, or doing home surgery on my wrists in the bathtub.”
“I know. I can sense that isn’t your way.” Kris nodded slowly, then said abruptly, “I have a friend who specializes in . . . immune disorders. I think he can help you. Would you consider seeing him?”
Adora thought about it.
“He isn’t the Tooth Fairy, is he?” she asked with a half smile, attempting a joke to see how he reacted. “ ’Cause I think I’ve reached my weird quotient for the week.”
Kris smiled. “No, just one of my many helper elves. His name is Zayn, and he lives in a place called Cadalach.”
Mugshottz twitched once, but then went back to doing a fine impersonation of a statue.
“Ka du lac?” she asked. The name sounded vaguely familiar.
“That’s close enough. It’s named after a . . . a town in Ireland. We may be going there later. Not to Ireland—my Cadalach isn’t too far from Palm Springs. I have family there.”
Adora tried not to gape.
“You have family?”
What? You thought he grew on a tree or was cloned in a lab? Joy asked, but Adora could tell she was surprised too.
“Yes. I didn’t mention my nephew? He’s the one who restores the wonderful cars I use. He’s a bit of a car buff.”
“I’m speechless,” Adora said, wondering if her prayers to the gods of research had been answered. Surely Kris’s family could tell her more about him. “I don’t know why—”
Yes, you do, Joy inserted.
“—but I somehow pictured you as coming into the world like Athena, sprung whole from the brow of Zeus.”
“Wrong legend again,” Kris said. “Jack is the son of my younger brother, Phaneos. He’s a lot younger than I am.”
“Isn’t everyone?” Adora asked. Kris just nodded.
At the next table, Adora heard the click of a camera shutter, and even without Mugshottz’s hard glance, she knew who was being photographed: Though he had done nothing but sip his coffee, Kris had still managed to attract the attention of every female in a three-table radius. Even in the land of beautifully engineered people, he attracted attention.
It’s probably super-pheromones.
“Eat your breakfast,” Kris cajoled. “You don’t want to miss the street musicians—the lutin mariachis are fabulous. You won’t believe what they can do with a twelve-string guitar. They close up shop before the sun gets too warm, though. Goblins don’t do well in bright sunlight. They dehydrate. The condition is called hydrophilia.”
“Why do they go out in it then?” Adora asked.
“You don’t know much about goblin hives, do you?” Kris said. The question might have been condescending but wasn’t.
“Nothing,” she admitted. “I feel very ignorant and am afraid I’ll say something foolish before I finish doing my research and offend someone. It would be easier if goblins looked like goblins,” she added.
“No, we couldn’t have that,” Kris said mildly, though he looked a bit serious. Then he went on to explain, “The situation is complicated, and every hive is different. Molybdenum is the new leader— king—of the L.A. hive. He’s only been in power a few months. Being fey, I would normally be considered an enemy of the state, but we’ve reached a sort of agreement about my staying here in town. I have dispensation because of an old debt. This is . . . restitution from this hive for an ancient wrong they did me.”
“I see. What happened to the last king?” Adora asked.
“Queen. Sharyantha. The story is that she tragically cut her throat while shaving.”
“Goblins shave?” Adora said. She wasn’t certain if Kris was kidding.
“The females do.”
“You’d think she’d prefer facial wax. Much safer,” Adora remarked.
“Indeed. Especially since such shaving accidents kill off a lot of goblin kings and queens. Coup d’e-tats are very common in lutin hives. In fact, I don’t think any goblin ruler ever has died of old age. Don’t get the wrong idea: The average lutin is quiet and law-abiding, but the leaders—many of them— are monsters. And monsters don’t have many friends, and way too many relatives who want their job. It compounds their already raging paranoia, and they tend to be tyrannical. Molybdenum is better than most, but still . . .”
“Kings everywhere have this problem,” Adora pointed out. “ ‘Uneasy lies the head’ and all that. It has to be a hard life. Still, there’s an up side to assassination—for the general populace at least,” she suggested.
“Yes?” Kris cocked his head, waiting for her to go on. A slight smile hovered about his mouth.
“Well, at least with a revolution you don’t have to go through two primaries and a general election. Our last presidential election almost put me in a psychiatric hospital.”
Joy didn’t speak up, though Adora half-expected her to.
Kris shook his head. “How very cynical you are. I take it that you don’t approve of politics. I was going to introduce you to someone today, but perhaps it would be best if you didn’t spend time with him. You and my political adviser might not get along.”
Nodding, Adora bit into her cinnamon roll—and almost moaned aloud at the pleasure. Nothing was as good as cinnamon and too much butter.
“It’s that g
ood?” Kris asked, taking a smaller bite of his own. He closed his eyes for a moment. “I am so glad that cholesterol isn’t a problem in my life,” he remarked.
“Your political adviser. Alistair Hyatt?” Adora said a minute later in a somewhat sticky voice. “We’ve already met. He went hurrying by this morning with a file even bigger than mine. He seems surprisingly nice—too nice for his job. I’ll just have to see about getting him some vocational counseling. It’s never too late to change careers,” she joked.
“Bite your tongue. I need him,” Kris replied. “I share your distaste for politics, but I have learned— at huge cost—that you cannot completely ignore that realm and the people who dabble in it.”
“No? I certainly try. I have no use for politicians— scoundrels and liars, one and all.”
Kris shook his head, looking surprisingly serious. “True. But you’re in a goblin town now. Ignore politics at your peril.”
“Explain,” Adora demanded. As she took another bite of her roll, she noticed Mugshottz look Kris’s way. He did that fairly frequently, and it was hard to read his expression, but now it seemed more curious than nervous. That was probably a sign that she should take notes. Adora wiped her hands on her napkin and reached for her notebook.
“It’s complicated,” Kris said.
“I have all day.”
“Very well. In the human world, consider how politics influence fashion and art, from deciding what clothes we wear to what musicians and artists will be favored in our society,” he proposed. “There are unholy alliances built by greed, all around us, influencing us daily. And this is in the human world, where there are some checks and balances, and a supposedly free media to inform the masses of abuses of power. Now, there is no United Nations or free press for lutin hives.”
Kris got up from the table and began to pace. Mugshottz watched him worriedly. Adora had the feeling that the troll-cross would start pacing also if his boss got more than a shadow’s length away.
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