Pomegranates full and fine

by Unknown Author

  She sighed and stood up, turning out the lights in the living room. There was nothing in Riley’s bags that could help her find him. Nothing at all. That left her another avenue of exploration, one that she had been hoping to avoid because it had appeared unlikely to work out. Now it seemed her next best hope. If the little girl she had sat beside on the airplane from San Francisco had indeed been Riley transformed, who had been playing the girl’s mother?

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  She sucked and sucked and sucked the more Fruits which that unknown orchard bore

  The streets and alleys of Yorkville were just beginning to fill with men and women in business suits, some out “doing lunch,” some just enjoying the sunshine outside of their offices, all of them talking about last night’s penny murder. A prostitute this time. Tango had found herself with conflicting feelings when she had heard that on the morning news. She had known prostitutes and she felt bad for the murdered woman, but at the same time, she couldn’t help feeling relieved that it wasn’t another man from Hopeful. And that it wasn’t Riley’s body that had been discovered. She hoped she could find him before that happened. Tango stepped out of the alley and peered down into the dark stairway that led to Duke Michael’s court. “Ruby?” she asked.

  “Here to see the duke?” Ruby’s voice echoed in the stairway. The old nocker appeared a moment later. Tango hadn’t actually seen her appear the first time she had visited the court; Ruby had simply been waiting in the shadows. This time, Tango watched as a bulge formed in the wet bricks of the wall, then pulled away, becoming Ruby. “You just missed him. He’s gone out.”

  “I know. I saw him leave.” Tango walked down into the stairwell and rapped on the wall where Ruby had emerged. It was as solid as brick and mortar had ever been. “That’s an interesting trick.”

  “I can teach it to you if you like. I’ve always been close to the bones of Mother Earth.”

  Tango shook her head. “I’ve got about as much talent for working with stone as a sidhe.” She smiled. “Actually, I came to see you.”

  Ruby raised one eyebrow up into her wrinkled forehead. “We may both be nockers, Tango, but I’m still the duke's Gatekeeper. Sweet talk isn’t going to get you anywhere.”

  “I don’t want in. I need help.”

  “What kind of help?” Ruby grinned. “If you want to get rid of Epp, there’s nothing I can do for you. I’ve wanted to take her down a peg or two myself for years, but she’s too close to the duke.”

  Tango shook her head and sat down on the stairs. “I’m trying my best just to ignore her. No, I need...” she gestured vaguely, then sighed and looked up at the other nocker. “I need contacts, Ruby. There are things I have to do and I don’t know enough about Toronto to get them done. I’m trying to find Ril—”

  “Sister, don’t you go telling me secrets.” Ruby sat down beside her. “Like I said, I’m the Gatekeeper. I owe my allegiance to the duke. If I were to hear that somebody, even another nocker, was going against his commands, I would be duty-bound to report ,it.” She glanced at Tango out of the corner of her eye. “Now say someone were to ask me questions without saying what they were going to do with the answers, well, then, maybe I might be able to help them.” Her face grew soft. “Some of us think the duke should be doing more to find out what happened to Riley — an oath of allegiance puts some responsibilities on the lord, too. You’re not the only one who’s worried.”

  Tango smiled again. She had hoped when she came back into Yorkville that she would be able to find something of an ally in Ruby. The old Gatekeeper had struck her as a decent, friendly person. And Tango desperately needed someone else to turn to for help — Miranda was, of course, utterly unreachable during the day, deep in the daylight sleep of vampires. Waiting for her to wake would have wasted the whole day. Tango didn’t have that kind of luxury. “I need to get in touch with someone who could hack into a commercial computer system. Do you know anybody?”

  Ruby whistled. “You know something? How bad is

  it?”

  “Pretty bad, I think, but all I’ve got is a thin lead. Maybe not even that.” She looked at Ruby hopefully. “Any Kithain in the court into computers? A good mortal who won’t ask many questions?” She considered asking if there were any Virtual Adepts, the young, computer-wielding mages, in Toronto, but suspected that the nocker would be as ignorant of mages as Dex had been.

  Ruby just shook her head sadly. “Sorry, sister. Don’t know many humans who are into that, and there isn’t a Kithain in the city who could do it — even if you could talk one into defying the duke’s ban on helping Riley. We had a kid who was a whiz with computers. He pulled up roots and took off for Vancouver a couple of years ago. Couldn’t stand Toronto anymore.”

  “I can understand that.” Tango got to her feet.

  “I’m sorry, Tango.”

  “It’s okay, Ruby.” Tango sighed again. “That was just the easy plan, and easy never works. Where can I find a really quiet pay phone?”

  “Try the sushi bar. Hardly anybody goes in there anymore. Sushi isn’t trendy enough for Yorkville these days, I guess.”

  “Thanks.” Tango walked up out of the dark stairwell and back into the light. Her hand was on the handle of the sushi shop’s door when she thought of something else. Leaning back, she asked Ruby, “Who else is concerned about Riley?”

  “Lucas, the duke’s Steward.” Ruby’s disembodied voice came out of the darkness. She had already vanished back into the bricks. “A couple of eshu. One of the sluagh. Sin and Dex.”

  Tango blinked, “Really?”

  “Don’t underestimate them. They have to toe the line because of their position as knights, but they’re good guys, especially Sin, Dex...” Ruby paused. “I heard you were with him yesterday afternoon. Don’t think badly of him. He has a temper.”

  “And not much of a use for humans?” Tango had met a lot of Unseelie Kithain who felt that way.

  “No. But he’d die to protect another Kithain. If any of us can help you, we’ll try.”

  Tango let go of the door and stepped back down into the stairwell. “Then why am I doing all the work?” Ruby was silent for a moment. When she replied, her voice seemed to come from all around. “Because you can go back to San Francisco if the duke gets angry at you.”

  Tango suppressed a bitter twist of a grin and climbed out of the stairwell again, pulling open the door of the sushi shop. A wave of odor greeted her: fish, sharp vinegar, bitter seaweed. There were a couple of tourists lingering in the restaurant, but the sushi chef and the maitre d’ were talking by the bar. The maitre d’ snapped to attention and started over as she entered. Tango shook her head. “I just need to use the pay phone.” His disappointment was so obvious that Tango felt guilty. “I’ll pick up something on the way out,” she promised. “Where’s the phone?”

  He pointed down a hall toward the back of the restaurant. The phone jutted from the wall between the restaurant’s washrooms. From the ladies’ room came the loud rush of a toilet flushing. Tango grimaced. Not an ideal location for what she wanted to do, but good enough.

  She lifted the receiver of the telephone and dropped a quarter in the slot. Pulling a piece of paper out of her pocket, she dialed the number that she had looked up and written down earlier that day. The phone rang once or twice before a voice mail system picked it up. “Air Canada, bonjour. Welcome to Air Canada. Pour obtenir service en frangais, composez une. For service in English...” Tango didn’t bother listening to the message, but simply pressed two for English service, then the sequence of buttons that would get her to the department she wanted. She had spent ten minutes navigating the voice mail system that morning in preparation for this. She waited as the phone rang and rang before a real person finally answered it. “Air Canada customer relations. How may I help you?”

  “Good afternoon,” Tango answered briskly. “I’m calling from the Ministry of Health. I’d like to speak to someone who can provide me with a passenger list for one of yo
ur recent flights, please.”

  * * *

  “I’m sorry, but I can’t let you have the package yet. We’re still waiting for the request form to come through on the fax.” The receptionist pointed to a blue vinyl-covered chair beside a tired potted plant. “If you want to have a seat....”

  “Look, I have three other deliveries to make on this run and Mrs. Stanton at the Ministry said to get this thing as fast as I could. Do we really have to wait for a form?” Tango shifted a bicycle helmet in her hands. The duke’s magic account card and a whirlwind visit to a department store had gotten her the helmet, a backpack, bike shorts, an olive drab T-shirt, and a wide enough assortment of children’s stickers to plaster across the helmet and pack. Add her own sunglasses, hair tied back in a ponytail, some talcum powder to dim the glossy newness of the tight shorts, a fast jog around the block to work up a sweat, and an expression of fierce attitude, and Tango was a bicycle courier. Or at least close enough to one to get away with it if no one looked at her too closely. Her own clothes were balled up in the backpack.

  “I’m afraid so.” The receptionist smiled pleasantly. “It’s company policy. I could have faxed this to the Ministry of Health easily enough — Mrs. Stanton didn’t have to send you.”

  “Yeah, well, you know how it is. Mrs. Stanton’s brother-in-law runs the company and she likes to send us as much business as she can.” Tango gave the receptionist a broad, open grin. “Everybody wants a piece of the government money.” The receptionist didn’t seem particularly amused, but Tango kept her grin strong. “Come on,” she pleaded. “Maybe something’s holding up the fax. Should I have to wait on it? Can’t you just give me the package?” She pointed at a'thick manila envelope on the receptionist’s desk. “Is that it?”

  The receptionist moved her hand to cover the package. “No.”

  Tango took a deep breath. She wished she had Miranda’s ability to control people’s minds now! It would make getting the passenger list for Riley’s flight away from the receptionist much easier. ‘“No, it isn’t the package’ or ‘no, it is the package but you can’t have it’?”

  “It’s the package but I can’t let you take it yet.”

  A man came walking along the corridor behind the receptionist’s desk, a cup of coffee in his hands. He glanced up toward the commotion at the desk, then turned into an office. There was a nameplate beside the office door: E. Spielberg, Tango hesitated for a moment. One of her reasons for coming here as a bicycle courier was to avoid dealing with the same person she had talked to on the telephone as “Mrs. Stanton.” But on the other hand, she also knew that the fax the receptionist was waiting for was never going to come, and she needed that passenger list. She crossed her fingers and hoped Mr. Spielberg wouldn’t recognize her voice. “Look,” she told the woman loudly, pitching her voice to carry, “the Ministry of Health wants this pronto. I don’t know what was stirring up the chaos over at their office, but if this package is that

  important....”

  That got the man’s attention. He popped back out of his office, coffee still in hand. “What’s the problem, Pat?”

  “We’re still waiting on that form from Mrs. Stanton at the Ministry of Health, Mr. Spielberg. Everything else is ready to go.”

  “Don’t worry about the form. I’ll authorize the request.” Mr. Spielberg picked up the package from her desk and passed it to Tango. “Get this over to Mrs. Stanton right away.”

  “Yes, sir.” Tango pulled an artificially battered receipt book from a pocket of her backpack, scribbled in it, then tore out a receipt and handed it to Mr. Spielberg. “Thanks.” She smiled at him, then at the receptionist, as she shoved the package into her backpack. Suckers, she thought on the way out.

  She rode the elevator back down to the lobby of the office building. In the lobby, she winked at the young security guard she had flirted with to get into the Air Canada offices. There was a coffee shop in a row of small stores on the way out of the building, and she stopped for a large coffee to go. Under the shade of some modern, stainless steel sculpture in a parkette outside, she settled down and ripped open Mr. Spielberg’s package. There was a note inside from Mr. Spielberg to the nonexistent Mrs. Stanton: “Hope this helps. Air Canada is happy to work with you in tracking down the source of these illnesses. Elliott Spielberg.” It was a charming attempt at damage control. Tango snickered.

  The obstinate bureaucracy of the receptionist had been the hardest part of getting her hands on a passenger list for flight 2800 from San Francisco to

  Toronto. All Mrs. Stanton had had to tell Mr. Spielberg was that the Ministry of Health had received three reports of people on that flight having come down with food poisoning and that Air Canada’s cooperation in helping to contact the other passengers would be most appreciated, and he had fallen all over himself agreeing to have a list printed out immediately. He had even offered to have it couriered over to the Ministry offices at the airline’s expense, but Mrs. Stanton had insisted on sending a courier to collect it. It had all gone very smoothly, although Tango had had to stare down a tourist who’d wanted to use the bathroom in the sushi restaurant. A flushing toilet in a government office would have sounded very suspicious, even to Mr. Spielberg.

  Tango took a sip of her coffee and leafed through the pages. Everything that Mrs. Stanton had requested seemed to be there: names, phone numbers, street addresses, all neatly alphabetized. Tango frowned and took a closer look at the list, then snarled in frustration. There w’ere no seat assignments, and she didn’t know the mysterious woman’s name!

  “Damn!” she muttered, throwing the list to the ground. “Damn, damn, damn!” It would probably be trickier this time, but she might be able to make another call to Mr. Spielberg as Mrs. Stanton and convince him that she needed the seat assignments as well. To track the cases of food poisoning by position in the airplane cabin, maybe. She’d have to come up with some other way of getting the list, though. Having the same courier show up twice might be a bit much.

  Unless...

  She grabbed the list and flipped through it. She didn’t know the woman’s name, but she knew the name of the “little girl” who had been Riley. Cheryl. It wasn’t much to go on. Still, how many Cheryls could there have been on the flight? And if the woman with Cheryl had been pretending to be her mother, chances seemed good that she would be listed under the same last name.

  Tango made a complete pass through the list, then came back to two listings under H. Cheryl Hunter... and Atlanta Hunter. The name fit the platinum blond woman perfectly. Apartment 210, 608 Milverton Street, East York, Ontario. Tango had purchased a map of Metro Toronto along with her courier disguise. She dug it out of her backpack and checked to see that East York was part of the city. It was. She could go there without worrying about Epp’s geasa. She breathed a sigh of partial relief. Now all that she had to do was hope that the address was real and not a fake.

  She glanced at her watch. Quarter to three. The better part of six hours until sunset. If this woman had helped kidnap Riley, Tango didn’t want to try to go after her alone. And in spite of Ruby’s assurances, she didn’t quite trust Dex or Sin to help her. After dark, she would try to get in touch with Miranda again. Hopefully, the vampire would be willing to accompany her on a visit to Atlanta Hunter’s apartment.

  * * *

  Tango was waiting just where she had said she would be, near the entrance to the subway station. Miranda glanced at the dashboard clock as she pulled up to the curb. Half an hour late. At least she didn’t have to honk the horn to get the changeling’s attention — Tango saw her right away and came over. Miranda reached across and pushed the door open for her. “Sorry I’m late,” she apologized, “The play was longer than we expected.”

  Another lie, but when Tango had called her just after the sun went down, Miranda hadn’t exactly been able to say, “Why don’t I meet you later, after my pack has gone out and beaten someone to death?” Instead, she had invented something about a long-planned even
ing at an alternative theater, and tickets to a version of Hamlet written from Ophelia’s point of view, a favorite of Tolly’s. Which, of course, had necessitated a fast description of the pack. It was all only .a partial fabrication. There really was such a play, and Tolly loved it. Unfortunately, it had run last year, and then only for a brief time. The lead actress had vanished mysteriously, about the same time Tolly had gone missing for a few days. The mad vampire had come back with flowers in his hair, wet clothes, and a well-fed grin on his face.

  Tango had accepted her explanation, though, suggesting that they meet after the show. She had been very clear that this wasn’t a social engagement. It was serious, a potential link in finding Riley, and possibly dangerous. She would owe Miranda another favor, she had said; Miranda had rather hastily agreed in a way that she hoped didn’t sound too greedy. In fact, she had forgotten that she was supposed to be charging the changeling for her services. The urgent concern that Tango expressed whenever she talked about Riley made Miranda feel even worse for being late.

  It had taken longer to find a suitable victim than she had thought it would. Solomon’s plan to terrify Toronto was already working. Even early in the evening, and in spite of the apparent connection to sex, people were starting to move around in groups. Maybe they were guilty of a lot more than they seemed. Miranda watched Tango fasten her seatbelt and added, “You know, you really shouldn’t be waiting around on your own with these murders going on.” Maybe the comment would help erase any connections Tango had drawn between the vampires and the dead men from Hopeful.

  Tango snorted. “I wouldn’t mind meeting whoever is committing them. We’ll see what happens if they try to pick on me.” There was anger in her voice. “You heard about last night?”

  “Yes.” Miranda turned the car back onto the road. “Where to?”

  “Left here, straight for two blocks, then right. We’ll drive past the apartment first — I think we should be able to see if there are any lights on. Hopefully no one is home. There’s a parking lot a couple of blocks away. We’ll park there and walk back.”