Not Your Ordinary Faerie Tale (17 page)

“And she’s a one-woman border patrol?”

“She makes the decisions about who passes, yes.
Very, very rarely someone discovers a new door that has opened on its own, but those are shut as soon as they are discovered.
I heard that the one leading to the Winter Court was closed just recently after some sort of incident there.”

Corinne frowned.
“Then how did Seoc get here to begin with?
For that matter, how could you have gotten here in the past like you said you have?”

“I had permission,” he said.
“And we think Seoc snuck through one of the palace doors when a room was left unguarded.”

Her eyebrows climbed toward her hairline.
“I bet that as the head of the Queen’s Guard, that really chaps your ass, doesn’t it?”

He frowned.
“It doesn’t make me happy.
While I had a man stationed in the room the night Seoc went through, he was distracted from his duty, and it is ultimately my responsibility to make sure that kind of thing doesn’t happen.”

“I wasn’t saying it’s your fault.
I just want to have my facts straight.”

“Well, the fact is it doesn’t matter how Seoc got here, because he’s here now and so are the five doors back to Faerie.
But those are the only doors on
Ithir
.
A door can lead to any number of alternate dimensions; Faerie is only one of them.
The only way for Seoc to tell where a door goes is to have been told in advance, or to try it and see what happens.”

“And he’s the reason why we’re having this conversation.”
She frowned.
“Wasn’t the point of this conversation originally to discuss why Walter Hibbish disappeared?”

He had to give her points for persistence.
“I’m getting to that.”

“Get faster.”

“Fine.
I think Hibbish disappeared because Seoc was experimenting with the doors and needed someone to test them on.”

Her eyes widened.
“You think Seoc killed Hibbish?”

“No, I think he sent him through a door.”

Corinne did her best to wrap her mind around the information Luc was giving her, but she just didn’t think her brain was that flexible.
Maybe she should look into mental yoga.

She shook her head.
“But you just said that the Faerie Queen closed all the doors between
Ith
—um, between here and Faerie.
So how did Seoc send Hibbish through one?”

“He didn’t.
At least, he didn’t send Hibbish through to Faerie.
I think he sent him into limbo.”

Her jaw dropped so hard, she almost heard a crash.
“He sent that guy into eternal nothingness?”

Luc’s mouth curved in a brief grin.
“Not exactly.
Limbo isn’t any one specific place.
It’s what we call the place between any two worlds.
It doesn’t technically exist, so a being who can do magic can shape it to be anything he or she wants.”

Corinne grimaced.
“You sound like a theoretical physicist.”

She knew whereof she spoke.
She’d dated a theoretical physicist for a while in college.
She still got occasional flashback headaches.

“Okay, so Hibbish is…somewhere that’s not here and not Faerie.
But why was Seoc experimenting with the doors?
Are you telling me he came to—er, he came here without already knowing what door he’d need to get back?
No one could be that stupid.”

“You haven’t met Seoc.”

“Huh?”

“He’s exactly that stupid.
Now I think he’s looking for the doorway back.”

“You’re kidding me.”

He shook his head.
“I wish.
One of the five remaining Faerie doors is here in Manhattan.”
He topped off his tea and added a fresh slice of lemon.
“Mab opened a new door for me when she gave me permission to come here, but she’s the only being I know capable of still using that kind of magic.
Seoc needs to know where the permanent door is, and I think he’s trying to find it.”

“But what’s so bad about that?
If all of you want him to go back to Faerie, and he’s trying to find his way back there, why not just let him?
Or better yet, help him find it and get him home even quicker.”

“Because I don’t think he’s looking for it so he can use it to go home.
I think he’s looking for it so he can prop it permanently open.”

He said it so gravely and with such a forbidding frown on his face that Corinne could only speculate.
“And that would be a bad thing.”

He nodded.
“That would be the thing I told you about last night.
That would allow anyone and anything that wanted to travel between our worlds to do it.
That would upset the balance between them.
That would do all those bad things I told you about last night.”

Corinne blew out a breath.
“Right.
So then it’s important for us to stop him.”

“You could say that.
But first, we have to find him.”

“True.”
She drained her coffee mug and frowned.
“Well, I was going to focus this afternoon on finding Hibbish.
He gave the most complete statement about seeing Seoc, so it made sense that he’d be able to give us the most details, but his sighting wasn’t the most recent.”

“Whose was?”

Corinne pulled out the notebook to double-check.
“Rabbi Aaronson.
He reportedly spotted Seoc near his synagogue in Morningside Heights.”

“That’s farther uptown, isn’t it?”

She nodded.
“North of Central Park.
And that was just three days ago.”
She reached for her cell phone.
“He was one of the calls I made this morning.
I left my number on his office machine.
Let me see if he called back.”

He watched while Corinne dialed her voice mail, seeing her impatience grow as she navigated through the prompts to listen to her new messages.
When he saw her go pale, he knew something was very wrong.

“What?”
He reached across the table to cover her hand with his.
Her fingers had gone icy cold.

Corinne shook her head and put the cell on speaker before laying the phone down between them.

“This message is for a Corinne D’Alessandro.”
The woman’s voice sounded think and shaky, as if she were very old or very upset.
“Ms.
D’Alessandro, this is Rebeccah Silver from the Temple Beth Elohim and the office of Rabbi Levi Aaronson.
We received your request for an interview, but I’m afraid that Dr.
Aaronson has…Dr.
Aaronson was killed last night in a mugging near his home.
I hope—” She broke off, drew a raspy breath.
“I hope you’ll understand if I refer you to the media relations office at the Jewish Theological Seminary with further questions.”

Corinne pressed the button to end the call.
For several minutes, they both remained silent, considering the implications.
For her part, Corinne wasn’t quite sure what to make of the news.
This was New York.
Muggings happened, and sometimes, people died; still, this was at least the third coincidental event to make her list since she’d first heard about sightings of an elf on the streets of Manhattan.
So far, nothing had linked directly to the subject of the sightings, but the questions were beginning to pile up.

She spoke first.
“You don’t think that Seoc would have—”

“No.”
Luc spoke firmly.
“I can’t picture it.
You don’t know Seoc, but he’s…he’s just a boy.
He’s spoiled and immature and willful, and I don’t think he’s stopped one time in his ridiculous life to consider the consequences of his actions, but he’s not a killer.
I don’t know if he’d be able to manage a kill if he tried.”

Corinne drew back.
This was news to her.
“When you say boy, you don’t mean he’s a child, do you?”

“No, of course not.
He’s legally an adult, though not by much, according to Fae standards.
He’s only just over three hundred.
But he’s not a child; just an idiot.”

Corinne choked on her coffee.
“Three hundred?
As in
three hundred years old
?”

“About that.
Three hundred and seven or eight, I think.”

“And you call that a child?
What are you?
Four thousand?
Give or take?”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”
He shot her an impatient stare.
“I’m only nine hundred and twenty-seven.”

“Oh, well, I guess you’re lucky Dmitri doesn’t make you sit at the kids’ table for Thanksgiving dinner!”
Corinne set her mug down with shaking hands.
If only it were filled with vodka instead of Kenya select.
“Nine hundred twenty-seven.
Holy Jesus.”

Some of her distress must finally have filtered through to Luc.
His expression softened and he reached for her hands, cupping his fingers around hers.
“Try not to panic,” he said.
“Time is different in Faerie, and the Fae age differently from humans.
Technically I’ve lived somewhere in the neighborhood of that many human years, but to my people I’m in my prime, nothing more.
Think of me being around, oh, thirty-five or thirty-six.”

Her fingers continued to tremble.
“Is that what it comes out to in the New Math?”

He chuckled.

Corinne struggled to breathe slowly and deeply.

She could handle this; really she could.
So what if the newest man in her life was older than the country she lived in?
Was that really such a big deal?
After all, Reggie was one of her best friends, and Reggie’s husband was even older.
He’d topped a thousand before the two of them even met, which meant Luc was practically wet behind the ears in comparison.

Yup, wet behind his cute, pointy ears.

“Oh, God.”

Luc squeezed her fingers.
“Do you need to put your head between your legs?”

“I’m not going to pass out.”
Probably.
“I just…I need a minute to cope, that’s all.
Just give me a minute.”

He fell obediently silent.

Okay,
Corinne told herself, taking another deep breath.
Think about this calmly.
Rationally.
Age was just a number, right?
A concept humanity had agreed upon to keep track of the passage of time.
The only reason it was important to a relationship was because it often indicated how long two people might have together and how similar their backgrounds and perspectives were likely to be.
Considering that her background and Luc’s had happened in different dimesions, they could pretty much assume the “shared experiences” ship had sailed.
How else was age important to them?

“Oh, shit, are you going to live forever and never age a day, while I get old and wrinkled and ugly until you find me repulsive and abandon me like a used-up tube of toothpaste?”

Luc let her babble out the question, then nodded.
“Absolutely.”

“Luc!”

He squeezed her hands.
“Hey, my answer wasn’t any more ridiculous than your question.
Don’t be foolish.”

“I’m not being foolish.
Tell me the truth.
Are you?
Going to live forever and never age,” she added hastily when his expression began to turn angry.
“I think that’s something I have a right to know.”

He made a face.
“It’s complicated.
Like I said, the Fae age differently from humans, and time passes differently in the two worlds.
For the moment, let’s just say that in Faerie I’ll age like any other Fae, but while I’m in
Ithir
I’ll age more like a human would.
Now can we please stop worrying about nonsense and get back to the problem at hand.”

“I wouldn’t call it nonsense,” Corinne muttered, squeezing his hands back, “but yes, we can get back to Seoc.”

“Good.”
He leaned across the table and brushed her mouth with his.

“It’s not that much more pleasant a topic, though.
You’re certain he couldn’t be responsible for Rabbi Aaronson’s death?”

“As certain as I can be without having witnessed it myself.
I honestly don’t think Seoc is capable of that kind of violence.”

“I believe you,” she reassured him.
“If you think Seoc didn’t do it, then he didn’t do it.
But it seems like too big a coincidence that one of the witnesses to Seoc’s little magic shows is missing and now another one is dead.
It makes more sense if you assume the events are related somehow.”

“I agree, but that’s my gut talking.
I don’t see that we have any hard evidence to back up the feeling.”

“You’re right.
We don’t.”
Corinne eased her hands from his and picked up her phone.
“Fortunately, I think I know where we might start looking for some.”

When Corinne had told Luc that she had contacts who might be able to give them a little more information on Rabbi Aaronson’s murder, he’d guessed she was referring to someone on the police force.
Reporters were always talking to the police in the novels he read when he visited the mortal world.
As it turned out, though, his heartmate must read an entirely different sort of novel.
Corinne did have a contact in the police department, but she spoke to him briefly on the phone, then swung by her apartment to pick up a fax he’d sent her before leading Luc back outside and through Manhattan’s grid of streets to the East Side and the cool corridors of the city morgue.

The sign in the lobby had caught his attention first:

Let conversation cease; let laughter flee.
This is the place where death delights in helping the living.

It was the kind of message that stuck with a man.

And gave him a serious case of the heebie-jeebies.

“You couldn’t have asked these people for a fax and gone to visit the police station instead?”
He kept his voice low, whether out of respect or unease, he couldn’t be certain.

“Everything McMartin had to tell me could be written down,” she said, not even bother to glance back at him as she led the way to the building’s basement.
“Dr.
Tortelli can show me things that I’d never understand if I just read about them.
I’m a bright girl, but I never did manage to fit in the time for medical school.”