Whiskey and Water (16 page)

"Got rundown chicken ready
here," Monette said.

"Rundown and rice."

"I should warm it up?"

"Cold is fine," he said, and she
fixed him a plate while he sat down and drank his coffee, then kissed the top
of his head and went off to bed.

A dream of opalescent eyes flashing
shattered planes of color awakened him Tuesday morning, fretful and cold,
before the alarm. He slept with the window open when he could, but that wasn't
the reason for the chill on the back of his neck. Sweat beaded his forehead
over goose-flesh, and his hands were shaking as he grabbed the edge of his
water bed and swung his legs out from under the burgundy comforter.

"Shit." He hadn't had it this
bad since Times Square—which was to say, ever. He pushed himself out of bed,
carpet harsh underfoot, and reeled to the bathroom to inspect his clammy skin
under green fluorescent light. He groaned. The frosted window by the toilet
was cold, and he leaned his shoulder on it while he got yesterday's coffee out
of his system. His gut clenched and he gritted his teeth. The taste of toothpaste
didn't soothe his nausea, but he brushed twice anyway, hard enough that pink
curled through white foam when he spat in the rust-stained sink.

It didn't make him feel clean, and neither
did the shower.

Hot water and steam eased his chill. But
they didn't clear his memory of those gigantic eyes, observing, weighing.

Don had been at Times Square, when he was
still another anonymous figure in midnight blue. Don had seen the Dragon. And
more, the Dragon had seen him. Had noticed him, and bowed her great head down
to look him in the eye. He'd fallen to his knees under her regard, and he'd
been prone to night terrors ever since, and to knowing things he wasn't
supposed to know. Like the fact that those two scared kids had had nothing to
do with the murder of Althea Benning, and that it wasn't just a coincidence
that Matthew Szczegielniak had turned up where he'd turned up, as awkwardly and
habitually close to the action as any Peter Parker or Clark Kent.

Any cop knows that there are people in his
city who don't seem important and whose appearances are deceptive. They're
campaign coordinators, quiet millionaires, the unacknowledged illegitimate children
of important men. They're the childhood next-door neighbors of senators.
They're investigative reporters without a talent for self-promotion, whose
scoops get appropriated by the guy with the television hair. They're the guys
the mayor calls at two in the morning when the martinis aren't helping him
sleep.

Don Smith knew who Matthew Szczegielniak
was, when he wasn't a junior professor and student of English literature. And
if Don hadn't known it just from shaking Dr. Szczegielniak's hand the very
first time he turned up unexpectedly and dropped a few shy and useful hints
about some weird-ass crime, he would have known it when he discovered who paid
his rent.

Jane Andraste was one of the people whose
importance
wasn't
transparent, even now that she was back in private
practice and semiretired. At first Don had assumed Szczegielniak was her
much-younger lover, a kept man, a rich woman's toy. But there wasn't any
evidence of that; they never spoke, and they certainly never saw each other.
And Andraste was widowed and Szczegielniak never married, and it wasn't as if
there was much of a scandal in a romance that couldn't even be called
May-December, although August-November might come close.

So it wasn't that. And it wasn't
political. But whatever it was, Jane Andraste had been at Times Square too.

Don stepped out of the shower while
wrapping a towel around his waist. The sky was still dark beyond the window,
and in the bedroom his alarm had started pinging. He shut it off, hoping it
hadn't woken his mother, and sat on the bed in front of the open closet door
considering his options.

Don had his own suspicions about Times
Square, and Jane Andraste's part in it . . . and why she was supporting
somebody who, as near as Don could figure, couldn't stand her but was willing
to take her money if it freed him up to investigate paranormal problems in the
city.

Don was a good enough cop to notice that
she'd been paying Szczegielniak's bills for years, long before Times Square,
and that she'd also been paying medical costs for Szczegielniak's
institutionalized brother, who had vanished without a trace around that same
time.

It didn't add up to murder, necessarily.
But it added up.

And now here was a real murder, a bloody
murder, a girl in an alley half-eaten to the bone. And here was Dr.
Szczegielniak again, and a Fae connection, and Jane Andraste. Again.

And seven years after the day after Times
Square, here was Detective Don Smith waking before sunrise with the memory of
a black iron Dragon stirring within.

The coffeemaker perked in the kitchen,
which meant his alarm had woken Mama up. Don shook off his lethargy and stood.
He found the black pants that went with his black pinstriped suit coat, and a
shirt and tie in complementary shades of royal blue, and stuffed his feet into
his shoes before he went to check his e-mail.

Mama intercepted him with a mug of coffee
as he was coming into the living room. He cupped it in both hands, breathing
steam gratefully, and she glowered up at him. Both of Tiyah Smith's children dwarfed
her, and both of them still obeyed her with indoctrinated immediacy.

"You had a bad day, Monette
saying?" Tiyah put her hand on his chest. "Sit. Let's talk about
it."

"Not much to tell," he said,
perching on the edge of the couch. "I got a murder. I think the thing is magic,
but they won't let me pass it to the FBI."

"Why so?"

"Politics." Don shrugged.
"You know how it goes." He sipped his coffee, rolling it over his
tongue. "No glory for the city if it's the FBI who crack the case. You
know."

She'd never sat down, just hovered—the way
she did—and fiddled her fingertips against her waistband. "And you don't
want none of that glory?"

"Just don't want to mess up something
crucial." He lifted the coffee to his lips, but didn't taste it. The admission
made him sick, along with the unsaid word.
Again.

You good, my boy," Mama said.
"But you must take a chance again someday, Isaih. You can't always look
for the door out." She patted him on the head and brushed past him, bound
for the kitchen. "What you want for breakfast?"

Donall lowered the coffee cup and thought
about it, but his deliberations kept being diverted by the uneasy conviction
that he'd just witnessed the opening salvo in another war.

*                                                           *       *

Àine stood on the battlements of a white
castle in Faerie and held up her hands to the moon. Its blue light drenched
her, glistened off her glossy ebony hair and her ivory face and her lips red as
blood scattered in snow on a windowsill. Her gown drooped in sunflower-embroidered
pleats from her arms as she raised them, her train puddling behind her feet in
a gold and green swirl. A tiara shimmered, diamonds like dew in her hair.

She was the Queen of the Unseelie court.
She was Leannan Sidhe, a fairy-muse with old blood on her tongue. The fangs
that dimpled her lip were not for show.

She was waiting for something with wings.

It wasn't long in coming, hawk's body
making a cross against the moon, though the sharp-edged shadow it cast across
her face was the shadow not of a hawk but of a man.

It landed on the battlements beside her,
wings cupping air like a gargantuan pelican, the stag's head tossed up as it
checked. Cold light turned moss-green wings matte black and cast no reflections
on the fluted antlers adorning its long-nosed head: a stag's head, except for
the blood on its breath and the teeth that glinted cold silver when it smiled.

"Cat Anna," it said. "I
have done as you bid."

Àine reached up over her head and smoothed
the lanceolate feathers at its nape. They might be black in moonlight, but the
margins were gilt. The peryton clucked and rubbed into her hand, talons flexing
on the white, white battlement. "You have done well, Orfeo. What
intelligence?"

"I saw no unicorn." It settled
feathers with a rustle and turned its head to preen, careful of her flesh and
the razor-edged antlers. "There are Fae hunting the city. All that mortal
meat, all so unwary."

"Aye. My children will not be
forbidden the hunt. Let Jane Maga entreat with her daughter and the Daoine. I'll
not bend to Elaine's command."

"I do not think the archmage will
have entreaty on her mind." Orfeo permitted Àine to stroke warm velvet
skin and rub between its eyes. She did so, as careful of her nails as the
peryton was of its horns.

"Dear Orfeo," she said.
"Let Hell and Heaven and the iron world claw each other's throats, and
bring Elaine down with them when they fall."

"We lack for nothing."

Àine laughed brightly. "We lack a
great many things, brave one. We've traded an overlord for a mistress. But that's
just a matter for patience, with our new allies. And as you're content so long
as you have meat, we're in no hurry at all."

Madman Across the Water

J
ewels hadn't expected to be stripped out of her
filthy skirt, sweater, tank top, and sandals like a horse being untacked. It
was disconcerting—but she was comfortable in her skin, armored in ink and
scars and silver.

She would not show them fear. Not here.
Not now that she was, finally,
here.

And she was so entranced by the chamber
she found herself in and the creature doing the undressing that she barely
raised a hand in protest. She'd never been in a castle before, and she'd had
the idea that they would be drafty, tattered places, with rough mortar and bits
of stonework protruding at odd angles. But the room they brought her to was
cozy, a little chamber under an angle of roof with two dormered windows. Light
prismatized through the bevels on dozens of watery diamond-shaped panes,
scattering rainbow splinters on the bed, the clothespress, and the wall.

The Fae servant that peeled her clothes
off with long twiggy fingers never spoke. It was a creature like a doll twisted
of shredded alder bark, with a face that was mostly a suggestion of knots and
undulations except for quick alert eyes, soft as brown water under mottled
lids. It unbraided her hair gently and combed snarls away with a comb dipped in
scented oil.

The Fae was hesitant to touch her at first
because of the colors and metal in her skin, the confident scars across her
back and shoulder blades that delineated a phoenix arising in glory before a
tattered sun whose rays were picked out in brilliant red and orange knotwork.
The braid around her hairline extended two of those rays, ink twisting into
scar at the base of her skull. Gently, the creature reached out one tapered
fingertip and aimed it at the loop of metal through her lower lip.

It didn't feel a pins-and-needles prickle
across the little space, and she seemed to understand the gesture.
"Silver," she said, touching it. "And there's no iron in my
tats. The black is logwood. You can touch . . ."

It did, running a fingertip down the bony
edge of her scapula. The scars twisted in slick ridges across the softness of
her skin, and it understood. Scars, like Kadiska's scars. Some mortal alchemy.
The girl was wrong, though; there was iron under her skin. Not much, but it
felt like a current, a trickle, a tickle. Enough to tingle, not enough to burn.
The Fae let its hand fall away, and she turned and smiled, showing dots of
color and more wire on her teeth.

"Bath?" she said, so the Fae
showed her a corner opposite the bed, screened from the room, just where it
would get the benefit of the light through the southern window. She couldn't
remember seeing these dormers from the outside of the palace—though the smooth
translucent golden stone was right—and the gardens below weren't the ones they
had passed through. Voices floated up to the window, women's voices, sounding
pleased.

There were steps up the side of the
claw-footed tub. She ascended, pausing at the top for the different angle into
the gardens, and found herself looking into the bead-shiny black eye of a raven
with a drooping wing as it settled itself on the window ledge.
"Shoo," she said, but she didn't mean it.

Slick hair fell over her shoulder when she
leaned down to brace one hand on the edge of the tub, and floating rainbows
spiraled from the strands as she slipped into the water. The scent of the oil
refreshed; roses and something Jewels didn't know the name of: dragonsblood incense,
a deep resinous scent that clung to her skin like smoke. Hot water stung the
raw places her sandals had rubbed on her feet. She gasped, and jerked forward
before she settled back.

The tub was a revelation, deep and broad,
the bottom curved to accommodate her body. She sighed and leaned back, the
water rising to the points of her breasts, heat saturating her joints, relaxing
her neck until her head lolled against the scrollwork.

The raven watched, expressionless, as the
alder-doll Fae loomed alongside the bathtub and offered the child a sponge
dripping with scented suds. She took it, rubbery roughness dimpling under her
fingers, soap clouding limpid clarity when it dripped into the bathwater. The
scent of roses grew stronger, twining the air currents that wound in and out of
the open windows. The raven flapped for balance in a freshening breeze. Its
old injury twinged: it wasn't the wing, but the breast muscle, a wound long
healed but never forgotten.