Whiskey and Water (20 page)

"I've just got a feeling about those
kids," Peese said.

"Well, I'll tell you what," Don
said. "As soon as you want to charge them with something, I'll drive up to
Hartford and fetch them myself."

He grinned at Peese and turned his back,
pretending an urgent appointment with the men's room. Once inside, though, he
only washed his hands and checked his hair and tie.

It was probably a Fae crime. It
was
probably
a Fae crime, and he was a fool to keep chasing it. But maybe it was something
else.

And if it was, Don thought he knew who to
ask.

You don't just call people up and ask to
talk to them. It's ineffective. They respond much better to a face and a firm
handshake and a badge. And it's harder to hang up on somebody when he's
standing on your lawn.

Cop work was a lot like selling vacuum
cleaners.

Don walked down the dished granite steps
from the brownstone police station and into a morning much sunnier than the
earlier overcast had promised. Long rays warmed his scalp and shoulders,
picking out the odd gnarl of silver in his wood-brown hair. The city breathed
around him, a thousand pulses and rhythms blending seamlessly into one gigantic
beat.

He followed it down into the subways, and
ascended into the light again near the gray-white Romanesque revival facade of
the Museum of Natural History, where a tropical butterfly vivarium was that
particular winter's homesickness-inducing display. It was a nice day for a
walk, and Don crossed the street to pace under trees, along cobblestones, as he
strolled south on Central Park West, hands in his pockets.

That was where Whiskey picked up his scent
and recognized it, even without the overlaid reek of blood and magic from two
days before. Thomas' magic trick to locate Jane had worked, and led him and Whiskey
to Jane's building. Getting inside was more of a trick, however, and they had
spent some time watching people come and go, hoping to catch Jane leaving or
somebody they knew to be visiting her going in.

Whiskey nudged Thomas—the bard was half
drowsing on a wall at the edge of the park, under a barren tree—and folded his
arms. "Our ship of passage has arrived."

Pardon?" Thomas lurched upright,
rubbing his eyes. "I don't take your meaning."

Whiskey's gesture was slight, an uncurling
of his fingers. "Remember him?"

He would have been hard to forget: a
massive, square-shouldered black man in a well-cut suit, who was putting up a
pretty good fight against a middle-aged paunch. He was bigger than Ben Jonson,
and just as confident in his rolling stride.

"I do. You think he's going into the
tower?" Thomas nodded to an apartment complex across the street.

"If he doesn't, I'll be interested to
see where he does go." Whiskey stood, and Thomas stood beside him. The
poet hung a glamourie on their shoulders, a whistled phrase of pass-unseen, and
they followed, sidestepping midmorning joggers and commuters hurrying for
their trains in business suits and tennis shoes. A minor hazard of functional
invisibility.

Don found the building he was looking for
and paused before the entry to straighten his tie, frowning a bit at the
rippled smears of color sliding across the glass behind his reflection. The
optical illusion was so strong he actually turned to see if someone was
standing there, but the sidewalk was empty.

The doorman became considerably more
cooperative when Don showed him a badge. "Shall I call up for you,
Detective?"

"Just point me to the penthouse
elevator." Don had a pretty good idea that he'd call up anyway, as soon as
Don's back was turned, but it wasn't as if he had a warrant, or was even
checking out a lead.

Whistling, he followed the doorman's
directions across a marble atrium to the brass-doored elevator concealed behind
a potted palm. The elevator was smooth and spacious, with brass rails and
burled walnut paneling, but Don couldn't shake that ghosty feeling that
someone was standing behind him, staring over his shoulder.

It figured a wizard's tower would be
haunted.

Jane Andraste waited for him in the
elevator lobby when the doors scrolled back. He'd only known her from a
distance, back then, but the years out of the public eye had made a difference.
She looked frailer. An old woman now, in her pink Chanel suit and low-heeled
pumps, her hair gone stone-white instead of iron-gray. But she was perfect and
poised, delicate jewelry glinting at her throat and ears.

"Bringing trouble to my door,
Detective —

"Smith," he said, and stepped
out of the elevator. He had his folder in his hand; the ones with money always
wanted a long, hard look at the badge. But she barely glanced at it and stood
aside, gesturing him on, gesturing him in.

Whiskey and Thomas had followed him,
cloaked by Thomas' magic, crowding the far wall of the elevator. They moved for
the doors as quickly as they could without noise and without stepping on
Detective Smith's heels. The doors whisked closed behind them as Thomas swept
his cloak out of the way, and they entered a small elevator lobby, white-walled
and marble-floored, bright with sun from a skylight. An archway led to a bigger
room beyond, and through it could be glimpsed stark modern furniture and the
corners of richly framed art.

"Trouble?" Don said.

Jane brought her hands together and
fiddled one cold iron ring. She halted when the elevator closed, so abruptly
Don almost walked into her.

"You can drop the pass-unseen,"
she said, without turning. "I know you're there, although what a Mage I've
never met is doing in New York, I haven't the faintest. And walking alongside a
Wild Fae and a mortal man. What an interesting alliance."

The poet almost choked on his spell.
"Archmage," he said. "I'm an idiot." Because of course
things had changed in four hundred years, and what had worked a charm on
Richard Baines wouldn't necessarily work on Jane Andraste.

He let his pretenses fall.

Don had rounded when Thomas spoke. His
eyes widened, and he reached, reflexively, under his coat before he froze. He
might have expected all sorts of things of Jane Andraste, but materializing a blue-eyed,
six-foot-five black man in an immaculate white suit—and a considerably shorter
dirty blond dressed for a Renaissance festival — hadn't been high on the list.
"Son of a bitch —"

Jane folded her hands before her hips,
demure as a girl. It should have been a collar of pearls glowing at her throat,
and not winking marcasites. "Oh," she said. "I know you after
all."

I have never had the pleasure of a
personal introduction," Thomas said. "I presume you are Mistress Andraste."

You're four hundred years dead, on the
books. Am I to understand the Master of Records was misinformed?"

He stepped forward, gallantly, and made a
bow. "Perhaps a little. But it is only because we are enemies."

She smiled a little purse-lipped smile.
"Quite. And you, Whiskey. Brave to come after a wizard in her tower. I
assume you are not here as Her Majesty's messenger?"

Whiskey scraped a foot across the marble
floor and looked everywhere but at Jane Andraste. "Mmmm," she said.
"I thought not. So if you're not here to bargain, then you are here to
assassinate. Well, have at me."

Don, who had been watching the
conversation with the brow-furrowed attention of a tennis fan at a football
match, stepped forward, his hand upraised. "Just
one
minute,
please! Now, nobody's laying a hand on you, Mrs. Andraste. And I don't know who
these people are — "

"One of them is not precisely a
person, Detective," she said, unbuttoning her suit jacket. She shrugged
it down her shoulders and let it slide from her wrists unregarded. In an
off-white silk shell and the trim rose-colored skirt, slack-fleshed arms folded
over her chest to show the peridot bracelet, she looked a peculiar warrior. But
Don noticed that the big guy stepped back nonetheless, and not as if shocked by
her charge of intended murder. No, as if he were nerving himself to take her
on, and wasn't sure he had the muscle to do it.

Which was ridiculous; he was twice her
size. But his head went back and forth as if he were a horse trying to shake
off a bit, and his nostrils flared.

Jane reached up and pulled a lock of hair
loose from her chignon. It curled coarse and colorless between her fingers as
she combed them to the end, and pulled it taut. "Do you think I don't have
the power to do it? I know you carry her name, and I gave her that name,
water-horse.
By my hand and my heart, by the name of your soul
..."

"Wrong choice," Whiskey said,
and grinned. "I've already danced that dance with your daughter." He
stepped forward, reaching for her wrist. Don grabbed his arm, squeezing hard
enough that bone should have ground on bone, and the tall Fae—he had to be a
Fae—knocked him off like a kid tossing aside an unwanted doll. Don went down on
his ass, sliding on the stone tiles, shocked into a yelp. He burrowed for his
piece, fingers closing on warm metal and crosshatched black plastic, and had no
idea what happened next except the little blond guy made some sort of negligent
sideways gesture and Don froze, locked in place as if by an electrical current.
He pushed against it—
dammit, there are not supposed to be Fae in my city—
and
surely the semiautomatic was a big enough chunk of steel to break a Faerie
enchantment, and his fingers were
on
it, and these two were going to
kill Jane Andraste right in front of him before he could ask her what the hell
had happened to the girl —

He strained, fingers aching, every nerve
and muscle in hand and wrist and elbow stretched against the spell, as the big
guy in the white suit started to swell, to bulge in unnatural places like a
horror-movie monster, until he blurred and a spotted stallion snorted and pawed
in his place, droplets scattering through sunlight from his shaken mane. The
creature's eyes grew huge, glaring like the blue fire closest to the wick
before it sears itself into invisibility. He stepped forward, water flooding
from his hooves, wetting Don's shoes and trouser legs as it puddled on the
stone. Beside him, the blond guy had yanked a glittering blade from somewhere
under his cloak and was advancing as well.

The horse reared up, an argument against
cathedral ceilings, hammered silver gleaming on his forehooves. And Jane still
stood calmly, ropy old-woman's arms folded again, that single lock of hair drifting
against her cheek as she breathed. The Kelpie towered over her, and she saw his
crushing hooves and white-rimmed eyes.

And she brought him crashing to the tile
with a gesture of her hand. Enough," she said. "Enough."

Whiskey fell like a sliding mountain,
marble splitting—
splintering—
under his hooves and knees. The whole
building pitched, a roll and drop like a seismic shock, and blood dripped
dilute pink down his fetlocks when he struggled up.

A hand raised, a flat palm, and she turned
the poet's blade without even turning her eyes. She caught his wrist, pressing
iron to skin, and smiled when he showed no pain. "Mortal man."

Once," he answered, as she drew him
close, unresisting. The strength she used was greater than her own; she stood
in her own tower, and the walls and beams and the deep roots into the earth
themselves were her strength, in this place. An alarm rattled, distantly.
Overhead sprinklers kicked on, two, four, eight, dragging Jane's hair into her
eyes, sluicing off the poet's cloak and soaking his shoulders.

Children," she said. "Children
who don't observe the niceties." He wore no rings at all, neither steel nor
silver, and not on any finger, but every finger bore scars at the root, round
and round. "Christofer Marley," she said. "Excommunicate of the
Order. What is your purpose?"

"Your destruction, archmage," he
said calmly, setting his heels. Her touch was a command; he could no more
struggle against it than Whiskey could advance past the wall of her other,
upheld hand. The Prometheans dealt in symbols and constructs, real and
imaginary. There were forms, as she insisted, and she was
enforcing
them.

"Tell me why, Christofer."

"That is not my name anymore, madam.
Nor am I numbered among the Prometheans, not for some little while now."

"It's my place to say who is or is
not so numbered," she said. She looked him in the eyes, and smiled.
"So tell me, Christoferus Magus, why is it that you seek my death?"

He heard Whiskey breathing like a pipe
organ, leaning, straining against the archmage's magic, his hooves slipping on
the broken stone, rattling and cracking it. But they were in her tower, and as
soon as she had noticed them, they had been doomed. Jane Andraste was a
Promethean archmage: in her tower, she could draw on the strength of all those
who swore fealty to her. She was all but untouchable here.

Still, there were forms. And Jane Andraste
was not the only one who could exploit forms. There was one way to force her
out of her tower, and to force her to rely only on her own strength to defend herself.
All it required was that the poet challenge her as an equal.