Whiskey and Water (22 page)

Felix knew the way up. As a crackle of
discharged energies still rattled the apartment complex, he adopted valor as
the better part of discretion, crossed Central Park West against the light,
leaning on his luck hard and bending it in the process but not quite breaking
it, and made the doorman think he was flashing a badge as he galloped past. The
elevator awaited.

The funny part was, he thought—impatiently
counting flashing numbers—that he wasn't sure to whose defense he was
charging. Or what he thought he would do when he got there. He held on tight to
his luck all the way up, white-knuckled with the grip.

It was over by the time the elevator doors
opened. Jane, her cream-colored blouse plastered to her skin and revealing
details of her lingerie, was helping the equally soaked cop to his feet, and
neither the Kelpie nor his associate was visible. She turned at the
ding
of
the elevator, frowning in expectation of building security, and stopped dead as
Felix put his hand on the door to prevent it from closing in his face. He
killed the sprinkler system with a sigil sketched left-handed on air, and
picked his way across shattered tiles, wet marble dust gritting under his
shoes.

"I see my assistance wasn't required
after all."

"Felix," she said, the detective
forgotten as she squatted to pick up her soggy jacket. "What on earth are
you doing here?"

"Well," he said, as dryly as
possible, "I came to slay a monster for you, but I hope you'll settle for
the key to a murder mystery." He gestured to the cracked stone and
dripping sprinkler heads. "Thaumaturgical error, or equipment
failure?"

"Pitched battle." She hadn't
moved, heels set and jacket clenched in ringed fingers.
"Do
tell me
what you want."

He stopped, not quite willing to push past
her to enter her space, and aware—if Jane wasn't—of the weight of the
detective's attention. "I want what I want," he said. "My place
at your right hand, as the cliché goes."

"Power."

"That's wrong?" The arched
eyebrow and the wrinkled nose belied a coldly sardonic smile. Same old Felix.

No," she admitted. "One second.
Let me call the alarm company and tell them it was a malfunction before I wind
up paying for a ladder truck."

She turned away and fussed with her cell
phone briefly—damp, but functional—and then turned back. "And you think
you can buy that? Your old job back?"

I think I can earn it," he said.
"Should we be talking so frankly in front of your friend?" His gaze
flicked to Smith, and away, back to -Jane's face. Earnest and friendly and
nothing more than a calculated surface, a mirror reflecting expectations.

Don won't talk," she said, and made
it so with a gesture. Whatever had touched him—and she meant to get to the
bottom of that at her earnest convenience—he had no mastery of it. Which made
him valuable. It tickled her bones, a tingle of excitement in her fingertips.
For the first time in seven years, she felt hope, like a brush of feathers on
her hair.
Fuck
the vultures, her poor, scavenged, half-talented apprentices
of whom only Christian had any potential at all.

Prometheus was not dead.

Jane said, "We've found common ground
for an alliance, haven't we?" And Smith nodded, confirming her assessment.

Felix wet his lips. Double or nothing.
"The murder," he said. "The Otherkin girl."

Jane hadn't expected him to know. It
showed in the faint relaxation across her cheeks, the slight flattening of her
smile. "What do you know?"

"Something for nothing, Jane?"

Her hand flicked dismissively beads
rattling on the turn of her wrist. "You want New York. I can't give you
New York. It doesn't
like
you anymore, Felix. It doesn't even like
me."

"It wouldn't have a choice, would it?
If Matthew were gone?"

"Whoa," Don interrupted.
"What you're going to say, don't say that. Felix, that's your name? Felix,
don't say that."

"I don't mean
murder,"
Felix
said, tiredly. "More like a sacking. Or a relocation. Jane, I need
something
after the manner of a guarantee.'

She thought about it.
"Prometheus."

"Yes."

"You still have the ring."

He smiled, and held up his hand.

"Right," she said.
"Detective, you should probably go now, unless you plan to arrest
somebody, or you have a warrant you haven't happened to show me."

"Oh, no," Smith said. "That
dead girl's my problem, Mrs. Andraste. I'm staying right here." She
turned, and frowned. "It's a Fae matter, Detective."

"It's a murder," he said, and
crossed his arms.

Felix held his tongue, though the drip of
water grew louder in his ears each moment. Finally, Jane snorted, flicked
strings of hair from her eyes, and clapped her hands together like Pilate
calling for a bowl of water.

"On your head be it," she said,
and even Felix almost didn't see the manipulation. "We'll just have to extend
your jurisdiction. Donall Smith."

"Yes, ma am? Brows beetling over
watchful eyes.

"Do you solemnly swear, avow, aver,
and affirm that you will uphold justice in the service of humankind, that the
Promethean flame of art and science may be evermore preserved in the
furtherance of that service, and the sacrifice of the fire-bringer
remembered?"

Smith thought it through before he
answered, and Felix, for a moment, wasn't sure which way he'd choose. But then
his lips thinned and he nodded, slowly, thoughtfully. "To serve and
protect? I can promise that. Is that all there is to it?"

"That's all there is to it,"
Jane said. "Felix, give that ring of yours to Don. I'll get you a new one
in a minute. Don, welcome to the Prometheus Club. And now Felix will explain
who killed your murder victim. Won't you, Felix?"

So easy. As easy as that. Felix pulled his
ring off and slipped it on Don's finger like a wedding band. It fit, just
barely, as they always did — despite the size disparity in their hands.
"Peryton," he said, over his shoulder to Jane. "A bound one.
Fae. I don't have the name of its master yet, but I will."

How'd you find that out?"

Because New York doesn't like me anymore
doesn't mean I can't hear when I choose to listen. I called up the memory of
its shadow in the alley, and its claw marks on a roof nearby. There aren't too many
monsters with an eagle's talons and a man's reflection."

"Nothing Matthew couldn't have
done."

Felix smiled. "If you hadn't
intentionally limited his education. Admit it, Jane. You missed me." We
need better weapons. We need allies. I have half-trained apprentices, not
warriors."

I beg your pardon," Don said,
"but what's a peryton?"

The soul of a murderer reincarnated as a
winged, carnivorous stag," Jane said. "Not a pleasant thing to meet
in an alley at night."

Not pleasant at all," Don said,
remembering shredded flesh. "That's what we're up against?" "No.
We're up against its boss. By the way, Felix?"

"Yes?"

"Now that there is a Prometheus Club
again, I need a second. For a duel. Or else you may find yourself rather
abruptly with a different archmage than you bargained for."

Damn,
Felix thought, with dull finality, as the strings
snapped taut. Don Smith wasn't the only one who didn't see Jane digging the trap
until he tumbled into it.

"How do you feel about a trip to
Faerie in the morning?"

Tension flowed from his neck as he finally
let go of his luck. "It seems to me that I'm the only man for the
job."

Devil in Blue Jeans

M
ichael looked cold. She was standing on a rooftop when
Fionnghuala—a white swan skimming through cold rain, over the ice-tipped
branches of the trees—found her, her arms crossed and the longer ends of her
hair whipped forward in cords around her jaw and throat as wind and wet turned
the A-line bob into a plastered cap. Michael stared through netted tree
branches that made a stark damp silhouette in the streetlights. Her head was
dipped as she watched something at ground level, the line of her neck sloping
gracefully, and she didn't seem cognizant of the rain that rolled down her
spine and plastered her T-shirt to her bony shoulders. Only her crossed arms
gave any hint of discomfort as the rain slid down her face, scattering from
her eyelashes each time she blinked.

She stood still as a gargoyle, grim and prescient,
poised above her prey. She neither turned nor flinched when the swan's wings
folded behind her, and Fionnghuala rose from a crouch, her mantle of white
leathers clutched tight at her chest in white fingers. The rain soaked her
feathers and draggled her hair in ragged spirals down her cheeks, streaming in
rivulets over the pale, naked skin underneath. Unlike Michael's,
her
flesh
prickled up in goose pimples, and a shiver rattled her teeth.

Cold after Hell," the angel said,
with the manner of one offering an observation to an empty room. She didn't
turn, and her folded arms dropped to her sides, palms against her thighs,
smoothing the jut of her shoulder blades under her soaked shirt.

"Cold
cut
Hell, I'd rather
say," Fionnghuala answered, and came to stand beside the angel. She might look
like a skinny girl in a white tank top with the words IT'S ALL MUSCLE printed
on the front, but Nuala knew who wore that form, and no one would notice them
here. No one would look up and see, as long as Michael stood beside her. Angels
passed unnoticed through the world. "Still unsmiling, I see. Is this your
storm, then?"

"It is not serving," Michael
said. She extended her right hand, a flick of her fingers, the rain tumbling off
them. In the street below, two figures entwined, kissing in the shadows at the
edge of a streetlight, oblivious to the rain.

"Wouldn't you like to jump down there
and put your sword through his heart?"

Michael sighed. "You know the answer
to that."

"You don't have to obey."

She turned to glance at Fionnghuala then,
her mouth wrenched sideways by an expression that could have been despair, if
despair was not a sin. "No one
has
to obey. Lucifer also was an
angel once." Fionnghuala shrugged. "And is His love and regard worth
so much?"

"You've been to Hell. You tell me
what it's like to live without it." Michael's fingers flicked, significantly,
to the street below. "The ones who don't believe are such easy prey."

Fionnghuala peered down. She recognized
the man, but not the woman, and she knew from Michael's words what must be
transpiring. "Does it matter when they can't be damned?"

Michael turned and gave Fionnghuala an
eyebrow, frowning. "You were. And how is it you are out of Hell now? Or
come you on Hell's errand?"

"Can't you see my heart, angel?"

"The Lord thy God gave thee free
will, creature."

"The Lord my God," Fionnghuala
said, "came along a bit after I did. The fact that my story was consumed
in His doesn't change what I was before that. And don't play the innocent with
me; it was always you who walked among humans. You know us well enough to know
that too, Prince of the Presence. Isn't it beneath an angel of the Lord to bait
an old woman?"

"Any other old woman, perhaps."
Michael never smiled, they said. She hadn't since Lucifer fell. And so
Fionnghuala could only call the change in her expression a softening. She
turned back to the clinching couple. "You didn't answer my question."

"She'll catch a chill and die in
this," Fionnghuala said, the rain freezing on the ends of her hair. "She
won't get cold with
that
one holding her."

Fionnghuala frowned, and tucked her chin
into her feathers. "The answer is no, Michael. No, I'm not damned. Damned
is different than
sold,
and God does not condemn for acts of pity."

Michael did not answer. Silently, they
watched the lovers kiss and break apart, but not too far. The man pulled the
woman inside his embrace, and kissed her again. She laughed out loud and clung
to him. Michael raised her eyes to Heaven; a stinging curtain of rain froze on
Fionnghuala's feathers and melted on her skin, and pelted the lovers below.

Fionnghuala shivered, teeth chattering,
huddled under her cloak, and waited. There was more than patience to dealing
with angels, but patience was a very good place to start. Ice crackled under
her toes as they passed beyond pain and into numbness. Roof gravel bit the
soles of her feet.

What does Lucifer want?" Michael
asked, finally, after five hard minutes of rain. Warmth cupped Fionnghuala's
shoulders, living feathers over the frozen feathers of her swanmay's cloak.
She leaned into it gratefully, protected by a curve of broad jade-colored
plumage, Michael's wing like a heron's. Forgiveness," she said.

Michael snorted and drew her under the one
arched wing. She was cold and clammy beneath her cloak. It wasn't Lily who
needed to worry about catching her death. "It's his for the asking."