Whiskey and Water (4 page)

Silence, until the poet stepped away.
"I understand."

Whiskey shook his mane and pawed lightly.
His black-marked fore-hoof left a gouge in wet greensward, and the scent of
fresh-turned earth almost covered the scent of sympathy. Worse, that he was
cold enough that the sympathy warmed him. Worse, that he had a soul to see
kinship, where he should have seen the weakness the bard let slip, just a
little, and thought,
Prey.

"Yes," he said. "I think
you do." He tossed his forelock and snorted. "My Queen forgave her
mother the war."

"Did she." Not a question, as
the poet sank into a crouch with his cloak spreading on the ground around him,
a puddle of a thousand colors. The patch that gleamed at his right shoulder
was some sort of silk, blue as watered steel and catching the light and shadows
when it moved, like the sea.

"Someone could
find
this Jane
Andraste, Promethean and Mage. Someone could do something about redress. For these
crimes. For this war," the poet said. He dug his fingers into the earth
again, as if unwilling to ever let go. As if he wanted to pull the turf over
his shoulders like a blanket and lie down under it, warm and still.

"Get on my back," Whiskey said,
before the words could freeze in his throat and choke him. "Climb on my
back and ride."

Times Square had not become a monument,
other than the monument to the gods of capitalism that it had always been.
There had been very few killed here: a Fae girl pregnant with a royal child, a
television reporter, a Duke of Hell, a rookie cop. The damage had been for
show— though how much show is necessary to bring home a point is questionable,
when a dragon the size of a jetliner unfolds basalt wings across a city sky.

There's a certain admirable fierceness in
the way New York mythologizes its trauma, and the dragon of Times Square was no
different. Two years later, a smaller, somewhat pudgier replica of that dragon made
its debut in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. The LCD screens had been
rebuilt, the shimmering marquees repaired. Old stone facades still lurked
behind the frameworks of advertising displays, dowager creases and age spots
concealed under gaudy paint. Worker-ant traffic crept nose to tail in red- and
-white-lit profusion, and the TKTS booth had a line around the block.

The city had left the knife-cut claw marks
along the rooftops alone, and tourists with telephoto lenses clotted beside the
police substation, peering up and snapping pictures, couples handing cameras
and binoculars back and forth.

Geoff and Althea and Jewels stood shoulder
to shoulder in the chill, Geoff's arm around Althea's shoulder, holding his
coat open for her to crowd inside because she was shivering in the gaudy
tourist T-shirt. She trapped a layer of warm air and cloth between them, her
arms wrapped tight across her belly although she was not
quite
shivering.
Her head was craned back, and the delicate rings of her larynx pressed her skin
from the inside, revealing pale highlights and blood-blue shadows.

It was Jewels who spoke, eyes bright and
streaked brown hair pulling free of braids to twine in the rising wind.
"What wouldn't you give to have seen that?" Her voice throbbed with
wistful envy.

"Funny," Geoff answered. "I
was just thinking I was glad I'd missed it. He glanced at his watch. "We should
go if we're going to eat before the parade."

They wound up in a steel-countered deli on
Fifth Avenue, eating overstuffed pastrami sandwiches and salty kosher pickles.
Althea ate her own, and Geoff's too. They were too hurried for much
conversation, and by the time they left, the sky had darkened and the
streetlights were on.

Althea found herself falling into Geoff's
and Jewels' slipstream. Jewels walked hurriedly, cold in her thin skirt, and
Geoff kept positioning himself to break the wind for her. Jewels endured his
attention with a kind of annoyed stoicism, but at least she didn't say anything
about it.

Although maybe it would have been better
if she did. Althea had time to think about it, following his black coat and her
gray sweater through the increasing crowds, shivering a little bit in her own
thin shirt. Her jacket was in Geoff's knapsack, though, and she'd have to catch
up with him and make him stop to put it on, and they were in a hurry.

She'd stay warm enough with the walking
until they made it to the parade. And she was keeping up all right. Geoff
turned to look over his shoulder once in a while to make sure of her, and she
was never more than three steps behind.

Which was why she couldn't explain how she
lost him. She hadn't taken her eyes off his jacket, or his back, and Jewels'
braided hair was hard to miss, as was her laugh. But one moment they were
there, and the next Althea realized she was following another couple entirely.

She blinked and her eyes blurred. For a
moment, she saw Geoff and Jewels again, getting farther away through the crowd.
And then, as if a slide had been pulled from a projector, they were gone again,
and she saw only a red-haired man in a black leather jacket and a girl with
dark hair, not Geoff and Jewels at all.

Althea stopped and turned, rocking on her
heels. She hadn't accidentally walked past them, either. She hesitated,
oscillating, and tried not to meet the eyes of the passersby who snuck quick glances
at her and then looked down.

"Dammit," she muttered. And then
she heard Jewels laugh. A side street. They must have turned, just there, and
she'd missed them. A shortcut. They'd notice she was gone in a second, and turn
back, and she'd meet them coming to look for her. Skipping, hugging herself
with relief, she hurried down the alley.

The last thing she heard was the
tremendous whirring rush of wings.

*                                                           *         *

Halloween fell on a Sunday that year, and
so did the end of daylight savings time. The coppery warmth gilding the green
men and gargoyles had dimmed to quicksilver by the time Matthew reached the Village,
and the blue hour of twilight held the city in the cool, lingering embrace
extended by building shadows. The parade wouldn't start until seven, and
Matthew intended to watch the spectators as much as the participants. He
wandered along Fourteenth Street, flotsam in a stream of humanity, alert for
the messages flickering in neon or reflected in storefronts.

Several bars of "The Lady Is a
Tramp" slid from a basement doorway along with a coil of smoke. Matthew
walked through the scent of cigarettes and unwashed bodies; they clung to his
skin along with prophecy, and like prophecy broke and slid away before the
force of his talismans and a survived destiny.

Cars slid past, stop and go, one stereo
blaring a Don Henley song. Matthew had heard that one before, the morning the
towers fell; New York's Magus hadn't been able to take that bullet for his city
either.
Maybe it's time we make it a ceremonial position,
he thought,
but understood the portent and read his directions in the flickering light of a
Dos Equis sign.

He turned his face away but the sign
persevered, heartbeat of electricity stuttering its neon, and another across
the alley took up the plaint. They were coy, long-lashed things, never quite
forthright, but transparent enough in their intentions. He sighed and turned
left between buildings, picked past bundled newspapers and a green plastic
trash barrel, and walked through a puddle of floodlight, glancing up once to
make sure the human-seeming shadow at its edge was the outline of another
gargoyle. It was: one he didn't remember having seen before, a squat birdlike
silhouette whose gorgeously fluted antlers must have been the chef d'oeuvre of
a master stonemason, imported from Europe along with all those boatloads of
marble.

He sought after it, but no trace of magic
hung nearby—just the thinking chill of stone worked fine enough to hold an
ageless, patient soul. A hungry soul, and he pulled back.

The coat was not keeping him warm. But now
he was close enough to smell what hung in the air, and he frowned. It was an
old, wild musk, harsh and deep—the scent of weathered bones at the maw of a predator's
lair. It was a thickness as deep and sweet as the Kelpie's, but without the
tang of sea-rot and sea-change that kept the Kelpie's trace unique. He walked
on, an ache in his scarred hand. The fear was alive in him, a wild cold coiling
thing, but he would not honor it. No matter how it made his hands shake and the
bile rise in his throat.

The girl was already dead when he found
her, her tourist's subway-map T-shirt ripped from breast to belly. Matthew
crouched beside the body and pulled his cell from his pocket. He checked for a
pulse—cursorily: her blood was a banner spread ragged on the stones around her,
along with her entrails—thumbed 911 with his ruined hand, and raised his head
to search the shadows, taking comfort in a child's lie: that he did not fear
the dark.

The reek of raw meat and spilled bowels
made him gag. There were no footprints in the blood and the foot
steps
echoing
behind him came too soon and too lightly for the police. He turned just his
head over his shoulder, spectacles flashing in the light, blood drying on the
first two fingers of his left hand. The runners held hands as if one of them
meant to pull the other up from drowning. The leader was a cautious, coltish
boy in black leather, black denim, black-dyed hair and steel-grommeted boots.
The flowered chiffon skirt of the sandaled girl beside him blew about thin
ankles, and a charcoal sweater that fell to the top of her thighs was rolled up
three times at the sleeves, draping off her reedlike wrists in fat doughnuts.

"Don't
—"he said, and stood.

At the far edge of the puddled light,
Jewels dragged Geoff to a stop as the red-coated man spread his arms
helplessly. The movement pulled the cuff of the coat away from his glove and
let the fine hairs on his arm be limned. He stood foolishly, shaking, as if he
could block their vision of Althea. He wasn't tall, but he looked dangerous,
strong.

A snaky breeze scarfed Jewels' skirt
between her thighs and locks of wavy tea-brown hair across her eyes. She pushed
the latter aside with a nail-bitten finger and sucked her lower lip into her mouth,
her stomach tangled around her ankles. She stepped from artificial light into a
shadow, shielding her eyes, and felt no chill; the meaty reek of the alley
fevered her. Not cold at all, though she was shivering. "Al . . . ?"

"Don't look," the man said.
"Just don't look. I called the police." He twisted his wide-held hand
to show the green lights of the phone; the 911 operator's voice was still
audible, and he moved slowly to bring it back to his ear. "Sir? Some other
bystanders just arrived — "

"Althea," Jewels said, and took
a step forward, almost tripping out of her sandals. She caught herself and
shook free of Geoff's clenched hand. She couldn't feel herself breathing.
"Oh, God. Al."

Matthew saw her distress and came to her,
still holding the phone to his ear, ready to catch her if she rushed forward or
went down. Beside her, the boy swayed, pressed both hands to his mouth. His
head dipped as he gagged and shuddered; his knees folded like a foal's and he
went straight down, curled forward, kneeling. The girl turned and tripped
again; this time she didn't catch herself. She collapsed against the boy, her
hands on his wrist and the nape of his neck, holding him up while he gagged,
her face nearly in his hair. "Geoff?"

Matthew moved a step closer, still pressing
the phone to his ringless ear.
Today is the naming of named,
he thought.
Patently unfair, considering that it seemed to be her friend on the ground, but
he recognized his own distanced chill as shock. He almost put his hand in the
girl's hair to comfort her, but saw the blood on his fingers and winced, and
scrubbed them on his jeans first, shuddering.
Jesus.
"Yes
sir," he said. "I'm right here. I won't hang up. Somebody just
fainted."

A banshee wailed—a siren, only a siren,
after all. The girl's hair was soft and faintly greasy. She leaned into the
touch silently, suffering, holding her friend, smelling of patchouli. The scent
reminded him of a woman he hadn't seen in seven years, and almost covered the
tang of blood. "Miss?"

"Jewels," she said, without
lifting her lips from her friend's spiked, matted hair. The word struck music in
his breast—her name, and her true name too. A breath caught in his throat; he
stroked her hair out of her face and stopped, shocked by what his fingers
brushed. A fine braided tracery of raised scar tissue ran along her hairline,
leading his fingers to an ear tipped to a delicate point.

At the mouth of the alley, light flashed,
blue and red and gold and white.
Fae,
he almost said, but no, she
wasn't. She was as human as he, mortal blood and mortal bone.
"Otherkin."

She looked up at him and grimaced. The
brackets on her braces were fashion colors, fuchsia and violet between the
wires. A titanium hoop glimmered in her nostril.

"Holy fuck," he said, the phone
in his hand forgotten as the first policemen hustled down the alleyway,
paramedics right behind. Otherkin. Sweetheart, what the
hell
were you
kids doing in New York City if you're playing at being Otherkin? Don't you know
your kind aren't welcome here?