Whiskey and Water (46 page)

"Angry? Matthew's sweater clung to
her shoulders, dripping cotton swinging at the hem. The charm on her bracelet
jangled as she twisted her hands. "Because I found out you've lied to me,
and so has Michael, and there's some sort of . . . cosmic game of chess going
on?"

"I care for you." He shook his
head. "I would have told you."

"But you didn't."

"No. Not yet. I wanted you
comfortable with me and with your power. I wanted—"

"You wanted to seduce me. You wanted
me
invested."

"Yes," he said. The rain
straggled his hair down his face in lank red coils. It looked too much like blood.
She turned her back, and stared down at the lilies instead. "You need me
more now than before, Lily. You're in Faerie now, and you've fallen headfirst
into the argument I wanted to keep you out of."

"Until you could use me."

It was inevitable, one way or the
other." He reached out and turned her around. "Michael would have done
no less in her time. Your potential is irresistible. My lady, you are a
song."

She breathed out across her lower lip and
let her hands fall to her sides. She wondered if she would ever get the drying
itch off her palms. "You're a devil."

I'm a little more than that." He
touched her cheek, and stroked his fingers across her mouth. "And you need
me more than ever. You drank the "water.

"Yes. So?"

His hand fell. He dried it on his
trousers. "Faerie owns you now. I have a lot to teach and little time to teach
it in."

She could still taste the pollen and
rain-water when she swallowed. "What do you mean,
owns?"
"I
mean it will kill you to go home."

He took no joy in it when she blanched,
and was ready when she sat down hard on the garden border, cushioning her fall
as best he could, though his grip burned her wrists and pressed her bracelet
into her flesh. At least she believed.

"Kill me?"

"If you are absent from Faerie for
too long. Yes. Ask your new friend Marlowe what it means." "But he
was in the iron world — "

"You will notice he did not stay
long."

Her hands were shaking when he let her go,
and the chill was back. The cold and trembling worried her. It wasn't just the
rain. "I can't," she said. "I'll need my medicine. What about my
classes? Who'll take care of my
cat?
"

"You see?" He squatted beside
her in the wet that was soaking through her skirt now, and pulled her out of
the grass and crushed lilies, and lifted her to her feet. "I can aid
you."

She twitched reflexively toward the
cottage, gray stone streaked with fading whitewash, all rose-draped in the
rain, with its vivid crimson door.
If she's really Morgan le Fey, surely she
can help.
Christian touched Lily's arm. "You know those hounds of
hers? And the raven?"

"Yes?" She didn't want to look
at him. When she looked at him, if she actually let herself hear the timbre of
his voice, the hurt came swelling back up her throat and her eyes burned, her
sinuses swelling until she had to open her mouth to breathe.

"They were men once." When she
blinked at him, he stepped back far enough that she could feel the distance
between them. "Let me help you, Lily."

She pressed her elbows to her sides, rain
dripping from her lashes. Thoughtfully, she reached out, and took his hand.

Dirty Old Town

"T
hat was foolish," Jane said, as the
door closed behind her apprentice. She reached with steady hands to pour
herself a cup of tea. The last few drops trickled from the spout flecked with
bits of leaf. "And not congenial to a sense of community."

"You won't 'win him back," the
Bunyip answered. "Though you do not wish to let go."
"Donall?"

"Matthew Magus," Bunyip said. He
folded his hands around the cup, held it fragile and strong as an eggshell.
"He's lost to you. You think you can use him, to straddle the boundary
between iron and moonlight — " It was what the Prometheans had made him
for. "You think not?" I think you're a fool to try it," he
answered, and sipped. "My way is better."

Your way." Felix, who stood, precise
and cautious in his bespoke suit, and crossed to examine the flowers tumbling
from a tall verdigris vase on the floor before the black-and-white shoji
screens. "I believe we're still unclear on what that might be, old
man." "Ally yourself with me. Ally yourself with Heaven — " That
has always been our goal. But Heaven has not been open to allegiances."

Bunyip covered a bubbling chuckle with the
back of his left hand, and Jane understood what she was meant to: that he knew
something she didn't, and intended to raise her curiosity. She glanced at
Christian. Christian shrugged.

"Times change," the Bunyip said.

Jane settled back on the couch—not
lolling, but erect and graceful, her saucer balanced on her hand. "Do
finish your tea," she said. "I'll fetch more."

"Thank you," he said, and set
the empty cup down, scraps of tea leaf clinging to the sides. "I've had enough."

"You wish us to choose sides,"
Felix said. He ran a fingertip along the orange-yellow spike of a bird-of-paradise,
and down the stiff dark stem. "It would be a compromise to our principles
to negotiate with Fae."

"Your principles? Of conquest? You
don't want another war."

"We lost the last one," Jane
said. "It would mean starting over from scratch. And Faerie is forewarned
this time." She let herself smile, though her face felt tight, and did not
permit the cup to rattle on the saucer. "Three hundred years, give or
take, it took us to chain the Dragon. One hundred years of peace it bought us,
and Faerie undid it in a week, once they learned the symbols. You cannot make
me believe that once freed, she'd permit us a wreaking like that again—and you cannot
convince me that it would be worth the cost, if she did." She glanced
aside, at Christian, his expression dreamy over his folded arms.

Christian shook his head. "The wards
on the iron world are still strong. We wouldn't be starting from scratch."

"Of course not," Bunyip said.
"Which is one reason Kelpie's laxity concerns the Dragon. His weakness
weakens Mist, as well. But you know her strength isn't drawn only from Faerie.
It comes from the Promethean power also. She's as much in New York as she is the
rock beneath it, if you know how to look. The
Dragon
doesn't care who
wins. She doesn't care to see a winner at all."

"Dynamic equilibrium," Felix
said. "You're suggesting we readjust our goals."

"I'm suggesting you examine the
source of your goals, and determine if the course you were set, half a millennium
since, was really to humanity's benefit, or . . ."

"Or become yours?" Jane was
allowing Felix to take the lead. He tried not to revel in it.

"Or reinvent yourselves. You have
accomplished so much. Your path may have been flawed, but let's speak the
truth; it is Promethean power that's healed the sick, raised your iron miracles
into the sky, built a world where mortal men and women never even had to
believe
in the Fae, never mind fearing them." "Lost now," Jane said.

Bunyip dismissed it with a pass of his
hand. "As Christian says. The wards are strong. If you have the strength
to win your duel and bring your prodigals in line, those shan't be lost. And
should you fail — "

"Marlowe has no loyalty to our
goals," Jane said. "Nor any love of our works. He'll leave the iron world
unguarded."

Bunyip's eyes crinkled at the corners.
"And you can be assured that Faerie will not hesitate to ally itself with
your other enemies as it must. You need your own friends."

"You're that enemy," Jane said.
"Why "wish us victory?"

"It's not that simple. There are
factions in Faerie that would see you and Elaine destroy each other, resulting
in their own elevation to power. If they cannot set you at each other's
throats, they'll find other "ways to strike. There's factions in Hell, and
Prometheus has been allied with only one of those, and the others will not be
kind to you. There are factions in the iron world. Your choice is to choose
whom you will be used by, who you "will use. The only monolith is Heaven,
and they do not give up information to outsiders. And for the first time in a
very long time indeed, the Divine has extended its hand."

"What do you mean?"

He dusted his lap off as he stood, and
straightened the crease of his trousers before lifting his hat off the sofa
cushion. His smile sent prickles of unease through her, though she forced
herself to reply in kind.

Michael has returned," he said.
"And you
can't
claim you missed the unicorn."

She sat dumb for seconds before
re-collecting herself, setting down her cup, standing to escort him to the
door. "What do you get out of this?" she asked, as he shrugged on his
coat.

Simply put, your help in reclaiming what
the Queen of the Daoine Sidhe and her minions have, that I need."

Which is?" A clink from behind the
screen told her that Felix and Christian were collecting saucers and cups.

My shadow," Bunyip answered.
"And the sea. I'll be in touch. Only see what you can do about the Daoine
Seeker, and I'll handle the rest." He bowed and left Jane standing by the
door, the handle chilly in her palm. She closed it and made sure of the
latches, and went to help Felix and Christian.

She found Felix staring into the bottom of
Bunyip's teacup, a frown souring his mouth. "What is it?"

He tilted the cup so she could see the
pattern of leaves adhering to bone-white china, below the golden rim: wings, a
crown, a cross, a blade, a rose. For a moment, they stood with their heads bent
together, a study in perplexity.

"Damn," Jane said, when it
became obvious that Felix wasn't about to. "He was telling the
truth." "He was," Felix agreed. "What the hell do we do
now?"

"Win the duel," Christian
offered. "Re-create the order. Save the world."

Ian brought Jewels home—not to her own
home, but into the capable hands of the Merlin and the Merlin's mistress, on a
chill Saturday morning not quite a week after the murder of Althea Benning had
started it all.

Perhaps
started
is the wrong word.
Because it was not, truly, so much that the killing
began
anything as
that it brought it dripping into the light, a flash of color in the pan.

When it broke, then, rather than when it
began.

And so Ian delivered a grimly determined
Jewels onto Autumns front porch before breakfast, when the sky behind bare
trees was transparent golden and cold birds sang in their limbs. He didn't
enter the house this time, though there was no rowan over the doorway, and the
only iron was a horseshoe nailed to the lintel in the attitude of a waxing
moon. Instead he put one hand each on Jewels' thin arms, and presented her
before the door as if he were bringing home a recalcitrant stray.

She obeyed, and that was all he required.
She lifted her hand and knocked—it was important to knock rather than to
ring—and waited gentle on his glove until the door popped free of a sticking
frame. Autumn beckoned from the other side of a coir fiber mat the same color
as her unraveled braid. "Your new apprentice," Ian said.

"Not mine." But she took Jewels'
chill hand and drew her over the threshold. "Gypsy said he'd be here by
lunchtime. In the meantime, Jewels, you look as if you ought to have a cup of
cocoa and a nap. Thank you, Ian."

"You're very welcome," he said,
and retreated down the porch stairs.

Inside, Jewels drank the cocoa fast to
keep from dozing off into it. It was Swiss Miss, with the petrified
marshmallows, but Autumn had twisted a small carton over it and plopped a
dollop of half-and-half into the hot water and powdered chocolate, so it was
good. Just not good enough to keep Jewels awake.

Like an overtired child, she couldn't
recall how she made her way to the bed she woke up in. It was a daybed, a white
metal frame and a lumped mattress covered in a green store-bought quilt. The
covers were warm, and tucked up around her shoulders, and she'd been sleeping
soundly despite the brightness that pushed through yellowed eyelet curtains
and filled the clean, worn room under the eaves. A few moments later, she
realized she'd heard the rattle and thump of a weather-swollen door.

She swung her feet onto cold wide pine and
stood: misplaced, disenchanted. Wendy waking up in her own bed, alone, with no
shadow, no Tink, and no Pan. The quality of the light, the smell of the air, were
all wrong.

She couldn't find her shoes, but her face
was clean, the makeup scrubbed away, and she was wearing a woman's enormously
oversized sweatpants and her own undershirt as pajamas. Anxiety writhed in her chest
as she descended the stair, and it couldn't just be from—what —
missing
half
an hour or more. She'd probably gone through the motions with closed eyes and
numbed fingers, head nodding into microsleeps. She could still taste stale
sugar, cloying in her mouth. She'd forgotten to brush her teeth, or even run a
finger full of toothpaste around the inside of her mouth and rinse.