Whiskey and Water (55 page)

Kit grinned at him. " 'And when he
falls, he falls like Lucifer, never to hope again.' "

"You?"

"Will. Some teacher of literature you
are — "

"I don't know the play."

"' 'Tis not surprising," Kit
said.
"Henry the Eighth,
and not one of his best. I think he wrote
it only to complete the set—"

"Jealous?"

"Envious." As Kit faced the
mirror, it revealed the smile playing around his lips, half hidden by the beard.
"I'd be twice the fool I am to
be jealous
of poetry like that. Come
along."

They stepped through, and fell. Matthew
might have panicked, but Kit's grip was strong. Darkness rushed past, whipping
his hair and stinging his eyes, and he reached up left-handed to be sure he
hung on to his glasses. He couldn't see the man who clung to his wrist, or his
own hand in front of his face.
"Kit?!"

"You needn't shout."

Almost prim, so that Matthew laughed—which
was good. The oxygen settled his nerves, and if he pretended he was skydiving,
that the free fall was a controlled and chosen thing, the scrape of adrenaline through
his veins became a focus rather than a panic-inducing blur. "How long do
we fall?" Without shouting this time, though he pitched his voice to
carry.

"As long as we need to. Don't worry.
There's no bottom."

"No—oh!" And suddenly, in the
darkness, they were caught, an unanticipated yank that straightened their
spines and banged them together, bruising ribs and elbows. Warm arms wrapped
them, revealing their features dimly in a pale, moonlight glow.

:Kitten, I have told thee before, thou
shouldst send ahead that thou art coming.: Lucifer chuckled, the hard warmth of
his velvet-clad body bearing both Magi up.

Matthew and Kit felt the pump and stretch
of the starlit wings through the angel's body, felt the muscles on his chest
flex with the rowing rhythm of the pinions. The strength of those arms and those
wings was incalculable. They could not have said at any given moment that they
stopped falling and started flying. But they knew, and a dizzy exaltation took
them both.

Too short, the flight. The Morningstar set
them down on a stone disc furnished like any lamplit, comfortable sitting room
in existence, except it had no walls, and hung softly in a yawning black abyss.
He lowered first Matthew and then Kit lightly to their feet, his great wings
pounding while he hovered, the wind making mare's nests of their hair.

Matthew ducked low until Lucifer settled
beside them, debonair and perfect in a brushed black velvet doublet, picking a
hair that was Kit's, by its color, off his breast. He smiled at it, pursed lips
as rich and soft as any woman's, and blew it off his palm.

A cross-breeze swept it from the light,
into the abyss.

Kit said not a word nor made a gesture as
he watched that little ceremony, but the nameless emotion that stilled his face
pierced Matthew's heart and silenced his tongue. If he could have moved against
it, Matthew would have reached out and brushed the back, of his hand against
Kit's, as if by accident. But he could not even draw a breath.

And then Lucifer turned back to them, and
smiled like a budding rose, and Matthew's heart as much as stopped beating
again. :Gentlemen,: the Devil mocked. :However may I serve?:

"Matthew," Kit said, thinly,
"please remove your shirt, so that Lucifer can see your marks."

Matthew untucked the hem slowly, ducked
his head and yanked the shirt off over his head without thinking about it too
much. Eyes down, looking at the floor. When he glanced up, he found himself looking
in Kit's eyes, the right one glimmering brighter with reflected light.

:Yes,: Lucifer said, the backs of his
fingers pressed against his jaw. :I comprehend. Show me the rest, Matthew
Magus.:

Matthew let his shirt fall to the floor
and glanced at Kit, who shrugged. Lucifer's hand snaked down in an abrupt
gesture, counter-weighted by the flicker of the opposite wing. :Hast anything
God gave not Adam?:

Matthew coughed. "Not that I know
of."

:Then I've seen it. But I have not seen
the spells inked in your human hide, and you must have taken your trousers off
for the sorcerer who wrote them there.
Strip.
:

Matthew squatted to unlace his boots. Stood,
and unbuttoned his jeans. Hooked his thumbs under the waistband and shoved them
down, boxers too, leaving clothes slouched around his feet like Christmas
wrappings. "Happy? "

"Ecstatic," Kit said, with the
sort of leer that would have begged a slug on the shoulder if Lucifer hadn't
been standing between them.

:Turn,: the Devil commanded, and Matthew
turned. Slowly, stepping out of his jeans first so he wouldn't trip. Forked
tongue-tips wavered from the Devil's mouth a moment, and he turned to Kit. :Yes.
I recognize them. As do you, no doubt?:

Kit inclined his head in the Devil's
direction. "We'll talk of it some other time."

:You wish them removed?:

Kit smiled. "I wish them
duplicated."

Later, while Kit reclaimed his clothes and
dressed, back turned to Matthew and Lucifer in a show of modesty, Matthew paced
the edge or the room over the abyss and trailed fingertips along a tabletop.
The Devil's attention was patent; he looked up to meet those transparent azure
eyes. "Do you suppose it's jealousy?"

:Matthew Magus?:

"Michael. You and Michael. Is that
what's between you?"

Lucifer's amusement curved his mouth
gorgeously, his hair disarrayed in ringlets against his cheek, over his
collar.
"Oh, what a goodly outside falsehood hath."

:Angels do not suffer envy, Matthew
Magus.:

"I've heard stories that
differ."

But nothing Matthew could say would shake
that smile.

:Then they must be true.:

New York City
, King Size Rosewood Bed

W
olvesbane opened the throne room door, and Ian
stepped forward, conscious of his carriage: chin up, hands at his sides—the
apple he'd been eating while he waited palmed in the left one—and straight-spined.
He entered the throne room not along the promenade, but from the head,
alongside the dais. Less far to walk, and less sense of marching to his
execution.

He should thank the Queen for that.

Measured paces brought him before her soon
enough. His mother awaited him not on her chair of estate, but on foot before
it, clad in the sort of iron-world clothes he hadn't seen her in since she was Seeker
and not Queen. He'd
never
seen her with her hair shorn, but he expected
he understood.

The Merlin stood beside her, hands on her
hips, looking more tired than upset.

"My royal mother," Ian said,
bowing low.

"Stand up," she said, and
touched his chin to make it so. Her fingers flexed, as if they could hook him, and
then relaxed and fell away. ' Tell me that Cairbre wasn't on your errand, Ian,
at the court of the Unseelie Sidhe."

"I can tell you more than that,"
he answered. "If he went there since Lucifer's ball, he went there against
my orders."

She was watching him, staring into his
eyes with her grayish ones. Not an attractive color, but a changeable one, and
Morgan had it too. So had Hope, who had died.

"I am not lying, mother."

"No," she said. "I can see
you're not. So he acted without your knowledge?"

"I discovered his plotting at the
ball. The outline of it, anyway. I did not find it necessary to bring it before
you."

"It's you he serves."

Ian shrugged. A revelation to no one.
"And he went to Àine? And has not come back?"

The Queen made a gesture that was rude in
any language. "I hope she turned him into a frog."

The Fae did not often resort to execution.
They had no souls; their deaths were final. More often, they would transform
and imprison rivals — changed into swans, harts, trees.

Carel put a hand on the Queen's sleeve.
The Queen leaned into it for a moment and then nodded, yielding the floor. She
actually walked backward, one step and then two, and Carel moved into her place.
"So, say that's settled — "

"Is it?"

Carel smiled. "We can say it
is."

And yet," Ian said. He arched a brow
at her, and cocked his head, and smiled.

And yet," Carel answered. Behind her,
the Queen folded her hands and bowed her head, twisting a toe on the stones in
a most unqueenlike fashion. "There's a little matter of a duel."

'Oh," Ian said. He shrugged.
"That."

The Queen raised her head. "Ian, your
father — "

father," he said, "will stand as
my second. Unless, of course, you should die or abdicate before the combat,
whereupon I would no longer be subject to the challenge, as a monarch."

The Queen paled. Ian smiled at her and bit
into his apple, prying off a crisp red chip, the tart ivory flesh waxy and
pink-veined within. Don't take it so hard, mother," he said. "You and
the Mebd both taught me well."

A drop of juice ran down his chin. He
reached to wipe it onto the back of his sleeve and startled as the floor jumped
under his feet and the drop jiggled loose and fell, spotting his doublet dark
on dark. He turned with Carel as the floor shook again, the glassed Gothic
windows cracking in their frames. The Merlin spread her hands at hip level,
fingers outstretched like an alert spider's legs, and the shaking stilled,
though a faint tremor like the echo of a finger run round the rim of a crystal
goblet tickled up their nerves.

Ian unbuttoned his doublet, slipped out of
his shirt. He tossed them to the floor and reached for the waist of his
breeches. If battle had found them, he would face it as a wolf.

He froze like that wolf at the figure
revealed in the doorway, a flensed and stinking creature like the corpse of a
horse dragged from the bottom of a loch with a drowned man sat upon its back.
The shattered armor of the door guards clattered about its feet, kicked cans,
as it shambled into the throne room with a silken bag slung over one peeled
shoulder.

"Unseelie," Ian said. His
mother's chin jerked. "Nuckelavee."

It lifted a green pine bough in its
malformed claw and curtseyed low on awful limbs. "To the Usurper Queen of
the Daoine Sidhe, from Àine of the Unseelie Court, Queen in Faerie, defiance. I
bring a message for your Merlin."

The Queen looked at Carel. Ian did not
take his eyes from the messenger. "Speak," Carel said. With a
flourish, the messenger upended its bag on the checkerboard floor. The contents
bounced and scattered: a human head and human hands.

Carel stepped between the creature and the
Queen. She wouldn't look. Not now. "Is that your message?"

"Her Majesty Àine wishes you to know
that your lady Autumn is her guest in the White Castle. And there she will
remain, along with the Daoine bard."

Carel's hand moved.

What she hurled was chthonic, draconian
fury: not precisely lightning, and not precisely fire. It crackled like
electricity and it stank or ozone, and it spattered, violet-white with power,
against the air in front of the Unseelie, blocked by some powerful ward. The
Nuckelavee bowed and withdrew, sliding back through the vast double doors,
while Carel was still framing her second curse. Ian recovered first, running
forward shirtless, his sword in his hand, shouting to rouse the castle—as if
the thumps of the thing's club dispensing with the armor hadn't been enough.
The Queen called for Whiskey as Carel walked forward. She crouched inside the
door, wrath crackling around her hands.

It would wait. This wasn't the building
she meant to bring down with it. Because she knew before she touched the grisly
trophies what she'd find: the gray head and work-rough hands of the
hedge-wizard who called himself Gypsy, who must have gotten in between the
Nuckelavee and its prey.

She touched his saturated hair and
recoiled from the loathsome mats, sticky-flaking with dried blood. And then she
forced herself to stroke the hair back, to touch his face, his cheeks, his
half-closed eyes. She knew his life in his blood, his name, his path.

"A long life, and a merry one, and a
quick death, and a painless one," she said, and touched the back of her
bloody hand to her tongue, a kind of promise. "Gypsy, you gallant
fuck."

The blood was bitter in her mouth. She
clenched her useless fingers against her palms.

When the dogs lifted their heads, Morgan
set aside her knitting. She dropped it into the basket beside her chair, taking
pains with the needles, and stood. By the time a blond head peeked over the
sill of her window, she had the kettle on.

Matthew," she said.

He folded his arms. "Have you heard
from Don?" "The raven's not back. Have a drink. We'll wait together."