0449474001339292671 4 fighting faer (2 page)

Mab reached up, her cool, pale fingers cupping his stubble-roughened face, and the smile she gave him
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reminded him why human and Fae alike still wrote odes to her beauty, even after a lifetime of centuries.

“If you do all in your power, my Lucifer, then I know well you cannot fail me.” Leaning up, she brushed a kiss against his cheek and stepped back, raising her hands before her and waving them in an intricate pattern that dripped trails of light from her fingertips. As the Guardsmen watched, the light wove itself together into a shimmering doorway, expanding until it was large enough to accommodate even Luc’s height.

Blowing out a deep breath, Luc stepped forward into the Faerie door and felt the warmth of the Queen’s magic surround him. As reality bent and reshaped itself, her voice reached him on a silver whisper. “Go safely, my Lucifer, and may what you find to please you, ever be yours.” Chapter Two

A woman could only take so much, Corinne D’Alessandro decided as she looked down at the assignment sheet her editor had just handed to her. In the past five months, she’d taken a lot: learning about the existence of vampires, watching her best friend become a vampire, learning about the existence of werewolves, watching her other best friend marry a werewolf. All in all, an eventful few months had just passed. Corinne figured it was a testament to her inner strength and resilience that she’d taken all this news without ending up in a padded room atBellevue, contemplating her navel and holding conversations with her big toes.

But this, she thought, staring at the black print on the page before her. This just might be the last straw.

“Leprechauns?” she asked.

“Well, maybe pixies. The reports vary.”

Corinne couldn’t decide if she wanted to run screaming from the office, past her curious colleagues and out onto the streets ofManhattan, or if she wanted to bang her head against the wall a few times before she buried it in her hands and whimpered. Instead, she pushed her chair back from her paper-strewn desk and gave her editor a baleful stare. “Either way, I can tell you now that I don’t need to do an investigation, Hank. Leprechauns, pixies and sprites don’t exist. Now how about we store this in the circular file and move on to a real story, hmm?”

Hank Buckley shifted the toothpick he was chewing from one side of his mouth to the other and shook his head. “No can do, toots. This one’s hot. Even the TV stations are starting to pick it up. Don’t want us to get left in the dust.”

“Why not?” Corinne asked, her tone dry and weary. “It’s not like we’re scooping the
Times
on a regular basis here.”

“Maybe not, but we gotta give it a shot, right? Prove we’re not some sort of fly-by-night tabloid
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operation.”

She raised an eyebrow. “And doing a story the worst rag in print would think twice about running is supposed to boost our credibility factor? What’d they put in your coffee this morning? ‘Cause you’re seriously high.”

“Only on the excitement of actually talking to you, instead of sending yet another email for you to ignore, sweetie. It’s the kind of thing that goes to my head.”

“Your sarcasm fails to make me laugh. As does this stupid-ass story. What are you thinking?” She waved the note he’d handed her under his bulbous nose and upped her stare to a glare. “I’m supposed to do a story on leprechaun sightings inManhattan? For a St. Patty’s Day spoof, I might just down enough Guinness to play along, but it’s August, Hank! You don’t even have green bagels and Shamrock-mint milkshakes to tie in to. You’re a freak.”

“Actually, I’m the boss, but I can see where the similarities could get confusing for you.” Hank rocked back on his heels and drummed his hands in his pockets, making his loose change jingle. “Maybe you can do a write up on the rise of insanity among the editors of small, urban newspapers. Right after you turn in the leprechaun story.”

Corinne ran a hand through her dark hair and gave a pained sigh. “Look, Hank, if we’re slow for news, and you really want to run with this one, why don’t you hand it to Shawn? He’s always going on about how Irish he is. He’d probably eat this shit up. And I’d get to go back to my feature on the student protest arrests atColumbia.”

Hank shook his head. “No can do. Shawn is already on the Tech show over at the Javits. It’s gotta be you, kid. Besides,” he grinned, his toothpick bobbing, “you’re the one who went to all those Goth clubs a few months ago. I figured this supernatural crap would be right up your alley.”

“Well, you figured wrong. I don’t believe in fairies or fairytales, so give the story to someone else.”

“I gave it to you.” Hank gave a pointed look at the assignment sheet. “Ironically enough, that means I want you to have it. Now do you want me to fill you in on the particulars, or do you want to go it alone and get me ticked when you come back with a lousy article?” Closing her eyes on a sigh, Corinne laid the sheet down on top of a teetering pile of manila folders, yanked open her desk drawer and dug out a bottle of extra-strength aspirin. Shaking three little white tablets out onto her palm, she slammed them into the back of her throat and washed them down with a few gulps of cold coffee. Then she turned back to the man standing beside her desk and picked up a pencil. “All right. Fine. Fill me in. But I won’t pretend to be happy about it.”

“I don’t need you to be happy. Besides, they say hardship builds character.” Hitching up his battered khaki trousers, Hank perched one hip on the edge of her desk and folded his arms across his chest.

“Okay, first off, you got the first sighting back in May. Sort of an isolated incident, that one. Easy to write off. But then around the second week in June, you start to hear stories from sources all overManhattan that pretty much corroborate each other. All witnesses saw the same thing, and none of them knew each other before they made their reports.”

Corinne looked up from the notes she’d been jotting down. “What did they see? A little green man with a top hat and a pot of gold?”

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Hank ignored her. “Witnesses reported seeing an extremely fair blond man, about six feet tall, with hair almost down to his butt and pointy ears.”

She rolled her eyes. “Oh, for God’s sake, Hank. That’s not a leprechaun sighting. That’s an escapee from a
Lord of the Rings
convention. Some teenaged geek with way too much time on his hands dressed himself up like Orlando Bloom’s character and paraded down Fifth thinking he was the shit.

Case solved. Can I go home now?”

Hank shook his head. “Not so fast, kid. I’m not done yet.” He shifted his shoulders and continued.

“Now the man in and of himself wouldn’t have raised so much as an eyebrow under normal circumstances. This
is
Manhattan, after all.” Corinne grumbled under her breath, but she didn’t interrupt.

“So almost universally, the witnesses initially dismissed the weird guy as just that—a weird guy. But that was before he started doing magic.”

Corinne sighed. “Did it involve dice rolls and phrases like, ‘my wizard calls on the House of Illusion to summon forth a seventh level Temporal Distortion plus three?’”

“From what I hear, it just involved a temporal distortion. Would the plus three thing have been more impressive?”

Her pencil paused over her notepad, and Corinne looked up. “What did you say?”

“Would the plus three thing have been—”

“Not that,” she growled, her eyes narrowing. “Before that. The part where you said it did involve a temporal distortion.”

“That’s what the witnesses say.”

Corinne looked longingly at the aspirin and debated pretending she hadn’t read the warning label about permanent liver damage. “You’re telling me thatOrlandowaved his magic wand and opened a rift in the time-space continuum?”

“Get real,” he scoffed. “You’re just mixing metaphors. Magic wands and time-space continuums are two totally different animals. Besides, no one mentioned anything about a wand.” Her hand inched toward the aspirin. Who really needed a liver anyway? “Forget the wand,” she snarled.

“I think the rift is the material question here, no?” Hank shrugged. “Whatever. It’s your story.”

“Are you
trying
to kill me?”

Hank ignored her, or maybe he just didn’t hear the question, since her face was buried in her arms and smushed up against the surface of her desk. It muffled the whimpering. “The witnesses claim that the man in question walked up to the wall of an abandoned building, and the bricks slid apart to let him through.” Corinne turned her head just enough to glare at her boss through one narrowed eye. “Meaning that Orlando Bloom took a trip to Diagon Alley. Did he tap a strange badge on his shoulder and talk into thin air as if someone could hear him?”

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“They said the air around the wall seemed to shimmer, but after he went through, it looked totally normal, as if nothing had ever happened. The same sort of story has been reported by individuals uptown, downtown and midtown, and that’s why I want you out there checking out if it’s true.”

“I can answer that for you right now,” she said, lifting her head and grabbing the assignment sheet to wad it up into a little, crumpled ball. “It’s not true. Now can we talk about that proposal I sent you on the Columbiastudents arrested during the animal rights protest?”

“Looks good. I’ll look forward to reading it. Right after you turn in the leprechaun article.”

“Someday you’ll pay for this, Hank. I hope you realize that.” He shrugged and looked remarkably unconcerned. “I’ll live in fear.” His weathered face wrinkled into a grin, and he clamped the toothpick between his molars, chuckling. “Look at it this way. I didn’t make you check out the lead this spring when that cab driver said he picked up two werewolves outsideCentral Park. I know when a story’s complete crap.” Then he turned and ambled back to his office, chortling to himself all the way.

Corinne soothed her temper by making an obscene gesture at his back with one hand, while she used the other to rub the elbow she’d smashed on the desk when he’d made the werewolf comment. For God’s sake, those werewolves had been her friends. Well, her friend and her friend’s furry fiancé.

Throwing caution and the potential for irreversible liver damage to the wind, Corinne popped another two aspirin and slugged back the last of her cold coffee. Staring at the dregs left behind in her cup, she realized her need for caffeine superceded starting her research on the leprechaun story. Without a new dose of her drug of choice, she wouldn’t be able to so much as lift a pencil, let alone go pounding the pavement to track down potential witnesses.

Grabbing a handful of change from the bottom of her purse, she shoved herself to her feet and headed for the door. Weaving her way between the desks of her colleagues, she ignored their absent greetings as easily as she ignored the ringing of telephones and the clacking of computer keyboards. All her attention remained focused on the front doors to the
City Chronicle’s
office suite and the elevators just beyond.

Those elevators were her ticket to the basement of the building and the vending machines that stood there, patiently waiting to dispense the sweet, dark nectar of the gods.

She tapped her foot impatiently while she waited for the car, punched the button marked “B” a dozen times in rapid succession as soon as she stepped inside, and stared at the digital floor indicator as it counted down. Just as the thick metal doors slid open, her pocket started to trill the opening bars to
Toccata en Fugue
. Sighing, she dug out her cell phone and flipped it open. “Yeah?”

“I give up. I surrender. This is the official white flag I’m waving in your ear right now.” Corinne fed four quarters into the vending machine and scowled. “Ava, what the hell are you babbling about?”

“I am not babbling,” the other woman snapped, her voice crackling over the line even though the cell signal came in clear as glass. “I am informing you in perfectly rational and reasonable terms that I am throwing in the towel and washing my hands of the whole mess. I may decide to take religious orders.” The machine button protested the amount of force Corinne used to punch it, but it yielded an icy bottle of soda with a reluctant thump. “Yeah, right. Sister Ava Immaculata. I can see it now.” She pinned the
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phone between ear and shoulder so she could twist off the bottle cap. “Mind telling me why you’re in such a tizzy?”

“This is no tizzy, Corinne Magdalena. This is utter exhaustion and despair. I give up on the whole lot. I just needed to call and wish you a nice life before I left for the nunnery.” Corinne raised the bottle to her lips and headed back toward the elevators, giving the button a much more civilized push this time. “Same to you. Leave an address, though, or you won’t get a Christmas card.”

The curse Ava muttered managed to retain an unexpected air of grace and elegance solely due to its manner of delivery. It had certainly never sounded the same on the lips of the dockworkers who usually used it. “You fail to amuse me, Corinne, darling. But then, most things fail to amuse me when so many people I’ve tried to care for turn their backs on me within the space of six months.” Corinne swallowed fast to keep from choking on her drink. “Turn their backs on you? Going for the melodrama here?”

“What would you call it when people ignore everything you try and do for them, only to end up making horrible decisions on their own?”

“Reality?”

Ava never raised her voice, but Corinne still had to fight the urge to pull the phone away from her ear and wince. “I can see I’ll get no support from you. And why I should have thought I might is beyond me.