Ash to Embers (Courting Shadows) (3 page)

"Was that so difficult?"

Anyone with less of an ego would have ripped her apart.

"Not if it pleases you, Oracle."

He speared a cloud of yellow smoke corkscrewing through the humid air and inhaled slowly, savoring the taste where it mingled with the remnants of her blood left splattered on the metal. The grace in his movement struck Tian as forced.

"They all think I'm mad, you know."

The change of subject was abrupt, but the statement was hardly news. She agreed, but he wasn't asking, so she kept her mouth shut. The Oracle's madness had been the rumor for centuries.

"Answer me," he said. He appeared unaware that he hadn't asked a question.

"I believe that we are all slave to something, Oracle," Tian said. She leaned over and covered her molars with the palm of her hand, unwilling to leave them behind and hoping he wouldn't notice.

He barked out a sharp burst of brittle amusement before his face closed in on itself. He worked the filigree pipe between two fingers. His shoulders hunched around his ears and he leaned towards her with a feral snarl. The Oracle snapped the fingers of his free hand, expecting her to crawl to the base of the tree where he was perched. Little to her credit she did.

"I am slave to none, mongrel, least of all Her."

He was referring to their errant Goddess. The one that had forsaken them so long ago she was more myth than reality. Tian had been born after the abandonment and found it difficult to muster up anything other than ambivalence. The highborn Sidhe, especially the older ones, still mourned the loss. Supposedly Faerie had been on the decline ever since, not that anyone would admit it.

"As it pleases you, Oracle. What of the cup you would have me retain?"

Easier to fall back to ritualistic answers as she struggled to get the conversation back on track. The faster he told her what he wanted, the faster she could get the hell away from him.

"That was not my fault." The vehemence in his response spewed loose strands of spit down his jaw and at her face.

Whoa, now.

"No Oracle."

Any other half-breed would have handled this cocksucker better, but her brain didn't churn out the kinds of platitudes that would get the job done. She used to grovel better than this. Now she just died and hoped like hell she stayed that way. It never worked.

"They're using it against me," he said. "Taking what is mine."

"Who is?"

"If I knew that, obviously I'd have little use for you. JUST GET ME MY FORSAKEN CHALICE!"

Tian felt herself pale.

Goddess turned.

He'd lost the Sidhe Chalice. No wonder he'd required her oath of silence. She was screwed. Totally, utterly, unfailingly screwed.

Sio shoved back from his desk. There was a stack of paperwork covered in his handwriting with notes in the margins that he had no recollection of making. A flick of the cordless mouse next to his right hand, and a halfhearted glance at the digital read-out at the bottom of the monitor caused him to curse out loud. He should have been gone nearly an hour ago. Instead he'd been chasing stray thoughts around his skull that had no business being there in the first place. Overthinking his life had never managed to do him any favors and yet here he was doing it at work of all places.

Textbook definition of a glutton for punishment, son.

He was still obsessing over the three hour stretch he'd spent in the shower after getting home. He'd scrubbed Gray Dress's phone number off of his chest until the water had run cold and his torso looked like it would be better suited to a butcher shop than a bedroom because she'd written on him with a goddamned purple permanent marker. A Brillo pad had been the only thing he could find that had been sufficiently abrasive. He would have preferred steel wool. Hell, he would have preferred sulfuric fucking acid if it had been available, and even then he had the sneaking suspicion the removal would have taken more effort than he'd had skin. He should have been paying enough attention to avoid being used like a coloring book by a woman whose name he couldn't remember.

He couldn't remember much about the sex either, except that she hadn't shut up. She'd moaned, whimpered, cussed, gasped, and whined like a porn star until he'd been forced to choke her to get her quiet. He didn't want to think about that though, didn't want to think about the fact he felt like he'd profaned the mirage of the goddess in the fireplace by getting laid, or how he felt unclean.

The whole incident was another item on a rapidly increasing list of shit that he didn't want to think about. Sio shook his head, disgusted with himself, and scrubbed a hand over his face. He should have kept his dick in his pants, but he hadn't and now he was at the center of a full on meltdown that began and ended with the hallucination of a staggeringly hot piece of strange floating in a hotel fireplace. The breakdown was beautiful in its simplicity.

The image of that half submerged female was burned into the back of his brain. He couldn't get her out. Sio rubbed his eyes, miss-stepped in the mental sparring, and pulled up a pulse-cranking visual from the night before. He'd been avoiding it all day. Picturing her only made things worse. The contrary impulse to find her set off a savage flare of temper that nearly caused him to put a fist through the wall of his cubicle. He'd broken a sweat. The realization of how close he'd come to losing control made him nauseous.

Sio took a deep breath and pied-pipered his spooling sanity closer to home. Out of all of the seriously broken sad sacks he'd known, he had the dubious honor of being one of the most high-functioning. Vacillating emotion settled into something less mercurial. There was only one remedy for this kind of head trip and he craved it before he'd fully resolved to make the call.

The chair beneath him groaned in long suffering protest as he hauled his ass up and out. He grabbed his gym bag and made for the exit. He hit the landing and barreled down the stairs, taking them three at a time. It felt good to move, as if he could outrun the sick feeling that came on the heels of too much personal reflection.

If he had any sense, he'd be headed straight for the gym to beat himself until there was nothing left to his psyche but muscle and movement. But he didn't have that much sense and he knew it. He needed to hit something, sure... problem was, he needed that something to hit back. Sio dug into his pocket on a mission to locate his phone. He found it and came away undaunted by the lack of reception in the stairwell.

Thirty seconds later he was standing outside being battered by the ambient street noise of the financial district, wondering how he was going to hear anything that came out of the other end of the line while city fire trucks wailed past in every direction. The sun filtered through the cloud cover, glinting off the mirrored high rises in random patches that looked like slanted golden searchlights. On any other day he loved the city, loved the subtle neon hum, the wildly varied crush of life, the vibrancy, and the grime, and the dark edges that hid in the shadows of alleyways and alcoves. He loved the comfortable anonymity of existence. Today, every urban molecule was suffocating.

Sio took a deep breath and let it out slowly, hoping for some miracle akin to drowning in reverse. The airflow was cool in his chest, thick enough to conduct the electric charge that seemed integral to the city's natural rhythms. It wasn't fresh, but he wasn't choking on it either. It was also curiously absent of whatever magical soothing property he'd been hoping for. He tried not to dwell on the disappointment as he sifted through the contacts he never used in search of the elusive one he kept telling himself he was going to delete. After two years it was still there.

He hit send and started walking, pointedly ignoring the group of tourists who were taking his picture from across the street. He hadn't been sure if the line had made connection until it went silent. Ten seconds later a whisky soaked brogue hit the other end.

"Speak."

"I need a fight, Liam."

A heavy rustling in the receiver preceded a satisfied grunt. "I don't do amateur on short notice, mate. Even for a crowd pleaser like yourself."

"You don't do amateur anyway," Sio said flatly.

"Too many rules, not enough green. It's business."

Sio stopped dead in his tracks as three whip thin teenagers on skateboards careened around him, nearly getting flattened by a city bus in effort to get out of his path. He shook his head. "Does this sound like a social call to you?"

"Mate, I wouldn't know a social call if it bit me in my fuckin' arse. Waste of time...but I might be able to sort somethin' for forty percent."

Sio started walking again, dead set on ignoring the fact that he was being watched. The feeling gnawed at his nerves. He didn't exactly read as inconspicuous. If people were staring, it was because he stuck out. He got that. It was just too damn bad that the dumbasses with the overwhelming need to test their testosterone quotient only crawled out of the woodwork when he was in a
good
mood.

"Thirty and you're a greedy prick, Liam."

"Forty, and we both know you don't give a toss about the money, Sio, so there's no point in arguing. Now, are we havin' a conversation or are you havin' a fight?"

"Make it good."

Liam snorted. "How soon can you get here?"

"Five minutes."

"Don't bother using the buzzer...shit don't work."

"For the kind of money you've made off of me in the last few years you live like a low life."

Liam grunted into the other end and hung up on him.

"I'll text," Sio said to no one in particular.

He stuffed a pair of headphones in his skull and cranked the volume until he could feel the vibration from the bass resonating in his jaw. It wasn't as easy as he would have liked to buy into the illusion of isolation he was aiming for, especially not with the nagging sense that he was hauling a tether. Sio ducked down a side street and came out on O'Farell. He could smell that he was in the Tenderloin about the same time that it registered visually because the area was a shit box. He plowed through the endless supply of humanity languishing in the persistent filthy haze of addiction, neglect, and the downright war zone depression that clung to every object, alcove, and building.

"Sio."

Hearing voices is when you know for certain that what you lost, ain't coming back.

It may not have been one of the initial indicators that he was nuts, but it sure as hell was an effective reminder. He kept walking, willing the unnaturally loud feminine chirp to fade into the mess of sound still blaring from his ear buds, as if he weren't delusional.

"Sio, seriously? WTF, I like, know you can hear me..."

He stopped ten feet from the rundown shop front that sold stolen knock offs below Liam's apartment, gazed at it longingly, and turned around.

Gray Dress, who was wearing something hideous and hot pink, stood facing him with her hands on her hips. He still couldn't remember her name. He tried, and came back with nothing but the overwhelming urge to get away from her. Sio rubbed his chest and took an unconscious step out of her reach as she moved toward him. The girl stopped and pursed her lips as if she'd gotten a mouthful of something sour, eyes narrowing in offense. For a split second her expression became threatening, spiteful, in a way he hadn't seen in years.

"You should be happy to see me." Her tone was laced with an agitation at odds with the surety in which she'd rendered the statement.

"I'm surprised. Seems like an unlikely place to run into one another." He tossed out a noncommittal shrug and lopsided half smile that felt more like a grimace.

"You didn't call."

An accusation. Jesus, this was not going well. He'd been inside of her so he wasn't about to disrespect her, but he wasn't in the head space to have this conversation either. He hadn't led her on, and he sure as hell hadn't promised her anything, spoken or otherwise. Given the mood he was in it was a small wonder he wasn't screaming his damn head off. He almost pitied the poor bastard that got into the ring with him tonight.

"It's been less than a day since the last time I saw you."

"You should have wanted to call as soon as I left."

"I was busy scrubbing off the art project you left on my chest."

Gray Dress lunged at him, fake nails bared like talons as she made a grab for the front of his shirt. He side stepped and pushed her hands away. Her reaction was totally disproportionate to the provocation and they were acquiring an audience.

"You need to stop," he told her.

"Who do you think you are?" She was scowling and staring at the front of his shirt as if the material would dissolve under the sheer force of her will. Apparently he wasn't the only one that was nuts. The air warped around her, giving off the wavering illusion of heat.

"Unless you want to spread the wealth, sweetheart, piss off. I got business with your boy," came a loud bellowing from above. Sio looked up to see Liam and his waist length rust colored dreadlocks hanging out of a third story window.

"You have no idea who you're dealing with," the girl hissed, folding her arms and staring petulantly up at the Scotsman. She looked back at Sio and pointed at the center of his chest. "You'd better make this up to me."

Not damn likely.

Sio shook his head as the small woman turned on her heel and flounced down the street. "I'll pass."

****

The sun was setting and Tian wondered whether she'd been in the Oracle's tender care for one day or a dozen. Time ran differently in Tir Na Nog so it was hard to tell. When staring down the barrel to infinity, the difference between one hour or a hundred years was negligible. Either way she was battered as she got to the gated entryway in front of the house she shared with the rest of Eamon's Cell. The run down Victorian in the Haight hadn't looked this appealing in years. Tian rummaged through the leather bomber jacket she was sporting, searching for the wayward key with no luck.