Doc Sidhe (16 page)

"I know it sounds like he's trying to cough up a hairball, but it's all part of the ceremony." Harris eyed the tracer screen with concern. The incoming signal, still northeast, was getting closer, faster than he liked. "Doc, can you snap it up?"

Doc shook his head, not interrupting the flow of foreign syllables.

Gaby eyed the distance to the nearest stand of trees. "Look, if that really is them, we ought to get back into the subway."

"We'll be fine." Harris spoke with confidence he didn't feel. "When Doc finishes, they won't be able to get at us. You need to trust me about this."

She gave him a hard look. "You're making it hard. Not telling me what this is all about."

"You
really
won't believe it until you see it."

"Try me."

Doc interrupted his recital. "Harris." His voice was rough and weak, and Harris could see sweat pouring down his face. "Almost done. Are you staying?"

"Hell, no." Leave Gaby to go back to the fair world alone?

Harris took a last look at the device. The incoming patch of light was very close now; its edges nearly touched the edges of Doc's glow.

Doc began his chant again.

Gaby looked suspiciously at the two men, then her eye tracked something behind Harris. He turned to look . . . and saw the park grass writhing, curling and dying in a wave front spreading out from the circle of stones.

"See?" he told her. "It's real."

"This is your trick?"

There was a sharp crack from the east, and a little spray of dust kicked up two inches from Doc's knee.

Doc flinched and bent to be lower to the ground, but he kept chanting. Harris swore and looked toward the source of the noise—where a half-dozen men, bobbing pale faces out in the darkness, were running at them from the direction of the Met.

Gaby grabbed Harris' jacket. "God, Harris, we've got to get out of here." She dragged him half off the circle.

He grabbed her around the waist, spun her down to the ground as gently as he could. "Not yet."

She looked at him, her eyes wide, as if he'd pulled off a Harris mask to reveal the face of Adonis beneath it. She hit his shoulder. "What the hell are you doing?
We have to go.
"

"Not yet. Trust me."

Another crack, another section of ground twitched as if hurt.

Dammit, dammit, dammit!
Harris bore Gaby down, flattening her by sheer weight, covering her as much as he could. He pulled one of the fake policemen's pistols out of his pocket, saw her eyes get even wider.

He aimed it in the direction of the oncoming men.

No. If he missed, he might start raining bullets down on the museum. There could be people over there. It would be enough just to make them duck for cover. He lowered his arm a bit, aiming into the ground thirty or forty yards away, and pulled the trigger. He was startled by the way the gun kicked in his hand, by the painful loudness of the shot, but he brought the gun back in line and kept firing.

The three closest faces disappeared. He marveled that he might have hit them anyway. Then the three men returned fire from prone positions. Dust kicked up around Doc, and something high-pitched whistled inches over Harris' head.

His gun clicked on empty and he dropped it. He began groping around in his pocket for another revolver.

Gaby hit him again, ineffectually. "Get off me." There was fear in her voice. He felt a moment of pain as he realized it was him she feared.

He got out the second captured revolver and aimed it.

"Harris, you're crazy."

Harris began firing again—one shot, two. There were only two faces out in the darkness now, and one of them was shouting to the others. The return fire abruptly stopped. The two faces kept coming, one of them much higher off the ground than the other.

Gaby's hand clamped down on Harris' balls with a grip of steel. He jerked in pain and fired an accidental shot into the air. "Jesus, let go!"

"Let me up, or
I Will Tear It Off!
"

Harris writhed. It hurt worse that way, but he couldn't help himself. And that face was getting closer—

That
face. Adonis, not more than ten yards from the edge of the circle. Harris took aim and fired. He missed; he couldn't hold his aim steady. Not with a furious nutcracker clamped on him.

Five yards. Adonis was so close that Harris wouldn't be able to get to his feet in time. Harris fired again.

The shot hit Adonis in the nose. A gross spray of blood and meat, black in the moonlight, blew out the back of Adonis' head.

Adonis jerked to a stop and looked surprised.

Then it kept coming.

And it began to grow, stretching unnaturally just before it reached the boundaries of the circle. Moving too fast to slow down, Adonis, ten feet tall and growing, reached the edge—and stopped there like a mime running into an imaginary pane of glass.

Doc fell over on his side and turned to look at Adonis. He was in time to see the old man, a stretched, twelve-foot-tall version of the old man, stride up to the edge.

The old man's face, twisted in anger, peered down at the three of them—and Gaby, finally seeing what was going on, gasped at the sight of their elongated attackers. She let go of Harris.

Doc looked at the old man. He said a single word: "Duncan." His tone was pained, not surprised.

Then the world popped.

The bubble of light in the conjurer's circle dwindled to nothing. Adonis and the old man just stood there as Phipps tentatively approached.

It was bad. The old man's shoulders were shaking. "Sir?"

The old man spun on him. It was his I'm-just-about-to-lose-it look, all trembling anger ready to erupt. "It was him," Duncan hissed. "He's found me. Like he always does."

"Sir, we need to get back to the cars. The police will be coming."

The old man looked at him as though he'd spoken in a foreign language, then finally nodded.

The other men had hung back, brushing off their clothes. As he reached them, the old man quietly asked Phipps, "Who started shooting?"

"That was Kleine, sir."

"Kleine!" The old man smiled at the startled gunman. "How is your lovely daughter?"

"Uh, just fine—"

The old man drew his automatic and shot the man between the eyes. Bloody matter blasted out the back of Kleine's head.

Unlike Adonis, the gunman didn't keep going. He just fell over backwards.

The rest of them hurried back to the cars.

Harris rolled off Gaby and gulped in the air of Neckerdam. The stars above the city glittered down at him.

Nobody was
shooting
at him. But his arms were still shaking.

Gaby rose, looking around. "What the
hell
is happening here?"

"Doc!" That was Alastair, pelting up the roadway leading to the manor house. He skidded to a halt beside the collapsed body of his friend and knelt to check his pulse.

"They shot at us," Harris gasped out. "I don't know if he was hit." He reached over to pick up the guns he'd dropped—and froze. They lay where they'd fallen, but they were now deformed, twisted as if exposed to some enormous heat. Like Gaby's pepper spray.

"What the
hell
is happening here?"

Alastair gingerly probed around Doc's back, then peeled him out of the sweatsuit jacket. "I don't think he's been hit. A bad poisoning, though. I wager he ignored it."

"Much as he could." Harris wearily tried to sit up, then decided against it. His groin still hurt. Better just to stay here for a minute.

"And then commencing a devisement like this. Exhaustion and shock. The idiot."

Gaby stood over Harris and glared at him. But her voice was deceptively sweet. "Are you going to tell me? This is the last time I ask nicely."

Weary, he grinned up at her. "Welcome to Neckerdam. Gaby, meet Alastair Kornbock. Alastair, Gaby Donohue."

"Grace, child. Harris, help me carry him to the car, will you?"

Doc didn't wake up, but didn't get worse. They got him up to his room in the Monarch Building and Alastair sent the two of them away.

They found Jean-Pierre and Noriko back in the lab. Jean-Pierre spotted Gaby, put on a predator's smile, and walked up to her as if dragged by magnetism. "Harris, introduce us."

"I'm surprised to see you two awake." Dawn was finally lightening in the east, but Jean-Pierre and Noriko looked alert.

"We were preparing to spell Alastair out at the estate. Harris, your manners."

"Oh, yeah." Jean-Pierre's sudden, deliberate charm put Harris off. "Gabriela Donohue, this is Jean-Pierre Lamignac and Noriko Nomura."

Noriko bowed.

"Grace," said Jean-Paul. "So, you are the famous Gabrielle. Doc's description does not do you justice." He bent to kiss her hand.

She watched this with a bemused expression. "You remind me of my uncle Ernesto."

"Truly?"

"Yes. He's in jail where he belongs."

He straightened, his expression confused, and she turned away from him. "Harris, your friend Doc is in bed, all your fires are put out . . . it's time for you to give me some answers."

Gaby caught on faster than Harris had. "Wait a minute. When you say `Sidhe Foundation,' you don't mean the pronoun. You mean like in `banshee.' "

Jean-Pierre winced. "No. Daoine Sidhe. But like the Bean Sidhe, they're almost gone."

Gaby's face was an interesting study; Harris could almost see the thoughts clicking through her head like coins through a mechanical change-counter.

She looked at him. "Pop's half-Irish," she said. "And a fireman. A great storyteller both ways. He had lots of fairy tales for all the kids."

"So this means something to you."

"Oh, yes. Either you slipped me a tab of LSD, or we're in the land of the little people." She glanced at Jean-Pierre and Noriko. "Only they're not so little."

Harris finished up his account: "So just as we were popping out he saw the old man and called him `Duncan.' I can only guess that means the old guy is Duncan Blackletter."

Jean-Pierre paled and lost all the charm he'd been beaming at Gaby. "Doc killed Duncan Blackletter."

"Don't count on it."

"Gods. Then
I'll
kill him."

Gaby broke in, "I have a question. The way you've been talking about `protecting' me—am I your prisoner?"

Noriko and Jean-Pierre looked at one another.

"Of a fashion," she said.

"Of course not," he said.

"Which is it?"

"You are not," Jean-Pierre stated firmly, before Noriko could speak. "You are our guest. We will defend you with sword and firearm as long as you choose to accept our aid."

"Thanks." Gaby rose. "For right now, though, I'm going to take a walk."

Jean-Pierre rose also. "I will be pleased to accompany you."

"I mean, I'm going
alone
."

He frowned. "That is not advisable."

"I know. I'm doing it anyway."

"Why?"

"To prove I can. If the only way I can go somewhere is with one of you hanging off my arm, then I'm your prisoner. Right?"

Jean-Pierre tried being patient. "Doc would want—"

"Come on, Jean-Pierre. Do I walk, or am I your prisoner? You just said I wasn't. What's your word worth?"

Harris winced. He already had the impression of Jean-Pierre that Gaby's words would cut deep.

Jean-Pierre's face froze into a blank, cold lack of expression. "If you are foolish enough to go . . . I will not stop you."

"Or send anyone else to follow me."

"Or that, either." Jean-Pierre looked very much as if he'd benefit from half an hour of outraged swearing. "Please do not.
They
are out there. If you go, you expose yourself to danger. They have tried to kill Harris already."

She glanced at Harris. He gave her a private little nod of confirmation.

"Okay, it's dangerous." She did not look happy at the prospect. "But I'm doing it anyway. So sit." She took a tentative step toward the door.

Harris cleared his throat. "Gaby, you want some company?"

"You're damned right I do."

He rose. "Mind if I go upstairs to change?"

"I have grass on my ass, too, and you put it there. No, let's just go." She had on her tougher-than-nails expression, but Harris could hear the distress in her voice: she wanted out,
now
.

"Right. Never mind." Harris checked his pockets. Doc's gun, the volt-meter, and the big silver coin he'd been given about a day ago. He hoped these would be all he'd need.

It would otherwise have been an enjoyable walk. The morning sun was sending tentative streamers of light down into the street as they headed uptown from the Monarch Building, and even at this hour the street was alive with traffic. Fruit stands were already set up, if they'd ever been taken down, and a boy wearing shorts and a beret with his long-sleeved shirt hawked newspapers with a sales cry of "Oyez, oyez!"

Come to think of it, the street had been alive at every hour he'd passed along it. Neckerdam didn't sleep. He liked that. But he'd enjoy it a lot more if he didn't look behind every bush and in every storefront expecting one of the Changeling's men to come leaping out at him.

"You jumped on Jean-Pierre pretty hard. Were you just testing the limits, pushing the rules as usual?"

She smiled. "I don't have anything against him . . . but from the way he talked, I felt like I was some sort of package to be stuck in a storeroom. I hear talk like that, all I want to do is slap it down." She shrugged and changed the subject. "I'm sorry if I hurt you."

He forced a falsetto: "No problem, didn't hurt a bit."

She laughed. He thought, maybe if he built up a large enough supply of her laughs, then she'd reconsider things.

Gaby continued looking around her, wonder on her face. "God, this place is
great
."

"You sure are taking it better than I did when I first arrived."

"Maybe. It's all very familiar. Like the kinds of places I dreamed about when I was a kid. It's hard not to believe in a place you already sort of know." She shrugged. "You know, when I was little, I didn't want teddy bears or Barbie dolls. I always wanted my pop to find me a stuffed toy no one else had. An eight-legged horse."