Emma Bull (25 page)
Authors: Finder
And yet—oh, surely not."
"What?"
"A part of it was true."
"What?" I said again, but in a different tone, because there was something in her voice that scared me thoroughly.
"We are—the elven people are in a few ways more like animal-kind than humans are. The wild canines know in a dozen small ways which are members of their pack and which not, and where they stand
within those groups. We can do that too, a little. We can sometimes identify the blood of Faerie. And what that girl had, my heart—it was not so, but it was very like. What can it be, this thing we seek?"
I was just wondering if this latest piece of information was news to Rico, when three people came around the corner behind Tick-Tick. They weren't moving quickly, but they were purposeful just the same. "Company," I said. "Three of them. I think they're looking for us."
"Five," Tick-Tick replied. "And no question of it."
It was almost a relief; I knew from the Ticker's face, anyway, that she'd set everything else aside for the moment to deal with whatever physical problem we might be about to have. The newcomers were all
humans, and I wondered how many of them had applied for their passports. From the looks of them, if they had, none were as far along as Tiamat. Was that to our advantage or not? We needed some serious advantage. Neither of us was in the rumbling line at the best of times, and I wasn't at the top of my form right then.
They stopped and spread out—at least, the three behind Tick-Tick did, which was all I could see, since she and I hadn't changed position. Stopping was a good sign. In sane people, it means that they're willing to consider being talked out of pounding your face into the asphalt. Two male, one female, probably friends and/or roommates of Tiamat's. None of them had anything in their hands, but one of the guys had a baggy denim coat on, with pockets big enough to hold a lot of things I hoped they didn't. "It's all right," I said, trying for a soothing balance of calm and scared. "We're leaving. And we promise not to come back."
"Damn right you won't come back," said one of the ones behind me, and I had maybe part of a second to realize that one of them didn't want to be talked out of it, and that it only took one, before someone
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grabbe
d the back of my shirt. The Ticker's fist whistled past my ear and my
shirt was free again, and I
was sliding
past her to deliver a stomping kick at the kneecap of the girl who'd come up behi
nd her. I
knew when I landed it that it wasn't in the right spot, but it stopped her anyway.
I left Tick-Tick to pay attention to things behind me. The guy in the coat was hanging back a little, but the other one, a boy with a long blond braid and a big purple bruise on the side of his jaw, waded right in. I made a feint at the bruise, which ought to have worked, so I didn't pay as much attention to defense as I should have and got a stiff one in the ribs. The girl whose knee I'd kicked lashed out at my ankle with the heel of her work boot and had her calf stomped on instead. But that put me off balance, and I couldn't do anything about it when her partner punched me somewhere in the vicinity of the kidneys.
One thing led to another, as things do if you let them. We ended up with me on my feet but pretty thoroughly immobilized by two people who, if they hadn't had a grudge against me when they came
down the street, certainly did now, and Tick-Tick pinned down to the hood of a long-abandoned Buick Special by three people, one of them the guy in the coat, who was holding a pistol with the barrel end in the hair over her ear. Him and his damned pockets. We were all breathing hard.
I knew next to nothing about guns—it wasn't my job. Tick-Tick knew about them, though. The guy in the coat pulled the hammer back with his thumb. The Ticker's face looked as if it had never worn an expression in its life.
Guns are pretty rare in Bordertown. Ammunition is even more so. I kept my voice low and even, so it wouldn't startle anyone, and said, "Tick-Tick? Is it loaded?"
Tick-Tick, who knew about guns and what they did and how they did it, who had the acute hearing of her species, would have listened when the hammer went back; she would know, from the sound of metal on metal, if there was a round in the chamber. If there wasn't, I hadn't figured out what we would do, since there were still five of them and two of us. But we would probably think of something.
In a voice as blank as her face, the Ticker said, "Yes."
I hadn't been afraid until then, I discovered. "What do you want us to do?"
"Just wanted to make sure you knew we were serious," said one of the ones pinning Tick-Tick, a dark-skinned female one. "Don't come back. It's none of your business what happens to us."
I thought of the day's events, thought of saying that if the climate of public opinion got any worse, it would be everybody's business, that there were people who already considered it their business who had even less reason than I did. But all I wanted was to see the side of Tick-Tick's head undamaged and out from under that gun barrel. So all I said was, "It's a deal. We're going."
The guy with the gun stepped back first, keeping Tick-Tick covered. Then the other two let her go, and she straightened up slowly. "Go on," said the gun owner. I realized it was the first time he'd spoken; his voice was higher than I'd expected.
"What about my friend?" asked the Ticker.
"Start walking. When you get to the end of the block, we'll let him go."
For the life of me—maybe literally—I couldn't think why they'd do it this way. Pure harassment?
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Tick-Tick turned around, leaned agains
t the fender of the Buick, and folded her arms. "Maybe you'd
better jus
t shoot me and be done with it."
"Go on!"
"Not without my friend."
"Tick-Tick," I said, "go ahead."
She wrinkled her mouth. "I don't feel like it."
The two people holding me didn't loosen up, but I could tell their attention was caught. The dark-skinned girl said, "Are you crazy? We're not afraid to shoot you. What's your problem?"
"He's my best friend," Tick-Tick said to her, as if she were explaining why one shouldn't cross the street when there was traffic coming. "I'm not stirring without him."
"He's a human," said the guy with the gun.
Tick-Tick blinked. "No, really?" She didn't sound a bit sarcastic.
Still, the dark-skinned woman took a step toward her.
"No," said the Ticker. "I will not run, and I will not fight, and I will not leave here without my friend.
Let him go," she told the two who held me, and they did. Probably out of surprise. Once they did, I stood where I was, and since I refused to do anything hostile, they probably felt it would look silly to grab me again.
We all looked at each other for maybe half a minute. Finally the dark-skinned girl said, "If you come back, we'll shoot you dead. We won't do any talking."
"Fair enough," Tick-Tick replied. I joined her by the fender, and we started up the road. Nobody said anything, so we kept going. After two blocks we looked back. They were gone.
My place was closer than hers at that point, so we headed toward it. Twilight had set in; everyone who lived south of Ho was finally awake and looking for something to get into. Now that I knew to look for it, I saw signs of pulled threads in the social fabric—odd, suspicious, sliding-away glances at Tick-Tick or at me from humans or elves, respectively, whom we didn't know. There were people around town,
apparently, who believed that one or the other of us was letting the species down.
We didn't do a lot of talking until we got to my building. Then Tick-Tick said, "What now, my dear?"
I had been thinking about that, which was why I hadn't been talking. "I say to hell with Linn's little plan to keep this quiet. Rico needs to know all this."
She nodded. We made it to the first-floor landing before I remembered that I was out of beer.
"Go on up," I told her. I went back down and cadged two bottles of lager from my neighbor Yoshi, who looked like he'd just gotten up.
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"I owe you," I said.
"Nah. I think I owe you. Anyway, don't worry about it." He scratched his scalp with both hands and yawned.
I tramped back up the stairs with the two sweating bottles. At the end of the hall, my door was open, and the room beyond was dark. I set the bottles down on the floor outside and bumped the door open with my arm at full stretch. Tick-Tick was sitting in the armchair by the window.
"You didn't light a lamp."
Her silhouette shook its head. "Hadn't the energy. And the dark is so restful—"
Her words stuck on a long and painful-sounding cough.
