Gods and Swindlers (City of Eldrich Book 3) (8 page)

“Would you get me some more coffee?” Meaghan asked John.

He stared at the unconscious elf.

Meaghan hoisted the saucepan. “I’ll be fine. If he wakes up, I’ll give him another little tap.”

John nodded and headed up the stairs.

Meaghan looked around the basement. Russ had done a lot of work down here since their father had died. He’d gotten rid of the boxes of random junk and set up the space as a rough but serviceable recreation room. There was a slouchy old couch with a new cover Annie had made for it, a card table, and a newer futon sofa, which was now open and covered with rumpled bedclothes.

Not sitting there.
Meaghan moved over to the couch and sat down. While she was okay—theoretically—with the idea of Natalie and Owen being together, she didn’t want to know any of the details.

The elf had been chained by an ankle and a wrist to one of the support columns in the center of the room. A pallet—it looked like an inflatable sleeping bag pad and a couple of quilts—had been placed on the floor, along with a galvanized bucket and a plastic jug full of water.

Meaghan had been so amped on adrenaline out in the woods she hadn’t really looked at her attackers. The elf was small, not as short at Owen, but far more slender, almost child-like. It wore a plain gray tunic and leggings, not the rich fabrics and colors she’d expected. The clothing was like a blank screen, she supposed, and the elf projected on it whatever it wished.

As Owen had described, the elf had sallow pockmarked skin and pointy ears. There was nothing beautiful or glamorous in the least about its actual appearance.
No wonder they hate the impervious so much. We’re like the kid who told everybody the emperor was naked.
Even the thing’s laughter was unappealing, like tomcats having a fight.

The elf stirred, groaning. Meaghan had assumed it was a he, but up close, she wondered. These things seemed as genderless as the Troon.

When the elf saw Meaghan, it bared its pointy, yellowed teeth and began to hiss.

She merely stared back.

The elf began to hiss louder.

Meaghan, her face impassive, held up the saucepan.

It cringed back toward the column.

“You be nice,” Meaghan said. “The leprechaun is strong, but I’ve got leverage on my side. I’ll hit you even harder.”

The elf stared back, its face twisted in revulsion.

“Do you understand what I’m saying to you?” Meaghan asked. “Do you speak English?”

“No one speaks this. You grunt it,” the elf hissed. “Like pigs. This is barely language.”

Meaghan raised an eyebrow. “You really don’t get what’s going on here, do you? You’re the one chained to a post. Insulting me is probably not your best strategy at the moment.”

“Impervious,” the elf spat. “You are a disease. Worse even than the rest of the humans.”

Meaghan smiled. “For you, yeah, I’m your worst nightmare. Because if everyone could see what I’m seeing, you’d be finished. What’s your name?”

“You couldn’t say it with your human excuse for a voice.”

“Try me.”

The elf sneered at her. More high-pitched shrieking erupted from its mouth.

Meaghan clamped her hands over her ears. “Enough, already. Shut up.”

“You wanted my name,” it said, smirking.

“That’s your name?” Meaghan shook her head. “And you’re insulting English? You got a shorter version of that?”

It shrieked again, sounding like a rusty hinge.

“Fine,” Meaghan said. “We’ll come up with something on our own. Why are you here?”

“You attacked me and then brought me here.”

“I attacked you
?
You bastards jumped me in the woods.”

“You broke the truce,” the elf said.

“I broke the truce? How?”

“You brought him. The smith.”

Terry?
“I didn’t bring him. He just showed up. After you attacked me.”

“Your feeble gods can’t protect you from what’s coming.”

Meaghan frowned. Was it still talking about Terry? “What feeble gods?”

The elf hissed and bared its teeth again. “Those who are no more.”

“So what’s your problem with the smith?”

The elf glared at her but said nothing.

Meaghan nodded. “It’s the iron thing, isn’t it? It was the iron smiths who put the hurt on you guys. Well, I got news. You got bigger problems than one blacksmith and his thoroughly pissed-off wife.”

The thing’s eyes widened.

“Huh. You’re more scared of her than him.” Meaghan smiled. “You should be. If it were up to her, you’d already be dead. She really doesn’t like you guys.”

“Who?” John, no longer bare chested, asked, as he headed down the stairs with two mugs. “I was cold. I had to get a shirt and then make more coffee.”

“We were chatting about Terry and Steph. He’s scared of Steph. Don’t suppose you know why?”

“Uh . . .” John handed her a mug. “She is very scary?”

Meaghan sighed. “You’re going to tell me eventually.”

“I don’t know the whole story.”

Meaghan took a sip. He’d gotten the cream and sugar exactly how she liked. “Mmm. That’s good. And you know more than you’re telling me.”

“Uh . . .”

She smiled up at him. “I get you’re protecting him. It’s sweet. Infuriating, but sweet.”

The elf squinted at John. “You. You are a Fahrayan.”

“Was a Fahrayan,” John said. “We are human now.”

The elf twisted its mouth in a humorless grin. “Not all of you.”

John’s coffee mug slipped from his hands with a crash. “What are you saying?”

“Would you like your wings back?”

John gasped. “Who are you?”

Too late, Meaghan noticed John was looking at a point about two feet above the elf’s head. “John, no, it’s—”

John gasped and fell to his knees.

Meaghan ran to him.

John, still kneeling, wrapped his arms around her, his body shaking. “I can feel them. My wings.”

Meaghan glared at the elf. “What did you do?”

“I gave him a taste of what he lost.” The elf smirked at her.

“Stop it,” Meaghan shouted as John clung to her, sobbing. The red fury rose up in her mind and she could see herself smashing the elf with Terry’s sledgehammer. “Stop!”

She dimly registered the sound of feet clattering down the basement stairs, shouting, and then the elf’s shrieks again, before the sound was shut off like a radio. In the welcome silence, John’s sobs seemed to grow louder.

Meaghan felt a hand on her shoulder and turned to see Lynette standing beside her.

“Where is everybody?” Lynette asked. “Who’s been guarding it?”

“Natalie was here,” Meaghan said in a rush, “but it started shrieking, and Owen hit it with the saucepan and knocked it out, and told us it would be out cold for a while, so I thought it would be safe. Then John came downstairs.”

“Where’s Natalie?”

“Upstairs,” Meaghan said. “Taking a shower.”

“Where’s Owen?” Lynette asked, frowning.

“Um . . .”
You promised not to tell.
“Around.”

“Damn it,” Lynette said. “What happened to Gretchen?”

“She put a spell on it to make it sleep and then went home.”

Lynette gestured toward John. “What did that thing do to him?”

“Made him feel his wings again,” Meaghan said.

Lynette gasped. She’d been there the day John had escaped from Fahraya with bloody stumps where his wings had been. She’d help dress his wounds and had watched the aftermath. “We’d better call Terry.”

Meaghan nodded. “As soon as I get John upstairs.”

Chapter Ten

L
YNETTE CALLED GRETCHEN
, who zapped herself there in moments. Natalie, her hair still wet from the shower, joined them. The three witches put up multiple spell walls. With Lynette standing by with a stunning spell, Gretchen and Natalie trussed the elf as tightly as they could with the steel chain and strung from it every piece of iron and steel they could find, including several rusty cast-iron skillets Russ had picked up at swap meets but hadn’t cleaned yet.

By the time Meaghan got John to her bedroom, he had calmed down quite a bit, enough to object to being removed from the basement.

“I am fine now. It was only the surprise. I want to talk to it again.”

“Not a chance in hell,” Meaghan said. “That thing got in your head somehow and until we figure it out, you need to keep your distance.”

Meaghan led John to the bed, but he refused to lie down. “I am not sick. Stop. I don’t need this. I am going downstairs again.”

“Not until we know what went wrong with the buffering magic.”

“Nothing went wrong with it,” Lynette said as she walked into the room. “The magic was working. Did you call Terry?”

“On his way. What did you see when you came down the stairs?” Meaghan asked. “What did the elf look like?”

“Small, ugly, and dressed all in gray,” Lynette said. “It looked the same as it did last night.”

“No,” John shook his head. “Something else was there. Tall. Beautiful.” He glared at Meaghan. “You did not see it?”

Meaghan shook her head. “There was no one else there. You were looking above its head when you were talking to it. That’s when I realized what it was doing.”

“No, that’s . . . I saw it like you did when I came downstairs and then someone else was there. The one who . . .” John’s face twisted in revulsion. “They were the same? How could I not see that?”

“Because it was affecting your perception,” Lynette said. “Somehow. Even with the buffering magic. It’s what they do. When you’re under their influence you can’t tell truth from lies. You only see what they want you to see.”

“You’ve dealt with them before,” Meaghan said.

Lynette nodded. “Before the truce. Before we let the evidence of what they really are be erased.” She shook her head, her lips in a tight white line. “I never agreed with Matthew on that decision. I know he was trying to keep things from dragging on any longer, but it was a mistake to let them hide from their crimes.”

“The information wasn’t erased.” Owen strolled into the room. Instead of his typical impeccably tailored dark suit, he wore a black turtleneck and jeans. “It was removed and put in storage. And I know how to get it.”

At their first meeting, Owen had made Meaghan a proposal. He would provide resources to help care for the misplaced Fahrayans in exchange for Meaghan’s assistance in negotiating the release of Matthew’s redacted files from the people keeping them. But then all hell broke loose, and together they’d fought love-crazed witches and power-mad wizards, and barely stopped the invasion of mysterious hellish monsters who appeared even worse than the fair folk.

When the dust settled, Owen offered his help with the Fahrayans, no strings attached, and told Meaghan not to worry about it for now. The fair folk seemed like a lesser problem in light of the threat posed by the “extra-dimensional stinky space squid,” as Natalie had dubbed them.

Not anymore.

“The elf got into John’s head even with all the buffering magic in place,” Meaghan said.

“Yeah, I heard.” Owen looked at Lynette. “You couldn’t see any tampering?”

“No. Unless . . .” She groaned. “Damn it. I know better and I still fell for it. Unless he hexed me to think that’s what I saw.”

Owen nodded. “That’s what the fair folk do. It’s like mirrors in a funhouse. They can bewitch you so badly you have no idea anymore what’s real.”

“Yeah,” a deep voice said. “That’s what they did to me for a while.” Terry walked into the room and peered at John. “You okay, Johnny?” He looked around. “What happened?”

Owen sighed. “Uh, there’s something I haven’t told you all.”

Terry shook his head. “They know we know each other. Steph and I are still going back and forth on what else we want to tell them.”

“That’s a relief,” Owen said.

Terry nodded. “What happened?”

“The elf,” John said. “It got in my head. It made me feel my wings again.”

Terry grimaced. “You okay?”

John nodded. “I think.” He gave Terry a small smile. “But this may be a one-moment-at-a-time day.”

“Whatever it takes.” Terry squeezed his shoulder. He looked around. “You had spells up?”

Lynette nodded. “Several. But it still got to John. Then it tricked me into believing the buffer spells were still working.”

“Yeah, they’ll do that,” Terry said. “Little fuckers. That’s why Steph wanted to kill it last night. She says there’s no safe way to be around them. You shouldn’t have taken the iron off.”

Lynette shook her head. “We didn’t.”

Terry frowned. “You’re telling me you had the chain on it and it still managed to mess with your head?’

“Around an ankle and a wrist.”

“You said it wasn’t a big threat on its own as long as we kept some iron on it and put up spell walls,” Meaghan said.

“I was wrong,” Terry said. “This one is stronger than it looks. Usually any iron is enough to short-circuit them. We need to get it better secured.”

“Already done,” Lynette said. “It’s chained around the torso and we added every piece of steel and iron we could find. And we added several additional barriers. Is that enough?”

Terry nodded. “Probably. But you need at least two experienced witches down there at all times, and I think I’d better pay a visit and make some threats. Remind it who I am.” He wore a worried scowl. “If it’s resistant to iron, then it might have let itself get caught. So it could size us up.”