Hallow Point (29 page)

I almost didn’t even bother to ask him. At this point, I was pretty well convinced that, no matter how out of character it was for ’em, the Unfit were keeping a low profile. So I was pretty well expectin’ his answer.

“Umm…” Franky wandered to a nightstand, pulled a bottle of something pungent from the built-in cabinet, and took a swig. “Mick, you’re talkin’ the loud stuff? Fireworks?”

“Anything attention-grabbing, yeah. That tough for you to understand?”

“No, it’s just…” He sat hard on the nightstand, which creaked a loud protest. “Mick, other’n your impromptu clambake with Áebinn at Scola’s place—and, well, the incident with me’n the
rusalka
—Chicago’s been pretty quiet. I mean, not the whole city, of course. Just, uh, our half of it. Been some gang violence and all, but I ain’t heard of anything else involving Fae.”

“And what’s that tell you?”

I let him work it out. Franky don’t always make great decisions—in the same way I “sometimes” don’t like cars—but he’s no bunny. Once I got him thinking about the repercussions of what he’d just reported…

“But that makes no sense!” He sounded almost put out, as if it were my fault things weren’t adding up. “
Maybe
the outsiders mighta managed to keep outta the Seelie’s way, but if the Unseelie are out in force, looking for this thing… There’s no
way
they dodged
everyone
, and no way they didn’t… Mick, there oughta be a trail of human and Fae bodies a mile long!”

“Give the man a cigar. So how do
you
explain it?”

“Maybe I just ain’t heard about stuff—not
everything
comes to me, you know?—but it’s hard to figure anything too big woulda slipped by me.” He frowned, didn’t seem to really believe his own words; started to shrug, discovered he was sloshing perfectly good rotgut from the bottle, and took another gulp instead. “Maybe they coulda hidden some of it in the human gang violence, but not all of it. Beyond that…”

“Yeah.” Didn’t figure I oughta spill about the so-called accidents just yet. “‘Beyond that’… How long’s the talk about Gáe Assail been crawlin’ the grapevine?”

“Jeez, at least a few weeks? Maybe a couple months? Honestly, though, I think most of us—even those who were out lookin’—only sorta half believed at best. The search was pretty well dyin’ down until the museum break-in.”

Well, well. And could that maybe have been the
point
?

Oh, and that reminded me: I hadda quick detour I oughta take before headin’ home, once I was through here.

“Tell me everything out of the ordinary you
have
heard, Franky. No matter how unimportant or small. And then, yeah, I’m gonna need you to deliver a couple messages for me.”

Franky cradled the bottle to his chest like it was a teddy bear.

“I’m not gonna care much for this, am I?”

“If it makes you feel any better,” I said, grinning, “they ain’t gonna care too much for you, either…”

* * *

The crowd was tiny.

Later in the day, even a slow one, the place’d be crawling with patrons. The buzz of conversation woulda drowned out a falling bomb, and the parking lot woulda been more steel and rubber than concrete. Hadn’t been too much quieter’n that last time I’d been here: even though it was after hours, and even though there hadn’t been that many of ’em, the bulls and newshawks had been making more than enough of a ruckus for anyone’s tastes.

But now? Early morning on a weekday? Place looked as though they oughta be throwin’ a “going out of business” sale to move the elephants along. Was only a trickle of people passin’ through the doors; a stream, at most. Nothin’ close to the normal current. Hell, since a lotta folks were still making their morning commute, the passing sidewalks were a
lot
busier.

Mighta been that I didn’t need to be here, that I was wasting time I couldn’t be certain I had to waste. But I couldn’t shake the memory that’d struck me a couple times already—back at Rosen’s flop, for instance—and that I’d been reminded of again at Franky’s place: so far as I could recall, I hadn’t sensed anything powerful enough to be
Gáe Assail
at the museum. The more I thought about it, the more certain I was that the discrepancy was important, maybe even the key to this whole goofy fiasco. And that meant I couldn’t rely on recollection of “probably” and “maybe.”

I hadda be sure.

Gave some real serious thought to just walking in with the rest of the tourists and then sneakin’ my way down. Odds were good I could be quick’n quiet enough to be done before anyone noticed I didn’t belong…

On the other hand, “good odds” are still odds. Gettin’ caught red-handed could seriously gum everything up, especially if someone called the cops before I had the opportunity to, uh,
talk
’em out of it, or if the security guards were packing: I could wind up taking a few nights to recover, or cooling my heels under glass. Galway and the others who’d been bamboozled into taking orders from the Seelie sure wouldn’t mind an excuse to put me away for a spell.

The other way, then.

The “gettin’ in” part was the same. I paid for admission. Then it was just a matter of wanderin’ a bit until I found myself a security guard near an exhibit that was still pretty quiet. The display where I finally found him was something about gems, if I recall right. They were blue.

Gink I eventually located was a tired, doughy-lookin’ mug in uniform somewhere between a cop’s and a postman’s. He
was
wearing heat at his belt, though.

He didn’t much appreciate being flagged down and talked to, either.

“What do you—?”

“Mick Oberon. PI. Consulting with the police on the recent break-in.” Hey, it was only
sort of
a lie, right?

“I…”

Guess, on top of the talking, the guard hadn’t been prepared for anything that might require, y’know, thinking.

“How do I know you’re—?”

I slipped my PI ticket out of my wallet and thrust it at him. His brow furrowed, and I worried he might be planning to read the whole license.

But that was okay. I had him confused, the idea planted in his noggin, so now it oughta be duck soup as soon as…

He looked up. I dove in.

Into and through his eyes, easy as a pond, and I gotta say I had plenty of elbow room back there, if you get what I mean. I really didn’t need to do much more’n a poke a few thoughts to make him nice and pliable.

“’Kay,” he said dully. “So whatcha need?”

I hadn’t actually planned to grill him at all, just use him as a walking key, but… “Mr. Lydecker been behavin’ at all unusual lately?”

“Uhh… Well, yeah, a little. He’s usually down in that basement for hours after close, but accordin’ to Sal, last night was the second night he ain’t stayed late. Guess the break-in spooked him.”

It
could
be that simple, but I doubted it.

“Yeah, I guess. Right.” I guessed this “Sal” was one of the night guys, and Officer Moron confirmed it for me. Also confirmed, as I’d figured, that Lydecker didn’t come in this early.

“Well, thanks. Now if you could just show me downstairs, I gotta poke around a bit.”

“Well, but… I should probably get one of the curators to—”

“No, you shouldn’t.”

“Nah, I shouldn’t.”

I
thought
he’d see it my way.

Gink got me past the “authorized” doors, and a few janitorial staff who mighta looked at me askance if I’d been alone.

I posted him in the hall, to keep me from bein’ bothered, and I told him in no uncertain terms that nothing’d interrupted his day, that when he got back to his rounds he’d forget all of this. I think he mighta drooled in response. Sharp
and
silver-tongued, this guy.

I had no trouble finding Lydecker’s workspace. Room was bathed in sickly light and an irritating buzz, just as I remembered. A few other people came in’n out, far across the room, but I encouraged ’em to assume I belonged here. Since I’d gotten through the door’n had my security-guard escort, it wasn’t a hard idea to plant.

Lydecker’s table held maybe half the number of tools and fossils it had on my last visit. I dunno if that was because the workload had lightened or just ’cause some bits were actually put away at the end of the workday. And I cared even less than I knew. I wasn’t here to criticize Lydecker’s organizational habits.

I held my hands over the table, shut my eyes, reached out…

Nothing. Just as I’d I remembered it. And that made even less sense than anything else I’d stumbled over on this job.

I felt the cogs startin’ to turn deep in my head again, same as they’d done back in Elphame, but I didn’t try to focus on ’em yet. Didn’t examine what I was thinking too closely. I needed to be
absolutely
certain before I risked breaking that chain of contemplation.

So, I did more’n just reach out, groping blindly for a lingering aura of magic. I reached into my coat, held the wand, and drew power to me—a lot of it. I was careless with it; a few of the smaller fossils crumbled.

Until, finally, I had enough. That same energy, that same luck I’d just taken in, flowed right back out, carrying my sight with it, my touch, senses you ain’t even got words for. Auras and power far too faint for me to ever normally detect should become clear to me now.

And they did, but not how I expected.

Still no sign of the Spear of Lugh. Nothing even close. Oh, there was a ceremonial bowl and dagger set in the next room that had a minor enchantment on ’em, and there was a remnant of power in a trilobite fossil that I admit confused (to say nothing of worried) the hell outta me. I was almost tempted to pocket that one.

But no trace of the spear.

If it’d been here, it was
stupidly
well shrouded.

I did, though, glom to something else, something I’d never’ve noticed if I hadn’t been swinging so much mojo right then.

Fae.

Oh, not now. But recently, there’d been another of the Fae in this basement, maybe even this room. Couldn’t say who or when, wouldn’t have even come close to spotting an aura this faint without all the extra power. But there’d definitely been someone from the other side of the tracks in here not
too
far back.

Fae were here but the spear wasn’t? Or someone could hide the spear but not themselves? Or…?

Goddamn it.

Was useful to know I’d been right, that there’d been no trace of Gáe Assail here, but that didn’t bring me any nearer to understanding what the hell
was
up with the spear. Or
where
the hell. Or why the Unfit thought what they were doing was
so
urgent it was worth losin’ the race we were all running. All I knew was that the room contained absolutely no-room-for-error-
zero
trace of the spear.

Why? How? I’d sensed it elsewhere; why not here, in the one place we
knew
it had been?

We
did
know Gáe Assail had been here… Didn’t we?

Or did we?

Lost in my own labyrinthine thoughts, startin’ to fit all this into my mental puzzle, I collected Officer Moron and made my way back toward the stairs.

* * *

Can I just tell you how very surprised I was, when I got home, to discover my place was bein’ watched? What’s an amount less’n zero?

Wasn’t Sealgaire this time, though I didn’t doubt he was skulking somewhere near. (I could tell by the nine thousand and three spiders crawling along my spine.) Nah, this was a tiny rise, a slight hump in the overgrown, autumn-soaked grasses between two stoops of a neighboring greystone. Hadda be a
ghillie dhu
—or
leshy
or green man, if you prefer. Between the leafy skin and the grassy beard, no human woulda noticed him even without the glamour that lay over him, an extra layer of supernatural camouflage. Only reason
I
made him was that I’d lived here long enough to memorize even the smallest details; once I’d caught the change in the topography, it hadn’t taken much to identify my new frond for what he was.

Yeah, I said it; maybe Pete was rubbing off on me. Deal with it.

He
coulda
been local, keeping peepers on me for the Chicago Seelie, but probably not. Most
ghillie dhu
are way too timid to get mixed up in this sorta thing, and I knew from experience that the ones who live around here all more or less fit that stereotype to a T. Odds were this one was an outsider, keeping tabs for one of the bands who’d come hunting the spear.

Either way, though, didn’t really matter. I gave him a jaunty wave—kinda funny watching the lawn twitching in surprise—and headed on in.

I decided then’n there that the gink’s name was “Mow.” Whaddaya want from me? Gotta amuse myself somehow.

What happened after I got inside was a lot less funny.

After all the Colts and Tommies and all that, you wouldn’t figure a twenty-year-old Winchester hunting rifle’d be all that scary.

And I wasn’t scared, really, since I knew it wasn’t gonna kill me. Didn’t really feel inclined to resting up a few days to heal, though, so I was maybe concerned. Worried a touch. Startled, certainly.

Goddamn sick of having heaters stuck in my mug, too.

He’d been lurking in my office when I shoved the door open and flicked on the lights. Standing behind my desk—who the hell knows how long he’d been there?—and, I guess, just waiting for me to show.

Took a moment to chew myself out something good, if only internally. Gink shouldn’ta gotten the drop on me this way. The rifle was freshly oiled and its owner was sweating worse’n a constipated hog. Even stronger were the emotions rolling off him, fear and rage and helplessness and grief thick enough to walk on. I shoulda sensed him from the hallway, maybe even the stairwell, but
noooo
. Mick’s too busy running through plans and schemes in his noggin, and thinkin’ wildly confused and contradictory thoughts about a certain dame, to pay attention.

I mighta
finally
begun puttin’ the pieces together, but if I’d seen my own behavior over the last few days, I sure as hell wouldn’ta hired me as a detective.

Anyway, yeah, lights come on and I’m staring down another barrel. Only this one ain’t quite steady. Not shaking so much it’d have much chance of missing me at this range, but not still.