The Modern Fae's Guide to Surviving Humanity (24 page)

“You!” they exclaimed simultaneously.

Halloran jumped to his feet. Janet found the sight of the cold-blooded bastard in his undershirt and slippers, his pants held up by suspenders, almost as unbelievable as the fact of where she'd found him. At least the paper in his hand was the
Wall Street Journal
.

“You're a leprechaun?”

“How the hell did you find me?”

“I met a guy in a bar.”

Halloran snorted. “It's always a guy in a bar.”

“You're a leprechaun?” Janet repeated.

“No, I'm a selkie.” He shrugged huffily, and snapped his paper, which he then folded and put in his chair.

“What are you doing here?”

His temper worsened. “Where else would I be? This is my home!”

“Aren't leprechauns supposed to be out in the woods somewhere? In Ireland?”

“I emigrated.”

“To Wall Street?”

“What, you think I'd come all the way to this country so I could be a shoemaker? Lots of Irish on Wall Street. I'm right at home.”

“And you're really a leprechaun?”

“I already answered that question. How'd you find me?”

“I followed the rainbow.”

“It stopped raining? I guess the weekend's not going to be a total loss after all. Maybe I can get in a full eighteen holes.”

“You know him?”

Janet looked behind her. Buzz had finally followed her inside.

“He's my boss.”

It sounded absurd. Here she was in an underground living room next door to the New York Fed with a guy she saw, and hated, regularly. Taking his gold would be easy.

“
Was
your boss,” he said. “Consider yourself fired.
Barging in on me at home like this. Where are your manners?”

Janet smiled. “Being fired won't matter if I have your gold.”

He looked at her slyly, a fox peering out through the shrubbery of his eyebrows. “You know about that?”

“Of course I know about it. You're a leprechaun. That's how it works.”

“I could grant you three wishes instead.”

“I don't want wishes.”

“You sure?”

Halloran tilted his head to one side, thumbed his suspenders, and winked. A tourist might have been fooled, but Janet was enough of a New Yorker to recognize when she was being conned.

“Just give me the cash,” she said, looking around the room for pots of gold.

With a sigh, Halloran pulled back the rag rug that covered the floor and opened a trapdoor. A sturdy wooden ladder led to the cellar below.

Janet couldn't make out anything in the darkness.

“I don't see any gold,” she said.

“I'm not Fort Knox, you know.”

“Yeah, but you are living right next to the New York Fed, which is even better.”

Halloran beamed. “It is, isn't it? Prime piece of real estate I've got here. Better than the damn bogs my cousins still call home back in the Old Country. Nothing like a little gold nearby to keep out the damp and warm the cockles of your heart. But that doesn't mean I can lay my hands on it. I have to work for what I have, just like anyone else.”

“Do you have a flashlight?” Janet asked.

Halloran smiled around his pipe. “Nope.”

“How am I supposed to see what I'm doing down there?”

“That's not my problem.”

“I have an idea,” Buzz said.

He went out into the hall and came back with the sconce and candle. Janet held out her hand.

“I'll carry it.” He hefted it like he was doing curls. “It's heavy.”

“You're coming with me?”

“Sure.”

Since Buzz had the light, he went first. Janet couldn't get a good look at what was in the cellar until she was already below the floor, her normal caution buried under a rich loam of cupidity.

She had to stoop, the ceiling was so low, and Buzz had to crouch. Halloran would have fit just fine. Her shoes scuffed against solid Manhattan schist as Buzz turned slowly, holding the sconce before him, so they could see the entire room. There was no pot of gold. Just metal filing cabinets along one wall.

Janet yelled back up the stair. “Where's the gold!”

Halloran's face appeared in the rectangle above. Janet's heart jumped. A quick kick, and the leprechaun could bury them forever. Though Buzz was big and strong, and the chairs hadn't looked heavy enough to weigh down the trap door against them.

“There isn't any gold,” Halloran said.

Janet was indignant. “You said there was gold.”

“No, you said there was gold.”

“What's in the cabinets?”

Halloran shrugged, and sucked on his pipe.

Janet remembered what the old man in the pub had said about bearer bonds, and turned back to Buzz. “Let's look in the cabinets.”

What they found was better than gold. The cabinets were full of stock certificates, which were a lot easier to carry without a truck. IBM and General Motors and Microsoft and AOL. Intel and Yahoo and InfoSpace. Amazon and Cisco. Every blue chip and high-flying dotcom Janet had ever dreamed of owning.

She held up a double fistful of paper. “Jesus, Buzz. They're all bearer certificates. We can just take them!”

“That's a good thing?”

“Yes! They're as good as cash. Whoever has a bearer certificate in his possession owns it. If these were registered certificates we could take as many as we want, but it wouldn't matter unless Halloran transferred ownership to us. With these, all we have to do is walk into a brokerage house and sell them. For cash.”

Buzz began grabbing certificates by the handful.

“You'll never get enough that way. Do you think we can lift one of the cabinets?”

They couldn't. Halloran had bolted them to the wall. They tried stuffing certificates into their pockets and inside their coats, but that ran the danger of wrinkling or ripping them. In the end Janet went upstairs and, with an attitude that dared Halloran to stop her, dragged the rug down to the cellar. Then she sorted the certificates into piles according to the largest face value, mostly the high-flying Nasdaq names, and rolled up as many of those as she could in the rug.

With each of them carrying an end, she and Buzz struggled up the ladder. On their first and second attempts the rug split open and everything fell out on the
floor. Janet was forced to do another sort before they were finally able to carry the load up to the den without spilling any of it. And the hardest part was still to come, lugging the carpet through the sewer.

“Think you have enough?” Halloran asked.

Janet blew a loose lock of hair away from her face. “If I could get a truck down here, I would. Don't think we aren't coming back.”

“It only works once. You'll never find this place again.”

“I can follow you after work.”

“I won't be showing up for work.”

“That reminds me: thanks for firing me. Now I don't have to bother to resign. Not with this nest egg.” She patted the rug.

Buzz was gloating, too.

“How much do you think we got?” he asked.

“I don't know. Thirty, forty million.”

“I believe you have about forty-seven million there.” Halloran eyed the girth of the rug. “That is, assuming you only took the highest priced shares. I know you have no qualms stealing from me, but would it bother you to know that a leprechaun's gold is a metaphor for his country's capital base? That's why Ireland was always so poor—people kept stealing our gold. The same thing will happen here.”

“What do I care about other people? You think I'm a liberal or something? I'm a trader. Besides, forty-seven million isn't even an ink stain on the capital base of this country.”

“I said the relationship was metaphorical, not nominal. The last time someone stole my securities was 1929.”

Janet patted the rug. “As long as I've got mine, what do I care?”

“No, I suppose you wouldn't.”

“You wouldn't, either.”

“That goes without saying. I'm a leprechaun. Watching humans screw up is my favorite pastime.”

“Well, I'm not screwing up. Not unless these are forgeries.”

“I assure you, they are the real thing. You are a wealthy woman.”

“That's all I need to hear. Come on, Buzz. Let's get these to a brokerage.”

They had some trouble getting their loot out through the sewer tunnels. The lights that had led them in had gone out, and Buzz had to hold the sconce with one hand to show the way. The last they saw of Halloran, he was watching them from his doorway, puffing at his pipe. For someone who'd just lost forty-seven million dollars, he looked remarkably cheerful. Then Janet lost sight of him as a corner of the rug flipped opened and a couple thousand Microsoft and Apple shares fell out before she could grab them. She nearly dropped her end of the rug trying to keep the certificates out of the sewer, but remembered not to be too greedy just in time.

The sun was well up by the time they made it outside, late enough for the markets to be open. Maiden Lane churned with people on their way to work. It being New York, few people cast a second glance at them as they lugged the rug down the street. Suddenly a man buying a cup of coffee from a street vendor shouted, “Look out!” and pointed above their heads. Janet had no time to react. The rug was jerked violently down out of her
hands. There was a loud thud, like a bundle of newspapers being tossed out on a curb, and stock certificates burst up into the air out of the carpet and fluttered around her.

She looked down. A man lay motionless on the ground, the rug squashed beneath him. Blood oozed from his face.

She looked up. A man and a woman leaned from a window nine or ten stories above. The woman held her face in her hands.

A crowd gathered. Even Wall Street stopped for sudden, violent death.

“He must have lost a fortune.”

“To be sure, the market's taking it on the chin again this morning. It's just like October 1929 all over again.”

Janet hadn't thought she'd hear that voice again. Halloran stood at the front of the crowd, looking like any other man in a dark suit and not something out of a fairytale.

His eyes twinkled.

“Let's just hope the Depression that follows isn't as bad as the one we had back then.”

On her hands and knees, Janet scrabbled at her shares.

Jean Marie Ward

T
here were lots of advantages to being a part-time cat. Being chased by a Rottweiler named Bitsy through Holcomb Creek Park wasn't one of them.

Heart pounding, chest heaving, Jack Tibbert raced down the bike path, insensible to the late November cold, the people on the path, or anything except escape. Bitsy's heavy grunts grew louder as she closed the gap between them. His imagination added the heat of the dog's breath on his neck as her massive jaws closed in for the kill. He had to take cover—high where her crushing teeth couldn't reach. But where? To his right the ground dropped sharply to the creek. The leafless saplings masking the fall were barely up to Jack's feline weight. They'd never survive the dog. The only trees worth climbing grew on the left side of the path. To reach them he'd have to cross a field of dead grass set with exercise equipment too low to fend off a Chihuahua. It was gonna be close.

He feinted right. With a triumphant
woof
and the
crackle of dead weeds, his pursuer plunged into the brush. Jack veered left, gaze locked on the outdoor balance beam. If he could run the dog into the log …

“Look out!” a female voice screamed.

He turned just in time to see a bicycle twice his height tearing up the center of the path. Instinctively, he jumped. The wheel clipped his shoulder. He tumbled across the pavement and kept rolling until one of the saplings knocked all the wind out of him.

It took him a minute to put the world back together.
Had to get up. Dog. Too close. Yelping?
He shook his head.

“Are you all right?”

The light girlish voice seemed to come from heaven, which had dropped to a few feet overhead. The angel kneeling beside him had a perfect oval face, almond-shaped eyes, and windblown black hair streaked with rusty brown. She looked about sixteen, maybe a year younger than him—the kind of girl you see in all those dumb TV shows set in high school but you never meet in real life.

Small teeth raked her plump lower lip. “Don't scratch me, okay? I need to touch you to see where you're hurt.”

Sugar, you can touch me wherever you want.

Somewhere in the background, Bitsy started to whine. Her owner wailed, “But it's the cat's fault!”

“Not if Bitsy was off her leash and chasing him,” Jack's vision shouted over her shoulder.
Foxy chick was a cat person, too.
He purred, arching his back into the hand she trailed along his fur.

“Spine and hips, good,” she muttered to herself. She found his tail. He flicked the tip playfully. “All right. Anything else we can fix.”

She flinched at another blast from the Rottweiler's
owner. “Just keep her calm, Mrs. Saar. It'll be okay. I've got my phone.

“It's not like it hasn't happened before,” she added under her breath.

She couldn't keep her hands off him. Swearing at the hit-and-run cyclist, dialing her phone—the whole time, one of her hands was stroking him or scratching the sweet spots behind his ears and between his shoulders. He rewarded her by turning the baby blues on high. They worked their usual magic. Her bright brown eyes and pretty pink mouth got all soft. She forgot the phone pressed to her left ear. When the call connected, she bounced in surprise.
Ev-er-y
-thing bounced.

With a grin as wicked as feline lips allowed, Jack rolled his shoulders and hauled himself to his feet. Joints popped. A dozen different muscles and tendons hummed with pain. He tottered a couple steps, wincing at his scraped fore pads, and collapsed dramatically across her jeans. He wasn't hurt much—nothing broken, anyway. Roughed up, yeah. Sore, definitely, and he'd be stiff tomorrow. But he had hopes for tonight.