Whiskey and Water (15 page)

"Lay on, MacDuff," she said, and
made a languid arm. "And damn'd be him that first cries, 'Hold, enough!'
" he answered, and took her wrist to lead her on.

They took the T back over the river, and
she pointed out that if she stayed too late he would have to drive her home,
because the trains stopped running soon. Something spined and too big for a cat
scurried monkey-quick into the shadows as they crossed a street against the
light. "Don't worry about it," he said, and held her hand to lead her
under the horseshoes and thorn branches hung over the apartment's front door.

His apartment was on the third floor of a
gaudy, peeling, converted Victorian with a practiced sense of irony. Blue light
still flickered under the door of the second-floor apartment as they climbed
past it, and she leaned on his arm, straining to make out the television words.

Christian dropped his grip on Lily as they
achieved the landing. She stood aside and stared at the door. "No
wards?"

The boards were bare. Just brown wood with
peeling varnish. He laid a hand flat over the doorknob and pushed; the door
swung open. "Anything I have to fear, a little iron wouldn't keep back.
Welcome in, Lily. Take off your shoes; I'll get the wine."

He latched the door behind them and walked
toward the kitchen, shedding his jacket across the spine of a ladder-back
chair. Lily didn't hesitate about the shoes; the lace-up granny boots looked
great with the softly shiny superskin of her glove-leather pants, and they had
good arch support for walking, but heels were heels and they didn't breathe.
She slid them across the old swaybacked floor and dropped onto the futon with a
sigh.

He found her there when he came back,
balancing glasses and a freshly opened bottle, the viny, vivid scent of the
shiraz twining the apartment. She'd unhooked the busk of her bustier, and it
hung open like a vest over the velvet peasant blouse. Small breasts pricked
naturally under the clinging cloth, lifted by the sprawl of her arms. The
leather pants pulled taut against ridged hips, conforming to the soft curve of
her belly and pudenda, clinging in the hollow of her thigh. The hide dimpled
and stretched oddly, though, and he smiled softly to himself. That explained
where the power came from. She was a creature of the chinks and intersections,
neither bird nor maiden. There was power in transformations.

"Drifting off on me already?" He
set the wine and the glasses on the coffee table, and lifted her feet to slide
underneath them. She started to pull out of the way, but he held on to her
ankles, and a moment later she relaxed and let him rest her feet across his
lap.

"If you're plotting what I think
you're plotting, you'll have me at your mercy in a moment," she said sleepily.
She slid her arm down from across her eyes and pushed up on elbow. "Pass
me my bag, Christian?"

He did, without comment, and she rummaged
around loose change, credit cards, condoms — fresh today—a cased syringe, and a
mostly empty tin of Flavigny rose pastilles until she came up with her pillbox.
It was actually an antique silver snuffbox, and Christian watched as she
rattled it and slipped it back into the bag without opening it. "Should I
ask?"

"I just wanted to make sure I had my
hydrocortisone if I need it."

"Allergies?"

"Not exactly." She jangled her
Medic Alert bracelet, the crimson caduceus welded to a hammered steel disk on a
stainless steel bangle Michael had made to replace the ugly standard-issue one.
"If you ever find me incoherent and vomiting or dead to the world, there's
always a syringe in my bag. Just jab it into the nearest available muscle
tissue. I'll thank you for it later."

He nodded, and leaned forward over her
feet and ankles to pour the wine. "Liquor's okay?"

"Liquor's positively indicated,"
she answered, accepting the glass before slumping back against the bolsters.
The wine tasted of oak and black cherries, round and tannic. He flicked on the
television—a smallish set on a cherrywood cabinet that was much nicer than the
TV deserved—with a remote control, and Lily lolled and sipped wine while
proletariat stiffs identical to the living dead shuffled through their routines.

And then she moaned, "Oh, Christian —
" as he balanced his glass on the other arm of the futon and dug his
thumbs into the arch of her left foot.

She had big feet for such a little girl.
But she was heavy-boned for her height, with bony masculine hands. Not at all
surprising, though the curve of her hips and the jut of her breasts was
convincing, and so were her graceful arms. She pressed her foot into his hands,
head arched back in abandon as he slid strong digits over her bones and flesh.
"Just yell if I push too hard."

"Got a jackhammer?" she quipped,
then groaned heavily as he worked sore skin and tendons. "Oh, God."

"Only in my off hours," he said,
and bent over the task. She shivered and stretched against him, surrendered,
the movie forgotten in favor of the pressure of his erection against her
calves. He slid one hand up her left leg, over the leather, and didn't stop at
her knee. She caught his fingers.

"Christian, before you go any
further, there's something you should know. I'm — " She hesitated, searching,
and he stepped into the breach.

"Not like other girls?" he
asked.

Her hand tightened on his, and the light
that soaked her skin guttered and brightened, a blown flame. "How did you
know? "

Not accusing, but curious, and he squeezed
back before he answered. "The pants are
very
tight, Lily. And you
mentioned an endocrinologist. Are you pre-op?"

She half sat up, but awkwardly, with the
glass in her hand and her feet in his lap. "Not exactly. I have congenital
adrenal hyperplasia. Do you know what that is?"

"Not a clue," he lied. All fairy
tales aside, he couldn't really see into human souls. That would have removed
all the challenge, and besides, it wasn't
his
job to measure sin against
virtue. But he was a very good guesser, and not much else was a mystery to him.
Modern medicine included.

"I'm intersexed," she said,
bluntly, holding his eyes. He didn't look down, and he saw her smile. "Which
is to say, I'm a girl—genetically—but—"

But," he said, and very gently
disentangled his hand from her fingers and laid it across her crotch. She pressed
against him, her hips a broad, lean arch. Men didn't
do
that, didn't
take her bravado at face value and answer with their own. Didn't watch her face
with inquiring eyes while deft fingers molded engorging flesh, outlining,
exploring through warm leather.

"Stop?"

"Not if I have anything to say about
it."

"You know," he said, as she
purred and coiled into his touch, "once, you would have been raised a magician
or a shaman, for being born as you were. Maybe you found us for a reason."

"Us?"

"The coven."

"You talk too much." She lifted
her arms to him as he turned and slid from beneath her legs. "You are a
bad, bad man."

"Not really," he answered,
meaning
not a man
and knowing she would hear
not really bad.
He
set her wine aside and moved his own to the coffee table, and then he kissed
her, tugging an earlobe with his teeth, flicking his tongue across the skin
between her piercings. She tasted of salt and earwax and the bitter astringency
of her perfume, and her combs and hair clips scratched his fingers when he
cupped her head in his hands and nuzzled over stark collarbones to the knob of
her sternum.

The old house shivered with her pleasure,
the power awakening under her skin, creaked as it settled its stout old beams
and bawdy dowager facade. Her fingers disheveled Christian's hair, took his
pony-tail apart and spread the locks over his shoulders, a translucent curtain
of copper and saffron that turned the wavering television glow into streaked
light through stained glass. She found the hem of his shirt and tugged it up,
her torn fingernail snagging threads, the shirt tousling his hair more as she
drew it over his head and down his arms. He sat back and untangled himself,
dropping the shirt on the floor.

The flicker on his skin wasn't just the
television, though Lily couldn't see it yet, and he had eyes only for her. But
the old house saw, and stretched under them, warming itself on the heat of her
light, of his darkness. She arched up and pulled him down, skin against skin
interrupted by the cold steel of her busk brushing his chest, the rucked-up
velvet shirt. Her legs wrapped his and heels hooked knees, pressing her groin
against his. "You'll have to teach me how to touch you," he said.

She grinned against his neck, her nails
describing lazy spirals on his back. "The penis is just a supersized
clitoris anyway. What I have is sort of in between. I have faith in you."

"I'm glad someone does," he
answered, and kissed her again when she giggled. Her joy filled the room with
heat; the old house offered warm drafts to caress her skin, to fan that
trembling brightness. She fumbled in her purse and came up with a condom in a
bright foil package. He pulled it from her fingers and set it next to the
wine. "I'm sorry. Were you in a hurry?"

"No," she said. He blew a
raspberry against her belly. She laughed and pulled his hair. "But it
might come in handy later. And I wanted you to know — "

"That I could?"

"With me, anyway. We're all unique
snowflakes." She smiled through her irony and bit his jaw. He hissed
pleasure; she took the hint, pulling hair, rolling his nipples between her
fingers until he gasped wet heat against her ear.

"Harder," he said, and, grinning
wickedly, she extricated a butterfly clip from her hair. She held it up before
his nose. "How hard do you want it?"

He closed his eyes and shook his head.
"Hard," he said, and she pushed him onto his back as tinny shotgun
blasts plinked from the television's speakers. Their weight on the futon bowed
the old floorboards, and the old house yearned in to them with all its
shadows, swaying around their coupling, humming as it sustained them in its
embrace. She was so bright, moth-wing bright, flicker of strength like the
tremble of her pulse in the hollow of her throat, and the angel who held her was
so weary, and so dark in her arms when he left his mark upon her skin.

And the old house loved them for their
tragedy as much as for her brilliance, like a corona trailing a falling star.

The protocols, such as they were, for
dealing with a Fae crime in the mortal world were simple. One reported it to
the Fae consulate, and the consulate reported it to the Queen.

But that was for places that were not New
York City, and crimes that didn't involve a suspected wizard as the first
responder on the scene. Not to mention the complicating factor of Ernie Peese
filling out the paperwork, and the mayor's office getting interested so fast
they must have roused the old man out of bed before the body was cold.

That was probably Ernie's doing too. Suck
up, kick down. If Ernie ever made captain, Don Smith was moving to Connecticut.

The autopsy was finished by noon on
Monday, and Don finally made it home late Monday night. Monette was in the
kitchen still, home from her shift at the restaurant, showered free of grease and
wearing a towel wrapped like a turban and a long marigold caftan with fringe
that tapped her ankles. She cut flowers in the sink, under ice-cold water. Don
paused to kiss his sister on the cheek as he went by, en route to the
coffeepot. She was a rangy woman, rawboned, smelling of fake freesias from her shampoo.
"Isaih," she said without looking up, "you drink that stuff now,
you be awake all night."

"I go sleep just fine," he said,
relaxing the careful diction of the middle-class accent he put on with his tie
in the morning and wore all day, and for the same reasons he used his middle
name on the job. "What you cooking up?"

"If you be home for supper, there
would be food for you on the table."

"If nobody went got killed for just a
month, I'd be here every day."

She huffed and turned her back on him as
he poured coffee. She replaced the flowers on the white cloth—covered shrine
in the hall, and the glass cylinder of the vase was chilly against her hands.
She straightened statuettes and centered the white candle and the water glass.
"Bad day?" she asked, finally, bringing the old flowers into the
kitchen to dispose of.

"Little girl," he said.
"Twenty-one." Unconsciously he pawed at his chest through the shirt,
pushing aside the untied necktie. Monette caught his wrist and pulled his hand
down, away from a scar too old to have any right to itch. "Mama
home?"

"She home," Monette said.
"In bed. Don't rub at that."

He dropped his hand as she opened the
refrigerator. He could still feel it, a tight inflexibility in the center of
his chest, a shape like a Spanish Dancer mollusk or a centipede. Only a single
bypass, and he was taking better care of himself now. But the medical leave and
the divorce had taken it out of him.

And besides, his mother and Monette could
use the help. And there had been room in the apartment for another. Easier than
finding his own place, in New York City.