Whiskey and Water (45 page)

"I will." Michael's frown pulled
the corners of her mouth sternly down. "'TIS what angels are for."
The angel stepped back, turned, and squared her shoulders under the trailing
cape of wings. And did not see Lucifer smile behind his hand, as —somewhere
above—he felt a warlock once named Marley reach out and take up the power he
had so long laid aside.

:Nuala,: Lucifer said, making his
wineglass vanish before he took her arm. :Wilt dance with me, my swan?:

Jewels was not following the conversation.
Fortunately, the Prince did not seem to require her comprehension, merely her
attendance. And she was
motivated to
learn. She wanted this, wanted the life
she could see eddying around her, as if she were a rock tossed into a moving
stream. She could almost feel its ripples and rills, the lift of a little curl
of white water where it stroked her edge, the pressure that wanted her to roll
downstream. She wanted to treat with these winged and elf-eared and magical beings
the way Matthew did, or Kit, with his ash-colored hair and his too-dark eyes.

And it started here, in this echoing and
two-thirds empty hall, with trying to follow a quick, slurred conversation in a
language she didn't understand, between Ian—her
lord—
and the red-haired,
sword-bearing giant who was his father. She folded her arms together, her own
pulse racing under her fingertips.

She had too much to learn. But it was
happening. Finally. All around her. Happening now. She took one deep delighted
breath to fix the scent of this place in her heart, and smiled. It might be
Hell, but it smelled of roses.

The odor of sanctity," a young
woman's voice said in her ear, and Jewels startled and found herself eye to eye
with an angel. An angel her own small height, stern in a pearl-gray coat, with
slicked dark hair.
"He
likes to pervert what he can."

"Him?" Jewels asked. She let her
gaze slip toward the devils gathered at the center of the hall.

"Who else?" Jade-colored wings
settled, revealing translucent lavender and gray under the foresty greens. The
angel brushed past Jewels to wait at Ian's elbow until he gave her his
attention, a matter of a moment or two. "Your Highness."

He nodded, balancing at the crux of her
attention and his father's without appearing to slight either one. A delicate
trick. Jewels caught herself admiring it, and frowned. The Prince might be
pretty, but she suspected he would not be safe to fall for. Not when she lived
as his servant. She'd gathered that nearly everyone in Faerie belonged to
someone else — and the rest lived by the sword.

"Michael," Ian said, and waited.
No honorific, just the name. It seemed dignity enough, said that way, though
neither the angel nor the Elf-prince bowed. And people
did
bow here,
like they meant it.

Michael waited too, and then brushed
Jewels' arm with the leading edge of one wing. It felt nothing like she had
expected, warm and flexible. She almost cried out. "I have a message for
your servant," the angel said, when she seemed to think some
responsibility had been satisfied. "With your indulgence?"

Ian never glanced at Jewels. He nodded,
casual tolerance, leaving Jewels unprepared for the irritation that clenched
her jaw. She had never been good at accepting parental authority.

But she'd chosen this, and she would
learn.

"By your leave?" the angel said,
and extended her arm. Belatedly, Jewels understood that she was intended to
take it, like a lady escorted to the ball, and after a moment she accepted,
stepping inside the bivalve camber of Michael's wings.

The angel's air was grave. Jewels let
herself be led, thinking of the warmth and hardness of the slender arm under
gray wool, like the marble under her shoes. "A message."

Michael turned an eye on her. The corners
of her lips dragged as if her mouth were a bow, drawn to deliver an unwelcome
arrow. "Your friend is dead." Her steps hesitated as if she expected
Jewels to crumble.

I know,
Jewels almost said.
I saw her body.
But she
hesitated. "My friend?"

"Geoffrey," Michael said.
"I am sorry."

The words formed in Jewels' mouth without
her knowing where they had come from, heavy and round as stones. "You're
wrong."

Michael shook her head. Jewels stepped
back, pushing Michael's arm away.

"He can't be dead. He's here. I just
saw him."

Jewels turned, and Michael turned with
her, following her sun. The tall arch of her wings simulated privacy, and also
blocked Jewels' line of sight. She jerked back, three steps, intending to step
out of the living bower and find Geoff for herself, point him out and prove
Michael wrong. But the green wings crossed behind her, fenced her in, and drew
her close.

"He left," Michael said.
"He went back to New York. And he has been killed there. By that which murdered
your friend Althea, and no one could protect him."

When the girl staggered, the angel caught
her, balanced her, and kept her on her feet. She swayed, fists to mouth, and
Michael's grip on her forearms was all that kept her from crashing to the
floor.

"Why would he go back?" It
wasn't what she had meant to ask. Not exactly. Her eyes were burning, and she
didn't want to blink. When she closed her eyes, she saw him. Poor gentle Geoff,
who'd made Virgin Mary’s with wassail instead of horseradish. He would have
been mutilated like Althea, tangled up in his own blood, and blood made him
dizzy and he'd loved her anyway, even when she didn't really want him to —

"Why New York?" That was closer
to it. She forced herself to lower her hands and breathe, watching the angel's
eyes.

"I cannot answer that," Michael
said. "But there are others who may know."

She half turned her head when she spoke,
not quite looking Jewels in the eye.
Do angel's lie?

But Michael cleared her throat and
continued, "Vengeance takes its own time," and peeked quickly back at
Jewels' face.

And so maybe Michael wasn't avoiding her
gaze. Maybe she was looking over Jewels' shoulder, craning her head past the
sweep of her wing. Toward Ian, and his father, the so-called Dragon Prince.
Jewels licked her lips.

She must have stopped shaking, because the
angel let her stand on her own. "Thank you, Michael." The angel
folded her wings, left hand dropping to her rapier's hilt. "I am but the
messenger."

Keith listened with folded arms while Ian
laid out his plan, and then said, "Elaine won't forgive it.'

"She won't have a choice," Ian
said, lowering his voice again as he checked the position of those who would
have the most interest in this conversation. Cairbre stood with the Queen, and
the girl, Jewels, was still distracted by the angel. Scents threaded the air in
the ballroom, each aroma knotting through the others until the whole made a
sort of net, smells woven into a palimpsest of who was there, and who had gone.
"She did what it seemed she must, and now it's done."

Another man might have made a gesture, a
flick of his fingers as if brushing something away. Ian stood very quiet, with
folded hands, and waited for his father to answer.

"She would have done more,"
Keith said.

"Do you
want
to see her
suffer?" Ian amended his question before Keith could object. "No, I
don't mean it. You went to Hell in her place. I just — "

"You were raised to be King,"
Keith answered. He leaned forward, his cloak falling over his shoulder, draping
in sculptural folds. "And you want it. Ambition's no sin — "

Ian flashed a look over his shoulder, in
the direction of Lucifer Morningstar, who danced with Nuala in a sway of
alabaster feathers.

"All right," Keith allowed, with
a laugh. "There's ambition and there's ambition. You know I want Elaine
off that damned throne, and I want her to be herself again. And you — "

"I am a wolf," Ian said, with
quiet pride. "I do not need to sell away my heart or soul to endure the White-horn
Throne. No matter what mother thinks of me. I can do what she cannot. And if there
are four that love her, three of us I
know
would see her released, and I
do not think Carel would be opposed."

Keith bit his lip at the mention of his
rivals, but had the sense to nod. "She says the Fae can't love —

"They can," Ian replied. "I
have loved as one, and loved as a wolf as well, and as a man. It's not the same
love. But it is love nonetheless. And she acts in love now—she
does"
—in
the face of his father's arched brow—"but it's a Fae thing, cold and
implacable as ice peaks in the sun. We need a ruler who chooses to rule, rather
than enduring it. Too many of her subjects would see her replaced—and mother will
not kill Àine, and Àine will never leave her alone. The Mebd was the Summer
Queen, the elder sister, and now it is Àine's role, and mother is the Snow
Queen — "

"And you want it," Keith
repeated.

"And I want it," Ian said.

Ian felt his father decide. In wolf-shape,
Keith would have settled his haunches, flipped his tail over his feet, and
waited, alert, to see where Ian pointed.

The man just nodded once. "Then how
to make her abdicate?"

Ian let his hands fall apart and pressed
damp palms to his thighs. "She won't do it for herself. So we make it the
only way to save our lives."

Keith schooled himself, breathed deeply,
and frowned. "What do you mean?"

Michael," Ian whispered. "Do you
think you can take her?"

Keith's gaze went over his son's shoulder,
to the frail dark-haired girl with the dappled jade wings. And then he frowned.
"We'll talk later. Your friend returns."

Ian turned to meet Jewels and waited. She
wobbled somewhat; the news had not been good. He might have felt pity, if he
had permitted the emotion. Instead he pressed his tongue to the roof of his mouth
and thought of what his mother would have done.

Jewels' throat worked. "I need your
help," she said. "Geoff is dead. And I want — I want revenge."
And you appeal to me as your lord to obtain it?" Conscious and careful,
Ian arched an eyebrow and accepted a small smile, and didn't think of the boy
in his black leather and his ridiculous badly dyed hair.

He felt Keith fading away behind him: a
diminishment of presence, a diminishment of scent. I — " She hadn't
thought. No, not really.

"Let go of the iron world," Ian
said. "It's not yours anymore. You chose."

Her fingers blanched as she balled her
hands.
"You're
sending me back there to learn."

A temporary thing, to secure her future in
Faerie, and she knew it. It was a false trail, and he wouldn't pursue.

"It will break your heart." Calm
and stern. The way, he fancied, Cairbre would say it. "You shall live a long
while. Will you seek vengeance every time something mortal you cared for dies?
It will keep you very busy."

She closed her eyes. "You're laughing
at me."

"No."

"Do you . . ." She swallowed.
"Do you forbid me?"

He let it hang for a moment, so she would
remember that he could. "No," he said. "Not this time." "Then
what? "

"I won't forbid you to seek your
revenge," he said. "But I will not weep when I bury you, when you fail."

"I don't like prophecies. Who killed
my friend?"

"Àine," he answered. "The
Queen of the Unseelie Fae. The girl with the sunflowers in her hair."

She swallowed that too. Calmly, with a
little smile. And then she dropped her head and murmured, "I can
wait."

Lily had bitten off most of her lipstick
and what remained was a bruise-colored stain around the margins of her mouth.
She stood in the warm rain, outside Morgan le Fey's cottage, where the roses wouldn't
drip down her neck, and worried at her cuticle with her nail.

She could have stayed inside, but the
cottage wasn't big, and she was in the way as Kit and Don and a red-haired
woman scrambled over Matthew. And she couldn't bear standing in the hearth
corner, fiddling her Medic Alert bracelet, helplessness breaking over her. The
rain was better.

She stepped onto a graveled path and
strolled between banks of white and gold lilies, growing madly out of season.
Except this rain held no hint of November. It was warm and mild, summery, as
sweet as the flowers.

The stone cottage looked medieval and the
damask roses overgrowing it were antique, but the lilies were every variety
Lily had ever seen and more: modern cultivars, white, speckled, orange, yellow,
red as the heart's red blood. She bent over them, burying her face in the
petals, and breathed their fragrance down. The petals clung to her cheeks and
water dripped under her collar. She closed her eyes.

She licked up the sweetness of the flowers
in the rain that wet her lips, and turned to face Christian before he came up
on her. The flowers brushed her fingers as she folded her hands behind her
back.

"You're angry."