Whiskey and Water (5 page)

Seen the Lights Go Out on
Broadway

F
or the ten millionth time, Jewels said, "We came
to New York for the Halloween parade," and for the ten millionth time
Detective Peese shook his head.

"Three Otherkin kids? Pull the other
one."

"Geoff's not Otherkin." She dropped
her head into her palms, knotting wisps of hair between her fingers. She
itched and stank and her butt hurt from the hard wooden chair, and she wanted
to go home. The steel-edged Formica table was worn in two patches under her
elbows, and she imagined how many other people had leaned forward in this
interview room just as she was leaning now, hopelessness a bubble under their
breastbones. That was the worst part. She hadn't even cried for Althea yet.
Couldn't cry, as if her fear for herself had stopped the tears or soaked them
up. "He's just a friend."

The cop braced his hands on the other edge
of the table, looming over her. He smelled sharply of Irish Spring and Old
Leather, an infelicitous combination. "You had to know you were taking a
risk coming to New York, with your ears tipped like that and those scars
hanging out there."

They rasped the heels of her palms: her
own work. Her own design, a fragile Celtic braid, pale stains of aqua and lime
overworking the white lines. Her hair mostly covered it, most of the time. She
took a breath and spoke more sullenly than she'd intended. "It's still a
free country."

The cop wasn't much bigger than Geoff, and
definitely not any bigger than the guy with the ponytail and the red velvet
tuxedo jacket who'd hovered over her until the police separated the three of
them into different rooms. His hair was cropped close to the skull, the short
dull brown fuzz showing pale lines of scars sparser and less intentional than
Jewels', and he was wearing a suit instead of a uniform. A badge hung on a cord
around his neck like he'd forgotten to take it off.

He sighed tiredly and leaned back, thumbs
hooked through a creaking leather belt. "That doesn't mean you weren't
asking for trouble coming here, Halloween or not. You're lucky whoever got
your friend didn't get you too. Tell me the truth, Julia. You were looking for
fairies, weren't you? Come to New York, go look at the claw marks on top of the
Times Building, wander around and see fairies and try to talk them into taking
you to the Otherlands, right? The only way we're going to find your friend's killer
is if you level with us about where you went and what you did."

"There aren't any Fae in New York
City." She shifted her bottom against the chair and didn't correct him regarding
her name. "Everybody knows they never came back after the fight in Times
Square. I wouldn't come to New York for Fae. And we went to Times Square, but
only for a few minutes. It was just for the parade. I swear . . .” She trailed
off as someone tapped on the door of the interview room, then lifted her head
out of her hands, meeting Detective Peese's flat hostile stare.

"Christ, if you were my kid, I'd haul
your ass right back to the plastic surgeon who put those ears on you and get
them cut right off." He turned away and opened the door.

This man
was
enormous. His skin was
a few shades darker than his cocoa-colored sportcoat, which was a few shades
darker than his sherry-colored eyes, and his right paw almost enveloped a
two-liter bottle of Poland Spring, condensation running between his fingers
and dripping on the floor. "You about done in here, Ernie?"

Peese raked him with a glance, a frown
hardening the corners of his mouth. "Oh, look. It's the good cop." He
shot a searing look over his shoulder at Jewels, who lost her battle not to
clench her hands on the table. She gasped, but Peese had already turned back to
her rescuer. "Yeah," Peese said. "I'll go see how they're doing
in the other room."

Jewels bit her lip and pulled cold fingers
inside the sleeves of her sweater as the white cop brushed stiff-shouldered
past the black one. The newcomer held the door open with his elbow, then let it
ease gently into place.

"Shit," Jewels said, leaning
back against the painful wooden chair, "if that's Detective Peace, I'd
hate to meet Detective War."

The big man laughed as he set the bottle
of water in front of her and retrieved the pilled navy blanket he'd tucked
under his other arm. "I'm Detective Smith. Will that do?"

"Are you really?" She watched
him as he shook the blanket out. She wasn't cold enough to shiver, but the
warmth when he swung the rough cloth over her shoulders was enough to make her
sigh. "I think I'd like to see some ID."

He laughed and held out his hand.
"Donall Smith." A faint flavor of a fluid island accent underlay his speech:
Jamaican, she thought. She shook the hand, but didn't get up. "Peese gets
a little — "

"Yeah. So you
are
the good
cop, I take it?"

"Nah. I'm the cop who came to run
Ernie off so you can make your train home. It's tomorrow." "You're
not going to keep us in the city?"

"What purpose would that serve?
You're not suspects, no matter what he would have liked you to believe. We've
got your info. Drink your water"—he jerked his chin at the bottle —
"go home to Hartford, and for Christ's sake don't go wandering around New
York City looking like you just stepped out of
The Brown Fairy Book
if
you know what's good for you, okay?"

She opened the water. It was cold, and the
plastic ring cracked when she unscrewed the top. Her lip split and the blanket
slipped down her shoulders when she tilted her head back and drank, holding the
bottle in both hands, shaking with weariness.

Her eyes closed, short dense lashes
interweaving like the fringe on a Venus flytrap, and she swallowed once, twice,
a third time — so thin each gulp showed as it bobbed down her throat. She set the
bottle aside and wiped her mouth on the back of her hand. "I'm not leaving
without Geoff."

Donall leaned against the doorpost. The
edge dug into his spine through shirt and sportcoat. He crossed his arms.
"He's waiting for you in the lobby."

"The lobby?" She looked up,
startled, a flush under the pale olive of her skin. Attenuated hands fumbled
the blanket closed over the ridges of her collarbones. "I thought he'd be
— "

"Getting the Peese treatment? No, 1
made sure both he and Szczegielniak were out of harm's way before I came to
rescue you. Look, kid"—as kindly as he could manage —"we've got your
information. Your friend's parents are en route to pick up her body. I know
you don't believe it at your age, but there's no shame in needing a shoulder to
lean on once in a while. Do yourself a favor and call your mom, have her come
get you."

The girl hesitated. She reached for the
water again and tipped it to her mouth. Smaller swallows this time. "I
can't call my mom," she said when she was done.

"I'll let you use my phone."

"My mom's dead," she said.

Donall grimaced in self-reproach.
Stupidity. "Your boyfriend's mom?"

"Geoff's?" She stood, gawky and
awkward, staggering briefly with exhaustion. "We'll get home okay. We have
money." She widened bright eyes the color of agates and smiled faintly.
"Thank you, Detective Smith."

"I'm sorry," he said. Her smile
blew away. She took his hand between hers, dwarfing both of her own, and
slipped out the door and was gone.

Seven years after the Dragon, Whiskey
returned to New York.

He had risen dry from the filthy ocean
earlier on that All Hallow's evening, the bard not named Thomas on his back,
and in the shadow of a ferry he changed from steed to man. His hooves didn't clip-clop
on asphalt, because he made his silver horseshoes into boots with silver
nails, but he felt the cold burn of the city threading his body anyway. Iron
and steel, bronze and copper under the stone, her poisoned bones themselves
were ward and pain. But she was wrapped in water and born of the sea, Manhattan,
and though she was built on bedrock, all her bridges, all her tunnels could not
chain him away.

The crossroads of the world.

Beyond his bitterness, beyond the cold
obsessive weight of emotion he could not lay aside, it still amused him that he
fit in better than the half-mortal knight beside him, who struggled not to gape
as they walked the length of the docks. Even on a Sabbath night, the streets
bustled. Whiskey felt the bard wrap glamourie around them, pass-unseen and
pass-unheard, and they slipped between pedestrians and police without notice.
"You've never been in New York?"

"Never," Thomas answered. He
shrugged under the weight of his cloak, turning to watch a woman dressed as a
fantasy warrior in chain mail and leather stride past. "London, and then
Faerie, and then Hell. Why is she dressed like that?"

"Samhain. The Americans celebrate it
with a masque. Are there no cities in Hell?" An honest question, if
perhaps a little sharper than Whiskey had intended it. The magic shoes and
mortal soul were some help, but the weight of all that metal shortened a temper
that had never been legendary for its length.

The poet tilted his head back, watching a
shadow bigger than a bat row across the sky with the
otherwise
sight of
his right eye. Something antlered, with broad hard wings. "Yes, Whiskey.
There are cities in Hell. But they are empty."

The stallion shoved his hands into his
pockets. The reek of oily water carried over the tang of smoke and stone,
diesel and grease. Someone slipped past him, wrapped in Fae glamourie that hid
flat serpent's eyes and hands webbed and sequin-scaled. She eyed him
incuriously, flicked blood from her wide lipless mouth with a fork-tipped
tongue, and slid toward the estuary they'd left behind. Whiskey shrugged at her
dismissal.

The smell of blood made him sick with
hunger, an empty twist in his belly he couldn't crop enough grass to fill.
Seven years tamed, seven years named.

No one respects a king without fangs.

"Mermaid?" Thomas asked, turning
to watch her go. Whiskey noticed that he saw through the glamourie.

"Undine. Jenny Greenteeth, I think,
all the way from Yorkshire—if it's not one of her sisters. Rusalka, lorelei . .
. one's much another. They came with the ships across my back, a hundred, two
hundred years gone."

"Your back?"

"Each-Uisge," Whiskey said, and
tapped his forehead with his knuckle. He brushed the back of a long-fingered
hand across the buildings and the night-black water behind. "Water of all
water in the world. The Atlantic and the North Sea, the channels and the inlets
and the rivers and the lochs. The beat of the tides up the Stour and the
Thames—and the East River too—is the beat of my heart."

"Who's the poet here?"

Thomas smiled when Whiskey snorted and
shook his head, water flying from spring-curled hair, and said, "You are,
poet."

"So if you're all the water in the
world, what are they?"

"They're water too. Lakes and
springs, creeks and billabongs, seas and storms. Greater or lesser. Rusalka,
lorelei, merrow, selkie, mermaid, nixie, naiad, kappa, undine, samebito, the
golden carp, and brother frog. Hapi, Masacouraman, Tocouyaha, Melusine — "

"Nuckelavee. Orkney's Devil from the
Sea. The black horse and the skinless rider."

"You know of him." Not a
surprising tidbit, from one who wore a bard's patched cloak, but it was easy to
forget that when Thomas was trying not to gawp like a child at his first court.

"I was to Scotland once. And the
Devil bears many names. So you're all those things and all those creatures at
once? Isn't this city forbidden to the Fae?"

"Not forbidden," Whiskey
answered. "But respected."

"Then what was your subject doing,
hunting here?"

Whiskey answered with a snort and glower.
The sidewalks grew crowded, and Thomas let the pass-unseen lapse so they
wouldn't be trampled. There was music and laughter, sirens and lights. The bard
had developed a tendency to veer a bit from side to side as one thing or
another caught his attention, and he seemed not to notice the admiring glances
he received, not all of them drawn by the splendid cloak.

Whiskey laced long fingers through the
crook of Thomas' arm, slightly surprised that the bard let him. In fact, he
scarcely seemed to notice the touch, but drew his cloak closer about himself
with his free hand.

Even the slow dreams of the city stirred
when Whiskey walked her stones. She knew him. She remembered the wild ring of
hooves and a tail flying like a banner, a charge down Broadway and the groaning
weight of the world come to rest on her stones.

Whiskey led the poet faster.

"The seas have been strange of late,
wild where they should be tame, tame where they should be wild." The poet
made his observation quietly, but he was waiting to see how Whiskey would
react. The stallion didn't, not even a flexing of fingers on the poet's
arm—which was as revealing as anything else. "And before you ask, yes.
There are seas in Hell."

"Nor is it circumscribed in one self
place,"
Whiskey
answered, and smiled at Thomas' sideways glance. "I hear the Devil is fond
of your work."