Whiskey and Water (53 page)

"Detective Peese?" Her voice was
familiar from several years of news bites and local television interviews.
"I hope I didn't wake you."

"Only a little," he said. He
rubbed the back of his neck, which didn't ease the pain strapped around his head
from skull-base to temples. "Mrs. Andraste?"

"Very good. I'd like you to come
visit me, Detective."

"I'm on leave. You'll have the call
the lieutenant — "

"This is personal." A creak of
plastic carried over the line, as if she were twisting the cord in both hands.
"One does not call down archangels in my city, Detective, if one cares to
go unnoticed."

A tongue like sandpaper clove to the roof
of his mouth. He cleared his throat and coughed. "Your city, ma'am?"

She let it pass. "I need to get a
message to Michael."

"Have you tried prayer?"

"Mr. Peese," she said,
"come."

The phone clicked dead in his hand, empty
cables echoing his own breathing back to him. A restrained
tick,
the
press of a forefinger rather than a slam. He rubbed at his face.

There might still be cold coffee in the
coffeepot. He dropped the handset in the cradle, heaved himself to his feet,
and staggered toward the kitchen, wondering what the hell Lucy had done with
his shoes.

Felix didn't need a devil to show him the
way into Faerie twice. Having Kadiska's trail to follow didn't hurt, either;
the scent of her was like roses baked into the stone.

She herself might flit in and out of
shadows, the Seeker's power, a thing of half-light and memory, while Felix was
forced to find a rise in the Ramble crowned with thorn trees, and step through
like any magician would. But once in Faerie, on a yellow-green hillside, he dug
a compass from his pocket. "Kadiska," he said, and watched it twitch
and waver before settling on a left-hand path. He told himself that it was not
possible for him to s
mell
her when he faced into the wind.

He'd dressed for a tramp: country tweeds
and stout boots, a pistol in his pocket and a knife thrust up his sleeve. Those
last threw him off-balance, the gun in particular bumping his hip with every
stride, but he wasn't brave enough to venture into Faerie without a touch of
iron above his ring.

The trail led him down the slope and
beside a river that ran dark red, and suffused the air with a meaty, iron-rich
smell. Many feet had worn the path bare before his.

His ring grew colder on his hand. The path
diverged, and again he studied his compass. The needle shivered like a spaniel
on point, directing him away from the crimson river, thankfully—all very picturesque
in a ballad, but unpleasant to walk alongside—and over the flanks of hills,
down dells, and through pasturage with never a sheep in sight.

She found him before he found her, waiting
in a beech-roofed meadow for him to step around a low-lying branch.

Here in Faerie, she made no concessions to
mortal dress. The light through beech limbs dappled her long indigo-black
torso, leafy translucence creating a diffuse green glow broken by dancing,
radiant shafts. Loose crimson trousers wrapped her lower body, her bracelets
and necklaces tinkling like glass bells as she breathed. Her shadows lay about
her, each one a promise: wildcat, cobra, spider, and broad-eared elephant.

He paused at the edge of the glade.
"You came looking."

"The shadows tell me plenty. But not
why you're here."

He kept his hands out of his pockets, the
compass folded in his palm. "Maybe I wanted to see where you were
from."

"Maybe you wanted to track me
down," she answered. "What, hunt the Queen through me? I won't take
you to her, Felix."

"I only wanted to see you." True
enough. Truer to say he didn't want to be here at all. "I have something
to give you. Something important. Now. "What's in your hand?" She
closed half the distance, imperiously reaching.

"Just a compass." He held it
out. "The needle's iron."

He cupped it in his left palm. She stepped
nearer, leaves rustling under her feet, and bent to look. Her braids slid over
polished skin, caught on the round nubs of her scars. He knew what they felt
like, beads rolled under his palm.

"This isn't what you came to bring
me, is it? I must hurry you, Felix;

I'm away from my task."

He wasn't fool enough to think he'd get a
second chance. The only thing buying him the first one Was that Matthew never
would have done such a thing—and that Felix and Kadiska had been friends. Once,
of a sort.

A twist of his right hand freed the
meteoric iron knife from his wrist. The hilt warmed Felix's palm, clicked
against his ring. He folded his fingers over the compass, and let his left
hand fall. When Kadiska lifted her head, turning from the waist, he placed the
point of the blade below and inside her left breast, between the fourth and
fifth ribs, angled up, and pushed it in.

Obscene, how easily and how irrevocably it
glided home. There was very little gore; the black ensorceled blade itself kept
her heart's red blood inside even as it perforated her left atrium, punctured her
left lung, and severed the pulmonary arterial trunk.

She was dead before he caught her under
the arms and lowered her tenderly. The brain, they said, kept functioning for
long seconds after the heart was gone. He sat on the leaves beside her and held
her hand, to be sure she didn't die alone.

He didn't try to close her eyes. In
funeral parlors, they sew the eyelids down; the trick of smoothing them with a
palm only works in the movies.

The atmosphere of money enfolded Peese
like cling film when he entered Jane's apartment. It coated his skin, thick
and silken; it slid down his throat like buttermilk. It intimidated.

It was meant to.

Jane greeted him with tea and cookies,
which he accepted, but didn't taste. He sat stiffly upright on the sinfully
comfortable love seat, staring past his folded hands at the teacup on the
coffee table while she nibbled a cookie and watched. She got bored first.

I am instructed to talk to you about
Heaven," she said.

He laughed. "I've never been."
When he looked up, her eyes were on him, clear and thoughtful under soft, pale
hair. "Instructed by who?"

Whom." She sipped her tea, golden
Ceylon in a tall white pansy-painted cup, a wheel of lemon bumping her lip.
Oils seeped from the rind to bead the surface, the aromas consoling. "A
Wild Fae. Who has no love of the Lord of Hell, or the Daoine, either. He
thought we might make an alliance."

"Archangels do not bargain. Besides,
Fae. They'll deal with devils, and any other thing."

"He
cared
to deal with you. Or
with your master." "I prefer to call him a guardian angel. So to
speak."

"In any case, Prometheus is in the
process of reinvention. I'd like to plead our case. Look." She put her cup
on the saucer and the saucer on the coffee table. "Would you just call
him? I'd rather not explain it twice."

"It's not quite that simple."

"Angels," Jane said, "know
when they are named." She leaned forward and laid her cool hand on Peese's
wrist, her marcasite bracelet sliding low over blue veins and bones. He
shrugged and covered her fingers with a brief pat.

"Michael?" Peese pulled his hand
away.

The angel appeared without fanfare,
wearing blue jeans ripped at one knee, eight-eye Doc Martens with a Union Jack
toe, and a white T-shirt with a line drawing of a frazzled-looking cartoon
bunny making a particularly American gesture on the front. "I was
listening. You were Hell's ally not so long ago."

Jane Andraste smiled. "That was in
another country— " "And besides, those men are dead?" Michael uncrossed
her arms. "You know Lucifer sends messengers pleading forgiveness."
"That displeases you." "I have no quarrel with him until I am
assigned one. But I take an interest. Of course."

"Bunyip seemed to think Heaven had
more than an interest." "There are a lot of devils in Hell."

Michael's eyebrows rose. Otherwise, she
might have been a statue.

"So it would seem. I'll tell you the
truth, then, as plain as I can make it. I fight a duel with Christopher Marlowe—late
of England, Prometheus, Faerie, and Hell— " "I know him."

"Just so. In a very few days. He has
the very Devil on his side. Witchcraft. And I need wards against it."

"And you want to bargain with God for
those protections."

"I wish to
remind
you that
Marlowe is allied with forces that have no love for Heaven. That to combine
Faerie and Hell with Prometheus would subvert—reverse, even—the task that
Prometheus was founded to fulfill."

"Prometheus is a shadow,"
Michael said. "A cracked vessel. It holds nothing."

"No," Jane said. "But it
will. Ally with me, and I give you the Prometheus that will follow. I give you
a more tractable Faerie . . . perhaps. If everything goes according to
plan."

"If I loan you my power to destroy
Christoferus Magus."

"Bring him to heel."

"Oh," Michael said.
"Whatever.
I won't fight your duel for you." Great wings unfolded from her shoulders
and fanned the still air softly, rustling silk flowers and flexing the rice
paper squares in the shoji screens. "I have one of my own. Not to mention
whatever the Morningstar's plotting." One wingtip flicked in eloquent
dismissal:
and he is always plotting.

"A duel of your own?" Jane
picked up her tea. Steam flowed over the side of the cup, bent by Michael's
agitation.

"Yes," Michael said. "The
Daoine Prince has challenged me as Hell's champion, to prove the Morningstar's
innocence in the eyes of Heaven." Her perpetual frown curved deeper,
creasing her face from lip to chin. Trial by combat. He'll be
slaughtered."

Jane would have turned, just then, and
stared at Felix under one peaked eyebrow, if he had not been gone. Peese was no
help. He sat, head bowed and hands folded, as wordless as he had been since he first
said Michael's name.

I m not afraid to do the work, Michael.
But it's our souls that stand at risk if Marlowe's allowed to win, and
Matthew's and his I'll save for you if you help bring them to the light."

Jane did not rise, and the angel did not
settle. But the silence dragged taut between them as if they struggled over a
rope, and in Michael's eyes Jane saw all her sin and malfeasance, the small
selfishnesses and the hubris that had nearly wrecked the world, reflected. The
chill settled into her, hard and sharp as swallowed glass. She had failed and
ailed again, and all her failures were naked in the angel's eyes.

She drove her nails into her flesh, and
lifted her chin, and did not blink. And the angel looked down first.

"Yes. It's a good reason. All right.
You have our help. But see to it that you do not fail. And I will have none of
your Promethean trickery."

"No tricks," Jane promised.
"So, tell me, Michael. If we're to be friends and allies, have you any
fear that Lucifer will regain God's grace?"

"Fear? Not much."

The archmage sipped her cooling tea.
"And if you had a legitimate means of keeping Lucifer in Hell? Would you
use it?"

"I am an angel, Mrs. Andraste."
I know," Jane said. "That wasn't what I asked."

The Arrangement

"W
ell," Matthew said, hiking up the
bank between the wood and the walls of the palace, "that got me nothing
but bloodied."

He spread his arms and flopped on the
resilient turf, bouncing on his left hand before settling into the grass beside
Kit. Kit, sprawled under the sun of Faerie like a smug green lizard, did not
open his eyes. "Thought you to obtain any satisfaction from her?"

"I didn't even get to talk to her.
Just Felix, that rat in a bespoke suit. And he was no use either."
"You tried," Kit said, complacently. "You failed."

"And now? " Matthew propped
himself up as the shadow of a passing bird flickered between them and the
warmth of the sun. It was gone by the time he glanced after it.

And now we fight," Kit said. He
pressed his elbows against the yielding lawn and pushed himself upright. He
looked past Matthew, frowning across the garden. "Your prodigals
return."

Mine?" Matthew rolled onto his back
and turned his head to see, the sun on his face warm and firm as a caress.
Christian walked up the curved road to the palace, Jewels on his right side and
Lily, still in Kit's castoffs, on his left. Matthew met Kit's frown and matched
it. He hadn't been sanguine about letting Lily go with Christian to take Don to
New York —but she'd insisted, and it seemed unfair to leave Don alone with the
Devil without the buffer of somebody halfway trustworthy. Lily and Christian
returning having exchanged Don for Jewels wasn't any more reassuring. "I'm
responsible for the lot, huh?"

"They have not the art for it
themselves." Kit grinned. "And nobody entrusts his children to
me." He heaved himself to his feet and held out his hand. Left hand, for
Matthew's ease. Matthew accepted, and hauled himself to his feet using Kit as
an anchor. "Here's a more immediate concern. Can you think of a way to
pry that name from Morgan's lips?" "Bunyip's?" "Aye."