Whiskey and Water (59 page)

He glanced over his shoulder, left and
right. No sign of Michael. No sign of Christian, more to the point. Kit tossed
his hair off his forehead. His hands were busy with the girl as he spoke to the
absent devil. "It was a fireplace poker.
Coxcomb."

There must be something Morgan can do.
Kit lifted Lily as gently as he could, his
knees aching under the weight. He strained up, staggered, caught himself and
cuddled her to his chest. She wasn't light for her size, and whatever strength
she'd used to cry Michael's name had been her last. She was limp as a corpse in
Kit's embrace, her eyes dully wet behind slitted lids, and the only assurance
he had that she lived was the racing pattern of her breath and the heat soaking
from her skin.

The lake would serve for a mirror. The
bank was turfed and didn't look too bad. He stumbled toward it, balanced as
best he could, sliding on the wet grass. Mumbling a little prayer of thanks,
because it never hurt. And it kept him from chanting
Surely Morgan can help
over
and over like a damned rosary.

The shape that rose from the water was as
black as the water, and sparkled in the sun. Its vast eyes whirled with opal
colors in the crushed velvet of its face, and the great scale-sequined claws
ducked
in the wet earth of the shore, releasing the cold, rotten reek of
waterlogged mud.

Kit paused.

Morgan said he wasn't strong enough.
Morgan was probably right. The world was full of better Magi, stronger
warlocks, cleverer sorcerers. He was a dabbler. A dilettante. Northampton had
said as much, whilst Sir Walter laughed.

There was nothing else he could do.
"Garndukgu-Wurrpbu," he said, in his clearest, most carrying voice.
"Let us pass."

Bunyip grinned through a mouthful of
swords and daggers. "As you wish," the monster said, and with a
negligent wave transformed them both into black swans.

Snowing in Brooklyn

M
atthew wasn't young enough—or fool enough—to call
this love. But that didn't ease the wistfulness that ran sweet fingers up his
neck as he watched Fionnghuala, wrapped in a knotted towel, sit on the edge of
his bed and comb her wet hair. His skin still tingled with remembered pain, and
his own turn in the shower had presented him with an alien body, nude and
vulnerable, marked with strange, golden lines across his torso and arms, white
and bare elsewhere.

"The duel's tonight," he said,
to fill the silence. "I need to find Kit. Since I abandoned him to chase a
unicorn."

"We'll go together." She laid
his comb on the bedcovers. "Get dressed. You'll want your coat. It's supposed
to snow.

"In Faerie?"

"In New York."

He laid out the red coat—because it would
annoy Felix—and a white button shirt, and then stared at them for thirty
seconds before returning to the closet, knowing what he was looking for but
not quite where to find it. The steamer trunk under a pile of old shoes seemed
likely, though, and he pulled it into the light to go through it.

The jeans he wanted were on top of the
pile. Vintage, soft denim worn thin, embroidered with dragons on the side
seams, boot cut rather than the bell-bottoms the garish decorations would
suggest. They'd been a gift from Jane sometime in the mid-1990s. That would
mean something too: the dragons, and the gift, and the acknowledgement of Jane.

He lifted them out, and found something
else underneath. Another pair of jeans, torn, bloodstained, mud-stained.

He'd forgotten to empty the pockets. He
shoved his hand into the left-hand one and found something that rattled like a
handful of change. Once upon a time, he thought, when coins were silver, they
really would have jingled, and not
clanked.
He contemplated the cliché
for a moment, and pulled a handful of base metal out of the pocket.

It wasn't coins. It was twenty-one cold
iron rings, seven times three: ten for fingers, eleven for ears. Another chain
disguised as armor. "How many ways did she have me bound?" he asked,
without looking over his shoulder.

Warm, horny-callused hands touched his
neck, and small knees pressed against his back as Nuala bent over him, her hair
dropping forward. "You'll be finding out for years. Every so often you'll
turn a corner, and there it'll be. Another chain you didn't know about."
She clamped her fist in his hair and pulled his head back, staring upside down
into his eyes. " 'Twas I who killed your brother."

He reached up and pressed the back of his
bad hand to her cheek. "You did what I should have done. What he wanted.
What was merciful. And you didn't do it for Jane, did you?"

"Jane thinks she controls many things
she may not." Fionnghuala kissed Matthew's mouth and stepped away.
"What will you do with the rings.?"

Keep them." He stood with the
dragon-embroidered jeans in his hand. "They may come in handy, someday. I
wish I could fight her myself— "

Another thing you could blame me
for."

I could." He threw the rings on the
bed, and started struggling into the jeans. The zipper was a pain in the ass.
The flap was on the left, and his right hand wasn't strong enough to keep a
grip on the tab. He managed, though, and stuffed the rings into his pocket and
reached for the shirt before he finished speaking. "But I won't. There's
other things I can do."

"Matthew — "

"Lady," he said, tucking in the
shirttails, "let alone."

She bit her lip, and picked up the comb.
"Let me fix your hair. A favor from a lady."

So he sat on the edge of the bed, and it
was done.

He looked strangely gallant 'when he
shrugged the coat on and stomped into steel-toed boots, and hid his right hand
in a leather glove. Strangely gallant, and strangely whimsical, a pony-tailed
patchwork sorcerer with his steel-rimmed glasses glinting clemency from the
bridge of his nose. "Would you like to borrow a shirt?"

"Thanks," she said. "I have
my cloak." She flipped it around her shoulders, drawing the velvet against
her skin. "I've clothes in Faerie."

He didn't smile, but held out his hand.

Through the mirror in the bathroom, now
that Kit had showed him the trick of it, they stepped into Faerie.

"Something's wrong," Fionnghuala
said, before their feet were even firmly on the stones. Matthew nodded. He
could smell it on the air, tension and blood, a crackling fury that shivered
the palace foundations.

"Go get your dress. I'll meet you
wherever Elaine is."

"Can you find your way?"

He touched her nose with a fingertip.
"I can find a page."

Foxglove found him first, actually, as he
raced down a spiral stair. The ground floor seemed a logical place to commence
his search, but he was grateful to the voice that piped, "Matthew Magus,
this way!" and the spindly figure in livery that presented itself.

"Fionnghuala is with me," he
told the page as they hurried to the throne room at a pace only a few scraps of
decorum shy of a run, Matthew's boots thudding and his coattails sailing behind
him, chains and charms jingling with every stride — until he drew up in front
of the throne room doors. "Oh, my."

The marble floor was shattered before each
door, scraps of dented silver that had once been armor scattered this way and
that. The doors themselves were scarred, delicate spiral and triskelion carvings
chipped and broken, as if something had slammed into each one. They stood open,
and the throne room was even halfway crowded, beyond.

Elves and fairies, gnomes and sprites,
Tuatha de Danaan tall and fair and creatures without a trace of human shape—or
even bilateral symmetry— thronged beyond, clumping and chattering and making small,
desultory gestures of grief and disbelief that he knew all too well.

The throne on its dais stood empty at the
other end of that mob, and he would wager the people he needed to see were by
it.

"Thank you," he said to
Foxglove, but the page was gone.

Morgan's shoulders, her hair, her height
and her unmistakable carriage caught his eye as she moved through the crowd,
speaking to one, touching another, gentling and moving on. Some shook their
heads — some horned, some leafed in green, some hung with black and rose and
silver pearls—at her words. Some nodded hesitantly. Some murmured a quip with
twisted mouths. But all stood a little straighter when she had passed.

Matthew squared his shoulders, braced
himself, and hurried to catch up to her. She spoke before he said her name.
"I hope for your sake that was Master Marlowe's plan."

"I hope for my sake that you haven't
killed him and buried the body at a crossroads."

"I gave him the name." She
lifted a hand adorned with a silver ring and pressed the fingertip into the notch
of his collarbone, stroking the bare skin there. "And I see I've missed my
chance to collect on your gratitude for my munificence."

"Does it show?"

"It might be written on your face
with a pen." She tossed her hair behind her shoulder. Not a coquette's
gesture, but a queen's. "Have you left your fear on the bedsheets with
it?"

"It was easier before I met
Geoff." A nauseous admission. "If I had walked away from Kelly and
Jane twenty years ago — "

"Matthew."

Her voice stopped him. He pulled his gaze
from the toes of his boots and looked at her. "Which one of you is
dead?"

"Me or Kelly?"

"You or Geoff."

He stepped back and shuddered. "Thank
you for throwing that in my face, Morgan."

My point is merely that you might not be
so quick to grasp after his choices. If you thought things end to end."

"Touché," he said, with a tip of
his imaginary hat.

The witch clucked her tongue. "Were
we fencing?"

He stared at her for seconds before he
shook it off, and waved around the room. "What happened here?"

"Matthew," Fionnghuala
interrupted, appearing at his shoulder in a sweep of red velvet and airy feathers
over a plain green gown, "Wolvesbane says Kit's not in the palace, and
hasn't been since he left it with you."

That would be true and accurate; the pages
always knew.

Morgan coughed. "He went to fetch
Lily from the Devil."

Matthew turned on instinct, brows arching
behind his glasses, and met Nuala's frown as she looked too, and said,
"I'll go."

"I'll-"

"You'll
stay here. Because if Kit's in trouble, you can't
fight it. And when was the last time you slept?"

He opened his mouth and closed it. The
murmurs of the jostling crowd around them gave them a kind of privacy, combined
with the space the Fae accorded to both Morgan and to the iron on Matthew's coat.
He glanced to Morgan, reflexively, for support, and found her grinning at
Fionnghuala. Morgan shook her head and held out an even older spare pair of
glasses: the ones he'd loaned to Kit. "By the way. I understand these are
yours."

They warmed his hand. He slipped them into
his breast pocket. He turned, casting over the crowd. "Has anyone seen
Jewels? She might know how to find Lily."

"She's over there."

"Matthew?"

He concentrated on the back of Jewels'
head, feeling the power running clean and unfettered through him in ways it
hadn't. . . ever, he realized. As if Fionnghuala had broken down a dam with
ringing hammer-blows when she peeled the iron cage off of his skin. The shiver
left him light-headed, dry-mouthed.

He put his hand on Fionnghuala's shoulder
as soon as he got the shaking stopped. "Go," he said. "Get Kit.
Bring him to Rossville if you find him. Morgan, where's Carel?"

"That would be the other
problem." She told them quickly about Nuckelavee and the message from Àine,
and that the Queen and Whiskey and the Merlin had gone to deal with it.
"And there's no sign of Kadiska, either."

"The timing on this was not an
accident."

"No. I don't believe it was. You know
Ian's supposed to fight Michael tonight, as well?" "Fuck, nobody
tells me anything—"

"Going," Fionnghuala said, and
melted into the crowd—just as Jewels responded to the pressure of Matthew's
stare, looked up, caught sight of them, and winced. She didn't pull back,
though, when Matthew crooked his finger at her. She shook herself together,
tucked her hair behind her ears with a nervous flinch, and closed the distance
with crab-quick steps that took her around the knots of conversation between.

"Matthew, I — "

"You need to choose," he
interrupted. "Pick a side. Right now."

"What do you mean?"

"You took service with Ian. Did you
mean it?"

Her tongue eased dry lips. She nodded.

"Then I won't tell him about you
making deals with Christian. Unless you give me another reason to." Her
eyebrows drew together, and she folded her arms over her chest. "What have
I got that's worth blackmailing me?"