Drink Down the Moon (19 page)

It seemed befitting that he choose the faerie of Kinrowan as his next prey.

The risk to himself appeared minimal. Kinrowan no longer had a gruagagh. Its Court was small. Its Unseelie neighbors were recently defeated and in need of a leader. Its fiaina sidhe few in number. It had seemed perfect.

And at first, it had been so.

Colorc had begun— as he always did— by stealing the luck of the sidhe. The solitary faerie rarely banded together for anything but their rade, so it was unlikely that they would rise against him in a group. All went well until their Pook went in search of help. That he couldn’t allow. He’d meant to play her out for as long as he could— the taste of her luck, even diminished from lack of a rade, was so tenderly sweet— but he had no wish for a Bucca in Kinrowan. A Bucca was worse than a Jack. And almost as bad as a gruagagh.

With the Pook dead, he’d meant to continue his slow assimilation of Kinrowan, but that was before luck— ill luck, he saw now, the Moon’s sainly curse on him— had delivered the Jack and her friend into his hands. It had seemed so clever to threaten them with his shadow, and then “rescue” them. Oh, yes. The Moon had made that seem so simple. And then the Jack’s own naive simplicity had let her invite him into her Tower.

But he’d been—

“Too clever by far,” he repeated bitterly.

And too greedy.

It was greed that made it all go wrong. For first the Jack’s companion escaped. Then the Jack herself. All because he’d reached for too much, all at once.

He tasted the ash of his defeat again. He had to be careful. The Moon’s influence was strong in Kinrowan. With the widdershinning of his plans, he could well lose it all. His heart. Safely hidden, yes, but with the Jack loose

He turned away from the window, shaking his head. No, that must never be. Better he cut his losses than risk that. If they found his heart

A droichan who died, died forever. There were no further turns on the wheel of life for them. No final rest in the Region of the Summer Stars.

He would give it a day, he decided. No more than two. If the Jack wasn’t in his power again by then, he would move on. There were other realms. Not so sweet as Kinrowan, perhaps. Without such a perfect mix of the Courts and sainly borderfolk. But they would do.

Power was sweet, but life was sweeter.

Closing the door to the third-floor study, he made his way back downstairs to wait for word. From the Host, perhaps, though it was more likely that his shadow would bring her back.

Without fire, there was no light, the old saying went. But the fire could leave ashes, too— a good thing to keep in mind, for a Jack’s luck burned like fire. It was good to remember the ashes.

Dark-eyed, Colorc stared out into the night beyond the kitchen windows and waited for his shadow to return. But when it finally did return, it was to bring him word that the Pook was abroad in Kinrowan once more.

Colorc ran his fingers through his hair and frowned.

That could not be. He had stood over her body himself, drunk the final flicker of her fire from her death. But the image that his shadow gave him was of the Pook’s face, dark with sorrow and anger, walking the streets of Kinrowan.

For a long moment the droichan stared out into the night beyond the kitchen’s windows. Then he arose and, drawing his shadow close to him like a cloak, he went out into the night himself.

Thirteen

Jemi Pook, Johnny discovered, was very easy to argue with. She insisted on going alone into Kinrowan, arguing that what she was looking for would be easier to find by herself. She had sidhe blood, after all; he didn’t. She knew Kinrowan and its faerie, by sight at least, if not to speak to; he didn’t. It was her sister who had died; not his. It was her responsibility; not his.

“I just want to help,” Johnny said.

“I know. And you can help right now by letting me do this on my own. I’m not helpless, Johnny.” Her expression softened. “It’s better this way,” she added. “I can go places that you can’t. The faerie will at least talk to me. If they see you with me, they’ll only hide. You see that, don’t you?”

“All I can see is that something out there killed your sister and if you go chasing after it, it’ll probably get you as well.”

“I’ll be careful.”

Like Jenna was careful? Johnny wanted to say, but it was unnecessary. The question hung between them, unspoken.

“I’ll go as far as your apartment with you,” Jemi said. “Will you wait for me there?”

“It’ll be hard— just waiting.”

“I know. But I will need your help later, Johnny. Once I have a name. I’m not trying to shut you out of my life. We’ve only just met and I want to know you better. I want to see if the Bucca’s bone carvings know what they’re doing.”

The look she gave him was pure warmth. It melted away Johnny’s reservations. The thought of enchantment, of being ensnared in a glamour, crossed his mind, then dissolved and was gone. He didn’t care if it was magic that had brought them together. This Bucca, whoever he was, could work all the magics he wanted. What Johnny wanted to do was follow through on the promise he saw in Jemi’s eyes, because he’d never before experienced anything like what he was feeling now.

“I’ll wait for you,” he said.

“I wasn’t sure you would,” Jemi said, “but I’m glad you will. Things have got to get better.”

But the warmth was fading from her eyes and the pain was back again. She touched his cheek with the back of her hand, then stood. Johnny fetched his fiddle case and they went out into the night.

They didn’t speak much on the walk up to Johnny’s apartment. At the corner of Bank and Third Avenue, they paused.

“Wish me luck,” Jemi said.

Her voice was small, almost plaintive, but Johnny didn’t start the argument up again.

“Luck,” he said.

A quick fierce grin came and went across her features. Johnny could see the strain of her sorrow, the dark feral light of her anger in her eyes.

It had to be her sidhe blood, he thought. That was what made her so mercurial.

She leaned close for a moment and tilted her head. When Johnny kissed her, she nipped his lower lip, then stepped quickly back. Without another word, she turned and headed up Bank Street.

Johnny rubbed his lip and watched her go until she reached Second Avenue. Sighing then, he turned down his own street. He didn’t see the light on in his apartment until he was right on the porch.

As Jemi walked on alone, it all came back to her. She saw the Bucca’s face— broad and dirt-brown, lined like the patterning luck of moonroads; the dark curly hair; the small eyes, darker still, but golden like honey as well.

Salamon Brien.

He was a fat-cheeked, stout old man no taller than her own shoulder, always dressed in a motley array of Gypsy colours, with a rattling necklace of bone ornaments around his neck, and in each earlobe a gold ring— the gold so pure it looked brassy. He’d left the borderlands near Kinrowan years ago. And Jenna had gone looking for him. To renew the rade.

She thought of the rade, of all those times— late afternoons crisp with autumn, nights dark with summer’s mystery— listening to the Bucca talk of the moonroads and the rade, of the patterns in both and the luck they gave to the fiaina sidhe. He was teaching Jenna, but Jemi had listened to it all, feigning indifference, far more interested in the speckles on this mushroom than in what he said. Pretending to watch that bat flit, but her head was cocked near to hear it all.

The pattern of the rade rose in her mind’s eye. She saw Salamon walking it, a crow with white-speckled wings perched on his shoulder, Jenna pacing at his side silently mouthing what the Bucca told her so that she’d remember, and then there was her own younger self, straggling along behind them, hair as pink then as it was today. What Jenna studiously repeated to remember, Jemi could repeat word for word without needing to think about it. But Jenna was the elder and she had no mortal blood, and Jemi wasn’t interested in any of it anyway. But now

Now it was all in her lap.

The memories washed through her, impossible to avoid. Her eyes misted with tears. The Bucca long gone. Jenna dead.

She steered her steps away from the Court of Kinrowan where she had been going and turned instead towards her own apartment in Sandy Hill.

Click, clack.

She could recall the rattle of the Bucca’s necklace so well.

Click, clack.

Little bone ornaments carved into the shapes of instruments and animals and trees, buildings and faerie and even mortals. He told stories about them. A gnarled brown hand would reach up to stroke a tiny badger and he would tell a tale of mischief and tricks that made everyone laugh until their stomachs ached.

Click, clack.

“A tale in each one,” he’d said once. “And more tales when one touches another. And more again. And still more.”

He stroked one perfectly carved ornament after the other, the creamy bone gleaming under the touch of his fingers. He would never say who made them or where he’d gotten them, only that there were tales in them. Tales of times past. Tales of days to come. Every kind of story.

Jemi wished he was here now. She wished that he would touch a carving and turn back the Moon until Jenna arose from under her cairn and was back in the world to argue with her again.

How often had they argued? A dozen times a day? A hundred? They couldn’t agree about one thing, except they never fought. They weren’t that sort of arguments.

“You’re too much the same,” Salamon told them once. “You argue with yourself.”

But they weren’t the same. Not anymore.

Jenna was dead.

Jemi had reached the front walk of her building. She wiped her eyes on the sleeve of her piper’s jacket, wished for a Kleenex, but didn’t have one. Sniffling, she dug about in her pocket for her key and went inside, up the stairs. She opened the door to her room and the air seemed stale inside. Dry. Like a crypt. A room where no one had been for decades.

But Johnny had been here.

She crossed to her dresser and lifted her little bone flute from where it hung.

Click, clack.

It had rattled against the Bucca’s other ornaments once. She slipped it around her neck and tucked it under her shirt, then she stared at her reflection in the mirror.

They’d been too much the same, the Bucca said.

Jenna had talked to Jemi about her worries, about how the rade was disturbed time and again. But she hadn’t spoken of any danger. She hadn’t said she was going to look for Salamon. Where would she even begin to look? Had she known all along where he’d wandered off to?

Too much the same, and not the same at all.

She heard the floor creak in the hallway and turned quickly, adrenaline pumping through her, but it was only her next-door neighbour, Annie Hamilton. She tried to still the frenzied beating of her heart.

“Hi,” Annie said. “There were a couple of guys here looking for you today. I think maybe they broke into your room. Is there anything missing?”

“No.”

Jenna’s features flashed through her mind and she bit at her lip.

“It’s

it’s okay,” she told her neighbour. “They were friends.”

Annie shifted her bulk and the floorboards creaked again.

“You don’t look so good,” she said. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

Jemi nodded.

“Greg was by as well— around suppertime. He wants you to call him.”

Greg. AKT.

Jemi remembered that there had been a rehearsal this afternoon. The memory came to her as though it belonged to someone else. It came from an entirely different world.

“I have to go,” she said suddenly.

She flicked off the light in her room and shut the door. Annie looked at her with a worried expression, but there was nothing Jemi could say to her. They weren’t really friends. A talk or two on the porch, or late at night in the kitchen after a gig. That was about it.

“Jemi

“

Before Annie could finish, Jemi bolted for the stairs. She ignored Annie’s voice, calling her name after her, just took the stairs three at a time and ran outside, up the street, ran until she reached the brighter lights on Rideau Street, then leaned against a building to catch her breath. Her hand went to touch her flute pendant through the fabric of her shirt.

What’s wrong with me? she asked herself.

But all it took was Jenna’s face to rise up in her mind, and she knew. It was the pattern of the rade, incomplete. It was the luck lying broken on a moonroad, looking like a scatter of bone ornaments, a broken necklace, or like a stout, brown-skinned Bucca sprawled there in the dirt—

No!

She looked around herself, really frightened now.

All this time, she thought, and I never offered to help. Jenna’s problems, the rade

Why didn’t I do something? Why wasn’t I there? Jenna wouldn’t have had to go looking for Salamon. She wouldn’t have had to die.

The bright lights hurt her eyes, which were misty with tears again. She turned away from Rideau, back to the darker streets of Sandy Hill, trying to keep to the shadows, but the streetlights, though not so numerous as those she’d left behind, were still bright. Her eyes stung now, the tears fell freely. Her head was awash with memories that were all tied together with a moon-bright ribbon that was the pattern of the rade.

And something else. A presence that spoke to her from the shadows. A whispering sound. Beckoning, calling to her

.

She’d always preferred the loud sounds, music in bars, the bright lights, friends laughing, dancing, blowing her sax, and now she wanted only darkness and quiet. But it wasn’t to be found. The city surrounded her. The lit windows of the houses were like eyes peering into her soul. The whole night seemed to be watching her. She sensed a malevolence loose in the darkness, and once again she started to run.

When she finally stopped, she was in amongst the buildings of Ottawa University. It wasn’t so bright here, though her sidhe sight pierced the darkness as though it were merely twilight. It was quieter as well, but her head rang with an odd warning buzz. And then she realized what it was that she felt, what it was that was out in the night, loose and haunting— hunting— her.