Immortal at the Edge of the World (30 page)

It was at least big enough that we didn’t stand out overmuch. Anything smaller and we would have drawn a lot more attention just for being strangers, and I didn’t feel like being a part of anyone’s drunken xenophobia.

The food was actually not that bad for bar food. It was too salty, and a lot of it clearly originated in a freezer before passing through a microwave. It was also true that the very best thing about any of it was the description in the menu, but it still wasn’t bad. Or I’m less discerning after a few drinks, which is much more likely.

Clara picked at something that had been described as Tuscan pizza bites, but which were clearly English muffins with store-bought pizza sauce and old cheese. She had Iza on her shoulder, but a dark bar is one of those places where having a small naked woman on your shoulder isn’t noticed, or is only noticed by people who are certain they’re seeing things. “She said he’s sleeping in the rafters,” Clara whispered, and we all resisted the urge to look up.

“He’s still there?” I asked.

“Yeah, she’s checked twice already. He’s sleeping.”

“I could probably knock him down with a knife if I knew which rafter,” Mirella said.

“I don’t want to kill him,” I said. I could picture her flinging knives at the ceiling, and that not going at all well.

“The knife handle, not the pointy end,” she said, slapping my wrist. “And you should stop ordering beer. This is going to be a long night.”

“I don’t know, a few more beers and I’ll be down with a plan to knock an iffrit from the ceiling in the middle of a crowded bar.”

She huffed. “I could do it. Excuse me.” She got up and headed to the extremely tiny and unsanitary bathroom in the back while roughly every human male and half the women watched her go. She turned heads even when dressed down, although in fairness the hockey game on television was between periods.
 

“You know she likes you, right?” Clara asked.

“She’s being paid to protect me,” I said. “You make this sound like high school.”

“Yeah, okay. It’s just, every time you wince from that wound on your stomach she winces with you. And there’s the hand-slapping-on-the-wrist thing, which is a dead giveaway.”

“She does that when she’s pissed at me,” I argued.

“My god, Adam. Sixty thousand years, how’d you
ever
get laid?”

“Cheap shot.”

Clara laughed and took a long sip of her beer. I couldn’t fully grasp why, but it made perfect sense to be getting advice from her about women. “She’s not angry with you,” she said. “I mean, when she acts huffy like she just did. She’s angry with herself for liking you.”

“Right.”

“Fine, don’t believe me.”

I sighed, and decided I didn’t want to know if she was correct at that particular moment. “All right, if we’re playing at being honest with each other right now, tell me about the father.”

“I’m not telling you anything about the father, I already told you that. I’m not even okay with you knowing about Paul.”

“Does the father at least know his son has been kidnapped?”

“Yeah. Yeah, he knows, but he’s letting us handle it.”

“Did he have a choice?”

She groaned and looked at the ceiling. “No, he didn’t have a choice, and he’s not a part of his son’s life so it doesn’t matter. They’ve never met. And I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Okay, fine.”

I stuck a fork into something that was described as a potato puff on the menu, but which looked suspiciously like a tater tot, as Mirella returned to the table. She put her hand on my shoulder when she passed behind my chair, which caused Clara to arch an eyebrow and give me a tiny
I told you so
grin.

But it was just a touch on a shoulder.

*
 
*
 
*

We were out of the bar and back in the SUV well before 2 a.m. The SUV was parked four blocks away because any closer than that was inviting a criminal act, and none of us were in the mood to deal with that. The thing was so big there was plenty of room in back in case anybody was in the mood for a nap, which Clara was.

Mirella and I sat in the front and watched the digital readout on the clock change. Each minute took forever. It was like a microcosm of my entire existence.

“I can steal the thing myself,” Mirella said after a while. She was in the driver’s seat on the off chance we needed to actually navigate the car somewhere on short notice.

“I’m sure you can,” I said.

“Without being detected.”

“You’re insulted.”

“I’m a little insulted, yes. Goblins are natural thieves, you know.”

I never thought of them that way, but this wasn’t the time to say that. “Well, you can’t bring me with you, and there would be nobody to guard my body while you were gone.”

“You’re joking. You already tried to convince me you don’t need a bodyguard once.”

“Yes, I’m joking. But I’m not when I say this is best handled by an iffrit if we get a hold of one. If we can’t, plan B is you breaking in and stealing it. But we’re talking about something we’re not even sure of the location of right now. We know it’s in a building on Oxford Street in Cambridge, but that’s like saying we know a book is in the library somewhere. What we need is someone who can get inside and wander around for a few days. But if it were a museum piece on display, a smash-and-grab would be fine.”

“I understand. But these things sound foul. I don’t know how you trust one to find you gold and still return to you.”

“Iffrits only care about alcohol and having someone to drink it with. You’ll see.”

*
 
*
 
*

At 3 a.m. Mirella got out and scouted the bar, determining that both patrons and employees had left the building but that nothing else appeared to be going on inside either. We gave it another hour, then woke up Clara and left her groggy but conscious in the driver’s seat while we headed back to the scene for a little breaking-and-entering.

“I still see nothing happening in there,” Mirella said. “But it’s very hard to tell.” She was trying to get a good look through the window. Even though the beer sign had been turned off, the glass was so smoky it was really tough to see if anything inside was moving.

“If he’s still asleep we can try your knife-throwing stunt,” I said. “Might even make this easier.”

It was ten minutes of lock picking before we made it inside, because there were a number of locks to get through. Quantity and quality of locks have an inverse relationship to the value of commercial real estate, I have learned. At least in cities.

It was very dark inside, but thankfully we had a basic idea of the layout, even if it had been altered slightly by the repositioning of all the chairs to the tops of the tables. It was the bar counter we were looking for, and it hadn’t gone anywhere.

Mirella pulled out a small flashlight, but I stopped her from turning it on with a gesture. “Listen,” I whispered. I could hear the sound of someone drinking something from a bottle, and after a second she could hear it, too. She nodded understanding.

I took the flashlight from her and went around to one end of the bar while she crept around the other end to cut off any potential escape route. On three we both turned toward the liquor side of the counter, her with her hands outstretched to catch a small fleeing person and me with the flashlight flickering to life.

What we found was an empty space that had very recently been occupied by a tiny drinking person.

“Where did he go?” Mirella asked. I was about to respond when a cry came out from directly above me.
 

“Banzaiiiiiiiii!” the iffrit shouted. He had an empty beer bottle in his hand, upside down by the neck and intended for use as a weapon. And it might have been modestly effective—potentially even connecting with his target, which was my head—had he not shouted on his way down from the rafters. But hearing him coming I took two steps back and watched him land face down on the edge of the bar. The bottle bounced harmlessly away.

I had him in my hands before he had a chance to move again, and was treated to a loud belch.

“Hello,” I said.

“I’ll fucking kill you! You and her both! Let go of me!”

I recognized the voice.

Of course I did.

Of all the iffrits I could have come across, it had to be the least trustworthy one alive. “I don’t believe it.”

He blinked as his pupils adjusted to the light in his face. “Adam? Oh fuck, is that you?”

“Hi Jerry. You little shit.”

*
 
*
 
*

An hour later we were back in the hotel room dropping a sack of screaming iffrit on the nearest hard surface. Jerry had been screaming apologies the entire trip under the assumption I was taking him someplace so that he could be tortured and killed. He held onto this belief up until he popped out of the sack and saw where he was.

“Heyyyy, this is some room!” he declared.

I would have been entirely justified in killing him. He had sold me out for next to nothing, despite having virtually no use for money beyond that which was used to purchase alcohol. And in particularly dark times I actually did consider hunting him down for just that reason. But the unfortunate truth was that Clara had done much the same thing—sold me out, albeit for very different reasons—so it was hard for me to justify murdering Jerry. I imagine there were a few bar owners in Philadelphia who wish I had.

“How’s the arm?” I asked him.

“It hurts when it rains. You got a fuckin’ wet bar in here?”

Mirella drew her sword and held it against his chin. “He’s disgusting. Can’t I please kill him and we try something else?”

“Oh hey, honey, look at
you
. Damn, Adam.” He spotted Clara on the bed, caught somewhere between fascination and disgust. “Heyyy, I remember you, babe. Loved the whole tied-up look you had.”

“Oh god, Mirella just do it,” Clara said. “Adam?”

I should mention that a portion of the disgust on display in the room had to do with Jerry’s erection, which was on full display because of his lack of clothing. I’ve found that this is something you just have to accept if you’re going to be around them for any real length of time.

“I’m thinking,” I said.

“Aww, c’mon, Adam! You need me for a thing, right? What she said, you need my help? What can I do?”

I was actually thinking this was the best possible outcome because ironically, the one utterly untrustworthy iffrit I’d ever met was probably the most reliable one for this particular job. Jerry knew his way around museums, he was actually very smart for his species, and he was actively afraid of me. Better, I had just proven I could track him down if I wanted to. He certainly didn’t need to know I hadn’t been looking for him specifically.

“Put the sword away,” I said. “The bar’s over here, Jerry. Let’s talk about what I need you to do for me. And how much she’s going to kill you if you fuck it up.”

Chapter Eighteen

“We could travel easier if we did not require an entire mule just to carry our wine,” Hsu complained one evening following a particularly unpleasant excursion through rough terrain and rougher weather.

“We likely would,” I agreed. “But until they devise a way to make wine lighter, I don’t see another solution.”

*
 
*
 
*

A real low point for all concerned was when Jerry noticed there was a tiny naked woman flying around the room, which nearly resulted in Clara murdering him with an olive fork. Iza was blissfully unaware of most of this because, so far as I have ever been able to tell, pixies have no idea what sex is. This again raises the reproduction question and again I have no answer, but I will say that now I’m reasonably certain pixies and iffrits do not reproduce together. That’s almost a foregone conclusion because iffrits are twice the size of pixies, but they were close enough that I was willing to consider possibilities, like maybe iffrits shrank during mating season, or pixies grew. It wouldn’t be the weirdest theory I’d heard and it was better than the apparent asexual reproduction that was causing their respective existences. But given that Jerry had self-evidently never even seen a pixie before, and Iza was undisguised in her dislike of him, it just didn’t seem like a good bet.

Notwithstanding Jerry’s puerile interest in Iza, it was actually sort of nice to have someone around who liked drinking as much as I did. Granted this particular someone had indirectly gotten a couple of friends killed and tried to turn me in for a beer truck, but he loved alcohol in a way it was difficult to get anyone else in the room to really appreciate. Mirella had her moments, certainly, but it seemed like she usually drank mainly to prove that she could do it. Less pleasure and more dare. And Clara was almost a puritan nowadays. She had never been a big drinker, and when we lived together she actually talked me into three years of near-total sobriety, only to discover I’m more difficult like that. She wasn’t against alcohol, and she did move into the back end of a vineyard, but for her it was always something to sip.

For Jerry—and me when I had nothing better to do—drinking was like an endurance sport. And that was an attitude I kind of missed being around.