Nicole Peeler - [Jane True 01] (24 page)

W
e drove
out to Rockabill Bluffs, overlooking the Old Sow, so that Ryu could read the
file and have a think.

The tiny trunk of the Porsche was filled with packages from Iris’s, and
I still felt a little weird about that fact. I hadn’t wanted Ryu to buy me
anything and I
certainly
wasn’t comfortable accepting such expensive
gifts. But he’d said that he was doing it as much for Iris’s sake as mine—that
he owed her as part of the information game they’d played and he’d bill it to
the company anyway. So I let him buy me the pants outfit, the kimono dress, and
their matching accessories, wandering away to look around the shop when she
rang everything up so I didn’t see what everything actually cost. I bet each
pair of those red-soled shoes cost at least a hundred dollars.
So you
needn’t worry, my sweets,
I thought down at my battered old Converse.
Mommy
will never replace you.
All joking aside, Ryu had even wanted to buy me the
gown, but that’s where I drew the line. I didn’t need a gown in Rockabill, no
matter how beautiful it was.

Iris had also thrown in the sweater I was currently wearing, since Ryu
had laid waste to my own. It was a lovely cream-colored V-neck made of real
cashmere. I’d tried to talk her out of it, but she was insistent. I could tell
she felt really guilty about me being the subject of Peter’s research, which was
silly since she hadn’t even known who I was.

When we got to the bluffs we parked a little way from the edge. Ryu
rummaged around the packed trunk until he managed to extricate his picnic
blanket and a bottle of wine. The mere sight of the blanket made me a little
hot under the collar, but Ryu’s face wasn’t exhibiting any signs of erotic
life. In fact, when he lit a little mage light that tagged along behind us like
a faithful terrier, he still looked really pissed off.

“Ryu?” I asked hesitantly, as we spread the blanket and sat down. “Who’s
Nyx?”

Ryu scowled. If I thought he’d looked angry before, he now looked
positively apoplectic.

“Nyx is an absolute piece of shit,” he said, unhelpfully. Then he seemed
to collect himself, and his voice took on the “tour guide to the supernatural”
tone I’d gotten so used to at this point. “In our world, the Alfar rule,” he
began. “They’re the oldest, and rarest, of our kind.” He stopped and thought
for minute, as if unsure how to continue. Finally, he started again. “We don’t
study ourselves, the way humans do. We don’t try to trace our origins or
examine our past for the keys to our present. But some of us have our own
theories as to how we came into being. We know that our kind has been around
for a very long time—far longer than humans—and that in the beginning we were
all the same. But, and this is just one theory, mind you, at some point we
began to… interfere with ourselves.” At this point, Ryu paused to open up the
bottle of wine. He took a swig and passed me the bottle.

“Basically, because of our access to the elements, we could force our
own evolution. And that’s what some of us think we did,” he continued.
“Different factions chose to pursue different strengths, admittedly making
themselves vulnerable to certain weaknesses. For example, nahuals gave up most
of their access to the elements in order to concentrate on developing their
shape-shifting ability. Then humans came along, and they were impossible to get
rid of.” I took another drink of the delicious red wine, choosing to ignore
that bit about “getting rid” of mankind. “So we had to integrate them into our
landscape, so to speak, and this led to further evolutionary engineering. Some
of us, like vampires, succubae, and incubi, all evolved to harvest a concentrated
form of power, what we call essence, straight from humans. After millennia had
passed, these changes were occurring naturally rather than consciously, for by
this time we’d lost the power to mutate ourselves directly.

“Are you following me?” he asked, and I nodded. I was getting the gist.
“The only creatures left who still resemble our origins are the Alfar. They
remain the most powerful of us, and the longest living, but in some ways this
has made them curiously weak.” He looked around, like he was betraying a
secret, before he realized what he was doing. “They are our leaders, and yet
they are out of touch with reality. Their long lives mean they live in a world
almost separate from ours. Yet at the same time their power allows them to rule
over us—” He cut himself short, mentally veering back on course. “Our current
King and Queen are Orin and Morrigan. They are of the fourth generation of
Alfar, only three generations removed from the beings that first manipulated
their own destinies. They are both tremendously old, but they have held their
throne for only a short time—a little less than one hundred and fifty human
years. When the former Queen faded, there was a Great War of Succession.
Luckily for those of us who fought with them, Orin and Morrigan won that
battle.”

“Really? A war? Like a real war?”

“Yup, definitely a real war.”

“How did we not know?”

“You mean, how did humans not know?” Ryu asked, his lips quirking. I
ignored his implication and waited for him to answer my question.

“Well,” he said, when he realized I wasn’t to be baited, “it was a long
time ago, in terms of human advancement. There were less people, fewer ways to
communicate, no cameras to avoid. Not all of us, after all, are as good at
manipulating human technology or humans, in general, as my kind are. So it was
close, and there were quite a few leaks. The fallen would sometimes turn up as
murder victims, or battle sites would turn up as legends of hauntings. Neither
side could risk exposure; both were weakened, forced into corners. So even
though it was difficult to keep it secret from humans, we managed it.”

“Something you probably wouldn’t be able to pull off, now. What with
CCTV, global satellites, Google maps—”

“No,” Ryu agreed. “Another war would be too conspicuous to hide.”

I realized I’d polished off almost a quarter of the wine, so I passed it
to Ryu who quaffed it nearly to the halfway mark with a look of relief. I lay
down on my side, propping my head up on my hand, and waited for him to
continue. He put the wine bottle down, nestling it into the blanket to keep it
upright, and then lay down beside me, his eyes looking into mine. He ran a
finger down my cheek gently and I smiled. He leaned toward me for a split
second, but then seemed to recover himself.

He forged ahead, only his peeping fangs betraying his internal struggle
to keep on task. “Right, well, there have always been two philosophies, shall
we say, regarding the relationship between our kind and humans. One says that
we should live alongside humans—not entirely separate and not entirely
equal—but peacefully. The other philosophy preaches a more ‘demon overlord’
approach to the whole matter. To make an extremely long and complicated story
short, Orin and Morrigan are of the former train of thought, as were those of
us who fought with them. Whereas the party that lost thought we should enslave
humanity and seize our rightful position as their natural leaders. The war was
long—it lasted a few hundred years. Eventually, I was old enough to choose
sides, and I chose Orin and Morrigan’s. That’s where we get to Nyx.”

Ryu turned over to lie on his back, his arms pillowed under his head. I
snuggled up against him, placing my ear on his chest to hear his voice purring
from the source.

“Nyx is my cousin, but she’s older than me by a few hundred years. When
the war started, she was firmly on the side of the ‘crush humanity’ faction.
Basically, she despises humans as anything but lunch. But she’s also an
extremely capable political animal, so when the tide started to turn in favor
of Orin and Morrigan she did what any two-faced bitch worth her salt would do.
She sold herself and her copious knowledge of the enemy to our side for the
price of her life and a position in the new Court. Where, believe it or not,
she’s made quite a name for herself. People think that because they
know
she can’t be trusted, they understand how to deal with her. Which totally
underestimates the depths of her depravity and is eventually going to sink us
all into some seriously profound doo-doo.

“So that’s Nyx, in a nutshell,” he concluded, sighing. I could see that
what he’d just told me meant that there was big trouble in little Rockabill.
The disturbing nature of the idea that Jakes had been
cataloging
halflings was suddenly very evident, and for the first time that night, I
confronted the idea that Peter had been collecting my own data for his little
inventory.
Should have left the little shit in the Sow
.

“What do you think Nyx wants with Peter’s catalog?” I asked.

Ryu exhaled noisily, scrubbing his hands through his hair in what I’d
come to know was his gesture indicating extreme concentration. “I have no
idea,” he said, at last. “But it can’t be good.”

He rubbed a hand over his face and then sat up to take a mouthful of
wine. He drank slowly, and then very deliberately corked the bottle and set it
aside. I was lying on my back, mulling over everything I’d just been told.
Ryu’s world sounded incredibly complicated. And while I didn’t know shit from
Shinola, I feared that, because of Peter Jakes, I was involved whether I wanted
to be or not.

Ryu had opened Peter’s case file, and I sat up to see what was inside.
In the pocket labeled “master list,” there was a register of names and places,
about eighteen in all, with the first twelve of them crossed off. I shivered
when I saw that “Jane True—Rockabill, ME” was written underneath the last name
that had been crossed off.

There were thirteen sections of the accordion file that had been
labeled, and the names on the labels accorded with the twelve names that had
been crossed off, with one for me. Naturally, we started at mine.

Written in small, almost typewriter-perfect print was everything about
me. There were my parents’ names, their status—“selkie” and “human”—and their
current whereabouts. I stifled my disappointment when I saw next to my mother’s
name the word “location unknown.” There was my physical description, address,
place of work, and even a list of my hobbies. Next to the heading “powers” was
written “Manipulation of water elements; strength as yet to be determined.”

Ryu and I exchanged a long look, and he put the contents of my personal
file back into the folder. Then we took a brief look through the other files,
but they all contained similar information. I was eager to snoop and see what
the other halflings out there were like, so I took the file marked “Gonzalez,
Joe” and was poring over it while Ryu rummaged through the rest of the folder.
Then he pulled out from the very back a sealed Ziploc baggie. It had been stuck
in an unlabeled section and folded small so that you wouldn’t see it if you
just glanced at the folder.

I kept reading about Joe, who was the product of a male dryad and a
female human. He was forty-eight years old, and lived in Shreveport, Louisiana.
He had never met his father and had no idea of the man’s true nature. He had
very weak control over earth elements, his file read, but not enough for
contact to have been necessary. Mr. Gonzalez apparently just thought he had an
unusually green thumb. I shook my head, putting the file back into the folder
while Ryu mulled over the clippings. He appeared to be comparing them to the
master list of halfling names.

“Shit,” he swore. “This is
not
good.”

“What?” I asked, leaning toward him.

Ryu handed me the master list and the clippings. My heart froze when I
saw that one of the clippings bore a headline about the murder of a local man,
Joe Gonzalez. I picked it up, reading that the body of Mr. Gonzalez, 48, native
of Shreveport, Louisiana, had been found in his garden, a trowel buried in his
skull. With trembling fingers I picked up the other clippings, all about
murders, and compared them to the other names surrounding Joe’s on the list.
They matched.

“They’re all there,” he said. “All twelve halflings that Peter had
investigated are now dead. And all under suspicious circumstances.”

We sat in silence while I read the clippings. None of the victims had
anything in common. They were all different sexes, races, ages, and were from
all walks of life. They lived all over the country. Unless you knew they were
halflings, you’d never know they had any connection to each other whatsoever.
But
now they sure do
, my brain commented drily, as I felt a wave of nausea.
Nearly all of the clippings mentioned the fact that whoever had killed the
victim had sliced off a single ear, presumably as a trophy. And I’d been next
on the list.

I stopped myself from going there; if I went there, I’d freak out.
Instead, I mimicked calm as I put the clippings back into their bag, zipped it
shut, and then put it back in the folder. Ryu wordlessly handed me the bottle
of wine, watching as I pulled the cork out with my teeth and chugged another
quarter of it down.

When I was finished, I took a deep breath. “Do you think Peter murdered
these people?” I asked, already knowing the answer. But I wanted to hear Ryu
say it.

“No,” he said, confirming my suspicion. “I think whoever murdered Peter,
Martin, and Gretchen is the one responsible for these killings, as well.”

“Was Peter working
with
the killer, then? Tipping him off? Those
clippings, the way they were hidden away like that—maybe he was hoarding them
so he could get off on them at night, or maybe he was hiding them. He told Iris
that something was going on, and she knew he was scared, but just because he was
scared or in over his head doesn’t mean he wasn’t involved.”