Pomegranates full and fine (15 page)

“We can’t comment on that at this time.”

Tango clenched her jaw. She had been hoping for something more. The same footage she had seen at eight-thirty was played again as the anchor recapped the death in terms slightly more graphic and speculative, then added, “Reaction in Metro’s gay community has been swift.”

A new scene. Tango recognized the interior of Hopeful and the little shrine commemorating John Elliott. Now Todd’s picture had joined his customer’s. A man was speaking, his appearance as different from the police spokesman’s as possible: his head was shaved, he had multiple earrings, and he wore a T-shirt printed with a vivid pink triangle. “The police are doing nothing! Bashing is on the rise and the police aren’t taking it seriously. John’s and Todd’s deaths are hate crimes. Some lunatic is out there
preying
on homosexuals,
murdering
us, and what are the police doing? What are the straights doing? They’re shaking their heads and saying ‘Oh, it was probably their own fault.’ Well, we’re not going to let Toronto ignore this.”

The camera came back to the anchor. “No plans for memorial services yet, but we’ll let you know when announcements are made. In other news...” Tango turned off the television, punching savagely at the button on the remote.

Epp cleared her throat. “Tango?”

Tango didn’t turn around. “Take the
geasa
off me.” “I can’t. You’ll go back to San Francisco.”

“I won’t.” Tango sighed. As long as she had Miranda to help her, she didn’t need to leave the city — although she wished she didn’t have to wait to get Riley’s bags. She would have liked to have them now. “All right, but let’s make this perfectly clear.” She shifted to look at Epp. “I do not want to be involved in this damn party, i have other things to worry about.” “Are you still looking for Riley? The duke...”

“The duke can go screw himself. You plan the party, Epp. When you need something paid for, let me know. I’ll pay for it. Better yet, save the payments up. I’ll do them all at once. I don’t want to see you, I don’t want to hear from you unless it’s absolutely necessary. Understand?”    .

“Yes.” Epp hesitated, then added, “What about today? I have appointments scheduled. I have a whole list of places to visit. I may need the card to pay for things.”

Tango put her hands over her eyes and rested her head against the back of the couch. She wasn’t doing anything else anyway. “Okay. Let me get dressed. We can take my car.”

“Actually, we can’t. The duke told Dex to help me

— or rather, us. We’ll take his car when he gets back.”

“Gets back from where?” Tango asked tightly, head still back.

“Taking your car back to the rental agency.” Epp seemed pleased with herself. “I decided you wouldn’t really need it, so I gave him the keys while you were in the shower. He should be back anytime. By the way, you were charged extra for parking overnight.” Tango heard a rustle of paper. “You’re lucky you didn’t get towed. Parking is such a hassle in Toronto.”

Tango was glad her hands were over her eyes. Otherwise they would almost certainly have been around Epp’s neck.

* * *

Dex, it turned out, was much more like Sin than Tango would have suspected from her brief encounter with him yesterday. Away from the duke’s court, he smiled and laughed a lot. He was as unfailingly polite as any of the humans Tango had met in Toronto, but it was the politeness of
noblesse oblige
rather than a cold, defensive politeness. Aside from the air of nobility that he sometimes wore like a cologne, Dex was also much less like a sidhe than Tango would have expected. Occasionally, he could be as downright adolescent and immature as a university student at a beer blast. He was a golden boy out of some American nostalgia movie, the perfect counterpart to Sin’s dark rebel. Neither of them were what the ancient faeries would have expected in a faerie knight.

At a bakery, they waited while Epp discussed a massive order with the manager. This was the third bakery they had been to so far. Epp was being very demanding, very brisk and businesslike. She had a recipe for bread like none Tango had ever seen before. Tango had never been much of a cook, but she suspected that Epp’s recipe would produce a loaf not unlike an egg bread, rich and golden and filled with fruit and nuts. It might almost have been a dessert bread, but Epp insisted that it would be part of the main course for an enormous feast. The first two bakeries had looked over the list of ingredients and the almost arcane directions for the baking, and replied that they could make something similar from a variation of one of their stock recipes. Epp had been adamant that the bread be produced according to her recipe. Tango was sure that the staff of the bakeries must have been snickering at her demands almost before the trio of Kithain had left.

At least the third bakery seemed to be somewhat more receptive to Epp’s stringent wishes, and the boggan had come down to talking prices with the manager. Tango groaned as Epp tried to haggle him down. It wasn’t as though there was any need to save money. The duke’s card had an apparently inexhaustible limit. Tango had felt guilty every time she paid for something with it, hoping that the fake credit wouldn’t somehow reflect back on the storeowners. The little credit card machines always approved the card, however, so presumably the credit was being swallowed by some giant credit corporation. “Why does she bother?” she complained out loud to Dex.

The golden sidhe put down a bag of croissants and shrugged. “Part of her nature. You know the joke about the sidhe, the redcap and the boggan who found flies in their beer?”

“Like the human joke about the Englishman, the Irishman and the Scotsman?” Tango yawned. “Englishman covers the beer with a napkin and sets it aside, Irishman flicks the fly out and keeps drinking, Scotsman picks the fly out very carefully and yells ‘spit it out, you little bugger, spit it out!’”

“Basically. Except the redcap eats the fly.” Dex smiled at a saleswoman behind the bakery counter. She blushed and smiled back. “I think this is some kind of ancestral recipe of Epp’s. Something that has been passed down for centuries. I heard her mention once that it’s the original recipe for Cornish saffron buns, given to a Cornish housewife by a faerie queen in exchange for mending her shadow. She’s been saving it for a really special occasion. I hope it’s worth it.” Tango made a grimace of disgust. “So do I. I had something once that an old Scottish sluagh claimed was heather ale made according to an ancient Pictish recipe. It could have taken paint off the wall. Ancient recipes don’t always work out too well.”

“Maybe they need more Glamour to turn out right. Like there was in the old days.”

“Maybe.” Tango considered a basket full of brightly decorated gingerbread men and women. Her stomach snarled at her and she made her decision. “I’d like the one with the yellow skirt, please," she told the woman behind the counter. “Do you want one, Dex?”

“The one with red hair,” he said lasciviously. The woman behind the counter, a redhead, blushed again and gave him two: a gingerbread woman with red icing hair and a gingerbread man with yellow. When Tango tried to pay for three, the server would only take payment for the two that had been ordered. Tango rolled her eyes as they stepped outside to eat the cookies.

“Does anyone from your court ever pay humans for anything?”

“Not if we can help it,” Dex grinned. “If they want to give us things for free, well...”

“I can see why Riley liked it here so much. He’d fit right in.” Tango broke a leg off her cookie and popped it in her mouth. She chewed thoughtfully for a moment, then added, “Did... I mean, do you know Riley, Dex? What can you tell me about him?”

Dex paused. “You know that the duke has forbidden anyone to look for him, don’t you?”

“That doesn’t mean I can’t ask what you thought of him, does it?”

“I guess not. He was a pretty okay guy. I mean, he was a pooka. He lived for pranks. About the only real contact I had with him was through the court after he became the duke’s Jester.”

“Was there anybody that he really pissed off? Anyone who might want revenge on him?”

“Lots of people. Most of the court. Probably a lot of humans, too, not that they would have realized what was going on.” He bit the head off one of his cookies.

“How about a mage?” Tango thought of the little girl’s voice on the answering machine.

Dex almost choked. “A mage? Not even Riley would have gone against the duke’s orders to stay away from them!”

“But he did, remember?”

“Yeah, okay. In San Francisco.” He shook his head. “I don’t think Riley would have tried doing that here. Besides, there are hardly any mages in Toronto. I’ve

heard of one or two, maybe three.”

“What Tradition?” Tango asked eagerly. Some mages were more likely than others to have the ability to transform a person as Riley had apparently been transformed. “Verbena? Akashic Brotherhood?” She groped for a name from the Technocracy, the enemies of the mages. “Progenitors?” Dex just gave her a blank look. She sighed. And she had complained to Miranda about vampires being insular! “All right, how about telling me where I can find them?”

“I don’t know.”

“Don’t play court games with me, Dex. This thing of the duke’s about mages can’t have completely fried your brain.”

“I really don’t know, Tango! I’ve never paid that much attention. All I’ve heard is that they’re do-gooders, not the kind of people who would go out for revenge.”

“Damn.” Tango angrily bit the last piece of her cookie in half. “How about anyone he hung out with? A blond man, maybe?”

Dex shrugged again. “Never saw him with anyone outside court. Of course, I didn’t see him much outside of court at all.”

Tango frowned. “So you don’t know anything about this blond guy?”

“Nothing. Sorry.” Dex brushed crumbs off his fingers.

A knock on the window from the inside of the store brought the conversation to an end; Epp stood on the other side of the glass, her fingers miming a small rectangle. It was time to pay. Tango took her time savoring the last bite of her gingerbread, making the boggan wait. When she was ready, she went in, shook the bakery manager’s hand and put down the account card, ignoring Epp’s hostile glares. “Where to next?” she asked sweetly as the bakery’s credit-card machine coughed up another approval for the phony card. In addition to the three bakeries, they had also stopped at two florists, an interior design supply house, a graphic design firm and a gourmet caterer whose services Epp had eventually rejected. It was getting very late in the afternoon, and most stores would be closing soon.

“A chocolate shop in College Park,” replied Epp frostily. “And you’ll be happy to know that it’s on your way home. We’ll drop you off after we’re finished there.”

“Thanks ever so much.”

Their route took them down Bay Street, a wide avenue between the steel-and-glass temples of business. For all of the street’s width, however, their progress became slower and slower as they neared their destination. “Rush hour?” asked Tango from the rear seat of Dex’s Mustang.

“It’s not usually this bad on Bay.” Dex was frowning at the traffic in the oncoming lanes. It was heavy, but moving fairly quickly. “Something must be happening. Maybe an accident. People are rubbernecking and slowing things down.”

They discovered the source of the trouble as they stopped for a red light at the last intersection before the lot where Dex w'ould park. A mass of people clogged the cross-street, College Street, just past the intersection. Police on horses kept watch over them, while a white-gloved cop stood in the intersection and directed traffic coming along College onto Bay instead. Dex’s was the first car idling at the intersection, so they had a good view of the crowd. Tango stood up to see over the turning traffic. There were a lot of pink triangles visible in that crowd, and a lot of angry faces. People held hand-painted signs with slogans like “Action Now!”, “End bashing!”, and “Justice for John and Todd!” “What’s down there?” she asked Dex.

“Police headquarters.” He had taken off his sunglasses and was looking as well. “We don’t usually get demonstrations like this in Toronto. It looks like it could get ugly.”

Epp glanced away from the demonstration with distaste. “Sex belongs in the bedroom,” she said sanctimoniously.

Dex snorted. “When was the last time...”

“Hold on.” Tango grabbed Dex’s shoulder and pointed. “Something’s happening.”

A young man with a megaphone had jumped on someone’s shoulders and was swaying above the crowd. Tango recognized the activist from Hopeful whom she had seen on the news. “Queen’s Park!” he bellowed. “Queen’s Park! The government has to listen to us!” He put his fist in the air and began to chant, “We’re here! We’re queer! We’re...” The crowd took up his chant and slowly began to turn. The mounted police officers glanced at each other. One of the horses shifted nervously. Its rider reined it in.

Tango glanced at Dex. “Queen’s Park?”

“Ontario legislature. Big, old, pinkish stone building we passed a couple of times today.” He pointed off to the right. “Straight down there about two blocks.” “They’ll be going right past us.” Tango slid down into her seat.

“Nothing to worry about.” Dex put his sunglasses back on. “If the cops are smart and things don't get out of hand, they’ll go by and we can get going again. Pity the poor souls down College where they’ll be marching. They’re going to be completely trapped.”

By now, the crowd had turned almost fully and the front lines — formerly the quiet hangers-on at the back of the crowd — found themselves face to face with the mounted officers. There was a tense moment as the demonstrators and the police stared each other down, then the line of horses opened up, pulling back to either side. The demonstrators began to pour through into the intersection.

Tango didn’t catch what happened next. There was a sudden commotion on the far side of the intersection, near the horse that had shied nervously before. Abruptly, people were shouting and placards were being waved threateningly. The mounted officer was trying to control his horse, but it fought him and reared up. Tango thought she saw a hoof flash out and strike someone.