Whiskey and Water (13 page)

"Because I'm here to watch his
back."

The city held its breath around them,
brisk late-night traveler, wino on a bench with the
Post
spread over his
face.
Do not disturb.
This city wouldn't talk to Felix now.

He curled his nails out of his palms. Of
course he didn't miss it. What sort of idiot wanted a dragon's attention? What
sort of idiot wanted
the
Dragon's attention? Matthew was welcome to it,
chapter and verse. Felix didn't need it any longer. New York City with its
thousand-chambered heart wasn't his anymore, and hadn't been since Jane
Andraste decided Matthew made a prettier sacrifice.

Any other city would be better.

Any other city wouldn't curl and drag in
his bones. Promising so much. Delivering a dragon's heart, when it gave
anything at all.

Lily slept past three.

She awoke with sticky face and lashes
adhered from leftover makeup, her cheek pressed to a dingy pillowcase dabbed
with last night's lipstick and eyeliner. Sunlight had crept through the heavy
curtains and warmed her ear and the side of her head, and when she reached up,
half-aware, to push the irritation away, a cracked fingernail snagged in her
hair and tore to the quick.

She yelped and pushed herself up on her
elbow, examining the drop of blood on her fingertip. Sticking it into her mouth
converted her curse to a mumble. She briefly considered burying her face under
the pillow and sleeping until dark, but an insistent pressure in her bladder
convinced her otherwise. She slid her legs out of the tangle of unwashed
flannel, dislodging Max the piratical cat from her backside, and padded to the
bathroom to swill down two Cortef with a palmful of tap water and contemplate
waxing the soft dark down on her upper lip. The sound of running water
followed, and a sigh.

For his part, after a somewhat ungainly
leap to the floor and a better one back up again, Max regained the portion of
sunbeam that spilled across Lily's bed. The bed was actually a battered and repurposed—but
once darkly gorgeous — fainting couch, which didn't trouble the cat at all. He bulldozed
the pillows into a more congenial prospect with his head and settled among
them, purring in the sun that bleached his glossy coat from black to darkest
auburn.

He was fast asleep by the time the mobile
telephone on the unrefurbished Shaker end table that served as a nightstand
rang. Lily scurried from the bathroom naked, droplets of water and body jewelry
flashing like sequins sprinkled across her skin. She wrapped a green towel
around her plum-colored hair one-handed and fumbled the phone up before it quit
beeping out its off-key version of "How Soon Is Now."

A flat steel disk with an anodized red
caduceus soldered to one side flashed from a heavy bangle as she slapped the
phone against her ear. "Hello?"

"Hello, Lily. Did I wake you?"

Despite herself, she smiled at the voice.
"Christian. No, Max handled the waking. And I bet you haven't even been to
bed."

I had breakfast with the coven and then
went in to work for a few hours. We missed you last night." Moira was
asking for me, I take it?"

Afraid you might slip out of the snare.
You went Gothing?"

I'm tempted to open a club myself. Or
maybe just shoot every third DJ.
Pour encourager les autres.
You know,
to buy some new music or something." She caught sight of herself in the
mirror propped against me far wall and paused. Gooseflesh pimpled her skin and
her small brown nipples were crinkled with cold around circular barbell
piercings of green and black titanium. Her ribs were sharply defined by the
shadows between them.
Eat,
she told herself, and frowned. "I should
have come to the Sabbat."

You should have. Gypsy brought the
food."

Oh,
man.
You know how to torture a
girl." He coughed, and she smiled. She could almost hear him blushing, and
her hip bones were sticking out too. She wondered if he was one of those shy
boys who got all toppy when you got them backed up against the wall, or if he
was quiet
all
the time. "Hey, Christian, you want to get dinner
tonight?"

He paused, a faint clicking revealing that
he was consulting his PDA. "I'd love to. What time?"

She checked the time on her phone, which
necessitated pulling it away from her ear. Max had cracked open pumpkin-colored
eyes, and was staring at her through the slits with uncanny feline intensity. She
mouthed words at his reflection.
Three hundred years ago, you'd have gotten
me hanged ad a witch.

He smiled at her. Black cats were the
devil's watchglasses, or something. Maybe toothbrushes, given the way his tail
could bottle up.

"I have a class at six. Afterward?
Chinese? And if you want, I'll get you into Ceremony. It's Monday night — I
think Object 775 might be playing unless I have my dates mixed up."

This time he did laugh, rich and dark and
almost out of character in its chocolatey irony. "You were just bitching
about the bad music at Goth clubs, and now you want to take me to a Goth
club?"

She let the towel drop uncoiling on the
warped wooden floor, where it lay exhaling warm moisture like a serpent on a
sun-heated rock. Behind the drapes, the window was fogging, and her hair
tumbled over her shoulders in snarls of violet and black and rose, rose-red.
" A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds . .

Christian never disappointed. He cleared
his throat and finished for her, in a tone that slid from portentous to
teasing. " '. . . adored by little statesmen, philosophers, and divines.
With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do.' And are you a great
soul, Lily?" She smiled against the phone. "If not me, then
who?" "Good girl," he said, and that didn't annoy her.
"I'll pick you up at seven thirty."

"Harvard Square S'bux?"
"Please.
Algiers."

"Algiers it is. Cheerio!" She
thumbed the phone off with a shaking hand before she went to find her leather
pants, which she was sure were somewhere in the pile on the floor.

*                                                           *       *

When they emerged from a dark tunnel that
Jewels could never say exactly how she entered, it was like stepping into a
watercolor. In, into, and through, to come to the other side—like finding the
world behind a rain-washed window of fish-eye glass, suddenly thrown wide. She
clutched the Merlin's fingers tight in her left hand, Geoff's in her right, and
tried to remember to breathe in between blinking back tears.

They emerged into Faerie at the top of a
long sweeping hill not unlike the one they'd left behind in the iron world,
but on five times the scale. It 'was spring here, the grass underfoot the shade
of glass stained green with ferric oxide, the sky overhead like cobalt blue.
The colors had that same pure transparency so concentrated they might tint the
light that fell against them. Even the air smelled different: sweet, faintly of
rain, with an overtone Jewels at first thought might be the Merlin's elusive
perfume, but the wind was blowing the wrong direction.

Despite the breeze, mist clung like a gauze
gown to the curve of the hills. Geoff let his coat fall closed as Jewels
stepped from under its black leather wing. She paused on the crest of the hill,
hands by her sides to pin her skirt to her thighs, leaning into the wind that
snaked her hair in writhing tendrils. The Merlin's beads clattered as her
braids swung, and every charm on Matthew's coat jangled like harness bells.
Only Geoff was unruffled by the wind. It picked at the rats in his hair, but
snarls and denim and leather defeated it and it spurned him. "Which
way?"

The Merlin gestured through the swirling
mist, the scent of sandalwood and roses following the sweep of her arm.
"Into the valley and down to the sea," she said, and then planted her
hands on her hips. "I hope you all brought good walking shoes."

Jewels was still standing, staring,
breathing so deeply that the rise and fall of her ribs showed under the loaned-out
sweater. Geoff nudged her, and she turned to him and grinned, her eyes bright
as sunlit water. “ ’Up the airy mountain,' " she whispered, " 'Down
the rushy glen, / We daren't go a-hunting, / For fear of little men — ' "

She jumped as Matthew's strong arm in its
velvet sleeve came around her shoulder, his withered hand scratching her arm.
She would have stumbled, but he held her up. She snuggled into the embrace, and
let him move her.

"Don't forget the rest of the
poem." He shepherded her down the hill.

"They stole little Bridget for seven
years long;

When she came down again Her friends were
all gone.

They took her lightly back

Between the night and morrow;

They thought she was fast asleep,

But she was dead with sorrow."

Repressed anger rattled his voice, a
contradiction to the warm protectiveness of his grip. Jewels saw him catch the
Merlin's gaze, and the Merlin looking down—and she also saw Geoff drop his chin
to hide an expression that was torn halfway between worry and jealousy.

Which was fine. She stuffed her hands
inside the drooping sleeves of the sweater, the roughness of scars along the
insides of her wrists catching her fingers. Jewels didn't mind being wanted.
But she didn't
belong
to anybody, and it was best if Geoff didn't forget
it.

And best if she didn't let Matthew dismiss
her the way he so obviously would like to. She pressed her shoulder into the
curve of his arm, and turned to study his profile as they walked. He seemed
intent on the mist-shrouded distance; she pitched her voice teasing rather than
accusatory. "You
really
didn't want to tell me about witchcraft,
did you? The not-Wicca kind. Don't think I didn't notice you ducking that half
of the question."

Matthew paused, and made a decision.
"You know any fairy tales? Bluebeard? You put the key in the lock, you
can't ever get the blood out again. One-way gate. That's a power by initiation.
Bought and paid for with a sacrifice. Shamanistic power is similar, although
the nature of the sacrifice varies."

She paused, thoughtful, and kept
snuggling. "So you can learn power on a dream-quest, or —" She touched
the knotwork of scars around her hairline.

"Yes. If you go about it right.
Sundance, forty days in the desert. Ritual scarification, sure. The powers
tend to be unpredictable, though." "So what do you sacrifice to
become a witch?" "Your body. Sexually speaking. To the Christian
Devil." "You say that like he's real," Jewels said, and Geoff
said, "You mean there're others?"

Matthew's grin was a little cold. Jewels
wasn't sure she liked being the target of that much cynical mockery. "You
believe in Faeries, and you don't believe in the Devil?" "I've s
een
Faeries," she said.

"Touché, Matthew," the Merlin
said. And then she turned her –wicked grin on Jewels. "And I've seen the
Devil. So I can assure you, he exists."

Jewels subsided, but pursed her lips when
she thought that over. A little later, she pitched her voice low and asked
Matthew, "And is that what you did?"

"What
I
did?"

She blushed red-hot. "With the Devil.
You know—" His outright laughter turned the Merlin around, and brought a
curious glance from Geoff, who stared with arched eyebrows but stayed back. The
Mage doubled over, leaning on her for support, his whole body shaking. He had a
nice laugh. Uninhibited.

"Oh, God, no," he said, finally,
releasing her briefly to lift his glasses and cuff tears off his cheeks. "Quite
the opposite, I assure you." That got him a sharp look from the Merlin,
but he didn't bother to explain, and Jewels was still blushing too fiercely to
ask the next question.

At least Matthew took her elbow again, if
he didn't rest his arm across her shoulders anymore.

They walked through mist that never quite
touched them and never quite revealed the horizon. The way was rolling, the
path that Carel and Matthew followed faint. Geoff trudged beside them
obediently, subdued and trying not to stare. Shapes loomed from the fog on one
side or another: embankments, gnarled trees, once a dry stone wall in very good
repair despite its air of mossy abandonment. They splashed through a ford and
gained the embankment opposite, and all the while Matthew kept his hold on the
Otherkin child—not really a child, not precisely, but not any older than his
students, either, and thinking of her as a child kept other interests from
emerging. Better to indulge his old, harmless crush on Carel; she was safely
impossible anyway.

"How far is it to walk?" Jewels
said, when some of the tension seemed to have glided off Matthew's body. He
didn't answer, but the Merlin did, after a brief thinking pause. "That
depends." "On where we came out?"

"On whether the Queen wants to see
us," the Merlin answered. "We could be walking forever if she doesn't
— ah. And apparently we're welcome."

Jewels followed her pointing arm as the
mists rolled back, unveiling a sunny prospect: a long line of beeches edging an
airy wood, all frothy green and silver with spring, and the viridian sweep of a
lawn up to a turreted fantasia of a castle. Towers snapping with banners glowed
against an azure sky, golden stone so translucent ripples of twisted light
showed in the shadows it cast. A cobbled road curved up the hillside, joined by
the path they followed. From the murmur of waves and the tang of salt, not too
far beyond the palace was the sea.