Whiskey and Water (24 page)

I don't know," she said, her eyes
wide open. She swallowed, but settled back into place and eased her bone-aching
grip. "If everybody just did what they wanted— "

"Grown-ups," he said, "also
do what they s
hould
do. Without being told. What they
should
do,
even when it's not what they're
supposed
to do. Even when they get
punished for it. Grown-ups don't need to be threatened to get their chores
done."

"You don't think it's . . .
condescending ... to say that anybody who acknowledges a higher power is an
undisciplined brat? That's more judgmental than I expected of you. ..."

He smiled. "Not at all," he
said. "But I think we can do better for a God than one that's
paternalistic and suffocating, don't you? Leave that one for the angels.
They're into being told what to do. Now let go of my hands, Lily, and hold
yourself up."

She set her jaw and jerked her hands back
all at once—and flopped onto the bed like a landed fish, laughing until she
choked, giddy unto hysteria. He pulled her tight and kissed her neck and
stroked her back, his body warm and smooth in her arms.

"Well, I fucked that up," she
said, when she stopped coughing. She lay under him, panting, her hands clenching
and unclenching on the sheets.

"Nonsense," he said, and kissed
her mouth this time. "You're doing great. Come on. Let's try it
again." "Sure," she said. "Just let me go pee and take my
pills."

A smiling man dressed for a dinner party
wandered through the bright November afternoon, twirling a silver seal-headed
cane and tipping his hat to the ladies, unaware that a shadow tracked him.
Padding on lynx feet, tasting the air with a serpent's tongue, flittering
across walls and tree trunks on a spider's eight bristled legs, it moved
unremarked, without hesitation, through the park. Its eyes watched Bunyip from
the shade of every withered leaf and blade of grass, a bee-vision kaleidoscope
that would have dizzied most.

Custom can inure one to stranger things.

When the crowds thinned and the evening
cooled, Bunyip tucked his cane under his arm and drifted west as if headed home
along with everyone else. He passed under a sere wooden wisteria arbor on the Lake's
southwest edge and paused to catch a glimpse of shoebox towers like God's own
dominos lined up beyond the treetops, hazy in the failing light. Those haunting
shadows coalesced, and when he turned back, a running woman caught his
attention and he turned to watch her go.

Too much temptation. And she was already
running. What predator could resist?

He never seemed to move much faster than a
stroll, but her strides opened no distance between them as he followed her over
grass" and through rustling leaf litter, down a slope to the western
bridle path. Her black braids bounced and her footfalls thudded dully on the
packed clay trail, echoing from fern-hung boulders as she came up on the rustic
Rift-stone Arch, in the shadow of the Dakota but concealed from its view by
high embankments. She trotted under the bridge, vanishing in blue twilight, her
running shoes squelching in mud.

The perfect place, and
now
Bunyip
hurried. He wanted to catch her under the gray mica schist, press her back on
rough stones and taste her fear for a moment or two, feel the rumble of her
heart in her chest. He wondered if she was brave enough to feel her death or if
her pulse would stop when he touched her, like a fist-clenched bird's.

He undulated forward, mud cold and slick
under his belly, his clawed flippers churning broad tracks alongside the smooth
curve pressed by his abdomen. A sharp thrust, a crashing lunge after her
fleeting shadow in the dimness. He called out, a weird bitternlike wail that
crashed and reverberated in the confined tunnel to startle and confuse her. She
turned, crouched, hands raised before her face.

She did not look afraid.

A cabled shape writhed underfoot and
snapped around him in brusque convulsive flexion. The coils wrapped hard, a
king cobra's man-thick body wrought of shadow and glamourie twisting, thrashing
him to the ground. Scales rasped scales, belly to belly, scraped, scarred,
slid. He thumped and rolled, flippers scrabbling mud and shadow-stuff, slashing
as they'd slash flesh. And then he was on his back, stunned with the force of
the fall, a woman's small face hovering and her filed teeth smiling while the
coils of the shadow-serpent tightened around his neck. Her left hand was
uplifted, poised. A glimpse of knapped black-glass blade flecked with pale
crystals showed between curled fingers, and something
big
flared
shadow-ears like tent flaps behind her and trumpeted mockery.

"D'you think I could steal a Bunyip's
shadow?" she asked, in an offhand manner belied by her own panting
breaths. "If I cut it off with my little knife? You're big and strong. But
I'm smarter, and sister
ndovo
is stronger, isn't she? So maybe I should
just give you the cobra, and the spider bite, and not have to worry about you
anymore. Little fishie."

He writhed and snarled. Her coils ground
tighter, bending back his scales, tugging his pelt. She'd pinned one flipper in
her coils and bound the other with her right hand grown magically powerful, but
even the elephant's strength couldn't hold
him
long. She'd been wise to
trick him, to catch him off guard and surprised.

He let her think she'd cowed him, and
surrendered in her grip. "What do you want, Kadiska? " "Stop following
the water-horse." "What is
that
to you?"

She reached past him, past his tusks and
staring opalescent eyes, and laid the blade of her obsidian knife against the
path. It tugged as it pricked his shadow, and he winced. "He belongs to my
mistress," she said. Hiss of her breath, warmth of it on his cheek.
"And if she ever decides she's done with him, he's mine."

"Oh." She might be strong—just
as strong as her sister-shadow, power shrugged around her shoulders—but she was
little,
despite the cobra coils. "That's no path I can walk,
Seeker." "What mean you?"

"I mean he is failing his charge, and
if he cannot keep it, then one who
can
will. I carry the word of the Rainbow
Snake." "Assassinate him." A nose-wrinkled snarl.

"Is there another way for power to
pass from hoof to hand, in Faerie?" He said it wryly, quietly, and when he
saw her lips twitch in answer, he slammed both flippers upward, hurling her
back and sideways, toward the hand with the knife. She clutched after him,
coils tightening with all her stolen strength, but he had already pulled on his
man-guise and slipped free, shoving the coils down and lifting his legs clear,
heaving himself to his feet. A twist of thighs and hips and he stood upright,
and then shifted again, reared over her, balanced on his flukes like a
breaching cetacean, flippers spread wide to embrace and crush her before she
could throw her shadow-coils round him again.

He came down like a tsunami, expecting to
meet her strength for strength, elephant shadow to elephant seal. But she was
gone, rolling away, cat-shadow quick as she somersaulted aside, mud smeared in
her braids and down her back, caked clots on her cheek and her thigh.
Claw-quick flash of her black knife and a
rip
like caught and shredding
skin.

He rolled, reared back and howled,
thrashing in the tunnel like a gaffed fish as she skittered away. The shriek
rose over the city, rang, resonated, churned, turned heads and shattered
windows. Trees swayed, their last shop-worn leaves sailing free. Dogs howled on
Staten Island. In Jersey City, babies woke crying, and wouldn't be soothed.

Kadiska stood up with Bunyip's black
shadow twisting and squirming in her right hand, and watched him contort on
the muddy New World clay. He lay still, finally, moaning his pain as Kadiska
folded the shadow small and tucked it into the bottom of her pocket, weighing
it down with the knife. She folded her arms over her chest, smearing the red
elastic of her sports bra with still more mud, and waited until Bun-yip was
silent.

"Go back to Australia," she
said. "There's nothing in New York for you. And another thing. You tell
Mist that if she wants Kelpie, she can come and get him herself. And if you
want your shadow back" — she smiled, with all her teeth — "you can go
and get it from Elaine."

Ian's irritation all but colored the air
around him. The Prince paced, ignoring the Kelpie and the Mage and their
gathering coterie at the bottom of the garden, stealing sidelong glances at
the Merlin and his mother and the girl who stood beside them, so earnest and
strangely un-cowed.

Ian's place in the court was complex. His
father, Keith MacNeill, was the Dragon Prince—the champion touched by the
Dragon and doomed to sacrifice and horror, his own life forfeit for the lives
of whatever nation he fought for —and his mother, who had been Elaine Andraste
MacNeill, was the Queen of the Daoine Sidhe. But the Mebd —Ian's
great-grandaunt (and the wife of Elaine's father) who had been Queen before —
had named Ian her heir, not Elaine. Elaine's intervention had left Ian more human
and Elaine more Fae, and it had spared Ian the embrace of the White-horn
Throne.

And cost him his lover, and his daughter.
For which he had forgiven her.

Perhaps.

So it wasn't unusual that Ian was
irritated and restive in his cold mother's presence. Nor was it unusual to find
him pacing, a dark world flung in orbit about her pale, stationary star. But
the anxiousness was something new.

"The girl's not that pretty,"
Cairbre whispered under his breath as Ian swung near. Too soft for the Queen or
the Merlin to overhear, and far, far too soft for the girl. But Ian's wolf ears
made it plain, and he paused with one foot in the air and set it down slowly.
His hands unfolded and fell to his sides, palms turned against his thighs as
if to conceal glistening sweat.

The Elf-prince shot the bard a green-eyed
stare. "It's not about pretty," Ian murmured. "But why does s
he
get to stay and play Barbie-dolls in Faerie, when she hasn't a glimmer of
strength?"

"Because she wants to?" Soft, so
soft, Cairbre's lips barely moving and the sound no more than a brush of breeze
across Ian's neck.

Ian gritted his teeth, the first sharp
edge of canines cutting his gums. "That tune's not so pretty in my mother's
ears when it's her son that plays it."

Cairbre's hand brushed his elbow, strong
as oak sticks. "She is less consistent than another might be, in her
place."

"She doesn't love anything. She's the
Queen." But either the hand on Ian's arm or spitting out his own venom calmed
him, and he managed to settle back against the wall and fold his hands over his
arms. "And you so much want to be King and sit in that chair?"
Cairbre's mildness was deceptive. Ian checked, but didn't see mockery on his
face, or find it in his scent. To all appearances, he wasn't even looking at
Ian. His regard rested on the Queen.

Not quite.
But Ian didn't say that. Because he'd managed,
suddenly, to put a name to his rage.

"If she's staying, then," he
said, "well, let her stay." He stepped forward, passing by Cairbre,
and paused before the Queen. He made a bow, and addressed her when she looked
down. "Mother."

His curls broke at the nape of his neck,
showing pale skin unadorned by a collar, and she reveled in that nakedness
before gesturing him to rise. "Are we so formal, then?"

"She's to be of your court?" Ian
asked, not so quietly that the mortal girl couldn't overhear. "What else
shall I do with her? " Light, and mocking.

Ian met her gray-green eyes, dark and soft
as moss in shadows, and waited for the colors to shift to chocolate and autumn
while he bit his tongue. "Give her to me," he said, and refolded his
hands.

If she had been the Mebd, her fan would
have been open between her fingers, flick-flick-flicking a little wind. But she
was Elaine, or she had been Elaine, and her hands stayed curled loosely by her
sides. Her high court diction would have told him she mocked, if the frankness
of her scent did not. "Do you think that . . . seemly, Ian, my son?"

"What cares the court for
seemly?" He rolled one shoulder. "Give her to me. Unless you think
I'll misuse her. Unless you think I'm not owed something for what I've lost.
Unless you'd rather make her a lady-in-waiting. Waiting for what?"

The Queen angled herself away from Ian,
staring over his shoulder. "Did you hear that, Juliet?" White-lipped,
the girl nodded. "What do you want of me?"

Ian turned to look at her. "What are
you good for?"

Her smile startled him, white and bright
as a wolf's. Ian stepped back at her voice. "I can cut you. Or pierce just
about anything you want, if you're not afraid of a little pain."

'She's not pretty," the Queen said,
such a sharp echo of Cairbre that Ian laughed.

"I brought her in," he said. It
wasn't exactly a lie, and he stared the Merlin down when he said it, as if she
would challenge him, but she just tilted her head and smiled, and let her beads
swing. The smile on her lips could have meant anything, and that was Carel all
over.

Jewels' voice clipped the silence short.
"Is
pretty
all you care about?"