Whiskey and Water (28 page)

He stopped short, and Lucifer took the
last few steps to close the distance between them. :He does not care for my
presence in Faerie.:

Kit chuckled and lowered his voice, hoping
to keep his words for the angel alone. He felt the strength around his
shoulders when Lucifer encompassed him with a wing, for all he didn't see its
arch. "Few enough do, I warrant. Art leaving?"

:Art following, when I do?:

Thou hadst thy use of me," Kit
answered. He turned in the lee of the angel's pinions and folded his arms atop
the balustrade, looking over the night garden. The crunch of Kelpie's hoofbeats
faded into the distance. Enough and more than enough."

Lucifer laughed almost silently, his hair
escaping around his face in coiled tendrils, his face creasing beside the nose
and eyes. :Thou'rt prideful as I, Kitten.:

"Aye, and for almost as long. Mayhap
I'll be archmage, an I win the combat. Would it please thee?" :And so
comest thou on a spiral, from mastered by Prometheans to mastering them?:

"There's a certain poetry in
it." Kit turned to the Devil. "And, as thou didst but now proclaim, I
am prideful as thee."

:Aye,: Lucifer answered. :Thou dost
thee
the Devil. There is a detailed pride in that.:

"Methinks I've earned
familiarity."

.But thou aspirest to virtue now?:

Kit shrugged. "Virtue untested is no
virtue at all. Thou knowest I loved thee. The Devil can see in human
hearts."

:Ah. Would that that were so.:

Lucifer sighed, eyes downcast, and Kit
cleared his throat. "So tell me —"

Polite attention, a stirring of invisible
wings and a lift of a golden brow.

" —is
it better to reign in Hell?"

:No,: the Devil answered, with rare, plain
honesty. :But then, I am thy Lucifer, thou-who-wert-Christofer Marley, and not
John Milton's Satan. Thou wouldst achieve a different answer in another story,
sir.:

"You came back for me. Back through
history."

:What's time to the Devil?:

"I'm sorry."

:Think not on't.: And Lucifer stepped
away, leaving Kit's shoulders cold with the brush of a swan's hard feathers.
:There are worse images to be made in. Ah, and thy second appears to have made
thine arrangements. Wilt speak with him?:

The Devil furled his wings with a flick
Kit heard, though he saw nothing but a shift of shadows in the moonlight.
Matthew peered worriedly through his glasses. The Mage had paused just outside
of Lucifer's reach, and he stood there, fingers rippling against his jeans.
"Yes, Matthew?"

"Sunday the seventh," Matthew
said.

" 'Twill serve. Where?"

"Not Manhattan," Matthew
answered. "Nor Faerie either. Rossville, Staten Island. I'll take you
there later."

"Good," Kit said. He rubbed the
back of his hand across his mouth, and looked away. "I'm going to find a
drink."

It was odd, Matthew thought, that it
didn't seem
more
odd to find himself standing on a verandah in Faerie,
kitty-corner to Lucifer Morningstar, watching a long-dead poet stalk away.
What
am I doing here?

He didn't quite know. He'd lost
everything, in Faerie. And gone back to Manhattan because it was what he knew,
what he'd been raised to. He just kept doing what he'd been doing because he
didn't know what else to do, and passion and devotion—to a
ccuse
he had
believed in—had become habit as tired as any moribund marriage.

"A measure of a misspent life,"
he murmured. Well, he was due a midlife crisis, wasn't he? Master Marley?:

"No," Matthew answered. "I
meant mine. You know, he's not what I would have expected, if you had told me I
was going to meet Kit Marlowe."

:They called him Kind Kit, you know.:

Matthew laughed and brushed his topcoat
open with his thumbs so he could shove his hands in his pockets. "I had
heard it was meant as mockery."

Lucifer's wings rustled, and now Matthew
could see them, manifest in the darkness. The Devil smiled. :He was never less
than kind to me.:

The next day was Thursday, and Don knew he
was going to have to tell Ernie something. Don planned to take the subway in,
the way he always aid, but the sidewalks chilled his feet through leather soles
and he needed coffee first. He'd have to trade in his loafers soon enough, but
for now, he was reluctant to let go of summer. Even if it meant cold feet in
the morning.

Monette and Mama were both still in bed
when he got up. Breakfast was Starbucks from the shop near the precinct and a
self-delivered lecture to take better care of himself. He paused outside to
sip his latte and contemplate the pigeons and the pedestrians, the wind icing
his neck. A black-haired girl with Snow White skin turned and smiled at him without
breaking stride, a girl in a yellow skirt, sunflower barrettes framing her
face.

It struck him odd. Middle-aged black man
in a suit doesn't get smiled at so often by a white girl his daughter's age,
even if he is drinking a four-dollar coffee. Not unless she's on the job, and
she didn't look like she 'was on the job.

NYPD was the only metropolitan police
department in the US with an international counterintelligence presence. In
enforcement strength, the department numbered more than thirty thousand officers,
the population of a good-sized suburb unto itself. Most days, Donall found
that a comforting thought, as if the sheer mass of the armies of the law must
have a relativistic effect on the fabric of society, bending it toward what was
right and honest. The brotherhood. The thin blue line.
We hold these truths
to be self-evident. . .

But in the shiver of recognition that
spidered up his spine, he found himself entirely alone.

It was a hunch, a stark absolute certainty
with nothing under it but instinct. Don slurped the last gulp of latte, tossed
a cup light as a shed insect husk into a keep-your-city-clean barrel, and
waited for the street traffic to fill up the space between them before he
followed her on down.

What the hell. He could call if it looked
like he was going to be late.

The residual heat of the coffee cup still
warmed his palm, but the ring Felix Luray had pressed on him retained nothing
of it. It was cold, cold and tight, a serpent wrapped around his finger,
constricting. He clenched his fingers against it, squeeze and release. The cold
soaked to the bone, demanding and reassuring. Another compact. Another oath.
New allies.

He needed a different brotherhood now.

People hunched in their jackets, steam
drifting from their lips, the manhole covers, the subway grates. And maybe that
was what it was about the girl, besides the warning chill in his ring. Bare
legs, a skirt like a garland of dandelion fluff, her hair all down her back in
a dark cascade, restrained by those plastic barrettes. She wore marigold
Converse All Stars laced up her skinny ankles, the holes frayed where the
grommets had been picked out, black socks bunched around the tops.

She doesn't look Fae.
But, then, what did Fae look like?
Anything they wanted, Don supposed.

He followed her around the corner,
watching her avoid the subway grates as she
trip-trop, trip-trap, trip-tropped
along the sidewalk. The ring was an ache up his arm to the elbow joint,
cold or pain conducted by the bone. She turned onto Sixth Avenue, and he was definitely
going to be late. He checked the time on his phone and winced. The desk was on
speed dial, and he used the phone to hide his face while varying his distance
and keeping the bulk of the crowd between him and his quarry. The skirt made
her easy to keep track of, as they whispered like a breeze through the city.

And what am I supposed to do if I catch
her?

Something snagged, something caught—as if
a silk thread brushed on a stucco wall, tugging. One thread, and a whole
stocking laddered. The city wore them like a garment, brief decorations on a persisting
being. But just now, the snag and ravel brought a focus of attention into the
street, the eyes on cornices and drain spouts observing sleepily, a gleam
behind the lashes of an immense, drowsing beast.

They wound through the dance of the
streets like children playing tag through a pavane. The rawest of apprentice
Magi, somber in navy wool, followed a girl bright as a spatter of paint through
labyrinthine ways that could not be solved by the expedient of keeping one's
left hand on the wall. In this maze, that solution would only walk one in
circles endlessly. A different sort of maze, New York: one with a thousand
ways in or out, and a hundred hearts, and more than one minotaur.

The girl in yellow needed no scroll of
yarn behind her. She was seeking a man, as girls in mazes have for centuries,
and her own magic was more than enough for finding him, even if she hadn't
known that he'd await her at the tangled intersection of Bleecker, Carmine, and Sixth Avenue.

The tree-edged West Fourth Street
basketball court hosted a desultory cold-weather handball game and Don paused
to watch it for a moment—and beyond it, the girl, through two layers of chain
link. She extended one hand and trailed fingertips along the wire, jerking them
back and knotting the fist in her skirt as if she'd been scorched. The cold
locking Don's hand into a fist intensified, and he had quickened his pace,
intent on catching her up, putting a hand on her shoulder, and turning her
around to ask her a question or two, when a completely unexpected silhouette
detached from the onlookers by the fence and fell into step alongside her:
Ernie Peese, hands in pockets and a knit cap pulled over his ears, the tip of
his nose ruddy. He rubbed at it with the back of his hand as Don hesitated,
fading against the trunks of slender, leafless maples.

Ernie and the girl moved fast. She had a
good stride; she kept up with Ernie and from what Don could see of the
conversation, the exertion didn't distress her at all.

He wouldn't get close enough to overhear,
unfortunately. Tailing the Faerie girl was risky enough. Ernie would make him
in a second.

It explained some things, though. Like how
eager Ernie was to prove that Althea Benning's murder hadn't been a Fae crime.
Of course, Ernie talking to a Fae didn't mean anything, except that a Fae was impolite
enough to come to New York, and thought she had some reason to talk to a cop.
Maybe a Faerie would be as worried about retaliation as a homicide detective.
Maybe a Faerie would snitch, if she knew something a cop should also know. He
thought about what Jane had told him, about a monster with a murderer's soul,
and the murderer who had sent it to do his killing for him, and left a girl's guts
spread out on the waking stone of New York City.

Maybe a Faerie wouldn't want another war
either.

Don didn't know.

Which was why he was still watching Ernie
and the girl, keeping the basketball court between them and ignoring the cold
pull in his ring, when another joined them: a tall man, a broad-shouldered man
with a trim black beard and a sleek black ponytail, wearing boots and black
trousers and a retro patchwork jacket closed with leathern toggles at the
front. He wore a guitar case slung over his shoulder, and he forgot himself
enough to bow a little, or perhaps the reflex was too ingrained, though his
hair stripped back over his ears hid the most obvious evidence of his
heritage.

Don knew him at a glance. Another Fae, and
one better known: Cairbre, the bard of the Daoine Sidhe, who rode at the right
hand of the Queen. Don had seen him in
Time
magazine.

Curiouser and curiouser, Donall thought,
and withdrew behind a tree to call Jane Andraste. Call him crazy. He was sure
she'd want to know.

He was scrolling speed-dial numbers with
his thumb when the phone buzzed in his hand like a hyped rattlesnake. He almost
dropped it.
Duty beckons.

The archmage would have to wait. Another
girl had been murdered.

Sensible folk do not gallop a horse
bareback through trees in the dark of the night. They don't discard their court
gowns over a lilac bush and cling like a burr in the cresting mane, shifts
rucked about their thighs, brown legs clasping prickling hide. They don't close
their eyes and duck their heads and let the horse run, a milk-white shade
bending between the smooth boles of silver beeches, a pale, thundering outline
in the leaf-shadowed dark.

But Whiskey was not an animal who
stumbled, and no rider fell from his back until he chose to throw her—and the
Queen, not even then.

And Whiskey could see in the dark.

He stretched out, running hard, ears up,
hooves a staccato on cracking leaves and litter. He was broad-barreled, his
gait as smooth as brown river water when he chose to make it so, and the Queen didn't
need stirrups to keep her balance. She had the strength of her thighs.

They crested a hill, twigs fouling the
Kelpie's feathers, the bright streaks in his mane and tail flashing as he and
his rider broke into moonlight along the ridgeline. The scent of running water
rose from the gully on the left. It would be a crashing descent through gorse
and briar down the bluff, and the Kelpie hesitated, silver horseshoes striking
thick, blue sparks from exposed flint. He danced sideways at a trot, legs
scissoring, then curvetted as he straightened, hoofbeats caroling like bells,
the echoes ringing from each side. The Queen rode the short skips lightly, then
settled back, slid down his withers, relaxed her grip on his mane. He slowed to
an amble, almost a shuffle, click and clatter of metal on stone dulling as he
crossed to chalk and stony, mossy earth in the shadow of a wind-stunted tree.