Whiskey and Water (33 page)

He didn't answer. He stroked her braids,
listening to the jangle of coins.

"You fail us, Whiskey."

"I'm failing no one but myself."

"On the contrary." She lifted
his wrist to her mouth and licked away the blood congealing in streams across
the heel and the thumb. Her wet, rough tongue ferreted stringy red from the
lines braceleting his wrist; his blood was musk and salt, seaweedy. "You
give the Prometheans more advantage than they have already. It's neglect, and
you know it." She smiled, and let his hand fall. He didn't argue, just watched
as she turned toward him, her eyes narrowing.
"You. are not doing your
job."

"My job?"
A braying snort. "Fae is not a
profession."

"No. It is an obligation." Her
tongue curled across her lip, eradicating a last trace of red. "The sea
is blood. Blood is the sea. You must be what you are, Whiskey, though what you
are be terrible."

He untangled his arm from her shoulders.
One of the pockets that hadn't existed when he wore his horse-shape, his
water-shape, produced a linen handkerchief: an antique thing, a froth of
yellowing lace and ivory cloth. He could not remember the face of the girl he
had taken it from. A redhead, he thought. Maybe a blonde. "Is that a
Seeker speaking?"

"Or a huntress." She tipped her
head in dismissal as he bound his wound. "Bunyip is right. You've gone
soft. Humans manage their evils burdened by souls, and none can say that their
beasts are less beastly than you ..."

"Aye," he said. He stood, and
tucked the edges of the handkerchief in, forming a tidy package. "Their mortal,
human beasts are beastly enough, when they do not have Fae to blame for the
teeth in the night. But when I was what I was, Kadiska, it was not . . . evil.
Terrible, perhaps"—he hesitated, as if savoring the word —"but the
sea, as you say is blood. And evil is an iron concept or an angelic one, of no
concern to the Fae. But now I have a soul, and I would as soon not sin.

"Mm." She paused, considering.
Her shadow lashed a tail and flared a hood behind her when she stood and paced,
the short fluid steps of a caged panther, stalk and wheel and stalk again. She
did not look at him, her head bent, considering.
She
would not bow to
convention, insofar as shoes. "Coward. Out of a little fear of Hell, you
give away strength."

"Like water," he answered. She
didn't laugh. Whiskey drew one foot onto the bench and clasped his hands around
the knee. "Get Elaine to take the damned thing back, pussycat, and I will
be all the monster Mist could wish of me."

Donall Smith was straightening his tie in
the window beside the revolving door when Felix walked up Central Park West,
northbound under a sky like a slate casket lid. The creases laddering the back
of the detective's blue suit coat informed anyone who cared to know of hours
slouched at a desk.

Felix paused behind him. Don's eyes slid
sideways in the reflection and he straightened up before Felix cleared his
throat. "Long night?"

"The longest." Don tugged the
hem of his jacket ineffectually, and stifled a yawn against his palm, his Kevlar
vest chafing his armpits as he moved. "What brings you here, Kemo
Sabe?"

"Returning from errantry in far
lands," Felix said. He ushered Don through the door. The doorman did no
more than glance at them. Jane must have left instructions. "I'll share
the rest upstairs."

No point in telling the same story
twice," Don answered.

They shared the elevator ride in silence,
Felix straight-backed, hands folded, and Don sleepily studying his thumbnails.
"She knows you're coming?" Don asked, as the penthouse alert dinged. "To
the minute." Felix softened his tone with a smile. "Figured that put,
did you?"

She do this sort of thing a lot?"

She's a great believer in
efficiency." The doors slid open, and Felix stepped out.

This time, Jane wasn't waiting for them.
Workmen were in evidence amid a mayhem of plastic sheeting, ladders, and marble
dust. One of them caught Felix's eye and gestured a path around the edge of the
room; he nodded and obeyed, Don still following.

The inner door swung open as he came up on
it, and Jane's papery-skinned hand drew a sheet of translucent four-mil plastic
aside. She beckoned them into her home.

Even having seen it once before, Donall
found his awe unabated, though he concealed it behind professional cynicism.
Felix's reaction was at once more open, and more pained.

Jane had taken the great, empty, echoing
chamber that had once been the meeting hall and mystic center of the Prometheus
Club, and turned it into a domicile. As if she could not bear to leave the
place where her Magi had gathered before they had fallen —or even, in
particular, bear to change it much—the vast sunlit space Felix remembered was
still undivided. Soft music threaded from concealed speakers, sup. plied by a
sleek laptop propped open on a coffee table. Here and there, clusters of blond
wood and ivory raw silk furniture huddled under potted palms and ficus,
circling Caucasian and Afghan carpets hand-knotted from burgundy and gold and
white and indigo wool. The floor underneath was pale hardwood, broad expanses
visible between the conversational groupings, its stark pallor ameliorated by the
glittering-eyed shapes of coiled and tendriled five-toed dragons, crafted from
inlaid cherry, purpleheart, olive, cocobola, and other colored woods. Orchids
and cacti clustered near the windows, arranged in pale-glazed pots with
restrained simplicity.

A few strategically placed
paper-and-lattice screens broke sight lines. One of them concealed a door that
led to service facilities, including what had once been the Prometheus Club's
coed locker room, and a restaurant-sized kitchen. Another screen provided a
private nook for Jane's bed.

It was a calm, soothing room. All that open
space, all that airy brightness. Room for hundreds to gather, if they didn't
care to sit.

All that comforting pallor made the black,
twisted hulk in the geometric center of the floor seem so much more uncanny.
It could have been the carcass of a steam locomotive, warped and bent from some
unimaginable explosion.

Dislocated, out of context, dominating the
single enormous room Jane lived in, it was the wreck of a wrought-iron stair.

"Tea?" Jane asked. She shut the
door firmly behind them, and engaged the alarm as her sound system offered up
tinkling Tchaikovsky-

"Please," Felix said.

Donall pulled his gaze away from the
ruined stair. "Coffee, if you have it?"

"I can get it," she answered.
Felix could not resist reaching out as they walked past the fused lump of iron
and stroking one hand over what remained of the railing. He remembered it as it
had been, a lovely thing, a spiral as tight as a nautilus shell, as a unicorn's
horn, a masterpiece of the Promethean Art—beauty, function, science, and magic
wrought into one devastating artifact.

It filled him with a great, bewildering
homesickness to stand in this room again, so changed and so changeless, and it
wounded him hot and deep to see what Matthew had done.

His fingers brushed metal. He expected
roughness, the ambient warmth of iron. Cold spiked and writhed under his
fingers, a shock that made him snatch his hand back as if something small and
venomous had sunk teeth into it.

"It's still alive," he said,
stupidly, looking at his hand.

"Matthew severed it," Jane said.
"He didn't
unwreak
it. Nothing short of his death would manage
that. His blood is bound up in it, his and Kelly's. The bond between them makes
a road to Faerie. Though"—a thoughtful hesitation as she turned to examine
her favorite students handiwork —"the way is tangled now, and dark."

She smiled over her shoulder, and Felix
swallowed a chill as he and Don followed her behind a screen. "That's why
you've been protecting him."

"Don't be ridiculous," Jane
said. "I love all my Magi. Even the wayward ones. Christian, are you there?"

I am indeed," a gentle voice
answered. Felix stepped wide of Don and Jane to see who spoke; it was a
red-haired, hazel-eyed man in a plain white shirt and a pair of jeans, who rose
from Jane's cream-colored sofa to extend his hand.

'Christian Magus," Jane said,
"Felix and Donall Magi. Christian is my apprentice of longest
standing." "Not yet Proved?" Felix asked.

Next year I ascend to full status,"
Christian said. "I've heard a great deal about you, Felix."

Felix smiled, showing teeth. "I wish
you luck in your trial." Some-how, he managed to modulate the wrath out of
his voice when he turned to Jane and continued, "Matthew is standing
second to Marlowe."

"Hah!" Jane threw her head back
hard enough on the laugh that strands of her careful bun slid down around her
ears. She tucked one back up, and let the other fall. "I should have
known. All the better. The arrangements are settled, then?"

"As they're likely to be. Sunday in
Rossville."

"I'll look forward to it," Jane
said, as she led them through the door. The enormous kitchen was far beyond her
needs; a few small appliances clustered in one corner of the stainless steel
and black-and-white granite countertops. Only one burner on the stove showed
signs of regular use, and beside it rested a stainless steel Russell Hobbs
electric kettle, a toaster oven, and a Braun coffeemaker with the usual
accessories. "Christian, be a love and get the beans out of the freezer,
please?"

He did as she instructed, and measured
them into the grinder too. The whine of the blades defeated conversation for a
moment. Then he said, "There was another murder yesterday. A young woman
named Nancy Rivera."

She took the cylinder from his hand after
he unplugged it, and tapped it into a paper filter, clearing the blades with a
forefinger while Felix ran water into both pots. A warm, earthy aroma rose from
the grounds until she swung the basket closed. "Related?"

"Fae," he said. "Not the
same animal, I don't think. Something big. Wet. With claws. The girl looked like
she'd lost two separate fights, the first one with a rhino and the second with
a tiger."

"Bunyip," Felix said. Jane
looked at him sharply.

"Not our usual mythos."

"I saw it talking to the Kelpie in
Central Park earlier this week.

"And you didn't mention
anything?"

"There hasn't been a lot of
time." Felix rubbed a thumb across the band of his ring. Donall felt
echoing cold in his own fingers, while the other apprentice, Christian, fetched
cream and rattled cups.

"Well then." Jane took the pot
from Felix's hand and poured water carefully into the coffeemaker, a sparkling,
trembling stream. "That certainly helps us make our case against
Elaine."

She sounded disappointed, and Donall felt
a flush of affection for the old woman because of it. No matter what, she
wanted to think the best of her child. He picked up the beans from the counter
and turned to put them back in the freezer, and stopped with his hand on the
door. "Oh."

"If that was meant to be reassuring,
it failed utterly," Felix said, when Don let the resulting silence drag on
a little too long, broken only by the hiss of steam from the coffeemaker.

"This Matthew?"

"Matthew Szczegielniak," Jane
said. "My former apprentice." "He was the first person at the
scene of the first murder," Don said, with real unwillingness. It wasn't
his job to
like
people. It was his job to arrest them. "We
questioned him as a witness, and he took those two Gothy Otherkin kids home.
And I'll tell you something else. Before I got called to the scene yesterday, I
had my thumb on the button to call you."

Jane didn't turn away from her
contemplation of the thin brown aromatic stream drizzling into the bottom of
the glass carafe.
This
was magic, and she loved it. She rested the backs
of aching fingers against the warm glass. "Out with it, Donall."

"I followed my ring," he said.
"And I saw a cop I know on a street corner, talking to a couple of Fae. One
I didn't recognize." It left him cold inside. He squeezed his fingers
around his ring, and asked himself sternly whether it was worth protecting a
cop who might not be such a good cop after all, if the price was a little
girl's life.
Dammit, Ernie. Tell me there'd an innocent explanation for
that.

She didn't speak. Christian filled up the
silence for her. "And the other one?"

Elaine's bard," Donall answered, and
tried not to feel like a traitor for saying it.

Her first time into shadow, Fionnghuala
had ridden a white mare decked with bells, the Morningstar riding beside her.
This time, only the click of her shoes accompanied her, like the tapping of
dainty hooves. Dainty slippers for a dainty foot.

She descended the long stair
straight-backed and unmolested, her cloak shimmering faintly in the darkness.
It was all the light she needed. Fionnghuala knew the way into Hell, and the
oppressive stillness in her would have told her she was on the right road, even
so. The loneliness was an ache in her breast, a hollowness like a scooped-out
heart, a gasping stillness that echoed when she listened into it. No lightness
filled her, no faith. She had no hope, and she had no song.