Whiskey and Water (36 page)

They were for the shooting range. He
praised a couple of random deities in passing that the plugs had still happened
to be stuck in his jeans, and seated each one in turn. It lowered the deafening
rattle of the music to an uncomfortable roar, and gave him time to inspect the
venue. His ducked head and hands cupped before his face presented the
convincing illusion that he was indulging in a couple of fingernails of blow.

The Rathskeller had been a laser tag
labyrinth before it became a dance club, and the reminders of its former
employment were evident. Salvaged fire escape stairs rose to a grill-work
balcony that circumnavigated the vast chamber, chained to the ceiling and
braced by frequent pillars. The far side of the space was one long bar, worked
by three bartenders.

Also on the left, a drop led to a dance
pit, reached by two broad steps carpeted in leopard print. The far left wall
was a stage, complete with maniacal DJ and towering speaker stacks. The dance
floor was an incandescent darkness writhing with bodies, a Bosch painting
wrought animate, cluttered with forms made mutant by strobing crimson light and
elaborate clothes. Black-painted pillars in front hosted two men and a woman
chained in various states of dishabille. One of them was offering himself to
be flogged, ten knotted ropes braided into a handle clenched in his teeth and
hopeful tears staining his cheeks. The dancers were far too busy just now.

The walls were cinderblock, matte-black, and
the surreal, intentionally disorienting fluorescent designs left from the
club's previous incarnation smeared them in great, random whorls. On Don's
right, the leopard-print carpet extended under a seating area composed of
repurposed cast-iron lawn furniture. Beyond even that, a portion of the
labyrinth remained: a plywood maze three stories tall, confounding with mirrors
and disconcerting with switchbacks. The booths, such as they were, were
situated in its recesses, and other things went on in shadowed and curtained
corners. Everywhere was the groan of leather, the hush of velvet, the glint of
plastic.

Right now, the best-lit part of the club
was a patch of newspaper-clad concrete near the labyrinth, which was set off by
still more two-pipe railing, this painted dull crimson and crowded with
onlookers. Don couldn't have missed Jewels if he'd meant to. Wearing a smock
and a surgical mask, she commanded the middle of that bright spot at the back
of the room. She bent over the back of a half-nude young man who hunched in
turn over the back of a reversed chair, a blue plastic-handled scalpel in her right
hand, making his red blood run. The boy she said wasn't her boyfriend was
nowhere in evidence, but another young man had been permitted inside the rail
and leaned against it, arms folded, watching. He made Don's Promethean ring
cold, but not sharply so, and whoever the young man was, he had no apparent
difficulties with the iron.

Don stuffed his hands in his pockets and
slipped between tables, toward Jewels and her acolytes, pressing against the
current of tension that hung on the air. The shirtless boy was Caucasian, hair
ratted around his face, his eyes closed and his teeth clenched as he pushed out
tightly controlled sobs. Jewels worked with absolute concentration. The teeming
crowd, the breath-held observers lined up along the gallery rail, the thumping
music and the shouts of the drinkers and the bartenders might have been the murmur
of wind through long grasses. She never glanced up, even when Don eased his
bulk between two curvaceous velvet-clad women and claimed the railing directly
in front of her and her subject, where he couldn't see too clearly what she was
doing.

He could smell it, though. Over the
perfume of the ladies he'd nudged aside — one darkly redolent of grave-sweet
lilies and sharp with ylang-ylang, the other musky rose and myrrh—an abattoir
savor threaded the air. Attenuated chrysanthemum streaks curved around the
boy's pale, corrugated torso, drying on his chest. Don imagined his back must
look like a fireworks display in reverse, dark on bright. It wasn't
much
blood,
though.

He wondered what Jewels was carving on his
skin.

She set the scalpel aside on a TV tray
covered with paper and picked up something else. Her hands deft in red-daubed
vinyl, she moistened a cotton ball in some viscous substance and stroked it
into the pattern or "wounds, her lips moving as she murmured to her
client, or maybe herself. Don couldn't imagine that either one could hear what
she was saying over the music.

She patted him on the shoulder at last,
and stood back, stripping her gloves inside out. The boy remained where he had
been, eyes easing open a little at a time, his face flushed strawberry bright
in patches on skin like bone.

Someone nudged forward a bucket. Jewels
pulled off mask and smock, and they went in on top of the gloves. The recapped
scalpel followed, wadded in the paper from the tray. She crouched, murmured
something in the ear of the boy, who was still aswim in his endorphin cocktail.
And Don, nerving himself, slung a leg over the railing and moved forward.

He expected to be grabbed, intercepted.
But no one reached out for him, and instead he found himself the center of
attention, bathed in a flood of incandescent light, towering over a skinny
child with a Faerie's ears pricking through her brown-blonde braids. "You
wanted to see [me," he said as a young man came up to them.

"Come on," Jewels answered,
stepping away from the blood and the bleeding boy. "We've got a booth.
This is Ian. Ian, Detective Smith."

She'd meant to rattle him. Make him run a
gauntlet, force him onto her turf. He followed her, coat swinging around him;
they resembled a mantling raven pursuing some twig-and-bent-grass creature. Ian
brought up the rear.

The Bertelli boy was holding down a table
inside the maze, past two clinching couples and an argument, and a shortish
girl with violet hair was sprawled on one of the wooden benches, her back in the
angle of the corner, a drink cupped in her hands. She rocked her head in time
to the music, eyes closed, and Don thought Jewels looked sour-faced over
Geoff's attention to her.

It was quieter here; the walls baffled
sound. The booth had two sides flanked by benches built into the wall and the
other two buttressed by chairs. Once Jewels placed herself in a chair, she
managed introductions without shouting while the men sorted themselves into
seats.

Are you sure you want to talk in front of
all these people?" Don asked, when he'd waited for her to regain her drink
and click nearly melted ice against her teeth.

Unless you have a warrant," she said.
"These are friends."

But Don thought the guilty sideways glance
that she shot Lily said something else. Not a threat: she was on edge, but not
scared of them. Don didn't know what to call it yet. He waited, folding his
hands, resisting the urge to fiddle his ring. She was at ease here, at home.
Not at all the trapped fey thing she'd been in the interview room.

Jewels set her drink aside. "You
wanted to talk to me, Detective Smith," she said.

He smiled and awarded her the point.
"Interesting place you've got here," he said, with a vague gesture of
his left hand. Somebody tromped overhead, dancing or running through one of the
twisting corridors on the second level. "What you were doing out there —
"

"This is where I work," she
said, tracing a finger through the lukewarm condensation that had left rings
puddled on the tabletop. "One of the places. This is my job."

"Cutting people?"

"Decorating them." She shrugged.
"I wouldn't expect you to understand. I'm trained — " "You
seemed very confident."

"She's good," Geoff said,
leaning forward on his elbows to intersect their conversation.
"Well-known. Respected. You don't get the kind of buzz Jewels gets unless
you do good work."

Don held up his hand. "I wasn't
questioning that. Is it an apprenticeship sort of deal?"

"Mostly," she said. "And
most people are too squeamish to do a good job. So yeah, I found a guy who did
body modification, and said I wanted to learn." She looked down and
counted on her fingers. "Six years now."

"She studied with Sergei," Geoff
said—if that was the name, exactly, under the music. Don could tell he was
supposed to recognize it. More, the purple-haired girl — Lily—did. Her head
tilted with reluctant respect.

Jewels dismissed it with a blush and
downcast glance, but she was pleased. "Ask me what you wanted to ask
me."

"It makes me a little nervous,"
Don said, leaning back with folded arms that got his itchy fingers a little closer
to the butt of his gun, to come all this way to talk to you about your friend's
murder and whether the agency behind it was Fae or mortal, and find you hanging
out with a changeling."

Ian smiled pleasantly. "I've just met
the lady," he said. The first words out of his mouth, and Donall was
surprised by the light sweetness of his voice and the gentle Scottish burr.
"She came to my mother's court for assistance in solving the murder. And I
am that. Assistance, I mean.

"Your mother's — " Don had never
experienced the sensation of being dumbstruck before. His mouth opened and
closed, until he swallowed and tried again. "You're
that
Ian. Ian
MacNeill."

A lingering constriction in Don's chest
released pain he hadn't even realized he carried. There
was
an explanation
for Ernie's clandestine conversation with the bard.
"That'd
what
your mother's courtier was doing in New York."

Ian looked uncomfortable. "I beg your
pardon?"

"Queen Elaine's bard," Don said,
aware that he was volunteering too much and gambling anyway. "I saw him in
New York City. Meeting with a homicide cop who's working the murder of Althea
Benning . . . and another Fae, a woman."

"What did she look like, the
woman?" Ian's hands had gone still on the table, and his voice was very calm.

"Black hair, very pale skin. Maybe
five-ten, not over one thirty-five. She was wearing yellow, and barrettes with
sunflowers."

Ian's lips thinned. "I don't suppose
you can draw?"

"Not good enough for that." Don
licked his lips, and cast a sideways glance down at his ring. What assurances
did
he have that Jane was on the right side? In retrospect, his agreement to
help her seemed hurried, unconsidered . . . unwise. He was not usually so quick
to choose sides. “Can
you
draw?"

"As a matter of fact," Ian said.
"Pass me a pen."

Lily provided one, a violet rollerball, and
a folded sheet of paper with a shopping list written on one side. Ian hunched
forward over the table with his long-nailed fingers twisted through his hair,
supporting his head as his other hand scratched with the pen.

Don tried not to stare, but it didn't take
more than a few lines to convince him. "Different hair," he said.
"Different clothes. But that was her."

Ian capped the rollerball and handed it
back to Lily. Jewels leaned over his shoulder, one hand resting on his arm,
oblivious to his raised eyebrow and sideways glance. "I've seen her
too."

"Juliet?"

She leaned away from Ian. "In New
York. On Halloween."

Thank you," Ian said, and crumpled
the paper into his pocket.

Don, in the process of reaching for it,
frowned. "I take it from your reaction that your mother didn't send
anyone?"

"Not Cairbre," Ian answered.
"Curious ..." He paused, looked up, and jumped to his feet sharply enough
to rattle the table. Jewels squeaked and grabbed her drink. "Aunt
Nuala!"

Don hadn't seen her arrive. He glanced up,
and there she stood, a pale woman in—perhaps —her vigorous sixties, her gray
hair tangled in wiry waves around her shoulders, wearing a white button-down shirt
and indigo jeans, as out of place as a dove in a rookery. "Your father
sends his greetings, Prince Ian," she said, with a nod.

Ian's hand went to his mouth, covering his
expression. "Only his greetings?"

"And his love," she said more
gently. "And he inquires if you still wish to claim your throne, when you have
had time to think on it. Also, his master wishes me to extend an invitation to
you and your family, to attend a masque in Hell tomorrow, as a farewell to
Master Marlowe." She seemed to notice Don's startle when she said
Hell,
and smiled at him with the corner of her lip as she extended a sealed,
folded paper to Ian, who accepted without comment.

The woman glanced around the table, fixing
each one in turn on her gaze. "And you, Mary Wakeman, who calls herself
Lily . . ." she said, when she paused.

Lily pressed into the corner, pulling her
drink against her chest. "Who told you my name?"

The gray-haired woman smiled. "That
isn't the matter now. You and I need to talk, my dear, about your choice of
paramours. Please, come with me."

Whatever it was — Lily's whole name, so
blithely delivered, or the old woman's grace and poise, or the way her voice
(harsh, not melodious, but resonant and deep) cut the noise in the club as if
it were murmured direct in Lily's ear —Lily got out past Geoff, who slid from
the booth to facilitate her passage, and looked from Jewels to Ian and back
again.