Whiskey and Water (62 page)

Matthew, facing Jane, rubbed his hands
together. The right one prickled pins and needles; the left felt raw across the
knuckles, where the cold nibbled his skin.

"You've lost your shield," Jane
said. She stepped left, a fencer's sweep of foot and change of balance. Matthew
echoed the gesture, orbiting their common center.

Matthew adjusted his glasses. They misted
in the chill and damp. "If that's what you want to call it." He
stepped this time, and she echoed. His boots crunched strange objects, scuffed
aside a rotting square of drywall. "Does it worry you not to have control
over me?"

One more step brought Don into his
peripheral vision. Don leaned forward, waiting, straining like a greyhound in
the gate.

"When did it ever?" Jane
answered. But there was a flash, an edge of bitterness. He'd gotten a nail under
her skin.

She
had
controlled him. Down to the
breath he drew. He'd thanked her for it, and it hadn't been enough for her.
Fair enough. He had, after all, defied her in the end.

Her tests glided over his boundaries like
a seeking hand. Charisma like a furnace, backed by Magecraft, urging him to
lower his barriers, accept her again. It would be easy. She'd help, advise, protect
—

Now his back was to the stern. Treacherous.
If he didn't turn and look he could slip off the deck, flail into the Arthur
Kill and strike deep through the falling tide. He'd break both legs when he
hit, and the mud of the tidal flats would bind him until he
drowned—immediately, or with the strait's return.

He laughed. Distract with the expected
suggestion, then feint for a presumed fear. She could do better, even if that
was an attack he couldn't match. Influence, persuasion, those were within his
powers, if he didn't intend to
hurt
her. When he even thought of a
straight assault, though, he felt his magic gutter. "You should have stuck
with Felix."

"You know, I think you're
correct?" She looked at Matthew when she said it, though. "He wants
the right things."

They had come three-quarters of the way
around the circle now. Matthew paused, scuffling his boots against the deck.
The sub chaser yearned after him, all 173 feet of her shivering as the sea
drained from her hull. The tide was falling faster now, and she told Matthew
about it, giving him the knowledge through the rubber of his soles, the bones
of his ears. She had slept long and deeply, while the world grew strange around
her and her bones weakened from too much rest. He had awakened her with a
kiss.

He petted her deck with the sole of his boot.

Jane struck: a straight-out blow he
thought was a feint, a wedge of fury with all her weight behind it. Unsubtle,
and he batted it aside without effort, felt it splash and scatter around the
shield that was Fortitude. Now, when she was extended, would have been the time
to hit her.

If he could. He reached for her, but
couldn't make it a blow. He twisted it, though, and caught her eye, and reached
in with a tickle of trust and old friendship. Her expression softened as he
said, "That wasn't your best effort." "Lucky for me."

"Improves your chances." Said
with a lighthearted shrug, as if they sparred in practice.

He felt her agreement, pleasant surprise
at his tractability. Yes, this was how it should be. One of them should
suggest, the other respond. It wasn't about Felix. It wasn't about the war. It
was about Jane and Matthew, who had been friends, who could be friends again if
Jane would just agree to see things his way, to compromise.

She laughed, and clapped her hands. And
just as he was drawing a relieved breath, the submarine chaser groaned apology.
Prompted by the Magery that Jane had worked while Matthew was preoccupied with
his own seduction, the ship's brittle deck unraveled under Matthew's feet, and
he broke through.

Carel Bierce, Merlin the Magician, walked
into the palace of the Cat Anna sheltered under devil's wings, the Winter Queen
on her right hand, the Dragon Prince on her left, a Prince of the Daoine Sidhe
at her back. They came under an archway that stood open, inviting all within.
The tunnel beyond was portcullised and roofed in murder-holes, oil stains alien
against the white translucent stone. Carel spared them not a glance as she
walked under, her power around her like a dragon's fire, and paused at the courtyard
gate.

She and her companions found an angel
waiting.

Michael sat alone in a pearl-cobbled
courtyard that was walled only on three sides, polishing her sword upon a
stone. The whetstone was a rough gray thing, a haggled bit of pumice, and it
scattered bits across her jeans and the ankle of the boot she had propped on
her knee, the flat of the blade braced against the arch. To her left rose the
sweep of a grand stone stair. To her back, the walls of the palace flared wide,
cast open like arms embracing the sea. They were built right out into the
water, so the tidemarks stained white stone, and they marched in serried
descent some hundreds of feet out to sea. Torches burned in profusion along the
battlements, lighting the sea and the waves below, and under the dark waves
more lights shimmered, green and amber and blue, a hint of windows open on the
deep.

Michael looked up when the Merlin strode
through the castle gate, but crushed her whetstone in her left hand when
Lucifer rode into sight. She stood and bowed, a frown narrowing her face. She
kept her focus on Ian, though, as he swung a leg over the bay and slid down her
side, and not on the Devil at all.

Lucifer dismounted without fanfare, half a
beat before Keith, and took both Ian's and the Dragon Prince's reins. He led
the horses to the highest corner of the courtyard and busied himself looping
their reins through the iron rings of a hitching post that hadn't been there
before.

Iron rings in a Fae Queen's castle;
Lucifer had not tempered his arrogance.

"If I'd known you were coming,"
Michael called, sheathing the sword across her back, "I would have brought
the family."

The sounds of the sea echoed within the
sheltering walls, and waves mellowed by the palace walls lapped a crystal-pale,
sandy beach that sloped up to the cobbled court. The echoes drowned sounds beyond
the whimper of the surf, but Keith and Ian shared a glance over something they
heard that no one else seemed to, and Ian nodded slightly. Faintly, over the
breakers, he'd heard a stallion's cry of rage.

Lucifer stared past Michael at the
glow-speckled sea.

:What need I more, when my favorite
brother attends?: He turned, and gave Michael the smile that Michael would not
answer. :I come as a guest. Here are your challengers. Where is our hostess?:

As if she had been waiting for her cue,
the double doors at the top of the stair opened wide, and Àine, clad all in
green with her dark hair swept up on her head, said, "Here."

As one, they turned: Michael and Keith and
the Morningstar, Ian and the Queen and Carel. Carel most of all drew the eye,
stern and impassive, broad at the shoulders, and her head proud on her elegant
neck. She didn't fold
her
arms; her hands hung naturally at her sides,
and her braids spread over her shoulders like the veil on an empress' crown.
But she had weight, and the torch's shine bent around her. Every shadow
stretched away, flickering and black, as if she glowed with an ember's heat,
and the hands that hung by her sides were veiled in a gauze of sparks so dark
they were almost violet.

"You have something of mine,"
she said, in a voice that belonged less to the woman, and more to the
half-seen, batwinged vastness hanging over her.

And Àine smiled. "So I do. And I'm
willing to bargain for its return."

She descended, shimmering with teal and
lime and emerald sequins, the robe beneath rich greeny-gold as olive oil. The
Nuckelavee came behind her, its rotten head rolling on its shoulders as it
headed a procession of lesser monsters, redcaps and Leannan Sidhe and the
flesh-craving courtiers of the Bone Court. Carel clenched her hands.

"After the entertainment," Àine
said.

The brush of the Queen's fingers on her
elbow brought Carel back. Carel turned, so slightly, and looked in Elaine's
changeable eyes.
Cold,
they told her, and Carel took a breath and gentled
the Dragon within. Cold as Fae. There wasn't a thing she could do for Gypsy.
And Autumn was still alive.

"By all means," Carel said, as
Keith and Ian silently came up beside her and the Queen. "Let me be entertained."

Carel didn't see it, but the Queen did:
the tilt of the Morningstar's head, the quick purse of lips, an eyebrow arched.
:By all means,: he echoed, :let us
all
be entertained.:

Àine paused, and gave him a curtsey with a
mocking twist of her heel and no more than the flick of her wrists raising her
hem. He answered with a bow that swept one hand to his heart, one wingtip
across the nacreous cobbles and over the sand to point at the rim of the sea, a
hard silhouette against the radiance that heralded a not-yet-rising moon.
"We all dance, when devils call the tune," she said, showing him the
fangs indenting her berry-ripe lip.

The folds of her cotehardie slipped from
her fingers and puddled by her feet. Her hands rose and summoned into being two
galleries of boxes and two stands of bleachers along either wall of the palace,
bright with banners. On the right side, the cerulean and silver of Heaven. On
the left side, the
gules simple
of Hell, and under it, Keith MacNeill's
red wolf on snow, reversed with the crimson dragon. Over them all flew the white
banners of the Bone Court, the Unseelie Fae.

"No," the Queen said, with a
quick glance at Ian. His head down, his hands folded, his flank to Carel, he
seemed all but oblivious. "Pull those down. If my son fights, my son
fights under the Daoine banner."

"I'm sorry," Carel said. She
reached out and brushed the Queen's elbow as the Queen had hers, but she looked
past the Queen, to the Dragon Prince. As if Keith felt it, he turned, and
frowned at her across the Queen.

"Sorry?"

Carel smiled the Dragon's toothy smile,
tears stinging her sinuses as the shadow embraced her. She let go of the
Queen's arm, allowed her hand to be slid into her sleeve, found warm curved
wood and a knob of bronze and silver. "Your son doesn't fight," she
said, and plunged the blade into Ian's back, below the ribs, beside the spine.

Whiskey, You're the Devil

M
atthew fell. He reached reflexively and caught at the
edges of the gap. The left hand gripped; the right hand struck flaking steel
and bounced away. Rust cut his palm, purchase crumbling, metal like stretched
cloth under his fingers. He caught himself, one-handed, and swung, the red coat
bellying about him.

The ship herself tore under his hand and
he went down into darkness, magically unsnagged by ragged metal. Maybe the
coat protected him from cutting edges; he vanished like a magician through a
trapdoor, out of the city-lit night and onto the deck below, where he struck
unevenly and rolled.

The pop when his right knee buckled was
loud enough to echo in the confined space into which he'd fallen. Pain
followed, twist and shred, new injuries reawakening old.

He rolled onto his back, panting, waiting
for a shadow to cross the peach-colored sky behind the irregular hole in the
decking. Footsteps echoed more than the lapping water; he couldn't tell where
they were coming from. The decking was oxidized slime, soaking through to his
skin. He rolled over and tried to stand without allowing time to think.

The back
could
be made to support
him; the knee gave way with an appalling short circuit of pain. He'd torn the
anterior cruciate ligament. He wouldn't walk on it tonight.

It was too dark to hop. He'd have to
crawl. Not that he had any idea where he was crawling to, or if the ship's
ladders were still in place. He might find a hatch and discover that the only
ascent was via more empty sockets and unscrewed fasteners.

His fall had damaged the sub chaser's
delicate equilibrium. The hulk groaned under him, settling, half-liquid mud and
seawater gurgling in her rocking hull. She stank like a tide pool, salt and
trapped rot, the rusted metal gritting into his palms and sliming the knees of
his dragon-embroidered jeans. He had to crawl with his right leg pointed out
behind him, the unsound decking scarring the backs of fingers he couldn't
feel. He might wear down to the bone. He'd never know.

The hatch in the middle of the foredeck
was open. The hatch cover had been torn off, and it or possibly some other
piece of debris lay across the opening kitty-corner, but anyway, Matthew could
see an irregular patch of light. He slowed his breathing—he could hear it echo
— and listened to the ship, to the night.
Where?
he asked her, and felt
her wriggle at the attention, like a puppy daring to hope it might be forgiven
so soon. He couldn't do Jane's trick with the floorboards—not
wouldn't:
it
was as impossible a task as if he tried to reach out with his third hand and
pick up an apple. The potential for violence simply was not there — but the
cold iron rings jingled against his thigh with every painful, stiff-legged inch
he dragged himself, and that brought an idea of what he might do instead.