Chapter Thirteen
H e always like that?” Alphonse asked as we wound our way through dazzling corridor after dazzling corridor.
The fey, especially these fey, loved ostentation, and some of the murals must have taken decades to do. They were huge and 3-D in cases, almost jumping off the wall. I had to move towards the center of the hall to avoid an abalone shell-covered fish leaping from the “water,” and a little further on, I had to do it again, this time for the fisherman who held the rod at the end of the line.
I’d never seen anything like it: jade sea turtles watched me from hidden caves, small mother-of-pearl octopi changed hues depending on what direction they were viewed from, and crystal sea serpents slid by overhead, where some light source I couldn’t see lit them from the other side like stained glass. It also shed varicolored light on us as we passed by as if we were under the sea. It was beautiful.
It was also intimidating, and I thought that last was on purpose. Nimue’s court was rich and powerful enough to afford world-class decor even in minor corridors, and wanted you to know it. But it wasn’t working as intended, as I was too busy wondering what was wrong with Pritkin.
“No. He’s been acting weird since I got here,” I told Alphonse.
“Well, I hope he snaps out of it by tomorrow and gets his game face on. You two die, and Tony might take off.”
I shot him a glance. “Thanks.”
“Just keeping it real.”
And yeah, I was starting to remember that about Alphonse. He had been the exception at a court ruled by deception and backstabbing. Not that he wouldn’t shiv you, but it would be face-to-face.
I guessed that was something.
“Pritkin always insisted that I learn how to fight,” I said, aggrieved. “Because he knew I’d have to. When everyone else was trying to bury me under a pile of bodyguards or hide me in the closet, he was throwing me off of cliffs.”
“And you . . . liked that?”
“No! But if the bad guys were going to do it to me sooner or later, better that he did it first, and I figured out how to deal with it. Pritkin saw that when nobody else did. And if he hadn’t made me see the importance of learning to defend myself instead of depending on others, I wouldn’t be here now.
“But when I finally get at least somewhat competent, he changes his mind! It doesn’t make sense.”
“Sure it does,” Alphonse said.
“No, it doesn’t!”
“It doesn’t make sense to the head; the heart has its own logic.”
I blinked at him. “I guess you are a poet.”
He shrugged. “Poetic or not, it’s true. You know, when I first met Sal, what I liked about her was how feisty she was. She grew up in a saloon—her ma was one of the “ladies” there if you know what I mean—and she had to learn to fight early. Cut a guy’s ear off when she was eight ‘cause he liked ‘em young and didn’t take no for an answer. She never backed down from anything.”
I remembered the hard-edged, one-eyed blonde who had been Alphonse’s other half and thought that that sounded about right. Sal had grown up in the Old West with a dagger in her garter belt and a gun in her purse. And nothing had changed over time.
When I knew her, her stiletto heels had transformed into the real thing because vampire or no, Sal never went out unarmed. She saw the world for what it was, always expected a fight, and made sure she had the means to win it. Alphonse was right; she hadn’t been scared of anyone—except her master.
“After we started dating, nothing changed,” Alphonse added. “I always made sure Sal was on my crew for any little errand the boss had ‘cause I didn’t have to watch her. She didn’t screw up instructions, and she didn’t run. We were the dream team.
“Until this one mission, when a first-level master—that Barrio guy from Jersey; you remember him?”
I nodded, even though I did not remember him. And if he was first-level, I should have because they weren’t exactly thick on the ground. So, he was probably a screw-up or into some highly illegal stuff—and illegal by our Senate’s definition, not that of the local police—or else he’d have been at court instead of trading blows with lowlifes like Tony.
“Anyway, the boss had gotten into a . . . difference of opinion . . . with one of Barrio’s boys,” Alphonse remembered, “and I was sent to mediate.”
“With or without his head on a pike?”
Alphonse shrugged. “Depended on how reasonable he was willing to be. Which was not very reasonable, as it turned out, since his master was visiting him.”
“I thought you said masters didn’t back up their pawns,” I reminded him.
“They don’t unless said pawn ain’t one, and Barrio’s boy, a guy by the name of Fletcher, was working directly for the boss. He was pretending to be out on his own, so if he screwed up, the boss had plausible deniability. But he was under orders the whole time.”
“To do what?”
“Barrio had him giving fey wine to normies, getting ’em sloshed, and seeing if any latent magical abilities showed up. If any did, he held ‘em for Barrio, who sold ‘em on to some dark mages for extraction. It was a nice gig, too—the Circle gets all pissy when magic workers go missing, but if it don’t know they were magic workers?”
I scowled. That sort of thing wasn’t unknown and was one of the reasons why the many concoctions known on Earth as “fey wine” were banned. They brought out all kinds of latent abilities in the human population that would have never surfaced otherwise.
Most people with a witch as their six-times great-grandmother didn’t know it and acted like the regular old, garden-variety humans they believed themselves to be. But they weren’t regular humans, and nobody knew how many there were. Many of the old records had been lost through the years in wars and fires and what-have-you, not to mention mages fathering kids in brothels or through one-night stands and not knowing it.
As a result, magic blood was more common in the human population than the Circle liked to admit, mainly because they couldn’t keep track of it all. That was usually fine, as it tended to be recessive anyway. Right up until fey wine brought it out, that was, just in time for the newly minted witch or wizard to get grabbed up and sold to some dark mages, who sucked the power, and the life, right out of them.
That was even more the case these days since the Black Circle was on the other side of the war and needed all the weapons they could get. And all the magic it took to make them. And humans went missing all the time. . .
“Nasty business,” I said because Alphonse already knew all that.
“It was that night,” he agreed. “We showed up about a different matter, only to find a hundred or so freaked out people in cages, a couple dozen of Fletcher’s guys armed to the teeth, and Barrio the Bastard himself. He was there to take a new shipment and was not pleased about being interrupted.
“We were boned.”
“How did you get out of it?” I asked because obviously he had. Yet I didn’t see how.
A first-level master didn’t need Fletcher’s people to back him up, not when facing a group ranked at fourth or fifth level, with maybe a few strong sixes thrown in. And working with the Black Circle would likely end with Barrio’s head in a bag if the Senate ever found out about it. So, he had every reason to ensure that Tony’s men didn’t live long enough to tell anybody what they’d seen.
“It wasn’t fun,” Alphonse said dryly. “I lost five guys that night, and I only had six to begin with. Me and Sal were the two survivors, and she was disemboweled. I dragged her out of there, holding her guts in my hands while she was double-fisting a couple of semi-automatics and firing incendiary rounds from both barrels. Luckily, one of ‘em caught Barrio himself, and he went up like a Roman candle.
“Must have had a little too much of that “wine” he was giving the normies, and when one of her bullets ripped his gut open, it spilled like gasoline.”
I winced, but Alphonse smiled at the memory.
“His boys stopped to save the boss,” he added, “and I threw Sal on my back and ran like hell. And even after we got back to the farmhouse, when they told me she’d be okay, when I knew a vamp don’t die from shit like that, it didn’t matter. It changed things. You know what I’m saying?”
He threw me a glance, but it didn’t help.
Because no, I didn’t know.
He sighed. “Anyway, I anonymously reported Barrio, even knowing what might happen if he found out it was us. Or me, ‘cause Tony didn’t want to know. He was too scared to risk taking on a first-level master, even at the loss of five guys, and was holed up in the basement to wait it out.”
“What happened?” I asked, pretty sure that I already knew.
I had a feeling there was a reason that Barrio’s name didn’t ring a bell.
“Barrio had an accident a week later,” Alphonse confirmed. “Nobody knew exactly what happened, but everybody knew it was the Senate ‘cause they took his head. It allowed Tony to move in on Fletcher, making him one of his satellite houses. The fat man shut down the human trade soon after as it was too risky, and that was that.
“Only it wasn’t. Cause the next time I had a little errand, I left Sal behind. She was healed by then and well and truly pissed about me ditching her, getting all up in my face when I got back. But it wasn’t like she thought; I didn’t blame her for anything. She was the reason we got away that night, and the roasting she gave that bastard allowed the Senate time to finish him off before he came after us.”
“Then what was the problem?”
“What was the problem?” Alphonse, who had been going at a good clip, his legs being considerably longer than mine, stopped to stare at me. “What was the problem ? I’d held her guts in my hands was the damned problem! Felt her bleeding out all over me! Saw the agony and fear on her face and thought I’d lost her. Like Pritkin saw your dead body tonight, floating on the waves in a pool of blood.”
“Ah.”
“Yeah, ah. And from what I hear, that ain’t the only close call you’ve had recently. So, whether you get it or not, cut the guy some slack, alright? He’s not okay right now.”
Maybe not. But Alphonse had no idea of the kind of crap Pritkin and I had seen. This wasn’t our first time at the rodeo.
So, what was different now?
Maybe the answer was nothing. Maybe Pritkin was having a perfectly normal reaction to recent events, and I was the weirdo. It wouldn’t surprise me.
Alphonse took off down the corridor again, and I hurried to catch up. But not to continue the conversation, as I was too busy with my thoughts. None of which I liked.
Gertie’s training had taken place back in time and over months, too many to count as it had involved whizzing around in between the centuries half the time, when she decided that things were too tame in old London to challenge Agnes and me properly. I didn’t know how long it had been as a result, as the mind got confused after a while. But the body didn’t, and I’d needed three haircuts while there, all of which had been overdue.
And every day, she’d put me through the wringer, knowing that if she didn’t, someone else would. And that she wouldn’t be there to pull my butt out of the fire when I failed. It had been a harsh apprenticeship, and whenever I returned to my court, only a day or so after leaving from their point of view, it felt strange and left me off balance.
Like coming back to a place that I vaguely remembered, when another court and another time had started to feel like home.
Until the next attack came, as it always did, and then it felt okay. I felt okay because I had a new normal now, one of hypervigilance and constant fighting for my life, and . . . yeah. Maybe it was me who had changed.
Like tonight, when I was tired and hungry and had bruised my elbow somewhere in all that, to the point that it ached like a struck tuning fork. But other than that, I was fine. And I shouldn’t be. I should be . . . I didn’t know. But not this battle-hardened warrior thing I seemed to have going on. Because I wasn’t invulnerable, and I knew it.
Dying tends to bring that home real quick.
And I still made mistakes, although fewer than before, after having Agnes’ scornful laughter ringing in my ears. I’d made several tonight. I’d probably make more because that was what humans did, and mother’s blood notwithstanding, I had always been very human.
But the fey made mistakes, too. And, for that matter, so did war mages. Yet nobody said they couldn’t fight!
I remembered a story Pritkin had told me about a watering hole in Stratford where the Corpsmen went after particularly grim missions. It had a wall in a back room covered in the pins they received when promoted, which identified them as the Circle’s elite and which they never took off when on duty, any more than a police officer would go without their badge. And when one of them fell, their brothers-in-arms brought his pin back to that particular pub and put it on the wall, which had become an unofficial memorial for the fallen.
There were a lot more pins since the war began, some of which Pritkin had placed on that wall himself. Including the one belonging to Mac, his longtime partner, who had died protecting me. Pritkin had honored his sacrifice; he hadn’t tried to lock him up to keep him safe as he had me.
Because he didn’t know me anymore, I suddenly realized. He had been surprised to hear about one minor training exercise, something Gertie had thrown out on a weekend afternoon because we’d been getting on her nerves. It was nothing to some of the ones she’d planned, several of which I hadn’t been sure I’d come back from.
But he hadn’t seen those, had he? The months of hard training, the battles against ridiculous odds, the decisions I’d had to make alone. He hadn’t been there.
Maybe that was why he’d never questioned Agnes, Gertie’s heir and my predecessor. Because he’d met her when she was a majestic older woman with power to burn and a presence that could knock a man down at ten paces. He hadn’t seen her shlepping back to court clutching a pissed-off seagull with fish guts in her hair and murder on her mind.
But that had been part of her story, too. Part of the price we paid for the power we wielded. Part of the price I had been paying all these months to earn the right to the position I held.
I wasn’t a frightened, confused girl anymore, with more chutzpah than sense, who had somehow failed her way upward. I didn’t need another war mage to die protecting me. It was my job to die, if need be, to protect everyone else.
And keeping me back, like a queen on a chessboard that some newbie was too afraid to risk, was the best way I knew to lose. This was the war of all wars, and there was no sitting on the sidelines, no matter how much Pritkin might prefer it. I needed to be here, whether either of us liked it or not, and if I fell. . .
Well, I had an heir back at court, a brilliant Pythia-in-waiting who was furious with me for leaving her behind. Not so much because she feared for me but because she wanted to fight alongside me. She was as fierce as her mother, and yes, I recognized the irony in the fact that Agnes’ daughter would succeed me.
But it was comforting, too. She’d already had to act for me once and handled it with all the ability and grace I would have expected from someone of her bloodline. And if the worst happened, she would mourn me when the power came to her again, this time permanently, and then she’d get up and do the damned job.
Just as I had. And just as I would, whether or not anybody ever saw me as Pythia. Including my supposed partner!
“You okay?” Alphonse said, looking at me strangely.
“Yeah.” I cleared my throat. “Is what happened with Sal why you didn’t break Pritkin’s jaw?”
“Partly. And partly because he got a shield up before my fist hit him.” He shook his right hand and scowled. “I hate breaking the little bones. If they don’t heal back right, you gotta break ‘em again and start over.”
He banged his hand on the wall, and I tried not to wince at the crunching sounds.
“But I probably wouldn’t have anyway, ‘cause he’s got enough problems,” he added, sliding those dark eyes over at me.
And yeah, I got it. I was the problem, at least in Alphonse’s eyes. I didn’t know what to do about it because feeding into Pritkin’s freak-out wasn’t likely to help.
“How did you get past it?” I asked him.
“Get past what?”
“Worrying about Sal?”
“She died,” he said grimly and pushed open a door.