Chapter Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Eight
They dropped him in town, at his own request, next to Consort Park, a good few streets south and east of the Doorbell.
He didn’t want Bainbridge knowing where he stayed, and he certainly didn’t want to go back and risk another encounter with Belle D’Or this early in the day.
His prick was still sore where she’d yanked it about in her cocaine abandon, he was all out of small talk, and he couldn’t face drinking again just yet, at least not at flapper levels of intensity.
What he needed was time to think.
He waited until the Crossley had motored urbanely out of sight, then made his way across the street to the privet hedging and black iron railings that fringed the park.
Overhead, chestnuts in autumn leaf made yellow counterpoint to the greenery.
He slipped through the corner gate, into the island of manicured quiet beyond.
Apart from a couple of wifeys pushing prams and a groundsman meticulously raking up the scatter of early autumn leaves, he had the place to himself.
One of the black iron benches along the path beckoned; he sat on it and tried to relax.
He had to keep reminding himself that his enemies thought he was dead, that no one was looking for him, that this big, brawling city had swallowed him up the way Belle D’Or would put away one of her gin martinis.
Enjoy it while it lasts, pal.
We have a breathing space, Bainbridge told him on the way out to the car.
Hardy is unaware that you survived, and that can only work in our favor.
It must stay that way. In the meantime, plans must be laid if you expect to retrieve the child and her mother.
I will do what I can. He handed Duncan an embossed card.
You may contact me at this number if you wish, but you must give me time.
A few days at least. I only arrived in Erlsley this morning, and there is much to do.
You came all this way to find me?
The archmage looked at him strangely. This is about much more than you, Mr…. Silver.
And there it was. The urbane hint at disbelief, the mannered sense of some gentleman’s game being played.
Ambiguity, subterfuge, and masks. Duncan recalled vaguely that some scandal had attached to Bainbridge’s time in America—rumors that he’d backed the German effort to keep the Americans out of the war, moved in isolationist, even explicitly pro-German, circles.
Others said he’d been working for British Military Intelligence as an agent provocateur the whole time.
And now, here he was in Erlsley, building alliances for some future crisis of power that Duncan wasn’t convinced he wanted any part in.
Mebhuranon up from the south, Svalenkari down from the north. Mimi Rush at the heart of it all. You are fucking involved, pal, like it or not.
In which case, the more allies in the fight he had the better, whatever their modus operandi might be. However that might make him feel.
In the war, intelligence operatives had been thin on the ground where Duncan fought.
He’d met only one or two, and those passing rapidly through, there and gone too fast to form much of an impression.
Which, he supposed, would go well with the job description.
But once, he’d had to go out into no-man’s-land by night and retrieve a spy—a pale, bony man called Ritter, apparently escaping with extensive battle plans and maps of German intentions for the Somme.
The recovery went off smoothly, but later, waiting in a trench at the reserve line for motor transport out, sharing a bottle of rough brandy cadged from the local village inn, Ritter smoked in intense silence for a while, fixed Duncan finally with a bitter blue stare, and said in clipped Teutonic tones: I envy you, Lieutenant.
That right? Duncan poured them both more brandy. Strange. You’re the one getting a motor ride out of here.
Ritter plumed smoke, shook his head. You fight.
That is what I envy. You fight clean, against men who will kill you if you don’t kill them first. There is honor in that.
I creep around, deceiving men who believe I’m their brother-in-arms, stealing their trust, so I can steal the means to butcher them when their back is turned.
And then I run for cover and leave men like you to carry out the slaughter.
What kind of man does that make me?
We’ve all done things we’re not proud of, Duncan told him. I wouldn’t worry about it.
But he had to wonder how he’d feel if he knew some British equivalent of Ritter was creeping around in his trench, setting Duncan’s men up for slaughter and defeat.
And he thought that, faced with a man like that, he’d probably kill him with his bare hands.
—
Evening crept in, the park darkened around him, some final molten fragments of sun dripping through the branches of trees at the western end.
Over his head, the chestnuts shifted in the breeze in a way that started to seem like stealthy intent.
He heard a couple of burrs thud to the lawn behind him.
A wren popped up on the back of the bench opposite, fired streams of warbling into the gloom.
A spider the size of the one he’d seen in the Forest came scuttling across the grass from the trees opposite, sidled up to him hesitantly, like a family dog looking to be petted, then pulled in its legs and cuddled itself up under the bench by his feet.
Stordalen’s blood, ticking in his wrists and throat.
“All hail, Duncan.”
Whispered caress to the back of his neck; it brushed every hair on his nape upright in the instant.
He jerked around, found Mebhuranon crouched on the lawn behind him, five yards or less from the bench.
Her eyes showed the violet center, but there were fangs in her smile.
Despite the black iron latticework he was leaned against, she seemed poised to pounce on him.
Beneath the partial shrouding of her cloak, she looked made of moonlight, or ivory daubed with some chemical to make it fluoresce.
“You followed me?” Wishing his voice would stay firm.
She sniffed. “You aren’t very hard to find.”
He supposed she could leap the back of the bench like a hurdle, claw him from his seat, tumble them both to the ground on the other side, take only superficial burns from the iron.
Seasoned Huldu knew the combat tricks needed to stay untouched, had practiced and honed their skills for centuries against men with steel in all its forms. With only his hands and the sgian dubh for weapons, Duncan didn’t rate his chances.
“If I intended you harm, Duncan, the harm would already have been done.”
He grimaced. “I’m that easy to read?”
“Your whole species is that easy to read. And I have been doing it a long time. But you should not fear me, Duncan. There is no need for that.”
Abruptly, she uncoiled, switched stance, lay back on her elbows with her legs stretched out before her on the grass, a flapper on a picnic.
Her cloak wrapped her with the change of posture, rode up her thighs.
She put her head coquettishly on one side, let her mass of silver and raven hair cascade off her shoulder.
It would have been a lot more appealing, he thought, if the contortions she’d just gone through hadn’t been so sinuously unhuman, if they hadn’t reminded him so much of the vatnalfr he’d trapped with Garner at the mere’s edge in Macclesfield forest, the way it thrashed to get back into the water when he set it loose.
“I don’t fear you,” he lied evenly. “I just want you out of my way.”
“Am I in your way?”
She parted her thighs slightly, so he glimpsed the dark-haired cleft of her sex in the scant shadow of the cloak.
He felt arousal slam through him like a train.
His prick strained in his underwear; the muscles in the pit of his stomach clenched.
Even with Niamh, it took him a little while to get as ready as this, but he knew as certainly as he’d ever known anything in his life that the Fae queen need only curl her fingers loosely around him once and he’d come like a shaken magnum of champagne as the cork popped out.
Or not, if she chose otherwise.
He breathed with it, constructed a smile. “I’m proof against this, Meb. I have witchery, spells and wards, runes laid down.”
“Yes. I feel your witch. She’s…not much of a barrier to me.”
He swallowed hard. “What do you want? You say you could have harmed me, if you wanted, but you haven’t. You say you could have…this, if you wanted it, but you’re not taking it. What do you want?”
“Do I have to want something?” Her emphasis mocked his.
Her violet mock pupils vibrated. Another blink-of-eye contortion and abruptly she sat cross-legged on the grass in the gloom.
The arousal puddled out of him as fast, left him with a small, throbbing ache in belly and groin.
She smiled, showed him her fangs again. “We are not like you, Duncan. You should know that by now. We are willful things—capricious, itching, drawn on whim, easily bored. Perhaps I just wanted to play.”
“You came a long way from the Forest for a whim.”
Mebhuranon looked around her, disdainful.
“Your cities hold no terrors for me. If you knew the times I have gone amid the heave of your kind in Portsmouth, Plymouth, Exeter…” On her tongue, in Skogurtal, the names had a curious ring, suddenly exotic.
“You deaden your own senses with smolder and concrete and iron; you live and climb over each other like ants, until closing yourselves off to it all becomes your only path for survival. You are dead inside, all of you. I might walk a dozen leagues in your streets and across your roofs, and not one in a hundred would feel me, except to shiver as I pass.”
“Oh, I see.” Rising conviction that something was off, that he had her on the back foot. “You came all this way not to kill me, not to fuck me, but to give me a speech. Is there much more of it?”