Bad, Dad, and Dangerous

by Rhys Ford

  “He was grateful,” she said, her voice thick with contempt. She raised her chin stubbornly. “He said ‘thank you,’ he asked me to dance, and I think maybe I got him killed. So I’m not going anywhere, Agent. Not until Robin’s safe.”

  She clenched her hands into fists, and the hounds fell into position behind her. They’d forgotten they were meant to be dogs, the cocked heads and expressive tails dropped like a sheet from the killing machines that had always been underneath.

  Bell dropped his hand to his sap out of habit but didn’t pull it. If it was a question of getting Nora back to the ford and to safety, he’d bet on himself against the hounds. He might not come out intact, but he could do it. But kidnap was different from rescue. An unwilling passenger would change the odds a lot.

  It was Conri who broke the silence.

  “My son was at the party too,” he said as he stepped forward. The apparent non sequitur made Nora give him a confused look that he ignored. “You might have met him. Finn, red hair and a Cali accent. Still looks a lot like a goblin.”

  Nora looked annoyed. “Maybe,” she said. “A lot of the fey kids at the party had red hair. I didn’t talk to him. I didn’t talk to anyone but Robin. Good girls don’t. They don’t talk to fey. They don’t eat the fruit. They miss out on a lot.”

  “Well, he was,” Conri said. “So now he’s in the crosshairs of Iron Door because of you and Robin. The minute the news leaves the county, bounces out of state, the treaty will be torn up… unless we take you back and you tell everyone the right story.”

  Bell stalled for a second on right instead of true. The implication stuck in his throat, even though he knew Iron Door would take the same approach. It was hardly the corrupt agency that Ned wanted to paint it as, but everyone involved had bled for that treaty.

  Literally. If you looked at the original, there were bloody fingerprints smudged on the corners.

  It still didn’t feel right to put the weight of that on Nora.

  “We have time. Why don’t you tell us what really happened?” he said as he held his hand out.

  She didn’t take it. Bell supposed he’d nearly shot her, so he couldn’t blame her for that. After a pause, she nodded stiffly, and the hounds relaxed. One of them tried a yawn that went way too far back.

  “While we walk,” she said as she turned to grab the last of her things and stuff them in a backpack. The bag had been pink once and maybe even as stylish as a girl could get with a pig-farm wage. Now it was grubby and stitched, patched with hide and thorns. “I went to a lot of effort to stampede those unicorns. I don’t want to waste it.”

  Conri shrugged at Bell and scattered the greasy bones of their meal with his foot. The heavy leather singed lightly as he stirred the embers.

  “Where are we going?” Bell asked.

  Nora lifted her hood up to cover her pale hair. “I told you,” she said as she struck out. “I’m going to rescue Robin and the others. With luck, the stampede will have attracted Keith’s attention, and him and Ned can keep each other busy while I get into his camp.”

  The hounds slunk off into the trees, glimpses of mist through the branches the only evidence they kept pace. Only the big female stuck with Nora, glued to her shadow.

  Bell weighed Felix’s instructions against the current development in the field. He still didn’t need to get Robin and the others back to the mortal realm, but he at least needed to get them to the border if he didn’t want to have to fight Nora all the way there.

  And she was definitely more resourceful than he expected.

  Useful and resilient, the memory of Conri’s voice sighed in his head. That described him and Nora, and Bell filed that away for later.

  It took a few paces, but finally Nora cleared her throat and started to speak.

  “Keith only dated me because it meant he got to hang out with my brother and shoot guns,” she said flatly. There was no room for sympathy in her voice. “I don’t think he even liked him, which was okay because I don’t think I ever much liked him either. But I was the pig-farm girl, and he was a football player, so why not? So I wasn’t surprised when he started being a dick to some fey kids from the summer camp, but this time he took it too far….”

  THE STORY was much the same as the one that Jamie had told him, although sharper edged from someone who’d been there. The prank was meaner, the fey kids less gullible, and Keith didn’t leave them there so much as flee with his tail between his legs.

  “He left me there, on the ground,” Nora said. “I thought I was gonna get a pig nose or something for my trouble. They do that in the stories. And—”

  She stumbled over her own tongue as she glanced back over her shoulder at Conri. Color slapped her cheeks, and even though he didn’t react, it took her a second to compose her thoughts again.

  “Anyhow, all Robin did was help me up. He thanked me for trying to stop Keith and the others, even though they were my friends. He said I was as brave as I was beautiful.” Nora paused halfway over a tangled briar and smiled at the memory of that. Her fingers tightened around the wood knot of the rose runner, thorns sharp where they stuck between her knuckles, and she lifted her chin. “I told him he was full of shit, and that made him laugh. They walked me back to town and… you know what was the most magical thing about it? Not that they were fey, but that they didn’t come from here. Robin grew up in Providence and Shanko was from Brooklyn and… the farthest I’ve ever gone is over the state line for a pig fair. They left me at the gas station—I wasn’t going to let them meet my inbred bigot of a brother—and figured that was it. That was going to be my story. When I was seventy-two and had spent my whole life on the pig farm with my brother and his family, this would be my big brush with fairy-tale romance. The summer I was almost a fairy bride. Pathetic, but better than most people’s romances around here.”

  She stopped, shrugged, and jumped down onto the boggy dirt track that faded in and out between the trees. The hound followed her in an easy, long leap that stretched over the thorns.

  “Except then he came to the party,” Conri said. He boosted himself over the knot of briar and dropped easily down on the other side. “And asked you to dance.”

  He looked at ease here, Bell noted. In the borrowed fey leathers, amidst the thick white alien roses that hung from trees like kudzu, Conri looked like he was made for this. He had been, from what he’d shared, but it still rubbed Bell the wrong way.

  It wasn’t suspicion. Bell didn’t know if Conri could be trusted in a wider sense, but he obviously loved Finn, and that meant he was on Iron Door’s side this time. The irritable itch in the back of Bell’s head felt more like… jealousy, like the moment you saw your boyfriend laugh at an inside joke with his ex and they didn’t include you.

  Bell wanted to roll his eyes at his neurotic approach to a one-night stand. A pending one-night stand, at that. It was stupid and needy, neither of which he was. But he could still taste the resentment in the back of his throat for the boggy ground underfoot and the smell of salt and roses on the air. Something old and dark and sullen dug its heels into his mind and chewed on old wounds like they were ribeye steak.

  The Otherworld didn’t get to take anyone else from him.

  Bell swallowed the sour-skin taste of that old memory and left it to fester while he focused on his own scramble over the vine.

  “That didn’t please Keith,” he said. His boots hit the ground with a sticky squelch, and he could smell the crushed roses on his clothes. It wanted him to run. He could feel it as his heart rate sped up and sweat broke out.

  “It wasn’t his business,” Nora said sharply. “I’d already told him that, but no, he wasn’t thrilled. Robin didn’t care. He thought it was funny when the fight kicked off. It was funny when I was with him—what were a bunch of hick-town kids when you’re the son of a prince? He only left because he got bored of it, and I went with him because I was bored of all of it. So why not? Except Keith hung out with my brother, goes to the same hateful forums,
and when he found out the summer camp was going to be here—”

  “He got iron,” Conri said grimly. “How much?”

  She shrugged. “What he could afford,” she said. The fey didn’t care for steel much, but it irritated them. It wouldn’t end them. That took cold, pure pig iron, and it was illegal to buy without a license and a valid reason. So people who bought it illegally had to pay over the odds for it. “A crowbar. A couple of shells full of iron ball bearings for his shotgun, but he clipped Thistle with it, and all it did was hurt her. But that’s when it stopped being funny. Keith was… he didn’t even care about me that much. I don’t know why he lost his head over this like he did. Robin told Thistle to go and get help—I guess she did—while we ran for it. Keith was going to kill us, Agent, all of us. I don’t know how Robin got us through to here, but it was to save my life, not to steal me away.”

  “Only problem was,” Bell said, “Keith came with you.”

  Nora nodded. “It didn’t seem like a problem at first. This is the Otherworld, after all. It’s the fey’s playground. Robin thought he had the upper hand—we all did. Even Keith agreed to stay out of our way, but… nothing worked the way we thought it would. We couldn’t get back, he couldn’t find the way out, and there was nothing to eat.” Her voice broke at the memory, a raw scratch of trauma she’d had no time to do anything but repress. The hound looked up at her curiously, its head cocked to the side. “It was okay, though. We knew someone would come for us. Ned’s a crazy bigot, but he loves me, and the camp would send a Walker to get the fey back. It was okay, we just had to keep it together until someone got here. Except, that’s when Keith found….”

  She reached out and pushed a tangle of briars out of the way with her heavily sleeved arms, thorns hooked into the rough stitchwork. The dim light picked out the bloodstains on the leather.

  “That.”

  Bell ducked down slightly to peer over her shoulder. The ghosts of the old fey structures were there—a stray doorframe slouched crookedly in a stand of grass and old, broken walls used as climbing frames for the briars. The only building that had survived, or been put back together by the diligent slough, was a splintered, gray old house with a bleak aura.

  He glanced around at Conri and raised his eyebrows in a mute question. Of the three of them, Conri was the only one likely to recognize the layout of the buildings. Bell had read about the hunts—the Hunt—and come across enough stray hounds, but whatever the fey hunted these days, it wasn’t human prey, so it wasn’t Iron Door’s business.

  Conri crouched down to get a good view. He glanced across the space from corner to corner, and a dour frown creased the open, easy planes of his face. He swallowed, an audible squelch of sound in his throat, and answered reluctantly, “It looks like the Stables.”

  Chapter Nine

  IT WASN’T a lie, Conri defended himself to the squirming part of his brain that wanted to kiss Bell again. The words were the truth, and it wasn’t his fault if they didn’t all share the same bleak, background information.

  Or it was, but he wasn’t going to do anything about it right now.

  “The Others were in the stalls,” Nora said. She’d worked her way through a few different terms for the programmed things before she’d settled on that. Until she had someone to talk to, they hadn’t really needed a name. She knew who they were. “I was with him. Shanko too, but he left after we found the clearing to let Robin know. He told us to wait, but Keith never listened to anyone. We went down to explore and found… them.”

  She nodded down at the two half-formed Keith clones who were driving long spikes into the ground at crooked angles. One of them looked old, his hair gray and face melted like candle wax into folds and wrinkles, while the other had black hair instead of dirty blond.

  “They weren’t him then,” Nora said. “They weren’t even alive, just bones and leather, but he was obsessed with them. He said they were murdered people, that it was proof that the fey saw us as prey, that they were probably our ancestors. Nobody has even seen a fairy circle in Elwood for decades, but everyone insists they have a grandparent or a great-aunt who disappeared and never came back. They probably left town, but… Keith believed the fey took them.”

  Keith was probably right. Something had motivated the inhabitants of Elwood to seal off the slough and deal with the repercussions afterward. Fields would have gone sour, fertility of the stock and people dropped, and wells lost their sweetness. Yet based on the state of the tree, not one person had snuck out to try and pull a nail out of the trunk.

  There were plenty of complaints that Conri could make about his own time in the Otherworld, but it definitely could have been worse. His old master could be cruel at times, but he’d never been wasteful.

  “You didn’t believe him?” he said.

  “Of course not,” Nora said impatiently. “My brother used to spout this stuff all the time. I know it’s rubbish. It’s just excuses for why our town sucks so much. Keith wouldn’t listen to me, though. He said that Robin and the others had to explain this before he’d come back to camp. I thought… I thought he’d calm down if I left him alone for a while, so I went to tell them what we’d found. Robin was really excited at first and dragged us all right back there. He said this could get us set up like kings, that we wouldn’t have to do anything now until rescue got here.”

  She stopped and unhooked the water bottle from her hip to take a drink. Her eyes were fixed on the far left side of the barn, where the sour, gray grass was churned up and stained with blood.

  “It was a trap,” Conri said.

  Nora laughed harshly. “Wow,” she said. “I wish you’d been here to tell us that before.”

  “He does that,” Bell said dryly. “You got…. How did you get away?”

  Nora crouched down and hugged the hound around her thick, muscular neck. “Betty here got me out,” she said. “I’d fed her scraps from my meals when I could—scrapings and bones mostly. She was skittish, near took my hand off a couple of times, but I guess she decided to hang around. When Keith tried to drag me away, she went for him, and I was able to get away. The others were captured, though. I couldn’t help them.”

  She pressed her face to the hound’s shoulder and squeezed. Betty. Conri couldn’t remember the last time a hound got a true name, just for itself. His master bred his own, a selected bloodline seasoned with occasional mortality, and even they only had heritage names from the dogs they replaced.

  Betty stared at him over Nora’s shoulder. Her eyes might look brown in the overcast Otherworld, but in the mortal realm they’d be red. They both knew what she was, but if she wanted to pretend to be a dog right now, Conri didn’t see any benefit to them in disabusing Nora of the idea.

  “Time to change that,” he said. “Are you sure Keith will have gone after your brother?”

  Nora wiped her face on Betty before she stood up, her nose pink and eyes watery. She pulled her hood back up firmly to throw her face back into shadow.

  “He always has his Others on the borders of my territory,” she said. The absentminded claim made Conri twitch slightly, an itch over his shoulder, but what was done was done. “They’d have alerted him about the stampede, but they can’t really do much more than that. They’re limited. Keith would have to go out and take a look himself if he wants to find anything out. He’d want the jeep.”

  Bell shifted back a step, away from thorns, and absently checked his gun in the holster. His palm wrapped over the butt and his finger rested along the metal of the gun. The controlled danger in the gesture, the deadly elegance of Bell’s hands, made the nape of Conri’s neck tingle and his mouth go dry.

  “You aren’t worried about your brother?” Bell asked. “He’s here to rescue you. That might not be something Keith wants.”

  Nora looked down at her feet and shrugged her shoulders with a sullen heft that was painfully familiar.

  “You don’t get it,” she said. “Keith and Ned are cut from the same crazy cloth. Ned’
s here to take me back, but that’s not the same as rescue. Unless I do what they want, say what they want, and grovel for what a filthy whore I’ve been? Ned would kick me out on the street to starve the minute he worked out I’m not sorry.”

  She delivered the last fiercely, as if it were a relief to find out it was still true.

  “Maybe it won’t be that bad, once he hears what really happened,” Conri offered awkwardly. Even he—with the dull ache of his skull as a reminder—didn’t believe it, but it seemed like the sort of thing someone should offer her. He hadn’t had any family—not until Finn—and nothing in the mortal world to be his anchor. If he had, maybe he’d have left with ears he could hide under his hair. “He’s your—”

  “He’s my brother, but…. He can’t love me the way I am right now. So I can’t worry about him,” Nora interrupted him bluntly. “So, me and Ned are going to have to look out for ourselves. I guess we have been for a long time, anyhow, but we didn’t want to admit it.”

  “SO?” BELL asked as they worked their way through the dense briars along the edge of the clearing.

  Nora had stayed above with the hounds. She might not care what happened to her as long as Robin was safe, but Conri hadn’t paid for Finn’s private school all this time to see it all burn down with the treaty. When he crawled out of this bloody slough, it would be with the one kid who could stop a war.

  The hounds would be useful too.

  “So?” Conri repeated Bell’s question back at him. Thorns pulled at his hair and plucked holes in the thin cotton of his T-shirt as he scrambled through the thicket. His blood dripped on the Cheater’s Roses, but the Otherworld had taken that bit of mortality years ago. It didn’t leave a mark. “So what?”

  Bell had lost less skin on their trek. Kevlar and reinforced leather did more than look hot, apparently. He wasn’t beholden to the Otherworld’s rules either—he hadn’t run out of water or protein bars yet—so it had to work harder to leave its mark on him. It was a good thing. His blood would have betrayed them.