by N. P. Martin
Iolas slammed his fist down hard on the desk, causing me to jump involuntarily as my eyes widened. "Enough nonsense. You will do this or I will have you dumped into the Irish Sea right this minute. Your insulting behavior still pains me, Corvin. You are lucky I don’t kill you in one of a thousand different ways here and now."
"I thought killing people was a thing of the past."
His eyes narrowed, and for a moment, I thought he was going to use his magic to kill me, which he could’ve done as easily as blinking. But instead, he pursed his lips slightly as if trying to contain a smile. "Maybe you have more balls than I thought, Corvin."
It didn’t feel that way to me as I stood across from him, thinking I was about to die.
"I think you’ll do fine in your new role," said Iolas, seeming to relax a little as if the deal was done and no further discussion was needed. "You can go now, Corvin. One of my associates will be in touch when you are needed, which I don’t anticipate will be very long. A lot of people owe me a debt. Including you, it now seems."
I stood for another moment, wanting to say something, but not knowing what to say. It was the vampire hissing in the corner that finally convinced me to leave. As I got to the door, Iolas stopped me and I turned around.
"Not a word to anyone about my friend here," he said. "Unless you want him to come and visit you some night as you sleep."
Glancing once more at the vampire, I saw that his eyes were burning fiercely amongst all that surrounding darkness. "Don’t worry," I said. "My lips are sealed."
"A fucking vampire?"
Dalia couldn’t contain her surprise when I told her. "Keep that to yourself for now," I said.
It was 5:30 in the morning, and we were inside my flat. As soon as one of Iolas’s orc grunts dropped me off ten minutes ago I had called Dalia and she arrived five minutes later. She didn’t sleep much. I was on the whiskey again to calm my nerves as my mind buzzed with too many thoughts for me to keep up with.
"Jazus," Dalia said as she sat on the couch, her raven hair covering half her face. "Elves aren’t supposed to consort with vampires. Vampires consort with nobody but their own."
I shook my head. "I don’t know what the vampire was doing there. Whatever the reason, I’m sure it’s not good."
Dalia went silent as she stared at me a moment. "You’re carrying a lot of residual fear. What happened with Iolas, Corvin?"
Sighing, I told her about the debt collecting gig. "Not so much a job offer as a condition of my fuckin’ parole."
"He threatened to banish you again?"
"He said he would have me tossed into the Irish Sea if I didn’t agree to work for him. I believed him."
Dalia went silent again for a moment. "Keep your friends close and your enemies closer," she said.
"Yeah, I know that’s what he’s doing." I poured myself another whiskey, put the bottle on the mantel and then went and sat on the couch next to Dalia. "He also knows I know that. He seems to enjoy controling people."
"No shit."
"He holds all the cards… for now. This might be an opportunity, though."
"To take him down, you mean?"
I nodded. "Damn right."
Dalia stared at me a moment. "You still haven’t told me how you know he… killed your mother. No offense, Corvin, but you weren’t exactly forthcoming with details before you left. Everyone thinks your mother died in a robbery gone wrong."
I shot her a look. "Is that what you believe?"
"It’s not really about what I believe, is it?" She brushed her hair from her face. "Tell me what you believe; that’s all that matters right now."
Sighing, I retrieved the whiskey bottle and then sat back down again. In the days after my mother’s death, I didn’t have much to do with anyone, locking myself away in the flat as I tried to process everything that had happened. The only time I saw Dalia was at the funeral, and as I’d been drinking (rather heavily) I ended up declaring to whoever would listen that Iolas was the one responsible for my mother’s death. There were Council members there as well, having traveled over from the States to attend the funeral, and also to do their own investigation into the death of my mother.
As they had concluded like everyone else that my mother died in a botched robbery, the Council members were none too pleased that I should accuse their main man in Ireland of murder and conspiracy. Most people assumed I was just a poor soul in the throes of grief when I made my outburst. Needless to say, Iolas wasn’t happy, and had me escorted from my own mother’s funeral and banished from the country the very same night. So Dalia didn’t know much of anything, and only had my word to go on.
"All right," I said, looking at her. "Here’s how I know Iolas killed my mother…"
Chapter 7
The night I found my mother dying in the street, I was walking back from a gig I was playing in Temple Bar. The gig went well and the crowd seemed to dig my music so I was on a natural high as I jaunted home, helped along by just a few measures of whiskey and a puff of someone’s joint. It was fairly late, so the Quay was pretty much deserted, and as I neared the bookshop the street seemed to be empty, as it usually was after a certain time. Sometimes my mother kept the shop open late if she was expecting customers, but for the most part, the place was always closed by about six or seven.
Which is why I was surprised to see that the lights were still on. At that point, I slowed my pace as a bad feeling came over me. I didn’t need my heightened senses to know that something was wrong.
A second later, I saw the form on the ground. Someone in a white lace dress with long dark hair spread out over the cobbles.
And something else.
Blood.
A lot of blood.
I didn’t want to believe it, but I knew it was my mother lying there, and I ran as fast as I could toward the shop, discovering to my horror that my worst suspicions had been confirmed. "Ma!" I said urgently as I shook her. "Ma!"
She hardly moved at all, but her eyes opened when she heard my voice. There was so much blood soaking her white dress and pooling on the cobbles around her, I was frankly shocked she was still alive at all. It was hard to tell what her injuries were, and I thought at the time she had been shot, but as I later found out, she had been stabbed in the chest and had probably been bleeding out for at least half an hour before I found her. Of course, the first thing I did was try a healing spell on her, but she had lost so much life-force by that point that the spell had no effect on her.
"… Son…" She barely managed to raise a hand to touch my arm.
"Help!" I screamed into the empty street. "Somebody help me!"
As I reached into my jacket to get my phone, my mother stopped me by squeezing my arm. "… Too late…" she breathed.
"Ma… no…"
Her grip tightened on my arm then, and her eyes came into full focus for just a second as she said, "Iolas… stop him…"
Crying, I shook my head in confusion. "Did he do this, Ma? Did Iolas do this to you?"
She smiled then, barely. "I… love you… son…"
"Ma, no please…"
"… so… much…"
Her eyes closed as she let go of my arm, and then her head fell to the side and she stopped breathing.
"Ma?" I said, shaking her. "Ma!"
But she was dead.
I don’t know how long I knelt there in the street, sobbing as I hugged my mother’s still warm body, but eventually a man and woman happened along and they called the police. The Guards arrived soon after and took me into the bookshop for questioning. It was established at that point that my mother’s jewelry was missing—all her rings, bracelets and necklaces—a fact which pointed to a robbery. I didn’t believe that, though, and throughout the whole interview, all I could think about was my mother’s last words:
"Iolas… stop him…"
What did she mean by that?
Even in all my shock and grief, I was determined to find out.
It was no secret to me that
my mother kept meticulous diaries, which she had written in every night for as long as I could remember. It was after my father was killed, when I was nine, that she started the diaries, which at first were just a way to keep her head together while she mourned my father, whom she loved very much. But even after she got over the worst of her grief, she still maintained the diaries and they soon became like a record of everything she did, both in business and in life. When she had finished writing, she would lock the diaries away in a safe in her bedroom which I knew the combination of, although she didn’t know that. Sometimes I would get curious and ask her about the diaries, and she would say that they would be mine to read if I so wanted after she had gone.
I hadn’t expected to be reading the diaries quite so soon, but I knew if I was going to find answers anywhere, they would be the best place to start. So the very next day, after I’d dealt with the police and finished answering a million phone calls from around the world made by people who had heard about my mother’s murder (word travels quickly in the Touched world), I opened the large safe in my mother’s bedroom and stared at the stack of journals in there for quite a long time. I was almost afraid to touch them, for I knew in doing so I would end up exacerbating my grief by reading my mother’s innermost thoughts, knowing I would never speak to her again. I broke down twice before I was finally able to take out the most recent journal.
The journal was quite large and thick, bound in soft brown leather, smelling of ink and my mother’s favorite perfume. Opening it to the first page, I was confronted with my mother’s exquisitely neat handwriting, which covered the whole page. She was old school, so she used quill and ink to write with. I asked her once why she didn’t use a normal pen, and her reply was that the laboriousness of writing with a quill made sure she stayed concise in her writing, and helped ensure that every word counted. Her handwriting was so meticulously formed that I had no trouble reading it.
I went to a date that was about six months before she was killed and started reading from there, skimming over much of the stuff relating to the Council which was more often than not descriptions of petty grievances she had helped to sort out between members of the Touched community here in Dublin and the outlying counties. Surprisingly, there was very little in the journal about herself that didn’t involve her work. Sometimes she would write that she had been thinking of my father that day, or that she was depressed or saddened over something she had seen. For the most part, though, it was the thoughts of a happy woman contented with all the good work she was doing. She mentioned me a lot, of course, and when I read some of the things she wrote, I couldn’t help but cry. She loved me so much, and despite my slacker ways she was immensely proud of me, even if I wasn’t living up to my full potential, as she put it.
After a couple of hours of reading, I finally came across an entry that was dated two weeks before her death, and which concerned Iolas:
Iolas was even more arrogant and dismissive than usual at the Council meeting today. Two of the thirteen Manhattan Council members were also present via video link. I was growing increasingly concerned at the vamp attacks that have been happening around the city, so I called the meeting to plan a strategy to combat the attacks. I even asked the Princes to attend, but they point blank refused and said they wanted nothing to do with the Council or its business, and the Council should stay out of theirs. Needless to say, the Manhattan members were not amused by this arrogance, and were threatening to send an envoy to Dublin to force the vampires into compliance. Attacks on humans are strictly forbidden of course, so the Council wasn’t going to stand for it if we couldn’t contain the situation ourselves. I was confident we could sort things out however, and expected Iolas’s backing on the matter. Instead though, Iolas dismissed the whole thing as an over-reaction, and even had the gall to suggest that a few human lives hardly mattered in the grand scheme of things. "You give the humans too much protection," he said. "They don’t deserve it."
He left the room after that, leaving everyone else appalled at his callous attitude. I, of course, know Iolas well, and I am aware of his deep contempt for humans, but he had never been so transparent about it in front of the Council before. It was like he didn’t care about pretenses anymore.
I’ll be keeping a close eye on Iolas from now on.
Iolas stopped attending most of the Council meetings, as if he saw them as a waste of time. When my mother confronted him about his absenteeism, Iolas claimed he had no interest in maintaining the status quo anymore, and that he’d had enough of bowing down to human society, viewing humans themselves as weak and pathetic.
As I read through the rest of the journal, I picked up on various lines such as:
… Iolas always was a dark horse compared to his mostly benign Elven brethren, though I’m not sure why…
… he seems ruled by his darker desires…
… Iolas is making moves… I can feel it…
One of her last entries detailed how she saw Iolas get into the back of a black limo right outside the Council building on Dame Street, the same building occupied by Dublin City Council. It was night, and as the limo drove past, the window rolled down just enough for my mother to glimpse the face of Prince Constantine, the same vampire who killed my father all those years ago. My mother wrote that he "smiled coldly at me, as if enjoying the fact that I had now seen him, knowing full well what the consequences of the sighting would be… and not caring at all."
When I came to the very last entry in the journal, dated the day before she died, I read it with a heavy heart that was tinged with more than a little anger:
Seeing Constantine in the limo with Iolas has been a huge shock to me. That vampire took my husband from me and didn’t even try to hide the fact that he did it at the time. He killed Max for doing his job, nothing more. It still galls me to this day that the Council did little to punish Constantine for his murderous actions. The only reason I chose to remain working for the Council afterward was so I could ensure such a travesty of justice never happened again. And now Constantine, that murderous wretch, is in my city, apparently teaming up with an elf who is supposed to be looking out for the South, not bringing danger to it in the form of a six-thousand-year-old vampire who sees humans as nothing more than walking blood bags. What can Iolas hope to gain from such a partnership that he doesn’t already have? Or perhaps I am just jumping to conclusions, allowing my own prejudices to twist what is in front of me? Either way, the Council has to know about Iolas and Constantine being seen together…
The very next night, my mother was dead.
Chapter 8
After I’d finished telling Dalia everything, she sat for a long time in contemplative silence, though I knew what she was going to say even before she spoke.
"Everything you just said is circumstantial at best, Corvin, you do realize that, don’t you?" I felt her dark eyes on me as I stared toward the fireplace. "I can see now why the Council didn’t do anything."
"Fuck the Council," I snarled. "That’s both my parents dead in service to that kangaroo court."
Dalia sighed as if she could sense my pain, and moved closer to put her hand on my shoulder. As I looked into her eyes, I saw my face reflected back at me in her slightly swirling retinas. "I feel your pain," she said. "When I was taken to the Otherworld, I spent a long time feeling powerless and mourning the loss of my former life. Then when I escaped and got back here to find an impostor in my place, I had to experience that loss all over again. But you know what got me through?"
I did, but I asked anyway. "What?"
"Having you here. You accepted me straight away, even though I had changed." She smiled and stroked my cheek, her hand cold on my skin. "My dear Corvin. What would I do without you?"
"I always knew that imposter wasn’t you."
"How?"
"Initially I sensed the Fae Glamor, but there was something else missing: the connection we had." I had told her this a thousand times, but she never tired of hearing it. Anyway, you h
ave your own people now… the Demi-Fae."
"Yes, but none of those understand me like you do."
"You think I understand you, even after all you’ve been through?"
She nodded. "You do, whether you know it or not. I know I confound you, even scare you sometimes, but even after everything, we still have that connection, you and I. It’s a miracle, don’t you think?"
"You’re asking a magic slinger if he believes in miracles?"
"There are other powers in the universe besides the Void." Her eyes went black for a moment, that ineffable darkness within her excited by something unknown to me. "The Otherworld opened my eyes to so much more…" She trailed off, then said, "I wish I could tell you about it all, but…"
"My mind couldn’t comprehend, I know."
"One day I will find a way to show you the wonders outside of this realm." She smiled as she rested her head on my shoulder. "You’d be amazed."
"I’m sure I would," I said. "It sounds more preferable than my current existence. Maybe you could take me to the Otherworld yourself and leave me there."
Her head snapped up, her eyes darkened again. "Don’t even joke about that. As much as my eyes were opened to wonder, the pain and horror I experienced far outweighed it."
"What about the Seelie Court? Wouldn’t things be easier there, amongst the light Fae?"
Dalia shook her head and sighed slightly like I knew nothing. "There are no 'light' Fae, Corvin. There are Fae who are too indifferent to humanity to bother with them much, and there are Fae who like to indulge their darker desires and inflict pain and suffering on humans and other creatures—those of the Unseelie Court—but there are no light Fae, not any more than there are light or dark humans. So even if I did drop you at the Seelie Court, you would still suffer greatly, as your very makeup and fundamental nature got stretched and torn and shredded and then hammered painfully back into an alien shape."
