Hell and High Water

by Charlotte E. English

  ‘Besides that, Daix and Phélan are still trapped.’

  ‘Yep, we should absolutely do something decisive and heroic about that, too.’

  I won’t admit to having stripped a set of suitably warm garments off some hapless passer-by, because nobody would ever respect me again. Let’s just say my lucky stars shone brightly that night, and leave it at that.

  I might also assert that it was a warmish night in April and no one was in any danger of freezing to death if they hadn’t taken an impromptu and ill-advised dip in the river first.

  Anyway, somewhat better clad, Fionn and I made our way back to the Selkie’s Pearls club in rather grim silence. I was thinking, and no doubt Fi was, too. Trying to puzzle the pieces together. What did this peculiar club have to do with Narasel, or Mearil, or Melly? I could well believe that Cellann might have been brought there by Brianne, if we hadn’t intervened. Having got the idiot girl’s attention with an expensive gift and admittance to an exclusive club, it wouldn’t have taken much to coax her into leaving Eventide again in Brianne’s company. Only drop a few hints about a joint even more exclusive, and the foolish child would go anywhere, with anyone.

  No doubt, either, that those pools of water would have had much the same effect on Cellann that they’d had on Fionn. And with nobody to intervene, she would have wandered straight in. Pearls and all.

  And gone… where? Because while Narasel had turned up dead in those same river-waters, Melly and Mearil had not.

  At least, not yet.

  So where were they?

  I was becoming increasingly certain that the operation was more about selkies’ powers than their skins. Not that a canny and ruthless operator wouldn’t take full advantage of an opportunity to make a few quid on the side; I hadn’t forgotten Tully’s tip about a few scummy sluagh and a selkie-skin sale.

  The question of what we had to do with it was a whole other problem. We weren’t being targeted, precisely; if we were, Fionn would have been the first selkie taken. And it wouldn’t have been all that hard to do it. Hit her quickly, take her by surprise; she was a fashion designer now, no longer the hard and wary fatale of yesteryear.

  No, we weren’t the target. Not exactly. But we were being baited.

  I shook my head. ‘I can’t make it make sense.’

  ‘Not yet,’ Fionn agreed. ‘But we do not lack for leads, now. There’s much work to be done.’

  ‘Right. Get Daix on it, for a start. Use her surveillance, her networks, for information. I’ll get back on Tully at the Puca, see if I can track them from the sealskin end. And you—’

  ‘I have a plan,’ said Fionn.

  ‘Super,’ I said, rather warily, for there was a cold note in her voice I didn’t like. I mean, Fi’s always a bit chilly, but this was diamond-hard. ‘Why don’t we talk it over?’

  ‘Later.’

  ‘Now would be—’

  She made a cease and desist gesture. ‘Later. Look.’

  I followed the direction of her pointing finger, and saw… a faint flicker on the horizon, a glimmer of light behind the looming shadows of darkened buildings.

  Fire.

  ‘Oh, for—’ I snarled, and began to run. ‘Fuck’s sake. Daix.’

  We made it back to Selkie’s Pearls in two minutes flat, and there to greet us was a vision of actual nightmare. The club, such as it had been, was gone. At least, some of it was probably still there, but between us and it was a wall of green-tinged flame, roaring with all the infernal voices of hell. Black smoke poured gleefully into the sky, and from somewhere within I heard the protesting groans of a collapsing building.

  I noted with distant approval that the fire was neatly contained. Not a lick of flame touched the buildings on either side of the club.

  ‘So they’re dead,’ I gasped, pausing to recover my breath. The heat of those flames was beyond anything natural. I took several steps back.

  ‘Oh, completely,’ said Fionn, watching impassively. ‘No doubt about it.’

  ‘Nothing could survive such an inferno.’ I turned away from the fire and scanned the shadows, eyes narrowed. ‘Nothing left for us to do but mourn. Deeply. And for always.’

  ‘Oh, fine,’ growled Daix, and emerged from an alley. Greenish flames wove through her fingers, and lit up her eyes. ‘Couldn’t you have been a bit sad?’

  ‘You wanted us to pretend?’

  ‘Like you aren’t a master of pretence, Tai.’

  ‘Yes, but I only roll out the cold-blooded manipulation for special people.’

  Daix scowled, and the flames around her fingers died out.

  ‘I always liked that cool eye effect,’ I added. ‘Creepy as fuck.’

  She grinned. ‘Isn’t it?’

  ‘You had to burn the place down, I suppose?’

  ‘How else was I supposed to get out?’

  ‘Something something less blatantly destructive, but remembering I’m talking to Daix — no. There was no other conceivable way.’

  ‘Nice of you two to ride to my rescue, though.’ She blew us a kiss.

  ‘Yes, also we’re fine, thanks for asking.’

  ‘Was on my way to the river to pull your lifeless corpses out of it. Now I can go straight home and put my favourite socks on, yay.’

  ‘You have favourite socks.’

  ‘There are people who don’t have favourite socks?’

  I abandoned the whole line of enquiry. ‘You managed not to also burn Phélan alive and screaming, I assume?’

  ‘Why would you assume that.’

  Fionn intervened before I could beat Daix to death with her own boots. ‘We did end up in the river,’ she said, calmly. ‘We’ll compose a suitable report about it shortly.’

  ‘Reports? Seriously? Fi, I thought we’d moved past this.’

  ‘We need detail. Writing things down helps.’

  Daix sighed.

  ‘And yes, I expect you to produce a similar report of your findings for us.’

  ‘Damnit.’

  ‘Also, while I fully understand and support your burning of the club—’

  ‘See, Tai? Fi gets it.’

  ‘—if you were hoping to keep a low profile hereafter that’s more or less busted it, hasn’t it?’

  ‘That place identified me by name, and locked the door after me. What would be the point?’

  Fionn inclined her head. ‘Perhaps that’s fair. But—’

  ‘Fi,’ I said. ‘She’s right. It’s too late for caution. It was too late from the first moment they took Narasel. We’re supposed to be involved in this.’

  ‘I just… I’m not used to working this way.’

  I wrapped a comforting arm around her. ‘I know. I miss the days of calculated lying, ruthless deceit, and stealthing around in fabulous disguises too. Maybe next time.’ I squeezed her shoulders, and released her. ‘What we are now is a crew of pissed-off Fatales, with awe-inspiring power to cause harm.’

  ‘Right,’ said Daix, and stomped one booted foot for emphasis. ‘It’s time to kick some ass.’

  ‘You’ve been watching way too many action movies,’ I told her.

  ‘Define this “too many”.’

  ‘Can we return to the subject of Phélan just for a second?’

  ‘What about him.’

  ‘Still breathing, yes or no?’

  ‘I don’t see how that’s any of my business.’

  ‘It—’

  ‘Or yours, either.’

  ‘It’s my business because I asked him here. Sort of. If he got burned to death by my pyromaniac maverick of a partner it’s a little bit my problem, isn’t it?’

  ‘If you’re going to insist on mooning around after moody sluagh types I don’t see what’s so wrong with Rudy. He’s cute.’

  ‘Daix.’

  ‘Fine. He’s alive, okay? But only because I love you.’

  ‘And you stashed him where exactly?’

  ‘I stashed him nowhere. Where he’s stashed himself, who knows.’

  If
he was still lurking around somewhere and had any intention of showing himself, he’d have done so by now. I suppressed a traitorous feeling of disappointed hurt, and firmly dismissed the subject. He was fine. He could tend his own damned burns. ‘Okay. It’s time to retreat and regroup. Fi, I still think you weren’t supposed to be making it out of here tonight, so you might want to be extra careful.’

  ‘As in, how?’

  ‘As in, don’t go home. Or back to your studio.’

  ‘But you’ll be fine to go back to your home, considering your own damned roommate is among the missing?’

  Oops. I’d touched a nerve. ‘I know you can handle literally anything,’ I said. ‘But I also know you need sleep, and nobody does a great job of fighting off mortal peril while unconscious.’

  ‘Fair,’ said Fionn. ‘Where then do you suggest I go?’

  ‘You, nowhere. We are going to my bolt hole.’

  ‘You have a bolt hole?’ said Daix. ‘Oh no, is it a secret bolt hole? A place no one could possibly know about but you?’

  ‘Yes, I’m sure you know all about it,’ I said. ‘But no one else has had quite your incentive for tracking my every movement, now have they?’

  ‘We’re going,’ said Fi, sounding weary.

  ‘I have hot chocolate,’ I offered. ‘And excellent socks.’

  ‘Was that an invitation?’ said Daix. ‘I can’t always tell around all the sarcasm.’

  ‘Yes, and it expires in ten seconds.’

  ‘My house hasn’t been compromised.’

  ‘Six seconds.’

  ‘I could go there right now.’

  ‘Three.’

  ‘Get my own, favourite socks on.’

  ‘And expired.’

  ‘Damn you, Tai.’

  ‘Three-person chocolate and sock party it is.’

  Chapter Eleven: Fionn

  Tai’s bolt hole, as she describes it, turned out to be a cellar. Entered via an unassuming door positioned halfway down a shabby alley of no notable features whatsoever, the place is discreet, to say the least. Considering how much gramarye Tai has shrouding the door, I’d be surprised if anybody ever discovered it unless they were looking for it. Which Daix probably was.

  ‘People don’t notice that you come into this alley and never come out again?’ I asked, as Tai negotiated with the door.

  ‘It isn’t a dead end. It’s a shortcut. Tube station just down the way.’ She tilted her head in the direction of the opposite end of the alley. ‘If I’m worried, I have an illusory me wander out the other end, and disappear into the Underground.’

  ‘You’ve improved at glamours.’

  By way of answer, Tai hummed a few notes in two-part harmony, and a vaguely Tai-shaped shadow flitted away down the narrow street, and faded out of sight. ‘It isn’t really a glamour,’ she said, opening the door. ‘It’s more that I ordered your brain to perceive one. I used to do it a lot, back in the bad old days.’

  ‘Not on us, though,’ I said.

  ‘Right. Not usually on you.’

  ‘Stay out of my brain,’ said Daix.

  ‘Daix, nobody in their right mind wants to have anything to do with your brain.’ She ushered the two of us ahead of her, and I stepped through the door. The space beyond was both dark and dank, judging from the smell, and led away into a blank void.

  Daix held up one small fist wreathed in clear flame, and the void resolved into a stairwell leading down. ‘Nice place,’ she said, starting down it.

  ‘It’s not so bad below,’ said Tai, giving me a gentle shove from behind.

  I went down. The stairs wound around in a spiral, and ended at last in the aforementioned cellar. Its crumbling stonework and gothic-pointed arches suggested a medieval construction. While chilly, the place was more comfortable than I might have expected considering the approach: thick rugs covered much of the floor, and Tai had manoeuvred a shabby but comfortable old Chesterfield into position before a blackened fireplace. Matching chairs flanked the sofa. Once Tai had switched on a pair of standard lamps with charming Art Deco shades, and Daix had encouraged the hearth to develop a warming fire, the cellar grew cheerful. Tai compounded the effect by switching on a dusty gramophone; the strains of an old night club song filled the room.

  ‘You’re right,’ said Daix, flopping onto the sofa. ‘It’s not so bad down here at all.’

  ‘How did you get hold of this place?’ I asked, reposing myself in one of the armchairs. Chesterfields can be unforgiving articles of furniture, but this one had been broken in long ago. I began, a little, to relax.

  ‘Pheriko found it.’ Tai disappeared into another, shadowed room; light flared where she passed. ‘The building belongs to some connection of hers,’ she called back. I heard sounds of a kettle boiling, mugs clinking. ‘Wasn’t using it, so we do. Sometimes.’

  ‘What the hell does Pheriko want with a bolt hole,’ said Daix.

  ‘Photographers,’ I murmured. ‘Can be a nuisance.’

  ‘Right. You’d know all about that.’ Daix rolled her eyes.

  ‘Not so much. My brand is famous, but I’m not personally so.’ And I took care to keep it that way. Few people want to deal with that kind of attention, and the fae… very much not. Some say I ought never to have entered the world of fashion at all, that it isn’t safe. Someday, my identity will be compromised and my true nature discovered by the non-fae world.

  Perhaps. But a life spent crouching in the shadows, paralysed by fear, is no life at all. And I’ve spent enough of my life like that.

  The same questions apply to Tai, of course, with still greater force. But Tai being Tai, I am pretty sure she doesn’t care.

  ‘What she said.’ Tai returned bearing a chipped dinner plate, atop which were balanced three gigantic mugs smelling, gorgeously, of chocolate. ‘Also, it’s a quiet spot. We come down here to compose, sometimes.’

  Daix snatched up a steaming mug, miraculously spilling none of it. Half the contents were gone in a blink.

  ‘Oh,’ said Tai, watching this performance with some bemusement. ‘I forgot about that whole fire-proof thing.’

  Daix chugged the rest in three gulps, and smiled sweetly. ‘You just watched me fail to immolate myself despite my best efforts, which, I might add, were significant. You know I’m fire-proof. What you mean is you forgot the heat-proof thing.’

  ‘I remain uncertain of its usefulness,’ said Tai, taking the other chair, and settling with her own mug. ‘You drank that too quickly to appreciate it. Fi and I, on the other hand, will go on appreciating ours for at least ten glorious minutes.’

  ‘Meh,’ said Daix. ‘Life’s too short.’

  ‘You literally came over with the Conqueror and you’re saying life’s too short to savour hot chocolate.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘That’s your stance on the finer things in life.’

  ‘No, just on hot chocolate.’

  Tai met my gaze, and rolled her eyes. I grimaced in sympathy, but inside I was smiling. It’s been such a long, long time.

  ‘I’ve… missed you two,’ I said.

  Daix sat bolt upright. ‘Fionn. Did you just admit to a feeling?’

  ‘A mild one,’ I said. ‘Let’s not get carried away.’

  ‘She missed us a little,’ said Tai, smirking at me. ‘Every other Tuesday in March.’

  ‘No, no,’ I murmured. ‘Much more than that.’

  ‘Also Wednesdays in August.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘I’m overcome,’ said Daix. ‘What a tribute.’

  ‘Still waiting for yours,’ said Tai.

  ‘Good luck with that.’

  I sipped chocolate. ‘Daix’s spent the past eighty years stalking our every move. She didn’t so much miss us as obsessively miss us.’

  ‘Untrue,’ said Daix.

  Tai looked at the ceiling. ‘Tell me you aren’t going to deny the whole twenty-four-hour surveillance thing.’

  ‘Not at all,’ said Daix. ‘But for eighty years? You pe
ople aren’t nearly interesting enough.’

  ‘Okay, how long for?’

  ‘That’s classified.’

  Tai smirked, and returned to her mug.

  ‘So,’ I said. ‘If we are to work together again—’

  ‘Who said anything about that?’ interjected Daix.

  ‘Agreed by tacit vote,’ said Tai. ‘Including yours, or why the hell are you here?’

  Daix scowled. ‘Fine.’

  ‘If we’re to work together again,’ I resumed. ‘We perhaps need to agree on a course of action.’

  ‘Before we do that, we probably need to make sure we’re all on the same page with what we’ve got so far,’ Tai said.

  I nodded. ‘Fair. Tai, would you like to begin?’

  Half an hour later, we’d covered all three of the missing selkies; the finding of Narasel’s body in Faerd’s waters; Tully’s hints about a sealskin sale at the Puca; the questions surrounding Eventide and Selkie’s Pearls; my experiences in the strange pools at the new club, and Tai’s; Brianne Lamarre; and the Quinn-Diamhor family.

  ‘One thing that doesn’t make sense,’ Tai said. ‘If Mea was taken at the airport, and signs do suggest she was: why? Does that mean she was never at Eventide?’

  ‘It suggests she was never at Selkie’s Pearls,’ I said. ‘Or at least, that she didn’t walk in there voluntarily. But she may have been at Eventide.’

  ‘Snatched before she could leave the country,’ said Daix. ‘They weren’t finished with her, and didn’t want her getting away.’

  Tai frowned, plainly worried. ‘I suppose that makes sense,’ she sighed.

  ‘We need to find out where that waterway was supposed to take me,’ I said.

  Tai looked at me. ‘You don’t think the river was the intended destination.’

  ‘No. Why would it be? Nothing happened there. I think you may have been right when you spoke of being — waste. We were dumped there in the same way as Narasel’s body. And I think perhaps you were also right when you said I would not have been, if I’d had my pearls.’

  ‘Tell me you aren’t thinking what I think you’re thinking.’