Considering they’d done the same thing to Fionn, I’d call it fair.
‘First,’ I said. ‘I’ll be needing Fionn’s sealskin. Bring it to me.’ I used three voices as I issued the command, blended together into a choral bludgeon. Overdoing it, really, but so what? They’d earned it.
It was Silise who obeyed, albeit with an expression of murderous rage in her eyes. I could make people do what I told them to do; I couldn’t make them like it.
Fine by me.
I looked long at her as she put the heavy sealskin into my hands. What kind of a viper had we harboured in our midst for all those years? She’d been all warmth and bonhomie, once upon a time. I’d never thought she’d possessed this capacity for blank hatred.
I gave the sealskin to Fionn, first. I didn’t watch as she regained possession of herself; a woman like Fi, hyper-controlled, intensely reserved… she’d want some privacy.
Instead, I advanced on Silise.
‘Tell me there’s more to this than Ravensbrück,’ I said. ‘Eighty years, Sil. An eight-decade grudge because of a mistake? Really?’
‘A mistake?’ she spat. ‘You three took your sweet time showing up, didn’t you? Do you have any idea what I had to bear?’
‘Nope, because apparently communication is beyond you.’
‘Pray you never find out, Tai.’
‘Okay, thanks for the melodramatics, but let’s skip to the relevant part.’
‘Those alven,’ she said. ‘Gutted like goats, both of them. One after another, right in front of me. And I bet you don’t even remember their names.’
‘It’s been eighty fucking years, of course I don’t remember their damned names. But so what? I’m sorry we couldn’t save them, but since when has a little violence rattled you so badly? You’re a ban sith. Death is your business.’
‘Yes,’ she said, hollow-eyed and cold. ‘Yes, it is. I sang them both into death, Tai, and many others, too. So many others.’
I began to get an inkling of what she was talking about. She was ban sith, a banshee, and she’d wound up stuck in a concentration camp for… well, not all that long, I’d thought. It’d taken us only a few weeks to figure out where she was, and get there.
A few weeks.
To Silise, those few weeks must have seemed longer. Much longer. She’d seen, felt, every approaching death; wailed out her heart for every last one.
And in those days, towards the end of the war, we were talking a lot of deaths. Fifty a day. Sixty, eighty… I didn’t even know, but a lot.
‘Shit,’ I said. ‘Sil… I’m sorry. I am.’
For some reason, that only enraged her more. If it weren’t for my thrall still holding her fast, she’d have attacked me. I saw it in her face.
‘Okay, you hate us, I get it,’ I said quickly. ‘But what did you expect? We did everything we could to find you. We did find you. But you’d vanished into the mist like a puff of fucking smoke and it took time, all right? We couldn’t work miracles. We were just a group of tired, worried women doing our damned best. Sorry it wasn’t enough for you.’
‘It’s too late,’ said Silise. ‘No amount of words will ever change what happened to me, and nothing will ever change how I feel about you.’
‘Cool.’ I shrugged.
She stared.
‘What do you want me to do, commit seppuku? From where I’m sitting, my ex-best friend is a malevolent bitch with an entitled fucking attitude. What, you abandon us for a century, follow that up with a charming supervillain routine, and you expect to walk off with the moral high ground? That’s a hard no.’
Brianne stirred. My thrall seemed to have hit her harder, for some reason, but why was I surprised? Silise always was hard to handle.
‘Yes?’ I said to Brianne. ‘Go ahead and speak.’
‘It was me,’ she said, slowly, with some kind of difficulty. ‘Me who found her, me who got her out. If I could do it, why couldn’t you?’
‘Something to do with the fact we thought she was dead, I expect. If you had better information, good for you.’
‘I almost died,’ grated Silise. ‘I felt my own death, Tai. I almost bled out, me, conquered by a fucking SS nobody.’
‘That would hurt my pride a bit, too,’ I nodded.
‘Let me go,’ panted Brianne. ‘You can’t hold us like this forever.’
‘Why the fuck would I want to? Fuck’s sake.’ I risked a look at Fionn; she’d gathered herself, to a point, though there was an empty look in her eyes I didn’t like.
We’d work on that later.
‘Let’s ask the group, shall we?’ I proposed. ‘Phélan, what’s your vote?’
‘Kill them both.’
‘Perfect. It’s neat, it’s tidy, it eliminates all possibility for future trouble. I like it. Fi?’
Fionn looked at the pair of them in silence, for a while. When she spoke, it wasn’t to cast a vote; it was to ask a question. ‘The pearls,’ she said. ‘Mine, and the others’. You wanted them for Silise? So she could breathe down here?’
Brianne nodded her head, once.
‘You love her.’
‘More than anything.’
I rolled my eyes. ‘Right, because she’s so fucking cuddly.’
‘Tai,’ said Fi, on a slight sigh. ‘If you love me, shut up.’
I drew a finger across my lips, indicating total silence going forward. Probably.
‘I’d rather not kill you,’ she said, looking with admirable calm at Brianne, and Silise. ‘You probably deserve death more than Narasel did, but I won’t be the one to make that call. Neither will Tai.’
‘Hey,’ I said. ‘That’s not—’
‘Tai.’
‘Don’t make me thrall you.’
‘Like you’d even think about it.’
She had me there.
I shut up. Again.
‘However,’ she said, more coldly. ‘If you’re discovered to be involved in any more such schemes, I’ll change my mind. And if you dare enslave another selkie ever, ever again, I’ll slit your throats myself.’ Her face hardened. ‘Slowly.’
I shivered, a little. Fi in this mood is scary beyond all reason; I’m glad she’s never turned that kind of icy anger upon me.
Silise wasn’t buying it. ‘So we just slink meekly away like good little girls, and that’s that?’ she snarled. ‘No. My morrough—’
‘Won’t be coming to your rescue, sorry,’ I put in. There had only been a few of them, after all, and they hadn’t been expecting Phélan. Or me. Or the spectre Phélan had picked up in the cells, who, as it turned out, had a bit of a grudge going on of their own.
That took the wind out of Silise — a little. ‘Forget it,’ she said. ‘I’m not backing down. You all deserve to pay.’
‘I’d say we have,’ said Fionn. ‘You’ve led us a merry dance this past week. You’ve hurt several of those we love. You’ve hurt us. And besides all that, our best friend is dead. The Silise we knew is gone forever; all that’s left of her is you.’
Fi said this with such revulsion, such contempt, I wasn’t surprised it shut Silise up.
I also wasn’t surprised to see a renewed depth of hatred in our erstwhile buddy’s eyes. She was proud, like Fi; she wouldn’t like being so graciously spared. She’d rather die.
Fionn absolutely knew that.
‘It’s no good,’ I said to Fi. ‘They aren’t going to just walk away.’
‘I know,’ Fionn answered, with the ghost of a smile. ‘Someone’s going to have to do something about that, wouldn’t you say?’
‘You mean someone’s going to have to punch their lights out?’ I flexed my hands, curled my fingers into fists in sheer anticipation. ‘Delighted to oblige.’
Fi turned and drifted away. ‘Be quick,’ she said. ‘But not too quick.’
I smiled upon Silise and Brianne. It was low, to beat up people I’d already enthralled; they couldn’t fight back, and there wasn’t much honour in that.
Eh, fuck honour. Thes
e two pieces of shit hadn’t a lick of it between them, and I didn’t have the time.
By the time I’d finished relieving my feelings — er, securing our escape — Fi had found us the way out.
‘They won’t wake up for a while,’ I cheerfully reported, catching up with her outside of Brianne’s weird throne room.
‘I trust they’re still breathing,’ said Fi.
‘Confirmed.’
‘For now,’ said Phélan.
Fionn favoured him with a dark look.
He returned this without a blink, and without backing down.
‘He’s got a point,’ I said. ‘You sure you don’t want to round off the week with a little murder, Fi?’
‘Yes.’
‘They did do unspeakable things.’
‘Yes, and so have we, in our time.’
‘Bollocks. None of us ever did anything that messed up.’
‘Debatable.’
Phélan was shaking his head. ‘And if you’re finished debating, I’d like to get back to my life.’
‘Sorry,’ I said guiltily. I hadn’t meant to drag Phélan down here, but that counted for little. ‘You’ve been back in my life for five minutes and already I’ve embroiled you in high drama.’
‘Par for the course.’
‘Hey, at least you made new friends,’ I tried. ‘New, dead friends.’ The spectre who’d taken a shine to him was nowhere in evidence, but I hadn’t really the eyes to follow such things. Maybe he or she and Phélan were inseparable now. Cute.
Phélan looked at me like I was nuts, which felt all kinds of familiar. I smiled.
Brianne’s palace didn’t get noticeably less ornate outside of her inner sanctum, or whatever the hell it was supposed to be. I drifted after Fi as she conducted a search, her selkie-senses presumably engaged for odd patches of water.
Wasn’t too long before she found one.
‘Quick,’ she said tersely, her hair and gown streaming in a spiralling flow of blue water. ‘I’m not sure how long this thing will function.’
I hurried to catch up with her, and took firm hold of her arm. Phélan took the other. ‘Oh,’ I said, as the currents swirled up to claim us and the world began to fall away. ‘Just before I rendered Brianne a senseless heap, I got intel. Mea and co were sent back to—’
The auction hall, I’d been going to say, but a roar of water drowned the rest of my sentence and we were swept away.
We emerged back where we’d started. The old car factory, front and centre, the same decayed, echoing hall we’d stepped into half a lifetime ago. Back when Mea was unaccounted for, Brianne remained a mystery, and Silise was still dead.
‘You didn’t truly want to kill her, did you?’ Fionn said softly as I released her arm.
‘Obviously, I did,’ I said, but it wasn’t the truth and we both knew it. Silise was our best friend, once, and whatever kind of a hell-bitch she’s turned into now, you just don’t run around eviscerating your buddies. I’d like to think even Daix would draw a line somewhere in there.
Maybe.
‘Show’s over,’ said Phélan, and struck up a ghostly light.
The hall was empty, or, nearly so. Almost all of the auction attendees had gone; had left, presumably, once the bidding was over. Most of the witch-lights had gone out, casting the crumbling space into shadows only partly alleviated by Phélan’s light.
Only a small gaggle of people remained. One leant against the far wall of the room; another slumped in a chair at one of the abandoned tables; and a third advanced upon the bedraggled, sodden group of Fionn, Phélan and me, grinning all over her petite little face.
‘Finally,’ she said, and to my immense surprise, tackled me in a ferocious hug.
‘Daix?’ I said dumbly. ‘What the fuck.’ Affection? From Daix?
She shrugged, and moved on to hug the stuffing out of Fionn. ‘I don’t know. You took an age, and once your roommate and all the rest of them showed up and told me just what was going on down there—’
‘Mea’s here?’ I scanned the faces of the few people remaining, or tried to. The shadows were deep, but I was pretty sure neither of them were Mea.
‘Not now. She went home, and yes, I made sure she had suitable escort. She’s safe. They all are.’
‘How did you — what did you do, murder all their buyers?’ I’d expected to have another battle on our hands; Brianne had whisked away our selkie friends before we’d managed to free them, and delivered them straight into the hands of those she’d sold them to.
‘Don’t be an idiot,’ said Daix darkly.
‘So I’m an idiot. Explain it to me.’
‘We are their buyers.’
‘We who?’
Daix gave a piercing whistle, and beckoned. The two mysterious figures separated themselves from the shadows at the back of the hall, and came forward.
I recognised one of them: the naga. She’d out-bid a few people for possession of at least two selkies.
The other was tall and cloaked. Conceivably the same tall, cloaked figure who’d won the bidding for a few more.
‘Who the hell?’ I said. Not my most intelligent utterance, but I was soaking wet, shivering violently with cold, and beginning to be aware of a vast and unconquerable exhaustion.
‘May I introduce Ghian,’ said Daix, tucking her arm through the cloaked person’s. ‘My husband.’
Ghian pushed back the hood of his cloak, and gave us a shy smile. He was a true ancient, I judged, though not because of any outward sign. He had the eternal youth of most of the fae, with light brown skin, a shock of silvery hair, emerald eyes that crinkled with mirth at the corners, and a tiny pair of curled horns. A faun.
I blinked.
‘And Anat,’ she said, repeating this gesture with the naga. ‘My wife.’
Anat inclined her head, a faint smile turning up her red lips. Golden-skinned, dark-haired and glamorous, she had an effortless poise about her; she was probably no youngling, either.
‘…Did I know you were married?’ I said to Daix. ‘Twice?’
‘Probably not.’
‘Wait. Did I know you had that kind of money?’
‘Probably not.’
I felt a gentle touch on my shoulder, and I ceased to be wringing-wet. Fi. ‘It’s a pleasure to meet you,’ said she.
‘Er,’ I said, still shivering. ‘Right. Yes. It is! A pleasure.’
Phélan said nothing. He was hanging back, melding with the shadows behind me. When I turned, he met my gaze in silence.
‘You can go right ahead with being not-here, if you want,’ I said, drifting back to join him. ‘We seem to be done.’
‘Neat ploy there,’ he observed, nodding at Daix and her entourage. ‘It’s what I would have done.’
‘Didn’t occur to me,’ I admitted. ‘Then again, I’m not filthy rich.’ The fact that someone — presumably Brianne — had got away with that much money didn’t sit easily with me, but we’d got the ladies back. That was the part that mattered.
Phélan nodded. And lingered.
‘Is there something?’ I asked after a while. ‘I thought you were in a hurry to get back to your life.’
‘Right,’ said Phélan, after an instant’s hesitation. ‘Yes. See you around, Tai.’ He nodded at me, and faded out. Where he’d been standing, nothing remained but shadow.
‘Wait,’ I said, cursing. I’d almost forgotten that trick of his. ‘Thank you? For your help?’
No reply came. I had no idea if he’d heard me.
I suppressed a sigh, feeling oddly deflated. Weren’t we the conquering heroes? We’d recovered the missing selkies, punished the perpetrators (sort of), and made it home before dawn — and with all our eyes and limbs intact. Mea waited for me at home, already reunited with Coronis. Daix was happily married to two people at once, and Fionn was — sane, more or less, in spite of the events of the night. So what was my problem?
Fi, ever sensitive to atmosphere, was looking steadily at me.
I
plastered a smile onto my face, and joined her. ‘Thanks for the, er.’ I twirled a finger in the air, indicating my now-dry self.
She just nodded. She had a drawn, too-pale look about her, and her eyes, far too huge in her face, held a haunted expression. I slightly revised my optimistic ideas about her sanity.
‘You’re tired,’ I said immediately. ‘I’m tired, too. Why don’t we call it a night?’
She looked around, a faint frown creasing her brow. ‘Can we? Are we — finished?’
‘We’ll probably have to do something about Brianne and Silise, but not right away.’
‘I don’t… know where to go.’
Meaning, she didn’t want to go back to her flat yet, where she would be alone. ‘Happily,’ I said. ‘I know the perfect place.’
A little later, my cellar hideaway was full of people, and cosier than I’d ever seen it.
Part of that was due to the quantity of, well, fire.
Daix had started by kindling a fire in the hearth, which I appreciated. But the cellar was still perishingly cold, and Fionn couldn’t stop shivering. So, Daix had set fire to one of my lampshades as well.
‘Hey,’ I objected, rushing to put it out.
‘Oh, please,’ said Daix, rolling her eyes. ‘These are my fires, okay? Your lamp will be fine.’
Once I paused long enough to really look at it, I saw she was right. It was cheery, controlled blaze, even if it did flicker in weird shades of green, and my charming Art Deco lampshade appeared intact.
So I objected less when she lit up the other lampshade, too, and the only unoccupied chair.
By the time she was finished, I’d come right around. The cellar was rapidly warming up, all its dank darkness dispelled by green-and-golden light, and everybody appeared cheered.
‘Fine, tipping my hat to the demon in the room,’ I said, miming the gesture in Daix’s direction.
‘Hey,’ she scowled. ‘I identify as fae.’
‘Oh, you do.’
‘Keeps the smell of brimstone out of my hair.’
She’d commandeered the sofa, along with her two spouses. Ghian confirmed my initial impression of him, and maintained a shy silence. Anat, though, was voluble enough. Tucked up in my favourite armchair with three cups of hot chocolate all my own, I spent a half-hour or so catching her up on the entire adventure, prompted by regular questions.
Hell and High Water Page 24
