What Man Defies

by Clara Coulson

  He considered our words for a minute, then said, “What about this Kennedy guy? You think Abarta will be able to wring information out of him?”

  Ah. There it is. Yet another issue I don’t want to dwell on.

  I leaned against the wall next to the now cleared corkboard and fiddled with the torn sleeve of my dirty coat. “I can’t say for sure. Human minds are versatile, but that same trait makes them fragile. The well wasn’t meant to be used by a human, and it’s pretty clear having all that information shoved inside his head at one time scrambled Kennedy’s mind. It probably caused significant brain damage, overloaded his memory center. If he’s not a vegetable for the rest of his life, I’ll be surprised.”

  I bit my lip and flipped through the possibilities for Abarta’s next move. “That being said, Abarta will try to extract the knowledge from Kennedy’s mind. If he’s not careful, he’ll destroy that mind entirely, and all the information will fall to dust with it. If he is careful, and this is Abarta, so we can assume he’s smart enough to try a light touch, he may be able to slowly siphon information out of Kennedy’s mind using magic. I can’t think of a method that wouldn’t be incredibly time consuming, but Abarta is far older and more adept at magic than me. It could be weeks. It could be months. But I don’t think he’ll leave this stalemate empty handed. I think he’ll get something from Kennedy.”

  “But we’ve stalled him.” Saoirse rapped her knuckles against the wall. “And stripped him of an easy victory for the second time.”

  “We have, and we did.”

  “Considering what you all were up against,” O’Shea said, leaning back in his chair, “I think that’s cause enough for celebration. I’ll give you four rounds of drinks on the house. If for nothing but to help you all relax. You look like you’re ready to jump out of your skins.”

  “Do you blame us?” Granger muttered.

  “No. But scared cops make for twitchy trigger fingers, and we don’t need more of those roaming around. So I’m not going to let you out of my bar until you lose some of the tension in your shoulders.”

  “Hey,” I said, “I’m not a cop—”

  “You damn well are”—O’Shea gave me his look—“so shut up and accept the beer.”

  I raised my hands. “Okay.”

  “Before you all get sloshed though, I want to tell you what I figured out while you were off in fairyland.” He opened one of his desk drawers and pulled out a stack of papers covered in handwritten notes. “There was the lingering question of what all the victims had in common, considering that they were a variety of ages, genders, ethnicities, etc.”

  “We figured out they needed to be human in order to open the vault locks,” Saoirse said.

  “Yes, that’s what you said. But I think it was more than that.” He dropped the stack on his desk with a thump. “I did a little digging into the family histories of all the people who were abducted, and I found an interesting trend: a lot of them were distantly related.”

  I crossed my arms. “I wondered about that. Amy Newsome and Rebecca Shriver were cousins. I didn’t have time to pursue the idea though, since Christie got snatched.”

  “Ah, but you see, they aren’t all directly related, at least not as far back as I can trace.” He patted the top of the stack and smirked, proud of his achievement. “However, every single one of them has an ancestor within the last three generations who possesses a particular trait.”

  “What?” I asked.

  O’Shea leaned forward and said, “They’re Irish.”

  The revelation dropped down from the ceiling and whacked me on the head. “Oh, of course.”

  “I don’t get it,” Saoirse said. “What does being Irish have to do with anything? I’m Irish.”

  “Exactly.” I rubbed my temples. “Here’s the thing. There are a number of places on Earth where the veil between worlds is thinner than it is elsewhere, which makes it easier for things to cross over from the Otherworld. It just so happens that one of the largest thin spots overlaps with a big portion of Ireland. That’s why the fae, who cross over to Earth far more frequently than beings from most other realms, are so prevalent in Irish mythology. Because they used Ireland as a crossing point for centuries, since it required less energy to exit there than elsewhere. When the vault was built around the Well of Knowledge centuries ago, the person who designed it used not just humans in general, but Irish people, as the basis for the bloodline requirement.”

  Saoirse’s eyes lit up. “And Kinsale has a large Irish community.”

  “Now you’re getting it,” I replied. “Abarta didn’t just target Kinsale for the well plot merely out of proximity. He did so because we conveniently have a large population with Irish roots.”

  “So the banshee,” Mallory said, “was working from a list of people of Irish descent?”

  “Yes, and the fact we now know that is important.” I tapped the corkboard beside my shoulder.

  “Because we can make a list of everyone in Kinsale who fits the criteria to open the vault locks,” Granger guessed, “meaning we can immediately tell if Abarta is targeting them again in the future?”

  “Because it stands to reason,” Mallory branched off, “that if Abarta is seeking other things that were locked away at around the same time as the well, possibly by the same ‘architect,’ he might find himself needing Irish people again.”

  “Precisely,” I said.

  Saoirse pushed away from the wall. “I’ll make the list a priority down at the precinct for the admin staff. Spin it as an initiative to protect people especially vulnerable to paranormal crime. I’ll have to tell Captain Drew key things about Abarta to convince him to give me the green light, but he’s smart enough to know he shouldn’t go digging for more. He usually defers to my judgment on things like this.”

  “On the note of Captain Drew,” Mallory said slowly, “what are we going to tell him about Kennedy?”

  Saoirse bit the inside of her cheek. “Nothing.”

  “Nothing?” Granger’s eyes widened. “You think we can get away with that?”

  “No one knows Kennedy accompanied us to Tír na nÓg. No one at the precinct saw him tag along on our walk to the warehouse. It’ll seem like he just up and vanished. Which is better than the alternative.” She absently fiddled with a button on her coat. “If his parents find out what really happened to him, they might throw a fit that could destabilize the entire PD. They have enough money and influence to crush us, with ease. They’ll probably revoke their donation anyway now that he’s gone, but as long as they don’t suspect we had anything to do with his disappearance, they’ll only complain so much. Demand we start an investigation. Which is easy to put on the books.”

  Mallory massaged her neck, uncomfortable. “You think it’ll stay quiet forever?”

  “Nothing stays quiet forever,” Saoirse said. “But we can’t let the department take a blow like this at such a critical time in the reconstruction period. We have to try to hold the truth back until we’re in a better financial position, until we can weather a scandal, until we no longer have to rely on the goodwill of rich bastards. If the PD folds now, a lot of people are going to suffer.”

  Silence enveloped the room. Along with a creeping sense of dread.

  Eventually, O’Shea sighed and said, “Okay, it’s well past time for those beers. Get out of my damn office before you sad sacks paint the whole thing depression blue.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Warm beer sloshed in my gut on the walk home. It was nice to have my harried thoughts blurred at the edges, just enough to take my mind off my mounting problems. Calling my day “long” would be a ludicrous understatement, and if a racing mind kept me up all night, my fatigue was going to compound into sleep deprivation. I knew from my experience with overtime on the force that I didn’t work well with too little sleep, and if I wanted to be ready for Abarta’s next play, I’d need all my wits about me. My wits and more luck than you could fit into a cement mixer.

&nbs
p; Home appeared when I turned the corner, and I trudged down the sidewalk through drifts of ankle-deep snow as the sky started spitting new flakes. I hoped the deep winter period would let up soon, but I didn’t have much hope. Mab was watching me. I knew it. I could almost feel her, an expansive, oppressive presence hanging over Kinsale, like the city was nothing but a snow globe and she was peering through the glass at the tiny people on its streets.

  I rued whatever quality I possessed that had made her pluck me from obscurity and situate me firmly on her game board. And regardless of her reasons, I loathed the gall of such an action, after what the Unseelie Court had done to me when I was nothing but a small, defenseless child. I had been perfectly content as an exile from the court. I had hated the fae since I was six years old, and I hadn’t wanted anything to do with them, not even when the purge threw a shadow over my life on Earth.

  After all, they’d proven they didn’t want me. Why the hell would I want to join them?

  Now Mab wasn’t giving me a choice about whether to serve the Unseelie. She’d roped me into her shadow war against Abarta, and to refuse to play the game would be to betray my own morals. Worse, even if I did try to quit the game, Abarta’s vendetta against me would eventually come back to bite me in the ass. Which gave me even more incentive to play by Mab’s rules.

  The whole ploy was a flawless example of faerie manipulation, and if I didn’t dislike Mab so much, I might’ve actually found it impressive. As it was, I just wanted to hang up a dartboard with Mab’s face on it and practice my aim.

  I clambered over the last pile of snow blocking the way to my shop and finally made it to the front door. A minute later, I was inside, reactivating my wards. The corner of that stupid ad poster had come unstuck from the window again. I kept forgetting to add a new strip of tape. But tonight, half drunk and barely able to stand upright thanks to about a dozen back-to-back near-death experiences, I didn’t even bother to slap the corner into place before I stomped across the room. The tape could wait until tomorrow afternoon, when I woke up from my virtual coma after sleeping for twelve hours straight. And so help me god, if anyone bothers me for any reason tomorrow…

  I stepped on a ward that wasn’t mine.

  And before I could utter the eternal words of panic—Oh, shit!—my house exploded.

  Fire rushed toward me from every direction. A vortex of bright orange flames. There was no time to raise a shield. No time to run. No time to do anything but close my eyes and pray the fire was so hot it killed me instantly.

  To my surprise, it didn’t kill me at all.

  I stood there with my eyes screwed shut for almost half a minute, whimpering as I waited for the end. But it never came. I felt a nearby heat, but it didn’t scorch my skin. I heard a loud rumble of fire, but it didn’t strike me down. So with more foreboding than I’d ever experienced in my entire life, heart pounding, pulse racing, fear jabbing my gut harder than the Spear of Lugh, I wrenched my eyes open to observe the world around me.

  Fire, fire everywhere. But none of it was moving. The raging flames hung suspended in the air, as if time itself had stopped. A snapshot of an inferno. Eating all the stuff I’d spent so much time collecting from the stretches. Towels and sheets and pillows rendered kindling. Flashlights and radios melted down. A hundred and one odds and ends warping under the heat. The glass display windows and the door had blown outward, a field of glass twinkling in the air. The ceiling above me had blown upward, wooden boards splintered and smoking, a canopy of fiery debris.

  There were only three things in the house that weren’t on fire: me, my checkout counter, and Tom Tildrum, who was sitting on top of the checkout counter.

  Tildrum was clapping. “Queen Mab sends her regards, Vincent Whelan, and congratulates you for securing the Well of Knowledge and hindering Abarta’s plans once more.” The pupils of his green cat eyes were narrowed to slits, and the smile on his face, sharp as a blade, was anything but friendly. He seemed at once amused and annoyed, and I couldn’t tell why on either front. “She admits, however, that she is mildly irritated you allowed the one called Nolan Kennedy to fall into Abarta’s hands alive.”

  Here I was, standing inside a frozen explosion that had just destroyed my house, and the King of the Cats had the audacity to shame me for my decision not to let Kennedy drown. I was petrified at the idea of burning to death, tipsy enough to fall into the fire if I bent too far to the left or right, so tired I could’ve slept through another nuke blast in Raleigh, and still sore from nearly being rent in two by Agatha Bismarck and having my shredded insides rearranged, first by a faerie and then by a witch. And this fucker decided to insult me? Like I was some new hire who’d shown up to work twenty minutes late?

  A droning voice in the back of my mind reminded me I was dealing with an ancient force of great and terrible power, but my drunken mouth didn’t give a crap. “If Mab wants the job done ‘right,’ she can do it herself. I went above and beyond to stop Abarta from gaining access to that goddamn well, and it nearly cost me and everyone who helped me the ultimate price. Not to mention that two dozen innocent people got slaughtered by the vault, some of them before I even knew what was happening, and Mab did absolutely nothing to stop it. The least you could’ve done was drop in and give me a lead before the Sluagh started popping up. But no, you have to be as opaque as a three-foot-thick wall of—”

  Tildrum hissed like a cat, loudly, and my liquid courage withered away.

  When he was sure I was too scared to continue, Tildrum said, “As fascinating as your inebriated rant is, Vincent Whelan, nothing you say will change what has already come to pass. Your arguments against Queen Mab’s decisions hold no water because you still lack full understanding of the overarching situation in which you and Abarta both play crucial roles. And before you ask, because I know you will, no, I am still not allowed to tell you what that situation is. Not entirely.”

  He slid off the countertop, smooth as silk, and padded toward me. I wanted to back away, but there was nowhere to go except into the fire. Tildrum was shorter and skinnier than me, but he didn’t need to be large to be imposing. The way he moved, fluid like a cat. The way those eyes bored into your own, as if they could physically dig into your brain if they tried a little harder. The hands that appeared human but seemed to have claws when they hung in your peripheral vision. The little flash of sharp teeth when he smiled in a way that spoke of inconceivable atrocities, some he had committed, some he had allowed to come to pass.

  Before me stood a god of disaster and mayhem, a predator that had lived in the forests of Tír na nÓg when the realm was new and wild, long before the Tuatha Dé Danann were even born. This remnant of that primal state slinked to a stop less than six inches away from me, tilted his head side to side, as if deciding whether to devour me alive, and spoke quietly, “I have been permitted to tell you this, and only this, a this that if you repeat to anyone will bring the rage of winter down upon your head. And the this is such:

  “The sídhe face a new foe whose existence defies all logic, and whose reach defies all laws. While the queens work tirelessly to defeat this foe, they must delegate lesser tasks to those worthy of undertaking them. And they must do so in a way that does not alert this new foe, so that this new foe does not seek to make dangerous allies. Abarta is a problem for Mab to ignore because to acknowledge him would make him a bigger problem.”

  Tildrum raised a finger—the claw was no longer hidden by his glamour—and slashed it across my neck, drawing a thin line of blood. “My role in this machine of many moving parts is to keep all those assigned to these tasks on track. I am the taskmaster in my queen’s stead, you must understand. That is why I interfered in your favor when the Bismarck woman injured you with iron, and why I will interfere again in the future if I deem it necessary to the overall success of your mission. However, that does not mean I will tolerate your childish reluctance to fulfill your role, simply because it is not a role you prefer.”

  I was quivering now,
hard enough for him to see, but I managed to find something that resembled my voice. “These tasks you’ve volunteered me for could kill me. And everyone I know.”

  Tildrum drew even closer to my face, our noses nearly touching. He spoke like the crackle of distant thunder: “And if Queen Mab fails her tasks because you are unwilling to complete yours, then everyone on Earth will die, and everyone in Tír na nÓg, and everyone in realms beyond uncountable. Manannán warned you once that you must put your homeland above the preservation of this pastiche you call a life. I am warning you a second time. There will not be a third.”

  He pushed me back, hard enough to throw me into the fire, but caught me by the shirt as the frozen flames brushed the back of my neck and reeled me in again. “Queen Mab assigned you this task known as Abarta because it suited you, Vincent Whelan. Because it appealed to your human notions of compassion and justice. Appealed to your history as a detective. Out of all the players Queen Mab needed to pull into this game to prepare a winning strategy, she favored you the most and slotted you into a role in which you comfortably fit. Do not take that kindness for granted.”

  Tildrum didn’t need to add a threat. The total destruction of my existence was implied.

  “Tell me,” he said, “have my answers satisfied your curiosity?”

  Somehow, I managed to nod.

  “Then I will take my leave. And you will continue to act as you have in regards to Abarta’s plots.” In the blink of an eye, he was back on the counter. “As a side note, I am aware your thieving friend smuggled Nuada’s arm back to Earth, and that you chose to gift it to the human witch who lost an arm in battle. My queen has informed me she will allow the witch to retain possession of the arm, so long as she remains among your party and assists you in counteracting Abarta’s efforts to awaken the Tuatha Dé Danann. I leave it to you to inform her of this condition of the loan.”