A Crack in Everything

by Ruth Frances Long

  That would be the day.

  She waited a moment longer, staring up into his sculpted face. His eyes stared deeply into hers, unwavering, and for a moment she wondered if he would lean forward and kiss her. It wasn’t far. If she stood up on her toes she’d be within reach. He’d only have to bend his head, curve his long neck.

  His lips parted and before she knew what she was doing, she let her eyelids flutter closed, tilting her face up towards him.

  But he didn’t kiss her. Instead he gave the smallest sigh. ‘I’ve got to go.’

  Shock and shame flooded through her like icy water. She turned away and crossed the street, head down as she aimed for the door and tried to staunch the sting of mortification.

  Jinx’s voice drifted across the sound of traffic and pedestrians. ‘Goodbye, Izzy.’

  She turned around as she stepped up onto the pavement and caught a final glimpse of him out of the corner of her eye. He stood there, without moving, staring at her. Only for another moment before he turned sideways. The sunlight flared behind him, blinding her, and then he was gone.

  Chapter Three

  Old Blood

  Jinx let Izzy go reluctantly. She crossed the road, a little slip of a thing with shoulder-length red hair that, illuminated by the sun, seemed too bright to be entirely natural, darting through the traffic and other people. By the time she reached the far side and glanced over her shoulder, he had already pulled the glamour around him, turning sideways to the sun so as to be invisible to human eyes. The girl paused in the doorway of the music shop, gazing back almost as if she could – well, not see him, but still sense him, perhaps? Could that be it? A touch of old blood, perhaps? It had looked like she could see through his glamour, just for a moment or two. But that wasn’t possible in this day and age when fae and humans rarely mixed anymore, let alone interbred. The old blood had largely died out.

  His instincts stirred, the deep-seated ancient knowledge of hunter and hunted, intuitive and primal. Standing still as a statue, the late afternoon crowds flowed around him. Light broke through a far off gap in the clouds and fell on her. She glowed with it – special. He couldn’t shake the sense that she was special. And that discomfited him more than he could say. Mistle had already noticed her, after all, and it took something mighty special to get him to crawl out of whatever bottle he was currently drowning himself in.

  Even Jinx’s glamour hadn’t worked as fully on her as it should have. Mortal girls blushed and flushed, begging him for attention from the moment he touched them. A fae could always make a human’s blood run hot. It was the way of things.

  But she’d fought it. She’d fought so hard. For all appearances, it had barely affected her at all … well, right up until the end.

  Why hadn’t he taken advantage of that moment? He breathed out slowly, forcing his body to unwind. She’d looked like something else, something much greater than she was. Old blood, old soul, old and powerful. But she wasn’t. She was just a girl.

  Jinx waited until she sighed and turned away. She vanished inside. The sun slid behind the clouds and his world seemed a darker and colder place.

  Coincidence, he told himself. Nothing more.

  But that was a human excuse. The problem was that in the world of synchronisations all the fae inhabited, there was rarely any such thing.

  Unsettled, he headed back home, subtly moulding a path through the crowd of pedestrians who could not see him. A small trick, easily crafted, but one that made life so much easier. Just a case of turning their attention to something – anything – else but him while at the same time making them loath to walk too close to him. Just enough to get them out of his way. From the alleyway it was a short step into the Sídhe-space comprising his home, part of the larger network of Sídhe-ways which made up Dubh Linn. The fae city existed slightly to the left of the human one, overlaid upon it, lurking in the shadows and the forgotten places, the points of intersection where the two converged and all the places stolen away by his people over the centuries. It was grubby and glorious, full of things that never were, the half-dreams of a drink-sodden night. If the gilt had rubbed off it in places, that was only to be expected. Dubh Linn was not for the unwary.

  He was suddenly glad he’d shown her the way out.

  The club was almost deserted. With all the lights on, it lost its mystery and took on a shabby air. A far cry from the hollows of old, the elders were fond of saying, his matriarch Holly most dismissively of all. Jinx didn’t know and didn’t really want to know. Life in a hole in the ground, miles from the arse end of nowhere, didn’t appeal. He’d always lived in the city, as had most of the fae he knew. Times had changed, another favourite quote among his elders, but in this he was glad of it.

  A sound at the open door made him turn. The Magpies stood there, side by side, blocking any chance of escape. They looked alike, dressed as always in pristine black and white, their sharp eyes focused on him and on him alone.

  ‘Well, now, there he is,’ said Mags, smoothing back his glossy black hair from his forehead.

  ‘A hard man to track, our Jinx,’ Pie agreed.

  ‘What do you want?’ he asked, shifting nervously and failing to hide it. ‘Silver’s not here. Club’s not open until later.’ And if Silver found them muscling their way into her domain without permission, she’d have their hides. She was in charge of this hollow.

  Mags cocked his head to one side and smiled that heartless smile. ‘Oh, we’re not after a social life. Not yet, anyway. The council’s meeting for a parlay in the Casino. You’re wanted.’

  He froze, staring at them. It couldn’t be a lie. Not even the Magpies would risk that. The council operated on a level of mutual distrust and loathing – enemies under a painfully fragile truce – that somehow worked to maintain equilibrium between all the different kiths. Their word was law – or as close to an actual law any of his people would obey. So the council, gathered together, demanding his presence specifically… that couldn’t be good. The Magpies served just one member of the council, the Amadán, and Jinx owed no allegiance to him, a fact for which he was eternally grateful. But a summons from the council … What they want? What did Holly want? As matriarch of his kith, she wasn’t the patient kind. It would bend her nose right out of joint if he shamed her in front of the other members. Especially if Brí was there. It was no secret the two of them loathed each other. And no secret that Jinx had been born in Brí’s hollow and handed over to Holly after the fact. Brí had marked him as surely as Holly, giving a geis to ensnare his destiny instead of tattoos and piercings. They always left their mark, the matriarchs.

  He had no choice but to attend. Shame Holly and he might as well hide for the rest of his short and miserable life.

  ‘Well, we wouldn’t want to keep them waiting, would we?’ he said, as if it didn’t bother him at all.

  Mags laughed as Jinx pushed by him, shoulder nudging shoulder, neither of them wanting to give way.

  ‘There’s a good dog,’ Pie murmured with a snide tone as they followed him out of the hollow. At the back of his neck, Jinx felt his hackles rise.

  The Sídhe-ways wound between the human world and the fae one, part of neither and intrinsic to both, in and out of time and space, borrowing minutes here and paying them back whenever. It made travel faster, but it could also mess with time, making an hour seem like a day or a week appear to be no more than an hour. Travellers had to know what they were doing, and even then, Jinx thought as they stepped out of a shimmering heat haze to evening sunlight instead of afternoon, it was too easy to slip up.

  Pie cursed and checked his watch, the hands of which were whirling around to catch up with reality. ‘Come on, we’re late.’

  Jinx didn’t hurry his gait as they headed across the lawns to the small neo-classical house built in the eighteenth century and quickly assimilated by the Aes Sídhe council so that it dwelt in a neutral area of Sídhe space. Stolen, some might say, or borrowed. Snatched out of one world and into another, but
not gone. Not really. It transcended here and there, balanced precariously between the two. The Aes Sídhe loved all things beautiful and deceptive, and it fitted that description. The Casino was only fifty feet square but contained sixteen rooms, and myriad tricks of the eye. Most people translated the name as ‘Little House’ when ‘House of Pleasure’ was nearer the mark. It had never been used for gambling. Well, not for money.

  The three of them passed unseen by the thin trickle of unwary tourists heading down the steps to the reception – who barely noticed them, let alone anything strange about their surroundings – and climbed the steps on the northern side to the enormous weathered oak door. Set inside the panels was the actual door, of a more normal size, and it opened to them at a touch. In the main hall, they crossed the highly decorated floor and Pie opened the central of three polished mahogany doors. The air shimmered like a heat haze. Jinx followed Pie, Mags taking up the rear, and they entered through a portal built into the fabric of the house. But like this place built entirely of illusions, the door led elsewhere. The world shifted subtly, shivering like a dog with a flea on its back, and the Casino changed with it, still resplendent and ornate, but now eternally new, gold instead of gilt and dazzling in its beauty. This Casino, on the fae side of the worlds, glittered and the space stretched to accommodate a banqueting hall far greater than possible in the building outside Dubh Linn.

  But inside, anything was possible.

  Lights hovered beneath a mirrored ceiling, revolving around one another, illuminating the chamber and the table dominating the centre, its surface inlaid with rare woods in intricate, delicate patterns that defied the eye. The three figures sitting around it remained oblivious to the finery of their surroundings. Beside each of them was an empty chair, demarcating the boundaries and distances between them. The largest chair of all, right at the end of the table, was similarly unoccupied.

  The Magpies fell behind Jinx as he entered the room. Silver smiled from her place by the silk-lined wall, her hair iridescent in the moving light, her pale grey eyes darting warily to Holly. Their matriarch didn’t deign to notice Jinx yet. She was feeding scraps of fragrant meat to the fae sitting at her feet. She teased him, dangling the food over him before allowing him to take it with his mouth.

  He was one of the Aes Sídhe too, the higher nobility of the fae, but that didn’t spare him. Stripes of red scored his back from her crop and he shuddered with a mixture of humiliation and despair as she fed him. His hands remained pressed hard on the polished parquet floor. It was hard to feel any sympathy. Most of the Aes Sídhe who’d ever paid Jinx a scrap of attention in the past had mocked and ridiculed him. But that didn’t make it any better to see one of them so broken now. It just reminded him of the things Holly had put him through over the years. She loved to show her power over those she ruled, especially those who crossed her. She wielded her power like a scalpel. Or a cudgel, when it suited her.

  He wondered what this poor sap had done. He didn’t want to know.

  Jinx fought to keep the scowl off his face as he watched, waiting for her to notice him. She was his matriarch. Until she did that, he didn’t exist for anyone else in the room. He used the time to study the other members of the council sitting today. Only three members had come, the three who hated each other more than the rest. Yet still they came, and met. Mainly to show they didn’t fear each other. Even if they did. Jinx suspected it made no more sense to them than it did to him.

  Brí’s riotous red hair was a marked contrast to Holly’s sleek blonde bob. She was shuffling through some papers, looking anywhere but at Jinx. Brí was as beautiful and terrible as any one of the Aes Sídhe, but normally reclusive.

  For a moment she looked so very familiar that something inside him ached and he wanted nothing more than to go to her, to serve her. He’d been born to be her creature, and the blood ran true. His father had died torn between her and the family he should never have even tried to have. And even when Brí had given Jinx to Holly in payment for honour broken, she’d cursed him at the same moment, giving him a geis that made him walk on a knife’s edge in everything he did, one that could see him enslaved or dead in a moment. An obligation. That was the polite term for it. When the Sídhe deigned to be polite.

  Her dog. Always. Even when he wasn’t anymore. The urge was too strong. The blood ran true. That was what happened to any pack animal, any hound. And though Holly owned him, though her charms and sigils bound him more firmly to his Aes Sídhe form, the dog would not be silenced completely. It wanted out. Always.

  The only other person seated at the table was Amadán himself, an aged man in appearance, but nothing so vulnerable in reality. He ruled alone, without a matriarch, and his followers, like the Magpies, were to be feared.

  There was no sign of Donn, naturally, but he never came anymore. Jinx couldn’t remember a time when he had. They kept his place though – wouldn’t dare not to. Donn was the most powerful of them, or so the lore said, the oldest and the most obscure, the dweller in the dark. Jinx had never laid eyes on him. He didn’t know many who had.

  Íde, the matriarch of the mountains, hadn’t come in years. Not since her lover, Wild, died right there, at the table, poisoned by an unknown hand. They hadn’t replaced Wild because Íde would never allow it.

  And the Seanchaí, the Storyteller as she was sometimes known, was no longer part of the council. She wouldn’t leave her hall, content to sit there and dwell on the future and the past, instead of the now. Her seat at the head of the table would never be used again.

  So half the council made up what was left of the council. They governed all the fae in Dubh Linn, of every kind, from the highest to the lowliest, maintaining a fragile peace. Sometimes their hand weighed heavily, and at other times it could not be felt at all.

  They were not friends, not even in convenience. This gathering was about the only thing keeping them from all-out war and though it had served this purpose for more years than he could tell, it still didn’t make the atmosphere any more comfortable. No one held a grudge like one of the Aes Sídhe, the nobility of the fae. Hot or cold, they were still at war, and that meant subterfuge, espionage and a variety of colourful assassination attempts were all on the cards. Of course they were. Wild’s death had shown that. It was the way of the Aes Sídhe, as old as time. But equally that didn’t mean they couldn’t meet and be coolly civil. Well, almost civil. Barbed words and one-upmanship were just more weapons in this most lethal of games.

  ‘Well,’ Holly said at last. ‘It’s about time you got here.’

  Jinx bowed his head respectfully. ‘It’s wonderful to see you, grandmother.’ He even sounded like he meant it.

  Holly wasn’t fooled though. She glowered at him. ‘Probably a good idea to claim that relationship, Jinx.’

  ‘Then again,’ Brí interrupted, her clear, bright voice ringing around the room, ‘maybe not. Given that he’s the child of a traitorous mother.’

  ‘The product of a traitor and an assassin,’ Amadán said with a chuckle. ‘Such a remarkable pedigree for a by-blow.’

  Ah yes, his mother the traitor and his father the killer. It always came back to them. Jinx fought to quell the rush of anger inside him. He hadn’t even known his parents, but lived every day with their legacy and the machinations of the very council he faced now.

  ‘Just so long as he never comes calling at my door.’ Brí poured herself another glass of wine. ‘Blood will out. In more ways than one.’

  They all knew about blood. About the spilling of it anyway.

  Holly growled something like a curse and stood up, kicking her kneeling slave out of her way. He landed heavily, his face smacking noisily off the parquet floor and lay still, trying to stifle sobs.

  They ignored him. It was a kindness that was somewhat unexpected. Clearly his humiliation wasn’t that important to anyone there but Holly.

  She stalked towards Jinx and he almost managed not to flinch as she stopped in front of him and slapped his face so ha
rd it snapped his head to one side and left his skin stinging.

  Jinx raised his head, but kept his eyes carefully averted from hers. Deferential. Servile.

  ‘I have a job for you,’ she said.

  ‘As you command, grandmother.’

  She raised her hand again, flexing he fingers as if to unsheathe claws. ‘Be careful boy, or this could quickly become very tiresome. Blood kin or not, I owe you nothing. My sources tell me an angel fell today, very close to Silver’s hollow. Maybe even right at the door. We want the spark left behind, Jinx. It’ll empower the touchstones for a decade or more. Quick as you can now.’

  A spark? Well, they’d all be hungry for that. A taste of power, a sniff of the divine … that would make every single one of the Aes Sídhe ravenous as wolves. The power that could be drawn from one, the things that could be done, the magic it allowed the skilled and ruthless hand to wield … But that wasn’t up to him. He didn’t have a touchstone or anything like that to put it into. He wouldn’t know what to do with a spark in the first place.

  But they did. Each hollow held a touchstone and they were central to the power of the Aes Sídhe. Even Silver had one, though it wasn’t as powerful as her mother’s. Holly would never allow that. They needed to be fed. That was the problem. Dreams, terror, the million emotions that could be wrung from a human were the most usual energy poured into them – but the light from an angel was the most powerful thing of all.

  ‘No problem.’ He didn’t even try to keep the relief from his voice. And he’d thought she wanted something difficult. If all he had to do was pick up the sorry remains of a fallen angel and—

  The girl had mentioned an angel. Jinx’s breath caught like a lump in his throat. She’d glowed. That was what he’d thought as he left her. She’d glowed and that had snared his attention, but what if that wasn’t all? He hadn’t looked any closer. Had he missed a spark in her? She had seemed normal enough. Apart from that wretched glow. An angel wouldn’t cause that, spark or no spark.