by Rhys Ford
“I’ve never seen one actually fly,” Ryder said quietly, approaching me on silent feet. “Whoever is inside must be very important for them to risk it so close to Pendle. It’s brave of them to pilot that, to risk being plucked out of the sky and eaten.”
He wasn’t wrong. Any type of air travel was dangerous, a far cry from the days before the Merge when giant planes skipped across the atmosphere, whisking people around the world. Now the air was populated with dragons and other airborne creatures with a healthy dislike for sharing the skies, and nothing said “quick meal” like a tube full of meat unable to defend itself from flying fangs and teeth. There were areas and times where a hasty flight was possible—between hatchings and mating seasons—but those were mostly along the interior regions, far away from the coast where dragons dominated the black lava fields separating San Diego County from the rest of SoCal.
“Nah, it’s a safe approach. Coming in from the south side. Probably someone from the inner corridor.” The heat of his body near mine was a welcome shift away from the cold shivers running over my skin. “In a couple of months, though, they’d have to go down the 8. Rocs’ hatching season makes them territorial near Helix. One of those will take down a chopper just because it got too close to Junior.”
The scattered clouds lingering on the horizon flickered with lightning, and my imagination worked dark shapes into their roiling forms—echoes of serpentine lines from somewhere in my buried memories. There were enormous cloud dragons who spent most of their lives slinking through the upper atmosphere, feeding on storms of white krill. Like Ryder and the helicopter, I’d never actually seen one, but I’d come across the shattered remains of what I thought was a cloud dragon’s skeleton, fallen from the skies following a battle or perhaps just dying of old age. The story was they were the size of mountain ranges, coming to rest in the high peaks of the Himalayas once a year or so. No one knew their exact numbers, but the elfin confirmed their existence, telling tales of Sidhe and Unsidhe warriors losing their lives to the hungry crystalline hatchling they stumbled upon while climbing the Underhill’s ice-swaddled mountain ranges.
“Here.” Ryder nudged my shoulder with his, holding out a waxed paper cup with a sipping lid. “I brought you coffee.”
I hadn’t even noticed he’d left.
It’d taken me nearly an hour to get Dempsey down to Medical and another ten minutes for the emergency room staff to hear me out. The only thing that saved the nursing staff from me shooting someone was my neighbor and onetime long-held crush Dalia Yamada, who spotted me down the corridor where she’d been handling an intake. In the years since we met, she’d gone from a nursing student to a full-fledged resident, stopping briefly at being a triage nurse. She’d stitched me up more times than I could remember and took care of my cat, Newt, when I was called out on a run.
Now she took care of my… mostly father, pulling Dempsey into a maze of surgical arenas and testing rooms, leaving me to drift alone and in the dark in the waiting room outside of a door where my past lay dying and my future stood beside me.
The coffee was hot, a rich shot of bitter chocolate and cream followed by a punch of whiskey, a hit to my empty gut, and I smiled despite the shitty circumstances and took another sip to taste the smoky charcoal whisper on my tongue again.
“This isn’t hospital coffee,” I said softly, meeting Ryder’s dark green eyes in our reflections on the wall of windows overlooking the city’s southern face. “Doesn’t taste like cat piss.”
“What’s the use of being a High Lord if I can’t get a decent cup of coffee.” Ryder saluted me back, his smile glimmering among the lights sparkling beyond the glass. Behind him, the people in Dempsey’s life sat in sparse numbers, pulled together by calls gone out from the Post. Ryder glanced over his shoulder as if taking attendance on the useless vigil. “Where’s Jonas?”
“On a run in El Centro. His husband, Angus, said he’s handed it over to someone else.” I sipped again, now wishing it was more whiskey than coffee, but I was glad for it anyway. “He and Razor are heading back now.”
Neither one of us mentioned we hoped they made it in time.
Sparky was sitting with Dalia’s boyfriend, Jason, a tattoo artist and master mechanic I’d known for a long time. They were an odd pair, her long-boned, desert-weathered, lanky frame next to his muscular, wide-shouldered, hunched-over body. Still, they were two peas in a pod, both engineers masquerading as grease monkeys, and in Jason’s case, a fantastic artist. He’d slid into my inner circle, hooking up with Dalia and getting in tight with Sparky. The old girl needed someone who’d take over her business, letting her retire and move closer to the city, but we all knew that would never happen. Jason would set up a satellite shop in downtown somewhere, and Sparky would burrow down into the desert nest she’d made, working on monstrous vehicles for Stalkers to use on dangerous runs while renting out storage bays for their shit.
Until the day one of us found her up there, dried up by the sun and staring at the sky.
I had to get my mind off my macabre thoughts. I’d been surrounded by death since the first moment I took up a gun, swearing to sculpt away the filth of the world for a few pennies and a shiny Stalker badge. Death was a constant in our world, yet I was being tackled by its touch this time, dragged down by the weight of cancers eating through Dempsey’s body. It was inevitable. We all died. We all gave up our last breaths to the hooded man with his sharp scythe. None of this was a surprise.
So then why the hell did it hurt so much?
“I might need more coffee to get through this,” I muttered under my breath. “Never thought I’d be such a coward.”
Ryder studied me for a moment. I knew this because not only could I feel his stare rake over my face, his glittering green eyes reflecting in the glass were pretty obvious about it. If there was one thing he was not made for, it was stealthy surveillance.
“Is that how you see yourself? As a coward? For feeling upset and unsettled because the man you think of as your father is dying?” He approximated as good of a derisive snort as he could, but I could hear him force it. His tone gentled when his shoulder pressed into mine, the push of his weight against my skin calming some of the gnawing in my stomach. “I’ve never had anyone close to me die like this, but looking at everyone else in here, I’d say you’re doing fine.”
We stood shoulder to shoulder in silence for a long time. Or at least long enough for the night to steal more of the sky away from the city as lights were doused and the understreets began to glow brighter than the upper levels. There were shimmering waves punching through the gaps between the upper levels’ roadways and concrete mesas, vibrant and insistent signs of the lives going on in the labyrinth of streets and alleys below.
It was hard to look at my mirrored self. I was still always shocked to find an elfin face staring back at me, and even worse, one that looked more like my true father every time I saw it. I was still gritty from the run, a bit of dust ghosting my black hair, but Ryder was, as usual, pristine in his long Sidhe Lord jacket, metallic emerald threads woven into the hunter green fabric to match his too-damned-cunning-for-his-own-good eyes. Every one of his golden hairs lay perfect against his skull, pulled back into a queue, probably to draw attention to his handsome face with its high elfin cheekbones and sweeping, pointed ears. Humans found him irresistibly attractive and charming, lulled by a melodic voice trained by centuries-old politicians and other lords.
To the elfin he was okay. Unfortunately for me, some perverse biological time bomb went off when we met, and I wanted to crawl over his whole body and leave my mark on every inch of his ivory-sheen skin. If I were honest, I’d admit it wasn’t just that we were drawn to each other on some primal level. He’d grown on me, worked under my skin like a spill of ink from a tattoo machine’s needle, but I wasn’t ready to confess to that. Not yet. Maybe not ever.
I didn’t like being told what to do, how to feel, but damned if Ryder wasn’t making it hard for me to think.
“I know.” Suddenly the coffee was flat in my mouth, sawdust with a burnt-charcoal chaser. “Thanks for that. There’s just nothing for them to do. Dempsey’s done. He doesn’t want to… try anymore. So, now we wait.”
“You going in to see him?” Another glance over his shoulder at the people gathered behind us pulled a sigh from his somber mouth. “Or is he keeping everyone out?”
“They just wanted some time to make him comfortable. I think they’ve run out of tests to do on him.” I couldn’t imagine what they could do to make the carved-in pain lessen on Dempsey’s craggy gray-skinned face, but I hoped it would be enough. He’d nearly broken my hand when he woke up, racked with a rolling anguish tightening his bones. “Doc said he’d let me know when—”
It had been a long time since the sound of a door opening made my muscles clench so hard that my bones cracked. The memories I had of being in Tanic’s cage were clouded by pain and starvation, living in a stew of bruises and iron hammered through my body. I still carried the mark of my father’s House on my back—a cicatrix in the shape of a black-pearl dragon’s wings, the ghost of its body traveling down my spine. The keloids were extensive and horrifically beautiful to someone who didn’t know the elfin healed without scarring for the most part and that every bit of ridged and mottled skin was put there by shanks and bars of a metal so poisonous to the Unsidhe that Tanic wore gloves to handle it as he worked them into my body.
Back then a door opening meant I would be forced to live through another seemingly endless nightmare, nothing but a meat puppet made to dance on Tanic’s strings. This time the double doors swinging apart brought a different horror, the grim face of a human doctor emotionally distancing himself from his dying patient with every step he took toward me.
“Mister Gracen?” the doctor called out, his hand on one of the doors to keep it open. He scanned the waiting room, eyes flowing over Jonas’s extended family and Sparky gathered around a low table overflowing with paper cups and candy wrappers. The doctor finally found me, his eyes widening as if he’d forgotten I was elfin. Or maybe he hadn’t and finally spotted Ryder the Great and Gorgeous to All Humans standing next to me. “Ah, um… you can come in now.”
Sparky stood up, and then Sarah, the Post Mistress, followed, both of them shuffling through the maze of people and chairs, but a shake of the doc’s head stopped them in their tracks.
“Just Gracen, please. Mister Dempsey is tired, and he’s not always able to maintain consciousness.” He met my gaze, twisting his mouth into a thin line. “You’ve got five minutes to visit with him, and you have to—”
“I’ll take however fucking long I want,” I growled back, baring my canines. “The only one kicking me out of that room’s going to be Dempsey.”
I knew the way, but I followed the doctor down the hall, forcing my feet to take each step. Dempsey’s room was at the end of the hall—private but close enough to a nurse’s station so they could get to him if he needed anything. I didn’t want to think about how much this all was going to cost. I hated that it even flickered through my brain, but that’s how he’d raised me. “Don’t pay for someone to put you together when you’ve got duct tape, a needle, and some thread, boy,” he’d said more times than I could count. “Nothing flows quicker in and out for a Stalker like money and blood, so don’t be handing it out to some quack with a handful of aspirin and a stethoscope.”
There wasn’t enough duct tape for this. Never would be.
I don’t know when the doctor slipped away, but it wasn’t like I was expecting him to stab me in the back with a knife he kept hidden on him. He whispered away, leaving me behind with the smell of death and antiseptic clinging to my face.
Dempsey was awake, his eyes hooded and glazed. His once brawny body was now stripped of its flannel-and-denim armor. There were machines chirruping along in some sort of dissonant song, keeping track of every time his heart beat or his lungs drew in air. For all I knew, there was one marking each time he peed or shit. He hated being here lying in that bed, flat on his back and waiting for Death to come knocking on his door. I could see it in his eyes and the set of his stubbled jaw when he stared at me, drugged to the gills so he wouldn’t feel any pain but not deep enough for him to sleep through his final breath.
I probably hated it as much as he did, but nothing was ever going to make me turn my back on him and walk out that door. The hospital was going to have to pry me out of the chair, and since I came in armed, I could take out anyone who tried.
“Tell me you’ve got a cheeseburger on you, boy,” he coughed out at me, a bit of spittle sticking to his lower lip. “Bastards are telling me only liquids for now.”
“I can get Ryder to get you something to eat. Fuck them,” I replied, holding out my nearly full coffee. “Here. This is liquid. They can’t bitch about that.”
I had to shove a straw through the sippy hole and hold the cup steady until he could get his fingers around it, but once Dempsey took a hit from the so-not-hot coffee, he sighed happily. Clearing his throat, he struggled to bring up his other hand. He tangled his elbow in the plastic lines taped to his arm but eventually fought his way clear of them. I didn’t move to help him. Hadn’t planned on it because he still had one hand free and I was within slapping range. Instead I grabbed the plump upholstered armchair from the corner and dragged it closer to the bed.
The view from the hospital room was spectacular—a breathtaking sweep of San Diego’s skyline with the ocean stretching out from its shores, the water glittering from the city lights, and the moons rising swollen and full, kissing the edges of the rolling waves. After dropping a quick thanks to Ryder and a plea to get Dempsey a Double-Double with extra-crispy fries, I closed my eyes and took a moment to finally breathe.
“Don’t fall asleep there, asshole,” Dempsey croaked, breaking through the singsong bell tones of his pet machines. “I’ve got a couple of things to tell you before I kick the bucket.”
“Old man, I don’t want….” I ground my teeth together, rubbing at the grit and dried tears tangling my lashes. My tongue tasted more of sulfur and chickenshit than whiskey and coffee, with a faint hint of resignation and fear ghosting around the edges. “Save your strength. Ryder’s going to grab you that burger, and you’re going to have to eat it, because I sure as hell ain’t going to chew it up like a momma bird and spit it in your mouth.”
His eyes glistened, either from the moonlight or maybe tears. I wasn’t sure. Still, I was damned certain I was out of swinging distance just in case he was done with my sassing him and had rallied enough strength to clock me. Dempsey might have been dying, but he was still the same mean, irredeemable asshole who raised me.
“Just… shut up for a few minutes. I need to talk,” he grumbled back, stopping for a moment to suck on the straw again and wheeze through another blast of oxygen. “There’s shit you’ve got to know. And I’ve been holding this off for as long as I could because, well, it didn’t seem like it mattered, but now… what with everything going on, you’re going to have to deal with some crap, and you should know about it.”
“You took a mortgage out on the property in Lakeside and I’m going to have to pay it off,” I responded flatly. It would be just like Dempsey to saddle me with a debt I wouldn’t be able to carve down for years, even if I took every damned contract the Post threw up on the boards. “Because if you did, I’m just going to sell that fucking place to the chicken farmers down the road. That damned place was paid off—”
“Seriously, I miss the fucking days when all you did was grunt and bite people,” Dempsey shot back. He struggled to sit up more, but the pillows under his head kept him in place. “Help me here, then shut up. This is important.”
I got the pillows arranged around his head and shoulders, earning myself a slap across my head as thanks. Flopping back down in the chair, I waited, refusing to r
ub at the smarting sting on my temple and the tip of my ear. I had to sit through him slurping up more of the whiskey and coffee before he put the cup down on the bed, gripping it tightly as he wiggled back into the plumped pillows.
Dempsey rolled his lips and held them there for a long second. Then he finally said, “There wasn’t ever any poker game.”
My first thought was his mind was going and maybe giving him whiskey on top of the painkillers had been a terrible mistake, but he shook his head when I reached for the call button gizmo dangling from a cord at the side of the bed.
“Hear me out,” he continued. “I mean, that story I told you. Shit, the one I told everybody about winning you in that poker game? It wasn’t real. None of it. There wasn’t any guard who’d taken you out. I didn’t palm any cards to cheat at the hand. It was all made up. Every single last bit of it.
“And before you start in on me, I’m going to tell you the truth and why I lied,” Dempsey cut me off before I even said a word. “See, you were a contract. A big one. I didn’t know when I took it that it was… you. It didn’t come through the Post, and that was fine by me because the percentage they would have cut out of my take would have been huge, and, well, the Post would have asked too many questions. Questions no one at the other end of that contract wanted answered.”
The slurping began again, and his hand trembled when he lifted the cup to his mouth. I reached for it before his fingers gave out and caught it before the dregs could spill onto the bed. I was trying to process what he was saying, but none of it made sense. Sliding the cup over onto the side table next to the bed, I asked, “I don’t understand. What the hell are you talking about?”
