by Rhys Ford
“I was hired on a shadow-market contract to get a chimera out of Tanic’s workroom. It lined up right for me. I was in Belfast and the Unsidhe Court wasn’t much more than three days from where I’d been staying. Ireland’s all Underhill now, but it was a good risk. The money was… I wouldn’t have had to work another day in my life. All I had to do was get the chimera to Elfhaine and I’d be set forever.” Dempsey shook his head, doing another lip roll. “The contact I had was a go-between, but he said the monster was small. About the size of a kid. What I didn’t expect was for it to be an actual fucking kid.”
His words eventually worked their way in, and I was left with a gaping hole in my being. Everything I’d known about how Dempsey found me, cheated at cards for me, was as solid as the clouds sweeping over the seas. The world was crashing around me, but I couldn’t find anything to hold on to. There wasn’t a single thing to grab at to steady myself—nothing but the old man dying in front of me.
“See, I brought a kennel with me, one of those folding ones to shove this creature into, and by the time I could get it hidden nearby, Tanic himself walked through the hallway and into that damned workroom. That’s when I heard him call you Ciméara. Shit, that’s when I finally figured out you were there, tucked into a cage beneath one of the worktables, matted hair, covered in fleas, and rebar sticking out of your back.” Dempsey looked away, his attention fixed on the city outside the wall of windows behind me. “All I could do not to throw up, watching him do things to you, waiting for him to finish so I could hit my contract and get paid. It took him hours. I don’t even know how long it was, but I can tell you I swallowed more vomit than air that night, and by the time he left, you weren’t nothing more than a bag of flesh, whimpering when I got near.”
“When did you decide you weren’t going to fill the contract?” My murmur seemed to startle him, maybe because I knew him all too well, and he smiled at my question.
“Takes a long time to travel across oceans and continents now. And it wasn’t like I could take you on a train. You were wild and injured, crazed out of your mind. By the time I got to Canada and bought that old truck of mine, you’d bitten me at least six times already. Almost lost a finger when I tried to feed you that first time. Stunk so much the boat captain thought I was smuggling ambergris into the States.” He chuckled as if my childhood was a romp I’d skipped through and not the stuff nightmares were scared of. “Drove the first two days toward the border with you in the back of the truck. Had a cage big enough, and, well, a tarp covered most of it. Figured the rain would at least wash off some of the stink, but then it began to snow.”
I didn’t remember any of what Dempsey was telling me, but then again, my memory of that time was spotty. Tanic used me for his blood magics, stripping away pieces of my skin and flesh to power his spells and craft the ainmhi dubh he hunted with. I needed to throw up, to rid myself of the bitterness pooling in my stomach, but I couldn’t find my legs, or at least that’s what it felt like.
“Pulled up into one of those roadside motels with bungalows. I needed to get you inside because I knew jack shit about elfin, and for all I knew, you could freeze to death. Figured I’d take a stab at bathing you at least, because I swear I could smell you through the glass….” Dempsey swallowed, his Adam’s apple working up and down his throat. “I got you in the bathroom and got my first good look at you. Then you kicked the shit out of me before I could even get you in the tub. You were ready to do anything you could to give as good as you got. You had balls. More than I gave you credit for. No way I was going to turn you over to those cat bastards in Elfhaine.
“You had too much fight, too much will to live. I sat and watched everything that fucking bastard did to you, and Pele knows how many of those times you’d already lived through, and you came out of the other side of it, bleeding and broken but ready to claw your way through whoever touched you,” he said, his voice thickening with emotion. “He made you. Or at least that’s what I understood. I was told you weren’t anything more than a golem, like one of his blasted black dogs, and with about as much intelligence as a sea cucumber, but that’s not what I saw. Not then. Not now. You were clever. Under all that hair, behind all of those fangs, you were going to survive, and if you got the chance, you’d kill whoever hurt you. That’s when I knew.”
“And not like the Post could ding you for not doing the contract,” I said through the waves of numbness hitting me.
“Nope, not a fucking thing they could do.” He nodded. “Thing was, I was kind of caught between a rock and a hard place. Couldn’t go back to Ireland, not with the Wild Hunt Master looking for his pet chimera, so I headed back to SoCal, figuring I could keep you away from the elfin. Not like they left their sparkling white mountain. Scraped the blood and dirt off of you and taught you how to be a Stalker. Only thing I knew. Only thing I figured would keep you alive.”
“Then Ryder came down to San Diego.” It was the shift in my world Dempsey hadn’t planned on. The arrival of the Sidhe into the city changed the dynamics, and the distant threat of Elfhaine was suddenly on his front porch. “That’s why you kept hounding me to do runs. To keep out of the city.”
“Figured that was best. I’d already gotten sick, and, well, we had a good thing going. Me out in Lakeside and you bringing in your bounty to clean up there. Things went to shit when the Post saddled you with that pointy-eared bastard. About lost my fucking mind when that asshole took you up to Elfhaine. I figured things would go to hell in a handbasket and we’d have to blow town but… then I got sick.” He turned his head, meeting my gaze head-on. “Someone up there wanted you. Someone up there knew about you. Knew Tanic had you. Now, I don’t know what they were going to do with you, but my guess is it wasn’t going to be good. Ryder seems to be on your side, but I don’t know if that’s a lie and he’s playing you or he’s ignorant of what happened. Either way, I’ve done my best by you, and, well, it’s time for you to step up and understand what’s out there.”
“Did Jonas know? Sparky?” I don’t know why I wanted to hear him say they were as clueless as I was about all of the lies he’d told me, but I wasn’t surprised to see him nod. The pain of it went deep, scoring down into my belly and guts. “Why? I mean, why did you even feel like you needed to make this shit up?”
“Because I needed to protect you. Or at least that’s what it came down to later. In the beginning? And I’m going to be honest with you, boy, because, well, you deserve it. The fewer people who knew I’d taken you out from under Tanic’s nose, the better,” Dempsey said with a shrug. “There’s an outstanding contract on you, and I more than a few times thought about turning you in because it’s been a shit road trying to haul you up. Right now, lying in this bed, I’m glad I didn’t, but it was close a few times. Especially when I was down hard.”
“You’d have handed me over to….” I didn’t finish it. I was a bounty Dempsey didn’t finish, a contract remainder he’d been dragging around for decades, and the people I counted as my family knew about it. “So, what? I was like a piggy bank for everyone? Something someone could eventually smash open and cash in if things looked dire?”
“At the start of it, yes.” He sugarcoated nothing, stabbing me deep with his bluntness. “At some point I began thinking of you as my apprentice, and then, well… my son. I did the best I could with you. And now that’s all I can give you. Because mark my words, boy. You best be watching the horizon for ainmhi dubh, because the devil’s coming for you and he’s coming hard.”
Three
LIGHTNING AND thunder rolled over the Presidio, the skies thick with dark, churning clouds glittering with sharp white electrical spikes. A heavy humidity settled over San Diego, pressing its weight down on everything until it was nearly impossible to breathe.
Or that could have just been me standing at the edge of a circle of mourners, waiting for either the gods to reach down and smite us for mourning a man some say was impossible to love or the damned priest to finish droning on about Dempsey as if he were
some kind of angel come down from the Heavens to right every wrong set upon this Earth.
He clearly did not know the man, but apparently redemption and soul whitewashing were big in the Catholic Church.
People shuffled around me, their soft murmurs grating along my bled-raw heart. Ryder stood to my right, an odd glimmering blond comfort, and I was thankful for his silence. I couldn’t absorb any more drops of false condolences and prayers for Dempsey. I was still reeling from the last few hours I’d spent with him, sorting through my emotions and the false truths I’d been told. It wasn’t until the babble of harsh Latin stopped that I realized everyone was looking at me, expectant and impatient.
Oh yeah.
The brick.
I held it in my hands, too tightly probably, because I couldn’t seem to open my fingers to place it in the outstretched palms of the Post’s honor guard. The curved wall behind him was mostly hollows, but there were a few similar white bricks set into its winding arc through the Presidio’s northern garden. It was a peaceful slice of greenery and flowers, with sweeping willow trees providing shade for water ponds and comfortable benches no one ever sat on.
The wall itself was a marble river winding down the gentle slope, its thick face punctuated with rectangular hollows meant to fit the square stone boxes the crematorium provided to the Post for the rare Stalker who died someplace their body could be recovered. It was the final resting place for very few, usually those without families or, worse, abandoned by all but other Stalkers. We were a curious, antisocial bunch, but no one could understand the destruction and gore we lived in like another one of our kind, so it was only fitting we would gather together in death as we did in life.
One such hollow was waiting for Dempsey, a brass plate already gleaming above the gaping wound in the marble river, a metallic black sleeve fixed into the space to lock down the brick once it was put into place. All I had to do was give the brick to the man standing in front of me.
It was just so hard.
I felt like I needed to tell the man in his dress blues what he needed to know before I could hand him my father. Important things like he hated for his eggs to be runny. Over hard was his preference, but he could never flip them, so he usually ate them scrambled. While he liked a good cigar, any type of stogie would do, and he’d pitch a fit if someone splurged on an expensive box but squirrel them away to smoke on a special occasion. His whiskey had to be neat, and his beer needed to be ice cold. The telenovela he liked came on at three in the afternoon, and he didn’t need subtitles because he understood Spanish. The guard was going to have to make sure Dempsey cut his toenails or they would grow long and sharp enough to cut through his socks.
And most importantly, he always wanted to know what happened after every run. Mostly so he could criticize and tell someone how he would’ve done better.
“It’s time, Chimera.” Ryder’s hand was at the small of my back, his long fingers brushing over my spine. “It’s time to let go.”
My knuckles hurt, and I choked on the anger boiling in my guts. I wanted to scream at him that I didn’t get enough time. I never would. And the people who were around me who should’ve been a comfort were nothing more than a pack of liars who kept my own secrets from me, secrets I should’ve known in order to protect Dempsey. I was lost and drowning in a sea of emotions, my hands aching from gripping the brick too tightly and for too long.
“Goodbye, Dad,” I whispered as I brought the brick up to my lips to give Dempsey the one and only kiss I’d ever given him. “May the road rise up to meet you and may you always hit what you aim for.”
I placed the brick in the guard’s hands, and somehow the absence of its weight made me feel heavier. Brushing my fingers down my left thigh reminded me I didn’t have any of my guns, their cold hard comfort left locked up in my truck. The world was unsteady beneath my feet, and I couldn’t find anything to anchor myself with. Not until I found Ryder’s hand once again on my back, a spot of warmth in the blizzard raging inside of me.
“Let us bow our heads in prayer as we say goodbye to our brother, Michael Gray Dempsey, who, while he leaves this mortal coil, remains in the hearts of his family and friends.” The priest’s voice rang out, fighting to compete with the toll of the Presidio’s often-silent bells. “Thus we consign Michael’s soul to the hands of his God and the Heavens, where he shall rejoice in His eternal glory.”
It was almost impossible to hear anything over the bells, but I heard Jonas well enough when he leaned over to whisper into my ear, “I’m sorry I wasn’t here, son. Dempsey—”
“Don’t you fucking call me son,” I growled back. “Not after all these years. Not after all those lies.”
JONAS CAUGHT up with me in the parking lot and grabbed my arm while I tried to get my key into the truck’s door lock. I might have been stronger than most humans, but no elfin musculature was going to be a match for Jonas’s pure brawn and mass. He flipped me around and had me up against the old Chevy’s side before I could protest, my keys flying from my fingers and landing someplace near my feet. I didn’t look for them. Not when Jonas stood nearly half a head again taller than me, his husky body blocking out most of the sun.
His dark eyes were filled with fury and confusion, and the small lizard part of my primal brain was happy to see it there because at least he knew how I felt. Especially now.
His deep complexion was made even darker silhouetted against the flashes of lightning still roiling through the clouds—an ebony statue looming over me with the same oppressive heat and humidity clinging to the air. There was no gentleness in his features, or what I could see of them. His breath was hot on my face, the words on his tongue thick with spit as he let them fly, splattering me with his anger.
“What the hell was that? You think you’re the only one that misses the man?” Jonas stepped into my space, trying to crowd me against the truck. “You think—”
“Dempsey told me I was a contract.” My words struck, cold jabs to Jonas’s fury. “And all of you told him to complete it. To drop me off at Elfhaine. Even when he told you it didn’t feel right to him. That his gut told him something was wrong. You. Sarah. Sparky, who found out afterward… who cut the damned iron out of my bones… and still said toss him to the fucking assholes on the white mountain. Because he’s not one of us. Not human.”
I’d held in everything, every damning secret Dempsey whispered to me in the rising tide of his death, the rattle in his throat clattering and clacking in time to the machines struggling to keep him alive for just one more moment. I’d listened, growing numb with each peeled-back layer of my past, exposing the callous man who’d taken me from Tanic’s lair in Ireland to flee across the American wildlands with every intention of throwing me to the wolves once he reached California.
Except he hadn’t, though every person in his life hammered at him to turn me over.
Including the man looming over me, a man I considered as much my uncle as Dempsey was my father.
There were people gathered behind Jonas, faces I knew in my soul, or at least I thought I had. If Dempsey’s death left me unanchored, the truth of how he’d fought his closest friends to keep me left me adrift and hurting. Ryder was lost in the small crowd, and I didn’t—couldn’t—seek him out. Finding an elfin face among the all-too-human sea would have undone me, unraveled what little grip I had on my forged humanity.
“Deny it. Tell me how Sarah didn’t leave him because he wouldn’t give me up and then tried to block my Stalker license until he pressed the Post to issue me one. Or how about you coming in that night, with me mostly there and you offering me chocolate with one hand while whispering to Dempsey that you’d take me on north if he couldn’t do it himself.” My shoulders began to ache, the scars dug into my skin itching and crawling beneath my shirt. The storm had nothing on me. I couldn’t stop talking, couldn’t stop plunging my verbal knives into Jonas. My voice cracked, but I ground out, “Even Najiri. So go on, tell me how Dempsey lied to me. Tell me I’m
wrong and he just decided to spend the last hour of his life fucking with my world.”
There were tiny bits of gravel beneath my boots, rubbing against the lot’s asphalt pour when I shifted my weight. The world past Jonas’s shoulders blurred, an indistinct mass of people I was no longer sure about. I thought letting go of Dalia hurt, but it was nothing compared to the weighted blows of Dempsey’s final words before he slipped off to the nothingness, his nicotine-stained gnarled fingers going lax in my grip.
Nothing sang in the trees lining the lot except for a sharp breeze picking through the leaves with a tight, discordant whistle. Someone behind Jonas said my name, but he jerked his hand out, keeping them back. I couldn’t even tell who spoke, but no one drew closer, probably held back by the storm brewing in front of them, the one bubbling across the skies fading into the background.
I searched Jonas’s face for even the slightest denial of Dempsey’s damning words, but I saw nothing there but resignation. Even his ire slipped from his eyes, the fire slinking off under the regret ebbing in. His gleaming deep brown skin grew slack over his bones, and Jonas faded in on himself, his mouth diving down into a grimace.
“It wasn’t… you’ve got to understand, Kai,” Jonas began softly, his hands dropping to his sides. He still loomed. He was too large of a man to do otherwise, but he was smaller now, pushed back by what I’d said. “Things were different. For us, it was a long, hard time fighting… we lost so many of our own. And then Dempsey showed back up with—gods, I don’t even know how to explain it to you. How damned hard it was to deal with having what was one of your worst nightmares dropped into your lap and be told by one of your best friends—”
“It was like he’d brought home a black dog and told us all, ‘Look at the puppy I found. I’m going to keep it,’” Sarah cut in, edging in around Jonas. “That’s what it felt like. We were still standing knee-deep in death and blood, and there he was, asking us to keep quiet about having an elfin in our circles. He chose to keep you over marrying me. For what it’s worth, I spent years resenting you because you took away the life I thought I was going to have, only to find out you were a better man than he’d ever been. I still… it’s not easy to change, Kai. It’s hard to let that kind of hatreds go.”
