Storm's Heart

by Thea Harrison

  “Hmm, pretty,” said the harpy. She looked up at Niniane. “If you don’t want him, can I have him?”

  A confused tangle of emotion roared up inside, gladness mingled with a bitter disappointment. She said, “Aryal, don’t hurt Duncan.”

  “I wasn’t going to hurt him,” said Aryal. “Not unless he asked for it.” The Vampyre’s eyes had started to glow red, and his fangs had distended as he strained against Aryal’s powerful grip. The harpy tapped his temple with one curved talon. “That’s even prettier. Dude, you ever taste harpy’s blood? We’re rarer than shit so I’m betting not. Want to go out for a drink sometime? If you put out, I might let you have a sip.”

  “Aryal!” Niniane exclaimed.

  “What!” The gorgeous winged nightmare blinked at her. “You know how hard it is to get a date in New York.”

  The Vampyre looked so confused and aggressive, but at the mention of harpy’s blood, a startled avarice crept into his bloodred gaze.

  Niniane started to laugh. She couldn’t help it. “Duncan is a very nice guy. Would you let him go, please?”

  “But I’m not done sexually harassing him.” Niniane dipped her chin and glowered at the harpy, who scowled back and grumbled, “Oh all right.”

  As soon as Aryal’s grip around his throat loosened, Duncan sprang to his feet and lunged to take a stance between Niniane and the harpy. It was a brave, stupid and totally useless gesture of protection.

  Aryal blurred into a Wyr’s shapeshift as she rose to her feet as well. In her more human form, she was a six-foot-tall powerful woman, armed and dressed in leather, with an angular face, lean muscles, tangled black hair and stormy gray eyes. She said to the Vampyre, “You wanna hug it out?” She feinted forward and Duncan jerked back a step. “Yeah, I didn’t think so.” She bounced once on the balls of her feet and gave Niniane a feral grin. “Hey, pip-squeak.”

  Aryal looked so happy to see her, the pleasure on her odd gaunt face so sincere and uncomplicated, for the moment Niniane’s disappointment that Aryal wasn’t Tiago took a backseat and she was simply glad to see her friend.

  Niniane put a hand on the Vampyre’s shoulder and pressed down, silently telling him to stay put as she told him, “You know, Duncan, I have seen this harpy drunk on her ass more than a few times. Once she even—”

  “Don’t say it,” Aryal warned.

  Niniane grinned. “She even let me put pink lipstick on her and her hair up in pigtails.”

  “Traitorous bitch!” Aryal said. “You carp-carp-carped. ‘Lemme just see what you look like, Aryal. C’mon, Aryal, I won’t tell anybody. Five minutes and you can wipe it right off.’ And now what do you do? You tell every freaking body you can every chance you get.”

  The Vampyre relaxed only slightly at their banter. He asked, “How did she look?”

  “You know how she looked just now when she smacked you down?” Niniane asked.

  Duncan’s eyes narrowed. “Yeah.”

  Niniane started to giggle. “She looked a lot scarier.”

  The harpy rolled her eyes. Still laughing, Niniane launched forward. Aryal grabbed her and hauled her in for a tight hug. “How are you doing, pip-squeak? I was awfully proud of how you kicked the shit out of those three Dark Fae assholes, but you gave us quite a scare when you disappeared like that.”

  She pressed her cheek against Aryal’s leather vest and her laughter dissolved into a harsh sob. “I’ve had a rotten day.”

  “Whoa,” said Aryal. She sounded alarmed. She patted Niniane’s back. “You know how tears freak me out. Who do I have to kill to make it better?”

  “I don’t KNOOOOOW.”

  Aryal said over her head to the Vampyre, “Go guard the inside of the patio door. Pretend you can’t hear us.”

  “Count me deaf and gone,” said Duncan.

  Aryal’s hug turned bone-bruising. Niniane tilted her head back. She gasped, “Let go already. I’m not going to cry anymore.”

  Wide, worried storm gray eyes looked down at her. “You sure?”

  She nodded. Aryal released her and she sucked in a deep breath. She turned to walk back to the patio table and sit. The harpy threw herself into a nearby chair and sprawled, arms crossed and long legs stretched, her piercing gaze fixed on Niniane’s face.

  Niniane said, “What are you doing in Chicago?”

  “Rune and I are here to investigate those fuckers who attacked you and Tiago,” Aryal told her. “Tiago called us just after you got back to the hotel and saw the doctor. We blew in a bit ago. We were barred from coming up through the hotel to see you. Then we heard from a Chicago PD chick that you and Tiago had separated. Rune went to find Tiago. I took the alternative route to see you.” The harpy tilted her head. “Now it’s your turn. Why isn’t Tiago still with you, and why are you having a rotten day?”

  “Oh gods, where to start.” Niniane put her elbows on the table and hid her face in her hands.

  “Wait a minute, you were awfully spry just now when you jumped at me,” Aryal said suddenly. “What happened to your knife wound?”

  “Carling,” Niniane said. Speaking between her hands, she told Aryal everything that had occurred since she and Tiago had returned to the hotel. Well, minus the blisteringly personal stuff. She hugged that to herself, to be examined in private later when she had the chance. “I went into shock when I found out that it had been Wyr and not Dark Fae in the attack. I’ve been dealing with old bad memories anyway, and to hear about it in the meeting—well, that wasn’t a good way to find out.”

  “I bet,” Aryal said. The harpy sat forward to put her elbows on the table as well. “Tiago should have told you.”

  Niniane sighed. “He tried to tell me he got busy and forgot. I just wasn’t able to hear it at the time, so I sent him away. Now I can’t get ahold of him to apologize.”

  “He’s used to giving orders. He’s not used to sharing.” Aryal narrowed her eyes on the plate of cheese, crackers and fruit. She raised her eyebrows at Niniane who gestured for her to help herself. Aryal popped a piece of cheese into her mouth.

  “It didn’t make any sense,” Niniane said. “Why would you attack me?”

  “We wouldn’t,” Aryal said. “That’s ridiculous. We love you.”

  There was the reality she knew. Niniane whispered, “Yeah.”

  The harpy patted her back. “And forgive me for being brutally practical in saying this, but setting aside personal feelings, it’s to our advantage to have you safely on the throne. That would give the Wyr an alliance with the Dark Fae for the first time since your father was alive.”

  Niniane nodded. “Of course. It was one of the reasons why the Wyr attack came as such a shock.”

  “I’ll tell you what’s even more ridiculous,” Aryal said. “Those Wyr attacked when Tiago was with you.”

  Niniane looked up quickly. “I hadn’t gotten that far in my thinking,” she said. “They wouldn’t have if they had known who he was, because it was a death sentence for them.”

  “Exactly. Do you know any Wyr in his right mind who would go up against Dr. Death?” Aryal said. “And nobody but Dragos and the sentinels—well, and of course Pia—knew that Tiago had come out to look for you.”

  Niniane said, “So those Wyr were either working on their own, or they were working for someone else. Carling brought up the possibility that there might be a schism in the Wyr we didn’t know about.”

  “Okay,” said Aryal. The harpy hooked the heel of one boot on a rung of her chair. “Maybe there’s a supersecret anti-faerie Wyr faction out there that we haven’t heard of before. Maybe they don’t want us in an alliance with the Dark Fae.”

  Niniane watched the harpy’s face. Aryal was in charge of Wyr investigations. “It doesn’t make sense that you would know nothing about a faction like that,” Niniane said. “Factions tend to grumble, write manifestos, protest, maybe blow things up. They often claim responsibility for things too.”

  Aryal ate a grape.

  “So what makes the most sen
se?” said Niniane. “Somebody wants me dead, and if they succeed in killing me, great. But if they fail, the next best thing is to drive a wedge between me and my strongest allies, because that would leave me vulnerable for when they try again. And they do want me dead, because if they just wanted to drive a wedge between me and the Wyr, there are lots of ways to try to achieve that that are much less potentially dangerous than an assassination attempt.”

  “Ding ding ding. Give the girl a gold star.” Aryal grinned and popped another piece of cheese into her mouth.

  Niniane told the harpy about Geril’s flirtation on the flight to Chicago and at dinner out at the Greek restaurant.

  “I was wondering what happened to you for those couple of hours before the alley attack,” Aryal said.

  “Again, there was no reason that I can think of for Geril to kill me if he was acting on his own,” Niniane said. “We didn’t know each other. There was no direct line of inheritance between us, and his connection to the throne was too diffuse for him to make a play for the crown himself. I may not be all that connected with the ins and outs of current Dark Fae politics, but I know that much.”

  “Right now, I have just one question,” said Aryal. “Are we looking for one entity—one person, conspiracy, or faction trying to kill you—or two?”

  Since before 1842, the Cook County morgue in Illinois had conducted an official inquiry on every questionable death in the county, which included the city of Chicago. Shortly before the Great Chicago Fire had occurred in 1871, the morgue opened its Office of Magickal Inquiry to investigate every questionable death relating to matters of Power or the Elder Races. In 1976 when Cook County established its Office of the Medical Examiner, the Office of Magickal Inquiry was placed under the Medical Examiner’s purview. The outdated term “Magickal” was dropped and the office given the simpler name of Paranormal Affairs.

  The intent behind the move had been to modernize this section of the morgue and rename it with a view to greater accuracy and political neutrality, but in this attempt the county officials failed miserably. Many of the Elder Races, including several humans with Power, were offended by the name. Paranormal was a term that indicated something was outside the realm of normal experience or scientific explanation. Opponents to the term argued that it was racism and bigotry of the highest order.

  Or so Dr. Seremela Telemar informed Tiago and Rune in her History of the Morgue 101 as she led them to the Paranormal Affairs section. Telemar was a medusa of late middle age, as evidenced by the length of her head of snakes that dangled down to her shapely hips. Medusas guarded their young ferociously. Tiago had personally never seen one of their children, but he knew young adult medusas had slim, short snakes that covered their heads like curly undulating afros.

  A medusa’s head snakes were semi-independent sentient creatures that shared a symbiotic relationship with their host, which included an exchange of sensory input and thought impressions. A medusa never had her back turned if one of her snakes was looking at you. For the most part the head snakes remained as peaceful as their medusa, but if a medusa felt frightened or threatened, they had a venomous bite that could paralyze most creatures and might, if the snakes were induced to multiple bites, cause death. When Telemar reached old age, which for her species would be between four hundred and fifty and five hundred years, her snakes would reach her feet or perhaps trail a little on the ground. For now, she bound them back gently in a loose headcloth like they were dreads.

  The medical examiner’s skin was a pale, creamy green that was several shades lighter than her snakes, and it had a faint iridescent pattern that resembled snakeskin. Her blue-green eyes had vertical slits for pupils and a nictitating membrane that flicked into place as she looked over her shoulder at the sentinels who followed close on her heels.

  “Like other morgues across the country, my department doesn’t usually see anything near the kind of traffic that the main morgue does,” she said. Several of her head snakes looked around her waist and over her shoulder at them, tasting the air curiously with their flickering tongues. “It is a significant event for us to get six bodies back-to-back. The main morgue conducts around fifty-two hundred autopsies annually, and usually I spend half my time working with them. We’re lucky if we see two hundred.”

  “Lucky?” Rune quirked a sleek tawny eyebrow at her. The gryphon was working his male charm on the medusa. She was, like every other female Tiago had seen around Rune, falling for it hook, line and sinker.

  “Well. Perhaps ‘lucky’ is not the right word, but you get what I mean.” She widened her eyes and smiled at Rune as she tucked a few of her snakes behind one shoulder. She pushed through a pair of swing doors and Rune and Tiago followed. “As you no doubt are probably aware, most Elder deaths are not even reported to a medical examiner’s office. Many of them happen in Other lands and/or they are processed and investigated by their own demesnes. The deaths that tend to come to me are human ones that involve a Power exchange or discharge of some kind. This has been a real kick in the pants in more than one way.”

  “I can imagine,” Rune said. “Politically as well as medically.”

  “Quite,” said the medusa.

  When Rune and Tiago had arrived at the morgue, the medusa had given Tiago one startled look that took in the implied threat flowing like silver mercury through his massive physique, his dark glasses and the banked aggression stamped in the strong bones of his face. Then her nictitating membranes had snapped shut and she kept herself busy looking anywhere else but at him.

  Tiago was down with that. The gryphon and the doctor’s conversation was more blah-fucking-blah as far as he was concerned. The First stood in an easy stance, his thumbs hooked into the back pockets of his jeans as he chatted with Telemar.

  Tiago let Rune run interference. It left Tiago’s mind free to pick over the pieces of the puzzle they had to date, and to grapple with what raged inside of him. He had a precarious hold on the beast. It would not take much to send him over the edge again, and he could tell that Rune knew it. Rune kept his body language casual and relaxed, but somehow he managed to always stay between Tiago and other people.

  At least Aryal had texted Rune to let him know that she was with Niniane, and that Niniane was okay. But Aryal was known for not being girl-savvy. What did okay mean to the harpy—not coughing up arterial blood? Hell, by that standard, Tiago had left her okay. He had known she would be physically safe under Carling’s protection. Mentally and emotionally were two different matters.

  The need to get back to Niniane gnawed at him. Every minute he spent away was agony. He kept having something like a PTS-fucking-D reaction every time he saw in his mind’s eye how she had flinched from him and turned lifeless as a little doll, and that had happened goddamn hours ago.

  It helped to have an agenda. He had stuff he had wanted to accomplish. He had corralled Cameron Rogers and they had gone to the nearest police station to look at the reports that had been filed on the two attacks. He hadn’t gleaned much more than he already knew, but it always paid to be thorough. He had taken a gander at Clarence/JoBe’s rap sheet, which was mostly full of petty shit involving break-ins and robberies. Tiago had memorized his address. After he had parted ways with Rogers, he had gone to check out Clarence’s crib and then gone to find Clarence himself.

  Checking out the morgue was the last thing on his list. He wanted to see the bodies for himself and get what information he could from them. Then Tiago was going to head back to the hotel, and nothing, not the freak-show Vampyres, not the snippy-ass Dark Fae delegation, not even Niniane herself, was going to keep him from having a word with her, or maybe even three or four.

  The room they had stepped into was utilitarian, full of steel and industrial-painted concrete, with tall cabinets in one corner that had to contain magical tools, for the cabinets gleamed with Power. There were no windows, of course. Tiago had been in many a morgue before—he had even been in the original Cook County morgue once—and he automatically
loathed the place. The autopsies on the bodies of the three Dark Fae males had been completed. They were stored in drawers awaiting release for cremation or burial. The three Wyr were still being processed. Their bodies were laid out on tables and half covered in sheets.

  Tiago prowled around the tables, looking at the males, his lip curled. That one—yeah, he remembered that one. The Wyr had died of blunt-force trauma to the head. The trauma had been Tiago’s boot heel coming down on him. One side of the Wyr’s face was now concave, but there was enough left of the other side to get an idea of what he had looked like.

  Rune was still ostensibly chatting up Dr. Medusa What’s-hername, but he said telepathically to Tiago, You recognize any of these gentlemen, T-bird?

  Just from the attack, Tiago said. You?

  Nope. They’re all new to me.

  One advantage to conducting an autopsy by magical means was that the examiner could use disinfecting spells instead of chemicals. The decision was a tricky one for the examiner to make, as it depended on the forces involved in a death, since spells could disrupt any lingering Power that might provide vital clues, or they could even have a toxic effect when certain kinds of differing Powers combined.

  These jokers were not that complicated. Death-by-stupidity was the cause as far as Tiago was concerned. Who the fuck didn’t know by now that Niniane had been sheltered and was supported by the Lord of the Wyr?

  The most important thing about these autopsies was how any information might aid in the investigation of the attacks. Dr. Medusa What’s-her-name had foresight. She knew the Wyr would have a keen interest in the proceedings and had kept the autopsy procedure clean of any scent contaminants. Tiago found a box of gloves on a corner cabinet and snapped on a pair. He caught movement out of the corner of his eye as the medusa took a sudden step forward. Even her head snakes looked alarmed. Rune put a restraining hand on the medical examiner’s arm, smiling down into her anxious face.