A Dream of Stone & Shadow

by Marjorie M. Liu

  “Ghost. A big hulking scary ghost.”

  “Scary.”

  “Terrifying. My knees knock when you’re around.”

  “I’ll take that as a compliment.”

  “Yeah? You like that?”

  “I do,” he said, and then, softer, “Take care of yourself, Agatha. I wish I could be here to watch over you. Maybe…maybe I’ll get another chance one day. Just to say hello.”

  It was the wistfulness in his voice that got her; the sense that he had already given up. Anger threaded through her gut; pure stubbornness. “I don’t live on maybes and hellos, Charlie. Not this time, anyway. I’m making my own future.”

  “Agatha.”

  “No. Where’s your body?”

  “She’ll kill you.”

  “She can try. And if you won’t tell me, then I’ll do it the hard way. You forget who I work for. I’ll figure it out.”

  “Agatha.”

  “Charlie.” Her voice broke on his name, and inside her heart she begged, she screamed, she threw her thoughts at him and raged. She refused to let him suffer; she refused it with all the power of her heart. Because it was wrong, because he deserved better, because she deserved better than to be given just a taste of some perfect dream, some possible mysterious future, and then have it snatched away like so much candy in the fist of a bully. No, absolutely not. She would not allow it. Short time together, maybe—but that was enough to know she wanted more, that she would do anything to get it, to see him safe. Killing himself, murder—that was torture, plain and simple. And he had endured it for her and Emma. The least she could do was return the favor.

  Charlie touched her face, drawing near, wrapping his spirit so tight around her own that she thought she must be a caterpillar and he was the cocoon, and together they would merge and transform into something beautiful.

  “Somewhere in Glasgow,” he whispered. “But that’s a fool talking. I’m crazy. Don’t try.”

  “Then don’t leave me.”

  “Agatha,” he said again, and she felt his soul press upon her mouth, infusing her with radiance and fire.

  And then he pulled away, far away, and she cried out, hands scrabbling the air.

  She could not hold him.

  When he opened his eyes the witch was there. She sat in the sand beside Charlie, cross-legged, covered in blood. His blood. The knife lay across her thighs.

  “I should cut off your head now and be done with it,” she said. “You are such a pain.”

  “You extended my death,” he realized.

  “I did,” she said. “I was overcome by a moment of weakness. I saw the lengths you went to secure your own exit, and could not help but admire your dedication. Death by repeated gouging and impalement? And on your brothers, too. That is rather sick.”

  “Just a bit,” Charlie admitted. “You didn’t give me much choice.”

  “I suppose not. I also underestimated you. Which is why your brothers will be sleeping outside your prison from now on.”

  Charlie looked. She had already moved them. They crouched just beyond the circle in the sand. Their bodies were still stained from his blood.

  The witch smiled. “Love makes such fools of men, human or not.”

  Charlie said nothing. Love had not made a fool of him. Love had given him everything. He had never imagined it could be that way, that he could be sustained and strengthened by his love for another, his compassion. But yes, truth. He loved. And if he never was able to see Agatha or Emma again, he had that much, the knowledge and the memory.

  Agatha is coming for you.

  She would never find him. Glasgow was a big city, and he had been deliberately vague. He could not lie to her—not when he wanted so badly to tell her the absolute truth—but he also could not risk her life for his. It wasn’t worth it.

  “You’re thinking of that woman,” said the witch. “I can see it on your face.”

  Charlie sighed. “What do you want?”

  “So much,” said the witch. “I’m having another guest tonight.”

  “Is this also someone who sees you as an asset?”

  “Yes,” she said. “And I want to impress her. I was thinking steak. Fresh meat.” She raised her knife and turned it this way and that, so the light rolled off parts of the dirty blade.

  “Don’t get your hopes up,” said the witch, raising her knife. “I’m not going to kill you.”

  “If only,” Charlie said, and then braced himself. He wished he could fight. He hated being so helpless.

  She cut him, deep.

  If it had not been for Emma, Aggie might have remained sitting in that meadow until the cows came home; the sky went dark, and birds forgot to sing. As it was, she remembered that there was someone who needed her, someone whose pain was greater than hers, and she put her heart aside to return to the rental car and the little girl within.

  “I saw him go,” Emma said. Her eyes were red. Aggie wished she had a doll to give her. Something to hold on to. She ended up giving herself, sitting down on the seat beside her, wrapping a gentle arm around the child’s narrow shoulders.

  “I’m all alone,” Emma said. “My mommy is gone.”

  And she began crying again, this time in earnest. Aggie wanted to march inside the house and put a bullet in Mrs. Kreer’s head. Her son, too. Maybe more than bullets for him. She had not seem him in the flesh yet, but she remembered the hunger in his eyes and knew. Just…knew. It made her sick.

  “Don’t worry,” Aggie promised. “I’ll take care of you.”

  And she would, somehow. She did not know what that meant, only that saving one life was not enough, not if that life got dumped by the wayside and handed over to the system. Emma might be crying now, but that was good, healthy. The kid still had strength, still had…something more inside her that was not yet broken. Despite everything, despite all the hardship, Emma was still strong. Aggie could see that in her eyes.

  And another reason to fight: Charlie loved the child. Aggie had to do right by him, too.

  In the distance, she heard sirens. As Aggie and Emma waited for the police, the little girl continued to weep. The big girl wept, too, but she tried to keep it on the inside, where her heart was howling.

  Amiri slunk out of the house. Aggie saw him and pushed his clothes out the back door, distracted Emma while he silently changed shape some distance away, and put them on. The little girl twitched when she saw his human face and body, but Amiri shocked Agatha by rolling up his sleeve and showing off his arm, which suddenly rippled golden with fur.

  “I am a fairy tale,” he said gently, and Emma nodded with grave understanding.

  She got another surprise when the police arrived—the FBI was with them. In fact, there was more of a federal presence than a local one, and Aggie thought, Roland, you are a devil.

  The cars stopped, surrounding them. Men and women piled out. Emma leaned against Aggie. An agent approached; a tall, spare man. Blond hair, nice face. She recognized him; he had been at the crash scene only yesterday—a lifetime distant. He was going to see a lot of very bad things in the next five minutes; the probabilities were quite high.

  He glanced at Emma and Amiri, and then to Aggie said, “Ms. Durand? I’m Agent Warwick, with the FBI. Maybe you remember me. We got a tip that, uh, you had a tip. Related to the David Yarns case you assisted on yesterday afternoon.”

  “Assisted” was generous; Dirk & Steele’s help on high profile cases like Yarns’s was usually billed as a tip-off or private-citizen intervention—which didn’t bother anyone at the agency, just as long as the job got done. The feds and local PD could have all the ego bolstering they wanted.

  “Yes,” she said to Warwick. “That’s correct. We came out here on an investigation and discovered evidence of an abuse in progress. We…took the child out of the situation and, given what we saw, secured the perpetrators—a woman named Mrs. Kreer and her son, Andrew.”

  “And this is the child?” Warwick asked carefully. Emma gave him a lo
ng, level look that was far too old for her years.

  “They kept me in the basement,” she said. “They made me do things.”

  Which was really all the testimony anyone should need. Warwick swallowed hard, nodding. Aggie told him where to find Emma’s kidnappers—as well as Quinn—and after a swift, “Stay here. We’ll need to take your statements,” Warwick jogged off and began coordinating their approach into the house.

  “Efficient,” Amiri commented. He sat in the grass, arms braced on his knees.

  “Yeah,” Aggie said. “Although I know who to blame for that.”

  Her phone rang. She answered it with a sigh and Roland said, “Perfect timing.”

  “You called the FBI?”

  “The FBI called me. I only happened to mention you were out of the state, investigating another potential connection to David Yarns. And gee fucking whiz, they were more than happy to assist.”

  “Convenient. How did you even know where to send them? The exact address, I mean. You must have given them something more than just Darrington.”

  “Do you remember that I was going to send Max down to the precinct to attempt a surface scan of David’s mind? Turns out there was a connection between your pervert of yesterday and your pervert of today. A big one.”

  “She’s the boss,” Aggie said softly, making the intuitive leap.

  “Maybe, possibly. You’ll need to tell me one day how you knew.”

  “Ghosts and angels,” she murmured. “More mystery than you can shake a stick at.”

  Aggie disentangled herself from Emma, and with a quick, “I’ll be right back,” walked a very short distance away. Amiri inched closer to the girl. Aggie saw Emma place a tentative hand on his shoulder.

  “Good kitty,” she said.

  “Roland,” Aggie said. “We have to do something about Emma, the victim in this. She deserves better than an FBI social worker and foster care.”

  “Doesn’t she have family?”

  “Her mother’s dead. I never talked to—I never talked about whether she had other people to take care of her. I’ve got a feeling, though, that she’s pretty much alone.”

  “Shit. Aggie—”

  “No,” she said. “Find a way.”

  “For what? Do you want her?”

  Aggie swallowed hard, thinking about the possibilities, what that would mean. She looked at the girl and saw the future fan out, and for a moment it was like seeing her own fate, her own probabilities; like last night in her home, being slammed with an image of this girl in need. Only now, the girl in her head still had need, but different. Just as important.

  “I don’t know,” Aggie said, quiet. “But she needs something more than what the system can give her. I know it.”

  There was silence on the other end, and then, “Okay. I’ll figure it out, make some calls. That’s why we have those expensive lawyers, right? We’ll make it happen. In some variation. But Emma will have to leave with the FBI today. That can’t be helped.”

  “I know,” Aggie said. “Thank you, Roland.”

  “Whatever. You and the boys, though…good work. Really fucking good work.”

  “Good boss.”

  “That’s right,” he said, and hung up.

  Aggie went back to the car and snuggled up next to Emma. She thought about both their futures. Amiri sat still. Quinn trudged over from around the house and joined them.

  He took one look at Aggie’s face and said, “You okay?”

  “No,” she said. “But I will be. I need to go away after this.”

  Emma stirred. “Charlie.”

  “Yes.”

  “He’s my ghost,” Emma said. “My friend.”

  “He’s mine, too,” Aggie said. “But he’s lost now, and I need to go find him. I need to do for him what he did for you. Take him away from the dark place.”

  “Can I come with you?” Emma asked.

  Aggie shook her head. “You’ll need to go with the police today, but that won’t be for long. You’ll have a better place to live. Safe, with good people.”

  “I’m scared,” Emma said.

  “I know.” Aggie put a hand on the child, soothing, calming. “You have a right to be, but we’ll take care of you. I promise.” She gestured to her colleague, who had just appeared. “This, Emma, is my friend Quinn Dougal. He gets kind of cranky, but he’s a good person.”

  “You’re little,” Emma said to him, with the simple honesty of the very young. “But you don’t look like a kid.”

  “No,” Quinn said kindly. “I’m a bit older than that. Humans just come in all sizes, that’s all.”

  Emma still clutched Amiri’s shoulder.

  “What’s your name?” she asked him, and he told her, and she liked that.

  Time passed. The FBI and police took their statements, and then they took Mrs. Kreer and her son. And sometime after that, as the afternoon stretched into evening, they took Emma.

  Before the child left, she reached out with her skinny arms and pulled Aggie in for a hug. Emma smelled better after being away from the basement—like sunlight and sweet grass—and when Aggie pulled back to look into her eyes she saw a hint of green that she had not noticed before. A flickering light that was pure and shot full of spring and leaf. Otherworldly, almost.

  “You’ll find him,” Emma whispered, with a conviction that was quiet, more confident than her years. “You’ll find Charlie.”

  “And when I do?” Aggie found herself asking, compelled by strength of the child’s voice, the heartbreaking sincerity of her old, old gaze.

  Emma brushed her fingers against the corners of Aggie’s eyes, and for a moment the air seemed to shimmer, and the child said, “You’ll see.”

  And that was the end of it. Aggie watched her go and felt like another piece of her heart was breaking. She had never realized she could feel so much for others in such a short amount of time. Charlie, Emma. There was something wrong with her. She needed to turn something off.

  No, she told herself. Don’t you dare. Your isolation is over. All you need now is courage.

  “What are you going to do?” Quinn asked, coming up to stand beside her. He took her hand and held it.

  “I’m going to find him,” Aggie said, glancing down at her partner, wondering if she would ever be able to tell him the whole unbending truth. “One way or another.”

  Quinn and Amiri returned to California that evening on the private jet, but Aggie did not go with them. She drove back down to Seattle. She did a lot of thinking. She did a lot of listening to herself.

  When she got to the airport, she bought a ticket to Scotland.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  It took her a month to find him, and even then it was by accident.

  Or not. Aggie was never quite certain.

  From Seattle to Chicago, and from Chicago to Glasgow, a hop, skip, and a jump. She entered that city and saw that Charlie had been right: it was big. But if a gargoyle could die and leave his body to save a girl and fall in love, and if shape-shifters could walk the earth, changing from animal to man while psychics banded together under the auspices of a detective agency with a really cheesy name, then anything was possible. Anything at all.

  She parked herself in a nice hotel on the edge of George Square, the heart of the city. People massed, the crowds ebbed and flowed, and from a bench she could watch faces and futures, seeking always blood and sand, and a man who was not a man but something more than human.

  She listened to the futures as she walked, too, which was how she spent most of her days. Up at the crack of dawn, and then down to the street where she would stay out until all hours—much to the chagrin of the hotel staff, who always said when she came back through the lobby, “Please, dear, it’s not safe, this city isn’t safe for young women at night.” And Aggie knew this, but no place in the world was safe for anyone, and she kept on prowling, looking, searching.

  There were endless paths in Glasgow; the buildings were old and the streets older, the architec
ture rich and fascinating. She went to Glasgow Cathedral and the Necropolis, hunting for witches amongst the holy and the dead; at the University of Glasgow she talked to historians, delved deep into libraries for clues on haunts and gargoyles, found legend, lore, wondered sometimes, too, if the men she spoke to were not gargoyles themselves, hiding in plain sight. She scanned the local newspapers for anything out of the ordinary—strange deaths, odd sightings, lights in the sky—and she sat in cafés and pubs and watched and watched and watched.

  And even then, she got lucky. Or not.

  A month after Aggie arrived in Glasgow, she found the witch sitting at an outdoor café behind the Gallery of Modern Art, sipping tea. She knew it was the witch because she recognized the face. Aggie, standing on the sidewalk, temporarily lost her mind. Froze up. She saw in her head a pleasant modern kitchen, something cooking in a pot. She did not see anyone who could be Charlie, but perhaps that was yet too far ahead in the future.

  But there it was: her. Aggie did not know what to make of the witch. She was, by any definition, a lovely woman: thick brown hair, a delicate thin face punctuated by luscious red lips and two black eyes. A little doll. Given what Aggie knew of her, she was not that impressed.

  Aggie waded past waiters and diners and sat down at the witch’s table. The woman did not look at her right away; she read a book of poetry by Carl Sandburg. Aggie waited. She was patient. She watched the woman’s shifting future.

  The witch finished her tea. “‘Broken-face Gargoyles.’ It’s a very good poem. Have you ever read it?”

  “No,” Aggie said.

  “Oh, you should. It’s quite beautiful.” The witch put down her book and looked Aggie in the eye. She had a powerful gaze, but Aggie remembered Mrs. Kreer, and this was not as bad.

  “You smell like him,” said the witch.

  “That’s some nose you’ve got,” Aggie replied.

  The witch’s lips thinned. “I was referring to energies, darling. Although you do have an odor. Not bathing much lately, are you.”

  “I’ve been busy.”

  “Yes, I know. You’re in love with an associate of mine.”

  “How interesting you know that. I’ve been looking for him.”