Dragon Noir (Pixie for Hire Book 3)

by Cedar Sanderson

He moaned wordlessly, shaking outright, now. I promised a clean death, and this thing… “You be hunger, be eating and eating and never get full. No thinking, no nothing. Just dead and hungry.”

  “What is it?”

  He shrugged. “Dunno. I don’ wanna know. It isn’t from ‘round here, an’ I wish it’d go back to where it came from. You gonna put me down?”

  I was half tempted. He’d never know anything more, and what she promised sounded like it would be long and painful. I holstered the weapon. “Nah, man. You get on, now. We never talked.”

  He gobbled again, this time in relief. “We din’t talk.” He repeated as he scuttled down the alley, not looking back, carefully. He didn’t want to see me, to remember me.

  I bubbled and went away. I didn’t know how much of this traveling I could do before I started to strain my resources. So far, other than being tired, hungry, and sick to my stomach from inhaling ghoul sweat, I couldn’t feel it. Having magic was good. But it wasn’t a cure-all, as I well knew. Back in the meadow I was sort of using as a pivot, I shucked out of my jacket and shirt, stuffing them into a nylon sack. I didn’t want to smell that while I was eating. I sat cross-legged and had my pasty while thinking some more. For the first time, I had solid information. Clues, as to what it was, and the biggest indicator, that it wasn’t from Underhill.

  Even had it been from another area Underhill, like Dreamstime, the ghastly ruins of what had been Mayan Court or Eastern Court, the ghoul would have known. They might not have second Sight, but they seemed to have a sense for magic. Georgio had talked to me about it one time, when he was gut-full of a bottle of Retsina I’d brought him, and he was feeling maudlin. Which was why I’d laid for the ghoul outside the bar. Conrad was human, not a trace of magic in him. Alger would have known if the thing were a common Underhill race. But what the ghoul said… this was from somewhere else.

  I finished Ellie’s meat pasty, and pulled a cold beer from nospace. I stared at the beads of condensation forming on it. Alger had said his library was somewhere else, not Above or Underhill. I’d always thought of the two worlds as mirrors of one another, with a shifting veil between them. But what if there were other worlds? Parallel universes, like the human writers were so enamored of in recent years? Could this thing have come from one of them?

  If so, how was I going to find it, what did it want, and how could it be killed. Those were the questions. Dionaea, now the Blood Queen, had ridden to power in its bloody tracks. But dealing with her would come after it, because I wasn’t willing to pay the price of ignoring her monster, or taking her on directly. War was not inevitable, if you were willing to walk on the darker side and nip the buds before they bloomed in fire and death.

  I didn’t want to play this game. I wanted to go home, cuddle my wife, and grow some beautiful babies. I pulled a shirt out of my rucksack and shrugged it on. Then a shoulder holster with a semi-auto, this time, and a magazine in each pocket. Finally the rank leather bomber, because I hadn’t packed more than one. Short-sighted.

  I needed more answers before I could end this. And I needed to keep moving, before Dion sensed me circling her, closing in on her. Because when that happened, it was going to get ugly, and I had no desire to meet the thing the ghouls feared.

  Walking in spraying and praying was the attack of a rank beginner, one who had a death wish, or worse, didn’t care one way or another. I’d no intention of bringing a massed magical attack on myself. The gun was insurance that was all. I probably wouldn’t show it, but it was there if I needed it.

  Low wasn’t a city, they said. It was just there. It had grown around the castle Low Court called home, picked up the name from the Court, and wore it with a perverse pride. The Courts had been divided by rank, once. Low peoples, and High. The aristocrats, and the middle class, as it were. But that had been centuries ago, and I wasn’t sure it was true. Myths were made by those who had stories to push. What was real, and here, in Low, was that Low court was the nexus of the bad in my world.

  Not everyone that lived in this place was evil. Some were simply weak, lost, and broken. Others liked it here, and that was a good description of the woman I was going to see. Not the Blood Queen, but someone who was proud of her heritage of blood and tears, and who did her best to continue that legacy. Somehow, although I was wary of her, I couldn’t blame her. A kelpie is born to it.

  I had circled the Low until I was upstream, and now I settled the little paper boat onto the gently rippling water of the stream and set it on its way. She’d have my message once the swift stream reached the river, and it was safer for me to summon her here, far from that home advantage. I looked around.

  Magic can be used Underhill to warp the forces of nature, and produce the landscape desired. I’d done it with my own home, having windows that opened into each of the four seasons in a slow rotation. Although that was more illusion than reality, my garden only had one season at a time. The Eastern Court gardens had entirely enchanted Bella with their beauty and serene perfection, created by powerful gardeners over the centuries.

  The forest around Low had only one purpose. To repel visitors. I didn’t know if it had been deliberate, at first. By now, it certainly was, things lived in there and drew magic around them like a giant spider web, warping the land for miles around. Someone like myself who could use transport bubbles only found it inconvenient. Those with less power found it a formidable obstacle.

  I’d chosen this place for two reasons. One, to get some distance between myself and the kelpie’s source of power, and second, to stay outside the interdiction shield around the Low Court castle. Breaking that took a lot of power, even though Alger had told me with no little astonishment that Bella had done it without batting an eye. And breaking it meant alerting the Court.

  I didn’t want to turn my back on the forest, on the trees with their tentacled limbs and watchful eyes. But I really didn’t want to put my back to the water. The whole thing had me more than a little jittery.

  The beautiful white horse didn’t surprise me. I’d been expecting her. I settled into stillness, my hands on hips, only inches from the butt of my gun.

  “Hello, Peg.” I greeted her, and the ears flickered back and forth. She stamped a forehoof, her fetlocks floating with the movement. But when she neared me and stretched out her nose toward me, nostrils wide, I could see her eyes. Black and empty, they were the product of a thousand nightmares before me.

  She whickered and tossed her head. I bared my teeth in what might have been a smile. “I know, I never call, I never write. I walked out one morning and never looked back, and now I want a favor?”

  This time the whicker was very close to a laugh. I kept going. “Peg o’ Dee, have you had your dead this year?”

  The horse reared, striking out with both forehooves. I stood still. She wasn’t aiming for me, but she might hit me if I flinched. “How long has it been, Peg, since the blood you crave was given?”

  The horse dissolved into a girl. “Are ye offerin’?” She asked, reached out taloned hands to me.

  “Not my blood, no. But I hear there is one who calls herself Blood Queen…” I pointed toward the smokes of Low, visible down the river. “Ruling there, where your waters flow.”

  “She gives me no blood.” Peg sniffed and spat in the waters. “Only she gets the blood.”

  I wondered how much truth there was to the rumor Dion was bathing in the stuff. Elizabeth of Bathory had, but she was using it as a complexion-enhancer, powered by a fairy spell. I hadn’t been around for that, but Alger had told me stories when I was younger and relished a shivery tale by firelight. Come to think of it, that probably explained some things about my later career.

  Peg absently ran her long nails, sharpened to points, through her tangled green hair. “Will you give me blood?”

  “I intend to.” It might take a little while, but that was what I meant to do, find Dion’s enforcer and open its veins, if it had any, into Peg’s river. Making a bargain with her would give m
e a lot of access to Low I wouldn’t get any other way. The waterways riddled the city which had grown around them and the moat around the castle, which was flushed with Peg’s river.

  Peg nodded. “You hae kept your bargains.”

  If I hadn’t, I’d have been dead. Peg o’ Dee was inexorable in her wrath, and her waters ran deep and far. She tilted her head to one side, running her fingertips down the line of her cheek and jaw. “You would bring chaos again.”

  “Yeah.” Here, anyway. Chaos here meant peace elsewhere. It was the balance of things.

  She looked toward the forest, her black eyes showing no white. Pits into nightmares. She had a dreamy expression on her face. “You are in a hurry.”

  I wasn’t sure what she was thinking. “There have been deaths.”

  “Not mine.” She shrugged.

  “No, mine. Those close to me. I prefer life, Peg.”

  “You do.” She pouted, bizarrely childlike for a moment, her hands fluttering at the ends of her dangling arms. “You like life, and you cling to it, and poor Peg is cold, so cold.”

  “Peg could be blood-warm, if she will help me.”

  She settled into stillness. “Turn away.”

  “What?” She was mumbling, and I wasn’t sure I’d heard her.

  “Turn away,” She snapped, showing her sharp teeth. “I don’t like to change in front of prying eyes.”

  “Oh,” Dutifully I turned to look at the forest, wondering how she categorized those eyes, watching her behind me. I could tell from their movement when she walked around me.

  The tall white horse tossed her head and knelt.

  “I’m supposed to what, just climb on? Peg…”

  She looked at me with a great sigh.

  “All right. You did say I liked life.”

  She nodded slightly, and I got on her back. Clumsy with lack of tack, but once I was astride and had a double handful of soft white mane, she surged to her feet and turned back toward the water. She walked, and I wondered what was coming, as she picked her way delicately around storm wrack, following the stream bed closely, sometimes walking in it. We neared the river, and she broke smoothly into a canter, water flying from her hooves. She leaped onto a bank, and ran across the smooth grass toward another bank, cutting the chord of the waterway’s intersection. I expected her to follow the riverbank, as she had with the stream.

  The muscles bunching under my legs was the only warning I got, and when she jumped, I tried to throw myself off, to land hopefully on solid ground – instead, I discovered that I was stuck. I couldn’t loosen my legs, or even let go of her mane. We hit the water with a monstrous splash. I tried to gulp a big breath of air, but as we sank into the green water, I watched the silvery bubbles spiral far over my head, and then they disappeared into grayness, and I knew I was out of air. Finally, there was only the black.

  Underwater

  I woke up with a drip of water falling on my face. It took me a while to focus properly on the ceiling, because it wasn’t really there. I didn’t know what it was made of, but it looked like flowing water. Greenish light filtered weakly through it, and it dripped constantly. I sat up and looked around. My head ached.

  I was sitting in a boat. I’d been stretched out on the rowing bench, and my head likely hurt because the boat canted at an odd angle, so my head had been lower than my feet. I stood up, looking down the length of the ancient craft. There hadn’t been something like this on the oceans or rivers in millennia. This boat was empty, besides me, but I caught a flicker of motion in the porthole of the closest wreck. A much newer boat, with an enclosed cabin. Peg’s home, at a guess.

  I shuffled more than walked across the slick wet surface of the deck. Water flowed eerily away from my feet, leaving me walking through ankle-deep water with none of it touching my boots. I paused at the edge of the ship, gauging the distance between it and the other, more level, surface. Both were wet. Jumping would be bad idea. I didn’t like the idea of using a bubble, not knowing where I was. If I broke the interdiction, the Low Court would be able to track me.

  Perhaps there was a gangplank. Peg had to get around somehow. I could see now that there were other boats and ships all jumbled up together, with a dome of water over the whole mess. Her prey, bones picked over and bleached with age. I walked toward the stern of the galley, picking my way carefully around the jumbles of broken benches, oars, and other debris. I wondered why she’d left me here, and why she’d brought me to her home in the first place. I’d never visited it before.

  Kelpies were a strange breed. They were never male, to begin with. I supposed life began by impregnation of mother with seduction of a sailor, and likely followed by his death once he’d served his purpose. Some kelpies could be satisfied with a sacrifice of lesser animals, others demanded people, and on a regular schedule.

  Finally, a rickety bridge over the water between the boats, merely two planks placed one atop the other, presumably for strength, as they were very thin. I stepped onto it cautiously and felt it bow under my weight. A quick couple of steps later and I was on the deck of the other boat, the planks clattering in my wake.

  Peg came out of the cabin, a wriggling fish in one hand. “You are awake.”

  She was back in girl form, dressed in a ragged white dress, and her hair looped back with a coil of waterweeds round it.

  “I am, and wondering why I’m here, wherever here is.”

  “The home of my mother, and my mother’s mother, and…”

  I held up a hand to cut off her flow. I got the idea, the family had been here a long time. “Why,” I repeated, “am I here?”

  “I was lonely.” She scuffed one bare foot across the deck, which was covered with a thick coat of algae but otherwise almost dry. “I wanted company, and surely a day, perhaps two, will not hurt?”

  I blinked at her. She brandished the fish. “I will prepare dinner.” She announced in a grand tone before ducking back inside the cabin.

  I stood on the deck for a moment longer, thinking about this and hoping there was going to be heat involved in that preparation. My stomach grumbled, and I was reminded it had been a long time since the pasty in the meadow. Then I followed her into the cabin.

  It was warmer in there, something I hadn’t noticed outside, the gathering chill. Peg was standing by a stove, where a skillet was sizzling merrily, and there was a table, and chairs, and it all seemed to be dry and lacking the fuzz of algae everything outside grew. I sat when she waved at the table, while looking intently into the pan.

  “I don’t cook often,” she said.

  “I appreciate the effort.” I really did. Sushi might be a recent fad Above, but in my opinion it was good for bait, and not much else.

  “I apologize for not warning you, but I was afraid if I asked, you would say no.” She flipped the fish in the pan, awkwardly. “I used to have friends. But since the Low Court came under her spell, no one visits me. And there is no blood.” She sighed.

  “When did she arrive?” If Peg was going to be talkative, maybe I could get some answers.

  “She was here for visits while the Low King still reigned. She would have been his queen, I think, had he not died.” She carefully slid the crispy fish onto a china plate and brought it to me.

  “Is it good?” Peg was curling strands of her hair around one finger with an anxious expression.

  “It smells wonderful.” I assured her. There was a napkin, and silverware, all of it very nice, and no doubt looted from shipwrecks. Maybe not the napkin.

  She sat down opposite me. I was just as glad she wasn’t eating. With a mouthful of needle-like teeth, her dining habits were unlikely to be attractive.

  “She brought a creature from Above with her, when the King was dead. Any who resisted her, she gave to it.” Peg didn’t seem to mind I was letting the fish cool a touch before I took a bite. “She doesn’t share the blood. Her creature was allowed to roam the streets of Low, once, and I thought…”Peg licked her lips, which turned my stomach. �
��But it doesn’t share, either. It both kills and drains, or it doesn’t kill, and the one who isn’t dead…”

  “Is hungry.” I filled in from what I’d learned before. “Peg, it came from Above? There is very little magic up there. How is it this thing can roam untouched?”

  I knew she would have killed it already, could she have. And while I once would have said there was no magic, Above, that was before I’d met Raven. The presence of the trickster spirit – he emphatically denied being a god, although he was the first immortal I’d met for sure – had altered my belief on that topic.

  “It came from Above, and intends to go back.” Peg leaned her elbows on the table, and her eyes were far away. “I went Above, once. In the time when men foolishly rode horses into rivers, ah, then I could choose a handsome one when I liked, as my mother had, and my mother’s mother, and…”

  I picked up the fork. The fish smelled really good, and my stomach was asking if my throat had been cut. “The Blood Queen intends to conquer Above, after Underhill?”

  That sounded like Dionaea. Overweening ambition. Only now she had the power to do it. I would give Peg her company, but I needed to leave soon. The fish had been gutted, but not scaled and I peeled the skin back carefully and extracted a flaky bit of white flesh from the underlying bones.

  “The thing, it was once a god, Above. It has promised her powers beyond magic.”

  I lifted the forkful of fish, thinking this was why I didn’t eat much of it. Too much work for so little reward. The bite never made it into my mouth. There was a splintering crash that shook the boat, and sent both of us sprawling to the floor. With a shrill scream, Peg darted out the door, me on her heels.

  She stopped dead on the now-tilted deck, and shrieked like a million teakettles. I clapped my hands to my ears, my eyes watering under the aural assault. Shaking my head to try and clear it, I looked in the direction of the noises, which were smaller, but no less alarming considering that I was underwater. Under water, and no idea how deep. Pressure kills, I knew, but Peg’s home seemed to have left me unaffected.