by J. L. Ray
Phil smiled. “Fifty years ago, it might well have been. It is a new world, my dear.” He returned to his car and headed to Tony’s apartment, hoping that he would be able to speak to her that night. Failing that, perhaps, just perhaps, he could get that idiot de Groot to understand what he had to do to fix the situation. Phil’s greater hopes rested on convincing Tony, but he would take any miracle he could get.
Tony had just finished brushing her teeth and washing her face when the buzzer rang next to her door. She walked over and glared at it, tightening the belt on her thick, fuzzy robe like a gunfighter adjusting a belt.
“You have got to be fuckin’ kidding me,” she muttered, certain it was Phil. “What?” she barked into the old-fashioned speaker.
“Uh, Tony? This is your temporary partner, Baz.”
Tony stood for a second, one eyebrow raised.
“Tony? It is Baz. May I come up for to talk to you?”
Tony shook off her inertia, “Yeah, sure. Hang on. I’ve got to buzz you through. When you hear the noise, push the door open and then come up to 3A. I’m in the front of the building.”
“Okay, good. One moment.” There was a pause and then Baz said, “Now, please buzz.”
Tony hit the button and a minute later, Baz stood outside her door. She let him in.
“Hey, Baz. What’s up?” she asked, worried that there was an issue with the case.
Baz looked confused. “The sky?”
“What?”
Baz shrugged. “The sky is up. The Washington Monument is up.”
“Very literal,” Tony muttered. “Baz, why are you here?”
Baz, who was dressed in jeans and a button-down shirt, his usual clothes, pulled at his collar and looked uncomfortable. She noticed that he kept glancing around the room, as if he was looking for someone. Finally, he mumbled, “I came by to see if you were okay.”
Tony nodded. “Sure, Baz. I’m fine. The mud came off, no problem, no side-effects.” She winced a bit, wondering if the dizziness and nausea counted as “no” side-effects. Maybe she should downgrade “fine” to “okay.”
Baz shuffled one very large foot and added, “I meant, okay after leaving with Mephistopheles.”
Tony stood very still, uncharacteristic anger rising. She could feel the heat running up her torso to her scalp, like a thermometer. Not a person who lost her temper often, when she did, it tended toward epic, so she took a deep breath and counted to herself. She understood, at this point, that Baz wasn’t looking around her apartment for something, but for someone. He was checking to see if Phil was here. And since she was standing there, in the most unsexy of robes, she felt like it should have been obvious that she was alone, but apparently Baz was too thick to figure that out.
Baz looked over at her and saw the anger on her face. He stood for a moment, trying to decide what to say when Tony finally responded.
Choking the words out through clenched teeth, she asked him, “Had a bet on the outcome? Is that it?” She pointed one finger up into his face. “And before you answer, know that the answer should be ‘Yes, partner, I had a bet and wondered if I had won and decided to stick my big foot in my mouth and come over here and ask instead of politely waiting for the office water cooler gossip, like a well-mannered Being.’ Then,” she wagged the finger at his nose, and his eyes crossed as they tried to focus on the finger, “you’ll want to apologize for interrupting my evening and scoot along on your merry way, before you get my foot up your ass.”
Baz gulped and took a loud breath. Then he said in a rush, “You must be careful with that devil. He is dangerous. I just wanted to tell you. I didn’t want for you to have the pain that I have had. You should stay away from that devil.” He was all but wringing his hands in earnest supplication.
Tony stood there a minute, expressionless. In a flat voice she said, “So you and Phil dated? Is, is, is that it?” She threw her hands in the air. “I don’t care. I know he has lots of exes. I’ve met some. In fact, I met some that really bothered me. Trust me, your former relationship is not a problem.”
Baz, a horrified look on his face, yelled, “No, no, you misunderstand!”
At that point, the building’s front door buzzer summoned Tony again. She stomped over to it. “WHAT?”
“Tony, I must speak to you,” she heard Phil say, his voice as sincere and sad as she knew he meant it to sound.
She grimaced. Then she glared at Baz. “Sure, Phil. Come on up,” she told him as cordially as she could.
“Really?” He sounded surprised.
“I’m buzzing you now,” she said, certain she heard him reply, “Promises, promises.” She almost laughed, but then she looked over at Baz, the second person to tell what to do tonight. This was gonna stop, right now.
A hesitant knock at the door, and Tony walked over to open it. She stood in front of the doorway as she let Phil in, so he was in the room with the door shut before he saw Baz standing in the entryway, glaring at him. If looks could eviscerate, Phil’s entrails would have been everywhere except under his ribs. As it was, Phil simply looked up and down Baz’s off-the-rack Levis and cotton/poly mix blue Oxford, raised one brow, and turned back to Tony, ignoring Baz like a house cat might ignore a big stupid dog that the cat knew was afraid of it.
“I see that I have caught you at a bad time,” he said smoothly. As soon as he saw de Groot, he had abandoned his plan to beg forgiveness and plant the seeds that he hoped would lead her to an independent deduction of his reasons for begging her to stay away from Baz. She was obviously on her way to bed, so he assumed that Baz was there for some reason of his own, perhaps one perilously close to his own.
“I—” She wanted to force the two to tell her why they were so intent on telling her to stay away from each other, but before she could even try to get the truth out of them, Baz shocked her to silence by walking over and throwing one arm around her shoulder, then pulling her into him for a tight squeeze.
“You have caught us at a bad time,” Baz emphasized the plural pronoun, his voice colder than she could have imagined.
She turned her head up toward him to say something and he leaned down, pulled her into a tight embrace, and kissed her. Unlike the moments in the warehouse, when she had cheerfully participated in what had seemed an innocent attempt to keep their cover intact, this time she was actively attempting to discourage Baz’s actions. Unfortunately, her attempt to bring a knee up between them or get a good bite hold on Baz’s lip just looked like sensuous writhing and open-mouthed, enthusiastic participation.
When Baz pulled back, they stared at each other a moment, both of their breasts heaving.
Tony looked over at Phil to see his face harden as he muttered, “I shall leave you to it, then, shall I? It seems that three is a crowd.” He glanced back at Tony, who had now pulled away from Baz and was sputtering in an attempt to put an end to all the misunderstandings. Phil slid out the door before she could speak.
Baz felt his breath go as Tony elbowed him in the solar plexus as hard as she could. He grunted and grabbed his middle, letting go of her as he went. When he was able to stand up again, he saw her standing, tapping one bare foot, her arms crossed under her chest and eyes narrowed. “You better have a good explanation for that shit. If I don’t like what I hear, I swear, I’ll call Azeem and lodge a complaint. This is beyond ridiculous. And don’t you EVER do that again.”
Baz rubbed his face, his five o’clock shadow rasping against his big hand. “I know, I know. I, I’ll do my best.” He sighed. “You are not going to like this.”
“I like all this manipulative bullshit even less.” She sighed. “Sit.” She pointed at her couch and he obediently went over and sat. “Speak.”
He nodded, and putting his hands together between his knees, he began his tale. And he was right. She didn’t like it.
“You know that I come from Fairie,” he began, after Tony sat in the armchair across from him on the sofa.
Her arms still folded under her chest
, she nodded. “I know you come from Fairie. I know you were turned into a bear. I know that you got stuck in Mundania. I know this happened in” she waved a hand around, “some country up in northern Europe—”
He interrupted, “In Norway.”
She mowed on past his interjection. “And I know your fairy princess didn’t come through for you and save you from the spell of an old hag, which apparently leaves a long legacy of pissed-off in a body, especially yours. So yeah, I know a lot.”
“You know nothing,” Baz told her flatly.
She narrowed her eyes and hissed, “Enlighten me.”
He swallowed. “I was a prince in a region of Fairie that is known as Vinterland. We were hunters by nature, magic-holders, not magic-wielders. When a young man in that culture reached maturity, he went on a journey into the Mundanian wilderness with nothing but a knife and the clothes on his back. It was our way to prove ourselves men and worthy of acceptance into the community.” He peeked over at Tony. She looked less angry, and so, encouraged, he continued.
“I had been engaged since birth to a princess in the next kingdom. Her name was Bergfrid, and she was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. Over the years of our childhoods, we met many times at royal events. I was quite happy to marry her. I was not the heir, you see, and neither was she, but we would be very wealthy and would live on property that bridged both kingdoms. It was why my parents had picked her in the first place.” He paused for a moment, and then continued, as if ashamed, “I loved her quite madly. As we got closer to the age of marriage, she was all I could think of. I didn’t even want to go on kriger seremoni because it felt like an obstacle in the way of our being together.”
Tony hesitated, but stopped him. “Kriger ceremony?”
He sighed and dropped his head. “Our manhood ritual, for warriors. I just wanted to get it over with so I could be back with her as soon as possible. But when I told her this, at the spring festival to celebrate the youths going out on kriger seremoni, she had other ideas.”
He paused, remembering the night, how he had pulled her aside, into a small parlor near the ballroom to talk to her privately. She tried to pull away, laughing as she told him not to muss her skirts, which were a spider gauze so frail that a high wind could have shredded them. Her golden hair floated around her heart-shaped face, and he had melted at the sight of her. He ignored her comments about the dress and insisted she go with him. Then she argued that it would be unseemly for them to be alone before they were married. Still, he insisted. He told her he needed to talk to her privately before the kriger seremoni, when he would be sent away from Fairie and unable to talk to her again until the rite was complete. Finally, she followed him.
Her blue eyes had widened when he told her that he would go to the closest line of mountains in the Mundane world to hunt his bear, that he would seek his krigerdom in the Oppland Mountains in order to get back to her faster and marry her. In his enthusiasm, he had grabbed her up and twirled her around, which had ripped her skirt, and she had chided him, telling him she would have to go find her nanny to repair it.
“I am so sorry, my sweet love,” he had told Bergfrid. “I may be a prince, but I am a rough man underneath it all.”
She smiled at him archly, “Not a man yet, my love. Not until you bring me the pelt of Ullr.”
This time his eyes widened. “I had thought to bring you a bear from those mountains, but not Ullr!” His heart sank at first. No one who had gone after that bear had ever returned. This was not the fast journey he had envisioned. But he could not forget the look of adoration on her face as she whispered, “The honor of being presented with the head of Ullr from my betrothed would make me the most envied woman in two kingdoms.” He had not been able to resist the chance to prove himself worthy of her in so spectacular a way.
Baz shook off his memory and looked up at Tony, pointing at himself. “Tosk. Fool, I was. I decided that the quick route to manndom that I had wanted, so I could hurry back to Bergfrid and my marriage bed, was a symptom of my youth, my impatience, and even, my cowardice. After listening to her, I thought that to take the harder road was an indication of my new life as a man.” He shook a bewildered head, as if, after all this time, he still couldn’t believe what had happened. “I loved her too madly to see anything except that she was pushing me to be a better man, not that she was egging me on to what she must have hoped was certain death.”
There was silence for a moment that stretched too long for Tony.
“Damn, Baz, don’t just stop. What happened?”
Baz felt more hopeful as she sounded less mad and more interested in the tale. He looked up at her. “I went on the kriger seremoni. I went to the Oppland Mountains. I searched for three years.” He stopped for a moment and sucked in a long, heavy breath. “For three years I lived in those mountains tracking Ullr, the Great Bear. And when I found Him, He very nearly killed me.” He stared off into space, reliving a moment from his past.
“And again with the pausing.” Tony got up and leaned over Baz. “You want a beer? I need one right about now.”
“Sure, yah, a beer,” he said, not looking at her but off into his distant past, and she noticed that his accent got just a little thicker.
She came back with two glasses of dark beer and handed one to Baz. “Please, continue.”
He stared down into the beer as if it held some kind of prize, then he swallowed half of it at once.
“Hey, buddy. That’s not some low-test, mass-market swill. Try to savor,” Tony commented, silently planning on making that Baz’s only beer of the night.
Baz nodded, but he still looked so miserable that Tony gently reminded him of why he had come. “Go on, Baz. Finish the story. Help me understand why you don’t deserve to get in trouble for what you just did in here,” she said to him as patiently as she could.
“The bear,” he began, lost in the memory of that day, “it was huge. I thought that no Mundane bear could be so big. I had followed it to a group of caves in the mountains, and I found its tracks there. There was no mistaking the marks of Ullr’s paws for any other. I cornered it in a tiny valley. In the back of the valley was a waterfall, and the stream in this valley ran out to a larger valley and eventually to the sea. The bear was at the pool at the bottom of the waterfall, drinking. I moved toward it, thinking to take it by surprise, when it wheeled to face me, faster than I would have thought possible.”
He stopped and downed the second half of the glass. Wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, he looked over at Tony, his eyes wide. “Its eyes were human. It was a Changeling, stuck in animal form.” He shook his head. “I went after it anyway,” his voice cracked on the last word, and he looked up at Tony, tears in his eyes. “I just wanted to go home, you understand? For three years I had dreamed of Bergfrid. At first, the dreams were sweet and good and gentle, but each year they got more disturbing. I saw her destitute, waiting for a suitor who never returned. I saw her growing old and haggard.” He began to whisper, “I saw her beautiful and fecund, pregnant with some other man’s child. And I just went crazy.”
Tony sat as still as she could. The Baz she had spent the past day with wasn’t the one in front of her. Her partner was a big, slightly goofy foreign guy who needed a musical update, stat. This man sitting in front of her made her want her Net-All Supernatural Holder gun, just in case. The tension in his body made him shake. His huge hands clenched into powerful fists, and she didn’t think he was aware that he’d done that. Her hand drifted up to the medallion she had yet to take off and without thinking, she began to rub her finger across it. She could still feel the Bear in him, and it wanted out. Now. She wanted a set of steel bars between them. She couldn’t believe that twenty minutes ago she had elbowed him in the stomach and yet she was still living. She listened, as motionless as a rabbit sensing danger, as he carried on.
“Ullr came at me, running on four legs. Then he reared up on two and caught me in his forelegs, almost crushing the life from me in th
e first few minutes. I would have given up, but for the dream I had had of Bergfrid the night before. In it, she called to me, cried to me, to come home, pelt or no pelt. Somehow I wrenched free of the Changeling and managed to pull my knife. Before it could countermove, I ran forward and slammed that knife into its soft underbelly and began to carve my way up to its heart.” Baz was sobbing now, and Tony inched forward, wanting to comfort him, yet not able to bring herself to touch his arm. His body shook with tension as he continued the story, and she was afraid that if she touched him, he’d react to the violence of his memory and not the comfort she wished she could offer.
“As I killed Ullr, he managed to rip off half of my scalp, to bite into my shoulder as he went for my jugular vein. His fangs missed that by just a few millimeters, or I would not be here to tell the tale.” He sat still, sighed, and then continued. “I landed with the Great Bear on top of me, and I lost much blood. I went in and out of consciousness. Then, it happened.” He shook his head, bewildered. “I thought, at first, when I saw her, that I was hallucinating. She couldn’t be there!” He stared into Tony’s eyes. “But it was her, Bergfrid. She dressed like a peasant, and she stood next to an old hag, a witch. They argued with each other, and then the witch began to cast a spell. I passed out. I know that some time passed, but I know not how much of it. When next I awoke, I saw my Bergfrid. This time, instead of the witch, she was with Mephistopheles. He was holding her, touching her...” His voice trailed. He looked up at Tony. “She was dressed in royal gowns, clinging to his arms, and I? I was a Changeling, a Great Bear. The witch who did it lay dead at Mephistopheles’ feet, and my betrothed was in his arms.”
No, Tony didn’t like that story at all. Worse, she didn’t like the questions it raised since she wasn’t certain that Baz could answer them. Or would.
“Did you ask her?” she asked after a few minutes of silence, prodding as gently as she could
