by J. L. Ray
“While you certainly make good points,” Phil said, “I do not see how the last line clearly fits that interpretation.” He paused and added apologetically, “I cannot say that I am as sure about the other two as you. I think you might be reaching in that interpretation.”
Cal parsed the lines again and drooped a bit. “When you’re right, you’re right. Those don’t quite fit. The key is in the first line. If we get that, we’ll get the rest.”
Naamah walked over from the fire she had just stirred, a large pot of fresh tea in her hand. “I find that the riddles I See are rarely literal. They always have figurative meanings laced through them. To what could vine refer other than a vine?”
“Wine, of course.” Phileas had just come in the door, stamping the mud from his boots. The pouring rain kept them grounded, not because they couldn’t fly, but because they weren’t sure where they were going and because it simply wasn’t fun to sail in a balloon in gusty, wet weather. “If this doesn’t let up soon, I may run a dry spell.”
“Phileas!” Naamah shook her head. “You know that those often backfire and cause a drought, and then you have to bring in a stronger wet spell to cover them.” Then she registered his other comment. “Of course! Vine and grain refer to alcohol—wine and beer and spirits!”
“Indeed.” Phil added, “Crossing hands suggests a bar.” He frowned and then grimaced. “I think I know now to what the next two lines refer.”
“Dude! Rockin’ the riddle!” Cal put out his hand for a high five, then adjusted it to Phil’s height. Phil just looked at him, one eyebrow raised. “Leavin’ me hangin’, Phil.” He shook his head. “Not cool.”
“I, er, draw the line, Calvin, at a gesture like that. My apologies for leaving you ‘hanging,’ as it were.” He addressed the company. “The lines ‘where the fool and the wise man stand, where the angel and tree live in,’ have some grammatical issues, but I believe that this refers to two Beings that Tony and I saw just last week—Sammeal, a former ‘angel’ and a fool and the Willow, a hamadryad whose tree is a pub and who, I believe, may be controlling Sammeal’s actions.” He snorted. “I suppose that might make him the wise man, though I think anyone attempting to control Sammeal lacks any sense of self-preservation, and that makes him more a foolish than a wise man.”
Cal nodded then asked, “What about the last line in there, ‘where the child of light will be riven’? What child and how will that child be torn and from what?”
“Could it refer to the trafficking in Changelings?” Phil mused.
“I suppose,” said Cal. “But haven’t a lot of children been riven? I mean, if we’re talking about the Changeling trade, why mention just one?”
“Yes, in that sense, a single reference makes no sense. And why a child of light?”
Naamah sighed as she passed a cup of hot tea to Phileas. “I am sorry about the opaqueness of the riddles. I have a Vision, but when it comes out as a riddle, the picture isn’t that clear in what I say. I have no control over what comes out, you see. It is what it is.”
“No worries, ma’am.” Cal patted her gently on the back, causing her to spill only a little out of her teacup. “We’ll figure it out.” He turned back to Phil. “What about the next one?”
“Ah.” Phil recited, “That one goes, ‘Find the witch who leads the pack. Find the son who wants her back. Find the giant who lives without shame. There find the girl who needs her name.’ Hmm. Issues with the rhyme scheme. It doesn’t quite scan. “ He looked at Naamah, “Where do the rhymes come from, old friend?”
Naamah laughed. “I have no idea, Mephistopheles. Don’t blame the errors in form on me! This happened after the Geas. Before that, my Visions were much more straightforward and simple—pictures, images that I could relate to those who asked. Those silly Oracles that moved to Greece loved a good riddle, but I was happy to be able to just blurt out what people wanted to know.” She shrugged, shamefaced. “I used to envy the power of their divination. I sometimes think these riddles that come more often now are the Geas’ punishment for my envy.”
“Ah,” Phil nodded. “It created a greater gift but made the using of that gift more difficult. That sounds very like the magical signature of the PTB.” He looked at Cal, who was silently repeating the words to that riddle. “Does the content of the poem make sense to you?”
“Sounds like Tony’s report from Fairie. The witch with the noir fetish and her son, the giant. I guess he wants her back whenever she’s gone, am I right?” Cal shook his head. “But as for the girl needing a name? I got nothin’.” He brightened. “I think we should try the third poem.”
Phil shut him down. “I believe the third poem was completely personal.”
“But I—“
Phil interrupted him. “It has no bearing on the case.”
“But it might—“
“Enough, Calvin.”
Calvin let it go. Later, they would realize that, in fact, Cal’s instinct was right and it did indeed have a bearing on the case. The Rule of Three always happened for a reason.
Tooley swallowed and tried to answer the pink-haired woman who had an iron grip on his arm. “I have to go,” he whispered, desperate to keep from waking the witch sleeping just down the hall. The woman gripping his arm expressed no reaction to his answer. He tried again. “My name is O’Toole. You can call me Tooley. Now, I must go.”
She started blinking quite vigorously, her green-gray eyes watering from the light in the hall.
“Are you okay?” Tooley asked her.
“I don’t know,” she whispered, imitating him. “Can you…” She paused and swallowed before continuing. “Can you tell me who I am?”
His eyes widened. “You don’t know?”
“No,” she hissed, “but it must be bad. You look very frightened.”
He shook his head. “I don’t know if it’ll be bad or good, but” and he glanced back at the door to Crystal’s bedroom, “I have to leave. Now.”
“Why?”
Tooley shuddered. “The woman who owns this place has me under a compulsion.” He realized very suddenly that the last thing he wanted to do was to tell this beautiful woman, or, oh hells, anyone else for that matter, the details of the last twelve hours. He wanted to crawl into a shower for a few years and then pretend it never happened. Heedless of the fear he had felt earlier when he saw this woman in the marble coffin, he grabbed her arms back and added emphatically, “I need to go now, while she’s sleeping.”
“Is she very bad?”
Tooley just nodded, his eyes wide.
“Why am I here?”
He looked down the hallway again, his imagination creating noises that he knew he hadn’t heard. Then he looked at the young woman. She stood still, looking him in the eye, apparently without guile. He couldn’t just leave her here with that rapist. He wouldn’t be able to face himself in a mirror.
“I can tell you what I know, but not here. Do you want to come with me?”
She stared at him and her hands tightened on his arms. “Yes.”
“Fantastic.” He looked at her clothing. “If anyone asks, you’re dressed for a RenFairie.”
“I...I don’t know what that is.” She blinked some more, and a little moisture ran down her face. It might have been a tear. He couldn’t say.
“I’ll cover for you. Probably no one will ask. D.C. isn’t L.A., but it has its share of nutters.”
She nodded mutely, wondering what a Deecee or an El A or a nutter was but worried that if she bothered him with too many questions, he might hit her, or worse, abandon her. She couldn’t remember anything—not her name, not her life, not where she was, certainly not how she had gotten wherever this was. But somehow, she just knew that asking too many questions led to pain. She was determined to follow this Tooley. He seemed...kind.
Tooley tucked The Cover of Darkness into his pocket. It wasn’t big enough to cover both of them, but it compacted quite well. He’d have to hope they wouldn’t need it. They made it o
ut of the shop’s back door, and Tooley found the minivan that he had driven the night before. He couldn’t make it start, not even using magic. He looked under the hood as quietly and quickly as he could. Crystal Winkowski had assured his inability to leave through one simple action—she had removed his battery.
“I suppose she made Theo do it,” he mumbled as he considered her long nails. He shrugged his shoulders, taking the weight of his shirt off of the scratch marks those nails had dragged down his back at one point that morning. Turning to the woman standing by him, he said, “I’ll have to hot wire something in the parking lot up front.”
She nodded and followed him, hoping to find out what it meant to hot wire. It didn’t sound pleasant. She would gladly stand in for him if she could, if this hot-wiring involved pain. She wasn’t sure, but she had a feeling that pain might be something she handled quite well.
Tooley darted to the side of the building and looked around, then gestured for her to follow. She darted after him, mimicking his movements in case it was important to move both where he went and how he went. Tooley didn’t notice until she ducked her head around him to see what was on the other side of the building.
“Wait—let me! Your hair is a little loud,” he hissed.
She put a hand up to her strawberry pink hair. “You can hear it? Is it talking?” she said incredulously.
He looked at her from under his brows. “It’s a metaphor. Or kinesthesia.” He shook his head. “Never mind. We need to move.”
“But my hair is simply hair!”
Tooley rolled his eyes. “Your hair color is very noticeable. I said loud as a substitute.” They heard a car engine start on the far side of the building, the front of the old strip mall. “Look, never mind. Let’s go, Strawberry Shortcake.”
She didn’t ask what he meant. She did not think that was her name. She hoped it wasn’t. It was too long and impractical. For now, she was content to follow this man who had saved her...from something.
They crossed another side of the strip of buildings, this one much, much shorter and close to a line of trees in a small grove. She glanced over, sniffing the air and getting a sense of the types of small animals in the thicket—mice, rats, two other warm-blooded creatures that she didn’t recognize. How strange. No name came to her mind as she sniffed them. Perhaps she had never smelled them before. She smiled.
“Strawberry!” His call was still a whisper, but a frantic one.
She turned and saw that Tooley had gone to the end of the building and was waving at her to follow him. “Yes.” She trotted toward him, hoping that her movement was correct. She had not watched him. She had been distracted by the smells of the woods and the woodland creatures. She might be beaten for this later, but she knew that she deserved it. She came as close to him as she could. “I am here.”
He smiled, and it was like sunshine. His thin face lit up with the smile and his blue eyes made her happy. She smiled back.
“I am going to go out there and find a car that is unlocked. There aren’t very many out there, so I may have to break a window. Then I will pull out wires from under the dashboard and hot wire the car so its engine starts.”
“Yes,” she agreed, in part because so many of the words didn’t make sense, though now she felt that hot wire might not be a form of torture, which was good.
“When I have the car started, run out to me and get in the other door.”
She worried that she might not know how to do that, but she worried more that if he knew this, he would leave her. “Yes,” she told him earnestly.
He felt very protective of her. Perhaps because she seemed to be so certain that he could do all these things he said he would do. He patted her shoulder. “Keep an eye on me out there. I won’t be too long.”
“Yes,” she told him and nodded.
He almost doubted her then, but she had said words other than “yes.” He thought she understood what he was saying. He turned back to the lot and looked over the ten or so cars parked there. He needed one that wasn’t too new. Those all had magetech theft detection. Not fun. He needed an older model car. Luckily, in this strip mall, most of the cars were older. Only two of the ten looked like late model cars. Most were pre-1990 and magetech-free, unless the owner had upgraded. Since none of the cars left looked like it had so much as been washed in the last decade, Tooley figured the odds of high-end mageware in one of the old shitbangers were next to zero.
He walked out onto the parking lot as if he had just come out of a store and was headed for his car. As he passed a car, he would casually attempt a door handle to see if he would get so lucky as to have an unlocked car to start. On the third try, bingo! An old Toyota Camry, probably white but now gray with dirt, layers of it. The driver’s side front door opened at his touch, and he made quick work of the wires.
As soon as he had the car started, he saw a pink head come up in his window. He almost had a heart attack. When he got a breath he pointed at the passenger door. “Get in, quickly. We’ve got to go!”
She ran around the front of the car, and then stood at the door. He rolled down the window to ask her what the hell she was doing, and when she climbed in through the window, he realized that she had no idea how to open a car door.
He had a sudden sense of having jumped off the high dive to fall through the clouds. He had no idea what he had gotten himself into by rescuing the woman, but he wouldn’t have it any other way now. He couldn’t have left her there. It just wasn’t right. He put the car into drive and turned toward Route 355, heading back to the city and hoping to get some answers from someone, and soon. It was time to talk to his mother.
While Baz and Tony waited for a call from their Fairie contact, Baz continued to sort through old reports, mapping out the differences between the two smuggling operations and hunting for clues to the identity of their contact last night. Tony took the list of items that had been recovered and started contacting the people who had bought them to look for a sales pattern. Most of the items recovered from their cloaked figure, the one who Tony had taken to calling Gandalf because of his theatricality, were small spells. While more potent than those that could be bought from craft shops in Mundania, they were far from the level of sheer power that it took to create a vampire, as the artifact Maybelle and Mickey had sold to Heraphina had done. Most of the items the police had were recovered before they were sold, but a few had been reported when the Natty buyers trying to use them had gotten hurt. For instance, one spell, meant to clear up acne, had actually turned the skin to porcelain, temporarily making the girl it was used on quite unhappy. She had missed her high school prom. Her parents, having purchased the spell illegally in a well-meant attempt to help their daughter have a happier prom night, had to turn themselves in to get help making her a real girl again.
No one had pursued this particular smuggler because his operation was so small. He chose innocuous items, bringing them in through warehouses that skirted the edge of D.C. or were just over the line in Virginia or Maryland. He seemed to have no partners, only fences. While his earnings must have been very small per item, he made up for this in volume. Until this last deal he had run, Tony might have said it was a waste of time to go after him. She understood why he hadn’t been a priority to the SCIB. It would be like going after one guy in Times Square selling knock-off Gucci or, she grinned, Louis Vuitton. Buyer beware was the best advice. But this last haul seemed different. He was really scared. Tony had seen that. And his fear suggested that whatever he had smuggled, it wasn’t wrinkle remedies or an Insta-Abs (Six-Pack Guaranteed) spell.
“Hey Baz,” she called out, as she continued to look at her screen. “What do you think was in the box, the long one?”
“Why do you ask?”
“I’m looking at all this little stuff that Gandalf usually moves, and I wonder what he was so scared of in that box.”
Baz looked up from his own perusal of reports. “Perhaps it is not the boxes he fears. Perhaps it is the person to whom tho
se boxes go. He is small-time, so passing up the income from the flamingoes would not be a small thing for him. It would be a problem.”
“Yeah...yeah, it would.” Tony looked at Baz. “Still, I wonder.”
Baz shook his head. “I think you know what is in the biggest box. Think of the shape.”
She pressed her lips together and nodded. “Yeah, I think I do. I keep hoping I’m wrong, but we helped smuggle a Changeling, didn’t we?”
“Probably,” Baz agreed, frowning. “Let us do what we can to make it the last one smuggled over here, yes?”
She nodded and looked back at her screen, relieved that they seemed to be back to a civil, working relationship.
“I wish he would hurry up and call. I want to go after him.”
Baz got up and walked over to her desk, sitting on the side of it. The desk groaned just a bit under his weight. “I called the officer on watch at the warehouse from last night. Our smuggler has not returned there. We have had no responses on the BOLO for the minivan. It seems to have disappeared. You must be patient.”
She looked up at him and raised a brow. “Pot? Kettle?”
Baz frowned. “Do you want some tea?”
She rolled her eyes. She knew he hadn’t been out of his animal form for all that long, but still—how long did it take to pick up modern language? “Never mind. I meant, you aren’t exactly the soul of patience yourself.”
He shrugged. “I have my moments. Animals can be very patient, especially predators in pursuit of prey.” He smiled a bit and something about that smile made her uneasy. But it slipped on and off the surface of his face quickly. “When you upset an animal, it reacts, and when in pain, it reacts. I have a temper. I am sorry you have seen so much of it.”
