by J. L. Ray
“Yes, dear, but why are you and Phil worrying yourselves with my welfare?” Naamah asked.
“Because you and Phil are old friends?” Cal tried.
“No, no. No we are not,” Phil said, tapping one finger on the table.
“Sure you are! I just heard you calling each other ‘dear’ not two minutes ago,” Cal argued.
Phil gave him a look from under his brows.
“Oh, so, like, Naamah isn’t Naamah to those two.”
“Right. We will need a name for you, and we will need a reason for me to be involved,” Phil continued briskly.
“I’ve always wanted to be called Esmeralda Jones,” said Naamah, a little blush stealing over her face.
“Really? Why?” Cal leaned forward.
“Oh, some book I read a long time ago. She’s a lovely girl.”
“You need to appear to be a Changeling. Can you change your mpsi flow?” Cal asked.
“No, I don’t have those kinds of magic. I can change my appearance, but not the mpsi reading.”
“I can do that,” said Phil. “I will give you the form of a goose.”
“Why a goose?”
“We shall say that you got nabbed by a giant with a penchant for golden eggs,” he began. Naamah interrupted him with a snort, but he continued, “…and you have got yourself in trouble by stealing from this giant as you escaped. Now, you are fleeing Fairie and all that you love to escape the giant’s wrath.”
“Oh dear, I sound a bit thick,” Naamah said. “Stealing from a giant isn’t exactly the brightest decision.”
Phil and Cal gave her a look.
She grinned and exclaimed, “Right. It’s a role. Acting! Well! How exciting!” She leaned over to Cal. “I’m a professional thief now. Not very bright, but a professional, nonetheless.”
“That a big change?” he asked fondly of the little fae as he took another bite of his sandwich.
“Oh my, no, not really, except for the intellectual bit. I am quite intelligent. But I must admit, despite being bright, I have been caught, though it has been at least a millennia since I was last brought in front of authorities and charged!” Cal choked on his bite of sandwich in surprise.
“Now…Why am I assisting you?” Phil pondered.
“I should think that obvious, dear. I made a deal with that devil Mephistopheles, who has connections, but limited time in Fairie to pursue them.” Naamah smiled in satisfaction.
“Very well then.” Phil leaned forward and stared into Naamah’s eyes. “I am going to rearrange your mpsi reading so it registers as Changeling, and as goose for those with the ability to sense more deeply than that.” Naamah put her hand up to her brow. “Try not to move, Esmeralda Jones. This will give you a little headache for a short time, but it will go away.” She nodded and sat as still as she could until he broke eye contact. Both of then were sweating a bit and just a little green around the edges when he finished.
Phil said quietly, “You have rather a lot more power than you once had.” He took out a pocket-handkerchief and started to hand it to her. She shook her head and got out her own.
“Yes, the residual effect of the Geas here,” she said.
He dabbed his own face, then replaced the handkerchief. “I had to fight that a bit to effect the mask.”
Cal interrupted. “So, we go up, tell them we heard they could help with special ‘packages’, see if they bite? If so, ‘Esmeralda Jones’ is our package and we want to send her to D.C., right?”
“That is it,” Phil said grimly. He turned to Naamah. “You don’t have to do this.”
“Oh, pish. Let’s go, before you get too sentimental for everyone’s good!”
“Wait a minute!” Cal stopped them both before they turned back to the bar. “Who am I?”
Naamah looked at Phil and exclaimed, “Oh dear! You didn’t wash residual magicks back on Cal, did you?” She turned to the ogre. “Your Calvin, dear.”
“No, I know what he means. Cal needs a role in this sting.”
“Yeah!” Cal frowned at the two. “I kinda forgot myself!”
Phil grinned evilly at his friend. “That is quite simple. I am an important criminal, so you must be my bodyguard in Fairie.” He straightened and got the haughty, unapproachable look on his face that Tony hated. “Come along, now. I do not have all day. I have other, er, fish to fry.”
He managed to suppress a smile when he heard Calvin mutter, “Fried fish. Man. First a big cupcake, and then a Long John Silver run.”
Midge walked around the edges of the clearing in front of The Willow. Its neon sign flickered, alternating between each letter lighting, one at a time, and then all staying on. To one side of the name of the bar was an artist’s rendering of a willow, neon pink against a blue background. Midge amused herself at first by timing the pulses in the neon. Then she calculated the mathematical progression of the letters to the picture. Then she calculated how many times the lights would work before they would likely die from use. She studied Mundane science in school while working for the PTB, with the goal of eventually being on an ambassadorial staff in Mudania, where she thought such knowledge would come in handy. By the time she finished her calculations, she was so bored she could have screamed.
“I wonder how much longer she’ll be in there?” Midge asked herself out loud. She herself was linked magically to the PTB’s courier office, but she was still startled when two voices answered.
One voice was her supervisor. “How long who will be where?”
Midge looked down at the lanyard around her neck. All PTB employees were issued an identification badge that doubled as conduit for spells used on the job. The filly had activated a vision spell, following standard courier procedure, when Naamah went into the bar. This allowed her supervisor in Fairie to both see her and hear her in a bowl of water. Her supervisor, thus, had a front row seat to what happened next.
“How long who will be? What’s the matter, sweet hooves, you lost your honey?” A nasty-looking goblin came out from behind a large oak that grew near the bar. “You need some company, pretty?” The male goblin grinned at her and ran a long-nailed, dirty hand down its concave chest. Far too much of it showed through the rags of a shirt that had seen better years than the one it currently occupied. “I ain’t seen you here before, little filly. Your kind don’t usually grace us with your presence.”
Midge had been slowly backing up as the goblin advanced. “Us?”
“Oh, me an’ my brothers.” He waved a hand behind him and three more lanky little goblins, whipcord thin and circling in a pack, slunk in behind the one already advancing. Midge knew she wasn’t supposed to leave her post, but she also knew she could outrun these creatures. She hesitated for a moment, caught between duty and self-preservation, her youth making her indecisive enough to give the goblins an advantage they wouldn’t have had with an older centaur.
They were on her and pulled her down before she could turn around.
Tony and Baz were almost out the door when Sergeant Hubbard stopped them. “Tony, the lieutenant just called down. You need to go back up to talk to him. He said that Baz should go on to the stake out.”
Tony looked confused, but shrugged. “Okay. Baz, I’ll be there soon, I hope.”
Baz wasn’t thrilled, but he left without her.
By the time Tony got to Lieutenant Azeems’s office, she’d realized that she was probably going to get news, finally, about Phil. About Phil and Cal, of course. Cal and Phil. She walked in hopeful.
“Sir?” she asked, then stopped talking when she saw that he was on his f-light and it was blinking red, indicating a call across the Divide with someone in the PTB.
She waited as patiently as she could, though it didn’t help that he kept his words to monosyllables while someone on the other end was obviously dominating the conversation. His tail made long, slow thwacking noises against the floor, killing any hope that she would hear good news. Finally, he got off of the phone.
“Sir?” she a
sked hopefully.
He shook his head. “The courier had to take Naamah to Detective Kelly and Mephistopheles at The Willow. Apparently, Naamah had a vision, in a riddle, and they had guessed almost as much as we knew about Sammeal and the Willow’s alleged involvement in the Fairie ring. Naamah went on to deliver the message, and the courier, a young centaur, waited outside. The courier had on her Vision spell, so the office was monitoring her. Unfortunately, she has been assaulted. The office sent a repulsion spell, but she’s hurt, and Naamah or the others still haven’t come out. We may not know more for a while yet.” He looked at her. “I made a split decision to tell you all of this on the assumption that you will be able to carry on and do your job. I hope that the decision I made was correct.”
“Of course, sir,” she told him, impressed by how certain she sounded. Her chest had gone hollow. It didn’t mean that anything bad was happening to Phil. Or Cal, dammit, or to Cal. She’d been to that bar, cloaked, but there. The clientele had seemed like the most desperate kinds of Supers, but all too worn down by life to actively assault anyone. It was horrible, the news about the filly. But it didn’t mean that her friends were also in trouble. It just meant that whatever they were doing, they weren’t done yet. And they still had at least fifteen hours before Phil had to be back, so no worries. Right? “If that’s all, sir, then I’ll go and join Detective de Groot at the stake out.”
“I think I’d like to keep you here, running through those files.”
“Sir? But you just said…”
Azeem sighed. “I know. But sitting still, in a van, watching from a distance? That won’t be very easy to do while you’re waiting to hear that your partner is okay. Stay here. Do the part of the work that most people don’t see—the analysis.”
She sighed. He was trying to help, and she knew it. “Yes, sir.”
She headed back into the main room and was surprised to see a blond woman sitting at Baz’s desk. She looked around the office. Joe was out on the Potomac with Jacques on a homicide case involving naiads that had just been reported, and most of the uniform support teams were either out on the stakeout with Baz or with Joe and Jacques. There was no one in the main room other than her and the mystery woman.
“Can I help you?” she asked the back of the woman’s head.
The woman stood and then turned to look at her. She had Baz’s coat, which she had pulled from the back of his chair, in her hands. Her nose was buried in it, inhaling it like it was high-end pixie dust, her eyes squeezed shut in an expression of bliss. She opened those eyes, which were so blue that looking into them was like looking into the summer sky. “Greetings. I seek Sebastian de Groot. Have you seen him? This coat is his. I smell him all over it.”
And that wasn’t creepy at all, Tony thought, as she watched the woman all but climb into the coat, as if touching it would make Baz reappear.
“May I ask why you seek Detective de Groot?”
“He is a detective? High-ranking?” She nodded as if answering her own question. “As a prince of the Realms should be, yes.” She stood up and looked at Tony, and despite standing about two inches shorter than Tony and being dressed in flowing red cloth that hugged onto curves so tight and firm that the cloth seemed to be losing a fight, she gave Tony a sense of palpable danger. “Who are you? One of his minions?”
Tony almost laughed, but the woman in front of her seemed to lacking something, a sense of humor of any kind, perhaps. Instead, as seriously as she could she said, “I’m his temporary partner, Detective Newman. And I’ll need to see your identification. Unless you are with SCIB or the PTB, you can’t be back here unescorted, ma’am.” She had her hands out in a placatory gesture, but one that would make it easy to pull her NASH. The woman just gave off that kind of vibe.
“Identification?” the woman stood and threw back a yard of glossy blond hair, some of it in long thing braids, but most of it loose and gloriously thick. “I need no identification. I seek my betrothed. We are promised to one another, and it is time for us to marry.” Tony’s eyes got big as she realized what was going on right before the bombshell in front of her announced, “I am Princess Bergfrid, promised to Lord Sebastian de Groot, and I have come to claim my husband.”
For about a beat, Tony just stood there, not sure where to go with this. Then she nodded. “O-kay. Right. About that. Baz has talked about you. A lot. And sister, you got some ‘splainin’ to do.”
The woman stared at her, frowning, “What do you mean? What is this ‘splane in’? I do not know what it is or how to do it.”
“Oh, I’ll be happy to help with that.” Tony nodded as she realized that, Phil or not, she was going to get the real story on what had happened five hundred years ago. “Baz is a friend of mine. I think you know another friend of mine, and I’d like to help you and Baz, so let’s have a little chat, shall we?” She pointed to the breakroom. “Let’s go somewhere comfortable to talk.” When the woman didn’t move, she said more forcefully, “Come on, Princess Bergfrid. Uhm. Hey, that’s a lot of name. Can I call you Berg?”
“Berg? Why would you call me after an ice formation?”
“Actually, I was just going to shorten your name,” Tony said, realizing how odd this must sound to someone who hadn’t been living in Mundania any time recently.
The woman stared at Tony. “You are a strange woman.”
Tony grinned at her. “Oh, just wait until I tell you who my friend is.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
“Another round?” The Willow nodded at the two empty beer glasses and the mug from the hot toddy.
“Why not?” Phil said. Then he turned to Sammeal. “My apologies for running off just when we had started talking. My client showed up with new information.”
“Client?” Sammeal blinked and looked at the line of empties in front of him. He had five empty glasses, so there was no way he was imagining what he just heard. That didn’t start happening until there were at least seven in front of him. “I thought you lived in Mundania now.”
“Yes, I do.”
“How do you...conduct business?” Sammeal asked after uncharacteristically searching for a diplomatic term to use in front of the old woman and the ogre, either of whom could be his old friend’s client.
“Very carefully, my old friend,” Phil murmured, slapping Sammeal on the shoulder. “And when I can get permission to come over, well, what happens in Fairie stays off the Geas’ radar, does it not?”
“It does not. Wait.” Sammeal thought a moment. “It does, I mean.”
Phil looked over at Naamah, who was trying hard to look distraught and desperate. “In fact,” Phil leaned against the counter as the beers showed up, the hot toddy right behind them, “I am here today because of some interesting information passed on to me in Mundania concerning you, my friend.”
Sammeal almost panicked, his eyes rolling enough to show the whites as he looked over the bar, searching for the Willow.
The barkeeper came back over and leaned toward Sammeal, setting a freshly pulled beer in front of him. “And what could you hear about old Sammeal the drunk in Mundania, then?” he asked pleasantly, a hint of steel underneath the words.
Phil turned his head and gave the hamadryad a pleasant smile. “Why only that, if one is interested in moving certain...merchandise...across the Divide without the attention of the Powers That Be or the Geas, then Sammeal and his partner, whoever that may be, are the ones to contact in Fairie.”
The Willow was boyishly slender, about five feet seven or so, and ridiculously pretty, with a head of curling brown hair, deep green eyes, tan skin, and dimples in both cheeks. He had inspired many a poet, lounging in the woodlands of the Fairie Realm. He normally wouldn’t be called a particularly imposing figure, but as Phil finished speaking, the air in the room changed, became electric, and it was obvious to all three, even Calvin with his stunted, Mundane upbringing, that the magic they felt was that of the Tree they were in, ready to kill invaders.
“Uhm, boss?�
�� Cal tugged at Phil’s coat sleeve, staying in character, but ready to take control if needed. His other hand reached for the gun he hadn’t been allowed to bring with him.
Phil turned to the Willow. “Cease your posturing, Hamadryad.” He held out one hand and looked down at his perfectly manicured nails as if they were the most fascinating sight in the Realms. Then, putting his hand on the bar, he looked back up and leaned forward, the force of his will battling the holding power of the hamadryad. “I have no interest in hurting your business. I have need of your...skills, shall we say, to move a particular piece of merchandise across the boundaries.”
The air settled, though several patrons chose to leave at that point, dropping coins on their tables and heading out the door. It said a lot about the kind of clientele the place attracted that not one came back in to report the assault that was happening in front of the bar at just that moment.
The Willow looked at Phil for half a minute, and then transferred his gaze to Cal. He looked back at Phil with his brows raised in question.
“My bodyguard.”
“And what would you be needin’ wit’ a bodyguard, Mephistopheles?” asked the hamadryad dryly, given the demonstration of power the dark fae had just enacted by dampening the Willow’s holding power in his own tree.
Phil sneered. “I never said I needed a bodyguard. I simply said he is one and he is mine.” Phil smiled and flicked a gold coin at Cal, who managed to catch it and play along. “I find that it gives me a certain cachet to have an ogre at my beck and call.”
Cal managed not to grin at that. Boy, was he gonna have a good time with this shit back home. He glowered at the Willow, putting in as much menace as he could.
