Foster bowed to her and then to me. He had a dagger sheathed on either thigh and crossed swords mounted on his back. His armor looked like a deep brown leather, partially hidden beneath the platinum blond hair resting on his shoulders. “Lord Vesik, I would humbly request the use of your esteemed abode.”
My grin filled out. “My clock?”
The older fairy beside him burst into laughter. She was dressed in an elegant gown, green with silver metal trim beneath a harness supporting two crossed swords of her own. The gown matched the intense green of her eyes. “Young one, your clock is a place of power, a nexus. A concentration of Fae magic is pulled through your … clock.” She stifled her laughter and curtsied to me. “I am Cara, Foster’s mother, and this,” she gestured to the younger fairy in a brilliant blue dress, “is Aideen, Foster’s wife.”
Aideen smiled and nodded slowly. Golden plates of armor and chains tinkled as she moved her head. It reminded me of the charms and metal Zola wore.
Foster met my eyes; his own a surreal and brilliant blue. “What price do you require?”
“Nothing,” Sam hissed in my ear. By the time I turned to look at her, she was smiling again.
I shook my head and I gestured at Sam with my right hand. “Any friend of my sister’s okay by me. You can shack up here as long as you need too.”
It was about that time a hideous beast of legend locked its jaws around my ankle and dragged me screaming into the back room. A few moments of sheer terror later, I learned it was a pregnant, and very grumpy, pet cu sith. Everyone else thought it was hilarious. Me? Not so much.
Ah, the good old days.
The cloud of memories vanished as the clerk slid my purchase across the butcher block counter. My eyes widened. No one had ever told me how big a twenty-five pound wheel of fabulous Irish cheddar cheese was. It was impressive. How could someone less than a foot tall not be blown away? The clerk rambled off my total.
My checking account was certainly blown away.
After a circus-worthy balancing act with said cheese to get out of the store, into the car, and up to my shop’s front door, I stumbled to the back room with make-up gifts in tow. The thud the cheese wheel made as I dropped it on the table was enough to raise the dead. A pair of fairies appeared in front of me, hovering with slow wing movements and swords drawn.
“Hey Foster, I have a peace offering.” I waved at the massive wheel.
He scowled at me, glanced at the cheese, and then back to me. His eyes went wide and he turned back to the wheel, gliding onto the label. “Cheese … it’s all cheese?” He looked astonished.
I started to smile when a small voice cleared its throat. I turned my head slightly to find Cara about an inch from my eyeball with a gleaming metal shard.
“Ah, hi Mom.”
I doubt the devil could match her grin. She didn’t lower her sword.
“Check this out.” I leaned backwards just a hair and crinkled the brown paper bag without moving the rest of my body to reveal a Bushmills Irish Whiskey label.
“Oh, you dear boy.” She smiled and patted my cheek. Her sword was gone and I was suddenly crinkling an empty brown bag. I have no clue where the whiskey went.
Foster laughed and hacked off a chunk of cheese the size of his head. With a full mouth he said, “Apology accepted. We don’t have to maim you now.” He vanished into the ancient grandfather clock, an armload of cheese in tow.
“Ha, yeah, that’s good.” I smiled, and shivered, and solemnly left the shop.
* * *
I had my hand on my rental car, ready to open it and hit the liquor store for some ale when the doggy door squeaked behind me and a small voice said, “Damian, wait!”
I paused and was surprised when Aideen landed on the roof of the car.
“What’s up?” I said.
“I wanted to thank you.” She bowed her head. “And apologize. I know you did not mean what you said to Foster. He never should have reacted like that. It’s Cara,” her eyes flicked to the shop and back, “she overreacts sometimes and I’m afraid he’s much the same on occasion.”
I’d never heard Aideen talk that much. I smiled and said, “It’s not a problem. I think we’re all happy now.”
“Yes, yes we are. Thank you, the cheese is fantastic.” She smiled and took off with one flap of her wings, turning back in midair. “Damian, please take care of Foster for me? I sometimes fear he doesn’t know his limits.”
“I promise Aideen, I’ll keep an eye on him.”
She smiled and vanished through the doggy door. It reminded me of the fact I hadn’t seen the cu siths around since my last impromptu piercing. Maybe Foster finally gave them up. I’d have to ask him.
I was in the liquor store moping about their lack of ale and picking up a six-pack of Sam Adams, when I remembered Robert. “Shit,” I muttered and glanced at the clock on the wall. Robert was my gemstone supplier and he was supposed to be at the shop in an hour. I grabbed two extra six packs and checked out.
I pulled out my cell and dialed. “Frank, hey, can you come down to the shop?”
“Sure, what’d you need? You’re not at Vamps ’R Us?”
I let out a short laugh. “Robert’s coming by in an hour. I’ll get some pizza and whatnot for an early dinner.”
“Hell yeah, I’ll be right there!” he said before he hung up.
He sounded sincerely excited. I stared at the phone in disbelief. Who gets excited about crap like this? Inventory? Gah. I shook my head and called the pizza joint.
* * *
I paid the pizza delivery girl and took the boxes to the back room. Foster was camped out on the top box before I made it three steps from the front door.
“Which one’s mine?” he said.
“The top one. Dammit, you know me too well.”
He grinned and flew to the grandfather clock as we cleared the saloon-style doors. “Just set it down on the bottom shelf will you?”
I put the three boxes on the table, then opened the top one and slid it into the grandfather clock. A swarm of fairies, several I didn’t recognize, descended on the pizza with battle cries aplenty.
Frank hesitated at the door.
“Don’t worry, they’re distracted by pizza. No one’s going to throw you out the door today.”
A cacophony of laughter rolled out of the clock and Frank turned red.
“Come on Frank, grab some pizza before Robert gets here.”
I heard him take a deep breath as he stepped into the room and pulled up a chair. “What kind of pizza you get?”
“Vampire special. Garlic sauce, extra cheese, and chicken.”
“Vampire what?” Frank eyed the pizza with great suspicion. “Does garlic actually work on them?”
The fairies erupted into laughter and I followed suit.
“I didn’t know you paid for entertainment too!”
I don’t even know which fairy said that, so I shot a warning glance at the entire group. They slowly quieted down to a roar.
Frank’s color approached purple as I said, “No, actually vampires love garlic. Some of Sam’s Pit works at the pizza joint down the street and they call this,” I waved a slice at him, “the vampire special.”
There was a knock at the back door.
“I got it,” I said as I dropped my slice and jogged a few steps to the door. I wasn’t surprised to find Robert there fifteen minutes early. That was his usual time. He had two wheeled travel bags in tow and took a deep breath through his nose before flashing his unnervingly flawless teeth.
“Vampire special, Damian? You shouldn’t have.” He laughed, shook my hand, and followed me back to the table. With his bags settled between himself and the wall, he grabbed a paper plate and two slices. His face was as gaunt as ever, with hair cropped in a close military style and bleached white except for the dark brown roots.
“Robert, meet Frank. He’s the new guy Foster told you about on the phone.”
Frank and Robert shook hands as Robert wav
ed at the clock. I think there was a greeting from the vicinity of the clock, but it was hard to understand a fairy with a mouthful of cheese.
“Good to meet you, Frank.”
Frank nodded and picked up a slice of pizza. He squinted at it and sniffed before taking a bite. His graying eyebrows rose as he said, “That’s a seriously good pizza.”
“Seriously,” I echoed in a deadpan voice to Robert’s chuckle.
We munched on pizza in relative silence for a few minutes. The fairies quieted down as Aideen finished eating and broke out her lute. Everything in the room slowed as the chords she patterned with her left hand were brought to echoing life by her right. Robert leaned back with a smile as Frank, with his slack jaw, stared at Aideen’s impossible performance of Sellingers Rownde as she propped herself up on the edge of the clock. When she finally brought the song to a close, the room swelled with a harmony and balance I have experienced only in the presence of her music.
“Christ Damian,” Robert said. “I don’t even care if you don’t buy anything. That was amazing.”
“Ah, right, back to business.” I smiled and waved to a group of departing fairies. “Robert, I’m going to let Frank pick something out today. See how he does. Maybe he can handle dealing with you every now and then for me.”
“I’m always interested in new blood.” Robert flashed us a pearly grin.
Frank shivered and balled his hands into fists. I couldn’t help but laugh.
“Robert’s a good guy, Frank, don’t worry. You’ll always walk away with your soul intact. More than I can say for some of my more, um, interesting acquaintances.”
Robert and I went through the usual bartering and bickering. He promoted his wares and inflated his prices while I pointed out every flaw I could find and told him he couldn’t sell some of his stuff to a trashcan until we finally ended up somewhere in the middle. In the end I was a few hundred dollars lighter with some amber, a couple pieces of jade, obsidian, a few different shades of aventurine, and some copper bound to small pieces of Magrasnetto to show for it.
I waved to Frank. “Alright, Frank, you’ve seen how we work. Now you pick something out and we’ll see if it sells.”
“I’ve got something you’ll like.” Robert reached into his duffel bag and pulled out a translucent gold pillar. It was at least a foot tall and six inches in diameter. Three wiry feathers near the center flared out close to the edges of the cylinder. The pillar made a healthy thunk as he set it on the table. Tiny streaks of darkness appeared at random intervals as he turned it under his hand.
“Good god, Robert, is that entire thing amber?”
“Sure is. It’s got a few dino feathers in there too.”
“Wow,” Frank said as he ran his hand down the side. “How much?”
Robert smiled like a shark, “Today? Twenty-five hundred dollars.”
Frank slapped the table and said, “That’s my pick, Damian!”
I made a gagging sound as I choked on my beer. I wiped the dribble off my chin and stared at Frank and asked, very calmly, “Are you insane?”
“No, buy it. That’s my pick. You’ve had a lot of amber buyers in, do it.”
I sighed and considered Frank’s comments, and sanity. I had sold a lot of amber lately, but no big-ticket items. Hell, I never sold anything that big. Pendants and loose pieces sold the best. Then again, I’d never actually tried to sell anything like it before. And Frank had managed to sell some jade pieces that’d been shelf warmers for almost a year. I rubbed my chin and looked at Robert. “How much?”
“Twenty-four hundred.”
I shook my head. “Seventeen fifty.”
Robert laughed, his smile never fading as he countered. “Twenty-two.”
“What, come on man, there’s bugs stuck in that stone. Two thousand. Best offer. Take it or take your pillar with you,” I said as I crooked a finger at him.
“You have a deal my friend.” He pushed the pillar closer to Frank.
Frank snatched it up like a curious monkey and headed straight to the gemstone case across the aisle to the side of the register. I heard a few things scrape along the wooden shelf before I heard a thunk and the quiet slide of the glass door closing on the display case.
Robert shook my hand as he packed up and thanked me for the beer. The few other purchases I’d made, much more reasonable purchases I might add, stayed on the table in the back room. I’d price them and put them out later. I was thinking about getting the fairies to whip something up with the copper. Nothing one of those trash can pizzas they loved couldn’t cover of course. I grinned as I walked Robert to the door.
“By the way, Damian. I found an old cranky bastard with a pile of old books he’s looking to get rid of.”
“Really?” I said with complete aplomb. Robert knew I was looking for old arcane books and grimoires.
He laughed. “You can stop worrying. I gave him your number. No middle man here. I’m sure you’ll hear from him.”
“Thanks Robert.”
“You still have a lot of space to fill upstairs. Only trying to help.”
“Of course you are.” I waved as he climbed into his car.
I found Frank standing in front of the display case with his pillar of amber. “I hope you’re right about that or it’s going to be one hell of an expensive paperweight.”
He grinned and said, “Oh no, it’s going to sell. You just wait.”
I laughed and I waited.
Chapter Ten
I had a few hours to burn the next morning, and spending them holed up on the second floor of Death’s Door between monolithic bookcases was my activity of choice. Zola had gutted the bedrooms on the second floor when she inherited the shop, knocking out everything but a handful of structural walls that stuck out from either side of the room. A thick gray carpet muffled the sounds from the first floor as I made my way into the towering bookshelves.
Here I am home, in the center pathway, at the end of aisles sheathed in bound knowledge, tucked into a deep leather chair around an old walnut table. I sat with the pages of a manuscript yellowed from age, cradled with the greatest care.
I’d been studying this particular document for the better part of a month. It was a ley line master’s detailed instruction for using your own aura as a bladelike weapon—an aural blade to be precise.
When the hours passed, the time for our trip south arrived. I laid the manuscript in the acid free binder and gently returned it to my personal shelf just above the table. While most things in the room were for sale, the small stranded shelves, enclosed like a barrister bookcase, were all mine. I took a deep breath, reveling in the scent of knowledge and dust, before shaking out my slightly numb right foot and heading for the staircase at the opposite end of the floor, away from our ceiling-scraping bookshelves. Robert was right, there was still some free space, but I was working on it.
I jogged down to the landing, my foot fully awake, and turned right to pass the back door leading to the parking lot. There was a clatter from the grandfather clock as I entered the room. I spared it a glance before turning to the black wood shelves to the left, near the bathroom door. We didn’t have a junk drawer per se. We had junk shelves. They were generally buried under all kinds of crap: books, tools, pens, coins, and bric-a-brac swarmed on all but one shelf. That sole beacon of organization was the all-important snack shelf. Woe to the man who loses the fairies’ fudge. I picked up some protein bars, beef jerky, Pringles, Crunch ’n Munch, and cookies, and shoved them into my black leather backpack along with the surviving vials of holy water and silver dust.
I shook the bag a few times to settle its contents. From the shelf above the food, after shifting last year’s accounting to the side, I picked up my trusty 1837 Allen and Thurber pepperbox pistol. Foster had given it to me as a gift. He had a Sidhe smith work it over so I could fire a single barrel at a time or, if I really needed to blow the shit out of something, he added a second trigger to fire all six barrels at once. The smith worked a
Celtic knot design into the barrels; it was, in fact, a talisman imbued with the power to reshape ley line energy into rifling for accuracy well outside the range of an unmodified pepperbox. I ran my thumb over the walnut grips, with vine-like inlays of gleaming blessed silver, and nodded. Hidden within those grips and the shell of the original firing mechanism was the smith’s last addition, a pin fire upgrade for modern ammunition.
I broke it open like a double barrel shotgun to make sure it wasn’t loaded before I stuck it in the side of my backpack. I grabbed a few extra boxes of ammo and was zipping the backpack up, when a hole in the wall near my shins caught my eye. It started at the floor and was almost a foot high beneath the bottom shelf. I crouched down, but couldn’t see more than an inch or two into its depths.
“What the hell is …” Did your parents, or grandparents, or anyone, ever tell you it is not a good idea to stick your hand in a dark hole? I’m telling you now, go find a flashlight and look first.
I screamed as something wet and sharp tightened around my knuckles. I yanked on my hand, instincts screaming to get my hand out of the hole. When the thing in the hole pulled on my hand hard enough to introduce my face to the wall, I can’t say I was too surprised a moment later when I dragged one of the MIA cu siths out, still firmly attached, with half my fingers in its mouth.
“Bubbles!”
The cu sith’s eyes rolled up and it growled, vibrating its teeth in my hand. I winced and glanced up to find Aideen hovering above me, glaring at the cu sith. She slapped her thigh.
“Bubbles! You let him go this instant!” Aideen swooped down and rapped the cu sith on the ear with her sheathed sword.
“Bubbles?” I choked out. I was torn between tears and laughter. The fairies had named the cu sith Bubbles.
After another rap on the head, Bubbles let go of my hand and scampered backwards, disappearing into the hole with a clatter of toenails. “Ow.” I tried to move my thumb, but something wasn’t working right.
“Oh, Damian, I am so sorry.” Aideen flitted from one side of my hand to the other. “I don’t know if I can fix it right.” I yelped as she tried to move my thumb. “I’ll be right back.” She zipped into the clock and came back seconds later with Cara in tow.
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