A glimmer of recognition crossed his face. “Maybe. Course, I see a lot of people around here…”
I could have read his mind, but it was simpler to produce a folded hundred-dollar bill from my back pocket. “Think hard,” I said, holding it up to the glass.
The attendant hesitated only long enough to note the face on the currency. “Yeah, the freak show. They’re staying here.”
“Not here now?”
“Nah. Ghost huntin’ or some shit like that.”
“Indeed.” I slid the bill through the slot in the window and pulled a second one out. “Any idea where they might have gone?”
“They might have mentioned the Monroe House.” I tilted my head, and he explained, “Old Man Monroe used to own half the town. He haunts the house he built. Or that’s what folks say, I don’t know,” he allowed. “Ain’t never seen a ghost. Me and my girl went up there once before the new family bought it.”
I had a strong suspicion that the attendant’s girlfriend was attached to his wrist, but I let it slide. “Where would I find this place?”
He pointed toward the darkened brick courthouse. “Up the hill, hang a right on Third, go halfway down the street, and you’ll see the driveway.” He cleared his throat, and the second bribe joined its fellow.
I left him to his pornography and trekked off into the night, having helped myself to the attendant’s mental map. True to his word, the house wasn’t far—and true to Paul’s, the driveway was choked with vans, black vehicles grossly out of place in a neighborhood of modest Hondas and Subarus. I stepped up to one and peered in the open back doors at a tangle of monitors and blinking computer components, all overseen by a skinny kid wearing thick-framed glasses and fat headphones over braided black pigtails. Before she could notice me, I slipped out of her line of sight and headed for the house.
As glad as I was to see Paul again, I suspected something was amiss when I found him sitting on the porch steps, drinking from a tiny flask. He saw me approach, lifted his metal box, and swigged. “Don’t even start, Leffee,” he warned. “I’ve had one hell of a day.”
I sat beside him, and he shifted to make room. “What are you drinking?”
“Gin,” he said miserably. “Found it in my trunk. I think you left it there a few years back.”
“Just dump it,” I told him as a bottle of port appeared at his feet.
He cut his eyes to the wine, nodded his thanks, and poured the rest of the gin in the bushes. “The imbeciles driving me to drink have decided that Madison—that’s our little girl—is being haunted by the ghost of Henry Monroe.”
“Former owner, heard the short version.”
Paul eyed his miniature flask and the full-sized port bottle for a moment, and I dropped a funnel in his lap. “Got a cocktail shaker, too?” he asked as he commenced the operation. “I’m curious how much barware you’re carrying these days.”
“As always, whatever’s needed,” I replied, catching the old priest’s smirk. “And should you require something a bit more potent, I can do a decent syringe and—”
“Don’t tempt me tonight. I might take you up on it, and that’s a confession I’d rather not make. Cheers.” He handed me the funnel and drank deeply, careful to avoid dripping on his stole, then slipped the flask back into his pocket. “Did you want to hear the voice?”
“Sure,” I said, and Paul slapped his recorder against my glove. I depressed the button and waited while the babbling subsided, and then a sweet, high voice I assumed to be Madison’s growled insults against the mothers of everyone around her in Fae. “Yeah,” I muttered when the sound ceased, “I think this is Harrow again.”
“Another burger jingle?”
“Not nearly as polite. You know, Paul, my offer stands—”
“And my answer is unchanged,” he replied. “Please stay out of my head.”
I shrugged and passed back his recorder. “As you like. Well, this isn’t fixing the problem.” I sighed, pushing myself off the step. “Coming?”
He looked sick. “Colin, they’ve got a damn psychic in there. She sees shadow figures in every room.”
“I’ll take point, then.” I paused to check the integrity of my gloves, then picked up an abandoned trowel and tested its weight. “This may get messy, you know.”
“It pains me to say this, but see if you can avoid killing the idiots, okay?”
I snorted and headed up the stairs. “Some priest you are, man.”
“I’m only human,” he called after me. “I’ve got limits.”
At the door, I glanced back at him and raised an eyebrow. “You think mine are any higher?”
“No, and that’s why I’m staying out here.” Paul pulled his flask free again and unscrewed the cap. “Go on, have a good time. Ego te absolvo.”
Want to have a little fun with ghost hunters? Here’s a tip: bear in mind that they’re straining to pull meaningful sounds from silence.
Aside from a pair of tapers shoved into empty wine bottles in the foyer, the house was dark when I slammed the door open and stomped inside, earning a satisfying round of shrieks for my pains. The evening breeze caught the candle flames just so, sending them dancing before snuffing them out, and I set my hand ablaze to compensate. “You people like orbs, right?” I asked as they stared at the fire in my palm like terrified deer. “Time to pack up,” I said quietly, meeting the eyes of the nine kids ringing the living room. “And turn off the recording devices before I do it for you.”
The boy behind the camera, who looked as if he might be on a first-name basis with the proprietor of every pizza joint in a twenty-mile radius, gawked at me in shocked silence.
“Turn it off,” I repeated, “or it’s history.”
His stubby fingers began to reach for the buttons, but before they could make contact, a boy in a black baseball cap barked, “Keep rolling! What the hell is that thing?”
The cameraman, too stunned to argue, swiveled the camera on its tripod until I stood in the center of the lens’s field of view.
“Kid,” I murmured, “I warned you. Close your eyes.”
At least he had a modicum of self-preservation. By the time the camera exploded into shrapnel, he had flung himself behind an antique loveseat and was whimpering along with his crew’s renewed shouts.
“Hey,” their leader yelped, “that’s expensive! The fuck—”
I didn’t waste time asking nicely again. He shrieked as I sent a focused bolt of energy around the room, electrocuting every voice recorder and repurposed voltmeter in their arsenal as well as all of the family’s lamps. Blue lightning flickered from pockets and bounced off the metal objects in its path, and the short hair on my arms stood on end as it returned to me, ricocheted off my trowel, and passed out the window.
By the time the light show ended, the would-be exorcists had become a cowering mob in the corner, shaking in the firelight. A girl near the front prayed and frantically rubbed a plastic rosary, while her leader had somehow slunk to the rear of the pack, putting his assistants between us for safety. As I finally spotted the little girl, who had been tied to a coffee table in the back of the room, a woman in a white broom skirt stepped forward and raised her hand. “Unclean spirit!” she bellowed, swishing her way toward me. “I banish you to the darkness from which you came. I banish—”
“Yeah, that’s not going to work,” I interrupted, turning up the flame to get a good look at her bottle-thick glasses. “I suppose you’re the psychic, hmm?”
She flinched, thrown off balance. “Go into the light?” she tried weakly.
“Nope,” I replied. “Now, listen up, children. I’ve got a priest on the porch who actually knows what he’s doing, and instead, I find you lot playing at Ghostbusters. So who’s the spirit, then?” I asked, focusing on the alleged medium.
She held her composure remarkably well, considering that I was standing ten feet away from her with a large ball of spectral flame in my palm. “Henry Monroe,” she said, fighting the quivering in
her jaw. “He has unfinished business.”
“He may well have buried a fortune in pirate gold in the garden, my dear, but he’s got nothing to do with this mess.” I turned from her to the bound child, who strained against her restraints, and switched into Fae. “Drop her, Benatin.”
Little Madison sighed, and her eyes rolled back in her head as she slumped against the table. A disembodied voice to her right whined, “You have no right—”
“I have every right,” I snapped, and threw the globe of fire into the air to free my hands. “And I thought we had this conversation already.”
“My lord gave me—”
“Your lord is dead, or hadn’t you heard?”
The voice hesitated. “My…my lord—”
“Robin? Yes. Our mother killed him. Now show yourself.”
The shadows wavered, and the paranormal experts gasped as Benatin popped into view, all four feet and dimpled cheeks of him. I tapped the trowel against my glove and said, “Drop the glamour. You’re not fooling anyone.”
His tone turned petulant, but his eyes remained focused on the trowel. “Who are you to give orders? I don’t have to drop it, not for you.”
I stood in silence for a moment, long enough to make him twitch, then tucked the trowel into my belt and let myself explode in a white corona. Our observers screamed again, and Benatin staggered backward before tripping over the rug and falling on his side. By the time he righted himself, I had grabbed him by the shirt and pulled him toward me, then willed his glamour away until I found myself facing a petrified adult version of the little boy he chose to be. “Robin’s not the only one lately dead,” I said softly. “Now, what were you saying?”
His pronounced Adam’s apple bobbed. “You…you can’t…Lord Oberon will—”
“Oberon doesn’t seem to give a damn. But I do.” I yanked at his shirt, drawing him nearer. “What’s it going to take to get through to you? Honestly, you didn’t even leave the state. The damn state, Benatin! What sort of idiot lingers where he’s been warned away?”
His panic mounted by the minute. “I wasn’t hurting anything!” he wailed, squirming in my grip.
“You were using that child like a puppet!”
“I didn’t hurt her!”
“That’s not the point!” I shook him until his head snapped back and forth. “You did what I told you not to do, you got those morons mixed up in this mess,” I continued, dragging him into view of the bug-eyed ghost hunters, “and you pulled me away from what was promising to be a very pleasant evening. What do you have to say for yourself?”
His defiance melted into begging. “My lord, please…Lord Coileán, I swear it, never again…”
I let him babble for a moment, then threw him onto the sofa beside the unconscious girl and pulled the trowel free. “This is the last time I let you live,” I murmured, holding him down with a heavy wave of force. “Though I see that you’ve yet to learn the lesson I taught you. Let’s try again.”
I pushed the trowel’s blade against his cheek, holding it steady as he screamed and thrashed with the pain, then pulled it out of his ruined flesh and stepped back. “Try to learn something this time, won’t you?” I said, and waved the door open.
Benatin, still screaming in agony, ran for the door and vanished. A moment later, Paul stepped into the foyer, looked around, and peered at me. “Problem solved?”
“Problem solved,” I replied, switching tongues again. “And I kind of like this thing,” I added, turning the trowel’s wooden handle over. “Good weight, bit of a buffer.”
Paul cleared his throat pointedly. “Colin, uh…you’re glowing.”
“I’m aware of that.”
He cut his eyes to the kids and their ruined equipment. “This isn’t being recorded, then?”
I shook my head. “Anyone wearing a pacemaker would be on the floor by now. Remember those conversations we’ve had about why I’m not getting a computer?”
“Yeah, understood.” He looked the team up and down and snorted. “All right, boys and girls, you’ve got no proof that any of this ever happened, and anyone you tell will think you’re making it all up. And should you decide to go public, my shiny associate might be distressed, and that would be a very unfortunate turn of events. Is that quite clear?”
All of them, even the boy in the baseball cap, nodded.
“Good. Now, run along, all of you. I’ve got to see to Madison,” he said, heading for the coffee table.
The praying girl spoke up. “Uh, Father Paul…if the feed died, her parents are going to be back here soon...”
“Good,” he snapped, untying the sleeping child. “They should have been here from the get-go.”
“But for control purposes—”
I willed a pair of candelabra onto a side table and shut off my brights. “This wasn’t a damn experiment,” I interrupted. “You’ve got a case of mind control on your hands, and you’re worried about bad data? Moon and stars, what the hell is wrong with you?”
I never received an answer. Something firm and fast slammed into the back of my head, and all I saw were stars flickering into blackness.
“Shit. Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit.”
The voice was female, moderately pitched with a slight drawl muddled by panic. I couldn’t place it, but at that moment, as I was waking to a blinding headache, that detail was inconsequential. So there was an unknown woman nearby, probably young, definitely distressed. So what? I was almost certain that my skull had gone concave.
I must have moaned, because the next thing I heard was Paul’s voice—darker, rougher, far deeper—somewhere in the haze. “He’s coming around. Stand back.”
“He’s going to kill me,” the woman protested. “If you don’t let me go—”
“Stand back, but stay where I can see you.”
The floor creaked, and then a hand landed on my forehead. “Come on, Colin. Wake up. You need to wake up,” Paul murmured. “Rise and shine. Don’t make me get a bucket.”
At that, I forced one eye open, and he smiled tightly. “That’s more like it. “Now the other one.”
It took three tries, but I managed to get both eyes open and keep them that way. Paul, I saw, had knelt beside me with a camping lantern, but only one of his hands was free. The other was wrapped around a little pistol, which was pointed at the pigtailed girl from the van.
“Shit,” she whispered.
I blinked a few times, trying to recall exactly why I was prone and in pain. “What—”
“Be still,” Paul interrupted. “I’ve got the situation in hand, and you probably have a concussion, so take it easy while I—”
“No.” I forced the screaming pain deep down and sat up, though the effort almost cost me my last meal. “What happened? Where did they go?”
His eyes disapproved, but his voice was resigned. “They ran while you were out. Victim’s still sleeping it all off,” he said, nodding toward the far table, then moved his gun hand closer to the girl. “This one sneaked in through the side door and smashed a candlestick into your head.”
I glanced around and spotted a glint of brass in the lantern’s glow, then carefully examined it while I prodded the wound. “No blood. She didn’t break the skin.”
“I’m more concerned about internal bleeding,” he replied. “Swelling. Bruising. Cranial fractures.”
“It’s just a candlestick,” I protested.
“You fell like a sack of potatoes. Now sit there and let me handle this.” He rose slowly and turned his full attention on the girl, who remained frozen in the middle of the room. “All right, I need some answers,” he said. “Unless you’d like to go down for aggravated assault, young lady.”
Her glasses flashed as she tilted her face toward mine. “You think he’s going to call the cops?”
“Wouldn’t be the first time,” I said, pushing myself off the floor over Paul’s protestation. I turned the candlestick over in my hands—my appropriated trowel was nowhere to be found—and s
tudied my apparent assailant more closely. “You were in the van. Technical oversight?”
She nodded. “Someone had to monitor the feeds.”
Paul grunted beside me and muttered, “We’ve got to destroy that van.” I looked at him quizzically, and he shrugged. “All you did was break the cameras. The real recording is in that vehicle.”
“It’s already been erased.”
We whipped back to the girl, who crossed her arms and glared at the pistol. “I killed the whole thing once the lightning started. Little bug I wrote into the software, untraceable by anyone else on the team. They won’t suspect me. Chalk it up to supernatural forces and move on.”
“Why would you—”
“Want to put the gun down?”
I nodded, and Paul lowered the pistol. “Okay,” I said, “I’m listening.”
She exhaled in a soft rush, then dropped to one knee. “Lord Coileán, my name is Vivian Stowe,” she muttered at the floor. “I apologize for the candlestick, but it was either that or the fireplace poker, and I figured you’d prefer my choice.”
I gingerly rubbed the back of my head, which had begun healing. “Not sure I like either option, to be frank. And how do you—”
“My parents are of Lord Oberon’s court.”
“Ah. And you…are not?”
“My allegiance is to the Fringe,” she replied, pulling a phone from her pocket as she stood. “And given the time since the feed went down, we should expect the victim’s parents here any minute. I need you out of here so I can clean up your mess.”
I laughed in disbelief. “My mess?”
“Yours. I had the situation under control before you barged in and lit up.”
Her wristwatch caught the light when she returned her phone to its place, and I couldn’t contain a smirk. “Under control, you say? You had a full-blooded faerie under control, kid?”
For a fraction of a second, she wavered. “The plan—”
“Whatever plan you had was moronic. Your parents—half fae, yes? Certainly not full, not if you’re wearing that.” Her hand went to her wrist, covering the metal band. “Didn’t get what they’d expected, did they? How’s your skill?”
The Faerie King Page 9
