Her jaw rose in challenge. “Sufficient.”
“Not if you’re wearing steel. So what was this grand plan, ask him nicely?”
She paused at the sound of tires and a rumbling engine outside. “They’re back. Are you going now, or are you going to explain to these folks how you lit your hand on fire?”
“Girl’s got a point,” Paul muttered. “I’ll come up with something, call you when this is over. Are you, uh…going to be with Meggy?”
“This little outing killed the mood.” I produced a phone like Joey’s and handed it to the priest. “You can reach me here.”
He flipped the cover up and frowned. “No buttons.”
“No need.” I spotted the shadows running up the driveway and gave Vivian a final glare. “This conversation isn’t over.”
“Talk to Rick. He’ll explain everything,” she replied, and made a little shooing motion.
And so, at a loss for a better idea, I opened a gate back to Rigby.
Since inserting myself back into Meggy’s life, I’d thought my nights at Slim’s were behind me. Walking past the knot of smokers on the street and through the front doors felt a bit like coming home, if home had grime-blacked windows and an omnipresent smell of beer and cheap floor cleaner. At least it was Wednesday, still twenty-four hours away from another round of karaoke.
I slid onto my old bar stool, nodded to the regulars flanking me, and caught Slim’s attention when he looked away from the baseball game playing on the television mounted in the corner. He nodded curtly, grabbed a bottle of Johnnie Black from the shelf, and placed it in front of me with a glass that was almost clean. “Honor system,” he muttered, and turned back to the game.
An inning and about four fingers later, I waited while Slim made the rounds, topping up drinks for his few patrons, then met his eyes when he passed. “Rick,” I murmured, conscious of my neighbors, “we need to talk.”
He ran one pudgy hand through his thinning hair, then glanced up and down the line of drinkers, all of whom were focused on a commercial—for either a truck or erectile dysfunction pills, I couldn’t tell. Satisfied that they were distracted, he nodded toward a door beside the empty stage. I followed him across the bar, drink in hand.
The door led to a flight of stairs, which terminated in a surprisingly well-appointed apartment. “Well, this is unexpected,” I said, turning to examine the living room.
“Something wrong?” Slim puffed as he locked the door behind us.
“No, I’d just pictured you as more of the brown recliner and sagging couch type,” I replied, taking in the sleek lines of Slim’s white leather sofas and matching ottoman. “Scandinavian?”
“Try not to spill anything,” he said, sinking onto the larger of the pair. “What happened? Did she throw you out?”
“Aren’t you a beacon of hope,” I muttered, taking a seat on the empty couch. “And no, this has nothing to do with Meggy. I was sent to you for information.”
“Me? By whom?”
I studied his posture—back tense against the cushion and trying to disguise it, hands tightly locked across his ample stomach. “She called herself Vivian,” I said, waiting for his reaction. “Vivian Stowe, I believe. Sound familiar?”
Slim sat motionless, expressionless, for a full five seconds, and then he puffed his cheeks and exhaled. “What’s she gotten into now?”
“Ghost hunting, apparently.”
“Oh, for crying out loud.” He rubbed his face and softly groaned. “Kid means well, she really does, but she’s…rash, you know. Young.” He hesitated, then asked, “How did y’all cross paths?”
“Coincidentally,” I replied, leaning back into my couch, “but fortuitously enough for her. Thought she could take on a faerie by herself.”
My bartender continued to massage his forehead. “How bad a faerie are we talking, here?”
“Does it matter? She’s a quarter-blood at best. No power to speak of, right?”
“None at all, actually.” Seeing my confusion, Slim stopped trying to rub his headache away and regarded me quizzically. “You don’t have much experience with lesser bloods, do you?”
“Not a great deal, no,” I admitted. “I’ve known one or two, but—”
“But you’re terrifying, you’ve been terrifying a long time, and the smart ones know to avoid you. And then there’s me.”
I raised my glass to him and drank.
Slim smirked at the salute. “Did Vivi tell you about the Fringe?”
“She mentioned it,” I said, producing a fresh bottle of scotch and giving myself a refill. Slim’s eyebrow rose, and I offered him the bottle across the ottoman.
He took it from me silently, inspected the label, and gave it a tentative sniff. “Smells like the real article.”
“It’s close. Never quite perfect, but I’ve got the taste down well enough to replicate it almost faithfully.”
He held out his hand, and I created a crystal tumbler in his palm. “Classy,” he muttered, taking a test pour.
“Keep it. I’m sure I still owe you for a drink or two.”
Slim sipped, then nodded. “Close enough to fool me. Shit, man, if you’ve got this on tap, why’ve you been darkening my door, huh?”
“Because I like you,” I replied with a shrug, “and because eventually, the walls close in. Now, you were saying about this Fringe?”
He drank slowly, almost carefully, and I joined him in silently imbibing, listening to the faint voices of the game downstairs. After a moment, he set his glass aside and crossed his legs, adding unwise strain to his trousers’ seams. “You see things as a binary, yeah? Court and not court?”
“Sometimes. I mean, there are nuances—”
“Just say yes for purposes of this exercise, okay?” he interrupted. “Well, the Arcanum’s even worse about it—you’re either Arcanum or a potential danger. Trust me,” he muttered. “So given that all of the organizations of magic-wielding peoples have an in-or-out mentality, what do you do with the ones who don’t fit into either category?”
I frowned, trying to discern where this was going. “Meaning?”
“Meaning you’ve got Column A and Column B, but there’s a bunch of us who straddle the line between them.” Slim lifted his empty glass, considered it, then poured a refill. “Mongrels. Witches. Duds. Quarter-fae, eighth-fae, one guy with a little drop of fae blood on his dad’s side, maybe ten generations deep. I’ve known quarter-fae who can’t even sense magic, and that old bastard runs circles around them. Weird world,” he mused, raising his glass to his lips. “We’re the Fringe,” he said when the whisky was gone once more. “A support network for the rejects, if you like.”
I took the bottle back and poured a double. “All of them?”
“We don’t discriminate,” he replied. “There’s no point. Arcanum won’t take us, courts certainly won’t, but we have each other.”
“Fair enough, but why not just blend into Column B, then?”
Slim’s mouth twitched. “We do, more or less. You wouldn’t have known about me had Toula not blown my cover, right?”
He had a point. “So this Fringe is…what, group therapy?”
“Sometimes. But it’s bigger than that.” Taking up the scotch once more, Slim explained, “Let’s say the mundanes find out about wizards, for example. Everyone freaks out. Time for torches and pitchforks, yeah? Only the real wizards are sealed off and safe, maybe in Montana, maybe in another of their hidey-holes. That leaves us—the ones who might seem a little odd but don’t warrant protection. If you’ve got a town on a witch hunt, they’re not going to find a real wizard. They’re going to grab a witch because he can’t stop them. Or she, more likely,” he amended. “The mundanes expect witches to be female, after all.”
I put my drink on the carpet and folded my arms. “Come on, when was the last time you saw a torch-wielding mob?”
“It’s happened before,” he said defensively, “and there’s nothing preventing it from happening again.
They might come with tranquilizer guns and vivisection next time, for all I know, but the principle’s the same: they fear what they don’t understand, and they don’t realize that we’re bit players. Or care, I guess. A dead witch is a dead witch, right?” Slim collected his thoughts as the drinkers downstairs cheered. “Sure, I guess we could hide it all and blend in, but…you know, it’s part of you. We’ve all seen what we could have been. A good chunk of us grew up with the Arcanum in our lives, and then you’ve got kids like Vivi—half-fae parents whose kid got all the mortal bits. I’ve met them, you know,” he added after a drink. “Nice folks. They look like her siblings now.”
“What were they doing—”
“Came in to find out what we were about after I got her hooked into the network. I told you, we don’t discriminate.” Slim shrugged. “They’re married, oddly enough. Live up north of Anchorage. They’ve had a few kids over the years, all relatively fae—Vivi’s the first to come out wrong. They’re devastated, but what do you do? Kid’s going to die in seventy years, give or take. I think they’re still trying to come to terms with it.”
My thoughts ran to Olive, who was solidly fae, and I flinched inside at the surge of relief I felt. Never mind the fact that I barely knew my daughter—we had time to work on that. But the Stowes, having a child, loving her, raising her, only to know her end was inevitable…
“I’m surprised they let her out of their sight,” I replied.
“There was no ‘letting’ about it,” said Slim. “She moved down here two years ago. It was easier, I think.” He stared into his once-again empty glass, muttered, “Screw it,” and reached for the bottle. “Vivi’s got a little streak of paranoia, but she’s not entirely off-base. She and a few others have been inserting themselves into these paranormal groups, keeping them focused on ghosts and Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster and whatnot to draw attention away from the rest of us. I’ve seen a couple of our guys on TV, actually,” he said, passing me the scotch. “Fake psychics, researchers, tech people—Fringe folks do it all.”
“And get cocky, and get killed,” I said, refilling. “Her team was up against a guy who loves nothing more than tormenting mortals. He must have found her extermination squad amusing.”
Slim shook his head. “I’ve warned her—”
“Obviously, it didn’t stick.” I rose and threw back my drink. “Tell your people not to be stupid, all right? If there’s a genuine problem, I’m willing to help, but I work best without half a dozen cameras in my face.”
“Shit,” he muttered, and pushed himself to his feet. “I’ll pass it along. Want this?” he asked, lifting the scotch.
“Nah, keep it.”
As I abandoned my glass and turned for the door, Slim said quietly, “You should know there are rumors of a mongrel in the silo.”
I paused. “Oh?”
“Nothing verifiable, but word is he might be one of Titania’s.”
I looked back at Slim’s carefully neutral face and blanked my expression to match. “Do him a favor and keep your silence, would you?”
“They’re true, then?”
“He’s safe. That’s all that needs to be said for now.”
With a nod, he muttered, “Understood. Poor little bastard.” My eyes twitched, and Slim’s mouth tightened. “You grow up Arcanum,” he murmured, “and you’re taught that anything coming out of Faerie is the Great Satan, more or less. And then you get a little older, and someone finally tells you that you’re tainted…” He let the thought hang, then said, “I mean no disrespect, Colin. I’ve got no beef with you, and I know what you’re about. But I’ve had a few years to let everything sink in, and I don’t constantly have a mob of wizards looking down their noses at me. Not anymore.” Slim hesitated and folded his arms. “It’s…well, it’s a lot to digest, you know? It’s bad enough that you can’t do magic, but when the real wizards look at you like you’re evil incarnate…and then you add on something like, I don’t know, a rapist father who wants you dead…” He cleared his throat self-consciously. “There’s a support group for a very good reason. If this hypothetical kid needs to talk…”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” I said, shaken to finally see beneath Slim’s unflappable façade. “Listen, Rick—”
“I’m sorry, I just wanted to put that out there,” he said in a sudden rush. “No big deal. In case…you know.”
“I only met him a few hours ago. He’s at my place now, safe.” I stepped away from the door and shoved my hands in my pockets. “The rumors are right, he’s my half brother. His sister—his father’s daughter—is on track to be grand magus.”
Slim’s pudgy face contorted in a grimace. “He’s going to need more than therapy.”
“Yeah.” I studied my loafers for a moment, then met his eyes. “So tell me what to do.”
The sun was beginning to rise over the Atlantic by the time I took my leave. Slim punctuated our talk with occasional trips down to the bar to pour and tally, but we spoke long after the regulars had stumbled off into the night. He didn’t mention Vivian again, but her specter remained in my thoughts as we talked of Aiden.
Finally, when the last of the scotch was long gone, Slim told me, “The important thing to remember is that this isn’t an overnight process. You’re going to have to go easy on him—the Arcanum’s in his blood and in his head. That’s not something he’s just going to forget.” He paused, thinking. “You left him with the priest, you said?”
“Ex-seminarian, but yes. Why?”
Slim smiled faintly. “You left him with a guy ten years his senior who’s completely non-fae. I can’t think of a less threatening guide, can you?”
“Aside from the minor detail that Joey goes armed, you mean?”
“You’re being too literal.” He perched on the edge of the ottoman, grimacing as it creaked. “Joey’s still young. Talks the talk, knows the music, probably has a favorite Avenger. Old enough to be responsible, but young enough to be cool to a teenager—aside from the priest thing,” he muttered. “I can’t do anything with that.”
For some reason, I felt slightly miffed. “You’re saying I’m not cool, then?”
Slim’s eyebrow rose. “Weird old alcoholic loner with a thing for a much younger woman, who employs a good-looking young man as…well, what is it that Joey does for you, again?”
“Touché,” I mumbled.
He shrugged in reply. “If I were you, I’d give Aiden his space. Let him get his bearings, and then let him come to you. Don’t try to rush this—he’s got a lot on his plate.” Slim scratched at his stomach and yawned. “Breakfast? The Waffle House still stands.”
“Thanks, but no.” I opened a gate beside me, giving Slim a peek at dawn-pink sand on the far side. “I’ve got an appointment to keep.”
He craned his neck and scowled at the view. “You sure about that? Looks like the morning after an orgy to me.”
I looked more closely through the window to the Keys, took in the dozen half-naked bodies strewn about the beach, and sighed. “That may not be far off. Wish me luck,” I said, and headed for Florida.
CHAPTER 7
* * *
That quiet Thursday morning, Red’s could have been any beachside dive long after last call. Darkened strings of icicle lights drooped from the rusty roof, their nighttime allure cheapened by the white cords glinting in the dawn. A handful of clear plastic cups littered the long bar, some bearing traces of suds, others laced with colorful stains and smeared lipstick prints. Half a bowl of shelled peanuts remained as testament to the night’s revels and the bartender’s lazy cleanup. Really, if not for the people passed out between the shack and the shore, Red’s could be instantly forgotten.
As could its proprietor, whom I found sitting on a wooden folding chair at the tide line, bare feet in the surf and green eyes trained on the southern horizon. A salt-stained Marlins cap hid most of his hair, but a few ginger strands waved around his face as the wind whipped up from the sea. With his long black shorts and
bare, well-bronzed chest, he could have been any local boy, another twenty-something kid wasting time in a lonely corner of the Keys.
Not until he turned to face me did the truth begin to peek through. Oberon looked like a beach bum those days, but his eyes belied his apparent youth—unlined, unclouded, but if you knew how to see, they were so striking in their age.
Fleetingly, I wondered if that was what Meggy saw when she looked at me.
“You’re overdressed,” he called, raising his voice to be heard over the breaking waves. “As usual.”
“Not a social call,” I replied, slogging through the trampled sand. “As usual.”
He gave me a once-over and snorted. “Drop the glamour. At least get rid of the loafers.”
“And walk on broken glass? No, thanks.” I made my way to his side, waved an identical chair into existence, and wedged it above the waves as my glamour fell. “Or whatever else you throw around out here. Needles—”
“No, nothing more than pot. I don’t allow it. There’s no point in drawing attention.”
“Care to explain that, then?” I asked, cocking my thumb at the nearest clump of sleeping patrons.
Oberon looked over his shoulder at the scene and smiled. “Tell me, boy, what draws bad press to a bar like nothing else?”
“Fights? Fires? Dead hookers in the bathroom?”
“Drunk drivers.” He leaned back and dug his heels into the wet sand. “You don’t want to be the guy who last served the fool who swerved off the road and into a van full of photogenic children, yes? So I take precautions.” The hint of pride in his voice was unmistakable, satisfaction with a problem solved. “Anyone still here at closing time takes a little nap. They’ll wake around eight,” he continued, turning again to survey his work. “Sandy, maybe bitten, hung-over as hell, but relatively sober.”
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