The Chrome Borne

by Mercedes Lackey

  She'd kept running once she was out of the line of fire because she also couldn't afford to get caught up with the dead, wounded, and witnesses when the cops came. Somebody might remember the guy was trying to grab her—might even finger her for the one who shot first. The Savannah cops were some of the best. They'd never let a private little war go on for long; she had to be out of there before they arrived and sealed the area off.

  But who was that man, and what was he? Was he a pimp himself, or somebody's muscle? She didn't recognize him, but that didn't mean anything. New pimps moved in every week; he could have been someone new trying to expand his stable. She knew why he'd try for her; she was working alone, which made her a tempting target. Blondes, especially young ones, were always in demand. That was what Laura had told her when she'd insisted on bleaching Tania's hair.

  But he hadn't looked or acted like a pimp; he'd had none of the flash, none of the surface style and smoothness. Hired heat was more like it—but if he'd been hired, who had done it? Why hire muscle to bring her in—was she that valuable, or was it just that there was just a scarcity of young blondes worth recruiting? And would they try again—or hunt her down and take the loss of the muscle-boy out on her?

  Her head swam, and not just from the heat of the bath. It was all too complicated . . . and none of it made any sense.

  She'd have to wait until Laura got home. Laura knew the street, Laura would be able to help her sort it out, and decide what to do.

  I ought to at least change my territory, she thought drowsily. That's a good idea. I could start working President Street. It would be a little hazardous to move into a new area, since she'd be competing with girls who already had established territories, but maybe she could trade one of them for her old beat on Bull.

  Or maybe she could see if she could hit Tannim up again—

  But what if Tannim had sent the muscle?

  The thought made her sit up straight for a moment. It was possible. He knew where her beat was; he knew when she worked. He'd already advanced her three hundred bucks and gotten nothing for it. Maybe he'd decided to collect. . . .

  The thought made her sick. She'd trusted him. But wasn't that how the really sick people operated? They got you to trust them, and then they did horrible things to you.

  Maybe he was the one behind some of the disappearances that had been going on for the past couple of months—the hookers that went off somewhere and never came back. The ones that weren't in the shelters, hadn't been busted, and hadn't moved to Atlanta. Maybe she wasn't the first kid he'd approached; maybe she was just the latest one in a series. She'd read a discarded newspaper's article about serial killers the other night; about how they always chose the same kind of people, that they seemed real nice until they were caught. Regular people; folks you'd never suspect.

  She could only sit in silence and cry, her shivers making ripples in the steaming water.

  * * *

  The minute Tannim pulled up to the gate and keyed it open, he knew that there was something wrong. The radar detector on his dash whined as the gun hit it, but the run-lights didn't come on.

  Suddenly he recalled his dreams last night; all of them had been about Unseleighe critters attacking and being countered. And he remembered the careful way Keighvin and the others had handled him before he'd left last night. There had been something about to go down—and they'd been keeping it away from him.

  He flushed with anger, half tempted to turn the Mustang around and go home, his good mood vanishing. They were treating him as if he was some kind of invalid, a risk, just because he was a little tired and his aim got a little erratic—

  Unbidden, the memory of Conal and the near-miss during the last little altercation rose up before his mental eye, and the flush turned to a blush.

  He had been more than a "little" tired last night. It had been all he could do to get home and into bed. And his aim was worse than erratic when he was that weary. The last near-miss had been funny, but if someone from Fairgrove got plugged by Tannim's friendly fire, it would be a lot worse than Conal's hair-loss. Last night he'd been too exhausted to have been any use magically—it would have been firearms, then, and no mage-fire shield would deflect a steel-jacketed slug if the mage wasn't expecting one to come winging in.

  But he was in good shape now . . . and he'd better get up there and see what Keighvin had for him.

  The radio announcer finally ended his commercial spiel, and the first notes of the next half-hour's series of songs started.

  There was no mistaking that horn riff, even without the lyrics. "Dead-man's Curve," by Jan and Dean.

  With a shiver of ill-omen, Tannim snapped the radio off before the singing started.

  The radar detector continued to whine as he pulled up the drive, at exactly two miles per hour under the posted limit of thirty. Whoever was on the cameras—probably Janie—would know by that speed that the car she was tracking was a friend and not a stranger or an enemy.

  The glare beyond the trees told him that the parking lot was lit up like the yard of a maximum-security prison. In fact, all of the halogens were probably on tonight. Whatever had gone down, it must have been big. . . .

  He cursed his own weakness. He should have been there. He should have. He longed to floor the Mustang and race up the drive, to get there all the sooner—but that would give Janie and everyone else heart failure.

  Instead, he pulled sedately into a parking lot so brilliantly illuminated that every stray pebble showed clearly. It was a good thing the lot was square, or pilots would be mistaking it for the runway at the airport.

  Sam's old Mark IV Lincoln presided over an otherwise empty lot. There were no other cars there, elvensteeds or otherwise. Of course, most of the other Fairgrove humans would be gone by now; the few that were left tended to have gift-steeds, presents from their foster-parents, like the Diablo and the Dino. And any elvensteeds would have gone back to native form for a fight. Still, the empty lot gave Tannim the shivers again.

  He parked and locked the Mustang—normally he never locked it here, but there was no point in giving anything to the enemy. If the enemy was still here.

  Once he was outside the Mustang's protective shields, there didn't seem to be any sign that the Fairgrove complex was still under siege. There was nothing in the air but the scent of honeysuckle and wet grass; no tremblings in the power-flows betrayed any disturbance of the protections around the place.

  But out beyond the parking lot, there were more glares of halogen lights. The lights at the fence were blazing at full power, so there was something going on at the borders tonight.

  He gave up on speculation and headed for the shop. Whatever had happened, he'd find it out a lot quicker by just going in.

  The shop was quiet, with no one working on prototypes. No elvensteeds waited in car-form for someone to suggest modifications to their lines to add to verisimilitude. There was a huddle of bodies, standing and sitting, at the far corner, beside the prototype Victor he and Donal had been working on, and Tannim headed that way at a limping trot.

  Sam looked up first, and his wide grin of relief was a welcome sight. Keighvin finished whatever he was saying to Sarge Austin, then turned his own emerald eyes up to greet the young mage.

  "We had a visitor last night," the Sidhe said without preamble.

  "And a fair horde of his friends," Conal said with a grimace of suppressed pain. "He'd sent a challenge with yon mortal, but we hadn't reckoned on his bringing as many as he did."

  Tannim glanced around the circle, and came up quite a few names short. And there was a gloom about the Sidhe, combined with the reddened eyes of the humans, that spoke volumes.

  We lost somebody. Shit.

  "Casualties?" he asked carefully.

  "Donal," his twin replied, and the lack of expression in his voice told Tannim just how deep and raw the wound of loss was. Tannim closed his eyes briefly, and extended a tentative mental "hand" to his elven friend. It was clasped, and Conal accept
ed the comfort that flowed across the link.

  "And one of the fosterlings," added Kieru. "Rob van Alman. Dinna fret yerse' lad, 'twouldn't have changed matters if you'd been here. The black bastard sent a Bane-Sidhe, an old, powerful one, and he'd gi'en his lesser Sidhe compound crossbows loaded wi' elf shot. 'Twas the shot that got yon Rob, and the Bane-Sidhe that did for puir Donal. Ye'd ha' been no use 'gainst either one."

  Tannim kept his eyes closed for a moment more, as he mentally ran through every swear-word he knew twice over. None of them were enough. Rob had been the most cheerful guy he'd ever known, always ready with a joke at his own expense, keeping the place laughing at the worst of times and under the most stressful conditions. And Donal—the Sidhe driver was Tannim's own replacement as mechanic on the SERRA team. He'd taught Donal everything he knew, and he could always count on Donal being there at the track whenever he ran—ready with a cold towel and a squeeze-bottle of Gatorade—

  His throat tightened. He opened his eyes, and asked, hoarsely, "And wounded?"

  "About a score," Keighvin replied with the carefully impassive expression of a war-leader. "We know that they're learning from us now; we won't underestimate them again."

  Tannim took a deep breath to force his throat open, then another. He'd have his own private mourning session later. Maybe, once it was safe, he'd try to visit them on the other side. . . .

  "What do you want me to do?" he asked.

  "Mine-sweeping," Phil Austin said.

  He blinked, puzzled. "But we don't—"

  "What Sarge there means is that there's bits of steel all over the grounds," Sam stuck in. "Bullets that missed, that kind of thing."

  And none of the Folk would be able to do any precision magic except in the protected rooms until the stray metal was gotten rid of. He nodded. "And when I'm done?"

  "Reinforcement on the perimeter," Keighvin replied decisively. "I want a shield ye couldna bring tank nor mouse through."

  He nodded, and turned to go.

  "Take Sam with you," Keighvin added. "There was enough ordnance flyin' about last night ye'll need four hands, an' he can tell ye the full of the story."

  And that was definitely toned as a dismissal. Tannim's liege he was not, but the young man knew that the Sidhe's terseness was caused by pain, and not the arrogance of a nobleman. They walked out to the lighted perimeter, with Tannim stopping long enough to pick up a couple of chisels to dig bullets out of trees with, from the silk-lined tool locker where steel implements were kept. A half-dozen other humans prowled the grounds already, most of them sporting stained bandages, but none of them were mages. They were looking for bullet holes by eye alone; digging the steel-jacketed rounds out, and marking the hole with a splash of paint. Others were wrapping the Pinball bars in their special silk sheathes and shoving them down into the fence-posts. Someone with her face obscured by a bandage—Dottie, he recognized after a confused moment—came up and handed him a can of paint and a brush.

  "Glad you're here now and not earlier," she said. "I just sent Fred home and you're the best mage we've got. Fred found all the easy ones; we know there's more out here, but they're probably buried in the dirt or twenty feet up in a tree."

  Tannim nodded, a little relieved. He wouldn't have been any use, earlier. The presence of the other rounds would have obscured the ones that were harder to find.

  "If you find something in a tree, dig it out, and slap this stuff on it real good," Dottie continued tiredly. "There's fungicide, wood-sealer, and growth-hormone in it. The least we can do is make sure the poor trees have a fighting chance after the way we damaged them."

  "Are you all right?" Tannim felt impelled to ask.

  "What, this?" she replied, touching the bandage. "Just a graze. Bled like hell and hurts worse, but I'm good for duty."

  Unspoken—that there were plenty who weren't. Tannim nodded again, and as she turned back to her own task of putting the Pinball bars to bed, unfocused his eyes and reached into himself for the spell that would let him detect any amount of iron and steel, however small.

  Sam asked quietly, "Uhm, lad, can you call up any of your friends to help?"

  Tannim absent-mindedly sniffed the paste, and closed his eyes. "No . . . no, Sam. I'm not going to call in any favors for something we can do ourselves."

  We may need them later.

  While Sam waited in silence, he gathered power from inside himself, chanted in a mechanical drone to set the spell in place, then triggered it with a hissed syllable only Chinthliss would have recognized.

  There was a bullet not ten feet from him—straight up. It didn't take a prophet to predict a lot of climbing tonight.

  "So," he said, waving to Sam to follow him and handing the older man the paint and brush to hold as he climbed the tree, "tell me what went down."

  Sam took a visible breath, and began.

  * * *

  The tiny office was too small to contain Aurilia's rage. "You fool," Aurilia stormed at Vidal. "You empty-headed witling. I told you that I had a plan, that it involved the child-whores, especially Tannim's chosen slut; why couldn't you wait until I got the girl here?"

  Vidal Dhu glowered and sulked, but Niall stood behind Aurilia, radiating cold anger, and finally Vidal deflated, slumping down into his seat. "I thought it would be better to act directly," he muttered. "I thought that if we left the girl out on the street, anything could happen. She might decide to return home, she might decide to go into one of the shelters, she could even get herself killed being stupid."

  "And you nearly got her killed!" Aurilia snapped. "Now you've frightened her; she'll be twice as wary as before! You've undone everything I built, in a single moment of genuine idiocy!"

  "Maybe not," Niall rumbled thoughtfully. She turned to stare at him.

  "How on earth can you say that?" she asked. "This—man—sent out a stupid human to kidnap the girl. He died trying to coerce her, and she was so frightened she ran, the gods only know where! You say he hasn't undone everything I worked towards?"

  "Think a moment, child," Niall replied, as she chafed at being called a "child." "The girl has been affrighted, it is true. She may keep herself from the street for some time, it is also true. But you know who one of her friends is. And it seems to me that if she were offered a chance of employment that appears to be safer—at least, safer in the light of the attempted kidnapping—than whoring on the street, she may well take it"

  Aurilia licked her lips thoughtfully. It was true, she did know the boy called "Jamie." It would be easy enough to find him in the course of a night. And if she offered him another "movie job," not only for himself, but for a female friend, he might bring in the girl. The ploy might not work the first time, but if Aurilia made it tempting enough, and added offers for other friends, sooner or later, she'd get Tannim's protégé, especially when the "movie work" was mild bondage, some sado-eroticism with only the trappings, not the actuality, or perhaps a staged "satanic ritual" before the cameras; nothing that would frighten them. It would mean a delay in her plans—for she had expected to go directly to where the girl was, and make the "movie offer" in person, but it wouldn't be too great a delay. Right now if anyone or anything approached the girl directly except her trusted friends, she'd bolt—and Aurilia wasn't certain she had the resources to try and catch a fleeing child without complications.

  "I'm going to explain what I have in mind clearly this time," she said waspishly to Vidal Dhu, "so that there will be no mistakes, and no ill-advised attempts to anticipate the capture. I will find the boy I used in the party-film. He knows the girl. I will offer him more work, work for himself and a female friend. If he brings the girl in the first time, well and good—if not, we will be patient. We will offer him another night of work, this time with two females, and ask him if he has any more friends. Eventually, especially after we gain their trust, the girl will come of her own accord."

  "Then we send Keighvin Silverhair a special little tape, or perhaps some pictures," Niall rumbled in s
atisfaction. "But—do we bring him here? That could be dangerous—this place is full of the kind of machinery and creations of Cold Iron his humans use so well. Even if it is on our own ground—"

  Aurilia shook her head. "No, we will let him think that we have the children on our ground, Underhill. He will bring humans and Cold Iron weapons there trying to thwart us. We will ambush him, but more than that, we will portray him and his dogs to the Seleighe Court as a danger to us all. His position is tenuous enough; this violation of custom will have even his supporters against him. If he survives our ambush, he will never be allowed to set foot in the human world again."

  "Leaving this place open to our hunting—" Vidal breathed in surprise. She nodded.

  "And leaving us the children to dispose of in front of the cameras, accomplishing two tasks in one."

  She smiled at Vidal's stunned expression. You never gave me the credit for that much intelligence, did you? she thought with viperish satisfaction. When Keighvin is a memory, and I no longer need you, I think I shall challenge you, Vidal Dhu. With Niall's backing, I will not only humiliate you, I may even be able to destroy you.

  But she allowed no hint of her thoughts to appear in her speech or her body-language. Vidal studied her for a moment, but evidently read nothing, and shrugged.

  "Very well then," he said. "I will go and prepare the ambush site. I can still conjure or cajole more than enough underlings to take on Keighvin and all of his allies—"

  "Just be certain you do not underestimate him," Niall said coldly. His eyes glittered red within his pitted face. "As you did the last time."

  Aurilia watched Vidal seethe with anger, but he held his tongue. "This time the confrontation will be on prepared territory of our choosing," he replied, just as coldly. "There will be no mistakes this time."