“So, sweet cheeks,” the man whispers in my ear, “it’s getting crowded in here. How ’bout we go someplace more private, huh? You and me?”
Without taking my eyes off what’s happening in the booth, I raise my hand and push the guy’s face away from me. “A minute,” I say, getting up.
I weave my way around the crowd, narrowly missing a few perverts trying to feel their way up my skirt. I do so wish I were wearing heels for once, but I think my heavy boots are doing the trick, because people give up immediately.
“So he grabbed the b-bottle and s-s-s-smashed it on his own h-head, but it d-didn’t b-break,” I hear the short man hiccup. A wide grin stretches his flushed cheeks, and his ginger hair stands up in hirsute tufts. “Then he tried it again, and again, and again, and still it didn’t break! He ended up p-p-passing out!”
The man roars in laughter, banging his tiny fists on the table. But none of the three boys joins in the fun.
“Tell me what happened to the people on the island, Nibs,” Arthur says. Though his voice is low, I can hear him distinctly over the overwhelming drunken buzz that fills the bar.
The laughter dies abruptly. The little man doesn’t look drunk anymore. Even his cheeks aren’t flushed. “I wasn’t there,” he says, eyes shifting to the side.
Unfortunately for him, Lance is sitting next to him, blocking his exit.
“I didn’t ask if you were there,” says Arthur. “I asked what you knew about it.”
The man’s tongue darts out to lick his lips. Lance pulls a knife out of his boot, and the whole bar goes quiet. But the silent boy then pulls out an apple from his pocket and starts peeling it.
Though the rest of the patrons return to their drinks, the little man’s more nervous than before.
“T-T-They’re g-gone,” he says. He drinks the remainder of his beer in one long swig, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down like a yo-yo.
“We know that already,” Percy says. “What we want to know is how, who, and why.”
The stranger sets his tankard down, wipes his chin with the back of his hand, and shakes his head.
A heavy hand grabs my waist, and the drunk man from before pulls me tight to his side. “Where’re you goin’, sweets?” Apparently he’s managed to down a couple of shots of liquor before looking for me again.
His hand travels farther down my back, and I freeze. This has never happened to me before, thanks to my years at all-girls schools, and for an instant, my mind blanks.
“Get your hands off me,” I whisper, my throat so tight I barely produce a sound.
The man tries to kiss me, but misses and goes for my neck instead. It’s only been three weeks, but my recent training takes over, and I find myself kneeing the guy in the guts before cracking my elbow into his temple. The man drops to the floor, bringing a whole table with him in a resounding crash of breaking glass.
“He’s getting away!”
I see a man, no taller than my hips, run out of the bar as fast as his little legs can carry him, a bright red hat anchored firmly on his head.
Lance rushes after the man, followed by Percy.
“You look great!” Percy yells at me, taking off after the other two.
Someone grabs my arm roughly, and I’m about to throw another punch, when I realize it’s Arthur.
“I don’t know what you think you’re doing,” he says, dragging me out of the bar under the intense scrutiny of the patrons, “but when this is over, we’re going to have a talk.”
I look back at the mess we leave behind. “Sorry about that!” I yell before the cold night air hits me like a punching bag.
“Go home,” Arthur growls.
Percy and Lance are waiting for him in the car. To my surprise, I notice the little man’s angry face staring at me from the back window.
“And put some clothes on!” Arthur yells, getting in the passenger seat right as Percy floors the pedal.
“Crap.”
I run to Irene’s car, fumble with the keys, manage to turn it on, then leave the parking lot without running over anyone—a real feat in and of itself.
Thankfully, there aren’t many cars in this part of town, and none of them driving as crazily as Percy, so it’s not too hard to pick out where the boys are going.
I follow them north, past the nuthouse where we go every Monday morning to catch the boat to school, down a series of empty fields, then finally stop in between a row of houses, close to a private wharf.
“Where are you going?” I ask, getting out of the car and running after the three boys, who are dragging the little man with them.
“Morgan, go back home,” Arthur says.
I cross my arms, glad for my school jacket. “I don’t think so. I want to know what you guys are doing to this poor man who obviously doesn’t like water. Who is he, anyway?”
“He’s just a clurichaun,” Arthur says. “Nothing important. Now go away.”
The little man glares at him.
“Obviously he’s of some importance to you,” I reply, “or you wouldn’t have gone to such an extent to get your hands on him. Which is quite rude, and against knight etiquette, I might add. By the way, what’s a clurichaun?”
“A Fey critter that’s known to bend an elbow,”[15] Percy says. He nudges the clurichaun. “Ain’t that right?”
I must’ve looked as confused as I felt, for Lance adds, “He likes to drink.”
“And that’s against the rules then?” I ask, following them to a little boat moored by the water.
“Drinking’s not against the rules,” Arthur says, getting in the small vessel carefully. “But refusing to give us information in an important investigation is.” He forces the little man after him. “At least on our end.”
Percy and Lance hop in after them. I make to get in too, but Arthur stops me. “You’re not coming. It’s too dangerous!”
“If you’re going,” I say, “then I’m going too.” I tap my foot on the wooden platform. “And if you don’t let me on that boat now, I’ll swim. You know I will.”
“That ain’t corral dust[16] she’s sayin’,” Percy says. “We all saw what she’s capable of.”
“I don’t care whether she’s lying or not,” Arthur says through gritted teeth. “She’s not coming.”
“Fine.” I take off my jacket, then proceed to undo my bootlaces.
“She could get hypothermia,” Lance says.
I hear Arthur let out an exasperated snort, and I smile. Point for me!
◆◆◆
“Don’t hold him like that. You’re hurting him.” I try to pry Arthur’s fingers off the clurichaun’s neck, to little effect.
To be perfectly honest, this doesn’t seem to bother the little man much other than he can’t look around. Instead, he spends the whole ride staring at me, an indecipherable look on his face.
“So, what do clurichauns do,” I ask, “besides getting drunk? Do you, uh, have a job?”
I hear Percy chortle.
“Nibs has been allowed to roam free on the surface world,” Arthur says.
“So long as it’s around this lake,” Percy adds.
Nibs throws a series of curses at their faces. “This is our world,” the clurichaun barks. “We lived in it long before you and the rest of your bare-assed people decided to join in.”
“I think we’ll agree to disagree on that one,” Percy says, looking bored. He smiles at me. “There’s always some debate goin’ on ’bout what happened after Creation.”
“Needless to say, Nibs has one job,” Arthur says, shaking the little man, “and that’s to be our informant. We pay him good money for it too. Isn’t that right, Nibs?”
The clurichaun doesn’t answer, but keeps his gaze uncannily fixed on me.
“Have we, uh…have we met before?” I ask. I rack my brains, but can’t ever remember seeing a clurichaun.
“Your mother would know,” he says with a smirk.
Irene? Why would she know, when I was raised my whole
life on the other side of the globe from her? Unless this was something that happened when I was still a baby…
“So are you a, uh, earth elemental?” I ask. “Like a gnome? Or are you a dwarf? Do you always carry a lot of gold on you? Maybe in your hat?”
Nibs slaps my hand away when I try to reach for his baseball hat. He sneers. “I’m not a leprechaun, you dumb bitch.”
I stare at him, openmouthed. Not the kind of answer I had expected; that’ll teach me to try to play nice.
“We’re here,” Percy says as Lance directs the skiff to the shore.
◆◆◆
The island is quiet, with not a single light to guide us but the ones of the city we’ve left behind and the quarter moon above us. Every single hair on the back of my neck stands up; this place is too quiet.
Nibs, still held around the collar by Arthur, leads our way to a forbidding, dark shape ahead of us. A deserted house.
“This it, then?” Percy asks, his voice sounding inordinately loud in the still air.
“Y-Yes, sir,” says the clurichaun. “And another, f-further down.”
“What are we doing here?” I ask them. There’s something about the place that makes me want to turn around and swim back to the other shore.
“You’re coming with us,” Arthur tells Nibs, who’s trying to pull away.
The clurichaun whimpers. We set out at a steady, but careful pace. Any minute now I expect to see something jump out of the shadows at us. Lance, beside me, has his knife out again, the blade gleaming in the dim moonlight. I wish I had a knife too, or a fork, or anything sharp.
Shaking, the clurichaun climbs up the steps to the porch, swallows audibly, then pushes the door open.
I hear a little pop behind me and nearly freak out, but a second later, the glow of a salamander encircles us, getting brighter and brighter until we can see inside the house like it’s daylight.
“Wish you’d done that sooner,” I tell Percy.
He grins at me. “Where would the fun be in that?”
“Be quiet, you two,” Arthur growls.
The house looks like any other, rugs covering the parts of the floor where the scuffs and marks are heaviest, a set of worn-out but clean couches angled before a fireplace, books and magazines covering the coffee table.
It’s not till we arrive in the kitchen that my heart does a somersault. On the table is a full meal, the chicken congealed in its dish, the soup moldy in the bowls. Whoever lived here never had a chance to touch their food. Either these people had to flee without getting a chance to pack anything, or they’d vanished in thin air. And despite how unlikely the latter may be, judging from the serene order reigning in the house, it looks the most plausible.
“I thought it was a couple of hikers that disappeared,” I say.
“Yep,” Percy says, opening cabinet doors, then shutting them closed again.
“So why are we here?”
“’Cause these here folks have gone too. We’re just checkin’ if the two are related somehow.”
“Maybe they heard about the first disappearance, so they got scared and left,” I venture.
“Perhaps. ’Cept we found one of the bodies this morn, and the other two are still missin’.”
He doesn’t expand further, and I’m suddenly too scared to ask.
“Looks like another kidnapping,” Lance says, coming back from checking out the floor upstairs.
Arthur nods. “Fey or human, though, that’s what we need to figure out now.”
Next to the window, sitting beside a small water jug, rests a small rosebush. Its petals have withered and fallen around its now-black stem, and its leaves, curled up on themselves, look to be about to go the same route. Frowning, I reach out to the fragile plant. This is exactly the same kind of disease that had overtaken our arboretum back at Notre-Dame.
“Don’t touch anything!” Arthur barks.
I pull my hand away as if I’ve been stung and look at him accusingly. As if I needed to be scared more than I already am.
“You don’t know what could be poisonous or not,” he says. He pushes Nibs in front of him. “Are you sure you don’t know more than this?”
Head downcast, the clurichaun doesn’t answer.
Arthur shakes him so hard his head bobs up and down and he loses his hat. “I know you were here,” he says. “Kaede reported seeing you swim back the night these people disappeared, and we all know how much you hate water. So tell me. What. You. Saw!”
“N-N-Nothing…” Nibs squeaks out. “Much,” he adds under his breath.
“Well, explain what you did see.”
Looking defiant, the little man clamps his mouth shut. Arthur pulls out a dagger from inside his coat. He grabs the clurichaun’s arm, pulls up his sleeve, and presses the tip of the blade to Nibs’s bare skin. There’s a sharp hiss and a slight smell of something burning, like feathers.
The little man growls, tries to pull away, in obvious pain. Sweat drops down his forehead like fat dollar coins.
Arthur cuts a small line down his forearm, and blood pools around the injury like a scarlet rictus.
“What are you doing?” I ask, jumping to stop Arthur. But Lance extends his arm to prevent me from getting any closer and shakes his head.
I watch, in horror, as Arthur draws his blade down the little man’s arm.
“Either you tell me,” he says, “or I shall remove your ogham.”
Nibs swallows heavily. “Just…just one person,” he finally says, his voice shaking more than ever. “Too dark to tell who. He’s the one who took them.”
“Where did he take them?”
“Nowhere,” Nibs says.
Arthur presses his blade down even harder, and I notice a strange yellow object poking out slightly from the wound. Nibs cries out.
“Please, sir, I’m not telling lies! He left without taking anything with him.”
“So you saw him leave then?”
Nibs nods eagerly.
“How?”
“B-By the waters.”
“He had a boat?”
“N-No, someone came to fetch him.” Nibs tries to pull away, but the more he does so, the more that yellow thing’s coming out of his arm, and I soon realize it’s his ogham.
“Who came to fetch him?” Arthur asks, relentless.
“Please, sir, you’re hurting me…” the clurichaun whimpers.
“I asked who?” Arthur repeats, pulling his knife away without letting the little man go.
The clurichaun, seeing that the immediate threat of the blade is somewhat alleviated, thrashes about like a fish caught on a line. He bites Arthur on the arm, hard. Arthur lets out a slew of curses, brings down his other hand to hold Nibs down. Then, with a sickening plop, the ogham slides out of the little man’s arm and bounces on the tile floor.
Nibs yells as if he’s been stabbed to the heart, holding his arm close to his body. The whole house shakes beneath us as his yells turn into a high-pitched howl.
“Criminy!” Percy yells over the racket. “Get the thing to shut it!”
Arthur picks up the fallen ogham, pulls a small metal box out of his coat pocket, and slips the golden gem inside.
The moment he shuts the lid, Nibs drops to the floor like a dead spider.
“Did you just kill him?” I ask, stricken.
“No, he’s just in shock,” Arthur says, looking grim.
“Can’t we…” I breathe in deeply to stop myself from crying. “Can’t we just put it back in?”
Percy shakes his head. “It’s a whole lot easier to let the cat outta the bag than get it back in.”
Which I take to mean that once Fey lose their sources of power, it’s nigh on impossible for us to get them to reconnect. Either that or we don’t want them to.
“But he helped us,” I whisper, still staring at the short man curled up on the floor.
“He lied to us,” Arthur says, putting the little metallic bag back inside his pocket. “And people are dead.”
>
“I thought Fey people couldn’t lie!”
“They can twist the truth, which is just as bad.”
Arthur heaves a sigh. “Come on, let’s go check out the other place before we go home.”
“What about Nibs?” I ask, indignant. How could they treat him like that, take what’s most precious to him, then leave him like he’s nothing more than a pile of dung?
“He’s trapped,” Arthur says without looking at the clurichaun. “He can’t go anywhere while we have his ogham.”
All three of them head back to the front door, arguing with each other about how well the Board’s going to take the loss of one of their best informants.
I pretend to follow them, but hang back instead. I crouch over Nibs and pat his back. I pull my hand away quickly. His whole body’s below freezing temperature, his skin showing a thin layer of frost.
“Nibs, are you all right?” I ask, my breath fogging in the air. “Do you need anything? Is there something I can do?”
But the little man either can’t speak or doesn’t want to.
My eyes water, and I sniffle. “I’m really sorry about what happened,” I say. I take off my jacket and place it on his inert body. “I’m really sorry.”
The dim glow of Percy’s fire elemental dies out, leaving me in near-total darkness. Only the faint moonlight bleeding in through the kitchen door remains, delineating the black rosebush sitting like a vulture on the windowsill.
Feeling sick, I hurry outside, drop to my knees, then retch the little food I’ve ingested during the day. When the spasms subside, I take in deep lungfuls of the crispy night air, then pause.
I pass my hand over the grass, feeling its coarse brittleness under my gentle touch, and my stomach does another flip. Whatever disease has attacked the rose plant has also spread outside.
Walking with my nose close to the ground, I make my way farther and farther down the yard. Dried leaves crunch under my footsteps as I walk over the garden. The virus hasn’t left an easy trail, jumping about from one point to another, often forcing me to backtrack and examine multiple trees and bushes before finding more evidence of its nefarious results.
Morgana Trilogy Complete Series Page 17
