In Truth and Claw (A Mick Oberon Job #4)

by Ari Marmell

  Mostly because it was covered in old blood.

  Redcaps. I’ve always hated redcaps—which suited everyone just fine, since they’d always hated me—and after Grangullie’s schemes nearly got a whole bunch of people rubbed out last year, me included, I hated ’em even more.

  I’d seen this particular setup before. Redcaps in a milk wagon, I mean. Hadn’t been more’n a few blocks from here. In fact, it was entirely possible that this gink was one of the same redcaps I’d run into back then.

  Didn’t figure they were after me—they knew where I worked, wouldn’t hafta sit on the Ottati’s place and hope I showed—so what were they doin’ here?

  He had his beady little peepers glued to me, definitely knew who I was, but I didn’t figure he knew I’d seen through his glamour yet. Me, I kept on walkin’ like I hadn’t a care in two worlds, and tried to work out how I was gonna handle this. Not a lot of humans around on the street, but enough driving or ankling by on occasion, plus however many might decide to look out a window if things got loud. Lots of opportunity for people to get hurt, or see more’n was good for ’em.

  Also, coulda been any number of Unseelie in the back of that wagon. Hmm.

  I waited until I’d right about drawn even with the driver, then spun and gave him my best glare from across the street, yankin’ the L&G from its holster.

  He shot to his feet, hand goin’ for his own piece. It looked to be a .38—Elphame-made, seein’ as how it was brass.

  “This is for Grangullie, you fuck!” he shouted. Speak of the devil.

  That was okay, though. Using the wand to magnify it a couple dozen times over, I brought some of my oldest fears to mind— not the worst ones, since that woulda killed the poor creature, but bad enough—and shoved ’em all into the horse’s noggin.

  Screaming like you’ve never heard, eyes rolling and mouth foaming, the creature tore off down the street, yanking the wagon to speed as though it weighed nothin’ at all. The redcap driver was thrown from his hocks by the sudden start, bouncing off the seat before tumbling to the roadway. The wagon wheel just missed him as it rumbled past, and then the wagon was gone faster’n a Dizzy Dean fastball. I heard screeching tires and car horns and angry shouts.

  Me, I was already sprinting across the street. I landed on the fallen redcap, knee in his stomach, and jammed the L&G hard into his throat, hard enough to have crushed a man’s windpipe. For this little shit, that just meant it hurt a lot.

  “And this is for you,” I told him, pickin’ up where he’d left off. “Who’dya think’s gonna get his delivery first?”

  Oh, he was angry. It roared off him, near hot enough to burn. He was smart enough not to move or grab for his fallen roscoe, though.

  I reached out and pushed it away with my other mitt, far enough he couldn’t reach it if he tried, just to be sure.

  “One fuckin’ day, Oberon…” he growled.

  “Yeah, probably. When that day comes, though? It still ain’t gonna be you.”

  His teeth sounded like grinding rocks—and probably coulda ground rocks, frankly.

  I hadda make this quick. I’m sure we were already drawing curious eyes, and I really didn’t need someone callin’ the bulls because all they saw was some crazy mook beatin’ up on a milkman.

  Didn’t figure Fino’d appreciate the police runnin’ up and down on his street, either.

  So I dragged the bastard off behind someone’s hedge before demanding, “What’s your business here, you little shit?”

  Got an ugly, jagged grin for my troubles. Redcaps are tough bastards, and even if he hadn’t been ordered to keep his yap shut, he’d stay mum just outta spite. I could probably get into his thoughts and make him tell me, but it’d take time I didn’t guess I had. Couldn’t threaten him with much, either; nothin’ I could do in public would hurt him too bad, and popping him now he wasn’t an active threat would get me in serious dutch with people I really didn’t need gunning for me.

  I stood up, makin’ sure to snatch up the heater he’d dropped. “Get gone. I see you or any of yours around here again, redcap, you’re dead and nuts to the consequences. Savvy?”

  He said nothin’, but that hideous smile fallin’ into an equally hideous snarl told me as good as a nod that he understood and believed. He climbed upright, tossed me one more glare for good measure, and stomped off along the sidewalk.

  Probably he’n his buddies would report back to whoever they answered to—hopefully not Eudeagh, “Queen Mob” herself, or this was gonna get even more complicated—before takin’ any further steps. On the other hand, it wasn’t outta the question that he was goin’ to fetch those buddies before comin’ right back and trying to introduce me to the underside of some off-season daisies. I decided gettin’ inside off the street was today’s “better part of valor” special.

  It was, of course, only then that I realized I’d lost my grip on Adalina’s scarf when I’d jumped the damn redcap. Gods only knew where the Windy City’s autumn gusts had taken it.

  Random misfortune? Or another manifestation of that bad luck curse that even my best precautions still couldn’t entirely cancel out?

  Either way, fuck.

  Didn’t have to knock at the Ottatis’ door; Fino’s boys, always on guard for trouble, had seen the whole scuffle through the windows. They opened up for me soon as I stepped onto the porch and ushered me inside.

  Fino “the Shark” himself met me in the hall. “What the fuck was that about?”

  “Ehm. Fino, why don’t we talk somewhere a bit more private? Might wanna bring the wife and kids in on it, too.”

  Saw his shoulders slump under his coat. Fino knew “You’re about to have some Fae-related difficulties” when he heard it. He ordered a couple of his people to bring drinks to Bianca’s sitting room—including a glass of milk—and led the way. I’d been here enough times that the boys were no longer confused when he cut them out of a sit-down but invited his family, though I’m sure they still guessed and gossiped about what went on behind those doors.

  I felt the usual faint itch of the wards he kept around the place, meant to protect against my kind. Weak and basically useless, but they made him feel better.

  His mother, now there was someone who knew how to inscribe a ward. I’d been happier when I thought she was dead.

  I still didn’t say anything to him about her.

  * * *

  “All right.” I put the empty milk glass down on the table. I was sittin’ on that same old sofa, in that same overstuffed room with way too many crucifixes and votary candles. Bianca held a rosary in her fingers, had since before she’d walked into the room. Adalina was curled up small and tight on the seat beside her, Celia—Adalina’s sister, sorta; it’s quicker’n saying “the daughter who was taken away when Adalina the changeling was left in her stead”—standing behind, hands on the back of the chair. Fino leaned forward in his own chair like he was gonna lunge out any second, one mitt wrapped around a glass of whisky, the other clenched tighter’n a leprechaun’s coin purse.

  “Um.” Now I was here, I found myself oddly reluctant to get into it—in part because I was feelin’ a little guilty over the mess they were in. “So, how’s business, Fino?”

  “You really here to talk about my fuckin’ business, Mick?”

  “Pretend I am so we can all stay happy for a few more minutes, yeah?”

  “Anyone in this fuckin’ room look fuckin’ happy to you?”

  “What, that’s not your laughing face?”

  Fino sighed. “Business is okay. Not great. We’re all still figurin’ out where to refocus and how to divvy up operations now Prohibition’s winding down. There. You fuckin’ satisfied?”

  “No.” Then, before he could pop a blood vessel, “But we’ll get on with it anyhow. Friends, you got problems. Unseelie problems.”

  Didn’t take much time to go over what’d gone down. What wasn’t the part that really interested the Ottatis, anyway. The first big question was…


  “Why?” Celia was the one who asked what they all hadda be thinking. She sounded put out as much as worried, as though frustrated that she hadda deal with this new bullshit in her life. Save me from pouty teenaged children.

  “Can’t say for certain.” I turned to look at the other girl, the one clearly not human. “But I think we gotta be square and admit it’s most likely you they’re after.”

  Adalina sorta squeaked from her little ball of knees and elbows, and tightened up even harder, until the chair creaked.

  Nobody here needed reminding that the Unseelie’d made a go of snatching her once before, back after I’d made a real unfortunate bargain with ’em to help find and retrieve Celia. At the time, best I was ever able to figure, they did it just ’cause she was hinky, bit of an unknown quantity that they thought they might be able to exploit. That was before Orsola’s magics had revealed she was even weirder than we’d thought. And also before she’d just about died and gone all Sleeping Beauty for a year.

  But if they didn’t know she was more’n she’d seemed, why bother tryin’ again? And if they did, why wait? She’d been lyin’ there ripe for the picking for a good while, and been up and about for months now.

  “It’s just possible,” I admitted, even though I really didn’t care to and hoped I was wrong, “that it was our little trip into the other Chicago that tipped ’em off. The Courts have eyes and ears in each other’s territory, and even with you keepin’ your face hidden, someone mighta put two and two together.”

  I shook my head at Fino before he could explode. “I said possible, and if it’s so, I already said everything to myself you’re about to yell at me. But it ain’t probable. We were just there yesterday. For word to get back to Eudeagh or one of the other bosses, and them to figure out who Adalina was, and then get someone to sit on your place? Think it’d take more’n a day to set up. And it still wouldn’t tell us what their interest is in the first place.”

  “Can you poke around, Mick?” Bianca asked, rosary goin’ click-click-click. “I know you don’t have much to do with the Unseelie, but you must have contacts?”

  “I… can do a little digging, but not as much as any of us’d prefer. I gotta be careful.” I was answering her, but I made sure to catch Fino’s gaze. “I got… certain debts that could put us all behind the eight-ball if the wrong Unseelie took an interest.”

  He nodded, thinkin’ he understood, and I let him go on believing that. Fae oaths make mob debts look like a kid’s IOU, and the one I owed Eudeagh was a doozy. If she called in that marker and just flat-out told me to turn over Adalina… Well, I cared for the girl, and most of her family, but they weren’t worth my soul. Sorry, they just weren’t.

  So I hadda make sure it never came to that. I’d offered up that marker for the sake of one Ottati daughter. I didn’t mean for it to cost us the other.

  “I intend to learn how this all figures,” I told them. “What it is they want—with Adalina or the rest of you or whatever this is about. Why it’s goin’ down now. All of it. But that ain’t the first priority.”

  Which brought us to the second big question, and it was Bianca who asked it. “What do we do?”

  “I know what to do,” Fino admitted, though the low growl said pretty clear that he wasn’t thrilled.

  “You do?”

  “He does,” I said. “Fino’n me, we talked about this a while ago.”

  Bianca’s rosary stopped clicking. “Without me?”

  “Oh, Maddon’! We’d just gotten both girls back, dollface,” he protested. “You were happy. I didn’t want nothin’ to mess that up, but…” He sorta petered out, hands waving.

  I wasn’t about to let this argument happen, not now. No time. “You go to the mattresses,” I said. “You lie dormy as though you were target number one in the biggest mob war you ever imagined, and you stay there. You give your orders to Archie over the blower, you don’t let anybody know where you are. You have what you need delivered, under fake names, from different shops. You disappear outta your lives so fast and so completely your own goddamn dreams can’t find you.”

  Celia opened her trap to protest, clapped it shut when she saw the looks me’n her father both gave her. More pouting, then, but at least she also had one hand holdin’ Adalina’s shoulder.

  Fino turned back my way. “You know what you’re fuckin’ asking, Mick? You know how hard it is to run a fuckin’ business that way? Plus Celia’s fuckin’ school, and—”

  “You know the alternative, Fino.”

  “Fuck! Yeah, I know. I just… We really there already? No other options?”

  “Yeah, I think we are, and no, none I can see.”

  “Fuck!”

  “Think you mighta mentioned that already.”

  He started to pace, waving his empty glass like a weapon. “I don’t care what kinda fuckin’ monster he is or what it takes to kill him, I ever fuckin’ find whatever stronzo is behind all this, he’s fuckin’ dead!”

  You better hope for your sake you don’t, Fino.

  “Times like this, I wish momma was alive. For everythin’ she did, she woulda known how to protect us from this.”

  I almost bit through my tongue. Judging by their expressions, nobody else in the room was real happy to be reminded of Orsola, either, if not for all the same reasons.

  “Okay,” he said finally. “Okay. We’ll be packed and out in an hour. We’ll go to—”

  “No!” Then, at the shock on every one of their mugs, “Sorry. It’s just a lot safer if even I am in the dark about where you are.”

  “You wouldn’t betray us, Mick!” Bianca protested.

  Oath I made, I might not have a choice. But what I said was, “If the Unseelie are desperate enough, they got ways to make other Fae hurt. A lot. Probably they wouldn’t go that far, but until I’m wise to what they want, and why, I can’t be sure. Better if I just don’t have the beans to spill.”

  They were even less happy now than they had been, but they bought it, which was the important part. Me, I hung around long enough to see ’em off, make sure nobody and nothing turned up to shadow them, and then I hoofed it back toward the L.

  Unseelie watching the Ottatis. The Seelie Court’s pet banshee gunning for me. Orsola still lurking out there somewhere, workin’ who-knew-what kinda magics.

  Connected? Coincidence? Some of each?

  Lot to ponder on, lot to do. But at least, way I figured it, nobody’s in any immediate danger.

  Adorable, wasn’t I?

  CHAPTER THREE

  So, in the “How long did it take for Mick to learn what an optimistic twit he was being” pool, who had their money on three days? Congrats. You win.

  They’d been quiet days, for the most part. I wrapped up the paperwork on a few small jobs, went to fetch Pete from Elphame once the full moon was passed, got a quick ring from the Ottatis lettin’ me know they were settling in, though I still wouldn’t let them tell me where, and otherwise sat around twiddling my thumbs.

  Well, no. Otherwise kept diggin’ around trying learn anything new about what Orsola or the Unseelie or Áebinn mighta been up to, but since I came up with zilch, the results were the same either way.

  Mighta had more luck if I’d been willin’ to do any poking around in the other Chicago, but I had plenty good reason not to show my mug there. But at least I was startin’ to figure that Áebinn wouldn’t be bothering me here in your world; I mean, if she was plannin’ to show here, she’da done it already, right?

  Yeah. See above, regardin’ me being a twit.

  So, three days. Weather’d gotten a little crisper, skies a little grayer, just enough rain to keep everything chilly and damp without actually washing any of your factory- and flivver-pumped crap out of the air.

  Miserable, basically.

  I was kickin’ around the office, avoiding workin’ on anything big by avoiding work on anything small, when the ameche out in the hallway rang.

  On the square, I gave real thought to ignoring it.
I hate that contraption, and I was preoccupied worrying over everything going on already. Still, it coulda been related, and if it wasn’t, well, even a stiff like me’s gotta work on occasion. I shuffled out my door, glowered at the dingus hopin’ I could scare it into a shutting up, and then answered.

  “Hello, Mick?”

  I already had the familiar itching in my ear and my head that comes with usin’ a telephone, but I had no trouble hearing him. He was already talking pretty loud, over the hubbub around him. I was used to the police station’s noise, and this was worse.

  “Busy day down there, Pete?” I said.

  “You got no idea. That’s kinda why I’m calling, actually. Any chance you can come down? They’ve got… Hang on. Will ya pipe down! I’m trying to talk here! Sorry. Got a job for you, some lighter stuff they want taken off their hands.”

  I allowed myself a petulant grumble about the timing, but I wasn’t gonna say no. I made a good chunk of my folding green from the police department, and funds had gotten lower than I liked. Wouldn’t do me any good to run out of milk—or palm-grease—while out hunting Orsola or tracking redcaps.

  “Okay, Pete. Lemme pin my diapers on and I’ll be there.”

  How many times have I described the ride on the L, or the squatting brick of a building that was the clubhouse, or the constant in-and-out stream of bulls and people with a complaint for the bulls and mugs nabbed by the bulls? I’m not sure either, but point is, I ain’t doin’ it again. I headed there, I got there, I went in.

  Place was a zoo. Well, if you swapped cigarette smoke for zebra dung. Citizens were packed into the waiting area up front, standing room only. A lot of ’em had been waiting for hours, to judge by what they were yellin’ at the beleaguered desk sergeant—the parts that weren’t profanity, anyway. Sarge didn’t even cast me his usual evil eye as I stepped past him without signing in, so I knew he was havin’ a bad day of it.