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

by Ari Marmell

  “Uh, for what?”

  “For being an aggravation!” I swear she near hissed as she took a step toward me. “You’ve spent too long with the mortals, Oberon. Don’t forget which world you’re in now! We might prefer to have a legal reason to imprison you, but we don’t actually need one!”

  Least she actually called me “Oberon.” Lotta the high pillows in the Seelie Court don’t much like that I took my cousin’s name, refuse to use it. Hell, she probably wasn’t thrilled with it either, but she always was real big on etiquette.

  “Okay, true,” I said, “but then you wouldn’t learn what I know.”

  “Oh, you would talk. Eventually.”

  Wow. She was really steamed.

  “Maybe. But not anytime soon. And when I did, I wouldn’t be in much mood or condition to help you with the situation, would I?”

  “We don’t need your help, Oberon!”

  “Sure. Which is why I’m standin’ here in your private meeting room behind the secret passage.” Then, before she could really blow her wig, “Come on, your Majesty. I ain’t part of the Court anymore. I got no pull here, so there’s no need to save face with me. Let’s cut the hooey and just get to the part where we figure out how to work together.”

  Laurelline remained still, a scowling statue, for almost half a minute, before… “Fine. Sit. Have a drink, if you wish.”

  She musta seen something on my mug, a flicker of doubt I couldn’t quite hide, or maybe she just caught a whiff of it in my aura, ’cause her scowl deepened. “What do you take me for, Oberon? I am not one of the Unseelie thugs with whom you are far too comfortable keeping company. I do not play such trickster’s games.”

  I couldn’t help it. I still hesitated.

  Fire flashed in her eyes—and I ain’t bein’ metaphorical— but she nodded. “Very well. This repast is offered without condition. Eat and drink freely, and owe me nothing in return.”

  What’s that they say? It ain’t paranoia if they really are out to get you?

  “Thank you, your Majesty.” I sat and poured myself a glass of something made from a fruit you never heard of that’s been extinct for centuries.

  It tasted like apple juice.

  I mean, don’t get me wrong, really, impossibly good apple juice. But still apples.

  She, too, took a glass, swirled it around a bit and then took a real dainty sip. Refreshment as theater. I couldn’t wait to leave.

  I also decided I couldn’t wait for her to decide the most dramatic way to start grilling me.

  “So, is Áebinn workin’ for you on this? Or is she harin’ off on her own? I’ve never known her to work without a team before.”

  The queen’s—sorry, “chief’s”—peepers narrowed, and I think she mighta imagined crushing me with her eyelids. “Everything Detective Áebinn does is on behalf of the Seelie Court.”

  That was not only not an answer, but it was more or less the same not-an-answer I’d gotten from the bean sidhe herself. We were off to a roarin’ start, here.

  “With all respect,” I started, “if you’re not gonna—”

  “You are here to answer my questions. Then, if I feel it in everyone’s best interests, I may answer yours.”

  I was startin’ to get irate. Was a time even she’d never have talked to me that way, and yeah, I’d given all that up of my volition, but… “That may be why you had your lackey fetch me back, but it ain’t why I came.”

  “Why you came is of no…”She paused, frowned, gently placed the glass on the table. “All right, Oberon. Why did you seek me out, specifically? You’ve involved yourself in Court affairs quite often of late, but you’ve never demanded a royal audience.”

  “Because there ain’t many people with the know-how to tell me if this wild theory I’ve come up with is a total load of malarkey, or if there’s even the tiniest chance I’m onto something. You or his Majesty were the ones I figured could do it, and not to tie me up in a web of favors in the process.”

  “I see.” Another pause, then, “Tell me everything.”

  And I did. I mean, I left out the stuff with the Ottatis, but I spilled pretty much everything else. Áebinn and her death visions—which I figured Laurelline probably already knew, but described anyway—along with the other weirdness around town, the bodies, and finishing up with Varujan.

  She looked troubled by the time I was done, which was good; she shoulda been troubled. None of it could mean anything positive.

  “And this theory of yours?” she asked.

  This was the tricky bit. If she decided I was nuts, I wasn’t gettin’ anything more outta her. But I hadda know if it was possible.

  “Vampires,” I started, “are sorta ‘half Fae.’ They’re the bodies—”

  “I know what vampires are, Oberon!”

  I raised both hands, palms forward. “I know you do, your Majesty. I don’t mean to offend. But please, follow me through this. My notion’s pretty much rooted in their nature.”

  “Fine. Go on.”

  “Human bodies that die by real emotional violence, particularly suicide, occasionally leave themselves open to inhabitations by a certain kinda Fae spirit. Or bodies killed by other vampires, of course. When that essence inhabits the corpse, that’s when it rises, with access to some of the person’s memories but a totally new—and completely predatory—soul.

  “Now, we know that a rare few necromancers, real powerful ones, have developed rituals to summon or even control vampires. But this ain’t one of those. So…

  “Is it possible for someone to have developed magics to summon or control the spirits? The essence of what would become vampires?”

  Laurelline stared at me as though I’d just wiped my nose on her unmentionables. “That’s insane.”

  “You sayin’ it ain’t possible, then?”

  “Oberon, those spirits… For all practical purposes, they aren’t real! They have no separate, measurable existence, no being, no personality, no power. They are little more than fragments of a larger body of pure etheric essence! You speak of the equivalent of summoning and describing a nightmare before a mortal has even dreamt it! Yes, the potential for that specific nightmare exists in his thoughts, but as a thing unto itself, it doesn’t exist yet!”

  “I get that it ain’t probable, ain’t easy. That it’s never been done, that we may not have the slightest notion how it could be done. But with everything you know of magic, everything you’ve learned, seen, even heard of, down to the most basic fundamental theories… By the remotest stretch, in the craziest and wildest circumstances, is it possible?”

  “No! It’s…” She trailed into silence. For the first time since I’d walked through that door, her Majesty seemed to shrink just a touch, and for a couple of seconds, she wouldn’t meet my gaze. “I honestly don’t know.”

  Well, it meant I didn’t have to start all over from the beginning just yet, but tellin’ you square? I think I’da been happier if she’d stuck with no.

  “But even if I concede that such a thing is feasible,” she went on, posture and tone both firming up again, “that hardly means you’re pursuing a viable lead with this… this fantasy. It’s never been done, there are no known ways of doing it, and it would hardly even accomplish anything! Such magics would still provide the sorcerer no real control over the resulting vampires. What would be the point?”

  “I dunno yet. Maybe it’s just step one. There are other necromancies that offer some influence over vampires, yes? But either way, I don’t figure it’s near as improbable as you do.”

  “And why is that?”

  “One,” I said, ticking ’em off on my fingers, “we got a call that, accordin’ to our firsthand witness, only nosferatu can hear, but which ain’t strong enough to compel ’em to do anything. Two, we got enough dead bodies to suggest a small handful of vampires in Chicago, but they ain’t all part of the same pack, which is pretty near unheard of. Three, watermelons. Vampire friggin’ watermelons, your Majesty. Something so damn rar
e even I thought it was pure hokum, and which is only even a myth in one tiny slice of Eastern Europe. And four, whatever spooky death magic your housebroken bean sidhe’s been sniffin’. All in Chicago, all in a matter of a couple weeks.

  “So maybe it’s a spell per se, and maybe it ain’t, but I’d say something’s attracting those pre-vampire spirits in abnormally large numbers, yeah? I can’t really see how anything else fits the facts.”

  Laurelline, prim and proper queen of Chicago, looked as if she wanted to spit. “No,” she admitted. “No, I suppose I can’t, either.”

  We each took a few more gulps of our drinks, absorbing what’d been said.

  “Very well, detective,”she said, dabbing at her lips with a silk— yeah, silk—napkin. “How do you recommend we proceed?”

  “Well, it just about goes without saying that we gotta determine who’s responsible, and why.”

  “Yes, it does.”

  Heh. “To start with, we’re probably lookin’ for a mortal occultist. I mean, we can’t rule out the Fae, and it’d be dippy to make too many assumptions, but just playin’ the odds, our bad guy’s more likely a human.”

  “And how did you come to that conclusion?”

  “Because, like you said, this ain’t ever been done before. And when you’re dealin’ with a brand-new idea, well…”

  All I could do was shrug as she glowered at me. Sure, some individuals are exceptions to the rule, but it ain’t any big secret that we Fae, as a whole, are more mimics than innovators. You only gotta look at how we structure our society, the whole ridiculous “municipal government versus organized mobs” setup the Seelie and Unseelie Courts got goin’ in Chicago, to see that. Guess maybe it ain’t considered polite to openly talk about it, though.

  “Presuming that to be the case,”Laurelline said coldly, “it would require a mortal with a frighteningly in-depth understanding of mysticism and the occult. Are there truly those on the other side of Chicago so knowledgeable and so powerful?”

  “Yeah, some.”

  Orsola Maldera was my suspect number one, of course. No surprise there. But would her whacky religious notions even let her interact with vampires and dark spirits? She’d all but dismissed me as some kinda unholy monstrosity—I mean, even before we started tryin’ to croak each other—but I didn’t have the first idea how that crazy old dame’s mind worked.

  But I couldn’t let myself get too fixated, and she wasn’t the only possibility. Dan Baskin had himself enough old writings and grimoires and potent relics that he coulda stumbled across something dangerous, something he was too much of an amateur to understand he shouldn’t mess with. And what about Saul Fleischer? I’d only bumped up against him the once, over Nessumontu. I had no real idea how powerful his Kabbalistic magics were, whether he’d even be capable of somethin’ like this.

  And nuts, those were just the three I knew about. Coulda been others; probably not, but I couldn’t rule it out. Or it coulda been a Fae after all, one with a more creative bent than most of us and a penchant for spiritual or death magics…

  I was startin’ to get a headache.

  “What would it take?” I asked. “For someone to pull this off, I mean?”

  “Hmm.” I let her ponder on it for a spell. Uh, so to speak. “The specific ingredients could vary dramatically, as long as they had potent symbolic connections to death or undeath. Bones, grave dirt, old funerary wrappings. Blood, of course. The list is long.”

  “So, no way to track someone down based on that, then.”

  “Unlikely.” More pause for thought. “Sacrifice, almost certainly. A human life. Probably multiple lives, actually. I can’t say for sure, not knowing precisely how much power a ritual of this sort requires. Also not much help, I fear, unless you believe you can pick out a ritual sacrifice from among all Chicago’s violent murders.”

  “I’m good, your Majesty, but I ain’t that good.”

  “Shocking. The location of the rite would also be of significance, I should think. Equally as symbolic as the components. A graveyard would be the most obvious choice, but hardly the only one. A church or other place of religious importance, no longer hallowed, for instance.”

  I couldn’t help but be reminded of the battle with Orsola in the charred ruins of Santa Maria Addolorata. Yeah, I didn’t wanna get too caught up in my assumptions, but this was definitely soundin’ more and more like her kinda shindig.

  Laurelline’s tone hadn’t changed as we’d gone through the possibilities, but she was gettin’ agitated. Talented as she was at suppressing any sign of her inner feelings, I could feel it in her aura.

  “What’s buggin’ you, your Majesty?”

  “I keep coming back to the fact that if we’re right about what’s happening, we are dealing with an occultist not only of great knowledge, but great imagination. Someone willing to attempt magics that have, so far as I know, never been tried. And who is willing to deal with truly dark powers. I greatly dislike the notion of someone like that running unchecked in my city…”

  Your city?

  “…but even more so, I worry a great deal over what might happen if this person makes a mistake.”

  Oh, now there was a cheery thought.

  “There is already,” she finished, “enough going on in Chicago that I do not understand.”

  Was it my imagination or had she peered my way just a bit more intently when she said that? Was she talkin’ about something I was involved in?

  Was she talkin’ about Adalina?

  When the hell had my life gotten so complicated?

  Since that wasn’t a topic I was too eager to pursue, I made up a few more questions to ask about this hypothetical “vampire spirit spell.” We tossed around some more notions, built up a few theories, none of which made any notable difference. Bottom line was, we’d hashed out about everything we could. There was nothin’ else for it but for me to see if I couldn’t dig up some solid dope, try to turn some of these theories into fact and hope that led me to a “who,” or at least a “why” and a “what next.”

  I put down one more drink, made my polite obeisance and farewells, and was halfway to the door when…

  “Oberon?”

  I stopped, turned. “Your Majesty?”

  Hard as she worked to conceal it, hesitation and uncertainty added a bitter tang to her aura. If she’d been human, she’da been clenchin’ her mitts, or maybe workin’ her jaw without sayin’ anything.

  “I am… concerned about Áebinn’s involvement in this affair.”

  “How’s that? You said she was acting in an official capacity.”

  “Indeed she is, but she has become, ah, unduly obsessed with this case. It was she who first brought the issue to our attention, first reported the deathly essence she had sensed, and even then her eagerness to pursue it was a bit startling. I felt the same from her when she pressed for permission to pursue the matter into the mortal world. She has been brusque in her communications, and has missed several scheduled reports. It is unlike her, to say the least.”

  Yeah, I’ll say. Normally, when it came to rules and procedure, the bean sidhe detective was wound tighter’n a dvergr’s pocket watch.

  “I appreciate the tip-off, your Majesty. Uh, I think. Why are you tipping me off, your Majesty?”

  “It’s not a decision I make lightly, Oberon. But I’ve no idea why Áebinn is so consumed with this case, and with her in a potentially compromised state—and assuming we’re correct in our conjectures—I’m equally uncertain as to how she’ll react to an opponent this unpredictable and outside her experience.”

  “Okay. Sure. I can dig that. But I still don’t quite get why you’re admitting this to—”

  “Because you need to be ready to step in and finish the job if she can’t, or to clean up any… residual damage. Now that you’ve involved yourself in this matter, and now that I’ve taken the time to assist you with it, I expect you to act on behalf of the Seelie Court should it become necessary.”

&n
bsp; I didn’t figure that “not interested” would go over real well, and it ain’t as if she was wrong. I had involved myself. So, “Yeah, all right. I’ll make sure this doesn’t blow back on you guys if I can manage it.”

  “Good.”

  I was three-quarters of the way to the door, when…

  “Oberon!”

  I stopped again, turned again. “Yes, your Majesty?”

  Now she was all business, her aura the same cold and near-colorless wall it usually was. “This is twice now that you’ve bullied and brayed your way into an audience with someone of power and influence in the Court without going through proper channels. That’s two more than most are permitted, and it is the last that you will be permitted. Attempt it again, and I do not care what the circumstances may be, you will face the justice of the Court and find yourself imprisoned—at best.

  “You may go.”

  That last was blatantly unnecessary, since I’d already been on my way out, but I didn’t guess pointing that out was a wise choice. Didn’t much think she was kidding about the consequences if I pulled a stunt like this again, either.

  Not having anything else to say that’d do either of us any good, I made for the door a third time and skedaddled.

  * * *

  I was maybe half a mile on from City Hall, head’n shoulders covered in a light dusting of snow, when I saw ’em rumblin’ down the street and headed my way.

  Black carriage. Tarnished silver trim. Dark-haired and mean-eyed horses that, from what I could tell at this distance, might or might not’ve been kelpies.

  I’ve mentioned before, it ain’t unheard of to find Unseelie in Seelie territory, or vice-versa. Diplomatic missions, or Fae on separate sides doin’ business, or even an occasional friendly chat; you find all kinda weird pals and relationships between the two sides. It’s rare enough, though, to catch your attention. Especially when you just happen to be in the middle of an investigation that just happens to involve big names in the Court and you also just happen to have tussled with a few redcaps not all that long ago.

  I walked faster. The carriage kept closing.