Mad Lizard Mambo

by Rhys Ford

  “No, those dogs were toying with him. With us. Right now, Malone should be a piece of bone with its marrow sucked out instead of sleeping in a private room with a needle stuck into his arm,” I explained. “They pulled away without feeding, and I brought one down, the largest one, but the other two didn’t react. They should have attacked me, if that was their pack leader. That wasn’t a rogue pack, Ryder. Someone had a hold on them, and a good hold. There was this whistling sound—”

  “I heard that,” Ryder cut in. “I wasn’t sure if it was the wind or… something else. Is that how they’re normally controlled?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so.” Shoving aside memories of shadows, stench, and pain, I replied, “Whenever I’ve been around a Hunt Master and their dogs, it’s been all verbal or hand gestures, but a whistle isn’t any different than a word. Ciarla knows Valin, but those dogs were too small to be his. Too weak.”

  “You think he survived the river?”

  “It would take a hell of a lot more than getting shot and tossed into the rapids for Valin to die.” I shook my head. “Her being here at the same time as the dogs can’t be a coincidence. You running into her… that’s by chance. She looked surprised and pissed off to see you.”

  “She was… our conversation wasn’t… it was tight, angry underneath the pleasantries. I went looking for her after the attacks, but she’s gone. The hotel manager—Bryan—said she and the two elfin she came with left an hour after we talked.” He pushed a piece of tomato onto a chip but made no move to eat it. “She told me she was heading to Phoenix. At my grandmother’s request. One of the Houses there is in talks with the Sebac about trade.”

  “Do you think that’s all they’re in talks for? Trading what?”

  The whiskey was nice, a bite of fire on my gums, and I held the bottle up for Ryder, but he refused, holding up the bottle of fizzy water he’d been sipping on.

  “You believed her?”

  “This stop could be considered on the way to Phoenix, but no, I don’t believe her. Phoenix trades for spices and sometimes technology, but I can’t see it being anything important enough to require someone to meet in person.” Ryder sighed. The day was on his face, carving a weary expression on his handsome features. “She and Grandmother have always… fought for control. Ciarla sees herself as the next head of our Clan. My grandmother does… not.”

  “Your grandmother is only going to give up control of that clan over her dead body,” I murmured. “Of course, that can be arranged. With your sister following close behind.”

  I had problems with Ciarla. Big ones. And questions. Cocking my head, I studied the cheeseburger, wondering how I could shove some of it into my mouth without seeming like a stray dog finding its first meal in a week. As I unwrapped the burger, I found it cut into quarters, and I shot Ryder a brief, questioning glance.

  “You cut your food. I’ve seen you eat,” he explained with a shrug. “Nothing that can’t be held in one hand, usually. Or chopsticks out of a container.”

  “Huh. Yeah, guess you’re right.” I’d never thought about it much other than doing it to piss Dempsey off. He had clearly defined ways of eating, and it’d been my way of rebelling. Now it was just habit and an odd one Ryder noticed, but I was too hungry to care about it beyond getting the burger into my stomach. “Thanks.”

  “You also eat the toppings off of your pizza and then eat the bread,” Ryder added. “You have very strange eating habits, Kai.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m not the one whose family is trying to fuck him up,” I pointed out, then grimaced. “Okay, so your grandmother’s tried to fuck me up, and right now, I know Ciarla’s got something to do with the black dogs tonight. Tell me something. When you were concocting that human-carrying-elfin-babies idea, how did you get Ciarla’s… contribution? Were they already cooking and you got them out or… what?”

  “Ciarla was already carrying, or so I was told. A couple of healers who said they were sympathetic to the fertility cause removed the eggs and transferred them to Shannon. One of those healers is missing, so I can’t say for certain how she and Valin… created the twins.” Ryder frowned. “I thought she’d gotten pregnant from one of her husbands, but….”

  “Instead, she hooked up with Valin, either in bed or in a cup.” I picked up a piece of cheeseburger, opening the bun to see if there were pickles. There were none, and I murmured another quick thanks to Ryder, then took a bite and saw heaven. “God, this is good. Okay, so the Courts think you’re the one who arranged for the sidhe and unsidhe mix?”

  “Some of them, yes. Ignorant of the situation, some make decisions based on… old loyalties. Some also damn Ciarla for lying with Valin because he is unsidhe.” He leaned back, pushing his box of food away. “What does it matter what race we are? Sidhe. Unsidhe. Human. From what I can see, we are all going to live well or die horribly… together. Very little separates us. Our magics are all different, our technologies are all different, but that can be shared. We can learn from one another instead of feeding on each other. Why can’t people see that?”

  “Because people don’t look into their neighbor’s bowl to see if he’s got enough food,” I answered. “They look to see if that asshole has more. Greed is easy. Sharing’s hard. It’s why parents have to teach that instead of not hoarding shit. We’re all hardwired for self-preservation.”

  “Except you.” I didn’t need a road map to point out the sarcasm in Ryder’s tone. “That seems to be something you are severely lacking.”

  “Hey, keeping you alive is self-preservation. You die, I don’t get paid,” I pointed out. “Ciarla. What does she gain if she gets control of the Clan?”

  “Besides money and power?” He shrugged. “Nothing much.”

  “Yeah, but that power… it comes with a hell of a lot of responsibility.” I took another sip of whiskey, hissing at its sting. The cheeseburger lost its appeal, and I rubbed at my eyes. The edge of the bed was soft, a silken promise for how it would cradle my aching body if I simply lay back and let sleep take me. “Kind of like you’re crazy. You and that Court of yours.”

  “Do you ever wonder why you and I… fit into one another, Kai?” Ryder chuckled at my scalding look. “Speaking as one crazy man to another.”

  “I’m practical. You just think that makes me crazy because you don’t live out in the real world. This thing between us? So you make me hot. A lot of people do.” I saluted him with the small bottle. “Doesn’t mean I’m going to do something about it.”

  “What is between us goes beyond physical, Kai. There are reasons why we are drawn to each other.” He picked at the nachos again, moving a chip around the congealing cheese. “You make my bones sing, but that isn’t why I want you. Have I ever felt this before? No. But I might again, but can I take that chance? The thing is, this between us… this is something special… too special to walk away from. A destiny of sorts. A promise of greater things. I can feel that. So can you.”

  “No such thing as destiny, Your Lordship,” I grunted. “No one… no god… makes my life but me. I’ve been owned enough, thank you very much.”

  “And I keep telling you, I do not want to own you.” He sighed. “Do you want to know why I didn’t use the gun on the ainmhi dubh?”

  The whiskey turned sour in my mouth. “What does that have to do with… this push-pull we’ve got going?”

  “Everything and nothing.” Ryder gave up poking at the chips, then moved the boxes to the dresser.

  “You’re beating a dead horse here, Ryder.”

  “I don’t think so. I think that horse is very much alive. You just refuse to see it breathing.” He smiled, a wan, thin, resigned press of his lips, then sat back down on the bed. “I tried to shoot the ainmhi dubh. I did. I’ve shot at things before. Everything in me knew it had to be done, so I held that gun up to its head—or as close as I was going to get—but my finger, it refused to press down on that trigger.

  “And I knew you’d be angry, furious actually. As well a
s the very real possibility of the monster healing enough to grab at the people coming out of the bungalows,” Ryder explained. “But I couldn’t. I couldn’t kill it. It was dying, but I couldn’t bring myself to take its life, so I left it for you.”

  “Because you knew I would do it.” There’d been no question about the dog for me. There never was when I stalked the packs running their murderous rampages through the prairies and farmlands outside of the city. “I’ve seen you shoot at black dogs before. Back in Pendle.”

  “I’ve never purposely killed anything before.” He shook his head at my incredulous murmur. “Yes, I have fished, but not like… that. I couldn’t kill it.”

  “And killing’s what I do.” I let the words go flat. If I thought back to our trip down Pendle or even when I handed Ryder the gun and ordered him to finish the dog off so I could help Malone, it wasn’t hard to remember the tremble in his hand when he gripped the gun’s stock. “And it’s what you can’t do. No shame in that.”

  There wasn’t any shame in being unable to take a life… even as wicked of a life as a murderous ainmhi dubh. I wouldn’t expect Dalia to pull a trigger. What right did I have to expect Ryder to? The anger I’d nursed in my belly whispered away, its dank film burned off by the glare of understanding Ryder’s nature.

  “You are more than just a killer, Kai. There is so much more than that to you.” Ryder inched closer, dipping the bed down, then crossed his legs, facing me. “You have led a short, brutal life, yet you have not become a shortsighted, brutal person. You inspire people’s loyalty. Even as irascible as you are, people know they can trust you. Your word means something, and you fight for people’s well-being even when you cloak it in pride and stubbornness.”

  “That means shit to the elfin,” I pointed out softly. “I’m human, Ryder. I might have pointed ears and fangs, and I might even live thousands of years, but when it’s all said and done, I’m not elfin. And I don’t want to be. Not if it means being like your grandmother… or my father.”

  “That is what I am getting at, ainle. As lovely as you are—and yes, I find you extremely desirable—I need who you are as much as I need you. You balance out my flaws, my shortsightedness, my sidhe arrogance. There are things I would not begin to think of, and you do. I envision a world and move to make changes, social or political, and you show me where I have pulled the wrong thread.” Ryder sighed, leaning forward until his breath ghosted over my shoulder and cheek. “The dragon? I was… wrong to pressure the museum to take it down. It wasn’t just your pride up there—”

  I snorted. “Big part of it was my pride. I fucking worked hard to get that thing in.”

  “You pointed out to me how that dragon fit into the workings of the city, of the people who live off of its bones,” he continued. “I ask the humans to make compromises… I ask you to cleave to the ways of the elfin… but I don’t stop and think about how my actions will affect them. We’ve spoken of this before, but I don’t think you realize exactly how much I need your balance and insight. How much I need to you make sure I never, ever become my grandmother.”

  The idea of Ryder becoming like the Sebac was both humorous and chilling. She lived there, in the depths of his eyes, in the cracks of darkness between the green and gold. There’d been times when his voice whispered with the dryness of a dragon’s cough and the slither of a spider’s leg on a cobweb strung up years ago to catch a single, precious fly. The Sebac was holed up in her Elfhaime towers, pulling on her puppets’ strings, content to manipulate the sidhe, but Ryder—stupid, guileless, and bossy Ryder—was smack dab in the middle of San Diego, and any web he spun would have much more dire consequences.

  I shifted onto the bed, pulling one leg up and wincing when the plasters yanked at my skin. “And what’s in it for me?”

  “I make sure you never become your father.”

  His response cut me as keenly as any spell or knife ever had.

  “We are two sides to a single coin, two wings to one dragon—whatever saying you want to use to describe what we are to one another. What we can be to one another.” His hand ghosted over my knee, sliding goose bumps and desire over my skin. “And tell me that you do not feel me in your bones, like I feel you in mine.”

  “No,” I admitted softly. “I can’t, but… you’re asking a hell of a lot of me, Ryder. And I’m not going to say it’s something I want.”

  “Just tell me this, then,” he murmured, sliding his fingers off of my leg. “Is that horse still dead to you?”

  “Maybe not.” I took a long slug of whiskey, taking the edge off of the pain in my body and the ache in my soul. “But for right now, I’m not going to be checking its pulse.”

  “That is fine,” Ryder whispered, then brushed a soft kiss over my cheek. “So long as you don’t put a bullet in its head like you did the ainmhi dubh, there is hope for us yet.”

  “YOU CAN’T take me off this run,” Malone protested. “The doc says I’m fine.”

  Since the doctor in question was passed out and lit up with enough alcohol he would burst into flames if someone even whispered fire in his direction, I had my doubts. According to Bryan, Ed stayed sober up until dawn cracked through the storm, then fell nose down into a jar of rotgut he’d stashed in his sleeping bag. From the looks of Malone’s wounds, Ed did pretty much all he could, but I was a little bit grumpy after waking up to find Ryder sprawled over me after pushing all the pillows to the floor. I was stiff and aching, which turned to pissed off once I hooked my link to Bryan’s landline and downloaded my messages.

  The first was from Sarah Marks, the de facto mother figure of every Stalker in San Diego, if a stern-faced, round woman with a cutting wit and sharp tongue could be considered maternal. She ruled the Post with an iron fist, doling out contracts and payments with an icy fortitude and snipping precision so keen she could have taught the Fates how to cut threads. I didn’t want the complications her message dropped in my lap, and my practicality warred with my contrariness, with my common sense taking a leave of absence because things were going to get a bit rough.

  “Why didn’t you tell me you’re Sarah’s nephew?” I stood at the end of Malone’s hospital bed, arms crossed and staring down at his skinny legs poking out from under the blankets. “And when did you have time to tell her you got bit?”

  “She’s the only family I’ve got down here. My folks are up in Eugene,” he explained. “Aunt Sarah’s the one who got me the Post job, but… it wasn’t a good fit, and I wanted to go to the university—”

  “You didn’t tell her I was taking you on a run until last night?” Even through the data stream, Sarah’d torn a good chunk of my ass off, leaving its chewed-up remains floating around my update from Dalia about Newt’s tuna orgy and hairball ejection. “She wants you back down there. Now. And considering the shape you’re in, I’m more than inclined to agree with her.”

  “You can’t send me back down.” Malone slid out from under the blanket, swinging his legs over the edge of the bed. Shakily getting to his feet, he grabbed my upper arm for support. I held him up, bearing his weight until he caught his balance. “I go back now, I’m never going to be anything other than Sarah Marks’s nephew or a dead professor’s assistant. No one wanted me to work for them, Kai. I wasn’t smart enough… connected enough. This run is all I’ve got.”

  Draped in a paper hospital gown, Malone wasn’t much. He was a pale, scrawny scarecrow covered in clean, neat stitches and freckles. A pair of sagging white briefs left him with some dignity, but that was stolen by the desperation in his young face.

  “This run’s going to kill you, Malone,” I finally said. “You know that, right?”

  “I need to find my place, Kai. How am I going to do that without trying to live?” he pleaded. “Ed said I was good to go—well, before he passed out. I’ve got antibiotics, and the stitches aren’t that bad. You said it yourself, the dogs were playing with me. No real hard damage. Just some scrapes. I can do this. Just… let me go on this run.”


  “The boy wants to go, Kai,” Ryder tossed in from his lurking behind me. “His wounds aren’t as bad as yours, and you’re still going.”

  “I’ll heal. I’m elfin. He’s human.” I didn’t think that needed pointing out, but apparently it did. “I’ll be healed up in a couple of days. He’ll be lucky if we’re taking those stitches out by the time we get back. And what happens if he throws an infection out in the middle of nowhere? What do we do then? Jog over to New Vegas?”

  “Yes, that’s exactly what we do.” Ryder smiled at me when I turned around to glare at him. “Because, while you are in charge of the run, I should at least be able to determine who goes. Robbie is coming with us. And if it gets too much, we veer off.”

  “Even if that means those assholes who were trying to kill us gets there first?” I cocked my head at him. “Because you know that’s why they were on our asses. Someone doesn’t want us there, Ryder. Or they wanted something from the professor they didn’t get. It’s not going to be the cakewalk Pendle was.”

  “If Pendle was a cakewalk, then we need to redefine your idea of dessert,” he drawled, slithering his sidhe accent around his sarcasm. “We’re armed this time… well, you are. And for what it’s worth, we can at least help defend the transport.”

  “You two are as worthless as teats on a fish with a weapon.” I smirked at Ryder’s grimace. “Fine, Robbie comes along, but we’re going to need another gun, because if something happens to me, you two might as well go stake yourself out for the condors.”

  “Where are you going to find another Stalker?” Ryder asked through Malone’s excited yips. “Have you changed your mind about Cari?”

  “No, Cari doesn’t have the experience to go through Mercury, and she’s a hibiki. If we’re heading into a dead elfin Court, I don’t want to expose her to whatever ghosts are lingering there.” I put my hand up when Malone came in to hug me, stepping away from his flailing arms. “All we need is for one strong echo to grab her and we’re screwed. She’s dealt with humans, and I don’t know what a dead elfin’s imprint would do to her.”