~~~~~~
Marco was an Elf who worked with cars. This gave Casey certain expectations. Elves were, after all, icons of grace and beauty. They supported life, environmentally friendly choices and vegetarianism. Marco lead her behind the gas station dumpster. She wanted to see a sleek silver Prius with “save the rainforest” “Nature is my church” and “I heart my hybrid” bumper stickers.
But Marco unlocked the passenger door on a Ford F-350 diesel. If the sniper's car had been a black sedan bullet, all shark teeth and doll-eyes, this was a bull in fire-engine red. Subtle flames licked out of the tire wells, and a red tower had been airbrushed onto the hood. An image Casey recognized in her gut. She looked at Marco, accusingly. That was something from one of her stories, and was a little too detailed to be merely an artist’s rendering.
“Yes. It’s King’s Tower at Cir’Feyon. I thought you might recognize it.” He opened the passenger side door and helped her into it.
The insides were custom. White leather interior, carpet on the fine line between shag and sane. A stereo system that had all the bells and whistles. A handful of CDs sat in the change drawer. Blind Guardian, Epica, Modest Mouse and—she died a little inside—the Black Eyed Peas. Okay, everybody was entitled to their own tastes, but seriously? The Peas?
“You get this on a mechanic’s salary?” She asked as Marco slung himself into the driver’s seat.
“We’re not mechanics.” He said it quickly, as if this were an old conversation and he’d rather not have it again, thank you. “My partner and I mod cars. We’ll do tune-up work if we have to, if you’re a friend, and if ‘tune up’ means maybe replacing a spark plug and a couple gaskets that haven’t failed yet. I put a turbo in Arthur’s truck and Tim airbrushed a tiger on the side. That’s how we met.”
“You must not drive this much.” She said. “It still smells new.” It was a five year old model. There wasn’t even a scratch on the dashboard.
Marco smiled. He picked a screw out of the ash tray and, before Casey could protest, gouged the dashboard between their seats. Then he dropped the screw back in the ash tray and hovered his right hand over the wound. There were no lights, no motes of glowing dust to show what happened next. The plastic simply healed itself. “Good as new,” Marco said, satisfied. “If you remember what something looked like, you can bring that memory back. It helps if you still have the original object, of course. Things from home…not so much.” He sighed. “I can still do a great glass of beer from the tavern near my old home. I can’t remember the fruit, or the feel of sheets, or the sound of the birds. Not well enough to replicate them, anymore. They say the great ones’ memory never fades, but Raziel—Razielara, also known as Rachel Hunt, our leader—has it worse than I do. She’s been gone longer.” He glanced sideways at Casey. “And no, I won’t do that to your car.”
“Why not?” Casey asked.
“Because it’s a Nissan.”
“Nissan makes great cars.”
“Yes, they do. You didn’t buy one of them. It’ll be totaled if you scratch the paint job.” Marco turned the key. Dragon fire roared in the engine block and throbbed through the soles of her feet. He shifted into reverse and glanced over his shoulder. “Where do you live?”
“Padre Island. Right on the coast, heading towards the park.” Padre Island National Park was a big tourist draw. Her grandfather had bought the land near it for pennies compared to the property value today. Someday soon, the taxes would be so high she’d have to sell. It wasn’t the land she wanted. It was the memories. “Um…you really are an…” she trailed off. She couldn’t just say it, after all.
“An Elf?” He grinned through strands of long, blond hair. “You want me to scratch my car again to prove it?”
“And you’re venerable to steel.” She enunciated carefully.
He clicked on a blinker. “Yes. Which I’m not going to demo, so don’t ask.”
“I wouldn’t. But how can you work on cars?”
Marco sighed and rolled up his sleeves. Stripe-like scars raked the inner surface of his arm. One of them was wrench shaped and looked fresh. “I’m careful. And I hired Tim, my partner, to lug pig iron for me. Only he proved to be better in the creative department than I am. It’s his paint on the hood. Besides, I’d have missed digging around under the hoods. Anderson-Creed is my life, these days. I wouldn’t trade it for the world.” He steered the truck through a right turn that, on a different night, would have landed him with a ticket. “You’re amused?”
“I wouldn’t have made an Elf a car man.” Casey said, grinning. Then her smile dropped completely. Oh, god. She’d never even considered this. “Um…ah… Am I your…uh….creator?” Her mouth had gone dry.
Marco threw his head back and laughed. The car stayed on a straight line, as if it were bolted to rails, but Casey still grabbed for the door’s oh-shit handle. “Oh, by all the gods and galaxies…no. No, you don’t have us on your conscience. Don’t worry.”
Don’t worry? Excuse me? “How do you know it wouldn’t just be a huge ego trip?”
“Because if you were that kind of person, you wouldn’t be working at a stop-and-rob on Leopard Street.”
“I could just be trying to save up for my boob job.” Casey was brown hair, brown eyes, and flatter than most of Nebraska. She sighed. “So the fact that I write about Elves, and the fact that you are an elf, are just total coincidences.” She looked out the window for a second. “Alright. I can do that.”
Marco sighed. “Raziel’s gonna kill me,” he muttered. “No. It’s not just coincidence. You didn’t create us, but…” he signaled a lane change, made it, and said “You have a gift. We don’t know how it works, because there aren’t a lot of people like you in the universe. The Faerie don’t share your ability, either. I can’t teach you how to use it, or explain how you have it at all. But it’s like you have a window into another world. My world.” He paused a long time. Streetlights ticked by. “Ambercross.”
Casey’s pulse fluttered like a trapped bird. “I made Ambercross up when I was sixteen. I wrote it on two sheets of lined paper I have framed on my office wall at home.”
“I’m glad you found that outlet for it. Most people think they’ve gone insane. I’d guess that, Earthside, there were probably four or five other people in the history of the world that had your gift. Because you’ve also got talent for writing, you’ve cherry-picked the interesting things in my world…though you did make a lot of it up out of whole cloth. The Dark Wars were real, but that Leythorne guy…you made him up. Plus you have this pro-mortal slant that just…” he stopped, and smiled sheepishly. “Favorite drinking conversation. Sorry. Anyway, creative license aside, you’ve gotten a lot of things about Ambercross right. Too much for it to be coincidence, or sourced from Earthside lore.”
“Like what?” She asked, a little impatiently. The sky was lightening. It was almost seven AM now.
“The name Ambercross, for one. The Elestrin race. That’s what humans used to call the Wild Hunt. Herne the Hunter and all that. The Dark Wars between Faer and the royal Council. You have a real bead on Ambercross. It encouraged us a lot.”
“Us?”
“Yeah.” He dodged a slow moving Lincoln. “There’s quite a few Faerie trapped Earthside. Most of us are immortals. There aren’t enough of us to support a pure breeding population, and mixed breeds are rare. There’s a few colonies, though. The Merrow colony in Shetland. A dwarven settlement in Arkansas. And the Phooka group in Russia, which most of the other cities won’t even touch. The Earth-born Faerie aren’t all that different from Earth-born humans. It’s all they know. For the Faerie born.” He shrugged .”We drive cars, we own homes, we pay taxes, and if we get homesick, we read your books. And if we don’t read them, we’re still buying them and keeping them around. It isn’t much, no offence, but it’s all we have.” He looked at her with those dreamboat eyes of his.
“How can you be here?” She asked.
> He thought for a minute before answering. "You're not the only person with this gift. There’s at least one other person with it, somewhere. It takes two people to make your gift work as intended. Odds are, you’ll never meet him. If you do, though, the two of you could create a doorway from Earth to Ambercross. That’s how all of us got here. Wandered through the wrong door by mistake, and got caught in your world until it was too late to leave. I came over maybe ten years ago, and by the time I tracked down the guy who brought me here, he’d died.”
There was so much pain in the car, Casey could have cut it into strips and deep fried it with jalapenos and cheese. “What if I found him? That other part of me. My…gift.”
“You could take me home. But you won’t find him. Besides. I’m not the man I was back in Ambercross. Humans have corrupted me. I’ve got Anderson-Creed, Tim and his boyfriend are adopting a kid, so I’ve got to keep that going. I’m the guy Raziel depends on to keep Corpus’s Exiles from misbehaving when she’s gone…” he shrugged “I’m not Earthborn, but I am Earth-bound.”
Not much she could say to that. "Why did you get involved tonight? There’s no way you could have known I’d get shot. And you were right. This isn’t Faerie business.”
“I lied my ass off back there, sunshine. Rule one of being an Exile: Keep the humans happy. When humans get unhappy they start killing things. The Faerie can’t compete with you, so it’s usually a good idea to make sure our communities are successful and relatively trouble free. Because if things go wrong, and you find out about us…” he shrugged, then shifted lanes again. They were stuck behind the remnants of early morning construction. “And most of the Faerie are hunters. We behave ourselves, but it is open season on serial killers. My only issue with that is, some of us don’t care much about collateral damage.”
“None of which,” Casey said, carefully, “explains why you were protecting me.”
"Silver bullets.” Marco said. They were passing over the Laguna Madre, over to Flour Bluff. “Either a human knows about us or they’re psychotically insane. I’m willing to go with the former right now, because of the targets they chose. Also…
“Raziel is the Elestrin in charge of Corpus Christi. She is good people, but really, really, really scary. She actively hunts murderers, anyone who abuses children. You know Jack the Ripper?”
“Yeah,” Casey said.
“She was too busy taking his head as a trophy to realize her doorway had closed behind her. That’s how she got stuck on Earth. If Raziel were here, the sniper would have died a long time ago.
“But she’s not. We’ve got a minor emergency in Mexico, and Raziel got called to a meeting in Vegas for the last month. She can’t leave until it’s resolved, either. Looks to me like the sniper knew Raziel wasn’t going to be here to retaliate. The first guy was killed the day after she left.
“And, other than the first two guys, the people murdered are aware of Faerie presence in the city. Amaya Hernandez worked very closely with Raziel—and if you want to talk about scary, that murder has Raziel fucking redlined. When they shot Amaya, something told me you’d eventually pop up on their list…and I was right.
“More importantly, every one of the people killed, including the two guys at the start and the woman shot last night, had contact with the Exiles in Corpus Christi.
“That makes it our problem.”
Casey nodded and closed her eyes. “Can you pull over? I think I’m going to be sick.”
"So they picked me out.” Her hands were shaking a bit less now, and she hadn’t humiliated herself by vomiting on Marco’s plush upholstery. But she was nowhere near ready to close the car door and keep going. “They watched the store, killed someone to draw the police away, and waited for me to walk out of the store.” Marco had pulled over into a storage center parking lot while Casey got her breath back. Now, as her fear faded, something warm and hot replaced it. "What about the other victims?"
"One of our Exiles looks like a small child. He isn’t, but in his human guise he can’t pass for thirteen. He wound up with Amaya as a case worker, and we informed her of Ero’s problem. She placed him with understanding individuals. She also smoothed the way for Tim’s adoption, kept the government off Raziel’s back once. Those two gang members at the start had been harassing the local Merrow. We have three of them, two at the Aquarium, and one…well, never mind. I’d paid one of them a visit, and they both agreed to stop.”
“What about the college girl?”
Marco closed his eyes and leaned his head back. They could see the bay from this parking lot, and the sun broke over the horizon, lighting the sky with red. The water was soft lavender, and a stray sunbeam wove gold into Marco’s hair. His face could have been carved of stone, save for the tear rolling slowly down his cheek. “We were lovers.” He said, at last. “Her teacher introduced us. She is…was.” He dropped his head for a moment, then came back up with a deep breath. “She was generations younger than I, but she wanted so badly for something beautiful to be real.” He paused, and another tear escaped his control. He turned to Casey. “I got her killed.”
“I’m sorry,” Casey said, and took his hand. Her own pain scraped just below the surface. Love could be a twisted thing when it refused to die. And despite everything Jack had done to her, she still loved him. People didn’t get that, sometimes. Marco met her eyes. She saw that he did.
And then Marco’s phone rang.
Silver Bullet (Exiles of Ambercross 1 Page 3
