“But I want to know more,” Keith pleaded. “Please! When did you come to Chicago? How did you get here?”
“We can speak more at the party,” Liri said. “Goodbye for now, young friend. You are safe. You can find your way now, but we must leave you here.”
“Here?” Keith said. “But the water’s frozen.”
“No matter,” Rily said. As gracefully as a salmon, he leaped toward the water. The jewels on his forehead and wrists caught the distant light like sudden comets. His back arched, and the ice seemed to part before his outstretched hands. He slipped beneath it, becoming a pale streak beneath dark gray glass. His bare toes, pointed like the best Olympic divers, were the last things to disappear. Liri smiled gently at Keith’s astonished face before she followed her lord. Keith just caught a glimpse of green as they slid away. Not a single ripple or crack in the ice betrayed their passage. It was as if they had never been there at all.
Wow, he thought, shaking his head. Right here in the city. Wait until he told Holl. And Diane. And everybody.
But once he started walking back toward the city, alone again in the cold, empty night, his mood began to sink with the temperature.
It was four o’clock in the morning. In just four more hours he’d have to go back to work. Keith stumbled up the access steps of the pier to street level and found himself at the far eastern end of Randolph Street near the Yacht Club. He began to trudge west, feeling the cold wind batter him from every direction at once. Despite his gloves, his hands were as cold and numb as his feet. It seemed like a month ago, not a day, that he was supposed to anchor the discussion with the Gadfly team about ads aimed at the B2B market, business-to-business, for the upcoming run of trade shows. Dorothy was probably very upset with him. He had never missed an important meeting. He owed her an apology, to be delivered from his knees with a box of chocolate-covered caramels as an offering. She wouldn’t be interested in an explanation, and she wouldn’t believe it anyhow. Jason was probably chewing the curtains with fury, and no bribe would placate him. Keith was pretty sure that in the back of the boss’s mind the notion was still there that somehow Keith was responsible for the leak of the ad sheet several months back. But he had to go back and resume his normal life.
But how could he? he thought despairingly, listening to his footsteps echoing on the icy pavement. He’d only gotten away from Beach because the sidhe were there to help him. Next time he’d be on his own. Beach would be looking for him, harder than before. It was his fault they’d found him. He had been careless. That could never happen again. Next time they’d be looking for tricks. They would make it impossible to get away, by whatever means necessary. Keith shuddered. Beach was right: his imagination was their greatest weapon against him.
Anger at his own stupidity making his gestures fierce and sharp, he restored the eye-avoidance charm on himself. He stalked along Washington Street, changing the focus of the spell every few feet to an inanimate object or a shop window. No one would ever catch him off guard again. No matter how much it annoyed his friends or his co-workers, they’d have to put up with it. He wouldn’t be the one who caused the elves a moment of trouble, not when they’d been having such problems themselves. He wouldn’t be the liability that cost them their long-sought freedom.
Chicago before dawn was populated by people on their own missions. A thin stream of cars and trucks hurtled by him, the drivers clutching the wheels with purpose. A man wrapped in an old brown sleeping bag sat in a sheltered doorway, rocking and talking to himself. He didn’t look up as Keith passed; just kept on repeating in his rough, tuneless voice the same line of a song. Keith felt lost. This wasn’t his time of day, his place.
The hollow feeling of despair reminded him that he was literally empty inside. Somewhere in the vicinity there had to be an all-night diner. At the next intersection a passing taxi drew with it the fast-cooling aroma of hot coffee. Keith turned in the direction from which the taxi had come.
Wandering down the street, he looked into shop windows. Advertising was his business, at least until PDQ canned him, but he couldn’t bring himself to be interested in the point-of-purchase displays or the merchandise they showcased. Makeup, boots, stereo equipment, books, candy—they all ran together in a blur, until a white chevron caught his eye.
It was a seagull in flight on a poster in the window display of a card shop. The words, in white over the photographic background said, “If you love something very much, let it go.…” Keith was prepared to forget about the old cliché until he was reminded suddenly of the conversation he and Holl had had not that long ago. “You might absent yourself on purpose,” Holl had said, as though he had foreseen this very moment.
How could he have known? Keith turned away from the display window, stricken. He balled his hands up, shaking them furiously at the air. How could he let the Little Folk go? They meant so much to him. They were his best friends, his second family. He loved them.
But that was the point, he realized, after stalking block after block of empty stores and offices. If they needed him to let go, how could he deny them that? He would never want to be the cause of harm to them. Beach was a danger to them. Keith was only the means to that end, he realized that now. He wasn’t the source of magical toys or weapons-grade spells; they were. He had to keep Beach from finding the Little People. The Australian would probably have a hard time enslaving them, but once he knew they existed they would have no peace.
All right, he thought, if he wasn’t just paying lip service to his ideals, if he really meant he would never cause the elves harm, then he would do it. He would do anything, if it would prevent anybody from reaching them and disturbing the peace and safety that they had worked so hard to attain. Even though it could mean he would never see them again.
Keith felt a pang of misery. It seemed like his whole world had been swept away. Even if he got it back again it would never be the same.
Beach would never find him.
***
Chapter 27
“No, don’t take that. Please.”
The short Hispanic waitress in the blue uniform and stained white apron looked down at the pair of pale hands clutching the coffee cup she had just tried to pick up.
“Sorry, I didn’t see you,” she said, instead taking the empty platter that was pushed to the edge of the table. “You need a refill?”
“Please.”
She poured out the contents of the glass pot in her left hand, upending it for the last drops. Keith pulled the cup closer to him, inhaling the sour, bitter aroma. He’d wolfed down a giant-sized truck-driver breakfast so fast he didn’t remember what it tasted like. There’d been pale yellow blobs and dark crumbs on the plate. So he had eaten eggs and toast. Part of this complete breakfast, said the advertising genius in his subconscious.
Once he had food in his belly he had nothing to do but think. He couldn’t go back to work. That was the first place Beach would look for him. He was afraid to go back to the apartment. They’d been in and out of it. Beach knew about all of his possessions. Keith worried what had been on his hard drive. Was the spy-guy responsible for all the troubles he’d been having with his e-mail account?
Most of all he was afraid to go back to the farm. The last thing he wanted to do was draw attention to the elves. If Beach trailed him there …
He had to talk to Holl. He fumbled for his cell phone and began to dial. Fear overwhelmed him, making his hands shake. Hastily, he hit the END and CLEAR buttons, wiping the number off the screen. What if Beach was serious about having listened to Keith’s phone calls? Did he have bugs on this phone? He smacked it on the table and stared at it as if it was a poison snake that hadn’t made up its mind whether to bite him or not.
An unshaven, tipsy-looking man in the booth facing Keith’s had watched his performance with the phone. “Wha’s the matter with you, pal? Girlfriend throw you outta the apartment?”
“No,” Keith said, staring glumly at the paper placemat. “I was kidnapped
and beaten up by international spies.”
The man regarded him with owlish sympathy. “Don’t y’ jush hate when that happens?”
“Emil, don’t talk to yourself,” the waitress said, coming back with a full pot of coffee. She filled the drunk’s cup and shoved it into his hands. “You come in here so drunk and you expect me to sober you up before work. I’m not your mama. Drink this. I’ll be back to give you a refill.”
“I’m not talkin’ to myshelf,” Emil argued, pointing at the booth across from him. “This guy here … where’d he go?”
The jingling of the bell on the door was his only reply. The waitress sighed. She picked up the check and the twenty-dollar-bill sitting on the table in the abandoned booth. At least the other man had paid before he went. Funny that she couldn’t remember what he looked like.
* * *
Dunn was doing a crossword puzzle and eating a bowl of cereal when he suddenly found his attention fixed on an individual spoonful of Cheerios.
“Keith,” he said positively. He tried to turn his head, but his eyes were riveted on those floating O’s. “Where have you been, man? We’ve been worried to death. Your boss called when you didn’t show up. They sounded pissed.”
“I was kidnapped,” Keith said.
“What?” Dunn demanded, standing up. “Daggit, Keith, take the whammy off me!”
“Not here.” Keith looked around. “The apartment might be bugged.”
Dunn thought for a minute. “The laundry room. I’ve got an excuse to go, and if I talk to myself, no one cares.”
While his roommate filled a washer with khaki pants and chambray shirts, Keith told him all about the situation. “And he said he could monitor my phone calls and my e-mail.”
“He could at that,” Dunn said. “If this is the guy who’s using something like Carnivore he can find information about you that’s translated into electronic bits in any online database, including any time you use your credit card. All it takes is time. Sometimes a lot of time. So how’d you get home?”
“My bus pass is anonymous; I paid cash for it. I stood in the middle of the thickest crowd of passengers I could find, and took the first bus heading north. I couldn’t go to work looking like this anyhow.”
“And how is ‘anyhow’?”
Keith lowered the spell. He let Dunn get one brief look at him before refocusing. His clothes were soggy, stained, and torn, and the bruises on his eye and unshaven cheek were already turning purple. Dunn was shocked.
“You can’t let ’em get anywhere near the little guys,” he said to the detergent dispenser. “What can I do to help?”
“I need you to call Diane,” Keith said, sinking down on an upturned laundry basket. “I’m afraid to get on the phone. If Beach’s tappers hear my voice they’ll know where I am. She’s supposed to come up here this weekend to shop for engagement rings. Call her off. Tell her not to come up. I know she’ll think I’m trying to get out of committing, but I don’t want her involved in this.”
“Too late for that,” Dunn said, shoving his quarters into the machine and pushing the slide home. The roar of the washer nearly drowned out his next words. “She’s here.”
“What?”
“She’s asleep in your room.” Dunn turned around to look at Keith, but his eyes were still fixed on the coin slide. “She wanted to surprise you. I guess she has.”
* * *
“You have to let me see you sooner or later,” Diane said, sitting cross-legged on the couch in a pair of pink-flowered pajamas like a grade-schooler at a slumber party. Dunn slumped in his favorite armchair. Both of them had their gaze fixed on a folder that lay on the coffee table. The radio was playing sixties favorites at conversation level.
“Not here,” Keith whispered. He was perched on the arm of the couch between them like the Ghost of Bar-room Brawls Past. “They’ve got to have someone observing the building. They’ll go back to all the places they know I go. I’m taking a risk even talking. There could be a bug.”
“Doubt it,” Dunn said, “but I’ve got a friend in law enforcement who can come and find out.”
“Well, how’s this spell work anyway? Do people who are across the street suddenly get interested in a dropped cigarette butt they can’t actually see when they look toward you?”
“Uh, not really,” Keith said. “At a distance their eyes just slide off me. It’s not until they get really close that they look at what I want them to.”
“Okay,” Diane said reasonably. “Even if they’re watching they don’t know you’re here, because their eyes keep sliding off you. Is there a big closet with a light?”
“Red here is living in it,” Dunn said. “There’s a pantry cupboard, where we keep the broom and cleaning supplies. Pretty tight quarters, though.”
“That will do,” Diane said. She got to her feet and beckoned to the air. “Come on. I came all this way to see you. I can take it.”
* * *
Keith stood in the utility closet straddling the vacuum cleaner with his hands behind his back like a shamed little boy. Diane, one foot on an upturned pail, wiped his face with a wet kitchen towel. He tried to keep from wincing. “It doesn’t hurt so much anymore.”
“Shut up,” Diane said fiercely, though her hands were gentle. In the light of the single bulb Keith watched a tear roll down her cheek. “Why didn’t you tell me there was someone stalking you? They tried to run you off the road? Is this tied up with what’s going on at the farm?”
“No. I mean, not really, but it could be. I didn’t want you involved,” Keith said. He put the misdirection spell back on himself and opened the closet door. “It could be dangerous.”
“Well, I am involved,” Diane told the thermostat. “I love you. If something happened to you I’d be furious. When you didn’t come back last evening I thought Dunn had called to warn you I was here. I didn’t believe him when he said he didn’t know where you were.” Diane looked upset, but with herself, not at him. “If I hadn’t been so suspicious, we could have been out looking for you.”
Keith felt a chill go right through his bones. He grasped her hand and kissed it. She jumped, not knowing he was going to do it. “It’s a good thing you didn’t. These people mean business. Dunn, did you call the police last night?”
“No, man. Considering the people that we know. I mean, what would I tell them? You were stolen by the fairies?”
Keith gave a bitter laugh as he emerged, blinking, into the light. “Not this time. The fairies rescued me.”
* * *
“Good morning. May I help you?” asked the young woman in the elegant black coat-dress behind the counter.
“Yes,” Diane said, feeling dowdy by comparison in jeans and her Irish sweater. She wished she’d worn something nicer, but her dress blouse wasn’t warm, and it was snowing hard outside. Besides, she thought, steeling herself, she was a customer. “We … I’d like to look at engagement rings.”
The woman smiled, totally unaware of Diane’s insecurities. “Of course. Right back here.”
“I don’t like this,” Keith whispered, following Diane along the narrow aisle on the left side of the store to the case where the saleswoman beckoned. He glanced at the black-flocked walls and the mirrors lining them. He was sure most of them had security cameras concealed behind them. His spell could fool human beings, not video tape. “We’re only a block from my office. If Beach came by …”
“He can’t see you,” Diane murmured. “We can’t only look in the big department stores. Shopping ought to cheer you up. Besides, you promised. Now, shut up.”
“Do you want to look at wedding sets?” the saleswoman asked.
“No,” Keith whispered.
“No?” Diane asked. “Why not?” She smiled at the saleswoman, who had been giving her puzzled looks. She would question Keith later, when she could see him face to face. “Just engagement rings, for now.”
“Of course. Do you want a solitaire, a solitaire with baguettes, or something mo
re modern?”
“I don’t know,” Diane said, her eyes dazzled by the blaze of blue-white in the case. She loved to look at jewelry, but mostly as a window-shopper. It felt different to be choosing a piece that she’d be able to keep. That made it more fun, but exciting, too. These weren’t just pretty stones in pretty settings—they were engagement rings. At last. Four years of dating, talking, planning, and endless dodging the subject were over. The man she loved was making a commitment to their future. She looked at the ring finger on her left hand and tried to picture a diamond there.
Suddenly, she felt shy. She curled her hand up and took it off the counter, out of the way of any rings that might jump up and climb on her finger. This was a big step for her, too. Was she ready? She had thought she was. When Marcy and Enoch had gotten married she had been so happy for them, but jealous, too. Why them and not her? She wasn’t kidding herself that theirs was an easy relationship. The reaction of Marcy’s parents alone would have been enough to break up a stable love match. But her turn for happiness and stability was coming. This ring would be its symbol. The skin of her palms tightened with nerves. She put her hand up under the light.
“All right,” she said.
The woman pulled a tray of rings out of the case.
“Do we have a price range we’re trying to keep within?”
“I’m not sure,” Diane said. Keith was silent. He was probably as nervous as she was. She leaned backward, feeling his warmth, tickled by his breath in her ear. The saleswoman had no idea why she smiled.
“Well, why don’t we pick out a few things you like and you can find out what your fiancé says.”
Advanced Mythology Page 31
