by Amy Lane
Green looked surprised to see Arturo, then dismayed when he realized what time it was. Arturo shook his head and pointed to Cory, making vague gestures that Green, bless him, interpreted just right. He aimed a green-eyed gaze at his beloved and then spoke up normally.
“She’s under, and so’s Brack. What’s so important you need them asleep?”
“I’m going to go… take care of some tricky business, leader. I’m hoping she doesn’t need to wake up until it’s finished.”
Green’s eyes widened, and his busy, clever brain ran through all that he knew Arturo hadn’t said. Then he smiled a little bit wickedly. “That sounds like a lovely idea, mate. Maybe, if she’s not up by then, wake us when you’re through?”
Arturo nodded, and for the first time since the lot of them had arrived that morning, he flashed the silver caps on his teeth, the trademark of his most beautiful smile. “You can count on it, brother. I’ll be sure to let you know when we’re done.”
“Who’s ‘we’?” Green’s expression was thoughtful—weighing strengths, perhaps. Perhaps just judging the weight of his beloved’s anger should any of “we” get hurt.
“All of us in the living room just now,” Arturo said blandly, and Green sent him a droll look.
“I’m not going to keep Renny out of the fight, you know. Corinne Carol-Anne wouldn’t do it, and I’m at least as wise as she is.”
Arturo shrugged. “People forget she’s not helpless,” he supplied, and Green nodded.
“Well, she isn’t. And you know who else isn’t helpless and might want a piece of this?”
Arturo caught his breath and grinned. “Hallow.”
Green answered with a grim joy of his own. “Give him a call, brother. I think he’ll be glad to be there.”
In fact, Hallow was waiting for them.
Arturo drove one of the black SUVs—he would have preferred the Cadillac, but he wanted something as anonymous as possible. As he pulled up to the curb in the shabby, decaying suburb in Citrus Heights, he thought the Cadillac might have been the better choice. There was certainly more than one classic blue or purple Caddy on Sayonara Drive, but Arturo’s was better maintained.
Hallow was standing by his understated white Lexus, wearing pale khakis and a simple white linen shirt and sunglasses in the bright, heavy heat of mid-July. The Lexus was attached to a small U-Haul, and Arturo blinked. He’d known—had always known—that the tall reserved sidhe had been waiting for a chance at some sort of redemption before coming back to Green’s hill. Until he saw Hallow leaning against his car and sending the curious gang members cool glances that made them scuttle away like beetles, Arturo had truly had no idea how much going back to Green’s mattered to him.
The smile Hallow turned toward him was actually warm and enthusiastic, and he had looks for the shape-shifters that could almost be described as tender. Renny, mindless of the gravity of the occasion, pattered up to the man who heard her deepest secrets every week and hugged him around the waist—which was about as high as she could reach without it getting awkward.
“What’s our plan, Arturo?” he asked. Arturo looked around the neighborhood and grimaced.
“Well, I’m a cat’s whisker from having Renny and LaMark change so they can guard the cars,” Arturo said dubiously, but while they screeched in protest, Lambent rolled his eyes.
“Right, lovey, move away from the car. Uncle Lambent’s going to make it all better for you.” With that, Lambent put his hand on the Lexus and concentrated. In a moment, everyone who knew what power looked like could see the sizzling blue field around Hallow’s car and then surrounding the SUV when Lambent moved on to that.
“Now, don’t touch them until I beep the magic alarm, duckies. I’d hate to see you all crunchy on the sidewalk, right?” The fire elf sashayed back.
“Thank you, Lambent,” Arturo growled, trying not to scowl. Hallow chuckled grimly.
“Lady Cory puts up with that shite?” he asked, bemused, and Lambent flushed, the expression making him almost glow in the heat.
“Lady Cory does not, Papi,” Mario muttered. Lambent flushed even deeper.
Hallow laughed and pushed his sunglasses up his nose with a smooth little nudge. “I’m glad to hear it—there’s much to love in our little Goddess, is there not?”
There were various assents, but nobody really needed to answer that out loud. It was why they were all there.
Nolan Field’s house was actually in better shape than a lot of houses in the neighborhood—the yellow-colored siding was relatively new, the sidewalk was cracked but there were no weeds growing through it, and the lawn was watered, even if it was uneven. It was mostly a squat, one-story, two-bedroom ranch house, with very little on the outside to indicate the level of loathsomeness of the creature who inhabited it.
They didn’t bother to knock. Arturo turned the knob, and the door opened because he asked it to—and before Mr. Fields could stand up from the computer desk that dominated the small living room, there were seven supernatural creatures in it, each of them with a story of his or her own that Fields was willing to exploit.
The short, sweaty, balding little man only had eyes for one of them.
“Hallow…,” he said dreamily. “This is a surprise. Do I… do we… can I have another session?”
Arturo’s stomach turned, and he met Lambent’s eyes while avoiding Hallow’s. For this alone, the man needed to die. It was, in fact, quite fitting that there were three of the Goddess’s shining ones in the group to send him on his way—no one treated the sidhe like this. No one shared their bed without profound gratitude and reverence.
That Nolan Fields was too ignorant to know what he had been given ranked as one of his most criminal of sins. That he knew of the existence of the shining ones and used it to harm them was the thundering, indelible stamp of death on his sentence of transgressions.
“Nolan,” Hallow said sweetly, “we need to know about your story. You told me that it would be ready to send tomorrow.”
Nolan Fields nodded eagerly and stepped forward on the beige carpet to shake Hallow’s hand. Hallow didn’t extend his hand to be shaken, though, and Fields looked uncomfortably around his sparsely decorated room for some way to impress his lover-by-blackmail. There were no pictures to inspire him, and much of the room was beige—except the couches, which were sort of a lime-olive green. There was a giant plasma-screen television that was on without sound, and piles of books in every corner—most of them tell-alls or true-crime interviews. Well, the man did his research.
“Oh, you should see it, Mr. Hallow,” he said, not letting the chilly greeting dampen his enthusiasm for long. “It’s gonna be a great piece! I made you guys look real good, and I gave that Cory chick a prime layout—but I gotta tell you, it was hard to make her look good. That woman does not photograph well—looks like a turn-of-the-century farmwife in every shot. Couldn’t you pick someone else as your poster girl?” He leered at Renny. “This one here, she’d look great!”
Renny was suddenly a kitty in a miniskirt, hissing at the man while her husband—now furry and tangled in his jeans, T-shirt, and gun harness—yowled in her face to hold her back.
“Or not,” Fields finished weakly.
Lambent looked at the man quizzically, as though examining an exotic and repulsive intestinal parasite under a microscope. He cocked his head at Hallow.
“You say he doesn’t do the mind-fuck?”
“No,” said Hallow grimly. “He’s entirely too focused for that.”
“Excellent,” Lambent replied with a truly evil grin. “There’s something I want to try. I saw our little Goddess do it with Rafael—I think I can do something of the sort here.”
Arturo pulled back from his own distaste-filled examination of their victim. “You mean, trace his bloodline? Except….”
“Except instead of his blood-sharing, it will be his work,” Lambent completed the thought. “Our vampire queen can trace a person’s thoughts through their blood exch
anges. If this one is so focused on his work that it’s all he cares about—well, humans call it blood, sweat, and tears, but really, when you think about it, it’s—”
“Touch, blood, and song!” Hallow filled in, delighted. “Of course. That should work.”
“What will work?” Fields asked with wide eyes, and the happy expressions of discovery on the faces of the elves closed down to the sober faces of men with jobs to do.
“Mario,” Arturo asked, “is there any way you and LaMark could hold it still for a minute? And Max?” Max turned his muzzle Arturo’s way. “We’ll need you. Swat that pussy one and come back to us, will you?”
Renny let out an indignant growl, but Arturo winked at her so she sat back on her haunches and started cleaning her paws indifferently. Max flattened his ears at her and then changed—and then yowled because his gun harness had gotten tangled around his crotch while he was a jumbo-sized tabby cat.
“I love it when they do that,” the reporter breathed, completely blind to the danger he was in. “Do you think there’s any way to get them to do that for the camera?”
“I’ll stick my gun up your ass and pull the trigger first,” Max rumbled, and Hallow gave him a mild expression.
“Don’t get attached to your prey, Max. You’ve been a cat long enough to know that.”
“Sorry, sir,” Max said contritely, and Arturo broke in before they could go on.
“Okay. LaMark, Mario, you hold him down. Max, we need your gun—I don’t think he’ll respond to another threat. Hallow….”
“I’ve got my own plan when this is done, Arturo,” the taller sidhe replied. “Lambent, you can do this with just Arturo’s help, right?”
Lambent shrugged, and they all took that as their signal to begin.
“Wait a minute!” the squat human protested as the two Avians seized his arms, and Mario braced his heavy thigh behind the little man’s ass to keep him standing in place. Nolan grunted and looked alarmed, and Arturo thought that maybe, just maybe, the man’s mortal peril was sinking in.
“You can’t do this! I’m a member of the press—I’ve got rights!”
“You trespassed in our country,” Arturo answered, wanting the man to know what he’d done in human terms before they took him out preternaturally. “You forfeited your rights when you made hostile moves against us.”
“Hostile! Hallow, back me up here. When have I been hostile?”
Hallow cast the man a glance of such cold contempt that the sweat on the little reporter’s brow literally dried before their eyes. “Blackmail is an act of hostility,” he said icily. “Threatening to expose an innocent people who only wish to remain hidden, that’s a hostile, aggressive act. And doing it against a kingdom you didn’t understand—”
“But I like you guys!” Fields claimed, and now Hallow shivered.
“Yes, I’ve felt what you pass off for liking. You’ve threatened people I care for. You need a stronger word to defend your actions. Lambent?”
“Ready when you are,” the fire elf shrugged.
Fields started struggling harder, until he heard the ominous click of a .45 releasing the safety.
“Jesus, that’s a big gun,” he breathed. And then, a little more indignantly, “But aren’t you a cop?”
“‘Cop’ is a job,” Max said mildly. “Goddess-get is who I am—and that’s what you threatened. You threatened my wife, my king, my queen. Talk to me about conflicts when I feel them.”
Arturo looked hard at Max in surprise and then grinned. Suddenly having Max here seemed as natural as having Renny. “Now just relax, Mr. Fields. Lambent won’t make this hurt.” Of course, Arturo had no idea what Hallow had in mind.
“Mmmm….” Lambent seized the man’s pudgy, stubbled cheeks and stared directly into his eyes.
“You can’t mess with my head,” Fields told him smugly. “Hallow was right about—hey, you can’t do that. How did you know… no, dammit, not my work!”
There were two crackle-pop-puff sounds in rapid succession, and then the big hard-drive unit on the computer desk suddenly emitted sparks and shorted out. The screen went completely blank as a faint tinge of smoke drifted lazily up, stirred by the ceiling fan, but not enough to hit the fire alarm unit that hung over the short hallway behind them.
The backpack by the kitchen table was emitting the same sort of smoke, but Lambent was still glaring into Fields’s eyes while the reporter whimpered in horror.
“No, you can’t do that. That’s my editor’s desk. He’ll kill me…. My photo processor—no, they’ll never speak to me again. Please… please… this is my life’s work. This story will make my career….”
One of Lambent’s eyes twitched. Then he closed both of them, then pulled back and nodded decisively to Arturo and Hallow. “Not anymore,” he said crisply.
Fields let out a moan and sank to his knees. Mario and LaMark released him and let him fall farther onto his hands.
“Why?” he whimpered. “Why would you do that? All that work—people need to know about you….”
“People do know,” Arturo said in surprise. “They write poems and songs about us. They write frightening novels and happy romances. They write things that breathe joy into their tired souls. They do not”—his voice grew harsh, and the glass-topped coffee table cracked under its sharpness—“ever write exposés that confuse facts with truth.” He looked at Hallow. “Are you ready?”
Hallow nodded. “Oh, yes. Long since.” Gracefully, Hallow sank to a crouch in front of the shabby, sweating, horrid little man who had plagued them for so long. He spent a moment taking care that his white-blond braid didn’t brush the ground, then took Nolan Fields’s chin between his fingers and looked deeply into his myopic brown eyes.
“What are you going to do to me?” Lasciviousness twisted Nolan’s voice, but Hallow had dealt with that—he was the only one in the room who didn’t recoil.
“The question is, Nolan, what are you going to do to yourself?”
“I… I don’t understand….”
Hallow tilted his head a little but kept up that searching, soulful gaze. “The eyes are supposed to be the mirror of your soul. You’ve heard that?”
“Bullshit and poetry.” The pudgy, unkempt face twisted, his mouth sinking so far into his jowls that it almost disappeared.
“Sometimes, yes. Now look into my eyes, Nolan. What do you see?”
The grimace disappeared, replaced by bemusement, and Nolan drew his head up to take a closer look into Hallow’s eyes. “They’re… blue. Crystal blue, like deep ice…,” he said.
“Mmmm. Interesting you should say that. We all have our gifts here, Mr. Fields. Did I ever tell you that?”
“No.” Fields’s voice was oddly passive now. The werecreatures stood far enough away to be safe and respectful, but close enough to see what was going to happen to him.
“Well, it’s true. I tend to see into people’s souls. What I’m doing now is letting you take a look at what I see.”
“But…,” Nolan Fields complained, “I don’t see anything. It’s an open window into a white sky…. You could just fall, and fall… and fall….” He stopped talking and went completely, totally still. He whimpered once, and then his eyes lost their focus into Hallow’s and seemed to turn inward. He sat on all fours like that for about a minute, his soul falling into its own emptiness. His body finally realized that the thing powering it was only mechanical and sputtered to a halt, the engine ground to immobility by the sand of a vacant life.
The squat body plunked sideways as Nolan Fields continued to stare vacantly into space. His eyes began to run with blood, and the twin red rivers from his nose trickled sideways and mixed with drool from the corner of his mouth. It all formed a little puddle on the dirty beige carpet. His body began to twitch—not violently, really, but in defeat—his animal vessel acknowledging that whatever intellectual or divine impulses had directed it were well and truly gone.
Hallow stood and spat on the jerking corpse, then
spun on his heel and walked out of the crappy little house, his long white-blond braid whipping around behind him. Without another word, Green’s people followed him out.
When they got outside, they waited for a moment while Lambent stepped over a twitching teenager on the ground and deactivated the car security system. Arturo made a noise and gestured to the boy, who was wearing a Chicago Bulls jersey over a red shirt, with a matching mint-condition baseball hat. Lambent looked at the boy and shrugged.
“He’ll be all right. It wouldn’t have hurt him this badly if he hadn’t had a gun in the back of his pants. Give it fifteen minutes—he’ll get right back up.”
That seemed to be it until Renny scampered over to Hallow and changed into a girl again, giving her clothes a cursory yank in deference to all the people on their lawns staring at the drooling car thief. Hallow looked at them all too, then sighed and waved his hands, and everybody looked blank for a moment and then looked somewhere else. So much for witnesses.
“Professor,” she said urgently, “what would happen if you looked at one of us that way?”
Hallow smiled at her gently—all the sidhe were gentle with Renny. “With you, little one, all you would see would be a lovely tabby cat with her handsome mate licking her ear. And lots of love—you’d see that even in my eyes.”
Renny grinned at him and then turned a troubled look to Max. Max looked just as troubled and, as he did sometimes, asked his wife’s question for her.
“What do you suppose Cory would see?”
That caused restless movements in all those who had seen her in battle the night before. They knew the terrible cost her fierceness had exacted in the light of a harsh dawn.
Hallow smiled his tender smile at all of them. “No worries, people,” he said softly. “She’d see everything you see, only she would see the love in her actions too. She’d be just as beautiful to herself as she is to you.”
