by Rhys Ford
“I’m sure you’ve heard I established a Court….”
“No, actually Sarah told me when I got the job slip.” I sipped at the water, the chill biting my teeth. “I don’t really pay attention to what the elfin are up to.”
“Noted,” Ryder said, inclining his head. Newt bounced from the couch to the chaise then back again, and the sidhe eyed him suspiciously before continuing. “I started Southern Rise a few months ago but have just started gathering my people. I wanted a Court without the cloying politics or the backstabbing, someplace safer and more relaxed.”
“Sounds like utopia,” I said. “When do you start serving the Kool-Aid and passing out the tinfoil hats?”
“You’re not the first one to mock me.” He laughed. “My father said nearly the exact same thing. Well, in sidhe and without the tinfoil hats, but still, similar. You’d like him. He’s… outspoken.”
“I’m still working on liking the first family member I’ve met. Don’t push it.”
“Shannon, the girl in question, is friends with my sister, Ciarla. When she ended up in her current state, her family was displeased.” Ryder ignored my snort, taking his first sip, and leaning into the chaise’s curve. “The family’s old-fashioned, very pre-Merge, so the situation’s become stressful for Shannon.”
“Her current state’s so pregnant that she’s about to burst like a peapod,” I said. “And the family’s more stressful than coming down through Pendle? What do they do? Eat their young?”
“Shannon’s only eight months along. Hardly about to pop,” Ryder said. “She’s not a minor, so there’s no complication of an illegal borderline crossing. She’s coming of her own free will because I’m offering a fresh start.”
“Where’s the pickup?” I left Newt on the couch for a moment to retrieve the job contact sheet. “It says Anaheim. Which Court?”
“It’s Beltaine Dawn in Elfhaine. They’re hosting her until we get there,” he answered. “They’re originally from San Francisco, near my family’s Court at Golden Gate. That’s where my sister met her. They’ve been friends for years, good friends. Ciarla only wants to help.”
“I’m usually suspicious when the sidhe offer to help,” I commented, then jerked my head up. “The listing said I was taking a sidhe up with me. You’re the sidhe I’m taking up with me?”
“How else did you think you’d gain entrance into a sidhe city?” He smiled, stopping before he took another sip. “So yes, Stalker Gracen, you might want to at least learn to tolerate a sidhe, because we’ll be spending a lot of time together over the next couple of days.”
CHAPTER FIVE
THE WAREHOUSE’S flat roof gave me a view of Mission Bay, its still waters daubed with floating lights from junks and houseboats. Behind me, glass towers dwarfed me, enormous spears made of glowing opaque panes and black connectors. Across the bay, Coronado was quiet, its rich dark forests surrounding the Del, the only structure other than the bridge to survive the Merge. The stars teased me through the cloudbank, and I’d gone through two cloves before I heard Dalia call to me from across the gap.
“Requesting permission to come aboard, Captain?” She’d changed from scrubs and let her coxcomb hair free of its ties. “Well, I’m giving you permission to cross, because there’s no way you’re getting me on that deathtrap.”
“Hold on,” I called back. “I’ll be right there.”
Our warehouses sat in wedges on the circle and at an angle; the separation between our two places was at most five feet. A thick rope bridge with wooden plank steps lay curled against the wall surrounding my roof, and it tossed easily over toward Dalia’s roof, landing with a clunk on the other side. She gripped its end, pulling the ladder taut to secure it on a pair of hooks we’d fastened with anchors.
“Clear.” She waved me over and held up a bottle of Primo’s to entice me. “I’ve even brought the grog.”
I didn’t need the bribe. The sidhe left me unsettled, and I wanted someone sane to talk to. Newt was next to useless, not only mute but solely focused on filling his belly and sleeping. I pulled myself up, balanced myself with a stretch of my arms, then walked barefoot over the bridge.
“I can’t watch you do that,” she said, handing me the cold beer bottle. “It scares me and makes my feet itch.”
“It’s only, what? A thirty foot drop?” I peered over the side. “That’s nothing.”
“Maybe for you.” Dalia snorted, popping the seal of her beer. “Seriously, people would think you’re insane for doing that.”
“Not when I have so many other things that could put me in a wraparound jacket,” I said, clicking my bottle against hers before I took a sip. The yeasty bubbles tickled my nose, and I suppressed the urge to burp. “How was your shift?”
“Ah, speaking of crazy,” she sighed, plopping down into one of the lounge chairs near the wall. I straddled the middle of one, close enough for our legs to touch. “Today was screaming at the doctor day, preferably done at the top of your lungs and usually about something crazy like the bugs are eating your eyes. What about yours?”
I told her about the sidhe, leaving out nothing, including the way he made me feel. Dalia listened, still and calm as I watched the boats in the distance and spoke about another man.
“There’s something in our blood that sings when another elfin touches us. It’s not always the same. Sometimes it’s good. Sometimes it’s nothing. I’ve had others… sidhe… touch me, and it’s never been crazy under my skin before.” I shrugged, unwilling to see the look on her face. I could feel her worry, the waves of it crashing against me. “He made me feel… like I wanted to crawl inside him and live there… or have him crawl inside me. And I can’t do anything about it.”
“Can’t, or won’t?” She sat up, turning to face me as she listened. Her eyes were enormous, soaking up the starlight, and she reached over to touch my leg.
“Can’t,” I said, meeting her gaze. “Won’t. I can’t give anyone… I’m not right. There’s a lot inside me that’s broken. Last thing anyone needs in their life is me.”
“Baby, I don’t know what to tell you,” she said, putting her bottle down, reaching for me. Her hand seared my skin, even through my jeans. I swallowed another mouthful of beer, trying to clear away the sandy coating in my throat. I needed the splash of cold in my belly to work downward to quell the knot in my stomach when her nails traced over my knee. “Well, I do, but you don’t want to hear me.”
“Dalia.” I put my hand over hers, stopping her before she could move her fingers again. “It is what it is.”
She moved closer, leaving her hand under mine. Our legs touched, her shins wrapped around mine, our feet brushed, and she leaned in, her heat moistening my mouth. “We’ve known each other for what? Five… six years?”
“About that.”
I didn’t pull away. I should have. Every spark in my brain told me that sitting there with her legs curved around mine was possibly the stupidest thing I’d done since trying to eat a fuel cell. The other part of me whispered that the kick from the cell would be nothing compared to her mouth on mine. She stared up at me, an ivory and crimson doll that walked in my dreams, leaving bloody footprints on my thoughts and hardness in my body I couldn’t shake. It would be easy to put the bottle down and cup Dalia’s sweet face so I could drink those stars from her eyes.
I took another mouthful of beer instead.
“I’ve seen you troll the whores on the lower levels. Don’t give me that look. Medical’s right up against the red lantern district, and we step outside once in a while on break.” Dalia stood and moved away, letting the cold in when she took her body away from mine. “I know you don’t care if someone’s human. You’d prefer it. Everything about you is human until you do something like skip across that rope. If someone can scratch an itch someone else can’t, why not take the chance?”
“It’s complicated.” I joined her, walking across the rooftop to stare at the city. “Too complicated.”
“I kn
ow that something’s tangling you up inside.” She came up behind me and wrapped her arms around my stomach, fitting her hips against the curve of my ass. “You take risks, and every time you walk back through the door, you’re already thinking about how you’re going to try to kill yourself next. Why not take the risk now?”
“I am not trying to get myself killed.” Protesting seemed useless. I could feel her smile against the middle of my back. “I’m not.”
“I think the only reason you’re my friend is so I’ll take care of your damned grumpy cat and those bits of machinery you play around with.” She pinched my ass, making me yelp. “So what if you go out and get laid? Just be sure to come back home… and don’t forget to bring me presents.”
Turning, I held her tightly, rocking Dalia as she sighed. She hit me once with a small fist, then again when I laughed at her. When her giggles became hiccups, I pulled us both onto a lounge so she could lie down on my stomach. She stretched out, using my shirt to wipe her cold face.
“Thanks.” I wrinkled my nose. “I’ll treasure that forever.”
“That won’t be hard. When was the last time you did your own laundry?” She nestled down against me, and I closed my eyes, storing the feel of her into my memories. “Are you going to avoid me now that I know you’re a red lantern troll?”
“Nah, you can’t get rid of me that easy,” I teased, trying to keep my voice light. “Who’d feed my cat?”
“God, I hate you.”
“See, it starts already. Familiarity does breed contempt,” I joked, but inside I felt hollow, a swelling emptiness I knew she could fill. It would break her, swallowing the sweetness of her soul until nothing remained but a husk and the bitter remains of a fantasy I’d concocted. “Who said that first?”
“It’s one of Aesop’s fables; once again, your poor education shows,” Dalia corrected. “The fox is never contemptuous of the lion. The moral of that story is acquaintance softens prejudices. So maybe, my black fox, you’ve just met the one lion you’ve needed to meet.”
“I think he’s less of a lion and more like Typhoeus.”
“Promise me you won’t fall in love with your sidhe prince and ride off into the sunset.” She poked at my nose, pushing the tip up until I was certain she could see the back of my skull. “Promise.”
“I promise,” I repeated, crossing my finger over my heart. “Besides, he’s kind of an asshole.”
I ORDERED Dalia to bed so she could sleep off the beer and her shift. She tossed the ladder back over to my side, and I waited for her to go downstairs, rolling it up and leaving it against the wall. Around me, the lower streets were beginning to come alive with the city’s nightlife, the doors of bars opening for business. Unlike Dalia, San Diego was waking up, ready to drown its sorrows in whatever cheap vice it could find.
Being tagged with a job I couldn’t turn down was more irritating than bad, but having a sidhe lord show up on my doorstep to look me over for that job was troubling. Ryder had accused me of “throwing” human, something I wouldn’t deny considering I’d learned to be a person from Dempsey and other Stalkers, but he wasn’t as haughty a sidhe as he should have been.
“Definitely didn’t turn his nose up at drinking out of plastic,” I said to Newt, who greeted me at the stairwell. “It bugs me that I don’t know squat about someone I’m going to be stuck with for a couple of days. So, time to go sniffing around, Newt.”
The couch creaked under me, and I pulled my legs up, grabbing my boots. The cat battled me for one of my socks, hooking his claws into the toe. He lost, and I tossed him a crocheted mouse as a consolation prize. He batted it around a few times, then promptly dumped it into one of his water dishes, stored for future retrieval.
“Don’t open the door to anyone while I’m gone.” I slid on a shoulder rig, tucking a Glock into the harness. Newt ignored me, licking his back right foot as I spoke to him and stopped at the door to put on my leather jacket. “And don’t wait up.”
THE NIGHT was cool, damp from the fog lingering in the air. Scents led me down to the understreets, the crackle of noodles hitting a hot wok at one of the corner stalls. My stomach reminded me about the last meal it’d had, something to do with rice and the taint of black dog blood in the wind. The beer I’d drunk earlier complained of loneliness, and I stopped at the kiosk, grabbing a small sleeve of cake noodles flavored with oyster sauce. I grabbed a pair of chopsticks from the bar, squirted a line of rooster sauce, and ate quickly. Chewing a mouthful of noodles, I found a short barrier wall to sit on while I ate. Cars passed by, interiors hidden behind glass smoked nearly black with concealing film. A few slowed, cracking their windows to take a better look at the men and women standing around the red paper lanterns strung up over the sidewalks.
No one stopped and took a look at me, but I was okay with that. I had work to do.
I tossed my trash into a blue bin and headed into the lower streets. A few yards in, the world went skyless, lit up with floods of neon and LEDs. The upper streets blocked out any view of the buildings, weaving concrete cats’ cradles above me. It was a crazy jigsaw world, an Escher landscape turned upside down. It made some people dizzy, their minds trying to make sense of the truncated structures and swooping spans. Most of us just avoided looking up.
Split horizontally in two by a thick weave of streets, the city hub was a triangular wedge stretching from El Cajon to the ocean and divided into a well-to-do upper level of high rises and the grimy remnants of the old city under the cement tapestry divide. Originally the streets below were meant to be used for transportation and sewer tunnels, but that plan went the way of most urban renewal plans, balled up into a paper wad and tossed into a wastebasket. The poor and disenfranchised needed a place to live, and the relatively dank but vast undercity was cheap. Entire blocks of businesses and prefab residences sprang up before the city council could even blink. Other than a few riots and the occasional mutation crawling through, San Diego seemed quite fine with the arrangement.
Streams of water, filthy from running through the drains on the upper side, poured down on the street, thin and thick falls the locals dodged without thinking. “You can always tell a tourist by how wet they are,” I’d been told. “A couple of drops, that’s normal, but if you’re walking understreets drenched like a rat, you might as well wear your wallet around your neck and beg to be robbed.”
Since much of a Stalker’s work was cleaning up messes the police didn’t want to tackle, I needed to be able to get into the city quickly. The city or unified state would shunt local jobs to the Post, some small, like working a prison transfer, and some larger, which usually involved a lot of guns and some prayer. Private corporations and citizens also used the Post to log in jobs, sometimes skirting the line of illegal, and for the most part, paid much better than any government work.
Contract jobs ran a wide range of specs: missing teenagers, embezzlers on the run, and other various odd tasks. I’d taken a job once to protect a cow for three days. I didn’t ask why, and the cow was pleasant enough company. I read and switched off shifts with Kinsey, another Stalker, so we could sleep. At the end of the three days, we were paid, and they slaughtered the cow for a sacrificial feast. Kinsey, being a vegetarian, was horrified, then refused the money. I signed for the account transfer, thanked them for the job, and took the twenty pounds of steaks they gave me.
The cow was as good to eat as she was to babysit.
Smaller jobs, however, usually required a lot of legwork, and being registered in a city let me take area-specific jobs. Locating a missing kid meant walking the streets and asking questions, sometimes even pushing someone up against the wall to ask a specific question, but it all required knowing the underside of an area.
So living on the edge of the red lantern district was perfect for me.
Most people who disappear don’t know what they’re doing. They’ll take enough money to last a couple of days if they’re adults. If they’re suburban kids, then the common sense level drop
s dramatically. If you’re born in the lower levels and go missing, no one goes looking for you. It’s assumed that something or someone bigger and badder got you. People with enough money to hire a Stalker to look for a skipped-out husband, wife, or kid tend to be hysterical and say they only want news.
They don’t want news. They want the Stalker to find their runaway and bring them kicking and screaming home so they can be yelled at.
I’d rather babysit cows, but groceries need to be bought and ammo is expensive, so I’ve taken more than my share of finding lost family members. And I’ve regretted nearly every single one.
The red lantern streets are the first place to look when someone goes missing. The clueless seem to be drawn there, as if the danger and grit will mask their scent. In reality, they stick out like a white egg on nori, and it makes them very easy to find. Ask a few questions and I’m usually led right to where the missing person is hiding out. Or directly to the person who’s taken them in and is now working their ass on the streets.
Persuading someone to give back a meal ticket makes the job a little harder, but that’s where bribery and ammo come into play. I keep track of my expenses and submit a detailed report when I hand over the family member. I try to be nice and use bribes first, but it’s cheaper and easier to keep track of ammo, something most skin traders keep in mind when a Stalker knocks on their door to politely ask for the return of someone’s daughter or son.
Since a lot of the work in the lantern district meant standing around waiting for a customer, there was ample time to gossip and pass information, making the lower streets the best place I could think of to find out about a sidhe lord.
Even having just eaten, the rows of cooking food set up under store overhangs made my mouth water. Like Newt, I always had time for a meal. Passing a woman pinching meat into white pockets of bao, I stepped around the line of people she had waiting, inhaling the sweet bread scent of the steam rising from her tables. A few stalls down, a man skimmed malasadas out of bubbling oil, then tossed the fried dough into a sugar vat, where a young boy gave them a light coat before serving them up.
