by Rhys Ford
Staring up at the city, I forgot to breathe, only remembering to take air in when my lungs started screaming obscenities at me.
The city consumed the sky, rising up from the ground and eating up the white stone mountain looming behind it. Fog clotted the upper reaches, rounded tower caps threading through the feathery mists. Mica flecks sparkled along the plastered turrets, drawn out by the sun’s rays, and a river poured from a keyhole in the mountain, coursing through an elaborate marble aqueduct and filling the city’s winding, raised canals. Tiny specks floated on the causeways, punters steering triangular skiffs, pale-haired passengers stepping carefully into waiting water taxis along the way.
Small zeppelins bobbed past, their frameworks a complicated mélange of green and gold metals. The city’s air seemed full, either with skippered cars rising or descending lead lines to different levels or bursting with tree canopies, tapered slopes of emerald and amethyst leaves brilliant against the pale, cream-toned buildings. Massive cogs turned, shifting some structures in measured clicks. The city felt alive, an organic, breathing creature nestling against a cold, protective mountain.
It made me feel awkward, a dirty smudge on a crystalline vase.
I knew the stink of a human city, had inhaled it deep into my lungs and entrenched its foul scent into my bones. If cut open, my marrow would bleed out sewage and plastics, discarded flotsam of a short-lived, savage people who gnawed off pieces of the earth to survive. The sidhe, in their beautiful golden city, were as far removed from me as the sun.
“Are you feeling okay?” Ryder asked.
“I’m okay.” It was a lie. My body was sluggish, and my mind wasn’t much better. Watching the city in the morning light was dizzying. There was too much to see, and the shifting dots of color kept drawing my attention away from what I’d been focusing on. “I could probably drive through the gates if they’d let me.”
Ryder stared me down, his green eyes hard on my face. Shifting, I rested against the window, breathing slowly. It was an old trick, one I used while playing poker with other Stalkers. Lack of tension in the body meant a person was telling the truth or at least was oblivious to their surroundings. It was the perfect bluff and had raked me in more than one pot.
“You’re lying,” he said, snorting at me. “There are accommodations outside the city gates. You’ll be able to take a shower in one of the pods and maybe sleep while I go in and get Shannon.”
“Works for me. Just looking at that place makes my skin itch,” I mumbled. We’d moved out of the forest and into the open road, leaving the weald behind.
A wall surrounded the city, sections of brass-inlaid white stone standing about thirty feet tall and running outward then back toward the mountain. The top of the wall had a walkway with patrols checking the span, their heads visible over the edge. Scalloped metal gates lay open, with the gravel road ending at the foot of the wall. Beyond the gates, Elfhaine’s beige stonework laid out a wide street filled with midmorning foot traffic and the occasional car. Beyond, in the distance, one of the service canals sliced a dark ribbon through the gentle rise of the city as it climbed the mountain, the rock cut into tiers to support Elfhaine’s upper levels.
A smattering of house pods sat next to the road, a few hundred yards from the gate. The mobile cabins were soft-shelled and could be broken down in minutes. I’d used them before while on longer runs in the wilderness, and while spartan, they were a damned sight better than sleeping on the ground.
“You were planning on driving Oketsu in?” I asked when he stopped at the pod closest to the gate.
“No. I don’t want to run the risk of someone opening the hood to take a look inside. This thing you drive is a violation of the natural order.” Getting out, Ryder reached for the jacket he’d tossed onto the backseat, then shook the wrinkles out with a snap of his hands. “If I leave the car out here, it’ll be left alone, as it’s your property. Besides, I’m not too sure I got the entire dragon off it. Even being a High Lord of a new Court, I’m not such a high rank that they won’t seriously debate cooking me on a bonfire for that.”
“You’re serious?” I scanned the hardtop when I got out, looking for traces of the reptile’s fins.
“It’s a joke, Kai,” he said, looking at me curiously.
“Just wake me when you come out.” I waved him off, grabbing a pack from the trunk. “I’ll be the one inside snoring. I’ve got enough time to get some snoring done, right?”
“Yes. You have enough time.” He keyed open the pod, then left the door open for me. “There should be some food supplies inside, but if there’s anything you need, let the gatekeepers know. They’ll get it for you.”
The guards at the gate watched us, keen-eyed sentinels dressed in black body armor. The city might be old, but it was obvious that the military or police kept up on technological developments. The chest casings the guards wore were newly minted, fresh off the lab racks if I wasn’t mistaken. They also carried long-barreled automatics at their hips, and from the looks of the muzzles pointing down their backs, the sidhe encouraged the use of multi-shot rifles as well.
“That’s a lot of firepower they’ve got there.” I looked around at the pastoral scenery and back up to the fog-shrouded Esgar Mountain. “What the hell is there to shoot out here? Bunnies?”
“We just finished a war with the humans, if you recall,” Ryder said dryly. “Tensions still run a bit high where security is concerned.”
“That was years ago, and shit, you guys won.” I was stacking up Ryder’s curious looks pretty quickly and earned myself another. “Why bother?”
“A few human years, perhaps,” he said, straightening his shirt and tugging his jacket down over his hips. “I’ve never heard a sidhe refer to his people as you guys, much less thinking that we came out of the war victorious.”
“Okay, their side lost, what? A couple million, maybe?” I couldn’t remember the exact number, but the casualties had been heavily skewed toward the human end of things. “The elfin, both Courts, lost only five hundred? Six hundred?”
“If you consider that a woman is deemed fertile if she has one child,” Ryder pointed out. “Most marriages hope to raise one child among the whole group over their lifetimes, while humans reproduce quicker than bacteria. Those few hundred…. It was like every family bled for the war.”
“I’m sure at least some humans mourned their dead too.” I waved away any more conversation with a tired hand. Sleep dragged me down, and my thoughts were far from organized. “Go do whatever dance you need to do; get the girl so we can head out by nightfall. We’ll need to hit Pendle as soon as it gets dark. I’ll be good to go once I get some sleep in me.”
Ryder gave me a curt nod, thinning his mouth into a tight line, then walked. I watched him approach the guards, stopping long enough to have a short conversation before disappearing into the city. The crowd sucked him in, and I lost sight of his tall form in the river of sidhe.
“I am never accepting another run to Anaheim,” I promised myself, grabbing some clothes from a duffel bag. “Every sidhe is treasured, like the humans that died weren’t someone’s kid. What the hell makes the sidhe deaths more important than ours?”
Ours.
I waited until the cool darkness of the pod cabin enveloped me before I hiccupped with a choked-back curse. My reflection in the bathroom mirror surprised me, as it always did. I forgot I wasn’t human. When I caught a glimpse of myself, I expected to see rounded eyes and flat-planed cheekbones. In my mind’s eye, my face was squarer, rougher in features. The androgynous purple-eyed, black-haired alien I saw was a shock. It was the face of my nightmares, of the monsters that stalked me in the darkness when I was weak.
This is not my face, I’d cried once to Dempsey.
The bastard’s reply stung, even now. It’s who you are, boy. Might as well accept what you are. You’re elfin. You can pretend you’re human all you like. But you know that’s bullshit.
“Maybe that’s why that dick back
at the club… what the fuck was his name… Orin. That’s why he’s screwed up,” I said to the black-haired cat-bastard staring back at me from across the bathroom sink. “Maybe when he looks in the mirror, he’s expecting to see this.”
Muttering at the craziness, I stripped off my clothes and stepped into the hot water, using the spiced soap left in a toiletries basket on the counter. Fatigue made my bones heavy, and my hands dragged a scrub cloth over my limbs. Lathered, I stood under the almost too-hot water and let it pound my body, feeling the last of the bruises left beneath my skin by the black dog soften under the torrent. Turning my head, my neck clicked, popping back in place. Rotating my arm, I felt my shoulder blade shift and the knots release along the small of my back.
I soaped the cloth again, then twisted to scrub at my back. My fingers brushed along the edge of my shoulder blade, and I fingered the ridge of scar tissue there, unable to trace it to its end as it burrowed toward my spine and down my back. The smooth keloids ached, tender to the touch and hot under my fingertips, and I didn’t need to see them to know what they looked like. I knew, because I’d studied their shapes in private, knowing where the tight spots were when I turned. The span restricted some of my movements, the thin skin tearing and weeping water when I overstretched. My body failed to recognize the tangled nerves and skin as an impediment and tore itself apart, reaching beyond what I could do… should do at times.
The elfin were supposed to heal quickly and without blemish, but then, my bastard father knew ways around that. My back would always wear his mark, and nothing I did seemed to budge one damned bit of scarring from my skin.
Dried off and dressed, I debated the pod’s long, slender bed, not much more than a rack pressed against the one straight wall bisecting it in two, separating the space into a small bathroom and a larger sleeping and eating area.
Easily erected and soft-walled, pods were standard military issue and after the war became a camper’s dream accommodations. Freeway underpasses and abandoned lots bristled with them, creating bubble cities underground. I’d spent more than one night in a rented pod, either on a run or sleeping on the floor while a drunk and snoring Dempsey slept off his week.
Yawning, I shoved a handful of dried beef-tofu strips into my mouth, softening the jerky with my saliva as I chewed. The rack was hard, and its thin mattress barely dented under my weight. I grabbed the pillows and sheet, then left the pod to unlock Oketsu’s passenger door. A few latch presses later, the bucket seat reclined nearly flat, and I rolled the window down to let some airflow in. The black leather seat squeaked as I lay down, fitting around my body. Closing my eyes, I fell off quickly, shutting out the coppery cream city filling Oketsu’s windshield.
A TAP on the window startled me awake. I had my hand on the shotgun resting between the door and the seat before my eyes were open. The sun nearly blinded me when I blinked, and I raised my other hand to block out the late afternoon light.
Two black-armored guards had come to rouse me. One lurked a short distance away from the Mustang’s front end, and another stood by the door, the butt of his rifle resting against Oketsu’s door. He’d raised the shield of his helmet, exposing his sidhe face. His features were broader than mine, coarser, and his eyes and hair ran to the amber gold of the Dawn Court. His mouth tightened, and he shifted, pressing his shoulders back as he stared me down.
Everything about him stank of cop.
Or asshole.
I was sure about the first from the uniform and the badge embroidered into the sleeve of his uniform. I suspected the second when he tapped the glass again, rattling it in its channel.
“Yeah?” I kept it short.
He said something to the one standing behind him, turning his sharp chin toward his companion. The sun hit the high gloss of his helmet, splashing a flare of white light into my eyes. I heard them laugh, a dirty, dark sound, before he turned back to me.
“I’m guessing you didn’t come over to see if I was resting comfortably,” I replied, sitting up. I pulled at the shotgun, bringing it up against my thigh. Nestled against the door, it would be invisible to the guard, but angled correctly, a blast from one of the cartridges would hit the sidhe in the face and embed most of the tempered glass into his skin. “Need something?”
“You need to speak ’uman to me?” The guard’s teeth were white, his canines pointed and pressing against his lower lip as he spoke. His Singlish was horrible, and I barely understood him, but his intent was clear. “Bet between men. Dusk Court or ’uman, you?”
“Get out,” the one behind him called to me. “See you. Now.”
“See what?” I asked, taking a quick glance back at the gate. “Going to look at my ass for a tail?”
There were three more armored sidhe standing there, acting like they all had nothing better to do than watch the first two play bait-the-guy-in-the-Mustang. I understood him fine. They were bored, and since I was an outsider, I should be easy prey.
I suck at being easy prey. It puts a damper on my life.
“Get out car. Stupid? Can’t hear?” Canines rapped the window again, this time with the business end of the rifle pointed at me. “Think unsidhe, not ’uman. Filth. Maybe have to kick it.”
It’s going to get ugly, I thought as I reached for the door handle. The shotgun only held two cartridges, and even with a good shot, the pellets wouldn’t pierce the sidhes’ armor. I’d loaded for meat and bone, not polymer-ceramic hardshell. I also wouldn’t be able to reload in time to get the other three. Picking up one of the auto-rifles meant all hell would break loose, and I could guarantee I wouldn’t be the one riding triumphant into the sunset.
Ryder would also kill me if I started something. I was sure of it. It would be almost worth it just to see the look on his face.
“Hold on,” I said, opening the door slowly. “Just give me some space. Back up a bit.”
He hawked, leaving a globule of spit on Oketsu’s windshield. “Get out. Now.”
Keeping a hold on my temper, I did a count and watched the viscous spit travel down the glass. It’s washable, I told myself, easily taken care of. Nothing to get into a fight over.
Nothing a punch to his nose wouldn’t take care of, the more feral part of my brain muttered.
Leaving my hand looped over the window, I held tightly onto the shotgun, hoping to keep it hidden in case I needed it. The guard bent forward, pressing himself into the hair at my temple, inhaling deeply. As close as he was, I held my ground, keeping my shoulders straight as he nudged into me. I had to look up at the sidhe, falling short of his height by several inches. I estimated he had a good fifty pounds of muscle on me, and the rifle he hefted promised to puncture a hole through me and Oketsu with one shot.
I didn’t understand much of what he said after that. Mangled Singlish became sidhe, and I caught shreds of meaning, a comment on my smell and maybe my mother. With him pressed up against my body, I should have felt something other than disgust, even an arc of my nerves reacting to the presence of another sidhe like I’d had with Ryder, but there was nothing, just a slight hum, which receded after a few seconds.
His tongue touched me, rough on my bare skin.
And my world went red.
CHAPTER TWELVE
THE UNWANTED feel of another elfin tore me. I tasted blood, and I was unsure if I’d bitten through my cheek or tongue, but it sickened me—enraged me—as I held back the blackness rising inside.
Words floated to the surface of my mind, ebony liquid compared to the gold ribbon language Ryder spoke, but the similarities were uncanny. Power surged from someplace within, filling me with anger, and it ached to lash out, needing to savage the tongue that tasted me. The echo of hands roamed over my body, prodding into secret places and delving deep into crevices that hurt and ached. My head hurt, crackling noises interspersed with flashes of red, and I reeled under the pressure squeezing my thoughts together.
Conflicted, I wanted to both kill and die. Either, so long as it was with my bare han
ds.
Instead, I brought the shotgun up out of the car’s deep wheel well between the seat and the doorframe, slamming its stock against his helmet and jerking his head back with a snap. Kicking the door so it flung fully open, I swung my legs out, keeping the shotgun pointed at his stomach. Oketsu’s door hit him in the legs, pushing the guard back.
Wiping at the wet spot on my neck, I said, “Don’t fucking touch me.”
A rattle of gunfire filled the air when the second guard shot a flurry of rounds over our heads. I ducked, keeping the door open to hide behind as I grabbed shotgun shells from under the passenger seat, then shoved them into the pockets of my jeans. When I risked a glance over the doorframe, Canines was on me before I stepped away from the car, grabbing my shirt with one hand and hauling me over the metal, scraping my stomach on the door.
I let him drag me out, going limp to become dead weight in his hands. When he got me clear of the car, I twisted up, folded in two, and jabbed my knee into his unprotected throat. Surprised, he went down in a choking fit, dropping his rifle. Pulling free, I turned over and landed on my feet, then hooked the toe of my boot under the rifle’s brace, tossed it up, and caught it in midair.
I brought the shotgun up to place its muzzle against his cheekbone, then stared at his companion, my finger pressed on the trigger. Flipping the rifle around, I pointed it in the direction of the second guard.
“Your choice. Back off, or I give him a new pair of nostrils,” I said to the other one, digging my heel into the supine guard’s crotch to keep him still. “His blood’s the same color as my paint job. A couple cups of water will wash it right off. Shit, I’d even drink the water just to piss it off.”
The whine of an autoglider rippled over the meadow, and it appeared, whipping out of the city’s gates. It arced around the three guards running toward me, hugging the ground and kicking up streams of dust in its wake. Its pilot lit up its engine, closing the gap between the glider and Oketsu before I could even blink. A guard’s helmet poked up out of the open cab, and I groaned, spotting an official-looking seal on the glider’s side as it slowed to a stop, then settled onto the ground in front of the second guard.
