Black Dog Blues

by Rhys Ford

  “Standing right here.” I waved my hand between the two sidhe. They were close, standing eye to eye and almost snarling at one another. “And no, no babies. Thanks for the offer, though.”

  “Come on,” Ryder said, tugging at me. I stopped and looked at him, silently daring the lord to pull at me again. He released my arm, puffing his cheeks up as he exhaled. “Sorry. Things have been a little tense.”

  “Not a problem,” I replied with a shrug. Stopping at the truck, I retrieved one of my shotguns, sliding extra ammo into my jacket pocket.

  “So you really think you’ll need that?”

  “I’m thinking yes. Especially after not having any weapons the last time I walked into a sidhe Court.” I bowed my head, preparing to follow him into the building.

  “Is that your vehicle, áinle?” Alexa’s wrinkled nose and horrified sniff told me she thought very little of my truck. “What color is that?

  “It’s not a color. It’s primer.” The truck had seen better days, certainly, but it was sturdy and durable. It wouldn’t make a Pendle run, but it was great for hauling around bounties and skins. “Well, the gray parts are. Most of the rest is just dark brown. Some of it is black dog blood. It eats the paint.”

  “It is very ugly,” she declared, walking around the truck bed. “And it does not suit you. You should be driving something sleek and beautiful. Maybe a little dangerous. Unpredictable—like your pretty red car.”

  “Let’s not talk about Kai’s pretty red car,” Ryder interrupted.

  “Yeah, let’s not,” I agreed. “See you later, Alexa.”

  “Of course, áinle.” The sidhe warrior gave my truck another indignant sniff before heading back to the transport. “Try not to let my cousin corner you in a hallway.”

  “Lovely girl. Very shy. She should work on opening up,” I said, falling into step behind Ryder. The glass doors swished open for us, parting like beetle wings into the stone sleeves near the entrance. No one stopped me. Someone should have, considering I was following Ryder with a gun near his back. “Your security is horrible. I’m surprised no one’s tried to kill you before now.”

  “Alexa’s my security now. Take it up with her,” Ryder said, punching in an access code for the lift. “We didn’t have any before. We never had a need.”

  “There are human-only zealots right outside your front door. You didn’t think it was necessary?” The sidhe lord boggled my mind. There was arrogance, but this bordered on suicidal. “Are you insane?”

  “No. Mostly the local police took care of any problems we had.” He shrugged. Letting me into the lift first, he selected a floor near the top. “I didn’t anticipate that someone would come into the building to kill the children. It’s not something… it’s not an elfin thing to do. Killing a child is… unimaginable.”

  “Well, someone else imagined it pretty good, I think.” The elevator clicked off the floors, racing us up to thirty. “You know, you guys aren’t living on the yellow brick road anymore.”

  “It wasn’t expected.” Ryder stepped out into a plain beige lobby, his tense back muscles hardening his body line. “Alexa being here will help. She has a good reputation. There’s a bloc of sidhe soldiers coming here to the Court because she’s here.”

  “Shouldn’t they be coming here because of you?” I asked his back as he walked away from me.

  Standing in the middle of a sea of dull, Ryder was a vivid line dividing the hallway into shadow and bright, his lean body cutting off the glow from the low-light panels as he walked in front of them. I followed, counting off the number of times the hallways intersected. I’d gotten up to four crisscrosses before we stopped at a door. The place was a maze, and it wasn’t hard to imagine losing someone in a foot chase through the sea of dun carpet and wallpaper.

  “Gotta admit,” I said as I stepped carefully into the room, trying to imagine how the scene played out, “I’m really surprised someone hasn’t broken in here and killed all of you in your sleep before now.”

  The smell of fresh blood was strong. Not human blood but sidhe—the faint snake-scale powdery tinge coupled with copper. I’ve bled a lot. I know how I smell, and from the overpowering scent, there was a lot of it spilled somewhere in the closed-up rooms.

  I went silent, keeping a running string of filth rolling in my throat. Ducking around a narrow wall that blocked my view to the main room, I shoved Ryder behind it. To his credit, he didn’t make a sound, letting me stalk farther into the room, the shotgun kept down and cocked at the ready.

  Crouching next to a trail of sticky liquid, I skimmed the tip of my finger over the wet on the floor, not surprised to find it was blood. Fat drops shone dull on the wood, spreading out over the pale blue carpet covering the expanse of a living room with windows for walls. The view was expensive, overlooking the ocean and the wide white private beaches maintained for the sector’s residents. With the sun falling into the sea, an orange-red glow filled the room, turning the bloodstains on the carpet to mahogany.

  The previous owner of the blood lay open-eyed and dead on the floor, partially hidden behind a low couch. Her face was veiled by a curtain of brown-striped wine red hair, a glaze of white already settling into her silver eyes.

  Another mouth had been cut into her throat. It was slit so far open that it was uncomfortable to look at her slung-back head. She stared at nothing, her upside-down face slack and white. Clothed in a loose cotton shirt and pants, she lay where she had died, the spray from her throat coating the underside of a glass table. Blood dripped down from the glass and onto the carpet, and up close I could feel some warmth left on her skin.

  “Morrígan damned.” Ryder swallowed and stopped himself before stepping on the carpet.

  “Unsidhe,” I said, carefully walking around the edges of the room so I could get a better look at the body. Her blouse was wet from leakage, breasts heavy on her narrow chest. “Odd choice for an assassin. She’s milking. I’m guessing she was brought for the babies. Do you know her?”

  “No.” He followed my footsteps, taking a good look at the woman. “The nursery bedroom is over there.”

  “I’ll go look,” I said, giving Ryder a stern frown before he argued. “Stay here.”

  There was more blood in the hall, drops that got farther apart and tinier as they led to a door. Bringing the gun up, I placed my hand on the latch, keeping to the side as I flung the door open. A hallway dressed in beige lay quiet on the other side. Another door was ajar, and I peeked in, waiting to be jumped. Two elaborate cribs sat against a solid wall, ivory-painted wooden trees cradling soft hammock mattresses. There wasn’t any sign of a struggle in the room. Nothing was overturned or looked disturbed. From what I could see through an archway, Shannon slept in an antechamber off the nursery. Or I would have assumed that’s where she slept if there’d been any sign left of her in the room.

  Drawers were open, left empty of any possessions. She’d only packed a few bags, but the sole trace I found of someone sleeping in the room was the spit of toothpaste in the bathroom sink. Stepping back into the nursery, my stomach sank to my knees, and I was sicker than if the whole building had broken out into a sidhe opera.

  “Fuck.” Singlish didn’t satisfy, so I tried again with better results. “Diu nei ah seng.”

  “Kai?” Ryder’s shadow darkened the doorway, and I turned to glare at him.

  “Didn’t I tell you to stay there?”

  “What’s going on? I heard you swear.”

  “Shannon’s gone.” I padded around the place. The babies were tiny and wouldn’t spill a lot of blood. Dark corners lurked in the bedroom, and my stomach clenched in fear. A shadow near a dresser turned out to be a fallen toy rather than what I was scared I’d find. “The girls are gone too. It looks like someone took them.”

  “Damn it!” Ryder stepped back, searching through the nursery. “Shannon?”

  “I’d guess so. Packed up her shit and left. Place is wiped out.” I motioned to the bedroom. “I think she’s the one w
ho took them, and it wasn’t to protect them. If it was, she’d have come and found you.”

  “She was going to be their nanny until Ciarla and her marriage could take over.” He looked shocked and about as sick as I felt. The anger would come later. For right now, he was stunned and guilt-ridden. “What is going on? How did an unsidhe get up here without anyone noticing?”

  “I don’t know, Ryder.” Passing him, I patted his shoulder and activated my phone. “But I think I know someone who can help us find out.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  RYDER PACED and chewed on the edge of his thumbnail. I put it down as a nervous habit, but the creased line between his eyebrows said something different. He needed to do something. Standing around waiting wasn’t a Ryder thing to do.

  Standing with me and Alexa, he watched Cari Brent crouch over the dead unsidhe, staring into her open eyes to pull on the memories left behind. I’d grown tired of staring at Cari’s butt, and if she suddenly turned and found me checking her out, I’d have to dodge a knife or shoe to my head.

  “She’s a what?” Ryder asked.

  “A hibiki.” Cupping my hands over the end of my cigarette, I lit the clove, taking a full mouthful of smoke into my chest. It numbed my tongue and pressed the air from my lungs, leaving me with a slight dizziness when I exhaled. “It means echo, kinda. She can look into a dead person’s eyes and see their last thoughts. Depending on how fresh the body is.”

  Most humans refused to believe in things they couldn’t see, especially anything dealing with the dead. The elfin spent their lives surrounded by mysteries and magic, so my words got the barest of nods. Alexa murmured something about the skill being useful in investigations, but they seemed to accept Cari’s preternatural ability with a shrug of impatience for her to get on with it.

  “I would say her last thought was, ‘Why am I breathing through my throat?’ or maybe something like that?” Alexa paced off a length of hallway, her hands clenched at her sides. “How long does this take? We should be doing something.”

  “Nothing to be done,” I said, leaning against the wall to get out of her path. “Cari’s the best bet. Shannon didn’t exactly leave us a note. Besides, Cari’s a Stalker. She’ll be able to put the things she sees together into something we can use.”

  “You shouldn’t do that here,” Ryder said, absently noticing I’d started smoking. For a moment, I thought he was going to join his cousin in measuring out the carpet with his feet, but he remained where he was, splitting his attention between me and Cari. “This is where the babies spend a lot of their time.”

  “I think smoke and ash aren’t high up on your to-be-worried-about list right now.” I took another pull, crossing my legs at my ankles. “Finding Shannon and the kids, that’s what you should be worried about.”

  “Are we sure that woman took them?” Alexa stopped, pinning me to the wall with a sharp look. “Do we know that?”

  “All her stuff is gone, and only the babies were taken from the nursery,” I replied. Ryder and I had spent the ten or so minutes before Cari arrived going through the room. He verified that none of the clothing purchased for the infants was gone. Only a few bottles of breast milk and a chiller had been taken. On one hand, I was relieved she took that. It showed she meant to keep the babies alive for a while. On the other hand, it looked like she or someone else killed the wet nurse brought for the girls. “I’m wondering why she gave birth to them at all if she meant to take them. That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Grandmother,” Alexa pronounced. “I will bet she forced the human into something.”

  “The human?” I cocked my head. “About half an hour ago, she was your buddy Shannon.”

  “She’s violated our trust. Her name’s dead to us,” Ryder said, turning back to the doorway to watch Cari work. “Just like she’ll be dead in body once we find her.”

  “Can’t let you do that,” I said softly, shaking my head when the sidhe turned to stare me down. “She’s human. She falls under our—human—law. That’s the accord. Either a Stalker or an officer of the law can arrest her, but she’s got to be handed over to the human authorities.”

  “I do not like it,” Alexa growled. “The human courts will charge her only with kidnapping. They will not understand the—taking—how wrong it is.”

  “Might help that Ryder’s got that diplomatic get-out-of-shit card, but I don’t think so.” I poked my head in the door, hearing Cari call my name. “Yeah?”

  “Come in here,” she ordered. “I’m ready for you.”

  Raised by her Latina mother near the Tijuana-sidhe border while her German-Irish father hunted black dogs and other beasties, Cari was a third-generation Stalker, born into the life with an extra kick of mojo that made her a dangerous woman to cross. Dempsey pissed her off once, and while I wasn’t clear on the details, he now avoided Cari Brent like the plague.

  Of course, pissing people off was something Dempsey did on a regular basis.

  “Stay here,” I told Ryder and Alexa. As they pressed up behind me, I didn’t have much hope they’d listen to me. All I was hoping for was a manageable distance.

  “You ready, bonito?” Cari took the clove from my fingers and put it to her mouth. She took a deep slug of smoke, then exhaled slowly up into the air. Passing it back to me after another hit, she shook her arms loose, breathing out a few times to clear her mind. “Finish the rest of that, bebé, and let’s get started.”

  I took what I could of the cigarette, bringing it down an inch or more closer to the filter. I pinched the clove out between my fingers, then tossed it into a metal refuse can near the door, hurried by the impatience in her voice. Ryder and Alexa filled the foyer opening. He stood still, with his cousin stalking a few steps back and forth behind him. There was nothing I could say that would make what had happened better or all right. The most I could do for Ryder right now was find out where Shannon went and hope the girls would be alive when we found them.

  Other sidhe gathered outside in the hallway, keeping their voices down, but their words floated in, worried and increasingly loud. A silent jerk of Ryder’s head toward the door ordered Alexa to close off the hallway, keeping the room quiet. He returned my thanks with a quirk of his mouth.

  Cari’s fingers worked to loosen her hair, unraveling the thick plait at her back. Strands of gold thread dangled from smaller slender braids hidden within the larger weave. Set free, they fell forward, brushing against her smooth, creamy skin. Her youth had ripened lately, rounding out her curves and layering age into her dark blue eyes. She looked more like her mother than her father, stone-hewn features native to the area, rich with a hot wisdom and a fiery tongue.

  I wasn’t overly tall by any standard, elfin or human. With her shoes off, Cari came up to my shoulder, but despite the lack of height, there wasn’t anything childlike about her. Her eyes were cunningly sharp, and as she lowered herself to the floor, her hips swayed in a way that told men she knew what she could do with them. Crossing her ankles under her, she sat on her legs, wiping her palms on her jeans.

  “Good thing you called me before she got deader,” she said, her Spanglish rasp roughening her words. “I’ll be able to get a lot out of this one.”

  She needed someone she trusted to help her as she worked, and I made the short list. I’d pitched in for Cari and her mother before and knew that people focused on the oddest things when they died. I could only hope the dead unsidhe woman knew the details of Shannon’s flight from the Court’s towers.

  “Ready?” I asked. I was dreading what was coming, but I was more scared of what we’d find out.

  “Yeah, let’s screw this bitch,” Cari replied.

  With the taste of cloves on my tongue, I sipped at the rotgut tequila Cari had brought with her, swishing it around in my mouth. She laid her head back with her face toward the heavens and opened her mouth wide, laying her tongue cupped against her jawbone.

  Standing over her with my feet on either side of her thighs, I let t
he tequila dribble from my mouth into hers, wiping at the splatter on her cheeks. The rotgut agave went down her throat, and Cari choked, coughing around the liquid, but she kept her head back.

  I picked up a pair of long tweezers, then dug around in the glass jar she’d opened and placed near us. I fished around the cactus buttons and dried yellow-warty red mushrooms, trying to find what I needed in the milky, clouded tequila. An alcohol-bloated, roasted gusano floated by the tines, and I snagged it, careful not to pinch the worm in two.

  The worm fit against my lip and teeth, and I held it there while I dug out a few of the buttons. Careful not to swallow the gusano, I squashed the cacti down between my molars, then flicked the worm around to add to the mix.

  Chewing carefully, I pushed the mash to the front of my mouth, trying not to gag on the bitter, dry potato taste of the buttons. The worm’s nuttiness did not mask any of the rancid sourness on my tongue, and when I felt like I couldn’t take much more of the taste, it blended together. I pulled my cheeks in to gather the mash up, then spit it past Cari’s waiting lips.

  She took the mash better than I did, catching it on the flat of her tongue and chewing, sipping at the tequila bottle every few turns to wash the worm-laden buttons down. I left her to swallow, concentrating on extracting three mushrooms from the liquor. The peyote was already working, numbing the skin along my arms and neck.

  Struggling to control my fingers’ trembling, I found what I needed from the jar and put the caps on my tongue. Using the tips of the tweezers, I dug under my skin, opening up a gash on my palm. I heard Ryder say something, but I ignored him, concentrating only on the hibiki.

  Dripping my blood into my mouth, I chewed thoroughly, keeping my tongue pressed up against my throat so I didn’t swallow any of the mushrooms. By far they were the worst tasting things in the batch, and I didn’t want them anywhere near my throat. Cari grunted as she took the last of the mash down with a mouthful of tequila and laid her head back again, waiting for the rest of it.