by Tanya Huff
“Of what?”
“What difference does it make?” Joe rolled his eyes-inhumanly green now she knew what to look for-at her expression. “Fine. Whatever. Probably old age. Point is, without it there, I’ve no counterbalance to keep me here, so I fade as I’m Called back under the hill.”
Under the hill was the mythic reference to the UnderRealm. It was strange to hear one of the Fey use the Human term.
“Your grandmother made a drink that unfades me,” he added.
He seemed to be waiting for a response. “She did?”
“Why the hell would I lie about something like that, then?”
Good point.
“Don’t you want to go home?” She could feel the ache of her own home pulling at her.
He snorted. “Not even. The food’s crap and the music sucks. Oh, and let’s not forget…” He scowled. “… my loving family traded me off for a human when I was a babe. And it’s not like they even want me, do they? The Court just hates the thought of a pureblood not under their control. They can Call until Finnbhennach comes home.”
“Who?”
“White bull of Connacht. Far as I’m concerned, I am home.Your grandmother keeps the drinks in the locked cabinet behind the counter.”
He seemed pretty sure she was going to give it to him.
“I can pay for it,” he growled as she hesitated. “It’s not charity.” One grubby hand indicated the shelves of junk. “It’s part of the business.”
“Of course it is,” Allie muttered, searching the ring for the right key. Trust Gran not to mention which community her business had become crucial to.
There were three shelves inside the cabinet crammed with bottles and jars that looked like they’d originally held condiments. All of the aunties had similar cabinets although, back home, they were never locked. The aunties liked to weed out those members of the family they considered too stupid to breed.
Probably why they never labeled anything either.
“Do you know…?”
He frowned and leaned over the counter. “I think it’s… uh… no. That one.”
“This one.”
His pointing finger didn’t move. “No, that one.”
“This one?” When he nodded, she lifted what looked like a ketchup bottle carefully from the shelf. “You sure?”
“Mostly. It’s the right color.”
It was the only liquid that virulent a shade of orange. When she passed it over, Joe cradled it for a moment between both hands before unscrewing the lid and draining the bottle. He didn’t look any solider but he felt more… there. Slipping a thin hand in past the worn edges of his pants pocket, he pulled out a lump of…
“Fairy gold.”
“Yeah, what of it?”
“Well, it’s fairy gold,” Allie repeated, wondering if he was trying this out on her because she was new. He could move about under his own power, so he hadn’t tried it on Gran. “When the sun touches it, it’ll turn to earth. Or leaves. Or dog shit.”
“You think I’m after cheating you?”
Allie gestured at the fairy gold on his palm, letting it speak for itself.
“You think I’m after cheating Catherine Gale’s granddaughter? Obviously, you think I’m a complete idiot.” He slapped the pale yellow lump down on the counter and glared at her. “I like my balls right where they are, thank you very much. Just put the gold in the cashbox like always.”
“And?”
He blinked. “And? And after twenty-four hours it’s coin of the realm. Well, paper money of the realm anyway.” Another blink wiped the remaining anger away as realization began to dawn. “She really didn’t tell you anything?”
“She really didn’t.” Allie pulled the cashbox out from under the counter, stared into it, and rolled the fairy gold between her fingers. “So, about my grandmother…” When she looked up, he’d started to fidget. “Do you know where she’s gone?”
“Hard to say.” His smile wouldn’t have fooled a three year old. “Heaven wouldn’t want her and Hell couldn’t hold her.”
True enough as far as it went.
“So you believe she’s dead?”
Except for his eyes, he went completely still. His gaze flicked first left then right as though he was afraid there might be eavesdroppers in the shadows. “I believe what she wants me to believe.”
The words came out in a rush and so quietly that Allie had to strain to hear them. The subtext was obvious; she’d better believe the same.
Allie sighed. “Am I going to get a visit from a large man in an expensive suit looking for a lot of money?”
“No,” Joe told her indignantly. Paused. “Probably not.”
“Great. Did she tell you why she wants me here?”
“She had to leave her stuff to someone, right?”
“But why me?”
He snorted. “Why not you? All I know is…” He was watching the shadows again. “… she had me sign that paper and she let me have your name. And then she wasn’t here for a few days. And then you were here.”
“How many days?”
“Store’s been closed since last Friday.”
“I got the letter on Monday. She must’ve mailed it…”
“Before.” He scratched at the back of one hand. “Before she was gone. Yeah. Said she couldn’t trust the post to get it there after.”
“The letter said, if you’re reading this I’m dead, so she either knew she was going to die or she knew she was going to disappear.”
“Well, yeah.” Joe stared at her like she was slightly simple. “She knew things, didn’t she?”
“Good point.” She’d probably seen Allie accept and her reason for leaving things the way she had didn’t need to be any more complicated than that. Allie couldn’t decide if that took the pressure off or added some kind of unwanted destiny factor.
I’m your grandmother, Luke.
She dropped the fairy gold in the box, reached out to close it, and saw Joe swallow, prominent Adam’s apple bobbing up and down in his throat.
“I’d go get coffee for your grandmother sometimes,” he said hurriedly when she paused. “You know, when she didn’t want to lock up the store.”
Allie glanced over at the closed sign still facing the street.
“But yeah, I guess I’m early today so, you know, I’ll just leave you to it.” Hands shoved into his pockets he turned away from the counter. And then back again. “Oh, and don’t be forgetting to mark that I got my bottle down in the special ledger. The accountant comes in every Friday afternoon to do the bookkeeping, and he gets right shitty if he’s got to ask about stuff. He’s old school.”
“Right. The special ledger.” Joe had gotten as far as the door and was shifting his weight from foot to foot as he waited for her to let him out and lock it behind him.
More than Joe seemed to be waiting.
“You know what?” Allie said slowly, feeling her way but growing more confident with every word that she was moving in the right direction. “A coffee sounds like a good idea.” She pulled a twenty from the cashbox. “And a muffin if Kenny’s got anything edible. And the same for you. I know it’s an imposition,” she added hurriedly before he could speak, “but I’m flounder ing here. If you don’t mind staying for a while…?”
“To help?”
“Yeah.”
“Here?”
“Yeah.You seem to know what’s going on. More than I do anyway.”
It was entirely possible that Joe was older than her grandmother, but just for a moment, the moment between uncertainty and his smile, he looked painfully young.
“How’d you take your coffee, then?” he asked, pulling the twenty from her grip.
“Black.”
“The Saskatoon berry muffins are killer.”
“Great.” Then she rethought it. “That is great, right? You weren’t warning me?”
“No, it’s great. Coffee and muffins, then. You don’t need to lock the door behind me, I’ll only be a tick.”
<
br /> He looked solid through the door. Solid, and completely alone. Allie checked off a box in her mental actually-figured-out-what-Gran-wanted column. Feeding one of her strays wasn’t much, but it was a start.
—
“Wait a minute, you can’t be Irish.”
Joe picked the last of his muffin crumbs off the counter with one finger. “Leprechaun.”
“Okay, ethnically Irish, but you said you were raised by human parents.”
“In Ireland.”
“Oh. Right. Then what are you doing in Calgary?” Allie asked hurriedly, feeling a little stupid for having missed the obvious answer.
“Why not Calgary? Things are happening here. It’s a good place to start a new life.”
She didn’t point out that his new life seemed to suck a bit.
—
At ten, Allie turned the sign, opened the store, and went reluctantly back behind the counter. All three account books were up on the glass-one for the yoyos, one for the potions and the mailbox accounts, one for the store. “Okay. Let’s try an easy question. Did Gran ever explain why she kept the yoyo sales in a separate book?”
Joe shrugged. “Not big on explaining herself, your grandmother, but I’m guessing it’s because she’s got so many of them.”
There was the box of plastic, glow-in-the-dark yoyos on the counter, a box of old-fashioned wooden yoyos enameled in primary colors on one of the shelves next to three stacks of saucers that seemed to have lost their cups, and there was a box of miniature yoyos, each about as big around as a twoonie, on the floor next to a box of old musical scores.
Allie opened her mouth, about to protest that three boxes weren’t that many, then reconsidered. “There’s more than I can see from here, isn’t there?”
“In the storeroom.”
She drained the last drop of cold coffee and, as fortified as she was going to get, said, “Show me.”
He nodded toward the door. “What if someone comes in while we’re gone?”
“That’s a risk they’ll just have to take.”
“Don’t you mean a risk you’ll have to take?”
Allie thought about the monkey’s paw and tips of icebergs. “Nope.”
The basement had a packed dirt floor, stone walls patched in a couple of places with concrete blocks, and bare bulbs, dusty and dim, hanging from the underside of the floor joists. Piles of boxes filled nearly the entire space with only narrow passageways between them for access.
“This isn’t a storeroom,” Allie muttered, ducking under a spiderweb, “this is a horror movie clichй waiting to happen.”
The stained boxes nearest the stairs were packed with smaller, unopened boxes of yoyos.
“She only brought new ones up when the old boxes were completely emptied,” Joe offered, crouched by the trapdoor.
“And the rest of the stuff?”
“Stuff.”
“Specifically?”
“People bring your grandmother boxes of stuff, and she buys them. Bought them.” Allie could hear the frown in his voice as he changed verbs. “Used to buy them.You know, stuff like the last bit of crap you can’t get rid of at a yard sale or the odds and sods an estate auction won’t touch.”
That explained the smell. The storeroom reeked of other people’s lives, a melancholy mix of the stale perfumes left behind by withered dreams, lost hopes, and forgotten promises-with a faint hint of cat pee. And mold, Allie acknowledged, as she made her way carefully back up the steep stairs and headed into the tiny store bathroom to blow her nose on a handful of toilet paper.
“Your grandmother told me once that nine out of ten people throw away the answer all unawares like.” Joe closed the trapdoor and straightened, arching his back. “She also said nine out of ten people don’t know what the fuck the question is.” He turned, cupped both hands over his corduroy-covered crotch and scowled at his reflection in the mirror, his ears suddenly redder than his hair. “I hate it when it does that!”
Allie glanced over. “That’s why it does it. For the reaction.”
“It doesn’t bother you, then?”
She shrugged. “I have a lot of cousins; if you freak at a live frog in your lunch bag, next time it’s pepper in your pompoms.”
“What in your what?”
“Pepper in your pompoms.” Allie pointed at the mirror now showing her reflection in full cheerleader rig. “Red and gold,” she corrected, and the colors changed. “Most of the Gale girls are cheerleaders in high school. Even Gran.”
“Scary thought,” Joe muttered following her back into the store.
“We’re less scary when we’re young.”
“Differently scary.”
“Fair enough. Auntie Jane says Gran was deadly with a field hockey stick.”
“Actually deadly?”
“It’s always safer not to make assumptions.” She slipped back behind the counter. “No customers while we were gone. No surprise.” Although the traffic along 9th Avenue was steady, the sidewalks were empty.
“I should go.” Joe headed for the door. “Your grandmother didn’t like me hanging around all day.”
“Gran’s not here.” When Joe turned to check the shadows, Allie managed to keep her eyes locked on him rather than join in the search. Just managed. “Listen, if you could stay just a little longer, I could get started checking this place for…” She examined and discarded a couple of descriptive phrases that would have gotten her mouth washed out with soap at a much younger age. “… less than normal merchandise.”
“Like the monkey’s paw?”
“Hopefully not.”
“There’s that velvet Elvis.” He nodded toward the box.
“I saw.”
“It’s like its eyes follow you.”
“Optical illusion.”
“If you say so. The thing creeps me the fuck out.”
“Okay, that’s…” Her phone rang before she could finish.
“Your mother says Catherine’s crucial business is a junk shop,” Auntie Jane announced without preamble.
“That’s right, but…”
“Ha!” she said, and hung up.
“Auntie Jane.” Allie slipped her phone back into her pocket. “Long-distance mocking.” His shrug suggested he didn’t care. “So, are you staying? I’ll throw in lunch.”
“Lunch?”
“The meal in the middle of the day. I’m a good cook. I was thinking grilled cheese sandwiches, a bowl of homemade tomato soup…” Gran may have gone wild, but she was still a Gale. The pantry was full of canning. “… and pie.”
He rolled his eyes. “Grilled cheese sandwiches aren’t exactly hard to cook.”
“You don’t have to stay.” She tried to sound like she didn’t care either way and suspected she’d failed dismally. Joe wasn’t just a connection to her missing grandmother, he was the only person she knew in Calgary.
“What kind of pie?”
“I don’t know yet.” She pulled another bill out of the cashbox. “We can start with more coffee.”
“I’m not staying all day, mind. I’ve got things to do.”
“Okay.”
Joe tugged the bill from her hand. “You want another muffin with that?”
—
The charms the old woman had put on the windows were still in effect. He could see the reflection of the street-traffic passing, the storefront directly opposite, himself in ballcap and dark glasses struggling to get a paper from the box-but nothing past the glass. His employer hadn’t liked that Joe O’Hallan had been hanging around the old woman, his concern only slightly tempered by the evidence that Catherine Gale had barely tolerated the changeling. He really wouldn’t appreciate him striking up a friendship with this new Gale and, unless Joe had snuck out the back way, he’d been in there for hours.
He’d trailed Joe for three days back after he’d first shown up, his employer suspicious of anything that might interfere with him building a power base in the city. There was a danger inherent in
tracking purebloods-some of them literally had eyes in the backs of their heads, and they very much disliked interference in their business. Where disliked meant if caught, expect to be ripped limb from limb. Leprechauns like the changeling were not only nasty little sons of bitches, but they’d taken to Human weapons like cops took to Timmy’s. They might throw a curse of seven years of bad luck but were just as likely to pull a submachine gun from a convenient pocket universe and use the spray of bullets like a scythe, cutting anyone they’d caught trailing them off at the ankles, leaving them to flop around in shock, and eventually bleed to death. He figured all that attitude had something to do with them being the shortest out of the box.
The trick was not to get caught.
He was very good at what he did.
This changeling, though, except for pulling the old fairy gold scam, he appeared to be living Human. And living rough. Not only had trading lumps of what looked to be raw gold for cash gotten more complicated since the old days, but the cash it brought didn’t go far. If the glyphs on his scope hadn’t allowed him to see what his target truly was, he’d have dismissed him as a mutt dumped to fend for himself. His report on Joe’s pathetic existence had been enough to tag him no threat.
In retrospect, that might have been a mistake.
The Courts had to know what was going down by now. No way movement of that magnitude hadn’t been flagged. Generally, they didn’t give a crap about what happened in the MidRealm, but Joe was still of the blood, no matter how long he’d been gone, and damned near living on top of the epicenter. It was possible, however unlikely, they’d warned him.
It was possible Joe had taken that information straight to the new owner of the shop.
It would certainly explain why he’d been in there for so long.
He rattled the door of the newspaper box one last time-as an excuse to linger the damned things were near foolproof-gathered up his Herald, checked the sky, and headed west. His orders had been to find out what Alysha Gale knew, but he couldn’t do that as long as the changeling was with her. Joe was as suspicious as all hell just generally. In case the Courts hadn’t been in contact, the last thing he wanted to do was give him a reason to call home.
If it turned out Joe had told the Gale woman nothing of note, he wondered how they were going to keep it that way. The Courts were possessive of their own; taking out a pureblood would attract more unwanted attention from yet another source.
