A Mate Worse Than Death

by J. L. Ray

He grimaced at her nickname, then went very still as she turned to him, but he nodded, “Dienah, I should like nothing more than to sit down and talk old times with you over a glass of milk and your delicious,” his voice quivered as he pulled out the syllables, “really delicious cookies, but we have a murder investigation, and you know how it is. The Great Geas isn’t particularly patient. If we don’t solve it quickly...”

  Dienah snarled at that, the personality shift so swift that it gave Tony emotive whiplash, “The Great Geas my sweet--”

  “Now, now, Dienah. It protects as well as punishes.”

  She curled a lip but then smiled, as suddenly happy again as she had been angry. “I will put together a, what do you call them in Mundania? Ah yes, a to-go bag.”

  For a second Phil closed his eyes, but then he opened them and smiled, “Marvelous, marvelous. You are a treasure still.”

  As she led them to the door, she looked back over her shoulder, “As if you didn’t know that. Silly demon.”

  Twenty excruciating minutes later, the two waved furiously cheerful goodbyes to Dienah, who stood at the door of her thatched cottage, waving back as she saw them off. The cottage stood beneath huge evergreen trees of a type that Tony didn’t recognize, not that she considered herself some kind of Natty Bumpo naturalist. It was more a feeling of looking at them and thinking that they were only almost making sense to her eyes.

  “So, what’s the deal with Dienah, anyway?”

  Phil grimaced. “The deal?”

  “She’s like, I don’t know, goblin Martha Stewart or something.

  He barked out laughter.

  “How come she could see me?”

  “We spoke to each other in her presence. We cannot talk to one another if we are trying to use the cloaking spell.”

  “Good to know,” Tony nodded. “Hey, other than making cookies that must be really God-awful yucky, which I guess would be points off for the Fairie Realm Martha Stewart award, why is she so dangerous?”

  “Dienah did some...reprehensible things, and her punishment from the Powers That Be was to banish her from Mundania and put her in service to me as a housekeeper for a century. This, of course, was before we triggered the Geas, or she would have ended up in the FBI working on some missing child taskforce.”

  Tony gulped. “She killed Natty kids back home?”

  Phil nodded. “Remember the witch in Hansel and Gretel? Well,” and he gestured behind them with his thumb.

  “So the story got it wrong? Not an actual witch, huh? Boy, that’s a first case of undeserved bad PR for the witch community.” She gasped and shook the to-go bag of cookies, “I know I can’t eat anything here that I didn’t bring with me, but, hey, you can’t eat these either!”

  Phil smirked, “I believe that is exactly what I was trying to tell you. When we find a good spot far away from Dienah, we’ll need to dump these.” He looked at the bag, “I wouldn’t grasp that too closely to the actual foodstuffs in it.”

  Tony looked at him, her gray-green eyes going wide.

  “Don’t worry,” he told her smoothly, “the paper should hold long enough for us to dispose of the bag where Dienah won’t see it or smell it.”

  They had gotten just around a bend in the path leading from the cottage when a much larger house appeared a few hundred yards away.

  “We can stop there, leave the cookies, and regroup before we continue on to the first stop on your list,” Phil told her as he started on to the house that definitely would rate the term mansion back in Tony’s world.

  “Why are we stopping here? Who lives here?” she asked him.

  He didn’t reply for a moment and then sighed. “No one lives here now. That was my house. Before.”

  “Before what?”

  “Before I moved to Mundania more permantly. I used to go back and forth to do...things, but when the Great Geas went into effect, I was on that side. I had to stay,” he looked forward at the house rather than make eye contact with her.

  “That happened to a lot of folks, right? I mean, Cal was born on our side, like his kids, but Berthell told me her parents had come over for a little vacation in the Alps to do some sheep raiding when she was just a little spawn, but then the Geas hit them and they got stuck. And they actually died.” She looked at him, her eyes narrowed.

  “What?”

  “You had no idea that the Geas was coming?”

  He sighed again. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “So how often do you travel back now?” she wondered out loud.

  He looked over at her, his beautiful mouth twisted in a lop-sided grin that made her catch her breath. “I don’t travel. I have not been here since your year of 1986.”

  “Yikes. You haven’t been home since before I was born.” She didn’t notice his grimace as she thought over his dilemma. Then she looked at him, the question obvious on her face. “Why haven’t you come back?”

  “I can’t be here for very long,” he looked over at her and added, “so we have to avoid Sleeping Spells, of course, but also any kind of involved, time-consuming games or riddles from some of the Beings you need to interrogate. If I stay more than a day, that would be bad.”

  She stared at him as they continued toward his old home. “Define ‘bad’.”

  She got the twisted grin again, but no eye contact, “No.”

  She stared at him harder.

  “I can feel that stare, and I said, no.”

  She kept staring.

  “And you truly say you have no fae blood?”

  She kept staring.

  He caved, “All right, all right.” He took a deep breath and spilled it, “If I stay more than a day, the Geas kills me.”

  She paled and stopped walking. “Why in the hell did you agree to come on this trip? Does the Lieutenant know this? Shit!”

  He stepped back from her, “You aren’t going to headbutt me again, are you?”

  “Funny, funny man. Dammit.”

  “That’s just it, Antonia, I’m not a man at all.” His head dropped and then he looked into her eyes. “I am fae. I am dark fae, and I am damned by the Great Geas to serve. For years I worked in another capacity. Now I am runnning Monster-Mate. And if Lieutenant Azeem needs me to do this, then I do this. The Geas is affected by his need to solve the case.”

  She seemed stunned by some of this, though she knew, of course, that the largest effect of the worldwide announcement that fairy tales were true histories, and that the creatures in them had been living in her world for millennia, was that the worst of the creatures could not wreak havoc on the humans in the land they called Mundania. At least, not the kind of havoc they wanted to wreak. Once they came out into the open, the curse forced some types of good behavior on those who lived in the Mundane realm. If a creature broke that curse long enough to do extremely bad acts, extreme misuse of magic, rape, or murder, then the Supernatural Crimes Investigations branch had a very short space of time to work the crime and bring the criminal to Mundane justice. Otherwise, the Geas would exact its own justice, and sometimes that could go horribly awry. Thus, the pressure to solve crimes involving Supers remained high and teams like Tony and Cal were especially prized by law enforcement.

  Still, she couldn’t believe that Azeem, who claimed to be friends with Phil, allowed him, no, forced him, really, to back her up under these circumstances.

  “We don’t have time to stop and regroup unless you have something at your old home that might be useful in speeding this along.” She frowned at him. “I am not going back to the Lieutenant and explain to him that I got his buddy killed while trying to questions suspects and family members.”

  Mephistopheles went still for a moment, then turned to her, charm on full. “Why darling detective, I didn’t know you cared so much about my welfare.”

  “I don’t. I care about the amount of paperwork it would generate if you bought the farm on my shift. Now, if you really insist on stopping at your house, move it. Your limited time’s awastin’,�
� she flipped her hands at him to shoo him along, and they hurried up at least one hundred granite steps into the large double doors at the front of the building.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Tony came from a reasonably wealthy family, no doubt. Both her father’s parents, the Newmans, and her mother’s parents, the Lamberts, were old money, and she had grown up in D.C., surrounded by the glitter of politics and embassy parties. And she had really, really hated it, a lot. In fact, her family background was one reason she had become a police officer. She loved her parents, but she had no intention of spending her time getting to know the right Naturals or other Beings or dressing in clothes that cost the kind of money that could have fed a typical family of four for a couple of weeks. One day soon she would inherit a large trust fund, and she had every intention of using a chunk of it in ways that would have Grandpere Lambert more than a little upset. She didn’t even want to think about Papa Newman’s reaction. So when she walked in the front door of Phil’s otherworld “house”, she was impressed, but she managed to keep her lower jaw reasonably close to her upper jaw. Mostly.

  “Homey,” she murmured to him as she walked through the enormous gilt doors and into a huge rotunda. A table roughly the size the of a Volkswagon Beetle sat in the middle of the expanse of black and white marble tile, its gilt surface glinting like, “Hey, Phil, is that thing really solid gold?”

  Phil hung his head. “I’d forgotten how over the top this place really is.” He looked at her sheepishly, “I do live a bit more simply in D.C. in a loft apartment. No gilt at all.”

  She looked around the entry way, its walls awash in paintings that were hung in gilt frames, the stairs, twinned white marble climbing the left and right hand sides of the room, the rails all done in gilt. At the top of the stairs, more paintings set in, of course, more gilt frames.

  She looked at Phil, wide-eyed, “You must be having shine withdrawal back home. Are you sure you don’t want to snag a few paintings to go?” She gestured at the Louis Vuitton tote that hung over her left shoulder. “Apparently, I could put the kitchen sink in here and never notice it.”

  He shook his head at her. “Nice, very nice. Make fun of a poor old man who can’t take it with him.”

  “Huh?”

  “My dear, surely they covered this in one of you courses. Neither you nor I can take anything of this realm with us,” he looked around the painfully bright room and pursed his mouth. “Not that anything here would tempt me.”

  “It’s your house,” Tony pointed out, hand on hip.

  “It wasn’t always mine,” Phil admitted reluctantly. “After I moved in here, I left this area of the house alone to help discourage the riff-raff coming in for silly requests. If I made a deal with someone, it needed to be worthwhile.”

  “You got this in one of your deals,” and this time her astonishment was all over her face.

  “Don’t ask.”

  “I’m leaving it for now--we have a deadline, literally. But don’t think I won’t be asking about this later.”

  He shot her a look, “Over cocktails, perhaps? At my place? After we’ve had a long, slow--” and this time he ducked, which was good because the Vuitton tote had a motorcycle in it, somewhere.

  Phil had wanted to go into his former home to to check on the location of the three fae whom Lt. Azeem had put on the contact list for his detectives. They went to what had been his library so that he could scry and determine their next destination.

  “Did you know we would arrive near your home?” Tony asked. “I thought the portal was pretty random about exact location.”

  Phil looked up from the large, elaborately carved ebony desk where he was working. He raised one brow, “Before the Geas, it was random, which certainly helped keep traffic between the worlds to a minimum. Now the door reads intent, which is why some beings are stuck permanently in Mundania and why some beings are able to move between the worlds.” He reached over to pull a glass bottle from a shelf behind him and poured the fluid from it into the large, shallow brass bowl in front of him on the table.

  “So if you had bad intentions, it wouldn’t have let you through at all? But since we’re investigating a murder, it let you through with a one day pass?”

  Phil grinned as he continued to work on the scrying spell in front of him. “Something like that,” he said to Tony without taking his eyes away from the bowl.

  “I wonder--”

  Phil interrupted her apologetically, “Darling woman, I would love to answer all your questions, but I am a tad bit busy here. Let me just finish this spell first, yes?”

  “Oops, sorry,” Tony came closer and looked over his shoulder. He turned his head and looked at her. “Uhm, too close?”

  “You are welcome to take over if you like. No? Then, yes, a little elbow room would be useful.”

  “Sorry!” Tony backed away and watched as he held his arms out to the left and right sides of the bowl, like a band conductor, and began to move his hands while repeating a few words under his breath. In a few moments he said to her, “First name on the list?”

  “Agrat Bat Mahlat,” Tony parsed the name carefully.

  “Oh, dear.”

  “That’s not promising.”

  “What are the other names?”

  “Sammeal, just Sammeal, no surname” she paused at his hiss of reaction, then continued, “and Naamah, again, just Naamah. Like rock stars or something.”

  “Or something. Lovely,” he said, dripping sarcasm. “ I cannot believe Azeem wants you to try to talk to these three.”

  “What’s the deal?”

  “How about frying pan, fire, raging volcano?”

  Tony sat on the edge of large, ornate chair. “Well, which is the frying pan? How about we work our way down?”

  Phil nodded. “Frying pan would be Bat Mahlat. The fire would be Naamah, and the raging volcano, Sammeal.”

  “I’m embarrassed to say that I have no clue who these folks are. Should I?”

  Phil laughed, “Your father isn’t a rabbi, so I’m not surprised. In Mundania, they were most famous in B.C.E. for crimes against humans. But a couple of truly good holy men managed to send the two ladies through a portal in C.E. 1, around the 300s if I remember correctly.”

  “Remember from a textbook?” Tony asked warily.

  Phil gave her a look, “This is like a Mesopotamian High School Reunion movie for me, but without the singing, the dancing, or the bitchy cheerleaders. I am quite familiar with all the players in this game.” He paused a moment. “Actually, it may have bitchy cheerleaders after all.” He sighed. “This is disturbing.”

  “I think I’m more disturbed to find out that you’ve seen any high school reunion movies, actually.”

  “Research. On Naturals. For work, really.”

  “Uh huh.” Tony grimaced, “It doesn’t matter where or when, all reunions are a suckfest,. So are they dark fae? And what about Sammeal?”

  “Agrat Bat Mahlat and Naamah are dark fae and very much like Lilith, just without the extensive PR that Lilith had in the bad old days. She got blamed for a lot of their acts. She got quite bitter about it. That is probably how she ended up on the Mundane side of the portal at just the wrong time. There was another friend, Eisheth Zenunim. She isn’t on your list?”

  Tony glanced down, even though it was a fairly short list. “No, she isn’t here on the list. Maybe she really isn’t here?”

  Phil nodded. “She must have been on the other side when the Geas went into effect as well. Odd that I haven’t heard about her. I wonder if she got off the hook for misdeeds? She did do a rather important service that could have been considered a mark on the good side of the Geas checklist.”

  “Do I want to know?”

  “Perhaps not. Let’s cross that dark fae bridge when we get to it.”

  “So Sammeal is the raging volcano? He is also dark fae?”

  Phil shook his head, “He should be, but no, he is high in the light fae hierarchy. I never have understood how he
managed that. He is a real troublemaker all around. And he and Lilith were lovers off and on for quite some time.”

  “Quite some time meaning...”

  “Millennia, off and on.” Tony choked. “More off than on from what I remember, but honestly, I tried to stay out of such situations unless someone was coming to me to make a deal. The problem with immortality is that there is far too much time to brood over imagined slights or actual fights, and when the Beings involved have a lot of power as well?” he slapped his palms together. “A real mess all around.”

  Tony sighed. “Hey, the clock is running for your time here. Does time here run like a day back in Mundania?”

  “Close. We won’t know how close until we return, but it never varies more than a few hours, at least not now. Before the Geas? It was totally unpredictable.”

  “Good to know. Shall we head for Agrat Bat Mahlat? Wow. She may a be a hot mess, but I love her name.”

  Phil laughed, throwing out his arms, then nodded and looked back down at the bowl. “Oh dear. I shouldn’t have made that gesture.”

  “Why?”

  He looked up at her under his brows, “There is a fire sale at Maleficient’s Castle, everything half-price.” He raised his arms and changed gestures, muttering again. “Ah, here we are. That is one location.” He muttered some more, “Another, and,” he finished, “here is the last.” He snorted, “Three locations, three to question. The rule of threes.”

  Tony nodded, “It’s a thing, right?”

  “Indeed. It is a thing. There is power in numbers. We will follow the order and go to the three names and hope that, in the end, we have something to show for it. Let us go. We will need that motorcycle,” he said to Tony’s back as she headed to the door as quickly as she could.

  She turned her head, “I just hope I can keep this stupid robe out of the way.” She turned her head. “I’m going to have a long talk with Glinda when I get back!”

  She missed Phil’s reply, and he meant her to miss it, “As will I, my sweet, as will I.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN