by J. L. Ray
When Tony came to, she was lying on a soft mattress. She blinked her eyes and glanced around the room. It looked like she was in a cottage. The walls were whitewashed, the floors brick. A table sat in the middle of the room and on it lay a pile of chopped vegetables, prepared to go in a big pot that sat on the hearth. The fireplace was just far enough away that she wanted to snuggle deep into the warm down comforter. It was at that moment that she realized, on the plus side, she wasn’t wearing the most uncomfortable garment on the face of the planet. However, on the minus side, she wasn’t wearing the most uncomfortable garment on the face of the planet. That meant that whoever owned this house knew Tony existed, knew Tony was human, and wasn’t likely to play nicely. And since they had just pulled up to Naamah’s home before she blacked out, it looked like she was in the homespun cottage of one of the original Queens of Hell, with no protection other than an infuriatingly sexy and angry demon. And she had thought that yesterday sucked. It looked like she had underestimated her bad luck.
“Naamah, thank you for helping me with my, uhm, pet,” Mephistopheles told the Being at his feet. Naamah was on her hands and knees, plucking ripe strawberries from a line of plants to one side of the rustic cottage which she had apparently decided suited her more than the palace she had lived in the last time Phil came to visit.
Naamah looked up at Phil, her stocky body covered in a garment not unlike Tony’s hair shirt, and she shaded her eyes from the sun, which was low on the horizon and thus reminded Phil that his time was running out. She cackled, “Your pet. Silly boy!” Since her current incarnation made her resemble an octogenarian, and since she actually was more than a few centuries his elder, he didn’t object to being called either a boy or silly. She continued, “You and the detective still have quite a bit of work to do, and you are not getting it done lolling about in my cottage, so I will answer your questions and have you on your way in no time. You cannot have any of my food, of course, but you should go in and prepare a small meal for the both of you from what you brought with you. You can question me while we eat.” She turned back to picking berries, obviously dismissing him, and after a stunned moment, he turned back to the thatched cottage and opened the door.
Other than walking into her cottage holding an unconscious Tony and allowing Naamah to undress her and put her to bed, Phil had done nothing. He certainly had told her nothing about their purpose in turning up on her doorstep. How had Naamah known who Tony was and why they were there?
When he walked in the door, he saw Tony, who had gotten out of the bed and was looking for her jeans. She heard the latch and turned around, her white bikini briefs mostly covered by the jeans she held in front of her, and her button-down shirt hanging open and providing a glimpse of the lacy, white bra that matched the underwear. For a second Phil forgot that he had almost stranded her in Fairie and considered moving in for a second taste. Then Tony grimaced at him from under a furious blush and pointedly turned her back to him while she climbed into her jeans.
“How fucked are we?” she hissed over her shoulder as he watched her slide her gorgeous legs into the jeans.
For a second, he didn’t quite parse the sentence, since his mind had been on a whole different type of fucking. “With Naamah?” he asked thickly, after a noticeable pause while he watched Tony’s furious back jerk as she buttoned her dark green shirt.
She turned to face him, unaware that she had mismatched the buttons and created a gaping hole right around her breasts, which allowed continued, intriguing views of the white lace contraption currently cradling said breasts. Phil called on thousands of years of adulthood and moved his eyes to her face. Mostly.
“I am not sure. Obviously,” he gestured at her body, no longer draped in the cloak, “she knows you are a Natural and you are here. I was just told to come in and prepare food for us both from what we brought with us, so she isn’t attempting to trick us through food. At least not overtly.” He gestured at he stewpot, “She was never particularly cannibalistic, and I heard she became a vegan years ago, so I doubt she is fattening us up for the pot.”
Tony was still angry, but a vegan Queen of Hell? Too much. She laughed and shook her head. When she looked at Phil again, she saw that his eyes were on her chest, and she narrowed hers at him. He immediately looked away.
“Well, if Naamah told you to prepare food, then you should prepare food,” she told him as she turned and leaned over the foot of the bed and picked up the tote, then held it out to him. “Knock yourself out. I need to find that stupid hair shirt.” She turned away and bent over the end of the bed again, digging around, unaware that Phil was standing there, enjoying the view. “Ah ha,” she muttered, and pulled it out from a pile of blankets it had landed on. Its color, or lack of color other than mud brown, had concealed it from her until her hand hit the sandpaper texture of it. When she stood back up and turned around, she found Phil still standing a few feet in front of her, holding the tote and staring at her and realized what he had been watching.
“You are getting on my last nerve,” she told him through clenched teeth. “Spit it out.”
“Spit what out?” he asked warily.
“Whatever it is that’s got you acting like such a jerk. You, you...Dammit! One minute you’re all innuendo, oozing sexy like it’s some cologne you bought back in the Middle Ages. Then you kiss me and suddenly I’m a pariah and you can’t stand to look at me! Then we get here” she frowned, “and I have another premonition episode, and now you’re staring at me like I’m on the menu again. Do you have a thing for magic chicks or what? Am I not interesting unless I have some kind of trick up my sleeve? Because, dude, those premonitions are a new one on me. I don’t even think I’m doing it myself.” She folded her arms over her chest and at that moment realized that her blouse wasn’t fully buttoned. She looked down, then looked up, and suddenly Phil was very glad of the “no guns” rule for visiting the Fairie Realm. “Are you kidding me?” she hissed. “Seriously? You’ve been staring at my bra?” She turned around and redid the buttons.
“My dear, it is a very attractive bra,” Phil tried, very hesitantly, but stopped at her low growl. “I was trying to decide if it was better to tell you now or let Naamah tell you, female to, uhm, female.”
“When we get back, Cal can deal with you. I have had enough,” she grated out in a firm tone as she turned back around from fixing her shirt. She stared Phil in the eyes and pointed at the door. “Go. Fetch Naamah and let’s get the questions done. If we have time, we’ll go see Sammeal. If we don’t, well, maybe Berthell’s popped by now and Cal can come over here instead of me and cover that interview because Sammeal sounds like a serious bag of shit, that is, he sounds like a typical guy!” And with that she snatched the Louis Vuitton tote out of his hand and walked to the table, shoving one hand in and rummaging around until she pulled out a lunch bag.
Phil, having survived to a ripe old age, knew when to argue and when to just do as ordered. He headed out the door.
Naamah cackled as Mephistopheles gently shut the door behind him. “Is your pet misbehaving? Or are you misbehaving?” She laughed some more when he grimaced. “I promise not to tell her anything about our past.” She gave him a mischievous look. “Not even that one time, in the Cave of the Sibyls, when you and I and several of the girls--”
“Yes, yes, I remember,” he told her, blushing at bit, which made her laugh. “Tony wants to question you, and I want to make sure she eats something. We should go in now.”
“I am done here, since I cannot actually feed you any of my berries,” she twinkled at him as she stood up and stretched, then grabbed her basket of fruit. “We had best get back in and make your detective happy. After all, this murder won’t solve itself,” and she turned and headed in the door of the cottage while Phil stood behind her, his mouth hanging open, just a little.
“I do not remember her having such strong divination. When did that happen?” he muttered. Then he heard the less than dulcet tones of his beloved, “G
et your ass in here, Phil. NOW!” Squaring his shoulders, he headed for the door.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“So,” Tony said, pointing the end of her truly fabulous roast beef sandwich at Naamah, who sat across from her at the little wooden table, “what you’re telling me is that I can ask you all the questions I want to ask, and in return, all you want to do is give me truthful, complete answers to the best of your ability to remember the particulars.”
“Why yes, my dear,” Naamah told her.
Tony finished chewing the bit she had just bitten and said, “Is that the catch? That your memory isn’t going to be very good right now?”
Naamah twinkled at Tony, “Catch? Why do you believe there is a catch?” Tony gave her a look. “So very young and yet so very cynical! I do hope, Miss Antonia, that you are not always so suspicious of the kindness of strangers.”
Tony looked at the sandwich, then at Naamah, “Well, ma’am, it really depends on the level of strangeness of the kindness, if you know what I mean.”
Naamah nodded, “I do indeed, my dear, I do indeed, and I have to say that with me, the strangeness level is rather high.” She giggled, leaned to her left and poked Phil in the shoulder with one finger. “Poor Mephisto here is still gobsmacked over the whole change in my ability to predict the future. It is far stronger than it was the last time you saw me, old friend.“ She smiled at him, “I have to admit, even I found it hard to take at first. It actually happened soon after the Great Geas was invoked in Mundania.”
Tony looked confused. “Weren’t you here?” Then she held up her hands in a halt motion. “Wait, wait. Don’t answer anything until I know what our deal here is.”
“What deal, my dear?”
Tony sat the sandwich down and sighed. “Look ma’am, I don’t want to offend you. I don’t want to be turned into a toad or a, a” she looked at the basket of fruit on the table, “a strawberry, I don’t want to spend the rest of my life here in servitude. I just want to find Lilith’s killer. I need to know what you expect in return for answering questions.”
Naamah sat for minute in thoughtful silence. Then she reached over and took Tony’s hand across the table in her right hand and grabbed Phil’s in her left from his seat next to her at the table.
“I am not sure what I can do to reassure you that I want what you want--to catch Lilith’s killer. I cannot See who it is,” she frowned, “which is unfortunate because I could save you both a lot of bother.” Then she smirked, looking from Tony to Phil, “Actually, it may be better that way.”
“It? What it? And what way?” Tony asked, then shook her head. “Never mind. I do not want to know the future. I just want to ask questions. May I, with no repercussions?”
Naamah squeezed both of their hands and nodded, “I swear on the Blood and the Bone that I, Naamah, will answer you. All I ask in return is that you find Lilith’s killer and end the murders.”
“Okay then,” Tony started, reassured by one of the most sacred oaths of Fairie. Then she paused, mouth agape. “Murders? Don’t you mean murder? As in one?”
“Not by the time you return, unfortunately, but I wouldn’t have been able to help you stop it. If I could, you would be on your way home by now.”
“Shit,” Tony tried to pull her hand out of Naamah’s and discovered that the woman who looked like an octogenarian and was actually many thousands of years old had a grip like a 25 year old body builder. “I need to get back, now.”
“You need to ask your questions,” she was told sternly, the cheerful old lady act suddenly gone. Naamah’s eyes rolled back in her head, going from twinkling blue to milky white, and she began to sway. “Child, I am a source from which can come success if you ask the right questions, failure if they are wrong. Ask carefully what you wish to know.”
Tony gulped and looked at Phil. He shook his head at her, as flabbergasted as she. Tony gestured at him with her other hand and he gave her a one-armed, “What?” kind of gesture. With no help coming from that quarter, she went with the question she had almost asked, “Were you here in Fairie when the Great Geas was invoked?”
“I was.”
“Did that enhance your divination abilities?”
“It did.”
Tony nodded. Those had been test questions since she already knew the answers. If she asked closed questions, she would get a closed answer.
“When and where did you last see Lilith?”
“I saw her two hundred years ago, when she was living in the desert in Mundania, in a mountainous region, helping some of the locals avoid being overrun by another country.”
“Why did you visit her?”
“She had been interfering in Mundane religion, and I wanted to try to reason with her, to stop her from trying to control the Naturals.”
“How did she react?”
“She was very hostile. She tried to kill me.”
“How did that make you feel?”
“Sad. Disappointed. I was already moving to a different place in my life. I had moved back to Fairie and married. I was happy. She was not happy. She was living without love, only with anger.”
“What did you do?”
“After I talked to her, after we fought, her acolytes chased me from her mountain eyrie. I came back here, and I sent her a message through Agrat, who sent it to her son Asmodeus, who eventually took it to Lilith. She got it five years after I sent it. By then she had calmed down. She had left the mountains of that desert and the rebels and had moved to high alpine mountains, to a country that does not war. She wanted peace. She was there for a long time. Only Asmodeus could get messages to her, and we have written each other for years.”
Tony perked up at this. She turned to Phil, “I guess this is what Agrat was hiding.” Then she asked Naamah,“May I have the letters?”
Naamah turned her blind eyes to Tony, “You may have them, but you cannot read them.”
“Why not?”
Phil muttered to Tony, “ Cuniform, old Summerian. You literally cannot read them.”
“Crap.”
“You may get help from the demon Mephistopheles to read the letters. He may have access to them.”
“So he can read old Summerian?” Tony muttered. “Figures.”
“Since he is a former lover both of Lilith and of me, I will allow it.”
Tony shot Phil a look and muttered, “And that figures, too.”
Before she could continue her questions, Naamah added, “The Sphinx may read them also. He earned that right.”
Tony nodded, even though she knew Naamah couldn’t see her.
“Can you see who she interacted with during her last days?”
Naamah sighed, “I see old friends and lovers.”
When she stopped, Tony snorted. “This feels like the gypsy tent at a carnival. At least we have the letters.”
“You have no more questions for her?” Phil asked Tony.
“Yeah, just, the answers aren’t exactly screaming new lead, and I was actually starting to think...” she paused, then turned her head to Naamah and asked,
“Did Lilith say anything about potential enemies? Was there anyone in particular lately who might have had trouble with her?”
Naamah’s head jerked around in an odd fashion, then she said, “Lilith stayed in Mundania and was caught by the Geas. Through the effect of the Geas, she became a social worker. She had Natural enemies--people whose children she had to move to foster care. But none of the Naturals would have known how to create a vampire. And a vampire and its master are what you seek. Love will yield the answer.” At that, Naamah’s eyes shut, she slumped over, and when she sat back up, she was back to blue-eyed, cheerful old lady.
She looked from one to the other, her hands still clutching theirs. “Did I give you anything interesting?” she asked hopefully.
“Yeah. Yeah, you did.” Tony looked at her, “You don’t remember anything?”
“Sometimes I do, sometimes I do not. It is what it is,” she shrugged and
then laughed. “You can have your hands back. You’ll need them to finish your food.” And with that, she rose and began chucking chopped vegetables into the soup pot. “What did I tell you?”
“You had a correspondence with Lilith and you agreed to give us the letters so Phil could read them. And Lt. Azeem, the Sphinx.”
“Ah, yes. I could have told you that without the trance.”
Tony nodded, “So that’s what you call it?”
Naamah turned from stirring the pot and nodded, “I do. Now in various other times and places, it was called many things. And of course, one reason I came back to Fairie was the risk of the witch hunts in Mundania. I cannot control when it comes over me now at all. But even before the Geas affected my abilities, it could happen at the most inopportune times! One time, my husband and I were right in the middle of--”
Phil jumped in at that bit of oversharing,”You also said we were looking for a vampire and its master.”
Naamah looked at him thoughtfully, and then she nodded. “Well, that explains a lot.” She turned back to the pot to stir until Phil cleared his throat. “What, dear?”
“Explains a lot of what?” Tony asked her.
“Oh my, I think I must be alone too much. I forget if I have said something out loud or if I’m just talking to myself! Why, it explains why I cannot See the murderer.” She saw that Tony wasn’t following and added, “Vampires are of your world. They were spawned by the small levels of magic in Mundania and by the large levels of religious belief and fervor.”
“That’s all it took?” Tony asked her.
“Oh yes, and a magic talisman that came from Fairie,” Naamah added.
“So it did take Fairie magic?”
“This time it did. The PTB wiped vampires out in the early 20th century. Vampiric magicks were causing a rift in our magic and that had to be stopped. To start that cycle again?” Naamah shook her head. “That is true evil, and it had to have outside help. Have you ever made sourdough bread?” Naamah asked her.
