A Mate Worse Than Death

by J. L. Ray

  “What is your plan for questioning Adonis?” he asked her, his mouth almost on her ear, and his body leaned in as close to her as the harness would allow.

  “Plan?” she asked him.

  “You don’t have a plan of attack?” he asked her.

  “Has someone been watching too many old TV shows?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Some of them raise really unrealistic expectations.”

  There was a long moment of silence behind her.

  “You know, Phil, I’ve always found that the best way to go into an interview is to go in wide open and play the situation for all it’s worth. I have no idea what Adonis is going to say, so it’s hard to have too many questions planned in advance.” She had a brainstorm at that moment. “Hey, I’ve got my earbugs with me. Why don’t we listen to some road music? I’ll share.”

  She reached into her pocket and pulled out her f-light and two earbugs, both of which woke and stretched, protected in the palm of her hand. The wind around them made transferring one to her ear and one to Phil’s hand and then his ear a bit dicey. But the bugs were super sticky for use during physical activity, so they both managed to get a bug in an ear.

  The bugs were linked to Tony’s f-light, so she turned up her playlist selections and concentrated on enjoying the music, assuming this, at least, might shut Phil up. However, a few minutes later she realized that he was humming along to a Death Cab for Cutie song right in her ear. After a moment spent listening to him pick up the words of “I Will Possess Your Heart” she flipped to the next song.

  “I was enjoying that,” Phil whispered in her ear.

  “I wasn’t,” she replied.

  “It is your playlist,” he reminded her. “I must get that song. I found it... inspirational.”

  She flipped the f-light again to a song by Puddle of Mud, “I think this one should be your guide.” And she grinned as the lyrics of “She Hates Me” bounced with them through the air to New Jersey.

  Lock Up had its own dragonhold, a hanger outside the gates and down the road from the facility. Keeping the dragons away from the main facility was less about the worry of a prison break and more about keeping them from treating the general population of the prison like their own personal food larder. Dragons’ natural food favorite, sheep, often got supplemented with the occasional Super in Fairie. In Mundania, before the Geas was invoked, dragons had nabbed the occasional Super or Natty, also. The Geas kept the dragon community reigned in, but that didn’t mean that they couldn’t be tempted. And since dragons’ self-awareness ranked more on the level of dolphin or monkey than Natty or Super, the Geas tended towards leniency with them. So their handlers tried to remove temptation to cut down on any bad publicity.

  When Tony and Phil arrived, the DragonMaster checked Nick into a visitor’s hold and then gave them a little Mini-Cooper loaner to drive the five miles up to the prison itself. The road to the Lock Up facility, like much of Lock Up itself, exists both in Mundania and in Fairie. It wasn’t good for the average Natty who had to work there or visit it to think about it too much--it was one of those conundrums that caused university physics professors violent headaches and sleepless nights trying to describe it in scientific terms. It didn’t help that one of the leading magicians of the GOOEN squad had told Hawking once, “Of course, it can be explained mathematically. Magic is mathematics.” That was like throwing chum in shark-infested waters. Every respectable university in the country which aspired to be known for its math or physics department now had a Center for the Explanation of Magic (CEM). They hadn’t gotten far yet, but they weren’t well funded either. Any Super in a position to fund a CEM tended to treat it like a kindergarten, “Here you go, kiddies, a nice crayola box for you. Make some pretty pictures.” What the Supers didn’t seem to get was that a Natty kid with a crayon could come up with some pretty spectacular pictures, so the CEM directors took what they could get and worked together toward trying to come up with an answer without the usual academic bickering and infighting. Nattys could rise to a magical challenge given the right provocation. The smug certainty on the part of many Supers that the Naturals of Mundania weren’t quite up to the intellectual level of magic-wielding or magic-holding Supers proved to be the right motivation. No one was giving up yet.

  When Tony first started down the road, it looked like a British B road out on the moors of Devon, the kind actually meant for two lane traffic but providing only one lane of driving space, and turn outs, lots of turn outs. Tony assumed the road took its cues from the type of car. They passed an F-250, obviously a prison guard on patrol and for a second, the road in front of them shimmered, and suddenly they saw the Pine Barrens around them. After the truck passed, another shimmer and they were winding through the moors again, with Lock Up off in the distance.

  Tony downshifted going into a curve at the bottom of a steep hill that really shouldn’t exist in this part of the country, and there was Phil’s leg in her way. She looked over at him and realized that he had fallen asleep. He was leaning into the door and his legs had strayed into the shifting radius.

  “Phil?” He didn’t move, so she tried again. “Mephistopheles?”

  Phil twitched and sat up, scrubbing at his face, mussing up his beard and hair, which was still pulled back, but looked lopsided now. It was sweet, in a puppies and kittens way that didn’t go with a guy bad enough to get stuck with running Monster-Mate. But he looked so sleepy and out of it that she made herself look away. No sense in getting soft about the guy. The old guy. The really old guy. Nothing was going to happen if she could just get this case finished and get him out of her daily life. Man, three days, and it felt like she’d know him forever.

  “Just stop it,” she muttered to herself.

  “Stop what?” Phil said, looking around for the problem.

  “The road keeps changing,” Tony told him, appalled and equally impressed at her ability to lie around him. Unfortunately, it had become quite a habit.

  “It adjusts to the car and driver,” he told her.

  “Huh?”

  “The road that seems to be annoying you more than I do, at least for the moment,” he grinned.

  “Well, yeah,” she added, “and it’s hard to keep adjusting in a stick-shift when there are so many changes.”

  “Yet you handle that stick very well,” he murmured.

  She rolled her eyes and didn’t answer. No point in encouraging him by showing how much he could annoy her.

  “Ah, there is the front gate,” he pointed to a gatehouse that sat on the other side of a moat, a moat which ran around the walls of a castle, all of it lit with huge torches.

  She raised her eyebrows as she turned onto a wooden bridge which they bumped along as they went over that moat. “Seriously? What the hell?” Tony muttered. Then she stopped at the portcullis where a guard waited to see her f-light. He checked her through, and they proceed into the center court, which contained the castle keep surrounded by the curtain wall.

  “So,” Tony asked casually as she parked her Mini in the visitor parking area. “Do you see a medieval castle?”

  “Nothing so modern,” Phil replied. “I see the ancient dungeons of Babylon.”

  “Get out.”

  “Indeed.”

  “Sometimes the magic does get a little overwhelming,” Tony admitted.

  “Just remember, it is responding to you. This is your expectation of what you will see. If you can change your expectation, you will change what you see.”

  “It feels like I’m at some kind of really upscale RenFairie festival.”

  “Ah, and were the Renaissance-Fairie Festivals in the back of your mind when you drove up? “Hell, no. Definitely not my idea of a good time. I guess I was thinking about dungeons. And dragons,” she cracked a grin at Phil, which her returned in full.

  He then added more seriously, “Think about something else. You can change this. Do you have something in mind?”

  “I think I’m set. Let�
��s get going. All I want to see is what we can get out of Adonis.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  A guard in full battle dress opened the door at the castle keep, armor clanking, and as they walked inside, a woman in farthingale and wimple greeted them. “Greetings to you, fair sheriff and...well...and...”

  “Civilian consultant,” Tony prompted when the woman looked at a complete loss for a description to fit Phil.

  “Yes, and fine civilian consultant,” she curtsied. “I am Lady Edwina, chatelaine of this keep. We received your missive requesting audience with one of our charges, and though it be outside of the rule of the day to allow audience this late, we have had, of late, much instruction from Judge Werthog giving us leave to present you with the prisoner. Therefore, come you to our audience chamber for parley.”

  “Are you--”Tony started to ask Phil, but before she could finish, he shook his head.

  “I suspect we are not hearing the same thing, unless you speak Akkadian,” he told her sotto voce.

  She gave him a look.

  “Ah, that’s Babylonian. To some extent. Not what you hear, I take it?”

  “No.” Tony sighed and got a determined look on her face. “Okay, enough already,” she said loudly enough for the “chatelaine” to hear her and give her a surprised look.

  “Prithee, enough what, fair sheriff, dispenser of justice?”

  Tony shut her eyes, grabbed one of Phil’s hands, and said out loud, “I see a modern, maximum holding facility for highly dangerous prisoners staffed by modern guards.” She kept her eyes shut but jerked on Phil’s hand. “And so does he.”

  She peeped one eye open and saw that the chatelaine was the same person in every way except that now the woman appeared in the usual drab, badly fitting polyester uniform of prison guards everywhere. She was eyeballing Tony and snapping a piece of gum.

  “Hey, Detective Newman?” she asked in a typically nasal-toned Jersey accent. “Are y’coming or not? I don’t got all day to stand around waiting on a bunch of Washington suits. You wanna see the prisoner tonight or what?”

  Tony managed to control the urge to hug the woman, whose big hair rivaled that of any Texas deb she’d ever met. Those debs didn’t have a thing on the ladies from Jersey when it came to big hair. She nodded at, sure enough, the name tag said Edwina, “We definitely want to see the prisoner and we’re ready. Right, Phil?”

  “Right as rain,” he chimed in, then asked, as an aside, “It is English that she speaks, yes?”

  “It’s Jersey English,” Tony grinned. “Just roll with it.”

  Guard Edwina didn’t move, just stood there and gave her gum a pop. Then she looked down at Tony’s hand, which still gripped that of Phil. “Just so’s you know, you may want to leave your ‘civilian consultant’, or whatever he is, here. Adonis tends to have an effect on people, especially people who are” she paused significantly and even more insultingly, “together.”

  Tony dropped Phil’s hand like it had caught fire and folded her arms across her chest. “He is a consultant for the department, and that won’t be a problem,” she hissed through clenched teeth. Then she gestured for Guard Edwina to move along.

  As they walked through to admitting in order to leave pocket items, f-lights, and anything else the guards thought might be potentially weaponized by a prisoner, the tote bag, for instance, Phil murmured, “Well, she has, how do you say it? She has got our number.”

  “I don’t say that. My father wouldn’t say that. However, my grandfathers would say that.” Phil winced. “ And it’s your number,” Tony ground out between clenched teeth. “She’s got your number. My number is unlisted, buddy. And it’s staying that way.”

  Guard Edwina gestured for Phil and Tony to proceed her into an interview room. The room was warded, similar to the wards used at crime scenes, only instead of protecting a crime scene by keeping out potential contaminants, its job was to keep in the prisoner, kind of one giant contaminant in a way, a magic-wielder who had attacked Nattys and Supers. Most of the prisoners in Lock Up were magic-wielders. Magic-holders tended to be less likely to commit crimes, though that had never proved a hard and fast rule. However, those who simply were magic often were less inclined to see magic as a weapon, whereas those who wielded it were more inclined to use it as a means to an end. In the case of creatures like the mages on the GOOEN squad, the end was a relatively noble one, as long as no one pissed them off. In the case of creatures like Teraphina, one of a group of six witch sisters, the end usually literally spelled trouble for some poor Being or other.

  The wards around the interview room tingled as Tony and Phil walked through. They saw a room painted a dull greenish-gray and an industrial strength iron table with iron shackles and silver shackles. Apparently, there was a choice based on the type of Being brought in for the interview. There were chairs on both sides of the table, but the ones on the side for the prisoner were iron, while the ones on the side for the visitors were aluminum.

  After Tony and Phil settled, Guard Edwina spoke into her own f-light, “Bring him in.”

  They watched as two more guards walked in a Being so lovely that even with a day-glo orange jumpsuit as his only adornment, he radiated glamour. Tony slipped a surreptitious glance at Guard Edwina but saw nothing in her face to indicate that his glamour affected her. She looked at the other two guards and realized that they must all have had an immunity spell to counteract his glamour. As they seated the prisoner and shackled him with silver, she wondered if the same company made standard issue charms for Lock Up as did for the rest of the law enforcement. Working with these kinds of prisoners would necessitate seriously powerful products. Then she looked at Phil. He was staring at Adonis, but the look on his face was anything but admiring. He looked like he had swallowed a lemon. She turned her head back to Adonis, who had turned the full intensity of his gaze onto her.

  “Adonis Adoni, I am Detective Tony Newman with the Washington D.C. Police, Supernatural Crimes Investigation Bureau. I need to ask you a few questions.”

  For a second, Adonis just sat, staring at her. She kept her face still and unresponsive. One of the few things she had dragged out of the Vuitton tote, her own charm to protect her from glamour, seemed to working quite well.

  “What could I have to offer...you?” Adonis whispered so that she had to lean forward to hear him. As soon as she had done so, Phil reached over and gestured for her to lean back. Adonis turned toward Phil and for the first time acknowledged his presence. “Mephistopheles, I offer you nothing. You already have everything that was mine.” His voice was still low, almost a sing-song, lilting and comforting, warm and inviting, with the mildest of accents, Greek, of course, to Tony’s ears. Tony gave herself a mental slap. Apparently, her protection charm handled only visual, not audial, which was a monumental pain in the ass at the moment. She gave herself another shake and taking Phil’s unspoken advice, leaned back in the chair.

  Phil had not responded to Adonis’s comment, and he looked as if he had no plan to respond, which kind of made Tony wonder what role he thought he was playing here. He’d insisted on coming. What did he plan to do? She decided to poke around a bit and see what would happen.

  “You blame Phi--Mephistopheles for what happened to you?” Tony asked, as casually as she could since this question was essentially the heart of the matter.

  Adonis turned his gaze to her, and it was clear that he couldn’t understand why she wasn’t responding to the weight of his glamour. “Mephistopheles is an opportunistic snake, who has slithered into my club and poisoned my memory and driven away all my dear, dear--”

  Phil finally found his voice, “Victims. Your dear, dear victims, yes?”

  Adonis turned to Phil, and the look that he gave Phil should have, by all rights, burned his skin, it held so much vitriol. “Friends. I have nothing but friends.” His head lowered and he looked up at them from under his brows, his beautiful features twisted and angry. “You steal my life and then treat me like a criminal.
I am a demigod--beloved of Aphrodite and Persephone. You will answer to them eventually, you bastard devil.”

  Phil, who had been angry, snorted at this. “Demigod, my ass. You are the product of incest and the plaything of two powerful Beings who abused you. There was a time when I felt pity for what was done to you, but no more. It is no wonder you do not understand, even after so many thousands of years, how to interact with other Beings.”

  “I understand what makes people happy,” Adonis roared and stood up quite suddenly, yanking his own chains. “I made people happy--you understand? They had no choice, they had no choice! They had to lie there and be happy or else suffer and suffer and suffer!” He was talking so furiously that spittle formed in the corners of his mouth.

  Guard Edwina, who was standing with her back against the wall to the right of the table, pushed off from the wall and gestured to Adonis. “Sit your ass down, now.”

  He didn’t acknowledge her, but he stood still for a moment, swaying, before he slowly, deliberately sat back down in the iron chair. Then he continued in a calmer, slyer tone, “No one understands the importance of impotence, but I do, now. Oh, I do, now.” He looked off to one side at nothing but green-gray paint. “I thought I knew, but I know, now. I know.”

  Guard Edwina gestured to Tony, who got up and went over to her in a corner of the room . “Do you think you’re gonna get anything out of him? Cause, see, when he gets like this, he’s a real bitch back in general pop, and we end up having to put him in solitary until he quits muttering to himself. One time, he even started rhyming. I thought I was gonna stick a shank in him myself, the rhymes were so fuckin’ bad.”