“Club soda.” The bartender nodded and started to pour her a glass. “And I’m looking for someone. He may be a regular here.”
Club soda splashed across the counter as the bartender’s hand shook. Some of the other men looked up. The bartender grabbed a cloth and hastily mopped up the spilled liquid. “Jack Elliott?” he murmured without looking up at Tango.
“No.” Tango glanced briefly at the men at the far end of the bar. Most of them were already turning away. One continued to glare at her, until another put his hand on the angry man’s shoulder and whispered something to him. The man’s hostility collapsed and he looked away with tears in his eyes. Tango heard an uncomfortable cough, as if someone were trying to suppress a sob.
“Oh. Sorry.” The bartender put her club soda down in front of her. He looked at it for a moment, then grabbed a wedge of lemon and stuck it on the side of the glass. “Sorry,” he said again.
“It’s okay.” Tango picked up the lemon and squeezed its juice into the soda. “His name’s Riley — at least that’s probably the name he’d give.”
The bartender nodded understandingly. “Lots of guys don’t feel comfortable using their full names around here. What does he look like?”
“Scrawny. Short red hair, thinning on top. Glasses. Kind of geeky. Probably wears ballcaps a lot.”
“Yeah.” The bartender swiped his cloth across the counter again. “I know him. He comes in from time to time. Drinks whiskey sours, but he’s not exactly what I’d call a regular.”
Tango smiled. “Do you know where I can find him?” “Sorry.”
“How about one of the other guys? Do you think they would? Was there anybody he came in with regularly?”
“A good-looking blond guy. Very quiet, didn’t drink.” The bartender glanced over his shoulder. “One of the guys might know your friend, but this isn’t a good time to ask.” He dropped a pen and a napkin on the bartop and shoved them toward her. “Leave your number. I’ll ask them. If they know or he comes in, I’ll give you a call.”
“I don’t have a number right now. I’m just visiting town. How about if I just come back in later? My name’s Tango. I saw a noteboard by the door — can I leave a message there asking people who know him to talk to you?”
“Sure. I’m Todd. If you’re going to put something up, I think I can get you some better paper.” He rummaged around and came up with an old, electric-blue flyer. “Use the back of this.” As he watched her write out a description of Riley, he asked hesitantly, “Do you mind if I ask why you’re looking for him?”
“I was supposed to meet him, but I haven’t been able to get in touch with him.” It was mostly the truth.
Todd sucked on his lower lip. “When was the last time you talked to him?”
“A couple of days ago,” Tango lied. She looked up.
“Why?”
“Just concerned.” Todd paused and added, “I don’t want to get you worried, but one of our regulars — Jack
— was found murdered in a park this morning. If your friend is missing...”
Riley might have been murdered as well. Todd’s concern for a stranger was touching. “I don’t think so.” She put down the pen and looked over her message. “I’m sorry about Jack.”
“Thanks. I hope you find your friend, Tango. I’ll keep an eye open for him.”
There were tacks on the noteboard. Tango put up her message and sighed. No luck at Hopeful. She left the bar and went back out to the street. The air was hot and muggy, the white light of full sunshine blinding. She pulled a pair of sunglasses out of her pocket and slid them on. “Excuse me,” she said to a woman walking past. The woman paused briefly, looking at her with a distant, polite gaze as though the exchange was distasteful. “How do I get to Yorkville?”
At the end of the 1960s, Yorkville had been the center of Toronto’s drug culture. Hippies, students, radicals, and drug dealers had gathered there. They’d philosophized. They’d protested. They’d hung out. Under cover of darkness, in the smoky havens of coffeehouses and behind the walls of once-elegant homes turned into flophouses, they’d left reality behind. Drugs had circulated freely — or almost freely. Somebody had to be making a profit somewhere. That somebody had been the Unseelie Kithain of Toronto. At least so went the rumors that Tango had heard. The court had ridden the drugs of the psychedelic counterculture to power in Toronto; a brief power that had lasted only until the good citizens of the city had had enough. The police had moved in and cleared the hippies out of Yorkville.
That brief power had been enough, though. The Unseelie were still in Yorkville. Tango walked along the street that had given the district its name, and felt the presence of other Kithain brush against her nerves. She couldn’t see them, but she knew they were there, congregating somewhere just out of sight. After fifteen years, the feeling was an unfamiliar thrill.
Yorkville, like the hippies, students and radicals of the sixties, had aged. It had acquired money and influence. Now it was one of the trendiest parts of Toronto. The once-filthy flophouses had been restored, if not to their original elegance, then at least to a kind of acceptable modishness. No one lived there, of course. Instead, the buildings housed fashionable restaurants, stylish clubs and expensive shops. The only signs of protest were the second- and third-floor offices of special interest lobby groups, their names posted on engraved brass plaques. Where hippies had hung out, there were sidewalk patios. More patios clustered on rooftops and balconies. Alleys between the buildings had been renamed “lanes” and “mews” and boasted tasteful street signs. In their shadowed depths lurked more shops. Everyone wanted a place in Yorkville.
Tango turned down one of the mews and crossed over to another street, letting her instincts guide her toward the other Kithain. Kennings, like so much other magic, didn’t come easily to her. In her youth, she had known Kithain whose talents in kenning were so strong that they could sense the tiniest drop of old faerie blood in humans, or feel the lost remnants of dancing circles buried under the asphalt of parking lots. Of course, those had also been the first Kithain to sink into depression, sick and dying, poisoned by the mundane Banality that sought to erase the last remnants of enchantment from the world.
Sometimes it was good not to be too sensitive.
She turned again, walked another half-block, and stopped. She cursed. The other Kithain felt farther away now than they had before. Tango resisted the urge to think that such a thing was impossible. Nothing, or almost nothing, was impossible around Kithain, and especially around the concentrated Glamour of a Kithain freehold. It was entirely possible that the feelings she had been chasing were like echoes, ricocheting around Yorkville before fading away.
She sat down on a bench, letting the flood of humans that crowded Yorkville wash past her. Teenagers in fashionable clothes bought with their parents’ money. Students from the university a few blocks away. Thirty- and forty-somethings in business suits and dresses, in spite of the heat. Hip tourists in summer clothes, laughing and chatting brightly, bumping into people. Locals walking in little pockets of polite isolation, never touching anybody, apologizing to the tourists who bumped into them. Tango watched them as the tingling feelings of Kithain presence waxed and waned. She took a deep breath. She was thinking like a human... or an old grump. The court was hidden with Kithain magic. She wasn’t going to be able to find it or even another Kithain simply by looking.
Tango stood up, closed her eyes, and spun around three times. Then, trying to ignore the stares of the tourists, she apologized to the businessman she’d bumped, and went into a gourmet ice-cream store. When she came out again, a cup of ginger ice cream in hand, a Kithain was parking his car outside the store. Tango stared, then closed her eyes with a quiet groan.
The Kithain was tall, lean and young —- maybe twenty-one or twenty-two. He wore a white T-shirt that set off his deep tan to perfection and clung to the flat muscles of his torso as his sun-faded jeans clung to his legs. His face, sharp and sculpted, was with
out flaw. A diamond stud flashed in his ear. His hair was like Rumplestiltskin’s straw under the sun. He was driving a vintage white Mustang convertible. Even without kenning him, Tango knew that his fae seeming would be as handsome and perfect as his human seeming. He was a sidhe, one of the aristocracy of the Kithain, very likely one of the nobles of Duke Michael’s court. As arrogant as a unicorn with a poker up its butt, and twice as proud.
A sidhe was the last kind of Kithain Tango would have wanted to meet. It had been inevitable that she would encounter one at court — Duke Michael was a sidhe himself — but she had been hoping to meet some other lowborn Kithain first. A gossipy eshu. A hedonistic satyr. Even a crude, vicious redcap. Anyone but a sidhe. In this case, unfortunately, she didn’t have any choice. Taking a last bite of the ice cream, she dropped the cup into a trash can and approached the sidhe just as he was turning around. He saw her before she could speak, and flashed her a smile that would have sent a human woman’s heart into pounding delirium. “Hello....”
She cut his sidhe charm off curtly. “I’m looking for a pooka named Riley, Jester to Duke Michael’s court. Where can I find him?”
The bright smile didn’t falter. “Riley or Duke Michael?”
“Riley.”
“You’re not from Toronto, are you?”
What was your first clue? sprang immediately to Tango’s tongue, but she bit the words back. If she was going to get the sidhe’s help, it would be better not to antagonize him. “No. I’m not. Riley’s an old friend of mine. He invited me here for Highsummer....”
This time the sidhe cut her off. “Do you know where he is?”
The demand grated against her nerves. “If I did, would I be asking you?” Tango snapped back.
The sidhe’s smile vanished into a hard line, like high clouds scudding across the sun. “Come with me.” He walked off without even a backward glance, taking her obedience for granted. Tango watched him go, wishing that she had any choice but to follow him. Except she didn’t. She couldn’t risk trying to find another Kithain and then failing. Cursing, she ran after him.
The sidhe led her down the very mews she had passed through before, but this time walking the other way, south to north. Halfway along, he turned sharply to the left, disappearing into the recessed entrance of a trendy sushi shop with carefully crafted plastic imitations of its creations in the window. When she reached the entrance, Tango turned as well and went in. There was no sign of the sidhe in the sushi shop. Flustered, apologizing to the maitre d’ and silently cursing the sidhe, she stepped outside again.
“Down here, sister.”
The voice was old and rough. She glanced down. A deep shadow resolved itself into a narrow doorway at a right angle to the door to the sushi shop. Two steps led down, and then the passage turned sharply and more steep stairs led into darkness. Standing in the corner of the turn was an old woman so gnarled, and dressed in clothes so dark and wrinkled, that she blended in with the stones and mortar of the wall. Another nocker, as ancient a Kithain as Tango had ever seen. The old nocker spoke again. “You following Dex, sister?”
“The sidhe?” Tango stepped down into the shadowy passage. There was a dim light at the bottom of the steep stairs, and she could hear music. The smell of cigarette smoke mixed with the damp odor of the stone.
“Like a piece of the sun, isn’t he? If I were younger...” The other nocker pumped her hips. “Whumpfh! He wouldn’t know what hit him.”
“I presume this is Duke Michael’s court?”
“Such as it is, yes.”- A twisted hand emerged from the dark clothes. Tango shook it. “I’m Ruby, the duke’s gatekeeper. You better get down there. Dex doesn’t like having to wait.”
“Thanks.” Tango started down the steps, then glanced back up. The duke’s gatekeeper had already faded back into the wall. “Ruby, I’m looking for Riley. Is he here?”
“You’re a friend of Riley’s?” Ruby’s voice was startled. “Sweet almighty, sister! Hurry and get down there before the duke gets angry!”
Abruptly, Tango was at the base of the stairs, as if the step she had been standing on had suddenly become the bottom one. A black-painted door with one small window of grimy glass opened and the sidhe, Dex, glared at her. “Where were you?”
Tango glared back. “You took the corner too fast and lost me.” She pushed past him into Duke Michael’s court.
Nothing, as she had observed back in San Francisco, was quite the way it used to be in Kithain society. Once the Unseelie tradition had been not merely a rejection of the values of the Seelie, but a dark reflection of it as well. Where the Seelie Kithain had been all golden pomp and pageantry in brightly lit fairytale halls, the Unseelie had been disorder and abandon... in shadowy fairytale halls. No more. Duke Michael’s court was disorder and abandon in a shadowy pool hall.
The only light came from lamps over the three pool tables that filled the big room, and from a pass-through window into a snackbar. There were maybe a dozen Kithain present, playing pool, watching the others play pool, or just talking in the dark corners. The ceiling was low enough that Dex could have easily placed his palm against it — at one end of the hall, a massive troll brushed the ceiling with his head. The floor was cheap black-and-white tile, and the grubby walls were decorated with old travel posters for such exotic destinations as Chicago and Atlanta. A portable stereo blasted out some British rock group that Tango only recognized because the DJ at Pan’s refused to play them. There was a haze of smoke in the air.
And yet the place was filled with Glamour that sent ripples of excitement singing through every part of Tango’s body. So much Glamour that a kenning settled over her spontaneously, the magic of the court calling to her Kithain soul.
The hall was still dark, but now it was the great hall of a dusky palace, with an arched ceiling that soared up into shadows. Tapestries hung on the walls in place of posters. The floor was marble. The smoke was heavy, sweet incense. The pass-through to the snackbar was a passage into a shining banqueting hall. The Kithain were fabulous courtiers in rich costumes bearing the duke’s crest. A few things were essentially the same, though enhanced by the Glamour. The music, for example, was still British rock, but it seemed to emanate from a phantom chamber quartet. The pool tables were still pool tables, except that one, down at the end of the room where the troll stood, was raised up on a dais. Two sidhe played there. One was dressed in rich black velvet embroidered in silver thread, with a black halfcape caught around his neck with a silver chain. His face and build were identical to Dex’s, although his skin was pale instead of tanned, he wore a pearl-drop earring instead of a diamond stud, and his hair was the blond of white gold. The other sidhe wore unrelieved black. He was as handsome as his opponent, but his hair was as black as his clothing, and he wore no ornamentation at all. He was also somewhat older, perhaps Tango’s age. There was something odd about his face; his eyes were strangely shadowed, it seemed. He bent over the table and lined up a shot.
Tango couldn’t see what the shot was, but she heard the clack of pool balls striking each other, followed by soft thuds as they dropped into pockets. Dex’s twin winced. “Shit.”
That one very mundane syllable broke the spell that the Glamour wove over the court. The pool hall snapped back to everyday reality. Tapestries were posters, marble was cheap tile. The Kithain at the head table were dressed in normal clothes. The black-haired sidhe wore dark pants and a black silk shirt. Dex’s twin wore patched black jeans, motorcycle boots and a black T-shirt — with a pearl in his ear. He took a deep, frustrated drag on a cigarette as his opponent rapidly cleared the table. “Good game, Your Grace.”
Duke Michael shook his head. “Don’t flatter me, Sinister,” he said flatly, “I missed pockets I should have made easily.”
A Kithain with the wiry hair and swarthy face of a satyr stepped up and whispered in the duke’s ear. The duke looked toward the door and nodded. “Dexter,” he called. “Come forward.”
Riley’s description ha
d been right, Tango decided. Duke Michael might have been Unseelie, but his rigid demeanor carried ail of the traditions of the Kithain. Including the arrogance of the sidhe. Dex brought her up to stand across the pool table from the duke. “Your Grace, she is looking for Riley. She says she is a friend of his and that he invited her to the Highsummer Party.”
“Dexter.” The duke’s voice was quiet, pitched just so that only those gathered around the table could hear it. “Does she have a name?”
Dex flushed. The sidhe that the duke had called Sinister snickered. Tango took a swift, confident step away from Dex. “I’m Tango.” The duke raised one eyebrow. Tango realized suddenly what it was that seemed odd about his face. His left eye was dark and shadowed, but his right was absolutely black. Not bruised. The eyeball itself was truly black, and cold. An artificial sphere of enameled metal. It was a rare thing to see a sidhe disfigured. “Your Grace,” she added, as smoothly as possible. The words almost caught in her throat, partly out of her dislike for the sidhe and their overbearing titles, partly out of shameful, disgusting pleasure at the duke’s disfigurement.
Duke Michael gave her a calm nod. “Do you know where Riley is, Tango?”
Briefly, Tango considered lying to him. He didn’t meet me at the airport here, Your Grace. He told me to meet him at his apartment, Your Grace, but didn’t give me the address. In San Francisco, Your Grace. Anything to avoid embarrassing herself with the true story in front of the court — and the sidhe. Then she looked at that scar again, and at the way Duke Michael w7as holding his pool cue. A normal person would hold it casually. Lightly. Duke Michael held his like a king would hold a scepter. No less than Dex, Duke Michael expected obedience. And a sidhe didn’t get to be a Kithain duke on expectations and polite questions alone. Tango wondered where he had gotten that scar. It was hard to swallow her pride, but she forced herself to do it. “Not really, Your Grace. I was expecting to find him here in Toronto, but he might still be in San Francisco.” Sinister and Dexter, as well as the satyr at the duke’s elbow, stirred uneasily. Duke Michael frowned. “Why do you say that?”
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