Moonshine

by Jasmine Gower

  “What’s done is done – there’s no helping that now. But what do we do? Cyan may be somewhere out in our realm, and these hunters know enough of us to follow us about. Do you think they’re aware of the office? Or the warehouse?”

  Andre appreciated that she was careful enough to keep her language ambiguous while they spoke in the office, regardless of the wards he had put up. Especially now, as he had no answers to her question. It was possible that mage-hunters were already scouting the front office or Pinstripes.

  “I’m not sure what to do. We should prioritize our own safety first. I will speak to Angel and Grey about this matter, to ensure that the company can protect you or anyone else here from the consequences of my foolishness. From there–” he shrugged, not caring about the cuts and bruises that ached under his shirt as he did so, “–I don’t know what happened to Cyan or how I might even begin going about finding anything on his whereabouts. Unless you know something that might give us a clue?”

  Miss Dell shook her head. “I imagine Cyan will not be able to open the portal back to his realm if the faerie ring is destroyed. Unless he can find another one, he’s trapped in our dimension. And I don’t know what will happen to him, in that case. I think, at best, he may struggle to find food and shelter and will probably end up hurting himself. And I don’t know if there are any other complications to his existing in this plane without a way to return home.”

  Andre sighed. There was no room to worry about Cyan when he had his own people to look after, and especially not if they had no way to help the faerie. Guilt jabbed at his heart, but he couldn’t linger on it. “Very well. Miss Dell, will you please send Angel my way. And–” he winced as he pulled a key from his pocket to hand to her, the key that opened the back way into Pinstripes, “–after that, would you fetch Jonas for me? I fear I’m in no condition to go find him on my own.”

  “Of course.” She took the key and turned to leave.

  “And…” Miss Dell paused, glancing over her shoulder at him. Fury had drained completely from her eyes, replaced only with weary concern, sorrow, and something bitter and cold – possibly fear. Andre opened his mouth to apologize again, but he just as quickly closed it and shook his head. He had expressed his regret already, and their time was better spent focusing on doing what they could to safeguard against his wrongs. Miss Dell left when he said nothing, and Andre waited there for Angel and the berating that she would certainly give him.

  Chapter 11

  Grey closed the office and the speakeasy the next day, after hearing Mr Swarz’s account of what had happened. Daisy had permitted him to share some of the details with Grey, but as she was not privileged to accompany him to that meeting, she never learned which details, specifically, he had needed to bring up in order to fully explain the situation. All Daisy knew was that, upon his return to the office lobby, Mr Swarz insisted on visiting her at home during the day off.

  “To secure your… trinkets,” he had said. “It is still unclear what happened at the faerie ring or what these hunters are after in particular. You and your belongings may still be at the most risk.” Daisy agreed, but she wasn’t keen on the idea of her boss visiting her at home. She wasn’t really much keen on Mr Swarz at all, lately.

  She did her best to clean her apartment, stowing away unwashed clothes so they were at least tucked into drawers rather than sprawling all over furniture, and making a token effort at cleaning the dishes in her sink until she gave up and threw a towel over what remained. What did it matter if Mr Swarz saw that her place was a mess? He already thought of her as an underachieving layabout.

  He arrived midmorning, and the expression on his face when she let him inside was as wrinkled-nosed and offended as she expected. What she didn’t expect was the mystified question that followed the snooty expression. “Don’t I pay you enough for better accommodation than this?” He hung up his coat on one of the hooks by the door and limped further inside, still battered from the attack at the faerie ring. His eyes were hollow and ringed with dark violet, appearing sleepless since that night.

  His inquiry, which didn’t sound as facetious as she might have anticipated from him, confused her. “No, not really.” He glanced between her tiny kitchenette and the cracked window above her bed before casting her a baffled look. She shrugged. “It’s expensive to live in the city. I have more time after working hours because my commute is short, and I can get to the grocery store easily, but convenience is costly.”

  “I pay you a living wage – enough to support a family, if you needed to.” He made a general sweeping gesture at her apartment. It was humiliating. “You could never fit a family into this.”

  “I’ve seen families fit into smaller. And it takes more than a few weeks at a job paying a living wage to afford relocating to a completely different residence.” Mr Swarz only looked more confused and horrified as the conversation went on, so she changed the subject. “So, what do you intend to do to protect my trinkets?” She nodded toward the box sitting on her dresser, and Mr Swarz approached to begin fingering through them delicately.

  “I can cast a ward over this – a field that will harm anyone who gets within a certain radius of the spell’s center point, with the special exception of yourself. I will not be able to ward each item individually, so the box itself will have to serve as the spell’s focal point. You should not store your trinkets elsewhere. I will need a sampling of your genetic code for the spell to recognize you.” He spoke with typical cold professionalism, though he nearly whispered everything he said to keep any neighbors from hearing. The walls here were much thinner than they were at the office, and he probably refrained from casting a silencing ward over her apartment to reserve his energy.

  “Genetic code? Like blood?”

  “That’s… a tad dramatic. A single hair follicle will do.” Daisy plucked a curling thread out by the root and handed it over. Taking it by the root, Mr Swarz rolled it in his good hand between a finger and his thumb, his eyes half closing as he focused. Daisy wasn’t all that familiar with the inner workings of methodical magic, so she wasn’t sure what was happening until a faint blue shimmer appeared as a dome around her box of trinkets. While she stepped closer to examine it, Mr Swarz dropped the hair and reached into the pocket of his pants for a vial of mana.

  “I’m afraid I couldn’t make it invisible – too much energy,” he said after taking a swig, panting softly around his words. “Could you please test it? If anything went wrong with the spell, it’s better to know now while I’m here to fix it.”

  Daisy didn’t care to think about what would happen if the spell “went wrong,” but she reached out and tapped the shimmering field. Her fingertip passed through without an issue. “Well, the exception worked. Should you test it, to make sure it successfully zaps away intruders?” Mr Swarz’s face paled, and she wondered how, exactly, the spell warded others away. “I’m kidding. I’ll trust that you’re capable enough to get it right.”

  “Well, it’s a relief to have your trust, certainly.” He tucked his now-empty vial away and took another glance around her apartment. “I think you are due a raise.”

  Not that again. Normally she wouldn’t balk at the possibility of more money, but she would have sacrificed any amount to get him to leave now that his work was done. “I still don’t intend to move any time soon, no matter how much you pay me. You don’t need to trouble yourself.”

  “I do, though.” He looked right at her, holding her gaze with a gleam in his eyes that almost dared her to turn away. She wondered about this man as she stared back. He couldn’t have been much older than her, not by many years, and his social background had been even worse off than hers if he grew up alone with a mother who worked in a factory. But he was more like Angel than Daisy or any of the working class people in the warehouse – academic-minded and posh and a little stuck-up. How had he climbed up so far in the social hierarchy, and why was he such a tit now that he was there?

  “Sir, you don’t. Just p
ay me what I earn.”

  “That’s what I mean.” His gaze drifted toward the box of trinkets before locking back on her. “I’ve made a mess of things. I misled you about the nature of our company, I strongarmed you into sharing your secrets with me, and then I failed to safeguard those secrets, putting you in danger. You deserve so much more than money as compensation for all my blunders.”

  “Then give me more than money.” Anger flared up, rising in her throat like a sickness. Mr Swarz was too philosophically-minded, too detached from people and their emotions as anything other than theoretical data points. All of the methodology of his magic came out in everything else about him. And Daisy nearly choked on her anger, because it felt so pointless to feel it toward a man who had a heart like a machine. Just as well to be furious at a light bulb.

  She thought her words would confuse him again, but this time his shoulders slumped. “I understand. I’m sorry, Miss Dell; I never meant to disrespect you in any manner. I will–” His head swung toward the window over her bed as his sentence cut off. “What was that?” Daisy turned to look, as well. She couldn’t see anything out there at first, but she heard a staccato of clicks against glass. Leaning over her bed, she peered out and managed to catch sight of a movement beyond the grimy lower edge of the window. A blur of… something tapped on her window. She crawled over the bed to get a better angle, thinking that it was a confused or injured bird, until she saw…

  “Oh, shit!” Daisy jerked open the window and leaned out to grab her visitor, hauling him up and through. Mr Swarz took a startled step toward the bed as she tumbled back onto it with a blue, feathered being, both sprawling over each other.

  Mr Swarz gawked uselessly from where he stood. “Cyan!” The faerie lifted his head and peered up at Mr Swarz with a pleased hum. Daisy interrupted their moment, shoving Cyan off of her and scrambling up onto her knees so she could shut the window and jerk the curtains closed.

  “You foolish creature! It’s full daylight! What if someone saw you?” Cyan titled his head like a puzzled dog. He probably understood her tone, if not the words themselves. Daisy ran a hand over her face. “The pair of you are going to destroy my life. How did you even find me?”

  She got off the bed and hurried to the window in the kitchenette, peering out for sign of any followers before closing the curtains there, too. “He might have been in the area and felt the spell I was casting,” Mr Swarz said. “I imagine his innate abilities with magic must make him particularly sensitive to such.” That still begged the question of how he managed to get so close, but the faerie knew her and her scent. It wasn’t impossible that he had tracked her – or Mr Swarz – to that location.

  Daisy returned to where Cyan knelt on her bed and examined him. He had dark blue bruises over his vibrant body, and his feathers were ruffled, and there was even a patch near one elbow where several appeared to have been torn out. A few loose ones drifted off his arm to land on her bed, and she picked them out of the way and absently shoved them in her pocket. His clawed fingers had blood caked around the cuticles, and there was a cut running down one cheek. She reached out to touch him gingerly, and he didn’t pull away or even flinch. “Poor bastard, just look at you. The human world is no place for a beast like you.” Cyan mumbled in his lyrical faerie language in what sounded like agreement. “Mr Swarz, can you tend to him? I’ll see what I have by way of food for this ridiculous ass.”

  “Of course, Miss Dell.” While he settled at the edge of the bed and began looking over Cyan’s injuries, Daisy went to her kitchenette and dug up the best imitation of a faerie offering she could find. A jar of jam and a stale heel of bread were the best she could do – having already given up all of her chocolate to Cyan the week before – and she brought it over while Mr Swarz ran a hand over the faerie’s face, his eyes half-closed. The cut on Cyan’s face began to shrink, though it did not fade completely. If Jonas were there, he likely could have rid Cyan of every bump and scratch in half a minute. All in all, Daisy was quite tired of having any of her coworkers applying healing magic to injured patients on her bed.

  Cyan happily accepted the pieces of bread dipped in jam that Daisy offered him. “We need to find a way to get him home.”

  Mr Swarz glanced sideways at her, almost like he didn’t care for the suggestion. “Can we take him back to what’s left of his faerie ring? Is it the location itself?”

  Daisy shook her head. “I can’t imagine so. He would have just gone back if that were the case, don’t you suppose? Like I said before, I think the mushrooms themselves are part of it, although admittedly my grandmother never really explained that in great detail. I don’t understand much of…” She recalled when she had taken Mr Swarz to the faerie ring, asking him what he knew of faeries. “Vinnie is Boltivician, right?”

  “What?”

  “You told me that you thought faeries had only been seen in Boltivic since the volcanic eruptions here. It might not necessarily be true, but faeries may be more common there. Do you think a Boltivician might know more about their lore – about how to get one back to its realm?”

  Mr Swarz shook his head. The movement drew Cyan’s attention, and the faerie reached out to pluck the bowler from Mr Swarz’s head, shoving his angular face inside to explore it. “It’s possible, though that might be a bit presumptuous. Vinnie and his family are from Boltivic, though, yes.”

  “You told me that Vinnie practices aural magic, not methodical. That’s traditional to Boltivic, right? If he knows something of auras, he might know something of other types of magic.” It was presumptuous, but something had to be done about Cyan.

  “We can ask him, certainly. Or, rather, you can. I suspect he’s more partial to you.” Considering that Daisy had only spoken to Vinnie on a few occasions, he must have had an impressive dislike of Mr Swarz. “What do we do with Cyan in the meantime?”

  Daisy didn’t dare take him back outside where someone might see him. It would be too easy for that to get back to the mage-hunters after them, if they hadn’t already followed him there. “We have to keep him in here.”

  “By himself?” Mr Swarz cast a wary glance toward the now-warded box. Cyan hadn’t expressed much interest in her trinkets when she had summoned him at the faerie ring, but that wasn’t to say that he wouldn’t grow overly curious without someone there to supervise him.

  “No. And I don’t intend to leave my home unattended when it’s possible that someone traced him here. Can you housesit while I go talk to Vinnie? If it’s not too offensive to your delicate senses to linger in my slum-shack, of course.”

  Open anger lined the crease of his brow. “I just want what’s best for–” He broke off with a sigh, and his scowl somehow seemed abruptly turned inward. “Yes, I will watch over Cyan and your home. Do try to be safe. Keep an eye out to see that you are not followed.”

  She went to locate a scrap of paper and a pen while Mr Swarz gave her the address to Vinnie’s residence. Considering her boss’ warning, she decided before heading out the door to arm herself with her smokescreen headband trinket and a gaudy, onyx ring that could conjure fire. When she stepped out the door, Mr Swarz had returned to tending to Cyan’s injuries as best his highly-specialized healing magic could manage. The faerie kept his eyes locked on Mr Swarz, hardly seeming to notice that Daisy left at all.

  Back at her house, Ming pored over documents and photographs procured by her various informants around Soot City while the others licked their wounds. Jase was refreshing the linen bandage wrapped around one forearm, and two other local toughs – Kelsie and Arnold – cleaned off blades and clubs that had not yet been tended to since following that man out to the farmhouse.

  The venture had been ill-advised, Ming knew. She and her companions had visited the locations offered to her by Johnston. They had gone to stake out activity when they found the dark-haired man in the bowler hat. He had pulled his car up to a four-way stop near where they sat in their own jalopy down a narrow, connecting street with the engine off. Th
ere were no other vehicles or any pedestrians present.

  When his car stalled at the stop, he got out, carrying a cane, and went to lift the hood and tinker around a bit inside before closing it. Ming wouldn’t have thought anything of it until she watched him get back in the driver’s seat, glance around, and pull a small glass bottle from a coat pocket. He appeared not to notice the other car or its occupants at all as he downed the liquid within.

  It was enough to make Ming curious, and they had decided to trail him to wherever his destination was, keeping enough distance that he wouldn’t grow suspicious of them. When he had reached the limits of Soot City and began to head out into the wild countryside, they had to fall back even further, relying on the tire tracks in the ash to continue tracing him. Stopping the car a little ways down the road from the farmhouse the man had led them to, Ming, Jase, and Kelsie had continued on foot while Arnold waited at the wheel. The sight of the rift cracking reality open and the colorful bird-beast was enough to spook them into rash action, and they had paid for their panic and unpreparedness. In the end, they destroyed the mushroom ring surrounding the rift, hoping it would send its ethereal beast back to his plane, but the creature had already scurried off into the ashen woods. There was no way to tell if their frantic gambit had worked.

  Safe at home, Ming focused on piecing together what little solid information she had on the local magicians while she and her companions healed. “How’s your arm?” she asked Jase while examining photographs taken from blurry distances of ordinary-looking townspeople.

  Jase’s ugly features pulled into a grimace. “Birdy bastard got me good. The gashes are still deep, but at least they’re clean. A bit of red meat in my belly, and I should heal up fine.”