“A pixie,” Jessup said, as if Reg should have figured that out.
“Oh. A pixie. And pixies and fairies can’t touch each other.”
“Most beings can’t touch fairy blood. Pixies are no exception.”
“But people can. Human beings,” Reg corrected herself, not wanting to discriminate against fairies or pixies or whatever other beings who might consider themselves ‘people’ too.
Letticia indicated Reg’s hand. “That should be all the answer you need to that question,” she said sternly. “If humans are immune to fairy blood, then why is your hand getting worse instead of better?”
“Oh.”
“The yarrow will help,” Letticia assured her. “We might need the addition of rowan berries as well, but I’ll have to see if I have any dried berries in my stores. I might need to source them out…”
“Amazon Prime,” Sarah advised. “Next day delivery.”
Reg fought the urge to laugh.
“Come here,” Letticia instructed. “We’ll apply the milfoil directly to the wound and keep it covered. I’ll also make you a tea to fight what’s already in your bloodstream. Lucky for you, milfoil has a pleasant enough taste.”
Reg looked out the car window as Jessup drove through parts of the town that Reg had never seen before.
She hadn’t expected Jessup to ask her to ride along with her to meet with the Rosdews. After having scared Ruan off, Reg figured Jessup would want her to be as far away from the investigation as possible. But Jessup hadn’t seen it that way.
“You were the last one to see Ruan that we know of. These are a people who will lie and deny everything, including that Ruan was ever at school that day. I want a witness as to what he said. Particularly that the kidnapping was pixie business.”
“How will that make any difference?”
“Maybe it won’t. But I’m getting worried about Calliopia. If the pixies have her… there’s no telling what they might do.”
“Like… what?”
Jessup looked at her sidelong. Her fingers tightened on the steering wheel. “They may look and act human, but don’t be fooled by that. They do not have the same scruples as we do. They have human intelligence, but they don’t have the same social constructs as we do. If you hadn’t touched Ruan with fairy blood… there’s no telling what he might have done to you.”
Reg’s stomach turned. The unseen world was full of dangers that she had no idea of. She’d thought that she was going to the school to talk to a human youth about the disappearance of his sweetheart. She couldn’t have been much farther from the truth.
“Is it safe to talk to them?”
“I have certain wards. It’s not one hundred percent, but when was police work ever one hundred percent safe?”
“Well, considering where you ended up on the last case… I’m guessing Black Sands isn’t exactly Mayberry.”
“No. Things can get pretty wild around here. You might not have the drugs and gangs of big-city USA, but believe me, we’ve got plenty to rival it.”
“And a smaller work force.”
“That’s right.”
The scenery outside Reg’s window was getting more and more disreputable. They had left behind the retirement villages and single-family bungalows. They hadn’t gone to the green country and mansions like when they had traveled to Calliopia’s house. Instead, Reg saw slums that would have rivaled any of the big cities. Falling-down concrete buildings, shacks built from cardboard shipping boxes, cars that had probably last been driven in the seventies. There was no lack of people on the streets. Youths hanging around smoking and selling drugs or other goods or services. Old men and women with shopping carts piled high with everything they owned in the world. Children playing games or crouching in ditches, some of the little ones stark naked, a state of affairs that didn’t appear to garner any special attention.
A rock hit the car. Jessup hit the brake, looking around for the culprit. No one appeared to be looking at them, but Reg suspected a group of youth huddled close together, talking and laughing with each other. Jessup shook her head and kept driving, deciding not to pursue it. She probably would have had to call for backup, and they had a job to do. At least it had been a rock and not a bullet.
“I didn’t know…” Reg couldn’t finish her sentence. She shook her head. She’d lived on the streets. She knew what it was like. But she’d never imagined that such a grim place existed right in Black Sands. When she’d been researching places to move to on the internet, Reg had imagined Black Sands to be an idyllic village. No poverty, no violent crime, a place full of rich marks and other people taking advantage of the opportunities.
“It’s nothing to brag about,” Jessup agreed. “On one hand, we have plenty of affluence and magically-enhanced lifestyles. On the other, we have…” she gestured to indicate the streets around her. “Dante’s inferno. Misery on a grand scale.”
“I guess there’s no escaping it. You can’t have one without the other.”
Jessup concentrated on her driving, her eyes moving back and forth as she avoided potholes and detritus and watched out for other dangers that might lurk nearby.
“Most of the practitioners, at least the ones I know in Black Sands, will tell you there’s no objective good or evil. But that’s a cop-out. Believe me, good and evil are alive and well in Black Sands.”
They reached a dead end. Reg expected Jessup to consult a map or GPS and to turn back around, but she didn’t. She opened her door and got out.
“This is it,” she told Reg, leaning down to look into the car. “Let’s go.”
Reg climbed reluctantly out of the car. She didn’t like the looks of things. The buildings around her didn’t appear to be apartments, but industrial buildings, most of them falling around. It wasn’t so much a dead end as a place where debris had collected and never been cleared away. For all Reg knew, there had once been a through street, but it had long since been obscured.
“What is this place? People live here?”
“You’d be surprised at the conditions some beings live in.”
Jessup led the way into one of the buildings. A door swung loose on its hinges, the latch long since broken and rusted. Reg felt a chill as they entered, and tried to tell herself that it was just the coolness of the building, concrete walls blocking out the heat of the sun. Jessup walked around puddles, her hand resting on her sidearm.
“You’re sure this is where we’re supposed to meet? You’re sure it’s safe?”
Jessup said nothing. Reg’s mind started to crank through scenarios. What if Jessup were leading her into a trap? What if Jessup, like Hawthorne-Rose, was a dirty cop? She could be leading Reg to her death. Reg’s body would never be discovered in the abandoned building. The rats and other vermin would eat her flesh and scatter her bones until there was nothing left of her.
“Is this the right place? Did you check the address?”
“Shut up, Rawlins. I need to be able to hear.”
Reg zipped her lip and stayed as close as she could to Jessup without stepping on her heels. She strained her ears for any sound. Was Jessup expecting to hear something and hadn’t? Or had she heard something and was trying to figure out what it was?
Reg could hear water dripping. Not an unusual sound somewhere as humid as Florida. She couldn’t hear any footsteps but their own, or any noises that sounded deliberate.
Jessup led her through a couple of doors, into stairways that went down below ground level, each level getting darker and cooler. Reg had heard that they didn’t build basements in Florida because of the water levels, but there were obviously a couple of exceptions.
The halls turned into tunnels with rounded roofs and the temperature turned downright chilly. There was condensation on the rough-hewn walls, and a trickle of foul-smelling water running down the center of the tunnel. As they went farther, the stench grew worse. Reg was always glad in such circumstances that she wasn’t Erin, a super-smeller who would have been doubled over
retching by that point. Instead, Reg just breathed through her mouth and tried not to think about it. By her guess, they were in an old sewer network. Maybe an abandoned one that wasn’t used any more, though she was sure it would fill up with water during a storm. Jessup stopped abruptly. Reg nearly ran into her.
“What is it?” Reg whispered.
“Wait.”
Reg listened, wondering if Jessup had heard something. Water dripping, and maybe footsteps? She couldn’t tell if someone was splashing through the puddles toward them or whether it was just the irregular dripping from the walls and ceiling.
Jessup tapped on an access panel on the wall. A voice answered, but it didn’t come from behind the panel. It seemed to be all around them. Reg strained her eyes, but couldn’t see any speakers.
“Who enters the realm of the piskies?”
“Detective Jessup. Making inquiries of Brannock and Demelza Rosdew.”
“You have no jurisdiction here.”
“Under treaties with your people, I do. This is an official investigation. You can’t deny me entrance.” Jessup said it with complete authority and certainty. If she had any doubts whether the pixies would let her in, it didn’t show.
There was silence from the sentry. Reg waited for Jessup to make some sign as to what they would do next. Jessup waited. Time passed. Water dripped. The seconds drew into minutes; a long, silent interval during which Reg tried to stay focused and alert. Not an easy task with a mind that jumped from one thing to the next like a squirrel through the trees. Reg had often wondered what it would be like to live in the mind of someone who focused on one thing at a time and could live inside her head in perfect peace and serenity. It sounded like an impossible task.
Jessup reached over and knocked on the access panel. Loud this time, like a policeman normally knocked when rousing someone from their bed at two o’clock in the morning. A firm demand.
“Enter at your own risk,” the sentry’s voice sighed.
⋆ Chapter Nineteen ⋆
C
ome on.”
Reg expected the access panel to open up into another tunnel, or for some other hidden route to appear, but nothing changed. They continued to walk down the tunnel just as they had been, walking in the same direction as they had been. Reg looked around for some marker showing the boundary of the pixie’s lands, but couldn’t see anything that differentiated one part of the tunnel from another.
But in a few minutes, she started to hear voices, echoes bouncing back to them from somewhere farther down the line. Shadows flickered on the wall, but she couldn’t see who cast them. Eventually, just as the babble of voices and laughter grew to a level where Reg could hardly stand it, they entered a larger room where several tunnels joined together, and Reg saw the pixies.
Like Ruan, they were mostly dressed in brown. Worn and tattered clothing, mainly, though there were a few new suits among them. The girls were dressed pretty much the same as the boys. They all appeared to be young. Some looked like Ruan, nine or ten years old, some like teenagers. No one over twenty, certainly.
Several of the older teenagers swarmed toward them. Reg saw Jessup’s hand go to her weapon, watching them warily.
“You have no business here,” one of the boys said.
“I’m here on an official police investigation. According to the treaty between our peoples, you are expected to cooperate.”
“Not if police poke their noses into piskie business.”
“This is not family business. A girl has been kidnapped. I want to know where Ruan Rosdew is and how he is involved.”
“Kidnapped,” the boy scoffed. “No one has been kidnapped. Fairies kidnap. We are piskies.”
“Brannock Rosdew?” Jessup called, looking around at the pixies.
They looked stubborn, but eventually a young man appearing to be seventeen or eighteen stepped forward.
“I am Brannock.”
Reg laughed. She looked at Jessup. Jessup had said that Brannock was Ruan’s father, but the pixie wasn’t old enough to be anyone’s parent.
“Where would you like to go to talk?” Jessup asked.
The boy looked around at the other pixies, as if he would insist that they talk right there in front of everyone else, then he scowled.
“Follow me,” he said grudgingly.
Jessup and Reg followed close behind him. He moved quickly, light on his feet, darting ahead of them.
“Try to keep up,” Jessup warned.
They were out of breath by the time the pixie indicated a wooden door. Reg realized with a start that they were no longer in the round sewer tunnels, but once again the walls were straight and square. She guessed that they were handmade planks. But they were still underground.
“What happens when it rains?”
The pixie boy looked at her. “Humans drown.”
Reg opened her mouth to argue with this unexpected answer, but then didn’t know how to counter. She hadn’t been asking what happened to humans when it rained, she’d been asking what happened to the pixie settlement, so far underground and apparently connected to the town’s wastewater system. But the pixie’s answer demonstrated that they had no concerns about this. When it rained, it was humans who drowned, not pixies.
The boy pushed the door open. Reg didn’t see any latch or lock on it. They entered a small, square room. Cold, damp, and dark. The boy left the door standing open, letting in the dim light of the corridor. Reg gazed out at the corridor, her brows drawing down. There had been no windows, lights, or candles in the corridor. How were the halls being illuminated?
The answer would, of course, be pixie magic. But Reg wanted it to be explained to her in scientific terms she understood. Not just explained away as magic.
A young girl entered the room. Fourteen or fifteen, with a black kerchief around her head and red spots on her pale cheeks. She could have been no more than four feet tall.
She went to the boy, and they stood together, staring at Reg and Jessup with open hostility.
“Demelza?” Jessup asked.
The girl nodded her head. Reg looked at Jessup, confused. Jessup raised her brows.
“They all look like that,” she said with a shrug.
“Like children?”
“Not like ugly old trolls,” Demelza said.
Reg stood with her mouth open while Jessup laughed. “You did ask, Rawlins.”
Reg decided she’d better keep her mouth shut, or the pixies were going to make them feel even less welcome than they did already. She noticed uneasily how sharp Demelza’s teeth were.
“Sorry.”
Demelza switched her gaze to Jessup. “You want questions answered, you ask, and be on your way.”
“Your boy, Ruan, where is he?”
She shrugged. “We do not track our children like humankind.”
“Does that mean you don’t know where he is?”
Demelza looked at her husband and neither of them answered.
“He was at the school and then disappeared. I’m concerned with his safety. Something might have happened to him. After Calliopia, I’m concerned that he might have run into someone that meant him harm.”
“Pixies take care of themselves.”
“Something could have happened to him.”
They both stared at her with their ice-blue eyes as if what she said were of absolutely no concern. Reg wondered if their emotions were different from human emotions, or were just expressed differently. They must have some kind of feelings towards their offspring. Otherwise, how would the race survive?
“How old is he?” she asked Jessup. “You could file a missing person report on him yourself, without their input, couldn’t you?”
Jessup looked at her.
“Well?”
“We’re talking about a race that lives hundreds of years,” Jessup said. “Ruan might not yet be a mature pixie—I really have no way of knowing—but he might be decades older than you or me.”
“Oh.”
Jessup turned her attention back to Brannock and Demelza. “What do you know about Calliopia?”
Brannock scratched at a spot on his jacket. Reg was cold, wishing she had dressed more warmly for the adventure. She hadn’t known that she’d be underground, far from the Florida sun.
“Fairy name,” Brannock said. “Fairy girl.”
“Yes, she’s a fairy girl. And she was kidnapped. At this point, I’m thinking she was kidnapped by a pixie.”
“Fairies steal children from their beds. Piskies… we do not do this.”
It was interesting, Reg thought, that the pixie apparently knew that Calliopia had disappeared from her bedroom and not snatched off the street or at school. Was that because he knew something, or just from the rumors that were doubtless flying around?
“Pixies have been known to steal children too,” Jessup countered.
Brannock shook his head. “Piskies take care of children who have wandered off. Showing hospitality.” He spread his arms wide to indicate the bare, cold little room as if it were a palace.
“Luring children still qualifies as kidnapping.”
“Children need to be cared for.” He smiled, showing off his teeth, sharp like his wife’s. Like a carnivore’s teeth. Reg shuddered, hoping that she wasn’t about to find out that pixies ate the children they stole.
“Where is Calliopia?”
“She is not here.”
Jessup took a slow look around, but it wasn’t like there was anything in the room that would tell them what had happened to Calliopia. It was a bare room with a dirt floor and plank walls. There was a table along one wall, with no chairs or other furniture.
“Where did you take her?”
“Why would we take her?”
“She liked Ruan. Maybe he liked her too. Maybe he asked for her to wife.”
“Piskies do not wed fairies.”
“It’s been known to happen.”
“Fairies and piskies are not compatible.”
A Psychic with Catitude Page 11
