Sweet Child

by Brie Tart

  The open space in front of her was empty, and a couple of faint street lights illuminated it through the line of gaping windows over the entrance. Plenty for her to see by while in her Hellfire mode. Something should have cast a shadow or made a shuffling noise against the cement floor.

  “Catch.” Yoel drew something long and flat from the lower lining of his coat. He tossed it to Helen, and she caught worn leather. He brought out a gun with a long tube at the end of its barrel, a suppressor. The safety snapped off with a click, and he pulled the slide back. “What is it?”

  “Something followed us.” Helen said it with more certainty than she felt. She saw empty air filling the factory, heard the wind whisking through the gaps in the roof, tasted and smelled fall’s crisp bite, and felt the cold touch of night creeping under her jacket. No solid enemies to face. That energy still set off her gut. A fae being lurked around them somewhere.

  The air shimmered in the corner of Helen’s eye. Her instinct moved her faster than she could and unhoned paranoia whipped her around. She yanked the machete from its sheath and slashed.

  A shriek tore through the factory and bounced across the brick walls.

  Helen followed the scent of burning meat and slashed again in the same place. Her blade caught and tore through something like fabric. A glassy sheen reflected bits of light on her other side. The same one or a second one? She spun around, the steel cutting with her. Smoke wafted from the area. The flickers fled toward the door.

  Two muted gunshots fired from behind Helen. They didn’t make Helen’s ears ring, but they’d catch the attention of outside passersby.

  The shimmers dropped to the floor. They shifted into human-sized figures as the copper taste of blood surrounded them. But lead rounds couldn’t bring down a fae, could they?

  One of them resembled a woman in a starched, old-timey dress and apron. She hugged her wet side and the bottom of her skirt was torn. The more masculine of the two in the thick black jacket and a newsboy cap clutched his chest as he stood up. He scrunched his mustached face at Yoel as he rubbed his soaked chest. Those weren’t leg shots. The bullets would’ve killed those fae if they were human.

  The guy jumped up and charged toward Yoel and Helen. In a blink, he vanished back into a shimmering specter. His partner had smoke coming from her as she propped herself up and flickered in and out of view. The machete wound must be disrupting her powers.

  Something slammed into Helen’s gut, five knuckles on a meaty fist. Good. If he was that close, she could grapple him. She ducked and grabbed for where his legs would be. She scooped at empty air and fumbled forward. A sharp elbow jabbed into her kidney. She went down to her knees. These things could turn into ghosts too?

  A boot kicked into her forearm, then her wrist. The machete skittered out of her fingers.

  The light fluttered behind her, going for Yoel.

  The woman’s shape disappeared for longer. She reappeared, bracing herself against the wall and inching toward the door. She’d reach it and get away soon.

  Another shot reverberated through the room. Soon somebody in the surrounding suburban areas would notice the sound of fireworks and call the cops to the abandoned district. They didn’t have time to drag the fight out. Helen scrambled for her blade. She couldn’t forget about the lady fae, or else she’d run off and warn her boss. But if she ran further away, it would take her longer to get back to help Yoel.

  Think, Hellfire. The machete was like a giant steak knife, right? She used to hang with some rednecks as a kid, and they’d have steak knife tossing competitions at an old shed. Helen won a few of those. She lined up the throw using the red spot in the woman’s side as a bullseye. She flung the blade with the same twist of her wrist she used to. The machete spun end over end at the aproned fae.

  The fae faded to a shape of glistening space and the blade held. Had she turned to an incorporeal phantom? Would the steel stick?

  The machete point hit the wall with a resounding thwack. The handle floated in the air with a fourth of its blade imbedded into an invisible body.

  The specter wailed as she collapsed and rematerialized. Smoke rose from her as she convulsed on the floor, and black veins rotted every part of her they touched.

  Helen bounded for Yoel.

  Yoel had his back to a brick wall and held his pistol steady in front of him. He fired off another shot point blank. The glassy figure turned solid, holding his nose and howling.

  Helen tackled him and shoved her knee into his back while grabbing a heap of his shaggy hair. She ground his bleeding face into the cement, red haze covering her vision. His cries of pain stirred a macabre impulse in her, and curved her mouth in a wicked smile. This is what she wanted: to make them suffer the same way she had.

  The body under Helen vanished. Her knee collided with the floor, and stinging spasms ran through her leg.

  The shimmering field flowed toward the doorway. Helen couldn’t keep up with that whizzing flash until her leg stopped. Her machete was still stuck out of the other one, out of reach.

  Yoel grabbed a spiked steel bar from the nearest pile of debris and closed the distance between him and the glassy cloud. He raised the pointed edge of the rod like a spear and plunged into it.

  The fae screamed as his body took shape with the bar sticking out of his back. He curled into the fetal position as the toxic web of lines from the iron turned him to a twitching, blistered heap like his partner.

  “Your sense for fae is better. I never even felt them on our way here.” Yoel pulled back on his pistol’s slide, The bullet in the barrel flew out. He clicked the safety back into place and slipped the semi-automatic back into his coat pocket. “They call themselves Hidden Folk. While they’re usually one of the benign middle caste races, some act as servants to the Light Elves.”

  “Why’d they follow us? How’d they even keep up with us on foot?” Helen went to the woman’s corpse and yanked her machete out. She wiped the blade on the fae’s apron.

  “To the latter, I’ve heard they can use magical, hidden roads to make travel shorter in the mortal plane. As for the former…their master either suspected you were Ailpien’s target under a glamour, or wanted to gather intelligence on us.” Yoel shook his head, raking back his bangs. “Either way, I’ll need to change your charm so this doesn’t happen again.”

  “We’ve gotta do something about these bodies.” Helen sheathed her machete and handed it to Yoel without a second thought. “The Seelie could find out about us when they come to clean them up.”

  “Yes.” Yoel put the machete back into his coat lining and glanced between the different piles of debris. “Burning them would be best. We’ll have to settle with burying them in whatever steel we can find here. It should degrade their corpses enough so the Seelie can’t recover anything from them.”

  “I’ll chop them up so it’s quicker.” Helen dragged the woman deeper into the room by her shoulders. This might take more time than they had before cops showed up. She couldn’t afford to be sloppy, though, not when she’d gone from the hunter to the hunted.

  * * *

  The two of them managed to dispose of the bodies right before sirens flashed down the road. Yoel helped Helen walk her bike out of sight for a few blocks until it was safe to hop on and ride away. They pulled up to the bookstore, parked, and Helen followed Yoel’s beeline into the shop’s basement. Yoel kept a tense silence as he locked every door behind them. His face stayed shut up and stoic. Impossible to read.

  Had Helen done something stupid? No. As far as Yoel knew she was defending herself. Then there was that alteration in the mirror vision: the black glass sword Ailpien had supernaturally photoshopped over the ladder rung she’d originally used. She held her questions in as long as it took for the two of them to descend the stairs.

  “We’re back,” Helen blurted. “What’s going on?”

  “In short, Ailpien has used you to take the first step in provoking another war between the fae courts.” Yoel ran his finge
rs over the rows of old tomes set along the basement’s shelves. His shoulders slumped. He seemed tired, like he’d finally given in under the weight of too much stress. “And you need to leave the city. Don’t remove that charm for any reason. Once I alter it, it’s better if you adopt that face as your new identity from here on out. Go somewhere remote and disappear. A desert would be best. I’ll keep your identity and your abilities to myself. I owe you that much.”

  “What?” Helen stammered at the sudden starkness of the advice. He was giving up on her that fast? She’d barely started learning what she was, what she could do. “You owe me a lot more explaining than that. I killed that bastard because he was trying to kidnap me. How does showing a picture of that suddenly jump to a big time war?”

  “It shouldn’t, but you’re not an ordinary case. I told you about the Hellhounds, didn’t I? Ailpien knows that the Unseelie Queen didn’t create you, but no one else does. So he put an actual Hellhound weapon in your hand to make it look like one of the Unseelie Queen’s personal guard ignored the treaty and killed a servant of the Seelie Queen’s council.”

  “But it’s a fake! A really good altered photo. With all their magic crap, somebody has to see through that, right?”

  “With any glamour, fae can sense it’s an illusion to a point if they’re close. However, seeing the image filtered through a scry makes that next to impossible. Watching a video of something isn’t the same as being with it.”

  “What about his boss, the High Queen lady? She won’t buy his crap.”

  “It doesn’t matter if the Seelie Queen knows the truth of the matter. I have no doubt she would stick by the farce so the reality that an un-bonded Unseelie exists never comes to light.” Yoel groaned as he pressed his forehead into the spines of the books. “Rumor of this will spread throughout both Seelie and Unseelie courts. It will reach the Dark Queen’s ears and call her to settle it personally. One way or the other, the actual treaty will be broken, then the entire structure comes crumbling down. It’s only a matter of time.”

  “How long?”

  “Days, at best.”

  “Then that means we’ve got that long to fix it.”

  “No. I’m cutting off any professional relationship we have here and now. The moment you entered my shop, I should have sent you away. I should have predicted your uncle was digging into something bigger than himself. I should have sent him away too. Then he would be alive, you would have your family back, and you could keep your life. But no, I wanted to help.” Yoel shook his head, sharp and final. “The best course of action is to hide out and hope the trouble passes.”

  “Hoping doesn’t make shit happen. Doing does.” Helen walked up to him and yanked his shoulders to face her. “You’re right, you dragged me into this. I was happy to follow along. Check your ego. And maybe you can up and move on whenever you want, but I can’t afford that.”

  “I gave you more than enough to support yourself and put some aside. If you spent too excessively, that isn’t my problem. And your vengeance isn’t worth antagonizing an international catastrophe by trying to ‘fix’ it.”

  “I took your fucking money ‘cause my family is living out of a shitty motel, and the bastard who put a price on my head landed us there!”

  “What?” Yoel jerked away. “You never...”

  “Same reason Tommy never told you about me.”

  “They don’t know, do they? No fae has ever seen you with them?”

  “My boyfriend’s got some secrets he’s keeping from me. I know he’s got a connection to them.” Helen let go of Yoel as she remembered Lucy was with her in that alley with Ewan. “And they’ve seen my kid. But I’m pretty sure Ailpien was watching me before that.”

  “You have a child…” Yoel pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes. “How old?”

  “Four. Her name’s Lucy, after the Beatles song.”

  “I need a drink.” Yoel trudged toward his desk and opened a drawer in it. He pulled out a glass bottle of amber liquor with the name “The Macallan” over a bold “25 Years Old.” Helen recognized the brand name from a snobby bail jumper who’d gone on a rant about single malt scotches.

  “You do that a lot?” She raised an eyebrow at him as he set the half-full bottle on the desk.

  “Only on special occasions.” He set a tumbler down beside the bottle and poured. “Would you like any?”

  “I’m a swill and cheap bourbon straight from the bottle kind of girl.”

  Yoel pulled another glass from the drawer and poured a second serving. “If you don’t have it, I will.”

  Helen rocked from foot to foot while Yoel nursed his neat whisky. The second glass waited there for somebody to touch it. Helen never minded the hard stuff when she needed something warm to loosen her nerves. She grabbed the tumbler and swallowed it like a shot. It went down smoother than she liked.

  “I guess fine liquor really is wasted on you,” Yoel said with a wince.

  “I like the burn.” Helen tapped her foot as she set the glass down. “It should be simple. Get rid of the rumor at its source before it spreads too far, then everything else will work itself out. If either of the all powerful boss ladies wanted to kill each other, they would’ve done it by now.”

  “A fair point.” Yoel tapped the rim of his glass as he swished the scotch around. “The real question is why is he trying to insight this with a false claim?”

  “Distract people from what he really wants. Me.”

  “Then why use you as the focal point of his conspiracy?” Yoel finished the rest of his drink in a long swig and tipped a new round in both his and Helen’s glasses. “And why does he want you to begin with?”

  “All I need to know is where he is so I can kill him.” Helen squeezed her eyes shut as she ran over her encounter with Ewan again and dug for something she hadn’t already told Yoel. “His lackey tried inviting me to meet Ailpien because he wanted to check on what my mom did with what they ‘gave’ her. If he meant those experiments to make a new Unseelie Queen, then maybe he wants to start them again.”

  “Hmm, let’s assume he wants to resume his experiments somehow. If he was pardoned by the Seelie High Queen, then he would have needed to swear oaths that would prevent him from doing the same sort of procedure again.” Yoel sighed and took another swig of his next glass. He pressed the side against his forehead like an ice pack. “What would his aim for making an Unseelie Queen be in the first place?”

  “What’s the Unseelie got that the Seelie want?”

  “The ability to expand their numbers.” Yoel’s eyebrows went up as he put the glass down so hard the scotch inside swished over the top. “In recent years, Seelie have had a horrible time conceiving children. The magic in their physiology has turned on them, and they’ve stooped to making more and more half-breeds in hopes that it will improve their fertility through mixing in other genes. While Unseelie can’t have fae children, they’re fertile enough to reproduce with mortals and make an enhanced, elemental sort of hybrid. And Nicnevin has never had trouble creating new members of her court.”

  “So he wants to learn how to make fae another way.” Helen took a shorter swig of her next dose of the high brow whiskey. Smokey and smooth like sitting in front of a fireplace. “Make somebody into an Unseelie Queen, figure out how you did it, do it again. Boom, you have an army of Nicnevins.”

  “Yes, but Unseelie energy is intrinsically opposed to Seelie. It’s not only the culture of the courts and the philosophy that separates them. A rare few Seelie have defected to the Unseelie side and stooped to serve Nicnevin, but they are still out of place. There have been one or two instances where a Seelie and Unseelie have formed a partnership, a courtship, but their fundamental differences always made them attempt to reverse the Unseelie transformation so that they could better coexist. It wouldn’t do him any good to have a force that volatile under his command. They would revolt.”

  “So maybe he just wants to make an Unseelie Queen so she can figure out how to m
ake fae for him, then show him how to do it so he can make little Seelie ‘abominations’.”

  “Yes, that would make a much better army. Then he could make enough of them to match Nicnevin’s entire court and overcome her.” Yoel pounded his fist against the desk at the epiphany. “Which is why he wants to sow the seeds of a war now. He must believe he’s close, that you’re the key to what he’s looking for. Reverse engineering you and altering the design.”

  “Sounds like a basic evil genius plan to take over the world.”

  “Yes, but I’d like for it not to succeed.” Yoel swigged the rest of his glass and tucked the bottle back in the desk drawer. The cup stayed there. He held out his palm to Helen. “Let me see the charm. I have to change it before I send you back. You were right that you can’t afford to do as I suggested, not when your little one has only known your face her whole life.”

  Helen unclasped the chain on the heart and handed it over. Her hair went from tickling her cheeks to a wind-swept tangle, and her eyelashes stuck together when she blinked them too fast.

  “There it is,” Yoel said with a small smile, his spirits seeming to pick up a little. He went to the safe and opened it with a few spins of the combination lock. “I admit, I’m still surprised you’re not single. You seem like someone who’d hate settling down.”

  “Yeah, it’s been surprising me for five years.” Helen leaned against the desk and tried her next sip. About the same as the first, with a little more wood. “What about you? Maggie seemed pretty flirty.”

  “Ha! I thought about trying when I first met her but she’s not in a situation to commit. I remain unattached. Being in this world makes relationships difficult.” He disappeared inside the safe for a few seconds. “What makes you suspicious your partner is connected to the Seelie?”

  “He knows shit. And he’s being dodgy about how.” Helen sighed and gave up taking her time with the fancy liquor. She downed the rest in one gulp. “Tommy and him worked together on the fae stuff behind my back. He made it seem like he was born stateside, but the green card Tommy had in his files said he’s from your part of the world. He talks another language with Lucy, Welsh, so I’m pretty sure he’s from there. I walked in on him talking on the phone about me to somebody, like a former boss.”