Beyond the Pale: A fantasy anthology (11 page)

I narrowed my eyes.

Is it so much to ask for civility?

“Justine,” I said calmly. “If you would stand aside, please.”

Justine quickly, silently moved out from between us.

I focused on Mag and said, “They are under my protection.”

Mag gave me a contemptuous look, raised the staff, and darkness lashed
at me, as if he had simply reached out into the floorboards and cracks in the
wall and drawn it into a sizzling sphere the size of a bowling ball.

It flickered away to nothingness about a foot in front of my steepled
hands.

I lifted a finger and Hendricks shot Mag in the back. Repeatedly.

The fomor went down with a sound like a bubbling teakettle, whipped
onto his back as if the bullets had been a minor inconvenience, and raised the
stick to point at Hendricks.

Gard’s axe smashed it out of his grip, swooped back up to guard, and
began to descend again.

“Stop,” I said.

Gard’s muscles froze just before she would have brought the axe down
onto Mag’s head. Mag had one hand uplifted, surrounded in a kind of negative
haze, his long fingers crooked at odd angles—presumably some kind of
mystic defense.

“As a freeholding lord of the Unseelie Accords,” I said, “it would be
considered an act of war if I killed you out of hand, despite your militant
intrusion into my territory.” I narrowed my eyes. “However, your behavior gives
me ample latitude to invoke the defense of property and self clause. I will
leave the decision to you. Continue this asinine behavior, and I will kill you
and offer a weregild to your lord, King Corb, in accordance with the conflict
resolution guidelines of Section Two, Paragraph Four.”

As I told you, my lawyers send me endless letters. I speak their
language.

Mag seemed to take that in for a moment. He looked at me, then Gard.
His eyes narrowed. They tracked back to Hendricks, his head hardly moving, and
he seemed to freeze when he saw the sword in Hendricks’s hand.

His eyes flicked to Justine and the child and burned for a
moment—not with adoration or even simple lust. There was a pure and
possessive hunger there, coupled with a need to destroy that which he desired.
I have spent my entire life around hard men. I know that form of madness when I
see it.

“So,” Mag said. His eyes traveled back to me and were suddenly
heavy-lidded and calculating. “You are the new mortal lord. We half-believed
that you must be imaginary. That no one could be as foolish as that.”

“You are incorrect,” I said. “Moreover, you can’t have them. Get out.”

Mag stood up. The movement was slow, liquid. His limbs didn’t seem to
bend the proper way. “Lord Marcone,” he said, “this affair is no concern of
yours. I only wish to take the slaves.”

“You can’t have them. Get out.”

“I warn you,” Mag said. There was an ugly tone in his voice. “If you
make me return for her—for them—you will not enjoy what follows.”

“I do not require enjoyment to thrive. Leave my domain. I won’t ask
again.”

Hendricks shuffled his feet a little, settling his balance.

Mag gathered himself up slowly. He extended his hand, and the twisted
stick leapt from the floor and into his fingers. He gave Gard a slow and
well-practiced sneer, and said, “Anon, mortal lordling. It is time you learned
the truth of the world. It will please me to be your instructor.” Then he
turned, slow and haughty, and walked out, his shoulders hunching in an odd,
unsettling motion as he moved.

“Make sure he leaves,” I said quietly.

Gard and Hendricks followed Mag from the room.

I turned my eyes to Justine and the child.

“Mag,” I said, “is not the sort of man who is used to disappointment.”

Justine looked after the vanished fomor, and then back at me, confusion
in her eyes. “That was sorcery. How did you…?”

I stood up from behind my desk and stepped out of the copper circle set
into the floor around my chair. It was powered by the sorcerous equivalent of a
nine volt battery, connected to the control on the underside of my desk. Basic
magical defense, Gard said. It had seemed like nonsense to me—it clearly
was not.

I took my gun from its holster and set it on my desk.

Justine took note of my reply.

Of course I wouldn’t give the personal aide of the most dangerous woman
in Chicago information about my magical defenses.

There was something hard and not at all submissive in her eyes. “Thank
you, sir, for—“

“For what?” I said, very calmly. “You understand, do you not, what you
have done by asking for my help under the Accords?”

“Sir?”

“The Accords govern relations between supernatural powers,” I said.
“The Signatories of the Accords and their named vassals are granted certain
rights and obligations—such as offering a warning to a Signatory who has
trespassed upon another’s territory unwittingly before killing him.”

“I know, sir,” Justine said.

“Then you should also know that you are most definitely not a signatory
of the Accords. At best, you qualify in the category of ‘servitors and
chattel.’ At worse, you are considered to be a food animal.”

She drew in a sharp breath, her eyes widening—not in any sense of
outrage or offense, but in realization. Good. She grasped the realities of the
situation.

“In either case,” I continued, “you are property. You have no rights in
the current situation, in the eyes of the Accords—and more to the point,
I have no right to withhold another’s rightful property. Mag’s behavior
provided me with an excuse to kill him if he did not depart. He will not give
me such an opening a second time.”

Justine swallowed and stared at me for a moment. Then she glanced down
at the child in her arms. The child clung harder to her, and seemed to lean
somewhat away from me.

One must admire such acute instincts.

“You have drawn me into a conflict which has nothing to do with me,” I
said quietly. “I suggest candor. Otherwise, I will have Mr. Hendricks and Ms.
Gard show you to the door.”

“You can’t…” she began, but her voice trailed off.

“I can,” I said. “I am not a humanitarian. When I offer charity it is
for tax purposes.”

The room became silent. I was content with that. The child began to
whimper quietly.

“I was delivering documents to the court of King Corb on behalf of my
Lady,” Justine said. She stroked the child’s hair absently. “It’s in the sea.
There’s a gate there in Lake Michigan, not far from here.”

I lifted an eyebrow. “You swam?”

“I was under the protection of their courier, going there,” Justine
said. “It’s like walking in a bubble of air.” She hitched the child up a little
higher on her hip. “Mag saw me. He drove the courier away as I was leaving and
took me to his home. There were many other prisoners there.”

“Including the child,” I guessed. Though it probably didn’t sound that
way.

Justine nodded. “I… arranged for several prisoners to flee Mag’s home.
I took the child when I left. I swam out.”

“So you are, in effect, stolen property in possession of stolen
property,” I said. “Novel.”

Gard and Hendricks came back into the office.

I looked at Hendricks. “My people?”

“Tulane’s got a broken arm,” he said. “Standing in that asshole’s way.
He’s on the way to the doc.”

“Thank you. Ms. Gard?”

“Mag is off the property,” she said. “He didn’t go far. He’s summoning
support now.”

“How much of a threat is he?” I asked. The question was legitimate.
Gard and Hendricks had blindsided the inhuman while he was focused upon Justine
and the child and while he wasted his leading magical strike against my
protective circle. A head-on confrontation against a prepared foe could be a
totally different proposition.

Gard tested the edge of her axe with her thumb, and drew a smooth stone
from her pocket. “Mag is a fomor sorcerer lord of the first rank. He’s deadly
—
and connected. The
fomor could crush you without a serious loss of resources. Confrontation would
be unwise.”

The stone made a steely, slithery sound as it glided over the axe’s
blade.

“There seems little profit to be had, then,” I said. “It’s nothing
personal, Justine. Merely business. I am obliged to return stolen property to
signatory members of the Accords.”

Hendricks looked at me sharply. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t have
to. I already knew the tone of whatever he would say.
Are there no prisons
,
perhaps. Or,
No man is an island, entire of itself
.
It tolls for thee
.
On and on.

Hendricks has no head for business.

Gard watched me, waiting.

“Sir,” Justine said, her tone measured and oddly formal. “May I speak?”

I nodded.

“She isn’t property,” Justine said, and her voice was low and intense,
her eyes direct. “She was trapped in a den of living nightmares and there was
no one to come save her. She would have died there. And I am not letting anyone
take her back to that hell hole. I will die first.” The young woman set her
jaw. “She is not property, Mr. Marcone. She’s a child.”

I met Justine’s eyes for a long moment.

I glanced aside at Hendricks. He waited for my decision.

Gard watched me. As ever, Gard watched me.

I looked down at my hands, my fingertips resting together with my
elbows propped on the desk.

Business came first. Always.

But I have rules.

I looked up at Justine.

“She’s a child,” I said quietly.

~

The air in the room snapped tight with tension.

 
“Ms. Gard,” I said. “Please
dismiss the contractors for the day, at pay. Then raise the defenses.”

She pocketed the whetstone and strode quickly out, her teeth showing, a
bounce in her step.

“Mr. Hendricks, please scramble our troubleshooters. They’re to take
positions across the street. Suppressed weapons only. I don’t need patrolmen
stumbling around in this. Then ready the panic room.”

Hendricks nodded and got out his cell phone as he left. His huge,
stubby fingers flew over its touchscreen as he sent the activation text
message. Looking at him, one would not think him capable of such a thing. But
that is Hendricks, generally.

I looked at Justine as I rose and walked to my closet. “You will go
with the child into the panic room. It is, with the possible exception of
Dresden’s home, the most secure location in the city.”

“Thank you,” she said quietly.

I took off my coat and hung it up in the closet. I took off my tie and
slipped it over the same hanger. I put my cuff-links in my coat pocket and
rolled up my sleeves, and skinned out of my gun’s holster. Then I slipped on
the armored vest made of heavy scales of composite materials joined to sleeves
of quite old-fashioned mail. I pulled an old field jacket, olive drab, over the
armor, belted it, holstered my sidearm at my side, opposite a combat knife, and
took a military-grade assault shotgun
—
a weapon every bit as illegal as my pistol
in the city of Chicago
—
from its rack.

“I am not doing it for you, young lady,” I said. “Nor am I doing it for
the child.”

“Then why are you doing it?” she asked.

“Because I have rules,” I said.

She shook her head gently. “But you’re a criminal. Criminals don’t have
rules. They break them.”

I stopped and looked at her.

Justine blanched and slid a step further away from me, along the wall.
The child made a soft, distressed sound. I beckoned curtly for her to follow me
as I walked past her. It took her a moment to do so.

Honestly.

Someone in the service of a vampire ought to have a bit more fortitude.

~

This panic room looked like every other one I’ve had built: Fluorescent
lights, plain tile floor, plain drywall. Two double bunks occupied one end of
the room. A business desk and several chairs took up the rest. A miniature
kitchen nestled into one corner, opposite the miniature medical station in
another. There was a door to a half-bath, and a bank of security monitors on
the wall between them. I flicked one switch that activated the entire bank,
displaying a dozen views from hidden security cameras.

I gestured for Justine to enter the room. She came in and immediately
took a seat on the lower bunk of the nearest bed, still holding the child.

“Mag can find her,” Gard told me, when we all rendezvoused outside the
panic room. “Once he’s inside the building and gets past the forward area,
he’ll be able to track her. He’ll head straight for her.”

“Then we know which way he’ll be moving,” I said. “What did you find
out about his support?”