Brightly (Flicker #2) (8 page)

“I bet they thought it would be interesting for their old apprentices to meet up someday,” Davis drawled. “
Our
files are probably around
here
somewhere, or in another shop. I bet they have more apprentices than just us.”

Jason was shaking his head. “You’re bluffing.”

Clementine wrinkled her nose. “Jason,” she said, “your birthday is September twenty-fifth. You’re not Sighted, but your music is magical, as bewitching as fey music. You’re from some nowhere little town in Canada. Your mother’s name was Cassandra, and your father’s name was Ethan. You were taken when—”

“That’s enough,” Filo snapped. Jason had gone pale. “That doesn’t change anything.”

“Actually, it does,” Clementine said. “When I said those files contained your names, I meant it—your
true
names.”

Fuming, Alice slid off the counter and stood beside Filo. “Are you threatening us?”

“No,” Henry insisted. “She doesn’t mean it like that.”

“Don’t I?” Clementine asked, arching her eyebrows.

Henry ignored her. “We have information that’s valuable to you. Information you don’t know about yourselves. If you agree to help us, we’ll hand over your files, and you’ll never hear from us again. If you don’t, then we’ll keep the files, and you’ll never know what’s in them.”

Leaning against the counter, Nasser regarded the strangers coolly. His tone was light, but there was a steely seriousness in his eyes. “And what’s to keep us from taking those files off your hands right now?”

Clementine blinked. “Well, you might remember that we’ve read the files ourselves. That information’s in here, too.” She tapped her temple. “It’s not going anywhere.”

Filo clenched his fists. He could feel magic building in his palms, a prickling heat beneath his skin that he forced back down. “You’re blackmailing us.”

“We hoped it wouldn’t come to this,” Davis said. “Really. We don’t want to force you to do anything you don’t want to do. But there’s nowhere else we can turn. We need your help. Now you might understand how much.”

“Even
if
we help you,” Nasser said, carefully weighing each word, “
and
you give us the files, how do we know you won’t use our names against us anyway? What with you having it all
up there
.”

“We wouldn’t break our word,” Henry told him earnestly.

“That may be,” Nasser allowed. “But that assurance isn’t enough. We’d need something a little more concrete.”

“What do you want?” Clementine snorted. “A
geis
?”

“If that’s on the table, then yes.”

For a second, she just stared at him, trying to gauge whether or not he was serious. Then she looked to Henry and Davis, who seemed to communicate with her through slightly raised eyebrows and inclinations of their heads. At last, Clementine said, “I’m sure we can come to some kind of arrangement.”

It was Davis’ turn to sigh. “What she means,” he translated, “is that we’d certainly be willing to consider a
geis.
Whatever it takes to assure you that the information in those files never has to leave this group—as long as you agree to help us. We can talk about it. Figure something out.”

Filo and Nasser exchanged a slow glance, and an understanding passed between them. After a moment, Nasser inquired, “Will you be sticking around Bridgestone for long?”

Clementine looked almost startled. Then a small, triumphant smile tugged at the corners of her mouth. “We’ve already paid for a night at a motel.”

“Then I imagine you wouldn’t mind letting us sleep on it.”

“Of course,” Henry said. “We’ll come back tomorrow morning, seven o’clock sharp. The three of us will be leaving for Siren no matter what—but depending on your answer, you should be ready to leave with us.” He offered them a brief, sheepish smile that bordered on apologetic, and for a second, Filo
almost
believed that Henry meant no harm.

“Right,” Filo said dryly, pulling his gaze from Henry’s. “Sure. Now
get the hell out of my shop.”

“What do you think?” Alice asked, leaning her chin on her hands. The question was probably meant for all five of them, but Alice’s hazel eyes were trained on Filo, who was silently studying the patterns in the worn wooden table in the workroom.

“We don’t have a lot of options,” Nasser sighed. “They have our names.”

“They
claim
to have our names,” Jason said. “We have no way of knowing what’s actually written in those files.”

“Well, they certainly seemed to know a lot about us,” Lee pointed out. “Where else could they have gotten that information? Who else knows that stuff about you, Jason?”

“Nobody who isn’t in this room. And,” he added, a little reluctantly, “I guess it stands to reason that Neman and Morgan would know it, too. Who knows how long they watched us, studied us, before they took us?”

Filo plucked an empty bottle from the tabletop and turned it slowly in his hands; afternoon sunlight slid up and down the glass. “This wouldn’t be a quick job. Something like this could take the rest of the summer. Maybe even longer. We’d have to shut down Flicker completely.” He looked to Alice. “Would Conall give you that kind of leave?”

She shrugged. “If I explained the situation, sure. Even if I didn’t tell him why I needed time off, he’d probably give it to me, anyway. He knows I wouldn’t ask if it were just something frivolous.”

“And you guys…” Lee began, glancing toward Nasser and Jason.

Nodding wearily, Nasser said, “We’d have to use most of the money we’ve saved toward rent a few months in advance, so we don’t come back to find someone else living in our apartment. We’d lose plenty of business in the meantime, too.”

“For what?” Jason bemoaned. “A stack of papers with Nem and Morgan’s writing? Some kind of twisted grades on how well we learned magic?”

“And our true names,” Alice said quietly. “Plus everything else we don’t know, everything they never told us. Haven’t you ever wondered?”

“Wondered what?”

“Why they picked us, for one thing. And…” She lowered her gaze a little, looking almost self-conscious. “Well, you and Nasser know your names and where you come from, but not all of us do. That’s worth something. To me, anyway.”

Alice’s gaze moved to Filo, who was still turning the bottle in his hands. At length, he set the bottle down and pressed his palms against the table.

“I’ve lived this long without my name,” he said, not quite looking at any of them. “I don’t need it. I don’t want it. But I also don’t like the idea of
them
having it. It doesn’t belong to them. Besides…”

“What choice do we really have?” Nasser finished.

“Exactly. If we help them, then they’ll leave us alone, and never speak our names to another soul. We can make sure of that. Now
that’s
something.”

“How?” Lee asked.

“A
geis
,” Filo said simply.

“It’s a kind of magical contract,” Alice explained. “It’s usually some kind of prohibition, something that a person is forbidden to do, either by magic or their own sense of obligation. Breaking a
geis
will cause something bad to happen.”

“Like what?” Lee asked.

Filo looked at her. “Have you ever heard of Cúchulainn?”

“No.”

“He was a hero from Irish mythology who had two conflicting
geasa
set upon him. The first was that he could never refuse any food offered to him by a woman. The second was that he could never eat the meat of a dog. One day, he met an old woman on the road who offered him dog meat. He couldn’t comply with one
geis
without breaking the other.”

“What happened to him?” Lee asked.

“He died.”

She grimaced. “Immediately?”

Filo shrugged. “Eventually. Breaking the
geasa
weakened him, and he died in battle.”

“Well, do you think you can convince those three to let you put a
geis
on them? One that keeps them from sharing any of our information?”

“Any of
our
information,” Filo corrected. “They don’t have anything on you, Lee.”

“It’s all the same to me,” she said with a shrug. “We’re in this mess together.”

That earned her a small smile. “Anyway,” Filo said, “if they’re really that desperate, yes, I think we could get them to agree to a
geis
. I can’t say how effective it would be. That’s heavy magic, and I don’t think any of us have ever tried anything like it.”

“We have some time to work on that part,” Nasser said. “I doubt they’d agree to it until after the job is done, just like they probably won’t give us the files until then.”

“Can’t blame them,” Alice said. “We’d do it the same way.”

“So we’re doing this on the honor system?” Lee frowned.

“Looks that way,” Filo sighed. “For now.”

Nasser looked around the table, from face to face. “We’re all agreed them? Hands up if you want to give it a go.”

His was the first hand up. One by one, the rest of them followed suit: Lee, then Alice, then Jason. Filo stared down at the table for a long moment, his shoulders tense. He didn’t look up at them when he raised his hand, but he raised it all the same.

Twilight was gathering, purple and soft. For half an hour, Filo and Rodney had been sitting near the top of the steps leading up to the Bridgestone Public Library, beside one of the old stone lions that guarded the entrance. As he caught Rodney up on what had happened today, Filo studied the normals on the sidewalk below as they walked their dogs or strolled into the little restaurants on the other side of the street.

Rodney reached into his pocket and withdrew a pack of cigarettes. He thumbed the top open and pulled out a single hand-rolled cigarette—pixie grass, by the look of it, one of the more popular items available at Snapdragons. The smoke of burned pixie grass supposedly dulled the heavy taste of iron that hung over human cities. That was why faeries tended to toss heaps of the stuff onto bonfires during their moonlit revels in the park.

Rodney held his cigarette out to Filo, who sighed and lit it with a touch of his finger and a spark of magic. The tip glowed a soft blue.

“So what are you going to do?” Rodney asked, raising the cigarette to his mouth. His tail swayed rhythmically behind him, like a metronome. Though the tail was invisible to normal eyes, Filo’s Sight easily pierced through the glamour that hid it.

“Go with them in the morning,” Filo replied. “See what we can do for them. We don’t really have a lot of other options.”

“I suppose not.” Rodney’s mouth turned down a little at the corners, and he pulled the pack out again, this time offering it to Filo. “Steady your nerves?”

For a moment, Filo hesitated. Then he shrugged and accepted a cigarette. “What the hell,” he muttered, lighting it. “We’ll call it a special occasion.”

While pixie grass didn’t exactly change the way the air tasted—not to humans, anyway—it did have a certain effect. Too much would turn Filo’s thoughts sticky and make his whole body feel numb and distant, like it didn’t belong to him. But a single cigarette would slow everything down, just enough for him to relax and not care quite so much.

Filo took a deep drag, trying not to cough, the way Jason had taught him. The smoke was sweet, like a dream of field and forest.

“You know,” Rodney mused, “I did notice a few humans wandering around the Goblin Market last night. Perhaps I should’ve looked a little closer.”

“I didn’t see you there.”

“If I had a dime for every time someone didn’t see me while I made astute and witty observations about their behavior, I could swim in my riches.”

Filo snorted. “Well, what did you think of them? The humans.”

“They didn’t inspire any particularly good zingers, if that’s what you’re asking. They struck me as slightly unusual, but, honestly, most humans seem that way to me.” He glanced toward Filo. “What did
you
think?”

“It’s not like I met any of them,” Filo replied. “Except one. Kind of. I was doing some storytelling last night, and he was in the crowd. I only saw him for a minute or two, and then he was gone.”

“Which one?”

“His name’s Henry.” Just speaking Henry’s name made Filo’s insides shiver in the strangest way: unsettling, but not unpleasant. Probably the pixie grass, he reasoned, though it didn’t usually make him feel anxious. Maybe it was because he hadn’t smoked any in over a year. His body just wasn’t used to it. That must be it.

Rodney blew a stream of pale smoke into the air. “So what’s
really
bothering you?”

“Hmm?”

“You’ve got more than merfolk on your mind.”

He shook his head, twisting the cigarette between his forefinger and thumb. “It’s just strange,” he admitted. “I never thought about Nem and Morgan having other apprentices or other shops. That’s all.”

“Ah.” Rodney nodded sagely. “So that’s it. You’re jealous.”