Authors: Ari Marmell
Was…
Shapeshifting. Aw, shit.
Goswythe.
I mean, I had no
proof
this was Goswythe, or even that it was a shapeshifter. It fit, sure, but I hadda lotta enemies from a lotta different time periods. But it was a solid working theory; something to think about, anyway.
It’d been over a year now since I’d last encountered the
phouka
who’d raised Celia, Fino Ottati’s daughter, after she’d been stolen away and replaced by the changeling Adalina. He’d up and taken the run-out some time after I’d gotten my keister handed to me by the not-so-dearly departed witch Orsola Maldera, may she rot in pieces. We’d been trying to beat the stuffing outta each other, me’n Goswythe, before Orsola interfered, and I had every reason to figure the gink still held a grudge. I’d poked around some, trying to find him, now and again—partly for my own sake, partly to put the Ottatis’ minds at ease. I’d never dug anything up, though, and between my own affairs and tryin’ to find some way of waking Adalina from her coma, I hadn’t put as much elbow grease into it as maybe I should.
Might be about time that changed.
* * *
It was in the stairwell down to the basement level of Mr. Soucek’s building, where I keep my office and hang my hat (on those rare occasions I can stand to wear one), that I came real near to killing a buddy of mine.
Well, “buddy” may be too strong a word.
“Jesus
Christ
, Mick!” Mashed up against the wall with my wand pressed tight under his chin, Franky looked paler and just generally more pathetic even than usual. I dunno how he got that nasal whine into his voice when he was hackin’ and gaggin’ around the pressure on his throat, but he pulled it off. “All I did was say ‘Hello!’”
“You shouldn’t sneak up on a fella like that.” I stuck the L&G—that’s the wand, a Luchtaine & Goodfellow 1592—back in the holster under my coat and unwrapped my fist from around his collar. “It ain’t healthy.”
“I wasn’t sneaking! I was just waiting!”
“Yeah, well… Wait louder.”
Wasn’t his fault, really. I’d been preoccupied and on edge the whole way across town, and I’d make the mistake of relaxing when home came into view. I shoulda known better, really. Wasn’t as though I hadn’t had more’n a few people waiting for me here now and again who weren’t near as harmless as old Four-Leaf Franky.
Dammit.
“Sorry, Franky. Been a bit outta sorts.” Then, since the fact that I’d apologized had him pretty well stunned, I had a breath or two to give him an up-and-down. “Looks like I ain’t the only one, either.”
His shirt and his coat had more wrinkles between ’em than the firstborn of a basset hound and a raisin, but that was nothing hinky in and of itself. Franky’d never met a suit too cheap, and his apparent allergy to clothes irons went far beyond the usual Fae distaste for the metal. Nah, what was off about him was the gold, or lack of it. Sure, he wore a couple of gleaming rings, and he was using a fifty-dollar tie clip to hold a five-cent tie. But for Franky, who had more’n a little leprechaun blood mixed into his
aes sidhe
ancestry, that was positively understated. In fact, I think the only time I’d ever seen him with
less
gold on him was after he’d been robbed.
Which wasn’t uncommon, but that’s what happens to guys who wear gold out in the open, ain’t it?
Point is, he didn’t look banged up at all. Only other reason I could come up with for him goin’ out and about without his jewelry was that he was tryin’ to be inconspicuous.
I moved back a pace, down a couple steps, and leaned against the banister.
“So who’s gunning for you, Franky?”
“Nah, you got it wrong this time, Mick. Or, well, mostly wrong, anyway. Nobody’s after me, least not personally. I’m here to do
you
a favor.”
“Uh-huh.”
Last few times me’n Franky’d crossed paths, things hadn’t been going too well for either of us. I’d seen him on a couple or three occasions since the whole Spear of Lugh fiasco, and we were good—no beefs, so far as I knew—but we hadn’t exactly been drinking outta the same bottle since then.
Whatever “favor” he was hoping to do me, he was looking to get something out of it, too. But just bulling through and asking him directly wasn’t going to get me anything, and while I could probably beat a song out of him, that
would
be a good way to make him an enemy.
Instead, I asked, “So why the play at goin’ incognito, then?”
He didn’t pretend not to know what I meant; that was something, anyway.
“Look, Mick, I’m here on behalf of the others. None of ’em really wants to be seen with you given what’s going down. I don’t really, either, so this seemed a good compromise.”
By “the others,” I assumed he meant the chunk of Chicago’s supernatural community who I sometimes palled around with. Not friends, really, but contacts, informants, people I’d helped and people who helped me—for the right price. Franky himself, of course, but also Lenai; Pink Paddy; the “L King,” this strange old entity who lives in one of the tunnel portions of the rail system; Gaullman, when he wasn’t committing himself to one asylum or another (for everyone else’s protection, he always said); a few others. Colorful characters, and mostly not the bravest sort, so them being too afraid to come to me in person if there was a problem was no big surprise.
Two issues with that, though. First, Franky was no braver’n any one of ’em. And second, given that
what
was going down?
So I asked him about both.
“Hey! I’m no coward!”
I just looked at him.
“I just have a healthy sense of self-preservation,” he finished, limp as wet yarn.
I looked at him some more.
Franky sighed. “Okay, so I figured, we all try to ignore this until it goes away and God only knows how long that’ll take, or who gets hurt in the process. I get you to suss out what’s happening, you solve the problem same way you always do, everything’s done with and we can all go back to the everyday.”
That… tasted of truth, but it wasn’t filling. He wasn’t lying to me, but he wasn’t spilling everything, either.
So, hey, I
kept
looking at him. Why not? It’d worked out pretty well so far.
“There’s people asking around about you,” he finally admitted.
A-ha! Now
we were gettin’ somewhere.
And now it made sense he’d come to me. If I sussed out whatever was goin’ down, great. If I got involved but
didn’t
wrap things up neat’n tidy, well, I woulda found whoever was nosing around. They wouldn’t have any cause to keep pestering Franky or Paddy or the others. Either way was good for Franky.
But… “I get that it’s maybe worrying for people to come to you about me,” I said, “but this ain’t exactly the first time
any
of you been grilled about something you didn’t want to talk about. And I suspect that if the mugs asking the questions were anyone or anything real dangerous, you’da started off with that, or at least be a lot more frightened than you are. You’re worried, not terrified. So what’s the skinny?”
Since I know you’re wondering, yeah, it woulda been a lot more comfortable and maybe even safer if we’d taken this to my office for a proper sit-down. I’d gotten Franky talking, though, and I didn’t wanna risk losing the momentum.
“Well… Part of it, Mick, is still the whole Spear of Lugh thing. After what happened last year, everybody’s jumpy thinking about the kinda people we might have wandering around Chicago poking into things. You can’t really blame them for that, can you?”
I’d have sighed, then, if I, you know, sighed.
“The spear’s gone, Franky. And so’s everyone who was here hunting for it. All we’ve got now are the usual, run-of-the-mill Fae.” As if there were such a thing. “Same sorta people and not-quite-people you been dealin’ with your whole life.”
“Sure, sure, but nerves is still nerves.”
“Whatever.”
“Anyway, it might not be too big a deal if it was just a few guys. But Mick, there’s been a whole
lot
of folks asking a whole lot of questions about you. Me’n the others, we’re getting jittery precisely because there’s so many. There shouldn’t be this many people that we don’t know but who know about us. At all, let alone that we all know
you
.”
“Wait, wait, wait. None of you know who these people are?
Any
of ’em?”
“Not a one.”
Okay, I hadda give him that one. That
was
reason to start worrying.
“What have they been asking about, exactly?”
“All kindsa stuff. Who you pal around with. Where you go to take a load off. What we know about your cases. Sometimes sorta asking around the edges of what types of magic you can throw, though they’ve never come out and dug into that directly. Oh! And a lot of questions about that lady you were chumming it up with back during the whole spear affair.”
My blood ran cold, and I don’t mean I felt a chill. When the
aes sidhe
say our blood “ran cold,” we mean it. You coulda wrung out an artery to cool a fifth of Scotch.
“Ramona?”
“Yeah, that’s her. Whatever happened with her, anyway?”
Who the hell knew? I hadn’t seen her since she’d swished her way outta the Field Museum of Natural History, and I still didn’t know if I even wanted to.
No, that ain’t true. I definitely wanted to. I just didn’t know how much of me wanting to see her was actually
me
wanting to see her. I never had figured out if there was anything more’n her own mojo behind how dizzy I got over her.
But I
was
pretty sure I didn’t much like people poking around about her—for her sake or mine.
“And it’s been a bunch of different guys asking these questions?”
“Yep. Gals, too.”
“And none of you recognized a single one?”
“Nope.”
“Fae?”
I’d pretty much given up any of my usual human subterfuge by this point. I wasn’t blinking, wasn’t fidgeting or shifting my weight, damn near a statue. Not that I had to hide any of that stuff from Franky anyway, but letting all that slide wasn’t a good habit to fall into.
He shrugged helplessly. “I really can’t say, Mick. They all
seemed
human enough, but you know how hard it can be to tell with some of us.”
Yeah. Yeah, I did.
Why’d you have to drop back into my life, Ramona? Things were a lot smoother without you.
So, who’d I seriously irritated lately? Not a whole lotta people were comin’ to mind, surprisingly enough. It was possible Vince Scola—one of Fino’s rivals—still held a grudge after our last meeting, but it didn’t seem too probable. I’d pretty well convinced his people that my world was something they wanted to steer clear of. Besides, this didn’t feel like the Outfit’s style.
My only other recent human enemy had been Orsola, and this didn’t sound like her, either. Plus the whole pushing-up-daisies thing kinda put the kibosh on that notion.
I had rivals and enemies in both Courts, but the Seelie and Unseelie both had better ways to learn anything they wanted to know about me—and anyway, they already knew a lotta what these people were asking.
Nah, this almost hadda be an independent or an outsider. And hey, who did I know who fit
that
bill?
“Is it possible,” I asked Franky, “that this wasn’t a group at all? Just one gink wearing a buncha different faces?”
“Uh…” Pretty clear he hadn’t thought of that particular notion before. “Sure, I suppose. I mean, I never saw more than one at a time, anyway. Guess one of the others might’ve, but they never said one way or the other. You got someone in mind?”
“I just might, yeah.”
All right, I’ll be straight with you. I
wanted
it to be Goswythe. The
phouka
hadn’t exactly been haunting my nightmares or anything, but I hadn’t much cared for having this lingering threat hanging over my head for a year. Or over the Ottatis’ heads, either, for that matter. It’d be not just neat and convenient, but a genuine relief, to have done with the bastard.
So yeah, on the one hand, I mighta been a bit more closed-minded to other possibilities than I ought to have been. But on the other, it
did
all fit. Somebody swapping faces the way most people change underwear woulda explained why I felt like I was bein’ shadowed but couldn’t catch anyone,
and
the upsurge in the curious masses asking about me. It came together, top to bottom.
Except…
Ramona. Why the hell would Goswythe be asking about Ramona? I’d only spent a few days around her, in the middle of the biggest influx of Fae your half of Chicago’d seen in a good while. At most, she shoulda been lumped in with my other occasional contacts. For Goswythe—yeah, yeah, or whoever—to be asking about her specifically? Meant someone either had a much stronger idea of the connection I’d shared with her, however much bunk it mighta proved to be afterward, than anybody should…
Or that whatever was goin’ on wasn’t just about me, but was about her, too. She might actually be a target, not just a means to get to yours truly.
Did I care? I shouldn’t care. And if I did, was it really me caring? Did the damn broad still have any magic hooks in me?
Goddamn it.
“Do me a favor, Franky? See if you can find out from any of the others if they’ve seen more’n one of these ginks at a time?” I didn’t figure any of ’em had—and it’d totally sink my Goswythe theory if they had—but better to be certain.
“Sure thing, Mick. Um, okay if I call you, though? Running back and forth across town like this…”
Makes you look up to your ears in whatever’s going on.
But he’d already stuck his neck out, and if it wasn’t entirely on my behalf, well, he’d still put me wise to something I really hadda know about. So, much as the skin on my ears crawled just thinkin’ of the damn payphone hanging in the hall near my office…
“Yeah, the horn’s fine. Just keep tryin’ back if I ain’t here.”
“You got it.”
“Hey, Franky?”
He stopped in the middle of turning away, each foot on a different step. “Yeah?”
“Thanks.”