Irregulars: Stories by Nicole Kimberling, Josh Lanyon, Ginn Hale and Astrid Amara (55 page)

“No, sorry.” Jason flushed a little and Henry recalled that in their questioning earlier Jason had also seemed surprised to be regarded with any importance. Most men his age would have betrayed a trace of excitement at discovering they were so unique.

“I’m pretty much alone. I moved here with my dad…” For just an instant something like fear flickered through Jason’s expression, but then he just shook his head. “He’s gone. So it’s just me now.”

“Yeah, same here.” Henry remembered his childhood dog better than any of his surviving relations. “So you grew up in the city?”

“Yeah. My dad and I moved here when I was seven and I’ve lived in the Bay Area ever since.” Jason supplied the answer with a telling kind of tension in his voice. This was painful for him, Henry thought.

“Never wanted to travel?”

“I don’t know.” Jason relaxed a little. “San Francisco’s familiar. I like that.” He took a bite of his burrito, effectively evading further questions. And Henry decided to let it go for now.

He sampled his Mongolian cheesesteak. His silver tongue drew in far more of the slaughterhouse from the succulent meat than Henry would have liked to swallow. That was always a problem with fresh food, traces of memory persisted in the flesh.

Beside him, Jason ate like a neat machine. Even after he’d finished his food Jason’s furtive gaze flickered over other men’s meals.

“You want these fries?” Henry offered. It wasn’t his habit to let other people eat off his plate, but he’d never cared that much for the common french fry.

“You’re sure?”

“Yeah. Have ’em.” Henry pushed the fries to Jason and watched in fascination as Jason drenched them in hot sauce and disappeared them like so many gangland snitches going into the East River.

Either the guy had a tapeworm for a dietician or he was half starving. In that, he reminded Henry a little of Frank but not so much that it hurt. They’d all been hungry young men back in the day.

“Can I ask you a question?” Jason glanced up at him from over the rim of his glasses. Henry wondered just what he saw.

“Sure, you can ask anything you like,” Henry replied.

Jason smiled slightly at his response.

“But you might not answer, right?”

Henry shrugged.

“Well, either way,” Jason replied. “There was something kind of fluttering in your coat pocket earlier. I’ve been wondering what it was all morning.”

“Can’t you see it?” Henry lowered his voice. “If you take the glasses off?”

“Not through your coat,” Jason responded as if Henry were dense. “I don’t have X-ray vision.”

“Good to know.” True sight was so rare that not even Henry knew exactly how far it extended and, as a rule, those who possessed it—and didn’t go crazy—generally kept the limits of their vision secret to protect the value of their services. Jason seemed oddly sane and forthcoming.

“So what is it?” Jason took a swig of his coffee. “The thing in your pocket.”

“It’s the remains of a little girl’s heart,” Henry replied. Jason blanched and set his coffee down.

“Why do you have…that?”

“Because she was murdered to create a curse. She died so alone and so terrified that her heart became a grasping, poisonous little thing.” Henry kept his tone neutral and low. “She needs be carried and kept company before her terror will fade and let her pass through the shade lands.”

Henry considered showing Jason the tiny cinder that remained of her. The girl would probably have liked to be held by someone as gentle as Jason. But Henry wasn’t sure of just how terrible her visage would be to Jason.

“Gunther mentioned the shade lands earlier. He said you could watch me from there, didn’t he?” Jason kept his voice low. “You never told me what they were.”

Henry frowned. All around them the clatter and rumble of more earthly pursuits rose and fell. Two construction workers debated their fantasy football picks. A scrawny Asian boy tried to convince the plump white girl next to him to come clubbing with him later tonight. And over it all the cooks at the grill kept up a steady stream of conversation and bursts of song as they shouted along with the classic rock drifting down from decades-old speakers.

And here was this fresh young man sitting beside him, so obvious in his longing both to know the truth and also to belong to a warm, mundane, human existence.

But the truth could change everything in this little sanctuary. It would make this diner—this whole city for that matter—seem like a world of happy insects frolicking on a fallen leaf as it drifted over the surface of an immense sea.

“Is it bad?” Jason asked quietly and Henry realized that the truth had to come out because it wouldn’t do anyone any good to keep it hidden. But it didn’t need to be grandiose. The hungry dead and the voracious darkness that held them weren’t Jason’s concern.

“The first thing you should know is that there are lots of other realms. The guys up in the labs like to call them infinite dimensional planes, but as far as I’m concerned they’re realms. Some are very small, others vast enough to contain countless worlds folded up within them. Some are nearly too far to reach, others sit right on top of our own. Irregulars deal with interactions between the populaces of those other realms and our own earthly realm.”

Jason nodded.

“I sort of got that idea with all the talk about faeries and the work being done in those offices.” Jason had the good sense to keep his voice down but not to draw attention by whispering. Nothing was quite so suspicious as the sound of whispers.

“Yes, but it’s not all just faeries, and not all of what we think of as faeries are the same race. The sidhe alone make up a solid fifty different tribes. Infinite worlds of infinite variation and all that, you know.”

“I…I think so.” Jason nodded. “So, these shade lands?”

“It’s not a realm where anything lives. It’s the place of the restless dead. The hungry dead,” Henry replied quickly. He hunted there, spent years at a time in those murky depths, but he didn’t like to talk about the place all that much. “The shade lands lie just under the skin of all living worlds. When you see a ghost here, its spirit is trapped in the shade lands and usually trying to break back through to the living world because of something unfinished, something it needs or fears or loves that it’s still holding on to, even in death.”

Jason was very quiet for a few moments.

“Are there a lot of ghosts?” he asked at last.

“Fewer than you’d think, if you believe in them,” Henry answered. “A lot more than you’d expect if you don’t.”

“That’s not really an answer.”

“It’s the best I can give.” Henry shrugged. “It’s not like they fill out census forms. And the shade lands aren’t a clear, bright place. They’re murky and filled with currents like the deep sea. They stretch infinitely out as far as death reaches.”

Jason nodded, but he wasn’t looking at Henry. He hardly seemed to be listening to him.

“If someone was murdered…violently, would he end up trapped there? Would he still be suffering?” The anxiety in Jason’s expression was obvious.

“No. Not necessarily.” Henry wondered just who Jason had lost. The father he’d mentioned earlier or the mother that he didn’t mention at all? From the way his face drained of color Henry guessed that it had been someone close to him and the end had been very ugly. “The vast majority of souls pass through the shade lands, no matter how they died. It’s generally when magic is involved that they remain. But most streak through instantly. Like shooting stars.” Sometimes they even made the gray darkness seem beautiful.

“My dad was murdered…” Jason looked away from Henry, down into his coffee cup. For an uncomfortable moment Henry feared that the young man might cry, but to Henry’s relief he pulled himself together. “He was torn apart by monsters—snow goblins. And I just need to know if he could be trapped in those shade lands?”

“How long ago was this?” Henry asked.

“Seventeen years.” Jason’s gaze remained on the dark liquid in his cup. “He suffered…”

It didn’t take a mathematical genius to figure out that Jason would have just been a child when his father had been murdered, and it sounded like he’d witnessed it.

“No. Your dad’s not trapped. See, unless they’re political refugees, snow goblins only come to the earthly realm as mercenaries, not magicians. They can be brutal, but they don’t bind souls or break them with torture,” Henry assured him. “Whatever your old man suffered, it ended with his life. By now he’s been reborn. More than likely he’s kicking up trouble as a surly teen somewhere.”

Jason at last lifted his gaze to meet Henry’s. He was a plain young man, but there was something so hopeful and relieved in his expression that he seemed rather handsome at the moment.

 Henry felt loathe to ruin Jason’s happiness, but the fact that his father had been murdered by snow goblins didn’t bode well for Jason himself. While a few of their clans lived as political refugees, most served the powerful rulers of other unearthly realms. And a man didn’t make an enemy of any of them by accident.

“What did your father do?” Henry asked.

“He was a musician. He could play pretty much anything with strings.” Jason answered this easily and with more than a hint of pride. “My mom too. She played the flute and the mandolin. I still remember the songs she taught me.”

“Yeah?” Henry encouraged Jason to go on. Smiling and animated, the young man took on a charming appeal.

“‘Suite Romantique’, ‘Syrinx’, ‘Carmen Fantasie’, ‘The Stone Of Fal’—”

“Stone of Fal?” Henry knew the name well enough but was surprised that Jason did.

“Yeah, I think it’s Irish or something.”

Sidhe actually
, Henry thought but he didn’t say so. “So what’s it about?” Henry inquired.

 “According to the ballad the Stone of Fal must be possessed only by the high king of where-ever-it-is.” Jason cracked a shy smile. “So when a usurper murders the rightful king and rapes the king’s daughter, the princess steals the stone from the usurper’s bedroom before he can claim the throne.”

“Yeah?” Henry asked. “And how does that work out for her?”

“Kind of weird and sad. Most old ballads are like that,” Jason replied, at ease with his subject. “According to the song, the only way that the princess can hide the stone is to swallow it. When she gives birth to the usurper’s child, the stone is in him. But the usurper, fearing the princess’s child will have a legitimate claim to the throne, hurls the child into the sea and thus loses the stone forever…It’s pretty dark, but the tune is really beautiful and the chorus is fun to sing.”  

“That’s the case with a lot of those old songs,” Henry commented, but his thoughts were on the ancient magics hidden so often in music. Sidhe in general—and the Tuatha Dé Dannan in particular—favored spells woven through simple melodies. Supposedly one of those songs—a cheery tune that unleashed a merciless slaughter—had stripped them of their humanity and gotten them banished to an underworld by a band of Milesian magicians. “Are you and your mother still in touch?”

“No. She left us when I was seven…” Jason looked a little sad but not as anguished as Henry had expected. “Dad always said that she was a free spirit who couldn’t be kept in one place. She had to go, but at least she left us with each other so we wouldn’t miss her so much. That’s what my dad said anyway. He was sort of a sap, really, but a good guy. I guess my mom’s probably in Timbuktu playing guitar with Tuareg nomads or something by now.”

Henry nodded. He wondered if she might not be even farther away.

Seven years would have been more than enough time to bind a truly immense magic to a child’s bones. That, added to the seventeen years that had passed since, would have placed Jason’s birth right around the time of the revolts against the Tuatha Dé Dannan regent, Greine the Usurper, as many called him. Greine still maintained rule over the Tuatha Dé Dannan Islands, but the theft of the Stone of Fal had prevented him from claiming both the title of high king and the power the stone conferred.

The thief had never been discovered as far as Henry knew.

“Do you recall much about your mother?” Henry tried to make the question sound casual.

“Her first name was Fionn…but I don’t think I ever heard her maiden name. I just called her Mom. She had bright red hair and long hands.” Jason spread his own fingers and smiled a little wryly. “I think I inherited her hands. I’d like to think I inherited some of her musical skill as well. She played beautifully.”

“So you share your parents’ disposition for music?”

“Yep.” Jason smiled. “Both sides of the family. No getting away from it.”

“Are you any good?” Henry asked.

“I think so.” Jason flushed slightly.

“Maybe you can play something for me? What’s your instrument of choice?”

Jason colored a little more, but Henry was certain why.

“I’m pretty good with most any musical instrument. I like woodwinds best. I have a fife that belonged to my mother that I’ve written a few melodies for.”

He took another drink of his coffee. “It’s really old-fashioned music, though. You probably won’t like it.”

“Nah, I’m pretty old-fashioned myself,” Henry replied. “My socks are the most modern things I own and they date back to 1962.”