TWENTY-SEVEN
I
DROVE THE LENGTH OF the docks with my windows down, letting the wind blow through the car. It carried the scent of a hundred deaths—mostly fish and pigeons, although the city’s human police were going to have at least one homicide case on their hands by the end of the night—but none of them was our Selkie. I snarled something wordless under my breath, earning a concerned glance from Connor, and rolled the windows up. Time to head for Bucer’s.
Having a full car kept me from needing to talk much, which was a relief, since my head was pounding and I couldn’t stop coming up with nightmare scenarios, all of them ending with Gillian’s death. Connor sat next to me in the front, while the back was filled with over-excited teenage boys. Raj was better at riding in cars than his uncle was, which wasn’t saying much, and Quentin was grumpy because he couldn’t get to the radio when he was sitting behind me.
“Can you
please
change the station?” he begged. “I think my eardrums are melting.”
“I would very much like to see that,” said Raj. He sounded sincere enough to make Quentin stop complaining for a moment. Then Raj started to snicker, Quentin smacked him, and the cycle started up again.
“I swear to Oberon, I will turn this car around and nobody will get to talk to the creepy underworld jerk,” I said, turning off the nice, ostensibly well-maintained main road and starting to make my way into one of the city’s less reputable neighborhoods.
“You can’t do that,” said Quentin, reasonably. “You need to talk to Bucer, remember?”
I muttered something nasty under my breath, and tried again: “Don’t make me duct tape your wrists and ankles together and shove you in the trunk while I deal with Bucer on my own.”
The silence that followed my statement lasted twice as long as the one that followed Raj’s joke about melting eardrums. Finally, Raj said, “I honestly believe she’d do that.” His voice was hushed, like he thought I’d courteously fail to hear if I thought he was whispering.
“So do I,” said Quentin.
My teenage passengers were silent for the rest of the drive. Quentin didn’t question my taste in music even when the DJ announced a thirty-minute block of Bruce Spring-steen songs without commercials. Connor was also silent, but for different reasons; anyone who looked at him could see that he was as tired as I was, and he wasn’t nearly as accustomed to running on empty.
Bucer’s neighborhood was on the line where “shabby” gave way to “slum.” Perfectly reasonable single-family homes that needed nothing but a coat of paint and some new windows sat side by side with decrepit apartment buildings whose inhabitants might well view fire as a viable means of home improvement. I parked between a rusted Volvo and a pickup truck that seemed held together with bungee cords.
“The ground rules,” I announced, twisting to eye my passengers sternly. “First, whatever I say goes. If I say we’re leaving, we’re leaving, and you’re not arguing with me. Got it?”
Quentin and Raj nodded enthusiastically. Connor frowned.
“I’m taking silence to mean ‘yes’ right now. Second, none of you raises a hand unless it’s in self-defense—with the stress here on
self
. The odds are pretty good that he’ll swing at me if he’s holding something back. I need to deal with him myself.”
Connor’s frown became a scowl. “Are you saying I’m supposed to sit back and let you get beaten up by a thug?” he asked.
“No, you’re supposed to sit back and let me mop the floor with a thug stupid enough to throw down with me. I can take Bucer O’Malley. What I can’t take is the hit my reputation will take if it looks like someone else is fighting my battles for me.” I smiled, trying to look comforting. “I know it’s hard, but trust me; I didn’t learn to fight from people like Sylvester and Etienne. They fight fair. I learned to fight from Devin and his lieutenants, and none of them ever started a fair fight in their lives.”
Devin’s biggest advice about fighting always involved the proverbial “bringing a gun to a knife fight.” That was sort of what I was doing. Bucer remembered me as an untried changeling with a lot of dumb luck that she could use to maneuver herself into the positions she needed to be in. I’m not quite that girl anymore. Oh, I still do my share of relying on luck—why mess with a good thing?—but these days, I back it up with a lot more actual skill.
And I still don’t fight fair.
Connor didn’t look happy. Quentin seemed confused but willing to go along with it. Raj, on the other hand, looked delighted.
“Is that all?” he asked. “Because if it is, can we get on to the part where you kick this guy’s butt all the way back to Market Street?”
“There’s one more thing.” I unbuckled my seat belt, reaching for the door. “Dealing with Bucer isn’t like dealing with the Luidaeg. He doesn’t just cheat when he fights. So don’t make any bets with him, don’t take anything he offers you, and for the love of Maeve, don’t eat or drink until we’re out of his apartment.”
“He enchants the food he serves his guests?” Quentin sounded mortally affronted.
“No. I just don’t want you getting salmonella.”
My ragged little parade made its way up the walkway to a gate that was probably state-of-the-art, once upon a time. These days, it offered no more than the illusion of security. Someone had long since broken off a key in the keyhole lock, and the deadbolt was open. The only thing the gate did right was creak when I pushed it open, rusty hinges wailing our arrival to anyone and everyone in earshot.
No one came to investigate as we stepped into the narrow, cabbage-scented entry hall. There was barely room for the four of us, and there wouldn’t have been any room at all if one of us had been bigger. According to Bucer, he was living in Apartment #4 on the second floor. I looked at the rickety stairs, frowned, and turned to push my way past Raj and Connor as I moved back toward the door.
“What now?” asked Connor.
“Hang on a second.”
The names of all the current occupants were written in faded, painfully neat ballpoint pen on little slips of off-white paper that had been taped next to their respective doorbells. According to this primitive directory, the person in Apartment 4 was actually named “K. Lyons.” Apartment 7, on the other hand . . .
“B. O’Malley,” I said, mostly to myself. I turned around again, facing my confused escorts. “We go up.”
“Up?” echoed Quentin.
“The stairs. We’re heading for the fourth floor.”
He groaned. “I was afraid you were going to say that.”
The stairs creaked with every step, and the banister was basically a haven for wayward splinters that would just love to go home lodged in our flesh. The original color of the threadbare runner was obscured by decades of ground-in mud, and the wallpaper wasn’t much better off. “I don’t think even the Luidaeg would willingly live here,” I muttered.
“What?” asked Connor.
“Nothing.” I grabbed the banister, getting two splinters in my palm for my troubles, and kept climbing.
Rickety and filthy as the stairs were, they didn’t collapse under our feet. That was about all I felt I had the right to ask, given the overall condition of the building. We reached the fourth floor without encountering anything nastier than a few exposed nails at the base of the banister.
Half the lights were out, casting the whole hallway into a deep shadow. “Follow me, and watch your step,” I said, mostly for Connor’s benefit. Out of the four of us, he had the worst night vision. He muttered something under his breath. I didn’t ask him to repeat it, and he didn’t volunteer.
Bucer’s apartment was the one closest to the outside wall. I clapped a hand over the peephole and knocked briskly, picking up more splinters from the half-shredded wood of the door in the process.
Footsteps—or something like them—approached the door from inside the apartment, followed by a scuffling sound as whoever was inside tried to get a look through the blocked-off peephole. After a few seconds of this, the sound stopped, and the steps retreated a few feet.
I knocked again.
This time, no one moved. Seconds stretched out in the silence, sliding into each other until they threatened to become minutes. I knocked a third time, pausing longer between each thud of my knuckles. There was more scuffling from inside, followed by silence.
That was probably long enough. “Open up and let us in, Bucer,” I called, loudly enough that he’d have to hear me, given his proximity to the door. “This isn’t the way Devin taught us to treat members of the family, now, is it?”
A few more seconds ticked by. The steps approached the door again, and Bucer said, “Devin’s dead.”
“True,” I agreed. “But I’m not, and you’re not, and we can either be family, or we can be enemies. Don’t you have a preference?”
This time, the answer was immediate: “Friends is better. But you said I should let ‘us’ in. Like people, plural. I’m not . . . ah. I’m not decent right now.”
I smiled almost despite myself. If there’s one thing Bucer O’Malley has never been in his life, it’s decent. “None of us is human, Bucer,” I said, pitching my voice lower to keep his neighbors—if he had any in this pit—from hearing me. “Now open the door, or I’ll start to think you don’t love me anymore.”
I heard the sound of locks being unfastened. After the third deadbolt was undone, the door creaked cautiously open, Bucer’s narrow face peeking through the gap. He wasn’t wearing a human disguise, and I could see the hairy edge of one goatlike ear curving upward from the side of his head.
More importantly, I saw that there was no chain holding the door in place. “Hi,” I said, brightly. “You going to let us in?”
Bucer hesitated. I could see him playing out the situation in his head: first he’d slam the door, and then he’d run for the nearest window, planning to escape to the street. Under normal circumstances, that might have been amusing enough for me to let him get away with it, at least until I chased him down and knocked his head against the pavement a few times. Sadly, I really didn’t have time to play around. I stuck my foot in the door before he could finish his thought.
“We’re coming in, Bucer,” I said, all brightness leeching from my tone. “We can do it as your guests, or we can do it as your interrogators. You want to pick one? Because I’m low on time, I’m low on patience, and I haven’t had nearly enough coffee.”
Amusingly, it was the last item on the list that made his eyes go wide. “Oh, uh, hey, October! Sorry, I didn’t realize it was you—sorry.” The door was pulled fully open, revealing Bucer in all his scrawny, unwashed glory. He was wearing cut-off shorts, revealing the point where his human thighs gave way to goat legs. Julie and I used to call him a bargain basement Satyr when we were all still living at Home. I’d never say anything like that now, but we were only half-kidding then. Satyrs are half-goat, half-man. Glastigs are three-quarters man, one-quarter goat—and, in Bucer’s case, one hundred percent craven scum.
“Good call,” I said, gesturing for the others to follow me as I stepped past Bucer into the apartment. Quentin and Raj were right behind me, surveying the condition of the hall with imperial disdain. Connor brought up the rear.
There was a moment, right after Connor passed the threshold, where Bucer visibly considered making a run for it. I raised an eyebrow, staring at him. Bucer’s shoulders slumped, and he shut the door.
“To what do I owe the pleasure?” he asked. The cheap carpet was thick enough to muffle the sound of his hooves, which probably kept his neighbors from reporting him for keeping livestock. These are the concerns of coexisting with humanity.
“I had a few questions for you, and this seemed more efficient than calling.” I let my gaze sweep lazily through the living room, taking in the half-filled boxes and the hasty piles of personal belongings. “Going somewhere?”
“Actually, yeah, so if you don’t mind—”
“How much did she pay you, Bucer?”
The question seemed to stop him cold. His ears trembled, giving more away than his face did; his expression was more quizzical than anything else, a man trying to find the answer to a question he didn’t fully understand. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“How much did Rayseline pay you for your help? Hell, how did she even
find
you?” I turned to face him, meeting his eyes with my own. “Don’t fuck around with me. I’m not in the mood to waste time kicking your ass tonight.”
“I really don’t know what you mean, October,” he said, and took a step toward me, holding his hands out in supplication. “Ain’t nobody paid me nothing since you paid me for that information on the kidnappings. I’m packing to get out of town, like I told you I was going to—like you would be, if you had any sense. It’s not too late, you know. You can ditch the preschool, blow this pretzel stand with me. We can set up business in some new city, someplace that doesn’t have the baggage this one does. You and me, just like old times . . .”
The smell of damp linen and pine gathered around him as he spoke, the tangled edges of his magic trying to slink past my defenses. Glastig are masters of persuasion. If Bucer had been a pureblood, I might have had reason to worry. As it was, I glanced to my companions, trying to measure how they were holding up in front of Bucer’s barrage of magically persuasive chatter. Quentin looked dubious; Raj looked disgusted. Only Connor looked like he was coming around to Bucer’s line of crap. That was fine. Training him wasn’t my problem.
I turned back to Bucer, took three long steps forward, and grabbed the edge of one sensitive ear before he had a chance to react. He yelped. I twisted. He yelped louder, the smell of linen and pine dissipating. “I was trying to do this the nice way, Bucer, but oh, no, we can’t have nice things, can we? You just had to go and try enchanting me. Now we can’t play nicely anymore. That was a mistake, don’t you agree?”
“You’re
hurting
me!” he wailed.
“No, I’m showing you that I
can
hurt you.” I let go. He staggered back a step, eyes wide and wounded. “Someone told Raysel where to find my daughter, Bucer. It wasn’t me. It wasn’t Connor, because he didn’t know. Not even the Queen knew where she was. It was a
secret
, and someone told.”