Hallow Point (10 page)

The attitude was nothing but face-saving, though, and as I hauled my keister up and into the creepy old vehicle, him and me both knew it.

I’d figured on the redcap climbing up to perch next to the driver, leaving me on my lonesome in the cab, but no such luck. He scrabbled in after me, hauled the door shut—which sounded awfully similar to a guillotine—and plopped himself down on the bench facing me.

Swell.

Always exciting to travel with someone whose strongest emotion is frustrated anger that they ain’t allowed to slurp your guts down like pasta.

I’d been in one of these contraptions before. Last one was a two-horse (or two-kelpie, or whatever) deal, with some half-assed effort to spruce the thing up all modern. Whitewalls on a carriage? Just as dippy looking as you’d expect.

Not in here. Whatever else you could say about this thing—and I coulda said plenty—it didn’t give a hoot about the fashion of the day.

Some of it was familiar, though. Same pungent scent of cleanser—they probably figured I’d rather take my chances challenging my escort’s Tommy than hang around if the place had its usual bouquet—and same super-supple leather seats. Soft and apparently freshly upholstered.

I could tell because someone had missed an umbilical cord dangling down beside the bench, and it hadn’t fallen off on its own yet.

Right about then, if someone had granted me one wish, I’d probably have wiped the whole goddamn Unfit from the face of two worlds. Fucking bastards.

Dunno if the gink saw my reaction and was rubbin’ it in, or if it was just coincidence, but the redcap laid his Chicago typewriter on the seat beside him—not quite pointing my way, but not quite
not
pointing my way—and started to pick his teeth with what looked to be a
really
small rib bone.

I damn near hadda sit on my hands.

Minute or two of scraping, then he said, “You keep looking at folks that way, Oberon, it’s maybe gonna get you hurt some day.”

“It’s gonna get
someone
hurt,” I assured him.

“Would you’ve mouthed off this bad if you’d made your appointment this morning? Don’t figure the coppers took it too good when you didn’t show.”

He wanted me to react, to get nervous, ask how he knew that. So I didn’t.

Took some willpower, though.

We both shut our yaps at that point, just listening to the crack and crunch and thump of wooden wheels over what felt like every pothole, bump, and loose rock in Chicago. Not that I hadda hear any of it, since I
felt
every friggin’ one. Damn bench was hard enough, even through the… leather. If I bruised easy as you, I’d have looked like a shaved baboon from the back.

I gotta confess, though, much as I’d rather not… Creepy and stomach-turning as the coach was, it was still nice, even calming, to be traveling across Chicago in something that
wasn’t
trying to set my brain on fire.

Speaking of, the cabin was pretty well insulated but it wasn’t soundproof. I heard the coughing of engines and the squeal of tires as cans of every make and model passed us on the roadway. Screeching brakes, though? Honking horns? Angry shouts full of impolite and either back-breaking or biblically suspect suggestions? Yeah, zip. I mean, I caught one here’n there from a distance, but nothing in the immediate vicinity.

Nothing to suggest a coach-and-four was trundling, pretty as you please, down a modern street.

“Nice glamour,” I offered.

“Yeah, you’re cute, too.”

And that was the end of
that
conversation. I leaned back, crossed my arms, and realized that even neck-deep in whatever this mess was, I
still
thought mostly about Ramona when things got quiet.

A while longer’n the traffic started to fade. Fewer flivvers, and those there were sounded a good ways away. That bugged me. Wasn’t
so
late that traffic shoulda just dropped off like that, and there was no way the carriage had carried us far enough to reach somewhere this quiet. Hell, we shoulda still been within sight of the Pilsen factories’ smokestacks. It was hinky, and where the Unfit are involved, I
hate
hinky.

Course, where the Unfit are involved I hate everything, so that’s maybe lacking some of the emphasis I meant to give it.

Engines and tires weren’t replaced by silence, either. Rain started tap-dancing on the carriage roof. Driver must be getting awful uncomfortable out there. Boo-hoo. Now if the redcap would just go join him…

Tap-dance became a marching band. A charging army. A damn machine gun. The whole contraption trembled beneath what felt like gallon-size raindrops, and shook in the grip of a wind that mighta just been strong enough to pick me up and throw me if I’d been burning shoe leather out there.

“Windy City,” yeah, but this was a bit much. I was damn near positive that I’d have heard something if there was a hurricane skulking up on Chicago. Which could really only mean…

Second to the right, and straight on
’
til morning.

Not that I guessed we were headed anywhere quite as swanky as Barrie’s Neverland.

“Thought you said she was on our side of the real,” I accused.

“Naw,
you
said that.” The redcap spit out something he’d finally dislodged with the rib. “I didn’t say nothing about it.”

“Yeah, I said it. And I don’t make mistakes, so she’s clearly in the wrong place.”

Little shit mighta had something to say to that, but he didn’t have the chance. Carriage trundled to a stop, and the door swung open all by itself, which is a neat trick if you’re nine.

The trick
beyond
the door was more impressive, though, even at
my
age.

There hadda be a world out there—though which one was up for debate. The storm was a
wall
, whipped sideways and made solid by gusts that must’ve rivaled the first breath of Creation, painted black by a night so thick I coulda stuck a straw in it and sucked up a few gulps.

It smelled like… after-death. That weird tang when whatever was left to decay
has
decayed, and there shouldn’t be squat left to smell at all, but there is? Yeah. That.

My buddy with the bad dentistry said something that was probably rude, but I didn’t catch it over the wind.

And that’s about when I got wise.
Not
wind, nuh-uh. A gale of souls rotten inside and out, howling and screaming through rains they couldn’t feel, rains made poison by the touch—or rather, the
un
-touch—of the profane.

Sluagh
. Dead mortal spirits half-born again as Fae, for reasons even the oldest and wisest of us had never really understood. A flock of specters; the Host of the Damned.

One of ’em, anyway. It’s a sad and scary fact of life and death in Elphame that the Damned assemble in a
lot
of different hosts. Maybe they get bored easy.

Whatever kinda reality might or might not’ve been out there, beyond the
sluagh
-ridden storm, it wasn’t uninhabited. Two figures coalesced outta the dark, and if you still suppose, by now, that I’m usin’ words like “coalesce” metaphorically, you need serious lessons in paying attention.

First one was an old geezer, real grandfather sort. Tall, thin, smooth-shaven, sporting silk duds that shoulda been totally soaked through but only looked vaguely damp. His smile was kind, friendly, which meant he was anything but.

Course, I already knew that. I’d seen him, or one just like him, before.

Boggart. Nasty as they get.

Wasn’t him I was worried about.

The boggart held an umbrella off to the side, looking for all the world as though he were taking his granddaughter for a walk, and just tryin’ to keep her dry. He scooted forward so his companion could climb into the coach without getting her ’do all ruined. Close enough that I could see the umbrella was made of baby blankets, stitched together over a copper frame.

God
, I hate these fucks. And at the time, none more so than…

“Lady Eudeagh,” I greeted her, correcting myself to “Boss Eudeagh” at her sideways glare.

“Mr. Oberon.” She sat down beside the redcap and waved her elderly escort over to my side of the carriage. I kept my grumbling in my head and scooted over.

“Mr. Téimhneach, Mr. Oberon. Oberon, Téimhneach.”

I offered my new seatmate a half-nod.

“I’d say I’m pleased to meetcha…”

The boggart’s smile, the twinkle in his peepers, never faded.

“But we would hate to start off by lying to one another, would we not?”

“Something like that.”

Eudeagh kept right on talking, as though her goon’n me had just become best palls. “I trust you and Mr. Grangullie need no formal introduction at this point? He’s taken good care of you, I hope?”

I didn’t even look at the redcap. I didn’t
need
to. You ever been around anyone whose grin you could
hear
? Can’t say I recommend the experience.

“He hasn’t made me knock him off, so I guess that’s something,” I said.

“Indeed.”

For a few tics we just kinda watched each other, swaying a bit as the carriage started forward again.

Boss Eudeagh. Leader, sovereign,
Capo di Tutti Capi
of… well, not the
entirety
of the Chicago Unseelie, but certainly the single biggest outfit in their whole loco setup.

Most of us called her “Queen Mob,” though I’d decided not to say so to her face. No idea how she’d take it. (I occasionally wondered how the real deal, Queen Mab, would’ve reacted to Eudeagh’s moniker, if she’d still been alive to hear of it. Maybe it woulda struck her as funny. Maybe she wouldn’t have cared—Eudeagh mighta been a big cheese here, but in the Old World she wasn’t much of anybody—and maybe she’d have hunted down the first gink to’ve made the joke, flayed him alive, and choked him with the skin of his own elbow. Mab always did make the rest of us look collected and predictable.)

Hell, getcha mind back in the present, Mick. The dead ain’t your problem right now.

She hadn’t changed much since I’d seen her last, not that I expected she would have done. Mighta come up to my waist, if she was standing in heels. Hair black as her soul, and a whole lotta curves, held in place by a slick violet number that
had
to have been woven around her to fit like that.

And two eyes, for the moment, thank Heaven.

In fact, now that we were close enough for a good up-and-down…

“You hurt?”

She blinked at me, then—when I pointed—she reached a fingertip to feel the smear of dried blood by her left peeper.

“Oh.” She spit the glass eye out, letting Téimhneach scramble to catch it before it hit the floor. A fat, wormy tongue excreted itself from between the newly revealed teeth, licking the smear away. “Thank you for your concern, Mr. Oberon, but no, I’m fine. It’s not
my
blood.”

Think I told you before that the
aes sidhe
don’t vomit? Yeah, that’s the only reason I didn’t. Shoulda just kept my dumb trap shut.

“Kinda surprised the rain didn’t wash that away,” I said, mostly ’cause I felt I hadda say
something
. “Can’t imagine blankets keep you all that dry.”

“All a matter of what you grease them with.”

“Oh.”

Yeah,
really
needed to keep my trap shut around these monsters. Seemed like every time I didn’t, I learned something I was a lot happier not having in my head. Part of me wanted her to just get on with it, spill what this was about.

The part of me that already had a pretty strong notion of what she wanted told that first part to close its head and keep her jawing about
anything
else.

We hit a particularly big bump, making Eudeagh scowl, and I guess she decided on her own it was time to cut the bunk. She squinted her right eye, looked at the glass orb in the boggart’s hand, and then spit out the other fake.

Wouldn’t want a mismatch, would we? Might not be stylish.

She smiled with all three pairs of lips and started to talk, switching mouths in the middle of sentences or even, now’n then, halfway through a word.

“I require a service from you, Oberon. It may keep you busy for some time.”

“I’m flattered, but I’m right in the middle of another—”

“I’m calling in my marker.”

Shit
. Not unexpected shit, but still.
Shit
.

Short version, for you bunnies with bad memories, is that the Unseelie Court helped me out a short while back, when I needed some leverage in Elphame to find a missing kid. Which meant I owed them—owed her—and shirking a debt ain’t something the Fae make a habit of. Bad things happen to us if we try. Real bad.

No point even in arguing it. If she’d decided whatever she wanted was worth cashing in with me to get it, I wasn’t gonna sweet-talk her into postponing.

“All right. What do you want?” I asked.

As if I didn’t know, what with the timing and all.

Please don’t say it, please don’t say it…

“I’m quite certain, by now, you’ve heard something about a spear?”

Fuck. She said it.

“Yeah,” I groused, “I heard about it. Already got a good solid broderick from Herne, and a really annoying visit from the other side of your tracks, over the whole thing. I told them all I was out of it.”

If Eudeagh was at all surprised to hear of the Hunter’s or the Seelie Court’s interests, she didn’t show it. Not that I figured she didn’t already know.

“Then I fear I’m making a liar out of you, Mr. Oberon. You are most definitely
in
it.”

Again I wanted to try to argue my way out, and again I decided it wasn’t worth the stress. Not when I already knew it’d be a trip for biscuits to even try.

Instead, I asked, “Why? Why’s this dingus got everyone so worked up?”

“It’s one of the old relics. Enchanted.”

Well, yeah, I’d figured something along those lines. But it still didn’t add up.

“They ain’t common anymore,” I told her, as if she didn’t already know, “but there used to be a fair bunch, back in the old days. And I gotta tell you, most of ’em weren’t all that impressive, except to mortals without the tiniest knowledge of magic in their primitive noggins. Not even sure how useful most of ’em would be today, honestly. I think the whole lot of you mugs are wasting your time.”