Irregulars: Stories by Nicole Kimberling, Josh Lanyon, Ginn Hale and Astrid Amara (61 page)

Henry felt, as much as heard, a bittersweet melody wash over him like the promise of redemption. Beautiful and definitely magic. Henry swallowed his burning spell back into his gut instead of wasting the energy.

“Do you know what you did just now?” Henry asked.

“Me?” Jason looked startled. “Nothing. I was just standing here like you told me to.”

“No, there was something. I felt it. Tell me what you were thinking about a second ago.”

“Nothing.” Jason shook his head. “I just had a little tune in my head but—”

“What tune?” Henry moved closer to him, drawing in the faint whisper of power before it could dissipate with Jason’s exhaled breath. Penetrating the camouflage of warm domestic tastes—coffee and milk—Henry discerned that spark of fire that he’d mistaken twice for cinnamon.

“It’s just a little song that I sing when I get nervous. My mother taught it to me.”

“Yeah? Like that song she taught you about the Stone of Fal?”

“That, and ‘Greensleeves’,” Jason replied.

Henry smirked. Jason definitely hadn’t been singing ‘Greensleeves’. No, an immensely potent magic fueled that other little tune of Jason’s.

“I need you to think about that tune—don’t sing it, not even a whisper. Just think about it, will you?”

“Sure.”

For a moment Jason simply looked thoughtful, his gaze distant and his fingers absently tapping in time to an unuttered melody. Then Henry felt the wards he’d set begin to shimmer and shudder with a kind of excitement. As he watched, his glinting, serpentine wards slithered and wriggled closer to Jason. They wove around him like love knots. Henry’s own damn spells. No wonder he couldn’t come close to hitting Jason.

“Fuck me,” Henry whispered under his breath. Then he raised his voice. “You can give it a rest.”

“Okay.” Jason looked nonplussed and Henry felt his wards slipping back into his control. “Did it help?” Jason asked.

“It cleared a few things up.” Henry studied Jason. “Tell me, when you were thinking of that song, what were you imagining—I mean, did you see anything?”

“It always makes me think of being safe…” Jason shrugged, but then added, “Anytime I hear music I sort of see the shape and color of the melody. With that particular piece I imagine the notes are weaving a shining gold orb around me…Sounds stupid, doesn’t it?”

Henry shook his head. “You see the orb when you’re thinking of the tune?”

“Yeah, but I see all kinds of shit—” A look of realization suddenly lit Jason’s features. “Is it really there?”

“Yeah, it’s there all right,” Henry assured him. “Your mother taught you a powerful protection spell. Clever, too, because it manipulates the powers around you so that someone watching for magic might not even notice that the spell is coming from you.”

“My mother knew all that?” Jason asked.

“I imagine she knew quite a bit more,” Henry responded. “How many songs in all did she teach you?”

“Dozen and dozens, but most of them are just normal songs. You know, ‘Do-Re-Mi’ sort of stuff…” Jason frowned at the small bone fife on his shelf. “Though there was one that was very strange…”

“Yeah? Strange how?” Henry prompted.

“I never got to play it,” Jason replied. “She made me memorize the fingerings for the melody on my fife but insisted that I never play even a note of it aloud…‘Amhrán Na Marú.’ I think that was the name of the piece. I’m not sure. It’s been a long time since I’ve even thought of it.”

Henry didn’t recognize the name of the song, but he did know what
marú
meant in the sidhe language. Slaughter.

“When you were practicing the fingerings on your fife, did you ever see anything?” Henry asked.

“Not really…” Jason responded slowly and Henry could tell that he was rethinking those pure, simple memories of his childhood. How different were they now that he knew his mother had been secretly training him to perform spells?

“One time, when I was about six, I’d gotten all excited about reading and writing music. I remember trying to write down the melody of ‘Amhrán Na Marú.’ I could hear it as I wrote it and then I started to see it...It scared me, all those white shining notes, razor sharp and spinning around me like saw blades. My mother caught me and tore the notations to shreds. She spanked the hell out of me. And after that I couldn’t forget about ‘Amhrán Na Marú’ fast enough.”

“Quite the lady, that mother of yours,” Henry commented.

“What do you mean?” A strain of offense sounded in Jason’s tone, but Henry ignored it. Jason needed to be told the truth—or at least as much of it as Henry could work out—but he didn’t imagine that Jason would thank him for it…He supposed that there wasn’t much Jason would thank him for.

Princess eyed him from the windowsill.

“Do me a favor, Princess. Keep Gunther company at the office and keep your ears pricked for any news concerning Jason,” Henry told her. “Find me if the sidhe court makes any more demands.”

Princess gave a quick nod and then slipped out the window. Henry turned his attention back to Jason.

“We should get a move on as well.”

“But I thought you were going to teach me how to defend myself?”

“You already have more skill than I could teach you in a single morning. You’ve just got to commit to unleashing it. The next time someone corners you, don’t just whisper that song under your breath, belt it out.”

“I’m supposed to sing to them?”

“Music soothes the savage beast, isn’t that what they say?”

“You’re serious?” Jason seemed caught between incredulity and amusement.

“Dead serious,” Henry replied. “You might want to bring that fife of yours along as well.”

“Of course.” A hint of sarcasm colored Jason’s voice as he snatched his fife from the shelf. “I can always knock someone over the head with it if serenading fails to produce an effect.”

Despite himself, Henry laughed and Jason’s annoyance seemed to dissipate.

“So where are we going?” Jason asked.

“The Grand Goblin Bazaar,” Henry informed him. “And while we’re on our way we need to have a talk about ‘The Stone of Fal’ and all those other songs your mother taught you.”

Jason looked apprehensive but tucked his fife into the pocket of his hooded sweatshirt and zipped it up. Then he followed Henry out the door.

Chapter Seven

Jason wasn’t certain if the events of the last day had simply depleted his ability to feel shocked or if he was somehow becoming accustomed to the surreal. A week ago he would have reeled with denial when Falk informed him that, in all likelihood, he harbored some mystic relic in his bones—the very Stone of Fal he’d described to Falk only a day ago. Falk played it easy and offhanded as he mentioned that there really was a usurper, Greine, who wanted the stone as well as a group of sidhe revolutionaries who were desperate to keep it from him.

More than likely the woman who’d raised Jason hadn’t been his biological mother but her lady-in-waiting, Fionn.

Jason wished he could dismiss it all as crazy, but he no longer possessed that capacity. Instead Falk’s words resonated through him with the inevitability of truth.

“Nobody’s going to get to you.” Falk’s blue eyes seemed to blaze against the gray morning mist. “Soon as we track Phipps and find out what he’s sold Greine, we’ll be ahead of the game.” He left much unsaid, Jason knew, just from the careful way he chose his words.  

Ahead of them the crosswalk light flashed. And for the first time Jason noticed that the icon of the walking man looked like the chalk outline of a murder victim: his head severed from his body, his hands and feet missing.

“Do you know if it was Greine or the revolutionaries who killed my father?”

“No way to know for sure.” Falk glanced quickly to him and Jason thought he read worry in Falk’s expression. He probably thought Jason was going to start bawling, but Jason had cried about all he could over his father’s death a long time ago. Not that he didn’t still feel the hurt and horror, but it wasn’t the open wound it once had been. He certainly wasn’t going to go to pieces in front of Falk.

Then Falk reached out and pulled Jason to him with an awkward but oddly comforting squeeze of his shoulder. An instant later Falk released him, but they continued to walk closely. Jason could feel the heat radiating off Falk.

“If I had to put my money on one or the other,” Falk said, “I’d bet Greine was responsible for what was done to your dad. Revolutionaries would have torched the entire house to cover their tracks and keep Greine from knowing where they’d been looking for you. The way your father’s body was left, that strikes me more as a message from Greine to the revolutionaries. He’d want them to know he was close to reclaiming the stone and just what he’d do to his enemies.”

Jason wasn’t violent by nature, but in that instant he wished he could lay his hands on this bastard Greine. He’d be more than happy to loose the razor notes of the ‘Amhrán Na Marú’ upon the man.

“If it’s revenge you’re thinking about, don’t,” Falk told him with an uncanny insight. “Trust me, no good comes from stewing on all the wrongs of the past. There are just too many to ever reach the end once you start down that road.”

“So what do you suggest?” Jason retorted. “That I just pretend nothing ever happened?”

“I didn’t say that.” Falk shook his head. “I’m just telling you that it’s easy to lose sight of your future when you’re caught up with the past.”

“My future?” Jason almost laughed at the idea. He’d lost the only promising job he’d had in years, he was being hunted by monsters as well as a supernatural megalomaniac, and the closest he’d come to a romantic encounter had been a morning-wood pity fuck from Falk—which Jason couldn’t even think about right now without feeling disheartened. Really, the idea of his future should have depressed the hell out of him, but there was something about Falk’s company that kept Jason from pitying himself; he certainly wasn’t going to whine about his job prospects and sad love life to a guy who just shrugged off bullet wounds.

“You said yourself that you’ve spent years trying to have a normal life and you obviously have a future as a musician.” Falk gave him another of his quick, piercing glances. “What I’m trying to tell you is that this world around you here and now is full of possibilities and hope. That’s what you should be living for, not some dank, dead past…You don’t want to end up as a haunted, half-dead relic like me, I promise.”

“You’re not so bad,” Jason responded.

Falk just snorted at that.

“I think you’re kind of charming,” Jason admitted because it was obviously true, otherwise this morning wouldn’t have started the way it had. Falk might not want it to be so, but Jason wasn’t going to lie, at least not to himself.

“Yeah?” Falk actually laughed. “That’s me all right, Prince Charming.”

Jason flushed but then shot back, “What would you know about it? I’m the one who can see people as they really are, not you.”

To his surprise, Falk didn’t have a response. Jason wasn’t certain, but he thought a faint flush might have darkened Falk’s tanned cheeks.

“We’ll want to turn right up here.” Falk quickened his step and Jason moved swiftly to match his long strides. As he walked alongside Falk through the damp morning mist, he picked out a plump man with the face of a carp selling cut flowers to a couple of tourists. A day ago the gaping jaws of the flower seller would have terrified him; he would have interpreted them as a sign of his disassembling sanity.

But now he knew he wasn’t out of his mind, and as he surreptitiously studied the flower seller arranging a bouquet of peonies, Jason noticed how the scales on his hands and face glinted iridescent gold in the passing breaks of sunlight. Across the street two young girls chatted. Tiny wings fluttered and flashed like butterflies on their shoulders.  

The world was stranger than most people would ever know, he realized, but also more beautiful.

When Falk showed him to a blue port-o-let near the harbor, Jason wasn’t surprised to discover rolling green hills and a cerulean blue sky beyond the door. He followed Falk out onto an oddly serene and empty hill. Countless tiny flowers carpeted the ground and perfumed the warm air. Sunflowers the size of Jason’s little finger bowed over even smaller sprays of scarlet poppies and white roses. The brilliant blue port-o-let seemed to be the only notable landmark as far as Jason could see.

“This doesn’t look like a grand bazaar,” Jason commented.

“Nah, this is just a layover.” Falk fished a pocket watch from his trench coat. “The portal to the bazaar won’t be aligned for twelve more minutes. All the portals have different schedules. Nowadays, of course, computers track most of them and set up layovers like this one. But back in the day we had to do it by memory and feel. It took skill and balls, like jumping trains.”

“You sound like you miss the old days.”

Falk appeared troubled by the idea.

“No, they were rotten times, really. People died—sometimes badly—and nobody could afford to give a crap because that was just the price of knowledge back then. I’m glad all that’s gone now.” Falk closed his pocket watch and slipped it back into his coat pocket. Then he offered Jason one of his self-conscious, crooked grins. “I’m just a codger who misses the man he was before all those good old days took their toll.”