“Just… if this don’t work… I don’t wanna see the boss disappointed again. I dunno if he can take it.”
“Trust me, Archie, I don’t wanna see that either. I—”
A deep, desperate, rasping breath sounded from beneath the heavy quilt. Nessumontu’s chant trailed off and the entire room fell silent.
For an instant only. Then everybody in the room who wasn’t centuries old cried out at once as Adalina bolted upright!
Bianca was already lunging in to wrap her daughter in her arms, Fino half a step behind, and I hadda practically leap across the room to bar their path.
“Hang on! Let’s make sure she’s okay before we—”
Adalina screamed, and I mean screamed. It was piercing, like gettin’ Ramona’s talons through the eardrums. One hand lashed out, grabbin’ me by the sleeve and hauling me in and around so we were near face-to-face. The girl’s peculiar Fae lineage made her ugly, even somehow alien, but there’d always been a kind humanity behind the bulging, widely spaced eyes and twisted, gawping mouth.
Not now. Now I couldn’t tell who—or what—I was facin’.
The painful scream dropped to a more manageable volume and for an endless few seconds she shouted at me, spouting what musta seemed an enraged gibberish to everyone else in the room. But finally, finally she wound down, let go of my coat and fell back on her pillows.
Again there was silence. I don’t think the Ottatis were even breathin’. And then…
“Mama? Daddy? What… What happened?”
This time I didn’t try to stop ’em. The entire family, both parents and her sorta-sister, were on the bed, near smotherin’ Adalina in hugs and tearful kisses. So far as they were concerned, whatever’d just happened was already over and done, a moment of trauma and confusion as their baby girl finally awoke.
Me, I stepped back away from ’em, and it’s a good thing everyone there already knew what I was, ’cause I totally forgot to blink, to fidget, to do anythin’ to make myself look even slightly human.
’Cause I was the only one there who knew that what Adalina’d been spouting wasn’t random nonsense. That for just a minute, there’d been someone else there, someone other’n a scared and confused girl.
It hadn’t been a single language, see, but a combination, switchin’ from one to the next as she shouted. I’d recognized several. Old Gaelic. Old Polish. Old East Norse, of all peculiar things.
And because of the constant switchin’, I hadn’t been able to understand most of it. Each language was gone, replaced by another, before my brain could start translatin’. But I’d caught just a snippet of meaning, at the very tail end.
Somethin’ about being woken too soon. About not being ready.
I turned my back on the sobbing, grateful family to stare out the window. Tsura, alone on the lawn, looked up just in time to catch my gaze.
* * *
All three of us were outside, now, loitering around the porch and watchin’ as one of Fino’s boys pulled up at the curb in the Shark’s burgundy LaSalle, ready to chauffeur Tsura and the mummy—which sounds like a duo act, come to think of it—back to the carnival. Nessumontu’d already refused any sorta real payment, and he’d been pretty anxious to get outta there once the grateful hugs had started flyin’ around the room. We got us a few weird glances from neighboring windows, or so the twitching curtains suggested, but I figure anyone livin’ near Fino’s place was used to odd visitors at odd hours.
Me, I was makin’ small talk with Nessumontu mostly, askin’ about plans we’d already discussed and some historical tidbits I was curious about. It beat dwelling on what’d just happened in Adalina’s room, or what the repercussions might be—or on the fact that I’d actually made me a new friend, someone without a hidden agenda and who wasn’t tryin’ to hold magical influence over me, and she wasn’t gonna be stickin’ around.
Almost as an afterthought, since he would be leavin’ in a few more days, I asked, “What about the curse? How far you think you’ll need to get before it fades?”
You ever see a fella with no peepers blink in confusion? It’s disturbing.
“I beg your pardon?”
“The curse? You know the… bad luck?” My stomach was suddenly sinkin’ toward my toes.
“I have no protective curse on me, Mick Oberon. I might once have, but if so, it has faded in the many years since I was taken from my proper tomb. This is one of the reasons I must prepare so many new defenses for myself.”
Yep, toes. And then even lower. If Nessumontu wasn’t the source of my recent misfortunes, unwitting or otherwise, then where the hell…?
Tsura reached out, brushing Nessumontu’s arm.
“Could you give us a minute, please?”
The stiff nodded, uh, stiffly.
“I shall wait in the vehicle.” Then, the way he’d seen so many of us do it, he stuck out a hand to me. I took it, and he turned and wandered toward the car.
“Well,” I said, a bit reluctant, “I guess this is it.”
“I’ve never been as scared in my life as I was in the last few days,” she said. “But your world is… amazing. I’m sorry to leave it, though I won’t mind not getting shot at for a while. Thank you, Mick.”
“You did good, kid. I’m actually gonna miss you.”
“Shocking,” she said playfully.
“I’m stunned, yeah.”
She smirked up at me. “I’ll be back, Mick. Chicago’s one of our regular stops. And what’s a couple years to a guy like you?”
“Yeah.” Wasn’t as comforting as she’d meant it.
“Listen, um…” Her voice got low, suddenly serious. “That shapeshifter you mentioned. The, uh, phouka? Goswythe?”
Not what I was expectin’ to hear.
“Uh, yeah?”
“You asked me to try to focus on him, see if I could sense anything.”
“Sure, but that was when I thought—”
“I know, but… I did. Sense something, I mean.”
“Yeah?” Didn’t know how much it mattered, now, but it’d be nice not to have him hangin’ over me anymore. “So where is he?”
“Dead.”
Whoa.
“You certain, doll? It ain’t easy to kill any of us, and phouka can be harder’n most.”
“I’m sure, Mick. Or as sure as I can be, anyway. None of my visions come with money-back guarantees.”
Well. Well, well, well. That was a load off. I mean, it’d be nice to know when, how, alla that—not just outta curiosity, but in case whatever zotzed him was a threat. But for the most part, it was good news.
“But that’s not all.”
I shoulda known.
“What else?” I asked.
“I got… flashes. Images. Of stone angels. Crucifixes. Last rites, a sense of the sacred.”
Now I stepped fully back so I could look her clear in the face.
“What’re you saying, Tsura?”
“I’m saying Goswythe got a Catholic burial, Mick. Full ceremony, the works.”
“That—that don’t make any sense!” How the hell would a damn phouka end up buried with completed rites on church ground?
“I don’t know what to say. It’s what I see. I thought you should know.”
“Thank you.”
There were more goodbyes, even a brief hug, but sorry as I was to see her go, I was too preoccupied to give any of it my full attention. This was supposed to have been a night of answers, and all I had was a new bucketful of questions.
Fortunately, I had a vague idea where I might go to find myself at least some shreds of understanding.
* * *
If I kept showin’ up here, I was gonna need to ask for my own key. One way or the other, though, I didn’t intend to be here again for a good long while.
What state I left the place, though, was up to her.
“No! God, no, I wouldn’t do something like that!” Gina was backin’ away across her living room, setting the chairs rocking as she bump
ed into ’em. Her limp hair and the smell of sweat made me think she probably hadn’t showered, or gotten much sleep, since she’d fled the horror show at Fleischer’s shindig.
“You sure, Gina? You don’t come clean, this ain’t gonna go easy for you.”
“I swear to God, Mick! I’ve never hexed you! No spells, no curses, nothing!”
I believed her. Woulda even if I couldn’t taste the truth mixed in with her desperation. Frankly, I hadn’t really figured it was her even before I’d showed up at her door; I just didn’t know of any other witches I’d bumped into lately. (I’d given a brief thought to the idea that Baskin’d done it, but I’d seen him in action. No way he had the skills to hex me without me sensing it, not yet.)
I wasn’t gonna tell her that, though. I still hadda learn more, she was one of the few people I knew who might be able to tell me, and I didn’t have time to mess around.
“Prove it,” I demanded. “Find the hex on me. Tell me everything you can.”
Took a few minutes for her to gather her ingredients, and then to calm down and concentrate enough to cast her spells. Eventually, though, I’d been splashed with more herbal oils than I cared to think about and she had her answers.
“It’s definitely there,” she told me. “Subtle, hidden. Your own power, your own aura, make it hard to spot. If I hadn’t been specifically looking for it…”
“Any way to tell who cursed me?”
“Not exactly. Not any way I know, at least. But it’s someone good. Real good. The skill it’d take to wind the hex into your own essence this way, to hide it… You’re not looking for any dabbler, I’ll tell you that.”
Great. So now what? Who the hell had I offended that bad? As I said, couldn’t be Baskin; not only was he not experienced enough, but the bad luck had started well before the two of us had even known we were involved in the same mess. So that also ruled out him havin’ hired anybody. I had more’n a few enemies among the Fae, and some of ’em mighta had the skills to pull this off, or the resources to hire somebody who could, but why now? I hadn’t dealt with any of ’em in a while. Fleischer? Again, this all predated the two of us lockin’ horns. I just didn’t know anybody who had the power to make this happen and who hated me enough to go through the hassle. Nobody still alive, anyw—
Oh, no. Oh, fuck no.
“Blower,” I hissed at Gina.
“Sorry, what?”
“Where’s your goddamn phone?!”
She squeaked somethin’ incomprehensible and pointed. I stalked across the room, grabbed it, dialed. I didn’t even notice the burning and buzzing in my ear, not this time.
“It’s Mick.” I’d known Pete’d be home. He’d managed not to get fired from the force, but he was on probation for taking sick time—his excuse for the days he’d missed while under McCall’s thumb—without callin’ in.
“Listen, I need… Yeah, I know you’re sorry. I told you, ain’t your fault. Listen, I… Dammit, Pete, listen! I need you to meet me. Yes, now.” I told him Gina’s address. “Get here fast as you can.
“And Pete? Bring lanterns. And shovels.”
I wanted to be wrong. I needed to be wrong.
Please, God, let me be wrong.
* * *
You waitin’ for me to say it? I wasn’t wrong.
Me’n Pete stood deep in a newly opened grave, covered in dirt and—in his case—hours’ worth of sweat. Our coats were draped over the tombstone above, our work lit by the lanterns placed beside it. We still had an hour or two before dawn; probably not long enough to get the hole filled back in, least not neatly, but I couldn’t really find it in me to care. We’d been at it so long that the crickets were chirpin’ again, having gotten used to our presence and the sounds we made.
The two of us, we were lookin’ downward at the coffin we’d—much to Pete’s dismay—forced open, using one of the spades as a crowbar. Of course, he hadn’t been happy about any of this, and I think it was only the guilt he felt for beaning me while under McCall’s influence that’d gotten him to go along with the whole Igor act. Now, though, he was more befuddled than anything.
“I don’t get it, Mick. Why would anybody bury animal bones like this?”
“They wouldn’t.” I idly poked around with the shovel, shovin’ aside a tiny sorta-canine skull, a femur way too small to be human. “But these ain’t animal bones.”
“Huh?”
“They’re phouka. When one of ’em dies, some of the bones revert to animal shapes, while others just fade away entirely.”
“Wait, phouka like…? Is this that Goswen guy you been gunnin’ for all these months?”
“Goswythe. Yeah.”
I hadn’t told him why we were here. Hadn’t wanted to talk about it, really even think about it much, until I was sure.
“That makes even less sense. Who’d bury—?”
“Nobody. But…”
Dammit, I shoulda seen this comin’. Shoulda made sure, even back then. The blackout… The surge of magic that’d put me under for just a minute, right after everything went down? I shoulda suspected something. It woulda been just long enough to make the swap…
“Mick, talk to me, dammit. Spill! What’s going on?”
“Transformation magic ain’t easy, Pete. Tryin’ to turn something into something else? Those are some of the most potent, most difficult spells any human can try to master. And it don’t last long, either, not without pumping even more mojo into it.”
“Um… Okay.”
“So if you were, say, tryin’ to convince people you were dead? Wanted to transform a corpse to look like you? Real hard, especially if you were badly hurt. And if it turned back before the funeral, before ‘you’ were safely six feet under? Catastrophe.
“But a natural shapeshifter like a phouka? They’re already chock fulla that kinda magic. It’d be easier, so much easier, than tryin’ to pull the stunt with any other corpse. And it’d last longer, too. Definitely long enough to get it buried. Long enough that you could be damn sure everyone, even the aes sidhe PI who’s supposed to be suspicious of everything, was well and truly convinced you’re dead.”
That’s why Goswythe’d never shown back up, after the brawl in my office. He was already dead, stashed away just in case she needed him…
“Who? For God’s sake, Mick, who’re we talkin’ about here?”
I told you, I hadn’t wanted to talk about it, think about it—or, for that matter, to answer any of the questions I knew Pete woulda asked—until I was sure.
Now I was.
I planted my palms in the dirt and clambered outta the grave, steppin’ over to the stone where I’d draped my coat—very deliberately—to hide the inscription. And without a word I brushed it aside, lettin’ it fall to the soil, lettin’ Pete read the words carved into the unyielding marble.
Orsola Maldera
Beloved mother, grandmother,
And faithful servant of God.
FAE PRONUNCIATION GUIDE
Áebinn [ey-buhn]
aes sidhe [eys shee]
Ahreadbhar [ah-rad-bawr]
bagiennik [baig-yen-nik]
bean nighe [ban nee-yeh]
bean sidhe [ban shee]
boggart [boh-gahrt]
buggane [buh-geyn]
brounie [brooh-nee]
Claíomh Solais [kleev-soh-lish]
clurichaun [kloor-uh-kawn]
coblynau [kawb-lee-naw]
Credne [kred-naw]
cu sidhe [koo shee]
dullahan [dool-uh-han]
dvergar [dver-gahr]
Elphame [elf-eym]
Eudeagh [ee-yood-uh]
firbolg [fir-bohlg]
Gae Assail [gey ahs-seyl]
gancanagh [gan-kan-aw]
ghillie dhu [ghil-lee doo]
glaistig [gley-shtig]
Goswythe [gawz-weeth]
Grangullie [gran-gull-ee]
Grindylow [grin-dee-lo]
haltija [hawl-tee-yah]
He
sperides [he-sper-i-deez]
Hruotlundt [hroht-loondt]
huldra [hool-druh]
Ielveith [ahy-el-veyth]
kobold [koh-bold]
Lairgneigh [Leyrg-nigh1]
Laurelline [Lor-el-leen]
leanan sidhe [le-an-uhn shee]
ljósálfar [lyohs-ahl-fahr]
Luchtaine [lookh2-teyn]
Lugh mac Ethnenn [lugh1 mak ehn-nen]
mari-morgan [mar-ee mor-gan]
Oberon [oh-ber-ron]
phouka [poo-kuh]
Raighallan [rag-hawl-lawn]
Rusalka [roo-sawl-kuh]
Rycine [rhy-see-ne]
Sealgaire [sal-gayr]
Seelie [see-lee]
Sien Bheara [shahyn beer-uh]
Slachaun [slah-shawn]
sluagh [sloo-ah]
spriggan [sprig-uhn]
Téimhneach [tey-im-nach1]
Tír na nÓg [teer na nog]
Tuatha Dé Danann [too-awt3-huh de4 dan4-uhn]
tylwyth teg [tel-oh-ith teyg]
Unseelie [uhn-see-lee]
Ylleuwyn [eel-yoo-win]
1 “Gh” pronounced as “ch,” but more guttural.
2 This sound falls between “ch” and “k,” as in the word “loch.”
3 This “t” is almost silent, and is separate from the following “h,” rather than forming a single sound as “th” normally does in English.
4 Strictly speaking, these “d”s fall somewhere between the “d” and a hard “th”—such as in “though”—but a simple “d” represents the closest sound in English.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ARI MARMELL would love to tell you all about the various esoteric jobs he held and the wacky adventures he had on the way to becoming an author, since that’s what other authors seem to do in these sections. Unfortunately, he doesn’t actually have any. In point of fact, Ari decided while at the University of Houston that he wanted to be a writer, graduated with a Creative Writing degree, and—after holding down a couple of very mundane jobs—broke into freelance writing for roleplaying games. In addition to the Mick Oberon novels, with Titan Books, his published fiction includes The Goblin Corps and the Widdershins Adventure series (Pyr Books), The Conqueror’s Shadow and The Warlord’s Legacy (Del Rey/Spectra), and Agents of Artifice (Wizards of the Coast), as well as several others and numerous short stories.