17
“I’d rather have a bottle in front of me”
MAC
I’m an aimless, trapped barfly, stalked by Unseelie ghouls who have once again replenished their numbers, confined to Chester’s by Ryodan’s insistence that I guard against a threat that isn’t the threat he thinks it is, while driving myself crazy worrying about a genuine threat of cataclysmic proportions.
There’s a black hole, or its close approximation, growing beneath my feet, and who knows how many more forming beyond the club’s walls. There were numerous icings in Dublin, more outside the city, and according to Ryodan, hundreds in various countries around the world.
Are innocent people, like the Unseelie ghouls, accidently brushing up against them and dying? How large are the other globes? Was Ryodan’s really the first or has the Hoar Frost King been in our realm longer than we know? Perhaps it started in China, or Australia, or even America. How solid is our information? How soon can we send scouts to learn more?
How close have I walked to one of those quantum pinpricks, not realizing Death was right there in the street with me, a misstep away?
Tired of wandering from one dance floor to the next, growing increasingly aggravated by the patrons, I decide to stake out the Sinatra subclub. The old world elegance appeals to me and it’s mostly empty—or at least it was before me and my dark, smelly army arrived. “Get off those stools!” I try to shoo them. They resettle with what I imagine are scornful looks beneath voluminous hoods. I recall the metallic flash I glimpsed as one of them was devoured by an impossibly dense globe of corrupted space-time and wonder what would happen if I tried to yank back one of their cowls to see a face.
I decide against it. I’d rather not know just how hideous my second skins are. I have enough nightmares.
I perch on a leather bar stool between them and begin watching an obviously inebriated bartender in a dirty, wrinkled tux that looks like he slept in it make the worst martinis I’ve ever seen.
Clubs call pretty much anything a martini now, and there’s no question he got his credentials at the school of life. He should be ashamed. I rummage in my purse, pop an aspirin in my mouth, and crunch it to dispel headache residue.
Barrons went through the Silvers to join the rest of the Nine, hunting for Dani. I prefer him there than wandering around the city without me. Though I’ve not gotten the faintest tweak from my inner antenna, it won’t be long before the princess resurfaces somewhere. And it’s not going to be on top of Barrons.
Dancer says we need Dani now more than ever. She was the one who figured out what the Hoar Frost King was doing, and he hopes their brains combined hold the key to relocking the doors that are opening in great yawning black holes all over our world.
If it can even be done.
According to physics, what we seek is impossible but since the walls came down between Man and Faery, human laws of physics no longer apply. I wonder if the fragments of Faery worlds I call IFPs are contributing to the black-hole problem. The boundaries of our world are a mess and have been for a while, creating a highly unstable environment where pretty much anything could go wrong, as it did eons ago in the ancient Hall of All Days and the Silvers. I wonder that we didn’t see something like this coming.
I munch an olive to get the taste of aspirin out of my mouth.
“Hey, you didn’t order a drink! Stay the fuck outta my condiment tray!” the bartender barks, hostile, and a little slurry.
Whatever happened to pretty girls getting free drinks? Or at least one damn olive.
I peer up at my reflection in the mirror behind the bar. There I am, blond hair, blue eyes, terrific white teeth (thanks Mom, Dad, and braces!), a nice mouth with a generous lower lip, clear skin. I think I’m pretty.
“And you guys”—the bartender snaps at my ghouls, and I think, Good luck with that—“order drinks or get off my stools!”
“You’ve been grazing on candied cherries for the past ten minutes,” I tell him. “You’ve eaten half a jar. Stow it.” People are starving in Dublin but Chester’s has condiments.
He flips me off with both hands and rotates the birds around each other.
I turn sideways on the stool so I don’t have to see him and resume my brood. The city I love is finally coming back to life, and although I have personal problems, they are slightly more manageable—or at least a little less urgent at the moment—than our newfound global issues.
My dark companion attempts to seize the moment.
Read me, open me, I possess the answers you seek, it lies. I will show you how to heal this world.
Again with the been-there-done-that. I don’t believe the Unseelie King dumped any knowledge about how to patch holes in worlds into his book of dark magic. It’s another fake carrot at the end of the Sinsar Dubh’s endless profusion of sticks.
Besides, it wouldn’t give a rat’s ass about saving this world. It would leave and find another. And another. Ad infinitum. I’ve not forgotten it once said to me: Can there be any act of creation that does not first destroy? Villages fall. Cities rise. Humans die. Life springs from the soil wherein they lie. Is not any act of destruction, should Time enough pass, an act of creation?
Our worries about rebuilding, parceling out districts, and reinstating currency now seem insignificant, but Ryodan insists we carry on. Barrons agrees that not only must we pursue an illusion of normalcy, but conceal from the general populace the danger the world is in. They contend if people believe the world might be ending, it’ll be the riots of Halloween all over again.
Oh, yeah. Politicians R Us.
I seriously doubt we’re going to be able to hide it long. If they’re still too small to spot, it’s only a matter of time before they’re not. People will start seeing them, messing with them, vanishing.
I half expected Barrons and Ryodan to say: screw it, pack up, we’re leaving. They’re immortal and there are countless worlds. There’s nothing to stop them from circling their wagons and heading off for the universe’s vast, untamed Wild West.
Yet, they stay and I’m glad they do because there’s no way I’m giving up on my world. This is what we’ve been fighting about since the dawn of time when the Fae first arrived on our planet and began messing with it. Earth is ours. I’m not letting them have it. I’m not letting them destroy it.
Not on my watch.
Too bad I have no idea how I’m going to back up my ballsy position, but I’ve been in impossible situations before and got out of them.
My brain processes what I just watched happen. Apparently I couldn’t keep my eyes off the pathetic excuse for a bartender and turned back toward him at some point without realizing it. “Oh, for heaven’s sake, you just ruined that drink! Who taught you to pour?”
“Fuck you, bitch. Ain’t your bar.”
I stand and hurry around the counter. My flock rustles in behind me. “It is now. Get out. I’m taking over.” I can’t let him tarnish my profession anymore. He just served a smoked martini that had begun promisingly, with gin and a dash of single malt Scotch—then apparently forgot what he was doing and added vermouth, and insult to injury, an olive, pimento intact, instead of a lemon twist. Yellow was Alina’s favorite color and I used to take my time making my lemon twists as complex and pretty as they could be, little origami fruit peels. My mouth puckers in sympathy for the silver-haired gentleman sipping the drink. It’s no wonder the world no longer knows what martinis are.
“Who the fuck do you think you are?” the bleary-eyed bartender snarls drunkenly as I approach. “This is my bar. Get your ass back on that stool and buy a drink or leave, you stupid cunt. And get those smelly fucks out of here!”
I see red. Like I’d drink anything he poured. And I really hate the c-word. No clue why. It just doesn’t work for me. Seems I have my own event horizon: inactivity, worry, and frustration have devoured my patience, sucked it away into a deep dark hole from which it may never return.
I walk straight for him and pop him in the face with my fist. Not too hard. Just hard enough to get him to go away.
His nose spurts blood—
YES BLOOD YES! the Book explodes. Kill him, worthless piece of human trash! Take this bar and take the club and we will K’VRUCK THEM ALL!
I rummage for my seventh-grade performance—where did I leave off? I remember being eleven. I was happy then, in a much simpler world. Or so I thought.
Bloodred like the blood of Mick O’Leary, the man you RIPPED to pieces with your bare hands then CHEWED—
For a second I can’t find my place, the word “chewed” throws me off so badly, and instead of focusing I wonder if I had blood in my mouth that day and didn’t notice. Panicked, I plunge into my recitation at the first place I can think of and shout, “ ‘Prophet!’ said I, ‘thing of evil, prophet still, if bird or devil! Whether tempter sent or whether tempest tossed thee here ashore—’ ”
The bartender clutches his nose and stares at me like I have three heads. I toss him the positively filthy bar towel he’d been using to dry clean glasses. Well, as clean as they could be considering the water in the sink behind the bar is disgustingly black with weak gray soapy suds. I realize I’m still spouting poetry and terminate mid-twelfth stanza.