“It got crowded up there,” Jackaby added grimly. “And the centaurs do not associate peaceably with ipotanes, which is ironic, considering how much they have in common. Hey, you! Aziza! I see you there. Kindly do not shake out your pipe onto my Bibles!”
This last he directed to a hairy little man with jet-black skin who sat atop the pile on the desk. He was not much taller than the books on which he perched. Aziza nodded understandingly and then proceeded to tip his pipe onto a copy of the King James anyway.
Jackaby took a deep, steadying breath. “We’re working on quadrants. Bipedal versus quadrupedal, trooping versus solitary, truculent versus, well, less prone to pitch a battle ax through a laboratory window.” He glared meaningfully at a stocky, bearded fellow by his elbow, who at least had the decency to shuffle his feet and look abashed. “Your room is currently housing avian anthropoids, by the way. You may need to wash your bedsheets later.”
“Why are they all here, sir?” I asked.
“Spade,” grunted Jackaby. “Miss Lee liberated Spade’s detainees per my request, but Mayor Spade was none too happy to see them go. According to a few of the first arrivals, he was downright livid. He apparently tried to block their release, but Marlowe stepped in on their behalf. That might have been the end of it, but Spade wasn’t about to let me walk away from this without making my life harder. He added an amendment to his original edict then and there, a clause granting the ‘undesirables’ one sanctuary in the city—one alone. The word went out hours ago. Care to guess which building he decided to declare an official paranormal refuge?”
“You’re kidding.”
“That’s right. This is me kidding. I’m knee deep in gnomes because I’m just so much fun at parties. Hey! I saw that! No biting your fellow refugees! We’ve been over this!”
“I had no idea New Fiddleham was so diverse,” said Charlie, peering around the room in awe. “I always thought there were very few of—us.”
“That would be the glamour inhibitor,” said Jackaby. “I put it in for Rook when I had the door redone. It will wear off in a bit, but when they passed through the entryway it temporarily rendered their guises null. You are seeing them as I see them—as they really are. Well, except for the null.” He nodded toward the man whose face I couldn’t seem to focus on. “One can never see a null as he is, because strictly speaking, a null isn’t.” The null waved at us sheepishly from the corner. I think.
“I cannot say that I am comfortable with your system,” Charlie mumbled. “Some of us have good reason to keep our identities to ourselves.”
“Did you get the impression that anybody in this room was comfortable at the moment, Mr. Barker?” Jackaby asked, his eye twitching just a little. “They were warned—they came in anyway. Well, some of them did. Half a dozen had inhibitions about the inhibitor and decided to favor secrecy over sanctuary. Thank goodness they did. We’d be overrun.”
“You really think we can keep them all safe?”
“No!” A hint of manic laughter crept into Jackaby’s voice. “Not remotely! I can scarcely keep you safe, let alone babysit every satyr and siren in the city! I can’t exactly turn them out, though, can I? Not with the mayor’s thugs patrolling the streets.”
“I think it’s good,” I said. Jenny turned to me with skepticism in her eyes. “I know this may not be ideal, but they need help. That’s what we do, isn’t it? We help people. I’ll sleep better tonight knowing that we did what we could.”
Jenny shrugged. “You do remember that there are birdfolk nesting in your bedchamber?”
“I will suffer less discomfort knowing that a lot of innocent people don’t have to go home tonight to find hunters waiting on their doorsteps.”
“No, that’s true,” said Jackaby, nodding toward the entryway. His expression had suddenly lost a degree of happiness that it did not have to spare. “They will find one waiting on ours.”
The entire assembly turned at the sound of the door thudding open and a booming voice erupting from the doorway. “Hot damn! Ain’t you all a sight!”
I felt a lump drop to the pit of my stomach. Second only to the actual giant in height, Hank Hudson was a mountain of a man, dressed in thick hides and heavy boots. His left arm ended just past the elbow, concluding with a curved metal hook, like a storybook pirate. Hudson was a friend and an ally, but he was also an expert hunter with a taste for paranormal prey. Sometimes his paranormal prey got a taste for him, too. That hand had gone into the gullet of a fifty-foot dragon the last time we had met.
He stood in the doorway with a smile spreading from one end of his bushy auburn beard to the other. “How come I wasn’t invited to yer shindig, chum?” he called over the crowd to Jackaby. “You know I like me a rare breed!”
Chapter Ten
With Hank Hudson in tow, Jackaby wound through the crowded house. Jenny abandoned her efforts to preserve a small statue of a man with a bird’s head and swept after them, and Charlie and I followed close on their heels.
Jackaby’s personal library was not as large as the public libraries I have known, but walking into it, I still found myself greeted by thousands of volumes, a collection full of rare and obscure works unrivaled by anything I had ever seen. My employer’s shelving method was maddening, to be sure, with books organized completely illogically, although Jackaby insisted they were set according to supernatural potency and color of aura. My eyesight being limited to prosaic things like light and color and items occupying actual physical space, his methodology was less than helpful—but still, Jackaby’s library was a marvel. I breathed in the scent of paper and leather and binding glue as we filed inside.
There was something else in the air today. Something musty with a hint of axle grease and copper. I could tell that Charlie had caught the scent as well, and I followed his eyes to a band of mottled gray-green creatures loitering around the alcove window seats. They were about the height and build of muscular eight-year-old boys with gangly arms and ill-fitting clothes. Each of the sinewy little men carried a weapon. These ranged from a bandolier of daggers to a massive blunderbuss that looked more like a small cannon in the hands of the diminutive figure.
“Chief Nudd.” Jackaby gave a civil nod to the goblin in the center, who was wearing a black top hat with a spray of cardinal feathers tucked neatly in the band.
Nudd tipped the showy hat and gave me a glance. “Ye’ve kept yer new Douglas around, I see. Have nae gotten ’er turned inter a bird or anyfin’ yet. You goin’ easy on thiss’n?”
“Mm? Oh, yes. Miss Rook is hale and whole.”
I nodded. “I was dead for a short while, but that was weeks ago. Very kind of you to inquire, Mr. Nudd.”
He smiled up at me with all his jagged teeth, a goblin’s most affable expression—which was, as far as I could tell, indistinguishable from a goblin’s most menacing expression.