Iron-Forge Crossroads, page 5
I jumped as she slammed her palm on the table. “Why can’t I see more detail?”
Lorraine’s gaze went wide and distant like she was seeing a train hurtling toward her at full speed. “Moreno is hungry for power, and she’s placed herself to get it. You are a key player in her domination.”
“I’m going to work for her?” I was incredulous. Normally there wouldn’t be a chance in hell that I’d do anything at that maniac’s bidding, but Lorraine was never wrong.
“Not willingly,” she clarified.
I nodded, mulling it over. Griselda was a master manipulator. It would stand to reason that she would be pulling strings and setting up her marionette show.
Lorraine suddenly hissed and grabbed her head in her hands. There was a low buzzing noise rising in volume filling the room and the feeling of being watched settled heavily on me. Jake yelped and crammed himself under my chair.
“Who are you!” she exclaimed. She began to tear at her hair, braids fraying as she scratched at her scalp. Like she was trying to wrench something out of her skull.
Dominic rushed to her, placing his hand on her forehead as he began to chant in a low, melodic rhythm. Vivianne was adding some of the herbs from her pouches onto the censer and an acrid odor began to overtake the warm comfort of the copal.
Dom’s voice rose, commanding with a mixture of Haitian Creole and Taíno as he pressed Lorraine back in the chair. He dripped a thick oil on her forehead and drew a series of overlapping symbols with it as he massaged it in, all but shouting now to be heard over the chainsaw-like buzzing.
Vivianne lifted the censer, dropped a few more herbs onto the burning charcoal disc and after a final command from Dominic both siblings blew the roiling smoke over Lorraine.
The noise cut out entirely, leaving deafening silence in its wake. The feeling of being watched ebbed slowly away until suddenly the muscles in my shoulders I hadn’t even been aware I’d been clenching relaxed.
“You need to leave,” said Vivianne.
“Wait.” Lorraine placed a hand weakly on her sister’s arm. “It’s not her fault.” She sipped some wine and wet her lips. “I pushed too hard. I knew someone was trying to conceal this shit, but I tried to bust past them anyway.”
When it became clear Vivianne wasn’t going to insist I leave, I asked, “Could you perceive anything about the magick used to keep you out?”
Lorraine shook her head and took another sip. “The only thing I know is that it’s old, old magick. Wielded by an old, old soul.” She stared hard at me. “You need to watch your back, Evyn, because these clowns are not playing around.”
She shakily got to her feet and motioned for me to follow her to the door. “There’s something else involved here that I couldn’t get close to, but the fact that it’s being guarded that heavily only scares me more. Griselda isn’t working alone, it’s not a simple power grab, and for better or worse you’re in this whether or not you’re ready for it.
“She needs you for something and there’s nothing you can do to avoid it. She has fifteen backup plans for every backup plan.”
I hooked Jake back up to his leash before we stepped outside. “Thank you. I’ll leave a check in the mailbox tomorrow.”
Lorraine smiled sideways. “No you won’t.” And she closed the door in my face.
Chapter four
The walk home was brisk; I didn’t want to risk running into anyone else I knew. I kept thinking about what Lorraine could have meant. Did she think I just wasn’t going to pay up, or was she not sharing something that she managed to see before someone tried to explode her brain?
Tired from his ordeal, Jake was all too happy to curl up and watch some TV. He barely registered while I changed and psyched myself up for what was supposed to be the only task of the evening and was asleep when I quietly shut the door behind me.
The bar was about four blocks away, so I decided to just walk there. It was a Strangefells hangout but it wasn’t hidden by any means, so humans did make their way there occasionally. For their sake I hoped there weren’t that many in attendance. There was at least one very drunk and soon-to-be-angry demon in the place.
The stench from the dumpsters on the side of the building made my nose wrinkle, and I stopped myself before I could wonder what was in there. It wasn’t necessarily anything nefarious. Sometimes the kitchen catered to special “tastes” of all kinds and the basement was owned by a succubus that ran a fetish dungeon to shame all others. Old me had been a regular, on both floors.
I pushed the door open and stepped into the dim interior. I was immediately engulfed in a cloud of pipe smoke belched up by the old man sitting in the corner of the small coat room.
“Evyn?” he asked, adjusting his glasses to no avail.
I lifted the glasses off his nose and wiped them on my sleeve, placing them back on his face. “These work a lot better when they’re clean, Gus,” I tsked.
“Haven’t been touched since the last time you were in here,” he said, this time blowing elaborate smoke rings just to show off.
“You are a terrible doorman.” I was trying not to laugh, and he leaned forward to study my smile like he’d never seen one before.
“Maybe my eyes are worse than I thought.”
I clapped him on the shoulder. “Things change when you come back from the dead.”
His wheezing laugh followed me into the bar. A quick scan of the standing-room-only crowd, thankfully with only a few humans, found Adrian pretty easily. “Damn.”
He was sitting at the end of the bar, leaning on his elbows, and clutching a half-empty glass. His black hair was longer than I remembered, sticking out at odd angles like he’d just rolled out of bed and sat directly on the barstool.
He had a beard now, decently groomed compared to his hair. It was cropped close to his face and the mustache was longer on the ends with evidence that someone had attempted to twist them but abandoned the venture.
I crossed the room slowly, doing some quick math to figure out if there would be much collateral damage should things get nasty. Or rather, should he get nasty… which he would.
Adrian looked skinnier now, almost deflated. His once wide, muscular shoulders drooped and his tall frame was lanky instead of built.
Not deflated, I thought. Defeated.
Preparing myself for the shitstorm, I subtly encouraged the person in the seat next to him to move on, sat down before the many people already eyeing the barstool could move in and motioned to the bartender.
“Well, shit, look who it is,” he said. “I thought you were dead.”
“A lot of that going around,” I said. “Old Fashioned, please, Tommy.” He nodded and started grabbing bottles.
“Since when does a bitch like you say ‘please’?” slurred Adrian, not looking at me.
I winced. “Hello, Adrian.”
“No, you know what? How about you don’t speak. That okay with you?”
I didn’t answer and he approved of that. He turned to me and looked at me through bleary eyes, rimmed with red and bloodshot from drunkenness.
“Jesus, Adrian.” The words slipped out on reflex, and he slammed his hand on the bar.
“Just shut your damn mouth!” Even on a busy night when the background noise was almost deafening his outburst drew quite a bit of attention.
The bartender came over and set my drink down, looking between me and Adrian.
“If you’re gonna fight, take it outside.”
I put my hand up. “Not a problem.”
“Yeah, run along now,” Adrian muttered under his breath. The bartender took one last look at me and when I shook my head once he left us alone.
I sipped my drink and waited for him to say something else, more than likely to start in on me with every ounce of venom that he had. Which was a lot.
A few minutes of silence passed before he said, “Do you know how long I looked for you? How many times I tried to contact you?” He glared at me, working very hard to focus his vision. “I don’t appreciate it when someone I’m close to just up and disappears without as much as a ‘fuck you, don’t bother calling.’ I didn’t sleep for weeks because I was searching and worrying and waiting to hear from you. You couldn’t be dead because I was still breathing.”
His anger started to ramp up. “So someone had to be holding you somewhere, right? Because there’s no way you would just leave, me, behind!” he shouted, slamming his hand on the bar for emphasis.
Almost half the bar looked around this time, but I turned to them and waved my hands in a don’t-worry-about-it gesture. They mostly shrugged and looked away but a couple of them kept watching, expecting a show.
“The other half of me took off and never looked back. So what was I left to do? Drink, drink, and drink some more so I’d forget all about her until I sobered up. Then I started all over again. The bars in this city never met a better customer.” With that he went back to his drink.
Was he done? Or just simmering? “When I left, I’ll be honest… I didn’t give you a second thought.” Adrian flinched and drained his glass. He motioned to Tommy for another and the bartender, for his part, was somewhat reluctant to refill it.
“All I cared about was getting away clean, and that meant cutting you out.” His shoulders set and his whole body tensed on the barstool, but he let me speak.
“After what happened, I couldn’t live with myself. I had to get away from all this and leave everything behind. And everyone.” I rolled my Old Fashioned between my palms and tried to find the right words. “I don’t think there’s any way I can say I’m sorry and have that mean something to you.”
“Damn straight,” he mumbled, taking a large swig and swallowing loudly.
“Please try to understand—”
“There’s that word again.” Adrian fought back a hiccough. “Please.” He burped sourly and glared at me. “Why didn’t you at least tell me where you were going? Say goodbye? Call me and tell me you were safe?”
I breathed deep, regretting it when all the smells of the place hit me at once. “I thought you would try to stop me or track me down and convince me to come back. I didn’t want to risk that.”
“What scared you so much?”
A switch flipped and it was my turn to be angry. He knew what I did. “I was a monster, Adrian! I killed an innocent child!” Memories of that night roared back to life and my chest felt tight with horror.
“Leaving an orphan behind would have been better?” Adrian asked, genuinely curious.
Angrily I gathered my hair into a ponytail so my hands would have something to do other than wrap themselves around Adrian’s throat. “You weren’t there.” My voice was cold with fury. “That little girl didn’t look you in the eyes as she died. I felt remorse for the first time in my life.”
My eyes started their familiar burning as tears threatened to fall but I refused to let them. Especially not in front of Adrian.
There was a lot more I wanted to scream at him, but I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of meeting him on the low road. “It made me reevaluate things,” I spat. “Maybe you should give it a try.”
He set his glass down with a heavy thunk on the bar top and grabbed my arm with a vise grip. “So you go into seclusion and cut off all ties?” He was leaning toward me and tipping precariously on his seat. “That’s a hell of a reevaluation.” He realized where his hand was and let me go before I tore it off him. “Most people would have just made a vow to ‘never do that again’ and moved on with their life. But you took the coward’s way out.”
I opened my mouth to protest, but he wasn’t hearing it. He stood, wobbled, and clutched the bar for balance. “The lady here is picking up my tab, Tom.”
Tommy nodded, relieved that at least one of us was leaving.
Adrian cocked his head to the side, thoughtful. “If you wanted to stay gone you could have just told me that. I would have respected that and left you alone.”
“Would you?” I looked him full in the face. “Would you really have been able to do that, in all honesty?”
He shrugged. “Guess we’ll never know.”
I took his hand, and he didn’t pull away. “How can I make this up to you?”
“You can’t.”
At the crestfallen look on my face, I thought he might actually crack. After a second he downed the rest of his drink, reached over the bar and took a piece of paper and a pen from next to the register. He scribbled away and narrowed his eyes at what he wrote to make sure it was correct before handing it to me. “Here’s my address. Give me a couple of days and then come over. We’ll finish this discussion then.”
He started to weave his way through the crowd but was actually just bouncing off people until they pushed him in the general direction of the door.
I stared after him until the door closed behind him and turned back to my drink. Tommy sidled back over and asked, “What else can I get you?”
“A time machine?”
“Fresh out,” he shrugged. “Whisky or rum? How fucked up do you want to get?”
I’d known Tommy for decades, so he knew exactly my reaction to both. I was surprised he even offered rum. The last time I got drunk off it I burned half this building down when I’d suddenly decided my new hobby was fire spitting.
“Let’s not get carried away. I’ll stick with whisky. Neat.”
“Double?” he asked with a sideways smile. I nodded and the glass appeared in front of me like he already knew what my answer was going to be.
I was turning into a whisky witch on my first night back, drowning my sorrows in the corner pub and scrying for a brighter future in the surface of every shot.
I don’t know how long I sat there but before I knew it I was ten shots deep, had propositioned and been propositioned by a handful of men—luckily we went our separate ways and I just found myself disappointed and lonely rather than disappointed and sexually unsatisfied—remembered why I loved and hated this city, and unceremoniously made Bob Seger’s “Turn the Page” the most played song on the jukebox for the night with a couple appearances of “Old Time Rock ’n’ Roll” in between.
Toward the end of the night when things began to quiet down a bit, some of the other regulars all snagged seats at the bar and I was peppered with what I was sure would become the typical questions everyone would ask upon seeing me around again.
Where have you been? I thought you were dead? And my new favorite: “Aren’t you Mara’s niece that works at the strip club?” Although maybe that was just a one off.
Too late I realized the pixie on the stool next to me was losing the fight against gravity and before I could grab them, they face-planted on the floor.
Tommy sighed and motioned Gus over from the entryway and they each took an armpit and a knee and moved them to a corner. They curled up, and Gus grabbed a pillow from the back and stuck it under their head, the pixie’s snoring never ceasing.
“They do that often?” I asked Tommy.
“Often enough,” he nodded. “I don’t have the heart to kick them out.” He looked at me darkly. “They’ve got reasons for wanting oblivion. I should probably just set up a room for them.”
I looked over at the sleeping pixie. Such a childlike face, but that wouldn’t change no matter how old they got. The tears falling freely down their cheeks spoke to something more than just a temporary hardship.
“Anything I can do to help?” I asked.
Tommy looked at me sideways. “You serious?”
I splayed my hands. “I’m different now, Tom. You’ll just have to take my word for it until I prove it enough times.”
Tommy looked back and forth between me and the pixie. “Ro doesn’t talk about it in much detail, but I get the distinct impression there are issues at home. Pretty sure their partner is a human.” The sneer of disgust on Tommy’s face showed plainly what he thought of humans in general. He’d take their money, but he was no friend.
“He knows about Strangers, but he’s using it as a weapon. Holding the secret over Ro’s head to keep control over them. You know pixies. Ro couldn’t hurt him if they tried, even if he’s making their life hell.”
My hands were clenched in anger. “That definitely sounds like something I’m qualified to help with.” I wrote my number down on a napkin. “Make sure they get this and have them call me when they’re ready for help.”
Tommy took the napkin like he couldn’t quite believe it was real.
“It’s not going to self-destruct, I promise.” I winked.
“Actually, I was thinking I’d better test it out, make sure it’s the real deal.” He aimed a wolfish smile at me.
“I’ll let you in on a secret.” I leaned forward and motioned him closer. He stepped in close, bracing his giant forearms on the bar top and stopping inches away from my face.
“What’s that?” he asked, his grin implying he already knew what I was going to say.
“I’m actually lousy in bed,” I said, straight-faced.
Not the answer he was expecting, Tommy backed away with a bark of laughter. “You’re full of shit.”
“It’s true.” I made the “scout’s honor” sign. “I’m lazy, let my partner do all the work, kick them out when I’m finished.” A smile started to crack free.
Tommy indignantly flipped a dirty dish rag over his shoulder, still chuckling. He stopped, struck by a sudden thought, and leaned in toward me again, his face even closer to mine this time. “I’m willing to take a chance.”
I couldn’t hold back the laughter anymore. Tommy reached over and grabbed the bottle of whisky, pouring us both shots. We clinked the glasses together, tapped them on the bar and downed them.
“I’m going to need at least another twenty of those before I’m drunk enough to make bad decisions,” I told him.
“Coming right up.” He refilled our shot glasses.
A man that had been one of the last sitting alone at a table sidled up and took the seat the pixie had unceremoniously vacated. I remembered seeing him around here in the past but that was as far as my familiarity went.
