Stories by Elizabeth Bear Part 26

SCENE 10.

Time: the Millennium Place: Delancey Street, Lower East Side, New York City Terry doesn't stop at the top of the stairs. He unlocks his apartment-two deadbolts and a regular lock-and goes straight to his bedroom.

He finds a shotgun he never owned before in the middle of his bed, checks to make sure it's loaded, and retrieves the preserved page of Vogue from the box on the nightstand. He lays it down in the center of his tightly made bed and stares, for a moment, at a picture sketched for money by a girl who used to paint the bare plaster walls of bas.e.m.e.nts in vivid psychedelic colors, a girl who should have grown up to be an artist, not an advertising executive.

"Break gla.s.s in case of emergency," he says, and-applying pressure with the shotgun barrel-suits actions to words.

When he kisses the drawing this time, static-stuck needles of gla.s.s cut his lips. "It's time I admitted it was over between us, sweetheart," he says, and then he crumples the blood-marked paper left-handed and stuffs it into his mouth. His tongue bleeds; his gums bleed. Something hard and brittle crunches between his molars. He swallows, and then he c.o.c.ks the gun.

In the mirror on the way through the living room, he sees himself. His clothing is bright and unfaded; his hair is sunlight blond, and down all over his shoulders. His lover is not home; he hopes she's not at Sunflower painting the walls. Not today.

"Look out, Moloch," he says. "Here I come."

He wraps a jacket around the shotgun, and descends the stairs into 1962, where he walks past the tinkling fountain and outside, on his way to catch a train.

Tatsu Ryusaki is at Sunflower; he looks not a day younger than he will thirty-eight years later. He walks around the bas.e.m.e.nt coffeehouse with the building's owner, poking into corners, peeling back broadsides sh.e.l.lacked to the walls, and scratching his thumbnail across the garish murals. He discusses with the owner how much Ryusaki will pay for the old building and how soon he will be able to end the leases of the current tenants, including Sunflower.

Terry waits until the current owner is poking around behind the bar, and Mr. Ryusaki is by the storeroom door. "Mister Ryusaki," Terry says, from the top of the steps. As the businessman turns, Terry drops the jacket, lifts the gun to his eye, and fires both barrels without saying another word.

Ryusaki does not burst into flames when he dies, but a single white pearl rolls from his hand across the floor, and disappears under the bar. Terry scrabbles after it, leaving the shotgun where it fell, while the horrified owner grabs the black pay phone out of its carapace and screams for the police.

Terry leaves him there.

Terry is dropping the pearl in the fountain when the pigs come to arrest him.

The koi swims after it as it s.h.i.+mmers through the water, his mouth wide enough to swallow a mouse.

Terry doesn't fight. As they lead him away, he cranes his neck, to see if there are any ripples in the fountain except the ones from falling water.

He doesn't think so.

They call him Terry the Dragonslayer in prison, although n.o.body can remember who came up with it. He serves seventeen years. He writes a fictionalized account of his time in prison; it's well-received, although the judge rules he can't make any money off it because it's directly related to his crime. When he gets out, he takes his old job in that coffeehouse down in the Village, and impresses the Boho wannabe poetry-slam crowd with his prison tattoos and his stories about Allen Ginsberg, and he answers the phone on the first ring, every G.o.dd.a.m.ned time.

"Sunflower."

Even Ginsberg shows up once in a while. He still lives in the neighborhood, and he still writes, and the murals on the peeling plaster bring back memories, even after all this time.

Wane Garrett lowered her gaze from the beaten-copper diameter of a rising moon to regard the soft-eyed wampyr beside her. The dark fabric of his sleeve lay smooth under her fingertips. A breeze still tasting of winter ruffled the forensic sorcerer's carefully arranged hair and s.h.i.+fted the jewels in her earlobes. "Thank you for coming, Sebastien."

"On the contrary, Abby Irene," the Great Detective murmured through lips that barely moved. "What man could refuse your company of an evening?" A lifted eyebrow made the double entendre express. The moonlight lay like a rush of blood across his cheeks, making Don Sebastien de Ulloa look almost alive. "Was this the face that launched a thousand s.h.i.+ps/ And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?"

"Perhaps in my youth."

"To a connoisseur, value increases with time."

She permitted herself an unladylike snort.

Wax No one slept well that night.

A little after three A.M., as a cold whispering rain fell over steep-gabled slate, husbands silently pulled wives close in the clammy darkness. Nursemaids rose from narrow beds to check bundled babes; ma.s.sive-headed mastiffs whined by banked hearthfires as household cats insinuated between dream-running paws; and in their warm, summer-smelling loose boxes, arch-necked carriage horses stamped and rolled white-rimmed eyes, leaning against the barred part.i.tions to press flank to flank. The City of New Amsterdam tossed restlessly.

Detective Crown Investigator Abigail Irene Garrett had no one to turn to for comfort on a dismal night in April. When the chill slipped like an unwelcome guest between sheet and featherbed and her faded blue eyes came open, Garrett's hand crept automatically to the pistol under her pillow. Her half-awakened intellect checked her wards and guards. Intact. Despite the m.u.f.fled impact of her heart against her ribcage, she was as alone as she should have been.

The pearl grip cool and heavy in her hand, Garrett sat up, swinging her legs over the edge of her black wood bedstead. Her left hand resting on the ornate spiral of a bedpost, she ran through her wards again. At her feet, her ragged patchwork terrier whined into the darkness.

"Hush, Mike. I know."

Nothing. She slipped her revolver back under the pillow and stood, belting a cream lace negligee over her nightgown. Her wand-ebony capped in silver, as long as the span from elbow to fingertip-lay on the nightstand, and this she lifted and touched to the wick of a gnarled beeswax stump. The candle sparked into light and Garrett drew a long, tight breath, trying to ease the clenching in her belly. Thirty years in the service of the Crown, and she had never felt such apprehension.

Setting her wand aside, she crossed rug-scattered tile to the credenza, where she poured herself whisky without water and sipped it slowly. Mike scampered close at her heels. She opened the cas.e.m.e.nt one-handed, rainbeaded gla.s.s icy on her fingertips, and leaned out into a gaslamp-jeweled night. Falling water trickled down her neck, washed her face like tears. The woeful exhalation of a late-arriving steams.h.i.+p, packet boat from England or places more distant, hung on the night. The black stone windowledge gouged a cold furrow across her belly. Mike shoved dustmop paws against the wall, too small to reach the windowledge. She reached down and ruffled his ears.

When the first inch of liquor warmed the chill from her shoulders, Abigail Irene Garrett straightened from the window, unwound white fingers from her tumbler, and began to dress.

"Grisly," Garrett commented-an uncharacteristic sentiment.

And an understatement. The rain had slowed to a mist, but the flagstoned walk lay puddled under her feet. Her eyes narrowed as she gathered the navy-blue skirts of her walking dress in her hands. She lifted them clear of the bloodstained stoop of a wide-fronted three-story brownstone as she minced up the steps. Stringy, clotted runnels dripped down them like paint.

She glanced at uniformed representatives of the Colonial Police and two of the Duke's city Guard, looking apprehensive and outnumbered. "Who can tell me what happened here?"

A patrolman stepped forward, avoiding the DCI 's gaze-and avoided following the direction of it when she turned her back on him, bending toward the body crumpled against the scored wooden door. She couldn't keep her boots out of the clotted blood, but uniformed officers had already walked through it. And a detective or two who should have known better, I warrant, she thought. Well, we're not all cut out to be sorcerers.

She glanced over her shoulder, pinning the hapless patrolman on a needle-pointed gaze, wondering which of her notorieties occupied his attention. Perhaps it's just the scent of blood paling his face. "Well?" Perhaps.

"DCI, I was first on the scene."

"And?" Garrett drew herself upright, ash-laced blonde hair falling in a wing across her forehead. Don't smile at him, Abby Irene, or you'll never get another word of sense out of him, and he might very well p.i.s.s himself. And you know Division would have something to say about that-disgrace to the uniform and so on. The thought quivered her lips. She fought the smile to a standstill and converted it into an expectant frown.

"He was dead when I arrived, DCI. I heard the screaming..."

"I see." She let him see her lean forward to note the number on his s.h.i.+eld.

"Did you identify the bystanders? At what time?"

He took a half-step back. "Sunrise, ma'am. Perhaps an hour ago. There were no witnesses present when I arrived."

"No-one came to his a.s.sistance? You heard screaming-"

The officer trained his gaze on the blood-spattered leaves of a just-budding rose alongside the wrought-iron fence. "It was over quickly. Ma'am. As I arrived, the neighbors began coming out of their houses. I was only around the corner."

"No-one has touched the body since?" Poor lad. He couldn't have been more than fifteen. What was he doing out so early in the rain?

"Officers entered. But they climbed through the window."

She could see that from the footprints. Thankfully they had sense enough not to move the body to open the door. Garrett planned to go inside once she had finished her work with the victim. She was too old to climb through windows in the rain.

I wonder what's become of his spine? She leaned forward to examine the damage. The skull is cracked, and I would wager the poor lad's brains have been scooped out. If a human being could do that, I'd say so violent an attack was personal. She crouched to investigate a scatter of pale flecks on the steps, like a splash of milk frozen in place.

The patrolman swallowed loudly. Red hair and freckles, couldn't have been four years older than the victim. Despite herself, Garrett took pity on him. "What's your name, officer?"

"Forester," he replied. His face gleamed white around a fevered flush spotting the center of each cheek.

She sighed, seeing her own imperious face reflected in his eyes. Twenty years ago, she had been thought a great beauty. Boys like Forester had been so far beneath her notice that she had not even realized it was possible for them to have feelings. Times change, Abby Irene. "I am a sorcerer, lad, not a cannibal. You did as well as could be expected." She turned away.

"Ma'am?"

"Dismissed," she confirmed. "Go back to your dispatch for debriefing, Forester. You were right to call me in. This is a matter for the Crown." She knew perfectly well that the summons had come from the city Guard, and not from the Mayor's Colonial Police, but it was polite to lie.

Sometimes-but only some times-Garrett could almost admit a sympathy for the Mayor and his push for home rule. Her true loyalties, however, lay with the Crown. And the Duke.

Except, she mused, bootheels clicking as she made her way back to her waiting carriage, the Crown was an ocean away on the other side of her self-imposed exile, and in these days of threatened hostilities with the French and Iroquois it seemed to prefer to forget the Colonies existed. And the Duke, loyal Patriot that he was, had problems of his own.

Still, it rankled: in London, she could have counted on a specialist sorcerer and at least one additional DCI for so gruesome a murder. In the entire reach of the Colonies, from the Atlantic to the Iroquois territories West of the Appalachians, Garrett's only colleagues were in Boston and Philadelphia. One doddered through the closing years of a white-bearded wizard's career; the other was a puling idiot who never would have achieved his Th.D. without judiciously applied nepotism.

Yes, unequivocally-and especially since the Iron Queen's death and her eldest son's succession-Garrett was on her own.

Her driver, huddled miserable on the box, touched his cap. The renewed patter of rain on the cobbles told her to hurry. Uniformed officers held the gathering crowd back while Garrett rooted in her blue velvet carpetbag, kept dry in the enclosed coach. Quickly, she found what she needed and returned.

It was nasty work, sketching a circle around the corpse, and the hem of her dress was black with sucking mud and daubed red as well by the time she closed it. Renewed murmurs ran through the onlookers. Garrett shook her head, not troubling herself to look up. They can't have only now figured out who I am.

But deliberate steps clipped along the bloodsoaked walk, and a silken voice close behind her said, "Crown Investigator."

Garrett pinched the bridge of her nose, thinking very hard about the silver flask of brandy in her carpetbag. She knotted the circle off so that it would hold during her distraction and turned to face the intruder.

"I see the officers recognized you, Viscount," she said, briefly distracted by hazel eyes under a fall of brown-black hair. Princely cheekbones, a caballero's n.o.ble nose, and the sensual lip of a Rumanian aristocrat. Garrett bit down on a sigh.

"Please," said the notorious amateur detective, extending his grey-gloved hand, voice melodious with the interwoven tones of his native language. "So lovely a lady must by all means call me Sebastien. Besides, your English t.i.tles are so confusing."

Garrett transferred her wand to her left hand and allowed him to bend over her right. Much as she despised the man, she had to admit to a certain agreeable s.h.i.+ver when his lips brushed her glove. Don Sebastien de Ulloa straightened and smiled, gesturing to the mangled remains of the boy with the tip of his walking stick. "And so, my dear investigator-what have we here?"

Garrett pursed her lips in frustration, but kept her voice level. "I'm not certain yet," she said. "I've just finished containing the scene. There are a few interesting anomalies "

"That is candlewax." Don Sebastien leaned forward, laying a hand on Garrett's arm to steady himself away from the circle.

"It appears to be," she answered, s.h.i.+fting from the touch. "Interesting, is it not? Other than the mud and blood, it is obvious that the doorstep and facade were immaculately kept; probably scrubbed daily, if their housekeeper is anything like my Mary. So the wax can be no older than a day."

Don Sebastien was no sorcerer, and she largely ignored him while she dipped mingled salt and lampblack out of a little pouch and spread those around the circle, pretending she did not notice the cold water dripping down her collar. Don Sebastien seemed untroubled. "What intrigues me, Crown Investigator, is the swiftness of the attack. Have you eliminated a human agency?"

She tucked the little pouch into her pocket. "I've ruled out nothing," she answered, feeling as if he tested her. "But I must admit, I can see no way around suspicions of sorcery. Unless it was a beast." She let her voice drop. "In which case, we can expect further attacks."

Don Sebastien pursed sensual lips. Rain spattered from the brim of his hat. "May I call you Lady Abigail? It is so much less unwieldy than 'Crown Investigator.'"

"My name is 'Abigail Irene.' And I would prefer to be addressed by the t.i.tle appropriate to the situation. 'Garrett' will do if you are pressed for time, Don Sebastien."

"I meant no disrespect. DCI, have you considered some of the more unpleasant possibilities?"

"Such as?"

"Were-thing. Wampyr. Summoned demon, improperly bound."

"What would you consider the more pleasant possibilities, Don Sebastien? A deranged lunatic with the strength to peel a man's spine out of his back?"

"Ah. I take your point, Investigator. Although I admit, I am still exceedingly curious about the candlewax."

Garrett chuckled. "So am I, Don Sebastien. So am I. And curious as well, where the other residents have gotten off to. Shall we proceed?"

Once the coroner had moved the body, Don Sebastien wrapped the bra.s.s door-pull-which had already been examined-carefully in his handkerchief and tugged it open, stepping aside so that Garrett could precede him. "Crown Investigator, may I join you?"

"Thank you, Don Sebastien. If you must, you may." She shook her gore-daubed skirts and knocked the worst of the mire from her boots before she crossed the threshold; it didn't help. Wet cloth still clung to her knees when she crouched. "Well."

Don Sebastien reached up and pulled a taper from the sconce upon the wall, keeping the drip s.h.i.+eld at its base. He set it alight with a silver lighter, drawn from his coat pocket, and dropped to one knee facing Garrett, tilting the candle to give her light. Shadows scrolled about them. "More candle-spatters," she said. "Beeswax, and a good quant.i.ty of it, too."

"Do you maintain your good opinion of the housekeeper?"

She lifted her chin and glanced around, hair moving against the nape of her neck. Don Sebastien's eyes were on the scrollworked secretary beside the door. Garrett reached out and ran a kid-gloved fingertip along its edges. She examined the results in the glow of the taper, which was of good enough quality not to drip even when he angled it. "Even the back is clean," she said. "And a family of some means, if they were spending so on candles. And that candle does not drip like this." She drew out a penknife and flaked a few dribs of wax into a gla.s.sine envelope.

"Your reputation does not do you justice," Don Sebastien said, and stood, offering Garrett his a.s.sistance. "The intruder's light, do you think?"

"If there was an intruder." His flesh was cool even through her glove. "Don Sebastien, you were too long in the rain."

"I am always cold," he answered, and released her lightly once her balance was sure. "The trail appears to lead this way. Shall we have a look upstairs, Crown Investigator?"

"By all means. Lead on, Lucifer." Light-bearer.

He laughed and held the candle high. "I have been called worse. You have noticed the angle of the drippings?"

"Of course," she answered. "They fell from the candle of someone leaving the house."

"Indeed." They entered the front room. He stood aside again, to allow her to precede him up the sweeping stair.

Very pretty. For a hobbyist. Does he think because a Crown Investigator is also a woman, she needs an expatriate Spaniard as her shadow to solve a murder? And then, since he was only looking at the back of her rain-wet head, she allowed herself a little, mocking smile. Perhaps he's just hoping to catch a glimpse of your ankles. "There is more wax up the stair runner."

"And on the banister."

"And across the landing-interesting. The droplets crisscross the hall." She bent again, gesturing for the light. Don Sebastien was beside her as silently as a cat in his patent-leather boots, dabs of mud marring their mirror s.h.i.+ne. "The intruder spent a fair amount of time here."

"Do you suppose he came in through an upstairs window? Two were open; strange on a stormy night."

"Do you suppose he was a he?" Garrett answered mildly, moving to the closest of the bedrooms, from which a cold draft flowed. The door stood open; mud on the threshold told her the officers had been through it, and she wished she knew if the door had been closed or open when they arrived.

She paused in the frame of the doorway, letting her eyes take in the room. A young man's, by the schoolbooks and fencing gear, and the bed had been slept in-disconsolately, judging by the crumpled and thrown-back covers and the disarray of the pillows. Unlike the downstairs entryway, there was light enough in this room to see the spatters of wax on the floor, although there was no candle in the holder by the bed.

A chill lifted the hair on Garrett's neck. She moved to the window, aware of Don Sebastien behind her, although the wide wooden boards scarcely seemed to flex under his weight. "Are you a swordsman, Don Sebastien?"

"A notorious one, in my youth," he answered, giving it the slight inflection of a double entendre. Her lips twitched. She did not look, instead leaning down beside the windowframe and tilting her head to examine it against the slanted light. The floor beneath was damaged, the wood already swollen from rain falling inside. That rain had washed away any traces that might have been on the windowsill; Garrett stared until her eyes crossed and found nothing. Still her skin crawled.

"He is restless," Garrett said, straightening and stepping away from the cas.e.m.e.nt. She whirled, noticing Don Sebastien's sudden stillness, as if he set himself for an attack. Garrett pulled her eyes from the Spaniard and paced quickly to the bed. "He rises. He-"

"-kindles a light," Sebastien interrupted. "There is a burnt match in the candle holder, and the box in the nightstand cubbyhole."