Black Ice - Part 4
Jun. 20th, 2011 12:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kittydesadeI.
I woke up the way no one ever wants to: with a headache and no memory of how I got here. Cold concrete floor, water dripping, it smelled like a sewer and looked like a set from a bad cop show. Not a bad show about cops, a show about bad cops, which meant that whoever dumped me in this basement either watched too much television or had a healthy sense of irony and self-preservation. These things showed up in shows because they just made sense. With no windows and not much of anything in the way of stuff, it was immediately disorienting.
They hadn’t tied me down. That wasn’t as hopeful as it seemed. It meant they were pretty confident they could deal with me, whoever they were or whatever they thought I was.
I looked around. Concrete floor, pipes in the ceiling. Sub basement or something. I couldn’t hear anything through the pipes and there wasn’t anything high enough for me to get my ear to the metal to listen. No stairs up to the top, just a ladder tucked into a trap-door in the ceiling. Place had been scoured clean.
Whatever this was, it didn't look like I was getting out of here alive.
I closed my eyes and sat down in the driest corner I could find, trying to keep warm and think of what I should do next. They hadn't left me anything. I'd have to take whatever I could off the next people who came down that ladder. Only with no idea who was coming down the ladder, I had no idea if I could take them or who or even what they were. I started counting the drips, then stopped when I realized how crazy it sounded even in my head.
They don't talk about what isolation is like in pictures. They don't talk about how hard it is to live with just the thoughts in your head for company. I never liked company most of the time, live alone, happy to stay that way, but this constant silence except for creaking and dripping was driving me up the wall. Every plan I could think of was a disaster. Every scenario ended in my bled-out corpse spread out over the floor in various ways. Hellhound teeth in my stomach. By the time I got that far I was shaking hard enough to rattle my teeth.
So I got up and paced, counting my steps, for lack of anything better to do. At least I could figure out the size of this damn house. Or just the basement.
I took measurements, and then the stepladder in the ceiling creaked. Slivers of yellow light split the gray of the floor, and I scrambled back into the corner to get my back up against a wall. Whatever was coming, I could at least face it head on, right?
Shit, those bastards were tall. And unpleasant looking. And... Hellhounds.
Shit.
II.
Every time I got a black bag over my head I wondered if they washed it after every use. Some kind of bad guy etiquette at play, there, friends don't let friends breath in other people's stale air. Except we weren't friends, and etiquette probably wasn't their first priority.
On the other hand, the bag smelled like laundry detergent and fabric softener. So maybe they really did think about those things.
Or maybe it had gotten thrown in with someone's socks, for all I knew.
They hurried me up the ladder, hurried me through a couple of rooms and sat me on the chair for the next three days. It felt like days, broken by footsteps and light passing over my skin. Hot lights. I pictured a movie interrogation where the detective with his shirt sleeves rolled up and his tie loose, sweat stains on his pits, leans over a metal desk and shines a light in some slimeball's face. Only I was the slimeball here, and I couldn't see the detective.
Or maybe I was the intrepid investigator, captured by the bad guys and tied up with very clean ropes to a chair and they were going to get the rubber hoses and work me over. That one just went dirty before I could stop it. Enough with the pulp metaphors.
"What do you want?"
Maybe they had been waiting for me to break down and say something. Maybe they just felt like answering, I don't know. I couldn't tell. "Answers." That voice rasped out from a throat that was either badly broken or not entirely human.
Answers. That was a mathematician's answer: true and the most unhelpful statement possible. No information given away. "Answers to what?" I didn't want to say I didn't know anything. I didn't want to say that I did. I knew a lot of shit that could get me into trouble but it had only led to more questions, and these people were giving me nothing.
Not even the benefit of more questions. Just more footsteps on the floor and my own breath collecting under the hood. Tasting my own breath was up there on the top ten list of common, foul things. They were talking, low growling voices I couldn't make out words from. Three different voices at least, but whatever they were saying was so gutteral nothing was coherent.
Then someone came back to stand in front of me. Cloth rustled, and before I could kick or try anything my legs were grabbed and tied together, then yanked. I went sliding to the floor as the chair toppled; of course I hit my head on something.
For extra special bonus points, the hood came up around my chin, too. I could see, not much, but enough to see that this was a damn fine house. Sort of a persian carpet or something else fancy in reds and golds under me, carved wooden feet on a table or something in front of me. Then they pulled the hood back down to the bottom of my neck and I couldn't see anything. The other thing I noticed was that the opposite wall was pretty far away. Interesting.
More harsh words. This time they were talking about me. "... find out anything, this is a bad plan."
"You got a better one?"
I knew I knew that voice from somewhere.
The rest of the conversation was short, to the point, and so predictable I mouthed the words along with them. No. Then shut up and... and do as you're told, was the finish on that, but it could have been anything along those lines.
Then they picked me up again. Threw me over some guy's shoulder, a shoulder that was big enough to be used as a table, and took me outside. First there was brick or tile or something, then there was wet grass and dirt. My table's feet sank into it a little with every step. We were walking somewhere outside. I tried not to think about mushroom rings and faerie lights. That kind of shit went out with the idea of living anywhere natural.
Hell, the idea of living anywhere natural probably went out because of that shit. The faeries eventually stopped harassing everyone. No one knew why.
... The Truce?
Thinking about that distracted me for long enough that I barely noticed until the table dropped me off his shoulder and onto the cold, wet ground. Gross. The voices were still talking, but this time they were too far away for me to hear, so I tried to concentrate on what I'd just figured out. And not freak out about why I didn't realize it before.
The Truce. The Hellhounds and the pixies and I didn't know what all else, I didn't remember when I was hooded and tied up like someone's temple sacrifice, but I remembered they'd talked about it. My contact had talked about it. The Truce had happened long enough ago that they talked about it in capital letters. The urban movement had happened long enough ago that people were starting to forget about it, believe things had always happened that way. The Hellhounds... well, no one really knew about the Hellhounds, only that they were vicious bastards who preyed on us normal folk and who you didn't cross unless your life depended on it, and then it was usually too late.
Circles overlapping circles. Cherry had to know. I had to tell her, this was big, this was ground-breaking. This was damn well going to affect her jurisdiction. But then the people at the edges of whatever this was, whatever was keeping them away, said something that sounded a hell of a lot like "bait."
"I don't want to be bait!" I yelled. But since I had a hood over my mouth it came out as a series of incoherent sounds. And what I wanted didn't seem to matter much anyway. Double shit.
III.
As with before, there was a hurry up and wait thing going on. They dragged me up from the basement, dumped me in a chair, and talked about me. Now they'd dragged me outside, dumped me onto the ground, and were waiting for something.
What the hell were they waiting for?
"You know, whatever you're planning on doing to me, you want to hurry it up already?" Still muffled. Still coming out as long strings of 'nngh! nnnngh nnngh!' Set it to a catchy beat and make a record hit out of it.
My limbs were tied so tight they were starting to lose feeling. Losing circulation, starting to tingle. Why had they tied me this tight? It wasn't like I could get away anyway, not with them standing around me, not if they were what I thought they were. Only then I realized that it wasn't my body losing circulation. It was something else.
My experience with faeries, pixies, anyone out of that world was pretty limited. I dealt with dead bodies and living ones, which meant hunters, necromancers, people who kept pets they shouldn't and traded with people who were just as dangerous. Not faeries, people who messed with your mind and your senses and did it because they lived in a world that was at right angles to ours. They didn't think the way we did. They were alien, in the most terrestrial sense. Half the abduction stories and cases probably ended up being faerie stuff.
They were setting me up for an alien abduction and not even using the good lube. Great.
My body started to go to sleep. Now that I was paying attention I could tell it wasn't normal foot going to sleep action, this felt like a thousand tiny electric tongues were licking me to death. Everywhere they touched, it put my body to sleep. My skin. Everything. My mind didn't go to sleep, though. Wasn't that was pixies were supposed to do? If these were even pixies. Maybe they were something else. What else came out of fairy rings in the dirt? Nixies? No, that was water spirits...
"I don't like this..." Only I didn't say it, because by this time they were up to my throat and the only reason I could breathe was because breathing was an involuntary reflex. They weren't taking that away. Yet.
I could really die like this. It hadn't been real before now.
I started to panic. Heart rate, respiration, all that stuff started to skyrocket. My heart beat so fast it hurt, and I couldn't move to rub the ache out of my chest. I couldn't do a damn thing. The grass went away, the damp, everything. It was about the roaring of blood rushing through the tiny veins in my head and the way my pulse jumped through my neck like whitehounds on a course.
Was I floating? Maybe I was floating. Maybe they were carrying me away somewhere.
"Shh..." Cherry said, I heard her even through the hood and then that was gone too. She took the hood off, or someone did anyway, and two fingertips brushed over my forehead. Now I was hallucinating. "Shh. Go to sleep. It's all right. It's just an experiment."
But I didn't WANT to be an experiment!
I slept anyway.
IV.
I woke up not in my own bed, but in a bed. Good enough for now.
Voices in the other room. Which made it about twenty four hours I had been picked up, shoved, bagged, tied, picked up again, dropped, and moved around with people talking over my head. Which was twenty two hours too many. I started up out of bed and was on my feet and heading to the door before the draft on my skin told me I was naked.
There just wasn't an upside to this. Of any kind.
Whoever had ahold of me left clothes, though. Just my size, too, and pretty swank. More fancy than I was used to, in aggressive colors, black and red and silver. Even the underwear, plain black cotton, not meant to be seen at least. By the time I got dressed I looked like someone's hooker. Or a pimp. Or both at once.
On the other hand, it wasn't a stripper outfit of any kind, no ridiculous underwear meant to be a peek-a-boo show out of the top of my pants, nothing tight enough to show off my body. No objectification here. I had boots with steel toes. Now that I thought about it, I'd meant to get steel toes for a while and never got around to it. DId they know that, or was it just a happy coincidence for the symbolism of shitkickers?
Why was I thinking about my clothes when I still didn't know where I was, who had kidnapped me, why I'd gone from prisoner and sacrifice to honored guest and, most importantly, who'd had their hands all over my naked body?
I tried the door. It wasn't locked. The first person I saw when I got out was my Hellhound friend. So I punched him.
Which might not have been the smartest thing to do on my part.
There was yelling and people shouting at me to stop, and at him to stop. There were a couple people on each of us, holding us back, but I was done. Just had to get that out. "It's cool, I'm done," I said, holding up my hands and shaking myself out. "It's cool. Hey, I didn't catch your name. Friend." I showed him some teeth. If I could make my eyes do that cool yellow trick, too, I totally would.
"Friend." He smirked back, and he had a better smile than me. "I didn't catch yours."
"I didn't toss it your way."
"All right, all right..." That was someone else, probably the leader, on account of he was seven feet tall and his shoulders had to be the table I was thrown over last night. He had a cigar in one hand and looked like he could get knocked through a wall or a plate glass window and it would only mildly inconvenience him. "Shut up, both of you. Step into my parlor."
We all stopped and stared at him. "You're kidding, right?"
The table shrugged. "It was right there. You gotta take these things, I mean, when they're right there."
A comedian. Wonderful.
We filed into his parlor, also known as a study as it turned out, and all sat down on tables and chairs, I took the couch because I got in there second, and waited for him to say something. All the Hellhounds looked at him like they were waiting for his cue, even when they weren't looking directly at him. So he was the alpha dog, and that made the rest of them, what? Pack members?
He sorted through some papers on his desk, tapped out the cigar, made us all sit and stew in our own juices for a while before he looked up. "So," he said, then took another hit off the damn stogie just because it was dramatic. "The treaty has been broken."
The room erupted in angry, angry barking.
"SHUT. UP."
I was glad he said it so that I didn't have to. So I'd been right about a truce, I remembered right, but that told me jack shit about what all else was going on. I raised my hand, making everyone stare. I guess they'd never been to school. "Uh. Can I ask a question?" Moot point, since I just had and I was about to ask some more. "What the fuck is going on here? What treaty?"
The second they started explaining, three sentences in, I wished I hadn't asked.
V.
After this, I was never taking another damn case for Cherry again, not unless I knew all the details. I was never doing another cloak and dagger assignment, strictly unfaithful spouses and cheating business partners for me. This was heavy shit. Far too heavy for me to lift.
I was here because I could give testimony as to what had been done to me, and because I was a neutral party. The Hellhounds had rubbed their scent all over me and made me look like one of theirs, a scrappy, scruffy one of them but one of them nonetheless. That was what they'd been doing with me in the basement, steeping me in pheromones like a damn cup of tea. And the pixies had taken the bait. And yes, it was pixies after all. I still had a hard time wrapping my head around that. Pixies weren't supposed to be able to murder Hellhounds.
It wasn't the United Nations, but it was damn close. The big house was the leader's house, and once we'd hashed everything out in the study we adjourned to the conference room, big long table with him at the head. The pixies and the faerie and their representative came in after that. And Cherry.
I stared at her. The coyote, looking about as groomed and pressed as I'd ever seen him, came at her heels and while I gaped at him he shook himself and dropped the glamour, now that I could see it was a glamour. Now that I was looking for it.
So, he wasn't a coyote. He was the biggest fucking whitehound I'd ever seen, and he stared at me with a pitying look like I didn't know what the hell was going on. Which was pretty fair. I didn't know what the hell was going on. But I knew Cherry had set me up. She hadn't been straight with me from day one of this case, maybe ever. I couldn't look at her. If I did I didn't know what I'd do, so I stared at the table and tried not to rack up dentist bills by grinding my teeth.
"The treaty has been broken," said the pack leader with all the gravitas of a movie announcer. It was so over the top it came right around serious to silly. I was the only one who thought so, so I kept my mouth shut. "One of the tribes has been killing off its enemies without calling a tribunal, vigilante justice..." His voice crept up into shouting territory, though he seemed pretty calm otherwise. "Does no one any good."
"You have proof of this?"
I expected the pixie to sound like a trained British thespian on helium. He sounded normal, not even amplified although the way things worked out I shouldn't be able to hear him if he talked at normal volume. I thought. Maybe not. I didn't know anything about the nature of pixies.
"We have the results of an investigation, and we have the testimony of one who has been under their influence and would have leapt off a cliff had we not been there to intervene."
The room murmured while I dropped my head into my hands and tried to forget that. I hadn't even remembered until the bastard started talking. Something about balancing on a ledge, wind blowing hard and pushing me over and all that empty space. Lots of empty space was scary. I tried not to think about it too hard while I testified. No preparation. Weren't they supposed to prepare you for these things?
Well, they were if this was a real trial with a real judge and a real proceeding, jury there and everything. I didn't think this would be binding in any kind of court.
I also didn't think, whatever the consequences, that any of this would see a real court. And then I did look over at Cherry. She answered to a higher authority.
"And the rest?"
The pack leader pushed an envelope down at the pixie, who opened it. The envelope was probably as long as the pixie was tall; two of them reached in and pulled out the evidence. Photographs, reports, samples. I recognized the test results I'd been waiting for, right before I'd gotten cold-cocked and dumped even deeper into this nightmare. My head jerked up and I looked around the room, but I didn't see the bastard. A friend of Cherry's. Suddenly that part made even more sense than I wanted it to.
The pixie looked over his shoulder. Everyone looked in that direction, even me. Even though I couldn't see what was happening. "Amelie? Is this true?"
Cherry's fingers bit into the table and that, more than anything else, told me what that strange tone to the pixie's voice was. Not that I knew what a pixie's voice should sound like. But it reminded me of something, that and Cherry's expression. She told me something, once, a good trial lawyer never asks a question unless she knows what the answer is.
This pixie leader knew what the answer was. And judging by the reactions of everyone in the room, the easiest way for him to know was because he'd set it up in the first place. Plausible deniability apparently wasn't just something humans knew about.
Amelie didn't bother to protest her innocence. She started in on something about the pride of the fae nations and the resurgance of power and I tuned it out and backed away as the room exploded in chaos. Leaders trying to get their people to sit down, no one wanted to stay quiet. I put my back to the door and squirmed out. This wasn't my fight.
I glared at Cherry as I got the hell out of there, too. She and I had unfinished business, however this turned out. I'd like to say I trusted her to do the right thing and make sure everyone got squared away, but I didn't. Not after the way she'd played me.
Coda:
"You lied to me."
She didn't argue. She didn't even try to explain, just stared at me with her arms folded like I was in the wrong, here.
"You lied, and you used me. How long have you been lying to me? The whole time we've been working together, or was that just the part where you're a faerie? And then you needed a patsy and I just happened to ..."
"You weren't a patsy."
The way her voice shook I kind of thought she was upset that I was upset. Except in order to care about my feelings she'd have to care about me at all, and I wasn't feeling that. "Then what was I? Your stooge? Stalking horse, that's what they call it, right? I was bait?"
Considering I actually was bait for this contingent of rogue pixies, and I couldn't believe I was even thinking that, she had no room to argue. "You were..." Her lower lip caught in her teeth. "You were the best person I could think of to investigate. You don't stop. You don't stop to think that maybe this might be a little bit crazy, you just... go where the case takes you."
"Right into the Hellhounds' mouth." I ground my teeth some more. "You orchestrated this whole thing. Right from the..."
"NO."
I stopped because she yelled. Not because her eyes were going watery or because she sounded like she was about to crack, or because her glamour was finally slipping. I hadn't seen it slip before ever, had I? No, because if I had, I would have realized what she was. "No?"
"No. The necromancer wasn't me. You brought me in on that, I didn't start you on this, I just... helped you along."
"I... don't even know what to say to that. You didn't help anything. You used me, you and that damned dog both pushed me around like a toy, and..."
Her arms unfolded. "And what? Huh? What exactly would you like to yell at me about? Yes, we used you. Because the last thing this city needs is more bodies on the ground, and you know what would have happened if we hadn't? Civil war. Real war. Do you know how many people die in wars, you little shit? Have you seen the bodies?"
My turn to stand there with my lips pressed shut and too upset to say anything. "Obviously, you still know a lot of things I don't." Okay, maybe not too upset to say anything.
"The gum on the bottom of my shoes knows things you don't."
We both recoiled from that one.
"Fine."
"Good."
"Get out."
Cherry gaped. Her lower lip wobbled, her eyes went wide and watery. I couldn't tell if it was on purpose or if she really was hurt, and I didn't care anymore. "You w--"
"I don't care. Shut up. Get out. You used me, and you haven't even said you're sorry for it. We're not friends. So give me a case, ask for my help, and pay my retainer, or get out."
She narrowed her eyes at me on that last part. "And if I have a case for you?"
"I'll recommend someone." Because she was still an attorney at the DA's office, that part I'd checked out and it turned out to be true. I still had no idea how. "Now get out of my office. And don't come back without a federal warrant."
She closed the door. Waited almost a full minute in the hall, her black silhouette against the bubbled glass, maybe for me to call her back. I wasn't going to call her back in. She hadn't even said she was sorry.
Her heels clacked down the hall and faded away. And I sank back into my chair, giving myself a whole five minutes to feel shitty about what had happened before moving on to my next case.
"Hey, Mr. Chou? About your daughter..."
I woke up the way no one ever wants to: with a headache and no memory of how I got here. Cold concrete floor, water dripping, it smelled like a sewer and looked like a set from a bad cop show. Not a bad show about cops, a show about bad cops, which meant that whoever dumped me in this basement either watched too much television or had a healthy sense of irony and self-preservation. These things showed up in shows because they just made sense. With no windows and not much of anything in the way of stuff, it was immediately disorienting.
They hadn’t tied me down. That wasn’t as hopeful as it seemed. It meant they were pretty confident they could deal with me, whoever they were or whatever they thought I was.
I looked around. Concrete floor, pipes in the ceiling. Sub basement or something. I couldn’t hear anything through the pipes and there wasn’t anything high enough for me to get my ear to the metal to listen. No stairs up to the top, just a ladder tucked into a trap-door in the ceiling. Place had been scoured clean.
Whatever this was, it didn't look like I was getting out of here alive.
I closed my eyes and sat down in the driest corner I could find, trying to keep warm and think of what I should do next. They hadn't left me anything. I'd have to take whatever I could off the next people who came down that ladder. Only with no idea who was coming down the ladder, I had no idea if I could take them or who or even what they were. I started counting the drips, then stopped when I realized how crazy it sounded even in my head.
They don't talk about what isolation is like in pictures. They don't talk about how hard it is to live with just the thoughts in your head for company. I never liked company most of the time, live alone, happy to stay that way, but this constant silence except for creaking and dripping was driving me up the wall. Every plan I could think of was a disaster. Every scenario ended in my bled-out corpse spread out over the floor in various ways. Hellhound teeth in my stomach. By the time I got that far I was shaking hard enough to rattle my teeth.
So I got up and paced, counting my steps, for lack of anything better to do. At least I could figure out the size of this damn house. Or just the basement.
I took measurements, and then the stepladder in the ceiling creaked. Slivers of yellow light split the gray of the floor, and I scrambled back into the corner to get my back up against a wall. Whatever was coming, I could at least face it head on, right?
Shit, those bastards were tall. And unpleasant looking. And... Hellhounds.
Shit.
II.
Every time I got a black bag over my head I wondered if they washed it after every use. Some kind of bad guy etiquette at play, there, friends don't let friends breath in other people's stale air. Except we weren't friends, and etiquette probably wasn't their first priority.
On the other hand, the bag smelled like laundry detergent and fabric softener. So maybe they really did think about those things.
Or maybe it had gotten thrown in with someone's socks, for all I knew.
They hurried me up the ladder, hurried me through a couple of rooms and sat me on the chair for the next three days. It felt like days, broken by footsteps and light passing over my skin. Hot lights. I pictured a movie interrogation where the detective with his shirt sleeves rolled up and his tie loose, sweat stains on his pits, leans over a metal desk and shines a light in some slimeball's face. Only I was the slimeball here, and I couldn't see the detective.
Or maybe I was the intrepid investigator, captured by the bad guys and tied up with very clean ropes to a chair and they were going to get the rubber hoses and work me over. That one just went dirty before I could stop it. Enough with the pulp metaphors.
"What do you want?"
Maybe they had been waiting for me to break down and say something. Maybe they just felt like answering, I don't know. I couldn't tell. "Answers." That voice rasped out from a throat that was either badly broken or not entirely human.
Answers. That was a mathematician's answer: true and the most unhelpful statement possible. No information given away. "Answers to what?" I didn't want to say I didn't know anything. I didn't want to say that I did. I knew a lot of shit that could get me into trouble but it had only led to more questions, and these people were giving me nothing.
Not even the benefit of more questions. Just more footsteps on the floor and my own breath collecting under the hood. Tasting my own breath was up there on the top ten list of common, foul things. They were talking, low growling voices I couldn't make out words from. Three different voices at least, but whatever they were saying was so gutteral nothing was coherent.
Then someone came back to stand in front of me. Cloth rustled, and before I could kick or try anything my legs were grabbed and tied together, then yanked. I went sliding to the floor as the chair toppled; of course I hit my head on something.
For extra special bonus points, the hood came up around my chin, too. I could see, not much, but enough to see that this was a damn fine house. Sort of a persian carpet or something else fancy in reds and golds under me, carved wooden feet on a table or something in front of me. Then they pulled the hood back down to the bottom of my neck and I couldn't see anything. The other thing I noticed was that the opposite wall was pretty far away. Interesting.
More harsh words. This time they were talking about me. "... find out anything, this is a bad plan."
"You got a better one?"
I knew I knew that voice from somewhere.
The rest of the conversation was short, to the point, and so predictable I mouthed the words along with them. No. Then shut up and... and do as you're told, was the finish on that, but it could have been anything along those lines.
Then they picked me up again. Threw me over some guy's shoulder, a shoulder that was big enough to be used as a table, and took me outside. First there was brick or tile or something, then there was wet grass and dirt. My table's feet sank into it a little with every step. We were walking somewhere outside. I tried not to think about mushroom rings and faerie lights. That kind of shit went out with the idea of living anywhere natural.
Hell, the idea of living anywhere natural probably went out because of that shit. The faeries eventually stopped harassing everyone. No one knew why.
... The Truce?
Thinking about that distracted me for long enough that I barely noticed until the table dropped me off his shoulder and onto the cold, wet ground. Gross. The voices were still talking, but this time they were too far away for me to hear, so I tried to concentrate on what I'd just figured out. And not freak out about why I didn't realize it before.
The Truce. The Hellhounds and the pixies and I didn't know what all else, I didn't remember when I was hooded and tied up like someone's temple sacrifice, but I remembered they'd talked about it. My contact had talked about it. The Truce had happened long enough ago that they talked about it in capital letters. The urban movement had happened long enough ago that people were starting to forget about it, believe things had always happened that way. The Hellhounds... well, no one really knew about the Hellhounds, only that they were vicious bastards who preyed on us normal folk and who you didn't cross unless your life depended on it, and then it was usually too late.
Circles overlapping circles. Cherry had to know. I had to tell her, this was big, this was ground-breaking. This was damn well going to affect her jurisdiction. But then the people at the edges of whatever this was, whatever was keeping them away, said something that sounded a hell of a lot like "bait."
"I don't want to be bait!" I yelled. But since I had a hood over my mouth it came out as a series of incoherent sounds. And what I wanted didn't seem to matter much anyway. Double shit.
III.
As with before, there was a hurry up and wait thing going on. They dragged me up from the basement, dumped me in a chair, and talked about me. Now they'd dragged me outside, dumped me onto the ground, and were waiting for something.
What the hell were they waiting for?
"You know, whatever you're planning on doing to me, you want to hurry it up already?" Still muffled. Still coming out as long strings of 'nngh! nnnngh nnngh!' Set it to a catchy beat and make a record hit out of it.
My limbs were tied so tight they were starting to lose feeling. Losing circulation, starting to tingle. Why had they tied me this tight? It wasn't like I could get away anyway, not with them standing around me, not if they were what I thought they were. Only then I realized that it wasn't my body losing circulation. It was something else.
My experience with faeries, pixies, anyone out of that world was pretty limited. I dealt with dead bodies and living ones, which meant hunters, necromancers, people who kept pets they shouldn't and traded with people who were just as dangerous. Not faeries, people who messed with your mind and your senses and did it because they lived in a world that was at right angles to ours. They didn't think the way we did. They were alien, in the most terrestrial sense. Half the abduction stories and cases probably ended up being faerie stuff.
They were setting me up for an alien abduction and not even using the good lube. Great.
My body started to go to sleep. Now that I was paying attention I could tell it wasn't normal foot going to sleep action, this felt like a thousand tiny electric tongues were licking me to death. Everywhere they touched, it put my body to sleep. My skin. Everything. My mind didn't go to sleep, though. Wasn't that was pixies were supposed to do? If these were even pixies. Maybe they were something else. What else came out of fairy rings in the dirt? Nixies? No, that was water spirits...
"I don't like this..." Only I didn't say it, because by this time they were up to my throat and the only reason I could breathe was because breathing was an involuntary reflex. They weren't taking that away. Yet.
I could really die like this. It hadn't been real before now.
I started to panic. Heart rate, respiration, all that stuff started to skyrocket. My heart beat so fast it hurt, and I couldn't move to rub the ache out of my chest. I couldn't do a damn thing. The grass went away, the damp, everything. It was about the roaring of blood rushing through the tiny veins in my head and the way my pulse jumped through my neck like whitehounds on a course.
Was I floating? Maybe I was floating. Maybe they were carrying me away somewhere.
"Shh..." Cherry said, I heard her even through the hood and then that was gone too. She took the hood off, or someone did anyway, and two fingertips brushed over my forehead. Now I was hallucinating. "Shh. Go to sleep. It's all right. It's just an experiment."
But I didn't WANT to be an experiment!
I slept anyway.
IV.
I woke up not in my own bed, but in a bed. Good enough for now.
Voices in the other room. Which made it about twenty four hours I had been picked up, shoved, bagged, tied, picked up again, dropped, and moved around with people talking over my head. Which was twenty two hours too many. I started up out of bed and was on my feet and heading to the door before the draft on my skin told me I was naked.
There just wasn't an upside to this. Of any kind.
Whoever had ahold of me left clothes, though. Just my size, too, and pretty swank. More fancy than I was used to, in aggressive colors, black and red and silver. Even the underwear, plain black cotton, not meant to be seen at least. By the time I got dressed I looked like someone's hooker. Or a pimp. Or both at once.
On the other hand, it wasn't a stripper outfit of any kind, no ridiculous underwear meant to be a peek-a-boo show out of the top of my pants, nothing tight enough to show off my body. No objectification here. I had boots with steel toes. Now that I thought about it, I'd meant to get steel toes for a while and never got around to it. DId they know that, or was it just a happy coincidence for the symbolism of shitkickers?
Why was I thinking about my clothes when I still didn't know where I was, who had kidnapped me, why I'd gone from prisoner and sacrifice to honored guest and, most importantly, who'd had their hands all over my naked body?
I tried the door. It wasn't locked. The first person I saw when I got out was my Hellhound friend. So I punched him.
Which might not have been the smartest thing to do on my part.
There was yelling and people shouting at me to stop, and at him to stop. There were a couple people on each of us, holding us back, but I was done. Just had to get that out. "It's cool, I'm done," I said, holding up my hands and shaking myself out. "It's cool. Hey, I didn't catch your name. Friend." I showed him some teeth. If I could make my eyes do that cool yellow trick, too, I totally would.
"Friend." He smirked back, and he had a better smile than me. "I didn't catch yours."
"I didn't toss it your way."
"All right, all right..." That was someone else, probably the leader, on account of he was seven feet tall and his shoulders had to be the table I was thrown over last night. He had a cigar in one hand and looked like he could get knocked through a wall or a plate glass window and it would only mildly inconvenience him. "Shut up, both of you. Step into my parlor."
We all stopped and stared at him. "You're kidding, right?"
The table shrugged. "It was right there. You gotta take these things, I mean, when they're right there."
A comedian. Wonderful.
We filed into his parlor, also known as a study as it turned out, and all sat down on tables and chairs, I took the couch because I got in there second, and waited for him to say something. All the Hellhounds looked at him like they were waiting for his cue, even when they weren't looking directly at him. So he was the alpha dog, and that made the rest of them, what? Pack members?
He sorted through some papers on his desk, tapped out the cigar, made us all sit and stew in our own juices for a while before he looked up. "So," he said, then took another hit off the damn stogie just because it was dramatic. "The treaty has been broken."
The room erupted in angry, angry barking.
"SHUT. UP."
I was glad he said it so that I didn't have to. So I'd been right about a truce, I remembered right, but that told me jack shit about what all else was going on. I raised my hand, making everyone stare. I guess they'd never been to school. "Uh. Can I ask a question?" Moot point, since I just had and I was about to ask some more. "What the fuck is going on here? What treaty?"
The second they started explaining, three sentences in, I wished I hadn't asked.
V.
After this, I was never taking another damn case for Cherry again, not unless I knew all the details. I was never doing another cloak and dagger assignment, strictly unfaithful spouses and cheating business partners for me. This was heavy shit. Far too heavy for me to lift.
I was here because I could give testimony as to what had been done to me, and because I was a neutral party. The Hellhounds had rubbed their scent all over me and made me look like one of theirs, a scrappy, scruffy one of them but one of them nonetheless. That was what they'd been doing with me in the basement, steeping me in pheromones like a damn cup of tea. And the pixies had taken the bait. And yes, it was pixies after all. I still had a hard time wrapping my head around that. Pixies weren't supposed to be able to murder Hellhounds.
It wasn't the United Nations, but it was damn close. The big house was the leader's house, and once we'd hashed everything out in the study we adjourned to the conference room, big long table with him at the head. The pixies and the faerie and their representative came in after that. And Cherry.
I stared at her. The coyote, looking about as groomed and pressed as I'd ever seen him, came at her heels and while I gaped at him he shook himself and dropped the glamour, now that I could see it was a glamour. Now that I was looking for it.
So, he wasn't a coyote. He was the biggest fucking whitehound I'd ever seen, and he stared at me with a pitying look like I didn't know what the hell was going on. Which was pretty fair. I didn't know what the hell was going on. But I knew Cherry had set me up. She hadn't been straight with me from day one of this case, maybe ever. I couldn't look at her. If I did I didn't know what I'd do, so I stared at the table and tried not to rack up dentist bills by grinding my teeth.
"The treaty has been broken," said the pack leader with all the gravitas of a movie announcer. It was so over the top it came right around serious to silly. I was the only one who thought so, so I kept my mouth shut. "One of the tribes has been killing off its enemies without calling a tribunal, vigilante justice..." His voice crept up into shouting territory, though he seemed pretty calm otherwise. "Does no one any good."
"You have proof of this?"
I expected the pixie to sound like a trained British thespian on helium. He sounded normal, not even amplified although the way things worked out I shouldn't be able to hear him if he talked at normal volume. I thought. Maybe not. I didn't know anything about the nature of pixies.
"We have the results of an investigation, and we have the testimony of one who has been under their influence and would have leapt off a cliff had we not been there to intervene."
The room murmured while I dropped my head into my hands and tried to forget that. I hadn't even remembered until the bastard started talking. Something about balancing on a ledge, wind blowing hard and pushing me over and all that empty space. Lots of empty space was scary. I tried not to think about it too hard while I testified. No preparation. Weren't they supposed to prepare you for these things?
Well, they were if this was a real trial with a real judge and a real proceeding, jury there and everything. I didn't think this would be binding in any kind of court.
I also didn't think, whatever the consequences, that any of this would see a real court. And then I did look over at Cherry. She answered to a higher authority.
"And the rest?"
The pack leader pushed an envelope down at the pixie, who opened it. The envelope was probably as long as the pixie was tall; two of them reached in and pulled out the evidence. Photographs, reports, samples. I recognized the test results I'd been waiting for, right before I'd gotten cold-cocked and dumped even deeper into this nightmare. My head jerked up and I looked around the room, but I didn't see the bastard. A friend of Cherry's. Suddenly that part made even more sense than I wanted it to.
The pixie looked over his shoulder. Everyone looked in that direction, even me. Even though I couldn't see what was happening. "Amelie? Is this true?"
Cherry's fingers bit into the table and that, more than anything else, told me what that strange tone to the pixie's voice was. Not that I knew what a pixie's voice should sound like. But it reminded me of something, that and Cherry's expression. She told me something, once, a good trial lawyer never asks a question unless she knows what the answer is.
This pixie leader knew what the answer was. And judging by the reactions of everyone in the room, the easiest way for him to know was because he'd set it up in the first place. Plausible deniability apparently wasn't just something humans knew about.
Amelie didn't bother to protest her innocence. She started in on something about the pride of the fae nations and the resurgance of power and I tuned it out and backed away as the room exploded in chaos. Leaders trying to get their people to sit down, no one wanted to stay quiet. I put my back to the door and squirmed out. This wasn't my fight.
I glared at Cherry as I got the hell out of there, too. She and I had unfinished business, however this turned out. I'd like to say I trusted her to do the right thing and make sure everyone got squared away, but I didn't. Not after the way she'd played me.
Coda:
"You lied to me."
She didn't argue. She didn't even try to explain, just stared at me with her arms folded like I was in the wrong, here.
"You lied, and you used me. How long have you been lying to me? The whole time we've been working together, or was that just the part where you're a faerie? And then you needed a patsy and I just happened to ..."
"You weren't a patsy."
The way her voice shook I kind of thought she was upset that I was upset. Except in order to care about my feelings she'd have to care about me at all, and I wasn't feeling that. "Then what was I? Your stooge? Stalking horse, that's what they call it, right? I was bait?"
Considering I actually was bait for this contingent of rogue pixies, and I couldn't believe I was even thinking that, she had no room to argue. "You were..." Her lower lip caught in her teeth. "You were the best person I could think of to investigate. You don't stop. You don't stop to think that maybe this might be a little bit crazy, you just... go where the case takes you."
"Right into the Hellhounds' mouth." I ground my teeth some more. "You orchestrated this whole thing. Right from the..."
"NO."
I stopped because she yelled. Not because her eyes were going watery or because she sounded like she was about to crack, or because her glamour was finally slipping. I hadn't seen it slip before ever, had I? No, because if I had, I would have realized what she was. "No?"
"No. The necromancer wasn't me. You brought me in on that, I didn't start you on this, I just... helped you along."
"I... don't even know what to say to that. You didn't help anything. You used me, you and that damned dog both pushed me around like a toy, and..."
Her arms unfolded. "And what? Huh? What exactly would you like to yell at me about? Yes, we used you. Because the last thing this city needs is more bodies on the ground, and you know what would have happened if we hadn't? Civil war. Real war. Do you know how many people die in wars, you little shit? Have you seen the bodies?"
My turn to stand there with my lips pressed shut and too upset to say anything. "Obviously, you still know a lot of things I don't." Okay, maybe not too upset to say anything.
"The gum on the bottom of my shoes knows things you don't."
We both recoiled from that one.
"Fine."
"Good."
"Get out."
Cherry gaped. Her lower lip wobbled, her eyes went wide and watery. I couldn't tell if it was on purpose or if she really was hurt, and I didn't care anymore. "You w--"
"I don't care. Shut up. Get out. You used me, and you haven't even said you're sorry for it. We're not friends. So give me a case, ask for my help, and pay my retainer, or get out."
She narrowed her eyes at me on that last part. "And if I have a case for you?"
"I'll recommend someone." Because she was still an attorney at the DA's office, that part I'd checked out and it turned out to be true. I still had no idea how. "Now get out of my office. And don't come back without a federal warrant."
She closed the door. Waited almost a full minute in the hall, her black silhouette against the bubbled glass, maybe for me to call her back. I wasn't going to call her back in. She hadn't even said she was sorry.
Her heels clacked down the hall and faded away. And I sank back into my chair, giving myself a whole five minutes to feel shitty about what had happened before moving on to my next case.
"Hey, Mr. Chou? About your daughter..."