And I was being hunted.

  ● ●

  ● CHAPTER 4 ●

  Notte

  I debated going for help. Merlin might be willing to lend me aid if his niece asked him ... although now they were both busy protecting that baby dragon thing, so he might not be able.

  Or worse, maybe he could protect me, but his solution would include hiding in his tower with him to wait it out. No, thank you.

  What else could I do? I could go home—ha! No, I really couldn’t. That was out.

  Who owed me favors? Lots of folks, but that was no good. Magic is a very precise force, and limited by species; not everyone can fight everything. If my acquaintances were as helpless as I, they would not thank me for drawing these creatures to them and damning us all together.

  That settled it: my only help was a crew of Ever-Dying humans who most definitely would not be able to keep me alive.

  Yes, I couldn’t keep them alive, either, but surely you see I’m worth more?

  Sorry. That was a selfish, terrible thing to say, but it was how I felt at that moment, and we’re being honest, aren’t we? We’ve all had our worst days, and this was a bad one for me.

  So I had a group of the Ever-Dying to work with. Right. If we were going to survive this, I’d need to take the reins. It was time to show them what they’d signed up for.

  There was no door to slam in the dining room, so I announced my return with magic.

  I hummed as I entered, a creepy tune in time with my steps that sent blue power skittering over their skin to raise their hair like static electricity before it bites. My own hair floated around my face as if I stood over a vent, all shimmery and gossamer gold, and just for fun, I made the lights flicker off completely for the count of three.

  “Do you really think I should join you?” I modulated my voice so it sounded like many voices all around the room. “Do you actually believe you can offer anything to me? You, the Ever-Dying, who age and fail merely by sitting there, who have no power of your own, who have no way even to save yourselves? Do you believe I should join you? Do you? Why should I help you, instead of leaving you here to be destroyed?”

  They stared (the Ever-Dying usually do), all of them breathless and terrified, everybody’s face going different colors. Well, almost all; Barry looked bored. Standing by the swinging door into the kitchen, he crossed his arms and glowered. But that was all right. I could allow him some boredom. Bored, bald Barry the bartender had had a longer day than I had.

  “We ... we ... ” Pinstripe tried to pull it back together.

  I waved my hand. “Silence! You speak secrets of which you know nothing! You talk of the Mythos, of the soul and its workings, of the ineluctable power of magic, and yet you know nothing!” I gave an extra burst of power, and my hair flew up around me like in some exorcist movie, only so much prettier. “I am the only one here with the right to such damning knowledge, and more than this—I am the one who holds your lives in my hands. You, who speak of the Mythos with such contempt, are you now prepared to be judged by them?”

  I might have overdone it a little, because the younger of the two teens started crying, and the girl Cassie looked like she was about to be sick. If she ralphed on the old man’s suit, I’d have to give her a prize.

  It was kind of a game, yes. I’m Fey. What do you want?

  Besides, it didn’t matter because Barry marched right over and yelled in my face. “Cut it out! We don’t got time for this!”

  Cut it out is not the standard response to phenomenal cosmic power.

  What was I supposed to do? I could zap him, but I was bluffing—I didn’t have that much power left, and now he’d ruined the theatricality of it all, anyway. I let my hair fall down around my shoulders and gave him a pout that would haunt him (I hoped) for the rest of his stupid mortal life. “You’re no fun.”

  They all stared, mouths open. This was a show of a different kind now.

  “Fun? Fun? You think this is fun?” Barry growled in dire bartender warning. “We don’t got time for fun! Freaking stupid elf. Did you count us? Do it now!”

  He called me an elf again, the stubborn bastard.

  Far be it from me to obey. Then again, I’m smart, and I couldn’t help but tote everybody up just because he’d made me think about it: the old man, camo-pants guy, Cassie, teen one and teen two, Barry, and me. Well. That made seven.

  Seven. Hell. “Oh,” I said.

  “Yeah. ‘Oh,’” said Barry, and he had the nerve to poke me in the chest with his finger. “We got to act now. Everybody knows you’re a special snowflake. Now help us, or you’ll be a dead snowflake.”

  “You mixed your metaphors,” I whined, because I had to say something.

  “Seven?” said the younger teen, hurriedly wiping his face. “So?”

  “Seven’s a number of amplification,” said Barry, finger still on my chest like I was a piece of paper that might fly away. “With us together like this, we’re a homing beacon. They’ll find us for sure, and they’ll probably converge.”

  You could smell the adrenalin spike.

  “Calm down, Barry,” I said, and pushed at his accusing hand. It didn’t move, so I pushed again. “It’s not that bad.”

  “It is that bad. We’re running out of time!” He got right in my face to yell that, so it was time to teach him a lesson.

  I kissed him.

  Poor Barry. He went leaping backwards like I’d burned him, rubbing his mouth almost violently. “Son of a bitch!”

  I laughed, so help me. “Did you forget we among the Mythos tend to be omnivorous?”

  “Son of a bitch!” He rubbed his mouth again.

  My tenuous grasp on the room was restored. “All right, humams, listen up, because I won’t repeat this. You do not know what you’re dealing with. Not about the shadow-eaters or anything else.” I tossed my hair. “Never mind that you’re in such violation of the laws that you could all be carted off. I like life. I like it, and I am not going to throw it away due to your incompetence or anything else, you understand me?”

  Barry still looked like I’d made him swallow bad milk. “Son of a bitch,” he said again.

  “What are you proposing, exactly?” said Pinstripe, trying to keep his voice steady.

  Time to drop a bomb. “I saw one of the victims outside the building. Outside the window, just now, before I came back in here. A woman who’d turned to ash and died—there she was, looking up at me. They already know where we are.”

  Cassie curled in on herself, hiding her face in a ball of arms and legs. The younger teen started to hyperventilate.

  The old man took a deep breath. “We are safe here.”

  Oh, this should be good. “Pardon?”

  He sat up straighter. “This building was planned by men in the know, Unseelie. It was built with silver from the other side, and iron made with dragon’s blood, and a dozen other things. They can’t reach us here. As long as we’re in this building, we are safe.”

  I rubbed my face. “No. No, that won’t work. Even if some crazy old-timey architect did use blessed silver and dragon’s blood”—which is possible; I’ve known some older structures on the east coast that do—“it also used other things. There are always cracks in every seam. A really determined monster will wriggle through miles of plaster to get what it truly wants.”

  Pinstripe wasn’t through. “We’re not your enemies, and I do not believe you are ours. We are in this together, united by the monsters under our beds.”

  I rolled my eyes at that one. “It’s not just the bed-bugs you need to worry about. Do you even know what laws you broke?”

  “We didn’t do nothing,” said the taller teen, clenching his fists.

  Aww, they’re so cute when they’re young and stupid. “Yes, you did. Do you think you’re safe because you’re young? Or American? That’s not how this works. You’re dealing with magical beings who live for centuries, occupying empires that last millennia. Do you know how short your lives are? Do you really think anybody cares about the teeny tiny laws of a country two hundred years old, a country that changes its own laws on a daily basis? Do you really think the temporary lives of the Ever-Dying, built and discarded with such ease, matter to us?”

  His mouth worked, but nothing came out.

  “Be gentler,” Barry said softly.

  Well ... he was right. Children are still children. “The laws are in place for a reason. You aren’t supposed to know any of the things Colonel Mustard over here has been teaching you, and if anyone who really cared found out, you’d all disappear.”

  “So are you saying you don’t really care?” Cassie said.

  Clever girl. “I’m saying you’ll be sent to the other side, and that’s all she wrote.”

  They looked confused and afraid for one glorious second.

  “The other side isn’t death. It’s where the magic people live,” said Barry, ruining my moment, like always. “It’s where they ran off to when we humans grew too populous for their taste.”

  “Populous? I love your vocabulary, Barry-cakes,” I said, and batted my eyelashes at him.

  “It’s basically another dimension,” said Barry, ignoring me completely. “He means they’d take us to their world, where we’d have to make new lives, new families, new everything, and we’d never be able to come back.”

  He said it so accusingly! “Well, that’s better than being dead, isn’t it?” I flipped my hair over my shoulder. “It’s about safety. It’s like what your FBI might do if you knew lots of state secrets. Witness protection program.”

  “More like dumped-on-your-own program,” said Barry.

  “Would that work?” The younger teen looked around. “Would they ... could the shadow-eaters follow us there?”

  “Yes, of course they could,” I snapped, but then I wondered. I had no idea what world these things had come from. The seven Peoples of the Earth (Fey being one of them) each have their own little niches, but that didn’t answer my question. What realm did these beasties call home? How had they even gotten here? You couldn’t just hop through worlds willy-nilly whenever you wished. It wasn’t that simple. How did a herd of these things come to be in New York City?

  “Oh,” said the older teen, and looked away, his eyes all shiny.

  That made me mad. See, this is exactly what I was trying to avoid—being locked in here with a bunch of fools, frightened fools, fools with feelings and lives they thought worth protecting, hoping they could win by the power of being underdogs. It doesn’t work that way, real life doesn’t work that way, and we were all going to die, and I knew it, and they knew it, and everybody stared at the floor and the table and then me and each other and nobody said anything at all.

  And then the doorbell rang, and we all jumped out of our skins.

  A modified version of Big Ben’s chimes bonged through the cavernous apartment. I will never admit to yipping like a fox with his tail stepped on. But maybe I did cry out. I know my ears went down like a donkey’s, which was pretty embarrassing in itself.

  “Who’s there?” the smaller teen shouted from his place at the table, as if that did any good.

  Barry charged past me with the determination of an angry rhino. We couldn’t see the door from where we were, but everybody leaned forward over the table to hear, craning in an unconscious imitation of small children at a puppet-show.

  They all felt so young just then, so helpless. These were people, as much as I tried to marginalize them, as much as I tried to say they were short-lived and therefore pointless. My stomach roiled; my skin crawled; and so I abandoned them and followed Barry into the hall.

  Barry threw open the door and stared.

  “Please forgive my intrusion,” said a honey-tenor tone. “I am looking for a friend of mine, who I believe has come to this place.”

  I knew that voice.

  “Uh,” said Barry.

  I was under grave stress, and so I peeked around the door like a deranged puppet.

  The contrast between these two men was ridiculous. Barry, in worn jeans and a plain white t-shirt, his black no-slip trainers and shiny-shaven head was a man of this era and area, through and through. While Notte ...

  He looks precisely he stepped out of a painting from the Romanticism period. He always wears a blue velvet suit, and it should be ridiculous, but he makes it magnificent. Enormous brown curls hang loosely around his face. His sharp jaw, full-lips, and thick-lashed eyes enhance this utter, solid elegance so engulfing that you feel that maybe you’re the one in the wrong century.

  And there is something about him that just isn’t normal.

  It’s hard to pinpoint and impossible to define. He’s different somehow, his build, his features, but he’s beautiful and so you stare, but something is not normal, and it isn't until you realize how old he is and how the weight of his years darkens the room like blackout curtains that your scared subconscious whispers he's primal and young when monsters roamed the world and you are afraid, because you know, you know you're a mouse and he, with his poet's face and artist's fingers, might just decide to crunch your bones.

  He waited patiently, a man from other eras, from every era, for Barry to find his tongue.

  “You,” said Barry, which was odd because it was as if he knew him.

  “I fear our conversation is urgent,” said Notte, who didn’t seem to know Barry back.

  “Okay,” said Barry, which is one of those funny words that technically means, yes, I agree, but in casual conversation really denotes I heard the words you said, but I don’t accept them.

  “Is he available?” said Notte, like he wanted to go on a play-date.

  “Uh,” said Barry. “Gimme a minute. Sir. Okay?”

  “Of course,” said Notte, and evidently stepped back with such grace that it would have felt hopelessly rude not to shut the door.

  Barry closed it politely, and then turned to stare at me. “The hell, Elf?” And I knew for certain: Barry recognized him.

  “What?” I said.

  “Who was that?” called Pinstripe, looking whiter than usual. “My ... the spells on this place ... they didn’t even let me know he was coming.”

  “The wind probably let him in,” I said, and didn’t bother to elaborate because I was sick of this and didn’t care if he was scared. “Look, Barry, he ... he calls me a friend.”

  “The hell he does. How did you”—I wish I could express the way he said that word—“get to be his friend?”

  “What is going on here?” Pinstripe demanded, standing again with a thock of his cane. “Who was that? How did he come here? Did you invite him?”

  “Notte goes where’er he wishes,” said Barry weirdly, looking at me like he was trying to dissect me with the raw power of dislike. “And if the elf really is his friend—”

  “Elf is offensive, I will have you know,” I huffed.

  Barry studied me. “If he really calls you friend, then he can help us.”

  “Well. Maybe.” I shrugged, not looking at him. “I’m not family, Barry-cakes.”

  “Don’t matter. He came here for you.”

  “Yes, well, I may have forgotten about a letter he left on my dashboard,” I mumbled.

  “Somebody explain something!” camo-pants demanded.

  I threw my hands in the air. “Fine. Fine!” And I opened the door.

  Notte smiled at me as though it were wonderful to wait in a narrow elevator foyer with nothing to look at but a forgotten, dusty Christmas tree. “John.”

  “It’s Grey. I’m in trouble.” I felt six pairs of eyes burn into me like lasers. “We’re in trouble.”

  There was the slightest, slightest pause. I doubt anyone but me would have caught it, but I did.

  “I agree,” said Notte. “May I enter?”

  No, he doesn’t need permission. He was being polite, you Philistine.

  “Please.” I stepped aside.

  He introduced himself, and so help them, everybody responded. You just do that with Notte. He bows, you bow, he gives his name, and you give yours. I walked away to get some tea, so I missed some of that nonsense.

  “I will not take much of your time,” he was saying as I came back.

  “Are you ... somebody?” said the younger teen (named Mario, as it turns out). “I mean, somebody important? You got power, man?”

  “Some might say so,” Notte said with such gravity that the kid was encouraged to talk more.

  “Can you help us?”

  “I will attempt to so. You are being hunted,” Notte said to the room at large.

  It was funny to watch them. They sat up straighter and tried not to fidget. Mario became aware (possibly for the first time) that he had dirt under his fingernails.

  “We know that,” snapped Pinstripe, whose name was Peterson. I had to give him points for bravery. “Of course we know that. You come in here, calm and you think you can just ... of course we know that.”

  “They are not shadow-eaters,” said Notte (I resisted the urge to point at Pintstripe and shout, Ha!), “although they do, in fact, eat the soul’s moorings. They may not be what you feared, but I fear they are worse. They are every inch as wicked as your child’s mind could imagine, for they are the First War’s leftovers. We call them slivers.”

  Slivers. Slivers!

  I smacked myself on the forehead. Slivers! Why did I think of that! But wait, if they were slivers, then that meant gods.

  And I was nearly empty. I didn’t have the power to fight gods.

  “First War?” said Cassie, eyeing me warily.

  “The very first—at least, the first which took place outside of Heaven,” Notte said.

  These people were human. They had no chance against slivers. I might have, but not like this. Dear hell, what had I stumbled into?

  “What are slivers?” said camo-pants, otherwise known as Sam.

 

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