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  “Not in the way you mean, I think. Believe me, Eric. What Perenor did to create me is nothing your friends would ever want any part of,” Ria said with quiet intensity. “It nearly killed my mother. It did drive her mad. And it cost the lives of several other people—he drained their essences to fuel his magic.”

  Eric sat back, a look of surprise and, oddly, pity on his face. “That’s a helluva thing to have to live with. To know you’re here only because a bunch of other people gave their lives—or had them taken away.”

  “Survivor’s guilt, they call it,” Ria said with a crooked smile. “It’s not the only way, of course, just the quickest and easiest if you have no conscience and no scruples. If you’d like, though, I’ll see what I can find about the other methods. I am uniquely placed for that kind of research.” And we’ll see whether the high and mighty Beth Kentraine is willing to let bygones be bygones if I can offer her her heart’s desire on a silver tray.

  “I’d like that,” Eric said. “I’m sorry I was so hard on you before. . . .”

  “But you didn’t trust me. And considering how we parted, you had every right not to. That wasn’t one of my best calls, Eric. If I’d been thinking clearly, I would have realized it at the time. I should have trusted what I knew of you. If you were out to get someone, you wouldn’t pretend to be their friend first.”

  She could tell by his expression that he knew she was telling him the truth. Truth-sense was one of the oldest of the Bardic gifts; she supposed she’d just been lucky he hadn’t developed it the last time they’d met.

  “Is that all we were? Friends?” Eric asked. “Funny, but I remember the relationship as being somewhat . . . warmer.”

  This is moving a little too fast for me. Ria got to her feet. “And it might be again. I won’t lie to you, Eric. As a boy you were pretty. As a man you’re devastating. But I think that right now it’s time for me to go.”

  He looked disappointed—her pride was grateful for that—but got to his feet without complaint.

  “I’ll get your cape.”

  Eric walked her to the curb and the waiting Rolls. The chauffeur opened the passenger door and stood waiting like a well-oiled automaton.

  Eric opened his mouth to speak, and Ria touched him lightly on the lips with her fingers. “I’ll be in New York for several more days. There’s no hurry. I hope we can see each other again. I’d like to get to know you.”

  And before Eric could assemble an answer to that, Ria had stepped into the car, and it was moving silently away.

  * * *

  There was someone standing outside his apartment door when Eric got back upstairs.

  “Toni?”

  The Latina woman spun around when she heard him. “Blessed saints! Greystone said you were here, but I called and no one answered, so I came up.”

  Must be pretty important. She looks kind of worried.

  “I was just walking a friend out. Do you want to come inside?”

  “No. I mean, I’d like you to come outside. We’ve . . . found something, and none of us has seen anything like it before. Jimmie said— So I thought . . . you’ve had a certain amount of experience in this sort of thing, and I was hoping I could get you to come take a look. Maybe it’s . . . what you were talking about.”

  Christ, I hope not! Eric thought fervently.

  “Sure,” Eric said. “Just let me get my coat and I’ll be right with you. Do I have time to change?”

  For the first time Toni seemed to notice what he was wearing. A slow smile crossed her face. “Sure. We wouldn’t want to scare the Ungodly with your great beauty. Heavy date tonight, eh?”

  “You might say,” Eric said with a smile.

  He dressed quickly in sweater, jeans, leather jacket and boots. He hesitated, then picked up his flute case and swung it over his shoulder. Toni hadn’t said what she wanted him to look at, but if it was capable of spooking a Guardian, he wanted to go loaded for bear.

  Toni’s Toyota was waiting on the street—a side benefit of Guardianship seemed to be never lacking for a parking space—and in a few moments they were moving. Toni Hernandez drove like a New York cabbie, zipping into spaces almost before they opened, weaving through a deadly dance with the fleet of trucks that took over the New York streets after-hours. The traffic lightened as they headed east, and Eric realized they were going toward Central Park.

  “Want to tell me what’s going on?” Eric asked, catching his breath after one particularly spectacular maneuver. She drives the way Bethie does—or did.

  “Not really. I think we’d rather see what you come up with on your own. Paul and Jimmie are already there.”

  The park was closed to street traffic at this time of night, and the gates were down across the road. Toni swerved into a parking space right outside and bounced out of the car before Eric had finished unbuckling his seat belt.

  “I’m afraid it’s a bit of a hike from here,” she said. “Good thing you changed your shoes.”

  He felt it long before he reached the spot where Jimmie and Paul were standing. Jimmie Youngblood was in her uniform, looking shuttered and forbidding, hand on her gun, though her expression lightened with something like relief when she saw him. Paul looked like an escaped university professor, Norfolk tweed jacket with leather elbow patches and all. Eric almost expected him to pull out a pipe and light it.

  The stench of magic was everywhere, a sort of palpable wrongness that made his hair stand on end. Eric’s steps slowed as he approached the Guardians. Outside of a few burned patches on the grass there wasn’t much to see with normal vision. Eric stopped where he was, closed his eyes, and looked again.

  He could see it now. A sketchy shape in the air, as though the night was a different color here. He turned slowly around in a circle, trying to pin it down further. He felt a chill that had nothing to do with winter, and a crawling feeling along his spine.

  “You already know this is magic, right?” he said at last, trying for a light tone in the midst of this incredible wrongness.

  “Ah, but what kind of magic?” Paul asked, as if this were just some sort of academic exercise.

  “I told you before how a lot of people’ve gone missing in the last couple of days, Eric,” Jimmie said. “People you wouldn’t ordinarily miss, except that so damn many of them are just dropping out of sight. Or turning up dead. What we need to know is, is this a part of that?”

  Yes, there was death here, and pain, and darkness. Eric thought again of the bonewood and goblin tower of his dream.

  “This feels like Unseleighe Sidhe,” he said reluctantly. “Mind, I’ve never had any direct contact with them, but it’s Sidhe magic, but twisted, so I suppose that’s what it feels like. . . .” He hesitated before saying more. “And there’s a lot of death here. Human death. Beyond that . . .” His voice trailed off again.

  “So what you told me about really is happening,” Jimmie said unhappily. “But why? And how, especially here? Don’t the Dark Elves have to follow the same rules as the Light?”

  “They’ve got the same limitations,” Eric agreed. The taint of inside-out magic was starting to make his head hurt. “But I kind of think the Unseleighe Sidhe would like the City, if they could stand to be here.”

  “Can you tell what kind of working this is?” Jimmie asked urgently. “Its purpose?”

  “It’s a Gateway,” Eric answered slowly. “It isn’t finished. If nobody messes with it for a few days it’ll probably fade away. But someone was here—an elf-mage or another human Bard—trying to open a Gateway between Underhill and the world.”

  He explained what he could about Nexuses—how they gave elvenkind a way to tap the power of Underhill that was life itself to them, how many of the Elven Court, especially the Lesser Sidhe, could not survive away from a Nexus, and that even the High Elves needed frequent access to one in order to replenish their magic. And that someone, apparently, was building one here.

  “Well, that’s something to go on with, anyway,” Jimmie
said when he was finished talking. She shook her head. “Now we just have to figure out what to do about it. I wonder what you bait Sidhe-traps with?”

  “Power,” Eric said bleakly. “At least in this case. Not your kind, though. That’s at least partly learned, I’m guessing, and pretty well shielded. He isn’t really interested in that. He wants the raw stuff, the innate Gift some people are born with and don’t know they have.”

  “Well, that’s a relief,” Paul said dourly, then forced himself to smile. “At least we know more than we did before. Thanks for coming out on such short notice, Eric.”

  “Why don’t you let me get rid of it for you?” Eric offered, reaching for his flute.

  “No!” Paul and Jimmie spoke at once. There was real pain on Jimmie’s face—and more. Fear. He remembered their conversation at the bakery: If anybody takes a bullet, it should be me.

  Was that what she was worrying about? Him?

  Paul held up a hand. “No, that’s okay. Now that we know what it is, we can keep an eye on it. It’s more important to stop who’s doing it rather than scare them off.”

  If you think you can scare off the Unseleighe Sidhe, you haven’t met many of them, Eric thought. “I still think I should—”

  “C’mon, Eric. I’ll drive you home,” Toni said briskly, taking charge of the situation before it could degenerate into an argument. “Paul, you want a lift?”

  “No,” Paul said. “I think I’ll stay out here a little while. You two go on ahead. Jimmie can drop me when she heads back to the station house.”

  “I still think I ought to do something about it,” Eric said. Most people wouldn’t notice anything out of the ordinary here, but anybody with any amount of Talent would have a natural aversion to the place. Or an attraction to it. . . .

  “I’m not bringing any more civilians onto the fire-line. Do what your friends told you, Eric. Stay out of this one, for your own sake,” Jimmie said urgently.

  There was a world of pain—and bitter self-recrimination—in Jimmie’s voice, and Toni was hovering over him as if she were about to pick him up and carry him. Reluctantly, Eric allowed himself to be led back to the car. He couldn’t force his help on them if they didn’t want to accept it, and Dharinel had all but ordered him to stay uninvolved. He let himself be led out of the park and deposited back on his own doorstep after another hair-raising ride in the Toyota.

  But the sense of unfinished business, layered on top of the unsettling evening with Ria, made sleep particularly hard to find that night.

  5Culinary Institute of America, Hyde Park, New York

  EIGHT:

  THE CITY OF

  DREADFUL NIGHT

  Chesley Kurland did not believe in miracles, even though he was holding one in his hands right now. Free samples. Hell, he hadn’t seen anything like that since the Sixties, and unlike most of the crowd on the streets these days, Chesley had been there for the Summer of Love and retained fond memories of it today. As dark and grey and unfriendly as the world had gotten, there were times when the memories were all that kept him going.

  Chesley made his living as a free-lance mechanic. He could repair any kind of engine, the more complicated the better. Anything mechanical just talked to him, always had, the same way some people knew what horses wanted just by looking. He was a man of no fixed address, and currently lived in the back of an old Ford van parked in the back of Ralph’s Niteowl Garage up in Inwood. Ralph paid him in cash, and Chesley liked to say that he was taking his retirement in installments, a line from an old book that he’d particularly liked.

  Earlier this evening he’d been hanging out down at the old Peacock Coffeehouse on the edge of the Village, and this dude who looked like he’d wandered out of the last Terminator movie had made the scene, offering little bundles of joy to anyone with a sense of adventure. And if there was one thing Chesley still had, it was a sense of adventure.

  The garage was fairly quiet as he walked across the floor. Despite the optimism of its name, there wasn’t often enough work to occupy a full crew 24/7, and tonight was one of those times. He saw no one as he made his way to the van and climbed in through the back.

  Most of all, he didn’t see the dealer who had been offering free samples, and who now stood concealed in the shadows with another man beside him, both of them watching Chesley as he climbed into his mobile home.

  Inside the van was everything Chesley needed in this world: a mattress to sleep on, his toolcase, his stashbox, and a towering blue glass bong. You could buy them on Main Street in the bad old days, Chesley remembered. What had happened to the world since he was a kid? It seemed as if all the joy were slowly draining away from everything, like somebody’d pulled out the plug in the Bathtub of the World. Well, in a few moments they’d see if modern chemistry was there to meet the challenge.

  Sitting cross-legged on the floor, he prepared the bong for use with the ease of long practice. He filled the upper half of the pipe with bottled water and packed the bowl with pipe tobacco and slivers shaved from a block of Turkish Blonde. Over that, he sprinkled the contents of the little packet. The powder glistened brightly, like a fresh fall of Vermont snow. “T-Stroke.” That was what the guy at the Peacock had called it. Well, the proof was in the smoking, he’d always said. When the mixture was smoldering brightly, Chesley picked up the mouthpiece and took a deep drag.

  The iron all around him made his skin crawl and put him in a foul temper, but Aerune was not to be deterred from his quest. He had chosen to follow the chief of the underlings that bore the Bardmaking elixir himself, and watched as the humans succumbed to its lure one by one. Two so far tonight had not died immediately nor manifested the insensate fury that not even Aerune could shape to his own purposes. But he had not been quick enough to seize either of them, and so they had both been spirited away by his great enemy.

  It had puzzled him for a short while why these men wasted their time giving their elixir to so many who would simply die, until he realized that he could see what they could not—the blue light, so feeble as to be nearly invisible, that crowned those who possessed gifts that could be aroused by the elixir. That faint flame burned above the head of the grey-haired mortal whom he had followed here, and Aerune was determined that the mortal men should not have this prize. To his elf-sight, the corners of the garage were not dark, and he could plainly see the two men lurking there. From Urla’s thoughts, he recognized one of them as the man in the black chariot who had first stolen Urla’s prey.

  “There is your quarry, my fine hunter,” Aerune said softly, his fingers brushing the redcap’s head. “Take him as you will.”

  Just then there was a flash of the blue light invisible to mortals from within the van, and the sharp ears of the Unseleighe Sidhe heard a stifled cry.

  Urla darted forward, its long arms swinging, lips spread in a toothy grin. It bounced toward its victim, its expression vacuous and innocent.

  “What the hell? You— Kid— Get outta heeeere—!” one of the men shouted. Aerune turned away. There was a sound of gunfire. The man’s words faded into a scream as Urla seized him.

  Aerune hesitated at the door of the van. A modern car would not have given him nearly as much trouble, but the old van’s panels were of heavy sheet steel, perilous to touch. He would have no more than a moment’s grace, he knew, before the surviving mortal minion was upon him.

  Aerune grasped the door handle and wrenched it from its hinges with inhuman strength. His gauntlets smoked as they touched Cold Iron, but they were dwarf-forged, and his skin did not burn. Within the fetid kennel lay the prize he sought—a skinny, unlovely mortal man, his face distorted with the ravages of age. The dark lord seized him, lips drawn back in a snarl of distaste, and flung the human over his shoulder. His elvensteed was waiting in the street outside. With one leap, Aerune gained the saddle and galloped away, toward the place he had chosen for his Nexus.

  Michael knew he was in trouble. He and Keith had followed Geezerboy back to this chop shop fr
om the coffeehouse where Keith had been doing his candyman imitation. The two guys who were there—waiting for tonight’s shipment of Gone In Sixty Seconds, Michael had no doubt—had been easily persuaded to go in the closet and stay there, and the decks were clear for a sweet little snatch-and-grab. They’d been about to make their move when everything went wonky. Some kid wandered in from somewhere and made a beeline toward Keith.

  Only it wasn’t a kid. It was . . . something else. It’d bitten Keith’s throat open with one chomp. It bathed in his blood, and it laughed, a high terrible sound like broken glass on a blackboard. Michael had emptied half his Glock into it with no effect, though he knew the Teflon-coated bullets hit it.

  Then he saw the other guy.

  Tall. Dark like Darth Vader was dark. Menace radiating off him like chill off a chunk of dry ice. And Michael had made a command decision, right then and there. He’d run for his life. Out the side door, up the hill onto Riverside, yelping at every shadow.

  But he wasn’t followed.

  His hands shook as he got his Star-Tac open and dialled the private number they’d been given for emergencies.

  “Boss? Boss! We’ve got a situation here—”

  It was not much of a greenwood, but it was all these mortal drones deserved. Aerune reined in and dropped his burden ungently to the ground before vaulting down himself. A moment later he crouched on the turf beside the mortal.

  The human creature twitched and muttered, still caught in a web of the elixir’s spinning. Aerune could see the nimbus of power grow brighter around him as the tiny guttering spark of the human’s innate magic grew and flowered under the effect of the draught he had imbibed.