Mad Maudlin Read online

"Thanks, George," he said, with the ghost of a grin. "I think I can find my way from here."

  "You have a good evening, Mr. Banyon. Be sure to call when you're ready to come down."

  "I'll remind him," Ria said. The guard touched his cap, and walked off.

  Eric looked at her questioningly.

  "New security measures," Ria said.

  "You should just buy the building," Eric said. "Then you wouldn't be bothered."

  "As a matter of fact, I do own the building; real estate is always a good investment. These are my security measures," Ria said with a little smile. "If you don't work here—and can't show an ID even if you do work here—you don't get above the lobby without an escort, no matter what time of day it is."

  "Welcome to New York," Eric said with a sigh. He looked around the office as if he'd forgotten why he'd come.

  There were deep shadows under his eyes, and an unfamiliar set to his mouth. No, Ria decided with an odd pang of recognition. A familiar one, but one she hadn't seen in years: it was that look of sullen anger the old Eric had worn, that look of always being on the verge of lashing out at something.

  Eric walked over to the window and stood looking out, staring down into the city streets below. Chains of head- and taillights moved through the streets below like rivers of sluggish jewels.

  "Tea? Coffee? Well, actually, I can't offer you either one now that Anita's gone home, but I'm sure there's something around here. But you didn't come over for a drink," Ria said.

  Eric leaned against the glass, his back to her. She watched him force himself to relax, saw the effort it took.

  "You know I've been seeing Dr. Dunaway for almost a year now, getting some stuff straightened out. It's been pretty useful. You know, you might think about trying it," he said, as if the thought had just occurred to him.

  Ria laughed. She couldn't help it. "Eric, my dear, any daughter of Perenor's got over the need to talk to strangers a long time ago. And I'm sure that inviting me to seek psychiatric help is not what this is about."

  "No." She watched as he took a deep breath, forcing himself to come to the point. "I came because I need help . . . to keep from killing somebody."

  His voice was as tight as Hosea's banjo strings, and the over- and under-tones so complicated that even she couldn't make head or tail of them, other than for the fury in it. Anger was too tame a word, and fury, too, wasn't the right word for what she heard in him tonight. Call it rage. Carefully controlled rage, that was on the edge of slipping that careful control.

  "Well," Ria walked over to her desk and sat on the edge, watching his back intently, "most people would say the opposite sort of help was more in my line."

  "I don't . . . I can't keep from hating them. I'm trying, but . . . I can't," Eric said raggedly.

  Ria walked over to him and put an arm around him, feeling the tension of the muscles beneath the jacket, and led him firmly over to the couch, forcing him to sit down. His face looked white and strained. "Make sense," she commanded. "Now. Or I am going to phone your very competent headshrinker and sit on you myself until she gets here." She sat down beside him and took both his hands. They were colder than the November weather outside could account for.

  "I've got a little brother." Eric's voice was forlorn.

  She'd been prepared to hear horrors—tales of death, dismemberment, terminal illness, coming apocalypse. Eric's simple statement caught Ria completely off-balance. She whooped with startled laughter.

  "It isn't funny!" Eric snarled, but then the sense of his own words seemed to penetrate, and his mouth quirked up in a rueful grin, setting Ria off again.

  She did her best to stop laughing, but it was hard.

  "Yes," she said, as gravely as she could manage, "I can certainly see that a baby brother is a great catastrophe." She took a deep breath, sobering further. "Are you sure? How do you know?"

  "I'm sure. I went to see my parents today."

  That drove the last of the laughter from Ria's emotions. Of all of Eric's close circle of friends, she was the one who knew the most about his childhood, and that only because she'd stolen the memories from his mind years before while she'd had him trapped and besotted in one of Perenor's pocket domains.

  "Why?" she asked bluntly.

  "I realized they still had too much power in my life. I'd never let go of the past, not really, just walled it up and pretended it wasn't there. I thought confronting them might help. It was probably a stupid idea."

  "Reckless at least," Ria said calmly. "Did they recognize you?"

  "They thought I was the private detective they'd hired to find their son. Their other son. Their seventeen-year-old piano prodigy son Magnus, who ran away from home last month."

  Ria could do the math as well as Eric could. Her eyelids flickered. Aloud she said only, "They took their sweet time hiring a specialist. Who?"

  "Someone named Dorland." Eric's voice was flat, colorless beneath his iron control.

  "I'll get on it, find out what I can about him. And do they remember you were there?"

  "No," Eric said, his voice even. "I took care of it."

  "That's my Bard," Ria said, kissing him gently on the forehead. "Now, where's Magnus?"

  "I looked in Boston," Eric answered. "He wasn't there. Ria, how could they—"

  "Because they're morons," Ria said matter-of-factly, cutting through Eric's rekindling anger with simple pragmatism. "Blind, stupid, selfish, ignorant morons, who have never taken a moment in their entire lives to think about anything but themselves and what they want. They aren't worth another minute of your time, now or ever. Eric, my—" she stopped herself before she could say the forbidden word, "—my friend, if they considered you disposable, how much more right have you got to think the same of them? Dispose of them; wad them up and throw them away. They're trash; they aren't worth a moment of heartache. But Magnus is. A runaway teenager—especially one as stubborn as a brother of yours is likely to be—oh yes, and don't forget one who's also likely to have the Bardic Gift, or at least leanings in that direction, since it runs in bloodlines—could be getting into all kinds of trouble out there, wherever he is. We should find him. Now."

  Eric took a deep breath, accepting the truth of her words. "Okay. We find him."

  "What have you tried so far?" Ria asked.

  "A Finding spell, up in Boston." Eric dug around in his pockets. "Here's a picture of him. And here's a lock of his hair. He wasn't there, either dead or alive. But I was only able to search the immediate area."

  Ria took the small card Eric handed her and studied the picture, then examined the lock of hair. "Cute kid. Plenty to go on here. Let me get what I need, and we'll try another kind of spell."

  Ria walked out of the office, leaving Eric sitting on the couch, and went looking for what she needed. She came back a few minutes later with a shallow metal dish full of water, which she placed carefully on the large round glass-topped table in front of the couch.

  "I am not getting water spots all over my leather-topped desk," she said firmly, noting Eric's quizzical glance.

  "What are you doing?" Eric asked curiously. Bardic magic was one thing, and Elven magic tended to be constructs of pure energy, but Ria, being half-human, tended to rely sometimes on things that owed nothing to the Elven magic that Eric was familiar with. In fact, Ria had told him once that she was a sorceress, not any kind of a Sidhe Magus at all. . . .

  "Scrying. Your brother's image should appear in this bowl of water, no matter where on Earth he is—and if he's been taken Underhill, we should at least get a hint of that from whatever images appear. The hard part will be seeing enough of the background to be able to pinpoint his location, but once I've got him, I should be able to move the image and look around a little. . . ."

  She selected a single strand of hair out of the coil and floated it on top of the water, then breathed across the surface.

  The water in the bowl went milky, then faded until it was as if they were staring down into a pool of mercury,
though, oddly, the silvery surface reflected neither of their faces.

  "What's it doing?" Eric whispered, unconsciously keeping his voice low.

  "It's working," Ria said shortly. "Quiet."

  Shapes appeared in the mirrored surface, familiar yet distorted, breaking apart and reforming almost too fast to be recognized. Eric caught the Port Authority Bus Terminal, Grand Central Station, the New York Public Library, the lobby of the Empire State Building. . . .

  "New York," he said.

  "He's here—and alive," Ria said. "Where is he? Show me!" she demanded of the magic.

  The mercury darkened now to true black, with moving flecks of light that Eric guessed must be the lights of passing cars, or maybe streetlights. But it still kept up its frantic dance of images, moving from scene to scene too fast for either of the watchers to quite identify any of them.

  Finally Ria gave up, passing her hand across the surface of the bowl. The liquid within faded to water once more.

  "He's in Manhattan," Ria said.

  "He's alive," Eric said, with relief. This morning, he hadn't known he had a brother. Tonight, he was weak with thankfulness that his brother was still alive. And he hadn't even had a chance to meet the boy yet!

  Ria frowned down at the scrying bowl as though it were a personal enemy. "It should have worked better than that," she said.

  "Bardic blood?" Eric suggested. It was the only thing he could think of.

  "Shall we test the theory?" Ria said. "Give me a strand of your hair."

  Eric wore his hair short these days, but he managed to yank a few strands loose. Ria coiled up the strand of Magnus' hair and returned it to Eric, then floated the short strands of Eric's hair on the surface of the bowl and repeated the spell. The water quickly darkened to silver and showed them Ria's office, with Eric sitting on the couch beside Ria.

  "Not that, then," Eric said, puzzled.

  "But something's interfering with the magic," Ria said. "Now what?"

  "I guess I go after him the good old-fashioned way," Eric said. "He's a runaway, and I know he's in Manhattan. There aren't that many places he can be."

  Ria made a face eloquent in its disbelief. "Why don't you ask Hosea about that sometime?" was all she said. "Eric, do you want some help? There are people who specialize in this sort of thing, you know. I can hire the best. They'll have contacts, experience. . . ."

  Eric hesitated. Was he being stupid, wanting to do this by himself? But all his instincts said no.

  "Just give me a few days. I'm not going to turn this into any kind of crusade. If I do need help, I'll ask for it. I'm not going to play games, Ria. Not with my . . . brother's . . . life. But . . . I feel almost like I already know him. And I do know his parents. He'll be expecting detectives. I did. And if he does have a trace of Bardic Gift—which might still be why your scrying spell didn't work—he'll recognize them through any disguise. If he gets frightened and runs again, to somewhere else, he could end up in even worse trouble than he's in now. I don't want to scare him, I just want to find him. But . . . what do I do then?" Eric smiled at her crookedly, and Ria reached out to ruffle his hair gently.

  "Find him first. Keep him safe when you do find him. Sort out everything else after you've done those two things."

  "I . . . thanks. You're a good friend."

  "Well, don't let anyone hear you say that. You'll ruin my corporate shark image," Ria said lightly.

  Eric got to his feet. "I guess I'd better be going. You're probably going to want to stay here and work all night."

  "Somebody's got to," Ria said. She went over to the phone and punched a two-digit number. "George? Mr. Banyon's ready to come down now."

  She set down the phone, and turned to give him a good once-over with her eyes. Maybe with more than her eyes. "Are you going to be all right tonight? Really all right?"

  Eric smiled tiredly, not pretending to misunderstand what she meant. "Greystone's just waiting for me to get back. We're going to order in Thai and have a Bogart film festival. And I'll call Dr. Dunaway in the morning."

  "That's my nice well-grounded Bard." She hesitated again. "Eric . . . just remember . . . if you should happen to see your parents again . . . or think about them . . . that you are what you are. So don't make any decisions that you'll regret, before you've made up your mind what you really want to do."

  Because the anger of a Bard can kill. Eric heard the words that Ria left unsaid. "I'll be good, Ria," he promised, kissing her lightly on the cheek.

  There was a quiet tap on the door, and Eric opened it.

  * * *

  Walking out with George across the penthouse floor of the LlewellCo building—only one bank of elevators ran after five, and it was a long walk to get to them—Eric wondered whether all this could possibly be what Ria really wanted out of life.

  And more to the point, could she afford to be such a public figure when she was going to live such an embarrassingly long time? True, she was only half-Elven, and would hardly have the millennium-and-more long lifespan of a full-blooded Sidhe, but even a couple of centuries would be awfully hard to explain. And as Chairman and CEO of LlewellCo, especially after the whole Threshold thing, she was incredibly well-known: on the cover of Time, Newsweek, and Fortune in the last year and a half just for starters. It would be hard for someone like that to just disappear from the public eye, even if she were willing to give up LlewellCo.

  Money that does nothing but make more money. Call me an old hippie, but it just all seems . . . pointless, somehow, Eric thought, riding down in the high-speed elevator. Nice, but pointless.

  "Have a good evening, Mr. Banyon," George said, as they reached the front door. Eric stepped out onto the street.

  "You do the same, George," he said. The night air was raw and cold—unseasonably so—and he turned up the collar of his jacket.

  He wondered where Magnus was, and what he was doing.

  Chapter Five:

  Chase Around The Windmill

  Hosea had stopped by Eric's apartment when he'd gotten home from work at five, but Eric still wasn't back from his trip to Boston—or if he was, he wasn't home. Hosea sighed. He hoped it had gone well—or at least not too badly. Being on the outs with your kinfolk was a sorrowful thing, no matter what sort of people they were.

  Not finding Eric in, he went on down to his own place.

  He'd taken over Jimmie Youngblood's apartment after her death, inheriting not only her position as Guardian and her apartment in Guardian House, but everything she owned, for Jimmie'd had no living relatives by the time she died to pass her possessions to. Over the next several months, he'd helped Toni with the painful task of going through Jimmie's things, destroying personal papers, giving mementos to those who would value them, donating her clothing to charity. When they were done, the apartment was considerably emptier, but it still didn't feel like his.

  Repainting helped. Jimmie'd favored cool blues and greens, colors that weren't to Hosea's taste. He'd felt a little guilty, repainting the place in warm creams and yellows—it had been Eric, surprisingly, who'd told him it was for the best.

  "It's not a shrine. She's gone. It's your apartment now."

  With the apartment repainted in more congenial colors, it had been easier to see what else should go. The large framed photos of wilderness scenes that Jimmie had decorated the living room with: beautiful, but not his style. He'd taken them along to one of the Basement Parties and given them away, along with a couple of the smaller pieces of furniture that just didn't seem to suit now.

  And slowly, he'd begun to accumulate his own things to fill in the gaps. The long bookshelves that filled the front hall—emptied now of Jimmie's books on police procedure, forensic science, and criminal law—were beginning to fill with his own books, plus those of hers, mostly fiction and poetry, that he'd kept. The day after the Basement Party where he'd given away all the photographs, Tatiana had showed up at his door with a pair of Thomas Canty prints that she said needed a new home. He'd hun
g them over the couch, and they looked mighty fine there. Funny, that. When he'd come to New York, he hadn't known who Thomas Canty was, and though he'd admired the covers the man had done for science fiction and fantasy books, most of the books themselves hadn't been to his taste, so he'd never bothered with finding out who the artist was. Now, divorced from those books, he could admire the covers as artworks in their own right.

  There had been other gifts along the way. Eric had given him a story-quilt—he used it to cover the couch, which had looked proper in a blue room but not in a yellow one—and Ria had presented him with a fine hard-rock maple rocking chair, just right for a man his size.

  "It stands to reason that a man with a banjo needs a rocking chair," she'd said with a smile on the day she'd brought it. "Please accept it as a housewarming gift. In New York, everyone's your neighbor."

  And he did have to admit that a rocking chair made any place seem a bit more like home.

  * * *

  After he'd showered and changed, Hosea thought about calling Eric again, and decided against it. Eric would call if he needed him, and more than likely he'd just want to be left alone. And to be perfectly fair about things, Hosea had his own plans for the evening.

  For the past several months, Hosea had been seeing Caity Tambling, a children's book illustrator who lived on the floor below. He'd met her at one of the informal Basement Parties the inhabitants of the House threw every few weeks, and they'd taken to one another pretty quickly. Caity was a shy, soft-spoken young woman from the mountains of West Virginia, born and raised not too far from where Hosea had grown up, in fact. She had a mop of white-blonde hair that was constantly falling in her eyes, and was plump in a way that Hosea liked to see in a lady, though Caity had been doubtful, at first, in accepting his compliments.

  He checked his watch, frowning at the time. She'd said she'd meet him here, but it was already a quarter of six, and she'd been going to meet him at five-thirty. She'd probably sat down at her drawing board to do just one little thing and fallen in. Hosea grinned to himself. He'd better go down to her place and roust her out, or they'd never have time for dinner before the movie.