Naked City: Tales of Urban Fantasy

underlay the hillside.

The stairs ended in a small room lit only by a small beeswax candle. The floor beneath his feet was polished and well laid, a light-colored wood ringed by a pattern of darker. It seemed an expensive luxury to find in a basement room of a nondescript little house.

While he’d been looking at the floor, his father had continued on through a doorway, and he hurried to follow. There was something odd about this place that made his stomach clench and the hair on the back of his neck stand up. He didn’t want to be left alone here.

He darted through the doorway and almost bumped into his father, who had stopped at a small entryway that dropped down a single stair and then opened up to a cavernous room. It too had only a single candle lighting it. Thomas couldn’t make out the face of the man ensconced in some sort of big chair.

His father bent over with a pained grunt and set three twenty-dollar gold pieces on the floor.

“Here is the son,” he said.

He put the flat of his hand on Thomas’s back and thrust him toward the other man.

Not expecting the push, Thomas stumbled down the step then turned to look at his father—only to see his sandaled feet disappear up the stairway.

“The son,” said the man he’d been left with. His accent was Eastern European—Slavic, Thomas thought. The Slavs were the among the latest immigrant wave that had washed over the mining town since Thomas Edison’s electricity had made copper king. “Pretty boy. Come here.”

Butte, Montana, present day

Though the sounds of the Christmas carols were pleasant enough, Thomas felt restless, impatient—the same feeling that had sent him driving here from San Francisco when he’d intended only an evening’s drive.

Something was calling him here, and it certainly wasn’t nostalgia. There wasn’t much left of the town of his childhood. The last of the old whorehouses in the red-light district was falling down, and only a few buildings were left of the Chinatown where he’d grown up and died and been reborn a monster. No, he wasn’t nostalgic for Butte.

This wasn’t his home. He had a condo in San Francisco and another in Boston. None of his family remained here. There was nothing here for him—so why had it seemed so imperative to come?

“Hello, Tom.”

He froze. It had been almost a century since he’d been in Butte. There weren’t that many people who lived eighty years and still sounded so hail and hearty.

Fae.

That’s why he’d had to come. He’d been called here by magic. If he hadn’t been walking in the middle of a crowd, he would have snarled.

He didn’t see anyone who looked familiar; the fae were like that. But he did find someone who was looking at him.

Leaning up against an empty storefront where a tobacco shop had once been was a balding man with an oddly fragile air about him. He was several inches shorter than Thomas—who wasn’t exactly tall himself. The man’s forehead was too large for the rest of him in the manner of some people who were born simple. Young blue eyes smiled at Thomas out of an old face. He wore new winter boots, red mittens and scarf, and a thick down jacket.

A couple, passing by, noticed Thomas’s interest and stopped.

“Nick?” The woman half ducked her head toward the little man. “Are you warm enough? There are cookies and hot chocolate in the old Miner’s Bank building at the end of the block.”

The male half of the couple glared suspiciously at Thomas.

“I have good new gloves,” said Nick in the voice of a man but with a child’s intonations. “I’m warm. I had cookies. I think I’m going to talk with my friend, Tom.” He darted across the sidewalk and took Thomas’s hand.

Thomas managed not to hiss or jerk his hand free. Nick, was it? His scent—at this close range—told Thomas that Nick was a hobgoblin.

“Do you live here? Or are you just visiting?” asked the man suspiciously.

“I’m visiting,” said Thomas. He could have lied. Butte was smaller than it used to be, but, according to the lady who checked him into his hotel, it still had thirty thousand people living here.

His answer didn’t please the man. “Nick’s one of ours,” he said, rocking forward on the balls of his feet like a man who’d been in a few real fights. “We watch out for him.”

Ah, Tom thought. Butte’s ties to Ireland had always been strong. In his day, the Irish here had set out cream in saucers outside their back doors to appease the fairies. Apparently the traditions of taking care of the Little People, changelings, and those who might be changelings were adhered to still—even if, as they clearly believed, the one they watched over was entirely human, just simpleminded.

“This is Ron,” Nick the Hobgoblin said to Thomas. “He gives me rides in his yellow truck. I like yellow.”

Ron who drove a yellow truck narrowed his eyes at Thomas, clearly telling him to go away, something Thomas was happy to comply with. He started to free himself.

“Tom likes tea,” Nick informed them, his eyes as innocent as he was not. Not if he were a hobgoblin. “Tom likes the nighttime.” He paused and with a sly smile added, “Tom likes Maggie.”

Thomas’s hand clenched on Nick’s at hearing her name. He gave the hobgoblin a sharp look. How did the little man know about Margaret? Was Margaret the reason he’d been called here?

“Does he?” said the woman, with a sharp glance at Thomas. “Nick, why don’t you come with us to see the singer at the old YMCA?”

Margaret.

Thomas decided that he would see what the hobgoblin wanted—and to that end, he’d have to allay the suspicions of Nick’s protectors. He inclined his head respectfully toward Ron.

“Nick and I know one another,” he said. “I went to school here.” A long, long time ago.

“Oh,” said the woman, relaxing. “Not a tourist then.”

The man looked down at his watch. “If you want to catch your brother’s performance, we’d better go.”

As soon as those two were gone, Thomas pulled his hand away from the hobgoblin’s. Mindful of the watchful glances of the people around him—the couple weren’t the only ones watching out for Nick—he was gentle about it.

“Tell me, hobgoblin,” he said with soft menace. “What do you know about Margaret Flanagan?”

Butte, Montana, 1900

He escorted the men through the tunnels, keeping to the front of the group so that the lanterns they carried wouldn’t damage his night vision. And also because it scared them that he didn’t need a lantern to find his way.

The current location of his father’s opium den was a few hundred feet from where they’d started, though he’d led them through alternate routes that had added a half mile and more to the trip. It was imperative that they— mostly experienced miners, though one was a merchant’s son—not be able to find their way here without a guide. First, payment was made before they entered the mines, and anyone who made it to the den was assumed to have paid their fee. Second, it made it difficult for the police to find. To ensure the location remained a secret, the den was moved every couple of weeks.

Thomas took a final turn and opened the makeshift door in invitation. The light from a dozen lanterns inside illuminated the smoky haze within. It looked like the hell the nuns had promised him.

“Tap her light, Tommy,” said one of the men he’d escorted, giving him the traditional farewell wishes of a miner: When forcing a stick of explosive into a drilled hole in the granite, a miner wanted to be very careful tapping it in with his hammer.

It caught Thomas by surprise, and he took a better look at the man’s face. Juhani. He’d been a Finnish boy whose father worked with the timber crews when they’d gone to school together once upon a time—twenty years and more ago. Now they were both damned—Thomas as his father’s monster, Juhani Koskinen as an opium addict.

For a moment they stared at each other, then Juhani stepped through the door into the den, followed by the rest of the men.

“Don’t know why you talk to him, Johnny, my boyo,” said one of them in a thick Irish lilt as Thomas closed