resigned.
“You should know up front that you’re going to die,” Wyatt said to his reflection. “The only thing you get to decide is if you die fast, or piece by piece until you’re begging me to end it.”
I shuddered.
“Who are you working for?”
The doppelgänger looked up. A crystal shard hung around his neck, swirling a lazy purple, tied with some sort of thin brown leather. “You know who,” he replied, and I understood why he had never spoken. His voice was like nails on a chalkboard, high and screechy and teeth-chattering.
“Say it anyway,” I said.
He didn’t look at me. Wyatt was questioning him, so his attention remained there. “A human male. His given name is Thackery.”
“Why?” Wyatt asked.
A blink. “Because it is the name given to him.”
“Be literal with your questions,” Phin said. “He’ll take them that way.” Wyatt nodded. “Why did you accept this job?”
“It was required.”
“By what requirement?”
“No.”
Wyatt flicked on the barbecue lighter and held the paring knife blade in the orange flame. Silent seconds passed. “By what requirement?” he asked again, turning the blade handle around. The trickster didn’t reply. Wyatt buried the blade in the other man’s thigh.
The gasping wail shattered a glass somewhere in the kitchen. Wyatt removed the blade, coated with very little blood. The odor of singed flesh tickled my nostrils.
“By what requirement?”
Four more times, Wyatt repeated the question and the action, but we didn’t get an answer. Finally, sick of the hair-raising squeals and stink of burned meat, I said, “Why do you wear that crystal?”
“Focus,” the trickster said, apparently able to answer that particular query. “Longevity. Location.”
“Explain those words to me.”
“No.”
Contrary little prick.
“I have a theory,” Phin said. “According to legend, pùcas are able to maintain alternate forms for only brief periods of time. It’s possible the crystal allows him to maintain focus on this form for longer periods.”
I chewed on that. “So if we take the crystal off?”
“You remove his face.”
“Fan-fucking-tastic.” I stepped around Wyatt’s chair, grabbed the crystal, and yanked. A jolt of energy ran up my hand the instant the leather cord broke. Like candle wax, the fake face swam and ran, melting away. The body shape changed, thinning out and shortening.
Phin was behind the chair before I could register the slipping bonds, and he worked to secure them tightly as our prisoner’s form stopped shifting. He had shrunk to two-thirds his previous size, closer to child proportions than adult. The face left behind was half-formed and inhuman—lashless eyes the yellow green of baby poop, a small hump and two small holes instead of a nose, and a lipless, tiny mouth. His ears were holes on the sides of his head, waxy-white skin completely hairless. He looked like a creature that had dwelled in a dark cave too long.
“Hello, gorgeous,” I said. The crystal was warm in my palm. “How the hell did this clown track us down in the middle of the woods?”
“Magic, perhaps,” Phin said.
Wyatt frowned. “Thackery’s human, and, as far as we know, he’s not Gifted. How the hell did he manage to charm that crystal? It takes a damned strong magic user to manage a spell, and the only people who use crystals —” He stopped, the sentence dying on his lips. A queer look crossed his face, not quite a flinch, but nothing remotely pleasant.
“What?” I asked. “Crystals what?”
“The Fey,” Phin said. “You were going to say the Fey, weren’t you?”
Wyatt nodded.
“That’s not possible,” I said, my insides quivering. “The Fey Council is on our side. They couldn’t be working with Thackery.”
“Like all large organizations, the Fey are as likely to have dissenters as any other race,” Phin said. “It’s possible, Evangeline, that whoever is assisting Thackery is doing so without the approval or knowledge of the Council.”
Phin knew better than any of us. Some of his own people, other Therians, were working with the dark races to raise an army against the Triads in an effort to overthrow humanity’s control of the city. We hadn’t squashed their efforts completely, only maimed them momentarily. It shouldn’t have been so hard to swallow the idea of Fey following a similar path of vigilantism. But it was.
“Jaron knew,” Wyatt said. “She knew someone was being betrayed. If not someone in the Council, then someone close to them. Why else come to us first, instead of directly to Amalie?”
Politics made my head hurt. Beyond Amalie, I didn’t know the names or faces, or specific races, of the other members of the Council. She was our only direct link to them, so everything we knew was filtered through her. “So our theory,” I said, “is Thackery had the crystal cast for him by a Fey powerful enough to manage the spell, then gave it over to our trickster friend so he could track me down and take my blood?”
“Basically.”
Okay, fine, I could accept that. It made all kinds of sense, in a bad-vibe, Fey-betrayal-in-aisle-three kind of way. “So why steal blood samples?” I asked the trickster. “Why didn’t he just have you kidnap me, or kill me outright?”
“Did not need to know,” he replied, voice even more inhuman with his smaller mouth.
“And he probably wouldn’t have bothered asking,” Phin said. “Whatever compelled him to take this job also compelled him to do as he’s told without question. The only person who knows the whys of this conversation is Thackery.”
“Not all the whys,” I said. Phin’s explanation made sense up to a point. If the only thing Thackery wanted was my blood, why take the time to feel me up? The improvisation of the plan demanded answers. “Phin, do pùcas have anatomy similar to humans?”
“Basic humanoid shape, yes, as well as brain stem functions and—Oh.” He got it a few seconds too late. “No, they do not reproduce sexually or maintain organs for a similar function.”
So it hadn’t been horniness. That didn’t leave a lot of other options. I snatched the serrated bread knife from Wyatt’s hand with my left and crouched in front of the trickster. With the crystal gone, that same sour smell I’d detected earlier was wafting off him. “I’m guessing you were warned about my healing ability,” I said, running the tip of the knife across his abdomen, scoring the shirt. “Which means you had to be very careful about dosing me. Too much and I’d probably go into cardiac arrest or something, too little and I’d do what I did, which is snap out of it and get away. Stop me if I’m wrong.”
He said nothing, horrid eyes fixed on me. I skimmed the same trail a second time, hard enough to slice the shirt and reveal pasty, translucent skin. I flicked my wrist, and dark blood welled up from an inch-long cut. “So consider your answer to this question carefully, because if I don’t like it, I’m going to see if you have kidneys in the same place as humans. Understand?”
A nod.
“Why did you try to rape me?” I felt, rather than saw, Wyatt start at the blunt question. He still sat behind me. Phin stood behind the trickster. All attention was on the interviewee.
“For pleasure.”
I dragged the blade across pale skin, deep enough to create a steady flow of blood and a high-pitched shriek. More glass shattered. My legs started to tremble, but I kept the knife steady. “What kind of pleasure can a dickless Dreg like you get?”
