When he looked up at her, the shadows hooded his eyes like the falcon's. "You seem to have failed again. What is this obsession you have with the Pendragon?"
"We each have our games. He's mine."
He showed his teeth in a parody of a smile. "I think I'd rather train spitting cobras. You should kill him."
She glanced across at Sean, noticing the red glitter reflecting in his eyes. Yes, she thought, you'd like that, wouldn't you.
"Oh, such a waste it would be," she added, aloud. "Would you kill that hawk, love, just because it's dangerous?"
Dougal sheathed his dagger and smoothed the feathers of his bird, then adjusted the jesses to clear a twist.
"Falcon, my dear. Peregrine falcon. Never call a falcon a hawk. We'll think you ignorant."
"Different interests, that's all, love. Do you know anything of genetics?"
"Enough to breed hounds. That's all I need. We don't need those human games in the Summer Country. Life is good enough as it is. Life was good enough a thousand years ago, for us."
She smiled, a thin, slow smile she had practiced in a mirror for years until it spoke volumes about quiet scorn. "Good enough? Is life good enough for Sean, denied children by the dice of chromosomes? How many of the Blood live here, live in the Summer Country and know themselves for what they are?"
He paused for a moment, still caressing his hawk. "A thousand, more or less?"
She deepened her smile a calculated hair's-breadth. "And how many of those are fertile, male and female?"
"Less than a hundred." He grimaced, and the hawk stirred under his hand, sensing tension. "You know the averages: fewer than one in ten."
"One in twelve would be more accurate. Such is the price of hybrid vigor. You think that this is good?"
"But there are the half-bloods in the human world, ten times, twenty times as many. This one Liam hunted for me, her sister, others. We've held our numbers for centuries by picking and choosing just this way."
Sean stirred, across the fire. "Liam was a breeder. Lose one, gain one, where has the average been improved? You don't even have this Maureen woman yet, do you? She may end up mating with dear brother Brian. The walls between the worlds get thicker every year. Snatching strangers from the streets gets harder. Switching babies in the crib is not as easy when the crib's in a hospital, you know."
Dougal growled, and the bird roused on his fist, fluffing her feathers and loosening her wings for flight.
Naughty, naughty, thought Fiona. Don't disturb the pretty murderess. For an instant, she saw herself in the bird, saw herself in Maureen, and hated the sight. Dougal lived for domination. He really was a shit.
But sometimes a useful shit.
"You don't yet have Maureen. I don't yet have little Brian. Our two problems seem to have come together. Perhaps we can work a temporary alliance?"
Dougal rose to his feet, cocked his head like the falcon on his fist, and took two steps that carried him into a ripple of air like a desert mirage. He didn't come out the other side. Fiona yawned. Two steps to the human world, two steps back to the Summer Country--such travel was a gift the Old Blood gave them.
She guessed he was just checking on the questions at hand. All she really knew was that her agents had failed, that Brian had escaped them and they were unable to follow. Where and how he'd left, and in what condition, remained mysteries to her.
She preferred a more distant style of management. Getting directly involved, either at the strip club or in the alleys, could be painful. She rubbed the back of her wrist in memory, the spot she'd burned to the bone by forcing Brian's trap.
Magical healing might erase the charred flesh and the scars, but it didn't cut the price he was going to pay.
* * *
Two steps carried Dougal from Tara to Naskeag Falls. He grimaced at the icy wind, the peregrine uneasy on his wrist.
That's the price of an image, he thought. Damned awkward bird to carry on a night like this. And she's more than a nuisance here, if some nosy law-man asks to see my federal permit. That little eunuch was right about the walls between the worlds. Most of them are made of paper, or of laminated plastic.
Time was such a strange thing, between the worlds. They knew of her agents' failure, Fiona and Sean and Dougal, days past in the golden afternoon of the Summer Country. And yet here was the Pendragon limping along under the streetlights, spreading the smell of fresh blood on the wind.
Dougal shook his head. He knew he could take Brian now, wounded as he was, but it would be ugly and dangerous--like following a wounded tiger into the elephant grass. He could take Brian now, but the only safe way would be to kill him. Little Fiona wouldn't like that. Oh, no, she wouldn't. Sean had made that abundantly clear. So revenge was out, for now.
He's your tiger, Fiona dear. I track my own mistakes. I don't track yours. Not even for the blood of my own clan cousin.
He watched from the shadows as Brian hauled his wounds up the steps of a rundown apartment building. Dougal sensed Maureen inside, sensed the power that had set Liam on her trail. So the wounded tiger considered this his lair? If the wind sat in that corner, Fiona's suggestion of an alliance made more sense.
Two steps took him back. Dougal drew the scene of Tara in his head--the fire and the shadows, the line of the sunbeam and Fiona's beautiful dark face glimmering in the firelight. The world bent around him and reshaped itself, through the half-world of gibbering spirits and uncanny lights and a musty, boggy smell to the clean resinous tang of birch-wood burning on an autumn afternoon. Sean had added two logs to the pile of coals while they waited.
The falcon
