" I expect you to do whatever it takes to get him to talk. We've got over five hundred dead, Doyle, almost six hundred. Besides, from what Rhys says, if these things aren't stopped, if we just keep letting them feed, they'll regenerate or something. I don't want a pack of newly born ancient deities with a taste for killing running around loose in my town. It's got to be stopped now, before it's too late."
We agreed to go with her, but first we made a phone call. We called Maeve Reed and let her know that the ghosts of dead gods had been resurrected to kill her. Which meant it was somebody in the Seelie Court, and moreover they had the king's permission to do it.
Chapter 39
Lucy flashed her badge a lot to get us through the metal detectors with our guns and blades intact. The men even had to show the cards identifying them as queen's guardsmen before the nurse in charge would let us on the floor. But finally we stood at the bedside of a man. . well, of a male. He was a tiny, misshapen thing. Sage was tiny, too, but he was perfectly proportioned. He was meant to be the size he was; clearly, the man who lay in the bed with the sheets tucked up under his arms was, even at a glance, wrong.
I am Unseelie Court and I call many shapes right, pleasant, but something about this one made the hair on the back of my neck crawl. It made me want to look away, as if he was hideous, though he wasn't.
I wasn't the only one having trouble. Rhys and Frost had looked away, turned their backs. Their reaction said that they either knew him or knew what had happened. It was a turning away like a shunning. Had he broken some age-old taboo? Doyle did not look away, but then he almost never did. Galen exchanged a look with me that said he was as puzzled and disturbed as I was. Kitto stayed near my side, where he'd insisted on being, one hand in mine like a child seeking comfort.
I forced myself to keep looking, to try to figure out what it was about this small man that made me want to cringe. He was a little over two feet tall, his tiny feet making small bumps in the sheet. Something about his body seemed foreshortened, "even though everything was there. His head was a little big for the thin torso. His eyes were large and liquid, far too large for the face. It was as if the eyes were left over from some other face. His nose matched the eyes, but because the rest of the face had receded, the nose looked too large, as well. That was what it looked like, as if his eyes and nose had been left stranded while the rest of his face had grown smaller, meaner, pinched, and wasted.
Nicca moved through the rest of us and held his hand out. "Oh, Bucca, what has become of thee?"
The tiny figure on the bed remained immobile at first. Then, slowly, he raised one small hand on an arm so thin it was like thick string. He laid that tiny pale brown hand against Nicca's strong brown one.
Kitto turned a face shining with tears up to the lights. "Bucca-Dhu, Bucca-Dhu, what are you here?"
I thought at first Kitto had left out a word or two; then I realized he hadn't. He'd asked exactly what he wished to know.
"The two of you know him," Doyle said, making it more statement than question.
Nicca nodded, patting the tiny hand ever so gently. He spoke rapidly in the strangely musical tones of one of the old Celtic tongues. It was too rapid for me to follow, but it wasn't Welsh and it wasn't Scots, Gaelic, or Irish, which still left several dialects, not to mention countries to go.
Kitto joined in, speaking something close to what Nicca spoke, but not exactly — a different dialect or maybe from a different century, like the difference between Middle English and modern English.
I watched Kitto's face, the eagerness, the sorrow. I knew he was very sad to find this man here in this condition, but that was all I could follow.
Doyle spoke in modern English at last. Maybe everyone else had been following just fine, but I had not. "Nicca knew him in a form not so different from this one, but Kitto remembers him as we are now, a sidhe. Bucca was once worshipped as a god."
I looked down at the wizened shape and knew what had made my skin crawl. Those huge brown eyes, that strong, straight nose — they were very like Nicca's. I'd always assumed that Nicca's brown skin and eyes had come from the demi-fey in his heritage; but now, staring down at the tiny figure, I knew I'd been wrong.
I looked at the man with a renewed fit of horror, for now I could suddenly see it. It was as if someone had taken one of the sidhe and compressed him down into something the size of a large rabbit. I had no words for the horror that lay nearly lost in that hospital bed. And no thought to how he could have come to that form.
"How?" I asked softly, and wished instantly that I hadn't, because the small figure on the bed looked at me with those eyes, that shrunken face.
He spoke in clear though accented English. "I have brought myself to this, girl. Me and me alone."
"No," Nicca said. "That isn't true, Bucca."
The small figure shook his head, his dark hair cut short, but resting thick upon his pillow, bunching as he moved. "There are faces here I know, Nicca, beyond yours and the goblin's. There are others who were once worshipped and eventually lost their followers. They did not waste away like this. I refused to give up my power, because I thought it would diminish me." He laughed, and the sound was bitter enough to choke on. "Now look at me, Nicca, what my pride and my fear have done to me."
I was confused, to put it lightly, but, like is so often the case in fey society, the very questions I needed to ask were considered rudely direct.
The man in the bed turned his oddly heavy head to look at Kitto. "The last time we met, I thought you tiny." Those strangely compelling eyes looked up at the goblin. "You have changed, goblin."
"He is sidhe," Nicca said.
Bucca looked surprised, then laughed. "You see, I fought so hard for so many centuries to keep our blood pure, to mix with no one. I considered you an unclean thing once, Nicca."
Nicca kept patting the other man's hand. "That was long ago, Bucca."
"I would not let any of our pure Bucca-Dhu line go out among the other sidhe. Now all that is left of my line is those like you who were not pure." He turned his head and it looked like it took effort. "And all that is left of all the Bucca-Gwidden is you, goblin."
"There are others among the goblins, Bucca-Dhu. And you see the moonlight skin on these sidhe? The Bucca-Gwidden are remembered."
"They may share the skin, but not the hair or eyes. No, goblin, they are lost, and it is my doing. I would not let any of our people join with the others. We would stay the hidden people and keep to the old ways. There are no old ways left, goblin."
"He is sidhe," Doyle said, "acknowledged by the Unseelie Court as such."
Bucca smiled, but not like he was happy. "And even now all I can think is that I did not know the Unseelie sidhe had sunk so low as to accept goblins into their ranks. Even dying as I am, having seen the last of my people die before me, and I cannot see him as sidhe. I cannot." He took his hand out of Nicca's grasp and closed his eyes, but not like he'd fallen asleep, more like he was trying not to see.
Detective Lucy had been very patient through all of this. "Could someone explain to me what's going on?"
Doyle exchanged glances with Frost and Rhys, but none of them spoke. I shrugged. "Don't look at me. I'm almost as confused as you are."