“Gaby—what the hell’s going on?”
She brushed her cheek along his. “Do you remember my uncle Pete?”
“Another one of your dizzying non sequiturs. Pedro, right? The cop? Yeah. I met him when he came up from Mazatlán to visit you. He told funny stories about his job.”
“My favorite uncle. When he was young, he went to the university. He was going to be a poet. I read some of his poems. They were wonderful.”
Harris put his arms around her and pulled her close—gently, afraid that she might evaporate. No, she was real; he could feel the warmth of her through the nightshirt. He felt himself grow hard beneath his boxer shorts. He didn’t adjust himself to conceal it from her. “Baby, I don’t understand.”
“They talked him out of it. His brothers and his father. They said it wasn’t manly. Poetry, I mean. So he became a cop like the rest of them. Sits on his lawn furniture and drinks beer and watches the clouds go by, and wishes he were flying up there with them. When I met you, you were so much like him, always dreaming. You could always make me laugh.”
“Leave our sex life out of it, okay?”
She chuckled and kissed him again. “The problem was, there was never a direction I could point at and say, ‘That’s the way Harris is going. That’s who he is.’ You always just did whatever I wanted. Whatever anybody wanted. I waited and waited for you to become you, and you never did. After a while you were part me, part Uncle Pete. There was no such person as Harris.”
“So you dumped me because I was putty in your hands.”
“Uh-huh. I don’t want putty, Harris. I push all the time. How am I supposed to respect someone who doesn’t push back? And now you do.” She ran her hand through the hair on his chest.
“Gaby, what would you have done if I had taken you up on your deal just now?”
“I would have watched you go home and then cried a lot. Because I decided I wasn’t going back. I’m staying here, too.”
“You lied to me.”
She smiled down at him. “Damned right I did. I reserve the right to do that. Now, why don’t you shut up for a minute?” She tugged down the waistband of his shorts.
He arched to make that easier, pulled the shorts the rest of the way down, kicked them free. He ran his hand up the smooth curve of her leg, carrying the hem of her nightshirt up with it. She wore nothing beneath it. She helped him pull the garment off and discarded it to the side.
Skin to skin, for the first time in forever. She leaned down to brush her lips across his; he stroked her from the nape of her neck to the swell of her behind, luxuriating in the feel of her. She reached down to take a hold of him and moved down to guide him into her.
“Gaby, I don’t want to spoil this—”
“So don’t talk, dummy.”
“— but we’re lying in an open compartment.”
“Oh, yeah.” She smiled at him. “Harris, this is the fair world. If anybody’s listening, they can stuff cotton in their ears, or cheer, or sing along if they want. I can take it if you can.” She began to move atop him.
A few steps away, Alastair listened until he identified the noises faintly audible over the engine growl. He rolled over, pulling the pillow around his head. “Well, it’s about time,” he grumbled.
Gaby continued to work on her Gift. She was able to spend more time each day in Gabrielle’s room without developing headaches. But each day she found she needed to be closer to the talk-box for her Gift to work. Finally, she found she had to keep her hands on it.
Yet even as the range of her Gift dwindled, she learned how to do something Gabrielle had long known—to force open the “eyes” of talk-boxes at specific addresses rather than just wait for voices to alert her to their presence. She could call direct to Doc’s talk-box whether or not he was there, or to any other talk-box she’d already visited; she could explore, sensing unknown talk-boxes as eyes, and force them open. Her growing versatility pleased her.
That, and Harris. Things were finally working out. The recent change between them kept her happily distracted.
Doc put her in charge of the private grid of talk-box cameras set up throughout his headquarters—his version of a closed-circuit security camera network. With the turn of a tuning dial, she could change her talk-box viewpoint to throughout Doc’s floors, including the basement levels, the exterior of the Monarch Building, even the distant Gwaeddan Air Field hangar.
And when she was within the Sidhe Foundation grid, working from Gabrielle’s little room, she was able to flit from view to view with the speed of thought.
She also continued her research into Duncan Blackletter . . . and, for that matter, into Dr. Desmond MaqqRee, and the feud that had erupted between the two men more than thirty years before.
Doc wouldn’t help; as always, he just shook his head and told her it wasn’t relevant. “I’ve made him my responsibility. That’s all you need worry about. Stop prying.”
But she didn’t. She pored through old newspapers from Novimagos and other nations. She consulted birth records, sometimes calling civic halls as far away as Cretanis. She sought homelords who had owned properties rented by either man.
She could find no birth record for Duncan Blackletter. That was hardly surprising; it was commonly believed that his name was a false one. But neither could she find a birth record for Doc. Though the fair world was not as crazy for paperwork as the grim world, she was already learning that it was unusual for someone to be given as important a task as building bridges for the throne of Cretanis without having a lengthy paper trail pointing to his family and education. She couldn’t even find out where Dr. Desmond MaqqRee had received his degree.
Doc arranged for the painting of conjurer’s circles throughout the four stories that served him as headquarters. By the time he was done, every room was decorated with four or five of the things, none quite touching another, arranged to occupy the maximum possible floor space. Harris spent days carefully stepping between freshly painted lines and symbols, then helped lay concealing rugs over the circles, brown wrapping paper over the ones in the hangar.
“Your cleanup bill is going to be amazing,” he told Doc. “Even if they don’t attack.”
“Yes. But in the likely event Duncan uses another of his rockets to launch a conjurer’s circle into our mist, this should spoil some of his plans.” Doc sighed and rubbed his eyes. “Assuming, that is, that I find enough time to study, correct, and activate every one of these damned things.”
“There’s no need to curse, Doc.”
A false gas-line scare engineered by Doc allowed him to evacuate the ten floors beneath his. The Sidhe Foundation provided the inconvenienced businesses with temporary accommodations in an unfinished skyscraper. Meanwhile, Lieutenant Galt Athelstane and a unit of his Novimagos Guard took possession of the topmost of the abandoned floors, the same floor from which the Changeling’s men had fired their rocket many days before.
Caster accepted Doc’s thanks and the offer of a boat trip back to Cretanis—accompanied by Foundation bodyguards. “I would be delighted to help you at any time,” he said. “But next time, let’s keep it to something I can solve over the talk-box, shall we?”
At the end of the third day, Doc announced, “We move to step two.”
The room cost four pennies a day and was almost worth it. The floor sagged. So did the bed and exhausted-looking chair. Even the radiator was bowed in the middle. Fergus Bootblack, sitting on the bed, looked at the bottle of potato liquor in his hand and decided that it was the only thing with straight lines in the entire room. He took another drink. It even burned a straight line down his throat.