“Toilets of the Gentry,” he muttered to himself as he dumped a pail of fouled water into the toilet and filled it up again. “Coming soon to a theater near you. Experience the horrors of faerie piss in widescreen, stink-o-vision. If you dare.”
He added a generous ration of cleanser to the hot water and got back to his task, amusing himself by casting the movie in his head. A blond Christina Ricci to play Miki, he decided. Did Ricci have a brother with the same witchy eyes who could be Donal? Buffy’s Joss Whedon to write the screenplay, definitely. Or maybe Kevin Williamson. Either way they’d all sound smarter and a little more hip than they really were. At least he would. Who to play himself? He’d pick someone like Brad Pitt, but with his luck he’d get Pee-Wee Herman.
He was so caught up with the .work and the stream-of-consciousness soliloquy running through his head that he didn’t realize someone else had come into the apartment until he heard the harsh, heavily accented voice speak to him from the kitchen doorway.
“You just don’t learn, do you?”
A twinge of phantom pain grabbed his side as Hunter looked up to see one of the hard men standing there. He had long enough to register that the newcomer wasn’t even wet—had he been hiding in the apartment all this time?—before the man started forward.
Hunter surprised himself. He should have been scared. He was scared. He was almost wetting himself. But more than that he was angry. For the second time that night, the first response that came to mind was violence. He half-rose at the hard man’s approach, bringing up the pail of hot water and cleanser as he did. The hard man was so sure of himself that Hunter’s response took him by surprise. Hunter had a good momentum going by the time the pail sped by the hands, raised in defense too late. The pail struck the man in the head, showering dirty, ammonia-sharp water all over the kitchen. His eyes went wide with shock, and he stumbled back.
Hunter hit him again with the pail, only half-full now, and the hard man went down, cracking his head on the side of the counter as he fell.
“Oh, fuck,” Hunter said.
He stared down at the still body splayed out on the linoleum and had trouble swallowing. Blood leaked from a gash on the side of the man’s head. Ordinary red blood, turning pink where it ran into a puddle of water. ,•
“Wh—why couldn’t you just leave me alone?” he said.
The hard man made no response. Was he dead?
Hunter swallowed, his throat feeling thicker than ever. He was scared and his pulse was hammering, but the worst of it was, it had felt good to strike back as he had. He was horrified to see the slack figure sprawled on the floor at his feet, unconscious, maybe even dead, and he’d put the man there. But an immense satisfaction rose up in him all the same, swamping the already confused mess of emotion running through him.
He’d never done anything like this before.
The pail dropped from his hand and went clattering across the linoleum. He gave the doorway a quick glance. Were there more of them out there? He cocked his head to listen, but heard nothing, only the rattle of the ice stonn outside. His gaze crawled back to the man on the floor, half-expecting from Miki’s stories for the body to dissolve into dust or go up in smoke or something. But it simply lay there, still, unmoving.
Nervously, he gave the man’s leg a push with the end of his boot.
Still no response. Hunter wasn’t even sure if the man was breathing.
Self-defense, he thought. If I killed him, it was in self-defense.
If he’s dead…
His stomach lurched at the thought.
That was bad enough. But what if he wasn’t? What was going to happen when he came around? Or when his buddies found out what had happened to him?
Hunter backed away until he was brought up short by the kitchen counter.
Whatever way you looked at it, he was screwed. If this was just a man, then he was going to have to do a lot of explaining to the police. He was going to have to live with the fact that he’d killed a man. And if the hard man was some kind of supernatural creature, then basically, Hunter was a dead man, too, because he had no illusions as to what the Gentry would do to him when they caught up with him. If they’d sucker punch him simply for dancing with Ellie…
He stared at the body, trying to see if it was breathing, not sure which he hoped for more—that the hard man was, or wasn’t dead. After that one contact, boot against limp leg, he didn’t have the courage to go any closer again. Too many horror movies and thrillers were running through his mind, images of the seemingly dead body suddenly sitting up and grabbing him as he bent near, the way the dead did in all those movies.
Face up to it, he told himself. Call 911 and let the cops deal with it.
But then he heard Donal’s voice in his head, what he’d said back in The Harp the other night when Hunter had asked him if he’d called the police when the Gentry had beaten him up.
That would have just made for more trouble. Men like that, they don’t forget a wrong. Jaysus, I’ve seen enough of them back home. Thepubs are full of them, brooding over their pints, remembering every hurt, imagined or real, that was ever done to them.
And then Miki: Back home, a feud is as real today as it was a hundred years ago. It doesn’t matter that all the original participants are long dead and gone. The descendants will continue with the hostilities until there’s no one left, on one side or the other.
In the end, he simply grabbed his coat and fled, still wearing the handkerchief over his face and the pair of bright yellow rubber gloves he’d put on when all that was ahead of him was to clean out Miki’s fouled apartment. He ran, or tried to run, skidding and sliding on the ice-slicked pavement, soaked to the skin in minutes, both by the sleet and the falls he took that sprawled him into puddles of icy slush.
10
Ellie couldn’t remember a night as foul as this one. There just didn’t seem to be any end to the constant rain. It was so deceptive, falling as water, hardening immediately into ice upon contact. The weight on the trees had to be unbelievable. Everywhere she looked, tree boughs were sagging, snapping off. They drove by cedar hedges that were bent almost in two, lilacs that had simply collapsed under the ice. The hardwoods were standing up better, but even they were getting a battered, war-torn look as they lost their smaller limbs. On the side streets, the ice-slicked pavement was carpeted with fallen branches and Ellie counted at least three cars and a couple of porches with boughs lying across their roofs. But so far the power lines were up. For how long, it was impossible to say, if the freezing rain continued. From the way the lines sagged, she wasn’t sure if they’d snap under the weight of the ice, or if a tree would take them down.
Tommy had the heater going full-blast in the van, but considering how inefficient it was at the best of times, they had to get out every few blocks to scrape off the latest build-up of ice. Angel had sprung for new tires for the van at the beginning of the winter, but they weren’t studded like the ones Tommy had put on his truck and didn’t help much for either traction or quick stops. All they could do was inch along the streets at a slow crawl. But at least they were moving. Everywhere they went, they saw abandoned vehicles, few of them properly parked. Most rested at odd angles to the sides of the streets, many up on curbs.
The city still had power, but according to the radio, hydro lines were going down in the outlying regions, blacking out whole communities. And this was only day one. The weather forecasts predicted that the ice storm was just settling in and might be with them for the better part of a week. Ellie couldn’t imagine what the city would be like after another few hours of this, never mind a week.