“Neither’s getting sick with a really bad cold—I mean, you do get the time off work—but still, who wants one?”
“Anyway,” Miki went on. “We had this fight and that brought me to the attention of these friends of his who ended up trashing my place.”
“Nice friends.”
Miki nodded. “But what makes it complicated is… well, they’re not exactly human.”
“Say what?”
“I know, I know. It sounds ridiculous.”
“Well, that depends,” Fiona said. “Do you mean not human as in they’re such nasty pieces of work we don’t want to claim them as part of the human race, or are you talking X-Files?”
Miki never watched the show, but you couldn’t have any awareness of contemporary pop culture and not know something about it by now.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Does The X-Files deal with genii loci? We’re talking immortal earth spirits here, bad-tempered ones with a mean streak a mile wide who can change shape and pull your arms and legs off if they happen to get pissed off with you.”
Fiona gave her a considering look. “You mean for real?”
Miki nodded.
“You’re supposed to tell me you’re kidding now,” Fiona said.
“I’m serious.”
“And that’s what’s scaring me,” Fiona said. “I mean, I like getting spooked as much as the next person. A little Anne Rice. Checking out Scream and stuff like that. But then I always have the comfort of knowing that when I close the book, or leave the theater, I’m back in the real world.”
“I’m not going to be able to do that.”
“You’ve actually seen these guys?”
“I’ve been on the periphery of them all my life,” Miki told her. “I guess I was just lucky that I didn’t catch their attention until now.”
“And your brother’s connection is?”
“He thinks they’re going to make him immortal, too. That they’ll give him the power to pay back every wrong that’s ever been done to him, imagined or real, and nobody’ll be able to call him on it because he’ll be this supernatural hard man then, too. Just like them. One of the Gentry.”
“Why do you keep calling them that?”
Miki shrugged. “That’s just the way everybody referred to them when I was growing up. Calling them by their real names is supposed to be bad luck—puts their attention on you and you don’t want that because they’ll turn you into a newt or something.”
“Oh, boy.”
“I know,” Miki said. “It’s a lot to swallow. I’m surprised you haven’t laughed me out of the room by now.”
Fiona gave her a funny look. “I guess,” she said after a moment, “it’s because no matter how rational we think we are, we always suspect that there’s more out there than we can see. It’s like the old boogieman under the bed, as if—right? I know he’s not there, not really, but I still don’t sleep with a foot or a hand hanging over the edge of the bed.”
“But it’s just me telling you about it,” Miki said. “You don’t have any proof that any of it’s true.”
“No. But I’ve worked with you for a long time now and the Miki I’ve always known isn’t the same as the Miki who came into the store with Hunter this morning. I knew something really weird and serious had happened to you and it wasn’t just your apartment getting trashed. You’ve been through a lot of shit and that kind of thing would only piss you off.”
“I was pissed off.”
“Yeah, but you were scared, too.”
Miki nodded. That was true. It was still true.
“And I guess I’m kind of primed for this sort of thing,” Fiona went on. She waved her hand in the general direction of her Anne Rice books and the skull on her mantle. “For it to be, you know, more than just make-believe.”
They fell silent then. Miki returned her attention to the wet streets outside. The last CD they’d been playing had finished, but Fiona didn’t get up to put on a new one.
“So do you really think they’re going to come after you?” Fiona asked. “That they could track you down here?”
“I don’t know. They’re probably not even thinking about me anymore. I’m no threat to them and they made their point in my apartment this morning.”
“Except you hold grudges, too, don’t you?”
Miki shrugged.
“And if they don’t know it, Donal will.” Fiona shook her head. “I know he’s a self-centered little shit, but I can’t believe he’d take sides against you.”
“Yeah. That… hurts.”
More than she could possibly put into words.
“So maybe we should do something,” Fiona said. “Protect ourselves.”
“How?”
“I don’t know. We could call the number Jessica gave me for the Creek woman and ask her advice.”
“I suppose.”
“Or barricade the door. Or—”
At that moment the power died and they both jumped with fright. A sudden stillness settled over the dark apartment. All the normal murmurings of fridges and clocks and the like were gone. And because of the weather, the streets outside echoed that strange oppressive quiet.
“Do… do you think they had anything to do with this?” Fiona said.
“No, it’s just the weather,” Miki told her, hoping she was right. “Look. They still have power across the street. I guess they’re on a different part of the grid.”
“Why doesn’t this comfort me?”
Miki laid her accordion on the floor and stood up.
“Come on,” she said. “Let’s light some of those candles of yours.”
“And make sure the front door is locked.”
Miki hesitated a moment, head cocked to listen, sure for a moment that she heard Gentry boots on the stairs coming up to Fiona’s apartment.
“And make sure the door’s locked,” she agreed.
14
It was almost midnight before Donal finally made it up to Kellygnow. He never did find his van and it took forever to flag down a cab, mostly because there were none out on the street by the time he left Hunter at Miki’s apartment. Who could blame them? The weather was worse than foul and there were no fares to be had anyway. The whole city was shutting down. Donal trudged past closed restaurants, convenience stores, clubs, theaters, diners. The only people he met were city and hydro workers. The only vehicles belonged to police and other emergency services, so there were no rides to be had. He was happy to keep his distance from the former and wouldn’t have presumed on the latter.
But a cab eventually stopped for him. The driver was off duty, on his way home and heading west anyway. He took pity on Donal, driving him across town and over the river at Lakeside Drive, before finally letting him out at the bottom of Handfast Road. Donal tried to pay for the ride, but the cabbie shook his head.
“Do somebody else a good turn,” he said.
“Thanks, mate,” he told the cabbie. “I will.”
Maybe stick a blade in the guts of one of the Gentry. Rip the smug smirking grin from a hard man’s gob as he felt his life turning to shite and bleeding away on him. That’d make for a good turn wouldn’t it?
“Drive carefully,” he added as he shut the cab door.
He stood in the freezing rain and watched as the vehicle pulled a one-eighty, piece of cake on the icy street, and headed back across the river. Donal was impressed. You had to be a damn fine driver to pull a trick like that in these conditions. When the cab’s taillights finally blinked out behind the hump in the road that rose up in the middle of the bridge, he started up Handfast. And got nowhere.