“Phipps wasn’t just bullshitting when he said your people wanted to carve me up for the stone and turn me into a—a zombie patch job, was he?” Jason stepped back out of Henry’s reach, but he didn’t run. That showed just how little he truly understood of the danger Henry posed to him. Or perhaps it simply betrayed Jason’s desire to trust him even now.
“Phipps wasn’t wrong. Gunther sent me a note this morning. R&D wants me to turn you over.”
“But you’re not going to…” Jason took another step back but then stopped and stood, staring at Henry warily.
All morning Henry’d shied from asking himself what he’d do when the moment came to pack Jason up and hand him over to the dowdy, merciless creatures that populated the R&D laboratories in DC. He hadn’t suspected that his own conscience would kick quite so hard. The Irregulars had created, trained, and kept him for nearly a century; the institution was a great gyre that carried his wreckage, making him look alive and full of purpose.
Jason, on the other hand, was nearly a stranger. They’d had sex, but Henry wasn’t one to mistake that for anything beyond a momentary respite—more pleasurable but certainly not more meaningful than sharing a drink and a laugh. It’d been a good time but taking it for more than that wouldn’t have just been whistful but damn unwise. Yet Jason’s gaze affected Henry more than he wanted to acknowledge; the smallest spark flickered in the darkness of his dead heart.
Jason exerted no special power over him—commanded no spells, oaths, or obligations written in blood. Instead he just looked at Henry like he could see the decency in him—like he was betting his life on it. And somehow just that made Henry feel the good, gallant, and foolish man he’d once been awaken within him.
Henry held his scarred left hand out to Jason and Jason came to him.
“When I said ‘us’, I meant you and me,” Henry told him.
Jason nodded, looking relieved but also exhausted. Overhead a flock of smoky blue butterflies swirled across the sun like a passing cloud.
“So what now...Henry?” Jason said his name like it was a secret spell. Silly, really, but still touching.
“We need to find a way to keep you out of both the research labs and Greine’s reach.” No news there. But Henry didn’t feel quite ready to explain all the details of the plan that had been growing in the back of his mind since early this morning. He didn’t trust his own commitment enough yet to test it against the hard realities that even words would evoke. “You need to disappear for at least a year.”
“Disappear to where?” Jason asked.
“As who might be more important—” Henry cut himself off as the door of the brilliant blue port-o-let swung open. A group of naked, green-haired youths burst out and immediately dispersed into a cloud of emerald butterflies. Princess padded out in their wake. She watched the nearest butterfly flutter with feline interest before trotting to Henry’s side.
Henry scooped her up, noting the pretty collar she now wore as well as the silver message cylinder hanging from it like a delicate bell. The note inside told him nothing he didn’t already know, except that Gunther had bought the collar for Princess and that Greine had been formally invited to take custody of his son first thing tomorrow morning. R&D were expecting Henry to make a delivery to them within the day.
Princess settled herself on Henry’s shoulder but watched the surrounding moths and butterflies with great attention.
“We better leg it,” Henry said. “Buttercup won’t abide a cat in her kingdom, not even an enchanted one.”
“But where are we going to go?” Jason asked.
“Back to where we started,” Henry decided.
Chapter Eight
Carerra’s strike team had left Phipps’s Curiosities and Antiques locked up, taped off, and warded with small gold spheres that looked to Jason like miniature sea mines. Jason’s own key and Falk’s knife made easy work of the first two obstacles, but after that they both spent nearly an hour dismantling all the security spells with lullabies and curses written across masking tape. At last they slipped through the backdoor.
Inside, the once-tidy shop now stood in disarray. Antique chairs and ivory-inlaid card tables lay toppled and cracked like the remnants of a fire sale. Tapestries had been ripped from the walls and the entire collection of eighteenth-century Japanese umbrellas rested in a heap, tattered with bullet holes, as if they’d been executed by a firing squad.
Most of the valuables were missing. The display cases that had housed Persian and Chinese gold jewelry were nothing more than battered frames haloed by shards of shattered glass.
Falk snorted derisively.
“I knew they’d snatch up the fool’s gold and leave the silver goblin’s scimitar lying in a pile of tarnished trash.” He carefully lifted the sheathed blade from a heap of broken glass and bent bookends. When he drew the blade a few inches Jason noticed red symbols glowing along it.
Princess circled Falk’s feet but then bounded away to bite the wings of a stuffed owl that had fallen behind the empty, open cash register.
“Of course they also left a lot of actual garbage,” Falk commented. He sheathed the scimitar.
Hints of both gunpowder and camphor scented the air. And a fine white ash drifted down from the second floor, where the incinerated remains of what looked like an immense serpent spilled across three shattered display cases that had once housed jade and carnelian hairpins.
The afternoon light streaming in through the windows dulled to hazy gold shafts as it filtered through the drifting clouds of ash.
Jason found a silk kerchief and tied it over his nose and mouth. He offered another to Henry, who followed Jason’s example after only briefly smirking at the spray of silk pansies embroidered across the cloth.
“What do you think?” Falk asked through the kerchief. “Do I look like a proper robber now?”
“It does strike a nice balance between criminal menace and floral extravaganza.” Jason grinned from behind his own display of pink roses.
“Sure. We’ll set a new trend in criminal fashion. Pretty soon all the young thugs would be swaggering around with their grannies’ hankies over their faces.”
Together they scavenged and pilfered through gilded cabinets, pungent travelers’ trunks, and the dark little drawers of any number of dressers and desks.
Steadily, he and Falk amassed a treasury of arcane weapons, ancient necessities, and petty valuables. Strings of semiprecious stones, silver blades, tinderboxes, leather satchels, two pocket watches, and a variety of old and costly clothes heaped up on the silken divan where they gathered their loot.
Jason’s nerves tingled with both excitement and anxiety when he surveyed the assortment of odds and ends and realized that he would have to build a new life in another world with just these supplies. But it would be his own life.
He picked up one of the battered pocket watches and studied the constellation of symbols and additional hands that revealed themselves to him. According to Falk it was a compass for traveling between realms.
Jason wound the hands experimentally. A portal to Atlantis would be active in only twenty-three more hours.
“What about Atlantis?” Jason asked.
“Depends on how much you enjoy the damp. Very pretty, though. Red Ogre’s tower was built there. She swears that some quiet nights you can hear the mermaids singing in the lower floors,” Henry replied from the balcony above.
Jason remembered his ghostly visions of serene sea creatures drifting through the hallway.
“I’d like to at least see it,” Jason decided.
“Not a bad thought. There’s certainly wealth there and the inhabitants aren’t too keen on either the sidhe or NIAD. There’s plenty of glass here to trade with the mermaids and merrows, though crystal would be better…” Falk glanced up and then suddenly swung up onto the railing of the balcony and leaned out to catch one of the crystal chandeliers. He quickly plucked several shimmering baubles from their metal supports as if he were picking cherries. “They love how leaded crystal splinters light into rainbows. Pixies tend to go for prisms for the same reason.”