“I’ll rephrase. It was supposed to be safer. Stable.”
“The more I think about it,” I said. “I’m not sure any place is. You find out about stuff like this, and… I guess normalcy is beyond your reach.”
“I refuse to believe that.”
“If there’s a way to get things back to normal for you guys,” Maggie told him, “I want to find it.”
“And you?” he asked.
“I don’t know. I like it,” Maggie said. “I like being able to protect myself against bumps in the night, see the underpinnings of things.”
“Even if those underpinnings aren’t pretty?” I asked.
“They are,” Maggie said. Her face brightened a bit. “It’s like looking at the workings of the human body. It’s messy and gross and bloody and mucked up and imperfect, but there’s an art there.”
As if to punctuate the statement, Dickswizzle made a loud, wet, sputtering sound.
“You look at the cells through a microscope, it’s beautiful,” Maggie said. “It’s the same with the balance of things, karma, and spirits. Even if that balance and those spirits like to mess with us more than they help us out.”
“I feel like I’m going to lose you if you continue down this road,” her father said.
“I don’t ever want to lose you, or have you lose me,” Maggie said, sincerely. “But I think stopping me from helping Blake is going to do more hurt than help, as far as us going down that road.”
Her father frowned.
“What do you need?” he finally asked me.
“I needed the goblins, which I just got,” I said. “And now all I need is to know where Laird is.”
Maggie reached into her pocket and withdrew a business card. “Like this?”
I could see the connection to Laird.
“That’ll do, thank you.”
■
Now
“Hey!”
The barked word startled me, as did the connection I felt. The certainty that it was aimed at me.
I turned.
A cluster of men had gathered at one end of an expansive living room. There was a minibar there, as well as a stylish wood-paneled cooler filled with ice cubes, beers standing within.
Kids milled around, some running, chasing others. Adults were in clusters, with couches and chairs given to the elderly.
The men at the alcohol station waved me over.
I mentally prepared my story, best as I could.
Fuck me, getting into a situation like this when I couldn’t lie.
“What’s your preference?” one asked me.
I could see the connections that so many of them had to the alcohol. Drinkers?
All six of them, I noted, were from the Duchamp family.
“I’ll take a beer,” I said.
“You’re new here, aren’t you?” the guy who’d waved me over asked. “First time?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“We’ve got a selection,” one of the other men said. “Dark? Light? Lager? Wheat beer? Stout?”
“Lager,” I said.
“Ah, let’s see here… here. One from England,” he said. He glanced at me, bottle held up in the air, and I gave a nod of consent.
He cracked the top off and handed me the beer. I tipped the bottle up, but controlled the amount that actually made it to my mouth.
“Only reason I tolerate these things,” the first guy confided.
“What finally got you to come?” one of them asked me.
I had had an answer ready, but I’d only just let my guard down a fraction. The answer I managed was a neutral, “Seemed like something was going on, tonight.”
I drank, then rubbed a bit of moisture from my mustache. Fun. I’d never had a mustache before.
“Wedding thing,” one of the other guys said.
“Wedding thing,” I said. I shrugged. “I dunno much about it. I’ve only been paying attention to things for a few days now.”
“Yeah? You new to the family?”
“Sort of,” I said. If you mean being here, disguised, included in the group.
“Wife? Kids?”
“Neither,” I answered. “I went my separate way from my particular family unit, not long ago. Stuff came up with a cousin of mine, I came into town for her sake. I thought tonight was a good occasion to see how all this works.”
“Eh,” one guy said. “With the wedding coming up, it’s going to be a lot of awful speeches. Not such a good occasion.”
“You know the drill for these things?” one of the guys asked me.
“I don’t know much of anything,” I admitted.
He leaned closer, lowering his voice, “They’ve got some secret society bullshit or whatever going on here. Keeps things lively in a town this small, I think. So we get good drink, good food, good drink-“
“Good drink,” another guy chimed in.
“-And some long winded speeches, before they kick us out or stick us somewhere and see to their own business. We’re nonentities, so the only real rule is you don’t get so drunk you cause a fuss, and you don’t poke your nose where it doesn’t belong. If you aren’t attached, which you aren’t, you might even get some not-so-subtle hints about marrying in.”
“Marrying me?” I asked. I affected a tone of voice and demeanor much like his. “Nah. I have an apartment. I barely made a living wage, these past few months. I don’t even know if my job’s going to be there when I go back.”
“You’d be surprised,” one of the guys said. “Listen, ah, this is hard to say gracefully, knowing your cousin might be one of these girls.”
“What Adam’s getting at,” one of the other men cut in, “Is these kids get a metric fuckton of pressure from their family to marry certain people, walk a certain line. Make connections, improve the family’s collective lot in life. You get me?”
“Suppose I do,” I said.
“Well, some want out. And the easiest way out is to get married before their folks marry them off. Even if that guy’s twice their age, living in an apartment, with a cruddy maybe in the way of employment prospects, some prefer that choice to the alternative.”