Fire Touched
Page 78

We all went to the scarred table and sat down, virtually at the same time. Adam was slower because he held my chair out.
“Are there any other fae in the building or adjacent lot?” asked Adam as he settled.
“No,” said Uncle Mike. “Just the three of us—and I don’t count.”
“What do you want?” asked Adam.
“There are nine fae dead,” said Beauclaire, very softly. Yep, I thought, my stomach clenched, bad fairy and worse fairy.
“They attacked us,” Adam told them. “That makes their deaths their own fault.”
“Point,” agreed Beauclaire, and he glanced at Goreu. “They were on their own,” he told us, “as, I understand, Uncle Mike informed you.”
“How often,” said Adam dangerously, “are we going to be discussing how many of your people have been killed by their own stupidity before you stop them instead of making me do it?”
“We have discussed this very thing,” said Beauclaire grimly.
Goreu pushed back his chair and sighed. “As well as a whole rotting cesspool of other things.”
He sat in silence a moment, examining Adam without meeting his eyes—and avoiding any kind of dominance game. Finally, he leaned forward, and it was as if he peeled off a glamour without changing his form at all. When he spoke, his voice was still tenor, but it had softened and lost the squeak. Instead of a parody, he became . . . someone who might once have ridden beside Arthur. “Some old king,” Goreu said, “some old time or other proclaimed that if the Welsh had all started fighting one enemy instead of each other, they would have conquered the world—that goes double for the fae. Still, we did passably well for the past couple of hundred years, protecting the weak and reining in the strong and vicious.” He flashed a humorless smile. “Coexisting, you could call it. Then Underhill opened unexpectedly—on one of the reservations, then on all of the reservations, thousands if not tens of thousands of miles from the nearest old door.”
“Unexpected by some,” murmured Beauclaire.
Goreu nodded gravely at Beauclaire. “You were behind the drive to create the reservations. I followed your lead because it made sense to have a place of safety to keep those who were too frightening or too frightened. I don’t know five fae who thought that you’d be right about Underhill, that she would follow us.”
He looked at Adam again. “While we were still debating what should change, what could change—this one killed a human for the sake of Justice.” There was a capital letter starting that word; I could hear it in his voice. “And then he issued a recall, and all of us were penned up in the reservations.” He pinched his nose and gave Beauclaire a pained look. “There were probably less . . . eventful ways to handle it.”
Beauclaire pursed his lips. “Are you sure that we should spill our secrets here?”
Goreu smiled, a smile as sweet and innocent as sunshine. “And what do you think they will do with our secrets, this warrior and his softhearted coyote mate? If our side in this battle prevails, it won’t matter—if not, well then, we’ll probably be fighting on their side anyway.”
Beauclaire gave a reluctant nod. “Point.”
Goreu’s smile widened a little, then died. When he spoke again, it was to us. “Afterward, we thought for a while that we could stay on our reservations. No humans could get in, not with their fighter jets or tanks. A bard might have managed, but your bards are not given to wandering in the wilderness in this era. We had, after all, Underhill to live in. Underhill exists in a different space and time. Infinite space.”
He and Beauclaire exchanged a glance. Beauclaire snorted abruptly and threw up his hands.
“Why not?” he said, and it was Beauclaire who continued. “But Underhill is different. I will spare you the dozens of explanations we’ve thrown at her and had thrown back. No one knows why. She’s volatile. Unpredictable. We lost four selkies on one of the other reservations. They apparently had found a doorway—” Here he paused, and said, “A doorway is not, strictly speaking, a doorway as you would think of it, though it can be. Some of the doors to Underhill are invisible and impossible to detect unless you happen to stumble through one.”
He sighed, which didn’t bode well for the four selkies, I thought. “They found a place where there was a big salt lake, cold and clear, a fifth selkie told me, that they could see to the bottom of, though it was a hundred feet down. They disappeared for a couple of weeks—which would not normally have been a concern because time can pass differently in Underhill. But the fifth selkie had gone to the salt lake and couldn’t find them. We searched and asked Underhill, who quit talking to us for a couple of days. Then the fifth selkie found the skeletons of the four selkies laid out on the sands of their lake.”
“A predator?” I asked.
“Selkies are tough,” said Goreu. “And there were no teeth marks on the bones.”
“There are some of us who are very old,” Beauclaire said. “Baba Yaga is one of those. She remembers a time when Underhill killed as many fae as traveled through her, a time when Underhill was very young. She told us that Underhill mellowed with time. Five or six hundred years.”
“So you couldn’t stay on the reservations,” said Adam. “There are too many of you for the land you have if you can’t trust Underhill to be a home.”
Goreu nodded. “So we were going to have to resume living in the humans’ world. But we would do it on our own terms.”