CHAPTER 1
“Could you at least wait until I open the window to shake that thing?” Iris shot me a nasty look as I yanked the braided rug off the floor and started beating it against the wall. “I can barely breathe, there’s so much dust.”
Chagrined, I dropped the rug to the floor and gave her a sheepish look. Dust didn’t bother me, and sometimes I forgot other people had to breathe. “Sorry,” I said. “Open the window, and I’ll shake it outside.”
Rolling her eyes, she lifted the sash and pushed it up as far as she could. I took over, finishing the job. A wash of warm summer air filtered through the open window along with the sounds of horns honking, blaring music, and laughter from a gang of street kids who were smoking weed in the back alley behind the Wayfarer. The air had a happy-go-lucky feel to it, a stir of excitement, like a street party about to spontaneously erupt.
I leaned over the sill, waving to one of the boys who was staring up at me. His name was Chester, but he went by Chit, and he and his buddies had become a fixture around the bar over the past few months. Too young to come in, they hung around out back, and every now and then I’d make sure they got a good meal from the grill. They were good kids—a little at loose ends, but they never caused much trouble, and they weren’t gangbangers or druggies. In fact, they kept some of the less desirable elements from hanging out in the alleys.
Chit waved back. “Yo, Menolly! What’s shakin’, babe?”
I grinned. I was far, far older than he, although I didn’t look it. But like a number of the younger FBH men I’d met, he flirted with every woman who looked under forty, especially if they were Fae. And though I was only half-Fae, and a vampire to boot, he treated me like I was just another one of the locals.
“Just getting around to some long-overdue cleaning,” I called down to him, waving again before I turned back to Iris, who was poking around an old-world trunk that had been hiding in a corner of the room.
Since I now owned the entire building the Wayfarer Bar & Grill resided in, I decided it was time to clear out some of the rooms over the bar and turn them into a paying resource. My sisters and I could furnish them, rent them out to Otherworld visitors, and make a nice chunk of change.
Even though we were back on the Court and Crown’s payroll, money was still going out faster than it was coming in. Especially since we were paying Tim Winthrop for the computer work he was doing for the Supe Community.
The Wayfarer’s second story held ten rooms, two of them bathrooms. And it looked like all of them had remained untouched for years. Piles of junk and thick layers of dust permeated the entire story. Iris and I’d finished one room, but it had taken us two nights to sort through the boxes filled with newspaper and old clothes.
I stretched, arching my back, and shook my head. “What a mess.”
The room had obviously been turned into a storage room, probably by Jocko, who wasn’t the cleanest bartender the Wayfarer had ever seen. Unfortunately, the diminutive giant had met an untimely end at the hand of Bad Ass Luke, a demon from the Subterranean Realms.
Jocko had lived in one of the Otherworld Intelligence Agency’s designated apartments in the city, and I was pretty sure he’d never slept at the bar. We hadn’t found any giant-sized clothes hanging around. At least not yet. But it was obvious that someone from Otherworld had stayed here at one time, because she’d left a bunch of her things here. I recognized the weave on a couple of tunics. They certainly hadn’t been made over here Earthside.
Iris snorted. “Mess is certainly the word, isn’t it? Now, if you’ll get your albino butt over here, I could use some help moving this trunk.” Hands on her hips, she nodded to the wooden chest she’d uncovered from beneath a pile of newspapers.
Shaken out of my reverie, I lifted the trunk with one hand and effortlessly carried it to the center of the room. Being a vampire had its perks, and extraordinary strength was one of them. I wasn’t all that much taller than Iris—skimming five one, I towered over her by a mere thirteen inches—but I could have easily lifted a creature five times her weight.
“Where on Earth are your sisters? I thought they were going to help.”
The Talon-haltija—Finnish house sprite—brushed a stray cobweb off her forehead, leaving a smudge from the grime that had embedded itself in her hands. Her ankle-length golden hair had been pulled into a long ponytail, and she’d carefully woven it into a thick chignon to get it out of the way. Iris was wearing a pair of denim shorts and a red and white gingham sleeveless blouse, with the ends tied together under her breasts. A pair of blue Keds completed her country-maid ensemble.
I grinned. “They are helping, in their own special ways. Camille’s at the store buying more cleaning supplies and dinner. Delilah’s out scrounging up a pickup so we can haul away some of this junk.” I’d left running the bar to Chrysandra for the evening. She knew where I was, and she was my best waitress. Luke was bartending, and he’d take care of any jerks that stumbled in. Tavah, as usual, was guarding the portal in the basement.
“Special my foot,” Iris mumbled, but she flashed me a brilliantly white smile. She had good teeth, that was for sure. “Let’s see what this old chest holds. Probably dead mice, with our luck.”
“If it does, don’t tell Delilah. She’d want to play with them.” I knelt beside her, examining the lock. “Looks like we need a skeleton key if you don’t want me to bust it open.”
“Forget about keys,” Iris said. She leaned over and deftly inserted a bobby pin into the oversized hole, then whispered a soft chant. Within seconds, the latch clicked. I gave her a long look, and she shrugged.
“What? Simple locks I can pop. Dead bolts, not so much. Life is easier when you don’t have to worry about locks and bars.”
“I would have to agree,” I said, opening the lid. As it softly creaked, the faint odor of cedar rose to fill the air. Even though I didn’t need to breathe, that didn’t mean I couldn’t smell—at least when I chose to—and I allowed the aroma to filter through my senses. Mingled with the fragrance of tobacco and frankincense, the scent was dusty, like an old library thick with leather and heavy oak furniture. It reminded me of our parlor, back home in Otherworld.
Iris peeked over the edge. “Pay dirt!”
I glanced into the trunk’s belly. No dead mice. No gems or jewels, either, but there were clothes and several books and what looked like a music box. I slowly lifted the box out of the soft cushion of dresses in which it had been nestled. The wood was definitely harvested from Otherworld.
“Arnikcah,” I said, peering closely at it. “This comes from OW.”
“I figured as much,” Iris said, leaning over to examine the box.
Wood from an arnikcah tree was hard, dark, and rich, with a natural luster that shimmered when polished. Easy to spot by its rich burgundy tones, the color rested somewhere between mahogany and cherry.
The box was fastened by a silver hinge, and I flipped it open, gently raising the lid. A small peridot cabochon, inset on the underside of the lid, flashed as the sound of tinkling notes fluttered out. Not panpipes, but a silver flute, sounding the song of woodland birds at the close of sunset.
Iris closed her eyes, listening to the melody. After a moment, it stopped, and she bit her lip. “That’s beautiful.”
“Yes, it is.” I examined the contents of the music box. “My mother had a box similar to this one. Father gave it to her. I don’t know what happened to it, though. Camille would know, if anybody does. The tune’s a common one, used to lull children to sleep.”
The inside of the music box had been lined with a rich, velvety brocade. I’d seen it used in the skirts of women who belonged to the Court and Crown. A deep plum, the cloth had absorbed the scent of the arnikcah wood.
I shuddered, finding myself unaccountably sad as I touched the glowing gem fastened to the underside of the lid. Once more, the melody began to play, lightly trilling through the dusty room. I closed my eyes, transported back to the long summer nights of my youth when I would dance in a meadow as Camille sang her spells to the Moon, and Delilah chased fireflies in her kitten form. We’d come a long way from those days.
Iris peered into the box. “There’s a locket inside.”
I gently set the box onto the floor and picked up the heart-shaped locket. Silver, embossed with a scrollwork of roses and vines, the heart sprang open as I touched the hinge, revealing a picture and a lock of hair. The photo was definitely Earthside in nature, and was of an elf. A man. The lock of hair was so pale it was platinum. No dye had ever touched these tresses. I held it out to Iris.
She closed her fist around the hair and squinted. “Elf, by the feel. What a pretty pendant. I wonder who it belongs to.”
“I haven’t the faintest idea,” I said. “What else is in the trunk?”
Iris lifted out the books and the pile of clothes. The books were obviously written Earthside: The Idiot’s Guide to Living Earthside and American English for Elves.
The clothing had belonged to a woman. A tunic, several pair of leggings, a belt and jacket, a brassiere. I held up the undergarment. Whoever owned this had small breasts. The cloth was elf-weave, that much I recognized.
Beneath the clothes, in the bottom of the trunk, we found a journal. I opened it to the first page. The inscription read “Sabele,” written in a scrolling hand. The name was in English, but the rest of the journal was in Melosealfôr, a rare and beautiful Crypto language from Otherworld. I could recognize it but not read it. But Camille could.
“This looks like a diary,” Iris said, flipping through it. “I wonder . . .” She stood up and poked around the room, rooting under the towering piles of debris. “Hey! There’s a bed here, and a dresser in the corner. Want to make a bet this was a bedroom, perhaps for whoever owned this locket and diary?”
I stared at the piles of old magazines, newspapers, and faded liquor boxes. “Let’s clear away all this trash. Just haul it into the next room for now. We’ll see what we find beneath it.” As I replaced the music box and clothes within the trunk, laughter echoed down the hall from the stairs, and within seconds, my sister Camille stood at the door, two of her men in tow.
“Pizza!” Camille entered the room, gingerly stepping over a rolled-up rug. As usual, she was dressed to impress, in a black velvet skirt, a plum bustier, and stilettos. Morio was right behind her, carrying five pizza boxes, and behind him, Smoky towered over everybody, looking bemused but not entirely thrilled to be tagging along.
Iris jumped up and wiped her hands on her shorts. “I’m so hungry I could eat a horse.”
“Hush, or Smoky might oblige,” Camille said, wrinkling her nose as she gave the dragon a playful look.
He might look like six foot four of man flesh with silver hair down to his ankles, but when he transformed, he was all dragon under that snow white veneer. He ate horses, cows, and the occasional goat. On the hoof. He joked about eating humans, too, but none of us took him seriously, although I suspected there might be the occasional missing person we could attribute to him. Whatever the case, Smoky wasn’t just a dragon who could take human form. He was also my sister’s husband. One of her husbands.
Morio, a Japanese youkai-kitsune—fox demon, loosely translated—was her other husband. He wasn’t nearly as tall as Smoky, but he was good-looking in a sleek, lithe way, with a ponytail that hung to his shoulders and the faintest hint of a goatee and thin mustache.
Camille had a third lover. Trillian, a Svartan, had been missing too long for comfort, and I knew she was worried about him.
“You just hush about my eating habits, woman,” Smoky said, gently patting her shoulder. He indulged behaviors in her that would earn most people a one-way ticket to crispy critter land. Love was supposed to be blind, but I had the feeling in Smoky’s case, he’d come to accept that he’d better develop patience with my sister or end up miserable.
I frowned at the pizzas. I’d give a lot to be able to eat pizza. Or anything, actually. My ever-present diet of blood kept me going, but I wasn’t particularly thrilled with it. All salt, no sweets.
Morio’s eyes gleamed as he pulled out a thermos and handed it to me.
“I’m not thirsty,” I said. Bottled blood wasn’t exactly a taste treat. Kind of like generic beer. It did the trick, but in no way or form could you call it haute cuisine. When I wasn’t hungry, I left it alone.
“Just drink,” he said.
I cocked my head. “What are you up to?” But when I opened the thermos, the blood didn’t smell like blood. Instead it smelled like . . . pineapple? I hesitantly took a sip. If I ingested anything but blood, I’d get horrible cramps.
But to my shock and delight, though it was blood that flowed down my throat, all I could taste were coconut milk and pineapple juice. I stared at the thermos, then at him. “By the gods, you did it!”
“Yes, I did,” he said, a victorious grin spreading across his face. “I finally figured out the spell. I thought piña colada might be a nice change for a first try.”
Morio had been working on a spell for some time that would allow me to taste foods I’d left behind when I died.
“Well, it worked!” I laughed and perched on the open windowsill, one knee pulled up to my chest as I leaned back against the frame. As I drank, my taste buds doing a Snoopy dance, it occurred to me that this was the first time in over twelve years that I’d tasted something other than blood.
“I could kiss you for this.”
“Go ahead,” Camille said with a wink. “He’s good.”