The Winter Oak Read online

  The weapons charge might be even worse. The Bobbies weren't talking about Maureen's toy .38 -- she had a license for that, concealed-carry and all. But he'd had his selector-fire FAL and a couple of suppressed machine pistols hidden in the flat, without the paper to cover them.

  Thing was, the way he'd hidden them, the cops could have taken the bloody building apart down to the sub-cellar and never found the bleeding abditory. He'd wrapped it in some damned strong spells, and the weapons sat at about ninety degrees to human "reality."

  That meant somebody with the Old Blood was involved. Fiona would be the logical suspect there. It smelled just like her kind of trick. And she might have been mucking about at the embassy as well. It should have been impossible to link up all his military records. Sometimes his sister could be a right royal pain.

  The weapons and papers really didn't mean much, all things considered. It wouldn't be the first time that he'd made things vanish from an evidence locker. The Bobbies tended to get very quiet when things like that happened.

  The door buzzed and clanged again, noise echoing off the bare concrete walls, and another deputy stuck his head through the opening. "Hey, Albion! Don't bother getting comfy -- you've got bail." The jailer glanced across at the card players, and a nasty grin spread across his face. "Eat your hearts out, jailbirds. None of you losers has a broad that's willing to pay hard cash to get her hands on your smelly bod." Then he waggled his tongue salaciously while his hands sketched big bumps in front of his own chest.

  That was fast. Brian shrugged at the other prisoners, flipped one hand in a "Nice to meet you" gesture, and turned toward the door. Should he tell Maureen about that little by-play? He never could tell about her and sex -- she might find it amusing. Or bite his head off. But her own description for her figure was "skinny and flat-chested," not the voluptuous curves that deputy had mimed. Brian found her beautiful, but she wasn't top-heavy by any measure.

  Brian continued chewing on his puzzles while the deputy marched him back out through the process. Change clothes. Check inventory and sign again. Log the prisoner out. Buzz-click-clang of another door, a different one next to the command room with all the CCTV monitors and control switches for those doors, and he added a few more twists and turns to his mental map. And then he stepped into a corridor and faced a woman. Brian stopped short.

  Not Maureen.

  A stranger, dark-haired and dark-skinned, big breasts and wide hips offset by a waist that would have done credit to a wasp -- a shape guaranteed to make most males forget the face above it. She smiled at him, sardonic, with the lazy narrowed eyes of a cat studying a trapped mouse, and the smile rang alarm bells all up and down his spine. His nose flared in reflex, sniffing the stale prison air.

  Fiona.

  She'd disguised her face and body, but hadn't bothered with either her smile or the dangerous whiff of pregnant Old One. For whatever twisty reason, she wanted him and only him to know just who she was.

  He guessed that they still had two locked doors between them and whatever other surprises she had waiting. His brain chased down the branches of her chess moves, operating in overdrive. She wanted to spook him, make him jump in some particular way. She knew how to follow him between the worlds, a nasty trick of hers that he'd never figured out. The pasture oak was rooted in her lands and the keep might be shielded.

  The Pendragons, then. And if she followed, he knew another step to safety. His old partner Claire had blurted it to him, one time together in a dead run from some Sidhe that had seemed likely to cut them both to bits and burn the bits.

  He stepped and felt the jail fade around him and stepped again and stepped again, quick through the darkness and the clammy air. And then he stepped into the parlor of a Georgian townhouse in Chelsea Court, furniture draped in yellowed dust-cloths and wallpaper peeling from the age and damp. No changes allowed -- they'd never even pulled the old gas lamps from the walls.

  "If they follow us, remember. Any safe-house transit room, there'll be a circle somewhere on the walls or floor. Round mirror, round rug, a scrawl of graffiti. Walk right through it, holding a red circle in your head. You'll end up in a place with friendly guards."

  That had been Claire's message, trimmed of gasps for breath and breaks as she spun behind cover and bore her weapon on their back-trail while he sprinted and dodged ahead to find a place where he could cover her. Then they'd reached a place where they could dare to drop their guards and take a world-walk.

  Those Sidhe hadn't followed, either through lack of skill or lack of caring. Fiona had -- he felt it along his spine from the base of his skull clear down to his ass, and he'd learned long since to trust that feeling. And she wasn't in any hurry, either.

  He scanned the walls, the floor, even the ceiling. The whole bloody place was rectilinear, wide solid furniture and heavy dusty picture frames and a square shallow hearth with long clouded mirror mantelpiece over. He felt his sister behind him, getting closer, taking her own sweet time and savoring every step of it. She liked to play with the mice she caught.

  A shadow negative on his right, the wallpaper, ghost of a picture or mirror removed and the old fresh paper exposed, a circle where centuries of sun and grime and smoke had never made their marks. He stared at it, making the edges red in his mind. He stepped to it and into it and through it. His sister flickered in the corner of his eye.

  Then she vanished. The room vanished. He stepped into a stone room, gray and bare and square, lit by flickering oil lamps, with one open doorway to the right and a faux arch in the masonry facing him. The place looked old, smelled old, like the cellars under Maureen's keep. Just clean instead of dusty. Raised smooth stone formed a disk in the middle of the archway. He assumed that was his next gate. He could walk right through.

  Except for the guards flanking the arch. Two guards, in ruffled purple velvet that put him in mind of Oscar Wilde, balloon pants and tunics and floppy poofter hats like overgrown berets straight out of Renaissance Italy. The men looked like they should be hoisting halberds at shoulder arms, instead of those 9mm SMGs. SMGs bearing on his chest, and fingers inside the trigger guards. Brian lifted his hands slowly over his head. He reminded himself that men could dress like drag queens and still be dangerous. Witness the Vatican's Swiss Guards.

  They stared at him, eyes narrowed, waiting for something. Safeties clicked. Off, he presumed.

  "Brian Albion, House Emris, access code Alpha Nancy Niner Fiver Seven Charlie." And if they wanted a bloody password, he was buggered.

  Well, he'd reached some kind of refuge, anyway. No sign of Fiona, no sense of danger behind him. But he didn't dare relax. He'd never seen uniforms like those. And the Pendragons guarded their secrets like, well, dragons. The guards stood maybe ten feet apart, corners of the facing wall. Too far for him to take both down, and too alert. He could get one, but that wasn't good enough.

  "Captain of the watch to the gatehouse!" The shout echoed back through that right-hand door into a tunnel, doubtless with a murder-hole overhead and a portcullis beyond. The place gave that same feel of a castle's outer gate. Defense-in-depth, against expected siege.

  Brian thought he recognized the men, higher ranking Pendragons he'd never actually met, didn't know their names. Field ops weren't supposed to know most of the roster. What you don't know, you can't tell under torture.

  They kept their weapons ready, held relaxed rather than tense, but it looked like the relaxed readiness of a Judo master waiting for a false move, rather than carelessness. He focused back and forth between the fingers hovering above triggers, moving in unison, slowly settling into contact and tightening on the slack. He could take one of them, but the other wouldn't miss. They'd had the same training he had. He held his ground and didn't move.

  And then the captain strode out of the shadowed door, another purple poofter outfit but with gold slashes on the sleeves and a sword at his belt. Brian felt the tension easing from his shoulders. Duncan. One of his field commanders.

  Dun
can stopped, looking as startled as the guards had been. "Brian Albion, by all that's holy! When did you join the Circle?" He turned to the guards and waved them back. They snapped to attention, presenting the SMGs as a salute, boot-heels ringing on the stone. Bloody Coldstream Guards.

  Then the captain scowled, staring first at Brian and then the guards. "Forgot the password again? This isn't the SAS, laddie. Every man in the unit doesn't know you and wave you through on the strength of your pretty face. But I'm glad to see you made the grade. I'll walk you through the next Circle." And he turned and stepped toward the archway with the disk.

  Brian felt the tension return. "Circle," again. He grunted non-committal agreement. Following Duncan sounded like a bad idea. The guards would let him move now, and he'd lost Fiona for the moment . . . he set his thoughts on the pasture oak and stepped forward. Circle? What have I walked into? And can I walk out again?

  Instead of sunshine and green fields and the fieldstone border fence, he stepped into another dark heavy space lit by oil lamps. That "gatehouse" must be shielded, with a one-way ticket out. And then pieces of the scene fit together in his head -- the room made a twin to the one in Maureen's cellar, complete with central menhir. He glanced down. Yes, it had the same stone flooring, the same labyrinth pattern leading to the twin of her quartz star. But this space was clean and lit and occupied, and the brooding atmosphere of old injury and hate was gone. Whatever the labyrinths were designed to do, this one would work.

  Another purple body stood dead ahead, next to Duncan, arms akimbo, staring. The stance and angular body cancelled any faint hint of femininity. Oh, shit. Dierdre.

  He could have gotten on just fine without adding her to his day. She taught the order's survival classes, the meanest drill-sergeant he had ever met. As far as he could tell, she didn't want her students to live through the course. Some of them didn't.

  And she did interrogations when the Pendragons really wanted to learn whatever a prisoner happened to know.

  "What the fuck's he doing here?"

  She stalked over to glare in Brian's face. No, she hadn't mellowed any since he'd last seen her.

  Duncan smiled. But then, he outranked her. "Brian's come into the Circle. Nobody ever tells me anything."

  "Congratulations!" She reached out to shake his hand, her grip stronger than you'd believe from a woman of her build, and suddenly jerked him forward. She spun, pulling his hand and arm up until she tucked in under his armpit while slamming her left elbow into his gut. He sagged around the pain, and she carried him over her hip into a throw. Brian tucked and started to roll out of it, but came up against her knee in his throat. Two fingers hung an inch in front of his eyes.

  He fought for breath, his head ringing. He heard dim noises. Duncan? Questioning?

  "The hell he is," Dierdre growled in answer. "I'm on the Board. I'd know. And he's been AWOL since he offed Liam. I'm taking him through to Corbin. Summon the Captain-General."

  Chapter Eight

  He left me.

  The rain poured down, matching her mood. Maureen sat under a tree, a European copper beech to be fucking specific, and let the cold water soak her jeans and blouse and run dripping down her forehead and into her eyes. Raindrops, not tears. She saved her magic for protecting the bottle. No way was she adding water to the precious uisce beatha.

  Maureen raised her bottle in a toast to the lightning that danced around her tower, wishing it health and happiness. Somebody fucking deserved a little happiness.

  White fire burned a jagged line across her eyes, leaving a purple glow in its wake. The snap of thunder followed so close that she didn't have time to blink. It came back as rumbling booms that echoed across emptiness.

  He left me.

  Well, you tried to claw his eyes out. The critic had come back to fight another round. Getting to be kind of a habit, isn't it? Only with Dougal, you succeeded.

  The keep was empty. Sure, there were maybe twenty or thirty humans in there, former slaves huddling away from her wrath. But Brian had left. The heart of it had left. She'd felt him leave, as she'd walked toward the Sunrise County Courthouse to post his bail. One moment there in Naskeag Falls, the next moment gone. And he hadn't come back. He hadn't bothered to leave a goddamn note or even yell at her.

  Left with some brunette with big tits, the duty sergeant had made it plain. One of so many ways in which Maureen couldn't compete to hold a man.

  And what would he come back for? A kick in the balls, next time? Or would you just carve his heart out of his chest with your fingernails and eat it for a morning snack?

  She'd tried to follow his path down into the cellars, see if he'd left some clues down there. Down into the dungeons, to be more exact, and the damp sour musty reek and darkness had closed in around her and sucked her back to Dougal and Padric and weeks of beatings, weeks without sleep, weeks of hunger and cold and the slow dive into madness as she stared at the stone walls of her cell. Part of her soul was still locked behind cold iron.

  Her hand shook with the memories, and she drained another swallow from the bottle. Maybe she would just drink herself to death and save Fiona or the dragon the trouble of killing her.

  {And here we'd thought we could let the suicide watch stand down.}

  Stand down. That was a Brian phrase, military-speak. But it was the fox. Her brain conjured up a red fox vixen whenever she deluded herself into thinking she could talk to the forest. The vixen sat in front of Maureen, prim and cat-like on her haunches, dry in spite of the raging storm and with every hair and whisker perfect like she'd just come from the groomer's bench at some goddamn poodle salon.

  {Poodle? For that, I should just let you drown yourself in your yellow poison.}

  "Get the fuck out of my brain. I've got enough problems without having to take shit from a sarcastic hallucination."

  {And who started with the insults, already? Delusions? Hallucinations? A perfectly innocent numenon for the magic wildwood, and you compare me to a poodle?}

  "I don't need this crap."

  The fox stood up, stretching fore and aft like a cat making sure that her spine was the correct length, and stepped daintily over wet rocks and roots and leaves until she stood by Maureen's right hand. She brought her sphere of dry air with her through the pounding rain. Delusion or not, Maureen smelled the faint skunky fox-musk of her, felt her warmth close enough to touch.

  {I'll tell you what you don't need. You don't need that bottle. The FDA has never approved ethanol for the treatment of clinical depression or paranoid schizophrenia or any other psychosis. Besides which, you aren't crazy. You're just lazy. Get off your butt and quit whining. You've got work to do.}

  Then the fox turned her head slightly, snapped, and pain lanced through Maureen's wrist. She stared at the blood welling up where the vixen's teeth had slashed the skin. The bottle lay next to her foot, glugging quietly to itself as the sharp fumes of Black Bush spread through the wet furry earthiness of the forest.

  Maureen was too shocked to rescue her booze. She just crouched there staring at the blood twisting into thin ribbons mingling with the rain, too shocked even to stop the bleeding and bring her Power to heal the punctures.

  "You bit me."

  {Damn straight. Hey, if you weren't sitting on it, I'd do the same number on your ass.}

  "You bit me!"

  {I work with what I've got. If I had hands, I'd try to slap some sense into your pointy little head.}

  "Get fucked! Who appointed you God for the day?"

  {You did. You bound yourself to the good of the forest. You gave us your memories and speech when you smeared your blood on the tree and threatened to burn this land bare of life if we didn't let your sister go. I'm just doing the job you gave me.}

  "Jesus Christ, now I've got a four-legged shrink nagging me into AA! As if Brian wasn't enough." And then she stopped and swallowed. Brian . . .

  {Exactly.} The vixen wrinkled her nose at the reek of whisky, stepped daintily around the polluted earth
, and walked away. Bone dry. She looked back over her shoulder. {And you might spend some time thinking about whose storm this was, and just where all the lightning struck.}

  The storm had subsided into thin rain while they talked, with only a few rumbled memories high in the clouds. Maureen's clothing and hair were dry again, her magical subconscious handling little details like fending off hypothermia while she was busy elsewhere. Where had the lightning struck? She'd been outside for the entire storm, shivering with the claustrophobia of the dungeons, the stone walls closing in around her and the cold burn of iron binding her neck and wrists and ankles.

  Most of the fireworks had flashed from cloud to cloud, as usual. She turned to the beech and laid her palm against its smooth bark, sending her thoughts into the forest, asking. Nothing had struck the trees. No list of killed or wounded from her tantrum.

  She played back the Frankenstein memory of dark sky and black castle ruins on a high hill, strobed by lightning flashes. All the ground strokes had hit her keep. Hit the burned stones of Dougal's tower. Sure, it was the highest point for miles around, but that was carrying things a little far.

  Jeezum. She hadn't realized how much she loathed that pile of stone and all the pain that oozed from it. Only Brian and whisky had made it bearable. And now he had left.

  Brian had taken it for granted that they'd move into the castle and live there. She owned the place, right? Feudal fort main shit, right? And he thought of walls as defenses, a way to keep threats outside and at arm's length.

  She guessed that he'd never been a prisoner. Sometimes people built walls to keep things in.

  The bottle of Irish ambrosia still lay at her feet, nearly half full. Or half empty. She bent down and picked it up. The smooth sharp tang of its golden liquid pulled at her. She lifted it to the paling sky and dissipating clouds, toasting whatever gods ruled this land.

  Then she tilted the bottle and poured the whisky out in a slow deliberate stream that gave her hand plenty of chance to argue with her head. Her body shuddered with longing as each drop splattered and sank into the deep forest duff at her feet.