The Night Dahlia Read online

  Memory bit into me. Thirteen was the age I’d left home.

  “You’ve been looking for her for all these years? And not even a lead?”

  Ankou shifted in his chair. I didn’t know enough about this guy, except by reputation, to read him, but that squirm was the first tell I noticed. “If my people had made any progress, Mr. Ballard, you would still be in that Houston alley, nestled up with your garbage and your vomit and not drinking my good whiskey. I have exhausted every possible resource at my disposal, including a pilgrimage back to the Shining Lands of our creation to scry in the waters of Elphyne for her. Nothing.”

  “You know she’s probably dead, right?” I said, leaning forward in my chair. “All these years, no word, no leads. It doesn’t look good.”

  “Then we need proof to that end,” White Wine said. His voice was exactly what I had thought it would be, nasally, like he was afraid to smell air contaminated by commoners.

  “This,” Ankou said, sounding a little pained, “is Lord Weerasethakulakkinuoye, of one of the most prominent of the Equinox houses. He is Caern’s betrothed.”

  “Ah, okay,” I said. “So this new urgency in finding your daughter wouldn’t have anything to do with an arranged marriage agreement between your house and Lord Snuffleupagus’s here, right?”

  “The girl is of age now,” Weerasethakulakkinuoye said. “The agreement must be fulfilled or dismissed. I need proof if she’s dead.”

  “I don’t work for you, pencil neck,” I said to Prince Pinot. I looked over to Ankou. “I’m not even sure if I work for you. You want me to chase down a girl and drag her back here for some bullshit marriage she had no say in”—I jerked a thumb at Weerasethakulakkinuoye—“and I’d lay good money on her not wanting any part of it.”

  “You may not believe this,” Ankou said. “But I love my daughter very much. We Fae do not conceive many children. Caern is our only one. My wife, my love, is gone. Caern was all I had left of her. The happiest I’ve ever been in this world, or any other, was when the three of us were together.” I saw some emotion pass behind those dark eyes; it was a mystery to me what it was. Ankou’s perfectly modulated voice cracked a little as he spoke. “I want her home safe, Mr. Ballard. I promise, I will listen to her wishes about the wedding and abide by them.” Weerasethakulakkinuoye didn’t like that; he started to open his mouth to say so, but Ankou shut him down with a stern look. “I just want to know that she’s safe. I’d like her home, but I won’t force her.”

  “What’s in all this for me other than a huge pain in the ass?” I asked.

  “I could threaten you,” Ankou said, “tell you how every person you’ve ever worked with or cared for would be dead in twenty-four hours if you refused.” I leaned back in my chair.

  “Fuck ’em,” I said. “You go on and kill ’em. See if I give a damn.”

  Ankou smiled. “You mean that, don’t you? I heard that about you too. Quite the mercenary, quite the loner. Many of those tales about you seem to end with you being the only one still alive. You really don’t care if I were to kill every single one of your associates and loved ones, do you?”

  “Only one way to find out,” I said. “Folks who run with me and don’t end up dead may be harder to grease than you think, Theo, and anyone stupid enough to love me gets what they deserve.”

  “I see,” Ankou said. “Well then, of course there’s money, but I know men like you acquire and lose it with great rapidity, and it is really more of a means to an end for your lot. So I won’t insult you with an offer.”

  “By all means, insult away,” I said.

  “Name a price,” he said, “I’ll triple it.” The look I gave him must have made him realize he shouldn’t have.

  “Well, lastly,” he said, slipping his hand into his jacket pocket, “I can offer you this.” He produced a small black glass bottle. The bottle had a rubber dropper–style cap, like you might see on eye- or eardrops. I sensed power off the bottle without even trying.

  “My grandmother told me never to accept potions from fairy folk,” I said. “Those could be magical roofies for all I know.”

  “If I had wanted you glamoured, Mr. Ballard, you would be licking my shoe right now. No, I need you with your somewhat odious personality and faculties fully intact. What do your perceptions tell you about this bottle?” Ankou said as he unscrewed the top of the bottle. I opened my third eye to a tiny slit and felt the waves of the energy in the bottle sync perfectly with my own aura. What the hell?

  “It feels like it’s mine,” I said. Ankou squeezed something out of the bottle by way of the dropper and moved the dropper and pipette over my palm. A drop of a glowing blueish-white liquid shivered at the mouth of the pipette.

  “May I demonstrate?” he said. I nodded. He released the rubber bulb, and the glowing liquid dropped from the glass pipette. It fell toward my palm, and then stopped and hovered, then drifted downward lazily, like a dandelion seed. The light was brilliant blue-white like an arc of lightning at the instant it strikes. It flashed like a firefly, and I slowly raised my hand toward it. This … belonged to me … it was part of me, somehow.

  I gently touched the drifting, flaring light with the tip of my index finger and felt … I felt … the emotion connected with the memory of my pa sitting me on his lap in his old, worn leather recliner. I could smell his hair tonic and his English Leather, the stale scent of tobacco—his coffin nails, he called them. He was reading to me from the Encyclopedia Britannica. Every night he’d let me pick a volume and then we’d randomly read an entry. It was the only good, solid memory of my pa I had, and it filled me with warm feelings of security and belonging, love and … joy. Joy, it was something I hadn’t felt in a very long time, was incapable of feeling anymore. The tiny lightning droplet sizzled against my fingertip and was gone; the emotion faded just as quickly.

  “That’s … my joy,” I almost whispered. Ankou nodded. The twist of a smile had returned to the corners of his lips again.

  “Yes,” he said. “It certainly is. This tiny sample of it was expensive, even for someone with my considerable means. To us Fae, the distilled emotions of humans are a very powerful drug, very valuable. You bargained away your joy to House Tycho, in exchange for their adoption of a human ghost into their demesne, I am led to understand. The girl had died in a car accident. She must have been very precious to you. Joy freely given is a very powerful narcotic indeed, Mr. Ballard.”

  I said nothing. I rubbed my index finger and thumb together, trying to feel any remainder of the tiny drop. There was none. The melting ice in my empty glass cracked and shifted slightly. “Find my daughter, and I will buy back every last drop of your joy from the Lunar Lords, and return it to you.”

  “Counterproposal,” I croaked, trying to get my head back in the game. “You use your position in the Court of the Uncountable Stairs and your pull with the Tycho clan, and you get that ghost released from her duties. She gets a walk. No more doing shit jobs for you all. You do that, and I’ll find your girl.”

  “Again, most impressive,” Ankou said, putting the empty bottle away. “Most mortals given a drop of pure, undistilled joy would do almost anything for more. This little ghost must have been very special to you.”

  Her name was Torri Lyn and, a million lifetimes ago, we had loved. She had been one of the only people in this world to see the real me and still love me. She died.

  “Joy’s only worth something if you got a reason for it,” I said. “We have a deal?” Ankou looked over to Weerasethakulakkinuoye, and the little fop nodded.

  “Yes,” Ankou said, “we have a deal.”

  FOUR

  Two hours later we were in the air on Ankou’s private jet, an Airbus A380. The thing was a fucking hotel with wings. Two levels, bars, conference rooms, a lounge, and a full kitchen with all the fawning staff to go with it. You could easily seat hundreds of people in here, crushed in cattle-car style like most folks have to fly. I wondered if the folks who flew this way could even survive a
coach class flight without therapy for the trauma. I was a long-ass way from the trailer park in Welch.

  I ordered a scotch, stretched my legs out—a luxury on most flights—and got comfy in the padded leather seat. I didn’t buckle up, a rebel even in gilded luxury. Burris was sitting across from me. He looked at me like a cat that had just swallowed a mouse past its expiration date.

  “What?” I said. His eyes flickered to the glass and then back to me. He said nothing. “Don’t like this, huh?” I said, raising the glass and taking a sip.

  “We were told you had dried yourself out,” he said.

  “Well, sucks to be ‘we’ then, don’t it?” I said. “I’m officially off the wagon. What’s your beef anyway, raised by warrior monks? Never touched the stuff? It will make Baby Jesus cry?” Something shifted behind Burris’s eyes, but his face remained stone.

  “It undercuts your performance, makes you sloppy and careless, and can leave you defenseless,” he said. “As a wizard, you should already know that; as former Nightwise, they should have trained this juvenile behavior out of you before you ever hit the streets. I don’t intend to carry your besotted ass through this. That’s all.” I noticed again that Burris had no British accent. He didn’t seem to have any accent my ear could pick up.

  “Shit,” I said. “I can conjure like Doctor-motherfucking-Strange, Master of the Mystic Arts on crank, even with a snoot full,” I said and took another drink.

  “We’ll see,” he said and lowered the back of his seat to get more comfortable. “With that kind of attitude, why did you stop?”

  “Trying to be something I fucking wasn’t for someone who should have known better,” I said. “Didn’t take.”

  “Obviously,” Burris said. He closed his eyes, and I assume he slept. Maybe he was meditating, or hibernating, or something. I don’t know what the hell Vulcans do.

  I was not happy to have a sidekick in this caper, especially one I didn’t pick myself. Burris coming along was the one term I couldn’t get Ankou to back off on. I had a large duffle bag stowed in my private freaking bedroom on this plane, which held half a mil of the Fae mobster’s money, all washed and clean as a whistle. He didn’t even blink when I told him I’d need that for walking-around money. In the seat next to me was a fourteen-thousand-dollar Solarin smartphone with better-than-military encryption, which Ankou handed me when I told him I needed ultra-secure communication to reach out to my people. But when it came to his knight, Burris, he simply ignored every argument I gave him.

  “Burris is my insurance policy,” Ankou said. “He makes sure you don’t simply take my money and disappear or go on a long vacation instead of looking for Caern. You’ll find him very unobtrusive, and he is not without his talents.”

  And that was that. So I was stuck with Burris. Swell. Talents my ass. If looking for a little girl lost comes down to a fucking firefight, I know enough on my own to get the hell out of that.

  I picked up the black-and-gold Solarin and dialed a number I knew was to a KFC in Okinawa. It was routed and rerouted about two hundred times, bounced off a few satellites, and finally was answered.

  “Talk,” a gruff bass voice on the other side of the world said.

  “Howdy, I wanted to pre-order a large twelve-piece bucket, original recipe, and large sides of chicken feet, rice balls, and squid ink for Christmas Day,” I said.

  “It’s the asshole that walks like a man,” Grinner said over the line.

  “We clean?” I asked the best damned hacker on the planet. His name was Robert Shelton, but everyone knew him by his handle, Grinner. He was one of those handful of people that Ankou had been talking about who had ridden with me and lived.

  “Affirmative,” Grinner said. “Whatever you need, Ballard, it’s already gonna cost you double, ’cause it’s you.”

  “Oh come on, really?”

  “After how you did Magdalena dirty, you’re lucky I’m taking your calls at all,” Grinner said. “She was the best fucking thing to happen to your miserable ass, and you pissed it away.”

  “Look, that was almost a year ago,” I said. “Give it a fucking rest.”

  “Double,” he said.

  “Well lucky for me I got the money to handle that,” I said.

  “Yeah, this week,” Grinner said. “You still owe me thirty K for debugging that shitty Herobrine thing that was killing people. I got mouths to feed, motherfucker.”

  “Calm your tits, Grinner,” I said. “Add the thirty thou to my bill for this one; I’ll wire you the money when we land. Okay?”

  “What idiot is giving you his ATM card?” Grinner asked.

  “The idiot I want you to dig up everything on,” I said. “His name is Theodore Ankou.”

  “The fucking alien mobster!” Grinner said. “Have you lost your fucking mind, dealing with those ass-probing motherfuckers?”

  “He’s not an alien,” I said, “he’s Fae … okay, well, they’re kind of like aliens … but not exactly.” Grinner made a whistling flying saucer sound, like something from a fifties monster movie. “Knock that shit off,” I said. “I want everything on him, his business, and his family, especially his daughter, Caern. She’s been in the wind since 2009.”

  “Oh, don’t make it too easy for me, Ballard,” Grinner said. “Okay, fifty large plus the thirty you owe me. Hell, let’s just go ahead and round that to a nice, even hundred thousand for that ‘tits’ comment … and how you walked out on Magdalena.” I sighed.

  “You’re a fucking brigand,” I said. “If I didn’t know it was going to the baby and Christine, I’d tell you to piss off. How is your beautiful wife and little Laytham?”

  “In your fucking dreams.” Grinner chuckled. “Little Turing is doing great. His mom is still a fucking smoking-hot sexy kitten MILF, and for some god-awful reason she still loves the hell out of you, hillbilly.”

  I heard Christine shout out in the background, “Hi, Ballard! Thanks for paying for Turing’s college!” I laughed.

  “Better than you deserve, asshole,” I said to Grinner, “both of them.”

  “Got that right,” he said. “Okay, man, I’ll get on it once I see the digits in my account. Try not to have a close encounter with a rectal probe if you can help it.”

  “Thanks, Mom,” I said, “I’ll send pictures. Talk soon.”

  “Out,” Grinner said, and I was listening to flat, dead silence over the line. I called one of Ankou’s people on the number he had given me and arranged for the money to be wired to Grinner’s dummy account du jour. I asked one of the nice attendants for another drink and snuggled up across the aisle from my new bestest buddy. A few benzos from the bottle in my pocket, some more scotch, and I tiptoed past the sandman into the realm of drugged, dreamless sleep.

  * * *

  We landed at the Athens International Airport. It was pretty much like every other major airport I’d ever been through, a bland cross between a shopping mall and a subway station. It did my heart good to know that the birthplace of western civilization had three frozen yogurt kiosks. From here we’d take a hovercraft over to the island of Spetses, where the super-rich played, while the folks here on the mainland watched their life savings crumble like a temple to Apollo.

  I made a quick stop at one of my drops in an airport locker here. I grabbed a few useful odds and ends, some of my clothes, fake IDs, and a fresh burner cell phone. I stashed a hunk of the cash Ankou had given me for a rainy day. Other people had houses, bedrooms, closets. I had dead drops: bus, rail, and plane lockers, and bolt holes. There was a photo of me and August Hyde taped to the door of the locker. We were laughing, sitting in a cafe in Rio. For a second, all the years folded like a paper fan, and I was beside him in that Thule bunker in the Argentinian jungle. His rune-covered Browning Hi-Power blasting away at the rustling things that had once been men, coming out of every shadow. I heard his voice, calm, like a teacher instructing a pupil, which I guess in a way he was: “Grab the brain slides, Laytham! Get the brain and go for the stairs,
boy!” I pulled the picture off the locker door, crumpled it, and dropped it in a trash can alongside greasy Sbarro boxes and discarded luggage claim tickets. I wish memories were as disposable.

  There was a bulletproof luxury SUV waiting for us on the tarmac. As we drove into airport traffic, Burris and the driver spoke softly in Greek. The knight leaned back to talk to me from the front passenger seat.

  “They told me they have a boat waiting to take us over to the island. The Ankou family has a house overlooking a private beach on the northwest side of Spetses. We’ll be staying there. Caern’s apartment is in the city on the eastern side of the island.”

  “Yeah, I caught some of that,” I said. “My Greek’s not as good as my Latin, but it will do. Kind of weird for a thirteen-year-old kid to have her own place in the middle of party central, ain’t it?”

  “Not if you’re this kind of rich,” Burris said. “Caern was a very independent kid after her mother passed away.”

  “What was your read on her?” I asked. The driver had turned onto a congested central street. Thousands of protesters were clogging the entrance to a large skyscraper that was corporate headquarters to one of the nation’s banks. The protest had spilled out onto the street, and cars were honking, drivers shouting and gesturing angrily as traffic had slowed to a crawl through the chanting, equally angry mob. Our driver swore under his breath.

  “My opinions are not going to help you find her,” Burris said.

  I shook my head and looked out the window. Our dark little air-conditioned cocoon creeped along through a screaming, shouting sea of angry faces. First it was unemployment and corruption, then the austerity shell game, then the referendum vote, then the run on the banks, insane inflation, and then the fight over immigration of refugees. Through the tinted windows, I saw a kid probably in his early twenties. He was wearing no shirt and had tattoos of Greek football team logos on his chest, arms, and back. He was pounding his fists against the bulletproof glass. His eyes were glazed over, stupid with raw hatred. I doubted he had a clue what he was protesting, but it was an excuse to meet girls, get wasted, and wreck stuff—oh and blame somebody else—an ideal little vacation from the shit pile of his own life. It’s sad how little history or people really change. We just keep doing laps. A thought occurred to me as we pulled free of the mob and the SUV accelerated again. All those times I saved the world with some snappy spell or daring last-second plan, I was saving it for a whole bunch of bullet-headed, mouth-breathing goons. No, that’s not true. I was saving it for me, to save my handsome ass. It may be a fucking circus on fire, but at least I got good seats.