Authors: Seanan McGuire
Rosemary and Rue (16 page)
The rose goblin stopped whining, watching me with wide, gleaming eyes. Good. Some flower spirits are more closely tied to their origins than others, and rose goblins tend to cling to the plants that birth them. I meant what I said: I’ve never met a rose that didn’t know Luna Torquill. Being a legend to the flowers must be interesting. It certainly keeps her busy during pruning season. I took another step forward. “Are you okay?”
The goblin sat up, whining in the back of its throat again. Rose goblins can’t talk. That makes getting information out of them an adventure all its own.
“You don’t look hurt.” I leaned forward, offering my hand. The whining stopped, replaced by something like a purr as it arched its back against my fingers. Rose goblins are built like porcupines—if you rub them the right way, you don’t have to worry about the spines. They’re sort of like people in that regard, too. “Aren’t you a friendly little guy?” It was kind of cute, really.
Opening its mouth, it displayed a fine set of needle-sharp teeth. “Nice.” It hissed. “Not so nice. What’s up?” It crouched away from my hand, rattling its spines, and arched its neck. Something red was wound around its throat. “Hey—what’ve you got there?”
Purring again, it tilted its head to show me the red velvet ribbon tied around its neck. Something silver was hanging from it. I reached down and twisted the ribbon carefully free, slipping it over the rose goblin’s head. The goblin stayed still, purring encouragingly the whole time, but even with this token assistance I pricked myself five times before I pulled away, clutching the ribbon in my hand.
I knew the key before I saw it: my hand remembered the weight of it, even though I’d never held it before. The image of a sprite with wings like autumn leaves darting out of Evening’s window, paid for its service in blood, flashed across my mind. I hadn’t been there, but I remembered. Blood has power in Faerie, and that power is greater when the blood is given freely. Only the Daoine Sidhe can ride its memories, but other races can use it in other ways—everyone needs a little bit of death. That sprite would have been able to mimic Evening’s magic for at least a night, and maybe longer. Long enough to make some smaller bargains of its own.
Faerie’s smaller citizens have their own culture and their own customs. Most of us are almost human one way or another: almost human-sized and almost human-minded. The smaller folks never acquired that “almost” and they scorn and resent the rest of us for having it. They don’t wear suits, get mortgages, or attend PTA meetings. They haunt the garden pathways, living in the space between what the eye sees and what it chooses to ignore, and they never pretend to be anything that they aren’t. I guess that makes it harder to forget what they really are, and what they are is inhuman . . . and greedy. I had no trouble believing that the sprite Evening paid would have commandeered a goblin to finish the deal without endangering itself.
The rose goblin started grooming itself as I pulled my hand away, washing the space between its front claws like a cat. I spent a moment watching it before looking down at the key. It was carved silver, covered in so many rings of ivy and roses that it was barely recognizable as a key, but it knew its nature: it knew what it was meant to do. The roses on the shaft never neared the teeth. They wouldn’t interfere. It was warm and heavy in my palm, and it gave off a pale light that colored the mist around it. I got the feeling that there were very few doors it couldn’t open. I just hoped it could handle the ones ahead.
The taste of roses was suddenly cloying on my tongue, surging back in tandem with the prickle of phantom thorns. If logic hadn’t already told me the key was important, the sudden strength of Evening’s curse would have. It was a clue, and her final gift to me. She gave me a job to do, one that might still involve the dubious privilege of dying in her service. She might also have given me the key to my own salvation.
“So where do we go now?” I asked, looking back to the car.
The rose goblin was gone, and the fog it brought with it was already thinning. I bit back a curse and bit my tongue at the same time, hissing to keep myself from shouting. The goblin was my one potential link to the lock that fit the key, and I’d been dumb enough to take my eyes off it. It was probably gone the second I looked away. Just great. Leaning against the car, I closed my eyes. The metal was freezing on my back and shoulders, but at least it stood a shot at easing my headache. I hoped so, anyway.
The key was the last piece I needed to make the situation perfectly frustrating: a murder without a motive, a curse without a cure, and now a key without a lock. If I could fit them together somehow, I would be in business. Fighting to focus past my headache, I opened my eyes and climbed back into the car, where the dome light would let me see the key more clearly and the heater would keep me from freezing.
There seemed to be no logic to the twisted brambles making up the key’s head and handle; they were tangled like real vines, and looked like they’d keep on growing if left alone. For all I knew, they would. I narrowed my eyes, looking for the place where the briars began. There were differences in the lines of metalwork if I looked closely enough. Some of the tangles were picked out in darker metals—copper, bronze, or gold—while others blended back into the silver handle. I chose a vine outlined in gold, following it through an overhang of carved ivy and rose branches until it faded behind a triple-twist of interlocked thorns. Jackpot.
Threes are sacred in Faerie. We have three Courts and three rulers, the absent King and Queens that par ented our myriad races. Most of our legends say there are three roads to any destination: the hard way, the easy way, and the long way. Evening was a traditionalist. Even when she played human, part of her wasn’t willing to fully hide what she was, and so her human name was Evelyn Winters, and the name of her human business was Third Road Enterprises. She brokered her faerie gold and natural skills through the doors of Third Road, and no one ever looked twice, even though the name announced what she was hiding.
Third Road Enterprises, whose offices were coincidentally just a short drive from where I was studying the key she’d been so anxious to protect. I don’t believe in coincidence. Everything happens for a reason in this world. I had a destination again. Now . . . well, now I just needed a lock to go with my key.
NINE
THIRD ROAD ENTERPRISES WAS DARK when I arrived. According to the clock on the dashboard, it was a little less than an hour to dawn, when the janito rial staff would probably start to arrive. The rest of the staff wouldn’t show up for a few hours after that, if they came to work at all. It was two days before Christmas, after all. If there was any time when I’d be reasonably able to get in and out undetected, it was now.
Despite my best efforts, I found myself wondering how many of the people who worked there would spend the next few days feigning sorrow before suddenly finding work a lot more pleasant. Evening was even worse with people than I am; she froze them out, while I just let them pass me by. Most folks would forget me if I disappeared again, but they’d remember Evening. They always remembered Evening: she was too wild and strange and fair to forget.
The people in that building would never have believed in Evening’s true face. They thought they knew her, but they were wrong. They knew a woman as human as they were, and I was willing to bet none of them ever looked for anything deeper. They’d never needed to, because in their world, you put Faerie away when you turned off the nursery lights. There’s no place for us in the human world these days, and still we can’t let go.
And when the hell did it go back to being “we”?
I walked toward the building, grateful for the lack of security guards. Considering my stained and increasingly grimy gown, no one was going to believe I had a good reason to be entering an upscale office building in the middle of the night. There’s pushing the bounds of credibility, and then there’s just getting silly.
The taste of roses faded as I walked. It was like playing a game of Hot or Cold with the rules reversed: the closer I got to my goal, the harder it got to know where I was going. If I caught Evening’s killer, the curse would snap and the roses would fade altogether, leaving me free to live or die as I chose. My fingers continued tracing the outline of the key cupped in my palm, trying to puzzle out its secrets. Evening had been more worried about it than she was about her own life. Why? Borrowed memories moved in the back of my mind, hissing,
The key will open the way in Goldengreen,
in her voice. I stopped where I was, almost stumbling.
The key will open the way in Goldengreen,
in her voice. I stopped where I was, almost stumbling.
Riding the blood isn’t an exact art: bits and pieces of the person you travel with can linger for days afterward, their secrets shaking loose like sand through a sieve. I hadn’t thought of the key in conjunction with Goldengreen before. It made perfect sense. I didn’t want it to.
Goldengreen was Evening’s knowe, and the gateway to her small holdings in the Summerlands. It was locked and sealed to her desires, and the idea of going in didn’t appeal. Once I set foot inside the boundaries of Goldengreen, the odds of being caught would go through the roof. I hadn’t considered that. What would someone who’d been able to kill Evening do to me? Probably nothing I’d enjoy. Not that I had any choice—not with Evening’s curse egging me on. If the key unlocked something in Goldengreen, Goldengreen was my next destination.
The front door wasn’t locked, despite the lateness of the hour. I hesitated with my hand on the handle, then walked inside and crossed to the elevator. There were no security guards. I still didn’t relax until the elevator doors closed between me and the lobby, and I was headed upward, toward the administrative offices on the ninth floor. The last thing I wanted was to be questioned about what I was doing there, but my luck was holding.
It couldn’t last. The door from the elevator lobby on the ninth floor was locked. Worse, it was one of those new keycard locks, which meant I couldn’t even try picking it. I rattled the handle a few times before I gave up, scowling. “Great,” I said, “now what am I supposed to do?”
Sometimes reality stops being subtle in favor of smacking you upside the head. Standing in front of a locked door with a magic key in your hand probably counts. I lifted the key. Somehow, not even the dimly flickering safety lights could make it look like the tacky stage prop it should have been.
“Will you let me in?” Hoping that I wasn’t completely insane, I pressed it against the lock, and said, “I’m here by leave of the Countess of Goldengreen.”
Nothing happened. I hit the door with the heel of my hand, saying, “Open sesame, damn it.”
The key flared, and the door swung open.
I gaped. Then, recovering my senses, I stepped through the door before it could change its mind. It made sense, in a twisted sort of way: most people would assume that Evening had her locks set to the more florid formal patterns. She could keep almost everyone out just by keeping things simple.
The office was almost totally dark. I pulled the door shut behind me, easing it closed, and stayed where I was, giving my eyes a chance to adjust. I hadn’t seen any guards or tripped any alarms that I was aware of, but that didn’t mean turning on the lights would be a good idea—and I, prepared as always, had left my flashlight in the trunk. Finding a path through the office would’ve been a cakewalk for Evening or my mother, but I knew the limits of my changeling’s eyes. If I didn’t take time to adjust, I was going to smash my shins against someone’s desk.
Unfortunately, my eyes weren’t adjusting. My head hurt, and thanks to the expensively tinted windows, there was almost no ambient light in the office. “Next time I bring the flashlight,” I muttered. The key in my hand suddenly blazed a brilliant white. I jerked my face away with a small, incoherent cry.
It took a moment for the afterimages to fade. When I was sure I hadn’t been blinded for life, I turned back toward the key, which was glowing with a rich, rosy light. I stared at it for a moment before shaking my head, muttering, “Lovely,” under my breath. Holding the key in front of me like a strange art nouveau torch, I began picking my way through the maze of desks.
The work spaces were almost all decorated with some small, personal touch—a photograph, a selection of small toys, a child’s drawing. One of the desks was practically a shrine to Tinker Bell, decorated with a half dozen ceramic representations of the world’s most famous pixie. I paused, looking at a figurine of the little blonde bitch posed coyly atop a thimble. Every changeling in the world would love to shove her into a microwave, but Disney, alas, is more powerful than most of us could ever hope to be. Shaking my head, I moved along.
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