Winter (The Manhattan Exiles) (2 page)

The D.C. Metro tunnels are nothing like the rambling underground train tracks you find in New York City. First off, the Metro’s a lot newer. And smaller. You won’t find any abandoned stations or forgotten architectural marvels buried beneath the Capitol.

And then there’s the third rail running between all the tracks. One slip, one misstep, and you’re fried like an egg. That unpleasant possibility, plus an overabundance of cameras, keeps the average track walker out of the tunnels.

I’m not the average track walker. I know my little piece of the Green Line between L’Enfant and Union Station better than most people know the way to their
own fridge. I’m unusually surefooted. And although it’s possible a train could sneak up on me if I were distracted, it’s very unlikely.

I don’t indulge in distractions. I’ve got too much to lose.

Still, when I’m alone, I have to keep away from the round spy lenses in the ceiling. I have to scrape the knuckles of one hand on the curve of the tunnel wall. I take the headphones out of my ears, and close my eyes because in the false twilight I’m much better deaf
and
blind.

So I didn’t see the mouse when she skittered out of the shadows. But I knew she was there before she’d climbed my pant leg and settled on my shoulder.

“What was it?”

Gabby is an elder, one of the original
aes sí
. Her voice is the only sound in this city of man that doesn’t make me want to press my hands against my ears and weep. This is a very good thing, because she was sent to the Capitol as my chaperone, and she takes the job seriously.

She also likes to chatter. Which isn’t really her fault.

“Murder.”

I paced carefully down the tunnel, counting strides. There was a break in the shadows as we passed Penn. The station was closed, but the emergency lights pricked the backs of my eyelids. Then we crossed back into the dim tunnel.

“Sorcery?”

“
No.”

The mouse exhaled in relief. Her paws were busy in my hair, grooming. Another thing she couldn’t help, and another reason I needed to get my hair cut sooner rather than later.

“Nothing to bother Himself about, then.”

“
I didn’t say that.”

Her paws stilled. Her tail twitched against my neck.
“
Tell me.”

I considered. In the near distance I could smell Chinatown, which would also be closed. My stomach rumbled. Two hot dogs and I was still hungry. I wanted sushi. Or donuts. And that coffee, because it was going to be a long night, and already it was almost dawn.

“What did Lolo bring in for breakfast?”

“
Winter!”
She nipped my ear. Most of the time Gabby doesn’t remember she isn’t really a mouse. I think she doesn’t want to mourn the life she lost. It’s a less painful to forget a wound than to keep poking at it.

“
Blood magic,” I admitted. “Gleaming skull, no body. Lots of nasty smelling fluids.”

The mouse made a hissing sound. Gabby had once helped Himself hunt down the most desperate of monsters: an
aes sí
who practiced blood magic on our own kind.

“
Mortal,” I said. “And whatever he was trying for didn’t work. It smelled off, interrupted.”

Gabby pressed her head against
my throat.

“
And still,”
she said, tinged with sorrow, “
it was murder.”

I walked the rest of the way home with my eyes open.

Richard met us on the tracks just past Judiciary Square. He held an old oil lamp in one hand, the kind you usually find in antique shops or on the mantle of fancy houses. A flame danced in the glass chimney, and kerosene shown orange through the beveled pot.

“Have we work?”
he asked, lifting the lamp over the tracks to guide us.

“
After I eat,” I promised.

“
Are you never full?”

“
It’s breakfast time.”

Richard ignored my wounded glare. His delicate features remained impassive in the flickering light. The carefully knotted cravat at his throat looked crisp and clean, and the green velvet coat he’d stolen from the Smithsonian was dust free. I suspected his trousers and lace up boots were also museum relics.

Just before Union Station Richard turned sharply right. He let me hold his lamp as he unlocked a grate in the tunnel wall with the key he kept on a chain around his neck. I brushed past him, waiting on the steps as he locked the gate again behind us. Richard took the light back and led the way forward as we descended beneath the track.

“
He’s been worried,”
Gabby cautioned.

“
Not worried,”
Richard returned.
“Frustrated.
The television’s gone off again. Lolo’s incessant whining is giving me a migraine.”

Richard, even when he wasn’t worried, sounded like a small bird beating its wings against a high wind. His dark curls were tussled, probably because he’d been pulling on them in aggravation.

“Leave Lolo to me.”

Fifteen feet into the ground the stair ended against a pair of steel doors. I punched our code into the grimy keypad. There was a faint quiver as the lock released. A late model fish eye watched us from the ceiling, but because we were with Richard no one at the other end noticed our passing.

According to Richard our home beneath the Metro was once a side track for the Transit Authority’s money train. Then technology made the money train mostly obsolete, and the tunnel was turned into a dumping ground for old train parts, stripped escalators, and pipe. The passageway is maybe as long as a football field, and not much wider than a subway car.

Lolo says it’s like living in the belly of a snake.

Richard found the tunnel by mistake and saw possibilities in the junk heap. By the time I trailed him to his lair, he’d spent more than a year cleaning and sorting, and he’d made the place almost livable.

The T.A. cut off electricity to the passage in the 1980s. Richard managed to hijack a piece of the main line. Now we have two strings of bare bulbs running the length of the ceiling and enough extra juice to power a microwave, a mini fridge, and Lolo’s precious television.

I don’t think the place was ever heated. We’d hung rugs and blankets from the ceiling, dividing the corridor into rooms, cutting the draft as best we could.

And you’d be surprised how easy it is to grow a collection of abandoned mattresses. The entire floor of Lolo’s room is covered with mismatched box springs and pillow tops. He’s a restless sleeper.

That night the abandoned money line sparkled. Every one of Richard’s kerosene lamps were lit, placed here and there on the floor between the old tracks, or in niches on the wall. It was a fire hazard of epic proportions, but it was the most beautiful thing I’d seen all day, Washington Monument included.

“You said the television was out.” I glanced sideways at Richard. “You didn’t say we’d lost power entirely.”

“
East Grid’s shut down.”
He shrugged. “
It’s out of my hands
.”

“
There’s been a murder,”
Gabby explained. She clamored down my back, and sat on the floor between Richard’s boots. “
On the tracks.”

“
Not on the tracks, exactly. Did you crack the vent?” I asked. The burning kerosene used to make me dizzy and sick but I’d grown used to it. Still, I didn’t intend to die of suffocation on a secondhand mattress.

Richard smiled a little, nodding. The back of the tunnel is his provenance. Most of the time the rest of us aren’t willing to brave the accumulation o
f junk he’s sorted into ceiling-high piles.

“
Lolo!” I shucked off my coat, and hung it on the rack Richard had fashioned out of copper pipe and old train hitches. “What’s breakfast?” I thought I could smell fried rice through the clouds of kerosene.

We picked our way past the lamps, and I pushed back a pair of heavy velvet curtains we used to divide the entry from our ‘kitchen’.

“Yum.” I inhaled, greedy. “You hit Mr. Shu’s.”

Lolo, sitting hunched over the monstrous creation Richard called a dining room table, refused to look up. An especially elaborate lamp burned
next to a pile of bulging takeout bags.

“
Uh oh.” I hooked a stool with my foot and settled down to nosh. Richard shuffled paper plates into a circle around the table, then followed suit. “Which rerun are we missing this morning?”

Lolo kept his eyes on his plate as I shared out noodles and ginger beef. Gabby wound her way up a table leg, and stuck her nose into a serving of pineapple chicken.

“Lolo. You know I can’t hear what you’re saying unless you actually spit it out.”

He slouched almost into the fried rice.
“
James Bond marathon on local. I was halfway through Goldfinger. And Richard won’t fix it.”

Where Richard’s a desperate bird in a storm, Lolo’s so cold he’s almost frostbite. You wouldn’t think it, because he’s generally all smiles and wise
-ass. For a twelve year old human, he’s an excellent fraud.

“
Richard can’t do anything about it until the T.A. decides to throw the switch back on. And you should have been asleep four hours ago. The sun’s almost up.”

Lolo sells papers to the morning rush hour. He stands on a curb in Dupont Circle, long dreads corralled under a baseball cap, and plays romantic ballads on his battered harmonica when he isn’t hawking the paper. In a world where every other person is connected to a news app, Lolo still manages to make plenty of money selling words printed on paper.

His boss loves him, and manages to ignore child labor laws so long as Lolo keeps bringing in fistfuls of dough.

“
If I’d gone to sleep you’d be waking me up now. And then I’d be all sick-like and no good to you.”
He finally met my stare
. “Right?”

“
Probably,” I admitted. “But you have to sleep sometime, Lolo. Eat that broccoli.”

“
Broccoli tastes like fart.”
He took a helping anyway. “
What is it this time? Drug dealers, gang snuff or sorcery?”

“
None of the above.”

Richard paused, fork suspended, noodles dangling.
“
Sluagh?”

I wasn’t sure I liked his eager
anticipation. Gabby muttered wordless mousy syllables under her breath.

“
No. Perfectly mortal blood magic gone off.” I slid from my seat in search of the coffee carafe, and then swore in surprise when the tunnel lights flashed abruptly on. “That was quick.”

Lolo craned his neck, trying to see past curtains to the clock in my room.
“
They must have finished clean up. Ninety minutes until the station opens. We going?”

“
Grab your things. We’re going.”

We walked the Metro back to the crime scene. With Richard at my side I didn’t have to worry about being seen, and when the trains aren’t running the tunnels are the easiest way to get around.

Gabby ran ahead, flitting from track to wall. Lolo walked in the middle, head
cocked, listening. Richard and I made up the tail. He tapped the watch fob on his belt with a gloved hand, but he didn’t speak so I couldn’t guess what he was thinking.

Bran’s team was efficient. The police tape was gone, and the walls and floor gleamed, an unusually clean patch in the grimy underground. The Sunday morning commuters would
stare and wonder, then board their trains and forget.

Gabby jumped onto the platform and snuffled about. Richard hoisted himself after. Lolo kept walking east down the tracks.

I didn’t have to snuffle. The stink of blood and violence lodged in the back of my throat.

“
You are correct,”
the
aes sí
confirmed
. “A waste of life but nothing to do with us.”

“
Maybe.”

I stood below the platform and turned in a slow circle, carefully avoiding the third rail, trying to decide what it was that made the nape of my neck twitch.

Richard was rooting around at the foot of the frozen escalator. He straightened, and held something out on his palm. “
Rock salt.”

“
Probably came off some tourist’s pretzel,”
Lolo guessed.

Richard walked to the edge of the floor, and held his hand over the tracks so I could see. The rock salt was very white against his black glove. Thick chunks, too big to be part of someone’s lunch. And mixed in with the salt
, shards of polished ivory.

“
Bone,” I confirmed. “Human bone. He cast a Summoning. Or tried to.”