Tai

I stood in that messed up excuse for a club, a messed up excuse for a siren staring at bad news incarnate and wondering how the hell I got there.

Fi was a staunch presence at my elbow, somehow managing to be calming despite the state she was in. And I barely resisted the urge to launch myself at Phélan.

Not sure if I was planning to kiss him or slaughter him where he stood.

He looked… unchanged. Tall; some would say intimidatingly so. Longish dark hair rather mussed, thanks to Daix’s tender ministrations. He’s not handsome, precisely, but he might as well be; all that catlike, predatory grace is dangerously attractive, not to mention that smile—

‘You cannot seriously have the fucking cheek to smoulder at me,’ I said, and he was, the bastard. Cross between a brooding, Byronic stare and some kind of puppy eyes routine. Deeply unfair.

I threw my shoes at him.

He blinked. ‘What?’

‘What. Are. You. Doing here?’

‘You called me.’

‘And I expected you to show up at my house! What are you doing here?’

‘I followed you. What are you doing here?’

‘Our investigations led us here,’ I said with infinite dignity. Then I began to laugh, because he looked so hang-dog, and my knees were weak with tension and possibly relief, and I never have managed to hang onto my dignity for very long anyway.

Phélan merely looked more confused. He glanced at Fionn, who sighed.

‘Do you know anything about this place?’ said Fi, with remarkable presence of mind.

‘Nothing whatsoever.’

The silence stretched. Fi would be giving him the intense stare, the one that promises to vivisect the man if he proved himself a liar.

I caught my breath and stopped laughing, assisted by the sobering sensation of cold water soaking through my gown. ‘I’ll say this right now,’ I said. ‘If you turn out to be mixed up with this shit, I will personally remove your delicates one at a time and feed them to you.’

Phélan’s brows rose towards his hairline. ‘My delicates?’

I pointed a finger at his face. ‘Eyeballs.’ I pointed lower. ‘Spleen. One kidney, perhaps both. Testicles—’

‘Okay. Stop. I get the picture.’

‘Lovely.’

He sighed, and ran a hand through his already tousled hair. ‘Why did you call me?’

Daix moved behind him, and his eyes flicked to follow her progress. She grinned. ‘Don’t worry, pretty. I won’t hurt you again… yet.’

‘Daix,’ I snarled. ‘Knock it off.’

Phélan rolled his eyes. I had to give him credit for not wiping the floor with her face; he could have. He returned his gaze to my face instead, and waited.

‘We need help,’ I said, bluntly. ‘We’re over our heads in trouble.’

Phélan stared at me. ‘Did you just say you need help?’

‘Correct.’

‘Thetai Sarra Antha? Asking for help?’

‘We’re eighty years out of practice and fae are getting killed. Get over it.’

His gaze sharpened. ‘This is about that selkie.’

‘Narasel,’ said Fionn. ‘She was one of my models. We’ve got two more selkies known to be missing, there may be more—’

‘We were hoping to find them here,’ I said. ‘Fat chance I guess.’

‘There’s no one here,’ Phélan agreed. ‘I’ve looked around.’

‘Someone came out,’ I said, frowning. ‘As we arrived. Drunk chick. Could’ve been human.’

‘Possibly an illusion,’ said Fionn.

‘Obviously an illusion,’ said Daix in disgust. ‘Look, this whole thing has patently been set up for our benefit.’

‘A trap,’ I agreed. ‘Considering our names were announced when we came in, though I don’t remember hearing yours.’ This last I directed at Phélan, who gave the faintest of smiles.

‘I didn’t exactly walk openly through the front door,’ he said.

‘You sneaked.’

‘Effortlessly.’

‘Even so,’ said Fionn. ‘The question remains: why the trap? What are we here for?’

‘In case you were wondering,’ said Daix. ‘The front door locked behind me when I came in.’

‘What?’ I said, whirling around. Too damned late.

It took us a few moments to establish that there were no other doors into or out of the place, and no windows either; the ones we’d seen on the outer façade were bricked up on the inside. And the front door, through which we had so casually strolled a half-hour or so ago, was completely impenetrable.

‘Well, then,’ said Fionn, and began to strip off her gown.

‘Fi,’ I said, eyeing this procedure with grave misgiving. ‘What are you doing?’

‘I’m not sure what you or Daix are supposed to be here for,’ said Fionn serenely, dropping her gown in a heap on the floor. ‘But I clearly have a date with that pool of water.’

‘You’re not going back in?’

‘How else would you like to proceed?’

‘Search,’ I said, groping for a sensible answer. ‘There must be something else here—’

Fionn just looked at Phélan, whose negative came swiftly and with certainty.

‘And we’re just going to trust him, are we?’ I snapped.

‘You tell us,’ said Fionn.

Phélan gave me a long look, mostly inscrutable, but I read a trace of interest in that gaze. Was I going to trust him? Even now?

‘Damnit,’ I muttered. ‘Fi, you are not doing this alone.’

She merely shrugged one shoulder, already leaving us, heading back to that scummy pool of water. The thing was too pretty by far; nothing but disaster could come of this.

‘Wait,’ I called. ‘Fi.’

She paused, but barely. The water had some kind of hold on her, and she was losing the battle.

I divested myself of my layers of velvet, and followed after. ‘Daix, hold the fort?’ I called back.

‘Yeah,’ Daix muttered. ‘By all means, give me the fun job.’

‘Tai?’

That was Phélan. I stopped, and turned back.

He held my gaze, his stare dark and intense. ‘Be careful.’

‘Really can’t promise,’ I said, and turned my back on him. Fionn was wading into the pool and I couldn’t let her get too far ahead of me.

‘Fi,’ I called, and broke into a trot. ‘Wait.’

She didn’t. The waters rose up to welcome her; she walked until she hit the very centre of the pool; then, in a flurry of ocean-scented spray and moon-pale foam, she was gone.

‘Shit,’ I spat, and ran.

I wasn’t sure if the waters would take me the way they did her; they had left Daix untouched, after all. But I wasn’t Daix, and besides… I had Fionn’s pearls.

I never did quite grasp what those things do for her. She doesn’t talk about it, and I haven’t asked. That they have some deep link to her selkie magics seems clear enough; beyond that, I haven’t a clue.

The waters wanted them, though. The pearls lit up again the instant I stepped into the pool, glowing that eerie sea-green, and I felt a coolness emanating from them, a deep and foreboding chill. I kept a tight grip on them as I waded farther into the water, willing it to take me as it had Fionn.

Ocean spray flew up, filling my nose with sea air. An arctic chill seeped through to my bones, and I began to shiver so hard my teeth clattered together. I heard Daix shout something unintelligible behind me, just as my vision blurred; then ice-water filled up my lungs and I began to choke.

‘Tai.’ That was Phélan, enraged; I distantly heard footsteps; but before he could reach me, the bottom rushed out of my world and I fell into darkness.

Fionn’s pearls, still clutched in one hand, glowed like stars in the deep, but that’s all, they shone, what use was a light to me when I was drowning—

Not that I took it calmly when something tried to take them— the currents whirled me around until I was dizzy, and tore at my hands, trying to loosen my grip on them, but they’re Fionn’s, and if I had to die before I’d give up something important to her then so be it—

The water wouldn’t end, and I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t see, couldn’t breathe—

Something heavy barrelled into me, and I was borne upwards — I hoped it was upwards — my lungs were on fire—

My head broke the surface, encountered clear air. I choked, vomiting up water — and then dragged in an enormous lungful of sweet, sweet oxygen, surprised that I possessed the power to do so.

After a few panicked, heaving breaths, I calmed enough to look around me.

Lights bobbed on the near horizon. The vague shapes of darkened verdure loomed from the shadows, gently limned in wan moonlight. A park. I was in a river, winding through a park.

Swimming in slow circles around me was Fionn, seal-shaped and pissed off. I knew this from the choppy nature of her movements; ordinarily she’s a being of effortless grace.

I took a few more breaths, marvelling at my capacity to do so without choking. Fi and her ways with water.

‘Okay,’ I said aloud. ‘Maybe that wasn’t the best idea.’

Fionn’s only response to this handsome concession was to shove me with her nose, in the process alerting me to the existence of a humbling quantity of deep aches in my rather abused physique. I’d have bruises tomorrow.

‘I’m sorry!’ I said. ‘Fuck’s sake, should I have just watched you wander into danger alone?’

Fionn said something, but since it emerged garbled, and she kept slipping into a seal’s chattering vocabulary, I didn’t understand a word.

I could guess, though.

‘It’s not that I thought you couldn’t handle it,’ I said, spinning in a slow circle as I trod water. Nothing else of much note caught my eye. ‘It’s that nobody should be running off without backup. Didn’t we learn that? Besides, how the fuck could you know that you could handle it?’

The seal vanished, leaving a wringing-wet Fionn in its place. She snatched her pearls from me and restored them to her wrist, after which she visibly calmed down. ‘If you hadn’t had those you’d be dead,’ she informed me. ‘You’d have drowned long before I got to you.’

‘If I hadn’t had them, maybe you’d be dead,’ I retorted. ‘Unless I miss my guess, we’re in the Thames Barrier Park, a ways upstream from where Narasel’s body was found. Whatever happened to her was supposed to be your fate, and it’s got to have something to do with your unusual jewellery choices. Do all selkies have those pearls?’

‘In a manner of speaking,’ said Fionn shortly.

I waited, but she said nothing more. ‘And?’ I prompted. ‘Now isn’t the time to be secretive about this stuff, Fi.’

‘You might thank me for saving your life.’

‘You might thank me for saving yours.’

‘You did no such thing. If the pearls are a danger, why aren’t you dead?’

I sighed, beginning to shiver again. ‘Other than your own tender ministrations — for which, indeed, I thank you — I’m not a selkie. Whatever power took us there had a strong interest in your pearls, Fi, but me? I felt … flushed, like waste. Like something else was meant to happen between that pool and this river, and we skipped to the end. Because I didn’t meet the criteria, and apparently, neither did you.’

‘A delightful piece of wild speculation, for which we have no evidence.’

‘True,’ I agreed. ‘But when Narasel showed up in these waters she was stone dead, and you palpably aren’t. And sure, we don’t know that she ever went near those weird-as-fuck pools, but we have quite the stack of coincidences piling up if she didn’t.’

I heard her sigh. Then she had hold of me, and was towing me towards the distant bank with remarkable strength, considering her rail-thin physique. ‘I can swim,’ I informed her.

She ignored that. ‘You’re freezing to death,’ she informed me calmly.

‘Fair point.’

We reached the bank, and I was mercilessly shoved up and out onto the hard, cold ground. I got up at once and began pacing, as if that would somehow make me warmer. Honestly. ‘One day,’ I said, somewhat indistinctly around my chattering teeth. ‘We’re back together for one day and already we’re wandering the city in our underwear in the small hours of the morning, soaked to the skin, after a near brush with death. Still got it, Fi.’ I punched the air with one fist.

‘Good,’ said Fionn. ‘If you’re capable of joking, you probably aren’t about to drop dead.’

‘I love you, too.’

‘As for your speculations,’ she said, ignoring that with aplomb. ‘I wouldn’t say that I think you’re wrong. Something… tried to…’ She paused. ‘I felt… drained. Downed like a cup of water, and spat out again. I barely had the energy to take seal-form.’

‘And the pearls?’ I prompted. ‘What the hell are they, Fi?’

In answer, Fionn appeared before me, and the moonlight somehow caught and lingered in her skin, her hair; she glimmered with pure magic, and every mote of light, every drop of water clinging to her pale skin was a pearl, or something like it.

‘Oh,’ I said.

‘If someone stripped you of your voice,’ said Fionn, letting the radiance fade once more. ‘You could imagine how it feels to be stripped of my pearls.’

‘I don’t know. I only have the one voice, but you seem to be well supplied with pearls.’

Fionn trailed her fingers in the water, sending up a spray. Each droplet became a fresh, lambent pearl, and sank slowly into the deep. ‘These, though,’ she said, indicating her bracelet, ‘are the oldest and rarest that I have. It would take me a century to replace them.’

‘What do they have to do with your shapeshifting? Your sealskin?’

‘Nothing. Take my pearls and you weaken me. Take my skin and… you enslave me.’

I paced faster. ‘I wonder if we’re barking up the wrong tree here. Is this about selkie-skins, or is it about selkie’s pearls?’ I said. ‘Or both? And while we’re thinking about that, how about we go get warm or something? I haven’t exactly tried, but I’m pretty sure I can’t sing my way out of a bout of hypothermia.’

‘Besides that, Daix and Phélan are still trapped.’

‘Yep, we should absolutely do something decisive and heroic about that, too.’

I might also assert that it was a warmish night in April and no one was in any danger of freezing to death if they hadn’t taken an impromptu and ill-advised dip in the river first.

Anyway, somewhat better clad, Fionn and I made our way back to the Selkie’s Pearls club in rather grim silence. I was thinking, and no doubt Fi was, too. Trying to puzzle the pieces together. What did this peculiar club have to do with Narasel, or Mearil, or Melly? I could well believe that Cellann might have been brought there by Brianne, if we hadn’t intervened. Having got the idiot girl’s attention with an expensive gift and admittance to an exclusive club, it wouldn’t have taken much to coax her into leaving Eventide again in Brianne’s company. Only drop a few hints about a joint even more exclusive, and the foolish child would go anywhere, with anyone.

No doubt, either, that those pools of water would have had much the same effect on Cellann that they’d had on Fionn. And with nobody to intervene, she would have wandered straight in. Pearls and all.

And gone… where? Because while Narasel had turned up dead in those same river-waters, Melly and Mearil had not.

At least, not yet.

So where were they?

I was becoming increasingly certain that the operation was more about selkies’ powers than their skins. Not that a canny and ruthless operator wouldn’t take full advantage of an opportunity to make a few quid on the side; I hadn’t forgotten Tully’s tip about a few scummy sluagh and a selkie-skin sale.

The question of what we had to do with it was a whole other problem. We weren’t being targeted, precisely; if we were, Fionn would have been the first selkie taken. And it wouldn’t have been all that hard to do it. Hit her quickly, take her by surprise; she was a fashion designer now, no longer the hard and wary fatale of yesteryear.

No, we weren’t the target. Not exactly. But we were being baited.

I shook my head. ‘I can’t make it make sense.’

‘Not yet,’ Fionn agreed. ‘But we do not lack for leads, now. There’s much work to be done.’

‘Right. Get Daix on it, for a start. Use her surveillance, her networks, for information. I’ll get back on Tully at the Puca, see if I can track them from the sealskin end. And you—’

‘I have a plan,’ said Fionn.

‘Super,’ I said, rather warily, for there was a cold note in her voice I didn’t like. I mean, Fi’s always a bit chilly, but this was diamond-hard. ‘Why don’t we talk it over?’

‘Later.’

‘Now would be—’

She made a cease and desist gesture. ‘Later. Look.’

I followed the direction of her pointing finger, and saw… a faint flicker on the horizon, a glimmer of light behind the looming shadows of darkened buildings.

Fire.

‘Oh, for—’ I snarled, and began to run. ‘Fuck’s sake. Daix.’

We made it back to Selkie’s Pearls in two minutes flat, and there to greet us was a vision of actual nightmare. The club, such as it had been, was gone. At least, some of it was probably still there, but between us and it was a wall of green-tinged flame, roaring with all the infernal voices of hell. Black smoke poured gleefully into the sky, and from somewhere within I heard the protesting groans of a collapsing building.

I noted with distant approval that the fire was neatly contained. Not a lick of flame touched the buildings on either side of the club.

‘So they’re dead,’ I gasped, pausing to recover my breath. The heat of those flames was beyond anything natural. I took several steps back.

‘Oh, completely,’ said Fionn, watching impassively. ‘No doubt about it.’

‘Nothing could survive such an inferno.’ I turned away from the fire and scanned the shadows, eyes narrowed. ‘Nothing left for us to do but mourn. Deeply. And for always.’

‘Oh, fine,’ growled Daix, and emerged from an alley. Greenish flames wove through her fingers, and lit up her eyes. ‘Couldn’t you have been a bit sad?’

‘You wanted us to pretend?’

‘Like you aren’t a master of pretence, Tai.’

‘Yes, but I only roll out the cold-blooded manipulation for special people.’

Daix scowled, and the flames around her fingers died out.

‘I always liked that cool eye effect,’ I added. ‘Creepy as fuck.’

She grinned. ‘Isn’t it?’

‘You had to burn the place down, I suppose?’

‘How else was I supposed to get out?’

‘Something something less blatantly destructive, but remembering I’m talking to Daix — no. There was no other conceivable way.’

‘Nice of you two to ride to my rescue, though.’ She blew us a kiss.

‘Yes, also we’re fine, thanks for asking.’

‘Was on my way to the river to pull your lifeless corpses out of it. Now I can go straight home and put my favourite socks on, yay.’

‘You have favourite socks.’

‘There are people who don’t have favourite socks?’

I abandoned the whole line of enquiry. ‘You managed not to also burn Phélan alive and screaming, I assume?’

‘Why would you assume that.’

Fionn intervened before I could beat Daix to death with her own boots. ‘We did end up in the river,’ she said, calmly. ‘We’ll compose a suitable report about it shortly.’

‘Reports? Seriously? Fi, I thought we’d moved past this.’

‘We need detail. Writing things down helps.’

Daix sighed.

‘And yes, I expect you to produce a similar report of your findings for us.’

‘Damnit.’

‘Also, while I fully understand and support your burning of the club—’

‘See, Tai? Fi gets it.’

‘—if you were hoping to keep a low profile hereafter that’s more or less busted it, hasn’t it?’

‘That place identified me by name, and locked the door after me. What would be the point?’

Fionn inclined her head. ‘Perhaps that’s fair. But—’

‘Fi,’ I said. ‘She’s right. It’s too late for caution. It was too late from the first moment they took Narasel. We’re supposed to be involved in this.’

‘I just… I’m not used to working this way.’

I wrapped a comforting arm around her. ‘I know. I miss the days of calculated lying, ruthless deceit, and stealthing around in fabulous disguises too. Maybe next time.’ I squeezed her shoulders, and released her. ‘What we are now is a crew of pissed-off Fatales, with awe-inspiring power to cause harm.’

‘Right,’ said Daix, and stomped one booted foot for emphasis. ‘It’s time to kick some ass.’

‘You’ve been watching way too many action movies,’ I told her.

‘Define this “too many”.’

‘Can we return to the subject of Phélan just for a second?’

‘What about him.’

‘Still breathing, yes or no?’

‘I don’t see how that’s any of my business.’

‘It—’

‘Or yours, either.’

‘It’s my business because I asked him here. Sort of. If he got burned to death by my pyromaniac maverick of a partner it’s a little bit my problem, isn’t it?’

‘If you’re going to insist on mooning around after moody sluagh types I don’t see what’s so wrong with Rudy. He’s cute.’

‘Daix.’

‘Fine. He’s alive, okay? But only because I love you.’

‘And you stashed him where exactly?’

‘I stashed him nowhere. Where he’s stashed himself, who knows.’

If he was still lurking around somewhere and had any intention of showing himself, he’d have done so by now. I suppressed a traitorous feeling of disappointed hurt, and firmly dismissed the subject. He was fine. He could tend his own damned burns. ‘Okay. It’s time to retreat and regroup. Fi, I still think you weren’t supposed to be making it out of here tonight, so you might want to be extra careful.’

‘As in, how?’

‘As in, don’t go home. Or back to your studio.’

‘But you’ll be fine to go back to your home, considering your own damned roommate is among the missing?’

Oops. I’d touched a nerve. ‘I know you can handle literally anything,’ I said. ‘But I also know you need sleep, and nobody does a great job of fighting off mortal peril while unconscious.’

‘Fair,’ said Fionn. ‘Where then do you suggest I go?’

‘You, nowhere. We are going to my bolt hole.’

‘You have a bolt hole?’ said Daix. ‘Oh no, is it a secret bolt hole? A place no one could possibly know about but you?’

‘Yes, I’m sure you know all about it,’ I said. ‘But no one else has had quite your incentive for tracking my every movement, now have they?’

‘We’re going,’ said Fi, sounding weary.

‘I have hot chocolate,’ I offered. ‘And excellent socks.’

‘Was that an invitation?’ said Daix. ‘I can’t always tell around all the sarcasm.’

‘Yes, and it expires in ten seconds.’

‘My house hasn’t been compromised.’

‘Six seconds.’

‘I could go there right now.’

‘Three.’

‘Get my own, favourite socks on.’

‘And expired.’

‘Damn you, Tai.’

‘Three-person chocolate and sock party it is.’