Michael Stackpole - Wolf and Raven

"Welcome to Jack O's Lantern," she smiled.

Something inside me died. "Jack O's Lantern?"

"The very same. Table for one?"

I blinked twice, then shook my head. "I'm meeting someone. A guy, mid-forties…" Her nose wrinkled in distaste. "In the back. He's nursing a beer."

I smiled. "Bring us both another."

Leaving her to traipse through the corpgeeks in synthleather trying to look tough at the bar, I made my way toward the back. Even though I didn't like the changes, I had to admit the added light was an advantage. I'd never noticed how big the place really was, or how tall the scarecrow crucified on the back wall. Of course the smiley face didn't really suit him, but not many people got this far back.

I slid into the booth and noticed my name was still carved into the table top. Even the nine lines beneath it had been left intact. "Hi, Dempsey. How's it going?"

Dempsey gave me a shrug. He's one of those guys who looks like absolutely everyone else in the world- you'd forget him in a second if you had no reason to remember him. That, and the fact that he knows people who know just about everyone or everything in the world, make him very good at what he does. Dempsey is a private eye and for someone who's got no magic and no chrome, he's lasted a lot longer than he has any right to.

"Life goes on."

"Easy for you to say." I laughed lightly. "Dropping cold intathe corp world means I have to wake up during this thing called morning."

Dempsey kept both his hands wrapped around his sweating beer bottle and appeared not to hear what I'd said. "I've done some checking, just like you asked."

"And?"

Another shrug lifted the shoulders of his kevlar-lined trench coat. "There are plenty of folks who'd love to take a shot at Tucker and Bors for what they did to the Lantern here, but no one has anything that suggests TAB is angry at the Ancients. Moreover, there are no anti-metahuman groups with ties into TAB. This city positively stinks with Humanis Policlub members, but TAB is as clean as can be in that department."

I chewed my lower lip. "What are the chances some snake is living under a rock you haven't overturned yet?"

Dempsey showed no concern over my having questioned his ability. "Slim and none. The word whispered in some high dark places is that Andrew Bors had a daughter who goblinized right after the awakening. Her daddy got her out of Seattle and has her staying in a mansion up on Vachon Island. After that, employees were screened for their attitudes toward metahumans through their employment questionnaire. You show signs of being a bigot and you're out."

"Damn." I'd been inserted into Tucker and Bors because the Ancients had gone to Doctor Richard Raven with their suspicions that TAB was backing gangs making attacks on them. As the Ancients are a rather powerful and militarily adroit street gang, the invasion of TAB headquarters was a distinct possibility and Raven started to work on the problem to forestall that from happening. The waitress arrived with our beers, and I handed her some corp scrip. She looked at it and laughed. "You should have told me you were one of us."

I frowned. "Come again?"

"You're a TABbie, just like me. Tabbies get a discount," She scooped up the bill and headed back toward the front.

The Old One did not like being called a tabbie, but I managed to keep him in check. "Dempsey, I need you to keep digging on the policlub angle. This whole thing smacks of race hatred to me. Something has to be there."

He nodded. "Anything else?"

"Yeah. I need you to find out if anyone has a hit out on me."

"You mean besides La Plante?"

"Yeah, besides La Plante." It was an open secret that Etienne La Plante had a contract out on Dr. Raven and any of his associates. It was also well known that hurting a single hair on any of our heads would set Kid Stealth on the assassin-proving once and for all that capital punishment, if applied quickly and without mercy, could be a deterrent to crime. "Some gillette in a Toro tried to interest me in tarmac fusion. I declined, and he flipped his lid and had an accident."

Dempsey took it all in stride. "Do I still relay information through Valerie Valkyrie?"

I thought for a moment, then shook my head. "Takes too much time. If you get anything on the hit angle, call TAB and ask for Keith Wolverton."

"And if Mr. Wolverton is not at his desk and I want to leave a message?"

"Say a relation is coming to visit. The greater the danger, the more distant the relative."

Dempsey's eyes focused distantly, then came back with a twinkle in them. "So if I say Adam and Eve are coming to see you…"

"I'll know Stealth is freelancing again." I glanced at my watch and slid out of the booth. "Stay and have another if you want. I've got to go meet Raven."

Dempsey shook his head and left the booth. "If I stick around here, they'll come by and give me a new trench coat."

"It's hell being a fashion trendsetter." I looked at the refurbished bar and shuddered. "I think this is the first time I've been in here and not felt like taking a bath afterward."

"It's the only time I haven't needed a bath afterward," Dempsey quipped. "Those were the days."

I signed for the tab up at the front, then walked a couple of blocks to the parking garage where I'd left my Fenris. The black coupe waited for me in a darkened corner of the basement like a feral creature hiding from the light. I disarmed the anti-theft devices-you only forget to do that once-and climbed in. I punched in the ignition code and cruised out into the light evening traffic.

The trip to Raven's headquarters took longer than it should have because of the series of turns and cutbacks I used to make sure no one was following me. After Raven and the rest of our crew had done various things to anger some of the more powerful individuals in the sprawl, paranoia had become a survival trait. Just because Kid Stealth would descend like a bloody avenger on anyone bothering us did not mean we were inviolate. Insanity becomes a courtroom defense because lots of folks do irrational things, and I had no desire to have bits of me in baggies labeled Exhibit A.

I parked the Fenris in the basement garage below Raven's brownstone, then took the stairs two at a time as I climbed to the main floor. Adjusting my tie and rolling down my sleeves, I marched straight to Raven's office and paused in the doorway. "Would have been here sooner, Doc, but someone wanted me to play immovable object to their irresistible force."

Raven leaned back in his black leather chair, pressed his hands together and rested his index fingers against his lips. Seated there in a custom-built chair, behind his individually hand-crafted desk, he looked normally proportioned. The pointed tips of elven ears jutted up through his long black hair as the only clues to his heritage. If not for that, his coppery skin, high cheekbones, and broad-shouldered, muscular build would have marked him as an Amerind.

His dark eyes focused above and beyond me, but I found myself entranced by their steady gaze. The blues and reds weaving through them in an aurora-like fashion flickered past in what I imagined was a mirror of how quickly thoughts strobed through his brain. The lights slowed, then he closed his eyes and I felt myself in control of my own mind again.

"Interesting." His hands fell away from his mouth as he leaned forward and stood. "I will want a full report later, of course, but I should introduce you to our clients. This is Sting and her lieutenant, Green Lucifer."

Elven women are often described with plant imagery, but with Sting you'd have to make that an industrial plant. Sure, she was long and lean like most of them, but you could only describe her as willowy if you thought rebar swayed in light breezes. I heard she had a temper to match her fiery mane, and her yellow Opticon eyes certainly reflected none of the warmth in her soul-if she had one. She had an edge to her that made it clear why she was running the Ancients, but likewise told me why, though she was attractive, I didn't find her seductive.