Jim Butcher: Naked City: Tales of Urban Fantasy

“What the devil kind of thing are you?” asked the selkie in the broadest of Scots.

“I’m a Pooka,” he said, with dignity. “From County Down.”

“Fresh off the boat and rotten with the iron-sickness, no doubt. Well, you’re a lucky wee doggie to have found me, and that’s a fact.”

The Pooka’s ears pricked. “You have a cure for iron-sickness?”

“Not I,” the selkie said. “There’s a Sidhe woman runs a lager saloon in Five Points. All the Gaelic folk who land here must go to her. It’s that or die.” The selkie pulled a little wooden box from his pocket and opened it. “Take a snort.”

The Pooka filled his nose with a scent of thin beer, sawdust, and faerie magic. “One last question, of your kindness,” he said. “Would a mortal be welcome at this Sidhe woman’s saloon at all?”

The selkie replaced the box. “Maybe he will and maybe he won’t. What’s it to you?”

“We’re by way of being companions,” said the Pooka.

“Dinna tell me he knows you for what you are?” The selkie whistled. “That’d be a tale worth the hearing. Tell it me, and we’ll call my help well paid.”

The Pooka knew very well that his tale was a small enough price for such valuable information, but it was a price he was reluctant to pay. Stories in which he was the hero and the mortal his endlessly stupid dupe—those he told with pleasure to whoever would hear them. A story in which the stupidity had been his own was a different pair of shoes entirely. Still, a favor must be repaid.

“I will so,” he said.

The selkie bared strong white teeth. “But no just now: I’ve work to do, and you, an Irish fay to see. Shall we say before midsummer? Ask for Iain. Everybody kens me here on the docks. Oh, and dinna fash yourself over yon mortal. The woman’ll no harm him—if he keeps a civil tongue in his head.”

“Oh, he’s civil enough,” the Pooka had answered, somewhat sourly. “He’s the gentleman of the world, he is. The creature.”

Which was why, as much as the Pooka resented Liam O’Casey, he could not dislike him, and why, after six months in Liam’s company, he was far from home, iron-sick and mangy and too feeble to shift his shape, burdened with an unpaid blood debt and no prospect of paying it.

The Pooka had a nose as sharp as a kelpie’s teeth, but lower New York was a maze of bewildering and distracting smells. The streets reeked of dung and garbage, of dogs marking their territory and the sweat of horses pulling heavy drays. The Pooka was startled out of what remained of his fur when a scrawny, half-wild sow squealed at him. Prudently, the Pooka whined and wagged his tail submissively. The sow snorted at him and trotted on.

Bowing to a pig! If the iron-sickness did not finish him, surely shame would do the job. The Pooka thought he’d like to kill Liam for bringing him here. But not until he’d saved his miserable life.

Liam had been hungry and thirsty when he got off the Washington at dawn. By noon, he was tired and footsore as well, and as bewildered as he’d ever been in his life. Listlessly, he watched Madra sniff the door of Maeve McDonough’s Saloon, which looked no different to him than the fifty other such establishments he’d sniffed along the way, except for a sign in the window offering a free lunch. Liam read the fare on offer—cold meat, pickles, onions—and sent up a short and heartfelt prayer to the Virgin that their journey might end here. He sent a second prayer of thanks when Madra pricked his ears, raised his tail, and trotted down the filthy steps and into the dark room beyond.

Upon inquiry at the wooden counter, Liam learned that the free lunch came at the cost of two five-cent beers, which he was happy to pay, even though the beer was poor, sour stuff and the meat more gristle than fat. While he ate, a woman, well supplied with dark hair and bold eyes and an expanse of rosy-brown skin above the neck of her flowered gown, cuddled up, giving him an excellent view of her breasts and a noseful of her musky scent.

“Like what you see, boyo? I can arrange for a closer look.”

Head swimming, he was on the point of agreeing when another woman’s voice spoke, tuneful and sweet as a silver bell. The whore hissed, showing teeth a thought too long and pointed for beauty, and slid back into the crowd of drinkers.

Startled, Liam looked up into the face of the tall, redheaded woman on the other side of the bar. She’d a faded-green woolen shawl tied across her bosom and a look about her he was coming to recognize after six months in the Pooka’s company: a luminous look, as though her skin were fairer, her hair more lustrous, her eyes more lambent, her whole person altogether more light-filled than an ordinary woman’s. It was not a look he’d expected to see in the new world.

“Welcome to Five Points,” said the woman. “There’s a fine dog you have.”

Liam looked down to see Madra sitting by his leg, panting cryptically. “Oh, he’s not mine,” he said. “Not in the way of ownership. Our paths lie together for a while, that’s all it is.”

The woman’s smile broadened. Liam noted, with relief, that her teeth were remarkable only in being uncommonly white and even. “A good answer, young man. You may call me Maeve McDonough. I am the proprietress of this place. You are welcome to drink here. Should you be looking for a place to lay your head this night, I’ve beds above, twenty cents a night or four dollars a month, to be paid up front, if you please.”

Liam laid the silver coins in Maeve’s hand with a bow that made her laugh like a stream over rocks, then recklessly ordered another beer and carried it toward a knot of Irishmen who looked as though they’d been in New York a week or two longer than he.

The Pooka yawned nervously and licked at a sore on his flank. It seemed to him that it, like everything else in this forsaken place, tasted of iron. How many nails were in this building? How many iron bands around the barrels of beer? He could sense a stove, too, and most of the customers, unless he was much mistaken, were armed with steel knives. Some even carried pistols. It was almost unbearable.

It was unbearable, and the Pooka was beginning to realize that there was nowhere in this city where he might escape from the pain that gnawed at his bones. Hemmed in by mortals, surrounded by iron, with more mortals and iron outside on the street, the Pooka was ready to bite everyone around him and keep on biting until he died or the pain went away, whatever came first.

A cool hand touched his head. A fresh scent, as of spring fields after a rain, soothed his hot nose and cleared the red mists from his brain. The Pooka looked up into the amused green eyes of a Sidhe woman.

“I am called Maeve,” she said. “Follow me.”

The room Maeve led the Pooka to was, if anything, darker and hotter than the saloon itself. Stacked beer barrels lined the walls, and a complex apparatus of glass and tin on a table smelled strongly of raw spirits.

“A Pooka,” Maeve said, setting down her lantern. “I’ve not seen your like before on this side of the wide ocean. A word for you, my heart. The city’s no place for a creature of the bogs and wilds.”

“Yet here I am,” the Pooka said irritably. “On the point of paying with my life for the privilege, too.”

“Well, perhaps it needn’t be as costly as that.” Maeve regarded him gravely. “What is your life worth, Pooka?”

“I haven’t much to give you,” the Pooka said. “Would you accept my everlasting gratitude?”

Maeve laughed. “What a joy it is to have a trickster to bargain with, even one half dead. I’d save you for the pure pleasure of your company, but that would be bad business. Come, give me a dozen hairs from your tail, that I may call upon you at my need.”