Justin Gustainis - Those Who Fight Monsters Tales of Occult Detectives

“Never have, never wanted to,” she said. Feeling in her pockets for her pack and a lighter, she lit up, inhaled, and added a small blue cloud to the low wet fog that fell around them like frayed lace.

“This way,” Rowan said, starting down the stairs of a long-abandoned tube station. In the light world, it would be full of people, buskers, newsagents. In the Black, it was boarded up and painted with graffiti in a dozen arcane languages, the steps slippery and the air dank. Pete hesitated on the top step.

“If this is a setup to get me eaten by something nasty, I’m going to be very bloody upset with you, Rowan.”

Rowan held out his long pale hand, the color of a drowned man’s. “I mean you no harm. I swear.”

Pete didn’t take his hand, but she did take the first step down to the tube platform. A shadow passed over the clouded moon, and for a moment there was perfect blackness. Something whistling and unearthly breathed in her face.

Pete’s cigarette went out.

When she could see again, she was in Faerie.

Pete didn’t know what she’d expected, exactly — perhaps some Froud-esque fantasy of pixies at play under giant, Alice in Wonderland mushrooms. Or perhaps a palace of tall, pale, ridiculously good-looking Fae straight out of Hellboy . She’d expected soft things, silver eyes, the scent of elderflower.

Faerie was hard, instead. It was brick and iron, blackened to the same color by soot and grit. A sign was worked into the tiles of the tube station, in a language that looked like twisting vines to Pete’s eye.

Rowan slowed when she did. “Is something the matter, Lady?”

“It’s, um…” Pete gestured at the wood track, broken and empty. “You have the tube here?”

“Used to,” Rowan said. “When people and the Fae were much closer. We shared a great deal.”

He hopped from the platform and started to walk. “The court is this way.”

Pete shivered. Things lived in the dark, of the Black and of the light world. That she knew. Demons, murderers, angry ghosts. If it was a toss-up between the Fae and the dark, Pete knew which she’d choose. She hopped the platform, her feet crunching into shifting gravel between the ties, and followed Rowan into the tunnel.

The Seelie Court loomed from nowhere, when Rowan and Pete emerged onto a rail trestle. Below her, in the dark, Pete heard the rush and burble of a creek, and laughter that sounded like water on rock. Selkies, or naiads. Maybe a kelpie.

“I thought it was always summer here,” she said to Rowan. Another tidbit from Jack.

“It is,” he said. “The Prince’s death has changed that.”

Prince. “Bloody fucking hell,” Pete muttered to herself. Not only was she supposed to Sherlock Holmes a culprit out of the thin Fae air, the victim was royalty. Pete had worked an overdose case once, an MP’s son, and the MP himself, his supercilious face and veiled threats, still haunted her. He’d wanted it swept neatly under the rug, had actually sent a bloke in a dark suit to Pete’s flat to offer her fifteen thousand pounds to say his son’d had a heart attack and blot out all mention of the pharmacy floating in his bloodstream.

Pete had told him to fuck off, in exactly those words. But she had a notion that her usual routine wouldn’t play well with the ruling members of the Seelie.

She wasn’t even a DI any longer. Why the fuck had she agreed to come?

Before she could find a decent answer, they had been swept through a private entrance, past a coterie of guards armed with billy clubs and short, brutal swords that Pete had no doubt would do the job they were intended for, and into chambers guarded with a twined seal of two oak leaves. “Bow your head,” Rowan muttered. “You’re about to receive an honor few humans ever dream of.”

“Aren’t I a fucking prizewinner,” Pete said under her breath. Then she remembered those blades, and thought better of finishing the thought.

The Queen of the Seelie wasn’t a person Pete had ever fancied meeting, and she could tell the reverse was also true. The Queen drew herself up and in when Pete and Rowan came in, patting at her cheeks with a handkerchief spun from something white and translucent. She wore a simple black gown, the kind of thing you saw in old photos of Victorian mourning. Flanking her were three more Fae, two men and a girl.

Pete took their measure even as she smiled and inclined her head. She’d treat this like any other homicide. “You’re the mother?”

The Queen’s throat worked, tightening, but not with sorrow. “I am the Queen.”

Pete nodded, as if that explained everything. “I’m sorry for your loss, madam.” It all came back, like getting on a bloody bike. The somber tone, the sympathetic yet determined demeanor, letting the family take the lead to get the information you really needed. “I realize this is hard for you,” Pete said, “but anything you can tell me about your son’s last hours will likely be helpful.”

The bigger of the two men stepped in. “Anything you need to know, ask me.”

Pete gave him the eye. “Don’t tell me you’re the family barrister.”

The Fae’s lip curled back. His two front teeth came to points. “I am the captain of the Ash Guard.”

“Ah,” Pete said. A security heavy. This was familiar ground as well. “And your name, Captain…?”

“Tolliver,” the Fae said gruffly. “The Queen is indisposed. You speak to me.”

“Tolliver,” Pete said, grasping him by the arm, “can I speak to you over here, please?” She led him to a shadowy corner, where a leaded window looked out on the storm-tossed hills of Faerie. “I understand,” Pete told him.

Tolliver blinked, clearly having expected to be lectured. “You do?”

“’Course,” Pete said. “You’re responsible for the family, and the boy getting done in was your cock-up. But being a pillock to me is not going to find the bloke, so how about you step aside while the chance is still there to catch him? Or her?”

His throat worked. Pete saw a scar there, under his jaw. His clothes were fine as the rest of the group, but his hands were roughed at the knuckles, bent and square from bare-fisted fighting. Tolliver was a man who believed in blunt force. Pete hoped that also meant he believed in honesty.

“I found him,” he said, and his voice went rough. “I came to get him for our daily fencing lesson and he was on the floor, like a doll with all of the stuffing gone out…” Tolliver’s jaw worked and he looked away from her, out at the boiling thunderheads illuminated by a sickly green light in the eastern sky. “Unseelie land,” he murmured. “They’ll be putting up a ruddy festival. This is their dream come true.”

“Could an Unseelie have done this?” Pete asked. Her hands felt restless and she wished for her leather-bound reporter’s notebook. Ollie, her old partner in the met, had used his PDA to take notes, but Pete preferred the feel of paper and ink.

“No.” Tolliver was back in control. “Our borders prevent it. The Courts are neutral ground. So it’s been since the accords long past, when we made the Seelie and Unseelie lands half each of Faerie.”

“So who’s your money on?” Pete asked. Tolliver’s eyes expanded, then contracted. Wrinkles sprouted like weeds at his cheekbones. After a moment he said, “That’s your job, isn’t it?”

Pete allowed herself a flicker of a smile. “You thought of someone,” she said. “When I asked. You have an answer back there behind that big, ugly scar.”

“I protect the Queen,” Tolliver said brusquely. “I protect the family. And I’ve told you all I’m fit to tell.” He turned his back, and stared out the window.

Pete sighed, and returned to the icy stare of the Queen. She was beautiful, of course. It was hardly remarkable in Faerie. Her beauty was that of statues, and ice — remote, chill and unearthly. Hair of the whitest white, like Rowan’s, skin to match, traced only by blue veins. A young face with eyes ancient as the stones under Pete’s feet. There was a little pink around them from crying, and they made Pete think of animal eyes. Hungry eyes.