Naked City: Tales of Urban Fantasy

Fairy Gifts BY PATRICIA BRIGGS

Patricia Briggs is the number-one New York Times bestselling author of the Mercy Thompson and the Alpha and Omega series as well as a number of traditional fantasy novels. She was born and raised in Butte, Montana, a city steeped in stories and storytellers—and the odd hobgoblin or two. She currently lives in eastern Washington State with her husband, children, and various and numerous animals.

Cold didn’t bother him anymore, but he remembered how it felt: the sharp bite of winter on toes, fingers, nose, and ears. Even with modern adaptations, ten degrees below zero wouldn’t be pleasant. Neither the temperature nor falling snow kept people out of the streets for the Christmas stroll, however. Hot apple cider, freshly made sausages, and abundant cookies under the streetlights strove to make up for the nasty weather—none of which were useful sustenance for him. He passed them by with scarcely a glance.

Well, then, he thought, impatient with himself, what are you doing here? He had no more answer now than he’d had two nights ago when he’d arrived.

The people who lived in the old mining town had always known how to party. In a hundred years that hadn’t changed. Brutal climate, hard and dangerous work brought a certain clarity to the need for pleasure.

His Chinese face garnered a few looks—curiosity, no more. A century ago, Butte had had a large Chinese population. Then, the looks he’d garnered had been dismissive up on the street level but full of eagerness or fear down in his father’s opium den in the mining tunnels where Thomas had been both guide and enforcer.

It was not just the looks that had changed. The streets were not cobbled, there were no trolleys, no horses. Steep streets had been somewhat tamed, and the town—once a bustling place—had a desolate air, despite the festive decorations. Buildings he remembered were abandoned or gone altogether, replaced by parking lots or parks. The few restored or well-kept buildings only made the rest look worse.

Some of the changes were vast improvements. The smelters and ore-processing plants now long closed meant that the sulfurous fog that had made it difficult to see across the street was gone. The air was immensely more pleasant to breath. The night was free of the constant noise of the machinery that churned day and night.

The crowd that moved beside him on the sidewalks was a respectable size, though much smaller than those that had filled the streets of his memories. He hadn’t decided to count that on the good side or the bad side of the changes.

He put his hands in front of his mouth and blew, a gesture to blend in, no more. Even had his hands been frozen, his breath wouldn’t warm them.

He didn’t know why he’d come back here. Just in time for the Christmas stroll, no less. He wasn’t a Christian, despite the nuns who had ensured he could read and write: an education for her children was the only thing his quiet, obedient mother had ever stood up to his father for.

If … if he did believe, he’d have to believe he was damned, and had been since his father had brought him to the old man.

“Here is the son,” his father said, his voice less clear than usual. It was hard to talk with a mouth that had been hit so many times.

Last night his father had been set upon by a group of miners who wanted opium and had not wanted to pay for it. They had beaten Father and tied him up. It had been Thomas’s day to protect the shop; his older brother, Tao, was away on other business. Thomas had been shot in the arm, and while he tried to stanch the blood, one of the miners had cracked his skull with a beer bottle.

When Thomas awoke, his mother had bandaged his hurts and was crying silently as she sometimes did. From Tao, because his father would not look at him nor talk to him, he learned that his father had given the men what they wanted and more: Arsenic in the opium would ensure that they thieved from no one again. But despite the ultimate victory in the fight, his father felt that his honor and that of his family had been impinged. He made it clear that he blamed Thomas for the shame.

The next morning his father had left Tao in charge of the laundry and gone out to speak with friends. He’d been gone most of the day, and Thomas had worked hard despite his aching arm, seeking to assuage his disgrace with diligence. His uncles, his father’s brothers, had stopped in with gifts of herbs, whiskey, and his grandmother’s ginger cookies. They spoke to his mother in hushed whispers.

His father returned after the sun was down and the laundry storefront was closed. He hadn’t said anything to the rest of the family gathered there. He’d only looked at Thomas.

“You,” he’d said in English, which was the language he used when he was displeased with Thomas, because, to his father’s horror, Thomas, born in America, was as fluent in English as in Cantonese. “You come.”

According to his brother Tao, when Thomas was born a few weeks after his family had come to the New World, his father had given him an American name in a fit of optimism. It must have been true, but Thomas could never imagine his father being optimistic or excited about anything American.

Obediently, Thomas followed his father up the steep streets to a single-story house nestled between two new apartment buildings. There was a dead tree in the yard. Maybe it had been planted in a fit of optimism.

His father entered the unpainted door without knocking and left it to Thomas to close it behind them. The incense burning on a small table didn’t quite cover a sour, charnel-house smell. Thomas followed his father through a partially furnished front room and down the narrow and uneven stairs to the basement, where the odor of dead things was replaced by the scent of the dynamite that had been used to blast the basement into the granite that underlay the hillside.

The stairs ended in a small room lit only by a small beeswax candle. The floor beneath his feet was polished and well laid, a light-colored wood ringed by a pattern of darker. It seemed an expensive luxury to find in a basement room of a nondescript little house.

While he’d been looking at the floor, his father had continued on through a doorway, and he hurried to follow. There was something odd about this place that made his stomach clench and the hair on the back of his neck stand up. He didn’t want to be left alone here.

He darted through the doorway and almost bumped into his father, who had stopped at a small entryway that dropped down a single stair and then opened up to a cavernous room. It too had only a single candle lighting it. Thomas couldn’t make out the face of the man ensconced in some sort of big chair.

His father bent over with a pained grunt and set three twenty-dollar gold pieces on the floor.

“Here is the son,” he said.

He put the flat of his hand on Thomas’s back and thrust him toward the other man.

Not expecting the push, Thomas stumbled down the step then turned to look at his father—only to see his sandaled feet disappear up the stairway.

“The son,” said the man he’d been left with. His accent was Eastern European—Slavic, Thomas thought. The Slavs were the among the latest immigrant wave that had washed over the mining town since Thomas Edison’s electricity had made copper king. “Pretty boy. Come here.”

Though the sounds of the Christmas carols were pleasant enough, Thomas felt restless, impatient—the same feeling that had sent him driving here from San Francisco when he’d intended only an evening’s drive.

Something was calling him here, and it certainly wasn’t nostalgia. There wasn’t much left of the town of his childhood. The last of the old whorehouses in the red-light district was falling down, and only a few buildings were left of the Chinatown where he’d grown up and died and been reborn a monster. No, he wasn’t nostalgic for Butte.

This wasn’t his home. He had a condo in San Francisco and another in Boston. None of his family remained here. There was nothing here for him—so why had it seemed so imperative to come?

“Hello, Tom.”

He froze. It had been almost a century since he’d been in Butte. There weren’t that many people who lived eighty years and still sounded so hail and hearty.

Fae.

That’s why he’d had to come. He’d been called here by magic. If he hadn’t been walking in the middle of a crowd, he would have snarled.

He didn’t see anyone who looked familiar; the fae were like that. But he did find someone who was looking at him.

Leaning up against an empty storefront where a tobacco shop had once been was a balding man with an oddly fragile air about him. He was several inches shorter than Thomas—who wasn’t exactly tall himself. The man’s forehead was too large for the rest of him in the manner of some people who were born simple. Young blue eyes smiled at Thomas out of an old face. He wore new winter boots, red mittens and scarf, and a thick down jacket.

A couple, passing by, noticed Thomas’s interest and stopped.

“Nick?” The woman half ducked her head toward the little man. “Are you warm enough? There are cookies and hot chocolate in the old Miner’s Bank building at the end of the block.”

The male half of the couple glared suspiciously at Thomas.

“I have good new gloves,” said Nick in the voice of a man but with a child’s intonations. “I’m warm. I had cookies. I think I’m going to talk with my friend, Tom.” He darted across the sidewalk and took Thomas’s hand.

Thomas managed not to hiss or jerk his hand free. Nick, was it? His scent—at this close range—told Thomas that Nick was a hobgoblin.

“Do you live here? Or are you just visiting?” asked the man suspiciously.

“I’m visiting,” said Thomas. He could have lied. Butte was smaller than it used to be, but, according to the lady who checked him into his hotel, it still had thirty thousand people living here.

His answer didn’t please the man. “Nick’s one of ours,” he said, rocking forward on the balls of his feet like a man who’d been in a few real fights. “We watch out for him.”

Ah, Tom thought. Butte’s ties to Ireland had always been strong. In his day, the Irish here had set out cream in saucers outside their back doors to appease the fairies. Apparently the traditions of taking care of the Little People, changelings, and those who might be changelings were adhered to still—even if, as they clearly believed, the one they watched over was entirely human, just simpleminded.

“This is Ron,” Nick the Hobgoblin said to Thomas. “He gives me rides in his yellow truck. I like yellow.”

Ron who drove a yellow truck narrowed his eyes at Thomas, clearly telling him to go away, something Thomas was happy to comply with. He started to free himself.

“Tom likes tea,” Nick informed them, his eyes as innocent as he was not. Not if he were a hobgoblin. “Tom likes the nighttime.” He paused and with a sly smile added, “Tom likes Maggie.”

Thomas’s hand clenched on Nick’s at hearing her name. He gave the hobgoblin a sharp look. How did the little man know about Margaret? Was Margaret the reason he’d been called here?

“Does he?” said the woman, with a sharp glance at Thomas. “Nick, why don’t you come with us to see the singer at the old YMCA?”

Margaret.

Thomas decided that he would see what the hobgoblin wanted—and to that end, he’d have to allay the suspicions of Nick’s protectors. He inclined his head respectfully toward Ron.

“Nick and I know one another,” he said. “I went to school here.” A long, long time ago.

“Oh,” said the woman, relaxing. “Not a tourist then.”

The man looked down at his watch. “If you want to catch your brother’s performance, we’d better go.”

As soon as those two were gone, Thomas pulled his hand away from the hobgoblin’s. Mindful of the watchful glances of the people around him—the couple weren’t the only ones watching out for Nick—he was gentle about it.

“Tell me, hobgoblin,” he said with soft menace. “What do you know about Margaret Flanagan?”

He escorted the men through the tunnels, keeping to the front of the group so that the lanterns they carried wouldn’t damage his night vision. And also because it scared them that he didn’t need a lantern to find his way.

The current location of his father’s opium den was a few hundred feet from where they’d started, though he’d led them through alternate routes that had added a half mile and more to the trip. It was imperative that they—mostly experienced miners, though one was a merchant’s son—not be able to find their way here without a guide. First, payment was made before they entered the mines, and anyone who made it to the den was assumed to have paid their fee. Second, it made it difficult for the police to find. To ensure the location remained a secret, the den was moved every couple of weeks.

Thomas took a final turn and opened the makeshift door in invitation. The light from a dozen lanterns inside illuminated the smoky haze within. It looked like the hell the nuns had promised him.

“Tap her light, Tommy,” said one of the men he’d escorted, giving him the traditional farewell wishes of a miner: When forcing a stick of explosive into a drilled hole in the granite, a miner wanted to be very careful tapping it in with his hammer.

It caught Thomas by surprise, and he took a better look at the man’s face. Juhani. He’d been a Finnish boy whose father worked with the timber crews when they’d gone to school together once upon a time—twenty years and more ago. Now they were both damned—Thomas as his father’s monster, Juhani Koskinen as an opium addict.

For a moment they stared at each other, then Juhani stepped through the door into the den, followed by the rest of the men.

“Don’t know why you talk to him, Johnny, my boyo,” said one of them in a thick Irish lilt as Thomas closed the door, sealing them in. “He don’t never talk.”

Not since he’d returned from the Master as his father’s new slave. What was there to say? Who would talk to him?

Even before his mother’s brother, a famous scholar from a family of scholars, rescued his mother from his father’s care, she had not looked upon his face if she could help it—not since he had become a monster. She had taken her other children with her when she returned to China with her brother. Thomas had been left behind.

For his father he had no words. Not that his father cared. He gave orders—and took him to the Master once a week to feed and be fed upon.

Thomas hoped his father regretted his bargain, regretted at least the necessity of the once-a-week twenty-dollar gold piece that was more than his father paid any of his workers, either in the laundry or in the opium den hidden down in the mine.

Alone, without a light of any kind, Thomas headed out deeper into the mines. The tunnels under the town were the labyrinthine result of more than three decades of every-day, round-the-clock mining. Above ground, the gallows frames of the elevators that took men down and lifted them up again when their shifts were done clearly marked the different mines. Below ground, all of the mines interconnected.

He’d heard that there were thousands of miles of tunnels and it wouldn’t surprise him if that were so. The other two men who ran dens sometimes took their nonpaying customers deep into the tunnels and left them in the maze of tunnels out of which they never found their way. His father’s customers all paid ahead of time or they didn’t get in.

He had always been good at finding his way around the mines. Since he’d been turned, he’d gotten a lot better.

He didn’t need light, didn’t need to see at all. He could feel the tunnel stretch around him—and the ones above, below, and beside him, too. He could sense the areas where miners were actively digging and the ones where no one had been for a very long time. He could tell north from south, up from down, and he knew where he was in relation to the city over his head.

He never got lost in the tunnels.

It was near three in the morning. His father had gone to sleep—the men Thomas had escorted in were the very last—and Thomas was free for the rest of the night. There were boys in the den whose job it would be to rouse their customers and escort them to the surface. Thomas never had to work in the den anymore: He scared the customers. He wasn’t sure if they feared him because his father used him to hurt the ones who displeased him, or if some atavistic sense warned them that he was a dangerous predator.

Thomas walked to the nearest elevator shaft—he was safely between shifts, so he didn’t have to worry about the elevator cars—and began climbing down.

The darkness soothed him, as did the growing heat. It was always hot in the lower levels. He didn’t need heat to survive anymore, but it had been such a luxury for him … before … that he always took pleasure in it. He climbed down until it suited him to stop a few levels above where they were actively mining. Descending the shaft pushed even his strength and abilities; he enjoyed it.

He was always alone, but somehow, deep in the heart of the earth, with none but himself for company, he felt less so. Walking down tunnels that might not have seen people for decades, he felt comfortable in his skin and he relished it, even though it made it difficult to deny his growing hunger. Tomorrow he would have to feed.

He dreaded the feeding time. Afterward, his Master renewed his orders and made certain his fledgling understood his place. Someday, Thomas was certain, someday he would be free. But for nearly twenty years he had been slave to his father and the demon-thing that had, over a whole long year, turned him into what he was now.

He put out his hand and touched the damp earth. There was water here, underground. A huge lake, he’d been told, and streams that ran just as the creeks aboveground did. He couldn’t feel the water the way he felt the earth, which spoke to his bones.

Somewhere in the darkness in front of him chains rattled.

“Please?”

A woman’s voice, and Irish.

He froze where he stood. Maybe she was one of the ones who did not pay for her opium—though usually those were left much higher than this. No one but he wandered alone down here. He couldn’t believe that either Mr. Wong or Mr. Luk would waste money on chains for a nonpaying customer.

“Please, help me?”

He hadn’t been walking particularly quietly. She knew he was there.

The boy he’d been, Thomas Hao, would have run to the rescue. But that boy had died a long time ago and left a monster in his place.

“What would you do for me in return?” he said, breathing in for the first time in a long time. He didn’t have to, especially since he didn’t speak. It made his father nervous when he didn’t breathe, so he made a habit of letting his lungs sit empty.

He hadn’t sensed her as he did the miners, and it bothered him. He’d assumed he could sense everyone in the tunnels, in his realm.

The chains rattled hard, agitated, as if the woman had not really believed there was someone else in the mine. “O lords and ladies, you are there,” she said. “Please. My father is the Flanagan. The old one of high court. His element is fire. And I am accounted a power in my own right. Our gratitude will be yours, my word on it.”

Fae. That’s why he hadn’t felt her. Now that he knew she was here he could sense her, but she felt so close to the sighs and groans of the earth that it was no wonder he hadn’t noticed her before she’d spoken.

He avoided the fae when he could, and when he could not … well, the fae, unlike humans, knew exactly what he was, and they despised the monster almost as much as he despised himself.

“Please,” she said.

If she were fae, chained down here, no human had done it, not this deep under the hill. He had no desire to find himself in the middle of a fae dispute.

“Sir?”

He could feel her listening. But he made no noise. This close to feeding day his heart only beat if he made it.

“You have nothing I want,” he said, the words coming out hoarse and strange. He turned to go back the way he had come.

“Vampire.”

He paused.

“They say there is a vampire who walks deep beneath the hill.”

They must be the fae, because the humans didn’t know. He didn’t hunt: the Master forbade it. As a fledgling he could only take nourishment from another vampire, anyway. Taking the blood of humans did him no good at all. Every week the Master had him try it. The Master himself was agoraphobic, unable to leave his basement.

“Vampire,” said the fae woman. “What do you wish most? I can grant you that.”

Freedom, he thought. If only the freedom to die. The bleak knowledge that no one would be able to give that freedom to him until long after the remnants of Thomas Hao had been thoroughly eradicated, and there was nothing to free, made him angry with a rage that did not cloak his despair.

The sun. It had been so long since he’d walked in daylight that the hunger for it nearly eclipsed his growing thirst.

“I have power,” she said. “Just tell me what you want?”

What I want, you cannot give me. And in the hopelessness of the thought, he found that he wanted her equally trapped, equally frantic, if only for a little while.

“You could feed me,” he told her, his long-unused voice sharp and bitter. “I’m hungry.”

“Come then,” she said. “Come and drink.”

No hunting, was the command. No unwilling victims. Sometimes the Master forgot things or did not word things carefully enough. Maybe he’d never conceived that Thomas would find a willing victim.

If he intended to stay out of fae conflicts he should walk away—but a small part of him made him hesitate. It wasn’t the hunger. It was the boy he had been who wanted the woman freed. He found he couldn’t ignore the boy’s necessities any more than he’d ever been able to ignore the Master’s. It made the monster angry.

He gave her no chance to adjust, to brace herself. He dropped beside her, gripping her head and chin. He jerked her until her neck stretched out and bit down, sinking his fangs deep. He could have made it pleasant for her; his master insisted upon it being pleasant. But he wanted her to struggle, which would force him to stop and give him an excuse not to save her, to be the monster they—the Master and his father—had made him.

Other than a gasp as he struck, though, she was silent and still against him.

Her blood tasted nothing like the Master’s. It reminded him of the taffy he’d eaten when he was human. Not in the flavor, but in the feeling of richness, of self-indulgence and satisfaction.

Feeding with the Master was carnal in its most profane sense—pleasure and pain. When it was over, it sent his senses into a stupor and left him feeling desperate for the bath that never really cleaned the stain from his soul no matter how hard he scrubbed.

This feeding was … as he imagined feeding from a dragon might be—sharp and not altogether comfortable, but rich with the bottomless power of fire and earth. The fire cleansed him, the earth restored him, leaving him raw and off balance—but not filthy.

It was the first time he’d fed from someone other than the Master, and it was hard to stop. One more pull, he thought, just one more. And one more became … He remembered the eyes of his old Finnish friend as he headed into the opium den. It gave him the strength to stop.

She was limp and unresponsive in his hold. He sealed the wounds he’d made, regretting the roughness of his attack and wondering if he had stopped too late. He lay beside her and listened to her heart beat.

When it continued past the first few minutes, he decided that she’d survive. His hands told him that they’d only chained her feet. He slipped his fingers inside the cuffs and broke them, one at a time. The flesh beneath was blistered, and her feet were bare. His clever hands told him also that she was young, far younger than she’d sounded—thirteen or fourteen, he thought, and clad in her nightdress. They’d taken her from her bed.

Poor thing.

He picked her up and carried her to the elevator shaft. She didn’t wake up until he fed her sweet tea in his father’s dark laundry. She drank two cups before she said anything, her big gray eyes looking at the face of the monster he was.

He felt ashamed, and at the same time better than he had any time these past twenty years or more, as if she had saved him, instead of the other way around.

He was not hungry at all.

“What is your name?” she asked. “I’m Margaret Flanagan. Maggie.” Her voice sounded composed, but her hands were shaking so badly.

He was pretty sure she was scared of him. He had put his arm around her to brace her while he fed her tea. He expected his nearness made it worse, but he also expected that if he backed away from her right now, she’d fall off the stool.

For all that she was fae, she was a child.

He told himself that her fear didn’t make him sad. He was confused and hid it behind his usual emotionless mask.

“I am Hao’s monster,” he told her abruptly. “Where is your father? I will take you home.”

She tilted her head. She closed her eyes for one breath, heaved a sigh of heartfelt relief. When she looked up at him, she smiled, her face as bright as the sun he hadn’t seen in years.

“He’s coming,” she said. “He’ll be right here.”

“Good,” said Thomas, though he didn’t know if that were true. If she’d had such power as he’d felt as he drank from her—earth and fire in abundance—then her father likely had more.

“Very true,” said a man’s voice, answering his thoughts—because Thomas had not spoken.

It took all of Thomas’s considerable control not to show his surprise.

“Papa,” said Margaret Flanagan, sounding for the first time as young as she looked. She pulled away from him and ran across the room to the arms of the man who stood in Hao’s Laundry in a flannel shirt and dungarees, though the door was locked and the room had been empty when Thomas had carried her here.

The Flanagan didn’t look imposing—only a few inches taller than Thomas, which made him short by the standards of the Irish in Butte. He didn’t have the shoulders of a miner, though his hands showed the calluses of hard work.

“Vampire,” he said, over his daughter’s head. “I could destroy you, you’re right. Fire is mine, and your kind are particularly vulnerable to it.”

“Yes,” acknowledged Thomas coolly. He might have been frightened, he thought, if he had really been afraid of death. Hell wasn’t a pleasant thought, but then neither was a lifetime, possibly a hundred lifetimes, tied to the depraved thing that was his Master.

If a monster had taken advantage of someone he loved the way he had taken advantage of Margaret Flanagan, he would have killed that one and never felt regret. The wounds on her neck were closed, but his attack had been brutal and it would be a while before the red marks on her skin faded. The Flanagan stayed where he was.

Margaret turned her head until she could see Thomas.

“You have it now,” she told him. “What will you do with it?”

“Have what?” asked Thomas.

“Freedom,” she told him, and then collapsed in her father’s arms.

He hadn’t understood what she had done at first, not when he’d let her and her father out and relocked the laundry’s door, not when he’d gone into the cupboard where he died for the day, not even when what had come to him had been sleep rather than death. He’d awakened and followed his father up the hill to the Master’s house.

Hao Xun took him down the stairs to the basement as he always did, leaving Thomas with a gold coin at his feet.

“Pretty boy,” said his Master. “Come here to me.”

Obediently, Thomas stepped down the single stair. Above them, he heard his father walk out the door and shut it behind him.

“Give us a kiss, my sweet thing,” the vampire told Thomas.

Thomas bent down to kiss his Master’s cheek, one side and then the other. As he did, he reached out with one hand to grasp the long, wooden candlestick that always sat on the little table beside the wing chair though the candle it held was seldom lit.

“I’m so hungry for your blood,” whispered his Master as Thomas pulled back.

As I hunger for yours, Thomas thought, thrusting the candlestick through the soft beeswax candle and into the old one’s heart. He took two steps back, amazed that at long last he’d been able to do such a thing.

The old vampire leaned forward and smiled at him.

“Pretty boy,” he said—and collapsed into himself.

Only then, staring at the dust that had been his Master, did Thomas understand the gift he’d been given.

Freedom, Thomas thought, following the hobgoblin up the hill to wherever Nick wanted him to go. He’d spoken to her with his lips, and Margaret had heard his heart.

Thomas had left Butte that very night, with his father’s twenty-dollar gold piece in his pocket. He could not wait for Hao Xun to come and get him, because he didn’t want to kill the man who had sired his human self the way he’d killed the thing that had sired his current flesh. If he’d seen his father again, he wasn’t certain he could have helped himself.

He had never seen either of the two fae again either, but unlike any of the vampires he’d met since then, he saw the sun every day and it did not burn him. He no longer needed to feed from a vampire in order to survive. Margaret had given him everything he’d desired as well as the feeding he’d asked for.

Nick stopped at a small well-kept house near the base of Big Butte, the hill that had given its name to the town—despite not being a butte at all. He let himself in the front door.

Thomas stopped on the porch. “If you want me inside,” he told the hobgoblin, “you have to invite me in.”

The little fellow stopped where he was and looked up at Thomas. “You mean no harm to me and mine, you will swear it.”

“I’m not fae. Oaths have no power over me, Nick,” he told the fae. “What I am is already damned.”

The hobgoblin hissed and dismissed that with one hand. “Don’t throw Christian gobbledygook at me,” he said. “Margaret told me you would come, told me you would help. You are here, so that is the first, but I wonder if the second is true. Vampire. I served her father most of my life. I can’t afford to get this wrong.”

The fae didn’t like vampires. Thomas would have left because, with one exception, he didn’t like the fae, either. But it hadn’t been Nick who had brought him here; it had been Margaret. For her, he would do what he could.

“I owe Margaret Flanagan,” said Thomas, who was better educated about fae than he’d been a hundred years ago. He knew what he was admitting—and that the fae would take it very seriously. “What she did for me was far more than what little I managed for her. I swear I mean no harm to her or hers.”

“Come in and be welcome,” said Nick after a pause, and turned to lead the way into his home.

There were four other people in the little man’s living room, waiting for them, along with a blazing fire in the fireplace that gave out more light than heat.

One of the people, a big blond man, looked familiar, as though Thomas might have known him a long time ago. They were none of them human, and given that they were in a hobgoblin’s house, Thomas was certain they were fae.

As soon as he entered the room on Nick’s heels, everyone stood up—almost everyone. The kid on the piano bench just relaxed a little more. Thomas judged him the biggest threat: The really powerful ones often disguised themselves as something soft and helpless.

“Vampire,” said the only woman. She was tall and muscular and spoke with a Finnish accent. “Is this the one?”

The big man’s nose wrinkled as if he smelled something foul.

There was an old man—or one who looked old, since the fae could adopt any appearance that suited them. He peered at Thomas with nonjudgmental interest, which Thomas returned.

“It is him,” said the boy on the piano bench. He was a beautiful young man, draped between the bench and the piano, his elbows on the cover that protected the keys. “Who else could it be? How many Chinese vampires do you think there are in Butte?”

“This is Thomas Hao,” said Nick. “It is he who will find our Margaret.”

He didn’t introduce the others—hardly surprising, as names were odd things for the fae. Even a nickname, if held long enough, had power.

“Why does Margaret need finding?” Thomas asked.

The woman and the big man dropped their eyes and looked uncomfortable. Silence hung in the air for a moment.

“It is a long story,” said Nick. “Will you take a seat?”

Thomas might be a vampire, but he had no way to judge the people in the room and was reluctant to sit down and put himself at a disadvantage.

The boy’s smile widened as he slid off the bench and onto the floor. “Sit down, vampire, do—and the rest of you, too. Nick’ll give him the rundown and then we’ll see if she’s right about the vampire.”

The piano bench was hard and easy to rise from, unlike the overstuffed furniture in the rest of the room. It was acceptable—and it told Thomas something about the boy that he understood that.

Thomas sat on the bench. Once he was down, the fae took their seats. Nick sat on the floor opposite Thomas, though there was an empty chair.

“Let me begin this tale in its proper place—with the Flanagan,” he said. “He was high-court fae. Do you know what that means, Tom?”

“Powerful,” replied Thomas. “Though there is no high court any longer. There are only the Gray Lords, who rule all of the fae.”

“Aye,” agreed Nick. “Powerful. Also old—and smart. A person didn’t survive long in the high court if he weren’t smart.” The little man looked down at his hands.

“That’s not really where the story starts,” said the boy sitting at Thomas’s feet. “It starts with Butte. With fae who came here hiding among the humans. It probably won’t surprise you to learn that all the fae don’t get along together, will it, Mr. Hao?”

“We vampires are the soul of brotherly love,” Thomas responded dryly. “I assumed that the fae were the same.”

The boy laughed until tears ran out of his eyes.

“It was not as funny as all that,” said the woman.

“Brotherly love,” repeated the boy. “Ayah. I’ll remember that. Anyway, the fae came. From northern Europe and the British Isles mostly, like the people. Norwegians, Swedes, Finns, Cornish, and Irish—they all came.”

Italian, too, thought Thomas. The Serbians, the Czech, the Ukrainians.

The boy sat up straight now, his eyes on the woman and the big man, turned slightly away from Thomas. “Once upon a time, the Irish fae would have squashed them all, but then came the ironmongers and their Christ and they bound the old places. Left us crippled and weak.”

“It didn’t hurt as badly,” said the woman softly. “We have more iron-kissed among us, we Finns and Nordic folk.”

“Iron-kissed?” asked Thomas.

“Those who work metals: dwarves, hiisi—some of them anyway, metal mages. So for thirty years we controlled the land here, and among us was one, a hiisi, who … was not kind to the other fae.”

The boy laughed as if he thought she were funny, too.

She looked at him. “Most of us were too afraid to object.” It wasn’t an apology … not quite. “He had a talent for finding what you held dear, and then using it to make you do his bidding.”

“Yes,” the boy said dryly. “You suffered too, didn’t you, you poor things.”

She bit her lip and turned away. Apparently she was ashamed.

“And then came the Flanagan,” said the old man. He might look fragile and aged, but his voice told a different story. It rumbled in Thomas’s ears—British with a hint of Welsh or Cornish.

“I knew we’d get to him sooner or later,” said Nick. “Flanagan changed things.”

“For the better,” rumbled the giant. “Even we could see that.”

The woman snorted inelegantly. “He pushed the hiisi—this was an old and powerful hiisi—into summing the Iku-Tursas. The Flanagan could have worked something out, but he pushed and pushed and would not compromise.”

Thomas frowned. Iku-Tursas. The name sounded familiar. He’d had some friends in school: Juhani Koskinen, Matti Makela, and another boy who was also Finnish. They told him a story once.

“The dragon,” Thomas said. “But I thought it was a sea serpent.”

The fae looked at him in surprise, except for the woman, who smiled and sat back. “Most people don’t know Finnish stories.”

“They didn’t grow up here,” said Thomas.

“The Tursas is a little more than a mere sea dragon, vampire,” said the boy coolly. “It can take many forms. It attacked the Flanagan when he was down in the mines.”

“No,” said the big man at the same time the old man did. The bench under Thomas slid forward a little bit in eagerness, as if it wanted to go to the old man. Forest fae of some sort, he thought, setting his feet down a little firmer.

“It attacked the miners,” said Nick. “Playing with them a little. The place where they’d be working would start leaking water. It was the Speculator Mine—the one Flanagan was working for as a mining engineer. Modern, safe, well ventilated—the Flanagan insisted upon it.”

“High-court fae always did love the silly humans,” murmured the boy as if to himself.

The woman snorted again and reached out with a boot to nudge him hard. “I’ve heard you might come from high court yourself,” she said.

He jumped up, fierce with indignation. “You take it back! You take that back right now.”

She smiled at him. “Of course, I never believed it. Too much stupid, not enough looks.”

He shook himself like a wet cat. “Damned piru,” he snapped.

“Easy prey,” she purred.

Piru, thought Thomas. Finnish fae, he remembered. But was it one of the witty demons prone to games of wit, or one of the air ladies who hung out and looked beautiful until something ticked them off? He looked at the woman and decided for the clever demon; she looked a little too substantial to be floating around.

“It picked groups of miners with fae among them to frighten,” said Nick, picking up his story from where he’d left off. “Eventually one of them figured out that the water they’d been hitting wasn’t just an accident of geology. He took the tale to the Flanagan.”

“He was supposed to charge off to confront the Finnish fae who was tormenting his people,” said the old man. “He would have, too, if a certain people hadn’t gone to him and told him that what he faced wasn’t just any fae.”

“There was betrayal on both sides,” said the woman. “Some did not think that the Flanagan was strong enough to keep his promises and it would be the less powerful fae who would suffer. Others looked to him for justice and a way out from under the hiisi’s thumb.” She rubbed absently at the fabric of the couch where she sat. “It didn’t matter. He went anyway.”

“Aye,” said the big man. “As he had to, being who he was. But he went armed and ready instead of oblivious. The Flanagan, he wouldn’t back down for Tursas.”

“Wait,” said Thomas. “The Speculator. The Granite Mountain fire? This was the mining disaster, during World War One.”

“1917,” said Nick. “When the fire broke out, we knew he’d won.”

“In true Germanic fashion,” said the giant morosely, “I suppose he had.”

“He never came out,” Nick told Thomas. “When the fires went out, we pulled out the bodies. Some of them were fae, most were human; some you couldn’t tell. We didn’t find the Tursas or the Flanagan.”

“Afterward,” said the woman, “we met. All of us. Summoning the Tursas from its exile, as if he were a dog to come to his master. If the Flanagan hadn’t … hadn’t done whatever he did it might have eaten the world.”

She believed that, Thomas thought.

“The fae killed him,” rumbled the old man. “That hiisi who summoned the Tursas. He’d used so much power to do it, he was vulnerable. Even his allies turned on him. All the fae that were here: Cornish, Irish, Finn, German, Norwegian, Slav, and that little guy from Italy. We killed that hiisi who thought that his power was more important than the survival of all.”

“We thought that was the end of it,” the woman said. “Time passed. The city started to die, people left, and most of us left, too. Just a few stayed.”

“But that hiisi had taken the Flanagan’s daughter to make certain of his victory if the Flanagan, by some miracle, had destroyed the Iku-Tursas,” the boy said. “Searches were made but … there are thousands of miles of tunnels. We thought her long dead. Then two years ago, she started to talk to us,” said the boy. “A high-court trick, that, getting into your head. Unpleasant.”

Thomas remembered.

“She’s quite mad,” whispered Nick. “Quite mad from all those years trapped in the earth.”

“So what do you need me for?” Thomas asked.

“We need you to find her and kill her,” said the big man.

“It is what she wants,” said the boy, answering Thomas’s raised eyebrow. “She tells me so, over and over. I’ve looked and looked and I can’t find her anywhere.”

“She’s in the mines.” Nick’s voice was pensive. “We don’t have an earth or iron-kissed fae left here to find her—not that they had much success when they looked before.”

“And even if we did, she has a haltija.” The woman looked out the window, and Thomas noted absently that the fae needed to replace the double-paned window because ice had formed around the edges of the inside of the glass.

“A what?” he asked.

She waved a hand. “A guard. This one is a kalman väki, we think—a dead man’s spirit. He was probably killed and set to guard her when she was taken.”

“A kalman väki,” Thomas said slowly. “How do you know that, since you can’t find her.”

“She told us.” The big man glanced at Thomas searchingly and then looked away. Thomas knew he wouldn’t read anything but mild interest in his face.

“We’d have to destroy it to get to her.” The woman closed her eyes. “Even if we could find her, we could not get by that. A kalman väki holds the power of mortification: It kills with a touch; not even the immortal are immune. But you aren’t exactly immortal, are you?”

“The mines were mostly filled when the company shut them down.” The old man pulled his beard lightly. “The old timbers were rotting through and the tunnels collapsing. Was a time you could take a step off your back porch in the morning to find a hole four or five hundred feet down that hadn’t been in your backyard when you went to bed. One tunnel collapsing on top of another, on top of another. Was quite the thing to fill them—expensive and time-consuming both. But some of it is left, where the tunnels were cut into granite mostly.”

“So,” said Thomas. “You want me—a vampire—to go looking in the old mines to find Margaret Flanagan, who has been trapped down there for a century. Because vampires are so good at … what? Dissolving into mist and sinking through the earth? I think you’ve been watching too many bad horror movies.”

“She was never the same after she met you,” Nick said. “She had such a touch with the earth: It came to her call and did as she bid. She had a little of her father’s gift for fire, but it was the earth that knew her. She was able to call you here. If she can do that, she should be able to guide you to her down in the mines, where her power is greater.”

“Hello, vampire,” said the big man softly—and his American accent turned lilting and softened. Thomas had only talked to Margaret for a few hours, one day out of the many years he’d lived, but he recognized her intonations in the man’s deep voice.

The other fae moved away from the big man, but they didn’t look startled. He knew that they would not perceive his surprise; his father had taught him well.

“Or ill,” the big man said, proving that her gift of reading thoughts that Thomas did not speak was still hers. The fae’s clear blue eyes were not quite the same shade as Margaret’s.

“They think I can find you,” Thomas said carefully. “That because you called me here, you can lead me through the tunnels.”

“Like to like,” she answered him. “I don’t know why you heard my call, just that you did. I could not have given you your wish if you had not been earth-touched.”

He knew what she meant. How could he not? He remembered that sense he’d had of how she was a part of the earth that had held them together in its maw. He’d sensed it because the earth spoke to him, too.

Vampires develop abilities, the Master had told him. The Master could make humans do as he wanted even before a blood exchange—a rare gift, and useful.

Thomas’s mother’s family were scholars, back as far as their family history went—all the way, the stories said, to the dragon scholar who knew everything that dragons knew and turned into a man to see what men knew. Thomas’s mother had told him that her family was founded by a dilong, an earth dragon. “Only a story,” his father had said, rolling his eyes. He had never cared for anything that reminded him that his wife’s family had higher status than his.

Thomas looked at the assembled fae. “Why do you say that she is mad?” he asked.

“My father’s blood runs in the earth,” the big man whispered in Margaret’s voice. “His fire consumes me. When I emerge I will burn them all to dust and beyond.”

“We think the Flanagan died two years ago,” said the woman in subdued tones. She did not look at the man who sat next to her and spoke with Margaret’s voice. “That he gave her his last strength so she could call out and find someone to help, so she could be saved, but it was too late.”

“What would you expect of her?” asked the boy. “Alone for nearly a century. Trapped with only the dead for company, under the earth. Chained, without food or water. Neither dying nor living. And now she has the power of her father, who killed the Iku-Tursas.” He shivered and hugged himself. “She will kill us all.”

“No,” said Thomas, coming at last to his feet. “I shall not allow it. The girl I knew would not want your deaths on her conscience.” She had rescued him, a vampire who had hurt her, and still she rescued him. She did not need the blood of these fae on her hands.

It took him four days to find a way to the place she’d been kept. As the old man had promised, many of the tunnels he’d known were collapsed or filled, but his sense of the ways beneath the mining town was as good as it had ever been. He found a path.

As before, though, that earth sense he had did not betray her to him. It was the blood he’d taken from her. Like calls to like, she’d told him. While all the fae around her thought she was talking about her magic.

He rose in the absolute darkness and felt the shape of the last obstacle that stood between him and his goal. It was not just winter’s chill, it was colder than that. He found himself wishing for a light to see the väki, but he’d never needed a light down here, so he hadn’t brought one.

“Why come you smelling so of death?” It was a woman’s voice; he hadn’t expected her to be a woman.

“I am vampire,” he told the kalman väki. “I bring death with me.”

“Mine is the power of illness, of mortification of living flesh,” she said. “But I would keep my charge though I have no power over the dead.”

“No more than I do,” he said gently. “I mean her no harm, guardian spirit. I killed those who did.”

He’d killed them, her father’s betrayers, so that Margaret wouldn’t have to. They hadn’t expected it, and he’d been careful to take out the boy first. Then the big man who could—Thomas was pretty sure—pick and chose how much Margaret could say through his lips.

He was a vampire, and these fae had believed he was their dog to do their bidding. They hadn’t expected a monster, despite knowing what he was. Killing them had not taken him long.

Thomas had been raised in Butte, among the Irish, Finns, and all the other races who had come to pull the treasures of the Richest Hill on Earth. He might wear the face of a Chinese man, but he came from a family of scholars and lived among the people here for all of his childhood.

A väki of whatever kind was a protector of the treasure it guarded. No one would set such a creature to keep a prisoner in. Only a fae would think that a vampire would assume a väki of the grave would be an evil thing. Her father or perhaps the Finnish fae who had first warned the Flanagan of the dragon must have sent it to protect her. If they meant his Margaret no harm, the väki would not have prevented them from reaching her.

If Margaret had remained powerless in the heart of the earth, they would have left her there to rot. When her father’s power came to her—or whatever had happened that she could tell their thoughts and return her own—she could finally take action against them; they had decided they had to kill her.

Somehow they’d discovered that she’d called him for help—perhaps she’d taunted them with it—that she had someone she could call for help. It didn’t matter. What do you send against the spirit of the dead? A vampire. They had the weapon they needed; they just had to point it in the right direction. Once Thomas had dealt with the väki, they would have killed Thomas and Margaret both.

But Margaret hadn’t told them everything about him. They assumed she could summon him because of the wish she’d granted him, that it had given her some sort of magical power over him. But it had been the blood. If she had trusted them—as they implied—she would have told them about that part. Telling him about the väki had been their first mistake. Not knowing that he’d bitten her and taken her blood had been the second.

Nick, who had served her father almost all his life, would have known a vampire saved her. But neither Margaret nor her father had told Nick the whole story.

The final, and greatest, mistake had been implying that Margaret had been driven insane, imprisoned in the earth. What was it Nick had said? “She’s quite mad.” A subtle word was mad. Nick had used it to imply one thing without a lie crossing his lips. Thomas would have been angry, too, imprisoned by his enemies. The earth was her element; it nurtured her and sustained her.

If he was wrong, if they had been innocent of all he suspected…? Well, then, he was a vampire, after all—and they were fae. He would not regret their deaths.

But he had not been wrong, because he could feel the guardian move out of his path, satisfied by his answer. He slipped by it and found the fragile thing he searched for, little more than bones in chains.

“Please,” she said, her voice as quiet as the whisper of the spring wind.

He broke the iron shackles first, throwing them as far from her as the confines of the tunnel allowed. He pulled a blanket out of the pack he carried and carefully, gently put her upon it.

“What would you do for me in return?” he said, raising her up and touching a damp cloth to her face. She pressed her face against it, sucking on the moisture. It would take her a long time to get water that way—and it would be slow enough not to make her sick from it.

When he pulled the cloth away and soaked it in water from his canteen again, she said, her voice hoarse, “Anything. My gratitude you have.”

“Yes?” he said, pressing the cloth against her face again. “You gave me such a gift last time. Gratitude is a poor substitute. Perhaps I should give your gift back to you, shall I?” He picked her up, and she was such a light burden, lighter even than she’d been the first time he’d carried her out of the mine tunnels.

“Oh, yes,” she sighed, understanding what he didn’t say, as she had before. “I should love to see the sun again.”