Harris looked dubiously at the black leather shoes, long-sleeved white shirt, silk boxer shorts, and gray two-piece suit with a lace-edged handkerchief in the breast pocket. The clothing was dated, with the jacket’s wide lapels and trousers’ high waistline, but not too garish, if you overlooked the two-tone red-and-green suspenders and matching tie.
In the attached bathroom, Harris shucked the baggy brown pants they’d given him minutes ago, then stooped to pull on the new pair. He moved carefully; it wouldn’t do to make his injury any worse.
Wait a second. He’d kicked the guts out of the man with the submachine gun and hadn’t even felt the wound pull. Adrenaline and painkillers could only mask so much; he’d have felt additional injury after he started to wind down. Curious, he unwrapped Alastair’s bandage from his thigh.
His wound was gone.
Where Adonis’ claws had torn open his flesh, angry red marks remained, like scars left from an injury that had been healing for days. They hurt when he pressed hard on them, but gave him no trouble otherwise.
He sighed. It really was no use getting upset over strange things anymore, so he pulled on his new underwear and trousers. “Alastair?”
The doctor called through the door, “Yes?”
“What exactly did you do to me?”
Alastair’s chuckle was faint but unmistakable. “Thatched you, of course. A good mending. You took to it well. Which reminds me, you’ll be ravenous in a bell or two. How does it look?”
“Great. Like it’s been weeks since I scrapped with something with teeth and claws.”
“Good. Don’t strain that leg for a few days unless you absolutely have to. Though if you decide you have to ‘scrap’ again with Jean-Pierre, I’ll allow it . . . provided you let me watch. Oh, and something else.”
“Yes?”
“Don’t bring any silver against that wound. You’d hate to see it spring open again.”
They returned to the lab just as brown-clothed workmen carried out the last of the dead assassins on a stretcher. The living attackers were already gone, and more men were at work with mops on the bloody patches of floor.
Doc stood in the center of the room, the lead assassin’s volt-meter in his hand, and looked up as Harris and Alastair entered. He indicated the volt-meter. “Harris, it’s you they wanted. This little device let me follow your movements to within a few paces.”
“Oh, great. Does that mean I have a radio on me?” Seeing Doc’s blank look, he explained, “Am I carrying some gizmo that this thing can trace?”
“No. It follows you. Probably the charge of energy Alastair sees as an aura around you.” He closed his right eye and widened his left to look at Harris. “I can see it a little, too. We’ll have to subject you to some tests when we return.”
“How do you know Gaby?”
Doc hesitated. “I’ve actually never met her in the flesh. A few years ago, she started calling me on the talk-box. Always with hints and clues. News about what the crime gangs were doing. Sometimes things they were planning to do to me. She never told me how she learned them. She’s never told me about herself.” He shrugged. “And now you come with her cameo in your pack . . . and she seems not to recognize you.”
“I can’t explain that part.”
“We’ll think on it later. For now, we need to begin our search.”
Noriko, a yellow topcoat thrown over her clothes, straightened up from the television set. “Not so. Harris appeared at Six Heinzlin Corners, Brambleton South.”
Doc gave her a curious look. “How do you know?”
“I called to Civic Hall on the talk-box and asked if anyone had reported a damaged walkway in a good neighborhood.”
Doc looked pained. “Angus Powrie’s attack. If I had been thinking . . . ”
“They said there was. And that there was blood on the walk not far away. Workmen will fix it all tomorrow.”
“After we look at it.”
Harris gave Noriko a disbelieving look. “Your city hall is open at this hour?”
“Of course. Why not?”
“Because it would be too convenient?”
Doc’s private elevator took them down to floor level and below, to a spacious basement garage filled with cars. All of them were the antiques Harris had come to expect, but they were otherwise of every imaginable type and color: a long, low two-seat roadster in an abusive glowing orange, a slab-sided panel truck in a shade of drab green Harris was already thinking of as comparatively inconspicuous, a pair of matching black-and-silver motorcycles, a long red monstrosity of a car with a decadently comfortable-looking interior, perhaps a dozen more cars in all. They settled on Jean-Pierre’s black-and-gold sedan, and the pale-faced, dark-haired mechanic on duty—Jean-Pierre introduced him as Fergus Bootblack—told them that it was fueled and ready.
Jean-Pierre drove them up the ramp out of the garage and onto the still-busy street with a disregard for traffic and the laws of physics that Harris found unsettling.
Ten minutes later, they were parked outside the walled estate Harris had fled earlier that night. There was the hole in the sidewalk made by Angus Powrie; there were the gates . . . hanging open.
And half an hour after that, as the sun began to send tentative shafts of light slanting between the tall buildings, Harris and the others prowled around the estate’s mansion. They looked at furniture long stored under dusty sheets and moved through echoingly empty rooms.
“Hasn’t been lived in for months,” Alastair said. He and Harris, in the kitchen, peered into the empty walk-in pantry and saw nothing but memories of crumbs. “I wager your friends hired it from the homelord, or moved in when he wasn’t looking. When you got away, they fled.”
“So what’s that ex-in-a-circle thing out on the front lawn?”
“A conjurer’s circle.”
“That’s what you called the circle in your lab. The thing with the paint.”
Alastair nodded. “Same principle. Same use. There are always two: one here, one there. What starts in one—”
“— ends up in the other. I get it. I did it.” Harris paused, worrying briefly about how easy it was for him to speak the language of the impossible when he was confronted with it. “Alastair, the other one of the circle out there is where I’m from, and that’s an awful long way away.”
“You want to return.”
“Right now. No offense. I have to find Gaby.”
A smile tugged at Alastair’s lip. “I doubt we can help you so soon. We have to know which rituals they used on this circle. But if anyone can help you find your way, it’s Doc.”
Harris asked, “Why?” Seeing Alastair’s blank look, he continued: “Why would he want to help?”
Alastair thought about that for a moment. “I don’t know too much about it. He’s almost the last of his kind, and he’d like for them to be remembered kindly.”
“Who is ‘them’?”
“Purebloods from a long time ago.” Alastair opened a floor-level cabinet and bent over to peer within it. “Amapershiat itifuwadda—”
“I can’t hear you.”
“Sorry.” Alastair straightened, looking dubious. “I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t bandy this about. A lot of it is public record, but Doc doesn’t care to have it discussed in his presence.”
“Sure.”
Alastair kept his attention on the door. “There was a bad one a while back. One of the Daoine Sidhe, like Doc. Did a lot of harm in the years leading up to the last war. Made their kind infamous. Doc fought him several times, but the people mostly remembered the bad that one did. If you said ‘Daoine Sidhe’ to the average man on the walk twenty years ago, he’d have bit his thumb and spat.”
“Whatever that means.”
“Well, it just means that Doc ended up being the heir to a very nasty legacy. That’s why the Sidhe Foundation. It’s all charities and philanthropies and fixing problems. Nowadays, you say Daoine Sidhe to the man on the walk, and he’s just as likely to think of the Foundation. Which is a victory.”