Those Who Fight Monsters: Tales of Occult Detectives

“It’s none of your bloody business,” Pete said, “but, yes.”

“He won’t be coming,” the Fae intoned. “Madam Caldecott…”

“Look, if you insist on speaking to me, lay off of that before I call the bouncer and get you thrown right the fuck out,” Pete ordered.

“Petunia,” the Fae tried, her given name looking like it caused it — him? — pain. “I bear a request from the Senechal of the Seelie Court. I need you to come at once.”

The Fae reached for her, and Pete lost what little patience she had for the creatures. “You lay that pretty hand on me and you’re getting a pretty stump back,” she said, swatting. Contact with its skin sent a spiraling jolt of power up her arm and into her heart. Pete didn’t make it her practice to cause a scene in the middle of pubs — at least not when she was sober — and when the Lament’s few patrons looked over, she felt herself flush. “Look, I’m sorry,” she said. “But here, you don’t just swan in and grab people…” she waited for the Fae’s name.

“You can call me Rowan,” it said. Pete crinkled her nose.

“That’s a bit swishy for a strapping thing like yourself.” The expression on Rowan’s face showed he had no idea what she meant. Pete sighed. “Rowan, what do you want? You’re making me conspicuous.”

“You must come,” Rowan said. “If I don’t deliver you…” The magic about him changed subtly, a darkening, a chill across Pete’s bare skin. “If I don’t,” Rowan whispered, “they cut off my head.”

Pete blinked. “How medieval,” she said dryly. “You expect me to believe that?”

“Don’t you know?” he said. “Seelie Fae can’t lie. We are bound by blood. Our very nature forbids it.”

That caused Pete to consider. Jack, the one with actual experience of the pasty bastards, had only spoken of Fae in the most dismissive of terms. She had no idea whether to trust Rowan or laugh at the audacity of his put-on.

“They told me you were smart,” Rowan said. “That you were a detective.”

Pete took a sip of her dark beer. “Used to be. Not any more.” It was hard to reconcile murders and robberies and the orderly procession of the Metropolitan Police with magic and curses and a place like the Lament Pub. Too hard. Six months next week, she’d been off the job.

“That’s why they want you,” Rowan continued. “The puzzle. The bloody business. Human eyes are needed.”

Pete raised her eyebrow at that. Rowan was growing more fidgety by the second, like a first-former itching to tattle on a classmate. “Come out with it!” she said.

“A murder,” Rowan said. “It’s the first in … well, a very, very long time, even for us. Honor killings are one thing. Duels. Assassination. But this…” He scrubbed his hand against his forehead. “It has no sense behind it.”

Pete sighed. “You look for murder to make sense, you might as well be looking for meaning in ‘Whiter Shade of Pale’. Don’t Fae have … I dunno, investigative types?” The idea of Fae police, in everyday Met uniforms, made her smirk a bit. Most of the Black was lawless as the American West, and it was by pure meanness and cunning that you kept your blood and entrails inside your body. Jack had taught her that. Where the fuck was Jack?

“We used to have Inquisitors,” Rowan said. “But the Queen disbanded them, long ago. It’s said … they said Petunia Caldecott was the cleverest human in the Black. And this needs a human’s eyes.”

Pete looked at the door again, at Rowan’s haggard face, and finally back at her mostly-still-full pint glass. “Fine,” she sighed, tossing down a few pounds for it. “Let’s have a look at your corpse, then.”

They left the Lament, which opened onto an alley that was never in the same place twice. Rowan visibly relaxed once they were outside, and Pete felt him shift something, the enchantment that had allowed him inside in the first place, though his magic still prickled her. “Have you ever visited Faerie?” he asked Pete. His voice was stronger, with the clearbell-like quality she associated with Fae.

“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.