Imperative: A Quinn Larson Quest (3 page)

Fairies were kind of in the moment creatures and didn’t understand the larger picture. I guess it comes from being tied to seasonal things like flowers. “No. It’s not good to end anyone. It’s better to stop them, but not end them.”

“Tell me what you know.” I put the whole bag of candy on the bench between us. Maybe I could stop the Sidhe before Bob had to make a choice.

“Fionuir found some way to stop baby fairies coming. Now we have to give her human spirit power to get okay to breed. That’s all I know.”

“Thanks, Bob.” I pushed the bag of candy toward him. “Let me see what I can do.”

Damn Sidhe, I thought as I walked home. They are like spoiled teenagers. Never caring about the repercussions of their actions.

Like I told Bob, all I needed to do was stop the killing. And do that before the humans found any clue that led to a Real Folk perpetrator. There is way too much history about humans and things they don’t understand. We may have magic, but they have bullets. Bullets win every time.

So, I had to talk to Fionuir and she wouldn’t just let me walk in and chat. She was the queen and all the other Sidhe obeyed and protected her, or else. Getting an audience with Fionuir could be easy if she liked you. I’m not sure she had any feelings for me— yet. The Sidhe could be cruel and cold, but they could also be charming and funny. I just had to figure out how to get on Fionuir’s charming side.

I needed a contact.

The only one I had in the court was Melbe. He’s a sprite with a talent for management who runs the Sidhe household. And he owes me.

I grabbed my crystal ball off the shelf. It’s not like you think, a big round globe of clear crystal. It’s a roughly round dingy pink lump of crystal. It gets clear when it’s ready to deliver the goods. I put the crystal on a black cloth which covered the dirt part of the floor and then I sat.

Now I had to get my questions in order. I knew the Sidhe would be monitoring information requests and the longer I was on the crystal, the easier I would be to locate. And if I got caught, Melbe would also be caught— and he would be hurt.

I cleared my thoughts and brought his face to mind. Sprites all look pretty much the same, only one or two differentiators exist. Mainly size; they came in all ranges from eighteen inches to the size of an ancient sequoia. If you know what to look for, you can recognize individuals at a glance. Melbe had a notch in his left ear from a duel with a pixie.

I breathed on the crystal and whispered his name.

The crystal cleared and then faded again. That usually meant someone was ignoring me. I breathed on the crystal again and whispered, “Melbe.”

“Go away. I am busy.” Melbe’s brown face frowned at me. “Oh, it’s you. Just give me a minute to get someplace private.”

I saw the background move nauseatingly for a second then Melbe’s face came back into focus. “I can only give you a few minutes before someone will come looking for me. What do you want? And whatever it is, we’re even right?”

“Okay yes, we’re even. I want to know what’s going on with this fairies thing?”

He nodded. “Ah, the breeding plan?”

It bothered me that he seemed so blasé about it. “There’s got to be more to this than trying to control the flow of baby fairies. What else is Fionuir up to?”

“Yes, Fionuir does not want to give up power so she came up with a plan to make herself the best choice.” He glanced around again.

“And that involves killing humans?”

He didn’t turn back to face me, but I could still hear his words. “Yes. You know how lazy the Sidhe are. Well, the killing is giving them power for no effort. So far it seems to be working.” He turned back to me and I could see the tension pinching his face.

I wondered if I could find an ally in one of the others, although no Sidhe could really be trusted. “If Fionuir is taking this much risk, the other contenders must be strong. Who is she most worried about?”

Melbe glanced sideways again. “I have to….” He faded from the crystal. Whatever made him leave must have been dangerous, it would have taken all his power to break the summoning. I hoped he was fast enough not to get caught.

At least he gave me some information. I could probably find out who the other Sidhe was and maybe she would be willing to stop Fionuir without extracting too big a price.

I wrapped the cloth around the crystal and put it back on the shelf. I was thinking about a cold beer when the rapping on my window started again.

I let Olan in the front door.

“Did you get any information?” He asked as he climbed onto the kitchen chair.

After I told him what I’d learned from Melbe he smiled and said, “So the Queen is worried. I’m sure she has reason to be. She’ll have made a few enemies while in power.”

I shrugged, that was like saying rain was wet. “I still don’t get why the fairies are suddenly becoming barren. What if it’s permanent? What happens when sprites can’t reproduce, or wizards? Or, pixies?”

Olan bobbed his head. “I’ve no expertise on fairy husbandry, and pixies are not having any problems in that direction. I doubt Fionuir is the kind to wait for fate to give her an opportunity. It’s my guess she created this whole situation.”

He had a point. This seemed like too much of a coincidence to me, too. I really wanted it to be more than a coincidence because I can’t do anything about fate, but I can stop a Bean Sidhe; maybe. “I need to talk to Fionuir. If I can get an audience, I might be able to get her to reconsider whatever the reason is for this.”

Olan snorted and hopped down to walk into the living room. He jumped on the coffee table and stood on tiptoes so he could look out the window.

I got tired of waiting for him to say what he had to say. “Do you know anything I can use to get to Fionuir?”

He turned back to me. “Well, I’m thinking you don’t have to do this alone.”

This was going to be a problem. I didn’t like to put other people in danger, and Olan was just unreliable. “I work alone. I could use information, but that’s all. This is going to be dangerous. Really dangerous.”

“Yes.” Olan turned back to me. “I was here when the Sidhe arrived. That’s, what? Five hundred years ago? I knew they’d be trouble then. I’ve been proven right more than once since. Remember when they thought Father Bear was mocking them?”

Father Bear was one of the old Pacific Coast Folk. They had been around since time began. Literally, they started time. “I’m only three hundred years old. What happened?”

He sat down and laid his bodkin spear across his lap. “Ah, you kids, you don’t know anything about history. Well it was Fionuir’s mother who got it into her head that there had been an insult. In revenge she burned half the forest. Father Bear got a singed paw.” Olan gave another laugh. “Ah, well, it wasn’t that bad; no one got killed and the forest did need to be refreshed.”

“Okay, we all know the Sidhe don’t have a lot of perspective when they’re mad.” I remember a few stories myself. “That’s why I’m going to do this alone.”

“Alone is not good,” Olan said. “Better to have many talents together. When you spread the work, you make it harder for your enemy to break you.”

Great, wisdom from a pixie
. “I don’t want anyone hurt.”

Olan walked back and forth. “Nor me, but doing it alone won’t stop the hurting. What happens to one of us hurts others. And, no matter how prettily you ask, Fionuir is not going to just change her plans to make you happy.”

He was right. I thought about how Cate would feel if I got killed. I know how I would feel if I got her killed. Crap, thinking about this wasn’t going to get the problem solved. “I know; that’s not what I was planning. I’m hoping I can get something to hold over her head. Or, if she’s done something, find a way to reverse it.”

“I was thinking of someone more reliable, Olan. I can’t be second guessing every step of the way. If you pull a trick, the whole plan could be screwed. It’s too important for that. You know the humans will kill us wholesale rather than look at us.”

“I swear I’ll not trick you.” He stifled a smile. “I am required to keep the humans safe. The only way I see clear to do that is to stop the Sidhe taking contracts out on them. I’m a bit too small to do that on my own.”

He turned to face me and I saw a green blush under his skin. “It is embarrassing and it’s not important. What is important is information about the Sidhe, or about the fairies.”

Nice try. I wasn’t going to let him get away with it. “The Morrigan is part of the same world as the Sidhe. If she is angry she’ll get in the way just to spite you.” I wondered why Olan was being so dense.

“I may have given insult to her. She may have misunderstood something.”

“Olan, just spit it out. I won’t agree to us working together unless you come clean.” I was getting really tired of this. It just proves my point, working alone is best.

“Okay. I was talking to Brother Eagle about the general advantage of being a bird. It was a great conversation.” He smiled up at me. “But, The Crow was listening and I might have made some comment, not being mean mind you, about how some black birds were bossy. Now Brother Eagle just laughed, but he has a sense of humor.”

I rolled my eyes. “Do you think you can avoid making it worse?”

He leaned against his bobbin and stared at me, and then he sighed. “I promise to try.”

“All I can ask.” I resigned myself to having a partner. It would be better to have Olan officially on my side, rather than have him ‘helping’ unofficially.

While Olan went snooping for more information, I was going to try to figure out why it had to be poison. Why not just a convenient accident, or a suicide? Poison seemed to be too obvious for Real Folk; too likely to bring attention. The Sidhe wouldn’t want that any more than I did.

I didn’t feel like sitting in the basement, and I didn’t need to work magic to do this research. I had a regular book on poisons, one I could read in public. So, I took it with me to the park, and enjoyed a bit of sunshine while I read about the effects of various plants on humans. Fairies would use plants. I remembered the way the woman convulsed that night. And started with Belladonna then looked at various mushrooms and flowers. They all gave pain and hallucinations and killed fast; most of them worked by ingestion. It would be difficult to keep some of them fresh enough to be guaranteed fatal. I figured two options, Belladonna and Lily of the Valley. So great, now I had information but no idea what to do with it.

“Hello, Quinn.” Olan’s voice in my ear startled me. He was standing on the back of the bench, staying in a shadow. I looked around, but there were no humans near enough to notice him.

“I figure the fairies are using Belladonna or Lily of the Valley. The key seems to be more pain, more fear, and more power.” This was Olan’s opportunity to show how much better it was to be working together instead of alone.

“That sounds about right. No one gets energy from a peaceful death. Fionuir probably knew that since she was a tiny thing. Have you never noticed that the Sidhe can be found around violence?”

“Yes. But it’s not just those clans affected. Bob didn’t say it’s just two clans, he said
fairies
.”

“There’s a patch of both down at the other end of the path. But I think it’s a red herring. If we stake out that patch, we could be wasting our time. Like I said, both grow everywhere.”