Besieged: Stories from the Iron Druid Chronicles(82)
That lie had always been the problem. Since his return to New York from a six-week assignment in Spain, his former lover wouldn’t answer his calls or reply to his emails. When he called round her Brooklyn apartment, only silence answered the buzzer on the ground floor. Sure, he’d hardly been the mild-mannered Englishman, leaving her high and dry, dropping everything to run off on the De Luca job. And it wasn’t as if he needed the money. He’d been around a long time. He got bored. He got restless. He went into his cave, as Rose would’ve put it. The jobs were a way of keeping in shape, and of course, his choice of clientele meant that no one was going to ask too many questions. Now he was paying the price for this diversion. A week back in the city and Rose was another ghost to him.
But once upon a time, once upon a time, when you didn’t ask questions and I could pretend, we were madly in love.
Outside, the rain lashing the window, and inside, the rain lashing his heart. April in Insomniac City was a lonely place to be. Ben took another slug of Jack, swallowed another bittersweet memory.
A motorbike growled up outside the bar. The customers turned to look. Exhaust fumes mingled with the scent of liquor as the door swung wide and the rain blew in – with it, a man. The door creaked shut. The man was dressed completely in black, his riding leathers shiny and wet. His boots pounded on the floorboards, then silenced as he stopped and surveyed the bar. His helmet visor was down, obscuring his face. A plume of feathers bristled along the top of the fibreglass dome, trailing down between his bullish shoulders. The bizarre gear marked him out as a Hell’s Angel or a member of some other freeway cult. The long, narrow object strapped to his back, its cross-end poking up at the cobwebbed fans, promised a pointed challenge.
As the other customers lost interest, turning back to their chatter, peanuts and music, Ben was putting down his tumbler of Jack, swivelling on his stool and groaning wearily under his breath.
The man in the helmet saw him, shooting out a leather-gloved finger.
“Ben Garston! This game of hide-and-seek is over. I have some unfinished business with you.”
Ben felt the eyes in the place twist back to him, a soft, furtive pressure on his spine. He placed a hand on his chest, a faux-yielding gesture.
“What can I say, Fulk? You found me.”
The newcomer removed his helmet and thumped it down on the end of the bar. It rested there like a charred turkey, loose feathers fluttering to the floor. The man called Fulk grinned, a self-satisfied leer breaking through his shaggy black beard. Coupled with the curls falling to his shoulders, his head resembled a small, savage dog, ready to pounce from a thick leather pedestal.
“London. Paris. LA.” Fulk named the cities of his search, each one a wasp flying from his mouth. Like Ben, his accent was British, but where Ben’s held the clipped tones of a Londoner, the man in black’s was faintly Welsh, a gruff rural borderland burr. Ben would have recognised it anywhere. “Where’ve you been hiding, snake?”
Ben shrugged. “Seems I’ve been wherever you’re not.”
Fulk indicated the half-empty glass on the bar. “Surprised you’re not drinking milk. I know you have a taste for it. Milk, maidens and malt, eh? And other people’s property.”
“Ah, the Fitzwarren family wit.” Through the soft blur of alcohol, Ben looked up at the six-and-a-half-foot hulk before him, openly sizing him up. What Fulk lacked in brains, he made up for in brawn. Win or lose, this was going to hurt.
The whiskey softened his tongue as well. He made a halfhearted stab at diplomacy. “You shouldn’t be here, you know. The Pact—”
“Fuck the Pact. What’s it to me?”
“It’s the Lore, Fulk. Kill me, and the Guild’ll make sure you never see that pile of moss-bound rubble you and your family call home again.”
But Ben wasn’t so sure about that. Whittington Castle, the crumbling ruins of a keep near Oswestry in Shropshire, was in the ancestral care of a trust. The same trust set up back in 1201 by King John and later bestowed on the Guild of the Broken Lance for safe keeping. The deeds to the castle would only pass back to the Fitzwarren estate when a certain provision was met, that being the death of Red Ben Garston, the last of his troublesome kind. The last one awake, anyway. Of course, the Lore superseded that ancient clause. Technically, Ben was protected like all Remnants, but he knew that didn’t matter to Fulk. The same way he knew that the man in front of him was far from the first to go by that name. Like the others before him, this latest Fulk would stop at nothing to get his hands on Whittington and reclaim the family honour, whether he risked the ire of the Guild or not. Vengeance ran in Fulk’s bloodline, and his parents would have readied him for it since the day he was born.
“The Lore was made to be broken,” Fulk Fitzwarren CDXII said. “Besides, don’t you read the news? The Pact is null and void, Garston. You’re not the only one any more.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
Before he could enquire further, the man in black unzipped his jacket, reached inside and retrieved a scrunched-up newspaper. He threw it on to the bar, next to Ben’s elbow.
It was a copy of The New York Times. Today’s evening edition. Warily lowering his eyes, Ben snatched it up and read the headline.
STAR OF EEBE STOLEN
Police baffled by exhibition theft
Last night person or persons unknown broke into the Nubian Footprints exhibition at the Javits Center, the noted exhibition hall on West 34th Street. The thieves made off with priceless diamond the Star of Eebe, currently on loan from the Museum of Antiquities, Cairo. Archaeologists claim that the fist-sized uncut gem came from a meteor that struck the African continent over 3,000 years ago. Legend has it that the Star fell into the possession of a sub-Saharan queen.