Chapter 26: Fume, Fume, Fume
In Which Miss Kurayami has reason to turn down a business offer, and Miss True finds frustration in a few loose ends.
Kurayami turned the slim vial of liquid over and over in her fingers, allowing the light to play in the lavender colored solution inside. "I will have you know that I do not do business with your kind," she said.
The person seated across from her desk leaned back with an insinuating smile. He clearly suffered under the delusion he was in control of this situation. Seymour, the club bouncer who had brought this visitor to Kurayami's attention, glared down at him, radiating silent intimidation, with no apparent effect.
"Is that so, Mistress Kurayami?" the visitor purred with insulting politeness. "I was given to understand you had no problems dealing with the Fae." He gave a glance over at the other table where an exquisitely-chiseled Fae sat shirtless and silent in front of a computer terminal.
"Claude?" Kurayami said. "He is a gift from Lord Melchior. He is pretty to look at and adequate in bed. He also has other uses." Claude was one of Melchior's people, what he called the 'Silicon Fae': faerie with a special affinity for technology. Claude tilted his head slightly, revealing the cable running from his computer to an input jack in his skull, just behind his perfectly-formed ear. Yes, Kurayami found Claude to be very useful. He made her system run 65% faster. She was not foolish enough to drink of him, though.
"But you misunderstand me," Kurayami continued. "It is not your species I object to, but your occupation." She tossed the vial back at her visitor. "I was referring to drug dealers."
"Please. I have no desire to cut into your profits. Indeed, I am more than happy to offer a percentage for your patronage."
"I run a legal establishment. I permit no drugs. They leave an unpleasant taste in the blood." She smiled, just enough to show her teeth. It was time this fool realized his position.
"But surely, Mistress Kurayami, a powerful vampire lord like you is not afraid of mortal law."
Now the fool was becoming tiresome. The blatant play on her vanity suggested a lack of respect for her intelligence as well as for her power. "It pleases the police that they not look too closely into my affairs and it pleases me that I never give them a reason to wish to. The first rule of control is to never give others a reason to challenge your control. Surely you know that."
Kurayami rose from her desk and sauntered around it to her visitor. Seymour stepped back to give her room, recognizing the quiet menace in her mood. The visitor seemed not to realize his danger; or perhaps he didn't care. He was clearly either very confident, or an idiot. It was time to end this game.
She leaned over the visitor, cradling his jaw tenderly in her fingers and bringing her lips close to the side of his neck. "I know what you are thinking," she whispered. "You are thinking that I will not dare bite you. You are thinking that your blood protects you; that the raw magic of your faerie nature would destroy me as surely as sunlight would; and that even if I were powerful enough to survive drinking of you, that the magic in your blood would bind me to you and make me yours. For that reason you think you have nothing to fear..." She felt the muscles in his throat tense in anticipation as her teeth hovered so tantalizingly close.
"You are mistaken!"
Her fingers abruptly closed upon his trachea and she wrenched his head back to meet her gaze. Her nails dug into the flesh of his neck and her eyes transfixed his like a pin holding a butterfly. "You will tell me," she hissed, "what manner of drug do you sell?"
"It - it's not a drug!" the person stammered. "It's Essence of the Fae, distilled from faerie blood!"
"Poison!"
"No! Not poison! It enraptures mortals, true, but their blood transforms the essence and makes it safe for your kindred!"
Kurayami knotted her brow and kindled twin sparks of malice in her eyes. In a moment or two, the Fae would realize that he could simply turn into a moonbeam or a cloud of thistledown or something equally poetic and escape her grasp, but for now she held him fast by her will. Beings of fancy rather than substance, the Fae were immune to most physical attacks, but not to domination by the will. Kurayami possessed will in abundant quantity.
For a moment their gazes held. Then, she released her grasp and the visitor fell to the floor with an ungraceful thud. "Do something to him, Seymour," she said. "I care not what."
Seymour bent over to pick up the visitor, but the Fae dissolved into a rainbow of mist and disappeared, leaving only the small purple vial.
He reached for the vial, but before he could take it, Kurayami crushed it beneath the toe of her shoe. The vial's lavender contents seeped into her carpeted floor.
"Claude, darling. Be a dear and clean that up. This way, Seymour." Kurayami strode out of her office, followed by her faithful shadow.
She felt a need for more pleasant company.
* * * * *
Cassandra had been working for the Morning Star less than thirty-six hours and already she had come to dread her editor's Kindly Voice.
"This is not the Daily Oracle, Miss True," Mr. Johnson said like a soothing parent explaining that This Will Hurt Me More Than It Hurts You. "We have a certain obligation to our readers. We can't have these unsubstantiated wild fantasies, no matter how imaginative."
"Unsubstantiated? I have quotes from witnesses!"
"Then there is the matter of your allegations against Ms Morrigan."
"The witch kidnapped me!"
A pained expression crossed the editor's face. "That word. It has certain negative connotations. You must understand, the Wiccan Anti-Defamation League is very powerful in this city. It is the policy of this paper not to disparage anyone's religion."
"Religion has nothing to do with it! She locked me up in a bloody iron cage!"
Mr. Johnson shut his eyes with a saintly patience and when he opened them said, "I can see that you are too close to this story. Your emotional investment is too great. I suggest that you turn your notes over to one of our more experienced reporters and let him write it."
That was the end of the matter. Cassandra spent the rest of the morning proofreading wire copy and sizing photographs -- something any halfway competent intern could do -- and fuming.
Mostly, she fumed at Strephon. She had saved his life the night before; or at least saved him from whatever that Morrigan woman had planned for him, and how did he react? “Clever girl!” Like she was a cocker spaniel who had brought him his newspaper. Well, it hadn't seemed quite so condescending at the time, but then she had mentioned that the police were on their way.
Because naturally, the first thing Cassandra had done when she got out of Morrigan’s cage was retrieve her phone from her handbag and call the police. What else should she do? But Strephon had gaped at her like she’d used the wrong spoon in front of a duchess at high tea, while Devon and Tobias exchanged uncomfortable glances. “She tried to drug me, and she locked me up in a cage!”
“Of course,” Strephon had said. “Quite sensible. I’m sure the police will easily sort things out.” But with something in his tone of voice suggesting that the police were the last people he wanted involved with this.
Devon didn’t help any by suddenly declaring that he wasn’t needed there any more and walking off down the path where his black trench coat quickly disappeared under the shadows of the trees. And then Tobias remarked that he ought to put his tyre iron back in the trunk of his cab so that the police wouldn’t find a big black man holding a dangerous weapon and get any funny ideas.
As luck would have it, Detective Masey was the officer in charge of the policemen who arrived. He winced when he saw Cassandra with Strephon, and although he did not say “Not you two again!” out loud, she was sure he was thinking it.
Strephon immediately took charge. He explained how a messenger had told him that Miss Morrigan was holding a friend of his and demanded he come to negotiate her release, which was true as far as it went, but he described Morrigan's servants as purely human agents. He explained that Morrigan had once been in love with his grandfather and had developed an irrational obsession with him. It all sounded so reasonable, except...
What about the Banshee? What about the Wisp? What about Morrigan's certainty that Strephon was the same man she had loved years ago? And that business about Strephon being a fairy?
She told Masey her story, but he seemed skeptical. "The tea she offered you, you thought it was drugged?"
Strephon offered. "Perhaps some of the things you thought you saw..."
"But I did see it!"
Finally, Cassandra grudgingly wrote out a formal statement for Masey that followed Strephon's version of the night's events. Masey gave her and Strephon each a copy and they were out of the police station by the first light of dawn.
On the ride home, Cassandra brought up one matter she hadn’t wanted to mention in front of the detective. “Morrigan told me you were a fairy,” she said.
“Oh, did she?” Strephon replied in a half-distracted manner. “She has all sorts of peculiar fancies, poor thing.” His tone of voice indicated that this was all he intended to say about it, and Cassandra did not press the issue. Nevertheless, Morrigan’s claim lingered in her mind.
She knew that magical creatures existed; she had encountered some in the past week. But the fact that vampires were real did not mean that the Easter Bunny was too. Cassandra found it hard to take the subject seriously. She associated them with Peter Pan and “Clap your hands if you believe in fairies!”
No, not fairies, Cassandra reminded herself; Fae. There was a distinction. Wisp and his sister were real enough; and they certainly were magical. They had a sense of... otherworldliness about them. For that matter, so did Melchior Dusk and his predatory assistant; that was why Byron Sanders thought they might be aliens.
But there was nothing weird or “nae canny”, as her grandfather used to say, about Strephon. He was as solid as the Bank of England. Granted, he was old-fashioned and a bit eccentric, but even his eccentricities seemed… well… normal. Ordinary. Respectable.
Devon, on the other hand, had a kind of aura of strangeness about him. It seemed easier to believe that he might be something other than human than Strephon. But he and Strephon were cousins; at least that’s what they both said. And for that matter, Strephon claimed that Melchior was related to him too, through one of his aunts.
Come to think of it, Detective Masey had once referred to Strephon as her “fairy godmother” but Cassandra had just assumed that he thought Strephon was gay. Was Strephon gay? She didn’t think so, but then she had never asked him. It seemed too personal a question. What did she really know about him?
One thing she did know. He tended to lie. A lot.
At home, with barely half an hour to shower, change clothes, and run for the bus, there'd been no time to write the story Mr Johnson had assigned. “Stories and secrets,” Cassandra muttered to herself as she settled in the bus seat and re-read her statement from the police report. It seemed that lately she kept coming upon stories which insisted on remaining secrets. Well then, she would tell as much of the story as she could. She could cut the remaining least credible details of the night, plug in the few Culture Claque facts from Mrs Trotter, and leave Morrigan looking like a pathetic, mad figure destroyed by obsessive beliefs in magic and theatre. Thanks to Wisp and the Banshee, Morrigan wasn't going to show up suing for libel. And once Cassandra could get one of the paper's photographers into Morrigan's cottage, Mrs Trotter would take one look and know the Culture Claque couldn't sue either. Besides the scandal would be as good as publicity for them. Come to think of it, this might not be a bad story at all!
Digging into her bag for her notebook, Cassandra began to scribble in the margins of the statement and across the faded official police language at top and bottom, her handwriting joggled by the bus-ride every other word. The bus let her out right at the newspaper's front door. She'd tried to sneak to her desk to pound out a clean copy of the tale she'd come up with. But Mr Johnson was already there. Meekly, she'd handed over the scrawled-over statement and her notebook, hoping to be able to only say "Yes, boss," and "No, boss", no matter how he reacted. After all the statement really was just Strephon's taradiddle, not hers. And she needed needed Mr Johnson to send those photographers to the cottage. Pictures would argue better than she could…
Well, at least she still had a job. With a newspaper. Newspapers usually had secret ways and means of ferreting out facts on otherwise unexplained events. The bizarre things happening to her lately were not being explained well by her only source.
“I need to learn more about you, Mister Strephon Bellman,” she muttered to herself.
"Hi, Cassie. How's it going?" Cassandra shook herself out of her thoughts and saw Saul Taylor leaning on her desk. He flashed her a charming smile.
She was not in the mood. "How does it look like it's going?"
Saul shifted his weight uncomfortably. "Um, listen. I hope you're not mad. Billy gave me your story to re-write."
Cassandra growled.
"It's a good story. Well-written. It's just, well... it is a bit fantastic."
"Hah!" Cassandra grumbled. "I didn't write the half of what happened. The problem is, without the unbelievable parts, the rest of it doesn’t make sense."
"Well then. Would you like to tell me about it... over lunch, maybe?"
Cassandra softened. She was feeling peckish and Saul did have a nice smile. "Hmmm... I suppose I could be persuaded."
* * * * *
"He talks to me like I'm a child," Cassandra said through a mouthful of Thai beef. "I've noticed that everyone else he yells at, but with me he uses this smarmy, soothing, patronizing voice like he's explaining to me why I can't have a lolly until after dinner."
"Well, I'm afraid you're a victim of your own success there," Saul replied. "Billy likes to hire his own reporters. He doesn't like it when the Celestial Mister Knox graces us with new employees by Imperial Decree. Until you can prove otherwise, Billy's going to assume you only got your job because Knox knows your uncle or you were a babysitter for him or something. It isn't fair, but there you are."
Cassandra stabbed a water chestnut with her fork to hide her irritation. That was roughly what Strephon had said, that Knox had hired her for reasons other than her ability. And if Saul brought it up, obviously other people at the paper thought so too. “In other words, I’ll need to be twice as good as everyone else to get half the respect. Well, that’s nothing new.”
"You have to also remember, this is a very conservative paper. Billy believes that reporters should report the news, not make the news."
"It's not like I asked to be kidnapped!"
"I know, I know," Saul said. "Listen. Let me try to talk to Billy. Maybe I can persuade him to cut you a little slack." He reached across the table and put his hand on hers. "And then maybe we could talk it over at dinner?"
Cassandra thought it over for a moment. "You know, there is one other thing you might do for me..."