“Very well, then,” Strephon said, arranging the tea things in a business-like manner. “Let us begin at the beginning, proceed 'til we get to the end, then stop. I touched on some of this in our earlier conversation, but you deserve to know the whole story. I thought...” he paused, holding his teaspoon over his cup, considering how best to put it. Finally he settled on the truth. “I had thought I could protect you from becoming entangled in my affairs. But since you are already, you need to know in what you are involved. And, to be truthful... I would welcome your opinion.”
He started with the commission from the Queen of the Fae to investigate Lord Melchior and his visit to Vanir Technologies. His initial impulse was to discreetly omit Inanna's flirting, but on further consideration decided that he couldn't be certain whether it was irrelevant to the narrative or not. Cassandra listened with grave attention, occasionally nodding and jotting down a thought in her notebook.
“So Vanir Tech's new virtual reality platform is based on fairy magic?” she said. “No wonder it freaked Byron out so much. He said he couldn't figure out how the programming worked; it just did.”
“Yes, I daresay he would find that disturbing.”
“I suppose you invited me to accompany you to Melchior's party for moral support, to help keep his randy secretary at arm's length.”
“In part. But I did feel I owed you a second chance at your interview. And I thought you might be agreeable company. I was right; you were. And are.”
There was little he needed to tell her about their dinner at the Tortuga Bay that she didn't already know, nor about the wolf attack which followed. He did, however, feel obliged to tell her about what happened later, after Mrs. Simms had left and Cassandra had fallen asleep.
“You're saying that you entered my dreams?” Cassandra asked.
“Mrs. Simms warned me that the werewolf attack might have left a shadow on your soul, and you seemed to be sleeping so fitfully... I thought perhaps I could do something to relieve whatever darkness might be afflicting you.”
“I didn't know you could do that.”
“Well, it's not something I make a habit of, but yes.”
“So the dream I had, where I was at the Daily Oracle's offices and everyone was a werewolf – you were really there with me?”
“I was.”
“And afterwards, when we were walking together on the beach in the same dream... that was you too?”
Strephon blushed. “It was a terrible liberty for me to take. I should have withdrawn as soon as I knew you were out of danger.”
Cassandra did not seem embarrassed by the memory of the beach. She looked at him thoughtfully. “What about the dream I had a couple nights later, where we were in a hospital and I was a nurse?”
“That was inadvertent. Our experiences had formed a sort of spiritual link and our dreams began slipping into each other.”
“Oh. And what about the one where you had entered the Grand National but instead of riding a horse, you were in your wheelchair and I was trying to help push you because I bet twenty quid on you but they told me I wasn't allowed on the track unless I was a jockey and I...” now it was her turn to blush. “You don't remember it do you.”
“When I realized what was happening, I erected psychic barriers around my mind to prevent me from accidentally trespassing on your slumber.”
“Oh.” That single syllable seemed to carry a tone of regret. “I wondered why... “ her thought trailed off. Then she dismissed it before it went anywhere. “Never mind.”
She looked away and Strephon realized that he felt regret as well.
A pensive silence hung over the tea things for a moment. Then Cassandra's expression changed, as if something had just occurred to her. “That next morning, when the detective, Masey, was questioning you, were you trying to get rid of him because he was a cop, or was it because he was a werewolf?”
Strephon almost choked on the biscuit. “What makes you think I was trying to get rid of him?”
Cassandra did not reply as much as she gave him an “Oh, really?” look.
“Very well, then. I was. How did you know he was a werewolf?”
“Putting things together. Saul told me that Lukas Bianka was the leader of a werewolf pack, and that another pack leader ran a big marketing firm in the city. Lucinda DuPres has a big marketing firm, and from what I saw of them at Melchior's party, they both know each other, so it was a reasonable guess that she was the one Saul meant. And since DuPres brought Masey along as her date, that suggested that he was a werewolf too. Especially the way Masey and Bianka were growling at each other over the buffet table. Tell me, was everybody at that party... um... well...”
“Unconventional?” Strephon suggested.
“Yes. That's a nice way to put it. Unconventional.”
“Well, there were the werewolves you noted, a few vampires – associates of Miss Kurayami, I would venture to guess, some witches and mages, at least one god that I recognized...”
“A god?”
“Well, he says he's the Egyptian god, Thoth, but then he says a lot of other things too. He owns the bookstore in Palmpiset Lane, “Dulcet Tomes”. That thin, bald fellow with the long nose.”
“The one who looks like a stork?”
“That's the one. Aleister, or I suppose I should call him Timmy now. But many of Melchior's guests that evening were normal enough, except perhaps in terms of affluence and social prestige. Mr. and Mrs. Trotter, for example, seemed quite ordinary.”
“I think I've gotten to the point where I wouldn't be surprised if you told me that Mrs. Trotter was a fluffy pink unicorn.” She paused and thought for a moment more. “What about Simon Knox?”
“Ah. He is a different matter. I'm not entirely sure about Mr. Knox. I tried reading his aura at the party but could discern nothing. Werewolves and vampires and persons who have dealings with magic – and faeries, for that matter – tend to have distinctive signs which may be recognized by those sensitive to such things. From Mr. Knox, I saw nothing. Which suggests that perhaps he is no more than an ordinary plutocrat; or that he is capable of hiding his true nature.”
“Could he be an Atlantean?”
Strephon's eyebrows raised. “What makes you ask that?”
“Something he said when he was interviewing me for the job at his paper. He had this gold paperweight on his desk, or it looked like gold anyway. It might have just been brass. But he noticed that I was looking at it and he said it was made of orichalcum. Well, I had read about orichalcum, it was the stuff the Atlanteans used to decorate their temples according to Plato, but I'd always thought that Plato just made the word up and all those stories about it being used as a cosmic power source or that it cured bad breath was just fancy.”
“It is,” Strephon said. “The word in Greek means 'Mountain Bronze', but no one really knows what Plato meant it to be. The post plausible theory I've heard is that it was an alloy of gold and copper like the tumbaga the pre-Colombian Indians used for some of their artifacts. It's malleable, but more durable than pure gold, and when treated with acid, leaves a gold veneer on the artifact. Decorative, but nothing terribly mysterious.”
“I assumed that either he was just trying to impress me, or that whoever sold him the thing was pulling his leg, or maybe both; so I just made polite noises and changed the subject.”
Strephon frowned. He had an annoying intuition that he was missing something, but the intuition refused to give him a hint what that might be. It was something important having to do with...
He smote his forehead. “Boil my brains and serve them with butter! Paperweights!”
“What?”
“Paperweights! Melchior has one: an ugly thing made of cast iron. He practically waved it under my nose. Knox has one too, but that's not all. That stone of Kurayami's, the talisman Taylor gave you – they're all paperweights!”
“A lot of people have paperweights.”
“Yes, but we're practically tripping over them.” He noticed Cassandra glancing at his wheelchair-bound feet and added, “ Figuratively speaking, of course.”
Cassandra disagreed. “If they were all the same paperweight, I'd agree that was a peculiar coincidence, but they're not. The one in Mr. Knox's office was gold, or orichalcum, or tumbaga or whatever. Kurayami's looked like colored glass, and the talisman Saul gave me is quartz, I think, or some sort of semi-precious stone, like the ones in Morrigan's workshop.”
“Disregard the material. Were they all the same size and shape?”
“They were all round, about the size of a goose egg, I suppose. They were paperweight-shaped.”
“And did they all have runes on them?”
Cassandra pursed her lips in thought. “No,” she decided. “The ones Morrigan had were plain; they had no markings on them.”
“Hmm...” Strephon was not yet ready to drop his theory. “Those might have been unfinished. What about Kurayami's?”
“That I couldn't say. I never got a good enough look at it. But Knox's paperweight did have some markings on it. They weren't Greek. That's what I would have expected from something that really came from Atlantis. Now that I think about it, those markings might have been the same as the ones on Saul's talisman.”
“Well, I can tell you with certainty that the marks on the talisman are the same as the ones on Melchior's weight. These paperweights are the key, I'll stake my wig on it.”
“You wear a wig?”
“I used to be a barrister. May we return to the subject?”
“All right then. The key to what? What are they supposed to mean? We have all these people who we think are involved with Melchior's plot, and some of them have connections to each other, but we don't have anything that connects them all.”
“Except for the paperweights.”
“Except maybe the paperweights.”
Strephon refused to be deterred. “It cannot be a coincidence. Melchior and Kurayami and Morrigan and Knox; they all have those paperweights in common. I'm certain they all have a connection to the plot as well.”
“Don't forget,” Cassandra said quietly, “I'm a member of this club too.”
NEXT: Apologetics