Paper & Blood Read online

  Surprisingly, it was my receptionist who replied first.

  You know, Mr. MacBharrais, I’ve never seen Australia. I have a feeling there’s some shite there I’d like to see.

  Oh. Did you want to come with us?

  Oh, no, I’ll make my own way there, thanks.

  You mean this week? So you’ll be gone too?

  I have plenty of vacation days saved up, sir. And I can email everyone who has an appointment with you now and take care of that online.

  Right you are. Nadia will be fine.

  Almost immediately after I sent that, Nadia replied to me.

  No worries, boss. Gladys Who Has Seen Some Shite will keep things running smooth.

  She won’t be there, sorry.

  What? Are ye joking?

  No. She’s taking annual leave.

  Since when? I’m shop manager and human resources on top of being your accountant, and I wasnae told.

  Since thirty seconds ago.

  There was an ominous pause before the reply arrived. Al? Do ye remember those yoga wankers in Colorado who aimed their arseholes at the sun for supposed health benefits?

  I sighed, and Buck picked up on it. “Nadia just starting tae chew ye out?” I nodded and he chuckled. “This should be a good one.”

  I do, I replied to her. I expect an unkind comparison forthwith.

  It’s not you, Al. It’s me. I want ye to picture a tender vegan yoga arsehole that’s been fed plenty of fiber and kale smoothies. Super-healthy arsehole, fantastic and elastic. Then one day, without warning, it’s bathed in ultraviolet radiation until it’s chapped and blistered and screaming WHY, GOD, WHY? That’s me. I’m the screaming arsehole, Al, because that’s what happens when ye dump surprises on me like this. I cannae believe ye would do this to me without a shred of warning or courtesy.

  I grunted in amusement. Buck would enjoy that one. I recently gave you a very nice raise above what you asked for, and that was pretty courteous.

  Fuck. That’s a really good point.

  Gladys Who Has Seen Some Shite will move the appointments around. You’ll only have walk-ins, deliveries, and pickups to deal with.

  Awright. I’ll go back to being a healthy arsehole. Don’t do anything in Australia that would need me there to save yours.

  Thanks, Nadia.

  Buck enjoyed a chortle at Nadia’s comparison when I shared it with him, but he had a lot of questions about yoga afterward that I wasn’t qualified to answer. When we got to MacBharrais Printing & Binding, we headed straight upstairs to my office. Buck glanced longingly at the whisky table, but I told him to lay off as he’d already had a shot and a pint and he was no doubt feeling fine.

  [Just wait; I’ll be as fast as I can. When we get to Gin71, you can have a drink if we have to wait for Coriander.]

  “Oh, well, that’s a sure thing, then. Coriander’s too fancy to be in a hurry.”

  While Buck’s observation that Coriander was very fancy could not be disputed, his fanciness was not the reason he sometimes made us wait. Brighid’s Herald Extraordinary had permission to travel the planes freely and as such wound up escorting the sigil agents around the globe during emergencies. His privileged movement also made incredible demands on his time, and finding him with an idle moment simply never happened.

  First thing I did was tear a new prepaid smartphone out of its packaging and plug it in to charge it, then tucked away a portable gadget that would continue to charge the phone from its own battery. I had several phones and chargers waiting in a drawer for situations like this. The ability to use the Fae planes as a travel shortcut in emergencies was a spectacular perk on one hand, but on the other it was astoundingly difficult to explain how a phone might ping in Glasgow one minute and then ping on a tower in Melbourne five minutes later. If sigil agents didn’t take such precautions, we’d wind up with military and spy services investigating us, and we didn’t want that. They always looked closely at financials, for one thing, and we didn’t need the hassle. And we always had to use memory sigils on anyone who knocked on our doors to ask us questions about the strange jumping of our phones, and then we’d raid intelligence services to erase records so that there wouldn’t be follow-ups. Wu Mei-ling was the one who’d had to deal with this first: Back in the early 2000s, the Chinese government wished to know how her phone had been in Taipei one minute and in Seoul three minutes later. The rest of us had taken the lesson to heart and established protocols for any traveling we did outside what humans believed possible. I printed a written list of numbers to program into the phone once I activated it in Australia—Nadia’s, of course, but also those of the other sigil agents, their apprentices, and some others. Then it was time to leave my outer office and enter the real office—the hidden one behind the bookcase on the north wall. I pressed the button underneath my desk and it shifted aside, revealing my ink-and-sigil room. It was a glorious space of cubbyholes, inkpots, jars of ingredients, cooking and brewing equipment, and paper.

  I grabbed stacks of all the prepared battle stuff I had available—sigils that would increase my strength and agility and so on—plus blank cotton cardstock and fountain pens filled with the proper inks to make more. These I stuffed into the many interior pockets of my custom topcoat. I didn’t have a prepared Sigil of Unchained Destruction or the ink to make a new one, so I had to hope I wouldn’t find myself in a situation where that was needed.

  I also packed the required pens and materials to write a contract for the services of a barghest. A Fae ghost hound would be able to find Shu-hua as long as she was alive and maybe even if she was dead, but Ya-ping wouldn’t be able to write such contracts yet.

  I almost brought my inks for the wards used in the Chinese system of sigils but reasoned that Shu-hua would already have these available in her study, and I could borrow hers if needed. I settled instead on bringing my favorite calligraphy brush.

  All told it took me only fifteen minutes, but Buck had begun to nod off in one of the plush armchairs arranged around the whisky table. He may have had another shot—I wouldn’t put it past him—but he’d already had plenty for his size and it had been a long day besides. It was already his normal bedtime, and we probably had another full day ahead of us before we could properly rest. I shook the chair to jostle him awake.

  “Waaugh! Huh? Fuck sake, MacBharrais, why do ye no just clap or sumhin? There’s no need tae make me feel I’m gonnay die in an earthquake. I nearly shat myself.”

  I hooked my thumb at the door and he scooched himself off the chair, yawning, as I retrieved the new phone and made sure I had my passport and official ID with me. Chances were we’d never have to present our passport to anyone, but if we did, there would be questions about the lack of stamp in there from Customs, and then the official ID—which was not official at all but a trio of sigils that granted me authority in the eyes of the beholder—would come in handy.

  I very purposely left my regular phone on my office desk. That particular tracking device needed to stay in Glasgow. I shooed Buck out, and he groused at me, “Do we have tae walk to Gin71 now?”

  I nodded, and he sighed.

  “I wish we could take Nadia’s gallus wizard van. Whisky and cheese for the gob of Lhurnog and all that—I think it does sumhin grand for ma state of mind.”

  It suited me well that we didn’t have that opportunity. Nadia’s patron deity, a man-eating god named Lhurnog—which she’d made up—currently had only three worshippers, if one included Buck. The danger was that gods could actually manifest if they accrued enough genuine faith from human believers, but Nadia was thankfully unclear on that concept and not actively trying to recruit disciples. I’d rather such a god as Lhurnog remain entirely fictional, so it was important that he didn’t collect enough psychic energy from worship to manifest. I didn’t relish trying to make him sign a contract to leave the citizens of earth alone; from wha
t I could understand, he would no more sign such a contract than I would sign one promising never to eat chicken.

  The cobbled square in Virginia Court was the site of the old Tobacco Exchange, and plenty of money had flowed through there in days of yore. Since its contours had remained stable for a good while, the Fae had bound it to Tír na nÓg via an Old Way, which allowed them to easily visit Glasgow—and me—at Gin71 on its perimeter. Buck and I entered the pub at a quarter to eleven, and I gave a thumbs-up to order my usual Pilgrim’s G&T from Heather MacEwan, one of two bartenders working that night, and pointed at Buck to indicate he needed one too. She brought them to us at a booth, and I promptly steered one to Buck as she left the pub and walked the Old Way to Tír na nÓg. Her exit did not go unobserved, since she was Fae and possessed the sort of ethereal beauty that ensured she would be observed at all times. She habitually dressed as a Victorian gentleman would, without a jacket—that is, a white long-sleeved shirt with a pinned cravat covered by a silver-and-grey paisley waistcoat. She wore men’s trousers and shoes as well, the first impeccably creased and the second polished to a soft shine. The subdued palette of her clothing only set off the fire of her red hair.

  Her exit to the patio seating area, closed for winter, caused some confusion. “Where’s Heather going?” I heard the other bartender say. Heather was Harrowbean now, and she quickly disappeared into the darkness and then, of course, from the plane entirely. She’d be back soon enough, with Coriander by her side, a being every bit as beautiful if not more.

  Buck took advantage of the fact that, without a working smartphone at the moment, I couldn’t tell him to shut it.

  “We need tae plan a proper heist, ol’ man. Another whisky barrel tae show the first one was no fluke. Ma second bottling of Buck Foi’s Best Boosted Spirits will be twelve years old instead of ten. Ye have tae avoid the sophomore slump, ye see.”

  I nodded agreeably, because it was a subject I could safely put off until later. I took out some blank cotton cardstock for new work and found the proper pen to draw up a few Sigils of Restorative Care. I had a feeling we might need them—and if we didn’t, Shu-hua and Mei-ling might. I also took out the seal for the Sigil of Postponed Puissance, which allowed me to preserve the sigils for later use, together with some red wax shavings that I set to melting in a spoon over the flame of a lighter. I had a collapsible brass stand that held the spoon steady over the lighter, and deploying it usually drew a few stares, but people lost interest once assured I wasn’t melting down heroin. While the wax dissolved into a puddle, I pulled out a twenty-five-millimeter-square dry-ink pad for the seal. It was one of only two dry inks we used as sigil agents—the other was for the Sigil of Binding Law, applied to contracts. This was a golden ink that required the carapace of golden tortoise beetles, which were ubiquitous in North America and easy to obtain in the summertime. But decocting the creatures down to isolate the gold pigment was the trick. It required some lengthy lab work to distill it; their golden shells dulled to brown upon death, but the chromatophoric dyes still existed in their bodies. Luster was achieved with the addition of ground pearls, and grinding them to a sufficient fine powder was a chore in itself. A liquid version of the same ink could be created and drawn on top of something like Sellotape, and while that was occasionally convenient, it was inelegant and aesthetically unsatisfying compared to pressing an inked seal into hot wax. (The liquid ink was also prone to clogging up a pen because of the ground pearls, in which case it was not so convenient.)

  The reason such a production was necessary was because sigils activated within a few seconds of completion, unless they didn’t have a target. That was denied them by folding over the top of the card. Still, the sigil would continue to search for a target, and its potency would fizzle out if not preserved, so I had about thirty seconds to pour the wax, ink the Sigil of Postponed Puissance, and press the seal into it, effectively delaying the underlying sigil’s activation until the seal was broken and a target was presented. It was a bit of a process to make a few sigils, but as Buck had said earlier, there was no use in wasting time.

  The hobgoblin gulped down his gin and tonic, not bothering to savor it, and kept talking while he watched me work.

  “Last time we hit the Highlands, but I’m thinking something Speyside this time. And after that we’ll get some ridiculously old and peaty Islay stuff and tell everyone tae slow down and sip it for once, give yer gob a chance tae taste it before it sluices down the throat.”

  I dearly wished to point out that he had not taken the opportunity just now to taste his drink, so I did my best with a raised eyebrow and a nod at the glass full of lonely ice, while I raised my glass to draw in its carefully distilled aromas. Pilgrim’s offers base botanicals of juniper, coriander, and angelica root, which are earthy notes common to many gins, but it layers hints of licorice and grapefruit on top and blends in a soupçon of black currant at the finishing stage. Heather had garnished it with three plump blackberries, which had no doubt been flown up from the southern hemisphere at this time of the year. Why Buck would rush past all those glorious goads to the senses was beyond me.

  “Oi, don’t gimme that look. I know ye like both gin and whisky, and good for you, ye’re a man of the world. But the Tuatha Dé Danann and the Fae prefer three drinks: ales, whisky, and whiskey with an e. Everyone knows that gin smells and tastes medicinal, and ye don’t stop tae savor medicine.”

  I responded with a snort. There was no judgment of taste that mattered except one’s own. Shunning food and drink because of what one was supposed to like was nonsense. That was the sort of hidebound thinking that gave us gender roles. If Buck truly didn’t like gin, then fine. But he had also just drunk some gin without visible disgust. He could like the things he liked if he would only grant himself permission—no other permission was required. If he limited his pleasure of simple things because of some external imposition of acceptable bliss, then he had let someone else build a ceiling over his life’s joy.

  “Wot? Why ye snorting at me?”

  I shook my head as if to say it was nothing and continued sealing fresh sigils with wax and golden ink, to be popped open later when needed. He continued to lay out a series of ever-escalating heists to improve the brand of Buck Foi’s Best Boosted Spirits.

  When Heather MacEwan and Coriander entered from the patio door, conversation stopped and mouths dropped open. One remarkable beauty in a waistcoat was bearable: two of them together somehow inspired a deep insecurity, a sudden desire to buy a raft of cosmetics and schedule elective plastic surgery.

  Coriander wore a lavender ensemble with a paisley waistcoat of shimmering silver and purple. He was attractive to all beings, so far as I could tell, regardless of orientation.

  He nodded a greeting at me and remained by the door, clearly not intending to sit down.

  I hastily put away my sigils and paraphernalia and slapped down twenty pounds on the table for Heather. She waved as she returned to the bar to resume her earthly duties.

  “Good evening, Al. Buck,” Coriander said, his Irish lilt smoothly welcoming. “I would appreciate a modicum of haste, since I have much else to do.”

  We exited to the patio and through the gate that gave egress to Virginia Court. Coriander walked to a seemingly random spot that was not random at all but a sort of planar off-ramp, which would extend all the way to Tír na nÓg if one walked it in just the right way.

  The Herald Extraordinary walked a few millimeters off the actual ground, fully enveloped by kinetic wards. He was impervious to most harm, including the everyday shocks that the skeleton took from merely walking around. “Stand behind me, please, single file, and follow closely and precisely, stepping forward with your left foot first.”

  We stepped and turned and doubled back on an invisible mazelike path, and gradually the cold pavestone court in Glasgow faded out as a bright-green sward surrounded by leafy oaks faded in. It smelled of gra
ss and pepper and the light floral kiss of daisies. Bumblebees hovered over poppies and other wildflowers growing amongst the grass and clover, almost frozen with indecision over which blossom’s pollen to plunder first. Songbirds chirped happily because there were plenty of insects and worms for them to eat and no cats to eat them.

  It was always a pleasant summer day in Tír na nÓg, and my infrequent visits reminded me for a brief instant of a trip I once took to Massachusetts with my family, a vacation during which I spent only a short time harvesting some ink ingredients I required. I needed to collect monarch butterfly cocoons shortly after the gorgeous creatures emerged, and there was a meadow of wildflowers and milkweed in the middle of the state where many of them took their first flight and then lingered, supping delicately on various nectars. When we saw the riot of colors—the butterflies dancing over the wildflowers in front of a line of green trees that brushed a heartbreakingly blue sky—the three of us gasped our wonder into the air and then breathed in peace. Here, we thought, was something unequivocally good. My dear Josephine squeezed my left hand and said, “Oh, Al, isn’t that beautiful? I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything so wonderful.” And Dougal, who was only ten at the time, squeezed my right hand and said, “Wow, Dad, look at that!” It was a moment as perfect as one could wish for, where you feel the love from your family and feel that the world loves you too and you know, if for only a few seconds, that you belong here after all. That’s what I felt every time I came to Tír na nÓg: that sense of peace and perfection, followed by a reminder of that time with my family, and then, hard afterward, a reminder that such times were long gone, for Josephine had passed in a motor accident and Dougal could not bear the sight of me anymore.