Drink Deep - Chloe Neill [65]
The fairies were becoming tenser; I could feel the rise of magical angst in the air.
“There is water,” he said. “Earth, and sky.”
“Again,” Jonah firmly said after waiting for a moment, “that could be anywhere in the city. That doesn’t mean anything to us.”
But I touched Jonah’s arm. “It’s okay. I think I know where that is.”
“You’re sure?”
I looked at the fairy. “It was the home of the city’s human king?”
When the fairy nodded back, I pulled the medals from Jonah’s hand and placed them into his. “Thank you for your business,” I told him, then pulled Jonah away. “Let’s go.”
Without objection from Jonah, we walked to our cars, climbed inside and were on our way.
We drove separately and parked on the edge of the street. We got out, suspiciously eying the trails of lightning that were creating a strobe light effect across the park.
There were a number of mansions in Chicago that had once been home to famous families. During the city’s golden age, entrepreneurs built homes along Lake Shore Drive in the Gold Coast neighborhood (now home, not coincidentally, to Navarre House), affording the fashionable a view of the lake and access to the rest of the city’s wealthy.
Some of the mansions were still standing; some had been razed. One of the most famous—the Potter Mansion, built by ancestors of the city’s former mayor—had been demolished when the mayor moved to Creeley Creek.
Well, mostly demolished.
The Potter family donated the grounds to the city, which was turned into the aptly named Potter Park. The only remaining bit of the mansion—a four-story brick turret—punctuated the middle of the park like a spear.
“This is it?” Jonah asked.
I filled him in on the history. “The tower was built by a family with a manufacturing fortune, and is all that’s left of the house. It reaches into the sky, it’s surrounded by green, and it’s two hundred yards from the lake.”
“Well done, Nancy Drew.”
“I try. The more interesting question is how the parks district doesn’t know there’s a fairy queen living in their tower?”
“Magic, I’d imagine. Although I’m surprised they’d allow their queen to live in a house built by human hands.”
“I had heard they hate humans.”
“And for good reason,” Jonah said. “You know of the changeling myth?”
I did. It was a prominent story in medieval literature, and warned that fairies occasionally stole healthy human children, replacing them with sickly fairy children. Thus, as the story went, any humans born with unusual features were actually fairy children who’d been switched at birth. Humans called the sickly children changelings, and would leave them in the woods in a ploy to win back their human children.
“I do,” I said.
Jonah nodded. “Thing is, it’s not myth. The stories are real—fairy tales in the truest sense of the word. They just got the protagonists wrong. Fairy children were stolen by humans, not the other way around. Sometimes their children were replaced with sickly human children; sometimes they were taken by parents desperate for a child.”
“And because fairies were, at best, myths or, at most, real-life monsters, no one considered such things a kidnapping.”
Jonah nodded. “You got it. Unequal treatment of supernaturals is centuries old. In any event, they probably won’t be glad we’re here. Keep your sword in hand, a finger on the steel at all times. Steel and iron solve the same problem—keeping fairies at bay.”
“I thought the point of this exercise was asking them for help.”
“The point of this exercise is finding out if they’re to blame. And from Frank’s perspective, it was also probably to get us to piss off the fairies so we incite a war.”
“How is our starting a war with the fairies going to help him?”
“Chicago is the only American city with three vampire Houses. Even New York and L.A. can’t claim that. We are the locus of vampire power in the United States, and Cabot knows it. Cabot House is small. Elitist, and necessarily small. If he minimizes Chicago’s importance—”
“He increases Cabot House’s power proportionally,” I