Emerald Magic_ Great Tales of Irish Fantasy - Andrew M. Greeley [36]
The noises from the other room grew more violent and promising. I heard the sounds of blows given and received, insults hurled, threats offered, and immediately followed through on. The music came to a sudden halt as—I presumed—the musicians either fled or joined in.
It was time. I smiled and spread my arms wide, letting the power born of blood and passion flow over me and through me. The bar had become a battlefield, a spinning turbine of broken knuckles and bloody noses, and I was a battery, drinking my fill. I was supercharged, I was industrial strength, I was growing greater by the second. I was drunk with power, engorged, enlarged, enlivened.
And stupid. Stupid. Stupid.
That kind of rapid growth, fueled by testosterone surges, fear, and anger, made me stupid for the moment. A faerie moment.Which is longer in human time than our time, of course.
I forgot the missing cloaked man, my mission, my masters, and all as I soaked up the human conflagration.
Human conflagration? What I was hearing was more than that. I dropped my arms and raced over to where I could see the action. The shaved-heads who had started things were down already, but the fight had spread like a fire to engulf the entire bar.
And then I understood why. It was May Eve, and apparently most of the patrons weren’t human at all. They were Fey.
I must have been too intent on spotting the Unseelie prince and then the Bean Sidhe to see through the elementary glamors they had dropped over themselves.
As I said—stupid, stupid, stupid!
Of course none of that mattered, as battle had been joined and all guises dropped. The dance floor was a heaving mass of Fey combatants, and I could not take my eyes off the sight.
As I watched, a fachan hopped into the fray on his sole leg. One-handed, he swung a club hard onto the head of a squat brownie in front of him, splitting it open, then falling to the ground himself, elf-shot through his single eye. Before the elf could notch another arrow, he took a bone knife in the kidney, courtesy of one of the diminutive bogies darting around the edges of the conflict. An urisk, impaled on the horns of a giant bogey-beast, screamed like the goat it half was. Will o’ wisps shot overhead like tracer bullets. Even the band had joined the melee, leaving their instruments onstage. But I had been as mistaken about them as I had been about all the others. The bodhran player was in reality a redcap, that old malignant Border goblin, and he was laying about with a bloody axe and bodies were falling everywhere. The blond guitarist was clearly a phooka, his long hair covering his entire body, his feet turning to hooves, which he employed with zeal. Only the big Viking with the guitar was fully human, and he joined in with a kind of maniacal glee.
I was about to head into the room myself when the doorman rushed by me with a pistol, yelling, “You fuckers, I’ve called the cops.”
The Bean Sidhe began wailing and a shot rang out.
Cold iron.
Time to finish my business.
THE PRINCE—who’d been in the midst of things, turned and saw me. “I thought we were to keep things quiet,” he cried. Or meant to. The last few words died before reaching his lips as I reached out with my mind and grabbed him by the throat. That surprised him, I know, for his eyes turned bloodred before closing forever. But he had touched me. And that I would not countenance for long.
Oh, I had been warned by my superiors to play it safe. But they had always known my character. I expect they guessed something like this would happen. Hoped it would happen.Why else send me off on May Eve for a parley. In a pub? Of course, never having exactly told me what to do, they would have what the humans like to call “plausible deniability.”
I laughed grimly and let the prince’s body drop. A dozen or so of the Fey had already been killed, with more to come. But the Unseelie Court had lost a