Whiskey and Water Read Free

twisted animals
bent in manners foreign to their anatomy. A green man watched him pass; a
beaked creature something like a wingless hippogriff twisted in its skin of
stone to follow him with a weathered granite regard. In the bright eyes of
buildings only sleepily alert to the mayfly existences of their creators, Manhattan's
last Mage burned with iridescence, a dragonfly catching sunlight through lazy
summer air.
    His city knew him still.
    Matthew headed for Greenwich Village. The
noise of the city followed like a lover's whispers. He jingled with every step.
The Fae were in the city tonight, this night of all nights, though they usually
gave New York the respect due a graveyard.
    Matthew couldn't keep them out, not alone,
and he was too tired to try.
    He couldn't keep them out. But he could
try to make sure they stayed out of trouble. And they knew his name, both the
Daoine Sidhe and the Unseelie, even if the residents of his city did not. They remembered
a bridge of iron and Matthew's own heart's blood that had carried a war into
Faerie.
    New York remembered a woman on a white horse and a dragon with
black iron wings that had carried that same war back to the heart of the city.
And Matthew preferred it that way. He could walk through New York unheralded,
the new gray streaks twisted into the blond of his hair, wearing the city's essence
like a hermit crab's home on his back, and play its warden in the dark, with no
one but the gargoyles the wiser. It was a lonely existence.
    But it would serve.
    The buzz of his cell phone pulled him from
his reverie, but when he read the display, he saw the name Jane Andraste. His
right hand ached when he thought about it, so he stuffed the phone back into
his pocket and rubbed the scarred palm with his opposite thumb, trying to chafe
some comfort into the old wound.
    He settled against a brick wall, his
shoulder to the traffic, and fussed with his glove for a minute. A car alarm
buzzed across the street, the flashing lights attracting his attention. He
dropped his hands to his sides and turned, scanning the crowds moving along the
sidewalk, faster pedestrians wending between slower clumps.
    Matthew spotted the follower before he
quite caught up. The man was easy to pick out of the crowd, not because his
head was bowed over a PDA, his lips moving in concentration, but because Matthew
could not have failed to notice the twisted, dark-colored rings encircling his
thumb and forefinger.
    Matthew didn't know this apprentice. But
Matthew knew what he was and also knew why his phone had rung just then.
    Matthew had it in his hand already when it
rang again. He didn't bother answering, because at the sound of his phone, the
apprentice's head came up. He turned until he faced Matthew directly. He was good-looking,
Irish or Swedish extraction, with freckles scattered across his cheekbones and
the bridge of his nose, and wavy dark red hair. The young man's face rearranged
itself around a positively dazzling smile as he slipped up to Matthew, who
found himself ridiculously at bay with his back against a brownstone wall.
    "Matthew Magus?" the apprentice
asked, and stuck out the hand that didn't have the PDA in it: his right hand,
and Matthew didn't reach to take it. He didn't care to offer his crippled paw
to shake like a well-trained golden retriever.
    "I am," he said. "What does
Jane want?"
    Matthew should have asked the man's name;
his eyebrows drew together at the sting of that slight. He recovered, though,
and lowered his hand. "I'm Christian Magus," he said, smoothly.
"I'm here on behalf of Jane."
    "Christian Magus," Matthew
repeated. "She's recruiting. It figures. How did she find you?"
    The young Mage wore a copper-colored
brocade blazer over a black turtleneck. He dropped his hands into his pockets
and drew the brocade around himself, fist balled around the PDA. There was a
bit of Mage-craft on it, Matthew could guess, a spell to help find Matthew
through the link established when Jane called