Hot Lead, Cold Iron by Ari Marmell

Author:Ari Marmell [Marmell, Ari]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781781168226
Publisher: Titan Publishing Group Ltd
Published: 2014-01-01T08:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TEN

The underground room was a study, and a big one, lit by glass-enclosed lamps of what I can only describe as “illusory fire.” More of a private library, really, it was clearly designed to guide the eye precisely from end to end.

Bookcases ran along both side walls, with fancy portraits of past Unseelie nobles, in all their bloody inhuman glory, between them. The books themselves ran the gamut; in just one quick glance, I saw antique diaries and mystic grimoires, dictionaries and encyclopedias, dime novels and pulp magazines. I stopped briefly on what I swear looked like an unexpurgated version of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (I thought we’d destroyed the last of those back in the early seventeenth century), and a Bible written in Ancient Greek.

On the right wall, two of the cases stood farther apart than usual, leaving room for a broad fireplace of red brick. It wasn’t burning at the moment, leaving me a clear view of the bronze manacles bolted to the inside of the chimney.

Guh…!

At the study’s far end, beneath an enormous painting of Friar Rush—the portrait’s cloven feet and hooked nails were embossed with actual fingernails, the edges ragged from where they’d been yanked out—a gaggle of upholstered chairs were clustered around a tea table. Another pair of dullahan stood behind those chairs, coats bulging with heavy roscoes; I had no clue where their heads mighta been, ’cause I sure as hell didn’t see ’em anywhere. A couple kindly-looking gentlemen in silk suits (yeah, silk) sat on the arms of two of those chairs; probably boggarts in human form, if I had to guess. At the feet of one curled a hairy black dog the size of a small pony, panting excitedly, its eyes gleaming green and its snout bared back in a very human grin. Even from here, I could smell the fear on its breath—not its own, either, but belonging to whatever poor sap last slipped through those jaws.

And between them—curled up in her chair, right in the center of everything, the way she loved it—Queen Eudeagh, Boss of Bosses, il Capo di Tutti Capi, of the local Unseelie. Possibly the single most powerful individual in the Chicago Otherworld, with as many enemies among the Unfit as among the Seelie, and proud of it to boot.

She preferred the title of “boss.” Most of us referred to her as “Queen Mob.” Look, just remember what I just said about Fae humor…

Eudeagh woulda been maybe three feet tall, in heels, if she’d been standing. Her hair, cut in a stylish bob, was black as unmined coal; the rest of her sat right on the knife’s edge between “curvaceous” and “chubby,” and made it look damn good. She wore red satin that clung like a second skin, slinky as a tipsy snake. Oh, she was one sweet tomato, no doubt—right up until she smiled at you between her ruby lips.

All six of ’em. The regular ones, where they were supposed to be, and the two smaller mouths where most of us—human, Fae, whatever—kept our peepers.

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