Naked City by Patricia Briggs

Author:Patricia Briggs
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Anthologies, General, Short Stories, Anthologies & Literary Collections, Literature & Fiction
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Butte, Montana, present day

Freedom, Thomas thought, following the hobgoblin up the hill to wherever Nick wanted

him to go. He’d spoken to her with his lips, and Margaret had heard his heart.

Thomas had left Butte that very night, with his father’s twenty-dollar gold piece in his

pocket. He could not wait for Hao Xun to come and get him, because he didn’t want to

kill the man who had sired his human self the way he’d killed the thing that had sired his

current flesh. If he’d seen his father again, he wasn’t certain he could have helped

himself.

He had never seen either of the two fae again either, but unlike any of the vampires he’d

met since then, he saw the sun every day and it did not burn him. He no longer needed to

feed from a vampire in order to survive. Margaret had given him everything he’d desired

as well as the feeding he’d asked for.

Nick stopped at a small well-kept house near the base of Big Butte, the hill that had given

its name to the town—despite not being a butte at all. He let himself in the front door.

Thomas stopped on the porch. “If you want me inside,” he told the hobgoblin, “you have

to invite me in.”

The little fellow stopped where he was and looked up at Thomas. “You mean no harm to

me and mine, you will swear it.”

“I’m not fae. Oaths have no power over me, Nick,” he told the fae. “What I am is already

damned.”

The hobgoblin hissed and dismissed that with one hand. “Don’t throw Christian

gobbledygook at me,” he said. “Margaret told me you would come, told me you would

help. You are here, so that is the first, but I wonder if the second is true. Vampire. I

served her father most of my life. I can’t afford to get this wrong.”

The fae didn’t like vampires. Thomas would have left because, with one exception, he

didn’t like the fae, either. But it hadn’t been Nick who had brought him here; it had been

Margaret. For her, he would do what he could.

“I owe Margaret Flanagan,” said Thomas, who was better educated about fae than he’d

been a hundred years ago. He knew what he was admitting—and that the fae would take

it very seriously. “What she did for me was far more than what little I managed for her. I

swear I mean no harm to her or hers.”

“Come in and be welcome,” said Nick after a pause, and turned to lead the way into his

home.

* * *

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