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"Eddie! It’s you! If I’d known you were coming, I’d have tidied up a bit, made a bit of an effort…Help yourself to anything you like, make yourself at home…Oh, God, Eddie, don’t kill me, please! I’m no threat to you!"
"Interesting," I said. "You should only know me as Shaman Bond. But you know my real name. How is that, Blue?"
"I can see your torc," he said, blinking rapidly. "I’m half elf, you know. Of course you know. You Droods know everything. And I have been known to do the odd job for your family, on occasion. I have to. They give me money. Don’t kill me, Eddie, please. They made me do it!"
"All right, Eddie, lay off him," said Janissary Jane, moving forward to stand beside me. "Hello, Blue. It’s me, Jane. You’ve got yourself into some real trouble this time, haven’t you? Even I may not be able to get you out of this one. What exactly did you do for the Droods that you’re so ashamed of?"
"Ah, Jane," said the Blue Fairy, calming down a little. "And Molly too. How nice. Welcome to my humble abode. Excuse the mess, but I live here. And I just can’t seem to work up the enthusiasm to give a damn anymore. Terribly lax of me, I know, but that’s life these days. My life, anyway. Still, I’m glad you’re here. If one is about to die horribly, it is marginally better to do it in the company of one’s friends. Could you perhaps persuade your friend the assassin to let me put some clothes on? I really would prefer not to meet my maker wearing just my underwear."
"Get dressed," I said, amused despite myself. "I’m not here to kill you, Blue. Just ask you some questions."
"Wait till you hear the answers," said the Blue Fairy.
We all backed away from the bed, and he levered himself up off the slumping mattress and pulled on a battered old silk wrap. He ran his hands through his thi
"God, you’re a mess, Blue," said Janissary Jane. "You look worse than your room, and that’s saying something."
"I know, I know," said Blue, drawing on his cigarette again and stifling another coughing fit through sheer effort of will. "Think of me as a work in progress. I keep hoping that if I drink enough, or ingest enough things that are bad for me, I won’t have to wake up again to this awful room, this awful life. This hole that I dug for myself, this burrow I have crawled into…But I always do. It’s hard to kill an elf, even when he’s cooperating as hard as he can. Even a half elf. Bless dear old Daddy and his rampant gonads."
"For someone so determined to die, you seemed very concerned about me being here to kill you," I said.
"I would prefer to go with some dignity," said the Blue Fairy. "Not kicking and screaming all the way, as you reduce me to small bloody pieces. I know how you Droods operate."
"But why do you want to die at all?" said Molly. "If you don’t like your life, change it, turn it around. There’s still time."
The Blue Fairy smiled fondly at her. "Ah, there speaks the i
"Now I’m no longer good-looking enough to hang on to all the pretty boys and pretty things that alone make life worth living. Sweet young things do still turn up in my bed, but only when I pay them. And the fortunes I once had, that I thought would last forever, are gone, long gone. On this…and that. I never worried about money until I didn’t have it any more. Which is why I have to take whatever work I can get these days. Even the jobs I know will come back to haunt me afterwards."
"What have you done, Blue?" I said.
He looked at me pleadingly. "I didn’t have any choice. One of your people turned up here quite unexpectedly. I didn’t think the Droods even knew I existed anymore, let alone where to find me. But he had work for me, and the money was good. Very good. And the threat behind it was very real. You don’t say no to a Drood. And since all he wanted was a little strange matter…I didn’t see the harm. Acquiring unusual objects from other dimensions is one of the few things I’m still good at. It’s in the genes, you see. I got some strange matter for your family’s Armourer once, some years back, and it must have been on file somewhere, because when they wanted some more they came to me."
"Who did they send?" I said.
"Matthew," said the Blue Fairy. "They always send Matthew when they’re not prepared to take ‘Go to hell’ for an answer."
"Of course," I said. "It would have to be Matthew. He’d do anything for the family. Go on, Blue."
The Blue Fairy blinked nervously at me, picking up on the coldness in my voice. He stubbed out the last inch of his cigarette on the bedside table and tried to sit up straight, clasping his hands together in his lap so they wouldn’t shake.
"Well," he said, "I went fishing. That’s what I do. Drop a line into the other realms and see what I can hook. Strange matter isn’t easy to find. I call it that because I haven’t a clue what it is, or what it’s for. It’s organic…maybe alive, maybe not, and it has some…quite unique properties. Fishing the dimensions can be very dangerous, you know. You never can tell when you’ll hook something big and nasty by mistake, and then up it comes through the planes, mad as hell and looking for revenge…But I got Matthew what he wanted, and he paid me in cash right there on the spot. Good money. Far too much, for someone in my reduced circumstances. That was when I started to get suspicious. But I didn’t do anything. I had new booze to drink and new drugs to take, and…he was a Drood, after all. You don’t mess with the Droods. Then I heard you’d been ambushed by an elf lord with an arrow made of strange matter and hired by the Droods…and I knew. I felt bad, Eddie; really I did. I’ve always known you were a Drood; you can’t hide a torc from elf eyes. And we’d had some good times together, in the old Wulfshead…You bought me drinks and listened to me talk, and you never laughed at me. So after I heard…what had happened…I waited for you to come looking for me. And here you are. But you’re not here to kill me, are you? You want something."
"The strange matter’s still in my body," I said. "And it’s killing me. Can you get me a cure?"
"No," said the Blue Fairy, meeting my eyes steadily. "It doesn’t work that way. I need to know exactly what I’m looking for when I go fishing, or I can’t find it. And I don’t know nearly enough about strange matter to have any idea of what its counterpart might be. I’m sorry, Eddie; really I am. I didn’t know what they were going to do!"
"Would it have made any difference if you had?" I said.