“You,” he’d said in English, which was the language he used when he was displeased with Thomas, because, to his father’s horror, Thomas, born in America, was as fluent in English as in Cantonese. “You come.”
According to his brother Tao, when Thomas was born a few weeks after his family had come to the New World, his father had given him an American name in a fit of optimism. It must have been true, but Thomas could never imagine his father being optimistic or excited about anything American.
Obediently, Thomas followed his father up the steep streets to a single-story house nestled between two new apartment buildings. There was a dead tree in the yard. Maybe it had been planted in a fit of optimism.
His father entered the unpainted door without knocking and left it to Thomas to close it behind them. The incense burning on a small table didn’t quite cover a sour, charnel-house smell. Thomas followed his father through a partially furnished front room and down the narrow and uneven stairs to the basement, where the odor of dead things was replaced by the scent of the dynamite that had been used to blast the basement into the granite that underlay the hillside.
The stairs ended in a small room lit only by a small beeswax candle. The floor beneath his feet was polished and well laid, a light-colored wood ringed by a pattern of darker. It seemed an expensive luxury to find in a basement room of a nondescript little house.
While he’d been looking at the floor, his father had continued on through a doorway, and Thomas hurried to follow. There was something odd about this place that made his stomach clench and the hair on the back of his neck stand up. He didn’t want to be left alone here.
He darted through the doorway and almost bumped into his father, who had stopped at a small entryway that dropped down a single stair and then opened up to a cavernous room. It too had only a single candle lighting it. Thomas couldn’t make out the face of the man ensconced in some sort of big chair.
His father bent over with a pained grunt and set three twenty-dollar gold pieces on the floor.
“Here is the son,” he said.
He put the flat of his hand on Thomas’s back and thrust him toward the other man.
Not expecting the push, Thomas stumbled down the step, then turned to look at his father—only to see his sandaled feet disappear up the stairway.
“The son,” said the man he’d been left with. His accent was Eastern European—Slavic, Thomas thought. The Slavs were among the latest immigrant wave that had washed over the mining town since Thomas Edison’s electricity had made copper king. “Pretty boy. Come here.”
Though the sounds of the Christmas carols were pleasant enough, Thomas felt restless, impatient—the same feeling that had sent him driving here from San Francisco when he’d intended only an evening’s drive.
Something was calling him here, and it certainly wasn’t nostalgia. There wasn’t much left of the town of his childhood. The last of the old whorehouses in the red-light district was falling down, and only a few buildings were left of the Chinatown where he’d grown up and died and been reborn a monster. No, he wasn’t nostalgic for Butte.
This wasn’t his home. He had a condo in San Francisco and another in Boston. None of his family remained here. There was nothing here for him—so why had it seemed so imperative to come?
“Hello, Tom.”
He froze. It had been almost a century since he’d been in Butte. There weren’t that many people who lived eighty years and still sounded so hale and hearty.
Fae.
That’s why he’d had to come. He’d been called here by magic. If he hadn’t been walking in the middle of a crowd, he would have snarled.
He didn’t see anyone who looked familiar; the fae were like that. But he did find someone who was looking at him.
Leaning up against an empty storefront where a tobacco shop had once been was a balding man with an oddly fragile air about him. He was several inches shorter than Thomas—who wasn’t exactly tall himself. The man’s forehead was too large for the rest of him in the manner of some people who were born simple. Young blue eyes smiled at Thomas out of an old face. He wore new winter boots, red mittens and scarf, and a thick down jacket.
A couple, passing by, noticed Thomas’s interest and stopped.
“Nick?” The woman half ducked her head toward the little man. “Are you warm enough? There are cookies and hot chocolate in the old Miner’s Bank building at the end of the block.”
The male half of the couple glared suspiciously at Thomas.
“I have good new gloves,” said Nick in the voice of a man but with a child’s intonations. “I’m warm. I had cookies. I think I’m going to talk with my friend Tom.” He darted across the sidewalk and took Thomas’s hand.
Thomas managed not to hiss or jerk his hand free. Nick, was it? His scent—at this close range—told Thomas that Nick was a hobgoblin.
“Do you live here? Or are you just visiting?” asked the man suspiciously.
“I’m visiting,” said Thomas. He could have lied. Butte was smaller than it used to be, but, according to the lady who checked him into his hotel, it still had thirty thousand people living here.
His answer didn’t please the man. “Nick’s one of ours,” he said, rocking forward on the balls of his feet like a man who’d been in a few real fights. “We watch out for him.”
Ah, Tom thought. Butte’s ties to Ireland had always been strong. In his day, the Irish here had set out cream in saucers outside their back doors to appease the fairies. Apparently the traditions of taking care of the Little People, changelings, and those who might be changelings were adhered to still—even if, as they clearly believed, the one they watched over was entirely human, just simpleminded.
“This is Ron,” Nick the Hobgoblin said to Thomas. “He gives me rides in his yellow truck. I like yellow.”
Ron who drove a yellow truck narrowed his eyes at Thomas, clearly telling him to go away, something Thomas was happy to comply with. He started to free himself.
“Tom likes tea,” Nick informed them, his eyes as innocent as he was not. Not if he were a hobgoblin. “Tom likes the nighttime.” He paused and with a sly smile added, “Tom likes Maggie.”
Thomas’s hand clenched on Nick’s at hearing her name. He gave the hobgoblin a sharp look. How did the little man know about Margaret? Was Margaret the reason he’d been called here?
“Does he?” said the woman, with a sharp glance at Thomas. “Nick, why don’t you come with us to see the singer at the old YMCA?”
Margaret.
Thomas decided that he would see what the hobgoblin wanted—and to that end, he’d have to allay the suspicions of Nick’s protectors. He inclined his head respectfully toward Ron.
“Nick and I know one another,” he said. “I went to school here.” A long, long time ago.
“Oh,” said the woman, relaxing. “Not a tourist, then.”
The man looked down at his watch. “If you want to catch your brother’s performance, we’d better go.”
As soon as those two were gone, Thomas pulled his hand away from the hobgoblin’s. Mindful of the watchful glances of the people around him—the couple weren’t the only ones watching out for Nick—he was gentle about it.
“Tell me, hobgoblin,” he said with soft menace. “What do you know about Margaret Flanagan?”
He escorted the men through the tunnels, keeping to the front of the group so that the lanterns they carried wouldn’t damage his night vision. And also because it scared them that he didn’t need a lantern to find his way.
The current location of his father’s opium den was a few hundred feet from where they’d started, though he’d led them through alternate routes that had added a half mile and more to the trip. It was imperative that they—mostly experienced miners, though one was a merchant’s son—not be able to find their way here without a guide. First, payment was made before they entered the mines, and anyone who made it to the den was assumed to have paid their fee. Second, it made it difficult for the police to find. To ensure the location remained a secret, the den was moved every couple of weeks.