Page 58 of Christmas with the Irish Devil
“Nessa,” I say.
“What about her?”
“She didn’t come home. I have men checking.” I keep my voice even. I do not sayriver. I do not sayalone.
“She texted earlier,” Aoife says, sorting through a stack of printed tickets without seeing them. “She—” Her voice falters. The air in the kitchen changes, the way air changes just before lightning.
My phone vibrates again.
Eddie:Found something. By the bridge. Not for here.
I touch Aoife’s elbow. “Office,” I say, and steer her gently down the hall. She shakes me off, fierce, and stalks ahead, the line cooks’ chatter dimming as she goes. In the office she rounds on me, arms crossed tight. “If this is you and your men playing God with my staff?—”
A knock, too soft. Eddie steps in, face washed of anything that could be mistaken for reaction. He looks at me, not her. That tells Aoife everything she needs to know.
“What?” she says. The word is a blade.
Eddie’s throat works. “Down by the spit. PD’s there now. They called me because I called them earlier about movement. It’s… it’s her, Miss Kelly.” He doesn’t say the rest. He doesn’t have to.
Aoife sits without looking for a chair. She hits the edge and folds, elbows on knees, mouth open like the breath has just gone out and won’t come back. I go to my knees in front of her and she jerks away, a reflex. When she finds my hand again a second later, she grips it so hard I feel bone.
“What happened?” she asks the floor.
Eddie glances at me. I nod once. “Hands,” he says softly. “Cut clean. Tongue missing. And—” He swallows. “An ornament. Silver. Pinecone. On her chest.”
Aoife makes a sound I never want to hear again. A small, animal thing. It comes out and dies and leaves the room colder. She stands up and takes two steps and then returns to the chair because her knees refuse her.
“We call the police,” she says. “We talk to them.”
“They’re already there,” I say. “They’ll do what they do.”
Her eyes snap to mine. “Which is not enough. Which is never enough.”
I take the punishment. “I’ll find who did it.”
“You’ll shoot who did it,” she says, the words cracking. “You’ll shoot someone and call that justice.”
“I’ll make sure they don’t breathe around you ever again,” I answer, because I don’t know how to say it prettier. “And I’ll do it in a way that makes the rest crawl back into whatever holes they came from.”
She shoves my chest with both palms. Not hard, but not playful. “Get out,” she says, voice raw. “Just… get out for a minute.”
I go. Eddie closes the office door behind me. I stand in the narrow hall and listen to the small sounds people make when they are trying not to break. I grip the doorjamb until my knuckles go white and then I start calling in what I’m owed.
By midnight the back alley’s cameras are pulled and copied to a separate drive I’ll review myself. The unmarked sedan is joined by a second, then a third. We switch the staff’s exit to the front on a rotating escort. The alley light that’s been dim since October is replaced with an industrial flood that turns the brick into day. A panic button is installed under the pass, hardwired straight to a man who owes me a life. I take the routes home apart and put them back together until there is only one path for each of them and two men walking it first.
I go to the river. I do not cross the police tape. I don’t need to. There is enough in the air to tell me what I need to know—the quiet fury of the detective I pay to tell me the truth when he can, the saccharine musk of candlewax from some well-meaning passerby already laying down grief. The silver pinecone glints inside an evidence bag under a flashlight’s cone, delicately wrought, old, not costume. The hands—Jesus. Cut clean. Cold precision. The tongue… That’s theater. That’s message. That’s someone who wants to humiliate as much as to hurt.
By two I am in the small office upstairs at the restaurant with the door cracked, the monitor’s glow painting my hands blue. I run the alley footage at quarter-speed. A shadow moves where no one should. Someone kills the motion sensor with chewing gum and a strip of tape. A neat trick that requires practice. The time stamp jumps. The camera looped for a clean four minutes. Not sloppy. Not lucky. Trained.
I dig through names until I reach those we don’t speak out loud. I call in debts from a priest and a port inspector and a woman who runs a pawnshop that is not a pawnshop. I buy oldledgers and new calendars and the kind of silence that comes only from fear.
At four, I press my palms to my eyes and see the letter again—wren-girls climb too far and fall / pine and needle—holy, listen—and every part of me wants to wake Aoife and show her, tell her we are moving against a thing that writes in riddles and leaves its relics like blessings. But the last time I told her I’d keep her safe, she watched a man die by my hand and ran until the train ran out of track. I swallow the urge. I swallow the rest of the night.
Morning comes without light. I ride the city’s gray up to the apartment above the restaurant and stand outside the door until I can make my voice gentle.
She’s at the desk, hair pulled up, face tired and scrubbed clean, hands quiet on either side of a cup she isn’t drinking from. When she looks at me, I see the residue of a grief that doesn’t know where to go yet.
“I’m sorry,” I say. No swagger. No oath. Just the worst, smallest words that are also the only true ones.
