The Dire King (Jackaby, #4)

by William Ritter

“Good morning, Mr. Jackaby,” I said. “The new entryway looks lovely.” “Contextual relevancy,” he said, although the words had to wend their way through a mouthful of spare tacks. “Come again?” He spat the nails into his hand. “The transom. Here, come closer.” I stepped up to the landing, and the frosted glass clouded over momentarily, clearing just as quickly to reveal a revised set of words: r. f. jackaby mentor & employer “That’s incredible!” I said. “Bit of a special order. The limited clairvoyant effect is achieved through a psychic crystal suffusion in the glass. It senses the needs and expectations of each caller and generates a respective title. Come, see it from the inside.” I followed him in. The letters should have been reversed, but the transom read the same from within as it did from without. “The house now knows what our potential clients really think of my services before we even open the door,” he said. “I thought that might be a convenient forewarning, given a few of our most recent visitors.”

I would like to say it was the first body that Jackaby and I had ever deposited on the old wooden bench in our foyer, or that it would be the last, but neither would be true. “What should we do with him now?” I asked. “I have a decent coffin in the attic that should suit the gentleman well enough. I’ll just need to find somewhere else to store my encyclopedias.”

There’s too much at stake now to start worrying about little things like being brutally murdered.”

It is a greater travesty by far to see the innocent punished than to watch the guilty go free.”

“Everything is a science. Science is just paying attention and sorting out the rules already in place.

“Miss Rook!” His chocolate brown eyes brightened as he saw me, and he crossed the room at once to sweep me into a warm embrace. I felt his chest rise and fall. I could hear his heartbeat. He smelled like cedar. “That will suffice,” Jackaby grumbled loudly from behind me. “Yes, yes. You are young and your love is a hot biscuit and other abysmally romantic metaphors, I’m sure. You do recall that you saw each other yesterday?”

you should never have chosen to work for me in the first place. It remains one of your most ill-conceived and reckless decisions to date—and that is saying something, because you also chose to blow up a dragon once.” He sighed. “Jenny is right. You could make a real life with that young man, and you shouldn’t throw that away just to hang about with a fractious bastard and a belligerent duck.” He sagged until his forehead was resting on his desk.

“Do you ever grow tired of unexplained phenomena?” I asked Charlie numbly. We both approached the stage. “Because I do. I grow very tired of unexplained phenomena. I would enjoy a perfectly logical and reasonable phenomenon just once. Just one case.”

Whatever he was, no good ever came of the dead rising.” “I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that,” Jenny called from across the crowded foyer. “Hey! Get off that lamp! Oh—I hope you burn your wings, you little brats!”

“Perhaps it would be best to let the gentleman cook, sir,” I said. “It does smell lovely, whatever it is.” I could not remember the last time Jackaby had prepared something for breakfast that did not end up melting its own pot or lodging itself in the wall.

I really have no time for all that How are you? I am fine, thanks. Here’s another inane question. Here’s an equally banal reply. Charmed. Delighted. nonsense.” “They’re called niceties, sir,” I said. “People say them.” “They’re stupid. And people are stupid.” He paused at the front door. “Come to think of it, the word nice used to mean stupid, so I suppose that’s apt.”

He tossed open the door. “Don’t forget to feed the pixies and to interrogate the murderess in the cellar. Oh, and the azalea could use some watering.”

As the day wore on, the mythical menagerie of creatures pervading our house had begun to settle into their own idiosyncratic routines. The ladies of a feather sharing my bedroom flocked together to the duck pond after lunch for a quick birdbath. The satyrs alternated between sneaking up to peep at them through the bushes and slipping into the library to harass the nymphs. Several swarms of spriggans, pixies, and other wee folk had found their way into the walls by midafternoon, which kept the passages a bit less crowded but generated a near-constant chittering, skittering sound that occasionally ended in eruptions of plaster. By early evening, Chief Nudd had returned with a few members of his horde and they had joined the gnomes at their dice game in the foyer.

“Like an idiom?” I said. “You mean they say hunting Hafgan’s shield the way we say a fool’s errand or a wild goose chase?” “Thassit. Idiom. But why wouldja chase a goose?” Nudd wrinkled up his nose. “Geese is terrifyin’.” “Yes, yes. We can all agree that geese are the worst of birds,” said Jackaby.

“I learned a long time ago that we do not survive because we’re strong—we become stronger the more we survive.

This world doesn’t need showy champions. It needs people who are good, people who do good, even if nobody will ever know.”

“All right then, my sage young apprentice—what do we do next?” “Something foolish, I imagine,” I said. “Foolish and decidedly dangerous. That sounds about our style, doesn’t it?”