The city of Tír na nóg stretched across the entire world. It had no start and it had no end. Endless palatial buildings stretched up to the sky, reaching for the clouds and shredding those they touched. Such architectural hubris made the sky angry, and storms swirled and raged down into the trunks of the sky scrapers, where mist and rain lashed and seeped down towards the ever-shadowed ground hundreds upon hundreds of feet below.
The chariots of the mighty zipped through the smoldering sky, their lights ghostly beams heralding their passing. It was very rare for one of those vehicles to descend to the dark streets, and the locals tended to notice when they did. On this particular night, only three eyes were watching this particular car as it descended in silence, the boosters swirling the mist all around its gleaming black exterior.
The side door to the town car opened, and a figure stepped out to stand on the street. She looked elegant and tall, not the sort to frequent the ground, and she paused not two steps from the vehicle, waiting. A light flashed within the car, a sharp pop echoed through the alleyway, and a sanguine mist burst from the woman's forehead before she crumpled and fell. Her body came to rest on the street, a unicorn's horn of blood trickling from the exit wound in her head, and the town car ascended into the mist, disappearing. No one was on the street that night to witness this. Everyone was curiously absent.
Save one.
The white mouse ran from its perch on the trash can, whisking away like a ghost. It hardly made a sound as it scrambled over soaking cardboard and under it, over empty beer bottles and take out boxes. Under other circumstances it might have paused to check out whatever scraps might have been left behind, but tonight it couldn't afford the delay. Narrowly avoiding the attentions of a cat, the mouse squeezed into a small hole gnawed by the wall of a tenement building. The pipes and wiring behind the walls was as good a series of bridges and ladders as any, and soon it creeped its way out another hole and into the kitchen cabinet of the apartment's tenant, Aldous McFerson.
With a pink paw, it nudged the door open just a touch further, poking its nose out to take a sniff. The smell of cheap wine hung on the air like gaudy Christmas lights in July, and it narrowed its ruby eyes. A series of ropes had been fixed all around the apartment, leading from one surface to the other along the walls, each length just wide enough to allow a mouse to pass.
Using these hemp bridges, the white mouse made its way to the living room sofa, where lay a man dressed only in black boxer shorts. Curling tattoos decorated his otherwise pale skin, black text winding from his fingers and wrists up to his shoulders like smoke made of letters, sentences, and spells. Enchantments. His nails were black, just like his long, unkempt hair, and his features were handsome when they weren't contorted by an open-mouthed snore.
The mouse clambered over his hair, chittering and sniffing to get his attention. It had no luck, so it slapped his forehead with its paw, but still, nothing. Truly, it preferred him to be awake for these things, but this couldn't wait. The mouse carefully climbed down his forehead, made a turn, braced on the man's nose, and then carefully climbed into the empty eye socket on the right side of the man's face.
As the mouse curled up, what distinguished it as a mouse disappeared, and its back peeled open to reveal an amber iris around a round black pupil. The pupil dilated a little as the man began to wake, and then it sharply contracted. He gasped and sat up suddenly, stiff as he received the visuals that the mouse had witnessed only moments ago. His memory of the event included a sense of place and time, and as his heart slowed down below a panicked state he began to understand the mouse's urgency.
Despite the nascent ache of a hangover, he caressed his fingers over his left eyebrow. “Good boy, Luch,” he murmured, and he felt a little coil of happiness emanate from his familiar, currently lodged in his head. It mingled in with his own inner maelstrom of disorientation, anxiety, and waning intoxication and sobered him up a little. Enough, in point of fact, to get to his feet. Enough to pull on his boots and a shirt. Enough to grab his keys and cell phone, slip out the service stairwell, and walk out into the alley to take a look for himself.
And there she was.
The man held his breath, eyes wide. This wasn't just some nobody – when he slowly walked over, he could see the face that had been on the news cycle for the last five years. In death her face, those parts not covered in blood, looked serene. Asleep. Her golden hair shined in the gleam of the streetlight a few yards away. And the fine tips of her elven ears, her beautiful blue eyes, and the silver tracings along her brow and neck all marked her as Niamh, one of the queens of Tír na nÓg and fabled daughter of the sea himself.
With shaking hands, the man crouched down next to her and pulled out his cellphone and took a quick picture. He didn't know what good it would do, but the death of a royal hadn't happened in centuries. If he could sell this image to the tabloids he might have enough money to move out of the slums. As he took more pictures, he felt a pang of guilt, provided by his familiar.
“What do you want me to do?” he hissed, frowning as he quickly emailed the images to himself.
Again, his conscience was squeezed, and he finally rolled his eyes and stood up, defiantly stuffing his phone into his pants pocket. “Look, if I call the Garda, what are they going to think? How could I prove that I didn't do it? We witnessed exactly what happened, but who'd believe it?”
Another little pang made him frown.
“Well... I suppose I could leave an anonymous tip. Someone has to.” He looked down at the fallen queen, still radiant, and slid his hands into his pockets. “It'd be a shame for the rats to get to her...”
Just then, out of the corner of his eye, he saw a shadow move. The lid of a trashcan clattered to the ground, and as he turned to look, a black cat with a white spot on its chest and white eyes dashed across the alleyway. It zigged and zagged, its bright yellow eyes looking up at the empty air until it jumped and twisted. Its long arms extended, paws wide, talons out, before it clutched something invisible and brought it to its mouth before it landed. The cat glared at the man as it appeared to eat what it had caught, then it contorted unnaturally. Something was wrong with it, like it was fighting against some powerful force, and then it crumpled and lay still. After a moment or two the cat got back up and looked at him, its eyes now blue. That same lovely shade as Niamh's.
The man kept looking down the alleyway even after the black cat was long gone. It left him frowning, nose wrinkled as he muttered, “Weird.” Behind him, the thunderous whirr of a Garda vehicle rumbled down to the ground, and the man turned in surprise. The search lights ignited and pointed down at the body, catching him right in the eyes. “FUCKING CHRIST!” he yelled, doubling over and clutching at his face. The hangover headache that had been simmering on the top of his head had been pitched into a hot boil by the glare, and when the back of the vehicle opened up and the Garda ran out it was embarrassingly easy to subdue him.
The wet, filthy asphalt rose up swiftly and cracked the man in the cheek, rattling his senses so much that the clatter of his phone tumbling out of his pocket was missed. The Garda above him was barking commands, but he couldn't make any sense of them. His ears were still ringing from the fall, and his body stayed limp even as his wrists were cuffed together behind his back. From his vantage point he saw that the eyes of the corpse were now white, white like the cat's had been. He didn't have time to understand what had happened. The world spun as he was pulled up to his feet and hauled into the van.
Before the back doors closed and sealed him into the rumbling dark, the silhouette of a Garda loomed over him. He was holding the phone and scrolling through it, deleting images. The man grinned, his tanned skin darkening just a little even as his white fangs gleamed. “It's a shame you saw all that, buddy. She wanted no witnesses.”
The doors shut, and neither Aldous nor Luch were ever heard from again.
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