Dead to Rites Read Online Free

well for either of us. I’d seen him on a couple or three occasions since the whole Spear of Lugh fiasco, and we were good—no beefs, so far as I knew—but we hadn’t exactly been drinking outta the same bottle since then.
    Whatever “favor” he was hoping to do me, he was looking to get something out of it, too. But just bulling through and asking him directly wasn’t going to get me anything, and while I could probably beat a song out of him, that
would
be a good way to make him an enemy.
    Instead, I asked, “So why the play at goin’ incognito, then?”
    He didn’t pretend not to know what I meant; that was something, anyway.
    “Look, Mick, I’m here on behalf of the others. None of ’em really wants to be seen with you given what’s going down. I don’t really, either, so this seemed a good compromise.”
    By “the others,” I assumed he meant the chunk of Chicago’s supernatural community who I sometimes palled around with. Not friends, really, but contacts, informants, people I’d helped and people who helped me—for the right price. Franky himself, of course, but also Lenai; Pink Paddy; the “L King,” this strange old entity who lives in one of the tunnel portions of the rail system; Gaullman, when he wasn’t committing himself to one asylum or another (for everyone else’s protection, he always said); a few others. Colorful characters, and mostly not the bravest sort, so them being too afraid to come to me in person if there was a problem was no big surprise.
    Two issues with that, though. First, Franky was no braver’n any one of ’em. And second, given that
what
was going down?
    So I asked him about both.
    “Hey! I’m no coward!”
    I just looked at him.
    “I just have a healthy sense of self-preservation,” he finished, limp as wet yarn.
    I looked at him some more.
    Franky sighed. “Okay, so I figured, we all try to ignore this until it goes away and God only knows how long that’ll take, or who gets hurt in the process. I get you to suss out what’s happening, you solve the problem same way you always do, everything’s done with and we can all go back to the everyday.”
    That… tasted of truth, but it wasn’t filling. He wasn’t lying to me, but he wasn’t spilling everything, either.
    So, hey, I
kept
looking at him. Why not? It’d worked out pretty well so far.
    “There’s people asking around about you,” he finally admitted.
    A-ha! Now
we were gettin’ somewhere.
    And now it made sense he’d come to me. If I sussed out whatever was goin’ down, great. If I got involved but
didn’t
wrap things up neat’n tidy, well, I woulda found whoever was nosing around. They wouldn’t have any cause to keep pestering Franky or Paddy or the others. Either way was good for Franky.
    But… “I get that it’s maybe worrying for people to come to you about me,” I said, “but this ain’t exactly the first time
any
of you been grilled about something you didn’t want to talk about. And I suspect that if the mugs asking the questions were anyone or anything real dangerous, you’da started off with that, or at least be a lot more frightened than you are. You’re worried, not terrified. So what’s the skinny?”
    Since I know you’re wondering, yeah, it woulda been a lot more comfortable and maybe even safer if we’d taken this to my office for a proper sit-down. I’d gotten Franky talking, though, and I didn’t wanna risk losing the momentum.
    “Well… Part of it, Mick, is still the whole Spear of Lugh thing. After what happened last year, everybody’s jumpy thinking about the kinda people we might have wandering around Chicago poking into things. You can’t really blame them for that, can you?”
    I’d have sighed, then, if I, you know, sighed.
    “The spear’s gone, Franky. And so’s everyone who was here hunting for it. All we’ve got now are the usual, run-of-the-mill Fae.” As if there were such a thing. “Same sorta people and not-quite-people you been