"Allston, Aaron - Doc Sidhe 02 - Sidhe-Devil" - читать интересную книгу автора (Allston Aaron)

Harris glanced around. With stacks of chairs all around them, no one appeared to have seen or heard their exchange. He bent and dragged the bearded gunman behind several tall stacks of chairs, an adequate place of concealment. Then he undid the man’s bow tie and tied his wrists behind his back.
And cursed. The man’s nose was a bloody mess, and so was the forearm of Harris’s jacket.
He drew off the jacket as he emerged from behind the chairs. And Zeb was right there, waiting for him. “Dammit,” Harris said.
“Man, why are you acting so strange?”
Harris sighed, then grabbed Zeb’s tie and pulled him around to look behind the chairs. “That’s why.”
“What the hell happened to him?”
“I hit him.”
“Why? What is he to you?”
“He’s a fairy.”
Zeb pulled back and looked appalled. “Harris, that’s not like you at all. You’ve never been a gay-basher.”
“No, no, no. He’s not gay. Or maybe he is. I don’t know. He’s a fairy.”
“You’ve lost me.”
“In other words, he’s someone from the fair world. Come on. We need to find out if there are more of them.” He drew Zeb back around the column and into the crowd. “You see any guys about chest-high, built like bowling balls, point ’em out to me.”
“So you can beat them up. Sure.”
The photographer called, “Husband, please stand beside the bride again.”
“Dammit! Zeb, give me your jacket.”

Zeb watched Harris rejoin Gaby in front of the camera. Zeb could tell Harris’s smile was forced. It looked genuine enough, but Zeb had known him long enough to distinguish between reality and acting where Harris was concerned. Zeb returned to the man Harris had slugged.
He didn’t find an invitation among the man’s effects. But he did find the man’s gun. It was a strange piece, brassy in color, large for a revolver.
Okay. So someone had crashed the wedding with a gun. Harris might be crazy, with all this talk of fairies, but he wasn’t paranoid. And he’d suggested there were more strange folk out there. Well, if there were potential enemies in the crowd with firearms, Zeb didn’t intend to be unarmed. He wrapped the gun up in Harris’s jacket and took it with him.
Zeb returned to the edges of the crowd and looked around. He immediately spotted men so like the one Harris had slugged that they had to be relatives: short, squat, thick-chested, most of them bulbous-nosed and bearded. They were wearing the worst off-the-rack suits Zeb had seen in a long while. All four stood at the main doors leading into the hall, but as he watched, three departed-leaving the tallest one behind.
A guard, Zeb decided.

Harris took Gaby in his arms and kissed her. Kissed her long past the point the photographer said he had the shot. Then he whispered, “There are fair folk here.”
Gaby held her smile. “I thought you were acting strangely.”
“Side by side, please,” the photographer said.
They obliged. Gaby asked, “Someone Doc sent to guard us, maybe?”
“Nah. Son of a bitch wouldn’t have drawn on me if he was guarding me. Is that another one? Over by your mother. Short, nose like a squashed avocado?”
“No, that’s my uncle Ernesto.”
“What’s he doing out of jail?”
“Attending our wedding, silly. Wait, there’s one, at the doors out. Oh, damn.”
“What?”
“Zeb’s headed right for him.”

Zeb snagged a glass of champagne from a waiter’s tray and added a drunken sway to his walk as he approached the door. Convince him you’re crippled, he told himself, and his guard will come down.
On his way through the door he bumped into the squat red-headed man and sloshed champagne all over his chest. “Oh, man, I’m sorry. Here, hold this.” He managed to get the glass into the man’s hand and began mopping the stain with Harris’s jacket. Beneath the man’s suit coat he could clearly see the hard edges of the butt of another handgun.
“Stupid buggering dusker, see what you’ve done.”
“Oh, man, I’m mortified. This jacket has to have set you back at least twenty bucks. I’ll fix it right up.” He grabbed the squat man’s lapel and dragged him out into the empty corridor, mopping away at the stain. “Harris is a friend of mine. Friend of yours? You know he fights, right? I used to fight with him. Then I was his manager. What’s a dusker?”
“That’s you, lad. Dusky, stupid, and drunk, like all your kind-”
“That’s what I figured.” Zeb took a quick look up and down the corridor; sure that there was no one to see, he swung the gun wrapped in Harris’s jacket and hit the man once in the side of the head, hard enough to jar his own arm. The man’s eyes rolled up in his head and he fell.
Zeb looked around. Still no witnesses. He took several long moments to pull free the man’s cheap tie and bind his hands with it, then stuffed him under one of the backless couches lining the hallway. Its shadow nearly hid the unconscious man.

The groom’s party sweated under the photographer’s lights. Zeb, lacking a jacket, stood behind Harris again. He leaned close and whispered, “There was another one, at the door. I got him.”
Harris’s eyes opened wider. “You got him? What does that mean?”
“I killed him and I ate him. What do you think it means? He’s sleeping it off under some furniture.”
“Hey, you! Straighten up, would you?”
Zeb glared at the photographer and did so. He stage-whispered, “There were originally four at the door. Three of them left. I don’t know where they went.”
“Great.” Harris smiled and waved at Gaby, showing three fingers, then blew her a kiss. She caught it and ate it, then turned to her family. “Okay, she knows.”
“Would the groom please quit waving and talking? We’ll get this done a lot faster if everyone cooperates!”
Harris sighed and whispered, “The Donohues hired the photographer. Since we wouldn’t let them arrange everything-”