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

A cage-style elevator with ornately worked bars took them down. The skill and style of the hallway woodwork they descended past, visible even in the dim light of single naked bulbs, reminded Zeb of his long-dead grandmother’s brownstone apartment building . . . but this building was in much better shape, much newer. He gulped a few more times and took a deep breath; his nausea was almost gone, as the doctor had predicted. But as the unreality of his surroundings hit him, he almost wished he had the nausea back to distract him. He tried to figure out some way this could have been staged, but making him ill and then swapping his surroundings would have required the use of drugs . . . and Zeb couldn’t imagine Harris drugging him for a practical joke.
Yet despite everything Harris and Gaby had told him, despite the fact that he had logically accepted part of their story, he found he wasn’t really prepared for it to be true. Accepting it as a working hypothesis had been one thing. But seeing that he was descending a very different building from the one he’d ascended less than an hour before hit him hard. He took in every detail of the elevator, of the floors he saw passing outside the cage door, trying to assure himself that he could not be making a mistake, could not simply have missed these details when arriving at Harris’s and Gaby’s building.
The lobby had a lower ceiling and darker wall paneling than the lobby by which he’d entered the building. Its doors were open to the outside and the nighttime air was cool, autumn weather New York should have been experiencing this year but hadn’t yet. They emerged from the lobby facing a broad brick street with a tree-lined median.
Beside the near curb sat a car, a massive roadster like many Zeb had seen at an automobile show featuring cars of the 1930s, all sleek boxiness with a hood long and broad enough to contain a modern compact car. The vehicle was black and gold, with a gold hood ornament shaped like a flying dragon. It was parked the wrong way, oriented leftward.
A woman stepped out of the rear passenger compartment and held the door open for the new arrivals. She was tiny and well-muscled, with raven-black hair that fell to the small of her back. Incongruously, she wore faded khaki shorts and shirt and a banded hat that reminded Zeb of Australian hunting wear. Around her neck was a gold-brown scarf decorated with jaguar spots.
“Ixyail del Valle,” said Harris, “princess of the Hu’unal people, meet Zeb Watson, fighter and manager of fighters.” He ducked into the passenger compartment, Gaby behind him.
“Hi,” Zeb said, and followed.
Ixyail settled in beside him, staring. “Grace. I think you are the blackest dusky I have ever seen.”
Zeb felt a flash of irritability. He hid it behind a mask of polite cheerfulness. “Why, thank you.”
Noriko took the right-hand-side driver’s seat. “To the Monarch Building?”
Alastair, studying the partially-unrolled rubbery creature, took the seat beside her. “No. Thirteen John’s Son, Pataqqsit.”
Noriko set the car into motion, merging into a sudden swell of traffic that, Zeb saw, stayed to the left side of the street. The cars were of various styles and colors, but, like this one, antiques. “What’s there?” Noriko asked.
“Cars.” The creature began yammering again; Alastair rapped its head several times against the car door and it shut up. “This is not a living thing,” he said. “Just rubber imbued with a bit of mystical energy, a tiny amount of instinct.”
Harris said, “What’s going on with Doc?”
Ixyail crossed her arms as if against cold winds. “He rose before dawn this morning and said he had an errand to be about.” Her accent sounded faintly Spanish, but a moment before, Zeb would have sworn she had none at all. “He did not return. Since noon, I have felt someone beneath my flesh.”
Harris frowned. “Meaning precisely what?”
“I am not sure. That is the best way I can describe it.” A patch of lustrous black hair sprouted on her forearm; distracted, she rubbed at it, and the hair fell away. “But I know somewhere there is devisement, and it involves me.”
Zeb stared at the floor of the car, where the hair had fallen, and felt that sense of unreality cut through him again.
They headed east on a two-way boulevard that was thick with traffic. The cars continued to suggest a 1930s automobile show. All around Zeb saw brick-topped streets, buildings with antique neon and marquees, and fine-featured folk in brightly-colored clothes that, if not for their rainbow of hues, would have looked appropriate in his grandparents’ closet.
But east from Harris’s building should have been- “Wait a second,” said Zeb. “No Central Park?”
Gaby shook her head. “Neckerdam has parks all over, and hardly a street without big old trees. I guess they figured they didn’t need a big park.”
Harris stared at him expectantly, and finally said, “Well?”
“I already believed you, man.”
“Yeah. But believing is one thing, seeing it is something else.”
“True.”

After the trip across what should have been the Brooklyn Bridge but wasn’t, they pulled up in front of a large building whose green neon sign read BELLWEATHER. Behind its huge windows were bright new cars, squatter and rounder than the one Noriko drove, less ornamental.
The front door did not yield to Alastair’s pull; he began banging on it.
Someone beyond yelled, “We’re closed!”
Alastair said, “I need to see Fergus Bootblack.”
Zeb saw the others exchange significant looks. “What’s all this?”
“Fergus is a mechanic,” Harris said. “Used to work for Doc. But he sold information to one of Doc’s enemies and almost got me killed. He later sort of made up for it, so we’re okay.”
Ixyail looked disgusted. “So you say.” Her Spanish accent was even stronger than before. “I think he should be gutted, his entrails tied off to a bumper while he screams for mercy-”
“Around to your right,” called the voice from within.
They moved around to the side of the building, where a large sliding door stood open; light spilled out from within.
When they entered, they found themselves in the dealership’s garage. Two cars were up on racks and two swearing men were working under one of them.
A man in green overalls and a plain red shirt, both grease-stained, approached. He was short, like most of the men Zeb had seen here, with black hair and skin that was closer to white than to pink. But he wasn’t pale from worry; he seemed curious but not intimidated by this group of visitors. “Grace.” He looked with special curiosity at Zeb.
Zeb found himself growing irritated. “What’s the matter, do you have a special entrance for ‘duskies’?”
“No. Light, dark, dusky, all welcome at Bellweather.” Fergus made it sound like an ad slogan. “But you’re not really a dusky, are you? You’re a grimworlder.”
Alastair stepped up. “You’ve got sharp eyes and a good memory, Fergus, and I need them both.” He handed the mechanic the rolled tube of rubber. “See what you make of this.”
Fergus unrolled it on a table not completely covered with tools and automotive parts. It immediately began yammering again. Harris whacked its head a couple of times and it shut up.
“Inner tube rubber, or something very like it,” Fergus said. “Except inner tubes are not usually so noisy.” He picked up something that looked like a miner’s hat; he put the thing on and turned on the light, then peered intently at the surface of the rubber. “What do you want to know about it?”
“Anything. Whatever you can tell us.”
“Your timing is very good,” Fergus said. “Next week I’ll not be here.”
“New employment?” Alastair asked.
“In a manner of speaking. I’ve passed all my tests and rented a Neckerdam office. Next week I’ll be a free eye.”
Gaby stood on tiptoe to whisper in Zeb’s ear: “Private eye.”
Alastair’s expression suggested that he was at least slightly impressed. “Truly? I didn’t know you had it in you.”
“That was always the problem, wasn’t it? I study in a dozen fields for a dozen years and the Foundation associates can only ever think of me as a mechanic.”
“Let’s not get into that again, Fergus. The problem-”