Death's Mistress

by Karen Chance

  Or so I liked to believe, anyway.

  A trip upward showed me a very healthy bosom encased in a bright red vest, which was mostly hidden behind a flowing brown beard. It matched the hair framing the wide face above, which had been teased to within an inch of its life and streaked with platinum highlights. Its owner regarded me quizzically.

  “Why you bent over like that?” Olga demanded.

  Out of shock, I didn’t say. “No reason.”

  I stood up and she pulled back, giving me access. The tiny mountain troll who had answered the door clambered back onto his stool, pushed over to one side where he could smoke in peace. He’d also been used as a doorman by the proprietors of the establishment’s former incarnation—a crowded gambling den. I guess it had gotten too crowded, because it had been replaced by a beauty parlor.

  “New look?” I asked, settling myself onto an empty stool.

  Olga plopped back onto a chair by a manicure station. The chair groaned, but held, and the manicurist went back to work on her thick, curved nails. “You should try,” she said, eyeing my short nails and casual hairstyle without favor. “You look like boy.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “Most guys don’t think so.”

  “I not see you married.”

  “Hell has yet to freeze over,” I agreed.

  She snorted. “What happened to that vampire?”

  “Which one?” Lately, I had more in my life than I liked. Of course, since I liked zero, that wasn’t hard.

  Olga spread her giant hands, turned them upward and made grabby motions. I grinned, thinking of Louis-Cesare’s expression if he ever found out that his name sounded like the troll word for “tight ass.” Not that it didn’t fit. On several levels.

  “I haven’t seen him in a while.”

  “You see him more often if you—” Olga looked at the manicurist. “What that word?”

  “Gild the lily?” the girl asked, shooting me an appraising glance. “You’d look great with highlights.”

  “I look like a skunk with highlights.” The curse of dark hair.

  “You just haven’t had them done right,” she told me. “I’m a whiz at color. As soon as I’m done here, we could—”

  “Maybe later,” I told her. I’d just gotten the blue.

  I sketched the problem out for Olga while the rest of the rhinestones were appliquéd. “We don’t know that he’s here to sell it, but it seems like a good guess.” The war in the supernatural community had driven up the price of all defensive wards. And this was supposed to be the grandfather of them all.

  She nodded and then just sat there. Unlike humans, trolls don’t have a problem with long silences. They also aren’t big in the idle chitchat department. Since I suck at that sort of thing myself, I found it oddly refreshing.

  I flipped through a few magazines, went out front and bought a soda, came back in and perused the new stock of weapons in the back room. There was enough firepower to take out half of Brooklyn shelved alongside the peroxide and bags of hair extensions. Olga had needed a cheap place to start up her business again, and the proprietor had needed some security, so they’d worked out a partnership agreement. It was currently possible to come in for a shampoo and leave with the magical equivalent of a bazooka.

  Most of the stuff I already had two of, but there was a nice selection of iron weapons I’d never really bothered to look at before. They were heavy and lacked the grace and flexibility of steel. There was nothing elegant here: no mirror-bright ceremonial blades, no inlaid grips, no fine-tooled scabbards. They were ugly, brutish weapons for ugly, brutish warfare.

  I hefted a short sword that was more like a club, and liked its weight in my hand. It was well balanced, with a dull, slightly pitted surface. No one would see this coming on a dark night. I also selected a couple knives and a mace that must have weighed fifty pounds, and took them back into the main room.

  And found Olga watching me. “What you do?”

  “I need weapons.”

  “You already have.”

  “Yeah, but they don’t work too well on fey. And you may have heard, we had a little visit last night. By the way, thanks for the twins.”

  Olga inclined her head. “What you do with these weapons?”

  I thought that was an odd question. “What do I usually do with them?”

  “You not go aftersubrand.”

  It had been more of a statement than a question, but I answered it anyway. “I didn’t go after him this time. And how did you know he was here?”

  “People talk.”

  “What else do they say?”

  She shrugged. “He here to make trouble. Not know what kind. But you stay away.”

  “I told you, he came after me.”

  Small blue eyes narrowed on my face. “And you not go hunt?”

  “What are you trying to tell me, Olga? That you won’t sell me weapons if I’m going aftersubrand?” She just looked at me. “Why?”

  “You good fighter, for little woman. But you no match for him. He kill you.” It was said with such toneless conviction that it sent a chill down my spine.

  “Well, cheer up. I’m not planning on searching him out. But in case he comes around again, I’d like something a little more lethal than highlights!”

  We finally reached an agreement, and I took the mace over to the doorman to arrange delivery. No way was I carrying that around all day. But the other stuff I tucked into my duffel. They weighed the thing down a lot more than normal, but it couldn’t be helped. I wasn’t going to get caught flat-footed again.

  I turned to find Olga levering herself to her feet. “Come.”

  She led me out the back door and into a small parking lot, where a specially built van was parked. She settled herself into the passenger’s side while the van’s struts creaked and groaned. Four hundred pounds of troll is a lot of troll, although she’s considered pretty petite for her species.

  The supernatural community in New York is broken into sections, much like the human city. The vamps prefer Manhattan; the mages have their East Coast base in Queens; and the Weres live mostly in rural areas upstate. Brooklyn, on the other hand, is fey territory. To be more precise, it’s a Dark Fey stronghold where the creatures who populate Earth’s nightmares hang out and attempt to make a living.

  A sizable minority of these are trolls, the human term for a wide variety of Dark Fey with a few obvious similarities. In reality, “trolls” were made up of dozens of different species, many of which had been enemies back in Faerie. But in the unfamiliar landscape of the human world, they’d bonded to form a tight- knit community. Olga’s late husband hadn’t even reached her waist.

  The rain had slowed everything down, and we got stuck in traffic going over the Brooklyn Bridge. “I hate Manhattan,” I said, itching to get there already.

  Olga nodded sympathetically. “In Faerie, Earth considered hell dimension.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “Yes.” She caught my expression. “Upper hell,” she said, placatingly.

  “I guess that’s something.”

  Traffic started to move again, and we inched into the city. There was no parking near our destination, so I dropped her off and went to find a garage. By the time I got back, she’d disappeared into a dimly lit restaurant decorated with raffia-wrapped wine bottles and paint-by-number images of Italy.

  It was fey run, meaning she could drop her glamourie like a coat at the door, the restaurant’s camouflage ensuring that everyone looked more or less human. Most of them were, but I spotted the slightly blurred outlines of at least three Others at the bar and a couple more eating spaghetti Bolognese at a corner table.

  “Lucas,” Olga told the waiter, who was in a glamourie to match the decor—dark hair, perfect little mustache, slight paunch, balding. What he actually looked like—or what he actually was—was anyone’s guess. I could detect glamouries unless they were very, very expensive ones. But I couldn’t see through them.

  That was,
after all, kind of the point.

  The little man took us over to a table where a distinguished white-haired gentleman of maybe seventy was enjoying some cacciatore. His wrinkles were discreet, like the subtle stripe in his four-thousand-dollar suit and the shine on his Prada loafers. He seemed human enough, as far as I could tell, but he didn’t so much as blink as Olga explained what we wanted.

  “You check,” she finished, summoning the waiter with a regal gesture.

  “My dear lady, I don’t have to check,” he said, blotting a daub of sauce off the end of his chin. “I can assure you, nothing like that is being offered for sale in New York.”

  “How can you be so sure?” I asked, as Olga basically ordered the menu.

  “Because it is my business to know!”

  “And your business would be?”

  “I find rarities for discerning purchasers, matching specialized items with buyers able to appreciate them. I know the inventories of all the major auction houses, as well as quite a few of the small ones.”

  “But not all. I mean, there have to be hundreds in this country alone—”

  “My dear young lady,” he said severely, “no small house would handle a prize like that. Naudiz is one of a set of runes rumored to have been carved by Odin himself. It would be worth ... Well, in essence, it is priceless. If it came up for sale, it would cause a stir around the world. It would be as if the Hope Diamond came up for auction in the world of jewelry.”

  I munched a bread stick and thought about it. “No, it would be as if the Hope Diamond was stolen, and then someone had to figure out a way to sell it. A minor jewel would be no problem; you could unload it anywhere. But the Hope freaking Diamond?”

  “Well, one could always cut down a diamond,” he said, starting on a supersized gelato. “Not that it would be necessary in the case of such a famous stone. A discreet sale to a private collector would be more likely, if the thief wasn’t a total novice. But it is a poor analogy since a magical object cannot be divided in such a way.”

  “So how would he do it? If someone wanted to fence it?”

  He quirked an eyebrow. “One doesn’t ‘fence’ an item of that quality.”

  “Then what does one do, hypothetically speaking?”

  He shrugged. “Arrange a private sale, as I said, or a small auction, by invitation only, for a select company. The latter would be slightly more risky, but would also probably result in a greater return.”

  I accepted a glass of wine from the bottle the waiter had brought Olga, and sipped at it as I thought it over. “Say he’s a novice. First-time thief. He wants the maximum return, so he needs to arrange a small, private auction. Who could do that for him?”

  “Any number of people. There are many unscrupulous types in our business, I am afraid. And quite a few others who could be persuaded into error by such a commission.”

  “But how do I narrow it down?”

  “Do you know what auction houses the individual has dealt with in the past?”

  “None, as far as I know.”

  “Does he have any contacts in this world, people who might have been able to provide him with suggestions?”

  “I don’t know.” The Blarestri, Claire’s group of Light Fey, didn’t venture into our world that much, but there was no law against it. The guard could have been here, either officially or not, any number of times, and there was no way to know who he’d met.

  “Hm.” He thought about it while Olga dug into a party-sized platter of antipasto. She pushed it at me, and I figured what the hell? I’d finished another glass of wine and enough prosciutto to kill an average person by the time he nodded. “If you can’t narrow it down on his end, the only thing you can do is to narrow it down on ours.”

  “Meaning?”

  “There is a good deal of fraud, in the case of some unscrupulous auctioneers, and it is often buyer beware. But no one would even attempt to sell something like this without providing cast- iron proof of its legitimacy. A valuation would need to be performed, to convince the potential buyers that it was, indeed, what the auctioneer said it was.”

  “And who would do this valuation?”

  “It would have to be an unquestionable authority, probably fey since the item is so, of proven discretion and sterling record.”

  “Do you know anybody like that?”

  “Oh, yes.” His spoon rang on the side of his glass and he sat back with a sigh. “Assuming you can find the little tick.”

  The heavy old slab of wood and metal, a relic of a twenties-era speakeasy, groaned as I pushed it open. “SHUT THE DOOR!” The usual chorus greeted me as I slipped inside and turned to shove the door closed behind me.

  With the daylight firmly shut out, the stairwell was dim enough that I had to be careful of my footing heading down. The bouncer at the bottom, a large water troll, raised a clammy hand in greeting as I entered the large cellar. It was a lot easier to see here, and not just because of the lanterns scattered about.

  Graffiti scrolled down the wall, golden lines rippling as they passed over the spaces between bricks. Some near the ceiling were written in black and stayed in place, as static as if they were drawn with paint instead of magic. But the rest flowed down the walls and onto the cracked cement floor, constantly uncurling and rewriting themselves as the odds changed.

  It had odds on everything from dog racing and jai alai, to table tennis and golf. Not that the fey needed a sport to bet on. A couple of dwarves at the bar were raptly watching a pint to see which bead of condensation would hit the bar first. The bartender, who was also the owner, scowled at them, preferring bets to be made with him instead of one another. But at least the winner bought another round.

  One of the few constants about the fey was their love for games of chance. They opened betting parlors before they did grocery stores, and they’d put money on anything. And despite its fairly mean decor, Fin’s was one of the best places in Brooklyn to put down a bet.

  “What do you mean, you don’t know?” I asked, frowning at Fin. “You know everybody.”

  “In Brooklyn I know everybody,” he corrected, hopping down from his perch on a milk crate to get me a drink. Fin was a Skogstroll, which was Norwegian for forest troll, although to my knowledge he’d never been out of Brooklyn in his life. But he still had the nose—only a foot long because he was still young—and he had to stand on a box to be able to see over the bar.

  He clambered back up and slid me another longneck. “The guy you want works out of Chinatown. Manhattan’s vamp territory—you know that.”

  “So what’s a fey doing there?”

  Fin shrugged. “He’s Chinese?”

  “He’s fey,” I repeated, pausing to drain half my drink. It was hot as hell outside, and I’d been running around all day, lugging half a ton of iron. And all I had to show for it was a pounding headache and a couple of blisters. I would have had to take the leather coat today, I thought, eyeing it resentfully.

  “Yeah, but luduans left Faerie a long time ago, and most of them settled in China. The Chinese emperors used them in interrogations.”

  “I know that,” I said crabbily. The human world has sodium pentothal and lie detectors; the supernatural world uses luduans—when it can find them. But this one had gotten fired from his job, wasn’t at his apartment and hadn’t been seen for two days at any of the places he liked to hang out.

  A trio of trolls erupted with stomps and hoots from their primo place in front of the large mirror on one wall. It was currently reflecting the qualifying heats for the insane mage sport of ley-line racing. The World Championships were coming to town, and it was all anyone could think about. Including Fin, who was raking in the bets hand over fist.

  I waited while he took some money off a Merrow, who of course was favoring an Irish driver. She wrapped her webbed hand around a pint and moved off, and I leaned over the bar. “I’m getting desperate, Fin. I don’t have time to wait around days or weeks for this guy to show. I’ve checked everywhere,
and it’s like he just fell off the face of the earth.”

  Fin shrugged. “All I know is he put a couple bets down with me a week ago, but never paid up. So I sent the boys after him.”

  The “boys” were a couple of cave trolls, short and squat like the rest of their breed, but with the long arms and huge, shovel- like hands needed for excavating large areas of earth. Those hands were also good for slapping around welchers, so much so that Fin rarely had a problem.

  “Did they find him?” I asked.

  He scowled. “Not yet. They went by his job, but he wasn’t there.”

  “He isn’t going to be. The management fired him after they found out about his gambling debts. I think they were afraid he’d walk off with some of the merchandise.”

  Fin paused to serve another customer, with the molasses-type beer trolls prefer. I suppressed a face. You can eat that stuff with a spoon. “You’re talking about that auction house he used to work for,” he finally told me. “He got another job last week—at a gambling den in back of a pharmacy over there.”

  I got out a notebook. “What pharmacy?”

  He shook his head. “Don’t bother. Didn’t I tell you I sent the boys?”

  “No disrespect to the boys, but tell me anyway.”

  A spear of light interrupted the cheering going on around a big-screen TV mounted to one grimy wall, washing out the horse race it was showing. “SHUT THE DOOR!” we all yelled, and it quickly slammed closed.

  “The owner had some trouble a few months back with mages coming in and cleaning up using spells to cheat,” Fin told me.

  “There are charms against that sort of thing.”

  “Yeah, but they’re expensive and have to be renewed regularly, and he wasn’t exactly making a killing. So he started keeping a luduan on-site so whenever somebody started a major run, he could have it question them. Make sure it really was a lucky streak.”