She screeched and slapped at her head as if the powder hurt, but at least she was moving. I grabbed her hand and started running. “Feish, let’s go!”
“This way!” the river maid yelped back as we burst out of the tarot card reader’s shop. Feish pointed to the left, which would take us up to Factors Row. Not my favorite place for a lot of reasons.
“You think Jinx will help us?” Jinx being the big-ass guardian spider/trickster that haunted the area and had a thing for classic books.
“No, but there is somewhere we can hide!” Feish already had some serious distance on me and Suzy as I dragged my young friend behind me. I could barely see for the sweat running down my face, and the nausea had picked a bad time to make itself known. My guts were empty, churning, and my energy was nearly spent.
The cobblestones dulled the sound of our boots as we ran as fast as we could after Feish. Suzy was still yelping about her burning scalp, and a glance behind us revealed we were being followed by three men in black, and not one of them was Will Smith. Hell, I’d take Tommy Lee Jones at that point.
“Here, turn quick!” Feish grabbed my hand as we came around the corner onto Factors Row. Cobblestones under our feet, and a giant black spider covered in bristling hair right in front of us. Her eyes were glued to something she held between two long appendages. A book. She was reading? And she had a red pen in her mouth.
Oh, Gawd, did she think she could edit a book?
Not the time to point out to her that not many people would hire an editor that was also a giant spider. I waved a hand at Jinx. “Out of the way! Eat the ones behind us!”
Startled, she skittered away, her eyes swinging to us as she dropped what she’d been reading. Seriously, a giant spider reading and editing a book. Just when I’d thought this world could not get any weirder.
Feish grabbed my hand and yanked me through a door I’d never seen before, and Suzy spilled in with us. The door slammed behind us, and I would have said we were silent as mice being stalked by three black cats, but there was so much noise in the place we’d stumbled into that I could have hollered my face off and not have been heard.
Music pounded all around us, a bass that drove itself into my chest and made me want to slap my hands over my ears like the old lady I was so often accused of being. How in the world had we not heard that music from outside? Even as I thought it, I remembered a passage in my gran’s book.
Within the shadows there are doorways and there are doorways. Some are nothing more than a passage between one room and the next. Some are more than that, and yet there is no explanation for their existence, for they will not always function as such.
“A go between?” I yelled the words at Feish and she nodded emphatically. I wanted to ask her how she’d known it would be there. Go betweens were rare, expensive to make, and based on what I’d read in Gran’s book, they didn’t last very long.
I made myself look around the room, at the bodies gyrating to the music. Some had clothes on. Some, but not many. Feish pushed against my side. “Oh. This is not where I thought it would lead.”
“Where the hell did you think it would lead?” I yelped even as I looked behind us at the door. I was more than expecting the three men to spill in after us. For that reason alone, I pushed deeper into the crowd, ignoring the tug of Feish on one side and the pull of Suzy on the other.
Suzy shivered. “I like this a little too much, Bree. It calls to my siren blood!” She had to shout to be heard, which meant that a few people took note of our passage and her words.
Smiles slid her way, hands following. I smacked a number of them back because she didn’t seem inclined to push them back herself. Siren blood indeed. All the way to the back of the club we went, squeezing through the press of bodies, the smell of perfume, cologne, and cigar smoke, and the sounds of laughter muted under the pulse of the music. To say that it was overwhelming was an understatement. But it was a cover for us, and for the moment we were safe. I found a booth at the back of the club with just a single man in it.
“You”—I pointed at him—“out. We’re here on official business.”
His jaw flapped open. “Do you know who I am?”
I shook my head and let a hand drop to the knife handle on my thigh, just like an old-school gunslinger. “Nope and I don’t care. Out.”
His eyes followed my hand to the knife. “I see. Well. I know who I can and can’t do business with.”
Nothing else was said as he slid out of the booth, and I all but shoved Feish and Suzy into the newly freed space. I leaned over the table at them. “Don’t leave this booth, don’t invite anyone in, and don’t go off with anyone.”
Feish nodded rapidly, but Suzy was slower to agree. I reached out and slapped her in the face. “Snap out of it. This has got to be some sort of spell.” I shivered, feeling whatever magic was affecting her brush against my skin. A flush of heat ran through me, pooling in my nether regions. “I’m going to find the exit. Then we’ll go.”
Again, Feish nodded, then she leaned forward. “Be careful. Boss would not be happy we are here.”
What would I even say to Crash? Yeah, we stumbled into an orgy pit of weirdness? Not likely.
“Boss will never know that we’re here,” I said, turned around and found myself staring at a man on the far side of the room who hadn’t noticed me. A man whom I’d seen wrapped in nothing but a sheet more than once. A man whose kisses had set every part of me on fire.
His head was bowed over a stunning young woman with liquid black hair that rippled down to her too-tiny waist in perfect ringlets. A white dress clung to her every curve, of which there weren’t many, and she had not even a single cellulite ripple. What was she, eighteen? Barely legal? Her laughter turned heads.
Crash was making her laugh. I frowned.
Nope, I did not like this one bit. The slice across the mid-region of my heart was not welcome, and I tried to reason the feeling away. So what if he’d kissed me? He could have been trying to distract me, and it had worked.
A tiny voice pointed out that he’d taken care of me after I was shot. That he’d sent me away from danger.
But what if he’d been the one to set the danger in motion?
I was muttering under my breath as I stalked through the room, and people knew enough to move out of my way. I found the bar quickly and the bartender leaned in close. “What can I get you, lovely?”
I put my hands on the bar. “The exit.”
He chuckled and I could smell a good amount of alcohol on his breath, beer by the ferment of it. I wrinkled my nose. “What’s so funny?”
“You go out the way you came in. Why would you do it any other way?” He polished up a glass and set it on the bar. “Have a drink, take off your clothes, have a good time.”
He poured me something from a bottle that glittered. Not in an edible glitter kind of way—this was magic. I grimaced. “I don’t do magic I don’t know.”
Turning on my heel, I meant to go back to the girls. Only now, Crash stood directly in my path. He still hadn’t noticed me. And now he had a second girl on his arm, this one with hair the color of mahogany, eyes that matched, and a slinky blue dress fighting a losing battle to cover a pair of boobs the size of melons. Considering how tiny her waist was, I wasn’t sure they were real.
He had an arm draped over the brunette, keeping her close to his side as he talked to the first girl in the white dress. Damn it, I did not like feeling this way. The green-eyed monster wanted me to stalk over there and punch him in his family jewels, let him see if he was any good in bed after that.
The old me would never have done it.
The older me was tempted.
I just needed a little stiffening up first.
I turned back to the bartender and snapped back the drink.
“Changed your mind?”
“Yup.” I put the glass down and tapped it. One more and I’d still be able to walk. He filled the drink up and I tipped it back like a pro, if I do sa
y so myself. Leaning on the bar, I looked up at the bartender and squinted. “You’re not human?”
“Nobody in here is, darling.” He winked and the image of him flickered, like seeing two pictures superimposed over one another. One was human looking, the other . . . the other was covered in fur but still standing upright, so not a werewolf. More like Eric.
“Bigfoot?” I asked, shocked at how numb my mouth felt. Oh no. That numbness spread through my body far quicker than any alcohol should.
“Close. Abominable. You know Eric?” he asked. I nodded, but that made the room spin horribly.
“Good guy, sad about his cousin,” I said. With that, I turned and headed out onto the floor where Crash still stood with those two very young and beautiful women.
To be clear, I didn’t begrudge them their looks or youth—I just didn’t want to feel like I had to compete with them.
“Hey!” I snapped the word out, only it sounded far from snappy, more like slurred.
Crash turned and his blue and gold eyes widened. “Breena. What in Hades’s name are you doing here?”
“Never you mind.” I pointed both hands at him as if I were doing a sloppy hex. “This is not cool. Just so you know. Not. Cool.” I waved my quickly flopping hands in his general direction to take in the two women.
The ladies smiled at me, and the one in the white dress spoke up first. “You think you could handle him? Please. You’re human.”
I made a pffffing noise. “Handle? Handle? Who says that? Are you twelve? Ten? Are you even allowed in here? Shouldn’t you be taking selfies and posting them all over?” Yup, I knew I was drunk as a skunk and didn’t care.
Crash didn’t take his hands off either woman—girl—they were practically girls. So that was how it was then. I bobbed my head a few times, which made the world spin hard. “Karissa was right about you.”
He jerked as if I’d slapped him, which was going to have to be good enough for me. Because I could feel the sparkly drink doing terrible, terrible things to me. And I’d just outed that fact that I knew Karissa. Would he put two and two together and realize why I’d been out in the wildlife reserve?
Tears pooled up in my eyes, damn it I hated crying when I was mad. I stumbled hard, bumped off some guy, and managed to direct myself back toward the booth at the end. I needed to get back to Feish and Suzy. They would look out for me because right then I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to see in three, two, one.
Lights out.
Only it was literal.
14
I fell forward as the sparkling magic liquor’s potency hit me right between the eyes, and as I fell, the lights and music went out, plunging us into darkness that was only silent for a second before people started hollering, or maybe they were singing? It was hard for me to tell. My knees met the floor, followed rapidly by the palms of my hands. Barely hanging onto consciousness, I knew that if I didn’t stand up, I’d face being trampled as everyone tried to blindly find their way out.
The best I could do was wobble forward in a crawl. I don’t even know how I found the booth where Feish and Suzy were, only that one minute I was on the floor, the next Suzy was pulling me onto the bench. “What happened, are you hurt?”
“Sparkle juice,” I whispered.
“Why would you drink that? It’s not for us!” Feish squeaked. “Come on, I can carry her. You two girls, so weak!”
I didn’t care, I only knew that I couldn’t keep my eyes open, even when Feish slung my arm over one of her shoulders and started hauling ass. “Not the door, they will be waiting there,” I mumbled.
Feish didn’t so much as give me a one-word answer. Suzy held my other arm and my legs went numb as we pushed our way through the mass of people who were heaving this way and that. Only they weren’t really people. They were something else. “People masks,” I said. Or I think I said. There were monsters in here. Was I one of them? I glanced at Suzy, seeing the siren in her clearly. Beautiful and terrible all at once.
The doorway we’d come through loomed in front of us. “Why aren’t people freaking out?” Suzy asked. “The lights and music stopped suddenly, but they all seem pretty calm.”
“I can’t say,” Feish answered. Again I wondered if it was that she wasn’t allowed or she didn’t know. She was good at answers like that.
Suzy reached for the door. I wanted to tell her not to open it—those men in black were going to be right there—but I couldn’t gather my thoughts in time. Before I knew it, they were carrying me through it onto Factors Row.
“They are gone,” Jinx said from the shadows across from us. “You were in there a solid eighteen hours. I hope you had a good time.”
I still couldn’t feel my legs. “I can’t feel my legs,” I mumbled.
At least the words came out. Feish snapped her fingers at Jinx. “Don’t tell him.”
“Oh, being sworn to secrecy is the most fun, but what will you give me for my silence?” Jinx leaned in close and Suzy squeaked. I couldn’t blame her.
I did however hold up a fist, the drink still thick in my veins and making me brassy as hell. “A knuckle sandwich is what you’ll get! Or another boot to the lady parts!”
Jinx’s too-many eyes blinked rapidly. “I don’t like to eat humans. You taste awful. Sour. But I do not relish another kick to my lady bits either. I will stay quiet should he ask me anything.”
Feish dragged me away, and I barely registered that it was very early morning. Eighteen hours. “We missed training.”
“You’re forgetting that we don’t train there anymore,” Suzy said, “which is maybe good, because if we had been training, the rest of the Hollows could have run into the idiots in black too. And if we’re all spelled like you think, who knows what would have happened?”
I snickered. “Idiots in black.” I was pretty sure that it wasn’t really as funny as I thought it was in that moment, but my brain was stuck on that sparkling giggle juice. “Giggle juice.”
“Terrible, this is terrible. I need to get tea into her,” Feish said. “Fae and their sparkling drinks.”
I’m pretty sure I blacked out because between one blink and the next we were inside Gran’s house, and I was being laid out on my bed, in my old room. The canopy was the same, there wasn’t even any dust on it.
“Here, tip her head,” Feish said, and Suzy tipped my head up.
“Only mostly dead,” I whispered. Neither of them so much as batted an eye at me. Apparently I was the only one who’d seen The Princess Bride.
Before I could say “you killed my father, prepare to die,” scalding hot tea filled my mouth. I wanted to yell at them to stop, only Feish plugged my nose and I had no body control, which meant I had a choice to swallow or choke to death on tea.
I swallowed.
The tea burned a hot path down my insides, and not in the pleasant way that whiskey does. No, this was a true burn that left my tongue and the inside of my mouth aching. Which meant the next mouthful hurt even more.
“Drink. You have to drink, or it will be bad,” Feish said.
Gran hovered over me. “What did she drink?”
“Potion.” Feish shrugged. “I don’t know what kind. Fae sparkling drink can be many things. Most not suitable for humans.”
Gran tsked at me. “Really? You drank an obvious magical drink and didn’t ask what it was?”
“Only one way out with it,” Feish whispered. “Sorry.”
I looked up at her and then at the tea. “Oh no.”
My insides were suddenly on fire in a way that I had never experienced since the food poisoning incident of ’99. On the plus side, my body was my own again. I lurched out of bed and ran for the nearest bathroom, where I didn’t throw up the tea or the potion. Nope, I was not so lucky.
Feish had finally given me her special tea, and it was burning as badly as if I’d chowed down on candy made of ghost peppers and cayenne.
Sometime later, I stumbled out of the bathroom, sure that I had to have lost fifteen p
ounds right there. I’d stripped off my clothing and necklace, and showered to wash away the sweat as well as any residual . . . well, residue. Though I was clean, my butt was still on fire and I wanted to sit it on a block of ice to ease the burn, not that it would work.
Grimacing, I stood next to the bed as I pulled my wet hair back into a messy braid. Feish and Suzy were downstairs now, and it was just me and Gran. Daylight streamed in through the window.
“That should learn you,” Gran said without a hint of malice in her voice. I sighed.
“I just . . .” I didn’t want to explain to her that I’d seen Crash fawning over two beautiful young women, less than half my age and probably less than half my weight, and it had stung. That was the truth of it, it had stung. And the worst part was that I’d gone and shown my hand to him. He knew I liked him.
I sighed. “I was stupid.”
“Yes, but what were you running from?”
At first I thought she meant my feelings for Crash. Then I realized she likely meant the idiots in black.
I took a step, grimaced at the way my body felt—particularly that awful hot spot that kept puckering in pain—and started moving toward the stairs. Down I went, gripping the banister for dear life. “Doesn’t matter.”
“I think it does,” Gran said, following me. “And those two won’t tell me.”
I made it to the kitchen, where Suzy and Feish were baking together, Eric overseeing them. It smelled like apple pie to me. My stomach griped that it hadn’t eaten in a long time, but the exit area tightened against the thought of expelling anything else.
“You need toast.” Feish was already on it, steering me away from the pie I’d smelled. “Come here. I make it.”
Damn, she was probably right, but that pie smelled amazing.
Suzy glanced at me. “I called Corb, let him know we were okay. I mean, he’d only left a dozen messages on my phone.”
“Did he freak out?” I grimaced as I sat on one of the kitchen chairs, adjusting myself gingerly. Gran’s house had been sold with all the original furniture still in it, which meant nothing had changed from when I’d lived in Savannah over twenty years before. The seats were still as hard as they’d ever been. I needed a donut to sit on.
Midlife Fairy Hunter: The Forty Proof Series, Book 2 Page 16