by Karen Chance
For a long moment, neither of us said anything.
“Did you know this would happen?” Louis-Cesare asked.
“This exact scenario?”
He looked at me.
“The room isn’t inside the purse,” I reminded him, as the breeze blew what hair I had around. “In fact, nothing is inside the purse, as the purse isn’t a purse, it’s a portal entrance. So, as long as it maintains integrity—”
“We can still get in and out.”
I nodded.
We went back inside.
The dark mage was kind of impressing me, as he was about two thirds of the way out of the war mage’s cuffs already. That put him ahead of everybody else, including Tomas, who apparently wasn’t as smart as he was pretty. Because he currently resembled a white tumbleweed.
A large one.
That was a problem since we had a limited amount of space in here. “Don’t struggle!” I yelled, to get through all the layers of webbing. “They pull power from you; they only get stronger if you struggle!”
I couldn’t tell if he heard me or not.
I sat back down.
The girl had found her voice, and she glared at me from her cuffs. “What the hell is this?”
“On the plus side,” I told her. “We didn’t all die from plummeting about sixty stories. I guess purses have decent wind resistance. On the negative . . .” I trailed off, looking at Louis-Cesare, who had started attacking the tumbleweed. “What are you doing?”
“Freeing Tomas!”
“Any particular reason why?”
“We’ll need him.”
“We’ll need him if he’s going to play nice,” I pointed out. “Otherwise, we have enough problems.”
Like the fact that the mage had just freed himself. But, surprisingly, he didn’t attack. He just walked over and stuck his head out of the door, AKA the top of the purse. He was there for a while.
“What are you talking about?” the girl demanded. “What negative side? And what did you do to my brother?”
“Standard knock out potion. He’s fine—”
Her face flushed angrily. “What gives you the right—”
“You did, when you decided to tear the city a new butthole. Seriously, what the hell?”
She looked as belligerent as someone in handcuffs can, which as it turned out, was pretty damned belligerent. Then she looked at the cuffs, and something about that gaze had all the hair standing up on the back of my neck. I remembered what Louis-Cesare had said about not letting her look at me.
Probably because of that, I thought, as my brand-new handcuffs fritzed out, despite the fact that they were guaranteed.
Against anything but a jinx, it seemed.
“If you don’t want that to happen to you, I’d better get some damned answers,” she said, getting in my face.
Or trying to. The mage was back, striding in between us, and heading for . . . the beer fridge. He grabbed a six pack and took it off to an empty piece of wall, where he squatted down and proceeded to chug like a freshman in a frat house.
“Hey!” I said.
“You have beer?” The bruiser asked, sounding hopeful.
I hadn’t noticed him coming around, but he was watching the mage enviously while still hog-tied on the floor. His buddy hadn’t bothered to free him, and he didn’t offer any beer. I sighed and started sorting through the remains of my stash, calling out the names of various crap beers, because I am not picky.
“Anything,” the bruiser rasped. “I’m parched.”
“You want something?” I asked my hubby, who was currently shoulder deep in tumbleweed.
“No.” Louis-Cesare’s voice was muffled. It was also pissy. He was having a moment.
I left him to it.
“How about you?” I asked the girl.
“How about I get some answers?” she snapped, and then apparently decided the heck with it, walked over and threw open the door.
Unlike the mage, she was not out there for long.
“What the fuck?”
She came back in, slammed the door behind her, and plastered herself against it, her eyes huge.
“Okay, the short version,” I told her. “This is my girl cave. I brought us in here because—well, in your case, I was rounding up my squad—”
“Your squad? What the—”
“Shut up?” I suggested.
And I guessed she really did want answers, because she shut up.
“I was rounding you guys up, got interrupted by the fight, and the squid kindly sent us flying over the city in a destroyed rickshaw that was about to plunge Louis-Cesare—this is Louis-Cesare, by the way,” I added, introducing my husband’s ass, because that was all that was sticking out of the tumbleweed at the moment.
“Hello,” the bruiser told it.
I decided to let him loose so he could drink his beer, which he did very politely.
“Anyway,” I continued, “we were about to plunge to our deaths, so I shoved us both in here, figuring that it gave us the best chance to survive—”
“And where’s here?” the girl interrupted.
“A stationary portal in non-space, kind of like the phase that allows this city to exist, only much smaller. I had a mage put the doorway in my purse—”
“You carry a phased arsenal around in your purse?”
“You’d get answers faster if you didn’t keep interrupting me,” I pointed out.
“Then get on with it!”
“I’m trying.” I was also trying to hold onto my temper, because we needed them. But she wasn’t making it easy.
“Anyway, we survived the fall, obviously, so here’s the deal. Louis-Cesare and I were at the fights hoping to meet you. Zheng-zi said you might be able to help us out—”
“When are you going to get to the point?” she practically shrieked.
I paused. “And which point would that be?”
“Why we’re in what looks like the goddamned dead zones on the horn of some monster, that’s what!”
I looked at her in confusion. “That’s where the purse landed?”
“Auggghhhh!”
She actually said that. And then pulled at her hair with both fists in a way that had me wondering if she was deranged. Since her next move was to round on the dark mage, who had already downed three of the beers and was popping the top on number four, I was pretty sure the answer was yes.
“You said this wouldn’t happen!”
He looked at her over the top of his beer can. “Sorry?” It was sarcastic as hell.
Despite myself, I was warming to the guy.
The girl, on the other hand, clearly was not.
“Auggghhhh!” she said again, and proceeded to do some more hair pulling.
I watched her enviously.
Must be nice.
“Is there a problem?” I asked, looking at the mage, who seemed the most clear headed. “Because we were told that you guys are experts on—”
The girl laughed. It was not a nice sound. “We’re all going to die,” she announced. And then she, too, raided my fridge.
This is why I stock crap beer, I thought. People always drink it all anyway, so why keep the good stuff? She came out with a can, looked for a place to sit down, didn’t find one and plopped back onto the floor where she’d been.
I eyed her warily.
“See,” I began.
“We aren’t experts in anything,” the dark mage said, starting beer number five. “It’s all bullshit.”
“Excuse me?” I blinked at him politely.
“It’s a living,” the bruiser agreed.
“What . . . is a living?”
“He had this thing,” the girl said, her voice tragic. She suddenly looked like she sounded, with her long, dark hair everywhere and her eyes huge and staring. She drank beer, and wiped the back of her hand over her mouth. “Zheng-zi, I mean. A tattoo, one of the magical kind, you know?”
I nodded.
“Well, Ranbir
had seen one like it before—”
“Who’s Ranbir?”
The dark mage lifted his beer can.
“That’s him,” the girl confirmed. “That’s my brother Jason,” she added, indicating the still unconscious dude on the floor. “I’m Sarah and that’s Ev. I mean, Evelyn.”
“Your name . . . is Evelyn?” I asked the bruiser, because I assumed that I’d misheard.
He sighed. “I get that a lot. It’s British. My mum was British.”
“Okay.”
“It’s usually pronounced Eev-lin,” he added helpfully. “Sarah keeps forgetting, because she usually just calls me Ev.”
“Uh huh.”
“You know, it used to be given more to boys than girls. It’s from the seventeenth century and means ‘desirable one.’ But I guess people thought that better fit a woman, and after a while—”
“I’ll give you a beer if you stop talking,” Ranbir offered.
Evelyn considered it.
He took the beer.
“Anyway,” Sarah said, eyeing them. “Zheng didn’t understand what he had. I was sort of surprised, as he’s triad—or he was, I don’t know about now—”
“He’s still triad,” Ranbir said. “It’s a lifelong thing.”
“Well, anyway, the triads all have tats, don’t they?” she asked, pushing messy hair out of her face. “So, I thought he’d know, but it was obvious that he didn’t.”
“Know what?” I asked.
“How the tat worked. This Eternity thing—”
“What Eternity thing? You mean the symbol they all wear?”
She nodded and pulled a small, golden charm, just like the one I’d given Zheng, out of her shirt. It was on a necklace, but she took it off and handed it to me. “That’s it. He found it on one of their boys, after a fight. He was going to interrogate him, but somebody activated another tat the guy was wearing, and blew him up. I suppose his group realized that he’d been taken, and didn’t want him talking.”
Sounded about right. The same might have happened to the guys at Hassani’s, except that they’d all been killed, and that Jonathan had been able to use them as his little puppets. Only I still didn’t understand what that had been about.
Jonathan was obsessed with Louis-Cesare. He wanted him back under his control; he didn’t want to kill him. And even assuming that he’d turned into one of those “if I can’t have you, nobody can” types, that whole attack seemed a bit . . . excessive. As for me, I couldn’t imagine why he would care about me at all, since they already had Dorina.
Unless he was afraid that I’d come after him, which, yeah.
Should have gotten me the first time, I thought.
“Anyway, Zheng still wanted to find out more about them,” Sarah said. “But nobody knew anything, and nobody would go inside the dead zones. He kept offering more and more money, and . . . well . . .”
“And well what?”
She took the tat back and pressed it, not to her skin as I’d expected, but like a fob for a car. A grid popped out into the air, in bright red lines like a hologram. It looked like a map of some kind, although I found it hard to read as it kept moving and changing.
“Why is it doing that?” I asked.
“Doing what?”
“Moving around?”
“Because we are,” Ranbir said.
Sarah nodded. “It’ll stabilize if we ever do. It needs a fixed point—”
“For what?”
She looked at me like I might be slow, for not having already figured this out. “It’s a homing beacon. We think that, because of how unstable the zones can be, Eternity has to move around a lot. So, they equipped each of their members with one of these, so they can always find their way back to base.”
I frowned at it. “But you found the base already, or narrowed it down. Zheng said—”
I stopped, finally getting a clue. As well as a sinking feeling in my stomach—a bad one. It felt like falling from a height, all over again.
“You didn’t find it,” I said.
“It was a lot of money,” Sarah told me, suddenly earnest. “The kind that could be life changing. And get us permanently out of those penny ante gigs we used to—”
“You’re telling me that you didn’t go into the zones?” I interrupted. “That you just sold Zheng a load of crap?”
“It wasn’t crap!” She had the gall to look indignant. “He got what he paid for. The homing beacon did give the location of their base. We just stretched things out, feeding him a little more info each week, so it would be believable—”
“But you fought in the ring! You were going to fight tonight!”
She nodded. “We acquired a reputation, after a while. There were only three groups in the whole city that would go into the dead zones, and we were the best known, because we never got hurt—”
“I gave myself a black eye once,” Ev said. “To be more, uh, authentic . . .” he saw my expression, and went back to drinking beer.
“—never got hurt bad,” Sarah corrected. “And people started to ask us about the fights. We couldn’t keep saying no, or it might have looked suspicious.”
“Then you do know how to kill the monsters.”
She shook her head. “We went out there to put on a show, but it was mostly theater. Tomas is a first level master vamp, and he protected us. We made it look good for a while, then the mages took over. We gave them a kickback from the purses, a decent percentage. They weren’t allowed in the ring, you see, and this way . . . everybody was . . . happy . . .”
I looked at her. She gazed back miserably. “You’re telling me—” I stopped, needing a moment. “How many times have you guys actually been in the dead zones?”
“We . . . haven’t ever . . . actually . . .” she trailed off.
I stared at her.
“One,” Ranbir said, tossing his last empty onto the little pile he’d made. “The number you’re looking for is one. This one.”
Chapter Forty
Dory, Hong Kong
Half an hour later, things had not improved.
Well, that wasn’t entirely true. Jason, the girl’s brother, had woken up with a typical potion’s headache, and was nursing it with the last of my beer. Louis-Cesare had finally managed to free Tomas, and taken a right hook for his trouble. They were currently glaring at each other, or at least, I assumed so. That’s how they’d been when I left, as persuading Tomas to help out wasn’t going well.
Of course, neither was this.
“You’re going to spook him,” Ranbir said. “You need to get the blindfold on him first.”
I paused, partway out of the purse, to glare down at him.
“He’ll see me and bolt.”
“If you do it fast enough, he won’t see anything. That’s rather the point.”
“You want to come do this?” I whispered.
“No.”
“Then shut up.”
He shut up, but his expression was eloquent.
I ignored him and concentrated on the task at hand. Problem number one was that the horn was really long, and right between the beast’s eyes. The purse had therefore been messing with its vision and bopping its muzzle whenever it moved, much less galloped. That had panicked it, because horses were not the brightest of animals, and the sparkly unicorn version was no better.
Problem number two was that, if I emerged too far from the purse, I’d get caught by the portal. That was how portals worked; you were either in or you were out, and if I fell out, this thing was going to go ballistic. But right now, I was no heavier than the purse itself, still technically being in non-space, and it was ignoring me. Even better, it had stopped to explore something on the side of the road, meaning that the horn was almost horizontal.
The idea was for me to jump, jump, jump in little motions, until the straps hopped off the end of the horn . . .
Without doing that, I thought, as one strap broke free while the other stayed put, tipping me too far out, and ca
using the portal to grab me—
And dump me right in front of a pissed off unicorn.
Shit, I thought, as it reared up on two legs, bright gold hooves waving.
I rolled out of the way—fast—but this unicorn had a ‘tude and followed. I dodged behind an abandoned minibus, which was promptly a very holey minibus, as the horn went to work trying to skewer me. It appeared to be made of some diamond hard substance that treated the minivan’s metal sides like they were made out of aluminum . . . foil.
Shit, I thought, as glass shattered, seats were slashed, and metal separations were ripped through as if they were nothing. I need a sword made out of that stuff, I thought, as three heads popped out of the purse. And were slammed into the bus’s remaining windows, more than once.
Ranbir, Louis-Cesare, and Tomas glared at me.
“Do you want that blindfold now?” Ranbir asked.
“Just snap the straps,” Tomas said, and reached for them.
“No!” Three of us said, simultaneously.
“Why the hell not?”
“This isn’t a purse; it’s a portal,” the mage said, more patiently than I would have. “Interfering with its integrity could collapse the whole—”
Tomas wasn’t listening. He was reaching out again, before Louis-Cesare knocked his hand away. So, Tomas punched him, and the two disappeared, probably wrecking more of my girl cave in the process.
I sighed.
Ranbir was then joined by Ev—I couldn’t bring myself to call him Evelyn—who appeared to be trying to get out.
“Let her handle this,” Ranbir said.
“She is so small,” Ev protested, eyeing me.
“She’ll be fine.”
“How do you know?”
Ranbir cocked an eyebrow. “I’ve seen her fight.”
Well, great. Now I had something to live up to. But there were no convenient flying rickshaws at the moment, because sensible people stayed the hell out of here.
Of course, there was another option.
“Give me the blindfold,” I said and Ranbir passed it over.
I ripped off one of the bus’s windshield wipers and tucked it through my belt. I backed up, giving myself a little room and a few seconds for a pep talk. Then I took a running leap, got a foot on the bus’s fender, catapulted up to the indentation for the wipers, and finally hit the roof. Before throwing myself off—