by Karen Chance
“Or in a loveless marriage to a monster.”
He glanced at Efridis. She looked back, expressionless. He frowned.
“Anyway, I thought, wouldn’t it be nice if I could have a body that just keeps going? Drink a little blood now and again, and its all good. I became fascinated with your body when I held you captive briefly,” he told Louis-Cesare. “So handsome, so strong, so sturdy. I told you I’d have you one day, and now I know how. I can’t control the fey; they’re not human enough. But you—I think I’ve finally figured out how to take you.
“And in return, I’m willing to be extremely generous,” he said, his eyes sliding over to Efridis. “I’m very sorry about the bodies. I truly meant no disrespect. I will return them, for the proper burial or funeral rights or whatever you do. I just need—”
He broke off as two large fey came forward, and snatched him up by the arms. Efridis had given no sign discernable to me, but I didn’t think they were acting on their own. There was no surprise on her face, and she made no attempt to stop them.
“Wait! Wait!” Jonathan said.
They did not wait.
“What is this? I can make you rich,” he yelled, as they dragged him off. “I can give you whatever you want! All you have to do—”
“Is make a compromise,” Efridis said softly. “A little cut to my honor. Just a small one . . .”
Jonathan looked relieved. “Yes, if you want to put it that way. I can—”
They jerked him out the door.
For a long moment, nobody spoke.
Finally, Efridis looked at me, and sighed. “Jonathan lied. As far as I know, your sister lives. She is lost in Faerie, however; I do not know where. And I doubt that I, of all people, will be able to find her, as she has every reason to hate and fear me. I can, however, give you the location where I saw her last, and anything else that you require to help you find her.”
I blinked a couple of times. “What?”
She smiled slightly. “You may also take whatever you find here. Jonathan included. He has been helping my husband to create . . . things . . . to use against you in the war. But he would not say where they are. I believe he wishes to use them to bargain for his life.
“Or what is left of it.”
She was handed a piece of paper and a quill by one of her fey, and she scribbled on it. She handed it to me, and it appeared to be a map. “I would give you safe passage,” she added, “but coming from me, it would likely do you more harm than good.”
I stared at the paper blankly, and then back up at her. “Why are you doing this? You fought against us. You tried to kill us—”
“I did a great many things,” she agreed. “Thinking it would all be shown to have been right in the end. I was wrong. And now a great jewel of Faerie is dead, at my hand, while I consorted with a monster. I cannot bring her back—”
She cut off, and for a moment, the beautiful, serene mask fell, and I saw another face beneath it. One that looked more like a little girl’s: confused, sorrowful, in agony. And then determined, too, as she regained control.
“I cannot bring her back,” she repeated. “I would give my life to do it, if it would suffice, but it will not. She is gone, and I . . . have to find a way to atone for that.” She had been staring at the floor, but now she looked at me suddenly. “Do you think there is such a thing? A way back?”
“I . . . don’t know.”
“No more do I. But I will find out.”
And then she was gone.
* * *
Efridis didn’t disappear, but she may as well have done. She and her fey could move like lightning when they chose, scooping up their misbegotten brothers and disappearing through a portal. Their speed said that they’d about had enough of Hong Kong. Frankly, so had I, but I had a mess to clean up.
And what a mess it was.
“So Aeslinn was behind the new triad that was leeching all the magic,” I said to Zheng, who had only understood about half of what we’d been told.
“Yeah,” he paused to kick one of the dead bodies. “Only that Efridis bitch butchered the lot of them before we could ask any questions, so how are we supposed to find the army? We don’t even know what the hell it looks like!”
“They’re still sort of warm,” one so his vamps said, kneeling by one of the corpses. “If we had a bokor—”
“Do you see any bokors around here?” Zheng snapped. He was in a temper, and I didn’t blame him. The consul was going to thank him very prettily for finding out all about Eternity—which I assumed was Jonathan’s idea of a joke, since that was what he had been after—but in her very next breath, she was going to inquire about this magical army. And when he couldn’t tell her . . .
Yeah.
“Maybe it’s all the crazy shit we’ve been fighting,” Jason said. “That stuff looked like an army to me.”
“Too random,” Tomas said. “The fey like organized, disciplined troops. The stuff we’ve been seeing . . .” he shook his head. “Some of that might have been discards, things Jonathan couldn’t use and released to keep people scared and away from here. But it’s not an army.”
“How do you know so much about Faerie?” I asked.
He shrugged. “That’s where I went, to escape your husband.” He hesitated, and then blurted out. “Are you really married?”
“Yes, why?”
“You don’t bear his mark.”
I looked at him levelly. “I bit him.”
Tomas just stared at me for a moment, and then he laughed. “Okay, don’t tell me. Who knew a dhampir would have a sense of humor?”
“Yeah, who knew.” I handed him my card.
“What’s this?”
“I might have a job for you, and your team, if you want it.”
He tilted his head. “What kind of a job?”
“The kind that pays a lot of money and might get you killed.”
He grinned. “Right up our alley, then.”
He walked off.
“What was that all about?” Louis-Cesare asked, coming up behind me.
“Thinking about hiring the team to help me go get Dorina.”
“And you trust them with that?”
I shrugged. “You know how it goes. Where else am I going to get a bunch crazy enough to go in there?”
He smiled slightly. “I suppose so.”
I looked back at him, but didn’t turn around, because he’d started to give me a shoulder massage and it felt good. “You don’t mind?”
“Why would I mind?”
“It’s just that, you and Tomas—”
“That was over as soon as Christine died. I need to explain that to him, but talking to the man for more than a minute without wanting to belt him—”
“He does have a certain charm.” I paused. I didn’t want to ask if we were all right, but I needed to. “Like me?”
He kissed the top of my head. “Later.”
Now what did that mean?
Not that I could blame him for not wanting to get into personal matters right now. Zheng was on a tear, which in his case, meant dragging the freshest of the bodies around and yelling. “Damn it, find me a bokor!”
“I thought you didn’t want one?” Sarah said.
Zheng snarled at her, and she put up her hands. “Okay, okay. We’re going. We’ll be by to pick up that reward tomorrow.”
“What reward?”
“The one you’re going to pay us to keep our mouths shut.”
They left.
One of Zheng’s braver boys edged up. “Sir, by the time a bokor could get here, the mind will have decomposed to the point—”
“Do it anyway!” he growled. “Not that we should have to. If that bitch Ranbir isn’t dead, I swear—”
“Did I hear someone take my name in vain?”
I looked up, and so did everyone else, to see Ranbir himself coming down a metal set of stairs from what looked like an office. Only, if I’d been him, I’d have been headed back up, instead,
because Zheng was Not Feeling It. But Ranbir tripped happily downward anyway, a small leather pouch in his hand.
“Nice of you to join us,” I said. “Your team just left.”
“Yes, I know. I was waiting for that.”
“Too ashamed to face them?” Zheng demanded, with a sneer.
“No, I thought you might want to decide this without an audience.” He held up the bag.
* * *
Zheng still had an audience, but only of three. His boys were downstairs with strict orders that we not be disturbed. Louis-Cesare, Zheng, Ranbir and I were up in the office, making decisions that all of us were far too tired for.
“This is above my paygrade,” Zheng said, striding back and forth. That was a good trick, as the office was small, and Zheng took up the space of two. The bag was there as well, sitting in the middle of the desk. It was nothing special, just the type that medieval people kept money in, and that somebody like Jonathan kept an army in.
It was, of course, fey tech, the same kind that my arsenal was composed of. Only this one was much, much bigger. I opened it up again, even though it was a little dizzying to look down into a space that your brain expected to be small, and see a vast hangar, of the type that they kept jumbo jets in, milling with Jonathan’s handiwork.
It was even stranger to think that all of this—the original attack on Hong Kong, the study and exploitation of its magical system, and the design of the super soldiers down there—all of it, had just been the day job to Jonathan. He was a necromancer; he specialized in studying the dead. He could give a damn about any of this, but as he’d admitted to us, he’d needed life magic, a huge amount of it, to sustain him, and so he’d been chained.
It didn’t make me feel sorry for him; I didn’t think there was anything that could do that. But I did understand him a little better now. I just didn’t know what to do about any of this.
“It’s above all our paygrades,” I said, throwing the army back on the desk. “But it fell in our lap. We have to decide this.”
“Easy for you to say,” Zheng snarled. He’d been doing that a lot. “I’m the one who’ll take the heat for this!”
“Is there another option?” I asked.
“Hell, yes, there’s another option! I turn it over to the consul and reap massive rewards. She could end the war with this. She could rule the world with this!”
“Exactly,” Louis-Cesare said, and said no more.
Zheng threw himself into a pathetically inadequate desk chair and glowered at us. “I hate you both.”
“We’re not trying to tell you what to do,” I began.
Zheng said a bad word.
“Okay, we are. But . . . you do realize that no good will come of this, right? Give the consul that much power—hell, give any vamp that much—”
“I have that much, right now, and yet I’m sitting here, listening to you.”
“But you can’t use it.”
“Like hell I couldn’t. I could . . . I could take over the world myself. I could run this shit!”
I looked at him. “Do you want to run this shit?”
“Hell, no. I have enough trouble running Lily’s, and she does most of it.” A huge hand pushed up the hair over his forehead. “I just wanted some respect. That’s how I got into this mess. I’m an ex-pirate and a gangster. I am not supposed to have to make these kinds of decisions!”
“You’re also a senator,” Louis-Cesare commented.
“Yeah, for a hot minute.” He picked up the bag and tossed it to him. “You deal with it!”
“We could destroy it,” I said. “Just burn the bag and destroy the gateway—”
Zheng grabbed it back. “Talk sense. We’re in the middle of a war. We need this.”
“Nobody needs this,” Louis-Cesare said, sitting forward. “You know that. This kind of power could unbalance everything.”
“And not having it could end up costing us the war. Not to mention the fact that I know it’s here, okay? I can’t unknow that. The first time someone like Ming-de scans me—or your father, or anybody else with mental abilities—you think it’s not going to get out? It’s getting out.”
“He has a point,” I told Louis-Cesare.
My husband frowned. “If your father were here, or Dorina—”
“But they’re not. And I wouldn’t trust Mircea with this, any further than I could throw him. He’s the general for this war. You think he’s going to throw away an advantage like that?”
Louis-Cesare frowned some more.
“Okay, so we turn it over,” Zheng said. “At least we know Aeslinn goes night-night—”
“And how many of his people?” I demanded. “How many of the fey in general? You’ve seen those things! We can’t turn them loose on anyone, not to mention that the only person who can control them is their maker—”
“We don’t know that!”
“—who is a dangerous dark mage!”
“He’s a dark mage.” Zheng hiked a thumb at Ranbir, who’d been sitting quietly all this time. “But he turned this over to us.”
“I’m more of a medium gray,” Ranbir said modestly.
“Why did you turn it over?” I asked. “And why did you leave us, anyway?”
“I had the map. It also serves as a communication device, and Jonathan texted me. He offered me a fortune to betray you—”
“But you betrayed him instead.”
He shrugged. “I know the type. This much power in his hands?” He shook his head. “I like money, but it doesn’t do you much good if there’s no world left to spend it in.”
Zheng scowled. “Tree hugger.”
“Pragmatist.”
“Whatever. Point is, I am not going to burn for this, okay?” He looked at Louis-Cesare and I. “You want it your way, fine, then pull my nuts out of the fire. And you might want to think about your own while you’re at it. The consul isn’t going to be any happier with either of you.”
He glanced at Ranbir. “And she’ll outright kill you.”
“That would be . . . distressing.”
“So, what do you want?” I asked. “A next level mentalist who can erase this from all our memories, someone we trust enough to do it, and somebody who isn’t gonna do it, and then abscond with an army and take over the world. Is that what you’re asking for?”
Zheng crossed his arms and gave me his best glare. “I will not burn. Find a—”
There was a knock on the door.
“What the hell?” Zheng was on his feet in an instant, furious. “When I say we’re not to be disturbed, I mean it, damn it!”
“Please do not blame your men,” came a familiar, soothing voice through the flimsy wood. “They simply . . . forgot.”
The door opened and I turned around to see Hassani standing there, looking like an angel in brilliantly white robes.
“How did you get here?” I asked.
“Bahram and Rashid are good boys. A bit rambunctious at times, it is true, but they have a useful talent. Together, they can summon a portal from anywhere they have been to anywhere they are. They cannot hold it for long and it takes two of them to channel enough power, so it is not a very useful master’s gift for them. But I have made use of it, many times.”
“You said to call you—”
“And I am sure you would have, eventually. But it seems that you need my help now.”
“Your help?”
I suddenly remembered what he said when he came in. And then I remembered something else: all he’d suffered, and that his people had suffered, at the hand of a so-called god. There was nobody in the world I trusted more to know the dangers of absolute power, and to avoid them like the fucking plague.
“Tell me you’re a mentalist,” I said, fervently.
“I am not, as it happens. I do know one, however.” He stepped aside, and—
“Maha?”
“I always was good with the mind,” she said, apologetically.
“How good?” Zheng said.
Dory, Cairo
“Our host is very strange,” Louis-Cesare said, sliding into the bath alongside me.
“Tell me about it.”
We were back at “work” in Egypt, finishing out our time here while our team geared up for the next adventure. I was glad for the brief break, which both of us needed. And also glad to be with vamps who didn’t scowl when they saw me.
I could get used to that.
But there were still . . . let’s call them peculiarities . . . about this place. I guessed every court had its quirks, and all things considered, this one was way less weird than our own. But it was still weird.
Take tonight, for instance.
Hassani had invited us to his study after dinner, to watch him burn some old bag. He’d been cackling the whole time, like a mad thing, like he had the day he’d burned the great snakeskin. Hassani, I was starting to think, maybe needed a vacation, too.
Maha had been there, as well, I had no idea why. But after all the leather pieces were curled up and black, and half the bag was simply powder on the desk, Hassani had looked at her. “Are they?”
She’d nodded. “Still there, all of them. The man, the creatures, and . . . him. They will always be there.”
“Eternity,” Hassani had said obliquely. “But perhaps not the way he’d envisioned it.”
She had stepped closer to him. “Do you want me to—”
“Not now. Take it from me tomorrow, as we discussed. For tonight . . . I wish to remember.”
She had bowed silently and left.
I’d noticed a small pot on the floor, the one I’d seen glowing with blue light the last time I was in these rooms. Its cover was off now, and it was empty. Hassani saw me looking and smiled.
“Another problem solved. Amazing how things dovetail, isn’t it?”