by Ari Marmell
“Safe?” I couldn’t hold back an ugly snicker. “You clearly don’t know as much about us as you think.”
“Yeah, safe! It was part of the pact. I made sure of it!”
“And the changeling?” I asked.
“We wanted a child,” he whispered. Now it was Bianca he couldn’t bring himself to look at, yet he was clearly speaking to her again, not me. “And I didn’t want you to ever know.”
“Because you knew I wouldn’t approve, you—!”
“Because I wanted you to be happy.”
The clack of her jaw snapping shut pretty closely mimicked the hammer on a revolver. She began picking at the upholstery on the chair, pulling tiny threads and chipping her nails, and I don’t think she ever so much as noticed.
“You’d be happy,” he repeated. “Nobody in the famiglia would ever know anything was wrong, Mama’d never have any reason to suspect I was involved, we’d have a little girl of our own, and our real baby’d be safe! What else could I have done, tesora?”
“Yeah, um,” I interrupted before Bianca could even draw breath to answer, “I ain’t so much interested in what else you coulda done, as I am in what Mommy did do. ’Cause I sure as spit don’t buy that she just forgot all about the whole shebang soon as her plan went off the rails.” I don’t even remember standing up, but I must have, since I was looking down at them in their seats. Good thing Fae aren’t prone to the fidgets, or I’d probably have been pacing like a caged animal. That woulda made ’em stop thinking of me as a “creature,” wouldn’t it?
“You know,” Bianca said thoughtfully, “there was something…” She reached out for the table, also pushed back against the wall, and poured herself a cup of cold, day-old tea. It got almost to her mouth before she stopped and stared into it, seemingly unsure what it was.
“It was right after Adalina… Celia… After the baby was born,” she continued softly. “Donna Orsola grew very depressed, unsociable. She spent all her time either in church, or locked in her room. I don’t think we saw her for an hour a day for three years. I just thought…” She shrugged at Fino. “I thought she was upset the child wasn’t a boy.”
“You know it never mattered to me, doll. I—”
Time to interrupt again. Geez, you people get sidetracked so damn easy! “I think we can assume,” I said, “that Orsola was spending her time trying to come up with a way of divining the girl’s… Look, can we just call her ‘Celia’ for now? I know you ain’t happy using the name Goswythe gave her—that’s the phouka she was with,” I clarified to the their furrowed brows. “—but we gotta call her something. Anyway, looking for a way to divine Celia’s location, even in Elphame. And we can also assume she came up snake eyes.”
Fino rose, started pacing a little, caught Bianca’s glare and quickly sat back down. “Yeah, you’re probably right. She threw herself into those smaller curses after that, hitting hard at anyone who looked like they was threatening me and my business.”
“I heard about a few,” I said blandly.
“So why didn’t she say anything?” Bianca asked. “If she knew Adalina was a—a changeling this whole time, why keep quiet about it?”
It was actually the Shark who answered. “What was she gonna say, tesoro? Even if she thought I’d buy it, the rest of the family woulda thought she’d gone fucking nuts. And we couldn’t have done nothing about it, anyway. All it woulda done was distract me from everything else. Fuck, she mighta worried that we’d have lost one of our wars on account of me being, uh, preoccupied.
“Nah, what I don’t get,” he continued, squinting at me as if it was my fault, “is why she didn’t go to you sooner. You been around Chicago for a while now, right?”
“Yeah…”
“And Mama knew what you are.”
I shrugged. “I dunno for how long, but yeah, she tumbled to it. Maybe one of her spirits told her.”
“Whatever. So why didn’t she hire you years ago?”
“Because,” I explained, “the crazy witch didn’t—”
“Hey!” Fino was up from his seat again, fists raised. “Don’t you fucking talk about my mama that way, you… you…”
I’d like to think it was my own glare of utter disdain that shut him down, but honestly, Bianca’s was worse. He actually cringed away from her, a whipped puppy, before he muttered something unintelligible and sat back down—in another chair, a little farther away from the both of us.
I rolled my peepers hard at Bianca, who managed a feeble grin, before I continued. “Because the crazy witch didn’t want to endanger her soul.”
Fino blinked at me. “What?”
“Brilliant question,” I said. “You been practicing for that one?”
“Why do you think your mother sent me,” Bianca asked him, “instead of going herself?”
“What the fuck are you talking about? I don’t—”
“Orsola believes I’m an unholy, soulless creature,” I said. “Half a step up from a demon. It’d endanger her immortal soul to ‘have congress’ with me. But what the hell, no reason Bianca can’t make all the arrangements, and Orsola just flit around the edges, right? I mean, her soul ain’t important at all.”
“Hey, Mama would never—” This time, he shut himself up, instead of waiting for one of us to do it for him. I think we were starting, finally, to get it through his head that, hell yes, Mama would.
“Are you trying to fucking tell me,” he asked after a moment, “that Mama’s got no problem throwing black magic curses that get folks fucking whacked, or using her own granddaughter’s blood in some fucking witchcraft ritual, but making a deal with something like you, that’s a sin got her worried about her soul?”
“Do you need me to explain ‘crazy witch’ to you, Fino?” And then, “Look, pal, I don’t pretend to fully get what goes on in your mother’s head. The men she’s cursing are evil, least where she’s concerned, and threatening her family to boot. The spirits she calls on are under her complete control, and she only uses those magics to thwart evil, or what she believes is evil. It ain’t that hard to imagine how she justifies it, but that’s all we’re doing: imagining. You wanna know exactly what she’s thinking, why don’tcha try grilling her instead of me. Just decide if you wanna do it before or after she does whatever she’s gonna do to your daughter!”
“What, you think, after all this time, she’s still—?”
“Yeah, I think so. And so do you.”
Fino frowned, but nodded. “Everything I did,” he murmured. “All for nothing. Fucking useless.”
“It wasn’t a bad scheme,” I said. “You just didn’t finish your homework. You shoulda known the changeling might grow outta looking and acting human.”
“And once Adalina had changed enough to convince me she was some creature,” Bianca finished bitterly, “it was easy enough for Orsola to manipulate me into hiring—”
A piercing, bitter wail whipped through the room, bursting Bianca’s words like balloons. It was followed first by a hurled hairbrush, whipping across the room from the stairs and rebounding from the wall near Bianca’s head, then by the sound of feet pounding on the steps and the deafening crash of the front door slamming hard enough to shake the house.
Shit! Damn it, I’d known she was there, eavesdropping, on the staircase—I’d heard her!—and still I’d forgotten. She’d heard it all, every last slashing word of it.
Poor kid.
“Adalina!” Bianca sprinted outta the room, was at the front door before a thunderstruck Fino had even finished rising from his seat. She fumbled at the knob, yanking the door open. “Oh, Jesus. I don’t see her! Fino, I don’t see her!”
“She can’t have vanished that fucking fast! She—Bianca! Goddamn it, take Archie and some of the boys! Don’t go searching around out there by yourself! Bianca!”
No telling if she’d heard or not. She was already gone, the door swinging gently in her wake.
Me, I was dealing with another surprise, though a pretty minor one
, all things considered. Archie? He still trusted Archie?
Fino was practically dancing, taking a few steps toward the door, a few back toward me. Then, cursing up a storm—mostly variations on “fucking fuck”—he stomped back in and started pacing the sitting room, instead of the hall.
“You got your boys here?” I asked. “They ain’t doing too good a job, if they didn’t come running when you popped off that slug earlier.”
He stopped his back-and-forth long enough to glare. “They’re in the fucking flivvers outside. That okay with you, wise-ass? I didn’t want ’em overhearing everything we hadda fucking talk about.”
All right, that made a certain amount of sense. Fino went back to pacing.
“You’re worried for her!”
Again he stopped. “Of course I’m fucking worried for her, mick!” I’m honestly not sure if he meant that capitalized, or if he was trying to rile me up. “She’s my—”
I actually smiled a little—a genuine one—at the shock on his face. “Yeah,” I told him, trying to come across at least a little bit gentle. “Yeah, Fino, she is.”
“Aw, fuck.” He turned away, his shoulders hunched, seemingly against an oncoming storm.
“Fino, let me out of here.”
“What?” He nearly stumbled on the carpet, so quickly did he spin back to me. “Fuck no! Whaddaya think I—?”
“I can help you, goddamn it! I can find Adalina, I can find Celia. Whatever your mother’s got going down, it’s big, and you know it! Let me help!”
“I don’t fucking trust you! You fate always have a Chinese angle on everything.”
“Look, you idiot, I’m just trying to—”
“No. No fucking chance.”
Sigh. “Okay, fine. Then tell me about last night.”
“What?”
Sigh. Again. “Fino,” I said, and I swear I was trying to sound patient, “Orsola had some kinda spell on me, so she could locate Celia. She probably tumbled the minute I first spotted the girl. So why didn’t you show up to pump my joint full of lead until this morning?”
“She didn’t fucking tell me you had her until this morning!”
“Right. So what was she doing with that time?”
“Fuck, I dunno. She spent some of it in church, I remember that. Otherwise…” He offered me a flex of one shoulder that was way too unambitious to make it all the way into a shrug. “I was busy.”
“Oh, for the love of… This is important, you twit! Can’t you remember—”
I actually jumped a little when the phone rang, much—judging by his quick chuckle—to Fino’s amusement. He headed for the door, and out into the main hall toward the chiming blower.
“Uh, Fino? Don’tcha think maybe they can just call back? This is—”
“Important, yeah, yeah, blah, blah. So’s this.” Then, clatter, “Yeah? Yeah. Uh-huh. Where? Yeah.”
I tried, I tried hard. But a voice on the other end of the line, with the receiver pressed hard to another Joe’s ear, in the next room over? Even my hearing ain’t that good, and without my wand, stuck in an iron glyph, no way I could make myself lucky enough, not in the time I had.
“So?” I asked him as he scurried back into the room. He dropped to one knee, and I thought at first he was about to be sick, until I saw he was scooping up the roscoe he’d dropped earlier.
“One of my boys,” he said. “Ricky. You mighta met him, back when you were a fucking vacuum salesman.”
“Okay, yeah, and…?”
“And he’s calling to tell me where to find Mama.” He chuckled, again, when my jaw dropped and just kinda hung like cheap Venetian blinds. “I’m not a complete fucking chump, Mick. You think I didn’t suspect she might try something, once we’d found Ada—Celia? Soon as she told me we hadda go find you, I had a few of the boys start shadowing her.”
“Okay, so where is she?” And then, at his expression, “Oh, fuck no! Fino, you can’t be that stupid!”
“I don’t want you finding some way to show up. And no fucking way do I want Bianca following, and you and me both know she would. Uh-uh.”
“Fino!” I actually threw myself at the edge of the glyph, stuck fast for an instant, and slowly oozed back. It felt much as I imagined trying to swim in molasses might. I tried to reach out for him, but I couldn’t even punch my hand through the barrier. “Damn it, Fino! Let me help you! You know I can help you! For God’s sake, you can’t take Orsola on by yourself! You can’t save your daughter by yourself!”
“I ain’t by myself. I got my boys.” He rose, gat in hand, and there was something in his expression, something haunted, something…
Something crying, because he could not.
“I can do this,” he said softly. “She won’t hurt me.”
“You don’t know that, Fino! You—”
“She won’t hurt me. And I can’t let you hurt her. She’s my mother.”
That simply, he left me, flailing and helpless in the middle of that tiny, powdery prison. And maybe Fino Ottati wasn’t alone, as he marched out into the dark to find his mother and his missing daughter, but I was.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“Boss?”
I couldn’t have told you—still can’t, to this day—whether it’d been six minutes or sixty since Fino’d split. I was too busy pushing against the glyph with everything I had left after a couple long, tiring, painful days. My brain ached, and I don’t mean my head, I mean my brain. I felt like I’d just spent about a week trying to do calculus-based logic puzzles with random numbers missing, and I was physically pressed against the barrier so hard it was actually taking most of my weight. I was getting somewhere, and it was starting to give, but slow, way too damn slow. At that rate, I’d be outta there by, oh, Sunday.
“Boss, you in here?”
I jerked up straight as one of the Shark’s gussied-up goons—I’d seen him around the house a time or two, but never caught a name—barged through the front door and into the room. I gotta wonder what he thought he saw, since for a second or two he musta spotted me leaning almost diagonal against thin air. He gawped stupidly, and I shrugged. “Ain’t here, bo.”
“Uh… What?”
“Your boss. Took a powder a while ago.”
“But… What, he just left you here?”
“Guess he decided he trusts me,” I said flatly.
“And you just been standing there this whole time?”
“It’s a fascinating room. Swell acoustics. Did you want something?”
Not that he had any good reason to answer me, but I was hoping he’d be distracted or confused enough not to think about that. And, yep, “We can’t find his girl. Been scouring the whole neighborhood, and there’s not a fucking sign.”
“Get me Bianca. Now.”
“C’mon, I’ll take you to her.”
“Uh…” Somehow, I didn’t feel that this was the right time to try explaining to the lug exactly why that wouldn’t be happening anytime soon. “No, I need you to bring her here.”
“What? Look, pally, the lady’s kinda busy looking for her fucking daughter! No way I’m—”
“I can help her,” I interrupted, “if you bring her here.”
“I’m not your goddamn errand boy! Why don’tcha tell me what you got up your sleeve before I plug you right between—”
“How about, before you finish threatening me, you ponder a minute on what’ll happen to you if the Mister and Missus find out that I coulda helped ’em, but it didn’t happen ’cause you were too proud to play ‘errand boy.’ Go on, take your time. I ain’t going anywhere.”
“You… I… Fuck!”
“See? I knew you’d get there.” I offered him a big, cheery smile, then dropped it. “So go, already!”
“If Mrs. Ottati don’t like what you gotta say…”
“Yeah, yeah. I been shot once today already. Come up with some new material, wouldja?”
Another few minutes—I went ahead and tried pacing my little cell, just for the novelt
y; it didn’t do much for me, and I went back to playing statue—and the front door slammed open yet again. “What do you mean,” Bianca demanded, stopping only at the very edge of the chalk rune, “he left?”
“I mean he’s gone. He ain’t here. He’s currently inhabiting an alternative locality.” I shrugged. “Got a ring on the horn, said he had some of his boys shadowing Orsola, and made tracks.”
Bianca’s blinkers went wider than the glyph. “Where?!”
“You think he told me?” I asked softly.
I swear I heard the tendons in her fists creaking as they tightened. “Porca miseria! Cazzo!” She’d turned away, but it didn’t make the shouting any harder to hear.
“You know, it’s still rude in Italian,” I said.
Stiff-legged and stiffer-backed, she stomped around the sitting room, grabbed up the teapot, and poured out the cold, stale stuff over a length of the binding circle. Chalk, salt, and iron powder sluiced away in a thick stew, leaving a clean break, and a pressure I hadn’t even realized I was feeling was abruptly gone. Kinda like your ears popping on a steep slope or a real high elevator, except all over. I stung and itched a little from the iron in the mixture, but it wasn’t too bad; not even as bad as standing on an L platform near the rails.
’Course, I still felt like I’d gone twelve rounds with the L-train, but there’d be at least a little time outside that damn circle to heal, now. Whole minutes, even.
“Go,” she said—well, more growled—to me. “Find Adalina.”
“Sure thing. Soon as I have my wand back.”
“Mr. Oberon, this is not the time to—”
“You’re right, it ain’t. So quit arguing.”
Her jaw moved a little, side to side. “I don’t know if he’d…” A quick head shake, sending some of her formerly pristine hair into her face, and then, “Fino locked it in the cabinet where he keeps most of his guns. I don’t have a key.”
“Show me.”
“Damn it! We don’t have time!”
“Show me.”
Cursing softly the whole way, Bianca led me upstairs to the master bedroom—with all the usual finery I’ve come to expect from the boudoirs of the rich and felonious—and to a heavy walnut cabinet. It was the size of an old-fashioned wardrobe, and someone had installed a high-quality lock.