“Do you have any ideas about how to fix this?” I ventured cautiously. Somehow Gideon was managing not to explode at me and I didn’t need to tip him in that direction. When he remained silent, I pressed on. “I’ve considered hundreds of ingredients, all kinds of poisons and lethal items, but nothing seems powerful enough. I don’t have time for trial and error. I have to get it right the first time. Any thoughts?”
“One.”
“What? I’ll try anything at this point.”
“There’s only one place where someone knows as much about death as heaven and that’s the underworld’s upper minions.” The warlock paused, lifting his head to look at me and frown. “Charon and the rivers that lead to final judgment. Those rivers separate the humans from the upper and lower worlds, marking the journey into the land of the dead. A drop from one or all of those rivers should succeed in separating the girl from her soul, freeing her to travel to Charon and the underworld.”
“You think?”
“In every story I’ve ever read, even the gods up on high steer clear of Charon and his rivers. Charon knows death, and he rides the rivers that carry the souls to the end.” For one rare moment, a look of sympathy crossed Gideon’s face as he stared at me. His expression was sad and worn, showing the weight of his existence for the first time. And then just as quickly, it was gone. “In all honesty, I don’t know. It was sheer luck that you made her immortal in the first place, so I think it’s going to be sheer luck that gets you out of this mess. Try a little River Styx when you tattoo her again. You either kill her or you don’t.”
“That’s true,” I agreed grimly. His logic made sense. I had used something from a heavenly body to get me in this mess, now I needed something from the other end to get me out of it. “Any chance you’ve got some water from the River Styx?”
Gideon shook his head as he pushed to his feet. “I don’t know of anyone who’s ever had that on hand. Not exactly easy stuff to acquire.”
“Are you sure? Simon keep a bottle around? Dab a little behind his ear each morning to lure the devil to his side?”
“Doubtful. If he did, I’m sure he would have slipped some into your morning oatmeal many years ago.”
“Thanks,” I grumbled.
“As much as I hate to think of it being out there, I would try the black market first. There are some very resourceful people there.”
“Seems like it would be incredibly rare. What if I strike out?”
“Then contact me immediately. We’ll think of something else.”
“There won’t be time,” I said with a shake of my head.
“Gage,” Gideon said in a warning tone.
“I’ll go after it myself if I have to.”
“You have to die to go after it.”
“I’m going to die in two days anyway if I don’t succeed.” I leaned forward and patted Gideon on the shoulder a couple of times, causing his frown to deepen. “If this all works out, I’ll catch up with you in a few days. We can grab lunch and talk about shit that doesn’t involve me getting killed.”
“We can find another way.”
“I doubt there is one.”
The warlock nodded, slipping his left hand into his pocket while he lifted his right hand to check the time on his watch. “If you don’t succeed, I will grab the girl and hold her in the Towers. I’ll find a way to take care of her. We can’t risk someone else finding out.”
“Thanks,” I mumbled, my stomach twisting at the thought of Tera being locked away in one of the Ivory Towers for the rest of her very long existence while a warlock worked to kill her. I’m sure it wasn’t what she had in mind when she finally got the cure for her cancer.
“Regardless, you destroy that feather before your time is up. It can’t fall into anyone else’s hands no matter what.”
I stared at the ground, trying to organize my thoughts and push past the guilt. “I will.”
“And, Gage, one last thing.”
As my head popped up to look at Gideon, his fist slammed into my nose. I stumbled backward until I finally fell on my ass. Raising my hand to my sore nose, I felt blood trickling past my fingers. I gazed up at Gideon to find him standing over me with his hands in his pockets, looking very calm and collected.
“Never again talk to me like you did earlier or the grim reaper will be the least of your concerns.” With a quick nod of his head, Gideon turned and walked out of the shop.
Flopping back on the floor, I closed my eyes and murmured a quick spell to stop the bleeding so that it wasn’t pouring down the back of my throat. What a fucking bad day! I didn’t get a lot accomplished other than ruining Bronx’s and my lives, but at least I had a lead. And for some bizarre reason, Gideon hadn’t tried to kill me for what I had done or tried to get the angel feather. Too strange. It didn’t make sense, but not much was as I lay on the floor thinking about my life. For now, I would just add Gideon’s odd behavior to the growing list of things to look into once I cleaned up my mess with the grim reaper.
It was too late to head to the black market. I didn’t have enough cash on me, nothing for trade, and the timing was just off. The black market kept a rotating schedule to avoid the Ivory Towers hassle and the other riffraff, while making it easier on other creatures who were bound by certain hours of the day. I would have to pop by tomorrow and see if my luck held.
Chapter 23
Squinting against the bright midday glare of the sun, I sipped my black coffee from my environmentally correct paper cup as I walked toward Diamond Dolls down the nearly empty sidewalk. I was on the other side of Low Town from Asylum. While run-down and slightly sleazy, this neighborhood didn’t appear to be too dangerous shortly before one in the afternoon on a Monday. Most people were either at work or still in bed from another late night—the same place I felt I should be. By the time I finished checking on the protection spells outside Trixie’s apartment and got to my own apartment, it was after three in the morning when I fell into my own bed fully clothed.
Despite a restless night, I was up relatively early. The problem with Tera was beating on my brain and time was slipping away from me. It also didn’t help that I wasn’t fond of being away from Trixie. I hadn’t seen her at all yesterday, as I had promised, and though Bronx reassured me that she understood, I felt like shit that I hadn’t at least called her. In truth, I was scared. I had screwed up yesterday, gotten myself into an even bigger mess, and I just wanted to come back to her with something positive to report. And so far, I didn’t have anything positive going on.
At the very least, I wanted to tell her how I was going to help with her situation, but I didn’t have a clue. In a moment of delirious insomnia I’d contemplated whether Bronx and I could rotate shifts watching over her until we found a way to extricate her from the king’s interest. In the end, I tossed the idea away, not because of Bronx, but because I knew Trixie would never agree to being guarded. I had to come up with another way of protecting her, and I knew the key would probably involve taking care of the king.
Beating back a sigh, I stopped before a large orange door with a heavy, worn brass handle. With three fingers wrapped around the second drink I was carrying, I extended my remaining two fingers to grip the handle so I could pull open the door. I slipped inside, careful not to spill either of the drinks. Pausing just over the threshold, I blinked against the thick, hazy darkness broken by pulsing colored lights and a brighter light that illuminated a stage at the opposite end of the large room. After being out in the bright sunlight, my eyes slowly adjusted to the darkness, and in truth, I really didn’t want them to focus completely. Diamond Dolls was one of the dingiest strip joints in the area, where desperate exotic dancers went when they could no longer cut it at any of the other clubs. Open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, Diamond Dolls catered to all walks of life and even some that preferred to crawl. Filthy, rancid, with a smell that defied definition, I felt as if I needed a shot of penicillin just to walk into the joint.
U
nfortunately, it was the easiest access to Chang’s shop. And for the truly rare and impossible to get, you went to Chang. He knew how to get his hands on anything, and I didn’t want to know how. The man was older than dirt, and if I let myself think about it, I knew that he wasn’t a man at all. But then, I didn’t allow my imagination to go there, not even on the brightest day of the year.
“No outside drinks!” barked a gruff but familiar voice from out of the darkness.
“Not even a mocha coconut coffee with nonfat milk, whipped cream, and toasted coconut flakes?” I replied as I walked toward the origin of the voice. My straining eyes focused on a large bar with an assortment of stools lining its front. A mountain of a man with a graying skullet and a broken heart tattoo on his right bicep leaned against the bar, glaring at me. When I raised the large drink at Jerry, his scowl relented and a crooked grin broke across his ugly mug.
“You’re an evil man, Gage,” he said as he accepted the drink. “You didn’t happen to bring a cherry tart or a blueberry scone?”
I shook my head, trying to fight back a grin. “Sorry. The bakery was mostly cleaned out by the time I got there.”
“Thanks anyway,” Jerry said, lifting his cup to me before taking a big drink.
I settled on the stool directly in front of him and glanced around the bar, taking in my surroundings. An old rock song pumped out some tired beats on the sound system while one dancer went through the motions of gyrating around a pole, a bored expression on her face. Her lack of enthusiasm didn’t detract from the shouting coming from the table that held the same three satyrs who had stopped at my shop last week. I ducked down and directed my eyes around the rest of the bar, hoping that they wouldn’t notice and remember me. At the opposite end of the club, a trio of strippers sat around a table playing cards.
“How’s business been?” I asked as I turned back to look at Jerry.
“Ugh,” he grumbled, leaning both his forearms on the bar. He turned the paper cup around with his fat fingertips, staring at the drink. Jerry Caskey was the owner of Diamond Dolls. I had gotten to know him over the past several years as I waited for my turn to see Chang. He always worked the morning and afternoon shifts at the club with the excuse that he was too old to stay up so late to watch over things.
“That bad?”
“Customers have been steady. It’s the girls who’ve been giving me problems. I recently hired this succubus with a solid résumé and a smokin’ hot body. Her first night on the stage we discover that she can’t dance to save her worthless soul!”
“You didn’t interview her first?”
“I did, but I didn’t make her dance. Her résumé had the names of some of the finest clubs in the area where she’d worked as a server. And honestly, have you ever heard of a succubus with no rhythm? I mean, you’ve got to think that she can’t be that great a lay, particularly for a succubus.”
“You fire her?”
“No,” he moaned. “Like I said, she’s got a smokin’ body. I’ve got her coming in during the afternoon to have the other girls teach her how to move, and she works as a server during the evenings. I keep telling myself that she’ll be a good investment one day, assuming she can stop dropping beer bottles.”
“Training usually comes with hiring anybody,” I said with a shrug. “At least you don’t have to deal with potential life-and-death situations if something goes wrong.”
“You’d think that, wouldn’t you?” Jerry continued, his face twisting in anger. “I had to let my one vamp go. Do you know what a great draw it is to have a vampire among your dancers? They’re impossible to get and impossible to keep happy. But I had to let Tiffany go. I found out she was draining clients during lap dances.”
“I can see how that could be a problem.”
“And the icing on that is that two of my human dancers just told me they’re pregnant. I’ve got about another month before they will both need to be replaced. I’ve yet to run across a clientele that finds naked pregnant humans highly attractive.”
“Sorry to hear things have gone so sour for you, Jerry. I’m sure it’ll turn around soon,” I said before lifting my coffee to my lips. I downed the last of the bitter drink in one gulp before it could cool to undrinkable sludge. The caffeine jolt had perked up my brain enough that I felt I could handle Chang without him weaseling away what was left of my soul in exchange for a handful of so-called magic beans.
“Hey, you still got that hot number workin’ for you? What was her name?” Jerry snapped his fingers a couple of times as he searched for a name. His mood seemed to lighten with each word as the idea formed in his brain. “Trixie! You think she’d be interested in a part-time gig here?”
“I doubt it. She seems pretty content working with ink, but I’ll pass your offer along to her,” I said diplomatically, though I had no such intention. Trixie would stake me to the wall with a set of tattooing needles if I dared to mutter such a suggestion in her general direction. While she had proved that she was definitely no prude, she was very selective about who saw her and who touched her.
“Do you mind?” I asked, lifting my empty cup toward Jerry.
Jerry grunted, “No problem,” as he took my cup and threw it in a trash can behind the bar.
“I should get going. Is anyone with Chang?” I asked as I eased to my feet off the bar stool.
“No one came through this entrance.”
“Thanks. It was great talking to you and I hope things turn around soon. You should stop by the shop some night. I’ll give you a nice discount on some fresh ink.”
“Got anything for good luck?”
I couldn’t stop my muscles from jerking at the question, as if he had thrown something at me. He didn’t mean to touch on such a sore subject, but I couldn’t help but flinch at the question. A good luck tattoo seemed to have started my recent problems. “I haven’t had much luck with that particular tattoo recently, but I’m sure Bronx could set you up with something,” I said, forcing a smile on my lips.
Waving one last time at Jerry, I turned and started weaving my way across the floor dotted with tables and chairs toward the back wall. I gave the satyrs’ table a wide berth, managing to get past them without notice as their full attention remained on the dancer on the stage. Entering a small alcove, I sighed with relief when the music was dulled from its bruising thump in my ears. Before me were three doors, the entrance to the men’s and ladies’ restrooms and then an unmarked third. Pushing open the unmarked door, I entered a small, brightly lit room that was painted entirely in white. The only occupants of the room were a pair of Doberman pinschers looking alert and hungry.
“Gage Powell to see Chang,” I announced in a steady voice. My gaze never wavered from the two vicious-looking dogs.
One of the dogs chuffed once at me before they stood in unison and walked over to the elevator, which had also been painted white. I pushed the call button and inwardly cringed as the dogs sat on the ground on either side of me to wait for the car to reach our floor. I suffered through this anxiety every time I visited Chang. It wasn’t that I didn’t like dogs, it was more that I didn’t like these particular dogs. There was a frightening intelligence behind their black eyes and I suspected a cold-hearted cruelty that matched the sharpness of their teeth. I wasn’t sure if they were even real dogs. They could have been part of a magical security system that Chang used to keep potential clients in line. Or they could have been highly trained canines. Either way, I knew that their teeth were real and that was all that mattered.
A soft ding jolted me from my thoughts just before the doors slid open soundlessly. I stepped inside the elevator followed by both of the dogs. I settled against the wall while one sat on the floor next to me. The other dog stood up on its back paws and leaned its front paws against the wall. Using its nose, it pushed the button for the third floor, which was where I usually met Chang. I had yet to see what was on the fourth floor and I had a feeling that I never would. The little man had more secrets than a Japa
nese puzzle box, and I knew better than to go digging in another man’s secrets. The answer wasn’t worth my life.
When we had descended to the third floor of the basement, I followed one dog out of the elevator while the second dog walked behind me, nails clicking on the bare concrete floor. We weaved through one row after another of shelves and tables containing myriad items. If I paused for a second to look at an object, the dog behind me growled, which was quite successful in keeping me moving. I didn’t dare take my hands out of my jeans pockets.
We finally turned a corner deep in the enormous room and I found Chang sitting on a banged-up metal chair. A small transistor radio rested on the folding table beside him, playing some fuzzy jazz. I couldn’t begin to understand how he was getting a signal so deep underground, below all these layers of concrete, but I let the thought go as a smile split the old Chinese man’s wrinkled face. He clapped his skeletal hands together and the dogs darted to him.
Rubbing both dogs on the head as they sat before him, he looked up at me. “Patty is such a sweetheart.” His words were wrapped in a heavy accent that he had never lost despite all of his years in the U.S. I had heard him speak a couple of times in a dialect that was akin to Cantonese, but had an older feel to it, the same way in which modern English is different from old English.
“I thought Cake was the sweet one,” I said, looking from the dogs to Chang.
Chang looked up at me and his smile grew a little wider. “Does it matter?”
“No, it doesn’t,” I said, matching his smile. In truth, the dogs looked absolutely identical in every way. It didn’t matter which one Chang said was the sweet one because I couldn’t tell Patty apart from Cake. Of course, any man who would name his brutal dogs after a children’s rhyme had to have a sick, twisted streak to him. I knew better than to press my luck.
“You’re a smart boy, Gage Powell,” he said with a nod. Chang patted each dog on the side and they left, returning to where we had gotten off the elevator to wait for me to finish with their master. It always seemed strange that he didn’t keep his dogs with him when he discussed transactions with his clients. He appeared to be a weak old man who could be broken in half with just a thought, but then anyone who could actually use the items Chang possessed also knew that the easiest-looking targets were always some of the most dangerous. From what I could tell, Chang wasn’t a warlock, but that didn’t mean he was powerless. I just wasn’t stupid enough to try to test his abilities.
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