by P. R. Frost
They looked at my twirling blade, then at each other.
“Drop the blade, or we kill your boyfriend,” a quiet voice said from the direction of the theater.
I chanced a glance in Gollum’s direction. His two captors both held the tips of their swords at his throat.
“Fuck!”
“Don’t listen to him, Tess. I can take care of myself,” Gollum said quietly.
Right. That coming from the most nonviolent person I’d ever met.
Still, I did have a vague memory of waking up from a tazerinduced coma to find three Marines down with bruises on their throats and Gollum leaning protectively over me.
“What do you want, Gregbaum?” I asked the newcomer. He had to be the producer. No one else had authority in this area.
“I want you to leave Las Vegas on the next plane.”
“No can do.” I slashed at the goon edging over to my left side.
He backed off. “I’m contracted to the writers’ conference. I’m also sworn to protect the innocent from demons. These guys look like demons, and you are holding a dance troupe of innocent faeries hostage.”
I parried a sword that crept too close. Without thinking, I slid into a long lunge and aimed for my attacker’s bare chest. He yelped and arched away from the tip of the curved blade, sword held off to the side.
My feet continued sliding forward. My thighs burned and pulled. I flipped the blade and raked him with the tines. A dozen parallel scratches oozed dark green, almost black blood—it matched their clothes.
At the same moment, Gollum’s attackers flew across the lobby and bounced against the ticket desk. Their heads hit the edge with matching resounding cracks. They slid to the ground, mouths open in surprise as their eyes closed and bodies grew limp.
Gollum went to his knees. His face twisted in agony. He mewled something incomprehensible and buried his head in his hands.
The remaining four monsters backed off, taking up positions between me and Gregbaum. I recovered forward from the lunge, not sure my inner thigh muscles hadn’t separated from the bone. They screamed at me. A groin pull. One of the hardest injuries to recover from, and I’d done it to myself.
Stupid, stupid, stupid.
“Get out of here, Guilford.” I used his real name to break through whatever emotions tangled his mind in that awful grimace.
“I . . . can’t . . . leave . . . you,” he choked.
“Sure you can. You just get to your feet and walk out the fire exit.” I edged closer to my enemies. I had to finish this quick before real pain set in and kept me anchored in place.
The guy I’d nicked still bled. Rivulets streamed down his chest to disappear beneath his pants.
“The alarms will sound if you open that door,” Gregbaum said.
“And your point would be?”
For the first time, I got a good look at the hottest producer in Las Vegas. Medium height and build, he looked like the slime lord of lounge lizards: slick sharkskin suit and a black shirt open nearly to the waist, revealing a bit of a hairy paunch. Five gold chains of varying length encircled his neck and another his right wrist. The left wrist sported a watch nearly the size of the school clocks in Paul Revere Elementary, where I’d attended kindergarten through sixth grade.
The kicker was the diamond pinky ring. It looked like a miniature version of the one Donovan offered with his proposal.
What in the hell was going on here?
“You may stay until your scheduled flight home. But do not enter my theater again. Do not, under penalty of death, try to contact any of my employees.”
“Agreed, as long as you do nothing to harm any of the dancers.” Just because I couldn’t complete this mission didn’t mean I couldn’t pass it off to another Warrior. Breven Sancroix had taken the same vows I had.
“The blade.” Gregbaum snapped his fingers
“Scrap has tasted blood. He can retract as soon as I’m clear.” I jerked my chin toward the steel gate and black curtain.
Gregbaum waved his hand. The lock clicked open and the gate withdrew about eighteen inches; just enough for Gollum and me to slip through.
“How’d you open that?” I asked, turning back toward Gregbaum.
He and his minions faded into the theater darkness. Concealing fog swirled around them. The doors closed quickly but silently.
On the last breath of air before the portal sealed, I heard a whisper. “Get back to the Valley of Fire. We can’t let her near the place.”
Nasty, nasty, nasty. Those brutes taste like they just crawled out of a toxic waste dump. Come to think on it, maybe they did.
But where is that dump and who put what into it to spawn these ugly thugs? Stolen energy from Faery for sure. But what else?
Imps used to offer a bounty on identification of new monsters not assigned a ghetto. Lots of credit with the Powers That Be and prestige all over the universes. I could parlay that into a new artifact of power for my dahling Tess.
Or break through the barrier between me and Donovan.
Gonna take some homework to figure out if these guys are mutated faeries or something entirely new. Their connection to Gregbaum and the “Fairy Moon” show means something.
If the dancers are real faeries ... hmmmmm.
I’ll have a nice long chat about this with my babe and Gollum. Later.
Right now I have to rest. And eat. The air conditioner atop this casino is jammed full of mold. That will sustain me long enough to follow Tess back to our hotel. She’ll order OJ and beer for me. Then I can sleep.
Maybe. I shrink back to my normal cute self (Hey, there’s a new wart on my chest!) as Tess begins limping toward the exit. Gollum drags himself out of his own inner misery and supports her with an arm about her waist.
They look like lovers, but this is not an intimate embrace. This is one friend helping another.
Oh, no! My babe hurts. I can’t leave her. But this is no ordinary wound that I can make all better with a bit of imp spit to counter demon venom and infection. This is something deep inside her muscles.
Sharp burning pains run up and down my legs in sympathy. My back aches, and my wings are numb. I need to curl up into a fetal ball and nurse my hurts. I can’t. I have to stay close to Tess. I have to help her. But I can’t. I must eat. NOW
Useless. I feel so useless. Just a scrap of an imp who can’t help his Warrior. And I’m so tired.
What to do? What to do? I can’t even run home to Mum and Imp Haven. The freeze-dried-garbage-dump-of-the-universe offers me no comfort. No love. No sanctuary.
Tess drops into Mickey’s taxi. Gollum follows. I can only fall into her lap and hope my body heat helps her pain.
Her pain is my pain. I can’t heal myself because I cannot heal her. I cannot recover from the strain of transformation because I cannot leave her while she hurts.
We are more than vulnerable.
Chapter 19
A High Roller Suite at the MGM Grand has 3000 square feet and comes with a private butler and chef.
THANK THE GODDESS FOR ELEVATORS. My normal bouncing up eight flights of stairs in lieu of jogging five miles every morning would have done permanent damage to my groin muscles. Gollum acting as a crutch helped some. Still I fell facedown through the door of my room and onto the closest bed.
Mom’s bed. Full of clothes. My face tangled with dirty underclothes inside her suitcase.
Ewww! Enough to push me to a sitting position. “Ice,” I croaked to Gollum.
He left with the ice bucket and my key card.
“Mom, what are you doing? We don’t go home until Monday morning.” I held my injured right leg up with both hands while she extricated her red party dress from beneath me.
“I’m not going home.” She tsked as she surveyed a crease in the georgette draperies.
“What?”
“You used to be more articulate, dear.”
“Can’t you see I’m suffering. Words elude me when I’m in pain.”
“What did you do this time?”
“Fencing. Long lunge.” I sank back onto her pillows. “Would you call room service and order me two beers and two glasses of orange juice?”
Scrap sighed from his fetal ball in the crook of my arm. I couldn’t tell if he slumbered or had gone comatose.
That sounded good to me right now. A couple of ibuprofen and about twenty-four hours of sleep ought to help.
Gotta keep movin ’r it’ll stiff up, Scrap mumbled. His mental speech came through slurred. He was in worse shape than I.
“I told you years ago that you’d get hurt in a most unladylike manner with that horrible sport.”
Now that was the mother I knew and loved.
“Let me see, dear.” She held up my leg and probed gently. “Hmmm. Big knot forming. Might just be a strain instead of a true pull. I’ll order you an immediate massage. That will keep the blood flowing and prevent it from stiffening.”
Huh?
“You still didn’t answer my question. If you aren’t going home, why are you packing?”
“I’ve signed a contract to sing at the hotel Wednesday through Sunday nights. They’re hiring me a band and giving me a wardrobe allowance, not that I need one. I’m moving in with Penny.”
“Uh, Mom, you do know that she’s a hooker.”
“Not anymore. We had a long talk. She’s retired. That Joyce woman is writing her memoirs. Pretty steamy stuff.” She waggled her eyebrows.
“How can you be sure she’s retired. She seemed pretty tight with that Stetson fellow.”
“Penny is tired. Flirting is second nature with her. Always has been. But she’s no longer serious. And she needs my help.”
“You? Mom, you’ve barely stepped off Cape Cod for fifteen years or more. Your life is the Garden Club and church choir—and picking up after me.” I gave Mom room and board in the mother-in-law apartment attached to the house. I didn’t think she’d survive on her own. She barely knew how to balance a checkbook or pay her bills. Dad and I did that for her.
“Penny made a bunch of money, but she didn’t keep it. Her jewelry is paste and her very small two-bedroom house is heavily mortgaged. She really needs money from that tell-all book. I can at least give her a little something extra each month for the mortgage payment.”
“Mom, what is going on? This isn’t you. You’ve always been suspicious of strangers. Disapproved of new friends. And I still don’t believe you ever spent time in New York.” No more stalling. Looked like this was the time to talk to her, even if I didn’t really want to.
“But it is me, Teresa. This is the me I dreamed of being when I was in high school.” She sat on the edge of the bed and gave me a long soulful look.
“I’ve never heard this story.” I scooched over to make room for her. Girl chat, like I had with my friend Allie back home. Never with my mom.
Unthinkable with the old mom. Quite natural with this vibrant woman with the whole world opening before her.
“Your Grandmother Maria forbade us to talk about it.” She caressed the silky fabric of the dress she held.
“Was it Grandma Maria or Grandpa Al who forbade you to talk about wanting to sing for a living?” Feisty and forgetful Grandma Maria was the only family member who cheered me on when I launched into the risky career of a professional novelist.
I hadn’t known my grandfather well. He died when I was six. Either that or he left town. No one talked much about him. And I hadn’t found a headstone for him in the local cemetery, at least nowhere near his parents.
“I thought I was ready to tackle New York my senior year in high school.” Mom fumbled with her pearls, an old and comforting habit. “I ran away at the end of January, right after my eighteenth birthday, with a few hundred dollars I’d been saving since . . . since grade school. But I wasn’t ready for New York. The competition, the dirt, the noise, the scathing critiques from really nasty people.” Tears flooded her eyes. She turned her head away.
“That’s when you met Penny!”
She nodded. “We shared a flat for a short time. We met at an audition and hit it off. Sometimes I think she was the only person in all of New York who had a kind word for me.”
I pulled her down into a hug. “I know how bad rejection from strangers can be. When my first short story was rejected, I thought my writing career had ended before it started. The editor told me I should forget about ever putting pen to paper again. It wasn’t even a professional level magazine. Just a paid-in-copies low-budget rag. Thank goodness my friend Bob . . .”
Here I had to pause. Bob had died last autumn while helping me on my first mission as a Warrior of the Celestial Blade.
“Bob convinced me to send the story to professional publications until it sold. He nagged me if I let a rejected copy sit on my desk more than twenty-four hours before mailing it to the next editor. You didn’t have friends in the city to encourage and support you.”
“I had Penny. Even she wasn’t enough. I was so energetic and full of hope. But it didn’t last long. You had a few positive rejections right off the bat. ‘Good writing but not right for us. What else do you have?’ I had only ‘Get off the stage. Next.’ ”
“Friends make all the difference when you try something new.” My thoughts turned to Bob, and then to Gollum and Allie, and yes, even to Donovan. Most of all I had Scrap. No matter how bad things got, I’d never be alone.
“And look at you now. On the best seller lists and making good money. You have done with your life what I wanted to do with mine. Instead, I crawled home with my tail between my legs and accepted a marriage to your father that my father arranged. A nice Catholic man with a good job as an accountant. And we all know what a disaster that turned out to be. I didn’t even finish high school.”
My father hadn’t married by the age of twenty-six, very late for a good Catholic man from a French Canadian family. He accepted the arranged marriage under pressure from his parents. He’d needed another fifteen years to come to terms with his alternative sexual preferences.
“Was the whole marriage a disaster?” I know Dad had hurt Mom terribly when he moved in with Bill. Looking back, that was just one more rejection in Mom’s life. One more person telling her she wasn’t good enough at anything she tried.
I knew I couldn’t be the next person to tell her not to bother trying because she would fail. She couldn’t know she’d failed until she tried.
I had to let her do this.
“My marriage wasn’t all bad. We had some good times. I have three wonderful children, even though your brother Stephen lives in Chicago and rarely calls home.”
I talked to Steve more often than he talked to either of our parents.
“What will I do without you, Mom? I mean, you organize my house and my life. You keep me fed when I forget to eat because I’m on deadline . . .”
“You’ll manage, dear. You’ll manage because you have to. And because you have friends. I can’t be your crutch forever.” Mom gave me a wicked wink, like she knew how Dad and I took care of her because she let us.
Then she straightened up and began pulling more outfits out of the closet. Mostly cocktail dresses. I didn’t remember her packing so many. She must have gone shopping. “You have Gollum living in the cottage, and your father and Bill close by. And Allie. Best friends are more valuable than gold. Though I wish she’d find some nice man and give up being a policewoman. Most unladylike.”
We both laughed at the idea of my best friend doing anything but be a cop. She’d saved my ass a couple of times when the going got tough with demons and escapees from the prison warden of the universe.
“And don’t forget MoonFeather.”
“Yes. Your father’s sister does seem to have more in common with you than my side of the family. I don’t approve of her being a witch, or living with Josh without the benefit of marriage, or her three divorces, but she is a good friend to you.”
Wow. A compliment about MoonFeather. That was almost more than I could imagine
. Mom really had undergone a major attitude adjustment.
“I worry about you, Mom. This is a big step. Something totally different from what you are used to.”
“I know. Isn’t it exciting!” She gave a little girl laugh. Then she sobered. “Marrying Darren was a disaster that taught me I have to live every day as if it were my last. When I found out that he only married me to get to you, and something weird about inheriting your house, I thought I’d never recover. I thought about killing myself. But that would only have given him what he wanted. Now I’m doing what I want to do for the first time in a very long time. I need to do this.”
“If it doesn’t work out,” and I couldn’t see how it could, “you can always come home. I’ll keep a spare bed for you. I’m only a phone call away.” We hugged again. “Now about that contract . . .”
“Don’t worry. I had Donovan look it over. He’s good about that sort of thing. But he seemed upset. Did you two have another fight.”
Gulp. “Yeah, sorta.”
“You going to tell me about it?”
“No.”
“Make it up soon. I don’t like my kids fighting.”
“He’s not . . .”
“Yes, he is. He’s my stepson and I care for him. He needs a mother. He’s also executor of Darren’s estate. Now I updated my will before we left home. I’ve left lump sums for Cecilia and Stephen, the rest goes to you. You gave me a home when no one else would. You took care of me when I should have taken care of you. If anything happens to me, you’ll have to work with Donovan on the estate business. So apologize and get back to being friends. That’s an order.”
“Nothing is going to happen to you, Mom. You’re still young and healthy . . .”
“Oh, good, Gollum is back with your ice. He can carry my bags down to the lobby. I’ll order your massage through the concierge. Are you sure all you want is beer and orange juice? You’ve got my cell phone number and I’ve left Penny’s number and address on the notepad by the phone. Call me.” She bustled out, organized and efficient and in charge of her life.