by P. R. Frost
I shook my hands and then wiped them on my slacks.
“She’s waiting for that apology.”
Junior’s gaze darted about again, looking for an escape, from me as well as the apology.
Scrap and I hemmed him in. I took one step closer, hands raised. He looked like he’d vomit.
“I . . . I apologize, Ms. Noncoiré, for repeating the opinion of others without thinking.”
“That will do for now,” I sighed. “Want to have lunch, Mom? Junior’s buying.”
I might even put up with his presence just to find out who dripped the venom of that opinion and why he got tickets to “Fairy Moon” for his mother if she deserted him when he was a baby, leaving him with Breven Sancroix to drag him through childhood any way he could.
I wondered if Breven knew he’d raised a changeling. And what happened to his real child?
Scrap, if we send Junior back to Faery, will his other self be returned?
How in the six hundred sixty-six hells am I supposed to know? That’s a faery secret and they have never talked to anyone about it. Ever.
One more thing to talk to Mickey about.
Chapter 30
Prostitution is legal, and highly taxed, in much of Nevada; however, it is not legal in Las Vegas.
IF LADY LUCIA is Junior’s silent partner,then I need to know what she plans. I zip through the chat room, barely lingering long enough to flutter my wings twice let alone get noticed by whoever is on guard duty today.
I come out in Lucia’s parlor. It’s deserted and totally tidy. I smell pine cleaner, the same brand Mom uses—used—on Tess’ house. The place is silent, so I prowl, keeping to the ceiling—no one ever looks up.
The ageless and ancient lad servant sleeps like the dead in one of the little interior, vaindowless rooms. His bed is a coffin with a handful of dirt from his native land scattered on the bottom. Maybe he really is a vampire. I can’t be sure since I’ve never met one before or had them confirmed in imp demon chronicles.
The sound of water gently lapping against tile draws me to the central bathroom and that huge hot tub meant for six. But only two occupy it this morning.
Donovan and Lucia.
Not a stitch of clothing on them. Her sun-deprived whiter-than-white skin is firm and smooth with only a little acceptance of gravity on her lovely, rose-tipped breasts. She’s so beautiful she could almost tempt me to start loving females.
His muscles ripple sleekly beneath his nearly hairless coppery shin. A magnificent reminder of why I find men so enticing.
They make a couple that look good together. I bet their personalities fit, too—opposing strengths, weaknesses, and tempers.
The bubbling chlorine-filled water that reflects the deep blue tile in the tub can’t mask the scent of their recent joining. The musk lingers in the air like a gentle aftertaste.
They are both pushing out hot and heavy pheromones that tell me there is more to come.
I’m quite happy to hang around the outside of the open door and watch.
But their conversation is what draws me as close as I can get.
“You don’t seem so weary of your humanity now as you did at dawn,” Lucia whispers. She runs a big toe up his inner thigh, letting it caress him in his most sensitive parts.
“I don’t know, Contessa. The delights of a body, or your body aside, I just don’t know what I’m doing right and what I’m doing wrong. It’s all so confusing.” He grabs her foot and brings it up to his mouth, sucking on each of her toes. His free hand drifts toward her ample breast, just barely breaking the waters surface.
“You are doing that precisely right,” she gasps, very near to coming. “What is so confusing about enjoying every sensation the Universe inflicts upon us? The good as well as the pain.” She purrs in response to his tugs on her toes followed by a vicious little bite.
“The emotions,” he sighs. “There is no logic. I don’t know if I feel anger, or fear, or jealousy, or love. I don’t know how I’m supposed to feel when, or with whom.”
Lady Lucia throws back her head and laughs loudly. “Welcome to being human, my lovely Donovan. No one can figure out emotions. That’s what makes life so delicious.”
“As delicious as you.” His hands move around her breasts, nipping and kneading fiercely.
“If you are truly ready to give up all this ...” She scoots closer to him, pulling her foot free from his mouth and draping her leg across his lap. Her hand caresses between his legs and gains instant and elegant response. “The Powers That Be owe me a few favors, or they will when I right the balances in Las Vegas. I can get you returned to your hideous gargoyle existence. You can sit and watch and do your job silently rather than have to figure out how to properly interact ”
“I’m not that much of a coward,” he growls. He’s responding to her ministrations with enthusiasm.
“You wouldn’t have to go back to that boring old Citadel and the copper body of a bat. I’d get you a new position, a prized one at Notre Dame de Paris. Perhaps somewhere in Florence and a dragon body beckons you more?”
What !
Donovan was previously a copper bat overlooking a Citadel?
I grow faint with this discovery.
No wonder he makes his human home on Half Moon Lake in Central Washington State. His magnificent glass-and-cedar house that lets him took out on the world from a private island is only twenty-five miles from the place where he looked out and watched the world from the refectory roof of my babe’s Citadel.
This is too rich to keep secret. But now is not the time to tell Tess. Maybe later, when it’s all over, she’ll appreciate the irony.
I leave them to their activities that begin to grow violent. He bites her nipple hard. She shoves his face away with a fierce grasp of his chin. He pulls her hair baclz. She pinions his hands against the pool.
“Again, so soon?” she laughs as she yanks him up and onto his back on the tile floor with more than human strength.
“I’m never satisfied. Not even by you.” Then he whispers or broadcasts telepathically, I’m not sure which. I have to strain to listen. “Except by Tess.”
He flips Lucia over, capturing both her hands in one of his as he prepares to enter her most vigorously.
“Don’t tell her that,” Lucia giggles. Her ears are better than mine; that makes her otherworldly if not a vampire. “If you do, she’ll never let you off her leash long enough for you come back to me or any of your other companions.”
He seems most determined to banish his frustrations in this act. I hope it works and keeps him away from my babe for a while.
This would be fun to watch if I had the patience. Maybe I’ll just nip over to that Citadel and enjoy a little of these dominance games with my own Ginkgo.
At five minutes to three, Gollum, Mickey, and I entered the Dragon and St. George and headed directly toward the theater.
Watch your back, babe, Scrap nearly screamed in my ear as he darted up to the ceiling of the adjacent casino. Mr. Stinky is in the building.
Sure enough, Donovan stood tall and steadfast in front of the curtain separating the casino from the theater entrance.
“You can’t keep calling him Mr. Stinky, Scrap. We know what he is now, so he doesn’t smell wrong. He smells of what he was, combined with what he is,” I replied.
Whatever. I still say he stinks.
“What are you doing here?” Gollum snarled at his rival.
Mickey hung back, hollow-eyed and silent, as he’d been since he picked us up at The Crown Jewels twenty minutes ago.
“Lady Lucia’s orders,” Donovan spat back. He turned and threw the curtain to one side.
“Since when do you take orders from anyone?” I asked, squeezing through the slight opening in the metal gate.
Donovan muttered something. His face remained dark and resentful. His five o’clock shadow had expired and reached well beyond the wee hours of the morning.
How long since he’d slept, eaten, or sha
ved?
Too long by the angry set of his shoulders and clenching fists. Maybe Scrap was right. He did carry a certain unwashed quality.
I didn’t need the magical comb, which lay hidden in my pocket, to know he hurt deeply.
My heart skipped a beat in the knowledge that my rejection of him had brought him this low.
It’s all an act, dahling. Believe me, he’s not as depressed as he wants you to think.
I had to remind myself that he had betrayed his life mission and his creator. He’d been condemned to being human raised by a Kajiri demon for his crimes.
Would he have turned out more complete, less ruthless, with a different purpose in life if my Dill had raised him instead of Darren Estevez?
He might have more morals, Scrap laughed, reading my thoughts.
I’d never know.
The curtain dropped behind us, shutting out the clang and clatter of the casino. The sudden silence and dim lighting of the theater lobby distorted my perceptions. I instinctively took up an en garde position. Only a little pull on my thigh warned me I hadn’t completely healed yet.
At least I’d worn decent shoes this time.
But I had no weapon today. Scrap was exiled a good ten yards from me as long as Donovan was anywhere near. Or until overwhelming demon evil threatened me.
Did Lady Lucia know that when she ordered Donovan here?
More important, what sort of blackmail had she used against him? Nothing less would coerce him into doing something he didn’t want to do, or didn’t earn him a great advantage, or a great deal of money.
A phalanx of six mutant faeries in black leather greeted us. I jammed the comb into my hair, letting the tight curls grab hold of it.
Instantly a dark mist enveloped the faeries. I saw the energy signature of wings on their backs; great leathery and ragged-edged things. Normal eyes couldn’t see them. They used up a lot of energy concealing those wings. I had a small advantage in that knowledge.
If these guys weren’t evil, I didn’t know what was. Scrap should be able to break through Donovan’s force field if things got nasty. Or is that nastier?
Not until they threaten you, babe.
Then Gregbaum emerged from the center of his palace guard, dwarfed by them, but radiating a confidence that diminished them.
My gaze zeroed in on his pinky ring.
Gollum followed the track of my eyes and raised his eyebrows in question.
“It’s a fake,” I said dismissively. At least it didn’t radiate an aura of magic as I expected. It just sat on his finger, but something . . . pulled at me, demanded I take the ring from him, use it as it was intended.
Gregbaum didn’t have the power or talent to activate whatever it was. It wanted me, knew I’d use it to its full capacity.
I don’t know if it existed entirely in this dimension.
Looking at the producer’s pudgy fingers, I judged it could be the same size as the ring Donovan offered me. Was it the same ring, a duplicate, or just a fake?
There are no coincidences, Scrap reminded me from his perch atop the curtain rod behind me. That ring keeps cropping up. You may need it to finish this adventure.
Gregbaum bristled.
“He’s a fake. No wonder Lady Lucia dominates him,” I added with a derisive smile. I needed to keep him slightly off-balance.
“Tess, don’t,” Donovan warned.
“You have your agenda, Donovan. I have mine. Right now I want to see the show. I have Lady Lucia’s private invitation for me and my entourage. Are you part of that?” With a slight gesture, I drew Gollum and Mickey closer.
“Lady Lucia called me an hour ago to inform me that I let you in or face her wrath. I admit you with extreme prejudice and reluctance.” Gregbaum stepped aside a half step. His guards remained sternly in place.
“Noted. I won’t engage a weapon unless they do,” I stated the terms of this temporary truce.
A brief nod from Gregbaum and a narrow passage opened for us into the theater.
My skin crawled as I passed through the ranks of dumb muscle. Gollum and Mickey kept as close to me as they could without actually sharing the same skin. Donovan entered the theater a distant fourth.
Inside, the VIP circle was filled with cameras, lights, sound equipment, and crews. More of the same had taken up positions on the musicians’ ledge and the varied levels of the stage. A quality production.
If Lady Lucia closed down the show in three more days, Gregbaum still had a money maker in the DVD.
Three days to negate any spells the smarmy producer and Junior had placed on the dancers, find the portal, and return them to Faery.
“This isn’t your fight, Tess Noncoiré,” Gregbaum said.
“If not my fight, then whose?”
But Gregbaum had already disappeared into the bowels of the backstage.
I wanted a different perspective from my first viewing of the show. So I took a seat in the third row to the left of the cameras.
Mickey and Gollum sat on either side of me. Donovan pointedly walked around to the opposite side, where he could watch me as well as the show.
Scrap breathed a sigh of relief and flitted back to me.
Within seconds the cameras began rolling and the music came up. Once more the story, the dance, the music, and the magic of “Fairy Moon” sucked me in. My hair comb revealed the special magic of Faery shining through the performance, giving me glimpses of laughter, beauty, kindness, and joy. Qualities all the other dimensions needed to share.
If the human dimension had twisted Junior to the polar opposite of true Faery, then Donovan was right. We didn’t need a demon ghetto to balance our goodness and light. We were often our own demons.
For endless moments I became a part of it all. I knew that if even a small amount of Faery’s brightness dimmed, all the dimensions became poorer. The Juniors and the mutants would have a free rein to wreak havoc.
The action never stopped for camera or lights or tech problems. A true performance from beginning to end.
About halfway into the first act I jolted back to reality. The faces of the dancers were absolutely blank. They performed by rote.
My attention wandered to the set; an open garden, an oasis set in the middle of a forbidding desert, complete with tinkling fountains and false gaiety. A metaphor for the city of Las Vegas. The caterpillar on the mushroom reminded me of the hookah-smoking character in Alice in Wonderland. Another metaphor for the addiction of gambling, bright lights, glamorous shows, and more gambling.
The full moon set on the action as the lights faded for the end of the first act. My attention pricked. Full moon was the time demons’ strength waned and portals closed.
We waited a scant ten minutes for the dancers to rest and gulp gallons of water. They lounged about the stage, watching the set and lights change. Gregbaum stalked around, shouting orders, growing angrier by the minute. Change this, adjust that.
“No,” the dancers said as one. They flowed upright and into position between Gregbaum and the set piece of the rock goblin. “We dance as before or we do not dance at all.”
Mickey tensed beside me. “Gregbaum does not want you to see the truth within the set,” he whispered.
Across from me, I watched Donovan jerk out of his slouch. He, too, noted that something was up.
More shouts. Some dancers slunk off stage. Others held their ground.
Scrap flitted about,invisibly tweaking hair and blowing cigar smoke in the faces of the stagehands who stood about in indecision.
“This theater is haunted,” one of the hands said, waving smoke out of his nose. He made the sign of the cross and looked around nervously.
Gregbaum threw up his hands and contented himself with shifting camera angles. The DVD probably would show very vague impressions of the set rather than details.
“I’ve got to get closer,” I whispered to Gollum.
He stayed me with a hand on my knee. “He’ll notice and use that as an excuse to throw us out
.”
“I’m not on his radar,” Mickey whispered. As he spoke, he slithered down to crawl along the narrow aisle between rows of high-backed seats. He really did have acrobatic talents. Quickly, he disappeared into the shadows. A hint of movement at the edge of the pit showed his progress.
The theater grew black.
Music drifted to life on a slow eerie flute note. Lights came up on the stage. Cameras fixed on the red rock goblin. Faeries crept out of holes in the stage.
A waxing quarter moon rose behind them all. The time when the walls between worlds thinned and portals could be unlocked. If you had a key.
Only at that time did the Celestial Goddess reveal herself in the heavens: the quarter moon defined her cheek, starscapes became her eyes and mouth, the Milky Way streamed away from her as hair blown in the celestial wind. When Scrap became my blade, he mimicked that configuration.
Everything glittered in the coruscated light. My eyes refused to focus, trying to follow the randomly blinking and scattered lights rather then settle on any one object. A blank spot appeared beneath the goblin’s arm. That tiny circle absorbed the light rather than reflecting it so that it appeared a black hole.
“Gollum, what’s the moon phase?” I gripped his hand tightly where it rested on my knee.
Waxing quarter on Monday night, Scrap answered for him.
This was Saturday. Not much time. A lot to do before then. I could only lead the faeries to safety on Monday night when the moon revealed the portal within the rocks.
I still needed Donovan to complete the task.
Chapter 31
A fire raced through the MGM Grand on November 21, 1980, claiming eighty-five lives.
TOO SOON, we reached the climax of the show. I held my breath as the little girl faery paused one last moment to drink in the awesome majesty of the desert embodied in one tiny yellow flower; so different from her home and yet so very beautiful in its own right.
As the portal grew smaller and smaller, I wanted to shout to her to hurry. My heart nearly broke when she tried to fly through and hit solid rock.