Black Dust Mambo

by Adrian Phoenix

  “Then speak fast,” Felicity advised. The knife didn’t budge.

  “All right, since it ain’t no secret that Gabrielle thinks this stupid May Madness Carnival is for fools, she was worried that y’all would brainwash Kallie,” he lied, wondering how Felicity’s lips tasted.

  “Jesus Christ,” Belladonna groaned. “Are you kidding me?”

  “’Fraid not, Bell.”

  “And you share those views, Mr. Brûler?” Felicity asked. “The carnival is for fools waiting to be brainwashed?”

  Cherries. Dallas would bet anything that her lips tasted like sweet black cherries. “Yeah, it’s definitely for fools. But no on the brainwashing, since most fools tend to lack brains.”

  “My, my, my,” Felicity murmured, her bright gaze flicking down to Dallas’s mouth as if she was making a flavor wager of her own. “A man who speaks his mind even with a knife at his throat.”

  “How about getting rid of the knife and letting me up?”

  Felicity chuckled, a warm and throaty sound that slid like hot liquid velvet along Dallas’s spine. “I suppose I shall. It’s time we got you and Ms. Brown safely to new rooms.” She sat up, and the steel-edged pressure vanished from Dallas’s throat.

  For a moment, Dallas didn’t know whether to feel relieved or disappointed. He sat up and tried to finger-comb his hair—still damp and stinking of bitter herbs—into some kind of order and failing. He eyed the black-suited guards standing motionless at either side of the door.

  Doesn’t bode well, podna.

  Face scrunched up as though she smelled a dead rat under the floorboards, Belladonna fanned her nose. “Whew! You smell strong enough to stun a bushel of skunks, Dallas Brûler. Booze and man-sweat and sulfur, and the devil knows what else. You need a shower in the worst way.”

  “Thank you, darlin’,” he drawled as he flipped her off. “Tell me something I don’t know, like why we need new rooms. What the hell is going on, anyway?”

  “Someone tried to kill both you and Ms. Rivière,” Felicity replied, “but managed to kill Ms. Rivière’s par-amour instead.” Untucking a rose lace handkerchief from her belt, she wiped Dallas’s blood from her knife blade with a quick and expert twist of the cloth. “So Lord Augustine has arranged protective custody for all of you.”

  Dallas frowned. “Kallie’s paramour?”

  “No, not for him, I’m afraid. He’s beyond the need for protective custody.”

  “No, I meant . . .”

  Felicity glanced at him from beneath her long, blackened lashes. A coy and knowing flash of eyes. “I know what you meant,” she murmured. “Given the tragedy Ms. Rivière just endured, perhaps it was good that you spent the night alone, Mr. Brûler.”

  Dallas winked. “Who says I did?”

  “I do.” A smile dimpled Felicity’s cheeks. She slid her knife into a sheath tailored into her belt. “The one thing you don’t smell of, Mr. Brûler, is a woman.”

  Dallas opened his mouth, closed it, mulled over a few possible retorts, then decided to change the subject. “You think Bell’s life is in danger too?”

  “No attempt has yet been made on Ms. Brown’s life, but given her association with you and Ms. Rivière, best not to risk it, wouldn’t you agree?”

  “Oh, I definitely agree,” Belladonna said. “Let’s get our asses moving.”

  “Fine by me,” Dallas said, standing. “Do y’all know if some wacko is just targeting hoodoos in general, or is it personal?”

  “It’s personal, all right,” Belladonna said, her voice low. “The hex on Kallie’s bed was a soul-killer.”

  Dallas stared at Belladonna. The grim steadiness of her gaze told him she wasn’t kidding. Ice coiled cold through his guts. “Holy shit,” he whispered.

  “Did anyone besides Gabrielle LaRue know you’d be attending carnival?” Felicity asked.

  Wrenching his gaze away from Belladonna, Dallas said, “No. Look, if you’re implying that Gabrielle had something to do with all this, you’re wrong. She’s the one who called me—”

  “And did Ms. LaRue’s call lead you to your door and the bucket beyond? . . .” Felicity’s words trailed off. She held up a just a moment finger before touching the Blue-tooth curving against her ear. “Yes?” she inquired.

  Dallas noticed that the guards had tilted their heads just slightly, as though listening to their own Comsats.

  Once again, podna, this doesn’t bode well.

  Felicity’s breath caught in her throat. She jumped to her feet, disbelief flickering across her freckled face. “Bloody ’ell,” she exclaimed, all the posh and polish in her voice scrubbed away in a Cockney-accented flare of emotion.

  “Summon the healers and get the medical facilities operational,” Felicity said into the rose-skinned Bluetooth, the polish once more glossing her words. But Dallas saw worry lines crinkling her forehead. “I’m on my way.”

  The guards shoved away from the wall, bodies tensed. One spun on the balls of his black-sneaker-clad feet, unlatched the door, then disappeared down the hall as swift and silent as a hunting wolf, his partner dogging his heels.

  “Is it Kallie? Is she all right?” Belladonna asked. Her fingers locked around the handle of her pink overnight bag.

  Felicity looked from Belladonna to Dallas, her face composed once more. “You and Ms. Brown shall stay here and wait for word from me. You should be perfectly safe in the meantime.”

  “All of a sudden we’re safe? What’s going on?” Dallas asked.

  “We’ve found the killer,” Felicity replied, a feral light glinting in her eyes. “Or rather, she found us.”

  “Hellfire,” Belladonna breathed. “Then it’s over?”

  “You’ll be among the first to know,” Felicity replied, striding out into the hall. “But until then, both of you remain here. Keep the door locked and warded.”

  Dallas exchanged a quick look with Belladonna, cocked an eyebrow. She nodded, her hair a bobbing blue-black field of curls, and grabbed her purse from the table.

  “We ain’t the sit-and-bite-our-fingernails types, sugar,” Dallas said, following Felicity into the hall. The woman was already halfway to the elevator, walking in brisk but still hip-swinging strides. “We’re coming with you, like it or not.”

  “I choose the ‘or not’ option,” Felicity called. She never looked back or slowed her pace.

  “Better run,” Belladonna muttered, brushing past him and sprinting down the hall.

  Dallas knew a good piece of advice when he heard one. He ran.

  THIRTEEN

  SHANGHAIED

  Nausea spun like a Ferris wheel through Kallie’s guts. The sharp and crackling scent of cordite smoked the air, intensifying the roiling in her belly. She swallowed hard and closed her eyes, concentrating on not puking. At least the killer slumped underneath her wasn’t moving. A big ol’ blessing, that.

  Better get up, Kallie-girl, and find that goddamned gun before she wakes up.

  Opening her eyes and disentangling herself from the maid’s lax body, Kallie rose to her knees. Blood smeared Rosette’s face, flowing from her rapidly swelling and now-canted-to-the-left nose. Out cold.

  She hoped the platinum-blonde murderer’s skull had bounced as hard against the floor as her own had against the wall when Augustine had shoved her.

  Augustine . . .

  Spotting the maid’s gun underneath the table, Kallie stretched and snagged it. She slipped it into her bathrobe pocket, then swiveled around on her knees. She crawled over to Augustine, pain throbbing at her temples and at the back of her head. Another bout of nausea bounced through her belly.

  The Brit lay on his back, face ashen and slicked with sweat, eyes closed. A dark and glistening patch of blood spread chest level across the front of his white dress shirt.

  The man who’d stepped in front of Mama’s gun.

  No, not Mama’s gun. The crazy-ass murdering maid’s gun.

  She needed to stop the bleeding. Not seeing anything else she could use to
staunch the blood soaking into Augustine’s shirt, she unknotted her belt and yanked off her robe. Just as she pressed the pink wad of terry cloth against his wound, the door flew open, slamming into the opposite wall. An avalanche of plaster flaked to the carpet in a creamy snowfall.

  Kallie felt the action’s violent vibrations more than heard it, since her ears were still ringing from the gunshots.

  A handful of HA warriors slipped into the room, one after another, with SWAT team speed and efficiency, faces expressionless enough to win poker games, their huge black guns aimed at her.

  Keeping pressure on the bathrobe/towel, Kallie nodded at the unconscious murdering bitch sprawled on the floor. “She was trying to shoot me, but got him instead.” Her voice sounded distant and muffled, lost in a thick bank of fog. Pain ricocheted against the inside of her skull.

  Two guards stepped past Kallie and Augustine to deal with the maid, while another knelt on the floor beside Augustine and across from Kallie. The guard pushed his shades up to the top of his brush-cut blond head as he thumped a black medic’s case onto the floor. “Your head’s bleeding,” he said, unlatching the case. “You sure you didn’t take a bullet?”

  “I’m sure. Just got knocked into a wall,” Kallie replied. “What can I do to help?”

  The guard looked at her from beneath his pale brows, a faint smile pulling at one corner of his mouth. Kallie realized that she’d probably shouted her reply. Pointing to her ears, she shrugged.

  The guard snapped on latex gloves, his ice-blue eyes sweeping over her and lingering for a split second on her red-lace-framed cleavage. “Just what you’re doing. Keep applying pressure. I’m gonna get an IV line going.”

  Kallie blinked. Warriors, magicians, and . . . medics? “Got it.” She pressed down with both hands, but dread curled cold along her spine when she saw blood darkening her bathrobe compress.

  From out in the hall, Kallie heard strained shouts, some desperate—is that the leprechaun?—some frost-edged and insistent—and Layne?—while others barked commands, but she couldn’t make out any words.

  If it is the nomads, what the hell are they doing here?

  Augustine groaned as the guard/medic slipped a needle into a large vein on the back of his right hand. His eyelashes fluttered.

  Deciding to whisper in hopes of keeping her decibel level down, Kallie said, “Augustine, hey, hang on. You’re safe now. Just hold on, okay?”

  The Brit’s eyes shuttered open, revealing dilated eyes rimmed with thunderhead gray. “Yes, by all means,” he gasped, his voice bubbling and liquid. He blinked. “Where is your bathrobe, Ms. Rivière?”

  “You’re wearing it. And it looks like I owe you big-time. Since I don’t like owing anyone, you’re just gonna hafta to put all of your effort into pulling through this so I can pay my debt.”

  Augustine crooked an unsteady finger. Kallie lowered her head, angling her ear against his bloodstained lips. “Naturally, the last thing I want is for my death to inconvenience you, Ms. Rivière,” he whispered.

  Kallie lifted her head and smiled. “You give good sass. That’s a fine quality in a man. But you ain’t dying. Now shut up and save your breath.”

  “You know, you really need . . . to stop punching . . . people,” he bubbled.

  “Shut up, I said.”

  “Your bedside manner must draw . . . admiring students from all . . . around the globe.”

  “Hush, you, or I’m gonna fetch the duct tape.”

  Closing her eyes, Kallie tried to draw white light into her, tried to visualize it flowing smooth and bright as sunlit chalk through her fingertips, tried to filter it through the bathrobe and into the Brit’s gun-shot chest, but the light—thin as a ghost and twice as pale—wisped away whenever she reached for it.

  Pain drummed a fierce rhythm behind her eyes, shattered her focus. For one dizzying moment she felt just like she had while trapped in the goddamned chair—bound with tight straps of prickling energy while pain pummeled her from the inside, as if someone was trying to batter their way free. Then the uncomfortable and alien—Alien? Really? Sure you didn’t feel something like this after you saw Mama put a bullet in Papa’s skull?— sensation vanished. Uneasiness coiled around her spine.

  Gotta be this sigiled-up room, that’s all. Now focus.

  Kallie reeled in her fragmented thoughts and tried to hook them together again. Centering herself, she chanted, “Seal the wound to keep the blood where it belongs . . .” But her aching mind refused to cough up a rhyme and refused to guide the incantation’s flow.

  Despite the fuzziness blurring her thoughts, Kallie reached again for the white light. But it wisped away once more and her concentration dissolved like sugar in hot tea.

  “I knew it.”

  Kallie opened her eyes and met Augustine’s victorious gaze. “You’re supposed to keep quiet,” she reminded him. “So you can, y’know, keep breathing.”

  A faint smirk tugged at his lips. “I knew it wasn’t just that charm—” His eyes widened as his words ended in a long, low sigh. The triumphant light in his eyes vanished like a flame snuffed by a yanked-open door. His head lolled to one side, a dark wing of hair sweeping across his forehead.

  Fear spiked through Kallie. “No, no, don’t do this. Stay here!” She grasped his chin with one shaking hand, turning his face back to her. His half-lidded and unfocused eyes looked through her. Empty as Gage’s.

  The monitor the HA guard/medic had just hooked up to Augustine emitted a long and steady beeeeeeep. “Shit! He’s crashed!”

  Someone grabbed Kallie by the shoulders, shoving her back as another guard dropped beside Augustine’s body to help with the resuscitation efforts. Her bloodied bathrobe was tossed aside and Augustine’s shirt torn open. Muffled voices swirled around her, shouting instructions. Kallie sat back on her heels, numb to the heart, knowing it was too late, their efforts futile.

  Basil Augustine was dead.

  Multiple ka-chunk s ricocheted through the hall as gun slides were pulled back and rounds were chambered. Multiple pairs of sunglass-shaded gazes targeted Layne. Aimed bigass gun barrels.

  Layne released his fingers from the grip of the Glock still tucked into the front of his jeans and lifted both hands palms out into the air. “I came up here to talk to Augustine,” he said, keeping his voice level. “Then I heard the gunfire. Just here to help.”

  “Gun on the floor and move slow if you plan on remaining lead-free.”

  Keeping his empty hand in the air, Layne slipped his Glock free of his jeans. He bent, jacket creaking, and placed it on the scarlet-flowered Persian carpet. Slid it toward the guards fanned out along the hall. Each and every gun barrel seemed to be aimed at the center of his forehead. He straightened slowly, pain radiating out from his sternum. He kept both hands lifted.

  A strange odor floated in the air—the stink of rotten eggs and brimstone mingled with sweet black licorice. The brimstone spoke of discharged magic and explained the pair of crumpled bodies in black stretched out along the carpet in front of one of the rooms marked with a Q.

  A hard fist knuckled into Layne’s shoulder blade—a punch quickly followed by an eye-watering yank on his dreads.

  “Dammit, Valin,” Mc Kenna spat, “yer—”

  “Man-stupid,” he finished. “Yeah, yeah. I know.” And at the moment, he agreed, even if he had no intention of saying so out loud.

  “Freeze! Hands in the air!” one of the guards shouted. “Maybe I should just kill you and save myself further grief,” McKenna said, releasing his dreads so she could knuckle another blow into his biceps before complying with the guard’s demand. “Ye planning on following Gage into the grave? Is tha’ it?”

  Startled, Layne looked at her. Standing beside him, her hands in the air, McKenna regarded him with cold dark eyes, her face a shaman’s unreadable mask. “No, shuvani, no. That ain’t it.”

  “Running toward gunfire? You coulda fooled me.” Layne held her icy gaze for a moment before shaking his head. He
couldn’t explain to her what he himself didn’t understand—the feelings burning through his heart—not without sounding like an even bigger man-stupid idiot.

  Gage died in Kallie Rivière’s place and paid for her life with his own, and now it’s my duty to make sure she stays alive, to make sure that no one succeeds in closing her violet eyes forever. It’s the only way I can give his death some kind of meaning.

  “It was all adrenaline, shuvani,” Layne murmured.

  “Both of you—hands against the wall, legs apart,” one of the guards barked, waving toward the other side of the hall with his big-ass-barreled gun.

  With a sigh, Layne turned around and splayed his hands against the cream-colored damask walls and spread his feet apart. The cold barrel of a gun slid between his dreads and nuzzled the back of his neck.

  “Take your jacket off and drop it on the floor,” a female voice said.

  Keeping his movements slow and deliberate, Layne shrugged off his jacket, then dropped it as instructed. The round metal studs decorating the leather jacket’s bottom half jingled as it hit the carpet.

  “Hands back on the wall,” the guard said. “And keep very still.”

  “Like a stone,” Layne said. “Can you tell me what’s happened? Does it have anything to do with the murder that happened a coupla hours ago?”

  “By ‘keep very still,’ I meant your mouth too, road-rider.”

  “Ain’t you just fulla sunshine?”

  “Don’t make me Tase you.”

  “Wouldn’t want that, no.” After a hard poke against the back of Layne’s neck, the gun barrel vanished and he breathed a little easier. Easy for a finger to slip on a trigger—sometimes even accidentally.

  From beside him, Layne heard Mc Kenna tell whoever was searching her, “You put those hands anywhere they don’t belong an’ ye’ll be getting yer face panned in.”

  “I think I’d have to find you a stepladder first, ma’am.”

  “Aye, most likely,” she grumbled.

  Layne snorted in amusement. “I wouldn’t advise it. She’ll tear you up.”

  “One more peep outta you,” Layne’s guard advised, “and you’ll make me do something you’ll regret and I’ll enjoy.”