“I know. I found the holy grail. Went back in time, found it, and followed it up to the present. I know how to conduct a patient search.”
“Of what?” Becca asked. “The whole world?”
“You’d be surprised how little interaction there is among magic users from different language backgrounds. I can almost always find what I’m looking for here in North America.”
“Like, the whole continent,” Becca said, feeling dumb again. Abby nodded.
“I don’t expect you to understand,” she said. “It really is a lot more complicated than I make it out to be.”
“Abby’s the best there’s ever been,” Lange said.
“Am not,” Abby said. “I think the guy they called Merlin was a psychic.”
“He was a mage, I thought,” Lange said.
“Exactly,” Abby said, tipping her head back.
“Focus,” Becca said, loudly. “How does this help me?”
“Oh, he’s going to love you,” Abby said with a kind of irony that made it impossible to tell what she meant by it.
“I’ve got to be there when it happens,” Lange said.
“I’d be watching, except that she’s there,” Abby agreed, tapping her fingers together. “Be strong. You aren’t here begging. But don’t be demanding, either.” She looked over her shoulder at Lange. “You think it’s worth risking a Sam play?”
“Could backfire,” Lange said.
“Could,” Abby agreed, narrowing her eyes at Becca. “And they don’t look at all alike.”
“I’m not pretending to be someone else,” Becca said.
“No,” Abby said. “I’m convinced he misses her. He’s cranky all the time, and I think that’s why. If we could trigger some sort of association, because you’re young…”
“Thought he just about kicked her out the first time she showed up,” Lange said. Abby nodded.
“It’s a good point.”
Becca threw her hands up.
“That’s it,” she said. “Enough. I’m doing this. None of this is helping.”
Abby and Lange looked at each other.
Lange shrugged.
Abby shrugged back.
“Sounds like you’re as ready as you’re going to be,” Lange said, standing.
Abby’s eyes went vacant for a moment.
“He’s out shopping,” she said. “If we hurry, we’ll beat him back to the apartment.”
“We can take my car,” Lange said.
Abby nodded and started walking. Becca felt distinctly like things had left her control the moment Abby had showed up, but she was getting what she wanted.
She went with it.
Lange turned off of the street onto a ramp that went steeply down below a building. A gate into the garage opened as he waited, and he pulled through. As they passed the gate, Becca had the sensation of her face hitting cold water. She wiped at it absently, catching Abby’s look at her in the mirror. She didn’t ask and Abby didn’t say anything, but Becca made a note to be more careful how she behaved around Abby. The woman saw everything.
Lange parked in a garage full of old cars and went to push a button on an elevator. Abby looked around the garage with a poignancy that Becca didn’t understand, then followed Lange onto the elevator. Becca was the last one in before the doors dinged closed. Up five floors, and back off into a hallway with one door. Carter had the entire floor to himself. Abby went to the door and twisted the knob, but nothing happened for a moment.
Time delay of some kind on the handle. Interesting.
Eventually, the door made a low-pitched unbolting sound and Abby pushed it open.
“Don’t go through the fridge, don’t go into his room, and for heaven’s sake, don’t go into Sam’s room,” she said.
“You aren’t staying?” Lange asked.
“I need to not be here,” Abby said. “But I expect you to remember everything.”
She gave Becca a small, bracing nod, then went back to the elevator.
“How will she get home without a car?” Becca asked. Lange raised an eyebrow at her.
“The same way all New Yorkers do,” he said with a shrug. “Come on.”
He pushed the door all the way open and Becca craned her head to look in.
The front room went the entire width of the front of the apartment building, wood floors, plank walls, and somewhere in a dim overhead, wooden rafters. It had a healthy, earthen feel to it, under the dark and the sparseness. There was a round kitchen table off to her left, the same beaten color of wood as the rest of the apartment, and a kitchen to the right, bar stools along a long counter that separated the kitchen from the rest of the room. Two doors on the right, beyond the kitchen, then the wall cut into the room and then another door that faced the front wall. One black leather couch against the front wall, across from the third door, and that was it. No decoration. Nothing fabric or colorful. Steel appliances and wood whose only finish was time.
She kind of liked it. Not like she would have felt at home, here, but it wasn’t as menacing or foreboding as she would have expected, given Carter’s reputation.
Lange went and threw himself on the couch, sprawling across it like he belonged here, but Becca sat down at a chair, suddenly alert, aware that she was in a man’s apartment when he wasn’t expecting her to be here. He would be within his rights to shoot her on sight. She certainly knew Makkai who would assault first and ask questions later.
Seconds crept by and she tried not to fidget. She thought she heard Lange start to snore, but she didn’t look. She sat with her eyes trained on that door, waiting.
Wondering what she was actually going to say when he came in.
What he would say.
More time. She had no idea how long. Minutes, probably. And then the door bolt dropped and the door swung open.
Becca sat a fraction straighter.
A man with wallstreet hair and a full suit came into the room, walking directly to the counter and stopping, his hands out to either side, never facing her. He hadn’t seen her. Becca tried to figure out what to say that wouldn’t startle him.
“You bringing guests into my house now, Lange?” he asked.
“She came to me,” Lange called from the couch. “I’m just here to watch.”
Carter turned slowly, leaning back against the counter and looked at Becca through lowered eyelids.
“Who are you and what are you doing here?” he asked. He had a boyish face, smooth and scarless, and if someone had told her that he wasn’t shaving yet, she would have believed them.
“I’m Becca,” she answered and his hand twitched. Suddenly she wasn’t speaking anymore. It wasn’t magic. It was just something about him. He turned his head and looked at Lange.
“This?” he said. “This is Gypsy Becca?”
Becca’s head snapped to look at Lange.
“You’ve been talking about me to him, too?”
He put his hands up by his shoulders.
“It came up,” he said.
“She’s a child,” Carter said.
“She’s a woman by their standards,” Lange said.
“In what world does that matter?” Becca asked.
“I’m thinking Abby had the right idea,” Lange said. “I should have bailed.”
“Yes,” Carter said. “I’m going to have to have a word with her about the reason I permitted her access here, once we’re done.”
He turned to look at Becca again.
“Go on.”
She drew a breath.
“Do you know who Bella is?”
He dropped his head slightly, looking wolfishly at her with unamused eyes.
“Which one?”
“The one who is the queen of my tribe,” Becca said. He nodded.
“I know of her. Argo pays her to do menial work, from time to time.”
“Do you know what happened to that tribe ten years ago?” Becca asked. He yawned.
“Before me,” he said. “But that should have b
een about the time she took over.”
“And do you know why she took over?” Becca asked. He pursed his lips, still looking bored.
“That would be because the old queen died. Are we getting to a point here? My time is very valuable.”
“It’s happening again,” Becca said. He blinked.
“So?”
“Someone is going to stalk Bella and eventually try to kill her,” Becca said. “We think there’s a mage involved.”
He reached behind the counter and came up with a granola bar that he proceeded to peel.
“Go on,” he said around his first bite. She glowered.
“There’s dark magic involved,” she said. “And we have it under control, but if you were going to help, now would be the time.”
“You mean before her children turn up with rabies,” he said. There wasn’t a trace of humor on his face, no sign for her to go on to tell her how she was doing. But that he knew so much… that had to say something positive, didn’t it?
“You know who they are,” she said. “You know why they’re important. You don’t need me to convince you. Nothing I say is going to change what you know. You are going to help us.”
He chewed.
“Is that your attempt at a Jedi mind trick?” he asked before he swallowed.
“No,” she said. “It’s just what is.”
The corner of his mouth twitched.
“You know you make him look gutless,” he said, tipping his head to the side to indicate Lange. “He’s been trying to figure out how to get me to do something for months now, and he’s never come at it directly.”
“I’m Makkai,” she said. It seemed right. He laughed. There wasn’t any happiness on his face, but that was certainly a laugh.
“Why isn’t the old lady from here in the city here talking to me?” he asked, walking around the counter to get something out of the refrigerator. He poured a tall glass of orange juice and set it on the counter, bracing on locked arms to watch her again.
“Because it’s tribe business and because Lange would help me,” Becca said.
“Yes,” Carter said, casting another glance at Lange. Heavy brows knit at the center of his forehead, and then he nodded.
“I’ll do it,” he said.
“What?” Lange squawked. “Why?”
“Because it’s going to amuse me,” Carter said. Becca scarce believed he knew how to have fun, but she wasn’t going to point it out. “And because I don’t like the idea that the mages in New Orleans are going to get away with something because I’m not watching them.”
“You think this is coming out of New Orleans?” Lange asked. Carter was still watching Becca.
“Someone stalked and killed gypsy queens for a decade before Bella turned up. My bet is that they didn’t have the juice to take her, then, and they’ve been working on it ever since. And now they’re ready to take a run at her.” Deep brown eyes shot a look over at Lange without the smooth face shifting. “If they aren’t from out of New Orleans, they’ve been there and everyone knows them.”
“We don’t know why,” Becca said. He shook his head.
“Don’t care. Doesn’t matter to me.”
He looked at Lange.
“You ever bring a gypsy in here again, I will drop you out this window and see if you run out of intestines before you hit the ground.”
“You got a problem with Makkai?” Becca asked.
“No,” Carter said, not looking back at her. “Well, yes, but not as big a problem as the demons have.” His head swiveled again. “Hard enough to get demons to deliver dry cleaning as it is. They think it’s below them. This place starts smelling like Makkai, they’re never going to do it again.”
She had no idea what that meant, but it didn’t sound racist, so she let it go.
“You didn’t think he was going to help me,” she said standing to look at Lange.
“I didn’t think he was going to help you that easy,” he said, finding his feet.
“You know what would be fun?” Carter asked abruptly. “Taking her to Toby’s.”
“That’s exactly what I was thinking,” Lange said.
“I’m not a dancing bear,” Becca said.
“No,” Carter said. “But if you want me to help you, you’re going to have to keep in mind that my amusement is about the only thing I care about.”
He was standing out at the end of the counter, leaning his hips against it, watching her as if she were a bug under glass. He really didn’t care if she lived or died, she realized. She didn’t think she’d ever met someone so cold, even with Argo and his people considered. They were hot-tempered, at least. Carter was just… empty.
“I’m no whore, either,” she said. She was standing at her full height. Unafraid. They needed him. If she managed to offend him so badly that he decided they weren’t worth it, she could easily have caused Bella’s death. On the other hand, the Makkai were proud, and he knew it. If she backed down too easily, she wouldn’t be any fun. Abby had just about said as much. And Bella had chosen her because she said things she wasn’t supposed to say.
She wasn’t going to spend her time second-guessing herself. She was here, she was alone, and she was strong. He wasn’t going to drive that out of her with fear.
That wasn’t who the Makkai were.
He pursed his lips.
“Do you want to go make a room full of demons obscenely uncomfortable?” he asked. One slow blink. She let herself think about it.
“Yes,” she said. He nodded.
“Then it’s settled. We’re going to Toby’s.”
Toby’s was apparently a theater. Great pillars stood at intervals along a front walk with half a dozen double doors going into a big, red-floored lobby. The ceiling was black. Becca didn’t think this was necessarily tasteful, for a theater, but maybe it was normal in New York.
As she went through the doors, she felt the air change. From a sort of normal, city-ish sooty and unclean smell, it went to foul, tepid, perhaps a bit sweet. She wrinkled her nose. Neither Carter nor Lange reacted to it; she figured they must have been used to it.
The lobby had a few men and women in it, dressed well - better than Becca - but not to suit the architecture of the place. She’d expected to be embarrassingly underdressed when she’d seen it, but they were in nice work clothes, rather than suits and gowns. Carter stuck out; Lange didn’t.
The people in the lobby reacted to the three of them immediately. Sharp eyes turned in at her, though Becca didn’t back down. In places that knew what gypsies were, knew how to recognize them, this wasn’t an uncommon reception.
“Which ones are demons?” she asked quietly.
“You tell me,” Carter said. She looked at him and he raised his eyebrows. “You’re the Makkai. Prove it.”
She put her hand in her pocket and found her focus stone, closing her hand around it and looking at the first person in her line of sight, first looking hard, pulling in details, trying to find something about them that stood out. Nothing there, so she switched to smell. Did the foul odor come off of them? Again, she got nothing from scent. Would she have to touch them to tell? Would they be hot?
There was a sigh behind her.
“Tell them when you get back that you were insultingly naive,” Carter said.
“Demons are your problem,” Becca answered. “We don’t deal with them unless one of your people is slacking.”
She looked back. He had his fingers tucked into his pockets, thumbs out, and elbows out in a sort of relaxed posture. Commanding. He might have been amused. She couldn’t tell.
“It isn’t as complicated as you’re making it,” he said. “You’re Makkai. Just tell me who the demons are.”
And then she felt it. Against her back, without her eyes distracting her, she could feel the points of pressure, like someone pushing eggs against her spine. There, there, there. She turned.
“They’re all demons.”
Carter passed her, pulling open anoth
er pair of doors as the demons around her edged further away.
“Every last one of them,” he said.
The theater was dark, and it wasn’t a theater any more.
They’d pulled all of the furniture out of it and there were flashing lights and tables. The stench in here made Becca feel momentarily faint. Lange caught her shoulder with his chest as he went past, going to a table. She eased into a chair next to him, wondering what she’d gotten herself into. All around her - she could feel it now - there were demons. Ones that were reacting to her, physically turning to face her as they felt her presence the same way she felt theirs. Several hissed. Carter put his foot up on the chair next to him and reclined low in his seat.
“Drinks, Lange,” he said.
Lange grunted, but went along with it, disappearing.
“You know any more about dark magic than you do demons?” Carter asked.
“Didn’t know it existed until Tuesday,” Becca answered.
“They do like to keep you in the dark about everything,” he said. “You know about light magic?”
“That it’s better than dark magic,” Becca answered.
“And mages?”
“Do all three.”
“And that’s the whole of what they told you, isn’t it?” he asked. She moved chairs to hear him better.
“I don’t need to know about mages,” she said. “I know what I need to know.”
He would try to trick her. To get information from her. She needed to be careful.
But she also needed to keep him involved. Keep him willing to help.
“You do need to know,” he said. “If anyone is going to keep Bella alive, it’s going to be someone who isn’t stuck in doing things the way the Makkai have always done them.”
“What does that mean?” Becca asked. He shook his head.
“You used every bit of magic you had to keep Mona alive, didn’t you?” he asked. Something came flying across the room and he put his hand up. Whatever it was, it stopped dead in the air and fell on the floor with a wettish noise. Becca didn’t look at it. Tried not to look impressed or surprised. She opened her mouth to answer his question, but didn’t know what to say. He gave her an exasperated look.
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