by Karen Chance
The wind was fluttering real lace at Radu’s throat and wrists when I looked back at him, and ruffling the long dark hair that he didn’t always keep as tightly confined as his brother did. “What are you doing here?” I demanded, half expecting to hear my voice echo, since we were talking inside my head.
Radu didn’t answer. He seemed a little preoccupied, possibly because the insanely realistic picture Mircea had conjured up had some holes in it. Literally, I realized, following ’Du’s gaze to where pieces of things—buildings, the far end of a road, whole swaths of the sky—simply weren’t there. The weirdest one was a nearby skyscraper that just disappeared halfway up, like King Kong had passed by and had a snack.
“What’s wrong?” I asked, gripping his arm.
“I…Nothing.” He looked a little paler than usual. “I suppose those are areas you simply didn’t notice.”
“What?”
“Well, we don’t, do we?” he asked, a little more forcefully. “Even when we’re on hyper alert, we can’t notice everything.”
“But my memory doesn’t look like this!” I gestured at the moon, which was visible in the water but noticeably absent from the sky. Or maybe it was just behind some clouds; I wasn’t enthusiastic about looking for it since the sky had the most gaps, with massive areas filled with nothing but boiling black mist.
“Well, it would,” Radu said. “But your brain usually fills in the blanks.”
“With what?”
“With guesswork. That’s why many optical illusions work. Didn’t you know?”
“No.” And I could have lived without finding out. “Then why aren’t I filling in the blanks now?”
Radu tilted his head slightly, like he was listening to something I couldn’t hear. “Mircea said you would be, but he’s cutting through all that. We can’t have fantasy or mental manipulation filling in areas when it may fill them in wrong, do you see?”
“Yeah.” I repressed an urge to hug my arms around myself. “Yeah, I guess.” I sure as hell didn’t want to have to do this again because I’d dreamed up the wrong information. I looked at him. “Why are you here again?”
“Mircea can’t maintain the connection and also serve as your guide. That’s my job.”
“Okay, guide,” I said, glancing around. “Where to?”
“Well, how should I know? It’s your memory. I’m just here to pull you out if anything goes wrong.”
I had been watching a nearby ship bobbing about on the waves, or should I say half a ship, since I’d apparently never gotten around to noticing the back half. But at that I turned my eyes on ’Du. “What could go wrong? I’m sitting in the living room. Right?”
“Well, yes, your body is. But it’s your mind we’re concerned with here, Dory.”
I took a moment to process that. “You’re telling me that something could go wrong with my mind?”
“No, no, not at all. Nothing like.”
“Good.” For a minute there, I’d been a little worried. I wasn’t exactly the poster child for mental stability as it was. The last thing I needed—
“Of course, there have been a few incidents.”
Radu was fiddling with the lace on his sleeve. “Incidents?”
“Of people who, well, went too far in. You can become lost, you see, wandering about from one old memory to the next, until you forget where you came in and—” He stopped, belatedly noticing my expression. “It almost never happens. And in any case, that’s why I am here. To see that it doesn’t.”
“And you’ve done this how many times before?”
…
“’Du—”
“I know the theory, Dory,” he said testily. “And I’m related to both of you, which makes me more…in sync…if you will, and a better bridge than anyone else could be. It’s safer to have me do this than some stranger, however experienced. Which is why Mircea brought me along.”
I stared at him. “That makes me feel so much better.”
“Yes, I thought it would,” Radu said. “But problems are more frequent when the subject is tired, and this sort of thing is fairly draining. We should get going.”
Great. So not only was I in Wonderland, I was on a freaking timer. “How long do I have?”
“I don’t know. That depends on you. A few minutes?”
“A few minutes? How am I supposed to find anything useful in—”
I stopped, because I’d just caught sight of the fairly odd image of myself, slipping through the shadows of the ships and pilings. I was wearing my usual work uniform of black leather jacket, black jeans and black boots, and managing to be almost invisible against the night. But I wasn’t doing as good a job as whoever was with me.
Try as I might, I couldn’t get a clear look at him. I couldn’t even manage to bring him into focus unless he was silhouetted against the ghostly outline of a hull. And even then he was just a vaguely man-shaped cloud, or a dim shadow of someone who wasn’t actually—
“There.” Lawrence paused, the particles coalescing enough to allow speech. “The black one.”
I looked at the ship in question, a long, sleek, ebony torpedo in one of the larger berths, melding into the night almost as seamlessly as Lawrence did, looking exotic next to the flock of clunkier, paler specimens moored all around. But I didn’t see anything else of interest. Or smell, since Lawrence had been following a scent trail.
“You’re sure?” I asked, because all I could smell was brine and fish and gasoline, and the lingering scent of the cologne the now sleeping watchman had been wearing.
“No.”
Lawrence sounded surprised, which made sense. Before he’d moved on to the illustrious heights of first-level master, he had been a Hound—a vampire gifted with even better olfactory senses than the norm, which were already pretty damned good. It was why he’d been chosen for this assignment, since it required tracing a tiny thread of a scent across half a city not known for the pristine quality of its air.
“What do you mean, ‘no’?” I whispered, even though we were using a sound shield. It was just that kind of place. “Varus is either in there or he isn’t.”
Lawrence didn’t answer, but he coalesced a little more, the misty particles of his being coming together into the shape of a tall, thin vampire with creepy red eyes. Not hay-fever red, not hungover red. Not even I-smoked-too-many-joints-tonight-oh-God red. They were the solid crimson of a stoplight, with the same faint glowing quality to them. Though stoplights didn’t send shivers up my back when I looked at them.
Most vampires can pass for human even without a glamourie, but Lawrence clearly wasn’t one of them. And he couldn’t use a glamourie and his special sparkly master power at the same time, which left me running around with what looked like the spawn of Satan. Which would have been fine—if Satan’s spawn had been able to do the job.
“He was,” Lawrence told me, tipping his head back and then to the side, following some scent too faint for me to detect. “And he did not leave.”
“He went in there and didn’t leave, but he isn’t there now?” I asked, for clarification.
Lawrence nodded.
“You mean, someone brought him here and killed him?”
“No. There is no stench of blood or decomposition.”
“Then how does that work?”
“As I said, I do not know. But I am going to.” And before I could stop him, he had disintegrated into what looked like a swarm of black bees, if the bees were too small to see and had no more substance than ash as they blew by my face. And onto the ship, where they disappeared under a door.
Damn it!
This was why I worked alone. Because stupid assholes with impulse control issues gave me a headache. For a minute there, I contemplated leaving him to look around on his own, since a cloud of mist or ash or whatever was a lot less likely to get holes blown through it than I was. And this was smelling more like a trap every second. But ironically, in his disjointed state Lawrence had less sensory perception than I di
d, his super nose apparently not able to do its job when dissolved into a million pieces.
So if this was a trap, he’d just gone in blind.
I slipped down the pier to the ship, which was bigger than it had seemed at a distance. There was no deck, just an ultramodern domed and gleaming expanse of obsidian Plexiglas, and no convenient gangplank left out Hollywood-like for me to use. So I backed up, as far as I could go without falling in the drink, ran and jumped—over the low railing running along the pier and onto the tiny area where the gangplank would have been if my life had a decent screenwriter.
Because it doesn’t, I’ve had to develop some skills through the years, and I somehow stuck the landing. And then realized that it didn’t do me much good since, of course, the damned door was locked. I stood there, balanced on the maybe half-inch lip, grumbling under my breath and sorting through my pockets for something that might get the door open since I couldn’t just avoid it like some—
“Sorry to interrupt,” a head said, poking out of the door. And causing me to jump back in surprise. Which would have been fine if there had been anything behind me.
I flailed out even as I fell, trying to find a handhold or a foothold or any kind of a hold to avoid cracking my head on the damned concrete dock. Or the pylons. Or whatever was under the water that I couldn’t see but was about to experience the hard way, when my fingertips managed to snag the lip I’d been standing on. My body hit the side of the ship hard enough to rattle my teeth, while my fingers were almost wrenched out of their sockets trying to hold my entire weight.
I hung there for a second, watching little waves splash against the side of the ship and trying to convince myself that I shouldn’t attempt to murder the guy whose long hair was almost brushing my face.
“What?” I said, glaring up at Radu. Who was looking fairly pleased for some reason.
“Oh, good. You should be able to see it from there.”
“See what?”
“The name.”
“The name?”
“Of the ship. We need to know—”
I said a bad word and started struggling to get back up. “There’s only one black ship in the whole damned marina! How hard can it be—”
“But that’s just it. There was no ship, of any color, in that slip this morning. And Kit wants—”
“Kit can kiss my ass,” I grunted. Because fingertip chin-ups aren’t fun even when you have more than half an inch to work with. “And if you want the ship’s name, look for it yourself!”
“This is your memory, Dory,” he told me, in a voice that said he was overlooking my rudeness because he was generous like that. “I only see what you see. And by the way, Mircea says to tell you that you’re getting tired. We need to hurry this up.”
“I also…have a few things…you can tell Mircea,” I panted, somehow getting back into position. And then having to practically rupture something to maintain my balance while checking out the hull in both directions. “Tell him there’s no name.”
“None whatsoever?”
“No! And if you want me to hurry this up, you need to—”
“What are you doing?”
“Augghh!”
A head shoved through the door at me, but I somehow kept my balance. Even with the sight of those evil red eyes staring into mine from all of an inch away. Which was less of an ick factor than the neck ending in a working black mass, like a million ants were trying to consume it.
I swallowed.
“If you’d given me a moment, I would have opened the door,” Lawrence said mildly.
“Yeah, well. You failed to mention that.”
“I wouldn’t leave a partner behind,” he told me. Which would have been more comforting if the ants hadn’t taken that moment to swarm over his face, molding to the features until they were just nose- and mouth- and chin-shaped protrusions in a horrible, squirming mask. Until even that winked out and the door opened, so abruptly that I stumbled through his body on the other side.
It took everything I could do not to wipe frantically at my skin as the boiling black mass spun up around me. And then coalesced a few feet away into a vampire in a dark-colored suit. He looked like he had all the requisite parts, but my mouth still felt full of ash, my throat clogged with it, my heart beating double time because, damn.
“Take the back; I’ll cover the front,” he told me, as if nothing had happened. I just nodded. The sooner this was done, the better.
There wasn’t much to see in the living area, which was decorated in stark black and white. Plush white couches sat on gleaming black hardwood, which also supported a white baby grand. Black and white and red art prints were scattered over walls, although there weren’t any of the kind of personal photos that might have been expected. There weren’t any personal touches at all that I could see, except for a carved raven perched over a door, its gleaming obsidian feathers catching the light through a porthole.
Very literary, I thought, staring up at it. But not very reassuring. There also weren’t any signs of a wanted ex-lieutenant, so I moved on.
Down a flight of stairs were the bedrooms, five of them facing each other along a short hall, with the master at the end. I tried to scent something out of place without actually going into the rooms, because if there was going to be a ward or trap, it would likely be inside. But all I smelled were teak and beeswax, bright lemon cleaner and vinegary nail polish, the tang of ozone and expensive perfume and—
Nothing.
I paused outside the door of one of the smaller cabins near the end of the hall. Unlike the others, it didn’t appear to have been used recently, with no bright living scents cutting through a layer of dust. That wouldn’t have been a big deal—maybe the owners used it for storage or just didn’t have that many guests. Except for that Nothing: a gaping hole in the middle of the room’s scent story, like someone had come along with a giant pair of scissors and simply cut it out.
There were a couple of things that could do that, including a shield that hid smells like the one I was using hid sounds. It was often employed by bad guys brewing up illegal potions and people storing otherworldly ingredients or merchandise, the smells of which were so distinctive that they’d tell anybody with a nose that something was up. And considering that we were after a bunch of smugglers, that was probably all it was, just a shield in case the local War Mage Corps got curious about somebody’s stash.
But then, there was one other thing that left a big blank hole in the world.
I was about to call the expert when I felt an insubstantial hand materialize on my shoulder. “You found something.”
“Maybe. It could just be somebody’s cache of fey wine.” Which I would, of course, have to confiscate to teach them proper respect for the law.
But Lawrence shook his head. “No.”
“You’re the expert,” I said, and kicked in the door.
And okay. That wasn’t wine. The problem was that I wasn’t sure what it was, and judging by his caution as he walked over and knelt beside it, neither was Lawrence.
It didn’t look particularly threatening—just a square hole in the floor, like a trapdoor. But this door was open, and a square column of strange underwater light was shooting out the top and puddling on the room’s ceiling. Lawrence stuck his head in the hole, the light splashing his dark coat and thin features. I took my time, checking the room for nonexistent snares, before joining him.
The trapdoor turned out to be…a trapdoor. It was what was below that was interesting. A hole had been carved through the floor of the cabin and into a crawl space, and then kept on going right down to the hull. But instead of water gushing out to flood the room, there was only a film of light across the top, eerily similar to the waves outside in the way little ripples were chasing themselves across the surface.
It didn’t really look like the portal I’d been halfway expecting, which should have been either invisible when closed or a swirling mass of color when opened. But it didn’t look like anyt
hing else, either. It also still gave off no scent that I could name, but it looked like Lawrence might be having better luck. Because he’d jumped down and stuck his nose within an inch of the shining blue surface, which was ill-advised.
And then through it, which was crazy.
I followed and jerked him back. “What are you doing?”
He looked up in mild surprise, the first expression I’d seen him use. “Going inside.”
“Going inside what?”
“This is a portal—”
“I got that.”
“—through which Varus went along with three others, two vampires and a human. The last was a mage, by the smell.”
Great. That was all we needed, to have one of them involved. “Dark or light?”
“It isn’t easy to tell. The differences are not as great as humans would have you believe. There was no stink of blood magic on him, meaning that he could be a light mage—”
“Or a dark one who just hasn’t slit anybody’s throat recently.”
“Not within the last ten days,” he agreed. “Which is as far back as my scent record goes.”
I just looked at him, but he wasn’t kidding. And then he wasn’t there anymore, either. Because the bat shit crazy loon had dissolved and flowed straight through the portal.
“Lawrence!” I hissed, but it was too late.
He was gone.
Not being insane—well, not at the moment—I jerked my coat open and dragged out my key chain. I snapped off an Eye of Argos charm, threaded it through my belt and broke the surface with that, trying to peer around. On the plus side, the belt didn’t catch fire or get chopped off, shredded, or otherwise destroyed. On the negative, I couldn’t see shit, even after adjusting the charm, except for a few tumbled rocks. The portal’s light on the other end was blocking everything else.
I sat there on my heels for a second. If it had been just the two vamps we were talking about, I wouldn’t have been too worried. Anything a vampire—well, anything a normal vampire—could survive, so could I. But the presence of the mage made it hinky. Mages had tricks and spells and wards and traps and a whole host of other nastiness at their disposal, and that was just the light kind. I really, really didn’t like the idea of going through an unknown portal into a dark who-the-hell-knew with a possible black mage running around.