by Karen Chance
I started to get up, because Marlowe was in a scary mood. But to my surprise, his eyes softened slightly at the sight of the infuriated redhead invading his personal space, and his shoulders unclenched a trifle. “Your loyalty to your friend does you credit,” he told her shortly. “But it does not alter the facts.”
“Which are?”
“That my only witnesses are a human who left early and a vampire already under interdict for a variety of crimes. And that is hardly—”
“You have Dory!”
“A dhampir has no standing under the law. She is neither vampire nor human nor mage nor any other recognized creature—”
“You’re saying no one would believe her?” Claire demanded incredulously.
“I’m saying she would never be allowed to testify. Under vampire law, she isn’t a person—”
“The hell she—”
“—while on the other side are a first-level master and a handful of second- and third-levels—from a different court, I might add, making it far harder to put pressure on them. None of whom will likely remember anything of this evening’s activities.”
“They were in a jiffy store,” Claire said mulishly. “There has to be surveillance—”
I choked out a laugh. And for the first time Marlowe glanced at me with something akin to understanding. He and I both knew what SOP was in these cases.
I hoped Singh had insurance.
“Destroyed,” Marlowe confirmed. “And even had it not been, it would allow the owner to bring a claim for damages, nothing more. A dhampir has no protection under the law. She cannot—”
“Then anyone can just attack her on sight?” Claire said in disbelief.
“Yes. Which is why her father wanted her out of this.” He shot me a resentful look. “But she seems incapable of managing to go a single day without—”
“They attacked her!” Claire said, furious all over again. “What the hell are you thinking?”
Marlowe’s brows lowered once more, and for a moment he looked like he was considering telling her. Which was why they didn’t let him handle the diplomatic stuff. I decided I could live without seeing what would happen if those two ever really got into it.
“Uh, one question,” I said, pulling those dark eyes to me.
“What?”
“You said the bodies have been showing up in portals all over the city, like flotsam.”
“Yes?”
“But portals aren’t like…like a river system, are they? They’re self-contained units. So how did the bodies get in there?”
He just looked at me. And his expression said plainly that he didn’t know how he got stuck working with such incompetents. I scowled, because it was a valid question.
“Someone must have gone to each portal to plant them,” I persisted. “So maybe someone saw—”
“They didn’t have to plant them.”
“What does that mean?”
“Ask your servant,” he said sardonically.
“My what?”
I didn’t get an answer, because the door at the top of the stairs banged open and Ray staggered in. At least, I assumed it was Ray. All I saw was a shock of dark hair over a pile of dishes that smelled so good they had me tearing up.
“Oh, for— Go eat!” Marlowe said in disgust, and turned back to yell at an unfortunate vamp who had just been spit out by the portal.
“Come on,” Ray said. “I’m setting up on the porch.”
He and his tottering mound of dishes departed, and I got to my feet, joints creaking in protest. Sitting for that long had left me stove up, and when I tried to crack my back, it went off like another shot, scaring the shit out of the vamp. Claire’s expression teetered closer to open tears.
I sighed. “It’s not as bad as it looks.”
“Of course it’s not! You wouldn’t be able to stand otherwise!”
“You shoulda seen the other guy,” I said, grinning slightly at the thought of Zheng-zi’s messed-up face. And then almost choked on something. After a second of hacking, I spat part of a tooth out into my palm.
Damn. I hated when that happened.
I looked up to find Claire staring at me with something approaching horror.
I started to say something, but the horror turned to a glare so bright, I swear I could see little flames in her pupils. “If you say you’re fine,” she told me tremulously, “I’ll kill you!”
My mouth closed abruptly, and I meekly let her lead me off to the porch.
Ray, for some reason, had gone all out. The little table we used for snacks now had a bright white drape that someone had doubled over to hide Stinky’s latest artwork. In the middle was a vase with a bunch of the neighbor’s purple hydrangeas stuffed in the top. A chair had been pulled up along one side, near the ratty old swing. It was even rattier old wicker, but a pillow had been stuffed into the seat and a chenille throw had been folded over the top.
It was surprisingly comfy, but I wouldn’t have cared if I’d been sitting on the floor, not with the things Ray was piling on the table and on the broad porch railing when he ran out of room. “I can’t eat all this,” I said, unsure that I could eat at all.
“You haven’t tried,” he pointed out. “Besides, I picked soft stuff.”
And he had. The night’s extravagance included leftover chicken and rice, mushy peas, squashy white dinner rolls, beer and some kind of mixed-berry pie. I stared at it in a kind of wonder.
“We’ll call your father,” Claire told me, as I started slathering butter on a roll. “We’ll see what he has to say about—”
“Claire. There’s nothing to prosecute for, okay?” I said, with difficulty.
“Nothing—look at you!”
I glanced helplessly at Ray, because I wasn’t up to explaining the intricacies of vampire life right at the moment. He sighed. “It’s like this,” he told her. “Zheng-zi, well, he kind of paid Dory a compliment tonight.”
“What?”
“Look. He had his guys with him. He coulda turned ’em loose on us, and it woulda been over. Dory’s good and I’m…well, Dory’s good, but no way was she taking on that many senior masters with a couple little guns and no food. It wasn’t happening, okay?”
“Well, obviously it did happen. She’s alive!”
“She’s alive because he told ’em not to interfere. She’s alive because he showed her the respect of dueling her like he would have another master, with rules and shit.”
“He still tried to kill her!”
“Masters try to kill each other all the time,” Ray pointed out. “They’re dueling each other every night up at the consul’s place. It’s one of the big bummers about being locked away; I haven’t gotten to see any of the matches.”
“Could you even get tickets?” I asked, my mouth full of buttery goodness.
“Hey, I know people,” Ray said.
“Like who?”
“Like sharks who want an arm and a leg,” he admitted. “I was gonna ask you if your father’s box had any extra seats.”
I shook my head. “Full up.”
“Damn. I mean, I’d buy ’em and all—”
“Can we talk about the fact that Dory almost died?” Claire asked, livid.
“But she didn’t, did she?” Ray pointed out. “She won. And Zheng probably wouldn’t have killed her anyway. He said—”
“Probably?” Claire’s green eyes flashed.
I thought Ray should be careful. Claire was kind of looking like she wanted an excuse. But he just cocked his head sideways. “Hey, is that the baby crying?”
“No!” she told him. Right before a distinct wail was heard echoing through the night. “Damn it!” she said. And then she bit her lip. And then she bustled off.
“You have the devil’s own luck,” I told him.
“You may as well not bother,” he told me back. “Nobody can understand you, and your tongue keeps flopping out and it’s kind of off-putting.”
I responded with a gesture, bec
ause my tongue was busy with chicken at the moment. I found that if I chewed, very carefully, on the opposite side of my mouth, it was only painful instead of excruciating. Although it would have been totally worth it, anyway. If there was a heaven, it was made of this stuff.
“And it’s not luck,” Ray told me, pouring my beer into a glass. I usually didn’t bother, but it was nice, all frosty and chilled and stuff. He handed it to me and my fingers made little heat prints on the sides. “There’s a party in the backyard and Marlowe’s got a dozen men coming in and out, slamming doors and clomping around downstairs. Who could sleep through all that?”
“That’s smart,” I said, surprised.
“I can be smart.” He looked offended. “And I told you, don’t talk.”
I decided that might be best, and settled for watching him try to clean up the kids’ chess game. He’d set it on the floor in order to have a place to put the grub, which would have been fine if this were a normal game. But this was one Olga had enchanted for the kids, and troll magic tended to be a little…peculiar.
The pieces, which looked like miniature trolls and ogres, were fine as long as they stayed on the board. It enclosed them in their own little world, where they could stalk and ambush and whack the heck out of each other to their hearts’ content. But Ray had managed to knock a few of them off the board when he moved it, and they were now milling around in confusion.
One had wandered into one of Claire’s gardening clogs, where it was setting up what looked like a defensive position. Another was floundering around in the clutches of a mop, slashing at the gray threads with a tiny sword. And a third, a little mottled-looking fellow with wild hair, a crazed expression and just a ragged pair of pants left from his once nice uniform, was making a break for the stairs.
Ray clapped a clear plastic cup over the wild man with one hand, and grabbed the one battling the mop monster with the other. And promptly snatched that hand back. A tiny bead of blood was welling up on one finger.
He held it out to me. “What the hell is this?”
“You’ve got to keep them on the board,” I told him in between bites.
“Or what?”
“Or they get…feisty.”
“Screw that!” he said, grabbing the mop guy. “They’re going back in the box.”
I shrugged. I mostly just left them out anymore. It was easier.
But Ray managed to get two of the three back in their ogre- and troll-shaped cutouts, where the enchantment froze them in place. And then he turned to the wild man under the cup, who was making a series of familiar gestures. Ray got down on eye level and blinked at it.
A tiny face pressed against the side of the plastic, distorting tinier features for a moment, as the two of them sized each other up. Small fists were raised, and then the little creature turned around and something else was lowered. And a couple other things were pressed firmly against the plastic.
“Is that…what is he…is he mooning me?” Ray demanded.
I grinned, and then quit because it hurt. “That one’s a little weird,” I told him.
“That one’s about to be mush!” he said, grabbing it out of its temporary prison. “What’s wrong with it anyway? It looks like it’s been painted.”
“Something like that,” I said drily.
“What?”
“Stinky swallowed it a couple weeks ago.”
“Swallowed?” His lip curled. “Then how—”
“It came through okay, but it’s never been quite right since.”
Ray dropped it like it was hot. “You have a weird house,” he told me, smacking the cup back over it and wiping his hand on his pants.
I shrugged. I really couldn’t argue the point. He put a brick on the cup, got a beer and propped up on the swing, watching me stuff my face. The creak of the chain blended with the sound of music and light laughter from the garden, which I couldn’t see too well because of the glow from the house behind me. But it was nice.
“So,” he said casually, after a few minutes. “You’re, uh, you’re in a better mood now, right?”
I was, I thought, looking up suspiciously. “Why?”
“’Cause, uh, there might be some stuff we need to talk about.”
“Like what?”
“Oh, this and, uh…”
“Good stuff?” I asked, knowing damned well it wasn’t. My life didn’t work like that.
“Well, you know.…”
Crap.
Chapter Fourteen
The table and the glass and the freaking flowers should have clued me in, I thought sourly. “What?”
“See, you’re already mad. I knew that was gonna happen,” Ray complained.
“Then why bring it up?”
“’Cause I don’t have a choice. We have to talk. But I’m not good at it and I don’t want to piss you off, ’cause you’re already looking a little…tense. So this probably isn’t the right time, but if I don’t get to it soon, someone else will and that could be bad depending on who we’re talking about—”
“Pencil,” I said, as distinctly as I could, which apparently wasn’t distinct enough.
“What?”
“Pen. Cil.”
“Oh. I don’t—wait. I got a pen,” he said, pulling one out of his jacket.
I took it and wrote SHUT UP on the tablecloth.
“Oh, well, that’s nice,” he said, twisting his head around to look at it. “Pen don’t come out, you know, and that was one of the last decent tablecloths you guys had. And anyway, I just told you, I can’t. I gotta figure out how to start this, and you’re not helping with the shut ups. I know you’re probably tired, but there’s some stuff you need to know and—what’s that?”
He twisted his head some more to look at my latest doodle.
“Is that a butt? Are you calling me a butthead? Because that’s great; that’s real mature. I’m trying to be serious here and you’re—”
“Portal,” I said, around a mouthful of roll.
“What?”
I swallowed. “It’s a portal, damn it.”
“That’s a portal?” He squinted. “Then why does it have that crack up the middle?”
“That’s a person. Coming through.”
“A person?” He transferred the squint from the doodle to me. “Where’s the head? Where’s the legs? I think you’re shitting with—”
“It’s abstract!”
“Yeah. You know who does abstract art? People who can’t draw, that’s who.”
Ray, I decided, really did have the devil’s own luck, because I needed the fork too much to stab him through the eye with it. “Tell me about the hacking Cheung wants you to do,” I said.
“Oh. Yeah, well, that’s…yeah. I guess that could work,” he said. “We can start with that.”
“Start?” I asked, but he ignored me.
“So okay. You know about portals, right? Like how when you open ’em you get that big whoosh of power?”
I shrugged and went back to eating.
“Yeah, yeah. You wouldn’t,” he said enviously. “You keep yours open all the time, wasting a ton of energy because you got a damned ley line sink under the house and don’t care. But it took the smuggling community years to figure that out.”
“To figure what out?”
“That if you keep your portals open all the time, you don’t get that big burst. Or, you do, but you only get it the first time, and if there’s lots of ley lines in an area spewing out lots of magical energy, the Corps ain’t so good about tracking you down on the first go. It’s the third or the fourth or the tenth when they get you, narrowing it down a little more each time, see?”
“But most people can’t keep a portal open all the time,” I said, draining my glass and grabbing the bottle.
I was more a bottle kind of gal, anyway.
“We’re not talking about most people,” Ray said, looking at me disapprovingly. “And you guys aren’t the only ones to have a ley line sink. They show up every time two
lines cross. And they cross all the time around here. Ley lines don’t like New York, they love it, especially Manhattan. They’re snaking around all over the place like a subway map on acid.”
“Yeah, I—”
“Leave it to norms not to wonder why there’s this huge, overcrowded city on a tiny island barely two miles long,” he said, shaking his head. “Which also happens to be one of the hardest places to build in the world. I mean, it’s crazy. Manhattan’s traffic is a nightmare ’cause it’s an island, which is bad enough, but then every new subway tunnel has to bore through a slab of solid granite that eats drill bits like candy.”
“Ray. I know all this.”
“Yeah, but I’m getting to stuff maybe you don’t know. Just eat your pie.”
I didn’t think I could hold the pie. I pulled it over anyway. Mmm, flaky.
“But norms are attracted to ley lines,” he continued, “even though they don’t know it, and so cities tend to grow up where you got a lot of ’em. But unlike most places with this many lines, Manhattan doesn’t have a damned vortex. The lines cross, sure, but they don’t puddle up in one big snarl. That kind of thing’s useless ’cause it puts out too much power. Every time you try to open a portal around one of those, you get kerblammy—”
“Kerblammy?”
“—and that’s not good for business. But around here, the lines are more like…like this.” He held his hands up, interlacing the fingers. “They cross, but not all at one place. So you get lots of lines, lots of ley line sinks to power portals, and lots of background energy, making finding them a nightmare for the so-called good guys.”
“So-called?”
He shot me a look. “Come on. You like your wine, don’t you? Who you think brings that in?”
“We’re not after the portals because of the wine,” I reminded him.
“Not now, maybe, not with the war on. And not because of the Senate; they don’t care about stuff like that. But the Corps?” He scowled. “They’re a huge pain in my ass.”
“They also have a point. A lot of bad stuff comes through those things—”
“And so does a lot of good stuff. And so does a lot of stuff that can be bad or good, depending on how it’s used, but that the Circle just outlawed all together, ’cause it’s easier that way.”