by Karen Chance
I didn’t say anything, because I kind of agreed with him there. The Silver Circle was the light magic organization that governed the mages like the Senate did the vamps. The Corps were their police unit, and overall, they did a pretty good job of countering the Black Circle’s shysters, crooks and hoodlums. But they did tend to be a little…anal…about some things.
Including most things that came through illegal portals.
“I mean, it’s complete bullshit,” Ray bitched. “When the fey got mad way back when and yanked all the portals, nobody thought about the little guy, did they? Nobody thought about all the people on both sides that had friends and businesses and lives that depended on being able to come and go. Some of their leaders get in a snit for some reason, and all of a sudden—nothing. And they don’t get over being butt hurt after a while, like normal people. It’s been thousands of years and the pathways are still blocked and trade’s still in the shitter and nobody seems to give a damn!”
“Except for the heroic smugglers.”
“Sure, be that way. But when you want something—when the damned mages want something—that ain’t supposed to be available outside Faerie, who do you come to see?”
“So you’re the good guys?”
“Yeah,” Ray said defiantly. And then he shifted in his seat. “Sort of. Anyway, my point is, Manhattan is the shit. If you’re a smuggler, this is where you want to be.”
I thought about that while I gummed pie. “So you’re telling me you can just cut a new portal here, and nobody will notice?” I was pretty sure that hadn’t been in the briefing I’d had.
He shook his head. “Not if you’re trying to slice all the way through to Faerie, no. Takes too much power. But smaller stuff, yeah, you can get away with that. It sort of melds into the background noise. Like Olga’s portal—that didn’t raise any eyebrows, right?”
“Because it goes all of two blocks. And that wouldn’t do you any good.”
“See, that’s what most people would think,” he said, leaning forward. “But I been in the business a long time. And one day, the portal we were using got discovered by the damned Corps and shut down—right before a big shipment was due to come through.”
“That’s rough,” I said, wondering if there was more pie.
“You ain’t just kidding that’s rough. The boss don’t care about my problems. The boss just wants his stuff. He’s promised it to some pretty big-time people and he’s gonna look bad if he can’t deliver. So I get to thinking.”
“Uh-oh.”
“Yeah, as it turned out. But at the time, I don’t think ‘uh-oh.’ At the time, I think, hey, I gotta figure a way out of this problem. So I start to wonder, what would happen if I cut a portal, but not to Faerie? What would happen if I cut it—get this—into another portal?”
It took a moment for that to sink in, because he’d said it so casually. And because my mind was mostly occupied by important things, like pie. And because it was stupid.
Really, really stupid.
I’d always thought of ley lines the way most people view nuclear energy. They could be useful—ley line sinks powered all kinds of things, and the currents inside the lines were strong enough to make for quick transport virtually anywhere. But that convenience came with a steep price tag for anybody who didn’t show it the proper respect.
Not that there were too many of those. The dangers involved intimidated even war mages, who had a reputation for badassery that bordered on lunacy. But they hazarded the lines only with the heaviest of shields, and any portals they cut into them were done extremely gingerly.
Vampires—the sane kind, anyway—avoided them almost entirely. If something went wrong, their flammability ensured that they wouldn’t even have the few seconds the mages would to find a way out. Human transport was slower, but it came without the possibility of your own personal Chernobyl if something went wrong.
But my jaw ached every time I tried to talk, so I settled for summing up the obvious. “You can’t do that.”
Ray grinned. “Wanna bet?”
“No, I mean, you can’t—”
I broke off, because one of the fey was coming up the steps. He wasn’t glowing, having dimmed the light shadows their kind shed in our world down for our guests. But he managed to look fairly otherworldly anyway, the long white-blond hair holding a shimmer of moonlight; the bone structure subtly different from a human’s; the almond-shaped eyes hinting of other shores, except for their startling, almost vivid blueness.
He was holding a small, grubby creature that was kicking and flailing and giving every appearance of trying to murder the two long fingers gripping it by the scruff of the neck. “Have you perhaps misplaced something?” he asked, arching an elegant brow.
“Damn it,” Ray said, sitting up. “I thought I—shit.”
I assumed he was referring to the plastic cup, which was still weighed down by the piece of garden edging he’d placed on top. But which now had a mousehole-sized piece cut out of the side. Presumably by the tiny sword the escape artist was waving around menacingly.
“It appears to be defective,” the fey said drily. “Would you like a new enchantment?”
“A new enchantment?” Ray looked up from examining the cup. “What’s that do?”
“It replaces the old.”
“Replaces how?”
The fey looked at me. “Obliterates. Is that the right word?”
Damned if I knew. Claire had been helping them with their English, but she knew enough of their language to be able to figure out what they were trying to say. “It’s a word,” I agreed.
“You mean kill it?” Ray looked horrified.
“It isn’t alive, therefore it cannot die,” the fey reasoned. “But it would have a new…personality, if you like.”
“I don’t like,” Ray said, grabbing it. “It’s fine.” The fey’s eyes danced in the light from the house, obviously amused. Particularly when the wild man suddenly stabbed Ray in the palm. “Damn it!”
The fey shook his head and started to go. But then he paused on the stairs and looked back at me. “Oh, and you may tell the Lady Claire that her…gifts…while thoughtful, will not be needed.”
“Gifts?”
“The condoms,” Ray said, sucking his palm.
“You managed to get those?” I asked, incredulously.
“Hey, it’s what we went for. I don’t know if I grabbed the right sizes, though.”
We both looked at the fey, whose grin widened. But he only said: “There are enchantments for that. And in any case, the ladies appear to have…come prepared.”
“Well, have fun,” I told him.
His smile was blinding. “I shall.”
He left and Ray dragged his two-inch captive over to the chessboard. “They creep me out,” he told me in a low voice, after a moment.
“Who?”
“The fey. Always did. ‘New personality’ my ass.”
“They’re okay,” I said, because it was true, and because I wouldn’t put it past those ears to still be able to hear us. “What are you doing?” I asked, watching him struggle to stuff his prisoner into the felt-lined indentation.
“Putting him back!” he said, as the wild man popped up again, mad as hell. Ray had confiscated the sword, but his prisoner was resourceful. And bit the end of his thumb.
“Son of a—”
“That won’t work,” I told him, as Ray pushed the squirming thing down again and fitted the plastic cover on top. It was clear and molded to the shape of the pieces, which left the little guy effectively trapped. Until he wormed a knife out of his boot and started sawing away at it.
“Why is he doing that?” Ray demanded.
“He doesn’t turn off anymore.”
“What? Not at all?”
I shook my head. “It’s why we usually leave the game out. The boys like for him to have company.”
“Then why didn’t you say so?” he demanded.
Because I didn’t think you’d
care about a child’s toy, I didn’t say, helping Ray remove my dishes so he could set the game up again on the table.
We finished and he went to nurse his wounds on the swing. The pieces were back to exploring their little world, which I guess was what Faerie looked like. Or at least the part Olga was from. The board had started out a plain old chess type, if oversized. But the familiar checkerboard was invisible now, overgrown by grass and trees and caves and a miniature stream.
The whole setting was too big to fit on the board, so the scenery changed as they moved around, setting up ambushes and defensive positions, polishing armor and weapons, or just squatting on a rock, in the case of the wild man. Some of the other little ogres were starting a campfire over by a copse of trees, and they kept shooting him looks, but he didn’t appear to notice. He was too busy staring at the sky.
“They don’t seem like much company to me,” Ray said, watching the scene. “Look—they don’t like him now.”
“I don’t think that’s the problem,” I murmured.
What was it Plato had said? Something about a bunch of guys born in a cave, who had never seen the outside world. Just shadows of things reflected on the walls sometimes, distorted and unreal. Until one of them broke out one day, and started exploring a larger world. He could go back to his old life, but he wasn’t the same person anymore.
His world had gotten bigger, and things were never going to be quite the same again.
But Ray didn’t agree. “Naw, he’s different now,” he told me. “People don’t like different.”
There was something in his tone that made me look up. He was draped over the seat, wrapped in gloom since the porch light wasn’t on and the light from the house had diminished, thanks to someone shutting off the fixture in the hall. The main illumination came from the lanterns the fey had lit around camp, just little pinpricks in the darkness, and the flickering blue-white of the cartoon channel from the living room that nobody had bothered to turn off.
He’d lit a cigarette, and with just the reddened end lighting up his face, he should have looked sinister. But Ray’s features just didn’t run to it. The eyes were too big and too blue and too oddly guileless. The cheeks were too round, and the chin was tilted just a bit too defiantly outward. Like he expected to get belted at any moment, but wasn’t going to duck his head anyway.
It was the face of a guy who’d been beaten up before and who had every expectation of being beaten up again, but who wasn’t going to cower. And he’d had plenty of opportunities to learn. I didn’t know a lot about his background, but I knew enough to guess that he hadn’t found the vampire lifestyle to be all fun and games.
He’d been born the half-breed son of a Dutch sailor and an Indonesian village woman during the bad old days of colonialism. The sailor had decamped before Ray made an appearance and his mother had died when he was a teenager. Leaving him a blue-eyed freak among the villagers, and one who reminded people a bit too much of their hated colonial masters.
It hadn’t taken them long to drive him out, leaving him to fend for himself. Which he had done by joining a group of pirates right before they decided to attack a fat-looking prize. That might have been an okay plan, if said prize hadn’t been the flagship of one Zheng Zhilong, the leader of one of the greatest pirate fleets ever to sail the seas.
Zheng—no relation that I knew of to our tiger-tatted friend—had spared Ray’s life, only to turn around and take it when he decided to make him a vampire. Maybe he thought that having someone who could pass for a European in a pinch might come in useful. But apparently that hadn’t worked out so great, because he’d traded Ray to a fellow pirate only a few years later. Who had traded him in turn, because looking sort of European didn’t automatically confer a knowledge of languages Ray had never heard or customs he’d never experienced.
Somehow, he’d eventually ended up with Cheung. Who instead of trading him, had promptly shipped him off to the family’s outpost in New York. Which seemed less strange to me now that I’d had Ray’s rundown on the importance of the place for otherworldly smuggling.
What remained weird was that he was still here.
Despite being middling in looks, middling in power—he’d never advanced beyond fifth-level master status—and middling in ability of any kind, he’d done okay. He’d succeeded when those with far more impressive résumés had failed. He’d survived when those with far more power had died.
He was like the cockroach of the vampire world.
Of course, come to think of it, so was I. People might not like us, might even detest us. But we’d still be here when they were dust.
There were worse things.
“Different can be okay,” I said and passed him another beer. “Now tell me about your portals.”
Chapter Fifteen
Ray flipped the cap off with his thumb—an advantage to having vampire-tough nails—and took a swig. “It’s like I told you. I figured out how to hack into ’em.”
“So you said.” But that made no sense, so obviously I’d missed something. “Are you talking about just using the same entrance for different portals?” Because people did that all the time. Olga had tinkered with the one in the basement until it could go three or four places now, along two different lines, and I didn’t think she was done.
But Ray shook his head. “You can only do that if you’re at a conjunction of a bunch of different lines. Olga’s got two that cross here, so she can cycle ’em if she wants rather than having two gates cluttering up the place. But you still need access to the gate to do that.”
“Okay. Following you so far.”
“Well, it’s like I said. I needed to get into Faerie, but everybody guards their gates like mad. So how was I going to get to one? Much less bring a ton of stuff through without anybody noticing? It’d be like needing to get on the Internet and deciding to break into some high-security building to use one of their computers. Not worth it, is it?”
“But you still needed to get on the Internet,” I said slowly.
“Yeah. So I did what everybody else does.”
“You hacked into a signal?”
He nodded. “Only the signal in this case was a portal somebody else had already cut into Faerie. I just cut into theirs. It’s easy once you know where the thing is—”
“But you didn’t know!” I said, getting pissed. “None of us know. That’s why we’ve been running all over the city like a bunch of crazed—”
“Yeah, but I knew the other players, right?” he interrupted. “The Circle, the Senate, they don’t always know who’s doing what. But I knew the competition. So I had my boys spy on ’em and figure out where they were bringing their stuff in. And honestly, it wasn’t even that hard. Most of ’em had their gateway in a warehouse or something, so they didn’t have to transport the merchandise too far.”
I glared at him. “And once you knew where they were—”
“I knew which ley line they were using. And after that, it was pie.”
“Define ‘pie,’” I demanded.
“It was easy,” Ray said, trying to blow a smoke ring and failing. He frowned at the wobbly thing for a moment, and then glanced at me. “Portals kind of look like that in the lines. Just tiny ripples you can see through, so they’re almost invisible. They’re really hard to detect, especially if you have mile after mile to explore and you have no idea where they are. It’s why the Corps never tried to shut ’em down that way—it’s like a needle in a haystack, if the needle was transparent and the haystack was an ocean.”
“But once you do know where they are—”
He shrugged. “You just make another gateway. Only instead of cutting through the line, you cut into the portal that’s already cutting through the line. Minimal outlay of power; minimal chance to get caught.”
“Unless the owners figure out what you’re doing and kill you!”
“Yeah, but that don’t happen. Plenty of people try to attack other people’s gates; it’s how most turf wars ge
t started, and why the damned things are guarded so heavy. But this—they don’t even know they’re supposed to be looking for this. It’s not a thing—”
“It’s not a thing because it’s stupid!” I said harshly. “What if you’d missed the portal? What if you’d hacked into the middle of a ley line, and ended up getting nuked? What if—”
“What if we’d shot ourselves in the head?” he said sarcastically. “I mean, come on. We were careful. The only real problem was that there was no way to know where a particular portal was going. It wasn’t like I could just ask: hey, that illegal portal you’re running, so where does it go again? No. And a lot of ’em didn’t go where we wanted.”
He was completely sincere, like that was literally all he’d had to worry about. The sheer audacity was…well, it was almost breathtaking. Which was probably why he’d gotten away with it, I realized. Someone, somewhere, through the centuries must have had the same thought, possibly even several someones. But right on its heels had been a what-am-I-thinking slap to the head, and that had been it.
Until Ray. Ray had just thought, Cool. Ray had thought, Let’s do this and get me out of trouble with my boss. That was like…like getting a thorn in your toe and deciding to cut off the foot. It solved one problem, but boy, did it open up a ton more.
But Ray didn’t see that. Ray was looking smug. Ray was proud of himself.
Ray was quite possibly insane.
“So you cut some more,” I said, because of course he had.
He nodded. “Yeah, and then some more and—well, it took a while to find one near enough to our old location to work. And even then, we ended up in this creepy-looking swamp on the other end. And ran into all kinds of problems.”
“Like what?”
Ray didn’t answer. But I received a sudden flash of a swamp, old and fetid and dark as night, except for a few random beams of light spearing down from far overhead. They highlighted still black water, mold-covered bark and a bunch of silent shadows zipping through the trees.
We were running alongside the shadows, who I guessed were the vamps Ray had brought with him. Although I wasn’t sure quite what we were running on. Or why the trees seemed to be growing sideways for some—