by Karen Chance
She screamed as part of it started oozing down her chest, and she stumbled back down the catwalk. But as it was fast being littered with little broken bodies, most smashed and split open, it was pretty much inevitable that she'd slip and go sliding on her butt. Things sort of went downhill after that.
Protective spells were being fired off on all sides, which, when they impacted the kamikaze amphibians, caused fleshy fireworks in midair. This made the witches in the middle of the room, who were being liberally splattered with frog guts, even less happy, causing them to turn on their sisters with abandon. That slowed down the mages, but I could still see them, grim and determined, wading through the fracas toward us.
"Are there any more of you?" I asked Jesse.
He said something, but I couldn't hear him over the sound of the audience's chairs smashing into the battered mages. Of course, they were slamming into a lot of other things, too, blown here and there by the wind and the spells and the mayhem. But I didn't notice anyone else disappearing under a mountain of expensive painted wood. It looked like the mages had stepped on one too many witches' toes.
"What?"
"No!" Jesse screamed in my ear. "We were the only ones who got away!"
"Okay. Let's get away again."
Chapter 6
Miranda took one look at my dress, which had shifted to an agitated swirl of autumn leaves, and her ears went back. It was convenient to have such an obvious hint to her mood, since I'd never learned to read her very well. The fur on her catlike face might have had something to do with that, or possibly gargoyle expressions were too different from human ones for me to decipher.
The current group of Misfits crowded in behind me, leaving dirty footprints on her pristine white tile floor. I'd brought them to the room-service kitchens since I wasn't sure where Miranda lived. She was the leader of the group of Dark Fey that Tony had been using for cheap labor, but I only ever saw them at work, chopping and dicing with preternatural speed or pushing laden carts through Dante's halls.
They rarely paused except to pose for photographs with guests, who assumed they were midgets in suits. I wondered if anyone ever noticed that their film always came out slightly blurry, the same way their eyes never quite managed to focus on the small servers. Tony had spent a fortune to ward the casino, although considering the amount of alcohol that the majority of the guests put away, he probably hadn't needed to bother. I doubted he'd been so generous in accommodations for his workers, so what I wanted from Miranda was likely to hurt.
One of the kids, a girl who looked about twelve but who I later learned was sixteen, was holding a baby. It was maybe four months old and a little rumpled around the edges, wearing a pink T-shirt with a diaper and only one sock, its cheek flushed from being pressed against the girl's chest. I was about to launch into my carefully prepared speech when Miranda smiled, showing sharp fangs in her long, grave face. She was no longer looking at me.
I turned to see that several gargoyles had edged to within arm's length of the girl, close enough that she sent me a pleading look while clutching her infant tighter. "They won't hurt you," I assured her. "The Fey…well, they're really fond of babies."
It was a ridiculous understatement, as was becoming obvious. One of the larger gargoyles, with a dog's head above her spotless chef's whites, almost ran into a wall because she was waving at the infant while making a cutesy little face. Miranda's eyes were also fixed on the child, with enough longing in them that I started to worry. "Right?" I gave her a poke, and she swatted a paw at me. The claws weren't extended, thankfully.
"My people would defend a crèche with their lives," she told the mother with quiet dignity.
The girl looked relieved, but kept an eye on the closest gargoyle. He was one of the smaller variety, with floppy donkey ears under a tall chef's hat. He tentatively stretched out a hand mangled even more than Françoise's, with all but one finger missing. But the remaining digit ended in a long, curled claw of dense grayish black.
His hand was shaking, causing an iridescent shimmer to slide up and down the surface of the claw like an oil slick. The baby noticed the pretty colors and gurgled, reaching for it. The creature snatched it away in a blur of motion, letting out a bleat and falling backwards over its own squat tail. This, of course, further intrigued the baby, who fussed until her mother put her down, then crawled toward Donkey Ears with the intent of a hunter after prey, her one sock trailing and her chubby hand extended. The gargoyles retreated in a mad scramble.
Donkey Ears found himself trapped between the ferocious baby and a bank of ovens, which were filling the room with the scent of cinnamon and butter. Maybe that was what attracted the kid, or possibly she was just curious; either way, she crawled fearlessly up to the cowering creature and held up her hands demandingly. He stared at her with big eyes until Miranda cleared her throat. Then he snatched up the child, who made a contented sound and fisted her hands in his tunic before stuffing most of his scarf into her mouth.
My job wasn't too difficult after that.
Ten minutes later, we were gathered around the prep counter, wolfing down cinnamon rolls and milk. The kitchen staff had been feeding me up for a week. It had taken me most of that time to realize that they weren't being kind: I was their resident guinea pig, someone to let them know what recipes worked and what didn't. Apparently gargoyles don't have the same taste buds as humans. And now they had a whole slew of new taste testers on whom to experiment.
Despite the disruption caused by nine hungry kids descending on a sugar feast, I did try to explain. "Miranda, I appreciate this, but before you agree to babysit, there are a few things you should know."
Miranda didn't comment. She had appropriated the baby from her terrified underling and was spooning applesauce into the child's face at an alarming rate. She let out a small purr of approval when the little girl failed to spit up.
"See, the thing is…" Jesse, who was already on his third cinnamon roll, shot me a sharp look. It clearly said, "Do not screw this up for us." I swallowed, but plowed on nonetheless. "The kids who end up as runaways in our world usually have…well, there are reasons."
"Like with us," she murmured, clearly not listening to me.
"Yes…sort of." The gargoyles had fled Faerie because of prejudice and escalating violence, both of which were certainly familiar to Tami's kids. But out of their usual element, the Fey were likely far less powerful than the Misfits. "Look, if you're going to help me shelter these kids, at least until I can figure something else out, you need to understand—"
I stopped because a sharp toe connected with my shin. I shot Jesse a look, but he was already out of his chair. "I gotta talk to you," he said pointedly.
I rubbed my leg and scowled. "Fine."
We ended up outside, sitting beside the loading ramp used to bring larger items into the kitchen's storerooms. A couple of gargoyles were down below, scattering bread crumbs on the asphalt, peering upward hopefully. "What're they doing?" Jesse asked.
I'd wondered about that, too, until I'd spent a little time in the kitchens. "Let's just say that baked goods are usually okay around here, but eating meat requires a certain sense of adventure."
He nodded, then remembered that he was supposed to be pissed at me. "What's the big deal? Are you trying to ruin this for us?"
It looked like Jesse was a proud graduate of Tami's course on the Best Defense. Unfortunately for him, so was I. "I am trying to be honest with Miranda about what she's letting herself in for. I think that's only fair, don't you?"
He jerked a thumb at the nearest gargoyle, which had a feline head that contrasted oddly with a lumpy, reptilian body. "You think we could hurt them?"
"I think the bunch I used to run with could."
One day in particular came to mind. A couple of drug dealers, who had set up shop in the bottom floor of our building, had decided they could do without additional squatters. They burst in one morning after Tami went to work. I'd been babysitting Lucy, an eleven-year-o
ld empath, and Paolo, a twelve-year-old Were who had been abandoned by his pack. I never knew why, because he hardly spoke the whole time he was with us, which wasn't long. We found his mangled body a couple of weeks later, after he fled our protection in advance of the full moon. The Weres had been smart enough not to come in after him, and waited until he left. The dealers weren't so wise.
Not that they had a chance to find out what even a young Were can do. Lucy had been home with me for a reason. Most of the kids who ended up at Tami's magical halfway house held things together pretty well for a while. They tried to fit in and avoid calling attention to themselves while they figured out how things worked, so they wouldn't screw up and be sent away yet again. But something always set them off sooner or later, usually after they'd been there long enough to start to relax.
When they finally lowered their defenses, it all spilled out: rage at the condition that made them a pariah from birth, pain that the people they loved had turned on them, terror that any minute they'd be caught and dragged back to the special schools that were more like jails. They were supposed to stay there until they were certified safe, as no threat to the magical or non-magical communities. Most would never leave.
Tami had thought that the breakdowns were positive, letting the kids get it out of their systems and start to heal. Only none of them had previously involved an empath. Especially one who could not only read emotions, but could project and magnify them.
The other kids had fled, off to find somewhere, anywhere, else to be until it wore off. Tami had been frantic, needing to go to work as she was virtually our only income, but not daring to leave Lucy alone in that state. I'd volunteered to stay with her because she seemed to find being around me soothing. After a childhood monitoring my emotions at Tony's, I didn't project as much as most people. But that day, it hadn't made a difference.
I'd been watching the door with steadily mounting panic as wave after wave of emotion crashed into me, most of it too close to what I dealt with every day to be easily shrugged off. Paolo, who had stayed behind because he was trying to avoid leaving scent trails for his pack, had been almost literally climbing the walls. And we both had shields.
When they burst in, the dealers ran straight into the wall of pain Lucy had been building all afternoon. The feelings she'd suppressed since her family had dropped her off at her new "school," then driven away and never come back, had all spilled over. And her talent had magnified them a few hundred times. Instead of frightening us or whatever the men had planned, they ended up shooting each other to death in a fit of someone else's rage.
Jesse was watching me narrowly. "You think we're the monsters, don't you?"
I blinked at him. I'd almost forgotten he was there. I didn't let myself think about Tami's too often, and it felt odd to do it now. "I have a broader definition of normal than most people," I finally said. "But you know as well as I do that having you here could cause…some issues."
Jesse stuck his chin out. "Astrid's a null," he said sullenly.
"Astrid?"
"The girl with the kid."
"Ah." So that was why Françoise had gone to the far side of the stage to work her spell. Nulls exerted a dampening field on magic for a space around them. For the stronger, it could be up to a city block in size; for the weaker, it was much smaller. But even a low-level null would have interfered if she was close.
"That's how she got away, after she found out about the kid. They couldn't track her."
I nodded. Nulls weren't automatically incarcerated like some mages with malfunctioning magic, because they weren't considered a threat. But if Astrid had been discovered pregnant, a lot of pressure would have been put on her to terminate it, so as not to pass malfunctioning genes along. No wonder she'd run. And nulls were damn hard to find when they didn't want to be.
Tami was a low-level null herself, which had helped her to keep the Misfits safe and the chaos to a minimum, at least when she was at home. And her abilities ensured that any runaways she took in didn't have to worry about registering on a magical tracking spell. Which made it strange that, after so many years, the mages had caught up with her now.
"Okay. I'm relieved to hear that." And I was. Astrid's presence might help tone things down, but she couldn't be everywhere, and there were seven kids to watch besides the baby. I needed to know what I was taking on. "But we both know that not everyone here is a null."
Jesse kicked concrete with his heel and said nothing. "Jesse."
"I'm a fluke, okay?" he blurted, in the same tone someone might once have used to say "leper."
"That doesn't tell me much." «Fluke» is a catchall term for magical oddities dealing with what humans call luck. Not good luck, not bad luck, just…luck.
A famous example, even among norms, is the odd experience of the French writer Émile Deschamps. In 1805, he was treated to some plum pudding by a stranger, Monsieur de Fortgibu, at a Paris restaurant. Ten years later, he saw plum pudding on the menu of another establishment and tried to order some, only to have the waiter tell him that the last dish had just been served, to a customer who turned out to be de Fortgibu. Much later, in 1832, Deschamps was once again offered plum pudding at a restaurant. He laughingly told his friends that only de Fortgibu was missing to make the cycle complete—and a moment later de Fortgibu showed up.
Of course, what the history books don't say is that de Fortigbu was a fluke. His magic associated certain things with particular people, places or events. Every time he saw one of his cousins, for instance, she was wearing blue; the scent of oranges accompanied every visit to his favorite bookseller; and if he got within a few yards of Deschamps, pudding invariably appeared.
Most humans claimed that events like these were mere coincidence. Magical healers, on the other hand, speculated that they were somehow linked to memory. Images of people or places are stored in everyone's brain in connection with some type of sensory data. A flower a man's grandmother liked, for example, might make him think of her whenever he saw one. Being a mage, de Fortgibu had simply carried that to a new level: his malfunctioning magic insured that when one cue appeared, the other also did.
But not all flukes had magic that manifested itself in the slightly batty but mostly nonthreatening way of de Fortgibu's. One young man caused massive undertows whenever he got within five miles of the shore and had to be banned from any access to the beach. Another caused seismic activity and was restricted from going anywhere near an active fault line. That particular group of flukes was memorable enough to deserve their own name: jinx.
A jinx was basically a walking Murphy's Law, with «accidents» caused by out-of-control power cropping up on a regular basis. And unlike the random stuff that most flukes caused, a jinx's actions were invariably harmful. There was a time, a few hundred years back, when they'd been killed on sight. I really, really hoped that wasn't what I was dealing with here. Not that Jesse was likely to admit it, if it was.
"How strong are you?" A jinx of any type was dangerous, but a strong one would be a walking disaster. Literally.
"Not strong," he assured me fervently. "Not strong at all! And I'm the only one. The others are…pretty harmless."
"Uh-huh." None of the kids, most of whom appeared to be around seven or eight, had looked like a threat. But, then, neither had Lucy. "Define ‘pretty harmless. "
"If you're gonna throw me out, just do it!" Jesse said furiously. "But the others are okay. I'll clear out if you'll let them—"
"I didn't say I wanted you to leave! I just want to know what I'm dealing with here."
Magical children didn't fall through the cracks for no reason. It was almost a certainty that the kids all had some kind of talent that made them persona non grata in the magical community. Yet Jesse would admit only to a null, a fluke and a seer, swearing that the other five were just scrims, the current PC term for mages with little ability. I had my doubts. Scrims formed the largest population of magical runaways, but Tami hadn't concentrated on them when I knew
her because they didn't have handicaps that could benefit from a null's calming influence. They could also pass for norms, avoiding the magical community and its laws altogether if they chose. That was not an option for people like Lucy.
But doubts or no, I couldn't force him to tell me the truth. And with Astrid around, hopefully it wouldn't matter anyway. Her power should negate the kids' abilities, whatever they were, as long as they stayed close. Giving me time to find out what had happened to Tami.
I decided to change the subject. "How did the mages find you?"
Jesse shook his head. "I don't know. They just busted in one morning and Tami screamed at us to run. Astrid tried to drain them, but there were too many and they had guns. She didn't stand a chance."
"But she got away."
"'Cause they didn't want her. They were all about Tami. They hardly even looked at the rest of us until they caught her."
"Why?"
Jesse fidgeted with the sleeves on his god-awful pea green sweatshirt. "Uh, I don't know?"
"That sentence would work a lot better without the question mark at the end," I said dryly.
When he stubbornly stayed silent, I sighed and gave in—for the moment. If and when he learned to trust me, his memory might improve. Any lies now would only make it that much harder for him to admit the truth later.
"I'll see if I can find out what happened to Tami," I told him. "I know a few people who may be able to tell me if the Circle has her." Jesse's expression clearly said that he didn't give much for my chances. Knowing the Circle, neither did I.