As we were led into the restaurant, no matter where I looked I found something to amaze or amuse the eye. Grimacing war masks hung on the walls alongside shellacked sea turtles, and every doorway had Maori motifs painted along its edges. The entire left wall was covered in richly decorated vintage tapa cloths, made from the bark found in the South Sea Islands, and dominated by an imposing forty-foot-high tiki-god head with a roaring fire built inside its gaping mouth. The opposing wall, however, was made entirely of shatterproof Plexiglas, and housed the largest saltwater habitat I had ever seen outside of a public aquarium. I spotted a multitude of tropical fish, including adult sea turtles and manta ray, as well as several merfolk swimming inside it.
I stopped to stare in fascination as a mermaid, her hair floating about her head like a bed of kelp, glided past. With her clamshell-and-seaweed bra and dolphin lower body, she looked like an escapee from a children’s picture book. As I watched, she disappeared inside a larger version of the “Neptune’s Castle” found in more modest aquariums, leaving a trail of bubbles in her wake.
Our hostess showed us to an intimate grass hut for two, illuminated by multicolored glass float lights suspended in handwoven nets and a puffer-fish lamp that dangled from the rafters like a prickly piñata.
We carefully studied the menus, which were shaped like Easter Island heads and big enough to use as semaphore signals. I ordered the Polynesian Spare Ribs with Molokai Sauce, while Hexe picked the Island Flaming Chicken, which came skewered on a sword and was set on fire at the table. As for drinks, I opted for the Zombie, which left me feeling comfortably numb by the time we finished our entrées, and Hexe ordered a cocktail that arrived in a cup of dry ice that quickly engulfed the tabletop in a cloud of crawling mist.
“What’s that one called again?” I asked as I turned on my cell phone camera.
“A Smoking Eruption.”
“I’d see a doctor about that if I were you,” I said with a giggle.
“Is Lorelei here tonight?” Hexe asked the waitress as she cleared away our dishes.
“She’s tending bar in the Fishbowl,” she replied, pointing to the back of the restaurant.
“C’mon,” Hexe said, levering himself out of his chair. “Let’s go say hello and thank her for dinner.”
To reach the restaurant’s lounge, we had to walk over a bamboo bridge that spanned an artificial stream fed by an equally artificial waterfall. On the other side was a Plexiglas tank that stood four feet deep, twenty feet long, and twelve feet wide, with a wooden bar top built along its rim. Inside the tank were several different species of tropical fish, and in the middle, set on its own private island complete with palm tree, was a shelf full of liquor and an array of tiki drinkware. Standing—or, rather, floating—behind the bar was none other than the restaurant’s namesake and owner, dressed from the waist up in a twist-front bikini top that displayed her upper body to its best effect. She bobbed in place behind the bar as she vigorously shook a cocktail mixer without displacing the water or spilling a drop of alcohol into the “fishbowl.”
“I was wondering when you’d finally claim your free dinner.” Lorelei grinned as we stepped up to the bar.
“It’s been a busy week,” Hexe explained.
“For some more than others,” the mermaid replied with a sigh.
“You seem to have a good crowd tonight,” Hexe observed.
“The riot scared off my regulars, as well as the tourists. This is the first night people seem to feel comfortable going out after dark, praise Poseidon.”
“I think people are getting over their shell shock,” Hexe replied. “I tended to several locals who were injured in the riot the very next morning, but I haven’t had a client knock on my door since then until today. I think the worst has finally blown over.”
“I certainly hope so.”
While Lorelei and Hexe discussed the effect of the riot on Golgotham’s economy, I allowed my attention to wander as I continued to ogle the exotic war masks, ceremonial spears, and stuffed trophy fish decorating the lounge. As my eye traveled down the bar, I spotted a familiar head of electric blue hair seated on the very last stool, drinking from a large ceramic bowl shaped like a Hawaiian war-canoe.
“Look who’s here,” I said, nudging Hexe in the ribs.
His eyes widened in surprise upon espying the lonely drinker. “Faro!” he called out. “Is that you?”
The owner, and sole employee, of Faro’s Moving turned on his barstool to greet us, a chagrined look on his face. “Yeah, it’s me.”
“I’d ask how married life is treating you,” Hexe said acerbically, “but Chorea told us you ditched her during the honeymoon.”
Faro cringed, a worried look on his face. “You talked to Chory? By the Outer Dark, whatever you do, don’t tell her you’ve seen me! I’m trying to get our marriage annulled, and I’m laying low until it’s all over and she finally cools off. I’m even steering clear of my office in the Rookery. I don’t want her to know where I am.”
“Annulment?” Hexe raised a purple eyebrow in surprise. “Granted, you two had a whirlwind marriage, but Chorea’s still a hell of a gal.”
“You’re telling me!” Faro snorted. “I spent most of our so-called ‘honeymoon’ running for my life through the hills of Arkadia! We went to Greece so she could show me some of her old haunts, right? She starts drinking and dancing, and the next thing I know she’s coming after me with blood in her eyes! I ended up having to teleport myself back to Golgotham. I didn’t have my GPS on me, so I’m lucky I didn’t end up at the bottom of a river or stuck in a wall.”
“Well, she is a maenad, Faro,” Hexe pointed out. “You knew that when you met her. Look at it this way—at least she really cares about you; maenads tend to kill the ones they love when they are in a Dionysian frenzy, like Agave tearing her son, King Pentheus, limb from limb.”
“Now you tell me!” Faro groaned.
“Hey, it’s not my fault you opted out of Classical Studies in favor of Applied Teleportation in high school,” Hexe replied. “Chory’s a wonderful woman, when she’s sober. Maybe if you get her into AA, you can save your marriage. You know the makeup sex is gonna be killer.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of,” Faro replied glumly.
Having tipped our waitress, we wished Faro well with his domestic problems, thanked Lorelei for her hospitality, and made our way out the door. Kidron was waiting patiently for us when we exited the restaurant.
“Where to next?” the centaur asked as we climbed back into the cab.
“It’s such a lovely night,” I said, squeezing Hexe’s hand. “Why don’t we take our time going home?”
“You heard the lady,” Hexe told the driver. “Take the scenic route.”
“I had a wonderful time tonight,” I said, resting my head on Hexe’s shoulder as Kidron slowly made his way through the winding, narrow streets. Although traffic was lighter than normal, I was relieved to see activity at the various pubs and restaurants along the way. It seemed that Hexe was right, and that the citizens of Golgotham were finally returning to their normal routines.
“So did I,” he replied. “Lorelei’s is no Two-Headed Calf, mind you, but it does have its strong points.”
Kidron came to an abrupt halt. “Do you smell that?” he asked, his wide nostrils flaring in agitation. “It’s blood. Kymeran blood.”
Suddenly three figures darted out of a nearby side street and ran right in front of the centaur, causing him to rear up onto his hind legs and nearly overturn the cab. Hexe threw his arms around me to make sure I didn’t tumble out onto the cobblestone street.
The trio were dressed all in black, two of them in ski masks, and they carried aluminum baseball bats. A second later a red-haired Kymeran woman, her face swollen and bloody, staggered from the direction they had come from, only to drop to her knees upon reaching the curb.
“Call nine-one-one!” Hexe said to Kidron as he jumped out of the hansom. “Tell them we’ll need an ambulance.�
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“Way ahead of you,” the cabbie replied, tapping his Bluetooth headset.
I hopped out of the cab and hurried after Hexe, who was kneeling beside the woman. As I got closer, I realized that what I had mistaken for red hair was actually mustard yellow, dyed carnelian by the blood flowing from her scalp. Her right eye was already swollen shut, and her lower lip was split open.
“Go help Jarl,” she croaked, pointing behind her to a man with apricot-colored hair who lay sprawled in a rapidly widening pool of blood.
“Stay here with her,” Hexe told me as he dashed to help the second victim.
“Don’t worry,” I said as I helped the bleeding woman back onto her feet. “My friend is a healer. Here, let me help you.” I fished a handkerchief from my purse and handed it to her so she could stanch the blood flowing from her split lip.
“Thank you,” she murmured gratefully, only to freeze upon seeing my hand. My stomach cinched itself into a knot as she recoiled, a look of fear in her eyes.
“It’s okay, I’m not going to hurt you,” I assured her. “I saw the men who mugged you—I know they were humans, but I have nothing to do with them.”
“They weren’t muggers,” she replied. “They didn’t want our money. They jumped us as we were coming back from dinner. They started hitting us with bats before Jarl or I realized what was happening. There wasn’t time to raise a hand to defend ourselves. It was horrible—they kept beating my husband even after he went down. The one without the ski mask said they were the sons of Adam, and that they were going to make us ‘dirty Kymies’ pay.”
As the woman related her story, a crowd began to gather around us, curious to discover what had happened. There was not a single human face to be seen.
“Did you hear that?” an older Kymeran man with mold green muttonchops loudly announced. “They were witch-bashed by a bunch of numps!”
An annoyed buzz rippled through the assembled onlookers, as if someone had just kicked a hornets’ nest.
“What’s this nump bitch doing here?” asked a teenaged Kymeran girl in an Arcade Fire T-shirt.
“Get your stubby hands off her, nump!” another hostile voice shouted.
Suddenly Hexe was between me and the rapidly contracting ring of onlookers. “Leave her alone!” he barked. “She didn’t have anything to do with this!”
Most of the assembled Kymerans backed away upon recognizing Hexe, but the warlock with the moldy muttonchops held his ground. “Why are you taking up for some nump bint, Serenity? What’s she to you?”
“She’s his concubine!” the teenager chimed in, holding up her Android phone. “It says so right here on TMZ!”
“So that’s it, eh?” the moldy warlock sneered. “Kymeran women aren’t good enough for you now, Serenity?”
“Everyone calm down!” Kidron shouted as he pushed his way through the crowd, forcing the onlookers to part or risk being trampled. “The PTU are on their way. They’ll handle this.”
“In seven hells, they will!” The warlock spat as he returned to the pub from which he’d come. “They’ll roll over for City Hall, just like they always do, and you know it. No nump will ever be brought to justice for what they do in or out of Golgotham!”
Within seconds of the would-be mob’s clearing the streets, a centaur with a snowy lower body, the mark of an ambulance bearer, rounded the corner, harnessed to a whitewashed coach marked GOLGOTHAM GENERAL closely followed by a PTU response wagon.
A couple of Kymerans dressed in scrubs jumped out of the back of the ambulance, carrying a stretcher between them. Hexe hurried to greet them. “He’s got multiple skull fractures. You’re going to need to stabilize him before he’s moved.”
The boneknitter nodded his understanding and knelt down beside Jarl, gently placing his hands to either side of the wounded man’s head. He muttered an incantation in Kymeran and a pale white glow, similar to St. Elmo’s Fire, flickered into being around Jarl’s skull. A few seconds later he was carefully lifted onto the stretcher. As they carried him past me, I was shocked to see his face was little more than a mass of pulped meat, shattered bone, and twisted cartilage. It was a good thing the psychic surgeons at Golgotham General were capable of magic, because he was definitely going to need a miracle to survive his wounds.
As Jarl was strapped down in the back of the ambulance, I helped his wife climb in beside him. She seated herself on the passenger bench inside the coach, then turned to look at me.
“You’ve been very kind,” she said. “I’m sorry the others treated you like that. And I’m sorry I treated you like that, too. I should have said something. . . .”
“They weren’t in the mood to listen, even if you had,” I said with a rueful smile. “And for what it’s worth—I’m sorry, too.”
She nodded her head, and then turned her attention back to her husband. The last I saw of Jarl and his wife before the ambulance pulled away, she was tightly squeezing his hand, as if to tether his life to hers.
“Looks like you two can’t stay away from trouble.”
I turned to see Captain Horn regarding Hexe and myself with a bemused look on his face. Normally a PTU officer of his rank wouldn’t show up to a routine mugging, but these were not normal times.
“Did you see what happened?” he asked, fishing a digital voice recorder from his breast pocket.
“No,” Hexe replied. “But we saw who did it.”
“There were three of them, dressed in black. They ran that way,” I said, pointing in the direction of Pickman’s Slip. “They were definitely human. Well, at least the one without a ski mask was.”
“Do you think you could describe what he looked like?”
“I think so.”
“Good. I’ll send around a picturemaker first thing in the morning. Until then, I would recommend that Ms. Eresby go home and stay there,” Horn said grimly. “News like this travels fast in Golgotham, and there will be those looking to make any human they happen upon pay for what transpired tonight.”
“We understand, Captain,” Hexe said as he escorted me back to the waiting Kidron. “Thank you for your concern.”
“This is all so awful,” I groaned as I climbed back into the hansom. “The evening started off so wonderful, only to turn into something ugly.”
“Yes,” Hexe agreed with a sigh as he took his place beside me. “So much for all of this blowing over.”
Chapter 13
I woke up early the next morning, chased from my slumber by troublesome dreams where I pursued three shadowy figures down a narrow alleyway, while Golgotham burned around me. Unable to return to sleep, I threw on my clothes and went downstairs. I started a fresh pot of coffee and went to see if the Golgotham Gazette was waiting for me on the front step. It was.
COUPLE VICTIMS OF VICIOUS WITCH-BASHING, the headline screamed above the fold. I guessed I could forget relaxing with a nice cup of coffee while working on the Word Jumble.
As I shuffled back into the kitchen, Hexe came padding downstairs, dressed only in last night’s jeans, carrying Beanie under one arm like a football. “Somebody needs to go potty,” he said around a yawn.
“Here, I’ll take him,” I said.
“It’s a deal.” Hexe handed over the wriggling bundle of dog.
One of the nicest things about Hexe’s boardinghouse was that it had not only a backyard—a rarity in itself, no matter where you live in Manhattan—but also a garden. Secreted away behind a high stone wall, it was far larger than it looked from the outside, much like the house itself, thanks to what Hexe referred to as “architectural origami.” It was here that he grew many of the herbs necessary in his practice, and even kept a huge living-hedge-maze. As I stood on the back porch and waited for Beanie to finish sniffing every blade of grass in his immediate vicinity, I took a moment to enjoy the peaceful solitude the garden provided. It was hard to believe that on the other side of its ivy-covered walls people were trying to kill one another over something as silly as an extra ring finger.
“Morning, sunshine,” I said by way of greeting. “What are you doing up there?”
“It’s the only place I can get any peace when that honyock’s awake,” Scratch explained. “The idiot never looks up. It’s as good as being invisible—even better, since I don’t have to waste energy on a cloaking spell.”
“That’s because dogs can’t look up,” Hexe replied from behind his paper.
“Sucks to be them, then. What’s this about a witch-bashing?” Scratch asked, gesturing to the headline with one of his wings.
“You can read?”
“No need to sound so surprised, nump,” the familiar retorted. “Of course I can read! In fact, I can read every language known to mankind, plus a few you bloodthirsty bastards don’t know about.”
“Pull your claws in, Scratch,” Hexe warned, putting aside the newspaper. “Just because Tate is human doesn’t mean she’s responsible for what happened last night.”
“I won’t say I’m sorry, because that’s not how I roll,” Scratch said. “But I will say I’m not unsorry. How’s that?”
“A double negative is close enough to an apology for me,” I replied with a shrug. “And about last night—what I don’t understand is how three humans, armed just with baseball bats, could get the drop on a pair of Kymerans. I mean, all Jarl and his wife had to do was point a hand at them—left or right—and wiggle some fingers, and they’d have been toast.”
“It’s not as simple as that,” Hexe explained as he refreshed his cup of coffee. “While all Kymerans have some kind of magic, we’re not all dab hands at spell-slinging. Just like some humans have a natural aptitude for music, and others are born accountants—we all have our individual strengths and weaknesses. According to the paper, Jarl is an alchemist who distills katholikon and elixir vitae. His wife is a lapidary—her talent lies in the ability to transform pieces of quartz into scrying crystals. I’m certain neither of them was a quick draw, especially if they were ambushed. “
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