Touch The Dark cp-1

by Karen Chance

  "They do?" Billy asked with more interest than I liked. The pixie ignored him.

  The head paused. "I gotta think about this," it said and suddenly stopped moving.

  "Why does this thing say 'Made in Taiwan' on the bottom?" Billy asked, peering at it from about an inch away.

  We exchanged looks, and Billy didn't need any prompting. He passed into the head and reappeared a few seconds later, looking pissed. "There's no consciousness in there, Cass, not to mention that it's plastic! Someone enchanted it to wake up if anyone got stuck in the tar baby. I'm guessing it set off an alarm and was trying to delay us long enough for someone to get here."

  "Then why did it suddenly shut up?"

  "As a guess, we made an offer it didn't know how to answer."

  I closed my eyes and forced myself to calm down before I had a heart attack and saved Tony some reward bucks. "So, what are we supposed to do? We already tried attacking it!"

  "We need the password, Cass—the release. Sometimes it's an object that you have to touch, or it can be a password. But this place is full of stuff! It'll take me some time to work through it all."

  "What's going on? Who're you talking to?" Jimmy demanded.

  "There's supposed to be a trigger around here, or a word that can force that thing to release me," I explained briefly. "It isn't real; it was triggered by the spell."

  Jimmy looked surprised. "You mean that ain't Danny?"

  "And Danny would be?"

  "That shrunken head Tony made outta what was left of some guy back in the forties. We made it the model for our key rings." He looked annoyed. "You mean they put one of those novelty heads down here? What, I don't even rate the real thing?"

  It was just as well I was stuck, or I'd have been tempted to thump him. "Do you know what the release is or not?"

  He shrugged, still scowling. "Try 'banjo. " As soon as he said it, the stuff holding me in place was simply not there anymore. I'd been pulling away, useless though it was, and the momentum landed me on the floor on my already bruised backside. Jimmy grabbed me through the bars and hauled me to my feet. "You're wasting time!"

  "Banjo?"

  "We have passwords for restricted areas that are changed every few weeks. I approved the new list a couple days ago, and that was the first word on it." He saw my expression. "The boys are hired for brawn, not brain."

  "But why 'banjo'?"

  "Why not? Look, I have to come up with a couple hundred of these a year, okay? I ran out of abracadabras a long time ago. Besides, you wouldn't have guessed it, right?"

  "I still need you to open the door," the pixie reminded me as I finally found a leather key chain in Jimmy's suit coat. My hands were shaking, but it was obvious he couldn't let himself out. Somebody had run out of handcuffs, or maybe they didn't like him any better than I did. Both his hands had been smashed, and they weren't merely broken, but ruined to the point that not a finger or joint appeared to be working. I was betting that, even if he got out of this, he'd made his last hit.

  "I'm trying!"

  "Not that one," she said impatiently. "The one by the cage where they put me." She whirled around my head like a tiny cyclone. "Against the far wall. My hands aren't big enough to turn that oversized knob."

  "Give me a minute," I told her as the stubborn lock finally sprang open. Jimmy shot out of there at a dead run, heading for the hall. I glanced from him to the demanding pixie. "Follow him," I told Billy. "I'll be right there."

  "Cass—"

  "Just do it!"

  Billy went off in a huff and I rushed to open the door the tiny virago indicated. I was about to turn and follow Billy when I found out what Tony's latest business venture was. Three brunette women, all about my age, sat back-to-back on the floor inside a rust-colored circle. Their hands and feet were bound, and makeshift gags had been stuffed in their mouths. I stared. "My God. He's slaving now?" Even for Tony, that was low.

  "As good as," the pixie replied, flying over to the women. She grimaced and looked back at me. "This is worse than I thought. I can deal with the circle, but I can't get them loose."

  I ran forward, wondering if one of the other keys on Jimmy's ring would work, and hit what felt like a solid wall. It didn't look like there was anything there, but my bruised nose said otherwise, and my ward flared, spilling golden light around the room. The pixie began chattering agitatedly. "Stupid witch! It's a circle of power! I'll destroy it, then you free the women!"

  I moved backwards and my ward calmed down, although I could still feel it warm against my back. "I'm not a witch," I said resentfully, wondering if my nose was broken.

  The pixie had dropped to the floor and started rubbing at the circle. It was made of a dried substance that flaked off slowly. "Okay. The Pythia's not a witch. Got it."

  "Can't you hurry?" I asked after a minute, wondering how far Jimmy had gotten in his condition. "And my name is Cassie."

  Sharp lavender eyes gave an exaggerated roll. "I used to think it was the position that made you so annoying, but you were born this way, weren't you? And I'm doing the best I can! The blood has dried and it's not coming off easily."

  "Blood?"

  "How do you think dark mages perform a spell? It takes a death, stupid." She started mumbling in that other language, while I hugged myself and tried not to think about what Tony was doing with a member of the Fey, some slaves and a circle of blood. He'd been on the wrong side of human law as long as I'd known him, but this contravened both mage and vampire rules as well. I didn't know when he'd turned suicidal, but I suddenly wanted out of the casino in the worst way.

  Finally, my small accomplice finished cleaning a narrow line through the circle, and I heard a small pop. "Is that it?" I asked her. It seemed kind of anticlimactic.

  She sat on the floor and panted. "Well, try it!"

  I walked forward, tentatively this time, but nothing blocked me. I knelt quickly by the nearest woman and started trying keys. Thankfully, the third one worked. I pulled the gag out of her mouth, and she started screaming. I started to stuff it back in, before she alerted the whole casino, but she caught my hand. She began a rapid string of French in between kissing my wrist and whatever else she could reach. I didn't understand much of what she was saying—my only other modern language is Italian, and there aren't a lot of crossovers between the two—but the light brown eyes that were looking at me almost worshipfully rang a bell.

  I got a weird feeling in my stomach. I knew this woman. She was plumper and looked far less haggard, but otherwise, little had changed since I'd seen her stretched on a rack enveloped in flames. I did a double take, but there was no denying it. That face was seared into my memory, and a glance at her fingertips showed them to be heavily scarred. As impossible as it was, a seventeenth-century witch was sitting in a casino in modern-day Vegas. Presumably a dead witch, since no one could have survived what I'd seen her put through. Any other day, I would have seriously considered passing out; as it was, I just pressed the key into her hand and scrambled back out of reach.

  "I have to go," I said shortly and fled. My plan was simple: find Jimmy, question him, turn him over to the cops, then run like hell. Other complications I could do without.

  I didn't need Billy to figure out that going back the way we'd come wasn't a great idea. If anyone was coming for Jimmy, that's the route they'd take, and my one gun wouldn't help much against the kind of hardware Tony's thugs carried. Not that I had seen any employees, muscle or otherwise, since hitting the lower levels, a fact that was beginning to worry me. It was early morning, sure, but a place like this never slept. There should be people around, especially if the ring was on tonight, but the hallways echoed emptily. I followed the corridor until I came to where it diverged. I paused, confused, until Billy floated through a wall and beckoned to me. "In here."

  I entered through a nearby door to find myself in an empty employee break room. Jimmy was half-hidden behind a soda machine. "There's a doorknob," he said when he saw me, and pointed at the w
all with his elbow, "right about there. But I can't do anything with these." He held up his mutilated hands and I hurried forward. Behind the machine was what looked like an expanse of the same off-white, slightly stained dry wall that made up the rest of the room. But it rippled around the edges, although I wouldn't have noticed if I hadn't been expecting it. The perimeter ward was getting old. I slid my hands along the wall until I grasped what felt like a knob, and pushed.

  A door opened onto a narrow corridor that, judging by the dust on the floor, didn't get a lot of use. It wasn't a surprise. Tony always had multiple exits, half of them hidden, in his businesses. He told me once that it was a leftover from his youth, when armies went marching through Rome on a regular basis. He'd almost burnt to death when some Spanish soldiers in Charles V's army sacked his villa in the 1530s, and ever since he'd been paranoid. For once, I was grateful for it.

  We ran down the hidden hallway, then climbed up a ladder at the end. Or, rather, I climbed and shoved Jimmy up in front of me. His hands were a major handicap, but he used his elbows, I pushed from below and somehow we made it. We burst out of a trapdoor into a locker room. A human wearing a sequined devil costume blinked at us blearily but didn't ask questions. He worked for Tony, so he was probably used to assorted oddities.

  Jimmy scrambled to his feet and ran for the door, puffing like a freight train, and I wasn't much better off. I definitely needed to add gym visits to my to-do list, right after running for my life and killing Tony. The locker room exited onto another of those plain gray hallways, but mercifully, it was a short one. A few seconds later, we were standing near a forest of faux stalagmites overlooking the river. A Charon was rowing a few weary gamblers back towards the entrance a few yards away.

  "Hey, where do you think you're going?!" Jimmy had started off without a word and didn't so much as flinch at my shout. Wrestling him to the ground wasn't an option, but fortunately, I knew something that was. "Billy, get him!"

  I took off after Jimmy and felt Billy Joe flow past me like a warm breeze. He was usually cold or at least chilly, but he was hopped up on some vamp's wards and had energy to burn. But Jimmy reached the vestibule in record time and was heading for the gates when he suddenly stopped and stumbled backwards. I realized why when I saw Pritkin, Tomas and Louis-César coming in the main entrance. I didn't worry about how they'd found me or what they had planned. I grabbed a handful of Jimmy's elegant suit coat and dragged him back into the hallway.

  "You aren't going anywhere until we talk about my parents," I informed him. Some of the larger stalagmites were between us and the trio from MAGIC, and I briefly thought we'd gotten away without being seen. Then I heard Tomas call my name. Damn, I was busted.

  Chapter 7

  My predicament wasn't a complete shock. The Senate has plenty of money to hire wardsmiths to run screens across every window and door in MAGIC, and probably to ward their vehicles as well. I'd initially been impressed that Billy Joe had gotten me car keys so quickly, but when I reached the garage, I'd seen a whole tag board of them hanging just inside the door. That, and the fact that nobody was guarding the cars, had told me something about the quality of the wards. I'd probably broken through more than one, what with crawling out the bathroom window, passing through the garage door and stealing a nice black Mercedes for my ride into town, but it still should have taken them longer than this to track me.

  Good wards are better than a security alarm because they tell you basic facts about who it was who broke in—human or not, aural imprint—and, if you get a good enough one, what they did while in your place. But they don't tell you where the intruder went after he or she left, unless you get one of the really intricate, expensive über-wards specially crafted by a wardmaster. Since the members of the Silver Circle are the ones who license wardsmiths, it wouldn't be hard for them to get the best in the business to design their defenses, and they use MAGIC's premises as much as anyone. But even the best wards available don't tell you exactly where a person can be found, only if you're hot or cold on the trail. Otherwise, I'd never have been able to elude Tony's goons long enough for his spells to wear off. So the vamps would know I was in Vegas, but it should have taken them hours to narrow down the precise spot. Someone who knew me well and who knew Jimmy was here must have told them where to look for me. Otherwise they'd be staking out the airport and wandering around the strip. I was going to have a less than friendly talk with Rafe if I ever saw him again.

  Jimmy got his head together, shook off my hold and bolted down the hall. A silver cloud descended from the ceiling and started after him just as the employees only door behind us was kicked in from the outside. So much for not alarming the humans. I didn't even turn around, but ran down the corridor after my fleeing captive. No way was I letting him slip away while I tried to reason with the Senate's stooges.

  I heard Pritkin swear, but by then I had reached the door to the locker room and I slammed it shut after me. Since the door would hold them for all of about a second, I needed to find Jimmy fast. I ignored a question from a half-dressed man in a demon suit and dodged past benches and open lockers to the exit. A gust of warm desert air ruffled my hair as I emerged, and I looked up to see that I'd exited the building. I was along one side, in a spot where the elaborate decoration of the front gave way to a plain asphalt lot bounded by a chain-link fence. It was probably where the employees parked. I cursed, thinking it would be hard to find Jimmy among the rows and rows of vehicles, but then I saw him darting towards the back of the lot. Billy's sparkling cloud was trailing after him like a misplaced halo.

  I drew my gun and continued my pursuit. I was a still shaky on whether I could actually kill anyone, even someone who deserved it as much as Jimmy, but I could definitely wound him. And that would give Billy Joe time to try out his possession skills. I took off through a row of cars at a dead run after checking that my safety was still on. It wouldn't be funny if I saved everyone the trouble and shot myself.

  I hadn't gotten halfway down the row before I heard the door behind me burst open with enough force to wrench it off its hinges. Strangely enough, instead of picking up speed, Jimmy skidded to a stop at the same moment, only a few yards ahead of me. I thought he'd reached his car and was trying to figure out how to use his keys with mangled hands, but a minute later I realized that what he'd actually found was backup. A couple dozen ugly guys rose out of the lot like scarecrows popping out of a wheat field. I didn't take time to count, but at least five or six were vamps. How the hell had Jimmy managed to fix up an ambush?

  I skidded to a stop at the same time that a familiar iron grip caught me around the waist. It was sort of ironic, really. I'd spent more time than I wanted to admit fantasizing about being in Tomas' arms, but now that I'd spent much of a night there, it was getting old. Pritkin moved into view as Tomas dragged me backwards. He had his shotgun out and was glaring at me with something close to hatred in those clear eyes.

  It rattled me until I realized that he was actually looking over my shoulder. A loud creaking and popping sound came from where Jimmy was standing, as if a forest of trees had all decided to fall at once, and I glanced up. "You have got to be kidding," was as much as I got out before Tomas threw himself on top of me and we went down in a pile. I scraped my hands against the asphalt, losing a bit more skin, but keeping hold of the gun through some miracle. Yep, definitely getting old.

  I managed to get a partial glimpse of the sight in front of us through a curtain of Tomas' hair. Most of the mob at Tony's had nicknames. I think it's some kind of unwritten gangster rule, because virtually everyone had one tied to either their favorite weapon or most prominent physical feature. Alphonse was «Baseball» because of what he could do with a bat, and they weren't talking about on a diamond. I'd always assumed that Jimmy's nickname came from his looks, which were rather ratlike, or his personality. I'd been wrong. It seemed that Jimmy the half satyr was also Jimmy the wererat. Or something. Weres weren't my specialty, but I'd never seen anything quite like
that. I squinted. I'd never even heard of anything like that. Probably for good reason, since anybody who saw one was going to want to forget it as soon as possible.

  Whatever it was had a giant, furry body that looked like it was molting in patches. Its narrow head had goat horns growing out of it, its big, chipped teeth were the color of a rusty sink and its pink tail was as thick around as my calf. It had goat hooves on its hind legs and stunk to high heaven. And, whatever Jimmy had morphed into, some serious nepotism had been going on at Dante's, because a tribe of his relations surrounded him.

  My brain kept telling my eyes that they were seeing things. Number one, satyrs are already magical creatures, and as such are supposed to be immune from were bites, so what I was seeing was technically impossible. Number two, why would a whole group of were-anythings be working for Tony? That sort of cooperation just didn't happen; everyone knew that. But then, it was hard to argue with the evidence twitching wiry black whiskers a few feet away.

  "Rats." It took me a second to realize that Pritkin was commenting on the type of shape-shifters we were dealing with instead of expressing mild irritation.

  Okay, I'd been right. Point for me. I'd gotten confused because the were-DNA seemed to have gotten mixed up with the satyr genes for a really unappealing mess. Jimmy—I assumed it was him because he was wearing the remains of his once stylish suit—was a gray and white tower of fur with three-inch claws dangling from arms ropy with muscle. The change seemed to have helped with his hands. They were still bloody but looked like they might be functional. Something else had changed, too. He'd never been all that menacing in his usual form—it was one of the reasons he'd made a good hit man, since people tended to underestimate him—but he was doing pretty well at the moment. I was armed, but Tomas had trapped both my arm and my gun underneath me. Jimmy stood right in front of me, and I couldn't do more than glare into his beady eyes.