“What?” I asked.
He scowled. “There’s no time! Just visualize your sign and will the curse away.”
During my one whole hour of intensive training, he’d told me to pick a symbol to represent me and my mojo. Maybe just because we were sitting in the car, I chose the Thunderbird emblem. I pictured it now, with its long silver wings sticking straight out to the sides.
Then I brought the power shivering up from my insides. It wasn’t easy, but it had been a while since the brownwings, and I’d recharged my batteries at least to some extent. Since I couldn’t see any particular target, I tried to be a bomb again. To make the magic blast out in all directions and smash whatever had a hold on Timon and me.
Once again, the whole world seemed to lurch, but differently than before. This was like the hitch you feel when you step off the moving walkway back onto the regular floor in the airport.
Everything stopped flickering, and then I registered how the guys and women in the tuxes had gathered around to gawk at Timon and me moving in slow motion. I couldn’t see any sign that anyone had actually been trying to help us. Their eyes widened when we suddenly sped up.
Timon sniffed three times, then sneered like he could smell their unwillingness to get involved. He started to talk, probably to chew them out. Then, inside the ballroom, something bonged.
It had to be a clock striking the hour. We’d been stuck in slow-mo for twenty minutes.
I grabbed Timon and ran, dragging him along. One of the Oriental rugs slid under my foot. I almost went down and pulled the old man with me. But not quite.
The ballroom was fancy and full of candles like the lobby. The poker table with its covering of green felt sat in the pool of light under the chandelier. In the gloom on the far side of it were chairs for the flunkies the lords had brought along. The chiming grandfather clock stood beside the wall.
By the time I threw myself into the one empty seat at the table, there were only two bongs to go. The mummy clapped, too softly for me to hear. I wondered if his hands would explode into puffs of dust if he smacked them together hard enough to make a sound.
Standing beside me, Timon somehow oriented on the mummy, sneered, and said, “Was that you? It was a feckless little ploy.”
“But helpful,” the mummy said, “whoever set the snare. Since he’s occupied your chair, I take this fellow to be your proxy. So it was necessary for him to prove he’s of the blood. And now he has, without a bit of wasted time. In fact, we could start playing immediately, if only you’d be so kind as to find a place among the spectators.”
Timon took a deep breath, then pointed his torn, eyeless face down at me. “Win,” he growled. He snapped his fingers, and a girl in a tux came scurrying. Her legs bent backward, and she didn’t have much in the way of feet. Her black little shoes were round.
Watching her lead Timon away, I suddenly felt like a little kid whose parents have just dropped him off for his first day of school. Or his first night in Dracula’s castle.
The mummy smiled at me around his cheroot. “But it’s only courteous,” he said, “to have a round of introductions before the cards start flying. Most people call me the Pharaoh.”
“Hi,” I answered. “I’m Billy.” Timon had told me not to give my full name.
“Lovely to meet you, Billy,” purred the woman on the Pharaoh’s left. “I’m Leticia.” When I really looked at her, I felt a shock, and for once, it wasn’t a surge of fear.
Leticia had waves of auburn hair, and big, shining green eyes. Smooth creamy skin and a strapless sequined evening dress that showed a lot of it. I could give you all the details, and you’d get the idea that she was beautiful, glamorous and sexy, but you wouldn’t really understand. Think of the girl who made you crazy in junior high, right when puberty kicked in. Or the actress who hypnotized you whenever you watched one of her movies, no matter how awful it was. That was Leticia.
My mouth was dry, and my heart pounded. She might have sunk her hooks into me right then and there, too deep for me ever to pull them out, except that I’d played against other good-looking women who used it to get the guys to go easy on them. So this wasn’t a new experience, just a familiar one amped to a new level. And, after things went bad between us, Victoria told me I’d rather gamble than make love, and maybe she was right about that, too. Put it all together, and it may explain why I suddenly realized I was in trouble.
I did what Timon had told me to do whenever someone was trying to hex me. I visualized the T-bird emblem, concentrating on it really hard. A shudder went through me. Afterward, I was still attracted to Leticia, but I wasn’t drunk with it anymore.
Leticia winked like we’d just shared a joke.
On her left-and my right-was a guy who, like the Pharaoh, shouldn’t even have been alive. He smelled like oil and was made of painted tin, hinges, and springs. With his hooked nose and chin, leering mouth, and head bobbing at the end of his long neck, he reminded me of a jack-in-the-box, and when he twisted in my direction, I half expected him to introduce himself as Jack. But, in a voice that hissed and popped like an old LP, he told me he was Gimble of the Seven Soft Rebukes.
On my other side was a scrawny woman with the round, blank, bulging eyes of a bug. She had four arms, all too skinny, all with too many joints, and all covered in bristles.
An open glass jar sat beside her chip stack. An assortment of insects crawled sluggishly inside, but didn’t fly, jump, or climb out. I guessed the lump of blue jelly gave off fumes that kept them drugged. The bug woman popped a grasshopper into her mouth and crunched it as she introduced herself as Queen.
The guy between Queen and the Pharaoh looked as human as Leticia or me. So you’d think he might not make much of an impression, not sitting at this table. But he did. I didn’t suppose he was really a whole lot bigger than Pablo Martinez. People don’t come a whole lot bigger. But he felt twice as huge, and twenty times as dangerous. He had a long, shaggy black beard, hair to match, and faded blue tattooing on his forehead and hands that I couldn’t quite make out under all the fur. His suit and tie looked expensive-Armani or something-and as natural on him as they would on a grizzly.
“Wotan,” he rumbled. He stood up to offer me his hand.
Since I had a hunch what was coming, I wasn’t eager to take it. But table image matters, and I didn’t want to look scared. I got up again, and we shook.
If you want to call it that. Actually, he did his best to crush my hand. Since I’d been expecting it, I was able to squeeze back, but it still hurt. And creeped me out a little more, if that was possible, when I felt that he even had hair growing on his palm.
He stared into my eyes as we strained to mangle one another. His eyes were a muddy, bloodshot brown.
“I hope you realize,” he said, “a champion can lose as much as his lord. Sometimes he loses more.”
“And sometimes,” I said, just like I actually knew anything about it, “he kicks everybody else’s ass.”
“True enough,” the Pharaoh said. “I saw it happen in Punjab, two hundred years ago. So why not let go of him, Wotan, and we’ll see if he can do as well.”
Wotan couldn’t resist one last bone-grinding squeeze, but after that, he turned me loose. I sat back down and slipped my hand under the table, where I could flex the throbbing ache out of it without being obvious.
We didn’t have a dealer. We players were taking care of that ourselves. Queen was on the button, and her complicated four-handed shuffle was like a juggling act.
I took a breath and checked my stack. Timon wasn’t the chip leader, but he’d finished the previous night in decent shape. I checked everyone else’s. Wotan had the most, and Gimble, the least.
Six is a short-handed game, and so more hands were playable. Still, I decided to be a rock for at least the first hour, while I watched how everyone else was playing.
In other words, I was trying to push everything that was strange or scary out of my mind and make this just another poker game. It
seemed like the best way to keep from freaking out.
And there were moments when it almost felt like a normal game. We all shielded our hole cards with one hand as we lifted the corners with the other. Or, in Queen’s case, one of the others. The decks rustled when we shuffled; the Pharaoh managed without any problem, and I wondered just how feeble and fragile he really was. Leticia waved over the girl with the backward legs and ordered an apple martini, and while I had the chance, I asked for a ginger ale. Wotan fired up a pipe the shape and nearly the size of an alto sax and added its stinking smoke to the blue haze of the mummy’s cheroots.
And, off and on, the lords chatted. They talked poker, chess, archery, and horse racing, but also games and sports I’d never heard of. They gossiped about scandals I didn’t understand and told jokes I didn’t get. Still, it was table talk, and the tone and rhythm of it felt familiar, too.
Eventually I started to relax, at least a little. Whatever the tournament involved when the players weren’t at the table-and it would have been an understatement to say that I still didn’t have much of a handle on that-between midnight and dawn, it was cards. And cards, I understood.
I started playing more hands. A couple times, I opened from late position with garbage and managed to steal the blinds. I took a chance with suited connectors, made a flush on the river, and took down a nice pot from Leticia. Who revved up the bedroom eyes and teasing smile to congratulate me.
Fifteen minutes later, I caught pocket jacks and felt pretty good about it until Wotan raised from first position, and the Pharaoh came over the top. Then I mucked, and watched cards come out that would have given me a full house. I tried to swallow my annoyance and remember that folding had still been the right play.
See, just another night at the poker table. Until Wotan jumped up out of his chair.
In a way, that was normal, too. I’d seen gamblers get mad and even violent before. But I’d never seen anybody anywhere move as fast as Wotan circled the table. It was like watching a high-speed train hurtle down the track.
I tried to scramble out of my own seat, but I was too slow. Wotan would have caught me still sitting if he’d been after me. Fortunately, he wasn’t. He lunged past me, grabbed Gimble by the arm, and jerked him to his feet.
The tin man whipped his free hand back and forth, trying to hit Wotan in the face. The hard, fast sweeps made his body clink. Snarling like a mad dog, Wotan ducked, dodged, and yanked and twisted the arm he had in his grip.
I finished getting up and backpedaled away from the fight. The Pharaoh, Queen, and Leticia did the same.
Gimble’s forearm snapped away from his elbow. Wotan stooped and banged it repeatedly on the floor. On the fourth hit, a hatch above the wrist popped open, and half a dozen aces flew out. I guessed there was probably machinery in there, too, to slide a card into Gimble’s hand when he wanted it.
Wotan roared, stood up straight, and lifted the piece of arm to smash Gimble’s head. The metal man scrambled backward. Wotan started after him.
“Wait!” I said. I’m not sure why. Maybe it just wasn’t my night to mind my own business.
Wotan ignored me like a pit bull that’s decided to maul the neighbor kid no matter what its owner thinks about it. I took a step in his direction, and then he spun around.
His eyes had turned red. Not glowing red, like taillights, but completely bloodshot, like he’d had some kind of hemorrhage. Maybe it meant he couldn’t see, but as I got ready to dodge the first swing of the detached arm, I didn’t think I was going to be that lucky.
Then Leticia said, “Please don’t!” I felt her magic even though she wasn’t aiming it at me, like the breeze of a bullet shooting past my head.
“I agree,” said the Pharaoh. If he was using magic, I couldn’t feel it. Maybe he didn’t think he had to. I’d noticed early on that all the others, even Wotan, showed him respect. “Please don’t drag the game down to that level, especially so early in the proceedings. I came to Florida to play Hold ’Em. Didn’t you?”
“Gimble cheated,” Wotan growled.
“And you caught it,” Leticia said. “You spotted it ahead of any of the rest of us, and now he’ll pay the penalty.”
“All right,” the big man said. “He is a lord. But this one.” His eyes locked on me. “A human. Shouting orders at me. Interfering.” He shuddered.
“At least for the time being,” the mummy said, “punish his impudence at the table.”
Wotan turned on his heel and started prowling around the room. Everyone gave him plenty of room. Periodically he kicked a chair, or picked one up one-handed, swung it over his head, and smashed it down. Since it seemed to be the alternative to smashing me, I had no problem with how he was working out his aggression.
Meanwhile, Gimble called for his servants. They looked like ugly cartoon squirrels walking on two legs, or maybe like crosses between squirrels and chimps. After figuring out that his elbow was trashed, they bolted on a whole new arm at the shoulder. The boss stretched it out, bent it, and twisted it around to get the feel of it.
“Is it satisfactory?” the Pharaoh asked.
“It will do,” said Gimble, nodding, or maybe that was just the usual bobbing of his head.
“And it looks like Wotan is calming down. So let’s all resume our seats.”
When we did, Gimble posted an extra big blind six times in a row, and after that, nobody treated him any differently than before. Which was more forgiving than people would have been in the games where I generally played.
The difference was that cheating was considered legitimate play in the lords’ tournament. It was just that you tried at your own risk, because if somebody caught you, he was free to play back at you however he liked. But, except for having to throw in the extra chips, once the moment was over, it was over.
Or I guessed that was the way it worked. I wasn’t sure. If the lords really didn’t think like humans, how could I be?
What I did know was that, instead of holding a grudge against Gimble, Wotan kept giving me the stink eye. Either I really had pissed him off before, or he’d just decided to intimidate me.
I’d had other players try to stare me down. But generally speaking, they’d hadn’t had eyes that were still mostly red where they should have been white, and they hadn’t warmed up for the staring contest by ripping a guy’s arm off. The next time it was my deal, I fumbled the shuffle, and cards squirted out of my hands. Wotan sneered, and Queen and Gimble laughed.
That made me angry, which was good. It pushed out some of the fear. I pictured the Thunderbird, and that helped a little more, although not as much as it had against Leticia’s power. Maybe that was because she’d used actual magic. Wotan was just giving me a good look at what he really was inside.
A few hands later, I raised on the button with ace-ten suited. Queen folded, and Wotan said, “All in.”
He was still the chip leader, which meant he was really putting me all in. I wasn’t going to bet my whole tournament on ace-ten, so I tossed my hand and didn’t think a whole lot more about it.
But he went on putting me all in whenever the play was such that he could be pretty sure it would just be him and me in the pot. Which got to be more and more often. The session was almost over, and the others were more interested in protecting what they had than playing any more big hands. They didn’t mind getting out of the way and letting the two guys who had issues pound on one another.
I prayed for a premium hand. Pocket aces, kings, or even ace-king. I didn’t get one.
I wouldn’t need a great hand if I could figure out when Wotan really had something and when he was raising with trash. But I’d watched him all night and never picked up a tell. I couldn’t spot one now, either. He just threw off a kind of steady hatred.
I considered simply protecting my own stack by folding the rest of the night away. But what reason was there to think that Wotan wouldn’t play me the same way next time? Hell, if I didn’t make a stand, the others were likely to decid
e they could bully me, too.
It came to me that maybe I should cheat.
I didn’t like the idea, but I needed to remember that at this table, it was all part of the game. Why, for all I knew, every one of my opponents had been doing it all night, jabbing away at one another with magic, and I just hadn’t noticed because they hadn’t bothered to direct much of it at the human.
Besides, I was pissed off.
So I figured it was time to read Wotan’s mind. Or look through the backs of his cards with X-ray vision. And it was really a shame that I had no idea how to do either of those things.
My first lesson in Timon’s brand of mumbo jumbo had only focused on defense. He said there wasn’t time to teach me anything else, and that I shouldn’t try anything else. Just play cards and block any magical punch that anybody threw at me.
It was probably good advice. But I did have one trick I could try, because I’d taught it to myself. I visualized the Thunderbird and brought a quiver of power up out of my center. And the next time the action folded around to me, I bet. Queen threw away her cards.
Like many experienced players, Wotan never looked at his hand until it was his turn to act. As he reached for it now, I jumped out of my physical body and across the table. I landed behind him and looked over his shoulder as he turned up the corners of king-queen off-suit.
Not a great hand overall, but perfect for kicking the crap out of my king-jack. I flew back into my body, and when he went all in, I mucked.
And studied the others. If any of them had noticed me soul traveling-or whatever it was called-I couldn’t tell it.
Okay, good. Now I just had to hope I’d get a chance to make the trick pay off before the end of the night.
It happened five minutes later. I bet ace-nine. Wotan came over the top with queen-seven.
If he paired up and I didn’t, I was still going to the rail. But the odds were in my favor, and that was all I’d been waiting on. Grinning, I sprang back over the table. I meant to plunge back into my body like a hand sticking into a glove.
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