Vanity Scare

by H. P. Mallory

  “So, Dagan,” Christina started cheerfully. I had known her as something less than cheerful only twice in my existence, and on both occasions, there had been considerable stress upon the welfare of the world as a whole. Very few things were capable of rattling her cage, so to speak.

  “Why don’t you tell me everything you can about your brother?” she continued, sounding more like a psychotherapist than the head of HR.

  This was a calculated approach. Christina watched Dagan twitch and sit up a little straighter, trying to reassure himself of his own modest height, telling her that which both of us already knew: that Darion was, in fact, Dagan’s brother, and that their relationship was not one to be envied.

  “Bram tells me you two don’t get along,” she added after a protracted silence.

  Dagan chuckled bitterly. It was a sound that bubbled and burst like boiling tar, gurgling forth from a crack in the earth. But he smiled, as though the thought amused him, all the same.

  “No. We don’t,” he agreed, seeming to drag his voice out from the dirt and shake it off. His words rang like a thing dug out of a time capsule, or perhaps an unmarked grave.

  “Would you like to tell us why that is?”

  When Dagan smiled, there was a sting of fear behind the smirk that I cannot properly describe.

  “Not really, no,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  “Because you don’t need to know why we don’t get along,” he responded with a shrug. “Why do you want to know, anyway?”

  “Because you broke into a sealed federal building from a walled-off dimension, and Bram,” Christina replied, glancing in my direction, “tells us that Darion is part of the reason you went back in the first place.”

  Dagan looked over his shoulder at me. “Now, why would Bram go and tell you a silly thing like that?” The look he gave me, scalding and accusatory, asked why I’d bothered to rat him out.

  “Because it is true,” I pointed out with a frank shrug. “And because Osenna was worried about you.”

  “And you care because?” he asked incredulously.

  “I do not care in the slightest,” I responded, smiling at Christina with what I hoped was appropriate coldness for her earlier accusation regarding my alleged motivations for being here—that I was seeking out Dulcie. But the smile she returned was one full of warmth and parental amusement. “But I’m afraid our colleagues must have context.”

  “Colleagues?” laughed Vander, at whom I spent a long moment glaring. He did not match my stare, but the uncomfortable shift of his shoulders told me he felt my gaze like a sunburn on the side of his face.

  “Have you switched teams, vampire?’ asked Dagan, and now he seemed on the verge of laughter. None of his expressions, though, seemed to make it to his eyes. “Has our most beloved creature of the night fallen so far that the Federal Bureau of Investigation is your first call?” He pouted slightly. “Did you make fwends with the powice while I was away?”

  I could feel Christina suppressing a grin, though nothing in her expression seemed to give the same impression.

  So, to spite them both, I said, “Perhaps I am simply here to bother someone,” shellacking on as much venom and sarcasm as I could muster.

  The answer seemed to satisfy Dagan, whose entire existence centered around bothering people, and, as a bonus, Vander stiffened, developing a sudden imperfect tension strong enough to make Quillan and Agent James reconsider their proximity to him. I could not resist looking Vander in the eye and grinning.

  “Dagan, you can either tell us what you were doing up until you broke into our office,” said Christina, “or we can wait for a translator to get Zhe Ping’s side of the story.” She shrugged, a gesture of practiced nonchalance. “And we’ll just have to assume whatever he’s telling us is the complete, unadulterated truth.”

  This was not strictly true, but it was enough to make Dagan look away in consternation.

  “Christina knows a good portion of everything already, Dagan,” I informed him. “There is little you can tell her for which she does not already have at least a wisp of context.”

  “Great,” he said, with little vigor.

  “We want to help you,” put in Agent James.

  “We want to prevent Darion from finding you,” I added, slightly quieter. “And, as you are well aware, I have my own reasons for wanting to avoid your brother.”

  Agent James gave me a reproving look and continued, “And this will be a lot easier for all of us if we don’t have to arrest you.”

  Dagan was silent for a long while. Whether he was weighing his options or picturing the majority of the room in naked and compromising positions was anyone’s guess.

  “We can protect you,” said Christina.

  “That,” said Dagan, leaning forward, “is the funniest thing I’ve heard all day.”

  “And I expect you’ve spent the majority of your day fielding funny things,” I retorted, and I gave a rather theatrical sigh. My impatience was building, and the dam which held it back was riddling itself with cracks. I was tired of playing the proverbial nice guy. I narrowed my eyes at him.

  “Dagan, your stupidity has put me, in particular, in a more than modest amount of danger. I need to know exactly what you did when you, in your infinite wisdom, decided to go gallivanting about the one place in existence from which you are actively banished, and from which you paid me to retrieve you and your lady friend.” I further glared at him. “And, of course, a marriage you could not terminate by conventional means.”

  Dagan ground his teeth.

  There was a beat of silence. Christina’s computer made its awful buzzing noise and she kicked the machine under the table. The sound eased, but did not stop.

  “Marriage?” Christina repeated, looking first at me and then at the demon. “Dagan?” she asked slowly, the way one might speak when approaching a child abandoned in the woods. “What is Bram talking about?”

  Dagan shifted his gaze to me, then back at Christina, and then apparently decided he’d rather the story come from him than from myself or Zhe Ping.

  Christina waited patiently.

  “They were married,” he said at last, which glossed over more of the situation than War and Peace had words to rectify.

  “They?” Christina asked.

  “Osenna and Darion, my brother,” Dagan explained. He took a deep breath. “And later, Darion became abusive.”

  “Abusive? I thought you guys liked that sort of thing,” said Agent James.

  The look Dagan gave him could have bored holes through glass. Christina’s accompanying glare was fit to match.

  “Not like this,” said Dagan, and Christina kicked Agent James where he stood behind her desk. Kicking things that made unfortunate noises seemed to be the order of the day.

  “Ow!” Agent James held up his hands as though he were in submission.

  “So, when you say abusive, do you mean physically?” Christina asked Dagan.

  Dagan nodded. “Physically, verbally, emotionally, psychologically.”

  “Examples?” Quillan asked.

  Dagan shrugged. “Locking her in a room for days without food, destroying her things and claiming she lost them, physically beating her…” he paused, eyeing Agent James. “And not in a good way.” Agent James’ eyebrows reached for the ceiling as Dagan continued.

  “Darion would lie to her but insist he was telling the truth. He’d manipulate her.” He took a moment to collect himself from a rage that made the air around him shimmer. “The list goes on. It drove her crazy, or nearly did.”

  “So, then,” said Christina, lacing her fingers together under her chin, “you rescued her.”

  Dagan scoffed. “You make it sound so romantic. No, I absconded with her. I ran. I picked her up like a bag of stolen goods and I ran.” He shook his head, likely at himself, and almost laughed. “Or rather, I paid him to do the picking up for me.” And he glared at me.

  Now did not seem a good time to clarify that I, in
turn, had paid someone else to do the actual absconding. As a rule, I do not care to get my hands dirty. Unless, of course, a certain little fairy is concerned.

  “That sounds like the wisest thing, if Darion is as bad as you say.” Christina had clearly picked up the strange lilt of Dagan’s speech; perhaps one of her many new psychological tricks.

  “He is.” Dagan looked at the ceiling and found something funny there, because he began to laugh. “But my running away wasn’t wise, it was cowardly,” he added, looking back down at her, “and I’ll be the first to admit it. Darion is a piece of work, but so was I. And maybe I could have taken him, if I’d tried.”

  “Not likely,” I said, crossing my arms. We both were familiar enough with Darion to know such was not the case. Even if Dagan had succeeded, it was extremely likely he would have died in the process.

  Dagan chuckled. “I’m a lot of things, Christina, but stupid isn’t one of them.”

  “Are you quite certain of that?” I asked.

  Dagan appraised me over his shoulder, teeth flashing in a poor man’s reconstruction of a smile. “There are a number of things you can’t do when you’re dead,” he said. “My priorities are exactly in order.”

  “So, you ran,” Christina prompted. “And Bram brought you here, fixed you both up with fake IDs and… that was all she wrote?”

  “Yes,” said Dagan, and the smile became a jackal’s grin.

  “Okay, obvious question: Why go back to Dromir?” she continued.

  Dagan took the kind of breath one indulges in before saying something they find terribly amusing—in large part because it will confuse the people around them.

  “I forgot something,” he answered with a shrug.

  “In Dromir,” clarified Christina.

  “Yes.”

  “And you went back to get it five years later,” said Agent James, sounding thoroughly unamused, which seemed to amuse Dagan to no end.

  SIXTEEN

  Bram

  Dagan beamed at Agent James. “Couldn’t find the time to go back to Dromir until recently.”

  “And the thing you forgot,” Christina went on, holding up the scarf she had confiscated from him. “You brought it here to hide it, didn’t you?”

  “Yes. Originally.”

  “Originally?” Christina asked. “Did something change?”

  “Yes.” Dagan considered himself for a moment, then apparently decided not to complete the thought because he said nothing more.

  Christina continued in his silence. “Okay. So, why risk everything for a scarf?”

  “It’s not just a scarf.”

  “It looks like a scarf to me,” she argued.

  “It’s a magic scarf.”

  Christina raised her eyebrows. “A magic scarf.”

  “Yes,” said Dagan. “Put it on.”

  “Why?” Quillan suddenly interjected. “Why do you want her to put it on?” And the expression he gave Christina told her not to do so.

  Christina looked dubiously at the scarf, then back at Dagan with the same expression.

  Dagan sighed theatrically. He leaned forward, elbows on the table, and dragged his hand up Christina’s arm to the scarf in her hand, where he wrapped the silk around his fingers. Quillan reached forward and pushed Dagan away from her, but Christina glanced up at him and shook her head, as though to let him know she could fend for herself.

  “What’s the matter?” Dagan asked, looking her up and down, shoulders back, poised like a tiger in the underbrush. “Don’t you want to experience the feeling of disappearing?”

  Christina, completely unfazed, stared Dagan down as a matador stares down the nose of a snorting bull.

  Quillan looked very much like he wanted to pop Dagan’s head off like a bad bulb on a rosebush. Agent James held him back.

  Christina smiled. “Is that what the scarf does? Makes you invisible?”

  “Completely,” Dagan crooned. “Think, sweet lady, of all the terrible, wonderful things you could do with this in… more favorable circumstances.” He squeezed her hand and started to pull himself closer, onto the desk. “You can pretend I’m anyone in the world, sweetheart. Better than having the lights off.”

  Agent James very suddenly let go of Quillan, who surged forward, grabbed Dagan, and pushed him forcefully back into his chair. Christina mouthed a thank you.

  Dagan laughed.

  “Hey, easy,” he said, and he beamed up at Quillan. “It’s open invitation. All you had to do was ask.”

  “I’m not going to punch you because we’re in a professional environment, and I don’t want to lose my job over you,” growled Quillan, “but know that, if I could, I’d break your fucking teeth.”

  “Don’t threaten me with a good time.”

  “Quill, it’s okay,” said Christina. “He was just fooling around. Weren’t you, Dagan?”

  Dagan spread his arms wide, gesturing to himself. “Am I capable of anything else?”

  “Definitely not,” replied Christina, who was making a grand charade of enjoying the conversation. I could sense the tension and discomfort radiating from her like heat off the horizon, but Dagan gave no sign that he could tell. If he could, perhaps he was trying to manipulate it, or was simply basking in the energy of her unease.

  “The scarf makes you invisible, then,” she stated, returning to her more business-like tone.

  Dagan looked wistfully at the scarf in her hand. “Indeed, it does.”

  “You went back for a fancy toy?” asked Agent James. He looked sideways at Christina, who shrugged back at him.

  “I went back,” said Dagan, slowly, “for an edge.”

  The room indulged in a moment of contemplative silence.

  “A question, if you would,” I began.

  Dagan turned in his chair and mimed a bow without standing up. “But of course.”

  “The scarf renders one invisible,” I confirmed.

  “That is not a question.”

  “It is an established fact I would like to check.”

  Dagan rolled his eyes and slouched a bit, deciding, apparently, that the question was no longer interesting enough to hold his attention. “Yes, it renders one invisible,” he said, in a poor man’s mockery of my accent.

  “Invisible,” I said, “in what capacities? Invisible to audio detection as well as visual detection?”

  Dagan paused. Then, he smiled. “In all capacities.”

  Darion, you see, was a remarkably perceptive man. Even conventional invisibility could only carry one so far; but a device such as this, capable of concealing one in every detectable way—by shadows, sounds, auras, et cetera—would rupture the entire game.

  I could not help but smile back, though mine was dripping with irritation and sarcasm.

  “You intended to sneak up on Darion,” I said, and I tutted. “Very brave.”

  “On the contrary, it’s exactly as cowardly a move as you’ve come to expect from me.” He shrugged, still smiling. “Darion was going to find Osenna and me, eventually. I felt I was ready for an altercation, provided I could obtain a particular advantage.” He gestured to the scarf.

  “So, you went back to Dromir to try to kill your brother?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “I suppose that didn’t go as well as you’d hoped?” I pressed.

  “Oh, it would have,” Dagan said, draping an ankle across his other knee and bobbing his foot, “were it not for a… let’s say… detour I had to take on my way to finding him.”

  “Detour,” repeated Christina dubiously, because Dagan suddenly seemed unreasonably pleased with himself. “What kind of detour?”

  “A little reunion with an old friend,” he said.

  “An old friend?”

  “Indeed.”

  “And what was the nature of this reunion?” I asked.

  Dagan examined his nails. “Carnal.” When no one responded, he looked up. “What? Is there any other kind reunion?”

  “You said you slept with Zhe
Ping’s daughter?” I said.

  Dagan rolled his eyes as though it were painfully obvious. “I did.”

  “In a public fountain,” added Agent James.

  Dagan laughed. “Quite right.” He nodded, chewing on his lip. “And, oh, she was incredible.”

  “And does she have a name?” I asked.

  “Mingmei,” Dagan answered. “Very lucky, running into her like that.”

  “Like what, exactly?” I frowned at him.

  Dagan sprawled back over his chair like a cat basking in the sun and looked languidly up at me as though I were a part of some delightful dream.

  “Did Mingmei catch you stealing the scarf?” I asked.

  “Yes, actually,” he answered. “Only because I let her catch me, of course. She came into the room to clean something, or to steal something of her own, who knows.”

  “How did you know one another?” Christina asked.

  Dagan nodded. “We knew each other from way back when, and it occurred to me that I was two for three with Osenna this week and that I… had a little time to kill.”

  “Little time to kill in a dimension where someone apparently wanted you dead?” asked Vander, but that was not the part of the sentence that irked me.

  “Two for three,” I said. It was not a question; I was reasonably certain I knew what Dagan meant.

  Quillan, though, was foolish enough to ask. “What are you talking about?”

  Oh, Dagan reveled in the opportunity to answer. “Osenna and I,” he said slowly, tasting every word like a fine wine he already knew the rest of us despised, “have a little game we play.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” muttered Agent James, who by now had caught on.

  “We find people who accommodate our tastes, and we fuck them in new and exciting ways, in the newest and most exciting places we can devise.”

  “Gross,” Christina muttered.

  Dagan laced his fingers together and clucked his tongue. “The rules—or rather, the singular rule—is that the fucking must be in public.” He bobbed his head left and right, then took on the expression of one who has just recalled something. “One other… opportunity for bonus points is that the sex must be loud.”