by Karen Chance
Wonderful.
The clock ticking steadily inside my head wasn’t helping my mood, either. Geminus had my number, but he hadn’t used it. Either he really didn’t have the stone or he was cocky enough to believe he could take on the fey. That left no one on the party list who wasn’t dead or buttoned down tight. At least as far as I was concerned. Caedmon might have more luck, but he wasn’t here. And by the time he arrived, Louis-Cesare would have been sentenced and possibly executed.
Marlowe had been right: something needed to shake loose, and it needed to happen now.
I hailed a cab. There was one person who hadn’t been on the list who might know something. I’d already had my daily quota of ancient vampires with attitude problems who weren’t going to tell me shit. But talking to Anthony beat doing nothing.
Although not by much.
A yellow taxi slid to a stop in front of me, and the silent duo got inside. I started to do the same when my phone rang. “Yeah?”
“Who the hell taught you how to answer the phone?” a brisk voice asked.
I wasn’t sure I recognized it; the weather was overcast and the signal was lousy. “Fin?”
“The one and only. You still interested in that deadbeat?”
“Yeah, why?”
“Because he just showed up at his apartment. My boys are downstairs. If you want to talk to him before they take him apart, now would be the time.
“Now’s good,” I said fervently. “Thanks, Fin.”
“Where to?” the cabbie asked.
“Chinatown.”
A body hit the dirt at my feet, hard enough to send a gout of blood splashing up onto my face. I wiped it away and stared upward. I hate it when that happens.
“You will die a worse death if you do not leave my domain,” a voice thundered down from the third story of the old tenement. “I am a servant of the Sacred Fire, the wielder of the flame of Arnor—”
“So I should call you Gandalf?” I asked, getting the toe of my boot into a crack in the wall.
There was silence for a long moment, except for the sound of brick flaking off under my boots as I scrabbled for purchase. I got a hand on the lowest rusty rung of the fire escape just as my toehold gave way. A wiggle and a heave got me up to the first landing, where a feral-looking cat hissed at me before jumping up to the next level.
I’d have preferred to use the door, but we were trying to cover all exits. Fin’s boys were in the lobby, and Frick and Frack were watching the sides. This was the only way out left, and I wasn’t about to let him use it.
“Aw, fudge,” floated down to me, as a couple of golden eyes peered over a third-floor window ledge. “You’re a freaking dhampir. Why are you reading Tolkien?”
I shrugged, then had to dodge the potted geranium he threw at me. “After five hundred years, you’ve read just about everything. Besides, he had hella world-building skills.”
“You’re five hundred?” A head with small, curved horns came into view. “No way.”
“Yep.” I followed the cat up the trembling staircase. Flakes of rust clung to my skin and ate into my palms as I hefted myself over a couple missing stairs and up another floor.
“Well, you don’t look a day over four,” I was told, as a ceramic lamp exploded on the railings right beside me.
One of the shards must have hit the cat, which sent up a mewl of distress. Suddenly, my objective’s entire head stuck out of the window, regardless of the danger. “Oh, no! Pooky!”
“Pooky?” I demanded, as a squat creature crawled out onto the window ledge and held out a pawlike appendage beseechingly.
“Come to Daddy,” it crooned, but the cat was having none of it. It hissed at both of us and tried to run between my legs, but I scooped it up, careful to keep those sharp, little claws out of my flesh.
“You have a cat?” I asked, one brow raised, as the fur ball in my arms spit and hissed.
“Why shouldn’t I?” The creature’s face wasn’t real expressive, but its voice was defensive.
“You’re a dog.”
“I’m a luduan!” it said huffily.
I looked it over. It would be maybe three feet tall in its stocking feet, if it had feet, which it didn’t, or was designed to walk standing up, which it wasn’t. The body covered in golden brown fur looked a lot like a dog’s, except for the too-large lionlike head with a curly brown mane. To further confuse the issue, it had a unicorn- type horn in the center of its forehead.
“Dog-ish,” I corrected.
“Give me my cat!” it demanded.
“Or what? You’ll smite me like a Balrog?”
The golden eyes narrowed. “I quote Tolkien because he puts it better. But I can still open a can of whup ass all over you.”
“You’re right,” I told him. “He does put it better.”
The creature used its horn to snag a radio by the handle, preparing to launch it at me. I dangled the kitty over the long drop. “Just try it.”
His face crumpled. “Oh, come on. Don’t do that. You’ll scare her!”
“Maybe we can work something out,” I offered.
He sighed in resignation. “I don’t have any money, okay? So you can tell whichever one of those sharks you’re working for that he’s wasting his time.”
“I don’t want money.”
“And you’re not getting a pound of flesh, either!”
“I’m not here to beat you up.”
The big head tilted. “Then why are you here?”
I pulled the cat back in. She didn’t look particularly scared to me. Maybe because the “body” down below had vanished like the cut- rate illusion it was. “I just want to talk to you.”
“About what?”
“About what happened at Ray’s place last night.”
He blinked those enormous eyes at me. “Come again?”
“You heard me.”
“No, I didn’t. That’s the kind of talk that could get my horn ground up.” He petted it nervously. “It’s supposed to be an aphrodisiac, you know? Not that it’s done me any good lately. Do you know how few lady luduans are in existence?”
“Not really.”
“Neither do I,” he said miserably. “I just know there’s none around here.”
“That’s a bitch. Now are you going to help me or not?”
“Not!”
“Here, kitty, kitty.”
“Cut that out!”
“Look, you can talk to me, or you can talk to Fin’s boys. They’re waiting downstairs. But I’m nicer.” He shot me a look. “Okay, that was a lie. But I can help you out.”
“How?”
“Tell me what you know, and I get you off the hook with Fin.” I couldn’t afford it, but if it helped Louis-Cesare, I didn’t think Mircea was going to quibble about the expense account.
He looked at me for a long moment, those lamp-lit eyes brighter than the streetlight across the road. “Touch the horn,” he finally said.
It was my turn to look wary. “Is this something kinky?”
“As if.” He sniffed. “You’re not my type.”
Thank God for small mercies. “If you poison me, I can’t help you with Fin,” I pointed out.
He yawned, showing a mouth full of needle-sharp teeth. They matched the talons at the end of its paws. “Relax. All that was just good propaganda. Not that I don’t know a few tricks, mind you.”
“Like the flame of—”
“Shut up.”
I decided I didn’t have time to be cautious, hiked up to the third- floor landing and touched the horn. And no sooner had my finger brushed the tip than he rammed it into my skin. “Ouch!”
“Don’t be such a baby,” he told me, as my blood sank into the apparently porous bone. His eyes rolled up in his head, and he sat there, humming and making these weird faces. I let him get away with it for maybe a minute, and then I gave the kitty a little squeeze. The spoiled thing mewed, and his eyes shot open. “You’re a piece of work—you know that?” he demanded
.
“I told you this had better not be kinky.”
“It isn’t!”
“Could have fooled me.”
“Like that’s hard,” he sneered. “And you may as well let Pooky go. I know you won’t drop her.”
“Wanna bet?”
He sighed. “Lady—or may I call you Dorina?”
“No!”
“Okay, Dorina, it’s like this. I’m a luduan. I taste your blood, and I know what kind of person you are, whether you’re lying to me, yadda yadda.” He waved a paw. “You know the score, or you wouldn’t be here. Don’t waste my time.”
I sighed and pulled a gun. “You’re right. I can’t kill an innocent creature just for sport. You, on the other hand…”
“Hey!” Those bright eyes narrowed. “No need to get nasty. Did I say we couldn’t do business?”
“Then what was all that about with the blood?”
“Establishing some guidelines. It saves time. Otherwise, people try to lie to me and it gives me a real headache”—he tapped the space above the horn with his paw—“right here.”
“So do we have a deal?”
“I don’t know. What exactly do you want to know?”
“Well, for starters, you could tell me who killed Jókell.”
The creature’s small ears went back, and its eyes widened before it started beckoning frantically with a paw. “Get in here!”
It could have been a trap, but I didn’t think so. He looked genuinely panicked. Before I could move, the horn snagged my jacket and dragged me inside. The door slammed shut behind me, and I found myself in a narrow hallway smelling of mildew, urine and spices.
I didn’t get a chance to look around, because I was dragged into an apartment before my eyes had even adjusted, and another door slammed shut behind me. “He’s dead? Are you sure? What happened?” The luduan’s tail was twitching excitedly back and forth as he prowled across the floor. He looked freaked.
“Yes, yes, and someone gutted him,” I said, looking around for a chair and not finding one.
“But he had protection!” The little thing looked genuinely upset.
“You mean Naudiz?”
“That thing!” He wrinkled up his features in what I guess was a scowl. “I wish I’d never heard of it!”
“That seems to be the consensus. So what happened?”
He sighed and sat back on his haunches, but that still left his head too low for his liking. “Sit down, can’t you?”
“Where?” The apartment was clearly set up for nonhuman use. The weak streetlight angling in through gaps in the blinds striped a nest of blankets on the floor, a large rawhide chew bone with one end gnawed off and a couple food dishes. I assumed these were for the cat, because a wash of junk-food wrappers had collected in the corners.
“It’s over there,” he said, reading my body language. “I keep one for bipedal clients.”
He used the horn to point to a stack of folding chairs in the dining room area and I fetched one, bringing us closer to eye level. “Tell me.”
“Worst night of my life; I thought I was dead for sure.”
“You were there? You were in the office when he was attacked?”
“Yeah. I’d been there maybe a minute. I was late because I had to wait for that vampire who owns the club to leave. There was supposed to be a diversion to get him out of the office, but it wasn’t needed. He left on his own and I walked up. And a few seconds later the attack came.”
“You were working for Geminus.”
“I didn’t want to do it, but I needed the cash. I was in debt to him, big-time. Fin’s boys will just beat me up; he would have killed me.”
“In debt? For what?”
He blinked those massive eyes at me. “You’re kidding, right? Geminus owns half the illegal fights around here. Between fey and humans, fey and fey, humans and humans—anything, really, as long as someone will pay money to see it. Or to bet on it.”
I stared at him, a few things sliding into place. Along with drugs and weapons, no-holds-barred fights were another illegal import from Faerie. Ironically, it was the sort of thing the Dark Fey, who were treated like animals by some of their light counterparts, were fleeing Faerie to try to escape. But, once here, they had few contacts and fewer choices.
The authorities shut the matches down when they stumbled across them, but it wasn’t a priority. They weren’t a factor in the war, and that was all anyone cared about right now. Or maybe there was another reason.
“You’re telling me a senator was involved in a smuggling ring?”
“Involved in it? He runs it. He’s been smuggling for longer than anybody. He started bringing people over for the fights, and then branched out. He’s into a little of everything now.”
I sat there, growing quietly furious. No wonder we’d had so much hell stopping the smugglers. Geminus must have been tipping them off to our every move. Leaving us to clean up his competition—like Vleck or Ray—while he grabbed a bigger and bigger share of the pie.
I guess he’d been telling the truth when he said he wasn’t interested in politics.
“Why did he want the rune?”
“He didn’t give me the details. But I guess so he could control the fights. Give the stone to the fighter he wanted to win, and he could determine the outcome of every bout. And clean up even more than he already does. My debts were nothing compared to that.”
“You agreed to make the switch.”
“I thought it would be easy: a little sleight of hand, and no harm done. Jókell would get his money, I would get out of hock to all the people I owe and Geminus would get off my back. But I didn’t expect to be attacked!”
“What happened?”
“I’d barely gotten in the door. Jókell had taken the rune out of its carrier and was about to hand it to me, when the door burst open and someone threw me across the room.”
“Who attacked you?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t see.”
“What do you mean, you didn’t see? You were right there!”
“Right there and almost unconscious. I hit the wall and all but cracked my skull open. I heard the fight going on behind me, realized something had gone wrong and knew I had to get out of there. But the only window was bricked up, and the fight was between me and the door.”
“What did you do?”
He shrugged glossy shoulders—withers—whatever. “The only thing I could do. I went through the portal into Faerie. But time’s running a little slower there, so it took me this long to get back.”
I’d said it was like he’d fallen off the face of the Earth. I just hadn’t realized it was literally true. “You didn’t see anything?”
“I glanced back just as I crawled through the portal, to see if anybody was coming after me. And I glimpsed somebody in a dark cloak. But I didn’t see the face.”
“So tell me what you did see. Was he heavyset or skinny? Tall or short? Did you see hair color?”
“I saw the back of a cloak and it had the hood up; I couldn’t tell. And you all look tall to me.” He mumbled something that sounded like “planet of mutants.”
“Scent, then—what did he smell like? Or sound—did he say anything?” At this point, I’d take what I could get.
“I don’t have senses as acute as yours, and that club was too smelly and too noisy to make much out. Besides, I don’t think he said anything.”
I regarded him in utter frustration. I had an eyewitness who hadn’t bothered to use his eyes—or anything else. Perfect.
“You knew I was dhampir before I even opened my mouth,” I reminded him. “You must have sensed something.”
“I can tell species, even under a glamourie. It’s the whole truth thing.” He waved a paw.
“Then what was it?”
He started to open his mouth, and then stopped, frowning. “You know, that’s weird.”
“What is?”
“I hadn’t thought about it. But if I didn’t know bette
r, I’d swear it was a human.”
CHAPTER 34
The luduan’s evidence hadn’t helped as much as I’d hoped, since the only human involved in the case was dead. But vamps had human servants, even mages on occasion. And he had provided one tasty little nugget.
I had my phone out before I’d reached the bottom floor. “Geminus,” I told it.
“The master is—”
“Going to be really sorry if he doesn’t take this call. I can talk to him, or I can talk to Marlowe about the smuggling ring he’s been running. His choice.”
Geminus was on the phone in less than a minute, which told me a lot on its own. SOP was to let people like me hang, but then, he was probably afraid I’d do the same to him. One call to the Senate, and Geminus was going to be a very unhappy boy.
“What do you want?” The question was snapped in my ear before I’d even had a chance to say hello.
“I already told you that.”
“I don’t have it!”
“That’s too bad. I’m sure you’ve managed to cover your tracks pretty well up until now. But that was because no one was looking too closely at you. Once that changes, I don’t think the evidence for your smuggling operation will be hard to find. And that doesn’t even count what the fey are likely to—”
“Where are you?” he asked abruptly.
“Chinatown. Why?”
“Stay there, and keep your phone with you.”
“If this is a stalling tactic—”
“It isn’t. I really don’t have the damned stone. But I may know who does.”
“Who?”
“You don’t need to know that. I’ll get it and meet you.” The phone went dead.
I looked up to find Frick and Frack staring at me. “That was Senator Geminus,” Frick said.
“You do talk.”
“You’re blackmailing him?”
I put my phone away. “We’re reaching a mutually advantageous agreement.”
“What about the smuggling?”
It looked like someone had been eavesdropping. Not too surprising—it was probably why Marlowe had sent them along. “I’ll have to keep quiet about that, if he comes through. Of course, what you do is none of my business.”