The last song had barely begun before Vayl began to sing along from the back of the tent. I didn’t even know the thing had words, and I sure hadn’t expected him to turn it into a group performance. But there he was, walking toward me down the center of the aisle, singing Romanian in his husky baritone.
Definitely a love song,I decided as I turned and swung my hips at him. I looked over my shoulder. His smile was definitely predatory. I gave him a little torso roll and he rewarded me with a look of such piercing hunger I nearly jumped on him. How we maintained a PG rating through the rest of that song I will never know. But the thunderous applause at the end told me it was big fun.
I strutted off the stage, waving and blowing kisses to my new fans. Which was undoubtedly why, as soon as I made it past the backstage curtain, I ran straight into a support pole. I damn near brought the whole house down. Literally. I held the pole very still and tried not to think of what would happen if we couldn’t lure Lung into a one-on-one because the Assistant Assassin ran her head into a steel rod.
A sound to my right caught my attention. It was very subtle, landing somewhere between a quiet snort and a faint gurgle. I took a short hike outside the tent and found Cole rolling on the ground.
“Are you all right?” I rushed to him, trying to hold him still so I could see the site of his injury. Then I got a look at his face. “Are youlaughing ?”
“Oh my God, you should’ve seen your face!” He was trying to hold it in so the audience wouldn’t be distracted from Vayl’s singing. But the laughter kept slipping out the edges of his mouth.
“Don’t you have anything better to do?” I demanded.
“Than to watch a gorgeous woman belly dance? We are talking aboutme , right?”
“So it was good?”
“I sure couldn’t figure out why you were freaking out about the whole thing. Until the pole incident, of course. Good thing nobody saw you but me.”
“I saw her.” Cassandra came up beside us, laughing so hard her shoulders were shaking.
“Oh for—isn’t it your turn?” I glared at her.
“Yes, and I was dreading it so badly I threw up three times. But now I feel better.” Her smile was as warm as a hug. “Thank you.”
“Hey, anytime I can entertain you with my humiliation, I feel I’ve done my job. What the hell is it with me lately?” I wondered aloud. “I can’t seem to make it through a single day without running into or falling over something. And I was a college athlete!”
Cassandra regarded me soberly. “The universe requires balance, Jasmine. Your powers as a Sensitive have increased, have they not?”
“Well, yeah.”
“Perhaps your recent spate of awkward incidents is the price you are required to pay for that boost.”
“Well, if it’s true, that sucks.”
She nodded, clearly distracted by other, more important considerations. “Will you”—Cassandra licked her lips as her eyes darted toward the tent, as if she could see Lung through two layers of canvas and a black curtain—“when the time comes, you will stay close by, won’t you?”
“Is in the room close enough?”
“Oh, really? I can’t tell you how relieved I am to hear that.”
“It was Vayl’s idea. When we give away the free reading, we toss in a private belly dance too. That puts me right beside you the whole time he’s there.” There was a moment of silence from inside the tent, followed by a healthy round of applause. Then Vayl began his final song. “We know from talking to Yetta Simms that Lung loves the escargot. So we’ll offer him a tray of delicacies and hope he’s in the mood to indulge himself.” Cassandra already knew this stuff, but I needed to keep her thinking, thus the review. If her analytical mind let go, she was going to freeze like a math whiz at a spelling bee.
“And if he won’t eat it?” she asked.
“We’ll figure some other way to get him to swallow the pill. Maybe stuff it in his vitamins or something. That comes later— maybe. For now, encourage him to eat. Eat with him even, but stay away from the snails.”
She nodded, looking fairly calm until your eyes dropped to her hands. Her long slender fingers kept twining in and around one another like newborn snakes.
“Hey, Cassandra,” said Cole, “I meant to tell you. Your boyfriend’s in the audience.” He said it as if we’d teleported back to junior high, and he suspected she’d just contracted a terminal case of the cooties.
“My . . . what?”
Cole went into his superhero pose, legs spread, hands on hips, chin directed squarely at the sky, and sang, “Na-na-na-na, na-na-na-na, SWAT man!”
“Oh, God!” Cassandra clutched at me, her fingernails digging into my arms.Ow! “Jasmine! The vision!”
I hid the dread that twisted my insides at the realization that everybody in her divination had now reached his or her appointed place. “Don’t worry, Cassandra. When I see the snake, I promise I’ll shoot it before it strikes.”
“I’ll be there too,” Cole assured her.
I watched Cassandra, wondering how she’d manage to keep it together with her head full of death and her future depending on a rookie assassin, a woman with more stitches than sense, a distracted vampire, and a paranoid engineer. But I guess I already knew. She would because she had to. That’s always how people like us end up getting through hells like this.
The applause built to a crescendo and then faded as Vayl began to introduce our main event. Cole held the back tent flap aside for Cassandra and she stepped into the staging area, gracefully avoiding the pole that had nearly concussed me minutes earlier. She took a couple of deep breaths. “How do I look?” she asked.
She’d pulled her braids back and tied them with a vivid-blue scarf. Her matching skirt was embroidered with black sequined flowers. Her black sleeveless top provided the perfect backdrop for one of the pieces of jewelry she hadn’t lent me—a gold choker that started just under her ears and ended slightly above her collarbones. “Very Egyptian queen,” I said.
She nodded and smiled, but the pleasure never reached her eyes.
Vayl swept the backdrop curtain aside. The applause pulled her forward.
Cole asked, “Is she going to be okay?”
“I think so. But SWAT man’s presence is not a good sign. He dies in her vision too.”
“It must suck to be psychic.” Under his breath, Cole added, “We have company.”
I heard it then, a soft step accompanied by the squeal of a pumped-up baby. Xia Ge’s husband stepped around the corner of the tent. He carried Lai, whose resemblance to his dad was remarkable considering the difference in their ages and emotional states. Lai obviously thought walking with Dad was the be all, end all of great times. He bounced his butt against his dad’s forearm and patted him repeatedly on his broad chest and shoulders, as if Lai was a one baby band and Dad his instrument.
Dad, on the other hand, looked like he wanted to cry. It wasn’t the face he’d worn inside the tent, but then his family and manager had been around. I felt an instant connection to him. It sucked having to hide intense fears from the world. I gave him a warm smile and bowed.
“Hi. I’m Lucille, and this is Cole.”
He bowed too, which Lai thought they should do twenty more times. He communicated this by lunging forward so Dad had to catch him and pull him upright again. He kept it up the whole time we talked.
“I am Xia Shao,” said Dad. “My wife, Ge, tell me you save Lai’s life. I thank you.” He bowed deeply.
“It’s our pleasure,” Cole said.
When he straightened, Shao said, “Ge telling me you very nice people.Good people.” He stared hard at us, as if his eyes alone had the power to reveal any evil tendencies we might be hiding. In the end he shrugged helplessly. “Sheknow people. I trust her. She say I should talk to you.”
“She’s very sweet,” I replied. “A good mother.” I shook my head in amazement. “So patient.”
He cracked a smile. “Usually.” We watched Lai d
o some more waist bends before Shao continued. “I work—” he jerked his head toward the amazing acrobat arena. “Many friends there.” He shrugged. “You travel together, work together, you become close.”
Cole and I nodded.
“I have friends . . .” Shao looked away, his eyes scrunching at the edges as he struggled to hold back tears. “They disappear. Their clothes, equipment, all still in trailers, but no friends. They not coming to show tonight.” Now he looked at us, trying to communicate how bizarre he regarded this behavior to be. “Something is terrible wrong.”
In my mind I saw the men who had attacked Lung, still dripping from their swim from shore, and agreed with Shao that something was terrible wrong.
Now that Shao had said the hard part, the words came much faster and tougher to understand as his accent also increased. “I believe Chien-Lung have something to do with this. You know?” He pointed a thumb toward the tent. “Front row?”
We nodded. Boy, did we ever know.
“Lung own that boat.” He pointed to theConstance Malloy . “He bringing all Chinese crew to run it, but they stuck in Chicago.” He tried to find the word, couldn’t, and showed us instead, his free hand starting above his head, lowering slowly as he wiggled his fingers.
“Snowstorm?” guessed Cole. Shao pointed at him and nodded.
Aha!Now I understood how we’d lucked into the catering gig. I’d thought it out of character for Lung to allow strangers aboard his yacht. But with his staff snowbound in Chicago and a big shindig in the works, he’d had no other choice.
Shao went on. “My brother, Xia Wu, is part of crew. I fear what will happen when he arrive. I fear he disappear too.”
“What makes you think he’ll be in particular danger?” asked Cole.
Shao looked over both his shoulders and behind us. He leaned forward, giving Lai access to the huge buttons on Cole’s vest. He grabbed one and tried to put it in his mouth as Shao whispered, “Wu in army. So was my friends. Very shhh.” He held a finger to his lips to emphasize the secrecy.
Huh. So the People’s Liberation Army wants Chien-Lung dead. Well, I don’t suppose you can plan a coup without rumors flying into the wrong ears.Wu, undoubtedly, was supposed to help overthrow Lung last night, but his flight delay had kept him out of the fighting.
“What if Chien-Lung find out about my brother?” Shao asked. “Maybe he disappear too.” I thought that a definite possibility. “I cannot talk to Chinese authorities. I do not know who is faithful to Chien-Lung. But you. You from America,” he told us, as if we needed to be reminded. “You know who can help?”
Uhhh, well . . . Cole and I looked at each other. He gave me an it’s-your-call shrug.
“What exactly do you want us to do?” I asked Shao.
“I think my friends on that boat.” He pointed to theConstance Malloy . I thought them more likely under that boat, since I’d seen the generals weight the bodies before throwing them overboard. But I let him go on. “Maybe your police go on there, find them. Maybe arrest Lung?”
Maybe Lung would die tonight and we wouldn’t have to worry about it. “I know a policeman here,” I said, thinking of Cassandra’s SWAT man, Preston, and of how badly she and I both wanted to keep him alive. “I’ll talk to him tomorrow,” I said, knowing I wouldn’t. Unless I absolutely had to.
CHAPTEREIGHTEEN
With a promise to report to Shao in the morning, I convinced him to go back into the tent. Hopefully Lung would just think Lai had tired of sitting still and nothing would come of their absence. Lai might even help perpetuate the illusion, because the constant bowing and foiled attempts to eat Cole’s button had evidently worn him out. As we said goodbye, he turned in his dad’s arms and rested his head on his shoulder. I figured he’d be asleep before they made it back to the entrance.
“Okay, you were right,” said Cole. “I never should have brought the Xias within a hundred feet of this mess, because now I’m not going to sleep for worrying about them.” He fished a piece of gum out of his pocket and popped it into his mouth.
So the gum had graduated from a kicking-smoking habit to a hindering-stress routine. Like shuffling cards only saner. I linked arms with Cole, liking him even better now that we had something else in common. “They were already in this mess, or weren’t you listening? And hey, if everything goes okay tonight, they’ll be fine. Speaking of which, did you get the food?”
“Yeah. Yetta brought it over just after you went on.”
He took me back into the tent, into the staging area behind the black backdrop, and showed me a round, lace-covered table I hadn’t seen before because it sat in the corner, hidden by shadows. I could hear Cassandra talking as I borrowed Cole’s penlight to peek into the covered trays and dishes the owner of Seven Seas Succulents had provided. As Cassandra told an audience member his daughter would get the scholarship she’d applied for, I whispered into Cole’s ear, “Which one?”
He took my hand and pointed the light at a star-shaped glass plate loaded with escargots. He trained the light on one of them. It had been placed just at the tip of one of the points. “That’s it,” he murmured. “You can tell it’s the right one because there’s a little chip broken off the bottom of the tray just underneath.” I felt along the base of the star and, sure enough, my finger found the indentation.
On the other side of the curtain, Cassandra said, “I am growing tired. Perhaps just one more item from the audience?”
I heard scraping and shuffling. Then Cassandra said, with barely concealed regret, “Sergeant Preston?”
Uh-oh. I peeked around the side of the curtain that divided our narrow space from the stage. Yup, SWAT man had volunteered his Seiko. He and his kid, a cute little dude about five or six with his dad’s intelligent brown eyes, sat in the back row. Well, Preston sat. The kid stood on the bench, looking deeply enthralled. Suddenly Cassandra couldn’t beat off her admirers with a rubber mallet.
“What is it you want to know?” she asked stiffly as her hands worried over the watch.
“There’s a woman I’m interested in,” he said, giving her a slow wink. “Will I see her again?”
She hesitated, but couldn’t, even in this moment, bring herself to lie. You had to admire that kind of resolve. “Yes.”
“You are allowed two more questions,” said Vayl. I couldn’t see him, but I could feel him, standing on the opposite end of the stage. He and Cassandra had agreed audience members could ask three questions of her, hoping it would whet Lung’s appetite for a more in-depth reading for himself.
“Will I ever remarry?”
“I do not see that in your future.”
He looked surprised, then shrugged. “And your last question?” put in Vayl.
“Okay, uh, there’s no school tomorrow, so my boy and I are going fishing in the morning. Will we catch anything?”
Cassandra’s hands, holding tightly to the watch, jerked. Her voice, when she answered, wound so tight I could almost hear her vocal chords twang. “Nothing you want him to take off the hook.”
The whole audience held its breath. “Then I’ll definitely be taking him to the zoo,” said Preston. Everyone laughed, except him, Cassandra, and Vayl. Looking at Preston, I got the feeling he knew she was holding back the most important truths she could tell him.
Vayl stepped to the center of the stage. He held a gleaming black bowl in his hand. As planned, Bergman had piled the torn halves of our audience’s tickets inside. “Now it is time to announce tonight’s winner of a free private reading from Cassandra, preceded by a belly dance from the fabulous Lucille and accompanied by free refreshments. This will take place as soon as the tent has cleared. We are drawing by ticket number, so please look to your ticket stubs now.”
He jumbled the papers as he said, “And the winner is . . . 103.” He looked around the room. “Just bring your stub to me, if you would—”
Lung’s male companion, who held their ticket stubs, began to whisper in his ear as he bounced in his seat.
He looked as excited as an old fart who’s just gotten a BINGO. When Lung nodded he jumped up and handed Vayl the ticket, which he pretended to study.
“This is the one!” said Vayl. He held his hands out to the audience. “Please give our lucky winner and all of our performers tonight a round of applause.” The audience obeyed. As they shuffled out, Vayl said, “Thank you for your attendance and please drive home safely!”
I kept my eyes on Lung, who was getting it from both sides. His lady friend hissed in one ear, making fierce gestures that said she was not pleased with this turn of events. The new vamp chattered into the other, encouraging him to stay, relax, have fun.
Lung listened to them both, but his eyes followed the Xias as they exited the tent, lingering hungrily on Lai as he snoozed on Dad’s shoulder.Don’t worry, you freak , I thought.We’ve got just the snack you need .
Finally Lung focused on Vayl. “I am indeed fortunate,” he said in a perfect British accent. “Would you mind if I stand, however? I find these benches somewhat taxing.”
“Certainly. If you would just wait here, I shall escort Cassandra backstage to rest and Lucille will arrive to entertain you momentarily.”
Gulp. I clutched at the curtain, as if only it could support me under a sudden spurt of nausea. Now I’d only be dancing for three, but the very intimacy of such a setting made me want to zip into an ankle-length parka. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath.Quit being a wimp. You can do this. You haveto do this . I stroked the .38 riding my thigh as I might a beloved dog. It calmed me enough that I was able to meet Vayl and Cassandra with a pleasant smile.
Jennifer Rardin [Jaz Parks series book 2] Another One Bites The Dust Page 13