by Rob Thurman
Why me over Niko I wasn’t sure, but I accepted the phone with all the enthusiasm I would’ve shown if he’d handed me a piranha who’d just scented blood. “Motherfucker,” I said flatly in greeting. Not precisely phone etiquette 101, but it was the most I could manage.
“And a pleasant morning to you as well, Caliban.” Caleb’s smooth, placid voice hit my ear. “Are you enjoying a relaxing break after your abject failure?”
I wondered if Flay had filled him in, but then dismissed the thought immediately. Flay had been on the verge of dying as he’d dragged himself after us. It was highly unlikely he’d been capable of stopping to make a report—even with a life depending on him just as George’s depended on us. Making a split-second decision I was probably going to regret, I covered for the fur ball, saying harshly, “Did that son of a bitch Flay fill you in? I could’ve swore we left his ass dead on the roof.”
“Ah, that would be telling.” The mocking lilt deserted his voice abruptly. “You lost it, you miserable Auphe. You lost the crown and now I’m betting you’re quite curious to know what else you’re going to lose.”
“We’ll get it back.” I could barely hear myself through the sudden ringing in my ears. “Give us a week and we’ll get it back. Seven days, that’s all.”
“You sound so sincere,” he said with a hideous parody of reluctant doubt. “But I have to question your work ethic. Now, how can we provide an incentive you can’t close your eyes to?”
“Don’t.” One word, just one, but it was all I could get out.
“Come, now, you can’t tell me you don’t want proof that that precious girl is still alive. My little present didn’t prove that, did it? It only proved I have a pair of scissors.” It was said with a patient tone—a long-suffering accountant explaining for the tenth time why a deduction was so questionable. “How would you like your proof? I pride myself on being an accommodating business partner.”
“We’ll get it, you son of a bitch. We’ll get it. Don’t hurt her.” Me . . . who’d never begged. Not to an Auphe, not to any monster. But I was begging now. Raw, rage filled, but begging.
“You have your week,” Caleb said with the brisk efficiency of a true businessman. “I would say good-bye, but I believe I’ll let someone do it for me.”
Seconds later, the phone fell from my hand to thud onto the carpet. I watched it tumble with a distant gaze. “We have seven days,” I said remotely.
“What happened?” Goodfellow demanded. “Did you speak with Georgina?” Niko said nothing at all; neither did Flay, whose exceptionally sharp ears had flattened to his head. They knew . . . both of them.
“Seven days,” I repeated, and then I turned and walked away.
“Not your fault.”
He hadn’t made her cry. Couldn’t make her cry. It would’ve gone easier for her if she had just given him what he wanted.
“Not your fault.”
An exoneration . . . absolution. And yet it didn’t make hearing the sound of the thudding blow and the switchblade snicking to life any more bearable. Funny how that worked.
I walked through the apartment and on out. No mirrors to be found. We’d made sure of that. But the lobby had one. It hung over a cheap table with an even cheaper vase host to plastic flowers. Small and oval—a silver window that had once nearly ended my soul and had ended my life. Briefly. Since then mirrors had been a phobia that ruled by mundane details. Looking away from my reflection in plate-glass windows. Averting my eyes from every mirror in every public place. But now I was ready to look. I needed to look . . . needed to see. With my back to it, I took a breath that filled my chest to the aching point. And then I turned. You’d think I’d expect to see a monster, a long-dead one or maybe a brand-new one with an intimately familiar face. I didn’t, though, and I hadn’t expected to at all. In the end, I saw exactly what I’d suspected I would.
There was nothing there . . .
Nothing at all.
Not even me.
16
She was just a girl, Georgina King.
Granted, she was a girl in trouble, but that didn’t change who she was. A girl who was nothing special to me. Yeah, I’d do my best to help her, like the others would. Give my life to save hers—because it was the right thing to do. She was an innocent. . . . I was not. It was a fair trade. But George? George herself?
George was only a girl I knew.
Too bad I hadn’t figured that out sooner. It would’ve saved me a lot of melodramatic brooding. And Goodfellow would be the first to say I didn’t need any extra encouragement there.
Just a girl . . . it was the only way I could survive.
“You’re cleaning your gun.”
I rolled my eyes upward to see Niko gazing down at me with an overly bland expression. I recognized the look. He was perturbed by something. “You made it clear that my ass was lazing in that department.”
“I did,” he admitted, brow furrowing lightly. “But since when do you actually listen to me?”
I turned back to the task at hand. Cleaning the barrel with the rod and a solvent-soaked patch, I said seriously, “I always listen, Cyrano. I’d be damn stupid not to.”
He considered that for a moment and sat at the table with me. “It worries me to no end that you’re actually admitting that.” When I responded with only an absent nod, he moved on. “Where did you go earlier? After the call?” He paused. “Can you tell me?”
“Sure.” I finished with the barrel and began to oil the disassembled parts. “I went downstairs to the lobby.”
He picked up on the implications of that with lightning speed. “The mirror.”
“We can get another one for our bathroom, if you want,” I said, putting the weapon back together with several movements more practiced than they had the right to be. “I’m over that now. Pretty stupid shit to begin with, wasn’t it?”
“Hell.” He stared at me, lines bracketing his mouth. “You’ve . . . hell.”
I completed the thought for him. “Gone off the deep end?” The corner of my mouth quirked up. “Wasn’t a long trip for me, was it?” I started on the next gun. It was a new Glock that I’d gotten to replace the one lost at Moonshine. “Seriously, Nik, I’m okay. Actually, I’m better than okay—I’m functional. And right now, that’s what we need.”
He was far from convinced, I could tell. I pushed the Magnum in his direction. Something to keep his mind off his worries. “Clean it?” When his eyes darkened dangerously, I said reasonably, “You know you’ll do a better job of it.”
His disquiet didn’t fade, but he took the gun in hand. “That’s a given.”
“Did Flay say who Caleb took?” I squirted more cleaning solution on another swab. “You know, to keep him in line.”
“His son.” Niko shook his head grimly and went to work on the Magnum. “He’s three.”
“Caleb, he’s making friends right and left.” I shook my head and clucked a tongue. I absolutely did not think of a small child. A little fuzzy no doubt, but as afraid and lost as any human child.
“Flay had no choice. That hardly means he’s on our side or even a decent creature, but we have to recognize he was powerless in this situation.”
“Well, he’s not powerless now,” I pointed out. “He can help us and help his cub all in one. Bonus points all around.”
“Yes, and I’m sure that’s a great comfort to him right now,” he said impassively.
Yeah, probably not. “Goodfellow come up with any leads?”
“He’s close, he says. Very close.”
Very close turned out to be three days and over a thousand miles away. Lady Lucia, Florida. I’d thought it was sweltering at home; these people breathed lava masquerading as oxygen and somehow managed to keep from spontaneously combusting as they walked in the noontime sun. Promise, who trusted her cloaks and sunblock only so far, stayed in the RV. With the nonvampires of our group practically bursting into flames, I didn’t blame her.
“It’s hot.” I avert
ed my eyes from the unholy white fire shimmering in the midst of a hard blue sky.
“Yes, you said that.” From behind opaque black glasses, Niko scanned the shimmering stretch of dead yellow grass that covered the field before us.
“It bears repeating.” I wiped at the sweat on my forehead that had formed the nanosecond after I’d wiped the previous moisture away.
“It’s closer than the inside of Hephaestus’s jock-strap.” Goodfellow shaded his eyes, then hissed in outrage when he caught sight of the darkening of his shirt around his neck and underarms. “I’m perspiring .” He pulled his shirt away from his chest with fastidious fingers. “Sweat, actual sweat, and there’s not even sex involved. It’s an abomination.” He turned and started back toward the RV he’d provided for the trip. “I’ll wait inside with Promise.”
Niko snared him by the arm and pulled him to a stop. “We may need you, Goodfellow.”
“Suck it up, Loman,” I grunted. “You don’t hear Snowball bitching.”
“He’s panting too hard to breathe, much less complain,” Robin grumbled.
Unfortunate, but true. Flay, while back in what passed as his human form, was panting with gusto. It was an odd look—a well-dressed albino man with a mane of hair and a continuously moving red tongue. He was wearing a pair of black jeans that belonged to Niko and one of Goodfellow’s silk shirts. He’d given a derogatory sniff at the offer of one of my shirts. I loved that. The pound reject thought my stuff wasn’t fashionable enough for him. Or more likely, he’d been yanking my chain. There wasn’t a whole lot of love lost between the two of us, and while Flay was cooperating with us, it didn’t stop him from taking a swipe here and there. I didn’t hold any grudges. I tried to torture him while he was comatose; he scorned my clothes. If that’s all I had coming to me, I was ahead of the game.
Flay’s tongue was dotting his shirt with saliva as he growled with frustration. “Wait.”
He disappeared back into our home away from home. Goodfellow had gotten the RV on loan from one of his fellow sales sharks. It slept six, had a bathroom and a kitchen, and all in all was about the size of our apartment. At least it had seemed that way the first few hours. As time wore on, it began to rapidly shrink. Ten hours into the trip it was approximately the size of a shoe box. Even a clean Flay had a pungent musky dog smell that followed him wherever he went, and to add insult to injury, it turned out that one of the most dangerous men alive, Niko, was allergic to dander.
Less than three minutes later, Flay was back . . . wearing orange-and-black plaid shorts and a T-shirt that read FLORIDA, THE SUNSHINE STATE.
Goodfellow winced. “I don’t want to live anymore. I honestly don’t.”
Well-muscled but transparently pale legs were covered liberally with a dense mat of curly white hair, but it was the frighteningly long, horrifically furry toes revealed by thong sandals that were the crowning touch. Flay scowled at Robin and offered smugly, “Promise said look good. Promise likes way I look.”
Promise had picked up a new admirer during the trip, or at least it had seemed that way at first. It wouldn’t have been a big surprise, Promise being Promise, but it did give new meaning to the phrase “puppy love.” Every inch that she moved in the RV, soulful ruby eyes would follow her. During meals, the best and biggest portion of the fast-food fare would be snatched up and placed before her. A definite, raving doggy-style crush, I’d thought, until I caught the wicked grin Flay flashed at Niko’s back. It was all about revenge . . . annoying, evil, but basically harmless revenge. It should’ve been funny, but truthfully, nothing was funny much anymore. The world was all gray now. But, hey, you know what they say. You take the bad with the good. Balance. I was all about the balance now.
“Yeah, you’re styling,” I muttered, grabbing his arm to push him into motion. “Let’s go.”
We headed across the field toward a gathering of RVs, some similar to ours and some barely mobile, from the looks of them. They all squeaked under that bizarrely blue sky with nothing but swamp as far as the eye could see. After living in New York for a few years, I felt small and exposed in the midst of all this open space. It made me want to pull my knife on the off chance that an alligator or a rabid monkey jumped out of the scraggly brush. They had monkeys down here, didn’t they?
Lady Lucia was in southern Florida, land of gators and pissed-off monkeys, and no one could tell me differently. A near ghost town, it was nowhere near the ocean or a pretty, pristine lake. It sat on the edge of the Everglades and the local industry seemed to be mosquito ranching. I slapped the one on my neck and kept moving. We’d been phenomenally lucky. Of course, George would’ve said it wasn’t luck, that it was the way things were meant to be. Meant . . . to . . . be. I slapped my neck again, thought gray thoughts, and kept trudging.
Goodfellow, purveyor of this fabulous luck, had connections with a few Gypsy tribes—like we didn’t see that coming. After a few hundred calls he’d finally pinned a rumor on one particular tribe. The Sarzo tribe had emigrated from Eastern Europe nearly seventy years ago. They tended to follow a route all over the country, but Lady Lucia was their home base, as much as Gypsies had a stationary home. The Sarzo also boasted of the oldest lineage among Gypsies. Once upon a very long time ago, they’d been a tribe of half-naked nomads when the wheel was still five thousand years away from being the latest and greatest. They’d also known the Bassa. The Bassa had been nomads too . . . following the sun. Cold-blooded and reptilian, the Bassa weren’t huge fans of winter weather. They’d been allies, those who would become the Sarzo and a species who’d slithered rather than walked. If the Bassa had left anything behind, the Sarzo would know about it.
Or so went the theory.
Theories were great, but I was never one to underestimate the invariably piss-poor mood of reality. As we walked on, a few people began to venture out into the heat. Not many, only a few sharp-eyed men and an even sharper-eyed old woman. “Is it like coming home?” Robin asked as we walked.
He knew something about our lives, Goodfellow, but he didn’t know everything. This happened to be one of the things he didn’t know. He knew Niko and I were Gypsy. I was half, and we really didn’t know what Niko was. He could be half, could be whole. Sophia, not one to answer what she considered boring questions, had actually answered that one. She didn’t know. Couldn’t narrow it down if she was sober and had a week to think it over. It could’ve been a Gypsy from her tribe. The blond hair meant nothing. Sophia’s clan had traveled much of Europe, dwelling in Greece for a time. They’d intermarried there on occasion, although it was frowned on by both sides. A blond northern Greek had slipped in there somewhere. We’d seen evidence of that in the few pictures Sophia had taken with her; they were scattered carelessly in the bottom of a small trunk that held her fortune-teller costumes. Groups of close-faced, dark-skinned Gypsies with one or two bright heads spotted throughout like patches of sun. With his olive skin, Niko could be one of them, but there was no way to be sure. Sophia had left her people before Niko was born. Half or whole, neither of us had been nourished in the welcoming arms of Sophia’s kin. It made it difficult to consider them ours.
Not quite like coming home at all.
I didn’t say that, though. Niko would put it in a more diplomatic fashion than I ever could. I was right. “We’ve not met our mother’s clan,” he said from behind.
Goodfellow seemed surprised. “Didn’t you try to track them down?”
“We were a little preoccupied,” Niko replied dryly, “what with the Auphe situation and fleeing for our lives.”
That was two—count them—two blatant lies from my brother. Of course we’d tried to trace them. Sophia had been murdered, I’d been kidnapped, and we were being hounded day and night. We knew that we needed all the help we could get. We’d searched for Sophia’s tribe, and we’d found them. Her relatives, her family . . . what should’ve been ours.
They had spit on me. Literally. Forking the evil eye with thrusts of their hands, they’d hi
ssed in fear and hatred, and spit. As homecomings go, it doesn’t get much more festive than that. How did they know what I was? It seemed while Sophia might have left them, they hadn’t left her . . . not completely. They’d kept tabs on her. She was Gypsy. She might not have cared about that, but they did. They probably would’ve contacted Niko once he was old enough to understand, but then I came along. Sophia’s own knew what she’d done. They knew of the bargain and saw the result born. They’d written her off then, her and anyone with her. And when I’d shown up with my pale, pale skin, they’d known exactly what I was, and Niko was tarred with the same brush. They didn’t spit on him, he was an abomination by association only, but they turned away from him. He was invisible to them. Nonexistent. Dead.
That was the beginning and end of our family reunion.
Goodfellow didn’t question the lies, although there was a good chance he recognized them for what they were. Niko didn’t lie often, but he did it exceptionally well. That didn’t stop me from suspecting that the puck still knew. He’d had tens of thousands of years’ experience in the field. “Preoccupied, yes, I can see that. And family? Who needs it? Take the Borgia family for example. When I was staying with them for an extended holiday . . .”
I tuned out as beside me, Flay grunted and reached into the pocket of his shorts to pull out a baseball hat. He smacked it on his head, walked faster, and muttered, “Talk. Always talk, talk. Make ears hurt.” It was nice to know that the Goodfellow charm transcended the chasm between species.
By the time we crossed the field Niko had smoothly pulled ahead of us. It didn’t take any discussion to know that it would be best if the token human among us did the talking at first. Robin and I might look human, but you never knew when someone was going to have a quirky ability to sniff you out. With Flay . . . hell, even your average human living in blinders was going to do a double take. And Gypsies weren’t average in any way, shape, or form. They’d know a wolf when they saw one. We’d thought about leaving Flay in the RV with Promise, but decided at the last minute it might not hurt to flex our muscle. Gypsies weren’t known for their cooperative ways, not unless there was something in it for them. They had a lot in common with Goodfellow in that. Whether wearing a thousand-dollar suit or a five-dollar wife beater, businessmen were all the same. If you wanted them to play, you had to pay.