by Karen Chance
“I didn’t come to court until I was four,” I reminded Rafe absently. A tiny car from the Monopoly game had decided to trundle down the table to us and bumped into my hand. I turned it around and sent it back, where it collided with a briskly hopping shoe. It looked like someone had enchanted the game board for the kids.
“To live, no, but your father brought you as a bambina,” he replied, giving up on cleaning the sticky child. He held her against his chest with one arm, the palm of his hand curled protectively around her skull.
“What?”
“He loved to show you off. Of course, you were better behaved than some,” he said with a sigh, as the baby began chewing on his tie.
“I never knew that.” I knew so little about my parents that the tiny piece of trivia felt like a revelation. In my mind, “mother” meant a cool hand, soft hair, and a sweet smell. It was my strongest memory of her. Unless I thought very hard, it was my only memory of her. And I recalled even less about my father.
“Piccolina mia, please to stop,” Rafe said in exasperation, pulling his tie away and substituting a pacifier before his squirming armful could protest. Luckily, the small tussle seemed to have worn her out, and she soon curled into his chest and went to sleep. “The visits ended when you were about two,” he added.
“Do you know why?”
Rafe started to shrug, then realized it might wake up his new girlfriend. “My guess would be that you began showing signs of your gift. Your father must have realized that Tony would take you if he knew.”
Which he had, only a couple of years later. “How did he find out?” I’d never known how Tony discovered that I might be worth acquiring. The idea that the tip-off could have been something I did was nauseating.
“Tony never trusted anyone, not even his longtime servants,” Rafe reassured me. “There were people watching your father, who doubtless also had people watching them. The only ones Antonio did not monitor were those of us with blood bonds to him, which he knew we were not strong enough to break.” The last was said with uncharacteristic bitterness.
“I don’t suppose…Can you tell me anything about them? About my parents?” It wasn’t the first time I’d asked him, but Rafe had never been able to answer. He’d been under orders to stay mute, and as the vampire who made him had given the order, the prohibition was even stronger than Mircea’s.
Rafe regarded me with compassion. “I’m sorry, Cassie.”
“I just thought, maybe, with Tony gone…”
“But he still lives,” Rafe reminded me softly. “As does his hold over me.”
“But maybe Billy could—”
“And Antonio’s ban includes communication through the spirit world.”
My ability to communicate with ghosts came from my father. It wasn’t surprising that Tony would have thought to add that little caveat. I’d always hated him, but I’d never thought him stupid. Disappointment settled into its usual place behind my rib cage.
“Can’t Mircea break the blood bond?” I asked after a moment.
“I haven’t asked him. In his condition…I don’t dare do anything to weaken him further.”
“Which kind of brings me to why I wanted to see you.” I glanced at the kids, but none of them was paying us any attention. Jesse was biting his lip and glaring at the board, where tiny foreclosure signs had just appeared on a bunch of his hotels. As quietly as possible, I brought Rafe up to speed.
“You want to storm a dark mage stronghold?” Rafe asked incredulously when I’d finished. “On your own?”
“Not on my own,” I corrected. A night’s rest had helped to clear my head and made me reevaluate my plan. I needed to get Mircea to the Codex, but trying to handle him by myself was foolhardy. Fortunately, there was another option.
Besides Rafe and a few other trophies, Tony had specialized in acquiring badasses, the kind with the skills and personalities to complement his network of highly illegal activities. And some of them had had several hundred years to hone their skills. I was going after the Codex, and I wasn’t going alone.
“But if you already know where it is, can you not simply—” Rafe made an indeterminate hand gesture that was supposed to indicate shifting.
I respected him enough not to roll my eyes, but it took an effort. “If I could just run in and grab it, yeah. But I somehow doubt it’s going to be that easy. I need Alphonse.”
Rafe only sat there, looking horrified, but some of his tension must have communicated itself to the baby, who woke up and started sniffling. I watched her warily, knowing what that meant. But Miranda, having terrorized the staff to her satisfaction, came and took her away before the explosion came. And Rafe was still just looking at me.
The reaction wasn’t exactly a surprise. Alphonse was Tony’s right-hand man and chief thug. After the boss did his disappearing act, Alphonse had taken control of the family’s East Coast operations as Casanova had in Vegas. And, no, on the surface, nothing about him was particularly reassuring.
For one thing, he looked like a boxer who’d lost one too many fights: his features were all slightly off-kilter, as if they’d been smashed too badly to ever fit together properly again. For another, he sounded scarily like Don Corleone. It was due to tracheal damage from a vicious elbow to the throat in his mortal days, but that didn’t change the fact that every time The Godfather was shown at Tony’s somebody lost it and ended up bleeding all over the floor. Which may account for why it was so often on the playlist.
Even more worrying was the stack of thick, well-thumbed photo albums in his room that were filled with neatly labeled black-and-white prints. Some showed people in coffins, staring sightlessly upwards, others were facedown in gutters or sprawled on cracked pavement, still bleeding out. Alphonse kept pictures of everyone he’d ever killed. There were a lot of albums.
The photos had originally been Tony’s idea. In the human world, Alphonse had been a monster, the kind they made movies about with car chases and explosions and enough gore to prompt news reports on the societal effects of violence in the media. In the vampire world, he was just good at his job. A little too good sometimes. Tony hadn’t wanted his chief enforcer to end up on the Senate’s bad side for going overboard once too often, but talking to him didn’t help much and there are no such things as therapists in the vampire world. Then someone joked one night at dinner that Alphonse needed a hobby, and Tony’s eyes lit up.
The unfortunate joker had been saddled with the job of finding something that Alphonse liked to do that didn’t concern killing—or provide the entertainment himself. Everyone had assumed he was a goner, including him. That had been especially true when the pets were hunted for sport, the piano was used for target practice and the golf clubs were wrapped around his neck. But then he bought a camera and set up a darkroom and nobody saw Alphonse for a week.
When Alphonse had no corpses to model for him, he’d photograph anyone hanging around court. He particularly loved surprising people, catching them doing something embarrassing or from the worst possible angle. Under Rafe’s beautiful ceiling in my bedroom had been walls papered with hideous images: me with eyes rolled up so that only the whites showed; with my mouth full of pizza; and with my jaw swollen to chipmunk size from a tooth extraction.
I’d hated them at first, hated waking up every day to grotesque versions of myself that I’d started to see reflected in the mirror whenever I looked too long. But I hadn’t dared to take down Alphonse’s offerings, which soon circled the room and started on another row. And, slowly, as my collection grew, I began to change my mind.
Alphonse’s favorite model was his girlfriend, a buxom blonde with arms as thickly muscled as a man’s, known as One-Eyed Sal. Her appearance lived up to her nickname, with the scar that ran through her left eye slanting down her cheek to just lift the corner of her mouth. She’d lost the eye in the California gold rush to another saloon girl who knew how to wield a broken bottle better than she did. Shortly thereafter, Tony had decided to add her t
o his stable. Body parts lost before the change don’t regenerate, so Sal was one-eyed permanently. Alphonse didn’t seem to mind, though, and her lopsided smile and scarred face featured prominently in his collection.
I’d been staring at his most recent shot of me one day, my eyes passing from my acne-covered cheeks and chin, which Alphonse had enhanced with a red filter to resemble a landscape on Mars, to a photo of Tony sprawled on his throne, looking even more bloated than usual. I’d barely even noticed Sal’s newest photo in the middle, despite the fact that the lens had lingered lovingly on her scars. Between the two of us, she’d looked perfectly normal. Through Alphonse’s lens, I’d realized, everyone was ugly; or maybe, through his lens, everyone was beautiful.
I still found it confusing, but I’d never looked at my photos quite the same way again. I’d even started to think that, compared to the frilly, posed shots my governess preferred, some of them were actually kind of interesting. Alphonse might be a murdering bastard, but unlike a certain war mage I could name, he occasionally made sense. And I was really getting tired of dealing with people I didn’t understand.
I’d spent the last few weeks wandering around Pritkin’s world, where I was supposed to belong, feeling like someone visiting a foreign country who only halfway spoke the language. Most of the time, I had no freaking clue what was going on, and once or twice I’d reached a state of confusion so severe that it felt like it might be causing brain damage. I couldn’t win the game—hell, I couldn’t even play—when I didn’t understand the rules. I needed to level the playing field. I needed the vamps.
“Alphonse might be a first-class badass, but he isn’t a first-level master,” I reminded Rafe. “If Mircea dies, he’ll be in the same boat with you, forced to fight for position within whatever family absorbs him.”
“He needn’t worry. There are many who would gladly add his…special talents…to their arsenal.”
“Yeah, but how many do you think would be willing to make him their second?” Alphonse might carve out a niche for himself sooner or later, but no way was he going to end up second in command again. Not for centuries, maybe not ever. And I didn’t think that would sit too well with the vamp I’d known.
“The Consul has forbidden anyone to help you,” Rafe reminded me.
“Alphonse isn’t so great at following orders,” I reminded him right back. “I think he’ll risk it.” If I’d been giving odds, I’d have put them at ten to one at least. I was his best chance to hold on to his current position, which made me his new best friend. No matter what the Consul said. “I need Alphonse and a team of his craziest thugs. Can you get him?”
“I can contact him,” Rafe reluctantly admitted. “But even if he agrees, I don’t know if any of this will be soon enough.”
“Soon enough for what?” I asked impatiently. “I know where the Codex is, Rafe. I just need help to get to it!”
“Yes, but Mircea…he’s getting worse. And if he loses his faculties, will the counterspell reverse the damage? Or will he be left that way permanently?” Despite our position, which was a little too close to the ovens for comfort, he shivered.
I sat back in my chair, feeling dizzy. I’d assumed that once I had the spell, everything would go back to normal. But what if it didn’t? And with the Senate in the middle of a war, what if they decided a crazed master vamp was a liability they couldn’t afford? No wonder Rafe was freaking out. If the geis didn’t kill Mircea, the Consul might.
Ironically, what I needed was more time. I had the location of the Codex; sooner or later, I was going to get that spell. But it wouldn’t do me a lot of good if Mircea went crazy while I was making plans. Somehow I had to mitigate the effects of the geis while I figured everything out. And there was only a single possibility for that: the one place where I knew from experience the geis did not operate at full force.
“What about Faerie?” I asked. “If we could get him there, it might buy enough time to—”
“The Consul thought of that,” Rafe said. His tone was even, but his agitated fingers were reducing my linen napkin to shreds. “But the Fey do not want any more vampires in their world, especially one in Mircea’s condition. They refused a visa.”
“Who did? The Light or the Dark?”
He looked surprised. “The Senate doesn’t deal with the Dark Fey. Their treaty with the Light prohibits it.”
“But I do.” The Dark Fey king expected me to find and deliver the Codex. Until that happened, he needed to keep me happy. That gave me a lever to extort a few small favors, such as room and board for an ailing vampire.
“But, even were the Fey willing to help, how would we get him there?”
“What about the portal at MAGIC?” The Metaphysical Alliance for Greater Interspecies Cooperation was the supernatural community’s version of the United Nations. It wasn’t my favorite place, but we’d have to go in to get Mircea anyway, so it made sense to simply take him through MAGIC’s own link to Faerie.
But Rafe squashed that idea. “It has not yet been repaired. Your passage last time was not…conventional…and it shattered the spell. The Consul has appealed to the Fey to allow another, but they say if we cannot control who enters their lands better than that, they are not certain they wish us to have one. We are in negotiations, but there is no knowing how long they may take.”
And the Fey weren’t known for doing anything in a hurry. Not to mention that the portal, when and if it did open back up, was almost certain to be very well guarded. No help there.
“Damn it!” I hit the table with my palm, hard enough to slosh my untouched coffee everywhere. I was mopping it up with the napkin shreds when one of the mental Post-its I’d been filing at the back of my brain began waving about. “Tony has an illegal portal around here somewhere,” I said slowly. “He used it for smuggling. I just don’t know where it is.”
Rafe gripped my hands, and for the first time he looked hopeful. “How do we locate it?”
“I don’t know. But I know who to ask.”
“You don’t need a portal until you have the book,” the pixie said, fluffing her tiny shock of bright red hair. She’d found a compact somewhere, possibly in the trash because most of the powder it once held was gone. She was using it for a mirror on the dressing table she’d made out of a bunch of CD cases. “And you haven’t made any progress on that at all.”
“You need it to get back home,” I pointed out. “Unless you want to stay here?”
I looked around her makeshift apartment. It was fairly spacious from her perspective, taking up several shelves in the closet of Pritkin’s study room. She’d fixed up the top shelf as the dressing area, while the bottom was a bedroom, complete with an oven mitt for a sleeping bag and a small flashlight for a lamp. She shot me a dirty look nonetheless. “Yes, I’ve found your world to be so hospitable.”
“When I visited yours, I was almost killed!”
“And I was locked in a file cabinet,” she spat.
“It beats a dungeon!”
“Ever try it?”
I’d seen the file cabinet, which looked like a bomb had exploded from the inside. “It didn’t look like you had any trouble getting out.”
“Only because it was made of some inferior metal, instead of iron.” She shuddered. “I could have died, my magic leached away, my body slowly freezing in the cruel grip of cold—”
“Yes, but you didn’t. And if we could get back to the point?”
Furious lavender eyes met mine. “The point is that the slave must return to the king’s service and you must find the book you have promised him.” She smiled evilly. “You do not wish to return to Faerie without it. The king is not known for his forgiving nature.”
“Françoise isn’t going anywhere,” I told her, for maybe the tenth time. “And if the king’s wrath is so dreadful, why did you offer to help us escape from him? Weren’t you afraid of the consequences?”
The pixie fluttered her wings agitatedly. “That was different.”
&
nbsp; “Different how?”
“The mage offered me something irresistible.” Her frown faded and her eyes suddenly shone with a softer light. “No one would have blamed me for taking it, not even the king.”
“Offered you what?”
“It doesn’t matter! I can’t find it!” She kicked the jewel cases, then sat on the oversized spool of thread she’d turned into a seat, surreptitiously rubbing a hurt foot.
A memory suddenly clicked into place. “The rune stone. Jera.” One of the reasons I’d managed to survive—barely—my one and only foray into her world was because I’d acquired some battle runes from the Senate. The Consul no doubt wanted them back, because they’d be useful in the war and because I hadn’t exactly asked before taking them. But I thought that at the moment she might want Mircea more. And I couldn’t see what good a rune stone would do her when its only power was making people more fertile.
The pixie glanced up resentfully. “He said he had it. He even showed it to me. It looked real.”
“It is real.” Understanding dawned. “You were willing to risk the king’s wrath merely for the chance to have a child?”
“Merely?” Her tiny voice rose to a squeak. “Yes, trust a human to see it like that! My people hover on the brink of extinction, while your foolish, weak, puerile race, whose only accomplishment is to breed and breed and—”
“Yes, thanks, I get the point.” I looked at her narrowly. “What if I could get it for you?”
A whirlwind of glittering green wings was suddenly in my face. “Where is it? Do you have it? I thought one of the mages—”
I smiled. No wonder she’d been sucking up. “I can get it.”
