by Karen Chance
I sighed. Whatever or whoever she was, I wasn’t leaving anybody to be entertainment for the bastard or his boys. “If I let you out, you have to promise not to interfere with anything I’m doing,” I told her severely. “No blowing the whistle on us, okay?”
“You’ve lost your mind,” she said flatly. “And when did you change clothes? What is going on around here?”
That’s what I wanted to know. “Do I know you?”
Tiny green and lavender wings ruffled agitatedly on her back. “I can’t believe this,” she said in disgust. “I’m on a mission with an idiot.” Her eyes narrowed as she scanned me. “Oh, no. You aren’t my Cassandra, are you?” She threw up minuscule hands. “I knew it! I should have listened to Granddam: never, ever work with humans!”
“Hey, a little help here,” Jimmy called from behind me.
“Just go,” the pixie told me. “And take the ghost and the rat with you. I’ll deal with this myself.”
I had the feeling I needed to know what was going on, but staying around for a prolonged conversation probably wasn’t smart. I pulled the latch on her cage, ignoring Billy’s comments, and ran back to Jimmy. Unfortunately, his pen had a lock on it that required a key to open. “How do I get you out of there?”
“Here,” Jimmy slid up next to the bars. “They forgot to frisk me. The key’s in my coat. Hurry up; they’ll be back anytime!”
I reached for his jacket, but my hand stopped a foot away from the bars and simply refused to go any closer. It felt like an invisible wall of thick, sticky molasses had closed around it, one that didn’t want to turn loose. The pixie buzzed over while I was struggling to pull my hand back. “I’ll free the witches,” she said, “but I need you to open a door for me.”
“I can’t even open this one,” I told her, using my left hand to try to pull the right free. That backfired, leaving me with two hands that wouldn’t go forwards or pull back. I was well and truly stuck.
“It’s a tar-baby spell,” Billy said, hovering about anxiously. “We need the release.”
“It’s a what?”
“That’s slang for a really strong variation of a prehendo. I’m guessing that anything that gets within a certain perimeter of the cage is gonna get caught like a bug on flypaper, and the more you struggle, the tighter you’re gonna be trapped. Try not to move.”
“Now you tell me.” His warning came about a second after I’d panicked and kicked out with my foot, only to have it get caught, too. Sometimes I really hated magic. “Billy! What do I do?”
“Stay still! I’ll look around. It’s gotta be here somewhere.”
“Come back!” I yelled after him as he streamed off towards the suit of armor. “Get me out!”
Jimmy swore. “It has to be that thing.” he said, pointing upwards. I now noticed what looked like a week-old baked apple hanging from a chain above the door. A second later I recognized it as one of those ugly, shrunken-head key chains they had in the lobby gift shop, along with skeleton tie tacks and “I did it at Dante’s” T-shirts. Tony has no shame when it comes to making a buck. “It’s the only thing that shouldn’t be here.”
The pixie flew up to examine it and almost bumped heads with Billy Joe, who’d come back to have a look. “Stay out of my way, remnant,” she ordered. Billy was about to say something—probably fairly profane—but someone beat him to it. A shriveled, raisinlike eye popped open on the head and regarded the pixie with annoyance. “Call me that again, Tinkerbell, and you’ll never get this door open.”
I just stood there, not able to believe I was watching a pixie have a conversation with a shrunken head. I think that was about the time I gave up on logic and just decided to go with the flow. If I was lucky, someone had spiked my drink and I was hallucinating. No one said anything, so I figured it was up to me. “Can you please open the door?” I asked calmly.
The eye—there seemed to be only one working—swiveled to me. “That depends. What can you do for me?”
I stared at it. It was a shrunken head. The options were pretty limited. “What?”
“Hey, you look familiar. You ever come by the voodoo bar? It’s in the Seventh Circle, upstairs. I was the star attraction, you know, a lot more popular than those lousy floor shows this loser booked. People would tell me their orders and I’d shout them out to the bartenders. It went over great. Everyone thought I was this sophisticated audio-animatronics thingy. Sometimes I told jokes, too. Like, what would they call Bugsy Seigel if he became a vamp? A fangster!” The little thing cackled maniacally. “I crack myself up, you know that?”
“It is evil,” the pixie stated flatly. I nodded in agreement. Extensive warding was impossible in a place that ran off electricity, but was this really the best solution Tony had been able to find?
“Oh, we got a heckler, huh? Okay, how about this one? A guy walks into a bar in Hell and asks for a beer. The bartender says, sorry, but we only serve spirits here!”
“She’s right; it is evil,” Billy Joe said.
The pixie conked the head with the flat of a tiny sword she pulled off her belt. “Release her, or I will chop you into bits!”
The eye managed to look surprised. “Hey! You’re not supposed to be able to do that! Why aren’t you stuck like her?”
“Because I’m not human,” the pixie said through gritted teeth. “Now, do as I say and stop stalling!”
“I would, honest, but I can’t without authorization. I messed up once and look where that got me. All I wanted was a fast car and some faster women to put in it. Now I’d settle for my body back. Only, it’s scattered around all over the place since that voodoo bitch carved me up. Give me a break. I got a little behind in my payments, sure, but come on.”
“You owed Tony money,” I guessed.
“I had what you might call a run of bad luck with the cards,” it said with dignity.
“So Tony sold you to a voodoo priestess?” It didn’t surprise me. Tony gave a new meaning to the phrase “pound of flesh.”
“And then made me work in his stupid casino,” the head ranted. “Then a few months ago, they got worried cause one of the regulars began to suspect that I wasn’t just a pretty face, and I got stuck down here. No more parties, no more pretty girls, nada. It’s been damn depressing. But hey, maybe they’ll shrink you and we can hang out together. Literally. What do you—”
The pixie stopped the tirade by making good on her promise and hacking the head clean in two. I stared as the two halves swung free for a few seconds, each on one end of the thin chain; then they knitted themselves back together in front of my eyes. “Hello, already dead, remember?” the head said testily. “You may be able to hurt me, Tink, but it won’t be in time to help your friends, here. For that, we hafta cut a deal.”
“What do you want?” I asked quickly.
“My body, of course. Get those witches in there to reverse the bokor’s mojo and put me back.”
I stared at the crazed little thing. “That’s insane. No one can reverse something like that. Even if we somehow looked up this voodoo woman, even she couldn’t—”
“I’ll promise,” the pixie said impatiently. “Now, release her.”
The head turned back to her so fast it would have had whiplash if it still had a neck. “Say that again.”
To my surprise, she looked perfectly serious. “I will take you into Faerie. I don’t make any promises about what you will look like, but you may acquire a body. Some spirits manifest there in a physical form.”
“They do?” Billy asked with more interest than I liked. The pixie ignored him.
The head paused. “I gotta think about this,” it said and suddenly stopped moving.
“Why does this thing say ‘Made in Taiwan’ on the bottom?” Billy asked, peering at it from about an inch away.
We exchanged looks, and Billy didn’t need any prompting. He passed into the head and reappeared a few seconds later, looking pissed. “There’s no consciousness in there, Cass, not to mention that it’s
plastic! Someone enchanted it to wake up if anyone got stuck in the tar baby. I’m guessing it set off an alarm and was trying to delay us long enough for someone to get here.”
“Then why did it suddenly shut up?”
“As a guess, we made an offer it didn’t know how to answer.”
I closed my eyes and forced myself to calm down before I had a heart attack and saved Tony some reward bucks. “So, what are we supposed to do? We already tried attacking it!”
“We need the password, Cass—the release. Sometimes it’s an object that you have to touch, or it can be a password. But this place is full of stuff! It’ll take me some time to work through it all.”
“What’s going on? Who’re you talking to?” Jimmy demanded.
“There’s supposed to be a trigger around here, or a word that can force that thing to release me,” I explained briefly. “It isn’t real; it was triggered by the spell.”
Jimmy looked surprised. “You mean that ain’t Danny?”
“And Danny would be?”
“That shrunken head Tony made outta what was left of some guy back in the forties. We made it the model for our key rings.” He looked annoyed. “You mean they put one of those novelty heads down here? What, I don’t even rate the real thing?”
It was just as well I was stuck, or I’d have been tempted to thump him. “Do you know what the release is or not?”
He shrugged, still scowling. “Try ‘banjo.’” As soon as he said it, the stuff holding me in place was simply not there anymore. I’d been pulling away, useless though it was, and the momentum landed me on the floor on my already bruised backside. Jimmy grabbed me through the bars and hauled me to my feet. “You’re wasting time!”
“Banjo?”
“We have passwords for restricted areas that are changed every few weeks. I approved the new list a couple days ago, and that was the first word on it.” He saw my expression. “The boys are hired for brawn, not brain.”
“But why ‘banjo’?”
“Why not? Look, I have to come up with a couple hundred of these a year, okay? I ran out of abracadabras a long time ago. Besides, you wouldn’t have guessed it, right?”
“I still need you to open the door,” the pixie reminded me as I finally found a leather key chain in Jimmy’s suit coat. My hands were shaking, but it was obvious he couldn’t let himself out. Somebody had run out of handcuffs, or maybe they didn’t like him any better than I did. Both his hands had been smashed, and they weren’t merely broken, but ruined to the point that not a finger or joint appeared to be working. I was betting that, even if he got out of this, he’d made his last hit.
“I’m trying!”
“Not that one, “she said impatiently. “The one by the cage where they put me.” She whirled around my head like a tiny cyclone. “Against the far wall. My hands aren’t big enough to turn that oversized knob.”
“Give me a minute,” I told her as the stubborn lock finally sprang open. Jimmy shot out of there at a dead run, heading for the hall. I glanced from him to the demanding pixie. “Follow him,” I told Billy. “I’ll be right there.”
“Cass—”
“Just do it!”
Billy went off in a huff and I rushed to open the door the tiny virago indicated. I was about to turn and follow Billy when I found out what Tony’s latest business venture was. Three brunette women, all about my age, sat back-to-back on the floor inside a rust-colored circle. Their hands and feet were bound, and makeshift gags had been stuffed in their mouths. I stared. “My God. He’s slaving now?” Even for Tony, that was low.
“As good as,” the pixie replied, flying over to the women. She grimaced and looked back at me. “This is worse than I thought. I can deal with the circle, but I can’t get them loose.”
I ran forward, wondering if one of the other keys on Jimmy’s ring would work, and hit what felt like a solid wall. It didn’t look like there was anything there, but my bruised nose said otherwise, and my ward flared, spilling golden light around the room. The pixie began chattering agitatedly. “Stupid witch! It’s a circle of power! I’ll destroy it, then you free the women!”
I moved backwards and my ward calmed down, although I could still feel it warm against my back. “I’m not a witch,” I said resentfully, wondering if my nose was broken.
The pixie had dropped to the floor and started rubbing at the circle. It was made of a dried substance that flaked off slowly. “Okay. The Pythia’s not a witch. Got it.”
“Can’t you hurry?” I asked after a minute, wondering how far Jimmy had gotten in his condition. “And my name is Cassie.”
Sharp lavender eyes gave an exaggerated roll. “I used to think it was the position that made you so annoying, but you were born this way, weren’t you? And I’m doing the best I can! The blood has dried and it’s not coming off easily.”
“Blood?”
“How do you think dark mages perform a spell? It takes a death, stupid.” She started mumbling in that other language, while I hugged myself and tried not to think about what Tony was doing with a member of the Fey, some slaves and a circle of blood. He’d been on the wrong side of human law as long as I’d known him, but this contravened both mage and vampire rules as well. I didn’t know when he’d turned suicidal, but I suddenly wanted out of the casino in the worst way.
Finally, my small accomplice finished cleaning a narrow line through the circle, and I heard a small pop. “Is that it?” I asked her. It seemed kind of anticlimactic.
She sat on the floor and panted. “Well, try it!”
I walked forward, tentatively this time, but nothing blocked me. I knelt quickly by the nearest woman and started trying keys. Thankfully, the third one worked. I pulled the gag out of her mouth, and she started screaming. I started to stuff it back in, before she alerted the whole casino, but she caught my hand. She began a rapid string of French in between kissing my wrist and whatever else she could reach. I didn’t understand much of what she was saying—my only other modern language is Italian, and there aren’t a lot of crossovers between the two—but the light brown eyes that were looking at me almost worshipfully rang a bell.
I got a weird feeling in my stomach. I knew this woman. She was plumper and looked far less haggard, but otherwise, little had changed since I’d seen her stretched on a rack enveloped in flames. I did a double take, but there was no denying it. That face was seared into my memory, and a glance at her fingertips showed them to be heavily scarred. As impossible as it was, a seventeenth-century witch was sitting in a casino in modern-day Vegas. Presumably a dead witch, since no one could have survived what I’d seen her put through. Any other day, I would have seriously considered passing out; as it was, I just pressed the key into her hand and scrambled back out of reach.
“I have to go,” I said shortly and fled. My plan was simple: find Jimmy, question him, turn him over to the cops, then run like hell. Other complications I could do without.
I didn’t need Billy to figure out that going back the way we’d come wasn’t a great idea. If anyone was coming for Jimmy, that’s the route they’d take, and my one gun wouldn’t help much against the kind of hardware Tony’s thugs carried. Not that I had seen any employees, muscle or otherwise, since hitting the lower levels, a fact that was beginning to worry me. It was early morning, sure, but a place like this never slept. There should be people around, especially if the ring was on tonight, but the hallways echoed emptily. I followed the corridor until I came to where it diverged. I paused, confused, until Billy floated through a wall and beckoned to me. “In here.”
I entered through a nearby door to find myself in an empty employee break room. Jimmy was half-hidden behind a soda machine. “There’s a doorknob,” he said when he saw me, and pointed at the wall with his elbow, “right about there. But I can’t do anything with these.” He held up his mutilated hands and I hurried forward. Behind the machine was what looked like an expanse of the same off-white, slightly stained drywall that made up the res
t of the room. But it rippled around the edges, although I wouldn’t have noticed if I hadn’t been expecting it. The perimeter ward was getting old. I slid my hands along the wall until I grasped what felt like a knob, and pushed.
A door opened onto a narrow corridor that, judging by the dust on the floor, didn’t get a lot of use. It wasn’t a surprise. Tony always had multiple exits, half of them hidden, in his businesses. He told me once that it was a leftover from his youth, when armies went marching through Rome on a regular basis. He’d almost burnt to death when some Spanish soldiers in Charles V’s army sacked his villa in the 1530s, and ever since he’d been paranoid. For once, I was grateful for it.
We ran down the hidden hallway, then climbed up a ladder at the end. Or, rather, I climbed and shoved Jimmy up in front of me. His hands were a major handicap, but he used his elbows, I pushed from below and somehow we made it. We burst out of a trapdoor into a locker room. A human wearing a sequined devil costume blinked at us blearily but didn’t ask questions. He worked for Tony, so he was probably used to assorted oddities.
Jimmy scrambled to his feet and ran for the door, puffing like a freight train, and I wasn’t much better off. I definitely needed to add gym visits to my to-do list, right after running for my life and killing Tony. The locker room exited onto another of those plain gray hallways, but mercifully, it was a short one. A few seconds later, we were standing near a forest of faux stalagmites overlooking the river. A Charon was rowing a few weary gamblers back towards the entrance a few yards away.
“Hey, where do you think you’re going?!” Jimmy had started off without a word and didn’t so much as flinch at my shout. Wrestling him to the ground wasn’t an option, but fortunately, I knew something that was. “Billy, get him!”
I took off after Jimmy and felt Billy Joe flow past me like a warm breeze. He was usually cold or at least chilly, but he was hopped up on some vamp’s wards and had energy to burn. But Jimmy reached the vestibule in record time and was heading for the gates when he suddenly stopped and stumbled backwards. I realized why when I saw Pritkin, Tomas and Louis-César coming in the main entrance. I didn’t worry about how they’d found me or what they had planned. I grabbed a handful of Jimmy’s elegant suit coat and dragged him back into the hallway.
