Skulduggery 8: Building a Criminal Empire

by Logan Jacobs

  “We were just, uh… following a lead,” I said with a grin.

  “Was that lead deep inside Ava?” Penny rolled her eyes.

  “Well, you know, it’s important to investigate all possibilities,” I snickered and then tried to adjust my clothes to get rid of any wrinkles.

  “Sorry, Penny,” Ava said, “we were just--”

  “I’m just razzin’,” the redhead laughed when she reached us. “It’s too much fun not to tease you-- and that’s especially true for you, Ava.”

  “Oh,” the blonde assassin said as her cheeks turned bright pink again.

  “But you better be careful with all this secret sex,” the pixie thief said, “or Wade here just might get you pregnant.”

  I couldn’t help it-- I just laughed, but the moment I did, Penny turned toward me sharply, and I knew that her piercing green eyes suddenly read the truth of the situation.

  “Wa…” Penny trailed off. “You wouldn’t drink any coffee earlier, Ava, and you must have been really overcome with desire to take Wade in a closet in the middle of a mission… and if all that wasn’t enough, Wade just laughed, and that feels like a dead fucking giveaway.”

  “Um… a giveaway to what?” Ava swallowed.

  “You’re fucking pregnant!” the redhead hissed. “Am I wrong?”

  “Are you ever wrong, Penny?” I rolled my eyes.

  “Naw,” my redheaded lover laughed as she looked at my blonde lover. “I’m never wrong.”

  “Yeah,” the blonde assassin admitted. “Yeah, I am.”

  “I fucking knew it!” Penny said. “All the signs were there, like oh, shit! You even asked for fried pickles! So if--”

  “We’re just trying to keep it quiet for right now,” I interrupted her. “Got it?”

  “Yeah, sure, I can keep a damn secret,” Penny said and waved me away so she could slip her arm around Ava’s waist. “Now, Ava, I don’t want you to worry about a thing, okay? I’ve got it all under control.”

  “Um, what exactly do you have under control?” the blonde assassin asked.

  “Everything,” the redhead said as she gestured vaguely with her free hand. “Now, are you having any nausea? Sickness? Intense cravings for anything except for Wade and pickles?”

  “No,” Ava giggled. “I really feel fine, I promise.”

  “And I’m gonna make sure it stays that way,” Penny said and then pointed her finger at me. “She is not allowed to do anything, understand?”

  “She can do whatever she wants,” I laughed, “just as long as she’s careful.”

  “Nope, wrong,” the pixie thief replied. “See, Ava? It’s a good thing you’ve got me. I’ll make sure nothing happens to you, or to that precious little bundle inside you, okay? I’ll take good care of you.”

  “Penny, I’m just pregnant,” Ava said with a roll of her eyes. “I’m not dying.”

  “And it’s our job to make sure it stays that way,” Penny said. “You better be extra careful, Miss I’m-A-Badass-Assassin! If you’re not, I might just take that pretty new bow of yours right out of your hands.”

  “I’d like to see you try,” the assassin deadpanned.

  “Me, too,” I said with a smirk. “Penny, she’s fine. We’ve already talked about it, and she’s not going to take any unnecessary risks, alright?”

  “Okay,” the redhead sighed as she dropped her arm from around the other woman’s waist, so she could turn to face her. “I guess I’m just trying to say… you know, I hate this mushy shit, but--”

  “Well, you’re committed to it now,” I laughed. “Go on, what were you going to say?”

  “I’m just really happy for you,” Penny said with a smile. “For both of you.”

  And then the pixie thief took Ava’s face into her hands and kissed her firmly on the mouth, right before she turned to me, went up on her tiptoes, and kissed me, too.

  “Thanks, Penny,” Ava said and bit her lip. “You’re a really good friend, you know that?”

  “Oh, I know,” the green-eyed thief said with a toss of her bright red hair. “I’m also very good at my job, and that’s why I’ve been looking for the two of you. Come on, Dar’s saving our seats.”

  “Saving our seats for what?” I asked.

  “You’ll see,” Penny said and then pivoted to lead the way back toward the party. “He’s at the bar.”

  “The bar?” Ava whispered. “But if they’re not serving alcohol, then what are they serving?”

  “I have a feeling we’re about to find out,” I said. “Just like I have a feeling that Penny’s about to be very smug about what she found out.”

  “I’m glad she knows,” the blonde assassin murmured just before we re-entered the crowd. “She really is a good friend.”

  “What can I say?” I shrugged. “I have good taste.”

  Ava slipped her hand into mine just long enough to squeeze it, and then we followed Penny through the mob until we reached a long bar. They served all kinds of food and drink there, but I didn’t see or smell anything that seemed like alcohol. But since I didn’t know what the redheaded pixie had discovered, we just stayed right behind her until we came to the end of the bar and the three empty seats beside Dar that he had to actively swat people away from, in order to keep them clear for us.

  “Took you long enough!” the halfling grumbled when he saw us. “Do you know how hard it is keeping three seats open in a crowd like this? Where have you been?”

  “Oh, they’ve just been following another lead,” Penny said. “Anyway, we’re here now, so should we tell them?”

  “Please do,” I said.

  “So I was talking to this halfling woman over by one of the gladiator fights,” the pixie replied, “and she had this drink in her hands, and she said it was this absolutely amazing concoction that made her feel all tingly, even if it was a little hard to swallow.”

  “Does that mean we have a competitor here?” I asked.

  “I don’t think so,” Dar said as he waved the servant at the bar over toward us. “Give us a glass of the, uh… tingly stuff.”

  “That shit’s popular tonight,” the servant said as he smoothed his hair away from his partially pointed ears. “Coming right up.”

  “It makes you feel funny, right?” Penny asked. “I mean, in a good way?”

  “Oh yeah,” the halfie servant replied. “That shit’ll make you feel amazing, if you drink enough of it.”

  I raised my eyebrows but waited for him to return before I said anything else. Then once he came back and pushed the glass across the bar toward us, I raised it to my lips, took a careful sip, and then immediately spat it out onto the floor.

  “This is fucking elven temple wine,” I growled.

  “Yeah, I didn’t say it tasted amazing,” the halfie servant laughed. “I just said that if you drink enough, it’ll make you feel amazing.”

  “This shit is disgusting,” I said. “How can people drink it?”

  “People will do anything if it makes them feel good,” the man replied with a shrug. “After all, nobody lives in or visits the Gold City if they’re not looking for a good time.”

  “But how did elven temple wine get into this party?” I demanded as I swirled the dark liquid around in my glass.

  “Oh, it’s smuggled in all over the city,” the servant said. “People always like to have it at their parties, especially the elves.”

  “But isn’t this shit supposed to be sacred or something?” Penny asked.

  “Eh, there’s not a whole hell of a lot that’s sacred to the elves in this city,” the man answered, “or to anyone else, for that matter.”

  “Apparently,” Ava said with one arched eyebrow.

  “So people just… don’t care that it’s alcohol?” Dar asked.

  “Oh, sure, some people do,” the man said, “but you won’t find very many of them at a party like this.”

  “Good to know,” I said with a glance at my friends.

  “You sure you don’t want to try
it again?” the halfie servant asked. “I know the taste is shit, but it’ll make you feel good enough that you forget all about that.”

  “No, I really think I’m good,” I replied, “but I appreciate it. You can pass this drink along to somebody who needs it more than I do.”

  The halfie servant grabbed the glass and moved to the other end of the bar, while my friends huddled around me in case anyone tried to eavesdrop on us over the loud pulsing of the music.

  “You know… if this is what the elves get up to in the Gold City,” I said with a smile, “then our business could definitely make a killing here.”

  “Hell, yes,” Dar said. “If people will drink that nasty shit here just to get drunk, then just imagine what they would do if they got a hold of our whiskey.”

  “Exactly,” I said. “And I intend to put it right in their eager little hands.”

  “And it’s not just the dwarves and the humans and the halflings,” Penny said. “Even the elves are drinking this shit.”

  “So much for the prohibition on alcohol,” Ava muttered.

  “I guess everything’s a little different here,” I said. “But think about it-- if even the elves are willing to drink it, and they know damn well how illegal it is, then why wouldn’t they drink something else that tastes better but has the same effect?”

  “And that works faster, too,” Dar said.

  “That’s also true,” I said. “They won’t care that it’s whiskey because they’re obviously already corrupt. I mean, think about it-- they’re not just drinking alcohol. They’re drinking sacred fucking temple wine.”

  “Yeah, I think that halfie was right when he said that nothing is really sacred here, not even to the elves,” Ava said.

  “So what does that mean?” Penny asked. “That we can sell to the elves here, and not just to the other races?”

  “That’s the idea,” I said. “But the key is that we have to be smart about this. The elves might be corrupt, but that doesn’t mean they wouldn’t string us up in a heartbeat if we offered to sell them whiskey ourselves.”

  “So we’ll have to get a middle man after all?” Dar asked.

  “Not exactly,” I said. “A middle man would mean that we don’t control who the whiskey gets sold to, or how much it sells for, or anything like that. And since we’ve been down that route before, we’re definitely not going to do that again.”

  “Then what will we do?” Ava asked. “We still need someone else to sell the whiskey to the elves for us, right?”

  “Yes, but we just need him to be the face of the business, that’s all,” I replied. “We’ll tell him who to sell to, which clients to take, how much to charge, what to say, and everything else.”

  “So he would just be the frontman, basically,” Penny said.

  “Right,” I said, “and that means there’s really only two requirements that we would need from him. One, we’ve gotta make sure that we can keep him loyal, so we need to be able to offer him something that he can’t get from anywhere else.”

  “You mean like Golierian?” Dar asked.

  “Exactly like Golierian,” I said. “Think about it-- he’s the captain of the elven fucking guard, but he’s more loyal to me than he is to the empire.”

  “That’s because you offered him money and status,” Penny said, “and he would never have gotten those things on his own.”

  “Right, and that leads me straight to the second requirement for our frontman,” I said. “When I say he needs to be like Golierian, I mean just that-- he’s gotta be an elf.”

  “Shit,” Dar sighed. “I should’ve seen that one coming.”

  “Well, it is the only way to be completely sure that the elves wouldn’t hand him over to the authorities,” Ava said. “If we went through a halfling or even a dwarf, the elves here might decide that they suddenly have morals.”

  “But if we went through an elf, they’d be much less likely to turn them over,” Penny said. “They’d just congratulate themselves that one of their own kind was smart enough to come up with this delicious drink.”

  “That’s the plan,” I said.

  “Alright, so we need an elf like Golierian that we can run the whiskey through,” Dar said, “and that means he probably needs to have a lot of debts, right?”

  “That would sure as shit be helpful,” I laughed. “But he needs to have a high enough status that we can exploit that, so he should be important enough that other elves will listen to him and meet with him if he asks them to.”

  “And I guess we wouldn’t have to give him all the details of our business, right?” Penny demanded. “Just enough to make it work?”

  “Don’t worry, I’m not gonna bring him to our warehouse here or let him know about the portals or anything,” I said. “He just needs to set up meetings for us so we can sell to the elves here-- under his name, of course.”

  “That sounds good to me,” Dar said and rubbed his hands together. “I don’t know what I’m more excited about-- the fact that we’ll be able to get more clients and more coin here, or the fact that we’ll get to take our coins right out of the elves’ pockets.”

  “It’s a toss-up,” I said with a smirk. “Now, before we--”

  But I stopped myself when the music suddenly went silent. All the voices in the room died down as people looked around to see what had happened. I followed the gazes of all the rest of the party-goers as they turned toward the main platform with the guest of honor, and then I saw everyone raise their glasses in that direction.

  Tevian finally turned toward the crowd with a smug smile on his face. His blue skin looked almost like fish scales in the bright light of all the torches around the room, and he adjusted his black hair to fall straight down his back over his turquoise and silver cloak.

  “You have all gathered here to celebrate me,” Tevian called to the room as his gaze started to run over every face in the crowd, “but I would ask you to--”

  Tevian stopped mid-sentence when his gaze swung in our direction, and immediately, I felt my heart drop into my stomach.

  Chapter 5

  I didn’t even think about the Opalstone amulet. Instead, I just clenched my fists, and the moment I did, the whole room went still. Everyone’s raised glasses paused mid-air, and Tevian looked puzzled but pissed at the same time up on the platform.

  As I glanced around the frozen room, I saw that more than one party-goer had been frozen in a compromising position with their hand down their own pants or down somebody else’s. Even my friends were frozen in place, and when I waved my hand in front of them, it was like I had turned them all into statues.

  As soon as everything went still and silent, I felt the gem in the Opalstone necklace grow warm against my skin, but it definitely hadn’t been hot when I’d frozen the room. I wasn’t sure what to make of that, but I could almost hear Ava roll her eyes.

  She would tell me that it was because I was the magic, not some old dwarven necklace relic. She would say that it was because the Ancient Lords had chosen me, and that was why the Rainbow Keys worked for me, or why the amulet did, or why I had grabbed and then thrown a ball of pulsing energy in the elven temple back when all this first started.

  But I didn’t have time to think about all that right now.

  First, I needed to slip back into the crowd with my friends before Tevian really saw us. If we all moved before the room became unfrozen, then the night elf would think that he had just imagined me in the crowd, and I had to admit that I liked the idea that Tevian might feel like he was going crazy.

  I had never frozen such a huge crowd of people before, so I had no idea how long it would last, but I figured I should play it safe and just assume that it wouldn’t be long. I touched Penny and Ava on their shoulders, and as soon as they blinked and looked around themselves, I held a finger to my lips and then reached over to unfreeze Dar, too.

  “What the--” the halfling spluttered when he glanced around.

  “Let’s move,” I whispered. “
I think Tevian might have seen us-- or at least, he might think that he did.”

  “Fuck,” Penny swore.

  We all hopped down from the barstools and started to move through the frozen crowd. I was careful not to touch anyone else as we walked forward, but that was difficult since the room was so packed. Still, the four of us were able to pick our way forward, and if we couldn’t duck around someone or slip under their outstretched arms, we just took a different path.

  Finally, we reached a cluster of gambling tables-- the same tables that I’d found just before Ava came to get me so we could fuck each other’s brains out. I planned to pick right back up where I’d left off at the tables, especially because there were enough people here that it should be impossible for Tevian to see us through the crowd whenever the magic wore off. His vision as a night elf was good, but he couldn’t actually see through bodies, so we should be safe enough here.

  Sure, we could have just tucked tail and run off to make sure that Tevian didn’t discover us, but I wasn’t about to let him chase us out of our own party, even if it was technically for Tevian himself. We had made our plans around this party, so I’d be damned if the night elf interfered with them now.

  When we were in position beside the gambling tables, I prepared to unfreeze the room. For a second, I thought that I might just wait and see how long the effect lasted, but in the end, I decided that would be too much of a waste of our time. We still had business contacts to make, so I wanted to get right down to it.

  “Are you sure you don’t want me to take him out?” Ava murmured. “It would be so easy right now.”

  “I know,” I said with a smile, “but it would also be easy for you even if every person in this room was moving and actively trying to block your shot. That’s just how good you are.”

  “Thank you,” Ava said. “It’s always nice to be appreciated for my craft.”

  “Well, you are the best,” I said with a shrug. “But, no, I’m sure. I think it might be just a little bit too suspicious if everybody regains consciousness and sees Tevian with a knife through his throat.”

  “Especially when he was mid-sentence before you froze the room,” Penny added.