by Karen Chance
Zilch. I was starting to get a complex.
“So, listen. We’ve got a problem with the truck.”
She finally looked up. “It no go?”
“No, it’s fine. It’s just, uh, sort of packed.”
“Everyone not fit?”
“No, they’re in there. But I don’t think we’re going to be squeezing in any more.”
“Slaves make their own way home, once we free them.” She held up a fistful of the type of charms her kind used to pass as more or less human.
“Okay, but that still leaves the slavers.”
That got me a long stare.
“Olga,” I said, getting a sinking feeling. “I have to bring them back for questioning. We’ll never stop the selling of your people if we don’t know who’s behind it.”
“That vampire behind it,” she said, stuffing the charms into a sleek pink clutch.
She was talking about a rat fink named Geminus. Until his recent, unlamented demise, he’d been a member of the Vampire Senate, the governing body for all North American vampires. But power, fame, and the idolization of millions hadn’t been good enough. He’d wanted to be rich as Croesus, too, and found that running the slave trade from Faerie fit the bill nicely.
“He’s dead,” I pointed out. “And yet business goes on as usual.”
“Not for long.”
I sighed but didn’t bother pointing out that a handful of trolls and a lone dhampir were not likely to bring down a network Geminus had spent years building. Because that wasn’t our job. All we were after was a new arrival who had failed to arrive.
That sort of thing had always been a hazard for the Dark Fey who paid to be smuggled out of the almost-constant warfare in Faerie. Sometimes the smugglers took the money and then failed to show up, or left would-be immigrants stranded far from home and on the wrong side of the portal. Others did make it through, only to end up in the usual mess faced by any illegals—lousy jobs, worse pay, and no one to complain to. Although that still beat what was behind door number three.
There are tons of old legends about the fey kidnapping humans. What nobody bothered to record is that we do it right back. A lot of the slavers are dark mages who promptly drain the magic—and therefore the life—out of anybody unlucky enough to fall into their hands. Others are more like subcontractors, finding specimens for sale into nefarious “professions” that usually end the same way.
But lately, thanks to Geminus’ death and a simultaneous Senate crackdown on smuggling, the number of active portals was dwindling. That would have been good news, except for the law of supply and demand, which ensured that the price for slaves was going nowhere but up. That had left the smugglers with the ironic problem of having to watch out for other crooks who were trying to steal their illegal cargo. Like the group that attacked a band of would-be immigrants last night.
They’d been lucky enough to make off with an even dozen new slaves.
They’d been unlucky enough to have one of them be Olga’s nephew.
If she caught up with them, I strongly suspected there’d be a few less slavers to worry about. Which wouldn’t have concerned me except that my job these days—on the Senate’s anti-smuggling squad—was to make sure that that didn’t happen. Well, not before I had a chance to question them first.
“You know,” I said idly, as Olga locked up, “a few deaths, even of scumbag slavers, won’t do much to stop the trade. But the info they might provide . . .”
Olga threw me a look, which was hard to see behind her flashy new Dolce & Gabbana shades. They would have seemed odd, because the sun was close to setting, but these shades weren’t for keeping light out so much as letting it in. They’d been modified to enhance all light in an area, because troll eyesight sucks even at the best of times.
And I guess Olga wanted to see the leader’s face before she bit it off.
“You stubborn little woman,” she told me.
“It has been remarked.”
She tilted her head. “You take him away, how I know he dead?”
“Because the Senate isn’t known for compassion?” She just looked at me. Olga didn’t have a lot of faith in the Vampire Senate. Olga knew that they only cared about the smugglers because of the weapons they also brought in, most of which went to the Senate’s enemies. Olga knew nobody gave a shit about the Dark Fey, which was why they had to look out for themselves.
“And because I’ll take care of it,” I added.
“You kill?”
“It’s what I do.”
She thought this over while I sorted through the pastry box she’d brought for the boys. Tonight was muffins, although I couldn’t tell what kind. “What are these?”
“Lemon.”
I sniffed one. Human food was still a new experience for the fey, who tended to combine things in odd ways. I took a bite.
“And these green things?”
“Asparagus.”
That’s what I’d thought.
We reached the truck and Olga climbed in, making the struts groan and drop another inch. I donated the muffins to the boys in back and turned to follow suit. And found a chest in the way.
It was a nice chest, wearing a blue knit pullover in some kind of thin material that outlined hard pecs and a washboard stomach. It was attached to an even nicer pair of denim-covered thighs and a butt that ought to be hanging in a museum somewhere. It even smelled good—a rich, sweet, decadent scent that always reminded me of butterscotch.
The face topping the whole mountain of awesome was pretty nice, too. Even crowned by a mass of auburn, Breck-girl hair pulled back from a manly jaw by an understated tortoiseshell clip. And even if it was currently regarding me sardonically.
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
That got me a raised eyebrow. “Aren’t you glad to see me?”
I guess so, since my nipples just got hard, I didn’t say, because his ego was big enough as it was.
“It’s just a little unexpected.”
“I gathered that.” Narrowed blue eyes took in the straining truck. “Am I interrupting something?”
“Just . . . going out with some friends.”
“Indeed. That is reassuring. For a moment, I thought you might be planning to contravene doctor’s orders.”
Yeah, I was busted.
“We’re going to see the fights,” I said, hoping he somehow hadn’t noticed the army-issue truck, the armed-to-the-teeth posse, and the half ton of illegal weaponry I had hidden around my outfit.
An eyebrow raised.
Well, shit.
“I enjoy a good fight,” Louis-Cesare said, in what had to be the understatement of the century. “I’ll come along. Consider it a date.”
“A date, huh?” I looked him over. “If I buy you a popcorn, do I get to have my way with you later?”
He took a step, and I suddenly found myself trapped between hard steel and harder vampire. “How big of a popcorn?”
“I don’t know. What am I getting in return?”
He bent over and whispered something in my ear.
I swallowed. “We’ll see if they have a bucket.”
* * *
—
They didn’t have a bucket.
They did have beer, overpriced and in tiny paper cups, sold by enterprising types out of a repurposed ice cream van that prowled up and down the ridiculously long line to get in. I wouldn’t have plunked down the cash for what was essentially highway robbery, but I had my evening ahead to think about. And I wanted to see what the so-cultured Louis-Cesare would do with a half-frozen beer. Because the truck’s freezers had not been repurposed along with the rest of it, leaving us with what amounted to beer Popsicles.
Not that I was complaining.
Until I ran into something.
I’d been distracted
wondering how the gargoyle-like things driving the truck were managing to reach the pedals, since they were maybe toddler height, when I suddenly stopped moving. The obstacle in my way was skin warm, although it felt more like stone. And looked like it, too, when I turned my head to see so many muscles that some had given up trying to find an appropriate spot and were just bulging out haphazardly, wherever they could find room.
The living boulder regarded me for a second, and the squinty little eyes got squintier. “No,” he rumbled.
“No what?”
The rocklike dome, which lacked any sort of hair except for a couple robust tufts coming out of the ears, nodded at a nearby sign.
NO WEPINS, it informed me, in dripping acid green spray paint.
Okay, no.
“They have lockers,” Louis-Cesare murmured.
This was true. A stoner with a bad case of Muppet hair was sitting cross-legged on the dirt beside the sign, in front of a row of lockers. They looked like they’d been ripped wholesale off an elementary school wall, complete with bits of happy ducky wallpaper still clinging to the edges. And then piled haphazardly against a sagging chain-link fence, without any effort to secure them to anything. Meanwhile, their only guardian’s eyes were starting to cross from a joint the size of a cigar that he was munching on, Churchill-style.
“You have got to be kidding me,” I said.
“Move,” the boulder rumbled, when I just stood there.
“Then let me in.”
“Then lose the hardware.”
“You just let her in.” I nodded at a tall, model-pretty chick in a leather catsuit, with bright purple hair, carmine lipstick, and a half ton of lethal accessories. She disappeared through a gate in the chain-link and immediately flickered out of view, masked by whatever glamourie was being used to hide the night’s festivities.
The spell wasn’t perfect; every so often it let out a split second of raucous music, or a glimpse of smoky darkness lit by odd smears of light. But mostly it held. Meaning that the only thing I could see past the sagging fence was an overgrown lot strewn with grimy police tape, some pools of water from this afternoon’s downpour, and the fire-gutted building that had brought us all here.
Fly-by-night pop-up events like this preferred disaster areas, because any damage could be written off as part of the previous catastrophe. But this one was a little more catastrophic looking than usual. The sun was setting, making the old brick building appear to still be on fire, with the last rays boiling in broken, smoke-clouded glass. Glass that looked a lot like jagged teeth, framing the solid black maws of burnt-out windows, which could be hiding anything, anything at all.
Yeah.
“Imma need my weapons,” I told Boulder Boy.
“Know her. Don’t know you,” he said slowly, answering my previous comment. Because lightning fast was not the processing speed we were dealing with here. But then, most people didn’t want to pay for a bouncer who could think. Most people wanted a bouncer who could follow orders, and I was getting the definite impression that once an idea got lodged in that rocklike cranium, it didn’t get out again.
Well, not without some help.
“Hold my beer,” I told Louis-Cesare.
But then backup arrived. At least, I guess that’s what it was, because an arm the size of a small bus reached out of the glamourie and grabbed, not me—because I know how to move when I have to—but a guy standing behind me. Who had also come armed for bear, but not armed for whatever the hell had just grabbed him. And had now turned him upside down and was shaking him like a maraca.
For a moment, all conversation stopped as the line watched the shakedown. A couple knives, five guns, a set of brass knuckles, and half a dozen extra clips fell out of the guy’s coat and jeans and various useless holsters. Because they weren’t meant to stand up to that kind of abuse.
Of course, neither was human anatomy, and he’d looked pretty human to me. But I guess not. Because he was still breathing when the arm dropped him a moment later.
On his head.
“No weapons,” the bouncer told me.
“Gotcha.”
It was finally decided that one of the trolls, a small mountain named Sten who was nonetheless looking at the arm with respect, would take my stuff back to the truck and babysit it. That left us a man down, but I was somehow less concerned about security, all of a sudden.
The stoner cranked off a bunch of tickets from a roll that looked like the kind you got after stuffing quarters in a Skee-Ball machine, and Olga accepted them with a regal inclination of her head. She swept through the gate, with Louis-Cesare and me on her heels. And I guess the rest of the trolls brought up the rear, but I wasn’t sure because—
“Holy shit!”
Chapter Two
I don’t know what I’d expected. I knew we were going to an illicit, no-holds-barred fight of the kind that would leave the UFC writhing in envy. I knew that said fights were not supposed to be known to the authorities, human or otherwise, and were therefore an open invitation to all kinds of rabble. I knew that we were walking into danger, serious danger, which was why I’d been so loaded down with weapons that I basically clinked when I walked.
Even though I knew all this, I still wasn’t prepared for what I saw once we stepped through the glamourie.
I still wasn’t prepared for troll carnival.
And I wasn’t prepared for it to hit all at once, to the point that my brain could take it in only by breaking it down into different senses.
Sound: hitting like a tsunami that drags you under before spitting you out the other side on a wave studded with audible debris. Which beats and bangs you up, leaving you breathless and disoriented, because it’s coming at you from all sides: wonky loudspeakers giving updates nobody could hear; old-fashioned boom boxes blaring every kind of music simultaneously; hordes of gamblers screaming bets around bookmakers standing on piles of smoke-damaged furniture to get above the crowd; and people, all kinds of people, threading through the crowd of vendors’ tents and lean-tos surrounding the burnt-out hulk like a swirl of colorful skirts. And fighting and laughing and singing and shouting in a couple dozen languages, including some that scratched the brain because they weren’t in human decibels.
Smell: a five-foot toddler lurching by on unsteady legs, waving an odorous treat that left scent trails so thick they were almost visible; hawkers in the form of ieles—large bipedal cats—pushing their version of suspiciously mouselike shish kebab; families tailgating over open fires, with pots so bright with unknown spices that they twitched the nose and fooled the mind, turning the flames multicolored as several senses tangled up and tripped over one another.
Sight: a towering giant, leaning against a tree and scratching his nuts, waiting for the next partygoer with an attitude; a cascade of tiny ashrays floating by in bubbles of water, because they couldn’t touch land; humpbacked ogres peering suspiciously at the world from under thatches of unkempt hair; a beautiful blond selkie in human form, leaving watery footprints wherever she walked; a raucous tent filled with satyrs and mazikeen, flightless fey with iridescent wings often mistaken for angels except for their tendency to really get the party started; and a dozen others I couldn’t even put names to.
I’d started to think, after this summer, that I was something of an authority on the fey. My landlord was a Dark Fey princess; I had a basement full of troll in the form of several of Olga’s relatives; my adopted son was a half Duergar/half Brownie who’d helped me battle a Light Fey princeling with skills I’d never even heard of until I was almost gutted by them, and yet I’d somehow come out intact on the other side. And, I was quickly realizing, still didn’t know shit.
I was realizing something else, too.
“Wait a minute!” I screamed at Olga, who somehow heard me over the din. She turned politely. “What are all the fey doing here?”
That g
ot me a forehead wrinkle. “For the fights.”
“Yes, but . . . you told me it was fey being kidnapped and forced to battle to the death! Not that they’d be part of the crowd!”
Large shoulders shrugged. “Fey fight at home. Fey fight here. Fight not problem. Kidnapping problem.”
“Okay, but you appreciate it’s going to be a little hard to find your nephew in all this!” I waved at the crowd, maybe a couple thousand strong, already packed into the lot. And we hadn’t even gotten to the main event yet.
“We not need find him,” Olga explained patiently. “Find slaver. Then—” She made a fist.
And, okay, I was pretty sure he’d talk, too. But still.
“But still,” I yelled, because the noise level was astonishing. “That doesn’t look like it’s going to be any easier!”
It really didn’t. Especially since the place wasn’t packed just with fey. There were also droves of magical humans, who seemed a lot more in the loop than I was, since they were buying booze or haggling a buck off the price of a T-shirt instead of staring around in slack-jawed astonishment. And here and there were dark puddles of stillness that screamed vampires, who I guess had come for the fun, since fey blood didn’t nourish them. There were even a few weres, looking like humans but itchy, like a feather tickling up my spine.
Normally, finding the perp in my line of work is easy, since I’m mostly chasing things that go bump in the night amid crowds of humans. Find the supe and you usually find the bad guy, the needle in the proverbial haystack who shows up on my mental radar, all nice and shiny. Only here, half the haystack was made out of needles. And even that didn’t help me much, since, this time, they might be the good guys.
“Don’t worry,” Olga said, clapping a ham-sized hand on my shoulder and almost buckling my knees. “He albino.”
That seemed to settle things as far as she was concerned, because she took off, plowing through a gleaming stream of will-o’-the-wisps with a tchaa and some flapping of massive hands. They went swirling off in annoyed clouds, and I and my date went stumbling after her.
