by Eli Grant
I gestured to the world at large, and all the bills and the prejudiced systems and futile stupidity that implied.
“If that means living in the mundane world then yeah, fuck it! It’s better to be stable and mundane than be magic and still wondering where your next meal is coming from. Fuck’s sake, Aaron! You know I’m doing this for you. Could you try for one minute to cooperate? Or at least not actively sabotage me?”
That shut him up for a minute. The shame rolled back, temporarily defeating his stubbornness, at least long enough for us to reach the house. I felt his eyes on my back as I unlocked the door and I sent up a prayer to Tiamat or whatever asshole gods were listening that he would just let the conversation go.
He dropped his bag near the door as I shuffled towards the couch, but he didn’t head to his room yet. I sat down and tried to look like I wasn’t waiting on his last word.
“All I’m saying is—”
There it was.
“—There’s no way to make this work, Eva. If you try, you’re just going to screw over both of us.”
I leaned back into the couch, my head tipped back against the wall, and closed my eyes. If he wanted the last word he could have it. I was done.
He stood next to the couch, skinny shoulders tense, waiting for my rebuttal. The longer I stayed silent the more uncertain his posture became. Finally he looked away, defeated. He went back to his backpack and returned with a thick, stapled pamphlet.
“I’ve, uh, I’ve been looking at options,” he said, setting it on the coffee table. “I know it sounds like giving up for now. But once we’re more stable I can get my GED. And then we can look at community college or something. I’m...”
He paused, twisting his sleeves nervously.
“I know how much you’ve given up for me, okay? I’m not trying to sabotage you or be ungrateful or whatever. I just think that I don’t even know what I want to do with my life yet. What if you do all this and I end up in some degree program I hate for a job I can’t stand just because I don’t want to waste all the work you did? And whatever I end up wanting to do, I know I’m never going to give up being magic. Not ever. So, you know, I just...”
He trailed off, probably realizing he was starting to ramble. He took a deep breath, gathering his thoughts.
“I know you’re doing it for me,” he said finally. “I just want something different, okay?”
“Okay,” I said.
He waited for me to say more. When I didn’t, he squirmed in the awkward silence and finally left, shutting his bedroom door behind him. Being left alone with my thoughts was less of a relief than I’d hoped it would be.
Aaron had left the packet of papers on the coffee table. An informational pamphlet on the local GED program. I’d looked into it before for myself, but the time investment had been too much, even before you considered the testing and application fees.
I chewed on the inside of my cheek. Maybe it was more realistic.
I picked up the packet, though my stomach twisted with guilt at the thought. I knew what it was like to be suddenly pulled out of school and pushed into a minimum wage job. No sixteen year old should have to worry that their part-time paycheck was all that was keeping food on the table.
As I lifted the papers, something beneath it slipped off the coffee table and onto the floor. I bent to grab it before I realized what it was, assuming it was a take-out receipt. Instead, my hand closed around creamy card stock. Dante’s name and number stared back at me in fine embossed font.
I looked at the papers in my hand, and at Aaron’s bedroom door.
I put the GED packet down. Clutching Dante’s card in my fist, I slipped out of the house and into the pre-dawn dimness, my bare feet cold on the sidewalk pavement.
My hands shook as I punched the number into my phone and I stopped for a moment, steeling myself. I’d tried doing things the way you were supposed to. I’d struggled and settled and still been screwed over. Enough was enough.
As I hit call, I heard a cell phone ringing nearby and looked up, startled.
The call picked up as Dante stepped out of the shadows beside my house, phone to his ear and a knowing smile on his face. Creepy bastard.
“Yes, Miss Evie?”
I stared at him, hungry anger aching in my chest warring with stubborn fear and uncertainty and the desire to run away and never stop running. I let my cellphone fall to my side, let go of the breath I was holding.
“I’m in.”
chapter
5
“I’M OUT,” DANTE SAID WHEN I introduced my one condition.
I’d already picked up on the fact that Dante was a compulsive liar, but I was starting to think it was just one part of his overarching plan to be the biggest pain in my ass possible. In his defense, watching Mariposa use magic to shoot soda cans at Trip while he tried and mostly failed to deflect them with his “sick ninja moves” wasn’t exactly a huge confidence booster.
“Don’t start,” I muttered as Mariposa hit Trip square between the eyes. “You want me, you hire my whole team. That’s the deal.”
It was just past dawn and Domino had drawn blackout curtains over the windows of the run down old doublewide we were meeting in. The window mounted AC was already chugging away, dripping condensation as it tried to fight the inexorably growing heat of the day. Dante sat, stiff and unimpressed, on one end of the battered couch and I leaned against the arm on the opposite side, watching Mariposa and Trip horse around a few feet away in the open space between the living area and the kitchen. Whisper was perched on the console across from the couch next to the incongruously nice flatscreen, half watching them roughhouse, half watching the smoke from her cigarette, which curled in impossible shapes and shifted through a muted palette of psychedelic colors as it drifted up towards the ceiling. I couldn’t completely blame Dante for being moody. It was past his bedtime. A vampire’s power rose and fell with the sun. They were weaker during the day, less than half their usual strength by noon, and they got cranky when they were tired.
“Oh, are we your team now?” Domino asked as he emerged from the bedroom with a folding card table. “Here I was under the impression you worked for me.”
“Like any changeling has ever answered to anybody,” I scoffed. “Where’s Andre?”
“On his way,” Domino said, shooing Mariposa and Trip out of the way while he unfolded the table. “You two make yourselves useful and get the chairs.”
“Let’s get started anyway,” Dante said, checking his watch. “We don’t have much time to prepare as it is.”
“Well, you know Domino,” I said, gesturing to the man, who sketched a mocking bow. “He organizes everything. He’s usually the one who comes up with the jobs.”
“And you’re all changelings, I take it?” Dante assumed.
“Hell nah,” Mariposa answered as she and Trip returned from the bedroom with the chairs. “I’m a witch. Anton’s a wolf. Whisper’s a straight up goddess on earth.” She winked at her girlfriend, who leaned over to steal a kiss as Mariposa passed. She had a chair on each arm, and was using her powers to levitate a third. I knew the chair was probably close to the limit of what her powers could lift, but she was showing off. That’s what the horseplay had been about as well. Showing the vampire he didn’t scare them.
Mariposa was a year older than me, short and solidly built with black braids and sharp features. Butch and irreverent with expressive hands that darted and fluttered like small brown birds when she talked, even when she wasn’t translating for Whisper.
“Mariposa is septenary grade,” I explained while she set down the chairs and turn to sign something to Whisper in rapid-fire ASL. Trip snatched Whisper’s cigarette while she was distracted and danced quickly out of her reach when she grabbed for him. She rolled her eyes and let him go.
“I would have been quaternary at least,” Mariposa added. “But I didn’t kiss enough ass at occult school so they screwed me over. The
whole system is bullshit anyway.”
“And your specialty?” Dante asked.
“Kinesis,” Mariposa said with a shrug. “Up to about ten pounds. I can do a couple of objects at a time if they’re light. Any witch who's been trained can manage a little kinesis, but I haven’t met anyone under tertiary who could lift anything more than a pound.”
“Impressive,” Dante said, raising an eyebrow. “Can you manage anything molecular?”
Mariposa made an ambiguous gesture.
“That shit takes specialist training that I can’t get with my grade. I can just about start a fire if I need to, but I’m hungover as shit the next day.”
“She’s our safecracker,” I explained. “She can open mechanical locks easy, keep electronic alarms from tripping. And anything she can’t handle, Whisper can.”
I gestured to Whisper, who waved back casually. She and Mariposa made an odd pair. Whisper was about six feet and statuesque and had dropped her glamour as soon as she was inside. Her skin was pearly and iridescent, her eyes like mirrors, her white hair shaved close to her scalp. A crown of jet black horns, like teeth or shards of obsidian, circled her brow and a long tail, tufted like a lion’s, curled idly around her leg.
“I’m assuming you inherited more than just your looks from the Fae then,” Dante asked. Whisper signed back something that made Mariposa snicker.
“She can influence electrical currents,” Trip translated, unfolding one of the chairs and sitting in it backwards, taking a drag from the cigarette he’d stolen from Whisper. “Turn off cameras and short out sensors and shit. She also has a really mean right hook, which she wants me to tell you she can demonstrate for you any time.”
“I’ll take her word for it,” Dante said wisely. “And you?”
“Trip,” Trip said, holding out a hand to shake, which Dante ignored. Trip was thin—Waifish like an underfed supermodel in the right light. In the wrong light he looked more like a recovering meth addict, face gaunt under a curtain of long, stringy pale hair. His eyes were just a little too big, the soft heather gray color quietly impossible. He wasn’t wearing a glamour, but your eyes tended to skip over him anyway, dismissing him out of hand, until he wanted to be seen. Then you couldn’t take your eyes off of him. “Wanna see what I can do?”
I leaned over to put myself between them quickly.
“Don’t look him in the eye,” I told Dante, casting a glare at Trip. “He’s one of those Tam Lin types. He can convince you of just about anything as long as you’re looking him in the eyes. He’s our face on any cons and runs interference if police or security are around.”
“I can do little illusions and shit too,” Trip added, grinning and tucking the cigarette behind his ear. “Check this shit out.”
He shook his hands to loosen up, then slapped them down on the card table. It shuddered and unfolded a horse’s head, made of the same aluminum and laminate as the rest of the table, which it threw back and neighed, stomping its legs like hooves. Trip leaned back as it trotted around the room like a weird, angular pony. Dante was stone faced, but I could tell he was impressed simply because he wasn’t talking.
The door of the doublewide opening shocked us all out of it. A big bear of a man with dark brown skin and shaggy black hair was shouldering his way into the room, careful not to open the door too wide. When we looked back at the table, it was back where Domino had set it up, as though it had never moved.
“Andre!” Domino said, getting up to help the other man in. “Where you been?”
“Had to stop by the grocery store,” Andre explained, holding up the bags in his hands. He saw Dante, still staring at the table, probably examining it for enchantments, and made a disappointed sound. “Aw man, did I miss Trip doing his horse trick? I love that thing.”
“Are your illusions tangible?” Dante asked Trip, who was still catching his breath. “Can they be touched and perceived by someone not under your influence?”
“Nah, man.” Trip shook his head and nearly lost his cigarette. “It’s all in your head. Won’t show up on camera or anything. I’m just like, projecting an image into your brain and tricking it into thinking it’s real. If it was tangible you think I’d be here hanging out with these losers? I’d be in Vegas with like, tigers and a sequined cape and shit.”
“Like the High Circle would let you,” Mariposa said, rolling her eyes. “They’d stop you before the Triumverate did. They hate non-witches stepping on their shit.”
“Dude, I know, but if I could—”
“Anyway,” I cut in before it could turn into the argument it always did, and gestured to the large man. “That’s Andre.”
“The muscle?” Dante assumed. I couldn’t blame him for the assumption. Andre was so tall that when he stood up straight his head touched the ceiling and he was built like a powerlifter, with heavy arms and a body like a brick wall. When he shifted he looked more like a grizzly than a wolf.
“Andre?” I said. “He wouldn’t hurt a fly.”
“I’m a Buddhist, actually” Andre chimed in. “So, yeah. Not even flies.”
“Andre’s our forger,” I explained. “And he’s a god damn artist. Right Andre?”
“And don’t you forget it,” Andre agreed, gesturing at me with a wooden spoon. He’d unpacked the bags onto the kitchen counters and jumped right into making what looked like pancakes. “I’m also the medic, and I do most of the driving, and yeah a little heavy lifting when it’s needed. I’m flexible.”
“Plus if we need something done and none of us have got the right skills for it, Andre always has at least one cousin who does that shit professionally,” Domino added with a chuckle. “If anyone’s the muscle here, it’s Evie.”
“Fascinating,” Dante said. “I’m already aware of Ms. Evie’s skills. Which leaves Mr. Domino?”
He looked at Domino, glancing pointedly at the black band on his wrist which most people would have mistaken for a watch. Domino ran his tongue over his teeth and shoved his hands in his pockets.
“If you know what Evie can do, then you know what I can do,” he said.
“Please, elaborate,” Dante insisted. I would have stopped him—I knew how much Domino hated being seen without his glamour, and he couldn’t exactly show off his powers with it on. But Domino just huffed and adjusted the black band on his wrist. His glamour melted away like it had never been, like how he’d looked before had just been a trick of the light.
He had no horns or tail like Whisper, or any of the wilder fae traits I’d seen in some changelings. But he was a marvel to look at. His skin had a texture like marble, and swirls of black and white rolled across it like ink dropped in milk. Every strand of his hair flickered with bands of black and white. Only his eyes, red as coals, broke the monochrome. As we watched, the random Rorschach patterns in his skin grew still and took more recognizable shapes. Color bloomed across him slowly. Even his clothing melted into the pattern. Soon, it was difficult to tell where his skin ended and the wall behind him began. If we hadn’t already known he was there it would have been hard to spot him at all.
Then the color washed out all at once and Domino was back. He fixed his glamour before he spoke.
“There, happy?”
“Very impressive,” Dante said, leaning back. “And you can do this too, Evie?”
“Not as well as Domino,” I confirmed, shrugging. “But yeah. I thought you knew though?”
“Knowing and seeing with your own eyes are two different things,” Dante replied. “All I’ve seen you do is put a man’s head through a tile counter.”
“Well you’re not going to see me camouflage any time soon,” I said, looking away. “That shit’s exhausting. I don’t do it unless I have to.”
“Fair enough,” Dante agreed. “But there is one other talent you possess, correct? Impressive as Miss Mariposa’s lock picking may be, it wasn’t she that broke the magical security over Lord Ferroux’s treasure room.”
; I bit the inside of my cheek and stood up, putting more space between me and Dante. I didn’t know how he knew about that but I sure as hell didn’t like it.
“Yeah,” I confirmed. “I can nullify some magic when I touch it. But it’s unreliable and weird about what it will and won’t work on. Which is part of what got us into trouble at Ferroux’s. So I wouldn’t rely on it.”
“Oh, I never would,” Dante said, standing up and straightening his jacket. “Well then. I suppose it’s my turn. I am Dante of House Belial, and as I told Mr. Domino earlier this week, I intend to hire you, and in particular Ms. Evie, to steal an artifact of significant value…”
He took a folder from his jacket and laid it on the card table. The crew, save Andre who was busy with pancakes, crowded closer to see. He opened it up to spread out a collection of blueprints and specifications for Grace Cathedral.
“…from the opening ceremonies of the Tournament of Five Races. Tonight.”
“Fuck that!” Trip said with a loud laugh.
“Come on, Trip,” Domino said, leaning on the table.
“Nah, man,” Trip said, waving his hands at the whole thing dismissively. “Maybe if we had a couple months to prepare, but tonight? Not a chance in hell.”
“He’s got a point,” Mariposa said, pulling one of the schematics closer. “It’s not enough time. For something like this I’d want two weeks of prep at least. Figuring out security specs, doing test runs, getting the right gear-”
“I can provide any gear or details you require,” Dante added. He stood a little apart from us, near the sofa, though he didn’t sit down. “As for test runs, well, I’m confident in your ability to get it right the first time.”
“What are we even after?” I asked. “You still haven’t told us specifically what we’re stealing.”
Dante stepped closer, drawing a glossy photo out of his jacket and laying it in front of us. I heard breath catch around the table. We all recognized what was in the photo from the agonizing hours of our childhoods spent learning magical history while the human kids were enjoying summer. A sheet of parchment, kept magically pristine despite its great age. Elaborate hand-painted illumination surrounded a dense block of handwritten script, signed with five red wax seals, each one stamped with the sigil of an ancient royal house.
