by P. R. Frost
Between my cell phone and the hotel’s exorbitant long-distance charges, we managed to cover some of the bases.
“Ask Scrap about the ring,” Gollum said between calls.
The imp snoozed on my shoulder, clinging to my hair. At the sound of his name, he roused. Yeah, wadda ya want, he growled in his Chicago gangster voice. He leaned away, clinging to my hair for balance to grab his cigar from the windowsill.
“Ow, I felt that,” I complained, reclaiming possession of my hair with a tug.
Time to close the window and turn on the AC. A proper imp can only take so much, ya know. The clear blue sky was rapidly paling to white in the desert heat.
“Nice to see some of your spark and disrespect has returned,” I replied. I don’t think I’d know how to work with a docile and obedient imp.
Mickey’s at the door.
I got up to answer it before I heard the knock. “We need to know about the ring,” I reminded Scrap.
Um—It opens any portal into any dimension. He lapsed into silence as Mickey entered the room and we all exchanged pleasantries.
“Something is wrong with Scrap,” Mickey whispered.
Hey, I heard ya! I’m right here. He still hadn’t moved from my shoulder. His insubstantial tail tightened on my throat again.
Strange. I shouldn’t be able to feel that much of him. Was he more in this dimension than before, or was he more intense in his need to stay with me?
“I need to know how the ring works to be able to use it,” I said to Scrap.
No, you don’t. You just have to twist it, round and round your finger, willing a doorway to appear. Oh, yeah, and it helps if you twist it widdershins, toward the thumb.
“What aren’t you telling me, Scrap?” Anger tinged my voice, masking my deep concern.
Ask Mr Bloody Sancroix and his black imp. He popped out with a whoosh of cigar smoke.
Twenty minutes later we wandered the outer aisles of the Dragon and St. George Casino, searching for access to the backstage.
“How are we going to get twenty dancers out to the Valley of Fire?” I asked. “Supposing we can get them out of here alive.”
“Can’t they fly?” Gollum asked. His glasses slid as he looked up from examining the lock on a fire door.
I thought the door should lead where we wanted to go even though it stated in plain letters across it: “Fire Exit. Alarm will sound if opened.” My sense of direction faltered under the barrage of flashing lights, loud music, and animated shouts from gamblers.
Something about the assault on my senses made me want to let the machines make decisions for me. I should plug in some quarters and gamble. . . .
Scrap was of little help. He kept dangling over the slot machines, still trying to figure out how to hack into one.
“The dancers may be too weak to fly that distance,” I argued. “They are fading from too long a separation from Faery.”
“I will get a bus,” Mickey affirmed. “From the taxi company.” He looked grim. His leaf-green eyes looked dull.
His time in this dimension also stretched too long.
“Scrap, get your ass back here.”
Have I told you today how beautiful you look with the glow of love about you? He waggled his cigar at me in a poor imitation of Groucho Marx. Then he circled above me, relishing the stretch of his wings.
“Can the crap, Scrap. What’s on the other side of this door?”
Your wish is my command, babe. He popped out, leaving me wreathed in cigar smoke.
I coughed and waved the noxious fumes out of my face.
Mickey laughed. Mickey laughing worked better and thought more clearly than grim and frightened Mickey.
At least Scrap was good for something.
It’s just a long corridor. Scrap whooshed back in. He tangled my hair in his talons and buried his nose against my scalp.
“I just washed my hair, it’s clean, I promise.” This clinginess, alternating with distraction was getting annoying. “Now tell me where that long corridor leads and does it really have an alarm on it?”
You didn’t ask that, Scrap pouted.
I rolled my eyes. He was worse than a kindergartener on the first day of school.
Three doors off the corridor going left, back toward the theater. One goes down. One goes up, and one zigzags around to the dressing rooms, he sighed. He must have noticed my lack of patience. And yes, this door is wired with alarms.
“I wish you’d go back to being your normal sarcastic self,” I muttered under my breath.
He heard me. I knew he did because he blew a smoke ring that completely circled my head, like a halo drifting down and tilting.
I’d seen that cartoon too many times.
Mickey and Gollum, at least, thought it funny.
“Upward staircase must lead to the theater control booth,” Gollum mused when I’d translated Scrap’s report.
“Down goes to the dormitory,” Mickey added.
“Scrap, is there an exit to the outside at the end of that corridor?”
Yes, dahling. And it is also wired into the alarm system.
“Alarms can be cut or hacked.” I looked hopefully toward Gollum.
But it was Mickey who nodded with a grin. “This I know how to do.”
Scrap twisted my curls around his claws some more. I’m thinking we grab the dancers backstage and take them out that exit.
“I’m thinking the same thing. But there’s no show tonight. We’ll have to gather them up from the casino and the dormitory. Now how do we negate the magic around the building that keeps the dancers from igniting into faery torches?”
We all looked at each other blankly.
Gollum led us back to the center of the casino action. “We don’t want anyone to notice us hanging out in any one location too long,” he whispered.
“So, Mr. Professor-who-knows-everything, how do we break that spell?”
“We ask Lady Lucia. She set us onto the project. She must have some idea how Gregbaum works.”
“It’s not even noon. She won’t be up yet.”
I think she can be roused. Try her telephone. Scrap bounced a bit, like he was excited. I couldn’t see him to tell what color he’d turned.
“And where do I find her telephone number?”
Scrap rattled off a string of numbers. Gollum already had out his new super-duper cell phone that does everything but breathe and entered the number.
“How’d you get the number, Scrap?” Maybe he’d actually been scouting around while AWOL.
I memorized it when I visited. She’s got a nice blood-red landline phone next to her bed.
“That is also the number listed on the incorporation documents registered with the escrow office handling the sale of this casino,” Gollum mused as he dialed.
Chapter 41
There are more churches per capita in Las Vegas than any other US city representing some sixty-five faiths and denominations.
“OKAY, SCRAP, WE’VE GOT AN HOUR to kill before we can meet Lady Lucia at her office,” Tess says. She hangs on to my tail just so. I can’t fade out of her grip or escape to the chat room when she does that.
I’m as trapped here as I was in the Goblin Rock by the Guardians. This is a little less unpleasant though.
We’re in a back comer booth of a café on the end of a horseshoe-shaped strip mall. Lucia’s office is in the center of the long block. This place serves breakfast twenty-four/seven. Gollum and Mickey are slurping coffee like it’s going out of style. Tess toys with her second breakfast of pancakes with fresh strawberries. No more whipped cream for either of us.
She lets her coffee sit. A sure sign that she means business. Even if she is sitting so close to Gollum they might as well be one person.
About time. I’ve known all along that Gollum is her soul mate. But no, she had to dally with Donovan because he’s beautiful. She had to succumb to lust that clouded her good sense.
Now she knows better. She’s distracted with th
e newness of their love. Maybe I can get her all the way off the subject of Lady Lucia and the ring long enough for her to let go of my tail.
“I’m hungry.” Being trapped in sensory deprivation will do that to a body. “There’s no mold in this town, even after a rain. If you don’t mind letting go of my tail, I’ll just pop back home, check on MoonFeather and your dad and grab some mold from around the washing machine in the basement.”
“Nope. Not until you tell me everything you know about the ring and how to use it.” Her grip becomes firmer.
My tummy growls.
She doesn’t listen to it.
“You want to eat, you’ve got to talk first.”
“Ask him the origins of the ring,” Gollum says. He’s peering at me like he can almost see me. Now that he and Tess have gotten so close, maybe he can. He can see her scar and it comes from the same place I do.
“The faeries made it,” I admit.
Mickey brightens. “I know how to use faery magic.”
“Not this magic. Your ancestors forgot its essence a long time ago. That’s why they lost it,” I growl back at him.
Then I have to unfold the story of how alchemist/blacksmith Noncoiré got the ring.
“So it really is mine by inheritance.” Tess stared at the ring on her right hand as if diving into the diamond.
“Um... Tess, I wouldn’t do that if I were you.” I can feel the black imp leaking power, manipulating, urging Tess to meld her mind to his, give him a way to slip through the crack that got bigger when I stole the ring from Gregbaum.
“Do what?” She’s still mesmerized and going deeper.
“Don’t get lost in that diamond.” I yank on her hair.
“What’s in there that’s so dangerous?” Mickey asks. He sounds really stern ... like maybe he has an idea what lurks within those facets.
“A rogue imp,” I admit quietly. I hope that only Mickey hears me. I should know better. Tess is attuned to me and my thought patterns. “An imp so evil he’s turned black.”
Maybe that will get her thinking about Fortitude instead of the ring.
“An imp can go anywhere,” she breathes.
Nope, my ruse didn’t work.
“What could an imp do that the faeries imprisoned him like that. Was it voluntary or is it being punished?” Gollum asks.
“I don’t know. I only saw that his skin had turned black from his misdeeds.” I emphasize the black to make sure she hears it this time.
“Your skin changes color with your emotions,” Tess offers. Small comfort.
“I cannot turn black.”
“Have you ever been as completely enraged, hopeless, and helpless as that imp?” she asks. I know she’s trying to help.
“Yes.” I cannot say more. I look her dead in the eye, begging her not to pursue it.
“Tess, when this is all done, I have to free that imp. I cannot condemn him to that bleak existence that is no existence. Not any longer than he’s already endured.”
“Scrap,” Gollum addresses me directly once Tess has relayed my words. “Scrap, after all these millennia, that imp has to have gone completely insane. If he was black and rogue before, he will be more so now. You don’t dare loose him.”
“I have to!”
“We’ll discuss this later. Tell me how Lady Lucia got the ring.”
“She stole it from one of your ancestors, then he went off to Napoleon’s war and got killed.” That’s all Tess really needs to know. I can’t tell her that the young blond blacksmith with the godlike beautiful body fathered Lucia’s child. So I fall into storytelling mode and make that final scene in the Continelli garden as exciting as possible, adding a few nuances to make the count the villain of the piece—maybe a vampire—and how Lucia used the ring to escape with her child. I also suggest that she might be a Kajiri demon rather than a vampire.
“We know sometime after that escape Lucia sold the ring. From that point, its traceable to the auction house in Paris last December when Donovan bought it,” Tess muses. If she noticed that I left out some bits, she doesn’t push the issue.
“Then Donovan sold it to Gregbaum,” Gollum adds.
“So how did you get it back for me, Scrap?”
“I stole it, like any self-respecting imp.”
They all laugh at that.
“Can I go find some real food now?”
Tess lets go of my tail and I’m off before I have to reveal any more secrets.
Something rattled around my hind brain, demanding attention but sliding away whenever I tried to get close to it. It would hit me when I really needed it.
“For a woman wealthy enough to own the Pinyon outright, and be sole stockholder of the corporation buying the Dragon and St. George, you’d think she could afford an office in a more prestigious part of town,” Gollum muttered.
We sat in that back café booth staring across the parking lot at the plain glass door. It was tucked between two storefronts in a strip mall at the corner of a residential intersection. A coffee shop that served only specialty coffee and pastries stood to the left of her door and had a constant stream of patrons. A hair salon occupied a large space on the right. For a Monday just after noon both places seemed very active.
“You’d think she’d have one of those mansions out in the hills overlooking the city instead of living in an apartment above the spa at the Pinyon,” Mickey added. “She’d have more privacy out there.”
“It’s two minutes to one. Let’s go in.” I slid out of the booth. Scrap returned to my shoulder and burped. I was suddenly enfolded in a cloud of damp, musty air. He’d only been gone a minute. Long enough to gorge on his favored food. He’d also grabbed his new black-and-silver boa on the trip. He tossed it over his shoulder dramatically.
Gollum threw some money down. He’s good about that. We approached the office door slowly, looking all around and taking note of those who took note of us.
At the last minute I slipped the ring off my hand and onto a key chain in my belt pack. I didn’t want Lucia to know I had it yet. If the time came when I needed a major bribe, I’d tell her.
A thick layer of paint on the inside of the glass blocked any chance that daylight might filter in.
“We’re being watched. I can feel it,” Mickey whispered.
“From inside or out?” Gollum asked, also peering around.
Mickey shrugged.
Camera above the door. Scrap preened and mugged, flashing the boa in front of the lens.
“Scrap says we’re safe.” I replied.
Gollum opened the door and ushered me in with a gentle hand at my waist. Have I mentioned how much I enjoyed his little courtesies that come so naturally?
A dim electric bulb gave off enough light to see a narrow landing and a staircase leading up. No space between the stairs and the walls. No way to get behind the stairs. I couldn’t see if maybe the coffee shop and salon jutted into the area behind.
“At least there’s no place for an attacker to hide,” Mickey added. He twitched and started as a heavy truck drove past on the through street.
“Scrap, please scout ahead.”
Do I have ta?
I rolled my eyes. “You can leave me alone for ten seconds.”
That’s a long time in demonland. Time enough to get us both killed.
“Scrap, stop stalling and scout ahead.”
He popped out. Two seconds later he landed on my shoulder again, flapping the boa in my face. All clear for us, dahling, but there’s a fierce argument going on behind closed doors. He sang the last phrase, only slightly off key.
“Remind me not to ask you to join in next time Mom drags me up to the stage.”
He blew a smoke ring in my face.
I coughed and waved it away. But I didn’t need to. The air-conditioning sucked the smoke away so fast I almost didn’t see it.
“What does this place smell like, Scrap?”
Car air freshener. Pine. Fading. He wrinkled his snub nose in distaste. No
character at all.
“Would the air conditioner at the Pinyon account for Lady Lucia’s lack of demon odor?”
“Shouldn’t,” Gollum answered for the imp.
Something clicked in my mind. Then it slid away again.
“I’m thinking, that if Lucia has been poor, so poor she sold a valuable and treasured heirloom, that maybe the habit of saving money is how she gained so much. She doesn’t spend where she doesn’t have to.”
“And she doesn’t share. I couldn’t find a single list of stockholders in any of the multitude of shadow corporations. Layers and Layers of secrecy.”
“Just like Darren Estevez,” I added.
Damiri demons are all richer than Bill Gates, Scrap laughed.
“No one is richer than Bill Gates.”
Wanna make a bet? Lucia’s got assets upon assets that no one knows about. Darren, too, but not as many. That’s why his kids are fighting so hard to get your Mom’s half of the fortune.
“Hmmmmm.” I had to think a moment and paused on the last step, one foot in the air. “The estate is tied up in probate. Mom’s getting an allowance from his liquid assets. Donovan can’t cash in on the capital yet, except the exorbitant fees he collects as executor of the estate.”
That’s when I heard the raised voices behind the closed wooden door to the left of the landing. Fancy scrollwork detailed the door, avoiding the traditional cross-shaped reinforcing panels. The wall straight ahead and to the right was cement blocks painted a boring and unobtrusive gray.
“I have to own at least fifty-one percent!” Donovan nearly screamed. “A haven for the Kajiri is useless if I don’t control it!”
“I will not invest in your great enterprise. But I will own one haven and pay you to manage it,” Lucia replied, a little too loudly for the sweetness in her tone to be convincing. “I’m thinking an entire town built around a resort. No one lives there unless they work there and we screen all employees to make certain they contain at least one drop of demon blood in their veins.”
“You, of all people, should recognize the wisdom of diversifying. You own too much in and around Vegas. The SEC and the IRS are going to start investigating your corporations sooner or later. Experience tells me the haven should be elsewhere.”
