To his credit, he didn’t scream. Just a low moan, and that much pain all at once, you can’t expect anyone to take it quietly.
I crouched over him like a spider over a fly, and stared into his eyes—at so much hate and spite and self-righteous fury—and he stared back into mine. The loup wanted out. It was slamming itself against the bars of my fraying will, and I very almost let it out.
Almost.
“Lots of people must have heard that,” I said. “So maybe the cops will be along soon.”
Though, you’ll recall, they hadn’t shown up when Father Rizzo threw down on me at my apartment.
“So I’m gonna give you a choice, and I’m not gonna offer three times. I’m only gonna offer it once. Which, mind you, is one whole time more than I got.”
Maybe I was holding the Beast at bay, but the hunger was filling up every crevice of my mind. Heard that phrase “seeing red”? Right then, yeah. But it was goddamn literal. Drool leaked past my teeth and lips and spattered his face. He winced, and turned his head away.
“Stupid,” I hissed again. “Stupid fucking me. Should’ve dealt with you a long time ago.”
“So do it now and shut the fuck up,” he said. “Get it over with.”
“There’s where your choice comes in. I leave you lying here, crippled in a pool of your own filth, and you can maybe think on all those boys you raped. Maybe someone will find you, or maybe you’ll die of shock or hypothermia.”
That’s when I slapped him. A wonder I didn’t snap his neck. “You look at me,” I growled.
He looked at me.
“So, I can do that, or here’s your other choice. Door Number Two.” I leaned nearer, pressing my teeth hard against the racing drumbeat of his carotid, and, oh, that’s all I wanted in the world. To open up this man of a god I had no use for and take my own communion. Instead, I whispered, “You wanna live forever, Father Bertrand Rizzo? Wanna see the stars grow old with me?”
He was silent a moment, and during that moment, I ran my tongue along his throat. I could taste the blood through stubble and skin and the cloying sweetness of aftershave.
“You’d do that?” he asked.
I sat up and slapped him again. “The real question, Father, is would you?”
He blinked, and now there was blood on his lips, a steady trickle from his nose. He blinked a few more times.
“Yeah,” he gasped. “Yeah, I would.”
I stared up at the sky, briefly trying to imagine what Lenore had seen up there just before I’d put her out of the misery Berenice had doomed her to.
“You’re a piece of work, you are,” I laughed.
“Better than dying,” he said, gasping again, clearly having trouble getting enough air to speak, what with just the one lung and all. “Isn’t it better than dying?”
No, you asshole. No, it’s not.
“Rizzo, you know what I hate even worse than a rapist? Cowards and hypocrites.”
“But you—”
“Lied,” I said. And then I broke his neck. It was a cleaner death by far than he had coming. But I still had just enough self-control to remind myself how little time I had. I had to get the dildo to Aloysius and hope he’d help. Besides, back then, I had no idea if I actually could do to someone else what had been done to me.
I did waste half an hour hauling the body away to the river, weighing it down with a gut full of stones, and tossing it to the fishes. Then I slung the cocksucker’s shotgun over my shoulder and headed for the troll’s underpass.
• • •
“Don’t know, Quinn lass,” Aloysius said, holding the unicorn between a gigantic thumb and forefinger, well back from his tangerine eyes. “Stinks of magic. Don’t like it one damn bit, I don’t.”
I was sitting cross-legged on a ratty mattress near his feet, a mattress someone had dragged there and left in the dirt and gravel and weeds. I’d just lit a cigarette. Breathing out smoke, it’s almost like watching my breath fog in the cold.
“And you don’t?” I asked.
The troll stopped staring at the dildo, and he stared at me, instead. “Ain’t the same. You tumble to that.”
“Whatever, dude. Fairy magic. Old-time alchemist magic. Voodoo. Demon magic. Jesus fucking loaves into—”
“You’re not learning nothing,” he sighed.
I blew smoke rings. “Look, I don’t find a way to get the upper hand in this mess, my learning days just might be over pretty goddamn soon.”
“You even bring me presents?” he asked.
I had. I dropped a plastic bag with half a dozen 3 Musketeers bars on the ground in front of him.
“King-size,” I said. “Big on chocolate, not on fat. Just like you love ’em.”
He grinned and swept up the bag in his free hand.
“Twenty-four hours. That’s all I need. At most, twenty-four hours. No one’s gonna even think of looking here.”
He flared his nostrils and went back to staring skeptically at the ivory dildo. “You so sure about that Mr. B dug of yours? He’s a cannie wee cunt, that one.”
“He’s too busy counting money he doesn’t yet have and kissing Drusneth’s scaly ass.”
“Always ye come askin’,” he grunted. “Always with your havering, lass. Asking. Thinkin’ it nae danger to me nor mine, an’ not even, ‘Aloysius, ’s’a braw bricht moonlicht nicht the nichtaye?’ Think me tally?”
“I liked you better when you spoke English.”
“Liked ye better when ye were drawing breath and not gone wolfish.”
Well, yeah. I’d liked me just a little bit better then, too. But I didn’t tell him that. I just sighed and took a long drag on my Camel.
“Not even a bottle in the bag,” he muttered.
“Twenty-four hours, man. That is all I’m asking Take it back into your . . . wherever . . . and I’ll be back for it not later than this time tomorrow night. Cross my heart and hope to—”
“Bit late to promise that much, lass.”
The son of a bitch had a point.
“Twenty-four,” he said, snorting again. “Not a tickytock longer, or I toss it. Grind it to dust.”
“I swear.”
“The word of one gone plumb dead and wolfish,” he huffed, and shook his head.
I ignored the implication I was a liar, just because I was a vampire and a loup. It’s the sort of argument I always lose. Mostly because I’m a liar. But I was a liar a long time before I joined the ranks of the nasties. Still, no use arguing about such fine distinctions.
“That’s wicked nice of you, Aloysius. And I—”
“Scramble,” he grunted, then disappeared in a swirl of inky black.
And I sat there below 195, smoking and listening to the late night traffic above me, trying hard to figure out what the hell I was going to do next.
CHAPTER SEVEN
BAD AS ME
Okay, so, how about another quick and dirty rundown of my situation as it stood, that cold, cold late night after Saint Valentine’s Day? Partly, for the idiot kids in the back of the class who’ve been too busy sexting to pay attention, but also because even I’m having trouble keeping up with all the ins and outs of this kerfuffle. And, hell, I’m the one who was caught in eye of the storm, right? Don’t want this tale to end up as big a mess as, say, Howard Hawks’ 1948 adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep. You may recall, the screenplay was such a complete fucking discombobulation that even the directors and screenwriters—one of whom happened to be William Faulkner—finally admitted they had no idea whether a key character had been murdered or had killed himself.
True fact, so there. Film history. Don’t ever say books like this are utterly devoid of educational value.
I’d found the unicorn outside the Athenaeum, right where zombie Lenore had told me I would. Then I’d been surprised by and killed Rizzo, demon slayer.
I’d spirited the dildo away to Aloysius the troll, and he’d hidden it in Faerie, where, I figured, not even Harpootlian could find
the damn thing.
As for Harpootlian, she still thought I was her bitch.
Same with the Maidstones.
And Mean Mr. B and Drusneth, those two were pretty sure they also had me in their pocket.
But by this point, I realized that I’d become a free agent. Like I said not too far back, finders keepers. But, you see, what does the finder do with what she’s found?
After leaving Aloysius, I’d switched off my phone and headed to a hipster dive over on Federal Hill. That crowd, I hated them like the plague, but they were a lot less prone to staring at the waxy-skinned chick with the pointy teeth. I only had to endure the inane conversation, mostly crappy music, and the ironically mismatched and anachronistic clothing of that cooler-than-thou crowd. Pull that off, and I could drink all I wanted until the sidewalks rolled up at two A.M. Which was only about forty-five minutes after I showed up.
So, there I was, sometime after three in the morning, still four hours or so until dawn, wandering along Broadway, just thinking. Trying to get my head together, come up with at least half a plan, because I sure as shit hadn’t had one when I’d taken the ivory dick to the troll. I knew I could only hide from B and Drusneth and Harpootlian just so long. Fuck the Maidstones, because I was pretty sure they posed no threat to me whatsoever. They were the odd ladies out, as it were (even if Amity did have a cock).
Enter the wild card.
The fresh wrinkle I should have seen coming all along, except I’d gone and bought in to Auntie H’s spiel that I ought to take Natalie Beaumont’s (alias Mona Mars) short story with more than a grain of salt.
Call this another deus ex machina if you want. Me, I think I’ve established sufficient foreshadowing that this is not the case, but whatever. I don’t care, cross my heart and hope to die all the hell over again.
What happened, it wasn’t so different from when Harpootlian had snatched me and my Econoline off Atwells. One moment I was strolling past the Phoenix Dragon Chinese Restaurant, and the next—poof—I was standing in a very, very black room. Black as a sky that’s never even heard of starlight or the moon or light pollution. I’m not gonna go to all the trouble of describing the place, because it was pretty much a photonegative of Harpootlian’s white room.
Me, I was seated in a black wooden chair, and just like before, I wasn’t alone. A painfully skinny girl in an ebony satin evening gown, her skin just about the color of milk, was seated several yards in front of me in a chair identical to mine. Yep, she was barefoot, but with a gold—not silver—ring on every toe. Her shoulder-length hair was at least as black as that room, and her sharp nails were polished to match. In her left hand she held a golden chalice. Her eyes were goddamn green as emeralds.
“Well, well,” I sighed, not even an itty bit surprised, “what do you know? Déjà vu, all the fuck over again. I’m gonna go out on a limb and guess you’re Magdalena Szabó, and you’ve come for the dingus.”
“You’re as correct as correct can be,” the girl said. Okay, not the girl. Just like it had been with the avatar of Harpootlian, the child spoke with the voice of an ancient woman.
“White and black. What is this with the two of you, a goddamn game of chess?”
“Miss Quinn, that isn’t such an inapt analogy.”
I laughed and said, “Yeah, I’m on a roll. So, you’re Madam Szabó, one more thing from another world, and one more pain in my ass come to claim le godemiché maudit.”
I even managed not to mangle the French too badly.
“And you have it, Miss Quinn.”
“Correction,” I replied, holding up an index finger and leaning a few inches forward, all ballsy and shit. “I had it. Apparently your omniscient sleight of hand is a few hours behind current events.”
The girl stared at me with her green eyes. “Then where is it now, Miss Quinn?”
“Gave it away to a troll. And you know how trolls are. It could be anywhere by now, assuming he didn’t eat it.”
Silence from the milky girl, silence and more staring.
“You find this amusing?” she finally asked.
“Bunch of you shitbirds couldn’t find your asses with both hands and a flashlight? Yeah, I’m finding that pretty damn funny right about now. Right now, on the inside, I’m laughing so hard it hurts.”
“Miss Quinn—”
“Thought it would be rude to actually laugh out loud.”
“The unicorn is mine,” the girl said, the monster using the child like a sock puppet.
“See, that’s just exactly the same line your bff Harpootlian tried to sell me. One—or both—of you’s gotta be wrong, and what with you both being demons, I hope you’ll see why it’s kinda hard for me to make heads or tails of this.”
The girl leaned closer to me now, and she quietly snarled, baring teeth as shiny and black as the teeth of that pretty boy in the white room had been. So, here’s Szabó seeing my hand and raising it. At the sight of those teeth, all the bluster kind of drained out of me. I’m ashamed to admit it, but that’s the way it was.
All junkies lie—without exception—only not when they’re telling you the truth. It happens.
“Don’t talk yourself into a corner you can’t talk yourself out of again,” the girl said, then sat back again and examined her fingernails, polished the color of a ripe blackberry. “Though I admit I do admire your ambition, reckless though it may be.”
I sighed and also sat back in my chair. “When opportunity knocks,” I said, “make lemonade.”
The girl stopped inspecting her nails. “Twice-Damned, just how long do you believe you can keep this shell game up, playing every side against every other, before it finally blows up in your face?”
It wasn’t a question I had a good answer for, so I didn’t try. All at once, sitting there, the decision to keep the dildo and hand it off to Aloysius for safekeeping while I weighed my options seemed a lot less clever than it had just before I killed Rizzo.
“End this here and now,” Szabó said. “Deliver the unicorn to me and walk away. Wash your hands of this affair, Miss Quinn, this conflict in which you must know you should never have been involved.”
I stared at those ten perfect alabaster toes with their ten gold rings, thinking back on the days when I’d had a full complement of ten little piggies all my own.
“You want me to think it would be that easy?” I asked the sock puppet.
“I can assure you it would be.”
“You can assure me. You can make sure Drusneth isn’t gonna see I spend the next couple of centuries locked inside a cage, half loup? You can do that? You can promise me Harpootlian won’t rain napalm locusts down on my head? You can do that, too? And the Maidstones . . . oh, fuck the Maidstones.”
“If you bring me the unicorn, yes, I assure you these are, each and every one, problems I can solve.”
“Out of the kindness of your wicked, sour heart.”
“It’s a business proposition,” she replied. “Nothing more and nothing less. I am a businesswoman, and I do not pretend there is an iota of kindness in me.”
Okay, so . . . possibly there was a slim chance my squirreling away the dildo hadn’t been one hundred percent moronic, after all. But, see, even in the short six months since my death, I’d been around the block enough times to know one doesn’t simply take a demon’s word, not no way, not no how.
“Frankly, I don’t know why Yeksabet did make the same offer,” said the milky girl.
“Because she’s a flaming, fucking thunder cunt?”
The girl laughed, the nasty inside the girl laughed, and it would be a while before I’d hear another sound that grisly. “Let us just say that she has a weakness for theatrics, shall we?”
“Sure,” I muttered, gooseflesh up and down my arms and legs and the back of my neck. “Let’s just say that. And let’s also give Miss Quinn here a guarantee you’re not gonna live down to received wisdom and leave me to that bunch of vultures as soon as you get your paws on that unholy fucking grail.”
She narrowed her emerald eyes, considering me not so differently than she had her fingernails. Only, less bored, more bemused.
“What do you have in mind, Twice-Damned, Twice-Dead, given your inherent distrust for the Fallen?”
“I asked first.”
More bemused staring. More gooseflesh.
“I cannot deny, Miss Quinn, that adding so rare a creature as you to my stable is a powerful temptation. Speaking, again, as a businesswoman. But I have only come here seeking that which is rightly mine, and I will do whatever is necessary to secure it. This includes aiding you in the elimination of any perils you would incur, should we enter into an arrangement. But you will not ever trust me, and we’ll not waste time debating that point.”
I went back to staring at those ten toes. This little piggy went to market. “And if I don’t enter into that arrangement.”
“You’ll not leave this room,” the child said, and this time the words were spoken in the child’s voice. I’d have preferred Szabó had kept up her ventriloquist act.
“Hell of a choice,” I said. “Pun intended.”
“It is the best I can ever extend.”
“A shame that Ellen Andrews woman in the Beaumont story didn’t really make a copy.”
“Often have I had that selfsame thought,” the girl replied, and, mercifully, Szabó had gone back to using her own voice.
“The Maidstones,” I said, pretty much thinking aloud.
The girl cocked an eyebrow. “What of them? You’ve already indicated they’re the least of your concerns, which seems a fair assessment.”
In some old gangster film, this is where the protagonist of dubious morals and devilish charms, having hit upon a plan to extract himself from a tight spot, would have snapped his fingers. Me, I settled for a nervous, halfhearted excuse for a laugh.
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