by Jenn Stark
Time to go.
The crowd converged on Fernanda again, their hands stretched out greedily like supplicants at the altar. Plunging back through them was like swimming against a hurricane, but I kept my head low and my hands working fast. I pulled the leather cord out of my hair, hastily restrung the amulet, then tied it around my neck.
The damn frog was hot—way too hot, actually. Hot enough to burn.
Nothing I could do about that now.
I was halfway to the door when Fernanda screamed.
Chapter Three
Truth to tell, when I’d taken this job, I hadn’t been entirely sure about the jade amulet’s legitimacy, no matter what my client had been willing to pay. But the moment I’d touched the thing as Fernanda tumbled into the Sea of Grabby Hands, I’d revised my opinion.
Now the blasted frog was practically frying my chest, but I couldn’t reach for it or act like it was anything other than another pretty bauble in a room full of them.
Given my naturally cynical nature, I’d also questioned Fernanda’s legitimacy as one of the Connected. I wasn’t sure how sensitive she was, if she was truly a member of the psychic community. She certainly wouldn’t have been the first “priestess” chosen simply because she had a nice ass.
Yeah, no. Fernanda was the real deal. The moment I’d broken the fall of her muscled, curvaceous body, I realized the Princesa had practically zinged with power. If she hadn’t been so locked into her high priestess zone, I’m sure she would have figured out that I was a Connected as well. I wasn’t about to give her time to consider the finer implications of that realization.
Another stream of Portuguese wailed out over the crowd, louder this time, and everyone finally panicked. From what I could tell, they were being ordered to stop, to hold, and this group knew better than to think that good things were going to come from that.
They ran for the door, hurtling me forward, all of us pushing and shoving as we burst out of the room and up the wide stairway. We erupted in a naked geyser straight onto the dance floor of O Diabo, the Rio club that had already been raving when I’d first shown up here in broad daylight, three hours before.
Now the place was manic. Night had fallen. The energy of the city had jumped a few more notches, hitting fever pitch as the evening wore closer to the final night of parades at the Sambadrome.
O Diabo was a stone’s throw from the enormous venue, where Fernanda was due to march in a parade in a little under an hour. She was on a tight schedule.
In fact, for one sweet shining moment, I hoped the sight of the Sambadrome looming over us would be to my advantage. Fernanda might hit the open air and realize that, ritual-shmitual, she had a booty to shake.
Dare to dream.
Raucous cheering filled the club. I snuck a glance at my watch—then realized I wasn’t wearing one. My clothes were stashed behind O Diabo’s bar, courtesy of a very agreeable bartender who’d expressed significant doubt that there was really a full-tilt orgy going on in the club’s subbasement, but who’d been more than willing to help me strip. A good man, but there was no way I could stop for my clothes at this point. Not with at least two other Finders after me.
“Sara!” As if on cue, a hand snaked out of the crowd and latched onto my bicep, wheeling me around. Of course, the dashing British operative had managed to recover his clothes. Nigel was nothing if not a strategic thinker. Which was why his chest was covered in black tech material, his legs encased in running tights. He had on shoes, too. Actual shoes.
And, more to the point, there was a knife in the bastard’s other hand.
He slashed at my neck. My instinctual reaction to jerk away actually helped Nigel as he yanked the amulet free—taking what felt like a good chunk of my skin with it. He dangled his prize for just a moment to gloat. I grabbed for it, but he was already dancing back.
“That’s mine!”
Nigel, apparently unfamiliar with my jurisdiction over the amulet, turned and dashed out of the bar, his laughter floating back to me. I hadn’t taken three steps after him when a powerful, feminine hand snagged my left arm, whipping me around the other way.
Fernanda’s eyes were bright, almost manic. Before she could eat my face off, I pointed ahead. “Vamos! I don’t have it, he does! Get him!”
She apparently understood enough of what I said, because she took off again, her burly bodyguards pounding after her. She’d also somehow managed to find a microdress and platform heels, but I didn’t have that kind of time…or concern for modesty. I raced into the street, ignoring the cheers and catcalls as I focused on my quarry dead ahead.
They weren’t hard to spot. Nigel might have been ex-Special Forces, but he wasn’t Batman. I could see him racing ahead of the lumbering guards. As for Fernanda, the girl could move. She charged after Nigel with her arms bent and her legs cranking. Never mind the platform heels, she was gaining ground.
I followed about fifty paces behind, mainly because I had no shoes and was running through the streets of a city in full Carnival mode. Of course, losing that amulet would hurt a lot worse than bruised heels. Trying not to wheeze, I picked up the pace.
As we rounded the corner, Nigel braked sharply. A fifty-person-strong samba school shimmied in place, waiting while three-story stadium doors swung open in front of them. I blinked as every sense was assaulted with light, color, and an unbelievably loud wall of noise.
We’d reached the Sambadrome.
Enormous screens lit up the world like a revolution. Music blared over loudspeakers intense enough to vibrate my bones. An explosion of brightly hued revelers erupted from impossible-to-believe, larger-than-life parade floats that lumbered forward like elephants among ants. And everyone—everywhere—was dancing.
This was Fernanda’s home away from home. Showing that her lungs were nowhere near as crapped out as mine, she shouted loudly, her voice carrying over the music like a call to arms.
The men and women prepping an enormous Day of the Dead float reacted instantly, abandoning their positions and throwing themselves at Nigel. The cagey Brit changed direction on a dime, skimming around the parade float and racing toward the next one in line. Fernanda’s laugh was exultant, as if she’d somehow chased Nigel into a cage.
Gritting my teeth as my bare feet encountered sticks, chicken wire, gravel, and a swath of shattered glass, I matched strides with the guards. We tore around the float with its hundred white-robed, white-faced dancers…and smack into a forest of spinning, five-foot-tall chocolate cakes with little red cherries on top. Those were followed by midget white cupcakes with feet.
I shook my head, hard, but the hallucination wasn’t changing.
With another scream from Fernanda, the cakes burst apart into sections. The cherries popped up and swiveled around to reveal faces painted crimson beneath bulbous red hats. The chocolate cake pieces hurtled toward Nigel, a sight that threatened to put me off sugar for good.
Not to be taken down by a carbohydrate, Nigel leapt onto the fourteen-tier wedding cake float. Fernanda launched at him. She cried out in pain as she slipped and banged against the base of the float, but she still managed to snag his foot. As the float lurched forward, the Princesa collapsed against its side with another bone-jarring thump that earned a gasp of horror from more than a few cupcakes.
Nigel tried to kick Fernanda off him as fondant wedding roses bolted upright all around the wedding cake. Hard seed-encrusted balls rained from the second layer so furiously that the Brit hunched over and covered his head with his arms.
I scrambled past Fernanda and onto the lowest tier, where Nigel continued to fend off the dessert assault. Taking advantage of his distraction, I reached into his pants and yanked out the amulet.
Thankfully, he wore his trousers tight, or I would’ve had to guess on what to grab.
Nigel jerked away, only to find himself directly in front of a pristine white rose, who smacked him topside with a man-sized wooden spoon. His next kick went wild, connecting with Fernanda’s chin at the exact moment sh
e started to rise.
Once again, the Carnival princess went down in a heap. Once again, her guards came to the rescue. One scooped her up in his massive arms. The other lunged at Nigel and bashed the side of his thick British head with the butt of a spear. A brigade of pink bows shoved Nigel off the float. He landed in a heap on the Sambadrome floor, immediately set upon by the cupcakes.
Not something I’d ordinarily wish on any man, but he should have kept his sticky fingers to himself.
Jumping from the float, the jade amulet in a death grip, I grimaced with satisfaction. Got you. I struggled to retie the amulet around my neck, but my hands were shaking too much. If only I could get—
“Ochacontesooka Princesa!” Or at least that’s what it sounded like to me. I jerked back as one of the chocolate cake pieces raced up to me, shoving my arm. “Princesa!”
I was sorry I hadn’t learned the language, but really. Could they not at least try to speak English?
“Ochacontesookam elah?” The cake shouted again.
“Um… No?” My understanding of Brazilian Portuguese was nonexistent, especially under pressure. “No” seemed safest. I whirled around, taking in the fallen Princesa, the battered Nigel, and about three-dozen dessert forks and saucers bearing down fast. I sensed the cutlery about to turn on me. I backed away, feeling naked.
Probably because I still was.
“Sim!” An exceptionally overlarge man positioned himself squarely in my path.
I stiffened my spine, ready to rumble even if he did top me by a good foot.
“Vocha Devay!” he roared.
Immediately, two young girls ran up, their white tights and shoes betraying them as part of the cupcake brigade, sans the actual cakes. Instead, in their arms they held what looked almost like clothing, but with way too many feathers. “Vocha Devay!”
“Vocha what?” I reached for the clothes out of a knee-jerk reaction to put something on my body, but stopped myself in time. When another half-dressed baked good dashed up with a sopping-wet towel, however, I abandoned good sense completely and lunged for it. Putting the now blessedly cool frog amulet between my teeth, I wiped most of the oil from my skin, so disgusted by the amount of DNA I had sticking to me that I didn’t at first notice the white bra the youngest girl was dangling in front of my face. When I realized what it was, I seized it.
“Thnkmmphf!” I shouted around a mouthful of amphibian. I shoved my arms into the over-constructed straps, white and glittering with little tufts of tulle. The bra was definitely enthusiastic about my proportions, but at least I could stash the amulet inside it. And about six of my closest friends, but still.
As I struggled with the back fastening, the girl in front of me dropped to one knee. She tapped my right foot, then my left, making me hop. By the time I had the bra on reasonably tight, she was pulling something up my legs that looked like fluffy floss.
Realization began to dawn on me.
“Mmph—”
“Perfeito!” An old man with a few teeth left in his wide grin wheeled around the corner, dressed like a wedding-cake topper, all top hat, bow tie, and tails—only his top hat was the size of a golf cart. He leered at me as he bowed. “Princesa!”
Sweet Christmas, no.
Chapter Four
I spit out the frog and stowed it in my bra, belatedly realizing that the getup was some sort of effed-up idea of a wedding gown. Without the actual gown.
“Guys, guys. I’m not your girl!” A quick glance confirmed that Fernanda wasn’t either, not anymore. The real Princesa was out cold, currently draped over the shoulder of one of her guards. I swiveled back to the cake committee. “I don’t even know how to dance!”
“Perfeito!” The old man grinned again, turning me around toward the school. Something heavy settled on my head and floated around me—a veil. A freaking wedding veil, festooned with feathers. As I struggled to redefine my center of gravity, my feet were tapped again, and suddenly I was being strapped into white high-heeled gladiator boots.
“Seriously this a bad, bad—”
I stopped. Entering the crowd behind the glitter-dusted origami napkins was an all-too-familiar resting bitch face. Crap!
The Russian woman from O Diablo’s subbasement had followed us here, no doubt on Nigel’s ass. Which meant she was now also on my decidedly less covered one. Worse, she had her own collection of goons with her. They were scanning the school directly behind us even as the Russian grabbed a man in a death-mask outfit.
Resolutely, I wheeled around, reeling a little as I considered the option of faking my way through the parade. The towering boots almost fit, and I went up on my tiptoes, spreading my arms to steady myself.
“So what all do I—” I flapped my hands and tried a wiggle. Watching Fernanda shake her moneymaker for the past four days wasn’t helping me figure out how to get the loose change out of mine. “Do I just samba?”
“Samba!” That name connected, not surprisingly, and the cake topper smiled broadly. “You are English!”
“Oh thank Go—”
“You are English!” He nodded again, and I realized he’d exhausted his entire repertoire of the language. But he started dancing anyway, a stutter step move and shake that I could barely follow, let alone emulate. This was not going to be good.
Still, I couldn’t exit the Sambadrome the way I’d come. Not with From Russia with Love back there sharpening her shoe spikes.
“Come, come!” My bridegroom grabbed my hand and pulled me out in front of the enormous wedding cake float as the music started. He squeezed my hand. “Perfeito!”
That wasn’t going to help me samba either, but I appreciated the enthusiasm.
The lights swept over us, and sweat pooled between my shoulder blades as a flood of cupcakes trotted out around us, followed by their grown-up chocolatey counterparts. With that kind of frosted camouflage, maybe this would work. I just needed to get far enough along the parade route to find an exit, right? Piece of…never mind.
I struck a flourish. I could do this—seriously, I could.
The music started.
I froze.
Right there on the Sambadrome runway.
Chapter Five
Even as my panicking bridegroom threw a desperate smile my way, a different set of hands settled on my hips, warm and sensual, squeezing me.
“You can do this.” The voice breathed into my ear as I felt the hands move, pushing my body the way it was supposed to move. “It is as natural as breathing, as swimming in the open sea.”
“Haven’t done a lot of that, just saying.”
“I have. Relax.” The hands firmed on my hips, biting into my skin, forcing me to roll my step forward, then back, to twist and turn this way and that. As my muscles warmed to the task and the crowd responded to my attempt at a samba, my blood began to stir. The burst of energy started slowly at first, then picked up the pace until it was racing through my veins, jacking up my heart rate and flowing out in a wild flutter of my hands as I strutted my way back and forth across the Sambadrome floor.
I wasn’t samba-ing, but I was doing this! I was pulling it off! Sort of. “Are you making me feel this way?”
An amused chuckle sounded in my ears. “Just enjoy it, Miss Wilde.”
The shock of hearing my name again in that lilting, foreign accent jolted me back to awareness. The man opposite me, Samba King to my Princesa, grinned as his gaze dropped to my hips. “Sim, sim!”
I swung my hips like I was rotating off my own axis as I scanned the parade route. Throwing kisses to the crowd, I sashayed to the right, then the left. There was no clear exit on the left, but the right appeared more promising. A dark stretch that might be a tunnel loomed ahead, guarded by official-looking attendants.
Maybe…
The music changed, and suddenly the cakes exploded around us into several individual pieces, swirling and twirling to their own dance moves. My shimmying became less about form and more about function, trying to stay out of the way. Foll
owing the lead of my bridegroom, at odd intervals I threw back my head and laughed, flinging my arms out like a wounded albatross. Eventually, I realized that the unseen guiding hands had left as well. You just couldn’t keep good help these days.
I continued to work it, hard, and by the time we were a third of the way through the Sambadrome parade route, I was almost getting the hang of it. In fact, I had to admit… I was hot.
No really, I was hot.
With the fifty-pound wedding veil forcing me to keep my gaze straight ahead, I couldn’t afford to glance down, but the frog amulet currently nestled against my cleavage had suddenly decided to cleave me in two. Electricity sparked around the piece and arced out along my skin, igniting my nerve endings and making my feet move yet faster out of sheer desperation.
What was going on? The amulet was South American, yes. But not even I was willing to believe it was somehow activated by bad samba dancing. Worse, if I’d somehow tapped in to a Connected-synching amulet…then every other Connected in the Sambadrome would feel it too. I had to imagine someone in the crowd of eighty thousand was noticing this.
Especially since I suspected my hair was on fire.
“Princesa! She glows!” cried my bridegroom, as if this was a good thing. I grinned back at him, squinting through the sparks my headdress was now spitting, the electrical currents igniting my bloodstream and making my skin stretch way too tight over my bones.
I shot another glance at the dark tunnel leading out of the Sambadrome, up and on the right. That was my ticket out. That was my exit strategy. That was my…
A woman I was already beginning to despise rushed out of that same tunnel, coming fast. Before any of the attendants could stop her, the Russian vaulted the barricade and was on the runway, gunning for me.
There was nowhere to run—not forward, not back. And not out the tunnel, not anymore. Russia’s goons had to be there, waiting for me to make that move. Instead, I swung myself and my towering headdress to the side just as the woman caught up with me.
