Race of Thieves

by S. M. Reine

  The streets near the elevator were packed with a diverse crowd. No surprise there—this was the inversion of the Helios Tether, and almost as much of a draw for business. Yellow construction equipment unloaded crates from the far end of the elevator, which Cage hadn’t realized was loaded with cargo.

  A line of human tourists was kept behind a chain-link fence, waiting to return to the surface. UV lamps were positioned around them. A little extra protection from some of Shadowhold’s less savory denizens, most of which were allergic to anything resembling sunlight.

  Cage waited behind the cupola as the elevator unloaded. He watched the demons without moving—until Charity Ballard passed.

  Then Cage slipped into the line of demons behind her.

  He watched her stringy-haired scalp above the crowd. She was taller than most, so it was easy to follow her through winding alleys barely wider than Cage’s shoulders.

  As he passed a cart selling veils, he snagged one off the rack. He passed another shop, this one with tables of cheap hats advertised as protection from the humans’ beloved sun, and he snagged one of those too.

  He whipped the veil around his shoulders to hide the distinctive uniform, then pulled the hat over his head.

  Charity stopped to speak with a vendor selling kebabs. Cage stopped too, pretending to be interested in rings sold across the street. He didn’t actually try any of them on. He could feel the baritone hum of curses within his ribcage, and he wasn’t keen on finding out which curses they held. But he fiddled with them while keeping an eye on Charity.

  He couldn’t read the infernal language on the kebab cart, so he wasn’t sure what Charity was haggling over. The meat smelled a little bit sweet, like pork roasted with corn.

  Cage doubted they were selling pork.

  No revenant would have looked as happy being handed a large skewer with chunks of fleshy pink pig upon it.

  He dropped the rings he was examining back onto their velvet cushion, and the oversized cockroach of a vendor chittered at him.

  Cage had heard that Shadowhold tried to uphold ancient infernal traditions, some of which had never had been legal in any country on the planet. The tradition of harvesting human meat looked to be one of them. It was possible that the meat was enchanted, or lab produced, but…he doubted it.

  Cash money exchanged hands, and that was the real crime here, because even demons should have been good enough to switch to cryptocurrency by now. “It’s like going back in time,” he muttered, eyeing the coffers of the kebab cart as he passed.

  Cage had pulled a disguise together, but he couldn’t steal everything he needed for a month. If he was going to be stuck in hiding here for the next month, he’d need Shadowhold’s currency.

  God, the next month was gonna suck.

  But every month after that was going to be awesome, since Cage was going to have the Death Underpants, a job with Silverclaw Corp, and later, a Hero cult of his very own.

  His fingers dipped into the coffers as he passed.

  It was a smooth gesture. Cage was almost as good as Brigid at pickpocketing.

  Almost.

  The cook seized Cage’s wrist, claws tightly bracketing him so that he could not leave. “Thief,” it hissed.

  “One of the best,” Cage said. And then he flipped the coffers, slapping the bottom with his hand so that the coins flew into the demon’s face. The cook reared back, dazed. She’d been struck hard by the box’s lid.

  Cage managed to snatch a handful of bullion out of the air before breaking into a run again.

  The demon’s hissing shriek was consumed by the oppressive weight of the city, indistinguishable from the other shrieks within the squalor. The cook had swung around to punch Cage but hadn’t looked first. Instead, she had managed to backhand the cockroach jeweler. Now a fight was breaking out. A most excellent distraction.

  Cage stuffed his stolen money in one of Phil Germanotti’s utility pockets, then flew up the side of a building, hand over hand. The roofs down here were tiled, but lazily so; without rain or sun, they only needed to serve as privacy screens from flying demons. The tile slid under Cage’s feet as he tried to leap quietly to the next building, and the next.

  He found Charity Ballard again when she stopped at the corner, looking over her shoulder toward the ruckus. His distraction had caught her attention too.

  Now she held a keyring. Most locks in Phaethon Bay were opened by biometrics, so it was very charming to see that she had actual keys on the ring along with a pair of miniature rubber flip flops, which had the name of a Caribbean port printed on the soles. It was charmingly old-fashioned. Cage wondered how old the revenant must have been to have so many keys.

  She lost interest in the fight. Charity crossed the street to a building that looked like a sentry tower, or maybe a lighthouse. It had one door on the floor and no windows until the very top of its smooth-sided column.

  Charity unlocked the door and slipped inside. This was her house with Arawn.

  It wasn’t impenetrable. Nothing was impenetrable. But Cage was certainly not equipped to get inside a building with such sheer walls and so few entry points.

  He scampered over rooftops to reach the lighthouse. He wasn’t the only one treating the upper level of Shadowhold as his playground. A cluster of imps scattered when he landed feet first on another roof, sending tiles flying. The imps chittered angrily at him.

  Beetles that looked like oversized scarabs—each bigger than Cage’s head—swarmed out from the eaves where the imps had been hunting. They fell to the ground below, making heavy tapping sounds rather like hail.

  “Sorry!” Cage called back to the imps. “Have dinner on me!” He lobbed the stolen bullion at them. They hurled something at him that smelled suspiciously feces-like back at him before scurrying to gather the money he dropped.

  It gave Cage enough time to crawl to the other side of Arawn’s house. He found a quieter roof and tucked himself among the dormers, where he wouldn’t be seen by a casual glance out the window from Charity’s building.

  The window, he noticed, was trimmed with brass. The window had the faceted look of pressed crystal—a luxury item that Cage, at a glance, would value easily in the tens of thousands of dollars. It was only one meter by one meter. But whatever had come out of the city of Dis back in the day was always in fashion and always in demand.

  Tens of thousands of dollars on the outside of this building alone. Cage was drooling to see what Arawn had on the inside.

  A small human voice echoed from the alley below him. “Dammit! It’s not possible!”

  Cage leaned over to look down.

  Surprise flooded him at the sight of a red-blond head, attached to a slender woman battling with her backpack. She was shoulder-deep digging through its contents. Brigid Byrne had been flagged by security, but somehow, she hadn’t missed the elevator to Shadowhold.

  They were both locked down there together for the next month.

  Rationally, Cage knew that was a bad thing. It wasn’t like the two of them could cling to each other for survival, renting a week-by-week demon motel room to pass the time with carnal passion.

  Probably.

  Maybe.

  The tiles slipped under Cage’s foot, and he fell with a shout.

  Right on top of Brigid Byrne.

  For a moment, he was engulfed in her warm softness. Her lavender-scented hair. Her peachy soft skin.

  She kneed him off of her, and there was a sword against his throat a moment later.

  “It’s me,” he said hurriedly, lifting his hands to his sides to show they were empty. “It’s me.”

  “Dammit, Cage! How the hell did you get down here this fast?” Brigid sat back, and even though her tone was angry, her face wasn’t. The galaxy’s swirl in her eyes turned sharper, calculating. “You’ve been keeping secrets from me.”

  Oh shit. She knew that he was a squirrel. She was never gonna have sex with him again. Nobody wanted to have sex with squirrels. Even squirrels a
s intimidating dressed in leather as Cage was.

  “You figured out how to fight my poison lipstick,” she said.

  Cage stared.

  She didn’t know.

  He laughed, and then he made himself stop laughing, because his relief was too obvious. “I just came down on the second elevator. They’re loading people up to leave now. You should get out of here too, or else you’re going to be stuck inside Shadowhold until the next Open Day.”

  “I’m not going anywhere without those Underpants,” she said grimly.

  “You don’t have them already?”

  “No,” Brigid snapped. “I was going to scale the side of this building with my lead rope and picks! But...” She glared at her backpack in despair.

  Cage had suffered minor head trauma since leaving Phaethon Bay, but he still remembered emptying Brigid’s backpack to make room for his big fat squirrel butt. He’d gotten rid of the equipment Brigid wanted to use to penetrate Arawn’s household.

  He had promised himself he wouldn’t feel guilty.

  “How’s this?” Cage asked, his stomach writhing like it was filled with worms. “I’ll shapeshift into a phoenix and fly to that window. I’ll affix a rope to the top so you can climb, and I’ll let you go inside first. The only cost is that I need you to walk about a block away so that you don’t see my frightening yet awe-inspiring phoenix form.”

  “Do you think I’m stupid?”

  “I think you’re desperate, and desperate people get pretty stupid,” Cage said. “But I’m as good as my word. My word is my bond.”

  “The hell it is.” Heat entered Brigid’s voice. “Every time we cross paths, you ruin everything for me. You ruin my heists. You interfere, you cling, you—”

  “What about all the shit you do to ruin me?” he demanded.

  She laughed, incredulous. “I’m only trying to do my job! And you appear with all of your emotions to distract me!”

  Cage’s heart jumped. “I distract you?”

  “It’s not a compliment!” Her expression darkened when he didn’t immediately speak. “Whatever you’re thinking, you’re wrong.”

  “I’m not thinking anything,” he said. As long as the fact that Brigid was obviously madly in love with him was nothing. She did love him. She must have loved him if she hadn’t slit his throat. “Seriously, just go around the block. I’ll get your rope up there.”

  “And then let me steal the Underpants?” She had gone monotone with skepticism, hands planted on her hips.

  “It doesn’t look to me like you have a choice,” Cage said.

  “That’s right,” said a voice from behind them. “You seem to have run out of choices.”

  Cage swung around, positioning himself in front of Brigid for protection. He came face-to-face with a man who didn’t look very human. He had a face that passed for human. He also had all of the limbs that humans often did. There was no extra tail, or even horns.

  But his papery skin belonged on the dead. His guts were exposed like Charity Ballard’s. The eyeballs peering at Cage from behind his thick brass goggles were black, utterly black, and without a hint of remorse.

  It was the tattoos that served as the best positive identification for Arawn, heir to the Pit of Souls. Almost every square centimeter of him was inked. The only bare patches looked as though they were fresh—cut off of some poor human victim and stitched onto the demon’s skin. He must have been waiting for the flesh to integrate before he could tattoo it.

  “Oh, hey,” Cage said, snapping his fingers. “You’re Arawn, aren’t you? Boy, are we glad to see you.” He slung an arm around Brigid’s shoulders, attempting to pull her uncooperative body close. “Maybe you can help us. We’re on our honeymoon in Barcelona, and we heard that the daytrip down to Shadowhold is great—and it was!—but now we can’t find our way back to the elevator. Can you…?”

  “Nice try. I already know who you are. Gutterman says hi.” Arawn snapped his fingers, and four towering, burly demons stepped into the alleyway to seize them.

  “I hate you,” Brigid told Cage.

  “The feeling’s mutual,” he lied.

  Chapter Ten

  There was very little less dignified than being stuffed into a dog’s kennel. Cage had done it before, once or twice. Crawling through a door was demeaning, and sometimes, demeaning was exactly what Cage and Brigid wanted.

  But he wasn’t being dommed by Brigid in her Crimson Room of Pain. Brigid was currently on all fours, too, crawling into the kennel beside Cage’s.

  It was Arawn who kicked Cage’s ass to shove him inside.

  Arawn with the goggles, and a gang of burly biker demons, and his wife, Charity Ballard, standing behind him with her arms folded.

  “You were right,” Arawn said, dumping the contents of Brigid’s bag onto the floor. She looked to have been pickpocketing demons around the market too, much more successfully. She had several wax-sealed phials and shreds of rune-stamped leather. “They were here to steal from us.”

  Charity gave Cage a sad, betrayed look, which almost made him feel an emotion in the same neighborhood as guilt. “You’re not Paul, so who are you?”

  “A thief,” Arawn said, answering for Cage. “A stupid thief. He thought that he could steal money from Gutterman and get away with it. I reckon that he thought he could hide here for safety. Is that why you guys were trying to steal from us? Looking to fund your Shadowhold vacation so Gutterman can’t kill you?”

  Charity rubbed a clawed hand over her face, sighing. “Please don’t tell me you’re still friends with Gutterman.”

  “It’s not like that, gorgeous!” Arawn really looked at Charity as though she were gorgeous, which she may have been by demon standards. There was nothing like visiting with demons to make Cage feel like the most beautiful motherfucker on the planet. “This is just business.”

  “Is it old business or new business?” Charity asked.

  “Old favor, so old business. I swear, my sweet, as soon as Gutterman comes here to pick up this jackass, my favor will be repaid, and I’ll really be done with him this time.”

  Charity nodded, seemingly mollified. Arawn kissed her palms, a tender gesture despite the fact that her dusty phalanges were exposed underneath ragged skin.

  “So this is about some creature named Gutterman?” Brigid asked.

  “Your boyfriend’s double-crossed him,” Arawn said. “Gutterman put out the word to all his friends that he wants Shatter Cage dead. Now he’s the currency I’m going to use to get Gutterman off my back.”

  They hadn’t been caught because they were trying to steal the Death Underpants. This was all about Cage’s stupid debt.

  “Then this has nothing to do with me.” Brigid was leaning against the door of the kennel beside Cage. “Am I correct?”

  “Answer her,” Charity said to Arawn, elbowing him.

  “Gutterman didn’t mention anything about you, but I’m not letting you out until he gets here. Just in case. I want done with him for good.” The last line was directed to Charity, whose eyes softened as though she were touched by Arawn’s commitment.

  “Gutterman is coming here?” Cage asked.

  So much for his good mood. He’d just been starting to have fun.

  Arawn checked his pocket watch. Cage only needed a glimpse to see that it had dials for both Earth time and Shadowhold time. “Gutterman might have gotten down on the last elevator. If not, you might be waiting in this cage to die for about a month. What do you think is worse? Dying quickly and brutally, or waiting for a long time and then dying quickly and brutally?”

  “I prefer to avoid all brutal deaths,” Cage said.

  Brigid banged her palms against the inside of the kennel. “I have nothing to do with this! Let me out!”

  “Secure the room,” Arawn told his gang. He looped his arm through Charity’s, hooking his hand on the inner corner of her elbow, and they walked away.

  “You guys are an adorable couple and I hate you,” Cage called as the d
oor shut.

  Nobody responded. They were gone.

  * * *

  ‘Awkward silence’ failed to convey the miserable atmosphere after Cage and Brigid were left locked in kennels.

  It was a nice room, aside from the fact that they were being detained inside of it. The window let in light from the city outside. It bathed the low-slung furniture in the warm crimson glow of lantern light. A pair of grow lamps stood in one corner of the room, making their tent shine like a pale blue star. Chairs had been positioned around the grow tent like it was a lounge with a fireplace.

  Arawn had good taste in art. The pieces he displayed were eclectic, ranging from watercolors to jagged abstracts. All were framed superbly. His collection must have been worth millions.

  Cage couldn’t distract himself by imagining how he’d fence everything Arawn owned. After a while, the cramped kennel got to him. The silence was too heavy. Brigid remained sullenly silent. And Cage was left with nothing to do but mentally review what he’d done wrong to end up in this place—which was everything, as it turned out.

  His biggest regret was leaving Vision. Vex would wait a few days before getting worried, but by the end of the month, he’d be freaking out. Full-blown panic attacks. Who’d bring him pureed liver and garlic to soothe him, just like his mom used to?

  “Stop worrying about Anton,” Brigid said, her voice small through the bars. “He’ll be fine.”

  “Stop reading me like an open book,” Cage said.

  “It’s hard to stop. You’re less like a Hemingway and more like the Hungry Little Caterpillar. Anton’s a frighteningly smart guy. He’ll be fine.”

  Brigid and Vex had never spoken face to face, but they’d chatted a few times over the Link on jobs. They weren’t friends—Brigid didn’t seem to be interested in friendships—but they were civil to each other. Cage hadn’t realized she held Vex in such regard from their brief talks.