by V M Black
I took my receipt and shoved the new books into my backpack, pulling up the hood of my jacket to shade my face. As I lowered my sunglasses and stepped out of the bookstore, a voice called my name.
“Ciao, Cora!”
I turned around to see a familiar face behind a broad pair of Louis Vuitton sunglasses.
“Cosimo?” I asked incredulously. “What are you doing here?”
Chapter Thirteen
“Spying.” Cosimo dropped his voice conspiratorially. “I heard that Dorian’s new consort was an actual honest-to-goodness college student, and I had to see for myself. I heard he even lets you live in the dorms. For most consorts, school would be traded in for a Maserati and diamond studs in three days flat.”
I had met him when he’d grabbed my arm as I was trying to run from the ballroom during the introduction. Why was he hunting me down here, on campus?
“Maybe I’m different.” I narrowed my eyes at him behind my concealing shades. How fast could Dorian get here if I called?
As if he could read my mind, Cosimo said, “Don’t worry, cara. There’s no reason to be afraid.” He waggled his fingers in a dismissive motion. “We’ll have you back safe and sound in no time.”
“Back from where?” I demanded as a low-slung car in a violent yellow rolled up to the curb.
Cosimo opened the rear passenger door. “If you don’t get in, you’ll never find out. Don’t worry. I’m not going to touch a hair on your pretty head. That’s very bad form, you know. We’re just going on a little field trip. Very educational. If you want to.”
“If?” I asked. I looked around. There were at least a dozen people within view on the sidewalk—all human. They couldn’t save me from Cosimo. The only thing screaming would do would be to put them in danger, too. If I had a choice, it was because Cosimo was giving it to me.
“Yes, if.” He gave me a dazzling smile. “I really mean it. You can stand right here, in your own little world, and never see anything that Dorian doesn’t want you to until it’s far too late for you to care. Or you can come with me, and I’ll show you a few things I’m certain he doesn’t want you to know about—and tell you some things that you will.”
“Why?” I demanded. “Why would I want to know? It’s not like I can do anything about anything, one way or another.”
He smiled again, showing too many teeth. “What if I told you that you could?”
I caught my breath. Could he mean it?
“In, then, bella,” he said, waving. “This is your only chance. In thirty seconds I leave, with you or without you.”
I hesitated. Could I trust him? He wasn’t doing something nice because he was my friend, so that left only one other possibility. He planned to do something Dorian didn’t want in order to hurt him. Which meant that getting in would betray what Dorian and I shared.
Whatever it was.
“Twenty-five.”
Of course, the best way of hurting Dorian would be to take away his cognate. If Cosimo wanted to kill me, though, he wouldn’t bother to ask me to get in the car at all. It wasn’t like I had the strength to fight off an agnate, nor would anyone else come to help.
“Twenty.”
So that meant Cosimo wanted to convince me of something, not kill me outright. And it had to have something to do with the bond.
That thought sent a tremor of unease through me, and then a second spike of fear that I could feel anything but happiness at the thought of doing something to the bond that held me to Dorian.
“Fifteen.”
What did I owe Dorian, after all? Sure, he’d saved my life, but only because he wanted it for himself.
I’d never wanted this. I had to be free.
I took off my backpack and got in.
“Excellent!” Cosimo stood in the door and held out his hand. “Your phone, cara. Not that I don’t adore Dorian’s company. It’s just that he’s not going to be very happy with what I want to show you. If he’s tracking you and you come anywhere near where we’re going...well, that’s an establishment he’d do a great deal to keep you out of.”
Reluctantly, I handed him my phone, and he passed it to a woman who had been leaning against the bookstore’s brick wall. I’d hardly even noticed her before, but she must be one of Cosimo’s thralls. My lifeline to Dorian, my phone with the tracking software he had loaded on it, was now gone.
If I’d been terrified, then maybe Dorian could have sensed it and come to find me, one way or another. But I wasn’t. I knew Cosimo was up to no good, but I really did believe that he didn’t plan to hurt me, at least directly. If he wanted me dead, there was no reason that I wouldn’t be already.
“She’ll keep it safe until you come back,” Cosimo said, bending down to smile at me through the open door. “Cross my heart. Now, scoot.” He made a small waving motion with his hands.
I slid across the bench seat to the other side, and he got in to sit beside me. My skin prickled with uneasiness at his closeness. Just because I trusted him not to kill me didn’t mean that I liked him.
“Drive,” he said to the chauffeur, and the car began to move.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“Just a little field trip to Baltimore,” he said, pulling his sunglasses off and folding them primly before sliding them into the pocket of his blazer.
Baltimore. Dorian had gone there when I’d been attacked to try to find out who was behind it because the city was a stronghold of the Kyrioi.
That didn’t bode well.
“Look, if anything happens to me, Dorian’s going to find out,” I said.
Cosimo smiled. “You’re welcome to tell him. But I don’t think you will.”
“Are you going to stop me, then?” I challenged as the car merged onto the Beltway.
“Not at all,” he said soothingly. “You’ll be free to tell him anything. I’m willing to gamble that you won’t want to, though. You’re a cognate who immediately leaves her agnate’s mansion for school and a dorm room.”
“So?”
“So you might be the kind of cognate who would jump at a way out. Out of everything. No more blood. No more sex. No more bond.”
My heart began to hammer in my chest. I hardly dared to believe it. “That’s not possible.”
“Has Dorian told you that?”
I ran through every conversation I’d had with him, and I realized that he hadn’t. Not in so many words. He’d told me how bonds couldn’t be broken—but not that they couldn’t be broken at all.
“Can you break a bond?” I pressed.
“Me? Not at all,” he said. “Agnates can’t break bonds. Just trying it would kill me as surely as it would you, and I’m not suicidal. But they can be broken.”
“How?”
“That little nugget will wait until the end of our field trip. Just think of it as an incentive. Go along, take the tour, get a good long look at what you’re getting yourself into—and then you’ll be able to make an informed decision.”
He was enjoying this. I could see it on his face. I opened my mouth to argue, but I decided I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction, so I shut it again and settled into the car seat, pulling off my shades.
I watched Cosimo narrowly, but he ignored me, poking at his phone as we drove north.
Dorian would look for me if I were scared enough. But now curiosity was uppermost. Was there really some way to weaken or even escape the obligations of the bond?
We took the Baltimore-Washington Parkway up to the loop and then took an exit into the city. I tensed slightly in my seat. It was the bad part of town—hell, most of the city proper was the bad part of town, but this was bad even for B’more.
The car turned, then turned again. Ugly rowhouses crowded block after block up against the cracked sidewalks, a concrete jungle of red brick and blank windows, half of them shattered or boarded up and tagged with layered graffiti. The sun glared onto acres of asphalt and cement, the only relief the weeds that pushed up through cracks in
the sidewalk and in the dirt that collected against the houses. I glimpsed a single tree as we drove by—through the front window of a shell of a house, the roof and floors above having long ago fallen into the earthen basement.
Though the houses looked derelict, the streets buzzed with tense activity. Teenagers lounged on the corners, sharp eyes fixed on our car as it passed. Men sat on stoops, smoking and drinking, their dogs chained to the metal railings. They called out to the clutches of people who prowled the streets with catcalls and insults that I could hear through the closed windows, some friendly, others not.
Great. We were driving straight through a scene from The Wire.
“Why are we here?” I demanded, an ugly suspicion forming in my mind. Cosimo had said he would not touch a hair on my head, but if he left me in a place like this, he wouldn’t have to.
“I want you to see our world,” he said. “All of it. Dorian keeps you locked up in that house like the princess on the glass mountain. He doesn’t want you to know what it’s really like.”
There was a break between two blocks of row houses, forming a narrow alley that faded into the shadows. The driver turned down it and was flagged to a stop by a man with the blunt end of a pistol sticking out of his waistband.
The driver rolled down the window. Somewhere, a child started to cry, and a woman’s sharp voice ordered it to be quiet.
“What d’you want?” the man on the street asked roughly.
“We belong here,” Cosimo called, and I felt the wave of influence pour out from him.
The man settled back. “Right, then.”
The car rolled on.
Behind the block of houses, the alley ended in a tall chain link fence that blocked the way into the bleak expanse of an abandoned brownfield. The man walked over to the gate as the car idled, pushing it open. The car rolled in across the cracked, overgrown road.
Rusting hulks of metal were scattered across the property, tangles of scrubby trees growing out among them. Wide squares of broken concrete formed a checkerboard amid the weeds and grasses and led to the skeleton of a manufacturing plant, its smokestacks punching up into the gray sky. The lot ended at the banks of the brown river.
“There’s nothing here,” I said, my stomach tightening.
“Oh, but there is, Cora Shaw,” Cosimo said. “It’s many things to many people. But for you, it’s a chance to get to know our world away from Dorian’s watchful eye.”
The car continued across the broken patchwork of concrete and asphalt, moving closer to the old factory. A prickle of unease came over me as we approached. It was the only possible destination here.
The car went around the corner of the building, and abruptly, we were facing a pad of clean white concrete, the parking spaces marked with freshly painted yellow lines. Dozens of cars were there, hidden from the view of both the river and the gate by two arms of the abandoned factory.
Not abandoned, then. Not at all.
The driver pulled into a parking space and turned off the car. Cosimo opened his door. I could hear the thud of bass coming from the building.
“Of course, today, there will be no one here of importance,” Cosimo said conversationally as he circled the car. “I asked around. Better not to come to the attention of some—yes, even I hesitate at that. Does it surprise you?”
I didn’t say anything as I shoved my sunglasses on, but he hardly paused as he opened my door.
“We’re here for the atmosphere, Cora, not the politics. And that will be quite enough.”
I didn’t see that I had a choice. Cosimo’s friend still had my phone. And somehow, I did believe him now, that he didn’t plan to hurt me. At least at the moment.
I got out of the car, leaving my backpack on the floor and ignoring the arm that Cosimo offered me with exaggerated gallantry.
“Oh, a modern girl,” he said. “Doesn’t hold truck with any of the conventions of the past. I like that.”
“Or maybe I just don’t like you,” I said.
Cosimo laughed as if I’d just told an excellent joke. “Of course! But let’s not hang around out here. There are so many people who are eager to meet you, or at least they would be if they knew you were coming. And all this sunlight isn’t good for my complexion.”
“I’ve met them already at the introduction,” I said, but I followed him toward a narrow steel door set in the crumbling brick.
“Oh, no,” Cosimo said. “You’ve only met the vampires.”
I stopped in my tracks. Only the vampires. That meant I could expect djinn inside the building. Djinn—and maybe other things.
Cosimo looked back, his eyes hidden behind the glasses as he smiled disarmingly. “Coming, bella?”
Right.
I strode forward, brushing past him, and knocked loudly on the steel door.
Nothing happened.
“Very impressive,” Cosimo said, “if ineffective.”
He reached past me, rapping out a fast rhythm on the door.
I looked askance. “A secret knock? Really?”
He smiled. “It works.”
The door opened so suddenly that I had to jump back to keep from being struck by it. A massive head stuck out, covered in golden scales, and I swallowed a scream.
Chapter Fourteen
A djinn in its natural form. But—I realized almost instantly—not the same djinn that had attacked me a few days before. Where the other one had been fast and lean, this one was heavy, muscle-bound, even. And its features were definitely male.
It looked me up and down, then turned to Cosimo.
“No food and drink from outside,” the djinn snapped, blinking its yellow eyes from behind its heavy black-rimmed glasses. Its voice was a surprising light tenor.
“She’s a cognate,” Cosimo said.
The djinn turned back to me. The black slits of its nostrils flared. “She doesn’t smell like a cognate.”
“She’s fresh. Converted in the last two weeks,” Cosimo said patiently.
“If you’re feeding me a load of crap, Mortensen will have something to say about it,” the djinn said.
Cosimo held up his hands, palms out. “He was at her introduction himself two nights ago. It’s good.”
The djinn’s eyes narrowed. “She’s that cognate, then. And she’s coming here? With you?”
“Mind your own business and let us in,” Cosimo said.
“It’s your funeral,” the djinn said, but he pushed the door all the way open so that Cosimo could catch it.
“After you,” Cosimo said, waving me inside.
I stepped inside the narrow corridor, edging past the djinn who stood against the wall with his arms folded over his chest. Despite my nerves, I had a moment of bemusement when I realized that it was wearing a Fringe Festival t-shirt and artfully aged jeans.
A hipster djinn. Well, why not?
An old-style TV blared Judge Judy in a small room off to the side across from a stained, overstuffed leather couch. I stopped to pull off my sunglasses and shoved them into the pocket of my jacket. Cosimo passed me, continuing down the narrow, dingy hall.
“Coming, cara?” His voice floated back over pounding bass.
“Of course,” I said, falling in step behind him.
A cat paced ahead of us, its tail an exclamation mark as it picked delicately across the stained concrete floor. I regarded it suspiciously, but it seemed to be just that—an ordinary fat tabby.
Dirty, unmarked doors interrupted the painted cinderblock at intervals. Cosimo ignored them, heading for the black drape that hung across the end of the hall. I looked back in time to see the djinn disappear into the TV room.
I wondered if it watched Judge Judy ironically.
We reached the heavy drape at the end of the corridor. The pounding bass was louder now, coming from beyond it. Cosimo pushed it aside as he stepped through, and I ducked through behind him with the cat twining around my legs.
And I gaped.
The factory floor was one great r
oom with red brick and cinderblock walls extending up at least thirty feet. The old glass block windows, high up in the walls, were so grimed with old dirt that only the palest light filtered down, and a maze of catwalks, scaffolds, and platforms formed a tangle of iron and wood against the long walls.
But it wasn’t the room that made my blood freeze in my veins. It was the clientele. And though the room was more than half-empty at this early hour, it only served to highlight their weirdness.
My gaze was first arrested by the movement on the dance floor at the center of the tables, where two couples stood ringed by knots of observers. They all looked human...at first glance, though between their hairstyles and body modifications, the crowd would fit right into a punk-horror show.
I didn’t have to be told that none of them were actually human at all.
Each couple moved together as one, their steps synchronized with the throbbing music. One woman’s tattoos crawled across her back and arms, up her neck and across her face, and her partner sported several pounds of metal in his face. Their audience wore cheek plugs and horn implants, piercings tied with ribbon like corsets, puckered scars cut in patterns across bare skin, and angry, half-healed burns.
“What have they done to themselves?” I didn’t realized I’d spoken aloud until I heard the words.
“Don’t worry,” Cosimo said lightly. “Among aethers, accelerated healing is one of the most common traits. A tattoo, a piercing—for most races, it will last only a few weeks, at most a couple of months. Think of it like a costume or even a pair of particularly uncomfortable heels.”
Which meant that they had to do those things to themselves over and over to maintain such a look. My stomach lurched. I wasn’t sure if Cosimo had meant to reassure me, but if he had, he’d failed.
I watched the dancing couples, unable to look away. The movements of one pair were simple, little more than keeping time. But the other....
It was hard to know if they were dancing or trying to kill each other. The male held the female by the back of the neck, taking slow, angry steps forward as she moved back with him. There was a flash of motion, almost too fast to follow, and suddenly she was tumbling across the floor, thrown by a furious gesture.
