I dipped a French fry in a puddle of ketchup and stuck it in my mouth just in time to nearly swallow it whole as the door banged open once again.
A woman swept into the room, wrapped in a cloak of haughty, and climbed the ramp to the main floor all the while managing to look as though she were looking down her nose at us all. She was strikingly beautiful, I decided, but the arrogance with which she surveyed the room stole a lot of its impact. Whoever she was, she wasn’t a nice person.
Her eyes, so pale as to be almost colorless, fell upon me and I felt myself shiver. My appetite vanished and I set the fry back on my plate. She took one step toward me and found her path barred by both the giants, the lycanthrope and Hades himself.
“Don’t even think about it,” Hades murmured, just loud enough for us to hear. He rolled up his sleeves and the silver-blue tattoos emblazoned on his black skin writhed like entwined serpents. “Who are you?”
She turned her gaze to him, eyes flicking down to his arms, and twitched her lips into the tiniest imitation of a smile. “You know who I am,” she said.
“No,” he replied, “I know what you are, but that’s hardly the same thing now, is it?”
“Perhaps. So who, and what, are you?”
“My name is Hades. I would suspect that means nothing to you, but that’s only because I haven’t kicked your ass yet.”
Her smile grew a little wider. “You think you can, little man?”
He shrugged “Maybe not by myself, but—well—I’m not by myself, am I?”
Her gaze scraped the room and she nodded slowly. “Interesting company you keep.”
“Yeah, ain’t it? What do you want with the goblin?”
“What, are you his daddy?”
“In a way, yes. Answer the fucking question.”
She thought about this for a moment. “He saw something he shouldn’t have.”
Hades smirked. “Too bad for you. Why’d you do it?”
She gave him a look as though she thought he was stupid. “There are things no female should have to tolerate.”
“I’m pretty sure I’d agree with you, but I’m not sure eating the perpetrator is the best possible solution to the problem. We do have laws, you know.”
“So do I. And one of my laws says that I should consume the terminally malignant.”
“Draconian arrogance,” Hades snorted. “At least the one dragon left here on Prime isn’t prone to that sort of thing.”
“One dragon?” she echoed, looking scandalized.
He shrugged. “The rest of them were killed off a long time ago. I was right, wasn’t I? You’re not from our Earth, are you?”
“You’re not distracting me,” she said, shifting her gaze to me once again. She took a step forward and he moved to block her path.
“Leave the goblin be. He won’t say anything to anyone.”
“He told you, didn’t he?”
“I saved his life. And I saw you.” Hades gave her an evil grin. “I’m a much more dangerous witness than a goblin is. People will listen to me.”
She paused and cocked her head, peering at him with a mixture of curiosity and annoyance. Her gaze made another quick sweep of the room. Disdainfully. “I do not fear your rabble here. Or your police.”
The one called Boneyard let out a harsh, barking laugh. “Oh, you don’t need to worry about the munies—the municipal police—they can barely handle mundane crooks. No, you’re preternatural, which means you’re an Adjuster’s Office problem. And believe me, they’ve tackled bigger trouble than a rogue dragon before.”
“I’m not a rogue,” she spat angrily, eyes flashing with an inner fire.
“Could’ve fooled me,” the mage cut in.
I was amazed how little fear they were showing. This was a dragon! I could almost see Hades’s reason for being so cavalier—he was an immortal, and, as such, notoriously hard to kill. But the rest of them were mere mortals. Superhuman, perhaps, but still ultimately vulnerable.
Apparently sensing my trepidation, the bartender leaned toward me once again and whispered, “Don’t worry. Help is on the way.”
“What kind of help? Did you call the Adjuster’s Office?”
“Uh-uh,” he said quietly. “Kevin is right. Handling the preternatural and paranormal end of things is their job and they manage well enough. But tackling a dragon is a pretty big order, and I think we need to bring in the heavy artillery.”
“Which is?”
“You’re a curious little monkey, aren’t you?” he asked with a chuckle.
I could have taken offense to the “monkey” line, but what would have been the point? As descriptions went, I’d heard much worse. Regularly. “Are you going to answer the question, or just laugh at me?”
Sometimes I surprise myself. That was a rather bold question and bold wasn’t exactly part of my makeup.
If anything, his grin grew wider. “I sent a quick vid-message to someone I know in Oregon. He’s exactly the person you’d want if you had to find someone to go up against a dragon.”
This, of course, made me curious, but I didn’t ask. I was far more interested in what was going on in front of me at this point. Our lady dragon was up to something, but I couldn’t tell what it was. I could sense a gathering of something around her and I stiffened in response to what I was feeling.
The bartender cocked his head at me. “What?”
“She’s doing something,” I told him, and wondered if she was planning to change shape right where she was.
“Not in my fucking place,” he growled, and vaulted the bar.
The air around her was starting to shimmer and growing hazier by the second. The mage had taken a few steps back and seemed to be staring at something we couldn’t see.
The bartender strode right up to the dragon woman and punched her full out in the side of the face as everyone else looked on in shock.
Whatever she was doing stopped instantly as she rocked back on her heels and almost fell over. He must have struck her pretty hard, I thought.
She whirled back on him, eyes blazing. “How dare you?”
He hit her again, this time a wicked driving punch straight between her breasts. The air exploded from her lungs and she sat down, hard. He stepped back and kicked her in the forehead. She went over as if she’d been clubbed with a ponderosa.
I was apparently not the only one stunned by his actions. Every other patron in the bar was staring at him as if he’d suddenly donned a tutu and started singing “It’s a Small World After All”.
The dragon lay on the floor, groaning and holding her face. “In human form they’re about as vulnerable as most mortals. It’s the best time to take them down,” he told us.
“Then what?” asked Hades with a wicked grin. “She’s not going to be too happy with you when she comes to her senses, Jack.”
“By that time Bigby should be here,” Jack told him with a casual shrug. I noticed his eyes did not, however, stray from the supine dragon woman. He wasn’t as confident as he appeared. Not by a long shot.
Hades nodded thoughtfully, as if he knew who—or what—Bigby was. That put him ahead of me, and, by the looks of things, everyone else in the place.
“Who the hell is Bigby?” The male giant asked, looking slightly annoyed as he walked forward and stood over the incapacitated woman. His companion came up beside him and stared down at the woman herself, frowning.
She was remarkably beautiful, if totally alien. I knew what she was, of course. Another experiment like myself—an Abyssian. Hades had created the winged humanoids as another type of soldier, only to find that they weren’t interested in fighting his battles. Or any battles, for that matter. Abyssians could fight, but they didn’t like to. I wouldn’t call them pacifists, but the majority of them seemed to look upon violence as some kind of sin.
Rather weird, considering how freaking scary they looked when they chose.
In the end the Abyssians had betrayed him, allowing the last pureblood Sidhe, Cart
h, to put a blade in his back in retaliation for what he’d done to all of them. Carth had been the progenitor of the Abyssians, his DNA modified by Hades to create them. They were half Sidhe, and half a lot of different other things.
I found it surprising that she could be in the same room with Hades, much less converse with him. Which, in fact, she was doing now in tones too low for me to catch. He nodded and patted her shoulder, though he had to reach up a ways to do it, and treaded down the ramp to the front door. He threw it open and a bulky figure entered.
I couldn’t make out many details, as the light up here interfered with my ability to see clearly in the relative dimness of the entryway. But I didn’t have to wait long. The figure strolled up the ramp with Hades in tow and stopped on the dance floor several feet away from the draconic woman.
Now I could see him clearly, I wasn’t sure what to think. Though large and bulky, he didn’t look like anything particularly special. An ordinary guy wearing a gray cowboy hat and a thick blue jacket with a kind of five-pointed star embedded on one breast. I knew I’d seen that insignia somewhere before but it took me a minute to recognize it for what it was.
He was a cop. A sheriff, to be exact. He didn’t really look like my ideal picture of a sheriff, being rather rotund and his face, but for the jutting beak of a nose, was mostly obscured by the unkempt salt and pepper beard that framed his face.
The woman groaned and stared up at him. “Who the fuck are you?” she asked, pushing herself up into a sitting position.
“The guy you’ve been waiting a lifetime to meet,” he answered in a thick, bass voice. It sounded like a stupid come-on line, but somehow he made it work for him. It meant a lot more than it seemed the way he said it.
She didn’t seem nearly as impressed as I felt. She levered herself to her feet and glared at Jack, who stood a few yards back, arms folded across his chest. I would have expected him to look scared, or at least a bit nervous, but he didn’t seem in the least bit worried.
She threw back her head and laughed suddenly and everyone jumped. “You’ve got some serious balls,” she told Jack, shaking her head. Then she appeared to dismiss him completely, turning her full attention on the newcomer. “And you are?”
He smiled. Or, at least I think he smiled. It was hard to tell through his beard. “The name’s Bigby.”
Her gaze flicked to his jacket and she frowned. “Are you some sort of police officer?”
He nodded curtly. “Yeah, but I’m way out of my jurisdiction here. So what’s this all about? Did you really eat someone in the park?”
She shrugged. “What if I did?”
He chuckled. “Well, I can’t say I’ve never done that. I once ate a National Guard Colonel.”
I nearly fell off my bar-stool. That was one hell of an admission. I wondered if it were true or if he was just trying to find common ground with her.
He was another dragon, of course. Different from her in more ways than gender, but I didn’t know enough about dragons to say how. I will go so far as to say she seemed somehow fascinated by him, and he by her. There was an instant connection I could sense even from across the bar. “You want to talk about it?”
“He was a serial rapist, a clever bastard who was using an unlicensed stunner to render the victims unconscious, then dragging them off into the woods to get his jollies. He was damn slick about it and most of the victims never understood enough what had happened to them to even report it to your police.”
She didn’t mention that despite several hundred years of progression, rape was still vastly under-reported and very hard to prove. And, from what I understood, there was still some tendency to blame the victim, which made it doubly hard for a person to convince herself to come forward after an assault.
The men all shifted uncomfortably. Except Hades. He affixed her with a bland stare and nodded. “What you did to him was far more merciful than what would have happened if he attracted the attention of the Lady of Blades,” he said.
I shuddered. Even I had heard that name. Urban legend said that if you’d been wronged in such a way and went in front of a mirror and chanted those three words over and over again, a woman would appear and deliver justice. If what Hades was saying was true, it was more than just urban legend.
“So—are you going to leave the goblin be?” Hades asked her.
She turned her gaze on me for a long, discomfiting moment. “I will. He poses no threat to me.”
“Good.” Hades stepped forward and extended his hand to Bigby. “Thank you for coming,” he said.
The big man frowned, I think, but took his hand and pumped it twice before releasing it again. “You’re welcome.” He glanced back at the woman. “What’s your name?” he asked her.
She considered the question for what I took to be a rather long time before answering. “Kaleel,” she said finally. “At least,” she added, mostly for our benefit, “that’s the short, humanized version of my name.”
Jack looked a bit abashed as he approached her again. “I’m sorry I hit you,” he said, sounding as if he meant it. “It was the only way I could think of to keep you from tearing my place apart.”
There was no overt sign of hostility in her nearly colorless eyes as she turned her attention to him. “Apology accepted. I wouldn’t recommend you do anything like that in the future, though.”
Bigby guffawed and slapped Jack on the back with just enough force to knock him slightly off-balance. “You haven’t changed, Jack. You’re still one of the craziest mortals I’ve ever met.”
Jack’s face broke into a wide grin. “You’re just saying that because of what I was doing the first time we ran across one another.”
“Running from a posse? Yeah. You’ve got to be the worst rider I’ve ever seen. I was tempted to change and eat you just to save your poor horse from any more abuse.”
They both laughed at that, which led me to the thought that dragons and humans were equally insane. How would considering making a meal out of someone be in the least bit amusing? Baffling, really. And it made me curious as well. What kind of history did they have and how was it that Jack was running from a posse?
I knew what a posse was, but I didn’t think they’d had those things in a long, long time. Since the early twentieth century, at least. There was no way Jack was over two hundred years old, much less nearly three.
“Take your lady friend home now, Bigby. And see what you can do about putting her on a human-free diet, will ya?”
They both laughed again and even the woman chimed in this time.
I was so rapt on what was going on between the three of them I neglected to notice Hades approaching until he was within a couple of feet of me. I shot upright and stared at him, doing what had to be a reasonable imitation of a deer caught in the headlights of an oncoming vehicle. “Gack,” I think I said.
“What’s your name?” he asked me.
I didn’t want to tell him. Not really. But it tumbled out before I could stop myself. “Vex.”
He nodded thoughtfully. “I think I remember you,” he said. “I just wanted to tell you that I’m sorry.”
“For what?” I managed to squeak.
“For doing what I did to you. To all of you. My regret won’t change anything…I realize that. But I wish I’d never done it. I don’t think there’s anything I’ll ever do that could possibly make up for the evil I perpetrated against you all.”
Near as I could tell, he meant every word of it. “I can’t tell you that your apology means anything to me,” I told him. “As restitution goes, it’s pretty sparse
“I realize that. But if there’s anything else I can do, just name it. I mean it. The debt I owe you goblins can’t be repaid. But I’m willing to do whatever I can. No strings.”
This was the devil Hades? The mad immortal who’d twisted us into these obscene mockeries of human children that we’d become? It seemed impossible. “Why?”
I wasn’t certain what question I was actually asking here.
Why had he done it? Or why did he regret it now? I couldn’t be sure. Maybe I meant it both ways.
“Because I was out of my mind, warped with pride and envy. And ambition. It’s not much of an explanation, I realize, but it’s the only one I have.”
I saw that he meant it and I actually found myself feeling pity for him. He’d done this to us, but now he carried a burden of guilt far heavier than I could ever imagine carrying.
Before I could say anything, he continued. “I don’t expect forgiveness. I have no right to it. But I’d like you to accept that the person who did this to you no longer exists and the person I am today would like very much to make it up to you.”
“You already said that.” Not in so many words, exactly, but close enough. “I’m not sure you can.”
“But I can try. Do you need a place to stay? How about any of your brethren? I have a nice place I’m willing to share. No strings. No rent, though I’d ask you to clean up after yourself. I live modestly and don’t have a housekeeping staff.”
I blinked at him. Was he actually offering me a place to live? With him? I was both frightened and captivated by the thought. “Can I think about it?”
“Please do. If you decide to take me up on the offer, just tell Jack. He’ll make sure you can find the place. For now I’ve got some things to do, so I’ll be leaving. Just think about it.”
I noticed the two dragons had already gone. I watched him walk slowly toward the door and vanish into the night without another word.
A place to live? I’d never had that, unless you considered the encampment my fellows and I had erected in the city’s storm sewers to be a home. I had, at one time, but wasn’t sure I could now.
“He means it, you know,” Jack told me, appearing behind the bar once again. “He’s a changed man.”
“Is he?” I sighed. “Should I do it? I don’t really have anywhere else to go. I can’t stand the company of most of my kind, awful as that sounds. I don’t really belong among them any more than I belong among ordinary humans.”
“That’s up to you. If I were you, I’d seriously think about it.”
“Believe me,” I replied. “I am.”
Tales from the Magitech Lounge Page 14
