by Beth Dranoff
“Are ye?” Owain watched my face over the rim of his glass for anything my words might not convey in full. Surely my tells had changed after all this time?
“Stop pushing,” I said. “Let’s see how things go this time around first.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
“So about that Agency job,” I said, propping my feet up on Anshell’s coffee table. “Owain came up with a workaround.”
“Really,” said Sam.
“Yeah. He clarified the terms of the contract.” I flicked a glance at Anshell, who gave me nothing, then back at Sam. “So I could capture Demon Blue and deliver him to the Agency.”
“Which you’re not going to do?” Sam made the question a statement. Just in case.
“Right,” I said. “But what if I could get Gus to spit me some of his blue diamonds? I could say we fought and I lost but hey, nifty shiny stuff, and that might just be enough. Plus Owain said he’d sign off on it. There’s no guarantee the Agency won’t send someone else for Gus later, but since this is a Covert Science request, it might be enough for now to just get them some organic matter to test.”
“And you’re not curious what they’re looking for?” Anshell’s voice was mild but I wasn’t buying it.
“Curious? Sure,” I said. “But they’re not going to let me in on their little secrets from out here. Belly of the beast and all that.”
“What about your beast?” Sam’s point wasn’t an unreasonable one. “How long will you be able to hide that?”
“I’ll do it for as long as I can.” Because really, what choice did I have? “Staying freelance helps. And I’ll make sure to be busy around the full moon. Female troubles, sore foot, visiting family—whatever it takes.”
“And Lazzuri will back you up?” Sam didn’t sound so sure, but he was willing to be convinced.
“Don’t see why not. Reduces the number of interested parties after him by half,” I said. “Then again, he’s an ornery bugger. He might refuse anyway purely because he can.”
“Assuming Mr. Lazzuri is willing to go along with your Agency plan, that leaves us with our tentacled bounty hunter friends,” said Anshell. “We’ve been making inquiries through channels. It’s a curious thing. Nobody knows who hired them.”
“Is that normal? I mean, for you to have zero intel?”
“No,” said Sam.
“Implications?” I was curious—was there a limit to Anshell’s reach as Alpha, or was there more to it?
“It increases the odds that this is not local,” said Anshell, “In fact, it might be quite the opposite.”
“So, uh, foreign?” I bit the inside of my cheek to control my smirk.
“Or inter-dimensional.” Anshell ignored my attempt at humor.
Wait. The quest for Demon Blue could be coming from an alternate realm?
There were dots, and I needed to be connecting them. Who did I know who hopped between planes of existence?
One: Alina. But if Frank and Squid D’Lee were working with her, they would have used that big bad demon stick by now—and to inflict pain extremes on me. Which meant, as much as I’d like to blame her for all the recent bad stuff I’d been through, she probably wasn’t the It in this particular game of tag.
Two: Celandra. Or at least I suspected it. Although she wasn’t consistently lucid enough to ask, plus hiring out for dirty work duty didn’t seem like her style. Celandra was also friends with Sandor—and loyalty wasn’t just a word for her.
Who else was there?
Ezra. He’d known enough about Demon Blue’s existence to authorize the freelance capture gig I’d gotten. But that was through official channels, and I was on two legs as far as he knew; I couldn’t see Ezra contracting out the work to anything less than humanesque. And cephalopods were about as non-mammalian as you could get. If Ezra needed something like this done, he’d go through the Agency to get it. Why pay out of pocket? He had the clearance levels to pretty much authorize anything he wanted. And what he’d wanted was me.
He wouldn’t need to hire a backup crew with tentacles.
Technically, I should be able to hop between dimensions, what with the tattoo on my back and the maps in the attic. But if I wanted to nail Gus, I’d do it myself and I’d do it here. I hadn’t located another portal, and while I continued to search, that search had so far been of the fruitless variety.
There was someone else, though. Someone I kept forgetting about, as though his existence itself was protected by some kind of Keep Away spell.
“My father,” I said.
* * *
It made sense. We all agreed.
“Plus,” said Sam, “have you noticed how those tentacle guys never actually hurt you? They threaten, they restrain, they inflict pain-based motivation on the rest of us but you? You keep walking away. Not a scratch.”
“It would certainly reinforce the hypothesis that whoever hired Squid D’Lee and the cephalopod crew included a specific note about you,” said Anshell.
“As in suction cups off the girl?”
“Something like that.” OK, that was Anshell trying not to smile.
But then I remembered it was my father we were talking about. Messing around with my life again, albeit from a distance.
“For the sake of argument,” I said, “let’s say my father somehow hired Squid D’Lee and his crew to capture Gus. And the contract does seem to be of the ‘capture’ rather than ‘kill’ variety for them as well. What would both Ezra and my father be hoping to achieve? And why wouldn’t they be working together on this?”
“You don’t know for sure they’re not,” Sam pointed out.
“True,” I acknowledged. “But then why bother with two contracts?”
“Unless it’s some kind of competition.” Sam jumped up and started pacing. Every bit the big cat in the too-small enclosure at the zoo. “They worked together in that Agency lab, right? Before the ‘accident’?” Sam actually air-quoted the word accident. Cynical much? I must be rubbing off on him.
“Right,” I said instead. Wondering where he was going with this.
“And now, by his own admission, your father is stuck in an alternate zone of existence?”
“Yeah, something like that,” I said. “And?”
“What if that’s the common denominator?” Sam stopped his back and forth momentum to plop down across from me on the coffee table. “Not Gus. What if everything that’s been happening is to get you to open another portal?”
“But then why would Ezra care about any of this? And what does it have to do with Gus?”
“Perhaps at this juncture we should ask Gustav Lazzuri ourselves,” said Anshell.
* * *
The Village was hopping.
In the days leading up to the parades, the City had closed off Church Street south of Bloor so that there were at least ten city blocks of pedestrian-only traffic. On either side, between the packed sidewalks and the even more densely populated thoroughfare, the road was lined with vendors, hawkers and food trucks. Everything from t-shirts and temporary henna tattoos to poutine to cock rings and baskets of free-from-the-City lube packets. If you could imagine it, there was a reasonable chance someone somewhere had it for sale at a special “Pride” price.
Every few blocks were the beer tents. This, in addition to the bars packed in at a higher-than-normal density within a block of the Church and Wellesley Village epicentric intersection.
We found Gus at the third one we tried. I still couldn’t believe nobody had noticed there was a tusked demon in leather gear who sneezed blue diamonds, but whatever. Guess people really do see what they expect to see. Unless that worldview is forced askew, whether they want it to be or not.
Gus was standing with his back to us at the bar, chatting up a guy almost half his size, with ca
rrot red manga hair that stuck out in all directions. That was pretty much it for hirsute coverage though; the rest of the guy was freckled pale and hairless as far as I could see. Which was actually quite a bit given that all he was wearing was a red leather thong, matching spiked dog collar and gold lamé flip flops.
I could tell it was Gus by the twinkling blue sheen of glitter he’d sprinkled on his ass cheeks before heading out.
“Over there,” I said to Sam and Anshell. Who suddenly seemed overdressed for the occasion in t-shirts and jeans, even when paired with low-key brown and navy-blue fabric/rubber flip flops of their own.
“Gustav,” Anshell said, touching him lightly on the shoulder. “A word?”
Gus narrowed his eyes at the interruption, tensing for a fight; his shoulders dropping to a more relaxed warrior stance once he realized it was us. Not quite luaus-and-coconut-pineapple-drinks-with-paper-umbrellas-and-Hawaiian-shirts-on-the-beach relaxed, but enough that the risk of him ripping our heads from our shoulders decreased significantly.
“In private?” Anshell added that last bit when Gus didn’t move from his new playmate right away. Maybe Gus was worried someone else would lay claim to the baby-faced manga man if he stepped aside, even for a couple of minutes.
Gus’s reticence held moments past the point of casual. Yep, we were definitely interrupting something. Oh well.
“Hi,” I said, reaching across to shake palms with the new boy. His flesh was clammy; I couldn’t tell whether it was stress sweat or just the normal kind that seeps from all living surfaces in 38°C with the humidity. “Dana. And you are?”
“T... T... Troy,” he stammered. “How do you know Gasper here?”
Gasper, huh?
“From here and there,” I said. “Do you mind if we borrow him for five minutes? We’ll bring him right back.”
Troy’s upper lip twitched and he blinked seven times in succession. Nervous tic? Or was he counting it out?
“What do you say, Daddy?” Daddy? Ick. “Tell me what you want me to do.”
Gus leaned over to whisper something in the shorter man’s ear while stroking the back of his neck. The blinking became more rapid; this time I counted fourteen blinks in fourteen seconds or less, eyes darting up and around, seeking out gaps in the overhead tent. At least that was my guess. If I was playing capture the tongue with a blue demon twice my size in assless chaps, I’d be wanting an exit strategy too.
But then Troy’s eyes fell to Gus’s black, thick-soled lace-up motorcycle boots, and I realized that whatever fight he had left inside had fled, leaving the flaccid bound shell of resistance behind. Gus waved over one of the staff loitering by an open flap, blowing smoke into the already heavy air, his or her tight t-shirt and baggy cargo pants suggesting female but I couldn’t be sure.
And really, did it matter?
I couldn’t hear what Gus said, but the end result was a short stool that had Troy at eye level with one inch above the surface of the bar’s counter. He could see what was going on around him, but there was no way to pretend he was doing anything but obeying an order designed to demonstrate who was in charge—and who wasn’t.
OK, sure, there were games to be played in private. Danas in glass houses and all that. But this kind of public display of obsequiousness? So not my thing.
Anshell raised an eyebrow, exchanging with Sam a look so fleeting I couldn’t catch it, but otherwise went with poker face before sliding into a table towards a darker, less densely populated edge of the space. Sam settled in beside him, making sure he had a clear view of all possible avenues for both incursion and escape.
Me, I waited until Gus picked his spot—across from Anshell—before dropping into a fold-up chair to Sam’s left. It meant I was facing away from the primary entrance/exit more than I would have liked, but I trusted Sam and Anshell to have my back. Or at least to give me a heads up if lives were in danger.
You know. Pack business.
“What did you find?” Gus looked from Anshell to Sam to me and then back again. “I know you didn’t interrupt my Pride experience just to have a beer and get ripped off on the cover charge. Right?”
“Nothing concrete. Not yet,” said Anshell. “But,” he continued, “we were wondering—have you ever had dealings with a Stuart Markovitz?”
Gus leaned back, crossing his arms over his pierced-nipple-ringed chest. Dude was seriously going for the full experience here. Eyes flicking to me and then back again.
“Her father?”
“Right,” I said, since Sam was keeping his words to himself for some reason. “Ever do a contract for him?”
“No,” Gus replied. He didn’t even have to think about it. “But isn’t he dead?”
“Not as much as you’d think,” I muttered. Gus raised an eyebrow. “I’ve been seeing him around so I’m thinking not so much.”
“Re-animation? Or are you sure he’s back?”
Re-animation was actually an option?
“I wouldn’t call my father ‘back’ exactly,” I said, keeping the rest of my thoughts to myself. “I think there’s some kind of inter-dimensional airlock situation, or whatever the technical term for it is, happening. It’s hard to tell. Dad pops in, fades out, comes back as someone else—and he doesn’t make consistent sense even when he’s the guy whose DNA I share. I think maybe he has early-onset dementia or something.”
Gus nodded. “Yeah,” he replied. “Realm hopping can be hell on you norms. Or,” he corrected himself, “those of you with human-based biology. Humans, shifters, that kind of thing. You know—you lot.”
I gaped. Shut my mouth again. “This is what happens to anyone who jumps dimensions? Like, once? Or does it need to happen on repeat somehow?”
“The more you do it, the worse it gets,” said Gus. “How do you not know this? It’s portal jumping 101.” He narrowed his eyes, looking at each of us for ignorance confirmation. “Why do you think our friend Celandra is as bat-shit as she is? IQ nearing 200, almost that old in human years and, what, you thought maybe she’d gotten a bit feeble-minded in her advancing age?” Gus snorted. “Hardly.”
“You do it,” Sam pointed out. “And you seem relatively sane to me. How’s that work?”
“Different physiology. Doesn’t affect me.”
“When you did contract work for the Agency,” I said, trying hard not to stare, “did they run any tests on you first?”
“Nah,” said Gus. “Subcontractor. No long-term responsibility for them and no stupid medical tests for me. Same reason you’re doing it that way, am I right? Wait...” His voice trailed off as his mind cast backwards through times past. “I did take a few dimension-hopping gigs for the Agency. Snatch and grabs mostly. That’s when I started noticing what portal crossing did to the mental grips of my packages.”
“Did you ever say anything to whoever had hired you?” No way Anshell’s question, however casually he posed it, was anything other than a cover. He wanted to know whether perceptual travel jetlag was a commonly known side effect.
“Nah,” Gus said again. “Kept that bit to myself. But it was pretty obvious. I’d deliver the packages, all of them valued assets before I got to them, and they’d be making with the rambling verbal diarrhea by the time I brought them in. I’m too expensive to waste on non-threatening cleanup.”
“Your Agency contact,” I said. “Are they still there? Do you know?”
“Yeah,” Gus replied. “Your friend Ezra Gerbrecht.”
Was everything connected? Because otherwise coincidence was a super-contagious virus around here.
“Weird dude,” Gus continued. “Always with the small talk. How was your trip, any issues, what did you eat—that kind of thing. Like he was making conversation, trying to act all whatever, but really he was filing every detail away somewhere in that brain of his.”
“T
hat would be Ezra,” I said. “How much does he know about what you can do? Or your existential resistance to crazy?”
“It’s not like the guy asked,” said Gus, shrugging. He glanced over at his slave of the hour, making sure Troy was still squatting on the stool. Amazingly, he was. “But isn’t he genius-level, that guy? Wouldn’t take much to figure out the differences by looking.”
“So then one might safely assume that Ezra Gerbrecht, who is still with the Agency, might have noticed you suffer no ill effects by either moving between or spending time in alternate dimensions.” Anshell seemed to be thinking out loud at this point. “If you were a scientist by nature, and you discovered a non-human with the physiology to keep his mental acuity despite dimensional travel shifts, wouldn’t you be curious? Want to study the phenomena closer?”
“I didn’t offer,” said Gus. “And he didn’t ask.”
Sam was nodding now.
“Of course,” he said. “And if the guy had asked? What would you have said?”
Gus’s stare reminded me of the frosty hoar that had ice-burned my last phone, the same chill that held me by the throat as it tried to choke the life from me. And still I lacked the answers I needed for that single question I’d asked: why?
“I’d have said fuck you,” Gus replied. “Fuck you, the horse you rode in on, and the next several generations of its offspring.” He was watching Anshell now, grin stretching into a slow leer. Right. He must have known Anshell was also equine by now.
Anshell ignored the jab.
“You would have declined his request then.” Hello stating the obvious, my Alpha. “So if Ezra Gerbrecht wished to study you, it would have to be without your permission. Correct?”
“Damned straight,” said Gus. “Oh.” Realization hitting, getting through even his thickest of skulls.
“So that explains the Agency snatch-and-grab gig they’re outsourcing to me,” I said. “But what about the cephalopod crew’s contract? Ezra doesn’t like dealing with anything that can’t walk on its own bipedal appendages. Legs,” I clarified. “So Gus there would be acceptable, but those eight-limbed guys wouldn’t. Too foreign. And yes, in case you were wondering, Ezra is a big-time specist.”
