The third woman in the room stood out in the strange surroundings just by means of her normalcy. She was tiny, just like the other woman, but young, Gretchen’s age maybe, her silky black hair drawn back in a plain ponytail. Her sneakers were worn, her blue jeans were dirty, like she’d been sorting through the clutter in the other room, and her T-shirt was from UCLA. In fact, I could easily believe that she’d just come from campus, if I hadn’t known that most schools were still out for the winter holidays.
Smiling, she patted the old woman on the back, speaking to her in the same musical language, and the elderly woman shuffled off through yet another beaded curtain. “Hi, I’m Cindy. You must be Ivan’s friends?”
“He sent us, yes.” She didn’t look like she wanted to shake hands, and I didn’t offer. Though she looked petite and delicate, something just told me not to. For no apparent reason, the thought of touching her hand filled me with a cold dread. “I’m Jesse. This is Tai and Gretchen.” She nodded to my companions as I introduced them, then turned her gaze back on me.
“Have a seat, all of you, while we discuss our business. Would you like tea? Soda? Something stronger?”
“Some water, maybe?” Gretchen asked as she found a seat on a low futon-type sofa. Tai sat with her, and I kept my standing position near the door. Always cover your way out.
“Of course.” Our hostess crossed to the other beaded curtain, calling out to the elderly woman I presume. While her back was turned, I shook my head subtly at Gretchen. Maybe I was being paranoid, but I didn’t want her eating or drinking anything that came from this strange woman’s hands.
As Cindy turned back, she gave me a faint smirk, and I got the idea that somehow she’d seen my signal to Gretchen. She didn’t remark on it, though, and I wasn’t going to bring it up if she didn’t.
She took a seat on the opposite side of the low table in the room, the creaking of her wicker chair sounding almost like the furniture was complaining at being put to work. “Now. Ivan told me little of what you are needing. Perhaps you could explain?”
“Before we get to that…I have a request, and it’s kinda strange.” I had no idea who this woman was. But before we went any further, I needed to make sure who she wasn’t.
She raised a dark brow at me curiously when I showed her the safety pin. “Do you always stab women you’ve just met?”
“You’d be surprised.” I gave her half a grin. “Would you prefer I get to know you a bit more? Cindy, that’s not a Chinese name, right?”
“I’m Korean, actually. And no, it’s not. It’s short for Cinderella.”
“Your name is Cinderella.”
“At the moment.” She held her hand out to me. “I think we’ve become good friends now, yes?”
Despite my inexplicable aversion to touching her, I held my hand out, and allowed her to place hers in mine.
I don’t know what I expected to happen, but nothing did. Her hands were soft, unmarred, obviously not into heavy manual labor. There was a faint tingle up the hairs on my arm, the telltale traces of magic on her skin, but nothing like Tai could produce. Hell, I’d felt stronger signs from my wife. I couldn’t even tell if this strange woman was a practitioner, or had just brushed up against something recently. And still, everything in me screamed to let her go, to put distance between me and this tiny, harmless-looking little girl.
I pricked the offered finger, releasing her as soon as the blood welled up, and she wrapped it in a tissue. “You’ll understand if I ask you to leave the pin, of course.”
“Sure, whatever you want.” I snapped it shut and tossed it her way. Practitioner, definitely. A layman would have let the safety pin go, and then I’d have had a trace of her blood if I needed it later. She knew what she was doing.
Gretchen glanced briefly at me to see if we were ready to go on, then took the rolled contract out of her purse. “We need this translated. I understand that you’re an expert with this language.” Good girl, smart girl, she displayed the paper to our new friend, but didn’t hand it over right away.
Cindy tilted her head, a small smile curving the corner of her mouth. “I don’t know that I’d say expert, but I’m familiar with it, yes. May I ask, where did you get it?”
Before Gretchen could offer up her story, I stepped in. “No. We just need to know exactly what it says, in minute detail.” With demons, every word has a dozen different possible meanings, all of which can drastically change what you think you’re agreeing to. If we were going to find this loophole, I couldn’t risk a vague translation.
The young woman held out her hand, and when I nodded, Gretchen passed the thick paper over. Cindy pursed her lips as she looked over the contract. “This is a lengthy document. It will take some time.”
“How much time?” New Year’s Eve was fast approaching. I had no idea what was supposed to happen then, but I didn’t think we had a lot of time to waste.
“A few hours? Three or four, I would think.” Her dark eyes flitted over the page as she spoke to us, and I could tell she was already translating in her mind. “There is a very good restaurant across the street if you want to get something to eat while you wait.”
That actually wasn’t a half-bad idea. I didn’t want to sit here in this oddity shop for three or four hours. “You wanna give us a price quote on the translation?”
Cindy looked up from the pages and gave me a sly smile. “I have no way of knowing that until the job is done. We’ll discuss payment when you return, all right?”
Man, I didn’t like that. It felt eerily like the favor that had gotten me into this mess in the first place. But who else did we know that could read demon script? She had us, and she knew it.
The restaurant across the street was Chinese—go figure—and was actually very good, as promised. The three of us ate with a minimum of conversation, either lost in our own thoughts or simply watching the people as they moved around us. It wasn’t the same before-Christmas hustle and bustle that I’d seen just a week ago. Now, they were people on a mission, with a destination. Going to parties, picking up supplies, spending Christmas loot. They were smiling people, people who weren’t worried about the credit card bills that would be coming next month, or anything really beyond what they were doing in the next few minutes. They had the happiness that comes with momentary blindness.
I think Gretchen picked up on it too. She seemed pensive, a faint crease drawn between her brows, and I almost asked her what she was thinking about. Almost. I wasn’t sure we were up to the touchy-feely-deepest-darkest-secrets phase of our relationship yet.
By unspoken agreement, after two hours had gone by, we all got up to return to Cindy’s little clutter shop. At least, I think it was a shop. Come to think of it, I hadn’t seen a single cash register or anything there. No customers, either, except us. Maybe it was just junk she put in the way to keep people out.
The elderly woman answered the door again, escorting us back through the shelves as they swayed ominously over our heads. Cindy herself was curled up on the futon when we reached the open room, her sneakers discarded and her bare feet tucked under. She looked like a college student, hitting the books for some prefinals studying. She didn’t even glance up when we came in, typing one-handed on a small laptop as her other finger marked her place in the demonic script.
Tai and I let Gretchen take the chair, and while he stood guard over her, I explored the room a bit more.
The floor beneath our feet was plain cement, not even smoothed out properly in some places, but the majority of it had been covered with old rugs. Layers and layers of old rugs, actually, the ones on top worn through enough to reveal the patterns of the ones underneath. It made for uneven footing at best, and a fire hazard at worst. I wondered how the little old lady made her way through here on a regular basis without breaking a hip.
Aside from the furniture, which looked like it had been rescued from Goodwill at some point, there was very little else to see. A few lamps hung from the ceilings, their low ligh
ts almost drowned out by dark shades beaded heavily just like the curtains that marked the doors. In one corner, a small set of shelves stood, displaying various knickknacks, and one ancient portable TV, the kind with the black-and-white six-inch screen and the antenna half broken off. I found a small Buddha on the top shelf, carved out of jade or a good replica of it, and smiled a little. He looked just like the one that sat by the waterfall in my backyard, and it was like finding a friend in a strange place.
I might have even reached out to dust him off, but I caught the slightest hint of cloves in that corner. It wasn’t fresh, by any means. Old, musty, faint. Whatever the spell was, it had been cast so long ago that it had almost faded away to nothing. Most likely, it would no longer be functional at all, no matter what its intention had been. Of course, there was also the very rare chance that the old magic had soured over time, becoming something other than what was meant entirely. In those instances, the results could be…unexpected, and highly unpleasant.
Best to follow my mother’s advice, and look with my eyes, not my fingers.
“And there. Finished.” Cindy gave a few sharp taps to her keyboard, then closed the laptop. “This was an interesting job, to say the least.” A few moments later, the elderly woman entered, handing Cindy the pages from some unseen printer. She nodded to us all, her cheerful smile still in place, as she disappeared into the other room again.
“So what does it say?” Gretchen leaned forward, suddenly eager now that all the answers were within our reach.
The translator gave her a small smile, but turned her dark gaze toward me. “I believe there was the matter of payment?”
“What’s your price, then?” It hadn’t escaped me that Ivan said he didn’t trust this woman. I almost dreaded what was going to come out of her mouth.
She pursed her lips thoughtfully. “Hm. I think about five thousand dollars will suffice.”
“Done.” Gretchen whipped out her phone. “I can transfer that now.”
“Wait…what?” I blinked at the seemingly innocuous Asian woman.
She smiled at me, and while it was still saccharine sweet, there was something behind it. Something darker. “What did you expect me to ask for, Jesse? A lock of hair? Drop of blood? A soul? I can get those things easily, should I want them. But money for rent, for supplies, that’s a bit harder to come by. It turns out I really am a material girl.”
Gretchen did whatever it was she had to do, and Cindy handed over the printed pages. “You can read through the entire thing if you want, but I highlighted a few sections I found interesting. Page seven, paragraph three was one of them. It seemed…important.”
I crouched down next to Gretchen, looking over the printout as she flipped to the indicated paragraph. “Upon death, the additional souls collected will become the property of the collector’s master.” Oh yes, that was definitely the clause we needed to see. How very kind of Cindy to guess just what we were about. Kind, my ass. She knew too much on such a short acquaintance, and I was really starting to not like it.
Gretchen looked at me, puzzled. “I don’t understand. Is the demon that made this contract my master?”
“I think that’s the loophole, Gretchen.” I flipped a few pages forward and backward, skimming for the pertinent words, but I wasn’t surprised when I didn’t find them. “Your ‘master’ is never defined. So I think what happens is, these souls go to whoever you name as your master. The decision lies with you.” And that’s why that thing was after me, not her. They couldn’t risk killing her until she’d passed her cargo on to someone else. They needed it to be someone on their side. They needed to get me away from her, lest I influence her choice. Axel’s master plan was starting to become clear to me. The bastard.
“Is there anything in here regarding a New Year’s Eve date?” I flipped through again as I asked, but I was already pretty sure I wasn’t going to find anything.
“Nothing that I saw, no,” Cindy answered. “Momentous date, though. Turning of the year and all. Things happen on a date like that.”
“Why?” Gretchen fixed her sharp blue gaze on me. “Why ask about New Year’s?”
I hadn’t told her. I should have, but I hadn’t. I think that makes me some kind of asshole. “The person who sent me out here said that everything would be settled one way or another by New Year’s Eve.”
“That’s tomorrow. Settled how?”
“I don’t know.” She gave me a suspicious look, and I took her hand. “I swear, Gretchen. Even the person who said that didn’t know what it meant.”
“Y’know, it might have been nice to know that the world was gonna end in twenty-four hours or something.” She stood up, snatching her translated contract out of my hands. “The original. I want it back too.”
Cindy handed that over with a rueful smirk that said she’d have kept it if we’d have conveniently forgotten about it.
“I’m getting goddamn tired of you people playing chess with my life.” Gretchen shot me a glare of pure venom, then whirled on her heel and stalked out of the room.
When I tried to follow Gretchen as she stormed out, the translator caught my wrist to stop me. “Hang back a moment.” I really, really didn’t want to be alone with this woman, but good manners required that I stop. Cindy waited until she heard the alleyway door slam before she continued. “I see things, Jesse Dawson.”
“Like dead people?”
A flicker of annoyance crossed her face. “You don’t have time for snark. Listen to me. That girl’s light isn’t much longer for this world. You mentioned New Year’s Eve…I don’t expect her to see the new year.”
“And you would know this how?”
“Like I said, I see things. I see the thin golden threads on you, stretching back to the East over so many miles. Protection spells, from a woman who loves you very much. I see the shadows left behind by contracts you’ve made. I bet you never knew that they left ghostly little marks. I see how long your light stretches for. Would you like to know?”
“No.” A man shouldn’t know the hour of his own death. It’s just not right. Not that I believed she’d tell the truth anyway. “These things you see…are they certain?”
“Of course not. Nothing is ever certain until it’s passed, and even then it’s negotiable.” She smiled a little, finally releasing my arm to sit back on the futon again. “My own light should have ended…well, longer ago than you’ve been alive.”
“You expect me to believe that you’re older than me?” I’d have bet money that I had a good decade on her.
Cindy smiled sweetly again. “The woman who let you in here? She is my great-granddaughter.”
“Why would you tell me this?” I mean, if she really was what she said she was, you’d think that kind of thing would be a little more hush-hush.
“Because someday, you’re going to come to me, Jesse Dawson, and you’re going to want to know how it was done. And if you’re very, very unlucky, I might even tell you.” She grinned then, showing teeth, and a shiver went down my spine.
“You see that too?”
“No. We’ll call that one a hunch.”
I shook my head. “Does Ivan know what you are?” I had a hard time believing that he’d have sent us here, knowing that she was…what the hell was she?
The strange woman chuckled softly. “Ivan and I have known each other for a very long time. You’d better be going. She’s going to take off without you in another few moments.”
That, I believed.
18
“I’m going to die, aren’t I?”
We’d ridden back to the hotel in stony silence, Gretchen’s pique with me obvious just by the set of her lovely jaw. It was only after we were alone, Tai retiring to the spare bedroom for some much needed shut-eye, that the movie star deigned to speak to me again.
“Everyone dies, Gretchen.” I looked up from my place on the couch, my armor in my lap as I lightly oiled the leather straps.
“Yeah, but soon. I’m going to die soo
n.” On the other sofa, she sat with her feet curled beneath her, her legs bare in a pair of tiny shorts, but the rest of her almost lost in the huge sweatshirt she’d thrown on. A man’s shirt, that much was certain. Dante’s, if I had to guess. “You said it’s all going to be over by New Year’s.”
How to answer that? If Mystic Cindy was to be believed, Gretchen had just over twenty-four hours to live. New Year’s Eve was fast approaching. The thing was, I didn’t trust Cindy any more than I trusted Axel. Neither were what I’d call a reliable source. “The ancient samurai believed that death wasn’t a thing to be feared. It wasn’t the dying that was important, it was how you died.”
“Do you believe all that?” She sat forward a little, watching as I worked with my mail armor. “The whole samurai bit?”
“Yes, I do.” Since she seemed so interested, I shifted my position so she could see what I was doing, laying the piece out flat. “These are chausses. They cover my legs when I fight.”
She reached out to touch the tiny links of chain. “So if you think that dying is nothing to be feared, why do you wear armor?”
I chuckled. “Just because I’m not afraid of it doesn’t mean I wanna jump into it. Besides, there are worse things than dying.” Excruciating pain came to mind. Picking your own intestines up out of the dirt. Things like that.
Her curious hands went next to the rest of my gear, poking through the pile of supple metal. “How does this all work?”
“You want me to put it on and show you?” Honestly, giving an armor how-to was much preferable to debating mortality. When she nodded, I got up, laying all the pieces out flat so I could get them on correctly. “First, the padding. ’Cause this stuff is heavy, and the links pinch when they move.” Getting chain mail caught in leg or chest hair? Like I said. Excruciating pain.
The padding part of my armor was easy to get into. It was the rest of it that required long hours of practice. Gretchen watched me for a few moments, then got up to help with the buckles. “So you have a handler that helps you get into this stuff for a fight, right?”
A Wolf at the Door Page 21
