She thought this over while I sorted through the pastry box she’d brought for the boys. Tonight was muffins, although I couldn’t tell what kind. “What are these?”
“Lemon.”
I sniffed one. Human food was still a new experience for the fey, who tended to combine things in odd ways. I took a bite.
“And these green things?”
“Asparagus.”
That’s what I’d thought.
We reached the truck and Olga climbed in, making the struts groan and drop another inch. I donated the muffins to the boys in back and turned to follow suit. And found a chest in the way.
It was a nice chest, wearing a blue knit pullover in some kind of thin material that outlined hard pecs and a washboard stomach. It was attached to an even nicer pair of denim-covered thighs and a butt that ought to be hanging in a museum somewhere. It even smelled good—a rich, sweet, decadent scent that always reminded me of butterscotch.
The face topping the whole mountain of awesome was pretty nice, too. Even crowned by a mass of auburn, Breck-girl hair pulled back from a manly jaw by an understated tortoiseshell clip. And even if it was currently regarding me sardonically.
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
That got me a raised eyebrow. “Aren’t you glad to see me?”
I guess so, since my nipples just got hard, I didn’t say, because his ego was big enough as it was.
“It’s just a little unexpected.”
“I gathered that.” Narrowed blue eyes took in the straining truck. “Am I interrupting something?”
“Just . . . going out with some friends.”
“Indeed. That is reassuring. For a moment, I thought you might be planning to contravene doctor’s orders.”
Yeah, I was busted.
“We’re going to see the fights,” I said, hoping he somehow hadn’t noticed the army-issue truck, the armed-to-the-teeth posse, and the half ton of illegal weaponry I had hidden around my outfit.
An eyebrow raised.
Well, shit.
“I enjoy a good fight,” Louis-Cesare said, in what had to be the understatement of the century. “I’ll come along. Consider it a date.”
“A date, huh?” I looked him over. “If I buy you a popcorn, do I get to have my way with you later?”
He took a step, and I suddenly found myself trapped between hard steel and harder vampire. “How big of a popcorn?”
“I don’t know. What am I getting in return?”
He bent over and whispered something in my ear.
I swallowed. “We’ll see if they have a bucket.”
* * *
—
They didn’t have a bucket.
They did have beer, overpriced and in tiny paper cups, sold by enterprising types out of a repurposed ice cream van that prowled up and down the ridiculously long line to get in. I wouldn’t have plunked down the cash for what was essentially highway robbery, but I had my evening ahead to think about. And I wanted to see what the so-cultured Louis-Cesare would do with a half-frozen beer. Because the truck’s freezers had not been repurposed along with the rest of it, leaving us with what amounted to beer Popsicles.
Not that I was complaining.
Until I ran into something.
I’d been distracted wondering how the gargoyle-like things driving the truck were managing to reach the pedals, since they were maybe toddler height, when I suddenly stopped moving. The obstacle in my way was skin warm, although it felt more like stone. And looked like it, too, when I turned my head to see so many muscles that some had given up trying to find an appropriate spot and were just bulging out haphazardly, wherever they could find room.
The living boulder regarded me for a second, and the squinty little eyes got squintier. “No,” he rumbled.
“No what?”
The rocklike dome, which lacked any sort of hair except for a couple robust tufts coming out of the ears, nodded at a nearby sign.
NO WEPINS, it informed me, in dripping acid green spray paint.
Okay, no.
“They have lockers,” Louis-Cesare murmured.
This was true. A stoner with a bad case of Muppet hair was sitting cross-legged on the dirt beside the sign, in front of a row of lockers. They looked like they’d been ripped wholesale off an elementary school wall, complete with bits of happy ducky wallpaper still clinging to the edges. And then piled haphazardly against a sagging chain-link fence, without any effort to secure them to anything. Meanwhile, their only guardian’s eyes were starting to cross from a joint the size of a cigar that he was munching on, Churchill-style.
“You have got to be kidding me,” I said.
“Move,” the boulder rumbled, when I just stood there.
“Then let me in.”
“Then lose the hardware.”
“You just let her in.” I nodded at a tall, model-pretty chick in a leather catsuit, with bright purple hair, carmine lipstick, and a half ton of lethal accessories. She disappeared through a gate in the chain-link and immediately flickered out of view, masked by whatever glamourie was being used to hide the night’s festivities.
The spell wasn’t perfect; every so often it let out a split second of raucous music, or a glimpse of smoky darkness lit by odd smears of light. But mostly it held. Meaning that the only thing I could see past the sagging fence was an overgrown lot strewn with grimy police tape, some pools of water from this afternoon’s downpour, and the fire-gutted building that had brought us all here.
Fly-by-night pop-up events like this preferred disaster areas, because any damage could be written off as part of the previous catastrophe. But this one was a little more catastrophic looking than usual. The sun was setting, making the old brick building appear to still be on fire, with the last rays boiling in broken, smoke-clouded glass. Glass that looked a lot like jagged teeth, framing the solid black maws of burnt-out windows, which could be hiding anything, anything at all.
Yeah.
“Imma need my weapons,” I told Boulder Boy.
“Know her. Don’t know you,” he said slowly, answering my previous comment. Because lightning fast was not the processing speed we were dealing with here. But then, most people didn’t want to pay for a bouncer who could think. Most people wanted a bouncer who could follow orders, and I was getting the definite impression that once an idea got lodged in that rocklike cranium, it didn’t get out again.
Well, not without some help.
“Hold my beer,” I told Louis-Cesare.
But then backup arrived. At least, I guess that’s what it was, because an arm the size of a small bus reached out of the glamourie and grabbed, not me—because I know how to move when I have to—but a guy standing behind me. Who had also come armed for bear, but not armed for whatever the hell had just grabbed him. And had now turned him upside down and was shaking him like a maraca.
For a moment, all conversation stopped as the line watched the shakedown. A couple knives, five guns, a set of brass knuckles, and half a dozen extra clips fell out of the guy’s coat and jeans and various useless holsters. Because they weren’t meant to stand up to that kind of abuse.
Of course, neither was human anatomy, and he’d looked pretty human to me. But I guess not. Because he was still breathing when the arm dropped him a moment later.
On his head.
“No weapons,” the bouncer told me.
“Gotcha.”
It was finally decided that one of the trolls, a small mountain named Sten who was nonetheless looking at the arm with respect, would take my stuff back to the truck and babysit it. That left us a man down, but I was somehow less concerned about security, all of a sudden.
The stoner cranked off a bunch of tickets from a roll that looked like the kind you got after stuffing quarters in a Skee-Ball machine, and Olga accepted them with a regal inclination of her head. She swept through the gate, with Louis-Cesare and me on her heels. And I guess the rest of the trolls brought up the rear, but I wasn’t sure because— “Holy shit!”
Chapter Two