“Until they actually need it, and realize they’ve been had. False confidence can get somebody—”
He broke off, because another flying camera had just zoomed in. This one was faster than the others, ducking and diving to elude the two war mages following it. And was doing a pretty good job.
“Damn it!” James barked. “I told you to find them!”
“I think there’s more than one group, sir,” one of the mages panted, swiping at the flying menace—and missing.
James said a word that sounded like an expletive, but I guess not. Because the next second, the camera zoomed right into his hand, as if magnetized. And a second after that, it was making these sad little whirring noises as it was slowly crushed in an iron grip.
The parallels with Vader were just piling up tonight.
“Then find both of them!” he snapped, and strode off, coat flaring.
“James—”
“Look around, but stay out of people’s way,” he said, spinning and walking backward. “And remember—we got a deal. What you know, I know.”
He whirled and went outside, I guess to yell at his boys some more, and I stared back down at the box.
Well, this was helpful.
I poked around a little, hoping to find something useful, but it was difficult. Because Fin was back, squatting down and getting his nose into everything. Literally.
He was also looking a little weird, all of a sudden. His eyes were blown wide—for a troll’s—but his mouth was almost nonexistent. He looked like he’d been sucking on an alum lollipop. He also kept casting little glances over his shoulder at a nearby mage, who was busy magicking up a model of a guy’s face from an imprint in the dirt.
One of the slavers might have gotten away, but he’d left something behind. He’d face-planted, whether from running too fast or from the troll’s fist, into the couple inches of dirt that had collected by a support column. And now the mage was pulling out the imprint of his features and inverting it, leaving a perfect mask floating in the air.
It reminded me of death masks I’d seen, the plaster casts of dead people’s faces that were once considered a nifty idea. It even had a map of the guy’s acne scars spread out over the thin cheeks and revealed that he had buckteeth. Although the latter might look a little different now, considering how hard he must have hit down.
I watched the mage solidify it, muttering something that made the dirt harden into a claylike model. And then wished I hadn’t. Some of the features were mushed and flattened, on the side where he’d hit down first, I supposed. The solidification turned them into a sludge of misshapen earth that looked a lot like the “faces” on the manlikans.
And sent a shiver up my spine.
I looked back down at the junk in the box and wondered if this meant anything. I didn’t like coincidences, but I couldn’t see Geminus giving a damn about crap weapons. And for that matter, neither did I.
I was looking for something big enough to warrant the response we’d had last night. Something game-changing. Something profitable enough to tempt a group of guys who’d just seen their family eviscerated to give it another go.
This was not it.
And then Fin grabbed my arm.
The war mage glanced over, his attention drawn by the sudden movement, and Fin started talking quickly. “I used to carry this kinda stuff at my place,” he told me. “They send guys around, from the manufacturers, you know, with these display boxes. Pay you a percentage if you put ’em by the cash register or behind the bar. I made some nice extra cash for a while.”
“You didn’t feel a little guilty?” I asked, looking down at his hand. Which was eating into my skin.
“Naw, naw, why would I? No different than that knockoff pepper spray they sell in convenience stores. Half of it don’t work, but it makes people feel better to carry it around. More secure.”
“Without being, in fact, any more secure.” If I was going to carry a weapon, I damned well wanted it to work. I also wanted him to let go, because I was about to have a permanent imprint of his fingers in my flesh.
I tried shaking him off, but his grip tightened. “And practical jokes,” he said, a little shrilly. “Most of the guys bought ’em for that or pranks. I made a killing!”
“Then why’d you get rid of them?” I asked, as the war mage started transferring his delicate sculpture into a case.
It looked like they were finishing up, magic turning what should have been a day’s work into a couple hours’. The last bodies were being carted out, and cases were being snapped shut here and there. And, somehow, I couldn’t see James letting us stay behind on our own.
Just as well; I had another errand to run.
But Fin didn’t seem to feel the same.
“Same reason most shops don’t carry fireworks,” he squeaked. “Some moron’s gonna misuse ’em. Had a couple guys playing chicken with one of the acid bombs, and it ate a chunk out of the polyurethane on the bar. Had to get the whole thing redone—”
“Listen, Fin—”
“—and then these two losers got in a fight,” he said, his voice reaching levels usually reserved for twelve-year-old girls and dog whistles. “And knocked the box over, sending all these things bouncing around the bar, some of them ricocheting off walls and breaking stuff, others setting fires. Weak don’t mean dead, not when fifty of ’em get set off all at once. I had to shut down for the whole night—”
The war mage clicked his case closed and walked off, and Fin jerked on my arm, bringing me as close to his face as the nose would allow.
“We got trouble!” he whispered.
“What kind?”
“The big blue kind!”
I looked at him and frowned. And then I looked where he deliberately wasn’t: at the pile of selkies. All heaped up in one spot, even though there was no reason for them to be, and squirming, squirming, squirming . . .
And hiding, hiding, hiding, I realized, an additional couple people in the crowd.
Well, shit.
Chapter Thirty-six
I joined Fin in staring blankly at the crate, and tried to think.
Blue was massive—like, “I’ve lived in smaller apartments” massive—so he must be under the floor. No way were the selkies’ emaciated bodies concealing him and Granny any other way. But they could cover any light the reveal spell might have tried to shine up through the floorboards.
Like around a trapdoor?
Seemed like the kind of thing smugglers might build, if it hadn’t been there already. Concealment charms worked better on enclosed areas, like a closet or a small room. Leaving them to float around nebulously tended to disperse them and use up power faster, and then your talisman putzed out or the spell became too thin to actually conceal anything, and why was I thinking about this right now?
Maybe because I didn’t want to think about how we were going to get them out.
“We gotta get gone,” Fin said softly. “They’re gonna move those selkies in a minute, and then—”
“People die.”
Because no way was Blue going down easy.
And no way were a bunch of armed-to-the-teeth war mages, with macho meters set on overdrive, going to play nice with an illegal, homicidal, massive battle troll, and his gun-toting sidekick.
This . . . could be bad.
Apparently, Fin thought so, too, because he started pulling on me. “Yeah, like us if we don’t get out of here!”
I looked at him. “So that’s your solution? We just leave him to be slaughtered, or to slaughter somebody else?”
He nodded vigorously. “Now you’re getting it.”
He got up.
I pulled him back down.
“You could live with yourself?”
Tiny, furious eyes met mine. “Better than I could as a greasy spot on the floor! I’m not a dhampir. You wanna play hero, fine. Just don’t expect me—”
“Pity about those profits, though.”
“—to be Rambo Jr. because I ain’t—” He stopped. “What profits?”
“The profits you were rolling in tonight. The profits you’re probably going to make every time those two take on some slavers. You’ve invented a whole new way to broadcast the fights, and only you have it. None of those other guys had your foresight—”