chapter SIX
It turned out that losing my mind and then getting it back was a motivator. I’d been pumped to do some damage even before Leticia started yanking my chain. When the game started up again, I was even more focused than before.
Although I didn’t hate her the way I did Wotan and Gimble. Maybe that was her gift working. If you liked girls, you couldn’t really hate her no matter how you tried. But I sure did want to knock her out of the game.
I didn’t. Nobody else went out that night. But, not long after the grandfather clock struck four, I flopped the nut straight, made the kind of big bet you often make when you don’t want a call, and got one from Gimble. He figured I was bluffing, which was what I wanted him to think. He had brains enough to fold when I put him all in on Fifth Street, but the hand still left him short-stacked. So that was progress, anyway.
When the session ended, I stood up, stretched, and looked for A’marie. She still wasn’t in the room. Then Timon grabbed me for some Monday morning quarterbacking. He mainly wanted to yell at me about how stupid it had been to risk his fief over a servant until I filled him in on what had really been going on.
When he finished with me, I went looking for A’marie. I couldn’t find her, and it wasn’t long before I started to drag. I wasn’t as tired as last night—or, technically, yesterday morning—but tired enough to convince me to pack it in.
Once again, I woke to see A’marie standing over me. This time, she had her clothes on, but she still looked cute.
“Hi.” I covered a yawn. “Are you supposed to just come in here whenever you feel like it?”
“I can start knocking if you want.”
“No, it’s okay. I was just thinking that if you want to get rid of Timon, and you guys all have passkeys… ”
“Lord Timon doesn’t sleep in the hotel or anyplace else where we can reach him. And even if he did, we probably couldn’t kill him.” Her silvery eyes narrowed. “Are you really going to punish me?”
Just then, I smelled bacon, and my mouth watered. I wasn’t starving like yesterday, but I was hungry. “Did you bring breakfast?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Then I’ll let you off with a warning.” I threw off the covers, revealing the shiny green silk pajamas I’d found in the dresser. I thought I looked stupid in them, but even if A’marie thought so, too, she managed not to giggle.
Like before, there was a ton of food, I invited her to share, and she said again that she wasn’t supposed to. The show of reluctance might have been more convincing if I hadn’t noticed the second set of silverware on the cart.
Everything was good. I enjoyed it until, for some reason, I suddenly remembered Wotan stuffing raw meat into his mouth. Then I set my fork on my plate with a bite of ham still stuck on it, wiped my lips, and pushed back from the table.
“Have you had enough?” asked A’marie.
“I guess so. Except for another cup of coffee.”
“I’ll get it.”
As she poured, I wondered what to say next. I decided to go with the obvious.
“Thank you,” I said. “And I don’t just mean for bringing this. Thanks for helping me during the game.”
She swallowed a last bite of guava-and-cheese turnover. “You’re welcome.”
I hesitated, and she sucked the sugary stickiness off her fingertips. “I just don’t understand why you helped me,” I said at last. “I thought you and your buddies want me to lose.”
“Lose,” she said. “Not die or go crazy. And I was afraid that was what was happening.”
“So was I. But are your friends mad at you for what you did?”
Now it was her turn to hesitate. “Kind of.”
“I’m sorry.”
“They’ll understand after they’ve had a chance to think it over.” She frowned. “We’re not all monsters. Although I couldn’t blame you for thinking we are, when you mostly spend your time with Timon and the other lords.”
“I don’t think that,” I told her. “You know, I looked for you last night, but you’d disappeared.”
“I had to leave the room to burn the handkerchief, so no one could use it against you anymore. And then I figured it would be safer to stay away from Leticia for a while.”
I sipped my coffee. “That was probably smart.”
“If you really do feel grateful,” she said, “will you do me a favor?”
“Sure,” I said, feeling cautious, and not liking myself because of it. “If I can.”
“You can,” she said. “I just want you to meet some people. They’re already here in the hotel.”
She waited while I brushed my teeth, shaved, showered, and pulled on a clean knit shirt and khakis. Then she picked up a candle in a silver holder and led me to a set of service stairs.
It was black in the stairwell, and almost as creepy when we reached the ground floor, even though there were a couple hurricane lamps burning. A spider web blocked the top half of a doorway, and the bride and groom figures from a wedding cake lay on a little round table. An upright piano on casters stood against a wall. The dust in the stale air tickled my nose and tried to make me sneeze, and roach droppings crunched under my feet.
“We don’t use this part,” said A’marie. “The kitchen and laundry are over that way.” She waved her hand to show which direction she meant. “So I was pretty sure that if I hid people here, Timon wasn’t likely to come across them.”
That little comment didn’t make me feel any happier about what was happening. But I kept following her anyway, even after I heard the panting and grunting.
The noises came from one of the scaly little finheads. Except that he almost wasn’t scaly anymore. He had too many scars crisscrossing his body, and the crest leaned to the side and had holes in it, like Swiss cheese. He was grunting and gasping as he strained to break the nylon zip restraints that held his hands behind his back and his ankles together. When he spotted A’marie and me in the doorway, he tried to scream instead, but the leather gag muffled the sound.
He lay on the floor on the floor of a storage room with empty shelves, give or take a few old cans of peaches and fruit cocktail. A finhead female and two finhead boys stood around him. His family, I suspected. They were scarred up, too, though not as much. The female had a broken nose and was missing the top of her left ear. The smaller kid had lost the tips of two fingers, and had an oval made of tooth marks on his forearm.
“Thank you,” A’marie said. “I know how hard it is to move him. And that you ran a risk sneaking him in.”
The finhead woman shrugged. “You said it would help.” She scowled at me. “Is it?”
“Is this your husband?” I asked. “What happened to him?” Although I had a hunch I already knew.
Sure enough, she said, “Lord Timon.” She clenched her fist and slashed it back and forth. I’d never seen that particular gesture before, but I was pretty sure it meant she wanted the boss to burn in Hell.
“Why?” I asked.
“My cousin Francisco is a river master in Cuba,” she said. “He wanted to take Ezequiel, my firstborn, to be his apprentice. It was a wonderful opportunity. But Rufino was indentured. He had to beg permission for Ezequiel to leave.”
I assumed that Rufino was the guy squirming on the floor, and that indentured meant almost-a-thrall, maybe almost-a-thrall-till-you-made-good-on-a-debt. “And Timon didn’t appreciate being asked?”
“I was there, Mr. Billy! Rufino was as respectful as anyone could be. He offered to give another year of service. There was no reason for any master to take offense, unless he was just looking for excuses to be cruel!”
“So what happened?” I asked.
“Nothing then. Timon was… nice. He said he’d think about it. But then, the next night, Rufino woke up screaming. Naturally, that woke me up, and I asked him what was wrong. He whipped around, saw me, and attacked me. If the boys hadn’t come running, I think he would have killed me.” He face twisted, and she hid it in her hands.
So Ezequiel, who was wearing a baggy orange-and-white Bucs jersey, took up the story. “Dad’s been this way ever since.” His voice cracked. The finheads weren’t exactly human, but apparently they had to suffer through puberty just like we do. “He wants to hurt everybody, but especially us, and even tying him up doesn’t always help. He still finds ways to hurt himself, to make us come in close to stop him. And then he can get at us.”
“Jesus,” I said.
Mrs. Rufino lifted her head. “The joke,” she said, “was that at the end of the week, Timon sent word that Ezequiel had permission to go. Because he knew he wouldn’t, even if I begged. He’d stay to help take care of his father.”
She, the kids, and A’marie all looked at me expectantly. I couldn’t think of a thing to say that wouldn’t make me look like an a*shole. Then I felt a shiver inside my chest.
It was the same thing that had happened after Gimble beat up Clarence. I wanted to help somebody who was hurt, so my mojo was revving up.
I hadn’t helped the little squirrel man because I hadn’t known how. I still didn’t, really. But Timon’s coaching had given me an idea, and at least I felt fully charged. Last night, all I’d done was call up the Thunderbird. It mostly hadn’t helped me, but it hadn’t been all that difficult, either, and maybe I was starting to build some magic muscle.
I pictured the silver bird again, just to get to a magic-y state of mind. Then I reached inside myself. It was like trying to dredge up a memory that doesn’t want to come. But I was looking for Red.
When I felt him, I imagined him growing bigger and bigger inside me, until he completely filled me up. Until he was wearing my skin like a glove.
It wasn’t like when the giant’s axe chopped me into five pieces. This time, Red didn’t have a whole other mind of his own, and I didn’t black out when he took over. But my emotions changed.
Imagine if you’d been sick in a hospital bed your whole life, and then, all of a sudden, you were as healthy as an Olympic athlete. Imagine running out of that sad white building into the most beautiful spring day anybody ever saw.
It was kind of like that. I wanted to grab A’marie and jump her bones. I wanted to bust open the dusty old cans on the shelves and gobble the fruit inside. I wanted to run, jump, and slap out rhythms on the wall. To do anything, as long as it was a chance to feel and move.
But Red wasn’t driving. I was, the complete me, and I’d called up Mr. Ka to do a job. I shut my eyes, took a deep breath, and told me to calm down. It blunted the edge of that wild exhilaration. I still felt good, but not crazy good.
“Are you all right?” asked A’marie. “You’ve got this weird grin.”
“I’m fine,” I said. “I think that maybe I can help Rufino. I’m going to try.”
I knelt down beside him. He thrashed harder, trying to tear his hands free so he could hit me and to hitch himself around into position to kick me. He looked like a fish flopping in the bottom of a boat.
“Can you guys hold him still?” I asked the others.
They did, although it wasn’t easy, even with A’marie helping. I put both hands on his chest, like I was going to do CPR, and tried to stream some of Red’s energy down my arms and through the point of contact. It flowed in surges, in time with the pumping of my heart.
For maybe three seconds. Then the world blinked, and I was someplace else.
I spun around expecting to see stone columns, and the Pharaoh’s giants coming at me. I didn’t. I was standing under the night sky beside the black expanse of the Hillsborough River. I knew it was the Hillsborough because I could see the silver minarets of the University of Tampa lit up in the distance.
A scream cut through the dark.
I ran in that direction. I figured I was headed into trouble, but not a trap. My gut told me that it wasn’t the Pharaoh or any of my other opponents who’d dumped me here. It was my own magic. If I really wanted to help Rufino, this was where I needed to be.
I heard more screams. Then one of the bridges that cross the river appeared in the darkness ahead, with Tiki torches burning underneath the near end. Since there were a dozen finheads gathered in the pool of yellow light, I stopped running and started sneaking. I was twice as big as any of them, but big only gets you so far.
Afghanistan had taught me how to sneak, and I made it close enough to see what the finheads were doing. I felt like puking when I did.
They had one of their own staked spread-eagled on the ground. It’s tricky recognizing inhuman faces until you get familiar with the particular race, but I was pretty sure the prisoner was Rufino. And that it was his own wife and kids slicing him up with knives while the onlookers laughed and cheered them on. Ezequiel’s Bucs jersey was a giveaway.
I realized this was the nightmare that had driven Rufino nuts. Somehow, he was still stuck inside it, and my job was to get him out.
By blasting it to Hell? Maybe. I wished my rifle into my hands.
It didn’t work. At the moment, I was Red, and weapons weren’t his thing. I considered switching to one of the other souls, but I was afraid that would drop me out of the dream.
Screw it. I was juiced with Red’s energy, and I had surprise on my side. The finheads were little, and imaginary to boot. How tough could it be?
I found out when I rushed them.
At first it went okay. They were all so intent on the torture that I was able to get right on top of them before anybody noticed me. I grabbed the closest, who was dressed in baggy shorts and a wifebeater, heaved him up, and slammed him into the graffiti spray-painted on one of the concrete bridge supports. Bone cracked, and when I dropped him, he didn’t get up.
A different guy ran at my flank. I pivoted and snapped a kick into his stomach. He flew backward.
But by then everybody else was spreading out to surround me. The torchlight gleamed on their knives. They all had one, and most of them held their elbows cocked and the blades in line with their forearms, just like my DI had taught me. They knew what they were doing.
I realized I wasn’t just juiced with Red’s superhealth. I’d let it make me overconfident. But it was too late for second thoughts.
As I backpedaled toward one of the bridge supports—to keep anybody from getting behind me—I spotted one of the Tiki torches out of the corner of my eye. I reached and jerked it out of the ground. It was just bamboo, and bent and bounced in my hands. But it was better than no weapon at all.
A finhead came at me. I shoved the flaming end of the torch at his face, and he stopped short. At the same moment, I glimpsed or heard or felt motion right beside me. I jumped away from it, and a knife thrust fell short by an inch.
Ezequiel snarled and scrambled after me. As his arm pulled back for another stab, I booted him in the face. That was one nice thing about fighting short creatures. It was actually practical to go all Bruce Lee on them and kick them in the head.
Ezequiel reeled backward. I turned to find the next threat. Unfortunately, it found me first.
Something shoved the back of my right knee, or at least that was how it felt. No pain, not yet, just pressure. As I pitched forward, I realized that one nice thing about being a short creature fighting a human being was that you’re in a good position to hamstring him.
Other finheads swarmed on me. Each stab or slash was a paralyzing shock. But then energy roared up from the center of me and burned the weakness away.
I had maybe half a second before the next thrust or cut would come. I screamed and flailed with the torch. It was clumsy to use such a long weapon at close quarters, but it either knocked the finheads away or made them scramble back. Maybe because they hadn’t thought I had any fight left in me.
I hadn’t thought so, either, until Red healed my wounds. But I was pretty sure he couldn’t keep doing it over and over again. I needed to put an end to this.
I’d at least changed the dream. Was that worth anything? As I scrambled back onto my feet, I risked a glance in Rufino’s direction. He was watching the fight, but he was still a dissected, bloody mess, and still staked to the sandy ground. There was no reason to think that the other finheads wouldn’t go right back to torturing him after they finished with me.
It occurred to me to try to run back to my physical body. I could take another crack at helping Rufino later on. But no, to hell with that. There had to be a way to turn this thing around.
Ezequiel’s little brother stalked toward me. His knife swept through horizontal figure eights. I jabbed with the torch and caught him in the chest. He yelped, and one of the grown-up finheads, a female with little rimless glasses on her face and skinny gold bracelets on her arms, rushed at my flank. I didn’t have time to swing the burning end of the torch around, so I thrust with the other one.
It thumped on her collarbone, stopped her cold, and skipped upward. It snagged on a fold of scaly skin and tugged it up and outward before whipping free.
Except that I realized it wasn’t really a fold of skin. It was the bottom of a head mask more lifelike than anything you can buy at Halloween.
I yelled and threw the torch like a spear. Startled, the finheads flinched, and I launched myself into the middle of them. That’s where Mrs. Rufino was.
At that moment, any of them could have cut me, except that I’d surprised them. I drove a punch into Mrs. Rufino’s face. It jabbed pain through my knuckles, but it knocked her off balance, too. I grabbed her and hauled her toward her husband, with everybody else and everybody else’s knife just a step or two behind me. When I was close enough for him to get a good look, I gripped her fin and pulled.
The mask made a sucking sound as it came off. The head underneath was nothing but dozens of eyes glaring in all directions from a round black skull. It shouldn’t have filled out the mask to give it the right shape, but apparently magic had taken care of that.
“Look!” I yelled, still scrambling away from the other finheads and their shivs. “It’s not your wife! They’re not your kids and friends! This isn’t real!”
The thing that had been passing for Mrs. Rufino wrenched herself out of my grip and jammed her knife into my guts. The breath whooshed out of me, and I didn’t seem to be able to suck in any more.
But then a shock jolted everything. I’d never been in an earthquake, but I imagined it was probably like that, except that the jolt was inside my head as well as outside. It was like the world was a mirror, and suddenly, it cracked.
The hostile finheads froze like statues, some of them with their blades just inches from my body. Rufino thrashed, snapped the ropes tying his wrists and ankles to the stocks, and shakily drew himself to his feet. “Lies,” he said. That first one was a whisper, but he got louder with every repetition, until he was screaming at the end: “Lies, lies, lies, lies, lies!”
I felt another shock, and another. Sections of what was in front of me disappeared, leaving white emptiness behind. If this place had been a cracked mirror before, now it was shattering completely, and pieces were falling out of the frame.
After another second, I fell out of it, too. I was back in my physical body with my hands on Rufino’s chest. I brought up another surge of Red’s energy, and this time I used some of it to wash away the scary feeling of wrongness in my stomach. After that, I could tell that Mr. Ka didn’t have any more to give. So I let him go, to sink back down inside me or mix himself back in with the rest of me.
Then, panting like I’d run ten miles, I looked down at Rufino to see if I’d actually accomplished anything.
His fin was still ragged and tilted off center, and scars still covered his skin. But he’d stopped struggling, and there wasn’t any terror, hatred, or craziness in his eyes, just a plea to be let out of the gag and restraints.
So that was what his family did. Then there was a lot of babbling and hugging. Rufino told them he was sorry for making their lives hell, and they told him it wasn’t his fault.
A’marie and I stood back and left them to it. Then she gasped, stepped right in front of me, and stooped to get a better look at the front of my shirt.
I looked down at it, too. It had blotches of wet blood all over it, with the biggest one on the stomach. I figured I had one on the back of my right pant leg, too.
“It’s okay,” I said. I pulled up the shirt to show there weren’t any wounds underneath.
Not anymore. Still, if I needed more proof that what happened while I was outside my body could kill me, well, now I was wearing it. And seeing, feeling, and smelling it made me feel lightheaded and queasy.
“Mr. Billy,” Rufino said.
I turned and saw him and the family looking at me.
“Thank you,” he continued. “It’s so… small just to say you saved me. That you saved our whole family. I wish I had bigger, better words.”
I wished I did, too, but the best I could do was: “You’re welcome. And now I think it’s probably time for the whole family to bug out to Cuba, don’t you? You don’t owe Timon anything anymore, not after what he did to you, and you don’t want him finding out you got better. He might decide to hex you all over again.”
“But if Timon isn’t the lord here anymore,” said A’marie, “then he won’t be able to hurt Rufino. He won’t dare to deprive another lord of the use of one of his servants.”
I sighed. I’d known this was coming. Still, it would have been nice to have another minute or two as everybody’s hero.
“You can’t count on Timon losing the fief,” I said. “Because I’m still not going in the tank.”
A’marie stared at me. “I don’t understand. You saw what Timon did to Rufino. It must have moved you, or you wouldn’t have healed him. Are you afraid of Timon’s revenge? Because you don’t have to be. If you make a deal with one of the other lords, he’ll protect you.”
“That isn’t it,” I said.
“Then what?
I wasn’t sure I could put it into words that would make any sense. Or that wouldn’t make me sound like a selfish scumbag. So I went a different way.
“Look,” I said, “I get it: Timon’s the devil. But I watched Wotan eat some poor person he murdered. Gimble beat the shit out of Clarence just to make it look like he didn’t stick me on purpose. Leticia messed with my brain just like Timon messed with Rufino’s, and the Pharaoh tried to mangle my soul. Maybe there isn’t any difference.”
A’marie’s eyes kept drilling into me. “You don’t know anything about our world or how we live. All you’ve seen is the lords’ stupid game. So don’t try to tell us you understand them and their ways better than we do!”
“I wasn’t,” I said, although I guessed that really, I had been.
“Please, A’marie,” Mrs. Rufino said, “it’s all right. He’s done so much already. We can’t ask—”
“It’s not all right,” snapped A’marie, “and I can ask! Of course we’re grateful for what he’s already done. But we need him to help everybody, not just one person!” She turned her glare back on me. “If you won’t do it because it’s right, do it because I stopped Leticia from hurting you.”
“And then I stopped her from hurting you,” I said. And was sorry as soon as the words came out of my mouth, since A’marie had only been in trouble because she’d stuck her neck out for me.
I could tell from the way her mouth twisted that she agreed with me that it had been a dick thing to say. “Fine,” she said. “Do what you have to do. Help Timon, take your money, and go away. We’ll fix our own problems.”
With that, she turned and disappeared down the dark hallway. Her spindly goat legs moved in kind of a delicate, mincing way even when she was mad and stamping along.
After that, there wasn’t much to do but ask Rufino and the family if they knew their way out. It turned out they did, so I didn’t have to help them look for it. I borrowed one of the hurricane lanterns—A’marie had taken our candle with her—and climbed the stairs back up to my room to put on fresh clothes.
There was a manila envelope leaning against the bottom of my door. And maybe all the danger and craziness was making me paranoid, but I got a bad feeling as soon as I saw it.
But it probably wasn’t a letter bomb, or the magical equivalent of one, and I couldn’t just stand and stare at it all day. I picked it up, tore open the flap, and dumped out what was inside. It turned out to be a cell phone.
A gift from Timon, to replace the one he’d blown up? I doubted it was his style to be so thoughtful. I flipped it open and checked for stored numbers and messages. I didn’t find either one.
Feeling edgy, I unlocked the door, carried the phone inside, and set it on the table in the middle of the dirty breakfast dishes. I was just pulling on another shirt when it rang, playing a bland little riff of tinny electronic music.
I snatched it up and said, “Hello.”
At first, nobody answered. I wondered if I should throw the phone across the room before something supernatural and nasty jumped through the connection. For all I knew, that kind of thing could happen. Then a girl said, “Billy?” I could tell from the catch in her voice that she’d been crying.
All of a sudden, my throat felt clogged. I was scared in a way I hadn’t been even when all the finhead impersonators were coming at me with their knives. “Vic?” I answered.
“They beat me up,” she whimpered. “And they say they won’t let me go until—” Then she wasn’t there anymore.
“Vic?” I said. “Vic?”
“She’s all right,” Rhonda Sullivan said in her husky four-packs-a-day voice. “But she isn’t going to stay that way unless you bring my money.”
“I’m getting it!” I said. “I just need a little more time!”
“This afternoon,” Rhonda said, and then hung up.
My hands shaking, I hit Redial. My call didn’t go through.
I strained to push panic out of my head and think. None of this made sense. Rhonda and the Martinezes shouldn’t have kidnapped an innocent, a real citizen, no less, just to put the screws to the likes of me. The return wasn’t worth the risk. And even if they were going to, they shouldn’t have picked on Vic. They shouldn’t even have known who she was.
And speaking of stuff that didn’t add up, how had the new cell phone gotten in front of the door to the room, and how had Rhonda known to call me on it?
There was only one explanation. One of the lords had somehow gotten Rhonda to do something she’d normally never do. Which still left the question of how any of the monsters had known about Rhonda or Vic. But hey, magic.
I ran downstairs to the front desk. The guy behind it told me Timon wanted me and was waiting in the meeting room where we’d talked the night before. So I rushed back up to the mezzanine.
Timon looked like his recovery was coming along. He had pale, glistening lumps in his sockets, although they weren’t anything you’d actually call eyes. Not yet. He sniffed twice when I burst through the doorway, then scowled.
“You’ve been working magic,” he said. “Why?”
“It doesn’t matter,” I answered. “Something’s happened.” Pacing around, I told him what it was.
When I finished, he said, “Hm. When you were experiencing your ‘flashbacks,’ as you called them, it’s possible Leticia caught glimpses of them, too. That could have led her to this Victoria.”
“Whatever. The point is, I have to pay Rhonda, and that means I need my money early.”
“No,” he said, “the real point is that one of my rivals wants to lure you out of the hotel, where you’ll be easier to attack.”
“I know that,” I said. “I’m not stupid. But I still have to help Vic.”
“Why?” he asked.
“What?”
“If she’s your ex-fiancée, why do you care?”
“Because,” I said, “not so long ago, she meant everything to me. I’m still grateful for all good times we had and all the things she did for me. I don’t expect you to understand—”
“The problem,” he said, “is that you don’t understand. This woman is only a human, and you’ve grown into something more: a lord’s champion. You can’t let a sentimental attachment distract you from what’s actually important.”
I glared. “Meaning, saving your ass.”
“Meaning, fulfilling your responsibilities according to our bargain, and so assuring yourself of a comfortable place in the world where you really belong.”
“Look,” I said, “it doesn’t have to be one thing or the other. If you’re worried about me, give me some bodyguards to tag along when I deliver the money.”
“I admit, that would reduce the danger. But not enough. My rivals are powerful and clever, and I seem to be going through a patch where my servants aren’t as motivated as they ought to be.”
“Well, how about if you have a messenger deliver the money? I can tell him where to take it.”
He frowned. The blob in his right eye socket started twitching over and over again. Bubbly fluid seeped out from underneath it, and I caught a raw-meat smell through his usual cloud of funk. “If I pay you in advance,” he said, “what is there to keep you motivated?”
“Oh, come on!” I said. “If you’ve been paying attention at all, you know I want to beat these a*sholes. Hell, everything they do just makes me want it more. And I will. I’ve dominated the table ever since you brought me in.”
“Still… ”
“If I lose, I’ll pay you back.”
He scowled. “Yes, you will, or—”
“You’ll kill me,” I snapped. “Or hex me. I understand that, too. I’ve seen how you people work. So let’s skip over the threats and just get the damn money together, okay?”
Eventually, we did. One of the Tuxedo Team brought bundles of bills from the hotel safe. We counted out a hundred and fifty thousand, and I pocketed twenty. I swear to God, at that point, all I really cared about was getting Vic out of trouble. But still, there was no point giving away money I didn’t owe.
Timon sent a guy named Donald, who looked pretty normal except for really long, pointed fingernails, each painted a different color, to deliver the cash. Afterward, I prowled around the hotel and waited for my new cell phone to ring.
It didn’t. And as time crawled by, I got more and more worried. More and more sure that sending the money wasn’t really going to accomplish anything at all.
Because if one of the lords was controlling Rhonda and the Martinez brothers, with magic hypnotism or whatever, then the real point of taking Vic prisoner was to get me out of the poker game. Which meant they wouldn’t let her go even after they got paid. They’d just keep using her against me.
A picture flashed into my mind. I walked into the nightly buffet, and this time, it was Vic lying in pieces on Wotan’s long silver tray, with her face still untouched so I could recognize her.
I needed to go to Rhonda’s store and see what was happening. But even desperate as I felt, I realized it would be a bad idea just to head for the front door and my car. Timon might have told his flunkies to stop me if I tried to leave, and it was possible that one of the other lords had agents waiting right outside to jump me.
I asked one of the Tuxedo Team where A’marie was. I found her on the fourth floor, brushing at the carpet in the hall with a broom and a kind of dustpan on a long handle. I guessed that was how everybody had to sweep a rug before Edison and Tesla gave us electricity.
Her face lit up when she saw me coming, and even with everything else I had on my mind, I winced when I realized I was about to disappoint her all over again. “I need your help,” I said, and then filled her in on what had happened and what I needed.
By the time I finished, she was frowning. “And if I do this,” she said, “are you going to give me what I want in return?”
“No,” I admitted. What else could I say? I felt more obligated to Timon than ever, now that I’d actually taken his money. “Look, you said it yourself. I’m a stranger in your world. I don’t know anything about anything. I’m not the guy you should be looking at to win the revolution.”
“Then why would I help you?” she replied.
“Well, I saved Rufino. I even got knifed doing it, or near enough. Didn’t I score any points for that?”
She looked at me for what felt like a long time. Her silver eyes reflected the light of the candle burning nearby. Finally she asked, “Do you really love Victoria?”
I shrugged. “I used to.”
“Wait for me in your room,” she said. She leaned the broom and pan against the wall and hurried away.
It took her a while to come back. I’d figured it would. But I was so impatient that I was about to say screw it and just make a dash for the T-bird when the lock clicked and she opened the door.
As I hurried over to her, she reached inside her black coat with its white carnation and shiny lapels, brought out a Smith and Wesson Model 439, and offered it grip first. “Is it all right?” she asked.
I wasn’t a big handgun guy. I would have felt a lot more at home with a rifle. But the automatic would put a hole in somebody, and it’s tough to tuck an M16 into the back of your jeans and hide it under the tail of your shirt.
“It’s fine,” I said, ejecting the magazine, then shoving it back in. “Where’d you get it?”
“It belongs to one of Timon’s guards. He won’t miss it for a while.”
So Timon let his people keep loaded pistols? I wondered again why they didn’t just kill him. Were they just that scared of him, or was he bulletproof? Was that possible, considering what the brownwings had—
I shoved that line of questions out of my mind. Timon wasn’t the problem, not right now.
“Are you ready to go?” asked A’marie.
I tucked the pistol into the back of my jeans. “Yeah,” I said.
This time we had to grope our way down the service stairs without a candle. I understood why. She didn’t want anybody to spot a light moving through the dark.
We had light for just a few seconds when we got to the ground floor, because one of the hurricane lamps was still burning. She took my hand and led me on, back into blackness and around a couple turns. Past the storeroom where we’d met the finheads, probably, although I wasn’t sure. Voices echoed, too soft and distorted for me to make out the words. The sound gnawed at my nerves. I told myself it was just the kitchen workers talking, not ghosts. Although for all I knew, ghosts were real, too.
I didn’t realize we’d reached a door until she cracked it open. The strip of bright sunlight dazzled me. Squinting, I made out a beat-up old Miata with faded paint and the top down. A’marie had parked it in a sort of rectangular niche that connected to an alley.
“I don’t see anybody,” she whispered.
“Me, either,” I replied.
“Then come on!”
We scrambled to the car. A Miata’s not made for a guy with long legs, but I wedged myself into the passenger side as best I could. I was still groping under my ass to find my seat belt when A’marie threw the convertible into reverse, backed out into the alley, then headed for the street. While she waited for a break in the traffic, I spotted my T-bird sitting safe and sound, without even a ticket on the windshield. Then she turned right and sped away from the hotel.
It would be bullshit to say that all the things that had happened since I met Timon suddenly seemed like a dream. How could they? I was riding shotgun beside a goat girl and on my way to deal with a problem that other strange creatures had caused. But it did feel weird to be suddenly back in the middle of normal life. All around us, human beings were doing ordinary human things. Drivers drove. Pedestrians scurried along. A woman dressed all in black set a panting on an easel in the window of an art gallery. A fat guy in a business suit fed a credit card into an ATM.
A’marie drove fast and changed lanes often, but she was good at it. I was about as comfortable as I ever was when it wasn’t me behind the wheel. I wondered if she had any trouble working the pedals with her hooves.
“‘How did he do those terrific stunts with such little feet?’” I quoted. Or misquoted, probably.
She shot me a smile. “Blazing Saddles.”
“Right. One of my dad’s favorite movies.”
“Well, they aren’t all that little. And they aren’t numb, or clumsy, or anything like that.”
“I didn’t really think they were.” I hesitated. “Look, I’m really grateful to you for helping me in spite of… well, you know.”
“I know,” she answered, and then we were quiet for a while. Until I realized we were going the wrong direction.
There are a couple good ways to get from downtown to Ybor City. So I didn’t think anything about it until A’marie shot past the last of the turnoffs. Then I said, “Hey!”
“If you’re going to walk right into a trap one of the lords has set for you,” A’marie answered, “you’ll need help, and I know where to get it. I promise it won’t take long.”
I hadn’t necessarily planned ‘to walk right into’ anything, but still, maybe she had a point. So I let her drive on to the northwest corner of Woodlawn Cemetery. To the part called Showmen’s Rest.
It’s the part of the cemetery reserved for circus and carnival workers. A little bit famous, at least to us Tampa natives, although it didn’t look any different than the rest of the graveyard. It was just a field with a low sandstone wall around it, and the markers were just little rectangular slabs. They weren’t shaped like tilt-a-whirls or elephants or anything like that.
As we got out of the car, A’marie fluffed up her tousled black curls, maybe to make sure they hid her horns. I didn’t think she needed to. There was nobody else around.
Which wasn’t all that encouraging, really. Where was the help she’d promised? I’d relaxed a little on the way over, probably because I felt that at least I was on my way to rescue Vic, but now worry and impatience sank their teeth into me again.
“Well?” I asked.
“This way,” said A’marie. She headed toward the garden mausoleum at the south end of the graveyard. As I followed, I wondered if she was going to introduce me to another walking dead man like the Pharaoh, or if she had some useful gadget like Frodo’s ring stashed inside the crypt.
When we were most of the way across the field, somebody whistled.
I turned around. I didn’t see anybody, but the shrill sound came again. I pulled the pistol out of the back of my jeans and said, “A’marie! We’re not alone.”
And I guess she answered me. But not with words.
Soft piping started up behind me. It sounded like Zamfir. But the few snatches of his music I’d heard on late-night TV commercials had never started my feet skipping and hopping to the beat like I was dancing some kind of folk dance.
I couldn’t stop, but I still had enough control over my legs to dance around to face A’marie. Her cheeks bulging, she was puffing away on a set of panpipes, and her left hand was also holding a white handkerchief. I couldn’t see the spot of my blood on it, but I was pretty sure it was there.
I know what you’re thinking: For somebody who’s been telling you what a kick-ass poker player he was, I hadn’t done very well at picking up tells on A’marie. She’d conned me from the moment she claimed to have burned the handkerchief right up until a second ago, when the whistles had given her the chance to pull the pipes out of her coat without me seeing. What can I say? I liked her, I was so worried about Vic that I wasn’t thinking straight, and besides, people who want to set you up don’t generally hand you a loaded pistol.
Which I now pointed at her as best I could. Even with her hexing me, I didn’t know if I had it in me to shoot her. I hoped she’d back down so we wouldn’t have to find out.
She didn’t. She kept playing, and suddenly my arm bent. I aimed the gun at my temple.
That was when I remembered that for the past couple days, I’d had magic powers, too. I called for the Thunderbird, and there it was, instantly, in my eyes, anyway. I only wanted to get back control of my body, but the ward sent A’marie staggering backward, too, like someone had shoved her.
She was game, though. As soon as she caught her balance, she sucked in a breath to start playing again.
“Damn it, don’t!” I said. “I swear—”
Something boomed like an anti-aircraft gun. Startled, I turned my head, and an object slammed into me. The impact knocked me at least ten feet, and then I slammed down on the grass.
As I lay there stunned and hurting, I realized I was spattered with scraps of filth and chips of bone, with more littering the ground around me. After a second, they started floating up into the air, drifting toward a spot a couple paces away. I realized that A’marie had brought me to meet a living corpse like the Pharaoh, and the dude had smashed himself to pieces flying into me. But no big deal. He knew how to put himself back together.
I needed to pull myself together before he did. I tried to lift the gun and realized it wasn’t in my hand anymore. I rolled onto my hands and knees to look for it. That brought me nose to empty nose hole with A’marie’s next surprise.
And I do mean nose. He rushed me wrapped in a rotting-fish stink that made Timon’s funk seem like Chanel No. 5. His legs ended at the knees, and he swung himself on his stumps and hands like an ape or a man on crutches. The hands were deformed, too, with just two thick fingers each that made them look like crab claws. The fingers were mostly bare bone now, just like the skull with the bullet holes in it.
I threw the Thunderbird at him. It didn’t stop him. I’d burned through a lot of mojo helping Rufino, I was still half dazed, and this time the magic just didn’t take. The zombie, if that was the right word for him, plowed into me and grabbed me by the throat.
We rolled around the ground tangled together. Those claws were strong. I managed to break his stranglehold on my neck, but couldn’t shake him loose entirely. Partly because I was teary-eyed blind and gagging on his stink.
A bass voice with an Italian accent said, “That’s enough.” I turned my head to see the Model 439 pointed at me.
The zombie holding it looked like the Pharaoh might have looked if he’d let himself go. In other words, on the surface he was pretty much all mushy-looking rot. But you could see that he’d been a big, strapping guy when he was alive, with a big curved mustache that looked like fungus now.
He was too far away for me to make a grab for the automatic even if the crab guy hadn’t been holding onto me. I froze.
“You can let him up,” said the Italian zombie. I figured he was the same one who’d smacked into me, then needed to put himself back together. “Just stick close to him.”
The crab did what his partner wanted. At least it gave me a little relief from the stink. I stood up.
“Can you handle him?” asked A’marie, still holding the panpipes and handkerchief near her mouth.
The crab guy smiled up at her. Some of his teeth had fallen out, and the ones that were left were black and brown. “No problem,” he said. “Get back to the hotel before they miss you.”
She looked at me and said, “I’m sorry. I… I wouldn’t really have made you shoot yourself. I just wanted to scare you into letting go of the gun. Lorenzo and Georgie won’t hurt you, either, unless you make them.”
“Just shut up and go,” I said.
She looked hurt. That was stupid, considering what she’d done to me, and what was even stupider was that it gave me a twinge of guilt.
“I could have just let you walk into the lord’s trap and hoped you wouldn’t make it out again,” she said. “Doing it this way, there’s a good chance we’re actually saving your life.”
“What about Victoria’s life?”
“I told you before: We have our own problems to solve. We can’t worry about humans we don’t even know.” She turned back to Lorenzo and Georgie. “Thank you for this.”
“There’s no need to thank us,” Lorenzo—the Italian zombie—said. “We need change even more than you do. Who sleeps and dreams more than the dead?”