chapter NINE
Vic and I caught a break when we came out of the crafts store. There was a cab just a few feet away dropping off a guy with a saxophone case in front of a pawnshop. I shouted, and Vic and I ran to catch it. The driver’s mouth tightened when he saw her bruises, and he started to shake his head. But I showed him my roll of bills, and then he let us get in. Money’s a wonderful thing.
As the cab pulled away from the curb, I took my first good, close-up look at Vic’s face, and then I couldn’t blame the driver for thinking we were trouble. “Take us to where she can see a doctor,” I said.
“I’m all right,” said Vic.
“You’ve been beaten up,” I said, then hesitated. “But I guess I could try to take care of it.” Meaning that Red could.
“What?”
“I… have this trick I learned. It’s like the laying on of hands. But I’m not sure how much power I’ve got left.”
She stared at me. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. But maybe the clinic is a good idea. For you. I saw how that man Raul hit you.”
“Okay. We’ll both get checked out.”
“And then go on to the police.”
“No. No police. You can’t tell anybody what happened to you.”
“Billy, those people kidnapped me! On school property!” She was vice-principal at a middle school, and apparently, in her mind, getting snatched right off the playground or the parking lot somehow made it even worse.
“I know,” I said, “but still.”
“Is it because they have something on you? Because if you testify in a capital case, I’m sure no one will care.”
I snorted. “Somebody still watches Law and Order.”
“Don’t make fun of me! I’m trying to help us both!”
“I know, and I wasn’t, really. It’s just… look, think about the really weird parts of what happened. Your mind may want to ignore them, but don’t let it.”
She just sat for a few seconds, while the cab rolled out of Ybor and turned right on Nebraska Avenue. Then she murmured, “Shit.”
“Yeah,” I said.
She laughed the way you do when it’s not really funny. “Not Law and Order. Buffy.”
I’d never seen that show, but I was willing to take her word for it. “Pretty much. The world is full of monsters, and the number-one thing on their to-do list is making sure normal people don’t find out. They’ll come after you if you tell.”
“And who’d believe me anyway?”
“There’s that, too.”
But she wasn’t ready to let it go. “Still, people were shooting guns. You said you shot somebody yourself. I’m sure the police showed up eventually.”
“Maybe, but that doesn’t mean anybody got arrested.” The taxi pulled into the parking lot of a place called the Lane & Harvey Doctor’s Walk-In Clinic. I paid the driver, and Vic and I got out.
It took us a few minutes to get checked in. She didn’t have her insurance card, and I didn’t have insurance. But cash took care of that, too.
We filled out our paperwork, turned our clipboards back in to the front desk, and settled down in the waiting room with the rest of the walking wounded. The TV droned through a loop of info about cholesterol and fibromyalgia while children whined and fidgeted. A nurse bellowed a patient’s name every couple minutes.
Eventually, Vic said, “Okay, monsters are real. Succubi and magic spells are real. What does it have to do with you?”
I looked around. Our fellow patients were busy with their own conversations, their smartphone games, music, or videos, or their misery. So I explained, although for some reason, I downplayed A’marie’s part in the story.
When I finished, Vic said, “You haven’t changed.”
“Did you catch the part about the magic powers?”
“You haven’t. You’re just as reckless as ever.”
“I didn’t know you’d get pulled in.”
She glared at me. “And if it were just you who got hurt, that would make it all right?”
“It would make it a risk worth taking.”
“Well, you took it and you won. You got your money and cleared your debt. Now you should get away.”
I sighed. My ribs gave me a twinge. “Probably.”
She studied my face and found a tell. “But you won’t. You’re going back.”
“Yes.”
“For God’s sake, why?”
That was when it hit me that we’d had this talk before, or versions of it anyway, and I’d long ago run out of ways to try to make her understand. Hell, maybe I didn’t even really understand. So I just said what I’d usually said near the end. “For the action.”
“Of course,” she said in the scornful way that, at the very end, I’d come to know and hate. But a few seconds later, she surprised me. “I know you didn’t have to come after me.”
“Sure I did. It was my fault you were in trouble.”
“Not exactly. And I walked out on you. And I should have let you know about your dad.”
I sighed. “He begged you not to.”
“You understand, it wasn’t that I stopped caring about you. It’s just… that wasn’t the life we were supposed to have.”
“Or who I said I was going to be.”
“Yes,” she said, and then the nurse yelled her name. She smiled at me and squeezed my hand, then got up.
And as I watched her walk away, something loosened up inside me. I’d known we were over, and thought I was okay with it. But now I really was.
I got my turn next. I told my doctor I’d been in a car crash. She didn’t believe a word of it, but didn’t argue, either. She just X-rayed me, taped my ribs, and gave me some Tylenol 3’s.
When I came back out into the waiting room, Vic was there ahead of me. I got the receptionist to call us another cab, and then we sat back down. The TV told me I should get a colonoscopy at age fifty, so that was something to look forward to.
“What did your doctor say?” I asked.
“I’m all right,” Vic answered. “He told me to go home and rest. And then I wondered, can I even do that?”
“If you aren’t going to talk about—what did you call them?—succubi.”
“Leticia could still try to use me to get at you.”
“I don’t think so. The lords don’t make the same move twice. It costs them style points. Or maybe it’s just boring.”
She shook her head. “My God.”
“I know it’s weird.”
“It’s more than weird! It’s horrible! How do I go back to a normal life knowing what I know?”
I took her hand. “You go back because your normal life is just as real and important as you thought. Your family’s real. Your friends are real. Your school and the kids are real. It’s just that the world has this… other layer to it. And it’s scary. But you don’t ever have to deal with it again. Think of it like, I don’t know, starvation in Africa. Bad but far away.”
She took a deep breath. “I’ll try.” And something in her face told me she was going to be okay.
She kissed me goodbye like a sister would before getting out of the cab. I watched her until she got inside the apartment we’d shared, then told the driver to take me to the Icarus.
I wondered how I was supposed to focus on poker after the day I’d had, then realized that, with Vic safe and nobody waving guns at me, I actually felt okay. In fact, I was looking forward to playing.
But first things first.
The cab dropped me in front of the hotel. I walked over and checked Dad’s T-bird. It still looked fine with the red light of sunset reflecting from the windows. There hadn’t been any tickets, vandalism, or break-ins. Glad that somebody, or some magic spell, was looking out for it, I headed on into the hotel and up to the desk.
The clerk was a guy with an Abe Lincoln beard and pointed steel caps on his oversized knuckles. He tried to keep it from showing in his face, but I could tell he knew someone had tried to take me out of the tournament and was sorry I’d made it back.
“Yeah,” I said, “I love you guys, too.”
“Lord Timon has been asking for you all afternoon,” he replied.
“Then he can go on asking a little longer. Where is she?”
“Uh… who do you mean, sir?”
I stared at him the way you stare down an opponent at the poker table. “Is that really the way you want to play it?”
He lowered his eyes. “I think she’s in the service area.”
He was right. A’marie was in the kitchen, where the cooks were bustling around preparing tonight’s buffet. She was spooning globs of whipped cream on top of some kind of parfait. Her face turned funny when she saw me coming. It was like she was scared and relieved at the same time.
“Time for your break,” I said. I took her by the forearm and led her to the start of the dark, dusty section where she’d hidden the finheads. “Now hand it over.”
Unlike her buddy out at the desk, she didn’t try to play dumb. She reached inside her tuxedo jacket and brought out the handkerchief with the drop of my blood.
I stuffed it into my hip pocket. “Now the pipes.”
She blinked. “They’re all I have from my family.”
“At this point, do you think I give a rat’s ass?”
She brought them out.
I reached to take them, and then, like somebody flipped a switch, I was just sick of the whole situation. Even with a damn good reason, it was just no fun being mad at her.
“Never mind,” I said. “Keep them. Just don’t use them on me anymore.”
She tucked them away. “Thank you.”
If I was going to go soft, I might as well mush out completely. “Have you heard from Georgie? How is he?”
“He’s all right. The Ones Who Linger are almost impossible to kill. I guess that if Death decides he doesn’t want you, it’s hard to change his mind.”
“Good. I’m glad he’s okay.”
“I’m glad you are.”
I snorted. “Said the woman who helped bury me alive.”
“I know it must have been awful, but I swear, it was to keep you safe as much as anything. Did you rescue Victoria?”
“Yeah. She’s all right, too.”
“Good.” She took a breath. “Look, I know you don’t have any reason to believe this, but I really am sorry.”
“I believe it,” I said, and it was true. I could hear regret in her voice and see it in her face.
But maybe she didn’t believe me, because she kept on in the same way. “It was wrong, especially after you helped Rufino. It made me no better than Timon.”
“Come on. That’s not true.”
“All I can say is that I won’t to do anything like that again. I can’t promise for the others, but I can for me.”
“Thanks. And not that it’s worth anything, but I wish I was the guy who has the fix for everybody’s problems. That would be nice.”
After that, we kind of ran out of things to say. And so, even though I didn’t feel much like dealing with Timon, it didn’t seem like there was much point in putting it off any longer.
I found him on the mezzanine as usual, with Gaspar guarding the door to the meeting room. When I walked in, he was sitting with a deck of cards spread out on the table in front of him, and holding one up right in front of his face. He turned in my direction, sniffed three times, then showed it to me.
“Is this the five of hearts?” he asked.
“Deuce of diamonds,” I replied.
“Damn it!” he whipped the card at the floor, and I got a better look at the wet lumps in his eye sockets. I could make out pupils now, though they weren’t the same size or completely round. I could also see speckled streaks where irises were trying to separate out from the whites.
“Even if you could make the cards out when you hold them that close,” I said, “it wouldn’t be good enough. You need to be able to see them when they’re in the middle of the table.”
“I know that!” he snarled.
“So why torture yourself? Are you that desperate to get back to the table? There’ll be other games.”
“Not like this one. Not if you don’t win!”
“I am winning.”
“So far. But where were you this afternoon?”
I sighed. “It doesn’t matter.”
“It does if you were off making a deal with one of the others. And how do I know if you won’t explain yourself?”
“Fine,” I said, and told him the story, sort of. I left A’marie, Georgie, and Lorenzo out of it.
Unfortunately, the edited-for-TV version left Timon frowning. He might look like a pile of greasy rags and smell like ass, but he wasn’t dumb. “That story doesn’t account for all your time,” he said.
“Sure it does. Vic and I had to wait a long time at the clinic.”
He leaned close to me and sniffed. “You smell of graveyard earth.”
Shit. “All right. I didn’t tell you everything. But you don’t need to know the rest.”
“I do if I’m going to trust you!”
“You’re going to trust me because you still don’t have a choice.”
“You’re… insolent!” He spat it at me like it was the filthiest insult he could think of.
“Be glad. Maybe that’s what keeps me a step ahead of the other lords even though I don’t know what the hell I’m doing. Anyway, how come you’re mad at me and not them?”
“I am mad, but they were just playing the game. You’re my vassal, and you disobeyed me!”
“Because I’m not a vassal. I’m your partner. Live with it.”
He looked like he was about to fire something back. But then he took a long breath and let it out slowly. It seemed to make his cloud of funk even fouler, but maybe that was my imagination.
“You can’t survive in our world without the protection of a patron,” he said. “I hope you figure that out before it’s too late. But for now, we have work to do.”
“Sounds good. Teach me to make a ward that will stop a bullet.”
“That’s not practical. You’re getting stronger, but after the day you’ve had, and the night in front of you, you can’t afford to spend the energy. But you can start learning how to raise the various aspects of yourself into prominence as quickly and easily as you’ve learned to invoke your sign of power.”
So we worked on that till suppertime. To my relief, there was no raw, carved human meat on the buffet tables tonight, maybe because Wotan didn’t show up. Neither did the Pharaoh.
But Gimble and Leticia were there and whispering together. Leticia smiled at me, set her plate of paella and her glass of white wine on a table, and glided over to me in her usual way. Not quite like a pole dancer slinking around the stage, but close enough.
“Poor Pablo didn’t make it,” she said. “And the police have the gun with your fingerprints.”
“Bullshit,” I said.
She laughed. “You’re right. It is. My servants and I cleared out right after you did, so I don’t know what happened when the police arrived. I imagine Mrs. Sullivan handled it all somehow. But I can’t tell you what happened to Pablo.”
“Like I care,” I said.
She smiled. “You have no reason to, but you do. It’s your weakness.”
“Even if it is, you didn’t have any luck taking advantage of it today.”
“Touché! I certainly didn’t. All I did was get us both all hot and bothered. We could take care of that. There’s plenty of time before midnight. No magic, just sex, I promise.”
My mouth got dry and I stepped back a little, like you’d back away from a hot fire. “Right. You promise. And I trust that why?”
She laughed again. “You can’t blame a girl for trying. You have a dab of something on your mouth.” She ran her fingertip over my lips and sent a shiver through me. Then she popped it between her own lips, sucked it, winked, turned, and walked back across the room to Gimble. I tried not to stare at her ass.
She, Gimble, and I were in our seats at the poker table with fifteen minutes to spare. Wotan limped in at ten till with sores and blisters dotting the exposed parts of his tattooed skin.
That surprised me. I understood that the lords were out to get each other just as much as they were the “insolent” human in the game. But after a day when a couple of them had done their damnedest to kill me or at least screw with my head, it was easy to forget.
Leticia gave Gimble an inquiring look. But if he knew anything, he wasn’t talking, and naturally there was nothing to read in the painted face bobbing at the end of his flexible neck.
Wotan called for a double shot of bourbon and knocked it back. Then he watched the door and the grandfather clock. The rest of us started watching with him, waiting to see if the Pharaoh was going to show.
It was three to twelve when he did, hobbling along with Davis’s help. This time he really needed it, because something had ripped off his left leg at the knee and his head off his shoulders. The chauffeur hadn’t bothered to bring along the torn-off piece of leg, but he had the head tucked under his arm.
I stared, and I wasn’t the only one. It was like when Queen started laying eggs. It even startled other Old People, and reminded me they could be as strange and mysterious to one another as they were to me.
I realized Davis was going to have trouble supporting the Pharaoh and pulling out his chair at the same time, so I got up and pulled it out for him. The mummy’s dry, sunken eyes shifted in my direction. “Thank you,” he said. Magic let him whisper even without lungs.
“Are you okay?” I asked. It was hands down the stupidest thing I’d ever said.
But he answered, “Yes, actually. I keep my life in jars, and as long as they’re intact, there’s not much anyone can do to me that can’t be mended. You’d think other sportsmen would work that out once they’ve known me for a while. But I suppose that some of us simply have a less… analytical approach to competition.”
Wotan glared.
Davis put the Pharaoh’s body in the chair and his head on the table in front of it, looking out at the rest of us. Then he went to sit with the rest of the spectators, and the mummy showed us he could still work his arms just fine. He put a cheroot between his head’s withered lips and lit it.
“That’s better,” he whispered. “The clock’s about to strike. Shall we begin?”
We did. With his head on the table, the Pharaoh didn’t have any trouble seeing the cards. But his smokes kept going out. He had to light them over and over again.
While I found out I had my own problems.
Gimble went all in early on. I called with ace-jack suited, and he turned over a pair of fours. A coin toss. I caught a second jack on the flop, but he made trips on the river, and then he was right back in it.
And after that, the cards kept running against me in one of the worst possible ways. I got my share of decent starting hands, but rarely improved on the streets afterward.
At a weaker table, it might not have mattered. I still had more chips than anybody else, and I could have used them to push other players off their hands. But not here. Not tonight. The others had all decided they needed to play back at me, and they did, whenever they had anything or just decided I didn’t. They kept forcing me to fold, and nibbled away at my stack.
I switched into rock mode while I tried to figure out what was the matter. Had I developed a tell? I didn’t think so. Although you can never really know unless somebody takes pity on you and warns you.
Were the cards marked, then, and everyone knew it but me? I looked for crimps and scratches. I didn’t find them.
But maybe somebody had used some kind of magic to mark them in a way I couldn’t see.
I limped in late position with king-ten. The flop missed me as usual, and when Leticia smiled and raised, I folded. Then, hoping it would do some good, I flashed the Thunderbird. It was just a flicker, the symbol hanging in the air one instant and gone the next. I hoped that would keep anybody else from noticing I’d used any mojo.
The backs of the cards I was mucking didn’t change. But one of the cards face up in the center of the table did. For a second, it changed from the nine of spades to the ten.
Except that really, it didn’t. I could feel it had been a ten all along, but magic made it look like something different.
Nobody else seemed to notice it blink back and forth. That was good. I wanted to figure out the whole scam before I tried to deal with it.
At the moment, I had it half worked out. Somebody was using illusion to turn what would have been good cards for me into bad ones. But he couldn’t know which cards helped me unless he also knew what I had in the pocket.
When I figured it out, I almost grinned. Because, like the gadget built into Gimble’s forearm and his suggestion that we signal one another, this part wasn’t really magical. It was the kind of cheating I’d learned to spot long before I ever heard of the Old People. Although I had to admit, I’d never caught anybody doing it exactly this way.
A careful, honest professional dealer sends the cards skimming just above the felt. Because if they fly any higher, somebody might catch a glimpse of the faces. Or some shiny object on the table could reflect them.
The Pharaoh had two shiny objects, a case for his cheroots and his lighter, both silver tonight despite his usual fondness for gold. He also had eyes that were a lot lower to the tabletop than anybody else’s. I was pretty sure he saw every card he dealt, and at least a few that other people dealt.
And all the others must know about it, or they wouldn’t be attacking me so aggressively. He’d even let Wotan, the guy who’d torn him apart, in on it. Their nasty little back-and-forth when Davis brought him in had been a show for my benefit.
I guessed I should be flattered. It meant the Pharaoh thought I was his toughest opposition. And it showed what a cool, conniving bastard he really was.
The flop missed me, or at least it looked like it. Unless I called up the Thunderbird, I couldn’t really know. I bet anyway, and Leticia raised.
As usual, I folded. The difference was that this time I threw in my cards with a scowl and a snap of my wrist.
A couple minutes later, the same thing happened again, except that it was Wotan putting me to the test. “Damn!” I said.
He smirked. “You know, human, you don’t do as well when you aren’t catching every card in the deck.”
“I’m not catching any of them!” I said.
Later, I missed filling a spade flush on Fourth Street, and folded when Leticia made a pot-sized raise. “Shit!” I snarled.
“Poor darling,” she said. “I guess it just isn’t your night.”
“It never is,” I said. “Not when it really counts. I do all right for a while, but by the end of a game or a tournament, I get one bad beat after another!”
I waved one of the Tuxedo Team over and asked for a Scotch. It was the first time I’d had anything alcoholic at the table. I drank it fast and got another.
Then the clock struck three, and it was break time.
As I expected, Timon was impatient to see me. With one grimy hand planted on Gaspar’s shoulder and the other clutching my arm, he hauled me out into the lobby. I was worried he meant to go all the way up to his little hideout on the mezzanine, but we didn’t. Either he thought we had enough privacy, or he just couldn’t hold back any longer.
“You’re on tilt!” he said.
“Bullshit!” I said. Or half shouted, really.
“You are,” he said. “You’re frustrated. It’s making you play too many hands, and push too hard.”
“Will you relax?”
“Settle back,” he said. “Conserve your chips and wait for premium hands.”
“How the hell can you give me advice?” I said, raising my voice another notch. “You can’t even see what’s going on.”
“Sylvester describes every hand.” Sylvester was a servant whose inhumanly tall but stooped body and long straight shaggy hair reminded me of a weeping willow. I guessed he’d been handling the play-by-play because Gaspar had trouble seeing the top of the table.
“That doesn’t mean you understand what he tells you,” I fired back. “You and I already talked poker, remember? And it got to be obvious early on that you don’t know as much as I do.”
He took a breath. He didn’t want to lose control. I’ll give him that. “I’ve been gambling for hundreds of years.”
“And losing, until now you’re down to your last piece of real estate.”
“You’re playing as my proxy, and you’ll do as I say!”
“Go to hell!” I snarled. I jerked my arm out of his grip, then shoved him. He almost fell and pulled Gaspar down with him, but not quite. They both looked amazed at what I’d done.
So amazed that for a moment, nobody spoke. Then Timon said, in a soft voice that was scarier than shouting, “That was over the line.”
“So what are you going to do about it?” I answered. “Fire me? Kill me? No? I didn’t think so!” I turned and strode back into the ballroom.
And everybody watched me as I did. Maybe they didn’t know everything that had just happened, but they’d overheard enough. And in their world, a stooge just didn’t dis his own lord, not even one on the injured list like Timon. Not unless he had a death wish. So, even if they hadn’t been convinced I was tilting before, I hoped they were buying it now.
When we players got back to the table, I got a third Scotch, but since I didn’t want to get drunk for real, I nursed it. And tried to figure out when to make my move.
It was tricky, because a lot of times, the flop just misses you because it does. And when that happened to me, the Pharaoh wouldn’t need to change any of the cards. So how was I supposed to know when he was really doing it? I didn’t want to fire up the Thunderbird on every hand. I didn’t want to burn through that much power, and I was afraid one of my opponents would notice.
So I lost chips—and eventually the chip lead—sulked, and bitched, while Wotan threw taunts in my direction. Until finally it was the Pharaoh’s deal, I called a bet with the eight-seven of clubs and flopped an open-ended straight flush draw.
That meant I was a six-to-four favorite to end up with the winning hand. So when I didn’t, it would also be six to four that it was because the Pharaoh had screwed with the cards. In other words, now was the time to take a look.
The king of diamonds came out on the turn, and it really was the king of diamonds. Gimble made a big bet, and I had a decision to make. The chances of me picking up a straight or a flush had just dropped to thirty percent. And if I missed, I was going to end up seriously short-stacked.
But sometimes you just feel that you’re going to catch the card you need. And sometimes that feeling turns out to be nothing more than wishful thinking. Still, I had it, so I called, and the others who were still in the hand got out of the way.
The king of spades came on Fifth Street. Except that when I splashed the Thunderbird across the table, it blinked to the king of clubs, then back again.
Bingo! Or at least I thought so for half a second. Then I realized a flush wasn’t the nuts anymore. With a pair on the board, Gimble could have a full boat.
And if he did have me beat fair and square, would it matter if I proved that the one king was really a different king? The cards talk—that’s basic poker—he wasn’t even the one screwing with them, and the others all wanted me gone. That’s why they were colluding against me.
Suddenly scared, I looked at the Pharaoh and tried to figure out just how deep a game he was playing, just how exactly he was setting me up for kill. That shriveled, crumbling face didn’t give away a thing. All I saw was that his cheroot had gone out.
Gimble checked. I figured he wanted to sucker the man on tilt into bluffing, but it gave me a way out. I could check, too, and not risk any more than I had already.
But I realized I didn’t want to do that. I pushed all in, and Gimble beat me into the pot.
We turned over our cards. Gimble’s were the king and queen of hearts, which meant he only had trips. I wasn’t out of the woods yet, but I felt a grin stretch across my face.
Reaching to rake in the pot, Gimble noticed my expression and hesitated. “What?” he asked in that scratchy voice.
“This.” I threw the Thunderbird, and this time, I put everything I had into it. I slammed it down on the tabletop like a sledgehammer.
Except, not a physical sledgehammer. It didn’t make the table break or even jiggle. Nobody’s chip stacks fell over. But all the other players felt it, and jerked back in their chairs. The king of spades turned into the king of clubs, and this time, it stayed that way.
I jumped up and stabbed my finger at it. Not the best poker manners, but I was excited. “I’ve got a flush, and that’s my pot!”
Gimble froze, not taking the chips, but not pulling his segmented tin hands back, either. Over the course of the night, he’d won enough and I’d lost enough that he’d had me covered. But not by much. Giving up this pot would cripple him.
“I felt you use magic,” he said. “I don’t know what you did with it. Maybe you changed the suit of the card.”
“Bullshit. You all know what the Pharaoh was doing. You were all in on it. But if I have to prove it more than I have already, let’s go through the deck. If I changed the card, there’ll be an extra king of clubs and no king of spades. If I just changed it back to what it really is, then there’ll be one of everything.”
Wotan shoved back from the table. “So you accuse us all of cheating?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said, looking him in the eye not because it was easy but because something told me I’d better not flinch. “I understand it’s just part of the game the way you a*sholes play it. But you’re caught now. Let it go.”
He stood up. And up. Damn, he was big. “We don’t have to ‘let it go,’” he said, “if we dispute the claim.”
“I thought you guys cared about your reputations,” I said. “You’re going to look bad enough when the story goes around that you all teamed up to cheat a newbie. It’ll be worse if people hear that when I outsmarted you, you jumped me, four on one again, and murdered me because of it. Talk about bad sportsmanship! Who’s going to respect you after that? Who’s going to want to play with you?”
The Pharaoh chuckled in the ghostly whisper that was all the voice he had left. “The young man has a point. There’s gamesmanship, and then there’s mere brutality.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Wotan snarled. “Do you really think anybody’s going to care that we put an upstart human in his place?”
Timon stood up. “They will when they hear the full story,” he said.
Wotan sneered. “From who? You? Everybody hates you, and after he’s gone, you won’t be a lord anymore. What you say won’t mean shit to anybody.”
“What about what I say?” said a female voice.
We all turned our heads. Queen was standing in the doorway with white, glistening little creatures crawling over her body, and more scuttling around her feet. The things looked soft, like some kind of larvae, which I guess they kind of were. But if you looked close, you could make out the human shape of the heads.
A couple of Queen’s maids stood behind her. They had baby bug people crawling on them, too.
The Pharaoh chuckled again. “My dear lady. I assumed you’d returned home to complete the blessed event.”
“I asked Lord Timon to move me to a nice, quiet part of the hotel,” Queen answered. “Because I was still interested in knowing how the tournament would go.”
“And in getting back at me if the opportunity presented itself?” the mummy asked.
“Yes,” said Queen. One of her four hands gently caught a larva that was trying to clamber up onto her face. “What you did to me was… inappropriate even by our standards. And I promise you that if this human dies now, like this, I will tell all our peers just how lacking in grace and finesse the four of you truly are.”
Now it was Leticia’s turn to chortle. “Well, goodness. We can’t have that.” She winked at me.
“No,” said the Pharaoh. “I daresay we can’t.”
Gimble made a raspy noise that might have been his version of a sigh. He finally pulled his hands back and left the pot to me.
Wotan raked the three of them with his glare. “I can’t believe this. Who cares what people say?”
“Well,” Leticia said, “it’s more hurtful when you understand all the words.”
Wotan clenched his fists and shuddered. I winced, expecting another furniture-smashing tantrum if not worse. But then he got himself under control and just growled, “This isn’t over. Between me and any of you.” He threw himself back down in his chair. “Someone, deal!”
Leticia shuffled. The Pharaoh made a show of moving his cigarette case and lighter off to the side, where they couldn’t reflect the cards when he dealt. Queen, her maids, and the babies went to join the spectators.
As I pulled in the chips from the center of the table, I said, “When Gimble got caught cheating before, he had to post an extra big blind six times in a row. Since that last hand was rigged for his benefit, he should do it again. And so should the guy who did the rigging.”
The Pharaoh smiled around his cheroot. “I concede, that’s fair.”
It was also lights out for Gimble. The penalty ate up the few chips he had left in nothing flat. He made a move because he had to, everybody called, and Wotan knocked him out with a pair of sevens.
Gimble stood up and said, “Nice game, everyone.” Then he offered me his hand.
I hesitated, wondered if this was his idea of a joke, then decided the hell with it and shook with him. This time, nothing jabbed me. He shook with the others, too, and then headed over to sit with Queen. A squirrel guy came scurrying to see if he wanted anything.
As the rest of us played on, I could tell almost immediately that things were different. Everybody was playing against everybody. They weren’t all just gunning for me anymore. That trick had failed, and, shifting gears as fast as usual, each of them had moved on to the next strategy. I still flashed the Thunderbird once in a while, just to be on the safe side, but the cards stayed the same.
At dawn, we all had about the same number of chips. I stood up, yawned—even though I’d gotten up late, it had still been one hell of a long day—and then headed over to where Queen and Gimble were sitting.
Away from the table, the light was dim. I was careful not to step on any of the grub babies on the floor. Although Queen and her people didn’t seem especially worried that someone would.
“I guess I owe you my life,” I told her. “Thanks.”
She inclined her head. “I did it to take back what the Egyptian took from me.”
“Still, I’m grateful. But how did you know to come in right when you did? You weren’t listening outside the room the whole time?” Despite munching disgusting snacks, exposing her private parts, and laying eggs in front of everybody, she somehow seemed too dignified for that. I could imagine her eavesdropping, but not while Timon’s flunkies in the lobby looked on.
“No,” she said, “of course not. But if you live through this, you’ll discover there are many kinds of magic. When I care to pay the price, I can become extremely intuitive.”
“Nice.” Especially for a poker player. I wondered if she’d been using it at the table before the Pharaoh got rid of her.
One of the babies started climbed up my pant leg. I let it. It was even smaller and lighter than a brownwing, so it wasn’t really bothering me. And you don’t score points with any mom by acting like her kid is repulsive. When it got up to my hip, I tried to stroke its pale gleaming head with my fingertip.
It opened up a mouth that already had teeth and snapped at me. I jerked my hand back just in time to keep from getting nipped.
A maid rushed over to get the larva off me. And Gimble said, “We all bite in our own different ways.”