Karen Chance - [Cassandra Palmer 03] Read online

  Augustine was wrong; they weren’t friends.

  The music started up and the first model elbowed me out of the way, gliding onto the catwalk, her leopard-skin bag slinking along beside her. I hardly noticed, my eyes on the two figures who had squeezed in the back door. I didn’t recognize them, but I knew what they were. The bulky coats they had on were a dead giveaway: war mages. And despite their scruffy appearance, I doubted they’d come to upgrade their wardrobe.

  They were nonchalantly scanning the crowd, and I’d seen those casual glances on Pritkin’s face often enough to know how much they took in. I moved farther into the shadow of the curtain, wondering if I could shift out unseen, when one of them nudged his companion and nodded at a group of dirty, poorly dressed children huddled against one wall. The mages started forward, faces grim, and the kids broke into a run. Most people had found their seats, so there was nothing between the kids and their pursuers except the two vamps acting as greeters.

  There was a temporary alliance between the Circle and the Senate because of the war, but that didn’t erase centuries of dislike and mistrust. Especially when war mages had been responsible for an attack on the premises a little over a week ago. The vamps blocked the way with insolent smiles on their faces, and the mages skidded to a halt.

  The kids had run down the aisle flanking the wall and were now climbing onstage. Most people were watching the catwalk, which had been designed to extend out into the middle of the room, so they didn’t garner more than a few puzzled glances. They headed straight backstage, but stopped on the edge of the frenetic activity.

  They looked back and forth between me and several blonde models who were struggling into their outfits. Then a black boy of maybe fourteen nudged a small girl. “Which one?”

  The girl had dishwater blond hair and big brown eyes that focused on me unerringly. “That one.” She pointed with the hand not clutching a beat-up teddy bear.

  The bag in my arms made a sudden lunge, causing me to almost lose my grip. Françoise said something that didn’t sound French and it froze, a shiny black claw all of an inch from my face. “You want for me to take the crocodile?” she asked.

  “Sounds like a plan.” I passed the wicked thing over gratefully.

  The boy looked at the girl with a dubious expression. “You sure?”

  She nodded and went back to chewing off the bear’s head. The boy walked over and held out a hand. The T-shirt he was wearing was thin and shot with pinholes, and his jeans were out at one knee. One of his tennis shoes had lost its lace and was being held together with a safety pin, and a ratty old sweatshirt was knotted around his waist. But the handshake was firm and he met my eyes. I had a weird sense of déjà vu, even before he spoke.

  “I’m Jesse. Tami sent us.”

  “Tami?”

  “Tamika Hodges.”

  I stared at him, feeling like someone had just kicked me in the gut. He stared back, dark eyes defiant, expecting to be ignored, rejected, thrown to the wolves. I recognized the look. A decade ago, I’d been about his age, and just as scared, just as defiant, just as sure I couldn’t trust anyone. For the most part, I’d been right.

  Years before I decided to destroy Tony, my ambition had been just to get away from him. I’d ended up in Chicago, because that was where the bus I’d caught happened to stop. As someone who had rarely been allowed to leave Tony’s compound outside Philly, and then only with half a dozen bodyguards, I found my new freedom to be a very scary thing. I had money, thanks to a generous friend, but I was afraid to stay somewhere decent, sure that I would wake up to find a couple of Tony’s goons looming over me. Not to mention that it’s a little hard for a fourteen-year-old to check into a hotel on her own. So shelters it had been.

  I soon discovered that there were a few problems associated with shelter life. Besides the drunks and the druggies and the knife fights, there were also limits on the length of your stay. The more long-term variety had a staff who might report a teenager on her own to the authorities, so I tended to gravitate to the two-week versions. That was long enough to get comfortable but not long enough for anyone to get to know me.

  Most of this type kept records, though, and once your time was up, you weren’t allowed to return for six months. The time limit was necessary to keep people from taking up permanent residence, but it also ensured that I went through all of the nicer shelters in a matter of months. I finally ended up in one that was so overcrowded, a third of us were living in a dirt-floored courtyard with a fence around it. Everyone was issued a sleeping bag at night and told to find a spot outside. The bigger and tougher crowd laid claim to the straggly grass and soft patches of dirt, leaving the hard concrete patio to the newbies and the junkies and the crazy old lady who made bird noises all night.

  I’d woken up one morning to the feel of a cold arm next to mine, belonging to a young guy who’d OD’d in his sleep. It was the same day Tami showed up, on one of her regular sweeps looking for kids who had slipped through the cracks of the magical world. When a pretty African American woman with kind brown eyes and a voice that seemed much too big for her small frame offered me a place to stay, she hadn’t had to do much talking. Only a couple of minutes after meeting her, I was dragging my backpack across the dirt to her beat-up Chevy.

  Luckily, Tami had been legit, taking me to join a motley crew of other strays who jokingly called themselves the Misfit Mafia. The name made me do a double take the first time I heard it, but after a while it seemed oddly fitting. I’d run from one mafia to another, but with a definite difference: the new one tried to keep people alive instead of the reverse.

  I eventually left the group to return to Tony, in order to try to take him down, and by the time I finally had all my plans in place, three years had passed. And then there was the blowup and the missing don and the bounty on my head, not to be confused with the shiny new one the Circle had recently laid. With one thing and another, it had been more than three years before I returned to the abandoned office building we’d called home. And all I found was echoing space, dirty windows and dust-covered floors.

  I don’t know why it was such a surprise. The magical underground changes fast, with three years being more like three decades. I’d stayed in Chicago a few days anyway, feeling restless and strangely anchorless. I hadn’t dared to contact Tami after returning to Tony’s, for fear he’d find out and take revenge on her for helping me. But subconsciously I’d always assumed that I would return one day and that nothing would have changed. And now that it had, I wasn’t sure what to do about it.

  Growing up in a place where any sign of weakness was quickly exploited, I’d learned how to bury inconvenient emotions, not how to release them. When even the youngest vamp was better than a lie detector at sensing physiological changes—a slightly elevated heart rate, the tiniest catch in breath, the too rapid blink of an eye—you learned self-control or you didn’t last long. I discovered in Chicago that a lifetime of practice is hard to reverse, even when you don’t need that skill anymore.

  I’d roamed aimlessly around a few old haunts, including the bakery where she’d worked, but nothing had looked the same and I didn’t recognize any of the people. After a few days, I realized that Chicago hadn’t been home; Tami had, and she was gone. So I left some flowers in a corner of the old building, even knowing I was just feeding the rats, and moved on.

  “How did you know where to find me?” I asked Jesse.

  “Jeannie knew. She sees stuff sometimes. She said you’d help us.”

  “Jeannie’s a clairvoyant?”

  “Yeah. She not very good. She don’t see much and mostly it’s stupid stuff. She’s only five,” he said disparagingly. “But Tami thought it was a good idea. She said we was to go to you, if something happened to her. After it all went down, we got on the bus.”

  “After what went down?”

  “The mages came. They took her.” Black eyes bored into mine, already anticipating the answer to a question he hadn’t yet asked. I
knew that look, too. I understood a thing or two about betrayal.

  “I’ll take care of you,” I heard myself say, and wondered if I was crazy. So far, it had been a chore just looking after myself. Tami must have been desperate to send them to me, when I had the biggest target on my back of anyone. I wanted to ask a thousand questions, but there wasn’t time. I’d get some answers, but first we had to lose their pursuers.

  I peered around the side of the curtains again to see that Casanova had joined the vamps holding off the mages. He was wearing a vest that jumped and crackled with animated flames—part of the menswear line, I assumed. It set off his dark hair and olive complexion nicely, but didn’t do much for his expression. War mages weren’t his favorite people. But while he could give them a hard time, he couldn’t throw them out without cause, and they were between us and the exits.

  I did a swift count of the gang, which numbered eight in total. Nine, I corrected, as the baby a girl was clutching a little too hard started to sniffle. Way too many to shift.

  I glanced at Françoise. “I could use a diversion.”

  “’Ow beeg?” she asked casually.

  “Beeg.”

  “D’accord.”

  She moved to the other side of the stage and started chanting something under her breath. Within seconds, a bank of dark clouds rolled in, settling over the catwalk with complete disregard of the fact that we were indoors. Chairs were knocked over as people scrambled to their feet, and the background murmur almost instantly became a roar. The witches apparently knew a bad sign when they saw one.

  The mages suddenly stopped playing nice, shoved identification in Casanova’s face and started up the aisle at a run. That was about the same time that something slimy and green hit the catwalk. I didn’t even have a chance to identify it before a lot of other somethings followed, bursting out of the rumbling black mass of clouds like popcorn. The current model’s pretty chiffon dress went from a pleased peach to an angry dark green, a hue that almost matched the skin of the toad that had slammed into her shoulder.

  She screamed as part of it started oozing down her chest, and she stumbled back down the catwalk. But as it was fast being littered with little broken bodies, most smashed and split open, it was pretty much inevitable that she’d slip and go sliding on her butt. Things sort of went downhill after that.

  Protective spells were being fired off on all sides, which, when they impacted the kamikaze amphibians, caused fleshy fireworks in midair. This made the witches in the middle of the room, who were being liberally splattered with frog guts, even less happy, causing them to turn on their sisters with abandon. That slowed down the mages, but I could still see them, grim and determined, wading through the fracas toward us.

  “Are there any more of you?” I asked Jesse.

  He said something, but I couldn’t hear him over the sound of the audience’s chairs smashing into the battered mages. Of course, they were slamming into a lot of other things, too, blown here and there by the wind and the spells and the mayhem. But I didn’t notice anyone else disappearing under a mountain of expensive painted wood. It looked like the mages had stepped on one too many witches’ toes.

  “What?”

  “No!” Jesse screamed in my ear. “We were the only ones who got away!”

  “Okay. Let’s get away again.”

  Chapter 6

  Miranda took one look at my dress, which had shifted to an agitated swirl of autumn leaves, and her ears went back. It was convenient to have such an obvious hint to her mood, since I’d never learned to read her very well. The fur on her catlike face might have had something to do with that, or possibly gargoyle expressions were too different from human ones for me to decipher.

  The current group of Misfits crowded in behind me, leaving dirty footprints on her pristine white tile floor. I’d brought them to the room-service kitchens since I wasn’t sure where Miranda lived. She was the leader of the group of Dark Fey that Tony had been using for cheap labor, but I only ever saw them at work, chopping and dicing with preternatural speed or pushing laden carts through Dante’s halls.

  They rarely paused except to pose for photographs with guests, who assumed they were midgets in suits. I wondered if anyone ever noticed that their film always came out slightly blurry, the same way their eyes never quite managed to focus on the small servers. Tony had spent a fortune to ward the casino, although considering the amount of alcohol that the majority of the guests put away, he probably hadn’t needed to bother. I doubted he’d been so generous in accommodations for his workers, so what I wanted from Miranda was likely to hurt.

  One of the kids, a girl who looked about twelve but who I later learned was sixteen, was holding a baby. It was maybe four months old and a little rumpled around the edges, wearing a pink T-shirt with a diaper and only one sock, its cheek flushed from being pressed against the girl’s chest. I was about to launch into my carefully prepared speech when Miranda smiled, showing sharp fangs in her long, grave face. She was no longer looking at me.

  I turned to see that several gargoyles had edged to within arm’s length of the girl, close enough that she sent me a pleading look while clutching her infant tighter. “They won’t hurt you,” I assured her. “The Fey…well, they’re really fond of babies.”

  It was a ridiculous understatement, as was becoming obvious. One of the larger gargoyles, with a dog’s head above her spotless chef’s whites, almost ran into a wall because she was waving at the infant while making a cutesy little face. Miranda’s eyes were also fixed on the child, with enough longing in them that I started to worry. “Right?” I gave her a poke, and she swatted a paw at me. The claws weren’t extended, thankfully.

  “My people would defend a crèche with their lives,” she told the mother with quiet dignity.

  The girl looked relieved, but kept an eye on the closest gargoyle. He was one of the smaller variety, with floppy donkey ears under a tall chef’s hat. He tentatively stretched out a hand mangled even more than Françoise’s, with all but one finger missing. But the remaining digit ended in a long, curled claw of dense grayish black.

  His hand was shaking, causing an iridescent shimmer to slide up and down the surface of the claw like an oil slick. The baby noticed the pretty colors and gurgled, reaching for it. The creature snatched it away in a blur of motion, letting out a bleat and falling backwards over its own squat tail. This, of course, further intrigued the baby, who fussed until her mother put her down, then crawled toward Donkey Ears with the intent of a hunter after prey, her one sock trailing and her chubby hand extended. The gargoyles retreated in a mad scramble.

  Donkey Ears found himself trapped between the ferocious baby and a bank of ovens, which were filling the room with the scent of cinnamon and butter. Maybe that was what attracted the kid, or possibly she was just curious; either way, she crawled fearlessly up to the cowering creature and held up her hands demandingly. He stared at her with big eyes until Miranda cleared her throat. Then he snatched up the child, who made a contented sound and fisted her hands in his tunic before stuffing most of his scarf into her mouth.

  My job wasn’t too difficult after that.

  Ten minutes later, we were gathered around the prep counter, wolfing down cinnamon rolls and milk. The kitchen staff had been feeding me up for a week. It had taken me most of that time to realize that they weren’t being kind: I was their resident guinea pig, someone to let them know what recipes worked and what didn’t. Apparently gargoyles don’t have the same taste buds as humans. And now they had a whole slew of new taste testers on whom to experiment.

  Despite the disruption caused by nine hungry kids descending on a sugar feast, I did try to explain. “Miranda, I appreciate this, but before you agree to babysit, there are a few things you should know.”

  Miranda didn’t comment. She had appropriated the baby from her terrified underling and was spooning applesauce into the child’s face at an alarming rate. She let out a small purr of approval when the little girl f
ailed to spit up.

  “See, the thing is…” Jesse, who was already on his third cinnamon roll, shot me a sharp look. It clearly said, “Do not screw this up for us.” I swallowed, but plowed on nonetheless. “The kids who end up as runaways in our world usually have…well, there are reasons.”

  “Like with us,” she murmured, clearly not listening to me.

  “Yes…sort of.” The gargoyles had fled Faerie because of prejudice and escalating violence, both of which were certainly familiar to Tami’s kids. But out of their usual element, the Fey were likely far less powerful than the Misfits. “Look, if you’re going to help me shelter these kids, at least until I can figure something else out, you need to understand—”

  I stopped because a sharp toe connected with my shin. I shot Jesse a look, but he was already out of his chair. “I gotta talk to you,” he said pointedly.

  I rubbed my leg and scowled. “Fine.”

  We ended up outside, sitting beside the loading ramp used to bring larger items into the kitchen’s storerooms. A couple of gargoyles were down below, scattering bread crumbs on the asphalt, peering upward hopefully. “What’re they doing?” Jesse asked.

  I’d wondered about that, too, until I’d spent a little time in the kitchens. “Let’s just say that baked goods are usually okay around here, but eating meat requires a certain sense of adventure.”

  He nodded, then remembered that he was supposed to be pissed at me. “What’s the big deal? Are you trying to ruin this for us?”

  It looked like Jesse was a proud graduate of Tami’s course on the Best Defense. Unfortunately for him, so was I. “I am trying to be honest with Miranda about what she’s letting herself in for. I think that’s only fair, don’t you?”