Death's Mistress

CHAPTER 34

The luduan’s evidence hadn’t helped as much as I’d hoped, since the only human involved in the case was dead. But vamps had human servants, even mages on occasion. And he had provided one tasty little nugget.

I had my phone out before I’d reached the bottom floor. “Geminus,” I told it.

“The master is—”

“Going to be really sorry if he doesn’t take this call. I can talk to him, or I can talk to Marlowe about the smuggling ring he’s been running. His choice.”

Geminus was on the phone in less than a minute, which told me a lot on its own. SOP was to let people like me hang, but then, he was probably afraid I’d do the same to him. One call to the Senate, and Geminus was going to be a very unhappy boy.

“What do you want?” The question was snapped in my ear before I’d even had a chance to say hello.

“I already told you that.”

“I don’t have it!”

“That’s too bad. I’m sure you’ve managed to cover your tracks pretty well up until now. But that was because no one was looking too closely at you. Once that changes, I don’t think the evidence for your smuggling operation will be hard to find. And that doesn’t even count what the fey are likely to—”

“Where are you?” he asked abruptly.

“Chinatown. Why?”

“Stay there, and keep your phone with you.”

“If this is a stalling tactic—”

“It isn’t. I really don’t have the damned stone. But I may know who does.”

“Who?”

“You don’t need to know that. I’ll get it and meet you.” The phone went dead.

I looked up to find Frick and Frack staring at me. “That was Senator Geminus,” Frick said.

“You do talk.”

“You’re blackmailing him?”

I put my phone away. “We’re reaching a mutually advantageous agreement.”

“What about the smuggling?”

It looked like someone had been eavesdropping. Not too surprising—it was probably why Marlowe had sent them along. “I’ll have to keep quiet about that, if he comes through. Of course, what you do is none of my business.”

They smiled.

Half an hour later, I was rooting around in my bamboo dim sum tray, hoping for another little barbecue pork bun, while my eyes scanned the scene outside. Chinatown is always colorful, but tonight was something special. A river of glittering lapis scales flowed by the window in front of me, twisting and turning in the traditional dragon dance, the light of nearby neon signs scattering spots of color on its long snakelike back.

The impromptu parade had been by twice already, a crowd following the dancers like the tide and blocking the entrance to the small restaurant. It was making the owner scowl from his perch behind the cash register, but the waiters and patrons clearly loved their front row seats. The August Moon Festival was a big deal, and everyone was in good spirits.

Everyone but me. Geminus hadn’t called, and his phone went automatically to his mailbox. I drank my beer to wash the anxious heartburn back down and watched the spectacle with everyone else.

My chopsticks rattled on bamboo. I added the dead soldier to the tower across the table while my waiter watched with big eyes. He was clearly wondering where I was putting it all. “Metabolism,” I explained.

I was trying to decide between more buns and the Mongolian barbecue when a static charge ruffled the hair on the back of my neck. My head jerked up to stare at a vampire walking down the street, flickering in between the line of glossy duck butts in the window. He paused on the corner, the shadows around him ebbing and flowing along with the overhead neon light.

It wasn’t Geminus. I saw a pleasant face with generic features under a swath of dark hair, totally unremarkable except for the sense of power radiating off him like a small sun. I watched the figure brighten and fade, brighten and fade, until it seemed like the face itself was flowing instead of the light.

There weren’t too many vamps with a power signature that strong, and most of them were at the Challenge. The traffic stopped, and he headed across the street. And my eyes narrowed.

Despite the stereotypes, there are plenty of tall Chinese. There are also quite a few who fill out a pair of jeans in interesting ways. But there are few people of any race who move through a crowd as gracefully as a dancer across a ballroom. I knew those moves.

More unmistakably, I knew that butt.

I swallowed the last of my Kirin, shoved a fifty at my waiter and burst out into the brilliantly colored night.

The vamp was already almost a block ahead, moving fast through the mass of shopping-bag-carrying locals and camera-toting tourists. He hit a snag in the form of the crowd around the dragon dancers, and it let me get close enough to scent him—or it should have. I took a breath, but all I got was the acrid smell of gunpowder from teenagers setting off illegal fireworks. Then the wind shifted, blowing in my direction, and I fell back quickly.

And someone grabbed my arm.

I whirled, slamming my attacker back against the darkened window of a shop, a knife to his throat. “Y-your change?”

“Sorry,” I mumbled, as I recognized the startled black eyes of my waiter. He thrust some bills into my hands and fled.

The distraction had been brief, but that’s all it takes when chasing someone who can move like the wind. I ran across the street and into the alley, and found what I’d expected. The full moon hung low and fat and orange in the sky, glowing like a lantern through the crack between buildings. It lit up four- and five-story brick structures, garbage, and the ribbon of water down the center of the passageway. And nothing else.

Damn it!

I forged ahead anyway, pausing every few yards to sniff the air. I hadn’t managed to get a whiff of him, but it didn’t matter. That particular scent was already cemented in my brain. But all I smelled were dog droppings, gasoline and garbage, the latter redolent of the reek of rotting fish. That was probably because there was a fish market at the end of the alley, its bright electric lights piercing the dark like a beacon.

The vamp had come that way. I finally caught him on the air, a thin thread of scent interwoven with the cleaner the proprietors used, the chlorine in the water and the smell of fresher sea life. But he was nowhere in sight.

But someone else was.

I stepped back into shadow as a tall figure in a black coat and hood came down the alley. New York in August does not require outerwear unless you’re hiding something. In my case, that something was weapons. I didn’t think that was the reason here.

The asphalt under the coat was splashed with a delicate white light. The person wearing it was outlined by a narrow halo as well, as if the coat’s fibers weren’t thick enough to contain the radiance within. It probably hadn’t been obvious on a street washed with light and color of its own, but in the gloom of the alley, it glowed.

I felt Frick and Frack come up to bracket me on either side. “Fey,” one of them said unnecessarily.

A dark shape flickered into view up ahead, under a streetlight, then passed out of view around a corner. The vampire emerged from the night to follow, and the fey ghosted behind him. With us bringing up the rear, it was like a small parade. It would have been funny, if I hadn’t thought it was about to get a lot more crowded.

“Can you distract him?” I asked Frick.

“We have no orders to engage the fey.”

“I’m not asking you to engage him, just to distract him. Make sure he loses his target.” They didn’t bother to respond, and neither moved. “What exactly were your orders?”

“To assist and protect you.”

“God, Marlowe must be desperate.” Frick remained impassive, but Frack’s lips quirked slightly. I saw them. “Look, I don’t have time to explain. But if there’s one fey, there’s probably more—maybe a lot more. And they don’t have any problem with engaging.”

Frick still didn’t say anything, but Frack stirred slightly. “If they spot her tracking them, we will have no choice but to defend her. And if there are others, the odds in that event might not be favorable.”

Frick didn’t respond, but after a moment, he sighed. The next second, they melted into the night after the fey. I gave them a brief head start and did likewise.

Away from the market’s dazzling glare, the street was a half-perceived tangle of tumbled shapes and awkward angles. The coat was barely a glimmer, its radiance swallowed by the shadows crowding thick and suffocating on all sides, and the vampire was just a slightly different texture of night.

I didn’t see what happened, exactly. One minute, the coat was gaining on the vampire, and the next, it had simply disappeared. It might have been jerked into an alley or side street, but it hadn’t looked that way. From back where I was standing, it appeared to simply vanish.

Marlowe’s boys were good. I wondered what they planned to do with him. I decided I didn’t care.

I emerged onto a busy cross street in time to see the vampire pass into a pot noodle place on a corner. I followed and found it jam-packed with waiters shouting orders, people standing three and four deep at the counter and crowding the small tables. But a quick glance around told me that my two weren’t among them.

I headed through the swinging door to the kitchen. I’d expected to be called on it, but I merited no more than a disinterested glance from the staff, who were sweating bullets trying to keep up with all the orders. I crossed to the back door, which was propped open to help with ventilation.

Outside, a graffiti- covered wall loomed over a small space filled with a stone table, a lot of cigarette butts and a heap of garbage bags. A tattered awning fluttered overhead on a small breeze. The remains of someone’s dinner sat on the table, being nosed at by a few flies.

It was dark. It was quiet. It was utterly boring.

I glanced back at the kitchen, where the staff were still scurrying around, ignoring me. They seemed way too comfortable with guests roaming around their private preserve. I had the feeling a lot of people came this way. The question was, where did they go then?

I paused beside the table. Despite the utter normalcy of the scene, something was wrong. It took me a minute to realize it was the garbage.

The flies buzzing about the half-eaten meal were totally ignoring the bounty in the trash bags nearby. I walked over to the pile, my nose twitching. Not at what I smelled, but at what I didn’t.

I’d expected the pungent odor of soured beer, the sharp acid of wilting vegetables, the stench of rotting meat. I’d expected it to smell bad. But it didn’t. It didn’t smell like much of anything, which was fair because it wasn’t actually there.

It’s never a good idea to stick anything you’d mind losing through an opaque ward. I went back to the kitchen, where a mountain of real garbage bags had been piled in a corner. The third one I tried yielded an empty industrial-sized aluminum foil container. In the center was a long cardboard tube, which I fished out and took back to the ward.

It wasn’t fancy, but my makeshift periscope allowed me to peek beneath without risking my head. The tube didn’t immediately catch fire or get chopped in two, which I counted as a plus. Of course, that didn’t mean that there were no booby traps, just that any that existed were farther down.

The tube showed me a flight of steps leading down to a safety door. Light radiated through the ornate grille casting black traceries of shadow over the stairs. It also cast the silhouette of someone in the room beyond the door, tipped back against the wall, with what looked suspiciously like a rifle in the crook of one elbow. I couldn’t get a scent reading on him, but not because of the ward. The sweet pungency of high-quality weed drifted up the stairs, filling my nose to the exclusion of anything else.

The fact that he had a rifle didn’t mean he wasn’t a vamp, but the weed probably did. Drugs had no effect on the vampire lack of a metabolism and so were uninteresting to them. They had plenty of other vices to compensate.

I stood up, tucked the tube inside my jacket and jumped through the ward. Any lingering doubt I’d had as to the type of doorkeeper I was facing wore off when there was no immediate response to the small tone the ward sent out at my entry. By the time the shadow’s bootheels hit the cracked cement underfoot, I was already at the bottom of the stairs and reaching through the iron cage to grab him by the shirt. A quick slam of his head against the unyielding doors knocked him out and the keys were in his pocket.

Simple.

What wasn’t so simple was what was reverberating off the walls. It sounded like drums or too many hearts beating too fast. I couldn’t pin it down, but it was doing bad things to my blood pressure. I stepped through the door and over the inert guard, taking a second to attach him to the grille with the cuffs he’d thoughtfully had in his back pocket.

A couple of small red dots had stuck to my jeans. I peeled one off with a thumb. It said “forty-two.” I flicked off a few more, and they had numbers, too. They were spilling out of a box with a lot of red, fewer orange and a couple of bright yellow circles. All had numbers, except for the yellow ones.

I took one of each, appropriated the guard’s flashlight and headed down the corridor. It sloped away on a sharp incline, not quite as steep as the stairs but close, and the thrumming sound got worse the farther I went, echoing strangely in the enclosed space. There was something familiar about it, something I’d heard before, I just couldn’t place it.

And then I didn’t have to wonder anymore.

A door slammed open at the end of the corridor, and a guy staggered out, obviously inebriated. A wash of light, noise and strong smells spilled out along with him. I caught the door before it closed and found myself in the back of a large room lined with sloping stadium-style seats and packed with people. I couldn’t see much else, because a couple of hulking shapes blocked my view.

The two vamps looked at me, one bored, the other just plain mean. The bored one said something, but I couldn’t tell what. My hearing is better than good, but the noise level was incredible. The commotion going on behind them had reached a fever pitch, and the crowd was chanting and stomping their feet.

That was the weird sound I’d heard: the collective pounding of hundreds of feet on a dirt floor. The place looked like it had once been a cellar, one of the mass of old structures undergirding Chinatown. They and the tunnels that connect them were once used by the tongs as escape routes in their constant feuds, but these days, they’d mostly been converted to underground shopping malls and storage areas for smuggled Gucci knockoffs.

This one appeared to have been appropriated for another purpose.

Golden graffiti traced along one grimy wall, but unlike Fin’s, it wasn’t scrolling. Instead, a running outline of abstract shapes girdled a list of names, with numbers scrawled alongside them. They were odds, I realized, recognizing the formula.

The bored guard pointed at the yellow dot on my clothes and hiked a thumb to the left. I didn’t know what that meant, but he moved out of the way, letting me pass, so I went in the specified direction.

I stayed near the wall, and edged around the crowd, trying to search for a familiar figure in the crush. It wasn’t easy, as it was standing room only in the back, and my head only came up to the shoulders of a lot of the people. But here and there I caught glimpses of what looked like a live-action version of Olga’s chess set.

A powerfully built male ogre in a leather loincloth was jabbing a long spear at an equally minimally attired troll. The troll had a club, but he wasn’t using it. It lay ignored on the ground, the heavy wood a poor substitute for his own stonelike hands.

He appeared to be trying to crack the ogre’s head between them like a nut. The ogre didn’t seem in favor of this idea and kept jabbing the spear at the troll’s small eyes. Considering how useless troll eyes are anyway, this seemed a bad strategy to me, and it had the double effect of pissing the troll off.

Luckily for the ogre, who was maybe half the troll’s size, mountains of troll flesh do not move quickly. He was just keeping ahead of the massive hands, one of which smashed down into the floor with a bone- shaking thud. The troll was becoming frustrated, and the ogre was growing tired. This wasn’t going to last much longer.

I spied a kind of box seats overhead, in the form of a platform jutting out of the wall. It looked like it had been built over the entrance to another tunnel. A rickety-looking set of wooden stairs went up to it and the back disappeared into darkness.

I headed for it, hoping that the stairs would give me a better vantage point from which to scan the room. There was a vamp at the bottom of the steps, which had a rope stretched across them, but he caught sight of the yellow tag on my shirt and let me through. I was halfway up when the stairs, which had been vibrating slightly to the enthusiastic stomping of the crowd, jittered more violently.

A man staggered out of the darkness at the top, a spill of bright red blood cascading down the front of his white dress shirt. I had a few seconds to recognize Geminus as he teetered on the edge of the platform, along with the gaping wound in his throat, the knife in his back and the disbelief on his features. Then he was falling, hitting the ground in the middle of the two combatants, his blood leeching out to stain the arena sands.

It looked like that ancient seer had been right, after all.