Kitty and the Dead Man's Hand

Chapter 16

Someone could have been tracking me, trailing two steps behind me, and in the weekend crowds I’d never know it. People were following me, people funneling along the same paths and walkways arranged between resorts, like the winding lines at an amusement park. I couldn’t smell anything beyond the concrete, sweat, and alcohol that tainted every crowded place here. I couldn’t hear anything but voices and loud music. The surveillance cameras had numbed me to the idea that people were watching me all the time. And I had stopped being able to focus on anything but what had happened to Ben.

It wasn’t until I reached the lobby of the Diablo that I stopped, because my neck had started prickling. I looked around, trying to track where the feeling was coming from. I made my way to the wall and tried to get my bearings.

Then I spotted him, near the front doors. Boris, wearing a leather jacket over his T-shirt. He didn’t look like he was watching me; he was turned toward the flashing lights over the stairs leading to the casino area. But I was undoubtedly in his peripheral vision. He was touching his ear and speaking into an almost invisible hands-free earpiece. It curled around his ear and lay flush along his skin.

He was talking to Sylvia. They could have followed me from the Olympus. From anywhere. They’d dodged Evan and Brenda. Crap, I had to get out of here.

Too late, I saw her. I’d been seeing her all weekend. Just once, couldn’t I be wrong about there being people out to get me? I was standing between them. She walked straight toward me, and all my instincts screamed for me to run. But where? They’d picked their spots well, Boris at the main door, his partner near the casino.

I took a breath and calmed down. I was in a wide-open space, in full view of security. What could they possibly do to me here? Anything they tried would draw way too much attention to themselves. A hundred cameras in fish-eye globes spaced regularly across the ceiling meant they couldn’t get away with anything.

I should have asked Evan or Brenda to stay with me. But I needed them to find Ben.

Working my way farther in, I headed for the casino. Plenty of people, along with plenty of security, made it seem like the safest place at the moment. All the noise of a million ringing bells and clicking slot machines hurt my ears and gave me a headache. Not to mention the lights stabbing at my eyes. But right now, it was a haven.

The woman angled to intercept me. I glanced over my shoulder; Boris still guarded the entrance, and he no longer made any pretense about not watching me. Without breaking into a run and shoving people out of the way, I wasn’t going to get out of the entrance. My back was stiff, hackles up, and I wanted to growl, but I swallowed it back and kept it together.

She slipped in front of me and stopped before I could descend the stairs to the main casino floor.

“I have a gun in my pocket,” she said softly, meeting my gaze. This was a different manner than any of the other personae I’d seen in her all weekend. She was an actress, a brilliant actress, completely unrecognizable when she wanted to be simply by changing the way she moved, spoke, and held herself. “Come with me or I’ll open fire right here.”

Astonished, I laughed. “What? Into a crowd in a Vegas casino? You’re kidding.”

“Either way you’ll be dead, which is all I want. I’m simply betting that your sunny disposition won’t let you take anyone else down with you. So how about it? Shall we be going?”

Wait a minute. She basically just told me she was going to kill me, and now she wanted me to stroll out of here with her or she’d fire into the crowd? But only after capping me first. I didn’t bother asking if she had silver bullets or not.

“You’re bluffing. You have to be bluffing.”

“You willing to make that gamble?”

My voice pitched higher, almost hysterical. “This is Vegas. Shouldn’t I be?”

I had a thought then: What if this were Cormac? If he were here, threatening to open fire in a crowded lobby unless I did as he asked, would I believe him? Did I really think he’d do it? No, of course not. But looking at Sylvia, she had something more than the cold, calculating, unwavering expression that I’d seen in Cormac when he was on a job, when he was about to kill—or had just killed—something. Someone. She had a fanatical glint to her expression, a berserker edge. I remembered what Brenda said: Sylvia didn’t play by rules. So yes, I believed if I pushed her, she would shoot me here.

I started walking, and she fell into step at my arm, and a little behind, guiding me out of the lobby and down the hallway to the elevators. She was half a head shorter than I was. I could totally take her. Right until she pulled that gun. I wondered what she planned on doing. Taking me to a room, maybe. Shooting me quietly, dumping me out with the trash. Or maybe taking me out to a car, driving out to the desert, out of sight of the thousands of surveillance cameras. No one would ever know.

I tried to keep her talking. People fired guns less when they talked. “Found a buyer, then, did you? Someone willing to put a hit on me? Because most people aren’t willing to go that far. I’m famous, you know.”

She sneered. “This one’s for the fun of it.”

“So,” I asked. “Does this mean you got Ben, too?”

“Why would we want him? I sure as hell don’t know what he sees in you, but I don’t have a beef with him.”

Which meant they didn’t know he was a werewolf, weren’t gunning for him, and hadn’t gotten to him. I should call Brenda.

I swallowed and kept my breathing steady. Kept Wolf settled. Had to think. “Cormac’ll go after you when he finds out about this. You know that.”

“Cormac’s in a box. There are ways of getting to him. You don’t actually think he’s safe in prison, do you?”

A million ways someone could die in prison, and no one would think it strange. God, what a mess. I couldn’t even warn him.

Had to run, had to fight, couldn’t just give up, had to do something. I could feel fur tickling the inside of my skin. Any minute now, I’d split open and Wolf would leap out. If I couldn’t save myself, she’d do it for me. That’s how it worked.

My breathing came too quickly, and I was sweating, even in the frigid air-conditioning. We were in a quiet hallway now. Boris walked about two dozen steps behind us. The doors we passed looked like they opened to utility closets or offices—locked in both cases, inaccessible as an escape route. Maybe once we got outside I could run.

We were near Odysseus Grant’s theater. I wondered...

There, around the corner, was the emergency exit I’d used when I sneaked backstage.

I bolted.

What did I have to lose? We were out of the crowd. She couldn’t hold the death of innocents over me anymore. I didn’t look back to see if she was drawing her gun or not. I had to get out of there and hope I could run faster than she could shoot. I could run fast. Wolf flowed through my veins.

Footsteps sounded behind me, but I was faster. I slammed into the door, shoving it open, and kept going. In a crack of thunder, drywall exploded behind me. Gunfire. She was actually crazy enough to shoot inside the hotel. But she only hit the wall. I sped up.

I thought I could lose her in the backstage maze, circle around, find another exit, get away. Call Evan and Brenda. Call the police. Anything.

I dodged into another hallway, painted black. Then I must have taken a wrong turn, because I ended up onstage, toward the back, looking out over an empty theater and the back of Grant’s equipment. The curtains were open, and Grant himself stood downstage. He looked like he was practicing with the Chinese rings, loops of silver interlocking, clicking as they linked and unlinked so quickly I couldn’t follow.

Then, because Wolf was at the front of my senses, because everything was sharp and brilliant and the world around me was moving a little bit slower—and maybe because I was standing behind him—I could see it. The ring in his hand never moved. He kept his grip on the same spot, always hiding it from the audience, and worked so quickly he only made it look like the rings changed places, linking together, slipping apart. Two of the rings were already connected, permanently, but he kept the joint hidden, so they looked like just two more rings hanging on his arm. And one of the other rings had a gap in it. He kept the gap hidden in his hand while slipping the other rings into and out of it. He handled them fluidly, perfectly. I never would have been able to tell, if I hadn’t caught that odd glimpse.

But it was still magic, because I certainly could never manipulate the trick as well as Grant. At least not without a lot of practice.

He turned around, as if alerted by the pressure of my gaze. The rings stopped and dangled from his hands instead of dancing. At first he seemed annoyed, scowling, but I must have looked desperate, flushed and out of breath, because he asked, “What’s wrong?”

“I’m being followed, they want to kill me,” I said, pointing behind me. I sounded incoherent to my ears, but I didn’t have time to give any more detail.

He glanced over my shoulder, and I turned, afraid that Boris and Sylvia had sneaked up behind me. They hadn’t; only the two of us stood onstage. But I could hear breathing echoing among the rigging backstage. They were close.

Grant must have sensed it, too. He marched to the painted cabinet, sitting innocuously to the side. “If you would step in here for a moment.”

I laughed, a tad hysterically. “You’re going to hide me in your trick cabinet? You really think that’s going to fool them?”

“Please, just step in here. Everything’ll be fine.” He sounded like someone urging me to drink the Kool-Aid. “And whatever you do, don’t move.”

What the hell? Maybe it would actually work. I stepped in, and he closed the door, relegating me to darkness.

Cautiously, I felt around the inside of the cabinet. I didn’t know the trick of the device that made people seem to disappear. Grant hadn’t told me, so I couldn’t activate the mechanism, spring the trapdoor, or whatever. All I could do was stand there. I strained to listen but couldn’t hear what was going on outside. Had they found me? Was Grant able to put them off?

I barely had room to move. I felt the door in front of me, the two sides around me, inches from my arms. I took a step back, expecting to come up against the back of the box. Then I took another step, and another. Three steps back. I’d walked around the cabinet; it wasn’t that big. There couldn’t be that much room inside.

Shifting my arms, I felt for the sides—which weren’t there.

Looking around, I saw shadows. Which was impossible, because the box was pitch-dark—not a sliver of light passed inside. But I could now lift my arms, stretch them all the way out from my sides. My steps didn’t echo like they should have on the wood floor of a cabinet. I glanced over my shoulder, half-expecting to see a snow-covered forest and a lamppost. I didn’t see much of anything: shifting tones of gray, like clouds passing over a nighttime sky. A breeze touched my face, ruffling strands of my hair across my face. Which was impossible—I was inside a box.

And standing on a piece of ground, with dirt under my feet. The air had a strange scent, marshy, decayed, like a swamp, or an aquarium that needed cleaning. Algae, fish, and mud. I shivered with cold, and a dampness crept under my skin, touching my bones. I hugged myself.

Then something moved. I sensed it rather than saw it, a shifting on the ground, a displacement of air that brought with it a wave of a new smell, of rotted flesh. To my right, a darker shadow moved, a surface that gleamed in an unseen source of light. Something wet and boneless, creeping toward me. I wanted to scream and run. But I couldn’t do anything.

Three steps forward would take me back to the place I’d come from. But ahead of me lay only shadow. No box at all, no cabinet, no stage, no magician. This was altogether a different kind of magic. No tricks, no mirrors.

Hugging myself tightly, I closed my eyes and stepped forward. One, two, three, exactly the way I’d come from. The air closed in around me, but I couldn’t smell the wood of the cabinet, the sweat of the stage, not like I expected. I didn’t dare open my eyes, in case I didn’t see darkness but those same half-seen shadows.

Something touched my arm, and I screamed.

A hand closed over my mouth, and another hand—the one holding my arm—pulled me forward, out of the cabinet onto the stage. Odysseus Grant looked at me, looked into my eyes. I blinked back at him, astonished, relieved, and confused. I was frozen. Even my Wolf was quiet.

Something like a smile tugged at his lips. “I told you not to move,” he said.

“What—” I stammered. Couldn’t get my voice to work, which was weird. I swallowed and tried again. “What is that place?”

“It’s just a box,” he said. “A magical cabinet.”

He guided me to a chair at the side of the stage, which was good, because I hadn’t realized how wobbly my knees were until I sat down.

“They’re gone,” he said. “They should stay off your trail for a while, but you might want to lie low.”

I wasn’t sure I could manage that. Stifling a smile, I shook my head.

“How’d you get mixed up with them, anyway?”

“This is what happens when a werewolf finds herself at a gun show,” I said. “It was bound to happen sometime this weekend. Apart from that, it’s a long story.”

“You look like you could use a drink of water. Wait here—”

“No—don’t go. I’m okay, really. I just need to sit a minute.”

“All right.” He leaned on the wall nearby and drew a pack of cards from his pocket and startled shuffling.

I needed a few moments to catch my breath, that was all. But as soon as I left here, I’d be alone again. Pack instinct had kicked in. I needed someone at my back, and right now, Grant was it.

I shouldn’t trust him. I didn’t know any more about him and his motives than I did about Balthasar. The door to the cabinet was still open. The prop loomed, but all I could see inside was darkness. That was all that was there, wasn’t it?

I said, “The box. It’s not perfectly safe inside, is it?”

“No. Not perfectly.”

“It’s not a cabinet. It’s a doorway.”

His expression didn’t change. He wore a wry, uncommunicative smile, and his gaze focused on his cards. He continued shuffling the deck, a different way each time, a dozen different methods that made the cards a blur.

“Who are you really?” I said.

“I suppose,” he said, “my act is exactly that—an act. You might say my real job is to be a gatekeeper. A guardian.”

“For what’s in there?” I took his silence as assent. Gateway, indeed. A doorway into yet another world, as if the current one hadn’t become complicated enough. I asked, “What’s in there?”

“Have you ever read Lovecraft?”

“No,” I said.

He made a wry face. “Never mind, then. Is there someone who can come get you? Someone you can stay with, in case those two come looking for you again?”

I had to shake myself from a spell. Reality was returning... slowly. I remembered: I’d been coming to see Grant anyway before the two bounty hunters waylaid me.

“Not at the moment. I was sort of coming to see you about that.”

He’d moved on to doing tricks with the deck of cards. He displayed a card—the three of spades—slid it back in the middle of the deck, shuffled, tapped the top of the deck, flipped the top card over. The three of spades. Shuffle, pick a card—ace of hearts this time—shuffled it back in, tap, and there it was. He did the sleight of hand another dozen times, producing a dozen cards on cue. His fingers seemed to move by instinct, as if they had minds of their own, working in a graceful, choreographed dance.

“I understand you can make people reappear after they’ve vanished,” I said.

“Given the right circumstances.”

“Trapdoors and hidden mirrors?”

“Something like that. You’re missing someone?”

“Friend of mine.” I paused, ducked my gaze. No need to be cagey, I supposed. “My fiancé. And don’t tell me he probably got cold feet and ditched me.”

“What happened?”

I told him.

Grant said, “It sounds like a perfectly mundane set of circumstances. I’m sure the mundane solutions—the police—will find him.”

He couldn’t help me. I wasn’t surprised. I’d just wanted to try everything. Leave no stone unturned. Time to hit the streets, then. But I didn’t want to leave. Somehow, even with his icy blue stare and the box that opened into a world of weirdness, I felt safe here. Feeling safe—that was a different kind of sexy. You got to a point where Prince Reliable was so much more attractive than Prince Charming. The thrill of living on the edge versus the warm glow of being cocooned and adored.

“Yeah, the cops’ll find him. But in one piece?” I sighed and looked away. “I’m sorry. I guess I believed those stories that there’s something... different about you a little too much. Box notwithstanding.”

“Do you know how wealthy I’d be if I could make people appear just by snapping my fingers?”

I snapped. “Poof, here’s Jimmy Hoffa?”

“Exactly. I’m not willing to pay the price for that kind of magic.”

I narrowed my gaze. “But that kind of magic exists?”

“What do you think?”

I thought that over the last few years I’d seen a lot of things that the rational mind said were impossible. A lot of magic. My whole life had become a mission to chronicle the impossible. It was how I kept myself anchored to some kind of reality, in a world where werewolves were real and I was one of them.

“I think there’s a whole lot of this world I still don’t understand,” I said.

He regarded me, a faint smile touching his lips, which gave him the most genuine—even warm—expression I’d ever seen on him. “You surprise me. Your kind tends to chaos. But not you.”

Kitty Norville, a force for order? Wild. I felt like I’d passed some kind of test with him.

“I like to pretend that everything’s going to be all right. That everything’s normal.”

“How is that working out for you?”

“Some days are better than others.”

Suddenly, he pulled himself from the wall, looking toward the theater door in the back of the house. Unconsciously, his hands straightened and re-straightened the deck of cards. He held them like I’d seen some people hold weapons. He looked like nothing so much as an animal who’d spotted danger.

I looked where he did, in the direction of the supposed danger, and didn’t see what he did, or what he sensed with whatever senses he had. But a moment later, I smelled it, the wild skin and musk of a lycanthrope.

Nick came sauntering in, hands in the pockets of his oh-so-tight jeans. A fitted T-shirt showed off his muscles. I tensed, wondering what he wanted. He barely glanced at me, just long enough to acknowledge me with a wink, before he stopped about halfway down the theater to regard Grant. The magician glared back with an icy gaze, his lips pressed in a line, hands tensed around his deck of cards.

“I see how it is,” Nick said, behind a laugh. “You have to lure us here because you don’t have the guts to come after us.”

Grant’s jaw tightened, like he had to keep anger in check. Then he smiled faintly, but it was cold, challenging. “A dozen of you against one of me? I’m not foolish.”

“Sure, right,” Nick said. “And what are you doing with her? Think you can use her to cut some kind of deal?”

“Nobody uses me for anything,” I said, though I was clearly out of my depth. This was a long-running argument, a rivalry that went deeper than I could see from my vantage. But if I stuck around, maybe I’d learn something.

“We were just having a conversation. Like reasonable people do,” Grant said.

“This is stupid,” Nick said. He’d begun pacing, fists clenched at his side, going a few steps up and down the aisle, like a tiger. “We could bring you down. If we went public, people would know we were monsters—and celebrate us for it. While you’d still be a two-bit magician.” He jabbed a finger at Grant, who didn’t flinch.

“You only think that,” Grant said, ever calm. “If you went public, you’d be nothing more than a freakshow. You’d lose every advantage you have. Balthasar knows that.”

I said, “Ah, do either of you want to explain to me what’s going on here?”

“Not your concern,” Grant said. “I’m sorry you had to see this much of it.”

“There’s some kind of feud between you and Balthasar’s troupe. I can see that much.”

“Feud?” Nick said, laughing. “It’s a war.”

“Over what?” I said.

Grant hadn’t taken his gaze off the lycanthrope. He said, “The nature of the universe.”

Now I laughed. “You’re joking.”

But neither of them reacted, locked in some epic stare-down. Odysseus Grant tapped the deck he was holding twice, then turned up the first card: ace of spades. Nick flinched but immediately straightened again and didn’t give ground.

“You really ought to leave,” Grant said.

“I will. I just came to deliver a message. To her.” He moved toward the stage, toward me, pulling something out of his pocket.

Grant moved to intercept us—to shield me from him. Frankly, though, I didn’t know who to be more worried about.

“Give this to her,” Nick said, tossing the thing from his pocket up to Grant. Still watching Nick, Grant handed it back to me.

It was a plastic bag holding a scrap of cloth, part of the collar of a white T-shirt. I opened it. The smell of Ben hit me, filled me. The plastic had preserved the scent.

My stomach turned to ice. “Where is he?”

Nick shrugged. “Balthasar said that would get your attention.”

Shit. My second thought was, not again. How many times could a guy need rescuing? Assuming there was something left to rescue.

“Why?” I said, my voice taut. “What does Balthasar want with him?”

“I guess you’ll have to go find out.”

I started running.

“Kitty!” Grant called, finally turning from Nick to reach after me. I stopped to listen. “It’s a trap. You know that.”

“So? Give me an alternative.”

He didn’t. Couldn’t. Nick wore an amused smile, like he was enjoying himself way too much. I ran past him, out of the theater. Nick might have followed me. I didn’t wait around to see.

Boris and Sylvia were still out there, which was one thing too many to worry about. If I moved fast enough, they wouldn’t spot me. So I just had to move faster.

But times like this, panic made time move way too slowly.