Moonshine

Chapter 16

She was just a girl, Georgina King.

Granted, she was a girl in trouble, but that didn't change who she was. A girl who was nothing special to me. Yeah, I'd do my best to help her, like the others would. Give my life to save hers—because it was the right thing to do. She was an innocent… I was not. It was a fair trade. But George? George herself?

George was only a girl I knew.

Too bad I hadn't figured that out sooner. It would've saved me a lot of melodramatic brooding. And Goodfellow would be the first to say I didn't need any extra encouragement there.

Just a girl… it was the only way I could survive.

"You're cleaning your gun."

I rolled my eyes upward to see Niko gazing down at me with an overly bland expression. I recognized the look. He was perturbed by something. "You made it clear that my ass was lazing in that department."

"I did," he admitted, brow furrowing lightly. "But since when do you actually listen to me?"

I turned back to the task at hand. Cleaning the barrel with the rod and a solvent-soaked patch, I said seriously, "I always listen, Cyrano. I'd be damn stupid not to."

He considered that for a moment and sat at the table with me. "It worries me to no end that you're actually admitting that." When I responded with only an absent nod, he moved on. "Where did you go earlier? After the call?" He paused. "Can you tell me?"

"Sure." I finished with the barrel and began to oil the disassembled parts. "I went downstairs to the lobby."

He picked up on the implications of that with lightning speed. "The mirror."

"We can get another one for our bathroom, if you want," I said, putting the weapon back together with several movements more practiced than they had the right to be. "I'm over that now. Pretty stupid shit to begin with, wasn't it?"

"Hell." He stared at me, lines bracketing his mouth. "You've… hell."

I completed the thought for him. "Gone off the deep end?" The corner of my mouth quirked up. "Wasn't a long trip for me, was it?" I started on the next gun. It was a new Glock that I'd gotten to replace the one lost at Moonshine. "Seriously, Nik, I'm okay. Actually, I'm better than okay—I'm functional. And right now, that's what we need."

He was far from convinced, I could tell. I pushed the Magnum in his direction. Something to keep his mind off his worries. "Clean it?" When his eyes darkened dangerously, I said reasonably, "You know you'll do a better job of it."

His disquiet didn't fade, but he took the gun in hand. "That's a given."

"Did Flay say who Caleb took?" I squirted more cleaning solution on another swab. "You know, to keep him in line."

"His son." Niko shook his head grimly and went to work on the Magnum. "He's three."

"Caleb, he's making friends right and left." I shook my head and clucked a tongue. I absolutely did not think of a small child. A little fuzzy no doubt, but as afraid and lost as any human child.

"Flay had no choice. That hardly means he's on our side or even a decent creature, but we have to recognize he was powerless in this situation."

"Well, he's not powerless now," I pointed out. "He can help us and help his cub all in one. Bonus points all around."

"Yes, and I'm sure that's a great comfort to him right now," he said impassively.

Yeah, probably not. "Goodfellow come up with any leads?"

"He's close, he says. Very close."

Very close turned out to be three days and over a thousand miles away. Lady Lucia, Florida. I'd thought it was sweltering at home; these people breathed lava masquerading as oxygen and somehow managed to keep from spontaneously combusting as they walked in the noontime sun. Promise, who trusted her cloaks and sunblock only so far, stayed in the RV. With the nonvampires of our group practically bursting into flames, I didn't blame her.

"It's hot." I averted my eyes from the unholy white fire shimmering in the midst of a hard blue sky.

"Yes, you said that." From behind opaque black glasses, Niko scanned the shimmering stretch of dead yellow grass that covered the field before us.

"It bears repeating." I wiped at the sweat on my forehead that had formed the nanosecond after I'd wiped the previous moisture away.

"It's closer than the inside of Hephaestus's jock-strap." Goodfellow shaded his eyes, then hissed in outrage when he caught sight of the darkening of his shirt around his neck and underarms. "I'm perspiring." He pulled his shirt away from his chest with fastidious fingers. "Sweat, actual sweat, and there's not even sex involved. It's an abomination." He turned and started back toward the RV he'd provided for the trip. "I'll wait inside with Promise."

Niko snared him by the arm and pulled him to a stop. "We may need you, Goodfellow."

"Suck it up, Loman," I grunted. "You don't hear Snowball bitching."

"He's panting too hard to breathe, much less complain," Robin grumbled.

Unfortunate, but true. Flay, while back in what passed as his human form, was panting with gusto. It was an odd look—a well-dressed albino man with a mane of hair and a continuously moving red tongue. He was wearing a pair of black jeans that belonged to Niko and one of Goodfellow's silk shirts. He'd given a derogatory sniff at the offer of one of my shirts. I loved that. The pound reject thought my stuff wasn't fashionable enough for him. Or more likely, he'd been yanking my chain. There wasn't a whole lot of love lost between the two of us, and while Flay was cooperating with us, it didn't stop him from taking a swipe here and there. I didn't hold any grudges. I tried to torture him while he was comatose; he scorned my clothes. If that's all I had coming to me, I was ahead of the game.

Flay's tongue was dotting his shirt with saliva as he growled with frustration. "Wait."

He disappeared back into our home away from home. Goodfellow had gotten the RV on loan from one of his fellow sales sharks. It slept six, had a bathroom and a kitchen, and all in all was about the size of our apartment. At least it had seemed that way the first few hours. As time wore on, it began to rapidly shrink. Ten hours into the trip it was approximately the size of a shoe box. Even a clean Flay had a pungent musky dog smell that followed him wherever he went, and to add insult to injury, it turned out that one of the most dangerous men alive, Niko, was allergic to dander.

Less than three minutes later, Flay was back… wearing orange-and-black plaid shorts and a T-shirt that read FLORIDA, THE SUNSHINE STATE.

Goodfellow winced. "I don't want to live anymore. I honestly don't."

Well-muscled but transparently pale legs were covered liberally with a dense mat of curly white hair, but it was the frighteningly long, horrifically furry toes revealed by thong sandals that were the crowning touch. Flay scowled at Robin and offered smugly, "Promise said look good. Promise likes way I look."

Promise had picked up a new admirer during the trip, or at least it had seemed that way at first. It wouldn't have been a big surprise, Promise being Promise, but it did give new meaning to the phrase "puppy love." Every inch that she moved in the RV, soulful ruby eyes would follow her. During meals, the best and biggest portion of the fast-food fare would be snatched up and placed before her. A definite, raving doggy-style crush, I'd thought, until I caught the wicked grin Flay flashed at Niko's back. It was all about revenge… annoying, evil, but basically harmless revenge. It should've been funny, but truthfully, nothing was funny much anymore. The world was all gray now. But, hey, you know what they say. You take the bad with the good. Balance. I was all about the balance now.

"Yeah, you're styling," I muttered, grabbing his arm to push him into motion. "Let's go."

We headed across the field toward a gathering of RVs, some similar to ours and some barely mobile, from the looks of them. They all squeaked under that bizarrely blue sky with nothing but swamp as far as the eye could see. After living in New York for a few years, I felt small and exposed in the midst of all this open space. It made me want to pull my knife on the off chance that an alligator or a rabid monkey jumped out of the scraggly brush. They had monkeys down here, didn't they?

Lady Lucia was in southern Florida, land of gators and pissed-off monkeys, and no one could tell me differently. A near ghost town, it was nowhere near the ocean or a pretty, pristine lake. It sat on the edge of the Everglades and the local industry seemed to be mosquito ranching. I slapped the one on my neck and kept moving. We'd been phenomenally lucky. Of course, George would've said it wasn't luck, that it was the way things were meant to be. Meant… to… be. I slapped my neck again, thought gray thoughts, and kept trudging.

Goodfellow, purveyor of this fabulous luck, had connections with a few Gypsy tribes—like we didn't see that coming. After a few hundred calls he'd finally pinned a rumor on one particular tribe. The Sarzo tribe had emigrated from Eastern Europe nearly seventy years ago. They tended to follow a route all over the country, but Lady Lucia was their home base, as much as Gypsies had a stationary home. The Sarzo also boasted of the oldest lineage among Gypsies. Once upon a very long time ago, they'd been a tribe of half-naked nomads when the wheel was still five thousand years away from being the latest and greatest. They'd also known the Bassa. The Bassa had been nomads too… following the sun. Cold-blooded and reptilian, the Bassa weren't huge fans of winter weather. They'd been allies, those who would become the Sarzo and a species who'd slithered rather than walked. If the Bassa had left anything behind, the Sarzo would know about it.

Or so went the theory.

Theories were great, but I was never one to underestimate the invariably piss-poor mood of reality. As we walked on, a few people began to venture out into the heat. Not many, only a few sharp-eyed men and an even sharper-eyed old woman. "Is it like coming home?" Robin asked as we walked.

He knew something about our lives, Goodfellow, but he didn't know everything. This happened to be one of the things he didn't know. He knew Niko and I were Gypsy. I was half, and we really didn't know what Niko was. He could be half, could be whole. Sophia, not one to answer what she considered boring questions, had actually answered that one. She didn't know. Couldn't narrow it down if she was sober and had a week to think it over. It could've been a Gypsy from her tribe. The blond hair meant nothing. Sophia's clan had traveled much of Europe, dwelling in Greece for a time. They'd intermarried there on occasion, although it was frowned on by both sides. A blond northern Greek had slipped in there somewhere. We'd seen evidence of that in the few pictures Sophia had taken with her; they were scattered carelessly in the bottom of a small trunk that held her fortune-teller costumes. Groups of close-faced, dark-skinned Gypsies with one or two bright heads spotted throughout like patches of sun. With his olive skin, Niko could be one of them, but there was no way to be sure. Sophia had left her people before Niko was born. Half or whole, neither of us had been nourished in the welcoming arms of Sophia's kin. It made it difficult to consider them ours.

Not quite like coming home at all.

I didn't say that, though. Niko would put it in a more diplomatic fashion than I ever could. I was right "We've not met our mother's clan," he said from behind.

Goodfellow seemed surprised. "Didn't you try to track them down?"

"We were a little preoccupied," Niko replied dryly, "what with the Auphe situation and fleeing for our lives."

That was two—count them—two blatant lies from my brother. Of course we'd tried to trace them. Sophia had been murdered, I'd been kidnapped, and we were being hounded day and night. We knew that we needed all the help we could get. We'd searched for Sophia's tribe, and we'd found them. Her relatives, her family… what should've been ours.

They had spit on me. Literally. Forking the evil eye with thrusts of their hands, they'd hissed in fear and hatred, and spit. As homecomings go, it doesn't get much more festive than that. How did they know what I was? It seemed while Sophia might have left them, they hadn't left her… not completely. They'd kept tabs on her. She was Gypsy. She might not have cared about that, but they did. They probably would've contacted Niko once he was old enough to understand, but then I came along. Sophia's own knew what she'd done. They knew of the bargain and saw the result born. They'd written her off then, her and anyone with her. And when I'd shown up with my pale, pale skin, they'd known exactly what I was, and Niko was tarred with the same brush. They didn't spit on him, he was an abomination by association only, but they turned away from him. He was invisible to them. Nonexistent. Dead.

That was the beginning and end of our family reunion.

Goodfellow didn't question the lies, although there was a good chance he recognized them for what they were. Niko didn't lie often, but he did it exceptionally well. That didn't stop me from suspecting that the puck still knew. He'd had tens of thousands of years' experience in the field. "Preoccupied, yes, I can see that. And family? Who needs it? Take the Borgia family for example. When I was staying with them for an extended holiday…"

I tuned out as beside me, Flay grunted and reached into the pocket of his shorts to pull out a baseball hat. He smacked it on his head, walked faster, and muttered, "Talk. Always talk, talk. Make ears hurt." It was nice to know that the Goodfellow charm transcended the chasm between species.

By the time we crossed the field Niko had smoothly pulled ahead of us. It didn't take any discussion to know that it would be best if the token human among us did the talking at first. Robin and I might look human, but you never knew when someone was going to have a quirky ability to sniff you out. With Flay… hell, even your average human living in blinders was going to do a double take. And Gypsies weren't average in any way, shape, or form. They'd know a wolf when they saw one. We'd thought about leaving Flay in the RV with Promise, but decided at the last minute it might not hurt to flex our muscle. Gypsies weren't known for their cooperative ways, not unless there was something in it for them. They had a lot in common with Goodfellow in that. Whether wearing a thousand-dollar suit or a five-dollar wife beater, businessmen were all the same. If you wanted them to play, you had to pay.

And the one in said wife beater looked like a helluva negotiator.

His skin was dusky, a shade darker than Niko's. Wavy black hair was paired with a thick, drooping mustache and impenetrable dark eyes. Impressive muscles bulged as he folded his arms over his chest. As he eyed us with suspicious disfavor, the old woman whispered in his ear. Two other men flanked them, each casually swinging a baseball bat.

"What do you want here?" the obvious leader demanded harshly when we stopped about ten feet away. "We're not running a boarding kennel." The slow sneer was flashed at Flay. Flay yawned, unimpressed, yet showing some rather impressive teeth. He'd heard it all before, most of it from me.

Niko ignored the posturing. "We're in search of something. To buy."

That perked the Rom's ears up although he refused to show it. Looking Niko up and down, he curled his lip. "Vayash, eh?"

He was right. Our mother had been of the Vayash clan. That in and of itself wouldn't have been too amazing of a guess; the Vayash were the only clan to spawn blonds. How he knew Niko was of Gypsy stock was another matter.

"Yes," Niko confirmed. "Our mother was Vayash."

There were worlds of meaning behind that statement. We were Gypsy, but we'd not been raised Gypsy. The man nodded and frowned. "That hair, those eyes, that nose. Vayash." His eyes traveled past Niko to take me in. It couldn't be more clear that Flay wasn't Rom, and neither was Goodfellow with his coloring. "You." He shook his head. "The Vayash, always polluting themselves with the Gadje." Gadje… outsiders, non-Gypsy. "We thought they'd finally seen the error of that particular way."

It was a free pass if ever we'd been given one. They didn't know I was Auphe. Sure, I was half-Vayash at best. Polluted, second-class, not true Rom, but it was a definite step up from abomination. It was also a helluva lucky break and Niko didn't waste any time in taking advantage of it.

"Our acquaintance"—he indicated Goodfellow with a jut of his chin—"has a good deal of money. Perhaps you can help him spend it… if you have what we're seeking."

Robin's groan was nearly inaudible, but considering his money-grubbing ways, that was the equivalent of a ringing endorsement. Four sets of dark eyes focused on him, brightening with a look I'd seen more than once in Goodfellow's own. Baseball bats hung at rest and white teeth flashed expansively under a thick black mustache. "We have many, many things. Surely one will be what you seek. I am Branje." He swept an arm toward an RV to the right. "We'll sit, we'll talk, we'll drink. We'll take very good care of our new friends." Bullshit, every word of it. We knew it, and Branje most likely knew that we knew it, but it was the game, and the game had to be played.

Although not by me. Flay didn't seem much interested in the dark and gloomy interior either. Instead he wrinkled his nose, shook his head adamantly, and sat his furry ass on the ground. I kept him company under the broiling sun, leaning against the hot metal. Drinking and conniving, watching the highest levels of tricksters, the Rom and a Puck, going mano a mano, none of it much interested me. I'd sooner sweat and bake.

"Smell weird."

The clack of the door closing above our heads had been several minutes ago, and I'd been sitting with eyes shut as I listened to the sound of a million enraged bugs. At least it seemed like a million. Swatting yet another mosquito on my forearm, I asked incuriously, "What smells weird?"

"You."

I opened my eyes and slanted a glance at Flay's moist face. I'd have thought the panting would mean he wouldn't have to sweat, but it seemed Snowball had gotten the worst of both worlds there. "Yeah, yeah, I smell like Auphe. Monster. Stinky. The subject's been covered."

Eyes rolled in annoyance under the brim of the baseball cap. "No. Smell weird. Not just Auphe stink. More. Human weird."

"So you're saying, now I'm stinky and I smell weird?" I summed up as I wiped the sweat from my face. "Great. My self-esteem says thanks for playing."

The T-shirt-covered shoulders shrugged. "Tell what I smell."

At any other time that would've been funny. The casual toss off by a tourist-gear-wearing wolf. I almost wished I could appreciate it, but if I did, there would be other things waiting to push in… things I would appreciate a lot less. I closed my eyes again. "Promise likes calla lilies. Her apartment is always full of them, all colors."

Seconds later I heard Flay get to his feet and start moving from RV to RV, knocking on the doors. I seriously doubted he would find any out here, but then again you never knew. It was nearly twenty minutes later when I was interrupted again. The sun had started to fall and the temperature had dropped nearly an entire degree when the door flew open and Goodfellow came storming out. He was cursing at the top of his lungs; I didn't have to recognize the words to know just how filthy they were. It was Romany he was speaking, the original language of the Gypsy clans. The dialect tended to vary from clan to clan, tribe to tribe, but as a rule every Rom knew it. Niko and I, however, didn't. Sophia hadn't let more than an occasional Romany word slip and those hadn't been exactly educational. Apparently, Robin's grasp of Rom foul language far exceeded Sophia's own, because I'd yet to hear anything that I knew.

Pointing a finger back at the RV, Goodfellow swore again, then switched to English. He'd once remarked to me that no language was quite as good as English for spitting disgust and disdain. French was close, but English won out in the end for sheer crudeness. "Soul-sucking harridan. Shriveled, toothless old crone. Put your malicious, grasping fingers away. You won't get a single penny from me."

There was the gentle thud of boots in the dirt beside me and Niko sighed, "Negotiations have begun. This may take some time."

"They have it?" I almost slipped. I almost felt the desperation. Yeah… almost. But you know what. they say about almost. Hand grenades and horseshoes. Nothing but hand grenades and horseshoes.

"It's a possibility." He sat beside me to watch the show. It turned out that the old woman, not the man with the mustache, was the leader—at least in the field of negotiations. "Abelia-Roo is a cagey opponent."

She came rocketing out of the RV shaking a wrinkled fist and swinging an elaborately carved cane. Not sharing Goodfellow's belief about English, she howled out a string of consonants and vowels in Romany that had even the perpetually jaded Robin's eyes widening. "My hair? My hair? You prune-teated old goat, you'd best take that back. Take it back or I'll rain fire on this miserable campsite until it's wiped from the face of the earth."

"Can he actually do that?" I asked skeptically.

Niko snorted. There was the tart smell of blackberry brandy on his breath. He had swallowed the traditional thimbleful to start the business at hand. "Hardly. If he could, every two-star restaurant in the city would be smoking ruins."

That was true enough. I watched as two gnarled fingers went up behind the white head like horns and Abelia-Roo made a sneering comment. "A leash?" Goodfellow shot back. "I think you're sadly mistaken, witch from hell. You've never kept one of my kind on a leash. Oh, I think perhaps you worshipped us as lowly cave apes should, and if anyone wore the leash, it was you." He spit onto the dirt at her feet. "Lying, thieving human."

This time she did switch to English. "Lying, thieving puck." Her spit actually hit Goodfellow's shoe.

Ah, it was like old times. I stretched my legs out into the dirt. "We're on a schedule, Nik. This is going to take forever."

"Have faith." His shoulder butted against mine. "Our shark against theirs? How can we not prevail?"

"I don't know. We've done a pretty good job of it so far." I drummed fingers on my leg and said pragmatically, "We could hurt someone. That would speed things along nicely, I'll bet."

There was an uncustomary hesitation on Niko's part before he said smoothly, "True." His finger thumped my knee before pointing. "How about her? She doesn't look precisely fleet of foot. We could run her to the ground in seconds." A pregnant Rom girl peeked at us from a doorway across the camp. Seeing our eyes on her, she quickly disappeared and slammed the door behind her. "We could break her wrist. It wouldn't take more than a minute at the most."

As brotherly lessons went, it was a little less subtle than usual. "I was thinking more of Branje," I drawled, "but you've made your point."

"Have I?" He was poised to say something more, but Flay moved past us carrying a handful of plum-colored lilies. Niko watched his progress as the wolf loped back toward our home away from home. A less-than-amused look was then turned on me. "I'm curious, little brother. How long have you had these suicidal impulses?"

"You're not afraid of a little competition, are you, Cyrano?" I elbowed him in a move so automatic that it worked entirely independently of my brain. "Besides," I added, "it gives him something to think about other than his kid." I closed my eyes again. "Wake me up when Goodfellow stops talking."

There was a swat on the side of my head, not hard enough to hurt, although it definitely stung. The words were more gentle. "Hang in there, Cal. We're halfway home."

Hours later, we were still only halfway there and Niko was giving new consideration to my idea. Eyeing Branje across the leaping campfire, he said thoughtfully, "We could rip off his mustache and feed it to him. That is sure to inspire a little spirit of cooperation."

The fire, less for heat and more for driving away the bugs, billowed with a peculiar green smoke. It worked. The air was thick with the acrid smell of sage and eucalyptus, but the mosquitoes were gone, though the night had brought out another kind of predator. Promise stood at Niko's side, a single lily tucked in her hair. I'd seen the look exchanged between the two of them when she'd first appeared wearing the flower. Pure affectionate humor.

"It is an exceptionally unfortunate mustache."

Promise agreed. "You'd be doing him a favor. I'm sure he'd be much more attractive without it."

Goodfellow chose that moment to stomp over with an expression of outraged frustration on his face. "I give up. I do. That maniacal old crone cannot be reasoned with. Not now. Not ever." His hand moved up to nervously smooth his wavy hair. "She cursed me, said my hair would fall out before the next full moon." He pulled his hand away and peered at the palm carefully for any deserters. "My hair," he murmured, still shocked over the audacity.

"You don't actually believe in Gypsy curses, do you?" I asked with a faint overlay of scorn.

Green eyes narrowed on me with impatience. "Of course not. I, an immortal creature, am only standing here with a vampire, a half Auphe, and a walking talking wolf. Why would I possibly believe in something as ludicrous as a Gypsy curse?" He rubbed the heel of both hands over tired eyes and went on to snap, "And then there's that entire year I spent impotent thanks to one."

Niko skipped straight over that information as more than any of us wanted to know and said, "They won't sell it, then?"

"Sell it?" he repeated with disgust. "They won't even admit to having the Calabassa. They have, however, tried to sell me everything else under Zeus's infinite regard."

"After all that time?" Promise touched a shimmering nail to her lower lip. "Abelia-Roo must be a formidable opponent indeed."

"She would eat every one of my salesmen for breakfast and have room for a champagne chaser," he said glumly.

Goodfellow went on to say something else, but by then I had drifted off. It was a casual stroll with what looked like no particular destination in mind, yet I ended up past the fire and closing in on Branje. I didn't pull my Glock. The Rom were skilled knife fighters; they didn't respect the gun. And I wanted their respect. I wanted their fear more, but a little additional respect wouldn't hurt matters any. Branje, drinking from an unlabeled brown bottle, didn't see me coming until he was on the ground and the knife at his throat. I wasn't quite as practiced in the art of silence as Niko, but I was close. After all, I'd been taught by the best. Branje was tough, though—I had to give him that. With my knee buried in his stomach and my blade in the softness under his chin, he cursed and grabbed at his own knife on his belt.

I cut him.

The wound was two inches long and shallow, but it was enough to still Branje's hand. "My men will kill you," he hissed.

"I think they have their own problems," I said serenely. I didn't look up to verify that. I didn't need to. I could hear the whip of Niko's sword through the air and his cold command of "Back away. Now." I'd heard his low curse as he'd spotted me right before I reached my goal, and I'd known he wouldn't be far behind me.

The Rom's eyes flickered from one side to the other, then back to me. "Then Abelia-Roo will curse the pecker right off your body."

I moved the knife from his throat to insert the tip in his nose. "Probably, but how much comfort will that be to you after I cut your nose from your face? Or maybe your ears." I considered for a few seconds as I idly twisted my wrist. A tiny trickle of blood began to creep from his nostril over his lip. "Or maybe—just maybe—I'll take it all. Nose, ears, eyes, tongue." I gave him a consoling smile. "I'll leave the mustache. You seem very proud of it."

I felt him twitch beneath me, but his face remained unmoving and stoic. Like I said, he was tough. But were his people gathered around us as tough? Some might be, but there were bound to be others with slightly weaker stomachs or softer hearts. Someone would break… sooner or later. I pulled the knife back and said truthfully, "It's nothing personal, Branje. Try and keep that in mind." This time the blade found his ear. He had large, fleshy lobes. I could take half off and he'd still have enough to spare. The first drop of blood had appeared when a voice stopped me.

"Now, here is one who knows how to negotiate." There was the approving smack of Abelia-Roo's toothless gums. "Now, here is a man."

If you only knew, I thought with dark amusement before my emotion shifted to cautious surprise. This wasn't the surrender I'd been shooting for. This was Grandma having balls to put all ours to shame and a shriveled soul to match mine. I looked up to see her duck under Niko's blade as if it were a garland of flowers. Arthritic knees popping like gunshots, she crouched beside Branje and me. "You want the Calabassa, do you?" Brown eyes flecked with gold and black nestled in the midst of tissue-paper skin folded into hundreds of wrinkles.

"I'm sure as hell not here to spread around my plastic surgery skills." I kept Branje pinned to the ground as I wiped the scant amount of blood from the metal onto my jeans and then sheathed the knife.

"Do you have any idea of the crown's purpose?" From the avidly gleeful flush in her face, I had a feeling it was nothing good.

"Granny," I said, "I couldn't give a shit if I tried."