Fury's Kiss (20 page)

“Yeah, I—”

“Leave it to norms not to wonder why there’s this huge, overcrowded city on a tiny island barely two miles long,” he said, shaking his head. “Which also happens to be one of the hardest places to build in the world. I mean, it’s crazy. Manhattan’s traffic is a nightmare ’cause it’s an island, which is bad enough, but then every new subway tunnel has to bore through a slab of solid granite that eats drill bits like candy.”

“Ray. I know all this.”

“Yeah, but I’m getting to stuff maybe you don’t know. Just eat your pie.”

I didn’t think I could hold the pie. I pulled it over anyway. Mmm, flaky.

“But norms are attracted to ley lines,” he continued, “even though they don’t know it, and so cities tend to grow up where you got a lot of ’em. But unlike most places with this many lines, Manhattan doesn’t have a damned vortex. The lines cross, sure, but they don’t puddle up in one big snarl. That kind of thing’s useless ’cause it puts out too much power. Every time you try to open a portal around one of those, you get kerblammy—”

“Kerblammy?”

“—and that’s not good for business. But around here, the lines are more like…like this.” He held his hands up, interlacing the fingers. “They cross, but not all at one place. So you get lots of lines, lots of ley line sinks to power portals, and lots of background energy, making finding them a nightmare for the so-called good guys.”

“So-called?”

He shot me a look. “Come on. You like your wine, don’t you? Who you think brings that in?”

“We’re not after the portals because of the wine,” I reminded him.

“Not now, maybe, not with the war on. And not because of the Senate; they don’t care about stuff like that. But the Corps?” He scowled. “They’re a huge pain in my ass.”

“They also have a point. A lot of bad stuff comes through those things—”

“And so does a lot of good stuff. And so does a lot of stuff that can be bad or good, depending on how it’s used, but that the Circle just outlawed all together, ’cause it’s easier that way.”

I didn’t say anything, because I kind of agreed with him there. The Silver Circle was the light magic organization that governed the mages like the Senate did the vamps. The Corps were their police unit, and overall, they did a pretty good job of countering the Black Circle’s shysters, crooks and hoodlums. But they did tend to be a little…anal…about some things.

Including most things that came through illegal portals.

“I mean, it’s complete bullshit,” Ray bitched. “When the fey got mad way back when and yanked all the portals, nobody thought about the little guy, did they? Nobody thought about all the people on both sides that had friends and businesses and lives that depended on being able to come and go. Some of their leaders get in a snit for some reason, and all of a sudden—nothing. And they don’t get over being butt hurt after a while, like normal people. It’s been thousands of years and the pathways are still blocked and trade’s still in the shitter and nobody seems to give a damn!”

“Except for the heroic smugglers.”

“Sure, be that way. But when you want something—when the damned
mages
want something—that ain’t supposed to be available outside Faerie, who do you come to see?”

“So you’re the good guys?”

“Yeah,” Ray said defiantly. And then he shifted in his seat. “Sort of. Anyway, my point is, Manhattan is the shit. If you’re a smuggler, this is where you want to be.”

I thought about that while I gummed pie. “So you’re telling me you can just cut a new portal here, and nobody will notice?” I was pretty sure that hadn’t been in the briefing I’d had.

He shook his head. “Not if you’re trying to slice all the way through to Faerie, no. Takes too much power. But smaller stuff, yeah, you can get away with that. It sort of melds into the background noise. Like Olga’s portal—that didn’t raise any eyebrows, right?”

“Because it goes all of two blocks. And that wouldn’t do you any good.”

“See, that’s what most people would think,” he said, leaning forward. “But I been in the business a long time. And one day, the portal we were using got discovered by the damned Corps and shut down—right before a big shipment was due to come through.”

“That’s rough,” I said, wondering if there was more pie.

“You ain’t just kidding that’s rough. The boss don’t care about my problems. The boss just wants his stuff. He’s promised it to some pretty big-time people and he’s gonna look bad if he can’t deliver. So I get to thinking.”

“Uh-oh.”

“Yeah, as it turned out. But at the time, I don’t think ‘uh-oh.’ At the time, I think, hey, I gotta figure a way out of this problem. So I start to wonder, what would happen if I cut a portal, but not to Faerie? What would happen if I cut it—get this—into another portal?”

It took a moment for that to sink in, because he’d said it so casually. And because my mind was mostly occupied by important things, like pie. And because it was stupid.

Really, really stupid.

I’d always thought of ley lines the way most people view nuclear energy. They could be useful—ley line sinks powered all kinds of things, and the currents inside the lines were strong enough to make for quick transport virtually anywhere. But that convenience came with a steep price tag for anybody who didn’t show it the proper respect.

Not that there were too many of those. The dangers involved intimidated even war mages, who had a reputation for badassery that bordered on lunacy. But they hazarded the lines only with the heaviest of shields, and any portals they cut into them were done extremely gingerly.

Vampires—the sane kind, anyway—avoided them almost entirely. If something went wrong, their flammability ensured that they wouldn’t even have the few seconds the mages would to find a way out. Human transport was slower, but it came without the possibility of your own personal Chernobyl if something went wrong.

But my jaw ached every time I tried to talk, so I settled for summing up the obvious. “You can’t do that.”

Ray grinned. “Wanna bet?”

“No, I mean, you
can’t
—”

I broke off, because one of the fey was coming up the steps. He wasn’t glowing, having dimmed the light shadows their kind shed in our world down for our guests. But he managed to look fairly otherworldly anyway, the long white-blond hair holding a shimmer of moonlight; the bone structure subtly different from a human’s; the almond-shaped eyes hinting of other shores, except for their startling, almost vivid blueness.

He was holding a small, grubby creature that was kicking and flailing and giving every appearance of trying to murder the two long fingers gripping it by the scruff of the neck. “Have you perhaps misplaced something?” he asked, arching an elegant brow.

“Damn it,” Ray said, sitting up. “I thought I—shit.”

I assumed he was referring to the plastic cup, which was still weighed down by the piece of garden edging he’d placed on top. But which now had a mousehole-sized piece cut out of the side. Presumably by the tiny sword the escape artist was waving around menacingly.

“It appears to be defective,” the fey said drily. “Would you like a new enchantment?”

“A new enchantment?” Ray looked up from examining the cup. “What’s that do?”

“It replaces the old.”

“Replaces how?”

The fey looked at me. “Obliterates. Is that the right word?”

Damned if I knew. Claire had been helping them with their English, but she knew enough of their language to be able to figure out what they were trying to say. “It’s a word,” I agreed.

“You mean kill it?” Ray looked horrified.

“It isn’t alive, therefore it cannot die,” the fey reasoned. “But it would have a new…personality, if you like.”

“I don’t like,” Ray said, grabbing it. “It’s fine.” The fey’s eyes danced in the light from the house, obviously amused. Particularly when the wild man suddenly stabbed Ray in the palm. “Damn it!”

The fey shook his head and started to go. But then he paused on the stairs and looked back at me. “Oh, and you may tell the Lady Claire that her…gifts…while thoughtful, will not be needed.”

“Gifts?”

“The condoms,” Ray said, sucking his palm.

“You managed to get those?” I asked, incredulously.

“Hey, it’s what we went for. I don’t know if I grabbed the right sizes, though.”

We both looked at the fey, whose grin widened. But he only said: “There are enchantments for that. And in any case, the ladies appear to have…come prepared.”

“Well, have fun,” I told him.

His smile was blinding. “I shall.”

He left and Ray dragged his two-inch captive over to the chessboard. “They creep me out,” he told me in a low voice, after a moment.

“Who?”

“The fey. Always did. ‘New personality’ my ass.”

“They’re okay,” I said, because it was true, and because I wouldn’t put it past those ears to still be able to hear us. “What are you doing?” I asked, watching him struggle to stuff his prisoner into the felt-lined indentation.

“Putting him back!” he said, as the wild man popped up again, mad as hell. Ray had confiscated the sword, but
his prisoner was resourceful. And bit the end of his thumb.

“Son of a—”

“That won’t work,” I told him, as Ray pushed the squirming thing down again and fitted the plastic cover on top. It was clear and molded to the shape of the pieces, which left the little guy effectively trapped. Until he wormed a knife out of his boot and started sawing away at it.

“Why is he doing that?” Ray demanded.

“He doesn’t turn off anymore.”

“What? Not at all?”

I shook my head. “It’s why we usually leave the game out. The boys like for him to have company.”

“Then why didn’t you say so?” he demanded.

Because I didn’t think you’d care about a child’s toy
, I didn’t say, helping Ray remove my dishes so he could set the game up again on the table.

We finished and he went to nurse his wounds on the swing. The pieces were back to exploring their little world, which I guess was what Faerie looked like. Or at least the part Olga was from. The board had started out a plain old chess type, if oversized. But the familiar checkerboard was invisible now, overgrown by grass and trees and caves and a miniature stream.

The whole setting was too big to fit on the board, so the scenery changed as they moved around, setting up ambushes and defensive positions, polishing armor and weapons, or just squatting on a rock, in the case of the wild man. Some of the other little ogres were starting a campfire over by a copse of trees, and they kept shooting him looks, but he didn’t appear to notice. He was too busy staring at the sky.

“They don’t seem like much company to me,” Ray said, watching the scene. “Look—they don’t like him now.”

“I don’t think that’s the problem,” I murmured.

What was it Plato had said? Something about a bunch of guys born in a cave, who had never seen the outside world. Just shadows of things reflected on the walls
sometimes, distorted and unreal. Until one of them broke out one day, and started exploring a larger world. He could go back to his old life, but he wasn’t the same person anymore.

His world had gotten bigger, and things were never going to be quite the same again.

But Ray didn’t agree. “Naw, he’s different now,” he told me. “People don’t like different.”

There was something in his tone that made me look up. He was draped over the seat, wrapped in gloom since the porch light wasn’t on and the light from the house had diminished, thanks to someone shutting off the fixture in the hall. The main illumination came from the lanterns the fey had lit around camp, just little pinpricks in the darkness, and the flickering blue-white of the cartoon channel from the living room that nobody had bothered to turn off.

He’d lit a cigarette, and with just the reddened end lighting up his face, he should have looked sinister. But Ray’s features just didn’t run to it. The eyes were too big and too blue and too oddly guileless. The cheeks were too round, and the chin was tilted just a bit too defiantly outward. Like he expected to get belted at any moment, but wasn’t going to duck his head anyway.

It was the face of a guy who’d been beaten up before and who had every expectation of being beaten up again, but who wasn’t going to cower. And he’d had plenty of opportunities to learn. I didn’t know a lot about his background, but I knew enough to guess that he hadn’t found the vampire lifestyle to be all fun and games.

He’d been born the half-breed son of a Dutch sailor and an Indonesian village woman during the bad old days of colonialism. The sailor had decamped before Ray made an appearance and his mother had died when he was a teenager. Leaving him a blue-eyed freak among the villagers, and one who reminded people a bit too much of their hated colonial masters.

It hadn’t taken them long to drive him out, leaving him to fend for himself. Which he had done by joining a group of pirates right before they decided to attack a
fat-looking prize. That might have been an okay plan, if said prize hadn’t been the flagship of one Zheng Zhilong, the leader of one of the greatest pirate fleets ever to sail the seas.

Zheng—no relation that I knew of to our tiger-tatted friend—had spared Ray’s life, only to turn around and take it when he decided to make him a vampire. Maybe he thought that having someone who could pass for a European in a pinch might come in useful. But apparently that hadn’t worked out so great, because he’d traded Ray to a fellow pirate only a few years later. Who had traded him in turn, because looking sort of European didn’t automatically confer a knowledge of languages Ray had never heard or customs he’d never experienced.

Somehow, he’d eventually ended up with Cheung. Who instead of trading him, had promptly shipped him off to the family’s outpost in New York. Which seemed less strange to me now that I’d had Ray’s rundown on the importance of the place for otherworldly smuggling.

What remained weird was that he was still here.

Despite being middling in looks, middling in power—he’d never advanced beyond fifth-level master status—and middling in ability of any kind, he’d done okay. He’d succeeded when those with far more impressive résumés had failed. He’d survived when those with far more power had died.