Page 39

“What the—where are we?” Louis-Cesare asked, his voice strained.

I flipped the light switch, showing the bare cement blocks and shiny weapons of my armory. He stared around for a second, his eyes wide, a pulse pounding madly in his throat. As if he’d expected a very different view, like maybe of the afterlife.

Finally, he looked at me. “You brought us back here?”

“Was there a choice?”

I sat down in the chair, feeling a little dizzy. The squashy old thing had come from a thrift shop, bought because it was the right size and shape to fit the space I had left, and because it was comfortable. I hadn’t actually noticed until this moment that it had a print on it, composed mainly of pastel yellow pineapples on a faded pink background. I looked away.

I did not want my last glimpse of the world to be polyester kitsch.

Unfortunately, that left me looking at my captives, some of whom were awake and unhappy. They were going to be a lot unhappier if this didn’t work. Or possibly even if it did, since we’d been over the dead zones when we fell.

But I didn’t have to think up a speech, because Louis-Cesare grabbed me. “We are falling to our deaths!”

And, okay, if I’d wanted a phrase to get everyone’s attention, I couldn’t have done any better. Eyes widened, breaths caught, and yet nobody spoke. They just looked at me.

I didn’t respond or explain, because I didn’t know what you said to that. And because it didn’t matter anymore. I just pulled my husband’s face close and kissed him, because that was what I wanted my last sight to be.

For a moment, it was perfect: the slight scrape of bristles along his jaw, the warm fullness of his lips, the silk of his hair falling all around us, and the hardness of the chest under my hand—

Until he pulled back and shook me, which, yeah.

Not really part of the fantasy.

“Did you hear me?” His face was wild and his hair was everywhere, probably because I’d forgotten to put the clip back in place earlier. I absently looked around for it, and the shaking recommenced. “Dory!”

“I heard you. But it’s kind of taking a long time, don’t you think?”

Louis-Cesare stared at me some more. Then he did exactly what I should have expected from my impetuous husband and threw open the door, poking his head out of the portal. That wasn’t exactly recommended operating procedure, and on a regular portal would have had the effect of sending his head somewhere very far from the rest of his body, while spaghettifying his neck.

However, this was a fixed portal, so he came back in after a moment, looking shaken and deathly pale, but otherwise fine.

“Is there a problem?” I asked.

He nodded.

Together, we looked back outside, which . . . yeah. Still not recommended, I thought, as it left us sticking out of the top of my wide-mouthed purse like two disembodied heads. That was bad, but charging down a foggy street at about fifty miles an hour was worse. Not as worse as it could have been, but still . . .

I didn’t understand what had happened until I looked up. And then I still didn’t, although there was a large, golden horn sticking through the purse’s handles. We’d obviously gotten snagged on something when we fell, but what, I wasn’t sure.

Then the bag shifted a little as we skidded around a corner, showing me a brief glimpse of a wall eye, a large rump and a sparkly mane. There were cartoon flowers in the mane, and also on the body that I saw when I turned around. It looked like Rambo’s daughter had designed a unicorn: white body, pink flowers, golden hooves, and big, butch muscles.

For a long moment, neither of us said anything.

“Did you know this would happen?” Louis-Cesare asked.

“This exact scenario?”

He looked at me.

“The room isn’t inside the purse,” I reminded him, as the breeze blew what hair I had around. “In fact, nothing is inside the purse, as the purse isn’t a purse, it’s a portal entrance. So, as long as it maintains integrity—”

“We can still get in and out.”

I nodded.

We went back inside.

The dark mage was kind of impressing me, as he was about two thirds of the way out of the war mage’s cuffs already. That put him ahead of everybody else, including Tomas, who apparently wasn’t as smart as he was pretty. Because he currently resembled a white tumbleweed.

A large one.

That was a problem since we had a limited amount of space in here. “Don’t struggle!” I yelled, to get through all the layers of webbing. “They pull power from you; they only get stronger if you struggle!”

I couldn’t tell if he heard me or not.

I sat back down.

The girl had found her voice, and she glared at me from her cuffs. “What the hell is this?”

“On the plus side,” I told her. “We didn’t all die from plummeting about sixty stories. I guess purses have decent wind resistance. On the negative . . .” I trailed off, looking at Louis-Cesare, who had started attacking the tumbleweed. “What are you doing?”

“Freeing Tomas!”

“Any particular reason why?”

“We’ll need him.”

“We’ll need him if he’s going to play nice,” I pointed out. “Otherwise, we have enough problems.”

Like the fact that the mage had just freed himself. But, surprisingly, he didn’t attack. He just walked over and stuck his head out of the door, AKA the top of the purse. He was there for a while.

“What are you talking about?” the girl demanded. “What negative side? And what did you do to my brother?”

“Standard knock out potion. He’s fine—”

Her face flushed angrily. “What gives you the right—”

“You did, when you decided to tear the city a new butthole. Seriously, what the hell?”

She looked as belligerent as someone in handcuffs can, which as it turned out, was pretty damned belligerent. Then she looked at the cuffs, and something about that gaze had all the hair standing up on the back of my neck. I remembered what Louis-Cesare had said about not letting her look at me.

Probably because of that, I thought, as my brand-new handcuffs fritzed out, despite the fact that they were guaranteed.

Against anything but a jinx, it seemed.

“If you don’t want that to happen to you, I’d better get some damned answers,” she said, getting in my face.

Or trying to. The mage was back, striding in between us, and heading for . . . the beer fridge. He grabbed a six pack and took it off to an empty piece of wall, where he squatted down and proceeded to chug like a freshman in a frat house.

“Hey!” I said.

“You have beer?” The bruiser asked, sounding hopeful.

I hadn’t noticed him coming around, but he was watching the mage enviously while still hog-tied on the floor. His buddy hadn’t bothered to free him, and he didn’t offer any beer. I sighed and started sorting through the remains of my stash, calling out the names of various crap beers, because I am not picky.

“Anything,” the bruiser rasped. “I’m parched.”

“You want something?” I asked my hubby, who was currently shoulder deep in tumbleweed.

“No.” Louis-Cesare’s voice was muffled. It was also pissy. He was having a moment.

I left him to it.

“How about you?” I asked the girl.

“How about I get some answers?” she snapped, and then apparently decided the heck with it, walked over and threw open the door.

Unlike the mage, she was not out there for long.

“What the fuck?”

She came back in, slammed the door behind her, and plastered herself against it, her eyes huge.

“Okay, the short version,” I told her. “This is my girl cave. I brought us in here because—well, in your case, I was rounding up my squad—”

“Your squad? What the—”

“Shut up?” I suggested.

And I guessed she really did want answers, because she shut up.

“I was rounding you guys up, got interrupted by the fight, and the squid kindly sent us flying over the city in a destroyed rickshaw that was about to plunge Louis-Cesare—this is Louis-Cesare, by the way,” I added, introducing my husband’s ass, because that was all that was sticking out of the tumbleweed at the moment.

“Hello,” the bruiser told it.

I decided to let him loose so he could drink his beer, which he did very politely.

“Anyway,” I continued, “we were about to plunge to our deaths, so I shoved us both in here, figuring that it gave us the best chance to survive—”

“And where’s here?” the girl interrupted.

“A stationary portal in non-space, kind of like the phase that allows this city to exist, only much smaller. I had a mage put the doorway in my purse—”

“You carry a phased arsenal around in your purse?”

“You’d get answers faster if you didn’t keep interrupting me,” I pointed out.

“Then get on with it!”

“I’m trying.” I was also trying to hold onto my temper, because we needed them. But she wasn’t making it easy.

“Anyway, we survived the fall, obviously, so here’s the deal. Louis-Cesare and I were at the fights hoping to meet you. Zheng-zi said you might be able to help us out—”

“When are you going to get to the point?” she practically shrieked.

I paused. “And which point would that be?”

“Why we’re in what looks like the goddamned dead zones on the horn of some monster, that’s what!”

I looked at her in confusion. “That’s where the purse landed?”

“Auggghhhh!”

She actually said that. And then pulled at her hair with both fists in a way that had me wondering if she was deranged. Since her next move was to round on the dark mage, who had already downed three of the beers and was popping the top on number four, I was pretty sure the answer was yes.

“You said this wouldn’t happen!”

He looked at her over the top of his beer can. “Sorry?” It was sarcastic as hell.

Despite myself, I was warming to the guy.

The girl, on the other hand, clearly was not.

“Auggghhhh!” she said again, and proceeded to do some more hair pulling.

I watched her enviously.

Must be nice.

“Is there a problem?” I asked, looking at the mage, who seemed the most clear headed. “Because we were told that you guys are experts on—”

The girl laughed. It was not a nice sound. “We’re all going to die,” she announced. And then she, too, raided my fridge.

This is why I stock crap beer, I thought. People always drink it all anyway, so why keep the good stuff? She came out with a can, looked for a place to sit down, didn’t find one and plopped back onto the floor where she’d been.

I eyed her warily.

“See,” I began.

“We aren’t experts in anything,” the dark mage said, starting beer number five. “It’s all bullshit.”

“Excuse me?” I blinked at him politely.

“It’s a living,” the bruiser agreed.

“What . . . is a living?”

“He had this thing,” the girl said, her voice tragic. She suddenly looked like she sounded, with her long, dark hair everywhere and her eyes huge and staring. She drank beer, and wiped the back of her hand over her mouth. “Zheng-zi, I mean. A tattoo, one of the magical kind, you know?”

I nodded.

“Well, Ranbir had seen one like it before—”

“Who’s Ranbir?”

The dark mage lifted his beer can.

“That’s him,” the girl confirmed. “That’s my brother Jason,” she added, indicating the still unconscious dude on the floor. “I’m Sarah and that’s Ev. I mean, Evelyn.”

“Your name . . . is Evelyn?” I asked the bruiser, because I assumed that I’d misheard.

He sighed. “I get that a lot. It’s British. My mum was British.”

“Okay.”

“It’s usually pronounced Eev-lin,” he added helpfully. “Sarah keeps forgetting, because she usually just calls me Ev.”

“Uh huh.”

“You know, it used to be given more to boys than girls. It’s from the seventeenth century and means ‘desirable one.’ But I guess people thought that better fit a woman, and after a while—”

“I’ll give you a beer if you stop talking,” Ranbir offered.

Evelyn considered it.

He took the beer.

“Anyway,” Sarah said, eyeing them. “Zheng didn’t understand what he had. I was sort of surprised, as he’s triad—or he was, I don’t know about now—”

“He’s still triad,” Ranbir said. “It’s a lifelong thing.”

“Well, anyway, the triads all have tats, don’t they?” she asked, pushing messy hair out of her face. “So, I thought he’d know, but it was obvious that he didn’t.”

“Know what?” I asked.

“How the tat worked. This Eternity thing—”

“What Eternity thing? You mean the symbol they all wear?”

She nodded and pulled a small, golden charm, just like the one I’d given Zheng, out of her shirt. It was on a necklace, but she took it off and handed it to me. “That’s it. He found it on one of their boys, after a fight. He was going to interrogate him, but somebody activated another tat the guy was wearing, and blew him up. I suppose his group realized that he’d been taken, and didn’t want him talking.”

Sounded about right. The same might have happened to the guys at Hassani’s, except that they’d all been killed, and that Jonathan had been able to use them as his little puppets. Only I still didn’t understand what that had been about.

Jonathan was obsessed with Louis-Cesare. He wanted him back under his control; he didn’t want to kill him. And even assuming that he’d turned into one of those “if I can’t have you, nobody can” types, that whole attack seemed a bit . . . excessive. As for me, I couldn’t imagine why he would care about me at all, since they already had Dorina.

Unless he was afraid that I’d come after him, which, yeah.

Should have gotten me the first time, I thought.

“Anyway, Zheng still wanted to find out more about them,” Sarah said. “But nobody knew anything, and nobody would go inside the dead zones. He kept offering more and more money, and . . . well . . .”

“And well what?”

She took the tat back and pressed it, not to her skin as I’d expected, but like a fob for a car. A grid popped out into the air, in bright red lines like a hologram. It looked like a map of some kind, although I found it hard to read as it kept moving and changing.

“Why is it doing that?” I asked.

“Doing what?”

“Moving around?”

“Because we are,” Ranbir said.

Sarah nodded. “It’ll stabilize if we ever do. It needs a fixed point—”

“For what?”

She looked at me like I might be slow, for not having already figured this out. “It’s a homing beacon. We think that, because of how unstable the zones can be, Eternity has to move around a lot. So, they equipped each of their members with one of these, so they can always find their way back to base.”

I frowned at it. “But you found the base already, or narrowed it down. Zheng said—”

I stopped, finally getting a clue. As well as a sinking feeling in my stomach—a bad one. It felt like falling from a height, all over again.

“You didn’t find it,” I said.

“It was a lot of money,” Sarah told me, suddenly earnest. “The kind that could be life changing. And get us permanently out of those penny ante gigs we used to—”

“You’re telling me that you didn’t go into the zones?” I interrupted. “That you just sold Zheng a load of crap?”

“It wasn’t crap!” She had the gall to look indignant. “He got what he paid for. The homing beacon did give the location of their base. We just stretched things out, feeding him a little more info each week, so it would be believable—”

“But you fought in the ring! You were going to fight tonight!”

She nodded. “We acquired a reputation, after a while. There were only three groups in the whole city that would go into the dead zones, and we were the best known, because we never got hurt—”

“I gave myself a black eye once,” Ev said. “To be more, uh, authentic . . .” he saw my expression, and went back to drinking beer.

“—never got hurt bad,” Sarah corrected. “And people started to ask us about the fights. We couldn’t keep saying no, or it might have looked suspicious.”

“Then you do know how to kill the monsters.”

She shook her head. “We went out there to put on a show, but it was mostly theater. Tomas is a first level master vamp, and he protected us. We made it look good for a while, then the mages took over. We gave them a kickback from the purses, a decent percentage. They weren’t allowed in the ring, you see, and this way . . . everybody was . . . happy . . .”

I looked at her. She gazed back miserably. “You’re telling me—” I stopped, needing a moment. “How many times have you guys actually been in the dead zones?”

“We . . . haven’t ever . . . actually . . .” she trailed off.

I stared at her.

“One,” Ranbir said, tossing his last empty onto the little pile he’d made. “The number you’re looking for is one. This one.”