A very jaded Queen of the Dead.
“Howdy!” I greeted her cheerfully, because I knew it annoyed her. “Is Aidan in?”
She looked up from the battered paperback she was reading and sneered. Her eyes flickered down to the shoe box under my arm.
“Gotta buy a ticket,” she said.
“Actually, I don’t,” I replied. We’d had this conversation before. Repeatedly. “I’ll just go on up and see him, then, all right?”
She shrugged.
Outside, the newly rebuilt tourist attraction had remounted its old-movie-poster-like placards featuring famous figures from the worlds of sports and popular music, as well as the ever-popular vampires and various torture devices in the Chamber of Horrors. But inside, the wax museum didn’t look much like the old one.
I climbed a floating acrylic-and-steel staircase that swept gracefully up to the second floor, averted my eyes from the Chamber of Horrors, which always gave me the willies, and smiled at the figure of local legend Mary Ellen Pleasant, as I passed through the new display featuring Great Entertainers, such as Louis Armstrong and Barbra Streisand. Just beyond Carol Channing was the door to Aidan’s office.
Few tourists would ever notice the door. Aidan had cast a glamour over it, so unless you were looking for it, the door appeared invisible.
As I held my fist up to knock, a pure white long-haired cat appeared at my side and wound around my legs. I wasn’t fooled by the friendly display—Noctemus, Aidan’s familiar, didn’t like me and no doubt knew I was allergic to cats. Her greeting was designed to leave me with a special souvenir: a few white cat hairs on the hem of my dress. My nose twitched.
Aidan opened the door and smiled.
“Bless you,” he said, in response to my sneeze. “To what do I owe the honor of this visit from my favorite witch?”
Even in a city full of attractive people, Aidan stood out. His eyes were an impossible periwinkle blue, and his golden hair gleamed under the museum’s subtle lights. I was one of the few who knew that Aidan’s good looks were due in no small part to another glamour; his true self showed dramatic burn scars. This was one reason he was such a homebody and a night owl; it was harder to maintain the glamour out in the open, in full daylight. Every once in a while—more frequently, recently—I noted a shimmer, a sign that the glamour was slipping.
Still, the Aidan who greeted me was lovely—and his aura sparkled still more intensely than his physical shell. Even people who weren’t sensitive to auras could sense Aidan’s.
“Nice to see you again, Aidan. I’m here for some advice.”
He grinned, displaying dazzling white teeth. “It just so happens that advice is my middle name.”
“I rather doubt that,” I said. “Speaking of which, what is your middle name?”
“Whatever you’d like it to be, Lily,” Aidan said silkily. “You know my fondest wish is to please you.”
Aidan’s blatantly flirtatious manner, combined with his incredible good looks, used to fluster me. Not anymore. At least . . . not as much.
“Okay if we step into your office for a consultation?”
“Please, come in,” he said, standing back and waving me through the doorway. “I’ll just add this to your growing list of indebtedness to me, shall I?”
This was the deal when reaching out to Aidan: Everything had a price.
Aidan’s rebuilt office was an exact replica of the one that had burned down, and was decorated in a lavish style I thought of privately as “Barbary Coast Bordello.” Red velvet drapes with gold fringe hid any trace of windows, while a plush Oriental rug in deep red, emerald, and ocher hues covered the floor. A heavy carved mahogany desk and leather office chair dominated the room. Floor-to-ceiling bookcases ran along two walls, their shelves crammed with musty leather-bound tomes. Aidan had lost his last library in the fire, but told me he had managed to replace many of the rare manuscripts by scouring the Internet. I had an inkling there was more to it than that—many of the books in Aidan’s collection were arcane depositories of highly specialized magic, with only one or two copies in existence—but since he allowed me to avail myself of his library whenever I wanted, I hadn’t pushed the point.
I took a seat in one of the comfortable leather armchairs facing his desk, and he settled into the thronelike desk chair. Placing his hands flat on the blotter, Aidan leaned toward me.
“What can I do for you today, Lily? Is this about Selena, or Renee?”
“What? No.” Then I wondered. “Why? Have you seen something?”
“Nothing new, not in particular. But we need to come up with a defensive plan soon. Have you been hunting down some of those names from the Satchel?”
I nodded. Not long ago Aidan had asked me to babysit his special satchel while he was out of town. In it were names of people who owed him favors, and who had pledged their loyalty. As the threat I believed Renee posed heated up, Aidan and I had been shoring up support, preparing to circle the magical wagons.
“We’ll need the Gypsies in on this,” Aidan continued. “Their support will be essential to our success.”
“Sailor told me his aunt Renna is on board, and Patience Blix also agreed, though with reluctance because she’s not much of a team player. Where those two go, apparently, so goes the rest of the extended family. Sailor can’t speak for any other clans, of course—”
Aidan waved off my concern. “If we have Sailor’s people, we’re good. What matters is not just that they’re Rom, but that they have special abilities.”
I nodded. “Also, Hervé Le Mansec is making contact with the voodoo practitioners.”
“Excellent. And how is Selena’s training coming along?”
“It’s . . . coming,” I hedged. Selena wasn’t the most patient student. Yet another way in which she reminded me of me. “Anyway, none of that is the reason I’m here tonight. I get that we need to
