I said nothing. I rubbed my index finger and thumb together, trying to feel any remainder of the tiny drop. There was none. The melting ice in my empty glass cracked and shifted slightly. “Find my daughter, and I will buy back every last drop of your joy from the Lunar Lords, and return it to you.”
“Counterproposal,” I croaked, trying to get my head back in the game. “You use your position in the Court of the Uncountable Stairs and your pull with the Tycho clan, and you get that ghost released from her duties. She gets a walk. No more doing shit jobs for you all. You do that, and I’ll find your girl.”
“Again, most impressive,” Ankou said, putting the empty bottle away. “Most mortals given a drop of pure, undistilled joy would do almost anything for more. This little ghost must have been very special to you.”
Her name was Torri Lyn and, a million lifetimes ago, we had loved. She had been one of the only people in this world to see the real me and still love me. She died.
“Joy’s only worth something if you got a reason for it,” I said. “We have a deal?” Ankou looked over to Weerasethakulakkinuoye, and the little fop nodded.
“Yes,” Ankou said, “we have a deal.”
FOUR
Two hours later we were in the air on Ankou’s private jet, an Airbus A380. The thing was a fucking hotel with wings. Two levels, bars, conference rooms, a lounge, and a full kitchen with all the fawning staff to go with it. You could easily seat hundreds of people in here, crushed in cattle-car style like most folks have to fly. I wondered if the folks who flew this way could even survive a coach class flight without therapy for the trauma. I was a long-ass way from the trailer park in Welch.
I ordered a scotch, stretched my legs out—a luxury on most flights—and got comfy in the padded leather seat. I didn’t buckle up, a rebel even in gilded luxury. Burris was sitting across from me. He looked at me like a cat that had just swallowed a mouse past its expiration date.
“What?” I said. His eyes flickered to the glass and then back to me. He said nothing. “Don’t like this, huh?” I said, raising the glass and taking a sip.
“We were told you had dried yourself out,” he said.
“Well, sucks to be ‘we’ then, don’t it?” I said. “I’m officially off the wagon. What’s your beef anyway, raised by warrior monks? Never touched the stuff? It will make Baby Jesus cry?” Something shifted behind Burris’s eyes, but his face remained stone.
“It undercuts your performance, makes you sloppy and careless, and can leave you defenseless,” he said. “As a wizard, you should already know that; as former Nightwise, they should have trained this juvenile behavior out of you before you ever hit the streets. I don’t intend to carry your besotted ass through this. That’s all.” I noticed again that Burris had no British accent. He didn’t seem to have any accent my ear could pick up.
“Shit,” I said. “I can conjure like Doctor-motherfucking-Strange, Master of the Mystic Arts on crank, even with a snoot full,” I said and took another drink.
“We’ll see,” he said and lowered the back of his seat to get more comfortable. “With that kind of attitude, why did you stop?”
“Trying to be something I fucking wasn’t for someone who should have known better,” I said. “Didn’t take.”
“Obviously,” Burris said. He closed his eyes, and I assume he slept. Maybe he was meditating, or hibernating, or something. I don’t know what the hell Vulcans do.
I was not happy to have a sidekick in this caper, especially one I didn’t pick myself. Burris coming along was the one term I couldn’t get Ankou to back off on. I had a large duffle bag stowed in my private freaking bedroom on this plane, which held half a mil of the Fae mobster’s money, all washed and clean as a whistle. He didn’t even blink when I told him I’d need that for walking-around money. In the seat next to me was a fourteen-thousand-dollar Solarin smartphone with better-than-military encryption, which Ankou handed me when I told him I needed ultra-secure communication to reach out to my people. But when it came to his knight, Burris, he simply ignored every argument I gave him.
“Burris is my insurance policy,” Ankou said. “He makes sure you don’t simply take my money and disappear or go on a long vacation instead of looking for Caern. You’ll find him very unobtrusive, and he is not without his talents.”
And that was that. So I was stuck with Burris. Swell. Talents my ass. If looking for a little girl lost comes down to a fucking firefight, I know enough on my own to get the hell out of that.
I picked up the black-and-gold Solarin and dialed a number I knew was to a KFC in Okinawa. It was routed and rerouted about two hundred times, bounced off a few satellites, and finally was answered.
“Talk,” a gruff bass voice on the other side of the world said.
“Howdy, I wanted to pre-order a large twelve-piece bucket, original recipe, and large sides of chicken feet, rice balls, and squid ink for Christmas Day,” I said.
“It’s the asshole that walks like a man,” Grinner said over the line.
“We clean?” I asked the best damned hacker on the planet. His name was Robert Shelton, but everyone knew him by his handle, Grinner. He was one of those handful of people that Ankou had been talking about
