Victoria?”
“Yeah. She’s all right, too.”
“Good.” She took a breath. “Look, I know you don’t have any reason to believe this, but I really am sorry.”
“I believe it,” I said, and it was true. I could hear regret in her voice and see it in her face.
But maybe she didn’t believe me, because she kept on in the same way. “It was wrong, especially after you helped Rufino. It made me no better than Timon.”
“Come on.
“All I can say is that I won’t to do anything like that again. I can’t promise for the others, but I can for me.”
“Thanks. And not that it’s worth anything, but I wish I
After that, we kind of ran out of things to say. And so, even though I didn’t feel much like dealing with Timon, it didn’t seem like there was much point in putting it off any longer.
I found him on the mezzanine as usual, with Gaspar guarding the door to the meeting room. When I walked in, he was sitting with a deck of cards spread out on the table in front of him, and holding one up right in front of his face. He turned in my direction, sniffed three times, then showed it to me.
“Is this the five of hearts?” he asked.
“Deuce of diamonds,” I replied.
“Damn it!” he whipped the card at the floor, and I got a better look at the wet lumps in his eye sockets. I could make out pupils now, though they weren’t the same size or completely round. I could also see speckled streaks where irises were trying to separate out from the whites.
“Even if you could make the cards out when you hold them that close,” I said, “it wouldn’t be good enough. You need to be able to see them when they’re in the middle of the table.”
“I know that!” he snarled.
“So why torture yourself? Are you that desperate to get back to the table? There’ll be other games.”
“Not like this one. Not if you don’t win!”
“I am winning.”
“So far. But where were you this afternoon?”
I sighed. “It doesn’t matter.”
“It does if you were off making a deal with one of the others. And how do I know if you won’t explain yourself?”
“Fine,” I said, and told him the story, sort of. I left A’marie, Georgie, and Lorenzo out of it.
Unfortunately, the edited-for-TV version left Timon frowning. He might look like a pile of greasy rags and smell like ass, but he wasn’t dumb. “That story doesn’t account for all your time,” he said.
“Sure it does. Vic and I had to wait a long time at the clinic.”
He leaned close to me and sniffed. “You smell of graveyard earth.”
Shit. “All right. I didn’t tell you everything. But you don’t need to know the rest.”
“I do if I’m going to trust you!”
“You’re going to trust me because you still don’t have a choice.”
“You’re… insolent!” He spat it at me like it was the filthiest insult he could think of.
“Be glad. Maybe that’s what keeps me a step ahead of the other lords even though I don’t know what the hell I’m doing. Anyway, how come you’re mad at me and not them?”
“I am mad, but they were just playing the game. You’re my vassal, and you disobeyed me!”
“Because I’m
He looked like he was about to fire something back. But then he took a long breath and let it out slowly. It seemed to make his cloud of funk even fouler, but maybe that was my imagination.
“You can’t survive in our world without the protection of a patron,” he said. “I hope you figure that out before it’s too late. But for now, we have work to do.”
“Sounds good. Teach me to make a ward that will stop a bullet.”
“That’s not practical. You’re getting stronger, but after the day you’ve had, and the night in front of you, you can’t afford to spend the energy. But you can start learning how to raise the various aspects of yourself into prominence as quickly and easily as you’ve learned to invoke your sign of power.”
So we worked on that till suppertime. To my relief, there was no raw, carved human meat on the buffet tables tonight, maybe because Wotan didn’t show up. Neither did the Pharaoh.
But Gimble and Leticia were there and whispering together. Leticia smiled at me, set her plate of paella and her glass of white wine on a table, and glided over to me in her usual way. Not quite like a pole dancer slinking around the stage, but close enough.
“Poor Pablo didn’t make it,” she said. “And the police have the gun with your fingerprints.”
“Bullshit,” I said.
She laughed. “You’re right. It is. My servants and I cleared out right after you did, so I don’t know what happened when the police arrived. I imagine Mrs. Sullivan handled it all somehow. But I can’t tell you what happened to Pablo.”
“Like I care,” I said.
She smiled. “You have no reason to, but you do. It’s your weakness.”
“Even if it is, you didn’t have any luck taking advantage of it today.”
“Touche! I certainly didn’t. All I did was get us both all hot and bothered. We could take care of that. There’s plenty of time before midnight. No magic, just sex, I promise.”
My mouth got dry and I stepped back a little, like you’d back away from a hot fire. “Right. You promise. And I trust that why?”
She laughed again. “You can’t blame a girl for trying. You have a dab of something on your mouth.” She ran her fingertip over my lips and sent a shiver through me. Then she popped it between her own lips, sucked it, winked, turned, and walked back across the room to Gimble. I tried not to stare at her ass.
She, Gimble, and I were in our seats at the poker table with fifteen minutes to spare. Wotan limped in at ten till with sores and blisters dotting the exposed parts of his tattooed skin.
That surprised me. I understood that the lords were out to get each other just as much as they were the “insolent” human in the game. But after a day when a couple of them had done their damnedest to kill me or at least screw with my head, it was easy to forget.
Leticia gave Gimble an inquiring look. But if he knew anything, he wasn’t talking, and naturally there was nothing to read in the painted face bobbing at the end of his flexible neck.
Wotan called for a double shot of bourbon and knocked it back. Then he watched the door and the grandfather clock. The rest of us started watching with him, waiting to see if the Pharaoh was going to show.
It was three to twelve when he did, hobbling along with Davis’s help. This time he really needed it, because something had ripped off his left leg at the knee and his head off his shoulders. The chauffeur hadn’t bothered to bring along the torn-off piece of leg, but he had the head tucked under his arm.
I stared, and I wasn’t the only one. It was like when Queen started laying eggs. It even startled other Old People, and reminded me they could be as strange and mysterious to one another as they were to me.
I realized Davis was going to have trouble supporting the Pharaoh and pulling out his chair at the same time, so I got up and pulled it out for him. The mummy’s dry, sunken eyes shifted in my direction. “Thank you,” he said. Magic let him whisper even without lungs.
“Are you okay?” I asked. It was hands down the stupidest thing I’d ever said.
But he answered, “Yes, actually. I keep my life in jars, and as long as they’re intact, there’s not much anyone can do to me that can’t be mended. You’d think other sportsmen would work that out once they’ve known me for a while. But I suppose that some of us simply have a less… analytical approach to competition.”
Wotan glared.
Davis put the Pharaoh’s body in the chair and his head on the table in front of it, looking out at the rest of us. Then he went to sit with the rest of the spectators, and the mummy showed us he could still work his arms just fine. He put a cheroot between his head’s withered lips and lit it.
“That’s better,” he whispered. “The clock’s about to strike. Shall we begin?”
