Although Queen and her people didn’t seem especially worried that someone would.
“I guess I owe you my life,” I told her. “Thanks.”
She inclined her head. “I did it to take back what the Egyptian took from me.”
“Still, I’m grateful. But how did you know to come in right when you did? You weren’t listening outside the room the whole time?” Despite munching disgusting snacks, exposing her private parts, and laying eggs in front of everybody, she somehow seemed too dignified for that. I could imagine her eavesdropping, but not while Timon’s flunkies in the lobby looked on.
“No,” she said, “of course not. But if you live through this, you’ll discover there are many kinds of magic. When I care to pay the price, I can become extremely intuitive.”
“Nice.” Especially for a poker player. I wondered if she’d been using it at the table before the Pharaoh got rid of her.
One of the babies started climbed up my pant leg. I let it. It was even smaller and lighter than a brownwing, so it wasn’t really bothering me. And you don’t score points with any mom by acting like her kid is repulsive. When it got up to my hip, I tried to stroke its pale gleaming head with my fingertip.
It opened up a mouth that already had teeth and snapped at me. I jerked my hand back just in time to keep from getting nipped.
A maid rushed over to get the larva off me. And Gimble said, “We all bite in our own different ways.”
CHAPTER TEN
After talking to Queen and Gimble, I looked for Timon, but he was already gone. That surprised me and made me nervous, too, but there wasn’t much I could do about it. I ignored a last come-hither smile from Leticia and a final sneer from Wotan and dragged myself off to bed.
The next thing I knew, I was standing in a hotel room a lot swankier than the one in the Icarus, with a huge canopy bed, and Dom Perignon chilling in a bucket. French doors led to a marble balcony. I stepped out under a night sky glittering with more stars than I’d ever seen, even up in the Pamir Mountains. Smelling of salt water, a cool breeze brushed my face. The sea whispered in the distance, where waves broke to foam on a white sand beach.
Closer in were gardens with paths winding through them. The long building itself reminded me of the palace of Versailles-not that I’d ever seen it, but one of my high school teachers showed slides-and had a big bronze statue of King Neptune with his pitchfork out in front. Distinguished-looking men in dinner jackets and beautiful women in fancy gowns and diamonds strolled in the main entrance while valets parked their Bentleys, Lamborghinis, and Aston Martins.
Something nudged me to look down at myself. When I did, I saw that, for the first time ever, I was wearing a dinner jacket, too. Maybe it meant I was supposed to go eat dinner.
Feeling cautious but curious too, I wandered out into the hotel. But I never made it to the restaurant. The casino sucked me in. I stood and watched the rich guys and their girlfriends play roulette, blackjack, and baccarat until I felt the itch to do it, too. Maybe the same person who’d dressed me for this place had supplied me with cash or credit cards. I started to check my pockets, and then a familiar stink washed over me.
“Jesus Christ,” I said, turning around, “even here?”
“‘Even here?’” Timon asked. The grime on his cheeks had stripes in it where sludge had leaked out of his half-formed eyes. “Do you understand where we are?”
“It’s another ghost world, like the one the Pharaoh dumped me in, only a lot more complicated. I’m guessing this is your world of dreams, and this particular piece of it is somebody dreaming about Monte Carlo. Or maybe a James Bond movie.”
“Very good.” Timon waved his hand. “That’s our host over there.”
He meant a little bald guy in black-rimmed glasses. He was sitting at a roulette table, but it didn’t look like he was placing any bets, talking to anybody, or even sipping the huge margarita that looked like he’d sneaked it in from a Viva Vallarta. His face sweaty and slack, he just stared at the spinning wheel and rattling, tumbling ball.
“Is he dreaming about losing?” I asked. “He doesn’t look like he’s having any fun.”
“His unconscious wanted to dream about something else entirely. But I thought a fellow gambler would enjoy these surroundings.”
“If you want me to enjoy my surroundings, just do something about your BO. You can cut that poor bastard loose.”
Timon scowled. “Your attitude… but that’s what we’re here to work on, isn’t it? All right, if you like, we’ll go to the permanent part of this place. That’s easier anyway.”
The casino spun away like water swirling down a toilet. For a moment, in the center of the whirl, the guy with the ugly glasses was standing on a driveway in front of the basketball hoop mounted on the garage. His mouth moved, though I couldn’t hear the words, and he pretended to shoot. A little girl was actually holding the ball, and, her round face squinting with concentration, she did her awkward best to copy the motion. But it all blinked away before I could see if she scored.
Now Timon and I were standing in a supermarket parking lot at the east end of Ybor City. There was marching-band music-a brassy version of some Latin pop song-playing somewhere down Seventh Avenue, and a different marching band in green and white uniforms forming up a few feet away from us. The band members all had the same build and the same face, like toy soldiers. It was only their instruments that made one different from the next.
“Climb aboard,” Timon said.
I looked around. He was clambering onto a gold and purple parade float. It didn’t seem possible that I’d missed it before. Maybe it really hadn’t been there.
I climbed up after him. He sat in the throne at the highest point on the thing. I found a place to stand beside the chair.
The drummers pounded out a cadence, and the marching band tramped out into the street. The float followed. It was the last thing in the parade. The big finish, like Santa on Thanksgiving. And as it neared the spectators crowded onto the sidewalks, they started going down on their knees.
“I thought,” said Timon, raising his voice so I could hear him over the band, “that perhaps you didn’t respect me as you should because you’d never seen the real me. You didn’t understand when I told you I’m a god.”
“First off,” I said, “I do respect you.” Well, his powers, anyway. “But that doesn’t mean I’m going to do everything you say, even when my own judgment tells me different.”
“If you wanted my help to deceive the other players, you should have let me in on the scheme.”
“Is that what this is about? If we’d gone off somewhere private and talked,
“It wasn’t your decision to make.”
I took a deep breath. Not a great idea since, even out in the open air, I was still inside his cloud of funk. “Look, I know you hate not being in total control. And I’m sorry if the way things happened worried you or made you feel dumb. But the trick worked. Gimble’s history. Isn’t that what’s important?”
“It’s not just the trick,” he said. “It’s everything.” He looked back out at the kneeling crowds. “I’m bored with this. Let’s make them livelier.”
The spectators jumped to their feet, stretched out their arms, and howled for his attention. Girls pulled up their shirts and flashed. Timon now had plastic beads in his hands, and he tossed them right and left. Jostling and shoving one another, people snatched them out of the air.
Timon turned his milky, seeping eyes on me and waited for a reaction.
“I don’t know what you want me to say,” I told him. “It’s impressive. But it’s basically just an illusion.” I didn’t exactly believe that, but I couldn’t very well tell him I’d already made a trip to dreamland and set Rufino free.
Timon scowled. “If that’s what you truly think, then you haven’t learned anything. It’s true, I built this interlude from a single human’s dream. But I’ve pulled a number of people inside it. Look carefully and you can pick
