The darkness wrapped around me like a wet blanket, moist and wool warm, almost smothering. The air I managed to draw in was musty and soup-thick on my tongue and strangely tacky, as if it was sticking to the sides of my throat going down. I don’t suffer from claustrophobia, but in the Shroud’s humid embrace, I felt it anyway.
Useful the thing might be, but it was dark, too, in more than just color. I scrubbed at my arms, trying to get the oddly solid blackness off and fighting panic when nothing I did helped. I bit my lip, but it wouldn’t be long before I could no longer choke back a scream.
“Black magic,” Francoise muttered, her voice echoing strangely.
“Get us out of here,” Marco hissed. “Now!” His last word sounded loud enough with the Shroud’s odd magnification to shatter eardrums. But a second later the dark lifted as abruptly as a sheet being pulled off my head. I stood gasping and blinking in the suddenly glaringly bright showroom, waiting for my eyes to adjust, while the salesman had the Shroud ripped from his hand by an angry vampire.
“Was that supposed to be funny?!” It looked like Marco wasn’t a fan of sensory deprivation. Vampire eyes usually work even better in the dark than in daytime, so why was I getting the impression that he hadn’t been able to see inside that thing any better than I had?
“I do apologize,” the salesman said hurriedly. “But the Shroud is very old, very rare. Most people have never even heard of it. Spells are often used to fool the senses these days, but they are far simpler to throw off. With such an unusual item, it is easier to demonstrate what it does than to attempt to explain—”
“Explaining will do fine,” I interrupted, and Francoise nodded emphatically.
“As you like.” The salesman looked disappointed that his demonstration hadn’t been well received.
“What kind of illegal crap are you selling?” Marco demanded.
“Everything we carry is completely legitimate,” the salesman assured me, ignoring Marco. “No need to concern yourself about any trouble with the authorities.”
“I generally don’t,” I muttered. The authority policing magical weapons was the Silver Circle, and I couldn’t really get in more trouble with them if I tried.
The salesman gave me a sly look that contrasted oddly with his Santa Claus face. “However, we do have some antique pieces that don’t, er, come under the more modern bans.”
“Such as?” Maybe there was some esoteric antique that even the Circle wouldn’t have heard about—something rare enough or weird enough to gain me an advantage.
“There’s this lovely item. It comes from the estate of, how shall I put it, an adventurer?” The small off-white statue he handed me turned out to be of a Buddha-type figure with a jaunty grin. Miniature cracks zigzagged over the figure’s fat little belly and were slightly darker than the rest of it, like old ivory. “Daikoku, one of the seven Japanese gods of fortune!”
“And?”
“It’s a netsuke,” Marco said, peering at the little thing. “I used to know a guy who collected them.”
“A what?”
He shrugged. “Kimonos didn’t have pockets. Traditional Japanese guys wore a sash around their waist with a purse tied on it. Only they didn’t call it a purse, because they were guys, you know? Anyway, the netsuke held the two pieces—the bag and the belt—together.”
“This isn’t a netsuke,” the salesman sniffed. “Admittedly, there were a number carved depicting Daikoku, but that’s all they were—mere depictions.”
“And this would be different how?” I asked.
“Because this is Daikoku.”
I blinked. “That’s a god.”
The salesman didn’t like my tone. “An ancient being,” he correctly stiffly. “The medieval Japanese peasants didn’t know how else to refer to him.”
“And you keep him in a closet?”
“’Ow deed you obtain ’im?” Francoise broke in. She actually looked like she was buying this.
Then salesman must have thought so, too, because he brightened. “The soldier of fortune I mentioned acquired him some years ago in Fukushima,” he explained. “I believe he stole him from another traveler. It was believed that if you took a statue of Daikoku from its previous owner, it would grant you good fortune in the form of a wish—as long as you weren’t caught in the act. The old folk tradition probably arose from stories of the real statue’s exploits.”
“Like a génie.” Francoise was regarding the little thing thoughtfully.
“Indeed. Except djinn are not known for benevolence. That is a dangerous old wives’ tale. Should you ever come across a trapped djinn, I strongly advise you to leave it so.”
“Shouldn’t we leave Daikoku alone, too?” I asked skeptically.
“Oh, no,” the salesman hurried to explain. “He isn’t trapped. Not at all. This is simply the form he uses to carry out his mission.”
“And that would be?”
“To bring abundance, wealth and happiness into the world.”
“Then why don’t you make a wish and get wealthy?” Marco asked pointedly.
We all looked at the shopkeeper. “Er, well, because Daikoku doesn’t always understand . . . That is, you have to be extremely cautious about how you phrase your request. There have been instances in which miscommunications have taken place.”
“Like what?” I didn’t know a lot about magic, but I was beginning to learn that everything always had a catch.
“Simply that he does grant the wish but perhaps not always in the way the wisher intended. The person from whom I acquired the item had such an experience. The former owner of the statue hired a group of mercenaries to retrieve his property, and they trailed the adventurer to a village in Tibet. They surrounded it and were closing in when, on the theory that it couldn’t hurt, the man asked Daikoku to help him get out of there.” The salesman broke off, looking vaguely uncomfortable.
“Did it work?” I prodded.
“Of course it worked. After a fashion. He was alive to sell it to me, wasn’t he?”
“So what was the problem?”
“Well, you see, the mages knew what the man looked like. Daikoku therefore reasoned that changing his appearance would be an easy way of fulfilling his wish. But merely laying a glamourie or some such on him wouldn’t work because the men chasing him were mages, with the knowledge needed to strip such a thing away.”
“What deed ’e use?” Francoise asked, her forehead wrinkling prettily.
“Nothing. Or, rather, no mere disguise. He actually changed the man’s form. And considering that the consequences would be death if the man was discovered, he made the change as . . . dramatic . . . as possible.”
“Meaning what?” Marco demanded.
“He changed him into a woman,” the salesman admitted in a rush. “An old Tibetan woman, to be precise. And of course, once the wish was granted, there was no way to change him back. There were no more wishes and the man, er, the former man, hadn’t specified any conditions, so . . .”
“He was stuck?” Marco sounded horrified.
“I’m afraid so.”
“And what ees so bad about being ‘stuck’ as a woman?” Francoise demanded. “Eet was preferable to dying, non?”
“Speak for yourself.” Marco self-consciously adjusted himself. “I got things I would miss!”
“Just for the sake of argument, how much?” I asked the salesman. I needed to know what price range I was looking at here, or discussing any of the other objects was a waste of time.
He named a price that had my jaw dropping in shock. “How much?” I asked in disbelief.
“With the war on, prices have increased substantially,” I was told. “Everyone wants to be properly armed.”
I sighed, looking around at all the things I couldn’t buy. “I don’t suppose you have layaway.”
He shrugged, catching sight of another customer. “My dear, I don’t mean to offend, but unless you are unusually powerful, a magical tap would take decades to resu
lt in that kind of a return.”
He bustled off before I could ask what he meant, but Marco caught my eye. “Don’t even think about it!”
“Think about what?”
“You know damn well what. Once those leeches get their claws into you, there’s no telling where it’ll end. They may say they’re only taking five percent or whatever the legal limit is, but how do you know? Unless you faint and fall over, most people aren’t going to miss more, maybe even a lot more. Then you get in a fight where you need your magic, and, surprise, you got nothing. And you end up dead for what, a couple of bucks?”
“It’s true!” The other bodyguard, another new guy, piped up. “I got in a fight with a mage once, and he said that was why I’d beaten him. Not that I wouldn’t have anyway, but he said he was weak because some shysters had jacked him. And he was telling the truth—he tasted flat. No zip.”
I stared at him.
“I mean, I think he would have, if I’d actually, you know, tried him. Which I absolutely wouldn’t—”
Marco clapped a hand down on his shoulder and he shut up. “Just don’t, all right?” he told me.
“I don’t even know what you’re talking about,” I said impatiently. “You mean it’s possible to tap into a person’s magic?”
“That’s the idea. You pawn part of your magic for a set time in return for a fee. You never heard of it? ’Cause people do it all the time. The mages do, I mean.”
“I thought only dark mages steal magic.”
“They do. They drain somebody every chance they get. But this doesn’t take all of someone’s magic. Just a small percentage. And since they gotta agree to it, it’s legal. Just really stupid.”
“Who buys it? And for what?”
Marco shrugged. “You want details, you gotta talk to a mage. All I know is, it’s supposed to stay within the maximum agreed on and to end at a specified time. Only sometimes, that don’t happen. Like I warned you, it’s dangerous. The Circle usually keeps an eye on that kind of thing, but with the war on—”
“I get it.” I knew for a fact that the Circle didn’t have enough war mages to go around, not when most of them had been recruited for combat duty. A lot of little things were likely to slip through the cracks, including mundane police work like checking on pawnshop owners.
“And damn, girl, it’s not like you need it!” Marco continued. “Lord Mircea could set you up with an allowance—”
“No, he couldn’t,” I said emphatically.
“He isn’t known for being cheap, and you are his—”
“If you say property, I swear—”
Marco’s cell phone went off, interrupting the conversation. “Sorry. Can’t help you,” he told it abruptly, and hung up.
“What was that?”
“Nothing.”
“It sounded like Casanova.”
The phone continued to ring, sounding shriller by the second. He finally got it back out and switched it off. “It wasn’t,” he said, meeting my eyes easily. Which meant absolutely nothing.
Vampires are great liars. They don’t blush, fidget, perspire or have any of the other tells a human might when under pressure. But I knew how much could be concealed by a calm facade. Usually, the more expressionless they were, the more they were hiding. And Marco was looking pretty damn blank.
“Marco—” I didn’t have time to call him on the lie, because Billy Joe streamed in.
“The Circle just grabbed a bunch of the kids,” he told me without preamble. “I don’t know how many. They were dragging them out when I left. Casanova tried to call you, but he couldn’t get through.”
I grabbed Marco’s phone out of his pocket and hit redial. “Hey!”
“Don’t start,” I told him, glaring. I’d have said a few other things, but Casanova picked up on the first ring.
“What is going on?” I demanded.
“It’s those damn kids again—” he began, before the phone was ripped out of his hand. I didn’t have to wonder who was on the other end. Even if I hadn’t heard the voice in the background, I didn’t know too many people who would attack a vampire with so little compunction. The fact that she was all of five foot three and human made the fact that much more impressive.
“Jesse’s gone,” Tami informed me quickly. “The Circle grabbed him and a bunch of the other kids a couple minutes ago. Casanova says he’s not allowed to attack the mages because of the treaty, but I didn’t sign any damn treaty, and I swear if they hurt Jesse, I’ll make them pay. They think they got a war now? They’ll know they’ve been at war when I finish—”
“Where did they go?”
“I don’t know!” She was crying, I could hear it in her voice, but she held it together. “They took off down the Strip in a couple limos.”
The Strip was a block from here, and if it had its usual traffic snarl, we might be able to catch them. “It’s okay, Tami. We’re going to—”
“How is this okay?”
“Because we’re going to get them back. You have my word.”
There was a telling silence on the other end of the phone. I couldn’t blame her. I’d given her my word before, when I promised that the kids would be safe at Dante’s. And look how that had turned out.
What the Circle wanted with a handful of runaways in the middle of a war I didn’t know, but I could figure it out later. Right now, we had to get them back. “I’ll call you as soon as I know anything,” I told her, and handed the phone back to Marco. “Let’s go.”
I started out the door only to have him grab me by the back of the collar. “Where are you going?”
“To get Jesse.”
“And how do you expect to do that?”
“You drive,” I told him, “and I navigate.”
“I was told to keep you safe, not to go on some daredevil rescue. Those kids are not my problem. You are. And deliberately taking you into the path of the Circle is not in the game plan.”
“It is now.”
Dark eyes narrowed to slits. “I don’t think so.”
“Then let me put it another way. I’m going after the kids, whether you like it or not.”
“You aren’t going anywhere.”
Francoise held up something behind Marco’s head that caught the light. Car keys. I didn’t pause to wonder how she’d managed to pick a vampire’s pocket without him noticing. I lunged for the door.
Marco jerked me back, but Billy had figured out what was happening and decided to help. He knocked the cabinet of magical weapons over. It hit a nearby display case, listed to the left, and teetered there for a long moment. Then it crashed to the floor, its deadly contents spilling everywhere.
Some of the items remained inert, sliding or rolling to a stop after a short distance. But a set of shackles slithered across the floor like a metal snake, making tracks in the dust as it headed straight for Marco’s buddy. He danced back, but it pursued him with ominous intent behind a counter. He gave a sudden yelp and disappeared from view.
Marco glared at me. “How did you do that?”
The salesman hurried up before I could answer and then suddenly turned white and started backing away, fast. I glanced behind Marco’s head to see what looked like a swarm of black insects swirling up from a shattered vial. One of them flew into the overhead light, and one of the bulbs went out.
It took me a second to realize that it hadn’t blown; it just wasn’t there anymore. Another spot floated down onto a bottle on the counter, which winked out of existence like it had fallen down a well. Or a small black hole, which is what the things were starting to look like.
All around the shop, items were disappearing, or parts of them, in the case of those too large to fit down the holes. The little black menaces came in different sizes, but unlike the Shroud, they didn’t appear to be expandable. The ceiling fan overhead lost a chunk from one blade, an old mirror was spotted with empty, black circles and the floor was missing half a dozen round chunks of concrete. I stared down at a teacup-sized
one near my foot and didn’t see anything on the other end—no foundation, no dirt, nothing.
Marco carted me back toward the door to the front of the shop, while his buddy reappeared, being dragged across the floor by the shackles, which had attached themselves to his ankles. One of the smaller holes floated down onto his wildly waving left hand, and just like the other items, it was suddenly gone. There was no blood, but there was no more hand, either. Just raw, red flesh and pale bone, sliced clean through like a demented cookie cutter had taken a bite out of him.
Marco let go of me to grab the salesman, who was trying to squeeze out the door ahead of us. “What the hell is happening?” he growled as several more holes appeared in his now hysterical friend.
“He’ll be all right,” the salesman babbled. “His hand isn’t gone; it’s simply misplaced.”
“Misplaced?”
“Y-yes. It’s rather like quarantine, in a way; it’s being stored.”
“Where?”
“That’s a little complicated,” the salesman muttered, grabbing a magazine to use as a fan to push a couple of small holes away from us. The air current acted on them like they were made of tissue paper, sending them tumbling over each other back into the middle of the room—where they came to rest right on top of the other vamp.
He was cut off midshriek as one of them landed on his face, leaving a perfectly round space where his mouth had been. A few gleaming molars could still be seen, one with a gold cap, above the gaping wound. Another took out part of his chest, missing the heart but leaving a baseball-sized hole through his torso. I could see part of what might have been a rib and a rapidly fluttering thing that was probably a lung. There was no spurting blood, no seeping fluids. It was as if part of him was simply somewhere else and his body didn’t realize it.
It didn’t appear to be pleasant, though. He stared at us, his eyes huge, as the shackles succeeded in dragging him into the cabinet. The door shut behind him on its own with a final-sounding thump.