She had broken up with him a few months back. Then just last week his betrayal had punched her in the teeth, but it felt like much longer.
Pia had been so lonely since her mother died six years ago. There was not another single creature who knew her for who and what she was. Only her mother had known. Her mother had loved her so much she had devoted her life to safeguarding Pia’s welfare and safety. She had raised her daughter with a fanatical attention to secrecy and with every protection spell she could muster or buy.
Then Pia had thrown away almost everything her mom had taught her for a sweet smile and the promise of some affection. I’m so sorry, Mom, she said in her head. I swear I’ll do better now. She stared at Keith doing a touchdown shimmy. He pretended to slam a football on the ground and grinned at her.
“I know I had that punch comin’ to me. I owed you one. No hard feelings, sugar.”
“Speak for yourself.” Pia’s words were coated in frost. “I’ve all kinds of hard feelings going on over here.”
She dropped her backpack to the floor and glanced around even though she was pretty sure they were alone. Fast-food wrappers littered the thrift store coffee table. A dirty T-shirt draped the back of the couch. Some things never changed.
“Aw, come on, P., there’s no need to be like that. Hey, listen, I know you’re still pissed, but you gotta understand somethin’, sugar. I did this for us.” He reached for her shoulder, but she jerked back before his fingers could touch her. His smile dimmed, but he didn’t lose his easy, caressing manner. “P., you don’t seem to get it. We’re gonna be rich now. Really fucking rich. Why, you can have anything you want. Won’t you like that, darlin’?”
Keith was the one who didn’t get it. The dimwit didn’t realize he was collateral damage. He had constructed this fantasy world in which he was a player while his gambling debts grew worse, and he fell more and more under the control of his business associates.
Those “associates” were shadowy connections a couple times removed from Keith’s bookie. She imagined them as a cackle of hyenas gathering around their prey with languid purpose. Keith was lunch, but they had decided to play with their food before the kill.
She didn’t know who his contacts were and she didn’t want to. It was awful enough that she knew there was real Power somewhere up that food chain. Human or Elven, Wyr or Fae, it didn’t matter. Something nasty had turned its attention this way. It had enough magic and muscle to take on one of the premiere Powers of the world.
And here was Captain Fantastic, a mere human with not a single spark of Power in him and not a lick of sense, either. The fact that she had ever hooked up with him, even for a few months, would keep her humble forever.
She told him, “You sound like the dialogue from a bad movie.”
Keith’s flirtatious manner fell away and he glared at her. “Yeah? Well, fuck you too.”
“And it goes on,” she sighed. A headache had begun to pulse in her sinuses. “Look, let’s get this over with. Your handlers wanted me to steal something from Cuelebre—”
“I bet my associates that I could get them anything from anywhere,” Keith sneered. “And they suggested something from Cuelebre.”
Today had been a long bad day on top of a long bad week. It had started the moment Keith had put an object of Power in her hand and told her she was going to find Cuelebre’s lair with it. The shock still clung as she remembered the pulse of serious magic that had seared her hand.
The feeling was compounded by a rush of terror for whoever, or whatever, had the kind of mojo to create that artifact and hand it to Keith.
That was sure a special moment, when she discovered Keith had betrayed her. When she realized that, between Cuelebre and the cackle of hyenas, she was screwed. If she stole from Cuelebre, she was dead. If she didn’t, she had no doubt Keith would tell his hyenas, and she was still dead. Rock, shake hands with hard place.
Having the charm sit in her hand was like holding on to a cluster bomb. The design had been deceptively simple. It had felt like a finding charm with a onetime activation, but it had had the Power to slice through all of Cuelebre’s protections.
Her breath shook as she remembered the terrible walk she had taken earlier that day, through an innocent sunlit city park where coffee-drinking adults watched over shrieking children as they threw sand and pelted from the merry-go-round to the jungle gym.
The sounds of traffic and barking dogs had punctuated the blistering pain in her hand, as the charm’s activated Power flared and drew her along a flower-lined path to an anonymous, utterly forgettable rusted metal maintenance door set into a park viaduct. The charm drew a thin shimmering path that led through an invisible mist of cloaking and aversion spells, which had her convinced with increasing urgency that she was lost, mistaken, cursed, trapped in her worst nightmare, in mortal danger, damned for all eternity—
Pia’s fragile control snapped. She slapped Keith’s chest with both flattened hands, driving him backward a few feet. “You blackmailed me into stealing from a dragon, you asshole!” she shouted. She pushed him again and he staggered back. “I trusted you with my secrets.” Although not all of them, thank the gracious Powers, not all. She’d somehow retained a few last scraps of self-preservation. “I thought we loved each other. God, what a wretched joke. I could crawl under a rock and die from embarrassment, except you. Are. Not. Worth it.”
Her last shove knocked Keith into a wall. The look on his face would have been comical if she’d had a sense of humor left.
His astonishment turned ugly. His hands shot out faster than she expected. He shoved her back so hard she tripped and almost fell. “Well, I must have done a good goddamn job of faking it,” he snarled. “Because you’ve got to be the most miserable fuck I’ve ever had.”
Pia never knew until that moment that she was capable of killing someone. Her hands curled into claws. “I am an excellent fuck,” she hissed. “I am the best thing that ever happened to your sorry, deluded, preejaculating ass. You just didn’t have the good taste to recognize it. And you know what? Now I don’t even know why I put up with you. I had a better sex life with five minutes and my hand in a hot shower.”
Captain Fantastic’s face turned puce. She stared. She’d never seen that color on a person before. He cocked back his arm as if to hit her.
“You do that and you never get what you want. Plus you lose a hand.” The frost in her voice turned to an ice pick. He froze. The ruthless stranger that had taken over her body brought her up nose to nose with him. “Go ahead,” she said, settling into a soft and even tone. “Amputation might be a little therapeutic right now.”
She stared him down until he dropped his hand and took a half step back. The move wasn’t much, but it meant a lot to her battered pride. In a contest of wills she’d pinned him to the mat.
“Let’s get this over with,” he snapped.
“About time.” She dug into her jeans and gave him a folded piece of paper. “You get what I stole when you read that out loud.”
“What?” He gave her a blank look. It was clear things had taken a turn beyond his comprehension. As a nonmagical human he couldn’t feel how the paper glowed with Power from the binding spell.
He unfolded it and scanned the contents, and his face contorted again with rage. He dropped the paper like it was on fire. “Oh no, bitch. This isn’t gonna fuckin’ happen. You’re gonna give me what you took and give it to me NOW!” He lunged for her backpack. She took several quick steps back, letting him rifle through the contents. Wallet, tennis shoes, the half-empty bottle of water and her iPod spilled onto the floor.
He made an incoherent strangled noise and rounded on her. She danced back another step and kept on her toes, both empty hands held up as she gave him a mocking smile.
“Where is it!” Spittle flew. “What did you take? Where did you hide it? FUCK!”
“You said it didn’t matter,” she said. As Keith advanced on her, she kept moving in counterpart, keeping a few fee
t between them. “You said your keepers—”
“Associates!” he roared, fisting his hands.
“—didn’t care what I took as long as it was from Cuelebre, since they had the means to verify the take. I suppose that means they can spell it somehow to prove it really is from him.” The back of her shin came in contact with the coffee table. She gathered herself and sprang backward as Keith made a lunge for her. She put a lot of push into her jump and landed in a crouch on the couch as Keith stumbled into the table. “And you know what?” she said. “I don’t give a damn, except for one thing.”
Pia paused and straightened. She bounced a little as Keith scrambled back to his feet. His good surfer looks had twisted into an expression of hate.
She wondered if it would occur to him that her backward jump had been too far and high for a normal human woman to make, but she supposed none of that mattered anymore.
“The thing about blackmail is it never stops at just one payment. All the TV shows say so, anyway,” she said. She didn’t know she had any more disappointment left until her stomach sank at the cunning expression that flashed in Keith’s eyes. “Did you think I wouldn’t guess you meant to keep using me? After all, why would you stop at just one theft? It was always going to be like, ‘Hey, Pia, I’ll keep quiet about you if you’ll do just one more little thing for me.’ Wasn’t it?”
His top lip curled. “We could have been a real partnership.”
He had the gall to sound bitter. Unbelievable. She dropped her flippant tone and became serious. “Either you would keep blackmailing me, or sooner or later—if you haven’t already—you would tell your owners about me. Or”—she held up a finger—“how about this scenario? You’re going to give them what I stole, which will prove to them you were doing more than just idle boasting. It’s going to make them take you seriously.”
His mouth tightened. “They already take me seriously, bitch.”
“Riiight.” She continued, “They probably promised to wipe out all your gambling debts if you could pull off the theft. Maybe they said they’d give you a good chunk of cash as well. You’re hoping this will save your miserable hide. Then they’ll finally sit up and give you the kind of attention you deserve. They’ll have to take you as a real player and not some chump up to his ears in bad debt. But don’t you see—if that happens, they’re also going to get seriously interested in how you pulled it off. They’re going to want to ask you a lot of questions.”
The anger faded from Keith’s face as what she said sank in. “It wasn’t going to be like that,” he said. “I didn’t tell them hardly anything about you.”
Hallelujah, it looked like he was turning thoughtful. Or what passed for thoughtfulness, for him. She relaxed enough to step off the couch and sit down. “You know, I think I believe you on that,” she said. “At least I think you believe it. But what you ‘hardly didn’t tell’ was already too much.”
She could see how his thought process would have gone. He was going to retain all the power. He would keep her strung along in a pseudo-partnership where he held all the strings and got her to do whatever he wanted. His “associates” were going to be admiring and respectful. He probably thought he would end up being a real broker for them too and get them whatever they wanted for exorbitant fees. Then Keith was going to get to live the good life.
“Okay,” she said, scraping at the dregs of her flagging energy to adopt a brisk attitude. She braced her hands on her thighs. “We have to step outside of Keith’s fantasy land now. Here’s how it’s going to be. You swore you would keep what I said in confidence. This is all about keeping a dishonest man honest. You blackmailed me, so now I’m blackmailing you, because however you look at the scenarios I just painted, I’d be screwed.”
He shook his head and said, “No, you wouldn’t, P. All you gotta do is work with me. Why can’t you just fuckin’ see that?”
“Because I’m not like you, Keith,” she snapped. “And damage control is the only way I have a remote chance of getting out of this nightmare.”
“I can’t believe you would just walk away.” He looked as petulant as a little boy.
“I walked away a couple of months ago,” she reminded him. “You just wouldn’t stay gone. Now pick up that piece of paper and swear the binding oath, or I’m leaving and you’re never going to get what I stole. That would mean you’ll have to renegotiate a different payment plan with those ‘associates’ of yours on the money you owe them. Wouldn’t it?”
She didn’t have to say how those different payment options would go. She could tell he knew his life was on the line. Keith regarded her, his mouth turning down at the corners. “You know, it could have been good.”
She shook her head. “Only in your dreams, cowboy.”
He walked over to the spell and picked it up, reluctance in every step. She held her silence as he paused one last time. She could tell he was trying to think of a way to get out of reading it. But there was nothing he could do, and they both knew it.
He read it in a fast, ill-tempered tone. “I, Keith Hollins, hereby swear never to talk about Pia or her secrets in any way, either directly or by inference or silence, or I will lose my ability to speak and suffer unremitting physical pain for the rest of my life.”
He gave a shout as the magic activated. The paper burst into flame. Pia sighed as a weight lifted, just a little, from her shoulders. She went to stuff her things into her backpack.
Keith said, “Okay, I did what you wanted. Now we go to pick up what you stole. What is it—a gem, a piece of jewelry? It had to be something you could carry.” Avarice crept back into his eyes. “Where did you hide it?”
She shrugged. “I didn’t hide it anywhere.”
“What?” Realization dawned. He bared his teeth like a feral dog. “You had it on you the whole time.”
She drew a folded linen handkerchief from her jeans pocket and handed it to him. He tore it open as she shouldered her backpack. She walked out the door as the swearing began.
“Oh, fuck me. You stole a goddamn PENNY!”
“Bye, baby,” she said. She walked away. The hall misted in front of her. She gritted her teeth until pain shot through her jaw. She would not spill one more tear for that loser.
He shouted after her, “What is a dragon doing with a penny in his hoard? How do I know this goddamn penny is even his?”
Well, there was a question.
She thought about reminding him his “associates” could verify a real theft. She thought about telling him she knew a fake would have gotten him killed, but the poor dumb schmuck was doomed anyway.
Either Cuelebre would find and kill him, or sooner or later he would piss off one of his “associates.” They would want to know how he got hold of Cuelebre’s property. And now Keith wasn’t going to be able to tell them. How awkward was that.
Then she thought of telling him about her own stupidity since it hadn’t occurred to her to try to pass on a fake to him. Despite a few unusual abilities, Pia didn’t have a larcenous bone in her body. She couldn’t think with the cunning of a criminal.
Besides, she hadn’t dared to do anything but the job once she had realized real Power moved in the shadows behind him. Something was brewing. It was bigger and worse than anything Keith could imagine or she would want to. It smelled dark like assassination or war. She wanted to run as far and as fast as she could away from it.
Never in a million years would she have imagined finding a jar of pennies amid all that blinding treasure in Cuelebre’s lair, or that “take a penny, leave a penny” would come to mind. Everybody did it at gas stations. Why the hell not.
She thought of a whole conversation she could have had with him. Instead she shook her head. It was past time to leave.
“You’ll be sorry!” he shouted at her. “You’ll never find anyone else that will put up with all your bullshit!”
She gave him her middle finger and kept walking.
Alow-level panic continued to urge Pia to run. A
fter several lip-chewing minutes, she decided not to return to her apartment. The difficulty of the decision surprised her. She didn’t own many things that mattered. Her furniture was just furniture, but she did have a few mementos from her mother and she was fond of some of her clothes. Aside from possessions, the real wrench was breaking from the continuity of what home she did have.
Don’t let yourself get too attached to people, places or things, her mother had said. You have to be able to leave everything behind.
Be prepared to run on a moment’s notice.
The definition of their lives had hinged on this. Pia’s mother had kept stashes of cash and different identities for them in a half-dozen places throughout the city. Pia had memorized public transportation routes, lock combinations and safety deposit numbers for all the locations by the time she was six years old. They’d had regular escape-from-New-York drills where she would go through the routes and get access to the documents and cash while her mother followed and observed. The picture IDs got updated as Pia had grown older.
Still, while Pia had nodded and said she understood, the events of last week showed just how much she hadn’t really understood or internalized things. Her mother had died when Pia was nineteen. Now, at twenty-five, she was beginning to realize how sloppy her behavior had become.
It wasn’t just her monumental foolishness at trusting Keith. She had kept up with the regular self-defense and martial arts classes, but she had fallen out of the habit of taking them seriously. Instead she treated them like they were for exercise and entertainment. Now her mother’s early lessons were coming back to haunt her. She only hoped she would survive long enough to appreciate what it meant to be sadder and wiser.
Earlier Pia had wiped out one cache to pay the witch for the binding spell. Now she took a circuitous path to Elfie’s bar in south Chelsea. She managed to hit one safety deposit box before banks closed and a second, less conventional cache hidden at her old elementary school playground. She had three new identities and a hundred thousand dollars in unmarked nonsequential bills stuffed in her backpack, along with a renewed paranoia weighing her down.