“What in heaven’s name . . . ,” he began.
Ernie had no words left. She had nothing left. No energy to think or fear or be suspicious, no room to figure things out or scheme or protect herself. Right now, what she needed was comfort and safety. She fell into him and wrapped her arms around his body.
Gabe stiffened for a moment, but then his arms enclosed her. Without a word, he guided her back into her apartment and shut the door behind them.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Somewhere between the door and her tiny living room, Ernie began to breathe again, began to sense the warmth coming from Gabe’s skin, the masculine scent of him, the powerful body enveloping hers. He pulled her close and set his chin on the top of her hair, his hand cupping the back of her head, her face nestled in the V made by the opening of his motorcycle jacket. “I’ve got you.”
“Thank you,” she whispered, clinging to him, not even caring what it meant, how vulnerable it made her, because right now, she felt safer than she had since this whole ordeal had begun.
After a few moments, not nearly enough for Ernie, he gently lowered her to the couch. She winced as her aching body settled onto the cushions.
“That bad?” he asked, taking in the look on her face.
“I thought that was obvious.” Ernie looked away and bit her lip. Her cheeks were warm even though the rest of her was chilled.
“You scared me. When I looked you up and realized you were here . . .” He ran a hand over his mouth. “Looks like you’re not quite up to a tongue-lashing.”
“Looked me up—with a card?”
“Still tracking you,” he said. “Good thing, too. You could have been followed or found by others as well.”
“You said I wasn’t up to a tongue-lashing,” Ernie said irritably.
He touched her cheek with his fingertip. “But I’ve learned not to underestimate you.”
“I don’t know if I can do this, Gabe,” she blurted out, her throat tight. She knew she shouldn’t admit this, but he’d wanted her trust, so she was stepping out on this limb. “And I don’t know if those other Dealers can help me, even if they wanted to.”
He nudged her chin up so she was looking at him. “Those other Dealers will help, as long as they believe you’re strong enough to get behind.”
She let out a hopeless laugh. “After what I witnessed, I’m not sure their help is even a good thing.”
“This is why Dealers usually play alone. We’re a scarred, sorry, and stubborn lot, down to the best of us.”
“Minh seems cool. Except for the hand grenade thing.”
“He definitely mellows after his sixth beer. But he’s quick on the draw and can be a terrible bastard if he wants.” Gabe sounded like he might have been on the receiving end of that draw a time or two before the Hong Kong encounter.
“Why do you guys fight each other, if you’re allies?”
“We often have to,” he said. “If we are assigned to different sides of a conflict by the Forger or contracted by opposing forces. Armies. Political parties. Feuding families.” Gabe rolled his eyes. “If the players have enough coin—”
“I thought you had a Coin card that could just magic you up some cash. Why would you need to take jobs you don’t want?”
“Do I look like the lord of the manor to you?” Gabe waggled his feet, showing off the worn soles of his scuffed motorcycle boots. “We’re only given what we need by the almighty Forger. We want more, we have to earn it ourselves. That’s what he wants. Players—regular humans—might be the pawns, but Dealers are the knights, bishops, and rooks on the board. He needs us to make things happen.”
“Yeah, he said something about how you guys make the music that keeps the world spinning. Or prevents it from exploding. He was a little hard to follow.”
Gabe shrugged. “He told you more than he tells a lot of us, but we’ve pieced it together. He claims to reside in the center of the universe, seat of all Forgers since the beginning of human existence. Center of the web. For all that, you’d think he’d be a bit more high-minded, wouldn’t you?”
“I think he craves a little normal humanity,” said Ernie. “He can’t quite manage it, though. Just like he doesn’t manage everything you guys do, right?”
“Depends on the Dealer—some, he keeps loaded up with jobs. Others, like Minh, he seems to leave alone. And I haven’t had a direct assignment from Andy since . . .” He sighed. “But if two opposing human sides can afford us, one way or another, blood or treasure, then sometimes there are two Dealers fighting each other. Those are the worst.”
“How come I never read about giant spiders and big, scary monster Virginias in the paper, then?”
Gabe chuckled and pushed his messy hair back from his stubbly face. “Well, when we’re under contract, we play a little bit more conservative, see. No monsters. More persuasion, deceit, concealment, tracking, foretelling, negotiating, moving pawns into place, occasionally taking out a key player—”
“Nothing that looks supernatural.” It suddenly made sense why no one knew about them, and how they could keep their existence a secret.
“But don’t tell me you’ve never heard tell of a giant sewer rat or a monster alligator,” Gabe said with a wink.
“Holy crap,” Ernie whispered. “I don’t want to meet the people who control those—”
“Dealers don’t control their decks,” Gabe corrected. “We’re bonded. It’s . . .” He bit the inside of his cheek. “A relationship.”
Ernie considered her tenuous interaction with the diamondback. “I’m getting that. She appeared to me tonight.”
Gabe’s eyes lit up the way they always did when he was convinced Ernie was finally bonding with the snake. “How long was she here? Did she meld onto your arm?” He looked around. “Is she still—?”
“She disappeared after only a few minutes.”
“Dammit. Duncan must be only allowing himself a few minutes of rest at a time, just to keep her from you.”
Ernie shrugged one shoulder. “I don’t know that it was the best use of my time, but she showed up when I needed her.” Ernie confessed what she had learned that night about her dad, and what she now suspected. “I was hoping I could find him, that maybe he’d come and help me, seeing as he was the one who sent the Marks here in the first place. But I think something happened to him, Gabe.”
Gabe’s brow was furrowed. “I’ve never heard of a Dragonfly deck. Must be a new deck? Or one that hadn’t been dealt in a very, very long time.”
“How did he get ahold of it, then?” She imagined her father as he looked in her childhood memories, bespectacled and long-haired, his fingers trembling, blowing dust off an ancient jewelry box, the kind that used to inhabit the wild bedtime stories he loved to tell her, full of demons or curses or treasure untold. “Could he have found it somewhere? Maybe it had been stashed away for centuries or something.”
“No Dealer would just lay their cards down like that. They have to be taken from us, and whoever took them would be the new Dealer. There aren’t any decks sitting around to be unearthed.” Gabe considered his scarred hands, laid out in his lap. “Perhaps he got his deck the same way I did,” he said quietly. “Perhaps he had a need so deep, so impossible, that only the devil himself could help.”
“You don’t really believe the Forger is the devil,” said Ernie. But then again, he had seemed like something not quite human, not quite benevolent.
“Does it matter? He still has all of us on a leash, and the tether is our bond to the spirits of our decks.” His thumb snuck under the edge of his jacket sleeve and caressed the skin there, where Caera’s talons were inked. “We accept the bond and all that comes with it, because the Forger grants a favor.” He shook his head. “At the time, it seems worth it.”
She stared at the side of his face, her eyes tracing his rough features, his grim expression. “And now?”
“Now I have a job to do,” Gabe said. “When I’m done with it, we’ll see.”
br /> Ernie felt a pang in her chest. “Is it that bad? You said immortality—”
“It’s fucking lonely,” he said hoarsely, turning his face away. “And I’m tired. I know it’s just one card I’m missing, but I’m more tired by the day. And I think that’s what the Forger wants.”
Ernie got up. She barely had the energy for it, but the wrenching sound of his voice made it necessary. She shuffled into the kitchen. Gabe joined her just as she was pulling her bottle of vodka from the freezer. She got out two juice glasses and filled each with a generous pour. Without asking, she handed Gabe a glass. He accepted her offering and swallowed it quickly.
“Tell me how you became a Dealer,” she said.
Gabe pulled out a chair from the table and sat down with a sigh. “You know that I’m old.”
“How old?”
“Lived through the change of two centuries, so . . . old.” He looked at her from the corner of his eye, as if gauging her reaction.
Ernie digested this knowledge as she took a seat. Gabe looked like he was in his early thirties. The dark circles under his eyes added a few years, sure, but not over a hundred of them. “You wear it well,” she said calmly.
“I’m not the oldest of us. But I’m close. I think.”
“You don’t know?”
“We’re not exactly a close bunch, but I know that Minh is really old, maybe three or four hundred years? And there are legends of ancient Dealers that you’d never know they were near you until it was too late.”
“Now there’s an encouraging thought.” She handed him her drink and took his empty cup. “So. You’re edging toward your third century of life . . . Go on.”
“We were farmers. Just grew enough to feed the family, but most years it was plenty.”
“Potatoes?” Ernie guessed.
He nodded. “Before the blight.”
She knew her history. The potato famine had ravaged Ireland in the middle of the nineteenth century. Something like a million people starved, and another million left the country, most of them immigrating to America.
His eyes met hers. “I lost my wife and child. Not to the famine. Childbirth. I went home to take care of what I had left—my ma, my sister, and my brother. Da had died of a sickness the winter before, and they were alone and needed me, so I tended the farm with my brother. He was just a few years younger.” He winced then, maybe some old memory pricking his heart. “That autumn the vines . . . they turned up rimmed with black. And when we started pulling spuds up from the ground, they’d fall apart in our hands, all black and brown ooze, with a stink like the grave. We’d eaten through our stores from the last season by November.”
“What did you do?” Ernie asked.
Gabe rubbed a hand over his face. “Everything I could think of. But the blight was already everywhere—you couldn’t find a potato for miles, and they were worth their weight in gold, which no one had, especially not us. My sister—” His fists clenched. “She was this little thing. Only twelve—so much younger than my brother and me. And I was watching her fade. My ma and brother, too. We all prayed, and God didn’t answer.
“So, when we were all living skeletons, not a coin to our names, turned out of our house by the landlord and living in an abandoned shack at the edge of the county, I cried out to the devil.”
“And he did answer,” Ernie said quietly.
“At first, I thought he was an angel. But then again, Lucifer was the most beautiful of them all, wasn’t he?”
“He was definitely good looking, but I wouldn’t say he was the most beautiful,” Ernie commented without thinking.
Gabe arched an eyebrow. She cleared her throat. “Please go on.”
“We’ll come back to that later,” he said. “I was out in the middle of one of our blighted fields, considering how I might end myself. I knew it was the coward’s way out, but I had already watched my wife and child die. I wasn’t going to watch the rest of my family waste away to nothing.”
“That’s when the Forger appeared.”
“He asked me what I wanted, and I told him I wanted food for my family. And coin enough to buy safe passage to America for each of them so that we could start a new life.”
He smiled ruefully in a way that made Ernie ache. “I remember he asked, ‘That’s all?’ And I didn’t want to request too much, yeah? I thought that was enough, and I was scared he’d walk away if I got greedy. I remember he looked like the sort who could deliver—and right then and there, he conjured up a plate of brown bread thick with butter and a bowl of hot stew with mutton and potatoes . . . I thought I had died and gone off to heaven. While I sat there like an animal, licking at the bowl, he asked if I would work for him. He told me that he’d give me everything I’d asked for—and more—if I agreed.” Gabe splayed his fingers in his lap. “Christ almighty, it was the easiest decision I ever made. I was on my knees in front of him, telling him I’d spend the rest of my life paying him back.”
“He didn’t tell you who he was?”
“I didn’t care. Here was a man or an angel or a demon, promising me a future for my family, all in exchange for a job? I would have killed for him.” Gabe set his elbows on his knees and hung his head. “I have killed for him,” he added.
“Did you talk to your family about it?”
“There was no downside, not that I could see. And I was so desperate. I swore an oath to him right there, on my knees in the mud and the rot. He warned me that I’d have to leave my family, that abandoning them would be the price of the favor, but by then I was so tired of watching them suffer that it seemed like an upside. I accepted his terms. That’s when Caera first appeared to me. I thought it was a miracle, a sign.”
“And did he keep his promise?”
Gabe nodded. “Instantly. He handed me a bag of silver coins and a basket full of warm bread, come out of nowhere. Then he gave me my deck and explained how to use it. He told me to feed my family, secure them safe passage, and then he’d give me my first job.
“I walked into that shack a hero. Ma’s face . . .” He downed Ernie’s untouched vodka. “As my family devoured that bread, I told them everything would be different now. That I would make sure they always had enough from then on. My brother asked me where I had gotten the money, and I told him that I had found work with a wealthy man.” Gabe rose and walked over to the kitchen counter, setting down his empty glass. With his back still to her, he said, “I walked to town and inquired about passage to America for my family. And that night, I played a card for the first time.”
“You had your first assignment as a Dealer?”
He shook his head. “I wanted a drink and some company. Caera sat on my shoulder and, with her beak, pulled the—”
“Nourishment card,” Ernie guessed.
“Got it in one,” Gabe replied. “Got myself good and soused. Stayed at a brothel because I couldn’t see straight to walk home. But the next day, I did, with the good news that we were leaving for America the next week.”
“Was your family excited?”
Gabe turned around, his expression desolate. “No, love. They were dead.”
Ernie’s stomach dropped. “What?”
“I was on the road back home when a neighbor came running up to me. He said they’d all tried to help. But somehow, the shack had caught fire. Maybe they were too weak to move, but that was it. Nothing left. Burned down to scattered bones.”
“What did you do?” she whispered.
“I threw the damn cards in the mud and demanded that the Forger come to me and right this wrong. He’d promised me safe passage for my family!”
Ernie swallowed her dread. “I have a feeling I know what he said.”
“Which means you’ve been paying attention,” Gabe said bitterly. “Something I had been too desperate and stupid to do. He did appear—long enough to tell me that if I ever abused my deck again, he’d tear Caera out of me and laugh as I died in front of him. Then he reminded me of our deal.”
“Your
soul, basically, in exchange for your family’s lives.”
“No,” Gabe said. “He gave me what I’d asked for—food, money, passage to America. I’d taken bread, and I’d taken silver, and I’d secured places on the next ship bound for New York.”
“But you hadn’t asked for them to stay alive.” She shook her head. “You can’t possibly hold yourself responsible for what happened! You all would have died if you’d done nothing.”
“Maybe we all would have been better off if I had.” His eyes met hers. “Including you.”
Was he saying she’d be better off if she’d never met him? She didn’t know how to feel about that. He’d come to her right when she needed him most, and he’d been at her side without wavering ever since. He’d earned her trust with every moment they’d been together. “Well, I’m glad you’re here,” she murmured, a lump in her throat. “But I’m sorry you gave up so much and lost your family anyway.”
“Sometimes wrongs take a long time to right.” He shoved off the counter and strode over to her. “And this is part of it.” He took her hand and pulled her up, steadying Ernie with an arm around her back. “I know you want to find out what happened to your da, but I don’t want you here unprotected. Will you come back to the shop?”
She looked up at him. The weight of his story was still on his shoulders, a palpable presence in the room. It reminded Ernie that everyone had a past to lay to rest, that she wasn’t the only one. Her dad was long gone, and wherever he was, he wasn’t in a position to come to her rescue. It had been stupid to even want that—hadn’t she learned forever ago that she needed to manage things herself? Well, maybe not all by herself. She leaned into Gabe, grateful and craving the closeness.
This time, he didn’t enfold her immediately. Instead, he hesitated, looking down at her with questions in his blue eyes. Something inside Ernie went as skittish as a cooped-up colt, and she pulled away, feeling foolish. “Ready when you are,” she said lightly, hoping he didn’t hear the tremor in her voice.
“If you don’t mind, I’m going to get us back the old-fashioned way.” He pulled his deck.