Chapter Fifty-three

I stabbed TALK. “Go to hell,” I told the phone.

“Dory?” Kit Marlowe’s voice came booming out of the speaker, like it was in surround sound. “Is that you?”

“Yes. Do you have something to say to me?”

“Naturally! Why else would I be calling? I need—”

I hung up.

He rang back immediately, because of course he did. Vamps didn’t need speed dial. They had speed fingers.

“Damn it! Don’t hang up on me!”

“Then say the magic words.”

“What magic words? What are you talking about? I want—”

I hung up.

I put the phone on silent mode, pulled on jeans and a black tee, and headed downstairs.

My butt vibrated. I sighed, took the phone out, and held it a good distance from my ear. “What?”

“Don’t hang up on me again!”

I hung up because I don’t take orders from him.

The kitchen was full of fey again. Including Reiðarr, who was rolling out dough—like a machine. He’d been the one with the sad, lumpy effort last time, but things had clearly turned around.

“Damn,” I said, and meant it.

He looked up, and froze. His face twitched around for a moment, like it wasn’t sure what expression it was going for. And then, slowly, it resolved into . . . not a scowl. It wasn’t a smile, but it wasn’t a frown, either.

“I was ordered to assist,” he informed me stiffly, in case I got any ideas.

“It’s impressive.”

“You cannot do this?”

“Never had the knack.”

He did smile that time, rather superiorly. “It’s in the wrists.”

“It looks good,” I said, because it did. And so did the hand pies on trays stacked literally everywhere. “Apple?” I asked hopefully.

“And cherry.”

“Goddamn.”

Ring, ring, ring.

“Sod it all!” Marlowe yelled. “What the hell do you want?”

“I already told you. I know it’s unfamiliar territory, but you’ll get it. I have faith in you.”

“This is ridiculous! I don’t have time for—”

Click.

I went over to the small stretch of counter by the stove, to help Gessa make sandwiches, and ended up getting handed a bucket of boiled eggs. It looked like we were all having sandwiches for dinner, and Gessa was putting some of each kind on the boy’s tray as she finished with them. I pointed out that it probably didn’t matter—he hadn’t seemed picky to me—and she nodded. But then kept doing it anyway.

“Slavers feed gruel,” she told me, after a minute.

“Okay.”

“Back in Faerie, also eat gruel.” Her eyes darkened. “And anything else.”

Ah.

“And now you’re having fun feeding him all kinds of different tastes he’s never had before.”

She didn’t answer, but looking at the determined slant of her chin, I didn’t think I had to worry about the kid going hungry.

“We’ll add some hand pies, too,” I told her, and she smiled.

My butt cheek did the mambo again, and I considered throwing the phone out the door. But it didn’t belong to me, and besides, that wouldn’t make the asshole go away. That would make him come down here, and then I might have to murder him.

“What?”

“All right, all right! I’m . . . sorry.”

It sounded like the last word got caught on something in Marlowe’s throat, probably his overweening pride.

“What was that? I couldn’t quite hear you.”

“You heard me! I’m tired of playing these stupid games! I need—”

Click.

I mushed up maybe three dozen eggs in one of Claire’s huge mixing bowls, added half a jar of mayo, some salt and pepper, some diced onions, and some Dijon mustard. And made a face after tasting it, because it was missing something.

Sven, who was stalking the kitchen like he was afraid we’d eat it all, passed me some brown sugar, because he used it on everything. Literally. How he still had teeth I didn’t know.

“Thanks, but I don’t think that’ll help.”

Sven looked like he was going to argue, but Reiðarr intervened. He put a spoon in my mix and sniffed it cautiously before taking a tiny taste on the very tip of his tongue. And wrinkled his nose.

“It’s mostly just eggs,” I said defensively.

“Tasteless eggs.”

“I could add some pickle relish. Or some bacon?”

Sven perked up at the mention of bacon. He liked to add brown sugar to it while it was cooking to make what was essentially meat candy, so it was always a hit. But Reiðarr disagreed.

“Vinegar.”

“Vinegar?”

And damned if a splash of the white wine variety didn’t help.

But not enough.

“I could go ask Claire,” I said, but Reiðarr bristled.

“We don’t need Claire. We can do this.”

We all stood around and contemplated the bowl for a minute.

Then Gessa finished wrestling a tray of hand pies out of the oven and took a taste. And rolled her eyes at us. She tapped a cabinet with the handle of a wooden spoon, and I opened it to find—

“Okay, yeah.”

“What is that?” Reiðarr demanded, because he was apparently now a chef.

“Ambrosia,” I told him, sprinkling a liberal dose over the eggy mix on his spoon.

He tried another tiny taste, looking dubious, and then his eyes widened and he ate the whole spoonful. He grabbed the jar before I could dose my own eggs. “What is this?”

“I told you: ambrosia. Or smoked paprika, if you’re looking for it in the grocery store.”

He looked like he was making a mental note.

Ring, ring, ring.

“All right, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” Marlowe snapped. “Is that clear enough for you?”

“I don’t know.” I ate some eggs. Those were damned fine eggs. I shared a look of triumph with my co-chefs.

“What do you mean, you don’t know? What more do you want?”

I licked my fingers. “Normally, an apology comes with a little more than that. Like an acknowledgment of guilt. What, exactly, are you sorry for?”

There was a sudden silence on the other end of the line.

“Bang, bang?” I prompted.

And got an outraged noise in return. “You can’t still be upset about that!”

“Still?” I felt my blood pressure rise. “You shot me! All of a day ago!”

“I clipped you all of a day ago,” he corrected nastily. “To slow you down. And you should be grateful—”

“Grateful?”

“I had a perfect shot, and that gorilla you were with never even heard me. I could have killed you—”

“So I should be thanking you?”

“Apologizing for wasting my time, perhaps—”

Click.

I was going to tell Louis-Cesare about that gorilla comment.

I swore to God.

“Turn off,” Gessa advised, looking at the phone.

“If I do, he’ll be here in person—”

Ring, ring, ri—

“Let me spell it out for you,” I snapped at Marlowe. “I am done. Finished. Out of patience, time, and interest in anything to do with you—”

“This isn’t about me! This is about the weapons—”

“What weapons?”

“What weapons?”

It was approaching screech territory. I pulled the phone away to save my hearing, and saw Sven wince. I took the party into the hall, because it wasn’t fair for everyone to have eardrum damage.

“You know damned well what weapons!” Marlowe was yelling. “They couldn’t have used all of the ones they took from Radu on the consul, not with a single man carrying them! Which means the rest are still floating around out there, along with who knows how many others!”

“And?”

“And?”

“And what do you expect me to do about it? I have fifty other things—”

“Not now. This is priority one!”

“Not for me.” I made it final. “You’re the one with the resources for a job like that. One more person isn’t going to help you play hide-and-seek across the city, and I have—”

Marlowe cut me off. “I want to know what you know—everything. Every tiny detail. We’re dealing with a ticking time bomb—”

“Why a time bomb?” I asked, and immediately regretted it.

Because I’d forgotten and put the phone back to my ear.

“Because that bitch isn’t talking!” Marlowe yelled, at front-row-at-a-death-metal-concert decibels. “Even Mircea can’t get anything out of her, and whoever was working with her is still at large, leaving us with two very ugly scenarios!”

“Such as?”

“Such as I can’t talk about this over a phone! There’s no telling who’s listening—”

“Everyone, if you keep screaming.”

“—and there’s certain terms I don’t need showing up in a file somewhere!”

But then he told me anyway.

“Such as number one: she was working with loyal confederates, who are even now tracking down the rest of those damned weapons, and smuggling them . . . somewhere we don’t need them to be. Giving her partisans a war-changing advantage should we ever invade!”

“Should? I thought that was the plan.”

“Until last night! But until we find those weapons, it’s suicide to even attempt it. No one is willing to send their people in there as things stand!”

“Okay,” I agreed. “That’s bad.”

“And number two isn’t any better. If her associates aren’t loyal, then they are sitting on a trove of . . . power . . . like nothing we’ve ever seen. Those fights have been going on for decades! They involved thousands of . . . people . . . especially after Geminus began enlarging and promoting them. There’s no telling how much . . . power . . . they currently have—”

“You think they’re going to sell it.”

“Of course I think they’re going to bloody sell it! And while I have people watching the black market, what if they don’t go there? What if they decide that, instead of selling it off in dribs and drabs, and taking a chance on getting caught every time, they just make one big sell? To our enemies who will fucking use it to fucking end us?”

I hated to admit it, but the asshole had a point.

“All right,” I said. “But I still don’t know what you want me to do. I’ve been on this for less than a week and I haven’t even been looking for weapons. I’ve been trying to help Olga—”

“Save it. I can’t talk like this. I’m coming down there.”

Damn it, I knew it!

“I have things to do,” I said. “I can’t just wait around the house all day—”

“Like hell you can’t. I’m leaving now. If you’re not there when I arrive, so help me God—”

“What? You’ll shoot me again?”

“No.” It was vicious. “I’ll make you wish I had!”

Click.

Goddamn, I hated that vampire.

---

I found the little troll in the boys’ room. The door was open since it was early afternoon, and the guys were off on adventures. But the bed skirt on Aiden’s bed was hiked up, to give a view of the door, and ruffling slightly.

Like somebody was breathing under there.

I sat the tray on the table the boys used for coloring and puzzle doing, got down on my hands and knees, and lifted up the skirt a little more. And found what I’d expected: two violet eyes, glowing faintly in the dark, a small hunched body, and a smock covered with bacon jam. For a moment, we just looked at each other.

I debated trying to fish him out, decided that probably wasn’t likely to go well, and brought the platter down instead. I put it on the braided rag rug beside the bed and started looking through the sandwiches on offer. There were two more BLTs, fat and happy looking; a couple of egg salad, thick and spicy, with a generous sifting of paprika; a couple chicken salad topped with lettuce, tomatoes and red onion slices; and no fewer than four PBJs. Because you can never have too many PBJs.

And just in case that wasn’t sufficient, Gessa had stuck a handful of turnovers around the sides like parsley only not, because trolls don’t get the point of garnishes you can’t eat. Their idea of how to improve a plate of food is to add more food, which is a hard point to argue with. Particularly when they’re still warm from the oven and dripping with glaze.

“Smells good,” I said idly, my own mouth watering a little, because the cinnamon-apple and sweet cherry scents were busy battling it out for dominance.

I pushed the mounded tray a little closer to the bed, started munching on a turnover, and attempted to look harmless.

I guess I succeeded, because, after less than a minute, a small, thin arm snaked out and grabbed a cherry pie.

It jerked it back under the bed, too far for me to see anything, but I could hear smacking going on.

I listened to him inhale a few more turnovers and a couple sandwiches, and then pulled over the paper and crayons that the boys use to design knights and fighter jets and knights piloting fighter jets.

Violet eyes peered out at me curiously.

I flipped back the rug to get a work space, and fed the kid another sandwich. He took it from my hand this time. He appeared to like the meat ones best, but he ate them all. Yes, ten full-sized sandwiches—or twelve, if you counted the two he’d had as an appetizer—along with half a dozen small fruit pies.

Trolls had to have a stomach that extended into another dimension; it was the only explanation.

“Fish, tracks, door,” I said clearly, and picked up a blue crayon.

I drew a fish.

He ate egg salad at it.

I drew train tracks, and even got the perspective right.

Nothing.

I drew a door, complete with a damned good version of a doorknob, if I do say so myself.

Nada.

I finally sat back and ate a pie.

This was starting to look like a waste of time—well, other than for feeding up the kid. Healing took food, and trolls weren’t like humans; soup wasn’t going to put flesh back on those bones. Cherry pie, however, appeared to be a hit. I watched as the rest of the pies and the platter they sat on were slowly pulled under the bedclothes.

I finished off my own snack, and contemplated my artwork. This was starting to look like a dead end. But like the stuff with Efridis, I just couldn’t let it go.

The kid didn’t know much English, and those weren’t survival terms that you’d prioritize: “food,” “water,” “bathroom,” “bed,” “medicine,” “help.” They looked more like words he’d deliberately tried to pick up, maybe even asked people about, despite the fact that doing so might earn him a beating. But he’d learned them anyway, possibly at different times, so as not to arouse suspicion, and then spoken them on what he thought was his deathbed.

Damn it, they meant something!

I just didn’t know what.

Like I didn’t know why Dorina had felt it necessary to send me another memory. I’d thought the point was the bones, and the fact that people were literally being killed for a potion ingredient. True, one time was vamp bones and the other fey, but the method was similar. Find a vulnerable community, people no one would miss, and exploit the hell out of them.

So what was I overlooking?

I reclined back against the trundle and rubbed my eyes. Come on, Dory. You’re better than this.

And, normally, I was. Normally, it didn’t take somebody hitting me over the head with a clue-by-four for me to figure out what I was dealing with. Normally, the problem was how to stop it, not how to find it, but this . . . I wasn’t getting this.

I’m tired, I thought at Dorina. Why don’t you just tell me?

Nothing.

Damn it, I know you can hear me!

Like she could probably hear Mircea last night. Because he didn’t get it: Dorina didn’t go to sleep anymore. At least, not like she once had. Every mind had to have rest, so there were times she wasn’t aware of what was happening, just like me. But there was no way to tell when those were anymore.

And she’d been aware enough to attack Efridis when she saw her, hadn’t she?

So she knew what Mircea was planning.

There was a mirror across from the bed—just a little thing, hung at kid height. One of Claire’s vain attempts to teach good hygiene to a couple boys who were happier splashing about in the mud. I doubted it was used much, but it was there and in my line of sight when I was sitting down. I caught my reflection in the glass, and swallowed.

Staring too long into a mirror is always a freaky experience, and that’s when you know no one is staring back. I didn’t know it now, and for the first time, I tried to get a glimpse of my other side. But the black eyes were the same, with no additional life experience that I could see. And so was the too-pale skin, the cap of dark hair, still slightly damp from the shower, and the teeth biting a lower lip in indecision. Damn it!

“I’m not going to do it,” I told her. “I’m not, okay? That was his idea, not mine!”

Nothing.

“He doesn’t speak for me—he never has!”

More nothing.

So we were back to not talking, huh?

What a shock.

“I’m still not,” I told her, feeling angry and frustrated and destructive—and mad at myself for it. Trashing the kids’ room wasn’t going to help. And neither was anything else.

Mircea could scheme all he wanted; she was going to do what she was going to do.

“Do what you want with your life,” I told her. “You have to live with it. I’m going to live mine—while I still have one!”

I got up and slammed out of the room.

And into another world.