Wicked as They Come

I couldn’t tell him that I was shaken to the core.



I shrugged away from his grasp and picked my glove up off the floor. I turned my back as I slipped it on and clumsily buttoned it. It was as intimate as dressing after a one-night stand, and I couldn’t face him until my hand was safely covered again. But I felt his eyes on my back, exerting his power. Or trying to.



“Why won’t you tell me, love? Was it something bad?”



“I can’t tell you,” I repeated dumbly.



“Whatever it is, if it’s important, I need to know,” he said. “Was it the Coppers? A fire? Imprisonment? Poison? Draining? Death?” He paused and, with a defiant tilt of his head, asked, “Or did you see something of my past?”



“I can’t tell you.”



“I’m not accustomed to being exasperated,” he said, his voice ragged with feeling. “I don’t want to force you to tell me, but I will, if I must.”



“You can’t force me to do anything,” I said. “You won’t.”



“Tell me.”



“No.”



“Tell me!”



He spun me back around to face him, and the look on his face was terrifying and more than a little thrilling. Anger and danger and excitement and desire were eloquent in his sharply cut features. No one ever had power over him, and now I did, an insignificant Pinky. A human.



“Look,” I said. “Nothing is going to happen to the caravan. It’s my problem, not yours.”



He put his hands on my shoulders, and I could feel the tension between us through the gloves and the thick brocade, like magnets that couldn’t decide whether to repel or attract.



“Your problems are my problems, for as long as you’re in this world,” he said. “Don’t you see? I brought you here. I’m responsible for you. You’re mine.”



“Excuse me?” I barked. “You don’t own me.” I tried to jerk away from him, but he held me tightly, his hands as strong as iron wrapped in velvet.



Jeff had called me his responsibility, his baby, his darling. His, his, his. My instinct was to run away from Criminy, too. Still, I sensed that he meant something different when he said, “You’re mine.” But whatever those words meant in this world, whatever they meant to him, I wouldn’t let myself give in.



I tugged away, but he only held tighter, and my heart wasn’t in it. The vision had stolen my fire. Part of me was tempted just to melt into him. Sure, I felt what he felt, the energy and heat and inexplicable longing between us. But underneath it, at the very core of me, was a fierce need for freedom. A stubborn rebelliousness.



And I couldn’t forget the constant worry about Nana, far away in another place, waiting for me, needing comfort and care that only I could give. I had a life there, in my other world, a life I was just starting to rebuild. This new, confusing vision of my future was just too much. I closed my eyes.



“I’m not yours. I don’t even work for you yet. My name is Tish Everett, and I belong to myself.”



“No, pet,” he said, taking a menacing step closer. “You belong to me.”



“I don’t.”



“Not yet.”



He sighed and pulled his top hat from somewhere inside his coat. He beat it against his leg once and twirled it up onto his head. Then he looked at me with eyes full of secrets and grasped both of my hands. Warmth bloomed between the gloves, a whisper of cloth always between us.



“Think what you will, love, but you know what they say of glancers.”



“I don’t,” I said, looking down to avoid his burning gaze.



“They can see everyone’s future but their own.”



I closed my eyes and shook my head.



He was wrong again, though. Touching him, I had seen what would happen to me.



And I was scared.



7



It was a long, charged moment, him waiting for me to look up, me waiting for him to let go. When the knock came at the door, his hands dropped, and my eyes opened. We stepped away from each other. I crossed my arms over my chest and tried to compose myself. He smoothed his hair and kicked a chair, reducing it to another stack of scrap wood.



“Come in,” he said, composed and commanding once again.



“I’m so sorry to interrupt, sir,” came a high, twitchy voice. “But you summoned me?”



The head that poked through the door seemed alien, until I realized that the man was wearing leather aviator’s goggles that covered his head and neck. His eyes were rendered huge, and he blinked fearfully and hiccupped like a screech owl on speed.



“Thank you, Vil,” Criminy said. “Please see to it that this wagon is made habitable for our newest star. By tonight.”



The man pulled a worn journal and a brass pen from his flapping leather jacket and licked the tip of the pen, saying, “And what’s to be painted on the side, sir?”



“Have it say, ‘Lady Letitia, Fortune-Teller,’” Criminy said grandly. “If that suits you, of course.”



I snorted. “I’m not much of a lady, and I don’t know if I can actually tell fortunes.”



“I say you are and you can,” he said to me. “And paint it burgundy to match mine, Vil,” he added. “With gold lettering.”



“Yes, sir, of c-course,” the man stuttered before disappearing.



“It seems like an awful lot of trouble,” I said softly. “Especially if I can’t be what you want me to be. If I leave.”



“You’re not leaving,” he said firmly. “Unless you have an enormous natural talent for magic or you know how to open a door to your world, which is one of many. I don’t think that’s going to happen. Not for a few hundred years, at least. Best get comfortable, love. You’re a gypsy now.”



“But … Me? A fortune-telling gypsy? It’s laughable,” I said, staring at my feet and blushing.



He spun me around by my shoulders and whipped a dusty sheet from a full-length mirror. Claws had raked across the surface, leaving four slashes that gouged across the silver and into the ornate frame. The wolfboy must have been furious.



And there we were.



It was a vision, like those phony portraits tourists have made of themselves dressed as knights or Old West whores, except it was real. He stood behind me, his gloves framing my shoulders, and together we were resplendent. Where I was lush and curved, flush with blood and paint and glitter, he was spare and elegant and hard as glass. The fascinator’s skull winked from my piled hair, and my face rose from the high, tight neck of the gown like a full moon over a dark landscape.



“ ‘Laughable’ isn’t the word I’d use,” he said.



“Wow,” I said, turning my head back and forth, trying to convince myself that it was real.



“Whatever you are where you came from,” he said, “whatever you think you are, here, you’re a lady and a glancer and a gypsy. And true glancers are rare.”



“What if I see something when I touch them—something I don’t want to see?” I asked. “Something horrible.”



“If you can help them avert trouble, like you did with Mrs. Cleavers, then you’re performing a vital service,” he said. “And they’ll pay for it. Not everyone in this world is happy and safe. Most aren’t, actually. If you can’t see anything or if you see something unavoidably wretched, learn to lie well. You’ll pick it up quick, and you can practice on the carnivalleros tonight.”



“I’ve never performed,” I said. “I get stage fright.”



He pulled a pocket watch from his vest and, after checking and winding it, said, “We don’t open for another day. With a little practice, you’ll do fine.”



“What’s my alternative?”



“Your alternative?” He said it slowly, letting the word roll out in a deadly warning.



“Yes. If I don’t want to live here and put on a goofy turban and read palms?”



“Having second thoughts, love?”



Hands on hips, he considered his boots. I chose the strongest-looking chair and sat, a puff of dust rising around me.



“If you don’t want what I offer—what you’ve already agreed to—you’ve got two choices. Strike out on your own and be eaten by the woodland creatures, leaving behind an awfully pretty skeleton. Or I can take you to the next city and turn you over to the Coppers while you’re alive.”



“And that’s a bad thing, right?”



“How to explain it?” He sat down on the ruined chaise and leaned over a low, oval table. With one gloved fingertip, he drew a rabbit in the dust. “This world of ours, it runs on blood. There used to be balance, but now there are too many of us. Something changed, and all of the animals turned on one another until every creature running wild had fangs.” He drew fangs on the rabbit and then snapped, and there were suddenly dozens of tiny, fanged rabbits in the dust.



He had made dust bunnies. I grinned. But he was serious.



“So the Pinkies took every normal animal they could catch and put them behind high fences, where nothing could turn them. Cities were fortified, with mazes of walls around their precious cattle and hogs and sheep. Now the city folk spend every second with clothing tightly laced around throats and wrists to keep from rousing the Bludmen they can’t avoid and high boots to crush the bludrats that they can never quite eradicate.”



“That sounds horrible,” I said.



“I happen to agree,” he said with a wry smile. “But a few hundred years ago, one of the strongest cities elected a group to maintain the balance between blood drinkers and supposed innocents. The Copper Equilibrium Consortium, they called it. Because, of course, blood tastes of copper and is worth money, which is made of copper. So clever. And it spread from city to city until the Coppers took complete power. They make rules. They punish rule breakers. And they make sure that the blood drinkers, whether animals or Bludmen, never gain control. Of anything.”