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The man was laser focused, looking like he was ready and able to take on the whole place by himself. But he wasn’t. Which was why I stepped on Ray’s foot, to shut his mouth, even before Curly grabbed him.
“No, he can’t! He can’t stay here! You promised!”
Curly was a little squirrelly without his friend/teddy bear.
“He can stay. We can all stay,” I said. “We just have to find a way through that door without anybody noticing!”
And then someone did it for us.
I jerked my neck around when what sounded like a bomb went off. And was just in time to see the sturdy security gate come flying through the ward and skidding down the middle of the street. Where it was promptly run down by Frankentruck, burning rubber, billowing smoke, and looking like a ride straight out of hell.
“What the fuck?” Ray said, stumbling back, although we were nowhere near the drive.
But then, neither was the truck. It smashed through a flower bed, careened back the other way to crack the fountain, and finally straightened up to gouge the blacktop, all while leaking enough fiery oil to set the pretty bushes on fire. It didn’t hit the brakes until it was halfway up the great swath of steps, just missing Claire’s Batmobile, and sending a bunch of beautiful people scattering and screaming.
The engine died a second later, judging by the clouds of smoke cascading out from under the hood. It was almost enough to hide Louis-Cesare’s expression as he jumped out of the way, and to obscure the front entrance in billows of white. Great big billows.
I looked at the guys; the guys looked at me.
“I think I just wet my pants,” Curly breathed.
And then we were darting across the road, up the steps, and through the entrance, unnoticed by the security guys, who suddenly had their hands full.
We ran through the atrium, which had a ceiling covered in strips of hanging, rippling glass that resembled seaweed, and which were chiming in the wind and smoke blowing through the doors. And then we veered off to the side and around a corner, because Curly was heading for the john, damn him! Ray shrugged at me and followed; Curly was the only one who knew anything about this place and we needed him.
“What are the trolls doing here?” Rufus asked, as I pretended to check a stocking to get my hair to fall in my face.
“Don’t know. Olga’s been searching for her nephew, who we think was taken by slavers—”
“Well, she won’t find him here! And she’s likely to screw up this whole thing!”
I glanced at him through my bangs. “You wanna tell her that?”
Rufus looked like he was considering it. But the dustup behind us was already getting heated, with a few fists being flung around—along with something else. Something that zipped here and there through the fog like dark bugs. Dark bugs with eyes. Dark bugs the size of soccer balls that—
“Damn,” I said, with feeling.
“What now?”
“Reporters.”
And, sure enough, a couple dozen camera balls were whizzing about, getting in people’s faces. Along with what appeared to be every reporter in town, jumping out of a bunch of cars that must have followed the truck, and screaming questions at the security guards. We needed to get gone.
Luckily, Ray pulled an annoyed-looking Curly out of the bathroom a moment later. “Can’t a guy take a piss?”
And then we were through, into the huge main room.
I caught it in glimpses, because there was so much to take in all at once: a white marble floor with a mosaic of the sculpture outside, and “Oceanid” carved around it in gold. A huge wall of glass on the opposite end, outside of which a passing ship was lit up like a Christmas tree. Slot machines, table games, a large bar with an abstract wave pattern in the big open space directly ahead. And on the walls—
I had no freaking idea.
The nonglass sides of the building had four balconies going up, all overlooking the main room. They were connected to the ground floor by open staircases fore and aft, the ultramodern kind that seemed to hang in space all by themselves, although that wasn’t the weird part. The weird part was what was on them.
Large, round doorways studded the walls in lines, like portholes on a ship. There were no actual doors, leaving the openings dark and kind of ominous. Except for one, on the lowest balcony to the left, which had just lit up with a circle of little lights curving around it, inset into the stone.
The lights were shaped like a bunch of orange squid, colorful and oddly cartoonish, glowing against all that white. But they seemed to make a bunch of people really happy. Because a sizeable chunk of the crowd peeled off and headed that way, some with glasses still in hand, chatting and laughing and booking it, as much as high heels would allow.
“What’s going on?” I asked—nobody, because I was the only dummy still standing out in the open like this.
