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“What people?” I asked, dreading the answer. I could number the ones who might consider me a friend on one hand. And except for Rafe, none of them knew where I was.
“Well, I don’t know, do I?” Augustine’s eyes flashed. “Why don’t I stop everything I’m doing seconds before the show to take care of your scruffy friends, who aren’t even on the guest list?”
I didn’t immediately answer, because the bag was currently winning. It had already sprouted four stubby legs and a tooth-lined snout. Now a tail covered with hard jade scales protruded suddenly from the rear, giving it enough leverage to thrash out of my grasp. It dropped to the floor and hurried off after a snakeskin belt. The belt tried slithering away, but the bag caught it by the tail, swallowing the writhing thing in a couple of gulps.
I wrestled the truant fashion accessory to the floor with Françoise’s help and wrapped a scarf around the snout. “What do they look like?”
“That’s my point,” Augustine snapped, tossing his curls. “They look like rejects from a low-budget production of Rent. Not to mention the smell. Get rid of them. Now.” He flounced off in a huff.
I peered out from behind the curtain separating backstage from the catwalk, trying to spot my visitors, but it wasn’t easy. The ballroom was packed with witches dressed to impress. It looked like big hats were in for summer, because at first all I could see was a field of brightly colored circles, bobbing and swaying like flowers in a breeze. There was no one in sight who looked like they smelled of anything that cost less than a hundred dollars an ounce. Then a couple of witches who had been partly blocking the view settled into their seats and I saw them.
Augustine was wrong; they weren’t friends.
The music started up and the first model elbowed me out of the way, gliding onto the catwalk, her leopard-skin bag slinking along beside her. I hardly noticed, my eyes on the two figures who had squeezed in the back door. I didn’t recognize them, but I knew what they were. The bulky coats they had on were a dead giveaway: war mages. And despite their scruffy appearance, I doubted they’d come to upgrade their wardrobe.
They were nonchalantly scanning the crowd, and I’d seen those casual glances on Pritkin’s face often enough to know how much they took in. I moved farther into the shadow of the curtain, wondering if I could shift out unseen, when one of them nudged his companion and nodded at a group of dirty, poorly dressed children huddled against one wall. The mages started forward, faces grim, and the kids broke into a run. Most people had found their seats, so there was nothing between the kids and their pursuers except the two vamps acting as greeters.
There was a temporary alliance between the Circle and the Senate because of the war, but that didn’t erase centuries of dislike and mistrust. Especially when war mages had been responsible for an attack on the premises a little over a week ago. The vamps blocked the way with insolent smiles on their faces, and the mages skidded to a halt.
The kids had run down the aisle flanking the wall and were now climbing onstage. Most people were watching the catwalk, which had been designed to extend out into the middle of the room, so they didn’t garner more than a few puzzled glances. They headed straight backstage, but stopped on the edge of the frenetic activity.
They looked back and forth between me and several blonde models who were struggling into their outfits. Then a black boy of maybe fourteen nudged a small girl. “Which one?”
The girl had dishwater blond hair and big brown eyes that focused on me unerringly. “That one.” She pointed with the hand not clutching a beat-up teddy bear.
The bag in my arms made a sudden lunge, causing me to almost lose my grip. Françoise said something that didn’t sound French and it froze, a shiny black claw all of an inch from my face. “You want for me to take the crocodile?” she asked.
“Sounds like a plan.” I passed the wicked thing over gratefully.
The boy looked at the girl with a dubious expression. “You sure?”
She nodded and went back to chewing off the bear’s head. The boy walked over and held out a hand. The T-shirt he was wearing was thin and shot with pinholes, and his jeans were out at one knee. One of his tennis shoes had lost its lace and was being held together with a safety pin, and a ratty old sweatshirt was knotted around his waist. But the handshake was firm and he met my eyes. I had a weird sense of déjà vu, even before he spoke.
“I’m Jesse. Tami sent us.”
“Tami?”
“Tamika Hodges.”
I stared at him, feeling like someone had just kicked me in the gut. He stared back, dark eyes defiant, expecting to be ignored, rejected, thrown to the wolves. I recognized the look. A decade ago, I’d been about his age, and just as scared, just as defiant, just as sure I couldn’t trust anyone. For the most part, I’d been right.
Years before I decided to destroy Tony, my ambition had been just to get away from him. I’d ended up in Chicago, because that was where the bus I’d caught happened to stop. As someone who had rarely been allowed to leave Tony’s compound outside Philly, and then only with half a dozen bodyguards, I found my new freedom to be a very scary thing. I had money, thanks to a generous friend, but I was afraid to stay somewhere decent, sure that I would wake up to find a couple of Tony’s goons looming over me. Not to mention that it’s a little hard for a fourteen-year-old to check into a hotel on her own. So shelters it had been.
I soon discovered that there were a few problems associated with shelter life. Besides the drunks and the druggies and the knife fights, there were also limits on the length of your stay. The more long-term variety had a staff who might report a teenager on her own to the authorities, so I tended to gravitate to the two-week versions. That was long enough to get comfortable but not long enough for anyone to get to know me.
Most of this type kept records, though, and once your time was up, you weren’t allowed to return for six months. The time limit was necessary to keep people from taking up permanent residence, but it also ensured that I went through all of the nicer shelters in a matter of months. I finally ended up in one that was so overcrowded, a third of us were living in a dirt-floored courtyard with a fence around it. Everyone was issued a sleeping bag at night and told to find a spot outside. The bigger and tougher crowd laid claim to the straggly grass and soft patches of dirt, leaving the hard concrete patio to the newbies and the junkies and the crazy old lady who made bird noises all night.
I’d woken up one morning to the feel of a cold arm next to mine, belonging to a young guy who’d OD’d in his sleep. It was the same day Tami showed up, on one of her regular sweeps looking for kids who had slipped through the cracks of the magical world. When a pretty African American woman with kind brown eyes and a voice that seemed much too big for her small frame offered me a place to stay, she hadn’t had to do much talking. Only a couple of minutes after meeting her, I was dragging my backpack across the dirt to her beat-up Chevy.
Luckily, Tami had been legit, taking me to join a motley crew of other strays who jokingly called themselves the Misfit Mafia. The name made me do a double take the first time I heard it, but after a while it seemed oddly fitting. I’d run from one mafia to another, but with a definite difference: the new one tried to keep people alive instead of the reverse.
I eventually left the group to return to Tony, in order to try to take him down, and by the time I finally had all my plans in place, three years had passed. And then there was the blowup and the missing don and the bounty on my head, not to be confused with the shiny new one the Circle had recently laid. With one thing and another, it had been more than three years before I returned to the abandoned office building we’d called home. And all I found was echoing space, dirty windows and dust-covered floors.
I don’t know why it was such a surprise. The magical underground changes fast, with three years being more like three decades. I’d stayed in Chicago a few days anyway, feeling restless and strangely anchorless. I hadn’t dared to contact Tami after returning to Tony’s, for fear he’d find out and take revenge on her for helping me. But subconsciously I’d always assumed that I would return one day and that nothing would have changed. And now that it had, I wasn’t sure what to do about it.
Growing up in a place where any sign of weakness was quickly exploited, I’d learned how to bury inconvenient emotions, not how to release them. When even the youngest vamp was better than a lie detector at sensing physiological changes—a slightly elevated heart rate, the tiniest catch in breath, the too rapid blink of an eye—you learned self-control or you didn’t last long. I discovered in Chicago that a lifetime of practice is hard to reverse, even when you don’t need that skill anymore.
I’d roamed aimlessly around a few old haunts, including the bakery where she’d worked, but nothing had looked the same and I didn’t recognize any of the people. After a few days, I realized that Chicago hadn’t been home; Tami had, and she was gone. So I left some flowers in a corner of the old building, even knowing I was just feeding the rats, and moved on.
