AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“You need to get some rest.” Billy tried to take my hand, but he’d expended too much energy back at the apartment and didn’t have the strength. His fingers passed right through me.
“And you need to feed,” I said, finishing the thought. I wasn’t looking forward to the energy drain, but I was only going to sleep anyway.
“I’ll make do,” he said, after a minute.
I looked up, confused. I couldn’t remember the last time Billy had refused to take energy. It was the main tie binding us together, his payment for helping out with my various problems. “What?”
“No offense, Cass, but you look like hell.”
“Thanks.”
“I don’t need much gas to spy on the manic mage, anyway.” He tipped his hat back and gave me a cocky grin. “And if we’re lucky, maybe some of his old buddies in the Corps will find him and take care of one problem for us.”
I fell asleep wondering why that thought didn’t make me feel any better.
Rafe met me in the kitchens before dawn the next morning. With Pritkin no longer in the picture, I’d had to look elsewhere for help, and there weren’t a lot of choices. I’d left a message on the private number Rafe had given me, asking to see him. I just hoped he wasn’t going to freak out too badly when I told him what I wanted.
Shortly after we snagged stools at an unused prep table, one of the staff wandered over and deposited a white clay coffee cup in front of me. It smelled like rich dark roast and freshly steamed milk, and had a dot in the middle of the foam from the espresso added right at the end. Pritkin would have loved it. I pushed it away, feeling queasy.
“Cucciolina, you are a mess,” Rafe told his newest admirer, as fat little hands gleefully smeared berry mush all over his green silk shirt.
Some of the staff were making pies for Midsummer’s Eve, which explained why the baby had a ring of purple all around her mouth and jam stuck in her wispy blond hair. Miranda, who had been trying to babysit and supervise at the same time, had handed her over almost as soon as I walked in the door. The baby had immediately made a peevish little huffing sound, and when I just stood there, holding her awkwardly, she broke into an angry shriek.
Rafe rescued me, taking her despite his elegant
attire and jiggling her against his chest. She hammed it up for a few seconds, wailing like I’d been sticking her with pins, before finally subsiding into anxious snuffles and pressing her face to his shirt. Considering how fast she recovered, it was pretty clear she’d just wanted to flirt with the cute guy.
A white china plate joined my coffee cup. On it was a largish, nicely browned muffin. I looked at the muffin and, as far as I could tell, it didn’t look back. Since it had passed the first test, I broke it open and sniffed it. Peanut butter and anchovy. A little chef was casually loitering nearby, waiting for a verdict. He was going to be waiting for a while.
“She reminds me of you at that age,” Rafe said, vainly swiping the baby’s lips with a napkin. It only made bad matters worse: now she had purple cheeks, too. “You could never eat anything without getting it everywhere.”
Jesse stifled a smile at the other end of the long table, where he and a bunch of the kids were playing Monopoly. They should have been in bed—it was barely four a.m.—but nobody at Dante’s kept a normal schedule. Having a staff partially composed of people who caught fire in sunlight probably had something to do with that.
Most of the older kids were intent on the game, but one of the younger ones was sitting on the floor, playing with an Elvis Pez dispenser someone had given her. She seemed totally intent on it, but the door behind her nonetheless stayed stubbornly open. It seemed that her parents had once hidden their embarrassing child in a small room with no windows, until she discovered that locks just loved to open for her and escaped. Now it had become a bit of a habit. It made getting around the casino something of a challenge, though: elevator doors simply refused to close as long as she was inside.
Watching her, I finally figured out what had been bugging me. These kids were just too young. The average age was eight, with several in the four-to-five-year-old range. Which made no sense.
At fourteen, I’d been one of the youngest in Tami’s brood. Most had been mid-to late teens, old enough to have figured out what their lives were going to be like in one of those special schools and to have engineered an escape. Sure, there were occasionally younger kids who came through, but they usually arrived with an older sibling or friend. I’d never seen Tami with so many really small children. How had they gotten away? How had they survived on the streets until she found them? I’d barely managed it, and I’d had more years and more money than most of them.
“I didn’t come to court until I was four,” I reminded Rafe absently. A tiny car from the Monopoly game had decided to trundle down the table to us and bumped into my hand. I turned it around and sent it back, where it collided with a briskly hopping shoe. It looked like someone had enchanted the game board for the kids.
“To live, no, but your father brought you as a bambina,” he replied, giving up on cleaning the sticky child. He held her against his chest with one arm, the palm of his hand curled protectively around her skull.
“What?”
“He loved to show you off. Of course, you were better behaved than some,” he said with a sigh, as the baby began chewing on his tie.
“I never knew that.” I knew so little about my parents that the tiny piece of trivia felt like a revelation. In my mind, “mother” meant a cool hand, soft hair, and a sweet smell. It was my strongest memory of her. Unless I thought very hard, it was my only memory of her. And I recalled even less about my father.
“Piccolina mia, please to stop,” Rafe said in exasperation, pulling his tie away and substituting a pacifier before his squirming armful could protest. Luckily, the small tussle seemed to have worn her out, and she soon curled into his chest and went to sleep. “The visits ended when you were about two,” he added.
“Do you know why?”
Rafe started to shrug, then realized it might wake up his new girlfriend. “My guess would be that you began showing signs of your gift. Your father must have realized that Tony would take you if he knew.”
Which he had, only a couple of years later. “How did he find out?” I’d never known how Tony discovered that I might be worth acquiring. The idea that the tip-off could have been something I did was nauseating.
“Tony never trusted anyone, not even his longtime servants,” Rafe reassured me. “There were people watching your father, who doubtless also had people watching them. The only ones Antonio did not monitor were those of us with blood bonds to him, which he knew we were not strong enough to break.” The last was said with uncharacteristic bitterness.
