Loki's Gambit, page 217
part #1 of I Bring the Fire Series
She notices she’s had a call routed to voicemail, and clicks. It was her mom. Maybe it is the monumental nature of what she’s about to do, but Penny finds herself listening to the message.
Come home, Penelope. You’re going to go to Hell just like your sister if you don’t. Disconnecting, Penny sighs. No, she’s going to a different hell than Chantilly.
“IDs!” a man bellows.
The girls in front of her giggle, and Penny ducks her head and starts rummaging in her clutch. Stupid, skimpy dress with no pockets. Someone bumps into her, and Penny pitches forward. Flailing at the air, she has sudden certainty that she’s going to belly flop. She’s had the same certainty when she’s been thrown from a horse, but it’s not sawdust beneath her or mud, it’s pavement, and her body is all wrong and ...
Large, cool hands catch her, and she finds herself staring at a pair of men’s boots. Regaining her feet, she rights herself, looks up, and finds herself staring at a man she is sure must be a movie star that she should know, but doesn’t. He has a square jaw, a perfectly straight nose, full lips, longish golden hair that curls around his temples, and blue eyes that she’d swear are glowing in the low light. The Cove is obviously so named to feed off of the popularity of a certain pirate theme park exhibit, because he’s dressed in an open shirt and leather pants that look pirate-y, or medieval, or something. Her brow furrows as her eyes travel from his clothes back to his face. Forget movie star, she’d say he’s a Greek statue come to life.
He smirks. “ID please?”
Penny blinks. “Oh, right.”
She holds up the ID. No wonder the girls were giggly. He’s just too beautiful to be a bouncer, or to even be believed.
He looks down at her ID, and then back to Penny. “You alone?” he asks.
What would a cool, sexy, confident party girl say right now? “Uh …”
His eyes graze her neck. He’s way too close, and she hopes she doesn’t smell too much like horse. That would disqualify her from the cool girl club. Can you be turned away at the door for being uncool? Of course you can, and part of her hopes she is.
His eyebrow lifts, and he gazes deep into her eyes. Has she smudged her mascara? He’s obviously judging her. Oh, wait, she was supposed to answer his question. “Uhhhhh …”
Inclining his head toward the door, the man whose picture is probably beside the dictionary definition of “statuesque” says, “Go ahead in.”
She blinks at him. “No cover?”
He winks. “No.”
Penny feels a shiver race down her spine at the same time she feels her resolve increasing. No way someone like her, with borrowed clothes and falling over in her heels, gets in without paying—something nefarious is definitely afoot. Trying not to trip again, she heads beneath the blinking neon light into the darkness and the thrum of music beyond.
A few seconds later she enters the club proper. The music is loud, there’s a packed dance floor with booths along three sides, and a bar directly ahead. It’s dark, and there are disco balls and lights. Above the bar she sees mirrors.
It looks normal … it was probably coincidence that this was the last place her sister was seen. Her eyes fall on the bartender. He looks a lot like the bouncer … pirate-y get-up, too good looking, and if he’s not the bouncer’s brother, he’s his cousin. Her eyes skim the crowd, and she sees a few more people like that who are obviously bouncers standing by a hallway. As she watches, a few girls try to go down it and the bouncers point them toward a restroom sign a few meters away.
Penny takes a deep breath. The hallway with the bouncers, that’s where she has to go, obviously. She bites her lip. Had Chantilly gone down that hallway and never come back? Her nails bite into her palms.
Looking around, she sees a woman in a black sheath dress with puffy pirate sleeves heading purposefully in her direction, a tray above her head. With long legs, a mane of thick curly hair, a flawless face, and preternatural grace, she has to be the sister of the bouncers and bartender. She’s also too gorgeous to be staring as intently as she is at Penny. Licking her lips, Penny turns away, pretending not to have noticed. Stepping out of her damn heels, she slips through the throng in her stocking feet, swaying to the music, moving from one guy to the next, trying to keep her eyes on the guarded hallway, and politely declining offers of drinks.
It’s probably after 1 a.m. when a fight breaks out. It’s so ferocious that the music stops, and the two guys guarding the hallway step in to break it up. A throng forms a tight circle around the combatants and the bouncers, hooting and hollering. Checking over her shoulder to make sure no one is looking, Penny bolts down the hallway, shoes in hand.
The hallway is almost pitch black, and she feels a stab of fear. What is she doing? This is a job for the police. She grits her teeth. The police were here and found nothing. If she gets caught, she’ll just say she was looking for the bathroom … and that will work great if the proprietor of The Cove is innocent like the police say.
The music in the main area comes on again. Penny feels her way along the wall. Her fingers trip on a doorknob. Pausing, Penny peers over her shoulder and sees the backs of the guards. She could probably be as loud as an elephant and they wouldn’t hear her. The music is nearly deafening and she knows her ears are going to feel like they’re stuffed with cotton later. She tests the handle, and it gives. With one more backward glance, she slips through the surprisingly heavy door.
The first thing she notices is that her feet are on thick, plush carpeting. The next thing she notices is the comparative quiet—the door must be soundproof. This hallway is nearly as dark as the last. There is only a faint red glow emanating from an open doorway on her left. She can just make out another door across the hall.
From the red room she hears laughter, the clink of glasses, and sighs. The air is heavy with incense, but she can’t smell marijuana, or the burnt sugary smell of heroin—she’s never tried it, but Chantilly had—Penny’s never forgotten the smell. She creeps up to the doorway and peers in. There are couples making out on ridiculously opulent chairs and a low divan. She sees wine glasses, but no signs of open drug use. Her shoulders fall. She’d hoped there would be a drug den back here, and that she could just call the cops and there’d be a raid.
Scanning the two dozen or so people in the room, she lets out a breath. Her eyes pause on a girl who has ginger hair and whiter than white skin just like Chantilly and Penny. The girl tilts her neck back, and the guy next to her, who’s probably related to the bouncer outside, leans in and starts giving her what looks like the hickey to end all hickies. The girl smiles, and pushes his hair back behind an ear with her fingers. Penny’s mouth gapes. Does he have pointed ears? She backs up and wipes her eyes. Must be the smoke from the incense. She sighs. There’s no sign of Chantilly there. She has to keep searching. Turning to the other door, she tries the doorknob, but it’s locked. Biting her lower lip, she unsnaps her clutch and finds her ID.
She hesitates for a moment.
What is she trying to find?
Anything. She’s trying to find anything that will help her find her sister.
Slipping the card between the door and the frame, she feels it catch and the lock give. Moments later, she steps into the darkness beyond and immediately falls—but not far. Her hands land on something soft. For a moment she is disorientated, but then she realizes she’s on a staircase covered with the same plush carpeting as the hallway. Her eyes adjusting, Penny sees a faint light above, and crawls to the top on her hands and knees. On the landing is an open door. She peeks in and her breath catches. It’s an office … but it looks like an office from, well, she doesn’t know, a palace maybe? The dark wooden desk is heavy and enormous, with inlays of gold. The wooden chairs have velvety-looking backs and seats and look like thrones. All the rest of the furniture is similarly antique looking and the whole place is dimly lit by an enormous crystal chandelier. Only three things look remotely modern: the window to the club which Penny guesses is the “mirror” above the bar; a softly humming juice machine like the kind that you see in Mexican restaurants mixing horchata—only this one is filled with some sort of red punch; and a computer on the desk.
Penny heads for the computer and sits down at the chair. She’s greeted by an enormous Windows XP icon, and of course she doesn’t know the password. What is she doing?
She blinks. What are they doing? They’ve obviously got money … but they’ve got Windows XP like her granny?
She quickly opens the top right drawer on the desk and sees exactly what she’d expect from her gran, a tiny scrap of paper with a password on it. Also, some keys—one looks like it is for a building, the other looks like it is maybe for a car. She’s never stolen anything in her life, has no idea what they’re for, but in for a penny, Penny, in for a pound, right? Glancing up to make sure she’s alone, she slips the keys into her bra since the damn dress doesn’t have pockets. That done, she enters the code from the paper into the computer and … bingo.
… She’s staring at a QuickBooks panel, and the company is one she recognizes. LifeBlood blood bank; it’s not far from here. Her brow furrows. The owners of The Cove have diversified into blood banks? She doesn’t have a business degree, or any degree, but that doesn’t sound very synergistic.
Hearing a creak, she ducks under the desk. Heart beating loud in her ears, Penny is about to chide herself for being paranoid, when from beneath the desk she sees a portion of the wall open. Brown boots, and the cuffs of men’s pirate-y trousers come into view. She hears a man saying, “So, Count, you thought you’d just drop in and we’d crawl on our bellies to surrender to Odin?”
Odin? The name of some gang leader maybe?
The shoes pause, and their wearer turns. Penny doesn’t breathe or even dare blink.
From the other room, another man says tiredly, “I’d rather hoped I’d find you’d stumbled through the Veil accidentally. The All Father is forgiving, Prince.”
“So forgiving of him to outlaw us obtaining the nourishment we need!” snaps the first speaker, Prince, Penny guesses.
The shoes start to move in the direction of the fruit-punch horchata machine. Penny hears a glass clink and the sound of it being filled.
The prince taunts, “Look at you, the mighty Count Darerick, so tired you can barely raise your head …”
“I seem to have spent a bit too much time in the sun,” the person she supposes is Darerick responds.
There is a dark chuckle, and the shoes retreat to the other room, but their owner doesn’t bother to close the wall panel behind him.
“Smell that? You want it, I know you do, mighty Count.” The prince’s whisper echoes into the office.
Penny hears laughter, some words in another language, and her heart that had been beating so loudly seems to stop. How many people are in there? Her fingernails dig into the carpet, and she tries to keep calm. “Fear is fine,” her dad used to say. “Panic isn’t.” Penny grits her teeth. It was always in the back of her mind that her sister had been captured by a serial killer, but serial killers are loners, and this is a gang so that’s hope … isn’t it?
“You will not bond me …” Darerick’s voice sounds strained.
“Oh, no, this is the blood of no fewer than thirty five donors. You won’t bond,” Prince hisses.
Penny’s mouth drops open. Wait. What? Blood? Bond?
“I … will … not … drink,” Darerick responds, sounding like he is in pain.
“Of course you will,” says Prince. His laughter is echoed by the other voices in the room, and then Prince barks something in another language. Penny hears scuffling, a sound like chair legs screeching across the floor, thuds, and cries of pain. Her nails dig even deeper into the carpeting. And then footsteps approach the desk. She sees six pairs of men’s shoes and one pair of velvety high heels. Conversation in another language buzzes around the room, and Penny hears the words, “Split Oak.” She wonders if they mean the park not too far away.
A pair of shoes walk around the desk so that someone’s toes are right next to Penny’s tummy. Every hair on the back of her neck rises.
“Speak in English,” Prince commands, and the buzz of conversation dies. “You need to practice.”
“Yes, Prince Aurel,” someone answers and Penny blinks. Like a real prince?
“I don’t want to kill him,” Prince Aurel says. “You saw him, so high and mighty. I want to bring him down.”
The woman says, “Why make it difficult, Prince?”
“Silence!”
The woman protests, “I—”
The prince cuts her off. “Do you smell that?”
The room goes quiet except for some tentative sniffs that would have been almost funny, if Penny wasn’t scared out of her mind.
“It smells familiar,” someone says.
“Yeah … I can’t place it, though …”
“Like that junkie who got over bled a few months back.”
Putting a hand to her mouth, Penny stifles a gasp. Junkie?
“You got rid of the body though, didn’t you?”
“Of course I did! Fed it to the gators just like the other ones.”
Penny swallows, and her hands start to shake.
“Doesn’t smell like a corpse, smells fresh. Mmmmmm …”
Prince slides the chair by the desk away, and the next thing Penny knows, he is sitting on his heels. His face is in shadow but his eyes glow slightly.
“Well, hello, what have we here?” Prince asks, reaching toward her jaw.
Penny bites his hand as hard as she can. He screams and jerks away, and Penny takes the opportunity to dart out from under the desk.
“Get her!” the prince screams.
“Yes, sire!” someone shouts, but Penny can’t see the speaker. She’s too busy swinging the business end of one of her borrowed heels at another guy. Someone grabs her from behind. She aims a heel at his shin, misses, and gets a chuckle. “Feisty.”
“Stop kicking, girl, we don’t want to hurt you,” someone says.
“Much,” says Feisty.
Penny’s heel connects with Fiesty’s shin, and he says, “That’s enough!” She is slammed hard on the desk, and her arms are wrenched behind her back. Someone else presses her head to the side, and she hisses in pain.
“She bit me!” the prince says.
“And she’s heard too much,” says the woman, coming into Penny’s line of vision. She looks to be about Penny’s own twenty-four, but there is a hardness to her face that seems like it belongs on an older person. She has long, thick, dark hair, and too-perfect features. She’s got olive skin, and thick dark hair pulled back from her face, exposing pointy ears … she’s so gorgeous it hurts, and Penny has to look away. They’ve all got those too-perfect features … and where their ears aren’t hidden, they’re all pointy. Before she can think about it, she’s shocked by something warm and slimy on her neck. Shuddering in disgust, she hears someone smack their lips.
“She tastes like that junkie girl we drained,” Lip Smacker says, and Penny struggles to kick him.
“Her name is Chantilly.”
The words don’t come from her. Penny’s mouth drops open and her eyes go to the speaker. He’s got light brown hair, and his eyes glow faintly as he stares at Penny. She feels like he’s looking through her. His shoulders slump. “I … I mean … her name was Chantilly.”
Penny’s heart sinks to her stomach. Her body goes cold, and she stops her struggling, the talk of junkie and alligators connecting in her mind. “She’s dead?” Penny whispers. Her voice rises to a scream. “You have to tell me, please!”
The man’s eyes focus on hers, and for a moment it is as though they are the only two people in the room. She sees his mouth open, and words start to form on his lips.
Lip Smacker snorts. “Rayne, you naiva, you bonded with it?”
The one who must be Rayne steps back, but his eyes stay riveted on Penny.
“I’m …” Rayne murmurs.
“Enough of this!” says Aurel, walking between Rayne and Penny.
“We could share her,” says the woman, approaching the desk, and Penny hears a sort of strangled sound from Rayne.
Aurel’s fingers twitch into fists; she can see blood where she bit him. He’s standing so close that Penny can’t see his face. She spits in his direction and a hand gets slapped over her mouth.
The prince leans down. He’s blonde and blue-eyed, square jawed, and straight out of Disney except for the pointed ears. He smiles and Penny’s eyes go wide and she tries to draw back. He has fangs.
The prince tips his head and licks his lips. “No, I have a better idea.”
Chapter Two
Dare is dreaming of Loki.
“Fire takes care of everything,” the fool says, standing among the corpses of Dare’s kinsmen. Dare’s skin is too hot … from sunburn, but in his dream it’s because he’s on fire. Dare wants to wake up, but he can’t. Is this what The Curse really is, not endless sleep, but an endless dream? What a daymare.
He’s surrounded by magic he can’t reach or use in the dream. That’s another carry over from the waking world. The building is a magical object, like the magic stone in his confiscated satchel. It is in the floors, and in the walls. He suspects it is in the electrical wiring. The prince must be using it to power some sort of illusion—probably something to hide the full-extent of his activities from the magical eyes of Odin’s spies.
That the prince hasn’t bothered to throw Dare in a cell without magical wiring says that he doesn’t believe Dare can utilize it, and Dare’s done a good job disguising his abilities. That would be more comforting if he wasn’t too weak to reach the magic, but he’s too exhausted to even reach consciousness.
… And then in the dream he smells a human.
Dare wakes, and instantly regrets it. His skin is on fire—they must have left him in the sun for a while and then flipped him over—he hurts everywhere. He hears a creak, a slam, a scuffle, and knows a human woman is very close. He couldn’t move if he wanted to, but his mouth waters obscenely, his fangs descend, his body shudders, and he can’t restrain a hiss of pain.
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