Devouring Flame, page 2
Hashim sighed and walked over to join him. If he didn’t, Rion would remain alone. Again. Everybody else, even the larger carnies like the golems and the centaurs, cut a wide berth around Rion. Minotaurs had a worse reputation than demons.
He sat down across from Rion. “I’m playing hooky.”
Rion blinked his soft brown eyes. He had eyelashes the length of Hashim’s fingers. “Is that allowed?”
“No.” Hashim grinned. “But I don’t care. It’s my last chance to raise a little hell before I go home tomorrow.”
Rion sighed. “I wish I could go home.”
Hashim reached over and patted Rion’s enormous shoulder. “I know. If it makes you feel any better, I almost wish I were staying here.” Almost. “My home isn’t nearly as nice as yours. Chances are, the sheikh will find another way to make money off me before too long.”
Rion frowned, a little smoke curling out of his nostrils. “That’s not right. You shouldn’t have to do what you don’t want.”
“Same goes for you, my friend.”
“But why play hooky so early? I bet Ringmaster finds some really nasty thing for you to do instead.”
“He can’t. Not unless he wants to take me out of the shows for the rest of the day.”
“That would be tough. You’re the reason people pay for the sideshow. Some of them are really mad that you’re not inside too.” Rion dug an orange out of his My Little Pony lunch box. “I’ve heard customers in the labyrinth talking about it before.”
“Well, not this morning, they won’t. I let my torches gutter in the middle of the dance.”
“What?” Rion stopped peeling his orange and stared. “You never let your fires go out. You told me you had to take every chance you got to flame because of the binding spells. Won’t you get sick?”
“I’ll make it up with the rest of the shows.” Even if Ringmaster made good on his threat—which he couldn’t if he expected Hashim to lure the tip into the tent for the rest of the day—once the cuffs were off tomorrow, he’d recover quickly enough. The only question was whether he’d be able to resist setting fire to Ringmaster’s tent on his way out.
“But why?”
Hashim sighed, the hurt and humiliation and, yes, guilt, rolling over him again. “There was someone I knew in the audience.”
“So? There’s bound to be. The same people show up here all the time for some reason. Wait.” Rion sat up, his ears flicking forward as they always did when he was excited about something. “You mean the guy?”
Hashim almost regretted telling Rion about Smith, but he’d had to talk to someone. “Yes. Him. Smith.”
Rion pushed up from the table, making its legs bow and groan. “Where? I want to see him.”
“You can’t. He left.” And there came the hurt again, the loss. I can’t blame him, though, can I?
Rion blinked again. “He left? Without talking to you?”
“Rion, I did something bad to him. Something no demon should ever do to another. It’s like our sacred pact.”
“But you didn’t mean to.” Blink blink blink. “Did you?”
“No. It was an accident.” But was it? Hashim had agreed to use that blasted fire gem to bind the prince to him when Yashar and the Faerie Queen conspired to place him in the candidate pool. He didn’t want to do it—had no wish to ensnare the prince just to fulfill Yashar’s hunger for power and the Queen’s desire to rid herself of her son. He understood what the prince’s feelings would be all too well. Hashim had been stripped of his own free will the moment Yashar conjured him into being.
But the fire gem spell required will to activate. Had Hashim, somewhere during that passion and flame-filled night, wished—even to himself—that he and Smith could stay together?
He didn’t remember it precisely, but considering how overwhelming the connection was, it was entirely likely.
“Did you tell him it was an accident?”
Hashim lifted an eyebrow at Rion’s outraged tone. “I didn’t really have a chance. He’s made a habit of walking away from me.”
Rion returned to peeling his orange in one long spiral. “But if he knows you didn’t mean it, he won’t be so mad anymore. Maybe he can fix the bad thing that happened. You said he was smart.”
“Yes. He is.” Too smart to get entangled with me. “It’s probably for the best this way. It’s not like I’m free to be with him. Once I’m back home, I won’t be allowed to see anybody at all. Not of my choice anyway.” Yashar preferred to keep Hashim as a secret weapon.
“I still think you should talk to him.” Rion offered Hashim an orange section. “It would make you feel better to tell him, even if he stays mad.”
Hashim accepted the orange, its sweet-tart juice bright against his tongue after the heat of the single flame he’d managed to devour. “Perhaps. But it hardly matters what I want. I’ll never see Smith again.”
Chapter Three
SMITH was still shaking when he gated into the Athens Interstices and made his way to the Parthenon Business Park where Enchanted Occasions’ headquarters was located. As soon as he entered the conference room, he headed straight to the buffet spread out on the credenza.
Chef ensured that there was plenty of slightly singed breakfast meat—bacon, sausage, ham—to meet Smith’s need to consume fire-touched flesh. He shoved a piece of blackened bacon into his mouth before the tremors in his hands turned into full-body shudders.
It’s low energy. That’s why I’ve got the shakes. Yeah, right.
Seeing Hashim unexpectedly was shocking enough. But why did his stomach roil at the idea of Hashim working in a dive like the Twilight Carnival? The guy had lied to Smith, entrapped him, abandoned him without a thought. Never a day went by that Smith didn’t wake up wondering if this was the day the fire gem spell would be invoked, trapping him somewhere he couldn’t escape, taking away his pride, his dignity, his very will to live.
Too bad demons were damn near indestructible, even defective ones like Smith. Of course, who knew what would be possible to do with that fucking fire gem. Maybe it could kill him after all.
Better dead than enslaved.
“Smith?” Brooke, the half undine who’d been promoted to lead event coordinator when their last one, Andy Skuldsson, left to marry the new Faerie Prince, sidled up next to him at the buffet. She topped a bagel with a shitload of lox. “Cutting it a little close, aren’t you?”
He shrugged. “Mikos here yet?”
“No. He’s on his way, though. He texted from the New Orleans Interstices.”
“New Orleans? What’s he doing there?”
She grinned, the hoop in her lower lip flashing in the overhead fluorescent witchlights. “He’s been negotiating a new booking for us. A major one.”
Smith munched another piece of bacon, his nerves already steadying. A big booking would be good. Since the competition for the Faerie Prince’s hand, they’d had a weird combination of flurries of supernatural business and complete dead months with nothing but Earthside events. Although the new prince considered the event a resounding success, that didn’t always offset the side-eye they got from prospective clients when they found out that instead of wedding one of the official contestants, the prince had married an EO employee instead.
He piled bacon and sausage onto his plate, then poured himself a cup of coffee. “Good. We could use another high-profile event.”
“I know. If I have to lurk behind the scenes in one more Earthside bar mitzvah….” To ward off that evil, she held up her left hand in the sign of Neptune’s trident, displaying a new piercing in the webbing between her thumb and forefinger. Unlike Smith’s horn stubs, Brooke’s watermarks—the traits that marked her as half undine—weren’t easy to hide, so she could never front any of their Earthside gigs.
Andy, Mikos, and Forrest were the only EO employees who looked completely human, but Andy was gone and Forrest, a half dryad more comfortable talking to trees than people, flat-out refused to handle anything but the flowers. So Mikos had had to coordinate far more Earthside events than he liked. No wonder he’d gone all the way to New Orleans at this hellish hour. Smith would have done the same if he’d been forced to be the public face of EO.
He was much better off lurking in the background with his tech gear. Look what happened when he’d last come in contact with a client. “Come” being the operative word, and the “contact” in question—nope nope nope. Not thinking about that now.
“Do you know anything about the gig?” Like Vegas, New Orleans was an Interstitial hub, and several supernatural races kept offices there.
“Not exactly. Mikos is keeping it close to his chest. But I’ve heard—”
“Good morning, people.” Mikos strode to the front of the room, black curls bouncing and his bronze skin glowing with health as if he’d just stepped off a sunny Mediterranean beach. He smiled at them, his even, white teeth nearly blinding. Before he’d founded Enchanted Occasions, Mikos, a half siren, had earned money as an artist’s model for everyone from Michelangelo to Brancusi. “Please have a seat.”
As usual, Smith settled in behind his computer rig at the desk in the corner while Brooke and Forrest took chairs around the conference table. Tessmacher, the bwci who was Chef’s long-suffering assistant, and Hazel, the brownie in charge of housekeeping, perched on high stools so they could see over the table.
Brooke swiveled her chair back and forth, smirking at Mikos from behind her teacup. “I take it by your grin that the negotiations were a success.”
“You tell me.” He turned to the whiteboard behind him and uncapped a marker. The number he wrote had an astonishing number of zeroes—and the first number was not a one.
Brooke set down her cup with a clatter. “Neptune’s balls. We’ve got a budget that big?”
“That, my dear, is our fee.” He wrote another number down, with another zero and the first number upticked by two. “This is our budget.”
“Fuck,” Smith muttered. “Who’s the client? King Midas?”
“Midas would never hire us.”
Smith swallowed a bite of sausage. “Why? Does he have a bias against aitchers?”
“No, he has a bias against Greeks.” Mikos spread his hands in a what-can-you-do gesture. “He blames my entire country and everyone in it for his daughter’s unfortunate condition.”
“That wasn’t your fault. You weren’t even born then,” Brooke said. “Wait. Were you?”
“It hardly matters. Biases are not based on reality or logic. Which—” He squeezed the back of his neck. “—I’d like you all to keep in mind when I tell you that we’ve been hired to stage the annual conference for the North American sector vampires.”
“What?” Brooke shrieked.
Forrest sat still, stoic as ever, while Hazel and Tessmacher seemed to shrink in body as their eyes grew huge.
Smith let his head drop against his chair back. “Vampires, Mikos? Seriously? Vampires were parasites when they were alive and they’re parasites now that they’re undead. It’s like an entire conference of entitled sentient ticks.”
Mikos shot him an admonitory glare. “That’s what I mean about biases, Smith. You dislike them because they’ve got a higher status in the supernatural community than aitchers.”
“Well, don’t you? The official party line—that they’re fully one thing now, even if they used to be human, is bullshit. They weren’t birthed by organic or magical means. They were made from humans. Constructs, like golems, yet the realms all granted them equal status with Pures.”
“Smith has a point,” Brooke said. “Vampires don’t even have their own realm. They’re scattered all over Earthside.”
“And that’s unfortunate,” Smith muttered. “Humans have developed an unhealthy obsession with vampires in art, literature, and film. And the damned bloodsuckers buy into every single myth. They’ve started to believe their own hype.”
Mikos tapped the whiteboard. “Let’s keep this in mind, shall we? Despite the relative success of the Faerie Prince’s coronation, we’re still in recovery mode from the Olesson-Pakulski wedding. This cash infusion will stabilize the company for several years to come, not to mention supply very nice bonuses for everyone if we pull it off.”
“Maybe someone should have mentioned the Olesson-Pakulski wedding to them before they signed on with us,” Forrest mumbled.
Mikos lifted the eyebrows that had been immortalized in Michelangelo’s David. “In the interest of full disclosure, I did. However, it wasn’t necessary. They already knew about it. In fact, it was the deciding factor in their choice.”
“The vampires chose us because of the Olesson-Pakulski wedding?” Smith asked. “But that was a—”
“Disaster!” Brooke said. “Is this like the Faerie Queen? They picked us because they want us to fail?”
“No,” Mikos said dryly. “They’re vampires. They think the Olesson-Pakulski… er… incident proves that we’re edgy. And not squeamish.”
Brooke gazed at the numbers on the whiteboard and straightened in her chair. “All right. Fine. The contract is signed. We’ve got the budget. And a retainer, I presume?” When Mikos nodded, she pushed away her tea and took her tablet out of her messenger bag. “What are the details?”
“We’ll be expected to provide the conference facilities for their annual sensitivity training, including the break-out sessions, which will take the entire first day of the event. The morning of the second day is their general meeting. Afterward, we’ll facilitate the election of their new officers.”
Smith looked up from his plate. “Do we have to supply the… er… refreshments?”
Mikos gave a wintry smile. “If you mean blood hosts, no. As a matter of fact, it’s likely that all of the attendees will be fasting during those first two days.”
“Fasting? Vampires? Since when do they practice self-denial?”
“It’s… ah… more in the nature of anticipation. Because we’ll also be staging the festivities for their Centennial Feast.”
Smith scowled over the top of his monitor. “That sounds a little ominous. What exactly are they feasting on?”
“You may not be aware, since most of you are relatively young, that every hundred years, the spells in certain Interstices enable vampires to eat normally—for humans, anyway—for the space of twenty-four hours. Most of that budget—” He pointed at the whiteboard. “—is for food.”
Smith’s jaw sagged. “Holy shit. How much do they eat?”
“When they’re only able to eat once every hundred years? Everything they possibly can.” He opened his briefcase and pulled out a thick stack of paper, stapled in one corner.
“Is that the contract?” Brooke asked, reaching for it. “The font is so tiny. Is it all fine print?”
“That’s not the contract. Trust me, you don’t want to see that. No, that’s the menu request.”
“For one day?”
“I’m afraid so. I’ve forwarded it to all of you for review.” Mikos rummaged in his briefcase for something else. “Obviously we won’t agree to all of it. We need to whittle down the list to something manageable. Tessmacher—” He glanced at the empty stool where the bwci had been sitting. “Where’s Tessmacher?”
Smith shrugged. “I didn’t see him go, but you know what bwci are like. You don’t see them unless they want you to.”
Mikos sighed. “I’ll catch him up later. From the vampires who are as old as the dirt they nest in, up through the youngsters who were turned as late as 2007 when the moratorium went into effect, they all have a long list of things they want for the feast. We’ll have to strike a compromise by—”
A deafening bellow shook the walls. Smith reached out a practiced hand and steadied his monitor before it could tip over. He waited for precisely ten seconds for the inevitable aftershock bellow and caught his stress ball as it rolled off the desk. “I’d say that was a solid 4.7 on the Chef tantrum scale. Tessmacher must have leaked a few hints about the size of the vampires’ menu.”
A crash rattled the floor, causing Smith’s teeth to clack shut. Brooke peered out the window. “Is that the stove?”
Mikos sighed and made a note on his tablet. “Smith?”
“On it.” Smith called up the headquarters specs and cut off the gas lines to the kitchen, then placed an order for a new stove with their appliance vendor. He sent a text message to the brownie team about the busted wall. “We’re set. New stove will arrive in three days.”
“That long?” Mikos’s brown skin turned a shade or two lighter. “Chef won’t like that.”
“Then he should stop launching his appliances through the wall whenever something annoys him.”
Mikos ignored the continued bellows from down the hall. “In addition, the feast day will include a costume ball from ten until midnight. The vampires apparently like to cosplay—as themselves.”
Smith snorted a laugh. “What?”
“They all get dressed up as different iterations of how the humans portray them. At the last ball, there were relatively few options. This year however—”
“There’s going to be a run on glitter.” Brooke grinned, resting her hands on the table, and at Hazel’s inquisitive chirp, said, “Sparkly teenage vampires. It’s a thing.”
“We’re also contracted to provide costume assistance,” Mikos continued. “Hazel, you and your staff should hold yourselves ready for last-minute sewing projects.”
Brooke drummed her silver-tipped nails on the table. “The venue for this shindig will be a challenge, Mikos. We need someplace with enough Interstitial real estate for us to transform into the entertainment sections, the conference facilities, the kitchen, the banquet hall—”
“The venue is nonnegotiable. The Vegas Interstices.”
Smith’s belly clenched, and he nearly choked on a mouthful of bacon. When he stopped coughing, he croaked, “Vegas? Surely we can talk them into someplace else. Portland—”
“Sorry.” Mikos lifted one shoulder. “There are only three sites where the Centennial Feast spell is active, and Vegas is the only one available to us. The Perth and Vladivostok Interstices are already booked.”
