Security for Hire, page 15
Val sniffed, and her stomach snarled in anticipation. Through the smell of damp leaves and river water, the fragrances of cinnamon, butter, and fresh bread drifted from a tiny bakery on the riverfront. A queue of humans waited outside, but it moved quickly, and Val quickened her step to join them. It was difficult to focus on scanning the trees and the river with those intoxicating scents in her nostrils.
“I’m buying.” Anne opened her black velvet handbag and extracted a pearl-encrusted leather purse. “Pick anything you like. The croissants are particularly good.”
Val had been wondering how to pronounce that word on the menu. “I’ve never had one.”
“We’ll get a selection, then,” Anne decided. “Coffee?”
“Black and strong,” Val told her.
Anne grinned. “Of course.”
Ten minutes later, they both carried promisingly warm and greasy paper bags. Anne led the way to a bench by the river in the shade of a huge old oak. Val quickly checked the branches, but they were empty except for colored leaves, robins, and a fat squirrel that chittered angrily at them for invading his kingdom.
She sat sideways on the bench, watching the park and the river, and extracted a glorious buttery bready thing from the paper bag. “Oh, wow.”
“Wait ‘til you taste it.” Anne hooked her veil away from her face, safe in the tree’s shade.
Val shoved half the croissant into her mouth and bit down. Butter, chocolate, and hazelnuts flooded her senses, and she sat motionless for a few moments, unable to chew.
Anne laughed. “Amazing, right?”
Val processed the mouthful slowly, savoring it. “Incredible.”
“They don’t even make them this good in France, and that’s where they were invented.” Anne sipped her coffee and sighed.
“You’ve been to France?” Val asked.
Anne smiled. “I’ve been pretty much everywhere.”
“Wow.” Val washed down the first croissant with coffee as hot, bitter, and strong as she’d asked for. “It must be incredible to see so much of the world at your age.”
“At my age, huh?” The corner of Anne’s mouth quirked up. “Yeah, it’s been quite a journey.”
“Are we meeting the next royal family here?” Val asked.
Anne shook her head, brushing crumbs off the front of her dress. “Oh, no. Nothing like that.” She tilted her head to the side. “Would you believe me if I told you I wanted to treat my valiant bodyguard to my favorite spot in the city?”
Val shrugged. “Maybe.” The next croissant was loaded with nuts and was even better than the first.
“Fair enough.” Anne smiled. “What if I told you that I know I’ll be confined to my apartment in the wake of last night’s attack, and I wanted a breath of fresh air and the chance to roam around a little?”
Val chuckled. “That I would buy.”
“Good.” Anne held up her coffee. “Although I’m still pleased to give my bodyguard something to enjoy.”
Val touched her coffee to Anne’s. “I’m not complaining.”
“Neither am I. I’m under attack because I’m doing something valuable and important.” Anne shrugged. “The apartment sometimes gets old, you know? That’s all.”
“I’d never thought about that,” Val admitted. “I’ve been so focused on the job that I didn’t think about what it has to be like to be unable to go anywhere without a bodyguard. Back home, people didn’t like me, but I had the freedom to go wherever I wanted, whenever I wanted.”
“People didn’t like you? Incomprehensible.” Anne smiled.
Val looked away. “I don’t fit in.”
“That must be difficult.” Anne tilted her head. “Maybe in ways I can’t imagine.”
Val paused, thinking again about the surname Anne was reluctant to talk about. “Maybe not.” She touched the platinum blonde curl on her shoulder.
“Your hair is lovely,” Anne observed. “I adore all the different looks.”
“Thank you.” Val grimaced. “I enjoy changing my hair every day, but being bald isn’t a recipe for success in an old-fashioned dwarven community. When I was a kid, I was taller than every adult I knew, and when everyone else got their beards during puberty, I didn’t have a single hair on my head.”
“That’s a tough age to stand out,” Anne sympathized.
Val turned on the bench, watching as a human in a thick trench coat hurried past. Her eyes followed the gray-headed man until he disappeared around a bend in the path before she turned to Anne. “It was tough, to be honest. The most frustrating part is that in every other way, I’m as dwarvish as they come. My dad raised me in the traditions of our culture. I have the tough skin, the strength, and the affinity to metals.” She raised her hands, then let them flop into her lap. “But to many, my appearance makes me less than dwarvish.”
Anne sighed. “I’m sorry. That can’t be easy.”
Val realized she was baring her heart to a client and looked away, cheeks burning. She was surprised by how good it felt. “The worst part is that it was the older dwarves, you know? People say kids are cruel, but they learn it from their parents. The kids picked on me for being tall, but the older dwarves told me that I was not a dwarf. It’s like their minds shut up tight as a vault after a certain age. Don’t you think?”
Anne’s lips twitched. “I’m not sure about that.”
“Hear me out, Anne. You’ll learn this as you get older.” Val sighed and shook her head. “You know what’s the problem with the world? Old people. They quit thinking after a while.”
“Is that so?” Anne inquired.
“You’ll see. Mark my words. Old people are the worst. Even my dad can be closed-minded, and he’s one of the best paras I know.” Val drained the last of her coffee. “Where are we going next?”
“Back to Manhattan,” Anne told her.
“Oh. Another skyscraper?” Val asked, queasy at the thought.
Anne laughed. “Not this time, but I think you’ll enjoy where we’re going.”
Over an hour later, having fought for every mile in the ridiculous traffic, Val and Anne stood in front of the facade of another magnificent human-made building.
“Whoa.” Val gaped at the elegant stone columns on either side of the building’s entrance. They flanked a vaulted doorway with window frames of exquisite wrought iron, outstanding quality for human make. “Now, this is a palace.”
Anne laughed. “Amazingly, Val, you won’t find any palaces in New York City.”
“What is it, then?” Val asked.
“It’s a museum,” Anne told her.
They slowly climbed the steps. Val tore her attention away from the building and focused on the crowds of humans instead, scanning for the tell-tale purple of glamours.
“A museum?” Val kept her voice low.
“The fourth largest art museum on Earth.” Anne smiled. “It’s called the Metropolitan Museum of Art.”
“I was just saying that I’m not into old things,” Val hissed.
Anne chuckled as they strolled through the huge doors into a hall that echoed the passageways of the Eternal Palace with its gleaming marble floors and vaulted ceiling. Humans milled through the space, passing intricate stone statues on pedestals in the center. Massive old paintings, hyper-realistic in brilliant colors, hung on the walls. Val paused to admire one, struck by the intensity of its details, although it featured a lot of naked humans. Sunlight poured through a round skylight and filled the hall with light.
“Before you ask, no, humans did not build this one on their own,” Anne murmured. “Many of these artworks were created by paranormals.”
“Amazing,” Val whispered.
They approached an elegant double staircase that rose from the end of the hall. Anne checked her phone while Val scanned the crowd. She spotted several elves and a pair of orcs, their light glamours easily pierced by paranormal eyes, but they were unarmed and appeared to be absorbed in the artwork.
“This way.” Anne climbed the left-hand staircase.
Val followed her, bewildered by the art and the crowd. It thickened as they moved down the hall. It was overwhelmingly human now, but Val spotted a young vampire girl in a black suit hurrying along the edge of the crowd.
“Stay close,” she growled, moving between Anne and the girl.
“You can expect to see a lot of vamps here today. Bellona Hortensia has a lot of vampire fans, and this is her gallery’s big opening,” Anne told her.
“Couldn’t we have met in a place where you’re less likely to have your throat ripped out?” Val hissed.
A human gave Val a horrified stare and hurried ahead.
“Bellona is famously reclusive. This was the only way I could persuade her to meet me face to face.” Anne sighed. “She’s...unique.”
Val wanted to ask what was unique about this vamp when she spotted two older vampires in the crowd, one walking with a cane, one clutching a program. Her skin crawled with the horrible possibility of an enemy lurking in this crowd. A fight here would be disastrous for Anne, the humans, and the monument to human culture.
The crowd packed tightly through a door, and Val stayed close to Anne, keeping a hand on her shoulder. Despite the thick crowd, no one jostled them. She noticed that the other vampires in the crowd moved with similar ease since most of the humans steered clear of them.
They stepped into the gallery, and for a second, Val forgot about the crowd.
Harsh techno music played at a low volume provided the background for excited conversations. Warm electric light poured onto the paintings arrayed on the walls around the gallery—if you could call them paintings. They made Val think of unicorn vomit. Mismatched colors sprayed haphazardly across huge canvases, accompanied by painfully realistic images that were so out of place that they instantly made Val uncomfortable.
One canvas was a wild swirl of blues and greens, accompanied by a single human eyeball, the veins etched in brutal definition across the whites, crying a diamond tear. In another, splashy droplets in yellow and hot pink framed a full champagne flute that was upside down, every bubble exquisitely detailed.
“Welcome, welcome, everybody! Keep coming in. Better late than never!”
The merry trill came from the center of the gallery.
“That way,” Anne whispered.
Val kept a grip on the vampire’s arm as they moved through the crowd, passing a canvas of blue and yellow polka dots dancing around a headless chicken on pointe. The crowd was thickest in the middle of the room, and they were also silent, allowing the woman at their center to fill the gallery with her voice.
“This is the masterpiece.” The woman’s sharp New York twang combined with a high-pitched voice to make the hairs stand up on the back of Val’s neck. “My magnum opus! My most magnificent work yet!”
The crowd clustered around the gigantic canvas, but despite its wild colors, Val could hardly see it. The woman in front of it was even more colorful and impossible to look away from. She was tall, and her hair made her taller, piled on top of her head in loops of teal, azure, and radioactive yellow, so studded with pins and fake flowers and strings of pearls that it looked like a very colorful garbage heap. The same regrettable color choices had been made on her face. An unnatural rosy glow highlighted her cheeks, and her neatly painted eyebrows were bright orange.
Val could hardly bring herself to look at the woman’s dress, if you could call it a dress. The skirt was an explosion of different fabrics in yellows and blues, cobbled together in scraps that ballooned out as she moved through a trick of either petticoats or magic. Her wasp waist looked painfully tight, and the neckline swooped dangerously over a withered cleavage accentuated by a gigantic sapphire pendant.
The necklace. It was gold, and the links were far too small and close to be of human make.
The gaggle of awed humans pressed closer to the woman, oohing and aahing over the eyeball-searing canvas. Well-dressed waiters drifted among them, holding trays of champagne glasses and tiny pointless snacks. The humans helped themselves. Val was tempted to have a drink. She needed one.
“Come on.” Anne pressed forward. “We need to get to her.”
“Wait, what?” Val hissed. “That is a vampire?”
The crowd reluctantly shifted as Anne and Val pressed forward. Champagne flute in one hand, ridiculous snack in the other, the flamboyant woman posed for a human photographer covered in tattoos.
“Bellona,” Anne murmured.
“In a minute, darling,” the woman twanged. “I’ll get to all my fans, don’t you worry!”
“Bellona,” Anne growled. “It’s me.”
The woman turned, and her face fell. “Ah. I’d hoped you wouldn’t show up.” She shooed the photographer away and downed her champagne in a gulp. “Do we have to do this?”
“I only need ten minutes of your time,” Anne told her. “I’ll keep it short.”
“I don’t suppose you’ll stop badgering me if I tell you that I couldn’t care less about whatever you’re going to say, would you?” Bellona inspected her unbelievably long nails, each bearing a sticker of a pink flamingo.
Anne cracked a smile. “No.”
“Oh, fine.” Bellona sighed. “This way.”
She led them to a secluded corner of the gallery as the crowd pressed around the giant painting. Now that Val’s eyeballs had adjusted to Bellona, the painting was even worse than the others: a hyper-realistic racehorse with the nude legs of a hairy dude against a background of wild pink and yellow splotches.
Val kept an eye on the crowd after swiping a fistful of snacks from a shocked waiter. Bellona procured another flute of champagne and turned to Anne. “Make it quick.”
“What do you know about the human blood conflict between the Noxes and Dragavei?” Anne asked.
“Nothing, and I don’t care, either.” Bellona swigged the champagne. “The paranormal world has never been good to me, and it can burn for all I care.”
Val winced.
“I understand that,” Anne murmured, “but as the only surviving member of the Hortensia family, I need your support on an issue that could cause war in both worlds.”
Bellona shrugged, waving her flute. “It won’t affect me, just like the last one didn’t affect me.”
Val’s hands clenched into fists. “The last war didn’t affect you because of the sacrifices of other paras and humans.”
Anne gestured placatingly. Val cleared her throat and stepped back. Anger and shame smoldered in the pit of her belly.
“I understand why you feel that way about the Third Pendragon War,” Anne told her calmly, “but a vampire conflict would spill over into the human world. The Dragavei and their supporters organize human blood donation drives to deceive humans into giving away their blood for vampire consumption. The Noxes are fighting to stop that. Should the Dragavei win, it’s possible that hunting humans might also be legalized.”
Bellona’s eyes widened between her extravagantly fake lashes. “Hunting humans? What are we in, the Dark Ages? Those were crap.”
“The humans might find out that vampires are very real and very dangerous.” Anne held her gaze. “No glamour can hide our pale skin and the fact that we never go out in sunlight. Humans don’t notice us because they’re not looking for us, but should they become suspicious...”
“It’s her!” Three older ladies in colorful clothes squeezed through the crowd. “There she is!”
Bellona smiled, but unlike her hair and nails, there was nothing false about the expression. The three humans thronged her, staring at her in awe.
“Bellona, it’s wonderful to see you face to face,” one gushed.
Another nodded vigorously, her feather earrings bouncing on her shoulders. “Your artwork is so emotive and vivid!”
“Vivid” was the word. Val averted her eyes from the creepy ballet dancer chicken.
“Your Lost Shoe in a Storm spoke to me in ways I can’t describe when my son had to have heart surgery.” The oldest of the three laid a hand over her heart. “It made me feel seen. Understood.”
“If my artwork can touch a single heart, I’ve done all I came to do in this world,” Bellona told them, her voice warm and deep.
The ladies fawned. One produced a postcard of the polka dot painting and timorously asked, “Your autograph, please?”
“Of course, darling.” Bellona produced a peacock feather quill from the folds of her dress and splashed a huge, extravagant signature across the postcard in gold ink.
The ladies twittered off, admiring the postcard, and Bellona turned to Anne with naked fear in her eyes.
“Do you really think that humans might find out I’m not one of them?” she hissed.
Anne nodded. “It’s a possibility if a war breaks out. I have a proposal that could avert war, protecting the interests of both humans and vampires and striking a compromise between the conflicting factions. I—”
“I don’t care. I’ll support it. Whatever you want me to do, I’ll do it.” Bellona patted her massive hairdo. “I’ve made a home for myself among these humans, Anne. I can’t be torn from it.”
Anne smiled. “I’ll email you the details.”
Bellona gazed at the crowd milling between her paintings. “They’re far too interesting to be viewed as food. I haven’t had blood of any kind for hundreds of years.”
“Bellona!” A keen-eyed reporter popped out of the crowd, notebook in hand. “A moment of your time, please?”
Bellona drew herself up. “I have to go.” She swept away.
“She didn’t listen to your proposal,” Val hissed.
“I’m amazed she listened for as long as she did, to be honest.” Anne backed away. “Come on. Let’s get out of here.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Val and Anne stepped out of the museum into a drizzle. The droplets splattered on Val’s bare arms, faintly cold. Muffled humans shot her worried glances as they passed her on the steps.
Anne smiled and lifted her veil out of her face. “Ah. That’s better.”
They strolled along the edge of the Met, the majestic building looming on Val’s right as they headed toward 80th Street. Despite the rain, a hot dog vendor on the corner had a long queue of customers. The smell of sizzling meat made Val’s stomach growl despite the recent croissants.
