Crossed (15 page)

“I didn’t tell her any of that stuff.” I pointed at Beatrice. “She figured the war stuff out when we were getting off the plane, but—”

Tabitha and I both stared questioningly at Bea.

“I know you think Rachel is the most knowledgeable thrall you have, Eric, but I was Lady Gabriella’s for quite a long time, and if there is one thing a high society thrall has to learn, it’s how to find out every little thing about her master. If you know what’s bothering them, what they want, what they’re thinking about, you can be a better thrall and they treat you well.”

“So you spied on him?” Tabitha asked.

“No, Lady Bathory,” Beatrice said, using the most formal title for a female Vlad. “Well, maybe, but for me it’s doing my job. Some of the information came from Magbidion when he got back from the Hilton. I wheedled a little more from Talbot when he came to make sure we were all packed up, and the rest I got by paying attention to Eric and asking questions. How else am I supposed to do my job?”

“Still—” Tabitha began.

Luc reappeared, and I nearly went for him out of instinct. His armor was gone, if it had ever really been there, and he was wearing the suit and sunglasses again sans earpiece. “I’ve taken care of the minibus. No one saw anything. It was late, and Aarika acted quickly.”

“He should be deported.” Aarika jabbed her finger in my direction. “He is too dangerous. He’s an old soldier and I respect him, but let him return at another time, with his
memento mori.
Perhaps then he will be able to control himself.”

“Let’s get his wife’s petition handled first,” James said. He lowered his sword. “He can stay magic-side until that’s handled and then we can let the Council rule on the issue of whether he can stay or not.”

“Because he’s your wartime chum?” Aarika asked. “For that
reason we should ignore his control issues? He should be muzzled, not kept magic-side. He should be staked. It won’t kill him.”

“He will remain magic-side until the Council has ruled,” Luc snapped. “And that”—he gave a pointed look, meeting the gaze of both other immortals, Aarika first, then James—“is final. Being kept here is restraint enough, I should think.”

“Fine.” She folded her hands over her chest. “I am not unreasonable. We are not in my country, after all. If the Treaty of Secrets is broken, it will fall at the feet of the Free French, not on Germany’s head.”

“Magic-side.” I looked around. The surroundings were still vaguely familiar, similar to where we had been, but with a few hundred years of urban development erased. “Where the hell are we?”

“A Vale of Scrythax,” James spoke first, sword still at the ready.

“That’s not how the Veil of Scrythax works back home.”

“V-A-L-E,” James said, “not V-E-I-L.” He had his hand over the lower portion of his face, mimicking a veil. “It’s a pocket dimension. Think of it as being two quick steps to the left of the mundane world. We use the Vales instead of playing with people’s memories. It works much better to keep the supernatural out of sight in the first place, and it keeps the European Mage Guild from getting the kind of stranglehold on the immortals that the American version has on the vampires.”

“So why doesn’t the U.S. use your kind of Vale?”

“We have a much bigger piece of Scrythax.”

“Piece?” Tabitha asked. “As in body part?”

Aarika snorted. “Aren’t you a little squeamish for a vampire?”

“Aren’t you a little short for a storm trooper?” Tabitha fired back.
Score!
I laughed. Aarika frowned.

“I have no patience for the spurious accusations,” Aarika began. “I am not a Nazi. I fought the Nazis. I—”

“She was making a
Star Wars
joke, Jerry.” I flipped Aarika the bird. “Calm the fuck down and try to keep up with the times.”

James opened his hands, and the sword dissipated into a cloud of silvery-blue effervescence that sank into his body. Interposing himself between Aarika and me, he held up his open palms. “Let’s all stay friendly. Okay?”

Aarika considered looking to Luc for support—I could see it in her eyes—but I respected her for not taking it there. She backed down a little and so did I. God help me, but I was starting to like her, despite myself.

“Scrythax was a very powerful demon,” she began, “the most powerful of the Infernatti. We’re talking pose-as-a-deity powerful. In the Dark Ages, when the True Immortals and the other magic-siders went to war with each other, before the Treaty of Secrets, Scrythax stepped in on the side of humanity. Both sides united against him and he was torn apart for his trouble. In a weird way, though, he got what he wanted. United by a common foe, the magic-siders agreed that humanity and the supernatural needed to be segregated and that for the supernatural to endure, limits needed to be put in place on all sorts of things: vampire population growth, hunting practices of the therianthropes . . .”

“Over time,” Luc picked up, “the various mystical properties of Scrythax’s remains were discovered and he was parceled out.”

“And which part of him alters the memories of humans in Void City, or dare I ask?”

“His skin,” Aarika said. “Vampires stole,” she emphasized
stole
like she was accusing me of doing it, “portions of his skin when the renegades who believed in less restrictive population controls fled to the Americas.”

“Why would his skin do that?” Tabitha asked.

“Scrythax loved humans,” Luc explained. “But his visage was
terrible to look upon and his form was so . . . primal . . . that he could not alter his shape. Instead, he enchanted his skin to make mortals see him as something other than he was. He didn’t much care what, just so long as they didn’t run in fear. In the hands of the right mage, Lord Phillip of Void City for example, a piece of his skin can be used to make mortals see something other than what is and cloud their memory even of that.”

“I wonder what his little toe does,” I muttered. “So what piece do you guys have?”

“His h—” James began to answer me, but Aarika cut him off.

“A substantial one. Those the Council trusts can create a small pocket dimension which represents their present location as Scrythax remembers it. In this fashion, our differences may be settled away from mundane eyes and powers which might otherwise draw attention to our community may be exercised—”

“Without scaring the norms,” Tabitha butted in. “So you guys have his head then, right . . . or an eye maybe?”

“I wish we had one of his eyes.” Luc spoke up. “Either one is said to hold remarkable powers. There are stories of Scrythax restoring the dead with one eye while peering forward into the future with the other to ensure the world was a better place with the newly resurrected returned to it.”

“I wouldn’t want to be around if he decided the world was better off without me,” Tabitha chimed in.

“No.” James shook his head in vigorous agreement. “You wouldn’t. One of the rules I was going to tell you about. In Europe, we don’t allow supernatural combat in the mundane world. If you’re a member of the community, you open a Vale of Scrythax and settle it there. Never to the death or destruction, either. Only the Council can grant permission for one magicsider to kill another. Breaking that law is an offense
punishable by destruction or permanent banishment into a Vale of Scrythax. You’re lucky that you had your freak-out before I told you about it.”

“Yeah, thanks for . . .” As I spoke, my heart beat . . . the first time I could remember that happening without Rachel around since I’d become a vampire. Then, the scenery shifted like air over gasoline or hot asphalt. Buildings rose up around us, winking into view to match the place we’d just left in the real world, right down to the wrecked minibus.

Luc glanced about, black hair falling down over his sunglasses. “
Alors!
Aarika?”

“We’re still in the Vale of Scrythax, Luc. I don’t understand. It should still appear as it did the last time Scrythax saw it.”

My heart beat again, once, twice, and the magnitude of the effect expanded. When it stopped, the change stabilized.

“Hey, guys?” I asked. “The eye of Scrythax, the one that could raise the dead? What would it look like?”

“No one knows,” James answered as Luc and Aarika went through motions very similar to what Magbidion does when he’s looking at things through his magic. I guess they were gauging their surroundings. If what I suspected was correct, however, they’d have had more luck studying my chest. “Some pieces of his body crystallized into beautiful gems, others grew dull and black, like a rock or a piece of coal, and still others maintained their gruesome forms, like desiccated remains. Why?”

“No reason.”

“We should get to the Council quickly,” Aarika told Luc.

“This way.” Luc gestured in the rough direction in which I’d seen the castle. “We aren’t far. Let’s press on magic-side. Aarika and I can maintain the Vale for all of us as we move.”

Tabitha did what she always does—forgave me too much, too fast—and we set out along the road, my right hand in her left and my left hand in Bea’s right, like I was a little kid or a
sick old man who needed looking after. When we turned at the corner, the area that had been out of my line of sight before we transitioned to the Vale was still old-school.

Of course it is,
I thought,
because I didn’t see it in the real world and I’ve got an Eye of Scrythax, also known as the Stone of Aeternum, in my fucking chest, turning me into the mystic equivalent of those guys from Google Maps.

Updates.

Jeez.

“I wanted to show you this anyway.” James dropped back to walk with us while Aarika and Luc led the way. “We’ll have to hurry to make sure we get there before you have to sleep, but the approach to the Château de Vincennes looks much better magic-side.”

“I’m sure it does.” I walked on, looking down at the ground in front of me.
And if you want it to stay that way, I suggest we leave by the same route.
Normal honeymoon? Yeah. Not so much.

    15    

RACHEL:

PARIS OR BUST

When you’re young, hot, and a witch (particularly a tantric witch) you can soar through airport security—no broom required. Customs agents find it hard to do anything but pass you through when they’re feeling unexplained pulses of sexual pleasure. The succubus who taught me magic calls it Blissing. “Any demon can punch their way through security,” she used to say, “walk through all horns, scales, and hellfire, but it takes skill to ensure that when the hosts say serving you has been their pleasure, they’re making a gross understatement.”

Unlike my old teacher, I don’t see the elegance of making someone cream their pants or experience an uncontrollable erection, but it sure is fun.

I walked out of Charles de Gaulle International Airport Terminal 2 with a garment bag over my shoulder and a small rolling suitcase trailing behind me. Springtime in Paris, and all I could see was pavement. I’d noticed from the air that the sections of Terminal 2 are shaped like eyes, with a road and TGV line where the eyelids would meet. The space where the iris would be is covered with ground-level parking, and the terminals make the
eyelashes. I leaned back against a rounded section of the exterior wall, looking right toward the rest of the terminal. Even the roofline had little puffy parts that looked like eyes.

Businessmen and -women went on their boring little ways, hailing taxis and yammering away on cell phones, which reminded me to swap the SIM card in mine so it would work on the network here. I powered the phone back on, started downloading my messages, and began reading through them while I waited for the vampire Winter’d arranged for me to meet. The screen went black without warning and I stabbed the power angrily.

“Work, stupid fucking phone!” I looked up to see if there was a phone kiosk, thinking maybe the battery had gone bad, when I noticed the airport, the planes, the parking lots, the roads, the TGV line . . . everything . . . was gone. My surroundings had been drastically altered, going from
nouveau
French to rural farm, the bright lights of the city replaced by a panoramic starscape. I was leaning against a waist-high bit of crumbling stone wall.