Dangerous Creatures (11 page)

Like Link’s bedroom in Gatlin
, Rid thought.
Maybe that’s a good sign.

“What’s that?” She pointed. At one end of the massive room was a sort of stage, with microphone stands and amps stacked to one side, and speakers mounted on the ceiling. A drum kit and three guitars sat on the stage.

“Practice room,” said Floyd, banging the cymbal on the drum kit as she walked by. Necro moved next to her. These were going to be Ridley’s new roommates. At least two of them. She sighed. Thankfully, Sampson, the Darkborn, was nowhere in sight.

“Unbelievable.” Link’s face lit up when he saw the stage, and he stood staring at it as if he could imagine himself hanging out there already. He took a step toward the stage, and a stadium-sized crowd appeared behind it, as if they were looking out from backstage.

Link took a step back, and the crowd disappeared.

Forward, back. Forward, back.

Crowd, no crowd. Crowd, no crowd.

He laughed. “I am so down with this.” He took another step forward. Then another. The crowd started to scream, until their chanting drowned out the noise of the water.

“Dev-il’s H. Dev-il’s H. Dev-il’s H.”

Link grinned over his shoulder. “Could we get them to chant my name?”

Rid yanked him back and the stage fell silent. “Can we not?”

“Aw, come on. Look at this.” Link gestured to the posters on the walls, nodding his approval. “Metallica. Guns N’ Roses. Black Sabbath. Iron Maiden. AC/DC.” As he looked at them, each one played a riff of their most famous songs. You had to love Caster fandoms. “Someone’s got good taste.” Link nodded.

“That would be me.” The blond girl smiled, mostly at Link.

“Figured it was you, Floyd.” He grinned. “Your name says it all.”

Wonderful
, thought Ridley.
A She-Link.

Floyd held up both hands. “No, no. I’m not named for the band. It’s a family name. Frances Floyd the Third.”

Link looked disappointed. “Aw, man. Well, your loss. It’s all good.”

Floyd broke into a grin and pointed at his face, laughing at him. “I’m messing with you. Pink Floyd is the greatest band of all time.” Her arm morphed into an electric guitar, and she played a few bars of “The Wall” with one hand.

“
We don’t need no ed-u-ca-tion
,” she sang.

Ridley had to admit Floyd sounded pretty good, which made her even more annoying. Especially when Link started playing bad drums against the coffee table with his hands. Her last hope that they’d get along evaporated as Floyd zeroed in on her boyfriend.

“
We don’t need no thought con-trol
,” he sang back. She wondered if he knew how bad he sounded. If Floyd thought so, she didn’t let on.

Ridley raised her voice. “Okay, okay. You’re a two-man band. Link Floyd. I feel we’ve established that.”

“Link Floyd,” Floyd said. “Look at that name. It was meant to be.”

Meant to be?

“You know it.” Link held out his fist to Floyd. “Pound it.”

“Did I say Link Floyd?” Ridley shook her head. “I meant
Supertramp
.” She glared meaningfully at the blond chick staring at her boyfriend.

Back off.

Floyd bumped fists with Link and added, “Or superhot.”

Excuse me?

Ridley frowned. This wasn’t what she was expecting. “Did I say Supertramp? I meant
Bitch
.”

Link’s eyes flickered over to her, surprised. Even Floyd looked at her like she was psycho.

Rid shrugged. “What? It’s a band. Look it up.” She stifled the urge to kick the coffee table to pieces. It would be bad for her boots.

“Da-ang,” said Link and Floyd, accidentally and in unison. They looked at each other and laughed.

It was the final straw.

“You two want to get a room?” Ridley rolled her eyes. “Or maybe you can just show me mine. I’m exhausted.”

“Yeah. Sorry. Sampson needs his own room, and Floyd and I share the other one.” Necro glanced at Floyd, like there was a story there and she was warning her not to tell it.

Which was fine, since if there was, Ridley definitely didn’t want to hear it. “Nice. I see who the boss is around here.”

A shadow flickered across Necro’s face. “You know any Darkborns? They’re unpredictable. Not exactly roommate material.”

“Darkborn?” Link was confused.

“Long story,” Rid said. She looked at Necro and Floyd. “Some kind of mutant Caster. But he’s nothing I can’t handle.”

“What are you gonna do? Charm him?” Necro laughed. “I’d love to see you try, Siren.”

Apparently, Darkborn immunity had advantages beyond Underground card games. Ridley had lost everything back at Suffer, when Sampson had beaten her in spite of her Power of Persuasion. She wasn’t interested in going head to head with him anytime soon.

Not like I’d admit that to these two fashion victims.

“So my mojo doesn’t work on him. That doesn’t mean he’s invincible.” Ridley was irritated. She just wanted this day to be over.

That and my own bedroom.

“Watching you try to Cast something on Sam? That would be like watching a fly try to high-five an elephant. You barely exist to him.” Necro was happy to remind her of what she already knew.

“We’ll see about that,” Rid said. “Just show me my bed, Nympho.”

Floyd looked at Necro, who stood there with a hand on her hip. “Find it yourself. You can’t miss it. It’s the only mattress on the kitchen floor. The dirty one.”

Then Necro smiled—her first smile of the night. “By the way. A friend of yours wanted me to tell you something.”

“I don’t have any friends,” Ridley said.

“Sure you do. I don’t know his name, but I think he gave me some kind of sick message for you. You seem to bring that out in people. It’s been stuck in my head, like a bad dream. Happens sometimes.” Necro extended an arm around Ridley, pulling her close.

“Keep your sick dreams to yourself,” Ridley hissed.

“
Vindicabo
,” Necro said. “One word. Four syllables. Noun. Vengeance Cast.” Her lip rings clicked against her teeth as she spoke. “I think you have friends in low places, Siren.”

Vindicabo.

The word hung in the air between them like a threat. Ridley stepped back, stumbling against the wall, pulling away from Necro. “What kind of message is that?
I will avenge
what? What are you talking about?” She’d seen enough
Vindicabo
Casts to know they were bad news for everyone involved. A
Vindicabo
was the Casting equivalent of a Vex: It showed no mercy, took no prisoners, and left a vast trail of destruction in its wake.

Ridley swallowed.

“That’s all I got.” Necro shrugged. “This stuff comes to me at night. I don’t control it. And I’m not your secretary.”

“Nice try, Nutbag.” Ridley rolled her eyes. Her heart was pounding, but she could see Link watching her curiously from the doorway, and now she had no choice but to try to play off the whole conversation.

No big deal. Whatever.

“Don’t say I didn’t warn you. My kind, we hear these things. Watch your back. Something’s coming for you. Or someone.” Necro’s eyes flickered to Link.

“Both of you.”

 
CHAPTER 10 

Dream of Mirrors

R
idley thought it had to be a joke. But Nympho or Nightmare or whoever wasn’t kidding. According to Miss Piercing Pagoda, not only was Ridley’s life in danger, but her bedroom was the kitchen.

The kitchen floor.

The second of the two was the bigger problem, as far as Rid was concerned. She was familiar with death threats, but sleeping on a bare mattress on a dirty linoleum floor was something new. Ridley suspected her new roommates were trying to punish her, and if they were, they were a couple of sadistic geniuses. She had never slept on the floor of anything, anywhere, in her life.

Even when Abraham Ravenwood himself had kept her in a literal gilded cage, she’d had a divan for a bed.

For the record, she wasn’t certain she’d ever been in a kitchen. It wasn’t entirely her own doing. Back at Ravenwood, Kitchen wouldn’t stand for that sort of thing.

By the time Link returned from the Beater with her three bags, a big gray box, and his old Stonewall Jackson basketball team duffel, Rid was lying on the mattress, fully dressed.

“There is no way I can sleep on this thing,” she said.

Link laughed. “A mattress in the kitchen. Sure you don’t wanna sleep in the Beater?”

“How about in a cab on the way to a hotel in Manhattan?” Ridley wasn’t kidding. Necro’s warning had shaken her up.

Who is Casting a
Vindicabo
on me? Maybe the same person who was watching me outside the apartment? If I wasn’t imagining the whole thing?

Ridley flung her arm over her eyes, blacking out the world around her, as if she could make it all go away.

Is any of this real, or is the Necromancer just messing with me?

Link slid his arm around her. “Come on. Where’s your spirit of adventure, Babe?”

“Don’t call me Babe.” Ridley shrugged him off. “And that’s easy for you to say. You don’t even sleep.”

“I wish I could. This day has been too freakin’ long.” Link dropped the bags and box from the car in front of her. The kitchen was so small there wasn’t much room for anything but the mattress.

He sighed, falling next to her onto the mattress. Then he shoved the gray box in her direction.

“What is it, a present?” Ridley hated surprises. She always imagined the worst.

A head in a box. A bomb. Link’s mother, miniaturized.

“I guess I shoulda told you,” Link said sheepishly. “But I didn’t know you were comin’, remember?”

Rid reached for the lid and knocked it to one side, tentatively, as if she were afraid whatever was in the box would bite her.

Turned out, she wasn’t that far off.

Lucille Ball stared back at her, curled up inside an old pink bath rug, looking as if she’d just woken up from a twenty-four-hour catnap.

“Are you kidding me? You brought the cat?”

Lucille howled, equally offended.

“Aunt Mercy said she’d never been up North. Aunt Grace said Lucille Ball would be better off crossin’ the Mason-Dixon Line in the sky. Then Ethan promised he’d ask, and I promised I’d think about it, and before I knew it—”

“Your big plan was to run off to New York City to become a rock star with your best friend’s great-aunts’ cat as your sidekick?” Ridley looked from Lucille Ball to Link.

“I thought it might be nice, you know, to have a familiar face from back home.”

“A cat’s face?”

Lucille Ball howled again. Link tried to muzzle her, and Lucille bit his hand.