Pirate's Alley (2 page)

“Oh God, they can. Of course they can. I can see it on your face.” She dropped my hand and clutched her pillow, then tossed it on the floor and stood. “I’m gonna be sick again.”

I watched in horror as she ran through the door into the hallway and out of sight. Holy crap. Eugenie didn’t have a virus. She had morning sickness—well, in this case, afternoon sickness.

I ignored the retching sounds drifting down the hallway from the downstairs bath and reined in the runaway thoughts and spiral of what-ifs trying to unspool in my brain. The last response Eugenie needed from me was horror or hysteria. A plain-vanilla human, she’d only learned about the preternatural world three weeks ago—including the fact that the lying, manipulative bastard she’d been sleeping with was an elf with political ambitions. She needed me to guide her through this minefield.

Only one problem: I was clueless.

Hadn’t they used protection of some kind? Had Eugenie thought a baby would help her hang on to Rand when she saw him slipping away, toward me? Before she knew what he really was? What would a half-elven baby be able to do?

I got up and paced the room, ashamed that my first thoughts had been to cast blame. If I’d learned anything from the New Orleans I’d inhabited since Hurricane Katrina smashed normal life into something unrecognizable, it was to not even go down the what-if road. Blame was a useless emotion, and assigning motive was worse than useless.

To move on, I’d learned, one simply had to take things as they existed in the present and keep blundering forward.

By the time Eugenie returned, looking paler than ever, I’d composed my face into a mask of calm. Beneath, I was shrieking like a model for Edvard Munch, but I looked serene and compassionate, if not exactly competent.

I’d taken Eugenie’s glass of juice back into the kitchen and added a little seltzer and powdered ginger to it, and handed it to her when she sat down.

“I doctored it to help with the nausea.” She raised an eyebrow, and I smiled. “Don’t worry. Nothing magical. Just stuff from your kitchen.”

I waited until she drank a few sips before asking, in my gentlest tone, “Are you sure?”

She bit her lower lip and nodded. “I haven’t taken a test, but believe me, I know.”

There was hope, then. “But it really might be a virus or—”

“You don’t know this, but I’ve been pregnant before, back when I lived in Marrero.”

I fell silent, waiting to hear the rest. The time was shadowy between her childhood in the western New Orleans suburbs and her arrival in Uptown, tattooed and henna-rinsed. From late-night girl talks, I knew there had been a man; wasn’t there always? There’d been a bad breakup in the old neighborhood of Marrero, across the Mississippi River from the bustle of New Orleans. This was the first I’d heard about a pregnancy.

“I lost the baby near the end of the second trimester.” She smiled and swirled the golden juice around in her glass, looking into the past. “It was a little boy. I’d already picked out his name: Charles, after my daddy.”

A stab of pity knifed through me at her expression, still filled with love for a child she’d never gotten to hold. “You had a miscarriage?”

She nodded, but when she looked back up at me her hazel eyes had lost their wistful softness. “Not the way you think, though. My ex caused it, by knocking me down a flight of stairs ’cause I was standing between him and the TV set and the Saints were playing the Cowboys.”

She shook her head and stared out the window at nothing. “The pathetic thing is that for the longest time I blamed myself. How stupid was I?”

I tried to reconcile the image of my brave friend, the one who’d never backed away from anything, with a woman who’d stay in an abusive relationship. But such a judgment wasn’t fair, either. Eugenie was so big-hearted that she believed the absolute best of everybody. I’d been the beneficiary of that too many times to count, and I was willing to bet her ex had, too. God knows, Quince Randolph had.

I wanted to hear what happened to her jerk of an ex, but first we needed to deal with this still-hypothetical pregnancy. “You’re saying you feel the same way now as when you were pregnant before?”

Eugenie sighed and leaned back on the sofa, her shoulders relaxing now that the burden had been shared. “Yeah. Same type of queasiness. Not like a virus. It’s just different.”

I did some mental calculations. She and Rand had only been together since late October, so she couldn’t be more than six weeks along, maximum.

“I recognize that look, DJ.” She reached over to the end table, picked up her cell phone, and stabbed at the screen. “I was studying the calendar and I figure I’m about a month along, maybe a little more, if…”

The
if
trailed into a long silence.

“If what?” If elves had the same gestational period as humans? If she should even consider having this child, given the circumstances and the fact that the father was a sneaky, manipulative elf?

“If it would show up on a home pregnancy test.” Her eyes brightened. “I mean, maybe I’m just panicking. We were always safe; I insisted on it. Would Rand’s baby show up on one of those tests you buy at the drugstore?”

I had no idea. “Let’s find out. I’ll run over to Walgreens and get one, and pick up some ginger ale for you while I’m there. It doesn’t have caffeine, and it’ll help the nausea.” Plus, I felt a growing need for chocolate and the store was stocked with Christmas candy.

I wrapped a scarf around my neck and bundled myself into a hideous orange and purple plaid wool coat I’d picked up at a charity thrift store yesterday, at Arnie the cabbie’s insistence. He often shopped there, and a girl needed a coat in this weather, he’d said.

I’d been even more fashion-challenged than usual since my entire wardrobe had gone up in flames just before Thanksgiving, and when I needed basics like underwear and shoes, it seemed frivolous to spend real money on a heavy coat that might get trotted out of the closet once a year.

Not that I had a closet. And no one except a pumpkin and some breeds of cat looked good in orange—and never when it was tarted out with purple, unless one were headed for a Clemson football game.

“Need anything else?” I paused at the front door and looked back at Eugenie. “Pizza? Soda?”

A good, stiff shot of bourbon?

She shook her head, sadness and fear etched into her face in equal measure. I’d be freaking out in her position, and I had a lot of resources she didn’t: other wizards, a passing knowledge of the prete world, Alex.

All Eugenie had was me. Maybe I hadn’t always been the best friend to her, but I swore to myself: This time, I wouldn’t fail her.

CHAPTER
2

One of the few good things about being blackballed by the car-rental places: I didn’t have to worry about fighting for a decent parking spot at the shopping center and schlepping my way across a quarter mile of frozen concrete tundra.

A blast of frigid air sent shock waves of cold through me when I opened the cab door and eyed the fifteen or so feet I’d need to run in order to get inside the store. The big entrance sign on Tchoupitoulas Street might say
RIVERSIDE MARKET
, but the drugstore’s location wasn’t nearly that chic. The long strip mall backed up to one of the Mississippi River wharves, and I knew it well. My official office was near the other end, a sparsely furnished rectangle called Crescent City Risk Management.

It wasn’t a deception, exactly, since I did manage risk. Just not the type of risk for which one bought an insurance policy.

“Man, that be some cold. I’ll be waitin’ on you, Miss DJ. I’ll even turn off the meter seein’ as how you’re a regular. Ain’t you glad you got dat coat?” Arnie gave me a gap-toothed grin. He was old-school New Orleans, of the generation that still called shopping for food “making groceries” and referred to the near-west suburb as “Metry.”

“Thanks, Arnie. I don’t know what I’d do without you.” Sure I did. I’d be riding the bus or forced to ask Alex if I could borrow the pristine Mercedes convertible he’d stored at his parents’ house in Mississippi last month. Things located near me, he pointed out, had a bad habit of turning into fireballs.

He hadn’t even offered me the use of his uncle Eddie’s beater of a pickup that got passed around the family in times of need. He could drive me wherever I needed to go, he’d said. My interpretation: He could control where I went if I had to depend on him for transportation. Thus my newfound relationship with Arnie.

Hurrying into the store, I relaxed at the cocoon of warmth that surrounded me, not to mention the piped-in Christmas Muzak and the reassurance of knowing an unlimited supply of junk food lay at my disposal.

I picked up a blue plastic shopping basket and made my way through aisles crowded with wrapping paper and Santa hats, tree lights and tinsel, weaving toward the back corner of the store where the actual pharmacy had been tucked. My footfalls fell in rhythm with Johnny Mathis crooning about roasting chestnuts on an open fire, which sounded dangerous.

Halfway down the “As Seen on TV” aisle, I lurched to a stop and backed up. For Alex’s Christmas present, I’d bought him a membership renewal at the city’s most high-tech gym, but the Perfect Bacon Bowl (“Everything Tastes Better in a Bowl of Bacon!”) looked like the ideal thing in which to hide the membership card. He’d be totally grossed out, toss it aside, and I could use it without admitting I’d bought it for myself. Alex considered bacon an express pass to heart disease. I considered it one of nature’s perfect foods.

Grinning, I grabbed the Perfect Bacon Bowl and wedged it in my basket. My amusement faded as the store’s holiday excess gave way to the health-care aisles, and the enormity of Eugenie’s situation finally hit me in all of its awfulness.

If she was pregnant, Rand would want the child, and Rand had a way of getting what he wanted even if it meant playing dirty. Oh, he thought he played fair, but the elves had an arrogantly warped worldview in which “fair” equaled “whatever the elf wants.”

Or would he prefer that she get rid of the child so his precious pure elven DNA wouldn’t be mixed with that of a human? I pondered that down half an aisle, but rejected it. Rand would want an heir. God knows he would never get one from his so-called mate, namely me, and if he had half a brain, he’d realize that.

Where would one find home pregnancy tests? I scanned row after row of vitamins, eye drops, elevated toilet seats, antacids, and finally found them—colorful stacks of boxes in frightening babylike colors of pink and blue and what had apparently replaced green as the new neutral pastel, lavender.

I stared at the half-dozen different brands, overwhelmed not only by the choice of tests but the ramifications of a baby fathered by Quince Randolph. What would a half-elven child be able to do? Look how many elven skills I won in the genetic lottery and I was far, far more removed from elfhood than this kid would be. Could the baby do bizarre mental games in utero? Were elves automatically devious and underhanded, or was that a learned behavior?

What
was
the gestation period for a half-elven child? Nine months like a human or an elephantine two years?

If Eugenie were pregnant, considering she’d lost a child before and the Catholic upbringing she staunchly upheld in the face of the weirdness around her, would she consider ending this pregnancy? Would it be fair to even ask her to consider it?

Okay, I was getting ahead of myself. There would be time later to panic and wrestle with moral dilemmas.

First step: Try the pregnancy test. The boxes all claimed to be ninety-nine percent accurate. Those results applied to humans, I assumed. Not surprisingly, the accuracy rating for half-human pregnancies had been omitted from the package labels. I picked one using the highly scientific method of prettiest logo.

I lingered in the candy aisle on the way to the register, thinking about Rand and piling in enough peanut butter cups and candy bars to replace my blood supply with cocoa and sugar. To balance it out, I grabbed a twelve-pack of diet soda along with Eugenie’s ginger ale.

While I stood in the checkout line, I had time to consider Quince Randolph, aka Rand. That would be Rand, my non-husband, newly minted member of the Elven Synod and clan leader of the T
â
n, the fire elves. Blond, blue-eyed, with broad shoulders and good cheekbones, Rand was the prettiest elf in this world or any other, with an ego matched only by his ambition. And tied to me by a blood bond for the rest of our miserable lives.

A tingle of fear zipped up my spine and across my scalp. I had to be careful. Since the bonding, Rand could no longer read my thoughts or influence my moods, but he would know if I got freaked out or frightened. He could also communicate with me mentally, although I’d gotten adept at ignoring him. I didn’t want him picking up any stray fear or tension and feeling the need to sniff around to see what had me upset.

I began slamming up mental barriers as fast as I could visualize them in my head. Ramparts, moats, and thick stone towers, all ringed around my thoughts. I set my brain inside the virtual stronghold of Mount Doom, surrounded by mental orcs dripping green saliva off their fangs and poison off their bow-strung arrows. If Quince Randolph turned his sneaky mental radar in my direction and picked up even a hint of freak-out, we’d have a problem before I could get back to Eugenie’s with the pregnancy test to find out the status of the potential elf spawn.

Mental note to self: Do not refer to the child as
elf spawn
in front of Eugenie.

Rand also could both read Eugenie’s thoughts and influence them if he was touching her or got close enough. Thank God he’d been cocooned in his house since the cold weather struck, or so Eugenie claimed. Even his mental pings to me—sort of a text message without the text or the device on which to read it—had become less frequent since the temperature dropped.

But the cold wouldn’t last forever. Eugenie might have to move. The wizards maintained a facility for criminal and mentally challenged magic-makers in a remote corner of Greenland. Rand would never brave the frigid weather in Ittoqqortoormiit.