Pomegranates full and fine (39 page)

Tango took them down the stairs. Miranda had to walk carefully; the old steps were worn. She didn’t want to drop Riley if she missed her footing and fell. As they reached the door at the bottom, it unlocked suddenly. Miranda glanced back up at Ruby. The old changeling flashed her a smile as she disappeared back into the wall. Tango, meanwhile, was boldly throwing open the door. “I claim sanctuary for myself and my allies in this freehold!” she shouted firmly.

Miranda barely had time to recognize that the changeling court was — contrary to anything she might have expected — nothing more than a dingy pool hall, before a hard, thin, lash of a man stepped in front of them. “What? Who are you?” He saw Miranda and Tolly, and spat. “Get out.”

“I’ve claimed sanctuary,” Tango said. “They’re my allies. They stay.” She paced forward, confronting the night watchman. “I’m Tango. The duke’s Jester? And I imagine you know Riley?”

Marshall’s eyes narrowed. “I know Riley. The duke isn’t too happy with either of you right now.”

“I don’t think he’s banned me from court yet, has he?” Tango asked sweetly. She gestured for Miranda and Tolly to come in, and for Miranda to lay Riley down.

“Well, he isn’t here,” Marshall pointed out. “And I’ve never heard of claiming sanctuary in a freehold.” “Fifth tenet of the Escheat — the Right of Safe Haven. Learn your Kithain laws.”

Marshall sneered. “The Right to Safe Haven maintains the safety of the freehold. It doesn’t mean lawless Kithain can just wander in in the middle of the night.” He hefted a pool cue as though it were a spear. Tango watched it as warily as though it really were. “Get...”

Abruptly, Tango ducked forward and grabbed the cue out of the night watchman’s hands. When she dropped it, the tip hit the floor.... Miranda blinked. The tip hit the floor with the clatter of falling metal?

As if it
were
a spearhead, and the floor were something harder than linoleum.

Tango had Marshall down on the dirty floor. Her knife was in her hand and hovering near his face. “See this?” she hissed. “This is real. I put this through you, and you stay dead.”

“Sixth tenet,” snarled Marshall. “The Right to Life. You can’t kill another Kithain. Learn the laws yourself!” Miranda saw Tango’s hand waver for just a second. Marshall’s words would have reminded her of what she had once been and done. Miranda’s jaw tightened in sympathy. But then Tango’s hand became steady again. She brought the knife down to prick Marshall’s cheek. “If I do kill you, you’re dead. Do you really want to put that to the test?” She held the knife down for a moment longer, then took it away and pulled Marshall to his feet. She thrust him toward the door. “Go find Duke Michael and ask him about sanctuary and the Right to Safe Haven. I’ll be waiting here when you get back.” Marshall reeled out into the dark stairwell, then spun around angrily. Tango slammed the door in his face and locked it.

“Is there such a thing as claiming sanctuary?” Miranda asked quietly, setting Riley down on top of one of the pool tables in the long room.

Tango nodded. “Yes and no. Under the fifth tenet, Kithain are supposed to be admitted to any freehold where they seek refuge. But it’s not guaranteed or enforced, and freeholds turn away refugees all the time.” “Why?”

“Out of fear that they’ll do what I’m going to do — steal Glamour.” She glanced at Tolly. “Take a break. Solomon can’t get to us here.” The mad vampire relaxed with a grateful sigh. His hands started fiddling with a rack of pool balls, clacking them together, and he giggled. Tango winced, turning her attention back to Riley. She reached for her necklace and took the sprig of heather out of its vial. “I’m not sure this is going to work, or how long it will take,” she murmured to Miranda. “It is going to take all of my concentration, though. Try to keep Tolly quiet.”

That would be tricky enough, but Miranda had another concern. “What do we do if this Duke Michael comes back before you finish?”

“Bluff. Stall. Whatever you can do. Just be careful if anyone points anything at you.” She nudged Marshall’s fallen pool cue with a toe. “This really was a spear in Marshall’s hands. A Kithain chimeric weapon created out of Glamour.”

“A spear can’t hurt me,” Miranda reminded her. “Maybe not, but an ordinary pool cue through the heart would, and you wouldn’t know the difference until too late.” The words were delivered coolly, like a warning in battle rather than advice to a friend.

Tango leaned over Riley and set the sprig of heather on his chest. She pressed her hands to his head, then slowly began to knead his scalp as if she were giving him a massage. Her fingers moved down to his jaw. Her eyes closed in concentration. Miranda turned away.

The entire pool hall... the entire changeling court, rather, had the same feel to it that Miranda had first noticed around Tango when the other woman had walked into Hopeful. Energetic. Dynamic. Electrical. As if the room were vibrating at a frequency so high that it only appeared to be motionless. Miranda had sensed something similar around Sin when they had seen him at Club Haze. The invisible, tingling energy in the court was much stronger than it had been around either changeling, however. Like riverwater to seawater. It was Glamour, she supposed, forever hidden from her. Miranda felt sure that there was more to the court than she could see. Only the shallowest of perceptions came to her now. The metallic clatter of the dropped pool cue, for example. The way her footsteps echoed, as though the pool hall were far larger than it looked. A sense of dark grandeur. Tango’s world was invisible to her, and almost incomprehensible.

Miranda had been watching Tolly whirl around the room for several minutes before she realized that he was waltzing between the pool tables, moving in perfect time, .as if to unheard music. Could the mad vampire see and hear things of the Glamour? Could he enter Tango’s world? It hardly seemed fair. “Tolly,” she asked softly, “what are you dancing to?”

Tolly snorted. “Nothing, silly.” He swept her up as he moved past, bringing her into his slow, rocking dance. “The orchestra’s gone home for the night.”

* * *

Glamour flooded through Tango like sunlight flooding through a prism. In the rich environment of the court, she had no trouble drawing it to her. The Glamour illuminated her entire being. The problem came when she tried to redirect it into Riley. It fractured — just as sunlight passing through a prism broke into a rainbow. She couldn’t focus the Glamour outside of her body, even though the atmosphere of the court should have made it easier. She could have used her cantrip on herself easily, but nothing she did seemed to carry the magic to Riley. She growled softly in frustration and moved her hands down to the pooka’s arms. “Work,” she muttered. “Work, damn you.”

The Glamour just dripped away from him. Again. She tried brushing the heather across his face as she drew on the Glamour, pouring the radiant energy through the sprig. Nothing.

Tango felt like pounding her hands on the table in frustration. Why had she even hoped that this might succeed? It had never worked in the past. In the forty -five years since she had gone through the Chrysalis, she had never found a way to use her magic on anyone but herself. Why should it work now? But it should have been possible! She should have been able to do it. She had to find a way to make the cantrip work this time!

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Miranda push Tolly away. The other woman sent the mad vampire to squat in a far comer, then came over to her. “Is it not...?”

“No,” Tango said harshly. “It’s not.”

“Oh.” Miranda turned away again. She stopped and glanced back. “Is there anything I can do?”

Tango clenched her teeth. “No. It’s not a problem you’d understand.”

The vampire just looked at her. “Try me,” she said, as if it were a challenge. “What’s your problem?” “Forget it! There’s nothing you can do.”

“Do you want to wake Riley up or not?”

Tango didn’t reply right away. She looked down at Riley. They had to wake him, or they would never find out all of what was going on. She and Miranda could only guess at part of the larger picture. Tolly knew something, but couldn’t tell them. Everything else that they needed to know was locked up in Riley’s sleeping mind. “All right,” she snapped grudgingly at Miranda. “My magic won’t work on him. I’ve tried, and I can’t do it!”

“Why won’t it work?” asked Miranda calmly.

“Because I can’t affect other Kithain. I don’t know' why. It just doesn’t work.” She glared up at the vampire. “And before you ask, I’ve tried every trick I’ve ever heard of to get it to work. The connection just isn’t there. I thought I could do it this time, with so much riding on being successful, but I can’t.”

Miranda was silent as she thought. “But you can affect your own body?”

“Easily.”

“What if...” Miranda drummed her fingers on the pool table. “What if you thought Riley’s body was yours?”

Tango stared at the vampire. “What? How?”

“I could hypnotize you. You’ve seen stage-mesmerists make people act like they’re somebody else? If you thought you were Riley — sort of like an out-of-body experience — maybe you could make the Glamour flow. A really deep trance might be enough to make the connection. It would be tricky. I’ve never actually done anything quite like it before.”

Tango considered the idea skeptically. “What would it involve?”

“A deep trance, a lot of suggestion.” Miranda shifted a bit. “And you would have to trust me enough to let me do it.”

Tango barely bit back a snarl. “Forget it.”

There was a fist-sized knot of guilt in her stomach when she said it.

“Why not?” demanded Miranda. “It’s our best chance.”

“You might mess with my head while you’re doing it.”

Why should she? Why would she want to do that to you now? Are you afraid she’s going to turn you over to Solomon?

Miranda’s face was a frozen mask. The vampire’s dark eyes looked down at her. Her lips were pressed tightly together. A human might have been breathing hard, nostrils flaring, but Miranda’s face didn’t move at all. Then, suddenly, she lashed out so fast that her hand seemed to blur, and slapped Tango across the face. “Damn it!” she screamed. “I don’t want to mess with your head! Do you think I enjoyed hiding the penny murders from you? Do you think I was playing games when 1 let Jubilee get away?
I hated it!"

“Then why did you do it?” Tango screamed back at her.

“Because I didn’t want you to find out about me! I liked you and I didn’t want you to start hating me. You were the first person in a long time that I didn’t have to play power games with. And you treated me like a person instead of a creature. 1 liked fthatr
^-

Doesn’t that make sense?
asked the guilt in the pit of Tango’s stomach. It rippled larger, and brought a flush of shame to Tango’s face.

Miranda wasn’t finished. “Remember what you said to me that first night at Hopeful? It’s nice to have someone you can talk to and know they’ll understand? Do you think you’re the only one who feels that way?”

Tango swallowed. “I...”

“Do you know why Solomon named me a traitor to the Bandog? Because I was trying to protect you. Because I was with you instead of committing another murder. Because I rejected him.” The other woman stood straight, her arms stiff at her sides, her hands clenched. “I’m tired of power games. I’m sick of killing. I want to do what you did, Tango. I want to walk away from it all. Why can’t you forgive me?”

Tango stared at her. In her anger, Miranda’s fangs had emerged. She looked so inhuman.
Say it,
whispered the voice inside her.
Admit it.

“Because,” Tango whispered, “you remind me too much of myself. You make me remember what I used to be like. You make me remember how easy it was.” She reached up and pressed Miranda’s lips closed, hiding the fangs. “Please don’t.” She looked straight into the vampire’s eyes. “Hypnotize me. Let’s do it.”

“Tango...”

“Do it!” She felt better, but still incomplete. “Hurry.”

Miranda looked like she was about to say something more, but stopped. Gently, she lifted Tango up to sit on the edge of the pool table. Then she caught her gaze again. Abruptly, Tango found herself falling into Miranda’s eyes. It was like diving into a warm swimming pool at night. The sensation was comforting, embracing. She didn’t fight it. Instead, she dove deeper into the shadows. Miranda was speaking to her, the vampire’s voice a distant, eerie murmur of command, encouraging her to remember everything that she knew about Riley, all of the experiences that they had shared. Obedienty, Tango remembered. The recent evening in Pan’s. Winnipeg six years ago. Boston before that. A wild road trip in the early eighties. The first time they met, 1978 in Montreal. Things she’d thought she had forgotten: postcards, Christmas gifts, telephone calls.

“Now,” instructed Miranda’s ghostly whale-song of a voice, “imagine all of that from Riley’s point of view.”

The imagining came easily. Riley’s end of the telephone calls. Riley writing postcards. Riley laughing uproariously as he steered the car off the road and they went jolting across rough desert in the wilds of New Mexico, with her grabbing at his arm and yelling at him.

“Become Riley,” Miranda said. “You are Riley. You are...”

* * *

Riley was barely aware of how strange it seemed to have a vampire tell him to open his eyes and look down at his own body. When she told him to reach out and purify his own blood, he did it — even though he had never been able to do any such thing before. His magic changed the shape of things. It wasn’t healing magic. But Glamour moved through his body and then into his other body, a sweet ripple of light. His other body stirred. The vampire watched the other body carefully, telling him to keep it up. He broke in two the sprig of heather he held and shifted his hands, putting one on his other body’s chest and one over its forehead. Heart and brain. His other body stretched.

“Just a little longer,” hissed the vampire. Riley concentrated, the ripple of Glamour becoming a rush.

His other body opened its eyes. “Tango?” he asked himself.

The vampire smiled. She turned Riley’s head back to look into her deep, dark eyes. “Tango. Come back.” Riley blinked.