0.5-The Asylum Interviews: Bronx: An Asylum Tales Short Story (5 page)

C
HAPTER
F
IVE

I
sucked in a deep breath as I stepped away from the back of the parlor and approached my car. The night air was cool and clean from the shower that had passed through just a few minutes earlier, wiping away the toxic fumes of the city. Cars rushed by with the soft shushing sound as the tires sliced through puddles and down damp pavement. Gravel crunched and scraped under Bronx’s heavy feet as he waited at the passenger side door of the SUV.

He arched one thick brow at me. “Rough day?”

“Tattooing?” I snorted. “No. Didn’t open until eight and I closed at ten. Three small tattoos all day. Parker, on the other hand, was a pain in the ass. By the way, thanks for dropping off the food.”

I discovered that while Parker may have been feeling full from his Jill-sized Happy Meal, the incubus was still a nervous eater. After being sent for coffee and pastries, I was forced to send Bronx out after dark for Indian takeout, greasy burgers, and something from Brownie Delights. I didn’t ask or look. I had no problems with the fey, but I had heard enough tales to know better than to eat anything made by them. Parke was now settled in with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and a pile of old magazines.

Jumping behind the wheel of my beat-up SUV, I shoved the key in the ignition and sat there, my mind swirling. Bronx clicked his seat belt in place beside me. The troll was well over six feet and weighed more than three hundred pounds of what I was willing to bet was pure muscle. He could make any space suddenly feel small.

“Are we really planning to go there?” Bronx asked once he was settled in his seat.

I heaved a heavy breath as I looked out the windshield. There wasn’t any choice. I needed something to counteract the potion embedded in Parker’s skin so the rest of us could move forward with our lives with him in it. I reached down and turned the ignition key, causing the SUV to rumble to life. “Yeah, we’re going to see the Vestal Virgins and we’re going to borrow some of their tears.”

As we pulled out of the small parking lot and headed down the street toward the interstate, I flipped on the radio, jumping from station to station as I tried to find something to calm my nerves. Bronx didn’t seem to be doing much better as he shifted in his seat, his thick fingers absently drumming on the door.

“I’m assuming that you made some calls, tried the shops,” Bronx said.

I snorted. My hand returned to the steering wheel as I finally settled on a rock station that was playing a song I didn’t much care for, but I knew something better would come along in time. “Before you arrived, I spent more than an hour on the phone. I called every supply shop within a one-hundred-mile radius and came up with nothing. I even called a handful of other artists that I’m acquainted with in hopes that someone had it, but I struck out.”

“What about the black market? I thought there was a . . . seller in the immediate area.” Bronx seemed hesitant to suggest it and I just smiled. For the most part, the troll appeared to be on the straight and narrow, which I could appreciate, but I didn’t know of any successful tattoo artist who didn’t know a black market connection or two so he could get the best and rarest of goods. This business wasn’t just about providing an excellent piece of permanent skin art. It was also about giving the client an edge in this world filled with creatures that had unique abilities and skills. And sometimes you needed to hit up some illegal connections to get the job done.

“I exchanged some messages with the seller I frequently use,” I said, shoving my left hand through my short brown hair, making it stand on end as I pulled at it. “He didn’t have any on hand since the tears must be relatively fresh to retain their potency. He told me he could get some in a day or two. Unfortunately, his price was too steep. I thought I would try to get them myself first before caving to his demands.” Chang was a wily son of a bitch, skilled at getting more than his pound of flesh for everything he sold. The trade he had wanted to make was not something I was comfortable with.

We fell silent as we drove out of Low Town and along the gray concrete strip that cut through the forestland that surrounded the city. The thick swath of trees that surrounded Low Town extended nearly fifty miles in all directions before giving way to several strips of farmland and the next town. Nearly every creature imaginable lived within the confines of Low Town, but many of the fey preferred to slip into the surrounding woods as if longing for the chance to shed the cloak of civility so that they could return to their roots.

I watched as the trees blurred by my window as I rushed into the forest, feeling only moderately protected by the heavy steel frame of my car. It had been a long time since the last roadside attack, but most people still didn’t feel comfortable leaving the safety of their respective towns at night. I hadn’t brought a weapon, but I tried to reassure myself that I did have a large troll sitting next to me. Large and frighteningly strong, Bronx could take on most things that could be thrown in our direction. Of course, I still had my magic, but a big part of staying hidden meant not using my magic in front of another person. I had also promised Gideon no more magic while dealing with the Parker problem.

My gaze strayed to my companion to find that his expression was tight and his shoulders were taut. He didn’t look happy about leaving Low Town and less thrilled about being in the open forestland, which seemed odd to me.

“You good?” I asked after looking down at my speedometer. I wasn’t speeding too much so I didn’t think it was my driving that was making him nervous.

“Fine,” he bit out.

“Sounds like it,” I murmured. I paused, waiting to see if he would comment further, but Bronx remained silent. “I’ve never cared for leaving town. You grow up with other kids telling you every kind of horrific faery tale imaginable, knowing that most of them have some kernel of truth to them. It really is no wonder that most people don’t ever leave the town they’re born in.”

“I was born in the Bronx,” the troll volunteered after I ran out of things to ramble about. “Moved to Low Town about twenty years ago.”

“Then Bronx isn’t your real name? It’s a nickname?”

“It’s my birth name. Trolls are named after the places in which they are born.”

My face scrunched up as I mentally digested this unexpected bit of information. I had only spoken to one or two other trolls in my entire life and I hadn’t caught their names. Truth was there wasn’t a lot known about trolls because they didn’t tend to be very talkative. Most people thought that they just weren’t very bright and tended to avoid them because they weren’t pleasing to the eye like elves and were frighteningly strong like ogres.

“So, there could be several other trolls running around with the name Bronx,” I said.

“I would imagine so, but then there are other humans running around with the name Gage, correct?”

“Probably. But do you also have siblings with the same name as you?”

“No, I’m an only child. Most trolls have only one child.”

“Really? Why?”

“The mother tends to eat the spares.”

I jerked the wheel as I twisted around to look at him in shock. I had heard of animals sometimes eating their young, but never another race that I actually spoke to and worked with. My mouth hung open as I struggled to recover and say something that was coherent and not overly insulting to his people when I heard him softly chuckling next to me. I caught sight of the huge grin on Bronx’s face out of the corner of my eye. He was teasing me.

“Fucking asshole! That wasn’t funny,” I grumbled, slowing down the speed of the SUV so I didn’t kill us in case something ran across the road in the dark.

“Sorry, it’s just that humans tend to believe the worst about trolls,” Bronx said in a smooth, even voice, showing that he wasn’t in the least angry about the fact that I believed him. His shoulders slumped slightly as the tension that had hummed through his large body dissipated.

“Are you really surprised considering the world we live in? The only things that humans seem to know about trolls are that they are big, strong, scary, and frequently violent.” I ticked off each item on the fingers of my right hand as I released the steering wheel. “You’re not exactly the most talkative group.”

“I’ll agree with all that,” Bronx said with a small smile. “We’re long-lived like a lot of the other races, but not particularly fast healers. We’re also solitary. We don’t live in clans so it’s sometimes hard to find a mate, even if it is just for the purposes of procreation. And even if you do find a temporary mate, it’s not easy to conceive, so most trolls don’t have siblings.”

I slouched in my seat, leaning my head against my left hand while resting my elbow on the door. I couldn’t imagine living like that. All of my earliest memories were crowded with thoughts of my older brother and younger sister. There had been other children who were human as well as some of the other races who attended my elementary school. All my life, I had been surrounded by others, particularly of my own race. Even while I was stuck in the Ivory Towers with the warlocks and witches, I never felt alone—just isolated. I couldn’t imagine what it might have been like growing up as a troll without others like myself around.

“Sounds . . . lonely.”

“There’s an old saying that holds some truth: there’s only one thing more annoying than a human,” he started, his voice a deep rumble. My head popped up and I looked over at him, my heart giving an erratic little beat as I waited for him to finish. “And that’s other trolls.”

“Oh,” I mumbled.

“Don’t feel bad for me, Gage. I don’t miss the company of trolls. Never have.”

We fell into a comfortable silence, listening to the evening DJ drone on about upcoming concerts, local pub crawls, and updates on traffic congestion for the evening commute. About an hour outside of Low Town I turned off on a lonely road that wound up a hill, rising above the forest as the trees started to thin out. As we crested the hill, we were stopped at a two-story wrought-iron gate. One man walked around to my side as I rolled down the window. A second man stood a few feet away from the front passenger side tire; a shotgun was pointed directly at Bronx’s head. To his credit, the troll looked completely unperturbed, his attention on the man approaching me.

“What’s your business?” the man demanded. He remained a couple feet away from me, a gun drawn but not pointed at me. On his waist, he wore a sword, while several other knives were stashed about his body. Bullets weren’t effective against everything that you might run across, but I didn’t know of any creature that could come back from having its head cut off.

“My name is Gage Powell. I called earlier today. I’ve got an appointment with Aemilia.”

His eyebrows jumped up in surprise at the mention of Aemilia. “Identification.” I tried to ignore his reaction, despite the fluttering of nerves in my stomach, as I reached into my back pocket and pulled out my wallet. I handed him my driver’s license and waited as he checked it against a little sheet of paper he had pulled out of his pocket. He handed it back, then stared at my companion. “What about him?”

“He’s my assistant. It’s already been cleared with Aemilia.”

“Yeah,” the guard drawled as he stepped back and waved for us to pull forward as some hidden guard flipped the switch for the gate to open. “Good luck with that.”

I rolled up the window against the cool night air as I drove through the gate and continued up the path. The asphalt road quickly turned to thick gravel, filling the car with the sound of crunching over the murmur of radio that played in the background. Bronx leaned forward and turned off the chatter before shifting in his seat to look at me.

“Did I hear you correctly? Did you request a meeting with Aemilia?”

“Yeah,” I mumbled. Bronx wasn’t the only one questioning my sanity and I didn’t blame him. I was thinking I was pretty crazy too. Aemilia was the head of the local order of Vestal Virgins and believed to be the most powerful and most dangerous. If you were crazy enough to seek them out, then you damn well hoped you didn’t get stuck with her.

The Vestal Virgins weren’t what most people thought they were. They weren’t a bunch of young, nubile virgins lounging about in white togas as they waited for orders from the gods. They started out as chaste little human girls, plucked from some of the local blue-blood families, or just families with a sizable wad of cash. But what waited for us at the top of the hill was no longer human.

Vessels for bodiless creature that fed off the dark spots on the souls of other creatures, the Vestal Virgins were possessed upon reaching puberty and spent the rest of their lives collecting and protecting the secrets of others. In the Roman Empire, they had been the most trusted of citizens and highly regarded. They were the keepers of state secrets and important legal documents, and even the final judge on accused traitors of the empire. Now people went to them to hold their secrets, because many believed that the Virgins could lift away the weight of the secrets as well as the guilt. Of course, the problem was trying to tell them just one dark secret. Supposedly if you were caught in the grasp of an older, powerful Virgin, she could pull all your secrets free, leaving you hollow and empty.

The Vestal Virgins could keep all this power and strength so long as they remained chaste. A breached body was an unclean body. The spirit would flee the body and the Virgin would die. Aemilia was one of the oldest Virgins and head of the order. To reach that peak, she would have had to remain chaste the longest, making her tears the most powerful. Exactly what I needed to wipe away the effect of the potion over Parker.

As we turned a final curve in the drive, we came upon a large mansion with gleaming white columns that seemed to glow in the flickering firelight cast by the half-dozen iron sconces that lined the front of the house. All the tall windows were bright with yellow light, framed by curtains that had been pulled aside. It felt as if the whole house was waiting for our arrival despite the late hour.

“Gage, I can talk to her for you,” Bronx offered as I threw the car in park in front of the building. “This is my mess, my mistake. I can collect the tears.”