“Xanthe, don’t forget that Horroban is a huge investor in Neveling’s enterprise,” Ferris added, apparently
slightly more concerned than his boss.
She nodded and said to Io, “Yes, well, it may be that you and Zayn will discover something of use about this perfume while you are in Goblin Town. Just keep your eyes and ears open…and
get close to Frost.
” Xanthe added: “And trust Zayn. He’ll keep you safe from the goblins while you find Horroban.”
“Will he keep me safe from Frost?
Can
he?” Io asked, wondering if her mentor understood how much emotional danger she was in. Io came from a long line of women who not only had blue eyes, but who were very vulnerable to certain types of love. Especially in relation to creatures of magic.
“You are a pretty woman, Io, and the cause is just. God will forgive you for anything you do,” Ferris answered in Xanthe’s stead.
Xanthe winced at this assessment, but didn’t contradict the priest.
Io nodded once more, not trusting herself to speak. She had said before that she wanted a chance to fight the goblins; she was being given one now, so she shouldn’t kick at the role she had been assigned. Many women were used as bait. It was her responsibility to see that Jack didn’t swallow her whole while Zayn did his job.
“Well, let’s graft some flesh,” Ferris said brightly, lifting a half-inch-long crescent moon out of the glass dish. “Where shall we start? Your left arm?”
Jack had drawn an inside straight. His random gift this trip into Goblin Town was invisibility. In a regular person this would have meant a small parlor trick of being able to make diminutive objects like coins disappear. But in a person born with one foot in the world of the arcane, it meant a whole lot more. With a little extra will, Jack could disappear himself—not just deadening his presence by erasing people’s sight of him, but muffling his scent and the sounds of his passage. Not even the goblins’ infra-sight would find him, because he could mask his body’s heat. He was like Death moving through this evil city.
The magic felt wild, a heat on his skin, a fire in his blood that knocked on his heart and brain demanding to be let in so it could take over completely. Of course, he wouldn’t let that happen, but it was pleasurable to be riding the wave of ancient
power that swelled up from beneath the ground of Motor City. That made him feel almost giddy. It made him feel invincible.
The thought gave Jack one of his rare smiles. Of course, no one could see it. Especially not the confused goblin tail who had only just crawled out of his hole and started trailing Jack through the city’s deserted streets when Jack vanished. He was a young goblin imp, not more than twenty years old. And chances were good he wouldn’t survive to see his next birthday, let alone make it to the ripe old age of two hundred that the strongest goblins achieved. Someone was going to be very angry that Jack had managed to give him the slip, and angry goblins tended to be violent.
Jack turned about slowly. Goblin Town was just waking up. Because of the goblins’ nocturnal natures, not a lot went on during the day. The place was kept up by some of the sorry humans who had become addicted to goblin fruit and stuck around so they could get a regular fix, but no activity of import happened aboveground until after the sun went down.
Of course, after dark was another matter. Goblin Town rocked when night fell. You could find a party of any perverse flavor without looking very hard.
So, what was it to be? Follow the bewildered imp back to his master and watch him get his skull caved in? Or did Jack go on to The Madhouse and catch Hille Bingel and SEXXX, and maybe pick up a little
more stray magic from the drunken club-goers?
He opted for The Madhouse. He’d seen goblins get their skulls caved in before. He’d never heard the goblin diva sing.
And Hille was supposed to be making the beast with two backs with Horroban, who was purportedly Jack’s main target on this mission. It made sense to stick close to Horroban’s lover.
“‘Behold, as goblins dark as mien and portly tyrants dyed with crime,’”
he murmured, and then laughed. Robert Louis Stevenson had understood it all. Only Jack wasn’t going to be like the wretched man in that poem. And he liked not being seen.
Zayn was descended from Gananagh, the Irish love faerie who ensnared women and kept them pining after him until they died from broken hearts. That blood had been drastically diluted over the centuries, but there was no denying that Zayn cleaned up nice when he was inclined to make the effort—which wasn’t that often, and never for Io’s benefit, once he’d figured out that she was determinedly immune to his particular charms.
Io and Zayn entered the city on foot just after sundown, the day after her meeting with Xanthe. The troll at the gate, assuming them to be human, collected their money with his prehensile toes and had them stick their hands in the shallow basin so they could receive their twelve-hour visitor spells.
Zayn drew an amazing voice that allowed him to
sing anything within the human range of hearing. It also allowed him to enchant weak-willed women—as if he needed any help there.
Io, her eyes temporarily hidden under masking contacts, drew a more useless spell. She was able to turn things blue. Admittedly, under less serious circumstances, she might have enjoyed this talent and had some fun with it. But in their present situation, she didn’t see that this was a particularly useful ability—though she supposed that it would make a convenient explanation for her eyes, if she were questioned at the club.
Of course the spells might seem useless at first, but the good news was that she and Zayn would be able to keep them for however long they remained in Goblin Town. Because of their fey blood, the usual twelve-hour magical limit didn’t apply. And all enchantment and spells were good because they could often be shaped or combined with other kinds of power. Io’s mother had taught Io the art of spell recombinance when she was young.
As per Xanthe’s suggestion, Io and Zayn were both wearing leather. Zayn’s shirt was lower cut, but Io’s heels were higher, her skirt short, and her corset more tightly laced. The fetish outfit also showed off her new birthmarks. She knew that she looked
hot
which made her feel pleased but also a bit queasy.
Though time was short, she was really hoping that they wouldn’t meet up with Jack Frost right away. She needed a night to get accustomed to the
idea that she was supposed to be a sexual lure for the probably fey mercenary. It was a flattering but ill deserved confidence of Xanthe’s that Io could play this role without any practice.
The Madhouse, a structure that was badly bent, and designed to look like a prison ruin, certainly lived up to its name. It was a great place for those with a taste for architectural decay. Io was unfazed by the urban gothic look, but she didn’t like the appearance of the iron bars that covered the building’s tiny windows. They seemed entirely too functional.
Io had heard that the place went through fifty thousand a night in booze alone when Hille and SEXXX played. Probably as much money changed hands for the purchase of things less legal. She could easily believe that fortunes were traded there every Saturday night—the band wasn’t even on stage yet and the crowd was already flying.
Lighting was uniformly lurid inside the gothic horror, and allowed everyone to look equally terrible; it was a great equalizer in this cross-species meat market. It was difficult to see where the auditorium actually ended because many of the walls were randomly decorated with mirrors, some warped, some fractured, others with strange writhing images embedded in them. Judging the actual size of the multitude gathered there was impossible, but it was overcrowded. Io was fairly certain that the owner didn’t worry too much about what the fire marshal
would have to say. Why would the marshal get any more respect than the police?
Talking to Zayn was out of the question, even had he been inclined to speak with her. They had agreed before entering the club to split up once inside. He was going to collect gossip from the ladies, and Io spells. There was a good chance that people so inebriated, would not be able to hold on to borrowed magic, and she might be able to acquire something more useful than her solo blue-crayon act.
Her contact lenses were gone, along with Zayn’s. His fractal green eyes needed to be visible for him to work his charm. It wouldn’t be a problem. His peculiarities were subtle and wouldn’t be noticed in the strobing light.
The contacts had served their purpose in deceiving the toll-taker at the city gate, but now Io was supposed to be seen and known for being something otherworldly. She was supposed to attract Jack Frost’s attention. Yet she felt very naked, being in public without her habitual disguise. Her eyes could attract more than Jack Frost, and she didn’t really trust Zayn to keep her safe if it interfered with the goals of his mission.
Time to go.
Taking a deep breath, Io used her borrowed magic to make her eyes ever brighter. She knew she had reached the right level when people began to turn their heads and stare at her. The odd goblin hand even snaked out to touch her exposed arms
and give her the small, sharp pinches that passed for compliments among their kind.
The crowd was multicolored, multispecied, and either ecstatic or terrified to lunacy about what was to come. Excitement ran through the room. But it wasn’t natural. Nerves were being stimulated with drugs, some taken voluntarily, but many probably not. It was entirely possible that something was being pumped in through the ornamental iron grates that covered the air-conditioning outlets. Madness was drifting merrily through the hazy air, and it wasn’t man-made.
In an odd way, and though she hated addicts, Io found the notion of drugs reassuring. It would have been far worse to have walked into a room humming simply with magic—big magic, not the little bits and pieces left lying about by drunken revelers. That kind of raw power was dangerous in crowds. It could cause riots and other explosions.
Io pressed between the partyers who were gearing up for their two-and-a-half-hour orgy. There were aging rockers—rail thin and almost as pasty as goblins from years of recreational drug use. There were giant-maned teenagers, too young to be there legally, but looking fresh in their muscle tees. And everywhere there was leather: braided, pierced, wrapped. Cokeheads, potheads, and poor souls addicted to worse things, they’d all come to party down in Goblin Town.
Io absorbed pieces of spells as she passed: a spell
for lighting candles, for making showers of rose petals, for being able to smell like peanut butter.
She was halfway to the raised arena, with her eye on Zayn who was rubbing up against a tall goblin female, when SEXXX finally took the stage.
Lights began to flash at a frantic number of pulses per second, and Io’s optic nerves and eardrums started to vibrate under the assault of new light and sound. For a moment she felt a jolt of vertigo and realized that a wave of something unnatural had passed through the room, carried on the sound that crested through the dancing masses. If it were a drug, then it was something cooked up by a magical being. Io was profoundly grateful for the hidden nose filters and her own natural resistance to perverted forms of magic.
SEXXX wasn’t into auditory discretion. They were loud, offensive in speech, and in Io’s opinion, strong contenders for an award for the Worst Din Ever Created Outside of a Battlefield. Hille’s voice seemed one long atonal shriek that was able to drown out the electrical guitars being plucked by long goblin teeth, fingers, and toes.
But there was a beat: the bass and drums, something primal. They pounded like a runner’s heart, and as the song progressed and listeners were drawn deeper into the veins of the music, that staccato beat became a frantic tremble of a heart filled with terror, perhaps the failing organ of some titan running for his life. It plucked at the brain and tried
to suck the listener in. People began to succumb, their eyes glazing over as they went into a sort of seizurelike trance.
Io stopped moving, unable to get any closer to the stage and the giant speakers that hurled dangerous sound her way. Whatever was moving through the room was coming directly from Hille and it was strong, probably too strong for Io even with her resistance to spells.
She looked hard at Hille Bingel, wondering for the first time who and what this creature really was.
Hille was tall for a goblin, very nearly human height. Her skin was pallid green, her hair and eyes goblin black. But she was something more than just goblin—perhaps reptilian fey, and maybe swamp witch. She had power, lots of it.
Io stared at the diva’s chest, half amused and half appalled. Hille wore a sort of crisscross harness that left two of her four breasts bare and the others only minimally covered. She supposed that it wasn’t an actual violation of the old decency code since the exposed breasts had no nipples, and that was all that was required to be covered. Yet even without nipples, the look still managed to be obscene, especially when Hille wiggled and caressed herself.
Io smiled slightly. She hadn’t expected to be amused by anything she saw or heard that night, but oddly enough, she was. She was glad for many reasons to be descended from the Welsh feys, and the lack of multiple breasts was one of them. Supernumerary
nonfunctional breasts were not appealing to her aesthetically, not to mention the cost of buying lingerie in multiple sets and having clothes custom-made.
Hille’s breasts also raised another interesting question: How many arms did Horroban have? Everyone at H.U.G had been assuming that he would have been modified to look human. But perhaps not. Maybe he still had four functional limbs.
Io began to back away from the stage and the increasingly violent gyrations of the frenzied SEXXX fans. She had only taken a few steps when she ran into something in the crowd. It wasn’t anything that she could see, or smell, or hear, but she felt him.
Him!
Jack Frost. And he
was
fey, his dark magic sparked over her skin in a way immediately recognizable and alarming. It was natural magic—the kind to which she was vulnerable.
“Jack?” she called, goose bumps spilling down her arms, but he had already pulled away.
Io turned and began to follow the magic trail, pushing for the outside door, when her arms were taken in a firm two-handed grip. She spun about to look into the face of one of the club bouncers.
She didn’t know the troll’s name, and couldn’t very well ask it with the noise whirling around them in a deafening tornado, but she managed a smile and to raise a questioning brow.
He jerked his head toward a mirrored wall, and Io saw a small door standing open with another
zoot-suited bouncer with a gray fedora waiting just inside. His double-breasted coat was open and revealed double holsters. Apparently, impossibly, both sets of arms were right-handed.
Uneasy, Io nodded and allowed the troll to lead her toward the mirrored door and the tunnel beyond. Though she was not happy to be separated from Zayn, it was a relief when the door finally swung closed behind her and the sound from the stage was mostly blocked.
The passageway led downhill and there were no windows for a hundred feet. Finally there was a series of doors to break up the stony monotony, but Io and the trolls didn’t stop at any of them until the tunnel reached its end.
There Troll One rapped on the thick wood panel, and hearing a rasping grunt, pushed open the door. When Io hesitated, she was gently propelled into what appeared to be the manager’s office.