Dead of Night (Ghosts & Magic #1) (7 page)

She looked like she actually cared. "Just a minute."
 

She stepped out from behind the desk and walked past me to a door on the left, giving me a whiff of fruit and spices. It wasn't perfume, elves just smelled that way, even halves. I took a deep breath to gather it in. For the dying, it was like taking a hit of life.

Of all the new humans, elves were the most integrated into the society of the now 'traditional' humans, to the point that half-elves were becoming somewhat common. Others, like the orcs, goblins, ogres, and other so-called leathers were still fighting for equal rights, fair job opportunities, and all of the socioeconomic bullshit that had plagued the prior minorities for so long. It was amazing how quickly that racism had been forgotten once a few new races had started manifesting.
 

In the beginning it had been much worse, with a whole lot of 'cides. Suicide, fratricide, infanticide, genocide. Until the Houses had put an end to it, even going so far as to force the major governments to parcel out land where the leathers that didn't want to deal with all the crap could do their own thing. That move had ended the threat of open warfare, and limited the problems to simple hate and segregation.
 

We never learned.

She came back in. "He'll see you now."

"Thank you, Miss..."

"Salazar."

"Miss Salazar. I don't deserve your kindness."

Her eyes were soft and sincere. "You look like you could use all the kindness you can get." She flashed me another smile, gave me another fruit and spice walk-by, and motioned towards the door.

I pushed through a frosted glass door into an open space filled with low-walled cubicles and computers. A light from a flat monitor provided the path to Mr. Clean. I could see him already, a small-statured man with a bald head and a subtle green pigmentation to his thick skin.

"Daaé," he said when I reached him. He turned his head from the monitor, the screen filled with numbers. He stood and stuck out his hand. "My name is Sal, it's a pleasure."

It might have been a test, but unlike some, I didn't hesitate to shake. "Thanks for seeing me."

"No need to thank me, no need at all. I don't mean to be rude, but I'd like to get this business concluded so I can get back to more important matters. I would have made you wait, but my assistant Gloria took pity on you. Do you have the card?"

Pity? I held myself in check and found the card in my pocket. He pulled it from my grip.
 

"I'm sending it through about two dozen accounts, so it will take a couple of days for the funds to show up."

Great. I might be dead before I saw the statement. "How do you know where to deliver it?"

"Don't worry about that, pal." His fingers flew along the keys, and screens flashed one after another. Then he put the card in front of it and scanned it. "Done."

Two million sitting in our account in two days. All I had to do now was finish the job, and time wasn't on my side. "The kill team can track the card's path back to you. How do I know you won't snitch if they come for me?"

He turned his chair back to me. "Who said I wouldn't snitch? This protection is only good as long as you finish the job. I've got a business to run, and I run it by misdirecting the Houses, not misleading them. Now, if you don't mind." He waved his hand, shooing me away.
 

I stood there for a few more seconds, but Sal didn't notice. He'd already put his attention back on the monitor, and was flitting through screens faster than my eyes could follow.
 

"You still here?" he asked, without turning his head.
 

I thought I should say something, but what would be the point? I turned and left.

When I reached Miss Salazar, she looked at me with a sad expression. "It's just the way he is."

I nodded, but didn't say anything.

Pity?

CHAPTER SEVEN

No rest for the wicked.

"Boring night," Evan said, the minute I opened the door to the van and slid back in behind the wheel. I pulled the door shut and looked over at Danelle.

"That was pleasant."

She laughed. "Clean? It's just his personality, but can you blame him? Goblins don't have it easy, even among the other leathers."

"Next time you can watch Wendy Wheelchair, and I'll go take care of business." Evan opened the steamer trunk and tossed the Bushmaster back inside. "I'm going to get rusty, as little action as I've been seeing lately. Either use me or let me sleep, but this guard duty bullshit is getting old."

I wasn't in the mood for Evan's mouth. "Stand down, captain."
 

He groaned through his teeth while he climbed back into the cooler. It didn't matter how much he hated me, he wasn't in charge. "I hope you die before you need me again." He pulled the lid closed, and I cut the cord.

"The money's being transferred as we speak, minus four hundred thousand, but it won't show up for a couple of days." I started the van and pulled away from the curb, out onto the empty streets. Unlike Evan, I was grateful for the quiet.

"One less thing to worry about," Danelle said. "Now we just need to find a new place to live."

"You aren't making the trip to the coast with me?"
 

She gave me the 'stop being a dumb ass' look. "What use would I be to you? I can roll this thing pretty quick, but all it takes is a flight of stairs and I'm out of the action. Let's just find somewhere for me to hole up, and I'll see if I can dig up anything about what it is you're going to try to steal."

"Fair enough. There's plenty of lousy hotels outside of O'Hare. Just pick one that doesn't have valet. I don't think they'd like the surprises in the back."

She found my cell in the glove compartment and hit the internet. I navigated us out of the Loop and made my way to I-90 while she searched for a good rate.

"How about the Best Western?"
 

"Free continental breakfast?"

"And free wi-fi."

"Jackpot."

By the time we pulled into the parking lot a little bit later, Dannie had already managed to score me an executive coach seat on a four o'clock flight to Connecticut. She'd also arranged for me to pick up a car there.
 

"I don't know what I'd do without you," I said, as I opened the passenger side and helped her with her chair. In truth, I did know, but it was a ritual we'd started whenever she would help me arrange a job.

She smiled and put her hand on my cheek. "You'd be dead. In a ditch. Or maybe an alley." She released my face and vaulted from the van to the chair with practiced ease.
 

Her answer wasn't too far from the truth. After all, she'd found me half-dead in a gutter.
 

"Can I help you?" Our rep's name was Jonathan. He was a heavyset man with a goatee and a light wisp of brown hair. When he looked at me, it was with an odd mix of fascination and disgust. I thought it was ironic, considering that he was killing himself on purpose.
 

"I made a reservation online," Danelle said, getting his attention. "Daaé."

He ran his fingers along the touchscreen, doing some turns and taps. "Credit card?"

She reached into the lip of her bra and grabbed her plastic, resting it on her index finger and thumb. She flicked it up, flipping it so that it twirled end over end and landed cleanly on the desk.

"Wow, nice." Jonathan picked up the card.

"You've been practicing," I said.

"A little."

Jonathan swiped it, did some more random tapping, and then prepped a couple of room keys for us. "Room 207. The elevator is right around the corner. Go up, follow the signs." He handed me the card-keys and the credit card, and looked over at Danelle. "Are you sure you don't-"

"She's sure," I said, cutting him off. It was obvious to anyone that Dannie had no legs, but that didn't mean she liked being treated that way. A handicap room would have been easier to manage, but she wasn't interested in easy. She wanted to live her life the way she had before, in every way she could.
 

I could understand that, even if I couldn't do the same.

"Okay. Enjoy your stay."

I nodded my thanks, collected our luggage, and followed Dannie to the elevators.
 

"You've only got three hours before your flight," she said while she rolled on board for the short ride up.

"I thought I'd go over the kinetics a few more times. I need to synchronize."

"That's a good idea."

We found our room and made our way inside. It was a standard three-star hotel room, with a queen bed, a writing desk, an armoire with a flat-screen, coffeemaker - the usual. It hadn't been renovated in a while.

"Home sweet home. You better make it back. I don't think I can stand being stuck in this place for more than a few days. The colors are awful."

"Do you say that about me?" I wore black ninety percent of the time. I wore gray the other ten. Colorful threads didn't look good on me. They tended to accentuate the pallor. "You know, if I die, you still get to keep the money."

"Only if I can convince the kill team that I had nothing to do with it. What do you think the odds are that they'll even give me the chance?"

"I already feel guilty."

She rolled over to her luggage, lifting and heaving it onto the end of the bed. "I'm not trying to make you feel guilty. This is death or death for you, I get that, and I hitched my wagon to yours a long time ago. We're in the shit together."
 

She unzipped her bag and pushed past the clothes to where the laptop was resting. She pulled it out and wheeled it over to the desk. I didn't try to move the chair out of the way for her. I knew she'd take care of it. It wasn't that she'd never accept help, but only if she knew you would have done it even if she were still fully operational.

Her upper body was strong, and she lifted the desk chair in one arm and spun about in a tight three-sixty, dropping it next to the table. She replaced it at the desk, opening the cover of the laptop and navigating back into the kinetics. We watched the dots a couple more times, and then started going over my route.

I found my other watch in another pocket. It wasn't the same one I had used to time my assault on the hulk twins; this one was more modern, with a curved, full-color screen and a buffet of apps installed on it. I opened up the timer app and reset it. I preferred the old-fashioned kind of watch because I didn't need to worry about the lithium running out of ions in the middle of a run. In this case, I needed the extra features.

It took another hour and a half and dozens of repetitions to get a clean plot of the inception, from the moment I snuck over the ten foot stone wall at exactly 10:31pm, to the second I put my hand on the prize at 10:39:08.
 

 
Eight minutes going in. It was a long time. I wasn't going to tell Dannie, but it made me nervous. So much could happen in eight minutes. So much could go wrong, and I had bet both our lives on it. Of course, she wasn't the one being threatened from the great beyond. Remembering what Rayon said gave me a new chill.

"That's it," I said, hitting the screen and setting the last timer. Once I started the countdown, it would vibrate on my wrist as each checkpoint was reached. If I hadn't made it... I didn't want to think about not making it.

"You still have a little time." She closed the lid of the laptop and rolled over to the window. I had parked in a good spot, leaving the van visible from our room. She wasn't looking for that though. She was looking to see if we were already being tailed.

"Anything?"

She reached up and lowered the blinds, closing them tight. "Not so far. Hey, did you see the news this morning? There's some Senator in Iowa pushing a meta registration bill."

"This again?"
 

In the sixty years since the reversal, and the forty since the Houses had smoothed the brave new world over, there had been what seemed like a bi-annual effort to force 'metas' to declare themselves. That was the fancy term the politicians used for wizards. The line of thinking was that we were inherently dangerous, because we could create destruction seemingly out of thin air. First, for most of us it didn't work like that. Second, guns were still a whole lot more dangerous than users were the vast majority of the time, and not everyone who owned a gun was subject to the scrutiny that we tended to fall under.

Dannie rolled her eyes. "The Houses will get it lobbied out again. Personally, I think she's just looking to line her pockets a bit more."

"She should introduce a subhuman equal rights bill if she just wants to get someone to pay for her next trip to Bora Bora."
 

There was no end of the groups that wanted to keep the leathers down and out, to go with the few that wanted to welcome them in. On one hand, I could understand the discomfort with having your CEO be a ten foot tall, muscular, greenish brute with long teeth jutting out from the corner of their mouth. It was a little intimidating. On the other, they were people. They looked different, and they had varying intelligence levels depending on their types, but we had the same origins. Some, like the ogres, even had their own specific usefulness. Fukishima would still be melting down if it hadn't been for them and their immunity to radiation.

We fell into a somewhat uncomfortable silence. We were trying to fill the gap while we waited for my flight. The fact was we were both nervous as hell about it. I'd done sneak and grabs before. So had she. We were good at them. This... This was the major leagues. This was serious business. If it wasn't for the fact that it was too late to go back, way too late, I would have been really tempted to call it off.

Dannie turned on the television. "I hate waiting on a job."

I flopped down on the bed with my jacket still on, while she flipped channels until she found some late-night news. We got past the commercials for the latest invention in slow cooking, what to do if you have diabetes, and class action lawsuit notices. It faded to a pretty young thing in a short, tight business suit.