“His father, actually,” Bethany said.
Kaldar felt the first hint of excitement. He was right; there was a family, and they were in this theft up to their eyeballs. Alex was probably too far gone to care, but they cared. They had something to lose. That meant he could lean on them.
Everyone had a lever . . .
While his mind processed and calculated, his lips were moving. “Just between you and me, did Alex’s father strike you as a man who can simply drop forty thousand dollars on this marble counter and walk away?”
“I can’t say.” The receptionist leaned back, but he read the answer in her eyes. “It’s not proper.”
“Who will know?” Kaldar leaned closer and made a show of glancing around. “I don’t see anyone, do you?” His voice dropped into a conspiratorial, intimate half whisper. “So just between you and me, he looked like a man who hunts for spare change in his couch.”
Bethany blinked, big eyes opened wide.
“You have to ask yourself, Bethany, where does a man like that get this kind of money. He borrows it, of course. No bank would give him a loan, so he has to turn to family.” Kaldar smiled magnanimously.
Understanding crept into Bethany’s eyes. “Oh.”
“All I want is to make sure that I’ve made a correct investment in Alex’s future. I’d like to speak to him and let him tell me if he is treated well and that his needs are being seen to. I promise I carry no contraband.” He raised his hands palms out. “You may search me if you’d like.”
He slipped just enough suggestion into that last phrase to make Bethany blush a little. “That won’t be necessary.” She pointed to the right, where a group of blocky leather chairs and couches surrounded a glass cube of a table. “Please wait here.”
Kaldar turned on his heel and clacked his way across the floor to the leather chairs. A hollowed-out wooden dish, shaped almost precisely like a canoe, sat on the table. The canoe held three spheres about the size of a large grapefruit made of smoky glass shot through with veins of gold. Odd decoration. He pictured himself swiping a sphere, its comforting weight heavy in his hand. In a pinch, he could use it to shatter the windowpane and give himself a head start if he had to leave in a hurry.
Two men emerged from the side hallway. One was middle-aged and blond, going gray, with the slick, clean look of someone accustomed to dealing with people of money and making a good living from it. The other was Alex Callahan. Tall, lanky, with longish hair on the crossroads of dishwater blond and faded red, Callahan walked oddly, as if he didn’t fully trust the ground to support his weight. His cheekbones looked sharp enough to cut, his cheeks caved into his face, and his neck, left bare by the collar of a too-big T-shirt, stuck out, thin, long, and bony. A mean, arrogant sneer bent his lips. His eyes radiated a manic energy and contempt. It was the look that said, “You think I’m shit because I’m a junkie, but guess what? I am better than you.”
Kaldar had seen that same look on the faces of spoiled addicts before. This wasn’t a desperate soul in need of help debasing himself for a fix. This was a man surfing the edge of violence, who saw himself as a victim and the rest of the world as owing him.
Callahan was too far gone. Threats wouldn’t work. He simply didn’t care about himself or his family.
“Cousin!” Kaldar grinned at Alex.
Callahan didn’t miss a beat. “Didn’t expect to see you here, cousin.”
The older handler held out his hand. “I’m Dr. Leem. I want to assure you that Alex is being well looked after. Isn’t that right, Alex?”
“Sure,” Callahan said.
“Let’s sit down?” Leem suggested.
They took their places on the leather furniture, and Leem launched into a long overview of the facilities. Kaldar pretended to listen, watching Callahan. Callahan watched him back. The file back in Louisiana said he was twenty-eight; he looked forty-eight. His foot tapped the floor; he picked on the skin around his nails; he rolled his mouth into different variations of his sneer, which was probably semipermanent. He’d been in the facility for over forty-eight hours. They had detoxed him. Alex Callahan was sober, and he hated it.
Finally, Kaldar raised his hand.
“I’m sorry to interrupt, Doctor, but my time is limited. I’m due in LA for a meeting. Would you mind giving Alex and me some privacy? This won’t take long.”
“Of course.” Leem rose and moved to the counter, keeping them in plain view.
Callahan leaned back, bony knees straining the loose fabric of his jeans. “What do you want, dear cousin?”
Kaldar flicked his fingers. A small clear packet appeared between his index and middle finger as if by magic. Inside the packet, a small purple flower spread three petals. Bromedia. The most potent herbal hallucinogenic the Weird had to offer. The purest of highs. He’d procured it during one of the jobs he’d done for the Mirror. It involved a caravan of illegal contraband trading between the Edge and the Weird, and in the chaos of the arrest, nobody ever realized that some of the illegal goods had gone missing.
Callahan’s eyes fixed on the packet, on fire with greed. Kaldar closed his fingers for a moment and opened them, showing Callahan an empty hand. The packet with the flower had vanished.
“How did you get out of Adriana?” Kaldar asked.
“I ported us. That’s my thing,” Callahan said. “Can only do it once in a while and about twenty feet tops. It went sour, the Hand’s freaks were closing in, so I got me and my old man out of the square, then we ran.”
A teleporter. Kaldar had run across them before—it was a rare talent and very useful, but teleporters could only move a few feet at a time, and most of them couldn’t do any magic for a day or two after.
“What happened to your third partner?”
“Audrey had left before we got to Adriana.”
A woman? Of course.
Fate had decided to have a little fun with him. Very well, he could take a joke.
“She said she was done.” Callahan shrugged. “My dear sister doesn’t care for me very much.”
I wonder why.
“Where is the box?”
“Don’t know, don’t care. Old man found a buyer somewhere. All I know, he dropped me off here to ‘get clean.’” Callahan’s voice dripped with derision. “That’s the last I’ve seen him.”
“Where would your father go to hide?”
Callahan rocked back and laughed, a dry humorless chuckle. “You won’t find him. Old man’s a legend. They call him Slippery Callahan. He’s got a hideout in every settlement in the Edge. Anyway, he isn’t who you want. You need Audrey.”
“I’m listening,” Kaldar said.
Callahan leaned forward. “The old man is good at planning. That’s his shtick. But to pull off the heist, you go to Audrey. She’s the picker. Any lock, any door, she can open it like that.” He snapped his fingers. “She doesn’t like me because of some business back, but the old man, him she hates. Daddy issues, blah-blah-blah. My sister is anal. She’d know who he sold it to, and she would be the one to get it back for you.”
Whenever a woman got involved, things instantly became more complicated. Kaldar flipped the packet of Bromedia back into view. “Where can I find Audrey?”
“That’s the funny part. She’s up in Washington, near some town called Olympia. The old man said she’d gone law and order on us. Works for some PI firm under her real name. Can you believe that shit?” Callahan laughed again.
Kaldar rose and held out his hand. Callahan got up, shook it, and Kaldar slipped the packet into his fingers. Callahan palmed it with practiced ease and let go. The whole thing took a second at most.
“Half a petal in hot water,” Kaldar murmured. “Any more, and you’ll regret it.”
“Don’t school an expert,” Callahan told him.
Kaldar headed for the door, nodding at Bethany and Leem in passing. There was no need to exchange threats and promise to return in case he was lied to. Callahan had been around long enough to know the score.
“THIS wasn’t one of my better ideas,” George murmured.
“Yes, but it’s fun.” Jack strode down the street. The sun shone bright, and he squinted at it. Kaldar’s scent floated on the breeze, spiced with the deep, resin-saturated aroma of eucalyptus. “When was the last time you’ve had fun, George?” He stretched “George” out the way Adrianglian blueblood girls did.
George looked sour. “I’m too busy making sure that you don’t kill anybody or get killed to have fun.”
“Blah-blah-blah.”
Around them, tan, white, and pale brown stucco buildings lined the street. They passed a gas station, followed by a furniture store, and some sort of restaurant emanating a smoky, charred-meat smell that made him drool, and now they marched along a low stone wall, behind which houses rose, each with a small square of a yard.
Jack stopped. Kaldar’s scent lingered at the curb and vanished, replaced by the bitter stink of gasoline, rubber, and a foul burned smell. He shook his head, trying to clear his nose.
“What’s the matter with you?” George asked.
“The fumes. All that time in the Weird with no cars made my nose extrasensitive. He got into a car here.”
“Which way did it go?”
Jack puzzled over the faint marks of rubber on the pavement. “Right.”
George surveyed the intersection up ahead. “That would’ve put him into the right-turn lane. Come on.”
“Why are we following him?” Jack trotted down the street. When he first mentioned that he wanted to go to the Broken, he’d expected George to shoot him down, but his brother jumped on the chance. At first they had to follow Kaldar to get to the boundary, which made sense. The crossing had been harder than he remembered. The magic squeezed him and ground, not wanting to let go, but, finally, he won and made it through into the Broken. Then they followed Kaldar’s scent so they wouldn’t get lost, which made sense, too. But the trail led them deeper and deeper into the city, and now Kaldar had gotten into a car. They were still wearing the Weird’s clothes: he wore a dark brown shirt, George wore a white shirt with loose wide sleeves, and they both sported brown practice leggings that passed for sweatpants in the Weird.
“I’m fourteen,” George said. “You’re twelve. Gaston is only five years older than me.”
“Yeah?”
“Gaston gets to run around with William and do cool shit.”
Jack gave him a sideways glance. “Do cool what?”
“Do cool shit.”
Jack peered at George.
“What?”
“Waiting to see if your face will crack after saying ‘shit,’ Cursed Prince.”
“Whatever.” George waved his hand.
Jack turned the corner. Ahead, a long street rolled into the distance, bordered on the right by a tall, dense hedge. The scent of the car continued up the street. Jack followed it.
“The point is, Gaston fights the Hand, he gets weapons, and he hasn’t spent a day stuffed into a boarding school,” George said.
“You like school.”
George stopped and gave him an icy look. “I don’t.”
Jack turned on the ball of his foot to face George. “You rule that damn school.” While he could do no right.
“I know the rules, and I follow them. It doesn’t mean I like it. I can’t just punch everyone who calls me Edge Trash, because both of us can’t screw up all the time. The more you throw your fists around, the less freedom I have to make mistakes.”
Oh, really?
“Exactly how is it my fault?”
“We’re the two brothers from the Edge. When the bluebloods look at us, they lump us together. If we both screw up, then they’ll completely despise us.”
“And this way they just despise me.” Jack stopped. A short side street sliced through the hedge. Through the break, he could see a parking lot. Whatever Kaldar drove, he had taken it in there. Why steal a car to drive it only a mile?
Jack turned into the parking lot. George followed. Rows of cars greeted them. To the left, five older boys loitered on the edge of the lot.
“Yes, please, do feel sorry for yourself.” George rolled his eyes. “Oh, poor Jack. Oh, he just doesn’t understand.”
Jack growled.
“When he grabs a guy by his hair and smashes his face into the wall, he is just reacting to being bullied. He is sensitive.”
Jack spun and launched a quick jab, aiming for George’s stomach. George blocked and danced aside.
“And then he runs and hides in his room, and his poor sister has to go and take his plate to him because he is brooding there . . .”
Jack snapped a quick hook. George dodged, and the blow whistled past his chin.
“. . . Crying into his pillow . . .”
Jack veered left, right, rocking on the balls of his feet, and sank a quick powerful punch. George saw it, but too late. All he could do was turn in to it, and Jack connected with his brother’s shoulder.
Ha! Landed one.
And then the heel of George’s left hand slammed into his nose. Jack staggered back. Ow.
“That’s right, solve all your problems with violence.”
“Don’t worry, I won’t hit your pretty face.” Jack stood on his toes and bowed, twisting his hands as expected before you asked a girl to dance. “We wouldn’t want to mar that delicate beau—”
George’s fist slammed into his face. Pain exploded in his jaw. The world blinked. He locked his fingers on George’s wrist, jerked his foot up into his brother’s stomach, and rolled back, heaving George over him. George slapped the asphalt with his back. The air burst out of him in a loud gasp. Jack rolled up, clamped George’s right arm between his legs, scissoring it, and leaned over George’s torso with his back, pinning him down, right forearm across the windpipe.
George squeezed out some hoarse noises.
Jack leaned closer and grinned. “Hi. How are you doing?”
George tried to jab the fingers of his free left hand into Jack’s neck. Jack ducked out of the way. He could still remember, five years ago, when George was dying, and he fought all of his fights for him. Jack had the upper hand now, but there was a second or two back there when, if they had been playing for real, George could’ve won. He had been practicing, and not just with the rapier. Jack had to figure out what George was doing and do that, or he’d be left behind.