Jinn and Juice (16 page)

“It’s a deal,” the jinni said before I could interrupt.

I swore and our guest grinned broadly. Oz may have thought he was using a casual expression, but in reality he’d just made a promise next to a magical circle, which meant he couldn’t renege without serious consequences.

“I’m looking for a girl named Tamina,” Oz said, speaking slowly in order to word his question carefully. “Tell me whatever you can about her current whereabouts.”

I felt a small swell of magic as the jinni pulled on his own reserves, careful not to touch any of Pittsburgh’s tainted juice. Those red eyes shut, the dense smoke of his body became even more opaque, until the magic was released with a faint pop.

“I can’t see anything in this miasma of a city,” the jinni said, with a frown. “But I did see a place where you can find answers. A house, with a Man Hole.”

“A house with a manhole?” Oz repeated, confused. The jinni pointed a swirling finger at Charlie.

“The sparkly man connected to that one knows the place. That is all I can ascertain,” he said. “Now release me.”

And just like that, the circle gave up our jinni.

“Hey!” Oz cried, but he was already gone.

We stared at the empty circle for a few moments, until Yulia spoke. “Well, that was a waste of time,” she said.

“Not necessarily,” I said, trying to think through where my brain was leading. “We know that Kouros is alive, first of all.”

“And trapped somewhere,” said Charlie, musing.

“Which he would not be happy about,” I said. Then it hit me.

“Someone tried to call something from Sideways,” I said, remembering our earlier conversation. “Something big… something powerful. Something so big and powerful they opened the Bridge wide enough to bring over a ton of fodden and a bugbear.”

Charlie nodded. “That is a possibility,” he said.

“So what if it was Kouros?” I said. “If the jinni was telling the truth, and I don’t see why he would lie, considering he didn’t give anything away except that Kouros was trapped Sideways, what if someone were trying to free Kouros?”

“That would make sense,” Charlie said, after a few moments’ thought. “If the jinni is that deep Sideways, it would take a tremendous amount of power.”

“That’s it,” breathed Oz, his head rocking back on his neck as if he’d been smacked in the forehead.

“What?” I asked.

“Why Tamina was taken,” Oz said, looking at me like I was an idiot.

In fact
, I thought, as realization flashed through me,
I
am
an idiot
.

“Of course,” I said. It was obvious. But Charlie was confused.

“What’s ‘of course’?” he asked, snippily.

“If they were using the Bridge, someone’s trying everything he or she can to get Kouros free of that cage, except the most obvious,” started Oz, who looked at me expectantly.

“Use a Magi,” I supplied.

Charlie’s colorless eyes widened. “Tamina,” he said.

Exactly. Tamina.

T
he Man Hole, it turned out, was a long-defunct gay bar in Greensburg, about an hour’s drive from Pittsburgh.

We’d needed that hour drive to explain to everyone how Tamina would have seemed like a great choice if one was trying to Call a jinni… except for one small fact: as her picture attested, she was unInitiated.

So she couldn’t Call squat. And we didn’t know much more than squat, despite our theory that Tamina had been taken for her Magi potential.

“Oh, the mammaries,” Rachel said, her voice thick as we ignored the stately front entrance of the house to drive around to the side, where lurked what looked like a hobbit door with a speakeasy grille. Oz and I gave each other a confused look but Charlie reached over from the driver’s seat to pat Rachel’s hand comfortingly.

“
This
is a gay bar?” I asked, eyeing the building doubtfully as I got out of the car.

Greensburg was dominated by a small university perched atop a large hill, looking down upon the town it fostered.
Luckily for Greensburg, the university was doing well and had started building “downtown,” as the locals called the two smaller hills, traversed by two one-way streets, that held “downtown’s” courthouse, and its handful of businesses, shops, and restaurants.

The Man Hole was actually the basement of a large Victorian house on the wrong end of one of those one-way streets. An absolute beauty of a dwelling, it had definitely seen better days. It was also the only house left on a thoroughfare that must once have been all residences and small shops, but had long since been converted into grim cement warehouses and auto-repair garages.

Against this squat gray background soared the graceful lines of the old house, a reminder of a bygone age in Greensburg’s history—and the apparent home of an entirely random gay bar.

“It was a speakeasy gay bar,” Rachel replied, taking Charlie’s hand and stepping fastidiously out of the car among the pebbles and broken glass that was the tiny strip of parking lot lining the side of the house. “Back in the seventies and eighties, before gay bars existed outside of the major cities. In the nineties, when I was there, it was less of a secret, but still the only gay bar in the area.”

“Wow,” I said. “Who owned it?”

“Miss Rose,” she said. “She bought the house for a song and fixed it up. Before her, the guy who ran it put in the bar for his cronies, when he retired. She made it pretty and played the songs she liked. Brought in local entertainers. The sort of stuff cronies hate, but gays dig. It evolved, quietly, into a gay bar. She ran a tight ship, though. It still wasn’t a gay bar in a big city—no go-go dancers or cages or drugs in the bathroom. She was a
lady who wore a hat and gloves to the store, and her bar was the same kinda place.”

“I just fell in love with Miss Rose,” I said, my mind creating a perfect version of her, gloves and all.

“We were all in love with Miss Rose,” Rachel said. “She gave me my first job, as a teenager, when my parents moved here to work in the Westinghouse factory. I was a gay black drag queen living in Western Pennsylvania and she loved everything about me. Made me love myself.”

“What happened to her?” Oz asked, also clearly mesmerized by Miss Rose.

“Oh, she got old and died. Kept the bar open till right before her death, though. Between the staff and the patrons, we did everything for her.”

“And she really called it the Man Hole?” I asked, realizing something wasn’t right.

“Nah, she called it the Golden Arrow. But we all called it the Man Hole—never where Miss Rose could hear, though.”

“Wow,” I said. “And it’s still here.”

“Yeah. The house was passed to a relative, who ran a real estate business out of the first floor for a while. But even that’s been gone for ages. I’m wonder if they left the bar?” Rachel mused. “They may have torn it out.”

“Only one way to find out,” I said, approaching the hobbit door.

“Careful,” Oz said, hovering beside me protectively. “We have no idea what’s in there.”

I nodded, surrounding us in a circle of black Fire that would turn to real fire if I needed it to. Then I used another wave of Fire to batter down the door.

We heard rushing feet inside the house. Rachel yelled “Front door!” and Oz was off. We followed, Charlie sprinting after my
Master, me running behind Charlie, and Rachel toddling after all of us in her heels. We rounded the corner of the house just as Oz tackled someone on the sidewalk in front of the hideous neighboring building. Whoever he’d snagged was fighting like a cornered cat, and Oz was barely managing to keep him down when Charlie and I pounded up. Charlie was there first and I heard him swear in both relief and anger.

“Aki?” I said, a second later.

Sure enough, tucked firmly in Oz’s grip was our favorite dishwashing kitsune.

“We thought you were dead,” I said, kicking him lightly in the ribs. Not enough to hurt, but enough that he knew letting us assume the worst was not okay.

Aki looked up at me, his enormous amber eyes unrepentant.

“I nearly was dead,” he said. “They killed my
tail
.”

I sighed as Charlie put a hand on Oz’s shoulder. Oz moved, letting our kitsune friend right himself. Aki gave my Master a baleful look, rubbing gingerly at a scraped palm.

“Who’s this knucklehead?” he asked.

“My new Master,” I replied.

Aki raised an eyebrow. “Bummer,” he said.

I resisted the urge to punch him for that bit of understatement. But he wasn’t part of the inner circle that knew about my curse, so he had no reason to know my being Bound deserved more than a “bummer.”

“What the hell are you doing out here?” Rachel demanded, puffing slightly from her little sprint.

“Let’s not do this here,” he countered. “Can I take you to my gay bar?”

A few minutes later we were all perched at the horseshoe-shaped bar in the Man Hole, Aki doling out snorts of whiskey in plastic cups. To Rachel’s delight, nothing had changed. The
bar was a seventies paean to the color brown: brown flock wallpaper on all the walls, and brown carpet on the floor that went up the sides of the bar. It was the first truly ugly gay bar I’d ever seen, but Rachel was in heaven, with a faraway look in her eye as she remembered her heyday.

“Long story short,” Aki said, “I still don’t know who attacked me, or why.”

I resisted the urge to flail. “What? We were told you could help us.”

Aki gave me a dirty look. “I’m glad to see I’m alive after you thought I was dead, too.”

“I am glad you’re alive,” I amended. “But seriously, we need some answers, and you’re the one we were told had them.”

“What answers? Who told you?”

Charlie gave Aki the rundown, telling him about the jinni and how it had told Oz there were answers as to Tamina’s whereabouts in the Man Hole.

“Maybe he meant an actual manhole?” Aki mused.

“No,” I said. “It was clear about the Man Hole. But Man Holes aside…”

“You just like saying
Man Hole
,” Aki said.

“Man Holes aside,” I repeated, “you must know something. Even if you don’t know you know it.”

“This is like philosophy,” Aki said. “I hate philosophy.”

“Humor us,” I said. “Maybe it has something to do with who attacked you?”

“Like I said, I still don’t know who attacked me. It was a couple of half-vamps I’d never seen before. They weren’t locals, not least because the blood gangs would never let a half-vamp live.”

Charlie, Oz, and I exchanged looks. “Were they kids?” Oz asked.

“If by ‘kids’ you mean deadly kill machines with teenage acne, then yes.”

“And you hadn’t seen them before?” Oz asked.

Aki shook his head. “No. Never.”

“Okay,” I said, “This can’t be too complicated. Aki, you’re usually attacked because you’ve pissed someone off. Who have you pissed off lately?”

“No one,” he said. “And I don’t piss people off. I mean, it’s not my fault if people are old-fashioned about things like personal property.”

“Have you stolen anything from anyone?” Charlie asked. “Anything big?”

“No, and I don’t ‘steal.’ I liberate.”

We ignored him. “Then what were you up to?” I asked. “I know you, Aki. You weren’t scrapbooking. What pie did you have your hand shoved into this time?”

Aki’s stomach rumbled. “Please stop talking about pie.”

“Aki,” Charlie said, using his Patient Voice. “What exactly happened the day you were attacked?”

“Well, it started with that douchebag bartender at Slides telling me the Exterminators were asking about me. That blonde, the siren?”

“Loretta?” I said, surprised.

“Yeah. I figured she either wanted to conscript me or to find out for herself if what all the ladies say about my fox-style is true.”

My eyes rolled in their sockets like bowling balls spinning in their ball return.

“What?” Aki said, catching the waves of scorn flowing from me. “I’m sexy and dangerous. Ladies love sexy and dangerous.”

“So Loretta was looking for you,” Charlie said, trying to move the conversation past Aki’s enormous ego.

“Yes. And you know I’m not about to work for free for anybody, and Loretta’s hot but I’m not a fan of her diet. So…”

“You’re a fox, Aki. You eat garbage.” Rachel said it before I could.

“Only delicious garbage,” he said, clearly affronted.

“What does Loretta have to do with getting attacked?” Charlie asked, getting us back on topic.

“I’m trying to get to that, if you’d stopped interrupting me.” Aki’s slender hips twitched and I felt a wave of sympathy for him. He was trying to flick his missing tail in irritation, but all he could do was waggle his little booty.

“I was so upset about Loretta that I figured I should probably take a little vacation, till she forgot about everything and anything she wanted me for.” He winked at me and my eyes once again auto-rolled. “So I went home. I was so busy looking out for blue eyes and blonde hair I didn’t notice the two half-vamps till it was too late.”

“Where did they jump you?” I asked.

“Right outside my loft, as I was opening the door. One minute I’m all alone, sniffing for siren, and the next minute I’m being set upon by hooligans reeking of Clearasil.”

“We’ve been to your apartment. That was quite the brawl.”

“No shit. Half-vamps are the
worst
. You saw what I had to do.”

I nodded solemnly, remembering that brilliant brush of red and gold lying on the dark-stained wood of his loft. “You sacrificed your tail.”

“I sacrificed my tail,” he agreed, eyes filling with tears.

Rachel snuffled. “It was a beautiful tail.”

Charlie, Rachel, and I bowed our heads for a moment of silence. Burlesque to the bone, we understood the loss of beauty, in whatever form.

Oz looked at all of us like we were nuts.

“So what happened after you got away?” Rachel said, after the moment was over.

“I ran like hell. Then I stopped running long enough to get mad. So I went back to my apartment, which was empty by then. And I followed their trail. They didn’t even try to hide it.”

“To where?” asked Oz, looking more than curious.

“It was weird. A squat across the river from Point State Park. Looked like the kind of place tweakers would set up shop. But there were a bunch of kids going in and out instead. And I didn’t recognize any of them, but they were all Immunda, obviously.”

Oz and I exchanged looks. Could Tamina have been one of those kids?

“Were they being held captive?” he asked.

Aki shrugged. “I don’t think so. But maybe. Some looked happier to be there than others. And there was definitely a kid in charge, a human sorcerer. And a strong one, at that.”

“A sorcerer?” I asked, alarmed.

Humans were sometimes gifted with the ability to manipulate the magic around them. Some could even go into the Deep Magic. But it was incredibly rare and usually did not end well, either for the human sorcerer or whomever he attacked before being put down.

There’s a reason humans can’t use magic. It scrambles their brains.

“Yes, a sorcerer,” said the kitsune, meeting my eyes with a
dramatic tossing of his hair. “Can you believe it? And he wasn’t even trying to hide it. He was casting spells right and left.”

“Well, this should be exciting. We haven’t seen a sorcerer here since…” I thought, hard.

“Nineteen fifty-four,” Charlie supplied, his voice grim. “That one lasted all of three days before the Exterminators caught up with her.”

I shuddered, remembering. “That’s right. The evisceration.”

Oz was staring between Charlie and me, his eyes round with his trademark look of horror and curiosity.

“What?” he squeaked.

I explained to Oz about sorcerers, adding, “Normally they’re not that powerful compared to a truly magical being, however, and they’re usually left alone until they fuck up. But not when they come to Pittsburgh.”

“What happens if they come to Pittsburgh?”

“If they try to stay, things like evisceration,” I said. “Because they’re human, they can use the Node. And sorcerers never come to Pittsburgh for the pierogi.”

“They come to rule over the misfit toys?” he asked.