The Night Shifters (26 page)

He laughed again,
but it wasn’t a derisive sound. In fact, he rather seemed to be
enjoying my company. I just wasn’t sure I should feel the same
way.

“You are welcome
here,” he said. “In fact, you shall always be. But my hospitality
has its price.”

“Does this count as
an official visit?” I worried. “Because it wasn’t really my
idea.”

“This one is a
freebie.” We left the hall, passing through a lovely door that
might have been made of pure silver, or a more precious cousin. Its
surface gleamed along a pattern of leaves and flowers, woven
together with runes. “This room shall be yours. Do you like
it?”

“It’s lovely.” But
it wasn’t exactly hospitable. It was about the same size as my room
in the Masked Man’s house, but it didn’t contain a stick of
furniture. It was a polished, hollow work of art. “A chair or two
would be nice,” I suggested.

“You won’t need
one. Here –” he led me to a wall and gently turned me to face him.
Then he seized my other wrist (the ow-ee one) and raised my hands
over my head, pinning them to the wall. When he let go and stepped
away, my hands stayed in place – they wouldn’t budge. I looked up
and noticed that the inlaid vine on the wall had looped firmly
around my wrists.

“Hey!” I shot him a
look of pure outrage.

He got quite a big
kick out of that. “Comfortable?”

“No! Get me out of
this!”

“Get yourself out.
That’s your task. I’m going back to the party, and when it’s over
I’ll return here to check on you. I don’t expect you’ll have freed
yourself by then, but that’s all right. We’ll have a nice, long
talk, and I’ll explain some things to you. When I’m done, you’ll
have a much better idea of your place in the City of Night. Perhaps
I’ll let you work for me then, depending on how charming you can
be.” He pointed to the opposite wall, where an ornate key hung on a
peg near the door. “That’s the key to your prison. Get it, and you
can unlock yourself. It’s that simple.”

He turned and
started to walk away.

“Why are you afraid
to fight fair with me?” I yelled after him.

He stopped. For a
long moment he just stood there. Then he turned and walked back. He
wore an expression I had never seen before, one that filled me with
equal amounts of hope and dread.

When he was
standing in front of me again he asked, “Are we fighting?”

I had thrown the
remark at him out of desperation, because I couldn’t think of
anything else to say. But apparently something about it hit
home.

“What do you call
this?” I struggled fruitlessly against the vines (no pun intended).
“A friendly argument?”

“It is if you
compare it to what I could do to you, if we were really
fighting.”

I stared
straight at him, though doing so made me as nervous as ever. What
had I said to shake him up? Because he
was
shaken, I felt sure of it.
Why are you afraid to fight fair... ?

“You were a weak,
sentimental child,” he said. “That’s why I didn’t recognize you at
first. But you redeemed yourself, I’ll admit. You killed a monster.
That’s one for you, Hazel.”

That seemed
like a fair remark. I couldn’t claim he wasn’t following the rules
(especially since I still wasn’t sure what they were). So he wasn’t
afraid to fight
fair
,

Why are you afraid
to fight... ?

“You’re still a
child, in many ways,” he accused. “I wonder how much you’ve really
learned from your trip down Memory Lane. That your mother is dead,
yes. That you wasted your life, also. But you didn’t marry that
pompous Bernard, so perhaps you’re not so weak after all. And
you’ve even earned a piece of advice, in case you haven’t figured
it out, yet. Getting punched in the stomach is less painful if
you’re braced for it.”

I blinked. “I hope
you mean that metaphorically.”

“
Hazel –” he
shook his head. “Brute force is not my style.” He placed a hand on
my middle. I tensed, though his touch was gentle, careful. It
occurred to me that he could tickle me mercilessly, if he wanted
to. Only a titanic act of will kept me from giggling. Not that the
situation was funny. It would have been a nervous reaction, and I
was
really
trying to look at least half-way
cool.

Besides, I
was getting side-tracked. The Car King was
not
afraid of any kind of fight, whether a sword fight with the
Masked Man, or verbal sparring with me. So that wasn’t it,
either.

Why are you
afraid... ?

Afraid.

The moment that
word began to echo in my head, a look must have flickered across my
face, because his pupils expanded as if they might suck me in like
a couple of black holes. “You’re thinking too much,” he said.

“You’re right. I
should be playing the banjo, instead. Release me and I’ll get right
on it.”

“In due time,” he
promised, with a poker face. “I have some hobnobbing to do with –
what did you call them? Mucky-mucks. Then I’ll come back. And
you’ll still be here, Hazel. When I release you, you’ll owe me a
favor. If you’re lucky, I won’t feel inclined to call it in –
immediately.”

“
If
I’m
really
lucky, I won’t be here.” I tried to
sound confident, rather than defiant.

He shook his head.
“Have you heard anything I’ve told you? When your dreams drove you
to walk the streets at night, did you ever imagine that someday you
would be my guest, that I would even know you existed?”

How could I?
I almost
asked. But then I realized what he had just said to me. I hadn’t
mentioned my midnight ramblings to anyone in the City of Night.
“You know more about my past than I do.” I said. “You’ve always
known.”

“I bring my own
particular talents to this game. I’ve played gently with you so
far, Hazel, and let’s keep it that way, shall we? I would hate –
“

I waited politely
for him to finish his sentence, but he didn’t. His poker face
settled into softer lines for one, fleeting moment, then hardened.
He leaned closer, and I was pretty sure he would kiss me. Maybe he
was too. Instead, he said, “There are some things you haven’t
remembered yet. Perhaps I’ll tell you what they are. Later.”

He turned on his
heel and marched out of the room. This time, I didn’t bother to
call after him. The door swung silently shut.

I gazed helplessly
at the key. “Here, key! Nice key!”

“I don’t think
that’s going to work,” said Voice.

“You followed me!”
At least I wouldn’t be lonely while I hung there. Though eventually
I would probably have to go to the bathroom, now that I absolutely
couldn’t.

“
I think I
got caught up in your wake,” she said. “And now I’m stuck, too. In
this realm I’m obliged to hang around roads, and
this
is totally out of my experience.”

“If I can figure
out how to get away, will you be able to escape too?”

“I sure hope so. In
fact, I’m kind of counting on it.”

“
I don’t know
if either of us should count on
anything
,
yet.” I tried to think. But my mind kept drifting back to what had
just happened with King. Funny, that shortening of his name seemed
right, now. It seemed more familiar too, which made me a little
uncomfortable.

Why are you
afraid... ?

He
was
afraid. Not of being fair, not of a fight – so
of what?

“I think he kind of
likes you,” said Voice.

Bingo. “I think he
does too. But I don’t think it does me much good. He’s not human.
Though I’m assuming humans thought him up.”

“No they didn’t,”
warned Voice. “He’s one of the Old Ones.”

The way she
said Old Ones sent a shiver up my spine. “Capital
O,
capital other
O
?”

“As capital as they
come,” she said. “I’ve only had a few conversations with him, and
they’ve all been scary.”

“So who are the Old
Ones?”

“
Pretty much
what their name implies. They look a lot like humans, but they’ve
been around a lot longer. Irish people called them the Fey Folk.
And they have a taste for blood. I can’t tell you much more than
that. But I’ll bet
he
would, if you asked
him the right way.”

“I think I’ll hold
off on that one, for now. I think he knows I know he likes me, and
I don’t think he’s happy about that. I might be able to charm a
human out of being upset with me, but I don’t know how to charm an
Old One.”

“But you must have
charmed him at least a little...”

“Yeah, if I could
just figure out how.” I looked around the room, trying once again
to spot Voice. I don’t know why I kept doing that, she really
seemed to be nothing more than a voice, yet I couldn’t help looking
for a person. Something tickled the back of my mind, and I tried to
pin it down. Something important.

“You know what
would be really helpful now?” she asked, so brightly that she got
my hopes up, and I lost the train of thought I had worked so hard
to capture.

“The key!” I
guessed.

“Well, that too,
but I was thinking of the Deus Ex Machina.”

For a moment, the
phrase just sounded like nonsense. But then another memory
dutifully presented itself for inspection. “The god machine.”

“
It works
great in the Greek plays,” Voice said, enthusiastically. “Just
lower the god onto the stage with the hidden lever, and he fixes
everything. Or
she
does, if it’s
Athena.”

“Okay,” I said,
still sort of hoping she had a real idea. “Do we have one of
those?”

“No, but wouldn’t
it be great if we did?”

Sigh. “I don’t
suppose we can conjure one just by dreaming it up, like the Night
Shifters do?”

“If we could, it
would be lowering the Masked Man right into the middle of the room
by now. I guess we’re going to have to think up something else.”
She clucked her invisible tongue, thoughtfully. “There is one good
thing about what’s happened.”

“There is?”

“You bet! Your
catsuit is all clean now. When we flew here, the wind blew all the
dust off.”

She was right, it
looked nice and velvety black again. I felt ridiculously cheered by
that. If I was a prisoner, at least I was a spiffy one. The Masked
Man would be pleased that I hadn’t ruined his gift.

I remembered the
way he had looked when he was standing in my room, his eyes glowing
in the semi-dark. How I wished I were back in that room with him!
For a moment, it almost seemed as if he could really see me again,
across time and space.

And then the
memory I had been trolling for so fruitlessly popped into my head
with a happy
boink!
Maybe you could
call that a sort of
mental
Deus Ex
Machina...

“Form!” I said.
“Voice, you said that you have form and consciousness!”

“Yes,” she
affirmed.

“So if you have
form – can you touch stuff?”

“I guess so.
Sometimes. Probably. What are you getting at?”

“Why can’t you just
go grab the key and unlock these stupid vines for me?”

“
I’m the
Chorus,” she objected. “I can’t go doing stuff with characters, I
just talk about them – or occasionally
at
them.”

“
But you
helped Woody Allen steal those files in
Mighty Aphrodite
.”

“Well, yeah, but
that’s the way my part was written.”

“
So let’s
write your part that way for
this
story.”

“This isn’t a
story, this is your life!”

“Story, life,” I
reminded her, “around here there isn’t a lot of difference! Look,
you’re the one who told me that things have changed for you, that’s
how you probably ended up in the City of Night. You don’t want to
be just a clever literary device anymore, right?”

“Right,” she
admitted.

“So be a full
participant in the story. Grab the key! Give it a shot! What have
you got to lose?”

She didn’t answer,
and I worried I had pushed it too hard, maybe scared her off for
good. But then I saw a small, sylph-like figure drifting down from
the ceiling. I could see through her, yet light bent around her
edges, almost as if she were made of glass. Her slender hand hooked
the key, and she ran toward me on the tips of her toes. She climbed
the vine as if it were the kind you would find in any garden. She
inserted the key in a loop that looked like it might be the
lock.

The vines slid away
from my wrists. I was free.

“You did it!” I
rubbed my wrists. “It really was that simple.”

“It was fun!” Voice
sounded younger than ever, like a kid just discovering the
world.

“Shouldn’t you look
a lot older?” I wondered, “considering how long you’ve
existed?”

“I may be an old
dramatic device,” she said, “but as a person, I’m fairly new.” I
couldn’t see more than a hint of her face, but I thought she was
grinning. “Now what?”

I eyed the door. It
was shut – could it be locked, too?

But when we tried
the door it swung right open. We looked through, into the hallway.
“Do you think he’s really gone?” whispered Voice.

“I hope so.” I
stepped into the hall.

Voice grabbed my
hand. Her skin felt cool – harder than flesh, but not nearly as
hard as glass. She stood only about five feet tall, but now that I
could see her better she didn’t strike me as a kid. She was sort of
a transparent elf. “Do you think he can look in on us whenever he
wants to?” she worried.