Embrace the Night

Page 12

A pretty brunette was at the locker next to mine, and we paused to size up each other’s outfit. Hers consisted of a lot of corpse-like paint, a necklace of skulls and a skirt composed of withered arms. They’d been cut off at the elbow, so they formed a miniskirt effect, and were moving around just enough to be creepy.
“Zombie,” she told me, fixing her lipstick in the mirror on the inside of her locker.
“I beg your pardon?”
“You know, the ones that used to work upstairs?”
“I thought they’d been shredded.” They’d gotten in the way of the Circle’s hunt for me. And although zombies are pretty resilient as a rule, they hadn’t done so well when facing a cadre of war mages.
“Well, yeah. But you know the boss. He didn’t want to waste a resource.”
“What are you saying?”
“He said zombies smart enough to wait tables but docile enough not to snack on the clientele are hard to come by. He’s using a human waitstaff while he locates some more, but he wanted something to remind everyone that it’s supposed to be a zombie bar, so…”
“He harvested their body parts for your costumes?”
“It’s not so bad,” she said, seeing my expression. “Except for getting felt up every time I sit down.”
“What?”
She frowned down at her skirt. “One of these guys keeps goosing me. But when I complained, the bokors said they couldn’t replace them all, so I’d have to figure out which one. But they all look the same.”
We regarded the shriveled gray things around her waist for a moment. I managed not to shudder every time a bony finger brushed against her bare skin, but my dress wasn’t so coy. As with much of the collection, it was spelled to respond to mood, with a repertoire that would make a chameleon envious. It had been showing tranquil nature scenes all morning, but now it switched to a dirty yellow-brown haze, the color of sunlight filtered through smog.
“I haven’t seen that costume before,” the brunette said, her eyes narrowing.
“I’m helping with the show.”
“You’re modeling? But they told me they didn’t need any more girls.”
“I’m just doing backstage stuff. But the designer wanted us to dress up, too.”
“Oh. That’s all right, then,” she said, mollified. “I thought something was wrong. I mean, you’re okay and all, just not exactly—”
“Model material?” I smiled, but my dress took on the sulfurous yellow-gray of the San Francisco skyline. Great.
“Yeah, exactly.” She scrunched up her nose at the new hue. “Ugh. How do you get it back to a prettier color?”
“I’m not sure.” And the designer, a pouty blond named Augustine, was not likely to approve of the change.
“Cheer up,” she told me breezily. “If you’re backstage, probably nobody will see you anyway.” She bumped the locker closed with her hip and gave a sudden yelp when one of the waving arms goosed her. And just like that, my dress returned to the color of a nice, sunny day.
Well, that had been easier than I’d thought.
One good thing about my latest assignment had been the chance to get a friend a job. Since she didn’t have a passport, a Social Security card or a strong command of the English language, I’d been wondering how she was going to earn a living. Especially since her references were about four hundred years out of date.
I found Françoise backstage and helped her into her designated dress, a solid white sheath with a long skirt and cap sleeves. It was cute, but I couldn’t understand what it was doing in a collection that made even wealthy witches twitch before placing an order. Then a small dot detached itself from one shoulder, unfolded eight tiny black legs and went to work.
A row of other dots that I’d mistaken for buttons peeled away from her shoulder and followed. By the time the dress was buttoned up, the spiders had covered half the bodice with a tracery of black embroidery, as delicate and intricate as the cobwebs they mimicked. The designs were constantly being woven and unwoven, so quickly that it looked like silken fireworks were exploding all over the fabric, each blooming in a unique design before morphing into another even more elaborate.
I gazed at the dress in covetous admiration while Françoise drew on her gloves. All of the models were wearing them as a way to tie the collection together. In her case, they were long and black and did double duty, hiding the scars where, four hundred years ago, a torturer who knew his craft had left her permanently disfigured.
She’d started life in seventeenth-century France, where she’d run into the Inquisition, which hadn’t approved of witches so much. She’d eluded them, only to get dragged into Faerie against her will, by slavers trying to make a fast franc selling young witches to the Fey. The scars had occurred right before the kidnapping, and her purchaser, a Fey nobleman with a jealous wife, had not dared to heal them. She’d eventually escaped to the Dark Fey, who decided that she would be more useful as a slave than as a meal. They, of course, hadn’t even noticed the scars.
The whole adventure lasted only a few years from Françoise’s perspective, but the Fey timeline isn’t in sync with ours. By the time she managed to escape, the world she knew was long gone, making her the only person I knew that fate liked to mess with even more than me. Luckily, she was tall, dark and exotic, characteristics that hadn’t been prized in her own century, which preferred women petite, fair and traditional. But in our time it had been enough to persuade Augustine to overlook her lack of credentials. It seemed that yesterday’s unfashionable Amazon was today’s supermodel.
Once Françoise was set, waiting for makeup she didn’t need, I turned my attention to trying to corral a rogue handbag. I finally cornered it between a rack of dresses and the wall. I pounced, grabbing the scaly handle as it thrashed and wriggled and did its damnedest to claw me in the face.
Augustine appeared at my shoulder, but didn’t bother to help. He watched the fight for a moment over the top of wild purple spectacles that were about to fall off his long nose. They looked like something Elton John might have worn to sing “Rocket Man,” with wide frames shot through with glitter. They didn’t go well with his pale blue eyes or artfully arranged curls. Of course, it was kind of hard to think of anything they would have complemented.
“There are some…people…who are demanding to see you,” he informed me. “They don’t have tickets, and frankly—”
“What people?” I asked, dreading the answer. I could number the ones who might consider me a friend on one hand. And except for Rafe, none of them knew where I was.
“Well, I don’t know, do I?” Augustine’s eyes flashed. “Why don’t I stop everything I’m doing seconds before the show to take care of your scruffy friends, who aren’t even on the guest list?”
I didn’t immediately answer, because the bag was currently winning. It had already sprouted four stubby legs and a tooth-lined snout. Now a tail covered with hard jade scales protruded suddenly from the rear, giving it enough leverage to thrash out of my grasp. It dropped to the floor and hurried off after a snakeskin belt. The belt tried slithering away, but the bag caught it by the tail, swallowing the writhing thing in a couple of gulps.
I wrestled the truant fashion accessory to the floor with Françoise’s help and wrapped a scarf around the snout. “What do they look like?”
“That’s my point,” Augustine snapped, tossing his curls. “They look like rejects from a low-budget production of Rent. Not to mention the smell. Get rid of them. Now.” He flounced off in a huff.
I peered out from behind the curtain separating backstage from the catwalk, trying to spot my visitors, but it wasn’t easy. The ballroom was packed with witches dressed to impress. It looked like big hats were in for summer, because at first all I could see was a field of brightly colored circles, bobbing and swaying like flowers in a breeze. There was no one in sight who looked like they smelled of anything that cost less than a hundred dollars an ounce. Then a couple of witches who had been partly blocking the view settled into their seats and I saw them.
Augustine was wrong; they weren’t friends.
The music started up and the first model elbowed me out of the way, gliding onto the catwalk, her leopard-skin bag slinking along beside her. I hardly noticed, my eyes on the two figures who had squeezed in the back door. I didn’t recognize them, but I knew what they were. The bulky coats they had on were a dead giveaway: war mages. And despite their scruffy appearance, I doubted they’d come to upgrade their wardrobe.
They were nonchalantly scanning the crowd, and I’d seen those casual glances on Pritkin’s face often enough to know how much they took in. I moved farther into the shadow of the curtain, wondering if I could shift out unseen, when one of them nudged his companion and nodded at a group of dirty, poorly dressed children huddled against one wall. The mages started forward, faces grim, and the kids broke into a run. Most people had found their seats, so there was nothing between the kids and their pursuers except the two vamps acting as greeters.
There was a temporary alliance between the Circle and the Senate because of the war, but that didn’t erase centuries of dislike and mistrust. Especially when war mages had been responsible for an attack on the premises a little over a week ago. The vamps blocked the way with insolent smiles on their faces, and the mages skidded to a halt.
The kids had run down the aisle flanking the wall and were now climbing onstage. Most people were watching the catwalk, which had been designed to extend out into the middle of the room, so they didn’t garner more than a few puzzled glances. They headed straight backstage, but stopped on the edge of the frenetic activity.
They looked back and forth between me and several blonde models who were struggling into their outfits. Then a black boy of maybe fourteen nudged a small girl. “Which one?”
The girl had dishwater blond hair and big brown eyes that focused on me unerringly. “That one.” She pointed with the hand not clutching a beat-up teddy bear.