Claimed By Shadow
Page 9

I didn't reply, being too busy staring at the platter of severed fingers that the owner of the voice was clutching between long, curved claws. I should have been more concerned by the greenish gray face, like mildewed rock, that was peering at me over the tray. It had a deep scar running from temple to neck and its only remaining eye, a narrowed yellow orb, was fighting for forehead space with two black, curled horns—not something you see every day. But I couldn't seem to tear my attention away from the severed digits.
There had to be twenty or more, all index fingers as far as I could tell, that had been shoved between pieces of bread. The crusts had been trimmed away and a piece of ruffled romaine lettuce carefully wrapped around each one. Finger sandwiches, some part of my brain observed. I choked, caught between a retch and a hysterical giggle.
My gaze moved around what I now identified as a busy kitchen. Another of the stone-colored things—this one with glowing green eyes and bat wings—stood on a stool at a nearby island, pressing something into small, finger-shaped molds. My frozen brain finally thawed enough to recognize the smell. "Oh, thank God." I sagged against Pritkin in relief. "It's pâté!”
"Where are we?" he demanded, dragging me to my feet. I had trouble standing, both because I'd somehow lost a shoe and because a larger gray thing barreled past, knocking me back with a flailing tail. It was wearing a starched white linen chef's outfit, complete with little red scarf and tall hat. The breast of the tunic had a very familiar crest emblazoned on it in bright red, yellow and black—Tony's colors.
"Dante's." When Pritkin had fallen on me at the theatre, my concentration must have wobbled. We'd ended up a little off course.
"You're sure this is the casino?" The mage was eyeing a nearby platter, which contained radishes that had been partly skinned to resemble human eyeballs. They had olives for pupils, and it almost looked like the pimentos were glowering at us. I took a closer look at the shield, a copy of which adorned every uniform in sight and appeared over a set of swinging doors across the room. It looked very familiar.
Antonio Gallina had been born into a family of chicken farmers outside Florence about the time Michelangelo was carving his fawn for old man Medici. But, some two hundred years later, when the impoverished English king Charles I started selling noble titles to fund his art obsession, the illegitimate farmer's son turned master vamp had had more than enough stashed away to buy himself a baronetcy. I personally thought that the heralds, the men who had designed Tony's coat of arms, had spent a little too long at the pub the night before. I guess it could have been worse—like the poor French apothecary who was granted arms showing three silver chamber pots—but the comical yellow hen in the middle of Tony's shield was bad enough. It was supposedly a play on his last name, which means chicken in Italian, but the fat bird bore an uncanny resemblance to its owner.
"Pretty sure," I said. I would have elaborated, but one of the creatures doing the cooking, a diminutive specimen with a hairnet confining its long, floppy donkey ears, scurried by. It ran over my bare foot with clawed toenails, causing me to wince and press farther back. That resulted in Pritkin getting smashed into a slotted cart filled with trays of tiny black caldrons.
"What are those things?" I demanded. I kicked off my remaining shoe to keep from breaking my neck in case we had to run for it. I kept a wary eye on the creature in front of us, but he didn't seem overtly hostile, despite his looks. The only thing he was doing to back up his request was to point forcefully at the swinging doors with a spoon.
"Rum torte," a tiny chef croaked in passing. He was wearing only the top half of the usual tunic-and-trousers set, which in his case brushed the floor. A long, lizardlike tail protruded from beneath it.
He resembled most of the other creatures in the room, the majority of which had bat wings, clawed hands and long tails, but there the similarity ended. Their heads were everything from avian to reptilian, with a few furred ones here and there. Some had horns and others droopy ears, and their height ranged from maybe two feet to tall enough to stare me in the chest. Their eyes varied in color and size, but all of them seemed to glow, as if lit from inside by a high-powered bulb. It was unnerving, especially since they reminded me of something, and I couldn't quite figure out what.
"Gargoyles," Pritkin said as we stumbled through the swinging doors into a short hallway. At the end, a door that looked like old, carved wood but was too light to be real let out into a much longer and wider corridor. It was lined with medieval weaponry and cobweb-covered suits of armor, and dimly lit by flickering torches—fake, of course. Dante's wards were minimal on the upper floors, so electricity worked okay except for the occasional splutter. And real torches would have been hard to get past the fire codes.
I stopped and glared at the mage, who was looking around like he expected something to jump him at any moment. It would really be nice if the universe could stop throwing creatures out of fables, myths and nightmares at me. "There's no such thing as gargoyles!" I said just as two of the little monsters pulled a cart out of the door and began tugging it down the hallway. The floor, painted to look like weathered stone, was carpeted with a narrow strip of old maroon plush barely two feet wide that ran down the middle. It didn't do much decorwise, and it threatened to tip the cart over whenever one of the wheels encountered it. "It's just a name for fancy rainspouts," I insisted, even as my eyes told me otherwise. "Everyone knows that.”
"How can you have lived so long in our world and know so little?" Pritkin demanded. "You must have seen stranger things. You grew up at a vampire's court!”
By this time, the servers had navigated the corridor and paused in front of an elevator. One of them pressed the call button with the tip of a pointed tail. He had the face of a dog and a bat's body, while his companion was covered in grayish scales and was drooling around a two-foot-long tongue. "The strangest thing about our cook in Philly," I told Pritkin dazedly, "was that he was almost deaf from years of blasting heavy metal. But he was human. Well," I amended after a moment, "until that time Tony promised an important visitor fettuccine Alfredo, only the cook somehow heard bacon, lettuce and tomato.... Anyway, shouldn't they be off decorating a cathedral somewhere?”
“The creatures on medieval cathedrals aren't gargoyles; they're grotesques," he replied pedantically, while we moved in the direction of the cart.
"Stop it! You know what I mean! Why are they here?"
"Illegal aliens," he said shortly. "Cheap labor." I stared at him suspiciously, but if the mage had a sense of humor, I'd yet to see any sign of it. "Aliens? From where?”
"From Faerie," he replied in the clipped tones he uses when annoyed. That seems to be most of the time, at least around me. "They have been coming into our world for centuries. But the numbers have greatly increased recently because the Light Fey have been making things difficult for the Dark—among whom the creatures we call gargoyles are numbered. The mages who handle Fey affairs have been complaining about the number of unauthorized arrivals we've been getting as a result.”
"So they come here and do room service?" The elevator came and the gargoyles tugged their laden cart onto it, ignoring the loitering humans. "They were traditionally employed as guardians for temples in the ancient world and for magical edifices in later centuries. But advances in warding have lessened the call for that kind of thing. Unlike the Light Fey, they can't pass for human, so their entrance is restricted." He scowled. "Their legal entrance," he amended.
"I guess around here, they just kind of blend in with the ambiance," I said, but Pritkin wasn't listening. He had crouched and was looking around a corner as warily as if he expected to find an army on the other side.
"Stay here," he ordered. "I'm going to check out the area. When I return, we will have that talk you promised, or the next time we meet won't be so pleasant.”
"Pleasant? What weird definition of that word are you—" I stopped because he'd left, melting around the corner and into the shadows like a character in a video game. The guy was obviously cracked, but I had promised to hear him out. And if there was any chance of cutting a deal to get him and his Circle off my back, I wanted it.
I didn't think that going back to the kitchen was a good idea, so I hung out in the hallway. The suits of armor were interspersed with ugly tapestries, with the closest showing a Cyclops eating his way through a human army, a soldier in each hand and an arm dangling out of his bloody mouth. I decided to concentrate on the armor.
That turned out to be more fun than I'd expected. The suits stood on individual wood platforms bearing brass plaques, each of which had a Latin inscription. I'd had to learn Latin growing up, thanks to my governess's idea of what constituted a proper education, but the only time I'd used it outside the schoolroom was when Laura, a ghost friend, and I had amused ourselves thinking up mottos for Tony. Her favorite had been Nunquam reliquiae redire: carpe omniem impremis (Never go back for seconds: take it all the first time). I'd preferred Mundus vult decipi (There's a sucker born every minute), but we settled on Revelare pecunia! (Show me the money!) because it fit better on the shield. I was rusty, but it didn't take long to figure out that, like our efforts, the inscriptions at Dante's weren't as serious as they looked.
Prehende uxorem meant, sis! (Take my wife, please!), begged the placard on the nearest knight. I grinned and moved down the hall, translating as I went. Some of the most amusing were Certe, toto, sentio nos in kansate non iam adesse (You know, Toto, I have a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore), Elvem vivere (Elvis lives), and Estne volumen in amiculum, an solum tibi libet me videre? (Is that a scroll under your cloak, or are you just happy to see me?).
I was crouched in front of a knight about halfway down the hall, trying to figure out the joke, when Pritkin came running full tilt back around the corner. I knew there was a problem before he opened his mouth—the fact that he was trailed by a line of hovering weapons sort of gave it away. "Get up!" he yelled as one of the floating arsenal—a knife long enough to be considered a short sword—took a swipe at him. If he hadn't dodged at the last second, it would have taken off his head. As it was, an arc of bright red blood went flying from his half-severed ear.