Embrace the Night
Page 31

“You can do that with a dress?”
“Darling, I can do anything with a dress. Anything legal, that is. So don’t go asking for a love potion or some nonsense, because I’m not about to lose my license.”
“What else can you do?” My mind was racing with the possibilities.
“What do you want?” A bolt of blank white fabric began draping itself around the form.
“Can you make me invisible?”
Augustine sighed and flipped the edge of my wig with a finger. “A bad outfit and worse hair can do that.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “Then what about spell-proofing? Can you make it so if someone slings something nasty at me it bounces off?”
“Jealous rival?” he asked sympathetically.
“Something like that.”
“How powerful is the little cat?”
“Does it matter?”
“Of course it does! I have to know how strong to make the counterspell,” he said impatiently. “If it’s something petty, like making you smell like a garbage truck—”
“No. I need to stop a major assault, like a dark mage could cast.”
Augustine blinked at me owlishly. “Darling, what kind of party are you attending?”
“That’s the problem. I don’t know.”
“Well, maybe you should think about skipping it. Who needs that kind of stress? Take the night off, do your nails.”
“It’s sort of mandatory.”
“Hmm. This isn’t really my line,” he said doubtfully. “The war mages use charmed capes sometimes, to reinforce their shields, but I don’t think fashion is their main priority.”
Françoise poked her head in. She appeared to be wearing a small animal over the top half of her body, one with a lot of brown quills extending outward in all directions. “I ’ave found somezeeng,” she told me.
Augustine stiffened. “Where did you get that? It’s a prototype.”
“What is it?” I asked, eyeing it warily.
“A jacket, of course,” he told me. “Porcupine. Wonderful for getting rid of unwanted attention. Unfortunately, that one tends to launch quills without warning at anyone who upsets the wearer, so I don’t think—”
“I’ll take eet.” Françoise piled an armload of other items onto the table. “And zese.”
“What is all this?” I asked. Behind her were a couple of walking mountains of clothes, which I assumed to be the shop assistants, although no heads were actually visible.
“Pour les enfants,” Françoise said, holding up a tiny T-shirt with WORLD’S GREATEST KID written on it in what looked like crayon.
I frowned at it and Augustine snatched it out of her hand, looking aggrieved. “An image of the child wearing it will appear under the title,” he told me loftily.
“There’s a place at the mall that can do that.”
“And it makes the wearer have a sudden, uncontrollable fondness for vegetables.”
I sighed. “We’ll take it.” He snapped his fingers at his over-burdened assistants, who began running around, adding things up. “About my dress,” I said, now that he was in a better mood. “I thought creative geniuses like you appreciated a challenge.”
He patted my cheek, which was a bit much considering that he didn’t look a lot older than me. “We do, love, we do. But there’s also the little matter of payment. This isn’t ready-to-wear we’re talking about. And for what you’re asking—”
“Send the bill to Lord Mircea,” Françoise said, playing with a scarf that, oddly enough, was just lying there being scarflike.
I started slightly. “What? No!”
Her pretty forehead wrinkled slightly. “Pourquoi pas?”
“I don’t…that isn’t…it wouldn’t be appropriate,” I said, very aware of Augustine listening avidly.
“Mais, you are his petite amie, non?”
“Non! I mean no, no I’m not.” The frown widened, then Françoise shrugged in a way that suggested she knew denial when she saw it. “Send the bill to Casanova,” I told Augustine. If he complained, I’d tell him to take it out of my overdue paycheck.
“Casanova,” Augustine repeated, with an evil glint in his eye. “You know he actually expects me to pay for the damage to the conference room? He presented me with a ridiculous bill just this morning.”
“Then present him one right back. A big one.” I eyed Françoise’s pile of assorted oddities. “And tack those on.”
Augustine’s smile took on an almost Cheshire cat quality. “Cinderella, I do believe you’re going to the ball.”
That evening, after I finished another shift in Hell, Françoise and I slipped out of Dante’s in a shiny black Jeep. While I waited for Alphonse and my backup to arrive, I had a few errands to do, and she had volunteered to help. Neither of us had a car, but I’d managed to find us a ride.
The tag on the front of the Jeep read 4U2DZYR. It belonged to Randy, one of the boys who worked in Casanova’s version of a spa. He would have been a perfect California beach bum, complete with deep tan, sun-bleached hair and toothy white smile, except that his voice still had a Midwest twang. He was possessed by an incubus, of course, but so far he’d been on his best behavior.
“You’re serious?” Randy asked me for the third time, as we pulled into the giant Wal-Mart parking lot. “You want to shop here?”
“Yes, I want to shop here!” I said, exasperated. There’d been a time when Wal-Mart had been pretty upscale for me, in comparison to the 25-cent bin at Goodwill or the Salvation Army. But I got the impression that there weren’t a lot of Randy’s clients who felt the same way. He’d had to ask one of the waitresses for directions.
He pulled into the closest available parking space, tires squealing, and stopped on a dime. He looked at me seriously over the tops of his Ray-Bans. “As long as you make sure Lord Mircea knows that I had nothing to do with this. I’m only following orders. If the boss’s lady wants to go slumming—”
“You sound like I’m going to a strip club or something!” I said irritably, getting out. “And I’m not the boss’s lady!”
“Oookay.” Randy pried Françoise, who had the backseat in a death grip, off the upholstery. I’d forgotten to ask if she’d actually been in a car before, and judging by the wide eyes and dead white complexion, I was betting the answer was no.
“I nevair want to do zat again.”
“I’m not that bad a driver,” Randy said, offended.
“Yes, you are,” she said fervently.
“Well the wheels have stopped rolling, sweet thing,” he told her, getting an arm around her waist. He deposited her on the concrete. “You know, I’ve done some of my best work in backseats.” This was accompanied by a huge how-could-anyone-not-think-I’m-cute? grin. Which is probably the only thing that saved him.
I hauled the extensive shopping list out of my purse and waved it at them before Randy said anything else. “Can we get going? Because we don’t have all day.”
Eight kids plus a baby, I had discovered, need a lot of things, especially when their entire existing wardrobe was literally the clothes on their backs. And except for a few T-shirts for the tourists, Augustine’s establishment didn’t specialize in children’s anything. He preferred his customers to be adult and very well-heeled. Hence the list.
An hour later, I was leaning against a shelf stacked with Fruit of the Loom T-shirts while Françoise terrorized various underpaid store employees. She had commandeered no fewer than four, whom she had racing back and forth, trying to find all the needed sizes. She looked a little out of place, as she was wearing one of Augustine’s sophisticated creations: a long, basic black dress with a chic jacket covered in a newspaper print. I hoped no one noticed that all the headlines were today’s.
Randy was standing in front of a mirrored column, admiring the flex of his bicep. “What do you think?” The muscle shirt he’d poured himself into was bright blue and perfectly matched his eyes. He knew damn well what I thought, what half the women in the store did. Either that, or we just happened to go shopping the same day every young mother in the state needed to restock her son’s closet.
“I thought you didn’t shop at places like this.”
“A T-shirt’s a T-shirt.” He shrugged, causing a ripple of muscle that prompted a squeak from a nearby customer. “So, listen. You got a lot of kids.”
“Yeah. So?”
For a minute, he just stood there, looking at me awkwardly, like a big kid himself. A big kid with a lot of muscles and a see-through mesh tee. “So you’re putting them up in the casino, right? In a couple free rooms?”
“How do you know that?” The kitchen staff hadn’t had space in the minuscule quarters that Casanova had allotted them for another nine people, so I’d had to get creative. It helped that I worked the front desk occasionally.
“Everybody knows. The staff have been working to keep the boss from finding out. But he does check the books sometimes, you know?”
“What’s your point, Randy?”
“I just wanted to say that, if you need, well, any money or anything…” He trailed off, while I looked at him incredulously. I had no idea what his incubus was teaching him. Apparently, they hadn’t gotten to the part where women were supposed to pay him.
“We’ll be fine.” If Casanova gave me any grief about the rooms, I’d have Billy rig every damn roulette game in the house. Come to think of it, he was pretty good with craps, too.
“You sure? ’Cause, I mean, I kind of get paid a lot. It wouldn’t be, like, hurting me any, you know?”
Françoise was giving him the kind of look I expected to see incubi giving her. She saw me notice and gave a shrug that could have meant anything from “I was just looking” to “I haven’t had sex in four hundred years, so sue me.” I decided I didn’t want to know.