Diana Read online

  That would be fun.

  He got to Tolemny’s workshop and knocked on the door. He could have opened it, he knew it just from the feel of the wood under his knuckles, but he wasn’t here to pick fights. He wanted to buy, and getting the right product at the right price meant keeping bridges he might have otherwise torched for the glee of watching them burn.

  Someday, Samantha would do all of this for him and he wouldn’t have to bother any more.

  Tolemny’s assistant Devoy opened the door and gave Carter a cautious look. It was a classic assistant look, one developed from many years of being the alarm when someone stormed an employer’s place of business, one that said that he didn’t entirely know if Tolemny was doing something that might put him on Carter’s bad side.

  It was a look that Carter enjoyed.

  “I’m here to shop,” he said. Devoy swallowed and took a step back and out of the way. Carter cleared his throat, walking past the assistant into the dim room. It smelled of oil and iron and smoke.

  “Is Tolemny here?” he asked.

  “In the back,” Devoy said, taking this as his opportunity to close the door and disappear. Carter didn’t disapprove. He looked around at the various things on display, daggers, bracers, bullets, wall ornaments, ceremonial products, then he brushed through the black curtain into the back room.

  He’d been here a few times before. Bought from Tolemny most of those trips. Not that one time, of course, but the others had ended with a satisfactory exchange of purchase for cash. Today would be a bit different, he suspected.

  Tolemny was crouched over a fire. The New York blacksmiths tended to either be just below street level or on the top floor so that they could vent their forge exhaust somewhere that people tended not to notice, and Tolemny was no different. He took the entire top floor of the building, filling it with piles of things disguised as clutter. Just one forge, here. He worked in a small, dedicated space. The rest of the floor was storage or display or a mishmash of the two.

  “Devoy is just as spineless as ever,” Carter said.

  “I like my assistants that way,” Tolemny said. “Less likely to try to swipe clients.”

  Tolemny was a broad-shouldered man, strong, but not as solidly-built as a blacksmith should have been. He had a faint Irish accent, one that bespoke a long history back in the darkness of another country, but he was as much a New Yorker as the pet spa lady downstairs.

  “I can see that,” Carter said, picking up a short sword and looking down the length of it to bug Tolemny and to watch the orange light from the fire playing off it.

  “What do you want?” Tolemny asked.

  “I brought a special, big bag of money with me today,” Carter said. “It’s invisible, though, because so is what I came here to buy.”

  Tolemny stood straight now and faced him.

  “What do you want, Carter?”

  “I want a new sword,” Carter said. “The ones I have are boring.”

  Tolemny closed the grate on the fire and put down his tongs.

  “What are you looking for?”

  “Something special,” Carter said. “You’ve sold me good swords, in the past, but now I want my sword.”

  Tolemny scratched his arm and pursed his lips.

  “A big bag of money,” he said. Carter nodded. “We’ll talk price after you find the sword worth talking about.”

  “You think I don’t have it now?” Tolemny asked.

  “You insult me,” Carter said. Tolemny nodded.

  There were rules to epic blades, and one of them was the amount of energy someone had to pour into making it. The list of epic blades forged by humans was single-digits. Angels had forged a count in the dozens, and the rest of them, maybe a few hundred, were demonic. It just took too much time and too much energy. Too much layering magic. It was much easier to forge them hellside, because they had nothing but time, but then you had to have something worth having, hellside, to exchange her for. Also not easy.

  Tolemny might have one or two, here, maybe a few more if Carter was underestimating him. But finding the right sword meant figuring out which of the ones this side of hell were available and sorting through them, one at a time, to find the piece.

  “I thought Bastard would suit you,” Tolemny said.

  “Annoying,” Carter said. “She thinks everything’s funny.”

  “So do you,” Tolemny said. Carter let one corner of his mouth drift up, just an inkling of a threat. Tolemny seemed unperturbed.

  “Let me go get Qint,” Tolemny said. “See how you like her.”

  “Didn’t know she was loose again,” Carter said. Tolemny nodded.

  “Keeping it quiet for now. She’s a drama queen when she gets suitors.”

  Carter nodded, waiting. Tolemny disappeared into the clutter and came back a few minutes later with a long blade, wide but fine, with an inset inscription in hellspeak that went the length of the blade. Carter cast a careless glance over it; it wouldn’t matter unless he liked her. Tolemny held her on her side across his palms and Carter took her, taking a step back to feel how she cut the air.

  Not bad. Light with a sense of determination. He could feel the draw of self-centered power, though. She wanted to go, to do important things, to be remembered as important. To be feared in her own right. He nodded.

  “Don’t like a sword that tells me what to do,” he said, offering her back to Tolemny. Tolemny took her and hid her away again, not so far this time, then returned.

  “You looking for an angel blade, then?” the demon asked.

  Carter shook his head. Handling Lahn made his skin crawl. He could master her, but there was a fundamental disconnect between him and that sword. He didn’t want another piece of judgmental metal on his back.

  “Demon-made,” he said.

  “They’re all pushy,” Tolemny told him.

  “Regent isn’t bad,” Carter said, drawing her. “Just boring.”

  Tolemny took her and held her out, feeling the magic on her the way a vinophile samples wine. Carter waited, and waited some more. And some more yet.

  “She doesn’t like you,” Tolemny agreed, returning her. Carter re-sheathed her behind his back. “You thinking about selling any of them?”

  Carter raised his eyebrow and Tolemny shrugged.

  “I could find a buyer for that angel blade, third party transaction, if you ever wanted.”

  “She’s got a new owner,” Carter said. “You find me a sword, and we’ll talk about how much I’m willing to part with to get her. Got it?”

  Tolemny nodded.

  “Sure. I’ll be in touch.”

  Carter nodded and looked around once more.

  “You do good work,” he said. “I need to come back on a dull day and just go through it all.”

  It was a threat as much as an earnest interest, and he didn’t look back to see how Tolemny took it. Threatening demons was passive work for him, and he took it seriously. On the way out, he looked at Devoy long enough to make the skittish demon uncomfortable, then left, whistling as he went down the stairs.

  He stopped by Walter’s card game on the way home, finding two contractors there. He’d expected three, but he got competitive bids from the two of them anyway, and got an agreement from a demoness named Wendy that she would stop by in the morning to talk through the reconstruction on the back of his building to keep him safe in the event that Samantha blew herself up.

  It was a good day.

  He didn’t know how Samantha got on, scouring Nuri’s library, and he didn’t care. He had Abby on a hunt for an ankle bauble he’d heard an Egyptian princess had once worn, whose stone someone along the way had swapped out for a seeing-eye ruby. He wanted to know if it were true, and if it were, where he could find it. He didn’t think the anklet added much value to it, but a seeing-eye ruby of that age had a lot of latent magic stored up in it, and he could find use for a piece like that. With Samantha gone and Abby on a que
st for a tiny object that tended to spend lots of time in magically-warded locations, he had a lot of free time on his hands.

  He went to Troy’s club, just to put in an appearance, and he spent time at Nuri’s, taking part in punishments as he needed to and otherwise just enjoying himself. He found, oddly, that he enjoyed himself here more now than with Samantha. A year ago, he’d enjoyed Samantha’s discomfort immensely, and he’d pushed her into circumstances that he could actually sit and watch as they scarred her.

  Now, though, he could just spectate, participate as he wanted to, and not worry about cataloguing her reaction to any given piece of sadism. It was more fun, and he made a mental note to do it more often.

  Two weeks later, Samantha found him at breakfast.

  “You’re slacking on your cooking responsibilities,” he said without looking at her.

  “I need to go to Singapore,” she answered.

  Damn.

  Someone had told her.

  “You won’t find anything useful there,” he said.

  “Yes I will,” she answered.

  “You should stick with the New York libraries,” he said.

  “I’ve been through all of the ones I know about,” Samantha said. “You’ve got quite a bill coming.”

  There was something about her voice, a playfulness to it, that made him look at her.

  “What’s that?” he asked. She nodded.

  “I read them.”

  He set down his newspaper and brought his mental focus back into the room.

  “You couldn’t read the titles on the books in this city that you should be familiar with before you even tried a feat like Singapore,” he said.

  She sparkled at him.

  Dammit, he thought he’d killed that sparkle.

  He needed the anger and the edge that came with it, but that idea that she had that she was going to win with him, he needed that gone, and quick.

  “How do you even know where all of the libraries are?” he asked, putting on his bored voice and picking up his tea cup. He wasn’t sure how he felt about drinking tea to punctuate a conversation with her, but it seemed to be working just this second. He crossed his legs to seem more bored.

  “I beat Marvin again,” she said. “He’s going to be very useful.”

  “You know he thinks you’re going to be useful,” Carter warned, more because it wasn’t she who would be useful, but the influence she had with Carter. He wouldn’t have minded Marvin just manipulating her.

  “He’s a demon,” Samantha said. “They all want to use me, somehow.”

  He raised an eyebrow and drew breath to say something bawdy about that, then changed his mind. Off-topic, as fun as it would have been. He saw her blush and chalked the point, anyway.

  “You couldn’t get in to most of them,” Carter said. She gave him a look that was a strange mix of patronizing, amused, and worried.

  “You’d be surprised what I can do these days,” she said. “Word is getting out that Marvin is my favorite demon in the city, and suddenly who I like and who I don’t like… matters.”

  She raised an eyebrow, again ripping off Carter’s favorite expressions, and he felt his temper spike.

  She never made him angry. Not like that. Not just for the fun of it.

  What world was this?

  He checked the date on his newspaper.

  “You’re selling influence,” he said.

  “I think I am,” she answered. “I need to go to Singapore.”

  “I maintain that you couldn’t have dusted the tops of the books you need to read,” he said.

  “Watch me,” she said.

  He folded his hands. She gave him a sly little smile then picked up the newspaper, folding it carefully down to the shape it had had when it arrived.

  “What part of this have you actually read?” she asked. Calling his bluff, now, no less. He raised his eyebrows and she sighed. “Doesn’t matter.”

  She drew a breath with her eyes closed, then set it back down on the table in front of him.

  “Quiz me,” she said.

  That wasn’t even approaching funny.

  “Obituaries,” he said.

  “Ginger Wilson, eighty-four,” Samantha said. “I can list them all, but…”

  It could have been a joke. He didn’t get it, but he couldn’t come up with any other explanation. She didn’t lie, and even if she did, he didn’t see the point, just now. Was a field trip to Singapore that enticing to her?

  He didn’t check.

  “How?” he asked. “You destroyed your paradise plane.”

  She’d demonstrated her new trick a while back for him, how she could hop across to the paradise plane with an armload of books and read them all on the time gradient, then come back and just pick up a new armload to read them, but without access to her paradise plane, it ought to be impossible. He frowned, considering. He’d never tried it with the hellplane.

  He picked up the paper and crossed, glancing up at the uniform red sky overhead, his ritualistic reminder that he no longer lived here, then looked at the paper in his hand.

  He couldn’t read a single word on it. It was like the ink had run. He checked Regent, who was where she was supposed to be, in the sheath on his back, so it wasn’t that he’d crossed funny and didn’t bring things with him that he needed. It was that he simply couldn’t read it. He moved aside, so he could see the image of himself on the earth plane, then he bent over and squinted. He could read the paper here, just like he’d done before. It was a bit blurry, even at short distance, because the hell plane was nothing if not obscuring and obtuse, but the words were all there, and they just required the focus to pull them out. He looked at the copy he still held in his hand. Like the ink had gotten wet and run.

  How strange.

  He crossed back.

  “It’s back,” she said. “Finally, it’s all back.”

  He nodded. That figured. She burned down paradise and it just took a few weeks to be good as new.

  “You can’t remember all of it,” he said.

  “But I can take notes,” she said.

  “On what?” he asked.

  “I told you I control the reality on that side. I’ve got my own library, full of notes. All I have to do is look it up.”

  Damn.

  She was the strangest, most extreme Shaman he’d ever heard of.

  Well, at least she was his.

  “You know you’ll have to leave Lahn here,” he said.

  “You fly with swords all the time,” she said. It was a simple enough magic to shield them from standard metal detectors, and a human with no magic skillset whatsoever wouldn’t even find one with a thorough frisk. That wasn’t the problem, though.

  “Lahn and Singapore don’t mix,” he said. “Too much swirl there. I guarantee she’d get sucked up and you’d never see her again. Not when you’ve got so little experience keeping her, now.”

  Samantha’s hand went to her back and he looked away, unimpressed.

  “You’d take care of her?” Samantha asked.

  “It’s a risk,” Carter said. “But I managed to keep her for several years before I gave her to you.”

  “She doesn’t like you,” Samantha said. He looked back at her, glowering.

  “I’ve been hearing a lot of that, lately.”

  She shrugged.

  “I think I can find a place for her in my room.”

  “Whatever you think is best,” he said. “She’s your problem. If you still think you want to go.”

  “I’m going,” she said.

  Someone had told her.

  He might have to track that someone down and punish them.

  “Fine,” he said. “But you’re going to come back to an awful lot of dishes.”

  “Seriously?” she asked. “That’s what you’re going with?”

  “It’s dusty in here, too,” he said. “There will be a broom waiting for you,
as well.”

  “You don’t deserve me,” she said.

  “I’ve been telling you that I don’t deserve this from the day you got here,” he answered.

  She sucked on a tooth for a second, then shook her head.

  “I’m going. Today. Using the credit card Abby gave me. Thanks, sweetie.” The last bit was directed at the open air, the psychic who was watching this at some point in the future. Or the past. With Abby, it was hard to know.

  “Where…?” he started, then shook his head. He knew Abby would take her side in anything. He should have guessed that Abby would find a way to tap into his human-world finances and get Samantha access to them.

  Samantha gave him a tight little smile. Points to her.

  “Good riddance,” he said.

  “Don’t starve,” she answered.

  He had some relatively trivial enforcement stuff to do over the next few days. He took a brief trip up to see Lindsay, the woman who was responsible for most of the New England region of the country, stretching through parts of the midwest and all of Michigan. He’d heard rumors she was letting things slip based on how far she’d have to travel to take care of them, and how much effort she would have to personally invest to take care of them, and he wanted to put some pressure on her to step up. He lacked a credible threat to replace her, unfortunately, because she’d earned her spot through true raw power, but he could at least impose his presence on her enough to make her uncomfortable. Less had worked, before.

  Five days after Samantha left, he found Abby sitting at the kitchen table.

  “You need a better cell phone,” she said.

  “I don’t have a cell phone,” he answered.

  “Exactly,” she said, moving her hands to reveal one. He wrinkled his nose.

  “I’ve been sending the number out to everyone who might want to be able to get in touch with you,” she said, her face still but the slightest murmur of humor tickling her eyes.