I don’t know what I’d expected. I knew we were going to an illicit, no-holds-barred fight of the kind that would leave the UFC writhing in envy. I knew that said fights were not supposed to be known to the authorities, human or otherwise, and were therefore an open invitation to all kinds of rabble. I knew that we were walking into danger, serious danger, which was why I’d been so loaded down with weapons that I basically clinked when I walked.
Even though I knew all this, I still wasn’t prepared for what I saw once we stepped through the glamourie.
I still wasn’t prepared for troll carnival.
And I wasn’t prepared for it to hit all at once, to the point that my brain could take it in only by breaking it down into different senses.
Sound: hitting like a tsunami that drags you under before spitting you out the other side on a wave studded with audible debris. Which beats and bangs you up, leaving you breathless and disoriented, because it’s coming at you from all sides: wonky loudspeakers giving updates nobody could hear; old-fashioned boom boxes blaring every kind of music simultaneously; hordes of gamblers screaming bets around bookmakers standing on piles of smoke-damaged furniture to get above the crowd; and people, all kinds of people, threading through the crowd of vendors’ tents and lean-tos surrounding the burnt-out hulk like a swirl of colorful skirts. And fighting and laughing and singing and shouting in a couple dozen languages, including some that scratched the brain because they weren’t in human decibels.
Smell: a five-foot toddler lurching by on unsteady legs, waving an odorous treat that left scent trails so thick they were almost visible; hawkers in the form of ieles—large bipedal cats—pushing their version of suspiciously mouselike shish kebab; families tailgating over open fires, with pots so bright with unknown spices that they twitched the nose and fooled the mind, turning the flames multicolored as several senses tangled up and tripped over one another.
Sight: a towering giant, leaning against a tree and scratching his nuts, waiting for the next partygoer with an attitude; a cascade of tiny ashrays floating by in bubbles of water, because they couldn’t touch land; humpbacked ogres peering suspiciously at the world from under thatches of unkempt hair; a beautiful blond selkie in human form, leaving watery footprints wherever she walked; a raucous tent filled with satyrs and mazikeen, flightless fey with iridescent wings often mistaken for angels except for their tendency to really get the party started; and a dozen others I couldn’t even put names to.
I’d started to think, after this summer, that I was something of an authority on the fey. My landlord was a Dark Fey princess; I had a basement full of troll in the form of several of Olga’s relatives; my adopted son was a half Duergar/half Brownie who’d helped me battle a Light Fey princeling with skills I’d never even heard of until I was almost gutted by them, and yet I’d somehow come out intact on the other side. And, I was quickly realizing, still didn’t know shit.
I was realizing something else, too.
“Wait a minute!” I screamed at Olga, who somehow heard me over the din. She turned politely. “What are all the fey doing here?”
That got me a forehead wrinkle. “For the fights.”
“Yes, but . . . you told me it was fey being kidnapped and forced to battle to the death! Not that they’d be part of the crowd!”
Large shoulders shrugged. “Fey fight at home. Fey fight here. Fight not problem. Kidnapping problem.”
“Okay, but you appreciate it’s going to be a little hard to find your nephew in all this!” I waved at the crowd, maybe a couple thousand strong, already packed into the lot. And we hadn’t even gotten to the main event yet.
“We not need find him,” Olga explained patiently. “Find slaver. Then—” She made a fist.
And, okay, I was pretty sure he’d talk, too. But still.
“But still,” I yelled, because the noise level was astonishing. “That doesn’t look like it’s going to be any easier!”
It really didn’t. Especially since the place wasn’t packed just with fey. There were also droves of magical humans, who seemed a lot more in the loop than I was, since they were buying booze or haggling a buck off the price of a T-shirt instead of staring around in slack-jawed astonishment. And here and there were dark puddles of stillness that screamed vampires, who I guess had come for the fun, since fey blood didn’t nourish them. There were even a few weres, looking like humans but itchy, like a feather tickling up my spine.
Normally, finding the perp in my line of work is easy, since I’m mostly chasing things that go bump in the night amid crowds of humans. Find the supe and you usually find the bad guy, the needle in the proverbial haystack who shows up on my mental radar, all nice and shiny. Only here, half the haystack was made out of needles. And even that didn’t help me much, since, this time, they might be the good guys.
“Don’t worry,” Olga said, clapping a ham-sized hand on my shoulder and almost buckling my knees. “He albino.”
That seemed to settle things as far as she was concerned, because she took off, plowing through a gleaming stream of will-o’-the-wisps with a tchaa and some flapping of massive hands. They went swirling off in annoyed clouds, and I and my date went stumbling after her.
I didn’t point out that this albino, if he was behind the theft, wasn’t likely to be hanging around in full view. Or hanging around at all if he realized he’d grabbed the nephew of the widow of one of Faerie’s most notorious weapons runners. A widow who still had a lot of connections and a serious hate-on for losing more family members. Hell, he might not even be on the planet.
But I didn’t tell her that, and not just because of the noise. I didn’t think we were going to find Olga’s nephew, not in one piece, anyway. A scared slaver was a dangerous slaver; why risk keeping a witness to your stupidity when a knife through the eye would take care of the problem?
But Olga didn’t need to hear that right now. I didn’t know what troll life was like back in the old country, but here the community was tight-knit, leaning on one another for support in a world they found as frightening and strange as we did theirs. Every new arrival was valued as a reminder of home and a hedge against adversity, and every death was mourned as a tragedy that affected them all.
So, no, I wasn’t going to tell her that we weren’t likely to find him. Because maybe we could find the son of a bitch who’d killed him. He should be far, far away by now, if he had any sense, but people often didn’t.
Especially arrogant slavers used to calling the shots.
The thought made me smile. And then a glance at Louis-Cesare made me smile bigger, because the French aristocrat with the flashing eyes and dangerous temper and heart affixed quite firmly to his sleeve still liked to believe that he was Mr. Cool Under Pressure. Nothing rattled him, no sirree, not a chance. Except for this, apparently, because he was staring around, as discombobulated as me.
I needed to keep up with Olga’s bright red head, bouncing just ahead, so I had to content myself with catching glimpses here and there. Like of his wider-than-normal eyes, reflecting the firelight as he watched ponderous troll jugglers deftly spin torches into the air in amazing parabolas. Or his openmouthed astonishment at a group of Thussers—Norwegian fjord fey—going to town on some fiddles, wildly enough that the closest vendors had shut down their music in deference to the awesomeness. Or his brief smile at a massive troll serving as a “ride” for some diminutive troll children, who were being flung three stories into the air and then caught expertly while they screamed and giggled and demanded something I didn’t understand, but which was obviously “Do it again!”