It hadn’t taken them long to drive him out, leaving him to fend for himself. Which he had done by joining a group of pirates right before they decided to attack a fat-looking prize. That might have been an okay plan, if said prize hadn’t been the flagship of one Zheng Zhilong, the leader of one of the greatest pirate fleets ever to sail the seas.
Zheng—no relation that I knew of to our tiger-tatted friend—had spared Ray’s life, only to turn around and take it when he decided to make him a vampire. Maybe he thought that having someone who could pass for a European in a pinch might come in useful. But apparently that hadn’t worked out so great, because he’d traded Ray to a fellow pirate only a few years later. Who had traded him in turn, because looking sort of European didn’t automatically confer a knowledge of languages Ray had never heard or customs he’d never experienced.
Somehow, he’d eventually ended up with Cheung. Who instead of trading him, had promptly shipped him off to the family’s outpost in New York. Which seemed less strange to me now that I’d had Ray’s rundown on the importance of the place for otherworldly smuggling.
What remained weird was that he was still here.
Despite being middling in looks, middling in power—he’d never advanced beyond fifth-level master status—and middling in ability of any kind, he’d done okay. He’d succeeded when those with far more impressive résumés had failed. He’d survived when those with far more power had died.
He was like the cockroach of the vampire world.
Of course, come to think of it, so was I. People might not like us, might even detest us. But we’d still be here when they were dust.
There were worse things.
“Different can be okay,” I said and passed him another beer. “Now tell me about your portals.”
Chapter Fifteen
Ray flipped the cap off with his thumb—an advantage to having vampire-tough nails—and took a swig. “It’s like I told you. I figured out how to hack into ’em.”
“So you said.” But that made no sense, so obviously I’d missed something. “Are you talking about just using the same entrance for different portals?” Because people did that all the time. Olga had tinkered with the one in the basement until it could go three or four places now, along two different lines, and I didn’t think she was done.
But Ray shook his head. “You can only do that if you’re at a conjunction of a bunch of different lines. Olga’s got two that cross here, so she can cycle ’em if she wants rather than having two gates cluttering up the place. But you still need access to the gate to do that.”
“Okay. Following you so far.”
“Well, it’s like I said. I needed to get into Faerie, but everybody guards their gates like mad. So how was I going to get to one? Much less bring a ton of stuff through without anybody noticing? It’d be like needing to get on the Internet and deciding to break into some high-security building to use one of their computers. Not worth it, is it?”
“But you still needed to get on the Internet,” I said slowly.
“Yeah. So I did what everybody else does.”
“You hacked into a signal?”
He nodded. “Only the signal in this case was a portal somebody else had already cut into Faerie. I just cut into theirs. It’s easy once you know where the thing is—”
“But you didn’t know!” I said, getting pissed. “None of us know. That’s why we’ve been running all over the city like a bunch of crazed—”
“Yeah, but I knew the other players, right?” he interrupted. “The Circle, the Senate, they don’t always know who’s doing what. But I knew the competition. So I had my boys spy on ’em and figure out where they were bringing their stuff in. And honestly, it wasn’t even that hard. Most of ’em had their gateway in a warehouse or something, so they didn’t have to transport the merchandise too far.”
I glared at him. “And once you knew where they were—”
“I knew which ley line they were using. And after that, it was pie.”
“Define ‘pie,’” I demanded.
“It was easy,” Ray said, trying to blow a smoke ring and failing. He frowned at the wobbly thing for a moment, and then glanced at me. “Portals kind of look like that in the lines. Just tiny ripples you can see through, so they’re almost invisible. They’re really hard to detect, especially if you have mile after mile to explore and you have no idea where they are. It’s why the Corps never tried to shut ’em down that way—it’s like a needle in a haystack, if the needle was transparent and the haystack was an ocean.”
“But once you do know where they are—”
He shrugged. “You just make another gateway. Only instead of cutting through the line, you cut into the portal that’s already cutting through the line. Minimal outlay of power; minimal chance to get caught.”
“Unless the owners figure out what you’re doing and kill you!”
“Yeah, but that don’t happen. Plenty of people try to attack other people’s gates; it’s how most turf wars get started, and why the damned things are guarded so heavy. But this—they don’t even know they’re supposed to be looking for this. It’s not a thing—”
“It’s not a thing because it’s stupid!” I said harshly. “What if you’d missed the portal? What if you’d hacked into the middle of a ley line, and ended up getting nuked? What if—”