&n
bsp; “What if we’d shot ourselves in the head?” he said sarcastically. “I mean, come on. We were careful. The only real problem was that there was no way to know where a particular portal was going. It wasn’t like I could just ask: hey, that illegal portal you’re running, so where does it go again? No. And a lot of ’em didn’t go where we wanted.”
He was completely sincere, like that was literally all he’d had to worry about. The sheer audacity was…well, it was almost breathtaking. Which was probably why he’d gotten away with it, I realized. Someone, somewhere, through the centuries must have had the same thought, possibly even several someones. But right on its heels had been a what-am-I-thinking slap to the head, and that had been it.
Until Ray. Ray had just thought, Cool. Ray had thought, Let’s do this and get me out of trouble with my boss. That was like…like getting a thorn in your toe and deciding to cut off the foot. It solved one problem, but boy, did it open up a ton more.
But Ray didn’t see that. Ray was looking smug. Ray was proud of himself.
Ray was quite possibly insane.
“So you cut some more,” I said, because of course he had.
He nodded. “Yeah, and then some more and—well, it took a while to find one near enough to our old location to work. And even then, we ended up in this creepy-looking swamp on the other end. And ran into all kinds of problems.”
“Like what?”
Ray didn’t answer. But I received a sudden flash of a swamp, old and fetid and dark as night, except for a few random beams of light spearing down from far overhead. They highlighted still black water, mold-covered bark and a bunch of silent shadows zipping through the trees.
We were running alongside the shadows, who I guessed were the vamps Ray had brought with him. Although I wasn’t sure quite what we were running on. Or why the trees seemed to be growing sideways for some—
And then I realized that we were sprinting along the trunks, hitting the ground only occasionally on a rock or a root or who-knew-what because we were moving almost too fast to see, as was everyone else. Like they were playing some crazy kind of swamp parkour. And they were damned good. Not a single foot touched the dark water below.
Until we did. Our foot hit a particularly slimy rock and slid out of control—just for a second, and just barely stirring the water. But a second was enough.
Something huge and old and cracked like the trunk of an oak, broke the surface, too fast for me to see much besides a few tons’ worth of terror coming right at us. A massive tail slashed down, sending an arc of greenish water ten feet into the air; huge yellowed teeth gleamed and lunged; and we came within a hairbreadth of losing a foot before another vamp caught us, swinging us high, high out over the water—
And then I was back, breathing hard, although I hadn’t moved an inch.
“Oh,” I swallowed. “Those kind of problems.”
Ray’s eyes widened. “Hey. Did you just see—”
“So how many portals did you make?” I interrupted. Because I didn’t like to talk about the glimpses the wine occasionally gave me into other people’s heads. Ray might act like it was no big deal, but I wasn’t used to it and I didn’t like it.
“I—” Ray stopped. “You mean, like total or just that time?”
“That time? How many times were there?”
“Well, it’s like this.”
“Shit.”
“Once I got the shipment in, of course the boss wanted to know how. I mean, you would, wouldn’t you?”
“And you told him. And he thought, why stop with one?”
“Right. Because the fey, they don’t travel much. Not the ones you got around here, they’re freaky or something, I don’t know. But most fey, they don’t want to move much from where they were born. So if you want their stuff, you gotta go to them. And the boss wanted, oh, a lot of stuff.”
“So he had you cutting portals like a mad weasel,” I said grimly.
And why not? Ray wasn’t exactly high in the power structure at Cheung enterprises. So Cheung wasn’t really risking anything. Ray gets vaporized and it’s no big loss. Ray gets caught and Cheung disavows all knowledge of his activities.
Which was probably exactly what he had done, or the Senate would have nabbed him already. The last people they wanted to have taking some of those vacant Senate seats were Cheung and his buddy with the messed-up face. They were an unknown quantity with possible ties to the Chinese empress, the leader of the East Asian Senate. Who just happened to be the biggest rival for power that the North American Consul had.
No, if Ray had given the Senate anything on Cheung, they’d have used it. On the other hand, it was in Cheung’s best interest to stay as far from his disgraced servant as possible at this vital juncture. Yet here he was, trying to lure him back into the fold.
I didn’t know what Cheung was planning to bring in, but obviously he wanted it pretty bad.