“These bars are iron, human! I feel sick already. Release me right now!” I blinked, surprised that a tiny voice could echo like that.
“Don’t do it, Cass,” Billy warned. “Doing the Fey favors is never a good idea. It comes back on you, and not in a good way.” Her teeny face flushed an ugly red and she let out a string of imprecations in a language that I didn’t know, but he obviously did. “Nasty, vile creature!” he spluttered. “Let her go to the ring, and good riddance!”
I sighed. Whatever or whoever she was, I wasn’t leaving anybody to be entertainment for the bastard or his boys. “If I let you out, you have to promise not to interfere with anything I’m doing,” I told her severely. “No blowing the whistle on us, okay?”
“You’ve lost your mind,” she said flatly. “And when did you change clothes? What is going on around here?”
That’s what I wanted to know. “Do I know you?”
Tiny green and lavender wings ruffled agitatedly on her back. “I can’t believe this,” she said in disgust. “I’m on a mission with an idiot.” Her eyes narrowed as she scanned me. “Oh, no. You aren’t my Cassandra, are you?” She threw up minuscule hands. “I knew it! I should have listened to Granddam: never, ever work with humans!”
“Hey, a little help here,” Jimmy called from behind me.
“Just go,” the pixie told me. “And take the ghost and the rat with you. I’ll deal with this myself.”
I had the feeling I needed to know what was going on, but staying around for a prolonged conversation probably wasn’t smart. I pulled the latch on her cage, ignoring Billy’s comments, and ran back to Jimmy. Unfortunately, his pen had a lock on it that required a key to open. “How do I get you out of there?”
“Here,” Jimmy slid up next to the bars. “They forgot to frisk me. The key’s in my coat. Hurry up; they’ll be back anytime!”
I reached for his jacket, but my hand stopped a foot away from the bars and simply refused to go any closer. It felt like an invisible wall of thick, sticky molasses had closed around it, one that didn’t want to turn loose. The pixie buzzed over while I was struggling to pull my hand back. “I’ll free the witches,” she said, “but I need you to open a door for me.”
“I can’t even open this one,” I told her, using my left hand to try to pull the right free. That backfired, leaving me with two hands that wouldn’t go forwards or pull back. I was well and truly stuck.
“It’s a tar-baby spell,” Billy said, hovering about anxiously. “We need the release.”
“It’s a what?”
“That’s slang for a really strong variation of a prehendo. I’m guessing that anything that gets within a certain perimeter of the cage is gonna get caught like a bug on flypaper, and the more you struggle, the tighter you’re gonna be trapped. Try not to move.”
“Now you tell me.” His warning came about a second after I’d panicked and kicked out with my foot, only to have it get caught, too. Sometimes I really hated magic. “Billy! What do I do?”
“Stay still! I’ll look around. It’s gotta be here somewhere.”
“Come back!” I yelled after him as he streamed off towards the suit of armor. “Get me out!”
Jimmy swore. “It has to be that thing.” he said, pointing upwards. I now noticed what looked like a week-old baked apple hanging from a chain above the door. A second later I recognized it as one of those ugly, shrunken-head key chains they had in the lobby gift shop, along with skeleton tie tacks and “I did it at Dante’s” T-shirts. Tony has no shame when it comes to making a buck. “It’s the only thing that shouldn’t be here.”
The pixie flew up to examine it and almost bumped heads with Billy Joe, who’d come back to have a look. “Stay out of my way, remnant,” she ordered. Billy was about to say something—probably fairly profane—but someone beat him to it. A shriveled, raisinlike eye popped open on the head and regarded the pixie with annoyance. “Call me that again, Tinkerbell, and you’ll never get this door open.”
I just stood there, not able to believe I was watching a pixie have a conversation with a shrunken head. I think that was about the time I gave up on logic and just decided to go with the flow. If I was lucky, someone had spiked my drink and I was hallucinating. No one said anything, so I figured it was up to me. “Can you please open the door?” I asked calmly.
The eye—there seemed to be only one working—swiveled to me. “That depends. What can you do for me?”
I stared at it. It was a shrunken head. The options were pretty limited. “What?”
“Hey, you look familiar. You ever come by the voodoo bar? It’s in the Seventh Circle, upstairs. I was the star attraction, you know, a lot more popular than those lousy floor shows this loser booked. People would tell me their orders and I’d shout them out to the bartenders. It went over great. Everyone thought I was this sophisticated audio-animatronics thingy. Sometimes I told jokes, too. Like, what would they call Bugsy Seigel if he became a vamp? A fangster!” The little thing cackled maniacally. “I crack myself up, you know that?”
“It is evil,” the pixie stated flatly. I nodded in agreement. Extensive warding was impossible in a place that ran off electricity, but was this really the best solution Tony had been able to find?
“Oh, we got a heckler, huh? Okay, how about this one? A guy walks into a bar in Hell and asks for a beer. The bartender says, sorry, but we only serve spirits here!”
“She’s right; it is evil,” Billy Joe said.
The pixie conked the head with the flat of a tiny sword she pulled off her belt. “Release her, or I will chop you into bits!”
The eye managed to look surprised. “Hey! You’re not supposed to be able to do that! Why aren’t you stuck like her?”
“Because I’m not human,” the pixie said through gritted teeth. “Now, do as I say and stop stalling!”