Chapter 5

Crystal Gazing is not the supernatural community's most respected journalistic voice. Its tagline, "All the news that's not fit to print," pretty much says it all. But, once in a while, its scandal-hunting reporters turn up a story that the more respectable papers reject as mere rumor. And even more rarely, that rumor turns out to be true.

But so far, although there was a lot of speculation about the identity of the new Pythia, no one had managed to come up with my name. It was only a matter of time, but I was grateful for any reprieve. And the lack of new information had allowed juicier stories to bump that one to the back pages. Today's screaming headline concerned an unknown woman who'd been raiding the Circle's facilities, although as usual, the article was short on facts and long on terms like "vixen vigilante" and "fetching fanatic." I silently wished her luck. Her activities might account for why no one had yet managed to track me down.

My break was over, so I stuck the rag in my locker, getting ready to go back to work. My current time-killing activity involved Casanova's never-ending search for new ways to make a buck. He'd somehow conned an up-and-coming fashion designer into renting one of the overpriced shops in the gallery. Part of the deal had been space for a fashion show at the beginning of each new season, along with the services of the showgirls as models and enough casino grunts to handle the heavy lifting. I, of course, was one of the grunts.

A pretty brunette was at the locker next to mine, and we paused to size up each other's outfit. Hers consisted of a lot of corpse-like paint, a necklace of skulls and a skirt composed of withered arms. They'd been cut off at the elbow, so they formed a miniskirt effect, and were moving around just enough to be creepy.

"Zombie," she told me, fixing her lipstick in the mirror on the inside of her locker.

"I beg your pardon?"

"You know, the ones that used to work upstairs?"

"I thought they'd been shredded." They'd gotten in the way of the Circle's hunt for me. And although zombies are pretty resilient as a rule, they hadn't done so well when facing a cadre of war mages.

"Well, yeah. But you know the boss. He didn't want to waste a resource."

"What are you saying?"

"He said zombies smart enough to wait tables but docile enough not to snack on the clientele are hard to come by. He's using a human waitstaff while he locates some more, but he wanted something to remind everyone that it's supposed to be a zombie bar, so…"

"He harvested their body parts for your costumes?"

"It's not so bad," she said, seeing my expression. "Except for getting felt up every time I sit down."

"What?"

She frowned down at her skirt. "One of these guys keeps goosing me. But when I complained, the bokors said they couldn't replace them all, so I'd have to figure out which one. But they all look the same."

We regarded the shriveled gray things around her waist for a moment. I managed not to shudder every time a bony finger brushed against her bare skin, but my dress wasn't so coy. As with much of the collection, it was spelled to respond to mood, with a repertoire that would make a chameleon envious. It had been showing tranquil nature scenes all morning, but now it switched to a dirty yellow-brown haze, the color of sunlight filtered through smog.

"I haven't seen that costume before," the brunette said, her eyes narrowing.

"I'm helping with the show."

"You're modeling? But they told me they didn't need any more girls."

"I'm just doing backstage stuff. But the designer wanted us to dress up, too."

"Oh. That's all right, then," she said, mollified. "I thought something was wrong. I mean, you're okay and all, just not exactly—"

"Model material?" I smiled, but my dress took on the sulfurous yellow-gray of the San Francisco skyline. Great.

"Yeah, exactly." She scrunched up her nose at the new hue. "Ugh. How do you get it back to a prettier color?"

"I'm not sure." And the designer, a pouty blond named Augustine, was not likely to approve of the change.

"Cheer up," she told me breezily. "If you're backstage, probably nobody will see you anyway." She bumped the locker closed with her hip and gave a sudden yelp when one of the waving arms goosed her. And just like that, my dress returned to the color of a nice, sunny day.

Well, that had been easier than I'd thought.

One good thing about my latest assignment had been the chance to get a friend a job. Since she didn't have a passport, a Social Security card or a strong command of the English language, I'd been wondering how she was going to earn a living. Especially since her references were about four hundred years out of date.

I found Françoise backstage and helped her into her designated dress, a solid white sheath with a long skirt and cap sleeves. It was cute, but I couldn't understand what it was doing in a collection that made even wealthy witches twitch before placing an order. Then a small dot detached itself from one shoulder, unfolded eight tiny black legs and went to work.

A row of other dots that I'd mistaken for buttons peeled away from her shoulder and followed. By the time the dress was buttoned up, the spiders had covered half the bodice with a tracery of black embroidery, as delicate and intricate as the cobwebs they mimicked. The designs were constantly being woven and unwoven, so quickly that it looked like silken fireworks were exploding all over the fabric, each blooming in a unique design before morphing into another even more elaborate.

I gazed at the dress in covetous admiration while Françoise drew on her gloves. All of the models were wearing them as a way to tie the collection together. In her case, they were long and black and did double duty, hiding the scars where, four hundred years ago, a torturer who knew his craft had left her permanently disfigured.

She'd started life in seventeenth-century France, where she'd run into the Inquisition, which hadn't approved of witches so much. She'd eluded them, only to get dragged into Faerie against her will, by slavers trying to make a fast franc selling young witches to the Fey. The scars had occurred right before the kidnapping, and her purchaser, a Fey nobleman with a jealous wife, had not dared to heal them. She'd eventually escaped to the Dark Fey, who decided that she would be more useful as a slave than as a meal. They, of course, hadn't even noticed the scars.

The whole adventure lasted only a few years from Françoise's perspective, but the Fey timeline isn't in sync with ours. By the time she managed to escape, the world she knew was long gone, making her the only person I knew that fate liked to mess with even more than me. Luckily, she was tall, dark and exotic, characteristics that hadn't been prized in her own century, which preferred women petite, fair and traditional. But in our time it had been enough to persuade Augustine to overlook her lack of credentials. It seemed that yesterday's unfashionable Amazon was today's supermodel.

Once Françoise was set, waiting for makeup she didn't need, I turned my attention to trying to corral a rogue handbag. I finally cornered it between a rack of dresses and the wall. I pounced, grabbing the scaly handle as it thrashed and wriggled and did its damnedest to claw me in the face.

Augustine appeared at my shoulder, but didn't bother to help. He watched the fight for a moment over the top of wild purple spectacles that were about to fall off his long nose. They looked like something Elton John might have worn to sing "Rocket Man," with wide frames shot through with glitter. They didn't go well with his pale blue eyes or artfully arranged curls. Of course, it was kind of hard to think of anything they would have complemented.