But he knew it couldn’t be Frank’s hand brushing the ragged collar of his coat just now, because most of Frank’s finger bones lay like shrapnel beneath Henry’s skin.
Henry recoiled at once, bounding up and away from the prone young man. He nearly collided with Gunther, who’d moved closer and stared at Jason with rapt fascination.
“Shake it off, Gunther!” Henry elbowed Gunther’s chest and Gunther suddenly snapped upright as if he’d just woken.
“Henry…Where am—” Gunther looked around in confusion and then his gaze settled back on Henry. “What the hell was that?”
“Not sure, but I think—” Henry stopped short as he realized that at least a dozen agents had been drawn to the balcony railing above them and were now staring down in varying states of confusion. Only a few feet from Gunther, two winged snakes that had previously camouflaged themselves on a carved bedpost hovered in the air, their gilded wings beating softly as they stretched toward the divan. They crooned like hungry doves and circled, as if searching for something that they had suddenly lost.
A dirty-looking brownie, standing no more than two feet tall and wearing only a pair of black dress socks, also seemed to have been drawn out from where it had been hiding in the dark corners of the shop. Now the gaunt, leathery creature swayed less than a yard from Henry and stared at Jason with its bony hands lifted like it was about to receive a precious gift.
Just as awareness lit the brownie’s expression, Henry bounded forward and snatched hold of it.
“NATO Irregular Affairs Division,” Henry informed the brownie before it decided to bite.
“Aw shit,” the brownie mumbled.
“Do we have a situation down there?” Carerra’s voice carried down from the second floor. She shouldered between two of her stunned agents and glowered down at Henry from the wrought-iron railing.
“It’s under control, Commander,” Henry assured her.
Carerra turned on her own agents, ordering them back to their positions. Just as she began to move away, the brownie let out a howl and jerked against Henry’s grip. It kicked at Henry’s crotch, landing a hard punt into his thigh. Henry swung it up off its feet and dangled it by its wrists at arm’s length.
“Put me down, you hog twat!” the brownie shouted. “Criminal brutality, that’s what this is! Not one of you dirty badges has got goods on me! I was here square and legal to do proper business for my master. I got rights!”
“I suppose you’ve got a passport and the sales documents to back you up?” Henry asked, and despite himself, he smiled at the savage little brownie. There weren’t many of this kind left. Nowadays most dolled themselves up like little butlers and played hurt or obsequious when they were collared with counterfeit bills or sacks of severed hands. It had been decades since Henry’d encountered a filthy, cussing brownie, swinging its withered little prick around like it could piss acid.
“I got that an’ more for you, dick wadcutters. It’s in my fine boot!”
“Dick wadcutters?” Gunther repeated the words as if they were from a foreign language. “What does that even mean?”
The brownie simply thrust out its stocking foot. Henry kept his right hand firmly clamped around the brownie’s tiny wrists and used his mutilated left hand to peel down the brownie’s sock and pull out a wad of reeking papers.
He tossed them to Gunther, who made a face at the dank fungal aroma but quickly flipped through them.
“Well?” Carerra called down. She sounded tired of the matter already.
“The passport’s legal,” Gunther announced. “The bill of sale looks shady, though.”
The brownie shrieked an obscene protest.
“Them papers are clean as a unicorn’s snatch, you screw! My master paid for that boy half up front, a troll’s skull of gold dust!” The brownie kicked its foot toward the divan where Jason lay. “I just came to collect the property. But seeing how you dirty badges banged the boy up, I want a discount!”
“This just gets weirder and weirder,” Gunther commented softly. He frowned at the young man.
“So, we can add human trafficking to Phipps’s crimes,” Carerra pronounced from the balcony. “We’ll need the paperwork on this filed before I get back to the station.”
A brief burst of gunfire sounded, followed by the voices of alarmed agents. Carerra glanced over her shoulder and obviously did not like what she saw among the antique canopy beds and exotic gilded statues. A smoky serpentine shadow swayed against the high ceiling, growing steadily more solid by the moment.
“Right now we’ve got bigger fish to fry up here.” Carerra turned her attention to Henry. “You handle this, Falk. Figure out what the hell is going on with that boy.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Henry saluted, though Carerra had already turned away.
Chapter Three
Jason woke to the awareness that he lay prone atop a firm surface. His feet dangled slightly and his right forearm throbbed with a dull ache. For just an instant he thought he’d fallen asleep on his narrow futon and dreamed something terrible.
But he knew instinctively that this wasn’t his home and he hadn’t been dreaming. His memory roiled with images of pale monsters in dark uniforms and a strangely luminous vagrant with a silver flame flickering in his mouth.
Crazy stuff, he thought in frustration. The kind of crazy that had gotten him locked up before and could get him locked up again…maybe already had.
He flexed his wrists, testing for the resistance of restraints. He encountered none and opened his eyes to take in the small beige room and the two other occupants seated at a cheap looking table. One of them took a swig from a metal flask while the other held a white paper coffee cup to the bloody gash of his gaping mouth.
Jason closed his eyes again immediately.
“Back among the conscious, Mr. Shamir?” He heard the rustle of clothes as the big blond vagrant moved closer to the white vinyl couch where he lay.
“He’s awake?” The second voice was smoother, younger. He sounded so calm, so human. Jason recalled him answering to the unremarkable name of Gunther. Still, Jason kept his eyes closed. He didn’t think he could bear to look at that gaping mouth again.
“Yes, I’m awake.” For a moment Jason tried to imagine what the other two men made of him, of the entire situation. He probably seemed insane. Jason didn’t allow himself to consider that they might be right to think as much. “I crashed my bike…”
“Yes, you did,” the vagrant said. “Banged up your arm too.”
“We had a medic clean it up for you,” Gunther told him. “It’s scraped up, but nothing’s broken.”
“Thanks,” Jason replied, but then he didn’t know what else to say. He wanted to demand to know where he was and who these two thought they were, holding him here.
But, God, he didn’t even know if he was really here with them. All of his senses told him that he was in the grip of reality: the slight tack of the vinyl against the bare skin of his arm, the smell of stale coffee, and the noise of an overhead fan.
And yet when he cracked his eyes just enough to glimpse the two men, horror gripped him and everything became unreal. It wasn’t just the toothy, slit-eyed monstrosity of Gunther. The other man, too, grew stranger and stranger the longer Jason studied him.
He flickered slightly like a florescent light that hadn’t come up to its full burn. A haze like the tracers of taillights built around his eyes until they seemed to blaze beneath the dark shadows of his lashes.
As he shifted, his rumpled coat fell open, and steadily, strange luminous symbols began to glow up through the threadbare material of his undershirt. The rubber bands ringing his long fingers twitched like reviving centipedes. And something in his coat pocket pulsed with the rhythm of a beating heart.