Strange Fates Read online

  Since my birth, my mother had trained me in magic to prepare me for the day she wouldn’t be there to protect me. It wasn’t that she wanted anything to happen to her sisters. Unbelievably, to me at least, she still loved them.

  But when it was them or me, she’d chosen me every time.

  “Don’t you regret it?” I’d asked her once. We were hiding out on a tiny island, Capri, I think, when I was about eleven. I swam with the naiads. I was brown and happy and had forgotten the threat of her sisters.

  Her mind was on other things, perhaps how to shield me from the debauchery going on around us. “Regret what, my little minnow?”

  “Me.”

  The charms on her necklace chimed like little bells as she swept me into her arms, ignoring my awkward attempt to fend her off. “Never.”

  I let her hug me for a few minutes before I wiggled out of her arms, aware that I was no longer a child. I didn’t know then how powerless I was.

  Gaston would find me eventually, but I hoped it wouldn’t be before I was ready for him.

  I had stashed the Caddy and decided to hoof it the rest of the way. It was touch and go trying to get back to my room, since the storm had moved in quickly and I was stupid enough to be out walking in it. I’d already spent way too much time. Elizabeth had been a delightful distraction, but she was a distraction I couldn’t afford.

  I hadn’t even made it four blocks before it hurt to breathe. It was so cold that every breath I took was like inhaling icicles. I wasn’t going to make it, not at the rate I was going.

  The cold was hampering my ability to think, but not so much that I didn’t notice that someone was behind me, walking fast.

  “Hey, hey, mister, wanna party?” A street kid, dressed in a ripped parka with ratty fur lining the hood, came apace with me.

  His triangular-shaped face had that chapped-skin look of someone who spent a lot of time outdoors. Despite the parka, he shivered as he put his hand on his hip.

  “You’re trying to hustle me in the middle of a blizzard? Beat it, kid,” I said. “I’ve got my own problems.”

  He sized me up. “Need a place to stay?”

  “I’m good, thanks,” I said through chattering teeth.

  “Where you going?” he asked. “The Amsterdam? The Drake?”

  My face must have given me away. “You’ll never make it,” he said. “I know a place. It’s close.”

  “I don’t have any money,” I said. “Or anything else for you.”

  “It’s cool,” he said. “You can crash there tonight. I’m Jasper, by the way.”

  I was freezing my balls off so I nodded. “I’m Nyx. Lead on.”

  He led me to a rusted-out fossil of a car, which might have been a Mustang in another life. The car skidded its way through the icy streets. The backseat was piled high with blankets, canned goods, and clothes.

  He parked on the street and we walked to a deserted military fort, which was surrounded by a barbed-wire fence. NO TRESPASSING signs were prominently posted, but Jasper ignored them and slipped through a hole in the fence.

  “Right this way,” he said. He led me to a boarded-up brick structure. Someone had written DEAD HOUSE in graffiti across the outside of the building.

  “It used to be a morgue,” Jasper explained.

  I was walking into a setup. Jasper had a touch of magic, enough to beguile, to charm, or seduce weak-minded mortals, but not enough to affect me. His clothes were free of any symbol to indicate an allegiance to a certain House, which wasn’t surprising. He probably didn’t even know he had any magic in his blood.

  But underneath the magic, I sensed fear.

  He wasn’t ready to let me know about whatever it was that he had planned for me, but it wasn’t going to be good.

  He moved a piece of plywood covering a window. It had been pried open before and simply hung by a single nail to give the illusion it was secure.

  “After you,” he said politely. I stuck my head in, expecting to find Jasper’s partner in crime waiting for me, but the room was empty except for the stench of old urine and mold.

  I crawled through the window. Jasper followed and looked around with an air of coming home.

  “The gurneys they used to move the bodies are still here,” he said. “C’mon, I’ll show you.”

  He gave me a tour of the place. For a military morgue, the place was surprisingly clear of ghosts. I didn’t pick up on one.

  Everyone talks about how ghosts feel cold, but they don’t mention that it’s more like a bite of frost in the blood. I’d seen more than my fair share of ghosts. They were everywhere, except here, in the place I expected to find them.

  There was something there, waiting, but whatever it was, it wasn’t a ghost. Somehow, the thought was not comforting.

  We reached the room I assumed was where Jasper spent most of his time. He’d furnished it in late Dumpster diving. There were no windows in the room. A curbside-find sofa leaned drunkenly against one wall, and a small pile of canned goods was stacked near a camping stove.

  “Have a seat,” Jasper said. He waved at the couch, but I chose the broken-down lawn chair instead. Less comfortable, but it had a view of the door.

  “So, you don’t know anyone in Minneapolis,” Jasper said. “No friends or family.”

  It was a statement that felt like a question.

  “No one here to care if I live or die,” I replied. It wasn’t exactly a lie. The Sisters of Fate would dance a jig if they heard of my demise, but I wasn’t going to share my family problems with total strangers.

  The thing waiting was getting impatient. I could feel it stir. It sent prickles down my spine, but as suddenly as it came the sensation was gone.

  “I should be going,” I said.

  “No, don’t go!” He sounded alarmed. Why would my departure warrant such panic? I gave him a questioning look.

  “You can’t go out in the middle of a storm,” he added. “You’ll freeze.”

  “My jacket’s lined,” I said.

  His eyes gleamed with avarice when he looked at my leather jacket. He was mostly human, but I could sense his magical blood. His intentions were obvious. He would wait until I was sleeping and bash my brains in and steal the jacket. Or something like that.

  There wasn’t much I could do in weather like this, anyway. He was a scrawny human. I could take him in a fight.

  “I’ll stay,” I said. “Thanks.”

  He heated up a can of soup on the camping stove and put two cups on the steel gurney he’d been using as a coffee table.

  “We can eat on this,” he said. He poured the soup into two chipped coffee mugs, and we ate in silence.

  I fished in my pocket for the chocolate I’d bought earlier, unwrapped it, and handed him a piece. “It’s not much of a dessert.”

  His face lit up. “Chocolate,” he said. “I haven’t had chocolate since last Christmas.” He gobbled his piece down with enthusiasm.

  “Here,” I said. I handed him my half of the candy bar.

  “Are you sure?” he asked.

  His face had the radiant look of a child. It wouldn’t have been difficult to get him to do my bidding. I wondered what his master had given him. I hoped it was more than a few pieces of candy.

  It had grown dark while we ate. Jasper lit a candle with the flame on the camping stove and turned off the burner.

  “I know something that will improve your mood,” he said.

  “What’s wrong with my mood?” I wasn’t used to anyone paying attention to my emotions.

  “You seem tense,” he commented. “Just relax. I’ll make you something to drink. Then we can talk about what’s bothering you.”

  I stifled a harsh laugh. Seeing Gaston had stirred up bitter memories, but it wasn’t anything I wanted to share, especially with a pseudo-solicitous runaway.

  He went into another room and came back with a bottle of cheap vodka and a liter of soda.

  There was no way I was going to drink the roofie he had
planned for me. Poor Jasper. He thought he was being so deviously clever, but his intentions were clear to anyone who had the brains to truly see him.

  On the inside, he was a scared child, clearly being bullied into this by someone bigger and stronger. Changing what you looked like on the outside was easy. Changing the person on the inside was considerably more difficult.

  I’d learned over time that what made Gaston such a great Tracker was his ability to see beyond someone’s exterior. Instead, he hunted by spotting patterns in someone’s behavior, learning to think like his prey, and striking.

  My first attempt to alter my patterns of behavior didn’t end well. No cities by the sea. No major metropolis. Instead I found a tiny landlocked town and rented a room above a butcher shop.

  The smell of fresh blood was bad enough, but it was the sound of the butcher sharpening his knives that really got to me. There were nights that the sound of a blade striking against stone gave me nightmares. It reminded me of the sharp scrick of Morta’s scissors as she cut my mother’s thread of fate. I lasted three days there before I moved.

  Jasper broke my reverie by handing me a drink in a jelly jar.

  He took a seat on the sofa. “Cheers,” he said. He drank his down in one gulp and waited expectantly for me to do the same. I didn’t have to take a sniff to confirm that the drink was spiked. The interesting part was that it was a magical concoction, well beyond his limited talents.

  “Sorry, I don’t drink,” I said. I handed him the doctored booze. “Have mine.”

  I wasn’t surprised when he declined the offer.

  “I think I’ll call it a night,” I said. I would leave in the morning, before he was up.

  “But it’s early,” Jasper replied.

  I yawned unconvincingly. “I’m beat.”

  He reached behind the sofa and came up with a couple of bedrolls. He handed me one.

  I made a pallet and tried to ignore the dark stain on the sleeping bag. It could be coffee or vomit or any other bodily fluid, but I knew what it was. Blood. Scrawny little Jasper was into some nasty business, but I got the impression it wasn’t altogether willingly.

  I spent the next few hours staring at the ceiling, waiting. I took off my jacket and used it for a pillow. There was a spiderweb in the corner of the ceiling and a piece of peeling paint in the shape of a duck. I waited for something that never came.

  At about three, I dropped off. I dreamed of drops of blood and the terrible sound of a golden knife cutting a silver thread.

  I woke to the sound of my own scream. I sat straight up and then realized where I was.

  Jasper was gone, but there was something else there. My skin did that itchy, twitchy thing it did when I came across another non-mortal. I fell back onto my pallet and feigned sleep.

  At first, I couldn’t identify the creature that stood in the shadows. I realized what it was from the smell of rotten cabbage and decaying flesh.

  Chapter Five

  A troll was in the room, watching me from the doorway. That explained why I hadn’t identified it right away. Trolls were rare. I had seen one once before, in Norway, by a fjord. Judging from the stench, this one had probably come up through the sewers. Or maybe they all smelled like that.

  It also explained the lack of ghosts. Most trolls didn’t care what they ate. Lost souls were as good as a steak to them.

  Mossy and green, his toad-like eyes gleamed through the darkness as he crossed to my pallet. His fat tongue came out as he held up my arm and pinched my bicep. Despite the pain, I stayed limp.

  A troll with a taste for human flesh. Exactly the kind of bullshit I didn’t have time for right now.

  A gob of drool ran down my face, and I decided that it was time to make my move. I didn’t anticipate how hungry the troll was. He chomped down on my arm, but I moved at the last second and his teeth scraped my arm. He didn’t manage to get a good grip, though, and I wiggled away and rolled onto my feet.

  Trolls have jaws like enormous pit bulls. It was all over if he managed to get his teeth into me.

  I ran for the door and the troll followed at a leisurely pace. He was fat and lazy. He’d gotten used to Jasper fetching his supper and he wasn’t expecting a fight, which told me that Jasper had been too cowardly to tell the troll I hadn’t slurped down the cocktail like the rest of his victims.

  My jacket! I’d forgotten to grab it in my haste, but I wasn’t leaving without it. The troll blocked my way.

  I desperately cast my eyes around the room, searching for anything to use as a weapon. I’d never win if it came to a show of strength. He was about a hundred times stronger than I was, but fortunately I was about a hundred times smarter.

  Magic was a last resort. I didn’t want to advertise that I was in town. Instead, I grabbed the gurney and wedged it into his stomach. I grabbed the lawn chair and beat him over the head with it, but trolls have extremely thick skulls, to protect their tiny brains. I broke his nose, but he just grinned at me before he tossed the lawn chair away and advanced.

  He wrapped one fleshy hand around my neck and squeezed until I thought my windpipe would collapse.

  In desperation, I rasped out a little sleep spell—dormite, dormite, dormite—and he dropped immediately. I always got the words for sleep and death mixed up. Had I remembered the right words?

  Apparently, I had remembered. The troll was unconscious, but alive. For a brief second, I thought about leaving him there for Jasper to find, but decided against it. The troll would have him back in thrall and bringing him victims in no time.

  “Is it over?” Jasper’s voice came from the other side of the door. “May I leave now, master?”

  “It’s over,” I said grimly. “Now get in here and help me.”

  There was a long pause and the sound of a choked-back sob. He came into the room with the look of someone who expected a beating. “He’s really gone?”

  “Not yet, but he will be,” I replied. The only sure way to kill a troll was to expose it to sunlight. The sunlight would turn our nasty friend into stone. At least I hoped it would.

  Jasper chewed his fingernails nervously, and for the first time I noticed the small trident inked on his ring finger.

  Trolls belonged to the House of Poseidon. They preferred somewhere dark, but near water. They loved dank caves, but would settle for any underground water system, such as a sewer or swamp.

  We loaded the troll onto the steel gurney they’d once used to carry in dead bodies and wheeled him outside.

  “What now?” Jasper asked. Relieved tears slid down his face, but he shook them away.

  “We wait until sunrise,” I said. “Unless you’d like me to leave you and troll boy here to continue with your little arrangement?”

  He shook his head. “God no.” He tried to suppress his sobs, but they bubbled out of him. Finally, he regained his composure enough to say, “He made me do it.”

  “How many?” I asked.

  “Three,” he said. “The first one was…messy.” His throat worked and he suddenly leaned over and heaved out last night’s soup.

  Trolls ate every bit of their victims, bones and all. I imagined the crunch my bones would have made. They also had enormous appetites. It was likely that the number was more like three dozen, but I wasn’t going to argue with Jasper when he was in this condition.

  We stayed there until the first rays of the sun touched the troll’s prone form and he turned to stone.

  “Let’s get some breakfast,” I said. No wonder the kid was so skinny. Being in the thrall of a troll wore you out.

  Jasper approached the stone troll and spit a huge loogie. “He killed my best friend the first night. He would have killed me, too, but he needed me.”

  “To bring him his dinner,” I said.

  Something changed in his face. “You’re him, aren’t you?” Jasper asked.

  “Him, who?”

  “The guy everybody’s looking for,” he said. “Fortuna’s son.”

  It was a s
hot in the dark. There was no way he could know that.

  “Who is Fortuna’s son?”

  “Dunno,” he replied. “But the Fates want him. Word is he’s supposed to bring about their downfall. They pretty much rule Minneapolis.”

  He had no idea. “I’m a minor magician from the House of Zeus,” I said. I motioned to his trident tattoo. “I don’t even warrant an insignia. Why did you think I might be this guy?”

  “You knew how to kill the troll,” he said. “I didn’t.”

  I shrugged. “I read a lot. It doesn’t take a lot of magic to outwit a troll. But I’m not looking to get noticed, if you know what I mean.”

  “You freed me,” he said. “I wouldn’t want to have the Fates take notice of me. I won’t say anything.”

  I relaxed a fraction. The ring of gratitude in his voice convinced me. “What have you heard about Fortuna’s son?”

  “There’s a bounty on his head,” he said.

  Old news. “Anything else?”

  “The Fates have a new manufacturing venture,” he said. “Right here in Minneapolis.”

  “Why Minneapolis?” I asked.

  “Something about the water being perfect for it,” he said.

  “Perfect for what?”

  “Something in research,” he said importantly.

  “What kind of research?”

  “Something about a new flavor of orange soda. They’re calling it ambrosia.”

  Sounded oddly benign for my aunts, but hey, witches needed to make a living, too. Except that ambrosia was also known as nectar of the gods, something that any mortal would kill for. In theory, ambrosia could extend a mortal’s life, maybe even make him live forever. But it had been banned by all the Houses years ago because it caused madness in mortals, followed by an agonizing death. Even the aunties wouldn’t want to piss off the entire magical community in order to make money. Would they?

  Money was power, and power was the one thing my aunts loved more than trying to kill me. “Where did you hear this?” I asked.