Page 27 of Spring's Arcana
Somehow, an X of raw lumber had appeared on the polished wooden dance floor. A ripple went through the crowd, fantastical shapes blurring and shivering at their edges. The butlers held Jay grimly as the white-robed man arrived, a soft reddish glow beginningbehind the fabric at his chest as if someone had turned on a nightlight inside his ribcage.
“Quiet,” the white-robed, goateed man said sharply. “Doesn’t hurt that bad, and I should know.”
“Y’all can just be quiet too. Ain’t even got the holes through your wrists proper, you Protestant bastid.” This was a barefoot towheaded girl in denim bib overalls, one strap frayed through and dangling as she melted out of the crowd on the other side. “He’s got a right, and don’t you forget it.”
“Youshould be seen, not heard.” The white-robed man scowled at her, forgetting his pacific expression.
Jay moaned weakly.
“And you’re supposed to be a rabbi,” a woman in a grubby tan mackintosh and steel-rimmed glasses sniffed. “Leave Scout alone.” Next to her was a big, dark-haired man, red-and-blue spandex hugging his rippling muscles, a long crimson cape hanging from his broad shoulders.
Nat could barely believe her eyes.
“Children, children.” A large rawboned man in a funeral director’s dusty black suit under a stovepipe hat raised his big lobsterlike hands. Nat began to feel distinctly faint; she knew that craggy profile from history class and copper pennies. “We do this every night. Let’s just get it done.”
“Wait, let me get a picture.” A man with an ancient camera, a silvery round flash atop it, pushed forward. He was in a tan coat like the woman with glasses, and his fedora was at a jaunty angle. He was elbowed aside by a big, heavy man in a blue serge uniform, a glossy black nightstick dangling from a black leather belt and his forehead oddly swollen.
“Oh, fa cry-eye.” The man in blue looked like every cartoon illustration of an Irish cop ever made, right to the gin blossoms on his twitching pink nose and the stiff reddish bristles of his stubble. “Back away, jackal.”
A deep, rich, resonant baritone broke the rising mutters. “You’re one to talk.”
The owner of that voice was a copper-skinned man with a battered top hat at a jaunty angle, silver conchas starring its band. Beaded necklaces of turquoise and crimson melded with a tattered, variegated scarf at his neck. Jeans clasped his long legs, ending in run-down boots with strangely soft soles and bright beadwork glittering almost like Dmitri’s toe caps, but far more pleasantly. The sleeve-fringes on his leather jacket swung idly as he moved, and he carried an old-fashioned peace pipe that definitely didn’t look like a carnival prize.
The white-robed man sized him up. “Well, isn’t this an honor.”
Hard on the heels of that statement, the blue-uniformed cop barked a question. “Why the hell areyouhere?”
“I am where you least expect me.” But the baritone’s dark gaze darted over the crowd, and a zing like biting on tinfoil jolted up Nat’s spine.
Other voices began, swirling at the edges of the onlookers, chattering over each other, an expectant crowd who had paid the door fee and wanted its money’s worth now.
“We have a new one tonight.”
“Daisy,” Jay moaned. “Oh, please,Daisy.”
“Can we just finish this?”
“It happens in its own time.” A familiar, iron-colored voice intervened. “Like everything else.”
Baba de Winter stepped out of the crowd. She was just as thin and angular as she’d been in her office, but her hair was now a high-piled rat’s nest of gray and black instead of tarnished ivory, a tower pinned with iron knitting needles. Her dress was a vaporous, moving cloud, torn black lace wrapped several times around a stick-thin figure with a hard, aggressive chest-prow, the cloth starred with silver safety pins and her cuffs masses of fraying thread. Her lips were no longer crimson but chocolate-cherry, red so tarnished it was almost black.
“I should make you do this,” she said in Dmitri’s general direction, the gesture heavy because her bone-white fist was weighted with an old-fashioned claw hammer, a bit of electrical tape fluttering on its wooden handle.
“Pay me and I will, Baba.” The gangster grinned, but his grasp didn’t loosen at all.
Baba de Winter turned away with a very teenage roll of her dark eyes, and bent to her work. Other hands held the nails steady, and the hammering started.
Nat pulled at Dmitri’s grasp. “Stop it,” she managed, breathlessly. “Please ohgodstopit—”
“He chose this,zaika.” Dmitri didn’t let go. There were bruises beginning under his grasp, she couldfeelthem. “Be quiet.”
“Daisy! Daisy! Daisy!” Jay screamed in time with each hit, but Baba knew her work. Three swift, ear-shattering blows at each wrist, and the crunching as the heavy iron railroad spikes went through made bile whip the back of Nat’s throat. The guests surged forward, hiding what de Winter did to Jay’s feet, and Nat almost lost what little champagne she’d had at Coco’s all over the floor.
When the X was lifted Jay sagged, and the screaming drained to a low cricket-whisper buzz, his lips vibrating. Nat shuddered, limp in Dmitri’s grasp. “You sick fucks,” she whispered. “Oh, myGod.”
“Look at that,” someone said. “Somebody’s first time.”
“You always remember your first,” someone else intoned, and there was a high glassy giggle. Baba appeared again, pushing between a pair of wasp-waisted, gold-dipped bipedal forms who chittered gently as they fawned on a tiny round man who looked exactly like the guy on the Monopoly boxes.
