Page 66 of Spring's Arcana
“Excuse me.” Her voice wouldn’t quite work right, high and breathy as if she was trapped in Koschei’s mirror-maze again. “Are we under arrest?”
Dmitri snorted, his expression barely easing. Friendly stared at her, a brick-red flush rising up his painfully bare cheeks. It looked like he shaved with a belt sander.
Thatwas a vivid mental image Nat didn’t need.
“I don’t need to arrest you—” Friendly began, and a great surge of pointless anger arrived out of nowhere, settling in the pit of Nat’s stomach, rising to her throat like vodka fumes, and pouring between her teeth in a reasonable imitation of her mother’sI am being patient but that might not lastvoice.
“Then we’re free to go.” Her hands had curled into fists, and she wasn’t even cold now, she realized. “That’s the law.”If there’s a god of the Constitution, I bet they’ll be along any minute.
Friendly studied her for a long moment. That brick flush deepened into maroon, the very picture of a petty Napoleon denied the pleasure of squatting over someone else. It was stupidly, deeply familiar—who, after all, hadn’t suffered a boss like that?
You could smile and play nice and go along, if you had to. But sometimes, you could stick it to what Leo calledgaetsand others calledThe Man.
The only thing more satisfying was getting away with it.
Of course, if they caught you next time, you’d suffer double. Still, this was an old game, and Nat was reminded of the headmistress of Sacred Grace Middle School, a holy terror to all the girls she was supposed to teach and guide but a deflating black-and-white balloon when Mom appeared, Maria Drozdova finally prodded into action by Nat’s pleading and whatever Leo had said to her during that one terrible fight.
That was a bad memory, full of the scent of her closet as young Nat huddled in a corner with her hands over her ears, but she wasn’t thirteen anymore. She set her chin and gave Friendly—dear God, what a name—her bestfuck youlook.
“Little girl.” The cop’s tone turned stentorian, a judge expressing his just displeasure from a high bench. “You know nothing of theLaw.Thatis a thief, a murderer, a despoiler and robber, and he will turn upon you the moment you don’t serve his plans.”
“Yeah.”I listened the first time he told me, thanks. “At least he’s honest about it.”
She’d never seen a cop deflate before. It did look an awful lot like the headmistress almost quailing in front of Mom, and a sudden, almost alcoholic sense of heady power filled Nat’s skull.
If Mama got better and her daughter lost this… this force, this sense of calm warm strength, what would she do?
“You’ll regret this,” the man named Friendly growled in her direction, but his thunderous mantle of overwhelming dominance was gone. Now he was just a portly man in Highway Patrol khaki instead of a massive monster in blue serge, and his hat’s brim actually drooped at the edges. He turned on one waffle-stomping heel and strode back to the Crown Vic’s open door. The car’s springs didn’t quite groan when he dropped in, but she thought it was probably close.
A chirp of tires, a cloud of noxious smoke, a howl like a jet plane taking off in place of a siren—it threatened to rupture Nat’s eardrums—and the white car lunged forward, narrowly avoiding clipping the black car’s rear left quarter-panel. Dmitri didn’t move, tense and ready, and when the screaming noise faded in the distance he regarded Nat, taking the long last final drag on whatever he was smoking.
She decided she could live quite comfortably without knowing what was packed in his cigarettes.
“He right,” the gangster said, finally. “You shoulda listened.”
What could she say to that? “My father’s an immigrant too.” It wasn’t really an answer, but then again, the gangster hadn’t really asked a question.
“Get in.” Dima flicked the spent filter away. It hissed as it met icy concrete, a tiny, lonely sound. The freeway noise returned, folding seamlessly over a hole in the world. “Still far to go.”
“Yeah.” Nat’s legs were a little rubbery; she shuffled for the black car.
Dmitri glided for the passenger side, his boot-toes winking. Hedidn’t look happy, but then again, she figured it really wasn’t in his nature.
He held the passenger door open, though, and when she slipped her backpack off her shoulder and dropped into the black car’s now-familiar interior, he closed it gently behind her instead of slamming.
Nat fastened her seatbelt, hugged her backpack, and stared out the crystal-clear windshield like she was watching the most interesting movie in the world. She didn’t have to ignore him very hard at all, though, because when the gangster got in he didn’t speak, just roused the car into purring life and swung the wheel, pointing them westwards.
WILL OF IRON
It was good to drive, but each mile was an itch of anticipation and the girl didn’t help. She did, however, dig a sheet of paper out of her silly bag after a hundred scorching miles passed underneath the car’s angry-muttering tires.
“Dmitri?”
Better not, little girl. “What?” He couldn’t quite snarl; after all, she had given Friendly a kick right in the stones, and that was something to warm a thief’s heart.
If he had one, that was. If it hadn’t been stolen by her fucking mother.
“This is where we’re going.” The sheet trembled in her fingers, maybe because of the vibration of travel—he wasn’t bothering to keep their speed below a certain mortal threshold since she had been burnished by a night spent among her own kind, and the flashing of small towns or the streaks of longer gray cities outside the windows blurred and ran in a way that would give one of the rubes nausea fit to kill.
