Page 26 of Spring's Arcana
“Is that his name? I couldn’t hear half of what he said.” Her stomach settled abruptly, probably because she wasn’t being swirled at high speed through a crowd of funhouse-distorted laughter and wavering forms. Dmitri had slowed down, and aimed them past a knot of giggling, cadaverous women in fluttering white with red crosses on their headbands, their pale cheeks striped with bright crimson.
“Least he didn’t make you Charleston.” His grip changed as if he was going to let her swing free, but at the last moment he changed his mind, and their feet moved through a complicated turn as if Coco’s heels knew the dance and were just carrying her along for the ride. “So, how you like the party?”
“It’s…” The skin on her back roughened into gooseflesh.Terrifyingwas the word, but a strange excitement also bloomed right behind her heartbeat, her skin tingling and every hair on her body attempting to stand up.It’s a hopped-up holiday hootenanny from hell, thanks. “I don’t know.”
“Good.” His dark eyes twinkled merrily. There wasn’t much difference between iris and pupil, but this close she could see the division, a single thread ringing the hole light struck his brain through. “You’re honest, at least.”
“More than you.” Irritation was good fuel; it got her through eight to five at an office every day and dealing with hordes of harried, unhappy customers during evening shifts. Maybe life was merely a series of irritating things to be endured, even if catsdidtalk and there were places where strange creatures gathered to drink and dance. “You’re a gangster, right?”
“Am part of American dream,zaika.” The grin left and he turned somber, which she liked better; at the same time, a chill ran down her spine as he tried to draw her in again. “We’re everywhere.”
“I thought you were Russian.” The tingling sense of danger ran cold fingers over her nape and slid away when he gazed over her shoulder, apparently intent on steering them. At least he was looking where they were going, which was more than she expected from a guy like him.
This can’t be real. She’d wake up at home, clutching her pillow, sweat-soaked and unsure whether she’d just suffered a nightmare… or something else.
Something worse.
“Everyone here from elsewhere, even the first rubes.” His lips barely moved, almost too quiet to be heard over the music. “And they all killed what they found.”
“Yeah, well.” She’d discovered as much in history classes, though Mama had always sniffed and remarked that truehistorywas hidden and all teachers talked about was merelyevents. “That’s America.”
Maybe she’d said the right thing for once, because his smile softened. “I love America.” The grin was still predatory, but the sharp tips of his canines dimpled his lower lip, pressing just on the edge of cutting. “America is great if you have money. The money is easy if you don’t mind the screams. And best of all is when you make the strong scream and take what is theirs.” He kept staring over her shoulder, turning them left, right, left, dipping and wheeling like a hawk over a rolling field. “The weak are no challenge, after all.”
That sounds like a life philosophy. She hadn’t dared drink anything, but her head felt full of fumes anyway. “What are all these people?” Nat hated the quaver in her own voice, the last word almost breaking in half. She was doing really well at treating all of this like it was normal.
But it wasn’t. Not by a long shot.
Dmitri paused. It wasn’t quite a stumble, and he smoothly recovered, steering them through a high arch into another smaller ballroom, just as crowded but somehow a little quieter. “What your mama tell you about asking stupid questions,zaika?”
You son of a bitch.Nat dug her heels in. To her surprise, they stuck fast. Dmitri pushed, but for once Nat Drozdova pushedback,or maybe she simply refused to move any farther. She tried to tug her hand away; his fingers bit down cruelly.
So she simply stood, immovable, an iron rod in a draped green dress. “It would be a stupid question if I knew the answer already.”
For the first time, the gangster seemed a little less than completely self-possessed. He examined her face, something flaring deep in tar-black pupils. “You don’t know what you—”
A shiver ran through the crowd. Music halted, the last notes draining away with a gurgle like soapy water down a half-clogged drain. For a moment Nat was sure she’d committed an unforgivable sin and the entire party was going to vanish into snowdrifts, ash, and sticks, leaving her shivering in an empty field, dressed only in cobweb scraps like in all the old stories, when someone shoutedGod help meduring a fairy revel to break the spell.
Maybe that’s why Mama sent me to Catholic school. Nat’s breath came hard and fast, her chin tilted, and she waited for all the magic to drain out of the world.
A crystalline chiming broke the airless silence. It was Westminster Quarters, that favorite of cuckoo and grandfather clocks everywhere, and when it finished the timepiece—maybe the one at the back of the foyer, with its syrup-slow pendulum—began to count off the hours. One, two, three, four, five, all the way to twelve, and the goosebumps were hard, swelling eggs under her skin.
Midnight.
Wait. How is that possible? We were at Coco’s just—
“It’s time,” Dmitri said, and that spark in his pupils was gone as if it had never existed. “You’re gonna like this,zaika.Come on.” A smart half-turn, her arm tucked through his, and he hustled her at high speed for the central ballroom, where a rising mutter sounded like an excited crowd at a football game. The crowd parted before them.
Over the carnivorous surf-mutter came a piercing cry.
“Daiiiiiiisyyyyyyy!”
WANT TO CHARLESTON
A half-dozen of the butlers with their concave chests dragged the linen-suited man into the middle of the ballroom, their noses lengthening and twitching as he twisted and screamed. Nat froze, her arm trapped in Dmitri’s and every face around her bright and avid, from the little girl in the flapper costume with a long black cigarette holder in her pudgy right hand to the man in a spotless white robe, his brown hair just brushing his shoulders, his goatee neatly clipped, and his bare feet pierced with round, red wet-gleaming holes. The latter glided forward when it looked like the butlers were having trouble, beaming a soporific smile and lifting mutilated hands—two more terrible hole-wounds were cradled in his palms.
Suddenly, Nat knew who he was supposed to be. The thought that this was just a crazy sort of holiday costume ball and nobody had told her might have been comforting if the deep, weeping wounds in his hands hadn’t looked so utterlyreal. “Oh, God,” she whispered, and attempted to surge forward, but Dmitri grabbed her trapped arm with his free hand as well, hot fingers sinking into her bare flesh.
“Don’t,” he said, his profile sharp as a Roman statue’s. “Happens every time,zaika. Just watch.”
