Chapter 2
Chapter
Two
I dropped the best thing that had happened to me all day and mourned the falafel, tahini dressing, and Greek yogurt mess on the ground. Annoyed, I looked up.
“What the?—”
Then, I stared.
The man in front of me was almost as tall as I was, his face the sort of angular perfection that belonged on a runway. And he was wearing a torn-open shirt, his leather pants fitting snugly on his hips.
My stupid gut said hey, there with interest.
Then, my eyes reached his bare feet, and everything in me screeched straight from hit that leather-clad ass into that is disgusting . Because bare feet on Paris streets was right up there with licking a slug from a Greyhound bus station.
He didn’t seem to notice that he’d left his shoes at whatever one-night stand had torn off his shirt. Instead, he eyed me, as though I had bumped into him and made him drop the best falafel he’d had since that time in Alexandria with the stolen antiquities and more gunfire than OSHA would recommend for my workplace safety.
“Excuse me,” he said in an unrecognizable European accent. “You’re in my way.”
I gaped. “Well, let me amend that, Your Majesty.”
Mockingly, I stepped aside, sweeping my arm back in an elaborate bow.
He simply arched an eyebrow. “Your Highness, actually.”
Then he was gone, and I was left wondering if he’d been mocking me there at the end. I had to admit, I was actually into the way his tongue had curled around the sounds, the way his small smirk at the end made something in me want to let him press me down on a mattress and do truly wicked things to me.
No.
Bad brain. Bad gut that kept saying, “Yes, please, may I have some more?”
Instead, I continued down the marketplace, the scents enough to convince me that the falafel was about to be a distant memory as I ate some other street food that made the city live up to its reputation as one of the culinary capitals of the world.
I traded a few coins for a savory crêpe wrapped in paper. The buttery mushrooms and cheese melted in my mouth, and I circled back to try one of their sweet offerings.
The fresh strawberries and cream burst on my tongue, and I had almost forgotten about His Highness when I caught sight of him further down the marketplace.
Somewhere, he’d acquired new clothes and, thankfully, shoes. Now, he was dressed in expensive jeans, his pale blue button-up shirt done nearly to the top with only the top two buttons undone. His shoes looked like expensive leather.
I’d have to get closer to tell if they were handmade. Everything else screamed posh and either he likes slumming, or he only dates in his social class .
It would only take a second for me to talk to him and find out. I shook myself.
No, that was on-the-job thinking. When I wasn’t on the job, I had no need to con someone, to figure out the best way to get close to them with the most minimal effort possible.
Anyway, I needed a roll in the sheets like I needed another expense invoice returned back to me for insufficient documentation. So sorry that black-market magical artifact dealers don’t give out itemized receipts.
A flash of gold caught my eye. I turned, charmed when I saw a street vendor with a blanket spread between a woman selling mass-produced touristy magnets and a man selling handmade leather products.
The small crowd around him groaned. A tourist wearing a fanny pack and a gleeful expression said, “Yes!”
She took her handful of euros and fled as the man’s face fell unhappily.
It had to be a ruse. The woman was too touristy, down to the massive, unnecessary camera around her neck. The man was too disappointed. The handful of euros too large.
“Anyone else?” He spoke in French, and my grasp of the language was pretty good, but I couldn’t place his accent. He grinned out into the crowd, but I sensed an air of desperation in the twitch of his lips. “Anyone want to win my last euro?”
A young man, still wearing his school uniform, satchel hanging at his hip said, “Yeah, I’ll go.”
The man smiled at him, and I saw what looked like genuine hope. Either he was a better con man than I was, or he needed a movie producer to see him. I could feel the emotion even through the crowd around him.
“Look at the coin. See if you can find anything unusual about it.” The man flipped a heavy gold coin to the student.
The boy examined it perfunctorily, glancing at both sides before handing it back. He’d obviously seen this part done before and was eager to get on to the main event.
The student dug in his bag, presenting a bill that he put on top of the one the street performer had out, next to the stage.
The street performer held the coin in his hand for a second, weighing it, closing his eyes for a split second of weakness before straightening.
“I’m going to put the coin under this cup.” He placed the coin under the cup and then made a big show of pulling the cup back off to prove that the coin had made its way under the cup.
I frowned. The angle was odd. Usually, purveyors of the shell game were more careful about their angles. They needed to have the audience at a distance or eye level so that they could control what we saw.
But this audience was up close, nearly stepping on the blanket. There was nowhere for him to hide, no angle for him to lose the coin in. I focused on his hands, on the cups, watching for the telltale glint as he palmed the coin or swapped it behind another cup.
The shell game was such a well-known trick that Mom hadn’t even wanted to teach it to us. She said no one we’d want to con would even play it.
“You don’t want some idiot who wastes money,” she said. “You want the idiot who’s too smart to waste money. Then he has money to steal.”
The street performer began moving the cups, arcing movements that made it easy to follow the coin. When it came time to point to the correct cup, the student chose. The coin wasn’t there.
The performer lifted the cup on the left, and the coin sat there, gleaming warmly in the overcast light.
My brows twitched. It was another difference. Usually, an artist would let the audience member win, then promise double or nothing. The taste of success made the rube more likely to bet again.
The student grunted, annoyed, but then said, out of nowhere, “Double or nothing.”
An appreciative murmur went through the crowd, and the student grinned, pulling out his wallet and putting down a hefty sum.
The artist looked at the amount, and I could see the defeat on his face, even if I didn’t understand why. Double or nothing only meant more money for him, so why was his expression telling me he thought he’d already lost?
He’d managed to palm the coin and slip it under a separate cup in a way that even I couldn’t see. And I was good at seeing everything, a skill honed by my mother’s admonition that if I got conned by a common swindler, she’d cut off all my hair and send me to work with my dad.
“Double or nothing,” the performer finally agreed. He pulled out his wallet and took out everything in it.
He lingered over the last of the bills, finally putting it down. With a long sigh, he offered over the coin again, and the young man barely glanced at it before handing it back.
I caught sight of it, the markings on it strange. The side I could see looked like a bird.
The performer put the coin under the nearest cup and began the same routine. But this time, I saw him palm the coin on one of the swooping shuffles. He slipped the coin into his long sleeves. That made sense.
I must have just missed it the first time.
When the shuffle was over, the performer paused, his breath going overly calm. “Which cup?”
The student pointed with perfect conviction at the wrong cup. It wasn’t wrong because the coin now sat safely in the performer’s sleeve. The student was pointing at a cup that would have been wrong even if the performer had been playing fair.
A murmur went through the crowd, and the boy shook off the hand of a friend trying to fix his mistake.
The vendor sighed unhappily, giving away the game early. He wasn’t smiling when he turned over the cup and the coin sat, a dragon’s head grinning up at the performer.
The student yelped in joy. He grabbed the cash and ran down the street, his friends following behind. I frowned after them as the vendor started to pack up.
My confusion was twofold: I’d seen the vendor pocket the coin. And this was the second rube who’d gotten away with a big wad of his cash.
There was always the chance that it was fake money, but the way that the man’s shoulders rolled in defeat, the way that his eyes pulled down in the corners, said that this was no ruse.
He stood, starting to put away his blanket, his worn pack behind him.
“Wait. I’ll play,” I said. Maybe he was just bad at the game. Maybe he was just starting out, but I had never seen a con artist let the rubes win and himself lose. That took away the magic, removed any of the fun in the game.
Moreover, I had to know how he’d done that sleight of hand; I had to understand how the coin had gone from his sleeve to the cup without me noticing. I was good at sleight of hand, ever since my mother had invented a game called “The only way to watch TV is if you can get the remote from my pocket.”
“No.” The man shook his head. “No, I’m out of money.”
He opened his wallet to show me, but there was a five-euro note left, and he took it out, frowning.
“Well,” he said. He stared down at the note. It trembled in his fingers, and he looked at me with such blank hope that I wondered if this was part of the con.
Would the tourist and the student circle around and come back for a second matinee showing after he’d won my money?
Still, I could expense five euros.
He put the bill down, setting up the game again. When he looked at me expectantly, I pulled out my own wallet—an expensive leather billfold that fit the character I was playing.
Pulling out a five, I placed it on top of his. Then, I waited as he took the coin from his pocket and offered it over to me.
“Examine it,” he said. His voice was unsteady, and I saw his throat work. “Make sure there are no tricks.”
I took the coin. It was heavier than I expected; the gleam of the gold looked antique. On one side, a bird glared at me. On the other side, a dragon raised his chin regally, wings extended.
I wasn’t sure what the coin was from or where he’d gotten it, but it lacked the slight buzz I associated with magical objects. As I turned it between my fingers, I had the urge to tuck it in my pocket, call the five euros payment for the coin. But no, this was someone’s livelihood.
Handing the coin back to him, I made a show of saying, “It looks right. Where is it from?”
My accent must have given me away because he spoke in broken English, “Nowhere you or I know.”
Then, he carefully placed the coin on the mat. He offered over one of the cups. “Cover it.”
I did as instructed, using the proximity to examine the mat. Nothing there was out of the ordinary, nothing that could explain the strange magic he’d pulled with the coin.
He lifted both of the other cups to show me that there was nothing in them before placing them on the mat. Then, he began the swooping motions of the shell game.
When the cups stilled, I chose the one the coin should have been under, expecting emptiness. But there, the coin gleamed.
Frowning, still not understanding his game, I took the two bills. I didn’t examine them carefully, but when I tucked them into my billfold, they seemed standard.
The man stared at the coin, then looked up at me hopelessly. “Try again. This time, if you win, you take the coin.”
“Sure.” I put down a euro coin just to make it feel fair.
The man nodded and began the game again. His hands hesitated as he reached the end of the game. He looked up at me. “Which?”
I pointed, and he pulled the cup up, and there sat the gold coin.
We both stared at it, and he jerked back, staring in awe. “It’s yours.”
“What?” I asked.
“Yours, yours.” He pushed the whole mat toward me insistently, his English growing rough. “Take. Take it.”
As though drawn by a magnet, I reached down and picked up the coin. It was normal. Probably something he’d picked up in a Halloween store or gotten from some DnD cosplay enthusiast. Maybe he’d picked it up from some TV show filming something set in the Middle Ages.
I turned my con artist eyes on it, but it wasn’t real gold, and nothing about it looked like a magical artifact. It didn’t buzz against my fingers the way that magical artifacts did. As far as I could tell, its only value was as a prop.
The man was crying, tears streaming down his face. He gathered up the mat and the cups and everything else on his patch.
“Listen, one artist to another, what is the game here?” I asked first in French, then repeating in English when he stared at me blankly.
“Game? No. Yours. It’s yours now.” He pushed himself backward when I tried to give him back the coin.
“Okay, fine, but?—”
“ Yours ,” he said insistently.
Then he turned, everything still gathered in his arms, and ran.
I stared, frowning. Should I chase after him?
Just as I thought it, gunfire echoed, screams following. The peaceful market turned into chaos as shopkeepers tried to protect their wares from stampeding people, and civilians ran for cover, shoving over everything in their paths.
Swearing under my breath, I hesitated. Part of me knew that this wasn’t my fight, and I couldn’t afford to draw attention to myself with Green Scales watching me so closely. The other half of me knew I couldn’t run away.
Grunting in frustration, I shoved through the crowd, toward the sound of gunfire.
As I got further in, the crowd cleared, and I caught sight of a group of people in paramilitary garb, automatic weapons raised. I ducked low to avoid a spray of bullets.
Rolling under a nearby café table, I reached for my cell phone to call it in. Twenty-one might not be able to do anything from all the way across the Atlantic, but she’d know who to contact. Someone shoved into me, trying to find cover under the same small table where I was sheltering. Annoyed, I turned and saw wide brown eyes. It was the attractive man from earlier.
He pushed harder, sending me sprawling into the line of gunfire, just as one of the assailants raised his weapon, pointing straight at me.