Chapter 15 — Masquerade
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Ophelia caught my elbow within a minute, black bob sharp under a black lace mask, emerald gown cut to the navel, her eyes everywhere at once. She smelled of clove and hairspray and the champagne someone had already spilled down her wrist.
“There she is, baby bat,” she said against my cheek, loud for the couple beside us. “Breathe. You look like money that bites.”
“I feel like a lamp in a moth room,” I murmured, smiling past her at an alderman's wife whose name I knew the way I knew exits.
“You are the lamp. Stay lit.” Her fingers pressed once on my left clutch, where the brass key waited. “Back stage is set. Ice machine leaks like always. Mercy is behind the curtain if you need her. Spots go black on my call, 4 seconds, no more. Do not miss your window.”
“I will not miss.”
“Good. Sip, do not drink. Marcus is by the north bar watching the screens like he owns them.” She leaned closer, voice dropping under the bass. “Gideon came in 20 minutes ago with the stare and the hands in the pockets. Cracked Zippo. You know the sound.”
I knew the sound. I had heard it in my sleep for 12 years, flint on steel and then the soft blooming of accelerant catching.
She moved off into the current, and I lifted a coupe from a passing tray with my right hand and kept my left free for the clutch, stem balanced light between 2 fingers.
The first sip ran cold needles down, too sweet, right for the part I played.
I circulated. I air-kissed. I let a man in a fox mask tell me my dress should be illegal in 3 states, and I told him only 2, I checked, and he laughed and turned to find someone prettier.
Through the fog and the strobing wash I tracked movement in slices.
Marcus Thorne by the north bar in a tuxedo cut to hide his middle, silver buzz cut catching the light, boar signet on his right hand as he lifted a glass an inch toward me and smiled the flat corporate smile that never traveled past his teeth into his eyes.
Two of his door men held positions at the main stairs.
A 3rd I did not know stood by coat check with his eyes too still.
And near the back-stage curtain, half-lost in fog, a tall shaved head bent over something in his hands, shoulders hunched the way men hunch over flame in wind.
My pulse struck once, hard, under the mask string. I smiled at the fox mask and asked about his cuff links.
At 11:18 p.m. I saw my opening and took it.
Marcus turned to take a photograph with 2 donors, his whole body angling toward the cameras, and his door men turned with him the way sunflowers turn.
The man by coat check bent to check a bag.
The fog machines exhaled a fresh rolling bank that swallowed the back 10 feet of the room whole.
I set my half-finished flute on a bus tray as I passed, freeing my right hand, and slipped sideways behind the back-stage curtain with the clutch tight under my arm, heels silent on the rubber mat Ophelia had laid for exactly this.
The service corridor ran narrow and cool behind the stage, concrete under rubber, emergency bulbs caged every 20 feet throwing amber pools.
It smelled of old beer and mop water and the vanilla fog leaking under the curtain, and underneath that the faint chemical sweetness I knew better than my own name.
My hands stayed steady. I fitted the brass key to the side door by feel, turned it the way Ophelia taught me, slow then firm, and stepped into the back-stage pocket by the ice machine with the door eased shut behind me.
Then I slipped the brass key into the bodice pocket with the burner phone, flat and secret over my ribs, and left the empty clutch on a crate. If I ran, I ran light.
Dark back here except for the spill from the corridor cage-lights and the blue standby glow of the ice machine.
Crates stacked head-high. Coiled cables thick as wrists.
A rack of spare spot gels. Mercy's familiar taped handle leaning behind the curtain where Ophelia left her.
The ice machine rattled and dripped into a dented pan, water striking tin in a fast irregular rhythm, and the air off it was cold enough to raise the hair on my arms. I tipped half a bottle of staged champagne across the boards near the curtain mouth so the spill caught the light in a bright sheet.
A lure. A reason for a man to look down for 1 second.
Then I waited in the lee of the crates with my right hand resting light on my skirt over the sheath, breathing through my mouth so the cold would not cloud in front of me.
He came the way I knew he would. Stalk, not chase. Let the prey arrange itself.
The curtain breathed. Fog curled around a pair of steel-toed boots.
Gideon Slade stepped through into the blue glow with his hands in his pockets and his shaved head gleaming with sweat, pale eyes nearly lashless in the dimness.
He was 6 foot 4 of blunt instrument in a rented tuxedo that pulled at the shoulders, and he moved like fire moves when it is deciding, unhurried and certain.
He stopped 3 feet inside, lifted his head, and sniffed once.
Clove cigarettes lived in his coat, old smoke ground into wool, and over that the sharp pen-chemical of the accelerant tube he carried like other men carry pens.
“You spilled,” he said. His voice was low and near-monosyllabic, the voice of a man who saved words the way other men save money. “Pretty smells like a party.”
My mouth was dry. I let the dryness sit there and did not swallow where he could hear it. “Parties spill,” I said lightly, from behind the crates, letting him hear the smile. “Clean it and I will tip you.”
He laughed once, a short exhale through the nose, and took another step toward the spill.
His right hand came out of his pocket, burn-scarred and shiny, the skin ridged white and pink to the wrist, and in it the cracked Zippo he turned end over end.
The hinge gave its small metallic sigh. Flint rasped.
A flame stood up 2 inches high, yellow and steady, and his face lit from below like a lantern, the pale eyes going soft the way I had seen once through a boathouse window when I was 14 and supposed to be asleep.
“Pretty,” he murmured. “Hungry.”
The accelerant pen glinted in his left hand as he thumbed the cap. One drop. That was all men like him ever started with. One drop on a hem, a curtain, a spill of champagne that would go up with a soft blue rush and then keep going.
I moved on the 3rd sway of the flame.
Three feet of boards between us and I covered it without sound, right hand finding the sheath under the slit by pure practice, mother-of-pearl warm from my skin as it cleared leather with its small clean snick.
He heard it. He turned with the Zippo still burning, flame guttering sideways, and his left hand came up with the pen aimed at my face.
I was already inside his reach. I put my left forearm across his burned right wrist and shoved the flame wide toward the concrete, and with my right hand I drew the stiletto in a short rising arc across his left cheek, edge biting deep enough to part skin and bring blood in a sudden hot line.
He grunted, more surprise than pain, and the Zippo flew.
It struck a crate and went out. The pen spun from his fingers and clattered under the ice machine, out of reach, its chemical stink sharp in the cold air.
I pressed my advantage the way 12 years of midnight math taught me, knee driving for his thigh, left hand fisting his lapel, and I brought my mouth close to his bleeding cheek and left the mark I left on every one of them, a full Huntress-red kiss pressed into the blood and sweat just below the cut, bright and deliberate.
“That is for Vivienne,” I said, flat and clear. “Remember her while you bleed.”
He roared then, hands closing on my upper arms with crushing force, steel toes scraping for purchase on the wet boards, and we went staggering sideways through the curtain mouth in a locked grapple, 12 feet of struggle from the corridor shadows into the full wash of the floor spots.
My left heel turned on a cable. My right hand kept the bloody stiletto up and between us.
Somewhere behind me wood cracked as Mercy hit the boards where Ophelia had dropped her to clear my line.
The crowd noise changed pitch, surprise rolling outward in a wave, 300 heads turning as one toward the curtain.
Then the room went white.
The 4 wall screens above the floor flipped in the same second from looped promo to live feed, 4 identical close-ups in brutal high definition, my face huge on every wall at once.
The camera above the stage had found us and held us.
Gold mask. Smeared red mouth. Honey hair coming down from the chignon in loose strands.
Gideon behind me with blood running from his cheek over my kiss mark, his scarred hand locked on my arm.
The image was 4 feet high and pitiless. A woman screamed.
A glass broke. The bass cut out mid-beat, leaving fog hiss and 300 gasps and the clatter of heels on wood as the crowd surged back from the stage.
My mask string had loosened in the grapple.
As I twisted to break Gideon's grip, the gold mask slipped down off my left cheek and hung off 1 ear, and the right side of my face lay bare to the camera in pitiless detail, green eyes wide, mouth open.
Across the floor through smoke and fog I saw him.
Dante stood 40 feet away at the lighting-booth doorway in his black wool coat, gloved hands empty at his sides, and his ice-gray eyes were locked on the nearest screen, on my exposed face held huge in the light.
His whole body went still in a way I had never seen, not the arranged stillness he wore like clothing but something underneath it breaking through, and 1 of his gloved hands lifted 2 inches from his side and stopped, frozen mid-reach.
He knew. I watched the knowing land in his shoulders, his stance, the angle of his head.
His huntress. Gold and blood and red. Me.
Gideon used my second of horror. His burned hand closed on my throat, not squeezing yet, holding, while his other hand fisted in my dress at the shoulder.
The left slit tore to mid-thigh with a long ripping scream of silk, and the makeup over my crescent scar split with it, the small pale curve laid bare to the lights.
My left heel snapped sideways and came off.
I drove my bare foot into his instep and raked my nails down his cut cheek, and he bellowed and threw me 3 feet across the stage boards toward the screens.
I landed hard on 1 knee, the old scar cracking open under the silk, blood welling warm down my shin.
The crowd screamed again, a single animal sound.
Somebody shouted fire, whether from the Zippo fuel smell or panic or design I never learned, and the whole floor moved like 1 animal toward the red exit sign.
Ophelia killed the spots. Four seconds of total black, her promise kept, thunderous dark full of shrieking and fog hiss and trampling glass.
In that dark a hand found the small of my back, large and gloved, steadying without grabbing, 2 full seconds of pressure before it guided, never closing on my wrist, and I knew the weight and the heat of it through silk.
Dante. He did not speak. He could not reach my hand in the crush.
He pressed once, directionally, toward the corridor mouth, and then the spots slammed back on, white and merciless, and he was gone from my back, swallowed by 40 feet of panicked bodies.
I ran. One heel gone, 1 heel turning under me, bloody stiletto gripped tight in my right hand.
I tore across boards slick with champagne, dress torn and mouth bleeding where Gideon caught me, toward the fire-exit corridor where the red sign burned through smoke.
The left heel of my remaining shoe wedged at the corridor door hinge and I wrenched my foot free and left it, running the last steps barefoot over concrete scattered with grit.
Far outside, thin under the screaming, a siren lifted and fell.
I reached the corridor mouth with my lungs full of smoke and my face still bare to every camera in the room.
The screens did not blink. My face looked back at me from four walls at once, gold mask hanging off one ear, mouth open around a scream nobody could hear.
Somebody shouted fire and the whole floor moved like one animal toward the red exit sign.
A hand closed around my left wrist, metal teeth biting, and a man's voice said, “Police.
You're coming with me.” The mask hit the stage boards. I went down to my knees in the crush.