VEEK

I watched Sophie climb up the hotel facade like a monkey.

This was no moment for hesitation. I thought of the scent of the hairs which I had stolen from her hairbrush.

Instantly, invisibly, I sent myself to her.

I materialized on the roof just as Sophie clambered nimbly over the parapet, slipping out of her climbing shoes as she came.

“Veek!” She threw her arms around my neck. “I have pulled off l’escapade merveilleuse!” She hugged me, swaying as if to pull my head off.

“Slowly, lentement.” I disengaged. “Your father is on our heels.”

She gave another squeak. “I promised I wouldn’t get arrested. Let’s go!” She took some sandals out of a backpack on the roof and stuffed her harness, ropes, and climbing shoes into the backpack. Then she slipped on the sandals.

I rolled my eyes. She was as bad as Jake. Anything for a joke, and then let Veek fix it. “Come on.”

We left the way she had come, through a roof access elevator, and passed all the way down to the ground floor by way of smelly, disused emergency stairs. When we had gained the street at last, she told me about her evening’s triumph. She finished, “And the room was filled with rose petals!”

“Very fancy,” I said, leading her down into the subway. That should be safe. Her father would surely eat french fries with ketchup before he would enter the common subway.

“I think they were magical.” Sophie dove a hand into the pocket of her cargo shorts and pulled out a fistful of crumpled rose petals.

“How would you know?”

“Oh, we have lots and lots of magic in Europe. Here you have not so much.”

This I had been aware of. It was one reason I had hope of taking possession of my title and my birthright properties.

As if she heard this thought she said, “Only last year an Englishwoman turned up at her own funeral. She had been lost while bathing in the sea. She said she had—”

“—Turned into a turtle for two years.”

“You know?”

“I follow such things. There was a small inheritance at stake.”

The courts had decided in the turtle-woman’s favor. She was poor and English, two matters that might not weigh with the Bureau, but it was legal precedent of a sort. I considered the wisdom of discussing it with Sophie—she might know what cases her father knew of, or planned to cite in his suit.

Then a face at the other end of the subway car caught my eye.

“Wait, Sophie—do you know that young man back there, by the other door?”

She turned her head full around, unconcerned. A scruffy youth was putting his hand into his shirt pocket, looking down.

“He was watching us,” I said, lowering my voice.

“Oh, him. He’s one of those paparazzi who follow Yoni.” She twisted back to look up into my face, swaying disturbingly against my body. “You worry about everything.”

“I thought he might have followed us from the hotel. Maybe he is in your father’s pay.”

She put her white hand up to my cheek. “Poor Veek. Never a quiet moment.”

I smiled in spite of myself. She smiled blindingly back.

I wondered at my own behavior. If I had delayed her out on the street in front of the hotel, her father would have caught up with her and then I would have been rid of her.

But when I saw her on a window ledge, while her father crossed the street, I’d thought only to protect her.

It must have been the power of the love philtre working on me. Or perhaps the navel string Jake had hidden among Sophie’s effects.

In the subway, as we clung to a pole and swayed with the train, I eyed her energetic person, looking for places where she might be hiding something as small as a hundred-year-old umbilical cord. Her backpack. Her dark green cargo pants with plenty of pockets.

She was explaining her coup, how she had invaded Yoni’s hotel suite via the window. “I didn’t bribe anybody this time! Where are we going?”

“To my place in Ravenswood Manor.”

With her crazy vibe, Sophie might enjoy the Lair. It should appeal to her fascination with adventure and the counterculture.

I prayed that she might be fascinated with me.

I couldn’t take my eyes off her.

Her upper lip curved up, inviting a kiss. She looked wide-eyed into my face.

The subway door opened. A dozen more people got on, shoving us as close as anchovies in a jar. Sophie pressed against me, breast and thigh. I sank into her as if into quicksand.

For the rest of the ride, I let myself wallow in her nearness.

A long time later, we forced our way to the door and got out.

At the street door to the Lair, she waited for me to use my key, chattering the whole time.

“I got a cramp in my leg on the train. How can you sleep here, with the trains going by all night long? Wow! There’s a garden on the train embankment! This is industrial chic noir, no? The windows have rusted wire in the glass.”

“It’s called chicken wire.”

“I will remember. Oh, look, there’s that paparazzo from the train. I suppose he lives in a loft, too. They don’t need darkrooms anymore, you know. I read all about paparazzi when I began following Yoni, to learn their stalking techniques. Before, they had to have secret places where they could work in every city, because they were known, and the smell of the processing chemicals was hard to hide.”

That was when I took her by the wrist and yanked her inside.

“Dieu, you talk, child,” I muttered, towing her across the basketball floor, away from the chicken-wire window in the front door. I glanced up at the overseer’s window, the one that looked down on us from the second floor offices, where we slept.

The window was lighted. Baz was home. Straining, I thought I heard voices: his and a woman’s.

Baz never brought women home.

I stretched my hearing, trying to identify the woman, but Sophie was pattering noisily about the wooden basketball court floor, cooing at everything she saw.

I put my hand out. “Sh!”

Of course she ignored me. She seized a basketball out of the drum by the door and dribbled up to me.

“What have you got? Come on! Let’s rumble!”

I snatched the ball from her and set it between my feet. “Silence!”

“But why? This is a wonderful room! Do you own the whole building? Are those motorcycles over there?”

I pulled her to me and wrapped one arm around her and put the other hand over her mouth. “Can’t you be quiet for one moment?” She wriggled violently in my grip, but she was silent. Straining, I distinctly heard Baz address his companion as Yoni.

Then Sophie bit my hand.

I swore. “Damn you! Stop it!” She kicked me on the shin. I picked her up and threw her over my shoulder and carried her off the basketball floor.

As I went, I saw a lighted patch of the floor flicker a bit, and looked back over my shoulder.

Someone was standing at the front door, blocking the streetlight, trying to see into the Lair.

I carried Sophie through the workshop to the loading dock and our vehicles, as far from the living quarters as I could get.

She went completely still as I carried her.

When we were standing in the dark among the parked cars, I dumped her on her feet and gave her a shake. “What do you think this is? Play? Am I the wind, that you shake off my words?”

Under one dim light bulb in the loading dock, she looked very pink, perhaps from being carried on her belly over my shoulder. Her eyes glistened and her lips were parted.

Now I would reap the whirlwind for abusing her. I saw her gather herself—to scratch my eyes out?

She threw her arms about me and kissed me.

I lost control in that instant. She took me by storm.

Soon we had our arms locked about one another, mauling and devouring like teenagers behind the ice cream parlor. Her small body was a glowing coal, burning through me from front to back. Where our tongues met, life poured into me.

She broke free to gasp, “You kiss better than any boyfriend I’ve ever had!”

She was bent backward over the hood of Baz’s miserable old BMW sedan, and my cock ground against her thigh. I knew we had to leave the building as soon as possible. I didn’t want to let go of her flesh.

I forced myself away. “How many boyfriends have you had?”

Her eyes were glittering again. I realized that this signified defiance. “Oo, grand-père, you are very strict!” She pointed at the bulge in my trousers. “Take care you don’t mess yourself.”

I stepped farther away and brushed myself off. “This is not play,” I repeated.

“Of course it’s play! Life is all play. Or punishment.” She stretched seductively. “But with you, life is an adventure!”

I snorted. “I’m an adventure, am I? Your first black man to kiss?”

She tossed her curls. “Oh, no. My second and third lovers were black. Moroccan and South Indian.”

Her composure had returned, but mine tottered. “Third. Out of how many?”

She laughed up at me. “I don’t know. I can’t count you yet because we haven’t had sex, except in my dreams.”

I found myself sputtering.

Now she was back to flirting. “Why do you care?”

I scolded like an uncle, “You’re a child, and my kouzen, and you lack common sense. Of course I care.”

A strange sound came from upstairs. I turned my head and saw a blaze of light in a very odd color coming from that second-floor window.

My skin tingled. Big magic was happening nearby. If Baz and Yoni were here, no doubt it was happening in a bed.

I gripped her arm. “We have to leave. Immediately.”

“But why?”

“I must get you to cover somewhere. That paparazzo is outside. Maybe we’ll go to the botánica.” I didn’t much relish the thought, but I had nowhere else to take her.

“Pooh, so uncomfortable!” Sophie made a face. “Jake’s bed is beastly!”

My eyes popped. I blurted, “Have you slept in Jake’s bed?” She had only been here two weeks, according to Jake. He had been sick, dying, stinking the whole time!

She primmed her lips and lifted her black brows. “Are you jealous? That’s an excellent sign!” I scowled, and she shook my arm. “Come on, M’sieur Sérieux, I have une clef—a—a key—to a friend’s place. She won’t be home now.”

We slipped out the back of the Lair. I double-locked the door behind us. Stealthily we crossed the alley, entered a neighbor’s property through their alley gate, flitted through their back yard to the front yard and out onto the next street over. Sophie took a map out of her cargo shorts and handed it to me.

She said, “Look for—hm, for Blossom Street? I can’t remember the number, but I’ll know the place when I see it.”

I walked slowly beside her, trying to read the map by streetlight while she examined every house we passed. “Blossom Street? I don’t believe there is such a street in this neighborhood. Magnolia Street is nearby.”

“Yes, yes! That’s it! I know it is!”

Rolling my eyes, I put the map in my pocket. “Let’s go.”

But in Magnolia Street Sophie suffered another attack of amnesia. Twice, we walked up and down the street before she said, “Of course, I don’t remember it from the front. She drove me here. We parked in back. I left by the front door but I didn’t look at the house from the front!”

We went to the alley and marched up and down, setting off automatic garage lights as we passed. Sophie cautiously opened one garden gate after another and poked her head in, peering at each house in turn.

Sophie gave a hiss. “We are here!”

We entered the back yard and tiptoed up the back steps. “Does your friend have a dog?” I said uneasily.

She was digging in her pocket. “You watch the alley. Make sure that man didn’t follow us here.”

“Good thinking.” I turned to scan such part of the alley as I could see, extending my woodcraft senses as well as I could, with the smell of Sophie hot and ready beside me. All appeared quiet in the alley.

I murmured, “I hope your friend doesn’t mind my visiting.”

She was fumbling at the door, keys jingling, making exasperated sounds. As I turned to offer to help, she opened the door and we went inside.

“No lights,” she said. “That man might be outside.”

We went through the darkened house, saved from blundering into furniture by Sophie’s pocket flashlight. She led me upstairs to an untidy bedroom with a giant, unmade bed, its floor strewn with shoes, books, and a man’s clothes.

“Your friend is married?”

“Her boyfriend stays here sometimes.” Sophie turned to face me at last. The street light from Magnolia Street shone in the window on us. Her pale skin looked yellow in that light, and my hand, as I reached for her, looked like a branch of some rain-wet winter tree.

She came to me and bumped her body against mine in a friendly way. I pushed the black curls out of her eyes.