28 
NO, YOU CAN’T HAVE ME FOR LUNCH SOMETIME
There was a kind of dark carnival atmosphere at the Crucible when I finally came back. I had been told to wait until the next fight was over so that anyone who lost money betting against me could have time to cool down, and I had seen the logic in this. So, I’d changed into some warmer clothes, retrieved my backpack, then stretched until another were-hyena—a young, gaunt male who I’d never seen before—came to fetch me. I soon realized that there was a lot more going on at the top of the dry riverbed than I’d been able to see from the bottom.
My first hint of this was another of Akihiko’s gashadokuro, the same padded black uniform draped over a skeleton, only the skull face visible through the surrounding black hood. I gave the bone golem a wide berth. Somewhere, a fiddle played in the background. It seemed oddly appropriate.
There were more booths and cars pulled up on the river embankment side of the trench, and I encountered a half-elf lounging on the outskirts of the throng beside a blue Honda Fit. The car’s hatchback was open to reveal bags of blood clearly labeled by type and kept warm by a space heater. The half-elf had a lot of tattoos peeping out, which I wasn’t used to seeing among the Fae (they have to plan centuries ahead), and he was shivering in some kind of brown sweater-shirt and a multicolored stocking cap. A half-smoked cigarette dangled limply from his mouth. It was really too bad that he couldn’t grow facial hair. Some stubble would have completed the slovenly hipster elegance he had going. All half-elves look young, but this one seemed young, and maybe he was.
I nodded at the plastic packets of blood. They were linked together by perforated strips so that you could hang a whole string of them over your shoulder like a bandolier or tear one off like a juice pouch. “Are you selling those?”
The half-elf shrugged unhappily. “Trying. Most of the vamps stayed away tonight.”
I nodded judiciously and blew a big, misting breath to make a point. “They’re cold-blooded.” This was nothing but the truth. One of the reasons there are so many werewolves in the Midwest and Alaska is because we don’t like vampires, and the bloodsuckers usually avoid cold places with lots of distance between dense population centers.
“Live and learn,” he muttered, looking away and clearly wishing I would move on. I obliged.
The next way station I encountered was a barbecue set up by a ghoul in ratty layers of cast-off clothing. He probably did most of his hunting in homeless shelters and subway tunnels and abandoned buildings. Roughly a million people go missing in the United States every year, just vanish and are never accounted for, and those are just the legal citizens. The disappearance rate among people who don’t have green cards or IRS records or checked boxes on a census form is much higher, and ghouls tend to go for easy prey. They are the low-hanging fruit of the supernatural world, little more than sentient zombies or cannibals. I have no idea how their name got bastardized from the Middle Eastern ghuls; the two species have nothing in common.
In the dark, this particular ghoul could still pass for human though it had shitty teeth and greyish skin and was selling lumps of meat on skewers. Some of the meat was raw, some of it roasted, all of it human.
“I lost three hundred dollars on you, Down Boy!” the ghoul yelled, but he was giggling as he said it.
“You should have spent some of it on a toothbrush,” I called back.
Our exchange had drawn attention my way, and I could feel cold if mostly neutral gazes around me as I slipped through the edges of the crowd. The throng was mostly made up of were-beings, cunning folk, and elvish castoffs, but there were enough other kinds of scents that I found it a little disorienting. It was the olfactory equivalent of being surrounded by a hundred television sets all broadcasting from different channels. I didn’t see or smell Akihiko, but I did spot a white van in the deserted industrial park across the bridge.
I worked my way across the bridge and around a booth where various beings had gathered to watch an argument between some kind of nymph and a gorgon. The gorgon was apparently telling fortunes for ten thousand dollars a pop. Expensive until you considered that her predictions were probably the real thing. The gorgon was dusky-skinned and wearing mirrored sunglasses over her bony nose. Greenish scales—a gorgon’s primary defense mechanism—had emerged and begun to cover her skin. Her dark hair, while not literally made of snakes, wove about her skull as if alive.
The nymph was unspeakably lovely, with skin made rosy in the cold. Long, sweet-smelling nut-brown hair cascaded over the swells beneath her pink ski suit. “I want to know where Lelika is!”
“It doesn’t matter where she is,” the gorgon said stiffly. “You’ll never see her again.”
It suddenly got windier as a breeze blew past me and visibly swirled around the gorgon, rocking the booth she was sitting behind and causing her dangling earrings to sway violently. All nymphs have elemental affiliations, and this one must have been one of the aurae.
Unfortunately, the breeze also blew the gorgon’s sunglasses off while the nymph was trying to stare her down. I had a brief impression of blind milky-white eyes devoid of any pupil or iris.
A moment later, the nymph hit the ground. She wasn’t really turned to stone, just paralyzed into a state of near rigor mortis that would last until her neurons came back online.
“Is there a problem here?” It was an icy voice that burned and cracked. The yuki-onna. Suddenly, the crowd around me disappeared like water down invisible cracks and I found myself in front of the snow woman.
“She didn’t like her fortune,” the gorgon said calmly, picking up her sunglasses.
The yuki-onna kicked the nymph experimentally in the stomach. Her foot disappeared into the pink padding with a heavy thud, but the nymph didn’t make a sound. Then the yuki-onna looked up at me. “Is that true, Down Boy?”
“Who are you talking to?” The gorgon seemed alarmed for the first time.
Gorgons are technically blind. The eye they see with, their psychic or “third eye,” is entirely separate from their physical body, and they can’t see knights at all.
The yuki-onna cackled, all bitterness and malice and glee. “Only a fool wants to know their fate.”
“Is that a—” the gorgon was facing my direction, and she choked as the yuki-onna reached out and touched an index finger to her throat, her vocal cords suddenly frozen.
“You’ve said enough for tonight,” the yuki-onna advised in a vicious parody of kindness.
The gorgon could clearly see her own possible future. She stood up and began folding her table and chair with alacrity.
Placing a companionable hand around my arm, the yuki-onna led me toward the white van. Her flesh was warm and her skin robust, and I wondered whose body heat she had consumed recently. “Come along, Down Boy. We never did get to discuss all of the possibilities of your name.”
It is said that yuki-onna mix arousal and killing in odd ways, though you have to take the Japanese sexualization of female monsters with a grain of salt. Actually a bag of salt, if only because there’s so much of it. Sometimes, the stories make the yuki-onna beautiful, and they will fall in love with a man and be a faithful wife until something tragic happens, but in most of the tales, yuki-onna are straight up predators. In some stories, yuki-onna have sex with men and leave them drained of semen and body heat. In others, they have sex with men normally and then kill them normally. Or they kill men and then have sex with them. The stories I find the most disturbing are the ones where the yuki-onna are hideous and force men to have sex with them against their will by, well, freezing the men… stiff.
“It’ll never work out,” I told her. “We have very different ideas of being in heat.”
Her fingernails pressed into my bicep, but her other hand patted my forearm companionably. “Aren’t you clever?”
“No, but I am quick.” I tried to keep my voice neutral and inject a little if-I-even-feel-a-chill-I’m-crushing-your-throat-before-you-can-blink-bitch into it at the same time.
She cackled—or maybe, in her case, crackled—and made sure to brush her hips against mine as we walked. It was a pretty fearsome assemblage, but the crowd parted in front of us like leaves in front of a very cold wind. We reached the van, a large white vehicle whose sliding side door was open, and I finally got one of the scorecards to the night’s fights. The sliding door reminded me uncomfortably of… wait a minute… I looked closer. Scratched faintly into the paint around the door were the same kind of sigils I’d seen on the sliding paper door in Akihiko’s warehouse. Son of a bitch.
The assclown had made himself a rabbit hole on wheels.
“This is Down Boy.” The yuki-onna was talking to a bald Asian man sitting at a folding table in the van’s interior. She was speaking Japanese, so I had to remember to pretend not to understand. “You have some money for him.”
I wordlessly unshouldered my backpack and handed it over. He took it with a grunt and told someone in the back of the van to get two hundred and forty thousand dollars. It wasn’t as much as it sounds like. Our group splits all the money we make along the way evenly, which meant that I was currently dividing any winnings eight ways.
The yuki-onna loosened her grip on my arm. “You don’t have to worry about anyone stealing your prize money here.”
“I know,” I told her, and she made that sort of amused hostile sound again and leaned over to kiss my cheek before releasing me. The kiss burned like dry ice.
I was still watching her leave—just to make sure she really did—when the fat Asian man in the van got impatient. “Do you want to bet on any other fights?”
I glanced down at the card and found Sig’s fight; she was listed as Britte the Hittah, and the card listed her vital statistics and mentioned that she was a valkyrie with an exclamation point. She was fighting someone named Big Bertie who the scorecard said was a siren, maybe the same one that Alyssa had gotten a feather from. The odds against Sig were three to one.
“Well?” the man repeated.
I would have liked to have put some money down on that fight, but… “No.” He handed me my backpack and told me to stop blocking the van.
“Down Boy!” I was really going to have to see about changing that name. I turned and saw the half-elf who had gotten the snottiness beaten out of him at the warehouse. I could smell that he’d been around Sig recently, but I wasn’t going to show any undue interest in that. His bruises and abrasions had already healed, or been healed, and he was dressed like a riverboat dandy or a pimp. Long red hair dangled beneath a broad-brimmed white hat, and he was carrying a walking stick with a heavy brass knob. The cream-colored all-weather coat was open to reveal a white dress suit and a pink carnation. “I made a lot of money off of you tonight.”
“Glad to hear it.” I nodded at his outfit. “I see you’re all dressed up for the dance.”
He flashed a breezy smile and made a point of smelling the pink carnation. “But not all alone for romance.”
I smiled. “I’ll take your word for it.”
He stuck his hand out. “Aubrey Dunne.”
I shook it. “Just call me Mark.”
He nodded toward the edge of the dry riverbed and began walking. “We’re missing another fight I have money on. Come on.”
We moved around another one of the motionless bone golems. It was the ninth one I’d seen.
“I never did thank you for settling with that mothersucker who humiliated me.” Aubrey’s eyes glittered for a moment. Elves, even half-elves, have long memories, and that’s not just a turn of phrase. Some Fae deal with the burden of immortality by completely immersing themselves in the endless now, but others think long-term like it’s another language. Piss the latter kind of elf off, and it’ll set a revenge plan into motion that you won’t see coming, because it’ll hit you ten or twenty years later, if it isn’t aimed at your great-grandchildren.
Aubrey seemed to fall somewhere in between those two categories.
“I didn’t do it for you,” I remarked. “I was trying to get some attention.”
“Well, you got mine,” Aubrey said easily. “In fact, I think we could make a lot of money together. I was thinking of using this place as a model and trying to set up a traveling underground fight circuit.”
Aubrey had recognized my reference to a Marty Robbins song about a white sports coat and a pink carnation earlier, so he was probably at least as old as I was, but here he was, talking about becoming Akihiko’s competition out loud, on Akihiko’s turf, in a place full of beings with enhanced hearing. This after almost getting beaten into paste. Either Aubrey was one of those eternal fools, or he liked to give his long, jaded life a little extra spice by living recklessly.
When we got to the edge of the riverbed, we joined the leopard woman who had helped Sig carry Aubrey out of the warehouse. Naturally, the person fighting was Sig.