Streets of Shadows Read online

  I wish I could remember the day we met as clearly, or any of the moments in-between. But they’re like snapshots, blurred, the focus just a hair off, so I can’t quite see whether the pattern on her high-heeled shoes is snake-skin or alligator, whether her nails are silver with white stars, or the reverse, whether her eyes are green or blue.

  What I do remember is her lying on her stomach, with her head pillowed on her arm – Vegas’ bright-bright spilling through the window illuminating her double heart tattoo.

  “What do you dream about, Athena?” she asked me. I remember, because it’s a variation on a conversation we must have had a dozen times.

  I could have said something profound. I could have even told her something true, like how sometimes my dreams put me back in the ring, re-living that last fight with Mayflower Jones. It’s what she was asking for, just a little piece of me. Her make-up was slightly smeared; she hadn’t wiped it off before we’d tumbled into bed. I don’t remember what I did tell her, then or any other time she asked, something stupid probably, because she punched me lightly in the shoulder before propping herself up on one elbow.

  “I’m serious. Don’t you ever wonder what else is out there?” She waved her hand, indicating the room, the window, the glow of Vegas beyond.

  “I don’t want to strip forever,” she said. “I’m sure you don’t always want to bounce.”

  There was something in her eyes. Something that frightened me. The shine I saw there, I was afraid it included me, locking me into Mel’s vision of the future; I was afraid it excluded me, shutting me out.

  “I have everything I want right here.” I grinned, traced the curve of her hip, but she slapped my hand away, frowning and looking toward the window.

  “Sometimes I think we’re living just on the skin of the world and underneath there’s so much more. I just have to find a way through.”

  I don’t remember what I said to that, if I said anything at all. I do remember it made my skin itch like there was something trying to rise up inside me, like I could feel the truth of what she was saying wound between my bones.

  Here and now, aloud in the empty gym, I say, “Fuck it.”

  It’s time to stop being a coward. I unwrap Carmen Estavez’s cards.

  It looks like any standard 52, but there’s a hum, a buzz that reminds me of Ahmed’s deck. I turn the cards over, one by one. Nothing out of the ordinary at first, then I freeze. The three of cups. That isn’t right. I keep going, flipping faster. Seven of cups. Jack. Ace. And there isn’t a single diamond in the deck.

  “Shit.”

  No wonder the King of Diamonds was pissed enough to carry out the hit himself. One of the old suits is making a power play, trying to slip back into the game.

  * * *

  “We’re going to Camelot,” I say, skipping hello.

  Ahmed looks up from his drink. His eyes are faintly bloodshot, but I don’t think it’s the alcohol.

  I set Estavez’s deck on the bar. Ahmed leans away slightly.

  “They’re cups,” I say. “It’s a custom-made deck, at least partially. You said Estavez was about to hit it big when he was killed. I’m guessing he was trying to build luck around the cups, tip the balance of power. And I think you’re right, someone put him up to it.”

  “And you think we’ll find that out at Excalibur?”

  I flip over the top card in the deck, the Ace of Cups, and tap it with one finger.

  “The Holy Grail.”

  Ahmed looks skeptical, and I shrug.

  “Call it a hunch,” I say. “So far, luck’s been on our side.”

  The Excalibur Hotel and Casino looks as gaudy as ever, but like the Temple, for our purposes, it’ll do. In Vegas, the city of illusion, the symbol can become the thing in the blink of an eye if you want it hard enough, if you believe. It’s what Carmen Estavez was betting on.

  Ahmed has his coin out. Flip. Palm. Vanish. It changes from gold to silver, shrinks and grows in size. For just a moment, I swear the face on its side is his. We enter the casino and it takes me a moment to realize it should be bustling, but it isn’t. It’s empty. Eerily so. We’re completely alone.

  Banks of slot machines glow in silence. Posed among them, mannequin knights in shining armor lift lances atop horses frozen in mid-prance, while heralds in brightly-colored robes hold trumpets forever to their lips.

  The coin moves faster over Ahmed’s fingers. A glow crackles around him; Excalibur’s lights dim. I don’t know whether to thank him, or try to snap him out of it. In the end, I hold my tongue. With the amount of luck he’s calling, I’m better off if I shut up and follow. He’s leading us exactly where we need to be.

  Which, as it turns out, is the throne room. Like the icy penthouse atop the Temple, I’m not sure the room is on Excalibur’s maps, for all that it’s done up in Vegas’ finest faux-medieval style. Tapestries and shields, swords and banners, adorn the wall. Under a pair of crossed lances, there’s throne painted in gaudy red and gold. The man sitting on it even wears a crown, though it doesn’t entirely fit him, and it’s clear he’s no king. A cup, just like the Ace in Carmen Estavez’s deck, sits on the arm of his throne.

  “Who the hell are you?” The man looks up, startled. The crown slips at the sudden movement, and he nearly knocks the cup to the ground.

  This is the man who put Carmen up to his stunt in the casino? The man who has the King of Diamonds scared enough to carry out a personal assassination? It doesn’t add up; he looks like he’s one step away from wetting himself in terror.

  He stands, then his eyes go wide and he takes a step back, banging into the throne, which makes a hollow, wooden sound.

  Turning, I see Jo standing in the door behind us.

  “Surprise.”

  The air in the throne room crackles. Between Jo and Ahmed, it’s like a localized storm. The lights flicker, dim, but stay on.

  “Finally decided to stop pretending?” A smile slides across Jo’s lips. She steps close to Ahmed and plucks a card from the pocket of his jacket, like a thief deliberately showing her hand.

  Like the cups in Carmen Estavez’s deck, it’s nothing found in a standard 52. The figure on the card’s face holds a handful of coins. Or maybe it’s just the artist’s interpretation of a man playing sleight-of-hand games, rolling a single coin so fast it multiplies before vanishing completely. The resemblance is uncanny – down to the cheeks hollowed by shadows and the hunted look in the man’s eyes.

  Before I can reach for the card, Jo snaps her fingers and it vanishes, back into Ahmed’s pocket or into some otherwhere I can’t reach. If Jo’s trying to get a reaction out of Ahmed, it doesn’t work. He’s still rolling the coin, his expression trance-like. I wonder if he’s really here, or if part of him is off in whatever space his coins and cards disappear to.

  It hits me then; the power crackling off Jo and Ahmed – there’s nothing like that surrounding the man beside the throne. He’s not one of Lady Luck’s children.

  “He’s only human,” I say. “You put him up to this?”

  Jo’s smile is slow this time, not cruel, but something about it makes my skin prickle. Like there’s a joke, and everyone in the room gets it except me. Habit shifts my body closer to a fighting stance, but I resist the urge to let my fingers curl.

  “He has ambition, but not much imagination. All I did was give him a deck of cards and a nudge. The game was getting boring, I wanted to make things more interesting.”

  “Two men are dead,” I say. “Is that interesting enough for you, or are you trying to start a war?”

  “You said…” the man starts, but Jo holds up a hand, silencing him.

  She turns away from Ahmed, facing me. Her eyes are mis-matched, motley, like the rest of her. I wonder how I didn’t notice it before. I clench my teeth, ignoring the ache in my jaw, ignoring the way the power humming off Jo raises ghost sensations under my skin. But mostly I’m trying to ignore the way she’s looking at me.

  “What do you want?” T
he words are strained; I force my aching jaw to relax.

  “You really don’t know what you are, do you? What you could be.”

  Jo shakes her head and the bells in her hair chime. Something in her expression reminds me of Ahmed, a kind of pity. She reaches out a hand, and at first I think she’s about to caress my bruised cheek again, but her fingertips brush my ear and she comes back with a card in her hand.

  “This is your card.” Her voice is soft, the emphasis in it itching at the back of my skull.

  It’s a simple playing card, just the Queen of Spades. But when I take it from her, the plasticized paper hums, lightning racing beneath my skin.

  “Oh.” The face on the card is mine, braids and bruised jaw and all.

  The illusion lasts only a moment, then it’s an ordinary playing card again. But the breath has already left my body, and in my mind’s eye, I see Mel sitting with a pair of scissors, diligently cutting something to glue into her scrapbook. When I look over her shoulder – when I looked over her shoulder - I see she’s cutting up playing cards, a Queen of Hearts and a Queen of Diamonds.

  “It’s us. See?” She lays the cards against a backdrop of Vegas’ glittering bright-bright, already glued together from glossy magazine ads. There’s more though – a flyer from the Gold Dust Lounge, a ticket stub from one of my old fights, a postcard from Paris, where we always talked about going.

  Or rather, Mel talked, and I listened. But I didn’t hear. She always wanted to run away; she finally got sick of waiting for me to run with her.

  “It works both ways,” Jo says, cutting into my thoughts.

  The Queen of Hearts, wedged under a corner of the light switch by the door, where I couldn’t fail to see. Mel was asking me to come with her, one last time; I just never understood where she was asking me to go.

  “She’s…” I can’t complete the sentence; my throat is too tight.

  “The game always needs new blood,” Jo says. “Someone like him,” she points at Ahmed, “drops out, and someone new rises to take his place. It doesn’t matter to the Lady whether it’s a cup, or a coin, a diamond or a spade. As long as the game is played in her name.”

  Mel with her dreams, Mel wanting something more from life. She found a way through to the place she could feel, just under the city’s skin. The place we could both feel, though I refused to acknowledge it.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” I turn on Ahmed, fingers curling now, but more to hold myself together than to strike.

  The gold coins of his eyes fix on me. His smile is sorrow-touched, the shadows heavy under his skin.

  “Why don’t you always remind me when I forget?”

  His words steal my breath all over again.

  “All of you shut up!” The wanna-be king lurches to one of the walls, grabbing at the nearest sword and pulling it down.

  He staggers under its weight, but manages to right himself, swinging wildly. I take a step toward the wall, reaching, but Ahmed’s voice stops me.

  “Careful, Athena. You don’t want to accidentally declare an allegiance without meaning to.”

  Cups, swords, lances – everything here is double-edged. I take a step back. Out of the corner of my eye, I see Jo watching, amused. Is all this her doing, or is there more to it than that? Maybe Jo gave the wanna-be king his custom deck of cards, and his ideas about power, and maybe she whispered in the King of Diamond’s ear, giving him the idea of using a decoy. But maybe there was someone else whispering in her ear, someone else who wanted me in the game. Jo said the Lady doesn’t like to get her hands dirty. Is this her way of giving me a second chance? Or is it Mel’s? Or is it just Vegas, the city of illusion, blinding me with its lights and making me want to believe?

  The possibilities make my head spin. But I can’t sort through them all right now, because the wanna-be king’s crown slips a little further as he takes another swing. He has the same wild-eyed look as the Sonny Malone outside The Lucky Bitch. If I drop him, will he bite down on a back-up suicide pill tucked in his jaw, too?

  I glance over my shoulder at Jo and Ahmed. Jo’s eyes are shining, drinking in the chaos. Light still flickers around Ahmed’s fingers, holding the rest of the world at bay, but his cheeks look even more hollowed-out than ever, the gold in his eyes worn-thin. I can understand why he walked away. Humans who play the game end up dead, like Sonny and Carmen, and even Lady Luck’s born children can burn out sometimes. If I accept the invitation to play, what am I getting myself into?

  But that’s me, isn’t it? Even when I don’t know what I’m getting into, I push.

  I can feel it, building like a storm, the tingle of electricity when I touched the Queen of Spades. I think about Mel’s scrapbook – her and me, two Queens framed against the Vegas night. I reach, snapping my fingers against the empty air. The thickness of a card appears between them, and even though it’s turned to face the man with the crown, I don’t have to look to know the Queen looks an awful lot like me.

  I take a step toward him. His grip is uneven on the sword. I doubt he knows how to use it, but the ache in my jaw reminds me anyone can get a lucky shot.

  “You don’t want do that,” I tell the man who would be king. “Seriously.”

  I don’t look to see whether there’s a glow surrounding my hand. I can feel it all through me, suffusing my skin. The sword clatters to the floor, the crown behind it a moment later as the man makes a break for it. The door slams behind him.

  There’s that sensation again, the whump of displaced air. It comes with sudden light and sound – the life of Excalibur popping back into existence around us. Ahmed sags, and I move to catch him. When I look up, Jo is gone.

  “Are you okay?” I ask. Ahmed nods, but the strain is clear.

  “Come on.” I keep my arm around his waist, helping him toward the door. “We’re getting you a drink. I’m buying.”

  He doesn’t protest, lets me lead him to the door. But before we step back into the bright-bright of the casino, Ahmed pauses.

  “Are you sure you know what you’re doing, Athena?”

  My mind is still catching up with everything that just happened, and I know it’s just the beginning. I can’t help myself, I grin.

  “I haven’t the faintest idea, but it’s too late to turn back now. I’m all in.”

  * * *

  A.C. Wise was born and raised in Montreal and currently lives in the Philadelphia area. Her fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Shimmer, the Best Horror of the Year Vol. 4, and the Year's Best Weird Fiction Vol. 1, among other publications. In addition to her writing, she co-edits Unlikely Story. Find her online at www.acwise.net.

  Shooting Aphrodite

  Gary Kloster

  I found Marrow in Gehenna's back room, sitting with Peter Lorre and a bottle of dead god's blood.

  The club's bass line thudded through the walls, echoing my pounding heart. Trapped by the wards etched into its glass prison, the black blood swirled in time with those beats. Watching it, I could feel the fever heat of divinity. So much blood. Seeing it made my skin, my soul, itch for the needle's bite.

  “Angel.” The bruised glow of black lights gleamed on Marrow's filed teeth when he smiled. “Join us.”

  I dropped into the chair across from them, the blood before me. “Is this the shit?”

  Marrow stroked the vial with one long nail. “Pure Aphrodite.”

  I'd shot that Greek bitch before. She was the gold standard of the sex trade. Never pure, though. I folded my arms and stilled my fingers so that they wouldn't stroke my needle tracks.

  “Who do I fuck? Him?”

  Peter Lorre blinked his pop-eyes at me, sweat trickling down his cheeks like tears. The blood charm tied around his throat dented his skin like a garrote.

  “No,” Lorre said, and the charm's illusion made his voice match the dead actor's face. Expensive trick. Whoever it was behind that mask, he'd spent a fortune to make sure no one saw him associating with a whore and her alchemist pimp. “You're…T
his is a gift.”

  “Expensive gift.” I couldn't stop watching the blood dance.

  “Expensive guy,” Marrow said. “Nathan Marks. Music agent. He lands in Manhattan tomorrow. You land on him tomorrow night.”

  “Money?”

  “Twice normal, up front.” Marrow flashed his razors again.

  “Twice?”

  “I have money,” Lorre said. “I need discretion, and talent. Do you have those?”

  “I can pony a god's ghost better than any uptown bitch.” That was a god's own truth. Those high-priced girls suffered the blood for money. My soul ached for it. Still. This deal was wrong. Even with the blood right in front of me, I could taste that.

  “There's a tip, too, if you give goddess as good as I say you can.” Marrow tapped the vial and a black speck of blood floated out through the glass, flickered and vanished into the purple-tinged shadows. “There are three hits worth of blood in here.”

  “A tip? Two more hits?” Yeah, this deal was wrong, but my nails were digging deep into the scars on my arms.

  “Give Marks the time of his life, and it's yours.” Lorre leaned forward, fish eyes shining in the black light. “It's nothing I need.”

  “Nothing you need,” I echoed, staring at the vial. Three times a goddess. “I'll do it.”

  * * *

  “You ever see them sacrifice a god?”

  The marble and mirror of the suites' bathroom bounced Lorre's voice around me, messing with my ritual.

  “No.” I tied a silk cord around my arm and slapped my skin, praying for a vein to rise.