had been shoved between pieces of bread. The crusts had been trimmed away and a piece of ruffled romaine lettuce carefully wrapped around each one. Finger sandwiches, some part of my brain observed. I choked, caught between a retch and a hysterical giggle.
My gaze moved around what I now identified as a busy kitchen. Another of the stone-colored things-this one with glowing green eyes and bat wings-stood on a stool at a nearby island, pressing something into small, finger-shaped molds. My frozen brain finally thawed enough to recognize the smell. "Oh, thank God." I sagged against Pritkin in relief. "It's pâté!”
"Where are we?" he demanded, dragging me to my feet. I had trouble standing, both because I'd somehow lost a shoe and because a larger gray thing barreled past, knocking me back with a flailing tail. It was wearing a starched white linen chef's outfit, complete with little red scarf and tall hat. The breast of the tunic had a very familiar crest emblazoned on it in bright red, yellow and black-Tony's colors.
"Dante's." When Pritkin had fallen on me at the theatre, my concentration must have wobbled. We'd ended up a little off course.
"You're sure this is the casino?" The mage was eyeing a nearby platter, which contained radishes that had been partly skinned to resemble human eyeballs. They had olives for pupils, and it almost looked like the pimentos were glowering at us. I took a closer look at the shield, a copy of which adorned every uniform in sight and appeared over a set of swinging doors across the room. It looked very familiar.
Antonio Gallina had been born into a family of chicken farmers outside Florence about the time Michelangelo was carving his fawn for old man Medici. But, some two hundred years later, when the impoverished English king Charles I started selling noble titles to fund his art obsession, the illegitimate farmer's son turned master vamp had had more than enough stashed away to buy himself a baronetcy. I personally thought that the heralds, the men who had designed Tony's coat of arms, had spent a little too long at the pub the night before. I guess it could have been worse-like the poor French apothecary who was granted arms showing three silver chamber pots-but the comical yellow hen in the middle of Tony's shield was bad enough. It was supposedly a play on his last name, which means chicken in Italian, but the fat bird bore an uncanny resemblance to its owner.
"Pretty sure," I said. I would have elaborated, but one of the creatures doing the cooking, a diminutive specimen with a hairnet confining its long, floppy donkey ears, scurried by. It ran over my bare foot with clawed toenails, causing me to wince and press farther back. That resulted in Pritkin getting smashed into a slotted cart filled with trays of tiny black caldrons.
"What are those things?" I demanded. I kicked off my remaining shoe to keep from breaking my neck in case we had to run for it. I kept a wary eye on the creature in front of us, but he didn't seem overtly hostile, despite his looks. The only thing he was doing to back up his request was to point forcefully at the swinging doors with a spoon.
"Rum torte," a tiny chef croaked in passing. He was wearing only the top half of the usual tunic-and-trousers set, which in his case brushed the floor. A long, lizardlike tail protruded from beneath it.
He resembled most of the other creatures in the room, the majority of which had bat wings, clawed hands and long tails, but there the similarity ended. Their heads were everything from avian to reptilian, with a few furred ones here and there. Some had horns and others droopy ears, and their height ranged from maybe two feet to tall enough to stare me in the chest. Their eyes varied in color and size, but all of them seemed to glow, as if lit from inside by a high-powered bulb. It was unnerving, especially since they reminded me of something, and I couldn't quite figure out what.
"Gargoyles," Pritkin said as we stumbled through the swinging doors into a short hallway. At the end, a door that looked like old, carved wood but was too light to be real let out into a much longer and wider corridor. It was lined with medieval weaponry and cobweb-covered suits of armor, and dimly lit by flickering torches-fake, of course. Dante's wards were minimal