beginning of a sob. Hands balled at her mouth, silent tears.
Mac let his chair drop back down to all fours. “But there’s no accounting for taste around here. Some of my clients like ’em different. I could give you . . .” He paused, digging something out of his teeth with his thumbnail. Shrugging, he tried, “Fifty?”
Ash swallowed, barely hearing the price. He prepared himself to say the thing he’d come here to say. “Would you take it in trade?”
The words turned his stomach. People weren’t things to be traded. Or, they shouldn’t be. But here he was.
Mac’s eyes narrowed, and Ash felt the muscles in his shoulders pull tight. Did he recognize him? Before the mega-quake, Ash’s face had been in the news here and there. He looked different now. His hair was longer and shaggier. He hadn’t bothered shaving since Dorothy had disappeared, and he had a little scruff on his cheeks.
But, still, there were people around these parts who might remember the young pilot who was brought back from the past by a mad scientist. Ash had been counting on Mac not being one of those people. He didn’t look like the type to watch the news.
Mac’s eyes lingered on him a moment longer. “You ain’t one of my regulars?”
It sounded like a question, like Mac was trying to figure out where he recognized him from.
Ash tensed. “No, sir, I’m not,” he said. “But I’ve been by the Rusty Nail now and then.”
The Rusty Nail was a bar at the end of Aurora that Mac was known to frequent. Mac nodded, apparently satisfied with this explanation.
Ash exhaled, relieved. “I heard you got a new girl. Real pretty. Brown hair.” I heard she bit the last guy who tried to touch her, Ash thought, but he didn’t say that part out loud.
It was the biting detail that had caught his attention. He’d been at some trash bar on the outskirts of town when the guy next to him had yanked back his sleeve, showing off two swollen, moon-shaped welts in the crook of his arm.
“Teeth,” he’d said, when he caught Ash looking. “Murphy’s new whore has a temper on her.”
Dorothy, Ash had thought. He could easily picture her biting any man who tried to touch her without her permission.
According to bite-mark guy, Mac’s new whore had shown up in a seedier part of the city about a month ago, lost and alone but pretty as a picture. She wouldn’t tell anyone her real name, but Mac was calling her Hope, and, Hey, wasn’t that ironic? Get it? Because she didn’t have any hope left. Followed by a hearty laugh.
Ash had supplied the bite-mark guy with drinks and bowls of peanuts until he was reasonably sure he’d gotten the whole story.
And then he’d taken him out behind the bar and beaten the living crap out of him.
Because really.
Now Mac’s face broke into a crooked smile that showed off several rotting teeth. “Oh, we got a new girl all right, but she’s worth a bit more than fifty.” A pause, like he was considering something. “I suppose I could let her go for twice that—and that’s me being generous, mind, what with you a new customer and all.”
Ash had been expecting this. He dug around in his coat, pausing when he found the slim envelope he’d tucked inside the lining.
The envelope contained his savings. It came to about seventy-five dollars. Just five creased and greasy bills. It felt like nothing at all.
How was it that he was going to hand over this envelope and get a person in return?
Dorothy’s face flashed into his head just then. He saw her as she’d been in those last few moments before she’d climbed out of his ship and disappeared into the storm. Grease-smudged face. Frizzed hair.
In the space of seconds, his disgust was snatched away and replaced with hope. Let it be her, he prayed. Let it be this easy.
He placed the envelope onto the rickety table, fingers tingling as he moved his hand away.
Mac grabbed the money and greedily counted the bills. “This all seems to be in order.” He shoved the envelope down the back of his trousers and nodded at Chandra. “Come with me, doll.”
“She stays here,” Ash said too quickly.
Mac hesitated, eyebrows climbing his forehead. He looked suspicious for the first time since Ash walked in.
“Did I miss the part where you give orders in my club?” he asked in a careful voice.