Blind God's Bluff A Billy Fox Novel - By Richard Lee Byers Page 0,87
bleeding into his beard. I had a hunch his upper teeth had cut it when they were growing into fangs.
“What?” he said.
“You run off into the night chasing her, and you might not make it back by midnight.”
He laughed. “How about a prop bet? I say I can bring her back in fifteen minutes tops.”
“Don’t tempt me. Because I know you’re this mighty hunter and everything, but how do you think she got hold of the knife? How do you think she made it out the door without any of the kitchen staff noticing?”
He frowned. “You think she had help?”
“I think the Pharaoh and Leticia both understand how much it pisses you off to have a victim escape. So why not use her as bait to sucker you out of the hotel and into a trap?”
He hesitated. “You just want to save her.”
“That doesn’t make me wrong.”
“If you thought I was really running into a trap, you’d just stand back and let it happen.”
“No. Because I want to be the one to knock you out of the tournament, you cannibal son of a bitch, and I want to do it my way. By playing better poker. Which I do.”
He shivered. “I suppose that once I’m master of these lands, I can hunt down the girl whenever I want.”
“That’s the spirit.”
He raked the kitchen workers with his glare, and some of them flinched. “And when I’m master, you’ll pay for your carelessness. I’ll carve the blood eagle into each and every one of you.” He spat some of his own blood onto the floor, then stalked back toward the dining room.
The space was quiet while everyone gave him time to get out of earshot. Then a scrawny, redheaded, freckled teenager—one of the Old People who just looked off in a way you couldn’t put finger on—murmured, “Screw you. Screw all you lords.”
“Now that,” I said, “is really the spirit.” I held out my hand, and he shook it. “Thank you. Thank all you guys for turning the girl loose.”
“A’marie said we had to. It would freak you out if we didn’t, and then you’d do something crazy. Something that could wreck the plan.”
“I was working up to it,” I said.
“But it wasn’t just that,” said a fat woman with a long, dangling nose like a baby elephant’s trunk. “Nobody wanted to see her hurt. We don’t all hate humans. My mother was human.”
“I know you don’t,” I said.
I shook hands all around, then made my own way back to the dining room. I didn’t want Timon to start wondering what had become of me.
Wotan wasn’t there. Maybe he’d gone to take his anger out on some more furniture. Leticia smiled at me and said, “Chivalry will be the death of you yet.”
I shrugged. “There are worse ways to go.”
After that, I did my best to convince Timon that I wasn’t really slipping back into my old insubordinate ways. It had only been a momentary relapse. I guess it worked. He bitched for a while, but then told me to forget about it, finish my supper, and get some rest.
Leticia and I were in our seats at ten to midnight. Davis wheeled the Pharaoh in a minute later. Wotan stalked in just as the grandfather clock started to strike. He still had the sword. He unbuckled the belt and hung it over the back of his chair.
I soon decided the others agreed with me that the game was likely to end tonight, and it was time to get serious. Leticia threw off sexual heat like a bonfire. It was hard to look at her or even hear that purr of a voice without remembering how it had felt to have her pressed up against me with her tongue in my ear. I did my best to remember that she was the one who’d had Vic kidnapped and roughed up, too.
To give him his due, Wotan was about as manly as manly gets, so I assumed he was feeling the pull as much as I was. But you couldn’t tell it by looking at him. His face was like stone—well, hairy stone—and his stare bored into the rest of us like a drill. The sword was just the toothpick through the olive in the intimidation martini.
Unless, of course, it was something more.
I flashed the Thunderbird, and then I felt the hungry, hating spirit in the blade. It wasn’t really doing anything at the moment, but it ached to hurt anyone and everyone who