to snooker me. Today is the best day I’ve had all year. In years, even.”
“There’s some people in the South who need to meet their ends.”
“Oh, the little fox has a vicious side to her. Talk. What did they do?”
“They’re killing people in the Alley.”
Silence.
“You have my attention.” Something about the woman’s tone changed, darkened, and made me shiver. “But you must tell me how you know.”
Shrugging hurt. “Maybe I’m a quadrant master, too. Maybe I coerced someone into looking into it for me. What do you think?”
The woman’s eyes narrowed. “Obviously, I was too cheap and hadn’t thought to have you tested if you might also be a little witch or mage. You have the bloodlines to be one. But if you’re angling for somebody in the South while you were in the Alley, that would make you a little witch. You know where because you’ve seen into the South, and you’ve enough skills you got a visual and general sense of your targets, but not enough skill to have identified them. And since you’re that confident, you’re a past scryer, as a future scryer would hesitate while debating over the inevitability of it. As scryers require talismans, you got a hold of something resulting from a man-made storm, which would have linked you to the mages, and since you’re confident they’re in the South, you’re after a music mage—or several of them. Yes, a coven of the bastards. They prefer the term choir. I prefer the term dead, as there’s rarely anything good about that lot.”
“It’s probable they’re in Miami or Orlando, I know for certain they’re in the South, and since they are music mages, if they know what’s good for them, they wouldn’t step foot within a hundred miles of New Orleans. The queens would have them long dead, and we’d be better for it.”
Stephani Moretti’s smile bore a sharp edge. “Do you know what I taught the boy when I figured out he was a little mage?”
“What did you teach him?”
“Ethics.”
Yes, I believed that. “The kind that would make him snap a finger, say a word or two, and take off the hand of a would-be assaulter who was going after a teen?”
That caught her attention. “As a matter of fact, yes. That is something he would do.”
“There’s a poet in the Alley making a reputation for himself, and he didn’t appreciate when a sleaze touched a teen waitress in a bar.”
“Damn that boy! How many damned lawsuits is he going to make my lawyers deal with? Last year, I had to deal with his rash behavior three times. Justified, and they regretted crossing the boy, but still. He isn’t even home and he’s costing me a fortune. This is all Marco’s fault, daring to use me to make sons!”
“And yet you want another one,” Theo said, his tone a mix of tired and exasperated.
“Well, yes. He does have this tendency to make excellent sons. But I really want a daughter, damn it.”
“Why would there be a lawsuit? He was in the Alley, and he wasn’t in one of the better parts of Tulsa. The asshole’s probably a corpse by now. You don’t live long in the Alley short a hand.”
“Tulsa has better parts?” Sandro’s mother eyed me with interest.
“For the moment.” How long would it be until the music mages sang their lethal song and wiped out the place I’d learned to call home? “Tulsa’s been my home for years.”
“And nobody wants to see somebody hurt their home. That’s fair. I’d be a hypocrite if I didn’t agree to help you, as I’m always trying to get those sons of mine to do good deeds without whining about it.”
“We shipped the girl he helped out of Tulsa. To the East.”
“What’s another bounty?”
Bounty? “I was thinking more of just finding her and giving her a job if possible.”
“That is not nearly as entertaining as a bounty, and it would take a lot longer to find her, and I could probably have her to the house in a few days if I just issue a good bounty with strict rules. It’s not like I’m making her an uncontested courtesan. Well, I mean, if she takes to one of those idiot sons of mine, it’s not like I have any sense when it comes to money.” Sandro’s mother took a deep breath and shouted, “And don’t you even start with me, Theo!”
“I’m not the one who told you that you’d lost your fucking mind. That was Marco.