And Pretty Maids All In a Row

  …AND PRETTY MAIDS ALL IN A ROW

  by

  Barbara Hambly

  Published by Barbara Hambly at Smashwords

  Copyright 2015 Barbara Hambly

  Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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  Table of Contents

  And Pretty Maids All In A Row

  About The Author

  …And Pretty Maids All In A Row

  “You a wizard?”

  Antryg Windrose leaned his elbows on the table – where he’d joined Joanna Sheraton for a cup of tea during a pause in his bartending duties – and regarded the questioner with his usual air of politely daft interest: Joanna, who’d gone two steps in the direction of a former school-friend glimpsed in the scrimmage around the bar, wheeled promptly and came back.

  The man making the inquiry – tall for a Chinese, dressed in an aggressively slick fashion which combined way too much jewelry with gang tattoos on his neck and hands – looked like trouble of a sort that Antryg, as a relative newcomer to Los Angeles, might not be able to identify quickly enough to side-step.

  And anyway, Antryg – lover, partner, friend and never-ending source of amusement and entertainment – would talk to anybody.

  “I am,” Antryg replied. “Though of course I can’t prove it, since in this universe I haven’t any powers. But if one is born a wizard, one doesn’t cease to be one… I’m Antryg Windrose. And you are…?”

  “So if you don’t have powers how can you be a wizard?” The Chinese ignored his outstretched hand.

  “It’s a matter of perception and training.” Antryg widened his gray eyes behind thick, round-lensed spectacles. “And minor abilities, like seeing in the dark, which I gather is no more common in this universe than it is in my own.”

  “Why do you ask?” Joanna stepped close, into range of the querent’s overpowering cloud of Jovan Musk.

  The young Chinese sized her up with what impressed her as professional speed, glanced from her to Antryg and back, then asked her, “Is he crazy?”

  “Yes,” she replied. “But he is a wizard.” She gave him the big smile she reserved for business clients to whose accounts she was about to append a seventy-five percent Aggravation Tax, and held out her hand. “I’m Joanna Sheraton. You’ve met Antryg—”

  “Lester Chan.” He altered his body-language – consciously, she had the impression – and deployed a mega-watt smile. His eyes remained exactly like black ball-bearings, but he returned her grip with a manicured hand. “A friend of mine said your pal claims he’s a wizard—”

  “Please do sit down.” Antryg scooted his chair over – furniture at Enyart’s had a vaguely science-fictional quality, slick, black, and not designed with human anatomy in mind – and reached one long arm to the next table to drag over a third seat for their guest. At eleven o’clock on a Thursday night the noise-level at Enyart’s was annoying without precluding conversation, even with the sound-system jacked to carry over it (it was Jim the manager’s turn to pick the music, so tonight was wall-to-wall Rolling Stones), but at this hour the place was emptying out. The low lighting gave the impression of a pastel cave. The Beautiful Kevin, concocting Piña Coladas and Fuzzy Navels at the bar in Antryg’s stead for the moment, caught Antryg’s eye and sent over a waitron with a couple of beers.

  Antryg poured himself another cup of tea and asked in a voice like jeweled brown velvet, “Now – Tell me exactly why you’re looking for a wizard.”

  Chan studied him for a moment, then looked sidelong at Joanna, who had taken her seat at Antryg’s side. Uneasiness sat oddly on him: clearly he wasn’t a man who often found himself hesitant about what to say or how to say it. He started out with, “So you’re from another universe?”

  “Well, I can’t prove it,” apologized Antryg. “So you’ll have to take me at my word, I’m afraid… Joanna can’t prove I am, either,” he added, as Chan’s glance shifted to Joanna again. “But clearly you’re prepared to believe me, or else you wouldn’t have sought me out… Not that you necessarily have to be looking for a wizard to come into Enyart’s on a Thursday night, of course, Enyart’s is quite a respectable establishment and their banana daiquiris are reportedly excellent. Would you say their banana daiquiris were excellent, Joanna? But you’ve had your mind siphoned—” He turned back to Chan, “—haven’t you? When and where?”

  Their guest drew back, and there was not the smallest shred of incomprehension in his eyes. “What do you mean, siphoned? I mean, that’s… What…? I haven’t—”

  “When,” repeated Antryg gently, “and where?” He folded his long fingers together, crooked where the bones had been broken by the Witchfinders in his own world. “And by whom?”

  “That’s – um – that’s what I need to ask you. I mean, you’re supposed to know these things—”

  “Oh, I do,” agreed Antryg, “I do. But you will need to tell the truth.” He said it as he’d have said, We’ll be visiting the Amazon rain-forest so you will need to bring an umbrella, and Chan made a slight shooing gesture, as if dismissing awkward facts.

  “Look, I’m not saying I’m some saint with a halo on my head, okay? I smoke a little Thai in the evenings to relax and I’ve been known to do a popper or two when I’ve got a big night coming up, you know? But in my business you’ve got to stay away from most of that stuff or you go down the toilet fast.”

  “And your business is—?”

  “Entrepreneur. I do a lot of things.”

  I bet you do, thought Joanna.

  “So there was this girl,” said Chan. “I dated her – uh – two or three times. Uh, Jennifer, her name was. And I didn’t do any kind of upper or popper or anything when I was with her, just good clean sex, you know? We had a couple of drinks, but that was all. But afterwards…” The gesture of his hands tried to shape from the air something for which there was no word, not even a concept. “I didn’t feel right. I just… What did you mean, my mind was siphoned? I don’t feel like myself. That’s the closest I can say about it. Sometimes I’ll sort of wake up, and realize I’ve been sitting for nearly an hour, just… Not doing anything. Not aware of time, not aware of what’s going on around me, nothing. My friends say they’ve found me like that, they’ll sort of wake me up, only I’m not really asleep. I’m just… not there.”

  His slick delivery – the casual way he’d tossed off the account of his dates with “uh, Jennifer,” – altered as he spoke, and Joanna could see the sweat start all along his hairline, and hear the suppressed crack in his voice. That’s the real part. Behind the Coke-bottle glasses, Antryg’s eyes had grown both distant and disconcertingly intent, matching up the story with things he already knew.

  Things no person in Los Angeles in 1988 had any business knowing.

  “And I… sometimes it’s like I’ll forget who I am.” Chan’s voice sank, and groped for meaning. “Or stuff about my life, about my family and friends, or where I came from, crazy stuff like that. And I don’t… I don’t feel the way I used to. My friends, and my brother, or girls I know, it’s like they’re just… just cardboard stand-ups, you know? I don’t care about them. Not even my brother… I know who they are, but sometimes it all means nothing. And sometimes it’s like I’m turning into a cardboard stand-up too.

  “So is she like a – a witch, or what’s going on? It’s just since I was with this gir
l. I swear it’s not drugs. If I go to a doctor that’s the first thing he’s going to say, and it’s not. I can’t afford this to happen… I mean, completely aside from losing… losing what I feel about my brother—”

  His voice faltered again.

  “—I can’t afford to lose my edge. It’s a competitive world out there, you know? I can’t slip. And I’m slipping. I can feel it.”

  “Just since you were with this girl?” Antryg tilted his head a little.

  “Yeah!”

  “Where would I find her?”

  “I don’t know.” He made the shooing gesture again. “Look, can you help me? My grandma used to talk about Hungry Ghosts, that would eat your soul up. Are those…” His voice dropped to a whisper. “Are those real?”

  Antryg’s eyes widened with surprise at the question. “Well, yes, but that doesn’t sound like what’s going on here.”

  Chan looked disconcerted, but continued, “So if I see this girl again, how do I control her? Is there something you can make, or do, so I don’t… so she doesn’t do this to me? And how do I get myself back to the way I was?”

  “I thought you didn’t know where she was,” put in Joanna. “Which would mean you’re not seeing her.”

  “She may come back,” said Chan quickly. “I got to be ready.” He turned back to Antryg. “Mostly, I’ve got to… to get myself back. To undo what she did… Siphoned my mind?”

  “Well,” said Antryg, “your self, actually. Your soul.”

  The “entrepreneur” looked slightly queasy at the thought. “Can I get it back from her? If I find her, I mean.” He turned his untouched beer-glass on the black shiny surface of the table. “Has she… Has she got it, someplace? Isn’t that what a wizard knows about? My grandma talked about wizards in stories and stuff, and how they could get rid of the Hungry Ghosts. It sounds crazy—” He shook his head. “But I swear to you this is really going on.”

  “Oh, I believe you.”

  His eyes brightened with hope. “Can you do something for me?”

  Antryg opened his mouth to reply, then paused, reconsidering his words. When he said, “Not at the moment,” Joanna was positive that wasn’t his original plan.

  “But I will look into it – do you have a card? Or a telephone number where you can be reached? Splendid!” He grinned toothily. “And how long has it been since you’ve seen Jennifer? And has she a last name?”

  “Uh – Wilson. And – I guess I saw her a couple of months ago.”

  “Two? Three?”

  “Two.” He had to think about it.

  “Excellent.” Antryg’s jack-o-lantern smile broadened. “Excellent. I shall be in touch—”

  “You can’t do anything for me now? Give me something, show me how to control her. I’m not asking you to do this for free—”

  Chan produced a gold clip from his breast-pocket, detached two hundred-dollar bills from it, and held them out between index and middle fingers, invitingly.

  “Let me look around a little, first.” Antryg folded his hands again. The soft light from the bar glinted on his spectacles, on the garish pink rhinestones of his earrings. For an Archmage in exile, reflected Joanna, he didn’t appear particularly convincing – few wizards, she was fairly certain, would be caught dead in a Bee-Gees t-shirt. (She herself wouldn’t, that was for sure).

  But Chan, whoever the hell he really was, only nodded, and glanced back over his shoulder two or three times on his way to the street door onto Ventura Boulevard.

  *

  “The problem is, it’s not magic.” Antryg folded his hands over the sprawling monstrosity of hybridized computer-parts and Leggos that occupied three-fourths of his worktable, connected by wires to a mostly-disassembled pachinko machine and four Coke-bottles half-filled with God only knew what. Joanna had heard him come in at about three – he biked the eight miles from Enyart’s to 75313 Porson Avenue – and climb the stairs of the shabby Craftsman bungalow they’d bought with the contents of an evil renegade wizard’s stolen bank-account. But, not much to her surprise, instead of coming to bed he’d gone into his workroom, a chamber that had formerly been the sleeping-porch across the back of the house. She’d heard him moving softly around for nearly an hour, before she’d gotten up.

  She’d said, “What is it?” as he lit a candle – he had been working, as he usually did, in darkness, since he really could see in the dark – and he’d known she didn’t mean, What’s bothering you? She knew jolly damn well what was bothering him.

  “Any form of vampire isn’t something you want wandering about loose in a city the size of Los Angeles,” he went on, and checked the alignment of his Coke-bottles. The candle-flame, repeated in the lenses of his spectacles, gave him an other-worldly look he hadn’t had in the more prosaic ambiance of Enyart’s, though she’d still have had trouble convincing anyone that he was not only a wizard, but the Archmage of the Council of Wizards. The other members of the Council – who’d exiled him two years previously – had trouble with that one, too.

  He frowned, sipped his tea – she’d seen it sitting on the corner of a bookshelf for at least two days – and poured the remainder of the cup into one of the bottles. “And it doesn’t sound like any of the varieties that are native to this universe, which is a pity. That’s if our friend Lester was telling the truth.”

  Joanna closed her mouth on, WHAT ‘native to this universe’??!!?? and answered, “He looked pretty shook up to me.”

  “Oh, he was. But that doesn’t mean he was telling the truth.” As he spoke Antryg opened and shut the drawers of an old library card-file that stood in one corner, looking for something – Joanna glimpsed electronic components, dried animal-skulls, empty baby-food jars and thrift-store jewelry before he found what he was looking for, which was an old disk-drive, which he shook, then put his ear against as if to detect some sound within.

  “The problem with mind-vampires – soul-vampires – lamia, they’re sometimes called – is that their victims can’t be trusted to tell the truth. Sometimes they don’t know the truth, but often it’s because they actually don’t want to give up being siphoned. The physical sensation is, I am told, intensely pleasurable.”

  “So somebody may be protecting her?”

  “Oh, almost certainly someone is. Quite probably Lester himself. And because this form of lamia—” He gestured at the labyrinth of wires, plastic, Bondo, and silicon on the table, presumably a tracking device, “—doesn’t seem to be a creature of magic – it’s simply a predator that has found a way to slip through the Void to this universe – it’s going to be difficult to locate.”

  Joanna recalled the gang tattoos on Lester Chan’s neck and hands, the gold money-clip and the inhuman hardness of his eyes. “So if Lester really knows where this babe is – and I don’t for one second believe her name is Jennifer Wilson – and may be protecting her with the help of some of his homeboys, do we really need to rescue him?”

  Antryg, hunting through drawers again, looked up at her, startled.

  “He’s a gangster,” Joanna explained patiently. “A criminal.”

  “Really?” The gray eyes widened. “You can tell looking at him?”

  “Can you, in your own world?” She recalled some of the scummier individuals she’d encountered in the waterfront taverns of the realm of Ferryth, and couldn’t imagine him letting any of them get close enough to him to pick his pockets.

  “Well… In some circles I’m regarded as a criminal myself. I do like to give people the benefit of the doubt.”

  “So do I,” she agreed. “But not if the victim we’re trying to save is going to have his buddies shoot us for trying to get rid of his pet vampire instead of just showing him how to ‘control her’ – for God knows what purpose. I mean, isn’t his problem going to be sort of… self-cleaning? He will eventually die from this, won’t he?”

  “Oh, absolutely. Well, not absolutely, but he won’t be alive in any real sense. The problem is…” Still holding the disk-drive Antr
yg walked to the window, a tall thin form silhouetted against the pre-dawn darkness. He stood looking out, his free hand extended a little so that his outspread palm nearly touched the screen: Joanna had seen an artist friend of theirs make the same gesture, gauging the heat of a kiln.

  His brows drew together and he closed his hand, unable to touch magic in this magic-less world, and he turned his face aside – Joanna said, “Well, yeah. The problem is when she’s done with him, she goes and gets another one.”

  “It’s a problem, of course. But there is a bigger problem.” He looked back at her, and the worry in his eyes was of the order that usually scared the hell out of Joanna. “You’re quite right: I’m sure Lester is a gangster. And a criminal. And he probably does have a lot of friends with guns who do things like steal cars and sell drugs and kill people….”

  Crap. “Will he become a vampire?”

  He looked startled that this would have occurred to her – as if she hadn’t done her homework, or thought that George Washington was still the President of the United States. “I doubt it,” he said. “The real danger is that she’ll become human. And that will be infinitely worse.”

  *

  Jim Hasselart, who managed Enyart’s and had numerous friends on the LAPD, stopped by the Psychic Heart – where Antryg told fortunes four mornings a week – three days later with the information that yes, Lester Chan was well known among his LAPD friends. The young “entrepreneur” worked out of an office in the fabric district downtown: “Probably more than one. You know the fabric district, Antryg?” While Jim had never said whether or not he believed that his weekend bartender was an exiled wizard from another universe, he did accept that he was, in the words of old TV detective shows, not from around here… and in any case two years of combat in South Vietnam had rendered Enyart’s manager proof against whatever random weirdness Los Angeles had to offer.