Dragon Bound (Elder Races #1)(9)

Either Cuelebre would find and kill him, or sooner or later he would piss off one of his “associates.” They would want to know how he got hold of Cuelebre’s property. And now Keith wasn’t going to be able to tell them. How awkward was that.

Then she thought of telling him about her own stupidity since it hadn’t occurred to her to try to pass on a fake to him. Despite a few unusual abilities, Pia didn’t have a larcenous bone in her body. She couldn’t think with the cunning of a criminal.

Besides, she hadn’t dared to do anything but the job once she had realized real Power moved in the shadows behind him. Something was brewing. It was bigger and worse than anything Keith could imagine or she would want to. It smelled dark like assassination or war. She wanted to run as far and as fast as she could away from it.

Never in a million years would she have imagined finding a jar of pennies amid all that blinding treasure in Cuelebre’s lair, or that “take a penny, leave a penny” would come to mind. Everybody did it at gas stations. Why the hell not.

She thought of a whole conversation she could have had with him. Instead she shook her head. It was past time to leave.

“You’ll be sorry!” he shouted at her. “You’ll never find anyone else that will put up with all your bullshit!”

She gave him her middle finger and kept walking.

Alow-level panic continued to urge Pia to run. After several lip-chewing minutes, she decided not to return to her apartment. The difficulty of the decision surprised her. She didn’t own many things that mattered. Her furniture was just furniture, but she did have a few mementos from her mother and she was fond of some of her clothes. Aside from possessions, the real wrench was breaking from the continuity of what home she did have.

Don’t let yourself get too attached to people, places or things, her mother had said. You have to be able to leave everything behind.

Be prepared to run on a moment’s notice.

The definition of their lives had hinged on this. Pia’s mother had kept stashes of cash and different identities for them in a half-dozen places throughout the city. Pia had memorized public transportation routes, lock combinations and safety deposit numbers for all the locations by the time she was six years old. They’d had regular escape-from-New-York drills where she would go through the routes and get access to the documents and cash while her mother followed and observed. The picture IDs got updated as Pia had grown older.

Still, while Pia had nodded and said she understood, the events of last week showed just how much she hadn’t really understood or internalized things. Her mother had died when Pia was nineteen. Now, at twenty-five, she was beginning to realize how sloppy her behavior had become.

It wasn’t just her monumental foolishness at trusting Keith. She had kept up with the regular self-defense and martial arts classes, but she had fallen out of the habit of taking them seriously. Instead she treated them like they were for exercise and entertainment. Now her mother’s early lessons were coming back to haunt her. She only hoped she would survive long enough to appreciate what it meant to be sadder and wiser.

Earlier Pia had wiped out one cache to pay the witch for the binding spell. Now she took a circuitous path to Elfie’s bar in south Chelsea. She managed to hit one safety deposit box before banks closed and a second, less conventional cache hidden at her old elementary school playground. She had three new identities and a hundred thousand dollars in unmarked nonsequential bills stuffed in her backpack, along with a renewed paranoia weighing her down.

When she pushed through the front door to Elfie’s bar, she had begun to feel like she was wearing half the dirt in the city. She felt grubby and hollowed out, emotionally drained and physically hungry. Stress had clogged her throat for days and she hadn’t been able to choke down much food.

Elfie’s was open for lunch during the day. Lunch, served from eleven to three, was a supplemental part of the business, as Elfie’s came alive at night. Quentin, the owner, could have turned it into one of New York’s premiere clubs if he had wanted to. He had the charisma and style for it.

Instead Quentin kept a lid on the business getting too big. Elfie’s was known as a good neighborhood club with a steady, loyal clientele of mixed breeds from all three races. They were the city’s very own Island of Misfit Toys, the flotsam and jetsam of societies, not being fully Wyr, Fae, Elven or human and thus not fully belonging anywhere. Some were open about their mixed-breed nature and argued the benefits of living out of the closet. Many, like Pia, hid what they were and pretended to fit in somewhere.

She had worked at Elfie’s since she was twenty-one, when she had pushed through those same front doors and asked Quentin for a job. It was the only place she had found after her mom had died that came close to feeling like home.

She pushed her way to the servers’ end of the bar and sagged against it. The current bartender on duty, Rupert, paused in slinging drinks and looked at her in surprise. He lifted his chin, silently asking if she wanted him to get her a drink.

She shook her head and mouthed at him, “Where’s Quentin?” The bartender shrugged. She nodded, waved at him, and he went back to work.

Air-conditioning licked her overheated skin. Her eyes threatened to water again as she looked around familiar surroundings. She liked bartending at Elfie’s. She liked working for Quentin. She hoped Captain Fantastic and his hyenas rotted in hell.