Standing beside me, Timon somehow oriented on the mummy, sneered, and said, “Was that you? It was a feckless little ploy.”
“But helpful,” the mummy said, “whoever set the snare. Since he’s occupied your chair, I take this fellow to be your proxy. So it was necessary for him to prove he’s of the blood. And now he has, without a bit of wasted time. In fact, we could start playing immediately, if only you’d be so kind as to find a place among the spectators.”
Timon took a deep breath, then pointed his torn, eyeless face down at me. “Win,” he growled. He snapped his fingers, and a girl in a tux came scurrying. Her legs bent backward, and she didn’t have much in the way of feet. Her black little shoes were round.
Watching her lead Timon away, I suddenly felt like a little kid whose parents have just dropped him off for his first day of school. Or his first night in Dracula’s castle.
The mummy smiled at me around his cheroot. “But it’s only courteous,” he said, “to have a round of introductions before the cards start flying. Most people call me the Pharaoh.”
“Hi,” I answered. “I’m Billy.” Timon had told me not to give my full name.
“Lovely to meet you, Billy,” purred the woman on the Pharaoh’s left. “I’m Leticia.” When I really looked at her, I felt a shock, and for once, it wasn’t a surge of fear.
Leticia had waves of auburn hair, and big, shining green eyes. Smooth creamy skin and a strapless sequined evening dress that showed a lot of it. I could give you all the details, and you’d get the idea that she was beautiful, glamorous and sexy, but you wouldn’t really understand. Think of the girl who made you crazy in junior high, right when puberty kicked in. Or the actress who hypnotized you whenever you watched one of her movies, no matter how awful it was. That was Leticia.
My mouth was dry, and my heart pounded. She might have sunk her hooks into me right then and there, too deep for me ever to pull them out, except that I’d played against other good-looking women who used it to get the guys to go easy on them. So this wasn’t a new experience, just a familiar one amped to a new level. And, after things went bad between us, Victoria told me I’d rather gamble than make love, and maybe she was right about that, too. Put it all together, and it may explain why I suddenly realized I was in trouble.
I did what Timon had told me to do whenever someone was trying to hex me. I visualized the T-bird emblem, concentrating on it really hard. A shudder went through me. Afterward, I was still attracted to Leticia, but I wasn’t drunk with it anymore.
Leticia winked like we’d just shared a joke.
On her left-and my right-was a guy who, like the Pharaoh, shouldn’t even have been alive. He smelled like oil and was made of painted tin, hinges, and springs. With his hooked nose and chin, leering mouth, and head bobbing at the end of his long neck, he reminded me of a jack-in-the-box, and when he twisted in my direction, I half expected him to introduce himself as Jack. But, in a voice that hissed and popped like an old LP, he told me he was Gimble of the Seven Soft Rebukes.
On my other side was a scrawny woman with the round, blank, bulging eyes of a bug. She had four arms, all too skinny, all with too many joints, and all covered in bristles.
An open glass jar sat beside her chip stack. An assortment of insects crawled sluggishly inside, but didn’t fly, jump, or climb out. I guessed the lump of blue jelly gave off fumes that kept them drugged. The bug woman popped a grasshopper into her mouth and crunched it as she introduced herself as Queen.
The guy between Queen and the Pharaoh looked as human as Leticia or me. So you’d think he might not make much of an impression, not sitting at this table. But he did. I didn’t suppose he was really a whole lot bigger than Pablo Martinez. People don’t come a whole lot bigger. But he felt twice as huge, and twenty times as dangerous. He had a long, shaggy black beard, hair to match, and faded blue tattooing on his forehead and hands that I couldn’t quite make out under all the fur. His suit and tie looked expensive-Armani or something-and as natural on him as they would on a grizzly.
“Wotan,” he rumbled. He stood up to offer me his hand.
Since I had a hunch what was coming, I wasn’t eager to take it. But table image matters, and I didn’t want to look scared. I got up again, and we shook.
If you want to call it that. Actually, he did his best to crush my hand. Since I’d been expecting it, I was able to squeeze back, but it still hurt. And creeped me out a little more, if that was possible, when I felt that he even had hair growing on his palm.
He stared into my eyes as we strained to mangle one another. His eyes were a muddy, bloodshot brown.
“I hope you realize,” he said, “a champion can lose as much as his lord. Sometimes he loses more.”
“And sometimes,” I said, just like I actually knew anything about it, “he kicks everybody else’s ass.”
“True enough,” the Pharaoh said. “I saw it happen in Punjab, two hundred years ago. So why not let go of him, Wotan, and we’ll see if he can do as well.”
Wotan couldn’t resist one last bone-grinding squeeze, but after that, he turned me loose. I sat back down and slipped my hand under the table, where I could flex the throbbing ache out of it without being obvious.
We didn’t have a dealer. We players were taking care of that ourselves. Queen was on the button, and her complicated four-handed shuffle was like a juggling act.
I took a breath and checked my stack. Timon wasn’t the chip leader, but he’d finished the previous night in decent shape. I checked everyone else’s. Wotan had the most, and Gimble, the least.
Six is a short-handed game, and so more hands were playable. Still, I decided to be a rock for at least the first hour, while I watched how everyone else was playing.
In other words, I was trying to push everything that was strange or scary out of my mind and make this just another poker game. It seemed like the best way to keep from freaking out.
And there were moments when it almost felt like a normal game. We all shielded our hole cards with one hand as we lifted the corners with the other. Or, in Queen’s case, one of the others. The decks rustled when we shuffled; the Pharaoh managed without any problem, and I wondered just how feeble and fragile he really was. Leticia waved over the girl with the backward legs and ordered an apple martini, and while I had the chance, I asked for a ginger ale. Wotan fired up a pipe the shape and nearly the size of an alto sax and added its stinking smoke to the blue haze of the mummy’s cheroots.
And, off and on, the lords chatted. They talked poker, chess, archery, and horse racing, but also games and sports I’d never heard of. They gossiped about scandals I didn’t understand and told jokes I didn’t get. Still, it was table talk, and the tone and rhythm of it felt familiar, too.
Eventually I started to relax, at least a little. Whatever the tournament involved when the players weren’t at the table-and it would have been an understatement to say that I still didn’t have much of a handle on that-between midnight and dawn, it was cards. And cards, I understood.
I started playing more hands. A couple times, I opened from late position with garbage and managed to steal the blinds. I took a chance with suited connectors, made a flush on the river, and took down a nice pot from Leticia. Who revved up the bedroom eyes and teasing smile to congratulate me.
Fifteen minutes later, I caught pocket jacks and felt pretty good about it until Wotan raised from first position, and the Pharaoh came over the top. Then I mucked, and watched cards come out that would have given me a full house. I tried to swallow my annoyance and remember that folding had still been the right play.
See, just another night at the poker table. Until Wotan jumped up out of his chair.
In a way, that was normal, too. I’d seen gamblers get mad and even violent before. But I’d never seen anybody anywhere move as fast as Wotan circled the table. It was like watching a high-speed train hurtle down the track.