“I’ll hold you to that,” I said.
“Consider yourself at home!” sang the golden skull as we shook.
I gave myself an unreality check. I’d taken a dislike to Mason Mastiff and his restaurant. Could I give fair value in consulting to a man I despised?
Perhaps it was his human nature. I like humans—especially served seared and roasted with butter and an herb crust of rosemary, sage, garlic, and parsley—and usually have little difficulty dealing with them. Mastiff rubbed me the wrong way. Perhaps it was his eagerness to court the translife world. I’d take a Templar, even a Black Templar, over a human who was so eager to profit on the preparation and consumption of his fellows. Since the soulrift, it’s been them and us, or them versus us I should say, alternating roles as hunter and prey for millennia. This recent mixing of life and translife—put me down as Not a Fan. It won’t end well. The farmer and the cowman won’t be friends, as that demented little stickpin might put it. I can guarantee that each little story and encounter is being transcribed for the Templar archives. They’re paying attention. Organized. We in the translife world spend too much time in a navel-gazing funk, or jealous of the fleshies and their daisy-chain lives.
Everyone served anywhere. Wisconsin was an anywhere and Mason Mastiff an everyone. Luckily for the world, everyone didn’t wear a goldbraided smoking jacket and strut around a barn like Mussolini with three feet of PVC up his arse, thinking the world’s ugliest dining room was some kind of tribute to Christo and H. R. Giger.
THE SERVICE THAT night, such as it was, depressed me. Few customers ordering fewer entrées. I tried a bit of the cuisine. A medical school lab equipped with a microwave and a salt shaker could have come up with a tastier dinner. The specials were an Unattended Death paella—an old lady and her cat, by the look of the kitchen bin—and Quad Cities suicide scramble.
Ravelston, the vampire waiter, spent more time talking to his friends among the clientele than shuttling food and drink. While I admired the gentlemanly charm and the smattering of knowledge and interesting anecdotes he could summon up on almost any subject, each involved him planting his feet at the edge of the table for ten minutes. The original thirdwheel waiter.
Mastiff was serving emergency room food at private clinic prices. Twat.
Most of the clientele sat in the bar, chatting with each other or the barmaid. A pair of werewolves in purple Vikings jerseys hooted at the television.
Traffic died early in the bar. Strange for a place catering to translife, but then, it was a long drive back to any of the cities.
The barmaid was the one bright spot in the whole front of the house.
She was clearly out of the Eastern heritage of translife. Young, beautiful, pale green skin, and wide red lips. She had six arms and a graceful walk, gliding behind the bar from bottle to tap while wiping, placing coasters, and picking up money. I guessed she was a Devi.
“How did you manage to make it to the West?” I asked her.
“Mastiff petitioned the Secret Eyes,” she said.
“That must have taken some doing.”
“He never fails to remind me of that,” she said, a red-green smile traveling across her face as if it were in a hurry to get elsewhere.
“What’s your name?”
“Call me Megha.”
“Devi?”
She gave me that brilliant smile. “I didn’t sew these arms on.”
“How do you like Wisconsin?” I asked.
She gave a matched set of shrugs. “It’s pretty. The air and water are wonderful. No pollution. You can’t imagine how bad India is with the exhaust these days.”
“Like bartending?”
“I’ve always been a listener, and I’m proud to say the bar never gets behind.” She checked the screen on her electronic assistant, opened a fresh jar of olives, and replaced the ice scoop. “Our patron, he’s something of an old letch. Those wigs should come with goat ears. I think he brought me over because he liked the idea of a girl who could rub his prostate, give him a reach-around, and fill out his taxes all at the same time. But I get tired of the bar. He wants a glamour girl here.”
She reached up with two of her arms and adjusted her fleshy breasts in their dressy bustier. “Regardless of what you’ve heard about minor Devi girls, we don’t all go for the stage makeup and jewels. Doing six sets of fingernails three times a week is tiresome. What’s a human life span again?”
“I give Mastiff three more decades, at best.”
“Vishnu’s discus,” she said. “These last two years have felt like ten. I don’t suppose you have American citizenship through the Secret Eyes.”
“Not even a green card,” I said.
THE PLACE HAD possibilities, no question. But at the moment, Mason Mastiff was playing checkers with some very expensive chess pieces, moving his queen like a pawn while his bishops sat back tossing off.
“This weekend will be better,” Mastiff insisted, as we talked over the dismal dinner service. “I’ve something special to celebrate the rebirth of the Skyline.” Mastiff let out a titter.
I HAD TO ride and think this through.
In all my travels I’ve yet to find a perfume sweeter than horse lather, and, given my nature, I doubt I ever will.
I found a small farmette surrounded by promising, moonlit fields. Their stable, under a buzzing incandescent floodlight coated in spiderwebs, didn’t even have a lock. Inside a chestnut mare dozed.
Her ears pricked up as I touched her nose. In Wales and Ireland the legends say that the horses fear us; that’s why they run so hard while we’re astride. The truth is our scent excites them as much as their sweat pleases us.
I led her out, grasped two handfuls of thick mane, and swung up onto the beast’s back. Muscles quivered between my thighs as I removed the tight restraining tie from my hair. I kicked her on. The mare galloped off into the night, accepted the challenge of the three-rail fence, and we were in the dark, free and away at last.
The pounding hooves soothed me and the fresh night air cleared my head, even if it came at the price of a swallowed bug or two. I’d return the mare, sweaty and trembling, by morning. A steamy mystery for whoever came first into the barn. For now, I’d give her the ride of her life.
THE NEXT MORNING I forced Mastiff to show me his surprise for the weekend.
I found him in his office. Megha had arrived early, or perhaps had never left, and was sorting bills into three piles: Delay, Delay Some More, and Final Notice.
“You’ve been hinting at some special cuisine for this weekend. I was hoping for some input on preparation,” I said.
He winked and took me down to the kitchen. The zombies were taking turns working the mop back and forth—Buck would hand it to Tooth, who’d wring it out and hand it back to Buck, who’d wring it again and pass it back, without mop head coming into contact with the floor—as the golem slumbered in a corner, gently ticking and shifting like a refuse pile with a rat exploring within.
We passed through what served as an office and into the old dairy storage tank room. He’d converted the two tanks into cells, after a fashion, by installing reinforcing-rod grills over the cleaning hatches.
A white-painted dungeon. It smelled faintly of bleach and mice.
“Only one’s occupied. Take a look.”
“HELP ME! OH GOD, HELP MEEE!” a voice pleaded from within.
I hazarded a look. An attractive, tan, college-age human with bruises up and down her forearms and fists shot toward the hatch like an electrified cat.
“Help . . . out . . . please,” she burbled.
It came to me. I’d seen the face on the airport news. The Stensgaard disappearance. The girl had vanished from the U.S. Virgin Islands while on spring break from her college in Syracuse.