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“I’m not that short.” After elbowing my way forward, the crowd finally spat me out ringside, where within the ring, two enormous, bare-chested gargoyles swung punches at each other. Blood and sweat glistened on their golden skin.
The crowd jeered.
“Is this legal?” I yelled, so Zee would hear me over the ruckus.
“It’s not illegal.”
Right. The gargoyle on the right threw a punch that landed on his opponent with a sickening crunch. The recipient of that punch dropped to a knee, so hard it shook the ground.
The crowd lapped it up, wide-eyed and bloodthirsty. A few vampires stood out by not reacting like everyone else. The silver in their predatory eyes swirled though. Bloodlust.
“It’s a way to earn money,” Zee added. I glanced up at him. “No different from selling yourself by the hour. C’mon, let’s go find Junk Jim.”
Zee wrestled a path back out of the crumbling building.
As we walked away from the spectacle, a roar thundered, and the sounds of the bloodlust-fueled crowd going wild filled the night. It would have been naïve to think all of this was harmless fun. There was a reason we’d hired Claymore as a bodyguard. Few dared mess with their strength. It took a lot to drop a gargoyle.
“Do you think Claymore got caught up in something like this?” I asked, as we ambled back toward the plaza.
“Claymore? Nah, that guy scoops up the fuck-off enormous hotel spiders and puts them outside with dead-fly care packages.”
“He does?”
Zee snorted. “You hired the softest security guard ever. Didn’t you know?”
“He’s a gargoyle, I thought . . .”
“Because he’s big and scary looking, you thought he’d be a violent psychopath? Adam Vex, that is prejudice.”
“No, that’s not—”
“And look at you, with your sunshine-twink energy. But you’re secretly a bloodthirsty murder machine.”
“That’s not . . . I’m not . . . I don’t . . . People die. It’s a thing that happens, that’s all.”
“Uh-huh. Sure, Kitten. They just up and die in front of you?”
“Exactly.” A lot of that was to do with the curse . . . “Yup.” Although a curse didn’t wipe out my entire family. I did that.
“You’re so cute when you lie. It’s fucking adorable.”
“It’s technically true.”
He chuckled. “I know we haven’t had much time to talk about shit, and we will, but let me say, your camouflage is fucking perfect. Average, all-American, boring guy. That’s you. Maybe a little bit too sweet and innocent, though. No real person is as nice as you.”
“I am this nice. It’s just some people make me not nice. Sometimes.” People like Gideon Cain.
“I fucking hear that.” Zee spotted a trio around a little campfire. “There’s some fae. Let’s ask if they know Jim.”
We spent the next few minutes asking after Jim, and were given directions toward the back of the camp where most of the residents lived out of caravans and cars. I spotted Jim’s familiar van and nodded for Zee to follow. The words Junk Jim had been painted on the side, and a whole lot more about Jim’s life began to add up.
As we approached, Jim hopped down from the front passenger side and made his way to the back of the van where he’d just lit a campfire. Piles of trash flanked his van. It was clear Jim spent his days rummaging through dumpsters for human flotsam to sell on to curious Lost Ones at the markets.
“Hey, it’s you, my best ever sales assistant,” Jim said, grinning. His green eyes glittered like gems. Shorter than Zee, Jim didn’t tower over me like most fae, but he was still taller than me. His tufty brown hair stuck out at all angles. “And you, scary flower-shirt demon, come back to interrogate me, bro?” He laughed. “Pull up a stump. You wanna buy a unique money box?” He whipped out a tin can with a hole cut in the top.
“That’s just an empty drink can, bro,” Zee said.
“Ah, but it has this convenient hole for all your coins, see?”
