"Where is he going with this?" I asked, gnawing the waffle more from nerves than anything. "He's getting that crowd really ginned up."
"We are not going to sit back and accept our fate this time!" Viktor called to the crowd like only he could. He could sound downright Shakespearean when he got on a roll, loud but never screaming, just enough of his accent showing through to give his words a mystical, musical quality. And now I knew how he was in person, and I really understood why he won the presidency in a landslide. "I know the rumors that started all of this. There is something happening--and the humans won't be able to stop it. They don't want to believe magic is real, prophecies are real--but if wishes were horses, then beggars would ride. Their wishes will not come true for once. Ours will. To all the humans of the world who have aided us in our fight for justice, who have welcomes us, you have my gratitude on this day. May the rest of you be on notice. Thank you."
The gathered crowd was roaring with excitement even though it was small, mostly the press and city officials. The reporters started screaming questions and Viktor always took time for questions, but not today.
It felt like a bomb had dropped. The ticker at the bottom of the screen said that reinforcements were coming to Istara from several sympathetic nations to support both the east and west regions, and then some quotes scrolled by from US senators taking different sides.
My phone rang and I jumped. It was Flor.
"Did you see Viktor's speech just now?" he asked, in a soft, low voice. If I hadn't managed to get in Flor's head I might have thought he actually was calm, but now I thought he was in fact, freaking out.
"Yes. Waylon and I just watched."
"Look on social media. There is already a shit storm brewing on Lower East Side."
"No doubt..." The Lower East Side was always tense. It was near the bridges to Istara, and a lot of shifters who worked at clubs and cafes or in other shady businesses in Manhattan lived in the cheap apartments that were once tenements.
“And Darius called this morning,” Flor continued. “He’s having…some trouble getting out.”
Damn it. ”That's not part of the plan,” I said.
"I know." Flor said, "I'll be at the hotel in a second. I hate talking on the phone." He hung up.
"Flor doesn't have many people he cares about," I said, worried. "But I can tell Darius is one of the few."
"If it was Ansel, I'd think the same thing," Waylon said. "It's why I risked arrest to put Leif's body in the sea. When you make a friend in this world..."
"But now Flor will be in danger too." I swallowed. "This was supposed to be an easy job."
Florian showed up minutes later. He had already pushed his hair out of his eyes, and those eyes showed real worry. Even fear. Flor didn't seem like a guy who ever feared anything, but of course I knew he had fears, and now I saw that he trusted me enough to show me. How could I do anything but live up to that fragile trust?
"I know it's not part of the mission, Frankie," he said gravely. "I'm not asking anyone else to go. But...Darius had my back all those years ago. When I got away from Shaw, he was one of the first friends I made. I crashed on his couch for almost six months. If I didn't honor that, I wouldn't be worthy of you either."
"We'll go with you," I said. I had already made up my mind. "We already have a good group here to wait for Decker and they know what they need to do. But we're a team."
"Frankie...thank you," Flor said. "I won't let anything bad happen. We'll get Darius out of there and take him back with us."
Ian came up behind Flor too. I didn't even know Ian came with him, but now he was looking at me like he already knew what I would say. "All right, man, we can do this! I'm excited to bring Darius back with us. He can play the piano."
I snorted. "Ohhh, okay. Priorities. We'll risk our lives to get a piano player."
"So we have to cross the bridge, then," Waylon said, grabbing his satchel, clearly already thinking of a spell.
"Save your spells for good luck and that mirror trick from before," Flor said. "I know a guy on the other side who'll let us across. I still live there, according to my ID. It won't be a problem."
"Whenever my dad says he 'knows a guy', it never seems to go well," Ian said under his breath.
“I’m not your dad,” Flor said. “It’ll just be a quick pickup.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Mina
I was pretty bored at Viktor's villa, even though it was beautiful. Gina offered to get us something at the store, but I gave her a list and all she found was the roller skates. Super cute pink Italian-made roller skates, which shows what I knew about Italy. I had no idea Italians liked roller skating. At least I could work with that.
I missed my ballet classes and even some of the study of history and current affairs that Alistair forced on me, that I now knew must have been to prepare me for queendom. I missed going out with him to scout for Eden Park or making business connections at clubs and restaurants. My life used to be pretty busy and now I was just chilling with Ansel day after day, still trying to think of the best way to psych out Viktor when he got back.
"We're only going to get one chance," Ansel said. "We have to throw him totally off guard. The next time, he'd expect it."
We decided that I should invite Viktor to bed and Ansel would hide in the room. Ansel could physically overpower Viktor as long as Viktor didn’t have psychic control. So that was the tricky part. I couldn't think of a surefire way to break Viktor's composure.
That is, until my natural nosiness found The Stash.
"Ansel! Come upstairs! Turn that off!"
Ansel was watching the news, which had been reporting on the unrest in America and Istara and broadcasting a speech Viktor made this morning on repeat with Italian commentary. He was quite happy to follow me to my discovery since we didn’t understand most of what was being said.
"I decided to dig around this stereo cabinet thing," I said, leading the way into a spare room that had a work desk by the window, an exercise bike in one corner, and a cabinet with an older stereo system and rows of neatly organized CDs, mostly classical and opera plus a bit of old Italian music, big band and jazz.
I started grabbing out handfuls of classical CDs and putting them aside. "It's stacked two deep. Look at this. I don't think they're Gina's or why would they be buried behind what is obviously Viktor's very tidy CD collection?"
"Oh...no way."
Behind the classical was a ton of Eurovision song contest compilation CDs from the 1970s to the early 1990s.
"This is the music of his childhood, I bet. Cheesy Europop. This is the stuff. If I invite him to bed and then I blast this stuff, tell me he won't be thrown off his game. And then I thought, we don't have a bunch of costume supplies here, but we do have white sheets. You know what we could make? That skimpy ABBA tunic with the cat on it. You know what I’m talking about?”
"No way." Ansel started cracking up. "You're going to tell Viktor you want to have sex with him and then slink out of the bathroom in an ABBA costume made out of sheets? And you have to wear the roller skates."