“Yes,” he said again. “Amanda said so. Of course, some of them wish their employers ill. But a few others, the ones in favor, they will back whatever move the family makes.”
I thought about the Fielders, who had helped a black woman in trouble… trouble that she’d gotten into through losing her temper.
“By the way,” I said. “How come you called the tsarina by her first name? That doesn’t seem very Russian court to me.”
Eli flushed. “It’s too familiar. But we sat together many nights when the tsar was doing badly. He fell on the stairs once. He was very, very ill. We talked as we waited.”
There was a knock at the door, and we both sat up. The world was suddenly coming to our door.
I had my gun in my hand and I was standing to one side of the door when I said, “Who is it?”
“Felix,” said a very quiet voice.
Eli nodded and I answered the door. Our visitor really was Felix, whose long hair was now wound up in a bun at the back of his head. Because he didn’t stand out enough before. He gave a quick glance at the gun in my hand, and then focused on Eli.
“Something has happened out at the Ballard place,” Felix said. “I don’t know what.”
I might as well not have been there, but that was all right. This was big news, and I was listening.
“I’ve been walking around the town, trying to be friendly,” Felix said. Every single Sallyite who would respond to Felix had told him there was another magician fellow at the Pleasant Stay. Felix found that almost unbelievable. It was obvious he had never lived in a small town.
While I pretended to be part of the wall, thinking how wonderful it would be if Felix attacked Eli so I’d have a reason to do him some harm, Felix told Eli that the staff at his hotel had been gathering in clusters to exchange excited whispers, then shooting off in all directions as quickly as they’d gathered.
Naturally, Felix had wanted to know what they were saying.
“I cast a far-hearing spell,” the grigori explained. “I heard one man tell another that someone had been killed out at the Ballard plantation. The Ballards did not call the hospital or the police or the funeral home.”
“We don’t do any of those things at home,” I said, just to remind myself I was in the room.
“What do you do instead?” Eli asked.
“We go to the cemetery and dig a hole and put ’em in it. If they were believers, the minister comes.”
“No coffin?” Felix was horrified.
“Not everyone can afford one,” I said. “Wood is not plentiful where we are. Not like here.”
Felix dismissed me and turned back to Eli. “One of us needs to investigate.”
“We have the mysterious meeting tonight,” Eli reminded him. “So it will have to be you.”
Felix looked pleased. “Then I will do it. I will have to find out where the Ballard house is, but that shouldn’t be hard.”
I opened my mouth to tell Felix he had better be able to turn invisible, because going to the Ballard house was a very dangerous venture. But then I shut my mouth again. Felix would not listen to me.
Eli met my eyes. He said, “Felix, you’d do well to wait until I can go with you. The Ballard family are rulers here, in their way, and they can dispose of us without consequence.”
“I think I’m a match for a backcountry tyrant,” Felix said, smiling. There was no doubt he believed that.
I touched my forehead with the thumb of my right hand. I didn’t know I was going to do it, I just did it. Gunnies did that sometimes when they were saying good-bye to a person who was about to die. Eli asked a silent question, but I shook my head.
Maybe Felix would get away with it.
He left a moment later, practically shining with the excitement of a chance to distinguish himself.
“What did that mean?” Eli asked, imitating my thumb-to-the-forehead gesture.
“Meant I think he’s going to die.”
Eli stared at me. “You didn’t say anything.”
“He’s not going to listen to me, is he?”
I could see Eli trying to come up with a reason to tell me I was wrong, but he couldn’t. He was fair enough to see it would be wasted breath.
So Felix had gone off to die, and we had to hope that Travis and Harriet would abide by their lukewarm agreement to back us up tonight. Otherwise, we might end up just like Felix, without the excuse of being ignorant.
“Do you think there’s really a chance that this meeting is with the Negroes who are willing to help us? That they’re just scared of talking to us in public?” Eli had resumed his pose on the bed, fingers laced behind his head.
“There is a chance,” I said grudgingly. “I see we got to act on it. But I think it’s a trap, myself.”
Eli shook his head. “This is a bad place to be in.”
“We’ve been in plenty of bad places. We made it through them.” Though by a very small margin. At great cost.
I had a good idea. “Can you do that invisibility spell? The one Klementina blessed me with so I could get away?” There was no way the Mexican police would have let me go, not after I’d shot a lot of people in public in broad daylight.
“I haven’t ever performed it, but I know the theory of it,” Eli said slowly. Then he grinned. If no one could see us, we had a much greater chance of coming out of tonight’s meeting in one piece. “Wait, what if this is a legitimate meeting? What if John Edward’s people are there, and they can’t see us? Can you see them agreeing to help us after we talk to them out of the darkness?”
“Can you see this being a real meeting? And are you sure you can turn us back to being seen? I don’t want to be invisible the rest of my life.”
Eli nodded after a moment of considering, his hair brushing against the pillow around him.
I decided it would be a good idea to kiss him. Then, pop!—we were doing what we did so well. He was inside me, and we were one being. It seemed to get more exciting every time, as we grew to know each other better and learned we could play with things we’d never done.
I’d had a pretty dim view of sex before Eli. Not much experience, and the little I’d had had not been thrilling. I had not asked Eli for details about his times with other women, and I never would, but I believed Eli hadn’t had this much fun before either. When it was over, gloriously over, I wrapped my arms around the sweating man above me and hugged him close, locking my mouth shut on all the words I felt bubbling up.
No point speaking them.
Every time we left this hotel, I had the strong feeling that we might die here in Dixie, killed by one faction or another. At least we’d had this.
And that was that.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
As soon as the sun began to go down, I put on my jeans and a short-sleeved dark blue shirt and my boots and my guns. As I glanced in the mirror, something inside me relaxed. For the first time since the train wreck, I felt like myself.
Eli was wearing his battered brown pants and his wizard vest over a long-sleeved ugly brown-and-green-checked shirt. We decided to wear the darkest clothes we had, just in case the invisibility spell didn’t work.
Eli had bought some compound from the pharmacy that was supposed to keep mosquitoes away. I just about prayed it would work. Mosquitoes here were big enough to carry away a baby rabbit.