Glen Cook - Wicked Bronze Ambition

1

“Love sucks.”

“If you’re a vampire.” Strafa scattered covers as she struck, diving at the spot on the side of my neck that triggers the reflex. Just the threat of the tickle kicks me into a psycho self-defense mode.

She bounced away laughing, sat up, her eyes the color of stout flecked with gold. Fair warning! Flee, Garrett, flee! Run for your sanity!

Being a skilled observer, I observed, “You’re not wearing anything.”

“I never wear anything to bed.”

“I know. But now I’m officially taking notice.”

“Ooh! You wicked man! I see how much you’ve noticed. Is that all on my account?”

I grunted and tried pulling a sheet over me.

She laughed. “That’s why I do it.”

Yeah. So I’ll notice. So things will happen. The real devil wears nothing, extremely well.

Strafa is as close to the perfect woman as this broke-down onetime Marine can imagine. She’s beautiful. She’s always cheerful. She’s always ready, for anything. She is fun to be with. She is fun to be around. She’s even rich. What more could a man ask?

Well, a nicer band of in-laws would help.

The rich is because Strafa Algarda is the Windwalker, Furious Tide of Light, one of TunFaire’s premier sorceresses. She has these immense, terrible powers but very little interest in using them. The rest of her family, though. . Another matter. Definitely another matter. They are weird and scary people, all. And I was on the brink of being pulled in forever.

I dove, tackling her. She laughed. “Distract me all you want, but we still have to go see Grandmother.”

“I’ll keep you here all day long.”

“Braggart. I’ll let you try tomorrow. But right now. .”

Right now time was running out. And even Furious Tide of Light dared not make Shadowslinger wait, so it wasn’t long before we started the endless, too brief two-block uphill trudge to Grandma’s house.

Strafa’s daughter, Kevans, let us in. Kevans has a lot of her father in her. She isn’t as slim or beautiful as Strafa. And she insists on being sixteen going on fifty around her mother. “Mom! You two are worse than a cage full of ferrets. You’re old ! Can’t you at least pretend to act your age?”

Old is a matter of viewpoint. Strafa was thirty-one, which made for interesting generational math. I ignored it. I ignore the weird Algarda dynamic as much as they let me.

I kept my mouth shut. If I stuck even one finger into the daughter-mother competition, I’d get my arm ripped off and fed to me after one or the other beat me with it.

Yes. The family was the downside to being engaged to the most wonderful, perfect, ridiculously beautiful, loving woman in the world. There was no getting out of having the in-laws included in the package.

Kevans and I get along fine when her mother isn’t around. I get along with their father when Kevans and Strafa aren’t around. Barate is a smart guy. He really thinks that I’m the best thing ever to happen to Strafa-though it didn’t always used to be that way.

Nobody gets along with Grandmother Shadowslinger.

She works hard to make it that way. I am assured, however, that she thinks well of me. As well as is possible, she being Shadowslinger. My most endearing trait was that I was willing to make an honest woman of her spinster granddaughter.

Strafa asked Kevans, “What kind of mood is she. .? Right. Stipulated. Stupid question.”

“Foul. But not because of anything any of us did, for once.”

Like most of the more ferocious magic-users who dwell on the Hill, Constance Algarda, commonly called Shadowslinger, occupied a vast, gloomy, dark edifice that looked like ghouls and graveyard fetches had thrown it up more than two hundred years ago. A parade of grim residents had installed countless bad smells, dire dust, spiders with webbed accessories, and lots of random clutter. Shadowslinger was not famous for her housekeeping. She was not your cliche tubby little rosy-cheeked homemaker kind of grandmother.

Most of the smells actually existed only inside my imagination, but Shadowslinger had fixed them there-while wearing a big, greasy, evil grin. A reminder, she said, never making it clear of what. One odor I never failed to catch was that of rotting flesh. It seeped out of the very walls.

Nobody else ever smelled it.

“She does it because she cares,” Strafa said. “What do you want to bet she makes it go away after the wedding?” Her eyes were big and blue and filled with self-deluding optimism.

I hunch my shoulders and take what I have to take. It’s the price of admission to paradise.

Kevans told us we should follow her, then complained every step of the way till we reached the room where Shadowslinger waited. Then the girl actually smiled for a moment.

Kevans likes her grandmother, though I’ve never heard her say a good word about the hag.

I was startled. Strafa squeaked. She was surprised, too.

Shadowslinger was not alone.

I’d never visited this room. It was big and comfortable and more civilized than any I’d yet seen inside Shadowslinger’s suburb of Hell. There wasn’t a single torture device, nor even one torturee, in sight. There were rich carpets, richer tapestries, big, ridiculously comfortable chairs, and massive furniture. A fire roared enthusiastically in a fireplace behind Grandmother, who was old enough to be convinced that she was cold all the time. A brace of servants in livery tended to the needs of her guests. I knew Barate, my father-in-law-to-be. He had been half devoured by a monster chair. He had a bone china teacup to his lips when we entered.

He had a relationship with his mother that was as difficult as Kevans’s was with her mother. Every little motion he made mocked her unusual efforts toward propriety.

There were another three people present. They were all older than me. Two were older than Barate and might be as old as Shadowslinger herself. I didn’t know them. Strafa did. She loosed a little gasp of surprise. I whispered, “Is this good or bad?”

Her right hand slipped into my left, trembling. “All of the above.”

A lean man, balding, six feet tall, stood about that far to the left of Shadowslinger. He was armed with another bone china cup. He had an upper-crust attitude on, but his clothing was workaday. He would attract no attention on the street.

Nearby, as though trying to take reassurance from that man’s presence without becoming personally involved, was a woman of an age well beyond the thirty-something she artfully strove to project. She was tall, thin to the verge of emaciation, equally plainly dressed but from a high-end source. My first thought was that her hair should be short and silver-gray instead of a grand profusion of chestnut curls.

The final guest occupied a chair like Barate’s, a few feet from Algarda. Unlike the others, he seemed comfortable.

A friend of the family.

I looked no closer because Shadowslinger had begun to respond to our arrival.

The ugly old tub of goo was scary just sitting there, behind a massive oak table a good four feet by eight. She would weigh in at three hundred pounds but was only five feet three inches tall on those occasions when she actually stood. She got around aboard a fleet of customized wheelchairs. Strafa said she hadn’t been able to stand and support her own weight for more than minutes for as long as she could remember. But Constance Algarda did not need to be a ballet diva. She was Shadowslinger, one of the darkest and most powerful Karentine sorcerers alive.

Rumor suggested that she never ate where she could be seen. I’d never seen her touch a bite, yet she kept on getting bigger.