Dangerous Women

I felt my eyes widen.

The Fomor situation just kept getting worse and worse. Chicago was far from the most preyed-upon city in the world, and they had still made the streets a nightmare for those of even modest magical talent. I didn’t have access to the kind of information I had when I was working with Harry and the White Council, but I’d heard things through the Paranet and other sources. The Fomor were kind of an all-star team of bad guys, the survivors and outcasts and villains of a dozen different pantheons that had gone down a long time ago. They’d banded together under the banner of a group of beings known as the Fomor, and had been laying quiet for a long time—for thousands of years, in fact.

Now they were on the move—and even powerful interests like Svartalfheim, the nation of the svartalves, were getting out of the way.

Wow, I was so not wizard enough to deal with this.

“Lara must have sent Thomas in for something,” Justine said. “To steal information, to disrupt the alliance somehow. Something. Trespassing would be bad enough. If he was captured spying on them …”

“They’ll have a demonstration,” I said quietly. “They’ll make an example.”

“Couldn’t the White Court get him out?” Waldo asked.

“If the White Court seeks the return of one of their own, it would be like admitting they sent an agent in to screw around with Svartalfheim,” I said. “Lara can’t do that without serious repercussions. She’ll deny that Thomas’s intrusion had anything to do with her.”

Justine rose and paced the room, her body tight. “We have to go. We have to do something. I’ll pay the price; I’ll pay it ten times. We have to do something!”

I took a few more bites of orange chicken, frowning and thinking.

“Molly!” Justine said.

I looked at the chicken. I liked the way the orange sauce contrasted with the deep green of the broccoli and the soft white contours of the rice. The three colors made a pleasant complement. It was … beautiful, really.

“They covet beauty like a dragon covets gold,” I murmured.

Butters seemed to clue in to the fact that I was onto something. He leaned back in his chair and ate steadily from a box of noodles, his chopsticks precise. He didn’t need to look to use them.

Andi picked up on it a second later and tilted her head to one side. “Molly?” she asked.

“They’re having a party tonight,” I said. “Right, Justine?”

“Yes.”

Andi nodded impatiently. “What are we going to do?”

“We,” I said, “are going shopping.”

I’m kind of a tomboy. Not because I don’t like being a girl or anything, because for the most part I think it’s pretty sweet. But I like the outdoors, and physical activities, and learning stuff and reading things and building things. I’ve never really gotten very deep into the girly parts of being a girl. Andi was a little bit better at it than me. The fact that her mother hadn’t brought her up the way mine had probably accounted for it. In my house, makeup was for going to church and for women with easy morals.

I know, I know: the mind boggles at the contradiction. I had issues way before I got involved with magic, believe me.

I wasn’t sure how to accomplish what we needed in time to get to the party, but once I explained what we needed, I found out that when it came to being a girly girl, Justine had her shit wired tight.

Within minutes a town car picked us up and whisked us away to a private salon in the Loop, where Justine produced a completely unmarked, plain white credit card. About twenty staff members—wardrobe advisors, hairdressers, makeup artists, tailors, and accessory technicians—leapt into action and got us kitted out for the mission in a little more than an hour.

I couldn’t really get away from the mirror this time. I tried to look at the young woman in it objectively, as if she was someone else, and not the one who had helped kill the man she loved and who had then failed him again by being unable to prevent even his ghost from being destroyed in its determination to protect others. That bitch deserved to be run over by a train or something.

The girl in the mirror was tall and had naturally blond hair that had been rapidly swirled up off of her neck and suspended with gleaming black chopsticks. She looked lean, probably too much so, but had a little too much muscle tone to be a meth addict. The little black dress she wore would turn heads. She looked a little tired, even with the expertly applied makeup. She was pretty—if you didn’t know her, and if you didn’t look too hard at what was going on in her blue eyes.

A white stretch limo pulled up to get us, and I managed to dodder out to it without falling all over myself.

“Oh my God,” Andi said when we got in. The redhead stuck her feet out and wiggled them. “I love these shoes! If I have to wolf out and eat somebody’s face, I am going to cry to leave these behind.”

Justine smiled at her but then looked out the window, her lovely face distant, worried. “They’re just shoes.”

“Shoes that make my legs and my butt look awesome!” Andi said.

“Shoes that hurt,” I said. My wounded leg might have healed up, but moving around in these spiky torture devices was a new motion, and a steady ache was spreading up through my leg toward my hip. The last thing I needed was for my leg to cramp up and drop me to the ground, the way it had kept doing when I first started walking on it again. Any shoes with heels that high should come with their own safety net. Or a parachute.

We’d gone with similar outfits: stylish little black dresses, black chokers, and black pumps that proclaimed us hopeful that we wouldn’t spend much time on our feet. Each of us had a little Italian leather clutch, too. I’d put most of my magical gear in mine. All of us had our hair up in styles that varied only slightly. There were forged Renaissance paintings which had not had as much artist’s attention as our faces.

“It just takes practice wearing them,” Justine said. “Are you sure this is going to work?”

“Of course it is,” I said calmly. “You’ve been to clubs, Justine. The three of us together would skip the line to any place in town. We’re a matched set of hotness.”

“Like the Robert Palmer girls,” Andi said drily.

“I was going to go with Charlie’s Angels,” I said. “Oh, speaking of”—I opened the clutch and drew out a quartz crystal the size of my thumb—“Bosley, can you hear me?”

A second later, the crystal vibrated in my fingers and we heard Waldo’s faint voice coming from it. “Loud and clear, Angels. You think these will work once you get inside?”

“Depends on how paranoid they are,” I said. “If they’re paranoid, they’ll have defenses in place to cut off any magical communications. If they’re murderously paranoid, they’ll have defenses in place that let us talk so that they can listen in, and then they’ll kill us.”

“Fun,” Butters said. “Okay, I’ve got the Paranet chat room up. For what it’s worth, the hivemind is online.”

“What have you found out?” Andi asked.

“They’ll look human,” Waldo replied. “Their real forms are … well, there’s some discussion, but the basic consensus is that they look like aliens.”

“Ripley or Roswell?” I asked.

“Roswell. More or less. They can wear flesh forms, though, kind of like the Red Court vampires did. So be aware that they’ll be disguised.”

“Got it,” I said. “Anything else?”

“Not much,” he said. “There’s just too much lore floating around to pick out anything for sure. They might be allergic to salt. They might be supernaturally OCD and flip out if you wear your clothes inside out. They might turn to stone in sunlight.”

I growled. “It was worth a shot. Okay. Keep the discussion going, and I’ll get back to you if I can.”

“Got it,” he said. “Marci just got here. I’ll bring the laptop with me and we’ll be waiting for you on the east side of the building when you’re ready to go. How do you look, Andi-licious?”

“Fabulous,” Andi said confidently. “The hemlines on these dresses stop about an inch short of slutty nymphomaniac.”

“Someone take a picture,” he said cheerfully, but I could hear the worry in his voice. “I’ll see you soon.”

“Don’t take any chances,” I said. “See you soon.”

I put the crystal away and tried to ignore the butterflies in my stomach.