House of Cards. C.E. Murphy

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СКАЧАТЬ of chiding a man of Janx’s position—either crime-lord or dragonlord—struck Margrit, and she steeled herself to keep a trace of laughter from her voice. “What do you want?”

      “Oh, Margrit, you hurt me. Can’t an old friend call up to say hello after a few weeks’ absence?”

      “Old friend?” Margrit kept her voice down with effort. “Pit vipers would be safer friends than you, and old friends don’t call at six in the morning unless they’re in real trouble. You can’t be in any trouble I could possibly help you with. The world’s not that capricious.” The accusation left aside the middling detail that Margrit, despite her better judgment, rather liked the fiery-haired dragon. “What do you want?”

      “Capricious,” Janx said with admiration. “Well done, for someone who protests she’s just been wakened.”

      “I’m a lawyer. I’m supposed to be capable of conversing with an augmented vocabulary in order to obfuscate an argument without exerting myself. Besides, I was already awake. What do you want?”

      “Better than a circus act,” Janx said happily. Then his bantering faded, a note of tension replacing it. “I require your services, Margrit. A balance has changed.”

      Margrit coughed in disbelief. “You called me up at six-thirty in the morning to give me cryptic messages? ‘A balance has changed’? What the hell does that mean? A balance changed in January when you had Vanessa Gray killed, Janx. Alban told me that you’d breached protocol by doing that. You’re not supposed to go around murdering people’s assistants, especially when they’ve been assisting for over a century. It’s not playing fair, or something.”

      “Margrit, my dear, I would never murder Eliseo Daisani’s assistant. That would be an inexcusable act of warfare.” Teasing lightened Janx’s voice again. Margrit groaned aloud and shook her head against the door.

      “Right. You don’t kill anybody yourself, right? You just hire people to do it.” Janx had all but confessed to arranging Vanessa Gray’s assassination, and it had been through his cell phone records that Margrit had helped the police track down the hired killer. The man had never gone to trial. Instead, shortly after his arrest, he’d been found spread in grisly detail across the Rikers Island prison courtyard. Rumor said the inmates were told he’d been arrested for child molestation, and had meted out their own justice. Margrit had no intention of asking whether Daisani had taken matters into his own inhuman hands.

      “Don’t be silly, Margrit. Of course I kill people.” Janx sounded downright cheerful, enough that she pulled the phone away to eye it. Uncomfortable as she was with the thought of the Old Races facing the human justice system, Janx’s bald-faced admission was beyond the pale.

      “I am a lawyer, Janx. You shouldn’t go around telling me you kill people.”

      “You’re not recording this conversation, are you?” Thin tension came back into Janx’s voice at the question, lifting hairs on Margrit’s arms. The dragonlord had rarely been anything but ruthlessly chipper in her experiences with him. She was certain she didn’t want to know what was making him cautious, and equally certain she would find out.

      “I don’t usually record my home phone calls, but if you’re going to be calling up regularly to make blanket confessions, I might start. What’s going on?”

      “We’ll discuss it this evening. I’ll send a car for you.”

      “Just as long as Malik’s not driving.” The djinn, Janx’s second in command, had none of the dragonlord’s peculiar sense of honor. That Malik coveted power had been obvious in Margrit’s first meeting with him, but he was no match in personality or intellect for Janx. A nasty, cruel man, he exercised what power he had over those he considered inferior, and Margrit numbered among them. Janx might play with her, cat and mouse, more interested in the game than domination, but Malik would simply hurt her until she broke or died. She had stood her ground against dragons and vampires, but it was the djinn who frightened her.

      Too late, she grimaced at the implied consent in her answer. “Don’t bother sending a car. I’ll get there myself.” Then impulse caught her and she asked, “Tonight?” with as much wide-eyed ingenuity as she could. “You don’t think my boss would be okay with me cutting out for a few hours to visit the notorious House of Cards and rub elbows with a gangster?”

      “If I’d gotten to him first,” Janx said mildly, “I have no doubt it could have been arranged. The situation, I fear, is otherwise, and so I’ll see you this evening. Goodbye, Margrit.”

      “If you’d—What? Dammit!” Margrit glowered at the silent phone, then got to her feet and stomped around the apartment as she finished getting ready for the day.

      A Town Car idled on the street, its driver leaning on the hood so he could watch her building’s front door. As Margrit exited, he snapped to attention, calling, “Ms. Knight? I’m your transportation.”

      Margrit looked both ways along the street, as if someone else might appear and answer to her name. “Are you talking to me?”

      “Yes, ma’am.” He was a few years her elder, far too young to call her ma’am.

      Margrit glanced up the street again, a terse smile forming. “I’m sorry. There must be a mistake. Excuse me.” She turned and managed a few steps before the driver moved in front of her.

      “I’m supposed to give you this if there’s a problem, ma’am.” He offered a sleek cell phone, so small that his palm dwarfed it. “The number you want is programmed in.”

      “The number I want,” Margrit echoed disbelievingly, and took the phone with dismay curdling her stomach. A glass of orange juice had seemed like a good idea minutes earlier. Now it felt like a bottle of acid had been poured into her belly and left to churn. She pressed the dial button and raised the phone to her ear, wincing preemptively.

      “You have a problem, Miss Knight.” Eliseo Daisani sounded distressingly pleased to make such an announcement.

      Margrit, prediction fulfilled, bit her tongue and waited until her impulse to respond with sarcasm faded. “Good morning, Mr. Daisani. Coming from you, that’s an alarming statement.” Coming from Eliseo Daisani, almost anything could be alarming. The appalling quickness with which he moved came back to Margrit as forcefully as the taste of his blood had the night before.

      “Good morning,” he said, undeterred by her stiffness. “I think you’ll want to come to my office to discuss your problem, rather than stand there on the street.”

      “It’s a quarter to eight, Mr. Daisani. I’m on my way to work.” It was an obligatory line of defense that allowed Daisani to chortle indulgently.

      “Of course you are. I’ve already spoken with Mr. Lomax,” he assured her. Margrit bit her tongue again, this time on an exclamation of understanding. Daisani had gotten to her boss first, forcing Janx into the situation he called otherwise. “He can spare you for an hour or two,” Daisani went on. “Obviously, your ride is there, or we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

      Clichéd protests leapt to Margrit’s lips. “You can’t do this, Mr. Daisani,” was first and most obvious of them, though it was abundantly clear that he could, in fact, arrange her schedule to his liking. “I’ve asked you not to call me at work,” ran a close second, foiled by Margrit neither being at work yet nor having had the foresight to make that request. She СКАЧАТЬ