“Well, sure. That’s different.”
“Why?”
“Because this time, someone’s spying on me.” She looked around. “Let’s find a parking garage. Someplace with low ceilings. Or, better yet, an elevator.”
“There’s a parking garage by that convention center,” Rondeau said, pointing. Marla set off in that direction, trailed by Rondeau and the hummingbirds. “You know, ‘Finch’ is kind of a birdy name,” Rondeau said.
Marla nodded. “Already crossed my mind. Could be coincidence, but it could be sympathetic magic, too, or a nickname he got for being a bird-man.” Marla shook her head. “This is like when I was first learning back home, before I knew who everyone was, what the surface and secret allegiances were, before I even knew people’s names. I thought I was through being ignorant and pushy—I like being well informed and pushy much better.”
“Welcome to a whole new pond, little fish,” Rondeau said.
She snorted. “I’m always a big fish. Sometimes I have to hang out in the shallows first for a while, is all.”
Marla opened a metal door on the side of the parking garage, intending to hold it open gallantly for the hummingbirds, but they zipped down close to the smalls of her and Rondeau’s backs so they could follow. She swatted at her back, fast, but the hummingbird buzzed out of reach.
“Little bastards can fly backward, you know that?” Rondeau said. “Everybody knows they’re the only bird that can hover, but they can actually go in reverse.”
“Such are the wonders of nature,” Marla muttered, and went into the garage. She felt instantly at home, with the low ceilings and exposed pipes, the piss-stained corners, the oil spots. This was the essence of the home of her heart, dark and somehow fundamentally illicit—why else did so many secret meetings take place in parking garages? The parking garage smelled like car exhaust and cold concrete. She followed the signs to an elevator and pressed the “Up” button. The scarred steel doors slid open. Marla and Rondeau got in, and the hummingbirds followed.
The doors slid shut, and Marla grinned. The hummingbirds were hovering in the corners of the ceiling, but the elevator was only about seven and a half feet high, and they couldn’t get that far away.
Marla opened her leather bag and rooted around inside for a moment, then pulled out a towel she’d stolen from the hotel. She put down her bag and twisted the towel, as if she were wringing it out, and tied a fat knot at one end. “Step back, Rondeau,” she said, and he pressed himself against the elevator wall. Marla swung the towel in a short arc, experimentally.
The hummingbirds instantly moved to hover right in front of Rondeau’s face.
Marla lowered the towel. “Huh,” she said. “Smarter than your average bird, aren’t they? I guess we need magic. What do you think, Rondeau—want to Curse at them?”
“In an elevator?” Rondeau said. “Isn’t that sort of dangerous for us?”
“We’re not moving, and we’re on the ground floor. Even if the cables snapped or something, we aren’t going anywhere, and if the doors get jammed, I can get them open.”
Rondeau nodded, the birds still hovering before his face. “Yeah, all right,” he said. “They’re right in front of me, so I guess the sound of the Curse will hit them first anyway.” Rondeau spoke briefly, three guttural syllables, and the air in the elevator car suddenly grew very hot and uncomfortable, the walls around them and the cables above groaning.
The two hummingbirds burst brightly, whitely, into flame, and fell to the floor of the elevator, their furiously beating wings throwing off streamers of smoke and shedding sparks. Marla and Rondeau jumped away from the flames, and Marla hit the “Door Open” button on the elevator. The doors slid apart slowly, creaking—Rondeau’s primordial Curse had twisted something in the mechanism out of true. They exited the elevator, stepping over the flash-charred bird bodies.
Rondeau spat onto the concrete. “Gah, I hate doing that, speaking that language always makes my mouth taste like cat shit.”
“You know this from personal experience?”
“When I was young, and I’d just taken over this body, I didn’t know what was good to eat and what wasn’t. Let’s not get into that.” He looked around nervously. “I always expect some sort of cosmic retribution for Cursing in the language of the gods, too.”
“Maybe that bad taste is the retribution,” Marla said. Rondeau had the gift of tongues, but only in a limited way. Hamil believed that when Rondeau capital-“C”-Cursed, he was mispronouncing the first Word that had created the universe. The results were always unpredictably destructive, though Marla couldn’t recall them ever involving white-hot fire before. Marla suspected there was no such divine association—she believed in gods, plural, or at least in supernatural beings with powers far beyond those of even magic-savvy humans like herself, but she didn’t believe in one creator-god who’d made the universe by speaking a series of well-formed sentences. It seemed more likely to her that Rondeau had lucked into some set of primal incantations, the language of demons, perhaps the language of whatever kind of creature Rondeau really was, inside that stolen body. Either way, the Curses were handy, though often more trouble than they were worth, and occasionally prone to backfiring in unpleasant ways, though never on Rondeau himself—just on innocent bystanders. Marla had once suffered a minor concussion as a result of one of Rondeau’s Curses.