The Mirador Read Free Page B

been lovers, and we’d crossed Vey Coruscant, who was boss of Dassament and a blood-witch besides. And when the Dogs got on my track, Ginevra walked out on me, walked straight back to her stupid poet. And a decad later, she was dead. Somebody’d told Vey Coruscant how to find her. And the cade-skiffs had dragged her out of the Sim with her throat cut.
    All at once, I had to move or I was going to start screaming. It was past the septad-night so I wasn’t likely to meet anybody else wandering around. I let myself out of the suite and started walking. I didn’t care where I was going. Truth to tell, I didn’t notice. I was thinking about Ginevra, like a knot you can’t untie and you can’t fucking leave alone.
    I hadn’t realized it had got so bad. I know how stupid that sounds, but blessed saints, if I’d known I was calling her Ginevra, I wouldn’t’ve fucking done it. I’d known I was still dreaming about Ginevra, but I’d kind of got used to it—got to where it seemed like it was normal, and maybe that was the problem.
    I was dreaming about a dead girl maybe two or three nights in the decad. That couldn’t be good, could it? I mean, I ain’t big into dream-casting or nothing, but you didn’t fucking need to be. And so what I was doing while I limped around the Mirador was trying to figure out how to shut it down. Which, yeah, I should’ve been working on a long fucking time ago, but I couldn’t do nothing about that.
    “So what is the big fucking deal?” I said out loud in the Buried Rotunda because there wasn’t nobody around to hear. It wasn’t like I’d never known anybody dead before. And sure, I’d loved her, but I couldn’t hardly remember her no more. I mean, I remembered things about her, but I didn’t remember her , and I knew it.
    Well, what did you do when somebody died?
    You went to their grave. But I didn’t know where she was buried. Probably out in the Ivorene where I’d never find her.
    You made offerings, burned a lock of their hair or something of theirs you still had, to a saint or the god they’d particularly followed or Phi-Lazary or Cade-Cholera. But I didn’t have nothing. Not nothing .
    You got together with other folks what knew them and had a wake, but even if any of Ginevra’s friends were still alive, they sure as fuck wouldn’t want to talk to me.
    You settled your debts with them. You did things they hadn’t gotten finished. You found answers to questions they’d been asking.
    And there, finally, I caught hold of the end of something I could use. Because there were questions, oh fuck were there questions, and they all clustered around when Ginevra had died. Somebody’d sold me to the Dogs. I didn’t know who. But it got me out of the way real neat. Somebody’d sold Ginevra to Vey Coruscant. I didn’t know who’d done that, neither. I didn’t know if it was the same person had done both. Or not. And I didn’t know which idea I hated worse.
    And well, fuck, Milly-Fox, if you got questions, then you need to talk to somebody with answers.
    I knew right where to go, too. There wasn’t no problem about that. The problem was that it meant going down in the Arcane and, well, me and the Lower City weren’t exactly on speaking terms no more.
    How bad you want them answers, Milly-Fox?
    But I knew ways to go—secret or forgotten or just not used— and I figured I could get where I was going without getting lynched.
    I could probably even get back again.

Felix
    Gideon sighed, his body tensing in climax, his hands knotting in the sheets. He was very good; he never tried to touch my head when I did this for him. I swallowed copper-salt warmth, my throat muscles working around him, and then eased slowly back, kissing his thigh, the line of his hipbone, buying myself what time I could.
    Gideon touched my shoulder gently, almost shyly. :Do you want to . . . ?:
    Neither of us ever said the word.
    I didn’t want to, particularly, but saying so would only lead to