“Why is he doing that?” Ray demanded.

“He doesn’t turn off anymore.”

“What? Not at all?”

I shook my head. “It’s why we usually leave the game out. The boys like for him to have company.”

“Then why didn’t you say so?” he demanded.

Because I didn’t think you’d care about a child’s toy, I didn’t say, helping Ray remove my dishes so he could set the game up again on the table.

We finished and he went to nurse his wounds on the swing. The pieces were back to exploring their little world, which I guess was what Faerie looked like. Or at least the part Olga was from. The board had started out a plain old chess type, if oversized. But the familiar checkerboard was invisible now, overgrown by grass and trees and caves and a miniature stream.

The whole setting was too big to fit on the board, so the scenery changed as they moved around, setting up ambushes and defensive positions, polishing armor and weapons, or just squatting on a rock, in the case of the wild man. Some of the other little ogres were starting a campfire over by a copse of trees, and they kept shooting him looks, but he didn’t appear to notice. He was too busy staring at the sky.

“They don’t seem like much company to me,” Ray said, watching the scene. “Look—they don’t like him now.”

“I don’t think that’s the problem,” I murmured.

What was it Plato had said? Something about a bunch of guys born in a cave, who had never seen the outside world. Just shadows of things reflected on the walls sometimes, distorted and unreal. Until one of them broke out one day, and started exploring a larger world. He could go back to his old life, but he wasn’t the same person anymore.

His world had gotten bigger, and things were never going to be quite the same again.

But Ray didn’t agree. “Naw, he’s different now,” he told me. “People don’t like different.”

There was something in his tone that made me look up. He was draped over the seat, wrapped in gloom since the porch light wasn’t on and the light from the house had diminished, thanks to someone shutting off the fixture in the hall. The main illumination came from the lanterns the fey had lit around camp, just little pinpricks in the darkness, and the flickering blue-white of the cartoon channel from the living room that nobody had bothered to turn off.

He’d lit a cigarette, and with just the reddened end lighting up his face, he should have looked sinister. But Ray’s features just didn’t run to it. The eyes were too big and too blue and too oddly guileless. The cheeks were too round, and the chin was tilted just a bit too defiantly outward. Like he expected to get belted at any moment, but wasn’t going to duck his head anyway.

It was the face of a guy who’d been beaten up before and who had every expectation of being beaten up again, but who wasn’t going to cower. And he’d had plenty of opportunities to learn. I didn’t know a lot about his background, but I knew enough to guess that he hadn’t found the vampire lifestyle to be all fun and games.

He’d been born the half-breed son of a Dutch sailor and an Indonesian village woman during the bad old days of colonialism. The sailor had decamped before Ray made an appearance and his mother had died when he was a teenager. Leaving him a blue-eyed freak among the villagers, and one who reminded people a bit too much of their hated colonial masters.

It hadn’t taken them long to drive him out, leaving him to fend for himself. Which he had done by joining a group of pirates right before they decided to attack a fat-looking prize. That might have been an okay plan, if said prize hadn’t been the flagship of one Zheng Zhilong, the leader of one of the greatest pirate fleets ever to sail the seas.

Zheng—no relation that I knew of to our tiger-tatted friend—had spared Ray’s life, only to turn around and take it when he decided to make him a vampire. Maybe he thought that having someone who could pass for a European in a pinch might come in useful. But apparently that hadn’t worked out so great, because he’d traded Ray to a fellow pirate only a few years later. Who had traded him in turn, because looking sort of European didn’t automatically confer a knowledge of languages Ray had never heard or customs he’d never experienced.

Somehow, he’d eventually ended up with Cheung. Who instead of trading him, had promptly shipped him off to the family’s outpost in New York. Which seemed less strange to me now that I’d had Ray’s rundown on the importance of the place for otherworldly smuggling.

What remained weird was that he was still here.

Despite being middling in looks, middling in power—he’d never advanced beyond fifth-level master status—and middling in ability of any kind, he’d done okay. He’d succeeded when those with far more impressive résumés had failed. He’d survived when those with far more power had died.

He was like the cockroach of the vampire world.

Of course, come to think of it, so was I. People might not like us, might even detest us. But we’d still be here when they were dust.

There were worse things.

“Different can be okay,” I said and passed him another beer. “Now tell me about your portals.”

Chapter Fifteen

Ray flipped the cap off with his thumb—an advantage to having vampire-tough nails—and took a swig. “It’s like I told you. I figured out how to hack into ’em.”

“So you said.” But that made no sense, so obviously I’d missed something. “Are you talking about just using the same entrance for different portals?” Because people did that all the time. Olga had tinkered with the one in the basement until it could go three or four places now, along two different lines, and I didn’t think she was done.

But Ray shook his head. “You can only do that if you’re at a conjunction of a bunch of different lines. Olga’s got two that cross here, so she can cycle ’em if she wants rather than having two gates cluttering up the place. But you still need access to the gate to do that.”

“Okay. Following you so far.”

“Well, it’s like I said. I needed to get into Faerie, but everybody guards their gates like mad. So how was I going to get to one? Much less bring a ton of stuff through without anybody noticing? It’d be like needing to get on the Internet and deciding to break into some high-security building to use one of their computers. Not worth it, is it?”

“But you still needed to get on the Internet,” I said slowly.

“Yeah. So I did what everybody else does.”

“You hacked into a signal?”

He nodded. “Only the signal in this case was a portal somebody else had already cut into Faerie. I just cut into theirs. It’s easy once you know where the thing is—”

“But you didn’t know!” I said, getting pissed. “None of us know. That’s why we’ve been running all over the city like a bunch of crazed—”

“Yeah, but I knew the other players, right?” he interrupted. “The Circle, the Senate, they don’t always know who’s doing what. But I knew the competition. So I had my boys spy on ’em and figure out where they were bringing their stuff in. And honestly, it wasn’t even that hard. Most of ’em had their gateway in a warehouse or something, so they didn’t have to transport the merchandise too far.”

I glared at him. “And once you knew where they were—”

“I knew which ley line they were using. And after that, it was pie.”

“Define ‘pie,’” I demanded.

“It was easy,” Ray said, trying to blow a smoke ring and failing. He frowned at the wobbly thing for a moment, and then glanced at me. “Portals kind of look like that in the lines. Just tiny ripples you can see through, so they’re almost invisible. They’re really hard to detect, especially if you have mile after mile to explore and you have no idea where they are. It’s why the Corps never tried to shut ’em down that way—it’s like a needle in a haystack, if the needle was transparent and the haystack was an ocean.”

“But once you do know where they are—”

He shrugged. “You just make another gateway. Only instead of cutting through the line, you cut into the portal that’s already cutting through the line. Minimal outlay of power; minimal chance to get caught.”

“Unless the owners figure out what you’re doing and kill you!”

“Yeah, but that don’t happen. Plenty of people try to attack other people’s gates; it’s how most turf wars get started, and why the damned things are guarded so heavy. But this—they don’t even know they’re supposed to be looking for this. It’s not a thing—”

“It’s not a thing because it’s stupid!” I said harshly. “What if you’d missed the portal? What if you’d hacked into the middle of a ley line, and ended up getting nuked? What if—”

“What if we’d shot ourselves in the head?” he said sarcastically. “I mean, come on. We were careful. The only real problem was that there was no way to know where a particular portal was going. It wasn’t like I could just ask: hey, that illegal portal you’re running, so where does it go again? No. And a lot of ’em didn’t go where we wanted.”

He was completely sincere, like that was literally all he’d had to worry about. The sheer audacity was…well, it was almost breathtaking. Which was probably why he’d gotten away with it, I realized. Someone, somewhere, through the centuries must have had the same thought, possibly even several someones. But right on its heels had been a what-am-I-thinking slap to the head, and that had been it.

Until Ray. Ray had just thought, Cool. Ray had thought, Let’s do this and get me out of trouble with my boss. That was like…like getting a thorn in your toe and deciding to cut off the foot. It solved one problem, but boy, did it open up a ton more.

But Ray didn’t see that. Ray was looking smug. Ray was proud of himself.