Waking Up in Vegas Page 2

  Dominic snorted, but he didn't look displeased by my answer. We kept walking.

  Right about when I decided we were taking a taxi back to the Golden Oasis, we turned a corner and found ourselves facing Big Al's Pawn Shop, Slots, and Notary Services. I relaxed a little. "We're here."

  "Here?" Dominic eyed the pawn shop. "Is ‘here' strictly sanitary?"

  "Nope." I started for the door. "Not sanitary, not safe, and totally awesome." The front window was full of knives, some practical, some so ornate that they wouldn't be appropriate anywhere outside of a science fiction convention. A few of them would definitely be accompanying me back to the hotel. I could call it a wedding present to myself, and besides, it wasn't like it was possible to have too many knives.

  Dominic followed my gaze and shook his head fondly before pushing open the pawn shop door. A small bell rang somewhere in the blessedly air-conditioned gloom. There were no other customers. There weren't even visible staffers; the space behind the counter was empty of clerk, although it was packed full of shoeboxes and mannequins and leaning sports equipment. Someone had even pawned what looked like a full-sized horseman's glaive, which made my fingers itch with acquisitive lust. The fact that I had nowhere to put it seemed somehow much less important than the idea of having it.

  The rest of the shop was equally cluttered, packed with statuary, old appliances, racks of fur coats and leather jackets, and anything else that could reasonably be expected to pawn for a decent price. Some of the things were new, recent arrivals, their owners no doubt still in Vegas, pumping quarters into a one-armed bandit and trusting their fortunes to turn around at any moment. Others were old enough to have acquired a thin patina of dust, slowly sinking into the background noise of the pawn shop. The air smelled of a thousand warring perfumes, none of them expensive, all of them flavored with cigarette smoke and stale beer.

  "Charming," said Dominic.

  "It's not much, but it pays the bills, and hey, I provide an important public service." Al emerged from the beaded curtain behind the counter, setting the plastic strands dancing. He was a mountain of a man, with the build of a former wrestler and the belly of a championship eater. Both impressions were accurate. For all that he hadn't seen the inside of a ring since before I was born, he was still light on his feet, and he moved along the narrow channel through the clutter like it had been made for him.

  I grinned. "Hi, Al."

  "Wait. Wait-wait-wait. Senility has finally come crashing down on this old man like a flying piledriver, because I could have sworn I just heard little Verity's voice coming out of this blonde chick in front of me, and that's not possible, because little Verity is still in elementary school."

  My grin widened. "Hi, Uncle Al."

  "Very!" He spread his arms, lumbering forward to sweep me into an embrace. Dominic had the good sense to get out of the way, which was probably the only thing that saved him from being swept up. Al's hugs were all-encompassing, and had won him several title bouts back when he still wrestled. "I knew you wouldn't forget me until the reading of the will! Not like your ungrateful siblings, feh, see if they inherit anything worth having when I'm gone."

  "You're never going to die. You're going to live forever, and when Death shows up to collect you, you're going to convince him to pawn his scythe." I squirmed a little. He let me go. I stepped back, out of easy hugging range, and took Dominic's hand. "I need papers. I have money."

  Al raised an eyebrow, looking from our joined hands to Dominic's face. Then he crossed his arms, and said, "Speak, boy."

  "Woof," said Dominic dryly. "A pleasure to meet you, sir."

  "What are you, Sicilian?"

  "Italian, originally," said Dominic. "I was raised there until I was ten, and then moved to England for the remainder of my education and upbringing."

  "Which gives you a messed-up accent and gives me a problem," said Al. "Nobody's going to buy your boy as American-born, Very. He even stands foreign. With his coloring, I could pass him off as Mexican if he were from Spain, but that's not going to work here. What kind of papers do you need?"

  "Full set," I said. "Passport, birth certificate, green card, all the way down the line to citizenship."

  Al snorted. "You fucking him? No offense, boy, I'm sure she's an excellent lay."

  "Some taken, I think," said Dominic. There was a dangerous note in his voice. I found myself suddenly glad that I hadn't told Al about his background yet. "Should we really be conducting this conversation in public?"

  "This isn't public," said Al. "This is my shop. Nobody here but us chickens."

  "Bucawk," I said blandly. "Yes, I'm sleeping with him. I'm actually planning on marrying him as soon as we have his papers sorted, so if you could do me a solid and get this started, and maybe throw in a Nevada marriage license, that would be swell."

  "Why do you need a new ID for your boy?" asked Al.

  "Am I not a part of this conversation?" asked Dominic. "I'm right here."

  "No, you're not." Al finally turned to focus on him. "You're the stranger Verity Price brought into my house. She knows the rules around here. If I decide you're a threat, you're going to have trouble walking back out those doors. This is a Las Vegas establishment, which means the house always wins. Now be quiet and let her negotiate for your life."

  "You're not scaring anyone, Al," I said. "Did you miss the part where I just called him my fiancé? You're not threatening some rube I'm trying to relocate. You're threatening a member of the family."

  "Not yet," said Al. He folded his arms. "What's he running from?"

  I glanced at Dominic. He nodded minutely. I looked back to Al, and said, "Dominic is running from the Covenant of St. George."

  "They believe me to be deceased, which should help somewhat," said Dominic.

  Al stared at the two of us for a moment before throwing up his hands. "Oh, only the Covenant, she says! Like this shouldn't be the end of the world. Were you followed?"

  "No," I said. "I drove a very circuitous route, and checked in several times with the road ghosts to be sure. No one tailed me here."

  "You fucking kids, I swear." Al shook his head. "Twenty-five thousand."

  Now we were getting down to business. "Fifteen is your usual price."

  "Fifteen doesn't account for the Covenant of St. George and needing to cook a full background for a foreigner," said Al. "Fifteen is fake IDs that can get you into bars and onto planes. This is ‘keep a man from being deported' territory. You marrying him will help with that, but I'm assuming you asked for citizenship because you don't want too many eyes on that wedding ring of yours."

  "You're assuming correctly," I said. "Twenty thousand, and we get it tonight."

  "Twenty-five thousand, you get it tomorrow morning, and you count yourselves lucky that I didn't throw you out of my shop the second you said the word ‘Covenant.'"

  "Twenty-five thousand, you throw in the marriage license, and I get to take whatever I want from the knife case." Haggling was part of the routine when purchasing from Al. He didn't believe in prices that couldn't be moved one way or the other, and he usually saw material goods and favors as on a level with cash. It was all about the value of the thing, and showing that you understood what you were getting.

  Al looked at me thoughtfully for a moment before he nodded, once, and walked past us to flip the sign on the door to "closed." He turned the lock at the same time, the deadbolt clicking home with ominous finality.

  "You are your father's daughter," he said. "Both of you, come with me. It's time for Dr. Al to make a new man out of you." He gave a wild mad scientist's laugh which devolved into a hacking cough as he made his way back to the door behind the counter.

  Still hand-in-hand, Dominic and I followed him.

  Al's workroom spanned a space almost as large as the main pawn shop. Three photo stalls had been set up along the back wall, each with a differently painted background. One mirrored the DMV; one matched the blank background of a cheap passport picture machine; on
e allowed him to take mugshots. Dominic blinked at the last.

  Al grinned toothily. "Some people, you look at them and you just know they've done time, right? So when we're setting them up as somebody new, we maybe fake a few minor arrests, slide them into deep background, if they ever get checked out, they look more believable. And sure, they serve more time if they get arrested, since now they have a record, but the important thing is that they serve that time under their new ID. The old one is gone."

  "Artie set up the online stuff and basic paperwork for my Valerie ID, but Al was the one who made sure her paperwork went all the way back to conception," I said, taking a seat next to his computer. "He's the best there is."

  "Flattery won't take a penny off your bill, sweetheart," said Al. He looked Dominic assessingly up and down. "All right. First things first: let's take some pictures."

  I sat and filed my nails for the next hour while Dominic posed in front of the DMV and passport backgrounds--giving the mugshot lines a wide berth--and filling out form after form. Faking an identity took a surprising amount of work. Al, meanwhile, was opening programs and digging through filing cabinets, muttering to himself all the while.

  "I got a Michael D. Delgado," he said, pulling a folder out. "Spanish last name, but this is America: most people won't even notice. Better yet, there's nothing in the paperwork says what the ‘D' was short for, so you can still go by ‘Dominic.' I can even doctor up the birth certificate a little. That way it's a believable nickname, and you don't have to get used to people calling you ‘Mike' all the time."

  "What happened to the original Mr. Delgado?" I asked.

  "He was a Bigfoot hunter." Al's smile was short, sharp, and full of teeth. "He caught one."

  "Ah." My family generally tried to run the ragged edge of civility between the human and cryptid communities. Part of that was discouraging cryptids from killing humans, even when their family traditions or natural dietary needs meant that it was tempting. (Ghouls, for example. They had mostly eaten dead people before embalming came along and spoiled their food supply; these days, they had a nasty tendency to go after live people, just because they were hungry.)

  There was no amount of discouragement in the world that would keep a Bigfoot from staving in the skull of a human hunter who had managed to get too close. Not even my family could argue with that. There was "don't be an asshole and eat people who don't deserve it," but that didn't take self-defense off the table.

  "As I was saying." Al walked back to his computer and dropped the folder next to the keyboard. "No family, no close friends--Bigfoot hunters don't usually go in for those things, they're all glory-hounds at heart--and he's been missing for thirty years, so it'll be pretty simple to close down any old files and update all his timestamps. Tomorrow morning's no trouble, as long as I get my money."

  "And you'll be careful?"

  "Sweetheart, I'll be so careful God himself couldn't catch me. Consider it my wedding gift to you." Al smiled at me. There was genuine affection in the expression. "Your boy's going to be clean as a whistle, and nobody's ever going to tell you different. The Covenant won't find him."

  "If I may, sir, how do you know so much about the Covenant of St. George?" Dominic's tone was carefully polite. I tensed. If Al figured out where he'd come from…

  "They killed most of my family," said Al. He looked flatly at Dominic. "You know what a jink is?"

  "Luck-manipulators, yes?"

  "You got a smart one, Very," said Al. He nodded. "Yeah, luck-manipulators. Jinks make luck dance. But we can't create it, you got that? We take good from one place and leave bad behind. Most of the time, we're careful. We just twist things a little. Better parking, better housing, milk that doesn't go bad quite so fast, we got it all. But that wasn't harmless enough for the Covenant. They say that we're parasites on the back of humanity, taking things that were never meant for us."

  Dominic didn't say anything.

  "So they hunt us down, when they can. Me, I was living with my folks and the extended family in Toronto when a purge hit. The elder members of the family bent the luck until it snapped to make sure us kids got out clean. For five years, everything that could go right did, for all of us. You know the price of yanking that much good luck out of the world? There was nothing left for any of our parents, for any of the adults we left behind. The Covenant slaughtered them like dogs for the crime of being a little different. The rest of us…we used those five years to learn how to hide. I decided I wanted to make people disappear, and the best instructors in the world just happened to fall into my path. They taught me what to do. They taught me how to do it. I make a decent living, but especially, if someone needs to disappear from the Covenant, they disappear. That is how I honor my mother and father. That is how I say ‘fuck you' to the people who would wipe me and mine from the face of the Earth. And that's how I know so much." Al picked up the folder that contained the seeds of Dominic's new identity, knocking it briskly against the desk. "I'll see you both tomorrow morning, along with my twenty-five thousand dollars. Enjoy the last night of your old life, Mr. Dominic. Tomorrow, you'll be a new man."

  I flashed Al a winsome smile as I stood. "Now, about those knives…?"

  "You kids, why I'm such a pushover for you, I'll never know," said Al--but he was laughing as he led us back out to the main room, and the pointy, pointy shopping spree of my dreams.

  He gave me the glaive as an early wedding present. We called a taxi to get us back to the Golden Oasis. One nice thing about Las Vegas: nobody batted an eye at the fact that I was carrying a polearm longer than I was tall, even when getting it into the cab required rolling down both back windows and letting it stick out to either side. The clerk at the front counter of the hotel was equally unimpressed, and barely glanced up from her magazine as we walked through on our way to the room.

  "Sometimes I wonder why I was ever so concerned about betraying the existence of the monstrous world to humanity," said Dominic. "It seems like no one believes the evidence of their own eyes."

  "Pretty much," I said cheerfully. I unlocked the door to our suite. The door swung open to reveal the mice having a dance party on the sofa, while the VH1 Video Countdown blared from the television. A few of them greeted us with cheers and quick obeisances, but most were more interested in trying to match Taylor Swift's dance moves. We took advantage of their distraction and ducked into the bedroom, closing the door between us.

  Dominic went straight to the bathroom. A few splashing sounds later, he reemerged with his shirt unbuttoned and his wet hair plastered to his scalp. "No more deserts for me," he said.

  "Trust me, Portland is about as far from a desert as we can get," I said.

  "Excellent. But Verity…" His expression sobered. "We've discussed your money troubles before. Where are you going to get that much money?"

  "From the bank." I sat down on the edge of the bed. "This counts as a valid use of emergency discretionary funds. We keep a certain amount fluid at all times, for situations like this one--and yes, this would be a valid use of the funds even if I wasn't planning to marry you tomorrow. Sometimes we need to help people disappear."

  "Ah." He settled next to me. After a moment's pause, he reached for my hand. "So my situation is not so unique, then. I suppose I should feel disappointed. Everyone wants to be special."

  "You're plenty special to me." I laced my fingers with his, leaning over to prop my head on his shoulder. It was wet. I didn't mind. "I wish you didn't have to give up everything to be with me. It seems like such a waste."

  "I don't think so," he said. "I'll miss my family name, I suppose, but as I never had the family to go with it, it's more an academic regret than anything more serious. I expected to spend another ten years in the field before being recalled to one of our strongholds to be married to a woman I barely knew, assuming I'd met her at all, but would nonetheless be expected to get with child."

  I raised an eyebrow, tilting my head back until I could look up at him. "So you know, if
you ever use the phrase ‘get with child' while we're trying to get busy, you're going to find yourself with negative access to my reproductive organs."

  "You say things like that, but you pretend I'm the one who talks funny." He pressed a kiss to my temple, and said, "If we have children, we'll have children. We'll both be involved, every step of the way, not just at the beginning. We'll argue over rules and whether they're allowed to have cookies before bedtime, and watch them grow up. If I had married as part of the Covenant breeding program, I would have been getting a woman with child. I would have been lucky to meet my descendants, much less be allowed to have a hand in raising them."

  "I really am the best possible outcome," I said.

  Dominic laughed. "In more ways than I can possibly list. I know you think I've given up a great deal to be here, but really, I think I'm gaining more than I've lost. The Covenant was no home."

  "I will be," I promised, and sat up, and kissed him with all the slow sincerity I could muster. Somewhere in the middle, I wound up straddling his legs, with his hands pressed together at the small of my back, steadying and anchoring me. He wouldn't let me fall. That was one thing I was absolutely certain of: no matter what happened, he wouldn't let me fall. I could let go completely, and know that I was still anchored.

  So I did.

  An hour later, tangled in the blankets and mercifully free of clothing, we stared up at the ceiling and just breathed. Our fingers were still tangled together, our joined hands resting on his chest, and that was perfectly right: that was exactly as it was supposed to be. Everything ached pleasantly, like the aftermath of a particularly vigorous training session. The image appealed. I smiled up at the mirrored ceiling, and my reflection smiled back.

  Dominic raised an eyebrow. "Something funny?" he asked.