Book 08 - Petty Pewter Gods Read Online Free Page A

pigeon wings growing out of his head where his ears
ought to be. Also, you could sort of see through him whenever he
moved in front of a bright light.
    A really intense light blazed up. I managed to get into a
sitting position but could not look up. That light was worse than
sunshine on the brightest-ever morning after a two-kegger.
    “Mr. Garrett.”
    I didn’t lie about it. I didn’t admit anything,
either. I didn’t react at all. I was busy trying not to make
more work for that princely fellow with the mop. I succeeded. And I
managed to get one hand clamped over my eyes. Somewhere way in the
back of my head a little voice told me I should take this as a
lesson in chemistry. Don’t play with stuff that might blow up
in your face. Like strange redheads.
    I know. I know. All redheads are strange. But there is strange
and strange.
    A different woman said, “Ease up on the glow. You’re
blinding him.” She had a voice of a type you never hear
except from the women who haunt your fantasies. It was the voice of
the lover you have been waiting for all these years.
    Something was going on here.
    The light faded till I could stand to open my eyes. It continued
to wane till there was no more than you would find in your average
torchlit dungeon, which was my first guess as to my whereabouts.
But I didn’t recognize any voices. I thought I pretty well
knew everybody who had a dungeon in the family inventory.
    Well, it’s a big city.
    Hell. No. Not a dungeon. This was some kind of big cellar with a
high ceiling and only a couple of really dirty windows practically
lost in rusty steel bars, way, way up at the back. The cellar was
mostly empty except for pillars supporting the structure overhead.
The floor was old stone, a dark slate-gray. Hard as a rock, hard on
a sleeper’s back.
    I took inventory. I didn’t have any bits missing or any
open wounds. My headache had not abated, though. My main injury was
a knot on my conk from my attempt to dive through that coach
door.
    And I still had a hangover.
    Maybe they turned down the lights too far. Now I could see my
captors. All eight of them. I would rather not have.
    There was a long drink of water who maybe used to be a pigeon,
your basic roof rat, leaning on his mop. There were the three
characters I had met already, all looking bigger and uglier than
ever. Those guys could get work as gargoyles at any of the major
cathedrals. Then there were three females. None was my redhead. The
closest to her was a brunette with a paler skin and eyes that were
smouldering pits of promise and curves that had been drawn by a
dreaming celestial geometrician. Her lips made me want to bounce up
and run over there. Presumably she owned the sexy voice.
    Next to her was a gal with the biggest hair I have ever seen.
What looked like snakes seemed to peek out. Her skin was a sort of
pale pus-green color. Her lips were gorgeously tasty but dark
green. When she smiled she showed you sharp vampire teeth. Not to
mention that she sported two extra arms, the better to whatever you
with. I decided I would put off asking her out.
    She stared at me with a heat—or a hunger—that set
those old frozen-toed mice to rambling along my spine.
    The third woman was a giant of a blonde, maybe ten feet tall and
at least that many years past her prime. She had put on weight
where women generally do not need much, and overall she projected a
sort of middle-class goodwifely dowdiness—with a suggestion
of all the hidden bitterness that so often goes with that.
    A guy I took to be her old man sprawled on some sort of stone
throne that was so chipped and crumbly it looked like it could
collapse under his weight. He was a couple of feet taller than the
blonde. He wasn’t wearing much but a stripey leather
loincloth that looked like it had been ripped off a saber-toothed
tiger on the fly and nobody bothered to cure it. He was built like
a muscle freak who had gone to seed. He could have lugged
minotaurs on those shoulders