Whispering Nickel Idols Read Online Free PDF Page A

materialized. Lugging industrial-grade butcher’s equipment. In a vegetarian establishment. “Them new-generation eggplants must be fierce.” Everybody seemed intensely interested in managing a wily envelopment of their good buddy Garrett.
    Not promising at all.
    Dotes made a slight gesture. “One more chance, Garrett.”
    “I wanted to check on how things are coming, setting up for tonight. And to say hi.”
    “And why are you interested?”
    “Because I have to be here, cabbage breath boy. I can’t weasel out. And I don’t feel good about the setup.”
    Morley glared at me. Slim and dark, handsome and always impeccably bedecked in the latest fashion, he radiates a sensuality that sets them swooning even when he strolls through a nun shop.
    “You got smudge under your nose.” He’d begun sporting a thin little mustache. Morley didn’t grin. “Sit down, Garrett.”
    I picked a chair. The one closest to the door.
    Morley sat across from me. He stared. Eventually, he said, “Word’s out that you’re on Belinda’s payroll now.”
    “That’s a crock. Who said that?”
    “Belinda. Last time she was here messing the arrangements around.”
    “It ain’t true. You know me better. I wouldn’t work for her even if I needed work. And I don’t. I’ve go me a nice little piece of the hottest manufactory in TunFaire. You’re just trolling for an excuse to get your bile up.”
    “She was convincing.” Dotes studied me some more. Something big was bothering him and all his boys. Nobody wanted Mama Garrett’s favorite boy for a friend.
    “Spit it out, Morley. What’s going on?”
    “This party is bound to go bad. And here you come, supposedly Belinda’s full-time top stud, ambling in ten minutes after your honey sends word the party won’t happen here after all. The Palms will just cater. The party will happen in Whitefield Hall. Because my place isn’t big enough. Too many people in the life want to pay their respects to the kingpin.”
    “I don’t know anything about any Whitefield Hall. Is that the Veterans’ Memorial hall that commemorates the War of Coady Byrne’s Broken Tooth?”
    Karenta had a lot of little wars over a lot of little provocations in Imperial times. Then we changed up, became a kingdom, and jumped into one big war that lasted over a hundred years. The one I was in. Along with every human male I know, including my brother and father and grandfather, and Grandpa’s father and grandfather and all their brothers and cousins and bastard kids.
    The killing is over now. So far, the peace has been worse than the war.
    “I don’t know anything about your wars,” Dotes replied. Being half dark elf, he enjoys treaty exemption from some human laws. Like the one establishing conscription. And he doesn’t give a feather about history. He doesn’t care about last week — unless last week might sneak up and whack him on the back of the head. “But it is some kind of soldiers’ memorial.”
    Morley is shallow. Morley is pretty. Morley is the nightmare that wakes fathers screaming in the night.
    He’s the daydream their daughters take to bed, fantasizing. He’s the bad boy the girls all want, thinking they can tame him, before they settle for some dullard who’ll just work for a living and treat them like they’re people.
    I’m so jealous.
    “I can’t picture it. What’s special about it? Why would she move there?”
    “I told you. Because she can get more people in. Because it isn’t operated by people she doesn’t trust.”
    “Belinda doesn’t trust you?”
    “Are you that naive? Of course she doesn’t. Not to be what she wants me to be.”
    “What would that be?”
    “Her tool, fool.”
    “Don’t start with the vegetarian poetry. It don’t make sense on a day when the sun is shinning.”
    Dotes shook his pretty head. He didn’t want to play. “Belinda wouldn’t trust me if I swore ten thousand ironbound oaths. That’s part of her insanity. She can’t trust