No Quest For The Wicked

The brooch was there for the taking. But which brooch? I couldn’t feel the difference between the real one and the fake one, so I grabbed both of them, tearing them off Mimi’s shredded evening gown. I shoved them into my undamaged pocket before wrenching my wrist from Mimi’s grasp.

Owen reached through the scrum of groupies piling onto the fight and pulled me to my feet. “We’d better get out of here,” he said. I wasn’t about to argue. With the brooch out of Mimi’s possession, the groupies lost their focus, so they didn’t try to stop us. I hadn’t knocked Mimi out, merely dazed her a bit, and she was already sitting up. As we ran away, I heard her scream of rage.

“The subway!” I said, pointing out an “M” sign on the next block. “Mimi’ll never look for us in there. I’m not sure she knows how to use the subway. She may not even know where those stairs lead.”

“But it’s full of people,” Owen cautioned.

“Right now, I don’t care. I just want to get away from her, and that’s the fastest way.”

Since we didn’t have a magic user with us to get us through the turnstiles, we had to scramble in purse and pocket for MetroCards. A downtown train was just pulling into the station when we reached the platform, and we jumped on board the nearest car. As the doors closed, I let myself breathe a sigh of relief.

But then a hand stuck between the closing doors, forcing them back open, and Mimi entered the packed car. She didn’t see us at first. As the train started moving, we scooted to the far end of the car and mingled with a cluster of people waiting at the door. Mimi spotted us just as the train pulled into the next station. As soon as the doors opened, we jumped out and ran down the platform to another car, waiting until the last second to duck inside.

The people there stared at us with suspicion and alarm. I glanced up to find that we were standing directly under the “If you see something, say something” sign, and we certainly looked like the kind of something people were supposed to say something about. “Whew, that’s the last time we cater a party for those people,” I said loudly as I sank wearily onto a nearby seat. “Things got way out of control.”

Owen raised an eyebrow as he joined me on the seat. So far, so good. No signs of power lust. Anyone riding the subway at this time of night was probably too tired to want power.

“Do you think there’s a chance we could get all the way to the office?” I asked Owen in a whisper.

“Do you think she’ll give up?” he whispered in response.

“Of course not.”

When there was no sign of her at the next station, I thought we had it made. I should have known better.

The first hint of trouble was a muffled yapping as a tiny dog being carried in an oversized purse got excited. That didn’t necessarily mean anything, I knew, but then a small child who’d been dozing against his mother’s shoulder woke and stared at me with an all-too-familiar look in his eyes. He wormed his way out of his mother’s arms and crossed the car to stand in front of me. “Gimme!” he demanded.

“Jacob!” his mother scolded. “Get back over here and leave the lady alone.”

“It’s mine,” Jacob protested, reaching small, grubby hands toward me. I shrank away and was grateful when his mother came out of her seat to take him by the arm and pull him back with her. He continued to whimper and squirm in her grasp.

I glanced around the car to gauge other potential threats. A trio of young men in hooded sweatshirts gave off menacing vibes, but they weren’t even looking in my direction. The dog owner was too busy grooving to music coming through her earbuds to notice her dog’s yapping. A couple of teenagers were making out at the other end of the car, oblivious to anyone but each other.

I tensed when I noticed a cop sitting across the aisle on the far end of the car. Normally, a cop’s presence would have made the subway feel safer, but I worried what might happen to an armed person in a position of authority if he came under the Eye’s influence. Not to mention the illegal weapon in my purse. So far, he didn’t seem to be reacting, though. He looked nearly as tired as I was, so maybe at the end of a shift he didn’t care about power.

The last person on the train I expected to be a problem was the elderly lady sitting on our side of the car. She was a frail little thing, the type Granny sometimes pretended to be when she thought it would give her an advantage. This woman sat dozing, her string shopping bag resting on the floor between her feet and her support hose sagging around her ankles. An equally elderly man whose white hair stuck out in sparse tufts around his ears sat beside her.