ice-water at him. He didn’t just look shocked—he looked angry. I wondered if he was under the mistaken impression that I’d stood him up for a date.
In one sense, I suppose I had.
My eyes narrowed. “How nice to see you too, Tal. Yes, as a matter of fact I did find Zaladin on Keeper’s Island, and you know what? Turns out he can kick my ass, but I’m fine, thanks for asking.” I walked inside, rubbing my temples, still feeling simultaneously hung-over, drunk, and drugged.
Campbell at least had the grace to look chagrined at my rebuke, but I found myself twisting my arms around my sides to hide the hole in my shirt from where I’d been stabbed. At least black didn’t show bloodstains very well. “I’m sorry,” Campbell said not much louder than a whisper. “When they said that Captain Jester was dropping off your corpse…”
I stared at him with my mouth open. “Did you just say Captain Jester?”
“Yes.” Merlin’s hand tightened on my arm. “That was his ship that jumped to hyperspace.”
“Jester? Bloody Jester the pirate?” I turned back to Merlin. “The Black Flag?”
“He insists,” Campbell said in a thoroughly disapproving tone, “that he knows you.”
“What? Don’t be ridiculous. How could he know me? I haven’t—” I blinked rapidly, then pushed my way past Campbell into the main room.
I ignored the MOJ security to concentrate on the one man in the room not in uniform. He was seated at a small folding table, although he’d pushed his seat back against a monitor and was using the table as a prop for his crossed legs. He wore gray suede pants and tall black boots and a ruffled white shirt that was open a bit too low. A low-slung, empty holster rested around his hips, the leather creased with the wear patterns I would expect of a man who was called on to use his weapons often. I was a little surprised that he’d left off the eye-patch and hook: he was a little boy playing dress-up. I’d have laughed if he wasn’t wearing that Black Flag as an invisible reminder that he might have earned the right to dress like a fool.
Besides, artists are an eccentric breed.
Ian Delgado turned his head and winked at me. “Hey sweet pea. See? I told you she’d be fine—”
He got that far into the sentence before I punched him in the jaw.
I caught everyone off-guard.
“Oh,” said Campbell to Jester. “I guess she does know you.”
Ian pulled himself off the floor and massaged the side of his face. “What the hell was that for?”
“Jester? You’re Bloody Jester?”
“Look, I didn’t have a chance to explain—”
“Didn’t have a chance?! At the party? Over breakfast—?”
He laughed and leered at me. “I was thinking about a week after the wedding, when we were in bed after your eighth orgasm.”
I inhaled sharply and took a step forward. I felt a hand on my shoulder and Merlin said, “He’s trying to make you angry.”
“He’s succeeding.”
“I noticed. Don’t let him.” That warning given, Merlin released his hold.
I turned back to the pirate. “You’re not Ian Delgado,” I observed.
I’ve always been the brightest kid in my class.
“No,” Captain Jester admitted. “Although he did serve on the ship for three years.” He winced. “Killed in ship-to-ship fighting off Gehenna. A shame. He was a good man.”
“Why aren’t you dead!?” That question had an odd, uncomfortable kind of echo to it, since it could asked of me as well, and I didn’t have a good answer for either case.
“Oh. That.” He smirked and opened his arms in an expansive shrug. “What can I say, beautiful? I’m a hard man to keep down.”
“I saw that building explode with you inside it.”
He made a circular motion with his fingers. “Closed loop on the cameras. I don’t like people to know where I am. Better that they just think they know.” He turned to one of the guards. “Can I go now? I told you she was fine. She’s here, and she’s fine.” He spared me a glance. “More than fine. Nice outfit.”
“You’re not going anywhere,” I said.
Jester sighed. “You can’t keep me—”
“You’re not going anywhere until your shipmates send a shuttle back. Call it to the control tower—The Dead Man’s Joke made an unauthorized hyperspace jump. They’re gone.”
“What?” Jester scrambled to his feet. “They wouldn’t leave me—”
“They did leave you.” I glared at the man. “Be glad they did. Now I want answers.”
“Sugarplum, there are no answers,” Captain Jester said, a wry smile on that rough, weathered and all-too-appealing face. “We hit a Sarc ship while it was still legal, and surprise, surprise, we found you on board. Someone was shipping your pretty little bottom back to Sarcos, except we mucked it all up. I brought you here thinking they’d be too busy to ask many questions, except it turns out that they were too busy to pay attention to the fact they’re not supposed to be arresting Black Flags. Oops.”
“As long as you’re selling me lines, do you want to pitch me the location of a diamond planet off Divaros? The deed to an unmapped star system?”
He chuckled. “Naw. Why complicate the story?”
“Take off your shirt.”
Campbell took a step forward. “Is that really necessary?”
Jester laughed. “I didn’t think you’d like the audience, but if that’s your thing—”
“Don’t flatter yourself. I want to see your ink.”
Jester stopped smiling. We locked stares and I wondered if he was going to tell me to go to Rio. I was calling him out in all sort of ways; demanding to see ink could be taken as accusation or insult, depending on circumstances. No one would claim it was polite.
He growled and stripped off the poet’s shirt; underneath was a lot of smooth skin, solid muscle, and no scars at all. His marks were unwashed and incomplete, which I suppose made sense for a man who’d left the striketeam life to explore the stars. Besides the pilot’s shuttle, I could see the eagle and squirrel, mountain lion and crossbow, St. Barbara’s tower and the bag of coins, an impressive number of Sarcodinay kill marks and usual number of memento mori. He had no world ink, which would have been unlikely for any striker on a recent team, but was common enough back before we figured out better ways of breaking the Terran blockade—ten years ago, minimum. What I was most interested in was on his left arm, the one the tattoo artists called the Road of Life: his striketeam identification, which was a sword crossed with a lightning bolt, and underneath that, the words “Les Dieux de Guerre.”
There had to be a lot of groups named Les Dieux de Guerre, right? This was just coincidence, wasn’t it? It couldn’t possibly be the same Les Dieux de Guerre that Zaladin had betrayed and reportedly slaughtered, could it?
Like hell.
I thought back over that report, what I could remember of it. I was regretting getting the summary instead of looking through each case file individually.
“MacLain, what you looking for?” I heard Campbell ask behind me. “He was a striker. We know he was a striker. So what?”
I found a second mark on his chest, nothing official, but a place where plenty of strikers put sentimental or bragging right ink marks, and sometimes call-sign identifiers. His was six-legged horse, which fit with a call-sign that had been on the Les Dieux de Guerre roster.
I stared at the pirate. “Loki,” I mouthed just above a whisper, soft enough that I didn’t think the others could hear. “The team’s pilot, Loki.”
Captain Jester stared at me for a long moment, not moving, hardly breathing. Then he grinned, grabbed his shirt off the table, threw it over his shoulders. “So I see you got your mother’s brains as well as her looks. Although she never cracked a jaw the way you do and you’re a lot more wicked in the sack.”
The second punch took him by surprise too, not because he hadn’t been expecting it, but because it hadn’t come from me. Jester’s head snapped back from the hard right
hook, and he half-fell, half sat down in the chair, cursing.
I blinked at Campbell, who was rubbing the knuckles of his hand and looking sheepish. He looked surprised at himself, shocked, as if the punch had been thrown by a hand owned by someone else and he couldn’t believe he’d lost control of his temper like that.
“Why should you have all the fun?” Campbell finally said, raising an eyebrow as if daring me to call him out over it.
Jester put his hand to his face and looked at the blood. He snickered. “Nice one.” He eyed Campbell. “Don’t get any ideas. I’m on good behavior here, or you’d already be a smear.”
“I think you have me confused with someone who’s scared of you.”
“You should be.”
“I never scored high in knowing what’s good for me,” Campbell said with a clenched jaw. Then he looked over at me. “How do you know him?”
“We were lovers,” Jesters answered for me.
I rolled my eyes. “Don’t be delusional. A one-night-stand doesn’t give you the right to use that word.”
“You slept with him?”
I looked back at Campbell, raising an eyebrow at the anger in his voice. We were going to have to have a talk about boundaries. I turned back to Jester.
“When I’m done here,” I told him, “I’m going to have some questions for you. And Keepers help you, you will answer them.”
The pirate grinned. “Maybe we can trade favors for it.” He looked at me, slowly, up and down with those green eyes. It was easy enough to know just what he was thinking—a replay of flesh and sex and sweaty memories. He let it all