Completely Smitten Part 24

"Shouldn't I bring this to Mr. Vari?" she asked as they left the kitchen. "I thought he was the one who took care of problems with the restaurant."

"He is, usually," Blackstone said. "But I think I'd better handle this one."

"Why?" she asked.

"Because Mr. Vari is gone."

Her heart fluttered. She resisted the urge to put her hand over that sore spot in her chest. "For good?"

Blackstone shook his head. "Only until he figures out what he should have known all along."

"What's that?" she asked.

"That there's more to him than snappy clothes and a pithy phrase."

"Excuse me?"

Blackstone glanced at her. "You have no idea, do you?"

She shook her head. "About what?"

"About what a great man Andrew Vari truly is."

Ariel stopped. "What are you trying to tell me?"

Blackstone studied her for a moment. "Something that's not mine to tell," he said, and walked toward the correct wall.

She found that amazing. She hadn't told him where she had seen the light, yet he seemed to know.

"I was supposed to meet Mr. Vari after work. Is that why he left?"

"I don't think he'll forget you," Blackstone said as he put his hand next to a particularly strange wrought-iron sculpture.

His words echoed the note that Darius had sent her. She felt an odd pang. "But you don't know."

He looked at her sideways, his expression speculative. "I'm beginning to know more than I should."

"Funny," she said, "since I met Mr. Vari, I'm beginning to feel like I know less than I ever did."

"Don't worry," Blackstone said, "everything will turn out just fine."

"That's precisely what I mean," she said. "I don't even know what just fine is anymore."

"You will someday soon," Blackstone said. "I'm sure of it."

*Thirteen*

Darius popped into the stall of a men's room. Graffiti had been scratched into the walls, all of it in English, and most of it crude. He stared at it, feeling disconcerted.

In the stall beside him, someone coughed. Darius glanced under the stall's side. A dirty pair of tennis shoes were half-hidden beneath a crumpled pair of polyester pants that were pooled at the bottom of a pair of hairy legs.

Darius stood quickly, nearly banging his head on the door's lock.

He was tall again. He hadn't used all his time in his original form this year. He rarely did, in case he needed it for personal emergencies. Most years he didn't. But he had learned this lesson during the Guinevere/Arthur debacle, when he hadn't been able to reappear to either of them as the blond stranger in order to put the record straight. Since that incident had lasting historical repercussions, he vowed never to do anything like it again.

It felt strange to be tall and thin again. He was just beginning to get used to Andrew Vari. Darius sighed. He still wore his natty gray suit, but it had changed along with him. Now it was long, like he was, and as expertly tailored as it had been before. Only it didn't feel as if it fit him anymore.

The suit wasn't something Darius would wear. Darius had no need to be flamboyant. In fact, Darius, in his modern incarnations, was more of a blue-jeans-and-flannel man. Wearing the clothes of one ident.i.ty when he was in the body of another felt very uncomfortable.

But he was in Monte Carlo--or he was supposed to be. At least that was where Cupid had said his casino was. But Darius had been to the casinos in Monte Carlo. They didn't have graffiti in the bathrooms, especially graffiti written in English.

Darius opened the stall door and stepped out. The bathroom was a pale industrial blue that had faded with time. A fluorescent light flickered overhead. A dirty mirror hung above the urinals, and the entire room smelled of ineffective deodorizers.

If this was a Monte Carlo casino, then standards had gone down in the five years since he'd been inside one. Normally in such a casino, this suit would be considered de rigueur. But Darius had a hunch that in this place the suit marked him as overdressed.

He found the exit and let himself out. The door led to a hallway that smelled of cigarette smoke. The air was blue, and it was clear that the air-filtration system had broken down a very long time ago. A bank of pay phones lined the wall. Two of them had phone books hanging from metal cords.

Darius picked up one of the books and looked at the cover. Las Vegas. He wasn't in Monte Carlo at all.

He frowned. He distinctly remembered Cupid telling him that his casino was in Monte Carlo. Darius had tailored his spell so that he would arrive near Cupid. Had the spell gone awry?

At that moment, the bathroom door swung open and a short man stepped out. The man wore a stained T-s.h.i.+rt that barely covered his beer belly, and his polyester pants rode a little too low on his waist. He was balding, but what remained of his curly blond hair had turned silver.

It wasn't until he walked past that Darius recognized the man's distinctive gait. It was Cupid. Darius had never seen him in twenty-first-century clothing. He'd only seen the man in robes and sandals or in a loincloth and wings.

"Cupid?"

The man turned, looking surprised. When he saw Darius, he waved his arms and said, "Shhh!" as loudly as he could. If that didn't get other people's attention, nothing would.

Darius leaned against one of the phones. "Monte Carlo, huh?"

"So I'm ambitious," Cupid said, coming closer.

"Ambitious? I haven't been outside yet, but I a.s.sume we're on the outskirts of Vegas, right? One of those areas that development hasn't hit yet. This doesn't look like Monte Carlo at all."

"It's just a name," Cupid said.

"It's a country," Darius said.

"No," Cupid said. "Monte Carlo. It's a name."

"It's a country." Had Cupid lost his brains with his hair? "You told me you had a casino there."

"I said I have a casino, the Monte Carlo. You must have misheard me." Cupid sounded offended, which was Darius's first tip that he had been intentionally misled.

"This is your casino," Darius said.

"Yeah." Cupid crossed his beefy arms. He had a tattoo of a heart with an arrow going through it on his left biceps. Only instead of a name running through the arrow's shaft, there was a single word: 'Nevermore. '"It has been for forty-five years."

"I see you've kept the place up."

Cupid nodded. "I do what I can."

"Is there any place we can talk?" Darius asked.

Cupid glanced over his shoulder. "I got some business I gotta attend to."

"Me too," Darius said. "And I'm on a short time schedule. So, where can we talk?"

"Later," Cupid said.

"Now," Darius said. "Or I tell people how you dress when you're not at the casino?"

Cupid's eyes narrowed. "So what's it to them?"

"I have photos." Darius extended his left hand. In it, he had Polaroids of Cupid at the Idaho house.

Cupid tried to grab them, but Darius pulled them out of his reach. "I don't remember you taking those."

"I didn't," Darius said. "Funny how well magic works, isn't it?"

Cupid cursed, loudly and creatively. Then he dug into the pocket of his pants and removed a cell phone. He held up one finger to keep Darius silent and dialed with the thumb of his other hand.

Darius heard some rings as Cupid put the phone to his ear. "Yeah," Cupid said, "it's me. I gotta situation here. I'll be there soon."

Darius could hear a tinny male voice responding, but he couldn't make out the words.

"Believe me," Cupid said, "if it takes longer than fifteen minutes, someone is gonna pay. And it won't be me."

He hung up, put the phone back into his pocket, and glared at Darius. "Let's make it quick."

"Let's make it private," Darius said.

Cupid shook his head, but turned and stalked out of the narrow hallway. It opened into a large room with a low ceiling. Smoke curled in the air. Players sat at kidney-shaped card tables, looking disgruntled. On the far side of the room, people sat before slot machines--the old-fas.h.i.+oned kind, which did not make electronic beeping noises, only the 'caching, ca-ching, ca-ching' of coins dropping into a coin tray.

Most of the people on the casino floor were over fifty.

Almost all of them looked like they hadn't left their chairs in days, maybe years.

Big gold signs covered the walls, declaring the casino to be the Monte Carlo, just like Cupid had said it was. There was an air of 1950s elegance gone to seed about the entire place.

Cupid led Darius around the cages to a door nearly hidden in the flocked wallpaper. They went through and immediately the smoke cleared some. The walls were a yellowish white and covered with promotional posters more than forty years old. Some had pictures of Sinatra, announcing a concert he had held in the casino's theater. Others had pictures of the rest of the Rat Pack.

After that, though, the string of famous artists turned into almost-rans and never-rans. The picture of a casino that had a short peak and somehow managed to hang on.

Cupid pushed open a presswood door and led Darius into an office filled with papers and poker chips. A wall of file cabinets blocked the door.

Cupid pushed some newspapers off a chair and pointed to it. "Sit."

"Do you want me to jump and beg too?" Darius asked, not getting anywhere near the filthy plastic.

"Hey," Cupid said, grabbing another chair and sitting on it backwards. "You're the one who came to me. Whazzup?"

Darius shook his head. "You know, for a man who is written about as a semi deity in many mythology books and who makes guest appearances on Hallmark cards every February fourteenth, you don't have a lot of dignity."

"Don't need it," Cupid said.' "The image is already established."

He grabbed a box off the desk. Cuban cigars. He opened it, and the scent wafted toward Dar. When he was in his Andrew Vari mode, he'd been known to enjoy a cigar or two. But right now, the smell sickened him.

"What did you do to me?" Darius asked, deciding he didn't want to stand in this small, sad room any longer.

"What do you mean, what did I do? You did something to me, pal. Seems to me that's why you got your sentence. Tampering with a semi G.o.d, you know. Very bad form."

"When you came to my cabin, you did something to me."

"Oh?" Cupid sat up. "You base this on what?"

"Ariel," Darius said.

"Aerial what? Acrobatics?"

"No," Darius said, speaking precisely. "My feelings for Ariel."

"Aerial what?" Cupid asked again. "Stunts?"

"Ariel Summers," Darius said.

"Aerial summersaults?"

"Are you being deliberately dense?" Dar's fists were clenched. He was going to punch this little fraud if this conversation went on like this much longer. "Ariel Summers is a woman."

"Oh!" Cupid grinned. "The redhead."

"Yes," Darius said. "The redhead."

Cupid got a silly grin on his face. "I love athletic women. Not that Psyche isn't athletic, but you know what I mean."

"I don't want to think about what you mean," Darius said. Then he frowned. "How do you know Ariel? Were you supposed to zap me so that I'd fall in love with her? Was this the final test of the Fates? Let's see if Dar can overcome his own l.u.s.t and still give the girl the man of her dreams, even if that man is someone else?"

"What?" Cupid asked.

"What do you mean what?" Darius asked.