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"If we're heading out
among the common folk, a disguise spell would be nice."
He was right of course. Even though I was
used to seeing him as he actually was, a Pervect with green scales and
yellow eyes, the average citizen of Possiltum still tended to react to
his appearance with horror and fear . . . which is to say much the same
way I reacted when I first met him.
"Sorry, Aahz."
Closing my eyes, I quickly made the
necessary adjustments. Manipulating his image with my mind, I made him
look like an ordinary castle guard. If anything, I made him a bit more
scrawny and undernourished than average. I mean, the idea was not
to intimidate people, wasn't it?
Aahz didn't even bother checking his
reflection in any of the windows we passed. He seemed much more
interested in prying details of my date out of me.
"Where did you find to go on this
backwater dimension, anyway?" he said.
"Oh, we didn't stick around here," I said
loftily. "We ducked over to Limbo. Cassandra knew a couple of clubs
there and we . . . "
I suddenly noticed Aahz was no longer
walking beside me. Looking back, I realized he had stopped in his
tracks. His mouth was working, but no sound came out.
"Limbo?" he managed at last. "You went
bar crawling on Limbo? Excuse me, partner, but I was under the
impression we were persona non grata in that neck of the woods."
"I was a little worried at first," I
admitted casually, which was only a little lie. As you'll recall, I had
been a LOT worried. "Cassandra said she could blip us back out fast if
there was any trouble, though, so I figured what the heck. As it turned
out, nobody seems to be holding a grudge there. In fact, it seems I'm .
. . I mean, we're . . . minor celebrates over there. That's
partly why the evening ran as long as it did. Half the people we ran
into wanted to buy me a drink for putting one over on the local
council."
"Is that a fact?" Aahz said darkly,
starting to move away. "Just who is this Cassandra person, anyway? She
doesn't exactly sound like a local."
"She's not," I confirmed. "Vic set me up
with her. She's a friend of his."
"Nice to know he didn't set you up with
an enemy," my partner quipped. "Still in all, it seems to me . . ."
He broke off and did another double take.
"Wait a minute. Vic? The same vampire Vic
that you hang around with over at the Bazaar? You mean this Cassandra
babe is . . ."
"A vampire," I said with a careless
shrug. The truth was, I was starting to get a bit of a kick out of
shocking Aahz. "Oh, she's okay. No one you'd want to take home to
mother, but . . . what's wrong?"
He craned his head around to peer at my
neck from different angles.
"Just checking for bite marks," he said.
"Com'on, Aahz. There wasn't any danger of
that. She was drinking her blood out of a glass last night."
"Those weren't the kind of bite marks I
was checking for," he grinned. "Vamps have a rep of being pretty wild
women."
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