Cold Copper Tears by Glen Cook Read Free Book Online

girls there, the oldest sneaking up on eighteen. Four of the five shared the urchin’s hairdresser and tailor. Maya wore real clothing and was better groomed, but not much. She was eighteen going on forty, war chief of a gang claiming two hundred “soldiers.” She was so emotionally sliced up you never knew which way she would jump.
    Most of the Sisters were emotional casualties. They’d all suffered severe abuse, and a murmur of defiance had driven them into the Doom’s never-never land. That hung, precariously and eternally, at right angles to reality, between childhood as it should have been and the adulthood of the untormented. They’d never recover from their wounds. Most of the girls would die of them. But the Doom gave them a fortress into which they could retreat and from which they could strike back, which left them better off than the tortured thousands who went through the hell without support.
    Maya had suffered more than most. I met her when she was nine, when her stepfather offered to share her if I’d buy him some wine. I’d declined to the crackle of his breaking bones.
    She was a lot better now. She was normal most of the time. She could talk to me. Sometimes she came to the house to cadge a meal. She liked Dean. Old Dean was every girl’s ideal uncle.
    “Well, Garrett? What the hell you want?” She had an audience. “Let’s see the color of your money.”
    I tossed her a coin. “Faith offering,” I told her. “I want to swap information.”
    “Come ahead. I’ll tell you to go to hell when you get on my nerves.”
    If she took a fit, I could go out looking like chopped meat. Those girls could be vicious. Castration was a favorite sport.
    “You know the Vampires? Run by an albino darko called Snowball and a crazy bleeder named Doc? North End.”
    “I’ve heard of them. They’re all crazy, not just Doc. I don’t know them. Word is, Doc and Snowball are getting ambitious, trying to rent muscle and recruit soldiers from other gangs.”
    “Somebody might take exception.”
    “I know. Snowball and Doc are too old for the street but not old enough to know they can’t trespass.”
    It’s a classic cycle. And sometimes the young ones pull it off. About once a century.
    Today’s kingpin was a street kid. But that organization recruited him from a gang and promoted him from within.
    “The Doom have any relationship with the Vampires?” The girls prefer being called the Doom. They think it has a nicer ring than the Sisters or the Sisterhood.
    “All take and no give, Garrett. I don’t like that.”
    “If you’re running with the Vampires I don’t have anything to give you.”
    She gave me the fish eye.
    “Snowball and Doc tried, to take me out,” I said.
    “What the hell were you doing in the North End?”
    “I wasn’t, sweetie. I was on Warhawks’ turf. War-hawks have a treaty with the Vampires?”
    “No need. No contact. Same with the Doom.” She shifted. “You’re sneaking up on something, Garrett. Get to the point.”
    “There are a couple guys watching my house. I’d guess chukos. Probably Vampires, considering last night.”
    She thought about that. “A genuine hit? You’re sure?”
    “I’m sure, Maya.”
    “Your place is on Travelers’ ground.” “You’re starting to get it. Trouble is, I don’t have any friends with the Travelers since Mick and Slick got caught in the sweep.”
    The relationships between the races have become terribly complex, them being all mixed together but each owning its own princes and chiefs and quirky root cultures. TunFaire is a human city. Human law prevails in all civil matters. A plethora of treaties have established that entering a city voluntarily constitutes acceptance of the prevailing law. In TunFaire a crime in human law remains a crime when committed by anyone else, even when the behavior is acceptable among the perpetrator’s people.
    Treaties deny Karenta the power to conscript persons of nonhuman blood, nonhuman being