Motherlode by James Axler Read Free Book Online Page A

no coldhearts.”
    “At least not your usual run of coldhearts,” Mildred said.
    “So what is your gig?” Madame Zaroza asked. “I’m guessing this isn’t a straight jack-up? Because we’d have gotten to the point by now.”
    “Not exactly,” Ryan said. “You got something that doesn’t belong with you. We’re here to take it back.”
    She nodded. “Well, Sleeping Beauty warned us you were coming for that, yes.”
    “‘Sleeping Beauty,’” repeated Ricky, who stood behind Ryan. “That’s the lady in the painting? On the side of the wag?”
    “Yes.”
    “And you said she said we didn’t mean you any harm, too. Is she a doomie?”
    “Well, you’re sure full of questions, aren’t you? Yes, she is.”
    “Indeed, Madame Zaroza,” Doc said. “I cannot help noting that a high proportion of your performers appear to be muties.”
    “I’m not,” said the fur-covered man, who answered to Squatsch. In the light, the pointed tufts sticking up from either side of his skull proved to be hair. His ears were normal in size, shape and placement, though covered with the same dark fur as the rest of him except the pink palms of his hands. “I’ve got a condition called hypertrichosis.”
    “I’m not,” said the slight man in tights. “I’m Stretch—what they used to call an India Rubber Man in the carny trade. I was born flexible and trained myself to the rest.”
    “Masked Max—yeah, he takes his mask off sometimes—is a skilled knife thrower and nothing otherwise out of the ordinary,” Madame Zaroza said, nodding toward the man with the vest sewn with many pockets or flaps with flat hiltless knives stuck inside. “Although he can also juggle, and he throws a mean bowling pin, as well—as I believe your older friend discovered.”
    With great gravity Doc mock bowed in his chair. He never spilled a drop from his teacup.
    “Professor Finesse, who dosed your other friend with his patented sneezing powder and then stunned you all with one of his Patented Double-Wide Flash-Bangs, is a whitecoat, exiled from the lab community he grew up in back East.”
    The man in the fawn coat bowed. “In many ways,” he said, “my life, should my background become known, would be in more perilous straits than those of our mutant brothers and sisters.”
    He straightened and smiled at their clump of visitors. “No hard feelings, I trust.”
    Mildred glared and sniffled. Ryan shrugged.
    “Ace trick,” he said. “Worked. That time.”
    “I also perform stage magic and conjuring. And of course my patent medicine will display remarkably curative properties to a diversity of ailm—”
    “Can the sales pitch, Prof,” Madame Zaroza said, lighting a cheroot. “ Our twins there are Spider and Monkey. They’d been with us a year before we found out their given names were Moss and Hilary.”
    “Are you muties?”
    “Ricky!” Krysty said sharply.
    “Sorry.”
    Moss—Krysty thought he was Monkey, but wasn’t sure—alternately glared defiantly and dropped his gaze. His sister seemed more comfortable with the strangers.
    “We don’t know,” she said in a clear voice. “All we know is we’re different. We’ve been on our own since we could walk and not welcomed anywhere, until we fetched up here.”
    “I don’t suppose I could convince you this is all makeup,” Draco said. He had laid aside his tray and rested his finely scaled forearms on the breakfast bar.
    “He’s a mutie. Sleeping Beauty, I told you about. And Catseye, of course. She’s our lookout.”
    The last was a tiny young woman, who looked to be little more than a child, who crouched in a corner staring at the intruders half curiously, half fearfully from beneath brown bangs with a pair of golden eyes that were easily twice as large as a norm’s. And their pupils were indeed vertical black oval slits, like a cat’s.
    “What about you?” Mildred asked.
    Madame Zaroza shrugged. “I’m just the head freak-wrangler,” she said. “I ride