Poison Sleep by T. A. Pratt Read Free Book Online

discuss the details with my human resources representative. Look, here’s a card and some cab fare. The address is a nightclub called Juliana’s. Go over there and knock on the door. My associate Rondeau owns the place, and when he answers, tell him I sent you, and that you’re my new personal assistant. He’ll get you set up. But if he tries to make you unclog his toilet,
don’t do it
. You work for me, not him. You can tell him I said that, too.”
    “All right,” Ted said, taking the card and frowning. “Will you be there?”
    “Yeah, pretty soon. We’ll talk more then. I’m Marla Mason. You can call me Marla.” Poor guy probably thought she was planning to drug him and steal his organs or something. Well, who could blame him? People weren’t trained to expect good things to drop on them from out of nowhere. But Marla had a lot of bad karma to burn off, and the occasional spontaneous outbreak of kindness was called for. Besides, Ted couldn’t be any worse than the people Rondeau would line up for her to interview. “See you later,” she said, and set off. She went the long way around Fludd Park, having no desire to walk on paths through bare trees, past a frozen duck pond, in
nature.
She’d seen enough nature this morning from the passenger seat of her Bentley. She should call Rondeau, tell him to expect Ted—
    Her vision blurred, her head pounded, dizziness overwhelmed her—and the city changed.
    She stepped down two inches, hard enough to make her teeth click together. The sidewalk beneath her feet had vanished. Instead of icy concrete, she stood swaying on broad cobblestones in the center of a wide avenue that curved away in both directions. The air smelled of orange blossoms, like Cordoba in spring. The buildings around her were no longer constructed of brick and stone, but of fluttering canvas with doors and windows painted on, like theater backdrops. A gust of wind blew through the street, and the sides of the buildings bulged like sails as air slipped into the cracks near the ground. Her vertigo faded as quickly as it had come. She wished for her cloak, or her dagger of office, something to make her more dangerous than endangered.
    Her impeccable sense of direction was gone, and she couldn’t remember when she’d been more disoriented. She knew her city, and this wasn’t it. Had she been teleported somewhere? But, no, that wasn’t possible, being teleported was a far more traumatic experience than
this,
and she didn’t sense any breaks in her consciousness. She was just…someplace else. Marla turned and turned about, checking her sight lines, looking for threats, and breathing slowly to calm the spike of adrenaline that caused her heart to hammer. No snow fell, and the warm, humid air already made her want to shrug out of her borrowed coat.
    Never one to wait when movement was an option, Marla hurried along the cobblestones, past the buildings, which sighed and billowed. The road curved and then dead-ended at a grassy square surrounded by leafy trees with branches full of bright yellow fruit. A woman sat on a stone bench in the center of the square.
    Approach, or observe? Before Marla could choose a course, the woman turned around and beckoned her. She had caramel-colored flyaway hair, and she wore pale yellow, except for a black scarf draped around her neck. She looked familiar, but vague, like the memory of a dream.
    “What’s your name?” the woman asked once Marla came within hailing distance.
    Marla ignored her, looking into the treetops and making sure no one waited to ambush her.
    “I’m Genevieve. Are you lost?”
    Genevieve?
Shit. This was Husch’s fugitive, and this…place…was hers, somehow. A little scooped-out pocket in the universe, a pinched-off piece of Dreamtime, a hallucination made real…or else, Genevieve was a reweaver, and she’d transformed Felport into this place of cobbles and oranges.
    “I guess I am lost,” Marla said, looking Genevieve up and down. Late