Ray was quite possibly insane.

“So you cut some more,” I said, because of course he had.

He nodded. “Yeah, and then some more and—well, it took a while to find one near enough to our old location to work. And even then, we ended up in this creepy-looking swamp on the other end. And ran into all kinds of problems.”

“Like what?”

Ray didn’t answer. But I received a sudden flash of a swamp, old and fetid and dark as night, except for a few random beams of light spearing down from far overhead. They highlighted still black water, mold-covered bark and a bunch of silent shadows zipping through the trees.

We were running alongside the shadows, who I guessed were the vamps Ray had brought with him. Although I wasn’t sure quite what we were running on. Or why the trees seemed to be growing sideways for some—

And then I realized that we were sprinting along the trunks, hitting the ground only occasionally on a rock or a root or who-knew-what because we were moving almost too fast to see, as was everyone else. Like they were playing some crazy kind of swamp parkour. And they were damned good. Not a single foot touched the dark water below.

Until we did. Our foot hit a particularly slimy rock and slid out of control—just for a second, and just barely stirring the water. But a second was enough.

Something huge and old and cracked like the trunk of an oak, broke the surface, too fast for me to see much besides a few tons’ worth of terror coming right at us. A massive tail slashed down, sending an arc of greenish water ten feet into the air; huge yellowed teeth gleamed and lunged; and we came within a hairbreadth of losing a foot before another vamp caught us, swinging us high, high out over the water—

And then I was back, breathing hard, although I hadn’t moved an inch.

“Oh,” I swallowed. “Those kind of problems.”

Ray’s eyes widened. “Hey. Did you just see—”

“So how many portals did you make?” I interrupted. Because I didn’t like to talk about the glimpses the wine occasionally gave me into other people’s heads. Ray might act like it was no big deal, but I wasn’t used to it and I didn’t like it.

“I—” Ray stopped. “You mean, like total or just that time?”

“That time? How many times were there?”

“Well, it’s like this.”

“Shit.”

“Once I got the shipment in, of course the boss wanted to know how. I mean, you would, wouldn’t you?”

“And you told him. And he thought, why stop with one?”

“Right. Because the fey, they don’t travel much. Not the ones you got around here, they’re freaky or something, I don’t know. But most fey, they don’t want to move much from where they were born. So if you want their stuff, you gotta go to them. And the boss wanted, oh, a lot of stuff.”

“So he had you cutting portals like a mad weasel,” I said grimly.

And why not? Ray wasn’t exactly high in the power structure at Cheung enterprises. So Cheung wasn’t really risking anything. Ray gets vaporized and it’s no big loss. Ray gets caught and Cheung disavows all knowledge of his activities.

Which was probably exactly what he had done, or the Senate would have nabbed him already. The last people they wanted to have taking some of those vacant Senate seats were Cheung and his buddy with the messed-up face. They were an unknown quantity with possible ties to the Chinese empress, the leader of the East Asian Senate. Who just happened to be the biggest rival for power that the North American Consul had.

No, if Ray had given the Senate anything on Cheung, they’d have used it. On the other hand, it was in Cheung’s best interest to stay as far from his disgraced servant as possible at this vital juncture. Yet here he was, trying to lure him back into the fold.

I didn’t know what Cheung was planning to bring in, but obviously he wanted it pretty bad.

I looked up to find Ray sulking. “What?”

“Can we stop it with the names?” he demanded.

“I didn’t call you any names.”

“What about ‘weasel’? That supposed to be complimentary?”

“It was more of an expression.”

“And ‘butthead’?”

“That was you. You called yourself—” I shut my eyes. “Never mind. Just tell me what happened.”

“What you think happened?” he asked grumpily. “I kept cutting portals and making deals with the people I found on the other end.”

“And nobody ever noticed anything? None of those other smugglers ever saw a bunch of people lugging out truckloads full of suspicious-looking merchandise right across the street from them?”

“Well, sure, they might have. If we’d been dumb enough to be across the street.”

“But you just said—”

“I said I had to be near their portal to hack into it. I didn’t say I had to stay there.”

“Then how did you—” I stopped. Because a horrible suspicion had just formed. A really, really horrible suspicion. But I had to be wrong. I had to be. Because not even Ray would have.…Would he?

“Ray,” I said carefully. “How did you get the stuff out?”

He looked up from contemplating his navel or whatever he’d been doing, and blinked at me. “Same way I got it in. Some masters have more guys, you know? So they can patrol more. I couldn’t be seen moving a lot of stuff right by where they had a portal. These guys aren’t too bright, most of ’em anyway, but they are paranoid. If they caught me with a bunch of stuff near their gate, they might have gotten suspicious.”

“So…”

“So sometimes I had to link another portal to the first one,” he said, oh so reasonably. “So I could cut into another line and divert the stuff away from the area.”

“You cut a hack, from the hack you’d just made, into another portal?” I asked, sure I’d gotten it wrong.

“Yeah,” he said brightly. “Or sometimes two, because it’s like the subway, every train isn’t going where you need. But link enough of ’em, and sooner or later—”

“Link enough of them? How many of the portals in Manhattan have you drawn into this bastardized system of yours?”

“I don’t know. Maybe half?”

“Half?” I stared at him in disbelief.

“Well, it’s not like I used all of ’em, but like I said, it wasn’t always possible to know where a portal was going when I hacked into it. There was a certain amount of trial and error in—”

“Does the Senate know?” I interrupted.

“Of course they do. I mean, I had to tell ’em, right? They were planning to blow up the illegal portals, but some of them were linked to legal ones through some of my hacks, and that could have caused…oh, a lot of problems. I mean, can you see their faces if they’d blown up one of theirs?”

I didn’t even react to that. I wasn’t even surprised anymore. Maybe I was going numb.

I drained the rest of my beer.

“You hacked into the Senate’s portals,” I said flatly.

“Well, it wasn’t like I was using their gateways, was it?” he said, frowning. Like he’d expected to be patted on the back for his ingenuity, and all he was getting was dull-eyed horror. “They got so many protections on those things, a guy’d have to be crazy to try to break in. And even say you did, whaddya got? A bunch of pissed-off masters who’ll end you before you can blink. And I didn’t need their gateways anyway, just some of the space in between. You know, to bridge the gap between some of my other lines.”

I just stared at him for a moment, actually speechless. “Why are you still alive?” I finally demanded.

“’Cause that was the deal. I tell ’em everything, spill my guts, not hold anything back. And then they don’t kill me. And they had to deal; they never would have found all of ’em on their own. I mean, seriously, we’re talking years—”

“And they just let you walk.”

He rolled his eyes. “Of course. Why not? They assumed Cheung was gonna kill me as soon as they tossed me out onto the sidewalk anyway. Save ’em the trouble.”

“But they didn’t toss you out,” I said, remembering a certain limo ride from this morning. True, nobody had seemed too interested in helping Ray not to go up in flames. But considering everything, I’d have expected them to be pouring on gasoline and lighting a match.

But he wasn’t listening.

“It really bites my ass, you know?” he told me. “I’m why Cheung ended up a big-time player in the smuggling trade in the first place, when we used to be small potatoes. It was me. It was all me. But did I get any credit, any respect, for any of it? Hell no. I’m still Ray the screwup, Ray the joke, Ray the butthead. Only the joke’s on him now, ’cause I got a new master, and he can bite me.”

“A new master?” I frowned. “I thought you’ve been in the Senate’s custody this whole time.”

“Yeah, well.” He fidgeted and stubbed out his cigarette, even though it was only halfway down. “You know how it was. I wanted to just go home. Go back to the way things were. But that’s a little hard with the master trying to kill me so I couldn’t give away the locations of all the hacks I’d done. And possibly incriminate him in the bargain. So where was I gonna go? I had to go to the Senate.”

“Yeah, you said you were going to sing like a canary,” I recalled.

Cheung had only allowed Raymond to fall into the Senate’s hands in the first place because he’d assumed that his erstwhile employee, who had been sans head at the time, wasn’t going to last long enough to tell anyone anything. But once he realized that Ray, who’d turned out to be unusually hardy thanks to Claire’s missing talisman, was still alive, the hunt had been on. He’d caught up with him a week or so ago, and Ray had used me to get him out of trouble.