2 Pushing Luck Read Online Free Page A

His mouth was being pulled wide by some migration of his cheek muscles and he couldn’t close his lips, tooth stubs emerging from his gums like crooked tombstones and causing drool to spill over. The worst part was his eyes; they were barely visible within the bloating face folds, but the eyes were Russell’s, and they were just sane enough to be self-loathing and helpless and terrified.
    “I told you,” Jamie murmured quietly beside me.
    There’s always been some confusion about where rakshasas come from. In some stories they are evil spirits that possess people’s bodies. In other stories they are creatures with bodies of their own capable of physically reproducing. But I understood, then, how rakshasas make new rakshasas. Russell Sidney wasn’t being possessed. He was being changed, the same way people who become werewolves or vampires are changed.
    Maybe it starts with corrupting their victims, getting them to hate themselves one weak decision at a time, leading them into increasingly destructive behaviors and desperate and selfish acts against others. Somewhere along the way feeding their wards human flesh must be part of the rakshasa’s magical induction ceremony too. But whatever was involved, Russell Sidney was some kind of horrible caterpillar in the middle of a transformation.
    He wasn’t going to become a butterfly.
    The rakshasa grinned at me from across the room, a proud new parent.
    *  *  *
    When I went back up to my room later, the guard’s head was gone.
    *  *  *
    That night, Jamie came to my room.
    “You’re right,” she said quietly when I opened the door. “There’s something wrong about this place, and I can’t figure it out and can’t shake it off. I’m scared.”
    She really was too. Her heart was hammering and the pheromones she was putting off were a dense mix of lust and terror.
    What was I going to say? One of the rakshasa’s henchmen was standing in the hallway, not even trying to be subtle. He was another big guy but kind of old for muscle work, sparse-haired and gray-skinned with lots of burst capillaries close to the surface on his face. He looked like the survivor of a Charles Bukowski poem.
    A loup-garou would take Jamie into the room and use her for all she was worth. Well, less than what she was worth, really. The fact that he was planning to kill her later would be gravy.
    I let her in.
    The first thing Jamie did was sit on the edge of my bed. She was wearing a short and tight black dress and she had reapplied her makeup. Her knees weren’t touching. “Can I just stay here for a while?” she asked me. “Without any funny business?”
    As it turned out, she couldn’t.
    *  *  *
    I couldn’t figure out how the rakshasa was cheating. The cards were fresh out of the pack and smelled like it. The dealer probably was a mechanic, but I was watching carefully and didn’t see any sign of bottom dealing. If the rakshasa was a hand mucker, it was the best one I’d never seen. Maybe it was just a better card player than me.
    The kid across from me was another fish in the rakshasa’s barrel. The pudgy little bastard was a better card player than the congressman had been, a pretty good player actually, but he was nowhere near as good as he thought he was. He had the same last name as a famous cereal brand, and presumably that wasn’t a coincidence. He played with the confidence of someone who had always had more than he could lose, the kind of confidence that is a huge advantage in life until it leads to disaster.
    Jamie was sitting on my right and playing a conservative game of duck and cover, staying even until one of us eliminated the other. At the moment, I was the only one bleeding chips.
    Russell Sidney was propped in his wheelchair and sitting at the table next to the rakshasa. He barely moved, and when he did, it was with spastic jerks and twitches. He occasionally made gargling sounds that could have meant anything as long as it wasn’t good.
    “You see,