For the Balance of a Heart: A Poker Boy Story Read online

  For the Balance of a Heart

  A Poker Boy Story

  Dean Wesley Smith

  For the Balance of a Heart

  Copyright © 2012 by Dean Wesley Smith

  Published by WMG Publishing

  Cover Design copyright © 2012 WMG Publishing

  Cover art copyright © Maksim Shmeljov/Dreamstime

  Smashwords Edition

  This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

  Chapter One

  I always figured that when Lady Luck needed a favor from me, things had to be really, really bad.

  Laverne, aka Lady Luck, appeared a little after noon on a Friday. My entire team was in my new office eating take-out Chinese and talking about our plans for the weekend. I had a poker tournament I hoped to play in later in the evening at the Bellagio and Patty Ledegerwood, aka Front Desk Girl, my sidekick and girlfriend, had to work swing at the MGM Grand Hotel front desk.

  In other words, a pretty standard weekend night for us.

  Then Lady Luck appeared.

  When that happens, normal becomes a laughing matter.

  Laverne had on her standard business casual gray pantsuit. Her dark hair was pulled so tight into a bun on the top of her head that it had to hurt. Her eyes looked neutral as they always did. Lady Luck seldom showed anyone any emotion and it was always impossible to get a read on what she was thinking.

  She looked around my new office and smiled and then nodded. “Original.”

  I thought that meant she liked my new office layout. At least I hoped that was what she meant.

  She glanced at Stan, the God of Poker who was trying to choke down the remains of a spring role. “Good job.”

  Stan, who had on his standard gray cardigan sweater and gray slacks, only nodded. Compliments from Lady Luck herself were rare and Stan knew that. The expression on his face and in his dark eyes never changed.

  At times I couldn’t believe my new office, or the fact that a superhero poker player like me even had an office. But I did, and it was invisible and floated above the city of Las Vegas, about a thousand feet above the MGM Grand Casino and Hotel.

  I doubted I would ever get used to how amazing that was.

  Since Patty worked at the MGM Grand, I figured directly above the MGM Grand just seemed like a great place to anchor the office. Besides, since I got a lot of my superhero power from casinos funneled through my black leather coat and Fedora-like hat, being parked over a major casino never hurt.

  And I seldom took off my coat and hat. Even now over a Chinese lunch that was about to get very cold.

  The office in this spot also allowed for a great view of all of Las Vegas and the surrounding mountains and desert since all four walls were glass and perfectly clear. At first that had scared me so much I stayed to the center of the room. Finally, after a day of almost crawling around the room on my hands and knees for fear of falling off the edge of my office tile floor, I had decided to put in a wooden rail about a foot wide and waist-high across the glass. On all four walls. That helped. I now could actually go to the edges of my own office and look down.

  Compared to normal offices, mine really wasn’t much of an office. No desk, no couches, no pictures or awards hanging on the glass walls. The entire center of the square office was filled with a large, oblong wooden booth. It was an exact replica of the booth in the Diner Restaurant from downtown Las Vegas where we had all met for the last couple of years.

  Plastic-covered booth seats and a scarred tabletop made it feel real. Bottles of ketchup and mustard sat next to the salt and pepper and a pile of white paper napkins in the center.

  Every detail was the same as in the Diner.

  In other words, my nifty new office was nothing more than a hunk of tile floor and a diner booth floating in the air over a major casino. I liked it.

  So did the rest of the team, or so they had said.

  The booth was large enough to handle the six members of my team. There were two or three extra chairs in the room that visitors could pull up to the end of the booth and a couple of lawn chairs in one corner where Patty and I could just sit and stare out at the city and the mountains.

  I’d only had this office for a week and I was starting to love sitting in those lawn chairs in the evenings before sunset.

  Lady Luck turned around, grabbed a chair and pulled it toward the end of the booth where we were all sitting. It had been Lady Luck herself who had suggested that Stan, my boss and the God of Poker, teach me how to build and secure a floating office for me and my team.

  Over the last few years my team had saved the world more times than I wanted to count, so it seemed like a great idea to me and it was turning out to be just that. But while I was building it, I hadn’t been so sure.

  It had taken two very long days and just about every ounce of energy I had, even with Stan helping, to put it all together and get it secured somehow in its floating and invisible location. But now it took no energy at all for me to keep it there.

  Stan tried to explain to me how that worked, but I flat didn’t understand a word he said. I figured there had to be some things only the gods could or should know. Since I was only a lowly superhero in the gambling universe, I wasn’t meant to know what we had just done or how it even worked. Honestly, I was fine with that, as long as the office stayed in the air and we could go and come from it.

  Lady Luck pulled the chair to the table and sat down. Then she sampled a bite of an extra spring roll and nodded. The food was from a restaurant called Larry’s Chinese Place just off The Strip. The locals knew it was the best in town.

  My entire team was there, plus Stan. I could tell they were all as shocked by Lady Luck’s action as I felt. One of the most powerful gods in the universe just didn’t join a bunch of superheroes and a poker god for lunch.

  The Smoke and Screamer both eased away from her on the left side of the booth. The Smoke was basically a werewolf who could walk through walls. He stood about my height at six foot, but had shoulders so large it made him seem shorter. His most striking feature was his deep blue eyes.

  Screamer was shorter than me and usually just wore Las Vegas tourist clothes like bright shirts and ugly shorts. He worked for the law enforcement side of the gods and seemed far, far harder than he actually was.

  Madge, the food-service-superhero waitress who always wore a too-tight pink diner uniform and owned and ran the Diner, had been sitting on the end on the right side. She now stood and moved to a position behind the booth facing Lady Luck and behind Stan, who sat in the middle.

  Patty and I moved closer to Lady Luck on the right side, taking up some of the room left by Madge.

  No one said a word and the smell from the Chinese food filling the middle of the table wasn’t helping my stomach any. Since my team covered five different branches of the gods, we were unusual, but I just never expected Lady Luck to join us for anything.

  “Poker Boy,” Laverne said, looking at me. Then she looked at Stan. “Everyone, I need a personal favor.”

  Now I really, really, really wished I hadn’t just eaten that last piece of sweet-and-sour chicken. Lady Luck never asked for personal favors. She had been alive for longer than any written history. Civilizations over the centuries had come and gone, but Lady Luck had lived through them all. So her asking us for a personal favor had to mean things were really, really ba
d.

  “Anything,” I managed to say. Stan only nodded and even though he was the God of Poker with the best poker face I had ever seen, I could tell he was too surprised to even speak.

  Everyone else nodded slightly, clearly too stunned to dare move much.

  “Thank you,” she said. Then she took a deep breath. “I need you to find Helen, my daughter.”

  I was fairly certain at that moment I had stopped breathing.

  Lady Luck had just told me she had a daughter. I had thought I was starting to get a grip on all the different gods and superheroes and who worked for whom and who hated whom. But now it was clear there was still a great deal I didn’t know about all the whos and whoms of the world of gods.

  “Do you know where she was last seen?” Stan asked.

  Thank heavens Stan knew about Lady Luck having a daughter and was managing to keep his wits about him. That was the difference between a god and a bunch of superheroes. He’d been alive a lot longer and could roll better with very, very strange requests.

  And even better, he could explain it all to us after she left.

  “Helen is somewhere here in Las Vegas,” Lady Luck said. “And I have no idea what she is doing or why she has vanished. I can’t even sense her.”

  “How long has she been gone?” I managed to ask, at least trying to sound logical and in control and leader-like. Thankfully, my voice didn’t squeak.

  “About twelve minutes now,” Laverne said, clearly serious. “I am very worried.”

  She started to take another bite from the spring roll, then changed her mind and pushed it away.

  “We’ll do our best,” Stan said.

  “Thank you,” Lady Luck said, nodding. “I know you will.”

  With that she vanished, leaving the chair empty at the end of the booth.

  I stared at the empty chair for what seemed like hours, but it must have only been a few seconds. Then I turned back to the stunned faces of my team.

  “Wow,” Madge said from behind Stan. “The Queen of Hearts has gone missing. Imagine that.”

  Now all I could do was stare at Madge.

  She just shrugged. “I’ll get some milkshakes for everyone if someone gets rid of all that dead food. Looks like we got some planning to do.”

  With that she turned and vanished. I had put in an invisible door right behind the booth—with Stan’s help—that allowed Madge and most of the team to move back and forth between the real diner in downtown Las Vegas and my office.

  I also put a door from my office to Patty’s apartment so Patty could be in the office as much as she liked as well, even when I wasn’t here. I was the only member of the team besides Stan who knew how to teleport.

  Across from me in the booth, The Smoke, a part-human, part-wolf superhero in the world of animals, looked completely shocked, his blue eyes wider than normal by a ways. That was going some.

  Beside him, Screamer just looked down at the pile of uneaten Chinese food and shook his head. Screamer worked under the gods of law enforcement and his superpower was the ability to take thoughts from one person and put them in another person’s head. He had seen more than I ever wanted to imagine and yet he seemed bothered by this.

  I honestly couldn’t believe what had just happened either.

  Lady Luck had a daughter, who was missing, and Lady Luck had come to us to find her.

  That did not bode well for anyone involved.

  I looked out over the city of Las Vegas. Helen, the Queen of Hearts, was out there somewhere. And up until a moment ago, I didn’t even know she existed beyond the faces of the cards I played poker with.

  Had she been the one to pose for those early cards? Or was that just her nickname? So many questions.

  In the distance, a Southwest airliner turned for final approach to McCarran Airport. Sometimes a plane landing at the airport got a little too close to this invisible office for comfort, but Stan assured me that a plane could hit the office and it would go right through and no one would notice. Something about the office and everyone in it being a half-turn out of normal time and space.

  Again I didn’t understand what he meant, but I was fairly certain I didn’t want to be in the office the day a plane passed through it.

  I was drifting. I had to get focused.

  I turned to Stan who was just sitting staring out over the countryside as well, his eyes blank.

  Beside me, Patty took my hand and squeezed it, sending waves of comfort and calm through me. She worked under the Gods of Hospitality. Calming people was one of her many superpowers. I loved it.

  “Stan, can you tell us about Helen? And why Madge called her the Queen of Hearts?”

  “Because for centuries, even before I was born, which was before Atlantis, she has been called that,” Stan said. “Her beauty is legendary. Red hair, very tall, and a temper when unleashed that could level a city.”

  “And she’s been gone now for thirteen or so minutes?” I asked. “How does Laverne know that?”

  Stan shrugged. “Some sort of connection, a family bond, at a level I am not familiar with.”

  “And that clearly was broken,” I said.

  Stan nodded. “I can’t sense her either.”

  I sat back and looked out at the view. I had no idea where to even start on this problem. And that scared me a lot.

  “We’re missing a lot of information here,” Screamer said. “First off, who would have the power to cut the link between Lady Luck and her daughter?”

  “Good question,” I said. “Can’t be many people I would imagine.”

  “Unless Helen did it herself,” The Smoke said in his level, deep voice.

  I glanced at Stan who sat calmly, not saying anything.

  “Stan?” I asked. “You know who could do this, don’t you?”

  Stan nodded, but said nothing. Instead he made all the food on the table just vanish with a simple wave of his hand, leaving the scarred wood top as clean as if Madge had spent an hour wiping it down. I had no idea where he sent it all.

  “Stan?” I pushed.

  He looked up and seemed almost afraid to say what he was about to say. And when a god was afraid to say something, it couldn’t be good.

  Finally he put both hands on the table and looked first at Patty, then at me. “There is only one person who could break the link between Laverne and Helen purposefully.”

  “That’s going to make the search a lot easier,” Screamer said. “Who is it?”

  “Laverne’s husband,” Stan said softly, again looking down at the table.

  At that moment you could have heard a pin drop in my new floating office over Las Vegas. Nothing is ever supposed to be that quiet in or above Las Vegas.

  Chapter Two

  I finally managed to choke out the most logical question we all had to be thinking, since we were all staring at Stan in shock. “Lady Luck is married?”

  “Separated, actually,” Stan said. “Centuries before I was born.”

  “His name?”

  Stan shrugged. “He’s gone by a lot of names over the centuries, just as Laverne has. Last I heard he liked Benny. Before that I think he went by Jonah. In Atlantis it was Belial.”

  “Evil one?” The Smoke asked, his voice almost a growl.

  “Not really,” Stan said. “Are you all familiar with the concept of Yin-Yang?”

  I was slightly, only because of that circle with the two black-and-white shapes inside it was sold as trinkets all over Vegas in just about every form.

  Everyone else nodded and Stan went on.

  Stan looked at me. “Ever wonder why you have as much bad luck as you have good over time?”

  I honestly hadn’t wondered that, or at least given it any meaning. I just knew it always balanced out in poker and skill always won out in the long run.

  “Benny is the God of Bad Luck?” Screamer asked.

  “Not really,” Stan said, shaking his head. “Any more than Laverne is only good luck. But Benny and Laverne must both exis
t for the other to exist. Yin-yang. Dark and Light. Masculine and feminine. Only down through time the two sides of that have been confused when it comes to sex.”

  I was confused as well, but managed to ask “How?”

  “Today the sunny, light side is called yang,” Stan said, “and is also associated with masculine. That got flipped. Actually, when all this started, yin was masculine and in the shadow while yang was sunny and feminine. The key is that everything stays on the Golden Mean.”

  “The middle between two extremes,” Patty said.

  “That’s right,” Stan said.

  I looked at my girlfriend in awe, then back at Stan. I had no doubt I could keep asking him questions and he could keep me confused for hours, And Patty could keep impressing me with her knowledge, but it seemed we had a task to do, so I needed to get that task in motion somehow.

  “So, why would Benny cut off connections between Laverne and Helen?”

  Stan shook his head. “I can’t think of one reason. They both love Helen.”

  “So if she went to visit her father,” Screamer asked, “where would she go?”

  “He lives right here,” Stan said. “You don’t see him out much. He has a walled compound over near the university. He mostly stays to the dark side.”

  “And we live on the sunny side?” I asked.

  Stan pointed at the clear blue sky around the booth.

  “Yin-Yang,” The Smoke said, his voice very soft as if he understood.

  I honestly didn’t, and I had no doubt Patty was going to have to help me understand later. But right at this moment, with Helen the Queen of Hearts missing, my understanding of ancient philosophy and aspects of how the gods work didn’t much matter. I hoped there would be time to learn it all. For some reason, this problem felt world-ending serious and I had no idea why.

  “Would crossing into the shadow side cause the connection to break?” I asked Stan.

  “And if we crossed over there, what would happen?” Patty asked.