Dinner at Deviant's Palace by Tim Powers

chuckled. “I see. Listen, I’m on my way to get some food. You hungry?”
    Rivas hoped that the quick gesture of touching his wallet looked spontaneous. “Uh, I guess not.”
    “You sure? The place I’m thinking of will give us each a big plate of machaca con juevos , on the house, no charge.” He winked. “And I can get us a table right next to the fire.”
    Rivas frowned. This was beginning to sound wrong. “Yeah? Where’s this?”
    “Oh, it’s a little place on Spring, run by some friends of mine.” The man yawned again and stretched his arms over his head and then let them fall—one of them landed, and stayed, around Rivas’s shoulders.
    Rivas’s mouth became a straight line. “Spring and what?”
    “Huh? Oh, only a couple of blocks from here, Spring and Main. A five minute—”
    “Right.” Rivas stepped out from under the man’s arm. “That would be the Boy’s Club. No thank you.” He strode off to find a different wall to lean on.
    But the man came hurrying after him. “You know about the place, huh? Well, listen, lad, this is no time for false pride. Let me just—”
    Rivas spun to face him, and he let the man see the knife he’d snatched from his right sleeve. “I can have it in your heart so fast you won’t have time to yell,” he remarked, not unkindly. “Vaya.”
    “Jesus, kid,” the man exclaimed, stepping back, “okay!” Once out of range of the knife he permitted himself to amble away insouciantly, and he called back over his shoulder, “But you could have had a friend!”
    I like the way, thought Rivas in almost honest puzzlement as he settled the knife back in its sleeve sheath and walked on, that every person in the world thinks his or her friendship is worth something. My God, if I really was a broke, hungry kid, I’d be a lot more chagrined at the loss of that breakfast.
    Earlier Rivas had noticed a gang of young people crouched around a fire under a canted stone arch beside the Relic Exchange, and when he glanced in that direction now he saw that one of the girls was walking toward him, smiling, her hands in the pockets of her long, pavement-sweeping dress.
    “Lost a friend, huh?” she asked when she was close enough to speak quietly and be heard.
    “Oh.” Rivas waved Vaguely. “I didn’t know him. He just came over and started talking to me.”
    “Are you hungry? Come and share our breakfast.”
    Rivas’s heart was thumping, for he suspected this might be the baited hook he’d been looking for, but he made himself look wistful as he said, “Well, I don’t have any money….”
    The girl put her hand on his shoulder and looked into his eyes. “Money is just the checkers in a game played by unhappy children,” she told him earnestly, and he turned away in case his sudden burst of feral satisfaction might show in his face—for he recognized her statement as one of the standard Jaybird come-along lines, unchanged since he’d first heard it on that lonely morning thirteen years ago. He’d later used it himself when out on recruiting expeditions.
    “That may be true,” he said, reciting a response to it that he remembered as being easy to counter, “but you need money to live.”
    “No,” she said gently, pulling him toward the leaning arch, “you’re exactly wrong. You need money to die . It’s love you need to live.”
    He laughed with sophomoric bitterness. “That’s even harder to find.”
    “Anything’s hard to find,” she told him, “if you don’t know where to look for it or what it is.”
    This girl’s smooth, Rivas thought as he allowed himself to be led toward the group of Jaybirds, who were all looking up now and smiling at him; the grime around her neck and wrists has been there a while, and the dress has been slept in, but the figure’s adequate, she delivers her lines with fair sincerity, and, despite her teeth, that smile is as bright as a lamp in a window on a stormy night, and it’s the only thing a hungry stray would notice