Chapter Three
Half an hour later, I
was still naked and still not enjoying it.
“Goddamn it, Marco!”
I croaked. “That hurts!”
“You don’t hold still
and it’s gonna scar, too.” The tone was harsh, but the large hand
on my abused derriere was gentle.
“Just be careful,
okay? That’s living flesh back there.” For the moment,
anyway.
“I’ll see what I can
do.”
I settled back onto
my stomach and tugged at the sheet that was supposed to be
protecting my modesty. It mostly wasn’t, but I was too tired and, I
suspected, too stoned to care. I knew the table I was lying on was
level, but it felt a lot like it was floating on the high seas,
thanks to the pills someone had given me and the two drinks I’d
washed them down with.
“Can you get seasick
lying still?” I wondered.
“If you’re gonna
hurl, you’re gonna tell me,” Marco said sternly.
“I’m not,” I said
with what dignity I could muster. Since I was sprawled naked on a
massage table while he dug glass out of my ass, it wasn’t
much.
“Just so we’re clear.
We got enough to clean up.”
This was
true.
We were back in the
suite, trashed as it was, because it had better wards than anywhere
else in the hotel. Not that they’d done any good this time, but for
the past month, they’d kept out most of the people who wanted my
head on a stick. So livable or not, it was where I was sleeping
tonight.
The vamps were trying
to sort things out, but it was a hell of a task. I watched through
the open door as a couple ran around, trying to catch the tattered
curtains that were billowing in through the ruined living room
window. At least, they were until one of the vampires muttered
something vicious and snatched down the last remaining rod, bolts
and all. He then tried to stuff it in a trash bag, but it didn’t
fit. So he crumpled it into a metal ball and made it fit. His buddy just looked at him with
crossed arms and slowly shook his head.
Another time, it
would have been funny. None of the guards were less than
third-level masters, which made them pretty much vamp nobility.
They were most definitely not used to carrying bags of trash,
sweeping floors and hauling out debris. But they wouldn’t let
anyone else near the suite, including maid service, so there wasn’t
a lot of choice. And, to their credit, not a single one had
complained.
Of course, that might
be because they hadn’t said anything at all. Most of them still
looked a little paler than usual, and occasionally I caught one
sneaking a glance at me as he passed. They were the kind of looks I
might have given a dangerous animal in the zoo that was a little
too close to the fence. Like they thought I might go for their
jugular at any moment and just wanted to be careful.
“I think they’re
scared of me,” I told Marco, as another one scurried past with the
same little eye flick.
“Not of you,” Marco corrected, tossing a blood-spotted
paper towel into the overflowing bin.
“What does that
mean?”
“It means you attract
enemies like rotten meat does flies.”
“That’s a nice
image!”
“And they’re not
normal enemies,” he complained. “Someone a guy can really pound.
They’re ghosts or demons or a fucking god, and my boys are good, but they don’t know how
to deal with that shit. It makes ’em feel helpless, and they hate
that.”
I didn’t exactly love
it, either, I didn’t say, because Marco was on a roll.
“And most of them
thought this would be a vacation. Free trip to Vegas, stay in a
luxury hotel, and all they gotta do is watch over the master’s
girlfriend. I mean, most of the time that means carrying her
shopping bags and being asked which color shoes goes best with her
purse, you know?”
I frowned. No, I
didn’t know. Their master and my significant other was pretty damn
chary about his romantic past. I knew he wasn’t inexperienced—at
five hundred years old, that would be kind of hard—but I didn’t
have many details. In fact, I didn’t have any, just some strong
suspicions, any or all of which might be wrong.
For some reason, it
had never occurred to me to ask Marco.
It occurred to me
now.
“You sound like
they’ve done this before.”
“That wasn’t my
point.”
“But have they? Have
you?” It was unsettling to think that I
might be just another in a long line of women Marco had babysat, at
least until they grew too old to hold the attention of their
perpetually thirtyish-looking boyfriend.
Really, really
unsettling.
“I don’t usually do
the bodyguard thing,” Marco evaded.
“But you’ve been
around a while, right?”
“Yeah.”
“So just how many
girlfriends has Mircea had?” I asked bluntly.
Marco sighed. “You
don’t want to go there.”
“Yeah, actually, I
think I do.”
“Then you want to go
there with him,” he told me flatly.
“But he isn’t here
and you are.” And the fact that Marco obviously didn’t want to
discuss it made me wonder just what kind of numbers we were talking
about. “I mean, how many can it have been?” I wondered aloud.
“Five, ten?”
Marco didn’t say
anything.
“Twenty?” I asked, a
little shrilly.
“You know, I forget,”
he replied. And then he stabbed me in the ass.
“Ow!”
“You want another
drink?” he asked, as a vamp came in carrying a tray with a decanter
on it.
“I want you to stop
gouging me with that thing!”
He held something in
front of my eyes. “See these? These are tweezers. They don’t
gouge.”
“Tell that to my
ass!”
“You want a drink or
not?”
“I want some coffee,”
I said resentfully, since I obviously wasn’t getting any answers. I
clutched the sheet to my chest and tried to peer over my shoulder
at my abused butt. And then I noticed the vamp looking, too.
“Hey!”
“He don’t mean
anything,” Marco said, as the man hurried out. “It’s just there,
you know?”
“And?”
“And we’re guys. We
look at women’s butts.”
“Are you looking at
my butt?” I asked suspiciously.
“I gotta look or I
can’t dig all the pieces out.”
“Then maybe we should
call for a doctor.”
Marco patted my
shoulder. “It’s okay. You aren’t my type.”
“What is your
type?”
“Someone who gets in
less trouble,” he said, as a sliver of glass rang in the ashtray he
was using as a receptacle. “I decided I was wrong. I don’t like the
wild side. I ain’t got the master’s stamina.”
“I don’t require
stamina.”
“Babe, you require a
freaking tank.”
I didn’t know what
that meant, but it didn’t sound complimentary. But before I could
ask, Pritkin came in with a mug that smelled like heaven. He handed
it to me, and I braced myself for his usual caffeine hammer to the
brain. This batch didn’t disappoint; after two sips I could already
feel my heart racing.
“It wasn’t demon,” he
told me, without preamble.
“The hell it wasn’t.”
Marco tossed another little sliver into the ashtray, more
forcefully than necessary. “The guys said it was like The Exorcist in here.”
“Amityville,” I muttered, but no one was
listening.
“They were wrong,”
Pritkin said shortly. He looked at me and frowned, then reached
over and brushed my curls out of my eyes. I smiled at him blearily,
which got a bigger frown for some reason. “You are certain it
wasn’t a ghost?”
I nodded. It was
about the only thing I was sure about.
“Can you describe
it?”
“Didn’t you see
it?”
He shook his head. “A
dark cloud, nothing more.”
“I didn’t see much
more than that.”
“Tell me what you
can. Anything would help at this point.”
I tried to think
back, but my head really hurt and the room was still swimmy and
there just wasn’t that much to remember. “It was dark colored,” I
said slowly. “Black or gray. Or really dark blue. And it had
feathers—I think.” I racked my brain, but I wasn’t getting anything
else. “It was big?”
“What about your
servant? Did he see anything?”
It took me a second
to realize that he meant Billy Joe. Pritkin had this weird idea
that Billy was for me what an enslaved demon was for a mage—a
capable, obedient servant who stayed unruffled in the face of
adversity. When the truth was pretty much exactly the opposite. As
soon as the crisis was over, Billy had fled into his necklace and I
hadn’t seen him since.
I gave him a little
poke, just for the hell of it, and got back the metaphysical
version of the finger. “Billy doesn’t know anything,” I
translated.
“Are you
certain?”
Tell him to suck my balls!
“Pretty
certain.”
Pritkin ran a hand
through his hair. It was sweaty, and although he’d put on a pair of
old jeans, they didn’t cover the marks from being hurled through a
wall. He looked about as beat up as I felt.
A particularly livid
bruise trailed up his rib cage and wrapped around his back—where
he’d hit the wall, I assumed. He was standing close enough that I
could reach out and touch it, so I did. It was hot under my
fingertips—Pritkin was always a little warmer than human
standard—for the instant before he moved away.
I let my hand drop.
“You should get that seen to. You might have broken a
rib.”
“It’s fine,” he said
curtly, as another vamp came in carrying a phone.
“For you,” the man
told me, his eyes already sliding south.
“Is there anyone in this apartment who hasn’t seen me
naked?” I demanded, grabbing the sheet and the
phone.
“I genuinely hope so,
Cassandra.”
I sighed and let my
head thunk down against the padded surface of the table. I could
always tell how Mircea was feeling based on what version of my name
he chose to use. When he was in a good mood, it was dulceață, the Romanian endearment that
colloquially translated as “sweetheart” or “dear one.” When he was
less happy, it was plain old Cassie. And when he was royally pissed
but not showing it because he was Prince Mircea Basarab, member of
the powerful North American Vampire Senate and allaround cool guy,
it was Cassandra.
“Cassandra” was never
good.
But this time, it
wasn’t my fault.
“This time, it isn’t
my fault,” I told him, wincing as Marco found another heretofore
untortured cut.
“I am not calling to
assign blame.”
“Then why the
‘Cassandra’?”
“You frightened me.
For a few moments, I could not feel you.”
I frowned at the
phone. “You’re in New York. How are you supposed to feel
me?”
“Through the
bond.”
“We have a
bond?”
A sigh. “Of course we
have a bond, dulceață. You are my
wife.”
By vampire standards,
I didn’t say, because that always got a
Cassandra. The ceremony, if you could call it that, had been over
before I fully knew what was happening. But that didn’t matter,
because little things like the bride’s consent aren’t required in
vampire marriages.
Except, that is, by
me.
That was why Mircea
and I were dating—or, at least, that’s why I was doing it, to
figure out whether this whole relationship thing was something I
could handle. He was doing it to humor me, when he remembered,
although he clearly thought the whole thing was ridiculous. Mircea
had been born in an era when men took what they wanted and kept it,
as long as they were strong enough. And strength had never been one
of his problems.
Listening, on the
other hand . . .
“I listen,” a velvet
voice murmured in my ear.
I bent my head and
let my hair fall over the phone. It wasn’t much as privacy went,
but around here, it was as good as it got. “Uh-huh.”
“And what does that
mean?” he asked, sounding amused.
“It means ‘that’s
bullshit,’ but I’m too high to think of a good comeback right now,”
I said honestly.
“High?”
“Blitzed, baked,
stoned . . .”
“I understood the
term,” Mircea said, his voice sharpening. “My question was
why?”
I hesitated. The
truth was, I’d been pretty near hysterical when I woke up. I was
getting better in crises, mainly because I’d had a lot of practice
lately. But afterward . . .
I still had problems
with afterward.
“Marco thought it
best,” I finally said.
Mircea didn’t seem to
like that answer. “I will speak with Marco,” he said grimly. “But
for the present, I am more concerned about the attack this evening.
I have heard my men’s report, such as it was. I would like to have
yours.”
It was my turn to
sigh. “I don’t know. It wasn’t a ghost; that much I’m sure of. And
Pritkin swears it wasn’t a demon.”
“There are thousands
of types of demons, Cassie. He cannot possibly be
certain—”
“He’s pretty
certain,” I said drily.
“—and you have
recently had problems with several of them. A demon is the most
likely culprit.”
“I think we should
trust Pritkin’s judgment on this one,” I said, because I couldn’t
say anything else. That Pritkin was half demon himself wasn’t
exactly universally known, but what type he was wasn’t known to
anyone but me.
I intended to keep it
that way.
“I am not so
certain,” Mircea said, sounding sour. “But I would speak with the
man. Can you put him on?”
I really didn’t think
that was a great idea, considering that Pritkin and Mircea mixed
like oil and water, only not as well. But I passed the phone over,
anyway. I didn’t get much of the resulting conversation, both
because it was pretty terse on Pritkin’s end, and because Marco had
started the extraction process again.
“There can’t possibly
be that many pieces of glass in my ass,” I gritted out, after a
couple of agonizing minutes.
“Babe, it’s like you
rolled in it.”
“It was all over the
floor!”
“And when that’s the
case, it’s best to avoid the floor,” he said drily, digging what
felt like an inch into my tender rear.
“I’ll keep it in mind
the next time I get possessed by an evil entity!”
“Demon,” Marco said,
sounding final.
“It wasn’t a demon,”
Pritkin argued, but I couldn’t tell if he was talking to Marco or
Mircea. “Yes, I’m bloody well sure!”
Mircea.
“Okay, this is going
to sting a little,” Marco told me, right before he set my butt on
fire.
“Shit, shit,
shit!”
“Gotta disinfect it,”
he said imperturbably. “You’re not a vamp. You could get an
infection.”
“In what? You just
burnt my ass off!”
“He wants to talk to
you,” Pritkin said, looking grim.
I took the phone
back. “What?”
“Cassie?”
Mircea wasn’t
accustomed to getting that tone from women, but I was too sore—in
several ways—to care. “If Pritkin says it wasn’t a demon, then it
wasn’t a demon. Goddamnit, Mircea! He ought to know!”
“And why is that,
dulceață?” Mircea asked smoothly.
And, okay, maybe I was going to have to revise that list. Because
sometimes Mircea also used my pet name when he was being
sneaky.
“He’s a demon
hunter,” I said, forcing myself to calm down before I said anything
stupid. Well, anything stupider, anyway. “It’s his job to
know.”
“I will have my
people check into all possibilities,” Mircea said, and I really
hoped he was talking about the entity. “In the meantime, I need
your promise that you will not leave the hotel.”
“Mircea, I was
attacked at the hotel. How is staying
here going to—”
“The guards will be
doubled.”
“You could have
tripled them—you could have had a guard per square foot—and it
wouldn’t have made a difference! No one could have
predicted—”
“We should have
predicted it,” he said harshly. “We knew there would be an attack.
I simply did not expect it so early. The coronation isn’t for
another ten days.”
“But why wait until
the last second?”
Mircea didn’t say
anything, but the very pregnant pause made it clear that he didn’t
think that was funny.
Of course, he didn’t
find too much funny these days. He was currently trying to
negotiate the first worldwide alliance of vampire senates. It was
what he’d been working on all month, what he was doing in New York,
where a lot of the senators had gathered for some kind of meeting
prior to the coronation. But as formidable as his diplomatic skills
were, there was no doubt that he was up against it. The senates had
had centuries to plot and scheme and piss one another off, and
they’d apparently done a pretty good job of it.
And nobody holds a
grudge like a master vamp.
Add to that the
ongoing war and now the coronation that was scheduled to be held at
his estate, and it would have been enough to give anyone a
headache. I didn’t want to add to his problems. And what he asked
was easy enough.
It wasn’t like I’d be
safer anyplace else.
“I’ll stay put,” I
promised.
“Good. Then I shall
see you tomorrow night.”
“Tomorrow? I thought
you wouldn’t be back for a week.”
“That was my
intention, but . . . I have obtained the information you
requested.” For a moment, it didn’t register, because I couldn’t
recall asking Mircea about anything. Except—
I suddenly sat
up.
And just as suddenly
regretted it. I gasped and Marco cursed. “Hold still!” he told me,
pushing me back down. That was okay, because it gave me a chance to
get my face under control.
“About our date,”
Mircea’s voice clarified unnecessarily.
“Oh. Right.” My voice
sounded normal enough, but I felt my palm start to sweat where I
clutched the phone. Because what I’d asked him for wasn’t the usual
dinner and a movie. I hadn’t really thought he’d be able to pull it
off—or that he’d be willing, for that matter. But Mircea never
ceased to surprise.
I wanted details,
wanted specifics, but I couldn’t ask for them. Not with Pritkin’s
eyes on me from across the room. If he knew what I planned, I had
no doubt at all that he’d try to stop me. And while that would
probably be the smart thing, it wasn’t the right thing. Not this
time.
“What should I wear?”
I asked, hoping that was safe.
“Classic formal
attire.”
“Okay. I look forward
to it,” I told him, and rang off.
Marco finished his
little torture session a moment later and bandaged me up. I
cautiously moved into a sitting position, and it still wasn’t fun.
But I was too distracted to really notice.
“We’ll get you one of
them little doughnut things,” he told me, as Pritkin walked over.
And, shit, his eyes were narrowed.
“So if it wasn’t a
ghost and it wasn’t a demon, what was it?” I asked, to forestall
any inconvenient questions.
To my surprise, it
worked. “I have a theory, but I would prefer some
confirmation.”
“What
theory?”
“Do you remember how
we defeated it?” he asked, as I tucked the sheet around me and slid
to the floor.
“I remember you threw
something at me.”
“It was half of a
nunchuck. I’ve been intending to get the chain re-soldered, but
haven’t had time.”
“Half a nunchuck?” I
frowned. “Why would you give me that?” It wasn’t like I could bash
a spirit over the head with it.
Green eyes met mine,
and they were serious enough to stop me. “Because it was the only
thing I had within reach that was made of cold iron.”