Chapter Twenty
I thought there was a
good chance the fridge was possessed.
It was subtle about
it, but I had its number. I knew its ways. Oh yes.
“How the hell did
nobody hear him?” someone demanded harshly. I couldn’t see who it
was because he was outside the kitchen. But it sounded sort of like
Marco. Or like Marco might sound if he wanted to bite someone’s
head off their body.
One of the vamps must
have thought so, too, because he was awfully tentative when he
answered. “He . . . apparently, the mage threw a silence spell over
the lounge. We couldn’t hear any—”
“I’m more interested
in why you couldn’t see. All of you
congregated in one place, with not a single fucking one watching
your fucking charge—”
“The apartment was
supposed to be empty!” Another, slightly less cowed voice said.
“And she hates it when we hover—”
“Then you play pool,
you play cards, you watch without making it obvious. But you
fucking well watch!” Something crashed into a wall.
Nobody said anything
that time. Or maybe I just wasn’t listening. After all, someone had
to keep an eye on the fridge.
There were slash
marks in the front, spaced evenly like evil eyes, glowing with
yellow light from the inside. And that couldn’t be the usual fridge
light, could it? Wasn’t that supposed to go out when the door was
closed? I thought I saw something move behind one of the slashes,
but then I blinked and it was gone.
Oh yes. I
knew.
Pritkin came in and
knelt by my chair. “You can’t go to sleep yet, Cassie,” he told me,
handing me a heart murmur in a mug. It smelled good, but not good
enough to wake up for. I mumbled something and turned over, burying
my face in the nice, warm shoulder someone had thoughtfully
provided.
Only to be hauled up
again.
So I sighed and
snuggled into a nice, warm chest instead.
“Drink.” My hands
were wrapped around the mug.
I pushed it away.
“Don’ wanna. Wanna sleep.”
“Not
yet.”
“Then why am I in
bed?”
He sighed and pulled
me to a sitting position, putting the mug firmly in my hands. “A
healer is coming and he wants you to stay awake until he arrives,
all right?”
I drank some too-hot
coffee and scowled at him, annoyed although I couldn’t remember
why. The light from the lounge was leaking in, highlighting his
spiky blond hair. I decided that must be it.
“You really hate my
hair, don’t you?” he asked, a smile flickering over his lips so
fast I might have imagined it.
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
I reached out to
touch it, and was surprised as always to find it mostly soft. Just
a little stiff in places from whatever product he used on it. It
felt weird, imagining Pritkin having anything in his hair but
sweat. But he must have; nobody’s did that all on its
own.
“It’s like . . .
angry hair,” I said, trying to pat it down and failing
miserably.
He caught my wrist.
“Most people would say that suits me.”
“I’m not most
people.”
“I
know.”
I went back to
watching the fridge. I could see the door over Pritkin’s shoulder,
and it wasn’t closed after all. It was very slightly open, like a
panting mouth. And some kind of multicolored mucus was dripping out
the bottom.
Condiments, I told
myself firmly.
Or so it wanted me to
think.
“Dryden’s finished
hugging the toilet,” one of the vamps said, walking into the
kitchen. “Do we need to dose her, too?”
“She took care of
that herself,” Marco said, joining the party. He’d pulled off the
barfed-on shirt but hadn’t yet bothered to go to his room for
another one. That left him in dark gray slacks, a pair of Ferragamo
loafers and a lot of hair.
A lot of hair. It was even on his shoulders. It was
like a pelt.
He crouched down on
the other side of me. “You’re really hairy,” I told him,
impressed.
“And you’re really
stoned.”
I thought about that
for a moment. It seemed like an outside possibility. “Why am I
stoned?”
“It was the goddamned
chocolates. I always taste everything before you eat it, yet I sat
right there and watched you scarf half the damn—”
“You couldn’t
know.”
“It’s my goddamned
job to know!”
I sighed and pulled
his curly head to me. He was warm and fuzzy, like a big teddy bear.
A big teddy bear with fangs.
I patted him
softly.
“Why didn’t the wards
detect that shit?” one of the other guards demanded angrily. He was
a redhead, his fiery hair worn in a slick style that went with his
natty blue-plaid suit. He was one of the ones who had made fun of
the mage when he first arrived, but who’d let him follow us in. I
wondered if he’d caught flak for that.
Probably.
“They detect poison,”
Pritkin told him. “This was a narcotic.”
“What the hell was
the point in that?”
“Probably hoped she’d
eat enough to kill her,” Marco said savagely. “Don’t have to be
poison to do the job if you consume enough of it! But even one or
two pieces would make sure she couldn’t shift away from that
asshole.”
“That asshole ate
half the box himself,” Pritkin said, “hoping he’d pass out before
that creature could make use of him.”
“Then why the hell
didn’t he?”
“He doubtless would
have, given more time. Unfortunately, our meeting broke up too soon
and Cassie found the box—”
A phone rang. Marco
pulled it out of his pocket and looked at the readout. “I gotta get
the rest of my ass chewed off by the master,” he told me. “Think
you can maybe not die for five minutes?”
“I’ll try,” I told
him seriously.
“You know, if anyone
else said that, it would be funny.” He left.
“What I don’t get is
how that thing knew that particular mage would get in,” another
vamp said. He was a tall brunet in nice tan jacket that was now
covered in beer. “We’d been tossing them out on their
fortune-hunting asses all day. He’d have gone the same way if he
hadn’t shown up with the Lord Protector.”
“Maybe that’s what it
was waiting for,” a third vamp said, glancing around. He was
another brunet, in shirtsleeves and dark brown slacks. A bright
blue tie was askew under one ear, but he didn’t appear to have
noticed. “It could have been there all morning, watching us,
waiting for someone to get in. . . .”
“Someone who just
happened to have poisoned chocolates?” the redhead asked
sarcastically.
“They weren’t
poisoned,” the brunet said, scowling. “And he could have gotten
them—”
“Where? At the gift
shop?” The redhead rolled his eyes. “Yes, I’ll take the drugged
kind, please. Do you have any in mint?”
“Very
funny!”
“Well, you sound like
an idiot! Obviously, the bastard brought them with him, meaning
this wasn’t random opportunity. It was planned.”
“I agree,” Pritkin
said, causing their heads to swivel back his way. “But not by
him.”
“You would say that,”
the redhead sneered. “Then where did he get the damn
things?”
“He brought the candy
with him, but it wasn’t drugged. He said he did that later, under
the influence of the entity.”
“With what?”
Pritkin reached into
a pocket and tossed something to the vamp, who caught it easily. It
was a little vial, the type war mages wore in bandoliers or on
their belts. A lot of them were filled with dark, sludgy substances
that sometimes moved on their own, but this one was just plain,
colorless liquid.
“And this does what?”
the vamp asked, wisely not opening it.
Pritkin didn’t reply.
He just knelt beside me, green eyes assessing. He held up a finger.
“Cassie, can you tell me how many—”
I grabbed it and
laughed.
He looked over his
shoulder at the vamp. “That,” he said drily.
“What the hell was he
carrying this shit around for?” the second vamp
demanded.
“It’s useful in
making captures, subduing difficult prisoners.” Pritkin
shrugged.
“Then . . . this is a
weapon.”
“Yes.”
“But he was going on
a date.”
Pritkin looked
confused. “Yes?”
The redhead threw his
hands up.
“How do we know the
mage was really possessed?” a skinny blond asked, leaning over the
counter. “Maybe somebody hired him—”
“He’s been in the
Corps for seventeen years,” Pritkin said.
“And mages can’t be
bribed?”
“He also comes from a
wealthy, prominent family. He has no need—”
“That guy?” the blond asked
incredulously.
“He didn’t dress like
it,” the redhead sniffed.
“Not everyone cares
about such things,” Pritkin said.
The redhead looked
him over. “Obviously.”
“Blackmail, then,”
Tan Jacket put in. “Maybe somebody had something on
him.”
“There will be an
investigation,” Pritkin told him. “But his actions speak for him.
If—”
“His actions? He
tried to kill her!”
“He tried to save
her. Not only did he attempt to eat the chocolates whenever he was
lucid enough, but he also slowed down his reflexes in the fight,
skewed his aim. And when she ran, he threw a nonlethal spell
instead of a fireball. He fought it every step of the
way—”
“And we know this
how? Because he told you?” Tan Jacket interrupted.
“We know this because
she’s still alive!” Pritkin snapped. “Essentially, he and Cassie
were both fighting it. He bought her time, and she used it,
brilliantly.”
He bent over and
topped off my coffee cup. Pritkin hadn’t shaved for a few days, and
I put my hand to his cheek. “Fuzzy,” I told him
seriously.
He
sighed.
“I don’t understand
why this thing needed to hitch a ride in the first place,” the
redhead said. “If it’s powerful enough to possess a war
mage—”
“Anyone can be
possessed if his guard is down,” Pritkin said curtly. “And no one’s
is up every minute.”
“It didn’t possess
one of us,” the vamp pointed out snottily.
“Vampires are more
difficult,” Pritkin admitted. “You can
be possessed, but it takes considerably more energy than possessing
a human. The creature might not have had the strength to manage it
and also force you to attack.”
“But why did it need
someone else to attack at all? If it’s such a big, bad evil entity,
why not go after her itself?”
“It already tried
that—” Pritkin said.
“It tried to possess
her, not simply attack her. If it can get past the wards, why not
go for an all-out assault?”
Pritkin shrugged. “In
Faerie, it doubtless would have. But outside its own world, its
power is weakened.”
“We still don’t know
that it’s Fey,” the vamp said.
“Yes, we do,” a new
voice said hoarsely.
I looked up to find a
slim blond figure standing in the doorway to the kitchen. For a
frozen second, I looked at him and he looked at me, and then I
screamed and threw my coffee, which hit him square in the groin.
And I guess that didn’t feel too good because he screamed, too, and
for a minute there was a whole lot of screaming going
on.
Then Pritkin put a
heavy hand on my shoulder and I belatedly noticed that Dryden was
flanked by a couple of vamps, each of whom had one of his arms. It
looked less like they were restraining him than holding him up. And
then I noticed other things, like the fact that his eyes were back
to blue and his nose was all bloody and he was pale and shaky and
his nice suit was torn and dripping coffee.
He smelled like hot
sauce.
“Sorry,” I told
him.
Dryden didn’t say
anything. He just stood there and shook at me.
Pritkin handed him
some paper towels. “How do you know?”
Dryden swallowed and
dabbed at his crotch. “My . . . my great-grandmother was Fey,” he
said shakily. “Somehow, it knew that. It tried to talk to
me—”
“About
what?”
“I’m . . . not sure.
I—”
“You don’t know the
language?”
“A little,
but—”
“Then take a
guess!”
“That’s what I’m
trying to do, if you’ll give me a chance!” he snapped, tossing the
wet paper towels in the trash. “I only caught maybe one word in
ten, but I think . . . I think it was trying to
apologize.”
“Apologize?” The
redheaded vamp sneered. “For what?”
Dryden scowled and
flailed a hand angrily. “For this? For
almost getting me killed? For almost making me—” he broke off and
glanced at me, and his lips tightened. “I don’t know. I didn’t get
that much. Just something like ‘they made me do it,’ and that she
was afraid of them—”
“She?” the vamp
asked.
“Yes. It . . . She .
. . I think it was female. It was using the female form of address,
anyway. Like I told you, my grasp of the language isn’t good and
that goes double for the High Court dialect—”
“High Court?” That
was Pritkin.
“It’s the version of
the language spoken at court—”
“I know what it is,”
Pritkin snapped. “How did you recognize it?”
“Because my
grandmother spoke it!”
“And your grandmother
was?”
“A Selkie
noblewoman.”
Pritkin cursed. “Dark
Fey.”
The mage didn’t deign
to respond to that. He looked at me and took a deep breath. “Before
I left, I just wanted to say . . . thank you.” It came out a little
strangled.
I thought about it
for a moment. “You’re welcome?”
“Do you know what I’m
thanking you for?”
Damn. I’d hoped he
wouldn’t ask that. It couldn’t be for lunch, since we’d never had
any.
And I guessed we
wouldn’t now, what with a possessed fridge and all.
“No?” I said,
figuring I had a fifty-fifty shot.
He knelt in front of
my chair, or maybe his legs collapsed; I don’t know. He wasn’t
looking so good. “I know what that is,” he said hoarsely, nodding
at my wrist, where my bracelet of interlocking knives lay hard and
cold against my skin. “It’s my job at the Corps to disenchant
confiscated dark objects and . . . I’ve seen one like it
before.”
His eyes searched my
face. He seemed to be waiting on some kind of response. So I
nodded.
“You could have
killed me,” he said. And then he kissed my hand. “Thank
you.”
He just stayed like
that for a while, head down, on one knee, like a supplicant in
front of a priest. Or like a guy making a marriage proposal. I
started to get nervous. Because the last thing I needed was another
one of those.
I decided to let him
down easy.
“You seem like a nice
guy,” I told him. “I mean, you know, when you’re not trying to kill
me. I just . . .” I sighed and came out with it. “I just really
don’t want to date you.”
He suddenly looked
up. His eyes were wet, but his smile was blinding. “Then it seems I
have something else to thank you for.”