Chapter Twenty-one
According to the
alarm clock on my nightstand, I slept for seven hours, despite
already having slept for most of the day. It was almost midnight
when I rolled out, groggy and thickheaded and gritty-eyed and
yucky. And saw a man in the corner of my room.
I didn’t scream,
because the man was a) sitting down, b) reading a paper and c) had
the golden-eyed glow typical of Mircea’s masters. I just snatched
up the sheet, because I’d been too high to worry about pj’s, and
scanned the room for more. But I didn’t see any, unless they were
hiding in the closet or under the bed.
And wasn’t that just
a fun thought?
“What are you doing
here?” I demanded after a moment.
He didn’t bother to
reply, just flipped over another page.
“You’re not supposed
to be in my room!”
Nothing.
Talking to a vamp
who’s not in the mood is one of life’s biggest time wasters, so I
didn’t try. I also didn’t attempt to budge him, because master
vamps go wherever they damn well please. I just wrapped the sheet
around me and dragged myself off to the bathroom.
I stood in the cool
air for a minute while my eyes adjusted to the brilliant light on
all that tile. But even after they did, I still stayed where I was,
one hand on the doorknob, like I was waiting for something. It
finally occurred to me that I was expecting another freak-out, only
my body didn’t seem interested. It felt chilly and kind of achy and
kind of high. But not particularly panicked. I gave it a little
longer, until I started to feel stupid; then I dropped the sheet
and checked out the damage.
It wasn’t all that
bad. Other than putting a new bruise on my ass and a lump on my
head, I’d come out pretty good this round. Whatever is trying to
kill me is obviously going to have to step up its game, I thought
viciously, and looked in the mirror.
And
swore.
I might not have been
too beaten up, but I still looked like hell, especially my hair.
Not only was it still faintly green, but it was now missing a large
chunk. I pushed it around for a while with clumsy fingers, but
nothing seemed to help. I tried parting it different, but the only
way that kind of worked looked suspiciously like a middle-aged
guy’s comb-over. And it still left me looking like something had
taken a bite out of my head.
Damn it all! Not so
long ago, my hair had been a shimmering red-gold wave that cascaded
down my back like a cloak. It had been my one claim to real beauty,
and I’d cried like a baby when I had to cut it while on the run
from Tony, because it was too recognizable.
I didn’t cry this
time. I was too freaking mad. I just brushed my teeth, washed my
face and dragged my big wad of fabric back to the
bedroom.
The vamp still didn’t
say anything, and neither did I. I also didn’t turn on a light,
which was stupid, because he could probably see about the same
either way. But it made me feel more naked to have it on, which was
why it took five minutes of hunting and grumbling and falling and
cursing around in the closet to find what I wanted.
I finally emerged
with an old Georgia Bulldogs baseball cap, a pair of silky blue
track shorts and a faded pink tank top from my comfort-clothes
stash. None of it matched, but right then, I didn’t give a damn. I
hauled everything back to the bathroom, and after dressing and
combing and slapping on some mascara, I decided I looked mostly
normal.
If normal people had
green hair and wore hats indoors.
The vamp folded his
paper and got to his feet when I started out the door, even though
there was another guard just outside. He was leaning against the
wall, smoking a cigarette, looking bored and butt-sore. He didn’t
say anything and neither did I. I just padded across the hall to
the living room, because stomping doesn’t work so well in bare feet
and on carpet.
The rest of the crew
was in the lounge, playing cards. Of course they were. I felt like
asking them if that’s how they’d envisioned spending eternity, but
I had other things on my mind.
Marco was sitting at
the card table, doing one of his fancy shuffles. He looked up and a
smile quirked at the corner of his mouth. “What?” I
demanded.
“You and the bulldog
got the same expression.”
“Very funny! What the
hell—”
He held up a hand.
“First of all, how you doing?”
“I’m fine! Or I would
be if—”
“You sure? We got the
doc on standby.”
I scowled. That was
where that sadist could stay, too. “No, thanks. And can
we—”
“You hungry? ’Cause
we got Chinese coming.”
“Marco—”
“Not from room
service; from that little place around the corner. Kung pao
chicken, ginger beef—”
“Marco!”
He sighed and gave it
up. “I told the master this was how you were gonna react. But you
gotta see that it makes sense, at least until we figure this thing
out.”
“It does not make
sense! There’s nobody in the apartment but us, and the creature
can’t possess a vamp—”
“We don’t know
that.”
“—or it would have
already done it instead of hanging around the foyer, waiting for
Mr. Mage to show up.”
“Mr. Mage,” one of
the vamps said. “I like that. I’m gonna start calling all of ’em
that.”
“I can think of a few
things to call them,” another one muttered.
“And if you think it
can possess a vamp, this makes even
less sense,” I pointed out. “You just left me alone in my room with
one for hours!”
“You’re right,” he
told me.
“I am?”
“Yeah. We obviously
need two.”
“Marco!”
He held up placating
hands. “Just kidding.”
“This isn’t funny.
It’s like being a freaking prisoner!”
He started to answer,
but the phone rang. It wasn’t the main line, but a black cell phone
sitting on the card table. Marco picked it up, glanced at the
readout, scowled and hung up. He looked at me. “Better than being a
freaking corpse.”
“Didn’t you hear me?
This isn’t going to help!”
“It will if that
thing goes after you. It already possessed you once—”
“And won’t again.” I
pulled out Pritkin’s little amulet. He’d left me another one before
he took the mage off to the Corps’ version of a hospital. It might
be stinky, but I liked it a lot better than the
alternative.
“That only works on
Fey,” Marco pointed out, wrinkling his nose.
“Which this thing
is.”
“Which this thing may
be. That ain’t been decided yet.”
“It spoke in a Fey
dialect—”
“And demons don’t
know that shit? If it’s trying to throw us off, of course it’s
gonna pretend to be something else.”
“Or maybe it really
was trying to communicate.”
“For what? To
apologize?” Marco’s tone said clearly what he thought about that.
He dealt another round. “Anyway, until we get some solid proof of
what we’re dealing with here, the master don’t want to take
chances.”
“That isn’t his call.
It’s my life!”
“Yeah, well. You’re
gonna have to take that up with him.”
I put my hands on my
hips. “Fine, I will. Get him on the phone.”
“Can’t.”
“And why
not?”
“He’s in a high-level
meeting—”
“How
convenient.”
“—and told me not to
disturb him until morning.”
“Then get a note to
him.”
“That would be
disturbing.”
“Damn it,
Marco!”
The phone rang. He
glanced at it, sighed and put it back down again. “Look, it’s only
for a little while—”
“Oh, please!” I
couldn’t believe he was trying that. “Sell it to someone else. I
know how these things work!”
He took his smelly
cigar out of his mouth and rested it on the ashtray. “And how do
they work?”
“I go along with this
now, and I’ll have Mutt and Jeff here dogging my every step for the
rest of my damn life!”
The taller vamp
looked at the shorter one. “Guess that makes you
Jeff.”
“I ain’t no Jeff. He
was a crazy little bugger.”
“Well, Mutt was an
idiot.”
“They were both
idiots, and shut up,” Marco told them. He looked at me. “You know I
don’t have any say over this. But you’re already up now, so it
don’t matter anyway. And you can talk to the master in the
morning.”
I just stood there
for a moment, debating options. Because giving in, even for a few
hours, wasn’t smart. Give a vamp an inch and he wouldn’t take a
mile; he’d take the whole damn continent.
My stomach
growled.
“Kung pao chicken,”
Marco wheedled.
The
bastard.
Mircea and I clearly
needed to have a conversation, but I also needed to eat. And only
one was currently available. And I was starving.
“Sweet-and-sour
pork—”
“Oh, shut up,” I told
him.
He
grinned.
I sighed. “You order
egg rolls?”
Marco spread his
hands. “Please.”
I decided that I’d
bargain better on a full stomach, and swiped a beer. He dealt me
in, and I grabbed a chair before looking at my cards hopefully.
Nothing—not even a pair of twos.
Typical.
The phone
rang.
“Can’t you turn that
off?” one of the guards groused. He was an attractive blond I
didn’t recognize. Probably one of the new guys.
“It’s my private
line. Could be important,” Marco told him tersely.
“Your private line?
How the hell—”
“I don’t know, but
I’m getting it changed tomorrow. Just play your
cards.”
“I would if I ever
got any worth a damn,” the guy muttered.
They anted up. I
folded. The phone rang.
“Damn it, Marco! I
can’t play with that thing going off every five
seconds!”
“Then don’t play,”
Marco told him.
“Just tell the mage
to go fuck himself—”
“What mage?” I asked,
and everyone froze.
“Thank you,” Marco
told the guy viciously.
The phone rang. Marco
had left it on the table, and it had jittered its way over to me.
So I picked it up. “Don’t,” he said.
I flipped it open and
checked the readout. PRITKIN. I shot Marco a look and put the phone
to my ear. “Hel—”
“Goddamnit, Marco,
you’re supposed to be—” He cut off abruptly. “Cassie?”
“What is it?” I
asked, feeling my heart rate speed up.
“There’s no
emergency—not right now,” he said, apparently hearing the alarm in
my voice. “But I need to see you. I’m coming up.”
“The hell you are,”
Marco said, grabbing back the phone. “I already told
you—”
“I want to see him,”
I said, crossing my arms.
Marco looked at me,
clearly frustrated. “You need to rest!”
“I’m playing cards
and drinking beer. How is that not resting?”
“You were gonna go
back to bed soon.”
“I slept all
day!”
The doorbell
rang.
Marco got to his
feet, looking conflicted.
“What are you going
to do—bar the door?” I asked, also standing up.
“I got orders,” he
said defensively.
“Mircea told you to
lock Pritkin out?”
“Just for tonight. He
don’t want the mage here while you’re vulnerable.”
“He’s my bodyguard!
When I’m vulnerable is when I need him!”
“Look, you really
gotta—”
“Take that up with
Mircea,” I finished for him.
“Yeah.”
“Fine. I will.” I
pressed the menu button on Marco’s phone.
“Cassie—”
And there it was. I
hit the button. The phone rang.
“Yes?” The familiar
voice was smooth, with no sign of irritation. Not yet.
“You said you weren’t
going to do this.”
There was a pause.
“Cassandra.”
“Wow, we just leapt
right to it there, didn’t we?” I asked, furious.
“You are supposed to
be asleep.”
“I was. And then I
got up to discover that I’m a prisoner.”
“You are not a
prisoner.”
“Then I can
leave?”
Another pause. “In
the morning, when you can shift.”
“So I’m only a
prisoner for the night, is that it?”
“It is for your
protection.”
“And how does that
work, exactly? I’ve been assaulted twice. And where have they both
been again?”
“You were vulnerable
the first time due to our ignorance of the threat. You were
vulnerable the second because a mage
provided a conduit for the creature—”
“And that explains
why I can’t see Pritkin?”
A third pause. That
had to be some kind of record. Mircea usually had the defense
prepared.
“No. Considering the
probable nature of the entity that has been attacking you, I
consider the warlock to be a threat in his own right.”
“The
what?”
“He had a demon
servant at one time, did he not? Encased in that battle golem he
devised?”
I frowned. “I
guess.”
“Then he is a
warlock, not merely a mage. Only warlocks can summon demons to
their aid.”
“Is there a
point?”
“Merely that warlocks
are a notoriously unstable class. They are prone to strange
behavior, increasingly so as they age, with some going mad over
time. It is one reason that many mages avoid the specialization,
despite the added power it gives them.”
“But Jonas had a
golem once,” I protested. “He told me so.”
“Forgive me, Cassie,
but Jonas Marsden is hardly an example of well-adjusted
behavior!”
Point.
“And we are
discussing the warlock Pritkin.”
Actually, we weren’t.
Because Pritkin wasn’t a warlock. His ability with demons came not
through some arcane magic, but because he was half demon himself.
His father was Rosier, Lord of the Incubi, which made Pritkin sort
of a demon prince. Or something. I really didn’t know what it made
him, since he hated that part of his lineage and almost never
talked about it. But I didn’t think mentioning that I was being
guarded by the son of a prince of hell was likely to go
well.
Of course, neither
was this.
“He’s a
friend.”
“Those creatures are
not friends, Cassie! They are selfserving,
power-hungry—”
“They say the same
thing about vamps.”
“—and unpredictable.
Not to mention that this one may well be part demon
himself.”
“What?”
“That is the rumor
Kit has been hearing. And it would explain why he heals so quickly,
how he has lived—”
“A lot of people are
part one thing, part another—”
“But most of them
don’t bother to cover up large areas of their past. Yet despite all
of Kit’s efforts, he has been unable to discover anything about the
man before the last century—”
“Because he wasn’t
born then!”
“We both know that
isn’t the case.”
I didn’t say
anything. Mircea had recently seen Pritkin on a trip we’d taken
back in time. And while mages tended to live a century or more
longer than most humans, it was kind of hard to explain why he’d
aged maybe five years in a couple hundred.
Of course, I didn’t
intend to try. I didn’t think that explaining that Pritkin had been
in hell for much of his life was likely to make him seem more
trustworthy.
“I would like you to
consider dismissing the man,” Mircea said suddenly. It caught me
off guard, which I suspected was the point.
“I can’t do
that.”
“Cassie—”
“I need him,” I said
flatly. “If he hadn’t been training me, I might have
died—”
“Or you might not
have been in danger at all. Have you noticed that your problems
with demonkind always seem to come when the warlock is
around?”
“What are you
suggesting?”
“That perhaps he is
the source of the threat, rather than its solution.”
“That’s
ridiculous!”
“Is it? I know only
that every time you have trouble with demons, he is
there.”
“He’s my bodyguard!
He’s supposed to be—”
“You have
bodyguards.”
“Yeah, only I think
most of them would like a new assignment. And this wasn’t a
demon.”
“According to
him.”
“Well, I trust
him!”
Pause number four.
“And I do not.”
And there it was, as
plain as any challenge ever given. And to underscore it, as if
anything else was needed, Marco quietly took the phone out of my
hand and put it in his back pocket. His expression said clearly
that it wasn’t coming out again.
All right,
then.
The doorbell
rang.
I glanced around the
room. One thing about Vegas hotels, especially those built before
the widespread use of cell phones, is that they put land lines
everywhere. Busy executives needed instant access to the empires
they were gambling away and wouldn’t stay anywhere that didn’t
offer it. As a result, there were no fewer than three telephones in
sight—one in the living room, one in the bar and one sitting on the
counter in the kitchen.
And a vamp was
casually loitering near every one of them.
Okay,
then.
I turned on my heel
and went back to my room.
Unsurprisingly, there
was no cell phone in my purse. I hadn’t really expected one. When a
master vampire gave an order, his men were thorough in carrying it
out. And Marco had never been a slouch. But there were things that
a vamp might not notice, especially one who had been around as long
as he had.
I went back to the
bathroom, turned on the exhaust fan and the shower and blasted Led
Zeppelin from the built-in radio.
Vampires don’t use
bathrooms all that much, especially the toilet facilities. And, of
course, housekeeping kept the place clean. As a result, I was
willing to bet that the guys outside had never bothered to so much
as crack the door on the toilet cubicle.
And then I knew they
hadn’t, when I opened it and saw what I’d expected—yet another
phone, this one mounted on the wall. It was big and kind of
complicated-looking, like something that ought to have been on the
desk of an executive secretary, not sitting above the toilet-tissue
dispenser. But it was there, and when I lifted the receiver, I got
a dial tone.
Pritkin picked up on
the first ring, like he’d been expecting a call. “Do you still have
Jonas’s keys?” I asked quietly.
There was silence for
a beat, as if he hadn’t been expecting that. But he recovered fast.
“See what I can do.”
He hung up and so did
I. After waiting another few minutes, I turned off the water and
went back to my room. I couldn’t change clothes, because somebody
might notice. But I put on a bra, jammed my feet into an old pair
of Keds and shoved some cash and my keys into my pocket. Then I
went back into the lounge.
The guys were still
playing poker, quietly now, as there was no need to keep up audible
patter for the human. So they didn’t fall silent when I entered and
picked up my half-finished beer. But ten pairs of eyes watched as I
made my way across to the living room and then to the
balcony.
The wind chimes were
tinkling in the breeze blowing off the desert. It was hot, but
after the deep freeze the vamps had going on inside, it felt good.
I hung over the rail and drank my beer and waited.
“Is there a problem?”
Marco asked, sticking his head out the door.
“Need some
air.”
He looked at me
suspiciously, but I guess his orders stopped short of actually
confining me to my room. He went back to the game, and I went back
to my beer. I hadn’t even finished it when my ride showed
up.
“Best I could do on
short notice,” Pritkin told me, grabbing my arm as I scrambled over
the railing. And into the front seat of a beat-up green convertible
that was idling in the air twenty stories up.
“No problem,” I told
him, hanging on for dear life as the rattletrap belched smoke into
the startled faces of half a dozen vamps, who had taken a fraction
of a second too long to figure out what was going on.
“Cassie!” I heard
Marco’s infuriated bellow behind me. But by then we were out of
there, soaring away into the star-shot indigo high above the
Strip.