Chapter Twenty-seven
The shape I was in
didn’t really hit me until I stumbled out of the car. And
face-planted onto something hard. I didn’t know if it was the
afterburn of adrenaline or being a snack for a half-incubus war
mage, but I was completely wiped. To the point that the concrete
under my cheek actually felt pretty damn inviting. I was all for
sleeping wherever the hell I was, but somebody picked me up. I
didn’t have the strength left to protest.
Those same hands
gently wrapped me in a blanket. It had to be three, maybe four
a.m., but Vegas in August is stifling even at that time of the
morning, and the blanket was scratchy and hot. I decided not to
care, because it was easier.
We started across a
cracked parking lot toward a brightly lit aluminum building with a
couple of trucks and, incongruously, a limo parked outside. I
squinted at it blearily. If that was war mage HQ, color me
disappointed. It looked like it ought to be warehousing shoes. But
I guessed it was more interesting inside, because a couple of
leather-coat-clad guards were roaming around, giving us the hairy
eyeball.
I didn’t care about
them, either.
I did care a few
minutes later when I was put down on something puke green that
smelled like cigarettes and old shoes, but decided I could live
with it. I went to sleep. And then woke right back up at the
furious, whispered conversation going on over my head.
“They called ahead;
told them to expect you. What the fuck am I—”
“Tell them whatever
you like. I am more concerned with getting a healer in
here.”
“You’d best be
concerned with your job!”
“I could care less
about—”
“Then how about your
neck? Because that was assault, and
assault on the Pythia carries a mandatory death sentence, as you
damn well—”
Which was when I sat
up. “No doctors,” I croaked.
“Cassie!” We were in
a small office, with Pritkin crouched beside what could best be
described as an antisofa. Besides the unfortunate color and the
more unfortunate smell, it was also hard and lumpy and stained, and
had sad little tufts of stuffing dribbling out of one of the
cushions. Kind of the Platonic ideal turned on its
head.
Two sets of startled
eyes looked at me, so I guess I’d said that last part out loud.
“What? I read.”
“Are you all right?”
Caleb asked, crouching down beside Pritkin. Which gave me nowhere
to put my legs. I thought about drawing them up, but then I’d
probably go back to sleep again, and that was a bad idea for some
reason that currently escaped me. I sat there and blinked at them,
and waited for it to come.
“She needs a healer,”
Pritkin said harshly, and started for the door.
That was it. “No
doctors,” I said again.
And then I flopped
over.
“You heard her,”
Caleb said, as Pritkin paused, his hand on the knob.
“Damn it,
Cassie—”
“I’m just really,
really tired,” I told him, wondering why the fake wood paneling
behind him was bleeding over into his body space. And then I
realized that my eyes were crossing. “Do you have any booze?” I
asked Caleb.
“You probably
shouldn’t drink,” Pritkin said, looking conflicted.
I thought about that.
There was a phrase I was looking for, but my brain was really not
cooperating right at the—Oh yeah. “Fuck it,” I said brightly. And
then I sat up again, because the antisofa seriously reeked and
because Caleb was coming over with a paper cup in his
hand.
It was the kind you
get out of watercoolers, small and cone-shaped, but it held some
really fine whiskey. Really, really fine, I decided, tossing it
back, all smooth and peaty.
And then it hit the
party going on in my stomach and oh, shit.
“Trash can,” I said
thickly.
“What?” Caleb looked
at me.
“Trash
can!”
Pritkin cursed and
grabbed one, just about the time everything I’d eaten that night
paid a repeat visit. Whiskey, pizza, milk shake, beer—and a lone,
half-dissolved gummy bear, which was a surprise, since I couldn’t
actually recall having eaten any. Fun times.
I finally finished,
and was rewarded with another little paper cup, only this time
filled with water. “Keep it coming,” I said hoarsely as Pritkin
held my hair back from my face and Caleb handed him a box of
tissues.
Cleanup took a while,
since I’d been pretty damn dirty to begin with. During which
Pritkin kept bitching about a doctor and I kept saying no, until I
got pissed. “You’re not putting your head in a noose when I’m
fine,” I croaked. “I’m just tired. For God’s sake!”
He finally shut up,
maybe because he realized he was giving me a headache. Or maybe
because he had one himself. He looked like nine kinds of hell. He’d
had the presence of mind to leave the shredded coat in the car and
to toss a blanket around the two of us, which had hidden the fact
that he had no shirt and his jeans were acid-washed and not in the
fashion sense. His face was drawn and pale, despite the feed, there
was dried blood on his chest and his hands shook. And the less said
about his hair, the better.
But then, that was
always true.
“You need clothes,”
Caleb said roughly.
“There are some in my
locker,” Pritkin told him. “Two twenty-one. Or there should be. I
don’t remember what I—”
“I’ll get them. Stay
here.”
Caleb looked at me
sharply, why I don’t know. Like I was actually up to shifting us
out of there. Or walking out. Or sitting up.
I slumped back
against the stinky couch and stared at Pritkin, who stared mutely
back. I didn’t know if it was because he’d fed, but his eyes were a
little freaky. Almost neon green, bright and burning. And full of
some dark emotion I couldn’t read, but could guess at pretty
well.
“I volunteered,” I
reminded him.
“To be used!” His
hand tightened on the sofa cushion, until the knuckles bled white.
“He wouldn’t have cared if I’d drained you!”
“He’d have probably
preferred it,” I said, staring at that hand. “Save him some
trouble.”
“How can you—” He
stopped and closed his eyes, and just breathed for a few moments.
That wasn’t a good sign; Pritkin was better when he was yelling and
stomping around. But maybe he didn’t have the strength right now. I
could sympathize.
I moved my hand over
the top of his and he immediately pulled back, something close to
horror on his face. It seriously pissed me off. “That’s a little
hypocritical, don’t you think?”
“It isn’t—” He looked
away. “It isn’t you.”
“I know it isn’t me.
What? Am I stupid?”
That got an eye
blink, and I grabbed his hand again and tugged at him. I was too
weak for it to have much effect, but he came anyway, sitting beside
me. I held on to the hand, partly to be an ass, but also because,
for some reason, it made me feel better. And right then, anything
comforting, I’d take without question.
“I’m sorry,” he said,
after a moment. His jaw was tight enough that it looked like it
hurt. I sighed.
“For what? For saving
my life? For almost getting killed in the process? For not dying
nobly? What?”
His brow tightened
into a familiar frown. “You’re in a mood.”
“Yes. Yes, I am. I
have had a day, and I am in a
mood. So what are you apologizing for,
exactly?”
“For . . . taking it
that far. But I didn’t see an alternative. He’d put you under a
strong compulsion, and that kind won’t break without—without
completion.”
“Completion.” It took
my tired brain a few moments to work through that one. And then
another moment, because the only answer I was getting didn’t make
sense. “Okay, let me get this straight. You’re apologizing for
giving me a mind-shattering orgasm?”
Caleb slammed in the
door. “I didn’t hear that.”
“Damn
straight.”
He had clothes, plain
gray sweats and sneakers for Pritkin, and an oversized navy T-shirt
for me. “It’s mine,” he told me. “I figured it’d work as a dress on
you.”
“Thanks.” At this
point, anything was better than the scratchy blanket. “Is there a
shower?”
“Yeah. Over by the
gym.” He looked at Pritkin. “Gonna wash her back?”
And Pritkin
growled—literally. Rabid pit bulls don’t make that kind of noise
when going for the jugular, although that seemed to be the plan,
since he was out of the seat and lunging for Caleb faster than I
could blink. Only to stop when I kept a grip on that
hand.
Good idea grabbing
it, in hindsight.
“Not the time,
Caleb,” I said briefly.
He nodded, looking a
little freaked. I guess he hadn’t heard that particular tone
before, either. I struggled to my feet.
I’d actually been
asking about the shower for Pritkin, who looked like he could use
some hot water downtime. But clearly, leaving the two of them
together was a no-no. And I was sort of afraid that maybe the couch
wasn’t the only thing stinking in the room.
Pritkin threw on the
new sweats, which pretty much negated their status as clean, but
which meant that I got to keep the whole blanket. I drew it around
me until I was pretty sure I wouldn’t shock anybody, and grabbed
Caleb’s tee. And then peered out the door.
Thankfully, the halls
outside were as deserted as you’d expect at something o’clock in
the morning. There wasn’t even a janitor pushing a mop around; just
a shadow behind a frosted glass door and a guy doing laps in the
gym. Not that it was a gym, per se. Just an area carved out of the
huge complex by some plywood partitions, and fitted out with a
track, some treadmills and a lot of iron in the form of weights
lining the walls.
A Fey would go nuts
in here, I thought vaguely, and felt slightly more
cheerful.
We followed a line of
lockers to the back, where two bathrooms were situated side by
side. Pritkin got me a towel and a squeeze bottle of something out
of his locker that had no discernable scent but that I assumed was
soap. I said thanks and he said nothing at all, and we went our
separate ways.
The shower part of
the bathroom was, like the rest of the place, extremely
utilitarian. I guessed it made sense—until a month ago, the Corps
had been based at MAGIC, aka the Metaphysical Alliance for Greater
Interspecies Cooperation, aka the supernatural version of the UN.
At least it had been, until the war left it a glass slick in the
desert. That had forced the Corps to find a new home, and trust
them to make it as Spartan as humanly possible.
There were no
cubicles—privacy was so damn girly—just an even dozen showerheads
and a sloping floor with a drain in the middle. The tile was white
and the fixtures were shiny, but only because they were new. I
doubted that the shoe warehouse had come equipped with bathrooms
this big, so they’d probably been a recent add-on. And yet, despite
the newness, the place managed to be really ugly in the tradition
of institutional spaces everywhere.
I scrubbed and
scrubbed and scrubbed some more, and since the soapy stuff seemed
to double pretty well as shampoo, that included tackling my hair.
And damned if I didn’t manage to finally soak the green out. Should
have asked Pritkin for something before, I thought blearily,
resting my head on the water-slick wall.
I felt exhausted,
clammy and vaguely nauseous—the same as when I fed Billy a little
too much. I wasn’t completely drained; Pritkin had stopped short of
that. In fact, Billy had left me feeling worse than this a time or
two—with one exception. Feeding Billy had never left me with a
burning little knot of guilt under my sternum.
And that’s exactly
what this was, too: guilt. Not overwhelming or paralyzing or
crushing, but guilt all the same. I’d experienced enough of it in
the past to have no trouble identifying it. I just didn’t know what
it was doing there.
This wasn’t the first
time Pritkin and I had gotten close; it was the second. The first
had been about a month ago during the final battle with Apollo.
Pritkin had been seriously injured and his incubus abilities had
saved him, with a little help from me. Very little, compared with
today, but the basic idea had been the same: I’d provided the
energy, he’d done the healing, the end.
And it really had
been the end. Our relationship had gone back to the usual and I
hadn’t even thought that much about it afterward. There had been so
much other stuff going on that it had seemed, well, just one of
those crazy things. Like almost drowning myself in a bathtub or
being chased by a dragon through an office building. Crazy shit
like that happened all the time lately, and that’s the folder it
had gone into in my brain. If anything, I’d just been grateful it
had worked and that we’d both come out of the battle with a whole
skin.
So what was different
now?
Was it because I’d
enjoyed it? Because I had; there was no point in denying it. Not
the first few minutes—those had been pretty damned horrifying. But
later . . . yeah. I’d enjoyed it. Kind of a lot. Okay, a hell of a
lot. But then, I’d enjoyed it the last time, too. And, seriously,
Pritkin was the son of the prince of the incubi. What the hell did
my brain expect? That I’d hate it? I mean, what were the
odds?
And the fact was, I’d
have helped him whether I’d gotten any pleasure out of it or not.
The guy was dying. I wouldn’t have let
that happen, regardless. And I sure as hell wasn’t sorry he was
alive. So no, I didn’t think the pleasure thing was the
problem.
Was it maybe because
I was dating Mircea now, and I hadn’t been before? I mean, Mircea
had claimed me a while ago, but master vamps had a habit of simply
taking whatever they wanted, as I knew from long experience. It
hadn’t surprised me, but I also hadn’t considered us married just
because he said so. I hadn’t considered us as having any status
romantically at all until we started dating, and that had been
after the last little incident.
So was that it? Was I
feeling like I’d cheated on him? I thought about it for a while,
but that didn’t feel quite right, either. It wasn’t like this had
had anything to do with romance. If Pritkin had been a vampire, I’d
have given him blood; as it was, I’d given him what he needed to
heal. And considering that he’d almost died in both instances
because of me, I’d sort of owed him one.
And yet, for whatever
reason, this one felt different. I hadn’t had any trouble meeting
Mircea’s eyes after the last time. I didn’t know if that would be
true now, and it pissed me off that I didn’t even know
why.
However, I did know
one thing. I wasn’t going to get any absolution—not that I needed
any, damn it—because I couldn’t tell him. Not because I didn’t
think he’d understand. Vampires tended to be a lot more pragmatic
than humans, and if I could explain that it had been a life-ordeath
situation . . . well, there was a chance Pritkin wouldn’t lose too
many limbs. The problem, of course, was that I
couldn’t.
I couldn’t tell
Mircea anything, because if I told him why, I’d also have to tell
him what—specifically what Pritkin was. And if I told him what he
was, I might as well tell him who he was, since there’d only ever
been one humanincubus hybrid in all history.
And I didn’t think
the magical community was quite ready to hear that Merlin had
returned.
Of course, I didn’t
know that they would hear about it. I didn’t think Mircea would
plaster it all over the front pages, for instance. But he’d do
something with it. He wouldn’t be a vampire if he
didn’t.
And I really didn’t
want to find out what that something would be.
After a while, I
sighed and gave up. I’d figure it out later when maybe I didn’t
feel like I was about to fall over. The water had stayed hot, but
my knees were starting to get wobbly, so I shut it
off.
God, I was
tired.
I dried off and
pulled Caleb’s shirt and a half over my head. The “short” sleeves
came down past my elbows, and the hem almost hit my knees. I
decided it would do and padded back outside.
The jogger had gone
off somewhere and no one had taken his place, so the cavernous
space felt kind of creepy. I looked around for Pritkin, because it
would be perfectly in character to find him pumping iron even after
being almost dead half an hour ago. But I didn’t see
him.
The gym was big but
it was also pretty open, with no real obstacles in the exercise
area and only industrial fluorescents overhead. So it wasn’t like I
could have missed him. For one, brief, panic-filled moment—or it
would have been panicked if I’d had any panic left—I thought he
might have gone back to pick a fight with Caleb. But then I heard
water running.
I debated it for a
couple of seconds, in case it was the runner who had decided to
have a sluice down. But I was really too tired to be embarrassed,
and war mages tended to take things in stride. I decided to risk
it.
The guys’ bathroom
looked exactly like the women’s, other than being larger and having
a line of urinals. I walked past the bathroom stalls and into the
big shower room in back. There was no door—of course—so it didn’t
take me long to find him.
It took me a little
longer to figure out what to do.
For a guy who was as
loud as Pritkin, he really didn’t lose it very often. Maybe all
that yelling served as a release valve; I don’t know. But no matter
how bad things got, he kept his shit together better than most
people I knew, including me. Not that that was saying much. I was
usually the run-screaming-at-the-first-sign-of-danger type, but
Pritkin was Mr. Cool under Pressure.
Which was why it was
a little strange to find him standing in the spray, staring at a
bar of soap with the air of a man who has forgotten what he’s
supposed to do with it.
It didn’t look like
he’d used it. There were streaks of blood on the powerful legs, oil
or something black on the broad back and livid bruises pretty much
everywhere. The black stuff had run, dripping down the multicolored
skin, making him look like some kind of avant-garde painting or
vandalized sculpture. The Thinker in
yellow, purple and green.
The hair was wet and
plastered to his skull. It made the bones of his face stand out
more, and his nose look bigger as he turned his head to me. It
wasn’t with his usual rapid reflexes, but in a bewildered kind of
way that really worried me. Not that an assassin was likely to be
sneaking up on him at war mage HQ, but still. I had the disturbing
impression that, if I had been an
assassin, Pritkin would have just stood there and let me kill
him.
Okay,
then.
I walked over,
despite not knowing what the hell I was supposed to do. Growing up
at Murders ’R’ Us, I’d seen a lot of nasty stuff, and my visions
had shown me a lot more. Pretty early on, I’d learned to distance
myself from inconvenient feelings, from anything I couldn’t easily
handle. And by now, I was tops at the Scarlett O’Hara school of
emotional distancing. I always thought about the uncomfortable
stuff tomorrow, and, as everyone knows, tomorrow never
comes.
And despite what
psychologists would have you believe, living in denial actually
works pretty damn well. At least most of the time. It had worked
for me, keeping me functional, keeping me sane—more or less—long
after anyone could have reasonably expected.
It wasn’t working so
well right now.
It meant that I
didn’t know how to talk to Pritkin about his shit, whatever his
shit was, because I rarely talked about mine. I didn’t know how to
tell him it was going to be okay, because I wasn’t sure that it
was. I didn’t have anything useful to say at all, so I didn’t try.
I slid my arms around him from behind and held on.
The water was still
warm. I supposed that was something.
Pritkin didn’t say
anything, either, so we just stayed like that for a while. I found
that I was in no real hurry to move. I was bone tired, but he was
warm and solid and easy to hold on to. I got this weird kind of
floaty feeling after a while, a combination of exhaustion, relief
and the thrum of his heart under my ear.
He hadn’t bothered to
turn on the lights, so the only illumination was whatever filtered
in from the bathroom or through the open top of the shower area. It
wasn’t much, and the water hitting the tile sounded like rain, the
kind Vegas rarely got. I pulled him closer and felt my eyes slip
closed.
I thought maybe I’d
just sleep here.
“Her name was Ruth,”
he said hoarsely. And then he stopped.
His back was warm
against my cheek. I could feel the column of his spine just under
the surface. I didn’t say anything.
“My wife,” he added,
after a while. I nodded, but he couldn’t see it, so I just
tightened my grip for a moment. I’d kind of thought that might be
it.
I wasn’t an expert on
Pritkin’s past, but I knew a few things. Like the fact that, more
than a century ago, he’d married a woman he’d presumably loved a
lot. I didn’t know much about her, because that was one topic that
got a very swift conversation change. But I knew the important
thing: I knew how she’d died.
It had happened on
their wedding night, when the incubus part of Pritkin got out of
control—seriously out. For some reason, instead of simply feeding,
which would have been normal under the circumstances, it had
decided to drain her—dry. Pritkin hadn’t been able to stop the
process, and it had killed her.
Or, rather, he had
killed her, because as the only halfhuman incubus, the two parts of
his nature were forced into an uneasy cohabitation. It was like
being Jekyll and Hyde, only at the same time, all the time. Other
incubi could leave their bodies behind when they weren’t feeding,
since they’d only borrowed them from a human anyway. But Pritkin
couldn’t.
I didn’t know if that
had something to do with why he’d lost it that night or not.
Because he’d told me those few hard facts and nothing else. It had
been around the time we’d started to notice an attraction, and I
guess the idea had been to scare me off.
It had worked like a
charm.
The idea of ending up
a straw-haired, desiccated corpse had proven a real incentive in
ignoring any inconvenient feelings. Pritkin and I were together a
lot, often in circumstances that got the blood pumping, if not
spurting. It was only natural that there might be an occasional
spike of something. It would have been strange if there hadn’t
been, really.
But we’d ignored them
by mutual consent, because, clearly, they weren’t going anywhere. I
was dating Mircea, and Pritkin . . . Well, as far as I knew,
Pritkin didn’t date anyone. Ever. I’d gotten the impression that he
wasn’t going to risk whatever had happened happening
again.
I suddenly found that
really sad.
Someone cursed behind
us, but I didn’t jump. I was too tired, and anyway, I knew that
voice. I looked over my shoulder and saw Caleb’s big body outlined
in the doorway for a second before he disappeared.
But a moment later he
was back with a couple of large towels. He shut off the water,
wrapped one around me and threw one at his buddy. Or former buddy,
given the scowl marring those handsome features.
“Out,” he said
roughly, pushing us at the door. “It’s getting too close to
morning. There’s going to be people showing up soon, and we got
enough to explain as it is. And that vampire’s on the phone, fit to
be tied.”
“Which one?” I asked,
pretty sure I already knew.
“Marco. Said you
either call him or he’s accusing us of kidnapping
you.”
He handed me a phone
and I took it with a sigh. I punched in the suite’s number and it
was picked up on the first ring. “Cassie, what the hell—”
“You know what the
hell. Am I still a prisoner?”
“You know damn well
you aren’t!”
“Then I’ll be back.
Now stop calling.” I hung up.
Caleb just looked at
me. “That was it?”
“That was it until I
figure out what story I’m using.”
“I know the feeling,”
he snarled, and pushed us toward the office.