The dining room had been destroyed, but the room service cart had miraculously survived, wedged in the doorway between the bar and the kitchen. I pushed it the rest of the way inside and peeked under the warming lid. Fried chicken, and it was still hot.
There was a God.
I hunkered down behind the kitchen table and concentrated on regaining enough strength to shift on my own if Billy failed. That basically involved stuffing down as much as possible as fast as possible without throwing up. I was making a serious dent in Marco’s vast quantities when something caused me to look up.
Three vamps stood in the kitchen doorway, staring at me. They looked a little shell-shocked, and a glance at the stainless side of the fridge told me why. I was naked and bloody, with tufts of half-dried hair sticking up everywhere and a chicken leg distorting one side of my mouth. I looked startlingly like a mad cavewoman.
I removed the leg and licked my greasy lips. “Um. Hi?”
They didn’t say anything. For a moment, we all just looked at one another. And then the creature attacked again, and I stopped worrying about the impression I was making and started worrying about getting my brains bashed out against the side of the table. I saw stars and red exploding things that probably came under the category of Not Healthy.
And then I saw Pritkin staring at me in utter shock.
I didn’t remember trying to shift, but I must have, because instead of cold kitchen tile, my toes were suddenly sinking into the carpet in his hotel room. I’d landed by the bed, which he’d been in the process of turning back. His hair was damp and curling around his neck, and a few drops of water still clung to his shoulders. And either he hadn’t bothered to put on pajamas yet or he slept in the nude, which might have been awkward if I hadn’t been in the process of dying.
“Possession,” I croaked, before my hands formed themselves into claws and my body launched itself off the floor, going straight for those clear green eyes.
I didn’t succeed in scratching them out—Pritkin’s reflexes are better than that, even when totally gobsmacked— but I did tear an inch-long gash down one of his cheeks. “Sorry!”
“What kind of possession?” he asked grimly, one hand locked around each of my wrists.
“Not ghost, but I don’t—”
I stopped talking, because my throat had closed up and my body started thrashing against his hold. Pritkin looked startled for a moment, like I was harder to control than he’d expected. But the next second, I found myself on my back on the bed with my hands pinned over my head by one of his. He used his other to summon a stream of little vials from a bookshelf he’d installed, apparently as a sort of filing system for nasty potions.
Most of which were soon all over me.
Some were sticky and some were sludgy and all of them were really, really vile. I wouldn’t have cared if they’d done anything. But as far as I could tell, the most they accomplished was to stain my skin in blotches without affecting the thing inside me at all.
And then my entire body suddenly went numb and I had maybe a second to think—oh, shit—before the entity used my legs to send Pritkin sailing across the room. I saw him hit and pass through the wall, in an odd mirror of what Billy had done. Only Pritkin’s much more material body took the flimsy Sheetrock and hard studs along with him.
And, to my surprise, the creature decided to follow. Maybe it assumed that I wouldn’t be much of a challenge if it killed him first, or maybe he’d managed to piss it off. I didn’t know, but I felt when it started to pull away, when all of the sensations of a seriously overtaxed body came rushing back at once, forcing out a whimper that I promised myself to deny if I survived long enough.
And then I felt its shock as I slammed my shields shut, trapping it inside.
I hadn’t been able to expel the thing, but this was a different story. It had managed to possess me in the first place because I’d been exhausted and careless and I’d been expecting Billy any moment, so my shields were down. But they weren’t now, and this was my body and ownership bestowed some privileges. And I was damned if I was going to let that thing finish off the one guy who had a chance of getting me out of this while he was possibly unconscious and—
And it had figured out that my body had become its prison and it
really
wanted out.
We apparently didn’t speak the same language, but it didn’t matter, because it started showing me a cascade of images like something out of a horror movie: my heart exploding in my chest, my lungs shredding like tissue paper, my brain—
If you could do all that, you already would have,
I thought back viciously, sending the image of it trying to stab me in the eye with a freaking hair pick. I didn’t know why it could trash the apartment and not me, but every single attack had been external or passive, like holding me underwater while I drowned. It was starting to look like maybe it wasn’t all that strong inside the body.
Or like it wasn’t so used to this possession thing, either.
That didn’t make sense for a demon who, presumably, did this all the time, but I didn’t have a chance to figure it out before it started thrashing around
inside
me. And if I thought I’d been in pain before, it was nothing compared to this. It was determined that I was going to let go, and I was determined I wasn’t, because if it killed Pritkin I was dead, anyway.
And then he was back, bloody and bruised and reaching through the hole to grab something from his footlocker that he tossed at me. “Cassie, catch!”
My arm shot up automatically and I felt my fist close around something cold and hard. And then I didn’t feel anything else for a long moment as I levitated completely off the bed.
Definitely
Amityville, I thought blankly, and let go of my shields. My body gave a huge convulsion, and I was immediately surrounded by a storm of dark, flapping wings, a noxious odor and an infuriated, screeching cry.
And then I hit the bed and rolled off the side. That was lucky, because a second later what felt like a miniature cyclone burst out through the window and a shower of glass exploded
into
the room, in flagrant disregard for the laws of physics. But most of it didn’t hit me, since I was huddled on the floor with my hands over my head, trying not to scream.
Pritkin had crawled back through the wall at some point, because when I looked up, he was crouched on the floor, staring at me. I stared mutely back, panting and limp, every limb shaking in reaction as confetti of dust and tattered bits of wallpaper rained down all around us. And then the door slammed open and Marco charged in.
He took in my naked, multicolored self, the hole in the wall, the broken window and the battered, bleeding war mage. “The
fuck?”
he said distinctly.
I swallowed, licking lips that tasted like dust and copper. “I think I freaked out the staff,” I told him weakly. And then I fainted.
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?”