“He will be soon.” She glanced at her husband. “Will you watch him?”
“Of course.”
“Without further incident?”
He rolled his eyes but looked a little guilty. He left. Leaving me with a goddess I didn’t know, and a mother I’d barely met.
For a long moment, I didn’t say anything. She was as beautiful as I remembered, and nothing like the legends said. She was a warrior—I knew that, and not just because of some old, probably half-mangled stories. But because I’d seen it with my own eyes. She’d turned a Spartoi to dust, trapped another in a time loop, run a third down in the nineteenth-century version of a chariot. And then, with a little help from me, she’d dumped most of the rest in time, stranding them forever in the fall of history, with no way to stop.
But she didn’t look it. Her beautiful spill of coppery bronze hair was curling in damp ringlets down her back, her soft white dress was wet and dirty around the hem, as if she’d had on a coat that had ended just a little short. And her beautiful face was serene as she soothed her child.
She smelled like lilacs, I thought blankly, the familiar scent circling my head like a caress. I remembered . . . from childhood . . . it was almost the only thing that I—
“Cassandra.”
Violet-blue eyes met mine. They were calm, like her voice. But suddenly, I wasn’t. Suddenly, I could barely breathe and my chest hurt.
“Cassie,” I whispered. “Most people . . . they call me—”
A soft hand cupped my cheek. I froze, not because the touch was unwanted. But because I suddenly wanted to turn into it, to hide my face, to tell her a hundred different things that I couldn’t seem to get past the swelling in my throat. I wanted—
“You should not have come.”
It was like a kick in the gut, even though I’d been expecting it. “I . . . I know,” I said, swallowing. “Agnes said . . . she didn’t want to see me, either. She said it let her guess too much, just the fact that I . . . I mean, she said not to come back. And I didn’t. But she couldn’t have helped me with this anyway. I needed to see you . . . to ask—”
“I know why you’ve come.”
“You do?” It brought me up short.
“I am not what I was, Cassandra. But I am not human.”
No, but I was. It hung in the air, unspoken, but palpable. I wasn’t what she was. I couldn’t see myself in her at all. I never had. I was a lot more like the bumbling guy downstairs, the one who dropped babies—hey, maybe that was what was wrong with me—the one who picked fights he couldn’t win, the one who stubbornly insisted on doing things his own way. It had gotten him killed.
I wondered what it would get me.
“I am glad to have seen you.” Her hand was soft, gentle on my cheek for another moment, before falling away. “You should go.”
I stared up at her, angry tears obscuring the sight of her holding the now calm baby, and wondered why she’d had me at all. Why she’d bothered. Did goddesses get knocked up, too? Hard to believe it had been on purpose, when she clearly could do without me now. Well, too bad. I was here and I was staying here, until I got what I’d come for. I’d gotten precious little in the way of preparation for this crazy life from either of my parents. But
I would have this
.
She turned away to put the baby in the crib. “You’re as stubborn as your father.”
“Then you know I won’t just leave.”
“You would do well to reconsider.”
“Like he should have reconsidered, that night in London?” It came out before I could stop it, but I wasn’t sorry. A human—a bumbling, clumsy, ham-fisted human—had saved her that night, from a group of creatures who made the gods shudder. It hadn’t been pretty and it sure as hell hadn’t been elegant, but it had worked.
Sometimes we mere mortals could surprise you.
“If he hadn’t been there, I would have died,” she agreed, tucking in the child. “But his life . . . might have been very different.”
“And mine would have been nonexistent. So forgive me for being glad he was stubborn!”
She glanced at me. “You even sound like him.”
Her voice had been fond, almost indulgent. It seemed impossible that she should have cared for someone so . . . not divine. I’d mostly been assuming that she’d been using him in some way. But it had sounded . .
“How did you two meet?” I asked, because I’d always wondered.
She didn’t answer. She also didn’t sit down, so I couldn’t, either. Maybe that’s why this felt less like a visit, or even an audience, and more like a bum’s rush to the door.
Fine, I thought, angrily. But I was going to ask anyway. She could ignore me, but I was going to ask what I damned well liked.
“It wasn’t that night,” I said defiantly.
She still didn’t sit, but she leaned against the crib. She looked tired, I thought, and then I pushed it away. Goddesses didn’t get tired . . . did they?
She smiled slightly. “We met when Agnes brought him back across more than three centuries. From a cellar in London, if you recall.”
I remembered Agnes taking the furious mage he’d been away, but I hadn’t thought she’d planned to keep him. “Why didn’t she turn him over to the Circle?”
“The Circle has no facilities for dealing with time travelers, however inept. Such is the responsibility of the Pythian Court. She brought him to London, and shortly thereafter, I met him—in jail.”
“And fell in love with an inept, time-traveling jailbird?”
It came out before I could stop it, but she didn’t seem offended. “No one knew he was inept at the time. I was designated to take him food, since he was presumed to be a dangerous dark mage and I could shift away on a second’s notice. Instead, I stayed. And we talked.”
“About what?” I couldn’t imagine two people who had less in common.
“The past, the future . . . a hatred of fate, of rules, of suffocating order.”
“I thought order was a good thing.”
“It depends on whose.”
I blinked. That had sounded grim. “I don’t understand.”
The lightning flashed outside, making her hair glow flame-red for an instant. “You do. You are the child of chaos, Cassie, of turmoil and mayhem and wild uncertainty. Your very existence is proof . . ”
“Of what?” I asked, when she trailed off.
“That hope cannot be chained. That fate can be undone!”
I blinked again. She’d said it fervently, passionately, which was just as well. Because, otherwise, it might have sounded less like prophecy from the lips of a goddess . . . and more like the cheap babble some so-called clairvoyants used in a reading when they didn’t know what to say.
Or when they were trying to change the subject.
She smiled again, as if reading my mind. “You wish to rescue this demon, then?”
I nodded.
“Why?”
“I—what?”
“It is a simple question, is it not? You are proposing to risk much for him.”
“He would do it for me.”
“Would he? They are self-serving creatures, demons—”
“You could say the same about humans—or gods.”
An eyebrow rose. “Perhaps. But we are not talking of them. But of a creature who is struggling against his very nature. Sooner or later, he will give in to it. Perhaps it is best if it is among his own kind.”
“They aren’t his kind! They’re—” I thought about the demons I knew, from the mostly benign to the frankly terrifying. None of which reminded me in the slightest of the man downstairs. “He’s human.”
“He is part human. It is his other half about which he has yet to learn.”
“I don’t think he wants to learn about it,” I said dryly. Pritkin had been pretty clear on that point.
“That is not his choice. We are who we are. All of us are governed by that, to some degree.”
“And all of us choose to what degree—except him. The choice was made for him. He was
taken
—”
“From you.”
“Yes.”
“And you resent it.”
“Yes!”
“Because he is yours.”
“Y—” I stopped, suddenly confused. Until I remembered: the gods had always taken humans as their servants, or playthings, or whatever, without a second’s thought. Before her epiphany, Mother probably had, too. But I wasn’t a god, and that wasn’t what had happened here. “No. He’s his own person—”
“Then should he not decide this for himself?”
“You don’t understand. He wasn’t given a chance—”
“But he was. To save you and be damned, or to let you die. He chose the former.”
“No! He—that wasn’t a choice! It was forced on him by . . . by his father, by circumstance, by—”
“By fate?”
“Yes—I guess.”
“And you wish now to remake his fate.”
“If you want to put it like—”
“Be sure,” she said, suddenly urgent. “Fate has many strings, Cassie, and when we pluck another’s, our own often resonates.”
Okay, I was beginning to think that maybe I wasn’t keeping up with this conversation. I was also starting to understand the problem people used to have with oracles. “In English?” I said hopefully.
“When you change someone else’s fate, it often changes your own.”
“For the better?” I asked, already knowing what the answer was going to be.
“There is no way to know. That is the essence of chaos, of stepping off a cliff, not knowing what you will find at the bottom.”
Yeah, only I knew what I usually found. “I think I like order better,” I muttered.
“Indeed?” She arched a slim eyebrow. “Then leave him to his fate, and go back to yours.”
“No.”
“Then you choose chaos.”
“All right, fine, I choose chaos!” I said passionately. “Just tell me what I need to know!”
I rematerialized a few minutes later in my favorite secluded corner of the hotel’s lobby. It gave me a wall on two sides, and a fat faux stalactite blocked most of the view ahead. A stalactite I quickly had to grab on to the side of to keep from falling on my butt.
Okay, I thought, as the room whirled madly around my head.
Okay, I thought, as colors ran together and a wind-tunnel-like effect roared in my ears and the whole thing gave Roger’s toys a run for their money.
Okay, I thought, as my stomach joined in and my brain decided screw it and I fell on my butt anyway.
Okay.
There was a slight chance I needed a day off.
I let myself fall backward, since I was doing it anyway. And then lay there, watching the girders in the gloom high above my head wave around in ways girders weren’t supposed to. That was fairly entertaining, but I had to close my eyes after a while, because it was starting to make me sick.
And I was sick enough.
In hindsight, I probably should have hung around after dropping Pritkin off, and given myself a break before the next time shift. Which, judging by the way I felt, I’d been doing a little too often lately. But he had started to come out of the groggy phase, and I’d wanted to avoid a conversation I wasn’t prepared for, so I’d skipped out.
Not my best move, I decided, as the whirling thing got worse.
After a bit, I turned my head to the side, because if I passed out and threw up at the same time, I didn’t want to choke. But I didn’t pass out. And nothing came up, maybe because I didn’t have enough in my stomach to bother with.
Skipping meals had its perks, I decided, and wondered if anybody would care if I just slept here.
The carpet smelled like shoes and cigarette butts.
I decided I could live with it and rolled over, trying to find a comfy spot.
And instead found myself nose-to-toes with a pair of shiny, shiny Ferragamos.
“I knew it,” someone said bitterly.
It took a moment, but my eyes finally focused on the handsome face of a very pissed off vampire. Fortunately, it wasn’t Marco. Or Mircea. Or anyone else I might have had to think up a good story for, because I wasn’t up to that yet.
“I’ve been waiting,” the vamp told me grimly. “I have a thousand other things to do, but I knew, I
knew
, you’d show up at the worst possible moment. And look. Faith confirmed.”
“You don’t have any faith,” I slurred as my eyes tried to uncross.
The whirl of colors and sounds and music behind the vampire’s legs slowly coalesced into a picture of the Underworld, if the Underworld sold tacky tees and fruity drinks and had people wandering around in tuxes.
Wait.
Tuxes?
“Oh, I have faith,” the vampire said, dark eyes snapping. They went well with the tuxedo that was currently highlighting his Spanish good looks. “I have faith you’re going to ruin my life!”
His name was Casanova. Yes,
the
Casanova, or so he claimed, although he wasn’t and never had been. But the incubus possessing him had previously possessed the famous Latin lover, and the vampire community isn’t immune to celebrity worship. So “Casanova” had adopted the name and the lifestyle along with the spirit, which meant that he was more accustomed to lying around in silken sheets than doing any actual work.
It had surprised me, then, that he’d taken to his first real job with a vengeance, although that might explain why he was glaring at me. Once again, I was sullying his hotel with my presence. Considering what the place usually looked like, that thought would have made me smile, if I wasn’t too damned tired.
And if tonight wasn’t the exception that proved the rule.
Dante’s hotel and casino was by turns tasteless and vulgar and gaudy and cheesy, but it wasn’t cheap. Nothing on a prime piece of the Vegas Strip was. But just because its guests were paying through the nose to poke more hard-earned cash into the casino’s gaping maw didn’t mean they dressed up. Despite what the movies would have you believe, standard Vegas evening attire was a T-shirt and shorts, except for the winter, when it might occasionally stretch to a hoodie and jeans.
But not tonight. Tonight, the stalactites and stalagmites and steam-shooting geysers in the overthemed lobby were being obscured—by the beautiful people. I’d never seen so many glittery dresses and sharp suits and sleek hairstyles around here at one time before.
And was that a string quartet?
“Are we having a party?” I asked, propping myself up on one arm.
“
We
aren’t having anything,” he said, snatching the glass of champagne a passing waitress had just bestowed on me. “And if I did believe in a Divine Being, he would have to be the biggest sadist since the marquis himself to have saddled me with you!”
“Okay, cut it out,” I said, making a face—at the glass, because the one sip I’d managed to get had been foul. “I just got back. And if that’s what you’re serving the guests, you’d better be prepared for some lawsuits.”
“They aren’t guests; they’re staff. And I’m not paying for champagne when the cameras can’t tell the difference!”
“What cameras?”
“The cameras you don’t need to be concerned about. Now twitch your nose or whatever it is you do and get out of here! And do it fast, before anyone sees you. There are bums credit-hustling the slots who look better than you!”
For once, he appeared genuinely offended.
I looked down.
And okay, I’d looked better.
The hoodie Pritkin had loaned me had largely protected my upper body during the melee. But my legs had been exposed and were covered in scratches and bug bites and dried mud and something I finally identified as patches of resinous tree gunk. My once white Keds were black, there was a layer of grime under my fingernails, and I thought it just as well that I hadn’t seen my face in a mirror lately.
But it felt scratchy, too.
I picked a pine needle out of my hair and tried for dignified. “I told you, I just got back. And I’m not going up to the room until I get something to eat.”
“I’ll have something sent up!”
“Yeah, right. In two hours, and I’ll be asleep by then.”
“I’ll tell them to hurry.”
“They never hurry.” Fred had been right about one thing—room service around here sucked. “I’m just going to run through the taco line—”
“That’s all the way over on the drag!”
“So?”
“Oh, for—wait here,” he told me, pointing to the floor in front of my filthy shoes. And then he stabbed the air a few more times for emphasis. “Right. Here. Do you understand?”
“I like them with guacamole and red sauce, but no lettuce,” I told him, and sat down against the base of the fake rock again.
He was back in a second, but not with food. But with a large potted fern in a bronze bucket, like the ones that framed the check-in desk. I don’t know what ferns had to do with the ambience, but Dante’s didn’t worry about little inconsistencies like that. Or about the fact that even hell wouldn’t have had that carpet.
“Right. Here,” he repeated, slamming the fern down. And then he was gone again.
I pushed fronds out of my face, since he’d set the thing directly in front of me, and checked out the party/ convention/random assembly of beautiful people that was happening. I didn’t know if Casanova was trying to attract a more well-heeled group by parading his off-duty employees in Gucci, or if there was something else going on. And, after a minute, I decided I didn’t care.
I leaned my head back against the stalactite and closed my eyes. The room felt like it was spinning faster this way, but oddly, it made my stomach feel better. Which, of course, just meant that my brain woke up.
It started crowding me with thoughts of all the things I could have asked tonight, instead of just sitting around chatting with Roger’s ghosts. But I’d been a little high and more than a little freaked-out, and they’d been hard to ignore. And then with Mother—
Damn. My mother. I swallowed, and then I banged my head a few times against the rock, because it deserved it.
I don’t know what I’d expected her to do. Welcome me with open arms? Shower me with kisses? Tell me she’d missed me?
And yes, I realized. Some part of me
had
expected that, or it wouldn’t have hurt so much. Some stupid part, because of course she hadn’t missed me. She’d never had the chance. She hadn’t spent decades wondering, searching, dreaming. . .
And she’d given me what I asked for. Well, more or less. And it had been nothing like I’d expected.
Not the information itself so much—after a week of contemplating breaking into hell, I’d been prepared for almost anything. But the fact that she hadn’t laughed at me, or told me I was crazy, or shot me in the butt . . . She’d just . . . told me.
She’d given me what I needed to get up to some next-level shit without much of an argument at all. So, either she was seriously overestimating me, or . . . or maybe I actually had a shot at this? Maybe she saw something in me I didn’t? Maybe . .
Maybe she thought the best way to get rid of me was to give me what I wanted and let me figure out for myself that it was nuts.
I didn’t know. I had this weird feeling that I knew less about my parents now than I had before. I sure
understood
less.
Like my father. I supposed the truth—if I’d even gotten the truth—was better than the rumors I’d heard, but it was no less bizarre. What was an ancient goddess doing with the magical version of a con man? And what had he been doing with the Black Circle?
He’d needed power, he said. But for what? Because a couple of ghosts couldn’t possibly use that much, even if they were going around playing Iron Man. So what was he using it for?
It couldn’t have been to help Mother. She’d been weak, yes. She’d needed magic, yes. But not the human variety. That was why the old legends spoke of the gods visiting earth, but living somewhere else—Asgard, Vanaheim, Olympus—whatever you wanted to call it. Because they couldn’t feed off human magic. I didn’t know if it was incompatible with theirs, or wasn’t strong enough or what. But they would get weak if they stayed here very long.
It was why Mother had ended up losing most of her power after trapping herself here. And why she’d finally gone to the Pythian Court after avoiding it all those centuries. Apollo, god of prophecy, had gifted the oracles of Delphi with some of his own power, back when they’d been good little worshippers, and it was still going strong. I guess the trickle the Pythias used was negligible compared to the amount needed by a hungry god.
But Mom hadn’t gotten to feast for long. Going to court had allowed her enemies to locate her, and she’d had to expend most of the power she’d gained fighting them off. So she’d ended up sitting in Tony’s guest cottage with Dad, who was avoiding the Black Circle, who presumably wanted to do violent things to him. And waiting . .
For what? Until tonight, I’d never really thought about it. I’d just assumed they were in hiding. That’s what you did when bad people were after you. But now that I’d met them, that didn’t make much sense, at least not as a long-term plan.
The Spartoi were relentless. She had to know they’d find her eventually, and as soon as they did, it was game over. Her power was all but gone, Tony’s guys wouldn’t fight for her, and even if they did, the Spartoi would make mincemeat out of them in about a minute flat. And having fought them both, I doubted Roger’s crazy inventions would do much better. And even if I counted the forest as part of her defenses—and having been through it, I saw no reason why I
shouldn’t
—well, Pritkin and I had survived it. A bunch of ancient demigods were hardly likely to do worse.
So, yeah, everything I’d seen had looked like a stopgap, something to buy my parents a little bit of time.
But to do
what?
“Here!” I was jolted out of a half sleep, half reverie by somebody thrusting something under my nose. Something that looked divine, I realized, as I managed to push a silver serving tray far enough away to focus on the contents.
“That’s not tacos,” I said sleepily.
“No, it’s better,” Casanova snapped. “Now get back up to your room before somebody sees you!”
I would have snapped back, but I was feeling tender toward the guy who had just brought me a tray of luscious-looking hors d’oeuvres. It held equal parts gorgeous salmon, juicy sausages, fat shrimp wrapped in bacon, and hearty meatballs. My stomach woke up and started grumbling plaintively. Suddenly, I was starving.
A phone rang and Casanova snatched it out of his jacket. “Of course you do,” he told it viciously. “I can’t take five minutes . . . all right, all right. I’m coming!”
He thrust the platter at me and was gone, with that liquid speed vampires use when they aren’t messing about. And I didn’t waste any time, either. I grabbed a salmon sliver sitting on top of an artfully piped swirl of herbed cheese, which in turn was resting on a slice of fresh cucumber—
Which would remain fresh forever, I realized a second later.
Because it was made out of plastic.
I managed to spit the thing out before I choked on it, and then just sat there, looking at the slimy thing in my palm. And wondering how my life had come to this. I threw it down, wiped my hand on my filthy top, and picked up a rubbery shrimp—that appeared to be made out of real rubber. And then a sausage with a beautiful sear that had come out of a spray-paint bottle. And then—
“No,” I said, increasingly desperate, pawing through the whole tray. But it was all the same. They were fake. They were all fake.
Casanova had just given me a tray of plastic food.
It looked like one of the sample trays the restaurants used out front as an enticement. It seemed that the employees not only weren’t getting real champagne, but weren’t getting fed, either. And neither was I.
“Son of a bitch!” I sat there, disbelieving and furious and utterly, utterly ravenous. For another second, before I was on my feet and pushing palm fronds around.
The place was packed. If possible, even more beautiful types had squashed into the already stuffed-with-tourists lobby since the last time I looked. There was no way to shift without being seen, and I didn’t feel up to it anyway.