Maybe I did look like a bag lady, but this was supposed to be hell. If they could have satyrs serving in the bar upstairs and incubi manning the salon and cocktail waitresses in devil ears wandering around, a random street person shouldn’t shock anybody. And if it did, that was just too bad. The universe might hate Casanova, but it was conspiring to starve me.
And I had had enough.
I was taking back control of my life, or at least my dinner.
I was heading out.
Or, you know, skulking behind the check-in desk, because I didn’t want to get tossed out on my ear.
Fortunately, nobody was checking in at the moment. I got a couple of glances from the staff, but most of them knew me by now, and crawling behind the desk was one of the least strange things they’d seen me do. Nobody tried to stop me, and I scuttled from there to a service corridor, through the back of an ice cream shop and out into the lobby again. Right where the hellscape gave way to an Old West ghost town, if the Old West had featured plastic cactuses and neon cocktail signs and overpriced boutiques.
And a fiberglass donkey cart with a flashing taco sign.
I could have sworn a heavenly chorus started singing, if that hadn’t been really unlikely around here. I lurched forward, drawn by the siren call of seared meat and habanero sauce, my mouth watering and my eyes glazed. And ran right into the front of a starched dress shirt.
“You thin’ I don’t know you by now?” Casanova demanded, his Castilian lisp showing up along with what looked like a full-on snit.
“Oh, for the love of—get out of my way!” I told him, trying to muscle past.
But I didn’t have much muscle left, and Casanova, despite acting like a little bitch half the time, was a master vampire. I didn’t go anywhere. Goddamnit!
“You are not ruining this for me,” he told me menacingly.
“I’m just trying to get in the freaking taco line! I don’t even know what ‘this’ is!”
“This is my attempt to save a failing business,” he hissed, grabbing me by the arm and jerking me behind a couple of fake hay bales. “I am about to be on television, coast-to-coast coverage, in prime time!”
“For what?”
“For that!” Casanova said, gesturing at a big-toothed guy with a lapel mike who had just emerged into a cleared area in front of the lobby. He and the dozen black-shirted guys he had running interference were blocking most people’s access to the elevators around the corner, but nobody seemed to mind. They were too busy watching him as he grinned at a professional-looking video camera.
“Fiends,” he told it suddenly, with every appearance of relish. “Ogres. Giants. Freaks of all kinds. If you don’t believe in monsters, you’re part of a tiny minority. Throughout history, almost every culture on earth has believed. Even odder, they have all believed in the same monsters.
“Take zombies for instance: ‘I shall raise up the dead and they shall eat the living . . . I shall make the dead outnumber the living.’ Where do you think that quote comes from? Stephen King?
Night of the Living Dead
? No. It’s from an ancient Babylonian epic that was written five thousand years ago. It’s one of the oldest written works in the world. Zombies . . . have a pedigree.”
“What is this?” I asked, feeling my stomach drop for a totally new reason. “How did the press get in here?”
“I invited them,” Casanova said shortly.
“What?” I looked up at him in disbelief.
“Do you have any idea how hard it is,” he asked fervently, “to make a profit when half your rooms and most of your staff have been appropriated by the damned senate?”
The “damned senate” was the vampire senate, which had lost its usual hangout in an earlier attack in the war. They’d temporarily moved in here, since the casino was owned by one of their own, being part of Mircea’s extensive portfolio. So far, that had gone better than I’d expected, what with a bunch of senior masters and their entourages crowding up the place. But that could easily change—like tonight, for instance.
“Are you
insane
?” I hissed. “You know what’s upstairs. What on earth could possibly have made this seem like a good idea?”
“I’m looking at her.”
“What?”
“Oh, how quickly they forget!” he said, sneering. “Or do you perhaps vaguely recall all but destroying my hotel a little over a month ago?”
“Which time?” I asked uneasily. Because, okay, there’d been a few incidents.
“But zombies are newcomers compared to Weres,” the announcer told us. “There are cave drawings from fourteen thousand years ago depicting humans with animal faces, or transforming into beasts of all kinds. From Europe come tales of the most famous Weres of all: werewolves. But did you know, in Central America there are stories of were-jaguars? In central Asia, of were-bears?”
“The huge battle?” Casanova whispered, spitting mad. “The one I’m still making repairs for?”
“Oh.” That one. “What about it?”
“Well, word got out, didn’t it? Containment isn’t so easy when you have giant magical melees taking place in the air over the damned roof! We did the best we could, but ever since, there have been rumors. They finally became so insistent that the senate decided it would be easier to have the
Hogwash
people come in—”
“What people?”
“You must have seen them,” he said impatiently. “With the little horns and the squeals and the—oh, never mind! The point is, their shtick is debunking urban legends and the like. If they come here and don’t find anything—”
“And if they
do
?”
“Then there’s everybody’s perennial favorite, the vampire,” the announcer intoned. “How far do they date back? Let’s put it this way: there are shards of ancient Persian pottery depicting blood-sucking creatures. That predates all written records, folks.”
“Then we make a few mental adjustments, erase some footage, whatever it takes!” Casanova said. “But in the end, they’ll go off satisfied and, more important, I will have had an hour-long, prime-time advertisement for free and you are not going to mess that up for me!”
“I’m not doing anything,” I said angrily. “What is your problem?”
“Oh, please! Don’t think I don’t know why those bitches are here!”
“What are you talking about?”
I didn’t get an answer, because a guy in a security uniform ran up, looking freaked. Since most of the security detail around the casino were vamps, and vamps who had seen some shit, it didn’t make me too happy. And for once, Casanova and I appeared to be on the same wavelength.
“What?” he demanded, before the guard even stopped.
“Sir, it’s getting worse. We can’t contain—”
“Then call for backup! They’re
filming
!”
“Sir, we
have
called for backup. We have every guard on duty either in place or on the way, but we aren’t, that is, we don’t—”
“Don’t give me that,” Casanova snarled. “There’s only three! Sit on them if you have to!”
“Sir, I don’t think you under—”
“All right, you’re going to have to hold it down,” we were told, by a guy in a black tee with a pink pig on the front. “We’re picking you up on the mikes.”
“So sorry,” Casanova whispered ingratiatingly, and jerked me back against the wall.
“And as for demons, well, they’ve been mentioned in almost every holy book going,” the announcer said. “Along with plenty of secular texts. Take the incubus, for example. A spirit who supposedly visits people in their sleep, for, er, carnal relations. That idea goes back to Mesopotamia at the beginning of written history, at least forty-five hundred years.”
Casanova turned on his vamp again. “They’ll be through with the intro in another minute. Just hold on until—” A chicken flew past his face. “What the—what was that?”
“Sir, that’s what I’ve been trying to tell you,” the vampire said tightly. “We don’t
have
a minute.”
“But now all these legends, fables, myths, and—yes— monsters, have been brought together in one place, for your entertainment,” the announcer said, throwing out an arm, “in the Vegas attraction everyone’s talking about! Dante’s, where it’s rumored, unexplainable things happen on a regular—”
Another chicken flew by, this time in front of the man’s face. “What’s that? What’s going on?” he demanded, breaking character.
“I do believe you missed one,” a woman’s voice rang out, sounding amused.
“What?”
“In your litany of supernatural creatures. You forgot the most important of all.”
“Forgot who?” the guy asked, looking confused.
But not as much as when a whole flock of panicked birds suddenly descended onto the crowd, screeching and clucking and causing people to duck and squeal. Or when one of them suddenly morphed midflight into a naked vampire. Who hit the floor with a thud and a shriek: “Witches!”
He scrambled up and took off, bare butt flashing the camera, but I doubt anybody noticed. Because pandemonium had just broken loose. Chickens, sheep, and a flock of—yes—pigs were running and soaring and squawking and squealing everywhere, people were screaming and ducking, and something or somebody crashed into the taco stand. Which tipped over, scattering sweet-smelling meat and shredded cheese and my last chance at dinner everywhere.
And I finally reached tilt.
“Stop! It!”
I screamed, at the top of my voice, unable to take any more.
And, just like that, it did.
It stopped.
Not something. Everything. Including a rogue head of lettuce, caught midbounce.
I looked at it for a moment. And then at the taco guy, who had been about to hand somebody a couple of huge white paper bags. I licked my lips. And then I walked over and tugged the bags out of his frozen fingers.
I’d feel bad about it later. Right now all I felt was hunger. I clutched my ill-gotten meal to my chest and stepped over the river of grease. And a fallen tourist. And a hovering bird. And then I rounded the corner—
To find that the time bubble I’d inadvertently created didn’t extend out quite this far. A potted fern’s fronds rustled slightly in the breeze from an air conditioner vent. A chicken caught inside a security guard’s uniform stopped struggling to stare at me out of the neck hole. And a trio of women by one of the elevators exchanged glances.
The elevator dinged and the doors opened. I got on. One of the women started to say something, but I held up a hand. It had taco sauce on it. “Next time,” I rasped, “try calling.”
“Calling?”
“I’m in the book,” I told her savagely.
And then the doors shut and I was gone.
So good. Oh God, so freaking—
There was a knock on the door. I looked up from the feast that was spread out on my bedspread, and glared at it. But, apparently, my mood did not communicate itself through the foam-core, because a moment later, the door opened.
A vampire looked in.
I hid my food as best I could, and snarled at him.
He backed up slightly, hands raised. “Jeez. I mean . . . Jeez,” he said, gray eyes wide.
“Go. Away,” I warned, and shoved another nacho in my face.
“Yeah, uh, yeah. Only Marco said to ask you—” He broke off, looking at something. “Hey, is that mole—”
“Get out!” And he suddenly disappeared.
Not left,
disappeared
.
I panicked for a second, but then I saw him, not mentally the way I had when I’d shifted someone once before, but running in a panic past the open door. For a second, I wondered if I’d actually shifted him at all. Vamps could move fast enough to make it
look
—
But no. The power drain hit a second later, forcing out a groan. Damn, I felt like crap.
No big surprise. The real shock was that I wasn’t dead. Almost constant time shifts for a week, barely pausing for food and sleep before going out again, stopping time—a massive power drain right there—and then shifting somebody . . . no wonder he hadn’t gone but a few feet. I was surprised he’d gone anywhere at all. And now I felt nauseated.
I drank margarita out of a classy foam cup and told my stomach to deal with it. A moment later, another vamp appeared in the doorway.
This one was smarter. This one didn’t come in. This one just looked at me, all crossed arms and big-brotherly disapproval, although whether at my appearance, at my eating in bed, or at my scaring poor Fred, I didn’t know.
“Is it safe to come in?” he asked, after a minute.
“Are you going to eat my food?”
Marco lifted a bushy black eyebrow. “Is that from the heartburn shack downstairs?”
“Yeah.”
“Then it’s sacred, I assure you.”
“Then you can come in,” I said, as if I had a choice. Marco went wherever he damned well pleased.
At the moment, he was pleased to occupy one of the delicate little princess chairs the designer had chosen to grace my bedroom. They always looked like they were going to crack under the strain, but somehow they never did.
“You were gone a long time,” he finally said.
“I fell asleep.”
“In a pine grove?” He picked something out of my hair.
Damn it, I thought I’d got them all.
“That was after I woke up.”
He looked at me. I looked back. And then I ate another nacho.
He sighed. “You’ve been acting weird all week.”
“I thought I always act weird, according to you.”
“Weirder, then.” He contemplated my scratched, dirty, and habanero-splattered self. “Is there something you want to tell me?”
And suddenly, there was. There really, really was. I didn’t know if he was doing the vampire thing and manipulating my emotions, but I doubted it. Marco didn’t usually go in for that kind of stuff. It’s why we’d developed a sort of bond over the weeks we’d both been trapped here.
I knew that Marco didn’t like babysitting any more than I liked being babysat. But it was his job to guard me and my job to be guarded, at least in the current everybody-wants-to-kill-me era. And we both did our jobs. It was to Marco’s credit that he did his with a little bit of grace, and made this place as welcoming for me as any gilded cage stuffed full of vampires could be.
Maybe that’s why I had a sudden, insane urge to spill my guts. I wanted to tell him exactly what I’d been doing. I’d wanted to tell
somebody
all week. The pressure, the fear, the gnawing, gut-churning anxiety, had all been building until I’d started to feel like I wanted to scream.
And look how that had turned out, I thought grimly.
“No,” I said, and chewed chocolate-covered chicken.
“You sure?” he asked, and looked pointedly at my T-shirt.
And crap. I didn’t know what other weird smells the filthy thing held after mopping up half the forest, but it didn’t matter. Vamps aren’t herbivores. They aren’t designed to differentiate between types of florae, even whacked out, god-induced florae. They’re designed to find prey. Like the guy I’d just been rolling around a forest with.
I loaded up a nacho, and didn’t answer.
Marco had never asked me where Pritkin was. But some of the other guys had hinted around, and some smart aleck had left a copy of one of the more scandalous rags on the kitchen counter. The one with a grainy pic of Pritkin and me making out on the boss’ front lawn.
It had been taken at what was supposed to be my coronation, after the Spartoi attacked me. We’d fought, and I’d won, a fact that continued to amaze me. But winning didn’t ensure survival, and I almost hadn’t. The picture had been of Pritkin donating the energy to me that I needed to live, basically giving me the incubus version of mouth to mouth. Only it hadn’t looked that way.
And the fact that I’d been butt-naked at the time hadn’t helped.
Maybe Marco thought the same as some of the others, that Pritkin was lying low to stay out of Mircea’s way. I didn’t know because we’d never talked about it. And we’d never talked about it because he’d never asked.
He didn’t this time, either.
He just reached over and appropriated the massive nacho I’d been absentmindedly building, swallowing the guac and meat and cheese and refried beans and sour cream and salsa-laden pile all in one bite. And then said mildly, “’Cause you know who’ll be asking next.”
“The senate?”
Marco gave me an odd look. “In a way.”
Crap, crap, crap.
“I thought Mircea was in New York.” He was always in New York these days. Well, except for when he was in Vegas, or at his court in Washington State, or at one of half a dozen spots in between. I understood the need to avoid putting all your eggs in one basket in war time, so it made sense that the senate would spread out their power base. But this was getting ridiculous. I was surprised he didn’t have whiplash.
“He don’t need to be here to be here,” Marco said. “If you get my drift.”
“Yeah.” That was one of the perks of being a master vamp: what his family saw, Mircea saw. But, unlike everybody else around here, I didn’t have the ability to mind-speak, and I wasn’t planning on picking up my phone. In fact, I might just jerk it out of the wall. Mircea my friend/ lover/protector/occasional-partner-in-crime would have been welcome. Mircea the senator . . . not so much. Not until I finished my current errand, anyway.
He might own a casino themed like hell, but I had a pretty good idea what his view on my visiting the real thing would be.
Marco sighed again and looked over my spread. “When did they get mole?”
“Last week,” I told him, and handed it over. I had plenty left.
We ate in companionable silence for a while. Marco was one of those guys who didn’t feel the need to talk all the time. I’d asked him about it once, and he’d said he spent years learning to block out the incessant chitchat from other family members that went on in his head. You’d think that vampire mental skills would be used only for important stuff, but apparently not. According to him, they gossiped all the time, and it almost drove him crazy before he learned how to filter. And now he didn’t appreciate the verbal kind taking its place.
That was okay. I liked the quiet, too. Especially when the alternative was a lot of questions I couldn’t answer.
Not that I wouldn’t have liked to try. Marco had big shoulders, and it would have been a relief to dump some of this on them. But it wouldn’t be fair, and anyway there was nothing he could do. Except tell Mircea what was going on, not because he was a fink, but because that was what vampire servants did. He’d basically just reminded me of that fact, since he was a decent guy. But I hadn’t needed the hint.
I knew I couldn’t tell anyone anything.
It was one of the hardest things about this job. And, I suspected, why a lot of Pythias developed reputations for being a little . . . odd. How could you not be when you knew things nobody else knew, things that nobody else could be
allowed
to know, and when you didn’t even have anybody you could vent to once in a while about the absurdity of visiting dead parents or stopping time or
going to hell
. . . ?
It was driving me crazy, and I’d only had the job a few months. How had Agnes done it? And for decades?
Of course, she hadn’t exactly been the poster child for normal. And that was despite having Jonas to help her. And while I doubted she’d told him everything, or even most things, I knew they’d talked. He wouldn’t have been able to train me otherwise.
And suddenly, stupidly, I felt a sharp stab of jealousy for a dead woman.
And okaaaay. That was enough for one day.
I scraped the last of the guac out of the little plastic cup. “I’m think I’m gonna turn in,” I told Marco. “What was it you wanted to ask me?”
The dark head tilted inquiringly.
“Fred said there was something?” I prompted.
He grinned. “Oh yeah. I wanted to know what you did to those witches.”
“Why?” I asked warily.
“’Cause they just called asking for an appointment tomorrow.”
“Um.”
Dark eyes narrowed. “Is there a problem?”
“Better make it the day after. I’m . . . planning to sleep in.”
He still didn’t ask. “Get a bath,” he told me, tapping the side of his nose.
And then he ruined it by stealing the rest of my nachos.
Bastard.
I was washing out the damned T-shirt when I got a text message. I grabbed my phone off the nightstand before it vibrated off the edge and saw a big black question mark staring at me. I stared back at it for a moment, and then texted
2moro
.
I waited to make sure it went through.
Shit.
Yeah. It went through.
I left the tee to soak and got my weary butt in the shower. After washing an acre of Tony’s back forty down the drain, I leaned my head against the water-slick tile, wrapped a hand around my neck, and tried to relax. It didn’t work. I was tired, really, bone-achingly tired, to the point that I was surprised I didn’t just fall asleep right there.
But I wasn’t tired enough.
Not to relax, not to forget, not to just let it all go for a while and stop the whirlwind in my head
.
Lately, it had felt like one of those carnival games with the big spinning wheel and the barkers telling you to pay your money and take your chances. Only with my wheel, there was no point. Since every damned segment just held another problem.
And the space the little clicker landed on this time was labeled Mircea.
God, Mircea. No wonder Marco was being nice to me. He probably figured I was in for it already.
I kind of figured that, too. Vampires think differently than humans about a lot of things, but I didn’t think seeing your girlfriend making out with another guy on your lawn was one of them. Not when it had been caught by some of the cameras on-site to record my big moment, which had ended up being different than expected.
Not that that had stopped them from broadcasting it to the whole freaking world.
I’d been expecting to hear about that—it was one reason the breakneck pace of the last week hadn’t bothered me. I preferred being somewhere else. But sooner or later, Mircea and I were going to have to talk, and wasn’t that going to be fun? When I couldn’t even tell him what had been going on, because that would out Pritkin as part incubus? And that so-sharp intellect wouldn’t take long to put two and two together, not when there’d only ever been one incubus-human hybrid in all history.
I wondered which would bother Mircea more, me making out with a war mage or with the guy the world remembered as Merlin?
Of course, I wasn’t the only one with secrets. Like that whole thing with the Pythias I’d half overheard. What the hell did Mircea want with a Pythia so badly?
I knew what the senate wanted: having the Pythia in their corner gave them power in the supernatural community to rival that of the mages, something they’d never really had. And it didn’t hurt their efforts in the war, either. But this hadn’t been about the senate, had it? This had been about Mircea personally.
So what had he wanted?
Maybe it was only what I already knew—his brother Radu had been imprisoned by the Inquisition and tortured into madness. Going back in time to save him had been almost the first thing Mircea asked of me once we met again as adults. And it was certain that he loved his brother. He talked about him all the time. . .
But he didn’t talk about that. He didn’t talk about the centuries-long campaign he’d waged to save him. I could understand not telling me before I did what he wanted, in case I figured out that changing time was usually a major no-no for Pythias. But he hadn’t said anything afterward, either. And after he had Radu back, what was the harm in telling me?
Maybe it just hadn’t come up. But that was the thing with Mircea—a lot of things just never came up. And whenever I tried to ask about anything beyond the superficial, the conversation got sidetracked fast. Real fast.
So what didn’t he want me to know?
Maybe it was nothing, just the old habit of someone who had learned long ago to keep things to himself. But I wasn’t a rival master. And we were dating. We should be talking more than this—shouldn’t we?
I didn’t know. It wasn’t like I’d had a boyfriend before. Thanks to growing up at Tony’s, it wasn’t like I’d had any relationship that could, strictly speaking, be called normal. And Mircea could talk circles around ages-old vamps; he probably wouldn’t even have to break a sweat to keep me in the dark.
But was he?
My brain didn’t know, but my gut . . . my gut had other ideas. It had, for instance, vetoed the idea that I ask Rafe, Tony’s old court painter and my childhood friend, about my parents. It would have been easier than running Laura down—a lot easier. And alone among Tony’s old court, Rafe wouldn’t lie to me.
But then, he wouldn’t be able to lie to Mircea, either, if he was asked point-blank what I was up to. So I’d gone with Laura, even if maybe I hadn’t had to. Even if maybe these doubts were all in my head. Even if . .