I gritted my teeth. “I can’t believe he said those things about Lissa’s dad.”
“Gossip and rumors never go away—you of all people should know that. Doesn’t matter if you’re dead. Besides, that conversation was actually to our—by which I mean
your
—advantage. Somebody else is probably considering the inside-job theory already. If that guy can help get it around even more, it’ll ensure no one even thinks the world’s most dangerous guardian could have been involved.”
“I suppose.” Forcibly, I pushed my temper down. I had always been trigger-happy, and I knew for sure now that the bits of darkness I’d gleaned from Lissa in the last twenty-four hours were making things worse, as I’d feared. I changed the subject, steering to safer ground. “You’re being pretty nice now, considering how mad you were earlier.”
“I’m not all that happy, but I’ve done some thinking,” Adrian said.
“Oh? Care to enlighten me?
“Not here. We’ll talk later. We’ve got more important things to worry about.”
“Like covering up a crime and getting out of this city without being attacked by Strigoi?”
“No. Like me winning money.”
“Are you crazy?” Asking Adrian that was never a good idea. “We just escaped a bunch of bloodthirsty monsters, and all you can think about is gambling?”
“The fact that we’re alive means we should live,” he argued. “Especially if we’ve got the time, anyway.”
“You don’t need any more money.”
“I will if my dad turns me out. Besides, it’s really about enjoying the game.”
By “enjoying the game,” I soon realized that Adrian meant “cheating.” If you considered using spirit cheating. Because there was so much mental power tied into spirit, its users were very good at reading people. Victor had been right. Adrian joked and kept ordering drinks, but I could tell he was paying close attention to the others. And even though he was careful not to say anything explicitly, his expressions spoke for him—confident, uncertain, annoyed. Without words, he was still able to project compulsion and bluff the other players.
“Be right back,” I told him, feeling Lissa’s call.
He waved me off, unconcerned. I wasn’t worried about his safety either, seeing as there were a few guardians in the room. What concerned me was the possibility some casino official would notice his compulsion and throw us all out. Spirit users wielded it the most strongly, but all vampires had it to a certain extent. Using it was considered immoral, so it was banned among Moroi. A casino would definitely have reason to be on the lookout for it.
The business center turned out to be near the poker room, and I found Lissa and Eddie quickly. “What’s the report?” I asked as we walked back.
“We’ve got a flight in the morning,” said Lissa. She hesitated. “We could have gone out tonight, but . . .”
She didn’t need to finish. After what we’d faced today, no one wanted to risk even the slightest chance of running into a Strigoi. Going to the airport would only require a taxi ride, but even still, that would mean we’d have to risk walking out into the darkness.
I shook my head and led them toward the poker room. “You did the right thing. We’ve got time to kill now. . . . Do you want to get a room and get some sleep?”
“No.” She shivered, and I felt fear in her. “I don’t want to leave this crowd. And I’m kind of afraid of what I’d dream. . . .”
Adrian might be able to act like he didn’t care about the Strigoi, but those faces were still haunting Lissa—especially Dimitri’s. “Well,” I said, hoping to make her feel better, “staying up will help get us back on the Court’s schedule. You can also watch Adrian get thrown out by casino security.”
As I’d hoped, watching Adrian cheat with spirit did indeed distract Lissa—so much so that she grew interested in trying it herself. Great. I urged her to safer games and recapped how Adrian had planted the idea of an inside job in the Moroi guy’s head. I left out the part about Lissa’s father. The night miraculously passed without incident—either of the Strigoi or security type—and a couple of people even recognized Lissa, which would help our alibi. Eddie didn’t speak to me the entire night.
We left the Witching Hour in the morning. None of us were happy about losing Victor or the attack, but the casino had soothed us all a little—at least until we got to the airport. At the casino, we’d been flooded with Moroi news, insulated from the human world. But while waiting for our plane, we couldn’t help but watch the TVs that seemed to be everywhere.
The headline story that night was all about a mass killing over at the Luxor, one that had left no clues for the police. Most of the casino guards involved had died from broken necks, and no other bodies were found. My guess was that Dimitri had tossed his cronies outside, where the sun would turn them to ash. Meanwhile, Dimitri himself had slipped away, leaving no other witnesses behind. Even the cameras had recorded nothing, which didn’t surprise me. If I could disable surveillance at a prison, Dimitri could certainly manage it at a human hotel.
Whatever mood-improvement we’d achieved instantly disappeared, and we didn’t talk much. I stayed out of Lissa’s mind because I didn’t need her depressed feelings amplifying my own.
We’d arranged a direct flight to Philadelphia and would then catch a commuter flight back to the airport near Court. What we’d face once there . . . well, that was probably the least of our concerns.
I wasn’t worried about Strigoi boarding our plane in the daytime, and without any prisoners to watch, I allowed myself to fall into much-needed sleep. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d gotten any on this trip. I slept heavily, but my dreams were haunted by the fact that I’d let one of the Moroi’s most dangerous criminals escape
and
allowed a Strigoi to walk free
and
gotten a bunch of humans killed. I held none of my friends responsible. This disaster was all on me.
TWELVE
W
HICH WAS CONFIRMED WHEN WE finally stumbled back to the Royal Court.
I wasn’t the only one in trouble, of course. Lissa was summoned to the queen for chastising, though I knew she’d suffer no actual punishment. Not like Eddie and me. We might be out of school, but we were technically under the jurisdiction of the official guardians now, which meant we faced as much trouble as any disobedient employee. Only Adrian escaped any consequences. He was free to do whatever he wanted.
And really, my punishment wasn’t as bad as it could have been. Honestly, what did I have to lose at this point? My chances of guarding Lissa had already been sketchy, and no one had wanted me as a guardian except Tasha anyway. A crazy Vegas weekend—which was our cover story—was hardly enough to dissuade her from taking me on. It was enough, however, to make some of Eddie’s prospects withdraw their requests for him to be their guardian. Enough still wanted him that he was in no danger of losing a good position, but I felt horribly guilty. He didn’t breathe a word to anyone about what we’d done, but each time he looked at me, I could see the condemnation in his eyes.
And I saw a lot of him in the next couple days. It turned out guardians had a system in place to deal with those who were disobedient.
“What you did was so irresponsible that you might as well be back in school. Hell, elementary school, even.”
We were in one of the offices in the guardians’ headquarters, being yelled at by Hans Croft, the guy in charge of all the guardians at Court and someone who was instrumental in guardian assignments. He was a dhampir in his early fifties, with a bushy gray-and-white mustache. He was also an asshole. The scent of cigar smoke always encircled him. Eddie and I were sitting meekly before him while he paced with his hands behind his back.
“You could have gotten the last Dragomir killed—not to mention the Ivashkov boy. How do you think the queen would have reacted to the death of her great-nephew? And talk about timing! You go off party-hopping right when the guy who tried to kidnap the princess is running loose. Not that you would know that, seeing as you were probably too busy playing slot machines and using your fake IDs.”
I winced at the reference to Victor, though I suppose I should have been relieved that we were above suspicion for his escape. Hans read my grimace as an admission of guilt.
“You might have graduated,” he declared, “but that does
not
mean you are invincible.”
This whole encounter reminded me of when Lissa and I had returned to St. Vladimir’s, when we’d been chastised for the same thing: recklessly running off and endangering her. Only this time, there was no Dimitri to defend me. That memory made a lump form in my throat as I remembered his face, serious and gorgeous, those brown eyes intense and passionate as he spoke up for me and convinced the others of my value.
But no. No Dimitri here. It was just Eddie and me alone, facing the consequences of the real world.
“You.” Hans pointed a stubby finger at Eddie. “You might be lucky enough to slide out of this without too many repercussions. Sure, you’ll have a black mark on your record forever. And you’ve totally screwed up your chances of ever having an elite royal position with other guardians to support you. You’ll get some assignment though. Working alone with some minor nobility, probably.”
High-ranking royals had more than one guardian, which always made protection easier. Hans’s point was that Eddie’s assignment would be lowly—creating more work and danger for him. Casting him a sidelong glance, I saw that hard, determined look on his face again. It seemed to say he didn’t care if he had to guard a family by himself. Or even ten families. In fact, he gave off the vibe that they could drop him alone into a nest of Strigoi and he’d take them all on.
“And
you
.” Hans’s sharp voice jerked my gaze back to him. “You will be lucky to ever have a job.”
Like always, I spoke without thinking. I should have taken this silently like Eddie. “Of course I’ll have one. Tasha Ozera wants me. And you’re too short on guardians to keep me sitting around.”
Hans’s eyes gleamed with bitter amusement. “Yes, we are short on guardians, but there’s all sorts of work we need done—not just personal protection. Someone has to staff our offices. Someone has to sit and guard the front gates.”
I froze. A desk job. Hans was threatening me with a desk job. All of my horrible imaginings had involved me guarding some random Moroi, someone I didn’t know and would possibly hate. But in any of those scenarios, I would be out in the world. I would be in motion. I would be fighting and defending.
But this? Hans was right. Guardians were needed for the Court’s administrative jobs. True, they only kept a handful—we were too valuable—but someone had to do it. One of those someones being me was too awful to comprehend. Sitting around all day for hours and hours . . . like the guards in Tarasov. Guardian life had all sorts of unglamorous—but necessary—tasks.
It truly, truly hit me then that I was in the real world. Fear slammed into me. I’d taken on the title of guardian when I graduated, but had I really understood what it meant? Had I been playing make-believe—enjoying the perks and ignoring the consequences? I was out of school. There would be no detention for this. This was real. This was life and death.
My face must have given away my feelings. Hans gave a small, cruel smile. “That’s right. We’ve got all sorts of ways to tame troublemakers. Lucky for you, your ultimate fate’s still being decided. And in the meantime, there’s
a lot
of work that needs to be done around here that you two are going to be helping with.”
That “work” over the next few days turned out to be menial manual labor. Honestly, it wasn’t too different from detention, and I was pretty sure it had just been created to give wrongdoers like us something awful to do. We worked twelve hours a day, much of it outdoors hauling rocks and dirt to build some new, pretty courtyard for a set of royal town houses. Sometimes we were put on cleaning duty, scrubbing floors. I knew they had Moroi workers for these kinds of things, and probably they were being given a vacation right now.
Still, it was better than the other work Hans would give us: sorting and filing mountains and mountains of paper. That gave me a new appreciation for information going digital . . . and again made me worry about the future. Over and over, I kept thinking about that initial conversation with Hans. The threat that this could be my life. That I would never be a guardian—in the true sense—to Lissa or any other Moroi. Throughout my training, we’d always had a mantra:
They come first
. If I had really and truly screwed up my future, I’d have a new mantra:
A comes first
.
Then B, C, D . . .
Those work days kept me away from Lissa, and the front-desk staff within our respective buildings went out of their way to keep us apart too. It was frustrating. I could keep track of her through the link, but I wanted to talk to her. I wanted to talk to anyone. Adrian stayed away too and didn’t bother with dreams, making me wonder how he felt. We’d never had our “talk” after Las Vegas. Eddie and I often worked side by side, but he wasn’t speaking to me, which left me with hours of being trapped with my own thoughts and guilt.
And believe me, I had plenty of things to intensify my guilt. Around Court, people didn’t really notice workers. So whether I was inside or outside, people were always talking like I wasn’t there. The biggest topic was Victor. Dangerous Victor Dashkov on the loose. How could it have happened? Did he have powers no one knew about? People were afraid, some even convinced he’d show up at Court and try to kill everyone in their sleep. The “inside job” theory was running rampant, which continued to keep us above suspicion. Unfortunately, it meant a lot of people now worried about traitors within our midst. Who knew who might be working for Victor Dashkov? Spies and rebels could be lurking at Court, planning all sorts of atrocities. I knew all the stories were exaggerated, but it didn’t matter. They all came from one kernel of truth: Victor Dashkov was walking the world a free man. And only I—and my accomplices—knew it was all because of me.