by Karen Chance
“Yeah. A couple dumb-ass dark mages stole it from Merlin that year and—”
“Wait.” I glared at the djinn, wondering if I was being had. “Merlin lived in…well, I don’t know exactly, but he couldn’t have still been alive in the eighteenth century!”
“He was part incubus—everyone knows that,” I was informed testily. “And demons are immortal. Now hush up if you want this, ’cause otherwise I’m gone.”
I hushed up.
“So, yeah, he was alive in 1793, when he lost the Codex to the mages, who put it up for auction at a little get-together on October third. Right before they bugged the hell out of the city to get away from the public executions and the fires and the mobs and the pissed-off half demon who was after their butts. Anyway, dress to impress and maybe you can get a look at it before they sell it off.”
“But, if they’re planning to sell it, it’ll be guarded! There has to be a better time—”
“Merlin was guarding the Codex until the mages got their greedy paws on it and, trust me, Pythia or no, you don’t want to go through him.”
“Then what about later? Who bought it?”
“Even if I had all day, I couldn’t cover all the rumors of where it went after that night. You don’t care anyway, since if you want it before the spells unravel, you have to get at it early. And that’s Paris, 1793,” he said flatly. “Try not to get beheaded. Trust me, it sucks.” He started for the corridor again.
“Wait a minute! Where are you going?”
“Where you think? I got a job to do.”
“Saleh!”
He paused beside the door. “This is none of your business, babe. Thanks to mystery man, I’m incorporeal again. Ten centuries of accumulated power down the drain, like that.” He tried to snap his fingers, but the lack of actual hands frustrated him. He grimaced. “Whatever revenge I can come up with is well within the rules. And believe me, I can be real inventive.”
He streamed out, leaving me staring witlessly after him. Well, at least that explained how he’d managed to leave a ghost: he hadn’t. The spirit was Saleh’s natural state. He’d just saved up enough power to form himself a body, the better to wheel and deal with mortals, I assumed. The question was, did I go after him?
I doubted if, in his current condition, he could do Pritkin any real harm. Ghosts, even new ones, have a limited power supply, one that is eroded very quickly by attacks on the living. Saleh wasn’t a ghost, but since he’d just lost most of his power along with his head, I doubted he was likely to do any better. Add to that Pritkin’s formidable shields, and he was probably pretty safe. Too bad the same couldn’t be said for me.
If Saleh found a way to communicate with the mage, to accuse him or berate him for the crime, he might let slip how he’d acquired his information. And that would be very bad. If Saleh didn’t even know him, it seemed unlikely that Pritkin had a personal grievance against the djinn. Which meant that his reason for killing him was probably to keep him from telling me about the Codex. And if Pritkin hadn’t balked at killing Saleh to keep it safe, why would I be any different?
In the end, I decided that the whole Saleh debate was stupid since I didn’t know how to round up a djinn that didn’t want to go. I finally shifted back alone, only to have Billy scream inside my head, “Get in the tub!”
When I just stood there, trying to catch up, he stepped out of my skin and gave me a shove, right in the center of my chest. Billy usually has trouble moving even small things, but he’d found some extra energy somewhere, because I almost flew off my feet. I staggered backwards against the old-fashioned claw-footed tub, lost my balance and fell in. At the same moment the corridor wall blew inward in a burst of plaster, wood and expensive wallpaper.
I lay among the debris, head spinning, eyesight going dark, for several confused seconds. The tub had been a restored antique, with the original solid cast-iron body. It had saved my life, but with a pounding head and dust-caked lungs, I was having trouble feeling grateful.
“Miss Palmer!” Pritkin’s voice came from the hole where the door used to be. “Are you all right?”
I didn’t look at him. I couldn’t look at him. “Sure.” I spit out blood—I’d bitten my tongue—and plaster dust. “Never better.”
I climbed out of the debris and started for the sink, only it didn’t appear to be there anymore. There was a sink-sized hole in the window, though, so I picked a shaky path across the destroyed bathroom and looked out. The fresh breeze was so distracting that it took me a few seconds to spy the remains of the plumbing eight stories below, in the middle of Flamingo Road. A taxi driver was standing outside his cab, staring at the big dent in his hood and looking puzzled. He looked up and our eyes met. I quickly ducked back inside. This place was about to be way more popular than I liked.
I peered into the hall and saw three unfamiliar war mages sitting with their backs to the wall. They looked pissed, maybe because they were trussed up like chickens about to be put on a spit. Since there were only three, I assumed they hadn’t been expecting us. They seemed to recognize me, though, or maybe they were glaring at everybody on principle.
“We can try a memory charm,” Nick said, regarding them doubtfully.
“It won’t hold,” Pritkin argued. “Not with their training.” He looked at Nick, his eyes shadowed with concern. “It seems you just joined the resistance openly.”
I blinked, but it didn’t help. The mask was absolutely perfect. I’d grown up around creatures whose emotions were often shown in the barest flicker of an eyelash, in an infinitesimal pause in conversation. I’d thought I knew how to read people, but even concentrating with everything I had, I couldn’t find a flaw.
The sleek, deadly predator I’d just seen was simply gone. In his place was a pale, tired-looking man with plaster powdering his skin and clothes. Pritkin ran fingers through his hair, which, already wet with sweat thanks to the ovenlike temperature in the apartment, gummed into punk-rock spikes. At least he’ll have to wash it now, I thought blankly.
Pritkin noticed me, and the touch of his eyes was enough to make my skin prickle. “Did you find him?”
I stumbled over to lean heavily against the wall. My heart was pumping against my rib cage, hard and fast enough that I could feel the pulse in my neck. “No.” I closed my eyes as if in weariness, because Pritkin had proven able to read them all too easily in the past. But I was proud of my voice. It was the one I’d cultivated at court, the one designed to tell even vampires exactly nothing. I forced my heart rate to slow down, my breathing to even out. “It seems that djinn are like vamps; they don’t leave ghosts.”
“You said you found something.” I opened my eyes to see Pritkin coming toward me. Okay, maybe there was a flaw, I decided. The walk was the same. He had the deadly fluidity of a fighter, all leashed strength and readiness. He stopped a little too close for comfort, those clever green eyes searching my face.
He’s Tony in a mood, I told myself sternly, looking for someone to bleed because he’s having a bad day. You feel nothing, no fear, because that attracts his attention better than anything else. You are calm, dreamy, serene. You feel nothing. “There was a ghost trail in the bathroom, but it wasn’t from the djinn,” I said casually. “Someone else died here, a while ago.”
“Are you sure you’re all right?” Nick came up alongside me. His eyes were on my dress, which had retreated from hopeful dawn into foggy night, with little tendrils of white creeping cautiously across a murky background.
“Fine,” I said steadily. “The sink missed me on its way to destroy a cab.”
Pritkin stared past my shoulder at the ruined bathroom and his scowl deepened. “We need to go. There’s nothing for us here, and the human authorities will arrive soon.”
I couldn’t make myself touch his hand, so I twisted a fist in his coat, which was back to the old battered brown. I wondered where he kept the cool clothes. I held out my free hand to Nick and prepared to shift us all back to Dante’s. “Yeah,�
� I agreed, my eyes on Pritkin. “We’re all done here.”
Chapter 9
Casanova had pointed out that it would be unwise for me to occupy a suite, in case the Circle had spies on the lookout for long-term guests. Instead, he’d stuck me in what had once been a small storeroom in back of the tiki bar. I still had several cases of cocktail umbrellas in boxes under my bed, and barely enough room to turn around. Pritkin had it worse, being stuffed into the dressing room once reserved for the club’s famous dead performers. It was larger, since it had once held their coffins, but he swore it still had a certain…odor. At the moment, that thought cheered me up considerably.
I finished pulling the oversized T-shirt I was using for a nightgown over my head as Billy drifted through the wall. I brought him up to speed on my conversation with Saleh while he sat on the edge of the bed and rolled a ghostly cigarette. “We need a team,” I concluded.
“We are a team.”
I was tired and I ached, in more ways than one. I hugged my pillow, which had all the comfort of one issued by an unusually stingy airline.
“The Cassie and Billy show might have worked for staying a step ahead of Tony,” I said. “It isn’t going to be enough to let us burgle a Black Circle stronghold.”
“And we’ve had such great luck with partners.”
“We can trust Rafe.”
“Cass, I know you like the guy, but come on. A great warrior he ain’t.”
“We don’t need a warrior,” I said irritably. “I’m not planning to attack the Circle!”
“And your plans always work out perfectly, huh?”
“Are you trying to be a pain in the ass?”
“Nope, it pretty much comes naturally.” He lit up and regarded me through a haze of ghostly smoke. “There’s always Marlowe.”
He meant Kit Marlowe, the onetime Elizabethan playwright. He was now the Consul’s chief spy. “Yeah, that’d be healthy.”
“You’d be saving Mircea as well as yourself. I’d think that would cancel a few debts,” Billy argued.
“It might, if they didn’t blame me for getting him into this mess in the first place.”
“But he put the geis on you—”
“Which, as my master, he had every right to do. I’m the one who had no right to double it, even accidentally.” I saw the objection trembling on Billy’s lips. “And yes, I think their reasoning sucks. I’m just saying.”
“I don’t like them any better than you do.” Billy sounded aggrieved. “But who else is there? We keep meeting these powerful types, but they’re all freaking nuts.”
“I’m not taking anyone back in time I can’t trust. Or anyone incompetent. Or who has their own agenda.”
Billy let out an exasperated sigh. “It’s gonna be a little hard to assemble a team if you keep to those kind of standards. Someone loyal and strong who doesn’t want anything? Come on.”
I found myself getting furious all over again at Pritkin, who was supposed to be exactly that. I’d started to let down my guard with him, just because he was smart and brave and sometimes strangely funny. I should’ve kept in mind that none of that meant he was on my side. When I give my word, I keep it, he’d once told me. Yeah, right.
I toyed with the bedspread, blue and gold brocade with scratchy lace. Not for the first time, I wished for something less flashy and more comfortable. I’d had a soft cotton coverlet at Tony’s that I’d used for years. It had faded in the wash, its bright, cheap flowers turning to soft pastels over time, like an English garden. It had gotten a little ragged around the edges, but I’d never let my fastidious governess change it for anything else. I’d liked it the way it was, flaws and all. But like the rest of my stuff, like Eugenie herself, it no longer existed.
“Cass?” Billy suddenly sounded awkward, something almost novel for him. “You know Pritkin was a jerk, right?” A jerk who also happened to be a friend, a tiny voice at the back of my mind whispered. Stop it, stop it. “Cass?”
The lump in my throat had grown enough to be almost painful, and my eyes had started prickling embarrassingly, and wow, was it time for a change of subject. “I know.”
“Okay, then. We’re better off. I never trusted him.”
“I don’t trust anybody,” I said fervently. It was the only thing I was sure of these days.
“Anybody except me,” Billy corrected. “So what’s the plan?”
“I have to get the Codex,” I said, starting with the one thing on which there was no argument. Pritkin had said it wouldn’t help, but I guess I’d just seen how much I could believe him. “Only I can’t bring it back here. It’s been roaming around for over two hundred years; who knows what taking it out of the timeline would do?”
Billy looked confused for a moment, and then his eyes got wide. “You can’t be thinking what I think you’re thinking.”
I scowled at him. “If the mountain won’t go to Mohammed—”
“Mohammed wasn’t an insane master vamp!”
“Mircea’s not insane.” Not yet, anyway. “He’s…tormented.”
“Uh-huh. You’re going to drag a tormented master vampire along to burgle a dark mage stronghold?”
“You have a better idea?”
“Anything is a better idea!”
“Don’t yell.”
“Then start talking sense!” I threw the pillow at him, which did no good because it passed right on through. “That doesn’t change the fact that you’re crazy.”
I flopped back on the bed and threw an arm over my eyes. He was probably right, not that it made a difference. If I couldn’t take the spell to Mircea, I had no choice but to take Mircea to the spell. And I’d been saying just that morning that I wanted something to do. As last words went, they pretty much sucked.
“You need to get some rest.” Billy tried to take my hand, but he’d expended too much energy back at the apartment and didn’t have the strength. His fingers passed right through me.
“And you need to feed,” I said, finishing the thought. I wasn’t looking forward to the energy drain, but I was only going to sleep anyway.
“I’ll make do,” he said, after a minute.
I looked up, confused. I couldn’t remember the last time Billy had refused to take energy. It was the main tie binding us together, his payment for helping out with my various problems. “What?”
“No offense, Cass, but you look like hell.”
“Thanks.”
“I don’t need much gas to spy on the manic mage, anyway.” He tipped his hat back and gave me a cocky grin. “And if we’re lucky, maybe some of his old buddies in the Corps will find him and take care of one problem for us.”
I fell asleep wondering why that thought didn’t make me feel any better.
Rafe met me in the kitchens before dawn the next morning. With Pritkin no longer in the picture, I’d had to look elsewhere for help, and there weren’t a lot of choices. I’d left a message on the private number Rafe had given me, asking to see him. I just hoped he wasn’t going to freak out too badly when I told him what I wanted.
Shortly after we snagged stools at an unused prep table, one of the staff wandered over and deposited a white clay coffee cup in front of me. It smelled like rich dark roast and freshly steamed milk, and had a dot in the middle of the foam from the espresso added right at the end. Pritkin would have loved it. I pushed it away, feeling queasy.
“Cucciolina, you are a mess,” Rafe told his newest admirer, as fat little hands gleefully smeared berry mush all over his green silk shirt.
Some of the staff were making pies for Midsummer’s Eve, which explained why the baby had a ring of purple all around her mouth and jam stuck in her wispy blond hair. Miranda, who had been trying to babysit and supervise at the same time, had handed her over almost as soon as I walked in the door. The baby had immediately made a peevish little huffing sound, and when I just stood there, holding her awkwardly, she broke into an angry shriek.
Rafe rescued me, taking her despite his elegant
attire and jiggling her against his chest. She hammed it up for a few seconds, wailing like I’d been sticking her with pins, before finally subsiding into anxious snuffles and pressing her face to his shirt. Considering how fast she recovered, it was pretty clear she’d just wanted to flirt with the cute guy.
A white china plate joined my coffee cup. On it was a largish, nicely browned muffin. I looked at the muffin and, as far as I could tell, it didn’t look back. Since it had passed the first test, I broke it open and sniffed it. Peanut butter and anchovy. A little chef was casually loitering nearby, waiting for a verdict. He was going to be waiting for a while.
“She reminds me of you at that age,” Rafe said, vainly swiping the baby’s lips with a napkin. It only made bad matters worse: now she had purple cheeks, too. “You could never eat anything without getting it everywhere.”
Jesse stifled a smile at the other end of the long table, where he and a bunch of the kids were playing Monopoly. They should have been in bed—it was barely four a.m.—but nobody at Dante’s kept a normal schedule. Having a staff partially composed of people who caught fire in sunlight probably had something to do with that.
Most of the older kids were intent on the game, but one of the younger ones was sitting on the floor, playing with an Elvis Pez dispenser someone had given her. She seemed totally intent on it, but the door behind her nonetheless stayed stubbornly open. It seemed that her parents had once hidden their embarrassing child in a small room with no windows, until she discovered that locks just loved to open for her and escaped. Now it had become a bit of a habit. It made getting around the casino something of a challenge, though: elevator doors simply refused to close as long as she was inside.
Watching her, I finally figured out what had been bugging me. These kids were just too young. The average age was eight, with several in the four-to-five-year-old range. Which made no sense.
At fourteen, I’d been one of the youngest in Tami’s brood. Most had been mid-to late teens, old enough to have figured out what their lives were going to be like in one of those special schools and to have engineered an escape. Sure, there were occasionally younger kids who came through, but they usually arrived with an older sibling or friend. I’d never seen Tami with so many really small children. How had they gotten away? How had they survived on the streets until she found them? I’d barely managed it, and I’d had more years and more money than most of them.
