by Karen Chance
Outside the limo, neon-lit streets melted by in chaotic smears, shimmers of light and color and noise. Billy and I were headed out of the city to our rendezvous with the Senate. I’d slipped away without telling Pritkin, mainly because he and the Consul hadn’t exactly hit it off the first time they met and I didn’t need any help making a bad impression. But also because as soon as I got my hands on Mircea, I was off to get the Codex and finish this thing. And I still wasn’t convinced that Pritkin was all that interested in saving a vampire’s life—especially not now.
It still felt strange not having him there, though: like an empty holster where there should be a gun. I hadn’t realized how much I’d come to rely on his particular brand of insanity. It was too bad; what we were attempting tonight would have been right up his alley.
So I had about a thousand things to worry about and less help than I’d planned. Yet not only did that not keep Billy from bitching, but it didn’t even slow him down. “You were out of it for almost a day,” I pointed out.
“Well, forgive me for exhausting myself saving your life!” he snapped. “Not to mention that you were supposed to be sleeping! Not running around with gangsters planning a hit on the Senate!”
“We’re not hitting the Senate,” I told him patiently for maybe the sixth time. “We’re going in, grabbing Mircea and getting out. No big deal.” It was what I needed to believe, anyway.
“Right. Which is why you’re too scared to stay in your own body.” Billy paused, fidgeting.
“What?”
“My boobs don’t fit in this dress. And no, I can’t believe I just said that.”
“Don’t do that,” I batted his hands away from a part of my anatomy they did not need to know any better. “You’re supposed to look dignified.”
“In these shoes? I’ll be lucky if I don’t break your neck.”
“Women do this all the time. You have it for one night. Stop with the whining.”
“Whining? You really want to go there, Cass? Because we can go there. We can so go there.”
“I take it back,” Sal told me. She and the rest of Alphonse’s boys had been watching the exchange with slightly interested expressions—which, since they were vamps, meant they were pretty much fascinated. Her boyfriend and Casanova were in the other limo, presumably to demonstrate family solidarity to anyone who might have heard about the fight. “If this is what you put up with every day, you deserve to whine.”
“I don’t whine,” I snapped.
“Gee, thanks for the input, Bonnie. Feel free to jump into a private conversation just any old time,” Billy added. Immediately after meeting them, he’d started calling Sal and Alphonse “Bonnie and Clyde,” and nothing seemed to be stopping him. And since he was in my body for the moment, I really wished he’d shut up so maybe Sal would stop fingering her automatic.
Billy fidgeted with my anatomy some more, but succeeded only in getting one breast stuck higher than the other. He regarded them sadly, head tilted slightly to the side. “You know, death has been a lot weirder than I thought.”
I looked out the window at the sunset that was painting the desert a deep bloodred. We’d just left Vegas, so we were nowhere near MAGIC yet. But I could feel Mircea’s presence growing with every mile, like a magnet drawing me closer. “Life can be pretty strange, too,” I said.
The outside of MAGIC is a group of nondescript stucco buildings in the middle of a sea of not-too-interesting canyons. There’s nothing to distinguish it from any other ranch except its isolation and the fact that there aren’t any horses or day-trippers in sight. But its looks are the least of its protections. Area 51 has less security; of course, it also has less to hide.
We arrived just as the place was starting to liven up. Not that it was obvious from the exterior, which was mostly housing for the human staff members, but thanks to Marcello’s senses, I could feel the activity happening beneath the ground. There was the hum of magical wards, the bright wells of energy that meant vampires, the totally different magical signatures that indicated mages and other, less familiar sensations that might be Weres or the occasional Fey. It felt how a seismic meter might look right before an earthquake hit: too much activity in too small a space, just waiting to explode. I tried not to think about how accurate that simile might be.
I followed everyone else in, trying to remember not to duck through doorways. The low ceilings could accommodate my new height, but they still felt too close, too hard. Billy, wearing my skin, was escorted into an antechamber of the main senate hall along with Sal and Alphonse to cool their heels and await the Consul’s pleasure. Considering how much she liked me, I assumed they’d be there a while. The other family members were ushered straight to Lord Mircea’s rooms to hang out while the important types did their business.
The vamps had housed me upstairs with the other humans the one and only time I’d accepted their hospitality. Looking around, I could see why. Mircea’s suite was a little too impressive, like an underground Renaissance palace, with lots of inlaid-marble floors, rich tapestries and crystal chandeliers reflected in too many mirrors. Three different hallways broke off from the foyer and an honest-to-God butler conducted us to a library where refreshments were milling around. The simple room I’d been housed in before was more welcoming, and far more Mircea, than this opulent blandness.
After a couple minutes of fighting off would-be blood donors, I started threading my way through the crowd. I’d almost made it to the hall when I stopped dead. Standing in the middle of the doorway was a vampire with big brown eyes, messy brown curls and a cheerful goateed face. Charming, if you ignored the whole cold-blooded murderer thing.
I could feel Marcello’s unease mount at sight of the Consul’s chief spy. I really couldn’t blame him—it wasn’t making me any happier. I didn’t know why Marlowe was slumming with the help, especially with an important meeting about to start, but it probably wasn’t a good sign. He tended to show up where the action was, but there was no way he could know anything interesting was about to happen here.
“You’re not hungry?” he asked cheerfully.
“Ate before we left,” I said, in Marcello’s low voice. I was glad I didn’t need my borrowed heart to beat, because it was suddenly in my throat. “I thought I’d pay my respects to the master.”
“Lord Mircea is indisposed.”
“Then I’ll keep it short.”
Casanova joined us, a suave figure in cool blue and white, with a bright print tie. He looked like he was heading for a posh party on a private yacht and managed to make Marlowe’s dark, Elizabethan-era attire look like it came from a bad stage production. “I’d like to see him, too,” he commented, “to thank him for my new position.”
“I thought it was merely an interim appointment.”
Casanova smiled slightly. “That’s why I’d like to see him.”
Several other vamps made tentative movements towards us, as if they were thinking of joining the party. Most didn’t get a chance to see Mircea very often, and with Tony under a cloud, they probably planned to do a little groveling. And blame everything on the fat man before the big boss gets any ideas, Marcello added in my head.
Stop that, I thought back.
“How brave of you,” Marlowe said genially. “He’s not in the best of moods, these days. Most people have been keeping a somewhat…safer…distance.” The newcomers scattered so fast I almost didn’t see them leave.
“Just you two, then?” It was still very friendly. I felt cold sweat breaking out all over my borrowed body.
“We’ll convey everyone’s best wishes,” Casanova said, apparently unfazed. Marlowe glanced at me. I didn’t say anything, but I didn’t leave, either.
He shrugged. “If you insist.”
We followed him down a long hall to a large bedroom/sitting room combo. I could tell by the fist-sized hole in the door that it was Mircea’s. It looked like things hadn’t improved since my last visit.
Unlike the muted colors tha
t predominated in the public rooms, it was awash in color, something I’d failed to notice on my previous visit because the lights had been off. They still were, but Marcello’s eyesight was a lot better than mine, and easily picked out the bright turquoises, reds and greens of traditional Romanian folk art in niches and painted on a huge carved wardrobe. The pieces should have looked gaudy and cheap next to the rich but understated brown and cream decor, but they didn’t.
Other than the colorful art, the first thing I noticed was the bed. The broken post was still listing to the left, and the covers were still rumpled but no one was in them. A quick glance confirmed that Mircea wasn’t lurking in any of the room’s dark corners, either. But someone else was.
“Tami!” It was out before I could stop it. Tami looked confused, Casanova gave me an “I can’t take you anywhere” expression and Marlowe grinned.
“Thank you. I was wondering how to tell which of you it was,” he told me pleasantly.
I was too busy goggling at Tami to pay him much attention. She looked older than I remembered, more so than should have been true for seven years, and she was too thin. Even more of a worry were her clothes—a rumpled tan suit with torn pantyhose—which would have told me something was wrong even if her expression hadn’t already said that she was on her last nerve. Tami had always taken pride in her appearance, never flashy but always neat and clean. The fact that it looked like she was still wearing the clothes they’d nabbed her in really bothered me. But she was alive.
Casanova sidled up, probably wanting to be in position so I could shift us out. That had been the plan, in case anything went wrong. Too bad it wouldn’t work now.
“Don’t bother,” I said, to get him to stop elbowing me in the ribs. “She’s a null.”
“What?” Casanova frowned at Tami and she frowned back, fear starting to replace the confusion on her face.
“It’s okay,” I told her quickly, hoping I wasn’t lying. It didn’t seem to reassure her much, probably because she didn’t know who the hell I was.
“In what definition of the term is this okay?” Casanova demanded.
I shot him a look, but he had a point. Since my power follows my spirit, not my body, it had seemed simple enough to slip in to see Mircea in disguise and shift him out. Even if the Senate had rigged a null bomb to prevent that, it wouldn’t be triggered by Marcello. I should have remembered: nothing was ever simple where the Senate was concerned.
“It was a good plan,” Marlowe said, almost as if he’d been reading my mind. He tried to look sympathetic, but that grin kept popping back out.
“Except for the part about it being a complete failure?” Casanova inquired.
“How did you get Tami?” I asked Marlowe.
“We heard that the mages had a null in their holding cells and asked to borrow her for a time,” he told me readily. “We thought it would be cheaper than using up a bomb every time you visit.”
And damn it, I should have thought of that. Parking a null beside Mircea’s bed was the perfect solution. Unlike a bomb, Tami was “on” all the time. And the fact that a live null’s power was effective only over a very limited area wouldn’t matter if she was sitting right next to him. She was just as secure this way as in one of the Circle’s cells, and her presence ensured that, if I showed up again, I’d be trapped until the vamps could nab me.
Like right now, for instance.
“I didn’t know until we started chatting that the two of you were acquainted,” Marlowe added.
I said one of Pritkin’s bad words. No wonder Marlowe looked so damn happy. The Circle had handed him a major lever to use on me without even realizing it.
I decided to just skip the part where we did the threats and the bargaining and the arriving at the obvious conclusion thing. “If she’s a loaner, the Circle is going to want her back,” I pointed out.
If possible, Marlowe looked even more pleased. That damn grin was going to crack his face pretty soon. “We’ll think of something,” he assured me. “Shall we?”
I sighed. It was a good thing that I’d dressed Billy up for the occasion, because it looked like we were going to see the Consul after all. “Yeah. Let’s get it over with.”
Tami stopped dead when we entered the Senate hall and just stared. There was plenty to look at, from the huge red sandstone cavern to the knife-edged chandeliers to the colorful banners that hung behind the ornate seats that clustered around the huge mahogany slab of a meeting table. But I didn’t need to wonder what had caused her mouth to drop open like that. It was hard to concentrate on anything else when the Consul was in the room.
I thought at first that, just for a change, she had decided to wear something that wasn’t still alive. But then the gold and black snakeskin print on her caftan undulated, sending a tide of glimmering scales rolling up and down her body. And a huge snake’s head rose behind her face like a hood, with gleaming black eyes that watched me malevolently. I realized with a start that she’d skinned what looked like the granddaddy of all cobras, but somehow kept it alive. Augustine, I decided faintly, would have had fits.
Billy moved to meet me, and I was relieved to see that at least he’d solved the breast issue. Augustine’s creation fit me like a glove down to the waist, where it billowed out in a bell skirt with a slight train. I wasn’t into antique fashion, but I’d seen enough period movies to argue with him about authenticity: it didn’t look like something Marie Antoinette would have worn to me. He’d only sniffed and informed me that (a) styles had quickly changed after the queen’s head went for a meander without her body, (b) we were talking about magical fashion here, not human and (c) I was an idiot. It was kind of obvious why Augustine wasn’t exactly a household name. You had to really want the clothes to put up with the guy.
But damn, he could sew. Or conjure or whatever. I hadn’t really appreciated his skill back at Dante’s, what with the near asphyxiation that went with it, but despite the fact that I was never going to outshine the Consul, I thought I looked pretty good.
The basis of the dress was deep midnight blue silk, but it was hard to focus on that because of what was happening on top. Or, rather, what appeared to be happening inside the dress, because the more you looked at it, the harder it was to remember that this was fabric and not a night sky, and that those were jewels and not an unimaginable swoop of stars. Somehow, Augustine had created a rotating band of diamonds that looked an awful lot like the Milky Way.
When Billy got up close, Marlowe flinched and stepped back. It took me a moment to realize why: stars are essentially millions of tiny suns. That probably explained the faint, disco-ball effect that the dress seemed to be throwing on the cavern floor, shedding a puddle of tiny prisms all around the hem.
“Cassie?” Tami was looking at Billy in disbelief, and I decided that switching back would make more sense than trying to explain at this point. Possession was not a skill I’d had when she knew me.
I slipped back inside my own skin and Marcello sighed in relief. Apparently, he hadn’t enjoyed the cohabitation any more than I had. “About time,” Billy muttered as he headed straight for my necklace. The tone clearly said that I’d be hearing about this later.
“It’s okay, Tami,” I told her, ignoring both of them. “I know you didn’t do anything wrong. This is just a mix-up.”
Marlowe laughed. “Mix-up? I don’t think so.” He’d apparently recovered from the singeing, although I noticed that he stayed a little farther back than before. There were tiny burn marks on his hose, the size of pinpricks, that I could swear hadn’t been there earlier. “She’s guilty as hell.”
Tami had recovered enough from the initial shock to send him a pretty good glare. It looked real familiar, maybe because I’d been on the receiving end of a carbon copy very recently. “Jesse! He’s your son, isn’t he?” I would have gotten it before, only she hadn’t had a kid of her own when I knew her. Or, at least, she hadn’t mentioned one.
Tami’s head jerked back to me. “Where is
he? Is he all right? Are the others—”
“They’re fine. They showed up a few days ago. I have them somewhere safe.”
“Oh.” She visibly sagged, and for a moment I thought she was going to end up on the floor. But she recovered in time to give me a hug that forced whatever air Augustine’s contraption had left me out of my lungs. “Thank you, Cassie!”
“It’s no big deal,” I gasped. “You did the same thing for me once, if I remember. Although next time it would be kind of nice to get, oh, a phone call? You knew where I was.”
“But not what you’d say. And it’s easier to ask forgiveness than permission.”
“You know me better than that!” I couldn’t believe she’d actually thought I’d say no.
“I used to know you better than that,” she corrected. “But times change. You got out of that life. Made a new start. And besides, paranoia is a damned useful quality.” We said the last together, laughing in spite of everything, because it had been the Misfit mantra that Tami had drilled into our heads practically every day.
Tami quickly sobered, however. “I was so worried, Cassie…the war mages wouldn’t tell me anything, and I didn’t know…Jesse’s smart, but so many things could have gone wrong and I—”
“Nothing went wrong.” I grinned ruefully. “Except that he wouldn’t tell me anything, either. Not that it surprises me now. He’s his mamma’s boy. Only I didn’t know you had a son.”
“I didn’t plan to get pregnant. When I found out, I hid it, and when Jesse was born…I had a talk with his father and he agreed to take him. His wife couldn’t have kids, and he somehow persuaded her to swear the baby was hers. We thought that, as long as Jesse took after him and didn’t show any signs of, of anything, he could get an apprenticeship one day, have a normal life. But when he was eleven—” she swallowed. “There started to be all these fires.”
