Tempt the Stars

by Karen Chance

  “I prefer to think of it as creative problem-solving,” he told me stiffly.

  “And you got away with it,” I said wonderingly. Because that was probably the most difficult part to accept.

  “You sound surprised.”

  “I’m flabbergasted,” I told him honestly. He smirked. “You should have been dead years ago.”

  The smirk faded. “Thanks,” he said sourly, switching the baby over to the other shoulder, since that one had been sufficiently drooled on. “But maybe one day you’ll learn, people are gullible. Often they’ll just believe what you tell them, if you sound confident enough—and if it’s something they like. They want to believe, so they do half the work for you.”

  “But . . . but the Black Circle,” I said, trying to impress on him the type of people he had been dealing with, since apparently he still didn’t get it.

  “The maxim holds true for crooks as much as anyone else,” he told me. “Maybe more so. They get so used to everyone being too scared to try to con them that they just assume you must be telling the truth.”

  I just sat there and looked at him some more. “And that army you kept promising? Wouldn’t they expect to see it, sooner or later?”

  “Well, yes,” he said, more quietly, because the baby had fallen back asleep. “That’s why we had the falling out. They demanded results and I . . . well, I stalled for as long as I could, pointing out that ghost recruitment is a little more difficult than the usual kind. And then I had to build the prototype, and then work out the kinks, and then demonstrate it—they were happy that day, at least. But eventually they demanded to see more, and of course two was all I had.”

  “But why make any at all?” I said angrily, because none of this made any sense. “What were you even doing there?”

  He frowned at me, maybe because I’d managed to wake the baby up, and stood to rock her. “I was there for the power, of course. I told them I couldn’t recruit ghosts without it, or support an army on my own. If they wanted results, they had to pony up. And they did.” He grinned. “Oh yes, they did. For years, I all but drained them dry—”

  “For what?” I demanded, wanting at least one true thing in this house of lies he’d built. “Why risk your life for power you didn’t even need?”

  He started to answer but then looked up. And his whole face changed. For an instant, he was almost handsome. He was looking at something behind me, in the doorway, and I knew even before I turned around what it was.

  Or, rather, I knew who.

  “I found a war mage bleeding onto the linoleum,” my mother said, coming in and taking the baby.

  “Bleeding?” I jumped up.

  “Healing was one of my gifts once,” she told me. “I have not completely lost the skill.”

  “Is he awake?” I didn’t doubt her, but I wanted to see that scowl for myself.

  “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 me
t 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!”

  Chapter Twelve

  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.”