Tempt the Stars

by Karen Chance

  “They aren’t guests; they’re staff. And I’m not paying for champagne when the cameras can’t tell the difference!”

  “What cameras?”

  “The cameras you don’t need to be concerned about. Now twitch your nose or whatever it is you do and get out of here! And do it fast, before anyone sees you. There are bums credit-hustling the slots who look better than you!”

  For once, he appeared genuinely offended.

  I looked down.

  And okay, I’d looked better.

  The hoodie Pritkin had loaned me had largely protected my upper body during the melee. But my legs had been exposed and were covered in scratches and bug bites and dried mud and something I finally identified as patches of resinous tree gunk. My once white Keds were black, there was a layer of grime under my fingernails, and I thought it just as well that I hadn’t seen my face in a mirror lately.

  But it felt scratchy, too.

  I picked a pine needle out of my hair and tried for dignified. “I told you, I just got back. And I’m not going up to the room until I get something to eat.”

  “I’ll have something sent up!”

  “Yeah, right. In two hours, and I’ll be asleep by then.”

  “I’ll tell them to hurry.”

  “They never hurry.” Fred had been right about one thing—room service around here sucked. “I’m just going to run through the taco line—”

  “That’s all the way over on the drag!”

  “So?”

  “Oh, for—wait here,” he told me, pointing to the floor in front of my filthy shoes. And then he stabbed the air a few more times for emphasis. “Right. Here. Do you understand?”

  “I like them with guacamole and red sauce, but no lettuce,” I told him, and sat down against the base of the fake rock again.

  He was back in a second, but not with food. But with a large potted fern in a bronze bucket, like the ones that framed the check-in desk. I don’t know what ferns had to do with the ambience, but Dante’s didn’t worry about little inconsistencies like that. Or about the fact that even hell wouldn’t have had that carpet.

  “Right. Here,” he repeated, slamming the fern down. And then he was gone again.

  I pushed fronds out of my face, since he’d set the thing directly in front of me, and checked out the party/convention/random assembly of beautiful people that was happening. I didn’t know if Casanova was trying to attract a more well-heeled group by parading his off-duty employees in Gucci, or if there was something else going on. And, after a minute, I decided I didn’t care.

  I leaned my head back against the stalactite and closed my eyes. The room felt like it was spinning faster this way, but oddly, it made my stomach feel better. Which, of course, just meant that my brain woke up.

  It started crowding me with thoughts of all the things I could have asked tonight, instead of just sitting around chatting with Roger’s ghosts. But I’d been a little high and more than a little freaked-out, and they’d been hard to ignore. And then with Mother—

  Damn. My mother. I swallowed, and then I banged my head a few times against the rock, because it deserved it.

  I don’t know what I’d expected her to do. Welcome me with open arms? Shower me with kisses? Tell me she’d missed me?

  And yes, I realized. Some part of me had expected that, or it wouldn’t have hurt so much. Some stupid part, because of course she hadn’t missed me. She’d never had the chance. She hadn’t spent decades wondering, searching, dreaming. . . .

  And she’d given me what I asked for. Well, more or less. And it had been nothing like I’d expected.

  Not the information itself so much—after a week of contemplating breaking into hell, I’d been prepared for almost anything. But the fact that she hadn’t laughed at me, or told me I was crazy, or shot me in the butt . . . She’d just . . . told me.

  She’d given me what I needed to get up to some next-level shit without much of an argument at all. So, either she was seriously overestimating me, or . . . or maybe I actually had a shot at this? Maybe she saw something in me I didn’t? Maybe . . .

  Maybe she thought the best way to get rid of me was to give me what I wanted and let me figure out for myself that it was nuts.

  I didn’t know. I had this weird feeling that I knew less about my parents now than I had before. I sure understood less.

  Like my father. I supposed the truth—if I’d even gotten the truth—was better than the rumors I’d heard, but it was no less bizarre. What was an ancient goddess doing with the magical version of a con man? And what had he been doing with the Black Circle?

  He’d needed power, he said. But for what? Because a couple of ghosts couldn’t possibly use that much, even if they were going around playing Iron Man. So what was he using it for?

  It couldn’t have been to help Mother. She’d been weak, yes. She’d needed magic, yes. But not the human variety. That was why the old legends spoke of the gods visiting earth, but living somewhere else—Asgard, Vanaheim, Olympus—whatever you wanted to call it. Because they couldn’t feed off human magic. I didn’t know if it was incompatible with theirs, or wasn’t strong enough or what. But they would get weak if they stayed here very long.

  It was why Mother had ended up losing most of her power after trapping herself here. And why she’d finally gone to the Pythian Court after avoiding it all those centuries. Apollo, god of prophecy, had gifted the oracles of Delphi with some of his own power, back when they’d been good little worshippers, and it was still going strong. I guess the trickle the Pythias used was negligible compared to the amount needed by a hungry god.

  But Mom hadn’t gotten to feast for long. Going to court had allowed her enemies to locate her, and she’d had to expend most of the power she’d gained fighting them off. So she’d ended up sitting in Tony’s guest cottage with Dad, who was avoiding the Black Circle, who presumably wanted to do violent things to him. And waiting . . .

  For what? Until tonight, I’d never really thought about it. I’d just assumed they were in hiding. That’s what you did when bad people were after you. But now that I’d met them, that didn’t make much sense, at least not as a long-term plan.

  The Spartoi were relentless. She had to know they’d find her eventually, and as soon as they did, it was game over. Her power was all but gone, Tony’s guys wouldn’t fight for her, and even if they did, the Spartoi would make mincemeat out of them in about a minute flat. And having fought them both, I doubted Roger’s crazy inventions would do much better. And even if I counted the forest as part of her defenses—and having been through it, I saw no reason why I shouldn’t—well, Pritkin and I had survived it. A bunch of ancient demigods were hardly likely to do worse.

  So, yeah, everything I’d seen had looked like a stopgap, something to buy my parents a little bit of time.

  But to do what?

  “Here!” I was jolted out of a half sleep, half reverie by somebody thrusting something under my nose. Something that looked divine, I realized, as I managed to push a silver serving tray far enough away to focus on the contents.

  “That’s not tacos,” I said sleepily.

  “No, it’s better,” Casanova snapped. “Now get back up to your room before somebody sees you!”

  I would have snapped back, but I was feeling tender toward the guy who had just brought me a tray of luscious-looking hors d’oeuvres. It held equal parts gorgeous salmon, juicy sausages, fat shrimp wrapped in bacon, and hearty meatballs. My stomach woke up and started grumbling plaintively. Suddenly, I was starving.

  A phone rang and Casanova snatched it out of his jacket. “Of course you do,” he told it viciously. “I can’t take five minutes . . . all right, all right. I’m coming!”

  He thrust the platter at me and was gone, with that liquid speed vampires use when they aren’t messing about. And I didn’t waste any time, either.
I grabbed a salmon sliver sitting on top of an artfully piped swirl of herbed cheese, which in turn was resting on a slice of fresh cucumber—

  Which would remain fresh forever, I realized a second later.

  Because it was made out of plastic.

  I managed to spit the thing out before I choked on it, and then just sat there, looking at the slimy thing in my palm. And wondering how my life had come to this. I threw it down, wiped my hand on my filthy top, and picked up a rubbery shrimp—that appeared to be made out of real rubber. And then a sausage with a beautiful sear that had come out of a spray-paint bottle. And then—

  “No,” I said, increasingly desperate, pawing through the whole tray. But it was all the same. They were fake. They were all fake.

  Casanova had just given me a tray of plastic food.

  It looked like one of the sample trays the restaurants used out front as an enticement. It seemed that the employees not only weren’t getting real champagne, but weren’t getting fed, either. And neither was I.

  “Son of a bitch!” I sat there, disbelieving and furious and utterly, utterly ravenous. For another second, before I was on my feet and pushing palm fronds around.

  The place was packed. If possible, even more beautiful types had squashed into the already stuffed-with-tourists lobby since the last time I looked. There was no way to shift without being seen, and I didn’t feel up to it anyway.

  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 cas
ino 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.