by Karen Chance
“Take that up with Mircea,” I finished for him.
“Yeah.”
“Fine. I will.” I pressed the menu button on Marco’s phone.
“Cassie—”
And there it was. I hit the button. The phone rang.
“Yes?” The familiar voice was smooth, with no sign of irritation. Not yet.
“You said you weren’t going to do this.”
There was a pause. “Cassandra.”
“Wow, we just leapt right to it there, didn’t we?” I asked, furious.
“You are supposed to be asleep.”
“I was. And then I got up to discover that I’m a prisoner.”
“You are not a prisoner.”
“Then I can leave?”
Another pause. “In the morning, when you can shift.”
“So I’m only a prisoner for the night, is that it?”
“It is for your protection.”
“And how does that work, exactly? I’ve been assaulted twice. And where have they both been again?”
“You were vulnerable the first time due to our ignorance of the threat. You were vulnerable the second because a mage provided a conduit for the creature—”
“And that explains why I can’t see Pritkin?”
A third pause. That had to be some kind of record. Mircea usually had the defense prepared.
“No. Considering the probable nature of the entity that has been attacking you, I consider the warlock to be a threat in his own right.”
“The what?”
“He had a demon servant at one time, did he not? Encased in that battle golem he devised?”
I frowned. “I guess.”
“Then he is a warlock, not merely a mage. Only warlocks can summon demons to their aid.”
“Is there a point?”
“Merely that warlocks are a notoriously unstable class. They are prone to strange behavior, increasingly so as they age, with some going mad over time. It is one reason that many mages avoid the specialization, despite the added power it gives them.”
“But Jonas had a golem once,” I protested. “He told me so.”
“Forgive me, Cassie, but Jonas Marsden is hardly an example of well-adjusted behavior!”
Point.
“And we are discussing the warlock Pritkin.”
Actually, we weren’t. Because Pritkin wasn’t a warlock. His ability with demons came not through some arcane magic, but because he was half demon himself. His father was Rosier, Lord of the Incubi, which made Pritkin sort of a demon prince. Or something. I really didn’t know what it made him, since he hated that part of his lineage and almost never talked about it. But I didn’t think mentioning that I was being guarded by the son of a prince of hell was likely to go well.
Of course, neither was this.
“He’s a friend.”
“Those creatures are not friends, Cassie! They are selfserving, power-hungry—”
“They say the same thing about vamps.”
“—and unpredictable. Not to mention that this one may well be part demon himself.”
“What?”
“That is the rumor Kit has been hearing. And it would explain why he heals so quickly, how he has lived—”
“A lot of people are part one thing, part another—”
“But most of them don’t bother to cover up large areas of their past. Yet despite all of Kit’s efforts, he has been unable to discover anything about the man before the last century—”
“Because he wasn’t born then!”
“We both know that isn’t the case.”
I didn’t say anything. Mircea had recently seen Pritkin on a trip we’d taken back in time. And while mages tended to live a century or more longer than most humans, it was kind of hard to explain why he’d aged maybe five years in a couple hundred.
Of course, I didn’t intend to try. I didn’t think that explaining that Pritkin had been in hell for much of his life was likely to make him seem more trustworthy.
“I would like you to consider dismissing the man,” Mircea said suddenly. It caught me off guard, which I suspected was the point.
“I can’t do that.”
“Cassie—”
“I need him,” I said flatly. “If he hadn’t been training me, I might have died—”
“Or you might not have been in danger at all. Have you noticed that your problems with demonkind always seem to come when the warlock is around?”
“What are you suggesting?”
“That perhaps he is the source of the threat, rather than its solution.”
“That’s ridiculous!”
“Is it? I know only that every time you have trouble with demons, he is there.”
“He’s my bodyguard! He’s supposed to be—”
“You have bodyguards.”
“Yeah, only I think most of them would like a new assignment. And this wasn’t a demon.”
“According to him.”
“Well, I trust him!”
Pause number four. “And I do not.”
And there it was, as plain as any challenge ever given. And to underscore it, as if anything else was needed, Marco quietly took the phone out of my hand and put it in his back pocket. His expression said clearly that it wasn’t coming out again.
All right, then.
The doorbell rang.
I glanced around the room. One thing about Vegas hotels, especially those built before the widespread use of cell phones, is that they put land lines everywhere. Busy executives needed instant access to the empires they were gambling away and wouldn’t stay anywhere that didn’t offer it. As a result, there were no fewer than three telephones in sight—one in the living room, one in the bar and one sitting on the counter in the kitchen.
And a vamp was casually loitering near every one of them.
Okay, then.
I turned on my heel and went back to my room.
Unsurprisingly, there was no cell phone in my purse. I hadn’t really expected one. When a master vampire gave an order, his men were thorough in carrying it out. And Marco had never been a slouch. But there were things that a vamp might not notice, especially one who had been around as long as he had.
I went back to the bathroom, turned on the exhaust fan and the shower and blasted Led Zeppelin from the built-in radio.
Vampires don’t use bathrooms all that much, especially the toilet facilities. And, of course, housekeeping kept the place clean. As a result, I was willing to bet that the guys outside had never bothered to so much as crack the door on the toilet cubicle.
And then I knew they hadn’t, when I opened it and saw what I’d expected—yet another phone, this one mounted on the wall. It was big and kind of complicated-looking, like something that ought to have been on the desk of an executive secretary, not sitting above the toilet-tissue dispenser. But it was there, and when I lifted the receiver, I got a dial tone.
Pritkin picked up on the first ring, like he’d been expecting a call. “Do you still have Jonas’s keys?” I asked quietly.
There was silence for a beat, as if he hadn’t been expecting that. But he recovered fast. “See what I can do.”
He hung up and so did I. After waiting another few minutes, I turned off the water and went back to my room. I couldn’t change clothes, because somebody might notice. But I put on a bra, jammed my feet into an old pair of Keds and shoved some cash and my keys into my pocket. Then I went back into the lounge.
The guys were still playing poker, quietly now, as there was no need to keep up audible patter for the human. So they didn’t fall silent when I entered and picked up my half-finished beer. But ten pairs of eyes watched as I made my way across to the living room and then to the balcony.
The wind chimes were tinkling in the breeze blowing off the desert. It was hot, but after the deep freeze the vamps had going on inside, it felt good. I hung over the rail and drank my beer and waited.
“Is there a problem?” Marco asked, sticking his
head out the door.
“Need some air.”
He looked at me suspiciously, but I guess his orders stopped short of actually confining me to my room. He went back to the game, and I went back to my beer. I hadn’t even finished it when my ride showed up.
“Best I could do on short notice,” Pritkin told me, grabbing my arm as I scrambled over the railing. And into the front seat of a beat-up green convertible that was idling in the air twenty stories up.
“No problem,” I told him, hanging on for dear life as the rattletrap belched smoke into the startled faces of half a dozen vamps, who had taken a fraction of a second too long to figure out what was going on.
“Cassie!” I heard Marco’s infuriated bellow behind me. But by then we were out of there, soaring away into the star-shot indigo high above the Strip.
Chapter Twenty-two
“You coldhearted son of a bitch.”
Pritkin looked up from perusing the stained piece of paper posing as a menu and gave me what he probably thought were innocent eyes. They weren’t. I didn’t think that was an expression he was all that familiar with. “Is there a problem?”
“You feed me tofu while you’ve been eating here?” I gestured around at the cracked Formica, orange Naugahyde and grimy windows of what had to be the greasiest greasy spoon in Vegas.
“No one eats healthy all the time.”
“That’s not what you always say!”
“And do you listen to what I say?”
“Yes.” He just looked at me. “Sometimes.”
“Which is the point. If I told you to eat well merely most of the time, then you’d do it occasionally at best.”
I started to reply to that, and then realized I didn’t have one. “So why bring me here now?”
“Because some days, everyone needs pizza.”
That, at least, we could agree on. He ordered for us, which normally would have annoyed me, but there wasn’t much of a menu to choose from. This wasn’t so much a restaurant as a dive, and you either ordered pizza and beer or you went home.
Unless you ordered ice cream. I decided on a chocolate shake instead of more beer, and although Pritkin didn’t say anything, his expression was eloquent. “You’re going to run it off me anyway,” I pointed out.
“Anything else?” he asked drily. “Onion rings? Pie?”
“They have pie?”
“No.” It was emphatic.
I was in too good of a mood to argue the point. The seat was sticking to my thighs, a broken spring was stabbing my left butt cheek, and the air-conditioning, while present, was completely inadequate for August in Nevada. But I was out. I’d won this round. And tonight, I’d take what victories I could get.
“Are you going to explain what’s going on?” he asked, after the waitress left. “When I tried—”
“Wait a minute.”
There was an old jukebox in the corner, with dirty glass and yellowed titles, not one of which was less than twenty years old. But it had Joan Jett’s entire repertoire, so I fed it a couple of quarters and punched in a selection. The sound quality wasn’t the best, but that wasn’t my main interest, anyway.
“It’s Mircea,” I said, when I rejoined him. “He’s got this crazy idea that you’re a danger.”
Pritkin’s jaw tightened. “I know.”
“You know? Has he said—”
“He didn’t have to. But you may assure him that I am no threat in that regard.”
“I have,” I said impatiently. “But when these things keep happening—”
“They do not keep happening. It was one time.”
I frowned. “One time?”
For some reason, he flushed. “Of any consequence.”
“Well, excuse me for thinking they were all pretty important!” Any time something was trying to kill me, I took it seriously.
Pritkin ran a hand through his hair, which didn’t need the added torture. “I didn’t mean to downplay the significance of what occurred—”
“I would hope not!”
“—merely to assure you that it won’t happen again.”
“You can’t know that.”
Green eyes met mine, with what looked like anger in them. “Yes, I bloody well can!”
I just sat there, confused, as he abruptly got up and went over to the jukebox. He received a glance from a woman in a nearby booth on the way, and it lingered. He was still in the same jeans as earlier, having just thrown a gray-green T-shirt over the top. Although you couldn’t see much of it because of the long leather trench he wore to cover up the arsenal all war mages carted around.
But he’d somehow jammed everything under there without noticeable bulges, because the dark brown leather fit his broad shoulders sleekly. Likewise, the soft, old jeans hugged a rock-hard physique, and the T-shirt brought out the brilliant color of his eyes. Pritkin would never be conventionally handsome; his nose was too big, he missed six feet by at least three inches and he only remembered to shave about half the time.
But I didn’t have any trouble understanding why she was staring.
“This is what you listen to?” he demanded, his back to me as he perused song titles.
“It’s ‘I Love Rock ’n Roll.’ It’s a classic.”
That got me a dark glance thrown over his shoulder, but he didn’t say anything. He just dug a couple of quarters out of his jeans and made a selection of his own. And oh, my God.
“Johnny Cash?”
“What’s wrong with Johnny Cash?” he asked, sitting back down.
“What’s right about him?”
“Country is based on folk music, which has been around for centuries—”
“So has the plague.”
“—longer than the so-called ‘classics.’ For thousands of years, bards sang about the same basic themes—love and loss, lust and betrayal—and ended up influencing everyone from Bach to Beethoven.”
“So Johnny Cash is Beethoven?”
“Of his day.”
I rolled my eyes. That was just so wrong. But at least “Ring of Fire” covered the conversation pretty well.
I leaned forward and dropped my voice. “I wasn’t trying to be rude a minute ago. I just meant that, to the vamps, a demon seems like the most likely culprit, and Mircea’s decided—”
“Demon?”
“Yes, demon.”
Pritkin frowned. “What do they have to do with this?”
I stared at him. “Well, what are we talking about?”
“I’m not sure.”
I took a breath. “Mircea thinks you’re a warlock,” I said, slowly and clearly. “He’s decided that’s how you’ve lived so long, why you’re as strong as you—”
“Is that what he told you?”
“Yes. Why?”
He looked away. “No reason.”
I waited, but he didn’t say anything else. And after a pause, I soldiered on. “Anyway, that’s why he told Marco to lock you out for the night. He was afraid you’d call up something else—”
Pritkin snorted.
“—while I couldn’t shift away.”
“Yes, I’m sure that was his main concern.”
“Is there something you want to tell me?” I demanded.
“No.” He didn’t say anything else, if he’d planned on it, because the waitress returned with our drinks. He poured beer, tilting the glass to minimize foam, because this wasn’t the kind of place where the waitstaff did it for you. “If you were merely instructed not to see me until tomorrow, why go to these lengths?” he asked, after she left. “Why not simply agree?”
“Because I couldn’t. V—” I caught myself. The jukebox had gone quiet, and I was kind of afraid of what he might select next. So I settled for modifying my language. “They will push and push, to see where your boundaries are. And if you knuckle under once, they’ll expect you to do it every time.”
“Meaning?”
“That if I hadn’t left, next time it wouldn’t have been, ‘It’s only for
tonight, Cassie.’ It would have been ‘It’s only for this week,’ or this month, or this year. . . .”
“And they chose to push when they knew you were vulnerable.” He sounded like he expected nothing less.
“They didn’t choose,” I said, frowning. Because Pritkin always assumed the worst about vampires. “They probably thought I’d sleep all night and it would never come up. But it did, and in their society, you can’t afford to ignore a challenge like that. If you do, you’ll be labeled weak, and that’s a really hard thing to undo.”
Pritkin looked confused. “Are you trying to say that Marco wanted you to defy him?”
“This isn’t about Marco. He was just following orders.”
“Then Mircea wanted you to defy him?”
I laughed. “No.”
Pritkin was starting to look exasperated. “Then what—”
“Mircea wants me to do what I’m told. He’d love it if I did what I’m told. But he wouldn’t respect it. He wouldn’t respect me.”
I took a moment to work on my shake, which was thick and rich and headache-inducing cold. I’d sort of given up explaining any vamp to any mage, much less Mircea to Pritkin. But he’d asked, and I owed him one, so I tried.
“Mircea didn’t give that order expecting me to ever know about it,” I said. “But he did give it, and once he refused to rescind it, it became a direct challenge.”
Pritkin’s eyes narrowed. “And you couldn’t ignore it because it would have made you look bad?”
I had to think for a moment about how to answer that. It was surprisingly difficult sometimes to put into words things I had accepted as the natural order since childhood. But they weren’t natural for Pritkin, or for most mages, other than for those who worked for the vampires themselves. And they didn’t talk much.
“It wouldn’t have made me look bad,” I finally said. “It would have made me look like what he was treating me as: a favored servant. Someone to be petted and pampered and protected—and ordered around. Because that’s what servants do: they take orders. But that isn’t how one of his equals would have responded.”
“But he wouldn’t have tried that with one of them.”
I snorted. “Of course he would. They do this kind of thing all the time, testing each other, seeing if there are any chinks in the other person’s armor, any weaknesses that maybe they didn’t notice before. And if they find one, they’ll exploit it.”
