by Karen Chance
“Well, we didn’t,” the blond snapped, rubbing his neck under the pretense of adjusting a rumpled burgundy tie.
“That’s why Marco couldn’t come after you himself,” the brunet informed me, leaning back against the SUV.
“What is?” I asked.
The cigarette glowed against the night as he waved a negligent hand. “The paparazzi have marked him. He was waylaid outside the hotel a couple of days ago by a mob shouting questions, wanting photos. . . .”
“Of him?”
“Of you. You’re front-page news. Haven’t you seen the papers?”
“Not recently.” And considering what they’d been printing the last time I did look, that was probably for the best. “But I haven’t seen any reporters—”
“They’re not allowed in the hotel.”
“And you don’t exactly use the front door,” the blond added. “I’m Jules, by the way.” He extended a slim hand, which I took after a brief hesitation. If they intended to stuff me into the SUV, they could do it whether I cooperated or not. “And this is Rico and Fred.”
“Fred?” I looked at Mousy, because no way was the brunet a Fred. He smiled weakly.
“I get that a lot,” he said. “I’m thinking of changing it. What do you think about André?”
I thought I’d never seen anyone who looked less like an André.
“So Marco’s afraid of the paparazzi?” I asked skeptically.
“More the other way around.” Rico grinned.
“He threatened to do something anatomically impossible to one of their men,” Fred told me.
“Not impossible,” Rico blew out a thoughtful breath. “The camera could be made to fit, although the case—”
“What about the tripod?”
“I don’t think he was serious about the tripod.”
“The paparazzi aren’t the issue,” Jules interrupted, shooting them a look. “But if they’ve managed to figure out that Marco’s your bodyguard, more dangerous types could have done the same. He couldn’t risk leading anyone to you, so he sent us.”
“To do what?” I asked, pretty sure I already knew.
“You want it verbatim?”
“Minus the profanity.”
Sculpted lips pursed. “Well, that would shorten it a bit.”
“What. Did. He. Say?”
“To paraphrase? ‘Let her finish her pizza and then drag her back here. By the hair, if necessary.’”
“Doesn’t he get it?” I demanded. “That’s the kind of attitude that forced me to leave in the first place!”
“Oh, he gets it,” Rico said. “He just doesn’t want it.”
“I don’t give a damn what he wants! He has to understand—”
“He understands that you’re twenty-four,” Jules told me, swiping his cigarette case back from his friend.
“What’s wrong with being twenty-four?”
“Nothing. Unless you’re dealing with a guy who’s well over a thousand.”
I blinked. “What?”
“Marco,” he confirmed, tapping a cigarette on top of the case. “Saw the fall of Rome, or so they say.”
“The fall of—” I stopped and stared. “Gladiators, Colosseum, guys in leather miniskirts—that Rome?”
“That would be the one.”
“I wouldn’t mention the miniskirts,” Rico advised. “Marco used to be in the army.”
“Have to wonder how anyone took them seriously,” Jules said.
“I think if you laughed, they cut your balls off.”
Jules paused, halfway through lighting his cigarette, the flame dancing in wide blue eyes. “That would do it.”
“But . . . but why is he working for Mircea?” I asked. Vamps that old were Senate members or headed up powerful courts. They didn’t work for masters a third their age.
Jules shrugged. “You’d have to ask him; I was always afraid to. But you can see why he doesn’t react well when someone he considers a child—”
“A fetus,” Rico put in.
“—ignores an order.”
“An order he had no right to give!” I said heatedly.
“Technically, the master gave it—”
“Who also has no right to order me around!”
“I like this one,” Rico said. “Feisty.”
I shot him a glare, which had no effect, except to widen his smile.
“I guess Marco figures, if he still has to take orders after all this time, why not you?” Fred asked.
“Because I’m Pythia,” I said, striving for patience.
He blinked at me, obviously confused. “And?”
I threw my hands up.
Jules frowned at him, but not on my account. “Stop it.”
“It’s driving me nuts,” the little vamp said, tugging at the polyester monstrosity around his neck.
“You’ll get used to it.”
“I don’t want to get used to it. And why do I have to wear a tie, anyway? Rico doesn’t,” he looked pointedly at the brunet.
“Rico is a law unto himself,” Jules said drily.
“Well, I’m not used to this.”
“What are you used to?” I asked, wondering where a guy like Fred fit into Mircea’s somewhat more . . . glossy . . . family.
“I just wear clothes, you know?” he said, pushing wispy brown hair out of his eyes. “I mean, nobody cares what an accountant looks like, as long as the books balance. Not that we use books anymore, but you know what I—”
“You’re an accountant?” Pritkin asked sharply.
Fred jumped and then regarded Pritkin warily. “Why shouldn’t I be an accountant?”
“Because you’re supposed to be a bodyguard!”
“Well, I am.” Pale gray eyes shifted. “I mean, I am at the moment. I mean—”
“He means that it’s none of your business,” Jules interjected.
“Well, it is mine,” I pointed out. “What is he doing here?”
I didn’t get an answer because Rico’s head snapped up. He didn’t move otherwise or even tense, as far as I could tell, but there was suddenly something dangerous about him.
Pritkin must have thought so, too, because his expression tightened. “Accountant?”
“Never said I was,” Rico said, his eyes on the empty street.
“Then what are you?”
“You could say I’m on the troubleshooting squad.”
“Troubleshooting?”
He put a hand on the back of his waistband. “I see trouble, and I shoot it.”
“Well, don’t shoot them,” Jules said irritably. “We have enough problems.”
“Shoot who?” I asked.
“Circle,” Rico told me, to the accompaniment of a car screeching around the corner and into the lot.
It was actually a limo, the kind that carted high rollers, honeymooners and anybody with a wad of cash all over Vegas. They were almost as ubiquitous as taxis, and often used back streets like this one as a way of avoiding clogged thoroughfares. But the ten or more grim-faced people piling out were too muffled up and too bulging with concealed weapons to be anything but the Circle’s favorite sons.
“Aren’t we supposed to be past this?” I asked Pritkin, as a familiar six foot five inches of pissed-off war mage got out of the limo and strode across the lot. The imposing mountain of muscle in the long leather trench had coffee-colored skin, a military-style buzz cut and a handsome face—when he wasn’t looking like he’d like to rip someone else’s off.
This wasn’t one of those times.
“What the hell?” he demanded in his deep voice, before he’d even reached us.
“Hi, Caleb,” I said, resigned.
“I was asked to get her out; I got her out,” Pritkin said obscurely.
“You were told to bring her in!”
“Bring me in where?” I asked.
“HQ,” Pritkin said. “After Jonas found out about this latest attack, he insisted—”
“And instead, you bring her here!�
�� Caleb gestured sharply. “Middle of goddamned Vegas in the middle of the goddamned night—”
“She’s perfectly safe—”
“—with one fucking bodyguard—”
“What do we look like?” Jules demanded.
“—and half the world looking for her!”
“I think the term is ‘chopped liver,’ ” Fred said.
“They’re looking for her at the hotel,” Pritkin snapped. “Not here.”
“How the hell do you know?” Caleb demanded. “You don’t know what this thing is—you told the old man as much yourself!”
“You called Jonas?” I asked, deciphering that.
“To ask if he had any ideas about what attacked you,” Pritkin said. “After what David Dryden told us, I had a suspicion, but this isn’t my area of—”
“Suspicion about what?”
“What we’re dealing with.” He pulled something out of his coat and handed it to me. It was a pencil sketch, heavily shaded, that looked a lot like—
I looked up. “Where did you get this?”
“I had one of the Circle’s artists do it, from some old drawings.”
“Old drawings of what?”
“The Morrigan.”
“The what?”
“The wife of the Dark Fey king. After the description you gave me of what you saw, and what David said about the High Court dialect, and what your servant mentioned about the gods having the ability to possess . . . well, I thought it possible. Particularly in light of the name.”
“What about the name?”
“It’s a Celtic title. Some translate it as ‘Great Queen’ or ‘Terrible Queen.’ But the oldest version, and, I believe, the correct one, is ‘Phantom Queen.’ The ancient texts speak of her being able to take both physical and spectral form.”
“But . . . this is Fey?” I asked, looking at what appeared to be a raven caught in a thunderstorm. A really wicked, pissed-off raven.
“Yes and no. Her mother was Dark Fey, but her father was one of the old gods.”
I felt my stomach sink. Please, please, please—
“Would you care to guess which one?” he asked.
“Not really.”
“Cassie—”
“This doesn’t have to be about Ragnarok,” I said stubbornly. “The Dark Fey king isn’t my biggest fan—you know that. Maybe he sent her—”
“It’s possible. But the fact remains that the Morrigan was worshipped by the ancient Celts as a goddess of battle, because her father was believed to be—”
“Don’t say it.”
“—the Celtic god Nuada—”
“I’m not listening.”
“—who is associated with the Romano-British Mars-Nodens—”
“I’m begging you.”
“—who many scholars equate with the Greek god Ares.”
“Goddamnit, Pritkin! Jonas can’t be right, okay? He can’t!”
“I am not saying that he is. However, it seems strange, if, in fact, this was caused by animus, that she would apologize and tell David that ‘they’ were making her do it.”
I dug out another antacid.
Caleb cursed. “And yet knowing that this thing might be after her, you still bring her out here!”
“Better than somewhere it would be likely to look!”
“Wait,” I said, crunching chalky cherry crap and trying to think. “Is David sure that’s what she said? Didn’t he say he was lousy with the language?”
“Yes. Which is why I had one of our linguists visit him. She couldn’t be certain, not having heard the words herself, but she said David seemed to have the gist of it.”
“Okay, but still. ‘They’ made her do it.” I held out the scary-ass image. “Who makes something like this do anything?”
“Her father, presumably.”
Damn it, I’d known he was going to say that.
“But Ares isn’t here! None of the gods are here!”
“Well, it looks like this one is,” Fred pointed out. “And how’s that work, exactly? I thought all of them were kicked out way back when.”
“They were,” Pritkin told him tersely. “But demigods have a human, or in this case, a Fey, parent, giving them an anchor in this world. The spell banishing the gods did not affect them.”
“Yet knowing a god or half god or whatever the hell might be after her, you bring her out here anyway,” Caleb said, beating that dead horse for all he was worth. I had to give it to the guy; he gave new meaning to “single-minded.” “Where she’s completely defenseless!”
“She is hardly defenseless—”
“Thank you,” Jules said indignantly.
“I’m with her. And whatever that thing was, it can pass right through wards. Meaning she would be no safer at HQ than at the suite. I told Jonas I would ask Cassie where she wanted to go and—”
“Yeah,” Caleb said sourly. “And he told me he wants her someplace secure!”
“She will be—”
“As soon as we get her back to the suite,” Jules butted in.
“She’s not going back to that death trap of a suite,” Caleb snapped. “And that’s final!”
“It’s not a death trap,” I protested.
“It is if you can’t shift away! As I explained to that thickheaded vampire, leaving you in that place, much less drugged and insensate, was virtually asking for another—”
“You talked to Marco?” Pritkin said sharply.
“Yes, we—”
“When?”
“A few minutes ago. I—”
“On the phone?”
“No, we—”
“How, then?”
“Would you let me finish a sentence?” Caleb said angrily. “When you didn’t show up with the girl, Jonas assumed you hadn’t been able to get her out of the suite. He sent us to assist, but that damned vampire wouldn’t tell us—”
“You went by the hotel?”
“Yes—”
“And then you came here?”
“Shit,” Rico said, and grabbed my arm.
And the next thing I knew, I was in the SUV.
It was almost like shifting—I didn’t remember moving, the car door opening or sitting down, but there I was anyway. I blinked at Rico, who was in the driver’s seat in front of me, for about a second. Until he was snatched out of the still-open door and sent flying.
“Lasso spell,” Fred said, as his buddy slammed into the open top of a Dumpster, halfway across the lot. “I hate those things.”
I peered into the front, to find the little vamp ensconced in the passenger’s seat. “When did you get in?”
“A minute ago. I figured we’d be leaving soon.”
“I didn’t notice.”
“Yeah.” He sighed. “I get that a lot, too.”
“I wish I had that problem,” I muttered, watching Pritkin and Caleb yelling at each other outside, while a trashcovered Rico crossed the lot in a blur. A second later his assailant went flying into the side of a truck. And a second after that, four war mages jumped Rico.
I sighed and started crawling over the seat.
“Is it always like this?” Fred asked, as Jules started forward, a fake smile plastered on his face and a placating hand raised—only to have someone use it to sling him into the SUV. I flinched back when he hit the windshield headfirst, that handsome profile making an impressive set of cracks in the supposedly shatterproof glass.
“No,” I told Fred, as Jules shook it off and leapt back into the fight. “This is pretty calm, actually.”
“What are you doing?” he asked, watching me check the cushions, the floor and then the visor over the driver’s side. The keys were under the visor, and they fell into my lap.
“Putting a stop to this. If they’re going to act like children, they can at least do it out of sight of norms.”
“And you think they’re gonna listen?”
“No. But if I leave, they’ll have to follow.”
“Well, I don’t
know how you’re gonna get out. They’ve parked that big-ass limo of theirs right across the exit. And the fence goes right up to—”
He cut off as a metallic shriek rent the air, bouncing off the surrounding buildings and echoing down the street. “What the hell was that?” he demanded, staring around wildly.
I didn’t answer. I was too busy watching the limo rise into the air, its long body twisting and writhing as if in pain, metal screeching, car alarm screaming and window glass popping. A windshield wiper flew off like an arrow, spearing the old sign above the diner and sending a wash of sparks across the pavement.
“What is this?” Fred yelled, gripping my shoulder as the limo was wrenched in two, the violence of the movement sending half of it crashing into the building opposite.
And the other half spinning straight at us.
“How things usually go,” I told him, and floored it.
Chapter Twenty-four
The engine must have caught at some point, because we shot ahead, the luxury projectile missing us by inches. I swerved and stomped on the brakes, avoiding another car but slinging us into the fence. I barely noticed, because I was sure the limo had just taken out the diner and everyone in it.
Only it hadn’t.
I stared through the cracked and bloody windshield at the limo’s backside, which was sticking, cantilevered, out of a wavering field of energy. Unlike Pritkin’s seamless blue shields, this one was a patchwork of colors and textures that ran and muddied together as they fought each other and the car. But somehow, they’d stopped it. Like a fish caught in a net, the huge hunk of twisted metal hung there, eight or nine feet off the ground, quivering and shaking—and leaking.
Something was dripping from the tail end, enough to form a puddle on the ground below. It reflected the sparks still shooting from the ruined sign, which were showering both the car and the puddle. It took my half-frozen brain a second to realize what I was seeing, and then I was fumbling with the gears, shoving the SUV hard into reverse.
“What now?” Fred demanded.
“Gas!” I said, stomping on the pedal while the war mages scattered, shields retracting around their owners or being thrown in front of the diner in a last-ditch attempt to protect the people inside. And the car—
