Karen Chance - [Cassandra Palmer 04]

by Curse the Dawn (v5. 0) (html)

  It was the PC way to do it, drawing her blood up through the skin in molecules so small, even she didn’t notice, but three on one was a definite no-no. Three hungry vampires could drain a human in less than a minute, and she was already looking unsteady on her feet. I glanced around, but there was no security in sight. Wonderful.

  I darted across the street before I could talk myself out of it just as a master vamp approached from the other direction. He grabbed the girl and sent her spinning into a party of Japanese tourists. They happily started posing for photos while she blinked at them dazedly, her cheeks pale under a liberal amount of blush.

  I breathed a sigh of relief. It looked like the Senate had their own security in place, and he looked pretty pissed off. The master hoisted one of the three delinquents into the air by his expensive lapels, looked him over with a slight curl to his lip and tossed him casually into the water tower. That would have been great, except the tower was a prop with no actual water in it. It hadn’t been designed to withstand the force of a 180-pound vampire hitting it at about ninety miles an hour, which it demonstrated by groaning and toppling slowly into the crowd.

  People screamed and scattered as it hit down, including the two remaining miscreants who’d started the whole thing. The master cursed and went after them, leaving me standing in the street in front of the downed tower. Everyone who wasn’t running for the sidewalks was looking right at me—including two war mages.

  For an instant, we locked eyes, and I saw theirs widen in recognition. Shit! I ran for the nearest sidewalk, intending to get out of sight and shift—assuming I could. But the crowd was six deep on either side, and nobody felt like letting me through. I looked back to find the mages almost on top of me. I changed course and scurried for the fallen tower. Maybe, if I could get underneath—

  An arm reached out of the aluminum side of the tower and pulled me in. Only I didn’t end up there. There was a moment of disorientation and then I popped out on a balcony hanging off the facade of a fake feed store. “I thought I told you to stay put!” Dee said, pushing a fallen curl out of her face.

  “What did you—How many portals are there?”

  “Never counted. A bunch were put in for a magic act a couple years ago and nobody ever shut them down. They don’t use magic unless they’re activated, so . . .” She shrugged. “Anyway, I got you an End of the Line burger and fries. Will that do?”

  I took a greasy sack that smelled like heaven. “Absolutely,” I said fervently.

  “Okay, then. We’re making progress. Now stay here while I go look for some shoes.”

  “Gotcha.” The balcony was more for show than anything else and only a few feet wide. I’d have to eat standing up, but at the moment, I didn’t care.

  Dee nodded and stepped back through the side of the building, heedless of any watching eyes, not that there appeared to be any. The crowd was fixated on the mages, who were studying the fallen tower suspiciously. One cautiously stuck an arm in the side, which disappeared up to the shoulder—and reappeared on my side of the portal.

  It flailed around for a second, almost brushing against me twice, while he craned his neck and looked around to see where it came out. He didn’t see me, but someone in the crowd did and pointed. The waving arm snatched at me, I jerked back and it grabbed my sandwich bag instead. And disappeared.

  “Damn it!”

  The mage pulled my lunch out on his side of the portal, dropped it on the ground like he was afraid it was contagious and threw a fireball at it. The crowd roared in delight, apparently deciding that this was some unscheduled entertainment. I almost cried.

  “That was my lunch, you idiot!” I yelled right before he stepped through the portal.

  He appeared in my face, startling me, and I instinctively pushed him away. He fell back through the portal, stumbled out of the tower and landed on his ass. He glared, scrambled up and pulled a gun.

  For a moment, I didn’t believe he’d do it. There were a couple hundred people around; no way would he risk killing one of them while trying to take me out. The Circle hadn’t impressed me with their sanity, but they weren’t that crazy.

  Then he pointed the gun, not at me, but at the fallen tower.

  I threw myself out of the way just as he shot at point-blank range into the portal. The bullet came out my side, ruffling my hair on its way past, and shattered a lighted sign on the other side of the street. I was still staring at the sparks and broken glass when he launched himself back through—and this time he grabbed me.

  I panicked and shifted—and since he was still holding on, he came along for the ride. We landed on the roof of the opposite building, or rather, he did. I was left dangling over the side, and in his surprise, he let go.

  I shifted midair and ended up back where I’d started, woozy and nauseous. Shifting two people on no food and maybe five hours’ sleep had wiped me out. I didn’t think I could do it again. That proved to be a problem when the other mage popped out of the portal practically on top of me.

  I did the only thing I could. I grabbed his coat, swung him around and fell back through the portal before he could curse me. I rolled out of the tower a second later, into the middle of the street, adding another layer of bruises. The crowd applauded as I struggled to my feet.

  “They do it with doubles,” I heard someone say. “The girl on the balcony was a lot more blond.”

  “You’d think they’d check for something like that,” someone else said.

  The mage stepped out of the portal and tripped over my body, kicking me painfully in the ribs. Down the street, his partner jumped from the roof and started for us through the crowd. I got my feet under me, kicked the still-burning remains of my lunch in the mage’s face and ran.

  “Over here!” I saw Dee waving at me, her wig towering over everyone else. A hand grabbed the back of my sweatshirt, but she jerked me over the heads of the last few people and it fell away. She swiveled on a heel, plunged into a ladies’ restroom and shoved me into the janitor’s closet. I didn’t even have time to catch my breath before we fell through a wall.

  We tumbled out into my room again a second later. I landed on the bed, but Dee hit her shin painfully on the side of the headboard. “Fuck it, that’s twice today!”

  I lay there, staring at the wall, wondering who was going to come through next. But nobody did. I guess the mages hadn’t been able to pass the gauntlet of outraged women in line.

  “Here!” Dee threw a package on the bed and pulled my shoes out of her bra. “God, what I do to look good,” she said, clutching them to her heaving bosom. And disappeared.

  Chapter Twelve

  I tried room service, but after getting a busy signal for ten minutes straight, I put my new sneakers on and decided to go out.

  There are things I am never going to like about Vegas: the relentless sun that reflects off sand and glass and concrete everywhere you look. The constantly changing skyline, where housing developments and gaudy tourist traps seem to pop up and fade away overnight, as if the whole city is set on fast-forward. And the crowds of tourists that are constantly underfoot. But you have to love a place just a little that serves up pizza and beer to go at midnight.

  I reentered Dante’s through a side entrance, intending to find a quiet place to picnic. But apparently someone else had other ideas. A meaty hand reached out of a stairwell and grabbed me around the wrist.

  “If you want some pizza, you could just ask,” I told Marco.

  He glowered at me out of red-rimmed eyes but didn’t say anything. Just breathed heavily and stuck a phone in my ear. “Cassie? Are you there?” a voice asked.

  Damn. It was Mircea. And I hadn’t even started to figure out what to say to him yet—about a lot of things. “What did you do to Marco?” I demanded, deciding to go with a good offense.

  “Assigned him as your permanent bodyguard.” Mircea’s usually warm voice was cold steel.

  “I meant as punishment.”

  “So did I.”

/>   I stared at the phone for a moment and then clicked it shut.

  It almost immediately rang again.

  I tossed it at Marco and continued walking. He followed. “You gotta take the boss’s call.”

  “Or what?”

  There was a slight pause. “He’ll be mad.”

  “He’s already mad.”

  “At me.”

  I looked up to find Marco practically shaking in his boots. His face was pale and his eyes were almost bugging out of his head. He looked terrified.

  At that moment, I didn’t like Mircea very much.

  The phone rang.

  Marco held it out to me and I took it. “What?”

  “I thought you might wish to know that Raphael is in the infirmary.”

  I stopped walking. “Why?”

  “The doctors tell me that he is dying.” Mircea said something else, but I didn’t hear him. I’d already dropped the phone and the pizza and was running for the stairs.

  I don’t remember how I got to the lobby and couldn’t tell you the name of the person who gave me directions. I skidded into a table on the way and almost fell but managed to clutch it with both hands and hang on. Cursing, I started to take off again and ran into a solid wall of vampire.

  Alphonse, Tony’s onetime head henchman, set me back on my feet. As usual, his seven-foot-plus body was clad in a bespoke suit. This one was dark tan with a cranberry stripe, and he had a ruby the size of a quail’s egg for a tie tack. More rubies glinted from a couple of finger rings and from the wrist of his longtime girlfriend, Sal. He had the suits cut loose to conceal the half ton of weaponry he carried but didn’t need. Between him and Sal, they could have taken out a platoon.

  Sal was all in red to match the rubies, from the skintight sheath designed to draw attention to her ample curves and away from her missing eye—lost long ago in a saloon brawl with another “hostess”—to her anger-darkened cheeks. “I wish someone had done this to him, so I could gut them,” she said by way of greeting.

  “You’ve seen him?”

  “Yeah.” Sal wiped an arm across her face, smearing her mascara. I stared; I’d never seen her look this rattled. She noticed and smiled grimly. “You kinda get attached to someone when you know him for a century and a half.”

  “He’s not bad, for a pretty-boy painter,” Alphonse agreed. “You been in there?” He jerked a thumb at the set of ornate doors down the hall.

  “No. I just found out—”

  “So did we. Fucking idiots didn’t tell nobody he was here, and he was too weak to do it himself. We’re getting him transferred to a private room.”

  “How . . . how is he? Mircea said something—”

  “Bad,” he said flatly.

  “If you want to see him, you better do it now,” Sal added bleakly.

  I ran.

  Casanova had said that they’d had to cancel the conventions, but I’d assumed it was because they needed the space. They did, but not only for rooms. The Murano glass chandeliers of the main ballroom, which usually looked down on fashion shows and business luncheons, now lit up row after row of cots. I could see them dimly through the glass insets in the main doors but not reach them. Because the ballroom had another new feature—a pair of armed guards.

  They were vampires, but they weren’t part of Casanova’s security force. I knew all of them by now and they knew me, whereas neither of these guys made any attempt to move out of the way. “Human visitors are not allowed,” one of them said without bothering to look at me.

  “I’ll take my chances,” I told him, but he didn’t budge. “My friend is in there.” Not a word, not even a glance. “He’s dying!”

  Nothing.

  “She’s with me,” Marco said, coming out of nowhere.

  “No humans,” the guard repeated in the same abrupt way, but at least Marco got eye contact. “Senate’s orders.”

  “There have been problems?” Marco asked sharply.

  The vamp shrugged. “Indiscriminate feeding. Some of the injured were out of their heads. The nurses say they have it under control, but the Senate doesn’t want any incidents. That means no human visitors.”

  “Well, this human is visiting whether the Senate likes it or not!” I said furiously.

  “Keep it in line or I’ll do it for you,” the guard told Marco.

  “Screw this,” I said, and shifted inside—only to almost get run over by an orderly with a cart. More than a dozen of them were zipping here and there, patching up patients like pit crews servicing race cars. A nearby patient had his sheets changed, his pillow fluffed, his water jug refilled and his meds doled out in about the time it took for me to blink.

  The guard was suddenly beside me. I hadn’t seen him come in, but I saw him stop when Marco’s hand latched onto his shoulder. Marco pulled back my hair to show off the two small marks on my neck. “She belongs to Lord Mircea.”

  The guard’s eyes thawed slightly. “Don’t let her run loose,” he warned.

  “Yeah. I get that a lot.” Marco put a hand to my back and hustled me down the nearest aisle.

  We stopped at a cot exactly the same as all the rest by one of the walls. The man-shaped patient who lay naked on top of the plain white sheets was covered head to toe in cracked and blistered flesh that glistened from ointment that didn’t seem to be helping at all. His bare hairy ankles and long pink feet looked relatively untouched, but the rest of him . . . It was like he’d been parboiled.

  His shoes, I thought blankly. Like his belt, which had left a pale stripe across his midsection, the heavy leather of his shoes had spared his feet the worst of it. But the light summer clothes and thin cotton sheets he’d wrapped around himself had been next to useless. They may have reduced the third-degree burns to second in a few places, but it was honestly hard to tell. A human wouldn’t have survived that kind of trauma. And even Rafe was so disfigured that, without Marco’s help, I would never have recognized him.

  But he knew me.

  “Cassie.” It was a harsh whisper, like his lungs were on fire. My legs gave out and I collapsed to my knees.

  “They say he was in the sun for hours.” Marco sounded awed and appalled.

  I didn’t answer. A rush of adrenaline was making the room seem to pulse around me, but there was nowhere to run, nothing to do. I gulped in air, a little too much, a little too quickly, and choked, causing Marco’s grip to tighten on my shoulder.

  “Why did he do this?” I whispered. “He could have stayed behind—there was shelter.”

  “I heard you came back with some mages.”

  “They escaped with us.”

  “Yeah. People work together when their lives are on the line. But when they calm down, they revert to type.”

  I remembered Caleb’s conversation with Pritkin. Had Rafe heard it and decided he couldn’t trust them? My stomach rebelled as the implication hit—had he ended up this way because of me?

  Rafe squinted up at us and tried to say something, but his lips had swollen so much that I couldn’t understand him. “I think he wants his sunglasses,” Marco translated. “Do you know what they look like?”

  “They’re Gucci,” I whispered.

  Marco found them on a nearby table and tried to put them on Rafe’s face, but there was no way of resting them that wasn’t going to hurt him. The moment they touched his raw flesh, he cringed and let out a hiss, and Marco snatched them back. I guess that explained the lack of hospital gown or top sheet. I couldn’t imagine anything touching him and not being excruciating.

  Marco was still trying to figure out the glasses dilemma when I heard a wet-sounding gasp and turned to see Sal staring at Rafe, her pale skin blotchy. Tears rolled and splashed down her face, though she didn’t seem to care; she just raised her arm to swipe at her cheek without looking away from the bed. I’d never been so grateful for anyone in my entire life, because Sal was crying, Sal was, so I didn’t have to.

  “They said that he . . . shouldn’t be moved,” Alphonse told
me from behind her. The unspoken words, wouldn’t survive it, hung in the air between us.

  “This is bullshit!” Sal said, grabbing one of the passing orderlies with a cobralike motion. “Why isn’t anything being done for him?”

  “Th-there’s nothing to be done,” the vamp said. He looked young, which didn’t mean anything, but there was also very little power coming off him. And he wasn’t very good at controlling his expressions. He glanced at Rafe and winced. “We had the healers look at him, but they said the damage was too extensive. That only his master had a chance of—”

  “His master is hiding his cowardly ass in Faerie!” Sal snarled, her bloodred talons biting into the vamp’s arm. “Think of something else!”

  “There isn’t anything else,” the vamp said, starting to look a little panicked. “P-please . . . I belong to Lady Halcyone. If I’ve offended—”

  Sal released him with a disgusted snort, and he scurried away. From her expression, he was lucky that his lady and defender was a Senate member. But he was right. Vampires either healed themselves or they didn’t, which was why it really worried me that Rafe hadn’t dropped into a healing trance yet. Or maybe he had and he’d already come out of it unchanged. A sickening rush of dread pooled in my stomach.

  I stared at him, remembering how quiet he’d been on the way back and how he’d disappeared in the lobby. I should have realized that there was a problem then, or if not, definitely when I took a shower later. The tip of my nose and the rise of my cheekbones had been sunburned enough to sting under the water. How had it not occurred to me that Rafe had to be much worse off? Nuclear-radiation-proof sunscreen or not, vampires under first level should never be out in direct sunlight. Everyone knew that; even people who hadn’t grown up at a vampire’s court. So how could I have missed it? How could I have gone to sleep and let this happen?

  “Please, Rafe,” I begged, my voice breaking. “Please—”