by Karen Chance
I thought there was a good chance the fridge was possessed.
It was subtle about it, but I had its number. I knew its ways. Oh yes.
“How the hell did nobody hear him?” someone demanded harshly. I couldn’t see who it was because he was outside the kitchen. But it sounded sort of like Marco. Or like Marco might sound if he wanted to bite someone’s head off their body.
One of the vamps must have thought so, too, because he was awfully tentative when he answered. “He . . . apparently, the mage threw a silence spell over the lounge. We couldn’t hear any—”
“I’m more interested in why you couldn’t see. All of you congregated in one place, with not a single fucking one watching your fucking charge—”
“The apartment was supposed to be empty!” Another, slightly less cowed voice said. “And she hates it when we hover—”
“Then you play pool, you play cards, you watch without making it obvious. But you fucking well watch!” Something crashed into a wall.
Nobody said anything that time. Or maybe I just wasn’t listening. After all, someone had to keep an eye on the fridge.
There were slash marks in the front, spaced evenly like evil eyes, glowing with yellow light from the inside. And that couldn’t be the usual fridge light, could it? Wasn’t that supposed to go out when the door was closed? I thought I saw something move behind one of the slashes, but then I blinked and it was gone.
Oh yes. I knew.
Pritkin came in and knelt by my chair. “You can’t go to sleep yet, Cassie,” he told me, handing me a heart murmur in a mug. It smelled good, but not good enough to wake up for. I mumbled something and turned over, burying my face in the nice, warm shoulder someone had thoughtfully provided.
Only to be hauled up again.
So I sighed and snuggled into a nice, warm chest instead.
“Drink.” My hands were wrapped around the mug.
I pushed it away. “Don’ wanna. Wanna sleep.”
“Not yet.”
“Then why am I in bed?”
He sighed and pulled me to a sitting position, putting the mug firmly in my hands. “A healer is coming and he wants you to stay awake until he arrives, all right?”
I drank some too-hot coffee and scowled at him, annoyed although I couldn’t remember why. The light from the lounge was leaking in, highlighting his spiky blond hair. I decided that must be it.
“You really hate my hair, don’t you?” he asked, a smile flickering over his lips so fast I might have imagined it.
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
I reached out to touch it, and was surprised as always to find it mostly soft. Just a little stiff in places from whatever product he used on it. It felt weird, imagining Pritkin having anything in his hair but sweat. But he must have; nobody’s did that all on its own.
“It’s like . . . angry hair,” I said, trying to pat it down and failing miserably.
He caught my wrist. “Most people would say that suits me.”
“I’m not most people.”
“I know.”
I went back to watching the fridge. I could see the door over Pritkin’s shoulder, and it wasn’t closed after all. It was very slightly open, like a panting mouth. And some kind of multicolored mucus was dripping out the bottom.
Condiments, I told myself firmly.
Or so it wanted me to think.
“Dryden’s finished hugging the toilet,” one of the vamps said, walking into the kitchen. “Do we need to dose her, too?”
“She took care of that herself,” Marco said, joining the party. He’d pulled off the barfed-on shirt but hadn’t yet bothered to go to his room for another one. That left him in dark gray slacks, a pair of Ferragamo loafers and a lot of hair.
A lot of hair. It was even on his shoulders. It was like a pelt.
He crouched down on the other side of me. “You’re really hairy,” I told him, impressed.
“And you’re really stoned.”
I thought about that for a moment. It seemed like an outside possibility. “Why am I stoned?”
“It was the goddamned chocolates. I always taste everything before you eat it, yet I sat right there and watched you scarf half the damn—”
“You couldn’t know.”
“It’s my goddamned job to know!”
I sighed and pulled his curly head to me. He was warm and fuzzy, like a big teddy bear. A big teddy bear with fangs.
I patted him softly.
“Why didn’t the wards detect that shit?” one of the other guards demanded angrily. He was a redhead, his fiery hair worn in a slick style that went with his natty blue-plaid suit. He was one of the ones who had made fun of the mage when he first arrived, but who’d let him follow us in. I wondered if he’d caught flak for that.
Probably.
“They detect poison,” Pritkin told him. “This was a narcotic.”
“What the hell was the point in that?”
“Probably hoped she’d eat enough to kill her,” Marco said savagely. “Don’t have to be poison to do the job if you consume enough of it! But even one or two pieces would make sure she couldn’t shift away from that asshole.”
“That asshole ate half the box himself,” Pritkin said, “hoping he’d pass out before that creature could make use of him.”
“Then why the hell didn’t he?”
“He doubtless would have, given more time. Unfortunately, our meeting broke up too soon and Cassie found the box—”
A phone rang. Marco pulled it out of his pocket and looked at the readout. “I gotta get the rest of my ass chewed off by the master,” he told me. “Think you can maybe not die for five minutes?”
“I’ll try,” I told him seriously.
“You know, if anyone else said that, it would be funny.” He left.
“What I don’t get is how that thing knew that particular mage would get in,” another vamp said. He was a tall brunet in nice tan jacket that was now covered in beer. “We’d been tossing them out on their fortune-hunting asses all day. He’d have gone the same way if he hadn’t shown up with the Lord Protector.”
“Maybe that’s what it was waiting for,” a third vamp said, glancing around. He was another brunet, in shirtsleeves and dark brown slacks. A bright blue tie was askew under one ear, but he didn’t appear to have noticed. “It could have been there all morning, watching us, waiting for someone to get in. . . .”
“Someone who just happened to have poisoned chocolates?” the redhead asked sarcastically.
“They weren’t poisoned,” the brunet said, scowling. “And he could have gotten them—”
“Where? At the gift shop?” The redhead rolled his eyes. “Yes, I’ll take the drugged kind, please. Do you have any in mint?”
“Very funny!”
“Well, you sound like an idiot! Obviously, the bastard brought them with him, meaning this wasn’t random opportunity. It was planned.”
“I agree,” Pritkin said, causing their heads to swivel back his way. “But not by him.”
“You would say that,” the redhead sneered. “Then where did he get the damn things?”
“He brought the candy with him, but it wasn’t drugged. He said he did that later, under the influence of the entity.”
“With what?”
Pritkin reached into a pocket and tossed something to the vamp, who caught it easily. It was a little vial, the type war mages wore in bandoliers or on their belts. A lot of them were filled with dark, sludgy substances that sometimes moved on their own, but this one was just plain, colorless liquid.
“And this does what?” the vamp asked, wisely not opening it.
Pritkin didn’t reply. He just knelt beside me, green eyes assessing. He held up a finger. “Cassie, can you tell me how many—”
I grabbed it and laughed.
He looked over his shoulder at the vamp. “That,” he said drily.
“What the hell was he carrying this shit around for?” the second
vamp demanded.
“It’s useful in making captures, subduing difficult prisoners.” Pritkin shrugged.
“Then . . . this is a weapon.”
“Yes.”
“But he was going on a date.”
Pritkin looked confused. “Yes?”
The redhead threw his hands up.
“How do we know the mage was really possessed?” a skinny blond asked, leaning over the counter. “Maybe somebody hired him—”
“He’s been in the Corps for seventeen years,” Pritkin said.
“And mages can’t be bribed?”
“He also comes from a wealthy, prominent family. He has no need—”
“That guy?” the blond asked incredulously.
“He didn’t dress like it,” the redhead sniffed.
“Not everyone cares about such things,” Pritkin said.
The redhead looked him over. “Obviously.”
“Blackmail, then,” Tan Jacket put in. “Maybe somebody had something on him.”
“There will be an investigation,” Pritkin told him. “But his actions speak for him. If—”
“His actions? He tried to kill her!”
“He tried to save her. Not only did he attempt to eat the chocolates whenever he was lucid enough, but he also slowed down his reflexes in the fight, skewed his aim. And when she ran, he threw a nonlethal spell instead of a fireball. He fought it every step of the way—”
“And we know this how? Because he told you?” Tan Jacket interrupted.
“We know this because she’s still alive!” Pritkin snapped. “Essentially, he and Cassie were both fighting it. He bought her time, and she used it, brilliantly.”
He bent over and topped off my coffee cup. Pritkin hadn’t shaved for a few days, and I put my hand to his cheek. “Fuzzy,” I told him seriously.
He sighed.
“I don’t understand why this thing needed to hitch a ride in the first place,” the redhead said. “If it’s powerful enough to possess a war mage—”
“Anyone can be possessed if his guard is down,” Pritkin said curtly. “And no one’s is up every minute.”
“It didn’t possess one of us,” the vamp pointed out snottily.
“Vampires are more difficult,” Pritkin admitted. “You can be possessed, but it takes considerably more energy than possessing a human. The creature might not have had the strength to manage it and also force you to attack.”
“But why did it need someone else to attack at all? If it’s such a big, bad evil entity, why not go after her itself?”
“It already tried that—” Pritkin said.
“It tried to possess her, not simply attack her. If it can get past the wards, why not go for an all-out assault?”
Pritkin shrugged. “In Faerie, it doubtless would have. But outside its own world, its power is weakened.”
“We still don’t know that it’s Fey,” the vamp said.
“Yes, we do,” a new voice said hoarsely.
I looked up to find a slim blond figure standing in the doorway to the kitchen. For a frozen second, I looked at him and he looked at me, and then I screamed and threw my coffee, which hit him square in the groin. And I guess that didn’t feel too good because he screamed, too, and for a minute there was a whole lot of screaming going on.
Then Pritkin put a heavy hand on my shoulder and I belatedly noticed that Dryden was flanked by a couple of vamps, each of whom had one of his arms. It looked less like they were restraining him than holding him up. And then I noticed other things, like the fact that his eyes were back to blue and his nose was all bloody and he was pale and shaky and his nice suit was torn and dripping coffee.
He smelled like hot sauce.
“Sorry,” I told him.
Dryden didn’t say anything. He just stood there and shook at me.
Pritkin handed him some paper towels. “How do you know?”
Dryden swallowed and dabbed at his crotch. “My . . . my great-grandmother was Fey,” he said shakily. “Somehow, it knew that. It tried to talk to me—”
“About what?”
“I’m . . . not sure. I—”
“You don’t know the language?”
“A little, but—”
“Then take a guess!”
“That’s what I’m trying to do, if you’ll give me a chance!” he snapped, tossing the wet paper towels in the trash. “I only caught maybe one word in ten, but I think . . . I think it was trying to apologize.”
“Apologize?” The redheaded vamp sneered. “For what?”
Dryden scowled and flailed a hand angrily. “For this? For almost getting me killed? For almost making me—” he broke off and glanced at me, and his lips tightened. “I don’t know. I didn’t get that much. Just something like ‘they made me do it,’ and that she was afraid of them—”
“She?” the vamp asked.
“Yes. It . . . She . . . I think it was female. It was using the female form of address, anyway. Like I told you, my grasp of the language isn’t good and that goes double for the High Court dialect—”
“High Court?” That was Pritkin.
“It’s the version of the language spoken at court—”
“I know what it is,” Pritkin snapped. “How did you recognize it?”
“Because my grandmother spoke it!”
“And your grandmother was?”
“A Selkie noblewoman.”
Pritkin cursed. “Dark Fey.”
The mage didn’t deign to respond to that. He looked at me and took a deep breath. “Before I left, I just wanted to say . . . thank you.” It came out a little strangled.
I thought about it for a moment. “You’re welcome?”
“Do you know what I’m thanking you for?”
Damn. I’d hoped he wouldn’t ask that. It couldn’t be for lunch, since we’d never had any.
And I guessed we wouldn’t now, what with a possessed fridge and all.
“No?” I said, figuring I had a fifty-fifty shot.
He knelt in front of my chair, or maybe his legs collapsed; I don’t know. He wasn’t looking so good. “I know what that is,” he said hoarsely, nodding at my wrist, where my bracelet of interlocking knives lay hard and cold against my skin. “It’s my job at the Corps to disenchant confiscated dark objects and . . . I’ve seen one like it before.”
His eyes searched my face. He seemed to be waiting on some kind of response. So I nodded.
“You could have killed me,” he said. And then he kissed my hand. “Thank you.”
He just stayed like that for a while, head down, on one knee, like a supplicant in front of a priest. Or like a guy making a marriage proposal. I started to get nervous. Because the last thing I needed was another one of those.
I decided to let him down easy.
“You seem like a nice guy,” I told him. “I mean, you know, when you’re not trying to kill me. I just . . .” I sighed and came out with it. “I just really don’t want to date you.”
He suddenly looked up. His eyes were wet, but his smile was blinding. “Then it seems I have something else to thank you for.”
Chapter Twenty-one
According to the alarm clock on my nightstand, I slept for seven hours, despite already having slept for most of the day. It was almost midnight when I rolled out, groggy and thickheaded and gritty-eyed and yucky. And saw a man in the corner of my room.
I didn’t scream, because the man was a) sitting down, b) reading a paper and c) had the golden-eyed glow typical of Mircea’s masters. I just snatched up the sheet, because I’d been too high to worry about pj’s, and scanned the room for more. But I didn’t see any, unless they were hiding in the closet or under the bed.
And wasn’t that just a fun thought?
“What are you doing here?” I demanded after a moment.
He didn’t bother to reply, just flipped over another page.
“You’re not supposed to be in my room!”
Nothing.
Talking to a vamp who’s not in the mood is one of life’s biggest time wasters, so I didn’t try. I also didn’t attempt to budge him, because master vamps go wherever they damn well please. I just wrapped the sheet around me and dragged myself off to the bathroom.
I stood in the cool air for a minute while my eyes adjusted to the brilliant light on all that tile. But even after they did, I still stayed where I was, one hand on the doorknob, like I was waiting for something. It finally occurred to me that I was expecting another freak-out, only my body didn’t seem interested. It felt chilly and kind of achy and kind of high. But not particularly panicked. I gave it a little longer, until I started to feel stupid; then I dropped the sheet and checked out the damage.
It wasn’t all that bad. Other than putting a new bruise on my ass and a lump on my head, I’d come out pretty good this round. Whatever is trying to kill me is obviously going to have to step up its game, I thought viciously, and looked in the mirror.
And swore.
I might not have been too beaten up, but I still looked like hell, especially my hair. Not only was it still faintly green, but it was now missing a large chunk. I pushed it around for a while with clumsy fingers, but nothing seemed to help. I tried parting it different, but the only way that kind of worked looked suspiciously like a middle-aged guy’s comb-over. And it still left me looking like something had taken a bite out of my head.
Damn it all! Not so long ago, my hair had been a shimmering red-gold wave that cascaded down my back like a cloak. It had been my one claim to real beauty, and I’d cried like a baby when I had to cut it while on the run from Tony, because it was too recognizable.
I didn’t cry this time. I was too freaking mad. I just brushed my teeth, washed my face and dragged my big wad of fabric back to the bedroom.
The vamp still didn’t say anything, and neither did I. I also didn’t turn on a light, which was stupid, because he could probably see about the same either way. But it made me feel more naked to have it on, which was why it took five minutes of hunting and grumbling and falling and cursing around in the closet to find what I wanted.
I finally emerged with an old Georgia Bulldogs baseball cap, a pair of silky blue track shorts and a faded pink tank top from my comfort-clothes stash. None of it matched, but right then, I didn’t give a damn. I hauled everything back to the bathroom, and after dressing and combing and slapping on some mascara, I decided I looked mostly normal.
