by Karen Chance
They left.
Fred started divvying up food.
I went to get a couple of towels—for hygiene’s sake; the bedspread was already done for—and to check out the bathroom. But all I found was a mountain of extra linens and a plastic bag of the tiny toiletries the hotel gave out, for the girls, I guessed. But no phantom lovers.
Sometimes a dream is just a dream, I told myself, feeling a little embarrassed. And a lot hungry. I grabbed some towels off the heap and went to claim my share of the bounty.
And discovered that Fred—good old Fred—had outdone himself. I helped him lay out the picnic, then climbed into the small amount of space left by the headboard, my stomach insisting that I was starving the whole time. I must have looked it, too, because Fred generously donated a tempura shrimp roll to my plate, although he was stingy with the wasabi.
He saw my face and rolled his eyes. “Don’t pout. Anyway, this place makes their own. None of that fake shit.”
“Fake?”
“Didn’t you know?” He plopped a much larger portion on his own plate, which he totally didn’t need because vampire senses are stronger than humans’.
“Know what?” I asked, with my mouth full.
“That the wasabi in most sushi places isn’t real. It’s horseradish they’ve doctored up with green food coloring and some mustard.”
“The bastards.”
“Tell me about it. But this place has the genuine article, and it’s hot. So be careful.”
I was careful. It was delicious. I happily ate my way through the tempura with a burning tongue and watering eyes before starting on the bright red tandoori. It was good, too, falling-off-the-bone tender and oniony and spicy and . . . yum.
I came out of a food-induced haze a few moments later to find that something else had appeared on my plate. It wasn’t chicken tikka. “What?” I asked, around a mouthful of awesomeness.
“Samosa.”
I poked at the little fried ball with a fork. Some nasty green stuff oozed out through a break in the breading. And, okay, ewww.
“It’s peas,” Fred told me impatiently.
“Peas?”
“You know, small and green? They’re these things called vegetables.”
“Very funny.” I pushed the pea thing over to the side of my plate.
Fred pushed it back. “Eat it.”
“I don’t want to eat it.”
“It’s good for you.”
“Then you eat it.”
“I don’t need veggies.”
“You don’t need tikka masala, either,” I pointed out, although a bunch of it had ended up on his plate. Along with most of the naan. I stole a piece back.
“There’s plenty left,” he said indignantly. “And you have to eat it.”
“Why?” I eyed the pea thing suspiciously. I wouldn’t put it past Marco to drug me. He wasn’t supposed to, since it interfered with my ability to access my power. But after the last few days, I could see him deciding that it was the lesser of two evils.
But apparently I was being paranoid, because Fred looked heavenward. “Because I’ll get The Look if you don’t!”
“What look?” I asked, shoveling the rest of the cumin-infused basmati rice onto my plate and pouring on the remains of the tikka. This place Fred had found made it right, with lots of cream in the tomato sauce and big, tender chunks of chicken and large, fluffy rounds of naan and—
And I almost forgot what we’d been talking about.
Until I looked up. And encountered a credible imitation of my former governess’s patented Look of Disapproval. It was so good, I felt a surge of the old, familiar guilt, despite the fact that I hadn’t done anything.
Except picnic on the bed, which would have been enough for a Stern Talking-To, at the very least.
“Who is giving you The Look?” I asked, confused.
“Who do you think?”
“I have no idea.” And I didn’t. Because living in a penthouse full of guys, even vampire guys, was sort of like hanging out at a frat house.
The kitchen never had food but always had beer. The living room was filled with full ashtrays, cast-off suit coats that nobody had bothered to hang up, and the latest sports event on the TV. But the salon was where people mostly lived because it had the pool table and the newly installed poker table and the dartboard that someone had made out of a picture of Casanova’s face.
He was the casino manager, and yes, usually looked pretty constipated, at least when he was around me. But he didn’t have The Look. As far as I knew, nobody did.
“Rhea,” Fred said, glancing over his shoulder, like he was afraid he might find her standing there.
“Rhea?”
“Yes, Rhea. Your acolyte. Or whatever she is.” Fred looked like he might have some suggestions for other titles.
I frowned.
“What’s wrong with her?”
“That’s what I’d like to know,” Fred said, and started on a local specialty, the Rock and Roll roll. It had spicy barbecued eel and creamy avocado and crunchy cucumber, and toasted sesame seeds sprinkled all over the top of—
“Stop it,” he told me.
“Stop what?’
“Stop lusting after my roll. And start figuring out what to do about your court.”
“Didn’t they eat?” I asked, feeling guilty again. I hadn’t thought—but then, I wasn’t used to having to feed anybody but me. Which was hard enough around here.
“Oh, they ate,” he said heavily. “I told them they could call up for pizza or whatever from room service, but no. Rhea wasn’t having it.”
“Then what did they have?” I asked. Because I was pretty sure that the only food in the fridge was a few stale beer nuts and some ketchup.
And I wasn’t sure about the ketchup.
“Stuffed chicken. Roasted potatoes. Broccoli.” Fred made a face.
“Where did they get that?” Vegas was not known for home cooking. You could get everything from a twenty-four-ounce prime rib topped with goat cheese and lobster, to a ninety-nine-cent shrimp cocktail that might or might not give you Mobster’s Revenge. But stuffed chicken?
Fred mumbled something around a mouthful of eel.
“What?”
He swallowed. “I said, she got it at the grocery store.”
“What grocery store?”
“The one she made me go out to. In the middle of the day.” He shuddered. “She decided that, since we have a double oven, she’d cook.”
“We have a double oven?”
“I know, right?” He munched cucumber. “Who knew?”
“So she sent you to the grocery store,” I said slowly, because I was trying to imagine a girl who’d just narrowly escaped death deciding that what she really needed right then was a stuffed chicken.
And because of something else.
Rhea wasn’t just some teenager. She was a member of the Pythian Court, and one who’d been handling the weirdness a lot longer than I had. If there was a way for me to go back fifteen centuries without turning inside out, she ought to know.
Well, maybe. I’d gotten the idea that she’d mostly worked in the nursery, taking care of the little kids we seemed to have a bunch of for some reason, instead of doing crazy time leaps. In fact, I seemed to remember her saying that she wasn’t really an acolyte at all, just an initiate, although I wasn’t totally clear on the difference.
But still, she might know something.
“—lettuce. Spinach. Bean sprouts,” Fred was saying, with the air of someone pronouncing unfamiliar curse words.
“Is she awake?”
He looked up from corralling an unholy mix of masala and wasabi with some naan, and blinked. “Who? Rhea?”
I nodded.
“No, she’s asleep. They all are. You were out almos
t two hours. Why?”
I thought about waking her up, but then I’d have to explain why. And I couldn’t explain why. I couldn’t risk anybody else finding out that I was planning a jump like that. Jonas would have a fit, and Marco . . . well, then I really would be getting drugged.
I shrugged. “She said something about wanting to talk to me.”
“Probably about Jonas.” That was Marco’s voice, from the doorway. I looked up to find him lounging against the jamb, eyeing the spread on the bed.
“What about Jonas?” I asked, as he strolled over and snared a piece of the roll Fred had lined up for a chaser.
And promptly turned white.
“What the hell?” he gasped, teary-eyed.
Fred grinned. “Teach you to steal a man’s food.”
“You don’t need food! And what the fuck is in there?”
“Ghost pepper,” Fred said, looking satisfied. “It’s called a roulette roll. All the pieces are pretty normal, except for the one that has—hey!” That last was in response to Marco stealing his beer. “I’m drinking that!”
“Not anymore,” Marco told him, and downed it in a couple of gulps.
I grabbed my bottle protectively. “What about Jonas?” I repeated.
“Just that they really got into it when he called earlier,” Marco said, and went to the bathroom for some water.
“Got into it . . . about what?” I called after him.
He came back in carrying both courtesy glasses filled to the brim, and downed them before answering. And then went back for a refill. “Don’t know.”
Wuss, Fred mouthed.
“I heard that.”
“You don’t know?” I asked skeptically, because of course he did.
But Marco shook his head. “Silence spell. Guess she didn’t want us knowing court business.”
“Rhea can do a silence spell?” I asked enviously.
“Guess so. By the way, Jonas knows you’re back.”
“How?”
Marco came back in still scowling, although whether at me or at the lingering effects of the pepper, I didn’t know. “Don’t look at me like that. You were the one hanging off the side of the damned building because God forbid anyone should know what you’re up to. And you know he has spies everywhere.”
“Some people need to learn to mind their own business,” I said, scowling.
“Couldn’t agree more,” he agreed, without a shred of irony.
Because, of course, I was his business, from a vampire point of view. Keeping the family safe was a Very Big Thing in the vamp world. Any master who couldn’t do it lost face—possibly literally—very soon, because he’d be viewed as weak. As would any servant be who let down said master, which Marco clearly had no intention of doing.
Good, I thought evilly. “Tell Jonas I died,” I told him.
“He’ll want to see the corpse.”
“Then tell him I left!”
Jonas was in my black book anyway. Only, unlike Mircea, I wasn’t too afraid to talk to him. I was too pissed. He’d forbidden me to go back in time to rescue my court, and despite the fact that he probably didn’t remember it because of the whole time-change thing, he’d still done it. Not to mention keeping from me the tiny fact that a bunch of my acolytes were bat-shit crazy and possibly homicidal. And what was his reason?
That I already had enough on my plate to worry about.
Yeah, like getting assassinated by enemies I didn’t know I had, Jonas!
Of course, he thought the Circle could protect me. He always thought that. Only the kind of things that came after me weren’t always things the Circle had seen before.
Jonas was smart, but he didn’t think I was, and I was getting tired of being treated like a witless wonder. No, I hadn’t been Pythia very long; yes, I was scarily ignorant of some parts of my job. But I was doing my best to remedy that in between planning rescue trips into hell and trying to stay alive! And so far, I’d proven a fairly quick study. If someone had been around to train me, I might have been doing even better.
Someone like my damned court, for instance.
But then, I wouldn’t need the Circle so much in that case, now would I?
Marco’s lips were twitching at whatever emotions had been running across my face. “What’s so funny?” I asked.
“Nothing.”
“Don’t lie. You suck at it almost as much as I do.”
“That’s why I’m the muscle,” he told me.
“I’d like to be the muscle sometimes,” I said wistfully, only to have him reach out and pinch my sad excuse for a bicep.
“I’m thinking no,” he said, grinning now. “But don’t worry; I’ll deal with Jonas.”
He appeared to be looking forward to it.
“Was there something else?” I asked when he just stood there.
“The girls?”
“Shit.” I didn’t know what to do about the girls.
Marco nodded in agreement. “They slept in the living room, in the lounge, in your bed, and in the spare room last night, and we still didn’t have enough space. We were tripping over cots—”
“And then they needed baths,” Fred said darkly. “And we didn’t have enough of those, either. By the time they finally finished, the whole apartment was steamy. And they left their stuff everywhere—”
“They don’t have stuff,” I pointed out.
“—bobby pins and ChapStick tubes and those little things that hold ponytails—what’re they called?”
“Ponytail holders?” I asked.
He frowned at me.
Marco didn’t, but he leaned against the bedpost and crossed his massive arms. Which was code for I’m-not-leaving–until-we-get-this-sorted, although I was damned if I knew what to do about it. Except the obvious, of course.
“This is a hotel, isn’t it?” I asked peevishly. “Tell Casanova to find rooms for them.”
“I tried, but nobody’s seen him all day. And anyway, you know what he’ll say.”
Yes, I did.
If I hadn’t known that Casanova was a vampire, I would have suspected Ferengi. He loved money like no one I’d ever seen, which meant he hated me because I didn’t have any. But I assumed the Pythian Court was better off. It was a three-thousand-year-old institution that people regularly paid for a glimpse into the future, or at least, it had been once. I didn’t know what it did for money now, but it had to have some, right? And either way, we were going to have to work something out, because this was not doable long-term.
“I’ll talk to him,” I promised.
“That should be fun,” Marco said. But I guess it was good enough, because he left.
Fred didn’t.
He pushed the pea thing over at me again. “Eat it. That way I can tell Rhea you had a vegetable.”
“A deep-fried vegetable.”
“The best kind.”
I gave up and ate it. It was okay. Kind of bland.
“Well?” Fred asked curiously.
“I prefer my vegetables in salad form, preferably covered with Ranch dressing,” I told him. “Or Caesar.”
“Caesar’s good,” he agreed, bundling the remains of our feast into the damp bedspread and pulling it off like a bag. “By the way, when’s that Pritkin guy getting back?”
“Why?”
“’Cause having another mage around might help with the girls. They, uh, they don’t seem to like vamps too much.”
“Soon,” I said. Because it was soon or never.
“Good to know.” Fred hoisted his bag like a greasy-faced Kris Kringle. Then he reached over and impulsively messed up my hair. “Get some sleep, Cassie.”
Chapter Six
Get some sleep. Sure. It was what I needed, but the aches and pains in my body and the burn of a wasabi-seared tongue said sleep
wasn’t in my immediate future. So I dragged myself off to get a bath instead.
And dear God, it was worse than I’d thought.
My clothes were stiff with brine, my skin was caked with salt and dust, and then I pulled a dead fish out of my bra. And freaked out and flung the thing into the trash, where it lay, staring back at me out of one fishy eye. I stared back, having one of those moments. You know the ones—where you suddenly get confronted by something so bizarre that makes you reexamine what you’re doing with your life.
I’d had a dead fish in my bra.
I’d had a dead fish in my bra.
It was only one of the small silver ones that had hitchhiked back from Amsterdam, little more than a sardine, but still. Other people had lipstick-smeared tissues in their trash. Or empty nail polish bottles. Or napkins with cute guys’ phone numbers scribbled on them.
What did I have?
A dead, possibly time-traveling fish.
I threw a tissue over the tiny corpse and got in the shower.
I bet Agnes had never brought back a fish-filled bra. I bet Agnes wouldn’t even have been in Amsterdam in the first place, because she’d have grabbed Pritkin in London. I bet Agnes would have known what to say to Jonas.
Too bad I wasn’t Agnes.
But, somehow, I was going to have to find a way to deal with him anyway. And to figure out what to do with the coven I’d somehow ended up with and didn’t want. And how to handle a bunch of rogue acolytes, and a pissed-off demon lord, and to get Pritkin back—
And I was. I was going to do all of it. But not right now.
Right now, I was going to wash my hair.
And I did, and it was glorious. Twenty minutes of soaping away salt and dirt and God-knew-what made me feel a lot better. And reek a lot less of whatever had been in those canals besides water. I even did the girlie stuff I never had time for anymore, the shaving and the plucking and the moisturizing, and felt almost human again by the time I got out and wrapped myself in a big white bath towel.
