by Karen Chance
It was everywhere.
Everywhere.
I suddenly realized that the balcony doors weren’t open, they were gone, without even any shards left around the edges. Which probably explained why there was a guard out there, every two feet, smoking and drinking and testing the weight-bearing limits of Dante’s architecture.
Considering who had built this place, I’d have been worried if I were them. But if they were, or if they were freaking out about the events that were just beginning to edge back into my consciousness, they didn’t show it. Rico even winked at me, through a haze of smoke.
I tried winking back, but my eyelid was still gummy and it got stuck.
I sighed. And pried it up. And glanced around to see what else had changed.
Annnnnd it was a lot.
The coffee table was gone, too, with its glass top. And the pictures with their metal frames. And the sconces with their mirrored backs. Even the recessed lights were different, their shiny rims now covered in black duct tape.
I blinked at them for a minute, swaying a little because my butt was still asleep. The clock had been obliterated, so I couldn’t see the time, but it felt like the middle of the night. Looked like it, too, with nothing but darkness and the distant glow of neon visible beyond the balcony. But somebody was cooking, nonetheless, and it smelled . . . oh so good.
I retrieved my slippers from beside the couch and shuffled my way into the lounge.
And discovered that it had been visited by the mad redecorator, too.
The TV was gone, and so was the light over the card table. The nice glassware on the portable bar had been replaced by red Solo cups, upping the I-live-in-a-frat-house ambience to something approaching 100 percent. But the real showstopper was the pool table.
Each of the little balls had been stuffed into somebody’s socks, I guess because they were glass and kind of reflective.
“Don’t you think this is a bit much?” I asked, toting one into the kitchen.
Rhea, who was at the sink, gaped at me for some reason.
“No,” Marco said, not turning from the stove, where he was cooking something in a cast-iron skillet. It matched the black duct tape on everything from the stove knobs to the drawer pulls to the sink faucets. And coordinated with the heavy taupe and black zigzag blanket someone had affixed to the front of the fridge.
“Don’t worry; she always looks like that in the morning,” Fred told Rhea, looking up from chopping a slab of bacon on the cutting board.
“I do when I sleep on the sofa,” I said, vainly trying to pat down my wayward hair. “By the way, why was I on the sofa?”
“Because you wouldn’t let us move you,” Marco told me, finally turning around. And giving me the once-over before shaking his head.
“I wouldn’t let you?” I repeated. Marco didn’t usually bother to ask for permission.
“The girls wanted to keep you with them, and when I tried to cart you off to bed anyway, you flailed at me.”
“I did not.”
“You did.” He rolled up the sleeve of his golf shirt to show me a massive bicep and a nonexistent bruise.
“You’ll be telling Mircea I abuse you next.”
“I already tell him that.”
I snorted. And opened my mouth to give him the reply he deserved. But then something was shoved into it.
Something wonderful.
“What—” I asked, after chewing and swallowing.
“Tochitura˘ moldoveneasca˘.” Marco rolled the sounds over his tongue lovingly, even though that wasn’t Italian.
“And that’s what?”
“This,” Marco said, handing me a flimsy paper plate.
And a plastic spork.
“Oh, come on!”
“It’s only temporary, until I can get somebody in to upgrade the wards.”
“When will that be?”
“Couple hours. We had someone do a hatchet job last night, just in case Jonas managed to find—hup,” he said, and quickly put another few paper plates under the first one, which was quickly soaking through.
“Just in case he managed to find . . . what?”
“Not what. Who,” he corrected. “His boys. Who you shifted . . . where?”
I had a vague recollection of a bunch of angry, half-drowned war mages thrashing their way up a familiar, pebble-strewn beach. Bet it hadn’t been a fun swim with all that hardware, I thought evilly. And then looked up to see Marco cocking a thick black eyebrow at me.
“Lake Mead.”
“Ha!” Fred said.
“It isn’t funny,” I told him, trying not to grin. And it wasn’t, really. This thing with Jonas wasn’t likely to go away just because we changed the wards. Or sent his boys for a surprise midnight swim. I needed to talk to him, right after I figured out what the heck to say.
I sighed and put it on my list.
“You going to eat that, or admire it?” Marco asked me.
I looked down at my plate. There were thick, crispy bacon, lovely meaty sausage, eggs fried in what might be bacon grease if I was lucky, polenta, and some weird white crumbly stuff I couldn’t immediately identify. But overall, an easy nine out of ten.
“Eat it,” I said, and found a stool at the bar.
The crumbly white stuff turned out to be some kind of delicious cheese. Which went really well when mixed with everything else in a gooey mass of heart-attack-inducing awesomeness. I started shoveling it in.
“What did you say this was again?” I asked after a heady few minutes.
“Moldavian breakfast of champions.”
“And you know how to make it why?”
“Horatiu taught me,” Marco said, referring to Mircea’s oldest servant. “It’s from the old country.”
“Old country my ass,” a redheaded charmer named Roy said, coming in. “That’s Southern cooking.”
“Southern Romanian, maybe.”
“Moldavia’s actually to the north,” Fred piped up.
“I don’t care where it is,” Roy said, bending over my plate. “That’s bacon, eggs, and cheese grits. Half the South eats that for breakfast every morning.”
“Well, I learned it from an old Romanian, and I’m pretty sure they had it first,” Marco said, in his don’t-argue-with-me-I’m-the-boss voice. And then he looked down, and his face changed. From hard-ass master vamp to . . . well, I didn’t know exactly what that expression was. But it was soft and he was smiling.
At the barefoot cherub in a crumpled white nightgown who was tugging on his pants leg.
“Phoebe!” Rhea said, quickly coming around the table. “Don’t bother the . . . the man. He’s cooking.”
She reached for her, but the little girl had already been swept up into Marco’s arms, looking impossibly tiny next to my giant of a bodyguard. Whose bicep was bigger around than her whole body. He showed her the contents of the pan. “You want some bacon and eggs?”
She nodded enthusiastically.
“I—was going to make oatmeal,” Rhea said, looking between the two of them.
Marco and the girl wrinkled noses at exactly the same moment, causing me to burst out laughing. And to almost swallow my damn spork. Rhea looked back at me in alarm.
“I don’t think she wants oatmeal,” I told her.
“It . . . it’s just . . .”
“It’s just?”
“That isn’t very healthy,” she blurted, looking at my plate. And then stood there, apparently stricken. And confusing the heck out of me.
Rhea seemed to have some kind of split-personality thing going on that I didn’t understand. One minute, she was telling off dangerous master vampires and the head of the Silver Circle, and the next she was freezing up into Little Miss Meek Voice when she had to talk to me. It was disconcerting. It made me feel like Godzilla. It was also goi
ng to be a problem if she didn’t get over it.
I decided to push her a little.
“So you think I shouldn’t be eating this?”
“I . . . No.” She looked startled. “No, I wouldn’t presume to . . . I mean, what the Pythia eats is, of course, her own—”
“But it’s not healthy.”
“It’s . . .” She looked at my plate unhappily. “It’s just . . . well, there’s no vegetables . . .”
“No vegetables in oatmeal, either,” Fred pointed out.
“No, but it’s a whole grain,” she said, glancing at him. And looking relieved to have someone she could actually argue with.
“Polenta’s whole-grain—”
“And oatmeal isn’t cooked in bacon grease!”
“We could add a vegetable,” I said, bringing her attention back to me. “Couldn’t we, Fred?”
He looked at my plate thoughtfully. Vegetables were not Fred’s strong suit. “Well, I guess I could chop up an onion—”
“An onion doesn’t count!” Rhea told him severely.
“Or put half a tomato on the side,” I said, thinking of all the breakfasts I’d seen Pritkin eat. He was supposed to be a health-food nut, and most of the time he lived up to it. But on Sundays he splurged on the most god-awful breakfasts on the face of the earth. I’d kind of gotten the idea that, lately, he’d been making them deliberately horrible just to mess with me.
“The court was in London,” I added. “That’s what the kids are probably used to.”
“Yeah, the Brits got great breakfasts,” Fred enthused. “With that nice thick back bacon—”
“And fried mushrooms—” I added.
“—and fried eggs—” Fred agreed happily.
“—and fried sausages—”
“—and fried bread—”
“You do realize that everything you’ve mentioned is fried?” Rhea asked him.
“—and scones swimming in butter,” I said, piling it on.
“Oh, don’t even go there,” Fred told me. “’Cause then you’re gonna need your strawberry jam and your orange marmalade and your clotted cream—”
“Clotted cream?” Rhea said, looking horrified.
“And cheesy Welsh rarebit,” he said dreamily. And grinned at me, as if he thought he’d won.
As if.
“Baked beans and toast,” I told him smartly.
“Toad in the hole,” Fred shot back, the light of challenge in his eye.
“Fresh kippers—”
“Scotch eggs—”
“—deviled kidneys—”
“—faggot—”
“—bubble and squeak—”
“—crumpets!” Fred said, starting to look a little worried.
I grinned, because Pritkin was Welsh, and the Welsh eat scary, scary things. “Laver bread,” I said smugly. Nothing like seaweed first thing in the morning.
“Marmite!”
“Kedgeree—”
“Pancakes!”
“Pancakes are American.”
“Shit, shit!”
“Give up?”
“No! No, I—”
“Ticktock, Fred.”
“Marag freaking Dubh!” Fred said, looking desperate.
And then hopeful, when I hesitated.
And then laughed in his face. “—and fried potatoes!”
“Bullshit!” Fred pointed at me. “Bullshit!”
“What?”
“We already said that!”
“We did not.”
“Yes, we did! We must have! You don’t get to win on fried potatoes!”
“Mmm. Fried potatoes.” I rubbed it in.
“Bullshit!”
“Fried potatoes do not count as a vegetable!” Rhea snapped.
And then suddenly clapped her hand over her mouth, in the realization that she had just yelled at the Pythia. She stared at me for a split second, in something approaching horror, and then ran out of the room. I sighed.
That hadn’t exactly been the response I’d been hoping for.
“What?” Fred asked me. “She wasn’t even playing.”
“See that the kids get fed something,” I told him, and went after her.
I found her in my bedroom, making up the bed. Which seemed kind of a waste, considering the state it was in. “I was going to have the bedspread changed,” I began, only to have her rip it off. “Rhea, it’s okay.”
She shook her head, sending dark curls flying. “It’s not okay! It’s dirty. They should have changed this al—”
“Rhea—”
“—ready, in case you woke up and wanted to—”
“Rhea.”
“—change beds or have a nap or—”
“Rhea!”
She abruptly stopped, clutching the awful bedclothes to her chest and staring at me.
“I don’t need a maid,” I pointed out.
And saw her face crumple. “Then I’m no use to you!”
“No use? You had the vision about Ares.”
“And maybe I was wrong! I don’t know anymore!”
“You weren’t wrong.”
“I don’t—” She caught herself. “Yes, Pythia.”
“Don’t do that!”
She jerked, and flushed guiltily. “I-I’m sorry,” she told me, gray eyes huge, although I doubted she had any idea what she was apologizing for.
“Or that,” I said, moderating my voice. “I don’t need an apology when you haven’t done anything wrong.”
“But you said—”
“That I don’t want a yes, Pythia or a no, Pythia if that’s not what you really think. I need someone who tells me the truth. Especially now.” I glanced at the door, because no way everybody in the damned apartment couldn’t hear us.
This whole lack-of-privacy thing was really starting to be a bitch.
“The truth is, I don’t have visions,” Rhea blurted as I looked back at her. “I don’t have anything. I was supposed to be a seer—they tested me, and I passed. I passed, and you know they don’t let you stay at the Pythian Court unless you score very high. But then—”
“No, I didn’t know that,” I said, sitting on the edge of the bed, trying to slow her down. “I wasn’t brought up there.”
“No,” she agreed, casting a nervous glance at the door. “You grew up with them.”
“Well, not with them, exactly. I grew up at the court of another vamp, a guy named Tony.”
“He—he must have been good to you,” she said, obviously trying for diplomacy.
“Tony? Tony wasn’t good to anybody. Tony was a bastard.”
Rhea seemed taken aback by this information.
“Vamps are just people,” I told her. “Good ones and bad ones and really irritating ones, just like anybody else.”
“But . . .” She looked at the door again, and then did something in the air that I really hoped was a silence spell. And I guessed so, because she was suddenly a lot less tactful after it clicked into place. “They’re not like anybody else!” she said fervently. “They can kill you—”
“A mage can kill you. A nonmagical human can kill you—”
“But they won’t . . . they don’t . . .”
“They don’t what?”
“They don’t eat you!”
I laughed. This didn’t seem to go down well, either. “I’m sorry,” I told her. “But Fred mostly eats tacos.”
“But they have to feed on us,” she hissed, in an undertone, despite the spell. “They can’t live otherwise.”
“No, they can’t.”
“So the children . . .”
I blinked. “You’re worried about—no.”
“But they’re here. And they’re so vulnerable. And I can’t protect th
em if—”
“Rhea!” She stopped, face pale, arms still grasping the pillow. And looking oddly childlike herself. It made me wonder how old she was.
So I asked.
“N-nineteen, Lady.”
“Nineteen?” I’d have guessed older. Maybe because everyone else seemed to defer to her.
“I know.” She looked chagrined. “It’s old. But they needed someone in the nursery, and I didn’t have anywhere else to go, and—”
“Since when is nineteen old?”
“For the Pythian Court it is, if you’re not selected.”
“Selected?”
“To be trained as an acolyte. They assist the Pythia, advise her, help her on her missions—”
“Good. Because I could really use some of that.” I put a hand out. “Congratulations. You can be my first acolyte.”
And, okay, that didn’t go so well, either, I thought, as Rhea jerked back, and started shaking her head violently. “No, no, no!”
“Rhea—”
“You don’t understand! It doesn’t come to me! It doesn’t! I’ve tried and tried and—”
“What doesn’t come to you?”
“Anything!” she said passionately. “That’s why I take care of the nursery! It was the only thing they found I could do. I was good with the little ones, but everything else . . . I can’t—”
“Rhea!” I put some power behind my voice, because the girl was wigging out. “Listen to me. I don’t know what else you were supposed to do, but you’ve already done the stuff I need, okay? You’ve already done it.”
“I haven’t done anything.”
“Okay. Then I was imagining you at the coronation? You weren’t there?”
“No. I mean—I was there. I saw what you—”
“We’re not talking about me. Why were you there?”
“To—to tell you about the acolytes. I’d had a vision—at least I think I did; I don’t have visions—”
“But you saw something that time,” I prompted.
She nodded.
“And the acolytes noticed and asked you about it. And you realized that they were happy at the thought of the god of war returning and kicking all our butts.”
She nodded some more. She was starting to remind me of a Pythian bobblehead.
“So you figured they’d joined the other side. And since Agnes was dead, you managed to get invited along to the big party for her successor so you could do what? Eat appetizers?”
