by Karen Chance
And I wasn’t stupid enough to think they’d just have me reverse the process after the war. Take all those shiny new masters and turn them back into regular old Joe vamps? Sure.
The vamps themselves wouldn’t stand for it, would run for the hills, would do whatever they had to do to avoid becoming little more than slaves again. And the senior masters over their families would probably back them, because any masters you had in your stable fed into your power base way more than a regular vamp. So you’d be cutting your own throat to let them be turned back.
And that was if I could even do it, which I doubted, because I wasn’t to be the source of the power, was I? I was just supposed to make the process more tolerable. The spoonful of sugar that helped all that power go down without burning the vamps in question to cinders.
So no. Once they were here, they’d stay here. And that so wasn’t happening!
But as fantastically bad as the whole idea was, that wasn’t what had me angry. And I was angry, I realized—not just pissed or peeved or irritated. I was hot, something it had taken me a while to realize because it wasn’t an emotion I felt very often. You couldn’t afford emotions around Tony’s. Emotions made you visible, emotions got you noticed, and getting noticed was usually a very bad thing.
I threw my toothbrush, which I’d found on an epic voyage to the tub, into the trash, wrapped up the towels in the soggy pelt of a bath mat, and tossed the whole mess in a corner. It wasn’t a perfect job, but at least we wouldn’t flood out the guys in the room underneath.
Which was just as well since they were part of my guards, too, and no way was anybody else fitting into this suite!
Then I got back in the shower, because I was soapy and sweaty, and because I needed to cool off.
And to figure out why I was pissed, because I still didn’t know.
I wasn’t angry because of what Mircea had asked, I decided. I might not know much about being Pythia, but I knew vamps. And no vamp in the world would have passed up a chance like that.
And, anyway, he might have thought of it first, because Jules was his so he’d heard about it first, but somebody else would have come up with the same idea sooner or later. Marlowe or the consul herself or somebody. Vamps didn’t overlook stuff likely to increase their power base, even by a small amount.
And this wasn’t small.
So no, I wasn’t mad at him for trying.
But if it wasn’t about the question, what was I so livid about? Because I was. I so very, very was.
And I didn’t really know what to do with that.
Fear, I knew, and panic—we were practically best buddies. And annoyance and irritation and happiness and relief and a lot of other emotions, because all of those were ones I’d been allowed to have growing up. Encouraged to have in the case of the first, to keep me in line.
But at Tony’s, only one person had been allowed to be angry, and it hadn’t been me.
Anger was an emotion for the guy in charge. Anger was something masters felt, a vivid, red-hot emotion they used like a lash to keep their households in line. At least, they did if they were Tony. I knew all about anger from being on the receiving end of it often enough, but the reverse . . .
I used to think it must be wonderful to be able to carry on like that. To just let go of all those bottled-up emotions and yell and stomp around like he did, to slash at the air and throw things and . . . and just get it all out. I used to think, when I had to stand there in court, blank faced and careful, with everything tightly bottled up inside, how wonderful it would be, just once, to get angry.
But it wasn’t feeling so wonderful now.
Now it was making me nauseous and shaky and faintly ill.
I didn’t like being angry at Mircea.
I liked being held by Mircea.
And I really had missed him this last week. I hadn’t realized how much until I saw him again. And even that first glance, when I’d been seriously annoyed, had been so nice . . .
Until he had to go and spoil it.
And finally, light dawned.
I wasn’t mad at Mircea as much for what he said but for when he said it. Because we had a deal. A deal he had come up with, so that what we did as Pythia and senator stayed away from what we did as Cassie and Mircea, and didn’t trash our personal life. Work was work and personal was personal, and they were supposed to stay nice and separate.
It was a nice theory.
I’d liked the theory.
I’d even thought it might work.
But not if he kept doing stuff like this. Because tonight hadn’t been a date, hadn’t been a Hey, I’ve missed you; let’s hang out, or even an I haven’t seen you for a while, so how about we get together and explore the hornier possibilities of this new power of yours? No. If it had, then he should have left it at that and said, Good night, Cassie, at the end. But instead, where had I ended up? In Jules’ room, getting propositioned in a whole new way that wasn’t nearly as much fun, and—
And damn it! I’d forgotten about Jules. And the Tears, which were a little more pressing right now, because Jules wasn’t about to die. But no way was Mircea going to give them to me, assuming he had any. He might trade me, oh yes, that he might damned well do. But give? When I had something the vamps wanted and I wasn’t giving in return?
Uh-uh.
Horse trading in the vamp world didn’t work like that.
And especially not when the item in question was something like this.
Mircea hadn’t put a crap ton of vamp bodyguards on me because he wanted me running around. Mircea wanted me to stay put in my nice penthouse. Mircea wanted me to get my hair and nails done and maybe see a show once in a while—heavily guarded, of course. Mircea wanted me to act like those other women he’d had, the ones I kept hearing hints about but that no one would give me specifics on, women who were beautiful and elegant and stayed where they were damned well put.
Like that woman in the painting.
I bet she never gave him any trouble, I thought enviously. I bet she never slouched home looking like a war victim. I bet she was perfect and beautiful and sweet and gentle and—
I realized I was scrubbing until I was about to take skin off. I put the remaining loofah down, nice and slow. And started rinsing instead.
So, no, bringing up the Tears with Mircea wasn’t going to go well. I knew that without even asking. I’d have a better chance getting some out of the Circle, although Jonas would probably also want an explanation, and I doubted I’d get any until I told him something he’d like.
And that was maddening. It was my potion. It was brewed specifically for the Pythia, to use when needed. Since when did he get to tell her when that was?
Since the Pythia was me, apparently.
I bet he wouldn’t have demanded an explanation from Agnes. And Mircea, if she’d gone to him for some crazy reason, probably wouldn’t have, either. The Senate had wanted a Pythia for so long—they’d have jumped at the chance to help her, to have her owe them a favor.
But not me.
And, abruptly, the final puzzle piece fell into place.
Because I would be expected to tell everyone why I needed it, wouldn’t I? And to have it be something they approved of to have any chance at getting it at all. And while that was infuriating with Jonas, it was worse with Mircea.
Vampires respected power and strength, and that was pretty much all they respected. I’d shown that I had power recently, by somehow managing to kill a Spartoi, one of the demigod sons of Ares, in a duel that many of the vamp leadership had happened to see. They’d liked that. They’d liked it so much that they’d signed the treaty of alliance shortly thereafter, doing what nobody had ever expected and putting themselves under the leadership of the North American consul.
That was a huge deal. That had never happened before. And it had only happened now because they
were dealing with a power they didn’t know how to counter and they needed somebody on their side who did.
I’d shown them power, power they didn’t have, and it had helped.
But I hadn’t shown them strength.
Because strength in the vamp world didn’t mean the ability to bend steel. The smallest vamp girl could do that. No, strength was something else.
Strength was the consul calmly saying to five other Senate leaders, each of them hundreds of years old and staggeringly powerful, I will lead this alliance, and making it stick. Strength was one master vamp bowing to another and giving way for him, not because he might not be just as strong, but because he wasn’t willing to find out. Strength was why Senate seats were still determined by duels, as archaic as that seemed these days. Because being a leader in the vampire world didn’t require just being powerful, it required being able to say to another first-level master, this seat is mine and I will take it.
So yes, I’d shown power, but so far, from a vamp perspective, I hadn’t shown strength. And now I was paying for it. Mircea might love me, but he didn’t respect me. He wouldn’t have pulled that stunt tonight if he respected me.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why I was angry. Not because he’d asked, but because of when and how. Because of the assumption that I would just do this, without question, without thought. That he could just tell me what he wanted and that would be it.
Or point me at a problem like a gun, because guns didn’t act on their own, did they? Guns didn’t have ideas and opinions. Guns were pulled out when needed and left in the drawer the rest of the time.
Or in a hotel suite in Vegas.
Chapter Thirty-two
Something jolted me out of a dead sleep the next morning, and I rolled over to see the clock. Barely seven a.m. But I didn’t go back to sleep. Because I had a job to do and because I needed to find something to stop the pounding in my head.
Which I belatedly realized wasn’t coming from my head.
It was coming from the door.
I stared at it blearily and wondered if I cared. And then the door burst open, and a wild-eyed, dark-haired woman came in, yelling my name even after being tackled by Marco in a flying leap.
Which turned into a trip in the opposite direction when she deflected him with a gesture, sending him slamming back through the air and then through the wall.
I sat up.
I guess I cared.
It took me a second to figure out who I was looking at, because I hadn’t seen her too often. And when I had, she’d been a little more indistinct. Incubi—or succubi, I guess, in this case—don’t normally have bodies, because it takes a huge amount of power to manifest them.
But then, this particular succubus had been on earth something like four hundred years and had power to burn.
“Rian?” I said blearily, and held up a hand so that nobody decided to shoot her.
Including Marco, who had just rushed back in, weapon drawn.
“It’s okay,” I told him. “She’s . . . she used to be Casanova’s girlfriend.”
“I am still his girlfriend!” Rian looked at me wildly, dark hair everywhere. I guessed real hair was harder to handle than the spirit kind she’d had until recently. Because it was a little scary.
Then again, that might have been because she kept pulling on it.
“Okay, you’re still his girlfriend,” I said, because this seemed to be important for some reason. “I’m sure he’ll be happy to hear that.”
“He won’t be happy! He won’t be happy at all!”
“And why is that?” Marco demanded, looking like he’d like to introduce her to the nearest window. The kind without a balcony.
But Rian didn’t look like she cared. “Because he’s about to be killed!” she shrieked, and grabbed my hand.
And the next thing I knew, we materialized in a roar of noise, like a wave crashing onto a beach. Make that a thousand waves onto a thousand beaches, I thought, momentarily deafened. And staring around at a bunch of backs, because we’d landed in the middle of a crowd.
I never shifted into crowds for fear of ending up inside another person, but Rian must have had better control. Possibly because she didn’t exactly shift, but instead could transition between the human and the demon worlds. Which is where it looked like we were, in the middle of a crowd on what appeared to be some old wooden bleachers.
I thought there might be an arena down there that the bleachers were surrounding, but it was hard to tell since almost everyone was taller than I was. And many of them were holding containers of beer and popcorn in the way. Along with the usual bad-for-you stadium snacks like nachos and chili dogs and huge squirming black insects on a stick, still trying to claw and bite despite being drilled through.
Rian dragged me past, still staring, and the scene rippled at the edges. Other holes appeared here and there, maybe because there were just too many people for any glamourie to compensate for. Or maybe because there was no substitute for some of them, nothing except shuddering horror.
I jerked back from something I’d seen once before, a giant clear slug of a man, with an evil-eyed demonic thing crouched inside his overlarge belly, black and red-eyed and visible through the layers of translucent, glistening fat. Which was horrible enough, even before the red eyes swiveled to mine. And I started backing up the other way because no, no, no—
And ran into something else.
Something that looked like some kind of centaur, if instead of the back half of a horse you substituted a horse-sized scorpion, complete with curling barbed tail, and way too many legs and pincers in the place of hands. I shied back from him—it—as well, looking this way and that, but seeing no way out. Just a crowd of monsters who had just seen me, too, and were closing in on all sides, popcorn or whatever the hell it actually was forgotten in the headlong rush for a real meal.
I screamed and shifted, with nowhere in mind, just “away.”
And away is where I went, only it wasn’t an improvement. I looked up from the panicked crouch I’d landed in, and found myself in the middle of a huge open space, surrounded by towering stands full of monsters. And, yeah, it was an arena, all right, filled with what must have been ten thousand screaming fans, like a major league football game. Only I didn’t see a football.
I did see the giant pincer that plowed into the ground a second later, though, throwing up a great welt of sand. And Casanova, the usual suave and impeccably dressed casino manager, running past wearing a loincloth and an expression that went beyond panic, left fear in the dust, and was well into full-on heart attack territory. Only he was a vampire, and his heart didn’t attack.
But something else did. I had a half second to see a massive carapace coming my way, black and oily and shining under the lights, before it blocked out most of them. Along with the stands and the crowd and the sky, because the thing was big as a bus. And that wasn’t counting the hairy legs large as tree trunks that caged me in on all sides, before some protrusion as big as a sword flashed down—
And missed, because I’d just shifted to Casanova. Who was halfway across the sandy soil of the arena, and moving fast. At least he was until he ran into me and we boiled over in a rolling, cussing, screaming ball, and I shifted—
Back into my atrium at Dante’s.
I hit the marble floor, scattering sand everywhere, and Marco grabbed for me with a snarl—why, I wasn’t sure.
Until I realized—Casanova hadn’t come with me, despite the fact that I’d been clinging to him with both arms and a leg when I shifted.
But something else had.
Something else that I didn’t even get a good grip on before it jumped from my back to Marco’s face, like a prop out of freaking Alien. Long, black, king-crab-sized legs wrapped around his head, extending from a beetle-like body, a miniature of the one I’d just fled from. And which I felt
like fleeing from again but instead I was screaming, “Get it off him! Get it off him!” while a dozen vamps tried to do just that.
Fred burst out of the suite with a kitchen knife and plunged it into the space on the creature where hideous body met ugly head. And jerked back, I guess trying to peel off the horrible shell. And ended up with only a broken knife for his trouble.
So he tried using his hand instead, before jumping back. “Shit! Shit!”
“What is it?” I said, afraid he was going to say “poison.”
“The damned shell is razor-edged. It almost cut my hand off!”
“Here!” One of the boys threw him a jacket, which he wrapped around his bleeding digits before trying again.
And this time, he actually managed to peel off the shell, with a horrible squelching sound that I thought I might hear in my nightmares from now on. And then Rico was there, blocking the entry to the main part of the suite with an expression that said a platoon wasn’t getting past him, and Marco was grabbing the knife. And throwing himself onto the creature, which had just rebounded off the wall and onto the floor and was still moving.
And biting and fighting and scurrying around the atrium, leaving a trail of slime behind that wasn’t eating through the floor but was tripping the hell out of the vamps trying to catch it. And then the creature lunged for me again, only to get caught in midair by Marco’s knife, before slamming into the wall over my left shoulder.
We both looked at it for a second, the knife quivering out of the still-moving body, the splatter of black ooze that had smeared the plaster and left flecks all over my shorty pink nightgown, and the chittering, squealing thing.
That suddenly burst off of the wall and came at me again.
“The fuck!” Marco said, grabbing and stabbing it over and over, and then Rian was back and we were suddenly somewhere else, somewhere with a cheering crowd and dazzling lights and a groaning buffet table.
