The Cassandra Palmer Collection

by Karen Chance

  “All of you,” Casanova gasped. “Every single . . . damned one . . . of your hateful, misbegotten clan!”

  “You’re part of that clan,” a loathed voice reminded him. He turned his head to see Rosier—God damn him—vault up from the room below like an Olympic gymnast.

  And why not? That was his power the bastard was using. Almost all of his power, judging by the way he felt. Casanova groaned and rolled over, wishing he still ate so that he could throw up.

  “Don’t be such a drama queen,” Rosier said, clapping him on the shoulder.

  “Pudrete en el infierno!”

  “Too late.”

  Rian came up and slipped a cool hand onto his shoulder, but wisely didn’t attempt anything else. He’d had about enough of incubi for the moment. He’d had more than enough.

  “Well, that’s less than encouraging,” Rosier said, after a moment, and his tone caused Casanova’s head to come up.

  “What is?” he demanded.

  But nobody was paying him any attention. They were all staring over the edge of the roof, including Rian. She’d moved from his side to peer between Rosier and his spawn’s shoulders. “Oh, dear.”

  “What?” he asked again.

  And was again ignored.

  “Hijueputa,” he muttered, dragging his exhausted body up and over to the edge, which was crumbling like the rest of the building, and didn’t sport anything like a proper guardrail. Casanova scowled. He hated heights.

  Especially ones looking out over torch-wielding mobs.

  “What the—what is that?” he demanded, grabbing Rosier’s shoulder so the bastard couldn’t avoid answering him this time.

  “What does it look like?” Rosier turned to Pritkin. “Any ideas?”

  “Yes,” Pritkin said shortly, and wandered off somewhere, making some weird kind of trill.

  They were all mad, Casanova decided. Every damned one of them. “If someone doesn’t tell me what the hell—” he began dangerously.

  “It’s the locals,” Rian said. “It seems the madam has convinced them that the disturbances in the area are all to be laid at our door.”

  “Which in fairness—” Rosier began.

  “Shut up!” Casanova snarled. He turned back to Rian. “We have to get rid of them. They’ll lead the damned Alû right to us!”

  “I think it’s a little late for that,” she said softly, staring down at the street.

  It was a long one, running the length of this sordid little part of hell, but something seemed to be going on near the end of it. Something that resolved into a bronze-colored wedge driving through the crowd like a bulldozer, or like the cow catchers on the front of old trains. A hateful, murderous train that was going to kill them all, Casanova thought blankly. There had to be a hundred of the council’s damned guards down there.

  “One hundred thirteen,” Rian supplied unhelpfully.

  “Do something!” he told Rosier.

  But the demon—damn his hide—was just standing there, lighting a cigarette. “And what would you have me do?”

  “You’re a council member!”

  “Yes, and I would normally call on that body’s guards to protect me.” His lips twisted. “Unfortunately, they’re already here.”

  “Then . . . then use magic! Do some sort of a curse. You’re a demon!”

  “I’m one demon. They are many demons. See how that works?”

  “Then why the—what was all—why did we—” Casanova spluttered.

  Rosier let out a smoky breath. “At the time, I assumed I’d only have to deal with small groups dispersed throughout the area. That seems to have changed.”

  “Then . . . then all that was for nothing?”

  “Don't be like that,” Rosier reproved. “I’ll always cherish our time together.”

  Casanova let out a little screech and went for the creature’s throat, intending to throw him off the roof. At least he’d have the satisfaction of watching him die first. But then a horrible shriek rent the air, right behind him, like a thousand nails on a hundred chalkboards.

  He spun and saw something out of a nightmare, which completely matched the sound. It was huge and deadly and spreading massive, leathery wings against the night. And Pritkin . . . was on its back?

  “Get on,” Pritkin told him shortly.

  “Die in pain!”

  “The idea is to avoid that,” Rosier commented, climbing up behind his bastard of a son.

  “Carlos, please,” Rian tugged on his hand.

  “You’re planning to fly that thing out of here?” Casanova asked, horrified. Torchlight glistened off a maw of eight-inch fangs. It could devour them all, any second.

  “Unless you have a better idea?” Pritkin asked.

  “Give me a minute,” Casanova said desperately.

  But they didn’t have a minute. One glance over the roof was enough to show a mass of homicidal demons flowing through what would have been the front door, if the place still had one. And he didn’t need vampire senses to hear them tearing through the house below. Or to feel them shaking the very walls by the number of their boots on the stairs.

  “Get on, or we’re leaving you,” the infernal mage said.

  Like it was just that easy.

  “Get on Carlos,” Rian begged. “Please!”

  Casanova glanced over the roof again, only to meet the faceless mask of one of the Alû, looking up from the window below.

  “Oh, just leave him,” Rosier said carelessly. “Once we’re gone, I’m sure he’ll be fine.”

  “They’ve already seen me!” Casanova said shrilly.

  “Oh, well. Probably not then.” Rosier shrugged.

  Casanova screamed and went for the demon, and Rosier grabbed his arm as soon as he was close enough. And then—

  “Mierda,” Casanova gasped, feeling his feet leave the roof, just as three Alû crawled up on top of it. And lunged for them, almost too fast to see. But a beat from the great wings knocked one of them down, and the wind of it tumbled a second off the roof, and a third had to whip up his shield to defect a fireball somebody threw.

  For a moment, it looked like they might make it. But then a fourth Alû Casanova hadn’t seen snuck up from the other side, and threw what looked like a fiery lasso around the great beast’s back paw. It roared in pain, getting the attention of the Alû still in the street, who raised their heads in one, bronze ripple.

  And then a barrage of thrown swords came flashing at them through the air. Casanova screamed, the damned beast flapped harder, almost bucking him off, and they jerked slightly higher in the sky. Making them an even better target for the swords that were about to—

  Disintegrate a few yards out?

  “Pretty, isn’t it?” Rosier yelled, as the weapons hit a barely perceptible bubble in front of them.

  “Pritkin—” Casanova gasped, ready to forgive the man for everything he’d ever—

  “Nope,” Rosier yelled cheerfully, to be heard over the beat of massive wings shredding the air. The beast they were riding gave a tremendous heave and surged upward, taking the Alû trying to restrain him right along for the ride. “That’s your power! Feel better about our time together now?”

  “Get your hand off my butt,” Casanova snarled, and kicked the Alû back into the crowd below. And then the great wings caught an updraft, and they were spiraling hundreds of feet skyward, at an angle that left them almost perpendicular to the rapidly receding ground. Casanova screamed.

  “If you don’t start holding on, my arm may get tired,” Rosier warned him.

  “Hijo de mil putas!” Casanova gasped, but somehow, he dragged his tired, bruised body further up the beast’s huge back, clinging there like a limpet.

  “No, just one,” Rosier laughed.

  And then they were gone.

  Epilogue

  Y ou had better be right about this,” John said, as they rematerialized in the middle of the main drag at Dante’s. He glanced about, but the only one in sight was the girl at the
coffee kiosk. And she just looked bored.

  “Sid’s a vindictive little shit,” Rosier said confidently. “He’ll want to watch us die. My bet is that he rejoined the hunt for Cassie, after ensuring that you were on your way to finish me off. Speaking of which—” he glanced at Rian, who nodded and disappeared.

  John clutched Cassie’s talisman inside his pocket, hard enough to leave an impression on his palm. But he didn’t move. As a spirit, Rian could check all the little spaces where Cassie might be hiding in a matter of seconds, far faster than he could hope to do.

  She would find her; of that he had no doubt.

  The question was—in what condition?

  Yes, the spell might have kept her alive, but at what cost? How long had they been gone? With time looping here, there was no way to tell, and the demon world worked so differently as to give no point of reference. It could have been hours, as it felt to John, but it could also have been days. Or weeks. Or . . . or it could have been years.

  What must it have been like, he wondered, being all alone, battling for her life, hiding or running or dying, over and over again, for what must have seemed like infinity? With no way out and with no one to even share the burden? He couldn’t imagine.

  He wasn’t sure he wanted to imagine.

  What would he find, back in that damned hotel room, or in that dark little closet Casanova had described? She might be alive, but would she be alright? Would she be sane?

  Would she still be Cassie?

  “We need to find Sid first,” John heard himself say. “If he never left, then I was the only missing piece of the puzzle, and my return just broke the spell. If he kills her again . . .”

  “Yes, but where to start looking?” Rosier asked. “He could be in spirit form still, or have possessed someone, anyone. I say we find the girl, and then let him find us, assuming the Alû don’t do it first—”

  “Like that?” Casanova croaked, from the floor. Which he appeared to be clutching.

  John followed the vampire’s gaze to see one of the Alû coming at them at a run. He grabbed one of his potion vials and prepared to throw, only to have a hand descend onto his shoulder. “Wait,” Rosier said softly.

  It was then that John noticed something odd about this particular Alû. Its once bright armor was battered and dented, one side was singed almost black, as if an explosion had hit it, and it was limping badly, essentially just dragging its left leg behind it. But it was limping fast.

  “Please . . .” The creature called out, its voice as scratchy as its armor, cracked and helpless. And the hand it lifted out to them, as if in supplication, was shaking.

  “Cassie?” John asked carefully, wondering if she’d somehow managed to disguise herself as one of the enemy. But no. Because a moment later, he saw her flying across the lobby, blond curls bouncing, pink t-shirt crisscrossed with weapons, and half a dozen Alû right on her tail.

  “Cassie!” he yelled, but she didn’t hear.

  “Now!” she screamed, running onto the drag. And the words had no sooner left her mouth than the windows on the upper floor of the Old West buildings slammed open, almost in unison, and she hit the deck. A second later, a massive barrage of gunfire erupted in the space in between, catching the Alû completely off guard.

  “No,” Casanova said pitifully, crawling past John. “No. No, stop it!”

  But nobody heard. And then Cassie flipped back to her feet, right on the edge of the gunfire, and tossed something into the hellscape that the center of the drag had become. “Yippie Ki Yay, Motherfuckers!” John thought he heard her say, although clearly, he’d been mistaken. And then she turned and ran behind an overturned wagon at the edge of the street.

  Rosier looked at John, and then they both grabbed Casanova and dove in behind her. Just as the street erupted in a massive explosion. The ground trembled, the shop windows blew out, and something caught the hay spilling out of the front of the wagon on fire.

  The automated sprinklers started up, making it look like it was raining indoors, as Cassie bounded back to her feet. And lunged at the battered single Alû, which had followed them over, and which John had managed to totally forget. “Get away from me!” the creature screamed. “Get away!”

  It ducked behind Rosier, pawing at him pathetically, while dozens of vampires poured out of the ruined storefronts on either side, weapons and fangs out.

  “Cassie?” John asked again, confused.

  She jerked her head around, teeth still bared from glaring at the Alû, and for half a second, she looked alarmingly like one of her vampires. And then she recognized him. “You’re back!” And suddenly he found himself with an armful of Pythia, warm and breathless and alive. And almost immediately squirming away.

  “Sorry, but I don’t want to miss this,” she told him. “It’s my favorite part.”

  “What is?” John asked wonderingly, as Rosier pushed the Alû off him with a look of refined disgust. The movement snapped the already battered face plate in two, and beyond it—

  A terrified elder demon stared out at them.

  It looked like Sid had been right, John thought, when he once said that he could make a body for himself at will.

  “John?” he wavered, looking at him pleadingly. But, apparently, he didn’t see anything helpful. Because he let out a wail and started limping down the drag again, toward the back stairs.

  “Wait,” John said, catching Cassie’s arm as she started after him. “Where’s Jonas?”

  She looked confused. “No idea.”

  “He isn’t . . . coordinating this?”

  She shook her head. “I tried calling him a few dozen times. But it always takes too long to get him to believe me. And when he does, he just wants me to hide away somewhere.”

  “That sounds like a good—”

  “I tried that. But it’s unbelievably boring. I don’t need to sleep—time isn’t passing for my body, so I don’t get tired. I don’t get hungry—well anymore hungry,” she said, shooting him a look. The sad excuse for a donut had apparently not been forgotten. “I don’t even need to pee. And there’s never anything new on T.V.”

  “You’ve been doing what, then?” he asked, in disbelief. “Killing demons?”

  “Well, it occurred to me sometime back in the sixties—”

  “The sixties?”

  “The sixtieth go ‘round,” she said, matter-of-factly. “Anyway, I knew that when you got back, the spell would break. But then we’d be right back where we started. We might dodge the bomb this time, but we’d still have a casino full of demons.”

  “You therefore decided to take care of that,” John said, his head spinning. “How many times?”

  “I don’t know. I lost count a while ago. Duck.”

  “What?”

  Cassie shoved his head down and let off a barrage from an M-16 that strafed a new group of Alû that had been trying to sneak up on them. She grinned at him, a little manically. “They hate it when I do that.”

  Her vampires let out what sounded like battle cries, and jumped the disoriented demons. That included Marco, John was relieved to see, back hale and hearty enough to rip one’s head right off its body. But unlike with Sid, there was nothing underneath.

  John looked back at Cassie. “Where—” he cleared his throat. “Where did you get the weapons?”

  “Downstairs,” she told him happily. “The senate’s using this as a base now, remember? It’s like Guns R Us down there.”

  “But they must have guards—“

  “Of course.”

  “—and you’re without your powers. How did you get in?”

  She looked at him like he might be slow. “I’m Pythia. I told them to unlock the goddamned door.”

  And then she was off, leaving John staring after her, his stomach falling, but a strange sort of smile twitching at the corner of his mouth.

  “I suppose I shall have to go rescue Sid,” Rosier sighed. “We need him to tell the council that neither of us was really at fault
here.”

  “Uh huh.” But John made no move to help. Instead, he turned and started toward the coffee shop, where a dazed-looking Goth girl was pouring something into an overflowing cup.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” his father demanded.

  “To buy someone the biggest damned pastry in the world.”

  Pritkin POV

  Author's Note: This is the Pritkin POV requested by the winner of the Pritkin swag bag that I put together for the Read for Pixels charity event in March, 2017. It contains Pritkin's take on a couple of scenes from Tempt the Stars, and will make very little sense unless you've read that book. It also contains spoilers for that novel, so it should be read afterwards, not before.

  T he first was pathetic. So much so that it took John a moment to realize what he was seeing. But his body seemed to be ahead of his mind, because he felt his face flush and his hand clench on the door to his suite, while a blonde in a slinky satin gown simpered at him. She had red-gold curls done in an artfully mussed style, bright blue eyes gunked up with mascara, and a feather boa, of all things, sliding alluringly off one shoulder. The absurdity of it was the only thing that saved her.

  "John—"

  He slammed the door in her face.

  The second was better. The second was much better. He was fairly sure the first was just his father being a cunt. John wouldn’t sleep with the bevy of beauties he kept sending? Wouldn’t help the family business? Wouldn't, as his father had memorably remarked, get his head out of his ass and grow up already?

  Fine. Then send him a reminder of what he'd lost. Of what he would never see in the flesh again.

  But, in that split second of confusion, John must have given some sign of exactly how deep that particular knife had dug. Or perhaps the night of drunken despair that followed and the trashing of his well-ordered suite had given Rosier a clue. Because, when everything else proved fruitless, his father tried again.

  And, this time, it almost worked.

  Even the scent was perfect, John thought, as she grabbed his biceps. Not the perfumed musk of the first Cassie-clone, but a lingering freshness from purloined Dante's toiletries, panicked girl-sweat, and an underlying sweetness that was all her own. Addictive, Pritkin thought, breathing it in.