by Karen Chance
That was bad, but if I didn’t shut it up, it was going to segue into the possible meanings of the card in combination with others. And then into how it should be read in the different spreads. And if I remembered right, that would be followed by the whole history of the tarot, which could go on for literally hours before it finally wound down. And the way I felt, a migraine was going to explode my left eye long before then.
After a fruitless search, I surfaced, gasping from a combo of boot funk and dust bunnies, and started sorting through the jumbled bedclothes for the pack that simply had to be there somewhere. But I didn’t see it. Maybe because it was hard to see anything in the wash of sunshine pouring in through the curtains.
I stopped and blinked at them.
The suddenly wide-open curtains.
The suddenly wide-open curtains that were being reflected in the mirror over the dresser.
And okay, no. That mirror had been in about a thousand pieces all over the floor last night. I mean, I couldn’t be wrong about that, right? I’d stepped in the remains, and even kicked some when—
My brain came to a screeching halt as three things happened simultaneously. My eyes wandered over the view beyond the bed, which was noticeably lacking in broken glass, destroyed furniture, or ominous stains. My nose registered a complete dearth of potion residue. And my ears pricked up at a small, new sound.
A sound like the beep of a key card tripping an automatic lock.
My head jerked around to see the doorknob start to turn, and I tried to shift. But my fuzzy brain wasn’t having it. Instead, it had gone into flight mode all right, but for some reason it had decided that the path to safety involved me trying to squash myself into the few inches of space under the bed. Only I couldn’t because the damned boots were in the way. And by the time I shoved them aside, thrust the still-talking tarot card down my shirt, realized there was already something wedged in between my breasts, crammed the card into the top of a small, greasy package I found there, and started stuffing myself past the dust ruffle . . .
It was too late.
The door opened and someone came in, sneaker-clad feet quiet on the tiled floor of the entryway. They stopped abruptly, and there was no sound for a beat, then two. And then they crossed silently onto the carpet before pausing again, beside the bed.
Where they were currently being treated to the sight of my ass wriggling around in the air like Pooh Bear sticking out of Rabbit’s house, because it hadn’t made it under here with the rest of me.
For a moment, nothing was said.
Then a single finger pushed up the dust ruffle. And a clear green eye peered underneath at me. I stared back at it, and what little coherent thought I’d managed to form went out the window.
“Is there . . . a problem?” a mild voice asked me.
I licked my lips, because, as usual for me, “problem” didn’t cover it. I opened my mouth to reply, and God knows what I’d have said. Only, luckily, speech was one of many things that didn’t seem to be working right now.
Like motor control. Because the next moment, when I was hauled out from under the bed and up to a pair of so-familiar green eyes, I just hung there limply. And stared.
At a face that was hard to look at.
Not that it was unattractive. There had been a time when I’d thought so—the overlarge nose, the hard-as-glass eyes, the I-couldn’t-be-bothered-to-shave-today-and-possibly-not-yesterday-either stubble didn’t exactly spell out movie-star good looks. But there was a lot more to John Pritkin than looks, although even there I’d started to come around recently. The strong, stubborn jawline, the rock-hard body, and the flashes of humor behind the taciturn expression—hell, even the rigid blond spikes he called hair might not add up to handsome, but they added up to something.
Something that might have been disturbing if I hadn’t had plenty of other things to disturb me right now.
“What is it?” Pritkin demanded, fingers tightening on my arms as his face suddenly swam in front of me.
I told myself to get a grip, but it wasn’t working. To suddenly have him just show up like that was . . . well, it was what I guess most people felt when they saw a ghost. It was startling and exhilarating and strangely terrifying . . .
And impossible, I realized, as the explanation slammed into me.
This wasn’t about Rosier growing a heart and sending his son back where he belonged. Pritkin’s expression told me that much. I didn’t know what look I might find on his face if I ever caught up with him again, but I didn’t think it would be mild concern mixed with a healthy dose of exasperation.
No. This was me, thinking, longing, dreaming . . . and shifting, while either asleep or as good as, back to a time where I knew I’d find him. Back to a time I was about to royally screw up if I didn’t get it together.
“Cassie—” Pritkin was starting to look seriously worried, maybe because I was still hanging there lifelessly, staring at him like an idiot. Except for one hand, which had come up to gently touch his face. I jerked it back down, because yeah. Losing it.
I licked my lips again. “Um,” I said, and stopped. I had nothing.
But something in my face must have reassured him anyway. Because he let go and sat on the edge of the bed, some of the concern draining out of his eyes. “We’ve discussed this,” he said dryly.
“We . . . We have?”
“Yes. You can’t merely shift down here because it’s faster than taking the elevator. I keep dangerous substances—”
“I didn’t touch the bookcase,” I said quickly. The memory of the one and only time I had wasn’t pleasant. Well, except for watching Rosier’s smug face melt into a puddle of goo after having a few dozen vials of demon-fighting potion dumped on it. And after everything that had happened since, that was actually quite—
“Cassie?”
“Huh?”
“There are more dangers here than just the bookcase.”
“Like what?”
“Like this,” Pritkin said, reaching under the bed and pulling out one of his smelly boots. And then jerking something out of the interior. Something that was—
A thumb came down on top of what looked a lot like a grenade, except it was smooth and bluish steel in color, and had a sort of lever thing on top instead of a pin. A lever that had been halfway down when Pritkin noticed it. Which might have had something to do with the high-pitched whine it had been sending off.
And still was, I realized, as his eyes widened. He grabbed the other boot and turned it upside down. And then he grabbed me. “Where is it?”
“Where is what?”
“The potion grenade!”
“You have it,” I said, looking in confusion at the object he’d just thrown onto the bed.
“No! The other one!”
“There’s another one?”
“There’s not supposed to be!”
“Well, I didn’t bring one!” I said feverishly.
“Then what is—” His eyes suddenly fixed on the front of my tee. “There!”
And the next thing I knew, he was snatching up my shirt. And yanking something out of my bra. And flinging it away with a savage motion that I barely saw before he threw himself on top of me.
We hit the floor, and it hurt, because Pritkin is mostly muscle and he weighs a lot. And because my head clipped the edge of the nightstand on the way down. And because his shields snapped closed so hard and fast that they cut off an inch of my hair. Which promptly fell into my eyes.
But that didn’t seem to matter so much if we were about to be blown to pieces by . . .
By a grenade that was taking its own sweet time, I thought, as seconds ticked by and nothing happened. Except for Pritkin’s heart beating loud in my ear, because I was squashed underneath him, with my head squeezed between his chest and the floor. To the point that I couldn’t . . . hardly . . .
“Air,” I squawked, and Pritkin raised himself up slightly.
And as soon as he did, I realized what was making the objectionable whine.
“The Star is universally considered to be the most beautiful card in the tarot,” a small voice said reproachfully, from above my head. Where it was protruding out of the elusive tarot deck. Which was now sticking out of an impact point on the wall. And squealing as seventy-eight cards simultaneously registered their disapproval at their rough treatment.
Pritkin lifted his head to stare at them. And then he looked back down at me. And then he crawled off a few feet and sat on the carpet, and put his head in his hands.
“Sorry,” I said breathlessly, as the cards continued to mutter to themselves.
Pritkin didn’t say anything.
That was okay. That was good. I needed a moment.
And a bath, I realized, as I lifted an arm to brush the fringe of severed hair out of my eyes. It wasn’t only Pritkin’s boots that were smelling up the place. I sat there, mortified, unable to believe I’d fallen asleep like this. “Is anything going to kill me if I use your bathroom?” I finally asked.
“Knowing you?” Pritkin’s voice was muffled since he hadn’t raised his head.
I frowned. “Is that a yes?”
A couple of fingers came up to massage his temple. “That is a no. Assuming you didn’t bring anything deadly along with you.”
“Just dirt,” I said, realizing the extent of it. I was going to have a hard enough time explaining this without looking like I’d been spelunking in the Bat Cave. “I’m going to get a shower,” I told him.
Pritkin didn’t react to this, so I scampered off to the minuscule bath Dante’s allowed its regular guests, which was about the size of my toilet cubbyhole upstairs.
Shit. Upstairs. Where the younger me was presumably hanging out and doing . . . well, whatever I’d been doing three weeks ago.
That was the first time Pritkin had taken me hiking on some god-awful mountain trail in the foothills of the Rockies. The Corps, the official name for the war mage branch of the Circle, used it as a training ground. It had been a memorable experience, mainly because it had rained the night before, turning the whole mountain into a massive mud pit.
Pritkin had made me run the trail anyway.
Of course.
The only good thing was that I’d twisted an ankle near the end, when I fell over a tree root, and had milked it for three days off the hellish workouts. Judging by the state of his boots, this was the first of those days, since I didn’t think he would leave them sitting around for long in that condition. Meaning that maybe Pritkin wouldn’t be going upstairs, and I wasn’t in as bad a mess as I’d originally thought.
Well, assuming I could come up with a reason for breaking into his room looking like a war refugee. The tee, what parts the bricks hadn’t shredded, was streaked with soot, my jeans looked like I’d been auditioning for a role as a chimney sweep, and my hair—what I had left—was dirty and sleep-matted. Not to mention that I had that pale look I always got when I skipped meals.
A siren I wasn’t.
I scowled at myself, wondering where that thought had come from. But it might not matter. For a guy who was so observant about other things, Pritkin never seemed to notice what I looked like.
Knuckles rapped on the door, loud enough to make me jump. “I’m going out.”
I opened it a crack and stuck my head through, since the rest of me wasn’t decent. “Why?” I asked, worried.
“To get some breakfast. What do you want?”
“How do you know I haven’t eaten already?”
He just looked at me.
“Does it have to be healthy?”
The look did not change.
I sighed.
“I asked what you wanted,” he reminded me. “I’ll run it off you later.”
“You already broke my foot!”
An eyebrow went north. “And yet you managed to get in there fast enough.”
I decided that maybe I should just shut up now. “They have cheesy bacon biscuits down at the café, if it’s before eleven.”
Pritkin gave me an odd look. “It’s seven thirty.”
“Well . . . then they should have some.”
He looked like he was going to say something else, but then stopped, eyes narrowing. “Some?”
“I want two.”
“You’ll get one.”
“I didn’t have dinner!”
“You ate with me,” he said, frowning.
Crap.
“Oh. Yeah. Well, one, then,” I said weakly, and slammed the door.
Chapter Six
I kept my back to it until I heard the door to the hall open and close, and then let out a trembling breath. God, I sucked at this. Which was why I ought to make up some excuse, leave him a note, and get the heck out of here before he returned.
So why was I getting into the shower instead?
Maybe because the active part of my brain had noticed something else it wasn’t bothering to share with the rest of me. But it felt important. And maybe I’d figure it out once I’d been awake more than two minutes.
I let the hot water hit me right in the face, and I guess it helped. By the time I’d lathered up my hair, rinsed it off, decided the damage wasn’t too bad, and washed a chimney’s worth of soot down the drain, I’d also chased down that elusive thought. Which proved that my subconscious was smarter than I was.
I’d been thinking that I needed a demon expert to have any chance of reaching Mom. So it had brought me to one. In fact, it had brought me to the one, the guy who knew more about demons than everybody else in the Circle combined.
There was only one problem: Pritkin hated my shifts through time. He was absolutely of the opinion that, if we kept shifting around here and there, sooner or later we were going to mess up something that couldn’t be fixed. He was so convinced that the first time I’d gone back in time to see my mother, when it had been about curiosity instead of abject need, I hadn’t even thought about taking him along. I’d already known what his answer would be.
And considering how that had gone down—demigods crashing the party she was at, trying to kill her—it was probably just as well. Pritkin’s reaction in cases of being shot at was to shoot back, and that wouldn’t have worked on that particular foe. But demons . . . yeah, he knew all about them.
Half of the vials that were so precisely and uncharacteristically arranged in the racks on his bookcase were potions for fighting various varieties of hell-spawn, since that was what he’d done before hitching his star to my unlucky train. He’d probably forgotten more about demon fighting than the rest of the Corps had ever known. In fact, he might know as much about how I could break him out of his current predicament as Mom would, only I doubted he’d be willing to tell me.
Because Billy had been right—Pritkin wouldn’t want me going after him. As badly as he hated his father, and as much as he might be hating his life right now, he wouldn’t want me risking it. I was probably going to be in for a major ass-chewing whenever I found him. . . .
Only Billy had been right about that, too, I realized. I wasn’t going to find him. Not without help.
I stepped out of the shower and into the hot air swirling around the bathroom. The mirror was all fogged up, and a swipe across it with my hand only changed that for a second. But a second was enough. It showed me a face still slightly round with baby fat, with heat-reddened cheeks, blond curls plastered to my head, a tip-tilted nose, and big, guileless blue eyes. Sopping wet, I looked about as dangerous as a stuffed rabbit. Sopping wet, I looked . . . well, like somebody who had no business going on some daring rescue.
I scowled, unconsciously imitating a certain war mage I knew. But while on him the expression was fierce, even terrifying, on me . . . mostly it made
me look constipated. I sighed.
But unlike last night, when I’d been feeling helpless and battered and a lot like giving up, today my lack of badass credentials didn’t seem so important. Because considering what I was up against, it wouldn’t have mattered anyway. I could have been the biggest, baddest mage of them all, could have been a master-level vampire—hell, I could have had an army of both—and it wouldn’t have made a difference.
Because I didn’t see any of them just waltzing into hell, either.
In fact, I wasn’t so sure that being me wasn’t an asset right now. Because Billy might have been wrong about one thing—I didn’t think Rosier was expecting me. Why would he be? Everyone else I knew underestimated me, and always had. Everybody else looked at me and saw the fluffy bunny in the mirror; well, almost everyone. But, despite his age, I didn’t get the impression that Rosier had his son’s insight, or much of anything else. And even Pritkin, when he wasn’t running me up mountainsides or pushing me off cliffs, still sometimes acted like I was spun glass and might break.
But I hadn’t broken.
I wouldn’t break.
I didn’t have that luxury.
And neither had Agnes. I looked in the mirror again, and decided that I didn’t look any more delicate than she ever had. Maybe less, in fact. She’d been all of five foot two in her stocking feet, with a heart-shaped face and porcelain skin and a little-girl air about her that I was coming to believe she’d deliberately cultivated. So that people would underestimate her.
And then she shot them in the butt.
I let one finger run over the faint scar she’d given me, which thanks to a certain vampire’s healing ability was far less prominent than it should have been. Just barely a dimple now, no big deal. But the thing was, I didn’t think she’d been aiming for my butt at the time.
At the time, she’d been after a Guild member, one of a secret sect of crazies that wanted to alter time to their own ends, and she hadn’t been playing around. She also hadn’t had a problem going after him alone, without the war mage escort she’d been entitled to. She’d told me they often caused more problems than they solved by shooting everything in sight, and given what I’d seen in my brief acquaintanceship with the Corps, I had no reason to doubt her. But I thought most people chasing a dangerous dark mage would still have wanted one or two along, just in case.