I turned to thank the woman for rescuing the card for me, only to discover she was gone.
Odd. I hadn’t seen her leave.
Of course, I had been busy conjuring up scenarios to fit the card’s appearance.
If I saw her again in the hotel—this hotel, my hotel—I would be sure to thank her. For now, though, I would concentrate on learning everything I could from the new clue she had handed me.
I needed to visit The Hotel.
Whatever it might be.
Circe
I’m not particularly religious—certainly not by the standards of the mer, who believe Poseidon and Amphitrite are gods.
But I do believe in something. Some humans might call it being spiritual. Others might consider it a form of connectedness.
I know there is magic in the universe. I can use some of it. And that leads me to believe that there is probably more that I cannot touch or see.
Relatively few mer-folk understand the truth of our world—that it is not the only one, and that we are almost certainly not its original inhabitants. The knowledge is closely guarded, and I learned it only by accident. Poseidon resented my possession of the secret, and I believed he would have had me killed long ago, had he not feared the consequences of failure.
We both knew that I was probably as strong as he was, and the outcome of any struggle between us was by no means guaranteed. Poseidon remained god-king of Atlantis because I had no desire to rule over our kind. Nor did I wish to see our society destroyed by the civil war that would surely follow any attempt to overthrow our ruler.
All this added up to the Atlantean temple not being on my usual list of places to visit when I came home. I attended high festivals if I happened to be around, and that was about it. But the temple had been built over a natural source of magical energy, and I suspected I would need access to as much power as I could gather. More importantly, if I wanted to end up in Athens, I had to go through the temple to leave Atlantis.
As I drew close to the temple, I heard the other Sirens practicing their song-magic. Technically, I was one of them, a song-sister, a weaver of magic through music. It was the sole form of sorcery our kind used. Openly, anyway.
But I had spent centuries searching out other forms of magic, learning to wield different kinds of power. Even before I sang Odysseus’s men to swine (and back again, don’t forget), I had learned to manipulate the magical energies surrounding us in a variety of ways.
That was why, when Poseidon decided it was time for the mer to leave the world of men entirely, he called on me to help sink Atlantis ever deeper, through a fissure between worlds. The magical font under the temple, the source of the power that pinned our city to its new place, was also the location of the rift that separated Atlantis from Earth.
The mer were as much prisoners as the Titans, locked in a reality separated from that of men.
The difference was that my people didn’t know it.
Occasionally, of course, a mer needed to go to the surface of the Earth on an errand for Poseidon or Amphitrite. Or, even more rarely, someone like me simply wanted to go.
That kind of trip between worlds took immense magic and power. Luckily for Poseidon, most of his subjects were content to live their lives in Atlantis. Travel was generally discouraged, and I knew my song-sisters thought I was, at best, slightly peculiar. At worst, I was considered absolutely deranged for wanting to spend so much of my time outside of our city.
Luckily for me, I had enough magical talent and knowledge to transport myself between dimensions. I didn’t need Poseidon’s permission or help to leave.
The temple itself was built on a Greek model, rather like the Parthenon. Lots of columns, with an internal structure that closed off various parts of the temple. The source of the power fed a fountain of light in the centermost chamber, opened to the public only on high-festival days. I could get in anytime—there wasn’t much anyone could do to stop me from going inside. Not that anyone had tried in longer than I could remember. But the chamber remained locked to anyone but Poseidon, Amphitrite, or me.
The stone door slid easily open, the blue light of the fountain pouring out into the antechamber. Even from outside the room, power swept across me, pulling me toward it, calling the light of my eyes to match it, filling me with the kind of joy that made me want to sing—the same power that spilled out enough to give my song-sisters their magical boost.
I slipped into the room and closed the door behind me, tilting my head back and reveling for a moment in the sheer joy of being in that light again.
When I floated in it, I knew it for the light of creation, the enchantment that connected all beings to one another, and I knew that confining it was wrong. It was meant to be shared by all who could use it. The force behind the power whispered to me to set it free.
But I was not in charge in Atlantis and had no desire to be.
I simply needed to use the magical energy stored here.
I drew the light into me, breathing it in through my gills, allowing it to suffuse every part of me. As I pulled more and more of the power into myself, I glanced down. A small black rectangle rested on the edge of the ornately carved fountain containing the light.
Without thinking, I reached down to pick up the card. As I touched it, a tiny electrical shock shot through my fingers.
Magic.
The square was a card, made of the thinnest mother of pearl, with lettering carved into it, and a logo in the shape of a Corinthian column capital.
The Hotel.
A card from The Hotel imbued with a compulsion to go there.
It wasn’t a strong spell—I threw it off easily enough—but its mere presence on the card irritated me, as did the fact that it had clearly been coded to me, since merely touching the card had set off the spell.
It didn’t feel like Poseidon or Amphitrite, and I was fairly certain they were the only other mer who know of the place.
So it almost had to be from someone inside The Hotel itself. And irritating or no, a summons from an employee intrigued me.
Athens could wait.
I needed to go elsewhere first, apparently.
I headed out of the temple, closing the fountain-room door behind me, and moved toward the only Hotel entrance I knew of.
With a shimmy of my fin, I stopped in front of the door.
It didn’t look like anything special—just another entrance into the temple, albeit an odd one, as it was set in the roof of the building and marred its otherwise perfect symmetry. Plus, it faced the wrong way. Despite our ability to use all 360 degrees of space, mer-folk architecture tended to follow human design. I had initially assumed that was true because we took our designs from the humans. More recently, I had come to suspect that it was because that part of us that created buildings came from our human-style brains.
We had lost much of who we could have been when Poseidon had condemned us to our half-shape.
In any case, the door could easily have been an entrance for celebrants to use to enter and exit the temple during ceremonies. In fact, it had been used that way more than once.
But that wasn’t its true function.
In reality—some realities, anyway—it also led to The Hotel.
I pulled it open and swam through, not down into the temple, but into a corridor that, in a dizzying shift of direction and gravity, led up toward a light.
Zale
I strolled slowly past a nondescript, shiny black door in one of the oldest parts of Athens.
The buildings were narrow, built close together, and generally two or three stories tall. Tiny balconies graced the upper stories of some.
This one was no different.
Except it didn’t even have an address anywhere on the building. It had to be the address on the card—it fit the numbering pattern of the houses on the street, and it was the only one without a number. When I got closer, I realized that the bright silver knocker in the middle was in the same shape as the logo on the card: t
he top of a Corinthian column.
I had tried to call my contact in the Athenian police department, but either their phone system was wonky, or something was wrong with my American cell provider; his number at the department rang and rang without ever being answered or going to voicemail. And every time I tried his cell, the call got dropped.
I didn’t want to go in totally blind. The more I saw of this place the card had led me to, the more I thought it was a whorehouse. Or maybe a drug-den. Possibly both.
A small restaurant sat on the corner of the street, at the top of a slight hill. The patio seating overlooked the road, including the door to The Hotel.
Time to do a little surveillance.
My phone was definitely messed up.
In the almost two hours I had spent eating souvlaki and nursing a couple of beers, I had tried at least a dozen calls. None of them had gone through.
I’d also seen a fairly steady stream of odd-looking people entering the building advertised as The Hotel. Not the types I expected, however. None of them looked quite desperate enough to be junkies. Besides, of all the people I’d seen enter, none had exited through the unmarked door. It generally didn’t take two hours to make a deal, so I was almost ready to drop my drug-den theory. The few people I had seen leave weren’t obviously high, either.
Then again, neither those who entered nor those who exited exactly fit the possibility of this being a high-end brothel, either. Some of them looked furtive enough to be visiting a whorehouse, but only a couple looked moneyed enough.
Except maybe him.
A tall, dark-haired, pale-skinned man in an expensive suit and dark glasses stepped onto the sidewalk and carefully adjusted his cuffs around his wrists before looking around as if to get his bearings. He was slim and elegant, and a little more effeminate than most of the other men I had seen enter the house—at least one of whom had been bulky and exceptionally hairy and looked more like a lumberjack than someone who might frequent an upscale gentleman’s club.
Anyway, this hotel’s clientele didn’t fit any of the patterns of illicit behavior I was familiar with.
The man turned and headed up the hill toward the restaurant where I kept watch.
I called over Anna, the single waitress on duty. Her charm at discovering I was an American who spoke Greek had faded as she realized that I was much more interested in that house than I might be in her. “I have never seen anyone enter or exit through that door,” she had finally said, rolling her eyes, after I had asked the question several different ways.
“You want another beer?” she asked now, her tone bored.
“Yeah. A Volkan, please. First, though, what about that guy? You ever see him before?” I gestured toward the elegant man headed our direction.
“Who?” she asked.
“Him.” I kept my hand low, shielded from anyone else’s view, but pointed in the man’s direction. He glanced up and made eye contact with me. With a smirk, he raised one hand in the air and waggled his fingers in some complicated motion.
“I don’t see anyone,” the waitress said. “I’ll be back with that beer.”
She didn’t see anyone?
The man was almost to the patio where I sat, and he had yet to break eye contact with me. As he drew even with me, he slowed. I couldn’t take my eyes off of him. His smirk turned into a full-fledged smile, and something about it made me shiver. Maybe the overly long canines.
He stopped, leaning on the wooden railing that separated the patio from the street.
“They’re waiting for you,” he said, tilting his head back toward the building I’d been watching. “You might as well go in.”
I didn’t recognize his accent—something European—but his voice, like his smile, unnerved me. So much so that I jumped when Anna placed my beer in front of me. “Here,” I said, planning to force her to acknowledge him, but when I turned from looking at the waitress to point at the disturbing man, he was gone.
I jumped up from my seat and leaned over the rail, peering both ways down the street.
He was nowhere to be seen.
“Yes?” Anna asked.
“Nothing,” I muttered.
Anna walked back inside, shaking her head.
I slowly sat down again, picked up my beer, and took a long, slow pull from the bottle.
Something weird was going on here.
The most obvious explanation was that Anna was in on it—whatever it was. If that was true, I wasn’t going to find out anything more by sitting here.
Even if it wasn’t true, sitting here wasn’t gaining me any more information than I already had.
I stared at The Hotel door for a long moment, thoughtfully sipping my beer.
Once more, I tried the police number I had.
Nothing.
Clearly, whoever was inside that building knew they were being watched.
Okay, then. Fine.
Decision made, I downed the rest of the drink, tossed some bills onto the table, and stood up.
Time to see what I could find out.
Circe
The change in the ocean water hit me as I crossed into The Hotel’s zone of influence. It wasn’t anything so obvious as temperature, but I sensed the shift the same way: across my entire body, through my skin and scales, and inside me, as it washed across my gills.
The Hotel knows its own, they say, and can keep out unwanted guests.
Unwanted by The Hotel, that is. Everyone must abide by its rules.
That’s not to say there’s never violence in the rooms. Only Hotel-sanctioned violence, however. Feuding parties cannot carry on their attacks within its walls except under strict guidelines, and bitter enemies have been known to speak cordially in its hallways. The Hotel metes out immediate punishment.
Part of that magic power was what I felt in the watery corridor leading to the ocean entrance to The Hotel—the only one I had ever used, though there are rumored to be as many entrances as there are cities in the world.
In all the worlds.
The power in the water slid along my body like a lover’s caress, touching me intimately, learning every part of me.
Learning what I most wanted.
What I needed.
How The Hotel could see to my needs.
I shivered, though the water temperature remained steady.
The Hotel Supernatural was, to the best of my limited knowledge, infinitely adaptable and changeable.
I needed access to that kind of power.
I only hoped The Hotel was willing to help me.
The light changed as I drew closer to the surface—not in any magical way, this time, but simply because the sun’s rays shone down on the water surrounded by marble columns embedded into the rocks that edged the salt-water pool in a room overlooking the ocean stretching away from this particular Hotel façade.
A closed room with a scalloped ceiling in the shape of a pavilion provided cover over the pool, with one entire wall of glass offering anyone who ventured into swim options of either shade or sunlight.
Not that I had ever seen anyone else in this pool.
My eyes’ light dimmed as I swam upward, and when I surfaced, my breath hitched in my chest for a moment as I switched over from gills to lungs, pushing the excess water out as my head broke the water.
Having made the passage successfully—not always a certainty, given The Hotel’s almost sentient nature—I took a moment to relax into the magic-charged water, floating on my back and using my fin to flip the water up and across my chest. This was always one of my favorite parts of a visit to The Hotel. I could almost feel the power soaking into me, replenishing what I had used in the passage across dimensions—or realms, or whatever they might actually be.
Exhausting. That’s what they were.
I might as well immerse myself in the best part of the transition. I wasn’t going to like the next bit nearly as much.
Eventually, I heaved a deep sigh and flipped over, diving down only far enough t
o propel myself to the pool’s edge, where an elegant staircase curved around a rock—or maybe a rock-shaped decoration?—and emerged from the water.
Perfect for mer-folk.
Probably some other shifters, too. Seals came to mind.
I glanced around. I hated for other people to see this bit, even other supernaturals, who might understand some part of what I was about to endure.
As usual, The Hotel had cleared the room for me—or perhaps created a private space that would no longer exist when I left? I wasn’t certain, though I had long known it was well within The Hotel’s capabilities to twist and shape reality to suit its needs at any given moment.
Also, from conversations I’d had with other guests during previous visits, I was almost certain that The Hotel showed its guests exactly as much of itself as it needed them to see.
Which led me to wonder why it had revealed so much of its powerful, changeable nature to me.
More of my curse at work?
In any case, at The Hotel, I never had to make the change in front of others.
When I reached the rock by the staircase, I pulled myself onto it, settling into the slight depression that was exactly the right size to cradle me as I sat upright. With one last flip of my tailfin, I splashed the rejuvenating water up over me and used it to smooth back my dark hair. Rivulets ran down across my shoulders and dripped off my naked breasts. A glance behind me assured me that, as usual, a dress hung from a hook embedded into one of the columns.
A few meters away from the dress was a showerhead, with a drain big enough to accommodate anything I might need to eliminate after the shift.
Everything is in place. As it always is. Get on with it, Circe.
Even with my internal admonishments, though, it took several more minutes before I could bring myself to begin.
Power and intention.
Those were the things I needed to make the shift.
Ridding myself of resistance to the change seemed to grow more difficult every time. I managed it once again, however, and allowed the power to roll across me, seep into me, begin to rearrange the very molecules of my being.
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