by Karen Chance
I flopped back against the pillows. “More than.”
“Then you of all people can’t go around changing things. You told me yourself that it can cause a cascade effect and screw everything up.”
“Which is why I don’t do it.”
“But you offered. In that Jonas guy’s office.”
“I was upset—and I wasn’t serious. I knew Pritkin wouldn’t take me up on it—”
“And if he had? Or if Jonas had? He doesn’t seem to mind bending rules as long as he wins.”
I stared at Billy.
I’d never heard Jonas Marsden described so well.
“You see a lot of the same kind of people when you’re dead,” Billy said. “I’m not saying they all fit into a little cubbyhole, but after a while . . . yeah. You start to see patterns. Jonas reminds me of this old gambler I used to know. He’d take new arrivals on the riverboats under his wing, teach ‘em the trade. Then use ‘em to help him cheat, only it was somehow always them who got caught, and always him who ended up with the cash.”
“You’re saying Jonas is trying to use me.”
“He’s already used you. You helped him get back into power, right?”
“He was better than the alternative.”
Billy couldn’t argue with that, since the alternative had been a traitor corrupted by our enemies. “Just be careful, Cass.”
“Why are you suddenly down on Jonas?” I asked.
Billy narrowed his eyes. “Seriously? You trying to tell me that that,” he hiked a thumb over his shoulder at my crappy ward, “ain’t a trap?”
Sometimes, I decided, my life would be easier if Billy was a little dumber.
I pulled up the covers. “Jonas was right about one thing: it would be nice to have someone we could question.”
“And if you get dead instead? You said the fey are resistant to the Pythian power. What if that thing don’t stop him—”
“It’s not supposed to stop him. It’s supposed to snare him.”
“—and why is it always your head in the noose?”
Billy lit another ghostly cigarette; I was pretty sure just so he could glare at me through the smoke.
“It’s not a noose,” I said. “Think of it as an extra layer of protection, assuming anybody shows up here, which I doubt. I think he’s going after Pritkin.”
Billy suddenly caught a clue. “No—”
I sat up again. “Just for a little while—”
“I am not babysitting that damned mage!”
“I thought you liked Pritkin.”
Billy rolled his eyes. “I like him better than the vampire, because he isn’t always trying to use you. But that don’t mean—”
“Billy—”
“—that I wanna hold his hand. Anyway, I thought he was supposed to be guarding you, not the other way around!”
“I don’t need a bodyguard. But right now, he does. He can take down a fey warrior, but not if he doesn’t see him coming—”
“And just how am I supposed to see him? No, no, don’t tell me. Just hang on.”
Billy fished around in the back pocket of his jeans and brought out a small notebook, of the kind that they definitely did not have in the Old West. Meaning that he’d materialized it out of part of his energy, just to be bitchy. You had to admire that kind of dedication.
“Let’s see. Rattling chains, howling and moaning, jumps scares—always a favorite—opening cabinet doors, flicking the lights on and off—”
“Billy.”
“—and spying on the living.” He flipped over a few pages. “Yep, that’s what I thought. Seeing through fey glamouries isn’t in my skill set! Guess I shoulda sprung for the deluxe version.”
“Billy.”
“But I didn’t. Meaning that I’d be no more use than the butt load of mages he’s already surrounded with. They’re packed in there like sardines, you said it yourself.”
“But they can’t see the fey.”
“Neither can I!”
“You don’t have to see him. You can smell him.” I reached over and picked up one of my new perfume bottles, which thankfully had survived the raid on my dressing room. “Like this.”
He scrunched up his face, but took a whiff. “Nasty,” was the verdict.
It was unfair. The concoction mostly smelled like roses crossed with lemons. A little unusual, but definitely not nasty.
“The glamourie an assassin will be under has to be fey, or HQ’s wards would detect it<’ I said. “You’ll smell him coming a mile off.”
“Then why can’t the mage?”
“He won’t be looking for it; you will.”
Billy gave me his stubborn face, which was a problem, because I couldn’t make him do anything. He wasn’t my slave; he was my friend. He could do me a favor or not, as he chose.
And right now, it wasn’t looking too promising.
I lay back against the pillow again and stared at the ceiling. “I have a boyfriend who’s being stalked by a fey, and an ex who’s decided that he’s Pythia, an imminent invasion and everybody yells at me—”
“Everybody doesn’t yell at you,” Billy said.
“Just in the last two days, I’ve been told off by Mircea, Hilde, Tami, Pritkin and Marco. And sort of by Rhea.”
“Rhea?”
“It was subtle. You know how she is.”
“Tops from the bottom,” Billy agreed, and I smacked him.
“Are you going to do this for me? Please? I need at least one thing marked off the list so I can sleep.”
“Hypothetically, say I was stupid enough to get talked into this. How am I supposed to warn him?”
“You know how. The same way you did last time.”
Billy had saved my butt a month ago, when he’d carried a message from me to Pritkin in the heat of battle. I’d been tied down by a rogue acolyte named Jo, who was determined to destroy the timeline for all the wrongs she felt humanity had done to her. Which was a lot, since she was a raging narcissist who basically thought she should be worshipped.
Anyway, I’d been battling for my life, which should have been easy enough. Except that she and Jonathan had become good buddies, and he’d toked her up on mass quantities of stolen power courtesy of the Black Circles reserves. She’d also fed some of it to a few thousand hungry ghosts, who most definitely will work for food, and stuffed them into rotting corpses to make herself an unkillable army. And she’d put me through an elaborate obstacle course to drain my strength before even showing up.
And did I mention that she’d been trained in the Pythian power, and I had not?
Yeah.
The result was me getting my ass handed to me, while the timeline slowly shattered around us. The only reason I was alive and Jo was finally dead—because that was the second freaking time I had to kill her—was Billy Joe. He’d taken a message to Pritkin for me, who had linked his power with mine through Lover’s Knot, lending me his incubus abilities long enough for me to drain Jo’s power, destroy her body, and open a smorgasbord for her ghosts to feed on what was left.
Don’t ever tell me that having a ghostly companion isn’t worth the aggravation.
The end result was that I’d decided I needed some training, damn the risks, and Billy had looked smug for a month. He was still kind of doing it, with a little smile of reminiscence playing about his lips. Until it abruptly changed into a scowl.
“The mage couldn’t hear me,” he said. “He’s half incubus, but couldn’t hear a ghost yelling in his ear I had to float through his damned head, to whisper straight into his brain.”
“So, do it again,” I said. “If you notice anything, give him a head’s up. Literally.”
“Ha, ha.” Billy didn’t look amused. “Do you know what he threatened me with, if I ever ‘breeched his bodily autonomy’ again? Not that that’s anatomically possible for a ghost, but still—”
“If you save his life, I think he’ll understand.”
“I’d rather stay here and save
yours.” The usually sarcastic, jokey face was suddenly serious.
“I don’t need—”
“—protection, yeah, yeah, I know. You get a month’s worth of training and all of a sudden you’re super Pythia, defender of the weak and all around badass. But you’re still in the same vulnerable body, Cass. Jo had all the power in the world but it didn’t save her. You ought to remember that.”
But I was remembering other things instead. Like all the years that it had just been the Cassie and Billy show, as he liked to call it. All the times we’d picked each other up, talked each other down, argued, fussed and fought like the siblings he’d left behind and the ones I’d never had. And then I reached over, pulled him to me, and hugged him.
“What was that for?” Billy asked, looking startled. Because I’d never been the hug-y type. But that had been before getting multiple ones a day from the little initiates, to the point that they’d started to feel . . . almost normal.
Guess we’d both gotten used to this place, I thought.
“No reason,” I said. “Just long overdue.”
Chapter Sixteen
I tossed and turned for what felt like an hour, then got up and sat on the side of my bed, feeling tired, achy, out of sorts, and annoyed. I had a packed-out day tomorrow! But did my body care?
Clearly not.
I yawned, feeling both sleepy and not at the same time, which should have been impossible. Or no, I corrected, that wasn’t it. I was drained because I’d just given Billy a hell of a draw, using up most of the reserves that a good dinner and an evening lounging around in my underwear had given me. But I wasn’t sleepy.
I wasn’t sleepy at all.
Damn it!
I got up, padded over to the door, and almost got caught in my own ward before I remembered and shifted through. I went to the kitchen, hoping for a midnight snack, or whatever time it was. But when I pushed on the door to the butler’s pantry, it didn’t budge, as if the hinges had stuck or someone had accidentally latched it.
So, I shifted through that, too.
“Oh, crap. Busted,” someone said, as I rematerialized on the other side.
I didn’t see who. I was too mesmerized at the spread laid out on the center island, which was groaning under a feast of epic proportions. A Spanish feast, because Tami’s paella must have given someone ideas.
Well, olé, I thought, grinning.
Then the voice came again. “Oh, never mind. It’s just Cassie.”
“Hey!” I said, looking up. And saw Fred, my shortest, chubbiest bodyguard, standing at the island with a shaker in his hand, wearing a pair of boxers and his necktie, which as usual was under one ear. He also had on his socks, I noticed.
And nothing else.
“Am I, uh, interrupting?” I asked, glancing at the assembly of ne’er-do-wells gathered on stools around the island.
“Have some tapas,” Vi said, pushing a platter my way. She was wearing a sports bra and a pair of cutoff jeans, which showed thighs hard enough to crack a walnut. But since that was a normal get up for Vi, it wouldn’t have worried me too much, except that she was barefoot.
Vi had a thing about shoes, specifically steel-toed boots, which she wore with everything whether they matched or not. Something about being chased across cut glass by a war mage, once upon a time. Which made it even stranger that a mostly naked war mage was sitting beside her, at the end of the island, looking mortified.
It wasn’t Pritkin.
For once, Reggie didn’t get up to salute. Just blushed all the way down his skinny chest, to where the freckles stopped in favor of ghost white skin. He had freckles on his face, too, scads of them, to the point that a few more would give him the tan that his complexion never could. But they were hard to see at the moment past fiery red cheeks.
They matched the hair, I thought, and ate some tapenade on a cracker.
I didn’t feel bad about snacking, because there was food for a small army, which probably meant that Fred was treating. Fred did not understand potion size. Fred did not want to understand portion size. Mainly because the only thing Fred liked better than fresh take out was leftover take out, preferably a spread of five or ten different types, like a retrospective of his weekly intake.
But this stuff would have to molder a while to be ready for the end of week extravaganza, because it was fresh.
“I told you we should have done this in my room,” Fred said, as I tried to decide between a second course of anchovy stuffed olives, scallops in a tomato sauce, and an intriguing breaded item the size of a golf ball.
“Done what?” I asked, munching on a fried oyster while I figured it out.
“And I told you that you’re gonna get crumbs on your sheets,” Saffy told Fred. She was wearing a thong and a t-shirt, the latter long enough to count as a minidress if it hadn’t gotten caught up by the stool.
“La Bomba,” Fred said, following my gaze. And answering the question I hadn’t asked. “It means the bomb, and it is, it so is.”
“But what is it?” I asked, intrigued.
He put one of the golf balls on a little plate for me, and grabbed a knife. “Ready?”
“Ready.”
He cut. “A spicy beef meatball, slathered with creamy mashed potatoes, then the whole thing is covered in breadcrumbs and—wait for it . . .”
I held my breath.
“Deep fried.”
“Deep fried?”
“Deep. Fried.”
He picked up the half he’d just sliced off with a fork and fed it to me. My eyes opened wide. “Oh. Oh, God.”
“Right?” Fred grinned. He loved food, and appreciated other people who loved food.
And then he ate the other half of my meatball.
“Hey!”
“Chef’s privilege.”
“You cooked it?” I asked skeptically.
“Bought it, cooked it, what’s the difference? Look, you can have another.”
I had another. And followed it with smoky chorizo cooked in red wine, baby octopus rubbed with paprika and seared in olive oil, and crab cakes with roasted red pepper sauce. It was all delicious.
“Read ‘em and weep,” Vi said, spreading a poker hand on the table, in between dishes.
A chorus of groans followed the sight of a straight flush.
“Okay,” Fred said. “You got me.” And his hand went to the waistband of his boxers.
A louder bunch of groans were heard, along with a squeal from Saffy. “No, no. Here, I got you,” she said, and tossed him a bracelet.
“What? I don’t need that. I got this covered.”
“Covered is what we want,” Vi said. “Covered is good.”
But Fred only turned around and looked coyly at us over his shoulder. And waggled a very well-padded behind in blue and shite striped boxers, which he sloooowly began to pull down. And then laughed at our horrified expressions and threw in his tie.
“You guys don’t know what you’re missing.”
“And we are totally okay with that,” Vi said, looking relieved.
A bunch of other assorted pieces of clothing were tossed onto the counter, and light dawned. “You’re playing strip poker?” I said. “In here?”
“The door was locked,” Vi pointed out.
“You know Hilde can shift, right?”
“Oh, God,” Reggie said.
He’d appeared totally miserable this entire time, I assumed from embarrassment. He hadn’t looked me in the eye once, and appeared to be trying to slide under the table. But Vi caught him.
“Come on. Pay up,” she ordered.
“I—I can’t.” If possible, he flushed an even brighter shade.
“Whaddya mean, you can’t?” she asked, leaning over the table. And then she laughed. “You bastard! I thought you still had your tighty-whities left. You went commando?”
“I didn’t know we’d be playing,” he whispered. “And I thought I’d win. With Rico gone—”
“Rico was here?” I asked.
“Where do you think all our clothes went?” Vi said.
“Rhea came into the kitchen, and he disappeared,” Fred told me, rolling his eyes.
“They’re out on the balcony, in the moooonlight,” Saffy added, and giggled. She’d obviously been hitting the sangria pretty hard.
“Good riddance,” Vi said. “I swear he was cheating. Like this poor bastard here.”
“I—I’m sorry, Lady,” Reggie whispered.
“Forfeit! Forfeit! Forfeit!” Saffy said, hitting the table with a fist. “We demand the naked chicken dance!”
“Ssshhh!” Fred said suddenly. “I think I hear something.”
Everyone paused.
“Oh, shit! It’s Hilde!”
Pandemonium broke out, and Fred grabbed his trousers.
“Give me mine!” Saffy said, but Fred just spread his hands. “I don’t see ‘em. Rico must have taken them.”
“Rico took my jeans?”
“Quick!” Fred told me. “Send them somewhere!”
“Where?”
“Anywhere!” Saffy said, staring around.
Reggie just sat there, frozen in horror.
Vi was trying to cast a conceal spell, but she’d also had a few. She held her liquor so well that I hadn’t noticed, but her magic did. It made the kitchen blink in and out like it was on strobes, but didn’t really conceal anything.
“Oh, God!” Fred said, in a panic. “She’s here!”
I shifted everybody except for him, because he’d grabbed my arm at the last second and the spell would have taken me along, too. And as soon as they were gone, the vibe totally changed. Fred tossed his trousers back onto the counter and picked up an oyster.
“Where’d you send them?” he asked casually.
“To Rico. He has their clothes, right?”
Fred burst out laughing. “Naw.” He opened a cabinet, and there they were, including Saffy’s jeans.
Some yelling filtered through from the balcony, but it was distant. I doubted it would reach the bedrooms. Sorry, Rhea, I thought, wincing.
“That’ll teach ‘em to do this kinda thing out here,” Fred said, looking satisfied. “There are kids in this house!”