by Karen Chance
“We’ve been out here half the day already,” I complained. “I’m tired, I haven’t eaten since breakfast and I can’t feel my toes any—”
“I’ll throw in a picnic.”
My head came up. “What?”
“I hid a basket this morning. After the test, I’ll take you to it.”
“It’ll be cold by now.”
“I left it with a warmer,” he said drily. Because war mages ate their fried chicken frozen to the ground and they liked it.
God. Fried chicken, potato salad, baked beans, maybe some apple pie or cookies for dessert—yeah. I could so use a picnic right about now.
“All right,” I agreed, faster than I should have. But I really was hungry. “No time travel.”
“You’re sure? Because when I win—”
“If you win.”
“—you’ll stay until you’ve run the entire course. And you won’t whine about it.”
“I don’t whine!”
“Then we have a deal?”
“I guess so,” I said, trying to sound reluctant.
“Good,” he told me pleasantly.
And then he let go.
A couple of hours later, I staggered into the Vegas hotel suite I currently called home and face-planted onto the sofa. There was already someone sitting there, but I didn’t care. I was too tired to even open my eyelids and find out who it was.
Until someone pried one open for me with a finger the size of a hot dog. “Rough day?”
I rotated my eyeball—and, goddamnit, even that hurt—to see the leader of my bodyguards peering at me.
“No. I like being dropped from airplane height without a parachute.”
Marco patted me on the ass, which I guess was fair, since I was draped over his lap. “You seem all right to me.”
Marco, I reflected sourly, was getting awfully blasé where my health was concerned. He’d started out assuming that I was as squishy as most humans, and practically had a heart attack every time I got a hangnail. But after seeing me survive a few dozen attacks, he’d started to relax. These days, if I didn’t come in with a gaping wound or spewing blood, I didn’t get much sympathy.
“Because I managed to shift to the ground before I splattered on it!” I told him testily.
“Then what’s the problem?”
I turned over so I could scowl at him. “The problem is that I just ran a marathon in freezing weather with a maniac chasing me.”
“Why didn’t you just”—he waved the ham-sized hand that went with his bear-sized body—“you know. Poof.”
“You mean shift?”
“Yeah. Why didn’t you shift?”
“I did! But Pritkin expected that, and he borrowed Jonas’s necklace.”
“What necklace?”
I sighed and sat up. “It’s some sort of charm that allows him to recall the Pythia in times of emergency. As soon as I try to shift, wherever I am, whenever I am, it pulls me back.” As Pritkin had known when he made that bet, damn him.
God, I wished I kneed him in the nuts.
Marco seemed to think that was funny, which didn’t improve my mood. I got up and limped into the next room, still freezing cold and starving to death. Because Pritkin’s idea of a picnic left a lot to be desired.
But my bathroom didn’t. I knew it was stupid, but my bathroom made me happy. Maybe it was the size—which was huge bordering on sinful—or the soothing white and blue color scheme, or the rain forest showerhead over the Godzilla-sized tub. Or maybe it was because it was the one place in the whole damn suite where I could actually be alone.
Marco wasn’t the problem. Over the last month, he’d gone from treating me like a burdensome pest to treating me like a slightly bratty younger sister, and most of the time, I found myself actually enjoying his company. But Marco was the tip of the iceberg where my bodyguards were concerned. And they’d only been growing in number since the date of the inauguration had been announced.
Everyone assumed there would be an attack. Even I assumed it. The supernatural world was at war, and killing off the opposite side’s leadership was SOP. And whether I liked it or not, the Pythia was seen as one of our side’s more important assets. Which explained Pritkin’s stepped-up attempts to make me suck slightly less at self-defense, and the dozen or so golden-eyed master vamps constantly patrolling the suite.
They were there for my protection; I knew that. But it didn’t make them any less creepy. They watched me eat. They watched me drink. They watched me watch goddamned TV. They even watched me sleep. I’d woken up more than once to find one of them just standing in the doorway of my bedroom, staring at me, like it was a perfectly normal thing to do.
If it hadn’t been for my bathroom, I really might have lost it.
Too bad I couldn’t sleep in there.
Marco stuck his head in the door as I was running hot water into my lovely big tub. “You need anything? ’Cause I go off duty in a couple.”
“Food,” I said, shrugging out of my coat.
“What kind?”
“Anything. As long as it isn’t good for me.”
He nodded and ducked out when I started to pull off my T-shirt. It was far too flimsy for where I’d been, but the saying on the front fit my mood perfectly: “I keep hitting escape, but I’m still here.” I tossed it on a pile with the coat, my stiff-with-cold jeans and the expensive scrap of silk that had been wedged up my ass for the past half hour. Then I slowly climbed into the tub.
Oh, God.
Bliss.
It was actually a little too hot, but I figured the amount of ice clinging to me ought to even things out. I added a generous amount of bath salts, found my pillow under some towels and let my head sag back against the tub. After a few moments, my muscles began to unclench and my spine sagged in relief, and I seriously began to wonder if sleeping here was such a bad idea after all.
I think maybe I did drift off for a while. Because the next thing I knew, I was at the pink and pruney stage, the mirrors were all fogged up and the water was no longer hot. And a ghost was sitting by the tub, staring at me.
I’d have been more concerned, but this was a ghost I knew. I grabbed a towel and shot him a look; I don’t know why. Billy didn’t worry about his numerous vices. He’d cheated death like he’d cheated at cards in life, and he intended to keep it up. That made his morality a bit of a mixed bag, since he never intended to answer for any of it, anyway.
With an insubstantial finger, he pushed up the Stetson he’d been wearing for the past century and a half. “I’ve seen it before,” he told me with an exaggerated leer.
“Then why are you looking?”
“’Cause I’m dead, not senile?”
I threw the sponge at him, which did no good, because it passed right through and hit the wall. “I can’t feed you yet,” I said. “Not until I eat.”
Billy and I had a long-standing arrangement, dating from the time I’d picked up the necklace he haunted in a junk shop at the age of seventeen. I donated the living energy it took to keep him feeling frisky, and he did little errands for me in return. At least, he did if I complained enough.
He stretched denim-covered legs out in front of him, as if on an invisible sofa. “Can’t a guy drop by without you immediately assuming—” He caught my expression and gave it up. “Okay, I’ll wait.”
I was trying to decide between getting out and running some more hot water when there was a knock at the door. “You decent?”
I pulled the towel up a little higher. “Yes, if my wrinkled toes don’t offend.”
Marco’s swarthy head popped around the doorjamb. “Naw, they’re cute.”
I wiggled them at him since I could actually feel them now.
“Anyway, grub’s outside and I gotta go.” He grinned at me. “Big date tonight.”
“Date?” I blinked in surprise, because master vampires don’t date. Not unless forced, anyway.
“Witch,” he said succinctly.
“Isn’t th
at a little . . . unusual?”
“I’m like the master. I like to walk on the wild side.”
It took me a moment to realize what he meant. “I am not the wild side,” I told him flatly. “I’m about as far from the wild side as it’s possible to get.”
He raised a bushy black eyebrow. “If you say so.”
I opened my mouth, then decided I was too beat to argue. “Well, have fun.”
“Oh, I will.” He paused. “And just FYI, there’s a bunch of new guys on tonight. Well, not new new, but new to you.”
I didn’t know why he was bothering to tell me. The bodyguards were changed on a regular basis. Round-theclock security meant that some of them got stuck on the day shift, which was hard on vampires. At least I assumed that was why, after a week or two, they started looking a little peaked.
I nodded, but Marco just stood there, as if he expected some kind of answer. “Okay.”
“It’s just . . .” He hesitated. “Try not to freak them out too much, all right?”
“I freak them out?”
“You know what I mean. It’s those things you do.”
“What things?”
His eyes darted around the bathroom. “Talking-toinvisible-people kind of things.”
“They’re ghosts, Marco.”
“Yeah, only most of the guys don’t believe in ghosts, and they’ve started to think you’re a bit . . . strange.”
“They’re vampires and they think I’m strange?”
“And no popping out of nowhere in front of a guy. That takes some getting used to. I don’t think Sanchez has recovered yet.”
“The only place I’m popping is to bed.”
“Good plan.” Marco looked satisfied. “See you on the flip side.”
I rolled my eyes at the slang, which as usual for the older vamps was decades out of date, and let my head sag back against the tub. I really didn’t want to move now that I was warm and relaxed and actually starting to feel my extremities again. But the smells drifting in from the next room were making my stomach growl plaintively.
I couldn’t immediately identify the source, but it didn’t matter. If Marco had done the ordering, it had to be good. Unlike Pritkin, Marco didn’t worry about things like trans fats and cholesterol. When Marco ate, he ate big: pasta dripping in cream sauce, huge peppery steaks, mashed potatoes with gravy, and cannoli sweet enough to crack teeth. Often at the same meal.
The fact that vampires didn’t technically need to eat didn’t appear to worry Marco. He’d told me that one of the best things about finally reaching master status had been the return of working taste buds. And he’d spent the time since making up for all those flavorless years.
I decided that maybe I was clean enough. “Turn around,” I told Billy. “I’m getting out.”
He made a pouty face but he didn’t argue. Maybe he was hungry, too. I wrapped the towel around myself and started to get out of the tub.
But instead my hands slid off the porcelain, my knees bent and I slipped back into the rapidly cooling water.
For a second, I just lay there, more confused than worried. Until I kept on sinking. Then I snapped out of it and began to struggle.
And found that it made absolutely no difference.
The best I could do was keep my face above the bubbles for a few seconds while I struggled to move, to cry out, to do something. But my body was as frozen as the shout trapped behind my teeth, which my lips stubbornly refused to let out. The most I managed was a muffled grunt as my head slowly went under.
Immediately, all sound vanished. The whoosh of the air-conditioning, the almost silent footsteps of the guards, the soft clink-clink of someone dropping ice cubes in a glass in the dining room, all faded into a watery roar. Silence constricted around me, a heavy, cold hand that robbed me of breath as effectively as the water over my face.
The bubbles had half dissolved by now, with pockets of suds floating here and there, like the sky on a cloudy day. In between I could see the ceiling of the bathroom, rippling with my barely discernible struggles. But they weren’t enough, weren’t nearly enough, and my lungs were already crying out for air.
After what felt like an hour but was probably no more than a few seconds, the scene above me was obscured by Billy’s indistinct shape. He was saying something, but I couldn’t hear, and then his face passed through the water and he gazed at me curiously. “Time to get out.”
No shit, I thought hysterically, trying to flail limbs that suddenly felt like they belonged to someone else. A frown appeared between Billy’s eyes. But it was the impatient Billy look, not the panicked Billy look. He still didn’t get it.
“Seriously, Cass. Your dinner’s gonna get cold.”
I just stared at him, my eyes burning from the soap, willing him to understand. Nothing happened, except that a chain of bubbles slipped out from between my lips, heading for the air a few inches away. It might as well have been a few thousand, for all the good it was doing me.
My toes were floating near the surface of the water, right beside the switch that controlled the drain. It was mounted just below the faucet, within easy reach—if I’d been able to move. As it was, I could only stare at it, stark terror creeping over my body, chilling my skin and threatening to paralyze whatever brain function I had left. I couldn’t move and Billy was useless and I couldn’t even take a deep breath to calm down because—
Because I was about to drown in the goddamn bathtub.
Chapter Two
The thought cut cleanly through the gibbering in my brain. People had been trying to kill me in elaborate ways for months, yet if I didn’t get a grip, my epitaph was going to read: SHE DROWNED IN THE TUB. But it wasn’t, it wasn’t, because I was damned if I was going to go out like that.
Only it didn’t look like I had a lot of choice.
The more I struggled, the more my body seemed to shut down. Trying to move was like battering against the lid of a coffin from the inside. I cried out furiously, but the shout stayed locked in my numb throat.
The worst part was the silence. Death was supposed to be loud—gunshots, explosions, screams and thunder. Not this eerie quiet that wrapped around me like a shroud. I couldn’t hear anything but the water lapping at the sides of the tub, like a watch counting down the seconds I had left.
And a harsh voice echoing in my ears: Assess, Address, Act.
For a second, the words just hung there in my head, refusing to connect with anything. And then I remembered Pritkin’s damn three A’s. I grabbed at the thought like a lifeline, before it could skitter away into the white noise of my panic.
Okay, I thought wildly. Assess. What was the problem? That I couldn’t fucking breathe.
Address. What could I do about it? Nothing. Not when my own body refused to follow my commands, when it seemed almost like it was under someone else’s—
Wait, wait. I didn’t need to move physically to use my power, which was independent of my human form. And my power could—
I shifted before I finished the thought, ending up outside the tub, with my bare ass several feet above the bathroom floor. Gravity took care of that, dumping me onto the cold tile before I’d even managed to get a breath, along with about forty gallons of tepid water. In my panic, I’d shifted the entire contents of the bath, which foamed over the floor, drenching the fuzzy rug and breaking against the walls like a miniature tide.
I barely noticed. I lay on the water-slick tile, sucking harsh gulps of air into my screaming lungs, while Billy hovered around me. He looked a little panicked now, I noticed irrelevantly, right before a hand clenched around my throat.
It took me a second to realize that it was mine.
Fortunately, I have small hands, so the one trying its best to choke the life out of me wasn’t having much success. It might have done a better job if it had had some help, but my other hand was locked, white-knuckled, around the standing towel rack and it wasn’t letting go. I stared at it, dazed and uncomprehending, and my own
wide blue eyes stared back at me from the bright chrome surface.
What the hell?
The question echoed the one in my head, but it hadn’t come from me. It took me a second to realize that Billy had slipped inside my skin, the way he did when feeding. It gave him access to my power, something I’d learned to put up with but never to like. Today, I grabbed him in a metaphysical clench, almost sobbing from relief.
Help!
Help how? he demanded. What’s happening?
Possession. The word stopped me, since my conscious mind hadn’t connected the dots. But my unconscious seemed to be more organized, because that sounded about right. I’d had some experience with possession in recent months because it was one of the Pythia’s chief weapons, but I’d never before had it turned on me.
I decided I wasn’t enjoying the experience.
By what? Billy demanded.
Like I know! Just do something!
Yeah, only what I can do depends a lot on what exactly is—
Billy!
Okay, okay. Don’t worry, Cass. I got this, he told me. Right before he was thrown out of me, across the bathroom and through the wall.
I watched him disappear, a look of almost comical surprise on his face, and belatedly realized who’d had control of my other hand. Because it immediately went numb and joined the choke party at my neck. But amazingly enough, that wasn’t my biggest problem.
There were a limited number of things that could possess a human. Ghosts were one of them, but unless they were welcomed inside like I did for Billy, they had to fight their way through the body’s defenses. And that meant a much-weakened spirit by the time it finally got in—if it did.
But that hadn’t been weak. Whatever it was had exorcized Billy while maintaining its grip on me, and no mere ghost could do that. Which narrowed things down to the Oh, Shit list.
A fact that was demonstrated when the towel rack tipped over and tried to bash my head in. My hand wasn’t on it anymore—no one’s was—but it was going nuts, anyway. It shattered the mirror over the sink, then ricocheted off and slammed into the tub, sweeping the jar of bath salts onto the floor and turning the soggy tile fluorescent pink.