by Karen Chance
“He’s been in the Corps for seventeen years,” Pritkin said.
“And mages can’t be bribed?”
“He also comes from a wealthy, prominent family. He has no need—”
“That guy?” the blond asked incredulously.
“He didn’t dress like it,” the redhead sniffed.
“Not everyone cares about such things,” Pritkin said.
The redhead looked him over. “Obviously.”
“Blackmail, then,” Tan Jacket put in. “Maybe somebody had something on him.”
“There will be an investigation,” Pritkin told him. “But his actions speak for him. If—”
“His actions? He tried to kill her!”
“He tried to save her. Not only did he attempt to eat the chocolates whenever he was lucid enough, but he also slowed down his reflexes in the fight, skewed his aim. And when she ran, he threw a nonlethal spell instead of a fireball. He fought it every step of the way—”
“And we know this how? Because he told you?” Tan Jacket interrupted.
“We know this because she’s still alive!” Pritkin snapped. “Essentially, he and Cassie were both fighting it. He bought her time, and she used it, brilliantly.”
He bent over and topped off my coffee cup. Pritkin hadn’t shaved for a few days, and I put my hand to his cheek. “Fuzzy,” I told him seriously.
He sighed.
“I don’t understand why this thing needed to hitch a ride in the first place,” the redhead said. “If it’s powerful enough to possess a war mage—”
“Anyone can be possessed if his guard is down,” Pritkin said curtly. “And no one’s is up every minute.”
“It didn’t possess one of us,” the vamp pointed out snottily.
“Vampires are more difficult,” Pritkin admitted. “You can be possessed, but it takes considerably more energy than possessing a human. The creature might not have had the strength to manage it and also force you to attack.”
“But why did it need someone else to attack at all? If it’s such a big, bad evil entity, why not go after her itself?”
“It already tried that—” Pritkin said.
“It tried to possess her, not simply attack her. If it can get past the wards, why not go for an all-out assault?”
Pritkin shrugged. “In Faerie, it doubtless would have. But outside its own world, its power is weakened.”
“We still don’t know that it’s Fey,” the vamp said.
“Yes, we do,” a new voice said hoarsely.
I looked up to find a slim blond figure standing in the doorway to the kitchen. For a frozen second, I looked at him and he looked at me, and then I screamed and threw my coffee, which hit him square in the groin. And I guess that didn’t feel too good because he screamed, too, and for a minute there was a whole lot of screaming going on.
Then Pritkin put a heavy hand on my shoulder and I belatedly noticed that Dryden was flanked by a couple of vamps, each of whom had one of his arms. It looked less like they were restraining him than holding him up. And then I noticed other things, like the fact that his eyes were back to blue and his nose was all bloody and he was pale and shaky and his nice suit was torn and dripping coffee.
He smelled like hot sauce.
“Sorry,” I told him.
Dryden didn’t say anything. He just stood there and shook at me.
Pritkin handed him some paper towels. “How do you know?”
Dryden swallowed and dabbed at his crotch. “My . . . my great-grandmother was Fey,” he said shakily. “Somehow, it knew that. It tried to talk to me—”
“About what?”
“I’m . . . not sure. I—”
“You don’t know the language?”
“A little, but—”
“Then take a guess!”
“That’s what I’m trying to do, if you’ll give me a chance!” he snapped, tossing the wet paper towels in the trash. “I only caught maybe one word in ten, but I think . . . I think it was trying to apologize.”
“Apologize?” The redheaded vamp sneered. “For what?”
Dryden scowled and flailed a hand angrily. “For this? For almost getting me killed? For almost making me—” he broke off and glanced at me, and his lips tightened. “I don’t know. I didn’t get that much. Just something like ‘they made me do it,’ and that she was afraid of them—”
“She?” the vamp asked.
“Yes. It . . . She . . . I think it was female. It was using the female form of address, anyway. Like I told you, my grasp of the language isn’t good and that goes double for the High Court dialect—”
“High Court?” That was Pritkin.
“It’s the version of the language spoken at court—”
“I know what it is,” Pritkin snapped. “How did you recognize it?”
“Because my grandmother spoke it!”
“And your grandmother was?”
“A Selkie noblewoman.”
Pritkin cursed. “Dark Fey.”
The mage didn’t deign to respond to that. He looked at me and took a deep breath. “Before I left, I just wanted to say . . . thank you.” It came out a little strangled.
I thought about it for a moment. “You’re welcome?”
“Do you know what I’m thanking you for?”
Damn. I’d hoped he wouldn’t ask that. It couldn’t be for lunch, since we’d never had any.
And I guessed we wouldn’t now, what with a possessed fridge and all.
“No?” I said, figuring I had a fifty-fifty shot.
He knelt in front of my chair, or maybe his legs collapsed; I don’t know. He wasn’t looking so good. “I know what that is,” he said hoarsely, nodding at my wrist, where my bracelet of interlocking knives lay hard and cold against my skin. “It’s my job at the Corps to disenchant confiscated dark objects and . . . I’ve seen one like it before.”
His eyes searched my face. He seemed to be waiting on some kind of response. So I nodded.
“You could have killed me,” he said. And then he kissed my hand. “Thank you.”
He just stayed like that for a while, head down, on one knee, like a supplicant in front of a priest. Or like a guy making a marriage proposal. I started to get nervous. Because the last thing I needed was another one of those.
I decided to let him down easy.
“You seem like a nice guy,” I told him. “I mean, you know, when you’re not trying to kill me. I just . . .” I sighed and came out with it. “I just really don’t want to date you.”
He suddenly looked up. His eyes were wet, but his smile was blinding. “Then it seems I have something else to thank you for.”
Chapter Twenty-one
According to the alarm clock on my nightstand, I slept for seven hours, despite already having slept for most of the day. It was almost midnight when I rolled out, groggy and thickheaded and gritty-eyed and yucky. And saw a man in the corner of my room.
I didn’t scream, because the man was a) sitting down, b) reading a paper and c) had the golden-eyed glow typical of Mircea’s masters. I just snatched up the sheet, because I’d been too high to worry about pj’s, and scanned the room for more. But I didn’t see any, unless they were hiding in the closet or under the bed.
And wasn’t that just a fun thought?
“What are you doing here?” I demanded after a moment.
He didn’t bother to reply, just flipped over another page.
“You’re not supposed to be in my room!”
Nothing.
Talking to a vamp who’s not in the mood is one of life’s biggest time wasters, so I didn’t try. I also didn’t attempt to budge him, because master vamps go wherever they damn well please. I just wrapped the sheet around me and dragged myself off to the bathroom.
I stood in the cool air for a minute while my eyes adjusted to the brilliant light on all that tile. But even after they did, I still stayed where I was, one hand on the doorknob, like I was waiting for something. It finally occ
urred to me that I was expecting another freak-out, only my body didn’t seem interested. It felt chilly and kind of achy and kind of high. But not particularly panicked. I gave it a little longer, until I started to feel stupid; then I dropped the sheet and checked out the damage.
It wasn’t all that bad. Other than putting a new bruise on my ass and a lump on my head, I’d come out pretty good this round. Whatever is trying to kill me is obviously going to have to step up its game, I thought viciously, and looked in the mirror.
And swore.
I might not have been too beaten up, but I still looked like hell, especially my hair. Not only was it still faintly green, but it was now missing a large chunk. I pushed it around for a while with clumsy fingers, but nothing seemed to help. I tried parting it different, but the only way that kind of worked looked suspiciously like a middle-aged guy’s comb-over. And it still left me looking like something had taken a bite out of my head.
Damn it all! Not so long ago, my hair had been a shimmering red-gold wave that cascaded down my back like a cloak. It had been my one claim to real beauty, and I’d cried like a baby when I had to cut it while on the run from Tony, because it was too recognizable.
I didn’t cry this time. I was too freaking mad. I just brushed my teeth, washed my face and dragged my big wad of fabric back to the bedroom.
The vamp still didn’t say anything, and neither did I. I also didn’t turn on a light, which was stupid, because he could probably see about the same either way. But it made me feel more naked to have it on, which was why it took five minutes of hunting and grumbling and falling and cursing around in the closet to find what I wanted.
I finally emerged with an old Georgia Bulldogs baseball cap, a pair of silky blue track shorts and a faded pink tank top from my comfort-clothes stash. None of it matched, but right then, I didn’t give a damn. I hauled everything back to the bathroom, and after dressing and combing and slapping on some mascara, I decided I looked mostly normal.
If normal people had green hair and wore hats indoors.
The vamp folded his paper and got to his feet when I started out the door, even though there was another guard just outside. He was leaning against the wall, smoking a cigarette, looking bored and butt-sore. He didn’t say anything and neither did I. I just padded across the hall to the living room, because stomping doesn’t work so well in bare feet and on carpet.
The rest of the crew was in the lounge, playing cards. Of course they were. I felt like asking them if that’s how they’d envisioned spending eternity, but I had other things on my mind.
Marco was sitting at the card table, doing one of his fancy shuffles. He looked up and a smile quirked at the corner of his mouth. “What?” I demanded.
“You and the bulldog got the same expression.”
“Very funny! What the hell—”
He held up a hand. “First of all, how you doing?”
“I’m fine! Or I would be if—”
“You sure? We got the doc on standby.”
I scowled. That was where that sadist could stay, too. “No, thanks. And can we—”
“You hungry? ’Cause we got Chinese coming.”
“Marco—”
“Not from room service; from that little place around the corner. Kung pao chicken, ginger beef—”
“Marco!”
He sighed and gave it up. “I told the master this was how you were gonna react. But you gotta see that it makes sense, at least until we figure this thing out.”
“It does not make sense! There’s nobody in the apartment but us, and the creature can’t possess a vamp—”
“We don’t know that.”
“—or it would have already done it instead of hanging around the foyer, waiting for Mr. Mage to show up.”
“Mr. Mage,” one of the vamps said. “I like that. I’m gonna start calling all of ’em that.”
“I can think of a few things to call them,” another one muttered.
“And if you think it can possess a vamp, this makes even less sense,” I pointed out. “You just left me alone in my room with one for hours!”
“You’re right,” he told me.
“I am?”
“Yeah. We obviously need two.”
“Marco!”
He held up placating hands. “Just kidding.”
“This isn’t funny. It’s like being a freaking prisoner!”
He started to answer, but the phone rang. It wasn’t the main line, but a black cell phone sitting on the card table. Marco picked it up, glanced at the readout, scowled and hung up. He looked at me. “Better than being a freaking corpse.”
“Didn’t you hear me? This isn’t going to help!”
“It will if that thing goes after you. It already possessed you once—”
“And won’t again.” I pulled out Pritkin’s little amulet. He’d left me another one before he took the mage off to the Corps’ version of a hospital. It might be stinky, but I liked it a lot better than the alternative.
“That only works on Fey,” Marco pointed out, wrinkling his nose.
“Which this thing is.”
“Which this thing may be. That ain’t been decided yet.”
“It spoke in a Fey dialect—”
“And demons don’t know that shit? If it’s trying to throw us off, of course it’s gonna pretend to be something else.”
“Or maybe it really was trying to communicate.”
“For what? To apologize?” Marco’s tone said clearly what he thought about that. He dealt another round. “Anyway, until we get some solid proof of what we’re dealing with here, the master don’t want to take chances.”
“That isn’t his call. It’s my life!”
“Yeah, well. You’re gonna have to take that up with him.”
I put my hands on my hips. “Fine, I will. Get him on the phone.”
“Can’t.”
“And why not?”
“He’s in a high-level meeting—”
“How convenient.”
“—and told me not to disturb him until morning.”
“Then get a note to him.”
“That would be disturbing.”
“Damn it, Marco!”
The phone rang. He glanced at it, sighed and put it back down again. “Look, it’s only for a little while—”
“Oh, please!” I couldn’t believe he was trying that. “Sell it to someone else. I know how these things work!”
He took his smelly cigar out of his mouth and rested it on the ashtray. “And how do they work?”
“I go along with this now, and I’ll have Mutt and Jeff here dogging my every step for the rest of my damn life!”
The taller vamp looked at the shorter one. “Guess that makes you Jeff.”
“I ain’t no Jeff. He was a crazy little bugger.”
“Well, Mutt was an idiot.”
“They were both idiots, and shut up,” Marco told them. He looked at me. “You know I don’t have any say over this. But you’re already up now, so it don’t matter anyway. And you can talk to the master in the morning.”
I just stood there for a moment, debating options. Because giving in, even for a few hours, wasn’t smart. Give a vamp an inch and he wouldn’t take a mile; he’d take the whole damn continent.
My stomach growled.
“Kung pao chicken,” Marco wheedled.
The bastard.
Mircea and I clearly needed to have a conversation, but I also needed to eat. And only one was currently available. And I was starving.
“Sweet-and-sour pork—”
“Oh, shut up,” I told him.
He grinned.
I sighed. “You order egg rolls?”
Marco spread his hands. “Please.”
I decided that I’d bargain better on a full stomach, and swiped a beer. He dealt me in, and I grabbed a chair before looking at my cards hopefully. Nothing—not even a pair of twos.
Typical.
The phone rang.
“Can’t you turn that off?” one of the guards groused. He was an attractive blond I didn’t recognize. Probably one of the new guys.
“It’s my private line. Could be important,” Marco told him tersely.
“Your private line? How the hell—”
“I don’t know, but I’m getting it changed tomorrow. Just play your cards.”
“I would if I ever got any worth a damn,” the guy muttered.
They anted up. I folded. The phone rang.
“Damn it, Marco! I can’t play with that thing going off every five seconds!”
“Then don’t play,” Marco told him.
“Just tell the mage to go fuck himself—”
“What mage?” I asked, and everyone froze.
“Thank you,” Marco told the guy viciously.
The phone rang. Marco had left it on the table, and it had jittered its way over to me. So I picked it up. “Don’t,” he said.
I flipped it open and checked the readout. PRITKIN. I shot Marco a look and put the phone to my ear. “Hel—”
“Goddamnit, Marco, you’re supposed to be—” He cut off abruptly. “Cassie?”
“What is it?” I asked, feeling my heart rate speed up.
“There’s no emergency—not right now,” he said, apparently hearing the alarm in my voice. “But I need to see you. I’m coming up.”
“The hell you are,” Marco said, grabbing back the phone. “I already told you—”
“I want to see him,” I said, crossing my arms.
Marco looked at me, clearly frustrated. “You need to rest!”
“I’m playing cards and drinking beer. How is that not resting?”
“You were gonna go back to bed soon.”
“I slept all day!”
The doorbell rang.
Marco got to his feet, looking conflicted.
“What are you going to do—bar the door?” I asked, also standing up.
“I got orders,” he said defensively.
“Mircea told you to lock Pritkin out?”
“Just for tonight. He don’t want the mage here while you’re vulnerable.”
“He’s my bodyguard! When I’m vulnerable is when I need him!”
“Look, you really gotta—”