Hunt the Moon cp-5

by Karen Chance

  “You still feel like this, don’t you?” I asked, in shock. “What I’m feeling now—all the time?”

  “Not all the time, no. It was almost constant for more than a decade—”

  “A decade?” He shot me a glance, and for some reason, it was amused. Because clearly, the man was insane. “How—”

  “I am ashamed to say that I became rather addicted to a number of substances during that time, in an attempt to . . . to survive, I suppose you would say. It didn’t help much, nothing did, but the struggle became easier over time, as the demon part of me became weaker. And I obtained an outlet for my energies in hunting down those who had done as I had—only on purpose.”

  I didn’t say anything for a moment. I watched the sand turn mauve and crimson and honey as the night slowly retreated before the sun. And thought about what it would be like to have a part of yourself literally starving to death and yet unable to die. And to know that if you gave in, even once, to the constant, gnawing hunger, you would forever forfeit your freedom.

  “Your father is a son of a bitch,” I said, with feeling.

  “I wouldn’t argue the point,” he said drily. “However, from his perspective, he feels cheated. He spent a considerable amount of time over the centuries trying and failing to have a physical child. And when he finally managed it, against all the odds, the result was not . . . quite what he’d expected.”

  “Too damned bad! A lot of parents have children who aren’t exactly what they thought they would be. But they learn to love them anyway.”

  “Most parents aren’t demon lords. And love was never the issue.”

  “It should have been.”

  “For someone who deals in it, or its physical manifestation, as much as my father, he knows astonishingly little about it.”

  Pritkin was quiet for a few moments, and I knew I should probably drop it. But he opened up so rarely, I fully expected tomorrow to come and the lid to be clamped down again, tight. If I didn’t ask now, I might never have a chance. And it wasn’t like the guy was shy. If he didn’t want to talk, he’d tell me. Probably pretty bluntly.

  “Is that why you’re a health nut now?” I asked. “To make up for those early days?”

  “No, it was more an attempt to compensate slightly for the power loss I had sustained when I stopped feeding.”

  “What power loss?”

  “As I told you, I had never merged with other demons, never tried to enhance what I was born with, as it would have merely made me more useful to my father. And him that much less likely to let me go. But much of my strength had nonetheless always come from . . . my other half, if you like. And once it was incapacitated, I had to find other ways to compensate.”

  “Like the potions.”

  He nodded. “I was never greatly interested in them before. But they became a way of balancing the power loss. And I find making them to be . . . calming. Some of the more deadly require utter concentration, and I discovered that when I was focused on something so completely, it helped to curb the hunger. Do you not agree?”

  I didn’t know what he meant for a second, until I realized—the flashback was gone. My breathing was normal, my heart rate steady, my hands still sweaty, but only as a leftover. I relaxed back against the seat with a sigh.

  “Thank you.” It was heartfelt.

  “One learns coping mechanisms over time—”

  “Or one goes insane?”

  “Some would say I already am.”

  “They’d be wrong.”

  We slid to a stop at a crossroads, and Pritkin turned slightly in his seat to look at me. “And how would you know?”

  We were close enough that I could see his long, sandy eyelashes, almost close enough to count the whiskers of the end-of-day beard shading his jaw. He hadn’t had a chance to torture his hair yet, and it was looking soft and oddly flat, and was blowing slightly in the breeze coming across the windshield. It made him look younger somehow, gentler, sweeter....

  I mentally rolled my eyes at myself. Yeah, sure.

  Pritkin was annoying, stubborn, secretive, impatient and rude. He had the tact of a Parris Island drill sergeant and the charm of a barbed-wire fence. He regularly made me want to slap him and other people want to shoot him, and that was without even trying. I’d probably yelled at him more than anybody else in my entire life, and I’d known him less than two months.

  And yet he was also loyal and honest and brave and weirdly kind. Most of the time, I didn’t understand him at all. But I knew one thing.

  “I grew up with some genuinely crazy men,” I told him harshly. “You’re not one.”

  “Then what am I?”

  I pushed a strand of wildly waving hair out of his eyes. It just wouldn’t behave for shit, would it? Kind of reminded me of the man.

  “Pritkin,” I said simply. It sort of summed up the whole, crazy package.

  His lips twitched. “Do you know, no one else calls me that?”

  “What about the guys in the Corps?”

  “They usually call me by my given name if they know me, or by my rank if they do not.”

  I thought about that. For some reason, it made me happy. “Good.”

  He shook his head, refusing to let the smile out. I don’t know why. Like it might damage something.

  “Where do you want to go?”

  I sighed. “Back to the suite.”

  “Are you sure? We can make other arrangements, and there’s the fact that . . .”

  “That what?”

  “That Jonas won’t like it.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “Does it matter?”

  He did smile slightly then, and put the car in gear. “Now you sound like a Pythia.”

  Chapter Thirty-one

  I guess I fell asleep in the car, because I didn’t remember getting back. Or getting into pink-striped shorty pj’s. Or falling headfirst into bed. But I must have. Because I woke up tangled in my own sheets, the pillow half over my head and sunlight leaking in through a crack in the drapes.

  I rolled over, feeling groggy and thickheaded and gritty-eyed and yucky. It was so much like yesterday that, for a minute, I thought it had all been a dream. But even my dreams weren’t that bizarre. And then I tried to move, and immediately knew it had been real enough.

  Because I got the charley horse from hell in my left calf.

  I didn’t shriek—it wasn’t that loud. But to a vampire’s ears, it must have been loud enough, because the bedroom door burst open and Marco rushed in, gun in hand and face pretty damn scary. He looked around wildly, I suppose for something to shoot, and when he didn’t find anything, he grabbed me.

  “What is it? What’s wrong?”

  I stared up at him, still half-asleep and disoriented from the pain, and didn’t say anything.

  “Cassie!”

  “Charley horse,” I finally managed to gasp, only it didn’t seem to do any good. Because he just stared at me, uncomprehending, as the room quickly filled up with vamps.

  And then he blinked. “Did you say charley horse?”

  I nodded tearfully.

  Marco said something profane and shoved his gun into the small of his back. “Get outta here,” he told the others, who melted away into the shadows, looking absurdly grateful.

  He sighed and sat on the edge of the bed. “Where does it hurt?”

  “Everywhere.”

  It wasn’t an exaggeration. It felt like my entire body had whiplash. I was beginning to understand why Fred had said he hated lasso spells. Of course, the one that had made me feel like shit had also saved my life, but that wasn’t all that comforting at the moment.

  I held up my left leg, which was cramped so badly I couldn’t even straighten it out. Marco’s big hand smoothed gently over the muscle, and then he applied a little pressure. I gasped in pain and then in wonder, as the muscle suddenly released. It still hurt like a bitch, a dull throbbing that mirrored the racing of my heart. But at least I could breathe.

  “You know,
I’ve lived a long time,” he told me, massaging the calf more firmly now. “And I met a lot of people. But I ain’t never met a woman made me want to beat her to death as often as you.”

  “Sorry,” I choked out, and tried to pull away, but his hand held me firm.

  “You’re not going anywhere,” Marco said. “Not until we have a little chat.”

  But he didn’t chat; he didn’t talk at all. He just continued the long, soothing strokes with those big fingers, so clumsy-looking but so deft in movement. And after a few moments, I felt my body slowly relax. “You’re good at that.”

  “Had a lot of practice.”

  “Really? Where?” I asked, less because I wanted to know than to postpone the bitching-out I was about to get. Usually, I held my own pretty well, even with the vamps. But right now, it didn’t feel like I had anything left.

  Marco shot me a look that said he knew damned well what I was doing, but then he shrugged. “The lanista I worked for had me ready the men for combat. They fought better if they were loose, or so he thought.”

  “Lanista?”

  “Guy who owned a bunch of gladiators.”

  “I thought you were in the army.”

  A bushy black eyebrow rose, but he didn’t ask. “I was. Worked and scraped my way up to centurion, just in time to see the empire crumble around me. I was almost dead after a battle, when some men dug me out of the blood and the muck and carried me off. Turns out they worked for a vampire with an entrepreneurial streak, and he liked ex-army.”

  He added a little extra pressure, and I moaned, but not because it hurt. That leg felt better now, although it just highlighted how sore the rest of me was. It was like I hadn’t been able to concentrate on all my other aches and pains until the big one got taken care of. And now they were all clamoring for help.

  Marco just shook his head at me. “Turn over.”

  I turned over, and those big hands got to work on my back. I stifled a whimper in the pillow, because Marco’s idea of a massage bore no resemblance whatsoever to the relaxing spa variety. There was no lavender oil, no soothing music, no hot towels. Just an all-out assault on cramped muscles, until they cowered in surrender and turned to Jell-O.

  “Why did this vampire like ex-army?” I gasped after a few minutes, mostly to give myself something else to think about.

  “Fortunatus was in the business of providing gladiators for the rich. Politicos who wanted to play up to the crowds, or fat cats trying to outdo each other in private events. The best money came from fights to the death, but it cost him a lot to train a gladiator well enough to put on a good show. Having him die in a death match one of the first times he fought wasn’t good business, even at the prices he charged.”

  “So he picked people who were already trained?”

  “No, he picked people who were already trained, and then he made ’em vampires. That way, the crowds could watch us ‘die’ over and over, but he didn’t have to constantly replenish his stock. We—” He stopped when I turned over and stared at him. “It was a long time ago.”

  “That’s horrible!”

  “That’s life. If his men hadn’t seen me on that battlefield, hadn’t decided that a centurion was just what the boss had ordered, I never woulda made it. I almost didn’t anyway. Took him two months to nurse me back to health so he could kill me.”

  I swallowed. “I hope you weren’t with him long.”

  “A century, give or take.”

  “A century?”

  “Until the games were outlawed.” Marco pushed me back down and started on my shoulders. “Christianity didn’t approve, maybe ’cause a few too many of their people had ended up in ’em, and not by choice. You know?”

  I nodded.

  “And once it started to spread, the politicians stopped financing matches, because they started to cost them votes’stead of the other way around. And then the emperor converted and passed a law against it, and while some people still held them illegally, there weren’t enough to make it worth Fortunatus’s time. He traded me to another master who needed a bodyguard, and I just got shuffled around after that.”

  “And ended up with Mircea.”

  “You know the score. Gotta belong to someone.”

  “But you’re a senior master.” I pointed out. “You could have a court of your own, if you wanted.”

  “Yeah. And have all the expense and the headaches and the diplomatic shit to deal with, and still have to answer to somebody. Everybody’s the same; can’t wait to move up, to hit fifth or fourth or third level, and strike out on their own. Only to find out the same thing.”

  “And what’s that?”

  His hands stilled on my back. “That there’s no freedom in our world, Cassie. If I left Mircea, I’d have to ally with some other high-level master in order to survive. And then I’d be dragged into his life, his fights, just like now. Everybody answers to somebody; everybody has restrictions they got to put up with. Even senators. Even Mircea.”

  I was starting to see why Marco had been willing to get on this topic. I sighed and buried my head in the pillow. “Even Pythias?”

  “Everybody takes orders from somebody,” he repeated. “Mircea takes ’em from the Consul, and believe me, sometimes, he really don’t like it. But he does it.”

  I turned over and regarded Marco tiredly. “Yes, and why does he do it?”

  Marco frowned. “It’s his job.”

  “And she’s his boss, his superior.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And there’s your answer.”

  “There’s what answer?”

  I sighed. “Mircea does what the Consul orders because he’s her servant.”

  “Yes?”

  “But I am not his.”

  I got up and went to the bathroom.

  Of course, Marco followed. “You are not his.”

  “His girlfriend, yes. His servant, no. I can’t be and do my job.”

  “You’ve done it pretty well so far. What the hell do you think Mircea’s gonna ask you to do?”

  “I don’t know. But that’s not the point, is it?” I started running hot water in the tub.

  “Then what is the point?”

  “That he can ask whatever he wants. I’ll probably even do it most of the time. I’d have done it last night, if it had been a request. I’d had the day from hell; I really didn’t want to go anywhere. But it wasn’t a request; it was an order. And if I start taking orders from a senator—any senator—I may as well forget having anyone take me seriously.”

  “The Consul takes Mircea seriously.”

  “As a valued servant, yes. But she knows that, when she pushes, he’ll do what she wants. He owes his job to her, so he can never be truly impartial. But I have to be, or the Circle will ignore me as a vampire pawn, and the Senate will ignore me because they can order me around, and it’ll be . . . the Tony Syndrome all over again. And I won’t live like that. I just won’t!”

  Marco sat down on the side of the tub, making the porcelain creak. “What’s the Tony Syndrome?”

  Somebody had restocked the bath salts, and I threw half the jar into the water. “Most seers see both sides of life,” I told him. “They see the baby somebody has been hoping for, or the long-overdue promotion, or the love of their life, right around the corner. It helps balance out the bad stuff, the stuff nobody wants to see. The earthquakes and the bomb plots and the fires and the car crashes. But I never had that balance. I don’t see the good stuff. I never did.”

  “That’s rough.”

  “It’s . . . exhausting. It’s depressing. It keeps you from enjoying a lot of life because, even when you’re having a good day, suddenly you’ll see someone else’s pain, someone else’s grief. And the record scratches, you know?”

  He nodded.

  “Eventually, I learned how not to see things. But for a long time, I didn’t have that ability. The only way I could deal was by telling myself that the stuff I saw was in the future, and that maybe some of it coul
d be averted. That maybe I could change things, at least for a few people. And Tony promised me he’d get the word out.”

  “And he lied.”

  “Of course he lied. But I was a kid and I believed him, maybe because I wanted to believe him. When I finally figured it out and confronted him, he just shrugged and told me that there was more profit in tragedy.”

  “That sounds like that fat little weasel.” Marco regarded me narrowly. “You’re saying you expect the Senate to go around averting tragedies?”

  “No. But if I see something coming, something potentially disastrous for our world, I expect them to listen to me. I expect them to trust me. And right now, I don’t know that they respect me enough to do that.”

  Marco sighed and looked at me, his elbows resting on massive thighs. “Look, I’m gonna tell you something, and if you repeat it, I’ll deny it. But the master shouldn’t have given that order. He ought to know you well enough by now to know what was gonna happen. But he did it anyway, because he’s scared and he’s stressed and he don’t always see so clear where you are concerned. But that don’t mean he don’t respect you.”

  “Well, it sure doesn’t mean that he does!” I said, swirling the soap around, a little more forcefully than necessary.

  “He talks about you a lot in the family. He’s proud of you—anybody can see that.”

  “Anybody but me.”

  “He may not say it to you, but that’s the truth.”

  “Then why doesn’t he say it to me? Right now, I feel like . . . like one of those floozies you talked about—”

  “I never used the word ‘floozy’—”

  “—who is supposed to hang around, shopping and doing her nails and waiting for her lord and master to show up! That’s how he treats me, so why shouldn’t I believe that’s how he sees me?”

  “Because he probably does like the thought of you shopping and doing your nails instead of the kind of shit you usually get up to! And because he’s a politician and don’t want to give up an advantage.”