Hunt the Moon cp-5

by Karen Chance

  “Advantage in what?”

  “In the power games you two got going—”

  “This isn’t about power.”

  “The hell it’s not.”

  “It isn’t! I don’t want to order Mircea around. I don’t want to order the Senate or the Circle around. I just want them—”

  “To take you seriously. To listen to you. To be guided by what you tell them. And that translates into power, don’t it?”

  “It translates into doing my job.”

  Marco looked at me for a moment and started to say something, and then he just shook his head. “I thought I’d never meet somebody as bullheaded as the master,” he told me. “But what do you know.”

  “I’m not trying to be stubborn.”

  “I know. It’s like with Mircea; you don’t got to try. It comes naturally.”

  I sighed. “I guess I need to talk to him.”

  I don’t know what my expression looked like, but Marco laughed. “Yeah, but you get a reprieve. He said he’ll call you tonight, late. He’s got a thing all day.”

  “What kind of a thing?”

  He shrugged. “Senate stuff, I guess. You’ll have to ask him.”

  “What about Jonas?” I might as well get one awkward conversation out of the way.

  “He called a while ago, while you were asleep. Said—Hang on.” Marco fished a notebook out of his back pocket and flipped it open. “Said he thought he might know what attacked you last night. He’s not sure, but thinks they could be something called the Spartoi.”

  “Spartans?”

  “No—that’s what I thought, too, but he spelled it for me. And it’s Spartoi. There’s supposed to be five of them, sons of Ares and some dragon—”

  I looked up from shutting off the water. “Dragon?”

  “Yeah, one of the Fey. They can shape-shift, you know?”

  “Yeah,” I said slowly. And that would explain why the damn dragon had been so hard to kill. I’d seen Pritkin and a friend of his, Mac, take on one before, and it hadn’t been anything like that. But then, that other dragon hadn’t been a half god, either.

  “Anything else?” I demanded. “Like how we’re supposed to fight these things?”

  “I think the idea is not to,” Marco said drily. “He said for you to stay in the hotel today. He’s tripled the guards, so nothing should get in here. He needs to do some more research, but he’ll talk to you tomorrow.” Marco flipped over a page in his notebook, but must not have found anything, because he flipped back. “And that’s it.”

  I kind of thought that was enough. Apparently, Marco did, too, because he was looking a little worried, like he was afraid I was about to break down on him again. I wasn’t. I was too pissed off. It looked like the other side didn’t worry about little things like playing fair. One not-so-great clairvoyant against five freaking demigods seemed a little onesided to me. No wonder it had almost gotten Pritkin killed!

  “You okay?” Marco asked.

  “Yeah.” I forced a smile, because none of this was his fault. “I was just thinking—I have all day with nobody bitching at me.”

  He grinned. “Well, I can, if it’ll make you feel better.”

  “You just did!”

  “Naw, that wasn’t bitching. You should hear me when I get going.”

  “I’m afraid.”

  “Hold that thought.” Marco ruffled my hair and left. I stripped and got in the tub, sinking down in the water up to my chin.

  It felt good. It felt better than good, and not just because of my sore muscles. Three days ago, something had tried to drown me in this very tub, and now I was back, relaxing in it. I had a stinky charm around my neck and a vampire probably listening at the door, but still. That was progress.

  My feet floated to the top of the water and I stared at my poor, chipped toenail polish. I thought about redoing it. I thought about making Augustine’s life miserable. I thought about going to the salon and seeing if any of the guys could do something about my hair.

  But none of that had much appeal. It was hard to concentrate on my to-do list with the sword of Damocles hanging over my head. It felt like I was just marking time, waiting for the next attack. And that was getting really old.

  I was sick and tired of playing defense. But to play offense, I needed some help, and I didn’t know where to get it. Or, rather, I did, I just didn’t know how.

  Assuming Jonas’s crazy theories weren’t quite so crazy after all, I needed to find a goddess—fast. And I thought there was a tiny chance that the one I needed was still hanging around. It had been her spell that banished the other gods, after all, so maybe it hadn’t affected her. And maybe she hadn’t wanted to go back to a world filled with a bunch of pissed-off fellow gods. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more it seemed like helping humanity might have stuck her with us. If she had gone home, wouldn’t her fellow gods have forced her to lift the spell by now? They obviously wanted back in pretty badly, and she could hardly have stood up to all of them. And gods were supposed to be immortal, weren’t they? So if she hadn’t gone home, it was at least possible that she was still here.

  But even if that was the case, she hadn’t been seen in three thousand years. And anyone who had hidden that long had probably gotten pretty good at it. Barring a vision with a map, I had no freaking clue where to start looking. And without a clue, I wasn’t likely to get a vision. It was a vicious catch-22.

  I needed somebody who could point me in the right direction.

  I needed somebody who knew about gods.

  I needed a god.

  Fortunately, I knew three of them.

  Chapter Thirty-two

  For a hotel designed to look like hell, Dante’s wasn’t so bad. It had been themed to within an inch of its life by someone who subscribed strongly to the “more is more” concept of decorating. But this was Vegas, where tackiness passed for ambience and vulgarity was all part of the fun.

  But this wasn’t fun. This was just plain sad.

  “You let guests come down here?” I asked, gazing around at what passed for a bus entrance. A few sickly topiaries guarded a cracked cement floor covered with oil and gas stains. There was trash in the corners and dirt on the walls, and the whole place smelled like pee.

  “Nobody comes to Vegas on a bus,” Casanova, the hotel manager, said while feeling around inside his suit coat. It was a pale wheat color, one of his favorites because it set off his Spanish good looks. But it was a little incongruous in this setting, like an Armani model who had taken a wrong turn and ended up on skid row. “At least, no one who stays here.”

  “So why have it at all?”

  “Because some people want to take tours—Grand Canyon, Valley of Fire, Hoover freaking Dam,” he said impatiently. “And they get pissy if there isn’t a place for them to be picked up on-site.”

  “And this is what you came up with?”

  Casanova shot me a look out of sloe-dark eyes that would have been attractive if they’d had a different mind behind them. “If they’re taking a bus, they’re leaving the casino.”

  “So?”

  “So they’re not going be spending any money here.”

  “So screw ’em?”

  “Exactly.”

  His hand emerged with a slim-bodied flashlight, which he shone around. There were fluorescents overhead, but they weren’t on. A spill of late-afternoon daylight leached away part of the gloom on either side of the echoing space, and some electric light spilled down the nonfunctioning escalator behind us. But that still left the main part of the garage a dark cavern.

  “I don’t think anybody’s down here,” I told him, halfway hoping that was true.

  “Oh, they’re here, all right,” he said grimly. “Took my boys the better part of two weeks, but they finally managed to track them. Now come on.”

  I pushed limp blond hair out of my eyes and followed him into the gloom, feeling a trickle of sweat slide down my back. The place was hot as an oven—apparently ai
r-conditioning was another thing bus-loving tourists were denied. And despite the fact that we’d been down here only a few minutes, the back of my blue tee and the waistband on my jean shorts were already soaked.

  “Why do people come to Vegas in summer?” I complained. “It’s the biggest tourist season, which makes no sense. It has to be a hundred twenty degrees out.”

  “The kids are out of school.”

  “But most people don’t take kids here. That whole family-friendly thing kind of fell flat.”

  “Exactly.” His flashlight bounced off the ceiling, as if he thought our prey might be clinging to the rafters like bats. It didn’t help my mood that, for all I knew, they could be. “The kids are out of school, so parents need a break from the little bastards.”

  “It’s a good thing you don’t have children!”

  Nervousness had made my voice harsh, but Casanova didn’t seem to take offense. “One of the best things about being a vampire. Now stop talking and start looking.”

  We edged farther into the darkness and my hands started to sweat, and not just from the heat. He was right about one thing: most of the people flooding into Vegas these days were adults, with fully half of them seniors. Which might explain why the three old crones we were after hadn’t been attracting the attention they deserved.

  Well, that, and the fact that they were ancient demigoddesses with more than one trick up their sleeves. That was what had me clutching the slim black box I carried hard enough to leave my fingers white. It was a magical trap, the kind that had once imprisoned the trio known as the Graeae long enough for their story to fade into legend.

  I suspected that they didn’t want to go back in.

  That was fine with me, because I didn’t want to put them there. I just wanted to ask them some questions, assuming we ever found them. But Casanova wasn’t exactly an altruistic kind of guy, and I’d had to fudge a little on my motivations.

  “I don’t know why you’re being so helpful all of a sudden,” he said suspiciously, as if he’d heard my thoughts.

  “I’m always helpful.”

  “You’re never helpful! You drop problems in my lap all the time and then disappear somewhere and leave me to deal with them.”

  “Name one.”

  “Those blasted kids you swore would be out of here two weeks ago!”

  He was referring to some magical orphans he had less than charitably taken in until we could find other homes for them. The casino had more than a thousand rooms, but the two the kids were occupying preyed on his shriveled little soul. He acted like it was causing him actual pain.

  “Tami is working on it,” I said, talking about their de facto foster mother. “It’s hard to find a house big enough for that many people that’s reasonable to rent.”

  “And why bother when you can stay here and eat me out of house and home?”

  “They don’t eat that much.”

  “In comparison to what? Starving marines?”

  I rolled my eyes. “Well, they’ll be out soon—”

  “That’s what you always say.”

  “—and I’m helping you today, aren’t I?”

  “About damn time, too,” Casanova muttered, stopping to peer into a curbside drain as if he seriously thought someone might have squeezed down there. I looked in along with him until my brain conjured up a memorable scene from It, and I shied back nervously. He glanced over his shoulder, an annoyed frown creasing those handsome features.

  “What is wrong with you?”

  “Nothing.” I didn’t really think there were any homicidal clowns down there—or any ancient goddesses, either—but you never knew. This was Dante’s. Crazy was what we had for breakfast when we ran out of Corn Flakes.

  “Good, because this is all your fault,” he complained. “You are not going to come up with another reason not to help me.”

  I didn’t say anything, because technically, he was right. I’d sprung the gals from jail, and nobody seemed to care that it had been an accident. Least of all Casanova, whose beloved casino had become their favorite stomping ground.

  “Why are you so interested in getting them out of here?” I asked, as we moved onto a loading dock. “They’ve been out for almost six weeks, and the worst thing I’ve seen them do is rip apart a slot machine.” And anyone who had ever played the one-armed bandits on the Strip could certainly sympathize with that.

  “Well, one little thing would be that they keep breaking into the upper-level suites,” he said acidly. “The Consul came out of her bedroom the other day to find them swimming in the pool on her balcony!”

  I grinned.

  “It’s not funny!”

  Considering that it had once been my balcony, before she’d pulled rank and kicked me out, I kind of disagreed. “Did they eat all her food?”

  “There wasn’t any food. But they drank all the booze and beat up the guards she sent to remove them. They were there almost three hours before they went off to terrorize someone else. She wants them gone!”

  “And God forbid anybody should inconvenience her,” I said sourly.

  To my surprise, Casanova agreed. “I’m losing money every day that the damn Senate stays in residence. They’re using half of my suites—for which I’ve yet to see a dime in payment—co-opting my staff, taking over the conference rooms and eating me out of house and home!”

  “This is only temporary. They’ll be gone soon.”

  “Yes, leaving me with a trashed hotel, a ruined conference schedule and debts out my ears!”

  “Mircea will understand—”

  “Mircea doesn’t give a shit about this hotel,” Casanova said viciously. “Mircea cares about the damn war. If I drown in red ink, it’s all the same to him. He writes it off as a tax loss and transfers me to some dead-end job where I can molder away for another century or so.” He suddenly rounded on me, shining the light in my eyes and making me wince. “And that’s not going to happen, you understand? This is my one shot at the big time. Those old crones aren’t going to ruin it for me, and neither are you!”

  “I’m not trying to—” I began, but he was already pushing forward again, muttering something indistinct in Spanish.

  I scowled and started to follow, when a grizzled head popped out of nowhere in front of me. It was hanging upside down, the long, gray curls streaming earthward like moss on a plantation. It was Deino, the one who had always had a soft spot for me—at least until I started hunting her.

  Like all the girls, she had a scrunched-up dried apple of a face with enough wrinkles to make a shar-pei jealous. It was a little hard to read the expression that was probably buried under there somewhere. But she wasn’t smiling.

  Her chin dipped toward the trap I still clutched, and a few more wrinkles appeared on the weather-beaten face. “Um,” I said awkwardly.

  It was hard to know what to say, since I’d been caught red-handed. And how much English she understood was problematic, anyway. But it didn’t matter, because before I could figure it out, she suddenly leaned over and kissed me on the cheek.

  “Heh,” she said, and popped back out.

  And so did the box.

  I whipped my head around, but I didn’t see anything. Except for Casanova looking behind some stacked crates. “Uh, we may have a problem,” I told him nervously.

  “What’s wrong now?” he demanded, brushing at a cobweb that had dared to sully his formerly pristine linen.

  I didn’t answer, because I was staring at another ancient crone who was prowling toward him over the tops of the crates. Her movements weren’t remotely old, ladylike or, for that matter, particularly human. Enyo had gotten her hair cut, I noticed irrelevantly, right before Casanova winked out of existence.

  For a moment, I just stood there while she bared toothless gums at me and cackled. Then she held up the black box and shook it suggestively. There was no doubt at all what had happened to the vampire.

  “Oh, shit,” I said. Enyo cackled again and then paused, before holdi
ng the box out like a gift. I eyed it suspiciously. “You’re giving him to me?”

  She nodded, grinning like a fiend. I suspected a trap, but, then, if the girls had wanted me in that box, they could have managed it easily enough. So maybe they were just trying to teach Casanova a lesson.

  I tentatively took a step forward, then two. I put out a hand and almost had my fingers on it when Enyo flicked her wrist, tossing it over my head to Pemphredo, the third member of the trio. She was crouched on top of a nearby van, wearing grizzled pigtails and a “Vegas Made Me Do It” T-shirt, and peering at me out of the one eye they all shared.

  She watched me silently for a moment, then slowly held out the box. Like I was actually going to fall for that again. “No, I don’t want to play,” I told her. “Really.”

  That was too bad, because it looked like I was in the minority.

  “I want him back,” I said. Pemphredo shot me a look. “Okay, maybe not actually want, but you know how it is.”

  She tilted her head inquiringly. Clearly, she didn’t know.

  That was a problem, because I didn’t, either.

  “See, it’s like this,” I said, trying to come up with a reason why they should let him go. “He’s annoying.”

  The girls nodded. This, apparently, we could all agree on.

  “And . . . and obviously he had no right to try to trap you like that. I mean, it’s not like you’ve been doing anything wrong.”

  More nods.

  “It’s just . . . um . . .” I stopped, trying to recall why I wanted the guy back. I thought about it while they all waited politely. I gave up. “Look, I don’t really have a good reason for you to give him back,” I said honestly. “He’s a crabby, self-centered, egotistical, money-grubbing snob. His own employees don’t even like him much. But it could be worse. If you cart him off somewhere, they’ll have to get a new manager. And he might be a lot more of a hard-ass.”

  They exchanged glances.

  I didn’t know if that was a good sign or not, but I decided to push ahead anyway. “And if you let him out, I’ll talk to him for you. Maybe if he gives you a suite, you can promise not to go breaking into the others anymore?”