by Karen Chance
I regarded it warily. “Does Augustine know you bought it for me?”
She grinned. “Worried?”
“A little.” I had enough problems without my skin turning blue or whatever he’d dreamed up this time.
“Relax. He thought it was for me.”
“And you think it’ll fit?” Sal was three inches taller than me and built like Mae West.
“Just try it,” she prompted. “It’s the new thing.”
It didn’t look like a new thing. It looked like an old thing: a plain slip dress and jacket made out of coarse brown fabric. But it had been a nice thought. I pulled it on over the bathing suit and turned to look in the mirror.
I blinked a couple of times, because what I was seeing didn’t make sense. I was suddenly wearing an elegant little cover-up in a deep blue that complemented one of the bands in my suit. It had a drawstring neckline, a mesh body and flippy little skirt. It was actually cute.
“It’s called a wardrobe-in-one,” Sal told me, opening more packages. An origami lion prowled to the edge of the bed before leaping off. It was soon followed by a paper eagle, which unfolded foot-long wings and soared to the top of the dresser.
“I don’t get it,” I told her, watching the dragon emerge from under the bed, a large dust bunny in its claws.
“The idea is an outfit that can morph along with the wearer’s needs, allowing you to go from work to shopping to evening with no need to change clothes.” She ran the hem of the cover-up through her fingers, her eyes narrowing. “I thought he was using some kind of glamourie, but this actually feels like different fabric.”
“It’s really cool,” I told her, and then bit my lip. “It must have been a lot, though.” She’d already bought me several outfits, none of which had been cheap. And it wasn’t like I could return the favor. I assumed that the Pythia usually received some sort of salary, but—surprise—I hadn’t been getting a check. And Mircea’s shiny new credit card was staying on his dresser where it belonged.
“We hicks have to stick together. Especially around here.” She shot a glance out the door. At first, I didn’t see anyone there, but then I noticed the edge of a finely pressed pant leg peeping past the door frame. One of Mircea’s masters was loitering in the hall.
He wasn’t there to eavesdrop—he could have done that from across the apartment—and besides, he’d stuck a leg out so we’d know he was there. Why he wanted us to know, I had no idea. But I could feel my cheeks reddening as my blood pressure soared. Maybe Mircea didn’t mind tripping over people all day, but I hadn’t had five hundred years to get used to it. And it was getting old fast.
I stomped over to the door and poked my head out. And immediately wished I hadn’t. It was Nicu, the one master I’d already had a run-in with. Of course.
“Yes? Can I help you with something?” I asked.
Those flat gold eyes met mine and held, but there was no attempt to overwhelm me this time. “You are the master’s woman,” he said. And stopped.
I didn’t intend to discuss my personal life with a guy I barely knew. Besides, there was no point. From Nicu’s perspective, I was Mircea’s woman because Mircea said so. My feelings were irrelevant.
I sighed. “And?”
“Your bodyguard is not here.” He sounded disapproving.
“Marco’s shift starts at sundown,” I said, not getting his point. Assuming he had one. Maybe this was the ancient master version of small talk. “I’m not planning to go out until then.”
“I will guard you until he arrives.”
I tried to remember Marco’s lecture and be diplomatic. “That’s great. Really. But, um, there’s only Mircea’s people here, so I don’t think—”
“There are others,” he said, cutting me off. Apparently, this manners thing worked only one way.
“What?”
“You are in a room alone with the traitor’s child.”
I still didn’t get it, but then Sal was there, smiling coldly. “He means me, Cassie. Because the toad who made me betrayed his master and joined the bad guys. Leaving me and Alphonse—and the rest of Tony’s old stable—under suspicion.”
“Mircea’s going to change her as soon as he gets the time!” I told Nicu heatedly. “Just like he did for Rafe!”
I may as well have saved my breath. Nicu just crossed his arms and settled back against the wall, those coinlike eyes fixed on Sal. He’d obviously said his piece and he was done.
“Come on.” Sal tugged on my arm, getting me away from Nicu before I said something stupid. “Don’t you want to see what I bought for me?”
Half an hour later, we had a paper menagerie stalking, slinking and crawling its way around the floor and Sal was in a good mood once again. She spun in front of a floor-length mirror, the deep coral charmeuse of her skirt hugging every curve. And I decided this was the best chance I was going to get.
“Um, so. Do you know anything about the Senate members who were hurt in the war?” I asked casually.
“Four were killed, two were injured,” Sal replied promptly, adjusting the fit of the top, which already fit like a second skin. “Although Marlowe’s pretty well recovered, or so he lets on. I hear he got hit in the head one too many times and keeps it bandaged up when he isn’t around people. But that could just be a rumor. Why do you ask?”
I shrugged. “Mircea said the Senate’s been overworked lately because of the casualties, and I was just wondering about them. Were any women injured?”
“Only Ismitta.” Sal held up a triple strand of pearls and admired the effect with the dress. “She put up a hell of a fight, even after they got her head off. I heard she killed two guys with it tucked under her arm.”
“But she’s dead now?”
“Oh, no. Other than Marlowe, she’s the only one to have survived. But with an injury like that, well, even a first-level master is going to be out for a while. I heard she’s gone back to Africa to recover. There’s some shaman over there supposed to have had experience with this sort of thing.”
“Africa?”
“Yeah. Don’t know what part, though. She looks kind of Ethiopian.”
Ismitta wasn’t the girl in the photos, then. So the pretty brunette probably wasn’t on her deathbed. Which meant that there was no reason why I couldn’t just ask Mircea about her. For some reason, that didn’t make me feel any better.
The fun ended with the arrival of a fussy little man in a rumpled suit, with a big bag and a bigger scowl. The wardsmith Mircea had promised. Apparently he’d just finished a shift with the detail trying to bring the casino’s wards up to the Senate’s exacting standards. By the shadows under his eyes and the snap in his voice, it seemed like maybe he was feeling a little overworked. But that changed when he got a glimpse of my ward above the back of my swimsuit.
“Oh, yes, yes.” He traced it reverently with a fingertip. “I’ve heard of this, of course, but never thought to see it. They said it was lost years ago.”
I didn’t feel like going through that whole story. “Can you fix it?”
“I’ll need to remove it. If I may?”
I paused and then nodded reluctantly. It had never left my skin since my mother had placed it on me as a child. But it wasn’t much good to me in its current form.
The mage said an incantation and I felt a trace of heat running along the familiar pattern on my back. Magical wards dissolve into the skin when on the body, mimicking the look of a tattoo. Off the body, they look like small gold charms, such as the one now filling his palm.
“Hmm. Let’s see.” He poked at it with a few odd-looking instruments. “When did you begin to have difficulties?”
“After leaving the ley line.”
“No, it was after that mage attacked you,” Sal reminded me, joining us on the sofa.
“Oh, yeah. I forgot.”
The mage’s brow wrinkled. “You suffered a magical attack?”
“Two. Well, sort of. They were both by the same guy.”
“And
then you got shot at by MAGIC’s wards,” Sal said. “And almost eaten. Or did I get that backward?”
“It sort of happened at the same time.”
“Did you say eaten?” the man demanded.
“And then there was the cave-in and the car crash,” Sal added.
“You were in a car crash?” The wardsmith was starting to look like he thought his leg was being pulled.
“Yes, but it doesn’t matter,” I told him. “The ward felt like it was fritzing out even on the first attack.”
“Which attack?”
“The one by the war mage,” I said patiently.
He closed his eyes and breathed deeply for a minute. “Let me see if I understand. You were in a ley line. When you left, you were attacked. Your ward held, but it felt weak, and then . . .”
“I was attacked again and it collapsed. That’s why I think the ley line did it.”
“Unlikely. Out of everything that you say happened to you, the line would be the least likely to cause damage. This is far stronger than the average war mage’s shields, and even they—”
“You don’t understand. I wasn’t in a ley line. I was in the line, the one that ruptured yesterday. I was thrown directly into a fissure.”
“And the ward held?” he demanded incredulously.
“Yeah. Well, long enough for me to get out, anyway.”
He tinkered some more, muttering to himself. “You are a very lucky young woman,” he told me after a while. “I cannot think of another ward that could have withstood a threat of that magnitude. If you had not been able to channel the combined power of the Circle—”
“I didn’t.”
“I can assure you, you did.”
I was beginning to wonder where Mircea had got this guy. “No, I didn’t!” I said, exasperated. “My ward was designed to take its power from the Circle, but it doesn’t anymore. They cut me off. A friend of mine set it to draw from the power of my office instead.”
The mage packed up his big leather satchel. “Well, your friend obviously didn’t know what he was doing, because I can assure you—”
“My friend was an excellent wardsmith!” I said heatedly.
“And I am a master wardsmith with almost sixty years of experience!” he snapped. “I am telling you that your ward is set to draw its power from the Silver Circle. It isn’t doing so now, of course, because it needs repair. But it was doing so yesterday or you would be dead.” He closed his case with an angry little snick.
“Can you fix it?” Sal asked.
“In time. However, this isn’t something I can patch up here. I’ll have to take it with me—”
He stopped because her long nails, gold today, had wrapped around his wrist. “Drop it.”
He bristled. “I assure you, young woman—”
“Sweetheart, I haven’t been young in a century,” she said, baring bright white fangs.
He paled but recovered fairly fast. “Be that as it may, the fact remains that I can do nothing here.”
Sal looked at me. “You really want this bozo handling the repairs?”
“Not really,” I said, torn. I didn’t like the guy, and I sure as hell didn’t want him taking my ward off somewhere. My back already felt naked and wrong. But I really didn’t like the idea of facing the Silver Circle again without it.
“I’ll take care of it,” Sal said, relieving him of the ward. She stuck it in her bra as a couple of the creepy guards escorted the indignant man out. “But it may take a little while. Can you stay out of trouble for a couple days?”
“Ironically, that’s how long I have until the meeting with Saunders,” I reminded her. “I’d really like my ward back before then.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
I spent the rest of the day in the penthouse eating, sleeping and checking on Rafe every twenty minutes, until the human nurse they had doing the day shift started to get a little snippy. I knew how he felt. By nightfall, I’d swum until I was pruney, done my nails, eaten all the ice cream in the fridge and played twenty games of poker with Sal, all of which I’d lost.
That was despite Billy Joe stopping by for a draw and giving me some free advice. I should have known better than to listen to him. He was stuck looking twenty-nine for the rest of his ghostly life because that’s what he’d been when a couple of cowboys who he’d cheated at cards shoved him in a sack and dropped it in the Mississippi.
By the time the sun started toying with the horizon, I was bored out of my mind and it was getting harder and harder not to focus on the upcoming meeting with the Circle. I’d gone to the last one in good faith, unarmed except for a bracelet they hopefully didn’t know about. But the idea of showing up like that again wasn’t appealing, especially now that my ward was on the fritz. I needed a few surprises of my own, and I wasn’t going to get them here. Besides, the guards were really starting to freak me out.
Marco swaggered in a little before sunset. I assumed he was making a point about his power or something, because a couple of the guards sneered at him. They’d been up all day.
“I need to go shopping,” I told him.
“I ain’t hanging around no lingerie section while you try stuff on,” he said bluntly.
“We’re shopping for weapons,” I said, grabbing my purse.
“What kind of weapons?”
“Nasty ones.”
And for the first time ever, I saw Marco smile.
Chapter Sixteen
“That’s not something you see every day.”
I had my head inside a large trunk and didn’t bother looking up. The observation could have applied to almost any of the items in the back room of the pawnshop. Unlike the front, which catered to the casual visitor with the requisite DVD players, camcorders and cases of mismatched jewelry, the back was stocked with items for the supernatural population of Vegas. But since the salesman had made the comment, I assumed he was referring to the two huge thugs who were lounging by the door, looking bored.
I shot them a narrow-eyed look, and Marco blew me a kiss.
Smart-ass.
Between one blink and the next, Marco was beside me, the old salesman dangling from his meaty paw. The guy looked terrified, his reading glasses sliding to a precarious position on his bulbous nose. “Hey!”
“He was reaching for you,” Marco said, and forced the man’s hand open. I don’t know what he’d expected to find, but he looked slightly disappointed at the sight of a small tape measure. Not enough to release the guy, though, who was rapidly turning a worrying shade of puce.
“Yeah, because he planned to measure me to death.” We were obviously going to have to have a talk about the difference between “maintaining security” and “being a dick.” Marco just stood there. “Marco! Put him down!”
“Sure. Because I like the idea of returning to Lord Mircea with your mangled body draped over my arm. If I’m lucky, he’ll just kill me.”
“You’re already dead.”
“There’s dead and then there’s dead, princess,” he said seriously, but he did set the old man back on his—rather shaky—feet.
“As I said, that’s a rare find,” the salesman said, adjusting his cloths. It took me a moment to realize that he was referring to the small brooch Francoise was holding. “The stones are blue when inert, but they turn orange if a malevolent spell is cast on the wearer.”
I regarded it with a frown. It reinforced my belief that there was some law requiring magical jewelry to be extraordinarily ugly. But Francoise was nodding slightly, so despite appearances, the thing actually worked.
I’d asked her to come along to vet the merchandise and because I’d come armed with only my own paltry bank account. It was necessary for my pride and what was left of my independence, but it severely cramped my purchasing power. Still, if anyone knew how to get a deal, it was Francoise. She had a gift.
“Can it prevent a curse?” I asked. I could live with a little ugly for that kind of protection.
“Alas,
no. But it will tell you what spell was used, which as you know is the trickiest step in removing it.”
“It’s not quite what I had in mind.”
“Are you sure? Because I think I have the matching necklace as well; it glows when the person who cursed you comes within a dozen yards. I could give you a good price for the set.”
I was almost tempted, just to get rid of him. He’d been hovering ever since we came in. Of course, that was mostly Augustine’s fault.
The wardrobe-in-one seemed to know we were shopping and had morphed into a chic skirted suit. It had apparently convinced the salesman that I might be worth a decent commision. “Thanks,” I told him, “but I’m looking for something a little more . . . proactive.”
“Ah, well, in that case”—he hurried over to a metal cabinet standing by the back wall—“I have just the thing.”
Marco bent to whisper in my ear. “Don’t let him take you. This place has a rep for sharp dealing.”
“Not much chance of that.”
The cabinet door swung open to reveal shelves stacked with the same kind of jumbled, dusty mess that characterized the rest of the shop. None of the items appeared to be guns, grenades or other recognizable weaponry—or anything else of interest. But from the way the salesman was smiling, you’d have thought we were looking at Ali Baba’s cave.
“Now, this is a real find!” He took out a tattered piece of black cloth about the size of a handkerchief and threw it into the air. Instead of falling, it drifted upward and began expanding. Within seconds, a bedsheet-sized undulating wall of darkness fluttered overhead—before suddenly dropping down on us, blocking out all light.
I heard Marco swear, a pissed-off sound that echoed faintly against the nothingness all around us. But his voice’s timbre had changed; every sound seemed to undulate, fading in and out from screamingly loud to whisper quiet, sometimes within the same word. I could no longer tell if he was standing right beside me or had moved halfway across the room.
The salesman’s cheerful tones drowned him out anyway and still sounded perfectly normal. “The Shroud of Darkness,” he said dramatically. “Excellent offensive or defensive aid. Drop this onto an enemy and watch them stumble about whilst you attack with impunity or slip away unnoticed!”