Tempt the Stars cp-6

by Karen Chance

  But that wasn’t true tonight. Tonight, every guard on duty was either sitting in the little conversation area, smoking out on the tiny balcony, or gathered by the bar. It was like a party.

  Or maybe a wake; the guys were looking pretty damned grim.

  “Why’s everybody out here?” I asked Marco, who had followed me down a short flight of stairs.

  “’Cause of them in there,” he said, hiking a thumb at the lounge. Which I’d just noticed was closed off, with the pocket doors shut tight. I’d never seen them that way; the guys preferred an open floor plan to better keep an eye on me.

  But it looked like they felt they could do without an eye on whoever was inside.

  “Who’s ‘them’? I don’t have any appointments tonight.” At least, I really hoped I didn’t. The kind of guest I got at two a.m. tended to be of the fanged variety, and not the fun kind. “Tell me it’s not more senators,” I said, because I really, really wasn’t up to that.

  “I wish.”

  I sighed and crossed my filthy arms. “Okay. Out with it.”

  But he didn’t come out with it. “Where’s Jonas? You’re supposed to be with him.”

  I shrugged. “Home?” I’d dropped him off in the lobby before going for coffee. And it had been a while, since despite the fact that I looked like a war refugee, I’d still had to wait in line.

  Vegas.

  “Damn it!” Marco looked genuinely put out. No, that wasn’t right. Marco looked almost—

  The sliding doors opened and a small vamp sidled out, before slamming them dramatically shut behind him. “Refreshments!” he said shrilly.

  “What?” Marco glowered at him.

  “You heard me,” the vamp said, wild-eyed. “They say if they have to wait any longer, that they deserve—”

  “I’ll tell you what they deserve,” Marco said menacingly.

  “—something to eat, but you know we don’t have any food in the place and I don’t know what—” The vamp stopped abruptly, staring at me.

  Or, to be more precise, at my small white bakery bag.

  “No,” I said, trying to hide it behind me. But a second later, it was in his hand anyway.

  The guy who had just crossed a room in an eyeblink was named Fred. He looked like an accountant when he stood still long enough—with wispy brown hair and a somewhat portly figure—which was fair, since that’s what he had been before getting tapped for guard duty. I still hadn’t found out who he’d had to piss off to get stuck with that.

  I knew who he was managing to annoy tonight, though.

  He saw my expression. “No, no, no!” he said, backing up, his big gray eyes going huge. And then the little weasel ran for it.

  “Come back here!” I demanded, but Fred wasn’t. Fred was a blur, clutching the bag I’d just stood in line twenty freaking minutes for, and heading for the kitchen.

  Only to find me waiting on him when he arrived.

  “What—how—shit!” He stared at me, hand over the heart that wasn’t going to attack him, since it hadn’t beaten in a few hundred years now. “You know I hate it when you do that!”

  “Then give me back my stuff!”

  “I . . . can’t,” he said, looking around desperately.

  Marco had come in behind him, but he wasn’t doing anything, just standing in front of the door with his massive arms crossed, waiting it out.

  “Please,” Fred said tragically when I grabbed for my property. And then, “Please! Please! Gaaah! Gaaah!”

  I let go of the bag, because I honestly didn’t know what the hell was wrong with him. “What the hell’s wrong with him?” I asked Marco.

  “He’s afraid.”

  Fred didn’t deny it.

  “Of what?”

  “Of them in there.” The thumb hike was backward this time, over his shoulder. But it didn’t help, since the shutters partitioning the kitchen from the lounge had been closed, like they were for the formal parties we never had.

  “Who in there?”

  Marco opened his mouth, but it was Fred who spoke. He was looking in the bag, and he didn’t seem happy. Maybe because he’d squashed it in all the agitation, and a smear of red had bloomed like blood on one side.

  He grabbed a plate and turned it upside down, dumping out the contents. And then he just stood there, staring at three sadly mushed pastries. “What are those?” he demanded.

  “What do they look like?” I snapped. Damn it, most of the powdered sugar had come off, and that was the best part.

  Big gray eyes lifted to meet mine, with the look of a man seeing his doom. “What did you buy?” he squeaked.

  “What did you expect?”

  “I don’t know! They have all kinds of things down there—dainty tea cakes and tiny tarts and pain au chocolate and finger sandwiches and those cute little baby macaroons! Why didn’t you get the baby macaroons?”

  “I don’t like macaroons.”

  He stared at me. “What do you mean you don’t like macaroons? Everybody likes macaroons!”

  “Well, I’m somebody and I don’t,” I said, reaching for the plate. And getting my hand slapped for my trouble.

  “But . . . but I can’t serve them these,” he said, a little madly. “And room service takes forever and there’s always a line downstairs and what am I supposed to do?”

  “You’re supposed to tell me what’s going on before I strangle you,” I said ominously.

  But Fred was past that. Fred looked like he thought strangling would be a step up. He was hunched over the plate, his eyes darting around the kitchen’s gleaming surfaces as if he thought a tea service and accompanying canapés were sure to appear somewhere.

  “Oh God . . ” he said miserably when this did not happen.

  I looked at Marco, expecting a little sanity. Only to find him regarding the plate, too. “Maybe you could . . . fluff ’em up,” he said, apparently serious.

  “Fluff ’em up? Fluff ’em up?” Fred hissed. “They’re jelly doughnuts! There’s nothing to fluff!”

  “They’re my doughnuts,” I said, reaching for the plate again. And had it snatched away.

  “Have an apple,” Fred snarled, tossing me one from a bowl.

  “If I’d wanted an apple, I wouldn’t have bought doughnuts!”

  “Well, that’s too bad,” he hissed, hunched over my dinner like Gollum with the ring. “Because I’m not going out there and telling a bunch of mumble—”

  “What?”

  “—that we don’t have anything for them. I’m not, do you hear?”

  Not really. “A bunch of what?” I asked, for clarification.

  The darting eyes made a return, and his tone was barely audible. “Wumble,” he said reverently.

  “What?”

  He looked up, a faintly annoyed frown creasing his forehead. “Wichel!”

  “What’s a wichel?”

  Marco sighed. “Witches,” he translated.

  “Witches?” I frowned.

  “Yes!” Fred said vehemently. “Witches! Witches! Wi—” He suddenly realized he’d been yelling, and bit off the word. And crouched down behind the kitchen table so, I suppose, Marco and I would be the better targets. “Witches,” he whispered.

  I put a hand to my head. I just wanted a doughnut. A sweet, squashy, jelly-filled reminder that there were good things in life, however much fate seemed determined to deprive me of them.

  “What witches?” I finally asked.

  “The coven kind,” Marco said dourly. “They showed up almost an hour ago, demanding to see you.”

  “Did they have an appointment?”

  Marco looked faintly uncomfortable. “No.”

  “Then why did you let them in?”

  “’Cause they appeared on the balcony and let themselves in through the wards?” Fred asked, peeking over the table and prompting Marco to shoot him a look.

  “Because one doesn’t just tell a bunch of coven leaders to get lost!” Marco bit out.

  “If they don’t h
ave an appointment, you do,” I said grimly.

  I wasn’t trying to be inhospitable, but seriously, this shit had to stop. Morning, noon, and night, ever since my not-exactly-a-coronation, it had been the same thing: senate leaders, Circle leaders, Pack leaders, press-tryingto-pretend-to-be-leaders of something, anything, that would get them in, all showing up. To gawk at me. And in the case of the latter, to get the story of the century.

  And the worst thing was, it wasn’t even mine.

  Yeah, I was the Pythia the vamps had pulled out of the woodwork a few months ago, who nobody knew anything about. And yes, that would have been front-page news in any situation. In any other situation.

  But, suddenly, nobody cared that I had been brought up by Tony the Louse instead of being carefully nurtured at the Pythian Court. Nobody was bothered by the fact that I’d therefore received practically no training for the job I was supposed to be doing. They didn’t even seem to care that an untutored vampire’s protégée was occupying one of the most important positions in the magical world while said world was being consumed by a major war.

  No.

  They only cared about one thing.

  They only cared about my mother.

  You see, it wasn’t my dad’s soul that had put that paperweight at the top of Jonas’ Christmas list. It was the fact that, shortly before he and Mom and their Buick were blown into a million pieces, my mother had done something that had linked her soul to his. So when Pop’s spirit was captured in the magical snare Tony had devised, hers went along with it.

  And hers was kind of a big deal.

  Because hers belonged to a goddess.

  Yeah, I know. It just gives the whole crazy mess that little extra touch of madness, doesn’t it? I spent my childhood thinking that Tony had taken me in out of the goodness of his cold, slimy heart, after my parents were killed in a tragic accident, only to find out that he’d arranged the accident. One that had killed not only my father, but the creature the world had once known as Artemis.

  Oh, she’d had other names, even before she started using the O’Donnell alias. All the gods had, skipping merrily around this new world they’d found, causing chaos and littering demigods about, while being worshipped under a hundred different titles. But she’d been Artemis in Greece, where she’d had an epiphany about just how much chaos the gods were causing during their sprees—and about how many humans were getting dead in the process.

  She’d been Artemis when she grew a conscience.

  At least, I assumed she had, although who knows? The gods were nothing if not capricious. Maybe she just woke up one day and decided to punk her fellow divine beings—by tossing their godly butts off the planet.

  She did this, it turns out, by a spell sustained partly by—you guessed it—her own divine soul. It was the only thing powerful enough to cut off access to an entire world. And it had worked . . . sort of.

  Meaning that it had worked at the time. And even later, after she started to decline from a lack of compatible magic on the planet she’d just stranded herself on— great idea there, Mom—it still had. The spell was now supported by the group Jonas currently led, an alliance of human mages known as the Silver Circle. So, presumably, even if it was somehow brought down, the mages should be able to recast it.

  Assuming they had all the parts, that is.

  Which, of course, is where the record scratched. Since Artemis’ protection spell had been linked through her soul, that soul formed a vital part of the spell. Meaning that if it disappeared, the spell it was supporting went away, too.

  And since the other gods hadn’t been amused by her little come-to-Jesus moment or whatever the hell it had been, and really wanted back in, that was a problem.

  Particularly when the other side in the war was only too willing to welcome them back with open arms. The whole mess had Jonas wanting to tear his crazy hair out.

  What had me wanting to shred mine was that everybody assumed I could do something about all this.

  Yeah, okay, at some point the goddess famous for virginity had decided to hook up with a human for some reason, and pop out baby me. But that did not automatically confer any special insight. I’d had to learn about the whole mess the hard way, like everyone else—by piecing clues together over the last several months, ever since the war made it obvious that the gods were getting serious about the reclaiming-their-playground thing. And I still didn’t know much.

  In fact, I probably knew less than most, since nobody seemed to think it important to actually tell me anything. I was just their ace in the hole, the quasi-divine chick they’d lucked into who was expected to pull something out of her ass every time a god or his little homicidal offspring showed up to wreak some more havoc. It was infuriating.

  It was also terrifying.

  Especially since, along with that lack of insight I’d gotten a big old goose egg in the divine equipment department. Sure, I had the power that came with my office, but all Pythias had had that. And most of them had known more about it than I did. But if there was some kind of demigod bonus I was supposed to get on the side, well, it had been lost in the mail. My maternal line notwithstanding, I was just Cassie.

  And some days—most days—I was afraid that wasn’t going to be nearly enough.

  Like days when I was covered in bruises and my own blood, plus some two-decade-old spiderwebs I hadn’t noticed until now. “Shit!” I said, running frantic hands through my hair and knocking off a couple of little brown things that scurried for cover. And didn’t make it thanks to Marco’s size-sixteen boot. “I need a drink,” I told him honestly.

  “Drinks!” Fred’s head popped up. “That’s right. We’re going to need—”

  “Don’t even—” I warned as he grabbed the coffee cup I had stupidly set down on the kitchen counter.

  “You couldn’t get a large?” he snarled, playing keep-away. And then somehow my coffee ended up parsed out into three little demitasse cups, slapped on a tray along with the leaking doughnuts, and sped out the door, all in about the time it took to blink.

  I started after it, but Marco didn’t move out of the way. “Wait.”

  “I wait and I starve!”

  “There are worse things.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like having your dingle cursed off,” Fred said, sidling back into the kitchen through the half inch of space left by Marco’s bulk.

  “What?”

  “You know.” He looked pointedly downward.

  “They don’t do that!”

  “Like hell they don’t! I’ve seen things, okay? And these aren’t mages. They’re not part of the Circle. They don’t have rules—”

  “They have rules, just ones decided by their covens,” Marco argued.

  “Yeah, rules like if someone pisses them off, they can curse his ding—”

  “Would you man the hell up?” Marco snapped. And clapped a hand the size of a catcher’s mitt over Fred’s mouth. Fred’s displeasure thereafter took the form of outraged grunts.

  “I thought the covens were under the Circle’s authority,” I said, trying to remember all the info Jonas had been force feeding me lately.

  “Not the most powerful ones. They never joined.”

  Marco shot a look over his shoulder. “I guess they figured they didn’t need to.”

  Yeah. And if they’d just waltzed in here through the kinds of wards the Circle had on this place, I kind of agreed with them. But that still didn’t make it okay.

  “Why are they here?” I demanded.

  “They wouldn’t tell me,” Marco said, effortlessly keeping Fred under wraps. And since, despite all evidence to the contrary, Fred was also a master-level vamp, that was actually kind of impressive. Or it would have been, had Marco not been simultaneously hiding from a few old ladies.

  “You’re intimidated,” I accused.

  He scowled. “Do you remember how old I am?”

  “What does that mat—”

  “It matters ’cause I didn
’t live this long by being stupid. Sometimes it’s smart to be intimidated. Sometimes it’s smart to look before you leap.”

  “I do that.”

  Fred suddenly stopped struggling, I guess so he and Marco could both send me the same look of stunned disbelief.

  “I do!” I said again, and it was true. Mostly true. Okay, true when I had a chance to look, which wasn’t often these days. But that wasn’t the point.

  “That isn’t the point,” I told him.

  “Then what is?”

  “That I’m sick of this, okay? I’m not their slave—or the Circle’s or the vamps’ or anybody else’s. I’m not going to live like this—”

  “It’s your job.”

  “Bullshit.” I glared at him, too tired and hungry and lacking in caffeine to bother with diplomacy, which was something else I sucked at anyway. “What do you think Agnes would have done if they’d broken in on her in the middle of the night?”

  “I don’t—”

  “Well, I do!” I said, remembering my sweet-looking predecessor, who had shot me in the ass the one and only time I’d tried it. “Agnes was a bitch, okay? But she needed to be a bitch. Because the people around her were all these big personalities with all this power and given half a chance they’d run roughshod over her. And she knew it. So she didn’t put up with that. Not at any time, not for any reason, not from any of them! And as a result, they respected her. As a result, they were afraid of her, not the other way around.”

  Marco regarded me with a mixture of affection and exasperation and maybe a little bit of pity. But he didn’t say anything. Fred, on the other hand, took the distraction of the moment to wiggle out of Marco’s grasp. And he wasn’t so subtle.

  “Yeah, but you’re not Agnes,” he reminded me.

  “I’m not Agnes yet,” I hissed, and shifted.

  Chapter Four

  I went from light and noise and stress to someplace completely lacking two of those things. I didn’t bother turning on a light. I could see well enough from the orange haze filtering in through a gap in a wall of curtains, and anyway, the view wasn’t much.

  The rooms that Dante’s, my home on the Vegas Strip, reserves for its more budget-conscious guests are a little . . . Spartan. Ironically, that makes them less eye-wincing than the suites upstairs, which mostly conform to the hotel’s over-the-top haunted house theme. But the designer had run short of money by the time he got this far, so the only affronts to taste were a few vintage horror movie posters and an ugly bedspread.