by Karen Chance
“Other things seemed more important.”
“Yeah, but you have your court now,” she said, joining me. And putting out a hand, ten inches or so away from the surface of the safe. “You’ve gotta think of the girls. Know how long I had to wait for the bathroom this morning? I should have gone down to the lobby—it would’ve been faster!”
“Casanova should be back to work soon. I’ll ask him—”
“Why? Why ask him anything? You don’t have to stay there. You could live anywhere. You could live here.” She glanced around appreciatively.
“Did you miss the whole blowing-up thing?”
“Okay, maybe not here here, but you know what I mean. Somewhere like this.”
I frowned. “What’s wrong with Vegas?”
“It’s Vegas?”
“I thought you liked it there.”
“For a vacation, sure. But it don’t exactly say serene and otherworldly, does it?”
“I’m not serene and otherworldly—”
“And you’re not gonna be living there.”
I frowned some more. “It’s convenient. MAGIC used to be there,” I said, talking about the supernatural version of the UN. Which had recently suffered a small setback in the form of an angry god. “They’re talking about building it back. And even if they don’t, a lot of groups still have reps in the area—”
“Those yard-long beers, always a draw.”
“—and Dante’s currently has the best wards anywhere!” The Senate had moved in temporarily while they sorted out long-term accommodations, and they’d upgraded the security almost immediately. “It makes sense to stay there.”
“You just like it there,” Tami accused.
I didn’t deny it. Despite the glitter and the glamour, Vegas had started to feel like home. And what were my alternatives? Going back to Philly? Because I didn’t have such great memories there. Or Atlanta? Where, yes, things had been better, if by better you mean living in constant fear of getting caught by my crazy old vamp master and then almost dying. I’d met some nice people in Atlanta, but it’s hard to make friends when you know you’re basically endangering them all. So, okay, but nothing I missed.
I thought I might miss Vegas.
There were places I’d been with people I did call friends. Memories I’d made, even whacked-out ones, that were important to me. And people . . .
Lots of people I cared about, even if some of them were currently acting like asses.
I glanced around. Someplace like this, I’d forever feel out of place, inadequate, like a little girl dressing up in mommy’s clothes, pretending to be someone I wasn’t. While in Vegas . . . you could be anybody you wanted to be. I’d often thought that was the real allure of the place. Not the cheap beer or the chance to get rich—which, on the Strip, at least, was basically zero—or the clubs or the shows. But a chance to try on a new skin for a while, to do something different, to be someone different.
A banker could be a biker.
A secretary could be a seductress.
And a palm reader could be Pythia.
Plus, London might be more posh, but it was also more structured. Everybody who’d been with the old court was here. If I came back, I’d be expected to do things their way, the old way. But in Vegas . . . it would be my court. And maybe it wouldn’t be as serene or as perfect, but . . .
But it might be more fun.
“I think we’ll stay there for a while, see how it goes,” I told her nonchalantly.
Tami shot me a look. “Well, wherever you stay, you need a bigger place—a lot bigger. You need some impressive areas for receiving guests. You need somewhere you can talk, with some damned privacy—”
“I need in that safe,” I reminded her. “Are you almost there?”
“Give it a minute,” Tami said, unconcerned. Because I guess after you break into a couple dozen Circle-run establishments, one little safe doesn’t seem like a big deal. “And a decorator,” she added. “The last thing you need is to let whoever designed that damned hellscape of a hotel anywhere near—”
“You could do it,” I blurted out, before I thought.
And damn it! I’d planned to wait a bit to say anything, like until I had some money. But too late now.
“You could help with . . . a lot of things,” I finished awkwardly, because she was looking at me.
“You offering me a job?”
“A . . . sort of job.”
“What’s a sort of job?” Ms. Practical asked.
“A . . . job with a delayed paycheck,” I said, wincing. “But just until I can pry the money out of Jonas,” I added quickly.
“You gave us a place to stay when the kids and I would have been out on the street. You got me a pardon from Marsden, to keep him from locking me up. I think I can forgo the salary for a while,” she said dryly.
“Then you’re on board?”
“On board as what? Chief babysitter? ’Cause I can do that, but—”
“No. I was thinking more like chief . . . coordinator. You can hire the babysitters and the tutors and whatever else we need. You can help me find a place for the court. You can help, well . . . coordinate things.”
I couldn’t be any more specific than that, since I didn’t even know what we needed. I hadn’t ever really thought about a court, not of my own. The one here in London had always been Agnes’ in my head, and somehow, the fact that it was mine now just hadn’t registered. Probably because the idea scared me to death.
But it scared me a little less with Tami around.
She glanced at Rhea. “You okay with that? I wouldn’t be stepping on any toes?”
Rhea shook her head. “No toes. Or . . . or anything else. That actually sounds . . .” She took a deep breath, and I could almost see some of the weight falling off her shoulders. “That sounds wonderful,” she said honestly.
“Well, I guess I could give it a shot,” Tami told me, but distractedly. Like she was already making a mental to-do list.
“And the safe?” I asked, because it looked the same to me, with the pale, almost invisible barrier still glowing faintly in front of the door.
“No.” Tami turned her attention to it. “Doesn’t feel like I’ve drained it at all.”
“Drained it?” Rhea said. “Is that what you’re trying to do?”
I nodded. “Tami’s a magical null. If she’s not actively repressing her abilities, wards come down when she walks in a room.”
“It was how I used to raid the Circle’s damned internment camps,” she told Rhea. “Hard to keep out somebody who can just walk in through the front door.”
“Yet this one is keeping you out,” I said, starting to get worried. I’d seen Tami drain bigger wards faster plenty of times.
She sighed. “Yeah, we may have a problem.”
“What sort of problem?”
“You know how a null works, right?” she asked.
I nodded, but Rhea shook her head.
“Our magic is inverted,” Tami told her. “Instead of projecting out, it pulls in. Specifically, it pulls in other magic in an area and destroys it. It’s like we have a big, black hole somewhere inside, just sucking all the magic in. But unlike a black hole, we do have a limit—we do get full.”
Rhea nodded.
I wondered where Tami was going with this.
“So, most of the time, it’s not a problem,” she said, looking balefully at the safe. “For a strong null, the limit is really, really high. A talisman, like the ones they use to power most wards, can usually be drained in a couple of minutes.”
“But you’ve already been at it that long,” I pointed out.
She nodded. “Yeah. And if I’m right, I could stay here all day, till I was full and running over, and it wouldn’t matter. That thing’s not coming down.”
“Why not? I
t’s just a ward—”
“A ward hooked into the ley line system.”
“What?”
Tami nodded. “And the ley lines aren’t some supernatural battery, like a talisman. They’re more like . . . a direct link to the world’s electrical system. To big rivers of metaphysical energy that just keep coming and coming and coming. I can’t absorb that. No one can.”
I stared at the little safe. “But . . . but if people can hook a ward directly into a ley line, why use talismans at all?”
She shrugged. “’Cause the lines don’t run everywhere. Plus it’s expensive. Cutting into a line is dangerous work, and it don’t come cheap. Someone must’ve paid a fortune for all the wards around this place. But if you really, really want to make sure that nothing and nobody gets in, that’s how you do it.”
“Then I can’t age through the wards, either?” I asked, because that had been option number two.
“Sorry.”
And that probably meant Marlowe’s were done the same way. Not to mention whatever snares and traps he’d laid out for unsuspecting burglars, all of which were probably lethal. No wonder the damned acolytes hadn’t found any Tears yet!
Of course, neither had I.
“Damn it! There must be a way!”
“If you have the pass code to the wards,” Tami agreed. “Otherwise, you need a way to bring them down, and then a safecracker to get you in. Or you’re going to be here a very long time.”
Chapter Thirty-six
I found Rico in the kitchen when we got back, doing the breakfast dishes. He had his jacket off and his sleeves rolled up, showing off muscular forearms. His dark brown hair was disheveled, the neck of his shirt was open, showing a V of taut bronze skin, and a smear of soap suds decorated his cheek. He looked like every woman’s dream, and I caught Rhea staring.
Rico did, too, and dropped her a wink.
Rhea did not appear to know what to do with that. Maybe because the only men at the Pythian Court had been about eighty. And because the initiates did not appear to have learned normal social skills. Like they’d been trained to be stoic and serene, but not how to interact with regular guys.
Or not-so-regular ones.
Rhea finally solved the problem by awkwardly winking back, which caused Rico to burst out laughing.
“I need a favor,” I told him, and nodded at her. The silence spell clicked shut around us.
“My dream come true,” Rico told me, still grinning at an increasingly flustered Rhea.
“I need a safe cracked. Do you know someone who can do it?”
Those liquid eyes slid to me. “What kind of safe?”
And some days, I loved vamps. No question about what was inside; no debates about possible legality. Just what kind is it?
I pulled my cell phone out of my jeans and showed him a photo. “That kind.”
A request to commit a felony didn’t even rate a blink. “Does it have to be operational after?” he asked, taking the phone from me.
“I don’t care if you rip it out of the damned wall.”
An eyebrow went up. “What about wards?”
I glanced at Rhea. “The wards . . . aren’t going to be a problem,” she said, a little breathlessly.
“Not a problem? Then this is a human’s safe?”
She looked at me.
I sighed and came out with it. “No, but the house it’s in is about to blow up, so the wards will be offline.”
A second eyebrow joined the first. “Sounds intriguing.”
“It will be okay,” Rhea said, as if she was trying to convince herself as much as him. “No one should be in the room at the time—”
“If the house is about to blow up, that would seem prudent,” he said gently.
“—but to be on the safe side—”
“Was that a pun?” he teased.
Rhea looked confused some more.
“Rico,” I said impatiently. “Do you know anyone who can do it?”
“Yes, me.”
I hesitated. “You did get the part about safecracking in Armageddon, right?”
He just looked at me.
Okay. His call. “There is one other thing.”
His look turned politely curious.
I bit my lip, trying to figure out how to phrase this without saying you’re a weird vampire.
But he was. He did dishes, which master vampires definitely Did. Not. Do. He liked guns, which a lot of vamps disdained as being unnecessary and too human. And he had given me the impression in the short time I’d known him that he didn’t care much for rules, even vampire sorts of rules.
Which was good, because I was about to ask him to break one—a big one.
“I’d just as soon Mircea didn’t know about this,” I finally said.
Rico frowned.
“You know, not right away,” I added quickly, because of course he’d tell the boss sooner or later. I just preferred it to be later.
A lot later.
Like after I had Pritkin back and had time to be yelled at.
Not that Mircea would yell; it wasn’t his style. But he would certainly make his displeasure known. Which was okay; I could deal with that. What I couldn’t deal with was his trying to stop me, because he was damned sneaky and he might well succeed and I didn’t have time for this!
Rico frowned some more. “We’re not his men,” he told me. “We’re your men. He sent us to help you.”
“And to report on me.”
“He hasn’t asked me to do that.”
“He doesn’t need to. There’s plenty of others—”
“—and I wouldn’t even if he did.”
I blinked. “Excuse me?”
He leaned one elbow on the counter, going into a graceful slouch. “I am a senior master, Cassie. I do as I like.”
“That’s not how the vamp world works.”
“Isn’t it? I am emancipated. The blood bond no longer holds me.”
“Then why are you here?”
“I like it here.”
“No one likes it here.” The guys called this place Australia. As in, they’d been exiled from the main court in Washington State and sent to a land down under, full of heat and craziness and frequent danger. It wasn’t anyone’s favorite posting.
But Rico didn’t seem to see it like that. “I do. I found court life to be very pleasant and very pretty. And very dull. Everything is too perfect there, too controlled.” He smiled. “I like things messy.”
“Then you came to the right place.”
He nodded. “The day I arrived, I was attacked by mages, almost blown up, and came very close to being eaten alive by a dragon.”
“And you liked that?”
“I wasn’t bored.”
Okaaay.
“And Mircea?”
“I find I like the idea of knowing something the master does not.”
“Me, too.” I looked around to see Fred’s head poking in through the shutters that separated the kitchen from the lounge, eating an apple. He must have been kneeling on one of the bar stools so he could spy on us. I scowled at him.
“Where did you come from?”
“My mother always said I came from heaven—”
“Fred!”
“—although others have occasionally expressed a different point of view.”
“How did you do that?”
“Do what?” He munched at me. “Oh, the silence thing?” He shrugged. “It’s a muffling spell, not a shield. And I get curious when the splashy splashy suddenly stops.”
“Get less curious!”
“I won’t have to be, ’cause I’ll be along.”
“You’re not going.”
“Of course I am.”
“And why should I let you?”
&n
bsp; “’Cause you’re smart? You’re gonna need someone to watch your back, and Rico can’t do that and crack the safe at the same time.”
“Who says I can’t?” Rico looked offended.
“I do. Anyway, you’ll need an alibi. I’ll tell everyone we’re going shopping.”
I frowned at him. “I never go shopping.”
“Well, you ought to. Your closet is full of ball gowns and ratty old T-shirts. You need normal clothes.”
“I need my head examined.”
“Don’t we all? So, when are we leaving?”
• • •
I staggered a little and went down to one knee. But said knee hit polished marble instead of kitchen tile, so I was pretty sure we’d made it. I breathed a sigh of relief.
And then I threw up.
“Cassie!” Fred grabbed me, which didn’t help, because I was already down. But then Rhea held my hair back, which did. And Rico took up a position in front of us, gun out, looking grim, giving me time to get it together.
Damn, I knew I shouldn’t have tried shifting four. Four sucked. But all four were needed: Rico to crack the safe, Fred to watch his back while he did it, me in my usual role as taxi-through-time, and Rhea . . .
Rhea to give me a boost so I could get us all back, because I was bottomed out.
I wiped the arm of my shirt across my lips and looked up.
We were in a dark corner of the ballroom of the palatial house in London that until recently had housed the Pythian Court. It still housed them, actually, because I’d brought us back to just before everything went kablooie. Not because I was a glutton for punishment, but because the asshole acolytes who were about to blow this place sky high had thoughtfully turned off the wards first.
But since the reason the wards were down was the three or four dozen dark mages on the premises, I didn’t think crawling around in the open was a great idea.
“Come on,” I told them, and staggered to my feet.
We hurried across the open floor, past the French doors that had been replaced after Mircea and I helped obliterate them sometime back in the eighties. We stayed out of line of sight to the main hall, where another me was about to flash in with a trio of badass witches. And ended up beside the wall where Agnes had once been frozen by a goddess in disguise.