“Shit,” I did the only thing I could think of, I googled Caesars and got the front desk number. I put on a front like I knew what I was doing as I placed the call.
“Caesars Palace, how may I help you,” a bright, cheery voice answered. I imagined a perky red head on the other end of the call.
“Hello, can you please patch me through to Ms. Venus Venitas?” I asked politely. There was silence on the other end. “Uh, hello, anyone there?” I asked after several seconds of nothing.
“I’m sorry, sir. We have no one under that name staying with us,” the voice remained cheery, with an undertone of caution.
My frustration started to rise, but I took a calming breath. I could understand where she was coming from. Venus was the Don Corleone of Vegas; except way sexier. She ran one of the most dangerous cabals in the world. Of course the front desk wasn’t going to have a direct line to her.
“How about Dani Underwood?” I tried again.
More silence. “Sorry, sir. Do you perhaps have the wrong number?”
I bit back the snap I almost let loose, and looked over to give Butters and Night a reassuring smile. “I’m confident this is the right place,” I kept my voice polite, but it was strained. “I’m sure Xamira Venitas is there.”
There was a huff on the other end. “Sir, we have no record of any of the people you are asking for; and this is beginning to sound like some sort of scam.”
“It’s not a scam,” I snapped, clenching the phone hard enough the plastic case let out a squeal of protest. “I know they’re there. I just need to get to them. Peter!” I exclaimed suddenly.
“We have thirty-two Peters as current guests, sir,” something in the girl’s voice told me she was mocking me. “Can you narrow that down for me?”
“Peter. Venus’s First. The unicorn!” I yelled despite myself. It had been a long morning, and I was taking it out on the receptionist.
“Unicorn,” she tried to hide it, but I heard the chuckle. “Peter the unicorn?”
“No, Charlie the unicorn . . . of course Peter the fucking unicorn!” I screamed, and resisted the urge to throw the phone through the wall.
If I was thinking straight, I might wonder why I was getting so worked up about something as stupid as being unable to connect with my friends. If I wasn’t so angry, I might wonder how I’d gone from zero to a hundred faster than a Ferrari. Unfortunately, self-examination was way down the list; behind eating breakfast; and way after keeping my head attached to my shoulders.
“Sir, if you do not lower your voice, I will be forced to call the police,” the receptionist’s voice got very stern.
“Please, please call the police. Tell them to drive their asses down to Mexico and come pick me up. I’m begging you,” I laid it on thick, and I heard a click.
I was breathing hard, rage rampaging through me. “Did she just hang up on me?” I seethed. “When I get back there, I swear to the gods I’m going to find her and fire her ass.” I finally realized I was being a complete asshole, but, dire situation, remember. I felt like I was warranted.
Then I heard another series of clicks. “What the hell?” It sounded like someone was dialing an old rotary phone.
“Cam?” a familiar voice finally asked. “Cam, is that you?”
Of course, Xamira, the resident cyber security specialist/hacker would be keeping an eye on the phone lines.
“Yes, Xamira, thank the gods!” I exhaled, and gave Butter and Night a thumbs up. They both looked at me like I was a crazy person, but I didn’t care.
“Cam, where the hell have you been? We’ve been looking all over for you for months. No one anywhere has heard a peep from you. What happened? What did you do? Where . . .?”
“Xamira, calm down. I don’t have much time.” We both knew the UN was definitely tapping the lines, and I had no idea if this was secure. The UN wasn’t even my worst problem. If the Tikals decrypted this signal, we were fucked.
“I’m in Mexico, somewhere in Tijuana. I don’t know where. I’ve got some people with me I need to get to safety, and some bad people trying to catch me,” I relayed.
“Tijuana, most of the city is Tikal territory,” she stated.
“No shit,” I couldn’t stop myself, but it let her know how serious the situation was. “I need a way out, or at least somewhere to lay low until help arrives. Somewhere secure.”
I’d only been to one other cabal safehouse, but it had a fucking dragon living in it. If they had a place even half as fortified, somewhere nearby, the girls and I were basically home free.
“Okay, let me look something up,” her end of the line started clicking again as she ran whatever cybersecurity magic she needed to keep everyone from honing in on my position.
I felt a little but like Jason Bourne. “More like James Bond. Bourne doesn’t fuck in his movies. Does he?”
Digging through four Bourne films occupied my attention until Xamira came back on the line. “Get here,” she rattled off an address. “I’ll let them know you’re coming.”
“Thanks, Xamira, you’re the best. I . . .”
“We can’t stay on the line. I’ll see you when you get home,” she hung up.
“Home,” it was a foreign concept, but if I had one, Vegas was the closest thing.
I turned to face Butters and Night with a smile on my face, but they were already getting their shit together. The best news though, was Skella sitting up under her own power. Her eyes were hooded, and she looked like she was about to fall asleep at a moment’s notice, but what little concentration she could muster was aimed directly at me. She was looking at me like I was crazy.
“Venitas . . .” she slurred. “That’s a cabal,” that stopped the other women in their tracks.
Leave it to Skella to ruin everything. “Well,” I started, before a hammerfist of solid air hit me in the chin.
Without any Fae power, or my sight activating, I went down hard. When I shook the cobwebs from my brain, Butters was straddling me, with a ball of fire glowing in her hand. She looked incredibly sexy, and intimidating. I couldn’t help but get some half chub. Maybe I needed to see a therapist about what turned me on.
“Did. You. Do. This. To. Us.” Butter’s voice was harsh, and if anything, that hit me harder than the magical punch.
“Of course not,” I shot back, massaging my jaw. “You hit me with your car, and they’re after Night for her failed mule run. This has nothing to do with me.”
“I don’t believe you,” Night stated.
“You believe me enough to want me to cum inside you, but not enough to go to a safe house that might save your life,” I kept the thought to myself. It wasn’t going to help.
“Butters,” I made sure my voice was soft, but firm. “Look at me. Look me in the eyes. I. Had. Nothing. To. Do. With. This,” I met her stern glare unflinchingly. “This is all just a shitty coincidence, and since we’re already ankle deep in this shit because of her,” I pointed at Night, “I’m just doing whatever I can to get us all out of here alive.”
It was completely sincere, and it turned out I was right; Butters did have a nose for bullshit. A second later, she extinguished the ball, reached out, and gave me a hand up. Night frowned, and Skella continued to look a few cards short of a full deck.
“We go to the safehouse,” Butters stated.
“That’s it?” Night crossed her arms in defiance. “He tells you he’s not the problem, and you believe him. By the Dark Lady, Butters, just because you’re pissed I fucked him doesn’t mean . . .” Night abruptly stopped when Butters rounded on her.
I didn’t see whatever was in her eyes, but Night went a few shades paler than usual.
“I didn’t say I trust him, but we are in this shit because of you, Mira,” being called by her given name was apparently a big slap in the face. Night flinched as the blow landed. “You hit him with the car. You tried to run drugs. You got us mixed up in all this. He might not be on the up-and-up, but the situation, here and now, is your faul
t.”
I wanted to cheer, but Skella was watching me closely, and the paranoid side of me thought this whole thing might be a set up to see how I reacted. That’s just how I thought nowadays. Thirty minutes ago, I was fucking one of them, and now, I was worried about them stabbing me in the back.
“Fine,” Night huffed as she backed down.
Crisis averted, we got ready to head out. Night stayed well away from all of us, as Butters helped Skella to her feet and worked the smaller woman’s arm around her shoulder. Night gave me one last look and went to open the door.
“Wait!” I yelled.
“Doesn’t this girl ever learn?”
“We don’t know what’s out there. Last time we opened the door, we had a machine gun pointed at us. We need to be smart about this.”
“What do you suggest, smarty pants?” Night challenged.
“This,” I gave her a smug grin, reached deep into my chest, and pulled on my Fae fire.
All they probably felt was a tingle as I worked some magic. I was strong enough now to get a fixed glamour over all of us. It wasn’t going to stand up to a hit from a newborn baby, but it would confuse anyone looking for a bunch of coed gringos.
“There,” I pointed to the mirror.
“Hoy shit,” Night’s jaw dropped when she looked at the old lady staring back at her.
I looked like my foster mom, and the three girls resembled three older women from her gardening club. It was hard to make a random glamour. It was much easier to work with something from memory. Either way, I doubted any Tikal spotters knew about my foster mom from Upstate New York, or the biddies she grew flowers with.
“Now we can go,” I smiled smugly.
My glamour didn’t hide how impressed Butters looked. Maybe it was because I’d shrunk her a good foot; or because Skella didn’t look like a recovering meth addict anymore. Also, it could simply be that her face finally had some normal proportions to it. She’d been dealt a shitty hand in life, and for the first time, she saw what might have been. Even if I’d added forty years to it.
I opened the door and was the first out. I figured with my Fae gifts, I could take a bullet if there was a sniper watching up from some nearby clocktower. When I didn’t take a round to the dome, I hobbled out into the parking lot and looked around like I imagined a confused tourist would.
“We can’t go back to the car,” I could see the vehicle parked down the street, and the dangerous looking men standing around it.
“Shit, they found it,” I looked around carefully. If they’d found the car, then they’d have eyes on everywhere someone could stay within a few blocks. Someone definitely had eyes on this place.
I spotted him on my third scan: middle aged, forgettable, pretending to read a paper while leaning against the wall of a shop next to the hotel. Anyone leaving onto the main street would need to walk right past him.
“And that’s exactly what we’re going to do,” I stopped a grin from forming.
When people were spotted by someone they were hiding from, the natural reaction was to run away. Maybe, if someone was smart, they’d turn around and walk away at a regular pace. A spotter would never expect their target to walk right up to them; at least, I hoped they wouldn’t. It had the downside of abandoning any sense of anonymity a crowd might offer. If his boss asked what happened on his shift, he would say that four grannies talked to him. That could bring with it some suspicion; especially if they shook down the hotel clerk for information. The hope was me and the girls were long gone by then.
“Excuse me, young man,” I did my best Betty White impression. “Can you tell us how to get to the . . .” I intentionally butchered the name of the place that housed the city’s botanical gardens.
The guy looked annoyed, but whoever had raised him had clearly instilled the ideal of respecting your elders. He gruffly answered me, and then even waved down a cab for us.
“Gracias,” I gave the man a grandmotherly smile, and hopped in the little yellow vehicle with the girls. They’d been smart and remained silent during the whole exchange.
The doors secure, I gave the cabbie the address of the cabal safehouse. I wasn’t sure if we had any money, but hopefully someone at the place would spot us.
The cabbie took off, zipping through the morning traffic in a way that ignored all traffic laws I knew of in the States. I found myself hanging onto the Dear Jesus bar above my head as we nearly sideswiped three different cars. For a few minutes, I thought the guy was using magic to avoid the collisions because his radio was blaring and he was speaking to us in rapid-fire Spanish the whole way. I was fluent in the language, but I only caught about every third word.
As we drove, we started to get away from the tourist areas, and into Tijuana proper. That was a good and bad thing. There were definitely bad parts of town; where the Tikal and cartel influence would be heavier. Things would be nearly as bad there for four elderly women as it would for our real persons.
There were also good places, government and business districts, upscale neighborhoods, and everything that a city’s elite required. I’ll admit, my idea of Tijuana is biased. All I thought about was Girls Gone Wild, drunken parties, and donkey shows. The city was obviously more than that, and the cabbie pulled up to an address that would have looked somewhat normal in midtown America; which made it perfect for a cabal safehouse.
It wasn’t too close to the heavily patrolled government and business districts. This allowed some autonomy for the undoubtedly elicit activities that occurred. It was also far enough away from the seedier areas, so as not to attract attention from that crowd. It was actually in the corner of a crowded shopping mall. It was the dominant building in the little strip, and important enough that it earned its own walled-in parking lot. In the States, that would raise a few eyebrows, but there were plenty of walls around here, so it was nothing new.
The cabbie jabbed his hand back toward us, demanding payment, and Butters came through for us again. She handed over some crinkled bills. We were barely out of the car before it shot away to find its next fare; leaving us all standing in front of a gate with a buzzer.
“Soluciones de Salud Ejecutivas,” I read the sign. “Executive health solutions,” I translated.
“It’s . . . a gym,” Butters sounded confused.
“It’s safety,” I corrected, and pressed the buzzer. Someone clicked the other end but didn’t say anything. “Hello, this is Cameron Dupree. I’m . . .” I didn’t get to finish before the gate started to open.
It wasn’t a real gate, not much more than a piece of aluminum on tracks, but it offered cover for all the vehicles inside.
“Whoa,” there were some seriously ritzy cars in the enclosed parking lot. Like most things with the cabal, this place wasn’t what it seemed.
The front door and windows of the gym were tinted, had a big logo in the middle, which was surrounded with motivational slogans. On the surface, everything said health club; except I was pretty sure there were multiple panes of bulletproof glass. I could feel the wards inlaid into the middle panes, and the heavy front door looked like it could go a round with a tank and hold its own. Despite that, it silently glided open when we approached.
The inside matched the cars outside. Everything was expensive, polished to a gleam, welcoming, and above all, clean. A tan-skinned woman stood at the welcome desk, with a big, gleaming smile, and a pair of tits that were nearly falling out of her too-small tank top. That smile didn’t even falter when I dropped the glamour, and four biddies became four worse-from-wear kids.
The lack of surprise, and the tingle in my nether regions, told me she was a supernatural. “I’ll put my money on imp.” The cabal’s foot soldiers would definitely have a presence at a safehouse.
Now that we were deeper inside, I got a good look at the interior beyond the welcome desk. Workout equipment, free weights, treadmills, ellipticals, and all other manner of exercise equipment were precisely placed around a wide-open space. In that open space a han
dful of clients, mostly in their forty and fifties were working out with the assistance of a trainer. Most of the clients were men, but there was a woman or two. In contrast, all of the trainers were at most in their mid-twenties, in incredible shape, and wearing skimpy workout clothing that emphasized that. Hell, you could even see the outline of a male trainer’s dick who was helping out an older woman on a bench press. It didn’t escape my attention that he was practically poking her in the forehead with his trouser snake, and she seemed to be enjoying it.
“This isn’t a gym,” I whispered to Butters. “This is a brothel.”
A high-end, health-conscious brothel. After seeing the spa back in Reno, this was right up the cabal’s alley. No sooner had I thought that than a man approached us. He was dressed similar to his employees, but there was an aura of more around him. He was definitely a supernatural, and definitely more powerful than the imp silently guarding the welcome desk.
He was all bulky, chiseled muscle, broad shoulders, narrow waist, and of course, huge cock. The guy should have been competing in the Mr. Universe competition, or doing porn, not working an upscale whorehouse in Tijuana.
“Thank you, Ariana, darling,” he stated in slightly accented English, and dismissed her with a wave.
Ariana gave us a final once over, and winked at me before strutting back to help a client. “Definitely an imp with a hint of succubus,” my eyes followed her ass for a moment too long before they snapped back to the dude in charge.
“How may I help you?” the big guy didn’t sound happy, but I wouldn’t be in his situation. Four random people showing up at your place never led to good things.
“My name is Cameron Dupree. This is Butters, Night, and Skella. Xamira told us you could help us, and directed us here. She should have called.”
“Cameron Dupree,” the man sounded like he was tasting my name on his lips. There was a flex, and power flooded out from him.
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