* * *
Casanova had spent years perfecting the alluring quality of his voice, imbuing it with the charm, the grace, the honeyed tones that often did much of his seduction for him. Rian had taught him some of that, but he was proud to say that much more came from his own Castilian roots, from a people who understood the lyrical potential of the spoken word in a way that few of the braying descendants of the British Isles ever would. He was an artist with his voice. He could make women, and the occasional man, weep with his voice.
And then there were times like these.
“Fuck it,” he rasped, which would have made his point quite clearly had anyone been listening to him.
“I think I found something,” Cassie’s excited shriek drifted out of one of the rocks on this godforsaken hill.
Literally God forsaken, Casanova thought grimly, and he didn’t blame Him one iota. Ugly, barren, and creepy as, well, hell--and he’d thought the city was bad. Out here, nobody bothered with a spell to disguise anything, because there was nothing worth the effort. Just rocks and a little on-the-brink scrub and a lot of dark, the latter broken only by the faint urban sprawl in the murky valley below them.
Why did anyone live here? Surely even demons could do better than this? And more importantly, what in the name of sanity was he doing here?
“Did you hear me?” Cassie demanded, and Casanova’s hand clenched.
He knew what he was doing here. She was like a disease, a human virus that infected everyone around her, turning off their good sense and making them do things completely against their own best interests. Someone should lock her up, study her, figure out a vaccine before the whole damn world caught the madness—
A curly blond head poked out of a crack in the rock so its owner could glare at him. “I’m not going in there,” he said curtly.
Blue eyes narrowed. “Why not?”
“Why not? Why not? Because this—” his savage gesture took in the entire train of events that had led him from a warm, soft bed in Vegas to a frigid, rocky mountainside in Hell--“is insane. The only thing that could possibly make it more insane would be to crawl inside an unexplored hole in the ground after a mage who, on a good day, is suicidally reckless and who on this day is chasing a demon battle queen.”
Cassie looked at someone over her shoulder. Rian, he assumed, since his traitor of a demon had floated in after her a few minutes ago. “I thought you said he’d calm down once we got out of the city.”
Rian murmured something reassuring.
“Well, I don’t know,” Cassie told her. “He’s getting pretty shrill.”
“I am not shrill!” Casanova said, and all right, perhaps that had been a little shrill, but if so, he thought he’d earned it. “I am the voice of reason—”
“Well the voice of reason needs to get his butt in here.”
Casanova didn’t even bother to respond to that. Instead, he pulled the little silk pocket square out of his coat and made a point of placing it exactly in the center of the nearest sort-of-flat rock he could find. He smoothed it out, sat his Gucci-covered ass on it and looked at her. Calmly, considering that he really didn’t see how this could get any worse.
“Okay, fine,” Cassie said. “I just thought you’d prefer it to the alternative.”
“What alternative?”
“I think she means me,” Rosier said gently, from behind him.
Casanova spun, but even vampire reflexes weren’t fast enough this time. A blast of power picked him up and sent his body hurtling backwards through the air, right at the wretched little cave. And for a moment, things became a bit blurred.
That was possibly because his head hit the overhang hard enough to send his brain cavorting around inside his skull. Or because the impact half collapsed the structure on top of him. Or because he was grabbed by the shirt and jerked into the falling mass of debris, half of which put dents in his already abused body, while the rest rapidly blocked the way behind him.
Which bought him perhaps seconds with the power Rosier had at his disposal.
That thought had Casanova staggering off the remaining wall, which for some ungodly reason appeared to be glowing, with his brain still sloshing about between his ears. But despite that, and the mountain of dirt he’d just swallowed, and the fact that he appeared to be missing maybe half a pound of flesh, he somehow got fumbling hands on a certain blond-haired menace. And shook her like a maraca.
“Shift us out of here!”
Burning blue eyes glared at him through the dust. “I can’t!”
“You shifted us in!” Her power wasn’t supposed to work outside earth, but that hadn’t stopped her from hopping them in stages across the damn desert, following the sight trail Rian had laid out.
“I shifted us outside.”
“Then shift us outside again—far outside!”
“Are you listening? I can’t,” she repeated, jerking away from him.
“It’s a form of magic,” Rian told him agitatedly, “when she shifts, I mean, and right now—”
“What difference does that make?”
“A great deal,” she said, her dark eyes on the cave-in behind him, as if she could see right through it. And maybe she could, because he’d never seen her that upset. “You need to listen, Carlos—”
His real first name usually got his attention, but not this time. “What I need,” he said, his voice trembling only slightly, “what we all need, is to get out of here, now, before—”
“I’m not going anywhere without Pritkin,” Cassie informed him, making Casanova want to scream. So he did.
“He’s a war mage! He can take care of himself!”
“Not if he can’t use magic!” she said heatedly, while scrabbling for something in the debris on the floor. “If he doesn’t know the risk, he could blow himself up. And even if not, he’s stuck down there facing that…that thing…with nothing more than a gun that probably won’t even dent it. And I won’t—”
He didn’t hear what the wretched woman wouldn’t do this time, because the rock fall took that moment to implode, sending a dozen shards of whatever made up this blasted hill into Casanova’s backside. But he’d grabbed the girl, covering her body with his as he tumbled to the floor. Which promptly cracked and dropped, and then gave way entirely.
Of course it did, Casanova thought, as they plunged into darkness.