Boy, had he gotten the wrong job.
But even if I’d been willing to spill secrets that weren’t really mine, the fact was that Marco didn’t want to know what was going on.
He didn’t want to know that the reason he had a living room full of Pythian initiates was because a handful of their number had just tried to kill them by blowing up the old Pythian Court. Not because they hated them, but in order to set a trap for me. One that had almost worked.
He didn’t want to know that the acolytes responsible were still out there somewhere. Or that the abilities they’d received from the old Pythia before she died had never been rescinded. Meaning that they could technically pop in here at any moment.
I didn’t actually think they would. I was a lot more vulnerable elsewhere, and it was me they were after. But still. I didn’t think Marco wanted to know that all the wards, guns, and vampire skills in the world might not be enough to deal with those girls’ power if they decided to risk it.
“Well?” he demanded.
“I’m thinking.”
“Damn it, Cassie!”
“Can you help . . . with this thing?” I asked, gesturing at the corset, which was the kind that laced up the back.
I wasn’t stalling for time; I really was having trouble breathing. All that water had tautened the strings, as Marco found out when he flipped me over and tried to loosen them.
He muttered something and pulled out the knife again. “I can’t keep you safe if I don’t know where you are!” he told me, hacking away. “Or who you’re with. Or what the hell you’ve been up to!”
“Exactly,” I muttered into the mattress.
Marco also didn’t want to know that I’d been hanging out with Satan’s good buddy, only no. Satan, assuming he existed, probably had better taste. So did I, but I was stuck, at least for the moment.
And damn it, we’d been so close!
“You’re not going to tell me a damned thing, are you?” Marco asked, flipping me over again.
The corset was in shreds, allowing me to take my first deep breath in what felt like days. For a moment, I just lay there, exploring the wonder that was oxygen. And staring up at Marco, who, despite current appearances, was a good person and a good friend. He deserved better than the insanity that was my life these days.
Of course, for that matter, so did I.
“You ought to ask for a transfer,” I told him honestly.
Thick brows drew together into a frown. “It’s that bad?”
“Isn’t it always?”
He sat on the edge of the damp bed. “With you? Pretty much.”
“I don’t try to be a disaster,” I told him, feeling my throat tighten up.
He sighed and took my hand, interlacing his fingers with my own. Since his were the size of sausages, that left mine spread uncomfortably wide, but I decided I could live with it. “You don’t have to try,” he told me. “It’s a gift.”
“You could always shoot me,” I offered weakly.
“I’ve considered it. But then I’d have a few dozen time-traveling little girls on my ass.”
“They can’t all time-travel.” At least, I really hoped not. “When did they get here?”
“You don’t remember?”
I shook my head.
“You missed quite the scene,” Marco said, letting go of my hand so he could lean back against the bedpost. And level exasperated dark eyes at me.
“Do I want to know?”
“No. But I’m going to tell you anyway,” he said pleasantly.
I threw my arm over my face.
“So, you come back from hell. Big swirly portal thing coughs you up onto the rug after all but wrecking the living room. But okay. At least you’re back.
“Only no. A couple minutes later, you’re gone again. No explanation, no good-bye, no nothing. One second you’re there, watching the news about that old house in London blowing up, and the next you’re not. For a minute, I thought you’d jumped back through the damned portal!
“But then I realized that the witches were gone, too.”
“The witches” in this case were a group of coven leaders who had volunteered to help me rescue mine. My coven, that is, since that’s what the Pythian Court apparently was. Since I’d never considered myself a witch, the idea of having a coven took a little getting used to.
Not as much as the concept of changing time, though.
But I hadn’t had a choice. I’d returned from my rescue attempt gone wrong only to find out that Agnes’ mansion in London had just been bombed. I’d sat around on the living room sofa for a few minutes, watching a magical news feed showing mountains of still-burning rubble and rows of tiny body bags and clumps of stunned-looking war mages. And tried to absorb that.
And then I’d taken the witches and gone back in time to fix things.
I wasn’t supposed to. The whole point of having a Pythia in the first place was to keep people from mucking about in the time stream, not to do it myself. But those little girls were my court now, even if I hadn’t had a chance to meet them yet. And they’d died because of me. And it had only been fifteen minutes. . . .
Anyway, I’d done it. It probably made me a lousy Pythia, but then, what else was new? And I wasn’t sorry, I thought defiantly.
Guilty, yes; sorry, no.
“And, uh, then what happened?” I asked, because I didn’t know.
I guessed the witches had gotten my court out, since it was here now. And that the demons had done the same for me, after I’d stayed behind to cover everyone’s retreat. And passed out from the strain of slowing down the battleground’s worth of spells that my acolyte’s dark mage friends had been throwing.
Because one had been waiting on me when I woke up, back here in my bed.
Not a spell—a demon. His name was Adra, head of the demon council, and incidentally, also the person who had cursed Pritkin. But he’d had a change of heart, or so he said, after seeing me risk my life to save my court.
I didn’t know why that should matter to the council, but maybe they weren’t as bad as I’d been told. Or maybe that had belatedly decided they might need some help with the gods, and I’d do. If, you know, they hadn’t just wiped my friend out of existence!
But I’d had no chance to find out before Rosier was throwing a pack at me filled with old-fashioned clothes, and we’d left right afterward, with my head still spinning.
Marco narrowed his eyes. “You tell me. The next thing I know, the windows start shaking and the floor starts moving, and it feels like about a six on the Richter scale. And then that damned portal activates again and there you are, stumbling out along with three battered witches and a couple dozen freaked-out little girls!”
I bit my lip. “Sorry?”
“And then you take two steps and fall over, and I think you’re dead. But no, turns out you’re just exhausted. So I carry you off to bed. And the next morning, when I think I’m finally going to get a damned explanation, what happens?”
I didn’t say anything that time.
“So I’ve had a day,” Marco said grimly. “You were gone and the girls wouldn’t tell me shit, and that damned mage kept calling—”
“You mean Jonas?” I asked worriedly.
“Who else?”
We were talking about Jonas Marsden, the head of the Silver Circle, the world’s chief magical authority and my . . . well, colleague, technically, although he acted more like my boss. And of course, he’d been there to see all of this. My luck practically demanded it.
“What did he want?” I asked, pretty sure I already knew.
“To talk to you. He had a fit when you disappeared last night, and a worse one when you came back. He wanted to carry you and the girls off somewhere, but Rhea wouldn’t budge until she talked to you, and he didn’t have enough mages with him to force
the issue. Not with the witches yelling about ‘Pythian sovereignty,’ whatever the hell that is, and me threatening him with a couple dozen masters—”
I winced. And was suddenly profoundly grateful that I’d been unconscious.
“—but it wasn’t pretty. For a while there, I thought I was going to have to call for reinforcements. But he finally agreed to go if I promised to have you call him as soon as you got up. But, of course, by this morning you’d skipped out—again—with no explanation—again. And I had to tell him you’d gone on an errand!”
“I owe you,” I said fervently.
“Oh no. No, we’re not even there yet.”
I swallowed.
“So every half hour: is she back yet, is she back yet?” Marco gave Jonas’ voice a high-pitched whine it in no way possessed. “And then the girls needed food and a place to stay—”
“I’ll see if I can—”
“And then the press got word about your court blowing up, and they somehow got our number—”
“Not again. How do they keep—”
“—and then the boss called.”
I swallowed. And, once again, everything else suddenly felt trivial. Manageable. Easy, by comparison. “The . . . boss?”
“Yeah, you know.” Marco smiled evilly. “Your husband?”
Chapter Four
Mircea Basarab was a lot of things. Handsome—beautiful, really, if you could use that word for a man—in that stunning way that movie stars are and the rest of us aren’t. Only Mircea didn’t need a great wardrobe and the right lighting. Mircea could make women swoon naked and in the dark.
Especially naked and in the dark, come to think of it.
It wasn’t surprising, since he’d had five hundred years to refine his seduction technique, which he now used as the chief negotiator for the dreaded North American Vampire Senate. It controlled the country’s vamps far more strictly than the Circle did its mages. And speaking of mages, the Senate was heartily tired of them monopolizing the Pythias, which they had done for centuries as the traditional Pythian bodyguards.
Right up until a Pythia ended up sort-of-kind-of-but-not-exactly married to a senator, that is.
Like I said, my love life is complicated.
Or it had been until recently, when Mircea had all but vanished from the scene. I hadn’t heard from him in more than a week, not since he’d gone off to handle some crisis in New York. That had been a little disappointing, because, okay, he was busy, but would a phone call have killed him? But it had also been a relief, because we had things to talk about, oh yes we did, and they were things that I’d just as soon postpone until I fixed the immediate crises of a demon curse and a homeless court and a bunch of homicidal acolytes.
“What did he say?” I asked Marco casually.
Marco cocked a thick eyebrow at me. “Think you’d better take that up with him. He wants you to call.”
He held out a shiny black phone.
I bit my lip and saw an unhappy-looking reflection do the same. Yes, Mircea and I needed to talk. Yes, we needed to do it soon. And not just because of personal issues. We were also allies in a war, the same war my dear acolytes had decided to join on the other side, and he might need something.
“Did he say it was urgent?”
Marco looked at me.
“Well, did he?”
“He didn’t say it wasn’t.”
I felt my back muscles unclench slightly. Mircea was a diplomat, but if it was life or death he would have said so. And Marco would be looking a lot more than just exasperated right now.
Of course, ignoring this was only going to dig me in deeper, and I had a feeling that I was in over my head as it was. But I just couldn’t deal with another problem right now, especially not a tall, dark, and handsome problem with wicked eyes and a knowing smile who played me like a violin even when I wasn’t exhausted. And starving.
“I’m hungry,” I told Marco plaintively.
He narrowed suspicious eyes at me but didn’t argue. Because a hungry Pythia was a vulnerable Pythia. The energy of the office might be all but inexhaustible, but that wasn’t true of the people who had to channel it. And out of fuel for me meant out of power.
He put the phone away. “What do you want?”
“Anything. And lots of it,” I added as my stomach woke up to inform me that half a beer was not an adequate daily intake. “And I need to see . . . uh, the guy. That I brought with me.”
“The demon, you mean?” Marco asked dryly, because yeah. He knew the wards, too.
But a moment after he strode out, a bedraggled, beaten-up, sopping-wet demon staggered in, sandwiched between two vamps. Someone had given him another pop eye to match the glamouried one, which oddly made him look better. Or at least more symmetrical.
It didn’t appear to have done anything for his temper.
“It’s okay. You can leave him,” I told the guards, more for their sake than his. Rosier might be temporarily powerless, but he wouldn’t stay that way forever. And he struck me as the vindictive type.
They exchanged glances, but they didn’t argue, either. Because we all knew it didn’t matter. Which was why I jumped up and clapped a hand over Rosier’s indignantly open mouth as soon as they’d gone. Vampire hearing ensured that they could eavesdrop equally well from the living room—of a suite on the other side of the building.
They didn’t do it on purpose, exactly. It was just that, with superhuman senses and living in one another’s brains half the time, vamps had about the same understanding of privacy as the NSA. And that was before getting orders to keep me safe or else.
So I put a finger to my lips while Rosier glared at me some more. But he stayed silent when I let him go so I could lean over and turn on the TV. Sumo wrestling, of course. Vegas only had about ten channels of the stuff. But I flipped around until I found a loud telenovela and blasted it, and then turned on the clock radio for good measure.
“What are—” Rosier demanded.
“Shhh!” I grabbed his hand and led him to the French windows on the other side of the room, which opened onto a balcony. It was a tiny trail of a thing, little more than a lip clinging to the side of the building. Because there are penthouses and then there are penthouses, and mine was of the low-rent variety.
I’d had a nicer one once upon a time, before the head of the Senate decided to move in and kick me out. It had a big balcony, with lots of room and a pool. I looked up and scowled; I bet she didn’t even swim.
“What are you doing?” Rosier asked as I climbed out.
“I need to talk to you.”
“And we can’t talk inside?”
“Not unless you want to be overheard.”
“I don’t give a damn,” Rosier said flatly. “And why do you live with a horde of bloodsucking fiends you can’t talk in front of?”
“They’re family,” I snapped. “Now get out here.”
“I’ll pass,” he told me, eyeing the twenty-something-floor drop without pleasure.
“Don’t tell me you’re afraid of heights!” I’d raised my voice a little, but it didn’t matter because the wind out here was something else. It came whipping around the side of the building like a banshee every few moments, carrying everything before it—including sound. But there was a railing, and it was sturdy.
Not that Rosier seemed to think so.
“Of course not,” he told me haughtily.
And stayed right where he was.
“Oh, for crying out loud!” I said. “You’re afraid of water and you’re afraid of heights. Anything else?”
“I’m not afraid.”
“Then what, exactly, is the problem?”
“Prudence. I might not survive a fall from that height. And while I could make another body, it would take time.”
“You’re not going to be falling?
??”
“I know that. Because I’m not going to be out there.”
“We don’t have time for this,” I hissed.
Rosier pried his hand loose from mine and began using it to strip off the double glamourie. The bulbous nose went first and then the fake pop eye. The real one had to stay, however, which meant that his looks didn’t improve much.
Or maybe that was down to his expression.
“On the contrary, we have plenty of time,” he said sourly, trying to pry off the shaggy left eyebrow, which had somehow become stuck. “Now that you’ve inexplicably brought us back to the present!”
“I did no such thing—”
“Then I was hallucinating the boat that almost drowned me?”
“You were doing that well enough on your own,” I snapped, not feeling charitable toward the guy who’d had one job and managed to screw it up. Just like he was managing to broadcast our conversation to every damned guard in the place.
At least, he was until I shifted him outside with me.
That elicited enough screeching and caterwauling to have brought every vamp in the hotel running. Except that I’d anticipated it and shut the door firmly behind him. And then put my back to it so he couldn’t dive back in, because I wasn’t going to be pulling that trick twice.
As it was, my knees felt wobbly.
“Why didn’t you hex him?” I demanded, to cover my reaction.
“Why did you shift us out of there before I could?” he returned savagely, whirling on me from where the shift had left him, half draped over the balcony railing.
“For the last time, I didn’t shift us! That other Pythia must have done that. The old one,” I clarified. “She . . . co-opted Gertie’s portal . . . used it to send us back to our own time. Or something.” It wasn’t a great explanation, but I actually wasn’t sure what had happened.
I’d been trying to shift us into the bright spring day that had been following us around like a panting puppy. It wasn’t a long-term solution, but it hadn’t needed to be. I’d just needed to buy a couple of seconds so Rosier could do his thing before Tweetie’s grandma followed us through the portal.
But she hadn’t given me the chance, hitting us with a time wave even as we dove. So instead of traveling half a year, or whatever it had been, we’d traveled two hundred, right back to our own time. And, somehow, she’d also managed to snatch Pritkin away in the process.