Embrace the Night

Page 21

“And we’ve had such great luck with partners.”
“We can trust Rafe.”
“Cass, I know you like the guy, but come on. A great warrior he ain’t.”
“We don’t need a warrior,” I said irritably. “I’m not planning to attack the Circle!”
“And your plans always work out perfectly, huh?”
“Are you trying to be a pain in the ass?”
“Nope, it pretty much comes naturally.” He lit up and regarded me through a haze of ghostly smoke. “There’s always Marlowe.”
He meant Kit Marlowe, the onetime Elizabethan playwright. He was now the Consul’s chief spy. “Yeah, that’d be healthy.”
“You’d be saving Mircea as well as yourself. I’d think that would cancel a few debts,” Billy argued.
“It might, if they didn’t blame me for getting him into this mess in the first place.”
“But he put the geis on you—”
“Which, as my master, he had every right to do. I’m the one who had no right to double it, even accidentally.” I saw the objection trembling on Billy’s lips. “And yes, I think their reasoning sucks. I’m just saying.”
“I don’t like them any better than you do.” Billy sounded aggrieved. “But who else is there? We keep meeting these powerful types, but they’re all freaking nuts.”
“I’m not taking anyone back in time I can’t trust. Or anyone incompetent. Or who has their own agenda.”
Billy let out an exasperated sigh. “It’s gonna be a little hard to assemble a team if you keep to those kind of standards. Someone loyal and strong who doesn’t want anything? Come on.”
I found myself getting furious all over again at Pritkin, who was supposed to be exactly that. I’d started to let down my guard with him, just because he was smart and brave and sometimes strangely funny. I should’ve kept in mind that none of that meant he was on my side. When I give my word, I keep it, he’d once told me. Yeah, right.
I toyed with the bedspread, blue and gold brocade with scratchy lace. Not for the first time, I wished for something less flashy and more comfortable. I’d had a soft cotton coverlet at Tony’s that I’d used for years. It had faded in the wash, its bright, cheap flowers turning to soft pastels over time, like an English garden. It had gotten a little ragged around the edges, but I’d never let my fastidious governess change it for anything else. I’d liked it the way it was, flaws and all. But like the rest of my stuff, like Eugenie herself, it no longer existed.
“Cass?” Billy suddenly sounded awkward, something almost novel for him. “You know Pritkin was a jerk, right?” A jerk who also happened to be a friend, a tiny voice at the back of my mind whispered. Stop it, stop it. “Cass?”
The lump in my throat had grown enough to be almost painful, and my eyes had started prickling embarrassingly, and wow, was it time for a change of subject. “I know.”
“Okay, then. We’re better off. I never trusted him.”
“I don’t trust anybody,” I said fervently. It was the only thing I was sure of these days.
“Anybody except me,” Billy corrected. “So what’s the plan?”
“I have to get the Codex,” I said, starting with the one thing on which there was no argument. Pritkin had said it wouldn’t help, but I guess I’d just seen how much I could believe him. “Only I can’t bring it back here. It’s been roaming around for over two hundred years; who knows what taking it out of the timeline would do?”
Billy looked confused for a moment, and then his eyes got wide. “You can’t be thinking what I think you’re thinking.”
I scowled at him. “If the mountain won’t go to Mohammed—”
“Mohammed wasn’t an insane master vamp!”
“Mircea’s not insane.” Not yet, anyway. “He’s…tormented.”
“Uh-huh. You’re going to drag a tormented master vampire along to burgle a dark mage stronghold?”
“You have a better idea?”
“Anything is a better idea!”
“Don’t yell.”
“Then start talking sense!” I threw the pillow at him, which did no good because it passed right on through. “That doesn’t change the fact that you’re crazy.”
I flopped back on the bed and threw an arm over my eyes. He was probably right, not that it made a difference. If I couldn’t take the spell to Mircea, I had no choice but to take Mircea to the spell. And I’d been saying just that morning that I wanted something to do. As last words went, they pretty much sucked.
“You need to get some rest.” Billy tried to take my hand, but he’d expended too much energy back at the apartment and didn’t have the strength. His fingers passed right through me.
“And you need to feed,” I said, finishing the thought. I wasn’t looking forward to the energy drain, but I was only going to sleep anyway.
“I’ll make do,” he said, after a minute.
I looked up, confused. I couldn’t remember the last time Billy had refused to take energy. It was the main tie binding us together, his payment for helping out with my various problems. “What?”
“No offense, Cass, but you look like hell.”
“Thanks.”
“I don’t need much gas to spy on the manic mage, anyway.” He tipped his hat back and gave me a cocky grin. “And if we’re lucky, maybe some of his old buddies in the Corps will find him and take care of one problem for us.”
I fell asleep wondering why that thought didn’t make me feel any better.
Rafe met me in the kitchens before dawn the next morning. With Pritkin no longer in the picture, I’d had to look elsewhere for help, and there weren’t a lot of choices. I’d left a message on the private number Rafe had given me, asking to see him. I just hoped he wasn’t going to freak out too badly when I told him what I wanted.
Shortly after we snagged stools at an unused prep table, one of the staff wandered over and deposited a white clay coffee cup in front of me. It smelled like rich dark roast and freshly steamed milk, and had a dot in the middle of the foam from the espresso added right at the end. Pritkin would have loved it. I pushed it away, feeling queasy.
“Cucciolina, you are a mess,” Rafe told his newest admirer, as fat little hands gleefully smeared berry mush all over his green silk shirt.
Some of the staff were making pies for Midsummer’s Eve, which explained why the baby had a ring of purple all around her mouth and jam stuck in her wispy blond hair. Miranda, who had been trying to babysit and supervise at the same time, had handed her over almost as soon as I walked in the door. The baby had immediately made a peevish little huffing sound, and when I just stood there, holding her awkwardly, she broke into an angry shriek.
Rafe rescued me, taking her despite his elegant attire and jiggling her against his chest. She hammed it up for a few seconds, wailing like I’d been sticking her with pins, before finally subsiding into anxious snuffles and pressing her face to his shirt. Considering how fast she recovered, it was pretty clear she’d just wanted to flirt with the cute guy.
A white china plate joined my coffee cup. On it was a largish, nicely browned muffin. I looked at the muffin and, as far as I could tell, it didn’t look back. Since it had passed the first test, I broke it open and sniffed it. Peanut butter and anchovy. A little chef was casually loitering nearby, waiting for a verdict. He was going to be waiting for a while.
“She reminds me of you at that age,” Rafe said, vainly swiping the baby’s lips with a napkin. It only made bad matters worse: now she had purple cheeks, too. “You could never eat anything without getting it everywhere.”
Jesse stifled a smile at the other end of the long table, where he and a bunch of the kids were playing Monopoly. They should have been in bed—it was barely four a.m.—but nobody at Dante’s kept a normal schedule. Having a staff partially composed of people who caught fire in sunlight probably had something to do with that.
Most of the older kids were intent on the game, but one of the younger ones was sitting on the floor, playing with an Elvis Pez dispenser someone had given her. She seemed totally intent on it, but the door behind her nonetheless stayed stubbornly open. It seemed that her parents had once hidden their embarrassing child in a small room with no windows, until she discovered that locks just loved to open for her and escaped. Now it had become a bit of a habit. It made getting around the casino something of a challenge, though: elevator doors simply refused to close as long as she was inside.
Watching her, I finally figured out what had been bugging me. These kids were just too young. The average age was eight, with several in the four-to-five-year-old range. Which made no sense.
At fourteen, I’d been one of the youngest in Tami’s brood. Most had been mid-to late teens, old enough to have figured out what their lives were going to be like in one of those special schools and to have engineered an escape. Sure, there were occasionally younger kids who came through, but they usually arrived with an older sibling or friend. I’d never seen Tami with so many really small children. How had they gotten away? How had they survived on the streets until she found them? I’d barely managed it, and I’d had more years and more money than most of them.
“I didn’t come to court until I was four,” I reminded Rafe absently. A tiny car from the Monopoly game had decided to trundle down the table to us and bumped into my hand. I turned it around and sent it back, where it collided with a briskly hopping shoe. It looked like someone had enchanted the game board for the kids.
“To live, no, but your father brought you as a bambina,” he replied, giving up on cleaning the sticky child. He held her against his chest with one arm, the palm of his hand curled protectively around her skull.
“What?”
“He loved to show you off. Of course, you were better behaved than some,” he said with a sigh, as the baby began chewing on his tie.