Chapter 3
We landed in a heap on
a white tile floor, and something fell with a splut right in front of my nose. My eyes crossed
trying to identify the pale pink item. As soon as I did, I shrieked
and scrambled back, knocking Pritkin off balance in the process. A
crooked hand with skin the color and texture of old stone grabbed
the offending item and returned it to a silver tray. “No guests
allowed,” I was informed in a gravelly baritone.
I didn’t reply, being
too busy staring at the platter of severed fingers that the owner
of the voice was clutching between long, curved claws. I should
have been more concerned by the greenish gray face, like mildewed
rock, that was peering at me over the tray. It had a deep scar
running from temple to neck and its only remaining eye, a narrowed
yellow orb, was fighting for forehead space with two black, curled
horns—not something you see every day. But I couldn’t seem to tear
my attention away from the severed digits.
There had to be
twenty or more, all index fingers as far as I could tell, that had
been shoved between pieces of bread. The crusts had been trimmed
away and a piece of ruffled romaine lettuce carefully wrapped
around each one. Finger sandwiches, some part of my brain observed.
I choked, caught between a retch and a hysterical
giggle.
My gaze moved around
what I now identified as a busy kitchen. Another of the
stone-colored things—this one with glowing green eyes and bat
wings—stood on a stool at a nearby island, pressing something into
small, finger-shaped molds. My frozen brain finally thawed enough
to recognize the smell. “Oh, thank God.” I sagged against Pritkin
in relief. “It’s pâté!”
“Where are we?” he
demanded, dragging me to my feet. I had trouble standing, both
because I’d somehow lost a shoe and because a larger gray thing
barreled past, knocking me back with a flailing tail. It was
wearing a starched white linen chef’s outfit, complete with little
red scarf and tall hat. The breast of the tunic had a very familiar
crest emblazoned on it in bright red, yellow and black—Tony’s
colors.
“Dante’s.” When
Pritkin had fallen on me at the theatre, my concentration must have
wobbled. We’d ended up a little off course.
“You’re sure this is
the casino?” The mage was eyeing a nearby platter, which contained
radishes that had been partly skinned to resemble human eyeballs.
They had olives for pupils, and it almost looked like the pimentos
were glowering at us. I took a closer look at the shield, a copy of
which adorned every uniform in sight and appeared over a set of
swinging doors across the room. It looked very
familiar.
Antonio Gallina had
been born into a family of chicken farmers outside Florence about
the time Michelangelo was carving his fawn for old man Medici. But,
some two hundred years later, when the impoverished English king
Charles I started selling noble titles to fund his art obsession,
the illegitimate farmer’s son turned master vamp had had more than
enough stashed away to buy himself a baronetcy. I personally
thought that the heralds, the men who had designed Tony’s coat of
arms, had spent a little too long at the pub the night before. I
guess it could have been worse—like the poor French apothecary who
was granted arms showing three silver chamber pots—but the comical
yellow hen in the middle of Tony’s shield was bad enough. It was
supposedly a play on his last name, which means chicken in Italian,
but the fat bird bore an uncanny resemblance to its
owner.
“Pretty sure,” I
said. I would have elaborated, but one of the creatures doing the
cooking, a diminutive specimen with a hairnet confining its long,
floppy donkey ears, scurried by. It ran over my bare foot with
clawed toenails, causing me to wince and press farther back. That
resulted in Pritkin getting smashed into a slotted cart filled with
trays of tiny black caldrons.
“What are those things?” I demanded. I kicked off my
remaining shoe to keep from breaking my neck in case we had to run
for it. I kept a wary eye on the creature in front of us, but he
didn’t seem overtly hostile, despite his looks. The only thing he
was doing to back up his request was to point forcefully at the
swinging doors with a spoon.
“Rum torte,” a tiny
chef croaked in passing. He was wearing only the top half of the
usual tunic-and-trousers set, which in his case brushed the floor.
A long, lizardlike tail protruded from beneath it.
He resembled most of
the other creatures in the room, the majority of which had bat
wings, clawed hands and long tails, but there the similarity ended.
Their heads were everything from avian to reptilian, with a few
furred ones here and there. Some had horns and others droopy ears,
and their height ranged from maybe two feet to tall enough to stare
me in the chest. Their eyes varied in color and size, but all of
them seemed to glow, as if lit from inside by a high-powered bulb.
It was unnerving, especially since they reminded me of something,
and I couldn’t quite figure out what.
“Gargoyles,” Pritkin
said as we stumbled through the swinging doors into a short
hallway. At the end, a door that looked like old, carved wood but
was too light to be real let out into a much longer and wider
corridor. It was lined with medieval weaponry and cobweb-covered
suits of armor, and dimly lit by flickering torches—fake, of
course. Dante’s wards were minimal on the upper floors, so
electricity worked okay except for the occasional splutter. And
real torches would have been hard to get past the fire
codes.
I stopped and glared
at the mage, who was looking around like he expected something to
jump him at any moment. It would really be nice if the universe
could stop throwing creatures out of fables, myths and nightmares
at me. “There’s no such thing as gargoyles!” I said just as two of
the little monsters pulled a cart out of the door and began tugging
it down the hallway. The floor, painted to look like weathered
stone, was carpeted with a narrow strip of old maroon plush barely
two feet wide that ran down the middle. It didn’t do much
decorwise, and it threatened to tip the cart over whenever one of
the wheels encountered it. “It’s just a name for fancy rainspouts,”
I insisted, even as my eyes told me otherwise. “Everyone knows
that.”
“How can you have
lived so long in our world and know so little?” Pritkin demanded.
“You must have seen stranger things. You grew up at a vampire’s
court!”
By this time, the
servers had navigated the corridor and paused in front of an
elevator. One of them pressed the call button with the tip of a
pointed tail. He had the face of a dog and a bat’s body, while his
companion was covered in grayish scales and was drooling around a
two-foot-long tongue.
“The strangest thing
about our cook in Philly,” I told Pritkin dazedly, “was that he was
almost deaf from years of blasting heavy metal. But he was human.
Well,” I amended after a moment, “until that time Tony promised an
important visitor fettuccine Alfredo, only the cook somehow heard
bacon, lettuce and tomato. . . . Anyway, shouldn’t they be off
decorating a cathedral somewhere?”
“The creatures on
medieval cathedrals aren’t gargoyles; they’re grotesques,” he
replied pedantically, while we moved in the direction of the
cart.
“Stop it! You know
what I mean! Why are they here?”
“Illegal aliens,” he
said shortly. “Cheap labor.”
I stared at him
suspiciously, but if the mage had a sense of humor, I’d yet to see
any sign of it. “Aliens? From where?”
“From Faerie,” he
replied in the clipped tones he uses when annoyed. That seems to be
most of the time, at least around me. “They have been coming into
our world for centuries. But the numbers have greatly increased
recently because the Light Fey have been making things difficult
for the Dark—among whom the creatures we call gargoyles are
numbered. The mages who handle Fey affairs have been complaining
about the number of unauthorized arrivals we’ve been getting as a
result.”
“So they come here
and do room service?”
The elevator came and
the gargoyles tugged their laden cart onto it, ignoring the
loitering humans. “They were traditionally employed as guardians
for temples in the ancient world and for magical edifices in later
centuries. But advances in warding have lessened the call for that
kind of thing. Unlike the Light Fey, they can’t pass for human, so
their entrance is restricted.” He scowled. “Their legal entrance, ”
he amended.
“I guess around here,
they just kind of blend in with the ambiance,” I said, but Pritkin
wasn’t listening. He had crouched and was looking around a corner
as warily as if he expected to find an army on the other
side.
“Stay here,” he
ordered. “I’m going to check out the area. When I return, we will
have that talk you promised, or the next time we meet won’t be so
pleasant.”
“Pleasant? What weird
definition of that word are you—” I stopped because he’d left,
melting around the corner and into the shadows like a character in
a video game. The guy was obviously cracked, but I had promised to
hear him out. And if there was any chance of cutting a deal to get
him and his Circle off my back, I wanted it.
I didn’t think that
going back to the kitchen was a good idea, so I hung out in the
hallway. The suits of armor were interspersed with ugly tapestries,
with the closest showing a Cyclops eating his way through a human
army, a soldier in each hand and an arm dangling out of his bloody
mouth. I decided to concentrate on the armor.
That turned out to be
more fun than I’d expected. The suits stood on individual wood
platforms bearing brass plaques, each of which had a Latin
inscription. I’d had to learn Latin growing up, thanks to my
governess’s idea of what constituted a proper education, but the
only time I’d used it outside the schoolroom was when Laura, a
ghost friend, and I had amused ourselves thinking up mottos for
Tony. Her favorite had been Nunquam reliquiae
redire: carpe omniem impremis (Never go back for seconds:
take it all the first time). I’d preferred Mundus vult decipi (There’s a sucker born every
minute), but we settled on Revelare
pecunia! (Show me the money!) because it fit better on the
shield. I was rusty, but it didn’t take long to figure out that,
like our efforts, the inscriptions at Dante’s weren’t as serious as
they looked.
Prehende uxorem meam, sis! (Take my wife, please!),
begged the placard on the nearest knight. I grinned and moved down
the hall, translating as I went. Some of the most amusing were
Certe, toto, sentio nos in kansate non iam
adesse (You know, Toto, I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas
anymore), Elvem vivere (Elvis lives),
and Estne volumen in amiculum, an solum tibi
libet me videre? (Is that a scroll under your cloak, or are
you just happy to see me?).
I was crouched in
front of a knight about halfway down the hall, trying to figure out
the joke, when Pritkin came running full tilt back around the
corner. I knew there was a problem before he opened his mouth—the
fact that he was trailed by a line of hovering weapons sort of gave
it away. “Get up!” he yelled as one of the floating arsenal—a knife
long enough to be considered a short sword—took a swipe at him. If
he hadn’t dodged at the last second, it would have taken off his
head. As it was, an arc of bright red blood went flying from his
half-severed ear.
I admit that I just
stood there for a moment. In my defense, the last time I’d seen
Pritkin surrounded by levitating weapons, they had been his own.
Before I could figure out why his knife was attacking him, two
other figures rounded the corner. I recognized them as the mages
who had been facing Enyo in Casanova’s earlier. “They aren’t with
you?” I asked stupidly.
He didn’t bother to
reply. “Shift us out of here!” he yelled, throwing out an arm like
someone doing a bad disco move. The other mages came to an abrupt
halt. I didn’t know why until I reached out and a tangible wall of
energy met my outstretched hand. Pritkin’s shields glimmered around
us, faintly blue and wavelike in the flickering light from a nearby
torch. “Do it!”
“Give us the rogue,
Pritkin,” one of the mages demanded. He was tall, with a prominent
Adam’s apple, pallid skin and a booming voice that didn’t match his
skinny frame. “She isn’t worth this.”
“She’ll get a fair
hearing,” the bulkier, African American mage at his side added,
although the look he sent me wasn’t friendly. “Come peacefully
while you can.”
“What’s going on?” I
asked. The only answer I got was something large whizzing past my
face, all of a millimeter from my nose. I jumped back with a shout,
just as a heavy mace collided with a nearby suit of armor. That was
a lucky break, since the heap of old metal had been about to bring
a sword down on my head. The mace caught the thing in the chest,
leaving a big dent and sending it staggering back into a
tapestry.
I looked around
wildly, not understanding what was happening. The mace had sliced
through Pritkin’s shields as if they weren’t there. Even more
worrying was the fact that the mages hadn’t thrown the thing—it had
come from somewhere behind us—but there was nobody back there. One
of the knights was missing its weapon, but there was no one around
to have thrown it.
A clanging sound
caused me to whip my head back around and, for a second, I thought
the mages were attacking. But although they were looking even more
grim, I was no longer the focus of their interest. Their eyes and
weapons were leveled on the damaged suit of armor. Instead of
simply falling over, it appeared to be fighting its way out of the
tapestry. Once it threw off the heavy material, it started feeling
around for its sword, which the impact of the mace had knocked
away. But Pritkin grabbed the weapon first and, despite it being
almost as tall as he was, leveled it menacingly on the
creature.
The knight appeared
unfazed. It righted itself, then wrenched a shield off the wall and
sent it sailing at us like a hundred-pound Frisbee. Pritkin threw
himself at me, smashing us into the wall just as the heavy iron
sphere sliced through the air where we’d been standing. It crashed
into a stained glass window at the end of the hall, causing a cloud
of multicolored shards to rain down around the back
staircase.
I didn’t even have
time to catch my breath before Pritkin hit the floor and jerked me
down beside him, pushing my head so low that my nose found out by
experience just how hard fake stone can be. I didn’t complain,
though, because the next instant my hair was ruffled as another
shield blew through the air right above us. It took a bite out of
the wall across the hall, embedding itself halfway into the plaster
and sheet rock.
The two war mages
must have done something that drew the armor’s attention, because
the old relic suddenly started moving towards them, flakes of rust
drifting to the ground behind it. I clutched Pritkin’s arm, stunned
and disbelieving. “How did that thing get past my ward?” The first
shield had come within about a foot of us, and the second had
missed me by maybe half an inch. How close did a threat have to get
before my star decided to pay attention?
Pritkin ignored me.
He jumped to his feet, grabbing the sword he’d dropped when we had
to get up close and personal with the wall. It turned out to be a
bad move. The knight’s visor-covered face immediately swiveled back
in our direction. I guess it didn’t like anyone else touching its
weapon. It couldn’t fight all three mages at the same time, but
somehow that didn’t make me feel better.
That was especially
true a second later when the corridor echoed with the sound of a
couple dozen metal figures simultaneously stepping off their
plinths. It seemed that the internal defenses Casanova had talked
about had decided to up the ante. The approaching metal army looked
like the medieval version of a chorus line, all moving in perfect
synchronization, but instead of doing high kicks they were
shouldering weapons.
“The Circle found a
way to block your ward—it won’t work,” Pritkin said shortly as I
scrambled to my feet, ignoring the pain from my bruised nose and
scraped knees. He was scanning the approaching line for some sign
of weakness. I really hoped he saw one, because the closest knights
had started to whirl heavy maces around their heads almost too fast
to see, and the ones right behind them had unsheathed very
sharp-looking swords. Then what he’d said hit me. I reached over my
shoulder to grab the top of my lopsided star. It was still there,
but its slight ridges lay quiescent under my
fingertips.
“The Circle can’t
remove it unless they have you in their power,” he added. “But it
won’t flare. Don’t depend on it.”
“And you were
planning on telling me this when?!”
Pritkin didn’t
answer, being busy pulling an old-fashioned .45 from his belt and
pumping rounds into the nearest knights. The bullets all connected,
leaving sizable holes, but there was no spray of blood or mangled
bodily tissue. The torchlight glimmering through the punctures in
the nearest armored head showed why—all I could see was the empty
interior of the helmet and part of a tapestry on the far wall.
There was no one in there to hurt.
Pritkin must have
figured this out, because he shoved the gun back into its holster
and sent a bright orange fireball at the line instead. It was
powerful enough to catch one of the banners hanging down from the
ceiling alight, quickly reducing it to a few burning shreds of
material. But when the flames cleared, I saw that it had had less
of an effect on the knights. The closest two emerged looking like
contestants in a three-legged race, lurching along with their
bodies melted together from the hips down. But they were still
coming, and the others had only been scorched and knocked off their
feet.
“Their weapons are
enchanted,” Pritkin said grimly. “And I’ve been using my shields
almost nonstop all day. They won’t last, and few spells will work
within the casino’s wards. Shift us out of here!”
I’d have liked
nothing better, but there was a slight problem. I might be in
possession of a whopping amount of power, at least temporarily, but
I really didn’t want to use it. Power wasn’t free, especially in
such large amounts. I’d been around magic users enough to know that
if you borrow power, eventually you get a bill. I didn’t like not
knowing what that bill might be, or who might be sending
it.
“Why are the knights
attacking us?” I asked, hoping for another solution—any other. “We
haven’t done anything!” Maybe I was misreading the situation, and
the casino’s defenses were actually trying to take out the mages
for us. In that case, all we needed to do was get out of the
way.
Pritkin quickly
destroyed that hope. “Andrew and Stephan triggered the automatic
defenses by drawing arms inside the casino. I didn’t respond, so we
should have been safe, but they came too close. The defenses have
confused us with the aggressors, and now we’re all targets. Shift
us now!”
I didn’t have time to
explain my views on my new power, because I had to dodge a spear
thrown by a knight down the corridor. I jumped aside just before it
slammed into the floor where I’d been standing, sending bits of
painted concrete flying up at me. I felt liquid slide down my left
cheek and raised a shaking hand to it. My fingertips came back
painted red, but my ward never so much as twinged. I stared
incredulously at my blood-smeared hand. So much for supernatural
protection.
“Do it!” Pritkin
yelled.
“I can’t!” I would
break my resolution, but only if I was sure that the only
alternative was death. If anyone sent me a bill for London, I could
reasonably argue that I had been getting myself out of the mess I’d
been dragged into against my will. I’d have no such excuse for
calling the power now, and I didn’t intend to end up owing somebody
my life if I could avoid it. That sort of debt in magical terms can
be a very bad thing.
Pritkin might have
argued, but the charred knights were quickly regaining their feet.
He sent his animated arsenal into the crowd, the wildly weaving
knives giving the knights some new targets. I added my daggers to
the mix, just in time to take out a mace spinning straight at
Pritkin’s skull. He hadn’t noticed it because he was using the
sword to block a pike that had been about to run him through from
the other direction. The last opportunity I’d had to see Pritkin
fight, he’d looked like he was enjoying himself. His face showed no
such emotion this time. Of course, the dangling ear might have had
something to do with that.
I looked around for a
way out, but there didn’t appear to be any. The back stairs were
surrounded by a minefield of broken glass, not that it was a huge
obstacle. My bare feet wouldn’t have enjoyed it, but if Pritkin
could lift that huge sword, he could probably haul me across. But I
doubted he could manage that while also fighting off the line of
knights between us and that part of the hall. The same was true for
the door to the kitchen. It was blocked by a fallen suit of armor,
which was being dismembered by one of my gaseous knives, and the
thing’s three companions, which were still on their
feet.
“Are there hidden
stairs?” Pritkin asked in a calm voice that sounded really out of
place at the moment. “They should have difficulty navigating
them.”
“How should I know?”
I looked around frantically, but my attention was monopolized by a
knight brandishing a wicked-looking two-headed axe. Alphonse, who
collected weapons of all kinds, had an identical item on his
safe-room wall. It had looked menacing enough just hanging there;
it was a lot worse now that it was almost close enough to take off
Pritkin’s head—or mine.
“Check the
tapestries!” Pritkin ordered, darting forward to take a swing at
the armor’s knees. “There might be a hidden door!” His blade took
off one of our attacker’s legs, causing it to topple over. But it
kept coming, dragging itself forward by its arms and using the
remaining leg to push. Even more disconcerting, its severed limb
wiggled along the ground behind it, trying to catch up to the main
event. To stop one of these things, we’d have to completely
dismember it, and there were too many of them and too few of us for
that to be practical. We’d be in pieces long before they
would.
I yanked the nearest
curtain aside, but nothing except more faux stone met my eyes. I
felt around, hoping to encounter a hidden door, but no such luck. I
glanced at the elevator, but the indicator light showed it to be
five floors away. Not to mention that the two mages were having a
hell of a battle right in front of it.
While I snatched
aside the other tapestries in our dwindling safe zone, looking for
nonexistent exits, the armor’s detached leg reunited with its body.
The metal at the top of its thigh grew liquid, like quicksilver,
and the two parts merged seamlessly. A second later, you couldn’t
tell there had ever been a wound. I finally accepted that we were
in an impossible situation. Even dismemberment was no more than a
brief inconvenience for these things. Tony was a cheap bastard, but
not when it came to security. Damn it.
“No stairs!” I
yelled.
Pritkin whirled
around, sweeping another knight’s feet out from under it, and
clipped me with his elbow. I fell in front of an empty plinth, my
ears ringing. My brain automatically translated the phrase in front
of my eyes: Medio tutissimus ibis (You
will be safest in the middle). It was a quote from Ovid advising
moderation, and seemed really strange at Dante’s, home of the
extreme.
While I struggled to
sit up, the six knights from the far end of the corridor, which had
been making their cumbersome way towards us, got within striking
distance. That gave us the choice of being skewered by them or
being dismembered by their buddies on our other side, since it was
obvious that we weren’t going to hold them all off for long. I was
about to damn the consequences and shift us away when I noticed
something interesting.
One of Pritkin’s
larger knives was slicing busily away at a nearby knight. The armor
had lost its weapon, which was clenched in the fist that had just
been severed at the wrist. But it was making no effort to retrieve
it, despite the fact that it lay on the carpeted strip only a few
feet away. The mailed hand was also motionless, not trying to
rejoin its body as the other knight’s leg had done. I suddenly
realized that I had a clear view of it because not a single knight
was anywhere near the center of the hall.
They were grouped on
either side of the narrow strip of carpet, which they were going
out of their way to avoid touching. I glanced back at the fight
behind us and it was the same story. The knights on one side had
gone after the mages, those on the other had come after us, but
neither group came in contact with the ratty-looking piece in the
center. For a brief moment, I almost felt like giving a cheer for
paranoid Tony, who always designed a way out of every trap, even
his own.
Pritkin had been
driven to his knees blocking another pike attack, while a second
and third knight converged on his position with raised swords. I
didn’t wait to see whether he would be fast enough to deal with the
predicament, but launched myself at him, hitting him with a thud
that rolled both of us onto the carpet strip. We landed catty
cornered, with Pritkin’s left leg and my whole right side dangling
off the edge. Before I could do anything about that, a knight
brought a sword down, spearing Pritkin’s calf where it stuck out
from between my legs.
“Don’t move!” I
yelled as the mage pushed me aside and plunged his sword into the
knight’s belly. The blow forced the heavy thing backwards, but it
also ripped the sword brutally out of Pritkin’s leg. He gasped but
started after the knight as if there weren’t almost a dozen others
within striking distance, converging on us from both sides. I
climbed up his body and sat on him, grabbing a handful of hair to
swing his face around. “Safe!” I screamed to be heard over the
clanging sounds of battle. “We’re safe in the middle!”
I tugged his bleeding
leg onto the maroon plush and put all my weight on the undamaged
parts of his body. Even though he was injured, I couldn’t have held
him for long, but as soon as we were no longer touching the floor,
it was as if the knights simply didn’t see us anymore. They began
lumbering down the hall toward where the mages had retreated around
the corner. Pritkin looked stunned but followed my pointing finger
to the inscription on the plinth and comprehension
dawned.
“We need to get back
to the kitchen,” he said, getting to his knees. He was careful not
to touch anything except carpet, but he swayed slightly, scaring
me. I looked down and understood the problem. His trouser leg was
drenched with red, making it a match for the jacket below his
injured ear. There was so much blood that I suspected a major
artery had been hit. He leaned on me heavily as we made our way
along the narrow safe way, reinforcing the impression.
Sounds of a furious
battle came from around the corner, no doubt from the mages, but we
ignored it. Personally, I was rooting for the casino. I knew how to
deal with it now, but the mages didn’t have a time-out
zone.
We burst back into
the kitchen. “We need an ambulance!” I yelled, squinting around. It
was hard to see, since the room seemed blindingly well lit after
the hall, but I got a vague impression of a bunch of squat shapes
pausing to stare at us out of huge, glowing eyes.
“No. I can deal with
this.” Pritkin collapsed just inside the door. He pulled off his
boot and gouts of purplish red blood flooded the previously
pristine kitchen floor. His face lost what little color it
had.
I grabbed up a nearby
dish towel and held it to the wound. Resolution or no resolution, I
wasn’t going to watch him bleed to death. “I’m going to shift us to
a hospital,” I said, but he drew back from my touch.
“No! I can heal
this.” He muttered something under his breath and the blood flow
did decrease, but I didn’t like the shallow, panting breaths he was
taking or the clammy pallor of his face. It also seriously creeped
me out to see his hanging ear slowly climb back up the side of his
face and reattach itself.
“Why don’t you want a
hospital?” I demanded, trying to ignore the ear, which gave a final
twitch to align itself with the slant of the other one. Suddenly,
some pieces of the puzzle fell into place. “Wait a minute. Those
mages weren’t just after me, were they? The Circle’s chasing you,
too!”
Pritkin didn’t reply,
being too busy chanting something inaudible. I felt a presence
looming over us and looked up to see a gargoyle with red eyes and,
incongruously, dainty ruby earrings in its pointed, catlike ears.
It pushed me aside gently but firmly.
I stood there
awkwardly, unsure whether to protest or not. I didn’t say anything,
mainly because I didn’t get a feeling of evil from the thing. That
might have had something to do with the jewelry, or the fact that
it had chocolate icing on its fuzzy chin. It seemed to have been
the right decision. A hand that looked more like a paw hovered over
Pritkin’s leg for a moment, then slowly, the jagged wound began to
close.
The process appeared
to be helping him heal, but judging by the way his eyes were
bulging, it wasn’t pleasant. He looked like he wanted to say
something, so I leaned in a little, staying out of reach of his
balled fists. “Me oportet propter praeceptum
te nocere (I’m going to have to hurt you on principle),” he
gasped.
“Very
funny.”
“You could have
shifted us out of there all the time!”
“Not without a
price.”
Pritkin’s glare
almost set a new record. “What price? You could have been killed!
So could I!”
“Stercus accidit (Shit happens).” While he was
deciphering my bastardized Latin, I went in search of another way
out. I did not intend to set foot in that corridor again, nor was I
planning to shift after going to such lengths to avoid
it.
What I found was very
satisfactory. If I hadn’t been so weirded out by the gargoyles, I
might have thought to take a look around earlier and saved us that
whole scene in the hall. After passing a couple of huge, built-in
freezers, a cool room and a storeroom for nonperishable stuff, I
found a loading dock that let out onto the back of the
casino.
I looked over the
sunlit parking lot and was seriously tempted to take off while the
mage was healing. I so didn’t have time for this, whatever this
was. I had to persuade Casanova to tell me where his boss was
hiding. Not that I was 100 percent certain that Myra was with him,
but it was a good guess. They both worked for the same guy, the
leader of the Russian vampire mafia, known as Rasputin in the
history books. What the books don’t say is that he found other uses
for his formidable persuasive abilities once a Russian prince
“killed” him. After lying low for a while, he brought much of the
drug running, counterfeiting and illegal magical weapon-selling
rackets in Eastern Europe under his control. He’d recently decided
to add the North American vamps to his growing business empire by
taking over the Senate, and he’d succeeded in killing off four
Senate members. But that got him nowhere unless he took out their
leader, and the Consul had proven tougher than he’d expected. The
whole thing was very Cold War-ish and didn’t interest me much,
except for the fact that I had accidentally blundered into the
middle of it.
After the failed
coup, Rasputin had simply disappeared. Thousands of vamps and mages
were searching for him, but had so far come up with zilch. Since
there aren’t many good hiding places, and since Tony and Myra had
vanished at the same time, I was betting they were all together.
But wherever she was, I had to find her before she recovered from
our last meeting, or she would certainly find me. And I doubted I’d
enjoy the experience. Or survive it.
But I had promised,
and it was intriguing to think that Pritkin and I might be on the
same side for a change. The enemy of my enemy might not, in this
case, be precisely my friend, but I’d take anything short of
outright hostility. I could use all the help I could get, and
Casanova had looked very nervous when Pritkin showed up. That might
be useful. I dodged a couple of gargoyles wrestling a crate of
cabbages up the ramp and started to go back inside. That was when
the fun really began.