“Wow, we just leapt right to it there, didn’t we?” I asked, furious.
“You are supposed to be asleep.”
“I was. And then I got up to discover that I’m a prisoner.”
“You are not a prisoner.”
“Then I can leave?”
Another pause. “In the morning, when you can shift.”
“So I’m only a prisoner for the night, is that it?”
“It is for your protection.”
“And how does that work, exactly? I’ve been assaulted twice. And where have they both been again?”
“You were vulnerable the first time due to our ignorance of the threat. You were vulnerable the second because a
“And that explains why I can’t see Pritkin?”
A third pause. That had to be some kind of record. Mircea usually had the defense prepared.
“No. Considering the probable nature of the entity that has been attacking you, I consider the warlock to be a threat in his own right.”
“The what?”
“He had a demon servant at one time, did he not? Encased in that battle golem he devised?”
I frowned. “I guess.”
“Then he is a warlock, not merely a mage. Only warlocks can summon demons to their aid.”
“Is there a point?”
“Merely that warlocks are a notoriously unstable class. They are prone to strange behavior, increasingly so as they age, with some going mad over time. It is one reason that many mages avoid the specialization, despite the added power it gives them.”
“But Jonas had a golem once,” I protested. “He told me so.”
“Forgive me, Cassie, but Jonas Marsden is hardly an example of well-adjusted behavior!”
Point.
“And we are discussing the warlock Pritkin.”
Actually, we weren’t. Because Pritkin wasn’t a warlock. His ability with demons came not through some arcane magic, but because he was half demon himself. His father was Rosier, Lord of the Incubi, which made Pritkin sort of a demon prince. Or something. I really didn’t know what it made him, since he hated that part of his lineage and almost never talked about it. But I didn’t think mentioning that I was being guarded by the son of a prince of hell was likely to go well.
Of course, neither was this.
“He’s a friend.”
“Those creatures are not friends, Cassie! They are selfserving, power-hungry—”
“They say the same thing about vamps.”
“—and unpredictable. Not to mention that this one may well be part demon himself.”
“What?”
“That is the rumor Kit has been hearing. And it would explain why he heals so quickly, how he has lived —”
“A lot of people are part one thing, part another—”
“But most of them don’t bother to cover up large areas of their past. Yet despite all of Kit’s efforts, he has been unable to discover anything about the man before the last century—”
“Because he wasn’t born then!”
“We both know that isn’t the case.”
I didn’t say anything. Mircea had recently seen Pritkin on a trip we’d taken back in time. And while mages tended to live a century or more longer than most humans, it was kind of hard to explain why he’d aged maybe five years in a couple hundred.
Of course, I didn’t intend to try. I didn’t think that explaining that Pritkin had been in hell for much of his life was likely to make him seem more trustworthy.
“I would like you to consider dismissing the man,” Mircea said suddenly. It caught me off guard, which I suspected was the point.
“I can’t do that.”
“Cassie—”
“I need him,” I said flatly. “If he hadn’t been training me, I might have died—”
“Or you might not have been in danger at all. Have you noticed that your problems with demonkind always seem to come when the warlock is around?”
“What are you suggesting?”
“That perhaps he is the source of the threat, rather than its solution.”
“That’s ridiculous!”
“Is it? I know only that every time you have trouble with demons, he is there.”
“He’s my bodyguard! He’s supposed to be—”
“You have bodyguards.”
“Yeah, only I think most of them would like a new assignment. And this wasn’t a demon.”
“According to him.”
“Well, I trust him!”
Pause number four. “And I do not.”
And there it was, as plain as any challenge ever given. And to underscore it, as if anything else was needed, Marco quietly took the phone out of my hand and put it in his back pocket. His expression said clearly that it wasn’t coming out again.
All right, then.
The doorbell rang.
I glanced around the room. One thing about Vegas hotels, especially those built before the widespread use of cell phones, is that they put land lines everywhere. Busy executives needed instant access to the empires they were gambling away and wouldn’t stay anywhere that didn’t offer it. As a result, there were no fewer than three telephones in sight—one in the living room, one in the bar and one sitting on the counter in the kitchen.
And a vamp was casually loitering near every one of them.
Okay, then.
I turned on my heel and went back to my room.
Unsurprisingly, there was no cell phone in my purse. I hadn’t really expected one. When a master vampire gave an order, his men were thorough in carrying it out. And Marco had never been a slouch. But there were things that a vamp might not notice, especially one who had been around as long as he had.
I went back to the bathroom, turned on the exhaust fan and the shower and blasted Led Zeppelin from the built-in radio.
Vampires don’t use bathrooms all that much, especially the toilet facilities. And, of course, housekeeping kept the place clean. As a result, I was willing to bet that the guys outside had never bothered to so much as crack the door on the toilet cubicle.
And then I knew they hadn’t, when I opened it and saw what I’d expected—yet another phone, this one mounted on the wall. It was big and kind of complicated-looking, like something that ought to have been on the desk of an executive secretary, not sitting above the toilet-tissue dispenser. But it was there, and when I lifted the receiver, I got a dial tone.
Pritkin picked up on the first ring, like he’d been expecting a call. “Do you still have Jonas’s keys?” I asked quietly.
There was silence for a beat, as if he hadn’t been expecting that. But he recovered fast. “See what I can do.”
He hung up and so did I. After waiting another few minutes, I turned off the water and went back to my room. I couldn’t change clothes, because somebody might notice. But I put on a bra, jammed my feet into an old pair of Keds and shoved some cash and my keys into my pocket. Then I went back into the lounge.
The guys were still playing poker, quietly now, as there was no need to keep up audible patter for the human.
