So they didn’t fall silent when I entered and picked up my half-finished beer. But ten pairs of eyes watched as I made my way across to the living room and then to the balcony.
The wind chimes were tinkling in the breeze blowing off the desert. It was hot, but after the deep freeze the vamps had going on inside, it felt good. I hung over the rail and drank my beer and waited.
“Is there a problem?” Marco asked, sticking his head out the door.
“Need some air.”
He looked at me suspiciously, but I guess his orders stopped short of actually confining me to my room. He went back to the game, and I went back to my beer. I hadn’t even finished it when my ride showed up.
“Best I could do on short notice,” Pritkin told me, grabbing my arm as I scrambled over the railing. And into the front seat of a beat-up green convertible that was idling in the air twenty stories up.
“No problem,” I told him, hanging on for dear life as the rattletrap belched smoke into the startled faces of half a dozen vamps, who had taken a fraction of a second too long to figure out what was going on.
“Cassie!” I heard Marco’s infuriated bellow behind me. But by then we were out of there, soaring away into the star-shot indigo high above the Strip.
Chapter Twenty-two
“You coldhearted son of a bitch.”
Pritkin looked up from perusing the stained piece of paper posing as a menu and gave me what he probably thought were innocent eyes. They weren’t. I didn’t think that was an expression he was all that familiar with. “Is there a problem?”
“You feed me tofu while you’ve been eating
“No one eats healthy all the time.”
“That’s not what you always say!”
“And do you listen to what I say?”
“Yes.” He just looked at me. “Sometimes.”
“Which is the point. If I told you to eat well merely most of the time, then you’d do it occasionally at best.”
I started to reply to that, and then realized I didn’t have one. “So why bring me here now?”
“Because some days, everyone needs pizza.”
That, at least, we could agree on. He ordered for us, which normally would have annoyed me, but there wasn’t much of a menu to choose from. This wasn’t so much a restaurant as a dive, and you either ordered pizza and beer or you went home.
Unless you ordered ice cream. I decided on a chocolate shake instead of more beer, and although Pritkin didn’t say anything, his expression was eloquent. “You’re going to run it off me anyway,” I pointed out.
“Anything else?” he asked drily. “Onion rings? Pie?”
“They have pie?”
“No.” It was emphatic.
I was in too good of a mood to argue the point. The seat was sticking to my thighs, a broken spring was stabbing my left butt cheek, and the air-conditioning, while present, was completely inadequate for August in Nevada. But I was out. I’d won this round. And tonight, I’d take what victories I could get.
“Are you going to explain what’s going on?” he asked, after the waitress left. “When I tried—”
“Wait a minute.”
There was an old jukebox in the corner, with dirty glass and yellowed titles, not one of which was less than twenty years old. But it had Joan Jett’s entire repertoire, so I fed it a couple of quarters and punched in a selection. The sound quality wasn’t the best, but that wasn’t my main interest, anyway.
“It’s Mircea,” I said, when I rejoined him. “He’s got this crazy idea that you’re a danger.”
Pritkin’s jaw tightened. “I know.”
“You know? Has he said—”
“He didn’t have to. But you may assure him that I am no threat in that regard.”
“I have,” I said impatiently. “But when these things keep happening—”
“They do not keep happening. It was one time.”
I frowned. “One time?”
For some reason, he flushed. “Of any consequence.”
“Well, excuse me for thinking they were all pretty important!” Any time something was trying to kill me, I took it seriously.
Pritkin ran a hand through his hair, which didn’t need the added torture. “I didn’t mean to downplay the significance of what occurred—”
“I would hope not!”
“—merely to assure you that it won’t happen again.”
“You can’t know that.”
Green eyes met mine, with what looked like anger in them. “Yes, I bloody well can!”
I just sat there, confused, as he abruptly got up and went over to the jukebox. He received a glance from a woman in a nearby booth on the way, and it lingered. He was still in the same jeans as earlier, having just thrown a gray-green T-shirt over the top. Although you couldn’t see much of it because of the long leather trench he wore to cover up the arsenal all war mages carted around.
But he’d somehow jammed everything under there without noticeable bulges, because the dark brown leather fit his broad shoulders sleekly. Likewise, the soft, old jeans hugged a rock-hard physique, and the T-shirt brought out the brilliant color of his eyes. Pritkin would never be conventionally handsome; his nose was too big, he missed six feet by at least three inches and he only remembered to shave about half the time.
But I didn’t have any trouble understanding why she was staring.
“This is what you listen to?” he demanded, his back to me as he perused song titles.
“It’s ‘I Love Rock ’n Roll.’ It’s a classic.”
That got me a dark glance thrown over his shoulder, but he didn’t say anything. He just dug a couple of quarters out of his jeans and made a selection of his own. And oh, my God.
“Johnny
“What’s wrong with Johnny Cash?” he asked, sitting back down.
“What’s right about him?”
“Country is based on folk music, which has been around for centuries—”
“So has the plague.”
“—longer than the so-called ‘classics.’ For thousands of years, bards sang about the same basic themes— love and loss, lust and betrayal—and ended up influencing everyone from Bach to Beethoven.”
“So Johnny Cash is Beethoven?”
“Of his day.”
I rolled my eyes. That was just so wrong. But at least “Ring of Fire” covered the conversation pretty well.
I leaned forward and dropped my voice. “I wasn’t trying to be rude a minute ago. I just meant that, to the vamps, a demon seems like the most likely culprit, and Mircea’s decided—”
“Demon?”
“Yes, demon.”
Pritkin frowned. “What do they have to do with this?”
I stared at him. “Well, what are we talking about?”
“I’m not sure.”
I took a breath. “Mircea thinks you’re a warlock,” I said, slowly and clearly. “He’s decided that’s how you’ve lived so long, why you’re as strong as you—”
