“—and half the world looking for her!”
“I think the term is ‘chopped liver,’ ” Fred said.
“They’re looking for her at the hotel,” Pritkin snapped. “Not here.”
“How the hell do you know?” Caleb demanded. “You don’t know what this thing is—you told the old man as much yourself!”
“You called Jonas?” I asked, deciphering that.
“To ask if he had any ideas about what attacked you,” Pritkin said. “After what David Dryden told us, I had a suspicion, but this isn’t my area of—”
“Suspicion about what?”
“What we’re dealing with.” He pulled something out of his coat and handed it to me. It was a pencil sketch, heavily shaded, that looked a lot like—
I looked up. “Where did you get this?”
“I had one of the Circle’s artists do it, from some old drawings.”
“Old drawings of what?”
“The Morrigan.”
“The what?”
“The wife of the Dark Fey king. After the description you gave me of what you saw, and what David said about the High Court dialect, and what your servant mentioned about the gods having the ability to possess . . . well, I thought it possible. Particularly in light of the name.”
“What about the name?”
“It’s a Celtic title. Some translate it as ‘Great Queen’ or ‘Terrible Queen.’ But the oldest version, and, I believe, the correct one, is ‘Phantom Queen.’ The ancient texts speak of her being able to take both physical and spectral form.”
“But . . . this is Fey?” I asked, looking at what appeared to be a raven caught in a thunderstorm. A really wicked, pissed-off raven.
“Yes and no. Her mother was Dark Fey, but her father was one of the old gods.”
I felt my stomach sink.
“Would you care to guess which one?” he asked.
“Not really.”
“Cassie—”
“This doesn’t have to be about Ragnarok,” I said stubbornly. “The Dark Fey king isn’t my biggest fan—you know that. Maybe he sent her—”
“It’s possible. But the fact remains that the Morrigan was worshipped by the ancient Celts as a goddess of battle, because her father was believed to be—”
“Don’t say it.”
“—the Celtic god Nuada—”
“I’m not listening.”
“—who is associated with the Romano-British Mars-Nodens—”
“I’m begging you.”
“—who many scholars equate with the Greek god Ares.”
“Goddamnit, Pritkin! Jonas can’t be right, okay? He can’t!”
“I am not saying that he is. However, it seems strange, if, in fact, this was caused by animus, that she would apologize and tell David that ‘they’ were making her do it.”
I dug out another antacid.
Caleb cursed. “And yet knowing that this thing might be after her, you still bring her out here!”
“Better than somewhere it would be likely to look!”
“Wait,” I said, crunching chalky cherry crap and trying to think. “Is David sure that’s what she said? Didn’t he say he was lousy with the language?”
“Yes. Which is why I had one of our linguists visit him. She couldn’t be certain, not having heard the words herself, but she said David seemed to have the gist of it.”
“Okay, but still. ‘They’ made her do it.” I held out the scary-ass image. “Who makes something like this do anything?”
“Her father, presumably.”
Damn it, I’d known he was going to say that.
“But Ares isn’t here! None of the gods are here!”
“Well, it looks like this one is,” Fred pointed out. “And how’s that work, exactly? I thought all of them were kicked out way back when.”
“They were,” Pritkin told him tersely. “But demigods have a human, or in this case, a Fey, parent, giving them an anchor in this world. The spell banishing the gods did not affect them.”
“Yet knowing a god or half god or whatever the hell might be after her, you bring her out here anyway,” Caleb said, beating that dead horse for all he was worth. I had to give it to the guy; he gave new meaning to “single- minded.” “Where she’s completely defenseless!”
“She is hardly defenseless—”
“Thank you,” Jules said indignantly.
“I’m with her. And whatever that thing was, it can pass right through wards. Meaning she would be no safer at HQ than at the suite. I told Jonas I would ask Cassie where she wanted to go and—”
“Yeah,” Caleb said sourly. “And he told me he wants her someplace secure!”
“She will be—”
“As soon as we get her back to the suite,” Jules butted in.
“She’s not going back to that death trap of a suite,” Caleb snapped. “And that’s final!”
“It’s not a death trap,” I protested.
“It is if you can’t shift away! As I explained to that thickheaded vampire, leaving you in that place, much less drugged and insensate, was virtually asking for another—”
“You talked to Marco?” Pritkin said sharply.
“Yes, we—”
“When?”
“A few minutes ago. I—”
“On the phone?”
“No, we—”
“How, then?”
“Would you let me finish a sentence?” Caleb said angrily. “When you didn’t show up with the girl, Jonas assumed you hadn’t been able to get her out of the suite. He sent us to assist, but that damned vampire wouldn’t tell us—”
“You went by the hotel?”
“Yes—”
And the next thing I knew, I was in the SUV.
It was almost like shifting—I didn’t remember moving, the car door opening or sitting down, but there I was anyway. I blinked at Rico, who was in the driver’s seat in front of me, for about a second. Until he was snatched out of the still-open door and sent flying.
“Lasso spell,” Fred said, as his buddy slammed into the open top of a Dumpster, halfway across the lot. “I hate those things.”
I peered into the front, to find the little vamp ensconced in the passenger’s seat. “When did you get in?”
“A minute ago. I figured we’d be leaving soon.”
“I didn’t notice.”
“Yeah.” He sighed. “I get that a lot, too.”
“I wish I had that problem,” I muttered, watching Pritkin and Caleb yelling at each other outside, while a trashcovered Rico crossed the lot in a blur. A second later his assailant went flying into the side of a truck. And a
