He and Tremaine took off without another word, and Caleb settled against the trailer, arms crossed and a dark frown on his face, watching his prisoner. I don’t know why. It’s not like any of us were going anywhere.
Rafe went back inside and emerged a few minutes later with a couple of white sheets that he proceeded to wrap around himself. With his riotous brown curls and easy smile, he looked like a particularly charming bedouin. A bedouin with a face full of sunscreen and a pair of designer sunglasses.
“Where’d you get the shades?” I asked.
“Rome. They’re Gucci.”
“Very nice.” I glanced at Red. “Vampires have coagulants in their saliva that aid in healing. If you’re still bleeding, Rafe could stop it.”
Red gave Caleb a panicked look. “You keep that thing away from me! I know my rights! You can’t let him feed!”
“He’s offering to help you,” Caleb said mildly.
“Yeah, help me out of a few pints! I know how they are!”
“I believe the bleeding has stopped,
mia stella
,” Rafe said wryly. “And I do not normally feed from, ah, that particular region.”
“What region?”
“Pritkin shot him in the ass,” Caleb said bluntly.
I looked at Red with more sympathy. I could relate.
A small gust of wind blew some sand in our faces, making me cough and settling onto everyone’s hair, turning it vaguely pink. I lifted my sweaty hair off my neck and wished for a headband. God, it was hot.
Fortunately, it wasn’t long before Pritkin was back, along with an older man in a golf cart. He seemed to be under the impression that we’d been in a boating accident and needed transport back to Vegas. He had already called us a cab.
“Where’s Tremaine?” Caleb demanded.
“Waiting for the cab,” Pritkin said blandly.
Caleb scowled, but he kept his comments to himself in front of the norm. He and Red got into the back of the golf cart, and Pritkin got in front. Leaving me and Rafe to follow on foot.
“That wasn’t very gentlemanly,” Rafe noted, watching them drive off.
I didn’t say anything.
It took us five minutes to make it out of the campground, up a small hill and down the road to the ticket booth. We found Pritkin outside, leaning against the booth. Caleb and Red were in the golf cart, taking a short nap. The ticket taker was inside, apparently fascinated by his shoelaces, which he’d knotted into some pretty intricate shapes. Tremaine was nowhere in sight.
“Do I want to know?” I asked.
“We have perhaps half an hour before they wake up,” Pritkin informed me. “Peter has gone to the highway to arrange transportation.”
“I thought a cab was coming.”
“We can’t afford to wait that long. McCullough is wearing a tracker; all prisoners do as a precaution. The Corps is preoccupied at the moment, which doubtless explains why a team has yet to arrive to pick him up. But with our luck, they will be here any moment.”
The Corps was the military arm of the Circle; i.e., war mage central. I was definitely in favor of moving on before any more of Pritkin’s old buddies showed up. But something else he’d said caught my attention.
“A tracker?” I blinked dust out of my eyes. “You mean, if he goes anywhere, they know it?”
“Essentially.”
“I don’t see it on him.”
“It’s a spell, not a physical device,” Pritkin said impatiently. “Is there a reason for your interest?”
“Yes. Can you check to see if I have one?”
He handed me a bottle of water from the ticket taker’s fridge and splashed his face with another. “You have three.” He started down the road at a fast enough clip that Rafe and I had to hurry to keep up.
“Wait a minute. How do you know?”
“One of them is mine.”
“You
bugged
me?”
“It isn’t a listening device, Miss Palmer. It merely records your location. Which, considering how many people wish to kidnap and/or murder you, is a reasonable precaution.”
“If it’s so reasonable, why didn’t you mention it?” Water and perspiration had turned his usually pale eyelashes dark and clumpy, emphasizing the color of his eyes as he rolled them. “Because I wanted it to work! Something it would not have done had you persuaded the witch to remove it.”
“Her name is Francoise and you’re damn right she’d have removed it!”
“Which is why I didn’t mention it.”
If I’d been less exhausted, I’d have been livid. As it was, the best I could manage was disgusted. “When I was growing up at Tony’s, I was followed everywhere,” I told him. “By bodyguards, by my governess, by someone all the time. I had zero privacy. But even Tony didn’t go so far as to put a spell on me!”
“He doubtless didn’t have anyone competent enough to cast it,” Pritkin said, striding ahead.
I shouted after him. “You said
one
was yours. It doesn’t worry you that two other groups are tracking me?”
Rafe cleared his throat. “Ah, Cassie . . .”
“Mircea bugged me?” I guessed.
“And Marlowe, I believe.”
“Why? Was he afraid Mircea might not tell him everything?”
Rafe looked shocked. “We all have the same desire,
mia stella
: to keep you safe. And a new version of the spell was recently perfected. It is much harder to detect, even by mages.”
“Then why not remove the old one?”
“We were not aware that the mage was also planning to cast one on you. And if someone did abduct you, they would expect to find such a spell.”
“So the original was left to give them something to remove, in the hopes that they wouldn’t look any further.”
“Exactly!” Rafe seemed pleased that I’d grasped his point so easily. Yet he managed to totally miss mine. Sometimes I forgot that Rafe, who had taken to modern clothes and cars, music and art, almost better than any vamp I knew, had been born in the same century as Mircea. No wonder he didn’t understand why I’d object to having my every movement followed. The women back then had probably enjoyed it.
Pritkin met my eyes. He got it; he just didn’t care.
“You could have asked me,” I pointed out, keeping my temper because I was too tired for anything else.
“You admitted that you would have had it removed.”
“If you had explained that you’d done it for my safety—”
“Yes, because safety is so important to you!” He rounded on me. “So important, in fact, that you deliberately lied in order to stay in a situation you knew was perilous. For no reason!”
“No reason?” I felt my face flush with more than sunburn. “I had the impression that you needed my help!”
“Until the prisoners were freed, yes. Afterward, there was nothing more you could do and no reason for you to remain. You should have left when I instructed you to do so!”
“Partners don’t abandon each other to die.”
“If the alternative is to stay and die with them? Yes! They do!” His words were angry, but his face was oddly still, strained and pale.
I tried again. “I
am
concerned with safety. But I can’t always do my job and—”
“That was
not
your job. Rescuing those prisoners had nothing to do with the time line! Had I guessed that you were foolish enough to almost get killed over them, I would never have agreed to help you!”
“It might not have been my job, but it
was
my doing. If I hadn’t gone to that meeting—”
“Then we wouldn’t know that there is a problem with the lines.”
I frowned. “What are you talking about? The battle—”
“Should have had no effect. If the lines were that unstable, they would be useless to us. Someone or something must have weakened the structural integrity of that line before the battle.”
“Some
one
? You think this was deliberate?”
“I don’t know. But I’ve never heard of anything of the kind occurring naturally, and the fact that the breach targeted MAGIC is highly suspect.”
I thought about the incredible power of a ley line, all those acres and acres of jumping, brilliant energy, and didn’t believe it. “But
how
?”
“I can’t explain it. No one has that kind of power. Not the dark, not even us.”
“Apollo does.”And if anyone had reason to want MAGIC destroyed, it was him.
But Pritkin didn’t seem to think much of that idea. “If he could send that amount of energy to his supporters, he would have done so long ago and destroyed the Circle at the outset. Thankfully, you possess the only remnants of his power on Earth.”
The conversation had to pause at that point because we’d reached Tremaine and, just beyond him, his idea of a ride. He shot us an apologetic glance. “It seems that any food that doesn’t make it into tourists’ stomachs is made into high-quality pig feed,” he explained. “And Mr. Ellis here hauls leftovers from several casinos to a recycler. He’s kindly agreed to drop us at Dante’s on his way back for another load.”
“It’s on my way,” the old man repeated cheerfully. “Now settle yourselves any old where. The drums are empty; you won’t hurt anything.”
Empty, as it turns out, is a relative term. The buffet sludge leaking over the sides of a half dozen black plastic drums was joined by several weeks’ worth of dried flotsam rattling around the truck bed. It was also about one hundred degrees with no shade, causing Rafe to hunker down with the sheets pulled up over his head.
“Are you all right?” I asked him, worried. Rafe was a master, but only fourth level. The sun didn’t merely drain someone like him of power; it could hurt or even kill him in sufficient quantities.
“Well enough,” he told me, but he didn’t sound good. Thankfully, it was only about twenty-five miles into town.
“I don’t get it,” I told Pritkin, who shook his head before I could even frame a question.
“Not here.”
“I don’t think he’s listening,” I said, nodding at the driver. The radio was blaring Johnny Cash at ear-ringing decibels, and that was from where we were sitting. The sound in the cab had to be deafening.
Pritkin just looked at me, so I turned to the nice war mage. “I don’t understand what stopped that thing. Once there was a tear in the fabric between worlds, why didn’t it continue all the way to the end of the line? Like ripping a seam when the thread’s cut?”
Tremaine looked nervously at Pritkin, who muttered something but answered the question. “My best guess would be that the ley line sink at MAGIC had enough energy to seal the breach. In your analogy, it would be like encountering a knot in the thread.”
“But what if that hadn’t been enough? What would have happened?”
“The tear would have continued until reaching a vortex big enough to counter it.”
“And that would be where?” I asked, getting a very bad feeling.
“The line where the eruption occurred runs from MAGIC straight to Chaco Canyon, where there is a great vortex—a crossing of more than two dozen lines. It is one of the most powerful in this hemisphere.”
“Chaco Canyon?”
Pritkin grimaced. “New Mexico.”
I stared at him for a moment, sure I’d heard wrong. “
New Mexico
? You’re saying that thing could have continued for hundreds of miles?”
“Leveling every magical edifice across three states,” he agreed tightly.
“And a lot of nonmagical ones,” Tremaine added, looking horrified. “Even some norms can pick up on the kind of energy a powerful ley line throws off. Traditionally, a lot of human structures have been built around the lines, even when the builders didn’t know why.”
Pritkin nodded. “If someone has found a way to disrupt the lines, it could be disastrous. Both for us and for the human population.”
I thought about the seared plain, the death and the destruction we’d left behind. “I think it already has been,” I said quietly.
At least I didn’t have to worry about any war mages who might still be prowling around the casino. By the time we made it back, our closest friends wouldn’t have recognized us. Or wanted to get within ten feet of us.
I picked a desiccated wonton wrapper out of my hair, thanked the driver and skirted a long line of cabs to the front entrance. Despite the fact that we were covered in garbage and leaving a trail of dust that would have done Pig-Pen proud, no one gave us a second glance. The place was a madhouse.
Hundreds of tourists had crowded around the reception desk, yelling and waving papers at the usually suave Dante’s employees, who were looking a little stressed. Luggage was piled in heaps on the floor and on overflowing carts as harried bellhops ran back and forth, trying to keep up with the demand. Children were crying and threatening to fall in the Styx. An overtaxed air-conditioning system was straining to lower the temperature to maybe ninety degrees. And a bevy of new, life-challenged guests were clogging the lobby bar.
For a minute, I saw a double scene, the ruined bar from my vision transposed over the real thing. Then I shook my head and it cleared, leaving me looking at a muscle-bound type who had one of the fetish-clad waitresses by the waist. She was kicking and screaming and not with pleasure, but the senator didn’t seem to care. He’d been born in ancient Rome, where the manners relating to bar wenches had been a little different. Fortunately, the southern belle by his side wasn’t in a good mood. She cut her eyes up at him, frowned and nailed his hand to the table with a swizzle stick. He eyed her unfavorably as he pried it loose, but he did let go of the waitress.
“What is the Senate doing here?” I asked Rafe, only to discover that he’d disappeared. I glanced around but didn’t see him in the uproar. “Where did Rafe go?” I asked Pritkin.
“He left as soon as we arrived,” he told me, eyeing the dozen vamps, luggage in hand, who were waiting by an elevator.
None were Rafe. “Did he say where he was going?”
“No. But he probably went to check in. It appears that the Senate and its servants were instructed to rendezvous here.”