A strong hand gripped the back of my neck, a thigh pressed hard between my own, and an unmistakable firmness pressed against me. I looked up to find myself staring into ravenous, alien eyes. Black and burning, there was only the thinnest rim of green around the pupil.
He kissed me, and on the surface, nothing had changed. The feel of his hair between my fingers was the same, cool, silky, irrepressible. The way he was so intent on the kiss that he forgot to breathe was the same, too, leaving us both gasping. But suddenly, what had been a breeze became a torrent, a freezing blast of power that swept over me, leaving my muscles weak as water behind it.
Unlike Rosier’s horrible leeching presence, it didn’t hurt, but it was a power drain nonetheless. A big one. Pritkin was still feeding.
Chapter Twenty-seven
For a heartbeat, I felt a blind panic constrict my throat,
knowing
what this meant in my bones. But before I could protest, everything stopped, fingers and mouth sliding abruptly away from me. I looked up to see Pritkin motionless above me, sweat running off his muscles, his thighs trembling with the effort of staying still. He drew in air, his lips pressed tight together as if fighting for control.
Those alien eyes met mine, and there was horror in them, but it was quickly being overtaken by something else—raw hunger. “Go!”
I didn’t need to be told twice. I scrambled away from him, not even taking the time to get to my feet, just scuttling backwards on all fours through the ward. I fell down the small step and landed on the tile floor of Dee’s dressing room, panting and panicking, because my capris had twisted around my thighs, momentarily trapping me. But Pritkin didn’t come through the ward.
I wasn’t sure if he was going to be okay, or if he was fighting to give me a head start. I really didn’t want to find out what would happen if he totally lost control, but what was the alternative? Running into a casino full of war mages? Ones who no longer seemed all that concerned about capturing rather than killing me?
I was still fighting with my clothes and trying to think when the door opened and Dee came in. She paused when she saw me, and one painted eyebrow headed north. I felt a hot blush creeping up my neck. “It isn’t what it looks like,” I blurted.
“Relax, honey,” she said, tugging her mile of rose-covered train inside the door. “We’ve all ended up with our panties around our ankles at some point.”
“My panties are exactly where they should be!” I told her indignantly, trying to stand. But the capris tripped me up and I went sprawling, just as an announcement blared through the bar. “
Ladies and gentlemen, we regret to inform you that there has been a bomb threat against the hotel. For your safety, we are evacuating the premises while a team of experts evaluates the situation. Please exit in an orderly manner through the lobby to the street
.”
“They’re looking for us,” I told Dee, trying not to lose it. “If we leave with the crowd, we’ll be spotted, and if we don’t, a search won’t take long to find us! Not in an empty hotel!”
Dee looked thoughtful, but she didn’t demand any explanations. “Can your friend do a glamourie?”
“Yes, but they’re war mages. They’d sense it!” Besides, I didn’t think Pritkin was up to doing too many fancy spells right now.
“I may have an idea,” she said. “Gimme a minute.” She went back out into the club.
I sat in her abandoned chair and got my clothes rearranged, which was harder than usual with hands that kept wanting to shake. I’d barely managed it when she was back. “It’s okay with the girls—they’re pissed at the Circle for ruining opening night anyway. Now we just have to convince your friend.”
“Convince him of what?”
Dee told me. I was still staring at her in shock when Pritkin emerged from the ward. His color was high, but otherwise, he looked fairly composed.
That didn’t last long.
“No.” He said it flatly, a muscle twitching in his cheek, when Dee had gone through it a second time.
“You absolutely have the body for it,” she wheedled, holding a silver-spangled sheath in front of him.
“I am not wearing a dress!”
She pursed her lips, which were currently Day-Glo orange, and grabbed something flashy and purple from the rack behind her.
“There’s always the catsuit. Of course, it’s skin tight, so we’ll have to hide the candy, but I can help with—”
I managed to grab Pritkin’s arm before the catsuit ended up in pieces. “They know what you look like,” I pointed out while pulling on my own disguise. “And even if they didn’t, you’re covered in blood. You can’t go out there like that!”
“If I’m going to die tonight, I would prefer it to be with a little dignity!”
“I don’t get you,” I said, leaning against the wall for support. My five-inch, fire-engine-red, glitter-covered Mary Janes were just as hard on the ankles as they looked. “You just spent over a day in a woman’s body—”
“Not by choice!”
“—and you’re hundreds of years old. Didn’t men once wear makeup and—”
“Court fops, perhaps. I wasn’t one!”
“Then expand your horizons,” I told him, throwing a boa around his neck. “And pick something.”
Pritkin eyed the selection Dee had provided with loathing. She noticed and crossed her arms over her massive chest. “You’re cute, but you’re getting on my last gay nerve.”
“I’m never going to live this down,” Pritkin muttered, snatching up an opera-length cape made of a profusion of gold lamé ruffles. It must have been designed with platforms and towering wigs in mind, because it swept the floor after him and the hood covered his head and face. I decided it would do.
A few minutes later, three sequined and bejeweled visions glided out of the club and into the middle of the crush on Main Street. Dee was in front, providing distraction, her massive breasts jutting out in front of her like the prow on a ship. Pritkin and I followed behind. I was kind of short for a drag queen, even in the platforms, but the rainbow-sequined jumpsuit and towering Marilyn Monroe wig more than made up for it.
The mages were everywhere, their eyes scanning the exiting crowd. Yet most barely glanced at us, despite the spectacle we made. And those who did quickly looked away when Dee blew them kisses or flashed a little thigh. It looked like hiding in plain sight might work after all. I’d barely had the thought when a vision crashed into me with all of the subtlety of a baseball bat to the head. It knocked the breath out of me and dropped me to my knees. It was like nothing I’d experienced before, vivid and crystal clear, and so solid that I couldn’t even see the street anymore.
Vegas was burning, fire leaping into the sky, shedding sparks like shooting stars. It was impossible to recognize anyone in the darkness and chaos or to pick out a single voice among the panicked crowd. Just screams and faceless, running people.
Beyond, the desert sand was being consumed, mile after mile under a blackened sky. Long after all the scrub had burnt, it raged on. Like a forest fire without a forest, or what it was: a seemingly endless exclamation of wrath from a creature with power and rage and centuries of bottled resentment but no compassion. No compassion at all.
The world had remembered the healer, the lyre player, the golden god, but had forgotten the other stories. The ones that whispered of brutal punishments, of rape and murder and a beautiful face that laughed as it flayed its enemies alive. They remembered now, for an instant, before memory was wiped clear in a rain of blood.
The vision shattered as abruptly as it had come, leaving me gasping on all fours in the middle of the sidewalk. “—a little too much wine with dinner, you know how it is. Always was a drinker,” Dee was saying to someone. She reached down and pinched my cheek. “Come on, love. Up you go. You can pass out at home.”
She dragged me to my feet and I did my best to keep my head down when what I actually wanted was to run back up the street screaming. My dreams had been warning me all along, but I’d been blind to what they really meant. And now it might be too late.
A cold wire tightened around my heart. There was something wrong with my chest; I couldn’t seem to get a deep breath. What had I done?
Dee and Pritkin started towing me back toward the lobby again. I gripped their arms. “We can’t leave.”
“Oh, yes, we can,” Dee said. “I think I just ruined this dress. My heart can’t take another scare like that!”
“We’ll deal with whatever it is later,” Pritkin told me, hurrying us along.
“Apollo’s here.”
He stopped abruptly, and we were almost run down by a harassed-looking woman with a kid in each hand. “Watch it!” she snapped, pulling the kids around. Pritkin dragged me over to the sidewalk.
“That’s impossible!” he hissed. “The spell—”
“He got around it,” I whispered. “I don’t know how, but I Saw it. He’s here!”
He was shaking his head in disbelief. “That spell has held for more than three thousand years. Yet he suddenly finds a way around it now?”
“I can’t explain it. I just know what I Saw.”
“It could be the future, the outcome of a civil war within the Circle. What could happen if we don’t solve our internal—”
“No!” I looked around, rubbing my arms as chills broke out all over them. “I’ve been Seeing the same thing ever since MAGIC blew up. But only in pieces, like my usual visions. But this . . . He’s here. I know it!”
“He can’t be.” Pritkin was adamant.
Dee had been looking at us out of the corner of her eye, and she’d started to edge away when I grabbed her wrist. “You told me once you can sense magic, right?”
“Maybe,” she said warily.
“Can you sense anything unusual now?”
“Other than the battle raging upstairs?” she asked with understandable sarcasm.
“I mean a single source, stronger than all the others. Like . . . like a supernova.”
“Maybe. But it don’t matter because there’s no way I’m going back in there! Not for—”
“A shopping spree at Augustine’s? Ten minutes, anything you can grab?”
Her eyes narrowed and she looked me over. “You got that kind of cash?”
“I’ve got that kind of credit.”
“I’d think you were lying, but you did have those shoes. . . .” She licked her lips. “Half an hour, take it or leave it.”
A war mage walked up. “There’s a mandatory evacuation,” he told us. “You’ll have to be moving on.”
“I’ll take it,” I said.
“Shit. I knew you were going to say that,” Dee told me, and slammed her gigantic purse into the mage’s face. He went down, and may have also gotten stepped on as 250 pounds of satin-clad fashionista ran over him and headed back up the street.
We ran to catch up, battling the tide of humanity going the other way. Mages were converging on us from all sides—it wasn’t like we were easy to miss. I grabbed Dee’s train to keep it from getting trampled and she towed me along like a freight train, scattering tourists and roses everywhere.
We passed the fake feed store that marked the halfway point with most of the mages on the street after us, and plowed into a dozen more. They’d formed a half-moon shape in the street, forcing the crowd to surge around them and re-form. As soon as we ran out of tourists, we barreled straight into them.
Dee almost knocked a hole in the wall of leather coats, but they kept their feet. I looked behind us, but the mages had closed the circle, leaving us nowhere to run. And then one of the closest caught sight of me. “Cassandra Palmer.”
The brown eyes searching my face still looked like they belonged to a mid-level flunky, but the snarl kind of ruined the effect. I didn’t say anything, panic and exhaustion closing my throat. But Saunders didn’t seem to expect an answer.
His gaze slid to Pritkin, who had stopped beside me. “Or is it?”
He looked Pritkin up and down, taking in the ruffled gold cape with a raised brow. “I’ve heard it whispered that the Pythia has more skills than she lets on. It would appear to be true. I’ve always been told that possession is impossible for humans, but either I accept that I was misinformed, or I have to believe that a slip of a girl threw me against a wall and almost shattered my shields. Which do you think I prefer?”
Pritkin didn’t answer him, either. He fiddled with his cape instead, looking twitchy and almost nervous. Saunders smiled.
“Of course, I could solve the riddle by killing both of you, but that would leave no one to put on trial. And the public does love the legal niceties,” he said, taking a few steps back. He glanced around, but the crowd had thinned and the few remaining tourists were being hustled out of the way by the mages who had been following us.
At a nod, his men parted to either side, pulling Dee and me back, and leaving Saunders and Pritkin alone in the middle of the street. “On a count of three, I think?” he asked politely. “Wasn’t that the way things were settled in the old—”
Pritkin threw out a hand and Saunders sailed off his feet, into the air and smashed against the side of a fake barn. Judging by the sound his skull made on impact, I didn’t think he’d bothered with shields. He slid down the side, bounced off a wagon and was speared by the iron spike atop a menu sign.
I swallowed and looked away as his body began to spasm. No. Definitely no shields.
The mage holding my arm twisted it painfully behind me. I cried out and tried to pull away, but there was nowhere to go. There was another group of mages jogging down the street toward us, as if the other side needed reinforcements.
One of them, a tall African-American in a battered coat, pushed his way through the circle to me. “Hello, Cassie,” he said somberly. He looked at the mage holding me. “Let her go, son.”
“They just killed the Lord Protector!”
Caleb scanned the area until his eyes lit on Saunders’ still quivering form. “Doesn’t look dead to me. Don’t you think you boys should maybe get him down?” I suddenly found myself released as the Apprentices rushed to aid their fallen leader.