Tempt the Stars
Page 8

Marco regarded me with a mixture of affection and exasperation and maybe a little bit of pity. But he didn’t say anything. Fred, on the other hand, took the distraction of the moment to wiggle out of Marco’s grasp. And he wasn’t so subtle.
“Yeah, but you’re not Agnes,” he reminded me.
“I’m not Agnes yet,” I hissed, and shifted.
Chapter Four
I went from light and noise and stress to someplace completely lacking two of those things. I didn’t bother turning on a light. I could see well enough from the orange haze filtering in through a gap in a wall of curtains, and anyway, the view wasn’t much.
The rooms that Dante’s, my home on the Vegas Strip, reserves for its more budget-conscious guests are a little . . . Spartan. Ironically, that makes them less eye-wincing than the suites upstairs, which mostly conform to the hotel’s over-the-top haunted house theme. But the designer had run short of money by the time he got this far, so the only affronts to taste were a few vintage horror movie posters and an ugly bedspread.
I hadn’t been here for a while, and I wasn’t sure why I was here now. Maybe because I didn’t have the strength to go much farther. Or maybe because I didn’t have anywhere else to go.
It was ironic; all of time was mine to explore—in theory, anyway—except for my own. In my own, I’d been living like a prisoner for weeks, with the few times I’d dared to venture outside the hotel not going well. And I didn’t think I was likely to find anybody to go AWOL with again, since the last guy who had . .
Well, he wasn’t here anymore.
But his room was.
Although it was looking a little rough.
A river of glass crunched underfoot, glinting in the band of rusty light. A nightstand lay cracked in two, the ceramic lamp that had been on top pulverized almost into powder. A splatter of some potion had eaten right through to the studs on one wall, and still gave off a faint, noxious odor, despite a week of air-conditioning. And a large stain soiled the carpet by the window, looking black in the low light.
I stared at it, and everything came flooding back: the shock, the horror, the fury of the night when the obstinate son of a bitch who’d lived here had taken it upon himself to trade his life for mine. The week that had passed since hadn’t dimmed the memory at all, or the emotion that went with it. If anything it was stronger than ever, the urge to grab him, to demand where he got the nerve, the right, to make that decision for me—
I stood there a minute, shaking, furious all over again but with no one to hit. Because he wasn’t here. Just the room, cold and empty and generic without its larger-than-life occupant, the echoing silence broken only by my ragged breathing. I hugged my arms around myself and waited for my heartbeat to back off attack levels.
Only it didn’t seem to be obliging.
I’d read once that there were five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. But that hadn’t been my experience. There had been a little denial, yeah, when I first realized what had happened, but it hadn’t lasted long. And afterward . . . well, let’s just say that I’d entered phase two with a vengeance.
And that was where I’d stayed.
I supposed that was why my nails had sunk into my upper arms, hard enough to draw blood. I slowly pulled them out and carefully wiped my hands on my already filthy jeans. I wasn’t going to do this now.
I was going to do this later.
I was going to do this once I got him back.
Although, so far, that wasn’t going great.
It was another thing that should have been easy. Hell, I was a time traveler, wasn’t I? Just go back and change a few things. Make a few adjustments. See to it that the good guys won. Simple, right?
Of course, I wasn’t supposed to. In fact, it was pretty much exactly the kind of thing I was not supposed to do. Pythias guarded the timeline from alterations by others; we didn’t change it ourselves.
Except, of course, when we did.
Agnes had, when she warned me that I was about to be assassinated. If she hadn’t, I never would have met the maddening man known as John Pritkin in the first place, would never have needed him to save me, would never have royally screwed up his life in the process. He might have been better off if she’d minded her own business, but she hadn’t and I’d lived. All because she’d changed one little thing . .
But that was the problem. Agnes had been doing this kind of thing for decades. She’d known what to change and what to leave the heck alone. Not to mention that the night she bent a rule for me had been easy mode compared to the craziness a week ago. If I did go back, where did I make the cut? I’d lain awake at night for a week, trying to figure it out.
The obvious place was right here in this room. The fight that had left it looking even more trashed than usual had been because of me. Someone on the other side of the war had wanted a device Pritkin carried, one that would summon me to an impromptu execution the next time I tried to shift. They’d fought. Pritkin lost it, chased after it, and as a result, found me in the nick of time.
So, if I wanted to change things, the easiest way would be to warn him about what was coming.
And that would work great — if he took the hint. But Pritkin defined stubborn and was making headway on a new meaning for paranoid; he might well ignore a heads-up like the one Agnes had sent me. And even if he didn’t and avoided following the would-be assassin to the battleground, that wouldn’t work so well, either.
Since in that case I’d be dead.
So then where? In the middle of a fight that I’d barely won the first time? Because I just didn’t see how that worked. The final battle had happened in a couple of minutes of frantic activity and gnawing terror. And, as usual, I’d survived by luck as much as skill. Any slight alteration might make things worse instead of better.
Not to mention the fact that, crazy as it had been, the duel I’d fought against another demigod had ended up being pretty damned useful. It had impressed the hell out of the six vampire senates, who had shortly thereafter decided that maybe they would join forces in the war, after all. If I avoided the battle, they might well avoid signing the treaty. And we needed that treaty.
Anyway, all of that was moot, because even if I found a way to save Pritkin, to not get myself killed in the process, and to not advertise that Pythias did alter time for their own purposes occasionally, what then? Because Pritkin would still be in a mess, and a bad one. And the fact that, for once, it had nothing to do with me didn’t help at all.
I didn’t want to rescue him just to put him back in the same tortured existence he’d been occupying for almost a century. I wanted to save him. For once, I wanted this power I’d never asked for, and which had been nothing but trouble from the moment I got it, to actually do its freaking job. And help somebody.
Somebody who deserved it.
I just wasn’t sure how.
I sat down on the bed to wait out the mess upstairs. The room was quiet except for the faint sigh of the air-conditioning, and peaceful. Or it would have been if the gap in the drapes hadn’t been illuminating a swath across one of the movie posters.
Not that it looked all that horrific at the moment. Someone had taken a Sharpie to it—some kid, I guessed, since I couldn’t imagine the dour war mage I knew drawing a mustache and glasses on Bela Lugosi. But then, that wouldn’t be the biggest surprise he’d handed me lately.
Sometimes I wondered if I’d known the man at all. I sure as hell didn’t understand him. One minute he was being an absolute horse’s ass, to the point that I just wanted to take him somewhere particularly nasty and leave him there, and then the next . .
I felt my breath start to come faster, my hands to clench, and stupid tears to spring to my eyes. I dashed them away angrily. I’d said I wasn’t going to do this anymore, and I damned well wasn’t—
“Cass?”
“Ahhhh!” I leapt back, hitting the remaining night-stand with my already bruised butt, as Billy popped into existence through a flutter of playing cards.
The cards were mine. I hadn’t even noticed that I’d been fingering them, but it wasn’t a surprise. Kids have a favorite toy; Linus has his blanket; I have a greasy pack of tarot cards given to me by my old governess, which she’d had enchanted as a joke. And which were now all over the place and talking up a storm.
They had been spelled to tell your fortune on their own, and either by design or some flaw in the enchantment, they always tried to outdo one another. The result was seventy-eight tiny voices gradually getting louder and louder as each tried to talk over the rest. And ended up making a god-awful racket.
I started shoving them back into the pack, which was the only thing that kept them quiet, and simultaneously glared at Billy. “Don’t do that!”
“Then don’t run off without telling me. You’re supposed to be sleeping.”
Yeah. Like that had been going so great lately. “I had some unwelcome guests.”
“So shift ’em out of there. Why’d you have to be the one to leave? It’s your room!”
“And I don’t want to have to redecorate it again. Like after three pissed-off witches finish trashing it.”
“They wouldn’t trash the Pythia’s suite.”
“Why not? They broke into it,” I grumbled, managing to shove most of the cards back into place. Except for a few still chatting away somewhere. I threw the bedding around, trying to find the damned things. “It was easier for me to leave.”
“But why come here?” Billy looked around and his nose wrinkled. “It smells like a combat zone.”
“I don’t care what it smells like.”
“And it’s probably booby-trapped all to hell.”
I paused for a second, my hand halfway under the bed. I’d known Pritkin mainly in his role as my Circle-appointed bodyguard/personal trainer/drill sergeant, but he’d had other titles at times. Like war mage assassin.
“I don’t think he does that anymore,” I told Billy. Not since I’d popped in a few times unexpectedly.