Curse the Dawn (52 page)

“Caleb—” Pritkin began.

His onetime colleague raised a hand. “Jonas called us. Said he challenged and Saunders refused.”

“Yes.” Pritkin went very still.

Caleb exchanged glances with the mages he’d brought along. None of them looked young enough to be trainees. Several had gray hair, and one or two looked like they might even be Marsden’s age. Their expressions ranged from sour to disgusted to war mage neutral.

“Well. I guess that makes him an outlaw.”

“And us?”

Caleb smiled slightly. “Technically, there are still warrants out for both of you. The fact that the man who issued them is currently under suspicion himself doesn’t negate that.” I licked my lips and started to speak, but Pritkin’s hand tightened on my arm. “So if I see you, I guess I’ll have to arrest you.”

Pritkin nodded.

“By the way, I liked the old coat better,” Caleb said, and turned away.

Dee sidled off as soon as the group of mages parted in front of us, fanning herself with a hand. “I never thought I’d say this, but too much testosterone. We need to get out of here,” she told me, heading for a bank of elevators.

“We need to find Apollo,” I told her, catching her arm.

“Well, he ain’t down here! We have to go up.”

“You can sense him, then?”

“Oh, yeah. There’s something up there, all right. Although I’m not getting a who so much as a what.”

“He’s . . . not exactly human,” I explained, not having time to go into it all.

“I should have asked for an hour,” she muttered, and then started for the elevators again.

Pritkin caught her arm. “We could get trapped that way. Saunders’ supporters are all over the place, and it’s going to take time to round them up.”

She looked at him for a second, and then her eyes slid to the stairs. “You have got to be kidding.”

He wasn’t kidding. Of course, I thought savagely, Pritkin was wearing his usual boots. Dee and I were in platforms almost as high as the steps. Navigating even one flight in those ought to be an Olympic event. By the time we’d made it up five floors, I was drenched with sweat and had small explosions going off behind my eyelids.

I stopped in the stairwell, bent over and gasping, only my hand on the railing keeping me up. Pritkin just threw me over his shoulder and kept going, earning him a speculative look from Dee. “Don’t even think about it,” he told her. “I’m not carrying you.”

“That wasn’t what I was thinking,” she cooed, and he flushed. I guess there weren’t any mages in the stairwell, because Dee’s laugh could have been heard all the way down to the lobby.

By the time we got as far as the stairs would take us, Dee was no longer laughing. “I think I hate you,” she told Pritkin, who had all but run her up the stairs. She looked like hell. Her roses had mostly been lost on the street and the rest had fallen off on the stairs. Her wig was askew, her makeup had sweated off and a huge fake eyelash had come unglued and was clinging tenuously to one cheek.

“Good for the figure,” he said, putting me down. He was also hot and sweaty after our marathon, with damp tendrils of hair stuck to his forehead and neck. His lashes had gone spiky dark, turning his eyes emerald. Grungy was a surprisingly good look for him.

I didn’t know what I looked like. I preferred it that way. If it was anywhere near as bad as I felt, I’d scare off any mages we encountered before they could shoot me.

“This is where I get off,” Dee said, sitting on a step to rub her arches. “The power is coming from the next floor up.”

I looked at Pritkin. “The penthouse.”

I didn’t have a key card, but Pritkin convinced the elevator to take us up anyway. The doors opened onto a deathly quiet foyer that looked a little worse for the wear. The gold flocked wallpaper had a big hole through it, the bronze sculpture had half melted into a Dalí-esque mess and the cow skin rug was covered in dirty boot prints. But the John Wayne posters had survived without a scratch.

We walked into the living room. Wind through the broken balcony doors was blowing the curtains inward in a billowing mass that, for a moment, made me think someone was there. But nothing else moved, except for the chandelier swinging gently overhead, no longer spilling light onto the roadster still parked below.

“Where did they all go?” I asked, looking around at the carnage. At least Casanova wouldn’t need to gut the place. The mages had pretty much done it for him.

I breathed a slight sigh of relief. Dee had been wrong. There was no one here.

Pritkin shrugged. “They took the fight elsewhere,” he said, crossing the lumber and glass obstacle course to the balcony. I followed, having to concentrate not to break my neck.

Outside was a wreck of destroyed patio furniture, shattered glass and a pool filled with flotsam. And a body, I saw sickly. Someone wearing a war mage coat was bobbing gently on the surface. Pritkin fished him out, and then I almost wished he hadn’t because the face was mostly gone.

I bit my lip and looked around. I wanted to check the rest of the apartment, but what if I found Rafe’s body? Had they gotten him out in time? What if I found—

“We need to check the place for survivors,” I said, cutting my thoughts off. I wouldn’t think that way. I wouldn’t think at all. I’d just go look because I couldn’t stand not knowing.

We didn’t have a flashlight, but the casino’s light through the windows was enough to see by, once our eyes adjusted. We found three more bodies in the dining room, none of them vampires. There was something to be said for masters, after all, I thought with relief. And then I wondered if they’d leave much of a corpse, with some of the spells the mages could throw. My stomach sank back down to my toes.

I’d turned to move on to the kitchen when Pritkin caught my arm. He put a finger to his lips, and the next moment, I heard it—a shuffling sound, like someone walking through the debris and not bothering to be quiet. We reentered the darkened living room to see a shape outlined against the expanse of windows leading out to the patio. It took me a second to recognize it.

“Sal!”

She turned slowly, obviously not surprised to see us. Of course, with vampire hearing, she’d probably known we were there all along. “Cassie? Do you know what happened? Where is everyone?”

“You just got back?” I asked, already knowing the answer. She hadn’t been here when everything went to hell. I imagined that it would be a little bit of a shock to come back to this. It was shocking to me, and I knew how it had gotten this way.

“A few minutes ago. I didn’t want to interrupt if the meeting was—”

She broke off at the sound of the front door opening. A moment later, Marco stepped into the room. Like Sal, he took a moment to survey the damage. “Well, I guess anything would have been an improvement,” he said, coming down the stairs.

Sal moved a few yards back, keeping her eyes glued to Marco. “It looks like we’ll have to find somewhere else to sleep. It’s almost daylight.”

He shook his head. “Won’t do, Sal,” he said quietly. “The master ordered five of you to stay away until just before dawn. And only you came back.”

“And you,” Sal snapped. She looked him up and down contemptuously. “You can ape Mircea all you like, but the finest clothes in the world will never give you his power. And everyone knows how much you hate him for that!”

It took me a second to realize what they were talking about. With everything else, I’d almost forgotten the trap Mircea had laid for the traitor. I looked at Marco, suddenly tense again, but his eyes never left Sal.

“Hate’s a little strong,” Marco demurred. “But you’re right. I like power. I just got limits on what I’ll do for it.”

Sal kept her eyes on Marco, but she spoke to me. “Cassie, think about it. Mircea told us the kind of person they’ve been looking for. Someone close to a senator, someone trusted, someone with resentment Myra might have been able to use!”

“He did say that,” I agreed, as Pritkin shifted next to me. He was trying to keep Marco and Sal both in sight as she started backing up. I don’t know why; the only thing behind her was the balcony, and we were twenty floors up.

“And Marco said it himself—I’m just a hick,” Sal reminded me. “Just like you. A nobody from a court so far out in the sticks, most people never even heard of it!”

“Making you too powerless for Myra to have bothered about,” Marco agreed.

I blinked at him, confused. “Are you confessing?” I demanded.

He looked slightly amused. “Would that surprise you?”

“Hell, yes! Mircea made you my bodyguard! And he didn’t trade you out, even after he got Marlowe’s list of suspects. He would never have done that if . . .” I trailed off, belatedly realizing what I’d just said.

“Sounds like she’s voting for you, too, Sal,” Marco murmured.

“Just tell me where the Consuls are, Cassie,” Sal said, ignoring him. “We need to warn them that there could be trouble.”

I was in too much in shock to reply, not that Marco gave me a chance. “Of course, there’s an easy way to settle this,” he told her. “We’ll just wait until the master gets back and ask him.”

“He’s not
my
master,” she hissed.

“He might have been, in time. He’s a good one, as masters go,” Marco said with a slight twist to his lips.

“I wouldn’t know,” Sal said bitterly.

He shrugged. “Master’s been busy. You should have been patient.”

“Right,” she said contemptuously. “I should spend my time shopping, maybe getting my nails done, while the war comes closer every day. All Mircea knows how to do is talk! Rafe ending up like that . . . It could be any of us next! Tony may be a worm, but at least he knows how to act!”

I’d been looking back and forth, trying to keep up, but finally something made sense. “Oh, God. Mircea never broke your bond. Tony is still your master.”

“And still giving me little tasks to perform, all the way from Faerie.”

I was hearing it, but I couldn’t believe it. Sal wasn’t some superspy. She wasn’t a traitor. She was just Sal. I’d known her all my life.

“You told me once you’d kill him if you ever saw him again!” I accused. “How can you take orders from him?”

“Because I don’t have a choice,” she spat. “I practically begged Mircea to break my bond, but all he did was talk:
soon, soon
. Well, it wasn’t soon enough!”

“But . . . Alphonse is fifty years younger than you!” I protested. “And he’s been able to ignore Tony’s orders for years! You don’t have to—”

She cut me off with a laugh. “Yeah. And he’s an idiot, you know? I taught him everything—how to talk, how to act, what to do to impress the boss. He’d be nothing without me. But power doesn’t care how smart you are. Doesn’t even care how old you are. Some people never reach master status, and others do it in a matter of decades! And I’ve never been strong. Why do you think I put up with Alphonse? He was the only way I had any position at all.”

“That’s why we couldn’t catch you,” Marco said, lighting a cigarette. “It was pretty clever. Everyone was looking for the traitor among the old masters, the guys close enough to a Senate member for Myra to have wasted her time trying to turn them.”

“Which is why Tony decided to use me.”

“The Consuls aren’t here, as you can see,” Pritkin said, watching her narrowly. “Whatever your master ordered you to do, you’ve failed. Mircea can still break your bond. You have no reason to—”

He broke off at the identical expressions of disgust Sal and Marco were sending him. “Why the hell do you hang around this guy?” Marco asked me.

Pritkin looked at me, and I shook my head. “It doesn’t work that way,” I told him numbly.

“Why not? If she is truly under a compulsion—”

“Vampire law doesn’t care about the why. It only cares about the result. Or in this case, the intended result. And Sal came back here intending to kill the leaders of the six vampire senates. It doesn’t get any worse than that.”

“Close, but no cigar,” Sal told me, sounding awfully unconcerned for someone facing certain death. “I’m just the doorman, you might say.” She held out her hand, and a shaft of light through the balcony doors lit up something on her open palm.

“My pentagram,” I said, recognizing it even from this distance. “You said you’d get it fixed.”

“Yeah. Only it’s a lot more useful broken.”

“I don’t get it.”

She laughed.“You know, I used to think it was ludicrous—you with Lord Mircea. I figured he was just using you, like everyone said. But lately, I’ve begun to think you two deserve each other. You’re just as clueless as he is!”

Marco tensed. “Give it to me,” he told her.

“Or what? You’ll kill me?” she asked incredulously. “You don’t have a lot of threats left, Marco.”

“Oh, I don’t know. Mircea didn’t specify how the traitor was to die, just told me to take care of it if anybody showed up. I got a lot of leeway here, Sal. Give me a reason to make it quick.”

“Oh, yeah. That’s tempting. Or I could follow Tony’s orders, and when his side wins, I not only
don’t die
, I get the position I always deserved. How about that instead?”

“Your side isn’t going to win,” Pritkin told her.

Sal ignored him. It looked like she was having fun. I was beginning to wonder how hard she had tried to resist Tony.

“Remember MAGIC?” she asked me. “Because this is gonna make that look like a sideshow.”

“What are you talking about?” I demanded. “It’s just a ward. It can’t—”

“A ward that channels your power—or used to,” she corrected. “Lately, it’s been channeling something else instead. You know, that damn wardsmith gave me a fright. I thought for sure one of you would figure it out. You survived direct contact with the ley line even though you couldn’t access your power. Yet even when he told you your ward was feeding off the Circle, you still didn’t get it!”