Tempt the Stars (3 page)

And
wheeeeeeeee
, loud enough to threaten my eardrums.

What the hell?

I pried my nose out of a dusty stretch of carpet and saw Jonas’ grim face looking down at me for a second. And then he said something—harsh, guttural, frightening— and I decided that maybe I’d hit the floor too hard. Because it looked like the room suddenly came alive.

“Get up!” he barked as an armoire on the far wall threw itself across the room and slammed into the door.

And had a fist punched through it for its trouble.

A lamp hurled after it, barely missing my head as I was hauled to my feet, only to shatter against the impressive pile of furniture piling up at the opening. Another lamp lay splintered on the floor—the rattle and crash I’d heard earlier, I guessed—like maybe I’d kicked it when I came loose. But that still didn’t explain—

“Isn’t that a ward?” I yelled over the unearthly shriek as we ran through a connecting door into the next room, which was shifting and changing as much as the last one. And flinging its contents behind us.

“Yes,” Jonas said abruptly, flattening us against the wall as a four-poster bed squeezed past.

“But . . . I thought . . . you took care of them,” I gasped.

“I did!” Jonas said indignantly. “But when one is forced to exert enough magic to level a small town, one

tends to trip even the most inadequate of wards!”

“Sorry?”

Jonas didn’t even bother responding to that. He just yanked me through the middle of two overstuffed armchairs that were muscling past and out into the hallway. Only to abruptly jerk me back again.

I didn’t understand why until the furniture around us suddenly stopped trying to fit through the connecting door and launched itself at the one to the hall instead. We dodged out of the way and then joined the stream flowing out. Only to see a wall of heavy oak pieces, almost ceiling high, trying to bulldoze a path down the hall to the office.

Trying and failing.

Maybe because someone on the other side was quickly turning them to splinters.

We spun back around to see the same thing happening on the other end of the hall, alongside the fireplace room. Antique pieces and old bits of junk were working in a solid mass, twisting and dodging and trying to hold back massive blows from the other side, which nonetheless kept sending pieces flying back at us. A painting of a woman in nineteenth-century dress was getting batted around the surface of the pile, her comically open mouth looking like she was yelling for help as someone did his best to turn the mountain into a molehill.

And his best was pretty damned good.

The fat lady is singing, I thought numbly, right before Jonas grabbed me.

“What is happening?” he demanded, looking pissed that his impressive display of magic wasn’t looking so impressive, after all. “Who is back there?”

“Mircea,” I admitted, and Jonas cursed.

“A first-level master? You didn’t tell me one of them would be here!”

“I didn’t know. And . . . actually . . . it’s two. Marlowe’s with him,” I admitted, glancing behind us. Mircea must have ended up on one side of the hall, when the first wave of animated furniture flooded the corridor, and Marlowe on the other. Which left us caught between the ultimate rock and a hard place, with two furniture dams barely holding back two master vamps and us stuck in the middle.

With nowhere to go.

“I suppose it is too much to hope that you can shift, just at the moment?” Jonas asked dryly.

I shook my head, and he scowled. But he didn’t argue with me. He’d been the lover of the former Pythia, and he knew things about the job that most mages didn’t. Like that the power of the office might be inexhaustible, but the Pythia herself wasn’t. And that a shift, even a spatial one like to get us out to the road, required concentration.

Something that’s a little difficult to manage after being almost choked to death.

Instead, he dropped my hand and raised both of his, mumbling a long string of something that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up and his already wild mane go positively electric. And all the doors to all the rooms between us and the furniture dams to slam open. And the contents start to stream out, like reinforcements going to the front lines.

“The instant you can, shift us out of here,” he yelled, to be heard over the creak of wood and metal moving in ways the designers never intended, and the high-pitched shriek of the wards. “We’ll have to come back for the other!”

“No . . . need,” I gasped, trying to will air into my starved lungs.

“What?”

I reached up and yanked off the fedora, which was somehow still sticking to the crackling mass on his head, and fished something out. It was a smallish bronze sphere encased in glass, which glowed faintly when I touched it. “Spelled,” I explained breathlessly. “You have to know . . . it’s there . . . or it isn’t.”

Jonas’ blue eyes moved from the paperweight to my face, going sharp and squinty along the way. “I assume there’s a reason you didn’t tell me about this before?”

I licked my lips. “Uh-huh.”

“Pythias!” He threw his hands up in a manner that reminded me eerily of Agnes, my predecessor, who would probably have had some trick to get us out of this. But the most I could do was to slide down on my heels, put my arms over my head to cut the noise, and concentrate on recovering.

I only hoped I did it fast, because Jonas hadn’t bought us much time. Two first-level masters redecorate quickly, and the rooms were already running out of things to shred. We needed to get out of here.

“Billy,” I whispered. “The train is leaving the station.”

I didn’t get anything back, even though I knew he’d heard me. Billy didn’t need ears to pick up on my call; whether he chose to answer it or not was another thing. But he’d sounded eager enough to leave before.

I started to try again, but Jonas grabbed my arm. “Change of plan. When you can shift, take us back to the office.”

“What? Why?”

“We have the orb,” he explained, less than helpfully.

“Isn’t that what you wanted?”

He looked exasperated. “Yes, but not to take it out of this time stream! The spirit it contains is the only thing keeping the world’s protective barrier in place. To remove it would drop that protection, exactly as our enemy wants!”

“Then hide it somewhere. Someplace where Tony can’t find it. Then we can look it up when we get back to our—”

Jonas shook his head. “We have no idea what Tony used it for between now and then.”

“To hold down papers?”

“And what else?” Jonas asked severely. “We don’t know; therefore we cannot risk removing a piece of a very delicate puzzle. We could inadvertently change history!”

I frowned. “If you’re not going to take it and you’re not going to hide it, then what are we doing here?”

“I needed to see it, to know what I’m looking for. ‘Paperweight’ could mean anything—”

“I described it to you!”

“—and to verify that the vampire Antonio had not lied about your father’s fate merely to torture you.”

Which he totally would have done, I realized. Tony and I had had what you might call a suboptimal relationship. “But he didn’t.”

“No. For once, it seems, he told the truth. Which means we must return this,” Jonas said, shaking the paperweight at me, “lest Antonio realize its importance and alter his actions in the future. Then we may never find it!”

I said something unladylike, which he didn’t hear because it was becoming impossible to hear anything. I felt like screaming right along with the wards, if I’d had the breath and if it would have done any good. But it wouldn’t—just like using the last of my energy to shift us to the office, where we’d be trapped all over again, because I wasn’t going to be doing this twice in close succession. Not the way I felt right now, and not carrying two. And that was assuming I could manage to do it at—

“Cass! Get ready to shift!” Billy’s panicked voice cut through the din.

“In a minute,” I said irritably, rubbing the back of my neck.

“Not in a minute!
Now
. Now, now, now, now, now, now, now!”

My head came up. “What is wrong with you?”

“You know how you said if I ran into problems to come back? Well, I’m coming back. And I got problems!”

“What kind of problems?”

“What kind you think?” he snapped. “I’m trying to lose ’em, but they know this place better than I do and I think they’ve finally found a reason to work together—”

“Wait.” I glanced around. Narrow corridor; isolated part of the house; nobody around but us and a couple of more-or-less indestructible vampires. “Don’t try to lose them.”

“What?”

“Just get back here—now.”

“You don’t get it, Cass. When I said
problem
, I meant—”

“I got it. Just do it.” I stood up.

“Cassandra?” Jonas was watching me narrowly. “What is it?”

“Um,” I said brilliantly, since explaining this sort of thing usually didn’t go well. But it didn’t matter because I didn’t have time anyway. A second later, a horrible wail cut through the air, making the shrieking wards sound like a melody in comparison.

I whipped my head around, but there was nothing to see. And Jonas didn’t look like he’d noticed anything. Until the air suddenly became thick and cold and hard to breathe, and the hallway started to shake perceptibly, and the light fixtures overhead blew out, one after the other in a long line.

“Cassandra?” Jonas said, a little more forcefully this time.

“I think it’s time for the midnight express,” I said, hoping I hadn’t just made a really big mistake.

“And what does that mean?” he demanded.

“It means choo-choo, motherfucker!” Billy screamed, swooping out of the ceiling. And right on his tail was a train, all right—of what looked like every damned ghost on the property.

Holy shit,
I didn’t say, because I was busy grabbing Jonas and throwing us at the nearest door, just before the unearthly wind slammed into the hallway like a tornado.

We crashed into the floor on the other side as it hit, boiling down the hall like a freight train of fury. Merely the wind of its passing was enough to rip light fixtures off the walls, to puff a week’s worth of ashes out of the fireplace, and to send china figurines plummeting to their doom. Half a dozen books went flapping madly through the air over our heads, only to tangle in the wildly twisting drapes as I dragged myself back up.

Jonas lifted his head to stare at me. “What the—”

“Ghosts!” I told him, staggering for the door.

My ankle hurt, my lungs were still crying out for air, and my neck was on fire. But I didn’t stick around to assess the damage. I didn’t even wait until the storm was over. I stumbled out into the hall with Jonas on my heels, the two of us being buffeted here and there by late-arriving spirits.

And then I stopped for a second in awe.

Because there were no ghost trails here. The corridor in front of us was a solid rectangle of pulsing, angry green. There was no furniture dam anymore, either, just random bits of wood sticking out of the plaster like quills on a porcupine.

There was also no pissed-off vamp.

The one behind us was okay, judging by the renewed sounds of destruction battering the mound. But whoever had been on this end . . . well, I didn’t know where he had ended up. But I didn’t think it was a good idea to go looking for him.

Because the train was headed back this way.

“Run!” I screamed at Jonas, and sprang for the office door, just as the storm barreled back at us again, flinging a deadly cloud of debris ahead of it. He dove in behind me, damned spry for an old guy, as jagged shards of paneling whipped by outside like knives.

And then he slammed the door.

I stared at him incredulously.
“Ghosts, remember?”

He looked a little shamefaced. “Right.”

And then they were back.

We hadn’t even made it into the inner office when Billy zoomed through the door, screeching something I couldn’t understand because an infuriated tornado was right on his nonexistent heels. Something tore through the outer office as we dove into the inner one, upending filing cabinets and sending a blizzard of paperwork dancing madly through the air. Jonas leapt for the hat rack, I leapt for him, and Billy grabbed me around the neck, still babbling something.

“What?”

“You owe me, you
so
owe me!”

“Did you get it?”

“Yes,
I’m fine
. Thanks for asking!”

“Billy! Did. You. Get—”

“Yes, damn it, yes! I got it! I got it!”

“Thank you,” I told him fervently.

And shifted.

“Don’t,” I told Marco, a decade and a half later, when he opened the door to the Vegas hotel suite I called home. “Just . . . don’t, okay?”

Marco is my chief bodyguard. He’s about six foot five, maybe two hundred and fifty pounds, and built like a freight train. My legs aren’t as big around as his arms, which might feel weird except that most
men’s
aren’t, either. He’s a swarthy, hairy, foulmouthed, cigar-munching, example of machismo who is usually covered in weapons he doesn’t need because he’s also a master vampire.

Which is why it’s annoying when he decides to play mother hen.

Not that that appeared to be happening tonight.

“Hadn’t planned on it,” Marco said, and yanked me inside.

“What’s wrong with you?” I asked, because Marco was looking kind of freaked-out. That was worrying on someone who, I strongly suspected, had been assigned to lead my bodyguard because he was the oldest of Mircea’s masters. He’d seen it all and he didn’t rattle easy.

Although he was kind of looking rattled now.

“We got a problem,” he told me grimly.

I shook my head, letting loose a little cloud of Tony’s lousy housekeeping. “No.”

“What does that mean?”

I’d have thought that was obvious since I was dragging in at two a.m., covered in soot, plaster, and sweat, with a bruised ring around my neck and an all-but-destroyed T-shirt. But apparently not. I edged around him, balancing a cup and a bag of heart-destroying pastries from the coffee shop downstairs, because it wasn’t like I was going to live long enough to have to worry about cholesterol.

“It means I’ve had enough for one night. I’m tired; I’m going to bed. If there’s a problem, it can wait until—”

I stopped, because I’d just noticed the living room. It would have been called sunken if it hadn’t been on the twenty-second floor of the hotel. It was a tasteful medley of white and blue and yellow, since I’d had a say in redecorating after the last disaster hit. It was also usually deserted, the guards preferring to hang out in the lounge with the pool table and the beer fridge.

But that wasn’t true tonight. Tonight, every guard on duty was either sitting in the little conversation area, smoking out on the tiny balcony, or gathered by the bar. It was like a party.

Or maybe a wake; the guys were looking pretty damned grim.

“Why’s everybody out here?” I asked Marco, who had followed me down a short flight of stairs.

“’Cause of them in there,” he said, hiking a thumb at the lounge. Which I’d just noticed was closed off, with the pocket doors shut tight. I’d never seen them that way; the guys preferred an open floor plan to better keep an eye on me.

But it looked like they felt they could do without an eye on whoever was inside.

“Who’s ‘them’? I don’t have any appointments tonight.” At least, I really hoped I didn’t. The kind of guest I got at two a.m. tended to be of the fanged variety, and not the fun kind. “Tell me it’s not more senators,” I said, because I really, really wasn’t up to that.

“I wish.”

I sighed and crossed my filthy arms. “Okay. Out with it.”

But he didn’t come out with it. “Where’s Jonas? You’re supposed to be with him.”

I shrugged. “Home?” I’d dropped him off in the lobby before going for coffee. And it had been a while, since despite the fact that I looked like a war refugee, I’d still had to wait in line.

Vegas.

“Damn it!” Marco looked genuinely put out. No, that wasn’t right. Marco looked almost—

The sliding doors opened and a small vamp sidled out, before slamming them dramatically shut behind him. “Refreshments!” he said shrilly.

“What?” Marco glowered at him.

“You heard me,” the vamp said, wild-eyed. “They say if they have to wait any longer, that they deserve—”

“I’ll tell you what they deserve,” Marco said menacingly.

“—something to eat, but you know we don’t have any food in the place and I don’t know what—” The vamp stopped abruptly, staring at me.

Or, to be more precise, at my small white bakery bag.

“No,” I said, trying to hide it behind me. But a second later, it was in his hand anyway.

The guy who had just crossed a room in an eyeblink was named Fred. He looked like an accountant when he stood still long enough—with wispy brown hair and a somewhat portly figure—which was fair, since that’s what he had been before getting tapped for guard duty. I still hadn’t found out who he’d had to piss off to get stuck with that.

I knew who he was managing to annoy tonight, though.

He saw my expression. “No, no, no!” he said, backing up, his big gray eyes going huge. And then the little weasel ran for it.

“Come back here!” I demanded, but Fred wasn’t. Fred was a blur, clutching the bag I’d just stood in line twenty freaking minutes for, and heading for the kitchen.

Only to find me waiting on him when he arrived.

“What—how—shit!” He stared at me, hand over the heart that wasn’t going to attack him, since it hadn’t beaten in a few hundred years now. “You know I hate it when you do that!”

“Then give me back my stuff!”

“I . . . can’t,” he said, looking around desperately.

Marco had come in behind him, but he wasn’t doing anything, just standing in front of the door with his massive arms crossed, waiting it out.

“Please,” Fred said tragically when I grabbed for my property. And then,
“Please! Please! Gaaah! Gaaah!”

I let go of the bag, because I honestly didn’t know what the hell was wrong with him. “What the hell’s wrong with him?” I asked Marco.

“He’s afraid.”

Fred didn’t deny it.

“Of what?”

“Of them in there.” The thumb hike was backward this time, over his shoulder. But it didn’t help, since the shutters partitioning the kitchen from the lounge had been closed, like they were for the formal parties we never had.

“
Who
in there?”

Marco opened his mouth, but it was Fred who spoke. He was looking in the bag, and he didn’t seem happy. Maybe because he’d squashed it in all the agitation, and a smear of red had bloomed like blood on one side.

He grabbed a plate and turned it upside down, dumping out the contents. And then he just stood there, staring at three sadly mushed pastries. “What are
those
?” he demanded.

“What do they look like?” I snapped. Damn it, most of the powdered sugar had come off, and that was the best part.

Big gray eyes lifted to meet mine, with the look of a man seeing his doom. “What did you
buy
?” he squeaked.

“What did you expect?”

“I don’t know! They have all kinds of things down there—dainty tea cakes and tiny tarts and
pain au chocolate
and finger sandwiches and those cute little baby macaroons!
Why didn’t you get the baby macaroons?
”

“I don’t like macaroons.”

He stared at me. “What do you mean you don’t like macaroons? Everybody likes macaroons!”

“Well, I’m somebody and I don’t,” I said, reaching for the plate. And getting my hand slapped for my trouble.

“But . . . but I can’t serve them
these
,” he said, a little madly. “And room service takes forever and there’s always a line downstairs and what am I supposed to
do
?”

“You’re supposed to tell me what’s going on before I strangle you,” I said ominously.

But Fred was past that. Fred looked like he thought strangling would be a step up. He was hunched over the plate, his eyes darting around the kitchen’s gleaming surfaces as if he thought a tea service and accompanying canapés were sure to appear somewhere.

“Oh God . . ” he said miserably when this did not happen.

I looked at Marco, expecting a little sanity. Only to find him regarding the plate, too. “Maybe you could . . . fluff ’em up,” he said, apparently serious.

“Fluff ’em up?
Fluff ’em up?
” Fred hissed. “They’re jelly doughnuts! There’s nothing to fluff!”

“They’re
my
doughnuts,” I said, reaching for the plate again. And had it snatched away.

“Have an apple,” Fred snarled, tossing me one from a bowl.

“If I’d wanted an apple, I wouldn’t have bought doughnuts!”

“Well, that’s too bad,” he hissed, hunched over my dinner like Gollum with the ring. “Because I’m not going out there and telling a bunch of mumble—”

“What?”

“—that we don’t have anything for them. I’m not, do you hear?”

Not really. “A bunch of what?” I asked, for clarification.

The darting eyes made a return, and his tone was barely audible. “Wumble,” he said reverently.

“What?”

He looked up, a faintly annoyed frown creasing his forehead. “Wichel!”

“What’s a wichel?”

Marco sighed. “Witches,” he translated.

“Witches?” I frowned.

“Yes!” Fred said vehemently. “Witches! Witches! Wi—” He suddenly realized he’d been yelling, and bit off the word. And crouched down behind the kitchen table so, I suppose, Marco and I would be the better targets. “Witches,” he whispered.

I put a hand to my head. I just wanted a doughnut. A sweet, squashy, jelly-filled reminder that there were good things in life, however much fate seemed determined to deprive me of them.

“What witches?” I finally asked.

“The coven kind,” Marco said dourly. “They showed up almost an hour ago, demanding to see you.”

“Did they have an appointment?”

Marco looked faintly uncomfortable. “No.”

“Then why did you let them in?”

“’Cause they appeared on the balcony and let themselves in through the wards?” Fred asked, peeking over the table and prompting Marco to shoot him a look.

“Because one doesn’t just tell a bunch of coven leaders to get lost!” Marco bit out.

“If they don’t have an appointment, you do,” I said grimly.

I wasn’t trying to be inhospitable, but seriously, this shit had to stop. Morning, noon, and night, ever since my not-exactly-a-coronation, it had been the same thing: senate leaders, Circle leaders, Pack leaders, press-tryingto-pretend-to-be-leaders of something, anything, that would get them in, all showing up. To gawk at me. And in the case of the latter, to get the story of the century.

And the worst thing was, it wasn’t even mine.

Yeah, I was the Pythia the vamps had pulled out of the woodwork a few months ago, who nobody knew anything about. And yes, that would have been front-page news in any situation. In any
other
situation.

But, suddenly, nobody cared that I had been brought up by Tony the Louse instead of being carefully nurtured at the Pythian Court. Nobody was bothered by the fact that I’d therefore received practically no training for the job I was supposed to be doing. They didn’t even seem to care that an untutored vampire’s protégée was occupying one of the most important positions in the magical world while said world was being consumed by a major war.

No.

They only cared about one thing.

They only cared about my mother.

You see, it wasn’t my dad’s soul that had put that paperweight at the top of Jonas’ Christmas list. It was the fact that, shortly before he and Mom and their Buick were blown into a million pieces, my mother had done something that had linked her soul to his. So when Pop’s spirit was captured in the magical snare Tony had devised, hers went along with it.

And hers was kind of a big deal.

Because hers belonged to a goddess.

Yeah, I know. It just gives the whole crazy mess that little extra touch of madness, doesn’t it? I spent my childhood thinking that Tony had taken me in out of the goodness of his cold, slimy heart, after my parents were killed in a tragic accident, only to find out that he’d arranged the accident. One that had killed not only my father, but the creature the world had once known as Artemis.

Oh, she’d had other names, even before she started using the O’Donnell alias. All the gods had, skipping merrily around this new world they’d found, causing chaos and littering demigods about, while being worshipped under a hundred different titles. But she’d been Artemis in Greece, where she’d had an epiphany about just how much chaos the gods were causing during their sprees—and about how many humans were getting dead in the process.

She’d been Artemis when she grew a conscience.

At least, I assumed she had, although who knows? The gods were nothing if not capricious. Maybe she just woke up one day and decided to punk her fellow divine beings—by tossing their godly butts off the planet.

She did this, it turns out, by a spell sustained partly by—you guessed it—her own divine soul. It was the only thing powerful enough to cut off access to an entire world. And it had worked . . . sort of.

Meaning that it had worked at the time. And even later, after she started to decline from a lack of compatible magic on the planet she’d just stranded herself on— great idea there, Mom—it still had. The spell was now supported by the group Jonas currently led, an alliance of human mages known as the Silver Circle. So, presumably, even if it was somehow brought down, the mages should be able to recast it.

Assuming they had all the parts, that is.

Which, of course, is where the record scratched. Since Artemis’ protection spell had been linked through her soul, that soul formed a vital part of the spell. Meaning that if it disappeared, the spell it was supporting went away, too.

And since the other gods hadn’t been amused by her little come-to-Jesus moment or whatever the hell it had been, and
really
wanted back in, that was a problem.

Particularly when the other side in the war was only too willing to welcome them back with open arms. The whole mess had Jonas wanting to tear his crazy hair out.

What had me wanting to shred mine was that everybody assumed I could do something about all this.

Yeah, okay, at some point the goddess famous for virginity had decided to hook up with a human for some reason, and pop out baby me. But that did not automatically confer any special insight. I’d had to learn about the whole mess the hard way, like everyone else—by piecing clues together over the last several months, ever since the war made it obvious that the gods were getting serious about the reclaiming-their-playground thing. And I still didn’t know much.