Chapter Fourteen
Shit,” I said, staring up at the biggest goddamned vampire I’d ever seen.
“I usually go with hello,” he said, eyeing me.
It might have been the outfit. I couldn’t go home right now to get something, as we had to assume the place was being staked out by Rand or one of their allies, whether it was or not. But the shops around here…
I’d have preferred to go to a regular store to pick up some jeans, underwear, and a few t-shirts, and maybe a pair of tennis shoes to tide me over.
But that would have required taking several hulking Arnou guards along, as that appeared to have been part of the deal Sienna had worked out with Sebastian.
I wasn’t sure whether they were for the bad guys or me right now, all things considered, and didn’t really want to know, so I’d decided to shop in-house.
It had been… a choice.
I was wearing the closest thing to regular clothes I’d been able to find, which wasn’t that close.
The t-shirt was okay, as it was just one of the tacky casino ones, with a grinning devil on the front holding a hand of cards, the gates of perdition on the back, and “Dante’s: A Hell of a Good Time” blazoned underneath. But the jeans…
They looked pretty normal, except for built-in leather chaps that were impossible to take off. And every step I took had the sound of spurs chiming softly in the background. Step, chime, step, chime; I felt like Wyatt Earp.
But at least they were subtle and had been hard to hear with the rowdy casino floor not far off.
They were louder in here, causing one of the vamp’s big, black eyebrows to raise when I shifted position.
But they were better than the cowgirl skirt, which had had a stampede of embroidered bovines across it every few minutes, along with a slap and a “Yee Haw” screamed in time to some rodeo music.
“Lia de Croissets, I assume?” the vamp said, mercifully not commenting.
I cleared my throat. “Yeah. I’m looking for Marco Carales?”
“You found him.”
“The, uh, casino manager said you’d see me?”
“Yeah, he called a few minutes ago. You know the Pythia’s not here, right?”
“That’s okay,” I said, trying not to look as relieved as I felt. Cassandra Palmer, the current Pythia, had a reputation, but I wasn’t entirely sure what it was.
Half the time, she was depicted as the heroic champion of humanity, battling outrageous odds to save us all, and the other half…
well, frankly, the other half, she looked like a lunatic.
It was rumored that she was a demigoddess, so maybe that explained it.
The Greek heroes with godly parents hadn’t exactly been known for stability.
Either way, her pale blue gaze was disconcerting enough from the pages of magazines. I could do without meeting it in person today. Or any other day.
The vampire gave me a look that made it clear he knew what I was thinking. But as with my outrageous attire, he didn’t comment. At his age, he’d probably seen it all.
But I wasn’t entirely sure that I believed his age.
“Are you really fifteen hundred years old?” I blurted out, before I could stop myself.
“Something like that,” was the laconic reply, which was absurd.
He was wearing a cotton-candy-pink polo shirt. According to Casanova, he had started life as a gladiator, which the six and a half feet of muscle, abundant body hair, and Italian good looks would tend to support. But that shirt!
It kind of killed the vibe, as did the feet sticking out of a pair of leather sandals, each toe of which had a different-colored nail polish.
“Kids,” he said easily, seeing the direction of my stare, and made a gesture, ushering me inside. Only inside of what, I wasn’t sure.
I’d never given the Pythian Court a lot of thought, even knowing that the current Pythia had established herself on several floors of the hotel I was currently staying in.
The court wasn’t something you were supposed to think about, as it did whatever it did behind the scenes, like a supernatural CIA or MI6. Or so I’d always thought.
But this… wasn’t giving James Bond. This was giving chaotic nursery school, I thought, as I softly chimed my way across the marble-floored entryway that gave birdcage vibes, and not just because of its white walls and high, arched ceiling, both of which were ribbed in gold.
But because of several bird-shaped kites fluttering around in it.
They looked like children’s toys, made of brightly colored paper, and inside the court proper were more of them.
A bunch of children were running after them, laughing, yelling, and ordering each other about, while the kites took turns zooming at them.
I guessed the idea was to catch one, only not with hands.
Some of the kids, who seemed to be all girls, had thin lassos of golden energy with which they were attempting to snatch the animated paper birdies out of the air.
That was not going so well, as their aim was terrible, meaning that they caught just about everything else instead.
Vases went crashing, pillows flew off expensive sofas, and plenty of girls ended up trapped in each other’s spells to the point that the sitting room resembled a giant, golden spider’s web.
They didn’t get a single bird. Not until a little girl of maybe four happened to grab one out of the air as it fluttered past her face, only not by magic.
She just snatched it with fat little hands, then waved it around excitedly, accidentally smashing it into the floor several times in the process, and laughing in glee.
“That doesn’t count!” one of the older girls said.
“Amelie has the first point,” a large, imposing woman with a cap of tight gray curls intoned.
“No! That’s not fair! She just grabbed it—”
“And why does that matter?” The old battleax demanded, turning her gimlet-eyed gaze on me as I passed through the room, and making me feel like a kid at school who had been caught doing something wrong.
“Magic or no, a win is a win. Not everything has to be about your power. The less you use it, the better. A non-magical way to do something will save your strength for more important battles.”
That almost stopped me, because it sounded exactly like something we were taught in the Corps.
Guns, potion grenades, and even good old knives were used to conserve our magic, which was a precious commodity.
And we needed those lessons; run out of juice in a battle, and it was game over for you, possibly permanently.
But why were a bunch of what looked like five to seven-year-olds being taught that?
I didn’t ask because we were already through the living room and onto a massive balcony bigger than most suites, and because the vamp was intimidating as hell.
Even with the candy-colored polo and the painted nails.
Maybe especially with them, as it said something about his power and self-assurance that he didn’t have to bother putting on a show.
If a guy had ever had an air of “it’s cool because I’m doing it,” it was this one.
We found a wrought-iron set of patio furniture under a bright green umbrella and sat down, and then I noticed: the table was old, pitted cast iron one second, and then whole and unblemished the next, and painted a cheerful white.
I sat there, watching the perfect paint glisten in the sunlight for a moment, wondering if I was seeing things.
Then it faded and rubbed away in patches of rust that ate across its surface like lace before the old, pitted top showed back up again.
And then I was stumbling back, overturning my chair in the process, and checking my arms to see if the same thing was happening to me!
“Relax,” the vamp snatched a bright blue and yellow paper bird that had escaped out of the doors behind us, and gave it to a tot—one far too young to be part of the lesson, who had nonetheless toddled outside after it.
“You want it, sweetie?” he asked the little girl, who was wearing a tattered pink bunny suit and had her hair in two puffy pom poms on either side of her head.
She had skin the color of Jace’s, and big brown eyes that reminded me of his, and yet, unlike him, she was absolutely fearless, grabbing the huge vampire’s knee and jumping for the prize he held just out of reach.
“What do we say?” he asked, arching an eyebrow at her.
“Gimme!”
“Try again,” he said sardonically. “What did Rhea tell you this morning, when you reached for the last doughnut?”
The little girl thought about it. Apparently, that was ages ago to her toddler’s mind. But then her eyes lit up, having remembered the magic word.
“Please?” she said, her face meltingly sweet.
The vamp lowered the bird so that she could grab it.
“That one’s gonna be trouble in a few years,” he predicted, sitting down and lighting up a cigar. “And it’s confined to the table.”
“W-what is?” I asked, confused.
“The time spell. One of the girls was practicing earlier and missed the target.” He shrugged. “Sit or stand, your choice. You wanted this meeting—for what, exactly?”
I gingerly sat, although staying well away from the continually morphing table. “I, uh, I asked for the name of the oldest vampire here, and was told that it was you.”
He thought about it. “Yeah,” he said, puffing. “The consul’s traveling circus isn’t in town at the moment, so I guess that’d be about right. You need a history lesson?”
“Something like that. Do you know what an úlfhe?dinn is?”
“úlfhe?dinn,” the vamp gave it the proper pronunciation, although whether because he knew it or because I’d just used it, I wasn’t sure. “That’s a term I haven’t heard in a while.”
“But you have heard it?”
“I’ve fought it.” He let out a slow stream of smoke. “Don’t want to ever again, either.”
“You fought one?” I leaned forward eagerly before I thought, and some white paint flaked off onto my hand. And then dusted away as I watched—without taking my skin along with it, thank God!
“And its horde,” he agreed. “It was memorable.”