Embrace the Night

Chapter 9

Casanova had pointed out that it would be unwise for me to occupy a suite, in case the Circle had spies on the lookout for long-term guests. Instead, he'd stuck me in what had once been a small storeroom in back of the tiki bar. I still had several cases of cocktail umbrellas in boxes under my bed, and barely enough room to turn around. Pritkin had it worse, being stuffed into the dressing room once reserved for the club's famous dead performers. It was larger, since it had once held their coffins, but he swore it still had a certain…odor. At the moment, that thought cheered me up considerably.

I finished pulling the oversized T-shirt I was using for a nightgown over my head as Billy drifted through the wall. I brought him up to speed on my conversation with Saleh while he sat on the edge of the bed and rolled a ghostly cigarette. "We need a team," I concluded.

"We are a team."

I was tired and I ached, in more ways than one. I hugged my pillow, which had all the comfort of one issued by an unusually stingy airline.

"The Cassie and Billy show might have worked for staying a step ahead of Tony," I said. "It isn't going to be enough to let us burgle a Black Circle stronghold."

"And we've had such great luck with partners."

"We can trust Rafe."

"Cass, I know you like the guy, but come on. A great warrior he ain't."

"We don't need a warrior," I said irritably. "I'm not planning to attack the Circle!"

"And your plans always work out perfectly, huh?"

"Are you trying to be a pain in the ass?"

"Nope, it pretty much comes naturally." He lit up and regarded me through a haze of ghostly smoke. "There's always Marlowe."

He meant Kit Marlowe, the onetime Elizabethan playwright. He was now the Consul's chief spy. "Yeah, that'd be healthy."

"You'd be saving Mircea as well as yourself. I'd think that would cancel a few debts," Billy argued.

"It might, if they didn't blame me for getting him into this mess in the first place."

"But he put the geis on you—"

"Which, as my master, he had every right to do. I'm the one who had no right to double it, even accidentally." I saw the objection trembling on Billy's lips. "And yes, I think their reasoning sucks. I'm just saying."

"I don't like them any better than you do." Billy sounded aggrieved. "But who else is there? We keep meeting these powerful types, but they're all freaking nuts."

"I'm not taking anyone back in time I can't trust. Or anyone incompetent. Or who has their own agenda."

Billy let out an exasperated sigh. "It's gonna be a little hard to assemble a team if you keep to those kind of standards. Someone loyal and strong who doesn't want anything? Come on."

I found myself getting furious all over again at Pritkin, who was supposed to be exactly that. I'd started to let down my guard with him, just because he was smart and brave and sometimes strangely funny. I should've kept in mind that none of that meant he was on my side. When I give my word, I keep it, he'd once told me. Yeah, right.

I toyed with the bedspread, blue and gold brocade with scratchy lace. Not for the first time, I wished for something less flashy and more comfortable. I'd had a soft cotton coverlet at Tony's that I'd used for years. It had faded in the wash, its bright, cheap flowers turning to soft pastels over time, like an English garden. It had gotten a little ragged around the edges, but I'd never let my fastidious governess change it for anything else. I'd liked it the way it was, flaws and all. But like the rest of my stuff, like Eugenie herself, it no longer existed.

"Cass?" Billy suddenly sounded awkward, something almost novel for him. "You know Pritkin was a jerk, right?" A jerk who also happened to be a friend, a tiny voice at the back of my mind whispered. Stop it, stop it. "Cass?"

The lump in my throat had grown enough to be almost painful, and my eyes had started prickling embarrassingly, and wow, was it time for a change of subject. "I know."

"Okay, then. We're better off. I never trusted him."

"I don't trust anybody," I said fervently. It was the only thing I was sure of these days.

"Anybody except me," Billy corrected. "So what's the plan?"

"I have to get the Codex," I said, starting with the one thing on which there was no argument. Pritkin had said it wouldn't help, but I guess I'd just seen how much I could believe him. "Only I can't bring it back here. It's been roaming around for over two hundred years; who knows what taking it out of the timeline would do?"

Billy looked confused for a moment, and then his eyes got wide. "You can't be thinking what I think you're thinking."

I scowled at him. "If the mountain won't go to Mohammed—"

"Mohammed wasn't an insane master vamp!"

"Mircea's not insane." Not yet, anyway. "He's…tormented."

"Uh-huh. You're going to drag a tormented master vampire along to burgle a dark mage stronghold?"

"You have a better idea?"

"Anything is a better idea!"

"Don't yell."

"Then start talking sense!" I threw the pillow at him, which did no good because it passed right on through. "That doesn't change the fact that you're crazy."

I flopped back on the bed and threw an arm over my eyes. He was probably right, not that it made a difference. If I couldn't take the spell to Mircea, I had no choice but to take Mircea to the spell. And I'd been saying just that morning that I wanted something to do. As last words went, they pretty much sucked.

"You need to get some rest." Billy tried to take my hand, but he'd expended too much energy back at the apartment and didn't have the strength. His fingers passed right through me.

"And you need to feed," I said, finishing the thought. I wasn't looking forward to the energy drain, but I was only going to sleep anyway.

"I'll make do," he said, after a minute.

I looked up, confused. I couldn't remember the last time Billy had refused to take energy. It was the main tie binding us together, his payment for helping out with my various problems. "What?"

"No offense, Cass, but you look like hell."

"Thanks."

"I don't need much gas to spy on the manic mage, anyway." He tipped his hat back and gave me a cocky grin. "And if we're lucky, maybe some of his old buddies in the Corps will find him and take care of one problem for us."

I fell asleep wondering why that thought didn't make me feel any better.

Rafe met me in the kitchens before dawn the next morning. With Pritkin no longer in the picture, I'd had to look elsewhere for help, and there weren't a lot of choices. I'd left a message on the private number Rafe had given me, asking to see him. I just hoped he wasn't going to freak out too badly when I told him what I wanted.

Shortly after we snagged stools at an unused prep table, one of the staff wandered over and deposited a white clay coffee cup in front of me. It smelled like rich dark roast and freshly steamed milk, and had a dot in the middle of the foam from the espresso added right at the end. Pritkin would have loved it. I pushed it away, feeling queasy.

"Cucciolina, you are a mess," Rafe told his newest admirer, as fat little hands gleefully smeared berry mush all over his green silk shirt.

Some of the staff were making pies for Midsummer's Eve, which explained why the baby had a ring of purple all around her mouth and jam stuck in her wispy blond hair. Miranda, who had been trying to babysit and supervise at the same time, had handed her over almost as soon as I walked in the door. The baby had immediately made a peevish little huffing sound, and when I just stood there, holding her awkwardly, she broke into an angry shriek.

Rafe rescued me, taking her despite his elegant attire and jiggling her against his chest. She hammed it up for a few seconds, wailing like I'd been sticking her with pins, before finally subsiding into anxious snuffles and pressing her face to his shirt. Considering how fast she recovered, it was pretty clear she'd just wanted to flirt with the cute guy.

A white china plate joined my coffee cup. On it was a largish, nicely browned muffin. I looked at the muffin and, as far as I could tell, it didn't look back. Since it had passed the first test, I broke it open and sniffed it. Peanut butter and anchovy. A little chef was casually loitering nearby, waiting for a verdict. He was going to be waiting for a while.

"She reminds me of you at that age," Rafe said, vainly swiping the baby's lips with a napkin. It only made bad matters worse: now she had purple cheeks, too. "You could never eat anything without getting it everywhere."

Jesse stifled a smile at the other end of the long table, where he and a bunch of the kids were playing Monopoly. They should have been in bed—it was barely four a.m. — but nobody at Dante's kept a normal schedule. Having a staff partially composed of people who caught fire in sunlight probably had something to do with that.

Most of the older kids were intent on the game, but one of the younger ones was sitting on the floor, playing with an Elvis Pez dispenser someone had given her. She seemed totally intent on it, but the door behind her nonetheless stayed stubbornly open. It seemed that her parents had once hidden their embarrassing child in a small room with no windows, until she discovered that locks just loved to open for her and escaped. Now it had become a bit of a habit. It made getting around the casino something of a challenge, though: elevator doors simply refused to close as long as she was inside.

Watching her, I finally figured out what had been bugging me. These kids were just too young. The average age was eight, with several in the four-to-five-year-old range. Which made no sense.

At fourteen, I'd been one of the youngest in Tami's brood. Most had been mid-to late teens, old enough to have figured out what their lives were going to be like in one of those special schools and to have engineered an escape. Sure, there were occasionally younger kids who came through, but they usually arrived with an older sibling or friend. I'd never seen Tami with so many really small children. How had they gotten away? How had they survived on the streets until she found them? I'd barely managed it, and I'd had more years and more money than most of them.

"I didn't come to court until I was four," I reminded Rafe absently. A tiny car from the Monopoly game had decided to trundle down the table to us and bumped into my hand. I turned it around and sent it back, where it collided with a briskly hopping shoe. It looked like someone had enchanted the game board for the kids.

"To live, no, but your father brought you as a bambina," he replied, giving up on cleaning the sticky child. He held her against his chest with one arm, the palm of his hand curled protectively around her skull.

"What?"

"He loved to show you off. Of course, you were better behaved than some," he said with a sigh, as the baby began chewing on his tie.

"I never knew that." I knew so little about my parents that the tiny piece of trivia felt like a revelation. In my mind, «mother» meant a cool hand, soft hair, and a sweet smell. It was my strongest memory of her. Unless I thought very hard, it was my only memory of her. And I recalled even less about my father.

"Piccolina mia, please to stop," Rafe said in exasperation, pulling his tie away and substituting a pacifier before his squirming armful could protest. Luckily, the small tussle seemed to have worn her out, and she soon curled into his chest and went to sleep. "The visits ended when you were about two," he added.

"Do you know why?"

Rafe started to shrug, then realized it might wake up his new girlfriend. "My guess would be that you began showing signs of your gift. Your father must have realized that Tony would take you if he knew."

Which he had, only a couple of years later. "How did he find out?" I'd never known how Tony discovered that I might be worth acquiring. The idea that the tip-off could have been something I did was nauseating.

"Tony never trusted anyone, not even his longtime servants," Rafe reassured me. "There were people watching your father, who doubtless also had people watching them. The only ones Antonio did not monitor were those of us with blood bonds to him, which he knew we were not strong enough to break." The last was said with uncharacteristic bitterness.

"I don't suppose…Can you tell me anything about them? About my parents?" It wasn't the first time I'd asked him, but Rafe had never been able to answer. He'd been under orders to stay mute, and as the vampire who made him had given the order, the prohibition was even stronger than Mircea's.

Rafe regarded me with compassion. "I'm sorry, Cassie."

"I just thought, maybe, with Tony gone…"

"But he still lives," Rafe reminded me softly. "As does his hold over me."

"But maybe Billy could—"

"And Antonio's ban includes communication through the spirit world."

My ability to communicate with ghosts came from my father. It wasn't surprising that Tony would have thought to add that little caveat. I'd always hated him, but I'd never thought him stupid. Disappointment settled into its usual place behind my rib cage.

"Can't Mircea break the blood bond?" I asked after a moment.

"I haven't asked him. In his condition…I don't dare do anything to weaken him further."

"Which kind of brings me to why I wanted to see you." I glanced at the kids, but none of them was paying us any attention. Jesse was biting his lip and glaring at the board, where tiny foreclosure signs had just appeared on a bunch of his hotels. As quietly as possible, I brought Rafe up to speed.

"You want to storm a dark mage stronghold?" Rafe asked incredulously when I'd finished. "On your own?"

"Not on my own," I corrected. A night's rest had helped to clear my head and made me reevaluate my plan. I needed to get Mircea to the Codex, but trying to handle him by myself was foolhardy. Fortunately, there was another option.

Besides Rafe and a few other trophies, Tony had specialized in acquiring badasses, the kind with the skills and personalities to complement his network of highly illegal activities. And some of them had had several hundred years to hone their skills. I was going after the Codex, and I wasn't going alone.

"But if you already know where it is, can you not simply—" Rafe made an indeterminate hand gesture that was supposed to indicate shifting.

I respected him enough not to roll my eyes, but it took an effort. "If I could just run in and grab it, yeah. But I somehow doubt it's going to be that easy. I need Alphonse."

Rafe only sat there, looking horrified, but some of his tension must have communicated itself to the baby, who woke up and started sniffling. I watched her warily, knowing what that meant. But Miranda, having terrorized the staff to her satisfaction, came and took her away before the explosion came. And Rafe was still just looking at me.

The reaction wasn't exactly a surprise. Alphonse was Tony's right-hand man and chief thug. After the boss did his disappearing act, Alphonse had taken control of the family's East Coast operations as Casanova had in Vegas. And, no, on the surface, nothing about him was particularly reassuring.

For one thing, he looked like a boxer who'd lost one too many fights: his features were all slightly off-kilter, as if they'd been smashed too badly to ever fit together properly again. For another, he sounded scarily like Don Corleone. It was due to tracheal damage from a vicious elbow to the throat in his mortal days, but that didn't change the fact that every time The Godfather was shown at Tony's somebody lost it and ended up bleeding all over the floor. Which may account for why it was so often on the playlist.

Even more worrying was the stack of thick, well-thumbed photo albums in his room that were filled with neatly labeled black-and-white prints. Some showed people in coffins, staring sightlessly upwards, others were facedown in gutters or sprawled on cracked pavement, still bleeding out. Alphonse kept pictures of everyone he'd ever killed. There were a lot of albums.

The photos had originally been Tony's idea. In the human world, Alphonse had been a monster, the kind they made movies about with car chases and explosions and enough gore to prompt news reports on the societal effects of violence in the media. In the vampire world, he was just good at his job. A little too good sometimes. Tony hadn't wanted his chief enforcer to end up on the Senate's bad side for going overboard once too often, but talking to him didn't help much and there are no such things as therapists in the vampire world. Then someone joked one night at dinner that Alphonse needed a hobby, and Tony's eyes lit up.

The unfortunate joker had been saddled with the job of finding something that Alphonse liked to do that didn't concern killing—or provide the entertainment himself. Everyone had assumed he was a goner, including him. That had been especially true when the pets were hunted for sport, the piano was used for target practice and the golf clubs were wrapped around his neck. But then he bought a camera and set up a darkroom and nobody saw Alphonse for a week.

When Alphonse had no corpses to model for him, he'd photograph anyone hanging around court. He particularly loved surprising people, catching them doing something embarrassing or from the worst possible angle. Under Rafe's beautiful ceiling in my bedroom had been walls papered with hideous images: me with eyes rolled up so that only the whites showed; with my mouth full of pizza; and with my jaw swollen to chipmunk size from a tooth extraction.

I'd hated them at first, hated waking up every day to grotesque versions of myself that I'd started to see reflected in the mirror whenever I looked too long. But I hadn't dared to take down Alphonse's offerings, which soon circled the room and started on another row. And, slowly, as my collection grew, I began to change my mind.

Alphonse's favorite model was his girlfriend, a buxom blonde with arms as thickly muscled as a man's, known as One-Eyed Sal. Her appearance lived up to her nickname, with the scar that ran through her left eye slanting down her cheek to just lift the corner of her mouth. She'd lost the eye in the California gold rush to another saloon girl who knew how to wield a broken bottle better than she did. Shortly thereafter, Tony had decided to add her to his stable. Body parts lost before the change don't regenerate, so Sal was one-eyed permanently. Alphonse didn't seem to mind, though, and her lopsided smile and scarred face featured prominently in his collection.

I'd been staring at his most recent shot of me one day, my eyes passing from my acne-covered cheeks and chin, which Alphonse had enhanced with a red filter to resemble a landscape on Mars, to a photo of Tony sprawled on his throne, looking even more bloated than usual. I'd barely even noticed Sal's newest photo in the middle, despite the fact that the lens had lingered lovingly on her scars. Between the two of us, she'd looked perfectly normal. Through Alphonse's lens, I'd realized, everyone was ugly; or maybe, through his lens, everyone was beautiful.

I still found it confusing, but I'd never looked at my photos quite the same way again. I'd even started to think that, compared to the frilly, posed shots my governess preferred, some of them were actually kind of interesting. Alphonse might be a murdering bastard, but unlike a certain war mage I could name, he occasionally made sense. And I was really getting tired of dealing with people I didn't understand.

I'd spent the last few weeks wandering around Pritkin's world, where I was supposed to belong, feeling like someone visiting a foreign country who only halfway spoke the language. Most of the time, I had no freaking clue what was going on, and once or twice I'd reached a state of confusion so severe that it felt like it might be causing brain damage. I couldn't win the game—hell, I couldn't even play—when I didn't understand the rules. I needed to level the playing field. I needed the vamps.

"Alphonse might be a first-class badass, but he isn't a first-level master," I reminded Rafe. "If Mircea dies, he'll be in the same boat with you, forced to fight for position within whatever family absorbs him."

"He needn't worry. There are many who would gladly add his…special talents…to their arsenal."

"Yeah, but how many do you think would be willing to make him their second?" Alphonse might carve out a niche for himself sooner or later, but no way was he going to end up second in command again. Not for centuries, maybe not ever. And I didn't think that would sit too well with the vamp I'd known.

"The Consul has forbidden anyone to help you," Rafe reminded me.

"Alphonse isn't so great at following orders," I reminded him right back. "I think he'll risk it." If I'd been giving odds, I'd have put them at ten to one at least. I was his best chance to hold on to his current position, which made me his new best friend. No matter what the Consul said. "I need Alphonse and a team of his craziest thugs. Can you get him?"

"I can contact him," Rafe reluctantly admitted. "But even if he agrees, I don't know if any of this will be soon enough."

"Soon enough for what?" I asked impatiently. "I know where the Codex is, Rafe. I just need help to get to it!"

"Yes, but Mircea…he's getting worse. And if he loses his faculties, will the counterspell reverse the damage? Or will he be left that way permanently?" Despite our position, which was a little too close to the ovens for comfort, he shivered.

I sat back in my chair, feeling dizzy. I'd assumed that once I had the spell, everything would go back to normal. But what if it didn't? And with the Senate in the middle of a war, what if they decided a crazed master vamp was a liability they couldn't afford? No wonder Rafe was freaking out. If the geis didn't kill Mircea, the Consul might.

Ironically, what I needed was more time. I had the location of the Codex; sooner or later, I was going to get that spell. But it wouldn't do me a lot of good if Mircea went crazy while I was making plans. Somehow I had to mitigate the effects of the geis while I figured everything out. And there was only a single possibility for that: the one place where I knew from experience the geis did not operate at full force.

"What about Faerie?" I asked. "If we could get him there, it might buy enough time to—"

"The Consul thought of that," Rafe said. His tone was even, but his agitated fingers were reducing my linen napkin to shreds. "But the Fey do not want any more vampires in their world, especially one in Mircea's condition. They refused a visa."

"Who did? The Light or the Dark?"

He looked surprised. "The Senate doesn't deal with the Dark Fey. Their treaty with the Light prohibits it."

"But I do." The Dark Fey king expected me to find and deliver the Codex. Until that happened, he needed to keep me happy. That gave me a lever to extort a few small favors, such as room and board for an ailing vampire.

"But, even were the Fey willing to help, how would we get him there?"

"What about the portal at MAGIC?" The Metaphysical Alliance for Greater Interspecies Cooperation was the supernatural community's version of the United Nations. It wasn't my favorite place, but we'd have to go in to get Mircea anyway, so it made sense to simply take him through MAGIC's own link to Faerie.

But Rafe squashed that idea. "It has not yet been repaired. Your passage last time was not…conventional…and it shattered the spell. The Consul has appealed to the Fey to allow another, but they say if we cannot control who enters their lands better than that, they are not certain they wish us to have one. We are in negotiations, but there is no knowing how long they may take."

And the Fey weren't known for doing anything in a hurry. Not to mention that the portal, when and if it did open back up, was almost certain to be very well guarded. No help there.

"Damn it!" I hit the table with my palm, hard enough to slosh my untouched coffee everywhere. I was mopping it up with the napkin shreds when one of the mental Post-its I'd been filing at the back of my brain began waving about. "Tony has an illegal portal around here somewhere," I said slowly. "He used it for smuggling. I just don't know where it is."

Rafe gripped my hands, and for the first time he looked hopeful. "How do we locate it?"

"I don't know. But I know who to ask."

"You don't need a portal until you have the book," the pixie said, fluffing her tiny shock of bright red hair. She'd found a compact somewhere, possibly in the trash because most of the powder it once held was gone. She was using it for a mirror on the dressing table she'd made out of a bunch of CD cases. "And you haven't made any progress on that at all."

"You need it to get back home," I pointed out. "Unless you want to stay here?"

I looked around her makeshift apartment. It was fairly spacious from her perspective, taking up several shelves in the closet of Pritkin's study room. She'd fixed up the top shelf as the dressing area, while the bottom was a bedroom, complete with an oven mitt for a sleeping bag and a small flashlight for a lamp. She shot me a dirty look nonetheless. "Yes, I've found your world to be so hospitable."

"When I visited yours, I was almost killed!"

"And I was locked in a file cabinet," she spat.

"It beats a dungeon!"

"Ever try it?"

I'd seen the file cabinet, which looked like a bomb had exploded from the inside. "It didn't look like you had any trouble getting out."

"Only because it was made of some inferior metal, instead of iron." She shuddered. "I could have died, my magic leached away, my body slowly freezing in the cruel grip of cold—"

"Yes, but you didn't. And if we could get back to the point?"

Furious lavender eyes met mine. "The point is that the slave must return to the king's service and you must find the book you have promised him." She smiled evilly. "You do not wish to return to Faerie without it. The king is not known for his forgiving nature."

"Françoise isn't going anywhere," I told her, for maybe the tenth time. "And if the king's wrath is so dreadful, why did you offer to help us escape from him? Weren't you afraid of the consequences?"

The pixie fluttered her wings agitatedly. "That was different."

"Different how?"

"The mage offered me something irresistible." Her frown faded and her eyes suddenly shone with a softer light. "No one would have blamed me for taking it, not even the king."

"Offered you what?"

"It doesn't matter! I can't find it!" She kicked the jewel cases, then sat on the oversized spool of thread she'd turned into a seat, surreptitiously rubbing a hurt foot.

A memory suddenly clicked into place. "The rune stone. Jera." One of the reasons I'd managed to survive—barely—my one and only foray into her world was because I'd acquired some battle runes from the Senate. The Consul no doubt wanted them back, because they'd be useful in the war and because I hadn't exactly asked before taking them. But I thought that at the moment she might want Mircea more. And I couldn't see what good a rune stone would do her when its only power was making people more fertile.

The pixie glanced up resentfully. "He said he had it. He even showed it to me. It looked real."

"It is real." Understanding dawned. "You were willing to risk the king's wrath merely for the chance to have a child?"

"Merely?" Her tiny voice rose to a squeak. "Yes, trust a human to see it like that! My people hover on the brink of extinction, while your foolish, weak, puerile race, whose only accomplishment is to breed and breed and—"

"Yes, thanks, I get the point." I looked at her narrowly. "What if I could get it for you?"

A whirlwind of glittering green wings was suddenly in my face. "Where is it? Do you have it? I thought one of the mages—"

I smiled. No wonder she'd been sucking up. "I can get it."

"I'll believe it when I see it."

"Then you'll believe it soon. But I want the location of the portal in exchange."

"I'll find it," she promised fervently. "Just don't think of double-crossing me, human. You'll discover that I'm even less forgiving than my king."