Hunt the Moon

Chapter Sixteen

“I knew it!”

I jumped, because the angry voice spoke at almost the same moment that I rematerialized back in my bedroom in Vegas. I spun around, sending my aching head sloshing unpleasantly against my skull, and saw Billy lounging on the bed. A pack of playing cards hung in the air in front of him, laid out in a vertical game of solitaire. But they were ghostly cards, no more substantial than their owner, and I could clearly see his scowl glaring through.

For someone who regularly was up to as much crap as Billy Joe, he did disapproval really well.

“What?” I said defensively, clutching the mink and my dignity. Since I was barefoot, mostly naked and completely hungover, I was pretty sure I grasped only one of them.

“You slept with the goddamned vampire!”

“I—How did you know?”

Billy rolled his eyes.

“Well . . . even if I did, it’s none of your business,” I informed him haughtily. And then I ruined the effect by limping to the bathroom.

I flicked on the lights, but they hurt my eyes so I flicked them off again. But then I couldn’t see. Until Billy’s softly glowing head poked through the wall, like a pissed-off night-light.

“I thought you were gonna give it some time,” he said accusingly. “I thought you were gonna get to know him first. I thought—”

“Does anybody ever really know anybody?” I asked. And, okay, it was lame, but my head hurt like a bitch.

“Oh, man.” Billy looked disgusted. “He must really be something. One night and he’s got you wrapped.”

“He does not!”

“Like hell.” He crossed his arms. “What did you tell me right before you left?”

I sighed, wondering why I never had any damn aspirin. “I know. But—”

“But what? You told me you’re absofuckinglutely, posifuckingtively, not getting horizontal. ’Cause vamps aren’t like regular people, and you’re in the middle of negotiating the relationship and he’d take it as a sign of surrender, and—”

“It wasn’t like that,” I said, running some cold water onto a washcloth. And then slapping it over my aching eyes. Dear God, I was never drinking again.

“Oh, okay. So what was it like?”

“A . . . time-out,” I mumbled incoherently.

But apparently not incoherently enough.

“A time-out.” Billy did sarcasm pretty well, too.

“Yeah.”

“Which means what?”

“Which means it didn’t count,” I snapped, and then wished I hadn’t, because it hurt. I stifled a groan and put my elbows on the counter, supporting my throbbing head.

“And who decided this?”

“We did.”

“And which part of ‘we’ came up with the get-out-ofjail-free card?”

I didn’t say anything.

“Yeah,” Billy said. “That’s what I thought.”

I took the washcloth off so I could glare at him. “I don’t recall appointing you my conscience!”

“You don’t need a conscience. You need some goddamn common sense! You used to have some, remember? You’re the one who told me what those things are like—”

“Mircea isn’t a thing.”

“Oh, so he’s not a monster all of a sudden? He got upgraded? I guess I must have missed the memo!”

I turned and walked out of the bathroom. Billy’s faintly glowing backside was sticking out of the wall above the dresser, framed in the mirror like a bizarre trophy. But all things considered, I liked it better than the other half right now. Get him wound up and he could go for hours, and I was so not up for it tonight. Or this morning. Or whenever the hell it was. The room was dark, but there were blackout shades under all the drapes in the suite, so that didn’t mean much.

“Okay, ‘monster’ is out,” Billy said, getting himself sorted. “So what are we calling him now? Sugar Tits? Baby Cakes? Angel Boy?”

I got a sudden image of a very naked Mircea, fire-warm skin backlit by flames, the same ones that had formed a vague halo around his head. He wasn’t an angel, I knew that. But regardless of what Billy thought, he wasn’t the devil, either. And it had been only one night, and he’d sworn it wouldn’t make a difference—

“Why are you here, anyway?” I demanded, going on the offensive, because my defense kind of sucked right now. “I fed you before I left.”

“Yeah, and that’s all I care about! You were supposed to be back hours ago!”

“Well, I would have been, but . . . there was a delay.”

“A delay that left hickeys all over your neck and made you walk funny?”

“I’m not in jail, you know,” I snapped. “I can come and go whenever I—” I stopped. “What hickeys?”

He pointed silently at my neck. I pushed the old-fashioned collar of the coat aside and leaned closer to the mirror. And saw—

“Son of a bitch!”

“You didn’t notice?” Billy demanded.

I winced. “No. And keep your voice down.”

“Why? No one can hear me but you.”

I rested my forehead on the cool top of the dresser. “That’s kind of the point.”

He snorted. “And to top it off, you’re hungover!”

“It was the wine. It always does this to me.”

“Then why’d you drink it?”

“Because after the night I’d had, I thought I deserved it,” I muttered.

Billy sighed, and a moment later I felt a ghostly chill on the back of my neck. It felt good. “What went wrong this time?”

“Short version: everything.”

“And the long version?”

“I’m too hungover for the long version.”

“Gimme the CliffsNotes, then.”

I pried myself off the dresser and started sorting through a drawer. “Let’s just say, it looks like my luck runs in the family.”

“Ouch.”

I went back into the bathroom to change, and this time, Billy left me alone. I pulled on an old pair of khaki shorts and tried a couple of different shirts, finally settling on one with orange and white stripes. It was soft, thin cotton with a mock turtleneck and no sleeves. It had been part of my work wardrobe, worn under a jacket to keep me from dying of heatstroke in the Atlanta summers, and it looked a little dressy for the shorts. But it was better than announcing my evening’s activities to everybody I met.

Only now that I was dressed, I found that I didn’t really feel like meeting anybody. I kind of felt like going back to bed. I walked into the bedroom, yawning. “What time is it?”

Billy looked up from his card game. “Four a.m.”

I sighed in relief and fell face-first onto the bed. Jonas was coming at one for our lesson, and I had nothing to do until then. And nothing sounded pretty damn good right now.

“Move over,” I told Billy, because he was hogging the bed as usual. He gave me maybe another two inches of space, also as usual. I turned onto my side, since it was easier than arguing.

The room was dark but the bed was spotted by watery blue-white rectangles, the light shadows from Billy’s cards. They moved across the duvet as he played, silent, intent. For about half a minute.

“You can call him what you want, but he’s still a monster,” Billy said, because of course this wasn’t over. “They all are.”

“I don’t know why you hate vamps so much,” I said sleepily. “What’d they ever do to you?”

“They’re creepy.”

“They are not.”

“Like hell.”

I didn’t point out the irony of this coming from a guy who would send most people screaming in terror if they could see him, because the door cracked open. A thin sliver of slightly less dark leaked in from the hallway and fell over the bed. It highlighted dust particles dancing in the air and a massive head poking around the doorjamb.

“Hey,” Marco said softly, like he thought I might already be asleep.

“Hey, yourself.”

“You okay?”

“Yeah.”

“You have fun?”

“Yeah.”

“Thought so.” I couldn’t see his expression, but his voice was smug.

It would have been weird coming from a human, but vamps got a lot of their self-worth from their masters. Anytime Mircea did something well—negotiated a treaty, got recognition from the Senate, banged the Pythia—their egos all got a boost. In a real sense, when you dated a master vamp, you dated his entire family. All of whom thereafter took a proprietary interest in your business.

It was something I tried hard not to think about.

“You hungry?” Marco asked. “We got pizza.”

Actually, I thought one more bite of anything, and I might just pop. “I’m good.”

“Beer?”

“Just gonna get some sleep.”

“Yeah, you probably need it,” he said, sounding satisfied. The door closed.

“No, that’s not creepy at all,” Billy said sourly.

I sighed and pulled the pillow into a more comfy position. “It’s just the way they are.”

“And I don’t like the way they are.”

It wasn’t surprising. Billy had never liked any of the guys in my life, not that there had been many. It wasn’t jealousy so much—not the physical type, anyway—but more of a natural distrust. I guess getting drowned like a sack of kittens would do that to a person.

“You don’t like anybody.”

“Not when they look at you like he does,” he said sharply.

“Like what?”

“Like the way hardened gamblers on the riverboats used to look at young rich guys. Like here comes dinner.” He glanced at me. “I don’t want you to be dinner.”

“I won’t.”

“For anybody,” he added. “He’s no worse than the rest of them; they all want a piece of you.”

“That’s how the game is played.”

“Yeah, well the game sucks.” He wiped a hand across his own game and it dissipated like mist, leaving only a lightly glowing cloud above the bed. It made the room darker, but not cozier. Someone must have fixed the window, because the air conditioner was running like it was trying to make up for lost time.

I pulled up the comforter.

“What is wrong with you tonight?” I asked. Billy could bitch with the best of them, but usually he had a better reason than my missing curfew.

“It’s . . . I don’t know,” he said, turning to face me. The scruffy features under the Stetson were unusually sober. “It’s nothing I can put my finger on. But lately . . . it feels like there’re ants running over my skin, all the time.”

I didn’t say anything, but I had to consciously refrain from smoothing my hands down my own arms. Because I’d had the same feeling for days. Not localized on anyone or anything; just a general impression that something wasn’t right. And that had been before somebody tried to kill me.

It was one reason it had been so damn hard to leave that warm hotel room this morning. Last night really had felt like a moment out of time. For once, no one had been after me, no one had wanted to hurt me, no one had even known who the hell I was. It had been really nice.

But I couldn’t hide in the past forever. And now that I was back in my time, that antsy feeling was setting my skin to crawling again. It was less than reassuring to know that Billy felt it, too.

How bad did things have to be before the ghosts started freaking out?

“I thought after that son of a bitch Apollo died, things were gonna calm down,” he said fretfully. “But it doesn’t feel that way. It feels like it used to, when Tony’s bastards got too close. If we were still back in Atlanta, I’d be bugging you to start packing.”

“And if we were still back in Atlanta, I’d probably be doing it,” I said honestly. “But I don’t think running is going to help now.”

He waved a hand. “I’m not talking about running. Plenty of people ran; he always caught them. You got away because you’re . . . I don’t know. Not smart, exactly—”

“Thanks.”

“—but clever, resourceful, stubborn—and freaking lucky.” He saw my expression. “What?”

“It’s just . . . someone else said that to me recently.” Well, minus the stupid part.

“What’s wrong with that?”

“Nothing.” Except that I didn’t want to have to be resourceful. I didn’t want to need to be lucky. I wanted to sleep late. I wanted to get up and putter around the suite. I wanted to go light a fire under Augustine before I ended up going to the damn coronation naked.

I didn’t want to have to figure out what was trying to kill me this week.

But while I didn’t know who or what had it in for me, at least I knew what didn’t. “All that stuff with the gods . . . it’s over,” I told him. “They can’t hurt us if they can’t get back to Earth, and they can’t.”

“You sure about that?” he asked skeptically.

I didn’t answer, because no, I wasn’t. Not entirely.

It had been a shock to find out recently that a lot of the myths I’d grown up with were all too real. But not nearly as much as discovering that some of them were still alive. And that they were plenty pissed.

Their bitch was that they’d been banished from Earth, aka the land of milk, honey and slavishly devoted worshippers, by one of their own, Artemis. She’d turned traitor, teaming up with some of the less-devoted types, because her fellow immortals viewed humans as disposable. And they had been disposing of a lot of them.

So Artemis gave humankind the ouroboros spell to solve the problem. It banished the gods back to their home world and sealed off Earth so that they couldn’t return to their favorite playground. The Silver Circle, named after the alchemical color sacred to Artemis and in the shape of her symbol, the moon, had been formed to furnish the power needed to fuel the barrier.

It was still doing so, all these millennia later. But no one believed that the Circle or the spell were foolproof any longer. Not since one of the self-styled gods had found a way past them barely a month ago.

Fortunately, it had been a short trip.

“Apollo got in,” Billy said, like he’d been reading my thoughts.

“And he’s dead,” I said harshly.

“Yeah.” Billy fell silent, and I rolled over, pushing the conversation away.

It was surprisingly easy. The bed was extra soft, just the way I like it, with a duck-down mattress pad and matching comforter. They were usually too hot, and the comforter often ended up on the floor. But tonight it was perfect. I felt myself start to relax, start to sink into the warm cocoon between all that squashy goodness, start to drift off—

“Where do you think they go when they die?”

Billy’s voice jolted me back to unwelcome consciousness. I turned my head to frown at him. He’d stretched out on his back, hands behind his head, and was staring at the reflection of his own ghost light on the ceiling.

“Where does who go?”

“The gods.” He turned his head to look at me. “They have to go somewhere, don’t they? Everybody goes somewhere.”

“I don’t know.” Somewhere nasty, hopefully. “Why?”

“I was just thinking about that thing that possessed you. It wasn’t demon or Were or human or Fey, right?”

“Jury’s still out on Fey.”

“But not any Fey we ever heard of.”

“No.”

“So what about a god?” Billy gestured, throwing leaping patterns like blue candlelight on the walls. “They were said to be able to possess people, weren’t they? In some of the old legends?”

I frowned. So much for sleeping. “Apollo’s dead,” I said irritably. “He couldn’t possess anybody.”

“I’m dead. And I possess people all the time.”

“You’re a ghost.”

“So? Maybe he’s a ghost now, too. You killed him—”

“And now he’s come back to haunt me?” I asked incredulously.

He shrugged. “I know it’s far-fetched, but compared to some of the other shit that’s happened to you—”

I pulled the pillow over my head. This was so not what I needed to hear tonight. Or any other night.

“I know you don’t wanna think about it,” he said impatiently. “But we gotta figure this out—”

“It wasn’t Apollo,” I said, my voice muffled by the pillow.

“How do you know?”

“Because he wouldn’t have waited this long to attack me.”

“Maybe he learned something last time. He underestimated you, and look where that got him. Straight down the metaphysical crapper.”

“And I haven’t had any more visions—”

“Maybe he figured out you were spying on him and blocked you somehow. He was the source of your power, wasn’t he? So he should be able to—”

“And he wasn’t human,” I said, throwing off the pillow. Because obviously Billy wasn’t going to let me sleep until we had this out. “And nonhumans don’t leave ghosts!”

“That we know of.”

“In a century and a half, how many nonhuman ghosts have you seen?” I demanded.

“None. But we’re talking about gods here. Who knows what they can do?”

“Well, they can’t do this. Whatever went after me was driven off by cold iron. That wouldn’t have bothered a god at all.”

“That could have been a coincidence,” Billy said stubbornly. “Pritkin even said so—”

“Stop eavesdropping on my conversations! And the spirit also didn’t know English. We could barely communicate.”

Billy thought for a moment. “Maybe he forgot?”

I snorted. “Yeah. And then he grew feathers.”

“Damn.”

I stared at him. “Did you just say ‘damn’?”

He grinned, unrepentant. “It was a beautiful theory, you gotta admit.”

I didn’t have to admit anything of the kind. “Look, the gods are gone. Finished, kaput, out of the picture. Okay?”

He held up his hands. “Hey. Preaching to the choir here.”

“Beautiful theory,” I muttered, and swung the pillow at him.

It was a wasted effort, because he disappeared before it landed, fading away until only his laughter remained. It was the last thing I heard as I finally drifted off.