Touch The Dark

Chapter 5

I decided that my left wrist was sprained but not broken, and that the scrape on my cheek was not as bad as I'd initially thought, although my butt hadn't fared as well. Falling on top of my gun back in the storeroom had left me with a bruise the size of my palm, and it had turned an unappealing purple. Great. It matched the finger marks around my neck, so at least I was coordinated.

I'd just finished the inspection when Billy Joe drifted in the window. I glanced at the door, really wanting to tell him off but not liking the idea of an audience. Billy was my ace in the hole and best chance of getting out of here. I didn't want anybody to know he was around.

He saw my expression and grinned. "Don't worry. Somebody put one doozy of a silencing spell on these rooms. Whatever they're planning, they're serious about not being overheard."

"Well, in that case: where the hell have you been?" My emotions came flooding back at the sight of him trying to look casual, as if he hadn't left me out to dry earlier.

Billy Joe, a hard-drinking, cigar-smoking card shark in life, was one of my only friends now that he was many years dead. But he'd screwed up on this one and he knew it. The big, tough gambler fiddled with his little string tie and looked embarrassed. I knew his reaction was the real deal and not another of his put-ons because he hadn't yet made a lecherous comment about my lack of clothing.

"I ran into Portia and she told me what happened. I went to the club looking for you, but you'd left already." He pushed up his Stetson with a nearly transparent finger, then solidified a bit more. "Did you do all that? The back room was a mess, and there were police crawling all over the place."

"Yeah, I'm in the habit of knocking off five vamps, then leaving the bodies for the police to have a fit over." Standard policy among the supernatural community was to clean up your own mess. In some circumstances, you could get in more trouble for leaving bodies lying around that might give a pathologist heart palpitations than for the actual killings. That didn't used to be the case, which was how a lot of those old legends got started, I imagine, but the more the human population expanded, the more the policy became vital. The Senate didn't care for the idea of seeing vamps chopped up in laboratories while some human scientist tried to figure out the secret to eternal life, or having freaked-out governments start a modern version of the Inquisition.

"What bodies?" Billy Joe solidified to the point that I could see a hint of red in his fashionable ruffled shirt—fashionable for 1858 anyway, the year the cowboys had given him an up-close-and-personal tour of the bottom of the Mississippi. "Blood was everywhere and it looked like a cyclone blew through, but there weren't any bodies."

I shrugged. I wasn't real interested in knowing that Tomas had a partner who'd called in a cleanup crew. If any of the other people I'd trusted had been lying to me, I didn't want to know about it. "Great, so make up for letting me almost get killed. What do you know about my problem here?"

Billy Joe spat a wad of ghostly chewing tobacco against the bathroom wall. It left a slimy trail of ectoplasm as it slid down, and I frowned at him. "Don't do that."

"Hey, are you nekkid under there?" He sat on the side of the tub and batted ineffectually at my bubbles. If he concentrated, he could move things, but he was only playing, so his hand passed through. I made him turn around while I got out and dried off. I know it's stupid, but Billy Joe hasn't been with a woman in 150 years and sometimes he gets distracted. It's best not to let his mind wander.

"Talk to me. What do you know?"

"Not a lot. I had trouble finding you. Do you know you're in Nevada?"

"How could I… wait a minute. Why did you have trouble finding me?" Most ghosts are tied to a single location—usually a house or a crypt—but Billy Joe haunts the necklace I bought at a junk store when I was seventeen, so he's more mobile. I'd purchased it because I thought it was only a piece of Victorian pastiche that might work for Eugenie's birthday. If I had known what came with it, I'm not sure I wouldn't have left it in the case. Since I hadn't, though, and since I was wearing it as usual, he shouldn't have had any problem locating me. As for travel time, well, let's just say he takes a more direct route than most.

"What have you been doing instead of checking things out around here?" Billy Joe looked guilty, a fact that did not keep him from trying to look down my towel. "Stop that." I had an epiphany. "Hang on. We're somewhere near Vegas, aren't we?"

"Yeah, about thirty miles out. This place looks like a ranch, 'cept there're no horses, no tourists and the ranch hands dress a little funny. 'Course, it don't matter, since all any humans ever see is a big, bare canyon with a lot of keep-out signs."

"Thirty miles?" Billy could draw energy from the stored reserves in his necklace for up to fifty. "Don't tell me that while I've been bespelled, moved halfway across the country, threatened and imprisoned, you've been at the casinos!"

"Now, Cassie darlin'…"

"I can't believe this!" I don't get angry with him often, since it's mostly a waste of time—he is the definition of incorrigible—but this was the last straw. "I was almost killed! Twice! If you don't care about that, think about what happens to your precious necklace if somebody guns me down or rips my throat open. Let me spell it out for you: it ends up in some old lady's jewelry box in Podunk, USA, a hundred miles from nowhere!"

Billy Joe looked chastened, but I doubted it was guilt over what might have happened to me. He is unable to stay away from his home base for too long or his power runs dry—which was why I knew he'd be along sooner or later. The farther from the source he gets, the faster his strength bottoms out. His nightmare is getting stuck in a rural, one-horse town with no honky-tonks, strip clubs or gambling dens within reach. For him, it would be the equivalent of Hell. With me he had a guaranteed urban environment, since it's hard to hide in a small town. He also had something even more important.

Over time, we'd developed a sort of symbiotic relationship. Billy Joe is one of those spirits who can absorb energy from a living donor, rather like a vamp. Vamps take life energy through blood, which in magical terms is the repository for the life force of a person. When they feed, they receive part of the donor's life, which substitutes for the one they lost when they crossed over, at least for a while. Some ghosts can do the same thing, and like vamps, they don't always ask first. But Billy Joe vastly prefers a willing donor, not to mention that he says the «hit» is much longer lasting from me for some reason. In return for my agreeing to give him additional energy from time to time, he had agreed to keep watch for signs of Tony's impending return. Right then, I felt cheated.

"If you aren't going to be any use, I should sell this ugly thing." I rubbed some steam off the mirror and took a look at the monstrosity around my neck. It was hand-wrought gold, heavy and intricate, with a mass of squirming vines and flowers around a central cabochon ruby. The junk dealer had assumed it was glass, since he wasn't used to seeing nonfaceted jewels and it had been encrusted with years of accumulated dirt. Even all cleaned up, it was, without doubt, one of the ugliest necklaces I'd ever seen. I usually wore it inside my clothes.

"I'll have you know, I won that off a countess!"

"And judging by all the pawn marks, it was real important to you, wasn't it?"

"I always redeemed it, didn't I?" Billy Joe was starting to sulk, so I decided to lay off. I needed him cooperative if I was going to find out anything.

"I don't want a fight. I'm not up for it tonight. I just need to know some stuff, like why the Senate grabbed me and…"

Billy Joe held up a hand. "Please, I know my job." He settled back on the tub and talked while I examined my knees. Raw-looking scrapes and bruises had flowered on both of them despite the height of my boots, promising stiffness by tomorrow. I knew I should feel lucky that I was alive to be an aching mess, but somehow that thought failed to cheer me up. Maybe because I didn't think I'd stay that way for long. "That vamp outside, Louis-César, is on loan from Europe. He's some kind of dueling champion. It's said that he's never lost a fight, and from what I hear he's been in hundreds."

"He can add another to the total after tonight." Not that it had looked like the guard was much of a challenge, but I guess it counted since he had decapitated the guy. "Did you know Tony bribed some lunatics to kill me right in front of the Senate?"

"That's nuts. Mircea'd kill him."

I brightened slightly. I hadn't thought of it that way. If Tony had been behind the second attempt on my life, he'd just made Mircea look bad, since nothing lowered your rep quicker in vamp circles than not to be able to control an underling. Even though I usually liked him, I'd always gotten the impression that Mircea would be a bad person to cross.

"We can only hope so."

"Yeah, well, it don't sound like Tony's style to me." I shrugged. In my opinion, Tony didn't have any style. "Anyway, when I learned Louis-César is second in the European Senate, I did some digging for you."

"Great. So tell me something I care about."

Billy Joe gave a long-suffering sigh. "All right. You're in the main headquarters of MAGIC, the Metaphysical Alliance for Greater Interspecies Cooperation, better known as party central for things that go bump in the night."

"I know that." Actually, I think I had figured it out, at least subconsciously. I'd never been there before, but where else could a mage bust in on a Senate meeting and a vamp greet a were like an old buddy? I just hadn't had time to think about it, and it wasn't like I knew a lot about what passed for the supernatural UN. Tony wasn't interested in talking through problems. He was more the stake-'em-and-forget-'em type, a practice that worked on much more than vamps. It's one of the similarities among species that MAGIC hasn't chosen to highlight: nothing lives too well with a big piece of wood stuck through its heart.

"Well, maybe here's something you don't know. The Senate is leading on this one because it's a vamp who's causing the trouble, but everybody's upset. You know that Russian master Tony used to do business with, the guy running half the rackets in Moscow?"

"Rasputin?" The old adviser to Nicholas II, the last tsar of all the Russias, had been poisoned, shot, stabbed and drowned by some prince who thought he had too much influence over the royal family. He was right: the tsarina loved the unkempt, self-proclaimed monk because her son was a hemophiliac, and only Rasputin's hypnotic stare was able to heal him. In return, Rasputin got power, and a lot of his friends were appointed to important government jobs. The prince and the group of nobles he'd talked into helping him remove the new power in town had been real surprised that poison, stabbing and gunshot wounds hadn't seemed to faze Rasputin. It wasn't until he fell off a bridge and they hauled his apparently lifeless corpse out of the freezing water that they were satisfied. Historians had been arguing ever since about why it took him so long to die. The Russian mafia could have told them: it's hard to kill somebody who's already dead.

"Yeah, that's the one. Rasputin got annoyed 'cause the Senate seat he wanted went to Mei Ling. He doesn't stand a chance of getting onto the European Senate—most of those crazy sons of bitches make even him look soft—but he thought he was a shoo-in over here. Word is, he didn't take the rejection well. He disappeared for a while, then about six months ago showed up again and began attacking Senate members. He's killed four and wounded two others so bad, no one knows if they'll pull through, and now he's challenged the Consul to a duel to try and take over the whole shebang. She called in a favor from the Consul in Europe and brought this Louis-César over as her champion. But, of course, that didn't make Mei Ling happy."

"I bet." I'd met the Consul's second, a tiny Chinese American beauty who was all of four foot ten and weighed maybe eighty-five pounds, when I was seven. She'd left quite an impression. The second's position isn't like that of an American vice president. He or she isn't there to take over if the Consul is killed—the remaining Senate members will vote on a replacement unless a duel decides it, in which case it's winner take all. The title also doesn't imply that the holder is the second most powerful member on the Senate—it's possible, but it isn't a job requirement. Each Senate member has a specific function for that body, sort of like the presidential cabinet. Seconds are appointed for one reason and one only: they're intimidating. Whoever holds the office is also known as "the Enforcer," because he or she enforces the decrees of the Senate by whatever means are necessary. Those can include everything from diplomacy to violence, but Mei Ling was known to prefer the latter.

She'd made that clear the day she'd visited Tony's audience hall to drag off one of his vamps for questioning. Whatever the guy had done, he definitely didn't want to talk to the Senate about it. In fact, he was so opposed to the idea that he issued a challenge. Mei Ling was new to the position and didn't have much of a reputation; she was also only about 120 years old and looked like a China doll, so I guess he thought he could take her.

It amazes me how even old vamps sometimes forget that it isn't size but power that matters, and while that often correlates to age, it doesn't always. Some vamps many centuries older than Mei Ling will never have her strength, and I've seen hulking bruisers forced to their knees by the glance of a child. The transition to vampire doesn't make you gorgeous if you were plain, intelligent if you were stupid or powerful if you were weak: a loser in life is a loser vamp, spending his or her immortality serving someone else. It's one of the major drawbacks to the condition, something the movies never seem to highlight. But occasionally it does give someone who was overlooked as a mortal a chance to shine. That day I saw a tiny, fragile-looking flower literally rip a vamp into bloody shreds. I also saw how much pleasure she took in it, how her dark eyes glowed with a fierce joy at the fact that she could do this, that once again a man had underestimated her, and this time he would pay for it.

She never did kill him that I saw. His head was intact and screaming when she ordered the pieces packed into baskets to be carted off to the Senate. I never saw him afterwards, and nobody present that day, to my knowledge, ever again challenged Mei Ling.

"Why did the Consul bring in a ringer? I'd think she or Mei Ling could deal with a simple challenge."

"The Consul's powerful, but she ain't a duelist. And Mei Ling don't have Rasputin's experience. He was already old when he tried to take over in Russia; rumor is that he's never been defeated in a fight, and that he don't much care how he wins. No one saw the fights with the dead senators, but the first two to be attacked are still alive—so to speak. And Marlowe stayed conscious long enough after they found him to say that Rasputin somehow turned three of his own vamps against him, and one of them had been with him over two hundred years."

A few scattered puzzle pieces started to come together. I filled Billy Joe in on my most recent escape, and he looked thoughtful. "Yeah, that would make sense. I don't know how the Senate guards are chosen, but it's almost sure to be from the stable of one of the members, since who'd ever think any of them would turn?"

"But why would Rasputin want me dead?" I shivered, and it wasn't from cold. I was used to the idea that Tony wanted to kill me, but there were suddenly a whole bunch of newcomers trying to jump on the bandwagon. And any one of them would be enough to give a sane person a serious case of paranoia.

"Beats me." Billy Joe looked way too cheerful and I glared at him. He enjoys recounting a good fight almost as much as being in one, but I wasn't his entertainment. He hurried on. "But you haven't heard the best yet. Marlowe took out a couple of his attackers before passing out, and the bodies were left behind when his reserves showed up. But nobody can ID the dead vamps. It's like they came outta nowhere."

"That's impossible."

I didn't doubt the part about Chris Marlowe being tough to kill. Before he crossed over, he'd been the bad boy of Elizabethan England and had been in a few hundred bar fights in between writing some of the best plays of the era. The only ones anybody thought rivaled them were by a guy named Shakespeare, who conveniently showed up a few years after Marlowe transitioned and had a real similar writing style. Eventually, when the two-bit actor he'd set up as a front died, Marlowe turned to his other hobby for kicks. He'd done some spying for the queen's government in life, and he added to his bag of tricks afterwards. He was now the Senate's chief of intelligence, using his family of vamps as spies on the supernatural community in general and the other senates in particular. He helped ensure the peace by taking out anybody likely to disturb it, which might explain why Tony had been more worried about Marlowe than about Mei Ling. The only time I'd ever seen him, when he dropped in to talk to Mircea one night during his visit, I'd thought he looked rather nice with his laughing dark eyes, messy curls and a goatee he kept getting in the wine. But, of course, I hadn't been planning to take out the Consul. If I had, I might have hit him first, too.

The part of Billy Joe's story I found hard to credit was the two unidentified vamps. That was literally impossible. All vampires are under the control of a master, either the one who made them or the one who bought them from their maker or won them in a duel. The only way not to have a master is to reach first-level master power yourself. Anything else, including killing off your own master, won't do any good; someone else will simply bind you to them. Since there are fewer than one hundred first-degree masters in the world, and they mostly hold seats on one of the six vamp senates, this makes for a nice hierarchal structure and keeps everyone organized. Most masters give their more powerful followers some freedom, although a certain amount of their revenues are sent as yearly "presents," and any servants they make are subject to their masters' whims. The masters also check on them from time to time, like Mircea with Tony, because they are always responsible for them. If Tony had ordered an attack on me after he knew I was under Senate protection, it would be Mircea who would be expected to deal with him.

It's a fairly uncomplicated system, at least for a government, because there aren't that many vampires powerful enough to have stables of followers. Unlike Hollywood seems to believe, not every vamp can make new ones. I remember watching an old Dracula movie once with Alphonse and having him laugh himself sick at the sight of a vamp only a few days out of the grave supposedly raising another one. He'd been impossible for weeks afterwards, mercilessly teasing all the weaker vamps in court about the three-day-old baby that was more powerful than them. But for all who do reach master level and create new vamps, it is a requirement that they record them with their respective Senate. As a result, there simply aren't any unknown vampires running around.

"Were they babies?" It was the only thing I could think of, although that didn't make sense, either. What good would a couple of newly made, and therefore weak, vamps do against any Senate member, much less Marlowe? It would be like sending children off to fight an armored tank. And what master would risk his head and heart by failing to report any new vamps he'd made? All the senates were strict on the rules, since anything else raised the specter of a master secretly assembling an army, and brought back memories of the bad old days when there had been almost constant war. As it was, the number of vamps anyone could have under his or her control at one time was strictly regulated to maintain a balance of power.

"Nope. It's kinda hard to tell with only the bodies to work with, but based on how much damage they did, the rumor is that they were masters." At my expression, he put up placating hands. "Hey, you asked me what I heard, and I'm tellin' ya."

"Where'd you get the info?"

"A couple of vamps in Mircea's entourage." Billy Joe didn't mean that he'd asked them. He has the ability to drift through people and eavesdrop on them mentally, picking up whatever they're thinking at the time. It isn't as good as real telepathy, since he can't go digging for information, but it comes in handy surprisingly often. "It wasn't hard to get. It's the main topic of conversation these days."

I shook my head, puzzled. "I don't get it. If Rasputin has been messing with the rules and ambushing people, why is the Consul preparing to fight him? He lost that right when he ignored the rules, didn't he?" It seemed to me that Rasputin was in deep shit, a thought that made me feel much better. If he got himself killed, it was one less bad guy for me to worry about.

The problem wasn't the attacks on senators—that was perfectly legal—but rather the way he'd gone about them. During the Reformation, the six senates had collectively banned open warfare as a way to solve problems. After the religious divide, both the Catholic and Protestant clergy had been supersensitive, warning their flocks to be watchful for evildoers who could rob them of God's favor. Religion had also been a big political issue, with Catholic powers trying to assassinate Protestant leaders and vice versa, a Catholic armada trying to invade Protestant England and a major holy war going on in Germany. Everybody was spying on everybody, and as a result, more people were beginning to notice supernatural activity. Even though most of the accused were as human as their accusers—and usually more innocent—the authorities occasionally got lucky and staked a real vamp or burned a real witch. Open warfare between senates or even feuds between prominent houses were only going to draw more notice to the supernatural community. So dueling became the new, approved way of solving disputes.

Of course, Tony wasn't about to risk his fat little neck in open combat, and there were plenty of others whose skills didn't run to battle who also didn't like the new system. So the practice evolved into choosing champions to fight for you if you didn't want to do it yourself. Once the two duelists were agreed on, though, the rules were very strict about what was and was not allowed. Ambushes were definite no-nos, and what Rasputin had done would earn him an automatic staking anywhere in the world. The North American Senate would never stop hunting him, and the others would lend a hand to discourage this type of thing in their own areas. I decided that he was either crazy or really, really stupid.

"I guess she figures it's better than letting him pick off people one by one. Besides, unless Marlowe or Ismitta pulls through enough to testify, there's no actual proof he cheated. Right now he can say he challenged them and they lost, fair and square."

"But if he has to meet the Consul in front of the entire MAGIC council, he can't cheat."

"Bingo. Besides, she don't got a lot of choices. CM' Ras has left the Senate with a diplomatic nightmare on its hands 'cause of his rampage. The Fey are livid and say if the vamps can't deal with this they'll do it themselves. They lost one of their nobles in the crossfire, and you know how they are about that kind of thing." Actually, I didn't. I'd never even seen an elf or talked to anyone who had. Some of the vamps at Tony's didn't even believe they existed. The rumor was that they were some elaborate prank the mages had been playing for centuries, to try to convince the vamps that they had powerful allies. "The mage's circle is pissed, too, though I don't know why, and are calling for Rasputin's head on a platter. The Consul has to deal with this soon or people will start thinking she's weak. Mei Ling's good, but she can't fight all the challengers who're going to climb out of the woodwork if this ain't stopped."

"But she isn't fighting Rasputin."

"No, and like I said, she ain't happy about that. Word is, that's why she ain't here—she's off hunting him. She's almost outta time, though. The duel is set for tomorrow at midnight. I think she plans to bring back his head on a pike before then."

"Okay, I wish her luck. But you still haven't told me what all this has to do with me."

" 'Cause I don't know, honey chile." I hate it when Billy Joe gets southern. It means he's either joking or about to turn sarcastic, and I didn't want to deal with either. His usual accent is a Mississippi drawl combined with bits of Irish brogue left over from a childhood starving on the Emerald Isle. He'd immigrated, changed his name, and made a new life in the New World, but he'd never completely lost the accent. I glared at him. No way was I putting up with attitude now. He'd done pretty well, but I was pissed that he'd totally missed Tony's return. That was, after all, his main job.

"What else do you know? Is that everything?" I had learned a long time ago that Billy Joe is a damned good spy, but he can't be trusted. Oh, he's never lied to me—that I know of—but if he can get away with leaving something out that might cause him trouble, he'll do it.

"I wasn't sure whether to tell you, after that whole thing with Tomas. You probably don't need to hear about another bottom-feeder right now."

"Tell me what?" I ignored the dig at Tomas, whom Billy Joe had never liked, mainly because I agreed with it. I started checking out my sorry pile of once-expensive club wear and decided that the boots and skirt, both leather, could be salvaged. But the shirt was wrecked and the bra was partially burnt, although my back felt fine. It was one of the few parts of my body that didn't hurt. The shirt was no big loss except that I didn't have anything to replace it with, and would prefer not to go back into the living room in nothing but a robe. I actually didn't want to go back in there at all but couldn't think of a good excuse to avoid it.

"Jimmy the Rat is in town."

I stopped trying to scrub the dried blood off my skirt and slowly looked up. See why I've put up with Billy for almost seven years? Every once in a while, he earns his keep. "Where?"

"Now, Cassie, love, don't go doing something crazy."

"I'm not." Jimmy was Tony's favorite hit man. It had been his hand that planted the bomb in my parents' car, thereby ending any chance I had for a normal life. I'd been looking for him even before I broke with Tony, but he'd proven surprisingly elusive. I did not intend for him to slip past me again. "Where did you see him?"

Billy Joe ran a hand through what had once been chestnut curls and sighed deeply. That's not an automatic thing for a ghost; he does it on purpose. "He's at Dante's on the strip, one of Tony's new places. He manages a bar there. But I don't think surprising him is a good idea. The place is probably crawling with Tony's thugs. Las Vegas is second only to Philly in his operation."

"Don't lecture me about the business I grew up with." I stopped before I went on a rant about Billy perusing the sights of Sin City instead of checking out the place properly, so I'd know exactly what I was facing. I'd forgive a lot if his addiction to gambling resulted in me being able to get my hands around Jimmy's neck. "I need a shirt and a way into town, plus Tomas took my gun. I want it back."

"Um, you might want to rethink that." Billy looked shifty and I groaned.

"What? There's more? Out with it!"

He glanced about, but there was no help in sight. "You don't have to worry about Jimmy anymore. He did something to upset Tony, and when I left, he was being taken to the basement."

"Meaning what?"

"Meaning, he's probably out of the picture already, or will be soon, so there's no reason to run off. At least not in that direction. I was thinking maybe Reno…"

"You don't know that he's dead. He could be down there rigging slot machines or something." The basement had been a euphemism for Tony's underground torture chambers in Philly, but here it might mean exactly what it said. "Besides, nobody gets to kill him but me."

In reality, although he certainly deserved it, I had serious doubts that I could kill anybody, even Jimmy. But that didn't mean I had no reason to want to see him. Tony had done his best to make sure that I never learned anything about my parents: I had no photos, no letters, no high school yearbooks. Hell, it had taken me years to even find out their names, from old newspaper accounts of their deaths, which I'd had to sneak around my bodyguards to read. Eugenie and my tutors had all been people whom Tony acquired from other masters shortly after my arrival at court and didn't know anything about the operation before then. Those vamps who had been with Tony for years and might know something were so closemouthed that I knew without asking that they'd been warned not to talk to me. I wasn't stupid enough to believe that he'd gone to that much trouble simply to focus my affection on him, especially since he rarely made any efforts to win me over. No, there was something about my parents Tony didn't want me to know, and if he and Jimmy had actually fallen out, I might finally have someone willing to tell me about it.

Billy Joe bitched, of course, but I was too busy trying to make the salvageable part of my outfit presentable to care. He finally gave up. "Fine, but I'll need an energy draw if you expect me to play fetch. It's been a tough night, and I don't got the juice to spare."

I wasn't pleased. I felt like crap and had to go off someone in Vegas; I didn't need this. But I could hardly go scouting around MAGIC headquarters myself, so I motioned him over without the usual fuss. Billy Joe put a hand on his chest. "Be still my heart."

"Just do it."

I swear he felt me up as we merged, assuming that a cloud of mist can feel. Knowing him, I'm pretty sure it can. He blew against me and, as always, the feel of him was soothing to my frazzled nerves. I've heard that norms find the company of ghosts terrifying or, at best, chilling; to me, they've always been like a cool breeze on a hot day. Under the circumstances, I didn't just open up and welcome him; whatever part of me convened with ghosts pulled him inside like a frightened child gripping a teddy bear.

For an instant I had flashes of his life: our ship pulled away from a distant shore and we watched the gray, windswept coast recede through a haze of tears; a pretty girl, maybe fifteen, wearing too much makeup and a dance-hall costume, gave us a knowing smile; a young, would-be hostler tried to cheat us, and we laughed as we pulled the ace out of his boot, then had to. dodge the knife his accomplice threw. It was often like this, and through the years I'd Seen enough mini newsreels to be amazed that Billy had survived as long as he had.

Finally, he got comfortable and started the draw. It was usually not an unpleasant experience, just tiring, but this time pain flared through my body as soon as he began. It wasn't overwhelming, more like a burst of static electricity on a doorknob, but it sizzled along my veins until silver sparkles flickered behind my eyelids. I tried to order him out, to say that something was wrong, but all that left my mouth was a startled wheeze. A second later, the sensation flashed bright enough to leave negative imprints on my vision. Then, as quickly as it had come, it was gone. A warm wind swept across me, so thick it felt like liquid; then Billy Joe erupted out of me and zoomed around the ceiling a few times.

"Woo-hoo! Now that's what I call a meal!" His eyes were sparkling and his color was bright, more so than it should have been.

I straightened up and, for the first time in a while, didn't feel like collapsing. Instead of being tired and a little cranky—my usual reaction to Billy Joe's snack sessions—I felt wonderful, rejuvenated. It was like having a full night's sleep compressed into a few minutes, and it was definitely not normal. "Not that I'm complaining, but what just happened here?"

Billy Joe grinned. "Some vamp has been leeching your strength, darlin', probably to keep you from trying to escape. He drained a lot of your energy into a sort of metaphysical holding pot, and warded it with some of his own so you couldn't access it until he released you. I accidentally broke through the wards when I tried to draw from you, and got one hell of a rush." He waggled his eyebrows at me, and they were almost as brown and solid as they must have been in life. "Damn, let's party!"

"Party later. Right now I need my stuff."

Billy Joe saluted smartly and streamed out of the window like a glittering comet. I sat on the side of the tub and wondered who it was who had done the hocus-pocus. Not that it mattered; it just gave me yet another reason not to trust anyone. Not that I'd been planning on it.

I'd finished the cleanup by the time Billy Joe got back. He floated through the window, scowling, and his hands were empty. "I left everything outside. That thing's gonna be a problem."

"What thing?" I grabbed a towel to keep from standing around in only my panties and walked over to the window. I saw what he meant as soon as my hand reached for the latch and it tried to scream. I stuffed the end of my towel into its newly acquired mouth and stared at it in annoyance. Wasn't it enough that they'd put wards on my energy, parked a bunch of master-level vamps outside my door and stranded me somewhere in the middle of the desert? Did they really need a charm on the window, too? Apparently, someone thought they did.

"Somebody cast a Marley on it," Billy said.

"You think?" I asked sarcastically, squatting to examine it more closely. The old-fashioned, bulbous latch had suddenly grown a pair of beady little eyes and a big, fat mouth. It was trying to spit out my towel so it could yell a warning, one that would no doubt slice right through the silencing spell and alert everyone in the outer room. When I tried to grab it to hold it in place, it started sliding back and forth along the length of the window, avoiding my hands. Looking at its expression, I think it would have bitten me if it could have. I narrowed my eyes at it. "Get me some toilet paper," I told Billy. "A lot of it."

A few minutes and a lot of silent swearing later, the little Marley sat immobilized, with a full roll of toilet paper stuffed in its mouth and the cords from the window blinds tied around it about nine times. "That won't hold it for long," Billy said dubiously, as the tiny alarm vibrated with indignation. A few wisps of paper drifted out of its mouth and floated to the floor as we watched.

"It doesn't have to." I lifted the sash and jammed it open with the plunger Billy found under the sink. "They'll know we've escaped soon enough anyway—this place is warded all to hell."

I began quickly sorting through the pile he dragged in the window and decided that, overall, he'd done a good job. My gun was back and I even had an extra clip he'd rounded up somewhere, plus he'd dropped a set of car keys on top of the shirts. On the down side, the tops were not exactly what I would have chosen. I should have specified no hooker wear, but a gal can't think of everything. My boots and mini looked cute and sassy when I was adequately covered up on top; spilling out from the most conservative of Billy Joe's finds, I looked like I ought to be charging by the hour. I pulled my hair into a ponytail using Louis-César's clip, but although it was neater, it didn't make me look much more innocent. I took one last look at my appearance in the mirror, sighed and pocketed the keys. As soon as I managed to find the garage, I'd take out the stress of the day on a certain old acquaintance and probably feel much better.