Tempt the Stars

Chapter Four

I went from light and noise and stress to someplace completely lacking two of those things. I didn’t bother turning on a light. I could see well enough from the orange haze filtering in through a gap in a wall of curtains, and anyway, the view wasn’t much.

The rooms that Dante’s, my home on the Vegas Strip, reserves for its more budget-conscious guests are a little . . . Spartan. Ironically, that makes them less eye-wincing than the suites upstairs, which mostly conform to the hotel’s over-the-top haunted house theme. But the designer had run short of money by the time he got this far, so the only affronts to taste were a few vintage horror movie posters and an ugly bedspread.

I hadn’t been here for a while, and I wasn’t sure why I was here now. Maybe because I didn’t have the strength to go much farther. Or maybe because I didn’t have anywhere else to go.

It was ironic; all of time was mine to explore—in theory, anyway—except for my own. In my own, I’d been living like a prisoner for weeks, with the few times I’d dared to venture outside the hotel not going well. And I didn’t think I was likely to find anybody to go AWOL with again, since the last guy who had . .

Well, he wasn’t here anymore.

But his room was.

Although it was looking a little rough.

A river of glass crunched underfoot, glinting in the band of rusty light. A nightstand lay cracked in two, the ceramic lamp that had been on top pulverized almost into powder. A splatter of some potion had eaten right through to the studs on one wall, and still gave off a faint, noxious odor, despite a week of air-conditioning. And a large stain soiled the carpet by the window, looking black in the low light.

I stared at it, and everything came flooding back: the shock, the horror, the fury of the night when the obstinate son of a bitch who’d lived here had taken it upon himself to trade his life for mine. The week that had passed since hadn’t dimmed the memory at all, or the emotion that went with it. If anything it was stronger than ever, the urge to grab him, to demand where he got the nerve, the right, to make that decision for me—

I stood there a minute, shaking, furious all over again but with no one to hit. Because he wasn’t here. Just the room, cold and empty and generic without its larger-than-life occupant, the echoing silence broken only by my ragged breathing. I hugged my arms around myself and waited for my heartbeat to back off attack levels.

Only it didn’t seem to be obliging.

I’d read once that there were five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. But that hadn’t been my experience. There had been a little denial, yeah, when I first realized what had happened, but it hadn’t lasted long. And afterward . . . well, let’s just say that I’d entered phase two with a vengeance.

And that was where I’d stayed.

I supposed that was why my nails had sunk into my upper arms, hard enough to draw blood. I slowly pulled them out and carefully wiped my hands on my already filthy jeans. I wasn’t going to do this now.

I was going to do this later.

I was going to do this once I got him back.

Although, so far, that wasn’t going great.

It was another thing that should have been easy. Hell, I was a time traveler, wasn’t I? Just go back and change a few things. Make a few adjustments. See to it that the good guys won. Simple, right?

Of course, I wasn’t supposed to. In fact, it was pretty much exactly the kind of thing I was not supposed to do. Pythias guarded the timeline from alterations by others; we didn’t change it ourselves.

Except, of course, when we did.

Agnes had, when she warned me that I was about to be assassinated. If she hadn’t, I never would have met the maddening man known as John Pritkin in the first place, would never have needed him to save me, would never have royally screwed up his life in the process. He might have been better off if she’d minded her own business, but she hadn’t and I’d lived. All because she’d changed one little thing . .

But that was the problem. Agnes had been doing this kind of thing for decades. She’d known what to change and what to leave the heck alone. Not to mention that the night she bent a rule for me had been easy mode compared to the craziness a week ago. If I did go back, where did I make the cut? I’d lain awake at night for a week, trying to figure it out.

The obvious place was right here in this room. The fight that had left it looking even more trashed than usual had been because of me. Someone on the other side of the war had wanted a device Pritkin carried, one that would summon me to an impromptu execution the next time I tried to shift. They’d fought. Pritkin lost it, chased after it, and as a result, found me in the nick of time.

So, if I wanted to change things, the easiest way would be to warn him about what was coming.

And that would work great — if he took the hint. But Pritkin defined stubborn and was making headway on a new meaning for paranoid; he might well ignore a heads-up like the one Agnes had sent me. And even if he didn’t and avoided following the would-be assassin to the battleground, that wouldn’t work so well, either.

Since in that case I’d be dead.

So then where? In the middle of a fight that I’d barely won the first time? Because I just didn’t see how that worked. The final battle had happened in a couple of minutes of frantic activity and gnawing terror. And, as usual, I’d survived by luck as much as skill. Any slight alteration might make things worse instead of better.

Not to mention the fact that, crazy as it had been, the duel I’d fought against another demigod had ended up being pretty damned useful. It had impressed the hell out of the six vampire senates, who had shortly thereafter decided that maybe they would join forces in the war, after all. If I avoided the battle, they might well avoid signing the treaty. And we needed that treaty.

Anyway, all of that was moot, because even if I found a way to save Pritkin, to not get myself killed in the process, and to not advertise that Pythias did alter time for their own purposes occasionally, what then? Because Pritkin would still be in a mess, and a bad one. And the fact that, for once, it had nothing to do with me didn’t help at all.

I didn’t want to rescue him just to put him back in the same tortured existence he’d been occupying for almost a century. I wanted to save him. For once, I wanted this power I’d never asked for, and which had been nothing but trouble from the moment I got it, to actually do its freaking job. And help somebody.

Somebody who deserved it.

I just wasn’t sure how.

I sat down on the bed to wait out the mess upstairs. The room was quiet except for the faint sigh of the air-conditioning, and peaceful. Or it would have been if the gap in the drapes hadn’t been illuminating a swath across one of the movie posters.

Not that it looked all that horrific at the moment. Someone had taken a Sharpie to it—some kid, I guessed, since I couldn’t imagine the dour war mage I knew drawing a mustache and glasses on Bela Lugosi. But then, that wouldn’t be the biggest surprise he’d handed me lately.

Sometimes I wondered if I’d known the man at all. I sure as hell didn’t understand him. One minute he was being an absolute horse’s ass, to the point that I just wanted to take him somewhere particularly nasty and leave him there, and then the next . .

I felt my breath start to come faster, my hands to clench, and stupid tears to spring to my eyes. I dashed them away angrily. I’d said I wasn’t going to do this anymore, and I damned well wasn’t—

“Cass?”

“Ahhhh!” I leapt back, hitting the remaining night-stand with my already bruised butt, as Billy popped into existence through a flutter of playing cards.

The cards were mine. I hadn’t even noticed that I’d been fingering them, but it wasn’t a surprise. Kids have a favorite toy; Linus has his blanket; I have a greasy pack of tarot cards given to me by my old governess, which she’d had enchanted as a joke. And which were now all over the place and talking up a storm.

They had been spelled to tell your fortune on their own, and either by design or some flaw in the enchantment, they always tried to outdo one another. The result was seventy-eight tiny voices gradually getting louder and louder as each tried to talk over the rest. And ended up making a god-awful racket.

I started shoving them back into the pack, which was the only thing that kept them quiet, and simultaneously glared at Billy. “Don’t do that!”

“Then don’t run off without telling me. You’re supposed to be sleeping.”

Yeah. Like that had been going so great lately. “I had some unwelcome guests.”

“So shift ’em out of there. Why’d you have to be the one to leave? It’s your room!”

“And I don’t want to have to redecorate it again. Like after three pissed-off witches finish trashing it.”

“They wouldn’t trash the Pythia’s suite.”

“Why not? They broke into it,” I grumbled, managing to shove most of the cards back into place. Except for a few still chatting away somewhere. I threw the bedding around, trying to find the damned things. “It was easier for me to leave.”

“But why come here?” Billy looked around and his nose wrinkled. “It smells like a combat zone.”

“I don’t care what it smells like.”

“And it’s probably booby-trapped all to hell.”

I paused for a second, my hand halfway under the bed. I’d known Pritkin mainly in his role as my Circle-appointed bodyguard/personal trainer/drill sergeant, but he’d had other titles at times. Like war mage assassin.

“I don’t think he does that anymore,” I told Billy. Not since I’d popped in a few times unexpectedly.

“Maybe not. But what about somebody else? It looks like this place was ransacked.”

“It always looks like that.” Except for his weapons, Pritkin’s idea of orderly living was roughly that of a fourteen-year-old boy.

“Yeah, but people gotta be wondering where he went off to,” Billy pointed out. “He’s a war mage, isn’t he? Isn’t anybody curious?”

“Everybody.” I’d gotten asked about it daily by virtually everyone except Jonas, which was weird since Pritkin was technically his subordinate. But maybe Jonas felt that a guy like that could take care of himself. Or maybe it was like he’d told me: he didn’t ask Pythias too many questions.

He so rarely liked the answers he got back.

“Then maybe you shouldn’t be crawling around on the floor,” Billy said pointedly.

“And maybe you should tell me what Laura said,” I pointed out right back.

Billy gave up trying to reason with me, and parked his insubstantial rear a couple of inches above the ugly bedspread. “She said they’re in the boathouse.”

I grabbed the card that had ended up halfway under the bed, pulled it out, and stared at him. “My parents?”

He nodded.

I frowned. “What boathouse? Tony’s farm is in the middle of the countryside. There isn’t a lake for miles.”

“Yeah, I mentioned that. Seems she was talking about some ramshackle cottage that used to be behind the house. Former owner stored his boat out there, and the name stuck. Until Tony had the place bulldozed to build a parking lot, anyway.”

I nodded. Among other things, Tony had been in the loan shark business. And not all the items he repossessed when people failed to pay up were small enough to be stored in the house. Eventually, he’d had an area out back paved to accommodate the cars, trucks, and motor homes he kept until the mark came through or he sold them off. I hadn’t gone out there much, since there wasn’t anything to interest a kid—the repos were always kept locked.

“She said your folks didn’t like the main house,” Billy continued, “and Tony didn’t like ’em in it—or their little friends.”

“What friends?”

“Seems they attracted demons like nobody’s business, and they were creeping out the vamps.”

“Demons?” My dad had had some abilities with ghosts, which was where I got mine, I guessed. But I hadn’t heard anything about demons before.

But then, he wasn’t the only person out there, was he?

Billy nodded. “There were some incidents— poltergeist-type stuff, fires, one vamp got torched—”

“Who?”

“Manny,” Billy said, referring to one of Tony’s more dim-witted vamps. “He recovered okay, but shortly after that, Mom and Pop got evicted.”

“To the boathouse,” I said, staring at the card in my hand without really seeing it.

“Yeah,” Billy said, sounding suddenly annoyed. “And don’t get that look.”

“What look?”

“That I’m-gonna-go-ask-Mom-how-to-get-my-buddy-Pritkin-back look. It’s not that easy!”

“Tell me about it.” But that didn’t matter, because if anyone knew how to get me out of this mess, it would be her.

Remember how I said the gods had different names in different places? Well, she’d been worshipped by the Norse as Hel, their goddess of death. Who, among other things, had been in charge of the regions that bore her name. And right now I really needed to know about those regions.

Because Pritkin had traded his life for mine, but not in the conventional sense. Of course not—when did he ever do the conventional thing? No, he’d had to get fancy with it.

By giving me energy when I was all but out, he’d saved my life. But he’d also broken a taboo that was the only thing allowing him to remain on earth. That had resulted in him being kidnapped by his bastard of a father, who had been waiting for something like a century for an excuse to put his only child back where he thought he belonged—on a throne in hell.

Or, more likely, in a bedroom, since Pritkin’s father was Rosier, Lord of the Incubi. That made Pritkin a powerful half incubus who had been, in his father’s warped view, playing about on earth long enough. It was time for him to take up his birthright and help the family by whoring himself out to the highest bidders.

The fact that that sort of existence would be worse than death to someone like Pritkin, who hated the demon half of himself and everything that went with it, was irrelevant to Rosier. He’d spent centuries trying to get a corporeal son to use as a bargaining chip, and he wasn’t about to lose him now. And unlike Persephone, Pritkin wasn’t even allowed visitation rights on earth.

Rosier had him and he planned on keeping him.

As if.

“Why are you looking like that?” Billy asked warily.

“Like what?”

“Like you’re about to cut a bitch.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, and shoved the rest of the cards back into place.

“Okaaaaay. But before you run off for a family reunion, there’s one other thing you might want to know.”

“Such as?”

“Such as, if your parents were hoping for privacy in their cottage, they got it. Laura said nobody went out there—not even the other ghosts. Demons can feed off ghost energy even easier than human—there’s no body to get through first, you know? And they weren’t taking chances.”

“So? I’m not a ghost.”

“I said easier. Demons feed off humans just fine if they want to put in the effort, and there’s a crap ton of them out there.”

I frowned. “How many?”

“Laura didn’t know. She never went there herself, not being stupid. But some of the vamps came back spooked as hell, telling stories about hearing what had to be hundreds of demons, seeing crazy lights, feeling space warp around them, the whole nine yards. They were scared shitless.”

I frowned harder. “What kind of demons?”

“What difference does it make? The moral of the story is, if the scary-ass bastards at Tony’s were afraid of that cottage, maybe you should be, too!”

“My mother is in there,” I reminded him. And it wasn’t like she couldn’t handle demons. From what I understood of the old legends, she’d practically ruled them at one point.

“Yeah, sometimes,” Billy said, sounding crabby. “But what if she’s off somewhere when you pop in? And how exactly are you gonna do that when you don’t know the layout of the place? You’ll have to show up outside, where you can see where you’re going, and that means getting through the woods to the front door. And then waiting for somebody to let you in—assuming somebody’s home to start with. And that whole time, you’ll be a sitting duck for a bunch of hungry demons. ’Cause you know as well as I do that you don’t know how to fight ’em off—”

“Stop it.”

“Okay, sure. I’ll stop it. Just as soon as you tell me how you plan to get in.”

I didn’t say anything for a minute. “Jonas knows about demons.”

“Yeah. And I’m sure he’ll be thrilled about making another trip to Tony’s right now. And even if so, he wouldn’t be happy about helping you do something that could change your whole existence—”

“I’m just going to talk—”

“—and what excuse are you gonna give him for needing to see her, anyway? You can’t tell him about the mage, ’cause that would tell him what Pritkin is. And you know how the Corps feels about demons—”

“I said stop it!” I told him savagely. I didn’t need this. Another freaking roadblock in a week that had been full of nothing else. A week of trying to track Mom down, when she was busy avoiding anybody attempting to do just that. She’d had enemies of her own on her ass, and she’d turned evasion into an art form.

I’d finally bitten the bullet and realized that I was going to have to go back to Tony’s, the only place I was sure I could find her. Only to discover—after tripping the wards and almost getting caught half a dozen times— that she wasn’t there, either. It had started to feel like she wasn’t anywhere.

But then Jonas had shown up this afternoon, declaring that he simply had to be taken back in time right that moment. With his help, I’d avoided the wards—mostly— and Billy had pried the truth out of Laura. So now I discovered that I hadn’t been able to find my folks at Tony’s because they hadn’t been there. They’d been in the cottage.

Which I now learned was surrounded by an army of freaking demons.

“Cass . . ”

“Don’t.” I said tightly. “Not now.”

“Yes, now,” Billy insisted. “Look, I helped, right? I tried—we both tried. But he’s gone.”

“He isn’t.”

“Yes, he is. And you can’t bring him back by sheer force of will. Look, even if you got in there somehow, and even if she told you how to get into Rosier’s court, what then?”

“Then I go get him,” I said fiercely.

“Uh-huh.” Billy looked at me, and he was solid enough that I could see the compassion in those hazel eyes. “Only you know that’s not happening, right? Cass, don’t take this the wrong way, but you couldn’t even burglarize Tony’s without help. And now you think you’re just gonna waltz into hell—”

“Shut up.”

“—and break Pritkin out? When Rosier is probably expecting something exactly like that from you? When he’s prepared?”

“Billy! Shut up!”

“Not this time,” he said flatly. “You need to hear this, and since nobody else knows what you’ve been up to, I’m the only one who can try to snap you out of it. Cass, it’s suicide. Pritkin gave up everything to save you; think he would want you to throw your life away trying to get him back?”

I got up abruptly, because I couldn’t stay still anymore. But it didn’t shut Billy up. Of course it didn’t. I’d never found anything that did.

“And even if, by some million-to-one chance, you were to get him out of there, what do you think would happen then?” he demanded. “It’s not like anything would change. He broke his parole, or whatever you want to call it. Rosier would just drag him back—”

“We don’t know that!”

“Yes, we do. Pritkin told you—”

“What he knew! But maybe he didn’t know everything,” I said, trying to pace and not being able to because of the damned glass. I kicked an arc of it out of the way and the shards flashed in the glow from outside for a moment, like licking flames.

“Oh. So you know more about hell than a guy who lived there.”

“No, but maybe my mother does!” I rounded on him. “She lived there, too, if the old legends were right. And for centuries! If there’s a loophole, she’ll know it!”

“And if there isn’t?”

“Then there isn’t,” I said, crossing my arms and glaring at him. “But until I hear that—from her—I’m not going to just give up. I can’t, Billy—don’t you get it?”

“Oh, I get it,” he muttered. “I’m just not sure that you do.”

“What does that mean?”

He shook his head. “Nothing. Just . . . nothing. But the fact remains, you can’t get to her to ask.”

I sat down on the bed, suddenly exhausted. It had been a long day at the end of a long week, and my chest hurt. I wanted to scream, to cry, to throw things, but I didn’t have the energy. I wanted to black out and find Pritkin there when I woke up. I wanted . .

God. Sometimes I didn’t even know.

“Not tonight,” I admitted, rubbing the back of my neck. If I hadn’t felt up to dealing with a few nosy witches, I sure couldn’t take whatever was guarding dear old Mom.

“Come back to the suite,” Billy told me softly. “Before you give Marco a heart attack. Get some rest. Tomorrow . . . maybe things will look different.”

In other words, tomorrow maybe I’d come to my senses.

“Yeah, maybe,” I said, because I didn’t want to argue anymore.

Billy nodded, and winked out, looking relieved. Which did exactly nothing to make me feel better. Despite the way he’d been sounding lately, Billy Joe wasn’t the timid type. Billy Joe had been a high-stakes gambler in life, until he ended up in a sack at the bottom of the Mississippi for cheating the wrong guys. When Billy thought something was too risky . .

Well, let’s just say the odds weren’t great.

And it wasn’t like everything he’d said wasn’t true. But so was something he hadn’t bothered to mention. That if our positions were reversed, Pritkin would have come after me. Whether I’d liked it or not, whether I’d wanted him to risk it or not, he wouldn’t have just left me there. It probably wouldn’t even have crossed his mind. I knew that, with more certainty than I knew which direction the sun would rise tomorrow.

So how could I just leave him?

I curled up on his messy bed, and even after a week, the sheets still smelled good. Like soap and gunpowder and magic. I lay there, staring at the ceiling, and didn’t cry. Because it was weak, and I couldn’t afford to be weak.

And because you only cried for people who weren’t coming back.

And that wasn’t the case here, no matter how it looked. I had to get to him, had to get him away from his loathsome father, had to find a way to keep him. And for that, I had to get to my mother.

Somehow.

But it had been a week, and so far, I hadn’t even managed that first step. I’d exhausted myself flipping around through time like a crazy woman. I’d been chased by guards through the old Pythian Court, almost gotten myself run over in London, been shot at by Tony’s thugs. And for what? I was no closer to finding Pritkin than I’d been a week ago.

When he left me.