Normally, Pritkin might have been able to get out of this kind of thing on his own, but he was trying not to call attention to what was happening. I sympathized with his dedication to the whole integrity-of-the-timeline thing, but getting killed over it seemed a little fanatical. I was Pythia, at least temporarily, and I wasn't willing to go that far. Normally I wouldn't lose much sleep over Pritkin's death, but he had gone into that box because I asked him. If he died, it would be partially my fault.
I sighed and raised my wrist. A dimly glowing dagger practically jumped out of my bracelet to hover beside my arm. It was fairly buzzing with excitement over the prospect of a fight, but I wasn't sure this was a great plan. Among other things, I had a feeling that it might decide to stab Pritkin instead of shattering the bottle. They had a history and, as far as I knew, had yet to fight on the same side.
"Take out the bottle only," I told it sternly. "Don't attack the mage-you know how he gets. I mean it.”
I got a faint bob of what I hoped was agreement before it was off. It flew over the balcony, straight for the bottle, which Mircea had just raised to Pritkin's lips. It shattered the thick glass easily, causing dark red wine to cascade over the mage's coat and splash Mircea's formerly pristine white shirt. Mircea whirled around, the bottle's neck still in hand, and saw me. He opened his mouth as if to say something, then stopped and just stood there, looking dazed.
Unfortunately my knife didn't follow his example but decided to ham it up. Onstage, Macbeth was asking if this was a dagger he saw before him. My flashing, luminescent knife dipped and swooped over the startled crowd, causing gasps and even a few screams, before coming to a halt in front of the actor's stunned face. It bobbed up and down for a minute, as if taking a bow, then flew back to me. Thunderous applause broke out all over the theatre, drowning out the rest of the actor's lines.
As soon as the attention hog melted back into my bracelet, I felt the disorientation spread over me that indicated that a time shift was coming. "Grab my hand, quick!" I yelled at Pritkin. "Takeoff is any second.”
He had used the moment of distraction to jerk away from the blonde. She was between him and the way out, but he got around that problem by vaulting onto an unused seat and launching himself across the divide between the boxes. He almost slipped on the edge, but I caught his hand. The next minute, we were once more spinning through time.
Chapter 3
We landed in a heap on a white tile floor, and something fell with a splut right in front of my nose. My eyes crossed trying to identify the pale pink item. As soon as I did, I shrieked and scrambled back, knocking Pritkin off balance in the process. A crooked hand with skin the color and texture of old stone grabbed the offending item and returned it to a silver tray. "No guests allowed," I was informed in a gravelly baritone.
I didn't reply, being too busy staring at the platter of severed fingers that the owner of the voice was clutching between long, curved claws. I should have been more concerned by the greenish gray face, like mildewed rock, that was peering at me over the tray. It had a deep scar running from temple to neck and its only remaining eye, a narrowed yellow orb, was fighting for forehead space with two black, curled horns-not something you see every day. But I couldn't seem to tear my attention away from the severed digits.
There had to be twenty or more, all index fingers as far as I could tell, that had been shoved between pieces of bread. The crusts had been trimmed away and a piece of ruffled romaine lettuce carefully wrapped around each one. Finger sandwiches, some part of my brain observed. I choked, caught between a retch and a hysterical giggle.
My gaze moved around what I now identified as a busy kitchen. Another of the stone-colored things-this one with glowing green eyes and bat wings-stood on a stool at a nearby island, pressing something into small, finger-shaped molds. My frozen brain finally thawed enough to recognize the smell. "Oh, thank God." I sagged against Pritkin in relief. "It's pâté!”
"Where are we?" he demanded, dragging me to my feet. I had trouble standing, both because I'd somehow lost a shoe and because a larger gray thing barreled past, knocking me back with a flailing tail. It was wearing a starched white linen chef's outfit, complete with little red scarf and tall hat. The breast of the tunic had a very familiar crest emblazoned on it in bright red, yellow and black-Tony's colors.
"Dante's." When Pritkin had fallen on me at the theatre, my concentration must have wobbled. We'd ended up a little off course.
"You're sure this is the casino?" The mage was eyeing a nearby platter, which contained radishes that had been partly skinned to resemble human eyeballs. They had olives for pupils, and it almost looked like the pimentos were glowering at us. I took a closer look at the shield, a copy of which adorned every uniform in sight and appeared over a set of swinging doors across the room. It looked very familiar.
Antonio Gallina had been born into a family of chicken farmers outside Florence about the time Michelangelo was carving his fawn for old man Medici. But, some two hundred years later, when the impoverished English king Charles I started selling noble titles to fund his art obsession, the illegitimate farmer's son turned master vamp had had more than enough stashed away to buy himself a baronetcy. I personally thought that the heralds, the men who had designed Tony's coat of arms, had spent a little too long at the pub the night before. I guess it could have been worse-like the poor French apothecary who was granted arms showing three silver chamber pots-but the comical yellow hen in the middle of Tony's shield was bad enough. It was supposedly a play on his last name, which means chicken in Italian, but the fat bird bore an uncanny resemblance to its owner.
"Pretty sure," I said. I would have elaborated, but one of the creatures doing the cooking, a diminutive specimen with a hairnet confining its long, floppy donkey ears, scurried by. It ran over my bare foot with clawed toenails, causing me to wince and press farther back. That resulted in Pritkin getting smashed into a slotted cart filled with trays of tiny black caldrons.
"What are those things?" I demanded. I kicked off my remaining shoe to keep from breaking my neck in case we had to run for it. I kept a wary eye on the creature in front of us, but he didn't seem overtly hostile, despite his looks. The only thing he was doing to back up his request was to point forcefully at the swinging doors with a spoon.
"Rum torte," a tiny chef croaked in passing. He was wearing only the top half of the usual tunic-and-trousers set, which in his case brushed the floor. A long, lizardlike tail protruded from beneath it.
He resembled most of the other creatures in the room, the majority of which had bat wings, clawed hands and long tails, but there the similarity ended. Their heads were everything from avian to reptilian, with a few furred ones here and there. Some had horns and others droopy ears, and their height ranged from maybe two feet to tall enough to stare me in the chest. Their eyes varied in color and size, but all of them seemed to glow, as if lit from inside by a high-powered bulb. It was unnerving, especially since they reminded me of something, and I couldn't quite figure out what.
"Gargoyles," Pritkin said as we stumbled through the swinging doors into a short hallway. At the end, a door that looked like old, carved wood but was too light to be real let out into a much longer and wider corridor. It was lined with medieval weaponry and cobweb-covered suits of armor, and dimly lit by flickering torches-fake, of course. Dante's wards were minimal on the upper floors, so electricity worked okay except for the occasional splutter. And real torches would have been hard to get past the fire codes.