“I’m sensing a wicked imbalance in the force, sweet cheeks,” it said. “Micky, maybe you should get naked in case you have to shift.”
I envied the way Mick could utterly ignore the thing. To Mick, the mirror was simply a powerful talisman, good to have on hand, and the fact that it kept up nonstop sexual suggestions rarely bothered him. Mick and I had awakened it from dormancy one night while working some Tantric magic, which meant that the mirror now belonged to us. It never let us forget how we’d awakened it, and its ongoing innuendo drove me insane. But I’d never throw it away. Magic mirrors were rare and powerful, and the mage who owned one could work amazing magic.
I took a seat next to Cassandra. I badly needed a shower, and a beer wouldn’t hurt, but more than that I wanted to know why Cassandra had been so spooked by the blood. I’d never seen anything frighten my ultra-efficient hotel manager.
Cassandra studied her bunched fists that rested on the table. “I’m sorry, Janet. I never should have come here in the first place.”
“Yes, you should have. I can’t run this hotel without you. Why do you think the message was for you, anyway? It appeared when Fremont and I were up there alone.”
Cassandra looked straight into my eyes. “Because I used to work for John Christianson.”
She obviously expected me to clutch my chest and fall over in shock. I blinked. “Who is John Christianson?”
Mick answered for her. “He’s a filthy rich hotelier and real estate magnate. Owns half of Southern California—commercial real estate, hotels, anything high-dollar in Los Angeles and down the coast to San Diego. Prominent in social circles, contributes to more charities than anyone in the state.”
I spread my hands. Big business, especially big business in other states, was far away and unimportant to my day-to-day existence.
“He’s a first-class bastard,” Cassandra said with venom. “I worked at one of Christianson’s hotels, the ‘C’ in Los Angeles.”
All right, so even I’d heard of the “C,” which featured in Fremont’s favorite television shows about the rich and famous. The “C” was a boutique hotel in Beverly Hills that attracted celebrities, high-profile politicians, and the ultra-rich. They could check in for the weekend and have every need met and every decadent wish granted, without ever having to leave the building.
“What has the ‘C’ got to do with messages on my bathroom mirror?”
“Because the secret of Christianson’s success is deep, dark magic,” Cassandra said. “He can’t work magic himself, but he’s hired some of the best in the business—mages into the blackest arts. At first, when Christianson asked me to manage the ‘C,’ the top of his chain, I was thrilled. It would be a huge step forward in my career.”
“But . . .” With a setup like that, there was always a “but.”
Cassandra shivered. “Please don’t ask me what really goes on at the ‘C’—what you get with the most secret and expensive of packages. Let’s just say there are people out there who will do anything—anything—and pay any price, for pleasure. And please don’t ask me what Christianson expected me to do, with my magic, with . . . myself. One day, I’d had enough, and I left. Escaped is more like it. I didn’t tell anyone, didn’t plan anything. I just walked away.”
“And came to Magellan,” I finished, finally understanding why she’d turned up on my doorstep, looking for a job. “Interesting choice. Why here and not half the world away?”
“The first place they’d look is half the world away,” Cassandra said. “I thought I’d give a small town in the middle of nowhere a try. I changed my name and got you to hire me.”
“So you’re not really Cassandra Bryson?” I’d taken her information for tax purposes, and it had all checked out, but I conceded that a competent witch could have taken care of such trivialities.
I’d read Cassandra’s aura when she’d first arrived and saw what I saw now: a powerful witch who liked things clean and tidy, but without a taint of true evil. I’d liked her, she’d had experience running hotels, and I’d been out of my depth with this place and knew it.
“If you don’t mind, I won’t tell you what my real name is,” Cassandra said. “They can hear names, and use them.”
Mick gave her an understanding nod. He’d explained to me once that his name—the full version of it unpronounceable to me—wasn’t his true name, which would sound more like musical notes. Only a dragon and its dam knew its true name, because knowledge of a dragon’s name—and Cassandra had told me this part—could enslave it.
I also had a true name, a spirit name, one my father had given me the day he’d brought me home, which was between me, him, and the gods. Names were powerful things.
“I came to Magellan because of the vortexes around it,” Cassandra said. “What better place to hide my magic than in a place permeated with it? When I drove by your hotel and saw the wards all over it, I knew I’d struck lucky. Even if you hadn’t been looking for a manager, I’d have washed dishes for you, anything for a chance to live here. Plus your aura held so much innocence, Janet, I knew I could trust you.”
“My aura?” I stared. “Held innocence?” This was the first time in my life I’d heard someone refer to Janet Begay as innocent. Janet, the Stormwalker with the goddess-from-hell mother and magic she was just beginning to understand, was a long way from innocent. Most people called me “troublemaker,” “pain in the ass,” or “oh-my-god-it’s-her-let’s-run.”
Cassandra smiled at me. “Trust me, Janet, after knowing the people I knew, your honesty was refreshing.” Her face fell. “But I’ve put you—and Mick and everyone here—in the worst danger.”
“You think the blood message in the bathroom means Christianson has found you?” I asked.
She nodded. “ And I can’t risk that he won’t kill everyone in this building to get to me. I have to go.”
Cassandra started to rise, but I pulled her back down. “Don’t be stupid. If they’ve found you, the safest place for you is here. We have Mick, and I’ll call Coyote—if I can find him—and we’ll get Pamela up here. There’s some damn strong magic within these walls. We’ll defend you. It’s what friends do.”
Cassandra looked pathetically grateful. Mick and Coyote were the strongest magical beings I knew, but my magic is plenty damn powerful as well. Mine is a mixture of earth magic—Stormwalker power that I inherited from my Navajo grandmother—and the crazy, white-hot goddess magic from Beneath.
Beneath is the shell world below this one, where the evilest of the gods got stuck when Coyote and others sealed the cracks between that world and this one. The vortexes around Magellan held gateways to that world, and one of the evil goddesses stuck down there was my mother. I’d inherited the nasty, unpredictable, insanely powerful Beneath magic from her.
I’d recently learned to twine my Diné-inherited storm magic and my Beneath magic to temper both, but earth magic and Beneath magic mix like oil and water. It’s like having a blender inside you all the time. An angry blender.
Cassandra flinched. “No, I don’t want Pamela here. I don’t want her hurt. If they don’t know about her, they can’t use her to get to me.”
Pamela was a Changer, a shape-shifter who could take the form of a wolf. She and Cassandra shared a small apartment in town, and Cassandra had met her here, in my hotel, the day Pamela had tried to choke the life out of me.
“Pamela will be pissed as hell if you keep her out of it,” I said.
“Yes, but that means she’ll be alive.”
“Good point.” I got up. “But I’m calling Coyote. It never hurts to have a god on your side.”
“I’ll reinforce the wards,” Mick offered. “Janet is right; this is the best place you can stay. Plus I can have a phalanx of dragons here anytime I need them. I don’t care how powerful a mage Christianson sends—he can’t work magic if he’s being fried to a crisp.”