That, at least, we could agree on. He ordered for us, which normally would have annoyed me, but there wasn’t much of a menu to choose from. This wasn’t so much a restaurant as a dive, and you either ordered pizza and beer or you went home.
Unless you ordered ice cream. I decided on a chocolate shake instead of more beer, and although Pritkin didn’t say anything, his expression was eloquent. “You’re going to run it off me anyway,” I pointed out.
“Anything else?” he asked drily. “Onion rings? Pie?”
“They have pie?”
“No.” It was emphatic.
I was in too good of a mood to argue the point. The seat was sticking to my thighs, a broken spring was stabbing my left butt cheek, and the air-conditioning, while present, was completely inadequate for August in Nevada. But I was out. I’d won this round. And tonight, I’d take what victories I could get.
“Are you going to explain what’s going on?” he asked, after the waitress left. “When I tried—”
“Wait a minute.”
There was an old jukebox in the corner, with dirty glass and yellowed titles, not one of which was less than twenty years old. But it had Joan Jett’s entire repertoire, so I fed it a couple of quarters and punched in a selection. The sound quality wasn’t the best, but that wasn’t my main interest, anyway.
“It’s Mircea,” I said, when I rejoined him. “He’s got this crazy idea that you’re a danger.”
Pritkin’s jaw tightened. “I know.”
“You know? Has he said—”
“He didn’t have to. But you may assure him that I am no threat in that regard.”
“I have,” I said impatiently. “But when these things keep happening—”
“They do not keep happening. It was one time.”
I frowned. “One time?”
For some reason, he flushed. “Of any consequence.”
“Well, excuse me for thinking they were all pretty important!” Any time something was trying to kill me, I took it seriously.
Pritkin ran a hand through his hair, which didn’t need the added torture. “I didn’t mean to downplay the significance of what occurred—”
“I would hope not!”
“—merely to assure you that it won’t happen again.”
“You can’t know that.”
Green eyes met mine, with what looked like anger in them. “Yes, I bloody well can!”
I just sat there, confused, as he abruptly got up and went over to the jukebox. He received a glance from a woman in a nearby booth on the way, and it lingered. He was still in the same jeans as earlier, having just thrown a gray-green T-shirt over the top. Although you couldn’t see much of it because of the long leather trench he wore to cover up the arsenal all war mages carted around.
But he’d somehow jammed everything under there without noticeable bulges, because the dark brown leather fit his broad shoulders sleekly. Likewise, the soft, old jeans hugged a rock-hard physique, and the T-shirt brought out the brilliant color of his eyes. Pritkin would never be conventionally handsome; his nose was too big, he missed six feet by at least three inches and he only remembered to shave about half the time.
But I didn’t have any trouble understanding why she was staring.
“This is what you listen to?” he demanded, his back to me as he perused song titles.
“It’s ‘I Love Rock ’n Roll.’ It’s a classic.”
That got me a dark glance thrown over his shoulder, but he didn’t say anything. He just dug a couple of quarters out of his jeans and made a selection of his own. And oh, my God.
“Johnny Cash?”
“What’s wrong with Johnny Cash?” he asked, sitting back down.
“What’s right about him?”
“Country is based on folk music, which has been around for centuries—”
“So has the plague.”
“—longer than the so-called ‘classics.’ For thousands of years, bards sang about the same basic themes—love and loss, lust and betrayal—and ended up influencing everyone from Bach to Beethoven.”
“So Johnny Cash is Beethoven?”
“Of his day.”
I rolled my eyes. That was just so wrong. But at least “Ring of Fire” covered the conversation pretty well.
I leaned forward and dropped my voice. “I wasn’t trying to be rude a minute ago. I just meant that, to the vamps, a demon seems like the most likely culprit, and Mircea’s decided—”
“Demon?”
“Yes, demon.”
Pritkin frowned. “What do they have to do with this?”
I stared at him. “Well, what are we talking about?”
“I’m not sure.”
I took a breath. “Mircea thinks you’re a warlock,” I said, slowly and clearly. “He’s decided that’s how you’ve lived so long, why you’re as strong as you—”
“Is that what he told you?”
“Yes. Why?”
He looked away. “No reason.”
I waited, but he didn’t say anything else. And after a pause, I soldiered on. “Anyway, that’s why he told Marco to lock you out for the night. He was afraid you’d call up something else—”
Pritkin snorted.
“—while I couldn’t shift away.”
“Yes, I’m sure that was his main concern.”
“Is there something you want to tell me?” I demanded.
“No.” He didn’t say anything else, if he’d planned on it, because the waitress returned with our drinks. He poured beer, tilting the glass to minimize foam, because this wasn’t the kind of place where the waitstaff did it for you. “If you were merely instructed not to see me until tomorrow, why go to these lengths?” he asked, after she left. “Why not simply agree?”
“Because I couldn’t. V—” I caught myself. The jukebox had gone quiet, and I was kind of afraid of what he might select next. So I settled for modifying my language. “They will push and push, to see where your boundaries are. And if you knuckle under once, they’ll expect you to do it every time.”
“Meaning?”
“That if I hadn’t left, next time it wouldn’t have been, ‘It’s only for tonight, Cassie.’ It would have been ‘It’s only for this week,’ or this month, or this year. . . .”
“And they chose to push when they knew you were vulnerable.” He sounded like he expected nothing less.
“They didn’t choose,” I said, frowning. Because Pritkin always assumed the worst about vampires. “They probably thought I’d sleep all night and it would never come up. But it did, and in their society, you can’t afford to ignore a challenge like that. If you do, you’ll be labeled weak, and that’s a really hard thing to undo.”
Pritkin looked confused. “Are you trying to say that Marco wanted you to defy him?”
“This isn’t about Marco. He was just following orders.”
“Then Mircea wanted you to defy him?”
I laughed. “No.”
Pritkin was starting to look exasperated. “Then what—”
“Mircea wants me to do what I’m told. He’d love it if I did what I’m told. But he wouldn’t respect it. He wouldn’t respect me.”
I took a moment to work on my shake, which was thick and rich and headache-inducing cold. I’d sort of given up explaining any vamp to any mage, much less Mircea to Pritkin. But he’d asked, and I owed him one, so I tried.
“Mircea didn’t give that order expecting me to ever know about it,” I said. “But he did give it, and once he refused to rescind it, it became a direct challenge.”
Pritkin’s eyes narrowed. “And you couldn’t ignore it because it would have made you look bad?”
I had to think for a moment about how to answer that. It was surprisingly difficult sometimes to put into words things I had accepted as the natural order since childhood. But they weren’t natural for Pritkin, or for most mages, other than for those who worked for the vampires themselves. And they didn’t talk much.
“It wouldn’t have made me look bad,” I finally said. “It would have made me look like what he was treating me as: a favored servant. Someone to be petted and pampered and protected—and ordered around. Because that’s what servants do: they take orders. But that isn’t how one of his equals would have responded.”