But I’d drawn on some of that magic when I’d survived the Maze, and now that I carried Lucifer’s sword it seemed the power was closer to the surface than it used to be. I pulled on my magic, infused it with my will, pushed it out through the palm of my hand. The snake tattoo on my right palm twitched.
The elevator doors flew open in a shower of sparks. Three hotel employees stood there looking surprised. The one in the middle held a crowbar. He stared at the bar, and then at the doors, then back at the bar.
“Good job, Ed,” one of the guys said.
The other two men shouldered past him and into the elevator. I maneuvered Arkan out by gesturing for him to turn around so I could put the sword to his back. Then I poked him in the spine and pushed past the bewildered Ed and into the hallway. One of the men inside the elevator cursed loudly when he saw the charred control pad.
When we reached the bank of guest elevators in the center of the hallway I gave Arkan a nudge.
“Where’s Sammy staying?” I whispered.
Arkan did not answer.
“You know, I can just kill you now and find Sammy on my own,” I said. “It will take longer, but I’ll still get what I want.”
“Getting a little dark, aren’t we?” Beezle murmured.
I would do anything possible to protect the innocent, and despite my tough talk I would rather not kill anyone. But if it was necessary, I didn’t mind ridding the world of another selfish, useless faerie who was perfectly willing to participate in the torture of a human being just because his queen said so.
I waited. Finally, Arkan said, “The penthouse.”
I pressed the button for the up elevator and waited. When the car opened there was no one inside. That was good. It lessened the likelihood that Arkan might decide to take a human hostage to get away from me.
This simple mission was already a lot more complicated than I’d bargained for. It wasn’t just about Amarantha going up against Lucifer because her pride was hurt. It wasn’t even just about saving some innocent soul from a horrible death in the Red Shoes. If Amarantha succeeded in cursing Lucifer, then the contents of the curse itself wouldn’t even matter. She would be, for all intents and purposes, declaring war on the kingdom of the fallen.
The courts of the various races were carefully held apart by a series of accords and agreements and laws. This was to keep some very powerful and ancient creatures from tearing the planet apart while they squabbled over territory. If a court of faerie made aggressive overtures toward the highest court of the fallen, you could guarantee that a whole lot of people were going to get caught in the cross fire. That wasn’t acceptable to me, so I would do whatever I needed to do to stop this curse from happening in the first place. If I managed to snag the Red Shoes, as Lucifer had requested, then so much the better.
Of course, Lucifer probably had nefarious plans for the shoes himself. But I couldn’t worry about that right now. I needed to deal with the crisis at hand and then worry about the next crisis when it occurred.
A key was needed to access the penthouse via the elevator, and Arkan produced it after much grumbling on his part and threatening on mine. Beezle fell asleep again in my pocket, snoring away like a baby piglet. Pretty much all he does is eat, sleep, make smart comments about my poor decisions, and watch bad television.
The elevator doors opened on the penthouse. It was curiously quiet. I’d expected an entourage, maybe a bunch of witches hanging around preparing a spell. But there was nothing except a room empty of people but full of expensive furniture. A row of windows faced Michigan Avenue. I pushed the sword into Arkan’s back. “Move.”
We stepped into the room, my anxiety growing with each passing moment. This wasn’t right. At the very least Sammy Blue should have been waiting for Arkan to return. That is, unless . . .
“You’re Sammy Blue,” I said.
He turned to face me, those crazy violet eyes agleam with triumph.
Ah. There’s the trap, then.
I had only half a second to turn before the blow fell. I had an impression of something large and scary bringing its fist down on my head. My sword clattered to the ground, and everything went black.
I woke to the sound of murmuring chatter, people moving around the room like bees in a hive. The back of my head ached, and so did my ribs and stomach. I suspected that Sammy Blue had either stepped on me or kicked me a few times while I was out cold. I also felt vaguely like a blanket had been thrown over me, even though there wasn’t one.
I opened my eyes just to slits so I could peek around without drawing attention. Unfortunately, I was lying on my side on the carpet, my hands and ankles bound, and so all I could really see were shoes in motion. From the sound of the conversation I deduced that the witches had arrived. My trapped and tied state led me to further deduce that I was the sacrifice for which they’d been waiting.
If I’d thought it through all the way I would have realized they’d need me for the spell. They wanted to curse Lucifer, and nothing carries a curse better than blood. The blood of the victim, if you can get it, is ideal. I couldn’t imagine anyone with sense in his head trying to stick Lucifer and carry away a sample, though. The next best thing was someone from his bloodline. Wasn’t it convenient that his great-granddaughter was at hand?
I wriggled experimentally, trying to see if there was any play in the knots. There wasn’t. I considered trying to set the ropes on fire, then discarded that idea. I don’t have fine control of my powers. If I tried to burn the ropes apart, the whole hotel could go up in a giant conflagration and thousands of people could be killed.
Still, I’d managed to open the elevator doors without setting the building aflame, so maybe I could play Jedi and unknot the ropes with the power of my mind.
I reached for my magic—and it wasn’t there.
Or rather, it was there, but it wasn’t available to me. Now I knew why I felt like I’d had a blanket thrown over me. Someone had put a dampening spell on my power so I couldn’t use it. Well, it was nice for the bad guys that Sammy Blue had thought of everything.
Beezle’s reassuring weight was still in my front pocket. Either Sammy Blue had forgotten about him or decided that Beezle was no threat. It was true that Beezle was a threat only if you were a bag of candy that did not want to be eaten, but that didn’t mean that my gargoyle wasn’t useful.
“Beezle!” I said through closed lips. My back was pressed up against a wall and no one was near me, but a lot of supernatural creatures have better hearing than I do. I knew werewolves that could hear a pin drop on the other side of the continent.
My gargoyle did not respond.
“Beezle!” I repeated, trying to wriggle my shoulder so that the coat pocket my gargoyle was nestled in would move.
The only response was a long exhalation.
“Seriously? You’re still asleep?” I muttered.
Beezle could untie my hands and feet. Even without my magic I could still use my sword. If I could find it. Since Sammy was so thorough, I was sure he hadn’t left it within my reach.
I opened my eyes a little more. Nobody was paying any attention to me. The furniture was pushed against the walls. The curtains were drawn. Three witches stood around a circle on the floor. They were young and completely ordinary-looking. They might have been office workers or college students. There was nothing to indicate that they were about to use their magic to torture another human being to death.
They were walking through the process of the spell, and occasionally one of them would use a piece of chalk to add a symbol inside the circle. Sammy Blue stood off in the corner, talking quietly on his cell phone, his back to me. I noticed he’d taken the time to change out of the suit he’d worn earlier and put on a different one—one that didn’t have a hole in the back from my nightfire blast.