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.