My mouth felt dry, so I swallowed. “I asked her where Pritkin was being kept. Maybe she went off to find out.”
Caleb shot me a furious look. “And maybe she went off to win bonus points with her lord and master by ratting us out!”
I shook my head. “That’s ridiculous. If she didn’t want me going after Pritkin, all she had to do was stay in Vegas. I’d never have made it this far without her. I could have opened the gate, but not gotten past the guards. I needed an incubus for that—”
“And she made sure you got one!”
“Yes, so why help us if she just planned to turn us in?”
“Perhaps she thought she’d get more if we proved a credible threat,” Caleb said, seething. “Telling her precious master what we have planned while we’re still in Vegas might win her a point or two. But if she stops us when we’re actually in his city, when we’re less than a mile from our goal, she could expect him to be a lot more generous!”
“Not if she helped us get in to begin with!”
“She can say she was afraid if she didn’t go along, we’d manage to find another way in, and she wouldn’t be able to warn him since she wouldn’t know what it was.”
I tried to think of an objection to that—tried hard. Because if Rian had decided to rat us out, we were pretty much screwed. And that was especially true a moment later, when a rolling, metallic sound clattered across the souk, coming from the direction of the gate.
The door on this side was still open, and still coughing out straggling parties of new arrivals. But I had a really bad feeling that maybe that wasn’t the case on the other side. It looked like they were rolling up the welcome mat for the night—with us inside.
“She timed it perfectly, all right,” Caleb snarled, grabbing my hand and jerking me toward one of the side streets.
“Caleb, listen,” I said, running along behind. “She’s helped Pritkin before, more than once. She’s even put herself in danger to help him. There’s no reason to believe—”
“There’s every reason! You heard her yourself. She’s overdue to return, probably by a few hundred years. Maybe Rosier got tired of her little dodge and her helping his wayward son, and told her she had to make room for someone else. And maybe she decided to hell with that—and to hell with us!”
And damn it, that sounded horribly logical.
“Then why did Casanova spend all that time arguing with us?” I demanded. “He was trying to turn us back!”
“Maybe she told him to ham it up, to make sure we didn’t suspect anything. Or maybe he really didn’t know. He’s a vamp, and they always look out for number one. And Mircea is his master. What kind of reception do you think he’ll get when Mircea finds out he put you in danger?” He whirled on me suddenly. “Can he stop her from saying anything? Can he at least slow her down?”
“If she stays inside his body, maybe. I don’t know. But she doesn’t have to. She can come and go as she pleases, and I don’t think he has any control over that.” At least none that I’d ever seen.
Caleb used one of Pritkin’s favorite swearwords. And then he used a few more. “Fucking demons. You can’t trust them, not any of them. I knew better—”
I didn’t bother pointing out that that was not exactly PC, because at the moment, I kind of agreed with it. “Fucking demons” sounded kind of like the phrase for the day.
Especially since I was about to run a bunch of them down.
“Where are we going?” I asked, ducking and dodging, and trying to avoid slamming into someone and putting a flashing arrow over our heads.
“Away. She’ll be expecting us to stay put, to think we lost her in the crowd. She probably thought she’d be able to tell the guards right where to find us, while we wandered around, eating kebabs or some shit.”
“So, what’s the plan instead?”
“To find a place to hide!”
“Hide?” I grabbed his arm, pulling him into the shade of a balcony someone had forgotten to roll up. It wasn’t much as a hiding place went, but at least it was off the street. “You know what the odds are of us avoiding them until morning?” I asked. “Or of making it back to the portal if we do?”
“You got a better idea?” he demanded. “Because I’m good—I’m real good—but I’m not going to be able to fight our way out of here!”
“Not on your own. But there’s somebody else here who knows the place at least as well as Rian.”
Caleb made a disgusted sound. “Casanova’s her creature. He’s also petrified of ruining that pretty face of his. Even if he didn’t turn traitor, we can’t rely on him to do a damned—”
“Not Casanova!” I said, because I pretty much agreed with that sentiment. “Pritkin.”
Caleb looked at me like I’d finally tipped the scales, like I’d been hovering in his mind between eccentric and downright nuts, and he’d finally decided where the arrow pointed. “And just how,” he said heavily, “do you expect us to reach him? The odds were bad enough before; any minute now, we’ll have the whole city on our asses!”
“But the city will expect us to be hiding, if we figured it out, or hanging around the souk if we didn’t. They won’t expect us to be going after Pritkin.”
“Yes, yes, that’s probably true. And there’s a reason for that,” Caleb hissed. And then he abruptly pulled up the hood on my robe.
“What—”
“Don’t look behind you, but a bunch more guards just ran into the souk.”
So much for any lingering faith I had in Rian. Goddamnit! If she had a neck, I’d wring it, I thought, glaring through the space under his arm at a bunch of guards who were pulling off veils and jerking robes apart and generally acting like none of the people had any damned rights at—
My thoughts screeched to a halt, just like something else had recently. Something else that was still poking out of a ruined shop front. Because around here, you were either a have or a have-not, and it looked like the haves could do whatever the hell they damned well pleased.
And nobody questioned it.
“Come on,” I told Caleb. “I have an idea.”
“You’d think we’d get more for a fine camel thing than that,” I grumbled at Caleb, ten minutes later.
“Ever since the XP-38 came out, they’re just not in demand.”
“What?”
“You don’t get cultural references, do you?”
I frowned. “I get them. You just have weird ones.”
“That was from Star Wars. It wasn’t weird.”
“I’ve seen Star Wars and that wasn’t in it.”
“In the first movie, when they’re in the desert?” he asked. “When they have to sell Luke’s speeder?”
“Oh. You mean the old ones.”
“The old ones? The old ones? You mean the only good—” He saw my expression. “Never mind. What did we need more money for?”
“So I could get an outfit like yours,” I said, looking enviously at the rich green woolly fabric of his long, caftanlike garment. It was warm. It was attractive. It covered his ass.
“What’s wrong with the one you have on?”
“Other than the fact that I look like a hooker?”
I tugged at the back of the tight pink panties I was wearing, but it didn’t help. They were still at least two sizes too small and riding up my butt. But they’d been the closest thing the merchant we picked had that we could afford. And we hadn’t had time to comparison shop.
Of course, it didn’t matter if you were in a nice, all-encompassing robe like Caleb’s. It was a little more problematic when it came to sexy slave girl attire, particularly when the only thing I had on besides the ass-baring panties was a pair of diaphanous, slit-up-to-heaven harem pants and a top that wasn’t covering as much as my bra had. But it was the pants that were really bothering me for some reason.