“A lot of people are part one thing, part another—”

“But most of them don’t bother to cover up large areas of their past. Yet despite all of Kit’s efforts, he has been unable to discover anything about the man before the last century—”

“Because he wasn’t born then!”

“We both know that isn’t the case.”

I didn’t say anything. Mircea had recently seen Pritkin on a trip we’d taken back in time. And while mages tended to live a century or more longer than most humans, it was kind of hard to explain why he’d aged maybe five years in a couple hundred.

Of course, I didn’t intend to try. I didn’t think that explaining that Pritkin had been in hell for much of his life was likely to make him seem more trustworthy.

“I would like you to consider dismissing the man,” Mircea said suddenly. It caught me off guard, which I suspected was the point.

“I can’t do that.”

“Cassie—”

“I need him,” I said flatly. “If he hadn’t been training me, I might have died—”

“Or you might not have been in danger at all. Have you noticed that your problems with demonkind always seem to come when the warlock is around?”

“What are you suggesting?”

“That perhaps he is the source of the threat, rather than its solution.”

“That’s ridiculous!”

“Is it? I know only that every time you have trouble with demons, he is there.”

“He’s my bodyguard! He’s supposed to be—”

“You have bodyguards.”

“Yeah, only I think most of them would like a new assignment. And this wasn’t a demon.”

“According to him.”

“Well, I trust him!”

Pause number four. “And I do not.”

And there it was, as plain as any challenge ever given. And to underscore it, as if anything else was needed, Marco quietly took the phone out of my hand and put it in his back pocket. His expression said clearly that it wasn’t coming out again.

All right, then.

The doorbell rang.

I glanced around the room. One thing about Vegas hotels, especially those built before the widespread use of cell phones, is that they put land lines everywhere. Busy executives needed instant access to the empires they were gambling away and wouldn’t stay anywhere that didn’t offer it. As a result, there were no fewer than three telephones in sight—one in the living room, one in the bar and one sitting on the counter in the kitchen.

And a vamp was casually loitering near every one of them.

Okay, then.

I turned on my heel and went back to my room.

Unsurprisingly, there was no cell phone in my purse. I hadn’t really expected one. When a master vampire gave an order, his men were thorough in carrying it out. And Marco had never been a slouch. But there were things that a vamp might not notice, especially one who had been around as long as he had.

I went back to the bathroom, turned on the exhaust fan and the shower and blasted Led Zeppelin from the built-in radio.

Vampires don’t use bathrooms all that much, especially the toilet facilities. And, of course, housekeeping kept the place clean. As a result, I was willing to bet that the guys outside had never bothered to so much as crack the door on the toilet cubicle.

And then I knew they hadn’t, when I opened it and saw what I’d expected—yet another phone, this one mounted on the wall. It was big and kind of complicated-looking, like something that ought to have been on the desk of an executive secretary, not sitting above the toilet-tissue dispenser. But it was there, and when I lifted the receiver, I got a dial tone.

Pritkin picked up on the first ring, like he’d been expecting a call. “Do you still have Jonas’s keys?” I asked quietly.

There was silence for a beat, as if he hadn’t been expecting that. But he recovered fast. “See what I can do.”

He hung up and so did I. After waiting another few minutes, I turned off the water and went back to my room. I couldn’t change clothes, because somebody might notice. But I put on a bra, jammed my feet into an old pair of Keds and shoved some cash and my keys into my pocket. Then I went back into the lounge.

The guys were still playing poker, quietly now, as there was no need to keep up audible patter for the human. So they didn’t fall silent when I entered and picked up my half-finished beer. But ten pairs of eyes watched as I made my way across to the living room and then to the balcony.

The wind chimes were tinkling in the breeze blowing off the desert. It was hot, but after the deep freeze the vamps had going on inside, it felt good. I hung over the rail and drank my beer and waited.

“Is there a problem?” Marco asked, sticking his head out the door.

“Need some air.”

He looked at me suspiciously, but I guess his orders stopped short of actually confining me to my room. He went back to the game, and I went back to my beer. I hadn’t even finished it when my ride showed up.

“Best I could do on short notice,” Pritkin told me, grabbing my arm as I scrambled over the railing. And into the front seat of a beat-up green convertible that was idling in the air twenty stories up.

“No problem,” I told him, hanging on for dear life as the rattletrap belched smoke into the startled faces of half a dozen vamps, who had taken a fraction of a second too long to figure out what was going on.

“Cassie!” I heard Marco’s infuriated bellow behind me. But by then we were out of there, soaring away into the star-shot indigo high above the Strip.

Chapter Twenty-two

“You coldhearted son of a bitch.”

Pritkin looked up from perusing the stained piece of paper posing as a menu and gave me what he probably thought were innocent eyes. They weren’t. I didn’t think that was an expression he was all that familiar with. “Is there a problem?”

“You feed me tofu while you’ve been eating here?” I gestured around at the cracked Formica, orange Naugahyde and grimy windows of what had to be the greasiest greasy spoon in Vegas.

“No one eats healthy all the time.”

“That’s not what you always say!”

“And do you listen to what I say?”

“Yes.” He just looked at me. “Sometimes.”

“Which is the point. If I told you to eat well merely most of the time, then you’d do it occasionally at best.”

I started to reply to that, and then realized I didn’t have one. “So why bring me here now?”

“Because some days, everyone needs pizza.”

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.