I got up abruptly, because I couldn’t stay still anymore. But it didn’t shut Billy up. Of course it didn’t. I’d never found anything that did.
“And even if, by some million-to-one chance, you were to get him out of there, what do you think would happen then?” he demanded. “It’s not like anything would change. He broke his parole, or whatever you want to call it. Rosier would just drag him back—”
“We don’t know that!”
“Yes, we do. Pritkin told you—”
“What he knew! But maybe he didn’t know everything,” I said, trying to pace and not being able to because of the damned glass. I kicked an arc of it out of the way and the shards flashed in the glow from outside for a moment, like licking flames.
“Oh. So you know more about hell than a guy who lived there.”
“No, but maybe my mother does!” I rounded on him. “She lived there, too, if the old legends were right. And for centuries! If there’s a loophole, she’ll know it!”
“And if there isn’t?”
“Then there isn’t,” I said, crossing my arms and glaring at him. “But until I hear that—from her—I’m not going to just give up. I can’t, Billy—don’t you get it?”
“Oh, I get it,” he muttered. “I’m just not sure that you do.”
“What does that mean?”
He shook his head. “Nothing. Just . . . nothing. But the fact remains, you can’t get to her to ask.”
I sat down on the bed, suddenly exhausted. It had been a long day at the end of a long week, and my chest hurt. I wanted to scream, to cry, to throw things, but I didn’t have the energy. I wanted to black out and find Pritkin there when I woke up. I wanted . .
God. Sometimes I didn’t even know.
“Not tonight,” I admitted, rubbing the back of my neck. If I hadn’t felt up to dealing with a few nosy witches, I sure couldn’t take whatever was guarding dear old Mom.
“Come back to the suite,” Billy told me softly. “Before you give Marco a heart attack. Get some rest. Tomorrow . . . maybe things will look different.”
In other words, tomorrow maybe I’d come to my senses.
“Yeah, maybe,” I said, because I didn’t want to argue anymore.
Billy nodded, and winked out, looking relieved. Which did exactly nothing to make me feel better. Despite the way he’d been sounding lately, Billy Joe wasn’t the timid type. Billy Joe had been a high-stakes gambler in life, until he ended up in a sack at the bottom of the Mississippi for cheating the wrong guys. When Billy thought something was too risky . .
Well, let’s just say the odds weren’t great.
And it wasn’t like everything he’d said wasn’t true. But so was something he hadn’t bothered to mention. That if our positions were reversed, Pritkin would have come after me. Whether I’d liked it or not, whether I’d wanted him to risk it or not, he wouldn’t have just left me there. It probably wouldn’t even have crossed his mind. I knew that, with more certainty than I knew which direction the sun would rise tomorrow.
So how could I just leave him?
I curled up on his messy bed, and even after a week, the sheets still smelled good. Like soap and gunpowder and magic. I lay there, staring at the ceiling, and didn’t cry. Because it was weak, and I couldn’t afford to be weak.
And because you only cried for people who weren’t coming back.
And that wasn’t the case here, no matter how it looked. I had to get to him, had to get him away from his loathsome father, had to find a way to keep him. And for that, I had to get to my mother.
Somehow.
But it had been a week, and so far, I hadn’t even managed that first step. I’d exhausted myself flipping around through time like a crazy woman. I’d been chased by guards through the old Pythian Court, almost gotten myself run over in London, been shot at by Tony’s thugs. And for what? I was no closer to finding Pritkin than I’d been a week ago.
When he left me.
Chapter Five
“The Star . . ”
A soft chime woke me.
“The Star . . . The Star . . . The Star . . ”
A soft, annoying chime.
I groaned and rolled over, because it was too damned early, and the chime suddenly became more muffled. “The Star . . . The Star . . . The Star . . ”
I groaned again and sat up.
“The Star is universally considered to be the most beautiful card in the tarot,” a smug voice informed me, from somewhere underneath my butt. “It is also one of the most fortunate, although not, perhaps, in the way that many people would prefer. The Star—”
I fumbled around, groggy and still half-asleep, and didn’t find anything.
“—indicates that success is possible, but only in time and through great effort. The Star shines in the night sky, a beacon of light in a dark world, pulling the querent forward onto a heroic quest—”
I felt something stuck to the back of my leg. I peeled it off and brought it up to my bleary eyes. And saw a small rectangle with a night scene, a garden, and a naked chick with a jug.
“—worthy of an equally great reward,” the little tarot card burbled at me. “Should the querent survive—”
“Survive?”
“—the undoubted dangers, snares, and, at times, mortal perils that lie in the way, the reward will be as sweet as the clear, cold water the lovely maiden pours into the pool reflecting the starlight. And if not—”
“What?” I croaked. “What if not?”
“—then one will have the knowledge that one fell in pursuit of an admirable goal,” the card said, its small voice rising passionately. “The heavens shall sing praises of your bravery, as they do for the heroes for which the constellations are named, and your renown shall echo down the ages to—”
“Oh, shut up,” I said viciously, fumbling around on the nightstand for the card pack. And not finding it. Great, I thought, and rolled off the bed.
But not mine.
I hit the floor, blinking at the god-awful coverlet that had half fallen off with me. Instead of tufted satin, it was one of the scratchy, cheapo kind the hotel reserved for rooms priced at less than a trip to Tahiti. And instead of a tasteful pale blue, it had a full-on Halloween theme in yellow, black, and gray, with a ghostly moon caged by the branches of a gaunt and lifeless tree.
Shit.
I must have accidentally fallen asleep in Pritkin’s room, instead of dragging my weary butt back to my own bed. And wasn’t that just going to get me blessed out by Marco? Of course, I was kind of surprised that it hadn’t already, since I knew damned well the vamps kept a tracking spell on me. I’d had Pritkin take it off a few times, but it always ended up right back in place, usually within an hour or two. And since he’d been gone for a week, it was safe to assume that they knew exactly where—
I’d hauled myself to my feet, in preparation for getting my shit together, but tripped over something and went right back down again. Only this time I hit the carpet beside a pair of dirty boots. They were old, with massive soles and scratched leather uppers, at least what I could see through a coating of mud. It was so thick that the steel cap over the toes was barely visible.
Huh. That’s weird, some tiny, more awake part of my brain commented. But it didn’t explain why.
I sat up and frowned at them some more.
There was nothing particularly odd about them, except for the mud, which wasn’t exactly common in Vegas. But they were the kind Pritkin wore, useful for caving in doors or bad guy’s faces, and had been thrown in his usual haphazard fashion under the bed. Or beside it, but the dust ruffle had obscured most of them. Which maybe explained why I hadn’t—
Okay, that was it. They weren’t weird, but the fact that I hadn’t noticed them last night was. Especially since I should have been able to smell them a couple of yards off. I wrinkled my nose at the locker room funk and pushed them to the side. And peered into the gloom beyond for the damned card pack, while a cheerful voice began to regale me with fun facts about the Star card.
That was bad, but if I didn’t shut it up, it was going to segue into the possible meanings of the card in combination with others. And then into how it should be read in the different spreads. And if I remembered right, that would be followed by the whole history of the tarot, which could go on for literally hours before it finally wound down. And the way I felt, a migraine was going to explode my left eye long before then.
After a fruitless search, I surfaced, gasping from a combo of boot funk and dust bunnies, and started sorting through the jumbled bedclothes for the pack that simply had to be there somewhere. But I didn’t see it. Maybe because it was hard to see anything in the wash of sunshine pouring in through the curtains.
I stopped and blinked at them.
The suddenly wide-open curtains.
The suddenly wide-open curtains that were being reflected in the mirror over the dresser.
And okay, no. That mirror had been in about a thousand pieces all over the floor last night. I mean, I couldn’t be wrong about that, right? I’d stepped in the remains, and even kicked some when—
My brain came to a screeching halt as three things happened simultaneously. My eyes wandered over the view beyond the bed, which was noticeably lacking in broken glass, destroyed furniture, or ominous stains. My nose registered a complete dearth of potion residue. And my ears pricked up at a small, new sound.
A sound like the beep of a key card tripping an automatic lock.
My head jerked around to see the doorknob start to turn, and I tried to shift. But my fuzzy brain wasn’t having it. Instead, it had gone into flight mode all right, but for some reason it had decided that the path to safety involved me trying to squash myself into the few inches of space under the bed. Only I couldn’t because the damned boots were in the way. And by the time I shoved them aside, thrust the still-talking tarot card down my shirt, realized there was already something wedged in between my breasts, crammed the card into the top of a small, greasy package I found there, and started stuffing myself past the dust ruffle . .