And ran into Marco, who was coming in. “Let’s do this,” he told me quietly. “I’m running out of jokes.”
“You could always feed them.”
A lip curled. “If we feed them, they’ll stay longer.”
“Not if the quality of the cuisine is anything like last time,” the Valkyrie said, from across the room. “Or was that deliberate?”
She sank a ball.
Marco looked at me.
Enhanced hearing, I mouthed.
The wards are supposed to stop things like that, he mouthed back.
“And your wards are shit,” the witch added, causing Marco to mutter something. “I heard that.”
I sighed and walked over.
“At least most of them are,” she amended, leaning on her stick and watching me. “There was a bastardized fey spell that gave us some trouble, mainly from us not expecting it.”
“Woven with holly all around,” the small witch added, in a singsong. “Shot through with sunlight and lightened by air, call on water, call on fire, call on wind—protect, protect, protect.” She took a swig of her beer. “Three elements are a bitch.”
“But we got past it,” her companion added. “Mainly from your lot not maintaining it.”
“The guy who usually does is out of town,” I said evenly.
“Well, you need to get him back.”
“Working on it.” Although it would be easier to do that if they’d go away, so I could track down Casanova and find out what he knew about the council. But that didn’t appear to be happening. And since I’d already pissed off the witches as much as I dared, it looked like I was going to have to practice my diplomacy for a while.
“You play?” the Valkyrie asked, racking up another game, even though they’d barely started the last one.
I looked over at the little witch, who grinned at me toothily. “I’ll sit one out,” she offered.
I shrugged. “Okay.”
Marco looked surprised, probably because he’d never seen me play. Something about almost dying on a weekly basis took the fun out of it. “I used to work in a bar,” I reminded him.
“Doing what?” the Valkyrie demanded.
“Bar-backing. Bartending sometimes, when somebody called in. Mostly reading tarot.”
“The Pythia read tarot in a bar,” the witch said, as if she thought I was lying to her.
“I wasn’t Pythia then. And I like eating.”
“You must have been quite the draw,” she said dryly.
“Not really.” I paused as she lined up the break, which she’d taken without bothering to flip me for it. “Most people didn’t like what I had to tell them.”
“And what was that?”
“The truth.”
Her cue stuttered on the velvet, and she flubbed the break. She scowled at me, as if I’d done that deliberately. I fished the cue ball out of a corner pocket and tossed it to her. “Redo it.”
She looked surprised that I was giving away my advantage. But I wasn’t feeling real competitive right now. And I doubted they’d broken into my suite and trashed the lobby in order to play pool.
The witch racked ’em up and broke again, leaving herself a couple of easy shots to start with. She took one of them before looking up at me through a fringe of gray bangs. “Didn’t expect to find you so polite.”
“Why? Because I didn’t talk to you after you broke in here?”
“No. But we have plenty of other reasons. Care to hear them?”
By the tone in her voice, I had a feeling I was going to anyway. “Sure.” I walked over to the wall and chose a cue stick.
“You didn’t invite us to the coronation, despite the fact that the damned Circle were there—in force.” She sank her first shot with a savage little motion. “You haven’t sent us the usual greetings or otherwise acknowledged our existence, despite having more than enough time to do so.” She sank two balls with her second shot, clack-clack. “And you’re living with a bunch of goddamned vampires!” She attempted a tough bank shot, and missed—barely.
She swore and moved off, and I took her place. Because no way was I giving her a second advantage after that. I took a moment to size up the table.
“Who I live with is my business,” I said, chalking up. “And I didn’t send you greetings because I didn’t know I was supposed to.” Or that you existed, I didn’t add, because I decided it was barely possible that the head of a whole coven might have an ego. “As for the other, well, if it helps, I wasn’t invited, either.”
“Wasn’t invited to what?” she demanded as I bent over the table.
“My coronation.” I took the shot. It was an easy two ball in the side pocket. It went in—just. I was rusty.
“What do you mean, you weren’t invited?” the witch repeated, as if I wasn’t making sense. Which, okay. It hadn’t made much sense to me at the time, either.
“The Circle and the senate got together and decided it was too dangerous for me to be there with all the death threats I’ve been getting,” I explained. “So they moved the date up without telling me. I barely found out in time to make it.”
“They moved the date?” She still looked confused.
“And when I did show up, they threw me out.”
“Of what?”
I looked up from lining up my next shot, to find her frowning. “The building. Marlowe—that’s Kit Marlowe—”
“I know who he is!”
“Well, then you know he can be pretty . . . persuasive. Not that he bothered that night. He just pushed me onto the back steps and slammed the door. They had some chick pretending to be me, and it would have been awkward if there were two of us running around.”
The Valkyrie didn’t say anything, but her lips tightened perceptibly.
“Then why not shift back in?” Afro asked, dark eyes dancing. Like she was expecting to hear about some serious shit going down. Too bad I was about to disappoint her.
“Because they had the damned thing warded. Some weird spell that parked the house in the middle of a ley line, basically taking it out of this world. It looked like it was there, but as far as my power was concerned, it wasn’t. And I can’t shift into nothing.”
I sank the three ball easily, as her face fell.
“I’d have found a way to make them pay!” she declared, stamping the floor with a walking stick I hadn’t noticed before, but which it didn’t look like she needed. It was black and old and gnarly, but shined to a high gloss. Like the eyes that met mine defiantly.
“Too bad you weren’t there, then,” I said mildly. And sank the six as Jasmine wafted in, a highball in hand and Fred close behind her.
He was making weird faces and gestures at me, until he suddenly froze, one hand and one knee up, toes pigeoned and tongue lolling. He looked like he’d decided to join the Ministry of Silly Walks. He looked frankly demented. He looked like he was making fun of our guests, which was not likely to go down well.
And then he abruptly spun and ran out of the room, with the awkward gait and surprised look of a man who has a huge hand at the small of his back, helping him along. One look at Marco’s face, and I decided that was probably not far from the truth. I sighed.
I didn’t know what Fred’s problem was, but I didn’t try to follow. Because I had plenty of my own. Like the fact that all three witches were now looking at me judgmentally, especially the Valkyrie.
“You let the bloody Circle and a bunch of vampires push you around like that?” she demanded.
And okay, I’d had about enough. I opened my mouth to point out a few salient facts, but I didn’t get a chance. Because someone beat me to it.
“She killed a Spartoi!”
The voice had come from behind me, so I turned around. To see that the girl from the kitchen had decided to come shake in the doorway, instead of by the counter. Her face was still white, but there were two little spots of color high on her cheeks. She was either furious or about to pass out, and considering her actions so far, I knew which way I was betting.
“Move,” I told Marco softly.
He looked at me, halfway through a sip of his whiskey sour. “What?”
“Go to the living room or something.”
“Why?”
“Because I think you’re scaring her.”
He looked over at the girl and then back at me. “I’m just standing here.”
Yeah, that was the problem. Some vamps managed to pass as human, if you squinted, even without a glamourie. But Marco wasn’t one of them. It wasn’t the looks so much, although two hundred and fifty pounds of predator is not easily disguised by a pink golf shirt, or the casual slouch he affected when standing so he didn’t loom over people. But mainly, it was the ’tude. The guy could be smiling and he still looked like he could rip your throat out in less than a second.
It didn’t help that it happened to be true.
He’d never worried me, possibly because I’d grown up with Alphonse, a Marco clone except not as good looking. But I’d learned early on that, despite the fiction, vampires weren’t mindless predators and they didn’t kill for no reason. And anyway, the smallest, most ineffectual one imaginable—Fred, for instance—could wreak just as much damage on a human as Marco, so what difference did looks make? But most people didn’t see it that way, and in Marco’s case especially, I’d seen grown men flatten themselves against a wall when he walked by, instinctively dropping into prey mode, hoping they wouldn’t be noticed.
God only knew what effect he was having on a girl who apparently thought I was scary.
“Go on.” I pushed on him, which of course was useless. “Get me a drink.”
“You’ve got a drink.”
“And now I want another one.”
“You don’t need another one. You had an Irish coffee earlier—”