He wasn’t buying it.
“We’re going to have a talk. Soon,” he promised.
“If it means you come back.” And in one piece.
“Mage Pritkin?” Someone called his name from somewhere off to the side, and he glanced their way.
“I have to go, Cassie.”
“Remember what I said about scent!” I said—to myself. Because the only thing in the mirror was my heat flushed face.
Damn it!
I got out of the tub. Instead of relaxed, I felt even worse than before, anxious and keyed up and worried and frustrated. And then it got worse.
I’d just finished drying off and was pulling my shorty nightgown over my head when what sounded like every hound in hell started howling. In a hurricane. Composed of fire trucks.
It was the worst noise I thought I’d ever heard, and came out of nowhere, almost making me jump out of my skin. I almost strangled myself fighting with the nightgown, finally pulled it down, and ran into my bedroom. Only to see—
“What the hell?”
I dodged back behind the bathroom door, and a moment later, something hit it like a fist, with an audible thump. Something that caused the new, freshly painted wood to crack and splinter and age. And a hole to eat its way right on through—presumably where the fist had landed.
“Cassie!” I heard Fred’s voice from outside, and my gut tightened.
“Stay out! It’s okay, just . . . don’t come in here,” I called, and laced my hand with the Pythian power. A lot of it, like a wad the size of a catcher’s mitt.
“What’s wrong?” Fred demanded.
“Nothing. Just a slight . . . ward malfunction,” I said, as what remained of my supposed protection ping ponged its way around my pretty new suite.Which was quickly becoming my pretty old suite, or at least pieces of it were, wherever that thing hit.
Damn it, what was wrong with it?
“I’ll keep ‘em out,” Fred said, and I sidled through the door, the mitt in front of me. And watched a golden ball slam into the carpet, where it dusted a hole in the custom blue and white swirl; into the ceiling, where a spreading brown stain ate it
s way over the plaster; into a chair that sagged and then crumbled into a pile of old wood; and finally—
“No!” I said, furious, as the ball of Pythian energy hit and then ran along my built ins, causing the books to explode in a storm of flying pages that disintegrated into nothing, like birds made out of dust. Right before finally slamming into my makeshift catcher’s mitt, where I squeezed and squeezed and squeezed, and choked it the hell out!
Maybe, I decided a few moments later, panting and winded and sweaty, I shouldn’t try doing any more wards for a while.
And then I looked up to see Fred with his arms stretched over the doorway, and behind him, a bevy of vampires, acolytes, and witches, with Hilde in the forefront.
She eyed me up—dripping hair, crumpled, backwards nightie, and boiling catcher’s mitt of power—and sighed. “Can’t you just play strip poker like everyone else?”
I threw them all out and went to bed.
Chapter Seventeen
I finally tore myself away from court the next afternoon, following hours of chair sitting and advice giving, the latter of which was useless because nobody cared. It amazed me how much the visitors to the Pythian Court were like the people I’d once read tarot for in a bar. They didn’t want advice, especially not the kind that required any work on their part. They wanted reassurance, or validation, or commiseration, or just to vent about things that they had no intention of changing.
It was infuriating.
It was also an example of the fact that Tami had been right, as usual. I didn’t need to spend so much time doing that. Not when I could be doing this.
I looked up at the giant, well-lit mansion in front of me, and smiled.
The Pythian Court in Vegas, where I’d ended up living because Mircea owned the hotel, was an aberration. For several centuries before me, the court had occupied a grand Georgian mansion in London, filled with marble and statuary and fine oil paintings and rugs, any one of which probably cost more than most houses. It was a gorgeous, if slightly intimidating pile, where Rhea had spent much of her childhood.