Brave the Tempest (Cassandra Palmer 9)

Strongly suspected, I thought, eyeing the Greek key designs on the tiles in my huge, basin-­like tub as I drew a bath.

They matched the blue border on the white tiled floor and the mosaics of fish and weird-­looking dolphins around the sink area. There were more dolphins in the mural in the attached dressing room, frolicking in a crystal blue sea visible through ivy-­covered, painted columns, which looked like it had been taken from a postcard of Santorini. It hadn’t. I knew that because I knew who’d commissioned it. So it was probably the view off Alexandria or something, the way it had been two thousand years ago.

Because the mind behind my luxurious new bathroom, and the rest of this place, was no less than the ­consul of the North American Vampire Senate. She looked like Cleopatra if she’d had a modern makeover, maybe because she was Cleopatra with a modern makeover. Some vamps’ histories could really play with your head.

But she was still around and more powerful than ever, and sometime after I ended up Pythia against everybody’s expectations, and then further surprised them by managing not to die, she’d realized that one of two things was going to happen. I was going to end up back in Britain, where the Pythian Court had resided for a while—­and thus back under the thumb of the Circle, who had their main base of operations there. Or . . . she needed to get busy.

So she had, booting me out of my old penthouse, which had stood in a fraction of this huge new space, and then gutting it along with the rest of the floor. The reason given was that her former local abode—­at MAGIC, the supernatural version of a United Nations—­had been an early casualty in the war. She’d therefore had no choice but to move in here and create a mansion for herself and the army

of servants she supposedly needed.

But despite my blond hair, I’m not completely dumb. And I’d noticed that, once she’d finished the place, she and the rest of the crew had flitted off back to New York, where she had a truly palatial estate near the Catskills, and where she’d remained. I’d be surprised if she’d spent more than a week rattling around in here.

So why go to all the trouble?

Call me evil-­minded—­comes from spending too much time around vamps—­but it had occurred to me that maybe, just maybe, my ending up here had been the idea all along.

I wasn’t from Britain; I didn’t know anybody there. But I was fond of Vegas. I liked the gorgeous desert ­sunsets I saw from my windows at night, the palette of soft reds and dark purples, and of orange, yellow, and flashes of jade that painted the skies every evening, only to come back for an even more spectacular show in the morning.

I liked the people, everybody from the native Nevadans, with their rugged individualism and practicality, to the crazy transplants from all over, to the always surprising denizens of Dante’s, the hotel and casino I called home. It was a vamp-­owned property with the best wards around, so it had become the senate’s local outpost after MAGIC ended up a glass slick in the desert. Back in the bad old days, when I was hiding out here, pretending to be a casino employee while it felt like everybody in the world was gunning for my head, I’d spent hours listening to the stories they told.

I’d met a woman who’d had a little bar in El Paso where she’d served the likes of Billy the Kid, Wild Bill Hickok, and the assassin Jim Miller—­and seen the steel plate he wore, like an early version of Kevlar, under his famous black coat.

I’d met the Mad Monk, one of the first Jesuits to arrive in California, who was hanged by his order for babbling about fanged demons in the desert and trying to bite the brothers. He could still show you the rope marks. They’d never faded, because the hanging had taken place during his Change.

I’d met a Native American bootlegger and stagecoach robber named Sadie Skull, after the tattoo that covered her entire face. She usually hid it with a glamourie these days, but could drop it in an instant and scare the ever-­loving crap out of you. And then laugh and laugh and buy you a beer.

I’d met a pair of Chinese Siamese twins who’d run a successful chain of laundries back in the day—­bought with profits from a series of train robberies that they’d somehow convinced the authorities had been done by some other pair of Siamese twins.

I even liked the city itself, in all its glitz and glamour and tacky wonderfulness, which shouldn’t even be here because this was the middle of the desert, where nothing was supposed live except for some desert hares and parched-­looking bushes. It had no business being where it was or doing what it was doing. Yet it was here anyway, just like I was. We fit.

And the consul knew that.

Which is why I found it suspicious that the perfect ­Pythian Court, complete with plenty of rooms for the girls, a formal audience chamber, a ballroom, a library, a massive dining room and kitchen, a huge master suite, big open common rooms, and a large outdoor garden and pool area—­which, until Tami got hold of it, had featured actual Greek statuary—­just happened to be left empty right freaking above me.

Of course, the consul hadn’t invited us to occupy it, oh, my, no. Vampires, especially vampires as old as her, never did anything so obvious, and if they did, you’d better run. No, she just vacated it once the reno was complete, leaving it for my very competent housemother/majordomo/I-­am-­the-­captain-­now Tami to notice.

Which she shortly had, and moved us in while I was away.

Tami was so proud of her find that I hadn’t had the heart to tell her that she’d been manipulated. It wasn’t a problem in itself; I liked the place overall, and was glad to have it. But it didn’t bode well for the future.

It didn’t bode well at all.

Someone tapped on the partly open door from the bedroom while I was trying to decide between mango madness and papaya passion bath bombs. I said to heck with it, chucked in both, and stuck my head out the door. And found Rhea standing there with a tray.

“Tami thought you might like lunch,” she told me. “Hilde said you didn’t have any.”

“No, we were afraid we’d get kicked out if we stopped moving.” I lifted up the fancy cover. Tami had found the dinner service of the gods when we moved in and had fallen in love with the antique Victorian food domes. She put them on everything now, even when the tray wasn’t going far enough to need one. But it did a wonder for capturing aromas.

Like off the homemade cassoulet that I guess everybody had had for lunch.

My stomach grumbled plaintively. “Hot damn.”

Rhea laughed. I used to shock her with my occasional colorful language, but after being around the guys for weeks now, she was immune. “I’ll put it on the table, shall I?”

I nodded. “I’ll be out in a few.”

I shucked my clothes and eased into the bath, which was too hot but felt amazing on my tired muscles. And tried to just zone out for a few minutes, because this was the best part of my day. The tub was huge and had more tech in it than the space station. I’d spent half an hour when I first moved in playing with the water jets and the different-­colored lights. I’d finally settled on blue, because it was soothing, and it matched the décor.