Embrace the Night (Cassandra Palmer 3)

“We don’t need a warrior,” I said irritably. “I’m not planning to attack the Circle!”

“And your plans always work out perfectly, huh?”

“Are you trying to be a pain in the ass?”

“Nope, it pretty much comes naturally.” He lit up and regarded me through a haze of ghostly smoke. “There’s always Marlowe.”

He meant Kit Marlowe, the onetime Elizabethan playwright. He was now the Consul’s chief spy. “Yeah, that’d be healthy.”

“You’d be saving Mircea as well as yourself. I’d think that would cancel a few debts,” Billy argued.

“It might, if they didn’t blame me for getting him into this mess in the first place.”

“But he put the geis on you—”

“Which, as my master, he had every right to do. I’m the one who had no right to double it, even accidentally.” I saw the objection trembling on Billy’s lips. “And yes, I think their reasoning sucks. I’m just saying.”

“I don’t like them any better than you do.” Billy sounded aggrieved. “But who else is there? We keep meeting these powerful types, but they’re all freaking nuts.”

“I’m not taking anyone back in time I can’t trust. Or anyone incompetent. Or who has their own agenda.”

Billy let out an exasperated sigh. “It’s gonna be a little hard to assemble a team if you keep to those kind of standards. Someone loyal and strong who doesn’t want anything? Come on.”

I found myself getting furious all over again at Pritkin, who was supposed to be exactly that. I’d started to let down my guard with him, just because he was smart and brave and sometimes strangely funny. I should’ve kept in mind that none of that meant he was on my side. When I give my word, I keep it, he’d once told me. Yeah, right.

I toyed with the bedspread, blue and gold brocade with scratchy lace. Not for the first time, I wished for something less flashy and more comfortable. I’d had a soft cotton coverlet at Tony’s that I’d used for years. It had faded in the wash, its bright, cheap flowers turning to soft pastels over time, like an English garden. It had gotten a little ragged around the edges, but I’d never let my fastidious governess change it for anything else. I’d liked it the way it was, flaws and all. But like the rest of my stuff, like Eugenie herself, it no longer existed.

“Cass?” Billy suddenly sounded awkward, something almost novel for him. “You know Pritkin was a jerk, right?” A jerk who also happened to be a friend, a tiny voice at the back of my mind whispered. Stop it, stop it. “Cass?”

The lump in my throat had grown enough to be almost painful, and my eyes had started prickling embarrassingly, and wow, was it time for a change of subject. “I know.”

“Okay, then. We’re better off. I never trusted him.”

“I don’t trust anybody,” I said fervently. It was the only thing I was sure of these days.

“Anybody except me,” Billy corrected. “So what’s the plan?”

“I have to get the Codex,” I said, starting with the one thing on which there was no argument. Pritkin had said it wouldn’t help, but I guess I’d just seen how much I could believe him. “Only I can’t bring it back here. It’s been roaming around for over two hundred years; who knows what taking it out of the timeline would do?”

Billy looked confused for a moment, and then his eyes got wide. “You can’t be thinking what I think you’re thinking.”

I scowled at him. “If the mountain won’t go to Mohammed—”

“Mohammed wasn’t an insane master vamp!”

“Mircea’s not insane.” Not yet, anyway. “He’s…tormented.”

“Uh-huh. You’re going to drag a tormented master vampire along to burgle a dark mage stronghold?”

“You have a better idea?”

“Anything is a better idea!”

“Don’t yell.”

“Then start talking sense!” I threw the pillow at him, which did no good because it passed right on through. “That doesn’t change the fact that you’re crazy.”

I flopped back on the bed and threw an arm over my eyes. He was probably right, not that it made a difference. If I couldn’t take the spell to Mircea, I had no choice but to take Mircea to the spell. And I’d been saying just that morning that I wanted something to do. As last words went, they pretty much sucked.