Karen Chance - Embrace the Night

"There's a bounty?"

"Half a million euros." His smile grew. "You are about to make me rich."

"Half a million? Are you kidding me? I'm the Pythia. I'm worth way more than that."

He took out a gun, a Sig Sauer P210, which I recognized because of the shooting lessons Pritkin had been giving me. My aim wasn't any better, but I could identify all kinds of guns now. Even the one about to kill me.

"I'm a simple man," Manassier said, "with simple needs. Half a million will do nicely."

It figured that I'd get the nongreedy crook. I swallowed a crazy urge to laugh. "You don't have to shoot me," I gasped. "I can't hold on much longer anyway."

"Yes, but if you slip, the Circle may say you died of natural causes and not pay the bounty. And then all this was for nothing."

"Yeah. That'd be a shame."

He clicked the safety off. "Now hold still and this won't hurt."

"That would be a nice change." My body felt like it weighed a ton, my arms were liquid with fatigue, and my shoulders were aching in their sockets. It would be such a relief to just let go.

So I did.

I heard him yell something in French and felt a bullet whiz by my head, but it was unimportant because I was falling, and there was nothing to hold on to, just sliding dirt and limestone rocks crumbling beneath my hands. My arms flailed wildly, grasping for the one thing I had to find, but for a long second I felt only air. Then my fingers collided with something warm and alive and I grabbed it and we were both falling. There was a dizzying rush of air and my power wouldn't come and all I could think was that I'd killed us both—then my brain whited out and my heart tried to stop and reality twisted and bent around us.

And we tumbled into a casino lobby half a world away.

I hadn't judged things perfectly because of the whole abject terror thing, and we fell from about four feet above the ground. Pritkin hit the floor first, with a pained grunt, with me clinging to his back. And then everything got incredibly still for a minute, as it always did whenever I survived something insanely dangerous and really stupid. The fact that I recognized the phenomenon probably meant it had happened a few too many times. I lay there quivering, hearing an upsurge in the polite babble of the guests and not caring. All I could think was, oh, thank God, I didn't kill us.

After a stunned moment, I coughed hard and rolled off. My face was dusty, my palms were scraped raw and I was panting and limp. Various muscle groups were twitching at random, seizing up with tight bursts of pain and then releasing. I felt like bursting into tears and screaming in triumph all at the same time.

Pritkin finally groaned and sat up. He was pale and sweating profusely, with damp hair plastered to his forehead. He had cuts on his face and hands and burns on his forearm.

I wanted to touch him, to reassure myself that we'd both actually survived, but I didn't dare. A gal could lose a hand that way. So I just stared at him instead, so glad to be alive that my aching back and trembling arms and ferocious headache hardly registered at all. "That was fun," I croaked. "Only, not."

Pritkin hauled me into a sitting position, one dirty, scarred hand cupping the back of my neck. "Are you all right?" His voice was sharp and biting, with a slightly panicked edge.

"I told you to stop asking—"

He shook me, and despite it being one-handed, it made my teeth rattle. "If anything like that ever happens again. You. Leave. Me. Behind. Do you understand?"

I would have argued, but I was feeling a little shocky for some reason. "I'm not good at abandoning people," I finally said.

A front-desk person scurried over, first-aid kit in hand, but Pritkin snarled at the poor guy and he quickly backed up a step. "Then get good at it!"

He stomped off, limping, one shoulder hanging at an odd angle. "You're welcome," I murmured.

Pritkin and I had landed at Dante's, Vegas' cross between a haunted house and a casino. It was currently what he referred to as our base of operations and I called our hideout. And, as hiding places went, it ranked pretty high. Not only was it a well-warded, vampire-run property, but we'd recently helped to trash a large piece of it. It seemed unlikely that many of our enemies would think to look for us there. At least, that was the plan.

I was sitting in Purgatory, the lobby bar, the next afternoon, trying to scalp a shrunken head, when a vampire walked in. He was swathed in a dark cloak and hood that would have looked theatrical anywhere else, but the prickle at the base of my spine told me what he was. It looked like the plan pretty much sucked.

I watched him out of the corner of my eye while I finished dissecting the head. The clump of matted black hair finally came off more or less intact. I put down the piece of molded plastic I'd been working on and picked up the real deal, which was perched on an overturned ashtray nearby. It glared at me balefully out of one shriveled, raisinlike eye. "I can't believe it's come to this," it complained. "Somebody kill me now."

"Somebody already did."

"That's cold, blondie."

I put the long ponytail onto its wrinkled skin and adjusted it. The head, rumored to have belonged to a gambler who had welshed on the wrong bet, usually took orders at the zombie bar upstairs. It was currently unemployed, courtesy of a fire that had raged out of control for almost an hour. The head had somehow survived, except for its hair.

I felt kind of responsible—the Circle's war mages had set the blaze while attempting to barbecue me—so I had been trying to replace its singed locks with some taken from one of the fakes sold as souvenirs at the gift shop. Dante's isn't known for the high quality of its merchandise, ensuring that I'd spent an hour sorting through about a hundred heads, trying to find a good match. Not that my help seemed to be appreciated.

"I can't go around looking like this!" it said sourly as I reached for the superglue. "I'm the main attraction here. I'm the star!"

"It's either this or I scalp Barbie," I threatened. "They don't make wigs in your size."

"Sweetheart, they don't make anything in my size. And it's never stopped me before."

"I don't even want to know what that means," I said honestly.

The vampire was now scanning the crowded tables. Maybe he was here for a drink or a quick game of craps, but I doubted it. I'd recently turned down an offer of employment from the Vampire Senate, something that isn't generally considered healthy. The surprise wasn't that they'd sent someone to restate their offer in more emphatic terms, but that it had taken them this long.

I watched a harried-looking waitress, dressed in a few black straps and thigh-high boots, move forward to greet the new arrival. She walked like her arches hurt, which was probably the case. Bondage chic was Purgatory's shtick, chosen to match the name, but it wasn't made for eight-hour shifts on your feet. I could testify to that personally, having spent several days literally in her shoes.

The idea was to hide in plain sight. At least that's what Casanova, the casino's manager, had claimed. I suspected he just wanted the free help.

Casanova's master was Antonio, a Philadelphia crime boss better known as Tony, although his name these days was mud for crossing his own master—who happened to be Mircea. Among other things, Tony'd tried to have me killed, which would have seriously interfered in Mircea's plans. Not being the forgiving type, Mircea had confiscated everything Tony owned, including the casino and its manager. Before being sidelined by the geis, he'd ordered Casanova to assist me, but hadn't given specifics. As a result, Casanova's «assistance» had taken the form of a lot of fill-in jobs for which I'd yet to see a paycheck.