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I spent the rest of the day in bed, hurting so much that even relaxing my muscles made them ache. It was hard to believe I could be this sore and live. I wasn’t sure if it was because of the attack or the whole stopping-time thing. My predecessor had died shortly after pulling that trick for the last time, which maybe should have told me something. For whatever reason, my whole body felt like one big bruise.
My mental state wasn’t much better. When I finally managed to sleep, my dreams were full of Pritkin’s face, wearing a brilliant and unguarded grin, which alone was enough to weird me out, since it wasn’t an expression I’d ever seen in real life. Then it began to sag, with waxlike rivulets of flesh running down his cheekbones to drip off his chin, eyes rolling in their sockets, the sunny grin fading to a skeletal grimace. I woke up in a cold sweat.
I stared at the patterns the bedside light made on my ceiling, consciously slowing my runaway heartbeat. This isn’t me, I told myself furiously. My breath doesn’t catch unless I tell it to. I don’t think about things I don’t want to. And I don’t scream like a little girl over a freaking nightmare. I breathed in and out for a few minutes, nice and steady, until my breath was calm without my having to work for it.
Then the door opened and Pritkin was there, staring at me. There was a sudden rumbling, rushing noise and a soft rustle of air. I screamed like a little girl.
He leapt into the room, snatched me off the bed and threw me to the floor, covering my body with his own and tucking his head down. I waited for the sickening lethargy to settle in, for the horrible sucking sensation on my power to start, but nothing happened. After a minute, the whirring noise shut off. I started to feel my face burn, despite being pressed against the cold concrete floor.
“Not that I’m not grateful for being protected from the air conditioner,” I mumbled, “but can I get up now?”
Pritkin released me, helped me back to bed, and vanished. Which was just as well. I still didn’t have the faintest idea what to say to him.
I went back to sleep like a person falling off a cliff, and didn’t dream. But by midnight, I’d slept as much as I was going to and had hit the point where boredom had overtaken aches and pains. I sat up, feeling thirsty, sweaty, and groggy. The mirror showed me a pale, washed-out version of myself, with an impression of the blanket’s weave on the left side of my face. But after a very hot shower, food and four aspirin, I went to find some answers.
Pritkin wasn’t at the scene of the crime. The glass had been swept up, though, and the opening had been covered with a sheet of heavy plastic printed to look like the once beautiful window. I assumed it was there as a placeholder, so that at least from the outside, everything looked semi-normal despite the chaos within. I could kind of relate.
I’d have liked a different perspective on things, but Billy was off duty, crashing in my necklace to soak up whatever energy it had managed to accumulate. The gold and ruby monstrosity, which was so ugly I usually wore it inside my clothes, was a talisman, storing magical energy from the natural world and feeding it to him in small doses. It was enough to allow him to remain active but was never as much as he’d have liked. I usually supplemented it from my own reserves, but at the moment I didn’t have any.
I went looking for the only other person who might know anything and found him glaring at the slots on level two. I thought from Casanova’s expression that someone must have just hit one of the big jackpots, but no. It was worse.
By then it was after one in the morning, but that’s prime time for Dante’s. So I’d thought it a little odd that fully a third of the main salon was empty, with row after row of forlorn slot machines silently begging to be petted, to be loved, and to be fed money. Then I’d rounded a corner and seen that there was, in fact, a good reason for their isolation.
Two of the three ancient demigoddesses known to myth as the Graeae were in residence. They looked harmless—short, wrinkled, and blind—except for Deino, who currently had the one eye they all shared. It must have been her lucky day, because when she grinned and gave me a little finger wave, I saw that she was also sporting their only tooth.
I’d accidentally helped to release the gals from their long imprisonment recently, which had made them my servants until they each saved my life. Considering how often I get into trouble, that hadn’t taken long. Now they were free and able, as Pritkin had put it, “to terrorize mankind again” unless I could trap them.
It was something that I absolutely intended to get around to one of these days, only it had slipped farther and farther down the to-do list lately, displaced by more-pressing crises. Françoise had volunteered to take it on for me, as a way of saying thanks for getting her semi-regular employment. I’d felt a twinge of guilt from involving her in a mess that, no matter what spin I put on it, was all mine. But frankly, a powerful witch would likely have better luck dealing with the Graeae than I would.
Not that she seemed to be doing much at the moment. She was watching them narrowly, but making no obvious attempt to trap them. She caught my eye and shrugged. “Zey ’ave a bond.”
“What?”
“A metaphysical bond,” Casanova snapped. “It causes magic to treat them as a single entity.”
I watched the gals while I absorbed that. Pemphredo was nowhere in sight, but Enyo was playing nickel blackjack and Deino was beside her, standing on a stool. She was gutting a poker machine, systematically strewing its mechanical innards all over the psychedelic carpeting. I guess she hadn’t been happy with the payoff.
I decided I needed a little more information. “So?”
Casanova tapped the small black box Françoise held in one hand. It was a magical snare that, despite its size, was perfectly capable of trapping and holding the Graeae—one just like it had once imprisoned them for centuries. “The spell,” Casanova repeated, less than patiently, “needed to get them in here and out of my hair?”
“Yeah.”
“For some reason it sees the gruesome grandmas over there as three parts of a single whole, which maybe they are, for all I know. Unless they are all present, they simply don’t register as being here at all, at least not to the spell. And they’ve figured out that we’re trying to trap them.”
“So they make sure that one’s always missing.” I finished for him. “But that doesn’t explain why they’re here in the first place. If they know we’re after them—”
“They’re staking me out,” Casanova muttered.
“What?”
“They were meant to be warriors, and I think they find Vegas a little tame for their tastes. Something it rarely is around here anymore,” he said, shooting me a dark glance. “They know that if all Hell is going to break loose anywhere, it’ll be here. So they Just. Never. Leave.”
“Speaking of Hell,” I said, but he brushed me off.
“Don’t even start. There’s nothing I can do.”