Tempt the Stars (7 page)

“What the hell was that?” I demanded shrilly.

“My abilities are triggered by strong emotion,” he said stiffly. “Whether mine or another’s.”

Incubus powers. No wonder I felt . . . like I felt. “No! I meant
that
,” I said, waving the arm that wasn’t busy keeping covered what little dignity I had left. “All the slamming and the knife waving and the . . . 
that
. What is
wrong
with you?”

“Nothing.” Accusatory green eyes met mine. “Other than the fact that the trace charm I have on you pinpoints your current location—five stories above our heads.”

Damn. I should have thought of that. The vamps weren’t the only ones who kept a tracking spell on me. Pritkin had his own to help him locate me in emergencies. But like all spells, it had to be renewed. And he hadn’t been around to do that lately.

Meaning that the only spell in this time frame was on the other me.

And that meant—

“Oh, holy crap!” I grabbed him with my free hand. “Did you talk to her?”

“About you? No. I merely called—”

“You
called
?” I shook him. “What did you
say
?”

He scowled. “I inquired how she was, and satisfied myself that it was in fact her. You. Damn it! Who
are
you?”

“Who do you think?” I said, sitting down on the window ledge, suddenly weak-kneed with relief.

God, if he’d said anything, and if that had caused me to do anything differently . . . But he hadn’t. He couldn’t have. Proof of that was the fact that I was still here instead of having my bones scattered all over a field somewhere.

“You’re from Cassandra’s future, aren’t you?” Pritkin demanded.

“Way to keep up,” I said, pushing wet hair out of my eyes. I looked up to find him glowering at me, but I was too far gone to care. “Look, I need something—”

“Evidently.”

“Don’t get all British on me,” I snapped as his accent went clipped. That usually precipitated a hissy fit, but I was already having one and we didn’t get to do that at the same time. “I need weapons. Against demons. A
lot
of demons.”

“No.”

I had been tucking in the towel, because I’d provided enough of a free show for whoever was down below as it was, so I wasn’t sure I’d heard that right. “I beg your pardon?” I said nicely.

“You heard me.” Pritkin was back to his default, steely-eyed look. And his voice had taken on some nuance again, with that faint lilt thing he did on the end of words sometimes. But that just meant he was less homicidal, not more helpful.

“I need weapons,” I repeated. “Something easy to use. I don’t know how to fight demons—”

“Which is why you aren’t getting them,” I was told flatly. “Angering a group of dangerous beings by shooting at them is hardly likely to improve your longev—”

“Shooting at them?” I perked up slightly. Because that would be good. Well, better than having to get close enough to dump a potion all over them, anyway.

“There is no reason to discuss weapons you are not going to be using,” Pritkin said repressively.

I barely noticed because I was busy checking out his demon-fighting arsenal. I assumed that’s what it was, given that most of his weapons were in a footlocker or taking up the space meant for clothes in his closet. But I figured that the demon fighting stuff would be together, because Pritkin was persnickety about his weapons if little else.

So I went to the bookshelf.

“What does this do?” I asked, reaching for one of the weird-looking guns arrayed on the wall above the racks of little vials. It had a maw at least twice the size of a .45, and looked like it should be used for shooting elephants. I bet it was heavy—

A hand clamped over my wrist, just before I had a chance to find out.

“Never. Touch. My. Weapons.”

I scowled up at him; the hold was strong enough to hurt. “Ow.”

He didn’t apologize, and he didn’t let go, although his grip softened a fraction. “You can’t handle that gun.”

“How do you know?”

“I’ve seen you shoot,” he said sourly, taking it off the wall.

“You haven’t seen me shoot that.”

“And I’m not going to. What kind of demons?”

“What?”

“Demons. What kind are you facing?” Pritkin demanded.

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t
know
?”

“My information wasn’t that precise,” I said, stung by the disbelief on his face. If he’d known what I’d had to go through to get that much . . . “I was just told that there’s a lot of them. They’re around this house and I . . . well, I need to get in.”

“Where is the house?”

“Why do you need to know that?”

He looked at me, exasperated. “Different demon groups frequent different areas. They are often territorial, as your vampires used to be. Knowing where this house is could possibly tell us what you are facing, or at least narrow the field.”

“Yeah,” I said, because that made sense. “Only no.”

Pritkin frowned. “What?”

I didn’t say anything. It had just hit me that I
couldn’t
say anything. Geography didn’t matter because these demons weren’t there for the usual reasons. They were there because Mom had summoned them—or whatever you did to call up an unholy army. I couldn’t tell him where I was going, because he knew the location of Tony’s farmhouse, and he was even less likely than Jonas to help me muck around with my own past. And of course, what I was planning to do was off-limits since no way would he go along with any plan to help me walk into hell.

Basically, I couldn’t tell him anything.

“I can’t tell you anything,” I said, knowing how well that was likely to go over. “I wish I could, but I can’t. I just need something that will get me through a forest of unknown demons and to the front door, long enough for someone to let me in. Do you have anything like that?”

Pritkin crossed his arms and glared at me. “Yes.”

“I didn’t mean you,” I said viciously, when we materialized in the middle of a dark, foggy field a few minutes later.

Pritkin was too busy scanning the area Special Ops–style to bother answering. Just like he hadn’t mentioned that he intended to grab me just as I started to shift. I should have figured it out when he suddenly got cooperative, but I’d been distracted trying to make the too-short emerald T-shirt he’d loaned me fit over my ass.

It wasn’t working that great.

I pulled it down again, wishing that he was taller or that I had a coat. It was chilly, and the thin tee wasn’t doing a lot to keep goose bumps from popping up. Or a couple of other things.

“Is it obvious that I’m not wearing a bra?” I asked nervously. I hadn’t given a lot of thought to what I would wear when I went to visit my parents, but a thin old T-shirt with nothing underneath wasn’t on the list.

“I . . . hadn’t noticed,” Pritkin told me.

I looked down at the offending mounds, which were straining the soft green cotton. And making a couple of points about my lack of underwear. “Do you think anyone else will?”

He glanced at me and then looked quickly away. “Well . . ”

“
Well
what?”

“They are a bit . . . jiggly.”

“Jiggly?” I looked down in horror. I wasn’t
jiggly
; I was too young to be jiggly. I bounced a little on my toes, and they moved, sure. But that was normal. Wasn’t it? “They’re not jiggly!”

“Perhaps it was a bad choice of word.”

“You’re damn right, it was!”

“I merely meant that they tend to sway a bit when you . . ”

“When I what?”

“Do anything, really.”

I sighed and hunched over. “Does this help?”

Pritkin didn’t say anything.

“Well?” I demanded.

“They’re a little . . . large . . . to be easily concealed by—”

“They’re not large!” I did not have large, jiggly boobs, damn it. I had nice, pert breasts. I’d always been proud of my breasts. I just didn’t want to flash the parents, that was all. “They’re the perfect size!”

“No arguments here.”

I stared at him, because coming from any other guy that would have sounded flirtatious. But Pritkin didn’t flirt. He did, however, pull off the hoodie he was still wearing and put it around me.

It was warm from his body and it smelled like him. And the fact that he was being an ass didn’t stop me from clutching it for a second, and the hands that were trying to zip it up, not wanting to let him go. Stop it, I told myself harshly. I was going to get him back. I was going—

“Where are we?” he asked softly.

I just looked at him silently for a moment. And then said what had to be said. “I’m taking you back.”

“No, you aren’t.”

“And how are you planning to stop me?” I looked pointedly down at his hands, which had tightened on the soft cotton of the hoodie. “By chaining me up? Because that doesn’t work so well.”

“No. By expecting you to use your brain. You said you need weapons—”

“And you have them. So hand ’em over!”

A lip quirked. “They are tools.
I
am the weapon. Without me they would do you little good.”

“I’ll take that chance!”

“No, you won’t,” he told me again, sounding certain. “You’re smarter than that.”

“If I was smarter, I’d have figured out some other way to do this!”

“Perhaps there is no other way.”

“Perhaps I’m losing my mind,” I muttered.

“It’s not so bad, once you get used to it,” he said, making me do a double take. Because Pritkin didn’t do funny, either. “Can you at least give me the general layout?” he added, before I could comment. As if we’d settled something.

And I guess maybe we had, since I automatically replied, “There was a parking lo—no. That came later. There should be a bunch of trees, like a small wood.”

Pritkin nodded at something behind me. “Those trees?”

I looked over my shoulder, and then turned around. The fog made sure I couldn’t see too well. Not even Tony’s house, which should be somewhere off to the right, assuming the gray lumps along the horizon were the trees in question. I couldn’t tell for sure, since I didn’t remember there being quite that many. And because my eyes weren’t interested in trees.

They were looking for patrols, one of the ones Tony always had messing about, and which could be gliding silently through the fog toward us right now. Although, if memory served, they’d spent most nights under the covered driveway out front, smoking and gossiping, since who the hell broke into a vampire’s stronghold anyway? Of course, Jonas and I had, but that would be years from now, after my parents were long dead. So even if it caused the patrols to be more vigilant afterward, it shouldn’t affect—

“Cassie?”

“I don’t know,” I said, trying to focus on the maybe-trees when my eyes wanted to look for vamps. Not that they’d see them. That was the problem. You never saw them . . . until they wanted you to. “I should probably mention that there’s a chance, um, that there might be somebody else around—”

“Somebody else?” Pritkin frowned. “You mean other than the demon army?”

“—so we should probably keep this quiet.”

“How quiet?”

I cringed slightly. “Like too-low-for-vampire-ears quiet?”

The frown tipped over into a scowl. “How many vampires?” he asked grimly.

“That would depend on how loud . . ”

Pritkin swore—quietly—under his breath.

“Can you do a silence spell?” I asked hopefully.

“No.” He started switching around some of the weapons in his holsters.

“But Jonas—”

Pritkin’s head came up.

“I mean, he could, or he said he could, uh, rig something—”

“Yet you didn’t bring him, did you?” Pritkin asked sweetly.

“He was . . . busy. . . ”

Pritkin shoved some more weapons into new holsters and muttered something that sounded like “smart man.”

“But if Jonas could do it,” I persisted. “You must be able—”

“It isn’t the spell that’s the issue,” I was told shortly.

“Then what?”

“Magic is linked with human energy.”

“So?”

“So human energy attracts demons!”

Well, shit.

Pritkin gestured at the lumps. “Are those the damned trees or not?”

I squinted. They looked a lot more ominous than the thin line I remembered, almost like a forest. But they were also the only ones in sight.

“Yes,” I said. “I think so. Maybe?”

Pritkin muttered something else. He was doing that a lot tonight. “Let’s go.”

It was the right group of trees. I could tell as soon as we got close enough to see the spears of light shining through the branches. It wasn’t moonlight—too bright and the wrong color—more like firelight or soft electric. But the mostly oaks with a scattering of white pine made it impossible to be sure, since I couldn’t see the house.

And what I could see, I didn’t like.

The weird lighting caused strange crisscrossing shadows to fall everywhere, turning the area under the trees into a half-lit maze. A foggy, half-lit maze, with the light beams sifting apart, like the eerie, otherworldly illumination UFOs gave off in the movies. I swallowed, suddenly really wishing for a Scully from
The X-Files
—some thoroughly prosaic presence to inform me that everything in life had a nice, comforting, scientific solution.

Of course, she’d gotten knocked up by some alien, hadn’t she? So maybe it was just as well that my companion was more like Mulder. A coked-out Mulder with a lot of weapons, who knew that the monsters under the bed were real and would
gut
you.

Pritkin was certainly looking more than usually cautious. Or maybe he just didn’t like fighting something he couldn’t even name. Whatever the reason, he stopped at an outlying oak, standing like a vanguard a dozen yards in front of the rest, and pulled the weird, big-barreled gun I’d seen at Dante’s.

“What is it?” I asked, suddenly tense. “What’s wrong?”

“I don’t sense anything.”

“But . . . that’s good, right?” I asked, watching him spin open the cylinder like an old-fashioned revolver.

“That’s good if your information was wrong,” he told me grimly, shoving some weird bullets from a leather case into place. They looked like tiny potion vials, with different-colored liquids sloshing against the transparent sides. I didn’t know how something that looked so delicate would survive being fired from a gun, but then, I guessed they weren’t actually made of glass. “How sure are you?”

“Pretty sure.”

“Then it’s not so good,” Pritkin said dryly.

“Meaning?”

“One of two things. Either there are no demons in there . . ”

“Or?” I prompted, because he’d trailed off to scan the tree line again.

“Or we’re dealing with something old enough and powerful enough to shield itself from detection—even in numbers.”

I tried to fit my spine a little more snugly into the unyielding bark behind me. “So . . . that would be bad.”

“Yes. Which is why you’re staying here.”

I started to say something and then bit my lip, because that had been in his don’t-argue-with-me voice. Which I tended to pay attention to since it only got trotted out when the shit was already on its way to the fan. “You may need to leave fast,” I pointed out, after a second. “I can get you out of there quicker than any weapon.”

He clicked the gun shut. “Not if you’re dead.”

“If we stick together, I won’t be. I’m telling you—”

I suddenly found myself jerked to within inches of a face with a tight jaw and hot green eyes. “No. You tell me nothing, not about this.
You do what I say
.”

“Damn it, Pritkin!”

The moonlight had washed all the color from his face, leaving it stark black and white. Uncompromising, like the hand on my arm, or the low timbre of his voice. “There are only two choices. You listen to me and we go forward; you refuse and we go back. You asked for my help; you do this my way. I haven’t spent more than a century battling these creatures not to know exactly how dangerous they can be. Do you understand?”

Yeah, I understood fine. The problem was that he didn’t. He thought he was protecting me, but if he ended up dead because I wasn’t there to shift him away, we’d both be screwed. But I couldn’t explain that, without explaining more than was safe for him to know right now.

“How much of a risk are you planning to take?” I whispered.

“No more than need be. I will find and draw off whatever is in there. When you see my signal, run for the house. Shift back here when you’re done and I’ll be waiting. But only move
when I signal you
. If I do not, you stay put.”

“And if you don’t come back?” I asked angrily.

“Then get out of here. Go back to your time—”

“The hell I will! I won’t just leave—”

“Then I won’t go.”

And the infuriating man crossed his arms, leaned against the tree, and looked at me. Calmly. Pleasantly. Like he had all freaking night.

I glared back. “And here I thought you’d been getting better lately!”

“I’ve been indulging you.”

“Indulg—” I tightened my lips on a torrent of words, none of which I could say. And not just because we needed to be quiet. Because for a second there I was actually rendered speechless.

Indulging me didn’t involve treating me like a Parris Island recruit. It didn’t involve questioning every order I ever gave. And it damned sure didn’t involve trading his life for mine without even asking what I thought of the idea.

Or how I’d feel afterward.

Somehow, in all the crying I’d done over the man in the last week, I’d forgotten what an absolute
bastard
he could be.

Like when he calmly started to pick at a fingernail.

“Stop that!” I knocked his hand away.

He looked up, bemused.

“You . . . you’ll get a hangnail,” I snapped, because I couldn’t say anything else.

“And that would ruin my evening.”

I stood there for a moment, seriously considering just starting for the trees. He’d have to come along or watch me possibly get eaten by whatever was in there. Only, no. Any
other
man would have to.

Pritkin would knock me out with something in his arsenal, throw me over his shoulder, and cart me off God knew where. And that would be that. Except that I’d wake up tomorrow no closer to a solution than I was right now.

And I was getting damned tired of dead ends.

I crossed my own arms. “Fine.”

“
Fine
what?”

“Fine, we’ll do it your way.” Like I had a choice.

Whatever his faults, Pritkin didn’t gloat. “Wait for my signal,” he reminded me. And then he was off, running hard for the tree line. Where, a second later, he disappeared.

And the minute he did, I was sure I’d made a mistake. It would be totally my luck to get the man killed while trying to save him. I peered around the trunk, my hands eating into the rough bark hard enough to send splinters under my fingernails.

Come on, I thought desperately, as the minutes clicked by. Come on, come on, come
on
.

But nothing happened. There was no sound, no movement, no anything. Just a soft breeze bringing the scent of rain and resin, and a hushed quiet making a mockery of my fears.

Until somebody started screaming.

I was running before I remembered the signal and then
fuck
the signal, because I’d never heard Pritkin scream. And I was desperately hoping I wasn’t hearing it now. But it sounded human—if a human was being eaten by a bear or roasted over a fire or torn limb from limb or—

I shut my brain down before it shut me down, and put on an extra burst of speed. I should have just shifted, but I couldn’t see clearly and anyway, it was too late now. The ground was growing uneven underfoot, the trees were closing in overhead, and I was slipping and sliding on a bunch of black-rotten leaves down an incline and through a wall of scratchy limbs. Before bursting out the other side and into—

What the fuck?

What looked like jerking red afterimages filled my vision, half blinding me, even though I hadn’t been staring at any bright lights. Just like I wasn’t out of breath, but the whole area pulsed in and out, like a marathoner’s vision. It looked like a demon disco and felt like standing in the middle of a tumbling kaleidoscope, while that unearthly scream went on and on and—