He drew a deep, shuddering breath and slowly pulled away from me. After a moment he spoke in a hoarse voice completely unlike his usual tones. «Give me the gun, Cassie. Someone could get hurt if it accidentally goes off.» The sound of his voice, harsh and curiously flat, cleared my head a little. Seeing my first attacker helped, too. He was lying in three pieces, having been eaten completely in half by the ward. Through the wreck of his body, I could see blackened splinters where part of a lopsided pentagram had been burnt into the wooden floor. I stared at the sight, feeling slightly dizzy and very odd. All of a sudden, I got the joke: someone could get hurt. Now, that was funny.
I clutched Tomas to keep from falling, my gun dangling uselessly against his back. He took it from my limp hand and tucked it away somewhere. I didn't see where he put it; it simply disappeared. He was looking at me with concern, and suddenly that was funny, too. I started to giggle. I hoped Tony paid him well—he was a riot.
«Cassie, I can carry you if you want, but we must go.» He glanced at the clock on the wall. It said 8:37.
«Look, we have time to make our appointment.» I was still giggling, and the voice didn't sound like mine. I vaguely realized that I was about to become hysterical, then Tomas moved. The next thing I knew, I was back in his arms and we were outside, running along a darkened road so quickly that the streetlights all blurred together in a long, silver line. A second later, two dark shapes joined us, one on either side.
«Sleep,» Tomas commanded as the world raced past. I realized that I was terribly tired and sleep seemed a very good idea. I felt warm and comfortable, although my head was spinning so much that it looked like the night sky rushed down to meet us or that we were flying up to the stars. I remember thinking dreamily, right before I drifted off, that as deaths go, this one wasn't so bad.
-
Chapter 3
I woke tired, aching and seriously freaked out. My mood wasn't improved by the fact that Tomas was looming over me so that his blank, upside-down face was the first thing I saw. «Get away from me!» I croaked as I struggled into a sitting position. I had to wait a few minutes for the room to stop moving, and when it did, I was less than thrilled with what I saw. Great. I'd been dumped in Hell's waiting room. The small chamber was carved out of red sandstone and lit by only a couple of scary-looking wall sconces. They were made out of what appeared to be interlocking knives and held actual, evil-smelling torches. That told me right away that I was somewhere with a lot of powerful wards, which would have interfered with electricity. Not good.
The place would have been perfect as a torture chamber, except that instead of iron maidens and thumbscrews, it was furnished only with the very uncomfortable black leather sofa where I was lying and a small side table with a few magazines. One was a copy of the Oracle, the equivalent of Newsweek for the magical world, but like most waiting-room reading matter, it was several months out of date. I'd dropped by a certain coffeehouse in Atlanta on a weekly basis to read it, in case anything happened in my other world that might affect my new life. I doubted that the cover story for this edition, on the effect of cheap Asian imports on the magical medicines market, fell into that category, however, and the other was just a scandal sheet, PYTHIA'S HEIR MISSING! the three-inch title on this week's Crystal Gazing screamed, TIME OUT OF WHACK! I rolled my eyes but stopped because it hurt. Guess the MARTIANS KIDNAP WITCHES story they'd been leading with had sort of run dry.
«Mia stella, the Senate assigned Tomas as your bodyguard; he cannot leave you,» a familiar voice reproached gently from beside the door. «Do not make things difficult.»
«I'm not.» After what I'd been through, I thought I was being reason personified. I felt seriously nauseous, so tired that I swayed when I forced myself to stand, and my eyes burned like I'd already had the good, hard cry I wanted. But I wasn't budging. «I don't want him anywhere near me.»
I ignored Tomas and an unfamiliar guy wearing seventeenth-century court clothes and concentrated on the only friend I had in the room. I had no idea what Rafe was doing here. Not that I wasn't glad to have him—I could use all the friends I could get—but I didn't know where he fit in. Rafe was short for Raphael, the toast of Rome and the favorite artist of the papacy until he'd made the mistake of turning down a commission from a wealthy Florentine merchant in 1520. Tony had been trying to compete artistically with the Medicis: they had Michelangelo, so he needed Raphael. Rafe told him he already had more commissions than he could handle, and that, anyway, he painted frescoes for the pope. He wasn't about to travel all the way to Florence merely to paint a dining room. It hadn't been a good move. Ever since, Rafe had been painting whatever Tony wanted, including my bedroom when I was a child. He'd made my ceiling full of angels that looked so real, for years I thought they watched over me while I slept. He was one of the only people at Tony's whom I had ever regretted leaving, but I had snuck away without so much as a good-bye. I had no other choice: he belonged to Tony and, if asked a direct question by his master, had to tell him the truth. So if he was here now, it was because Tony wanted him here. It lessened my joy at the reunion somewhat.