Tempt the Stars

like he’d decided to join the Ministry of Silly Walks. He looked frankly demented. He looked like he was making fun of our guests, which was not likely to go down well.
    And then he abruptly spun and ran out of the room, with the awkward gait and surprised look of a man who has a huge hand at the small of his back, helping him along. One look at Marco’s face, and I decided that was probably not far from the truth. I sighed.
    I didn’t know what Fred’s problem was, but I didn’t try to follow. Because I had plenty of my own. Like the fact that all three witches were now looking at me judgmentally, especially the Valkyrie.
    “You let the bloody Circle and a bunch of vampires push you around like that?” she demanded.
    And okay, I’d had about enough. I opened my mouth to point out a few salient facts, but I didn’t get a chance. Because someone beat me to it.
    “She killed a Spartoi!”
    The voice had come from behind me, so I turned around. To see that the girl from the kitchen had decided to come shake in the doorway, instead of by the counter. Her face was still white, but there were two little spots of color high on her cheeks. She was either furious or about to pass out, and considering her actions so far, I knew which way I was betting.
    “Move,” I told Marco softly.
    He looked at me, halfway through a sip of his whiskey sour. “What?”
    “Go to the living room or something.”
    “Why?”
    “Because I think you’re scaring her.”
    He looked over at the girl and then back at me. “I’m just standing here.”
    Yeah, that was the problem. Some vamps managed to pass as human, if you squinted, even without a glamourie. But Marco wasn’t one of them. It wasn’t the looks so much, although two hundred and fifty pounds of predator is not easily disguised by a pink golf shirt, or the casual slouch he affected when standing so he didn’t loom over people. But mainly, it was the ’tude. The guy could be smiling and he still looked like he could rip your throat out in less than a second.
    It didn’t help that it happened to be true.
    He’d never worried me, possibly because I’d grown up with Alphonse, a Marco clone except not as good looking. But I’d learned early on that, despite the fiction, vampires weren’t mindless predators and they didn’t kill for no reason. And anyway, the smallest, most ineffectual one imaginable—Fred, for instance—could wreak just as much damage on a human as Marco, so what difference did looks make? But most people didn’t see it that way, and in Marco’s case especially, I’d seen grown men flatten themselves against a wall when he walked by, instinctively dropping into prey mode, hoping they wouldn’t be noticed.
    God only knew what effect he was having on a girl who apparently thought
I
was scary.
    “Go on.” I pushed on him, which of course was useless. “Get me a drink.”
    “You’ve got a drink.”
    “And now I want another one.”
    “You don’t need another one. You had an Irish coffee earlier—”
    I rolled my eyes. “Yeah, like Fred did more than wave the cork over the—”
    “—and now you’ve got a beer. I don’t want you yakking all over the place again.”
    “I never yak—” A bushy eyebrow went north. “Okay, one time. But that wasn’t from a hangover.”
    “And this one isn’t going to be, either.” And he took my beer.
    “Hey!”
    “Is that coffee I smell?” he asked the girl, going over with a swagger and a grin, because despite all evidence to the contrary, Marco believed himself to be charming. And okay, sometimes he was, in his own big, hairy, swarthy, muscley way. But I didn’t think she was likely to be impressed.
    She wasn’t, but not quite in the way I’d feared.
    She shoved his outstretched hand away and pushed past, as if she barely even saw him. And maybe she didn’t. Because her eyes were on the witches and I decided I might have been wrong earlier. They weren’t afraid.
    They were
pissed.
    “You . . . you dare . . ” she gasped.
    “It’s all right, Rhea,” the Valkyrie said, looking uncomfortable.
    “It is not all right! You weren’t there—you didn’t see! She saved us, she saved us
all
, and with nothing—and you
dare
—”
    I didn’t know what was going on, but the witches were going frowny, and the air was getting tense and things had been bad enough as they were. Marco must have thought the same, because he put an avuncular hand on the girl’s shoulder. “Hey, why