Tempt the Stars

And considering the state of my dignity these days, I didn’t think another hit was going to matter.
    “Is it always like this around here?”The Valkyrie had come out of the lounge, and was standing in front of the sliding doors, hands on her hips. And looking at the hell-mouth with disbelief.
    “Pretty much,” one of the vamps said lazily.
    “Damn it, Cassie!” Marco looked pissed.
    “We’ve talked about this,” I reminded him. “You’re not my jailer.”
    “Well, someone damned well should be!” he shot back, black hair whipping in the wind. “Running around all over creation, battling demons,
what you did to Jules
, and now
this
—”
    “Battling demons?” I blinked, because I hadn’t thought he knew about that.
    It seemed absurd, like of course he would. But he hadn’t mentioned it, and not even Marco was that tight-lipped. And this was Dante’s, where loud, supernaturalthemed shows took place every day. And that one had lasted all of what? Five or six minutes?
    I wasn’t sure, but I didn’t think it could have been longer than that. And yeah, there had been a ton of witnesses, but those were either clueless tourists or guards under Casanova’s control. Like the security cameras . . 
    “You didn’t know about that,” I said, watching him.
    “Bullshit. Everyone knew—”
    “You
didn’t
. Not half an hour ago.”
    Marco didn’t say anything, but his face was enough. Because he was no more a diplomat than Jules. Mircea didn’t send diplomats to me; they’d just be wasted anyway.
    He sent tanks.
    “How did you find out?” I demanded.
    Marco crossed massive arms and tried staring me down. “I told you. Mircea knows what goes on around here—”
    “Mircea? He called you?”
    “That’s not the—”
    “When?”
    “A few minutes ago, and we’re not—”
    “Mircea called you . . . and not me?” I asked, wanting to be sure.
    “Maybe he thought he’d get further with me!”
    Yeah, or maybe he was avoiding me.
    And suddenly, it hit me like a ton of bricks. Mircea
was
avoiding me. I’d been so busy doing the same thing to him, I hadn’t noticed. But of course he was.
    He was busy, but he was also a first-level master. He could go without sleep for days if he needed to. There was a cost in power, sure, but he had it to burn. If he’d wanted to talk to me, he’d have talked to me. For as long as he liked and about whatever he wanted, and I doubted that my attempts at evasion would have worked for a second.
    But they had.
    “He’s avoiding me, isn’t he?” I asked Marco, in disbelief.
    “Stop it! Stop it right now!” the Valkyrie demanded. We looked at her. She pointed at the portal.
“What the hell is that?”
    “Yes,” Jonas said, coming up behind her. And regarding the hellmouth over his spectacles.
    I looked back at Marco. “Tell me the truth. What’s going on? Why doesn’t he want to see me?”
    Marco looked around, like he expected somebody to offer up a suggestion. But the vamps were clearly all suggestioned out. A couple of them were trying to talk Jules into going back down the hall, but hysteria feeds hysteria, and it didn’t look like they were having much luck. A lot more were over by the bar, clearly feeling that tonight went into the above-and-beyond category and they’d had enough. And the rest—Jonas, the witches and the girl—were staring at the hellmouth, which had started spinning fast enough to flip the pages of a magazine on the coffee table.
    Marco didn’t find any help.
    “Marco—”
    “I don’t know, all right?” he told me, exasperated. “I don’t even know if he is.”
    “Did he ask to talk to me?”
    “No. I—”
    “Did you tell him I was unconscious or something?”
    “No, he—”
    “That I was in the shower?”
    “No! Damn it, he didn’t—” Marco stopped suddenly.
    “He didn’t what? He didn’t
ask
?”
    Marco just looked at me.
    I stared back. “He called you up, informed you that I’d been seen battling demons on the drag, asked about the master vamp I just deprived him of,
and then he hung up
?”
    “You need to ask him about this,” he pointed out.
    “How can I when he won’t talk to me?”
    Marco started to answer, but then Jules let out an especially shrill shriek. Maybe because the portal had started whirling around at something approaching warp speed. And unless I was mistaken, it was also getting smaller.
    “Would somebody shut him the hell up?” Marco snarled.
    But Jules didn’t seem