Tempt the Stars

if someone pisses them off, they
can curse his ding
—”
    “Would you man the hell up?” Marco snapped. And clapped a hand the size of a catcher’s mitt over Fred’s mouth. Fred’s displeasure thereafter took the form of outraged grunts.
    “I thought the covens were under the Circle’s authority,” I said, trying to remember all the info Jonas had been force feeding me lately.
    “Not the most powerful ones. They never joined.”
    Marco shot a look over his shoulder. “I guess they figured they didn’t need to.”
    Yeah. And if they’d just waltzed in here through the kinds of wards the Circle had on this place, I kind of agreed with them. But that still didn’t make it okay.
    “Why are they here?” I demanded.
    “They wouldn’t tell me,” Marco said, effortlessly keeping Fred under wraps. And since, despite all evidence to the contrary, Fred was also a master-level vamp, that was actually kind of impressive. Or it would have been, had Marco not been simultaneously hiding from a few old ladies.
    “You’re intimidated,” I accused.
    He scowled. “Do you remember how old I am?”
    “What does that mat—”
    “It matters ’cause I didn’t live this long by being stupid. Sometimes it’s smart to be intimidated. Sometimes it’s smart to look before you leap.”
    “I do that.”
    Fred suddenly stopped struggling, I guess so he and Marco could both send me the same look of stunned disbelief.
    “I do!” I said again, and it was true. Mostly true. Okay, true when I had a chance to look, which wasn’t often these days. But that wasn’t the point.
    “That isn’t the point,” I told him.
    “Then what is?”
    “That I’m sick of this, okay? I’m not their slave—or the Circle’s or the vamps’ or anybody else’s. I’m not going to live like this—”
    “It’s your job.”
    “Bullshit.” I glared at him, too tired and hungry and lacking in caffeine to bother with diplomacy, which was something else I sucked at anyway. “What do you think Agnes would have done if they’d broken in on her in the middle of the night?”
    “I don’t—”
    “Well, I do!” I said, remembering my sweet-looking predecessor, who had shot me in the ass the one and only time I’d tried it. “Agnes was a bitch, okay? But she
needed
to be a bitch. Because the people around her were all these big personalities with all this power and given half a chance they’d run roughshod over her.
And she knew it.
So she didn’t put up with that. Not at any time, not for any reason, not from any of them! And as a result, they respected her. As a result,
they
were afraid of
her
, not the other way around.”
    Marco regarded me with a mixture of affection and exasperation and maybe a little bit of pity. But he didn’t say anything. Fred, on the other hand, took the distraction of the moment to wiggle out of Marco’s grasp. And he wasn’t so subtle.
    “Yeah, but you’re not Agnes,” he reminded me.
    “I’m not Agnes
yet
,” I hissed, and shifted.

Chapter Four
    I went from light and noise and stress to someplace completely lacking two of those things. I didn’t bother turning on a light. I could see well enough from the orange haze filtering in through a gap in a wall of curtains, and anyway, the view wasn’t much.
    The rooms that Dante’s, my home on the Vegas Strip, reserves for its more budget-conscious guests are a little . . . Spartan. Ironically, that makes them less eye-wincing than the suites upstairs, which mostly conform to the hotel’s over-the-top haunted house theme. But the designer had run short of money by the time he got this far, so the only affronts to taste were a few vintage horror movie posters and an ugly bedspread.
    I hadn’t been here for a while, and I wasn’t sure why I was here now. Maybe because I didn’t have the strength to go much farther. Or maybe because I didn’t have anywhere else
to
go.
    It was ironic; all of time was mine to explore—in theory, anyway—except for my own. In my own, I’d been living like a prisoner for weeks, with the few times I’d dared to venture outside the hotel not going well. And I didn’t think I was likely to find anybody to go AWOL with again, since the last guy who had . . 
    Well, he wasn’t here anymore.
    But his room was.
    Although it was looking a little rough.
    A river of glass crunched underfoot, glinting in the band of rusty light. A nightstand lay cracked in two, the ceramic lamp that had been on top pulverized