Tempt the Stars

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