Tempt the Stars

me do?” he asked impatiently. “I’m not a doctor and he isn’t a vampire. I can manipulate dead flesh any way you like, but I don’t have power over the living.”
    Maybe not, but I knew someone who did.
    He caught my arm as I jumped up. “She isn’t there. She—”
    “Like hell she isn’t!” I broke away and ran for the stairs.

Chapter Eleven
    There was only one flight, which let out onto a small hallway. There were two doors on either side, with the first opening onto a junk room, piled high with old furniture, and the next onto a tiny bath. But the door across the hall led to a bedroom, with a big brass bed, a window cracked enough to toss the sheers around, and an old-fashioned wardrobe. And another door—
    Leading to a nursery.
    There was no one in it except for a baby in a crib, who had somehow slept through the storm outside and the fight downstairs. But who woke up when I slammed in the door. Woke up and started screaming.
    “All right, that’s enough,” Roger said, coming in behind me.
    For a second, I wasn’t sure if he was talking to me or to her.
    Not that I guess it mattered.
    He hurried past and picked up a small thing in a yellow onesie, with a mop of downy blond curls and a scrunched-up face. “Your mother is in the forest,” he told me, feeling frantically around in his jacket for something. “Dealing with the mess you two made before it consumes half the state!”
    I didn’t say anything. He finally came up with a pacifier that he stuck in the wide-open mouth that was emitting all the noise. That worked for a couple of pulls, until she promptly spat it out. He sighed.
    “I always wonder about babies who can be fooled by those things,” he said, jiggling her up and down. “She—you—never is. A few pulls and when nothing comes out . . ” He shrugged and put her head on his shoulder, doing the please-shut-up baby dance all parents seem to know.
    I sat down.
    There was a rocker underneath my butt, but I’m not sure I’d known that. Right then I wasn’t sure I knew anything. I was looking at a concerned father gently tending his fussy child, the dim moonlight from outside flooding in a small window to halo their blond heads, one straight as a pin, the other a mass of curls. And nothing made sense.
    “You killed hundreds of people,” I said numbly.
    He looked up. “What?”
    “Ghosts don’t work for free. All that power . . ”
    “What power?”
    “To fuel your army. It had to come from somewhere.”
    He frowned. “Are we back to that again?”
    I stared at him, wishing he looked like the picture I carried around in my head. The crazed mage shooting at me and Agnes in a dank dungeon; the manic, stumbling idiot, barely staying ahead of the Spartoi on a desperate flight through London; the sarcastic, angry man downstairs. Any of them would make this easier.
    Instead, I got a frazzled-looking guy with spit-up on his shoulder. I got a hand desperately clutching a diapered bottom, with the please-don’t-let-her-need-changing-while-her-mother-is-out look of men everywhere. I got a ridiculously goofy grin when he realized she was dry.
    I didn’t get easy.
    “What did you offer your legions?” I said, deliberately making it harsh.
    “My what?” He looked confused for a moment, maybe because he’d started trying to fish a bottle out of a dorm-type fridge stuck under a table while also holding a squirmy baby.
    “The ones you were telling Pritkin about!”
    He finally snared the bottle. “The war mage, you mean? We never got around to introductions.”
    “Yes! The one your creature almost killed! You told him—”
    “What he wanted to hear,” he said, sticking the bottle on the table. And then muttering something and waving a hand at it. And then trying to test it on a wrist, but that’s a little hard with an infant drooling on your shoulder. “Here,” he told me, pushing her at me.
    I shied back, but he just thrust her at me again.
    I took her.
    She didn’t look like me. She didn’t look like anything in that distinctive way of babies and half-baked loaves of bread. Until she got bored staring at the pocket on Pritkin’s shirt, and a familiar pair of baby blues met mine.
    They didn’t appear impressed.
    “Son of a—” Roger cursed.
    I looked up to find him with a red welt on his wrist, courtesy of the now steamy hot and curdled contents of the bottle. I waited while he fished out another, tried whatever spell he was using again, and finally