Tempt the Stars

chocolate-covered chicken.
    “You sure?” he asked, and looked pointedly at my T-shirt.
    And crap. I didn’t know what other weird smells the filthy thing held after mopping up half the forest, but it didn’t matter. Vamps aren’t herbivores. They aren’t designed to differentiate between types of florae, even whacked out, god-induced florae. They’re designed to find prey. Like the guy I’d just been rolling around a forest with.
    I loaded up a nacho, and didn’t answer.
    Marco had never asked me where Pritkin was. But some of the other guys had hinted around, and some smart aleck had left a copy of one of the more scandalous rags on the kitchen counter. The one with a grainy pic of Pritkin and me making out on the boss’ front lawn.
    It had been taken at what was supposed to be my coronation, after the Spartoi attacked me. We’d fought, and I’d won, a fact that continued to amaze me. But winning didn’t ensure survival, and I almost hadn’t. The picture had been of Pritkin donating the energy to me that I needed to live, basically giving me the incubus version of mouth to mouth. Only it hadn’t looked that way.
    And the fact that I’d been butt-naked at the time hadn’t helped.
    Maybe Marco thought the same as some of the others, that Pritkin was lying low to stay out of Mircea’s way. I didn’t know because we’d never talked about it. And we’d never talked about it because he’d never asked.
    He didn’t this time, either.
    He just reached over and appropriated the massive nacho I’d been absentmindedly building, swallowing the guac and meat and cheese and refried beans and sour cream and salsa-laden pile all in one bite. And then said mildly, “’Cause you know who’ll be asking next.”
    “The senate?”
    Marco gave me an odd look. “In a way.”
    Crap, crap, crap.
    “I thought Mircea was in New York.” He was always in New York these days. Well, except for when he was in Vegas, or at his court in Washington State, or at one of half a dozen spots in between. I understood the need to avoid putting all your eggs in one basket in war time, so it made sense that the senate would spread out their power base. But this was getting ridiculous. I was surprised he didn’t have whiplash.
    “He don’t need to be here to be here,” Marco said. “If you get my drift.”
    “Yeah.” That was one of the perks of being a master vamp: what his family saw, Mircea saw. But, unlike everybody else around here, I didn’t have the ability to mind-speak, and I wasn’t planning on picking up my phone. In fact, I might just jerk it out of the wall. Mircea my friend/ lover/protector/occasional-partner-in-crime would have been welcome. Mircea the senator . . . not so much. Not until I finished my current errand, anyway.
    He might own a casino themed like hell, but I had a pretty good idea what his view on my visiting the real thing would be.
    Marco sighed again and looked over my spread. “When did they get mole?”
    “Last week,” I told him, and handed it over. I had plenty left.
    We ate in companionable silence for a while. Marco was one of those guys who didn’t feel the need to talk all the time. I’d asked him about it once, and he’d said he spent years learning to block out the incessant chitchat from other family members that went on in his head. You’d think that vampire mental skills would be used only for important stuff, but apparently not. According to him, they gossiped all the time, and it almost drove him crazy before he learned how to filter. And now he didn’t appreciate the verbal kind taking its place.
    That was okay. I liked the quiet, too. Especially when the alternative was a lot of questions I couldn’t answer.
    Not that I wouldn’t have liked to try. Marco had big shoulders, and it would have been a relief to dump some of this on them. But it wouldn’t be fair, and anyway there was nothing he could do. Except tell Mircea what was going on, not because he was a fink, but because that was what vampire servants did. He’d basically just reminded me of that fact, since he was a decent guy. But I hadn’t needed the hint.
    I knew I couldn’t tell anyone anything.
    It was one of the hardest things about this job. And, I suspected, why a lot of Pythias developed reputations for being a little . . . odd. How could you not be when you knew things nobody else knew, things that nobody else could be
allowed
to know, and when you didn’t even have anybody you could