Tempt the Stars

wasn’t. A second later, a storm swept through the hotel like a cyclone on a prairie. The crowd screamed and ran for cover, a couple of tumbleweeds went spinning by, and we started wafting around again, our makeshift sail partially reinflating before Caleb could snatch it off.
    I clung to the gently rotating rug, but it wasn’t the fear of falling that had me worried. It wasn’t even the storm, which we seemed to be in the eye of anyway. No, my fear was kind of occupied with the pair of elegant boots that were materializing on the carpet, as the storm swirled and spun and came together into the shape of a very pissed off demon lord.
    Who grabbed for me almost before he’d finished consolidating, but I rolled to the side and he got pig-man instead.
    Who he promptly dropped over the side.
    “Oh my God!” I lunged for the edge of the rug, and got a split-second glimpse of a stunned-looking TV reporter sitting on a bunch of crossed vamp arms, until they unceremoniously dumped him on the floor. And then I was jerked up to meet a pair of furious green eyes.
    “Try again,” Rosier breathed.
    “Drop her!” Pritkin snarled, pulling his knife and causing Rosier’s eyes to briefly flick to him.
    “Good plan,” he said, and dangled me over the edge. “It was the woman!” he yelled, apparently at the storm. “She deceived him! Take her and do as you will!”
    But the storm didn’t seem impressed. If anything, it got louder and more ferocious, and new shapes started to coalesce out of the blowing sand. One landed on our rug, causing the whole thing to bounce and throwing me into Rosier.
    Who promptly threw me off, only that turned out to be a good thing.
    A flash of light seared my retinas as I fell back, and the piece of rug right beside my body went spinning off on its own trajectory, with Casanova clinging to it like a shipwrecked sailor to the last barrel left afloat.
    For a second, I didn’t realize what was happening, until Pritkin shoved me behind him. And lashed out with his knife, sending a hand and the curved sword it held spinning out over the void, neon running along the blade like blood until it hit one of the fake storefronts. And stuck there, quivering.
    But not as much as I was when a now one-handed demon in black robes lunged for me. He was kicked viciously back onto Caleb’s carpet by Pritkin, where two of his buddies had been about to launch themselves at us. But his added weight sent them flying before they were ready, one onto a nearby roof and one straight at us—
    Where he landed on a sword held by . . . Rosier?
    And judging by the vicious satisfaction on Rosier’s face, I didn’t think it had been a mistake.
    “Call them off!” Pritkin yelled.
    “I can’t!” Rosier wrenched out the blade and kicked the body into the void. “They don’t answer to me!”
    “Then why did you bring them?” I demanded.
    “I didn’t bring them! I was trying to get my son away from them, before you managed to get him killed!” He glared at Pritkin. “What in the nine hells—”
    “Cassie wouldn’t leave without me! I was escorting her to safety!”
    “And how’s that working for you?” Rosier demanded as two more guards spun into existence—and were just as quickly dispatched.
    “I thought we were going to the Shadowland,” Pritkin said, looking at me.
    “We were,” I told him. “I thought . . . I must have shifted us—”
    “You can’t shift from my father’s kingdom!”
    “She didn’t,” Rosier snarled. “She linked the gates, mine and the one back to earth, bringing you straight back where she wanted you to be!”
    “I couldn’t have,” I said hotly. “I wasn’t even sure I knew how to open one—”
    “We came through on your wake!”
    Oh. “Then it was a mistake—”
    “Some mistake!” Rosier hissed. “You just put my son under interdict!”
    “I was restricted to Rosier’s domain on the council’s order,” Pritkin explained. “The Shadowland is neutral ground; I could have accompanied you there. But here—”
    “Here he’s an outlaw, to be killed on sight!” Rosier panted, having just thrown another guard over the side.
    “The council’s order?” I repeated, getting a bad feeling suddenly. “But why would they want—”
    “Because of
you
,” Rosier spat, getting in my face. “He has his own past with them. They never liked him, but it wasn’t until he allied with you that they began to
fear
him! A council-hating demon and a