I slammed it shut, one eye on the doorway, and chewed a nail. Several employees stopped to stare at me, taking in my sunburned face, tangled hair, and filthy, topcoat-clad body. I really needed a shower, but taking one here was out of the question. The only thing worse than getting caught by the Circle was getting caught by the Circle naked. I needed somewhere to recharge, somewhere I could get a change of clothes and a bath, somewhere safe. And only one place came to mind.
Sometimes, it really helps to have a witch for a friend.
Chapter Eleven
A string of furious French was the response to my knock. "I 'ave until four!" I was informed through the door. "Go away!"
I tapped on the door again—carefully—because a powerful witch in a mood is not someone to take lightly. Especially when she knows as many archaic spells as this one. "Francoise—it's me."
The door flung open to reveal a really unhappy brunette. Her long hair was everywhere, her chic green and white sundress was streaked with dust and she had a bulging garbage bag in one hand. From the look of things, it contained most of her clothes.
"Cassie!" Her eyes widened and a second later I found myself enveloped in a bone-crushing hug. "I was so worried! I was afraid the Circle 'ad taken you to MAGIC!"
"They did."
"But. . 'ow did you escape? Zey say it was destroyed!"
"It's a long story." I glanced at the garbage bag. "I take it you've been evicted?"
The scowl returned."Casanova, 'e say zat ze Senate needs my room for one of zere servants. So I must go! Today!"
"There's a lot of that going around."
"I 'ad thought to ask if I might stay with you," she admitted.
"What a coincidence."
"Mais c'est impossible!
You are ze Pythia!"
"And the Consul likes a view."
Francoise said some uncharitable things about the Consul. Since they were in French—which I'm not supposed to speak—I didn't contradict her. It was also a fact that they were all true.
I flopped onto the bed. I'd only meant to sit down, but I swear the mattress was spelled. It just pulled me in. I tried to kick my shoes off, but mud had welded them to my feet. I decided I didn't care.
I lay there for a few minutes, listening to Francoise tear the room apart. "Any ideas?" I finally asked.
Francoise grimaced. "Randolph 'as an apartment."
"Randy?" I opened an eye to watch her flush slightly. "Tall, corn-fed, crew-cut blond with biceps like boulders? That Randy?"
"When 'e 'eard that ze employees 'ave to move, 'e called me."
I rolled over onto my stomach and propped my chin in my hand. "Did he?"
The flush became a blush. "'E 'as an extra room."
"Uh-huh." And I'm sure he meant for her to stay in it, too.
She sighed. "'E ees very 'andsome, non?"
"Yeah." If you liked the laid-back surfer boy type, Randy was the man. He was also a genuinely nice guy, for someone possessed by an incubus. "So what's the problem?"
Francoise shot me a look. "You know what ees ze problem!"
"He wouldn't feed off you," I assured her. For one thing, she'd curse him into next week.
"I know zat!" She filled another Hefty bag with the extra pillow and blanket from the closet, the bedside lamp and the hotel's iron. When she picked up the last, the cord fell out the back.
"Then what is it? And you need that long skinny black thing." She looked blank. "It makes it go," I added, and she nodded and went hunting under the bed.
Francoise had issues with modern equipment. «Modern» meaning anything invented after the seventeenth century. That's when she'd been born, and when she'd met a bunch of dark mages with an entrepreneurial streak.
The Fey would pay top dollar for attractive, fertile young witches who could help them with their population problem, but most of the likely candidates were either too well-guarded or too powerful to be taken easily. But the mages had caught Francoise at a vulnerable moment and quickly bundled her off to a slave auction in Faerie. She'd lived with the Fey for what had seemed like a few years, until seizing the chance to escape—only to discover on her return that four hundred years had passed in our world. The whole thing just left Rip van Winkle standing.
"Zees?" She held up the cord.
"That would be the one."
It went into the bag, along with a painting that she climbed up onto the bed to rip off the wall. "It ees zese ozzair women," she told me, tugging on the painting. "I tell him, I weel not be—what ees ze word? Many women with one man?"
"Harem."
"Oui. I weel not be a harem!" she said, and tugged really hard. The painting came off the wall, flew across the room and put a dent in the door. Francoise hopped down and checked out the damage. The frame looked a little wonky, but apparently it passed muster because it went into the bag.
"I can see where that could pose a problem. He has an incubus to feed."
"I tell heem, geet rid of it," she said, making one of those wild French gestures that mean anything and nothing. "But non. 'It changed my life, " she mimicked.
"Maybe it did," I said carefully. "Casanova recruits a lot of his boys from small towns who don't think they have much of a future."
"'E ees 'ere now," she said fiercely. "'E does not need it anymore. I theenk it ees the ozzair women 'e does not wish to give up!"
I tried to find something to say, but everything was too jumbled, too out of control in my head. Thoughts and feelings I didn't want to examine kept pushing their way to the front. I wondered if Mircea felt the same way now that a spell no longer bound us together. Would he want other women? Or did he already have one?
He came from an era when it was common to have a wife to play hostess and a mistress or two with whom to play at other things. I'd never heard anyone speak of a long-term lover in connection with Mircea, but then, I hadn't asked, either. And I'd never been to his main court in Washington State. That was despite the fact that he'd discovered my existence when I was eleven, after a call from Raphael, his resident stooge at Tony's court.
Mircea was Tony's master, which by vampire law allowed him to put a claim on me. At best, he'd hoped that I might inherit the Pythia's position and give the vampires their first shot at controlling that kind of power. At worst, I was a genuine clairvoyant, and those aren't a dime a dozen. But he'd nonetheless chosen to let me grow up at Tony's rather than take me back to court with him.
I'd always assumed that had been to ensure that the Circle didn't find out about me. They had a proprietary interest in magic users in general and clairvoyants in particular, and they might have given him trouble. Tony's court was a lot lower profile than Mircea's, and therefore safer. But now I wondered if maybe there had been another reason as well.
A beautiful dark-eyed reason.
I groaned and threw an arm over my eyes. Damn it! There were only ever questions when it came to Mircea, never answers. It was starting to get really old.
My head hurt, my body ached and I wanted to just stop thinking for a while. But something about those photos was nagging at me. I suddenly realized that Mircea hadn't appeared in a single one, which seemed a little strange considering how many there had been. I'd have assumed that he was the one taking the pictures, but the woman hadn't been looking at the camera in any of them, at least not that I could remember. It was like she hadn't even been aware of it.
So what the hell was he doing? Paying someone to take photos for him, to keep track of her? And if so, why? Why not just take her if he was that smitten? Who could a master vampire possibly need to stalk?