I shifted midair and ended up back where I'd started, woozy and nauseous. Shifting two people on no food and maybe five hours' sleep had wiped me out. I didn't think I could do it again. That proved to be a problem when the other mage popped out of the portal practically on top of me.
I did the only thing I could. I grabbed his coat, swung him around and fell back through the portal before he could curse me. I rolled out of the tower a second later, into the middle of the street, adding another layer of bruises. The crowd applauded as I struggled to my feet.
"They do it with doubles," I heard someone say. "The girl on the balcony was a lot more blond."
"You'd think they'd check for something like that," someone else said.
The mage stepped out of the portal and tripped over my body, kicking me painfully in the ribs. Down the street, his partner jumped from the roof and started for us through the crowd. I got my feet under me, kicked the still-burning remains of my lunch in the mage's face and ran.
"Over here!" I saw Dee waving at me, her wig towering over everyone else. A hand grabbed the back of my sweatshirt, but she jerked me over the heads of the last few people and it fell away. She swiveled on a heel, plunged into a ladies' restroom and shoved me into the janitor's closet. I didn't even have time to catch my breath before we fell through a wall.
We tumbled out into my room again a second later. I landed on the bed, but Dee hit her shin painfully on the side of the headboard. "Fuck it, that's twice today!"
I lay there, staring at the wall, wondering who was going to come through next. But nobody did. I guess the mages hadn't been able to pass the gauntlet of outraged women in line.
"Here!" Dee threw a package on the bed and pulled my shoes out of her bra. "God, what I do to look good," she said, clutching them to her heaving bosom. And disappeared.
Chapter Twelve
I tried room service, but after getting a busy signal for ten minutes straight, I put my new sneakers on and decided to go out.
There are things I am never going to like about Vegas: the relentless sun that reflects off sand and glass and concrete everywhere you look. The constantly changing skyline, where housing developments and gaudy tourist traps seem to pop up and fade away overnight, as if the whole city is set on fast-forward. And the crowds of tourists that are constantly underfoot. But you have to love a place just a little that serves up pizza and beer to go at midnight.
I reentered Dante's through a side entrance, intending to find a quiet place to picnic. But apparently someone else had other ideas. A meaty hand reached out of a stairwell and grabbed me around the wrist.
"If you want some pizza, you could just ask," I told Marco.
He glowered at me out of red-rimmed eyes but didn't say anything. Just breathed heavily and stuck a phone in my ear. "Cassie? Are you there?" a voice asked.
Damn. It was Mircea. And I hadn't even started to figure out what to say to him yet—about a lot of things. "What did you do to Marco?" I demanded, deciding to go with a good offense.
"Assigned him as your permanent bodyguard." Mircea's usually warm voice was cold steel.
"I meant as punishment."
"So did I."
I stared at the phone for a moment and then clicked it shut.
It almost immediately rang again.
I tossed it at Marco and continued walking. He followed. "You gotta take the boss's call."
"Or what?"
There was a slight pause. "He'll be mad."
"He's already mad."
"At me."
I looked up to find Marco practically shaking in his boots. His face was pale and his eyes were almost bugging out of his head. He looked terrified.
At that moment, I didn't like Mircea very much.
The phone rang.
Marco held it out to me and I took it. "What?"
"I thought you might wish to know that Raphael is in the infirmary."
I stopped walking. "Why?"
"The doctors tell me that he is dying." Mircea said something else, but I didn't hear him. I'd already dropped the phone and the pizza and was running for the stairs.
I don't remember how I got to the lobby and couldn't tell you the name of the person who gave me directions. I skidded into a table on the way and almost fell but managed to clutch it with both hands and hang on. Cursing, I started to take off again and ran into a solid wall of vampire.
Alphonse, Tony's onetime head henchman, set me back on my feet. As usual, his seven-foot-plus body was clad in a bespoke suit. This one was dark tan with a cranberry stripe, and he had a ruby the size of a quail's egg for a tie tack. More rubies glinted from a couple of finger rings and from the wrist of his longtime girlfriend, Sal. He had the suits cut loose to conceal the half ton of weaponry he carried but didn't need. Between him and Sal, they could have taken out a platoon.
Sal was all in red to match the rubies, from the skintight sheath designed to draw attention to her ample curves and away from her missing eye—lost long ago in a saloon brawl with another "hostess" — to her anger-darkened cheeks. "I wish someone had done this to him, so I could gut them," she said by way of greeting.
"You've seen him?"
"Yeah." Sal wiped an arm across her face, smearing her mascara. I stared; I'd never seen her look this rattled. She noticed and smiled grimly. "You kinda get attached to someone when you know him for a century and a half."
"He's not bad, for a pretty-boy painter," Alphonse agreed. "You been in there?" He jerked a thumb at the set of ornate doors down the hall.
"No. I just found out—"
"So did we. Fucking idiots didn't tell nobody he was here, and he was too weak to do it himself. We're getting him transferred to a private room."
"How. . how is he? Mircea said something—"
"Bad," he said flatly.
"If you want to see him, you better do it now," Sal added bleakly.
I ran.
Casanova had said that they'd had to cancel the conventions, but I'd assumed it was because they needed the space. They did, but not only for rooms. The Murano glass chandeliers of the main ballroom, which usually looked down on fashion shows and business luncheons, now lit up row after row of cots. I could see them dimly through the glass insets in the main doors but not reach them. Because the ballroom had another new feature—a pair of armed guards.
They were vampires, but they weren't part of Casanova's security force. I knew all of them by now and they knew me, whereas neither of these guys made any attempt to move out of the way. "Human visitors are not allowed," one of them said without bothering to look at me.
"I'll take my chances," I told him, but he didn't budge. "My friend is in there." Not a word, not even a glance. "He's dying!"
Nothing.
"She's with me," Marco said, coming out of nowhere.
"No humans," the guard repeated in the same abrupt way, but at least Marco got eye contact. "Senate's orders."
"There have been problems?" Marco asked sharply.
The vamp shrugged. "Indiscriminate feeding. Some of the injured were out of their heads. The nurses say they have it under control, but the Senate doesn't want any incidents. That means no human visitors."
"Well, this human is visiting whether the Senate likes it or not!" I said furiously.
"Keep it in line or I'll do it for you," the guard told Marco.
"Screw this," I said, and shifted inside—only to almost get run over by an orderly with a cart. More than a dozen of them were zipping here and there, patching up patients like pit crews servicing race cars. A nearby patient had his sheets changed, his pillow fluffed, his water jug refilled and his meds doled out in about the time it took for me to blink.