Condiments, I told myself firmly.
Or so it wanted me to think.
“Dryden’s finished hugging the toilet,” one of the vamps said, walking into the kitchen. “Do we need to dose her, too?”
“She took care of that herself,” Marco said, joining the party. He’d pulled off the barfed-on shirt but hadn’t yet bothered to go to his room for another one. That left him in dark gray slacks, a pair of Ferragamo loafers and a lot of hair.
A lot of hair. It was even on his shoulders. It was like a pelt.
He crouched down on the other side of me. “You’re really hairy,” I told him, impressed.
“And you’re really stoned.”
I thought about that for a moment. It seemed like an outside possibility. “Why am I stoned?”
“It was the goddamned chocolates. I always taste everything before you eat it, yet I sat right there and watched you scarf half the damn—”
“You couldn’t know.”
“It’s my goddamned job to know!”
I sighed and pulled his curly head to me. He was warm and fuzzy, like a big teddy bear. A big teddy bear with fangs.
I patted him softly.
“Why didn’t the wards detect that shit?” one of the other guards demanded angrily. He was a redhead, his fiery hair worn in a slick style that went with his natty blue-plaid suit. He was one of the ones who had made fun of the mage when he first arrived, but who’d let him follow us in. I wondered if he’d caught flak for that.
Probably.
“They detect poison,” Pritkin told him. “This was a narcotic.”
“What the hell was the point in that?”
“Probably hoped she’d eat enough to kill her,” Marco said savagely. “Don’t have to be poison to do the job if you consume enough of it! But even one or two pieces would make sure she couldn’t shift away from that asshole.”
“That asshole ate half the box himself,” Pritkin said, “hoping he’d pass out before that creature could make use of him.”
“Then why the hell didn’t he?”
“He doubtless would have, given more time. Unfortunately, our meeting broke up too soon and Cassie found the box—”
A phone rang. Marco pulled it out of his pocket and looked at the readout. “I gotta get the rest of my ass chewed off by the master,” he told me. “Think you can maybe not die for five minutes?”
“I’ll try,” I told him seriously.
“You know, if anyone else said that, it would be funny.” He left.
“What I don’t get is how that thing knew that particular mage would get in,” another vamp said. He was a tall brunet in nice tan jacket that was now covered in beer. “We’d been tossing them out on their fortune-hunting asses all day. He’d have gone the same way if he hadn’t shown up with the Lord Protector.”
“Maybe that’s what it was waiting for,” a third vamp said, glancing around. He was another brunet, in shirtsleeves and dark brown slacks. A bright blue tie was askew under one ear, but he didn’t appear to have noticed. “It could have been there all morning, watching us, waiting for someone to get in. . . .”
“Someone who just happened to have poisoned chocolates?” the redhead asked sarcastically.
“They weren’t poisoned,” the brunet said, scowling. “And he could have gotten them—”
“Where? At the gift shop?” The redhead rolled his eyes. “Yes, I’ll take the drugged kind, please. Do you have any in mint?”
“Very funny!”
“Well, you sound like an idiot! Obviously, the bastard brought them with him, meaning this wasn’t random opportunity. It was planned.”
“I agree,” Pritkin said, causing their heads to swivel back his way. “But not by him.”
“You would say that,” the redhead sneered. “Then where did he get the damn things?”
“He brought the candy with him, but it wasn’t drugged. He said he did that later, under the influence of the entity.”
“With what?”
Pritkin reached into a pocket and tossed something to the vamp, who caught it easily. It was a little vial, the type war mages wore in bandoliers or on their belts. A lot of them were filled with dark, sludgy substances that sometimes moved on their own, but this one was just plain, colorless liquid.
“And this does what?” the vamp asked, wisely not opening it.
Pritkin didn’t reply. He just knelt beside me, green eyes assessing. He held up a finger. “Cassie, can you tell me how many—”
I grabbed it and laughed.
He looked over his shoulder at the vamp. “That,” he said drily.
“What the hell was he carrying this shit around for?” the second vamp demanded.
“It’s useful in making captures, subduing difficult prisoners.” Pritkin shrugged.
“Then . . . this is a weapon.”
“Yes.”
“But he was going on a date.”
Pritkin looked confused. “Yes?”
The redhead threw his hands up.
“How do we know the mage was really possessed?” a skinny blond asked, leaning over the counter. “Maybe somebody hired him—”
“He’s been in the Corps for seventeen years,” Pritkin said.
“And mages can’t be bribed?”
“He also comes from a wealthy, prominent family. He has no need—”
“That guy?” the blond asked incredulously.
“He didn’t dress like it,” the redhead sniffed.
“Not everyone cares about such things,” Pritkin said.
The redhead looked him over. “Obviously.”
“Blackmail, then,” Tan Jacket put in. “Maybe somebody had something on him.”
“There will be an investigation,” Pritkin told him. “But his actions speak for him. If—”
“His actions? He tried to kill her!”
“He tried to save her. Not only did he attempt to eat the chocolates whenever he was lucid enough, but he also slowed down his reflexes in the fight, skewed his aim. And when she ran, he threw a nonlethal spell instead of a fireball. He fought it every step of the way—”
“And we know this how? Because he told you?” Tan Jacket interrupted.
“We know this because she’s still alive!” Pritkin snapped. “Essentially, he and Cassie were both fighting it. He bought her time, and she used it, brilliantly.”
He bent over and topped off my coffee cup. Pritkin hadn’t shaved for a few days, and I put my hand to his cheek. “Fuzzy,” I told him seriously.
He sighed.
“I don’t understand why this thing needed to hitch a ride in the first place,” the redhead said. “If it’s powerful enough to possess a war mage—”
“Anyone can be possessed if his guard is down,” Pritkin said curtly. “And no one’s is up every minute.”
“It didn’t possess one of us,” the vamp pointed out snottily.
“Vampires are more difficult,” Pritkin admitted. “You can be possessed, but it takes considerably more energy than possessing a human. The creature might not have had the strength to manage it and also force you to attack.”
“But why did it need someone else to attack at all? If it’s such a big, bad evil entity, why not go after her itself?”
“It already tried that—” Pritkin said.
“It tried to possess her, not simply attack her. If it can get past the wards, why not go for an all-out assault?”
Pritkin shrugged. “In Faerie, it doubtless would have. But outside its own world, its power is weakened.”
“We still don’t know that it’s Fey,” the vamp said.
“Yes, we do,” a new voice said hoarsely.
I looked up to find a slim blond figure standing in the doorway to the kitchen. For a frozen second, I looked at him and he looked at me, and then I screamed and threw my coffee, which hit him square in the groin. And I guess that didn’t feel too good because he screamed, too, and for a minute there was a whole lot of screaming going on.
Then Pritkin put a heavy hand on my shoulder and I belatedly noticed that Dryden was flanked by a couple of vamps, each of whom had one of his arms. It looked less like they were restraining him than holding him up. And then I noticed other things, like the fact that his eyes were back to blue and his nose was all bloody and he was pale and shaky and his nice suit was torn and dripping coffee.