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“But why ‘banjo’?”
“Why not? Look, I have to come up with a couple hundred of these a year, okay? I ran out of abracadabras a long time ago. Besides, you wouldn’t have guessed it, right?”
“I still need you to open the door,” the pixie reminded me as I finally found a leather key chain in Jimmy’s suit coat. My hands were shaking, but it was obvious he couldn’t let himself out. Somebody had run out of handcuffs, or maybe they didn’t like him any better than I did. Both his hands had been smashed, and they weren’t merely broken, but ruined to the point that not a finger or joint appeared to be working. I was betting that, even if he got out of this, he’d made his last hit.
“I’m trying!”
“Not that one, “she said impatiently. “The one by the cage where they put me.” She whirled around my head like a tiny cyclone. “Against the far wall. My hands aren’t big enough to turn that oversized knob.”
“Give me a minute,” I told her as the stubborn lock finally sprang open. Jimmy shot out of there at a dead run, heading for the hall. I glanced from him to the demanding pixie. “Follow him,” I told Billy. “I’ll be right there.”
“Cass—”
“Just do it!”
Billy went off in a huff and I rushed to open the door the tiny virago indicated. I was about to turn and follow Billy when I found out what Tony’s latest business venture was. Three brunette women, all about my age, sat back-to-back on the floor inside a rust-colored circle. Their hands and feet were bound, and makeshift gags had been stuffed in their mouths. I stared. “My God. He’s slaving now?” Even for Tony, that was low.
“As good as,” the pixie replied, flying over to the women. She grimaced and looked back at me. “This is worse than I thought. I can deal with the circle, but I can’t get them loose.”
I ran forward, wondering if one of the other keys on Jimmy’s ring would work, and hit what felt like a solid wall. It didn’t look like there was anything there, but my bruised nose said otherwise, and my ward flared, spilling golden light around the room. The pixie began chattering agitatedly. “Stupid witch! It’s a circle of power! I’ll destroy it, then you free the women!”
I moved backwards and my ward calmed down, although I could still feel it warm against my back. “I’m not a witch,” I said resentfully, wondering if my nose was broken.
The pixie had dropped to the floor and started rubbing at the circle. It was made of a dried substance that flaked off slowly. “Okay. The Pythia’s not a witch. Got it.”
“Can’t you hurry?” I asked after a minute, wondering how far Jimmy had gotten in his condition. “And my name is Cassie.”
Sharp lavender eyes gave an exaggerated roll. “I used to think it was the position that made you so annoying, but you were born this way, weren’t you? And I’m doing the best I can! The blood has dried and it’s not coming off easily.”
“Blood?”
“How do you think dark mages perform a spell? It takes a death, stupid.” She started mumbling in that other language, while I hugged myself and tried not to think about what Tony was doing with a member of the Fey, some slaves and a circle of blood. He’d been on the wrong side of human law as long as I’d known him, but this contravened both mage and vampire rules as well. I didn’t know when he’d turned suicidal, but I suddenly wanted out of the casino in the worst way.
Finally, my small accomplice finished cleaning a narrow line through the circle, and I heard a small pop. “Is that it?” I asked her. It seemed kind of anticlimactic.
She sat on the floor and panted. “Well, try it!”
I walked forward, tentatively this time, but nothing blocked me. I knelt quickly by the nearest woman and started trying keys. Thankfully, the third one worked. I pulled the gag out of her mouth, and she started screaming. I started to stuff it back in, before she alerted the whole casino, but she caught my hand. She began a rapid string of French in between kissing my wrist and whatever else she could reach. I didn’t understand much of what she was saying—my only other modern language is Italian, and there aren’t a lot of crossovers between the two—but the light brown eyes that were looking at me almost worshipfully rang a bell.
I got a weird feeling in my stomach. I knew this woman. She was plumper and looked far less haggard, but otherwise, little had changed since I’d seen her stretched on a rack enveloped in flames. I did a double take, but there was no denying it. That face was seared into my memory, and a glance at her fingertips showed them to be heavily scarred. As impossible as it was, a seventeenth-century witch was sitting in a casino in modern-day Vegas. Presumably a dead witch, since no one could have survived what I’d seen her put through. Any other day, I would have seriously considered passing out; as it was, I just pressed the key into her hand and scrambled back out of reach.
“I have to go,” I said shortly and fled. My plan was simple: find Jimmy, question him, turn him over to the cops, then run like hell. Other complications I could do without.
I didn’t need Billy to figure out that going back the way we’d come wasn’t a great idea. If anyone was coming for Jimmy, that’s the route they’d take, and my one gun wouldn’t help much against the kind of hardware Tony’s thugs carried. Not that I had seen any employees, muscle or otherwise, since hitting the lower levels, a fact that was beginning to worry me. It was early morning, sure, but a place like this never slept. There should be people around, especially if the ring was on tonight, but the hallways echoed emptily. I followed the corridor until I came to where it diverged. I paused, confused, until Billy floated through a wall and beckoned to me. “In here.”
I entered through a nearby door to find myself in an empty employee break room. Jimmy was half-hidden behind a soda machine. “There’s a doorknob,” he said when he saw me, and pointed at the wall with his elbow, “right about there. But I can’t do anything with these.” He held up his mutilated hands and I hurried forward. Behind the machine was what looked like an expanse of the same off-white, slightly stained drywall that made up the res
t of the room. But it rippled around the edges, although I wouldn’t have noticed if I hadn’t been expecting it. The perimeter ward was getting old. I slid my hands along the wall until I grasped what felt like a knob, and pushed.
A door opened onto a narrow corridor that, judging by the dust on the floor, didn’t get a lot of use. It wasn’t a surprise. Tony always had multiple exits, half of them hidden, in his businesses. He told me once that it was a leftover from his youth, when armies went marching through Rome on a regular basis. He’d almost burnt to death when some Spanish soldiers in Charles V’s army sacked his villa in the 1530s, and ever since he’d been paranoid. For once, I was grateful for it.
We ran down the hidden hallway, then climbed up a ladder at the end. Or, rather, I climbed and shoved Jimmy up in front of me. His hands were a major handicap, but he used his elbows, I pushed from below and somehow we made it. We burst out of a trapdoor into a locker room. A human wearing a sequined devil costume blinked at us blearily but didn’t ask questions. He worked for Tony, so he was probably used to assorted oddities.
Jimmy scrambled to his feet and ran for the door, puffing like a freight train, and I wasn’t much better off. I definitely needed to add gym visits to my to-do list, right after running for my life and killing Tony. The locker room exited onto another of those plain gray hallways, but mercifully, it was a short one. A few seconds later, we were standing near a forest of faux stalagmites overlooking the river. A Charon was rowing a few weary gamblers back towards the entrance a few yards away.
“Hey, where do you think you’re going?!” Jimmy had started off without a word and didn’t so much as flinch at my shout. Wrestling him to the ground wasn’t an option, but fortunately, I knew something that was. “Billy, get him!”
I took off after Jimmy and felt Billy Joe flow past me like a warm breeze. He was usually cold or at least chilly, but he was hopped up on some vamp’s wards and had energy to burn. But Jimmy reached the vestibule in record time and was heading for the gates when he suddenly stopped and stumbled backwards. I realized why when I saw Pritkin, Tomas and Louis-César coming in the main entrance. I didn’t worry about how they’d found me or what they had planned. I grabbed a handful of Jimmy’s elegant suit coat and dragged him back into the hallway.
