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“Who’s Saleh?” I asked, trying to keep the desperation out of my voice.
“It’s too risky!” The glare Pritkin sent Nick would’ve melted glass.
“I’m Pythia,” I reminded him. “Breathing is risky.”
“Saleh deals in information. Esoteric, hard-to-get, valuable information,” Nick informed me, despite Pritkin’s steadily reddening face. “The problem is his price.”
“I can come up with the money,” I said, thinking about Billy and roulette wheels and big payoffs.
“He doesn’t deal in money,” Pritkin snapped, cutting off whatever Nick had been about to say. “Only in favors. And you don’t want to risk owing him one!”
“I’ll decide that!”
“We could at least talk to him,” Nick offered mildly.
I kept hoping his low-key attitude would rub off on his buddy, but so far no luck.
“If he knows something, I’ll get it,” the pixie said, fingering her tiny sword. It would have sounded comical, except that I’d seen what the thing could do.
Nick shook his head. “If we make him angry, we’ll never get anything out of him.”
“The fewer who go, the better,” I added. “Most people don’t like to talk in front of a crowd.” Especially if one of them is waving a sword in his face.
Pritkin looked like he was about to explode. “Did you hear nothing I said? The Codex is likely useless for your purposes. And I am not taking you near that piece of scum!”
“You don’t have to take me anywhere,” I told him impatiently. “I’ll take myself.”
“You’re not going.” It sounded final.
“I already know his name,” I pointed out. “How hard do you think it would be for Billy to locate him?”
“Do you have any idea what he could demand? He’ll try to trick you—”
“Then it’s a good thing we’ll be along to make sure he doesn’t,” Nick said smoothly. He cocked a sandy eyebrow at me. “If you’ll permit the escort?”
I glanced at Pritkin’s face, which was bordering on purple, and sighed. Until I got some training in defense, a bodyguard or two was pretty much a necessity. Besides, I wasn’t sure how to get rid of him. I said okay, even knowing I’d probably regret it.
Of course I was right.
Chapter 8
The room would have been elegant if it hadn’t been for all the blood. The apartment’s tasteful gold and cream interior clashed with the panorama of the Vegas Strip outside, but the view was less of a decor problem than the brown rivulets that had run down the embossed wallpaper and coagulated on the nice buff carpet. There was no body in sight, but there didn’t need to be. No one could have lost that much blood and lived. Not even something not entirely human.
My dress had turned to eerie twilight, with twisted black branches clasping a harvest moon like bony fingers. It was creepy as hell, and fit my mood perfectly. I glanced longingly back at the foyer, but I couldn’t cut and run when this had been my idea. The only good thing was that I’d managed to leave the pixie behind. I wondered if she’d figured a way out of the file drawer yet.
I reluctantly followed Pritkin through the wrecked living room while Nick stayed behind to check things out. We moved gingerly down a hallway, trying to dodge the worst of the blood. It wasn’t easy. By the time I managed it, I’d decided that the victim must have taken at least a few of his attackers with him. No single body could have possibly bled that much.
Sure enough, the door at the end of the hall was ajar due to the corpse lying half out of it. Or, to be more precise, part of a corpse. The top half was several feet away from the remainder, and I didn’t see a right arm at all. Of course, I wasn’t looking too hard.
I carefully stepped over what was left of the body and immediately spotted the missing arm. It was affixed to the wall inside the door, courtesy of a large axe that had severed it at the shoulder. The arm hung by the remains of a sleeve that may once have been blue but was now a stiff purple mess.
Swallowing hard, I stared around, sweat already forming on my upper lip. The air-conditioning wasn’t on, and despite an occasional breeze through a shattered window, it had to be ninety degrees in the apartment. But that wasn’t the reason I was perspiring.
The rays of midafternoon sunlight seemed thicker than usual, clouded with dust and what I realized after a moment were a couple hundred flies. They were hovering over what at first appeared to be a random mass of body parts atop a king-sized bed, but which I finally identified as the corpse of a man. To put it nicely, it wasn’t fresh. I’m no expert, but I seriously doubted that the newly dead would look like a fleshy balloon about to erupt with fetid gases and decay. The sight was gruesome enough that it took me a minute to notice that he had skin the color of an after-dinner mint, a chalky blue green.
“Djinn,” Pritkin said curtly, before I could ask. “Do you see him?”
I looked at him incredulously. “He’s a little hard to miss.”
