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“Caleb—” Pritkin began.
His onetime colleague raised a hand. “Jonas called us. Said he challenged and Saunders refused.”
“Yes.” Pritkin went very still.
Caleb exchanged glances with the mages he’d brought along. None of them looked young enough to be trainees. Several had gray hair, and one or two looked like they might even be Marsden’s age. Their expressions ranged from sour to disgusted to war mage neutral.
“Well. I guess that makes him an outlaw.”
“A
nd us?”
Caleb smiled slightly. “Technically, there are still warrants out for both of you. The fact that the man who issued them is currently under suspicion himself doesn’t negate that.” I licked my lips and started to speak, but Pritkin’s hand tightened on my arm. “So if I see you, I guess I’ll have to arrest you.”
Pritkin nodded.
“By the way, I liked the old coat better,” Caleb said, and turned away.
Dee sidled off as soon as the group of mages parted in front of us, fanning herself with a hand. “I never thought I’d say this, but too much testosterone. We need to get out of here,” she told me, heading for a bank of elevators.
“We need to find Apollo,” I told her, catching her arm.
“Well, he ain’t down here! We have to go up.”
“You can sense him, then?”
“Oh, yeah. There’s something up there, all right. Although I’m not getting a who so much as a what.”
“He’s . . . not exactly human,” I explained, not having time to go into it all.
“I should have asked for an hour,” she muttered, and then started for the elevators again.
Pritkin caught her arm. “We could get trapped that way. Saunders’ supporters are all over the place, and it’s going to take time to round them up.”
She looked at him for a second, and then her eyes slid to the stairs. “You have got to be kidding.”
He wasn’t kidding. Of course, I thought savagely, Pritkin was wearing his usual boots. Dee and I were in platforms almost as high as the steps. Navigating even one flight in those ought to be an Olympic event. By the time we’d made it up five floors, I was drenched with sweat and had small explosions going off behind my eyelids.
I stopped in the stairwell, bent over and gasping, only my hand on the railing keeping me up. Pritkin just threw me over his shoulder and kept going, earning him a speculative look from Dee. “Don’t even think about it,” he told her. “I’m not carrying you.”
“That wasn’t what I was thinking,” she cooed, and he flushed. I guess there weren’t any mages in the stairwell, because Dee’s laugh could have been heard all the way down to the lobby.
By the time we got as far as the stairs would take us, Dee was no longer laughing. “I think I hate you,” she told Pritkin, who had all but run her up the stairs. She looked like hell. Her roses had mostly been lost on the street and the rest had fallen off on the stairs. Her wig was askew, her makeup had sweated off and a huge fake eyelash had come unglued and was clinging tenuously to one cheek.
“Good for the figure,” he said, putting me down. He was also hot and sweaty after our marathon, with damp tendrils of hair stuck to his forehead and neck. His lashes had gone spiky dark, turning his eyes emerald. Grungy was a surprisingly good look for him.
I didn’t know what I looked like. I preferred it that way. If it was anywhere near as bad as I felt, I’d scare off any mages we encountered before they could shoot me.
“This is where I get off,” Dee said, sitting on a step to rub her arches. “The power is coming from the next floor up.”
I looked at Pritkin. “The penthouse.”
I didn’t have a key card, but Pritkin convinced the elevator to take us up anyway. The doors opened onto a deathly quiet foyer that looked a little worse for the wear. The gold flocked wallpaper had a big hole through it, the bronze sculpture had half melted into a Dalí-esque mess and the cow skin rug was covered in dirty boot prints. But the John Wayne posters had survived without a scratch.
We walked into the living room. Wind through the broken balcony doors was blowing the curtains inward in a billowing mass that, for a moment, made me think someone was there. But nothing else moved, except for the chandelier swinging gently overhead, no longer spilling light onto the roadster still parked below.
“Where did they all go?” I asked, looking around at the carnage. At least Casanova wouldn’t need to gut the place. The mages had pretty much done it for him.
