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A small gust of wind blew some sand in our faces, making me cough and settling onto everyone’s hair, turning it vaguely pink. I lifted my sweaty hair off my neck and wished for a headband. God, it was hot.
Fortunately, it wasn’t long before Pritkin was back, along with an older man in a golf cart. He seemed to be under the impression that we’d been in a boating accident and needed transport back to Vegas. He had already called us a cab.
“Where’s Tremaine?” Caleb demanded.
“Waiting for the cab,” Pritkin said blandly.
Caleb scowled, but he kept his comments to himself in front of the norm. He and Red got into the back of the golf cart, and Pritkin got in front. Leaving me and Rafe to follow on foot.
“That wasn’t very gentlemanly,” Rafe noted, watching them drive off.
I didn’t say anything.
It took us five minutes to make it out of the campground, up a small hill and down the road to the ticket booth. We found Pritkin outside, leaning against the booth. Caleb and Red were in the golf cart, taking a short nap. The ticket taker was inside, apparently fascinated by his shoelaces, which he’d knotted into some pretty intricate shapes. Tremaine was nowhere in sight.
“Do I want to know?” I asked.
“We have perhaps half an hour before they wake up,” Pritkin informed me. “Peter has gone to the highway to arrange transportation.”
“I thought a cab was coming.”
“We can’t afford to wait that long. McCullough is wearing a tracker; all prisoners do as a precaution. The Corps is preoccupied at the moment, which doubtless explains why a team has yet to arrive to pick him up. But with our luck, they will be here any moment.”
The Corps was the military arm of the Circle; i.e., war mage central. I was definitely in favor of moving on before any more of Pritkin’s old buddies showed up. But something else he’d said caught my attention.
“A tracker?” I blinked dust out of my eyes. “You mean, if he goes anywhere, they know it?”
“Essentially.”
“I don’t see it on him.”
“It’s a spell, not a physical device,” Pritkin said impatiently. “Is there a reason for your interest?”
“Yes. Can you check to see if I have one?”
He handed me a bottle of water from the ticket taker’s fridge and splashed his face with another. “You have three.” He started down the road at a fast enough clip that Rafe and I had to hurry to keep up.
“Wait a minute. How do you know?”
“One of them is mine.”
“You bugged me?”
“It isn’t a listening device, Miss Palmer. It merely records your location. Which, considering how many people wish to kidnap and/or murder you, is a reasonable precaution.”
“If it’s so reasonable, why didn’t you mention it?” Water and perspiration had turned his usually pale eyelashes dark and clumpy, emphasizing the color of his eyes as he rolled them. “Because I wanted it to work! Something it would not have done had you persuaded the witch to remove it.”
“Her name is Francoise and you’re damn right she’d have removed it!”
“Which is why I didn’t mention it.”
If I’d been less exhausted, I’d have been livid. As it was, the best I could manage was disgusted. “When I was growing up at Tony’s, I was followed everywhere,” I told him. “By bodyguards, by my governess, by someone all the time. I had zero privacy. But even Tony didn’t go so far as to put a spell on me!”
“He doubtless didn’t have anyone competent enough to cast it,” Pritkin said, striding ahead.
I shouted after him. “You said one was yours. It doesn’t worry you that two other groups are tracking me?”
Rafe cleared his throat. “Ah, Cassie . . .”
