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“That’s a first,” Alphonse muttered, settling my dinner across my knees.
I hadn’t realized how hungry I was until I smelled the roast beef sandwich Horatiu had rustled up. It had grilled onions and mushrooms and tangy little banana peppers and was pretty much my idea of heaven. The only thing that would have made it better was fries instead of the mountain of salad off to one side, but I didn’t feel like complaining.
I dug in while Sal frowned at me. It didn’t take me long to figure out why. She was hyperconscious of appearance, or so I’d always thought. But having met the family, her attitude was starting to make more sense. She might not have the age or the power of Mircea’s masters, but she was damned if she wasn’t going to outdress them.
“I look this way because the Consul threw me out of my room and somebody stole my luggage,” I told her between bites.
“Your luggage is here, where it’s supposed to be. What we couldn’t figure out is where you were, as you didn’t bother to inform anybody.”
“You had me tagged—you knew exactly where I was!”
“We knew you were somewhere in the hotel,” she agreed, as if monitoring my every move was no big deal. “But the wards around here interfere with the spell, so we couldn’t narrow it down any more than that. Marco only managed to locate you when you went outside.”
“For pizza. On her own,” he grumbled under his breath.
Mircea didn’t say anything, but his expression was deliberately blank. It made me very nervous.
“Coulda been worse,” Alphonse said. “We spent half the day thinking it was worse. The tag said you was alive, but then they brought the car in—”
Damn. I’d forgotten about that. “Is the Consul really pissed?” I asked nervously.
“About what?”
“Her car. I know it was probably really rare—”
“It was a car.” Alphonse shrugged. “It’s no big deal. But everyone would like to know how you survived.”
“It’s a long story.”
“I bet. I saw that thing and I’d have given odds that nobody made it out. Burnt to a crisp.”
I frowned. A lot of things had happened to that car, but that hadn’t been one of them. “It wasn’t burnt. And if it had been, the water would have put it out.”
Mircea lifted his head to look at me strangely. “What water?”
“The water in the lake. You know, that we nose-dived into?”
He was silent for a moment. “No, dulceata, I do not. The car exploded in the middle of the desert.”
For a moment, I just chewed sandwich. I swallowed and drank some of my wine. “It exploded,” I repeated.
“We believe it was a car bomb meant for the Consul. The Bentley was one of her favorites.”
The gray whale we’d left at the bottom of Lake Mead had been a Packard. I’d seen the name written across its bulbous backside in big silver letters as it sank. None of this was making sense.
“She informed us that she asked Raphael to drive it out for her,” he added.
And then I remembered. Rafe had been saving a seat for me in a black Bentley. I’d seen it in the lineup, a sleek, antique gem gleaming under the emergency lights. I’d almost forgotten until now because we hadn’t taken that car. Somebody else had. Somebody who was now dead.
“I assume you shifted out before the explosion?” Mircea asked, watching me keenly. He knew something was wrong.
“We took another car,” I said numbly. And if we hadn’t, Rafe wouldn’t have been in the infirmary today. He would have been dead. If I’d gone back in time to try to save him, I’d have killed him.
Chapter Fourteen
“Here.” Sal shoved a glass into my hand. From the fumes, I was guessing it was straight whiskey.
I stared at the coffee table while I sipped it, but all I saw were hundreds of ruined cars baking under a cloudless sky. And all around them, an empty, dead landscape filled with bones. Had all that been the power’s way of telling me that I was about to screw up big-time? Had it been trying to warn me about Rafe’s death?
