AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Well, I trust him!”
Pause number four. “And I do not.”
And there it was, as plain as any challenge ever given. And to underscore it, as if anything else was needed, Marco quietly took the phone out of my hand and put it in his back pocket. His expression said clearly that it wasn’t coming out again.
All right, then.
The doorbell rang.
I glanced around the room. One thing about Vegas hotels, especially those built before the widespread use of cell phones, is that they put land lines everywhere. Busy executives needed instant access to the empires they were gambling away and wouldn’t stay anywhere that didn’t offer it. As a result, there were no fewer than three telephones in sight—one in the living room, one in the bar and one sitting on the counter in the kitchen.
And a vamp was casually loitering near every one of them.
Okay, then.
I turned on my heel and went back to my room.
Unsurprisingly, there was no cell phone in my purse. I hadn’t really expected one. When a master vampire gave an order, his men were thorough in carrying it out. And Marco had never been a slouch. But there were things that a vamp might not notice, especially one who had been around as long as he had.
I went back to the bathroom, turned on the exhaust fan and the shower and blasted Led Zeppelin from the built-in radio.
Vampires don’t use bathrooms all that much, especially the toilet facilities. And, of course, housekeeping kept the place clean. As a result, I was willing to bet that the guys outside had never bothered to so much as crack the door on the toilet cubicle.
And then I knew they hadn’t, when I opened it and saw what I’d expected—yet another phone, this one mounted on the wall. It was big and kind of complicated-looking, like something that ought to have been on the desk of an executive secretary, not sitting above the toilet-tissue dispenser. But it was there, and when I lifted the receiver, I got a dial tone.
Pritkin picked up on the first ring, like he’d been expecting a call. “Do you still have Jonas’s keys?” I asked quietly.
There was silence for a beat, as if he hadn’t been expecting that. But he recovered fast. “See what I can do.”
He hung up and so did I. After waiting another few minutes, I turned off the water and went back to my room. I couldn’t change clothes, because somebody might notice. But I put on a bra, jammed my feet into an old pair of Keds and shoved some cash and my keys into my pocket. Then I went back into the lounge.
The guys were still playing poker, quietly now, as there was no need to keep up audible patter for the human. So they didn’t fall silent when I entered and picked up my half-finished beer. But ten pairs of eyes watched as I made my way across to the living room and then to the balcony.
The wind chimes were tinkling in the breeze blowing off the desert. It was hot, but after the deep freeze the vamps had going on inside, it felt good. I hung over the rail and drank my beer and waited.
“Is there a problem?” Marco asked, sticking his head out the door.
“Need some air.”
He looked at me suspici
ously, but I guess his orders stopped short of actually confining me to my room. He went back to the game, and I went back to my beer. I hadn’t even finished it when my ride showed up.
“Best I could do on short notice,” Pritkin told me, grabbing my arm as I scrambled over the railing. And into the front seat of a beat-up green convertible that was idling in the air twenty stories up.
“No problem,” I told him, hanging on for dear life as the rattletrap belched smoke into the startled faces of half a dozen vamps, who had taken a fraction of a second too long to figure out what was going on.
“Cassie!” I heard Marco’s infuriated bellow behind me. But by then we were out of there, soaring away into the star-shot indigo high above the Strip.
Chapter Twenty-two
“You coldhearted son of a bitch.”
Pritkin looked up from perusing the stained piece of paper posing as a menu and gave me what he probably thought were innocent eyes. They weren’t. I didn’t think that was an expression he was all that familiar with. “Is there a problem?”
“You feed me tofu while you’ve been eating here?” I gestured around at the cracked Formica, orange Naugahyde and grimy windows of what had to be the greasiest greasy spoon in Vegas.
“No one eats healthy all the time.”
