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The guys’ bathroom looked exactly like the women’s, other than being larger and having a line of urinals. I walked past the bathroom stalls and into the big shower room in back. There was no door—of course—so it didn’t take me long to find him.
It took me a little longer to figure out what to do.
For a guy who was as loud as Pritkin, he really didn’t lose it very often. Maybe all that yelling served as a release valve; I don’t know. But no matter how bad things got, he kept his shit together better than most people I knew, including me. Not that that was saying much. I was usually the run-screaming-at-the-first-sign-of-danger type, but Pritkin was Mr. Cool under Pressure.
Which was why it was a little strange to find him standing in the spray, staring at a bar of soap with the air of a man who has forgotten what he’s supposed to do with it.
It didn’t look like he’d used it. There were streaks of blood on the powerful legs, oil or something black on the broad back and livid bruises pretty much everywhere. The black stuff had run, dripping down the multicolored skin, making him look like some kind of avant-garde painting or vandalized sculpture. The Thinker in yellow, purple and green.
The hair was wet and plastered to his skull. It made the bones of his face stand out more, and his nose look bigger as he turned his head to me. It wasn’t with his usual rapid reflexes, but in a bewildered kind of way that really worried me. Not that an assassin was likely to be sneaking up on him at war mage HQ, but still. I had the disturbing impression that, if I had been an assassin, Pritkin would have just stood there and let me kill him.
Okay, then.
I walked over, despite not knowing what the hell I was supposed to do. Growing up at Murders ’R’ Us, I’d seen a lot of nasty stuff, and my visions had shown me a lot more. Pretty early on, I’d learned to distance myself from inconvenient feelings, from anything I couldn’t easily handle. And by now, I was tops at the Scarlett O’Hara school of emotional distancing. I always thought about the uncomfortable stuff tomorrow, and, as everyone knows, tomorrow never comes.
And despite what psychologists would have you believe, living in denial actually works pretty damn well. At least most of the time. It had worked for me, keeping me functional, keeping me sane—more or less—long after anyone could have reasonably expected.
It wasn’t working so well right now.
It meant that I didn’t know how to talk to Pritkin about his shit, whatever his shit was, because I rarely talked about mine. I didn’t know how to tell him it was going to be okay, because I wasn’t sure that it was. I didn’t have anything useful to say at all, so I didn’t try. I slid my arms around him from behind and held on.
The water was still warm. I supposed that was something.
Pritkin didn’t say anything, either, so we just stayed like that for a while. I found that I was in no real hurry to move. I was bone tired, but he was warm and solid and easy to hold on to. I got this weird kind of floaty feeling after a while, a combination of exhaustion, relief and the thrum of his heart under my ear.
He hadn’t bothered to turn on the lights, so the only illumination was whatever filtered in from the bathroom or through the open top of the shower area. It wasn’t much, and the water hitting the tile sounded like rain, the kind Vegas rarely got. I pulled him closer and felt my eyes slip closed.
I thought maybe I’d just sleep here.
“Her name was Ruth,” he said hoarsely. And then he stopped.
His back was warm against my cheek. I could feel the column of his spine just under the surface. I didn’t say anything.
“My wife,” he added, after a while. I nodded, but he couldn’t see it, so I just tightened my grip for a moment. I’d kind of thought that might be it.
I wasn’t an expert on Pritkin’s past, but I knew a few things. Like the fact that, more than a century ago, he’d married a woman he’d presumably loved a lot. I didn’t know much about her, because that was one topic that got a very swift conversation change. But I knew the important thing: I knew how she’d died.
It had happened on their wedding night, when the incubus part of Pritkin got out of control—seriously out. For some reason, instead of simply feeding, which would have been normal under the circumstances, it had decided to drain her—dry. Pritkin hadn’t been able to stop the process, and it had killed her.
Or, rather, he had killed her, because as the only halfhuman incubus, the two parts of his nature were forced into an uneasy cohabitation. It was like being Jekyll and Hyde, only at the same time, all the time. Other incubi could leave their bodies behind when they weren’t feeding, since they’d only borrowed them from a human anyway. But Pritkin couldn’t.
I didn’t know if that had something to do with why he’d lost it that night or not. Because he’d told me those few hard facts and nothing else. It had been around the time we’d started to notice an attraction, and I guess the idea had been to scare me off.
It had worked like a charm.
The idea of ending up a straw-haired, desiccated corpse had proven a real incentive in ignoring any inconvenient feelings. Pritkin and I were together a lot, often in circumstances that got the blood pumping, if not spurting. It was only natural that there might be an occasional spike of something. It would have been strange if there hadn’t been, really.
But we’d ignored them by mutual consent, because, clearly, they weren’t going anywhere. I was dating Mircea, and Pritkin . . . Well, as far as I knew, Pritkin didn’t date anyone. Ever. I’d gotten the impression that he wasn’t going to risk whatever had happened happening again.
I suddenly found that really sad.
Someone cursed behind us, but I didn’t jump. I was too tired, and anyway, I knew that voice. I looked over my shoulder and saw Caleb’s big body outlined in the doorway for a second before he disappeared.
But a moment later he was back with a couple of large towels. He shut off the water, wrapped one around me and threw one at his buddy. Or former buddy, given the scowl marring those handsome features.
“Out,” he said roughly, pushing us at the door. “It’s getting too close to morning. There’s going to be people showing up soon, and we got enough to explain as it is. And that vampire’s on the phone, fit to be tied.”
“Which one?” I asked, pretty sure I already knew.
