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How? We’ll never make it to the door through all that!
I won’t, but you will. It isn’t after you.
Yeah, except if I leave, that thing’ll have its claws back in you!
And if you don’t, it’ll beat me to death! I wasn’t seeing a whole lot of difference, really.
Okay, okay. Billy sounded like he was trying to calm down and wasn’t doing so great. Say I find the mage. Then what? He can’t see me.
Shit. Billy was so solid to me that I had a problem remembering that that wasn’t true for everyone. But Pritkin wouldn’t even know he was there.
It was hard to concentrate over the sound of the piano’s death throes, but I tried. Only the three A’s weren’t doing me a lot of good right now. I knew what the problem was: I needed to get to Pritkin. But I didn’t have any abilities to help me do that.
If I could have shifted, it would have been easy. But his room was five stories down and on the other side of the hotel. And I knew without trying that I couldn’t make it that far. It was hard to shift after Billy had fed, even when I wasn’t already exhausted. As it was, I’d be lucky to get five yards, and that wouldn’t—
I stopped, my thoughts reversing. Get to Pritkin, I told Billy over the sound of the blood pounding in my temples.
I just told you, that won’t—
Listen to me! He has Jonas’s necklace. He used it to pull me back to him today when I tried to shift. You’ve got to get it!
And then what? It works on you only when you use your power, and you can’t—
I only need to shift—it doesn’t matter how far! A couple of inches should be enough to activate it. Now go!
For once, he didn’t argue, maybe because he didn’t know what else to do. I felt him leave, and braced myself for another onslaught. But the entity was having too much fun to notice Billy slipping away, and I didn’t give it time to figure things out. I grabbed the top of the piano bench for a shield and started crawling.
A guard was on top of a tipped-over chair, batting at the flying shards of wood with a bloody table leg like a slugger at a baseball game. He saw me and his eyes went round, as if he assumed I must have been skewered ages ago. “Not dead yet,” I croaked encouragingly, and crawled on.
The dining room had been destroyed, but the room service cart had miraculously survived, wedged in the doorway between the bar and the kitchen. I pushed it the rest of the way inside and peeked under the warming lid. Fried chicken, and it was still hot.
There was a God.
I hunkered down behind the kitchen table and concentrated on regaining enough strength to shift on my own if Billy failed. That basically involved stuffing down as much as possible as fast as possible without throwing up. I was making a serious dent in Marco’s vast quantities when something caused me to look up.
Three vamps stood in the kitchen doorway, staring at me. They looked a little shell-shocked, and a glance at the stainless side of the fridge told me why. I was naked and bloody, with tufts of half-dried hair sticking up everywhere and a chicken leg distorting one side of my mouth. I looked startlingly like a mad cavewoman.
I removed the leg and licked my greasy lips. “Um. Hi?”
They didn’t say anything. For a moment, we all just looked at one another. And then the creature attacked again, and I stopped worrying about the impression I was making and started worrying about getting my brains bashed out against the side of the table. I saw stars and red exploding things that probably came under the category of Not Healthy.
And then I saw Pritkin staring at me in utter shock.
I didn’t remember trying to shift, but I must have, because instead of cold kitchen tile, my toes were suddenly sinking into the carpet in his hotel room. I’d landed by the bed, which he’d been in the process of turning back. His hair was damp and curling around his neck, and a few drops of water still clung to his shoulders. And either he hadn’t bothered to put on pajamas yet or he slept in the nude, which might have been awkward if I hadn’t been in the process of dying.
“Possession,” I croaked, before my hands formed themselves into claws and my body launched itself off the floor, going straight for those clear green eyes.
I didn’t succeed in scratching them out—Pritkin’s reflexes are better than that, even when totally gobsmacked— but I did tear an inch-long gash down one of his cheeks. “Sorry!”
“What kind of possession?” he asked grimly, one hand locked around each of my wrists.
“Not ghost, but I don’t—”
I stopped talking, because my throat had closed up and my body started thrashing against his hold. Pritkin looked startled for a moment, like I was harder to control than he’d expected. But the next second, I found myself on my back on the bed with my hands pinned over my head by one of his. He used his other to summon a stream of little vials from a bookshelf he’d installed, apparently as a sort of filing system for nasty potions.
Most of which were soon all over me.
Some were sticky and some were sludgy and all of them were really, really vile. I wouldn’t have cared if they’d done anything. But as far as I could tell, the most they accomplished was to stain my skin in blotches without affecting the thing inside me at all.
