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“You sure? We got the doc on standby.”
I scowled. That was where that sadist could stay, too. “No, thanks. And can we—”
“You hungry? ’Cause we got Chinese coming.”
“Marco—”
“Not from room service; from that little place around the corner. Kung pao chicken, ginger beef—”
“Marco!”
He sighed and gave it up. “I told the master this was how you were gonna react. But you gotta see that it makes sense, at least until we figure this thing out.”
“It does not make sense! There’s nobody in the apartment but us, and the creature can’t possess a vamp—”
“We don’t know that.”
“—or it would have already done it instead of hanging around the foyer, waiting for Mr. Mage to show up.”
“Mr. Mage,” one of the vamps said. “I like that. I’m gonna start calling all of ’em that.”
“I can think of a few things to call them,” another one muttered.
“And if you think it can possess a vamp, this makes even less sense,” I pointed out. “You just left me alone in my room with one for hours!”
“You’re right,” he told me.
“I am?”
“Yeah. We obviously need two.”
“Marco!”
He held up placating hands. “Just kidding.”
“This isn’t funny. It’s like being a freaking prisoner!”
He started to answer, but the phone rang. It wasn’t the main line, but a black cell phone sitting on the card table. Marco picked it up, glanced at the readout, scowled and hung up. He looked at me. “Better than being a freaking corpse.”
“Didn’t you hear me? This isn’t going to help!”
“It will if that thing goes after you. It already possessed you once—”
“And won’t again.” I pulled out Pritkin’s little amulet. He’d left me another one before he took the mage off to the Corps’ version of a hospital. It might be stinky, but I liked it a lot better than the alternative.
“That only works on Fey,” Marco pointed out, wrinkling his nose.
“Which this thing is.”
“Which this thing may be. That ain’t been decided yet.”
“It spoke in a Fey dialect—”
“And demons don’t know that shit? If it’s trying to throw us off, of course it’s gonna pretend to be something else.”
“Or maybe it really was trying to communicate.”
“For what? To apologize?” Marco’s tone said clearly what he thought about that. He dealt another round. “Anyway, until we get some solid proof of what we’re dealing with here, the master don’t want to take chances.”
