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I was trying hard.
“Bartender!” Casanova called hoarsely, and tried to snap his fingers. But he missed, and then kept on missing, frowning at his long, usually elegant digits as if he couldn’t figure out what was wrong with them.
Unfortunately, the summons had included everyone who had trespassed on the council’s good graces, i.e., had released a bunch of their former slaves into the ether. That included me and Caleb, as well as Pritkin. Along with one very sorry excuse for a casino manager, who was close to sliding under the table.
“Don’t you think you’ve had enough?” I asked, even as the shambling hulk of a bartender set another bottle down on the sticky tabletop.
Casanova sent me a helpful gesture that indicated that, no, he did not feel that way.
I didn’t return it, because I was busy trying not to be obvious about flinching away from the bartender. He had suspicious stains on his apron, and smelled like a slaughterhouse looks. He also kept squeezing Casanova’s shoulder whenever he came over, as if trying to gauge how much meat was under the expensive material. It normally would have skeeved me out, but after today, I was all out of skeeve. And Casanova was too drunk to notice.
“Did you hear me?” Pritkin demanded.
I clutched my glass and resisted a strong urge to throw it at him. “Do I know who my mother is? Yes, yes, I do, Pritkin, thanks.”
“I doubt that.” He crossed his arms and leaned back in his seat.
“And you do, I suppose?”
“I’ve had a good deal of free time lately,” he said grimly. “I used it to do some research. And let’s just say, she is not remembered in the hells quite the same way as on earth.”
“Is this relevant?” Caleb rumbled. “We got bigger problems, John.”
He pointedly didn’t look at the Rubik’s cube of a city beyond the bar’s dirty windows. I didn’t, either, since I was facing directly away from it, but it was like the elephant in the room. It made its presence felt.
/> Behind my back, buildings folded up onto buildings, streets became avenues, became trails, became dead ends, cars appeared and disappeared, trees and planters and mailboxes strutted and fretted their brief moment upon the stage and then, poof, were replaced by a parking lot. And the light constantly changed, as lamps and streetlights and lit billboards winked in and out of existence, each flip, flip, flip of the scene causing the shadows in here to move and shift, like a club with a lousy DJ.
It was giving my migraine a migraine, which was ironic.
Since that was exactly what it had been designed not to do.
The spell that masked whatever the real city looked like had been intended to be comfortable, even homey. It was supposed to make the place look like your hometown, or at least an area you’d be familiar with, which I supposed made sense for a place that served as a giant crossroads for the hells. No one look was going to work for everyone, when “everyone” was a thousand different species with totally different senses. So the Shadowland’s proprietors had said screw it and just given everybody what they wanted.
Or they’d tried. It never worked quite as planned, since it didn’t cover the people, most of whom would have gotten a double take even on the Vegas Strip. But it also didn’t normally look like the origami creation of a possibly insane artist.
But then, it didn’t usually have a pissed-off demon lord messing with it, either.
At least, that’s why I assumed that the street outside, which was supposed to lead to the council building, had suddenly acquired a severe case of ADHD. Rosier was clearly intent on me not being allowed to make my case. And so far, he was doing a damned fine job.
My power worked, to a limited degree, in the Shadowland, at least when I wasn’t exhausted. But I couldn’t shift when I didn’t know where I was going. And when the road was changing even as I looked at it. And while dragging along a guy who apparently didn’t want to go anyway.
“Yes, it’s relevant!” Pritkin said. “I am trying to make Cassie understand why she needs to drop this and go home!”
“I’ll be happy to,” I told him evenly. “After we see the council—”
“We don’t need the council—”
“We do when you can’t go back to earth without them!”
“I’m not going back to earth.” It sounded final.
Like hell it was final.
“I didn’t come all this way, go through all that”—I waved an arm wildly, because I didn’t have words for the last week—“just to go home without you!”
“Well, get used to the idea,” Pritkin said curtly, and sloshed some more hell juice into his glass.
“What is this stuff?” Caleb asked, looking at his drink suspiciously. He had yet to touch it.
