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“I do that.”
Fred suddenly stopped struggling, I guess so he and Marco could both send me the same look of stunned disbelief.
“I do!” I said again, and it was true. Mostly true. Okay, true when I had a chance to look, which wasn’t often these days. But that wasn’t the point.
“That isn’t the point,” I told him.
“Then what is?”
“That I’m sick of this, okay? I’m not their slave—or the Circle’s or the vamps’ or anybody else’s. I’m not going to live like this—”
“It’s your job.”
“Bullshit.” I glared at him, too tired and hungry and lacking in caffeine to bother with diplomacy, which was something else I sucked at anyway. “What do you think Agnes would have done if they’d broken in on her in the middle of the night?”
“I don’t—”
“Well, I do!” I said, remembering my sweet-looking predecessor, who had shot me in the ass the one and only time I’d tried it. “Agnes was a bitch, okay? But she needed to be a bitch. Because the people around her were all these big personalities with all this power and given half a chance they’d run roughshod over her. And she knew it. So she didn’t put up with that. Not at any time, not for any reason, not from any of them! And as a result, they respected her. As a result, they we
re afraid of her, not the other way around.”
Marco regarded me with a mixture of affection and exasperation and maybe a little bit of pity. But he didn’t say anything. Fred, on the other hand, took the distraction of the moment to wiggle out of Marco’s grasp. And he wasn’t so subtle.
“Yeah, but you’re not Agnes,” he reminded me.
“I’m not Agnes yet,” I hissed, and shifted.
Chapter Four
I went from light and noise and stress to someplace completely lacking two of those things. I didn’t bother turning on a light. I could see well enough from the orange haze filtering in through a gap in a wall of curtains, and anyway, the view wasn’t much.
The rooms that Dante’s, my home on the Vegas Strip, reserves for its more budget-conscious guests are a little . . . Spartan. Ironically, that makes them less eye-wincing than the suites upstairs, which mostly conform to the hotel’s over-the-top haunted house theme. But the designer had run short of money by the time he got this far, so the only affronts to taste were a few vintage horror movie posters and an ugly bedspread.
I hadn’t been here for a while, and I wasn’t sure why I was here now. Maybe because I didn’t have the strength to go much farther. Or maybe because I didn’t have anywhere else to go.
It was ironic; all of time was mine to explore—in theory, anyway—except for my own. In my own, I’d been living like a prisoner for weeks, with the few times I’d dared to venture outside the hotel not going well. And I didn’t think I was likely to find anybody to go AWOL with again, since the last guy who had . . .
Well, he wasn’t here anymore.
But his room was.
Although it was looking a little rough.
A river of glass crunched underfoot, glinting in the band of rusty light. A nightstand lay cracked in two, the ceramic lamp that had been on top pulverized almost into powder. A splatter of some potion had eaten right through to the studs on one wall, and still gave off a faint, noxious odor, despite a week of air-conditioning. And a large stain soiled the carpet by the window, looking black in the low light.
I stared at it, and everything came flooding back: the shock, the horror, the fury of the night when the obstinate son of a bitch who’d lived here had taken it upon himself to trade his life for mine. The week that had passed since hadn’t dimmed the memory at all, or the emotion that went with it. If anything it was stronger than ever, the urge to grab him, to demand where he got the nerve, the right, to make that decision for me—
I stood there a minute, shaking, furious all over again but with no one to hit. Because he wasn’t here. Just the room, cold and empty and generic without its larger-than-life occupant, the echoing silence broken only by my ragged breathing. I hugged my arms around myself and waited for my heartbeat to back off attack levels.
Only it didn’t seem to be obliging.
I’d read once that there were five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. But that hadn’t been my experience. There had been a little denial, yeah, when I first realized what had happened, but it hadn’t lasted long. And afterward . . . well, let’s just say that I’d entered phase two with a vengeance.
And that was where I’d stayed.
I supposed that was why my nails had sunk into my upper arms, hard enough to draw blood. I slowly pulled them out and carefully wiped my hands on my already filthy jeans. I wasn’t going to do this now.
I was going to do this later.
