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“And I don’t want to have to redecorate it again. Like after three pissed-off witches finish trashing it.”
“They wouldn’t trash the Pythia’s suite.”
“Why not? They broke into it,” I grumbled, managing to shove most of the cards back into place. Except for a few still chatting away somewhere. I threw the bedding around, trying to find the damned things. “It was easier for me to leave.”
“But why come here?” Billy looked around and his nose wrinkled. “It smells like a combat zone.”
“I don’t care what it smells like.”
“And it’s probably booby-trapped all to hell.”
I paused for a second, my hand halfway under the bed. I’d known Pritkin mainly in his role as my Circle-appointed bodyguard/personal trainer/drill sergeant, but he’d had other titles at times. Like war mage assassin.
“I don’t think he does that anymore,” I told Billy. Not since I’d popped in a few times unexpectedly.
“Maybe not. But what about somebody else? It looks like this place was ransacked.”
“It always looks like that.” Except for his weapons, Pritkin’s idea of orderly living was roughly that of a fourteen-year-old boy.
“Yeah, but people gotta be wondering where he went off to,” Billy pointed out. “He’s a war mage, isn’t he? Isn’t anybody curious?”
“Everybody.” I’d gotten asked about it daily by virtually everyone except Jonas, which was weird since Pritkin was technically his subordinate. But maybe Jonas felt that a guy like that could take care of himself. Or maybe it was like he’d told me: he didn’t ask Pythias too many questions.
He so rarely liked the answers he got back.
“Then maybe you shouldn’t be crawling around on the floor,” Billy said pointedly.
“And maybe you should tell me what Laura said,” I pointed out right back.
Billy gave up trying to reason with me, and parked his insubstantial rear a couple of inches above the ugly bedspread. “She said they’re in the boathouse.”
I grabbed the card that had ended up halfway under the bed, pulled it out, and stared at him. “My parents?”
He nodded.
I frowned. “What boathouse? Tony’s farm is in the middle of the countryside. There isn’t a lake for miles.”
“Yeah, I mentioned that. Seems she was talking about some ramshackle cottage that used to be behind the house. Former owner stored his boat out there, and the name stuck. Until Tony had the place bulldozed to build a parking lot, anyway.”
I nodded. Among other things, Tony had been in the loan shark business. And not all the items he repossessed when people failed to pay up were small enough to be stored in the house. Eventually, he’d had an area out back paved to accommodate the cars, trucks, and motor homes he kept until the mark came through or he sold them off. I hadn’t gone out there much, since there wasn’t anything to interest a kid—the repos were always kept locked.
“She said your folks didn’t like the main house,” Billy continued, “and Tony didn’t like ’em in it—or their little friends.”
“What friends?”
“Seems they attracted demons like nobody’s business, and they were creeping out the vamps.”
“Demons?” My dad had had some abilities with ghosts, which was where I got mine, I guessed. But I hadn’t heard anything about demons before.
But then, he wasn’t the only person out there, was he?
Billy nodded. “There were some incidents—poltergeist-type stuff, fires, one vamp got torched—”
“Who?”
“Manny,” Billy said, referring to one of Tony’s more dim-witted vamps. “He recovered okay, but shortly after that, Mom and Pop got evicted.”
“To the boathouse,” I said, staring at the card in my hand without really seeing it.
