AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I assumed his body was still there. His soul, on the other hand, was hanging out in Vegas these days, courtesy of an ugly old necklace he’d won a few weeks before his untimely demise and hadn’t had time to pawn. That had turned out to be his one bit of good luck, because the necklace was a talisman, a relic that collected the natural energy of the world and used it to support the owner’s magic.
Or in this case, the owner’s ghost. Billy now haunted it like other ghosts did graveyards and creepy old houses. And ever since I’d bought it, intending it as a birthday gift for my old governess, he had haunted me.
Only I didn’t think he was haunting me now.
There was no flash of red ruffled shirt or smug smirk to b
e seen. There was no ghostly Stetson falling over laughing hazel eyes. There was no anything, which probably meant that I was imagining things again.
I grabbed another towel and started scrubbing my dripping hair.
One of these days, I was going to have to consider the concept of just avoiding bathrooms altogether. Weird shit happened to me in bathrooms. Maybe I needed to come up with another way to get clean. Maybe I needed to find a room with a Jacuzzi. Maybe I needed some long-term therapy, although I wasn’t sure even a Pythia had that much ti—
There was a tinkling crash on the other side of the bathroom door.
I froze again, hands on my head, peering out from under a yard of Turkish cotton. And stared at the door. It stared back. But nothing else did, because it was closed.
“Roy?” I called softly, because a vampire’s ears didn’t need a shout. And because I felt more than a little absurd.
A feeling that melted into something else when nobody answered.
Damn it, get a grip, I told myself harshly, and grabbed the doorknob. There’s nothing scary on the other side. It’s just a freaking bedroom!
And it was.
It just wasn’t mine.
I stumbled into a room with high ceilings, beautiful molding, and tall windows looking out over the night. And then spun around in panic, and almost broke my nose on a stretch of old-world paneling. Because there was suddenly no door there anymore.
I staggered back, confused and pained, and landed on my butt beside an overturned teapot. It was on the floor underneath a small table, leaking onto the remains of a porcelain cup and saucer. And sending a rivulet of fragrant liquid running across some highly polished wooden floorboards.
It did not help with the confusion.
Neither did the large, unfamiliar bed containing rumpled bedclothes. Or the towel and robe that had been tossed over a pillow. Or the window I wasn’t close enough to see out of, but which was allowing moonlight to filter over expensive rugs and a Jackson Pollock–like painting on the far wall.
I didn’t know this place.
I didn’t know any of it.
But the vampire who walked through the door a moment later was another story.
I scrambled back to my feet, but he didn’t appear to see me. Which was the first thing that had made any sense. Because his name was Horatiu and he couldn’t see anybody.
He was Mircea’s old tutor—very old. He’d been middle-aged or more when he’d been trying to drum some Latin through his charge’s young skull. But that meant Mircea hadn’t reached master status—the level needed to make new vamps—until Horatiu was on his deathbed. And that sort of thing tends to mess with the formula. The end result was a doddering, half-blind, mostly deaf vampire who nonetheless insisted on earning his keep. As a butler, since I guess that was the safest job Mircea had been able to come up with.
Well, sort of safe, I thought, as the white-haired old vamp set a tray down precariously on the edge of a chair instead of on the adjacent table. A chair just above the overturned teapot, which I was starting to understand better now. But Horatiu didn’t seem to notice it, either.
Maybe because he was busy gathering the clothes off the bed and throwing them out the window beside a laundry chute. And watering a silk potted plant. And starting to do something to a bookshelf adjacent to the fireplace right before another vamp came in.
“Goddamnit!” The vamp was Kit Marlowe, the Senate’s curly-haired, goateed, impossible-to-ruffle chief spy. Well, make that normally impossible because he was looking a little ruffled now.
Maybe because the bookshelf had just caught on fire.
“Lord Marlowe,” Horatiu said, in his quavering old man’s voice. “Did you wish to join the master for breakfast?”
“No!” Marlowe said, rushing past the stooped figure to the adjoining bathroom.
“There’s plenty of kippers,” Horatiu called after him. “But not enough toast. I wish the master had said something—”
