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I felt like I’d been on a ten-day bender on the cheap stuff, with my head pounding, my eyes gunky, and my vision blurry, or maybe that last one was down to the room. The bedrooms at the consul’s house didn’t have windows, for obvious reasons. And the lighting in here was even worse than it had been in the senate chamber.
A single lamp glowed on a table by the wall, just enough to highlight the crimson bedclothes and fine, dark wood furniture of the bedroom Mircea used when he was in residence. It wasn’t something he made a habit of, which probably explained why the only touch of the man was a priceless Chagall on the wall, the bright golds, reds, and blues glowing softly through the gloom. Well, a
lmost the only thing, I thought, looking back at the woman.
“What do you want?” I asked, because if she was going to kill me, I kind of thought she’d have done it already.
I didn’t get an answer. The examination of my face continued, despite the fact that it couldn’t have been pleasant. “Good camouflage,” was the final verdict. “You could pass for completely human, except for the eyes.”
“What’s wrong with my eyes?”
“Nothing—for a seer.”
She sat back against the footboard, finally giving me some space, and lit up a blunt. The strange, sweet odor flooded the air around the bed, despite the fact that I hadn’t given her permission to smoke. Not that she’d asked.
I sat up some more and drew the covers farther around me. It was cold in here, more so than I remembered. Considering the size of this pile and the heat outside, the consul’s air-conditioning bill had to be really something.
“And what does that mean?” I finally asked, because she seemed content to sprawl there and smoke at me.
“Pale blue, eerily so, and distant, like they look right through you. Worked a trick in the senate chamber, though. You had those witches pissing themselves.”
“There’s no such thing as seer’s eyes,” I told her irritably. “They look just like everybody else’s.”
“Then I guess your mother did you a solid.”
“I take after my father, and did you want something?” I snapped, my temper unraveling. “Because I want a bath.”
A really hot one. Preferably back in my big, sauna-sized tub in Vegas. Although how I was supposed to get there, I didn’t know.
“There’s a change of clothes in the bathroom,” Dorina told me. “Your acolyte brought them earlier.”
“Acolyte?”
“Formidable old gal with a foul mouth and an attitude? I liked her.” She blew smoke at me.
Hilde. Bet she’s pissed, I thought darkly. God knew what kind of shit I’d just stirred up with the covens.
“There were some witches who tried to follow you out; said they knew you. They were still around, arguing with people, when she showed up.” Dorina grinned past the smoke. “Might be one of the top ten dressing-downs I’ve ever heard in my life—possibly top five. It was a thing of beauty.”
Great.
Way to make things worse, I thought, because that was probably Evelyn and company that she’d just told off, and they were the nice witches!
Or they used to be.
“The girls?” I asked hoarsely. “Are they—”
“They’re fine—or they were last time I saw them. One tried to follow the covens through the portal, and had to be wrestled down by Pink Hair—”
“Other way around.”
“What?”
“Saffy, the one with the pink hair, is the firebrand.”
Dorina raised an eyebrow at me, in a way that eerily reminded me of her father. “Yeah, not so much. The dark-haired chick was going off. Her father—Marsden?” I nodded. “Yeah, he had to spell her with something to calm her down, after the remaining witches tackled her to the ground to keep her from taking on a whole coven. Only it didn’t look like it worked so well, because she was still screaming mad when your acolyte showed up and dragged both girls off by the ear.”
Holy shit.
