Brave the Tempest (Cassie Palme) - Karen Chance Page 0,26

she and the rest of the crew had flitted off back to New York, where she had a truly palatial estate near the Catskills, and where she’d remained. I’d be surprised if she’d spent more than a week rattling around in here.

So why go to all the trouble?

Call me evil-minded—comes from spending too much time around vamps—but it had occurred to me that maybe, just maybe, my ending up here had been the idea all along.

I wasn’t from Britain; I didn’t know anybody there. But I was fond of Vegas. I liked the gorgeous desert sunsets I saw from my windows at night, the palette of soft reds and dark purples, and of orange, yellow, and flashes of jade that painted the skies every evening, only to come back for an even more spectacular show in the morning.

I liked the people, everybody from the native Nevadans, with their rugged individualism and practicality, to the crazy transplants from all over, to the always surprising denizens of Dante’s, the hotel and casino I called home. It was a vamp-owned property with the best wards around, so it had become the senate’s local outpost after MAGIC ended up a glass slick in the desert. Back in the bad old days, when I was hiding out here, pretending to be a casino employee while it felt like everybody in the world was gunning for my head, I’d spent hours listening to the stories they told.

I’d met a woman who’d had a little bar in El Paso where she’d served the likes of Billy the Kid, Wild Bill Hickok, and the assassin Jim Miller—and seen the steel plate he wore, like an early version of Kevlar, under his famous black coat.

I’d met the Mad Monk, one of the first Jesuits to arrive in California, who was hanged by his order for babbling about fanged demons in the desert and trying to bite the brothers. He could still show you the rope marks. They’d never faded, because the hanging had taken place during his Change.

I’d met a Native American bootlegger and stagecoach robber named Sadie Skull, after the tattoo that covered her entire face. She usually hid it with a glamourie these days, but could drop it in an instant and scare the ever-loving crap out of you. And then laugh and laugh and buy you a beer.

I’d met a pair of Chinese Siamese twins who’d run a successful chain of laundries back in the day—bought with profits from a series of train robberies that they’d somehow convinced the authorities had been done by some other pair of Siamese twins.

I even liked the city itself, in all its glitz and glamour and tacky wonderfulness, which shouldn’t even be here because this was the middle of the desert, where nothing was supposed live except for some desert hares and parched-looking bushes. It had no business being where it was or doing what it was doing. Yet it was here anyway, just like I was. We fit.

And the consul knew that.

Which is why I found it suspicious that the perfect Pythian Court, complete with plenty of rooms for the girls, a formal audience chamber, a ballroom, a library, a massive dining room and kitchen, a huge master suite, big open common rooms, and a large outdoor garden and pool area—which, until Tami got hold of it, had featured actual Greek statuary—just happened to be left empty right freaking above me.

Of course, the consul hadn’t invited us to occupy it, oh, my, no. Vampires, especially vampires as old as her, never did anything so obvious, and if they did, you’d better run. No, she just vacated it once the reno was complete, leaving it for my very competent housemother/majordomo/I-am-the-captain-now Tami to notice.

Which she shortly had, and moved us in while I was away.

Tami was so proud of her find that I hadn’t had the heart to tell her that she’d been manipulated. It wasn’t a problem in itself; I liked the place overall, and was glad to have it. But it didn’t bode well for the future.

It didn’t bode well at all.

Someone tapped on the partly open door from the bedroom while I was trying to decide between mango madness and papaya passion bath bombs. I said to heck with it, chucked in both, and stuck my head out the door. And found Rhea standing there with a tray.

“Tami thought you might like lunch,” she told me. “Hilde said you didn’t have any.”

“No, we were afraid we’d get kicked