Hunt the Moon : Cassandra Palmer #5 Read Free

win—”
    “ If you win.”
    “—you’ll stay until you’ve run the entire course. And you won’t whine about it.”
    “I don’t whine!”
    “Then we have a deal?”
    “I guess so,” I said, trying to sound reluctant.
    “Good,” he told me pleasantly.
    And then he let go.
     
    A couple of hours later, I staggered into the Vegas hotel suite I currently called home and face-planted onto the sofa. There was already someone sitting there, but I didn’t care. I was too tired to even open my eyelids and find out who it was.
    Until someone pried one open for me with a finger the size of a hot dog. “Rough day?”
    I rotated my eyeball—and, goddamnit, even that hurt—to see the leader of my bodyguards peering at me.
    “No. I like being dropped from airplane height without a parachute.”
    Marco patted me on the ass, which I guess was fair, since I was draped over his lap. “You seem all right to me.”
    Marco, I reflected sourly, was getting awfully blasé where my health was concerned. He’d started out assuming that I was as squishy as most humans, and practically had a heart attack every time I got a hangnail. But after seeing me survive a few dozen attacks, he’d started to relax. These days, if I didn’t come in with a gaping wound or spewing blood, I didn’t get much sympathy.
    “Because I managed to shift to the ground before I splattered on it!” I told him testily.
    “Then what’s the problem?”
    I turned over so I could scowl at him. “The problem is that I just ran a marathon in freezing weather with a maniac chasing me.”
    “Why didn’t you just”—he waved the ham-sized hand that went with his bear-sized body—“you know. Poof.”
    “You mean shift?”
    “Yeah. Why didn’t you shift?”
    “I did! But Pritkin expected that, and he borrowed Jonas’s necklace.”
    “What necklace?”
    I sighed and sat up. “It’s some sort of charm that allows him to recall the Pythia in times of emergency. As soon as I try to shift, wherever I am, whenever I am, it pulls me back.” As Pritkin had known when he made that bet, damn him.
    God, I wished I kneed him in the nuts.
    Marco seemed to think that was funny, which didn’t improve my mood. I got up and limped into the next room, still freezing cold and starving to death. Because Pritkin’s idea of a picnic left a lot to be desired.
    But my bathroom didn’t. I knew it was stupid, but my bathroom made me happy. Maybe it was the size—which was huge bordering on sinful—or the soothing white and blue color scheme, or the rain forest showerhead over the Godzilla-sized tub. Or maybe it was because it was the one place in the whole damn suite where I could actually be alone.
    Marco wasn’t the problem. Over the last month, he’d gone from treating me like a burdensome pest to treating me like a slightly bratty younger sister, and most of the time, I found myself actually enjoying his company. But Marco was the tip of the iceberg where my bodyguards were concerned. And they’d only been growing in number since the date of the inauguration had been announced.
    Everyone assumed there would be an attack. Even I assumed it. The supernatural world was at war, and killing off the opposite side’s leadership was SOP. And whether I liked it or not, the Pythia was seen as one of our side’s more important assets. Which explained Pritkin’s stepped-up attempts to make me suck slightly less at self-defense, and the dozen or so golden-eyed master vamps constantly patrolling the suite.
    They were there for my protection; I knew that. But it didn’t make them any less creepy. They watched me eat. They watched me drink. They watched me watch goddamned TV. They even watched me sleep. I’d woken up more than once to find one of them just standing in the doorway of my bedroom, staring at me, like it was a perfectly normal thing to do.
    If it hadn’t been for my bathroom, I really might have lost it.
    Too bad I couldn’t sleep in there.
    Marco stuck