“I can contact him,” Rafe reluctantly admitted. “But even if he agrees, I don’t know if any of this will be soon enough.”

“Soon enough for what?” I asked impatiently. “I know where the Codex is, Rafe. I just need help to get to it!”

“Yes, but Mircea…he’s getting worse. And if he loses his faculties, will the counterspell reverse the damage? Or will he be left that way permanently?” Despite our position, which was a little too close to the ovens for comfort, he shivered.

I sat back in my chair, feeling dizzy. I’d assumed that once I had the spell, everything would go back to normal. But what if it didn’t? And with the Senate in the middle of a war, what if they decided a crazed master vamp was a liability they couldn’t afford? No wonder Rafe was freaking out. If the geis didn’t kill Mircea, the Consul might.

Ironically, what I needed was more time. I had the location of the Codex; sooner or later, I was going to get that spell. But it wouldn’t do me a lot of good if Mircea went crazy while I was making plans. Somehow I had to mitigate the effects of the geis while I figured everything out. And there was only a single possibility for that: the one place where I knew from experience the geis did not operate at full force.

“What about Faerie?” I asked. “If we could get him there, it might buy enough time to—”

“The Consul thought of that,” Rafe said. His tone was even, but his agitated fingers were reducing my linen napkin to shreds. “But the Fey do not want any more vampires in their world, especially one in Mircea’s condition. They refused a visa.”

“Who did? The Light or the Dark?”

He looked surprised. “The Senate doesn’t deal with the Dark Fey. Their treaty with the Light prohibits it.”

“But I do.” The Dark Fey king expected me to find and deliver the Codex. Until that happened, he needed to keep me happy. That gave me a lever to extort a few small favors, such as room and board for an ailing vampire.

“But, even were the Fey willing to help, how would we get him there?”

“What about the portal at MAGIC?” The Metaphysical Alliance for Greater Interspecies Cooperation was the supernatural community’s version of the United Nations. It wasn’t my favorite place, but we’d have to go in to get Mircea anyway, so it made sense to simply take him through MAGIC’s own link to Faerie.

But Rafe squashed that idea. “It has not yet been repaired. Your passage last time was not…conventional…and it shattered the spell. The Consul has appealed to the Fey to allow another, but they say if we cannot control who enters their lands better than that, they are not certain they wish us to have one. We are in negotiations, but there is no knowing how long they may take.”

And the Fey weren’t known for doing anything in a hurry. Not to mention that the portal, when and if it did open back up, was almost certain to be very well guarded. No help there.

“Damn it!” I hit the table with my palm, hard enough to slosh my untouched coffee everywhere. I was mopping it up with the napkin shreds when one of the mental Post-its I’d been filing at the back of my brain began waving about. “Tony has an illegal portal around here somewhere,” I said slowly. “He used it for smuggling. I just don’t know where it is.”

Rafe gripped my hands, and for the first time he looked hopeful. “How do we locate it?”

“I don’t know. But I know who to ask.”

“You don’t need a portal until you have the book,” the pixie said, fluffing her tiny shock of bright red hair. She’d found a compact somewhere, possibly in the trash because most of the powder it once held was gone. She was using it for a mirror on the dressing table she’d made out of a bunch of CD cases. “And you haven’t made any progress on that at all.”

“You need it to get back home,” I pointed out. “Unless you want to stay here?”

I looked around her makeshift apartment. It was fairly spacious from her perspective, taking up several shelves in the closet of Pritkin’s study room. She’d fixed up the top shelf as the dressing area, while the bottom was a bedroom, complete with an oven mitt for a sleeping bag and a small flashlight for a lamp. She shot me a dirty look nonetheless. “Yes, I’ve found your world to be so hospitable.”

“When I visited yours, I was almost killed!”

“And I was locked in a file cabinet,” she spat.

“It beats a dungeon!”

“Ever try it?”

I’d seen the file cabinet, which looked like a bomb had exploded from the inside. “It didn’t look like you had any trouble getting out.”

“Only because it was made of some inferior metal, instead of iron.” She shuddered. “I could have died, my magic leached away, my body slowly freezing in the cruel grip of cold—”

“Yes, but you didn’t. And if we could get back to the point?”

Furious lavender eyes met mine. “The point is that the slave must return to the king’s service and you must find the book you have promised him.” She smiled evilly. “You do not wish to return to Faerie without it. The king is not known for his forgiving nature.”

“Françoise isn’t going anywhere,” I told her, for maybe the tenth time. “And if the king’s wrath is so dreadful, why did you offer to help us escape from him? Weren’t you afraid of the consequences?”

The pixie fluttered her wings agitatedly. “That was different.”

“Different how?”

“The mage offered me something irresistible.” Her frown faded and her eyes suddenly shone with a softer light. “No one would have blamed me for taking it, not even the king.”

“Offered you what?”

“It doesn’t matter! I can’t find it!” She kicked the jewel cases, then sat on the oversized spool of thread she’d turned into a seat, surreptitiously rubbing a hurt foot.

A memory suddenly clicked into place. “The rune stone. Jera.” One of the reasons I’d managed to survive—barely—my one and only foray into her world was because I’d acquired some battle runes from the Senate. The Consul no doubt wanted them back, because they’d be useful in the war and because I hadn’t exactly asked before taking them. But I thought that at the moment she might want Mircea more. And I couldn’t see what good a rune stone would do her when its only power was making people more fertile.

The pixie glanced up resentfully. “He said he had it. He even showed it to me. It looked real.”

“It is real.” Understanding dawned. “You were willing to risk the king’s wrath merely for the chance to have a child?”

“Merely?” Her tiny voice rose to a squeak. “Yes, trust a human to see it like that! My people hover on the brink of extinction, while your foolish, weak, puerile race, whose only accomplishment is to breed and breed and—”

“Yes, thanks, I get the point.” I looked at her narrowly. “What if I could get it for you?”

A whirlwind of glittering green wings was suddenly in my face. “Where is it? Do you have it? I thought one of the mages—”

I smiled. No wonder she’d been sucking up. “I can get it.”

“I’ll believe it when I see it.”

“Then you’ll believe it soon. But I want the location of the portal in exchange.”

“I’ll find it,” she promised fervently. “Just don’t think of double-crossing me, human. You’ll discover that I’m even less forgiving than my king.”

Chapter 10

That afternoon I was checking in the convention that the hotel staff had secretly labeled the Geek Squad, a couple hundred role-playing enthusiasts who had arrived with bag and baggage, and in a few cases swords and armor, when I caught Pritkin staring at me. He was across the lobby, leaning against one of the fake stalagmites that erupted from the floor, all beard stubble and mussed hair and strong, lean build. His body looked relaxed, but his face held the same hawkish expression I’d last seen when he was standing over Saleh’s headless corpse.

I scowled and handed a name badge to a guy dressed in a long trailing robe and a pointy hat. He shifted his staff to his other hand so he could pin it on. I didn’t think it likely to help with ID much; he was the seventh Gandalf I’d seen that morning.

“I still don’t understand why we can’t set up now,” the guy at my side whined. His voice was muffled by the mask he was wearing, but unfortunately not enough that I couldn’t understand him. It had taken me a moment to identify the mask since he’d added plastic tusks that made it sag weirdly in front. I guess he hadn’t been able to find a good ogre’s head, because he’d converted a Chewbacca.

“I told you, we’re doing some last-minute cleanup,” I explained for the fifth time.

“They can’t be cleaning the whole room at once! We can work around them.”

“It’s not my call,” I said curtly, watching a bunch of guys in elf ears who were pointing at the large creatures perched near the cavernous ceiling of the lobby. Each was six feet tall, grayish-black, with huge reptilian wings that ended in sharp, delicate claws. They looked like a cross between a bat and a pterodactyl, and most people mistook them for gruesome decorations. But the “elves” had apparently decided to use them for target practice: all three had bows in their hands and one nocked an arrow as I watched.

Before I could battle a path through the crowd, one of the creatures soared gracefully to the top of a stalagmite. Its new perch glittered with crystals in the low light, almost as brightly as the creature’s dark eyes as it surveyed the tourists with predatory anticipation. It caught sight of the bow-wielding gamer and gave a shriek like tortured metal that echoed around the vastness of the lobby, drawing every eye in the place.

“Hey, cool!” the guy with the arrow said. “A yrthak!”

“That can’t be a yrthak,” another gamer said in a superior tone. “It has eyes.”