Hunt the Moon : Cassandra Palmer #5 by Karen Chance Read Free Book Online

.
    I still had problems with afterward.
    “Marco thought it best,” I finally said.
    Mircea didn’t seem to like that answer. “I will speak with Marco,” he said grimly. “But for the present, I am more concerned about the attack this evening. I have heard my men’s report, such as it was. I would like to have yours.”
    It was my turn to sigh. “I don’t know. It wasn’t a ghost; that much I’m sure of. And Pritkin swears it wasn’t a demon.”
    “There are thousands of types of demons, Cassie. He cannot possibly be certain—”
    “He’s pretty certain,” I said drily.
    “—and you have recently had problems with several of them. A demon is the most likely culprit.”
    “I think we should trust Pritkin’s judgment on this one,” I said, because I couldn’t say anything else. That Pritkin was half demon himself wasn’t exactly universally known, but what type he was wasn’t known to anyone but me.
    I intended to keep it that way.
    “I am not so certain,” Mircea said, sounding sour. “But I would speak with the man. Can you put him on?”
    I really didn’t think that was a great idea, considering that Pritkin and Mircea mixed like oil and water, only not as well. But I passed the phone over, anyway. I didn’t get much of the resulting conversation, both because it was pretty terse on Pritkin’s end, and because Marco had started the extraction process again.
    “There can’t possibly be that many pieces of glass in my ass,” I gritted out, after a couple of agonizing minutes.
    “Babe, it’s like you rolled in it.”
    “It was all over the floor!”
    “And when that’s the case, it’s best to avoid the floor,” he said drily, digging what felt like an inch into my tender rear.
    “I’ll keep it in mind the next time I get possessed by an evil entity!”
    “Demon,” Marco said, sounding final.
    “It wasn’t a demon,” Pritkin argued, but I couldn’t tell if he was talking to Marco or Mircea. “Yes, I’m bloody well sure!”
    Mircea.
    “Okay, this is going to sting a little,” Marco told me, right before he set my butt on fire.
    “Shit, shit, shit!”
    “Gotta disinfect it,” he said imperturbably. “You’re not a vamp. You could get an infection.”
    “In what? You just burnt my ass off!”
    “He wants to talk to you,” Pritkin said, looking grim.
    I took the phone back. “What?”
    “Cassie?”
    Mircea wasn’t accustomed to getting that tone from women, but I was too sore—in several ways—to care. “If Pritkin says it wasn’t a demon, then it wasn’t a demon. Goddamnit, Mircea! He ought to know!”
    “And why is that, dulceață?” Mircea asked smoothly. And, okay, maybe I was going to have to revise that list. Because sometimes Mircea also used my pet name when he was being sneaky.
    “He’s a demon hunter,” I said, forcing myself to calm down before I said anything stupid. Well, anything stupider, anyway. “It’s his job to know.”
    “I will have my people check into all possibilities,” Mircea said, and I really hoped he was talking about the entity. “In the meantime, I need your promise that you will not leave the hotel.”
    “Mircea, I was attacked at the hotel. How is staying here going to—”
    “The guards will be doubled.”
    “You could have tripled them—you could have had a guard per square foot—and it wouldn’t have made a difference! No one could have predicted—”
    “We should have predicted it,” he said harshly. “We knew there would be an attack. I simply did not expect it so early. The coronation isn’t for another ten days.”
    “But why wait until the last second?”
    Mircea didn’t say anything, but the very pregnant pause made it clear that he didn’t think that was funny.
    Of course, he didn’t find too much funny these days. He was currently trying to negotiate the first worldwide alliance of vampire senates. It was what he’d been working on all month, what he was doing in New York, where a lot of the