Page 135 of Junk Magic

“Shit, that’s a big wolf,” Jen whispered, awed.

“Are you sure Cyrus can take him?” Sophie asked, sounding slightly panicked.

I opened my mouth to reassure her, only to find that my throat had closed up.

Because Whirlwind was huge. And even though Cyrus matched him in size when he suddenly Changed, causing the crowd to quickly back the hell up, he wasn’t any bigger. Not that size was everything, but this fight was to the death, and Cyrus was out of practice and I—

I needed to trust him, I thought, mentally slapping myself. I couldn’t do his job for him, but I could do mine, especially now that he’d given me the final piece I needed. Which was why I wasn’t watching as the two huge beasts clashed together, hard enough to rattle the windows in front of me.

I was looking at Jen. “Can you open the pics on your phone?”

She blinked. “My pictures?”

I nodded. And then took the lavender case she passed me—no need to guess what her favorite color was—and quickly scrolled back to the bar-b-que. It didn’t take long, as the only stuff in front of it was her and Sophie trying on literally everything in the Caesar’s Palace shops.

“Here,” I held up the phone, showing her the picture of a man. “Can you find him for me? I can’t easily move around here, but you and your . . . friends . . . can.”

“This guy?” Sophie took the phone and looked at it, frowning. “Are you sure he’s here?”

“No, but I suspect it. But don’t engage. Just find him, and let me know where he is.”

“So that you can . . . compliment his cooking?” she asked carefully.

“Something like that.” My voice was steady as I watched my lover get thrown against a wall.

“Ooookay. Time to go to work,” she told Jen, and a moment later, I was alone.

Chapter Thirty-Eight

The girls’ departure left me on my own for the first time in hours, which was not a plus. The wind wasn’t bad up here, as the main bulk of the hotel blocked it, but the myriad scents borne on the breeze confused my nose, making me almost scent blind. And the sounds from the Strip made it hard to hear small noises.

Like the scrape of a shoe over concrete.

“Tell me, did you send them away for their sake, or for yours?” Someone asked, coming out of the night.

I couldn’t see him very well; the light shining from the room below was bright. And he was standing in the shadow of the hotel on the other side of the pyramid. For a moment, I couldn’t even tell which form he was in, as the panes shivered in sympathy with the crashes from below, making him seem to morph and blur.

“How would it help me not to have back up?” I asked, fighting an urge to stand up as it might spook him.

The figure shrugged, a tiny movement, but I felt it in my body like a struck piano wire. “If you’re not planning to fight, you don’t need back up,” he said, walking closer. “And we don’t have to fight.”

“Don’t we?”

He didn’t answer, but kept moving around the mountain of glass. “You know, I have to give you credit. When I heard that you’d been taken by that bastard Jenkins, I didn’t give much for your chances.”

“Didn’t you used to work for that bastard?”

He laughed, and it was a rich, full sound, almost catching. “The operative phrase being ‘used to.’ I plan to kill him, once this is done, unless . . .”

“Took care of that for you.”

“Ah. Thought you might have, although I was looking forward to it.”

“You can go back and desecrate the body, if it makes you feel any better.”

He shook his head. “That was his thing, not mine.”

“And what is yours?”

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