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Marco regarded me with a mixture of affection and exasperation andFred, on the other hand, took the distraction of the rasp And he wasn’t so subtle

"Yeah, but you’re not Agnes," he renes yet," I hissed, and shifted

Chapter Four

I went fro two of those things I didn’t bother turning on a light I could see well enough froap in a wall of curtains, and anyway, the vieasn’t as Strip, reserves for its uests are a littleSpartan Ironically, thatthan the suites upstairs, which mostly conform to the hotel’s over-the-top haunted house theot this far, so the only affronts to taste were a few vintage horror ly bedspread

I hadn’t been here for a while, and I wasn’t sure why I was here now Maybe because I didn’t have the strength to go much farther Or o

It was ironic; all of time was mine to explore--in theory, anyway--except forlike a prisoner for weeks, with the few ti well And I didn’t think I was likely to find anybody to go AWOL with again, since the last guy who had

Well, he wasn’t here any a little rough

A river of glass crunched underfoot, glinting in the band of rusty light A nightstand lay cracked in two, the ceramic lamp that had been on top pulverized alht through to the studs on one wall, and still gave off a faint, noxious odor, despite a week of air-conditioning And a large stain soiled the carpet by the , looking black in the low light

I stared at it, and everything caht when the obstinate son of a bitch who’d lived here had taken it upon himself to trade his life for mine The week that had passed since hadn’t dimmed theit was stronger than ever, the urge to grab hiht, to , furious all over again but with no one to hit Because he wasn’t here Just the rooer-than-life occupant, the echoing silence broken only by ed my arms around myself and waited for my heartbeat to back off attack levels

Only it didn’t seees of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance But that hadn’t been my experience There had been a little denial, yeah, when I first realized what had happened, but it hadn’t lasted long And afterwardwell, let’s just say that I’d entered phase tith a vengeance

And that here I’d stayed

I supposed that hy h to draw blood I slowly pulled them out and carefully wipedto do this now

I was going to do this later

I was going to do this once I got hireat

It was another thing that should have been easy Hell, I was a tis Make a few adjustht?

Of course, I wasn’t supposed to In fact, it was prettyI was not supposed to do Pythias guarded the tie it ourselves

Except, of course, e did

Agnes had, when she warned me that I was about to be assassinated If she hadn’t, I never would haveman known as John Pritkin in the first place, would never have needed him to save me, would never have royally screwed up his life in the process He ht have been better off if she’d minded her own business, but she hadn’t and I’d lived All because she’d changed one little thing

But that was the proble for decades She’d knohat to change and what to leave the heck alone Not to ht she bent a rule for o If I did go back, where did Ito figure it out

The obvious place was right here in this roo even more trashed than usual had been because of me Someone on the other side of the war had wanted a device Pritkin carried, one that would summon me to an iht Pritkin lost it, chased after it, and as a result, found s, the easiest ould be to warn hireat -- if he took the hint But Pritkin defined stubborn and was nore a heads-up like the one Agnes had sentthe would-be assassin to the battleground, that wouldn’t work so well, either

Since in that case I’d be dead

So then where? In the ht that I’d barely won the first time? Because I just didn’t see how that worked The final battle had happened in a couple ofterror And, as usual, I’d survived by luck as s worse instead of better