Gabrielle’s office looked out over the west side of Las Vegas with a view of the vast mountains beyond, their tops brushed with snow. The office itself was smaller than mine at the Crossroads, but held simple luxury. A framed painting hung on a wall, a spotlight illuminating it. The only furniture was black—minimalist desk, a padded desk chair, and one metal framed chair for a visitor, only one.

I glanced around the room but my eyes returned to the painting, the art major in me coming alert. “Holy crap, is that a Hockney?”

Gabrielle glanced at the red and gold depiction of a fold of the Grand Canyon, done in an unusual but beautiful way. “I don’t know. Pretty, isn’t it?”

“I thought it was in a museum.” Could be a copy, but I had the feeling it was an original.

Gabrielle slung one hip on the corner of her desk, her dark blue dress businesslike but showing off her long legs. She tried to appear nonchalant, but I saw the sparkle in her eyes, her defiance, anger, and fear.

“Have you come to spoil all my fun and tell me to run home like a good girl?”

I folded my arms. “What exactly does this Mr. Christianson want you to do?”

“Protect the hotel. Keep the baddies out. Eject them personally if I have to.” She swung her foot in a dark blue, high-heeled pump that matched the dress. “It’s something I can do.”

She could, I had no doubt. “What I mean is, why would you want to? You can do the same thing at the Crossroads. I like having the extra power around.”

Gabrielle gave me an annoyed look. “No you don’t. At the Crossroads, I’m crazy Gabrielle who might do anything—and for the gods’ sake, don’t let her near the vortexes. Here, I’m Ms. Massey, respected magic woman, the one they’ll rely on to keep them safe. Cornelius is giving me a job. You give me a place to stay—reluctantly.”

I felt a twinge of guilt, which irritated me. Gabrielle truly was dangerous and slightly insane, and we’d be foolish to trust her near the vortexes.

Plus I worried about what Cornelius really wanted from her. Gabrielle wasn’t the best judge of character.

She was right, though, that I didn’t always show her she was welcome in my home. Her motives were never clear, and I’d learned to watch her with caution. I probably didn’t hide my dismay whenever she showed up at the Crossroads.

Colby was no help at all, settling in against the doorframe to watch us argue.

“Can you blame me?” I asked Gabrielle. “You’ve only recently stopped trying to kill me. I’m sorry we haven’t sister-bonded as much as you like, but you can’t make that all my fault.”

The flash of rage in Gabrielle’s eyes usually meant a slap of magic would follow, but I saw her control her instinct to strike.

“You can’t make it all my fault, either,” she said hotly. “Your grandmother treats me like I’m a live grenade. Your bratty nieces get away with far more than I do. You think I wear your clothes because I need to be like you, don’t you? Have you thought that maybe it’s because I don’t have any money of my own, and no one will let me out to go shopping for more? Cornelius knew I was strapped and gave me unlimited credit at his store.”

“I’ve bought you clothes,” I began, but she cut me off.

“When you wanted to, where you wanted to, and what you wanted to. I had to practically beg you for that party dress and then the stupid dragon slayer ruined it.” I saw her look of vast anger, my sister more upset that her dress had been destroyed than that the dragon slayer had nearly killed her.

I softened my tone. “I’m sorry, Gabrielle. I didn’t come here to fight with you.”

“Yes, you did. You came to tell me to stop being an idiot and go home, or at least that I’m stupid for wanting to stay.” Gabrielle stood up, her high-heeled shoes letting her tower over me.

She was a beautiful young woman, and at the moment, with her midnight hair flowing back from her face, wearing a color that brought out the gloss in her skin, her dark eyes nearly black, she was stunning. Maybe crazy Gabrielle had grown up.

But Gabrielle, despite the power as she had, was in many ways still naive. Good and bad were confused in her world.

“I’m worried about you,” I tried. “You know we’ve heard weird things about this hotel and its owner.”

“About John Christianson and the hotel in Los Angeles, sure. Cornelius isn’t like him. He doesn’t approve of his brother or what he does.”

Since I hadn’t met Cornelius I had no way to judge whether he’d told Gabrielle the truth or was putting one over on her. The brother of an evil man could very well be a liar and just as bad.

We continued to stare at each other, Gabrielle beautiful in her fine clothes, me in jeans with my unwashed hair tucked into a sloppy ponytail.

I had no idea what to do. Put my foot down and have Colby carry Gabrielle home? Or let her remain here, possibly in danger—possibly endangering all those who stayed in or worked at this hotel?

Grandmother would expect me to throw a rope around her and drag her back to Many Farms, no matter how much Gabrielle protested. So would Mick. Drake would say the same.

My father, on the other hand …

My father would do what he’d done with me all my life. Loved me and stood by to help me when I needed it.

I felt Colby’s tension as he watched us. He’d given me his opinion downstairs, that I should leave Gabrielle to do what she wished. I wasn’t sure if Colby would try to prevent me from taking her away, or if he’d help me. He liked Gabrielle and clearly wanted to protect her, and that might include protecting her from me.

“Do you trust Cornelius?” I asked Gabrielle, looking her straight in the eye.

She glanced around, as though scanning the room for listening devices, then she faced me again. “Do you trust me?”

Something in her eyes made me pause. Gabrielle gazed at me with a quiet confidence I hadn’t seen in her before, one different from the arrogance she hid her fear and anger behind.

I also saw a gleam of intelligence. Gabrielle was canny enough to know something was going on with Cornelius and the C, and she’d decided to take the position to find out what.

Her argument about wanting respect and a job of her own wasn’t feigned, but I realized in a humbling flash that Gabrielle wasn’t as foolish as I’d painted her. She’d taken the job not simply from pride but because she knew, like I did, that the best way to investigate was from the inside.

I understood, and admired her for her reasoning, but at the same time grew more worried than ever. If Gabrielle suspected something bad was going on in this hotel, I didn’t want to leave her in the thick of it.

I lifted my hands. “All right, all right. I’ll get out of your way, let you live your own life. But if you need me you call me, all right?” I slid a chammy bag out of my pocket and laid it on the desk. “Any time, day or night.”

Gabrielle glanced at the bag with some dismay but also perception.

Neither of us said out loud what was in it. Gabrielle was right to suspect listening devices, and neither of us wanted to let on to any other mage that we had a magic mirror. The last mage who’d tried to take it from us had nearly destroyed us, and hurt Gabrielle most of all.

Gabrielle slid open a metal drawer under her desk, plucked out a new small black purse, stuffed the chammy bag into it, and snapped the purse closed.

“I also have one of these.” Gabrielle slid a smartphone out of the drawer and waved it at me. “I can text you now. Oh, wait, you always break or lose your cell phones. That’s okay; I’ll text Mick.”

“Probably best,” I conceded, my face warm. I was notoriously hard on my phones.

“Or me,” Colby rumbled. “Janet’s heading back to the Crossroads. Me, I’m staying in Vegas. You need me, I’ll be only a few floors away.”

Gabrielle’s face softened. “Aw, Colby, that’s sweet.”

I made a noise of exasperation. “Sure, be happy he won’t let you out of his sight.”

“If you were a big, hot, dragon-man I might feel differently about you,” Gabrielle said. “But you’re my nosy older sister—not the same thing.”

She dropped her purse and phone into the drawer. “Run off and save the world, Janet. If you need me, you know where I am.”

I had a lot of misgivings turning around and leaving her. But I did it. I had the dragon slayer to worry about, and I had trust Gabrielle sometime, or our relationship would never move forward.

Could a relationship between two women whose only tie was a seriously evil goddess mother ever move forward?

I hoped it could, and I hoped that by walking out of this office, I wasn’t making one of the biggest mistakes of my life.

---

My first call came in around midnight. I’d spent the afternoon and evening after Janet finally left settling in and getting to know the hotel and its staff.

I was surprised to find that many of the maids, bellmen, and maintenance guys not only believed in dark magic but knew how to tell when guests were using it—they weren’t magical themselves and so couldn’t sense when magic was in the air, but they knew how to spot the accouterments of conjuring, spells, and the like. They didn’t confront the magic users but alerted security, and now me.

There were monitoring cameras all over the hotel, which I saw when I was showed into the security room—a little creepy, but some people came to Las Vegas to scam their way to riches, the head of security told me. The monitors caught mundane criminals, however, not magical ones, which was where I came in.

Cornelius had said I could make my own hours, as long as I kept a diligent eye out and agreed to remain on call. I decided to give myself time to sleep in the mornings, time to enjoy myself in the afternoon, then I’d watch the hotel at night, when most dark magic was likely to happen.

Colby moved into the hotel, in a different room from mine, of course. He wasn’t the sort of clientele the C liked, but I persuaded Cornelius that he needed to stay to lend his muscle. I fully intended to spend my enjoyment time with Colby, seeing the sights, letting him take me to lunch and then dinner …

I still hadn’t gotten over the kiss he’d given me, but I decided not to let on to him about that. The last thing I needed was a possessive dragon in my business—if Mick was anything to go by, dragons could be seriously possessive. When I caught myself touching my tingling lips, I’d quickly jerk my hand away.

Anyway, I was lounging in my office in my new blue dress, my feet propped on my desk so I could admire my new shoes, when my phone rang.

“This is Gabrielle,” I said cheerily into it. “What do you need fixing?”

The breathless and frightened tones of one of the room-service waiters came to me. This young man had brought me a heaping bowl of ice cream an hour ago when I’d grown bored and hungry.

I was by myself—Shelly, the receptionist, worked eight to five, like a normal person, and I had the feeling Cornelius wouldn’t approve of Colby up here with me—but I wasn’t afraid to be alone. The offices of this hotel must be the most securely locked and warded places on earth, and besides, there wasn’t much villainy I couldn’t handle.

“Something going on in room 4235,” the room-service waiter said in a voice just above a whisper. “I delivered a bottle of wine to them. Guy who told me to come in was scary looking, with yellow eyes. I didn’t go far inside, but I’m pretty sure he had a woman penned up in there. Front desk says a lady checked into that room by herself, the reservation for only one. You said to tell you if I saw anything suspicious—so I’m telling you.”

“Thank you, sweetie,” I said, swinging my legs off the desk, my elation rising. “You stay safe in your kitchen, and I’ll check it out.”

“Want me to alert security?” he asked.

I’d told the staff today that if they saw anything dark magic-y, or that even looked dark magic-y, they should contact me first. The goons with the earpieces were for ordinary bad guys, but I was first response for magical problems.

“I’ll call them if I need them,” I assured him. “Otherwise, they might get hurt. 4235, you said?”

“Yep.”

“All right. Thanks, Steve. I got this.”

I hung up, logged the report into my computer as Shelly had showed me, grabbed my purse and universal keycard, and left the empty office suite.

They’d given me a card that would open every guest room in the hotel. How cool was that? At Janet’s hotel, I didn’t even have a key to my own room. The maids or Cassandra always had to let me in.

Cornelius had already put a lot of trust in me, and I was determined not to betray that trust.

The hall in front of room 4235 was quiet, but the nasty magic oozing from the crack under the door made my fingers itch. A demon was in there assaulting one of our guests.

I swiped my keycard through the slot and the door clicked open. “Housekeeping!” I called as I charged inside.

The naked demon with yellow skin, yellow eyes, horns, and a magical aura that nearly blew me back into the hall was on top of the woman on the bed. She turned her head to me when I banged in, her eyes pleading.

Gabrielle to the rescue. I reached through the demonic aura, wrapped a snake of crackling magic around the demon’s neck, and hauled him off the woman.

She sobbed, and he gibbered, and then I noticed a few things.

First, something, not the demon, was sucking at my magic, as though trying to siphon it off.

A moment of watery panic tore through me as I flashed back to the shallow desert canyon, where Emmett Smith stood over me and ripped my magical self away, the diamonds on his glasses gleaming in the starlight.

I shoved away the memory with a gasp. The drawing-off wasn’t the same—nothing ever would be as terrible as what Emmett had done. This felt like an opportunistic magical being taking in power where it could find it.

Second, there was a circle on the floor, with the bed in the middle of it. The bed was against the wall, but the circle continued up the padded headboard and onto the wallpaper in an unbroken line. The marks were chalk, easily erased, but the magic that flowed through them turned the marks blood red.

The demon glared at me and snarled, but I knew no demon would draw a chalk circle in a room to contain a human victim. They didn’t need anything but their own strength to subdue their kill.

Which meant this demon had been conjured.

The woman was giving me a look of pathetic gratitude, but I sensed the erotic joy inside her, her triumph as she absorbed the demon’s magic.

“Eww,” I said, wrinkling my nose. “Can’t you just read tarot cards and light candles like other witches?”

I took a step forward. The demon hung in midair by my noose of magic, and now he sent me a terrible pleading look.

The witch sat up in panic. “No! Don’t break the circle!”

She was beautiful and voluptuous—at least, that was the glam she projected. Underneath, I saw an ordinary-looking woman trying to be irresistible to the netherworld.

“Why not?” I stopped with the toe of my shoe just outside the chalk line. “Oh, that’s right. Because if he’s no longer bound, he’s free to kill you. I’d kill you too, if I’d just been violated.”

“What are you talking about?” The woman tried to sound scared. “He came, he—he—”

“Nice circle,” I said admiringly. “I have a friend, she does circles, but she’s not stupid enough to conjure a demon in them, well, not for sex at least. Of course, she’s a good enough witch not to have to feed off other beings’ magic in the first place.”

The demon stared at me. I have no idea whether he understood us, but I could taste his need for vengeance. All I had to do was erase one mark, and he’d be free to annihilate the woman who’d tried to suck him dry—plus anyone else in this hotel, including me.

“Don’t take this the wrong way,” I told the demon. “But go to hell.”

A blast of my power sizzled through the markings, burning them bright orange and then blue-white. The demon shot me a grateful look before he vanished in a flare of light.

“You stupid bitch!” The woman was up and off the bed, her glam falling away to show her sagging belly and breasts. She was stark naked, which was something I really didn’t want to see. “He’s a demon! Evil.”

“Depends on your point of view, sweetie. Even evil beings have feelings.” With a sweep of my hand, I blurred the chalk markings into white powder, which poured down from the wall onto the pillows. “How about I send up a vacuum, you clean this place, and then you get the hell out of our hotel. You’ll owe us for the night.”

I felt her glaring at me as I turned for the door. I also felt her gather her magic, laced with whatever she’d been able to imbibe from the demon, ready to strike.

I spun on my heel and blocked the wave she threw at me, shards of her spell hitting my wall like sand on glass.

The witch snarled in rage. “Your time is coming.” She pointed a pudgy finger at me. “You will be obliterated from this world, and clean magic will pervade. I’ve waited for this moment for centuries, and finally, it is upon us.” Her triumph blazed, her smile wide.

She sounded like the dragon slayer. I wished I knew what they were going on about, but I didn’t want to give her the satisfaction of asking.

“Are you saying your magic is clean?” I asked. “Seriously? It stinks of demon from where I’m standing.”

“Not like the evil I smell on you.”

I put my hands on my hips. “Now you’re pissing me off. Everyone knows better than to do that.”

The witch frowned, her cockiness abating, but part of my power was my unpredictability. You never know what unstable Gabrielle is going to do.

She lifted her hands and began chanting words I didn’t recognize. Her fingers bent into claws, her eyes went dark, and inky smoke issued from her mouth.

I watched with interest as the smoke slid into my barrier and tried to destroy it. It failed, of course. I saw the witch’s frustration when she couldn’t budge my wall, but I definitely did not like the sensation of her Earth powers against mine.

She wasn’t stronger than I was—very few mages were—but I smelled a damp dirt odor, similar to what I’d sensed when I’d fought the dragon slayer, felt the same pressure as when I’d faced him at the pool.

I made a grabbing motion, squeezed the witch’s magic into a small, dense ball, and threw it at the window. The glass shattered from the impact, the magic dispersing in a draft of cool October air. The witch’s eyes widened, then she hissed.

“Now you owe us for the window,” I said. “Pack up and get out. If you’re still here by the time I send up security, I’ll have to get really unfriendly. And tell your friends that dark magic isn’t welcome in my hotel.”

The witch’s glare didn’t wane, but I was so done with her. I stalked out, a waft of my magic slamming the door behind me.

I laughed. I liked my new job.

As I turned the corner to head for the elevator, a wave of something so dense and dark it blotted out all sight and feeling hit me and sent me to my knees.