Waking Up in Vegas Read online

  "Just thinking about how great it is to live in an unpredictable universe." I squeezed his hand before letting go and sitting up. "Also how much I want dinner. Have you ever experienced the wonderful world of Las Vegas dining?"

  Dominic pushed himself up onto his elbows. "This is my first time in Las Vegas for any reason."

  "That's a no, then. Get your clothes on. We'll find someplace that serves steaks the size of your head and cocktails that glow in the dark. Call it a combo bachelor and bachelorette party. Play your cards right, and we'll even get to strip each other at the end of the evening." I leered at him.

  He laughed and grabbed for me as I slid off the bed and danced away. "Or we could stay here, not put our clothing back on, and do away with the need for strippers."

  "Now where's the fun in that? Come on, De Luca. Live a little."

  "Oh, believe me," he said. "I intend to."

  We made it back to the hotel eight hours and several bottles of champagne later, laughing as we tried to keep ourselves from toppling over. My knees gave out halfway up the stairs. Dominic scooped me up, slung me over his shoulder, and carried me the rest of the way. I unlocked the door while dangling upside down and giggling incessantly. The mice cheered when we entered the room.

  "HAIL! HAIL THE RETURN OF THE ARBOREAL PRIESTESS!"

  "Shhh," I said. My shushing was somewhat undermined by my giggles, and by the hiccups I was starting to develop. "Gotta be quiet, mice. No pets allowed."

  "Verity is very, very drunk," said Dominic proudly. "I am slightly less drunk."

  "Because you're bigger than me, you jerk," I said, doing my best to punch him in the knee. It would have been easier if his knees hadn't insisted on moving when I tried to hit them. It wasn't fair. I crossed my arms and sulked. "Stupid mass."

  "I also drank more water," said Dominic. He waved a hand at the mice. "Stay out here, you splendidly irrational examples of the genus Rodentia. I am going to defile your priestess like…like…"

  "The Normans defiled Lindesfarne?" I suggested.

  "Yes," said Dominic. "That." He raised his chin and carted me into the bedroom. I remembered to shove the door shut at the last second. I might be drunk, but there was no such thing as "drunk enough to forget that the mice were watching." That was a level of inebriation that implied liver failure and death. Which might still be better than having sex while the mice were in the room.

  Morning dawned bright and early and impossible to ignore, due to the fact that we had both been too drunk the night before to think about closing the curtains. I rolled out of bed, bounced to my feet, and trotted toward the bathroom to begin my ablutions. Behind me, Dominic groaned.

  "How are you so alert?" he asked. "My head feels like it was used as a football by Manchester United all night long."

  "Before or after the chorus girls took turns kicking you?" I asked, squirting a healthy dollop of toothpaste onto my brush. It smelled of mint. That was better than the things I currently smelled like. Open seafood buffets and champagne cocktails do not a sweet day-after perfume make. "And I wake up this well because I've never been in a position to sleep much. Try doing dance camp and monitoring the local woods for cryptid activity without ever slipping so much that the instructors catch on. You get real, real good at shrugging things off." That didn't even go into college, where the usual parties had taken me away from both my studies and my duties, if only temporarily. The classes had to be passed and the duties had to be done, and so I'd figured out how to do it all.

  My grandmother liked to tell me that I wouldn't be in my twenties and capable of bouncing back from anything forever, which might have been more believable if she hadn't been in her twenties for the past forty years. Sometimes being a member of my family made sensible advice difficult to take.

  Dominic groaned again. I heard him moving around in the bedroom as I brushed my teeth, and then moving around in the bathroom once I had hopped into the shower. I stuck my head out of the gap in the curtain and observed him shaving, meticulously scraping away both the stubble and the remarkable encrusting of glitter that he had somehow acquired during the night. I grinned and flicked a handful of suds at him before withdrawing back to the safety of the shower.

  "Are you going to be up for getting married tonight? Because we can postpone, if you're too hung-over to deal with an Elvis impersonator."

  "Are we really getting married by an Elvis impersonator?"

  "Assuming we can find one, why not? You only have one chance to elope to Vegas and have a ridiculous theme wedding." I rinsed the shampoo out of my hair. "Besides, that way the minister will be wearing more sequins than I am."

  I could hear the smile in his voice as he said, "That is something I would very much like to see. I'm a little dehydrated, and I could use another eight hours of sleep, but if you think I'm delaying our marriage one minute longer than is absolutely necessary, you must have had more to drink than I thought."

  "You say the sweetest things." I turned off the water, wrapping a towel around myself as I stepped out of the shower. "Get cleaned up. Al's going to expect us to be there soon, and it's never a good idea to keep him waiting."

  "As you wish," said Dominic.

  I laughed while I was toweling off my hair and getting into my robe. I was still laughing when I stepped out into the front room of the suite. About half the mice were on the couch, still watching television--a Law and Order marathon, from the looks of things. Someone knocked on the door. I stopped where I was, giving the mice a hard look.

  "Okay, fess up," I said. "Did you order room service without permission?" It was entirely possible that they had permission, of course. I mean, we had been really drunk the night before.

  "No, Priestess," squeaked one of the mice.

  The knock came again.

  I pinched the bridge of my nose, trying to chase away the last of my hangover. It worked about as well as I had expected it to, which was to say, not at all. "Okay, get out of sight," I said. "I'll see what's up."

  The mice scattered, vanishing under the furniture in an instant. I walked toward the door, leaning up onto my toes to look out the peephole. There was no one there.

  "Huh," I said, dropping back to the flats of my feet. "Must've had the wrong room." I started to turn away.

  The knock came a third time.

  This time I whirled, grabbed the doorknob, and opened the door before whoever had been knocking could duck out of sight. I was expecting to find a group of kids who thought that they were being funny, or maybe a hotel busboy with a breakfast tray. Instead, I found myself looking down the barrel of a sawed-off shotgun. It was in the hands of a man who looked like he ate bricks for breakfast. He was flanked by two equally rough-looking companions, one male and one female, both dressed in leather, denim, and a substantial helping of dust.

  "Hi," said the man in the middle.

  "Wrong room," I said brightly, and slammed the door on him.

  As I'd been expecting, it didn't actually close: one of the trio had managed to get his foot in the opening before the door could latch. That was breaking into a hotel room 101, and I would have been disappointed if they hadn't managed it. Relieved, but disappointed. What it did was buy me some time--almost nine whole seconds, between the slam, the bewildered "did she just slam the door on a man with a gun" pause, and the door banging open again.

  Nine seconds was all I needed. There wasn't time to get to my own guns, which were still under the pillows on the bed, but there was time to get to my wedding present. When the door opened, the three goons from the hall found me braced in a defensive stance, holding a full-sized horseman's glaive in front of me. As expected, all three of them stopped and stared. Eight-foot long polearms had that effect on people.

  "I am tired, I am hung-over, and I did not order room service," I snarled, hitting the butt of the glaive against the wall. Hopefully Dominic would hear the commotion, and would pause to grab a gun or six before he came out to see what was going on. "Get the hell out of my hotel
room."

  "What the hell is that thing?" demanded Goon #2. He was shorter than his male companion and about the same height as his female companion, with an impressive mullet that blended seamlessly into his equally impressive muttonchops. If I'd been looking for a man to stand in front of a biker bar and nod silently to people, he would have been my first choice.

  "It's a can opener on a stick," said Goon #3. She sneered at me. "Just give us the vermin and no one has to get hurt, sweetie. You can take your pretty bleached blonde head back to bed and sleep off the rest of whatever you drank last night."

  "Wait, what?" Any traces of sleepiness that had managed to survive the arrival of my unexpected guests fled as her words sunk in. My eyes narrowed. "Who the hell sent you?"

  Goon #1 thumbed back the hammer on his gun, aiming it straight for my chest. "We're the ones with the guns, sweetheart, so I think we get to ask the questions. Where are they?"

  Sometimes ignorance is the best defense. I tightened my grip on the glaive and said, "I don't know what you're talking about."

  "I'm talking about the mice. I know you have them. Now fork them over."

  Well, crap. "Let me think about that for a second," I said, taking a half-step backward and knocking the butt of the glaive against the wall one more time before I lunged forward and planted the blade end in the floor. The goons started to laugh, taking the move for the mistake of an amateur. Until I shoved off from the floor and suddenly had the makeshift equivalent of a fireman's pole in the middle of the room.

  People who make fun of pole dancers have never actually tried it. The core strength required to hang your entire body from your arms while you move in three-dimensional space is immense. And the psychological impact of whipping around in a perfect arc and planting your feet square in the face of the man who was just pointing a gun at you is not to be underestimated.

  Goon #1 made a squawking noise as he staggered backward, dropping the gun. I allowed my momentum to carry me around for another kick. Sadly, Goon #3 had enough of a grasp of physics that she ducked, leaving me to sail harmlessly past overhead. Oh, well. Time for plan B. I let go of the pole, hit the wall with both feet, and flipped myself back into an upright position, landing with both fists up and ready to swing.

  "She broke my nose!" said Goon #1, through his fingers. "Kill her!"

  Goon #2 produced a gun of his own. How unoriginal. Goon #3 had a length of chain, which she began whipping around over her head. That was a little better, if extremely impractical. I paused to stare at her.

  "Seriously? What do you think this is, Beyond Thunderdome?"

  She responded by whipping the chain at me. I ducked. The chain got wrapped around the glaive. While she was still trying to untangle it, I kicked her in the head, and ducked again as Goon #2 shot at the place where I'd been standing.

  The door to the bedroom burst open, and Dominic shouted, "Verity!" before chucking a rolled-up towel at me. I snatched it out of the air, shoved my hand inside, and pulled out my own gun.

  "Hi," I said, wheeling on Goon #2. His eyes widened as he saw the pistol in my hand. "Wanna see who the faster shot is? Spoiler alert: probably not you."

  Goon #1, blood pouring down his face, was smart enough to see the writing on the wall. He turned and bolted for the door. That would probably have worked out okay for him, if the mice hadn't run a dental floss tripwire across the opening. He went down hard, and he didn't get back up.

  The mice cheered. I grinned.

  "Well," I said. "Good morning to me."

  Getting our unwelcome guests tied up and secured to their seats wasn't hard. Goon #3 hadn't had much fight left in her after being kicked in the head; Goon #1 was unconscious; and while Goon #2 might be lowlife scum, he wasn't stupid. He'd put his gun down as soon as he'd realized how outnumbered he was. Dominic had kept watch on the trio while I got some clothes on. Fighting bad guys in a bathrobe was one thing, but interrogating them that way was just wrong.

  They were all awake and glaring when I stepped back into the front room. Dominic was leaning against the door.

  "Has the front desk called?" I asked.

  He frowned. "No."

  "Right," I said, and turned to the goons. "Here's how this is going to work. I'm going to ask who sent you. You're going to tell me. Then we're going to take our things, including the mice, and we're going to leave you here. I know I can trust you not to call the police, because I'm guessing you want to deal with them about as much as I do. In return for your cooperation, I will leave you with all your fingers. Do we have a deal?"

  "Sit on it and spin, bitch," said Goon #2.

  "Aw." I produced a throwing knife from my belt, twirling it between my fingers before flinging it at him. It socked into the wood of the already battered chair right between his legs, less than an inch from his genitals. He went pale. "How about you don't use that word anymore, and I don't make you regret it?"

  "You know, my chivalrous side says I should step in when men talk to you that way, but it's just so much fun to watch you work," said Dominic.

  "I am the gift that keeps on giving," I said blithely, before focusing on the goons again. "Come on. One of you has to be willing to give up your employer."

  "Lady, we would, believe me, but we don't know," said the first goon. His nose had stopped leaking, largely due to the wads of tissue paper jammed in both nostrils. He was going to make a mess the next time he sneezed. "We got a call from one of the brokers we work with, said he had a confirmed Aeslin colony in this hotel, and that it would be an easy pickup, on account of the people who were rooming with them had gotten wasted last night."

  I dimly remembered a few complementary bottles of champagne. They'd still been sealed, so I'd assumed they were safe to drink. I hadn't considered the possibility that getting us drunk might have been the goal. "If your broker knew we were out drinking, why didn't you just make the pickup then?" Even saying the words made my stomach crawl.

  "We tried," said Goon #3, glaring daggers at me. "We searched this whole damn place, and we didn't see a single mouse. So we figured maybe they only came out when you were around."

  I looked down at the mice, who were sitting on the floor around my feet. "Is this true?" I asked. "Why didn't you say anything?"

  "Because we Did Not Know, Priestess," said the head priest, stroking his whiskers with his forepaws and bowing his head in contrition. "We were granted permission to Hunt, and so Hunt we did. We have grown restless, sealed in the Van of Moving for so long. We wished to feel the wind in our fur, and to taste blood against our teeth."

  "…right." The mice had gone out, which I had told them was okay, and as a consequence, when the goons had come to visit, they hadn't been there to be taken. The narrowness of their escape chilled me as I swung my eyes back to the goons. "So a broker called you and told you what, exactly?"

  "That you had a healthy Aeslin colony traveling with you," repeated Goon #1. "Lady, I don't know if you're stupid or just perverse, but we could still make a deal. We were promised a half-million each for any live mice we brought in. Two million for every breeding pair. We could split it, fifty-fifty. Just untie us and grab your rodents, and you'll be rich before dark."

  My fist hit him squarely between the eyes, rocking his head back so hard that it damn near hit his spine. He groaned, and stopped talking. I turned to glare daggers at the other two. They shied away, as much as their ropes would let them. That didn't make me feel any better.

  "Aeslin mice are intelligent creatures," I said. It was a struggle to keep my voice level. "What you're talking about, what you tried to do? That's slavery. Unless you were planning to purge their current religion by breeding them and then killing the adults. That's murder. And I don't suggest telling me if that was the idea."

  They didn't have to tell me. Their eyes darted to the side, looking at anything but my face. I folded my hands into fists. The urge to hit had rarely been so strong.

  "Okay. Well, you kept our deal. We're leaving. You don't call t
he police, and I don't call my parents. Everyone gets to walk away."

  "Your parents?" demanded Goon #3. "What the hell, lady?"

  "Oh, good, nobody told you. Hi." I smiled at her, a great baring of my teeth, like I was getting ready to rip out her throat and swallow it. "You just tried to steal a group of living, sentient creatures from the latest generation of the Price family."

  The conscious thieves turned white. Neither of them spoke again as we gathered our things--including the mice--and made our way out of the room, leaving them behind.

  At the last moment, Dominic turned the heat up to full. The door shut on their dismayed faces.

  "It won't kill them, but they may wish it had," he said.

  "My hero," I replied.

  There was one more piece of business to take care of before we left. Dominic took our things--including my glaive--out to the truck while I sauntered up to the front desk. There was no one there except for the clerk. He blanched when he saw me, and scrambled to his feet when he saw that I was smiling.

  "Hi," I purred, dropping a handful of crumpled bills on the counter in front of him. "I guess we made a bit of a mess upstairs. Oopsie. But you're not going to charge us a cleaning fee, because if you did, I'd need to tell my family that you're a black market wildlife dealer, and that you tried to take my mice." I was going to tell them anyway. We couldn't let something like this go unchecked. Worse for him, I was going to tell Al. As a member of the Las Vegas cryptid community, he would be very interested in what had happened to us.

  "Oh my God," muttered the clerk. Louder, he said, "I'll scream if you touch me."

  "We're not the bad guys here," I said. "We're just the people who were trying to have a few days of peace and quiet. You're the monster who sicced a bunch of poachers on us. I won't try to explain why what you did was wrong. I'm sure you already know. But I will give you some advice: retire. Right now, while you still have hands. Because the folks around here aren't going to be thrilled when they hear what you did."

  He slumped for a moment before pulling himself laboriously upright and asking, "How did you know?"