Marsden was elbow-deep in flour when we went back in, shaping homemade dough with a wooden rolling pin. “I’m making lasagna for lunch,” he told us, “if you’d like to stay?” My borrowed stomach rumbled embarrassingly despite the fact that it had just finished breakfast. I stared down at it in annoyance and Marsden laughed. “I take it that’s a yes?”
Pritkin went back upstairs for his weapons while I sat at the table and listened to Marsden’s stories about Agnes. Highly unlikely stories. “She was messing with you,” I told him. “She did not date Caesar.”
“She couldn’t have shifted that far back,” I explained. “It would have killed her.”
“Oh, I assure you, she could. She traveled even farther than that for us on more than one occasion.”
“I don’t see how. The farthest back I’ve gone was the sixteenth century, but that was in spirit. I don’t know if I could make it that far with my body.”
The rolling pin hit the table top as loudly as a gavel. “You’ve gone back in time with your body?” He looked outraged.
“Because I can’t stay anywhere long enough to get anything done when I’m in spirit form. I’m like a ghost with nothing to haunt—my energy gives out after a few hours and I have to shift back. Not to mention that trying to do anything without a body is really—”
“But you can have your pick of bodies! You’re Pythia. You can possess anyone you choose! That is the reason you have that power, to make time shifting less perilous!”
I didn’t reply, but I thought about Agnes’ shoulder wound. It seemed like she hadn’t told Marsden everything. She probably hadn’t wanted to worry him, but obviously she’d taken her body along from time to time. Maybe there were missions where possessing someone was just too dangerous. Getting the person she was possessing shot might screw up the very time line she was trying to fix. Or maybe she hadn’t liked possessions any more than I did.
“And how do you know that, Jonas?” Pritkin demanded from the stairway, his old coat draped over his arm.
“Lady Phemonoe mentioned it,” Marsden said, grabbing a knife and cutting board and laying into some onions.
“Odd that she never told anyone else,” Pritkin said, handing me his boots. I took them gratefully. Summer in Britain was a lot different than July in Nevada, and my toes were cold.
Marsden looked a little shifty. “Yes, well, we worked together a long time and . . . she trusted me.”
Pritkin’s eyes narrowed. “Enough to spill age-old secrets?” “We didn’t have in-depth discussions. It was just a . . . a slip of the tongue, here and there.”
“A slip of the tongue?” Pritkin repeated, and something about the way he said it made Marsden go all pink.
“It’s hot in here!” Marsden said testily. “You might have installed some proper ventilation.” He’d opened a window, but most of the fragrant steam had chosen to hang around.
“That’s a bit tricky with stone walls,” Pritkin said dryly. “And you’re evading the issue.”
Marsden glanced at me. “Do you know, I think I need more basil. Cassie, if you wouldn’t mind?”
“Oh, I’d mind,” I said, planting elbows on the table and looking at him expectantly.
He sighed and added the onions to a pot on the stove, showing us his back in the process. “She was . . . we were . . . good friends, as well as colleagues.”
Again, it wasn’t so much what was said, as how he said it. “Wow.” I was impressed. “You and Caesar—”
Marsden threw some mushrooms in a colander a little harder than necessary. “Yes. Well. As you say. But that isn’t the point, is it? The point is that you’ve been doing it wrong, child.”
“Yeah. Imagine that. And with all of thirty seconds’ training, too.”
“You’re fortunate to still be alive!” he said sternly. “Do you have any idea how many diseases you could have encountered in the past? How many times you might have eaten foods that, while perfectly safe for the people of the time, would be deadly to you? And that is assuming the dark mage you are chasing doesn’t kill you first!”
“Does that happen a lot?” I asked nervously. “Mages slipping through time?”
“It takes an extraordinary amount of power, and few are able to raise or to control so much. Most who try end up dead long before you need to worry about them. Leaving you free to deal with other responsibilities.”
Marsden went ninja on some garlic. “Any number of things. We’ve already discussed the petitioners who will expect you to see the future for them and give advice.”
“Seeing the future is . . . problematic.”
“Nonetheless, people will want you to try. Along with presiding over the Pythian Court and supervising the initiates, it is a Pythia’s primary duty.”
“I know I’m going to regret asking this, but the Pythian Court is what, exactly?”
“A court of mediation for high-level disputes among the supernatural community. For example, if the Clan Council of the Weres were to have a dispute with the vampire Senate that they could not work out themselves, they might bring it to you in an effort to avoid bloodshed. The Pythia can best judge these cases because she alone can see how the dispute will end if it is not resolved.”
I swallowed. Great. Something else I didn’t know how to do. Not that it made a difference in this case. Half the supernatural community wanted me dead and the other half thought I was their little pawn. Neither group was going to listen to a damn thing I had to say.
As for the initiates, I couldn’t imagine a scenario that would have me seeking them out. Myra had been bad enough; I didn’t need a whole court waiting for me to kick off. Or trying to help me do so.
I looked up to see Marsden staring at me suspiciously. “Please tell me this isn’t the first you’ve heard of all this,” he said.
His knife thwacked into the cutting board hard enough to wedge there. He left it, glaring at Pritkin. “You should have brought her to me before this! She needs training!”
“Wait a minute.” I grabbed Marsden’s wrist, to keep him from trying to chop something else. “You can train me?”
“Not as Agnes could have, no. I can tell you what I saw and observed over a period of decades, but I don’t have your power. I can’t help you with things like possessions.”
“Semantics,” he said offhand.
“No. It really isn’t,” I said flatly. “There’s no one else inside my head and no one is getting hurt.”
Marsden looked at me impatiently. “I’m sorry if you find the idea distasteful, but we’re talking about your life!”
“This is exactly why you need training. The other initiates don’t question the necessity for occasional unpleasant acts.”
Yeah, I bet they didn’t. The Circle liked to get them young and brainwash them from childhood. They’d probably walk into a fire if the Circle told them to and never even question it. But that wasn’t my style. And if Marsden and I were going to work together, he had to understand that.
“I don’t have the right to steal part of someone’s life, put them in danger to protect myself and possibly traumatize them forever in the process,” I told him quietly.
“That’s overstating the issue,” he said stubbornly. “And it’s for the common good.”
“Which makes perfect sense, unless you’re the one getting screwed over for everyone else’s good.”
“But Apollo does know,” Pritkin pointed out. He’d stayed quiet during our discussion, seated at a small table near the wall, systematically cleaning his weapons. But he’d apparently kept up, because his voice had a definite edge. “He’ll be prepared for the status quo and have a plan of action for any move we make based on it. If we hope to best him, we must learn to think in new and different ways.”
“Stay out of this, John!” Marsden snapped.
“Why?” I asked. “He’s right.”
Marsden looked at me in exasperation. “The rules are there for your protection—”
For the first time, Marsden looked genuinely angry. I guess he wasn’t used to people talking back to him. “She was poisoned because of the Circle’s negligence! Of all the reasons I have to despise Saunders, that is by far the greatest! As long as I remained in office, she was properly guarded. As you will be once I return.”
I put a hand on his shoulder. His muscles were knotted with strain, with grief. He misses her, I realized. He wanted to honor her memory by helping to fulfill her last wish—that I succeed her. But he wanted to do it on his terms.
I exchanged glances with Pritkin. “About that . . . ,” I said.
“It’s perfect!” Marsden announced when I’d finished explaining the plan. “Better than I dared to hope for!”
“Don’t get too excited,” I told him. “We don’t have a deal yet. I can get you in, but I want a little more than confirmation in return.”
“Namely?” The old man’s expression didn’t change, but his usually bleary blue eyes suddenly looked a lot sharper.
“There are some schools the Circle has been running. I want them closed. Permanently.”
His forehead creased. “What schools?”
“The ones for kids with malfunctioning magic. The Circle has been locking people away for years who haven’t done anything wrong, and that’s including when you were in office. It has to stop.”
Marsden was shaking his head before I even finished. “The schools you mention are an unfortunate necessity. I don’t like them, either, but there simply is no other choice. We don’t lock away the harmless sort, but some of those children have very dangerous gifts!”
“If so, we’ve never found it. Unsupervised, they are a danger to themselves and everyone around them.” It sounded final.
“It’s a simple question. How many of them have you met? Because I’ve had nine hanging out at Dante’s for a week now and the place has yet to burn down or blow up or suffer anything worse than elevators with doors that won’t shut!”
“Then you’ve been very fortunate.” His tone was dismissive, as if I couldn’t possibly know what I was talking about.
“I also lived with a group of them for almost two years when I was a teenager. I’m not saying we never had a problem, but no one killed anyone or burned down any buildings. And the neighbors never noticed enough unusual stuff to bother calling the cops.”
“Forgive me, Cassie, but I find that very difficult to believe.” He sounded patient, and it pissed me off. I wasn’t the one being stubborn here.
“None. However—”
He looked at me for a long moment. “Perhaps. But you understand that I cannot promise you anything? To take such a step, the Council would have to approve, and while I once had a good deal of sway over that group, that is no longer true.”
Oddly enough, I actually felt better that he hadn’t automatically agreed to my demand. If he had, I’d have worried that it was only to get what he wanted, and that the kids would be forgotten if and when he came to power. But even so, I wanted something a little less vague.
“I understand. But I want the issue discussed—seriously discussed—in front of the Council. And I want a good faith gesture from you before then. On the day you return to power, you release to my custody the children the Circle kidnapped yesterday.”
“Only some. I want the rest. There aren’t many,” I added, because his face was still stuck on no.
“I will release the children taken in this latest raid,” he finally agreed. “And I will bring up the broader issue of the educational centers with the Council. But I cannot force their hand. The final decision will rest with them.”
I didn’t like it, but I respected him for refusing to promise more than he knew he could deliver. “Then it seems we have a deal.”
There was only one thing left on the agenda, but Pritkin wasn’t making it easy. “If you want this to happen, you have to drop your shields!” I told him, exasperated.
“You are certain this will work?” he asked for maybe the tenth time.
“Yes!” I put as much confidence into my voice as I could, but he didn’t look convinced. “This was your idea, remember?”
Pritkin had vetoed the idea of Billy possessing his body, even for a moment, so we’d opted for Plan B. The idea was for Billy to slip inside my skin and nudge Pritkin out. And as Pritkin’s body would be the only one in the room that wouldn’t be shielded, his spirit should have no trouble finding its way home.
It ought to work. It would work. But not if Pritkin refused to lower the shields he’d placed around my body.
“He’s afraid of opening himself up like that with a hungry ghost hanging around,” Billy said with a grin. He was clearly enjoying this. “He’s probably wishing he’d been nicer the last time we met.”
“What? What did he say?” Pritkin’s head whipped around, his eyes wild. And, okay, maybe he wasn’t taking this better than me after all.
“You remember,” Billy said, “when we were in Faerie and I had a body and he slapped the crap out of me?” He was glowing with the power I’d loaned him and it was making him sassy.
“He didn’t say anything,” I told Pritkin.
Pritkin broke and headed for the stairs. He’d have made it, but Marsden had been stationed there for just such an emergency and he blocked the way. “Drop your shields,” I said soothingly, motioning Billy over as casually as possible. “It’ll all be over in a second.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of,” Pritkin muttered, glancing around. His voice held the little crack it got when he was really disturbed and trying to cover it, the one that made me want to duck because usually it involved someone shooting at us. I glanced around nervously, but no one was there.
Marsden punched Pritkin on the shoulder. “You’re a war mage, man! Buck up!”
And to my surprise, after another moment, Pritkin did. Billy stepped inside and I breathed a sigh of relief. Maybe this would go okay, after all, I thought. Right before Pritkin started convulsing.
“John!” Marsden grabbed for him, but Pritkin jittered out of reach. A flailing fist took out one of the banister railings and knocked the phone off the wall before Marsden’s hands managed to lock on his shoulders.
“Take it easy! You’re in my body,” I reminded him. He obviously didn’t hear me. His eyes were unfocused, he was pale and sweating, and his knuckles were shining white where he’d dug his fingers into Marsden’s arms.
I’d never seen him so out of control. Pritkin usually took things in stride that would send others into raging fits. “Billy—hurry up!”
“I can’t do this if he keeps fighting me!” Billy said, sticking his head out of Pritkin’s chest.
“He’s fighting the possession,” I told Marsden.
“John, listen to me!” Marsden shook him. “You have to let go!”
Pritkin didn’t answer, just thrashed against his hold like a man possessed by something a lot scarier than a failed card shark. And he was doing more than struggling physically. Portions of Billy kept shooting out of him at odd places—a foot stuck out of a thigh, an arm poked out of his chest and Billy’s head reemerged from a shoulder.
“Some help here,” Billy gasped. “I’m losing him!”
“I can’t leave this body until he’s free!” I reminded him.
I didn’t like the idea, but I didn’t have a better one. And if we didn’t do this now, I had a feeling it would be a very long time before we managed to talk Pritkin into another attempt. “We’re changing the plan,” I told Marsden. “I have to help Billy.”
“Not in a few seconds. And I’ll return if it takes any longer than that.” I stretched out on the floor so that Pritkin’s body wouldn’t collapse when I left. “Ready?” I asked Billy.
“And waiting!” he snapped, struggling to hang on.
My borrowed head fell back against the floor. I concentrated, and after a moment, my spirit glided up and the face on the body below me went slack. I’d gotten a little better at this sort of thing in the last month, meaning that I no longer rocketed around like an out-of-control comet. So it would have been easy enough to drift over to Pritkin, if he hadn’t kneed Marsden somewhere sensitive and taken off for the stairs again. Damn it!
I floated after him and caught him as his foot hit the lowest step. But catching him and getting inside were totally different things. My body’s shields were back up and operating at a level I hadn’t known they could reach. I shield with fire, not water, but it was Pritkin’s spirit projecting the mental barrier, and I splashed down into an endless ocean of gently undulating waves.
I surfaced, sputtering and coughing, but Billy was nowhere in sight. And I didn’t know how to get past armor this advanced. Unlike with most shields, there were no rips or tears—no chinks at all. Just blue, blue water spreading to the horizon in every direction.
Diving, I discovered, only made things worse: now I was in a featureless indigo world with no reference points. Hovering blindly in the dark, I could feel the crackle of my spirit’s heat start to war with the ocean, churning up vast amounts of water that bubbled around me in a frothy tide. Then the ocean began swirling, a hard current took me and I rocketed back toward the surface in what I vaguely realized was a giant water spout. I tore through out into the open, thrust upward at a dizzying rate—and kept on going right back into the kitchen.
It took me a moment to realize that I’d just been exorcised from my own body.
“Got him!” Billy said. And the next moment, the pale, glimmering form of a man was pushed out of my skin and into the kitchen.
Most new spirits are hopelessly confused for a few moments at least, trying to depend on the senses of the body they no longer have to understand the world. And despite being half demon, it appeared that Pritkin was no different, hovering exposed and terrified in what probably felt like complete solitude. I tried to grab his insubstantial hand, but he shied back, horror passing over his hazy features.
He couldn’t see me, I realized. He didn’t know if the spirit who had touched him was that of a friend or a predator. I tried to reach out with my senses, to let him know who I was, to tell him to follow me, and a feeling of presence slammed into me that left me shaking. But it wasn’t coming from him.
Something was moving toward us, stirring up the spirit world with the force of a swift-moving storm. It shuddered across my awareness, filled with the spark of lightning and the hungry mutters of thunder. There were stray flickers at the edge of my vision, and a cold, brittle scent in the air.
A jolt of fear hit me like a punch. I froze, my entire form tightening in terror. Rakshasas. They had seen him, felt him, and they were coming. We had to get out of here, get of here now—
I grabbed for Pritkin, but his spirit form flitted off like a leaf in the wind. I followed, knowing what would happen if we didn’t get back inside the protection of a body. But before I could reach him, the tenuous membrane between worlds shuddered around us and something stepped out.
My first glimpse was of a red-haired creature maybe six feet tall that appeared suddenly out of the darkness at the top of the stairs. He’d assumed the basic form of a man, but the illusion wouldn’t have fooled anybody who’d been able to see it. Of course, anybody in that position wouldn’t have been hanging around for a second look.
Delicate bones underpinned a face with liquid black eyes and an elegant Roman nose. It was difficult to tell more than that because most of the features were hidden behind a mask of blood. It also gleamed wetly on the powerful, naked body, staining his golden skin in dark streaks, as if the blood ran in never-ceasing streams over his flesh. Gore was trapped under his nails, painted his lips and matted his long, tangled hair. And the expression in those eyes wasn’t human, wasn’t even animal. It was pure, ravenous hunger.
Another one appeared behind the leader’s shoulder and then four more in rapid succession. They were males and females with human forms but the smiles of beasts, all of them a nightmarish cross of wild beauty and absolute savagery. They spilled down the steps in a writhing tangle of bloodstained skin, fanning out around me and cutting me off from both my body and Pritkin’s.
“Here’s a pretty one,” the leader crooned, reaching out to me. A tender hand brushed across my cheek and I shuddered with revulsion. He smiled and his hand cupped my nape, drawing me close to that terrible face.
“This one lives,” one of the creatures purred. “I smell its breath.”
“Forbidden,” another said. “Protected.”
“No.” The leader stroked a hand down my spirit form, and a clawed nail sharp as a blade tore into me. For a moment, I felt nothing. Until a writhing agony ignited my spine as every vein was traced with fire, burning and tearing and all-pervasive. “Like the traitor, this one is ours.”
“We taste its blood.” Parched voices cried from all sides. “We hunger. Give it to us. . . .”
“Mine first,” the leader snarled. And I knew without asking that there would be no dealing with these things, no bribes accepted, no pleas heard. I had only one thing they wanted—and they were already taking it.
I looked down and saw that he’d ripped a gash in my spirit, and that something pale and completely unlike blood was starting to seep out. Power, I realized through the haze of pain. He was going to drain me.
The pack mewled hungrily but didn’t move. The leader ran his tongue down my chest like a lover, licking at the spilled power. But it was the laughing hiss that followed that drove my panic beyond the bounds of reason. If I’d still had a body, it would have caused the adrenaline in my veins to congeal, turned my breath to ice in my lungs. As it was, I suddenly couldn’t move, even when the leader tilted his head down, closed his lips over the wound he’d made and sucked.
It hurt, oh, God, it hurt, like acid on raw nerves, like barbed knives turning into bone. But more than the pain was the first bitter hint of loss. The knowledge that some part of me had been stolen, lost like a drop of water dissolving in a cold, dark sea. Forever gone.
The leader looked up at me and licked his bloody lips. “It tastes better alive,” he said, and released the pack.
It felt exactly like having a body again as they bore me to the floor. The cold stone at my back only magnified the hot agony as they tore into me. I screamed at the grinding bites, twisting mindlessly, trying to claw out of their grasp, but everywhere I turned was another leering face. Within seconds faint curls of mist were coiling up from a dozen wounds. They seeped slowly outward, flowing away from my form to cling to the pack’s hands and wind around their arms.
I watched, horror-struck, as they lapped it up, licking their fingers like kids with a half-melted ice cream. But it wasn’t enough. They were starving, and this was only a taste. They wanted it all.
“She is not lawful prey!” I heard someone call and looked up to see Pritkin stumbling into the middle of the feast, still half blind and probably extremely confused.
“Lord Rosier gave her to us,” the leader said, crouched over me jealously. “As he did you.”
Several creatures broke off the pack and started for Pritkin, but he avoided them and flung his flimsy, powerless form straight at the leader. For a split second, the pack forgot about me in the surprise of seeing someone running straight at death instead of cringing away. Then they released me to spring at Pritkin, and I threw myself backward, sending my consciousness crashing into his body lying so still on the floor.
Between one thought and the next, I was convulsing awake, my breath rasping in lungs gone tight and dry, starved for air. Red and violet spots exploded behind my tightly clenched lids, and I dragged in a ragged breath, coughing and gasping. Everything hurt. It was like the flu: no localized source of pain, just an all-over pervasive sense of illness.
For a second, I didn’t understand what was wrong with me. I’d been gone for only a minute; Pritkin’s body shouldn’t have suffered any damage in that time. And then I remembered: spiritual attacks manifest on the body once you return to it. If those things savaged him badly enough, it wouldn’t matter if we managed to get him back to his body. Because he’d die anyway.
Chapter Twenty-four
Marsden was there, helping me up, and he was saying something but I couldn’t hear and didn’t care. I threw him off and lurched for the table and the one chance Pritkin had: his potion belt. But once I had it, I realized that I could barely see the pack now, and if I missed even one . . .
My fingers fumbled on the belt, clumsy with adrenaline, my heart beating no time, no time, in a frantic pulse. In the end, I just threw everything as fast as I could shuck the little tubes out of their holders. My only concern was not to hit Billy, who was darting around the kitchen in my body, pursuing Pritkin’s fleeting form.
The shadows retreated to the stairwell, waiting for me to run out of ammunition, which wouldn’t take long. It was now or never, I realized, and threw myself at Pritkin. Billy had the same idea at the same time and lunged from the other side, causing us to crash into each other with Pritkin’s spirit trapped between us.
For a split second, I couldn’t tell which of us had him, or if either of us did. Then Pritkin stumbled into my body, I think by accident, but that was good enough. It grabbed him in a tight embrace and dragged him in despite his panicked efforts to get free. And just like that, we were back where we’d started.
“Cassandra! Is that you?” Marsden asked as Pritkin sank slowly to his knees. He was white and shaky looking, but he appeared to be in one piece. That was the important thing, I told myself.
“No, it didn’t work,” I said, bitterness staining my voice. Damn it! We’d been so close!
Marsden gripped my arm. “What happened?”
“Rakshasas.”
“They aren’t supposed to attack the living!”
“Tell them that.” I knelt beside Pritkin and revised my earlier assessment. His pupils were dilated, his color was bad and he was breathing heavy—until he suddenly slumped over my legs, his body relaxing into an awful stillness.
“I’ll get my medical kit,” Marsden said.
A clock fell off the wall, shattering into a hundred pieces. My head whipped around. “Now what?”
“We’re under siege.”
“Since when?!”
“It began a few moments ago. It seems you were correct—the Circle is unwilling to wait for us to come to them.”
“But you said they wouldn’t attack you!”
“Those who served under me wouldn’t. But Saunders sent Apprentices.” Marsden’s tone was bitter.
“Who?”
“Young mages still in the last phase of their training. They joined the Corps after I left office. Saunders is the only Lord Protector they’ve ever known.”
“Let me guess. They’ll follow his orders—whatever they are!”
“That is a distinct possibility.”
“So now what? Because I can’t shift!” At the moment, I was lucky to be vertical.
He put a hand on my shoulder. “One crisis at a time, child,” he told me, and jogged upstairs.
He’d barely gone when Pritkin tensed subtly and his eyes snapped open. I bent over him and, before I could say anything, he grabbed me by the back of my head, dragged my mouth down and kissed me. Kissed me, with no drama and no explanation, like it was just something we did.
Knowing in a half-forgotten way that he kissed like a demon was one thing; experiencing it all over again was quite another. There was no refined seduction—Pritkin kissed openmouthed, hard and hungry, until I could hear nothing over the pounding of my heart, until I could taste my blood on his lips as his tongue thrust into me. My skin shivered helplessly, but my flesh wanted more, suddenly starving for this. . . .
My brain informed me that there was absolutely no reason to find the scent of my hair or the soft spot beneath my elbow the slightest bit erotic. It pointed out that I was, essentially, kissing myself, but Pritkin’s body wasn’t buying it. Soft little hands racked up my shirt, slid across my chest, tweaked a nipple and oh, God.
A breath of wind curled around me, an almost living prickle against my skin. It slid around my body sinuously, cool but not calming, not calming at all. I shuddered and the current shivered along with me. And a jagged cut on Pritkin’s arm softened, faded and melted into the golden skin over his bicep. I blinked, and when I looked again, there wasn’t even a scar. It was as if the wound had never even existed.
I was dazed and extremely confused when we broke apart. Pritkin lifted his head and his eyes were fever bright and slightly unfocused. He radiated a barely leashed violence that was strange and nearly alien—but also echoingly familiar.
I screamed and started scrambling away, but he caught me, holding me fast. “No! It’s me! It’s only me! Rosier isn’t here!”
My own face coalesced in front of me and there was honest emotion in those striking eyes—worry, pain and a healthy dose of self-loathing. I stopped struggling. I was willing to bet Rosier had never had an honest emotion in his life.
“But I felt—”
“I’m wounded,” Pritkin said, flushing slightly. “It’s . . . something of an automatic reaction. I’m not going to hurt you.”
“Automatic?” He didn’t take time to explain, just levered himself to a standing position using the counter.
“Where do you think you’re going?” I demanded.
“We need to get out of here,” he said as another barrage hit.
“You can barely stand up, much less fight!”
“I’m perfectly fine,” he said stubbornly.
“Not after attacking half a dozen demons on your own! What the hell did you think you were doing? You had no weapons, no shields, nothing.”
“They would have killed you.”
“So what did you think they were going to do to you?” He didn’t say anything. “Or was that the idea? While they were busy ripping you to shreds, I’d have time to escape?”
“It was the only reasonable course of action.”
The matter-of-fact tone had anger surging through me. “Reasonable? That was my idea—my stupid, stupid idea! If someone died for it, it should have been me!”
“Your plan would have worked, had you been with anyone else.”
“What are you talking about? Those things—”
“Cannot normally attack the living. The demon lords made a covenant long ago not to ruin Earth—the hunting ground they all share—by overfeeding. Each race was limited to taking only one form of energy. In the case of the Rakshasas, they can only feed on whatever is left after death. But your body still lived; you should have been beyond their reach.”
“So did yours. And that didn’t seem to matter!”
“Rosier petitioned the Assembly of Lords to grant a special dispensation in my case.” There was an odd light in his eyes, not sorrow or pain or regret but some terrible combination of the three, a kind of emptiness that made me want to shiver. “One it seems he has managed to extend to you.”
“I don’t understand.”
Pritkin took a deep breath. “I have never explored the demon part of my nature. It’s what Rosier wants, why he performed his obscene experiment in the first place. He hoped by incorporating Fey and human blood with his own, he would create a demon without the limitations of his kind. By refusing to investigate my nature, I’ve denied him the results.”
“But you’ve also denied yourself. Don’t you wonder what else you can do? What abilities you may have inherited?”
“I worry about that all the time.”
“But that other side of you gave you immortality, didn’t it? So it can’t be all—”
“I’m not immortal, and my longer life span came from my mother’s Fey ancestry,” he snapped. “Nothing from my father’s side is remotely positive! As he is currently demonstrating. I thwarted him, you humiliated him and he wants revenge.”
“But Rakshasas can’t hurt me when I’m in my body. So how does he—”
“You heard Jonas—you can’t do your job safely without resorting to possessions. But they cause your spirit to become vulnerable, even if only for an instant. And with the Rakashasas, that will be enough.”
“But my power as Pythia is supposed to be inexhaustible. Even if they attacked me—”
“You’re confusing types of energy. Rakshasas feed off life energy, as do your vampires. Your magic doesn’t interest them.”
Marsden ran down the stairs with a basket draped over his arm but stopped short when he saw Pritkin on his feet. He nonetheless proffered a vial of viscous orange sludge that boiled with darker glints in it. Pritkin scowled but downed half of it anyway before I could ask what was in it.
“Energy potion,” Marsden said, catching my eye. “It’s harmless.”
And foul, judging by Pritkin’s expression. “If I take it, will it help me shift us out of here?” I asked as a ceramic water pitcher danced down a counter and crashed against the tiles.
“Oh, no. It isn’t that strong. Just adds a bit of pep, so to speak. But not to worry; I have another way out.”
Pritkin groaned. “Tell me you didn’t bring that damn thing with you!”
Marsden looked affronted. “That damn thing won me six titles, I’ll have you know!”
“And almost got you killed at least as many times!”
“A hazard of the sport.”
Pritkin grabbed his coat and weapons while appliances rattled in their places and the dishes chimed together in the cupboard. One glance out the window showed why: bolt after bolt of energy was exploding against a bubble of protection that began just beyond the garden. None got through, but every hit shuddered the foundations of the house.
Marsden threw open the back door and led us quickly across the garden. Beyond the cultivated area was a patch of weeds surrounding a small brick structure. He flicked on the lights and dragged a tarp off what turned out to be a gleaming red convertible. It was obviously a classic, with a long, low frame, high fenders and an odd arrangement of three headlights.
“An Alfa Romeo Spider,” he informed us, grinning. “Finest sports car ever made. Bought new in 1932.” He slid behind the wheel, and Orion, the demon-possessed dog, jumped into the passenger seat. That was a little creepy since I hadn’t even noticed him being there. “Get in, get in!” Marsden said impatiently.
“It only has two seats,” I pointed out, and Orion’s bulk pretty much filled his.
“We’ll all fit,” Marsden said with the confidence of a man who was already seated.
“You think we can outrun them?” I asked skeptically as Pritkin and I tried to squeeze two bodies into a negative amount of space.
“I know we can!” Marsden yelled, starting the engine.
And then the garage shuddered, and the door opened on a dozen mages all trying to fit through at once. Pritkin mumbled something, and I glimpsed several of them being plucked off their feet by vines as big around as my leg. But it didn’t matter because the rest came for us even as we started moving—straight at the garage wall.
“Marsden!” I screamed, but he just floored it. And the old car jumped ahead with a growl that shook the frame, leaping straight for the very solid-looking brick wall.
But instead of hitting brick, we sailed straight into the middle of a pulsing beam of white light. It was blindingly bright, shedding a killing radiance that made the sunny day look dark by comparison. The garage disappeared behind us, winking out of sight with a pop.
I slid into the seat, pushing devil dog onto the floor-boards between my legs. Pritkin found a perch behind me, his bottom on the trunk, his feet knotted into the seat belts to keep him from flying off. My eyes finally adjusted to the glow, allowing me to look out on a glimmering white landscape. Blazing but cold, it reflected diamond-brilliant off of the surface of the car.
We were in a ley line. But this one made the Chaco Canyon Line look like a backwoods road. I couldn’t even see an end to it on either side. But I could see dark shapes behind us, like tiny clouds obscuring the sun.
“You know, I think this is where I came in,” I said, trying to keep my voice from shaking.
“Don’t worry!” Marsden told me, flooring the gas pedal. “I won three world titles in this car!”
“Jonas is a former champion racer,” Pritkin explained.
“You race in the ley lines?”
“Used to. Gave it up a few years back.”
“You mean they made you quit,” Pritkin corrected.
“Why?” I asked fearfully.
“Jealousy,” Marsden said, hitting the dashboard. “Pure and simple.”
“Because it is fantastically dangerous, even with youthful reflexes,” Pritkin amended. “No one wanted to see you explode.”
“Explode?”
“It’s nothing to worry about,” Marsden assured me. “We’re shielded.”
And that’s when I noticed the pale golden shield all around the car, flowing over us like an elongated soap bubble and about as sturdy looking. I’d seen something like this before, a magical ward that allowed craft carrying multiple passengers to navigate the lines. It made me feel a little better . . . for about ten seconds. Until a jolt of power sizzled past us from the pursuing mages—the same ones who had just collapsed a much sturdier-looking shield around the house.
Pritkin twisted around, lying over the trunk of the car to fire a spell at them. “Do you remember what happened last time somebody did that?” I screeched, grabbing him by the waistband.
“The Belinus Line is perfectly stable!” he told me just as Marsden hit a patch of turbulence. If I hadn’t been hanging on, Pritkin would have gone flying, taking my body with him. As it was, we both hit back down hard, while Orion howled and Marsden cackled like the madman he undoubtedly was.
Something smashed against the shield around us, almost rolling the car and threatening to give me whiplash. “Marsden!” I screamed. “They’re gaining!”
“Not for long!” He jerked the wheel to the right, throwing me half out of the car. Pritkin grabbed me, pulling back hard enough that I almost kept my seat. We burst free of the line in a shower of silver-white fire—right into the middle of thin air.
It took me a second to realize what had happened, because piercing cold hit me like a fist, knocking the breath from my lungs. It felt like my body had been encased in a sheath of ice. I tried to move, but nothing happened. I decided that I should probably worry that it didn’t feel like I had any legs, but I was too busy freaking out about the fact that I couldn’t seem to breathe.
Most of my senses were useless: everything was utterly silent, and if there was any wind, I didn’t feel it. I gazed around, but there wasn’t much to see. The only clouds were miles below, leaving the sky an incredible, dazzling blue. . . .
It was the view from an airplane, I realized, except we weren’t in one. We weren’t even in the shield because it was designed only to operate within a ley line. We were thousands of feet above the ground in a car that had no business being there. I stared at the Earth, so ridiculously far below, but I couldn’t get enough air in my lungs to scream.
And then I was thrown back against the seat as Marsden nose-dived straight for the ground. The wind caused by our sudden plummet hit my eyes and I couldn’t see, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think through the sheer terror of it. We were going to die, I thought blankly, we were all going to die—and then we hit another ley line head-on.
This one was tiny, barely large enough for the car, almost brushing us on either side of the newly re-formed bubble. In the few seconds we’d been outside, my eyebrows had frosted up, my skin had turned a vaguely purple shade of blue and I swear my eyes had iced over. I blinked them rapidly, trying to see, and finally managed it—just in time to watch us slide straight down into a tunnel of leaping red fire.
I’d gotten my breath back, so I used it to scream, but the engine noise mostly drowned it out. I eventually trailed off, my throat raw, and yet we kept falling. It was like being on a roller-coaster ride with no bottom. The seat belt was cutting into my lap, threatening to bisect me; devil dog’s hair was floating straight up; and Pritkin was gripping the back of the seat with both hands to keep from being thrown against the top of the bubble. And still we dove.
Then the brilliant red suddenly shifted to crimson as we plunged through some kind of border. The car went from an almost perpendicular plummet to a steep slide, throwing me half out of the car. My arm flung out in an attempt to grab something, anything, to steady me, and plunged straight into freezing water.
Part of the car was outside the narrow confines of the line, creating a hole in the shield. My arm had gone out the hole and a flood of water was coming in. It hissed against the line’s energy, throwing a cloud of steam in my face.
“Get back in!” Marsden yelled. “I can’t see!”
“I’ll get right on that!” I snarled as the forward momentum did its best to rip my arm off.
Pritkin tried to drag me back. But with only my strength to work with, it did no good. I turned, bracing my feet against the side of the car, and pulled. My arm popped out of the hole, the car swerved back into the line and devil dog shook himself, spraying me in the face with waterlogged fur.
“The Channel,” Marsden yelled, looking perfectly normal except for the high energy in his eyes. “And I’d keep your hands inside the car, if I were you. The energy of the line tends to attract attention. Went a little offsides once and next thing I knew, there was this great dolphin in the passenger seat, flapping and writhing and thwacking me with its tail. Took me forever to get it out. Cost me the race.”
I just stared at him until my attention was caught by the huge, dark shape that coasted by outside the line. It was indistinct through the jumping energy, but was easily as big as a house. “Whale,” Pritkin said from over my shoulder. “Some animals can sense the lines; we’ve never determined quite how.”
“Damn nuisances!” Marsden declared. “That’s how Cavanaugh died, you know. Middle of the All Britain back in ’fifty-six, and this great blue decides to breach the line. Dove in right in front of him. Must have been daft.”
“Then perhaps we should attempt to leave this one behind,” Pritkin pointed out.
Marsden apparently agreed, because he floored it. We flew ahead along a twisting, perilous course, but the whale kept pace, ducking and diving and following the same crazy path from the outside. Until we suddenly shot up again, leaving the ocean behind along with the ley line.
I hung over the side of the car, staring down at the ocean and the huge head that bobbed for a moment among the iron-gray waves and then disappeared. We continued upward for another few seconds and then started to drop like the large hunk of steel we were. I kept waiting for another line to snatch us away, but nothing happened and the waves were close enough that I could see the foam cresting on them and—
We fell into a brilliant purple line and rocketed forward just over the top of the waves. “Can’t we slow down?” I yelled.
Marsden shook his head, his wild white mane flowing out behind him. “Have to pick up speed. There’s some skipping ahead.”
Pritkin made a noise that sounded suspiciously like a whimper, and I clutched Marsden’s shoulder. “Skipping?”
“Yes, like a rock over a pond. Ah, here we go,” he said, and the next second we were sailing into thin air again. I was hit in the face with some spray before I could point out that iron cars do not float, and then we were crashing in another line—yellow—which we stayed in for barely a heartbeat before launching into the air and hitting a deep purple line. The whole thing had taken maybe fifteen seconds.
“You see, skipping,” Marsden said happily.
I didn’t say anything; I was afraid I was going to throw up.
We left the purple line at the bottom of a bank of cliffs, twisting and tumbling through a very startled flock of seagulls and the smoking spray of waves, before merging with a bright blue line. That one headed straight inland—thank God—and Marsden patted my leg. “Almost there now.”
“Almost where?” I croaked as we leapt into thin air yet again.
I gazed dazedly at a rolling patchwork of yellow fields, and then we were dropping back into a silver-white ocean of the Belinus Line. But this time it was broken by the presence of a large dark mass extending almost completely across. “Barrier,” Pritkin said a little shrilly.
“Yes, thank you, John,” Marsden said, and spun the wheel. The car hit the side of the line, swooped up the side, and turned completely upside down. We skinned past the top of the barrier with maybe an inch to spare, and then we were rushing down the other side of the line, completing a graceful swoop that had my hands shaking and my stomach reeling. The barrier dissolved behind us as the mages hurried to catch up.
“How did they know we’d come back?” Pritkin asked as we hurtled ahead.
“One of them must be a racer,” Marsden said, looking irritated. “I laid out that course myself some years ago, and a number of the young hopefuls are known to practice on it. I should have taken an alternate route, but not to worry. We’ll lose them soon enough.”
He pointed ahead. I turned from watching our pursuers and a wash of color exploded across my vision. A firestorm of light boiled ahead, like a curtain of fire stretched across the entire center of the line. It was almost impossible to look directly at it. The power surges threatened to sear my retinas, the glow leaking in even through the hand I had thrown over my eyes.
“We’re taking a shortcut,” Pritkin said.
“A shortcut?” Why didn’t I like the sound of that?
“Yes. Try to relax, Cassie,” Marsden advised. I stared at him, wondering if he was trying to be funny. Because despite the fact that he was gearing down, we appeared to be picking up speed as whatever that was pulled us in. And Marsden wasn’t trying to avoid it, I realized; he’d cut back on his suicidal pace only to better handle the wicked currents being churned up by that thing.
“What is that?”
“A minor vortex,” Pritkin informed me. He sounded tense.
“Minor?” The thing looked like a supernova. And then a more important thought intruded. “Wait. We’re going in there?”
“Oh, no. That would kill us,” Marsden said calmly. And then the phenomenon grabbed us and we were hurtling forward at what had to be a couple hundred miles an hour.
I screamed and grabbed Pritkin, who was trying to fire off spells even as we bucked and twisted and slingshotted around the outer edge of the phenomenon and then—
Dead calm. For a moment, we hung alongside the electric white hub of the vortex, energy pulsing around us like the heartbeat of some giant beast. And the next we were somewhere else entirely.
I’d had a shift go bad before, had the weight of time pressing down on me, stretching me, until it felt like my body spanned the width of the planet. This was nothing like that. There was no gravity pulling on me, no bones and cells warping, no anything. It was almost like being back inside the Shroud, except that that had just caused sensory deprivation. This was having no senses to deprive.
I tried to breathe through the panic that was threatening to overtake me, but I couldn’t even tell if I had lungs anymore. I tried to reach out, desperate to feel, see, hear something, but if I had a hand it didn’t connect with anything. For a long moment, I really thought I was dead—that something had gone terribly wrong and we would be left here, drowning in nothingness, forever.
Until I slammed back into the seat. I couldn’t complain of a lack of sensation now. In an instant, I went from having no secure casing of flesh and bone to a body made of pain. It was everywhere, from my throbbing head to my bruised butt to the sharp pain radiating up from my lap where the seat belt was doing its best to cut me in two.
But the pain wasn’t the main problem. I stared up in blank terror at a thousand lines of power crisscrossing all around us: vibrant greens and glowing golds, cold blues and rich silver, flowing ebony and shuddering, bloody reds. I could have traced the lines just as easily blind: the bronze clanging like a bell, the blue murmuring like a stream, the purple crackling like lightning, the reds screaming.
“We hopped over to Glastonbury Tor,” Pritkin explained, looking a little pale. “The biggest vortex in Britain.”
“Hopped?”
“For short trips, you take a ley line,” Marsden said. “If one happens to be running where you want to go. For longer ones, you take a line to the nearest major vortex. All vortexes around the world are interconnected on the metaphysical plane, you see, with currents flowing between them. If you catch the right one, you can hop from one vortex to another.”
I shook my head numbly.
“There is no space here,” he said, trying again, “Only energy. Therefore distance is meaningless.”
I stared around in awe at the streams of power running all around us, each threading through the middle of the massive vortex. This close, it was like a giant heart, the ley lines running in and out of it like brightly colored veins, energy pulsing around us with every strobing beat. Everywhere I looked, colors melted together, shimmering off everything, painting the car in a dozen hues. It looked like we were swimming in rainbow water.
If a small ley line sink could power MAGIC, what could something like this do? “Why doesn’t somebody harvest all this energy?” I asked wonderingly. “It could power . . . everything.”
“Every generation has those who try,” Marsden replied. “But no shield we’ve ever created can withstand the forces inside even a small vortex.” He looked me over critically. “Have you recovered? Because I am afraid we have another jump ahead of us.”
“Another one?” I said numbly. “Do they all hurt like that?”
“Not after you’ve done it a few times. The trick is to go limp.” He snapped his fingers and devil dog demonstrated by collapsing against my leg, his long tongue hanging out. “You see?”
“This time we shouldn’t have any pursuers, at least,” Pritkin added. “Individual shields aren’t strong enough to withstand the forces this close to the vortex. Our pursuers should not have been able to follow us—”
He didn’t get to finish his sentence, because a dozen shapes popped out of nowhere, all huddled together in one big, dark blob.
“Unless they pooled their shields,” Marsden finished sourly, and threw the car back into gear.
Luckily for us, the trainees looked about as rattled as I felt. It gave us a slight lead, although a glance behind showed that some of them were already starting after us. Marsden suddenly jerked the steering wheel to the right and we roared into the middle of an apple green line. He waited until the mages had followed us and then threw the car into reverse.
We were free and back in the nothingness in the corona of the vortex for a moment, before that awful free-falling sensation took us again. And Marsden had lied, the bastard. Going limp didn’t help at all. And then we were racing through the middle of a world gone red. But it wasn’t the red of a ley line; it was the blinding dazzle of miles of sun-baked sand.
We hit down onto a black snake of asphalt with a jolt, a squeal of tires and a burst of speed. The dark shapes of war mages tumbled out onto the roadway after us—four, no, five—who had managed to keep up with the crazy ride. But they were on foot and we had wheels. Marsden left them in the dust.
We’d hopped to the Chaco Canyon vortex in New Mexico while I’d had my eyes closed. Half an hour later, we jumped to the shimmering blue line that ran through to Nevada and Dante’s. It didn’t take long from there to notice a big black blob on the horizon. It looked somewhat like the barrier the mages had constructed, except that there were no gaps around this one. There were other things, though.
Ragged flutterings of light darted here and there around the edges of my vision. I could glimpse them out of the corner of my eyes but could no longer see them directly. But even so, the sheer number was staggering. They looked like a crystal kaleidoscope, constantly shifting and changing all around us.
I looked back at Pritkin, and the expression on his face was enough to let me know I was right. “Rakshasas,” he murmured. I guess in that quantity, even my eyes could pick them out.
“Where?” Marsden demanded.
“Surrounding the ward. Thousands of them.”
“How did they know we were coming?” I asked, trying to ignore the chills that had sprung to the surface of my skin.
“They didn’t. And even if they had, two of us could never feed so many.” Pritkin gazed around in awe. “This is like the gathering before a great battle. When they expect a harvest of thousands . . .”
“Well, as long as they stay on the outside of the ward, we won’t have to worry about them much longer,” Marsden said, diving straight for it.
“What are you doing?” I screeched as a wall of darkness towered above us.
“The ward is spelled to let you in, is it not?”
“I don’t know!”
“We’ll soon find out,” he said as a swarm of black dots broke away from the base of the main structure. In a few seconds, they were close enough that I could identify them—war mages. It looked like Saunders’ men had called ahead.
Some of them came straight for us, while others stayed at the base of the ward, waiting for us to try to land, I assumed. Pritkin threw a spell that scattered the ones directly in front of us, but they re-formed almost at once and rocked the car with half a dozen spells. Devil dog whined and I sunk my fingers into his fur, either comforting him or holding on, I’m not sure which.
“Jonas—” Pritkin began.
“We’ll make it,” Marsden said calmly.
“Not if they hit us with another combined spell!”
“Yes, but to do that, they’ll have to catch us, won’t they?” The car sprang ahead, headed right for the black tower and the swarm of mages in front of it.
I didn’t care about them. At this speed, there wasn’t going to be anything left for them to attack. We were going to be splattered all over Dante’s ward like bugs on a windshield.
I clutched Marsden’s arm with nerveless fingers, silently begging him to turn around. He glanced at me and patted my hand fondly. “Where are you staying?”
“What?”
“Your room. Where is it?”
“The penthouse.”
“Oh, good,” he murmured, and we crashed straight into the wall of darkness.
I screamed, Pritkin swore and Marsden laughed, and then we were bursting out the other side, the ward dissolving like smoke in front of us.
It was still night at Dante’s, the moon hanging heavy and marmalade orange over the casino. I could see the color because we soared out of the line for ten seconds, leaving our pursuers behind, before we plunged back into the maelstrom of electric blue. Marsden had succeeded in confusing the hell out of the pursuers—an even dozen whisked by us, going up as we were heading back down. He’d done a pretty good job on me, too. I stared around blankly, not even sure we were still right side up.
And then I caught sight of the building rushing straight at us.
“Slow down!” I shrieked. “We’re going to crash!”
“Nonsense,” he told me, and plunged into the middle of a forest of other craft riding the currents of the ley line.
The interior of the ward was like a parking lot.We ducked under a tall clipper ship, its sails furled inside its bubble of protection, slid past a modern luxury yacht with lounge chairs scattered about the shining wood deck and swooped past a familiar dragon-shaped barge. It was the personal conveyance of the Chinese consul. I assumed the others belonged to her counterparts, something that wouldn’t have worried me except they were clustered around the wrong tower.
Mine.
“Oh, shit!”
“You can never get a parking space when you need one!” Marsden agreed just as a spell clipped our fender, spinning us straight at the balcony doors. I had a second to see a group of startled faces staring out at us, and then we were crashing through the windows, glass flying, bar stools soaring, couches splintering.
We slammed straight into the wall leading to the dining room but bounced off as if it had been made of rubber instead of wood and plaster. We spun back into the room, taking out a couple of potted plants and a cigar-store Indian in the process. The room was a blur of color and noise for a few confused seconds before we finally came to a stop beside the ruined sofas.
The antler chandelier swung wildly above us, slinging light everywhere. I clutched devil dog to my chest and glared at Marsden, who was grinning from ear to ear. “I thought you said we weren’t going to crash!”
He clapped me on the shoulder and laughed. “Just a little crash. And I do so enjoy making an entrance!”
Chapter Twenty-five
Mircea reached us first, pushing a pile of expensive kindling out of the way, heedless of damage to his sleek black suit. He wrenched open the door and devil dog growled menacingly, but Marsden got hold of the collar and pulled him back. “Now, now, Orion. You remember the good senator, surely.”
Mircea grabbed Pritkin and hauled him bodily out of the car, his eyes devouring Pritkin’s face with a nearly desperate relief. I blinked, taking a moment to catch up. And then it hit: Pritkin was still in my body. And that was definitely not something I wanted to explain.
“Crap.”
“If you find our company distasteful, Mage Pritkin, feel free to leave it!” Mircea said acidly.
Pritkin’s hand curled into a fist and he glared at me over Mircea’s shoulder as he was dragged into a bone-cracking embrace. I just shrugged. I thought he should have been grateful—at least Mircea hadn’t kissed him.
Marlowe approached, wearing modern clothes for once—a black shirt and tie with a dark russet suit that brought out auburn glints in his hair. He was waving a bottle of whiskey. “Can I interest anyone in a drink?”
Marsden peered at the label. “Glenfiddich? Oh, yes, please.” He climbed out, followed by devil dog, and surveyed the damage. “Not too bad,” he said musingly. “A new coat of paint and a bit of drying out, and she’ll be right as rain.”
“You modified it,” Pritkin accused.
“I added an external shield for landings that don’t, er, go quite as planned. It’s illegal in racing, but as I don’t do that anymore—”
“Could have fooled me,” I said shakily. I crawled out of the car and tried to take a couple of steps, but my balance was shot and the room swung crazily about me. My inner ears weren’t convinced that we’d actually stopped.
I looked around, expecting to see a ring of ancient, disapproving eyes. I did, but not the ones I’d feared. Besides the five of us, the only other people in the room were Mircea’s cold-eyed masters. It looked like the consuls had gone out for lunch.
One of the masters approached Mircea. “Sir, the representatives from the Circle have arrived.”
“Stall them,” he snapped, looking at Marsden.
The man bowed and exited, but Marsden just shook his head. “It’s too late for that, I’m afraid.”
“Cassie, may I see you a moment?” Mircea didn’t wait for a reply, just hauled Pritkin into the hall leading to the bedrooms, I guess for privacy. Thoughts of how well that was likely to go had me scrambling after them until Marlowe blocked my path.
He smiled. “Are you sure you won’t have a drink? You look like you could use it.”
“Maybe later,” I said, trying to hedge around.
He moved with me. “This is the last whole bottle left to us. I’d take advantage, if I were you.”
There was a curse from the hallway, followed by a grunt and a thud. I winced as Pritkin ran back into the room, face flushed and eyes livid. “Actually, I think a drink sounds like a good idea,” I said as Mircea followed.
“Cassie!” he hissed, his eyes on my face.
“Make that a double,” I told Marlowe before an angry vampire had me by the shoulders, fingers digging into my flesh.
“It’s not like we didn’t try to switch back!” I said defensively.
“You’re saying you can’t reverse this?”
“No, no! We totally can,” I promised quickly, because Mircea was looking a little stressed. “It’s just . . . well, the last time we tried, we sort of almost died and—”
Marlowe tried to hand me my drink, but Mircea took it instead and threw it back. “Ah,” Marlowe said, looking back and forth between Pritkin and me. “This is . . . disturbing.”
“Imagine how I feel,” I said, which won me a dirty look from Pritkin. “What? You like wearing a bra?”
Mircea put a hand to his forehead and just stayed like that for a long moment. A small vein was beating in his jaw. It didn’t look like the whiskey had helped much.
“Mircea,” Marlowe put in quietly. “Saunders is downstairs demanding to see Cassie.”
“He is in no position to demand anything, as you made clear in your communiqué. It appears thickheadedness is a requirement for Circle membership!”
“Perhaps, but he is here. She must greet him.”
“She must do nothing of the kind,” Pritkin spat. “He needs to be removed, not bargained with!”
“You don’t know what we’ve learned about him,” I added. “The man is completely—”
“Cassie, it is you who do not understand the situation!” Mircea told me.
“We understand it perfectly!” Pritkin snarled. “The man is a traitor to the Corps, putting its mages in danger to line his pockets—”
“How do you know that?” Marlowe demanded.
“One of the men Cassie released from the Circle’s prison knew about his activities. He went to tell Jonas, who has decided to challenge.”
We all looked at Marsden, who had commandeered a towel with which he was attempting to dry devil dog. He nodded and shrugged and then went back to clucking over his possessed pooch. Mircea shut his eyes briefly and Marlowe groaned. “Isn’t that perfect!”
“What else is there to do?” I asked, confused. “He has to be removed.”
“If we wanted him dead, we’d have arranged it before this!” Mircea informed me. “We want him controlled!”
“Controlled how? He’s head of the Circle. It looks to me like he pretty much does whatever he wants!”
“A state of affairs that will end tonight!”
“I don’t understand.”
“The man you helped me release from the Circle’s prison brokered the original deal for Saunders,” Marlowe explained. “He was the liaison between the Circle and the final purchaser of their power. Saunders locked him away after the deal was finalized, to keep him quiet.”
“Purchaser?” Pritkin’s brow knotted. “You mean purchas ers. No one person could use that much power.”
“The Black Circle could.”
“The Black—” Pritkin stopped, apparently unable to process that.
Marlowe nodded, a grim smile settling over his features. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it? The collective energy of the Silver Circle was being sold to their fiercest rivals. Of course, according to Mr. Todd—the man you released for us, Cassie—Saunders never knew where it was going. But he didn’t bother to find out, which makes him equally culpable. A point of view with which I’m sure the magical community would concur, were it to ever hear about this.”
“When it hears!” Pritkin corrected.
“All you war mages are the same,” Marlowe said dismissively. “Run at a problem full on and club it into submission! The finer points are lost on you.”
I crossed my arms. “Then explain them to me.”
Marlowe glanced at Mircea, who nodded tersely. “Saunders has been informed that we have Todd and his evidence. It would be enough not only to end his career, but to bury him if it ever came out—”
“Which it will!” Pritkin interrupted.
“Which it can’t,” Marlowe shot back. “Otherwise, whoever the Circle taps for his successor will put us back in the same quagmire in which we’ve been stuck for the last month!”
“You’re talking about blackmail!” I said, catching up. “You stay silent about his activities and he confirms me as Pythia.”
“And does any other little chore we may think up,” he added with a slight smile.
“That is completely out of the question!” Pritkin’s hands kept clenching as if only the lack of a target was keeping him from pouncing on someone and beating them bloody. “The Senate does not control the Circle!”
“Does not control the Circle . . . yet,” Marlowe murmured, deliberately provocative. Pritkin’s eyes latched onto him with an expression I didn’t like, and Marlowe gave him a small smile. The temperature in the room escalated about ten degrees.
Mircea ignored them. “Cassie, if you want the recognition and cooperation you need to function, this is the only way.”
“By leaving a felon in the most important position in the magical world? That doesn’t sound like a great way to begin!”
“Better than not beginning at all,” Marlowe said. “We haven’t spent the last month looking for something to hold over that bastard’s head to throw it aside now! Your scruples—”
“Are commendable,” Mircea broke in, throwing him a look. “But of course, we will make it clear to Mage Saunders that his financial arrangement will have to be terminated, and that we will be keeping a very close watch on his future activities.”
“You’re forgetting one small matter,” Pritkin said scornfully.
“And what is that?” Mircea demanded.
“Jonas intends to challenge—”
“Something that would not be the case had you not interfered!”
“—and indeed, I shouldn’t wonder if he hasn’t already done so.”
We all looked around, but Marsden had disappeared. Marlowe swore and dove for the foyer. Mircea started to follow, but I grabbed his arm. “We’re not done.”
“This isn’t the time, Cassie!”
“According to you, it’s never time, not to tell me anything! You get angry with me for bringing in outside help—”
“I would hardly categorize Mage Marsden as help! The man was almost impossible to work with—”
“To dictate to, you mean,” Pritkin put in.
“—not to mention that two days ago, you informed me that you intended to swim, relax and perhaps do some shopping. Not to start a revolution!”
I stared at him. “Okay, let me make sure I understand. I’m supposed to vet everything I do with you—”
“If it involves aiding a coup, yes!”
“—but you don’t have to tell me a damn thing in return. Not about Saunders, not about your girlfriend, not even about my father!”
That made him pause, if only for a second.“We have yet to confirm the rumors about your father,” he told me more quietly. “I did not wish to upset you needlessly. We had no way of knowing that Saunders intended to spread them before half the world!” His forehead wrinkled. “And what girlfriend?”
I ignored him, so angry I was almost shaking. “Upset me? What am I, five years old? I’m Pythia, Mircea!”
“I have never questioned—”
“You question it all the time! Everyone does! The Senate is as bad as the Circle. They both want the Pythia’s power but not what goes with it. They don’t want someone who might make them do things they don’t like or overrule them when they’re being stupid. They want a dumb blonde who is going to do what she’s told and stay locked away under a metric ton of guards the rest of the time!”
“For your protection, Cassandra! Or have you somehow failed to notice how many people wish you harm?”
“About the same number who are trying to assassinate the Consul, but she’s not in hiding! Because she knows it isn’t always possible to stay safe and get the job done!”
“Nor is it possible if you are dead! Do you have any idea how many plots against your life we have thwarted in the past month?”
“No! I don’t know anything! That’s my point! I need information to do my job—all of it, not whatever you think I can—”
“The Lord Protector and court,” one of the masters intoned from the top of the stairs. I looked up to find a large party of mages staring at the destruction, trying not to let it show that the circle of gold-eyed vampires creeped them out.
Marlowe and Marsden were having a low-voiced conversation in the foyer. I couldn’t hear them, but I assumed Marlowe was trying to persuade him to postpone his challenge. From the defiant jut of the old man’s chin, it didn’t look like he was having much luck.
A portly, balding man in an ill-fitting blue suit caught sight of us and stepped forward. “Miss Palmer, I assume?”
Pritkin just stood there for a moment before slowly stepping forward. “And you’re Reginald Saunders.”
I was grateful for the hint, because I never would have picked the guy out in a lineup. He looked more like a middle-management flunky than the leader of the most powerful magical association on Earth. But then, I didn’t look much like a Pythia, either.
“Indeed.” He held out a hand, but Pritkin made no move to take it. It was rude, but since we were about to get a lot ruder, I didn’t guess it mattered. “I’ve been looking forward to this meeting.”
“I’m surprised you didn’t send another lieutenant in your place.”
“Some things, it seems, it is best to do for oneself,” he said mildly. Then the hand he still held out made an odd gesture. And Pritkin sailed off his feet, flew backward out the missing window and disappeared into the night sky.
I stared in disbelief at the spot where he’d just been for half a second and then I was scrambling across cowhide, running for the balcony. I hung over the railing, praying to see a shield bubble somewhere below, but there was nothing. The lights of the hotel extended only so far, and beyond them was only blackness.
I looked up to find Mircea beside me, scanning the darkness. His eyes were better than mine, but judging by the way the metal railing was squeezing up through his fingers like butter, he didn’t see anything either. “Tell me he could manipulate your magic,” he said, his voice expressionless.
“Normally, yes,” I said breathlessly. “But we were attacked before we got here! He’s pretty drained, and I don’t know if—”
I didn’t get the chance to finish the sentence. Mircea launched himself at Saunders, the crackle of his energy hitting the mage’s shields like an out-of-control forest fire. It set the remains of the furniture alight, turning the center of the room into a bonfire, and threatened to scorch my skin even this far away. But Saunders acted like he couldn’t even feel it.
“You have a reputation for sagacity, Lord Mircea,” the man snapped. “Use it! The girl is dead. Even now, the power is passing to another Pythia—one I will control! The game is over.”
Mircea didn’t bother to respond, but someone else did. “Reginald! You worthless, spineless, murdering bastard! You couldn’t control a TV with a remote! As a member of the Great Council, I challenge your right to lead the Circle!” Marsden came striding down the stairs, his mane of silver hair crackling with static.
Saunders ignored him. “Don’t be a fool, Mircea! Did you think you were the only one to make preparations for this meeting? I have more than two hundred mages surrounding this building. It is time to renegotiate!”
“Renegotiate this!” The voice came from behind me. I turned, seeing nothing but darkness, until I looked down. The huge sailing ship hung suspended in midair, its prow dipping and rising, its rigging creaking lightly—and Pritkin hanging over the side. He threw a spell at Saunders that sent him slamming back against the wall, shields and all.
I don’t think it hurt him, but the look on his face was priceless. For about a second, until his phalanx of bodyguards closed in, cutting off the view. Mircea’s vampires moved to intercept them, and just that fast, things went to hell.
I helped Pritkin back over the railing while the ship just hung there, riding invisible currents. He must have ripped open the ley line to save himself, and fallen onto the ship. Like the Chinese barge, it appeared to be capable of levitating in real space in order to reach and descend from ley lines.
I looked back at the apartment to see Marsden calmly walking through the fray, spewing curses left and right, each of which landed like a hammer blow on Saunders’ mages. I was beginning to wonder if Pritkin might not have underestimated him. Certainly none of the mages seemed all that eager to fight him.
One guy tried to hide behind a buddy, who shoved him away and scampered out of the line of fire. The first guy stared at Marsden, who smiled gently back right before hitting him with a curse so strong it knocked him clear through the remaining balcony doors. He flew past us, sailed over the railing and landed on the deck of the ship. Only to be kicked off by a vampire in an old-fashioned captain’s outfit.
Once he’d cleaned off his deck, the captain barked an order and the ship started moving away, out of the line of fire. I didn’t blame him. Spell after spell was flying out of the apartment, exploding in the air like fireworks.
I ducked to avoid sparks from a near miss, and Pritkin grabbed my arm. “You have to get out of here!”
“Me? What about you? You’re in my body!”
“I’ll be fine!”
“Yes, you will. Because you won’t be here,” Mircea said, suddenly appearing beside us. His hair had come loose and one of the ends was smoking slightly. I pinched the flame out between my fingers, but considering the conflagration going on behind us, that didn’t make me feel any better.
Pritkin apparently had the same thought. “You’re outnumbered! You need the help!”
“And how much help do you think you would be in your condition?” Mircea demanded, motioning the ship back toward us.
“More than you, vampire! The place is going up like an inferno!”
“That is my concern. Yours is to get her to safety and switch back as soon as—”
I never heard the rest of the sentence, because a spell slammed into me, picking me up and hurling me into the void. It happened so fast, I barely realized what was going on until I was falling. The side of the building flashed by all of three feet away, the windows blurring together into a continual black line, the pavement rushing up at me at a ridiculous pace. And then something snatched me, almost cutting me in two.
I looked up to see the sailing ship above me, the prow dipped low and Mircea hanging off the end of the wooden figurehead. His fist was knotted in my waistband, which explained why I couldn’t breathe. Considering the alternative, I really didn’t mind so much.
Even so, I was surprised his reflexes had been good enough to catch me. He looked kind of shocked himself. For a second, the reserved demeanor cracked open on something wild and fierce and compelling. Then he dragged me up, put a hand on either side of my face and kissed me full on the lips. From somewhere above, I heard Pritkin swear.
“I guess that whole blackmail thing didn’t exactly work out like you planned, huh?” I gasped when Mircea released me.
“Saunders will die for this,” he hissed, staring back up at the balcony.
“That might be kind of tricky,” I pointed out as a swarm of mages burst out of the ley line and fell onto the deck behind us. It looked like Saunders hadn’t been kidding; the vampires hadn’t been the only ones making plans for this meeting.
Of course, plans don’t always work out.The mages seemed to have assumed the ship would be level, because half of them slid down the rough planks before grasping some kind of handhold, and the other half went plummeting over the side. I stared after them for a second as a dozen little shield chutes bloomed against the night sky. Then Mircea dragged me against his side, vaulted over the railing and jumped—straight after them.
We didn’t end up plummeting to our deaths but onto the surface of the yacht, which had quietly come around underneath. I grasped the railing, my heart still stuck on terror, but Mircea pried me off and we ran. The mages who had kept their balance followed us, and there seemed to be an awful lot of them.
“I can’t believe they’re trying this with the consuls here,” I panted as we dodged deck chairs and little folding tables.
“The consuls aren’t here. That’s why I went to Washington State, to my court. I had to welcome them. They’re there now, with the Senate.”
“Something else you didn’t mention!”
He grabbed me around the waist and tossed me over the side. I got a brief, dizzying view of the dark parking lot below before I was caught by a waiting vampire on the Chinese consul’s barge. Mircea jumped the distance behind me, and as soon as we were aboard, it took off—only to be hit with a spell that shuddered it to a halt.
I looked behind us to see a dozen or more mages manipulating the biggest net spell I’d ever seen. It had enveloped the dragon’s tail on the stern of the barge and was slowly drawing us back alongside the other ship.
“I couldn’t very well tell you anything without being overheard,” Mircea said, staring around.
“By whom?” I demanded. “The only people in the apartment were family!”
“Exactly.” His neck craned upwards as he caught sight of something. I followed his gaze to see what looked like a wall of wood descending on us. It took me a moment to realize that it was the sailing ship’s deck. The massive schooner had flipped upside down.
Mircea held me up and a vampire reached down and grabbed me by both arms, his legs enmeshed tightly in the rigging. Mircea jumped up beside him. “You don’t trust your own family?” I gasped, holding on for dear life.
“I don’t trust one of them. Someone tried to kill the Consul, if you recall.”
“But you said you knew who that was!”
He shook his head. “The Bentley was serviced the day before MAGIC was destroyed, and the bomb would surely have been noticed at that time. So it was planted later, after the man to whom you’re referring was already dead.”
“Then why did you say—”
“To make the guilty party feel secure. Kit narrowed it down to eight suspects, five of whom belong to me. I had them transferred here as soon as I received his report and borrowed the consular ships to make it look like the Consuls were meeting here. If an attempt was made to disrupt the meeting, we would have our traitor.”
“That’s why you discussed their visit in the middle of the living room. You wanted everyone to hear!”
Mircea nodded as the clipper began to move away, putting some distance between us and the melee. But some of the mages had managed to get themselves untangled from the net spell in time to launch themselves at us. I thought things were about as bad as they could get, dangling upside down twenty stories up while the Circle’s mages started swarming down the webbing toward us. And then the ship started to rotate.
I think the captain was trying to jiggle his stowaways loose, and he was doing a damn good job—on me. Mircea grabbed me as my grip started to slip and swung us over the side just as the rounded hull came into view. “No,” I said, shaking my head vigorously. “You aren’t suggesting—”
“I have you,” he assured me, setting my feet down onto the very uneven planks of the hull. “Think of them as small steps.”
“To where?”
“Up there,” Mircea said as the ship slowly began to rise back toward the balcony.
“The people trying to kill us are up there!”
“They’re down here, as well,” he pointed out. “And we have more allies there.”
“One of whom could be a traitor!”
“No. The suspects have been given the night off and instructed not to return before dawn. If one of them does, we’ll have him.”
We’d almost reached the keel, but the mages were right behind us and the balcony looked very far away. And unless I was imagining things, the rotation had picked up speed. “Wait. What if the traitor decided to go with a bomb instead?”
“We’ve checked. The apartment is perfectly safe.”
“Yeah. It looks it!” I said, and then the flat deck was coming up at us again and there was suddenly nowhere to put my feet. Not that it mattered because the ship’s rotation jerked to a halt, with my toes hanging off the edge. “Mircea!”
He didn’t answer, just swept me up and jumped down to the mast, which was sticking out of the deck like a bridge. The mages had nowhere near good enough balance to follow along the curved, polished surface, and so they decided to start flinging spells instead. One of the furled sails went up in flames right beside us and then Mircea put on a burst of speed and we were suddenly out of mast and jumping.
“Did you have to carry her?” Pritkin demanded, as we landed back on the balcony.
Mircea ignored him, beckoning the Chinese barge closer. “Come with us!” I said, gripping his hand.
He shook his head. “If Saunders gets away tonight, he’ll go into hiding. It may be months, even years, before we have him again.”
“You don’t have him now! He has you!”
The Chinese barge slid alongside, and Mircea picked Pritkin up and handed him over the side into the arms of the waiting captain. He said something in Mandarin, and the vamp nodded, setting Pritkin on his feet and reaching for me. I ended up over the side and on the deck before I quite realized it was happening.
“Mircea! Don’t do this!”
It was like he didn’t even hear. He turned and disappeared back into the thick, choking column of smoke that was now billowing out of the apartment. He didn’t look back.
I turned to Pritkin as the barge slipped rapidly away. “We have to get him out of there!”
“I’d be a bit more worried about us, if I were you,” he said as a large white ship appeared in the sky.
I knew it must have come from the ley line, but it had merged with real space so quickly that it looked like a magician’s trick. That made sense, as there were a few hundred mages lined up along the railing—the ones Saunders had boasted about, I guessed. “Tell me again that they don’t want us dead,” I said as a fiery blast exploded out of the side of the vessel, passed a yard in front of us and hit the clipper broadsides.
The ship went up like a Roman candle. The explosion of burning wood, rope and sail hit us, causing our craft to swerve precariously in a wide arc. I held on to the railing and watched burning pieces of the clipper ship plummet to the parking lot below. They crashed onto the rows of employee cars, sending half a dozen somersaulting skyward and setting off a chorus of car alarms. I didn’t see any of the crew make it off.
Even worse, the Lord Protector’s ship was heading straight for the penthouse. If it got there with that number of reinforcements, Mircea was dead. There wasn’t even a question.
I grabbed the captain by the collar. “Stop them!” He didn’t seem to understand, so I shook him and pointed at the ship. “They can’t be allowed to dock!”
He just pried my hands off his silk tunic. Not a word was said, but the idea was conveyed anyway—he wasn’t crazy. Luckily, I was on board with someone who was—or at least gave a fair impression of it most of the time.
“Hold on!” Pritkin told me, and threw his weight onto the long rudder pole hanging off the back. Our course corrected with a lurch that sent me and the captain staggering to the other side of the barge. The only reason we didn’t fall off was the railing, which was sturdier than it looked. And then we were plowing straight into the side of Saunders’ ship.
Chapter Twenty-six
The impact slammed me into the railing and the reverberation hit the inside of my skull like cannon fire, unbelievably loud and echoing. Saunders’ ship tilted, sending a few mages overboard and making the rest very unhappy. The Chinese captain was screaming orders to his men as war mages swarmed over our deck. There were too many of them to fight, but the crazy staggering course of the conjoined ships was making that pretty much impossible anyway.
The initial impact had thrown us almost beyond Dante’s property, but something seemed to be wrong with the navigation system, because the two ships had no sooner reached the highway than they lurched drunkenly back toward the building again. The captain was desperately trying to free his ship, but the dragon masthead had crashed through a porthole on Saunders’ ship and it seemed to be stuck.
The weight was dragging down the other vessel, and tilting it dangerously. “The other side! Get to the other side!” someone yelled, and a large number of mages ran to the opposite half of the ship, trying to compensate. But it was too late.
Dante’s was rushing toward us, we were at least ten stories up and there was nothing underneath but burning cars and asphalt. The captain took a final look at the situation, said something that sounded pretty profane and pulled a gigantic ax out of his belt. A second later, the massive dragon’s neck was in two pieces and we were sliding away from the other ship.
The efforts Saunders’ ship had been making to compensate for our weight backfired when we suddenly departed. The other ship flipped completely over, spilling mages across the parking lot like salt from a shaker. Shields bloomed everywhere and then Pritkin was yelling in my ear. “Brace for impact!”
He threw his shields around us, and a second later, while I was still looking down at the parking lot, we plowed into the side of Dante’s.
The barge crashed through a window, into a bedroom, out into the corridor and through another wall separating the hall from a stairwell. We hadn’t even stopped moving when Pritkin grabbed my hand, towed me off the side and down the stairs. Unfortunately, the mages had pretty good reflexes, too, and ten or more had still been on the barge when it took the plunge.
A spell sizzled overhead, slamming against the concrete wall directly in front of us. Pritkin still had shields up, but he couldn’t maintain them long and no way could we fight so many. We hopped over the railing to the next level, and I spied a number six on the stairwell door.
“Get us to the fourth floor and I can get us out of this!” I told him as a spell evaporated his shields. He nodded, looking a little gray in the face, and we ran full out.
Two flights of stairs had never seemed so long. We didn’t worry about safety, about bruised knees when we tripped or scraped flesh when we couldn’t stop in time and slammed into a wall. We just kept going: past number five, dodge a spray of bullets, around the bend in the stairs, jump to the next flight to avoid being fried by a fireball, down another flight and finally through the door to four.
“This way!” I yelled, and we pelted down the corridor and into the tiki bar.
I hauled him through a side door and into the tiny storage room I’d been calling home. “Now what?” he demanded as feet pounded into the club.
“Now this,” I said, and gave him a shove. He fell backward through the portal, and at the same moment, a mage flung open the door. He was young, with brown hair and glasses and a wash of freckles over his nose. He looked as surprised to see me as I was to see him, and for a moment, we just stared at each other. Then I jumped for the portal, he threw a spell and the world exploded in pain.
I tumbled out into the Old West saloon and rolled into Pritkin. I stared up at the out of order sign on the telephone and gasped in pain. My whole body was wracked with it, but my left leg felt like it was on fire.
The sound of clinking glasses, laughter and music drifted through the red velvet curtains, like there wasn’t a war going on upstairs. Pritkin caught sight of my face. “What happened?”
I just stared at him, tears flooding my eyes, and shook my head. If I tried to speak, I was going to scream. But as bad as the pain was, we couldn’t stay there. The mage had seen me disappear. He’d be right behind us.
Pritkin seemed to get the idea. He looped an arm under my shoulders and around my back, and he pulled me up. I put as much weight as possible on the good leg and we limped out into the club. People were everywhere, but thankfully the lighting was so dim, mostly from strings of lanterns overhead, that we didn’t attract as much attention as our looks probably warranted. Of course, the vision onstage might have also had something to do with that.
Dee Licious was lying in the spotlight on a shiny black baby grand, her dress a blinding mass of skintight fuchsia sequins, complete with matching boa. She was belting out a Liza montage and flirting with the handsome pianist at the same time. We turned toward the street, putting the stage at our backs, only to see two war mages stroll by outside.
“This way,” Pritkin said brusquely, pulling me back the other way. We hobbled through the forest of little tables toward the darkness at the side of the stage, where a red exit sign beckoned like a lifeline. We’d almost reached it when Pritkin stiffened. “What is it?” I asked.
“We have company.”
I glanced over my shoulder to see a group of dark shapes spill out of the alcove, looking around blindly while their eyes adjusted. Then Pritkin threw us through a door beside the stage, closing it firmly. There was no lock, but considering who was chasing us, that was kind of irrelevant anyway.
Dee Sire paused in front of a lighted mirror to stare at us. It looked like this was the performers’ dressing room. In addition to the table Dee was using as a vanity, there was a rack of colorful costumes in a corner and a towering pile of shoe boxes on a chair.
Dee smiled at me a lot sweeter than on our previous meeting. “Well, hello there.” Then she caught sight of Pritkin. “Damn, girl. And I thought you couldn’t look any worse than last time.”
He glanced at me, but I just shook my head and fell onto a chair beside the door. There was no way to explain the fabulousness that was Dee Sire in a couple of words, and I wasn’t up to any more. “Nice dress,” I gasped.
It was about eighty acres of cheap white satin, cut low and short and festooned with a train covered in fat white roses. More were tied into a careless bundle on the dressing table and another pile adorned her towering wig—bright red this time—anchoring a frothy veil. A wedding dress, drag queen style.
“It’s courtesy of that cow Licious,” Dee said, turning back to her mirror. “She knows damn well I do Liza. But we drew for the opening spot, and what does she decide she just has to sing? Sticking me with the tired old ‘Like a Virgin’ shtick. Although I will admit, it’s getting a little ridiculous at her age—”
“We, er, we’re kind of in a bind,” Pritkin said, cutting her off. “Is there a back way out?”
“Are you kidding? There’s back, front, and sideways,” Dee said, checking me out in the mirror while she slathered on the lipstick. “But your pretty friend there doesn’t look like he’s up to doing much running right now.”
I stared back at her, agony racing up my leg to my spine, and had to agree. If we had to outrun anyone else, I was toast. Not to mention the fact my foot in Pritkin’s boot was sliding on what felt like a lot of blood.
“Yes, well, there’s no other option at present,” Pritkin snapped.
Dee levered up her nine feet of satin and platforms. “There’re always options, sugar,” she said, and pushed him through the wall. “You, too,” she told me, pulling me up and copping a feel of Pritkin’s ass at the same time. “Ooh, nice,” she said, and pushed.
I expected a portal, but ended up merely falling through a ward that had hidden a small room. It seemed to be used by security. It was dark except for the light from a bank of televisions lined the wall in front of a small desk. Most of them showed the street outside, but one was trained on the stage. There was only one chair, and I took it.
Dee followed us in and turned the sound up. Licious was still in the spotlight, but she wasn’t singing. A handful of war mages had clustered around the stage and appeared to be trying to question her in front of the audience. Pritkin rolled his eyes. “Trainees,” he muttered, tugging at my boot.
“What was that?” Licious asked, bending over to push the microphone into the nearest mage’s face.
“I said, that sharp tongue of yours is going to get you in trouble one day!”
She laughed, a rich, full-throated purr. “Oh, but honey. It’s not sharp. It’s flexible.”
The audience roared, causing the man to flush angrily. He looked her up and down contemptuously, taking in the towering black wig, the sequins and the chandelier earrings. “Are you gay?”
“That depends. Are you lonely?” The audience erupted in jeers and catcalls. The man’s fellow mages jostled him out of harm’s way while Licious rose to her usual towering height. She whispered something to her pianist. “In honor of my new young friend, my last number tonight will be ‘I’m Coming Out,’ by Miss Diana Ross. And, baby, if you can dump your jealous friends, call me!”
Dee turned the sound back down. “I’m on next. Don’t worry; I’ll tell the girls to say they saw you run out a couple minutes ago. If you’d like to show your appreciation, there’s a charming pink number in Augustine’s window that would look divine on me.” She blew us a kiss and left.
“You have strange friends,” Pritkin said, finally wrestling my boot off.
I expected to see half the calf gone, judging by the pain. The khakis were soaked red to the knee, and slick streams of brilliant blood cascaded over the flesh of my bare foot. But when he pulled a knife out of my belt and slit the fabric, the actual wound was an ugly gash extending from the knee halfway to the groin.
“It’s a progressive curse,” Pritkin said grimly. “If left untreated, it will literally consume you.”
Consume him, he meant. “I’m sorry,” I gasped. “I hesitated. A mage came in the door and I didn’t jump in time—”
“You aren’t battle trained,” Pritkin said, dismissing it with a lot more composure than I’d have shown if the circumstances were reversed.
The wound was deep and bleeding heavily. He tried to hold it closed, causing me to bite the sleeve of his coat to keep from screaming. And it only caused more blood to well up between his fingers, the hot spatter soaking the front of his capris.
He stared at it for a long second, his hands gripping my thigh, and then looked up at me. “We have to switch back.”
“Now?”
“Yes, now! My body can heal this, but you don’t have the necessary knowledge and I don’t have time to teach you!”
“Have you forgotten . . . what’s circling this hotel?” I gasped.
“No.” He licked his lips. “But we have to risk it. You’re losing too much blood.”
I’d have preferred to wait until Billy Joe caught up with us, but that could be a while and I was already cold and shaky. I didn’t think this body had a while. “I’ll push you out,” I panted. “Just . . . don’t panic.”
Pritkin nodded, looking pale but relatively calm. I only hoped that lasted because as close as the Rakshasas were, we wouldn’t have much time if anything went wrong. I closed my eyes and let my head fall back, and the next moment, I was sitting up with Pritkin’s body beneath me.
I put a ghostly arm out and no shields were in evidence. My hand went right up to his chest, and a couple of insubstantial fingers slipped inside his skin. I felt him start at the intrusion, but he didn’t shy away, although I could feel him trembling. I could feel something else, too.
Unlike most ghosts, his spirit was warm and almost solid against my hand. I’d never thought to ask Billy how ghosts feel to each other. But now that I thought about it, the times I’d possessed someone who was still in-house, so to speak, they hadn’t felt like Billy Joe normally did. They’d been a warm, solid presence. Like Pritkin.
I started rummaging around in his chest, trying to get a grip, and he began to look very nervous. “Calm down. I have an idea,” I told him.
“Whatever it is, can you hurry up?”
I nodded. This was either going to work or it wasn’t, and hesitating could be fatal. I gripped his spirit as tight as I could, stepped into my body and thrust him back into his. The whole thing took a couple of seconds, and suddenly, we were home.
He blinked at me blankly for a moment and then winced as the pain hit. “That was it? That’s all it took?”
“I guess,” I said dizzily. The sudden absence of pain made me a little light-headed.
“Why didn’t you just do that before?”
“Because I didn’t know about it before!” I snapped, sticking my head through the ward over the door.
I borrowed the least sparkly thing I could find—a plain white cotton blouse—to rip up for a bandage and ducked back inside. A glance at the monitors showed that the mages had spread out, with a few left in the club to guard the portal and the others doing a systematic search of the street. I wondered how long it would be before they decided to retrace their steps.
“I’m going to owe Dee big-time,” I said, shredding the cotton with the help of Pritkin’s knife. “I just hope this was off the rack.”
He didn’t say anything, and he was sweating and trembling by the time I got a pad secured around his leg. It didn’t look like it was doing much to staunch the flow. It didn’t help that there were other wounds rending his flesh in several places that I hadn’t even noticed; courtesy of the chase, I assumed. But the leg was what had chills running up my arms, making my hands clumsy, churning my stomach.
“Pritkin,” I said carefully. “Why hasn’t the bleeding stopped?”
Perspiration gleamed in the hollow of his throat as he breathed faster and more shallow than usual. But there wasn’t a flicker of emotion in his voice when he spoke. “As soon as you are able, shift back to Jonas. Get him out of here and do not leave his side. You can protect each other until the issue with the Circle is—”
“What do you mean, when I shift back?” I demanded, the cold feeling in my stomach growing exponentially.
“Listen to me; we don’t have much time—”
“Before what?”
“Stop asking questions for once and pay attention. Don’t rely on the vampires to protect you from Saunders. There are too many tricks they don’t know and won’t be able to counter. And tell Jonas . . . tell Jonas he needs to—”
“Stop giving me orders!” I hissed, glaring at him.
That was less than satisfying since I couldn’t see him very well. What little light there was in the room seemed to fall at an angle to him, skirting his edges. I moved in front of him so I could grab his arms, so I could get in his face.
“You said you could heal this. So do it!” He wouldn’t look at me. “Stop the bleeding, Pritkin,” I pleaded, my fingers digging into his arms. “Stop it and I’ll do whatever you want.”
He licked his lips. “My energy level is . . . lower than usual. Healing will take time.”
Yeah. Time he didn’t have. I stared at him in utter disbelief. “You tricked me! You wanted me to switch back because you knew—” I couldn’t even say it.
I stared at him, unable to believe this was happening. That he could just disappear, along with everything rich and strange he’d brought into my life. Vanished, like magic.
“You can’t do this,” he said, finally meeting my eyes. And if I’d had any doubts that he was serious, that look would have dispelled them. “You can’t tear yourself up every time you lose someone. War—”
“Don’t give me some stupid lecture about war when the person we’re talking about losing is you!” I said, surprised by the savagery in my tone. At least my voice didn’t shake.
His face blurred and I tasted salt on my lips. It was warm, warm like Pritkin’s hands coming up and framing my face, his thumbs brushing over my eyelids, soft as his fingers in my hair. “One person is not so important in the scheme of things,” he said, and his voice was gentle, gentle when it never was, and that almost broke me.
But you are important, I thought. And yet he couldn’t see that. In Pritkin’s mind, he was an experiment gone wrong, a child cast out, a man valued by his peers only for his ability to kill the things they feared. Just once, I wished he could see what I did.
“Then neither is this,” I said, leaning in and pressing my mouth to his, the kiss lightened by desperation and weighted down by everything he meant to me.
His bloody fingers tightened on my face, but he kissed me back with a tenderness, a reined-in need that contrasted painfully with his passion in Marsden’s kitchen. There was no spark of electricity this time, no cool breeze rolling up my body, ecstatic and draining, no—
No power loss.
I tore away and stared at him. “Wait. What was . . . You healed earlier—back in Marsden’s kitchen. A scratch on your arm. I saw it!” Pritkin didn’t say anything. “You’re half incubus—you can feed from my power,” I said, slowly catching up. His ability must be spiritual rather than physical, like my power. That was why I could still shift, even in his body.
Like he could still heal.
“You don’t have any power to spare!” he told me.
“I have more than you!” I gripped his arms. “Pritkin, you can use my power to heal—” I stopped because he was wearing an expression that I’d never seen before. It looked a little like terror.
“This is precisely what happened last time!” he said harshly, his eyes skittering to the wall, the monitors, the wastebasket in the corner. Everywhere but my face. “You saw the house. It was even more isolated then, with nothing for miles but fields and water and forest. There was no one to help, no one to hear her scream!”
And it suddenly occurred to me that it wasn’t his own death that had him looking like he wanted to bolt. It was mine. He drew in air, his face strained, and a flush darkened the skin of his neck. “You don’t understand the risk,” he said more calmly.
“Your father tried to kill me. Believe me, I understand.” It had been added to my regular nightmare list, that horrible, sucking, draining sensation that had my flesh wanting to shudder off the bone. But that had been Rosier. Pritkin hadn’t wanted to hurt anyone. He’d lost control with his wife because no one had warned him about what might happen. But he knew the risk now.
Which is why he wasn’t going to take it.
It was written in the glint in his eyes, the flare of his nostrils, the jut of his chin. “I can’t lose you!” I told him, feeling defiant and miserable and furious all at once.
“I promise—you won’t. I’ll follow you. But you and Jonas have to—”
“I didn’t want to do this,” I said, cutting through the obvious lie. “But you’re not leaving me a lot of choice. This is my call and I’m making it. Do what you need to heal.”
“Yours?” It was if he’d put all the frustration he felt into a single glare. “How precisely is it yours?”
“Oh. So suddenly I’m not Pythia?”
“That has nothing to do with this!”
“It has everything to do with it! You’re a war mage sworn to my service who thinks he doesn’t have to actually do anything I tell you! And yes,” I said, as he opened his mouth, “I know you have a lot more knowledge and experience, which is why I listen to you most of the time. But you’re wrong about this because you’re too emotional to see that the risk has to be taken. So I’m making the decision—which, since I’m Pythia and it’s my body, is my right.”
I set my hand against his thigh, surprised by the heat of skin on skin. Pritkin twitched and looked at me, lips parted and eyes a little wild. “I warned you once before what someone looks like when an incubus has drained them completely. Do you truly want to risk that?”
“I’m a big fan of safe,” I told him quietly. “I really prefer it to sorry. But in this case, yeah. I’m willing to risk it.”
“I don’t know that I am,” he said thickly.
And I just couldn’t take it anymore. I closed the distance between us, slammed him back against the chair and kissed him, holding his head still with both my hands buried in that stupid, stupid hair. I half expected more resistance, because Pritkin had never met an argument he didn’t like. So it was a shock when he ran his hands down my sides, cupped my hips and slid us both to the floor.
“I’m going straight to hell for this,” he muttered.
“At least you’ll know a lot of people,” I said breathlessly. And then I couldn’t talk at all because his mouth had settled hot and fierce over mine.
I pulled his shirt off over his head and then let my hands wander. I wrapped one around his neck, running fingers into his hair. It was soft and silky—always a surprise—and slightly damp, like the skin below. I used the other to smooth down that powerful body, strong and filigreed with black ink and silver scars. It was almost as familiar as my own, and yet suddenly, it felt very different.
I followed a ripple of solid muscle over the hard chest to the flat belly, and then dropped to the light dusting of hair that pointed to even more interesting areas. But Pritkin intercepted my hand, pulling it away from him. “Don’t,” he said roughly.
“Why?”
“Because I have to remain in control, Miss Palmer, or this will go very bad, very quickly.”
“If you call me that one more time,” I said seriously, and then forgot where I was going with it when his mouth moved to my neck. His lips trailed a line down the side of my throat and along the curve of my shoulder before closing over a spot he liked and starting to suck.
I was quickly reminded of how determined Pritkin could be. Once he got his mind set on something, he was quite . . . single-minded, and right then, he was focused on driving me crazy. He was doing a pretty good job, somehow managing to get my shirt off and my bra unhooked one-handed, a calloused thumb lightly brushing a nipple.
I returned the favor, raking my nails through the dark blond hair on his chest, finding a little nub that went hard under my fingertips. I played with it until he pushed that hand away, too. I gave a moan of frustration and moved on, my hands sliding over bare, hot skin, finding the smooth punctuation of scars, pressing fingers bruise-hard into muscle and bone. There was no softness anywhere, except the velvet of his skin, the touch of his mouth.
My lips slid down the edge of one of the old, pale scars on his shoulder, feeling the faint ridge under my tongue. “Please,” Pritkin said hoarsely, and I smiled against his skin. “Don’t,” he added, and my patience broke.
“Pritkin! Sex pretty much requires losing control, at least a little!”
“This isn’t sex.”
I blinked. “Oh. Then what is it?”
“An emergency!”
I started to argue and then thought twice about it. Considering what Mircea would do to Pritkin if he ever found out about this . . . Yeah. Emergency sounded good.
But something I said must have gotten through, because hands, big and warm and rough, slowly slid down my sides. And something about their touch had changed. His fingers on my skin were as exquisite as a mouth, sizzling my nerves into overload, every touch sending spikes and waves of pleasure through me. I felt him strip away my capris and I didn’t care.
A chill breeze swept through the windowless room and he groaned, low and deep in his throat, and started kissing a path up my body. My heart gave an odd little skip in time with the fear and longing that spiked behind my ribs. He kissed my knee and then a line up my inner leg, applying suction as he reached the crease between thigh and groin, and I shivered at the feel of stubble against delicate skin.
His technique was magic—which I totally should have expected, I thought, torn between tears and hysterical amusement. “Is it sex yet?” I asked unevenly right before a warm, wet mouth closed over me. The laughter died in my throat.
It was perfect, perfect, a slick hot tongue tracing patterns that might have been runes against the thin cotton, but I was already too far gone to tell. He painted me with his breath, alternating between sketching patterns with soft exhalations and tracing them with the very tip of his tongue. A moment with nothing but the whisper of air against me was followed by a delicate, moist stroke, over and over until my vision was blurring with tears and my panting breath was on the verge of sobs.
That barely there sensation had my heart racing and my skin flushed and my body craving more like a drug. Every movement sent spikes of pleasure arcing up my spine, turning my muscles soft and helpless. I barely noticed when the breeze intensified into a skin-tingling, hair-raising rush. But it was impossible to ignore when his skin went burning hot.
I slid a hand under the edge of his ruined khakis. My fingertips skidded over a crust of dried blood, but it flaked away when I brushed at it. And beneath, there was only soft skin and hard muscle that tightened under my touch. He’d healed, I realized, so relieved I was almost giddy.
“Pritkin! I think—”
A strong hand gripped the back of my neck, a thigh pressed hard between my own, and an unmistakable firmness pressed against me. I looked up to find myself staring into ravenous, alien eyes. Black and burning, there was only the thinnest rim of green around the pupil.
He kissed me, and on the surface, nothing had changed. The feel of his hair between my fingers was the same, cool, silky, irrepressible. The way he was so intent on the kiss that he forgot to breathe was the same, too, leaving us both gasping. But suddenly, what had been a breeze became a torrent, a freezing blast of power that swept over me, leaving my muscles weak as water behind it.
Unlike Rosier’s horrible leeching presence, it didn’t hurt, but it was a power drain nonetheless. A big one. Pritkin was still feeding.
Chapter Twenty-seven
For a heartbeat, I felt a blind panic constrict my throat, knowing what this meant in my bones. But before I could protest, everything stopped, fingers and mouth sliding abruptly away from me. I looked up to see Pritkin motionless above me, sweat running off his muscles, his thighs trembling with the effort of staying still. He drew in air, his lips pressed tight together as if fighting for control.
Those alien eyes met mine, and there was horror in them, but it was quickly being overtaken by something else—raw hunger. “Go!”
I didn’t need to be told twice. I scrambled away from him, not even taking the time to get to my feet, just scuttling backwards on all fours through the ward. I fell down the small step and landed on the tile floor of Dee’s dressing room, panting and panicking, because my capris had twisted around my thighs, momentarily trapping me. But Pritkin didn’t come through the ward.
I wasn’t sure if he was going to be okay, or if he was fighting to give me a head start. I really didn’t want to find out what would happen if he totally lost control, but what was the alternative? Running into a casino full of war mages? Ones who no longer seemed all that concerned about capturing rather than killing me?
I was still fighting with my clothes and trying to think when the door opened and Dee came in. She paused when she saw me, and one painted eyebrow headed north. I felt a hot blush creeping up my neck. “It isn’t what it looks like,” I blurted.
“Relax, honey,” she said, tugging her mile of rose-covered train inside the door. “We’ve all ended up with our panties around our ankles at some point.”
“My panties are exactly where they should be!” I told her indignantly, trying to stand. But the capris tripped me up and I went sprawling, just as an announcement blared through the bar. “Ladies and gentlemen, we regret to inform you that there has been a bomb threat against the hotel. For your safety, we are evacuating the premises while a team of experts evaluates the situation. Please exit in an orderly manner through the lobby to the street.”
“They’re looking for us,” I told Dee, trying not to lose it. “If we leave with the crowd, we’ll be spotted, and if we don’t, a search won’t take long to find us! Not in an empty hotel!”
Dee looked thoughtful, but she didn’t demand any explanations. “Can your friend do a glamourie?”
“Yes, but they’re war mages. They’d sense it!” Besides, I didn’t think Pritkin was up to doing too many fancy spells right now.
“I may have an idea,” she said. “Gimme a minute.” She went back out into the club.
I sat in her abandoned chair and got my clothes rearranged, which was harder than usual with hands that kept wanting to shake. I’d barely managed it when she was back. “It’s okay with the girls—they’re pissed at the Circle for ruining opening night anyway. Now we just have to convince your friend.”
“Convince him of what?”
Dee told me. I was still staring at her in shock when Pritkin emerged from the ward. His color was high, but otherwise, he looked fairly composed.
That didn’t last long.
“No.” He said it flatly, a muscle twitching in his cheek, when Dee had gone through it a second time.
“You absolutely have the body for it,” she wheedled, holding a silver-spangled sheath in front of him.
“I am not wearing a dress!”
She pursed her lips, which were currently Day-Glo orange, and grabbed something flashy and purple from the rack behind her.
“There’s always the catsuit. Of course, it’s skin tight, so we’ll have to hide the candy, but I can help with—”
I managed to grab Pritkin’s arm before the catsuit ended up in pieces. “They know what you look like,” I pointed out while pulling on my own disguise. “And even if they didn’t, you’re covered in blood. You can’t go out there like that!”
“If I’m going to die tonight, I would prefer it to be with a little dignity!”
“I don’t get you,” I said, leaning against the wall for support. My five-inch, fire-engine-red, glitter-covered Mary Janes were just as hard on the ankles as they looked. “You just spent over a day in a woman’s body—”
“Not by choice!”
“—and you’re hundreds of years old. Didn’t men once wear makeup and—”
“Court fops, perhaps. I wasn’t one!”
“Then expand your horizons,” I told him, throwing a boa around his neck. “And pick something.”
Pritkin eyed the selection Dee had provided with loathing. She noticed and crossed her arms over her massive chest. “You’re cute, but you’re getting on my last gay nerve.”
“I’m never going to live this down,” Pritkin muttered, snatching up an opera-length cape made of a profusion of gold lamé ruffles. It must have been designed with platforms and towering wigs in mind, because it swept the floor after him and the hood covered his head and face. I decided it would do.
A few minutes later, three sequined and bejeweled visions glided out of the club and into the middle of the crush on Main Street. Dee was in front, providing distraction, her massive breasts jutting out in front of her like the prow on a ship. Pritkin and I followed behind. I was kind of short for a drag queen, even in the platforms, but the rainbow-sequined jumpsuit and towering Marilyn Monroe wig more than made up for it.
The mages were everywhere, their eyes scanning the exiting crowd. Yet most barely glanced at us, despite the spectacle we made. And those who did quickly looked away when Dee blew them kisses or flashed a little thigh. It looked like hiding in plain sight might work after all. I’d barely had the thought when a vision crashed into me with all of the subtlety of a baseball bat to the head. It knocked the breath out of me and dropped me to my knees. It was like nothing I’d experienced before, vivid and crystal clear, and so solid that I couldn’t even see the street anymore.
Vegas was burning, fire leaping into the sky, shedding sparks like shooting stars. It was impossible to recognize anyone in the darkness and chaos or to pick out a single voice among the panicked crowd. Just screams and faceless, running people.
Beyond, the desert sand was being consumed, mile after mile under a blackened sky. Long after all the scrub had burnt, it raged on. Like a forest fire without a forest, or what it was: a seemingly endless exclamation of wrath from a creature with power and rage and centuries of bottled resentment but no compassion. No compassion at all.
The world had remembered the healer, the lyre player, the golden god, but had forgotten the other stories. The ones that whispered of brutal punishments, of rape and murder and a beautiful face that laughed as it flayed its enemies alive. They remembered now, for an instant, before memory was wiped clear in a rain of blood.
The vision shattered as abruptly as it had come, leaving me gasping on all fours in the middle of the sidewalk. “—a little too much wine with dinner, you know how it is. Always was a drinker,” Dee was saying to someone. She reached down and pinched my cheek. “Come on, love. Up you go. You can pass out at home.”
She dragged me to my feet and I did my best to keep my head down when what I actually wanted was to run back up the street screaming. My dreams had been warning me all along, but I’d been blind to what they really meant. And now it might be too late.
A cold wire tightened around my heart. There was something wrong with my chest; I couldn’t seem to get a deep breath. What had I done?
Dee and Pritkin started towing me back toward the lobby again. I gripped their arms. “We can’t leave.”
“Oh, yes, we can,” Dee said. “I think I just ruined this dress. My heart can’t take another scare like that!”
“We’ll deal with whatever it is later,” Pritkin told me, hurrying us along.
“Apollo’s here.”
He stopped abruptly, and we were almost run down by a harassed-looking woman with a kid in each hand. “Watch it!” she snapped, pulling the kids around. Pritkin dragged me over to the sidewalk.
“That’s impossible!” he hissed. “The spell—”
“He got around it,” I whispered. “I don’t know how, but I Saw it. He’s here!”
He was shaking his head in disbelief. “That spell has held for more than three thousand years. Yet he suddenly finds a way around it now?”
“I can’t explain it. I just know what I Saw.”
“It could be the future, the outcome of a civil war within the Circle. What could happen if we don’t solve our internal—”
“No!” I looked around, rubbing my arms as chills broke out all over them. “I’ve been Seeing the same thing ever since MAGIC blew up. But only in pieces, like my usual visions. But this . . . He’s here. I know it!”
“He can’t be.” Pritkin was adamant.
Dee had been looking at us out of the corner of her eye, and she’d started to edge away when I grabbed her wrist. “You told me once you can sense magic, right?”
“Maybe,” she said warily.
“Can you sense anything unusual now?”
“Other than the battle raging upstairs?” she asked with understandable sarcasm.
“I mean a single source, stronger than all the others. Like . . . like a supernova.”
“Maybe. But it don’t matter because there’s no way I’m going back in there! Not for—”
“A shopping spree at Augustine’s? Ten minutes, anything you can grab?”
Her eyes narrowed and she looked me over. “You got that kind of cash?”
“I’ve got that kind of credit.”
“I’d think you were lying, but you did have those shoes. . . .” She licked her lips. “Half an hour, take it or leave it.”
A war mage walked up. “There’s a mandatory evacuation,” he told us. “You’ll have to be moving on.”
“I’ll take it,” I said.
“Shit. I knew you were going to say that,” Dee told me, and slammed her gigantic purse into the mage’s face. He went down, and may have also gotten stepped on as 250 pounds of satin-clad fashionista ran over him and headed back up the street.
We ran to catch up, battling the tide of humanity going the other way. Mages were converging on us from all sides—it wasn’t like we were easy to miss. I grabbed Dee’s train to keep it from getting trampled and she towed me along like a freight train, scattering tourists and roses everywhere.
We passed the fake feed store that marked the halfway point with most of the mages on the street after us, and plowed into a dozen more. They’d formed a half-moon shape in the street, forcing the crowd to surge around them and re-form. As soon as we ran out of tourists, we barreled straight into them.
Dee almost knocked a hole in the wall of leather coats, but they kept their feet. I looked behind us, but the mages had closed the circle, leaving us nowhere to run. And then one of the closest caught sight of me. “Cassandra Palmer.”
The brown eyes searching my face still looked like they belonged to a mid-level flunky, but the snarl kind of ruined the effect. I didn’t say anything, panic and exhaustion closing my throat. But Saunders didn’t seem to expect an answer.
His gaze slid to Pritkin, who had stopped beside me. “Or is it?”
He looked Pritkin up and down, taking in the ruffled gold cape with a raised brow. “I’ve heard it whispered that the Pythia has more skills than she lets on. It would appear to be true. I’ve always been told that possession is impossible for humans, but either I accept that I was misinformed, or I have to believe that a slip of a girl threw me against a wall and almost shattered my shields. Which do you think I prefer?”
Pritkin didn’t answer him, either. He fiddled with his cape instead, looking twitchy and almost nervous. Saunders smiled.
“Of course, I could solve the riddle by killing both of you, but that would leave no one to put on trial. And the public does love the legal niceties,” he said, taking a few steps back. He glanced around, but the crowd had thinned and the few remaining tourists were being hustled out of the way by the mages who had been following us.
At a nod, his men parted to either side, pulling Dee and me back, and leaving Saunders and Pritkin alone in the middle of the street. “On a count of three, I think?” he asked politely. “Wasn’t that the way things were settled in the old—”
Pritkin threw out a hand and Saunders sailed off his feet, into the air and smashed against the side of a fake barn. Judging by the sound his skull made on impact, I didn’t think he’d bothered with shields. He slid down the side, bounced off a wagon and was speared by the iron spike atop a menu sign.
I swallowed and looked away as his body began to spasm. No. Definitely no shields.
The mage holding my arm twisted it painfully behind me. I cried out and tried to pull away, but there was nowhere to go. There was another group of mages jogging down the street toward us, as if the other side needed reinforcements.
One of them, a tall African-American in a battered coat, pushed his way through the circle to me. “Hello, Cassie,” he said somberly. He looked at the mage holding me. “Let her go, son.”
“They just killed the Lord Protector!”
Caleb scanned the area until his eyes lit on Saunders’ still quivering form. “Doesn’t look dead to me. Don’t you think you boys should maybe get him down?” I suddenly found myself released as the Apprentices rushed to aid their fallen leader.
“Caleb—” Pritkin began.
His onetime colleague raised a hand. “Jonas called us. Said he challenged and Saunders refused.”
“Yes.” Pritkin went very still.
Caleb exchanged glances with the mages he’d brought along. None of them looked young enough to be trainees. Several had gray hair, and one or two looked like they might even be Marsden’s age. Their expressions ranged from sour to disgusted to war mage neutral.
“Well. I guess that makes him an outlaw.”
“And us?”
Caleb smiled slightly. “Technically, there are still warrants out for both of you. The fact that the man who issued them is currently under suspicion himself doesn’t negate that.” I licked my lips and started to speak, but Pritkin’s hand tightened on my arm. “So if I see you, I guess I’ll have to arrest you.”
Pritkin nodded.
“By the way, I liked the old coat better,” Caleb said, and turned away.
Dee sidled off as soon as the group of mages parted in front of us, fanning herself with a hand. “I never thought I’d say this, but too much testosterone. We need to get out of here,” she told me, heading for a bank of elevators.
“We need to find Apollo,” I told her, catching her arm.
“Well, he ain’t down here! We have to go up.”
“You can sense him, then?”
“Oh, yeah. There’s something up there, all right. Although I’m not getting a who so much as a what.”
“He’s . . . not exactly human,” I explained, not having time to go into it all.
“I should have asked for an hour,” she muttered, and then started for the elevators again.
Pritkin caught her arm. “We could get trapped that way. Saunders’ supporters are all over the place, and it’s going to take time to round them up.”
She looked at him for a second, and then her eyes slid to the stairs. “You have got to be kidding.”
He wasn’t kidding. Of course, I thought savagely, Pritkin was wearing his usual boots. Dee and I were in platforms almost as high as the steps. Navigating even one flight in those ought to be an Olympic event. By the time we’d made it up five floors, I was drenched with sweat and had small explosions going off behind my eyelids.
I stopped in the stairwell, bent over and gasping, only my hand on the railing keeping me up. Pritkin just threw me over his shoulder and kept going, earning him a speculative look from Dee. “Don’t even think about it,” he told her. “I’m not carrying you.”
“That wasn’t what I was thinking,” she cooed, and he flushed. I guess there weren’t any mages in the stairwell, because Dee’s laugh could have been heard all the way down to the lobby.
By the time we got as far as the stairs would take us, Dee was no longer laughing. “I think I hate you,” she told Pritkin, who had all but run her up the stairs. She looked like hell. Her roses had mostly been lost on the street and the rest had fallen off on the stairs. Her wig was askew, her makeup had sweated off and a huge fake eyelash had come unglued and was clinging tenuously to one cheek.
“Good for the figure,” he said, putting me down. He was also hot and sweaty after our marathon, with damp tendrils of hair stuck to his forehead and neck. His lashes had gone spiky dark, turning his eyes emerald. Grungy was a surprisingly good look for him.
I didn’t know what I looked like. I preferred it that way. If it was anywhere near as bad as I felt, I’d scare off any mages we encountered before they could shoot me.
“This is where I get off,” Dee said, sitting on a step to rub her arches. “The power is coming from the next floor up.”
I looked at Pritkin. “The penthouse.”
I didn’t have a key card, but Pritkin convinced the elevator to take us up anyway. The doors opened onto a deathly quiet foyer that looked a little worse for the wear. The gold flocked wallpaper had a big hole through it, the bronze sculpture had half melted into a Dalí-esque mess and the cow skin rug was covered in dirty boot prints. But the John Wayne posters had survived without a scratch.
We walked into the living room. Wind through the broken balcony doors was blowing the curtains inward in a billowing mass that, for a moment, made me think someone was there. But nothing else moved, except for the chandelier swinging gently overhead, no longer spilling light onto the roadster still parked below.
“Where did they all go?” I asked, looking around at the carnage. At least Casanova wouldn’t need to gut the place. The mages had pretty much done it for him.
I breathed a slight sigh of relief. Dee had been wrong. There was no one here.
Pritkin shrugged. “They took the fight elsewhere,” he said, crossing the lumber and glass obstacle course to the balcony. I followed, having to concentrate not to break my neck.
Outside was a wreck of destroyed patio furniture, shattered glass and a pool filled with flotsam. And a body, I saw sickly. Someone wearing a war mage coat was bobbing gently on the surface. Pritkin fished him out, and then I almost wished he hadn’t because the face was mostly gone.
I bit my lip and looked around. I wanted to check the rest of the apartment, but what if I found Rafe’s body? Had they gotten him out in time? What if I found—
“We need to check the place for survivors,” I said, cutting my thoughts off. I wouldn’t think that way. I wouldn’t think at all. I’d just go look because I couldn’t stand not knowing.
We didn’t have a flashlight, but the casino’s light through the windows was enough to see by, once our eyes adjusted. We found three more bodies in the dining room, none of them vampires. There was something to be said for masters, after all, I thought with relief. And then I wondered if they’d leave much of a corpse, with some of the spells the mages could throw. My stomach sank back down to my toes.
I’d turned to move on to the kitchen when Pritkin caught my arm. He put a finger to his lips, and the next moment, I heard it—a shuffling sound, like someone walking through the debris and not bothering to be quiet. We reentered the darkened living room to see a shape outlined against the expanse of windows leading out to the patio. It took me a second to recognize it.
“Sal!”
She turned slowly, obviously not surprised to see us. Of course, with vampire hearing, she’d probably known we were there all along. “Cassie? Do you know what happened? Where is everyone?”
“You just got back?” I asked, already knowing the answer. She hadn’t been here when everything went to hell. I imagined that it would be a little bit of a shock to come back to this. It was shocking to me, and I knew how it had gotten this way.
“A few minutes ago. I didn’t want to interrupt if the meeting was—”
She broke off at the sound of the front door opening. A moment later, Marco stepped into the room. Like Sal, he took a moment to survey the damage. “Well, I guess anything would have been an improvement,” he said, coming down the stairs.
Sal moved a few yards back, keeping her eyes glued to Marco. “It looks like we’ll have to find somewhere else to sleep. It’s almost daylight.”
He shook his head. “Won’t do, Sal,” he said quietly. “The master ordered five of you to stay away until just before dawn. And only you came back.”
“And you,” Sal snapped. She looked him up and down contemptuously. “You can ape Mircea all you like, but the finest clothes in the world will never give you his power. And everyone knows how much you hate him for that!”
It took me a second to realize what they were talking about. With everything else, I’d almost forgotten the trap Mircea had laid for the traitor. I looked at Marco, suddenly tense again, but his eyes never left Sal.
“Hate’s a little strong,” Marco demurred. “But you’re right. I like power. I just got limits on what I’ll do for it.”
Sal kept her eyes on Marco, but she spoke to me. “Cassie, think about it. Mircea told us the kind of person they’ve been looking for. Someone close to a senator, someone trusted, someone with resentment Myra might have been able to use!”
“He did say that,” I agreed, as Pritkin shifted next to me. He was trying to keep Marco and Sal both in sight as she started backing up. I don’t know why; the only thing behind her was the balcony, and we were twenty floors up.
“And Marco said it himself—I’m just a hick,” Sal reminded me. “Just like you. A nobody from a court so far out in the sticks, most people never even heard of it!”
“Making you too powerless for Myra to have bothered about,” Marco agreed.
I blinked at him, confused. “Are you confessing?” I demanded.
He looked slightly amused. “Would that surprise you?”
“Hell, yes! Mircea made you my bodyguard! And he didn’t trade you out, even after he got Marlowe’s list of suspects. He would never have done that if . . .” I trailed off, belatedly realizing what I’d just said.
“Sounds like she’s voting for you, too, Sal,” Marco murmured.
“Just tell me where the Consuls are, Cassie,” Sal said, ignoring him. “We need to warn them that there could be trouble.”
I was in too much in shock to reply, not that Marco gave me a chance. “Of course, there’s an easy way to settle this,” he told her. “We’ll just wait until the master gets back and ask him.”
“He’s not my master,” she hissed.
“He might have been, in time. He’s a good one, as masters go,” Marco said with a slight twist to his lips.
“I wouldn’t know,” Sal said bitterly.
He shrugged. “Master’s been busy. You should have been patient.”
“Right,” she said contemptuously. “I should spend my time shopping, maybe getting my nails done, while the war comes closer every day. All Mircea knows how to do is talk! Rafe ending up like that . . . It could be any of us next! Tony may be a worm, but at least he knows how to act!”
I’d been looking back and forth, trying to keep up, but finally something made sense. “Oh, God. Mircea never broke your bond. Tony is still your master.”
“And still giving me little tasks to perform, all the way from Faerie.”
I was hearing it, but I couldn’t believe it. Sal wasn’t some superspy. She wasn’t a traitor. She was just Sal. I’d known her all my life.
“You told me once you’d kill him if you ever saw him again!” I accused. “How can you take orders from him?”
“Because I don’t have a choice,” she spat. “I practically begged Mircea to break my bond, but all he did was talk: soon, soon. Well, it wasn’t soon enough!”
“But . . . Alphonse is fifty years younger than you!” I protested. “And he’s been able to ignore Tony’s orders for years! You don’t have to—”
She cut me off with a laugh. “Yeah. And he’s an idiot, you know? I taught him everything—how to talk, how to act, what to do to impress the boss. He’d be nothing without me. But power doesn’t care how smart you are. Doesn’t even care how old you are. Some people never reach master status, and others do it in a matter of decades! And I’ve never been strong. Why do you think I put up with Alphonse? He was the only way I had any position at all.”
“That’s why we couldn’t catch you,” Marco said, lighting a cigarette. “It was pretty clever. Everyone was looking for the traitor among the old masters, the guys close enough to a Senate member for Myra to have wasted her time trying to turn them.”
“Which is why Tony decided to use me.”
“The Consuls aren’t here, as you can see,” Pritkin said, watching her narrowly. “Whatever your master ordered you to do, you’ve failed. Mircea can still break your bond. You have no reason to—”
He broke off at the identical expressions of disgust Sal and Marco were sending him. “Why the hell do you hang around this guy?” Marco asked me.
Pritkin looked at me, and I shook my head. “It doesn’t work that way,” I told him numbly.
“Why not? If she is truly under a compulsion—”
“Vampire law doesn’t care about the why. It only cares about the result. Or in this case, the intended result. And Sal came back here intending to kill the leaders of the six vampire senates. It doesn’t get any worse than that.”
“Close, but no cigar,” Sal told me, sounding awfully unconcerned for someone facing certain death. “I’m just the doorman, you might say.” She held out her hand, and a shaft of light through the balcony doors lit up something on her open palm.
“My pentagram,” I said, recognizing it even from this distance. “You said you’d get it fixed.”
“Yeah. Only it’s a lot more useful broken.”
“I don’t get it.”
She laughed.“You know, I used to think it was ludicrous—you with Lord Mircea. I figured he was just using you, like everyone said. But lately, I’ve begun to think you two deserve each other. You’re just as clueless as he is!”
Marco tensed. “Give it to me,” he told her.
“Or what? You’ll kill me?” she asked incredulously. “You don’t have a lot of threats left, Marco.”
“Oh, I don’t know. Mircea didn’t specify how the traitor was to die, just told me to take care of it if anybody showed up. I got a lot of leeway here, Sal. Give me a reason to make it quick.”
“Oh, yeah. That’s tempting. Or I could follow Tony’s orders, and when his side wins, I not only don’t die, I get the position I always deserved. How about that instead?”
“Your side isn’t going to win,” Pritkin told her.
Sal ignored him. It looked like she was having fun. I was beginning to wonder how hard she had tried to resist Tony.
“Remember MAGIC?” she asked me. “Because this is gonna make that look like a sideshow.”
“What are you talking about?” I demanded. “It’s just a ward. It can’t—”
“A ward that channels your power—or used to,” she corrected. “Lately, it’s been channeling something else instead. You know, that damn wardsmith gave me a fright. I thought for sure one of you would figure it out. You survived direct contact with the ley line even though you couldn’t access your power. Yet even when he told you your ward was feeding off the Circle, you still didn’t get it!”
“Get what?”
Pritkin drew in air, and Sal grinned at him. “Dumb as a rock, isn’t she?” Her gaze returned to me. “Let me spell it out. Tony and company figured out a way around Artemis’ spell. It acts like a lock on a door, but a door isn’t much help when the wall of the house is split open. To get Apollo back, they needed to rip apart the space between worlds. They needed to crack open a ley line.”
“But nobody on Earth has that kind of power,” I protested. “That was the problem all along, trying to figure out who . . .” I stopped, a really horrible idea surfacing.
Sal saw my expression and grinned. “Yeah, that was the best part, hearing everybody say, over and over, that no one had that kind of power. When it was right under their noses, all the time. You had it. Apollo gave part of his power to the Pythias. All we had to figure out was how to access it.”
And suddenly, I caught up. I looked at Pritkin. “You said the Circle wouldn’t give you one of their tattoos, because power drains work both ways. They’ve been draining me, haven’t they?”
He nodded slowly. “It’s possible.”
Sal snorted. “Hell, it was easy. Richardson—our guy on the inside—just opened the conduit to your ward again. The Circle had closed it off, thinking you might try to drain power from them. Instead, we opened it up to do the same thing to you. Then Richardson got it to our allies by bundling it with the percentage Saunders was selling to fund his early retirement.”
“You used my power to weaken the ley line,” I said, still not quite believing it.
“Yeah. We almost had it porous enough to get Apollo and his army through, but Richardson just had to pull his little stunt with you. He hated you so much, he was afraid someone else would get to kill you. And then the battle broke out and ripped a huge-ass gash in the ley line, screwing everything up!”
“But why didn’t Apollo come through then?” I asked, confused.
Sal just stared at me. “Don’t you get it yet? He’s been here since MAGIC fell! But it wasn’t supposed to happen then, and it took everyone by surprise. The breach was supposed to take place over Vegas and to have to run all the way to the ley line sink at MAGIC before it was sealed. That would have given him time to get his whole army through.”
“But it hit MAGIC and sealed almost instantly,” I said, remembering that awesome funnel of power disappearing over the hill. I suddenly remembered something else, too.
My vision at MAGIC had shown me a ruined Dante’s. I finally understood why. If I had gone back and changed time, ensuring that MAGIC never fell, I would have handed Apollo everything he wanted. In that case, the original plan would have been carried out and he and his whole army would be here. And by now, the magical community would be well on its way to extinction.
My other visions were starting to make sense, too. The second had shown me the route the ley line’s destruction was meant to take on its way from Vegas to MAGIC. It was trying to do more than warn me about Rafe; it was telling me that the danger was still there. The third vision had reinforced that once again and showed me at the center of it all.
Because it was my power that would give our enemies a victory.
Chapter Twenty-eight
“Apollo got through,” Sal told me, “but the rest of his forces didn’t. He was back, but he’d been severely weakened when the line exploded around him, and he was stuck in a world with a quarter million war mages, any fraction of whom could banish him again. He realized that he needed to bring through his army before he threw down with the Circle.”
“But contact with the ley line fried my ward. You can’t get any more power!” I pointed out.
She shook her head. “As long as the ward was on your body, it continued to pull from you, but instead of transmitting the power to us, it stored it. It’s been building up the amount we need ever since the breach.”
So that was what Dee had sensed. Not Apollo, but my pentagram. And Sal, waiting for her master.
“Now we have enough,” Sal said cheerfully.
“Because the line is still weak,” I murmured. Mircea had said that it would take a couple of days to calm back down.
“Yeah, that’s why we have to do it now, before the line starts to strengthen again. Of course, Apollo thought it was a bonus that the consuls were also meeting here tonight. Destroy the leaders and everyone else would fall that much easier.” She grinned at me. “But you know, I really think he’ll settle for you.”
The sky flared red beyond the balcony doors. Crimson streaks that were nothing like a sunrise crackled across the heavens, shedding a killing radiance that made the hotel’s electric lights look feeble by comparison. Something was coming.
The whole time she talked, Sal had been slowly backing up, edging closer to the balcony. No one had tried to stop her. After all, even a vampire was unlikely to survive a fall like that. But now she could toss the pentagram over the edge anytime she chose, and we’d never find it. Not before her master did.
“Give me the pentagram, Sal,” Marco said again. He suddenly sounded deadly serious.
“Are you still trying that? When you have nothing to offer me but a quick death?” She sneered. “Don’t expect me to be so generous with you!”
The wind picked up as the light grew brighter. It looked like dawn was coming early. Or the sun anyway, I thought dizzily.
And then, faster than my eyes could track, Marco moved. I blinked and Sal was still standing there, but the hand clutching my ward was flying through the air—straight at me. She twisted, a snarl overtaking her face, and the next second Marco was staggering back, a sliver of the ruined couch frame sticking out of his chest.
I didn’t get a chance to see if it got his heart. Because Sal’s severed hand hit me and the impact jarred my ward loose. It went flying, I dove after it and Sal dove after me.
And then, just as suddenly, she was gone.
I felt a breath of wind pass me and looked up in time to see Nicu come out of nowhere and tackle Sal by the waist. I don’t know if he didn’t realize that she was as close to the edge as she was, or if he thought the railing would catch them. But it had taken as much abuse as the rest of the apartment and gave way under their combined weight. I saw bright gold eyes staring at me for an instant before they fell, and then they were gone.
Something bit into my palm. I looked down to see that I’d clutched my ward so tight, it was digging into my flesh. I pried it loose and looked up, only to realize that I wasn’t likely to keep it long.
Light spilled over the balcony, bright as the noonday sun. I couldn’t make out what I was looking at, at first. Until it came closer, and then it was nothing like I’d expected.
I’d met Apollo, at least in a metaphysical sense, a number of times before. But he hadn’t been in this world then and couldn’t reveal himself in anything other than mental impressions. And since my brain had interpreted them, he had always been in a form I could understand. This wasn’t.
A glowing tangle of light hovered in the sky, every color and no color, transparent like water, huge and abstract. If anything, it looked like a fractal on a computer screen, constantly changing into new patterns. None of them were particularly menacing, but the power radiating off the creature was enough to scorch my skin even this far away.
Apollo had once told me that I wouldn’t be able to withstand him in person, but I hadn’t known what he meant. I did now. Frozen in place, I stared into the fiery center of a creature my mind couldn’t even comprehend, pitifully aware of my own insignificance, and wondered how I could ever have thought I could fight something like this.
The bands of light thickened, swirling around a central point, and formed themselves into a monstrous head rising clear and fluid against the heavens. Faint points of light glittered in the huge skull, like savage eyes cold and measuring. My breath stuttered in my chest, out of rhythm with the sudden mad pace of my heart. Swaying on my feet, I clasped my hands together so the shaking wouldn’t show.
“Cassandra Palmer.” The voice was surprisingly soft, like a breath of wind. “We finally meet in the flesh. So to speak.”
“Apollo.”
“If you like. This world once had many names for me. Ra, Sol, Surya, Marduk, Inti . . . It has forgotten them all. It will be reminded.” The god’s intense gaze was fixed on me with almost affectionate mockery. I didn’t know if his anger had burnt itself out, or if he was merely savoring the moment now that I was finally trapped.
“I’ve seen it,” I said dully. “The city in ruins . . .”
“I’ve decided to leave it as a monument to your failure. The former seat of the blind Pythia.” He laughed. “You know, even your namesake did better. She understood what was coming but could not convince others. You, on the other hand, have been wandering about as foolishly as everyone else. It has been most entertaining.”
The wind picked up, stinging my eyes. “And I put the power to bring your army here into Sal’s hand. I gave it to you.”
The great face didn’t change, but the air around me shimmered with laughter. “Yes, that is the very best part. I won’t destroy your friends, your world, Cassandra. You will. I wanted to be sure you knew that, before the end.”
The voice remained soft, but the light patterns suddenly changed. The huge face had been almost clear, but now dense blue-black boiled up from the bottom, filling the form like ink in water. No, I thought, staring up in blank terror. It didn’t look like his anger had faded, at all.
I heard the sound of a car engine start behind me. Before I could turn around, an arm reached out of nowhere, grabbed the front of my shirt and dragged me into the seat of Marsden’s roadster. My legs were hanging over the side, my butt still in the air, as we drove straight off the balcony.
“You’re wasting your time, Cassandra!” Apollo thundered. “Where do you think you can hide?”
I was too busy screaming to reply. I grabbed the seat belt in both fists as my legs floated up behind me. I looked down at the concrete speeding up at us and saw no bubble of protection, no jumping blue fire. And then the air tore open around us and we were swept into the middle of the line.
I slammed back down, my legs landing painfully on the trunk as we suddenly leveled off. Pritkin was in the driver’s seat, frantically shifting gears, as I began to slide off the side. He hauled me into the seat with one hand while steering around a very surprised war mage with the other. The ley line was alive with activity. Ships and men were everywhere, still fighting a battle that no longer mattered.
“You do know how to drive one of these, right?” I asked nervously. The car had a lot of weird buttons and gears I hadn’t noticed before. And none were labeled.
“In theory.”
“In theory?”
“I’ve been with Jonas a few times.”
“How many is a few?”
“Counting today?”
“Yes!”
“Er, that would be . . . twice then.”
I bit my lip on a retort and instead twisted around to stare behind us. Apollo wasn’t there. He was right—in a world he controlled, there would be nowhere to hide. I might be able to stay ahead of him for a little while, but he’d find me eventually. I doubted I’d care very much at that point, after he finished destroying everything I loved.
“Turn around,” I told Pritkin.
“What?”
I grabbed the wheel and swerved. A war mage shot by us and out of the line, as we banked at an angle that almost had us both plummeting along with him. Pritkin cursed and wrestled the car back into the middle of the stream. “Don’t touch that! And why the hell do you want to go back?”
“Apollo isn’t following us. I’m not sure he realizes I have the ward. I never had a chance to tell him.”
“You want him to follow us?”
“Yes.”
I didn’t get a chance to explain. The wind pushed my hair out of my face, allowing me to see a cloud of pure energy barreling right for us. “I think he knows,” Pritkin said, swerving violently and sending us careening toward the outer edge of the line.
“Back! Back!” I screamed as my half of the car was pushed completely out of the line. I could see Pritkin silhouetted inside all that jumping energy, while on the other side of me the parking lot was racing up at us at breathtaking speed. “No, pull up, pull up!” I screeched as we headed straight for a group of tourists who had just come out of the casino doors.
“Would you make up your mind?” he demanded, fighting with the car. I just stared at the tourists, who were now pointing at us with awed expressions, watching them get nearer and nearer, and—Pritkin suddenly swerved upward, maybe two feet above their heads.
“Building!” I yelled as one of Dante’s towers loomed straight in front of us. Pritkin could sail right on through in the non-space of the line. But I was about to be vertical roadkill if he didn’t—
Pritkin swerved sharply and the building slid by, close enough that I could have reached out and touched it. A couple in bed stared out at us from a third-floor window, openmouthed, and then Pritkin jerked the wheel again. Suddenly I was back inside the line, lying against the seat, panting.
Apollo was right on our tail. The energy lines ran slower at the outer edges of the line, and we’d lost most of our lead. I reached over and jerked the steering wheel hard to the left. “Do not touch the wheel!” Pritkin snarled.
“We have to stay in the center, or he’ll catch us for sure!”
“And if you keep attempting to drive, we’re both going to be—” He stopped, staring behind us.
I twisted around, but other than an angry god, I didn’t see anything. “What now?”
“Rakshasas. They’re following us.”
“How many?”
“Many.”
I was thrown back against my seat as Pritkin floored it. “We need to get him as far away from populated regions as possible,” he told me. “Jonas can rally the Circle. However that creature got in, we can banish him again—”
“You told me that spell takes thousands of mages! There’s no time for that.”
“Do you have a better idea?”
“I have an idea,” I hedged. I wasn’t taking any bets on how good it was. “Just get us some distance ahead.”
We left the city behind, speeding into an area of high rounded hills and smooth, empty valleys. The ley line twisted and turned among them, and sometimes through them, and that seemed to give Pritkin an idea. “Hold on,” he told me, and raced straight for the very top of the line.
We left the line, sailing into the vast and brilliant canopy above. So many stars, jeweled and burning bright. A meteor slid eastward. Beautiful, I thought dazedly, as a roar split the air behind us.
I turned in time to see the world go briefly monochrome in a tremendous flash of light, the hills jumping up at me against the terrible whiteness behind. Then we plunged back into the line, and a cloud of dirt and rubble incinerated all around us, throwing burning bits against the car’s shield. “What was that?”
“Slowed him down!” Pritkin said with a little of Marsden’s mania in his eyes. “He took off half the hill trying to follow us. But it wasn’t enough. We need bigger mountains!”
He jumped again just as the line curved around another hill. We went one way and Apollo went the other, taking out the hilltop along with him. But I didn’t care because the ground was racing up at us and there was no line to catch us and—
The line curved around the other side of the hill and caught us.
“You knew that was there, right?” I asked, shaken.
Pritkin swallowed. “Of course.”
I shut my eyes. “Can we make it as far as Chaco Canyon?”
“Even if we could, he would simply hop with us! He can follow us wherever we go!”
“But can we get there?”
“No,” he said tersely. “My weapons aren’t designed for fighting a god, and I’m running out of tricks.”
I opened my eyes and stared at the dashboard. “Then maybe Marsden has a few.” There was a panel of buttons by the steering wheel that didn’t look like standard equipment. “What do those do?”
“I don’t know. Some of Jonas’ meddling. And don’t—”
I punched a green one and we rocketed forward. We were going fast enough to throw me back against the seat and to flatten my cheeks to my face. I couldn’t see. The pressure was too great for me to even catch a breath, too great for me to so much as move. The ley line looked like an almost solid tube around us, the flashes and flares streaming together into one long line of color.
“—touch anything,” Pritkin finished as we shuddered back to normal speed.
I drew in a gasping breath, my lungs feeling flattened in my chest, and leaned forward against the dash. I groaned when I had enough breath, feeling every pain, every bruise. But when I raised my head, the vortex was shining like a small star in the distance.
We made it there ahead of Apollo, but only just. We jumped from the dazzling energy of the line into the non-space pooling around the vortex with maybe a ten-second lead. Pritkin was desperately searching for the correct current that would allow us to hop to the next vortex, so he didn’t see Apollo enter. But it was all I could see.
This time, it seemed, Apollo was done talking. The boiling energy ball never even slowed down. Neither did the huge flock of demons that poured in after him. The faint glimmers of thousands of Rakshasas were visible even to my eyes as they wheeled around us like a colony of bats.
I grabbed the wheel and jerked it straight at the vortex. “We’ve got to get closer in!”
“Closer to what?” Pritkin snarled, fighting the current to keep us from doing exactly that.
“The vortex!”
“Are you mad?”
“You said we need a weapon to use against a god.” I pointed at the Rakshasas. “I think we’ve found one!”
Pritkin’s head jerked up, watching the long arc of demons flowing around the vortex. I saw when he realized the same thing I had—they weren’t following us. Every single one of them was clustered on Apollo’s tail, like dust following a comet.
“Apollo is an energy being,” he said slowly.
“Life energy,” I corrected. The very kind the Rakshasas fed on.
“And he isn’t from Earth. So the prohibition doesn’t apply.”
I nodded. “But he’s shielded. If he gets close enough to the vortex, it may weaken his protection enough for them to get at him.”
“And it may do the same to us!”
“Do you have a better idea?” I demanded as the black cloud caught up with us.
“No,” he said, and swerved straight for the heart of the vortex. It had been my plan, but I screamed anyway, staring into the face of oblivion. Then Pritkin threw on the brakes and bumped across three currents before sliding to a halt on an inner one. It had a shorter orbit and whipped us around the phenomenon at a crazy pace.
We came rushing back around the vortex, Pritkin fighting the current to keep us from falling in, the car groaning and shaking in protest. And then we had to duck as Apollo came rocketing by in front of us. He must have gotten a lot closer to the phenomenon than we had, because his shields were virtually gone.
The Rakshasas realized it the same time I did and dove as one entity straight for him. We passed out of sight once more, and by the time we zoomed back around, the cloud of raw energy had been savaged. It looked like the Rakshasas didn’t have much reverence for gods of any sort.
Apollo broke and ran, but they pursued him over and around the vortex, weaving easily through the lines of energy. The massive battle churned up the currents, tossing us around like a ship on the high seas, and for a few moments, I couldn’t see anything. I finally caught sight of a much reduced energy sphere edging closer to the pulsing heart of the vortex.
That may have been deliberate—Apollo might have thought that the energy it was giving off would hurt the demons badly enough that they would give up the chase. But it didn’t seem to affect them much that I could see, possibly because they weren’t entirely in this world. Maybe that’s why they were able to pull back when he got a little too close and the vortex sucked him in.
The death of a god caused barely a ripple on the surface of the massive ley line sink at the heart of the vortex. But an energy wave radiated outward, picking up our small bubble of protection and throwing it completely out of the lines. Pritkin cursed, grabbed me around the waist and jumped clear.
We started to drift slowly downward in a chute formed from Pritkin’s shields, just as the star-filled sky above bled into golden dawn. The crash of Marsden’s car was barely audible so far below. But Pritkin winced as it smacked down and immediately went up in a ball of flame.
“We got out of this alive!” I reminded him, hardly able to believe it.
“You did,” he said, staring at the burning pile of metal far below. “Jonas is going to kill me.”
“Explain again why I am paying for this . . . this?” Mircea asked, indicating with a gesture the cackling drag queen who was all but dismantling Augustine’s shop. The great man himself was standing by the door, wincing at the carnage and fingering my AmEx. He still detested me, but it seemed my money was okay.
“I’m paying for it, or I will be,” I assured him. “Jonas says I have a month’s back salary coming.” Of course, at Augustine’s prices, that meant I might be able to pay Mircea off in a decade or so.
He sighed and laid his head back against the nice Louis XIV striped satin chair that Augustine had rushed to bring up for him. I’d had to fetch my own. I shifted uncomfortably. Everything hurt.
Mircea noticed and opened an eye to look at me. “You are going to give me a stroke,” he said flatly, with none of his usual charm. “I sent you away to keep you safe. Instead, you kill the Lord Protector—”
“That was Pritkin, and Saunders isn’t actually dead,” I corrected. “Jonas is circulating the rumor that he was tragically wounded while bravely battling Apollo’s forces.”
“Apollo didn’t have any forces.”
“Yes, but nobody knows that.” Luckily very few mages had witnessed what really occurred, and they’d mostly been Apprentices. Apprentices who currently had bad headaches from having their memories altered.
Marsden had decided that it was better to get his rival out of the way diplomatically rather than risk civil war when we could least afford it. He’d managed to convince the Senate, but Mircea didn’t appear pleased to have the former head of the Circle still with us. I had a sneaking suspicion that Saunders’ recovery wasn’t going to go well.
“And for an encore, you kill a god!” Mircea accused.
“Technically, the demons did that. Or maybe the ley line. We’re not completely—”
“So your argument is that you did nothing?”
“Isn’t that what you wanted me to do? Swim, read, maybe do a little shopping?”
“Yes! I would vastly prefer that you spend your days doing exactly that rather than come back to me covered in blood!”
“At least I came back.”
“This time.”
“Mircea . . .”
“Yes, you have a job to do, or so you keep informing me. I understand that—intellectually. Do not expect me to like it.”
“But no more handcuffs?”
He gave me one of his slow smiles, the first sign of good humor I’d seen. “Not unless you request them.”
I swallowed. “About that . . .”
He sighed and laid his head back again. “Why do I doubt that this is going to be a request for one in every color?”
“They come in colors?” He smiled without opening his eyes. “No! No, I mean, I’ve been thinking. We knew each other when I was a child, but now . . . there’s just so much I don’t know about you.”
“You know me,” he said, his forehead wrinkling. “Better than most.”
“But it doesn’t feel that way. I’ve never even been to your court!”
“That’s easily remedied. Indeed, you may visit sooner than you think. Mage Marsden is proposing to have your inauguration there. A goodwill gesture to the Senate after the unpleasantness with his predecessor.”
“Will the consuls still be there?” I asked nervously.
“Probably.” Mircea opened his eyes to frown at the ceiling. “The negotiations are dragging somewhat. The Consuls are currently asking why they should agree to an alliance when our chief adversary is dead.”
“They can’t be serious! We have a major war brewing in Faerie, Tony’s group is still on the loose and plotting who knows what, and we have no idea how Apollo’s fellow gods are going to take his untimely demise!”
“All valid points. Whether they will be enough to override centuries of suspicion and dislike is yet to be seen. The Consul believes they will, and I sincerely hope she is correct. I do not relish the idea of proceeding into Faerie on our own. But Antonio is hardly going to come out and face us after this.”
“So we have to go in and get him.” The thought didn’t make me any happier than it did Mircea. I’d been to Faerie once. I hadn’t enjoyed the experience.
“Yes, but that can wait for another day. To more important matters.” He looked at me severely. “Are you attempting to break up with me?”
“No! It’s not . . . That isn’t what I . . . I’d like to date,” I blurted out.
He raised an eyebrow. “By vampire law, we are already married.”
“But I’m not a vampire, Mircea! And I wasn’t exactly asked about the marriage thing!”
“You wish I had not claimed you?” His face shifted to the closed expression vampires use when they’re being especially guarded. Great. This was going about as well as I’d expected.
“No, that isn’t what I’m saying.”
I stopped and gathered my thoughts, trying to put what I felt into words. “I always viewed not having any attachments as a strength. I thought I was better off, not getting too close to people I’d probably just end up hurting. Sometimes, I still feel that way. I’m more of a target than before, more of a liability in some ways than I ever was. But I always will be now. And I can’t live the rest of my life closed off from everyone. . . .”
“Dulceaƫă,” Mircea said patiently. “I am a target independently of anything you will ever do. And I assure you, I can take care of myself.”
I shook my head. “Nobody can be sure of that, not anymore. We almost lost Rafe; we did lose Sal—”
His eyes closed, and a flicker of something crossed his face. “If I had broken her bond as she asked, Tony would not have been able to use her.”
“He would have found someone else. We were vulnerable because of the problems within our alliance. He exploited it.”
“Nonetheless, I will blame myself for that, always. And for Nicu’s death.”
I swallowed. I was still trying to deal with that myself. He’d died to protect me, and I’d barely even known him. And the only times I had talked to him, I’d mostly been yelling. Marco was right—there was a lot about vamps I still didn’t understand.
“At least Marco’s okay,” I said, thinking about the last time I’d seen him. He’d been assigned a bed in the clinic, while the penthouse was being remodeled. He’d looked surprisingly cheerful for a guy who’d been staked through the heart. That would have killed anyone below master status, but Sal hadn’t lived long enough to take his head, too, so Marco would recover.
“But it looks like I’m off guard duty for a while,” he’d informed me, and then he’d made a noise that sounded suspiciously like a giggle. I’d just stared. I’d never seen him so happy.
“I have been too busy of late,” Mircea said, watching Dee strip a pink negligee off a mannequin while a valiant salesman tried to shove her size fourteen foot into a maybe size eight shoe.
“I don’t think it’s going to fit,” the sweating salesman gasped.
“If I had a nickel for every time I’ve heard that,” she muttered, and shoved it home.
“You’ve done the best you could,” I told Mircea. “That’s all any of us can do. And that’s . . . I think that’s what I’ve come to realize. I can’t keep the people I care about safe by distancing myself. They’re at risk anyway; they’re always going to be. I just have to love them now, while I can. Now is all we have.”
“I am afraid I am not following your reasoning, dulceaƫă,” Mircea said gently. “You want closer relationships, yet you push me away?”
“I’m not putting this very well,” I said, frustrated. “What I’m trying to say is that the geis we were under gave us feelings for each other. But they were feelings we might never have had otherwise. I need to find out if what I feel is based on something more permanent than a spell gone awry. I want to get to know you. I want you to get to know me.”
“You wish to be courted?”
“If that’s what you want to call it. Yeah, I guess.” He looked thoughtful. I took a breath and almost did it—almost asked about the mysterious brunette. But then I let it out again without saying anything. Screw it. I’d had an awful week; I deserved a break. Besides, if I was going to his court, I’d have plenty of time to ask around. And if he did have a mistress . . .
“Is there a reason you are looking at me like that, dulceaƫă?”
“Like what?”
“The last time I recall seeing something similar was on the battlefield—from an adversary.”
“I’m not your adversary, Mircea. I just want to know you better.”
“And you cannot get to know me as we’ve been?”
“Not and keep a clear head, no!”
He smiled at that, and then his gaze shifted to a spot over my shoulder and it faded. “These doubts wouldn’t have anything to do with the company you’re keeping of late, would they?”
I didn’t get a chance to answer before the shop door was thrown open and a furious war mage stomped in. Pritkin spotted me and his eyes narrowed.
“You shaved my legs?!”
Mircea looked at me and folded his arms across his chest. I looked from one unhappy face to the other and suddenly remembered that I had somewhere else to be. “You know, Jonas said something about lessons,” I said quickly. And shifted.
ONYX
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