Embrace the Night
Karen Chance
Chapter 1
A weeping angel shattered in a crack of gray dust, sending its wings flying off in two directions.
It took a second for me to realize I wasn’t dead, and then I dove for the side of a nearby obelisk. I
pressed flat against the ground, feeling the mud seeping into my already drenched clothes, while a
barrage of shots struck sparks off the granite overhead. I was starting to suspect that this tomb raider
thing might not be as much fun as I’d hoped.
Of course, that was pretty much the story of my life lately. A chain of events that might very
charitably be classified as disasters had left me with the position of Pythia, the supernatural
community’s chief seer. The Silver Circle, a group of light magic users, had expected one of their
tame acolytes to inherit the office since it had happened that way for a few thousand years now.
They’d been less than thrilled when the power went to me instead: Cassie Palmer, untrained
clairvoyant, protégée of a vampire crime boss and known cohort of a renegade war mage.
Some people have no sense of irony.
The mages had expressed their displeasure by trying to send me off to explore the great mystery
of what lies in store for us after death. Since I wasn’t that curious, I’d been attempting to stay under
their radar. It didn’t look like I was doing so hot.
I decided to try for better cover beside a crypt, and was halfway there when something that felt
like a sledgehammer knocked me to the ground. A bolt of lightning exploded against a nearby tree,
causing the air to tingle and writhe with electricity and sending blue-white, hissing snakes scurrying
over a tangle of exposed roots. It left the tree split in half, blackened along the center like old
firewood, the air flooded with ozone and my skull hammering from the near miss. Above me,
thunder rolled ominously across the sky, an appropriate bit of sound effects that I would have
appreciated a lot more during a movie.
Speaking of irony, it would be really amusing if Mother Nature managed to kill me before the
Circle got the chance. I crawled in the general direction of the crypt, temporarily night-blind and
helpless, blinking away afterimages. At least I discovered why gun grips are ribbed: so when your
palm is sweating with abject terror, you can still manage to clutch the thing.
My new 9mm didn’t fit my hand as well as my old one, but it was rapidly becoming a familiar
weight. At first I’d decided it was okay to wear as long as I shot only at supernatural bad guys who
were already shooting at me. Lately, I’d had to broaden that definition to anytime my life was in
danger. I was currently leaning toward a slightly more comprehensive rule somewhere between
proactive self-defense and the-bastards-had-it-coming, which, if I survived long enough, I intended
to blame on my deranged partner rubbing off on me.
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I found the crypt by running into it face-first, scraping a cheek on the pitted limestone exterior. I
strained my ears, but there was no sign of my attackers. A hail of shots rattled against a nearby path,
ricocheting off the cobblestones to fly away in all directions. Okay, no sign other than the fact that
someone kept shooting at me.
I hugged the wall and told myself not to overreact and waste bullets. I’d already lobotomized a
cupid after a gust of wind blew a few leaves across it, giving it a fleeting sense of movement—and
that had been with the glow of an almost full moon to see by. It was worse now that the wind had
blown dark clouds in, and the spatter of rain made it impossible to hear quiet footsteps.
The firing finally stopped, but my whole body continued to shake, to the point that I dropped
the reserve clip I’d fumbled out of my pocket. The old one still had several rounds left, but I didn’t
want to run out at a crucial moment. Another shot hit the cupid I’d decapitated, shaving off one of its
little butt cheeks. I flinched and my foot kicked something that splashed into a nearby puddle. I got
to my knees, searching around in the grass for it and trying to curse quietly.
“A little to the left.” I whirled, gun up, heart pounding. But the dark-haired man leaning against
a moss-stained fountain didn’t look concerned. Maybe because he no longer had a body to worry
about.
I relaxed slightly. Ghosts I could deal with; I’d even been expecting them. Père Lachaise isn’t
Paris’ oldest cemetery, but it’s huge. I’d had to reinforce my shields to be able to see anything past
the green glow of thousands of ghost trails, crisscrossing the landscape like a crazy spiderweb. It was
the main reason I’d left my own ghostly helper behind. Billy Joe could be a pain, but I really didn’t
want him serving as a midnight snack for a bunch of hungry ghosts.
“Thanks.”
“You’re American.”
“Uh, yeah.” A bullet pinged against an iron railing nearby and I flinched. “How’d you know?”
“My dear.” He looked pointedly at my mud-spattered jeans, once-white tennis shoes and
soaked gray T-shirt. The last had been an impulse buy a few days ago, something to wear to target
practice to remind my exacting coach that I was still a beginner at this. Its quip, “I don’t have a
license to kill. I have a learner’s permit,” was starting to look really ironic now.
Lara Croft would have worn something a lot less mud-covered, and she would have had her hair
in a sexy style that still kept it out of her face. My own curly mop was at the stage where it was too
long to stay out of the way and too short to keep in a ponytail. As a result, I had wet blond strands
falling into my eyes and clinging to my cheeks, adding to the overall lack of cool.
“When good Americans die, they go to Paris,” the ghost said, after taking a drag on a small
cigarette. “But you’re not dead. I suppose the question must be, are you good?”
My hand finally closed over the clip, and I slammed it into place. I surreptitiously looked him
over, wondering what answer was likely to get me some help. I took in the long velvet jacket, the
silk cravat and the lazy smile. “Depends who you ask.”
“Prevarication, how divine! I always did get along better with sinners.”
“Then maybe you can tell me how many people are out there?”
Another ghost drifted up, wearing only a pair of low-rise blue jeans. He looked vaguely
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familiar, with shoulder-length brown hair, classic features and a slightly petulant pout. “About a
dozen. They just shot up my ugly-ass memorial.”
The older ghost sniffed. “Your legions of fans will doubtless have you another inside a week—
”
“Can I help it if I’m popular?”
“—and will then proceed to vandalize it and everything in the vicinity.”
“Hey, be cool.”
The older ghost bristled. “Don’t talk to me about cool, you preposterous pretender! I was cool! I
was the epitome of cool! For all intents and purposes, I invented cool!”
“Can you two keep it down?” I asked a little shrilly. Sweat trickled down one side of my temple
and into my eye, burning. I blinked it away and watched a few shadows slink closer. They existed
only at the edge of my vision, and seemed to disappear whenever I looked directly at them. Then a
spell exploded overhead, lighting up the area like a flare and giving me a clear view. Unfortunately,
it did the same for my attackers. The Gothic arch above my head immediately rang with shots,
causing bits of stonework to crumble on top of me as I ducked inside.
“This is ridiculous! You people are worse than the madmen Kardec attracts.” The ghosts had
followed me in. Of course. “Mystic, ha! The man never even rose, yet there’s always someone
praying or chanting or draping him with flowers—”
“He believed in reincarnation, man. Maybe he came back.”
I fought my way out of a large cobweb, and managed not to slip on the stone tiles, which were
slick with rain and decaying leaves. “Shut up!” I whispered viciously.
The older ghost sniffed. “At least the mystics aren’t rude.”
I squinted down at the vague squiggles that were supposed to be a map and tried to ignore him.
It might have been easier if I wasn’t soaking wet and filthy with a pounding headache. I really, really
wanted to get out of here. But, thanks to a certain devious master vampire, that wasn’t an option.
I was prowling around a cemetery in the middle of the night, dodging guard dogs, lightning
bolts and crazed war mages, because of a spell known as a geis. The vamp in question, Mircea, had
had it placed on me years ago, without bothering to get my permission or even remembering to
mention that he’d done it. Master vamps are like that, but in this case, there might have been more
than the usual arrogance behind his forgetfulness.
On the one hand, the spell provided me protection growing up—it marked me as his, meaning
that no sane vampire would touch me with a ten-foot pole. On the other, it was designed to ensure
loyalty to a single person: exclusive, complete and utter loyalty. Now that we were both adults, the
spell wanted to bind Mircea and me together forever, and it didn’t appreciate my noncooperation.
That was a problem, since people have been known to go mad from this thing, even committing
suicide rather than live with the constant, gnawing ache that was just one of the spell’s tricks when
thwarted. But sitting back and enjoying the ride wasn’t an option, either.
If the bond ever fully formed, our lives would be run by the dominant partner—which I had no
doubt would be Mircea—leaving me stuck as his eager little slave. And since he was a member in
good standing of the Vampire Senate, the governing body of all North American vampires, I would
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doubtless end up running their errands, too. The thought of what some of those requests might
be was enough to put me in a cold sweat. It was what the Circle feared—the Pythia under the control
of the vamps. And while I wasn’t in favor of their method of preventing it, I could grudgingly
concede the point: it would be a disaster.
Becoming Pythia had made me a target for anybody in the supernatural community who was
attracted to power—in other words, pretty much everyone—but it had bought me some time as far as
the spell was concerned. How much, I didn’t know. Meaning that I really needed that counterspell.
And rumor was, the only grimoire that contained a copy was buried somewhere around here.
Of course, it would help if I could read the damn map. I squinted at it, but the only illumination
was moonlight filtered through the remains of once beautiful stained-glass windows. Half of a seated
Madonna looked out onto a charcoal gray sky, with the occasional flash of lightning outlining
layered clouds. I had a flashlight, but turning it on would only make me that much better of a—
Something lunged at me out of the night. “Don’t shoot!” a man whispered.
He smelled of sweat, metal and dirt, plus a static crackle of nervous energy that was practically
his signature. I turned on the flashlight and saw what I’d expected: a shock of pale hair, which as
usual was making taunting gestures in the face of gravity, a square jaw, a slightly overlarge nose and
furious green eyes. The Circle’s most famous renegade and my reluctant partner, John Pritkin.
I breathed a sigh of relief and clicked my gun’s safety on. To know Pritkin was to want to kill
him, but so far I’d resisted temptation. “You shouldn’t sneak up on me like that!” I whispered.
“Why didn’t you shoot me?” he demanded.
“You told me not to.”
“I—that’s—” Pritkin seemed momentarily incoherent, so I shoved the gun’s barrel lightly
against his stomach. At least I’d thought it was his stomach. I’d only intended to show that I wasn’t
defenseless, but in a flash, I was slammed against the side of the crypt, my gun arm pinned to the
wall, my body stuck between the hard surface and a very angry war mage. I reluctantly admitted that
there may have been a fantasy or two that began with this scenario, but I doubted the evening was
going to end the same way.
“I knew it was you,” I told him before his ability to vocalize returned. “You smell like
gunpowder and magic.” That was truer than usual because his coat, a thick leather duster that hid his
weapon collection, had a large spot where the leather was crisped and curled up. Like maybe a spell
hadn’t missed him by much.
“Those are mages out there!” he whispered savagely. “So do they! And what the hell are you
still doing here?!”
“I have the map,” I reminded him.
“Give it to me and go!”
“And leave you here alone? There’s a dozen of them!”
“If you don’t leave right now…”
I raised my chin, even though I’d turned off the flashlight so he probably couldn’t see it.
“What? You’ll shoot me?”
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His hand clenched my shoulder, almost painfully. Don’t tempt the crazy war mage, I reminded
myself, just as a bullet sliced through the open doorway. It ricocheted several times around the
crypt’s inner walls before crashing through what remained of the Madonna. “If you’re here much
longer, I won’t have to!” he whispered furiously.
“Let’s just get the damn thing and we can both leave,” I said reasonably.
“In case it has somehow slipped your notice, this was a trap!”
“Damn it, you can’t trust anybody anymore!” The elderly French mage we’d visited in his
sweet little country cottage had seemed so reliable, with his Old World charm and his kind eyes—
and his lousy map that had sent us on the treasure hunt from hell. It wasn’t fair; the bad guys weren’t
supposed to look like someone’s grandfather. “And Manassier seemed so—”
“If the next word out of your mouth is ‘nice,’ I will make your life hell when we get back. Pure
hell.”
I didn’t bother to dignify that with a response. Pritkin was just…Pritkin. At some point I’d
learned to mostly roll with it. I’d often wondered if he gave the Circle half as much trouble before he
broke with them over his decision to support me. If so, you’d think they’d have thanked me for
taking him off their hands. Maybe they planned to send a nice bouquet to the funeral.
“Look, all we know for sure is that some mages got here ahead of us. Maybe we all decided to
burgle the place on the same night.” I didn’t really believe it—they’d attacked us almost as soon as
we’d arrived and we hadn’t even found anything. But I hated to give up on our best lead yet. And
leaving Pritkin to pursue it alone wasn’t an option. He had all the self-preservation instincts of a bug
near a shiny windshield.
A strong hand clenched my arm. “Ow!” I pointed out.
“Give me the damn map!”
“Not a chance.”
“Hey!” I looked up to see the younger ghost staring at us. “In case you missed it, people are
trying to kill you.”
“People are always trying to kill me,” I said irritably.
“The only way you’re dying tonight is if I kill you,” Pritkin informed me.
“I’ve been in relationships like that,” the ghost sympathized.
“We’re not in a relationship,” I muttered.
“Sheer bloody-minded—what?” Pritkin broke off his rant, which I hadn’t been listening to
anyway, to look around wildly. “What’s happening?”
“You mean you let him talk to you like that and you aren’t even getting any? Man, what a ripoff.”
“Nothing. Just a couple of spirits,” I said, shooting ghost #2 a look.
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“Hey, standing right here.”
“And,” his counterpart chimed in, “I resent that ‘just’ comment. We’re the two most active
spirits in this entire—”
“Active?” A hand moved down my arm, the touch both gentle and rough, calloused from
holding guns and doing push-ups and snapping people’s necks. “Don’t even think about it,” I told
Pritkin, then turned my attention back to the ghost. “How active?”
The older ghost preened slightly. “We see everything that goes on around here. The things I
could tell—”
“So, if there were hidden passageways, you’d know?” I asked, as Pritkin found my wrist. A
moment later, the map was snatched out of my hand. “Still not leaving,” I told him.
“Oh. You’re after the thing, aren’t you?” the younger ghost asked.
I decided not to wrestle Pritkin for the map, which wouldn’t be dignified. It also wouldn’t work.
“What thing?”
“The thing with the thing.” He waved a negligent hand. I was starting to suspect that if you died
stoned, your ghost stayed that way.
“Could you be a little more specific?” Before he could answer, there was a strange sound from
outside, a dim, high-pitched whine. I felt a hand on my back, viciously shoving me to the ground.
Then Pritkin was on top of me, crushing me into a fetal position while things exploded and rained
fire all around us.
Red and violet spots danced behind my tightly clenched lids for several long moments. There
were minute tremors in the ground, like the aftershocks of an earthquake, and my skin prickled with
leftover energy. When I cautiously opened my eyes, I saw starlight seeping in from a gaping hole in
the roof and clouds of disintegrated stone in the air.
Pritkin was on his feet again, firing at the mages, who fired back, gunshots echoing off the high,
close-packed monuments like firecrackers. Most of the time I thought he was a little too quick to opt
for the shoot-it-and-hope-it-dies solution. Other times, like when someone was trying to make a
colander out of my head, it seemed okay.
“Over there,” the younger ghost offered, pointing to the right. “Come on.” He slouched off,
ignoring a nearby snaky pathway in favor of a shortcut across the tombstone-littered grounds.
“One of the ghosts knows where the passage is!” I told Pritkin. He looked surprised and I
scowled. Just because I didn’t know seven ways to kill a guy with my elbow didn’t make me
completely useless.
He looked like he was about to argue about the wisdom of trusting random spirits, or possibly
my sanity. But the mages accidentally did me a favor by sending a spell that exploded with a
massive crack against a nearby chestnut tree. The burning trunk fell over, taking half the crypt with
it. Luckily, it wasn’t our half.
“Come on, then!” Pritkin yelled, grabbing me by the hand and starting off, as if this had been
his idea all along.
“This way!” I dragged him after the ghost as a fresh haze of bullets rattled off the rubble behind
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us.
I found it hard going: the soggy soil sucked at my shoes with every step and the rain made it
almost impossible to keep the flickering, pale image of our guide in sight. But Pritkin, damn him,
slipped through the granite obstacle course like he’d laid it out himself. “How are you doing that?” I
demanded the fourth time I knocked a knee into a very hard tombstone.
“Doing what?”
“You can see!” I accused.
“Here.” I felt a hand against my cheek for a split second, and Pritkin mumbled something. I
blinked, and suddenly everything had a weird, flat, grainy look to it, like bad TV reception. Leaf
shadows moved over his face as a gust of wind shook a tree, spattering drops of rain on us, and I
could just make out the edges of that familiar scowl.
“Why didn’t you do that before?” I demanded.
“I thought you were leaving before!”
“Do you two want this or not?” the ghost asked, hands on insubstantial hips. He’d stopped in
front of the image of a bored-looking woman leaning on a tombstone. Enough moss had grown over
her granite gown that it was practically green. Green and slimy, I discovered, after the ghost directed
me to tap her knee three times. Nothing happened.
“Now what?”
“You have to say the magic word.”
“Please!”
He laughed. “No, I mean a real magic word. To get the statue to move out of the way.”
A spell exploded in the branches of an overhanging oak and a bunch of burning leaves dropped
around me, threatening to set my hair alight. “What is it?!”
“Don’t know.” The ghost shrugged negligently. “It’s not like I need it.”
“What’s the problem?” Pritkin demanded, sending his whole arsenal of animated weapons at
the advancing line of dark shapes. His knives swooped and danced, striking sparks off their shields
with every pass, but it didn’t look like they were slowing our pursuers down much.
“The ghost doesn’t know the password!”
Pritkin shot me his best edge-of-murder glare and muttered one of his weird British swear
words. I don’t think it was the open sesame, but the spell he cast with his next breath worked almost
as well. The statue split straight down the middle to reveal a gaping cavern.
Inside was as dark as a well, just a black hole silhouetted against the electric sky. I pulled out
my flashlight and clicked it on, but it barely dented the darkness. Even worse, there were no stairs,
only an iron-rung ladder descending into a claustrophobic tunnel carved into solid rock.
“I’ve seen many treasure hunters go in,” the older ghost commented, having floated up beside
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me, “but few come out again. And those who do are empty-handed.”
“That won’t happen to us.”
“That’s what they all say,” he murmured, just as a spell burst overhead. I shoved the gun and
flashlight in my belt, grabbed the first rusty rung and half climbed, half slid to the bottom. Pritkin
followed practically on top of me, and as soon as we were both down, he sent a spell back up the
tunnel that caused a cave-in.
It blocked our pursuers, but it also cut off what little light there was. Once the rumble from the
falling rock stopped, we were in dead silence and utter darkness. Apparently even enhanced vision
needs something to work with, because I couldn’t see a thing.
I clicked the flashlight back on. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust, and when they did, I
yelped and stumbled back a step. The thin beam didn’t show much—it was like the dark down here
was hungry, eating the light almost as soon as it left the bulb. But I wouldn’t have minded seeing
even less. Along every side of a long corridor were bones arranged in patterns all the way to the low
ceiling. Water had seeped in from somewhere, and a lot of the skulls were crying green tears and
growing fuzzy green beards. It didn’t make them look less creepy.
“The catacombs,” Pritkin said, before I could ask.
“The what?”
“The Parisians started using old limestone quarries as underground cemeteries a few hundred
years ago.” He took the flashlight and pointed it at the map, frowning. “I didn’t think they extended
out this far.”
“How far?”
“If these tunnels connect to those in the city, then hundreds of kilometers.” He started shining
the light here and there. I wished he’d stop; it lit puddles of water in the empty eye sockets, making
the faces seem to move. “There have been stories of catacombs under Père Lachaise for years, but I
thought they were merely rumors.”
I stared at a nearby skull. It was bodiless, sitting atop a stack of what looked like femurs, and
was missing the jawbone. But somehow it still seemed to be grinning. “They look pretty real to me.”
The flashlight picked out a glint of gold, half buried in the mortar keeping a line of bones in
place. I scraped at the cement with my finger, and it was so old that pieces of it just flaked off. The
golden circle I revealed wouldn’t budge, but I did get a better look at it. It appeared to be formed out
of a snake that was chowing down on its own tail. “The ouroboros,” Pritkin said, coming up behind
me.
“The what?”
“An ancient symbol for regeneration and eternity.”
“Like a cross?”
“Older.” He shone the light around some more. “The Paris coven must have created their own
catacombs, possibly during the Inquisition. Witches and wizards were sometimes disinterred and
their bodies mutilated or burnt. This would have been one way of preventing that.”
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“You mean this is a mages’ graveyard?”
“Possibly. The limestone pits were dug by the Romans. They were there for centuries before the
Parisian authorities decided to make use of them. Perhaps the magical community had the idea first.”
From up the ladder came a sudden rain of stone and rubble. It sounded like our pursuers weren’t
giving up. “Can you shift us here?” he asked, pointing to a vague squiggle on the map.
My new job had more downsides than I could count, but there were a few perks, too. Well, one,
anyway. The power that came with the office of Pythia allowed me to move myself and one or two
others around in space and time. It was a damn useful weapon, and so far my only one. But it had its
limitations. “I can’t shift unless I know where I’m going.”
“You’ve time-shifted before to places you’ve never been!”
“That’s different.”
There was a sudden avalanche, and a spell crashed into the floor behind us, igniting a storm of
violent white light. It hit the skulls, causing them to crack and splinter, then bounced off the opposite
wall, slinging stone fragments everywhere like flying daggers. Pritkin shielded me from the worst of
the blast, then grabbed my hand and towed me down the corridor.
Since I didn’t go bouncing off any walls, I assumed he could still see something, but to me it
was a headlong plunge into nothingness. He’d clicked off the flashlight, I suppose to make it harder
for our pursuers to track us, but without it the tunnels were so dark I couldn’t tell whether my eyes
were open or closed. “How different?” he demanded.
“The power lets me see other times, past places. Not the present,” I explained, flinching.
Afterimages from the blast were making reddish shapes leap in front of my vision, and I kept
thinking I was about to plow into something. “If I want to do spatial shifts in the here and now, I
have to be able to visualize where I want to go.” And a shaky line on a bad map wasn’t even close to
good enough.
The corridor abruptly narrowed, to the point that it was impossible to continue side by side.
Pritkin went first, pulling me along at something approaching a run. It was hot, the air was close, and
the ground underneath our feet wasn’t anything like level. It was soon obvious why someone would
put a treasury here; without clear directions, you could wander around for months and never find
anything.
Pritkin stopped, so suddenly that I ran into him. He spread the map out on the wall and handed
me the flashlight. I clicked it on and saw a much less organized scene than before: bones had
tumbled out of the walls and littered the floor, and in some cases they were mounded up in piles with
no effort at arrangement at all. Unlike the ones in the main corridor, these looked like they’d just
been thrown around any old way. I’m not usually sentimental about the dead—I meet too many of
them—but it still seemed wrong. Friends and enemies, parents and children, all jumbled up, with
nothing to give a history, a date of death, even a name.
“It would help if you shone the torch on the map,” Pritkin commented caustically. I obliged,
and the beam lit up his face, too. Its expression wasn’t reassuring. “Are your ghosts here?” he
demanded.
“No. They wouldn’t follow us beyond the cemetery limits.” And it felt like we’d left those
behind a while ago.
“What about others?”
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“Why do you want to know?”
“Because this map is less than adequate! Some directions would be helpful.”
I shook my head. “These bodies were disturbed. I think they were brought here from their
original resting places.”
“Meaning?”
“That their ghosts would have stayed behind.” Not to mention that if it was mages buried here,
they wouldn’t have left ghosts anyway. Supernatural creatures just didn’t, as far as I knew.
“But their bones are here.”
“Doesn’t matter. Spirits can haunt a house, even when their bodies aren’t there. It’s all about
what was important to them in life, the place where they felt a connection.” I looked around and
repressed a shiver. “I don’t think I’d feel real connected to this place, either.”
Pritkin finally settled on a direction and we took off again, sliding through gaps in the rock that,
at times, were barely big enough for me. I don’t know how he got through, but based on the muttered
comments that drifted back, it wasn’t without the loss of some flesh. Finally we came to a slightly
wider corridor, meaning that we still had to go single file but could pick up speed. For a minute, I
thought we’d succeeded in losing our pursuers, but as usual, Murphy’s Law caught up with us.
We came barreling around a corner only to run almost directly into a party of dark shapes.
There were yells and bullets and spells, with one of the last exploding against Pritkin’s shields,
popping them like heat on a soap bubble. “Run!” he snarled in my face. I heard rumbling, like distant
thunder, and then the ceiling came down with a roar that consumed the world.
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Chapter 2
It took me a few seconds to realize that I still wasn’t dead. I was in a crouch, my hands protecting
my head, expecting an attack, but the corridor was as silent as the tomb it was. The only people
besides us were cemented into the walls or buried under the pile of rubble that their own spell had
brought down on their heads. I collapsed back against the floor, breathing raggedly, and tried not to
scream.
After a minute, I felt around for the flashlight and my hand closed over a cool plastic cylinder. I
clicked it on, relieved to find that it still worked, and saw Pritkin lying on his side. He wasn’t
moving, and he had blood smeared through the stubble on his chin, bright and frightening. Murphy
and his little law can go to hell, I thought furiously, shaking him frantically.
“Would you kindly stop doing that?” he asked politely.
I stared. I wasn’t entirely sure, but a polite John Pritkin might be a sign of the apocalypse. “Did
you hit your head?” I tried to move closer to get a better look, and my knee accidentally knocked a
shower of stone pebbles onto the oozing gash on his forehead.
“If I tell you I’m all right, will you stop trying to help me?” Every muscle in my body relaxed at
the familiar tone, all ruffled feathers and crisp impatience. That was better; that was solid ground.
“So, still alive?” I croaked.
“Damn right.”
He just lay there, though, so I shone the beam around, giving him a minute. It took a few
seconds to realize exactly what I was seeing. Pritkin had apparently gotten his shields back up,
because they glowed blue and waterlike, rippling slowly in the yellow beam. But the cave ceiling
wasn’t above them anymore. Or, to be more accurate, it was there—it was just no longer attached to
anything.
Huge, half-quarried blocks, some still bearing ancient chisel marks, lay on top of the suddenly
very thin-looking shields. Every time they flexed, small showers of rubble and grit slid along the top
and trickled down the sides, making soft shushing sounds in the quiet. The larger pieces had nowhere
to go, but they moved enough to make it obvious that they weren’t anchored to anything. Even the
smaller, cobblestone-sized chunks would hurt like hell if they fell on us, and I didn’t have to wonder
what the larger ones would do. Two mages were giving gory proof of that barely a yard away.
I could have reached out and touched them, where they lay caught between the shield and the
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cave-in. Their bodies were oddly contorted, trapped in the stone and rubble like ancient fossils,
their open eyes shining in the reflected light. Except that fossils don’t usually come complete with
evidence of how they got that way, at least not in Technicolor brilliance.
The red-streaked white of newly shattered bone stood out starkly against the mellow gold of the
older specimens. One hand rested against the blue of the shield, caught in a gesture of defense, as if
human strength could stand against the weight of a mountain. It made me wonder for an insane
moment if it would leave a red outline, if the next time Pritkin raised his shields, it would manifest,
too.
The air suddenly felt a lot heavier in my lungs. Despite the large number of impossible things
that had happened to me lately, my brain couldn’t quite seem to deal. It was loudly insisting that
huge slabs of rock that weighed maybe a ton each didn’t just hover in the air and that we were both
going to die any second now.
I made a small, choked sound, but managed to swallow the bubble of hysteria before it could
tear loose. If Pritkin had been a second later getting his protection back up, there would be four new
bodies entombed down here instead of two. But there weren’t. We were safe. Sort of.
Pritkin had rolled onto his back and was staring at me, hard and intent. “This is exactly why I
told you to go home.”
“I have a devastating comeback for that,” I informed him with dignity. “Just not right now.”
“Do you want to give up?” I blinked. I could count on zero fingers the number of times he had
asked my opinion. “Because there are almost certainly more of them back there.”
I remembered the ghost saying that there were twelve mages all together. Which meant that
behind the rockfall, ten more were still hanging around, unless they were caught somewhere I
couldn’t see. Or unless they’d left, assuming that the cave-in had killed us. But no, I wasn’t that
lucky.
“You know what’s at stake,” I reminded him.
“I thought you’d say that.” Pritkin levered himself to his knees with a grunt. The rubble shifted
along with him, enough to bring another large slab crashing down. The jagged underside landed only
a few feet away from my face.
Pritkin’s voice, laced with its usual impatience, cut through my panic. “Let’s go.”
“Go?” It came out as more of a squeak than I’d intended. “How? Because I can shift us back
home but I can’t shift us beyond this. I don’t know what’s on the other side or even where the other
side is—”
“Just stay close.” Before he’d even finished speaking, his shields had changed from fluid waves
to hard crystal, reflecting the cave-in through a hundred sharp facets. A few more rocks fell off,
allowing more to rain down from above, striking off the new, rigid surface with dull thuds. Pritkin
started crawling forward, and his shields went with him, almost scooping me off my feet before I got
with the program and moved up close behind him.
It wasn’t until I saw the body of one of the mages slide down the side and roll behind us that I
completely realized what was happening. Our small bubble was plowing through the rocks and dirt
like a crystal mole intent on making a new burrow. We hit a wall once, looking for an entrance that
wasn’t there, but we found it a few feet to the left and burst through, the cave collapsing in on itself
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behind us.
Pritkin dropped his shields with an audible sigh, and the dust we’d dislodged in our escape
flooded in, almost blinding me. We forged ahead to get away from the choking cloud, which had no
way to disperse in an area without wind or open air. But before we’d gone ten yards, we ran into
what felt like another cave-in.
Once I blinked the dirt out of my eyes, I realized what I was seeing. A narrow tunnel stretched
out in front of us, filled halfway to the ceiling with what looked like a mile of bones. Pritkin climbed
on top of the broken human mass, flashing the light around. “There’s a hole in the wall up ahead. It
probably leads to another tunnel.”
I eyed the pile of bones uneasily. Anything kept in close proximity to a person’s aura eventually
imprints with a psychic skin. I’d experienced more horror stories from inadvertently brushing up
against a strong trigger than I could count. And I couldn’t think of a stronger trigger than an actual
body part.
“Hurry, damn it!” Pritkin thrust a hand down to me as the sound of voices echoed dimly from
the corridor behind us. Somebody had heard our exit.
I hefted myself up gingerly, before I could think about it too much. The bones were old and dry,
and crunched sickeningly under my weight. Many splintered, sending little knives into my palms and
tearing my jeans, but there were no psychic flashes. Moving them must have ruptured any imprints
that had formed.
When Pritkin said a hole in the wall, he wasn’t kidding. I could barely squeeze through the
thing, and it sounded from his language like he’d scraped off more than a little skin himself.
“Move!” he whispered, giving me a push in the small of my back. I scrambled inside the small rockhewn
cavern on the other side of the hole, and almost tumbled down a set of stairs that started after
only a few feet.
The claustrophobically low stairwell was extremely uninviting; mostly I just saw the darkness
that pooled in every niche and corner. I really didn’t want to go down there. Then a spell hit the
ceiling behind me with a crack like cannon fire and I reconsidered, scrambling down the stairs ahead
of Pritkin.
A second spell hit while we were still on the steps. It went on and on, like a slow-motion bomb
blast, causing gravel to pepper the back of my hands and neck like hail. It sent me sliding down the
stairs, but the vibrations rode up through my legs, making it almost impossible to find a foothold.
And then it didn’t matter because there was no foothold to find. The rock disintegrated beneath my
feet, and I tumbled through darkness and empty air before slamming into freezing water.
It took me a moment to realize I wasn’t drowning. The water came only up to my waist, but it
was like ice and the cold shot right up my spine. Worse was the by-now-familiar billowing cloud of
dust, trapping me in a choking haze. Instinctively, I sloshed farther away from the rockfall, trying to
breathe, and found myself treading water. I grabbed a moss-covered skull that jutted out from the
wall, my fingers finding purchase in the eye sockets. I held on, too grateful to be repulsed, gasping in
great lungfuls of air.
“Pritkin!” It was barely a croak, but a moment later the flashlight beam hit my eyes, blinding
me.
“Still alive?”
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I tried to answer, but my lungs decided this would be a good moment to expel all the foreign
matter I’d breathed in, and I ended up heaving and choking. I lost my grip on the slimy bone and slid
under the frigid water. For a long, terrifying moment, I was lost in an endless sea of black that
immediately chilled me to the core. Then two broad hands were fumbling for a grip on my shoulders,
pulling me back to the surface, reminding me where up and down were.
“Miss Palmer!”
I spat out a mouthful of limestone paste, the result of oily water mixed with dust, and gasped in
some air. “Damn right.”
Pritkin nodded and flashed the light around, giving glimpses of a corridor where the floor
rippled oddly and everything was suddenly shades of gray and pale, unearthly green. It looked like
the entire lower levels had flooded. I can swim, but I wasn’t in love with the idea of navigating a
dark underground stream with barely enough headroom to breathe.
“I’ll deal with this,” Pritkin said grimly. “Shift out of here.”
“And if they keep coming?”
“I’ll manage.”
And he called me bloody-minded. I took another breath to inform my lungs that asphyxiation
would have to wait, and pushed back off into the flood. “Just swim.”
Pritkin didn’t answer, unless you count a curse, although that could have been due to the spell
that hit the water behind us, instantly raising the temperature from chilled to boiling. I screamed, and
coherent thought fled. I didn’t think, just grabbed his hand and shifted.
A second later, we landed in the same corridor, but with no dust cloud, no mages and no flood.
I’d been treading water in the other time, so I was only a few feet off the ground. Pritkin,
unfortunately, had been floating, and he fell from a little farther. Like about six feet.
He hit the rocky floor with a thud, a curse and a crack, the last from the demise of the flashlight.
I tried to ask how he was, but a stitch was biting deep into my side and, for a long moment it was
impossible to draw oxygen into my lungs. I slid down the wall to a seated position because my knees
suddenly felt too rubbery to be reliable.
“What happened?” Pritkin gasped after a moment. With no flashlight and no deadly spells
zipping around, it was pitch-dark, but from the direction of his voice, it sounded like he was still on
the floor.
“I shifted us back in time,” I managed to croak.
I decided that it probably wasn’t good that I was still feeling shaky and nauseated despite being
this close to the floor and completely motionless. I couldn’t figure out what was wrong. I’d shifted
only twice today, once to get us to Paris from Manassier’s cottage and once just now, yet I was
exhausted. It looked like bringing another person along for the ride took a lot out of me. Too bad no
one had bothered to give me the manual.
“A little warning next time!”
“You’re welcome.”
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“When are we?”
I spit out more chalky-tasting dust. Now I knew why Lara Croft always carried a canteen. My
body was dripping, but my throat was parched. I swallowed dry, while running through the mental
Rolodex my power gives me. “Seventeen ninety-three.”
“What? Why?”
“Because I didn’t feel like being boiled alive?”
“You could have shifted us back a day, a week! This is no bloody use at all!”
Of course, I thought sourly, Lara Croft would also have some nice convenient techie thing to
get her out of this. And a partner who wasn’t a complete ass. I cautiously stood up and found to my
surprise that I was only faintly dizzy. I strained my ears, but all I heard was my own harsh breathing
and a faint drip, drip of water from somewhere.
“Let’s go,” I said, fumbling around until I found Pritkin’s hand. His skin was cold from the
water, and his pulse was fast but not bad. Not, for example, like mine, which felt like it could burst a
vein. I needed to make sure I didn’t have to shift again anytime soon. Like for the rest of the week.
Pritkin stayed where he was. “Go? Where?”
“To find the Codex! I thought it might be nice to look for it without somebody shooting at us
for a change.”
“An excellent sentiment. Except for the small matter of the Paris coven being one of the oldest
in Europe. They may have abandoned this facility in our time, but in this era there are doubtless
mages all over the place. Not to mention snares and traps. If we haven’t already tripped a protection
ward, we soon will!”
“Do you have another suggestion?”
“Yes. Shift us out!” Even in complete darkness I was positive I could see his glare.
I sucked in a breath, more annoyed than I could remember—well, more annoyed than before
John Pritkin, anyway. “Why didn’t I think of that?”
“You have shifted multiple times in a day before—”
“And it wiped me out before.”
“You never mentioned that.”
“You never asked.”
There was a brief pause. “Are you all right?”
“Yeah, peachy.” I really hated his suggestion, but I couldn’t think of a better one. “Let’s at least
clear the corridor first,” I said in compromise. “Then I’ll try to set us back a little early, before the
fireworks start.”
It took forever to get down that corridor, not because of the darkness but because Pritkin was
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certain someone or something was about to jump us. But the only problems were the usual—
heat, bad air and the fun of trying not to fall on the uneven floor or scrape off a little more skin on
the wall. We finally came to a branch in the path and Pritkin stopped. “Are you certain you’re up to
this?”
“What’s your plan if I say no?”
“Wait here until you say yes.”
“Then I guess I’m up to it.” I don’t suffer from claustrophobia, but I was getting really tired of
those tunnels. I gripped his hand tighter, focused on our era and shifted.
This time the world melted around us slowly, like paint dissolving in water, bleeding away in
slow drips. I normally don’t feel the passing of years, just a weightless free fall that ends with me
whenever I planned to be. I felt it this time. Reality rippled around us in a nauseating, frictionless,
gravity-free waver. I was suddenly grateful I couldn’t see, because what I could feel was terrifying:
For a long moment, I was a tearing stream of dislocated atoms, consciousness ripped apart, with a
body that was so elongated it neither began nor ended.
Then I snapped back into myself, only to have the whole process start again. There were
snatches of conversation, a few notes of music and what sounded like another explosion or cave-in,
all in quick succession, like someone flipping a radio too fast. And I finally realized what was
happening. This trip wasn’t one long jump, but a series of smaller hops, with us flashing in and out
of other times as we slowly made our way back to our own.
I could feel time, and it was heavy, like swimming through molasses. Pushing through the
centuries was like running a marathon. In the dark. With weights tied to my legs.
When we finally broke through, it felt like oxygen when drowning—shocking, unexpected,
miraculous. I’d half expected to materialize underwater, but apparently we’d passed the flooded area,
because I stumbled into a mostly dry wall. I sat down abruptly, tilting my head back, swallowing a
relief so sharp it made me light-headed.
Pritkin crawled over to lean against the wall next to me. “Are you all right?”
“Stop asking me that,” I said, then had to go very still to deal with the nausea. It felt like my
stomach had been a couple seconds behind the rest of me, and when it caught up it wasn’t happy to
be there.
“I take it that’s a yes.”
I swallowed, still tasting dust, and told myself that throwing up would be very unprofessional.
“Yeah. It’s just…the learning curve can be a little rough.”
After a few minutes of sitting quietly with my eyes closed, I managed to relax and start
breathing evenly. “You don’t have to do this,” Pritkin said. “I could—”
“I couldn’t shift out of here right now if my life depended on it,” I said truthfully.
“Your power shouldn’t fluctuate this greatly,” he told me, and I could hear the puzzled frown in
his voice.
“The power doesn’t fluctuate. My ability to channel it does. The more tired I am, the harder it
gets.”
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“But it shouldn’t be this difficult,” Pritkin repeated stubbornly. “My power doesn’t—”
“Because it’s yours!” Damn it, I didn’t have the breath for one of our long, drawn-out
arguments right now. “This isn’t mine. I wasn’t born with it. It’s on loan, remember?”
The power hadn’t originated with the Pythias, who had once been the priestesses of an ancient
being calling himself Apollo. I’d met him exactly once, when he’d promised to train me. So far, he’d
paid that promise the same amount of attention he had my objections over receiving the office in the
first place: none. Unfortunately, I didn’t have anywhere else to turn.
Unlike most Pythias, who had been trained for a decade or two on the ins and outs of their
position, my intro to the office had lasted about thirty seconds—just long enough for the last
incumbent to shove the power off on me before she died. And everyone else who might have given
me a few pointers was under the control of the Circle.
We sat there for a while in silence. I eventually summoned the strength to pull off my shoes and
toss my waterlogged socks against the far wall, where they landed with little splats. It didn’t help
much because I just had to put the wet shoes back on.
“Before you completed the ritual to become Pythia, your power controlled how and when it
manifested,” Pritkin said, as I dragged myself to my feet. I’d almost fallen asleep for the second time
against his shoulder, wet clothes, hard floor and all. “Is that correct?”
“Yeah. I was only allowed in the driver’s seat after I bought the car, so to speak.” Which was
better than getting thrown back to another century every time I turned around, to fix whatever was
about to get messed up—usually without having a clue what it might be.
“Then you must start monitoring your endurance. Otherwise, you could become trapped in
another time or overtax your system, possibly resulting in serious injury.”
“You don’t say?” I started down the corridor, my feet feeling like they were encased in cement.
“I’d have never figured that out on my own.”
“I am serious.” Pritkin grabbed my arm, in his favorite spot, right over the bicep. I was probably
going to have the permanent indentation of his fingers there someday. “You must begin
experimentation, to discover your limits. How many times can you shift before you reach
exhaustion? Does going farther back in time cause more of a drain than more recent shifts? What
other powers over time do you possess?”
“If I’m not letting someone piggyback along, three or four, depending on how tired I am to start
with; hell, yes; and I don’t really want to know,” I answered him, in order. “Now, can we deal with
the current crisis, please, and leave the twenty questions for later?”
Pritkin shut up, but with a meaningful silence that said this wasn’t over. I let him brood while I
concentrated on not falling on my face. We felt our way down another dark, dusty corridor.
We finally found the storeroom by the simple method of running into it. Or, to be more
accurate, into the rusty iron-work gate that blocked the entrance. I backed up a few steps while
Pritkin scuffled around. I heard a match strike and suddenly I could see. Watery yellow light filtered
outward from a small lantern set in a niche, allowing him to check the area for booby traps. He
didn’t find any, which seemed to worry him more than the reverse.
“What’s wrong? Manassier said this place was abandoned.”
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Pritkin ran a hand over his hair, which despite the water and the sweat and the limestone dust
was still acting like an independent entity. “Can you shift yet?”
“Maybe.”
“If anything goes wrong, you are to shift away immediately. Do you understand?”
“Sure.”
Pritkin shot me a suspicious look, and I gave him my best bland expression right back. He’d
asked if I understood, and I’d said yes. I hadn’t agreed to anything.
He smeared his finger across the door mechanism, cutting through an inch of dust and grime.
Something clicked and he pulled back before cautiously nudging the door with his toe. It swung
inward obligingly, but he hesitated on the threshold. “I don’t like it. This is too easy.”
I personally thought easy was just fine. In fact, it was about damn time easy showed up.
“Maybe our luck is chang—”
Pritkin stepped into the room and disappeared with a strangled sort of sound. “Pritkin!” There
was no answer. I knelt by the threshold, but there was nothing to see—only a small, empty cave,
with no exit, and no mage.
I got a death grip on the iron bars of the door and reached out. My hand encountered nothing
but dusty limestone for about two feet, then disappeared into the floor. I snatched my arm back, but
there didn’t appear to be any damage. An illusion, then.
I stretched out on the floor, closed my eyes and leaned over, to the point that my forehead
would have hit stone if there really had been a floor there. When it didn’t, I opened my eyes in
blackness. After a moment, my sight adjusted to show me dirty fingers, white with strain, clinging to
a shard of limestone three or four yards down. They were human, and below them, almost out of
sight, was a familiar, spiky head.
“Grab my hand and I’ll shift us out,” I called, hoping I could actually do it. The head snapped
up.
“What did I just tell you?!” Pritkin demanded.
“Hi, I’m Cassie Palmer. Have we met?”
Steel entered the suddenly soft tones. “Miss Palmer. Move away from the edge. Now.”
“I’m not going to fall in,” I told him irritably.
“Neither did I! There’s something down here.” I couldn’t see Pritkin’s face very well, just a
pale blur against the shadows, but he didn’t sound happy. Some people thought he had only one
mode—pissed off. In reality, he had plenty of them. Over the past few weeks, I’d learned to tell the
difference between real pissed off, impatient pissed off and scared pissed off. I suspected that this
was the last kind. If so, that made two of us.
That feeling amped up a few notches when he cursed and fired several rounds at something out
in the darkness. The faint, acrid smell of gunpowder floated up to me as I wiggled forward, keeping
my legs spread, hoping that if I distributed my weight over a larger surface I wouldn’t cause a rock
slide. I stretched until I heard something pop in my shoulder, but I wasn’t even close. And if I
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couldn’t touch him, I couldn’t shift him.
I bit my lip and stared up at the floor that wasn’t there. It was kind of odd seeing it from this
angle, as if the ocean’s surface had been smeared with dirt and pebbles. It didn’t help my
concentration, so I pulled back up to a sitting position and stared at the top of it instead.
Once upon a time, my reaction to scary things had been to run and hide. It was an effective
strategy for staying alive in the good old days when all I had to worry about was a homicidal
vampire. The difference between then and now was that once upon a time I’d had problems I really
could outrun. Now I had duties and responsibilities, the kind of things that are always with you.
There were about a dozen nightmares vying for the top spot every day, each of them spectacularly
horrible in its own way. And right at the top of the list was the fear that I’d have to stand by and
watch another friend die trying to help me.
I was suddenly really glad I couldn’t see the bottom.
The rock felt crumbly under my fingers as I slithered over the side. Or maybe that was my
hands shaking. A cascade of small rocks disappeared beyond the illusion and some of them must
have hit Pritkin, because I heard him swear again.
“What the hell are you—”
“Sheer bloody-mindedness, remember? And can you see my leg?”
I was holding on to the edge of the chasm by my arms and elbows, and still felt unbelievably
unsteady. I carefully did not look down, but for a few seconds, I strained to hear the rocks hit
bottom. I never did.
I tried to feel around with my toe without falling off, but met only air. Damn it, what if I needed
to be touching bare skin? Why hadn’t I thought to remove my shoes first? I tried toeing one off, but
the water had made the sneaker shrink around my foot. “Grab my ankle.”
A lot of less than genteel language echoed off the walls. “I can’t grab anything without letting
go!”
“You have two arms!”
“Listen to me.” Pritkin’s voice was low and controlled, the tone he used when he was
pretending to be reasonable. “I can’t let go of the gun. There’s something down here. It pulled me in.
It could get bored with me at any moment and come after you. You have to—” He broke off at the
sound of shouts and explosions and booted feet echoing down the corridor. “Shift, goddamn it!”
“Grab my leg!”
I lowered myself down to the point that my head was barely over the top of the chasm, but still
touched nothing. The damn rock was falling apart under my fingers and nervous sweat was making
my palms slippery. My arms were sending sharp little pains up to my shoulders and there was no
purchase on the side of the chasm for my feet. How the hell far down was he?
And then it didn’t matter, because a pair of booted feet stopped right in front of my eyes. I
craned my neck enough to see an older man with salt-and-pepper hair and pale gray eyes smiling
down at me. Manassier. Well, didn’t that just explain a lot.
“I didn’t think you would get this far,” he told me in his thick accent. And to think, only that
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afternoon, I’d found it attractive.
Somewhere along the line I’d bitten my tongue hard enough to taste copper. I swallowed blood.
“Surprise.”
He shrugged. “No matter. I still collect the bounty.”
“There’s a bounty?”
“Half a million euros.” His smile grew. “You are about to make me rich.”
“Half a million? Are you kidding me? I’m the Pythia. I’m worth way more than that.”
He took out a gun, a Sig Sauer P210, which I recognized because of the shooting lessons Pritkin
had been giving me. My aim wasn’t any better, but I could identify all kinds of guns now. Even the
one about to kill me.
“I’m a simple man,” Manassier said, “with simple needs. Half a million will do nicely.”
It figured that I’d get the nongreedy crook. I swallowed a crazy urge to laugh. “You don’t have
to shoot me,” I gasped. “I can’t hold on much longer anyway.”
“Yes, but if you slip, the Circle may say you died of natural causes and not pay the bounty. And
then all this was for nothing.”
“Yeah. That’d be a shame.”
He clicked the safety off. “Now hold still and this won’t hurt.”
“That would be a nice change.” My body felt like it weighed a ton, my arms were liquid with
fatigue, and my shoulders were aching in their sockets. It would be such a relief to just let go.
So I did.
I heard him yell something in French and felt a bullet whiz by my head, but it was unimportant
because I was falling, and there was nothing to hold on to, just sliding dirt and limestone rocks
crumbling beneath my hands. My arms flailed wildly, grasping for the one thing I had to find, but for
a long second I felt only air. Then my fingers collided with something warm and alive and I grabbed
it and we were both falling. There was a dizzying rush of air and my power wouldn’t come and all I
could think was that I’d killed us both—then my brain whited out and my heart tried to stop and
reality twisted and bent around us.
And we tumbled into a casino lobby half a world away.
I hadn’t judged things perfectly because of the whole abject terror thing, and we fell from about
four feet above the ground. Pritkin hit the floor first, with a pained grunt, with me clinging to his
back. And then everything got incredibly still for a minute, as it always did whenever I survived
something insanely dangerous and really stupid. The fact that I recognized the phenomenon probably
meant it had happened a few too many times. I lay there quivering, hearing an upsurge in the polite
babble of the guests and not caring. All I could think was, oh, thank God, I didn’t kill us.
After a stunned moment, I coughed hard and rolled off. My face was dusty, my palms were
scraped raw and I was panting and limp. Various muscle groups were twitching at random, seizing
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up with tight bursts of pain and then releasing. I felt like bursting into tears and screaming in
triumph all at the same time.
Pritkin finally groaned and sat up. He was pale and sweating profusely, with damp hair
plastered to his forehead. He had cuts on his face and hands and burns on his forearm.
I wanted to touch him, to reassure myself that we’d both actually survived, but I didn’t dare. A
gal could lose a hand that way. So I just stared at him instead, so glad to be alive that my aching back
and trembling arms and ferocious headache hardly registered at all. “That was fun,” I croaked.
“Only, not.”
Pritkin hauled me into a sitting position, one dirty, scarred hand cupping the back of my neck.
“Are you all right?” His voice was sharp and biting, with a slightly panicked edge.
“I told you to stop asking—”
He shook me, and despite it being one-handed, it made my teeth rattle. “If anything like that
ever happens again. You. Leave. Me. Behind. Do you understand?”
I would have argued, but I was feeling a little shocky for some reason. “I’m not good at
abandoning people,” I finally said.
A front-desk person scurried over, first-aid kit in hand, but Pritkin snarled at the poor guy and
he quickly backed up a step. “Then get good at it!”
He stomped off, limping, one shoulder hanging at an odd angle. “You’re welcome,” I
murmured.
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Chapter 3
Pritkin and I had landed at Dante’s, Vegas’ cross between a haunted house and a casino. It was
currently what he referred to as our base of operations and I called our hideout. And, as hiding places
went, it ranked pretty high. Not only was it a well-warded, vampire-run property, but we’d recently
helped to trash a large piece of it. It seemed unlikely that many of our enemies would think to look
for us there. At least, that was the plan.
I was sitting in Purgatory, the lobby bar, the next afternoon, trying to scalp a shrunken head,
when a vampire walked in. He was swathed in a dark cloak and hood that would have looked
theatrical anywhere else, but the prickle at the base of my spine told me what he was. It looked like
the plan pretty much sucked.
I watched him out of the corner of my eye while I finished dissecting the head. The clump of
matted black hair finally came off more or less intact. I put down the piece of molded plastic I’d
been working on and picked up the real deal, which was perched on an overturned ashtray nearby. It
glared at me balefully out of one shriveled, raisinlike eye. “I can’t believe it’s come to this,” it
complained. “Somebody kill me now.”
“Somebody already did.”
“That’s cold, blondie.”
I put the long ponytail onto its wrinkled skin and adjusted it. The head, rumored to have
belonged to a gambler who had welshed on the wrong bet, usually took orders at the zombie bar
upstairs. It was currently unemployed, courtesy of a fire that had raged out of control for almost an
hour. The head had somehow survived, except for its hair.
I felt kind of responsible—the Circle’s war mages had set the blaze while attempting to
barbecue me—so I had been trying to replace its singed locks with some taken from one of the fakes
sold as souvenirs at the gift shop. Dante’s isn’t known for the high quality of its merchandise,
ensuring that I’d spent an hour sorting through about a hundred heads, trying to find a good match.
Not that my help seemed to be appreciated.
“I can’t go around looking like this!” it said sourly as I reached for the superglue. “I’m the main
attraction here. I’m the star!”
“It’s either this or I scalp Barbie,” I threatened. “They don’t make wigs in your size.”
“Sweetheart, they don’t make anything in my size. And it’s never stopped me before.”
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“I don’t even want to know what that means,” I said honestly.
The vampire was now scanning the crowded tables. Maybe he was here for a drink or a quick
game of craps, but I doubted it. I’d recently turned down an offer of employment from the Vampire
Senate, something that isn’t generally considered healthy. The surprise wasn’t that they’d sent
someone to restate their offer in more emphatic terms, but that it had taken them this long.
I watched a harried-looking waitress, dressed in a few black straps and thigh-high boots, move
forward to greet the new arrival. She walked like her arches hurt, which was probably the case.
Bondage chic was Purgatory’s shtick, chosen to match the name, but it wasn’t made for eight-hour
shifts on your feet. I could testify to that personally, having spent several days literally in her shoes.
The idea was to hide in plain sight. At least that’s what Casanova, the casino’s manager, had
claimed. I suspected he just wanted the free help.
Casanova’s master was Antonio, a Philadelphia crime boss better known as Tony, although his
name these days was mud for crossing his own master—who happened to be Mircea. Among other
things, Tony’d tried to have me killed, which would have seriously interfered in Mircea’s plans. Not
being the forgiving type, Mircea had confiscated everything Tony owned, including the casino and
its manager. Before being sidelined by the geis, he’d ordered Casanova to assist me, but hadn’t given
specifics. As a result, Casanova’s “assistance” had taken the form of a lot of fill-in jobs for which I’d
yet to see a paycheck.
But until Pritkin found us an actual, honest-to-God lead, I didn’t have much else to do. Except
to stare obsessively at the clock, wondering how many seconds of freedom I had left. Staying busy
helped with that. A little. And Casanova had a point about the outfit. My shiny PVC shorts and
bustier combo didn’t hide much, but with elaborate eye makeup and a long black wig, I barely
recognized my strawberry-blond, blue-eyed self. I fiddled with the head and tried to look nonchalant,
hoping the disguise would hold up.
The man sitting beside me started complaining. “A thumbscrew?” He slapped the drinks list
down on the bar. “What the hell is that?”
“You’re not in Hell,” the bartender corrected him. “And no souls eat or drink in Purgatory.”
“Then what do they do?” the guy asked sarcastically.
“They suffer.” I thought the bartender’s dungeon master garb, consisting of a bare chest,
hangman’s hood and studded cuffs, should have already made that clear. If not, the couple dozen
torture devices serving as wall art might have clued the guy in.
“I am suffering—from thirst!” the tourist insisted.
“A thumbscrew is a screwdriver,” I explained helpfully.
“Gee, thanks, Elvira. So what I gotta do? Solve a riddle before I can order a drink?”
“It’s not that hard,” the bartender said patiently, placing a flaming cocktail in front of another
guest. “A Lynching is a Lynchburg lemonade, an Iron Maiden is an old-fashioned, a—”
“All I want is a Bloody Mary! You got one of them?”
“Yes.”
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“What’s it called?”
“A Bloody Mary.”
The vampire had paused beside me. “It won’t work,” I told him. No way was I changing my
mind. Vampires in general aren’t to be trusted, but the Senate makes the average vamp look like a
paragon of virtue.
“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you,” the head spat. “This is an outrage!”
I set the ungrateful thing back on its ashtray and swiveled to face my unwanted visitor. “And
why bother with a disguise? It’s not like I wouldn’t know what you are.”
“It wasn’t meant for you,” the vampire said, throwing back the hood.
A pair of rich brown eyes met mine, the color as soft and familiar as well-worn suede. Only
their agonized expression was new. I started in shock. “Rafe?”
He collapsed against the bar, holding his stomach as if he’d been punched. I slid off my stool
and helped him onto it, feeling him shiver despite the thick, fuzzy wool cloak he clutched around
himself. The streets outside were shimmering in the late June heat, yet he was bundled up like we
were scheduled for a blizzard. I’d known him all my life, and I’d never seen him look this bad.
We’d met at the court of the vampire who turned him, the aforementioned Tony, who had
ordered Rafe to paint my bedroom when I was a child. I doubt that Tony had done it to please his
resident clairvoyant. It just fit his warped sense of humor to give the greatest artist of the
Renaissance the most menial jobs he could find. But Raphael had actually enjoyed it, and in the
months it took to litter my ceiling with angels, stars and clouds, we’d become fast friends. He’d been
one of the few things that had made growing up at Tony’s bearable.
Rafe’s lips were cold when he kissed me briefly, and his hands were like ice. I warmed them in
mine, worry gnawing at my insides. He wasn’t supposed to be cold. Vampires are as warm as
humans unless they’re famished, but that couldn’t be it. Like all masters, Rafe could feed from blood
molecules drawn at a distance. If he felt like it, he could drain half the bar without anyone noticing
until the bodies started hitting the floor.
“I’m all right, Cassie.” Rafe squeezed my hands and I immediately felt more centered. He
always had that effect on me, maybe because he comforted me so often as a child. I’d grown up
believing that, if he said something was okay, it must be true, and old habits die hard.
“Then what is it? Something’s wrong.” He swallowed, but instead of answering, he just looked
at me pleadingly, his face dancing with neon shadows from the glass “flames” that surrounded the
bar. My short-lived calm fled right out the window. “Rafe! You’re scaring me!”
“That wasn’t my intention, mia stella.” His voice, usually a lightly accented tenor, was a harsh
croak. He swallowed, but when he tried to speak again, he only strangled. He let go of my hands to
claw at his throat, his face contorted in a rictus, and I stumbled back a step, colliding with the cool
column of mist that was Billy Joe.
Some people have spirit guides, wise, serene types who give them help from the great beyond. I
have a smart-aleck ex–card shark who spends more time rigging the casino games than he does
advising me. Of course, considering that his mortal existence ended with him taking a header into the
Mississippi, courtesy of a couple of cowboys he’d been cheating, that might not be such a bad thing.
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“He’s fighting a command,” Billy said unnecessarily.
I shot him an impatient glance. Billy’s status as the life-challenged segment of our partnership
often means he knows more about the supernatural world than I do, but of the two of us, I know
more about vamps. Growing up at Tony’s had seen to that.
Even vampires who become masters are still bound by their own master’s control—unless they
reach first-level status, which most never do. But older vamps have more flexibility in interpreting
commands than a newborn. A lot more, if they’re smart and willing to risk punishment. And Rafe
had stretched a point for me before, informing Mircea of Tony’s plan to kill me even at great risk to
himself. If he hadn’t helped me, I’d have never lived long enough to become the Pythia.
“Tony isn’t around to give any orders,” I said slowly, and some of the terrible tension left
Rafe’s face. The bane of both our existences was literally out of this world, hiding somewhere in
Faerie. “He couldn’t have forbidden you to see me—unless it’s an old command.”
For a long moment Rafe held himself unnaturally still, the flickering lights of the bar the only
movement on his face. Then, slowly, almost imperceptibly, his head moved side to side. I glanced at
Billy Joe, who had drifted off a few feet. The flames filtered through him eerily, gold and red and
translucent umber. He pushed his Stetson up with an insubstantial finger. “Well, that sorta narrows it
down.”
I nodded. With Tony gone, there was only one person left whose commands could make Rafe
choke at the mere thought of contradicting them: Tony’s master.
The bar was hot and humid with too many bodies, but chills shivered down my arms anyway.
Unfulfilled longing swept through me, blood and bone and skin stretched paper thin as part of me
yearned, reaching out for someone who wasn’t there. I glanced up at the sign over the bar: LEAD ME
NOT INTO TEMPTATION; THAT WOULD MEAN BACKING UP. No freaking kidding.
Rafe was looking at me with big, concerned eyes. I could only think of one reason for him to be
here: to ask me to see Mircea. And wasn’t that just all I needed. I bit back the urge to scream. My
nerves had a perpetually scraped-raw feeling these days, but it wasn’t Rafe’s fault. “You may as well
go back,” I told him unsteadily. “There’s nothing I can do.”
Rafe shook his head in a wild, negative motion, causing his dark curls to dance madly about his
face. He looked around the room, eyes shifting in sudden darts as if he thought someone might be
sneaking up on him. His nerves were showing, something he’d never been able to completely
control, even at court. It had cost him more than once.
His gaze returned to my face, and there was desperation in it, but also determination. “I am not
well,” he said, and paused, as if waiting for something.
I blinked, fairly sure I was missing the point. Vampires don’t get sick. Shot, burned, staked,
yeah; the flu, not so much.
“I can summon a healer,” I offered. Dante’s was more than familiar with little accidents. A
couple of hungry gargoyles had decided to snack on some of the animal acts the night before, only to
discover that the trained wolves weren’t wolves at all. The result had been a near apocalyptic battle
in the lower levels that had given the on-site medical staff something to do for the rest of the night.
And that sort of thing wasn’t exactly unusual.
“I do not think a healer would be able to help,” Rafe said slowly, his eyes brightening as no
visible retribution was taken. I realized what he was up to as he looked at me eagerly. If he pretended
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he was talking about himself instead of Mircea, he could get around the prohibition. The
thought drifted through my mind that Mircea must not be up to his usual standard, to have left such
an obvious loophole.
“It doesn’t matter,” I said, hoping to forestall a painful explanation. “If I could do anything,
don’t you think I would have?” The geis that was putting me through hell was doing even worse
things to Mircea. It strengthened depending on how long it had been in place, and due to a little
accident with the timeline, he’d been dealing with it longer than I had. By about a century.
My former rival for the position of Pythia, a lunatic named Myra, had decided to remove the
competition by a little creative homicide. She couldn’t kill me, because there was a rule prohibiting
the murderer of the Pythia or her designated heir from inheriting. But being savvy about all things
time-related, Myra had worked out an alternative. If Mircea died before Tony and I had our little
blowup, it would remove his protection from me, allowing Tony to do the dirty work for her.
The only problem with her plan was that it required fiddling with the time line, and my power
didn’t like that. It kept sending me back in time to prevent the assassination attempts. And during
one of those trips, I met Mircea in a period before the geis was placed. The spell immediately
recognized him as the other component needed to complete itself and jumped from me to him. That
not only gave him the geis a century early, but it ensured that when he had the original spell cast on
us, he ended up with two strands of it, not one. And, as I could attest, one was bad enough.
“But…there is no one else!” Rafe looked almost frantic at my refusal. He also looked surprised.
I had a sudden rush of guilt, which was monumentally unfair. Mircea had started this, not me.
“If I knew the counterspell, I’d have cast it already,” I repeated, with a little more bite to my
tone than I usually used with Rafe. What did he think I’d been doing for the past week, anyway?
The book containing the only known counterspell was the Codex Merlini, a compilation of
ancient magical lore that had been lost long ago—assuming it had ever existed. Most of the people
Pritkin and I had contacted had been of the opinion that the Codex was nothing more than a myth. It
was like the rest of the Arthurian legend, we’d been assured by one supercilious mage after another.
There’d never been a Camelot, except in the imagination of a medieval French poet. And there was
no Codex.
The only exception was Manassier, who’d had his own reasons for sending us on a wild-goose
chase. So far, everyone else had refused to talk, didn’t know anything, or was looking to get rich
quick off a couple of desperate suckers. I’d been battling rising panic already, and Rafe’s distress
wasn’t helping.
“Please, Cassie!” His voice cracked around the edges, and my stomach clenched at the almost
heartbroken look on his face. If it had been anyone else—any vampire, anyway—that look would
have had my paranoid instincts muttering furiously. But Rafe didn’t have that kind of deception in
him. At least, he never had before. And I suspected his basic character was pretty set after more than
four hundred years.
“I told you, I don’t have the spell,” I said, more gently. “Maybe in a few weeks—”
“But I’ll be dead in a few weeks!” he blurted out.
For a moment, the world tilted. There was a hollow roaring in my ears and the bar seemed to be
closing in, with not enough air, not enough light. It felt like the heavy bass of Purgatory’s continuous
pulse was suddenly pounding inside my skull.
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Rafe stared at me soberly. “I am sorry, Cassie. I didn’t intend to tell you that way.”
For a moment, I just stared back, understanding whipping through my mind with a white-hot
sizzle. I’d known the spell was vicious—my own reactions had been more than enough for that—but
that it could go so far I’d never even considered. Mircea was a first-level master. There were only a
handful of them in the world, and they were almost impossible to kill. The idea of his dying because
of a spell, any spell, was crazy, but especially one that hadn’t even been designed as a weapon.
“There has to be some mistake,” I finally said. “I know you’re suffering, but—”
“Not suffering, mia stella,” he whispered. “Dying.”
“But if I go to him, it’ll only make things worse!”
Rafe flinched when I dropped the wrong pronoun, but it didn’t stop him. “The Consul has
called in experts from around the world. And you know they would not lie to her.” No, I didn’t
suppose so. The Consul headed up the Vampire Senate, and was easily its scariest member. “I heard
one tell her that if you complete the spell, perhaps it will free…me. But he knew of nothing else that
would.”
“I’ll find another way,” I promised, feeling sick.
Rafe looked genuinely puzzled at my refusal. Like asking me to risk a lifetime of slavery was
no big deal. “I do not see what is wrong with this one. Mircea would never hurt you—”
“That’s not the point! How much have you enjoyed being Tony’s eternal errand boy?”
“Mircea is nothing like that bastardo Antonio,” Rafe said, appalled.
I shook my head in frustration. No, Mircea wasn’t Tony; despite the geis, despite everything, I
knew that. But he was a vampire. And the one thing no vamp could resist was power. If the geis gave
Mircea control over mine, he would use it. And, just like with Tony, I’d have no say about what he
did with it.
Tony wanted me dead mainly because I’d set him up for the Feds. I’d had a number of reasons
for helping them out, but top of the list was that he’d used my visions to point him to wherever
disaster was about to strike—and therefore where an opportunity for profit was to be found. Young
and naive, I’d believed him when he assured me that he wanted the information to warn the people
who were soon to be in distress. When I found out what he’d really been doing with it, I’d sworn
never to be used like that again. Not by him, not by anyone.
I swallowed, knowing this wasn’t going to go over well. But I had to ask. “Tell me the truth,
Rafe. Did Mircea send you?”
If he really was dying, it would make sense for him to send Rafe to tell me so. Mircea had
saved my life by refusing Tony his revenge. I owed him one, and I would have expected him to try to
cash it in.
What didn’t make sense was why he would order Rafe to put on an elaborate pretense, to make
me think he’d actually told him to stay away. But although Mircea looked to be in his early thirties,
he was five hundred years old. And, like most of the older vamps, to call his thought processes
Byzantine was a serious understatement. I’d discovered long ago that the easiest way to figure out
what a vampire really wanted was to look for whatever would benefit him the most, and ignore
everything else. And what would benefit Mircea was completing the geis.
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Rafe blinked at me, and for a moment there was something lost and wide open in his
expression, almost bruised. “You think I would lie to you?”
“If Mircea ordered you to, yes. You wouldn’t have a choice!”
“There are always choices,” Rafe said, offended. “Had I been ordered to tell you a lie—” He
gave a small shrug. “I cannot help it if I am not so good an actor at times.”
“But you’re fond of Mircea. It might be an order you’d agree with.”
He sighed in exasperation. “Mircea has many fine qualities, Cassie. I know them well. But he
has flaws, too—one in particular that I hope will not prove fatal. He is stubborn. Too stubborn to
listen to the Consul’s experts when they tell him he cannot defeat this. Too stubborn to believe that
even his power can fail. And too proud to admit it, even if he did believe!”
That did sound like Mircea. And I’d never really stopped to wonder how he would react to the
geis’ malfunctioning. If anything, I’d assumed his only thought would be to use it to get me under
his power. But while I’d almost become used to my life spinning out of control, it definitely wasn’t
the norm for him. Mircea manipulated other people, used them to get what he or the Senate wanted.
He wasn’t accustomed to having anyone, or anything, do the same to him.
“And consider this,” Rafe said urgently, “when you think on deception. Mage Pritkin has no
reason to save Mircea. If he dies, the spell is broken. All he has to do is stall long enough for that to
happen, and you are free.”
An automatic denial rose to my lips, but died before I could utter it. The Codex contained some
mysterious spell that Pritkin didn’t want found. We’d agreed that once the book was located, I’d let
him remove it before I searched it for the counterspell to the geis. But what if he didn’t trust me? I
didn’t know enough about the magical community to know whom to ask for information. So all the
experts we’d spoken with had been Pritkin’s. Had all that “you go, I’ll stay” stuff in Paris been about
my welfare or an attempt to make sure I didn’t find anything? What if the real reason we kept
striking out was because that was what he wanted?
“I almost forgot. I have something for you.” Rafe fumbled under the cloak for a moment, then
brought out a small package wrapped in a piece of black felt. “The Fey returned them to Mircea. As
your master, they assumed he could get them to you.”
I parted the felt and into my hands dropped a ratty old pack of tarot cards. They were dirty and
creased, and more than a few were missing the corners. I was a little surprised to see them, since I’d
lost them while on a disastrous trip to Faerie in search of Myra. I’d been happy to get out of there
alive, and hadn’t worried too much about what I left behind.
A card suddenly poked up from the deck with no help from me. “The Magician Reversed,” a
resonant voice began, before I shoved it back inside and slipped the pack into the pocket of my
shorts. It did not add to my peace of mind.
My old governess had had the deck spelled to report on the overall spiritual climate of a
situation. It was supposed to be a joke, but over the years I’d noticed that its predictions were
depressingly accurate. That was a problem because, no matter how I tried to twist it, the Magician
Ill-Dignified was never a good thing.
You know the guys with the three beans under the shells at carnivals? The ones with the stuffed
animals that are going all moldy because they never actually give any away? The Magician Ill-
Dignified is a lot like that: a salesman or con man who can make you believe almost anything. You
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can avoid him, but you have to be on your toes, because he will not seem like a deceiver.
The card was safely tucked away, but an image of the tiny magician’s face still seemed to hover
in front of me. And my imagination was giving him Pritkin’s bright green eyes. I didn’t know how
far he was willing to go to ensure that the mystery spell stayed lost. And if Mircea died, my biggest
reason for finding the Codex died with him. Maybe Pritkin didn’t view a single death as too high a
price to pay to keep the secret.
Especially if that life was a vampire’s.
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Chapter 4
Rafe watched me in silence for a moment, then cleared his throat. “There may be an alternative.”
I waited, but he just sat there, his jaw working but no sound coming out. “I’m listening.”
“I can’t tell you,” he finally said, sounding defeated. Apparently Mircea’s command hadn’t
been so flawed after all.
I glanced at Billy, who sighed and shrugged. He doesn’t like possessions, but they do allow him
to tiptoe through someone’s thoughts, gathering stray information here and there. And I doubted
Mircea had prohibited Rafe from even thinking about whatever it was he didn’t want known.
“Drop your shields,” I told him, “and hold that thought.”
Rafe looked a little nervous, but since Billy slipped inside his skin a few seconds later, he must
have done as I asked. I glanced around, wondering what the tourists would say if they knew that a
ghost was currently possessing a vampire a few feet away. It made Dante’s staged shows look a little
tepid by comparison. Then Billy stepped out of Rafe’s other side, looking freaked. “Oh, hell, no.”
“What did you see?”
“Nothing. Not a damn thing.”
“You’re lying.” I couldn’t believe it. Billy has a lot of flaws, but he doesn’t lie. Not to me.
His jaw set and his hazel eyes looked as implacable as I’d ever seen them. “If I am, it’s for your
own good!”
There are, so tradition says, four main reasons for a ghost to appear to mortals: to reproach, to
warn, to recall and to advise. I could add a few more: to annoy, to obstruct or, in Billy Joe’s case, to
seriously piss off. “I’ll be the judge of that!” I told him angrily.
“And your judgment’s been so great so far?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Every time you get involved with the vamps, it’s a bad thing.” Billy held up three translucent
fingers. “Tomas. ‘Oh, Billy, he’s just a sweet street kid who needs a home.’ A sweet street kid who
happened to be a master vampire in disguise, who betrayed you and almost got you killed!” A finger
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went down. “Mircea. ‘Oh, Billy, I’ve known him forever, he’s nothing to worry about.’ Until he
placed that damn geis on you and maneuvered you into the Pythia thing, that is.” Another finger
folded under, leaving me staring at a rude gesture. “See why I’m a little worried here?”
“I’m involved anyway!” I reminded him tightly.
“You won’t like it.”
“I already don’t like it. Just tell me!” The bartender was looking at me a little funny. Probably
wondering why I was yelling at the bar.
“Your buddy has been doing some investigating,” Billy said, with obvious reluctance, “and
heard a rumor. But it’s probably no more than that. People have been speculating about the Codex
for centuries—”
Rafe shook his head, then grabbed his throat again. The bartender began slowly edging away. I
sent him a smile, but the expression in his eyes said clearly that he thought we were nuts. It would
have bothered me less if I didn’t halfway agree with him.
“Billy!”
He sighed. “The word is that the Codex was never lost, that the mages have had it all along but
circulated the rumor because they didn’t want anyone looking for it.”
“Wonderful,” I said morosely. “All I need is another run-in with the Circle.”
“Cass,” Billy said, almost gently, “there’s more than one.”
It took me a moment to understand what he meant; then my eyes automatically slid over to
Rafe. “The Black has it?” I whispered in a savage undertone.
The Black Circle was a group of dark magic users, people with no scruples about how they
obtained power or what they did with it. They had recently allied with some rogue vampires against
the Silver Circle and the Vampire Senate, in a war that threatened to engulf the entire supernatural
world. So far, I’d mostly managed to stay out of it. I really wanted to keep it that way.
At least Rafe had the grace to look slightly abashed. “I’m trying to avoid making any more
enemies,” I said tightly.
“And if Mircea wants to raid a dark stronghold, he has the people to do it,” Billy pointed out.
“He sure as hell doesn’t need us.”
I nodded emphatically. For once, Billy was making a lot of sense. Rafe looked lost, unable to
hear Billy when he wasn’t in residence, so to speak. “Mircea has a capable stable—” I began, only to
have Rafe cut me off with an agitated gesture.
“None of them will do anything,” he croaked, sounding half-choked. I went around the bar to
get him some water.
“Why? Do they want him to die?”
“No!” He looked around agitatedly, but his almost yell had been lost in the thrum of music and
the hum of conversation. He leaned over the bar and dropped his voice to a whisper anyway, so
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much so that I practically had to lip-read. “There might be a few who resent their positions, who
think they could do better elsewhere, but most are wise enough to see…” He trailed off.
“See what?”
Rafe took the glass I handed him, but didn’t drink. He put it down and started rubbing both
hands across the bar top in an unconscious, distressed motion. “That with Tony gone and Mircea
dead, there will be no one to protect us. The family will be ripped apart, each of us taken by other
masters to add to their power base. And they won’t know us, Cassie; they won’t care. We’ll be
commodities to them, nothing more. Things to be used and discarded when we fail to please.”
I mentally cursed myself for not thinking that far ahead. Of course Mircea’s death would be
more than a personal tragedy—his position as family patriarch ensured that. And it would be
devastating for people like Rafe.
He’d never had much respect at Tony’s, where a steady trigger finger counted for more than
artistic genius. But at least he’d known the rules of the household and where he fit into the hierarchy.
In a new family there would be a constant struggle for position—maybe for decades. And Rafe was
no warrior. He might not last long enough to carve a new place for himself.
“Then why won’t the family help him?” I demanded. “It’s their butts on the line as much as
his!”
“Because the Consul has forbidden it!” Rafe whispered. “I am risking her wrath by even being
here!”
Well, that explained the nervousness. “Why would she do that? She needs Mircea alive!” As
scary as the Consul was, she couldn’t hope to win the war alone. The Senate was ultimately only as
strong as its members, and it had already lost more than a quarter of them to combat or treachery.
She couldn’t afford to lose Mircea, too.
“She says that everything that can be done is being done, and that we’ll only make matters
worse by interfering. But I think there is more to it than that. You’re the obvious person for us to
seek out, and she doesn’t want us to aid you.”
“But I’m trying to help!” Lifting the geis would benefit me as much as Mircea, and if there was
one thing I’d have thought the Consul understood, it was self-interest.
“I know that, Cassie. But she doesn’t. She believes that you are still angry with him for placing
the geis, and may attempt some form of revenge. She knows you don’t have to help him; that once
he dies, the geis is broken—”
“She actually believes I’d do that? Stand by and watch him die?”
Rafe’s hands clenched on the bar top. “I don’t know what she might think under normal
circumstances. But these are not normal! We are at war, and she is afraid of losing him. Even more,
she’s afraid of your power. Fear is not an emotion she feels often, and when she does…she tends to
overreact. Perhaps, if you spoke with her…”
I shot him a look, but didn’t bother to reply. I had a suspicion that the Consul’s plan to rid
Mircea of the spell might involve killing the one who had placed it on him. Which, thanks to the
aforementioned timeline snafu, was me.
“Mircea isn’t going to die,” I said, trying to convince myself as much as Rafe. “He’s a Senate
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member, not a newborn!”
Rafe didn’t answer. Instead, he held out his hand, opening the palm to reveal a slim platinum
hair clip. I recognized it immediately. Unlike a lot of ancient vampires, Mircea didn’t usually dress
in the clothes of his youth. I’d only ever seen him in them once, and that had been to make a political
statement. He preferred understated, modern attire, with the only outward sign of his origin the
length of his hair. He once told me that in his day only serfs and slaves had short hair and that he’d
never been able to overcome his prejudice against it. But even there he conformed to modern
conventions by keeping it confined at the base of his neck in a clip. That one.
I stayed a good two feet away, desperate not to trigger a vision. Just thinking about Mircea was
hard enough; I couldn’t risk seeing him. But this time, my caution did no good. A wave of images
crashed into me, sweeping me away.
I blinked a new scene into focus, my ears ringing from the sudden silence. Low-burning candles
cast a puddle of watery gold light around a large bed, raised up several steps from the rest of the
room. I had an impression of comfortable surroundings—dark wood, soft carpets and a lot of heavy
antiques—but I couldn’t focus on them. All my attention was taken up with the body lying on the
crumpled sheets, skin china-pale next to the chocolate-colored fabric. Dark blue shadows softened
the clean, strong lines, draping them with a subtle beauty completely unlike electricity. Watching the
flames run orange-gold fingers along Mircea’s muscles, I finally understood the allure of candlelight.
He’d unbuttoned his shirt but kept it on, and it was all he was wearing. It was plastered to him,
the thin white fabric gone nearly translucent from the sweat that soaked it. I took in a swift
succession of images, none of which did anything for my equilibrium: nipples drawn to tight points,
stomach muscles quivering, hips slick and straining, eyes liquid amber.
His body, already taut with pain, suddenly shuddered and twisted violently. His back arched,
throwing out his chest, flexing every muscle until it looked as though his spine would break. His
fingers splayed across the damp sheets helplessly, his thighs trembling as if he’d just finished a
marathon. His head craned back against the mattress, teeth clenched, the tendons in his neck standing
out starkly. I stared at him with a heart-squeezing ache that made me want to grab him and cling, as
if that would somehow keep him safe. Instead of damning us both.
His limbs finally went slack and he sprawled on his back, still breathing hard, shivers racking
him for long minutes. A few locks of glossy dark hair had stuck to his throat. Other than his eyes and
the pale blue veins visible just under the skin, they were his only color.
His face was free for once of its usual pleasant mask and he looked desperately hungry, almost
feral. His eyes were wide open, focused intently on the ceiling, and he was muttering something in a
hoarse, indistinct voice. Then he paused, hands fisting in the damp sheets beneath him. There was a
smear of blood on his lips from where he had bitten them in the seizure. He licked it away as that
sharp gaze flicked about the room. Although I wasn’t actually there, although he couldn’t possibly
see me, I was suddenly speared by a pair of feverish, fire-lit eyes.
“Cassie.” My name was half caress, half groan.
I found myself at the top of the steps, as if his voice had summoned me. I didn’t panic—visions
are not exactly unusual for me—but this one communicated something more than mere images. I
could feel everything: the slick wood of the bedpost, fragrant with beeswax; the heavy brown velvet
bed curtains, trapped by a soft satin cord, and the silken fringe that edged them, sliding softly over
my knuckles. I’d never had that happen in a vision.
It slowly dawned on me that I might have accidentally shifted, although that seemed
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impossible. Since becoming Pythia, I’d had the power under my control, not vice versa. I
decided where I went, and when. I started to move back when a shaking hand lifted and slid up my
thigh, feverishly warm against my skin. Of course, I could be wrong.
Mircea’s hair hung limp and snarled and his cheekbones stood out sharply under bruisedlooking
flesh. Despite the solidity of his body, he looked worn. But the eyes were the same—
burning, glittering, dangerous. The intensity in them caused me to decide that maybe I should panic a
little after all, especially when my skin started prickling, and not with fear.
With no warning, my legs went out from under me. I fell into a depression already warm from
his body, his scent clinging to everything like a drugging haze. The musk of it was almost a taste,
surrounding me with something dark and sweet and wild. It jumbled my thoughts, my brain trying to
catalog too much at once: the sheets, crisp old-fashioned linen, so finely made that they might have
been silk; dust specks glittering in the candlelight like gold dust; a few drops of sweat falling from
Mircea’s hair and landing on my cheeks like tears; and the weight of his body over me, his thigh
pressing between my legs, firm and blood warm.
He took my mouth hard, teeth and lips almost savage. He bit my lower lip until it stung, then
licked the marks with quick motions that soothed only enough to leave me even more sensitive for
the next bite. He growled against me, the words meaningless but the thought clear as crystal: Mine.
Just when I decided that there was nothing in the world but that skillful mouth, he started
shaping my body with his hands, sliding over my hips and stomach, up to my breasts and shoulders,
then to my throat and down again. The thin PVC conducted warmth almost as well as bare skin;
every touch burned, every possessive sweep of his hands said mine without the need for words.
I’d been living with the hunger the geis caused for so long that I’d almost become used to it,
almost forgotten how satisfaction felt, until the heat of his touch reminded me. His fingers tightened
with bruising strength, but I barely noticed. Another teasing bite was followed by a slow, caressing
kiss. My eyes slipped dreamily closed as I was marked with lips and teeth and the addictive slide of
his hands.
His feelings resonated through the bond as loudly as if he’d spoken, and I could feel him hard
above me. It hurt that we were still apart, still separate beings when the geis wanted us one. It was a
deep, hollow ache, like hunger that has gone beyond starvation, past where the need is a pang to
become a long, gnawing nothingness. I’d never known hunger like that for food, but I recognized it
anyway. Hunger can have so many forms.
I’d spent my whole adult life starting over. I’d been constantly on the run from someone, Tony
or the Senate or the Circle, never staying too long in the same place, never getting to know people
because I’d soon be moving on again, leaving them behind. I’d learned not to want things, not to try
to hold on to anything, because if I got used to it being there, it would be that much harder when I
had to let it go. I’d watched person after person with paranoid eyes, keeping them all—potential
friends, enemies, lovers—at a safe, painful distance. And all the while, the hunger grew, for someone
who would stay, someone permanent, someone mine.
And now the geis was whispering, so seductively, that I could have it all: Mircea, a family, a
whole world that I understood and that understood me. I might be human, but I didn’t think like one.
I hadn’t realized how much I didn’t until these last few weeks, when I’d been lost in a sea of human
magic that made no sense, in human reasoning I couldn’t follow and in human quarrels that might
end up destroying me. I had a sudden, intense longing for cool skin, calm voices, and ancient eyes.
For home.
Only I didn’t have one of those anymore. It was just so me, I thought bitterly, stroking the sharp
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lines of his cheekbones with my thumbs. The only place I truly felt at home was the last place I
could ever go.
My hands buried themselves in his hair, even while my brain tried to treat this like all the things
I’d ever wanted and not been allowed to have. But my usual compartmentalizing and compromising
weren’t working. Nothing about me wanted to hear “later” or “wait” or “too dangerous,” not with
dark strands running through my fingers, wrapping like a silken restraint around my wrist, just as
soft as they looked, and beautiful, so incredibly beautiful.
I explored his body while hunger and a deep possessiveness battled it out with a lifetime’s
caution. I wanted this, so badly. My hands shook as they rode the curve of his legs to the hollow of
his knees, the crest of his thighs. It wasn’t enough and it was too much. I badly needed to get out of
there, but I’d never wanted to stay so much in my life.
I caught his shirt, shoved it down his arms. His shoulders were broad enough to make me
stretch to bare them, the muscles knotted with tension as my hands slid over them, sweat slicking my
palms. I could have this, I argued with myself, just for a minute, a few stolen seconds before I did the
smart thing and got out of there.
I stroked up his biceps to the hard wings of his collarbones and the strong column of his neck.
Mircea was all long, sleek lines, the angles softened by lean muscle, the classic body of a runner, a
swimmer, a fencer. I reached his cheek and followed the line of his jaw, where a muscle quivered
helplessly, to lips that opened beneath my touch.
His tongue slid across my fingers the way his voice had shivered across my skin as I traced the
curve of that full lower lip. Our eyes met, and I felt like I could fall into that amber gaze for weeks if
I let myself. I expected him to kiss me, but his lips found my collarbone instead, mouthing it lightly,
his tongue sliding along the bone before moving back up to explore the vulnerable skin of my throat.
Teeth brushed against me, a small sensation precisely where a vampire would bite, but I felt no
fear. Unstuck, unmoored, floating almost gravity-free, but not afraid. He withdrew slightly, his
tongue making a slow, possessive glide, right over my pulse, and I once again felt teeth. They
weren’t the dull blade of a human’s, but a razor-sharp reminder of what, exactly, was in bed with me.
But I still wasn’t worried. Because Mircea never bit me.
Only he’d gripped the flesh over the jugular, just hard enough for me to feel it, and he wasn’t
letting go. It was a light sensation, no pain, but my pulse was beating hard against the pressure of his
lips and there was a claustrophobic ache when I swallowed. “Mircea,” I began, and felt fangs slide
into my flesh.
For a frozen moment, my heart stuttered in my chest, torn between pounding its way through
my rib cage and stopping altogether. But I couldn’t concentrate on what his lapse in control might
mean because the pain was immediately followed by a weightless swell of pure need. He was
grinding our hips together as his teeth sank deeper, bright agony broken by strobing flashes of
intense pleasure, everything bleeding into a surreal wave of sensation that rose and fell with each
sinuous move of his body.
I started making these sounds—high, strangled whimpers and faint little gasps that didn’t sound
like me at all. I arched as Mircea began to feed, the sensation rippling through me with an almost
audible sizzle. It seemed to free some part of me that had been stretched too tight for too long, like
an elastic band pulled beyond its limits. It finally broke with a snap I felt all the way to the bone, as
if a dislocated joint had suddenly popped back into place. The sheer rightness of it caught my breath,
hummed through my veins, telling me that I belonged here, right here, only here. I gasped in wonder,
indescribable tension flowing out of me as I relaxed into Mircea’s embrace.
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I could feel my blood surging into him, warm and alive and pulsing hotly. I tried to push him
away, but my hands found his shoulders instead, pulling him closer. Mircea locked one hand in my
hair, bringing the other behind my hips, melding us together…
And then I was sitting seaside, the green-blue water lapping at my toes, half buried in the sand.
I looked around wildly, disoriented, expecting an attack from someone, somewhere. I rolled
over and clutched the beach, trying to present a smaller target, and was momentarily blinded by the
sun in my eyes. I froze, sure that someone would use the advantage to sneak up on me, but nothing
happened. I blinked for a few seconds until I could get a clear view, but all I saw was sun and sky
and sand—and, on the crest of a rocky hill, a small temple slowly crumbling to pieces.
Nothing continued to happen. After a moment, my heart stopped trying to thud its way out of
my chest, and my breathing returned to something like normal. I lay there and watched a flock of
little brown birds dive in and out of the temple’s roof, where it looked like they had a nest. Other
than the waves lapping around my ankles, they were the only things moving on the whole beach.
I finally sat up and, when nothing attacked me, got to my knees. Enough adrenaline had left my
brain that I could think again, so I knew who it was that I should be seeing. The being who had once
owned my power had shown himself to me before in a similar situation. He seemed to find it funny
to pay his visits at the most awkward moments possible.
One of the small brown birds hopped along the sand, its feet making vague indentations that the
water quickly filled in again. It ran out to the wet sand when the waves retreated, looking for
whatever edible morsel they might have left behind, then raced them for the beach whenever they
started back in. It finally tired of the game and hopped over to me, looking for a handout. I blinked
and when I looked again, a handsome blond in a too short tunic rested on the sand beside me. For a
second I thought he’d crushed the little bird, but then I realized the truth.
“It’s all me, Herophile,” he said, gesturing about. “The waves and the sand and, of course, the
sun, although it is easier to converse in this form.”
“My name is Cassandra!” I snapped.
He’d given me the name of the second Pythia at Delphi, his ancient shrine, at our first meeting.
It was supposedly some kind of reign title, but I didn’t feel comfortable using it when I didn’t know
how to do the job it represented. Not to mention that, as names go, it pretty much sucked.
“Where have you been?” I demanded. “You promised to train me. That doesn’t translate into
hanging me out to dry for a week! Do you know how close I just came to screwing everything up?”
“Yes. That’s why I pulled you out of there.” He glanced up from toying with a piece of
seaweed. Unlike the last time I’d seen him, he didn’t look like he’d been covered in gold dust. But I
still couldn’t see his face, which was merely an oval of light. It wasn’t so much majestic as odd, like
talking to an oversized lamp. “You can’t continue this way. Something must be done about the
geis—it’s a distraction.”
“A distraction?!” I could think of a lot of ways to describe it, and that wouldn’t have been on
the list. “Mircea is dying and I’ll probably be next!”
“Not if you retrieve the Codex. The answer you seek is there.”
“I know that! What I don’t know is where it is or how to find it. Every lead we’ve had has led to
a dead end—almost literally with the last one! Or weren’t you paying attention yesterday?”
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He finished braiding the seaweed and fastened it around my wrist, bracelet style. “If it was easy,
it wouldn’t be a test.”
“I don’t need any more tests; I need help!”
“The help you need, you already have.”
“Then I guess I must have missed it!”
“You will find what you need when you need it. It is perhaps your greatest gift, Herophile. To
draw people to you.”
“Yeah, only they all seem to want me dead.”
He laughed, as if my impending demise was the funniest thing he’d heard all day. “I promised
to train you. Very well, here is your first task. Find the Codex and lift the geis before it causes more
complications.”
“And if I can’t?”
“I have every faith in you.”
“That makes one of us.”
“You’ll succeed; I’m sure of it. And if not”—he shrugged casually—“you don’t deserve your
position.”
And then I was back, clinging to strong, bare shoulders, fingers slipping on sweat-slicked skin.
Even to someone used to the abrupt way visions came and went, it was a bit of a jolt. Especially
since Mircea was still feeding, and it was still amazing.
I’d never felt this connected, this anchored, this close to anyone, and I wanted it to go on
forever. Only that’s what it seemed to be doing, I realized after a moment. Despite the fact that my
heart was thundering in my ears and little spots were swimming in front of my eyes and my breath
was coming in strangled gasps, he wasn’t stopping.
“Let go, Mircea,” I said as clearly as I could, considering the fangs in my throat. Nothing
happened, unless you counted the tightening of his hand on my hip, fever-hot even through the
material. “Mircea! Unless you plan to kill me, let go!”
I pushed as hard as I could, not caring at that moment if the movement tore my neck, just
wanting him off. My hands were at an awkward angle on his shoulders and my strength was no
match for his, but something about the action seemed to get through. He stopped.
I could feel the hesitation in him, need warring with whatever reason he had left, and for a long
moment I really didn’t know which would win. Then slowly, as if he were moving underwater, he
pulled back, his teeth sliding out of me cleanly.
“Cassie…” He looked dazed, and his voice was rough and cracked a bit at the edges. “I thought
you were a dream.”
I stared at him dizzily. “I think maybe I am.”
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He stared at me, swallowing harshly, the feverish glitter of his eyes even brighter, like an addict
who has had a fix. “Then my dreams are improving.”
I kissed him, a quick tangling of tongues, heat and softness. “We’re working on a solution.”
“I know.” He paused and looked around the room, as if he was expecting to see someone or
something. When he didn’t, he fell back, a shudder shivering through him as he pulled away.
“You know? How?” The only answer was the tightening of his muscles under my hands.
He closed his eyes, blocking out my face. “You must go, Cassie.”
It was good advice, but it made no sense that Mircea was giving it to me. I knew why I was
doing my best to avoid completing the geis, but he had no reason to do so. It would get him out of
his current torment and gain him a valuable servant. There was no downside.
“You don’t want to complete the geis?” I asked slowly, sure I was missing something.
“No.” His fists clenched in the sheets, hard enough that the knuckles showed white. “I want you
to leave!”
“I don’t understand—” I touched his shoulder, not thinking, my own mind still muddied from
the spell, and he flinched like I’d slapped him. He jerked away from me, all the way to the other side
of the bed, and sat there facing the wall. “Go, Cassie! Please.”
“Yes, all right.” Something weird was definitely going on, but I didn’t have time to figure it out.
There was a crack like a gunshot, and I jumped, then realized that no one was shooting at me. The
hand Mircea had curled around the huge bedpost had snapped it in two like a twig.
In the next heartbeat, I was flying, the room swallowed by darkness behind me. I blinked hard,
trying to clear my vision, and when I looked again I was back in the bar. The bartender gave a
sudden start at the sight of me and fled to the back room.
I stared blankly after him, then caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror behind the bottled
liquors. It reflected wide eyes, flushed cheeks and a kiss-swollen mouth. I put a hand to my neck,
and it came back red. I stared at the blood on my palm, and tried to say something. I failed.
Rafe handed me a napkin and I pressed it to my throat, Mircea’s kiss still throbbing on my lips.
Already, the lack of his touch was a fierce ache behind my ribs, as if he’d left fingerprints on
something deeper than skin. “Now do you understand?” Rafe asked softly.
I slowly nodded. That had been no vision. I’d unconsciously shifted, straight to Mircea’s side.
And if I’d lost that much control, how much worse must it be for him? The geis wouldn’t kill him, I
realized; it would drive him mad. And to stop hunger like that, sooner or later a person would pay
any price.
Even take his own life.
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Chapter 5
Crystal Gazing is not the supernatural community’s most respected journalistic voice. Its tagline,
“All the news that’s not fit to print,” pretty much says it all. But, once in a while, its scandal-hunting
reporters turn up a story that the more respectable papers reject as mere rumor. And even more
rarely, that rumor turns out to be true.
But so far, although there was a lot of speculation about the identity of the new Pythia, no one
had managed to come up with my name. It was only a matter of time, but I was grateful for any
reprieve. And the lack of new information had allowed juicier stories to bump that one to the back
pages. Today’s screaming headline concerned an unknown woman who’d been raiding the Circle’s
facilities, although as usual, the article was short on facts and long on terms like “vixen vigilante”
and “fetching fanatic.” I silently wished her luck. Her activities might account for why no one had
yet managed to track me down.
My break was over, so I stuck the rag in my locker, getting ready to go back to work. My
current time-killing activity involved Casanova’s never-ending search for new ways to make a buck.
He’d somehow conned an up-and-coming fashion designer into renting one of the overpriced shops
in the gallery. Part of the deal had been space for a fashion show at the beginning of each new
season, along with the services of the showgirls as models and enough casino grunts to handle the
heavy lifting. I, of course, was one of the grunts.
A pretty brunette was at the locker next to mine, and we paused to size up each other’s outfit.
Hers consisted of a lot of corpse-like paint, a necklace of skulls and a skirt composed of withered
arms. They’d been cut off at the elbow, so they formed a miniskirt effect, and were moving around
just enough to be creepy.
“Zombie,” she told me, fixing her lipstick in the mirror on the inside of her locker.
“I beg your pardon?”
“You know, the ones that used to work upstairs?”
“I thought they’d been shredded.” They’d gotten in the way of the Circle’s hunt for me. And
although zombies are pretty resilient as a rule, they hadn’t done so well when facing a cadre of war
mages.
“Well, yeah. But you know the boss. He didn’t want to waste a resource.”
“What are you saying?”
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“He said zombies smart enough to wait tables but docile enough not to snack on the clientele
are hard to come by. He’s using a human waitstaff while he locates some more, but he wanted
something to remind everyone that it’s supposed to be a zombie bar, so…”
“He harvested their body parts for your costumes?”
“It’s not so bad,” she said, seeing my expression. “Except for getting felt up every time I sit
down.”
“What?”
She frowned down at her skirt. “One of these guys keeps goosing me. But when I complained,
the bokors said they couldn’t replace them all, so I’d have to figure out which one. But they all look
the same.”
We regarded the shriveled gray things around her waist for a moment. I managed not to shudder
every time a bony finger brushed against her bare skin, but my dress wasn’t so coy. As with much of
the collection, it was spelled to respond to mood, with a repertoire that would make a chameleon
envious. It had been showing tranquil nature scenes all morning, but now it switched to a dirty
yellow-brown haze, the color of sunlight filtered through smog.
“I haven’t seen that costume before,” the brunette said, her eyes narrowing.
“I’m helping with the show.”
“You’re modeling? But they told me they didn’t need any more girls.”
“I’m just doing backstage stuff. But the designer wanted us to dress up, too.”
“Oh. That’s all right, then,” she said, mollified. “I thought something was wrong. I mean,
you’re okay and all, just not exactly—”
“Model material?” I smiled, but my dress took on the sulfurous yellow-gray of the San
Francisco skyline. Great.
“Yeah, exactly.” She scrunched up her nose at the new hue. “Ugh. How do you get it back to a
prettier color?”
“I’m not sure.” And the designer, a pouty blond named Augustine, was not likely to approve of
the change.
“Cheer up,” she told me breezily. “If you’re backstage, probably nobody will see you anyway.”
She bumped the locker closed with her hip and gave a sudden yelp when one of the waving arms
goosed her. And just like that, my dress returned to the color of a nice, sunny day.
Well, that had been easier than I’d thought.
One good thing about my latest assignment had been the chance to get a friend a job. Since she
didn’t have a passport, a Social Security card or a strong command of the English language, I’d been
wondering how she was going to earn a living. Especially since her references were about four
hundred years out of date.
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I found Françoise backstage and helped her into her designated dress, a solid white sheath with
a long skirt and cap sleeves. It was cute, but I couldn’t understand what it was doing in a collection
that made even wealthy witches twitch before placing an order. Then a small dot detached itself from
one shoulder, unfolded eight tiny black legs and went to work.
A row of other dots that I’d mistaken for buttons peeled away from her shoulder and followed.
By the time the dress was buttoned up, the spiders had covered half the bodice with a tracery of
black embroidery, as delicate and intricate as the cobwebs they mimicked. The designs were
constantly being woven and unwoven, so quickly that it looked like silken fireworks were exploding
all over the fabric, each blooming in a unique design before morphing into another even more
elaborate.
I gazed at the dress in covetous admiration while Françoise drew on her gloves. All of the
models were wearing them as a way to tie the collection together. In her case, they were long and
black and did double duty, hiding the scars where, four hundred years ago, a torturer who knew his
craft had left her permanently disfigured.
She’d started life in seventeenth-century France, where she’d run into the Inquisition, which
hadn’t approved of witches so much. She’d eluded them, only to get dragged into Faerie against her
will, by slavers trying to make a fast franc selling young witches to the Fey. The scars had occurred
right before the kidnapping, and her purchaser, a Fey nobleman with a jealous wife, had not dared to
heal them. She’d eventually escaped to the Dark Fey, who decided that she would be more useful as
a slave than as a meal. They, of course, hadn’t even noticed the scars.
The whole adventure lasted only a few years from Françoise’s perspective, but the Fey timeline
isn’t in sync with ours. By the time she managed to escape, the world she knew was long gone,
making her the only person I knew that fate liked to mess with even more than me. Luckily, she was
tall, dark and exotic, characteristics that hadn’t been prized in her own century, which preferred
women petite, fair and traditional. But in our time it had been enough to persuade Augustine to
overlook her lack of credentials. It seemed that yesterday’s unfashionable Amazon was today’s
supermodel.
Once Françoise was set, waiting for makeup she didn’t need, I turned my attention to trying to
corral a rogue handbag. I finally cornered it between a rack of dresses and the wall. I pounced,
grabbing the scaly handle as it thrashed and wriggled and did its damnedest to claw me in the face.
Augustine appeared at my shoulder, but didn’t bother to help. He watched the fight for a
moment over the top of wild purple spectacles that were about to fall off his long nose. They looked
like something Elton John might have worn to sing “Rocket Man,” with wide frames shot through
with glitter. They didn’t go well with his pale blue eyes or artfully arranged curls. Of course, it was
kind of hard to think of anything they would have complemented.
“There are some…people…who are demanding to see you,” he informed me. “They don’t have
tickets, and frankly—”
“What people?” I asked, dreading the answer. I could number the ones who might consider me
a friend on one hand. And except for Rafe, none of them knew where I was.
“Well, I don’t know, do I?” Augustine’s eyes flashed. “Why don’t I stop everything I’m doing
seconds before the show to take care of your scruffy friends, who aren’t even on the guest list?”
I didn’t immediately answer, because the bag was currently winning. It had already sprouted
four stubby legs and a tooth-lined snout. Now a tail covered with hard jade scales protruded
suddenly from the rear, giving it enough leverage to thrash out of my grasp. It dropped to the floor
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and hurried off after a snakeskin belt. The belt tried slithering away, but the bag caught it by the
tail, swallowing the writhing thing in a couple of gulps.
I wrestled the truant fashion accessory to the floor with Françoise’s help and wrapped a scarf
around the snout. “What do they look like?”
“That’s my point,” Augustine snapped, tossing his curls. “They look like rejects from a lowbudget
production of Rent. Not to mention the smell. Get rid of them. Now.” He flounced off in a
huff.
I peered out from behind the curtain separating backstage from the catwalk, trying to spot my
visitors, but it wasn’t easy. The ballroom was packed with witches dressed to impress. It looked like
big hats were in for summer, because at first all I could see was a field of brightly colored circles,
bobbing and swaying like flowers in a breeze. There was no one in sight who looked like they
smelled of anything that cost less than a hundred dollars an ounce. Then a couple of witches who had
been partly blocking the view settled into their seats and I saw them.
Augustine was wrong; they weren’t friends.
The music started up and the first model elbowed me out of the way, gliding onto the catwalk,
her leopard-skin bag slinking along beside her. I hardly noticed, my eyes on the two figures who had
squeezed in the back door. I didn’t recognize them, but I knew what they were. The bulky coats they
had on were a dead giveaway: war mages. And despite their scruffy appearance, I doubted they’d
come to upgrade their wardrobe.
They were nonchalantly scanning the crowd, and I’d seen those casual glances on Pritkin’s face
often enough to know how much they took in. I moved farther into the shadow of the curtain,
wondering if I could shift out unseen, when one of them nudged his companion and nodded at a
group of dirty, poorly dressed children huddled against one wall. The mages started forward, faces
grim, and the kids broke into a run. Most people had found their seats, so there was nothing between
the kids and their pursuers except the two vamps acting as greeters.
There was a temporary alliance between the Circle and the Senate because of the war, but that
didn’t erase centuries of dislike and mistrust. Especially when war mages had been responsible for
an attack on the premises a little over a week ago. The vamps blocked the way with insolent smiles
on their faces, and the mages skidded to a halt.
The kids had run down the aisle flanking the wall and were now climbing onstage. Most people
were watching the catwalk, which had been designed to extend out into the middle of the room, so
they didn’t garner more than a few puzzled glances. They headed straight backstage, but stopped on
the edge of the frenetic activity.
They looked back and forth between me and several blonde models who were struggling into
their outfits. Then a black boy of maybe fourteen nudged a small girl. “Which one?”
The girl had dishwater blond hair and big brown eyes that focused on me unerringly. “That
one.” She pointed with the hand not clutching a beat-up teddy bear.
The bag in my arms made a sudden lunge, causing me to almost lose my grip. Françoise said
something that didn’t sound French and it froze, a shiny black claw all of an inch from my face.
“You want for me to take the crocodile?” she asked.
“Sounds like a plan.” I passed the wicked thing over gratefully.
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The boy looked at the girl with a dubious expression. “You sure?”
She nodded and went back to chewing off the bear’s head. The boy walked over and held out a
hand. The T-shirt he was wearing was thin and shot with pinholes, and his jeans were out at one
knee. One of his tennis shoes had lost its lace and was being held together with a safety pin, and a
ratty old sweatshirt was knotted around his waist. But the handshake was firm and he met my eyes. I
had a weird sense of déjà vu, even before he spoke.
“I’m Jesse. Tami sent us.”
“Tami?”
“Tamika Hodges.”
I stared at him, feeling like someone had just kicked me in the gut. He stared back, dark eyes
defiant, expecting to be ignored, rejected, thrown to the wolves. I recognized the look. A decade ago,
I’d been about his age, and just as scared, just as defiant, just as sure I couldn’t trust anyone. For the
most part, I’d been right.
Years before I decided to destroy Tony, my ambition had been just to get away from him. I’d
ended up in Chicago, because that was where the bus I’d caught happened to stop. As someone who
had rarely been allowed to leave Tony’s compound outside Philly, and then only with half a dozen
bodyguards, I found my new freedom to be a very scary thing. I had money, thanks to a generous
friend, but I was afraid to stay somewhere decent, sure that I would wake up to find a couple of
Tony’s goons looming over me. Not to mention that it’s a little hard for a fourteen-year-old to check
into a hotel on her own. So shelters it had been.
I soon discovered that there were a few problems associated with shelter life. Besides the
drunks and the druggies and the knife fights, there were also limits on the length of your stay. The
more long-term variety had a staff who might report a teenager on her own to the authorities, so I
tended to gravitate to the two-week versions. That was long enough to get comfortable but not long
enough for anyone to get to know me.
Most of this type kept records, though, and once your time was up, you weren’t allowed to
return for six months. The time limit was necessary to keep people from taking up permanent
residence, but it also ensured that I went through all of the nicer shelters in a matter of months. I
finally ended up in one that was so overcrowded, a third of us were living in a dirt-floored courtyard
with a fence around it. Everyone was issued a sleeping bag at night and told to find a spot outside.
The bigger and tougher crowd laid claim to the straggly grass and soft patches of dirt, leaving the
hard concrete patio to the newbies and the junkies and the crazy old lady who made bird noises all
night.
I’d woken up one morning to the feel of a cold arm next to mine, belonging to a young guy
who’d OD’d in his sleep. It was the same day Tami showed up, on one of her regular sweeps looking
for kids who had slipped through the cracks of the magical world. When a pretty African American
woman with kind brown eyes and a voice that seemed much too big for her small frame offered me a
place to stay, she hadn’t had to do much talking. Only a couple of minutes after meeting her, I was
dragging my backpack across the dirt to her beat-up Chevy.
Luckily, Tami had been legit, taking me to join a motley crew of other strays who jokingly
called themselves the Misfit Mafia. The name made me do a double take the first time I heard it, but
after a while it seemed oddly fitting. I’d run from one mafia to another, but with a definite
difference: the new one tried to keep people alive instead of the reverse.
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I eventually left the group to return to Tony, in order to try to take him down, and by the time I
finally had all my plans in place, three years had passed. And then there was the blowup and the
missing don and the bounty on my head, not to be confused with the shiny new one the Circle had
recently laid. With one thing and another, it had been more than three years before I returned to the
abandoned office building we’d called home. And all I found was echoing space, dirty windows and
dust-covered floors.
I don’t know why it was such a surprise. The magical underground changes fast, with three
years being more like three decades. I’d stayed in Chicago a few days anyway, feeling restless and
strangely anchorless. I hadn’t dared to contact Tami after returning to Tony’s, for fear he’d find out
and take revenge on her for helping me. But subconsciously I’d always assumed that I would return
one day and that nothing would have changed. And now that it had, I wasn’t sure what to do about it.
Growing up in a place where any sign of weakness was quickly exploited, I’d learned how to
bury inconvenient emotions, not how to release them. When even the youngest vamp was better than
a lie detector at sensing physiological changes—a slightly elevated heart rate, the tiniest catch in
breath, the too rapid blink of an eye—you learned self-control or you didn’t last long. I discovered in
Chicago that a lifetime of practice is hard to reverse, even when you don’t need that skill anymore.
I’d roamed aimlessly around a few old haunts, including the bakery where she’d worked, but
nothing had looked the same and I didn’t recognize any of the people. After a few days, I realized
that Chicago hadn’t been home; Tami had, and she was gone. So I left some flowers in a corner of
the old building, even knowing I was just feeding the rats, and moved on.
“How did you know where to find me?” I asked Jesse.
“Jeannie knew. She sees stuff sometimes. She said you’d help us.”
“Jeannie’s a clairvoyant?”
“Yeah. She not very good. She don’t see much and mostly it’s stupid stuff. She’s only five,” he
said disparagingly. “But Tami thought it was a good idea. She said we was to go to you, if something
happened to her. After it all went down, we got on the bus.”
“After what went down?”
“The mages came. They took her.” Black eyes bored into mine, already anticipating the answer
to a question he hadn’t yet asked. I knew that look, too. I understood a thing or two about betrayal.
“I’ll take care of you,” I heard myself say, and wondered if I was crazy. So far, it had been a
chore just looking after myself. Tami must have been desperate to send them to me, when I had the
biggest target on my back of anyone. I wanted to ask a thousand questions, but there wasn’t time. I’d
get some answers, but first we had to lose their pursuers.
I peered around the side of the curtains again to see that Casanova had joined the vamps holding
off the mages. He was wearing a vest that jumped and crackled with animated flames—part of the
menswear line, I assumed. It set off his dark hair and olive complexion nicely, but didn’t do much
for his expression. War mages weren’t his favorite people. But while he could give them a hard time,
he couldn’t throw them out without cause, and they were between us and the exits.
I did a swift count of the gang, which numbered eight in total. Nine, I corrected, as the baby a
girl was clutching a little too hard started to sniffle. Way too many to shift.
I glanced at Françoise. “I could use a diversion.”
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“’Ow beeg?” she asked casually.
“Beeg.”
“D’accord.”
She moved to the other side of the stage and started chanting something under her breath.
Within seconds, a bank of dark clouds rolled in, settling over the catwalk with complete disregard of
the fact that we were indoors. Chairs were knocked over as people scrambled to their feet, and the
background murmur almost instantly became a roar. The witches apparently knew a bad sign when
they saw one.
The mages suddenly stopped playing nice, shoved identification in Casanova’s face and started
up the aisle at a run. That was about the same time that something slimy and green hit the catwalk. I
didn’t even have a chance to identify it before a lot of other somethings followed, bursting out of the
rumbling black mass of clouds like popcorn. The current model’s pretty chiffon dress went from a
pleased peach to an angry dark green, a hue that almost matched the skin of the toad that had
slammed into her shoulder.
She screamed as part of it started oozing down her chest, and she stumbled back down the
catwalk. But as it was fast being littered with little broken bodies, most smashed and split open, it
was pretty much inevitable that she’d slip and go sliding on her butt. Things sort of went downhill
after that.
Protective spells were being fired off on all sides, which, when they impacted the kamikaze
amphibians, caused fleshy fireworks in midair. This made the witches in the middle of the room,
who were being liberally splattered with frog guts, even less happy, causing them to turn on their
sisters with abandon. That slowed down the mages, but I could still see them, grim and determined,
wading through the fracas toward us.
“Are there any more of you?” I asked Jesse.
He said something, but I couldn’t hear him over the sound of the audience’s chairs smashing
into the battered mages. Of course, they were slamming into a lot of other things, too, blown here
and there by the wind and the spells and the mayhem. But I didn’t notice anyone else disappearing
under a mountain of expensive painted wood. It looked like the mages had stepped on one too many
witches’ toes.
“What?”
“No!” Jesse screamed in my ear. “We were the only ones who got away!”
“Okay. Let’s get away again.”
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Chapter 6
Miranda took one look at my dress, which had shifted to an agitated swirl of autumn leaves, and
her ears went back. It was convenient to have such an obvious hint to her mood, since I’d never
learned to read her very well. The fur on her catlike face might have had something to do with that,
or possibly gargoyle expressions were too different from human ones for me to decipher.
The current group of Misfits crowded in behind me, leaving dirty footprints on her pristine
white tile floor. I’d brought them to the room-service kitchens since I wasn’t sure where Miranda
lived. She was the leader of the group of Dark Fey that Tony had been using for cheap labor, but I
only ever saw them at work, chopping and dicing with preternatural speed or pushing laden carts
through Dante’s halls.
They rarely paused except to pose for photographs with guests, who assumed they were midgets
in suits. I wondered if anyone ever noticed that their film always came out slightly blurry, the same
way their eyes never quite managed to focus on the small servers. Tony had spent a fortune to ward
the casino, although considering the amount of alcohol that the majority of the guests put away, he
probably hadn’t needed to bother. I doubted he’d been so generous in accommodations for his
workers, so what I wanted from Miranda was likely to hurt.
One of the kids, a girl who looked about twelve but who I later learned was sixteen, was
holding a baby. It was maybe four months old and a little rumpled around the edges, wearing a pink
T-shirt with a diaper and only one sock, its cheek flushed from being pressed against the girl’s chest.
I was about to launch into my carefully prepared speech when Miranda smiled, showing sharp fangs
in her long, grave face. She was no longer looking at me.
I turned to see that several gargoyles had edged to within arm’s length of the girl, close enough
that she sent me a pleading look while clutching her infant tighter. “They won’t hurt you,” I assured
her. “The Fey…well, they’re really fond of babies.”
It was a ridiculous understatement, as was becoming obvious. One of the larger gargoyles, with
a dog’s head above her spotless chef’s whites, almost ran into a wall because she was waving at the
infant while making a cutesy little face. Miranda’s eyes were also fixed on the child, with enough
longing in them that I started to worry. “Right?” I gave her a poke, and she swatted a paw at me. The
claws weren’t extended, thankfully.
“My people would defend a crèche with their lives,” she told the mother with quiet dignity.
The girl looked relieved, but kept an eye on the closest gargoyle. He was one of the smaller
variety, with floppy donkey ears under a tall chef’s hat. He tentatively stretched out a hand mangled
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even more than Françoise’s, with all but one finger missing. But the remaining digit ended in a
long, curled claw of dense grayish black.
His hand was shaking, causing an iridescent shimmer to slide up and down the surface of the
claw like an oil slick. The baby noticed the pretty colors and gurgled, reaching for it. The creature
snatched it away in a blur of motion, letting out a bleat and falling backwards over its own squat tail.
This, of course, further intrigued the baby, who fussed until her mother put her down, then crawled
toward Donkey Ears with the intent of a hunter after prey, her one sock trailing and her chubby hand
extended. The gargoyles retreated in a mad scramble.
Donkey Ears found himself trapped between the ferocious baby and a bank of ovens, which
were filling the room with the scent of cinnamon and butter. Maybe that was what attracted the kid,
or possibly she was just curious; either way, she crawled fearlessly up to the cowering creature and
held up her hands demandingly. He stared at her with big eyes until Miranda cleared her throat. Then
he snatched up the child, who made a contented sound and fisted her hands in his tunic before
stuffing most of his scarf into her mouth.
My job wasn’t too difficult after that.
Ten minutes later, we were gathered around the prep counter, wolfing down cinnamon rolls and
milk. The kitchen staff had been feeding me up for a week. It had taken me most of that time to
realize that they weren’t being kind: I was their resident guinea pig, someone to let them know what
recipes worked and what didn’t. Apparently gargoyles don’t have the same taste buds as humans.
And now they had a whole slew of new taste testers on whom to experiment.
Despite the disruption caused by nine hungry kids descending on a sugar feast, I did try to
explain. “Miranda, I appreciate this, but before you agree to babysit, there are a few things you
should know.”
Miranda didn’t comment. She had appropriated the baby from her terrified underling and was
spooning applesauce into the child’s face at an alarming rate. She let out a small purr of approval
when the little girl failed to spit up.
“See, the thing is…” Jesse, who was already on his third cinnamon roll, shot me a sharp look. It
clearly said, “Do not screw this up for us.” I swallowed, but plowed on nonetheless. “The kids who
end up as runaways in our world usually have…well, there are reasons.”
“Like with us,” she murmured, clearly not listening to me.
“Yes…sort of.” The gargoyles had fled Faerie because of prejudice and escalating violence,
both of which were certainly familiar to Tami’s kids. But out of their usual element, the Fey were
likely far less powerful than the Misfits. “Look, if you’re going to help me shelter these kids, at least
until I can figure something else out, you need to understand—”
I stopped because a sharp toe connected with my shin. I shot Jesse a look, but he was already
out of his chair. “I gotta talk to you,” he said pointedly.
I rubbed my leg and scowled. “Fine.”
We ended up outside, sitting beside the loading ramp used to bring larger items into the
kitchen’s storerooms. A couple of gargoyles were down below, scattering bread crumbs on the
asphalt, peering upward hopefully. “What’re they doing?” Jesse asked.
I’d wondered about that, too, until I’d spent a little time in the kitchens. “Let’s just say that
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baked goods are usually okay around here, but eating meat requires a certain sense of
adventure.”
He nodded, then remembered that he was supposed to be pissed at me. “What’s the big deal?
Are you trying to ruin this for us?”
It looked like Jesse was a proud graduate of Tami’s course on the Best Defense. Unfortunately
for him, so was I. “I am trying to be honest with Miranda about what she’s letting herself in for. I
think that’s only fair, don’t you?”
He jerked a thumb at the nearest gargoyle, which had a feline head that contrasted oddly with a
lumpy, reptilian body. “You think we could hurt them?”
“I think the bunch I used to run with could.”
One day in particular came to mind. A couple of drug dealers, who had set up shop in the
bottom floor of our building, had decided they could do without additional squatters. They burst in
one morning after Tami went to work. I’d been babysitting Lucy, an eleven-year-old empath, and
Paolo, a twelve-year-old Were who had been abandoned by his pack. I never knew why, because he
hardly spoke the whole time he was with us, which wasn’t long. We found his mangled body a
couple of weeks later, after he fled our protection in advance of the full moon. The Weres had been
smart enough not to come in after him, and waited until he left. The dealers weren’t so wise.
Not that they had a chance to find out what even a young Were can do. Lucy had been home
with me for a reason. Most of the kids who ended up at Tami’s magical halfway house held things
together pretty well for a while. They tried to fit in and avoid calling attention to themselves while
they figured out how things worked, so they wouldn’t screw up and be sent away yet again. But
something always set them off sooner or later, usually after they’d been there long enough to start to
relax.
When they finally lowered their defenses, it all spilled out: rage at the condition that made them
a pariah from birth, pain that the people they loved had turned on them, terror that any minute they’d
be caught and dragged back to the special schools that were more like jails. They were supposed to
stay there until they were certified safe, as no threat to the magical or non-magical communities.
Most would never leave.
Tami had thought that the breakdowns were positive, letting the kids get it out of their systems
and start to heal. Only none of them had previously involved an empath. Especially one who could
not only read emotions, but could project and magnify them.
The other kids had fled, off to find somewhere, anywhere, else to be until it wore off. Tami had
been frantic, needing to go to work as she was virtually our only income, but not daring to leave
Lucy alone in that state. I’d volunteered to stay with her because she seemed to find being around me
soothing. After a childhood monitoring my emotions at Tony’s, I didn’t project as much as most
people. But that day, it hadn’t made a difference.
I’d been watching the door with steadily mounting panic as wave after wave of emotion crashed
into me, most of it too close to what I dealt with every day to be easily shrugged off. Paolo, who had
stayed behind because he was trying to avoid leaving scent trails for his pack, had been almost
literally climbing the walls. And we both had shields.
When they burst in, the dealers ran straight into the wall of pain Lucy had been building all
afternoon. The feelings she’d suppressed since her family had dropped her off at her new “school,”
then driven away and never come back, had all spilled over. And her talent had magnified them a
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few hundred times. Instead of frightening us or whatever the men had planned, they ended up
shooting each other to death in a fit of someone else’s rage.
Jesse was watching me narrowly. “You think we’re the monsters, don’t you?”
I blinked at him. I’d almost forgotten he was there. I didn’t let myself think about Tami’s too
often, and it felt odd to do it now. “I have a broader definition of normal than most people,” I finally
said. “But you know as well as I do that having you here could cause…some issues.”
Jesse stuck his chin out. “Astrid’s a null,” he said sullenly.
“Astrid?”
“The girl with the kid.”
“Ah.” So that was why Françoise had gone to the far side of the stage to work her spell. Nulls
exerted a dampening field on magic for a space around them. For the stronger, it could be up to a city
block in size; for the weaker, it was much smaller. But even a low-level null would have interfered if
she was close.
“That’s how she got away, after she found out about the kid. They couldn’t track her.”
I nodded. Nulls weren’t automatically incarcerated like some mages with malfunctioning
magic, because they weren’t considered a threat. But if Astrid had been discovered pregnant, a lot of
pressure would have been put on her to terminate it, so as not to pass malfunctioning genes along.
No wonder she’d run. And nulls were damn hard to find when they didn’t want to be.
Tami was a low-level null herself, which had helped her to keep the Misfits safe and the chaos
to a minimum, at least when she was at home. And her abilities ensured that any runaways she took
in didn’t have to worry about registering on a magical tracking spell. Which made it strange that,
after so many years, the mages had caught up with her now.
“Okay. I’m relieved to hear that.” And I was. Astrid’s presence might help tone things down,
but she couldn’t be everywhere, and there were seven kids to watch besides the baby. I needed to
know what I was taking on. “But we both know that not everyone here is a null.”
Jesse kicked concrete with his heel and said nothing. “Jesse.”
“I’m a fluke, okay?” he blurted, in the same tone someone might once have used to say “leper.”
“That doesn’t tell me much.” “Fluke” is a catchall term for magical oddities dealing with what
humans call luck. Not good luck, not bad luck, just…luck.
A famous example, even among norms, is the odd experience of the French writer Émile
Deschamps. In 1805, he was treated to some plum pudding by a stranger, Monsieur de Fortgibu, at a
Paris restaurant. Ten years later, he saw plum pudding on the menu of another establishment and
tried to order some, only to have the waiter tell him that the last dish had just been served, to a
customer who turned out to be de Fortgibu. Much later, in 1832, Deschamps was once again offered
plum pudding at a restaurant. He laughingly told his friends that only de Fortgibu was missing to
make the cycle complete—and a moment later de Fortgibu showed up.
Of course, what the history books don’t say is that de Fortigbu was a fluke. His magic
associated certain things with particular people, places or events. Every time he saw one of his
cousins, for instance, she was wearing blue; the scent of oranges accompanied every visit to his
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favorite bookseller; and if he got within a few yards of Deschamps, pudding invariably
appeared.
Most humans claimed that events like these were mere coincidence. Magical healers, on the
other hand, speculated that they were somehow linked to memory. Images of people or places are
stored in everyone’s brain in connection with some type of sensory data. A flower a man’s
grandmother liked, for example, might make him think of her whenever he saw one. Being a mage,
de Fortgibu had simply carried that to a new level: his malfunctioning magic insured that when one
cue appeared, the other also did.
But not all flukes had magic that manifested itself in the slightly batty but mostly
nonthreatening way of de Fortgibu’s. One young man caused massive undertows whenever he got
within five miles of the shore and had to be banned from any access to the beach. Another caused
seismic activity and was restricted from going anywhere near an active fault line. That particular
group of flukes was memorable enough to deserve their own name: jinx.
A jinx was basically a walking Murphy’s Law, with “accidents” caused by out-of-control power
cropping up on a regular basis. And unlike the random stuff that most flukes caused, a jinx’s actions
were invariably harmful. There was a time, a few hundred years back, when they’d been killed on
sight. I really, really hoped that wasn’t what I was dealing with here. Not that Jesse was likely to
admit it, if it was.
“How strong are you?” A jinx of any type was dangerous, but a strong one would be a walking
disaster. Literally.
“Not strong,” he assured me fervently. “Not strong at all! And I’m the only one. The others
are…pretty harmless.”
“Uh-huh.” None of the kids, most of whom appeared to be around seven or eight, had looked
like a threat. But, then, neither had Lucy. “Define ‘pretty harmless.’”
“If you’re gonna throw me out, just do it!” Jesse said furiously. “But the others are okay. I’ll
clear out if you’ll let them—”
“I didn’t say I wanted you to leave! I just want to know what I’m dealing with here.”
Magical children didn’t fall through the cracks for no reason. It was almost a certainty that the
kids all had some kind of talent that made them persona non grata in the magical community. Yet
Jesse would admit only to a null, a fluke and a seer, swearing that the other five were just scrims, the
current PC term for mages with little ability. I had my doubts. Scrims formed the largest population
of magical runaways, but Tami hadn’t concentrated on them when I knew her because they didn’t
have handicaps that could benefit from a null’s calming influence. They could also pass for norms,
avoiding the magical community and its laws altogether if they chose. That was not an option for
people like Lucy.
But doubts or no, I couldn’t force him to tell me the truth. And with Astrid around, hopefully it
wouldn’t matter anyway. Her power should negate the kids’ abilities, whatever they were, as long as
they stayed close. Giving me time to find out what had happened to Tami.
I decided to change the subject. “How did the mages find you?”
Jesse shook his head. “I don’t know. They just busted in one morning and Tami screamed at us
to run. Astrid tried to drain them, but there were too many and they had guns. She didn’t stand a
chance.”
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“But she got away.”
“’Cause they didn’t want her. They were all about Tami. They hardly even looked at the rest of
us until they caught her.”
“Why?”
Jesse fidgeted with the sleeves on his god-awful pea green sweatshirt. “Uh, I don’t know?”
“That sentence would work a lot better without the question mark at the end,” I said dryly.
When he stubbornly stayed silent, I sighed and gave in—for the moment. If and when he
learned to trust me, his memory might improve. Any lies now would only make it that much harder
for him to admit the truth later.
“I’ll see if I can find out what happened to Tami,” I told him. “I know a few people who may be
able to tell me if the Circle has her.” Jesse’s expression clearly said that he didn’t give much for my
chances. Knowing the Circle, neither did I.
We got up to rejoin the others, but were stopped at the door by a small parade. A line of little
bird bodies was climbing out of a large trash can and slowly lurching inside. They’d obviously been
in the trash for good reason: no feathers, skin or even flesh was in evidence, just brittle bones held
together by cartilage and, apparently, thin air.
Jesse said a word I’d have preferred he didn’t know at his age, and looked at me fearfully. “He
doesn’t do it all the time, only when the baby’s fussy or…or something.”
I followed the trail of pigeon corpses inside, where they joined a bunch of others, who were
doing an odd shuffling motion on the floor around Miranda. I finally realized it was supposed to be a
dance. The baby was happily waving a sauce-covered spoon at them, while a maybe eight-year-old
Asian boy grinned proudly.
“Necromancer?” I asked softly.
Jesse scuffed a shoe over the now quite filthy tile. “I forgot about him.”
“Uh-huh.” I wondered what else he’d “forgotten.”
I explained the situation as well as I could to Miranda. “Yesss, okay,” she hissed, wiping a lump
of sauce off the baby’s chin. “Yum, yum, yum.” The little girl burbled at her and Miranda bared her
fangs in the closest she could get to a smile. I gave up.
I cautioned Jesse to see that everyone stayed out of sight and close enough to Astrid to decrease
the likelihood of any accidents. Then I went looking for my partner. I needed to clear a few things
off my to-do list before I had to start keeping it in volumes.
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Chapter 7
Finding Pritkin wasn’t difficult. He and one of his buddies were where they’d been most of the
week—holed up a storeroom in the lower levels of Dante’s, poring over ancient tomes. When I
opened the door, he looked up from a giant volume with the trapped expression of a hunted animal.
His hair, which usually defied the laws of physics, was hanging in dispirited clumps and a smear of
red decorated his forehead and one cheek, courtesy of the book’s disintegrating leather binding. I’d
gotten the impression that research wasn’t his favorite thing. Maybe because he couldn’t beat up the
books.
“What are you doing here?” he demanded.
“Show was canceled.”
Nick looked up from the middle of a ring of books, scrolls and, incongruously, a modern laptop.
He appeared harmless, a bespectacled redhead with so many freckles that he almost had a tan, his
hands and feet too big for the rest of him, like a Great Dane puppy. But the gangly young man was
actually a mage, and since he was a friend of Pritkin’s, he was probably a lot more dangerous than he
looked.
He took in my ensemble, which had settled on a watery gray afternoon. A few random orange
blossoms scattered across the silk intermittently, as if blown by gusts of wind. It looked a little tired.
“Any particular reason?”
“It’s raining.”
Nick’s eyebrows drew together. “I thought you were showing in the ballroom.”
“Frogs,” I clarified.
The small doll-like creature perched on a stack of books at Nick’s elbow finally bothered to
acknowledge my presence. “Did you say frogs?”
“Kinda put a damper on things.”
Nick glanced at Pritkin, who sighed. “Go.” Nick didn’t need to be told twice. Maybe he was
tired of research, too.
His diminutive companion rolled her eyes and went back to ostentatiously ignoring me. The
pixie, named Radella, was a liaison from the Dark Fey king. By “pixie” I mean a tiny, foul-tempered
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creature who made even Pritkin look diplomatic, and by “liaison” I mean spy. She was here to
do two things: drag Françoise back into slavery and make sure I didn’t cheat on the deal I’d cut with
her king. He wanted the Codex, too, and figured I was the gal to get it for him. The pixie looked like
she was starting to have her doubts.
She wasn’t the only one. I’d agreed to the king’s proposal for a number of reasons. I’d been in
his territory and under his control, so saying no might have been very unhealthy. I’d needed room
and board for a friend, a vampire named Tomas, in the one place where even the Senate’s long arms
couldn’t reach. And the king had promised me help in solving the biggest riddle of my life.
Tony had always avoided telling me anything about my parents. My guess was that he’d
assumed I might be a little upset if I learned about the car bomb he’d used to kill them, thereby
allowing him to keep my talents all to himself. Or maybe he’d just felt like being a bastard. He
always had liked combining business with pleasure.
It was the same vindictiveness that had led him to decide that merely killing my father wasn’t
good enough. He’d been an employee of Tony’s, one of the humans kept around to manage things in
daylight, but he’d refused to hand me over when ordered. And no one ever told the boss no and got
away with it. So Tony paid a mage to construct a magical trap for my father’s spirit, allowing him to
continue the torment from beyond the grave.
I hoped to pry Tony’s trophy from his cold dead fingers someday, but that required finding him
first. And my last trip into Faerie had proven that I was no match for the Fey. Without the dark
king’s help, I would never get anywhere near the bolt-hole Tony had found for himself. And for
some reason, the king wanted the Codex as much as I did. A fact that worried me more than a little
whenever I let myself think about it.
“What happened to your neck?” Pritkin demanded.
My hand went to the scarf I’d tied over the puncture marks. One edge of the gauze pad I’d put
over the wound was sticking out above the chiffon. Trust Pritkin to notice, and to comment. “Cut
myself shaving.”
“Very funny. What happened?”
I hesitated, trying to think up a good lie, and Pritkin snorted. I sighed. “Mircea happened.”
“Where is he?” Pritkin was halfway to his feet before I shook my head.
“Relax. I went to him, not vice versa.”
“You went to him? Why?!”
My fingers made patterns in the dust on a nearby book’s cover. The skin below was old and
flaking, and looked vaguely reptilian. I pulled my hand away and resisted an impulse to wipe it on
my skirts. “I accidentally shifted.”
“How do you accidentally—”
“Because it’s getting worse!” I tried to read his scribbled notes, but they were in some language
I didn’t know. “Any luck?”
“No.” He saw my expression. “I told you this could take some time.”
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“And what am I supposed to do in the meantime? I’m sick of waiting tables and doing fill-in
work for Casanova. Some days I feel like I’m going out of my mind!”
“Going?” the pixie muttered.
Pritkin was staring at the stacks of books as if they’d just insulted his mother. He finally pulled
out a huge blue one from the bottom of a pile. “You aren’t in any immediate danger, as long as you
don’t have any more ‘accidents’ involving Mircea.”
“And what about him?” I demanded. “It’s getting worse.”
“He’s a master vampire. He can take it.”
Instead of replying, I reached across the table to remove the top from the small white pot by
Pritkin’s elbow and looked pointedly inside. The inch of liquid it held was faintly green, with a
pleasing floral scent. Chrysanthemum, as a guess. I glanced up to see him giving me the evil eye.
“Don’t think I don’t know it was you.”
I’d had Miranda start replacing the black syrup he called coffee with something more organic
two days ago, after the last time he got tanked on caffeine and bit my head off. I was pretty sure he
was cheating, but I didn’t call him on it. I honestly didn’t think he could survive without his daily
fix—or, to be more accurate, that nobody could survive him without it.
“You’re the best argument for decaf I’ve ever seen,” I said. “And, honestly, you don’t find
anything weird about eating bean sprouts and tofu and drinking twelve pots of coffee a day—?”
“My record is six.”
“And I thought you Brits liked tea. But maybe water would be—”
He snatched the pot away. “I need that!”
I got a better look at him and decided he might be right. He might have had a chat with a
shower recently, but not a long one. His eyes were red, and when he moved his head just right, the
light showed a fine coating of reddish-blond stubble on his cheeks and chin. Add that to a T-shirt and
jeans that he appeared to have slept in, and he was looking rough, even for him.
“You need to get some sleep,” I heard myself say. “You look like crap.”
“And who will handle things then?”
“Nick and me.” Pritkin shot me a look and I bristled. “I’m not a trained researcher, but there has
to be something I can do.”
“Yes, you can get me some damn coffee!”
I told myself that throwing something at his head, however richly deserved, wouldn’t help
matters. He’d probably dodge anyway. “The vampires heard a rumor that the dark mages might have
the Codex.”
“How helpful. Did Mircea tell you that before or after he almost drained you?”
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“Rafe told me.”
“Good to know you’re keeping up with the family.”
“What is your problem?”
Pritkin ignored me. “I don’t suppose ‘Rafe’ also had an address?”
“No. But you must have some idea—”
“Dark mages never stay in one place for long. If finding them was easy, we’d have destroyed
them by now!”
“There must be rumors.”
“There always are. And by the time the Corps hears them and sends a team in, the dark have
long since decamped—and often left us a nasty surprise.”
The “Corps” was the official term for the war mages, the enforcement arm of the Silver Circle,
who tended to be a lot more fanatical about their jobs than human police. They really did have a
license to kill, and they believed in exercising it. I didn’t want to deal with any group that regularly
made the Corps look bad. But if they had the Codex, I didn’t have much choice.
“You’re not going to find them in dusty old books,” I pointed out. “What are you doing down
here?”
The pixie flipped over a page in one of the larger volumes. She had to plant her feet and use
both hands to manage it. “We’d explain,” she panted, “but it requires words of more than one
syllable.”
“Trying to find another solution to that geis of yours,” Pritkin replied.
“By doing what?”
“By attempting to create a spell that can break it.” He wasn’t even looking at me as he said it,
but had already gone back to scanning another arcane passage.
I reminded myself sternly that Pritkin was a friend. It was easier to think of him that way than
to be constantly frustrated by the fact that I wasn’t allowed to murder him. “We already know where
the counterspell is. It’s in the Codex!”
“The geis was doubled, if you recall,” Pritkin said curtly.
“Then we’ll cast it twice!”
“Magic doesn’t work like that. Do you recall what happened when you went back in time and
met a Mircea who did not yet have the geis?”
“It jumped from me to him,” I said impatiently. Pritkin hardly needed to ask, considering that
he’d been there at the time.
“Doubling the spell and setting up the feedback loop you now have.”
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“Yes, but with the counterspell—”
“You act as if there are still two distinct spells, when that is by no means certain!” he snapped.
“I don’t understand.” I kept my temper because it was rare that I could get him to talk about this
at all, and I wanted answers.
“The geis was designed to be adaptable. That was its chief strength, but the adaptability also
made it too unstable for most uses. Often, it changed from the original spell to something new over
time, adapting to meet the needs, or what it perceived as the needs, of the caster.”
“You sound like it can think.”
“No more than a computer program can. But like a sophisticated program, it does adapt to new
input.”
“Like what?”
Pritkin’s green eyes met mine coolly. “The spell itself is logical. What its designer failed to take
into consideration is that most people are not. They are often confused about what, exactly, they
really want, and the spell does not differentiate between hidden thoughts, subconscious desires, and
acknowledged ones.”
“What are you saying? That I’m trapped in this because I want to be?!”
“Not now, perhaps, but—”
“I don’t want Mircea to die!”
“Yes, but that was not the point of the spell, was it? It was designed to bind two people
together.”
I stared at him, horrified. Was that why the spell had jumped from me to Mircea in the past,
because I’d secretly wanted it to? If I’d been less attracted to him, or more in control of myself,
could all this have been avoided?
“And it has been unsupervised for more than a century, doubtless growing and changing all the
while.” Pritkin went on relentlessly. “It is very likely that you are seeking the counter to a spell that
no longer exists.”
I stared at him, feeling panic well up in my throat, dark and bitter. Being under Tony’s thumb
most of my life had taught me not to try to control my surroundings; instead, I’d controlled the only
thing I could: myself. The idea of having that last small freedom removed frightened me on more
levels than I’d known I had.
“You’re saying the counterspell won’t work.”
“You changed the parameters of the geis when you doubled it,” Pritkin repeated. “It may well
have become something with which the counterspell was not designed to deal. And if so, finding the
Codex will do you no good at all.”
I didn’t reply for a long moment, just stared into clear green eyes that met mine unflinchingly.
What he was saying sounded scarily plausible, but how did I know he was telling the truth? How
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could I be certain that this wasn’t an attempt to persuade me to stop searching for something he
didn’t want me to find in the first place? It was hard to believe him when I had another authority
telling me the exact opposite, assuring me that the Codex would fix everything and making finding it
my first official duty.
“No good?” The pixie fluttered in front me, her little face gone livid. “It will keep my king from
killing you!”
An image of the Dormouse from Alice in Wonderland suddenly flashed across my vision. I
looked at the teapot longingly, wondering if she’d fit. Maybe if I pushed.
“I haven’t forgotten our deal,” I told her tersely. “And I don’t respond well to threats.”
“And I don’t make them! You made a deal with him, human. You do not want to find out what
he’ll do if you break it!”
I glanced at Pritkin, who was being oddly silent, only to see that he’d gone back to his research.
Apparently, thoughts of my possible death at Fey hands weren’t enough to hold his attention. I
slammed a hand down on the tabletop just to see him jump. “The Consul already has every magical
authority in the book working to try to find a way around this thing! Why do you think you’ll have
more luck?”
“Because I must.”
“That’s not an answer!” He just looked at me. “Damn it, Pritkin, I’m Pythia now! I can’t do my
job if you keep deciding what I do and do not need to know!”
“If you’re Pythia, then act like it!”
“I’m trying to. And I don’t think that involves waiting around for fate to kick me in the butt yet
again! I want to do something!”
The massive volume he’d been working on suddenly leapt up and slammed against the door,
leaving a powdery blue stain where it hit. Before I could comment on exactly how useless childish
gestures were, the door opened and a gingery head poked in. Nick looked like he thought he might
be safer with the free-for-all upstairs.
He cautiously edged in, pushing a room-service cart and skirting the upended book. “It’s
stopped. But there has to be a couple thousand of them.” His voice was almost admiring.
“What caused it?” Pritkin demanded.
“Augustine’s best guess is that one of his competitors is trying to rain on his parade.”
I winced at the pun, but Pritkin only looked even more severe. “There’s going to be more of this
kind of thing, with the Corps preoccupied with the war.”
“What kind of thing?” I asked.
“Mages with vendettas deciding to take matters into their own hands,” Nick explained.
“The Corps can’t fight the war and police every mage with a grievance, and they know it,”
Pritkin finished grimly. “And what’s all this?”
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“Lunch. I met a waiter on the way back with the cart.” Nick started sorting through the
sandwiches, fruit and cookies. “Would you like something, Cassie? There’s plenty here.”
“Not really hungry.”
“She’ll eat.” Pritkin said curtly.
“I said—”
“If you starve to death it would damage my professional reputation.”
“I eat plenty.”
“The same does not apply should I strangle you in understandable irritation, however.”
“I’ll have a sandwich,” I told Nick. “No meat.”
He came up with a benign-looking egg salad, which he handed over along with a box of apple
juice. I eyed him thoughtfully. Unlike his friend, he was still a member in good standing of the
Circle. He might be able to find out about Tami for me, assuming it was the Silver who had her. On
the other hand, I didn’t know his opinion on the whole magical handicapped debate. He might view
them with the same vague embarrassment/lack of interest everyone else seemed to show and not
think she was worth asking a few questions. But nothing ventured…
“Since she sheltered you seven years ago, I’m assuming she’s not a teenager, right?” he asked
after I’d sketched the problem.
“She was in her late twenties when I knew her, which would make her mid-thirties now. Why?”
“Then she’s way too old for the harvesters,” Nick said, around a mouthful of what I hoped was
chicken. “They wouldn’t waste their time, especially not if she was weak to begin with.”
Pritkin caught my expression. “He’s talking about the people who make null bombs.”
Nick nodded. “That’s when—”
“I know what they are,” I said numbly. The bombs were highly prized, as they concentrated a
null’s usual effect, stopping all magic in an area for a period of time—including mine. I’d found out
about them only recently, as Tami had never brought the subject up. Not too surprisingly,
considering that the process required to make a bomb drains nulls of their life force, thereby killing
them.
“Don’t worry,” Nick said, slathering mustard on another roll. “Like most mages, nulls come
into their full power when they hit puberty, making them as strong then as they’re ever going to get.
Harvesters like to get them as soon thereafter as possible, to maximize the amount of life force they
have to give. Your friend wouldn’t interest them.”
“Why would the Circle want her, then?”
He shrugged. “Beats me. Unless she was privy to important information of some kind.”
I shook my head. “Tami doesn’t know anything like that.”
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“But she knows someone,” Pritkin pointed out. At my bewildered look, he sighed. “The Circle
doesn’t know where you are—the fact that they were willing to put a steep bounty on your head says
as much. Perhaps they are attempting to lure you into coming to them.”
“You think they took her because of me?” The sandwich, which hadn’t been great to begin
with, was suddenly tasteless.
“It’s possible,” Nick agreed, warming to his buddy’s suggestion. “Half the Council was in
attendance when you flashed in, told off the Consul, seduced Mircea and stole Tomas out from under
her nose.”
“It didn’t happen like that!” I said, appalled. And it hadn’t. The Consul had been in the middle
of torturing a friend of mine to death when I made a desperate attempt to rescue him. It had worked,
a fact that still amazed me, but for a while there, I’d been in serious jeopardy—not to mention scared
out of my mind.
Nick shrugged. “Well, that’s the story that’s been going around.”
“If they are trying to persuade you to try another foolhardy rescue, they would need to find
someone you would consider worth the effort,” Pritkin pointed out. “But Tomas remains in Faerie,
and is therefore unreachable. Your parents, as I understand it, are deceased, and your childhood
friends are vampires protected by the Senate.” He thought for a moment. “Or ghosts. But even the
Circle can’t harm the dead.”
For a minute, I just stood there, blinking stupidly. What did it say about my life, when even my
enemies had trouble finding anyone close to me? I hadn’t seen Tami in seven years. Had it really
been that long since I’d had a friend vulnerable enough to act as hostage to fate? I guess it had.
Except for Tomas, and that was anything but a reassuring thought. I vividly remembered the
sickening twist in my stomach when I’d realized why he had been scheduled for such a horrible and
demeaning death, maybe because I was suddenly experiencing it all over again.
The Senate had had a lot of reasons for wanting Tomas dead, but the execution had been made a
public spectacle mainly in the hope that I would come after him. And I had, right into the middle of a
room half filled with their allies from the Silver Circle. Who had apparently been paying attention to
the lesson. Had they immediately started looking for a replacement for Tomas? Had I doomed Tami
the moment I freed him?
“If the Circle has her, can you find out?” I asked Nick.
“I can try,” he said slowly, apparently just realizing that this might be a sensitive subject. “But
if they want you to come after her, surely they’ll publicize the fact that they have her.”
“Not necessarily.”
“But—”
“Whatever memo they sent out about Tomas, I didn’t get. I only stumbled over him by chance,
after the execution had already begun.” He’d still been alive because he was a vampire, and not easy
to kill. Tami didn’t have that advantage.
“Be that as it may,” Nick said seriously, “the Council was given an up-close view of the kind of
power the Pythia wields. They aren’t likely to forget it. If they are setting you up, they’ll take
precautions. Which would make any attempt to rescue her extremely—”
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“You aren’t going to rescue her.” That, of course, was Pritkin.
“Not without some idea where she is,” I agreed. When I’d gone after Tomas, the Senate had
exploded a null bomb so I couldn’t just shift in, grab him, and shift out. It was a good guess that the
Circle had their own stash of the nasty things, waiting to ensure that any rescue attempt I made
ended with me being the one needing rescuing. If I was going to do this, I needed a plan. And
forming one required knowing where she was.
“I’ll do what I can,” Nick promised. “But about the Codex, I still say we ought to check with
Saleh.”
“Who’s Saleh?” I asked, trying to keep the desperation out of my voice.
“It’s too risky!” The glare Pritkin sent Nick would’ve melted glass.
“I’m Pythia,” I reminded him. “Breathing is risky.”
“Saleh deals in information. Esoteric, hard-to-get, valuable information,” Nick informed me,
despite Pritkin’s steadily reddening face. “The problem is his price.”
“I can come up with the money,” I said, thinking about Billy and roulette wheels and big
payoffs.
“He doesn’t deal in money,” Pritkin snapped, cutting off whatever Nick had been about to say.
“Only in favors. And you don’t want to risk owing him one!”
“I’ll decide that!”
“We could at least talk to him,” Nick offered mildly. I kept hoping his low-key attitude would
rub off on his buddy, but so far no luck.
“If he knows something, I’ll get it,” the pixie said, fingering her tiny sword. It would have
sounded comical, except that I’d seen what the thing could do.
Nick shook his head. “If we make him angry, we’ll never get anything out of him.”
“The fewer who go, the better,” I added. “Most people don’t like to talk in front of a crowd.”
Especially if one of them is waving a sword in his face.
Pritkin looked like he was about to explode. “Did you hear nothing I said? The Codex is likely
useless for your purposes. And I am not taking you near that piece of scum!”
“You don’t have to take me anywhere,” I told him impatiently. “I’ll take myself.”
“You’re not going.” It sounded final.
“I already know his name,” I pointed out. “How hard do you think it would be for Billy to
locate him?”
“Do you have any idea what he could demand? He’ll try to trick you—”
“Then it’s a good thing we’ll be along to make sure he doesn’t,” Nick said smoothly. He cocked
a sandy eyebrow at me. “If you’ll permit the escort?”
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I glanced at Pritkin’s face, which was bordering on purple, and sighed. Until I got some training
in defense, a bodyguard or two was pretty much a necessity. Besides, I wasn’t sure how to get rid of
him. I said okay, even knowing I’d probably regret it.
Of course I was right.
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Chapter 8
The room would have been elegant if it hadn’t been for all the blood. The apartment’s tasteful
gold and cream interior clashed with the panorama of the Vegas Strip outside, but the view was less
of a decor problem than the brown rivulets that had run down the embossed wallpaper and
coagulated on the nice buff carpet. There was no body in sight, but there didn’t need to be. No one
could have lost that much blood and lived. Not even something not entirely human.
My dress had turned to eerie twilight, with twisted black branches clasping a harvest moon like
bony fingers. It was creepy as hell, and fit my mood perfectly. I glanced longingly back at the foyer,
but I couldn’t cut and run when this had been my idea. The only good thing was that I’d managed to
leave the pixie behind. I wondered if she’d figured a way out of the file drawer yet.
I reluctantly followed Pritkin through the wrecked living room while Nick stayed behind to
check things out. We moved gingerly down a hallway, trying to dodge the worst of the blood. It
wasn’t easy. By the time I managed it, I’d decided that the victim must have taken at least a few of
his attackers with him. No single body could have possibly bled that much.
Sure enough, the door at the end of the hall was ajar due to the corpse lying half out of it. Or, to
be more precise, part of a corpse. The top half was several feet away from the remainder, and I didn’t
see a right arm at all. Of course, I wasn’t looking too hard.
I carefully stepped over what was left of the body and immediately spotted the missing arm. It
was affixed to the wall inside the door, courtesy of a large axe that had severed it at the shoulder.
The arm hung by the remains of a sleeve that may once have been blue but was now a stiff purple
mess.
Swallowing hard, I stared around, sweat already forming on my upper lip. The air-conditioning
wasn’t on, and despite an occasional breeze through a shattered window, it had to be ninety degrees
in the apartment. But that wasn’t the reason I was perspiring.
The rays of midafternoon sunlight seemed thicker than usual, clouded with dust and what I
realized after a moment were a couple hundred flies. They were hovering over what at first appeared
to be a random mass of body parts atop a king-sized bed, but which I finally identified as the corpse
of a man. To put it nicely, it wasn’t fresh. I’m no expert, but I seriously doubted that the newly dead
would look like a fleshy balloon about to erupt with fetid gases and decay. The sight was gruesome
enough that it took me a minute to notice that he had skin the color of an after-dinner mint, a chalky
blue green.
“Djinn,” Pritkin said curtly, before I could ask. “Do you see him?”
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I looked at him incredulously. “He’s a little hard to miss.”
“The spirit!”
I shook my head. If there was a ghost on the premises, he was keeping real quiet. Or maybe
he’d passed out from the stink of whatever was seeping out of a gash in the djinn’s side. At least the
flies seemed to like it; about a hundred had congregated there in a working black mound. I gagged
hoarsely and tried to breathe through my mouth. It didn’t help.
“Careful, Cass—you look about as green as he does,” Billy commented. “Tell the mage that the
only ghost around here is me, and let’s get outta here. This place is giving me the creeps.”
I swallowed hard. “Do you sense anything?” If anybody could round up a freaked-out ghost, it
was Billy.
“No, but I’ll check around, just to be sure. Sometimes the new ones hide.” He doesn’t get
generous very often, so I must have really looked bad.
“Thanks.” I started edging toward the door, intending to catch a breath of comparatively sweetsmelling
smog, assuming I could get a living room window open. But Nick was in the way.
I hadn’t seen him come in, and he startled me. I gave a yelp and pulled back so hard that I
would have fallen if Pritkin hadn’t caught me. “I doubt he’s here,” he said curtly, setting me back on
my feet, “even if part of him survived. He’d be after the murderer.”
“What could a ghost do to anyone?” Nick scoffed.
Pritkin and I exchanged a glance. He’d seen firsthand the damage a couple of pissed-off ghosts
could do. But he didn’t mention it. “I’m going to check the rest of the apartment,” he said instead,
and left.
“He may be the Corps’ best demon hunter,” Nick said, scowling after his friend, “but I’ll bet
you know more about ghosts. Saleh could have left one, right?” He looked from me to the body, but
it didn’t answer. That wasn’t too surprising, as it no longer had a head.
“I don’t know.” I’d never met a djinn before, but I assumed that the same laws governed them
as ruled other non-human magical creatures, none of whom left ghosts. Of course, neither do most
people. It’s actually a pretty rare condition all the way around, so whatever information this one had
carried into the great beyond was likely to stay there. But I didn’t feel up to giving a long
explanation at the moment. “Billy’s gone to take a look around. If there’s anything left of him, he’ll
find it.”
“Anything left? He’s either a ghost or he isn’t!” Nick seemed a little stressed, with a vein
throbbing insistently beside his right eye. He looked like the office type to me; maybe fieldwork
didn’t agree with him, either.
“It’s not that simple,” I explained. “Not all ghosts are permanent. Some spirits linger around
their bodies for a while before accepting things and moving on.”
“How long?”
“A few hours, maybe a few days. No more than a week, unless they’re planning to stick around
for the long haul.”
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“Based on the condition of the body, he couldn’t have died more than four days ago. By your
calculations, his spirit could still be here.”
“Maybe. But I don’t sense anything.”
“Try harder,” Nick urged. “He’s no longer in a position to make demands. If you can contact
him, he may be willing to tell us something.”
“If he’s here, Billy will find him. If he isn’t—” I shrugged. “I don’t do anything to attract
ghosts, so I can’t ‘try harder.’ They just tend to show up when I’m around.”
“We can’t afford to stay much longer.” Nick spoke quietly, but there was a warning note in his
voice that I didn’t like. It suddenly occurred to me to wonder why the place wasn’t overrun with war
mages. It was their job to investigate murders in the supernatural community, and there looked to be
enough bodies here to occupy them for a while. I’d just spied a foot—of a much more human golden
brown—sticking out from behind the bed. I didn’t look to see if it was still attached to anything.
“How long before anyone else shows up?” I asked uneasily. Pritkin and his fellow mages
weren’t exactly on good terms, and I would just as soon miss the reunion.
“There’s no way to know. But Saleh was under interdict by the Council.” Nick saw my
expression. “It’s like parole,” he explained. “And when he doesn’t show up for his weekly meeting,
someone will be sent to check on him.”
“Crap.” I started for the door, but Nick grabbed me.
“What if you were to touch the corpse itself? Would that make for a stronger connection?”
I stared at him in horror. “I’m not touching that thing!” The very idea made my skin crawl.
“What about something he owned, then?” Before I could stop him, Nick crossed the room to
tug at the dead man’s shirt. I think he intended to rip a piece of fabric off for me, but the dead flesh
peeled away with the cloth, flaking off the bone like a well-done fish. The shirt gaped open where
he’d grasped it, giving me a glimpse of a belly that moved on its own. When I realized I was seeing
maggots teeming beneath the skin, I gagged and almost lost it.
“That’s it. I’m done.” I staggered through the door and bumped into Pritkin coming up the
hallway. “Is there a bathroom?”
“Two doors down to your left. There’s no one in there.”
For a second, I didn’t know what he meant. There were only three of us along on this crazy
errand to interrogate a dead man—unless you counted Billy, and he hadn’t needed to use the
facilities in quite a while. Then I realized that he was implying that the bathroom was free of corpses.
I got a mental image of the bloated body behind me, choked and fled.
The dress seemed to like the bathroom better than the bedroom-turned-morgue. The mirror
reflected back to me a hesitant pale rose, like the sky just before dawn. But although I stood over the
sink for a long minute, trying not to heave up lunch, the sun didn’t rise. I didn’t blame it.
I’d just finished washing my face and hands, trying to get what felt like a greasy film off them,
when a fine mist floated up from the drain on a cold silver glow. It resolved itself into a face,
wavering in front of the mirror like a mirage made out of steam. It was vague and indistinct, not
almost solid the way I usually see ghosts. I blinked at it, but it didn’t go away. “Is it safe?” a
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tremulous voice demanded.
“Uh,” I said stupidly. There really was no good answer. On a few memorable occasions in the
past, I’d encountered spirits who weren’t yet aware that they were dead. And no one ever appreciated
being brought up to speed.
The misty eyes started moving around the bathroom. They detached from the rest of the head to
float off, poking into things. One slipped under the door, and I winced, only too aware of what was
coming. A few seconds later, the mouth opened in shock, but no words came out
“I know it’s bad,” I babbled, “but you’re going to a better place.”
The sightless head turned in my direction. “I’m a demon,” it snarled. “I don’t think so.”
Okay, he had a point. The other eye returned from looking out the window and settled in the
middle of his forehead. It gave him a weird Cyclops vibe, but under the circumstances, I didn’t think
that worth pointing out. “Who did this?”
“Don’t you know?” I asked, surprised.
“I was asleep!” he said, sounding outraged. “I heard someone break in, got halfway out of bed,
and then the lights went out.” Permanently, I thought but didn’t say. The eye focused on my face,
really seeing me, for the first time. “And who the hell are you?”
“Just visiting,” I said, edging toward the door.
“Not so fast.” The face reappeared in my path. The wandering eye caught up with the other one
and there was some jostling around while they fought each other for forehead space. When they
finally settled, he looked at me accusingly. “You can see me!”
“I’m clairvoyant.”
“Good. Then tell me who did this. Someone is gonna pay!”
I had a sudden idea. “Maybe we can work something out,” I offered.
“Whaddya mean?”
“I need to know about the Codex,” I said tenuously.
“Which one?” he demanded, suddenly businesslike.
“There’s more than one?”
“A codex is a compilation of knowledge, babe. Which one are we talking about here?’
I swallowed. “The Codex Merlini. The lost volume.”
His gaze sharpened. “What did you say your name was?”
“I didn’t. Do you know anything?”
“Possibly.”
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I sighed. “I’m Cassie Palmer,” I admitted, and the ghostly eyes visibly brightened.
“Okay, then.” Saleh’s voice turned brisk. “The Codex was lost centuries ago, but that isn’t the
main problem. Even if you find it, you won’t be able to read it.”
“It’s in code?”
“Better. Codes can be deciphered, sooner or later, no matter how good. He was a little more
creative than that.”
“He? You mean, there really was a Merlin?”
“No, they called it the Codex Merlini because it was written by a guy named Ralph,” Saleh said
impatiently. “You know that old story about Merlin getting younger every year, instead of older?” I
nodded. “Well, the storytellers got it mixed up.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning that it wasn’t the mage who aged backwards. He spelled the Codex so that, if it ever
left his possession, it would start aging in reverse.”
“Why would he do that?”
Saleh gave me a look that said he was starting to suspect that my IQ equaled my bust size. “So
it would begin unwriting itself, of course! In our time it’s just a bundle of blank parchment.”
“But if someone was to go into the past…”
Saleh slid me an evil smile. “Then that someone could possibly retrieve it.”
I felt my stomach sink. My new position meant that, among other things, I had the fun job of
policing the timeline. But without some of those lessons I was missing, every time I went back, I
risked messing up something I wouldn’t know how to fix.
“Where is it?” I asked, knowing I wasn’t going to like the answer.
“Wrong question,” he murmured. “You should be asking where was it. Because you need to go
back to a time when the text was still mostly intact, yet after it left Merlin’s hands.”
Someone rapped smartly on the door, and I jumped. “We need to go.” Pritkin’s voice carried
clearly through the thin wood.
“Then where was it?” I hissed quietly. The only person who hated my jaunts into the past more
than I did was Pritkin. I wanted to make the deal before he interfered and possibly screwed it up.
Billy suddenly zoomed through the wall like a firecracker on speed. “The mage is right, Cass.
We gotta get gone. Now.” He pulled up at the sight of the djinn’s spectral face. “Who’s that?”
“Saleh. I found him.”
“Great. So let’s go. There’s a cadre of war mages coming up the elevator.”
“Give me a minute.”
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“You don’t have a minute.”
“Billy! I may have found something!”
Pritkin started beating on the door. “What’s going on? What’s wrong?” Too late I recalled
being told once that his hearing was super sharp.
I looked at Saleh. “What do you want?”
He gave me an eye roll. “What do you think? You’re clairvoyant. I want to know who did this.”
“I don’t control my gift,” I told him desperately, as Pritkin started throwing himself against the
bathroom door.
“Then I guess I’ll hang around with you until it decides to manifest,” Saleh said pleasantly.
“Oh, I don’t think so,” Billy said, glaring daggers at the djinn.
I stared at Saleh, who gazed peacefully back. I sighed and gave in. “When did you die,
exactly?”
“Monday morning, sometime around ten.”
I glanced at Billy. No way was I going back to an apartment full of murderers in a vulnerable
human body. “Some help here,” I said urgently.
My body needs a spirit in residence to maintain life, but nobody ever said it had to be mine. I’d
been told by someone who ought to know that I didn’t need Billy to babysit my physical self
whenever my spirit took a little jaunt. Just shift back to the same time you left, she’d said
nonchalantly, as if timing a shift that closely was so damn easy. Needless to say, I preferred my
solution.
“I do not believe this,” Billy muttered, as one of the hinges gave way with a crack. I gave him
frantic eyes and he said something profane before slipping inside my skin. “Don’t be long. He’ll
figure out it’s me when I can’t get us out of here.”
“What’s going on?” Saleh demanded.
“I can’t tell you what you want to know. But I can show you.” I waved my hand through what
was left of him and shifted.
The bathroom reformed around us, four days earlier. There was no sound coming from outside
the door, so I cautiously stuck my insubstantial head through the wood and looked around. The
absence of blood on the walls was enough to tell me that I’d made it ahead of the murderers.
Saleh streamed through the wall, looking determined. I followed, keeping an eye out for
anything unusual. Like someone with a really big axe.
Saleh floated through the wall of his bedroom as easily as if he did it every day. On the bed was
the sleeping djinn. In life he’d been pretty normal-looking except for the skin color. No turban, gold
earrings or Middle Eastern garb in sight. Instead, he had a mop of curly brown hair, a well-trimmed
goatee and a Lakers tracksuit. He also had a head.
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The alarm clock on the bedside table said 9:34. Saleh and I glanced at each other, then settled
down to watch. It didn’t take long.
At 9:52, I heard the sound of running feet and the clash of weapons as, presumably, Saleh’s
bodyguards faced off with the assassins. A moment later, one of them stumbled through the door,
before a magically levitating axe took off his arm. A sword wielded by human hands bisected him a
moment later, while the figure on the bed woke up, blinked his eyes blearily, and started to look
around. Before he could focus, the second bodyguard was dead and Saleh’s head was playing
basketball with the clothes hamper on the far side of the room.
I barely noticed the gruesome denouement, because my eyes had fixed with disbelief on the
sword-wielding figure standing over the scene. I would have gasped, but my lungs didn’t seem to
work, my body suddenly empty of anything resembling air. A sickening disorientation hit me, and
for a moment I couldn’t move, couldn’t think. Time seemed to stop as I stared in hollow shock at the
face, splattered by his victim’s blood.
He looked different, some part of my brain noticed. Instead of a ratty T-shirt and a brown coat
that looked like it had been through one too many battles, his lean form was poured into close-fitting
black jeans, a matching button-up shirt and a rich black leather jacket. It was his usual look, but
upgraded, as if he’d suddenly developed a sense of style. His hair also appeared to have been
brushed recently, and the stubble on his cheeks looked more like a fashion statement than someone
who had forgotten to shave.
It was his expression that was the most radical alteration, though. I’d seen him angry more
times than I could count, but that particular arrangement of features, like a hunting bird about to snap
the neck of its prey, was new. I looked into a pair of familiar green eyes in utter denial. All I could
think was, No wonder he didn’t want to bring me to see Saleh.
“I don’t believe this!” Saleh complained. “I don’t even know him!” We watched Pritkin wipe
the bloody sword on a corner of Saleh’s sheets before sheathing it in a long scabbard slung across his
back. He walked out with an easy, unhurried stride, frightening and graceful. He didn’t look back.
“Some guy saunters in here, hacks me to pieces and I don’t even know him?”
“Calm down,” I said, feeling light-headed and faintly ill. “Keep your head.”
“I don’t have a head!” he snapped, and started for the door.
“We had a deal,” I reminded him.
“Your book’s in Paris,” Saleh threw over what would have been his shoulder if he’d still had
one. “Try 1793.”
I stared at him. “What?” Damn it—I should have known that wasn’t coincidence.
“Yeah. A couple dumb-ass dark mages stole it from Merlin that year and—”
“Wait.” I glared at the djinn, wondering if I was being had. “Merlin lived in…well, I don’t
know exactly, but he couldn’t have still been alive in the eighteenth century!”
“He was part incubus—everyone knows that,” I was informed testily. “And demons are
immortal. Now hush up if you want this, ’cause otherwise I’m gone.”
I hushed up.
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“So, yeah, he was alive in 1793, when he lost the Codex to the mages, who put it up for auction
at a little get-together on October third. Right before they bugged the hell out of the city to get away
from the public executions and the fires and the mobs and the pissed-off half demon who was after
their butts. Anyway, dress to impress and maybe you can get a look at it before they sell it off.”
“But, if they’re planning to sell it, it’ll be guarded! There has to be a better time—”
“Merlin was guarding the Codex until the mages got their greedy paws on it and, trust me,
Pythia or no, you don’t want to go through him.”
“Then what about later? Who bought it?”
“Even if I had all day, I couldn’t cover all the rumors of where it went after that night. You
don’t care anyway, since if you want it before the spells unravel, you have to get at it early. And
that’s Paris, 1793,” he said flatly. “Try not to get beheaded. Trust me, it sucks.” He started for the
corridor again.
“Wait a minute! Where are you going?”
“Where you think? I got a job to do.”
“Saleh!”
He paused beside the door. “This is none of your business, babe. Thanks to mystery man, I’m
incorporeal again. Ten centuries of accumulated power down the drain, like that.” He tried to snap
his fingers, but the lack of actual hands frustrated him. He grimaced. “Whatever revenge I can come
up with is well within the rules. And believe me, I can be real inventive.”
He streamed out, leaving me staring witlessly after him. Well, at least that explained how he’d
managed to leave a ghost: he hadn’t. The spirit was Saleh’s natural state. He’d just saved up enough
power to form himself a body, the better to wheel and deal with mortals, I assumed. The question
was, did I go after him?
I doubted if, in his current condition, he could do Pritkin any real harm. Ghosts, even new ones,
have a limited power supply, one that is eroded very quickly by attacks on the living. Saleh wasn’t a
ghost, but since he’d just lost most of his power along with his head, I doubted he was likely to do
any better. Add to that Pritkin’s formidable shields, and he was probably pretty safe. Too bad the
same couldn’t be said for me.
If Saleh found a way to communicate with the mage, to accuse him or berate him for the crime,
he might let slip how he’d acquired his information. And that would be very bad. If Saleh didn’t
even know him, it seemed unlikely that Pritkin had a personal grievance against the djinn. Which
meant that his reason for killing him was probably to keep him from telling me about the Codex.
And if Pritkin hadn’t balked at killing Saleh to keep it safe, why would I be any different?
In the end, I decided that the whole Saleh debate was stupid since I didn’t know how to round
up a djinn that didn’t want to go. I finally shifted back alone, only to have Billy scream inside my
head, “Get in the tub!”
When I just stood there, trying to catch up, he stepped out of my skin and gave me a shove,
right in the center of my chest. Billy usually has trouble moving even small things, but he’d found
some extra energy somewhere, because I almost flew off my feet. I staggered backwards against the
old-fashioned claw-footed tub, lost my balance and fell in. At the same moment the corridor wall
blew inward in a burst of plaster, wood and expensive wallpaper.
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I lay among the debris, head spinning, eyesight going dark, for several confused seconds. The
tub had been a restored antique, with the original solid cast-iron body. It had saved my life, but with
a pounding head and dust-caked lungs, I was having trouble feeling grateful.
“Miss Palmer!” Pritkin’s voice came from the hole where the door used to be. “Are you all
right?”
I didn’t look at him. I couldn’t look at him. “Sure.” I spit out blood—I’d bitten my tongue—and
plaster dust. “Never better.”
I climbed out of the debris and started for the sink, only it didn’t appear to be there anymore.
There was a sink-sized hole in the window, though, so I picked a shaky path across the destroyed
bathroom and looked out. The fresh breeze was so distracting that it took me a few seconds to spy
the remains of the plumbing eight stories below, in the middle of Flamingo Road. A taxi driver was
standing outside his cab, staring at the big dent in his hood and looking puzzled. He looked up and
our eyes met. I quickly ducked back inside. This place was about to be way more popular than I
liked.
I peered into the hall and saw three unfamiliar war mages sitting with their backs to the wall.
They looked pissed, maybe because they were trussed up like chickens about to be put on a spit.
Since there were only three, I assumed they hadn’t been expecting us. They seemed to recognize me,
though, or maybe they were glaring at everybody on principle.
“We can try a memory charm,” Nick said, regarding them doubtfully.
“It won’t hold,” Pritkin argued. “Not with their training.” He looked at Nick, his eyes shadowed
with concern. “It seems you just joined the resistance openly.”
I blinked, but it didn’t help. The mask was absolutely perfect. I’d grown up around creatures
whose emotions were often shown in the barest flicker of an eyelash, in an infinitesimal pause in
conversation. I’d thought I knew how to read people, but even concentrating with everything I had, I
couldn’t find a flaw.
The sleek, deadly predator I’d just seen was simply gone. In his place was a pale, tired-looking
man with plaster powdering his skin and clothes. Pritkin ran fingers through his hair, which, already
wet with sweat thanks to the ovenlike temperature in the apartment, gummed into punk-rock spikes.
At least he’ll have to wash it now, I thought blankly.
Pritkin noticed me, and the touch of his eyes was enough to make my skin prickle. “Did you
find him?”
I stumbled over to lean heavily against the wall. My heart was pumping against my rib cage,
hard and fast enough that I could feel the pulse in my neck. “No.” I closed my eyes as if in
weariness, because Pritkin had proven able to read them all too easily in the past. But I was proud of
my voice. It was the one I’d cultivated at court, the one designed to tell even vampires exactly
nothing. I forced my heart rate to slow down, my breathing to even out. “It seems that djinn are like
vamps; they don’t leave ghosts.”
“You said you found something.” I opened my eyes to see Pritkin coming toward me. Okay,
maybe there was a flaw, I decided. The walk was the same. He had the deadly fluidity of a fighter,
all leashed strength and readiness. He stopped a little too close for comfort, those clever green eyes
searching my face.
He’s Tony in a mood, I told myself sternly, looking for someone to bleed because he’s having a
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bad day. You feel nothing, no fear, because that attracts his attention better than anything else.
You are calm, dreamy, serene. You feel nothing. “There was a ghost trail in the bathroom, but it
wasn’t from the djinn,” I said casually. “Someone else died here, a while ago.”
“Are you sure you’re all right?” Nick came up alongside me. His eyes were on my dress, which
had retreated from hopeful dawn into foggy night, with little tendrils of white creeping cautiously
across a murky background.
“Fine,” I said steadily. “The sink missed me on its way to destroy a cab.”
Pritkin stared past my shoulder at the ruined bathroom and his scowl deepened. “We need to go.
There’s nothing for us here, and the human authorities will arrive soon.”
I couldn’t make myself touch his hand, so I twisted a fist in his coat, which was back to the old
battered brown. I wondered where he kept the cool clothes. I held out my free hand to Nick and
prepared to shift us all back to Dante’s. “Yeah,” I agreed, my eyes on Pritkin. “We’re all done here.”
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Chapter 9
Casanova had pointed out that it would be unwise for me to occupy a suite, in case the Circle had
spies on the lookout for long-term guests. Instead, he’d stuck me in what had once been a small
storeroom in back of the tiki bar. I still had several cases of cocktail umbrellas in boxes under my
bed, and barely enough room to turn around. Pritkin had it worse, being stuffed into the dressing
room once reserved for the club’s famous dead performers. It was larger, since it had once held their
coffins, but he swore it still had a certain…odor. At the moment, that thought cheered me up
considerably.
I finished pulling the oversized T-shirt I was using for a nightgown over my head as Billy
drifted through the wall. I brought him up to speed on my conversation with Saleh while he sat on
the edge of the bed and rolled a ghostly cigarette. “We need a team,” I concluded.
“We are a team.”
I was tired and I ached, in more ways than one. I hugged my pillow, which had all the comfort
of one issued by an unusually stingy airline.
“The Cassie and Billy show might have worked for staying a step ahead of Tony,” I said. “It
isn’t going to be enough to let us burgle a Black Circle stronghold.”
“And we’ve had such great luck with partners.”
“We can trust Rafe.”
“Cass, I know you like the guy, but come on. A great warrior he ain’t.”
“We don’t need a warrior,” I said irritably. “I’m not planning to attack the Circle!”
“And your plans always work out perfectly, huh?”
“Are you trying to be a pain in the ass?”
“Nope, it pretty much comes naturally.” He lit up and regarded me through a haze of ghostly
smoke. “There’s always Marlowe.”
He meant Kit Marlowe, the onetime Elizabethan playwright. He was now the Consul’s chief
spy. “Yeah, that’d be healthy.”
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“You’d be saving Mircea as well as yourself. I’d think that would cancel a few debts,” Billy
argued.
“It might, if they didn’t blame me for getting him into this mess in the first place.”
“But he put the geis on you—”
“Which, as my master, he had every right to do. I’m the one who had no right to double it, even
accidentally.” I saw the objection trembling on Billy’s lips. “And yes, I think their reasoning sucks.
I’m just saying.”
“I don’t like them any better than you do.” Billy sounded aggrieved. “But who else is there? We
keep meeting these powerful types, but they’re all freaking nuts.”
“I’m not taking anyone back in time I can’t trust. Or anyone incompetent. Or who has their own
agenda.”
Billy let out an exasperated sigh. “It’s gonna be a little hard to assemble a team if you keep to
those kind of standards. Someone loyal and strong who doesn’t want anything? Come on.”
I found myself getting furious all over again at Pritkin, who was supposed to be exactly that. I’d
started to let down my guard with him, just because he was smart and brave and sometimes strangely
funny. I should’ve kept in mind that none of that meant he was on my side. When I give my word, I
keep it, he’d once told me. Yeah, right.
I toyed with the bedspread, blue and gold brocade with scratchy lace. Not for the first time, I
wished for something less flashy and more comfortable. I’d had a soft cotton coverlet at Tony’s that
I’d used for years. It had faded in the wash, its bright, cheap flowers turning to soft pastels over time,
like an English garden. It had gotten a little ragged around the edges, but I’d never let my fastidious
governess change it for anything else. I’d liked it the way it was, flaws and all. But like the rest of
my stuff, like Eugenie herself, it no longer existed.
“Cass?” Billy suddenly sounded awkward, something almost novel for him. “You know Pritkin
was a jerk, right?” A jerk who also happened to be a friend, a tiny voice at the back of my mind
whispered. Stop it, stop it. “Cass?”
The lump in my throat had grown enough to be almost painful, and my eyes had started
prickling embarrassingly, and wow, was it time for a change of subject. “I know.”
“Okay, then. We’re better off. I never trusted him.”
“I don’t trust anybody,” I said fervently. It was the only thing I was sure of these days.
“Anybody except me,” Billy corrected. “So what’s the plan?”
“I have to get the Codex,” I said, starting with the one thing on which there was no argument.
Pritkin had said it wouldn’t help, but I guess I’d just seen how much I could believe him. “Only I
can’t bring it back here. It’s been roaming around for over two hundred years; who knows what
taking it out of the timeline would do?”
Billy looked confused for a moment, and then his eyes got wide. “You can’t be thinking what I
think you’re thinking.”
I scowled at him. “If the mountain won’t go to Mohammed—”
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“Mohammed wasn’t an insane master vamp!”
“Mircea’s not insane.” Not yet, anyway. “He’s…tormented.”
“Uh-huh. You’re going to drag a tormented master vampire along to burgle a dark mage
stronghold?”
“You have a better idea?”
“Anything is a better idea!”
“Don’t yell.”
“Then start talking sense!” I threw the pillow at him, which did no good because it passed right
on through. “That doesn’t change the fact that you’re crazy.”
I flopped back on the bed and threw an arm over my eyes. He was probably right, not that it
made a difference. If I couldn’t take the spell to Mircea, I had no choice but to take Mircea to the
spell. And I’d been saying just that morning that I wanted something to do. As last words went, they
pretty much sucked.
“You need to get some rest.” Billy tried to take my hand, but he’d expended too much energy
back at the apartment and didn’t have the strength. His fingers passed right through me.
“And you need to feed,” I said, finishing the thought. I wasn’t looking forward to the energy
drain, but I was only going to sleep anyway.
“I’ll make do,” he said, after a minute.
I looked up, confused. I couldn’t remember the last time Billy had refused to take energy. It was
the main tie binding us together, his payment for helping out with my various problems. “What?”
“No offense, Cass, but you look like hell.”
“Thanks.”
“I don’t need much gas to spy on the manic mage, anyway.” He tipped his hat back and gave
me a cocky grin. “And if we’re lucky, maybe some of his old buddies in the Corps will find him and
take care of one problem for us.”
I fell asleep wondering why that thought didn’t make me feel any better.
Rafe met me in the kitchens before dawn the next morning. With Pritkin no longer in the
picture, I’d had to look elsewhere for help, and there weren’t a lot of choices. I’d left a message on
the private number Rafe had given me, asking to see him. I just hoped he wasn’t going to freak out
too badly when I told him what I wanted.
Shortly after we snagged stools at an unused prep table, one of the staff wandered over and
deposited a white clay coffee cup in front of me. It smelled like rich dark roast and freshly steamed
milk, and had a dot in the middle of the foam from the espresso added right at the end. Pritkin would
have loved it. I pushed it away, feeling queasy.
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“Cucciolina, you are a mess,” Rafe told his newest admirer, as fat little hands gleefully smeared
berry mush all over his green silk shirt.
Some of the staff were making pies for Midsummer’s Eve, which explained why the baby had a
ring of purple all around her mouth and jam stuck in her wispy blond hair. Miranda, who had been
trying to babysit and supervise at the same time, had handed her over almost as soon as I walked in
the door. The baby had immediately made a peevish little huffing sound, and when I just stood there,
holding her awkwardly, she broke into an angry shriek.
Rafe rescued me, taking her despite his elegant attire and jiggling her against his chest. She
hammed it up for a few seconds, wailing like I’d been sticking her with pins, before finally subsiding
into anxious snuffles and pressing her face to his shirt. Considering how fast she recovered, it was
pretty clear she’d just wanted to flirt with the cute guy.
A white china plate joined my coffee cup. On it was a largish, nicely browned muffin. I looked
at the muffin and, as far as I could tell, it didn’t look back. Since it had passed the first test, I broke it
open and sniffed it. Peanut butter and anchovy. A little chef was casually loitering nearby, waiting
for a verdict. He was going to be waiting for a while.
“She reminds me of you at that age,” Rafe said, vainly swiping the baby’s lips with a napkin. It
only made bad matters worse: now she had purple cheeks, too. “You could never eat anything
without getting it everywhere.”
Jesse stifled a smile at the other end of the long table, where he and a bunch of the kids were
playing Monopoly. They should have been in bed—it was barely four a.m.—but nobody at Dante’s
kept a normal schedule. Having a staff partially composed of people who caught fire in sunlight
probably had something to do with that.
Most of the older kids were intent on the game, but one of the younger ones was sitting on the
floor, playing with an Elvis Pez dispenser someone had given her. She seemed totally intent on it,
but the door behind her nonetheless stayed stubbornly open. It seemed that her parents had once
hidden their embarrassing child in a small room with no windows, until she discovered that locks
just loved to open for her and escaped. Now it had become a bit of a habit. It made getting around
the casino something of a challenge, though: elevator doors simply refused to close as long as she
was inside.
Watching her, I finally figured out what had been bugging me. These kids were just too young.
The average age was eight, with several in the four-to-five-year-old range. Which made no sense.
At fourteen, I’d been one of the youngest in Tami’s brood. Most had been mid-to late teens, old
enough to have figured out what their lives were going to be like in one of those special schools and
to have engineered an escape. Sure, there were occasionally younger kids who came through, but
they usually arrived with an older sibling or friend. I’d never seen Tami with so many really small
children. How had they gotten away? How had they survived on the streets until she found them? I’d
barely managed it, and I’d had more years and more money than most of them.
“I didn’t come to court until I was four,” I reminded Rafe absently. A tiny car from the
Monopoly game had decided to trundle down the table to us and bumped into my hand. I turned it
around and sent it back, where it collided with a briskly hopping shoe. It looked like someone had
enchanted the game board for the kids.
“To live, no, but your father brought you as a bambina,” he replied, giving up on cleaning the
sticky child. He held her against his chest with one arm, the palm of his hand curled protectively
around her skull.
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“What?”
“He loved to show you off. Of course, you were better behaved than some,” he said with a sigh,
as the baby began chewing on his tie.
“I never knew that.” I knew so little about my parents that the tiny piece of trivia felt like a
revelation. In my mind, “mother” meant a cool hand, soft hair, and a sweet smell. It was my
strongest memory of her. Unless I thought very hard, it was my only memory of her. And I recalled
even less about my father.
“Piccolina mia, please to stop,” Rafe said in exasperation, pulling his tie away and substituting
a pacifier before his squirming armful could protest. Luckily, the small tussle seemed to have worn
her out, and she soon curled into his chest and went to sleep. “The visits ended when you were about
two,” he added.
“Do you know why?”
Rafe started to shrug, then realized it might wake up his new girlfriend. “My guess would be
that you began showing signs of your gift. Your father must have realized that Tony would take you
if he knew.”
Which he had, only a couple of years later. “How did he find out?” I’d never known how Tony
discovered that I might be worth acquiring. The idea that the tip-off could have been something I did
was nauseating.
“Tony never trusted anyone, not even his longtime servants,” Rafe reassured me. “There were
people watching your father, who doubtless also had people watching them. The only ones Antonio
did not monitor were those of us with blood bonds to him, which he knew we were not strong
enough to break.” The last was said with uncharacteristic bitterness.
“I don’t suppose…Can you tell me anything about them? About my parents?” It wasn’t the first
time I’d asked him, but Rafe had never been able to answer. He’d been under orders to stay mute,
and as the vampire who made him had given the order, the prohibition was even stronger than
Mircea’s.
Rafe regarded me with compassion. “I’m sorry, Cassie.”
“I just thought, maybe, with Tony gone…”
“But he still lives,” Rafe reminded me softly. “As does his hold over me.”
“But maybe Billy could—”
“And Antonio’s ban includes communication through the spirit world.”
My ability to communicate with ghosts came from my father. It wasn’t surprising that Tony
would have thought to add that little caveat. I’d always hated him, but I’d never thought him stupid.
Disappointment settled into its usual place behind my rib cage.
“Can’t Mircea break the blood bond?” I asked after a moment.
“I haven’t asked him. In his condition…I don’t dare do anything to weaken him further.”
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“Which kind of brings me to why I wanted to see you.” I glanced at the kids, but none of them
was paying us any attention. Jesse was biting his lip and glaring at the board, where tiny foreclosure
signs had just appeared on a bunch of his hotels. As quietly as possible, I brought Rafe up to speed.
“You want to storm a dark mage stronghold?” Rafe asked incredulously when I’d finished. “On
your own?”
“Not on my own,” I corrected. A night’s rest had helped to clear my head and made me
reevaluate my plan. I needed to get Mircea to the Codex, but trying to handle him by myself was
foolhardy. Fortunately, there was another option.
Besides Rafe and a few other trophies, Tony had specialized in acquiring badasses, the kind
with the skills and personalities to complement his network of highly illegal activities. And some of
them had had several hundred years to hone their skills. I was going after the Codex, and I wasn’t
going alone.
“But if you already know where it is, can you not simply—” Rafe made an indeterminate hand
gesture that was supposed to indicate shifting.
I respected him enough not to roll my eyes, but it took an effort. “If I could just run in and grab
it, yeah. But I somehow doubt it’s going to be that easy. I need Alphonse.”
Rafe only sat there, looking horrified, but some of his tension must have communicated itself to
the baby, who woke up and started sniffling. I watched her warily, knowing what that meant. But
Miranda, having terrorized the staff to her satisfaction, came and took her away before the explosion
came. And Rafe was still just looking at me.
The reaction wasn’t exactly a surprise. Alphonse was Tony’s right-hand man and chief thug.
After the boss did his disappearing act, Alphonse had taken control of the family’s East Coast
operations as Casanova had in Vegas. And, no, on the surface, nothing about him was particularly
reassuring.
For one thing, he looked like a boxer who’d lost one too many fights: his features were all
slightly off-kilter, as if they’d been smashed too badly to ever fit together properly again. For
another, he sounded scarily like Don Corleone. It was due to tracheal damage from a vicious elbow
to the throat in his mortal days, but that didn’t change the fact that every time The Godfather was
shown at Tony’s somebody lost it and ended up bleeding all over the floor. Which may account for
why it was so often on the playlist.
Even more worrying was the stack of thick, well-thumbed photo albums in his room that were
filled with neatly labeled black-and-white prints. Some showed people in coffins, staring sightlessly
upwards, others were facedown in gutters or sprawled on cracked pavement, still bleeding out.
Alphonse kept pictures of everyone he’d ever killed. There were a lot of albums.
The photos had originally been Tony’s idea. In the human world, Alphonse had been a monster,
the kind they made movies about with car chases and explosions and enough gore to prompt news
reports on the societal effects of violence in the media. In the vampire world, he was just good at his
job. A little too good sometimes. Tony hadn’t wanted his chief enforcer to end up on the Senate’s
bad side for going overboard once too often, but talking to him didn’t help much and there are no
such things as therapists in the vampire world. Then someone joked one night at dinner that
Alphonse needed a hobby, and Tony’s eyes lit up.
The unfortunate joker had been saddled with the job of finding something that Alphonse liked
to do that didn’t concern killing—or provide the entertainment himself. Everyone had assumed he
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was a goner, including him. That had been especially true when the pets were hunted for sport,
the piano was used for target practice and the golf clubs were wrapped around his neck. But then he
bought a camera and set up a darkroom and nobody saw Alphonse for a week.
When Alphonse had no corpses to model for him, he’d photograph anyone hanging around
court. He particularly loved surprising people, catching them doing something embarrassing or from
the worst possible angle. Under Rafe’s beautiful ceiling in my bedroom had been walls papered with
hideous images: me with eyes rolled up so that only the whites showed; with my mouth full of pizza;
and with my jaw swollen to chipmunk size from a tooth extraction.
I’d hated them at first, hated waking up every day to grotesque versions of myself that I’d
started to see reflected in the mirror whenever I looked too long. But I hadn’t dared to take down
Alphonse’s offerings, which soon circled the room and started on another row. And, slowly, as my
collection grew, I began to change my mind.
Alphonse’s favorite model was his girlfriend, a buxom blonde with arms as thickly muscled as
a man’s, known as One-Eyed Sal. Her appearance lived up to her nickname, with the scar that ran
through her left eye slanting down her cheek to just lift the corner of her mouth. She’d lost the eye in
the California gold rush to another saloon girl who knew how to wield a broken bottle better than she
did. Shortly thereafter, Tony had decided to add her to his stable. Body parts lost before the change
don’t regenerate, so Sal was one-eyed permanently. Alphonse didn’t seem to mind, though, and her
lopsided smile and scarred face featured prominently in his collection.
I’d been staring at his most recent shot of me one day, my eyes passing from my acne-covered
cheeks and chin, which Alphonse had enhanced with a red filter to resemble a landscape on Mars, to
a photo of Tony sprawled on his throne, looking even more bloated than usual. I’d barely even
noticed Sal’s newest photo in the middle, despite the fact that the lens had lingered lovingly on her
scars. Between the two of us, she’d looked perfectly normal. Through Alphonse’s lens, I’d realized,
everyone was ugly; or maybe, through his lens, everyone was beautiful.
I still found it confusing, but I’d never looked at my photos quite the same way again. I’d even
started to think that, compared to the frilly, posed shots my governess preferred, some of them were
actually kind of interesting. Alphonse might be a murdering bastard, but unlike a certain war mage I
could name, he occasionally made sense. And I was really getting tired of dealing with people I
didn’t understand.
I’d spent the last few weeks wandering around Pritkin’s world, where I was supposed to belong,
feeling like someone visiting a foreign country who only halfway spoke the language. Most of the
time, I had no freaking clue what was going on, and once or twice I’d reached a state of confusion so
severe that it felt like it might be causing brain damage. I couldn’t win the game—hell, I couldn’t
even play—when I didn’t understand the rules. I needed to level the playing field. I needed the
vamps.
“Alphonse might be a first-class badass, but he isn’t a first-level master,” I reminded Rafe. “If
Mircea dies, he’ll be in the same boat with you, forced to fight for position within whatever family
absorbs him.”
“He needn’t worry. There are many who would gladly add his…special talents…to their
arsenal.”
“Yeah, but how many do you think would be willing to make him their second?” Alphonse
might carve out a niche for himself sooner or later, but no way was he going to end up second in
command again. Not for centuries, maybe not ever. And I didn’t think that would sit too well with
the vamp I’d known.
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“The Consul has forbidden anyone to help you,” Rafe reminded me.
“Alphonse isn’t so great at following orders,” I reminded him right back. “I think he’ll risk it.”
If I’d been giving odds, I’d have put them at ten to one at least. I was his best chance to hold on to
his current position, which made me his new best friend. No matter what the Consul said. “I need
Alphonse and a team of his craziest thugs. Can you get him?”
“I can contact him,” Rafe reluctantly admitted. “But even if he agrees, I don’t know if any of
this will be soon enough.”
“Soon enough for what?” I asked impatiently. “I know where the Codex is, Rafe. I just need
help to get to it!”
“Yes, but Mircea…he’s getting worse. And if he loses his faculties, will the counterspell
reverse the damage? Or will he be left that way permanently?” Despite our position, which was a
little too close to the ovens for comfort, he shivered.
I sat back in my chair, feeling dizzy. I’d assumed that once I had the spell, everything would go
back to normal. But what if it didn’t? And with the Senate in the middle of a war, what if they
decided a crazed master vamp was a liability they couldn’t afford? No wonder Rafe was freaking
out. If the geis didn’t kill Mircea, the Consul might.
Ironically, what I needed was more time. I had the location of the Codex; sooner or later, I was
going to get that spell. But it wouldn’t do me a lot of good if Mircea went crazy while I was making
plans. Somehow I had to mitigate the effects of the geis while I figured everything out. And there
was only a single possibility for that: the one place where I knew from experience the geis did not
operate at full force.
“What about Faerie?” I asked. “If we could get him there, it might buy enough time to—”
“The Consul thought of that,” Rafe said. His tone was even, but his agitated fingers were
reducing my linen napkin to shreds. “But the Fey do not want any more vampires in their world,
especially one in Mircea’s condition. They refused a visa.”
“Who did? The Light or the Dark?”
He looked surprised. “The Senate doesn’t deal with the Dark Fey. Their treaty with the Light
prohibits it.”
“But I do.” The Dark Fey king expected me to find and deliver the Codex. Until that happened,
he needed to keep me happy. That gave me a lever to extort a few small favors, such as room and
board for an ailing vampire.
“But, even were the Fey willing to help, how would we get him there?”
“What about the portal at MAGIC?” The Metaphysical Alliance for Greater Interspecies
Cooperation was the supernatural community’s version of the United Nations. It wasn’t my favorite
place, but we’d have to go in to get Mircea anyway, so it made sense to simply take him through
MAGIC’s own link to Faerie.
But Rafe squashed that idea. “It has not yet been repaired. Your passage last time was not…
conventional…and it shattered the spell. The Consul has appealed to the Fey to allow another, but
they say if we cannot control who enters their lands better than that, they are not certain they wish us
to have one. We are in negotiations, but there is no knowing how long they may take.”
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And the Fey weren’t known for doing anything in a hurry. Not to mention that the portal, when
and if it did open back up, was almost certain to be very well guarded. No help there.
“Damn it!” I hit the table with my palm, hard enough to slosh my untouched coffee everywhere.
I was mopping it up with the napkin shreds when one of the mental Post-its I’d been filing at the
back of my brain began waving about. “Tony has an illegal portal around here somewhere,” I said
slowly. “He used it for smuggling. I just don’t know where it is.”
Rafe gripped my hands, and for the first time he looked hopeful. “How do we locate it?”
“I don’t know. But I know who to ask.”
“You don’t need a portal until you have the book,” the pixie said, fluffing her tiny shock of
bright red hair. She’d found a compact somewhere, possibly in the trash because most of the powder
it once held was gone. She was using it for a mirror on the dressing table she’d made out of a bunch
of CD cases. “And you haven’t made any progress on that at all.”
“You need it to get back home,” I pointed out. “Unless you want to stay here?”
I looked around her makeshift apartment. It was fairly spacious from her perspective, taking up
several shelves in the closet of Pritkin’s study room. She’d fixed up the top shelf as the dressing area,
while the bottom was a bedroom, complete with an oven mitt for a sleeping bag and a small
flashlight for a lamp. She shot me a dirty look nonetheless. “Yes, I’ve found your world to be so
hospitable.”
“When I visited yours, I was almost killed!”
“And I was locked in a file cabinet,” she spat.
“It beats a dungeon!”
“Ever try it?”
I’d seen the file cabinet, which looked like a bomb had exploded from the inside. “It didn’t look
like you had any trouble getting out.”
“Only because it was made of some inferior metal, instead of iron.” She shuddered. “I could
have died, my magic leached away, my body slowly freezing in the cruel grip of cold—”
“Yes, but you didn’t. And if we could get back to the point?”
Furious lavender eyes met mine. “The point is that the slave must return to the king’s service
and you must find the book you have promised him.” She smiled evilly. “You do not wish to return
to Faerie without it. The king is not known for his forgiving nature.”
“Françoise isn’t going anywhere,” I told her, for maybe the tenth time. “And if the king’s wrath
is so dreadful, why did you offer to help us escape from him? Weren’t you afraid of the
consequences?”
The pixie fluttered her wings agitatedly. “That was different.”
“Different how?”
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“The mage offered me something irresistible.” Her frown faded and her eyes suddenly shone
with a softer light. “No one would have blamed me for taking it, not even the king.”
“Offered you what?”
“It doesn’t matter! I can’t find it!” She kicked the jewel cases, then sat on the oversized spool of
thread she’d turned into a seat, surreptitiously rubbing a hurt foot.
A memory suddenly clicked into place. “The rune stone. Jera.” One of the reasons I’d managed
to survive—barely—my one and only foray into her world was because I’d acquired some battle
runes from the Senate. The Consul no doubt wanted them back, because they’d be useful in the war
and because I hadn’t exactly asked before taking them. But I thought that at the moment she might
want Mircea more. And I couldn’t see what good a rune stone would do her when its only power was
making people more fertile.
The pixie glanced up resentfully. “He said he had it. He even showed it to me. It looked real.”
“It is real.” Understanding dawned. “You were willing to risk the king’s wrath merely for the
chance to have a child?”
“Merely?” Her tiny voice rose to a squeak. “Yes, trust a human to see it like that! My people
hover on the brink of extinction, while your foolish, weak, puerile race, whose only accomplishment
is to breed and breed and—”
“Yes, thanks, I get the point.” I looked at her narrowly. “What if I could get it for you?”
A whirlwind of glittering green wings was suddenly in my face. “Where is it? Do you have it? I
thought one of the mages—”
I smiled. No wonder she’d been sucking up. “I can get it.”
“I’ll believe it when I see it.”
“Then you’ll believe it soon. But I want the location of the portal in exchange.”
“I’ll find it,” she promised fervently. “Just don’t think of double-crossing me, human. You’ll
discover that I’m even less forgiving than my king.”
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Chapter 10
That afternoon I was checking in the convention that the hotel staff had secretly labeled the Geek
Squad, a couple hundred role-playing enthusiasts who had arrived with bag and baggage, and in a
few cases swords and armor, when I caught Pritkin staring at me. He was across the lobby, leaning
against one of the fake stalagmites that erupted from the floor, all beard stubble and mussed hair and
strong, lean build. His body looked relaxed, but his face held the same hawkish expression I’d last
seen when he was standing over Saleh’s headless corpse.
I scowled and handed a name badge to a guy dressed in a long trailing robe and a pointy hat. He
shifted his staff to his other hand so he could pin it on. I didn’t think it likely to help with ID much;
he was the seventh Gandalf I’d seen that morning.
“I still don’t understand why we can’t set up now,” the guy at my side whined. His voice was
muffled by the mask he was wearing, but unfortunately not enough that I couldn’t understand him. It
had taken me a moment to identify the mask since he’d added plastic tusks that made it sag weirdly
in front. I guess he hadn’t been able to find a good ogre’s head, because he’d converted a
Chewbacca.
“I told you, we’re doing some last-minute cleanup,” I explained for the fifth time.
“They can’t be cleaning the whole room at once! We can work around them.”
“It’s not my call,” I said curtly, watching a bunch of guys in elf ears who were pointing at the
large creatures perched near the cavernous ceiling of the lobby. Each was six feet tall, grayish-black,
with huge reptilian wings that ended in sharp, delicate claws. They looked like a cross between a bat
and a pterodactyl, and most people mistook them for gruesome decorations. But the “elves” had
apparently decided to use them for target practice: all three had bows in their hands and one nocked
an arrow as I watched.
Before I could battle a path through the crowd, one of the creatures soared gracefully to the top
of a stalagmite. Its new perch glittered with crystals in the low light, almost as brightly as the
creature’s dark eyes as it surveyed the tourists with predatory anticipation. It caught sight of the
bow-wielding gamer and gave a shriek like tortured metal that echoed around the vastness of the
lobby, drawing every eye in the place.
“Hey, cool!” the guy with the arrow said. “A yrthak!”
“That can’t be a yrthak,” another gamer said in a superior tone. “It has eyes.”
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A shiver of dread crawled down my spine. Once before, the casino’s built-in security forces had
mistaken innocent bystanders for dangerous intruders—and dealt with them accordingly. That time,
it had been me and Pritkin in the hot seat, and we’d almost ended up dead. I somehow didn’t think
the average tourist was likely to fare even that well.
I dove between a couple of hobbits—or jawas or possibly very short monks—and grabbed the
bow out of the gamer’s hand. I tossed it to one of the security guys, who had jogged up from the
other side. Casanova’s love affair with filthy lucre was going to be the death of us all. “This was not
the time to book in a bunch of norms,” I hissed, sotto voce.
The guard just shrugged, holding the bow too high for the flailing arms of the outraged gamer
to grab it. “No discharging weapons inside the casino!” he bellowed.
The young man scowled. “Zero charisma, okay?”
I turned to find Chewbacca still foaming at the mouth. “Look, lady, I got vendors with no place
to put their stuff! What am I supposed to tell them?”
Even if Casanova had been paying me, it wouldn’t have been enough for this. I threw an arm
around his hairy shoulders. “See that guy over there?” I pointed at Pritkin. “He usually handles stuff
like this. Only he doesn’t like that to get around, so you might have to be a little persistent.”
Tall, dark and fuzzy pointed at Pritkin and yelled something to the half dozen vendors hanging
around the entrance. They converged on the mage in a pack and I went back to work. Five minutes
later, I felt a warm hand descend on my shoulder. “That wasn’t very nice.”
My skin prickled like someone was breathing on it. “Since when do you care?” I snapped.
“Nice” wasn’t even in Pritkin’s vocabulary.
“It isn’t one of my usual requirements,” he agreed, sounding amused.
I didn’t answer, my eyes on the group of gamers who were now trying to entice the “yrthak”
down from its perch by waving a sandwich at it. It really concerned me that it hadn’t gone back to its
proper place yet. Even more worrying was the fact that its eyes were fixed not on the proffered food
but on the nearest gamer’s jugular.
“You can control those things, right?” I asked a nearby guard nervously.
The man didn’t answer, but he moved a few yards closer to the “elves,” his face about as happy
as mine. Letting someone get eaten wasn’t likely to improve his next performance evaluation. He
pulled out a radio, looking worried. “We may have a situation,” he told someone.
“I saw you watching me.” The words were spoken directly into my ear.
“Bully for you,” I said, as my nice orderly line of elves, trolls and ancient wizards went
scurrying off to where the action was. Damn. I’d really hoped to be out of here soon.
Pritkin was standing close enough that the heat from his body was causing a little trickle of
sweat to run down my spine. “Entertaining as this conversation has been,” I told him caustically, “I
have actual work to do. Why don’t you go point a gun at something?”
He didn’t comment, maybe because he was too busy licking a slow, wet trail up my neck. For a
frozen second, I just stood there. I’d always assumed that Pritkin had some kind of allergy to human
contact. He rarely touched people, unless he was moving me around like a mannequin, and he never
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made passes. Especially not such…obvious…ones.
I spun to see his smile widening, his eyes gone vibrant green. It was not an expression I’d ever
imagined on his face—an almost feral sexuality. And his clothes were back to black. It gave me a
very bad feeling, and that was before he reached out and pulled me against him.
Whatever I might have said was silenced by lips sliding softly over mine. I wasn’t prepared for
him to kiss me, much less like that. His mouth was warm and surprisingly sweet, and the faint scrape
of stubble shouldn’t have been the least bit erotic, yet it was. His tongue traced a feathery caress over
my bottom lip in a way that felt positively indecent. I pulled back, seriously confused. “What—”
“No,” he said, tilted my head and kissed me. Heat radiated from the heavy hand resting on my
neck, and a thumb stroked light patterns down my throat. A sudden rush of desire made me forget to
keep my mouth closed, and a tongue twined expertly around my own. Pritkin took his time,
exploring me, tasting me. A hand rested on my waist, in what should have been a neutral spot, but it
burned.
I jerked away, angry and confused. “Are you crazy?” One of the fun facts about the geis was
the jolt of pain it gave me whenever I got close to anyone but Mircea. It seemed to have a particular
grudge against Pritkin, upping the usual warning where he was concerned to a level that had me
certain my eyes were dripping down my cheekbones.
He didn’t answer, just somehow backed me into the reservation desk without laying a hand on
me. Something was going on in the casino: I could hear screams and see camera flashes, and a bunch
of guards ran by with a huge net in their hands. “I know you talked to Saleh,” he whispered against
my lips. “What did he tell you?”
Another inhuman shriek rent the air, this time from above. The second creature did not appear
to like the fact that the guards were trying to trap its companion. It took off the top of one of the
stalactites on its way to join the fight, and fake rock rained down on us from all sides. I barely
noticed, being far more concerned about the body suddenly pressing hard against me.
“Answer me.” The hilt of a sword was gouging into my ribs, I realized vaguely, and something
was…was wrong about that. Where was the holster lump on his thigh? Or the ratty leather belt
studded with weapons and potions, like a homicidal mad scientist? And since when did Pritkin wear
cologne?
I suddenly panicked. None of this made sense. I was absolutely not standing in the middle of
the lobby making out with Pritkin while all hell broke loose. I pushed at him, with no more result
than trying to move a boulder. “Let go!”
Power flooded the air, making the hairs on my arms stick up in alarm and sending a scorching
tide rolling across my body. “I said let go,” I murmured, suddenly lost in a pair of crystal-clear eyes.
His mouth claimed mine again, fierce and possessive, not at all shy of anyone who might be
watching, and something about it made the rest of the world fall away into pure hunger. The scent of
him was maddening—something elegant and expensive and completely unexpected, with the musk
of skin and need beneath the rest.
He pulled back and I looked into the face of a stranger, one wearing an expression of hawklike
intensity. “Answer me.” The command surged through me with the irresistible force of a tidal wave.
I opened my mouth in unthinking response, just as a new shower of plaster from above dropped on
top of us.
I sputtered and choked on a mouthful of gray dust, and Pritkin gave a frustrated sigh. “For a
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place filled with incubi,” he said dryly, “managing a seduction here is surprisingly difficult.” I
stumbled back into another group of security men headed for the crisis of the hour, and by the time
we got ourselves sorted out, Pritkin was gone.
“You know, I’m not so forgiving, either,” I said, glaring at the pixie. As if I didn’t have enough
trouble with Pritkin going insane, Radella had come up with exactly zilch.
Françoise was still pawing through the alarming number of weapons Casanova had stockpiled
in a storeroom on Dante’s lowest level. I’d decided that, given the number of people who wanted me
dead, maybe I should stock up. And with Radella still scheming against her, I figured Françoise
might be able to use a few items herself.
She held up something. “Q’est-ce que c’est?”
I squinted at it. “It’s a Taser. It shocks people.”
“Quoi?”
“Like lightning.” I danced about a little and understanding lit her eyes.
She looked at the pixie, who was hovering well out of reach near the ceiling, and smiled.
“Shock me and I’ll cut your heart out,” Radella promised.
Françoise didn’t comment, but she clipped the small device to the olive green, army-style tool
belt she’d found in a weapons locker. It looked a little odd next to her outfit. She was still wearing
the dress from the fashion show, although the spiders were starting to look a bit lackluster. Two had
stopped moving altogether, and the one on her shoulder had been weaving the same web for the last
twenty minutes. It looked like the charm was meant to last for one day only.
Other than the dress she’d had on when she escaped from Faerie, it was the only outfit I’d seen
her wear. It suddenly occurred to me that she might not have any others. I made a mental note to take
her shopping.
“What seems to be the holdup?” I asked Radella, while examining a 9 mm. It didn’t look like
the grip was any smaller than mine, so I put it back.
“I can’t find it, all right?” She fluttered to the top of a gun cabinet and sat down, chin in hand.
Her iridescent wings drooped around her shoulders dispiritedly. “I’ve looked everywhere!”
“Then look again!”
“If the portal was here, I’d have found it!”
“Well, obviously not,” I pointed out. “Because it is here.”
“Then it should have been easy to locate,” Radella groused. “The power output alone—”
“Come again?”
She gave me a disgusted look. “Portals don’t run on batteries! They’re rare not only because
they’re regulated but because few people have a power source capable of handling one.”
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“What kind of power are we talking about?”
“A lot. A ley-line sink is usually required, although there are talismans capable of opening a
short-term gateway. But they’re rare. I doubt that vampire had one.”
“A ley-line what?”
“Where two lines cross and pool their energy,” Radella said impatiently. I blinked at her. “Ley.
Lines,” she said, very slowly and distinctly. “You do know what those are, right?”
I had heard of them, but the memory was vague. Just something about a lot of ancient
monuments being constructed on parallel lines. “Assume I know nothing,” I told her.
She smirked. “I always do.” Françoise said something in a language I didn’t know and Radella
flushed bright red. She slapped her tiny hand down, making the whole cabinet shudder beneath her.
“Quiet, slave! Remember to whom you’re speaking!”
“I always do,” Françoise told her sweetly.
“Ladies!” I looked back and forth between the two of them, but nobody was going for weapons,
which made it a pretty congenial conversation for those two.
“To put it really, really simply,” Radella said icily, her eyes still on Françoise, “ley lines are
borders between worlds: yours, mine, the demon realms, whatever. When those borders collide, you
get stress, like when two of your tectonic plates rub together. And stress creates energy.”
“Like magical fault lines.”
“That’s what I said!” Radella snapped. “Only in this case, there’s no land to move, only magical
energy getting hurled about. Therefore, instead of earthquakes or tsunamis, you get power, which
can be used for various applications by those who know how.”
“Like running portals.”
“Under certain circumstances. If two particularly strong ley lines cross, they might generate that
kind of energy, but it doesn’t happen often.”
“Then all we have to do is look for this sink thing,” I said excitedly. “If it’s putting off that kind
of power, it should be easy to find!”
Radella sighed and muttered something I was just as glad I couldn’t understand. “There are ley
lines all around Vegas,” she finally said. “But none cross anywhere near here. The closest area where
they do is the MAGIC enclave, which is why it was built where it is.”
“So what was Tony using?” I asked impatiently.
“As a guess?” Radella pursed her little mouth. It made her look like professor Barbie. “Death
magic. Quick, powerful, easily obtained.”
“As long as you ’ave the stomach for eet,” Françoise muttered darkly.
“Wait a minute.” I was really hoping I’d heard wrong. “You’re saying that, even if I find
Tony’s portal, I’d have to kill someone to use it?”
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Radella shrugged. “Well, you know. Not anyone you like.”
“I’m not committing murder!”
“I theenk I could power ze portal,” Françoise said, “for a short time. With some help.”
She was looking at me, but I shook my head. “I was never trained. Tony was afraid of having a
powerful witch at court.”
“But…you know notheeng?” She looked horrified.
“Pretty much.”
“But, you run ’ere and zere”—she made some flailing motions in the air—“doing theengs, all ze
time!”
“As opposed to what? Waiting for someone to come kill me?”
“But, eef the dark mages catch you, they weel drain you of your power! Eet would be awful!”
I smiled grimly. “Yeah. Only they’d have to get in line.”
“Quoi?”
“Nothing.” I glanced at the pixie. “We can worry about how to power the damn thing once we
find it. Any little ideas on that?”
She looked thoughtful. “It has to be a hidden portal. It’s the only thing that makes sense.”
“We know it’s hidden!” I said, exasperated.
“No, hidden hidden. As in, not in this world until summoned.”
“Did you hear me just say I know nothing about magic?”
Radella scowled. “Think of it like a door. A door that uses energy whenever it’s open. So you
keep it closed until needed.”
“When you open it with a sacrifice.”
“Right. But if that’s how this portal works, there’s probably a special incantation to summon
it.”
“Let me guess. You don’t know the incantation.” It figured.
“It’s different for every portal, a password known only to the users.”
“Who are now all in Faerie,” I reminded her. “How am I supposed to get it?”
A sly look came over her tiny, doll-like face. “Perhaps I could figure something out, for the
right price.”
I narrowed my eyes at the scheming little thing. “Now what?”
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She fidgeted, trying to look nonchalant. I thought it was just as well she was too small to do any
gambling; with a poker face like that, she’d have been soaked in five minutes flat. “I want a second
casting of the rune,” she finally blurted out. “In case the first one doesn’t result in a child.”
I got busy checking out another gun for a moment. I’d been under the impression that we’d
already agreed that I’d give her the rune, not just cast it. Maybe the thing was more valuable than I’d
thought.
“All right,” I said slowly, trying to sound reluctant. “Another casting.”
“With no restrictions! Even if I get with child on the first, I still get the second!”
“Agreed.”
Radella swallowed. “What kind of help do you want?”
“Whatever is needed.” I wasn’t about to let her impose conditions, either.
“I knew you’d find a way to talk me into this insanity,” she sniped, but her heart clearly wasn’t
in it.
“Do we have a deal?”
“Oh, you damn well know we do!” I smiled, and she grimaced back. “Don’t be so smug,
human. You haven’t heard my idea yet.”
Dante’s front entrance is something out of a medieval nightmare, with writhing basalt statues,
tortured topiaries and an honest-to-God moat. The front door handles are agonized faces that moan
and groan and utter its famous catchphrase, telling all who enter to abandon hope—along with their
wallets. But demented decor is expensive, which explains why the back looks more like a modern
warehouse, with loading ramps, overripe Dumpsters and a plain chain-link fence surrounding a
crowded employee parking lot.
Françoise, Radella, Billy Joe and I landed in Dante’s parking lot two weeks in the past. It was
still a few hours before the sun, or anyone with any sense, would think about rising. In other words,
high noon for the types I needed to see.
Radella’s big idea was to go back in time before everyone who knew how to summon the portal
left, and get the incantation out of them by whatever means necessary. I had amended that to exclude
beatings, knifings or anything likely to result in the total trashing of the timeline. Françoise had
added a refinement by mentioning that she could probably erase the short-term memory of anyone
except a powerful mage. So we had a plan—we just needed the right guy. And Casanova’s
predecessor, a slimy operator known as Jimmy the Rat, was my best guess for man in the know.
“Je suis désolée,” Françoise said, apparently talking to the bottom of the chain-link fence.
I exchanged looks with the pixie, who merely shrugged. I bent over to get a better look and
found myself handcuffed to the fence post. “What the hell?”
Françoise stood back and crossed her arms, regarding me with a fair imitation of Pritkin in a
mood. “We weel go. Eet ees too dangerous for you.”
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“Excuse me?”
“You ’ave not the skill in magique, n’est-ce pas?”
“What’s your point?”
“You ’ad to breeng us ’ere; zere was no choice. But you do not ’ave to risk yourself now. We
weel talk to thees gangster while you remain where it is safe.”
“I can handle Jimmy!”
Françoise didn’t answer, but she got this look on her face, like she was perfectly happy to stand
in the parking lot for the rest of the night discussing it. I tugged on the cuff, but she must have
liberated it from Casanova’s storeroom, because it was good-quality steel. All my efforts did was
rattle the fence and piss me off.
“Okay,” I said. “You go, me stay. Have fun.”
“You aren’t serious,” Billy said incredulously.
“You weel stay right ’ere?” Françoise looked doubtful. Maybe she’d expected me to argue
more.
I jangled the fence again for effect. “Do I have a choice?”
“I don’t trust her,” the pixie said, eyeing me narrowly. “We should stick her in a closet.”
“I have a gun,” I pointed out.
Radella frowned. “She’s right. She could shoot the lock.”
“I was thinking of something a little more animated,” I told her, not entirely sure I was kidding.
“Eet is for your own good,” Françoise said, biting her lip. She suddenly looked uncertain.
Radella snapped her fingers. “We knock her out. Then we stuff her in the closet. A really small
one,” she added viciously.
Françoise didn’t even bother to look at her. “We return soon,” she promised, then turned on her
heel and strode away.
“Yeah, I’ll just wait here like a glorified taxi driver,” I called after her. Her shoulders twitched
slightly, but I didn’t know if that was from shame or from not knowing what a taxi was.
“Okay, that was really—” Billy began.
I held up my free hand. Françoise paused by the back door and looked in my direction.
Probably wondering why my hand was hovering in the air. I waved at her and after a minute she and
Radella let themselves in through the employee entrance. As soon as the door closed, I shifted two
feet ahead. Behind me, the now empty cuff banged against the fencing.
“I forget you can do that now,” Billy said.
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“So do I, half the time.” I rubbed my wrist and looked around. There was no one in sight. It
occurred to me that maybe I should have looked before doing my Houdini impression.
“Why didn’t you just show them that they were wasting their time?” Billy demanded.
“I figured we might as well get the mutiny phase of our relationship out of the way early.”
Besides, I didn’t think Radella had been kidding about the closet. “Let’s go find Jimmy before he
sells them the Brooklyn Bridge or some—”
“Speak of the devil,” Billy said, as someone who looked an awful lot like Jimmy ran out the
back door.
I started forward after a surprised pause, hardly believing my luck. If I could get to him before
he reached his car, we could talk without encountering anyone else or possibly being overheard. But
then the door slammed open and a blonde ran out, looking around wildly.
“Wait, there’s some bimbo with him,” Billy cautioned. The blonde caught sight of Jimmy and
took off after him, hiking up her low-cut black top as she went. Billy whistled appreciatively. “She’s
gonna fall right out of that thing if she ain’t—”
He stopped abruptly, squinting across the lot, and I did the same, a vague feeling of unease
creeping up my spine. The energy-conscious halogen lights didn’t help a lot with visibility, but I saw
enough to make my stomach fall. “I think we have a problem,” I said numbly.
“Hey,” Billy said, eyes wide. “I think that bimbo is you! I can tell by the shape of your—”
“Do you realize what this means?” I managed to shriek in a whisper. I hadn’t figured out until
that moment that I’d brought us back to the night I first saw Dante’s—not a time I was real interested
in reliving.
“Yeah.” He glared at me. “Of all the times to come back to, why in the hell—”
“I didn’t do it on purpose,” I hissed. “Casanova told me the last shipment of slaves left for
Faerie on this night. If we can’t get Jimmy to talk, I thought we might overhear the incantation being
used!”
“If we were in the right place at the right time, yeah. But this ain’t it.”
“You think?” My first visit to Dante’s hadn’t gone well. In fact, it had gone about as
spectacularly wrong as humanly possible. There had been too many near misses, too many times that
I and a lot of other people could have died had things gone slightly differently. I needed to find the
team and get out, fast, before any of us changed anything.
Jimmy and the other me disappeared into the lines of cars, and the back door slammed open yet
again. Pritkin and a couple of vamps appeared, and I froze. My eyes might be having trouble making
out the action, but theirs certainly wouldn’t be. And if they glanced over here and saw me, it could
distract them from the task at hand. Which, among other things, included saving the other me’s life.
I didn’t move, didn’t breathe, didn’t blink. The black tank top and jeans I’d decided would be
appropriate for the night’s activities would help make me harder to spot. But they could smell me
from this distance, even in a parking lot filled with gas fumes and garbage. One of the vamps paused,
lifting his head slightly as if scenting the air, and I swallowed thickly. It was Tomas, my onetime
roommate, who had had six months to get my scent down cold. If he sensed me…
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But he didn’t. The three men ran into the rows of cars and a few moments later all hell broke
loose, with gunshots, screams, and someone setting a car on fire. I took off for the back door at a
dead run. And skidded to a halt a couple of seconds later when the very last person I wanted to see
appeared in my path.
I managed to catch myself before careening into him, but it was a close thing. I hastily
scrambled back a couple of steps just to be on the safe side. “You’re not supposed to be here!” I said
accusingly.
One perfect eyebrow formed itself into an equally perfect arch. “Then we have something in
common, dulcea .”
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Chapter 11
I stared at Mircea in shock. “You’re supposed to be downtown!” The version of me who’d just
chased Jimmy across the parking lot had escaped from MAGIC earlier that night. And although its
wards had allowed me to be tracked into the city, no one had been sure exactly where I’d gone.
While Tomas, Pritkin and a vampire named Louis-Cesare came here, Rafe and Mircea had gone to
Tony’s main offices. Or so I’d thought.
“I was. I left Raphael there, in case you made an appearance,” Mircea said, his eyes narrowing
slightly. “May I ask how you knew that?”
“Probably wouldn’t be best,” I said, wishing hysteria was a luxury I could afford.
Mircea just stood there, looking ridiculously model-pretty with his tousled hair and faintly
amused mouth, his rich black suit perfectly showcasing his—objectively speaking—extremely
attractive body. I didn’t know if he did it deliberately, but his clothes always seemed to run just a
little snug around the biceps and thighs, drawing my attention where it absolutely had no place
being. Not to mention that Mircea in black looked like sin. The only saving grace was that at least it
wasn’t leather—and why was I even going there?
He held out a hand. It was a silent invitation, but it made my stomach flip. My stomach was an
idiot.
I jumped back, almost stumbling over my own feet. “Don’t touch me!” The last time I’d
encountered Mircea in the past, the geis had leapt from me to him, starting this whole mess by
doubling the spell. Would I triple it if he got close enough now? Because I didn’t think either of us
could survive that.
Somewhere nearby, people were yelling and Pritkin was swearing and a couple of terrifiedlooking
wererats scurried past, dripping blood on the asphalt. “We must go, dulceata?,” Mircea said
mildly.
The fact that he was still using the pet name he’d given me years ago, meaning “dear one,” was
probably a good sign, but I doubted it was going to last. I needed to get gone, but I really didn’t want
to shift in front of him—it would tell him a lot more than I wanted him to know. But I couldn’t
exactly outrun him, and I sure couldn’t let him get close enough to touch me.
“Cassie.” Mircea looked at me reproachfully when I continued to ignore his outstretched hand.
But, I thought, desperately backing away, the screwup had come in an era before the geis was
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cast. That Mircea hadn’t had it, so the spell had leapt from me to him to complete itself. But this
Mircea did have it, had both strands, in fact, so he should be immune. Right?
“Cassandra!”
“I’m trying to think here!” I told him as he started toward me.
“You can think at MAGIC, where it’s safe.”
“You know,” I said savagely, “considering how often I hear that word, it’s amazing how
frequently I end up almost dead!”
“That will not happen tonight,” he said firmly, and took my hand. I stared at him in horror,
waiting for the electric sizzle that would tell me I’d just managed to kill us both. But other than the
faint tingle the geis always gave off, there was nothing.
Nothing except a sweet, cloying odor, like flowers on the verge of rot. Where had I smelled that
before? Mircea said what I suspected was a very bad word in Romanian and abruptly pulled me
behind him.
“Cass, you know the last time we were here, how a couple of dark mages showed up for the
party?” Billy asked, his voice quavering slightly.
“Why, what does that have to—” I looked around Mircea’s coat to see a group of dark shapes
silhouetted against the street lights. “Oh.”
“I’m thinking maybe I missed a few on the recon,” Billy said, looking freaked.
I did a quick count. “A few?” I squeaked. “Eight is not a few!”
In the distance, a blue cloud started to spread over the parking lot. I remembered that—Pritkin
had employed some kind of tear gas in combat and almost choked us all to death. It had been no fun
inside, my lungs burning for hours afterwards; of course, it wasn’t currently a thrill a minute on the
outside, either.
“The seer goes with us, vampire,” one of the mages said.
I expected Mircea to try to talk him around, to use some of the famous charm that had made
him the Consul’s chief negotiator. I guess the mages did, too. Because they looked really surprised
when the speaker suddenly went flying through the air.
He landed in the power lines overhead, snapping one of the bigger ones on impact and getting
caught on several of the smaller. A hiss of electricity stuttered wildly around his body for a moment,
then he plunged toward the ground, only to be snatched back up again by a line that had gotten
tangled around one foot. He bounced a couple of times before starting to swing slowly in space,
dangling upside down by an ankle like the Hanged Man in my tarot deck.
“That was unwise,” the nearest mage told Mircea calmly, right before a wall of scorching hot
air slammed into us. It lifted me completely off my feet and threw both of us back against the
fencing. I missed the spine-shattering post, but it felt like some of the links might have become
permanent additions to my anatomy.
Mircea was back on his feet in a blink, and two mages spontaneously caught fire. They put it
out almost as quickly, however, and by the time I had crawled out of the metal net, they’d responded
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with a blistering ball of electric blue and white. It drove Mircea to one knee, but he caught it,
hands sizzling audibly, then lobbed it back at the sender. The mages’ shields deflected it into the
power lines above, causing a pulse of electricity to run along them like blue fire. The streetlights
popped in a long line like firecrackers, and a pulse of energy exploded against the hanging mage,
sending him spiraling the rest of the way to earth with a power line snapping and stuttering around
him.
The electrocuted mage was twitching slightly against the ground, like he might still be alive.
Then I got a good look at his face, which was slack-jawed, with open, glassy eyes and a blackened
tongue, and decided no, probably not. One of his colleagues apparently reached the same conclusion,
but instead of mourning his friend, he elected to use him. He animated the corpse with a gesture,
raising it vertically until it looked like a scarecrow in a windstorm, all jumping limbs and dangling,
jittering feet, hovering just above the ground.
I glanced from the dancing corpse to the widening blue cloud, but enough flashes, rumblings
and muffled gunshots were coming from inside that I felt marginally safe from having our fight
overheard. It was the only thing I felt safe about, especially when a metal trash can came flying at
our heads. It stopped in midair, about a foot from my nose, then reversed course and flew apart,
razor-sharp fragments peppering the line of mages like shrapnel. Shrapnel that did not, it appeared,
make it through their shields.
The rusty tan Pinto that slammed into the mages a second later didn’t, either, but it did take
their combined effort to throw it off. It went flipping away across the night, rotating three times
before exploding against the nearest line of cars. Most of the mages were fine, if seriously pissed.
But one was either younger or less well trained than the others, because for a split second he lost his
concentration—and with it, his shields. And a second is all it takes.
A master vampire does not need to touch a person to drain him, a fact that Mircea took this
opportunity to demonstrate. I think he was trying to intimidate the others into running, because he
did not go for a clean kill. He extended a hand and the mage jerked to a halt, bloody tears suddenly
springing to his eyes. But instead of streaming down his cheeks, they flowed outward, flying across
the distance between us to Mircea’s palm, where the tiny droplets were immediately absorbed.
And then it wasn’t only his eyes bleeding; it looked like every pore on his face had ruptured,
sending not a trickle but a flood twisting through the air, like a long red ribbon. In a few short
seconds the mage crumpled, face now snow white, bloodless lips open in a silent oh. He was dead
before he hit the asphalt.
If intimidation had been the object, it didn’t work. The mages merely scattered and mounted
separate attacks. They probably assumed that Mircea couldn’t watch the remaining six at once, and
while he was dealing with one, the others would take him out. I was desperately afraid they might be
right. The animated corpse moved closer, and a cloud of glass fragments from the destroyed cars
rose up from the ground behind it, glittering in the flames like deadly diamonds. As if that wasn’t
enough, a group of burning tires rotated off the asphalt, looking like a squadron of UFOs against the
dark.
I lost track of exactly what happened after that, as everything came at us at once—most of it too
fast to see. I blinked and the next time I looked, a segment of fencing had jumped in front of us,
acting like a shield to catch the various flying objects. I realized why the corpse had continued to
move even after death when it crashed into the fence and the whole thing lit up with sparks. Around
its foot, the downed power line was still coiled like a long black snake, hissing and crackling,
spitting fire as deadly to a vampire as to a human. But it couldn’t touch us, and in a moment, the
body went dancing back across the parking lot like a demented puppet.
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Mircea sent the segment of fencing flying toward the nearest mage, and it hit his shields with an
avalanche of sparks. They held, ensuring that the hot metal didn’t touch his skin, but they couldn’t
stop the fence from wrapping around him like a blanket. The links almost immediately began to
glow with a new, more-intense light, melting into his shielding the way hot water sinks into ice.
The other mages had paused for some reason, and I didn’t wait to find out why. I dove for
Mircea, intending to shift us out before they got their wind back, even if it blew my cover. But a
solid wall of energy met my outstretched hand, searing a stripe across my skin that felt like a bad
sunburn.
“Get out of here, Cassie,” Mircea said, as I snatched my hand back.
“Here’s a thought,” Billy said. “Shift both of you out of here.”
I gave him my “no shit” face. “I have to touch him!”
“What’s stopping you?”
Apparently, he couldn’t see the barrier any better than I could. But it was there. Mircea didn’t
have shields—he wasn’t a mage and vamp magic didn’t work like that. It had to be pure power he
was putting out, surrounding himself and the mages in an energy field that had them trapped as
effectively as any cage. But in a way, he was as trapped as they were. He couldn’t drop the barrier
without setting them free, and I couldn’t get any closer as long as he kept it up.
“Mircea is stopping me!” I snapped.
“Cassandra! I cannot hold them forever!” A single drop of sweat ran down Mircea’s cheek to
hang suspended on the edge of his jaw. “You must go!”
Before I could reply, one of the mages tore free, a young man with acne and mismatched eyes,
one green and one blue. He stumbled away from the others, his clothes smoking, his limp brown hair
on fire. But a few whispered words put out the flames and when he turned, his face furious, there
was something in his hand. Something warm and pale pink, the color of the webbing between his
fingers.
The little ball looked innocuous, but I’d been around mages long enough to know how likely
that was. And Mircea couldn’t move, couldn’t defend himself, without freeing the others to do even
more damage. Fear, stark and violent, flashed down my spine and my heart started throbbing in my
ears, which made no sense because I could feel my skin prickling as the blood drained from my face.
The small ball dropped to the ground and rolled a few feet before coming to rest against a tuft
of grass growing up through the concrete. The mage sank to his knees, staring at me with surprise on
his face. And then he fell over sideways, still clutching the widening stain on his chest.
“You shot him.” Billy looked almost as surprised as I felt.
“I guess he forgot to get his shields back up,” I said numbly.
I wanted to sit down. My insides felt trembly and my hand was shaking, which considering that
I had a mostly full clip in the gun was probably a safety violation. But then the mages did something
that sent Mircea smashing back into what remained of the fence, causing him to momentarily lose
his concentration. And as soon as he did, the animated corpse came flying across the parking lot and
leapt straight at him.
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I screamed, knowing what fire of any type did to an unprotected vampire. Then I was shooting
at random, an ache blooming in my chest so sharp it felt like a knife. But the remaining mages all
had shields up. My bullets just pinged off a couple as if they were made of transparent steel, and
were absorbed by others, like rocks falling into water. They’d killed Mircea and I couldn’t even hurt
them.
“Cassie!” I turned at Billy’s voice, and found him hovering in front of Mircea, hazy and
indistinct, like a double negative.
I stared in disbelief as Mircea slowly raised his head. Then I did a double take, my mouth
literally dropping open, because he was hanging in the middle of a fence jumping with blue-white
energy and there was no way he’d survived that. Just no way.
“Get him out of there or he’s a goner!”
“What?” I said stupidly, and then someone grabbed me from behind. The gun went flying out of
my hand and a fist cracked against my cheekbone, slamming my head back, making my ears ring. I
tried desperately to shift, but I was dizzy and the pain was unbelievable and nothing happened.
“I have her!” a man’s voice yelled in my ear, and from the corner of my eye I saw another dark
shape advancing on us. But the arms around my waist wouldn’t budge no matter how I fought.
Someone was screaming nearby, a horrible, hopeless sound that messed with my concentration as
much as the hands that were forcing my wrists together.
I kicked out with my foot, as hard as I could, and felt the impact against something soft.
Someone swore and a pale, gaunt man with hard gray eyes appeared in front of me. He pulled a
wicked-looking knife from his coat and held it in front of my eyes until I was able to focus on it. As
soon as I did, he stabbed it down into my right wrist.
I could feel small bones breaking, then he gave it a twist and it tore against tendons, blood
dripping down my arm as he ripped it out and held it in front of my face again. “Still want to fight
us?”
For a moment, I couldn’t scream—there wasn’t enough air in my lungs. Then something hard
and slick tightened around my wrists, right over the wound. And I gave a shriek that didn’t sound
right, didn’t sound like me, but the pain slammed into me all at once and then I couldn’t stop
screaming.
“Shut her up!” someone said, and an arm clamped over my windpipe, cutting off the noise and
also my air. I desperately tried to shift again, and for a second I thought I had it. Just like in the
caves, I could feel time as a syrupy, elastic mass, only it wasn’t quite right, wasn’t enfolding me like
I wanted.
Suddenly I hit the ground, stunned and bleary-eyed, and when nobody grabbed me again, I
started trying to crawl away. But my hands were bound with a hard plastic tie, I couldn’t put any
weight on my broken wrist and my directional sense was shot. I ended up rolling into a puddle of
something warm and sticky.
I looked down to see a diamond pattern burnt into the asphalt. All around it were shreds of
fabric, which I finally recognized as crisped blue jeans and the singed remains of a cotton shirt.
There were hard white bits sticking up here and there, marring the pattern, and something that looked
like hair. It finally hit me. The fencing. Mircea had wrapped it around the mage, and it had burnt
through his shields and then it had—
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I scrambled to my feet and staggered away, bile rising in my throat, my breath coming hard and
fast enough to actually hurt my lungs. My head was reeling, and when I tried to steady myself, the
space around me shook instead. I would have run straight into the fence if Billy hadn’t shouted at
me.
“Your shoes! They’re rubber-soled, Cass!”
For a moment I didn’t know what he was talking about, but then blue-white fire flashed in front
of my eyes and I got it. The power line had come loose from its human delivery device and attached
itself directly to the fence, slithering back and forth over the asphalt like a huge electric eel. My head
kept swimming and my eyesight was trying to black out and my fingers didn’t seem to want to do
what I told them, even on the hand that didn’t feel like it was on fire. Getting the sneaker off was a
nightmare, and even holding on to it was a challenge—how was I supposed to use it for anything?
And why was nobody trying to stop me all of a sudden?
I didn’t want to risk touching the line directly, rubber soles or no. I tried throwing the sneaker,
but my aim was even worse than usual and I finally ended up kicking it instead. It took four tries, but
I managed to jar the downed line until it lost contact with the fence.
As soon as it did, I had a vague sense of Mircea jumping away and attacking the remaining
mages. I heard what sounded like a neck snap and a body hit the asphalt nearby, but I couldn’t seem
to concentrate on it. It was all I could do to fight the urge to relax and sink into the welcoming
darkness that hovered at the edges of my vision.
I stumbled backwards, and my heel hit something that crunched under the light pressure. When
I looked down, I saw two bodies on the ground. The nearest was a woman, so elderly as to be
cadaverous, her skin papery and mottled with age spots, her hair wispy and bone white. The other
was a man, at least I assumed so, based on his clothes. The slight breeze sent tiny pieces of a
disintegrating mustard-colored shirt blowing away, like pollen on the air. The body underneath
looked like a recently unwrapped mummy, all crinkled brown skin stretched over visible ribs. I
stared at them, stunned and uncomprehending.
“Cass! Cass!” Billy was talking to me, and something pale rolled against my remaining sneaker.
“Throw it!”
My eyes finally managed to focus on the small item, which I identified as the ball the mage had
been holding earlier. Billy must have retrieved it, but I couldn’t understand why until I looked up
and saw five more mages rushing towards us from the far side of the building. It looked like the
cavalry had arrived, but with my usual luck, they were for the other side.
I shook my head, trying to clear it, and that jolted my arm, and oh, God, that hadn’t been a good
idea. Luckily the mages weren’t paying any attention to me, either because they hadn’t seen me yet
or because, compared to Mircea, I didn’t look like much of a threat. He was providing a hell of a
distraction, stepping on one mage’s neck while wrenching another’s head almost completely off his
body. It looked impressive, but if he had resorted to old-fashioned hand-to-hand, he was pretty damn
drained. I didn’t know if he could survive another attack and I didn’t intend to find out.
I tried to grab the sphere, but my hands were slick with blood and I couldn’t seem to keep hold.
Every time I thought I had it, it slipped away, my fingers just not able to hold on. I accidentally
kicked it and held my breath, waiting for it to detonate and kill us all, but it only rolled off a few
yards until stopped by a ridge in the concrete.
“Cass!”
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I looked up to see that I was out of time. The mages had paused a cautious distance from
Mircea, but that was only because any master vampire deserved a certain respect, even a wounded
one. Maybe especially a wounded one. But the attack would come any second now. And I couldn’t
stop it.
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Chapter 12
“Billy! I can’t get it!” I looked at him desperately. “You have to do it.”
He shook his head. “I’m too drained. It took everything I had just to roll it over to you!”
I made another grab and trapped the ball under my hands, but it was too slippery. I had the
impression that its surface wouldn’t provide much in the way of traction even if I wasn’t bleeding all
over it. “Damn it! If I had more time—”
Billy looked at me like I was crazy. “You’re Pythia! You have all the time you want!”
“I can’t shift! I’ve tried.” It was probably the pain, but I couldn’t see past it. Maybe that was
one of the things training taught, how to concentrate when your brain was fuzzy from blood loss and
your hand felt like it was going to fall off and you had absolutely no time to get it wrong. I would
have really, really liked to have had that lesson.
But I hadn’t, so I had to go with what I knew. I stopped plucking uselessly at the sphere and
looked at Billy. “Take a draw.”
“Now?!”
“Damn it, Billy. Yes, now! Get your strength back and throw this thing!”
Billy didn’t waste any time. He slipped inside my skin before I’d finished talking, and I felt the
energy drain immediately. Unlike normal, it hurt. Maybe because I didn’t have much left to give,
maybe because Billy had to speed up the process, maybe because everything already hurt anyway.
But whatever the reason, within seconds my heart was hammering, my hands were shaking and I
could actually sense my life flowing out of me. My brain was stuck on a hamster wheel, bad idea
bad idea bad idea bad idea, but there was nothing I could do; I didn’t have the strength to stop it. I
heard someone sigh, a long whistling release of breath, and then I was falling a very long way.
I landed on the asphalt in time to see Billy scoop up the ball. He almost lost it once, it almost
slipped right through his still mostly transparent hand, but he caught it at the last second. The throw
looked a lot like something I’d have done, a wobbly underhand that didn’t land even close to dead
center. It exploded a yard or so in front of the mages with a barely audible poof and a small cloud of
hazy pink, as if a powder-filled balloon had been dropped onto concrete. The air seemed to ripple
slightly, but the mages showed no discernible effects.
“It’s a damn dud!” Billy cursed just as the first of the newcomers reached Mircea. He turned,
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his elbow connecting with the mage’s face, and I had time to wonder why the man’s shields
weren’t up, why they hadn’t stopped the attack. Then it was as if his head just exploded, like instead
of a man, Mircea had hit a face made of nothing more than colored sand.
“Lot’s Wife,” Billy said, sounding impressed. “Bad stuff, dark magic.” I wondered if I should
worry that his tone was approving.
The other mages had stopped, frozen in various stages of movement. One had been running,
caught with a single leg raised, and his own momentum toppled him over. He exploded against the
asphalt and Mircea gave a purely vicious smile. He walked to the next human statue, a young man
with sandy blond hair, and gave him the barest push with the flat of his hand. The mage toppled
backwards into another, and they both hit the ground with a bang, dissolving into a cloud of
multicolored dust. It so mixed them up that it was impossible to tell where one body started and the
other ended.
Mircea went on to the last while I stared at the flesh-colored sand pouring out of a scuffed
leather tennis shoe. A gust of wind blew across the lot, pushing little grains of the substance against
the cheek I couldn’t seem to lift off the asphalt. They didn’t feel like sand; they didn’t feel like much
of anything at all.
I heard the thud as another body hit the ground, felt the billow of wind as it broke into crumbly
pieces, but I couldn’t focus on it. Shock, I thought vaguely. I knew what I technically should be
feeling, but I wasn’t sure I was actually feeling it. My whole body hurt, but the pain seemed to reach
me only through a buzzing, staticky distance.
I stared at the pile of human remains and wondered what the spell did. Billy was saying
something. Maybe he was trying to tell me, only I couldn’t understand him. Maybe it sucked all the
water out, I thought vaguely. Was that what was left of a person with the moisture mostly gone? A
pile of crumbly, chemical-smelling stuff that looked like a human, but couldn’t be because people
didn’t turn into powder when you touched them? That was just wrong, not possible.
Like me shooting a man through the heart.
Someone knelt beside me and cut off the plastic bracelet. I could see flashes of white through
the bloody meat of my wrist, but it didn’t look like a vein had been hit. It felt bad, though. I was
hauled into someone’s arms, my back against a warm chest that was breathing too quickly, or maybe
that was me. I tried to slow it down but nothing happened, so I decided it wasn’t me after all.
Strong hands stroked through my hair, gently separating the tangled strands for a moment. Then
a whisper of breath was at my ear. “Dulceata?, I can heal this, but it would be better if we went to
MAGIC. There are healers there with more skill than I possess.”
Mircea, I thought. He was the one smelling like smoke and blood and sweat. That seemed odd;
I always associated him with expensive cologne. I looked down and there were black smears and
fingerprints on my skin where he had touched me. That seemed odd, too, although I couldn’t think
why.
“Cass, we gotta get out of here. He can’t take you back to MAGIC.” Billy hovered in front of
my face, and that was all right. Because he looked the same as always.
“I can’t go back to MAGIC,” I said, parroting Billy’s words, and my voice sounded almost
normal. Weird.
“It is a bad break, dulceata?, and there are many bones in the wrist. I may not be able to repair
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all of them perfectly.”
I looked up into his face. It was dirty and sweat-soaked, and there was a fading pattern of
diamond shapes all over his left cheek. But new skin was already pushing the crisped away as I
watched, leaving it to blow off like so much ash in the wind. And his eyes were the same, bright with
intelligence, soft with concern, full of understanding, beautiful. He was okay. Mircea was going to
be okay. Relief was so sharp that, for a second, it hurt more than my wrist.
I wanted to say something, but there was too much raw emotion burning too close to the
surface. I didn’t think you were supposed to say what I was thinking, anyway: that, even if my
endgame was short, I liked the idea that his wasn’t. It was sort of a future by proxy, and while it
wasn’t quite what I’d hoped for, it was good enough. It felt good enough. So I just looked at him
instead, unblinking, until I couldn’t see more than a blur of pallor and darkness, the colors all
bleeding into each other for some reason.
“I will heal it here,” Mircea said harshly, cradling my wrist in one large hand.
He looked strange, feral and too tightly controlled, with something brimming right under the
surface, rage or frustration or both. The others could see it too, because the vamps were all trying to
act submissive and the pixie was gazing at him with big worried eyes. Françoise was sitting on the
ground next to us, but she looked hesitant, like she had no idea what to say. It occurred to me to
wonder what they were all doing here, but then Mircea did something that made warmth spread up
my arm, and the sudden lack of pain made me catch my breath in wonder.
I looked down to see my wound closing and odd little shiftings taking place under the skin.
Bones realigning, I thought vaguely, and that part wasn’t so pleasant, but it still didn’t hurt and
suddenly I could even think a little better. I could feel my blood shoving roughly through my veins,
and my skin felt tight and flushed, but there was no lethargy, no pain.
Mircea was biting his lip as he followed the lines of tendon and muscle in my hand, reshaping
them with his finger as if it were a scalpel. It was a light sensation. He barely brushed my hand, but I
shuddered. A touch that simple shouldn’t be so powerful.
Mircea didn’t notice. His eyes were wide open and brighter than I’d ever seen them, the rush
from combat still humming behind them like electricity. He was utterly concentrated and strangely
young-looking, and when he finally raised his head to tell me he was through, I grabbed him by the
shirt and kissed him, hard.
It wasn’t a great effort. I got the angle a little off and our teeth clicked together and we both
tasted like adrenaline. I didn’t care. My fists clenched in his shirt, crushing the heavy silk, and I
couldn’t seem to make them let go. And I needed them to because I couldn’t hit him until they did
and I really, really wanted to hit him. I was furious suddenly, completely livid. Because he’d almost
died, damn it, and I hadn’t been able to do anything, and he’d almost died.
Mircea didn’t object, didn’t try to pull away; instead he drew me closer, close enough to hear
his heart beat, close enough to feel him breathe. He took charge of the kiss, slowing it down, until it
was all warmth and sweetness and inevitability. His hands glided up my back and into my hair,
combing through my curls and making me shiver. I’d never known that anyone could kiss in English,
kiss in apologies, but apparently he could. I wasn’t sure what he was apologizing for, but it felt right.
Like he should be sorry for scaring me like that.
He didn’t kiss fair, and he didn’t kiss all at once; he kept giving it up and taking it away until I
thought I’d die of frustration. I felt like screaming, but didn’t have the breath to waste, and when I
thought I would go completely insane he finally made a quiet, hungry sound and met me in the
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middle. And it was suddenly all panting, groaning need rising between us like steam.
I could feel the geis react, faint tremors humming just beneath the skin, symptoms of an
imminent explosion. And I didn’t care. I had somehow never noticed the tensile strength of his body,
of those hands, lean and strong and achingly gentle. A flash of what it would feel like, pressed down
beneath his weight, sent heat spiraling through me. I wanted that. Wanted everything.
And then he broke away, looking shocked and a little wild, like he hadn’t during the fight, when
it would have made sense. I looked at him, with the rumpled hair and the dirty face, and wanted to
kiss him again. Not because of a compulsion, but because he already tasted familiar, because I
wanted more of the warmth that seemed to bubble up through my skin whenever we touched.
But I couldn’t. This Mircea was two weeks behind the times, so to speak. For him, the geis had
just woken up. But the more contact we had, the faster it was going to grow. Putting my Mircea
through even more hell.
I jerked away, and he let me go. But his puzzled gaze shifted from me to Françoise and Radella.
“Is there something you wish to tell me, dulceata??”
I glanced at Françoise, but she gave me one of those French shrugs that I’ve never been able to
interpret. Great. I looked back at Mircea and swallowed. “I don’t feel well,” I told him honestly.
“Can we talk a little later?”
After an almost imperceptible pause, Mircea nodded. He stood up, still staring at me while
issuing orders, sending the vamps who had shown up far too late scurrying around like frightened
ants. I sat on the ground and watched them, wondering what they were doing until I saw that one of
them had some kind of industrial vacuum. He started sucking up the remains of the mages who’d
been hit by the Lot’s Wife spell. Another followed him, tossing shoes and other non-sand-like bits
into a large-size garbage bag.
I no longer hurt anywhere, but I still felt exhausted and slightly removed from everything.
Mircea must have hit me with a suggestion, the vamp equivalent of an all-night bender. I didn’t think
it would be a good idea to try to shift again just yet.
Another vamp had started breaking apart the two withered corpses. They were so old that their
bones snapped easily, brittle like dried sticks. They made a crunching sound as he shoved them into
a garbage bag. I watched them, the shiny gloss of the suggestion dulling my reaction. I knew they
must have been killed by a spell meant for me, but at the moment it didn’t seem all that important.
The vamp managed to get both of them into one bag. It looked like he’d brought the good kind,
because it stretched but didn’t break.
Another vamp suddenly ran screaming across the parking lot. He’d managed to set himself on
fire trying to extinguish the Pinto. Mircea looked disgusted, but he moved off to help. He’d have
probably done as much even if the guy hadn’t belonged to him. He was a senator, and had to uphold
the Senate’s unofficial motto: always clean up your mess.
I felt a slight twitch of pain in my wrist, the kind that said the suggestion might be weakening
and maybe I should think about finding some aspirin. But I didn’t move. I slumped there watching
the stuff that never makes it into movies because it’s not exciting. It’s just people doing a job. After
the action comes the fire extinguishing and the street sweeping and the explaining to families that
somebody isn’t coming home. Only that last wouldn’t happen here. No one knew who the dark
mages were or where to find them. If the man I’d killed had a family, they wouldn’t know anything
was wrong until he just never came back.
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The thought hit like a narrow, very sharp knife, slid right between the ribs. All the pieces of
myself that I didn’t talk about, didn’t think about, came rushing back. And for a minute, I saw
another scene.
Mac, a friend of Pritkin’s and briefly mine, had followed me into Faerie and died there to
protect me. I still had nightmares about it, my mind showing me surreal images of his hands pressed
to the trunk of a tree, the bark growing liquid and pushing up between his fingers. It flowed over his
wrists, paralyzing him as it surged up his body until skin, hair, everything, was covered with the
same monotonous, uniform gray. Like a shroud. I usually woke up in a sweat, my heart pounding,
when it covered his face.
When there was nothing human left.
It hadn’t happened quite like that, but I couldn’t complain about my brain’s editing process; the
reality had been worse. I was sick of being the person who got people killed. I’d sworn it wasn’t
going to happen anymore, and yet here I was, not just the reason for it but the actual instrument. A
man was dead tonight, and I’d done it. I’d killed him.
My mind was horrified, sickened, disbelieving. But my emotions appeared to be taking a break.
I wasn’t trembling, wasn’t ill, wasn’t, seemingly, anything. The most I felt was kind of numb. Just
numb. Despite the fact that the mage hadn’t been my only casualty.
Billy might have thrown the Lot’s Wife, but I’d donated the energy that made it possible. At the
very least, that made part of the responsibility mine. But those deaths didn’t seem as real, somehow.
I’d seen magic all my life, but it wasn’t the same. Vampires were magical creatures, but the ones at
Tony’s had mostly used speed, strength and a lot of human weapons to kill. Some of what they did
could be pretty spectacular, not to mention gruesome, but at least it made sense. Unlike an innocuous
little ball that could drain five people of life in a matter of seconds. The gunshot, though, was
something else. I’d seen the expression on the man’s face, watched the blood well up between his
fingers from a wound I had caused. No. There was no denying that one.
And beyond the guilt and the pain and who knew what else I was going to feel when Mircea’s
comforting numbness faded, I’d also probably completely screwed up the timeline. A lot of people
were dead who weren’t supposed to be. Or were they?
It was really hard to think, and, ironically enough, time-travel paradoxes aren’t my best thing.
But there were a few oddities I was starting to notice. Like, if this wasn’t how things were meant to
play out, why hadn’t I met Mircea the last time I was here? And why had I seen only two dark mages
that night instead of the dozen or so who’d apparently been hanging around? If Mircea and I hadn’t
fought them off before, who had? Because I hadn’t seen anyone else volunteering.
“Cassie. We should go,” Françoise said gently.
I looked at her blearily. She appeared to be bouncing up and down without actually lifting off
the ground, and all her edges were blurry. I decided that was probably me. “How did it go?”
She grimaced. “Don’t you remember?”
I thought back for a minute, to my experiences here two weeks ago. “You were captured. I
remember freeing you, but that’s about it.” I hadn’t really wanted to know what a bunch of witches
and a pixie were doing locked up in one of Dante’s lower levels. I’d run across them while here on
other business and helped them get away, but I hadn’t asked a lot of questions. “I’m a little fuzzy on
details,” I admitted.
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“Zee mages, zey thought I was one of zee slaves, who ’ad escaped,” Françoise explained. “Zey
locked me up, and when Radella tried to ’elp me, zey captured her as well.”
“Did you get it?”
She nodded gravely. “I was in the second group. I over’eard the spell when the others were
sent. I was to go next, but zen ze news came that you were ’ere—ze other you,” she explained
helpfully. I nodded. “Zey closed ze portal and left us, because everyone was told to drop what zey
were doing and find you.”
Yeah, I bet. Tony had wanted me pretty bad. I suppose his goons thought they could finish the
slave run later. I was suddenly viciously glad that they’d been denied that much, at least.
“I should never ’ave left you,” Françoise said mournfully.
“I want to see the damn rune before I go anywhere else with you people,” the pixie put in,
crossing her tiny arms.
“Why?”
“Because you’re all completely insane!” Radella snapped. Her eyes were on the vamps, who
were kneeling beside the diamond pattern on the asphalt, debating whether it was worth trying to
scrape anything out of the cracks, or if a new paving job would be easier.
“Because I could ’ave ’elped you,” Françoise said, looking at me like she wondered if maybe
I’d gotten hit in the head. Which I had, as my throbbing jaw was busy reminding me. I’d forgotten
about that until just now. Oh, yeah. That suggestion was going south pretty fast.
“It wouldn’t have mattered,” I told her. “And you might have gotten killed.”
“Better zan you!”
I shook my head, but stopped because it made it ache worse. “Since when is my life worth more
than yours?”
“Since you became Pythia!”
From halfway across the lot, Mircea’s head whipped around. I repressed a sigh. Damn vampire
hearing.
“Yeah. That’s kind of the point,” I said, grabbing her hand. Françoise looked confused, but I
didn’t stop to explain that the Pythia is supposed to be the one protecting other people, not needing it
herself. Mircea was striding toward us, looking determined, and I was not up to a verbal fencing
match with him tonight. Hell, I lost those even when my brain didn’t feel like it was about to throb
out of my skull. “Hold on,” I said, really hoping I could manage one more shift before I passed out.
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Chapter 13
Sight down the barrel of the gun. Balance the butt on your other palm if you need to steady your
aim. Squeeze the trigger lightly. You won’t have to apply much pressure to get it to fire. I breathed
slowly and watched the paper target flinch as if the bullets were cutting through flesh. Almost all of
them hit outside the target range, and not a single one was inside the circle that represented the vital
organs. Ironic, that.
The unused storeroom had good ventilation for an indoor locale, so Pritkin had set it up as a
firing range. Daily practice was supposed to improve my aim—at least that was the theory. So far,
the paper cutouts at the far end of the room hadn’t had too much to worry about.
I released the empty clip and reloaded. The weapon felt the same as always in my hand; the
weight, the smoky scent of the oil and powder, the almost-there smell of burnt paper, were all
familiar after almost two weeks of this. When I’d picked the gun up today, that had seemed strange.
Like killing a man yesterday should have changed it somehow, added weight, shown up on the sleek
black surface like a mark. Something.
But it didn’t.
Nine mm Beretta, clip holds fifteen rounds. Maximum effective range is fifty meters, but it’s
better close up. Remember to take the safety off and aim for the torso. Pritkin had been giving me
pointers, determined, as he put it, to reduce my status as a giant bull’s-eye in the field. And that’s
how I’d been thinking of the lessons: as something designed to help with defense. It had somehow
never registered that defense with a gun usually meant shooting something more substantial than a
paper target. That defense with a gun might mean killing.
I’d grown up around guns, had seen them so often that they were just a part of the scenery, no
more remarkable than a vase or a lamp. I hadn’t owned one myself, because I wasn’t expected to
fight. At Tony’s, I’d been among the group of useful noncombatants whom other people were
supposed to protect. I’d been told a hundred times that, if an attack ever came, my job was to get to
one of the many bolt-holes secreted around the place and wait it out.
There had been a certain comfort in my old position that I’d never really appreciated until now.
Because the simple truth was, the moment you took on a position of responsibility, there were people
who would look up to you, who would expect you to shield them, who would expect you to save
them. I was used to running away, was damn good at it in fact, or I wouldn’t have lasted this long. I
knew how to get fake IDs almost anywhere, how to change my appearance, how to blend in.
I didn’t know how to keep people alive.
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My clip was empty again, the little click, click telling me to reload. I pressed a button and
missed the grab. The spent clip bumped against my shoe before spinning away on the floor. I
retrieved it and manually reloaded with fifteen new bullets.
Despite the ache in my wrist, my hands were steady. I kept being surprised by that, kept
expecting to fall apart. I’d washed up in front of the bathroom mirror after we got back, letting the
washcloth linger on the back of my neck, cool and soothing, while I waited to dissolve. Only I hadn’t
yet. It was starting to really worry me.
Once when I was about six, Alphonse had come back from a job covered in blood, with a gash
in his forehead that almost bisected the scalp, making him look like Frankenstein’s monster before
the doc stitched him up. But he’d been in a rare good mood, because the other guys, the ones he’d
left lying in pieces all over a basketball court, had looked worse. They’d taken out a couple of our
people in a territory dispute and, since the dead had been Alphonse’s vamps, Tony had let him
handle it. Alphonse had done his usual thorough job.
He’d seen me loitering around a corner, watching him with wide eyes, and had chucked me on
the chin in passing. It had left a red mark on my skin, which Eugenie had scrubbed off later while
inadvertently teaching me my first swear word. When I was older, I’d realized that he’d been making
a point, coming back covered in blood to show that the insult had been properly avenged, but all I’d
thought at the time was that it was strange to see him so relaxed. If it hadn’t been for the gore, he
could have been anybody returning from a good night’s work.
It hadn’t bothered him either.
I aimed at the target again, which was still looking pretty pristine despite the fact that the air
was getting acrid. I thought of Mircea’s face, his eyes reflecting fire, his body outlined in jumping,
deadly flames. I wanted to touch him so badly that I could feel his fingers on my wrist, like a
phantom ache. This was how reaching for something with a missing hand must feel, restless and
empty and wrong. And I’d almost been left with it forever, thanks to a guy who thought that trying to
electrocute someone was an acceptable way of saying hello.
The air rang with gunshots and the sound of ripping paper until the clicking noise came again. I
reloaded, my eyes smarting from the smoke, wishing life was that easy. Just fill up what was empty,
replace what was lost. But it wasn’t. Some things couldn’t be replaced. So you had to make sure you
didn’t lose them to begin with.
It was all the way past crazy and out the other side that I was starting to agree with Alphonse.
That afternoon, Françoise and I made our way to the imposing marble and glass edifice in the
main arcade where Augustine had set up shop. My run-in with the dark mages had made one thing
very clear: if Mircea hadn’t been there, I’d have lasted all of about thirty seconds. If I had any hope
of actually getting my hands on the Codex, I had to be better prepared. I just hoped Augustine could
do what I had in mind.
Françoise had paused in front of the two large plate-glass windows that displayed selections
from the ready-to-wear line. She eyed a slim flute of a dress with golden bubbles rising upwards
from the hem, like champagne, but passed on without comment. Inside, a large chandelier took up
most of the ceiling, its crystals formed by icicles charmed not to melt despite the candles scattered
among its many tiers. Françoise immediately began browsing, although what she planned to use for
money I had no idea. I’d offered to take her shopping, since she’d ended up here sans family, friends
and wardrobe. But my bank account didn’t run so much to pricey boutiques.
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I decided to explain things if and when she found something, and walked past the staff into the
small workroom in back. Nobody tried to stop me. I was back in Elvira mode, wearing a black wig
and an official-looking name badge. I’d discovered that it avoided a lot of questions if I looked like
an employee, although it wasn’t doing my arches any good.
The workroom was so crowded with racks of garments and bolts of fabric that I couldn’t even
see Augustine, but I heard someone muttering in a far corner. It turned out to be the great man
himself, wrestling with a piece of golden fur that appeared to be trying to eat him. He threw it off
and slapped a chair down on it, then started digging in the pile of papers on a nearby desk and
muttering more.
I approached with caution, because the fabric was bucking and making a valiant attempt to
throw off the chair. “Uh, hello?”
“It’s no use complaining,” he told me quickly. “There was no show, so nobody gets paid.
Including me.”
“I’m not here about that.”
The fur gave a heave and almost dumped him onto the floor. He pretended not to notice, but he
surreptitiously slid the edge of the heavy desk over to join the chair. “Then I’m at your disposal.”
“I’m thinking about a dress. Something French.”
“You can’t mean that complete hack Edouard,” he said, sounding appalled. “Darling, please. I
can design you something better with my eyes closed. Hell, I could design you something better
dead!”
“I don’t mean I want a French designer,” I tried to explain. “Just something that looks—”
“Forget Paris. Paris is done,” he told me airily. “Now, at what occasion are you planning to
showcase my work?”
“I need an outfit that would fit into the late eighteenth century.”
“Oh, a costume party. I don’t do costumes.” Considering that Augustine’s personal style was a
cross between Galliano and Liberace, I thought that was debatable. At the moment he was wearing a
saffron yellow tunic with puffy sleeves over a pair of purple harem pants. A gold sash tied around
his waist pirate style held not a saber but a pair of scissors, a measuring tape and a tomato-shaped
pincushion.
“I don’t think you understand,” I told him patiently. “It’s kind of important.”
“Ah, you want to dress to impress,” Augustine said archly. “Well, in that case, you’ve come to
the right place.” He pulled me over to a dressmaker’s form in one of the few open spaces in the
room. With a mumbled word, it took on a very familiar, very detailed shape. I had a sudden urge to
throw a towel over it. “Any special orders I need to know about?” he demanded. “Some of those can
affect the design.”
“No. I just—”
“Because I don’t want you coming to me at the last minute saying you need a charm to make
you dance better or hold your liquor or be a scintillating conversationalist and just forgot to mention
it—”
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“You can do that with a dress?”
“Darling, I can do anything with a dress. Anything legal, that is. So don’t go asking for a love
potion or some nonsense, because I’m not about to lose my license.”
“What else can you do?” My mind was racing with the possibilities.
“What do you want?” A bolt of blank white fabric began draping itself around the form.
“Can you make me invisible?”
Augustine sighed and flipped the edge of my wig with a finger. “A bad outfit and worse hair
can do that.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “Then what about spell-proofing? Can you make it so if someone
slings something nasty at me it bounces off?”
“Jealous rival?” he asked sympathetically.
“Something like that.”
“How powerful is the little cat?”
“Does it matter?”
“Of course it does! I have to know how strong to make the counterspell,” he said impatiently.
“If it’s something petty, like making you smell like a garbage truck—”
“No. I need to stop a major assault, like a dark mage could cast.”
Augustine blinked at me owlishly. “Darling, what kind of party are you attending?”
“That’s the problem. I don’t know.”
“Well, maybe you should think about skipping it. Who needs that kind of stress? Take the night
off, do your nails.”
“It’s sort of mandatory.”
“Hmm. This isn’t really my line,” he said doubtfully. “The war mages use charmed capes
sometimes, to reinforce their shields, but I don’t think fashion is their main priority.”
Françoise poked her head in. She appeared to be wearing a small animal over the top half of her
body, one with a lot of brown quills extending outward in all directions. “I ’ave found somezeeng,”
she told me.
Augustine stiffened. “Where did you get that? It’s a prototype.”
“What is it?” I asked, eyeing it warily.
“A jacket, of course,” he told me. “Porcupine. Wonderful for getting rid of unwanted attention.
Unfortunately, that one tends to launch quills without warning at anyone who upsets the wearer, so I
don’t think—”
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“I’ll take eet.” Françoise piled an armload of other items onto the table. “And zese.”
“What is all this?” I asked. Behind her were a couple of walking mountains of clothes, which I
assumed to be the shop assistants, although no heads were actually visible.
“Pour les enfants,” Françoise said, holding up a tiny T-shirt with WORLD’S GREATEST KID
written on it in what looked like crayon.
I frowned at it and Augustine snatched it out of her hand, looking aggrieved. “An image of the
child wearing it will appear under the title,” he told me loftily.
“There’s a place at the mall that can do that.”
“And it makes the wearer have a sudden, uncontrollable fondness for vegetables.”
I sighed. “We’ll take it.” He snapped his fingers at his over-burdened assistants, who began
running around, adding things up. “About my dress,” I said, now that he was in a better mood. “I
thought creative geniuses like you appreciated a challenge.”
He patted my cheek, which was a bit much considering that he didn’t look a lot older than me.
“We do, love, we do. But there’s also the little matter of payment. This isn’t ready-to-wear we’re
talking about. And for what you’re asking—”
“Send the bill to Lord Mircea,” Françoise said, playing with a scarf that, oddly enough, was just
lying there being scarflike.
I started slightly. “What? No!”
Her pretty forehead wrinkled slightly. “Pourquoi pas?”
“I don’t…that isn’t…it wouldn’t be appropriate,” I said, very aware of Augustine listening
avidly.
“Mais, you are his petite amie, non?”
“Non! I mean no, no I’m not.” The frown widened, then Françoise shrugged in a way that
suggested she knew denial when she saw it. “Send the bill to Casanova,” I told Augustine. If he
complained, I’d tell him to take it out of my overdue paycheck.
“Casanova,” Augustine repeated, with an evil glint in his eye. “You know he actually expects
me to pay for the damage to the conference room? He presented me with a ridiculous bill just this
morning.”
“Then present him one right back. A big one.” I eyed Françoise’s pile of assorted oddities.
“And tack those on.”
Augustine’s smile took on an almost Cheshire cat quality. “Cinderella, I do believe you’re
going to the ball.”
That evening, after I finished another shift in Hell, Françoise and I slipped out of Dante’s in a
shiny black Jeep. While I waited for Alphonse and my backup to arrive, I had a few errands to do,
and she had volunteered to help. Neither of us had a car, but I’d managed to find us a ride.
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The tag on the front of the Jeep read 4U2DZYR. It belonged to Randy, one of the boys who
worked in Casanova’s version of a spa. He would have been a perfect California beach bum,
complete with deep tan, sun-bleached hair and toothy white smile, except that his voice still had a
Midwest twang. He was possessed by an incubus, of course, but so far he’d been on his best
behavior.
“You’re serious?” Randy asked me for the third time, as we pulled into the giant Wal-Mart
parking lot. “You want to shop here?”
“Yes, I want to shop here!” I said, exasperated. There’d been a time when Wal-Mart had been
pretty upscale for me, in comparison to the 25-cent bin at Goodwill or the Salvation Army. But I got
the impression that there weren’t a lot of Randy’s clients who felt the same way. He’d had to ask one
of the waitresses for directions.
He pulled into the closest available parking space, tires squealing, and stopped on a dime. He
looked at me seriously over the tops of his Ray-Bans. “As long as you make sure Lord Mircea knows
that I had nothing to do with this. I’m only following orders. If the boss’s lady wants to go
slumming—”
“You sound like I’m going to a strip club or something!” I said irritably, getting out. “And I’m
not the boss’s lady!”
“Oookay.” Randy pried Françoise, who had the backseat in a death grip, off the upholstery. I’d
forgotten to ask if she’d actually been in a car before, and judging by the wide eyes and dead white
complexion, I was betting the answer was no.
“I nevair want to do zat again.”
“I’m not that bad a driver,” Randy said, offended.
“Yes, you are,” she said fervently.
“Well the wheels have stopped rolling, sweet thing,” he told her, getting an arm around her
waist. He deposited her on the concrete. “You know, I’ve done some of my best work in backseats.”
This was accompanied by a huge how-could-anyone-not-think-I’m-cute? grin. Which is probably the
only thing that saved him.
I hauled the extensive shopping list out of my purse and waved it at them before Randy said
anything else. “Can we get going? Because we don’t have all day.”
Eight kids plus a baby, I had discovered, need a lot of things, especially when their entire
existing wardrobe was literally the clothes on their backs. And except for a few T-shirts for the
tourists, Augustine’s establishment didn’t specialize in children’s anything. He preferred his
customers to be adult and very well-heeled. Hence the list.
An hour later, I was leaning against a shelf stacked with Fruit of the Loom T-shirts while
Françoise terrorized various underpaid store employees. She had commandeered no fewer than four,
whom she had racing back and forth, trying to find all the needed sizes. She looked a little out of
place, as she was wearing one of Augustine’s sophisticated creations: a long, basic black dress with a
chic jacket covered in a newspaper print. I hoped no one noticed that all the headlines were today’s.
Randy was standing in front of a mirrored column, admiring the flex of his bicep. “What do you
think?” The muscle shirt he’d poured himself into was bright blue and perfectly matched his eyes.
He knew damn well what I thought, what half the women in the store did. Either that, or we just
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happened to go shopping the same day every young mother in the state needed to restock her
son’s closet.
“I thought you didn’t shop at places like this.”
“A T-shirt’s a T-shirt.” He shrugged, causing a ripple of muscle that prompted a squeak from a
nearby customer. “So, listen. You got a lot of kids.”
“Yeah. So?”
For a minute, he just stood there, looking at me awkwardly, like a big kid himself. A big kid
with a lot of muscles and a see-through mesh tee. “So you’re putting them up in the casino, right? In
a couple free rooms?”
“How do you know that?” The kitchen staff hadn’t had space in the minuscule quarters that
Casanova had allotted them for another nine people, so I’d had to get creative. It helped that I
worked the front desk occasionally.
“Everybody knows. The staff have been working to keep the boss from finding out. But he does
check the books sometimes, you know?”
“What’s your point, Randy?”
“I just wanted to say that, if you need, well, any money or anything…” He trailed off, while I
looked at him incredulously. I had no idea what his incubus was teaching him. Apparently, they
hadn’t gotten to the part where women were supposed to pay him.
“We’ll be fine.” If Casanova gave me any grief about the rooms, I’d have Billy rig every damn
roulette game in the house. Come to think of it, he was pretty good with craps, too.
“You sure? ’Cause, I mean, I kind of get paid a lot. It wouldn’t be, like, hurting me any, you
know?”
Françoise was giving him the kind of look I expected to see incubi giving her. She saw me
notice and gave a shrug that could have meant anything from “I was just looking” to “I haven’t had
sex in four hundred years, so sue me.” I decided I didn’t want to know.
“Thanks. I’ll be in Shoes,” I said, snagging the lightest of the remaining carts.
Sixteen feet—I wasn’t counting the baby because so far she hadn’t proven able to keep up even
with socks—need a lot of shoes. I stood up from fishing around on the bottom row, trying to find a
pair of Converse look-alikes in Jesse’s size, and hit my head on somebody’s elbow. Somebody who
looked like he’d escaped from Caesars Palace and forgotten to take off the costume.
“Why are you here?” The voice echoed loudly in the large space.
I looked around frantically, but nobody seemed to be paying the ten-foot golden god in the shoe
department any attention. “I could ask you the same question!” I whispered.
“I came to remind you that time grows short. Your vampire will die if the spell is not lifted.”
“I’m aware of that!” I snapped.
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“Then I ask again, why are you here? Have you made any progress?”
“Yes, sort of. I mean, I know where the Codex is.”
“Then why have you not retrieved it?”
“It isn’t that easy! And why do you care? What is Mircea to you?”
“Nothing. But your performance has not been as…focused…as I had hoped. This is an
important test of your abilities, Herophile. And thus far you have let yourself be distracted by
unnecessary tasks. These children are not your mission. The Codex is.”
“Uh-huh.” For someone who didn’t care about the Codex, he sure brought it up a lot. “Well,
maybe I could do a better job if I had some help! How about sticking around for a while? And while
you’re here we can get in a few of those lessons I keep hearing about.”
“I cannot enter this realm, Herophile. This body is a projection; only you can see it. And I
cannot maintain it for long.”
“Then how about telling me a little more about the Codex?” Why, for example, Pritkin was
willing to kill to keep it safe.
“You know all you need. Find it and complete your mission. And do it soon. There are those
who would oppose you.”
“I kind of noticed.”
“What has happened?” he asked sharply.
“You’re a god. Don’t you know?”
His eyes narrowed dangerously. “Do not forget yourself, Herophile.”
“My name is Cassandra.”
“A poor name for the Pythia. Your namesake opposed my will and lived to regret it. Do not
make the same mistake.”
It was more than a little surreal, even for me, to be discussing a myth with a legend in the
middle of the Wal-Mart shoe department. Especially with a clerk giving me the hairy eyeball from
the next aisle over. He didn’t say anything, though. Maybe a lot of his customers talked to the shoes
before buying them.
“Maybe so, but it’s still my name and I’m doing the best I can. Threats aren’t going to speed up
the process.”
“Find something that will,” he told me flatly, and vanished.
I sighed and fought the urge to bang my head against the metal rack and just not stop. The clerk
was peering at me around the size twelves with an expression that said he was thinking about calling
for security. I decided not to risk it.
I held up the red Converse wannabes. “You have these in a nine?”
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Chapter 14
I slipped inside Pritkin’s room the next morning, on a mission to find that rune I’d promised
Radella, and stopped dead. I’d expected it to be a quick search; for some reason, I’d assumed he
would keep his belongings in military precision. Only this wasn’t it.
The bed was still unmade from whenever he’d slept in it last, and clothes were strewn on the
floor like a hurricane had just blown through. And he’d been right—it did, indeed, have an odor. But
I was less inclined to blame its onetime residents for that than the vile-smelling potions that lined a
shelf on one wall.
The rickety-looking contraption was directly above the bed, something that would have worried
me, since most of the substances he carried around were lethal. Still, I supposed he hadn’t had a lot
of choice. The opposite wall was taken up with a closet, the one facing into the club by a door and
the one looking out over one side of the casino by a huge stained-glass window.
The windows were Dante’s trademark, and I guess the designers had situated this one behind
the dressing rooms because its Gothic splendor didn’t go too well with the bar’s tiki theme. But the
result of such a huge window in such a small space was a room completely bathed in jewel tones:
ruby, sapphire, emerald and pearl. They stained the comforter in watery, diffuse shades and splashed
the floor with pools of light. I’d have found it pretty hard to get any sleep myself, but at least the
subject suited him: a group of soldiers waving antique weaponry.
I reluctantly went to work, and was soon wondering more about what I didn’t find than what I
did. Along with some wadded-up T-shirts and enough firepower to conquer a small country, I found
several pairs of jeans, a new pair of tennis shoes, a few basic toiletries and some socks still in their
packages. All of said purchases bought in haste by a guy who wasn’t dressing to impress. He was
just replacing necessities that, presumably, couldn’t be reached because he didn’t dare to return to
his apartment. With the Circle after him for a couple dozen reasons, most having to do with helping
me, I didn’t blame him there. But it still didn’t explain where the wardrobe for his alter ego was
stashed.
I finally picked up a small wooden case on the nightstand. I’d deliberately left it for last, hoping
that I’d find the rune tucked into a sock and not need to pry into something that practically screamed
personal. If I hadn’t needed the damn thing so badly, I’d have been out of there like a shot. As it was,
I reluctantly opened the lid.
There was no rune in sight, just a few yellowing letters and a badly faded photograph. The
woman it depicted was wearing a dark hat and a high-necked dress that made her face stand out like
a pale thumbprint. It was pretty indistinct, but she looked young, with regular features and light-
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colored eyes. She was pretty, I decided—or would have been if she’d been smiling.
I turned the box over, but if there were any hidden compartments, I couldn’t find them. It was
just a plain pine rectangle, without even a lining that anything could have been hidden under. I
flipped the photo over. It had a studio’s name on the back: J. Johnstone, Birmingham.
Pritkin had mentioned once that he’d lived in Victorian England, which made him a hell of a lot
older than his thirtysomething appearance, but what with the fighting and the running and the almost
dying, I’d never gotten around to asking him about it. And he’d never mentioned any family. I didn’t
know if the picture might be his mother, his sister or even a daughter. I realized with surprise that
although I could have written a book about the mage, I didn’t know much about the man at all.
Billy drifted through the door, interrupting my thoughts. “Did you get it?” I asked eagerly. He
spread empty hands and I sighed. I put the letters back unread—a quick feel had been enough to
show that the rune hadn’t been tucked into one—and centered the box carefully back on its square of
dust-free wood. “What now?”
Billy gave me a look. “You know what now. You searched this room; I ransacked the den
downstairs. And he wouldn’t stash something that valuable just anywhere. He’s got it on him.”
It was worst-case scenario, so of course that had to be it. “How are your pickpocket skills?”
“Depends on whether he’s paying attention. I lifted a rune for you once before, but only
because you two were so busy yelling at each other that he didn’t notice. You’ll need to cause a
distraction.”
Great. Normally, picking a fight with the ever prickly mage wouldn’t have been a problem, but
now…“I don’t think so,” I said fervently.
“Then you may want to get gone, ’cause I passed him on my way here.”
I stared at Billy blankly for a second, then what he’d said registered and I lunged for the door. It
was exactly the wrong thing to do, especially when I could have shifted, but I panicked. The knob
turned under my hand and, before I could breathe, I was back on the bed, a hard chest pinning me
down and a knife at my throat.
I blinked nervously up at the mage, his face splashed with color from the rainbow spilling over
the bed. Blue light limned his pale hair and caught on his cheekbones, making him look oddly alien
for a moment. “What do you think you’re doing?” he demanded.
The cold edge of the blade had dented my skin, disturbingly close to the jugular. I swallowed.
“Trying not to move?”
Pritkin pulled away, scowling, the knife disappearing almost magically. “You should have
given me some warning if you planned to come ’round. What if I had rigged a snare?”
I didn’t answer, being too busy trying to figure out why, yet again, he looked so different. He
shrugged out of the old brown leather coat, revealing a sun-faded green T-shirt and a pair of jeans.
The jeans were pale blue, worn thin and smooth as silk, and loose enough to barely cling to the
muscular swell of his hips. They were, in other words, the exact opposite of tight and black. His hair
had also lost the spiky trendiness from the lobby. It appeared freshly washed, with bangs that needed
a trim flopping into his eyes. The rest of him should have followed it into the shower: there were
dark smudges all over his arms, popping the veins into relief, and one along his cheekbone.
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“What have you been doing?” I asked, sitting up.
“Researching.”
“In a coal mine?”
“Obscure magical texts are seldom found on hygienic computer files. Now, would you like to
explain why you’re here?”
I looked away before answering, having a hard time separating the regular, everyday Pritkin
with the ill-fitting coat and the stupid haircut from the man who had kissed me. “I thought you’d be
pleased to see me, after that scene in the lobby.”
“What are you talking about?”
I didn’t reply, having just registered a fact that felt important. As usual, Pritkin’s T-shirt was
crisscrossed with belts, sheaths and holsters. The guy was a walking arsenal, with almost every kind
of portable weapon known to man. Except for one.
“You don’t carry a sword,” I said, something clicking in my brain.
Pritkin turned from hanging his coat in the closet, and Billy flowed over to begin ransacking it.
I just hoped he did it quietly. “I don’t need one, remember?”
I stared at him for a second, then leapt off the bed and grabbed him. I spun him around, trying
to pull his shirt up at the same time. “What the—”
“Hold still,” I said, struggling to get the buckles and straps undone, half of which seemed to
have been designed simply to drive me nuts. Most of my adrenaline surges lately had resulted from
life-or-death situations; it was a little disorienting to feel the same response to something that might
actually be positive. But my heart had sped up until I could feel it in my throat and my hands were
suddenly too clumsy to do the job. “Take your shirt off,” I ordered, trying to keep my voice steady.
He turned, a half-quizzical, half-angry expression on his face. But to my surprise he didn’t
argue, stripping to the waist quickly and efficiently. I turned him back around and saw what I’d
expected: a spill of bright color, gold and silver and rich blue-black, running from his shoulder down
the length of one side.
My fingertips traced the slightly raised edges of the design, down warm skin and hard muscle,
until stopped by the waistband of his jeans. I’d been a fool not to think of it before, especially as I’d
watched part of it being carved into his skin. Pritkin didn’t need to carry a sword anymore. He
already had one, in the shape of a magical tattoo that manifested as a weapon whenever he chose.
“Thinking of getting another tat?” he asked, his voice oddly tight.
I didn’t answer. His arm was braced against the wall, making the muscles stand out, and his
back was tense. There was something mesmerizing about all that caged power so ruthlessly leashed,
all that coiled strength so docile under my hands.
I watched two of my fingers dip below the loose, frayed waistband, still following the edge of
the blade. The silky denim was warm from his body, and it gave way easily, baring a slight dimple
just below the small of his back. I guess I knew why there hadn’t been any underwear with his
purchases, I thought hazily, as my fingers abandoned the sword to trace the tiny depression.
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Pritkin suddenly spun and caught my wrist. “Careful,” he said roughly. “Or have you forgotten
what that geis of yours can do?”
And that was another mystery. There had been no warning rush of power in the lobby and there
was none now, although there certainly should have been. Pritkin released me and I sat back down,
feeling too warm and slightly disoriented. I couldn’t seem to stop staring at his chest. The hair grew
thick and dark gold over his biceps, but thinned to a dusky trail running down his stomach before
disappearing below the jeans. It looked soft against all those hard muscles, and way too inviting.
I swallowed. “We have a problem.”
Pritkin snorted. “Only one? That would be a change.”
I flopped backwards, exhausted from the implications. Pritkin hadn’t been Saleh’s killer, hadn’t
been the man in the lobby, wasn’t—probably—a traitor. I had my strongest ally back, but I also had
a mysterious doppelgänger with murder and seduction in mind. And he seemed to have a definite
knack for both.
I could see colors through my eyelids, vermilion, azure and jade, the window’s hues filtered
through flesh. They were suddenly blocked by a dark shape. I opened my eyes to find Pritkin glaring
at me from far too close for comfort. “You are going to tell me exactly what is going on,” he said
grimly. “Right now.”
And just like that, all the feelings from the lobby came back with a rush. Don’t even think about
it, I told myself sternly as my hand reached up to cup his face. My fingers ignored me, dragging
across soft skin and crisp stubble, turning his head to the perfect angle for a kiss. Maybe this was
what schizophrenia was like, I thought, my body screaming “forward” while my brain ordered it to
stay still. My brain lost.
Before I made the conscious decision, I felt my lips brush his. Although I suspected he was
cursing mentally, his body didn’t seem to be listening to his brain any better than mine. The muscles
under my hand were hard as iron, but he didn’t pull away. And after a startled second, he gripped the
nape of my neck and kissed me back.
I let my hands settle into his hair, which wasn’t just gravity-defying but thick and sleek and
soft, and wonderful to stroke through. Only I didn’t get much of a chance, because Pritkin kissed like
he did everything else, straightforward, accepting no prisoners and with an intensity that left me
breathless. It was hot and hard and desperate, like he was starving for it, and I opened my mouth and
took it, because, God.
“You bastard,” I gasped, when we finally broke apart. “I knew you were cheating!” The taste of
coffee had been rich and bitter in his mouth.
“Miss Palmer—”
“I’m lying in your bed. You just kissed me senseless. I think you can risk using my first name.”
“I’m risking enough as it is,” he muttered.
I let my fingers dig into the hard muscles of his shoulders. His skin was warm and slightly
damp from the heat of the coat, and completely hypnotic. I traced the gentle ridges of scar tissue on
his shoulder, the skin slick and too smooth, where something with claws had gotten a few into him.
He was an enigma, John Pritkin: a mad scientist with gun calluses and old scars and even more
secrets than me.
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My hands followed the swell of muscle down his arms, stroking across hard biceps, gliding
lower to caress the silken skin at the inner bend of his elbow. I couldn’t count the number of times
I’d felt a crackle of energy when we got close, but apparently touching with intent made it just that
much more—
“Cassie.”
“Well, you went and did it now,” I said dreamily. “Guess I’ll have to start calling you John.”
“This isn’t a good idea.” His voice was strained, but he didn’t pull away. I took that for
permission and slipped my arms between his, running my hands down the powerful back, feeling the
flesh give and spring back, warm and resilient. Stop it, I told my hands sternly. They ignored me in
favor of exploring the sleek, fascinating curve of his spine. They found the loose waistband, the
warm skin, the taut muscle and the same dimple that had fascinated me earlier. I had to stroke, just a
little, and Pritkin’s eyes suddenly went dark jade.
“I never asked if you have an evil twin,” I said vaguely. “Do you?”
He blinked. “Why?”
I tried to tell him, but I seemed to be having trouble getting enough oxygen. It was as if part of
him rode the air around us, like I took him inside me with every breath. I buried my face in the curls
on his chest, feeling them against my cheek, thick and warm, like his arousal pressed against my
thigh.
His hands hit the bed forcefully and his face filled my vision, its expression desperate rather
than angry. “Listen to me! There’s something wrong. What did you mean about the lobby?” His
voice poured over me, the words indistinct and meaningless. I raked my nails down his chest to the
tender skin of his stomach, and a shivery below-the-skin rush of power followed every movement.
It was with a feeling of distant shock that I felt him wrench away, the colder air of the room
swirling between us where there had been only moist warmth before. At the same moment, the light
from the window suddenly intensified, like a floodlight had gone on behind it. It drowned the room
in a color so rich, so loud, that it was almost sound.
The crimsons in the stained glass glowed until they seemed to break off, floating away from the
rest of the design in a firework display of red and gold. They coalesced over the bed in a sparkling
cloud of light that had a strangely familiar shape. I’d seen something like it once before, but that one
had been a pale reflection of this shimmering golden haze.
“All that power, and in such a pretty package. It really is irresistible.” The voice seemed to
come from the air itself, whispering along my skin like a breeze.
Pritkin’s head snapped up, pure rage distorting his features. “I knew it!”
“What is it?” Pritkin and the voice both ignored me. Or maybe I didn’t say it aloud; I wasn’t
sure anymore. Everything looked the way it does after a faint: all odd angles and meaningless
patterns, and blood was rushing in my ears like an incoming tide.
“You will not have her!” Pritkin snarled.
Soft laughter echoed through the room. “Who said anything about me?”
The glowing veil drifted down onto the mage, making him look as if his skin had been drenched
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in glitter. He screamed, there was no other word for it, and it was like a dam had burst. What
had been a musky fog was now a torrential rain, and I bathed in it, in him. The room suddenly felt
like the tropics in July, with a steamy, heavy heat that seemed to soak into my very pores.
His lips were on mine, his hands cradling my head so he could kiss all the breath out of my
body, and he was pushing me down against the bed. And then his lips were everywhere—my
collarbone, the side of my neck, the crease between my breasts, my jaw—and it hit me that he wasn’t
just choosing spots at random. These were places he’d thought about, and that was almost enough to
send me over the edge.
But then he paused, a fine shudder rippling through him, vibrating down his body into mine. It
caused me to arch upward and he gave a stifled scream, flinching as if my touch was actually
painful. “Don’t,” he forced out through clenched teeth. “Don’t move.”
I realized with a sort of horror that he was trying to stop, that he was going to be noble. A
crashing tide of angry despair overwhelmed me as soon as my body understood that it was going to
be denied yet again, with every emotion I’d ever felt toward Pritkin surging violently through me.
“No!”
I grabbed his shoulders and rolled him over, head swimming, heart racing. An alarm was
blaring somewhere in my mind, but I ignored it. I buried my face against the hard muscles of his
stomach. He smelled so good—salt and sweat and the sweet musk of skin, and I had to know if he
tasted as good as he smelled. There was suddenly nothing real to me but need and the hands on my
body, the body under my hands.
My tongue dragged a slow arc across him, just below his navel. His pulse was quick and frantic
against my lips, the echo of it under my fingers as they moved to the fastening of his jeans.
“Cassie—” Pritkin’s voice sounded oddly scraped and rough, but I ignored it, except to note with
approval that he’d said my name again. Twice in one day—that was a record.
I was discovering that I really liked old jeans. Once the first button came undone, the others
obligingly slid out of their holes with a single tug. “Oh, God,” Pritkin whispered, sounding almost
panicked for some reason. He stared at me, breath heavy, and the wild need on his face warred with
something close to terror. His irises were half black, with just a tiny band of green. And he was
literally clinging to the bed by his fingernails, as if it was the only thing that kept the ragged torrent
of emotions coursing between us from jerking him to me like a yo-yo.
I hardly noticed when the air began to move around us, drawing in toward an unseen center,
catching up the clothes scattered on the floor and swirling them about. A ragged-edged cry that
sounded like an incantation tore from Pritkin’s throat. And a glimmer of red appeared in the
shadows, like the wet flicker of the northern lights, lapping at the outlines of a man. I blinked, and
the figure behind the glow stepped through, the red mirage parting like fog. I blinked again, harder
this time, sure I was hallucinating, staring in disbelief from Pritkin’s face to its mirror image.
“She has to die,” the man said, almost conversationally. He noted Pritkin’s expression and his
answering smile was somehow both sweet and viciously cruel. “I promise it won’t hurt.”
“What is your interest in her?” Pritkin’s tone was filled with loathing.
“She talked to Saleh.” His double’s eyes came to rest on me, and there was no life, no heat,
nothing human in them, only cold appraisal. I couldn’t believe I had ever confused the two men.
“She knows.”
Before I could clear my mind enough even to frame a question, Pritkin had launched himself off
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the bed onto the new arrival. He hit him straight in the chest, the momentum taking them both
to the floor. They rolled around the limited space, their magic crackling together in spits and
sputters, while I looked around for something, anything, to use as a weapon.
I had a bracelet, which had once been the property of a dark mage, that was always up for a
rumble. Unfortunately, it had a mind of its own and didn’t always follow my instructions. I didn’t
dare use it now, as it was not fond of Pritkin and there was a better-than-average chance that it would
attack the wrong guy.
There was enough firepower in the closet to outfit a small army, but I couldn’t reach it, and the
only thing on this side of the room was the bedside lamp. It didn’t look too sturdy, but I yanked it out
of the wall anyway, just in time to see Pritkin immersed in a slow-curving maelstrom of blinding
white. There was a loud crackle and power rent the air, as if lightning had struck inside the room.
The flash turned me momentarily blind, and then something was on me.
He—it—was touching me, holding me down, but I could feel no heat from his body, and there
was no scent, not the faintest whiff of aftershave or the leather of his coat. Even though I was used to
such things from ghosts, there was a kind of horror to it, being held down by such a blank.
Unthinkingly, I reached out with my senses, desperate to find something human to ground me. What
I saw was alive and squirming, but not human—God, not human at all.
I could feel its need building like a thousand thunderstorms, an overpowering hunger that
wanted nothing more than to melt into me and feed and feed and feed. A smothering cloud
descended on my skin, and now I could feel it, sliding cold hands over my body, could taste the
miasma of corruption lingering at the back of its throat when it kissed me. The cloud began to sink
into my skin, rushing into my body as I breathed in its clammy breath, pushing past my defenses
until it ran through my bloodstream sickeningly.
It touched me everywhere, consuming me from the inside out. And it had lied. It did hurt, with
a horrible, draining sensation far worse than a vampire’s bite. It felt like razored teeth were slicing
into me everywhere, running like a blade between muscle and bone, turning even the air in my lungs
to broken glass.
I was supposed to be protected from this kind of thing. My mother’s only legacy was the
pentagram-shaped tattoo on my back that was one of the Circle’s strongest enchantments. She had
once been heir to the Pythia position, before she ran away with my father and was disowned, and the
star had been given to her as security. It packed quite a punch, but the geis interfered with it.
Meaning that if I was going to get out of this, it would have to be on my own.
I tried to fight, but my arms and legs wouldn’t move, all my strength pouring into the thing
holding me so gently in its grasp. My body felt as heavy and lifeless as if the creature had already
finished feeding. Only I knew it hadn’t, because I could feel it gnawing through bone and into
marrow, the lethargy ensuring that I couldn’t even scream as it sucked my life away. My
consciousness turned slippery and unresponsive, my body trying to shield me from what was
happening, from what was coming—
And then it was gone, pulled off by Pritkin’s arm around its throat. I stared at it, Pritkin’s mirror
image except that it glowed as brightly as flame, energized with stolen power. And just like that, the
pieces fell into place.
“You’re an incubus!” I was addressing the spirit, but it was Pritkin who answered.
“Only half,” he snarled, wrenching the creature’s neck savagely enough to have shattered a
human’s spine.
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In a move too fast for me to see, the creature broke the mage’s hold, spun and sent Pritkin
sailing into the window. He struck it hard, knocking the colored glass panes out of place, sending
them exploding outward. The creature whirled on me again, and his eyes were a flat, solid black, as
if the pupils had bled out.
I threw out a hand, a scream rising in my throat, but I never uttered it. Because suddenly the
attack just stopped. There was no sound, no movement. Nothing.
After a stunned second, I realized that the red spots in front of my eyes were a few shards of
ruby glass, slung in my direction by the fight. They remained halfway through their arc, hovering in
midair as if waiting for permission to fall. Everything else was also frozen in place, from the darkeyed
demon to Pritkin, caught halfway through the broken surface of the window, its sharp edges
digging into his skin. In the entire room, I was the only thing moving.
Agnes, the former Pythia, had been able to do this, to literally stop time for short periods, but
I’d never learned how. With an abrupt, white-hot spike of fear, I also realized that I didn’t know how
to undo it, either. I decided to worry about that later and deal with the problem I did know how to
solve. I grabbed a bottle off Pritkin’s shelf, uncorked the stopper and threw the entire thing in the
demon’s face.
Other than turning his hair slightly pink, nothing happened. I panicked a little after that, and
started throwing everything I could lay my hands on. Vials of liquid, clear and odorless as water,
were followed by others containing syrupy, viscous substances with odors that made my head swim.
But despite the fact that Pritkin’s arsenal was especially designed for battling demons, nothing
seemed to have the slightest effect.
I emptied the entire shelf, all the while unable to look away from the potion-streaked face in
front of me. The sensation of being watched from behind those glittering black eyes was more than
creepy. The hairs on the back of my neck rose as my own stare began to waver, and suddenly
everything started up again.
Pritkin crashed the rest of the way through the window, and the demon screamed. The sound
mixed with the silvery ring of broken glass and seemed truly agonized. I guess the potions had failed
to take effect because of the timeout I’d taken, but they were sure doing something now. Some set
his clothes and hair alight, searing the air with the smell of burning leather. He tried to put the flames
out with his hands, but that only blistered his skin. And the last potion I’d thrown, dark red with a
thick, peppery smell, made his face begin to run like melting wax.
After a moment, he gave up trying to save himself and instead grasped at me. I reached for my
power, but it was sluggish, the cost of that momentary hiccup in time tremendous. I threw the lamp
at him, but he batted it away with a roar, half rage and half pain. His hair was almost gone now,
burnt down to the roots by the fire consuming him with inhuman glee. But it wouldn’t be soon
enough.
I raised my right arm, where two glowing, gaseous knives emerged from the bracelet I wore.
There was only one Pritkin in the room now, and I didn’t much care what they did to this one. That
was lucky since they tore into the demon with their usual abandon.
“Cassie!” Billy was waving at me frantically over the smoking skull of my attacker. “Over
here!”
Like I didn’t know where the weapons were. “What do you think I’m trying to do?!” My knives
were flying about, sticking into and out of their prey so wildly that I could barely see them. I didn’t
dare move. “Get me something!”
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Nothing happened for a moment, then a clanging avalanche of weapons hit the floor. Billy had
managed to knock over the closet shelf. Most stayed where they fell, but a single knife slid across the
floor and bumped my foot. I grabbed it, but the demon was thrashing around at my feet, not staying
still long enough for me to use it.
“Finish him!” Billy was flickering in his agitation. “Do it!”
“I’m trying!”
The demon couldn’t see me, being blinded by the acid that had almost completely eaten away
his face. But he could hear, and he rolled toward me, hands outstretched. His skin was a cracked
mess of charred black and red, and the leather coat had melted against him in patches. I stared down
at him, feeling suddenly queasy that I had done this to anything, even something as vile as him.
What the hell was happening to me?
He turned what had been his face up to me, beseechingly, and I hesitated. In less time than it
took to blink, he had me by the foot, the raw bones of his fingers sliding against my skin in a slick
caress. Immediately, the horrible draining sensation was back, my power flooding into him from that
one small touch.
Pain made the world go white for a heartbeat. Then I screamed and tried to jerk away, but it did
nothing except to unbalance me. I fell on my butt and kicked out at the same time, hitting the
blackened face hard enough that crumbled skin fell off in a withered cascade. Stark white bone
showed through, but the demon only bared its teeth at me in a parody of a grin.
“You’ll look worse in a moment,” it whispered, and upped the speed of the drain.
For a second, the world went gray. “Don’t even think about it!” Billy said frantically. “I got
nothing left, Cass. Pass out and it’s over!”
“I’m fine,” I told him, biting the inside of my cheek hard enough to taste blood. My knives were
continuing to stab and pull out, over and over, but it was as if the creature had stopped noticing them.
“The neck,” I told them, my voice barely audible even to me. “Sever it.”
To my lasting shock, they not only heard but obeyed. They set to work with a will, sawing away
at the tendons and flesh, until I heard them hit bone. Blood roared in my ears and my eyes were
growing dark, but I wouldn’t let them close. Little pinpricks of light had started exploding in front of
my vision by the time the knives finally completed their task, severing the spine with an audible
crack.
The room was immediately filled with a hurricane. Clothes, bedding and shards of glass went
whizzing by in dangerous parabolas that had me clutching my head and trying to shrink into as small
a space as possible. I could feel everything spin crazily around me while my gut clenched and tried
to force itself up my throat and my whole body seized up like a giant cramp. I wanted to pass out. I
wanted to know what was happening. I wanted to see Pritkin’s face and I didn’t want there to be
blood on it.
Dimly I heard yelling from somewhere nearby, but I couldn’t even work out the separate
sounds. Scream after scream of tortured air passed over me, around me, but I huddled into myself
and refused to look. Then, as quickly as it had started, it was gone. Utter silence descended, except
for the sound of my faint, whistling breaths.
I rolled onto my back and stared at the ceiling. It was all I could do to heave the air into and out
of my lungs. My hand lay open on the floor, fingers still slightly curled around the knife I’d never
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used. Even with solid concrete under me I felt dizzy, like I was going to fall right off the edge
of the world. At least the creature’s body was gone, I thought dully, right before I was violently sick.
It seemed to go on for a while, although my time sense was so screwed up by then that I really
had no idea. My vision kept trying to go dark again, and cleared only spottily, black fading away
until I could see the scuffed toes of Pritkin’s boots and the pale skin on the inner side of his bicep as
he held me. My head was pounding and my body was shaking in a way I’d have been embarrassed
about if I hadn’t been so busy trying not to give a repeat performance.
I got a hand on the floor, trying to get enough leverage to push myself upright, but Pritkin
merely pulled me in a little closer. “Give it a moment.” His voice dripped fury, but his fingers were
warm and gentle against my skin. That was good, because I felt really odd, cold and light, like a
frozen bubble.
Blood speckled him from where the window had torn his flesh, tracing winding trails from his
forearm to his elbow, and his eyes looked like they were having as much trouble focusing as mine. I
had no idea why he wasn’t a smear on the parking lot, but then, it seemed I’d been underestimating
him all along. I stared at him, speechless, but Billy Joe knew just what to say.
“So the Circle’s best-known demon hunter is half demon himself,” he commented, floating over
from beside the closet. “I have to tell you, I didn’t see that one coming.”
I had to admit, neither had I.
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Chapter 15
I spent the rest of the day in bed, hurting so much that even relaxing my muscles made them ache.
It was hard to believe I could be this sore and live. I wasn’t sure if it was because of the attack or the
whole stopping-time thing. My predecessor had died shortly after pulling that trick for the last time,
which maybe should have told me something. For whatever reason, my whole body felt like one big
bruise.
My mental state wasn’t much better. When I finally managed to sleep, my dreams were full of
Pritkin’s face, wearing a brilliant and unguarded grin, which alone was enough to weird me out,
since it wasn’t an expression I’d ever seen in real life. Then it began to sag, with waxlike rivulets of
flesh running down his cheekbones to drip off his chin, eyes rolling in their sockets, the sunny grin
fading to a skeletal grimace. I woke up in a cold sweat.
I stared at the patterns the bedside light made on my ceiling, consciously slowing my runaway
heartbeat. This isn’t me, I told myself furiously. My breath doesn’t catch unless I tell it to. I don’t
think about things I don’t want to. And I don’t scream like a little girl over a freaking nightmare. I
breathed in and out for a few minutes, nice and steady, until my breath was calm without my having
to work for it.
Then the door opened and Pritkin was there, staring at me. There was a sudden rumbling,
rushing noise and a soft rustle of air. I screamed like a little girl.
He leapt into the room, snatched me off the bed and threw me to the floor, covering my body
with his own and tucking his head down. I waited for the sickening lethargy to settle in, for the
horrible sucking sensation on my power to start, but nothing happened. After a minute, the whirring
noise shut off. I started to feel my face burn, despite being pressed against the cold concrete floor.
“Not that I’m not grateful for being protected from the air conditioner,” I mumbled, “but can I
get up now?”
Pritkin released me, helped me back to bed, and vanished. Which was just as well. I still didn’t
have the faintest idea what to say to him.
I went back to sleep like a person falling off a cliff, and didn’t dream. But by midnight, I’d slept
as much as I was going to and had hit the point where boredom had overtaken aches and pains. I sat
up, feeling thirsty, sweaty, and groggy. The mirror showed me a pale, washed-out version of myself,
with an impression of the blanket’s weave on the left side of my face. But after a very hot shower,
food and four aspirin, I went to find some answers.
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Pritkin wasn’t at the scene of the crime. The glass had been swept up, though, and the opening
had been covered with a sheet of heavy plastic printed to look like the once beautiful window. I
assumed it was there as a placeholder, so that at least from the outside, everything looked seminormal
despite the chaos within. I could kind of relate.
I’d have liked a different perspective on things, but Billy was off duty, crashing in my necklace
to soak up whatever energy it had managed to accumulate. The gold and ruby monstrosity, which
was so ugly I usually wore it inside my clothes, was a talisman, storing magical energy from the
natural world and feeding it to him in small doses. It was enough to allow him to remain active but
was never as much as he’d have liked. I usually supplemented it from my own reserves, but at the
moment I didn’t have any.
I went looking for the only other person who might know anything and found him glaring at the
slots on level two. I thought from Casanova’s expression that someone must have just hit one of the
big jackpots, but no. It was worse.
By then it was after one in the morning, but that’s prime time for Dante’s. So I’d thought it a
little odd that fully a third of the main salon was empty, with row after row of forlorn slot machines
silently begging to be petted, to be loved, and to be fed money. Then I’d rounded a corner and seen
that there was, in fact, a good reason for their isolation.
Two of the three ancient demigoddesses known to myth as the Graeae were in residence. They
looked harmless—short, wrinkled, and blind—except for Deino, who currently had the one eye they
all shared. It must have been her lucky day, because when she grinned and gave me a little finger
wave, I saw that she was also sporting their only tooth.
I’d accidentally helped to release the gals from their long imprisonment recently, which had
made them my servants until they each saved my life. Considering how often I get into trouble, that
hadn’t taken long. Now they were free and able, as Pritkin had put it, “to terrorize mankind again”
unless I could trap them.
It was something that I absolutely intended to get around to one of these days, only it had
slipped farther and farther down the to-do list lately, displaced by more-pressing crises. Françoise
had volunteered to take it on for me, as a way of saying thanks for getting her semi-regular
employment. I’d felt a twinge of guilt from involving her in a mess that, no matter what spin I put on
it, was all mine. But frankly, a powerful witch would likely have better luck dealing with the Graeae
than I would.
Not that she seemed to be doing much at the moment. She was watching them narrowly, but
making no obvious attempt to trap them. She caught my eye and shrugged. “Zey ’ave a bond.”
“What?”
“A metaphysical bond,” Casanova snapped. “It causes magic to treat them as a single entity.”
I watched the gals while I absorbed that. Pemphredo was nowhere in sight, but Enyo was
playing nickel blackjack and Deino was beside her, standing on a stool. She was gutting a poker
machine, systematically strewing its mechanical innards all over the psychedelic carpeting. I guess
she hadn’t been happy with the payoff.
I decided I needed a little more information. “So?”
Casanova tapped the small black box Françoise held in one hand. It was a magical snare that,
despite its size, was perfectly capable of trapping and holding the Graeae—one just like it had once
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imprisoned them for centuries. “The spell,” Casanova repeated, less than patiently, “needed to
get them in here and out of my hair?”
“Yeah.”
“For some reason it sees the gruesome grandmas over there as three parts of a single whole,
which maybe they are, for all I know. Unless they are all present, they simply don’t register as being
here at all, at least not to the spell. And they’ve figured out that we’re trying to trap them.”
“So they make sure that one’s always missing.” I finished for him. “But that doesn’t explain
why they’re here in the first place. If they know we’re after them—”
“They’re staking me out,” Casanova muttered.
“What?”
“They were meant to be warriors, and I think they find Vegas a little tame for their tastes.
Something it rarely is around here anymore,” he said, shooting me a dark glance. “They know that if
all Hell is going to break loose anywhere, it’ll be here. So they Just. Never. Leave.”
“Speaking of Hell,” I said, but he brushed me off.
“Don’t even start. There’s nothing I can do.”
“He trashed your window—he practically killed Pritkin!”
“Considering that your mage has been stalking him for more than a century with the same thing
in mind, I don’t think he can complain too much.”
“We need to talk.”
“Yes, we do.” Casanova was the poster boy for “Not Happy.” “How about we start with the fact
that this is not a refugee camp? I already have a load of illegal immigrants in the kitchens thanks to
you—”
“That was Tony’s idea, as you know perfectly—”
“—and now I discover that they’ve been joined by a group of scruffy, probably lice-infested—”
“Hey!”
“—brats, who are also occupying two of my suites, probably planning to steal me blind!”
“They’re just kids.”
“Children should be seen and not heard. If possible, not even seen,” he told me, unmollified. “I
don’t have security enough to watch the terrible trio over there, clean up your messes and also
babysit!”
“No one’s asking you—”
He pointed an accusing finger at me. “I’m through with you, do you hear me? You and your
weird friends, corrupting my staff, ruining my casino, attracting Lord Rosier’s attention—”
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“Who?”
“Orders or no orders, I have had enough!” I grabbed him when he tried to stomp off, which
wouldn’t have worked except that Françoise decided to pitch in. “Oh, this is nice,” Casanova said
furiously. “Assaulted, in my own casino! What’s next? Tying me up?”
“Yeah, I’m sure you’d just hate that,” I said sourly. “Stop with the theatrics. Pritkin’s gone off
somewhere and I need answers. Either give them to me or throw me out.”
Casanova snorted. “Right. I’m going to evict the boss’s girlfriend!”
“I’m not the boss’s girlfriend!”
“Uh-huh. That’s not the memo I got. The last thing I heard, from the man himself, was to lend
you every possible assistance because you’re—how did he phrase it?—oh, yes, precious to him.”
Casanova looked vaguely disgusted. “Of course, that was before you started making out with the
mage in the middle of the damn lobby!”
“That wasn’t him!”
“You know that, and I know that. Does Mircea? Because he really doesn’t share well.”
“I don’t know anything,” I told him grimly. “But I’m about to.”
“Not from me,” Casanova said flatly.
Françoise started chanting something and he paled. “Quit that! I haven’t even gotten the bill for
the last disaster yet!”
“Then talk. Who attacked me? And why?”
“I already told you! And I’d prefer not to mention his name again; it might attract his attention.”
Casanova visibly shuddered. “Having his destructive spawn here is bad enough.”
“Are you making this up?” The only group I could think of who didn’t already want me dead
were the demons, mainly because I didn’t know any. At least, I hadn’t before today, unless you
counted incubi. And death and destruction weren’t really their thing.
At least, I hadn’t thought so.
“There are a few things I do not joke about, chica, and he is one of them.”
“You’re telling me that Pritkin’s father is some demon?”
Casanova paled. “Not some demon. The ruler of our court.”
“So this Rosier is what? A demon lord?”
“Don’t use his name!”
Billy Joe had said it, and I’d even heard a sort of admission from Pritkin’s own lips, but I still
couldn’t believe it. “But Pritkin hates demons, he’s hunted them for years, he’s fanatical about it…”
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“You don’t say.”
“But if he’s half demon himself, why would he—”
“I don’t know. Or, rather, they have issues; everyone knows that. Your mage has the distinction
of being the only mortal ever actually kicked out of Hell, but I don’t have any specifics. I don’t deal
in High Court politics; I have my own problems, most of which lately revolve around you!”
I ignored the obvious attempt to change the subject. “I don’t get it. How can Pritkin possibly be
half-incubus?” I poked him on the arm. “You’re incorporeal.”
“I have a host—”
“Which is exactly my point. You need a host to, you know.” I waved a hand at his body, which
was looking elegant as usual in a tan linen suit and snappy orange silk tie. Casanova raised an
eyebrow. “To feed, okay? And wouldn’t that make the host the father of any children, and not you?”
Casanova sighed heavily, the weight of my stupidity clearly becoming too much for him to
bear. But at least he answered. “The ruler of our court is powerful enough to assume human form at
will, instead of having to find a host, and is therefore the only one of us to have progeny.” He made a
face. “Considering the result, I can’t say I envy him that.”
“You mean, Pritkin is the only one of his kind?”
“There are plenty of demon races out there and many of them are corporeal all the time,”
Casanova said crossly. “Half-demon children aren’t exactly thick on the ground, but they do exist.
And most of them aren’t destructive maniacs.”
“But no other incubi?”
“The experiment wasn’t a roaring success,” he pointed out dryly.
“Okay, but none of this explains why Ros—” Casanova flinched. “That demon attacked me. He
only went after Pritkin when he tried to protect me.”
“Protect you? That’s like sending Pancho Villa to keep Che Guevara out of trouble!”
“Would you just—”
“I don’t know.” Casanova saw my expression. “It’s the truth! I don’t know and I don’t want to
know. The last thing I need is for certain people to decide that I’m interfering in their business!”
“Rosier killed Saleh,” I said, trying to fit the pieces together. “And when he came after me, he
said it was because I’d talked to him. But the only thing Saleh and I discussed was—”
“Don’t tell me!” Casanova backed away with a panicked look, right into the line of dangerouslooking
creatures who had just entered the salon. They’d been so quiet, I hadn’t even heard them. I
assumed Casanova would have, under other circumstances, but he wasn’t at his best. That was even
more true when he spun around and caught a glimpse of Alphonse’s smirking face.
He literally snarled, and casino security, which had been trailing the nattily dressed group of
vamps, closed in a little more. “I invited them!” I said, before things could turn ugly.
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“You set me up!” Casanova shot me a purely vicious look. And, okay, yeah, maybe I should
have brought this up a little sooner. But I’d been busy.
“They’re here to help me with something, not to fight,” I said. I caught Alphonse’s eye, which
was easy even with Casanova in the way since he is almost seven feet tall. “Right?”
“Sure thing,” he agreed smoothly, giving Casanova’s shoulder a friendly squeeze that had the
incubus wincing in pain. “Came to see the bikes over at the Mirage.”
“You’re in my territory!”
Alphonse grinned lazily. “There ain’t no territories no more—or didn’t you hear? The Senate
outlawed ’em to cut down on the feuding.” He chuckled, like that was the best joke he’d heard in a
while.
“He likes motorcycles,” I reminded Casanova quickly. “You know that!”
It was true. Besides photography, B-grade vampire movies and killing things, Alphonse liked
big, loud bikes that belched black smoke and choked anyone unfortunate enough to be behind him.
For a cold-blooded killer, he was remarkably well-rounded.
He was also really good at getting under Casanova’s skin. Not that he had to work very hard. I
got the impression that there was some lingering resentment over the fact that Alphonse had taken
Casanova’s place as Tony’s second a few years back. I had no idea if that had been a purely business
decision or was partly personal, but there was no doubt that the incubus resented it. And Alphonse
showing up on his doorstep without so much as a by-your-leave wasn’t helping.
“And if me and my lady want to do a little gambling, who’s gonna stop us?”
The five huge security personnel took a collective step forward. I started to get between them
and Alphonse’s group, which consisted of him, Sal, three vamps I remembered from Tony’s, and one
that I didn’t. I really didn’t want to be responsible for a territory war. But Sal caught my wrist faster
than I could blink and pulled me out of the way.
“Let ’em get it out of their systems now or it’ll be a whole lot worse later,” she said, as the two
groups surged into each other. Alphonse picked up a standing ashtray, which was as big around as a
small trash can, and swung it like a club. The black sand, which had been neatly impressed with
Dante’s logo, went flying everywhere before the ashtray caught Casanova squarely in the stomach.
He staggered back into Enyo, knocking her off her stool.
“You don’t care if they kill each other?” I demanded, as Enyo righted herself, looked around,
and tossed the gutted slot machine straight at Alphonse.
Sal pulled me back a few yards, to where a small bench sat near the ornate glass doors leading
to the promenade. She lit a cigarette, her numerous rings catching the light better than the cobwebcovered
chandeliers above our heads. “They gotta establish boundaries,” she said, shrugging.
“This isn’t why I brought you here!”
“Honey, this was gonna happen sooner or later anyway. Better it be now, when they still need
each other.”
Casanova took a flying leap, landed on Alphonse’s back, and started choking him with the
plastic cord from a comp card. “They don’t look like they’re pulling any punches to me.”
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“Relax. They can’t afford to kill each other with Mircea’s life on the line. It’s just a pissing
contest—let ’em get it over with and then we’ll talk.”
Apparently, Casanova had grabbed Enyo’s comp card, and she wanted it back. Or at least I
assume that was the reason she ripped him off Alphonse and threw him through the glass doors. Sal
appropriated a tray of drinks from a server, who was scurrying to get out of the way, and regarded
me narrowly, long red nails tapping slightly against her glass.
She’d gone all out dress-wise. Her silky white pants clung like they loved every inch of her, and
her gold lamé top plunged here and was cropped there until it was really more of a concept than an
actual shirt. Her honey blond hair was pulled back into a curly ponytail, and her makeup was
flawless. She took in my rumpled T-shirt and jeans, which I’d thrown on while still bleary-eyed from
sleep, and my rat’s nest hair. “You gotta step it up, girl. You’re with Lord Mircea,” she informed me,
in tones of awe.
I decided that attempting to explain my actual relationship with Mircea would be a mistake,
since I wasn’t even sure what it was. “So?”
“You represent the family. And this?” A dismissive gesture indicated my complete lack of
sartorial elegance. “Is downright embarrassing.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“You can’t go around looking like this,” Sal said clearly, as if she thought I might be a little
slow. Her boyfriend, who’d gotten up some momentum swinging from a chandelier, dropped onto
one of Casanova’s boys, who’d been beating the vamp whose name I didn’t know to a pulp.
“I wasn’t exactly expecting you tonight,” I said defensively. “Not to mention that I’m in
disguise.”
“As what? A homeless person?”
I should have remembered: Mircea was in the minority among vamps for preferring understated
attire. Most believed in the old adage that said, if you had it, flaunt it, and for all you were worth.
Alphonse was an enthusiastic convert to that mind-set, so much so that he’d gotten into trouble more
than once at court for being flashier than the boss. Tonight he was sporting one of the bespoke suits
he had tailored in New York for three or four thousand bucks a pop and enough bling to make a rap
star jealous. Maybe I should have at least brushed my hair, I thought belatedly.
Casanova staggered back in from the hall, grabbed a drink from the tray Sal had put on the end
of the sofa, and belted it before sending the dish slicing through the air toward Alphonse’s neck.
Alphonse ducked at the last minute and it would have hit Deino, except she caught it like a Frisbee
and sent it right back. Sal plucked it out of the air and set her now empty glass on it before putting it
back on the sofa cushion.
“You’re gonna need a look,” she said thoughtfully.
“What?”
“A persona.”
I blinked. It was disconcerting to hear words like “persona” come out of Sal’s mouth. I’d never
known her very well at Tony’s—mostly, she’d been draped over Alphonse, dressed in something
short, tight and revealing, doing a damn good impression of a dumb blonde. Actually, until that
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second, I’d thought she was a dumb blonde. “Take me, for instance. I’m an ex-saloon girl and a
gun moll. You think anybody’s gonna take me seriously if I show up in Dior?”
“Maybe Gaultier,” I offered, before yanking my legs out of the way of a vampire, who slid
across the carpet face-first before disappearing under the couch. When he didn’t immediately crawl
back out again, I peered underneath, only to have a hand wrap around my throat.
Sal ground her shiny silver heel into the side of his arm and he abruptly let go. I got a close-up
view of her shoe and realized that stiletto heels were, in her case, aptly named. The thing was made
of metal—alloyed steel by the look of it—and was sharp as a knife.
“You have to play to your strengths,” she said, as I tried to rub my throat without being too
obvious. “I’m a tough broad and everybody knows it, so I go with that. But in your case”—she gave
me the once-over—“you ain’t never gonna carry off tough.”
“I can be tough,” I said, stung.
“Right.” Sal cracked her gum. “With those little stick arms. I think we’re gonna go with
elegant, so you’ll match Mircea.”
“But Mircea doesn’t—”
“And don’t you think that makes him stand out? He’s saying, ‘I’m so strong, I don’t need to
play dress-up for you assholes.’ But even though he don’t wear some weird medieval shit like some,
he always looks good.”
“I have more important things to worry about than—”
“There’s nothing more important than your image,” Sal told me flatly. “You gotta be
impressive, or you’re gonna be fighting all the time. If you don’t look important, everybody’s gonna
assume you’re a pushover. Then we have to defend you for the boss’s sake and a lot of people end
up dead. Just ’cause you couldn’t be bothered to put on a little makeup.”
My time at court had been about blending in, fading into the background, trying to avoid
attention that usually didn’t end well. Nothing in my past experience had taught me how to make an
impression. “I don’t usually dress up,” I said lamely.
Sal gripped my arm, those bloodred talons denting but not quite piercing the skin. “Oh, we’ll
take care of that.” And the calculating look on her face was the scariest thing I’d seen all night.
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Chapter 16
“I can’t breathe,” I complained.
Sal shot me a look in the full-length mirror in front of us. “You don’t need to breathe. You need
to look good,” she said, ruthlessly lacing up the back of my bodice. We were in the penthouse suite
that she’d appropriated along with a bottle of champagne, half a dozen bellboys and the dress I’d
ordered from Augustine. He had not been pleased to be woken up in the middle of the night or to
have his workroom invaded, and had loudly declared that feats of genius take time and he wasn’t
finished yet, thank you. Then Sal bought two outfits outright and put in an order for an even dozen
more and he shut up so fast his mouth made a popping sound.
“No, you don’t need to breathe. I’m pretty sure it’s a necessity for me.”
“Did you always whine this much?”
“I don’t think asking to be allowed to breathe constitutes—”
“Because I don’t remember it.” Sal paused to admire the very rude slogan that had just written
itself across her chest. One of the outfits she’d gotten from Augustine was a black cat suit that
displayed neon-colored graffiti on itself at random moments. Sal had discovered that she could
influence the choice of words if she thought very hard, and she was having fun corrupting her outfit.
“Of course, I don’t remember much about you at all,” she continued. “You never had two words
to say to anybody, except those imaginary friends of yours—”
“They were ghosts!”
“—always slinking around in the shadows, looking spooked if anyone so much as noticed
you—”
“I wonder why?”
“—which as far as I can tell hasn’t changed.”
I sucked in a breath, planning to teach her suit a new word, except that she cinched in the waist
at that moment and all the air was forced out of my lungs. “Keeping your head down is the very
worst thing you can do! It makes you look vulnerable.”
“Which is fair enough since I am, in fact—”
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“You gonna hide all your life? You gotta show everybody that they need to be afraid of you, not
the other way ’round. That thing you did with the Consul, that was good. It made ’em pull back a
little, made ’em think. You haven’t had any more problems with the Circle lately, right?”
“Other than the huge bounty they put on my head?”
“Huh. Maybe we need to make the point a little more obvious.”
“Any more obvious and I’ll be dead.” Sal turned to pick up her champagne and a very rude
phrase flashed across her backside. I scowled at it, but I wasn’t going to lower myself to fight with a
piece of fabric. “I haven’t had any problems because they don’t know where I am.”
Sal paused to tip the last of the exhausted-looking bellhops. He’d just dumped a trunk big
enough to conceal a body in the middle of the living room floor. And considering who it belonged to,
it just might. “Honey, everyone knows where you are!” she said, as soon as he’d left. “I mean, come
on. What do you think we’re doin’ out here?”
“Planning to beat up Casanova?”
“Other than that.”
“I don’t know. Rafe called you—”
“And we usually jump when he snaps his fingers,” Sal said, rolling her eyes. “Alphonse’s come
to suck up to the new boss. And since he ain’t around, you’ll do.”
“Uh-huh.” Alphonse sucking up to me was about as likely as the earth suddenly deciding to
change direction, just for a switch.
“You really don’t get it, do you?” Sal looked genuinely puzzled. “There’s a war on.
Everybody’s choosing sides. The smart ones are aligning themselves where the strength is. Like with
Mircea. Like with you.”
“What about Tony? He’s your master.”
“And I never fully appreciated how much I hated that little toad until he was gone.”
“But if he comes back—”
“I’ll kill him,” Sal said, sounding as if she’d relish the opportunity.
“You can’t. As your master—”
“He won’t be my master by then. Mircea will.”
Things suddenly made a lot more sense. “You want Mircea to break your bond.”
“When this thing’s over, we intend to still be standing—and on the winning side,” Sal
confirmed, shooting me a look out of suddenly shrewd blue eyes. “Not dead fighting for a man we
both despise.”
Wonderful. Yet another group who was depending on me, expecting me to somehow
miraculously make everything right again. I decided that maybe I’d been better off alone; fewer
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people to disappoint that way, fewer things to screw up. “If I’m so powerful, why can’t I keep
those two downstairs from killing each other?”
Sal picked up the phone and handed it to me. “You want them to stop horsing around, tell
them.”
“Just like that.”
“Exactly like that.”
I looked at her blankly, but she just snapped her gum at me so I told the phone that I would like
to speak to Casanova. It told me that he was rather busy at the moment. I said I’d really appreciate it
if he could make the time. It asked if I would like to leave a message. Sal grabbed it out of my hand
with a disgusted look. “Get your ass in there and tell him that the reigning Pythia wants to talk to
him,” she snapped.
So much for my disguise. If the Circle didn’t already know where I was, they probably would
soon. “Do you have any idea what you just did?” I demanded, feeling a migraine coming on.
Sal punched me on the arm. “You’re Pythia. Start acting like it!”
I refrained from rubbing my now sore arm and glared. She glared right back. Casanova came on
the line, sounding a little breathless. “What?”
“Are you through?” I asked him. “Because maybe I’m insane, but I could have sworn we were
here because your master is about to go out of his mind, thereby forcing the Consul to kill him, and
do I even need to bring up what happens to both of you in that case?”
Alphonse grabbed the phone, not that he needed it—vampire hearing was more than good
enough to make any phone conversation a conference call. “What’s the plan? We gonna break him
out?”
“That would be good,” I agreed.
“Rafe said you saw the master a couple days ago. If you got in then, why do you need us now?”
“Because the wards almost certainly recorded that little visit!” I said impatiently. “They’ll be
expecting me to try again. And the last time I removed someone from the Consul’s control, she used
a null bomb to trap me.”
“I heard about that. Didn’t believe it, though.”
“Oh, null bombs exist,” I assured him. “And the Consul’s got a stash of them.” I’d seen it for
myself, and although I doubted that she wanted to use up any more of a very expensive, very scarce
resource on me, the fact remained that I’d made her look bad. It hadn’t been intentional, but vamps
rarely cared about such trifles. And messing with the reputation of someone who ruled partly through
the fear she was able to inspire was a very big deal.
“I meant I didn’t believe you could pull it off,” Alphonse clarified.
Neither had I. I decided it wouldn’t be prudent to mention exactly how much luck had been
involved. In a world where reputation was all-important, I didn’t have much of one to trade on.
Alphonse remembered me as Tony’s tame little clairvoyant, something that was not going to
convince him to do a damn thing. Thinking of me as someone gutsy enough or crazy enough to go
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up against the Consul would be a much better image.
Fortunately, both Alphonse and Casanova needed me to ensure that Mircea stayed alive and
well. Until the geis was lifted, I could trust them. To a point. Probably.
“I think I know how we can do it,” I said.
Casanova had been making spluttering sounds in the background. I thought someone had been
choking him, but I guess not, because he suddenly piped up. “Okay then. You’re insane. This
explains a lot about you.”
“Insane and the boss’s girlfriend,” I reminded him sweetly.
It’s probably just as well I don’t speak Spanish.
Thankfully, by the time Sal received word back from the Consul that she would see us, it was
almost dawn. That wouldn’t have bothered the head of the Senate, as she’d long since ceased to be
bound by the sun cycle, but Alphonse and company weren’t in that league. So I had a day’s reprieve
before I found out if my plan was going to work. And since I’d already screwed up my sleep cycle, I
decided to use it for other things.
Nick was holding the fort when I got to the research room. He had his nose buried in a huge,
dusty old tome, but looked glad to take a break. “There’s been no word on your friend, Tami,” he
told me before I could say anything. “Not that I have the same level of access anymore, as a fugitive
from justice.”
I squirmed slightly. “Yeah. Sorry about that.” Someone should have warned him that I tend to
have that effect on mages.
“It had to happen sooner or later. The system is antiquated, but the Council refuses to see that.”
“And here I just thought they were a bunch of power-grubbing asshats.”
“That, too,” Nick said dryly, shutting the cover of his book. It had a familiar symbol embossed
on it, silver scales bright against the worn green leather.
“The ouroboros,” I said, and was immediately sorry when his face lit up with the delighted air
of a fanatic who has found a kindred soul.
“I didn’t know you were interested in magical history, Cassie.”
I hadn’t been, before the Codex came along. Now I didn’t have much choice. “Symbol of
eternity, right?”
He nodded enthusiastically. “That’s one interpretation. The snake—or dragon in some
depictions—eats its own tail, thus sustaining its life and ensuring an eternal cycle of renewal.” He
flipped to the frontispiece, an almost translucent sheet covered with the image from the cover
rendered in bright jewel tones. “This one was copied from an Egyptian amulet, dated to 1500 B.C.,
but it was also known to the Phoenicians and the Greeks, the Chinese and the Norse…really, it’s the
ultimate archetype. There’s hardly a culture that didn’t know it in some form!”
“How interesting.” And it was, sort of. But I didn’t have time for a magical history lesson.
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“Have you seen Pritkin today?”
I was too late; Nick was already buried in another book. “It’s also one of the oldest protective
symbols in the world, possibly the oldest. Not to mention the most widespread. The Aztecs believed
that a giant serpent resided in the heavens as protection for Earth until the end of the age. The
Egyptians had a similar myth. Both cultures thought that when the ouroboros’ protection failed, the
age of man would come to an end.”
“Nick?” I waited until he looked up. He had a smudge of dust on his nose. “Bad-tempered
blond, in need of a haircut?”
“John? Oh, he’s around somewhere.” Nick dismissed him with one hand, while grabbing
another book with the other.
I plucked it out of his hand. “This is what you’ve been researching down here?” There seemed
to be an awfully lot of books devoted to Nick’s hobby and none to the geis.
He saw my expression and hurried to explain. “No, no. Or, rather, yes, but it does tie into our
search.”
“It does.”
“Yes. You see these?” He pointed out a line of symbols on the frontispiece, rendered in silver
gilt and curving around the outside of the snake’s scales. “The Ephesia Grammata,” he announced
proudly, as if that explained anything.
“And that would be?”
“Sorry. The Ephesian Letters. They gave an added…oomph…to the protection. You often see
them on amulets in conjunction with the ouroboros symbol. They were said to have been written by
Solomon himself.” He flipped to a line drawing showing the snake surrounding a guy on horseback
with a long spear. “That’s him, attacking evil,” he added, pointing to the figure in the middle of the
circle. “And there’s the Ephesian letters again.”
“But what are they?”
Nick blinked at me owlishly for a moment through his glasses. “You’ve never even heard of
them?”
“Why would I ask you about them if I had?”
“It’s just…they’re famous. Even to norms.” He looked slightly offended at my level of
ignorance. I crossed my arms and stared at him. “They were said to have been inscribed on the statue
of Artemis at Ephesus, the center of her cult in the ancient world,” he explained. “She was closely
associated with protective magic, and the words were considered some of the most potent voces
magicae in existence.”
“Magic words,” I translated. “And what do they mean?”
“That’s just it.” Nick looked at me proudly, like I’d finally said something smart. “No one
knows.”
“What do you mean, no one knows? Why use words if you don’t know what they mean?”
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Nick shrugged. “Words have power, some more than others.”
“And yet no one’s ever figured them out?”
“Oh, we know what the individual words mean,” he said, sounding vaguely patronizing. “The
first one, askion, translates roughly as ‘shadowless ones,’ probably some reference to the gods. The
problem is that each word is only a mnemonic aid, a memory prompt for a line of text.”
“It’s only one word out of a whole line? What happened to the rest?”
“That’s the point. Together, the complete text forms a spell too important, too powerful, for
anyone to risk writing it down in its entirety.” He grinned, a flash of large white teeth in his freckled
face. “Except once.”
“Let me guess. The Codex contains the full spell.”
“The oldest riddle in all of magic,” Nick said dreamily. “The secret to ultimate power.”
I was beginning to understand why the Dark Fey king wanted the Codex so badly. “Sounds like
something people might have wanted to hold on to.”
“It’s the same old story,” Nick said, his smile slipping. “A group of power-hungry leaders,
probably of the Artemis cult, didn’t want to risk it falling out of their hands. So they only transmitted
the full spell orally. But when the temple burned to the ground in 356 B.C., they all died.”
“And since no one had ever written it down—”
“No one knew what it meant.”
“Well, that was stupid.”
“Exactly. It is possible to be too careful. Sometimes you can lose more by being overly cautious
than by taking a necessary risk.”
“Like telling me where Pritkin is?” I asked idly.
“Yes, I—” Nick stopped, frowning. “You tricked me.” He sounded more surprised than upset.
“Where is he?”
“You need to give him some time. He’s—”
“Had as much as I have, and I was attacked, too. I need to talk to him, Nick.”
“I really don’t think—”
I leaned across the table, slamming a hand down on his precious pile of books. Keeping my
temper these days was starting to take a lot more concentration than I could spare. “Here’s the thing,
Nick. Tonight I have to pay a visit to the Consul, who has a bit of a short fuse and is already less
than pleased with me. So I really need to know if a ticked-off demon lord is likely to crash the party.
And the only way I can get that information is to talk to your buddy.”
“I understand, but you have to consider—”
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“And when I need to do that is now.”
His frown deepened. “Are you trying to intimidate me? Because I think you should know—”
“I thought all war mages were sworn to the Pythia’s service.” Not that they recognized me as
holding the office legitimately, or had so far shown any loyalty whatsoever. But supposedly Nick felt
otherwise. Or else I had to wonder what he was doing here.
“Well, yes, technically, but—”
“I’m Pythia,” I reminded him. “And you’re a war mage. I don’t have to intimidate you for
information you are duty bound to provide.”
Nick blinked at me a couple of times, then sighed and rubbed his eyes. He looked like he was
getting a headache. “He’s in the training salle.”
“Where you should have been half an hour ago,” Pritkin said crisply, from behind me. I jumped
and a hand reached out to steady me. “If you kept your appointments, you wouldn’t have to
browbeat information out of my colleague.”
Nick looked as surprised to see Pritkin as I was despite the fact that he’d been facing the door. I
had this weird picture flash across my mind of Pritkin simply materializing out of thin air, like his
father, before I squashed it. He was corporeal, all right, just damn sneaky.
“She didn’t browbeat me,” Nick said, offended.
Pritkin shot him a look. “Of course not.” He was wearing gray sweats that looked like he’d
already run a marathon in them. He gave my outfit a long look, but didn’t comment. “Get changed
and come with me.”
“Why?” I asked, my stomach already sinking. Because it was that time of morning, only being
up half the night I hadn’t noticed.
“We’re going jogging.”
“I don’t run for recreation. I run when someone’s after me with a weapon.”
“That can be arranged,” he muttered, pulling me out the door.
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Chapter 17
After I changed into a pair of old sweatpants and a ratty tank top, we made six circuits of the
underground hallways and then ran up and down the stairs until I couldn’t see straight. Pritkin swore
it was only about two miles, which he counted as a warm-up, but I was pretty sure he was lying.
Either that, or I was even more out of shape than I’d thought.
We stopped in what had served as the gym for a now defunct acrobatic act before Pritkin
appropriated it for training purposes. A few practice mats were still rolled against one wall, looking
incongruous considering the rest of the decor. The room was pretty, more like a ballroom than a
gym, probably originally designed for smaller conferences that wouldn’t need the larger room
downstairs. It had thick paneled walls running up to a spandreled ceiling, with huge mirrors on three
sides and tall stained-glass windows on the other. The light they let into the room rippled like water,
splashing a mosaic of color over the wooden floor.
I leaned casually against the door, trying not to look like it was holding me up, while Pritkin
dug around in a large canvas bag. He kept one eye on me, as if he thought I was about to bolt. Which
was totally unfair, as that had happened only once and he’d been pulling out the jump rope of doom
at the time. Not to mention that the only way I could make a break for it at the moment was if
someone carried me.
I expected some fiendish new exercise equipment, or another gun that he thought I might
actually be able to aim. The guy lived in hope. So I blinked uncertainly at what emerged instead.
“What is that for?”
“Guns jam and misfire with the application of the right spell,” Pritkin said curtly, “and
occasionally without it. They also aren’t effective against every enemy. Spells, likewise, can be
countered by shields, stronger spells, or by incapacitating the caster. Neither method is adequate on
its own, particularly when, as in your case, the potential enemies come in so many varieties.”
I narrowed my eyes. “Meaning what?”
He slapped the flat of an old-fashioned training sword against his leg. Its blade was wood, but it
still made a loud thwacking sound. “Meaning here we have it. Swords and sorcery.”
“No, there you have it. I’m not a war mage.” I’d agreed that I needed to get in better shape and
to learn how to occasionally hit what I aimed at, but I hadn’t signed up to be sorcerer’s apprentice.
“No. You’re not. Which is why you almost died yesterday.”
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“Um, no. I almost died because your father decided he didn’t like me talking to Saleh.
Something we should discuss sometime.”
“I knew you were up to something at that flat.”
“Yes, thanks. Not the point.”
“What did he tell you?” Pritkin demanded, giving me a weird and very creepy sense of déjà vu.
I just stared at him until he cursed and twisted, hiking up the corner of his sweatshirt. The bright
colors of the tattoo reassured me slightly, although I assumed they could be faked. “Maybe we need
a code word,” I said doubtfully.
Pritkin muttered one that I decided to ignore and shoved a sword at me. I immediately dropped
it because, despite being wood, it was roughly half my body weight. It hit the floor pommel-first
with a dull, ringing thud. “You can’t be serious.”
“It’s the smallest I have. We’ll get you something more appropriate later. And you evaded the
question.”
“No, I didn’t. Saleh didn’t say much. He was too preoccupied by the fact that your father killed
him.” I wondered how many more times I was going to have to bring up the family connection
before Pritkin took the hint. Not that under normal circumstances it would have been any of my
business, but almost getting the life sucked out of me wasn’t normal. Not entirely unknown, but not
normal.
“There are some creatures who cannot be killed,” Pritkin said, ignoring me as usual. “You
encountered one yesterday. Your instincts were good, but throwing potions at that one normally does
nothing more than annoy him.”
“He looked a little more than just annoyed to me.”
“Because you somehow managed to hit him with perhaps two dozen spells, half of them
corrosive to demonkind, all at the same time. I doubt if anyone else has managed as much.” He shot
me a look. “I would like to know how you did it.”
“I stopped time. By accident,” I said, as his eyebrows rose. “Agnes showed me once that it was
possible, but she never had time to teach me how.”
“Can you duplicate it?”
I shook my head. “I doubt it. Not without knowing what I did in the first place.” And not
without spending a day in bed, paying for it afterward.
“You were lucky, then,” Pritkin said grimly. “Next time you may not be.”
“What do you want me to do? Freak out?”
“No, I want you to learn what you can do to banish him or any demons who might take an
interest in you!”
“And why would they do that?” I asked, suddenly wondering if freaking out didn’t make sense
after all.
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“Why does anyone? You attract trouble like a magnet.”
I scowled. “Don’t even try it. This wasn’t my normal bad luck calling and you know it. That
demon was your father and you didn’t even warn me about him!”
“I’m warning you now. A decapitation won’t kill him, but it will force him back into the demon
realm for a short time, perhaps a few days. Anything that causes catastrophic failure of the body he
has assumed will do as much, but his shields can stop most attacks, including gunshots. And unlike
most demons, he is not affected by direct sunlight. He has to drop his protection to feed, however,
which gives you a moment of—”
I kicked my sword against the wall. “Pritkin!”
“You need to pay attention to this! I can’t be everywhere, and even when I am”—he took a
breath, as if the admission pained him—“there are some things from which I may not be able to
protect you.”
“I don’t expect you to. But I do expect to be told the truth.”
“We didn’t come here to talk.” He picked up my sword and shoved it back in my hands.
Maybe he hadn’t, but it had definitely been on my agenda. I couldn’t force the truth out of him,
though. And in his case, I didn’t think reminding him of my office was going to do much good. I
raised the sword, getting two hands on the pommel and wishing for something less likely to result in
back strain. It was about the only body part that didn’t already ache.
“You want to fight, fine,” I told him. “But if I prove I’m halfway competent at this, you have to
answer my questions for a change.”
Pritkin didn’t even bother to respond, except by attacking. I twisted out of the way before the
blow could land, a crotchety voice echoing in my ear, its scathing comments familiar, almost
soothing: You don’t have strength, girl, and you never will. Don’t depend on it! If you don’t need to
block, don’t. Your opponent may be stronger than you, but he can’t hurt you if you’re not there. A
second later, my sword was aimed at Pritkin’s jugular, putting him back on point.
I found myself staring at cool green eyes that were suddenly assessing. The tension seemed to
crank up a notch without him moving a muscle. I kept a proper distance back, which, since our
swords were the same length, was close enough to be able to strike but far enough away to need only
one large step forward to attack. He slowly circled me, footwork perfect, never crossing his feet or
giving me any chance to unbalance him. I hadn’t seen him fight with a sword before, but it looked
like he’d also had a few lessons.
I mimicked his movements, my governess Eugenie’s mantra in my ears: speed, timing, balance.
Slide your feet across the ground, don’t jump about like a frightened rabbit! I was a lousy shot and
was beginning to doubt that I was ever going to get much better. But I did know the basics about
swords. Eugenie and Rafe had sparred with me often enough growing up to ensure that. Eugenie had
defended the lessons to Tony by claiming that they were more exercise than combat training.
She’d lied.
Watch for the shift in weight, the drop of a shoulder, the slight tensing of muscles that
precipitates an attack. And above all, don’t think! Don’t think about your opponent, who he is or
how well he fights or what you believe is going to happen. You don’t know. Be confident but not
overconfident. Stay open, flexible and ready to act or react.
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Pritkin’s blade swept down, then suddenly reversed its stroke as he stepped into a perfectly
balanced thrust. On every wall, his mirrored self lunged with him—at empty air, because that feint
was one of Rafe’s favorite moves and I hadn’t fallen for it. He recovered almost immediately,
pivoting out of one pattern into another, far too fast for me to get behind him.
Hit the person, not the sword! It isn’t the sword that’s trying to kill you. And remember, taller
opponents have a longer reach, but they often leave their legs exposed. It isn’t only torsos and heads
that are targets, girl! I made a slashing move on a downward arc, and got a glancing hit on Pritkin’s
left calf as he danced out of reach. I doubted it would even bruise, but with a real sword, it might
have drawn blood.
Eugenie could have taken his leg off with it, but I didn’t have her skill. Despite her best efforts,
I never would. But unlike Rafe, she had never pulled her punches. We’d fought with wooden swords,
too, which was how I knew they hurt like hell when they hit. And she’d had no compunction about
spanking me across the shins or backside with the flat of her blade if I was giving less than my best.
Over the years, along with a lot of bruises, I’d accumulated rudimentary skill that, it seemed, hadn’t
completely deserted me.
Remember to breathe. We may not have to, but you do, so use it. Strike on the exhale, it gives
you more power. Great advice, but the trick was managing to land a blow at all, which was suddenly
a lot harder. Parry, retreat, strike, lunge—I was moving on autopilot as Pritkin kicked it into high
gear. I guess he’d decided playtime was over. And I hadn’t even realized that was what we’d been
doing.
Within a minute, the burn of tired muscles was working its way through my arms and
shoulders, down to my spine. Sweat was dripping in my eyes, turning my vision hot and grainy, and
an exhausted headache was building inside my skull. But Pritkin’s sneaker-clad feet made hardly any
sound against the polished wood floor, and he’d stopped telegraphing his movements. While the
mirrors threw back images of him as an almost living extension of his weapon, his word flowing
seamlessly into muscle and sweat and bone, I had to concentrate just to stay in the fight and not trip
over my own feet.
There’s no such thing as a fair fight! Use what you have, all you have: throw sand in their eyes,
kick dirt, hit below the belt. Remember, your goal is survival, not a prize for chivalry. That last was
one lesson, at least, that I’d never had to be told twice. I ignored the blade coming at me,
concentrated on the space behind Pritkin, and shifted. A second later, I had the point of my sword in
the small of his back.
I hesitated, foolishly assuming that would end it, but Pritkin apparently had other ideas. He
whirled, his weapon catching mine and spinning it out of my hand, his sword point under my chin,
all practically before I could blink. “I wondered how long it would take before you remembered you
can do that.”
I shifted before the look of amused superiority on his face had completely coalesced, and
grabbed my sword from where it had skidded to a stop under the windows. I turned to find him
almost on top of me, having crossed the room at a run, and I shifted again just before he got a hand
on me. I tried something a little fancy, hoping to save the few seconds it would take me to turn
around, and ended up facing him.
Unfortunately, my inner ears didn’t appreciate the sudden change in direction and a wave of
dizziness cost me more time than a spin would have. It also made me stumble into him as he started
to turn and we tripped and went down to the floor together, trying to move our swords out of the way
before we fell on them. I tried to pin him, but he rolled us over and grinned down at me, eyes bright,
face flushed.
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“That’s thrice now, practically back to back. What’s your limit again? Four?”
I shifted out from under him and heard him fall to the floor with a thump as I grabbed my sword
back. Or maybe it was his; my hair was in my eyes, along with a lot of sweat, and I wasn’t seeing too
clearly. “It varies,” I panted, denting the sweatshirt over his heart with the point. “On the
motivation.”
Pritkin’s leg caught me behind the knee, and I stumbled, barely managing to move the sword
before I impaled him with it. A hard body slammed me the rest of the way to the floor before I could
recover, and warm breath was in my ear. “You’re not sure?”
“Haven’t had reason…to find out yet,” I said savagely, trying to buck him off. Of course, it
didn’t work.
“It’s a good trick,” Pritkin said, not letting me up, “but of limited use if it’s the only one in your
arsenal. We’re going to have to work on—”
I gave a final heave, and when it had no more effect than the others, shifted once more. It was
perceptibly harder this time, and the dizziness on landing was a lot stronger. I’d aimed for the far
side of the room, but by the time I recovered, Pritkin was almost there. “Enough, already!” he yelled.
“Making yourself sick isn’t going to—”
“You’re just…a sore loser,” I panted, trying to get my breath back. Shifting the first time had
been like running up a couple of stairs; this one had felt more like ten flights.
“I wasn’t aware that I had lost,” he replied, sword point getting friendly with my ribs. But he
wasn’t taking me seriously, wasn’t watching my body language, probably expecting me to shift
again. So I didn’t.
A twist and a step took me inside his reach, the pommel of my sword caught his chin and my
foot hooked around his ankle. With a pull we were on the floor again, but this time I was on top, with
a wooden blade against his neck. He made a choked noise of surprise, or maybe it was protest over
the fact that I had pressed a little too hard. It wasn’t enough to break the skin, but it left a mark, red
and raw-looking. I rolled off, my heart threatening to pump out of my chest, my legs rubber.
I leaned back against a mirror, chest heaving. I would have liked to gloat, since I’d likely never
have the opportunity again, but I didn’t have enough air. “I win. So talk.”
“What would you like to hear?” he asked, sitting beside me. His tone was even—the bastard
wasn’t even breathing heavily—but he dragged the sword point across the floor hard enough to
scratch the wood. “That that creature forced himself on my mother, knowing she would die in
childbirth like the hundreds of other women he’d assaulted? That only the small amount of Fey
blood she possessed gave her the strength to survive until their child was born? That I exist solely
because of his perverse curiosity to see if such a thing was even possible?”
I blinked. I’d had a mental list of arguments lined up to talk him into telling me something, all
of which now had to be trashed. The one thing I hadn’t expected was for him to just come out with it
like that, with no embarrassment, no twitching. And therein lay the problem with every single
conversation Pritkin and I had ever had.
I was used to the way vamps quarreled, in convoluted, subtle conversations, a dance of lies and
hidden truths, more silent than spoken. I knew that dance, those steps. But with him, there were no
convoluted discussions, implied threats or discreet bargains, just blunt statements of fact that left me
oddly confused. I kept looking for the hidden meaning when there wasn’t one. At least I hoped there
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wasn’t.
“I’m beginning to understand why you hate demons,” I finally said.
“I hate demons because they exist solely and utterly to plague humankind! They have no
redeeming qualities—they are pests at best and scourges at worst—all of which should be hunted
down and destroyed, one by one!”
“You’re saying that in an entire race there isn’t one good—”
“No.”
I knew what it was to grow up feeling that something important was missing from life, to have
no reason to mourn people I never knew, yet to feel their absence like an ever-present ache. Pritkin
certainly had reason to hate Rosier, maybe even demons in general, but I thought genocide might be
taking things a little far. “And you’ve met them all?” I asked, trying not to flinch under that burning
green gaze.
“You grew up with vampires,” Pritkin said savagely. “Would you care to guess where I spent
my formative years?”
A little late, I remembered Casanova saying something about Pritkin being thrown out of Hell.
I’d assumed he was exaggerating. Or not, I thought, as Pritkin jumped up and began pacing, his face
redder than when we’d finished practice.
“You grew up with those creatures, yet you defend them! I have never understood that, how any
human could align herself with the very beings who feed on her!”
“You’re confusing demons and vamps again.” He’d had that problem all along, and living
around Casanova, the only incubus-possessed vamp, probably hadn’t helped.
“Am I?” Tension radiated from his body, and his mouth tightened to its usual downturned line.
“They’re self-centered, morally bereft predators who feed off any humans foolish enough to give
them the chance. I fail to see a great deal of difference!”
I was beginning to understand why Pritkin had never been a big fan of vamps. The way they
and incubi fed might seem a little too close for comfort. Vamps took blood, while incubi fed directly
on the life force itself, accessed through the emotions. But the distinction might get a little blurry for
someone with his background.
“It’s not that simple.” I struggled to my feet, trying not to wince at the ache along my spine. I’d
twisted too fast or stepped wrong, and rolling my head left, then right didn’t seem to help. Pritkin
noticed, but I didn’t get a neck rub. Somehow, I hadn’t expected one.
“Some vamps, like Tony, are monsters,” I agreed, “but I strongly suspect he was that way
before the change. There is no typical vampire, any more than there is a typical human.”
He stepped closer, pain and anger warring on his face. “There is a typical demon! Rosier is no
different from your friend downstairs, or from any of the others. Except in the amount of power he
possesses, in the amount of pain he can cause.”
“My father may not have been a monster, but he worked for one,” I reminded him quietly.
Pritkin wasn’t the only one who’d had to face a few unhappy truths about his background. “I’ve had
to come to terms with that, to accept that just because he refused to hand me over to Tony, doesn’t
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mean he refused to do other things—”
“Your father was human,” Pritkin hissed, the abrupt lash of his anger hitting me like a slap,
backing me up a step.
“So are you!”
He laughed his short, humorless laugh, and I realized that I’d never heard him laugh for real. He
had smiles of wry amusement occasionally, but that was as close as he came. And even they were
mostly in the muscles around his eyes. I wanted to see him really laugh, just once. But, somehow, I
didn’t think today would be the day.
He moved suddenly, so that we were pressed together from thigh to hip to shoulder, but I
refused to give ground again. “Am I? Have you never wondered why your geis reacts so much
stronger to me than to anyone else, sees me as so much more of a threat?”
“It doesn’t seem to feel that way lately.” The goose bumps running up my arms were proof of
that.
“Because he was here! He wanted to make a point, to have me demonstrate yet again that I’m
no better than he is.”
“Wait—Rosier can block the geis?”
“He is a demon lord. Human magic has no power over such a being.”
“Could he remove it?”
Pritkin grabbed my arms, his fingers digging into my flesh until they were haloed with pale,
bloodless outlines. “You will not seek out that creature!”
“I don’t usually go around trying to find people who want me dead!” Enough of them found me
all on their own. “But if whatever he did could be duplicated, maybe by another incubus—”
“No. No one else is that powerful.” His words were suddenly calm again, but his eyes slid away
from mine.
“Pritkin, if there’s even a chance you could do something about the geis, I need to know.”
Before I went to MAGIC and did something really, really stupid.
“What do you think I’ve been doing?!”
“I know you’ve been looking for a solution in human magic, looking hard. But you hate
demons so much, I wasn’t sure if you’d considered…another alternative.”
“There is no alternative,” he said flatly. “Even Rosier could not break the geis, and he has no
need to do so. His power can override it long enough for him to feed, long enough to drain you of
your life and the power of your office—a fine meal indeed!”
“Is that what he wants? The power of my office?”
Pritkin didn’t answer; I doubt he even heard me. He picked up a strand of my hair and gave it a
sharp tug. “You see how strong this is, how resilient? Do you know what someone looks like after an
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incubus drains them entirely? Hair brittle as straw, skin thin and aged, youth gone, everything—
” He turned away abruptly. “I have a long list of reasons to hate that creature,” he said after a
moment, with a bite in every word, “but at the very top is his failure to warn me about my nature, to
take even one minute to help me avoid becoming what he was.”
“You aren’t a demon, Pritkin!”
“Tell that to my victim.”
“I don’t understand.”
He whirled to face me, and I flinched just from his expression. “Then let me make certain that
you do. When I returned from my sojourn in Hell, I decided to make a normal life for myself. I met a
girl. In time, we were married. And on our wedding night, I drained her of life the same way that
thing almost did to you.”
I blinked. It occurred to me that I might know who the girl in the picture was, and why Pritkin
had kept it. I should have known: it wasn’t out of sentiment; he was using it to flog himself. I could
have reminded him that it hadn’t been his fault, that he hadn’t had anyone to ask about his abilities,
to warn him of the danger. I could have told him that if it had been me, I wouldn’t have wanted him
torturing himself over my death for more than a century. But I knew what response I’d get. The glare
he was already sending me could have melted glass.
“It was an accident,” I finally said. “You didn’t know—”
“And I am certain that was a great comfort to her as she lay gasping her last,” he said, biting off
each word. I’d never heard his voice so clipped, so cold. “Betrayed by the one who should have
protected her, by the one she trusted most. Seeing me in the end for what I truly am, and being
horrified by it—as she should have been all along. As you would be, if you had any sense at all.”
“Pritkin—”
He backed me up until I ran into the wall and there was nowhere left to go. The air around him
crackled so restlessly that it was uncomfortable to look at him. “But they bred it out of you, didn’t
they? You don’t mind the monsters feeding from you. You’ve convinced yourself that they’re just
like you, merely humans with a disease. Would you like to know how your vampires actually feel
about you?”
I’d grown up around creatures who could kill me with the same effort I would need to squash a
bug. I knew how they saw me, how they saw all humans. But just because you can kill something
doesn’t mean that you do. Not if that something is far more valuable alive. It was the tightrope I’d
walked long before I ever knew I was on one. “I already know—”
His eyes went very green and flat, like when he’d been killing people who were too stupid to
run away when they had the chance. “I don’t think you do. Believe that they care, believe that they
love, believe anything that makes it easier not to see the truth. But understand this. To them, you are
food. Nothing else. Anytime you forget that, you become vulnerable. And if you make yourself a
target often enough, they will destroy you. Not because they hate you, but because it’s their nature.
And nothing will ever change that.”
I didn’t try to tell him again that this was old news. Because he wasn’t talking about vampires
anymore, and we both knew it. And because he already looked like he’d lost a fistfight with himself.
A pulse beat in his neck and his cheeks looked hot, but his eyes were shadowed. “Don’t tell me what
I am. Just learn how to defend yourself. From them, or from me!”
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It wasn’t until after he’d left that I realized I still didn’t know why Rosier wanted me dead.
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Chapter 18
“What, I can’t leave you alone for five minutes?” Billy hissed. No matter how many times I
body-swap—not that it’s been all that many—I still get a weird tingle hearing my voice saying
words my brain didn’t think up. Maybe I’ll get used to it eventually, but I doubt it.
I glanced at the darkened window and saw what I’d expected: a swarthy, saturnine type in a too
loud suit, with slick black hair and a slight overbite. Not the prettiest face around, but also not one to
attract anyone’s attention. I’d have to remember to thank Alphonse for strong-arming his man into
this.
Possession tends to weird vampires out, mainly because it’s supposed to be impossible. Even
low-level vamps are able to evict an unwanted guest with a little effort, and the stronger ones have
shields formidable enough to ensure that nothing takes up residence in the first place. But Marcello
had preferred allowing a hitchhiker aboard to suffering his master’s punishment. So far, he’d
behaved himself, staying quiet and not attempting to wrest back control. I wondered how long that
was going to last.
Outside the limo, neon-lit streets melted by in chaotic smears, shimmers of light and color and
noise. Billy and I were headed out of the city to our rendezvous with the Senate. I’d slipped away
without telling Pritkin, mainly because he and the Consul hadn’t exactly hit it off the first time they
met and I didn’t need any help making a bad impression. But also because as soon as I got my hands
on Mircea, I was off to get the Codex and finish this thing. And I still wasn’t convinced that Pritkin
was all that interested in saving a vampire’s life—especially not now.
It still felt strange not having him there, though: like an empty holster where there should be a
gun. I hadn’t realized how much I’d come to rely on his particular brand of insanity. It was too bad;
what we were attempting tonight would have been right up his alley.
So I had about a thousand things to worry about and less help than I’d planned. Yet not only did
that not keep Billy from bitching, but it didn’t even slow him down. “You were out of it for almost a
day,” I pointed out.
“Well, forgive me for exhausting myself saving your life!” he snapped. “Not to mention that
you were supposed to
