Chapter 2
“ Is that who I think
it is?” Casanova gave a panicked glance at the mage, whose coat had
blown open to reveal enough firepower to take out a platoon. Even
vamps are cautious around war mages—wizards and witches who have
been trained in human and magical combat techniques by the Circle.
They have the Shoot first, ask questions if
you feel like it later mentality that human law enforcement
left behind with the Wild West. Of course, police officers don’t
have to face the kind of surprises the mages frequently
get.
I’d already seen as
much of this particular mage as I wanted, and apparently Casanova
felt the same. Without waiting for me to answer, he let go of
dignity and dove under the table. I was wondering whether it was
worth the effort to try to run, when Enyo hopped down from her bar
stool and jogged over. She gestured at the mage and raised bushy
eyebrows that in her case protected only empty folds of skin. I’m
not sure how I knew what she was thinking, because she didn’t say a
word, but the point came across. I shook my head emphatically. I
wasn’t actually sure what he was, but “friend” didn’t sound
right.
Enyo whirled to face
the mage, who was only a couple of tables away. He stopped dead in
his tracks and a second later I realized why. The three sisters
weren’t pretty by anyone’s standards, but they looked harmless
enough. Enyo’s squashed face—containing so many folds that the
absence of eyes wasn’t all that noticeable—toothless mouth and
straggling hair normally made her resemble a particularly homely
bag lady. But she didn’t look that way now.
My mythological
knowledge is not great, composed mainly of bits and pieces left
over from long-ago lessons with Eugenie, my old governess. This was
one of those times I wished I’d paid more attention. Where a
diminutive old lady had been, a towering Amazon stood, clad only in
matted ankle-length hair and a lot of blood. Enyo’s transformation
was so quick that I hadn’t seen it take place, but Pritkin’s face,
which had shut down to the pale, closed look he gets when truly
terrified, told me there was more to her story than I recalled. I
decided I didn’t want to know.
I have never claimed
to be a hero. Besides, Casanova had started to crawl away, using
the tables as cover, and I still didn’t know where Tony was. I
dropped to the floor and followed on his heels. The next second, it
sounded like all hell had broken loose behind us, but I wasn’t
crazy enough to look around. I’ve had lots of practice running
away, and I’ve learned that it’s best to keep your mind on the
goal.
Half of a black
lacquered chair flew over my head, but I just ducked lower and
crawled faster. Casanova appeared to be heading for a blank stretch
of wall, but I knew better. This was one of Tony’s places, and he
never built anything that didn’t have at least a dozen emergency
exits. I was pretty sure that somewhere up ahead was a door hidden
by a glamour, so when the top half of Casanova’s body disappeared
into the red Chinese wallpaper, I wasn’t surprised. I grabbed a
handful of his suit coat, scrunched up my eyes and followed. I
opened them again to find that we were in a utilitarian corridor
with industrial fluorescent lighting.
Casanova tried to
pull away, but I held on for dear life. It wasn’t easy since the
impromptu escape had left me with a serious wedgie and he was
stronger than I was. But he was my best link to Tony and I wasn’t
about to lose him. “Oh, all right!” he said, dragging me to my
feet. “This way!”
We raced to a door
that led to a much more luxurious corridor carpeted in thick
scarlet plush. The gold brocade wallpaper boasted a line of
salacious prints and reeked of musky perfume. I gasped, but
Casanova was too busy punching the elevator call button a dozen
times to notice. It finally came just as I was about to give up on
the idea of breathing altogether, and we jumped on board. Casanova
hit the button for the fifth floor and I managed to choke out a
protest. “Shouldn’t we be heading down, to the parking level? If we
stay in the building, he’ll find us.”
He shot me a look.
“Do you really think he came alone?” I shrugged. I’d never seen
Pritkin work with other mages, so it seemed possible. He did enough
mayhem all on his own. “He almost certainly has backup,” Casanova
informed me, running shaking hands down his slightly rumpled suit.
“Let the internal defenses deal with them.”
The elevator let out
into a spacious office that looked a lot like a boudoir. There were
mirrors and fat chaises everywhere, and a bar almost as big as the
one downstairs lined one wall. A good-looking secretary, who was
probably going to be recruited by the incubi if he hadn’t been
already, tried to offer us refreshments, but Casanova waved him
off.
We barreled through a
set of doors to a plush inner office.
Casanova ignored the
huge four-poster bed sitting incongruously in the corner and the
two scantily clad women reclining on it. He stepped through a
multicolored modernist painting that covered most of one wall and I
followed, ignoring the scowls the girls sent my way. On the other
side was a narrow room that was bare except for a table, a chair
and a large mirror hanging on the wall. He waved a hand over the
mirror’s surface and it shimmered like a mirage in the desert. I
figured out that this was his way of checking on his
employees.
I’d seen similar
devices before. Tony had never been able to use security cameras,
since anything run on electricity doesn’t do well around powerful
wards and his Philadelphia stronghold had bristled with them. I’d
had to learn about his surveillance equipment in order to elude it
when up to things I preferred him not to know about, like stealing
his personal files and setting him up with the Feds. Not that that
had worked out too well, but at least I hadn’t been caught during
the preparations. I’d discovered that any reflective surface could
be spelled to act as a monitor linked to other shiny exteriors
within a certain radius. Considering the number of mirrors and all
the polished marble around the place, Casanova could probably check
on anything within the spa.
He muttered a word,
and an image of the bar appeared. I wondered about the distortion
until I realized that he was using the large Chinese gong behind
the bar as his spy hole. It was convex, so the image was, too,
along with being tinted faintly bronze. I saw the backs of three
people whom I identified as war mages by the amount of hardware
they were wearing. I didn’t see Pritkin and was slightly worried
that Enyo had eaten him.
She certainly looked
capable of it. The vague old woman had been replaced by a
blood-covered savage whose head brushed the edge of the fringed
lanterns that swung from the central chandelier. Her hair was still
gray, but the body had gotten a definite upgrade and she now had a
full compliment of teeth and eyes. The former were longer and
sharper than a vamp’s and the latter were yellow and slitted like a
cat’s. She looked pissed off, maybe because she was encased in a
magical web, courtesy of the mages. She slashed at it with
four-inch-long talons and it ripped like paper, but before she
could move, the slender cords reknitted themselves, holding her
fast.
It looked to me like
a standoff, and I wondered why her sisters, who were still lounging
at the bar, didn’t intervene. I’d barely had the thought before
Pemphredo glanced up at the gong. Since it was her turn with the
eye, she was able to wink at me before cutting loose.
I remembered that,
when I’d looked up some information on the sisters after they
dropped in, Pemphredo had been called “the master of alarming
surprises.” I hadn’t been sure what that meant, but since the three
had been given the task of protecting the Gorgons, I assumed they
each had some kind of warlike talent. Considering what had happened
to Medusa, though, it didn’t seem like they’d been too
effective.
As if she’d heard me,
Pemphredo suddenly turned her gaze on the nearest mage, a delicate
Asian woman, who didn’t even have time to scream before the heavy
lacquered chandelier came crashing down on her head. Pieces of
splintered wood went flying everywhere, and the woman disappeared
under a pile of red silk lanterns. It seemed the gals had been
practicing.
The mage managed to
crawl out from under the fixture a few seconds later, looking
battered and bloody, but still breathing. She was in no condition
to rejoin the fight, though, and her companions were having trouble
holding Enyo on their own. She was tearing through the net almost
faster than they could reform it, and it was starting to look like
a question of who would tire first. I couldn’t tell whether she was
getting weary, but even with their backs to me, the mages looked
strained, with their raised arms visibly shaking.
“We have a problem,”
Casanova said.
“Duh.” I watched as
Pemphredo glanced at one of the other mages, who promptly shot
himself in the foot. Deino was sipping beer and trying to flirt
with the new bartender, who had crouched behind the bar with his
arms over his head. Casanova was probably going to get requests for
combat pay after today. I decided that I could live without
learning what her special talent was.
“No. I mean we
really have a problem.” I glanced up at
Casanova’s tone to see a pissed-off mage standing in the doorway, a
sawed-off shotgun leveled on us.
I sighed. “Hello,
Pritkin.”
“Call off your
harpies or this will be a very short conversation. ”
I sighed again.
Pritkin has that effect on me. “They aren’t harpies. They’re the
Graeae, ancient Greek demigoddesses. Or something.”
Pritkin sneered. It
was what he did best, other than for killing things. “Trust you to
side with the monsters. Call them off.” An edge of anger threaded
through his words, threatening to grow into something more
substantial soon.
“I can’t.” It was the
truth, but I wasn’t surprised that he didn’t believe me. I couldn’t
recall Pritkin ever believing anything I said; it kind of made me
wonder why he bothered talking to me at all. Of course,
conversation probably wasn’t foremost on his list. It’d be
somewhere after dragging me back to the Silver Circle, throwing me
in a really deep dungeon and losing the key.
I discovered that a
sawed-off, double-barreled shotgun sounds very loud when cocked in
a small room.
“Do as he says,
Cassie,” Casanova chimed in. “I like this body as it is. If it
acquires a large hole, I will be very annoyed.”
“Yeah, and that’s
really what’s worrying us.” The comment came from the ghost who had
just drifted through the wall. Casanova swatted in his direction as
you might a pesky fly, but missed him. “I thought incubi were
supposed to be charming,” Billy said, wafting out of the
way.
Casanova couldn’t see
Billy, but his demon senses could obviously hear him. His handsome
forehead acquired an annoyed wrinkle, but he didn’t deign to
respond. I was glad about that, since it meant that Pritkin
couldn’t be sure that Billy was there.
Billy Joe is what
remains of an Irish-American gambler with a love for loose women,
dirty limericks and cheating at cards. Because of that last item,
he cashed in his chips for the final time at the ripe old age of
twenty-nine. A couple of cowboys hadn’t liked his faint Irish
accent, his ruffled shirt or the fact that the saloon girls were
paying him a lot of attention. But the real kicker had come when he
won too many hands at cards and they caught him with an ace up his
sleeve. Billy was soon thereafter introduced to the inside of a
croaker sack, which in turn made the acquaintance of the bottom of
the Mississippi.
That should have
ended a colorful, if abbreviated, life.
But a few weeks
earlier Billy had won a variety of favors off a visiting
countess—at least he claimed she’d had a title—one of which was an
ugly ruby necklace that doubled as a talisman. It soaked up magical
energy from the natural world and transmitted it to its owner, or
in this case, to its owner’s ghost. Billy’s spirit had come to
reside in the necklace, which gathered dust in an antique shop
until I happened along looking for a present for my notoriously
picky governess. I’ve been able to see ghosts all my life, but even
I was surprised by my gift with purchase.
We’d soon discovered
that not only was I the first person in years who could see him, I
was also the only one of the necklace’s owners who could donate
energy in excess of the subsistence it provided. With regular
donations from me, Billy was able to become much more active. In
exchange, I got his help with my various problems. At least in
theory.
He caught my look and
shrugged. “This place has too many entrances. I couldn’t watch them
all.” He glanced behind the mage. “He’s got his helper with
him.”
He was looking at
what appeared to be a man-sized clay statue. I had mistaken it for
one the first time I’d seen it, but it was actually a golem. Rabbis
versed in kabbalah magic were supposed to have invented them, but
these days they were popular among the war mages as
assistants—maybe because it’s hard to hurt something with no
internal organs.
I reviewed possible
strategies, but none of my usual defenses seemed like a good idea.
The lopsided pentagram tattooed on my back is actually a ward that
can stop most magical attacks. It was crafted by the Silver Circle
itself and I had seen it do some fairly amazing things, but I
didn’t know if it would stop a nonmagical assault of that caliber.
This didn’t seem like the best time to test it.
I also had a bracelet
made of little interlocking daggers that seemed to dislike Pritkin
even more than I did. It had once belonged to a dark mage who had
used it mostly to destroy things. He’d been evil, and I suspected
his jewelry was, too, but I couldn’t seem to get rid of it. I’d
tried burying it, flushing it down a toilet and feeding it to a
garbage disposal, but no go. No matter what I did, the next time I
looked it was on my wrist again, whole and shiny and new, glinting
at me impudently. Sometimes it came in handy, and mostly it obeyed
my commands, but it never passed up a chance to relive old times.
All on its own it had sent two ghostly knives to stab Pritkin the
last time we met. The hand with the bracelet was firmly in my
pocket at the moment; no need to escalate this further.
Fortunately, I had another option.
“Hey, Billy. Think
you can possess a golem?” Pritkin’s eyes didn’t waver, but his
shoulders twitched slightly.
“Never tried.” Billy
floated over and eyed the golem without enthusiasm. He doesn’t like
possessions. They sap his energy level and often don’t work anyway.
Instead, his favorite trick is to drift through someone, picking up
any stray thoughts and leaving a hint or two of his own behind. But
that wouldn’t help us now. “Guess there’s only one way to find
out,” he muttered.
As soon as Billy
stepped into the thing, I found out why experiments are done under
controlled conditions. The golem began careening about the outer
office, knocking over tubs of plants and sending the girls
screaming into the next room. Then it altered course and crashed
into Pritkin, sending him sprawling.
I couldn’t tell
whether that had been deliberate, but I sort of doubted it when the
creature started ricocheting around our tiny cubicle like a pinball
on speed. It knocked me a glancing blow on its way to destroy the
table and sent me stumbling into the mage. I started to yell at
Billy to get out of the thing, but my breath was knocked out by
Pritkin’s knee, which came into contact with my stomach when I fell
on him. To be fair, my high heel might have gotten him in a
sensitive spot, but it had been an accident. I didn’t think his
knee was.
As I was struggling
to get enough breath back to tell him off, a very familiar and
extremely unwelcome feeling came over me. Time shifting is supposed
to be under the Pythia’s control, not vice versa, but someone
needed to tell my power that. I had only enough time to think,
Oh no, not now, before I was flailing
about in that cold, gray area between time.
After my short free
fall, the ground rushed up and hit me in the face. When my vision
cleared, I identified the surface as carpet with a red and black
oriental pattern thinly stretched over very hard wood. For a
stunned minute I thought I’d ended up back in the bar, but then I
noticed the two sets of feet in front of me. They didn’t look like
they belonged to tourists.
The woman was wearing
tiny black silk heels with a scattering of jet beads on the toe.
They matched the beadwork on her elaborate black evening gown, the
hem of which was about a foot in front of my face. The beading ran
up the front of the dress to an impossibly small waist, then
disappeared, I assume so it wouldn’t detract from the fortune in
diamonds she wore draped around her slim throat and clipped into
her golden curls. I glanced at her lovely blue eyes, narrowed in
distaste as she regarded me, and quickly looked away. It isn’t a
good idea to stare a vampire in the eyes for long, and that is
unquestionably what she was.
I scrambled to my
feet and got another shock. I almost fell again—only Tony would be
sadistic enough to make waitresses wear three-inch heels—and a hand
reached out to steady me. A very familiar hand.
Like the woman, her
escort was obviously dressed for evening, in a black swallowtail
coat over a low-cut vest, white shirt and white bowtie. His highly
polished shoes shone more than his understated jewelry—plain gold
cufflinks that matched the clip holding his hair in a ponytail at
the nape of his neck. The discreet accessories didn’t surprise
me—Mircea has never liked showy clothes. What threw me was the
abrupt, overwhelming sense of joy that spread over me as soon as
our eyes met.
I was suddenly struck
by the sheer masculine beauty of him. He was so gracefully made
that I caught my breath, all long limbs and elegant lines, like a
dancer or a long-distance runner—or what he was, the product of
noble blood going back for generations. Only one feature didn’t fit
that picture: his mouth was not the thin-lipped aristocratic
version, but had the full, beautifully sculpted lips of a
sensualist.
Maybe there had been
more peasant stock in the gene pool than the family would admit,
people who might not have had the airs and graces of their lords,
but who knew how to laugh and dance and drink with a passion the
aristocrats had forgotten. Dracula was supposed to have been the
one born of a fiery gypsy girl, but I’d sometimes wondered whether
the old rumors had gotten things mixed up, and instead it was
Mircea who had Romany blood. If so, it suited him.
His hand was under my
elbow in a light, impersonal touch, but for some reason it made my
whole arm tingle. I tried to sense the geis Casanova had talked about, but nothing
registered. If I hadn’t known better, I would have sworn there was
no spell to find.
I realized vaguely
that my hands had begun smoothing the thick silk of Mircea’s
waistcoat. It was crimson with red dragons embroidered on it and
seemed a little flashy for him, although the tone on tone made the
designs almost invisible unless the light hit them just right. The
embroidery was smooth against my fingertips, a beautiful, intricate
design. I could even see the tiny scales on the dragons. Then my
wandering hands discovered something more interesting, the faint
prick of nipples, barely discernable under several layers of
fabric.
My fingertips traced
them delicately, my whole body vibrating with pleasure from that
small sensation. Being near Mircea caused none of the mind-numbing
effects of Casanova’s attempt at seduction. I could have pulled
away; I just couldn’t think of anything I wanted less.
Mircea also wasn’t
going anywhere. He just stood there, looking bemused, but the hand
on my arm began pulling me gently towards him.
I went willingly,
lost in admiration for the way the gas light gleamed in his hair,
and a thrumming energy suddenly ran up my arm. It hit my shoulder,
then dove back down to jump from my fingertips like electricity.
Mircea jerked slightly as the sensation hit him, but he did not let
go. The feeling echoed back and forth, holding the two of us in a
loop of sensation that made the hairs on my arm stand up and my
body tighten.
The dark eyes
examined me as slowly and thoroughly as I had inspected him. The
sensation of that gaze made me shiver, and Mircea’s eyebrow climbed
a fraction at my reaction. His hand moved to the small of my back
but encountered only the tough frame of the corset. His touch slid
down to the curve of my hip, his fingers splaying over the thin
satin of my shorts as he pressed us close.
I took a deep breath
and tried to cope with the waves of emotion that were rolling over
me, but it did no good. Mircea didn’t help by reaching up to
delicately brush my cheek with the backs of his fingers. A spark of
gold leapt in his pupils, a color that I knew from experience
indicated heightened emotion. When he was truly angry or aroused,
cinnamon amber light spiraled up to fill his eyes, giving them an
otherworldly glow that others found frightening but I had always
thought beautiful.
Someone cleared his
throat in a harsh bark. Pritkin’s voice sounded over my shoulder.
“My deepest apologies, sir, madam. I am afraid one of our actresses
is not well. I trust she has given no offense?”
“Not at all.” Mircea
sounded distracted, and he made no move to release me.
“I will take her
backstage, where she can rest.” Pritkin put a hand on my arm, to
haul me away, but Mircea’s hand tightened on my hip. His eyes had
begun to glow, the green and light brown flecks no longer visible
against the rising tide of reddish gold.
“The child does not
look well, Count Basarab,” the female vamp said, taking his free
arm, mirroring Pritkin’s stance with me. “Let us not detain
her.”
Mircea ignored her.
“Who are you?” he asked. His accent was thicker than I had ever
heard it, and his tone was filled with the same wonder I
felt.
I swallowed and shook
my head. There was no safe reply. I didn’t know where or even when
I was, but since the female vamp had a slight bustle on her gown, I
didn’t think it was anywhere I’d find familiar. There was a good
chance I wasn’t even born yet. “Nobody,” I whispered.
Mircea’s companion
gave what in a less elegant person would have been a snort. “We
will miss the opening,” she said, tugging on his
sleeve.
After a noticeable
pause Mircea released me, the invisible energy stretching between
us like strings of taffy as his hand slid away. He allowed his
companion to lead him down the corridor, but he looked back at me
in puzzlement several times. The energy arced between us but didn’t
break, as if there was an invisible cord spanning the distance,
tying us together. Then they disappeared into a small curtained
archway to what I vaguely recognized as a theatre box.
As soon as the red
velvet curtains swooshed shut behind them, cutting off my view, the
connection between us snapped. I was immediately hit with a longing
so intense it was actually painful. It clenched my stomach like
someone had sucker punched me, and started a headache pounding
behind my eyes. I barely noticed Pritkin dragging me to the end of
the corridor, where a set of stairs climbed towards, presumably,
another set of boxes. An orchestra started to tune up somewhere
nearby, which explained why there were no more people in sight. The
entertainment was about to begin.
The stairs were lit
by a series of small lanterns along the wall, with deep areas of
shadow in between. As a hiding spot it wasn’t great, but I was too
preoccupied to care. My hands were shaking and sweat had popped out
on my face. I felt like a junkie who has been shown the needle but
denied her fix. It was horrible.
“What did you do?”
Pritkin glared at me, his short blond hair standing up in tufts as
if it was angry, too. It was a pretty fierce expression, but I’d
seen it before. And compared with what had just happened, it was
almost trivial.
“I was about to ask
you the same question,” I replied, massaging my neck to try to
clear my head. My other arm was clenched across my stomach, where
it felt like a hole had been ripped into me by Mircea’s absence.
This could not be happening—I wouldn’t
let it. I would not spend the rest of my life salivating over him
like some teenager with a rock star. I was not a groupie, damn
it!
Pritkin gave me a
little shake and I eyed him without favor. On the only other
occasions when I had been dragged back in time, the trip had been
triggered by proximity to a person whose past was being threatened.
“I have to tell you,” I said frankly, “if someone is trying to mess
with your conception or something, I’m not feeling a pressing need
to intervene.”
His face, normally
ruddy anyway, flushed a deeper shade of red. “Get us back where we
belong before we change anything!” he spat.
I didn’t like being
given orders, but he had a point. And the fact that I had a strong
urge to run down the hallway and throw myself into Mircea’s arms
was another good reason for getting out of there. I closed my eyes
and concentrated on Casanova’s office at Dante’s, but although I
could see it clearly, there was no rush of power sweeping me
towards it. I tried again, but I guess my batteries needed a
recharge because nothing happened.
“There might be a
slight delay on this flight,” I said, feeling queasy. All sorts of
fears began crowding my brain. What if there was a time limit on
the ritual that the former Pythia had forgotten to mention? What if
I couldn’t shift again, period, because the power had gotten tired
of waiting for me to seal the deal and had passed to someone else?
We could be stuck whenever this was permanently.
“What the bloody hell
are you talking about?” Pritkin demanded. “Take us back
immediately!”
“I
can’t.”
“What do you mean,
you can’t? Every moment we spend here is a danger!”
Pritkin was shaking
me again and I think he was getting worried, because his voice had
roughened. I had no sympathy—whatever he was feeling was nothing
compared to my mood. Wasn’t my life messed up enough without having
to handle the Pythia’s responsibilities, too? Couldn’t whoever was
running this show let me deal with a few of the items on my
personal problem list before dragging me off to sort out other
people’s? It wasn’t fair and I’d about had enough. If I was
supposed to do something, fine. Bring it on.
“Let me spell it out
for you,” I told Pritkin, shrugging out of his grasp. “I didn’t
bring us here. I don’t even know where here is. All I know is that
I can’t shift us out, either because the power has decided it
doesn’t like me anymore, or because it wants me to do something
before I leave.” I was betting on the latter, since I didn’t think
landing at Mircea’s feet had been an accident.
Pritkin didn’t look
like he believed me, but I didn’t care. I turned away from him,
intending to find out whether Mircea had any bright ideas, but
Pritkin’s hand clasped around my wrist in a viselike grip. “You
aren’t going anywhere, ” he said grimly.
“I have to find out
what the problem is and deal with it, or neither of us will be
going anywhere,” I snapped. “So, unless you can tell me where we
are and why we’re here, I don’t see much choice but to go
exploring, do you?”
“We’re in London, in
late 1888 or early 1889.”
I raised an eyebrow.
I hadn’t seen any clues to help narrow things down, other than the
woman’s clothes—Mircea’s were standard formal wear that could have
come from any period in a wide span of time. It was a little
disconcerting to learn that Pritkin was a connoisseur of women’s
fashion. I said as much and he actually growled at me before
thrusting a piece of paper into my hands.
“Here! Someone
dropped this.” I looked away from his perpetual glower to peruse
the yellow and black flyer he’d given me. It showed a man staring
up a hill at three old crones. They sort of reminded me of the
Graeae, only they had better hair. It informed me that it was a
souvenir of the Lyceum Theatre’s performance of Macbeth, beginning December 29, 1888.
“Okay, great. We know
the date. It’s a start, but I don’t see it getting us too far.” I
tried to pull away again, but he stopped me, this time with
words.
“The more you feed
the geis, the stronger it will become.
Not to mention that prostitutes in this era wear more clothes than
you currently have on. You can’t go anywhere without causing a
riot.”
“How did you know?”
It was disconcerting to find out that I’d been wearing the
equivalent of a sign on my back for years. Could everybody see it
but me?
Pritkin gave a
one-shouldered shrug. “I knew the first time I saw you
together.”
I considered the
situation and figured it was worth a shot. “I don’t suppose you
could do something about it? We are in this together, after all,
and I could probably think more clearly if—”
“Only Mircea can
remove it,” Pritkin said, dashing what little hope I’d had. “Even
the mage who cast it for him couldn’t do it without his assent. The
best you can do at present is to stay away from him.”
I frowned. It was
pretty much the same thing Casanova had said, but I wasn’t buying
it. “I don’t know much about magic, but even I know there’s no such
thing as a spell that can’t be broken. There has to be a way!”
Pritkin’s expression didn’t change, but a momentary flash in his
eyes told me I was right. “You know something,” I said
accusingly.
He looked evasive but
finally answered. I suppose he decided it would be faster to humor
me. “All geasa are different, but most
have one thing in common. Each has built into it a . . . a safety
net, if you like. Mircea would not want to be hoisted by his own
petard, so he would have designed the geis with a way out of the spell, should something
go wrong.”
“And that would
be?”
“Only Mircea and the
mage who cast it know that.”
I stared at him,
trying to figure out whether he was lying. His words rang true, so
why did I get the feeling he wasn’t telling me everything? Maybe
because no one ever did. “If this is 1888, Mircea hasn’t done
anything yet. There is no geis. Or
there shouldn’t be,” I added, since obviously something was
happening.
“You have a habit of
getting into unprecedented situations, ” Pritkin said with a scowl.
“I’ve never heard of this particular scenario. I don’t know what
will occur if the two of you spend time together in this era, but I
doubt you would like the consequences.” He adjusted his long coat
to minimize the ominous bulges underneath. “Stay here. I will look
about and see if anything strikes me as unusual. I lived through
this period and am more likely to notice anything out of place than
you. I’ll return shortly and we will discuss our
options.”
He left before I
could react, leaving me staring witlessly after him. Magic users
live longer than norms, true, but not enough to look about
thirty-five at a century more than that. I’d known since soon after
meeting him that there was more to Pritkin than met the eye, but
this was getting really weird.
I sat down on one of
the steps and hugged my knees, staring at a patch of threadbare
carpet. The minimal outfit was cold and the horns were adding to my
headache. I took them off and stared at them instead. The gold
glitter was starting to flake off in pieces, showing the hard white
foam beneath. I felt a little bad about that. Assuming we ever got
back to our time, the girl whose locker I’d burgled was going to
have to pay for a new one. Of course, if I didn’t get back at all,
she’d need a whole new outfit.
I noticed that the
stairway was getting colder but didn’t worry about it until a woman
suddenly appeared in front of me. She was dressed in a long blue
gown and seemed as solid as any regular person, but I immediately
knew she was a ghost. That was due less to my keen sense of the
paranormal than to the fact that she had a severed head tucked
under her arm. The head, which had a Vandyke beard that matched its
dark brown hair, focused pale blue eyes on me.
“A dashed improvement
over Faust!” it said, rolling its eyes up to its
bearer.
The woman stared at
me with no expression, but when she spoke her voice did not sound
pleased. “Why do you disturb us?”
I sighed as deeply as
I could manage with the damn corset cutting me in two. Exactly what
I needed, a ticked-off ghost. I was just thankful I hadn’t shifted
as a spirit myself, or I’d have a lot more reason to be worried. I
have time traveled before without my body, appearing in another era
as a spirit or in possession of someone. But both states create
bigger problems than putting up with an uncomfortable costume for a
while.
Leaving my body
behind means risking death unless I find another spirit to babysit
it while I’m gone. Since the only one usually available is Billy
Joe, this is something I try to avoid. Especially in Vegas, where
all his favorite vices are so near at hand. The other downside is
that traveling in spirit form saps my energy too quickly to allow
me to do much unless I possess someone and draw energy from him or
her. But I don’t even like drinking from the same cup as someone
else, much less using their body.
After becoming the
Pythia’s heir, I acquired the ability to take my own form along for
the ride, although that has a downside, too. One possession
resulted in an injury to the woman I was inhabiting—in the form of
an almost-severed toe—but I’d been able to leave the wound behind
when I shifted back to my own body. But if anything happened to me
now, I was stuck with it. The upside of my current condition was
that ghosts don’t have a lot of power over the living. They can
cannibalize other spirits under certain conditions, but attacking a
living body usually drains them of more power than they gain.
Still, there was no reason to provoke her.
“I’ll be leaving
soon,” I said, hoping it was true. “I have an errand to run and
then I’m out of here.”
“You aren’t in the
show, then?” the head asked, looking disappointed.
“Only visiting,” I
said quickly, since the woman’s eyes had started to glow. That’s
not a good sign in a ghost—it means they’re calling up their power,
normally just prior to letting you have it. “Really, I want to leave, but I can’t yet. Hopefully, this
won’t take long.”
“The other said the
same,” she intoned, her dark hair starting to blow gently about her
face as her power rose. “But after poisoning the wine, she did not
go. Now you are here. This must stop.”
“She?” I didn’t like
the sound of that. “The only person I brought with me is male.
Maybe you’ve seen him? About five eight, blond, dressed like the
Terminator? Sorry,” I said, as her forehead wrinkled slightly. “I
mean, he’s wearing a long topcoat over a bunch of weapons. He’ll be
back soon and we’ll get this sorted out.”
“It is not the mage
that concerns us,” the ghost said sternly. “You and the other woman
are the threat. You must leave.”
“She is somewhat
territorial, I fear,” the head said, looking sympathetic. “We’ve
been here such a long time, y’see. This land belonged to my family
long before they built a theatre on it, and it sustains us.” He
gave me a cheerful leer. “’Tis more fun these days. The demmed
Roundheads closed all the theatres, as well as the pubs, the
whorehouses, and all besides that wasn’t a church. They even
prohibited sports on Sunday! They were kind enough to behead me
before I had to live through that. But we triumphed in the end,
didn’t we?”
“Uh-huh.” I was
barely listening. Every ghost I’ve ever met wants to tell me the
story of his life, and if I hadn’t learned how to nod and smile
while thinking of other things, I’d have been driven crazy a long
time ago. And I had a lot to mull over.
From the little I had
managed to discover about my position, mostly from rumors Billy Joe
overheard, the setup worked like this: if someone from my own era
was messing with the timeline, the ball was in my court. It was my
problem, and I’d have to fix it. But if someone from another time
was trying to interfere, that was the province of the Pythia from
that person’s time. If that was true, the interference that had
brought me here should have come from my lifetime. But the only
person I knew who could skip around between centuries was in no
position to do so. Billy had checked with some of his ghostly
contacts and assured me that the wounds I put in Myra’s spirit form
would have manifested as physical injuries as soon as she returned
to her body. And there was no way she’d have healed damage like
that in a week.
But if the woman the
ghosts had mentioned wasn’t Myra, she could only be another Pythia.
Maybe my power had gotten confused, or I’d been called in as help
on a difficult problem. Since I didn’t know how this gig worked,
anything was possible. If I could find her, I could plead for a
little professional courtesy and get her to send Pritkin and me
back where we belonged.
“Can you show me this
other woman? Maybe I can convince her to leave and to send me home,
too.”
The woman looked
unsure, but the head seemed happy to help. “Of course we can! She’s
not far,” it babbled cheerfully. “She was in one of the boxes
earlier.”
The man’s enthusiasm
seemed to help the woman decide, and she nodded brusquely.
“Quickly, then.”
The ghosts followed
me down the stairs, politely not passing through me, then led the
way to the box beside Mircea’s. I parted the curtains and peered
inside, but it was empty. Onstage a woman in a green medieval gown
with huge, red-lined sleeves was gesturing dramatically. I barely
noticed her. My eyes fixed on Mircea, who was staring at the
elaborate gilt frame of the stage instead of the actress, with the
fixed gaze of someone who isn’t really seeing it. I felt the same.
One look at him and everything else suddenly seemed irrelevant. I
had been bespelled before, but it had never felt like this. Then
I’d known it was fake; I just hadn’t cared. But even knowing this
was due to a geis, it still felt
unbelievably real. I could hate that he’d done this to me, but I
couldn’t hate him. The very thought was absurd.
“There.” The ghost
pointed a finger in front of my face. “The wine has already been
delivered.”
She indicated a tray
with a bottle and several glasses that sat on a small table behind
the seats occupied by Mircea and the blonde. “What are you talking
about?” I forced my eyes to look at the ghost instead of Mircea,
and something like rational thought returned. “Are you telling me
that bottle is poisoned?”
“She said she would
stay until it was consumed, but perhaps her power was
insufficient.” The ghost looked pleased for the first time. I could
almost hear her thinking, One down, one to
go.
I ignored her, my
panic at the thought of anything happening to Mircea so
overwhelming that I could hardly bear it. I ran out of the box and
collided with Pritkin, who had been standing there looking annoyed.
He steadied us both or we would have ended up on the floor. “Let
go!” I batted at his hands, which were gripping my upper arms
painfully. “I have to get in there!”
“I told you to stay
away from him. Do you want to become completely
besotted?”
“Then you do it,” I
said, deciding he might be right. I wanted to go in that box way
too much for it to be a good idea. “There’s a bottle of wine in
there, and it may be poisoned. You have to get it!” I didn’t know
whether poison would kill a vamp, but I didn’t intend to find
out.
He tried out his
usual glare for a second, then his face changed and I knew I was in
trouble. “If I do this, do you swear to speak with me for as long
as I wish without shifting times, attempting to kill me or placing
any spells, curses or other impediments in my way?”
I blinked at him.
“You want to talk?” We never talked.
Stabbed, shot at and tried to blow each other up, sure, but never
talked. “About what?” I asked nervously, but Pritkin only gave me
an evil smile. He had me over a barrel and he knew it. “Fine.
Whatever. We’ll talk as long as you
agree not to try to kill me, imprison me or drag me off to the
Circle—or anybody else. And you don’t get an indefinite time,
either. One hour, take it or leave it.”
“Agreed.” To give him
credit, he didn’t waste time once the bargain was struck, but
immediately let me go and slipped past the curtain. For several
minutes I waited anxiously, but nothing happened. Finally, I
couldn’t stand it anymore and went back to the empty box so I could
at least see what was going on. It wasn’t good.
Onstage, a skinny
Macbeth with a drooping moustache was starting the
dagger-of-the-mind soliloquy, while in the box, Pritkin had a real
dagger at his throat, courtesy of the blonde. She was being
shielded from the audience by Mircea, who stood behind her, but my
box was closer to the stage and I could see them
clearly.
Before I could think
how to help Pritkin, things got worse when Mircea started to open
the bottle. His eyes were on the mage and there was a slight smile
on his lips. I didn’t like that look. Mircea has always been a
strong believer in letting the punishment fit the crime. If he’d
decided that Pritkin was trying to poison them, he was fully
capable of forcing the entire contents of the bottle down the
mage’s throat and waiting to see what happened.
Normally, Pritkin
might have been able to get out of this kind of thing on his own,
but he was trying not to call attention to what was happening. I
sympathized with his dedication to the whole
integrity-of-the-timeline thing, but getting killed over it seemed
a little fanatical. I was Pythia, at least temporarily, and I
wasn’t willing to go that far. Normally I wouldn’t lose much sleep
over Pritkin’s death, but he had gone into that box because I asked
him. If he died, it would be partially my fault.
I sighed and raised
my wrist. A dimly glowing dagger practically jumped out of my
bracelet to hover beside my arm. It was fairly buzzing with
excitement over the prospect of a fight, but I wasn’t sure this was
a great plan. Among other things, I had a feeling that it might
decide to stab Pritkin instead of shattering the bottle. They had a
history and, as far as I knew, had yet to fight on the same
side.
“Take out the bottle
only,” I told it sternly. “Don’t attack
the mage—you know how he gets. I mean it.”
I got a faint bob of
what I hoped was agreement before it was off. It flew over the
balcony, straight for the bottle, which Mircea had just raised to
Pritkin’s lips. It shattered the thick glass easily, causing dark
red wine to cascade over the mage’s coat and splash Mircea’s
formerly pristine white shirt. Mircea whirled around, the bottle’s
neck still in hand, and saw me. He opened his mouth as if to say
something, then stopped and just stood there, looking
dazed.
Unfortunately my
knife didn’t follow his example but decided to ham it up. Onstage,
Macbeth was asking if this was a dagger he saw before him. My
flashing, luminescent knife dipped and swooped over the startled
crowd, causing gasps and even a few screams, before coming to a
halt in front of the actor’s stunned face. It bobbed up and down
for a minute, as if taking a bow, then flew back to me. Thunderous
applause broke out all over the theatre, drowning out the rest of
the actor’s lines.
As soon as the
attention hog melted back into my bracelet, I felt the
disorientation spread over me that indicated that a time shift was
coming. “Grab my hand, quick!” I yelled at Pritkin. “Takeoff is any
second.”
He had used the
moment of distraction to jerk away from the blonde. She was between
him and the way out, but he got around that problem by vaulting
onto an unused seat and launching himself across the divide between
the boxes. He almost slipped on the edge, but I caught his hand.
The next minute, we were once more spinning through
time.