by Karen Chance
“So we’re cattle to you,” Caleb said, as if she’d just confirmed something long suspected.
Rian shot him a flirtatious glance. “Prized cattle, surely.”
“Oh, stop it,” Casanova said irritably. “She’s just teasing you,” he added to Caleb, making me blink.
I looked at Rian, but her violet-dusted lids were lowered, the long lashes shading her high cheekbones. And then back at Casanova. And then I wondered how a predator didn’t notice when he met a greater one.
But I didn’t say anything, and neither did she, being busy pulling a veil across the bottom of her face and turning away slightly, as another vehicle approached ours.
This one was different, a sporty two-wheeler, almost like a chariot, and driven like one, too. I didn’t have to ask who it belonged to; Rian’s reaction was enough. The incubus-possessed driver hadn’t bothered with an outer cloak like everyone else. Instead, he wore a fine, thin red silk robe embroidered with gold that flashed in the light as he all but ran us down, scattering us lesser beings to either side as he thundered past.
“Son of a—why couldn’t we get one of those?” Casanova demanded.
“They’re restricted to the Danim, those hosting an incubus,” Rian told him. “It would attract too much attention.”
“And my bloody feet won’t?”
“If it could cost you so much, why are you helping us?” Caleb asked her, eyes narrowed.
“Shouldn’t you have asked that before we got here?” Casanova demanded.
“I’m asking now.”
“The feud between John and his father is tearing the family apart,” Rian told him. “Among other things, it is making the master look weak. Some have begun to say, if he cannot control his own son, perhaps he should not be the one to control the family—and that is dangerous.”
“Who else would do it?”
“As at any court, ours has factions, senior demons and their followers, who constantly vie with each other for advantage. Rosier himself is usually above such squabbles, but John is his weak point and everyone knows it. And as with all who hold power, he has enemies.”
“Imagine that,” Casanova said poisonously. “And such a pleasant creature.”
“He is better than those who would replace him,” Rian said, more sharply.
“When you said this was tearing the family apart, does that mean some are taking Pritkin’s side?” I asked hopefully. Because we could use more friends.
But of course not.
“No. No one understands his reluctance to feed. It is seen as proof of his humanness, his alienness. No incubus could go so long. . . .” She shuddered. “It is against our very nature, against everything we are.”
“Then it sounds like everybody agrees with Rosier,” I said sourly.
But she shook her head. “Almost no one does. Few understood his obsession with obtaining a half-human child, and even fewer can comprehend why he refuses to let that child live as he chooses. Yes, John could be an asset to the family if he would use his powers on our behalf. But if he will not . . .”
“Oh yes. The horror,” Casanova said bitterly. “His father wants him to live in the lap of luxury, surrounded by beautiful women, and be treated like a prince. And all he has to do in return is sex up a few probably gorgeous demons. But what does he choose instead?”
“To live his own life,” I said. “To not be prostituted out by his father to gain power for Rosier’s ambitions. Which he doesn’t have control over and which could be any damned—”
“Oh, please. We’re all cogs in someone else’s ambitions, whether we like it or not. That’s life. If you’re smart, instead of bucking the system, you get what you can out of it.”
“Yeah, if you’re a selfish son of a—”
“Don’t even try that, little girl,” Casanova snapped. “I’m selfish? What about your precious mage? We’re at war, in case you didn’t notice.”
“That’s the reason he’s here,” I said impatiently. “He saved me—”
“Yes, one person. And what about the rest of us?”
“What about you? What was Pritkin supposed to do—”
“He was supposed to realize that, if he would get his head out of his ass, bow that stubborn neck to his father, and ask nicely, maybe he could get us some allies worth a damn!”
“What are you talking about?”
“The demon lords,” Casanova said severely. “The demon council. Do you have any idea how much power they have?”
“Carlos . . .” Rian said quietly.
“You want somebody to win this war for you, to do it fast?” Casanova demanded, ignoring her. “That’s where you want to turn for help. But instead, what are we doing?” He flung out a hand. “We’re doing our best to piss them off!”
“Carlos—” Rian said, a bit more urgently.
But Casanova was on a roll. “Let’s look at the facts, shall we? The damned mage gets his back up, decides he doesn’t want to be a demon. So he comes to earth, forgetting that you don’t merely get to wave something like that away. You are what you are. Denying it is just a head game you play with yourself. But his head game resulted in a girl getting dead—”
“That’s not fair!” I said, glaring at him.
“Of course it’s fair. He may not have planned to kill her, but he drained her, didn’t he? Yes, Rian told me,” he said, at my outraged expression. “If I’m going to risk my neck getting him back, I deserved to know.”
“Yes, but, Carlos—” she said.
“I’m not finished yet. So now he has a dead wife, courtesy of abilities he’d never bothered to learn anything about. So what does he do? Decide that perhaps his father had a point? Of course not. He goes insane and tries to kill him—”
“Rosier knew what she was planning to do,” I said, furious.
The girl in question had been Pritkin’s wife, and a low-level demon herself. But unlike him, she hadn’t hated the demon world. She’d loved it, coveted it, wanted to be part of it more than anything. But she was barred from it because of her almost nonexistent power.
So she’d decided to augment that power—with some of Pritkin’s. I don’t know if that’s why she’d gotten with him in the first place or if there had been genuine affection there, as well. But if there was affection, it hadn’t been enough to stop her from initiating a power exchange on their wedding night, hoping to increase her own abilities and thereby her status in the demon world.
Unfortunately, it had backfired horrifically, and Pritkin hadn’t been able to stop it. He’d never had sex with another demon before and didn’t know the ritual she was using. And Rosier hadn’t warned him, despite knowing her intentions ahead of time.
“We don’t know what Rosier knew or didn’t know,” Casanova argued when I pointed that out. “She went to visit him before the wedding; who knows why? Perhaps she was attempting to get the two of them to reconcile. Perhaps she just wanted to meet her famous father-in-law. Perhaps a million other things. We don’t know—and neither did he!”
“I think Pritkin knows his father a bit better than you do!”
“All right, say I give you that. Say Rosier knew ahead of time, or guessed, what the idiot girl was planning. Does that somehow obligate him to tell his estranged son—the son who said he wanted to know nothing of their world, the son who swore he wanted to live as a human—a damned thing?”
“Yes! If he wasn’t a complete bastard—”
Casanova looked at me like I might be crazy. “Demon lord?”
“It was still a shitty thing to do.”
“And striding into hell to kill him wasn’t? How was that supposed to end well? And how is this?”
“Because this isn’t about Rosier,” I told him impatiently. “This is about the demon council. They’re the ones who sentenced Pritkin to enslavement by his father for the atte
mpted assassination. They’re the ones who can reverse it.”
“And why should they help you?” Casanova demanded nastily.
I took a deep breath, trying to keep my temper. Because he was an ass, but he was an ass with a point. If he was coming, he did deserve to know. And because we needed him.
Without Rian, we would never find Pritkin before Rosier’s forces found us, and without Casanova, she would be spotted and identified before she could help us. She was supposed to be on earth, not here. And it wouldn’t take anyone who had known her long to figure out why she’d suddenly decided to return home after avoiding it for a couple of hundred years now.
“You said it yourself,” I reminded him. “We’re at war. The council doesn’t want the gods back any more than the rest of us—”
“And giving you one man is going to prevent that?”
“It’s done a pretty good job so far!”
Casanova sneered. “It’s done a pretty good job against exactly one god, who was already seriously weakened when he got here thanks to what he’d had to do to get through your mother’s spell. And who underestimated you because”—he gestured up and down at me, and made a face—“he was overconfident and it got him dead. But I don’t think the next ones will be!”
“All the more reason to give me what I want,” I said, refusing to let him get to me. “It’s a small enough request; it cost them nothing; it asks them to risk nothing. But the rewards could be substantial.”
“Then why not ask them before we trooped in here?” he demanded.
“Because they can’t go into another demon’s realm! None of the council has the right to violate another lord’s sovereignty. And none of them are going to try it and risk setting a precedent that might be used against them someday. But if we can get him out—”
“If being the operative word.”
“—then they can tell Rosier it’s for the common good.” Or whatever they wanted to tell him; I didn’t care. But Mother knew demons better than I did, and she thought they’d go for it—if we could get him out.
And we were going to. Somehow. But the city that shimmered into existence on the horizon, dim and distant and faintly blue, had me wishing we’d brought an extra canteen. Because my mouth had suddenly gone dry.
“We shouldn’t fight among ourselves,” Rian said, a little sharper than her usual tones. Maybe because she was looking at the city, too. “If this goes according to plan, it should be a simple enough procedure.”
“And when does it ever?” Casanova groused.
Yeah. That’s what I was afraid of.
Chapter Fifteen
As Rian had predicted, we reached the city at nightfall. And once again I felt it, the massive disconnect between everything I’d ever known and everything I was experiencing. It had been happening a lot lately, dating from the first time I’d shifted, going from a world of electricity and glass skyscrapers and the rule of law, to one filled with torchlight and stone castles and the rule of one man’s caprice.
That had been a shock.
That had taken some adjustment.
This was worse.
The desert abruptly ended at a jagged cliff with an almost sheer drop-off down what looked like maybe a few thousand feet. A jumble of vehicles lay scattered around the entrance to a stone bridge way too narrow for my liking. It stretched over the precipice like a slender finger, too tight for anything but foot traffic. And on the other side, a triangular spar of land held a city so old and so massive it made human metropolises look like toys in comparison.
We lined up with everyone else, including their smaller animals and handcarts, and went across, while a wicked wind plucked at our clothes like hungry hands and howled a warning in our ears. It didn’t help that the damned bridge was open on the sides, with just a flimsy railing between us and an epic free fall. Someone up ahead didn’t keep hold of a fat barnyard bird, and had it torn out of her hands by the wind, to flutter out over the void for a second before dropping like a stone.
I didn’t watch it fall.
“Is something wrong?” Rian asked me, in Casanova’s voice. She’d merged with him a few miles out, making it harder to communicate, since they tended to talk over each other in the same body. But it was necessary. Inside a body, even her own people had trouble recognizing her. They could tell what she was, if they were paying attention, but not who.
At least, we really hoped they couldn’t.
“This . . . isn’t exactly what I expected,” I confessed, staring down to where a river blazed gold with the last light of whatever passed for a sun, cutting a vivid scar across faceless red sand. There were some little black specks on it.
I realized with a jolt that they were boats.
“What did you expect?” She sounded curious.
“Something more like the Shadowland,” I said, talking about the demon world where the council met and where Rosier had a small, secondary court for when it was in session. It wasn’t like earth, but at least it was nice and compact, a small trade city in a twilit world, with everything and everyone close at hand.
It could have fit into the plaza we stumbled into on the bridge’s other side.
Like the fortress that towered overhead, it was dull red and gleaming under the last of the day’s sallow light. It was also jam-packed despite the size, and noisy, with people chatting, animals bellowing, bells on hems and bridles jangling, and our camel shaking off a wheelbarrow full of fine red dust all over us.
Most people started lining up to be allowed past the massive, studded gate maybe ten stories high, which appeared to be the only entrance through the main walls. But we shuffled off to the side with a few hundred others who apparently needed a break. Shaking sand out of our hair and clothes, we joined a queue for one of the shallow fountains on either side of the plaza.
A lot of the camel things, and a lot of the people, were drinking right out of the enormous basin, but we waited while Rian used vampire agility to grab us refills from higher up, where the first gush of water split the rust-colored rock.
“This . . . isn’t good,” Caleb rumbled in my ear.
And the understatement of the year award goes to, I thought, staring blankly around. But mostly up, up, up, at the nine walls within walls that made up the colossal fortress towering above us. It was so big it blocked out the last of the light, casting long shadows that bathed everything in smudged ochre.
“Rose red city half as old as time,” Caleb murmured.
“What?”
“Just a quote about a city on earth once.”
“I’ve never seen anything like that on earth.”
“And you won’t.” For some reason, he didn’t look as impressed as I was. “Human society is too fluid to have built up something like that. It would have been razed at some far earlier stage by a conqueror, or made obsolete by new technology. That must have taken thousands of years to build by a people stuck in one phase of existence and not allowed to move on.”
“Maybe they don’t want to move on.”
Caleb shot me a look. “And maybe their overlords won’t allow it, since it would make them harder to govern. Harder to control.” His lip curled. “I’m beginning to understand why John hates this place.”
He looked like he’d have said more, but Rian was back, thrusting overflowing canteens into our dusty hands. I drank some water, swirled it around my mouth, and spat it out, trying to get sand to stop cracking between my teeth. It didn’t work.
“All right, now do you understand?” Casanova hissed. It was always easy to tell when he was talking; Rian’s careful, measured voice and graceful movements gave way to wilder gestures and harsher tones.
At least they did when he was talking to me.
I didn’t answer until we’d moved away from the crowd, closer to a small, built-up edge of stone, near the precipice. It was only about waist
high, and the wind was something else, so I kept to the right side of the camel thing. But it didn’t help; it felt like we might both go flying at any moment.
I squatted down, and that was a little better, mainly because I couldn’t see the drop-off anymore.
“Now do I understand what?” I asked.
“Now do you understand how stupid this is?” Casanova demanded, squatting in front of me. “We need to get out of here before anyone recognizes us!”
“Recognizes?” I gestured around. “There’s got to be two, three thousand people just on this damned platform.”
“Yes, so with our luck, that should buy us about five minutes!”
“It’s not the recognizing that’s the problem,” Caleb said, his eyes on the gate. “They’re not checking everybody or even most people going in. It’s the getting out.”
“We’re not going to get out. We’re probably not even going to get in!” Casanova said, before Rian stopped his mouth with a canteen.
“We’ll get out like we got in,” I said, trying to reassure myself as much as them. “Mother said I should be able to open the gates between worlds, with or without the guard’s approval. It was her greatest gift.”
“Should be?” Casanova hissed, thrusting the canteen away. “You didn’t test it?”
“How am I supposed to test it, Casanova?” I hissed back. “Demons tend to take a dim view of people breaking into their courts!”
“Dimmer than Rosier when we try to steal his heir and then can’t get the hell out—”
The canteen was back.
“Mother said I could do it,” I repeated, slowly enough to hopefully get through that thick skull of his. “‘Should have’ was my phrasing and it was . . . poorly chosen. I’m sorry.”
I hoped an apology would calm him down, but of course not.
“If you’re sorry, then get me out of here!” he spluttered, shoving the canteen away and spraying water all over me.
“I’m not leaving him here!”
“He’s a demon lord! He can take care of himself! If he wants out, he’ll find a way—”
