Tempt the Stars

by Karen Chance

  Bonus, I thought blankly as they kicked and thrashed and he sprang free, looking a little crazed.

  But not as much as Rosier when he spun toward me, and screamed something in a language I didn’t know. And every warrior in the place abruptly stopped. And looked up, too.

  And then came rushing straight at us.

  “Jodor,” Casanova breathed.

  I didn’t say anything, because I was struggling to get on my feet—why, I don’t know. It wasn’t like I had time to do anything, or even to form a plan. But it didn’t matter, because my legs weren’t taking orders, and my eyes kept losing focus and then something hit me on the head.

  But it wasn’t a guard.

  It was—

  “Good one,” Casanova breathed. And started rapid-firing bottles over the bar that we were somehow suddenly behind.

  I grabbed my throbbing head, which had connected with the underside of the bar top, feeling dizzy and confused and really pretty unwell. And saw the bartender stooped in a crouched position over by the wall, looking equally bemused. Maybe because he suddenly had nothing to be crouched in back of.

  Because we hadn’t moved to the bar; the bar had moved to us. But I hadn’t done it. And then someone came sliding across it, and someone else jumped on top of him, and—

  “Was that you?” I asked Pritkin, who was somehow over here now, on his back, his one good hand wrapped around his father’s throat.

  “The door,” he said, half-strangled, because the same was true in reverse.

  “No, I did the door,” I said, and hit Rosier over the head with one of our dwindling stash of bottles.

  “That door!” Pritkin rasped, his eyeballs rolling up.

  Which I took for a bad sign until I looked up, too.

  And was hit in the face by something hairy.

  I pulled it off and found a coil of rope in my hands. Weird, I thought. And then Rosier was somehow gone and Pritkin was looping it around my waist.

  I tried to help him, because his hand didn’t seem to work right. But then, neither did mine. “Wer’ we going?”

  “Out.”

  “Oh, good.”

  “Come on!” I heard Caleb’s voice and looked up again. And saw him hanging out of the bar’s front door, which was now opening out of the ceiling above our heads.

  And then I was being hauled on a fast ride up and out, onto the roof, where I landed on some nasty shingles that bruised my butt. And then froze it, because the Shadowland was always cold. But that was okay, because it cleared my head slightly.

  Enough that I realized that Pritkin and Casanova were still down there.

  I scrambled back to the edge of the door, where somebody else was on the rope, somebody heavy enough to cause Caleb to strain. I grabbed for the end of it, but before I could do anything, Casanova was climbing out of the opening.

  “I saved one,” he told me, looking a little disheveled.

  “What?”

  He hauled a bottle of hell juice out of the darkness and set it on the shingles. “Only one left.”

  The building shook as some kind of serious spell went off in the room below, and I grabbed his lapels. “Where’s Pritkin?”

  And then there he was, struggling to pull himself past the doorjamb with only one functional arm. But he managed, even before Caleb could help him, like he was in one hell of a damned hurry. And a second later I realized why.

  When the section of roof I was kneeling on suddenly caved in.

  I had a split second to see Rosier’s evil face and a forest of shiny swords and the floor all rushing up at me—

  And then my arm was almost snatched out of its socket when someone caught me.

  I looked up to find Casanova staring at me, as if he couldn’t believe he’d managed that, either. Especially one-handed, because the damned bottle was still clutched in the other. And then he was screaming and yanking me up and screaming again, because his feet were slipping on the widening edge.

  And then Caleb jerked him back and Pritkin grabbed me. “Run!”

  Which, yeah. But the cascade of old tiles and half-rotten ceiling beams and moldy plaster that had been the roof made it seem like we were running in place even as we pelted for the edge. Because the precipice was coming along with us, nipping at our heels.

  And then consuming them, in a boiling mass of debris, just as Caleb grabbed me and swung me up, which seemed the wrong direction but I couldn’t scream with a throat full of plaster dust. And then we were going down again, fast, but I couldn’t figure out why until—

  “Shiiiiiiit!” I screamed, finding dust no match for a zip-line ride down a sparking electric wire, dangling off the bit of rope Caleb had thrown over the top and speeding fast, fast, too damn fast toward a one-story building across the street.

  Which we reached just as a bunch of indigo guards burst out of the bar behind us, and took off like bats out of hell. Or servants of one very pissed off demon lord, anyway. And then I couldn’t see them anymore because we were running up some stairs, and then pelting across the second building’s flat roof and running to the edge and no, no, no—

  And then jumping across a too-wide cavern we almost didn’t make, Casanova’s feet slipping on the edge and his arms spiraling wildly, and me grabbing him and spinning around, and then Caleb grabbing me and all three of us doing a strange, death-defying dance on a two-inch ledge before Pritkin grabbed us and yanked us back.

  And then we were off again.

  “Where’s the council?” Caleb yelled as we pounded across the roof.

  “Less than a block,” Pritkin said, which should have been good news. Only he didn’t sound like it.

  It didn’t look like Caleb thought so, either. “What’s the problem?” he demanded.

  “That,” Pritkin said as we ran up to the other side of the roof.

  And yeah.

  This side had a fire escape going down, but it didn’t do us any good. Because the street below had suddenly decided it didn’t want to be a street anymore. And turned into a culvert.

  And then flip, a stone-walled garden. And hey presto, a sewage tunnel. It was shifting so fast, it was making me dizzy, and I wasn’t even down there. I couldn’t imagine trying to navigate a yard through the middle of a landscape that was constantly changing, much less a block.

  Only it didn’t look like someone wanted us to have even that tiny chance.

  Because the building suddenly shook all around us, like the aftershock from an earthquake had hit it. Only the earthquake was coming, not going. And tossing us up—

  And up and up and up some more, as the building sprang out of the ground, additional stories popping out of the earth like cars on a freight train heading straight into the sky.

  “Oh, shit,” Casanova said miserably. And then, “Fuck that!” as the bits of rope came out again.

  And this time, I was siding with Casanova.

  Because yeah, there was another electric line, attached to the side of the building. And yes, it had grown up along with the rest of this place. But the building was now a good fourteen stories up, making the line into an almost perpendicular plunge to a tiny pole way the hell down there.

  Which might not even be there in a minute, the way things were going.

  And then it wasn’t, as Pritkin waved a hand and the pole went scooting down the street-that-was-a-street again for the moment, weaving in and out of the crazy landscape like a skier on a hill, only to stop at the entrance of a large edifice at the very end.

  An edifice that looked like a municipal building, but probably wasn’t.

  “Oh God,” I said, with feeling.

  “Fuck that!” Casanova repeated, backing away.

  “It’s doable,” Caleb said staunchly.

  “In what universe?”

  “You have a better plan?” Pritkin asked, th
rowing his very thin and not-at-all sturdy-looking piece of rope over the line.

  “Yes! Anything that takes place on the ground!”

  “Man up,” Caleb advised.

  “I’m a vampire—”

  “Yet you’re afraid of heights.”

  “Yes!” Casanova said hysterically. “They’re one of the few things that can kill me! I hate fire and I hate heights!”

  “How do you feel about stakes?”

  “Very funny! Very goddamned—” He broke off when a familiar streak of red lightning tore across the roof and exploded against the lip of the building.

  “What are they doing?” he screamed.

  “Trying to get a payday,” Pritkin snarled. And I remembered what he’d said before, about having enemies, even at court. But damn it, Rosier was here—

  Only he wasn’t, I realized. There was no slick gray suit among the blue robes leaping from the other roof to ours. He must be down on the street, keeping the card flip going. And that meant—

  “Oh, shit!”

  And I guess Casanova agreed. Because he grabbed Caleb, who grabbed the other bit of rope. “No, Caleb takes Cassie!” Pritkin said. “You come with—”

  I didn’t hear the rest, if there was any, because I was being shoved brutally backward. I hit concrete hard, just as red lightning exploded where we’d all been standing, and part of the roof disintegrated into a mass of flying stone. I would have ducked and covered my head, but it was the part Caleb and Casanova had been standing on, and I was screaming and scrambling up and—

  And watching them zoom away along the slender lifeline that Caleb had somehow managed to snag even as they dropped. An almost dizzying wash of relief flooded me. They were going to be all right; as long as the line held, they were going to be—

  “Cassie!” There were spells going off everywhere, deafeningly loud, but I heard that and my head jerked around. To see Pritkin, lit for a second by unnatural spell light, and silhouetted against a massive ball of boiling energy coming this way. And then I was grabbing him because he couldn’t grab me and the rope, too, assuming he was able to grab it at all when I couldn’t even see it with all the weird jumping light—

  And then we were jumping, too, and falling, and the roof was exploding and—

  And there was a disorienting moment of free fall amid flying debris and hot, rushing air, and no, no, no, no, NO—

  But then we caught—a barely perceptible jerk on a filament of line that hardly changed the feel of things at all because this was almost free fall, too—a crazy mix of whistling wind and abject terror and pant-wetting desperation. And that was just the initial descent. Then we hit the curve at the bottom, where the line dipped almost all the way down to the street and I felt loose pebbles in the roadbed roll under my filthy toes for a moment, a completely surreal experience that would have lifted my heart to my throat if it hadn’t already taken up permanent residence there—

  And then we took off, our momentum shooting us up and forward at the same time, on a mad slalom down a constantly changing street.

  For a long moment, I couldn’t see anything but a rush of neon on either side, colorful streamers like kites in the night, rising and falling as signs and buildings sprang in and out of existence and taxis honked and people shouted at us or ran to get out of the way.

  But for some insane reason, I was laughing as we ran up a car’s roof, pushed off, sprang over top of a bus, swooped down on the other side right in front of another madly honking car, and then bounced up onto a red, double-decker bus that caught us just as our improvised zip line gave up the ghost.

  I hit the open aisle, still gasping on wild, insane, out-of-control laughter to match a crazy situation that couldn’t possibly exist, but somehow did, and it took me a second to realize that Pritkin was laughing, too. And then we were running down the spiral stairs and jumping onto the sidewalk and crashing into Caleb and Casanova as they ran up to us on the street.

  “Show-off,” Caleb said breathlessly.

  From there it was a short dash through the doors of the great building, and across a strangely normal-looking lobby, and down a not-so-normal looking hall, and then through a set of double doors—

  Into a seemingly endless dark oval, slick and seamless, and littered with stars.

  And a voice that crashed like thunder all around us. “Council is now in session.”

  Chapter Thirty

  I don’t know what I’d expected. Maybe a courtroom or a boardroom, something made to look comfortingly familiar to human eyes. But all that had ended at the door. I guess if you made it this far, you either weren’t supposed to need comforting or weren’t thought to deserve it.

  I wondered which category we fit in as I gazed around, trying to get a grip.

  It was a little hard, since there was nothing to grip on. It was like we’d stepped out of a spaceship into a star field, being suddenly confronted by a big, dark space and hundreds, maybe thousands, of versions of the light creature I’d seen on the drag. Some were small and dim, others large and brilliant, but I couldn’t tell if that had to do with power or if some were just closer than others.

  I couldn’t tell much of anything else, either, since I literally couldn’t see my hand in front of my face. There was plenty of light in here, but it didn’t seem to reflect on anything. It was like the space between the stars, limitless and black, just a featureless void.

  And creepy as hell.

  It was also really inconvenient. Not only couldn’t I see Pritkin’s face, or Caleb’s or even Casanova’s despite the fact that he’d been right beside me a second ago, but the utter darkness was playing havoc with my sense of direction. I kept thinking I was about to fall over but couldn’t seem to do that, either. Or maybe I already had. My brain kept sending me weird sensations, like maybe I wasn’t entirely vertical anymore.

  It sort of felt like we were floating, just random spirits washing along on the tide, me, the guys, a bunch of pissed-off demon lords . . .

  “We all float down here,” Caleb muttered, somewhere off to my left, as if he’d heard me. And yes, that’s what I need right now, Caleb, I thought viciously, Stephen freaking King. But, for once, my brain didn’t latch onto the prompt and start torturing me. Maybe because it already had that covered.

  It was so unbelievably quiet. After that initial statement, nothing else was said. I didn’t know if they were waiting for us, if we were supposed to do or say something, but nobody was. Including Pritkin, who had been here before, so presumably knew the drill. So I didn’t, either, but it wasn’t fun.

  I’d read somewhere that the human brain doesn’t do so well when deprived of the usual sources of input. Like when people go into those sound-deadening chambers that cut out normal background noise. It would seem like it should be restful, peaceful even, all that quiet . . .

  But after a few minutes, their input-starved brains start to freak out, because they need that kind of stuff for navigation and balance and to not start imagining monsters in the corners.

  Not that that was an issue here.

  But only because this place didn’t have corners.

  No, it just had a crap-load of things that went bump in the night and who didn’t like me much and who ate people anyway and who probably thought they were due some payback after everything Mom had put them through and—shut up, Cassie.

  Yeah. Yeah, that would be good. Except that when I shut down my mental babble, I started having trouble with the auditory stuff, half-heard whispers and distant, not-found-on-earth sounds. And odd rustlings, like if I could see behind the collective light show, what was there wouldn’t look entirely human. Or, you know, at all.

  And okay, maybe I’d been wrong.

  Maybe dark wasn’t so bad.

  And then it suddenly wasn’t anymore.

  Two things happened at once: my mother popped into the middle
of the huge space, shedding a large halo of light around her, and a massive power drain hit, hard enough to send me staggering.

  Not a normal I’m-so-tired drain, like the one I’d been experiencing lately . . . like ever since I visited her. And yeah, maybe I should have put that together before now. But this was worse, and also a lot more literal, as if all that power I hadn’t been able to access for things like shifting and fighting and saving my life had been welling up, like a wall of bright water behind a dam. A dam that had just been breached.

  And oh, crap.

  I could almost see it, a sparkling river of power flowing from me to her, curling around her feet in a glistening stream. Or maybe a flood because this was way, way more power than I used for shifting or stopping time or . . . or anything. Way more than I’d ever channeled at once before in my life.

  And that was despite the fact that she wasn’t really here. I could see stars through her on the other side, although she wasn’t a ghost. I knew ghosts. It was more like she was on an intertemporal version of Skype.

  And the signal was running straight through me.

  So it took me a moment to pull myself together, to pay attention to something besides the forceful complaints of my too-human body, and to notice—that she looked exactly the same.

  Okay, maybe not exactly. There were a few changes; the mane of bright hair was a copper flame in the darkness, the violet eyes were huge and luminous, the porcelain skin glowed like it had its own light source. But she was still dressed in simple white, she wasn’t thirty feet tall or a mass of boiling energy like the last god I’d seen, and she wasn’t carrying any of the props I suppose I’d subconsciously expected: bows, arrows, shield, crown. . . .

  It wasn’t that I was disappointed . . . exactly. It’s just that, well, we could have used a little intimidation factor right now. Instead, she took a moment to survey the scene and then smiled, almost coquettishly. “It has been a long time, my lords. Miss me?”