Ride the Storm

by Karen Chance

  “What?” I asked, standing like a stork so I could examine my possibly broken toe.

  Jonas shielded his hand and plucked something disgusting from inside the Dumpster. It was iridescent purple and quivering, like a large piece of fresh liver. It didn’t smell like one, though.

  “That doesn’t help,” I said, now torn between holding my nose and my foot.

  “Concealment charm. Or it was. You press into it things you wish to hide—jewelry, keys—and it conceals them from detection spells.” He glanced at my foot. “And most people’s vision.”

  Great. Like I needed help killing myself. I edged around the sparks. “What else is in there?”

  “Junk,” he said, dropping the lid with a clatter. “The magical variety: old wards, potions, and amulets. They’re at the dangerous stage, with too little magic to properly hold the spell, but too much to be thrown away. The lot needs to be disenchanted, to release the remaining magic, but instead . . .”

  “Somebody threw them in a Dumpster.”

  “Your father.” Jonas glowered at the house. “He enchanted the inside of the receptacle, but it remains a serious risk. Collectively, there’s a good deal of magic in there, most of it unstable. I can’t imagine what he wanted with it.”

  “The same thing he wanted from the Black Circle,” I said, sitting on a nearby bench.

  “He told you?”

  “Enough.”

  Jonas sat down beside me.

  “It’s a long story,” I said, “but I’ll try to condense it. The Spartoi weren’t affected by my mother’s eviction spell, because they were demigods. That gave them a tether to this world, allowing them to hunt her. Her spirit is an essential part of the barrier spell, so they hoped killing her would bring it down and reunite them with their father.”

  “I know that,” Jonas said, sounding impatient.

  I ignored him.

  “Mother stayed ahead of them for a long time, but they finally caught up with her at the Pythian Court. She got away, with my father’s help, but they had money and connections, and there were five of them. It was only a matter of time before they found her again.”

  “So your parents took refuge here.” Jonas looked around at the dense forest, the wet ground, and the silvery moon, riding high above the trees. “There are worse places, I suppose.”

  “A lot worse. Most of the supernatural community ignores vampires. They’re seen as weird and dangerous, and they’re very distrustful of outsiders, especially mages. They aren’t the first place—or the second or third—where anyone would expect a human to go for help, especially not when the vamp in question is a vicious, two-bit hood like Tony.”

  “Then how did your parents manage it? As you say, vampires rarely trust a mage.”

  “A mage, no. But a necromancer . . .”

  “Ah.” He sat back against the bench. It was wet, but I guess when you’re dressed in a blanket, it doesn’t matter so much. “The one time being on the wrong side of the law is helpful.”

  “Yes. Tony always liked working with criminals, or at least those under suspicion. Gave them fewer options, and more reason to stay on his good side. Plus, Roger was a decent mage, and the vamps don’t get a lot of those.”

  Jonas nodded. Most of the mages the vamps were able to acquire—except for people like Mircea, who could afford the best—were pretty down-market. Tony had lost a lot of business through the years from spells that went wrong, because somebody hadn’t known what he was doing.

  “But getting close to Tony didn’t solve their problem, did it?” Jonas asked.

  “No. It bought them time, but the Spartoi were going to find them sooner or later, and without the Pythian power, my mother wouldn’t be able to fight them off.”

  “And she had a child to think about,” Jonas said, watching me.

  I stared at the moon, flirting with the branches of the trees. “She knew if they found out about me, I was dead. She also knew that she was dying, because of the starvation that had been dogging her for years. It had driven her to the Pythian Court, but even the Pythian power wasn’t enough anymore. It had sustained her, but it hadn’t repaired the damage. Nothing on earth could.”

  “Nothing . . . on earth?” Jonas said, and damn, he was quick. Quicker than I’d been.

  “My parents had a plan,” I confirmed. “But for it to work, they needed the Spartoi out of the equation. But they had no way to kill them. So they did the next best thing.”

  “Which was?”

  “They killed themselves—at a time when they knew the Spartoi would see it.”

  “I . . . beg your pardon.” Jonas stared at me.

  “Tony had ordered a hit on them,” I explained, “for refusing to turn me over as commanded. Roger knew the assassin he planned to use—they’d worked with each other before. And while Jimmy wouldn’t have been willing to walk away, he was perfectly happy to take a bribe to set up the hit at a time and place of my father’s choosing.”

  “I wasn’t referring to logistics!” Jonas stared at me. “You’re saying they wanted to die?”

  “Not wanted to, no. But it was happening anyway. Mother was dying and Roger wouldn’t leave her, so—”

  “I still don’t see how death was a solution to anything!”

  I shook my head. “You wouldn’t—no one would unless they were an expert on ghosts. It’s like my father told me the last time I was here—there’s no limit to how much power a ghost can consume. In bodily form, Mother would be easy prey. But as a hungry spirit?”

  Jonas just looked at me.

  “She knew her fellow gods,” I explained. “She knew they would likely try to come back separately, each of them wanting to rule it all. Which gave her a chance. She’d been able to drain powerful demon lords in seconds once. Why not a god, if he was distracted by battle?”

  Like, for example, with the very demon lords she’d helped me get on my side.

  I’d wondered why she’d been so insistent on talking to the council on Pritkin’s behalf, to the point of putting the Seidr spell on me so she could use my time-travel abilities to speak to them from beyond the grave. Yet she’d then spent most of that speech ignoring him, in favor of getting me powerful allies. It made more sense when I realized: she’d also been getting herself a powerful distraction.

  “But surely he would notice,” Jonas insisted. “And turn on her!”

  I smiled slightly. “Yes, he would turn on her. On a newly reinvigorated Artemis, full of stolen godly power, the same power that had weakened him. On the great huntress, the goddess who had torn swaths across whole demon armies; who had followed demon lords back to their home worlds and struck them dead before their thrones; who had single-handedly evicted the entire pantheon from earth and slammed the door behind them. And who knew she was literally facing the fight of her life.”

  Jonas blinked, absorbing that. “So your mother had to die . . . in order to live.”

  I nodded. “The gods aren’t like us. They don’t die so much as . . . fade, when they run out of power. And as damaged as Mother was, only absorbing the full power of another great god would be enough to bring her back. She could drain him dry and return to her old self, but not in the body she was in. It couldn’t absorb that much power fast enough. But a ghost could.”

  “And if you’re prepared to die anyway, why not let that death serve double duty and protect your child?”

  I nodded.

  Jonas frowned. “They were lucky, then, that Tony decided to kill them!”

  “Luck had nothing to do with it,” I said, and watched his eyes widen.

  He had no idea.

  “True seers are rare,” I reminded him. “And my parents had stressed my abilities enough that Tony’s desire for one was at a fever pitch. He didn’t really understand how visions worked then; I think he was under the impression that I could ju
st turn it on whenever he wanted, making him big bucks.”

  “And giving him reason to kill your parents?”

  “Not at first. But vamps don’t see things the way we do. My father worked for him; my mother and I lived on his estate; we were all under his protection. As far as Tony was concerned, I was already his. But when he commanded that I be brought to court, my parents refused.” I shrugged. “The outcome was predictable.”

  “It doesn’t sound predictable to me. To just assume—”

  I shook my head. “They didn’t assume anything. Tony had bugged the cottage—he was always paranoid—forcing my father to have to come up with a spell to control what he heard. But, for some reason, Tony had never considered that the reverse might be true. After all, who would be crazy enough to bug the office of a psychotic master vamp?”

  “Your father,” Jonas said dryly.

  “Yep. And Tony’s second-rate mages never found it. That’s the problem with cheaping out—you get what you pay for.”

  “But that left their child in the hands of a murderer,” Jonas said, sitting forward. And then cursing and drawing his blanket back around him, after it slid off one shoulder.

  “You sound so appalled.”

  “But . . . their child. In the hands of one of those things—”

  “That’s why it was perfect. Mages stick with mages. Deliberately putting a child into a vampire’s hands wouldn’t even occur to most people.”

  By Jonas’ expression, it clearly wouldn’t have occurred to him.

  “And they never intended for me to stay there,” I added. “The idea was for me to hide out at Tony’s for a few years, during which time he had every reason to keep me healthy, and then to be discovered by Mircea. My father had visited him, supposedly as Tony’s emissary, but really because he wanted to get a look at him—and at his security. He liked what he saw.”

  “But they couldn’t have known that Mircea would take you, or even find out about you!”

  Sometimes I forgot that, while Jonas knew more about magic than I probably ever would, he didn’t know shit about vamps. “Remember how I told you that Tony already considered me his, because a human who worked for him had me?” I asked gently.

  Jonas nodded.

  “Well, that applies doubly to vamps and their masters. Usually, someone like Mircea won’t come swanning in and just scoop up one of their children’s toys—it’s considered poor taste. But if that toy is a valuable asset—especially a game-changing asset like a possible Pythia? Hell yes, it’s gone. And Tony knew that.”

  “Yet he managed to keep you a secret for years.”

  “Because I was only four when my parents died. Tony essentially lost me at eleven, when one of his own people ratted him out to Mircea. It actually went pretty much like my parents had thought.”

  “Even with the Spartoi?”

  “Yes. They knew my mother was all but drained, and that seers rarely see anything true about themselves. As hard as it might be to believe that a second-rate gangster had managed to kill a goddess, if they saw it happen, and verified the reason—Tony said that Dad had been cheating him—well.” I flipped a hand. “They thought it would work.”

  “And it did.”

  “For a while. The Spartoi didn’t know of my existence, because Tony kept my identity a closely guarded secret. He was afraid that, if anyone ever found out who I was, they’d tell the Pythian Court and he’d lose his prize. And because I don’t think they expected it. Even after I surfaced again as Pythia, it took the Spartoi time to accept that the goddess most famous for her virginity had actually had a child.”

  “Still, they could have sent you to us! We’re the rightful guardians—”

  “And gotten me killed? We found a Spartoi in your organization, remember?”

  He scowled, but didn’t argue, because he couldn’t. One of the Spartoi, who could look human enough when they wanted, had infiltrated the Circle’s public relations office, because it got all the scandal first. They’d expected my mother’s spell to eventually unravel after her death, and when that didn’t happen, they’d started looking for a reason.

  But they’d never found me.

  My parents had hidden me well.

  “But surely, if the Spartoi saw your mother killed, it would have satisfied them,” Jonas said. “Why did your father also have to die? He had a child—”

  “Because he was the necromancer. His soul is what keeps them anchored here, just like it kept the spirits of his ghosts anchored in the crazy bodies he built for them. Just like the control crystal keeps a demon anchored inside a golem. Without him, my mother’s soul would transition beyond the confines of the barrier—”

  “Which would then fall.”

  “Yes.”

  Jonas looked faintly amazed. “They thought of everything.”

  “Except Tony taking the snare into another world. He’d been here for almost a century; there was no reason to think he would suddenly decide to leave. And if he did, that he would go into Faerie. It surprised even Mircea, who knew him better than anyone. No one expected him to suddenly join the other side in the war.”

  “Why did he?”

  “No idea. Like I still don’t know what my father was doing in that cellar in London, where Agnes nabbed him, if he wasn’t a tried-and-true member of the Guild. He won’t explain that, like he won’t tell me what he and Mother talked about, that convinced her to release him. There’s a lot I still don’t understand.”

  “Such as who made the trap for your parents’ souls?”

  I glanced at him, slightly surprised. “No, I know that. So do you.”

  “I do not.”

  “Jonas,” I said gently. “You just saw him working on it.”

  “That—” Jonas’ eyes flew back to the house.

  “When Dad said no, you can’t have my baby daughter, no, I won’t bring her to court, Tony freaked. Nobody told him no. Well, maybe Mircea, but no human. And certainly not one in his service. So he waited awhile, then told Roger he had a problem with an associate and wanted an unusual kind of revenge. He wanted a snare, one that was impossible to break out of, one like Dad had mentioned to him once, months before. He thought it would be amusing to have Roger create the trap for his own soul.”

  “So your father made the snare—”

  “No, my father made the talisman.” I pulled Billy’s necklace out of my shirt. “Like this. Only much more powerful. One that could sustain my parents’ souls while they waited for the gods to return. But a goddess’ soul takes a lot of feeding, even as a ghost, so the talisman had to be able to draw many times the usual amount of life energy from the world.”

  Jonas finally looked like something had made sense. “That’s why Roger joined the Black Circle—to pillage them.”

  I nodded. “He joined after Mother released him from jail. He needed a fantastic amount of power to create such a talisman, and didn’t know where else to get it. It worked pretty well—he got most of what he wanted before they discovered what he was up to.”

  “And the rest he took from these . . . things?” Jonas gestured at the Dumpster.

  I shrugged. “It’s what he knew. And how he persuaded Tony to work with him. Magic can be sold, if you’re willing to take the time and risk to extract it from what other people view as junk. And the more unstable it is, the more profit there is in it. It also gave him and Mom a reason to live separately from the main house, because of the risk of blowing it up. And since Tony knew shit about magic, Dad could siphon off a good deal of power from the stuff he was sent with no one being the wiser.”

  “But why give the talisman to Tony?” Jonas persisted. “Wouldn’t it have been better to bury it somewhere? Put it in a safe-deposit box? Stick it in a wall? Why deliberately give it to that maniac?”

  “It’s a powerful magical object, and there are plenty of peo
ple who could sense it,” I reminded him. “Bury it and it could be dug up. Put it in a safe-deposit box, and it could be stolen. Place it in a wall, and said wall might be knocked down. But Tony loves his trophies, and is well equipped to protect them. And with him, there wasn’t any risk of the holder dying and the talisman passing to someone who might want to disenchant it. Vampires are the closest things the world has to immortals anymore. Especially paranoid ones like Tony.”

  We sat in silence for a moment. I don’t know what Jonas was thinking, but I wasn’t thinking much of anything. The successive shocks of the last few days had left me almost numb. Which was better than the alternative, better than going over all the might-have-beens, all the ways in which everything could have gone so differently. If the gods hadn’t fought back quite so hard, if Tony had just stayed put, if Apollo had returned, full of rage and vengeance, and been met, not by a bunch of demons, but by one very hungry, very determined, goddess . . .

  But he hadn’t.

  My parents had had a good plan, but it had failed. And now we were left picking up the pieces. Which would have been a lot easier if they would listen to me. But Roger had made it clear that that wasn’t happening, just like Mother had the last time I was here.

  They’d seen me now; they knew that part of their plan had worked.

  They just didn’t understand—it wasn’t the right part.

  I realized that Jonas was looking at me. “We’re not going to get any help, are we?”

  “Not from my parents. What help they could give us, they already have. This is our fight, Jonas.”

  We listened to sparks ping off the inside of the Dumpster for a while. “I wanted to thank you,” he finally said.

  “For what?”

  “Your warning. About the Black Circle. Caleb arrived with it just before they hit. If we hadn’t been prepared . . .”

  “I didn’t send him with a warning.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  I took a breath. “I sent him to steal from you. The potion, if he could get it, or the recipe if he couldn’t. I guess he decided to talk to you instead.”

  He bowed his head. “How did we get here?”