by Karen Chance
We needed to get gone, I thought, as the warning bells ramped up a notch.
We needed to get gone now—
And then a blade appeared at my throat.
I looked up to see what looked like a gorgeous avenging angel: dark hair blowing like a banner; blood splattered, long, white dress hugging a figure more elegant than mine; and a silver, scimitar-like blade held in one dainty hand.
She said something, but this time, I couldn’t understand her.
“I don’t—I don’t speak, um, whatever it is that you’re speaking right now,” I said, wanting to feel around in my ear for the little silver whatever, but too afraid to move.
I also wanted to shift, but wasn’t sure I could. I should have been out of juice ten minutes ago! But it didn’t matter, because this time, as soon as I reached for my power, she waved a hand—
And shut. It. Down.
I blinked, pretty sure I was hallucinating—a couple of those goat hooves had connected pretty hard—but I didn’t get a chance to worry about it. Because the next second, she was jerking me up to her face, the front of my nightgown in one hand and the wicked looking blade at my neck. And yelling something at me—
That, all of a sudden, I could understand. But not because of the translator. The words were in her own voice, but didn’t match up with her lips.
Translation spell, I thought, and breathed a sigh of relief.
Until I felt the blade bite into my flesh. “Where?”
“Where what?” I half shrieked, panicked.
“Where is my child?”
“What?” I stared at her for a moment, not understanding. And then I got it. She thought I was working with the Svarestri, probably because I hadn’t had a chance to introduce myself. And Mircea didn’t seem to be around to do it for me, damn him! “Um, I don’t—”
The blade bit deeper.
I felt warm blood trickle down my neck, heard the alarm bells clamoring, now so loudly that they almost deafened me, saw my life flash before my eyes—
Or maybe that was the crap ton of fey now jumping for the roof.
Because I guess the ring of staring peasants had clued them in.
I found myself abruptly released, and somehow ended up fighting alongside Elena, on the top of what had been a high-pitched roof and was now more like a haystack with a lot of holes in it. Fey fell through the holes, not that it mattered because they bounced right back up again, like they had springs on their feet. Which wouldn’t have been so bad except they also had swords in their hands—or knives, clubs and arrows, the latter from those still on the ground who preferred to kill us from afar.
And they were making a pretty good attempt, because these weren’t crap, red-shirt types, there only to die. Mircea and Elena had made them look that way, but that had been a handful in the close confines of the house. There were a lot more here now, and they had plenty of room to maneuver.
The only reason I wasn’t shish kabobbed a dozen times was vampire reflexes, which slowed the chaos down to maybe a quarter of the normal speed. Which, considering how fast the fey moved, was still freaking fast! And still damned scary, because there were so many of attackers, converging on us all at once.
I won’t even lie; I sort of lost it. A few moments before, I’d been happily shucking clams—well, maybe not happily—and watching a possibly crazy dog chase its stubby excuse for a tail. Now I was fighting for my life, barefoot and in a nightgown, and my brain was having a hard time with it. The last summer notwithstanding, it was busy shrieking that this shouldn’t be happening!
No shit, I thought, and went ham on some fey.
“What are you doing?” Elena yelled, looking puzzled at my fighting style.
Which made two of us. One minute, I was tapped out, tossing the feys’ own fallen shields, helmets and weapons at them, trying to do some damage through vampire strength, because that was all I had left. And the next, I was lobbing time spells, not in full, but little balls of them at whoever lunged at me. One caught a Svarestri square in the face and went boiling through his head, aging the flesh to dust and leaving me looking through his now empty skull for a second, at the torch wielding crowd below.
He fell backwards off the roof, and into a hail of arrows that were meant for us. I caught the remainder with another spell, but hadn’t had time to aim and it was just a glancing blow. But it was enough to disintegrate a few, and to shave the feathers off one side of some more, sending them off course and into a Svarestri instead of me.
He nonetheless took a swing at me, despite looking like a porcupine, which I blocked by a strand of the Pythian power, the same type that I’d used to rope a badly behaving master vampire to a tree. It worked on the fey, too, it seemed, especially with vampire strength behind it. The rope wrapped around his blade and stopped it cold.
But then, he had two hands, didn’t he?
And while mine had been preoccupied with the rope, he had fished a knife out of his boot. I hadn’t seen it, half speed or no, but someone else had. A foot kicked out and caught him, just as he was trying to plunge it home, straight into my belly. It went into his instead and he fell off the roof, a look of surprise on his face.
Probably matching the one on mine.
I looked up at Elena, whose boot it had been. “Uh, thanks.”
“You’re not with them.”
“No, I’m with—”
“Mircea.” It was grim.
I didn’t get a chance to answer. But that wasn’t because of the fey this time. Suddenly, the very flammable straw of the roof had a couple dozen torches lobbed at it, streaking through the night sky like shooting stars. And catching immediately on the dry tinder we were standing on.
Or had been standing on, I corrected, as our part of the roof caved in.
Screw this, I thought, and grabbed Elena, just as we hit down hard. I somehow managed to shift us into the woods, where we hit down hard again, because the previous jolt had wobbled my concentration. And, this time, I didn’t get back up again.
I just lay there, my cheek in the dirt, watching the hut go up like a bonfire, sending flames and sparks shooting skyward. The townsmen—damn them—started to run, having finally gotten a good look at the strange, silver-haired warriors attacking their village. And that was despite the fact that none of the fey were looking for them.
They were looking for us.
And then I was snatched off the ground by a crazed looking, half naked, master vamp. “We have to go!”
“We have to stay,” I slurred, because my mouth didn’t seem to work right.
“She hit down hard,” Elena said, a hand on his arm. “I think she needs a moment.”
“We don’t have a moment! The Svarestri are starting to move into the woods!”
It was true. There was only maybe a dozen left, but they had dropped to the ground, hands digging into the soil, and they were doing something.
And, knowing them, it wasn’t anything good.
“Oh, look,” I said, watching the ground around the little hut start to move. A sunburst pattern formed in the dirt, which seemed appropriate considering the conflagration going on in the middle. And then it started to radiate outwards, like the sun’s rays. Or like dozens of moles tunneling underground.
And tunneling fast.
Mircea said a bad word and scooped me up.
“Can’t you shift us?” I said, my head flopping against his shoulder.
“Not with you leeching all of my power! I don’t have a family in this era. I have nobody to draw from!”
“What?” I said.
“This era?” Elena said.
Mircea ignored both of us and took off, looking harassed and wild-eyed.
“You didn’t hear that,” I told her, and she shot me a side eye.
“What is this ringing in my head?” Mircea snarled, jumping over a tree trunk and causing my head to bounce.
“A warning. We changed time. Or we’re in danger of doing it or something,” I said, not caring ve
ry much at the moment. I just wanted to—
“Don’t go to sleep!” he ordered. “Don’t you dare!”
“You’re not the boss of me.”
There were some more bad words spoken. “Even half dead, you’re a smart ass!”
“I’m half dead?” I repeated. Nice of someone to tell me.
Mircea swore and sped up, although it felt like we were flying already. Trees sped by in a blur, the wind caused my hair to fly everywhere, and the moon seemed to turn into a long, silver streak behind the trunks.
Or maybe that was me. My perfect eyesight didn’t seem so perfect anymore. Kind of like the rest of me.
I started wondering if I’d hit another tree root when we slammed into the ground.
Then I started wondering how Elena was keeping up with a speeding master vampire, who could have given a sportscar a run for its money. But then, I’d have to ask how she’d done everything else, and I frankly wasn’t up to it. I tried to close my eyes, just for a second, and Mircea yelled at me some more. And shook me, which made my head hurt, which made me start to cry and him to swear on pretty much an ongoing basis. Because this was going about as well as these things usually did.
And then we stopped.
“Wait,” Elena said, her hand on Mircea’s arm. I got the impression that she’d been the one to stop us, but didn’t know why.
And it looked like Mircea didn’t either. “We have to get past them!” he hissed.
“No, we don’t.”
She nodded at the moles, or whatever they were, which were right on our heels. But there weren’t enough of them to stay in tight formation anymore. The further we’d gone from the house, the more territory they’d had to cover, with the rays of the sunburst getting farther apart as a result. Leaving us in the free space in the middle of two of them.
Mircea put me down near the trunk of a tree. He wasn’t breathing fast because vampires don’t breathe, but he looked winded, anyway. Or maybe he was just worried. His voice sure sounded like it when he said my name.
“Hm?” I looked up at him vaguely.
“Cassie. Cassie, can you hear me?”
“Stop doing that,” I said, because he was snapping his fingers in my face. I tried to push them away, but I missed.
I didn’t care about that, either.
“Cassie. Cassie!” He sounded like he was shouting, yet I still couldn’t seem to hear him properly. There was a rushing in my ears, and a thickness in my throat, and a lethargy in my limbs. I didn’t feel good, I decided.
And whatever Mircea was doing wasn’t helping.
I felt him put hands on the sides of my face, felt him push power into me. But despite the fact that he was a gifted healer, it being one of his master’s powers, it wasn’t enough. Darkness swamped me, wrapped me up like a smothering blanket, and pulled me down.
“Cassie!” I could barely hear him at all now.
And then the darkness closed over my head, and I was lost.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
“Well. Here we are again.”
I blinked my eyes open and had a serious case of déjà vu. For a moment, I wondered if the stampeding goats and magical moles and torch wielding mob had been a dream, and I was only just now waking up at Gertie’s. Because the sun was slanting in through the drapes, just like before, although it looked to be at a different angle. And there she was, sitting at my bedside, in the same outfit she’d been wearing earlier.
But then I tried to sit up, and oh . . . oh, no.
“I’d take it easy, if I were you,” she said, as the room spun wildly around me. “You have quite a lump.”
I put a hand to my throbbing head, and felt something the size of a pigeon’s egg over my left ear. It was sore as hell, which worried me less than the fact that the room was still moving. I lay back on the pillow and closed my eyes.
“You followed me.”
“Fortunately,” it was dry. “Blanking all those memories and stitching time back together was a bit of a challenge, even for me.”
“Thank you,” I said, and meant it. I didn’t know what the hell I’d have done, otherwise.
“No thanks are needed. It was part of my responsibility as your trainer.”
“Your responsibility was to bring her back alive!”
That was Rhea’s voice. I opened my eyes again and saw her standing in the doorway. Her face was white and strained, and she looked like she’d been running fingers through her hair. Either that, or some of the wonky Edwardian electricity had shocked the crap out of her.
I sighed inwardly.
It would be nice to go one day without freaking out my acolyte.
“Which I did,” Gertie said mildly, responding to the accusation.
“But you didn’t help her!” Rhea said furiously. “You said so yourself. If that vampire hadn’t saved her—”
“That is the risk, for any Pythia.” Gertie glanced over her shoulder at the trembling girl. “Particularly for one who travels alone. But then, she doesn’t have a choice, does she?”
“That’s enough!” I said, but Rhea had already fled.
“Excitable little thing, isn’t she?” Gertie asked, looking back at me.
“When she’s defending others, yes!”
“But she didn’t defend you. She wasn’t there to defend you—”
“And you know damned well why!”
“—although you seemed to be doing that well enough yourself, until you fell on a rock.”
I had been about to interrupt again, but that caught me off guard. “Was that what it was?”
She nodded. “Your precision is off. We need to work on that.”
“Yes, but—but that’s not the point—”
“Oh?” She looked at me politely. “What is the point?”
“You need to stop antagonizing Rhea! She feels bad enough as it is—”
“She needs to feel worse,” Gertie said, unrepentant. “Badly enough to change or to leave. Either would be preferable to this perpetual indecision.”
“—and she’s right!” I said, getting angrier as I started to remember everything. “I appreciate your help, I do, but we almost died! All of us! Why even come at all if you—” I broke off, as light dawned. “You wanted to see what I’d do. About Mircea.”
“Consider it another test.”
“And that was more important than saving my life?” I stared at her.
“I won’t always be there to save you,” Gertie pointed out. “You have to learn to manage on your own. To take initiative, to figure things out, and to make solutions out of nothing if you have to. That’s what a Pythia does. You have the skills, Cassie, but you’re like your acolyte; you don’t know that you do.”
I tried to respond to that, but Gertie wouldn’t let me.
“You wanted me to train you?” she demanded. “Then you must first understand this: all the resources of the Pythian Court, all the accumulated knowledge of centuries, all the wealth of power gifted by a god, no less, are nothing, are useless, on their own. They are tools, Cassie. You are the craftsman who wields them into solutions that nobody else would think of, that no one else could find.
“The Pythian Court, all of this, is here for one reason: to find that one person, that perfect candidate, to take on the mantel of power, and lead when others merely follow, and wield all of those tools. You have what it takes, but you don’t believe in yourself or trust your vision; you therefore wait for other people to take the reins and drive the carriage, without realizing—there are no other people!”
“I—I take initiative,” I said, a little taken aback, because that had been the most vehement I’d ever seen her.
“At times,” she agreed. “When you’re forced into it. As I said, you can do the job, and do it well. But you continue to act like a follower more than a leader. You wait until you have no other choice, when some great crisis motivates you, to act. A better plan is to head things off before they become a crisis—which brings us to the vampire.”
That had me sitting up again, because I’d managed to totally forget—I wasn’t the only one Gertie had rescued.
If she had.
“Did you kill him?” I said breathlessly. “Tell me you didn’t kill him!”
Gertie sighed, and rearranged her skirts. They were dark blue, with dark red cherries all over them. You had to give her credit: she had a theme, and she stuck to it. It was the same tenacity she showed in everything else, which was why I was clutching the bedcovers in fear.
“From what I understand about this spell, it links the two of you,” she said mildly. “Creating, in effect, one metaphysical being with two bodies. If I had killed the vampire—”
“It would have killed me, too.”
I felt vast relief flood my system, even though I’d already known that. Or I should have; it seemed like my brain was still waking up. And wondering what the other half of the equation was, because I knew she hadn’t just let him go.
“Where did you put him?” I rasped.
“Where he should have been all along.”
Chrono cell.
I started to get up, as crappy as I felt, because Mircea and I had to have a talk. But Gertie’s hand was on my shoulder. “He isn’t going anywhere,” she told me, “and you need to rest. But we have to have an understanding.”
I stared at her, already knowing what she was going to say. “Gertie. This is my problem—”
“No, it is my problem. You are my student; you put yourself under my tutelage—”
“Gertie—”
“—so that I might train you how to be a Pythia. I told you before; it is not an easy job. It requires things of us, changes us—”
“I’m not going to let you kill him!”
“At the moment, I can’t,” she agreed. “But we are working on a way to break that inconvenient spell. You have until we find it to resolve this. And this is not a test, Cassie.”
“Then what is it?”
“Consider it a professional courtesy.” The brown eyes were calm and steady on mine. “You may tell him that, if he shifts again, he won’t be dealing with you, he will be dealing with me. And I shall end this.”
