by Karen Chance
I hadn’t seen him until his glamourie melted like dripping paint, showing pieces of him scrambling through the garbage on the alley floor. He was still trying to run, but it wasn’t going well. He kept tripping over his feet, getting up, taking a few awkward steps, and then falling back down again. Until he abruptly stopped, threw back his head and screamed.
Suddenly, I was grateful that there was so little light, that he’d made it into the shadow of the building, that I couldn’t see details of what was happening. Because what I could see was bad enough.
A wave of hair sprang from his head, going gray streaked and then solid gray and then pure silver-white as it snaked over his shoulders, pooling in the mud and grime caking the cobblestones. At the same time, the body under the long leather coat began to move in odd ways, bucking and writhing, although his hands stayed on the ground as if glued. And then the wave ate through the coat, disintegrating it like it had been dumped in acid, and what was underneath—
“Don’t look at it,” Mircea said harshly, pulling me back.
But I couldn’t not look. Skin darkened and then peeled away in patches, muscle thinned and browned, nails sprouted long as talons and a cascade of what I recognized dully as ropy intestines hit the cobblestones with a splat. And then the face lifted, the mouth still open but no sound coming out anymore.
No, of course not, I thought blankly.
It’s kind of hard to scream with no vocal cords.
And then my paralysis broke and we were pelting back toward the street, just ahead of the tidal wave boiling toward us. Mircea threw us into the road and then slammed us back against a building all in one quick movement. I stayed there, nails biting into the cold stones, as the wave shimmered through the air right past us.
I still couldn’t see it, other than as a vague distortion against the night. But I didn’t have to. I could see what it did well enough.
The sidewalk in front of the alley cracked and splintered, and the section of roadbed beside it suddenly rippled like an angry sea. The individual stones began moving up and down like keys on a piano, the whole expanse to the other side dancing as the mortar between the pieces crumbled and age pushed them out of place. It was like watching hundreds of years of wear happening in seconds.
But it didn’t stop there. A lamppost across the street began to writhe, the metal twisting and groaning as rust surged up the sides. The lamp on top cracked and then shattered, before what was left of the structure tumbled into the road, exploding against the uprooted stones.
But it didn’t stop there, either. The fence around a grassy area disintegrated in a pouf of bronze rust, glimmering in the moonlight like fairy dust. Flowers in a small bed bloomed and died and bloomed again, pushing upward against the snow as the sticklike sapling they hedged suddenly shot toward the sky. Limbs bulged, bark flowed and leaves sprouted in abundance. Acorns rattled down like rain as the leaves changed and fell and sprouted again, piling up around the rapidly thickening trunk like a mountain.
I blinked, and when I looked again, it was at a fully grown tree, branches huge and rustling, spreading luxuriantly against the night where a moment before there had been only sky. I stared up at it, the breath coming fast in my lungs, because no way. No freaking way.
I’d been willing to take the shifting thing on faith, to believe that maybe the mage had somehow learned a spell the others hadn’t, or had a special talent that allowed him to control the needed power, or had just gotten really lucky. But that? That was the sort of thing that only a Pythia could do—and a damned well-trained one at that.
Or a well-trained Pythian heir.
My head turned on its own, and I found myself staring at the darkened mouth of the alley again. It looked a little different now, the bricks on either side of the entrance cracked and discolored and in some cases missing altogether, crumbled into dust. But there was no sign of the mage, nothing to show that a man had ever been there, much less that he had suffered and died on those stones. It was almost like nothing had ever happened.
But it had.
And my mother had done it.
“I believe it has stopped,” Mircea said softly, examining a nearby fountain. As far as I could tell, the wave had done nothing more than add a little to the verdigris etching over the elaborate metalwork. It should have made me feel better, because I’d had no clue how to counter it if it had just kept going.
But it didn’t.
“Why would she help him?” I asked harshly.
Mircea looked up. I couldn’t see him very well with the only nearby lamppost now a bunch of rusted shards in the street. But he didn’t sound surprised when he answered; he’d probably been thinking the same thing. “He must have her under a compulsion.”
“But . . . why bother? If he could make her do anything, he could order her to kill herself! He doesn’t need—”
“If he wished to kill her, why not do so at the party? Why take the risk of trying to control power like that?” He sounded slightly awed, as if he’d never before seen precisely what a Pythia could do. And maybe he hadn’t.
It sure as hell was news to me.
“Why take her at all, then?” I demanded.
“As you said, the Guild exists to disrupt time. But their power is insufficient to allow them to travel where they wish. And even when they manage to collect enough, through whatever means, for a shift, there remains the problem of controlling it. Perhaps they decided—”
“That it would be easier to get themselves a pet Pythia,” I rasped. “To act as their goddamned cab ride!”
“It would make sense.”
I didn’t say anything. But I had a sudden, vicious image of the mage, kneeling in place in that alley, hair shooting out of his head as his body slowly disintegrated along with his clothes. It was surprisingly satisfying.
“What do you wish to do?” Mircea asked, as a lone figure darted across the end of the street. One of the remaining mages, no doubt. I was going to have to get them back to their own time before they screwed up something here, whenever this was. But that would have to come later. Right now, my mother was top priority, or there wouldn’t be a later.
“I want to find her,” I said savagely.
“Then let’s go find her.”
Two streets over, we came to another alley that looked a lot like the first, except that the light spilling in the end of this passage was a dim, hazy gold. The sun hadn’t suddenly come up, so I assumed that the light was man-made. It went with the sound of horses’ hooves on cobblestone, the rattle of wheels, and the shouts of people hawking something nearby.
I didn’t see my mother, but I kind of thought she might have been by.
“What is that?” Mircea demanded, staring at a mage loping along in the shadows beside us.
His arms were pumping, his legs were working, and his long coat was flapping out behind him as if caught in a stiff breeze. Only he wasn’t going anywhere. He also wasn’t paying any attention to us, which wasn’t surprising.
As far as he was concerned, we weren’t there yet.
Mircea frowned and reached out a hand, as if to give him a push. Until my fingers tightened over his wrist. “Don’t do that.”
He looked a question.
“Time loop,” I told him shortly, moving closer to the mouth of the alley. I was cautious, staying well inside the shadows provided by some stacked crates. I didn’t think my mother could manage another wave like that so soon—if she could, the man behind us likely wouldn’t be alive. But I wasn’t sure. And that little demonstration earlier wasn’t something you just forgot.
I kept telling myself that it hadn’t been her, that she hadn’t chosen to kill him like that, that she hadn’t known. But it still sent chills rippling over my flesh. God, what a horrible way to—
“Time loop?” Mircea asked, putting a hand on my shoulder.
I jumped and almost screamed.
He lifted an eyebrow at me, cool as always. Like he regularly saw people disintegrate into
puddles of flesh. I licked my lips and told myself to get a grip.
“He’s stuck on repeat,” I explained, glancing back at the mage running his personal marathon.
“And that means?”
“That he’ll keep reliving the same few seconds over and over until the bubble fades or he breaks out of it.”
“He’s encased in a time bubble?”
“Yes.”
“Then why can’t I sense it?” Mircea asked, wrinkling his nose, as if he expected to be able to smell it or something.
I thought that unlikely. All I could smell was pee. The alley must serve as the local latrine.
“Did you sense the other one?” I asked.
“Not . . . precisely. But I saw something, like a current in the air—”
“Probably caused by the different weather patterns that piece of air was shifting through,” I told him, figuring it out as I spoke. “Rain, sleet, snow—on fast forward, they’re going to make it look a little weird.”
“Then you’re saying I didn’t actually see anything.”
“You can’t see time, just what it does.”
His fingers tightened. “Then your mother could throw a bubble over us and we would never see it coming?”
“Something like that,” I said grimly.
Mircea abruptly pulled me behind him.
“That won’t help,” I said, peering between the crates at a busy street. “If she hits you with something, I probably won’t know how to counter it. And without you, the mage can take me out easily.” He’d managed to throw a master vamp at a wall, so that was sort of a given.
“Then how do we fight something we cannot see?” Mircea demanded.
I glanced back at him. “By not getting hit with it in the first place.”
“And how do we do that?”
“I’m open to suggestion,” I told him honestly.
I actually had no idea what to do. I’d assumed that my mother would be resisting her captor, and that when we caught up with him, the fight would be three against one. I’d liked those odds; I’d been all about those odds. I wasn’t so thrilled with these.
Because I couldn’t manipulate time like that. I hadn’t known that anybody could manipulate time like that. And while I had to get only a finger on her to shift her away, I had to stay alive long enough to do it.
I also had to find her. But the light was lousy and the street was packed with people rushing home through the cold. Most were in dark colors—brown or black or dark gray—not electric blue. But outside the illumination of shop doors and gas lamps, pretty much everything looked the same. If she stayed in the shadows, she’d blend in perfectly.
But while I couldn’t see her, I could feel her rapidly getting farther away, the golden cord between us stretching like an elastic band. “She’s moving,” I said, and ducked out into the street.
Mircea didn’t try to stop me, but he looked less than thrilled. I didn’t say anything, because I wasn’t any happier. As if I didn’t have enough other reasons, I was freezing to death. Unfortunately, my coat was a century or so away.
He must have noticed me shivering, because he stripped off the jacket of his tux and put it around me. It was thin, but the wool was top quality and still warm from his body. I clutched it around me as we dodged a street preacher, a hawker selling roasted nuts and a seemingly endless line of wagons.
Despite the weather, it looked like half the damn city was out tonight.
And then I saw why when we came to a crossroads. Four streets, all of them busy, converged here. I was sure we were in the right area, but there was no way to know which road they’d taken. And if I guessed wrong, by the time we backtracked—
“Can you shift to her?” Mircea asked, as we stood on the street corner, trying to look four ways at once.
“No.” Spatial shifts had more restrictions than the time variety, and if I couldn’t see her, I couldn’t shift. “Can you track her?”
“I can try.” He did the eyes-closed, head-back-andmouth-slightly-open thing again while I huddled inside the coat and tried to be optimistic. But it wasn’t easy. Even in the cold, the place reeked. The streets were packed with horse manure, garbage rotted in the gutters, and the joys of deodorant were apparently unknown to most of the crowd. Add that to the smell of spilled beer radiating out of a nearby pub, and it wasn’t looking good. My only hope was that she would shift through time again, and I could catch up that way.
At least, I hoped I could.
The fact was, I was getting pretty tired. The stuff at the party hadn’t been fun, and then there’d been the small matter of shifting a century or so and taking someone else along for the ride. I didn’t know how many more shifts I had in me, especially of the time variety. And if I ran out of juice and she shifted again—
I decided not to think about that. Besides, she had to be getting tired, too. I didn’t know if she’d had anything to do with what happened at the party, although it seemed likely. But even if not, she’d just shifted herself and five other people more than a century.
I didn’t know how the hell she’d done that. Or, rather, I understood it technically—the mages had been too close when she shifted, and had ended up trapped in the backwash of the spell. That was what happened when I took someone along with me, only I usually had to be touching them to do it. But I’d accidentally taken Pritkin on a shift once without touching him, so I knew it was possible. But six?
Carrying just one person this far had felt like it was wrenching my guts out. I couldn’t even imagine doing five more. Not that the power couldn’t handle it; the Pythian power was pretty much inexhaustible, as far as I’d been able to tell. But the person channeling it was not. And then there’d been the time wave and the time loop and the haring across London and—
And I didn’t know why she wasn’t passed out on the damn sidewalk. But she had to be tired. She had to be.
Because if she wasn’t, we were screwed.
“This way.”
I hadn’t realized I’d closed my eyes, half dozing despite the cold, until a tug on my arm woke me up. I followed Mircea down the street, not saying anything because I didn’t want to distract him. But apparently he could track and talk at the same time, because he glanced at me before we’d gone five yards.
“Do we have a plan?”
“I need to touch her.”
“That is not a plan, dulceață; it is an objective.”
I frowned. “Okay, your turn.”
“If I get close enough, I can drain the mage and end this.”
He was referring to the ability of master vampires to pull blood particles through the air, without the need to do the Bela Lugosi thing. I’d seen Mircea drain a guy dry in a few seconds once, but while it was damned impressive, it wouldn’t work here. “He’ll have a shield up—”
“I can drain a man even through a shield. But it takes longer.”
“How long?”
“For the average mage . . .” He shrugged. “Thirty seconds to incapacitate; perhaps a minute to kill. But with stronger shields, war-mage strength, for instance, multiply that by five.”
I didn’t think the mage had that kind of shield, but what did I know? I hadn’t thought he’d be able to kidnap my mother, either. “So worst-case scenario, two and a half minutes to unconsciousness.”
“From across a room, yes. But if I am right on top of him . . . perhaps cut that by two-thirds.”
I didn’t stop moving, but I stared at him incredulously. “You can drain a war mage to unconsciousness in fifty seconds—through his shields?”
“It depends on the mage, and I do not know this one’s capacities. But normally—”
“Normally?”
His lips quirked. “Let us say, it is what I would expect.”
I decided not to ask what he was basing that on.
“Still, two and a half minutes isn’t bad,” I said hopefully. “We might be able to keep them in sight for that long.”
“Yes, bu
t if I try it from a distance, he will almost certainly notice before I can incapacitate him. And then they will either shift away or attack.”
“And we can’t afford for them to do either.”
“No.” He looked frustrated. “Normally, I would call on the family to assist, but I have never cared for London and do not keep a residence here. And while I could borrow people from another senator—”
“We don’t have time.”
“No.”
“Then we’re on our own.” And for some reason, I felt the tension relax in my neck.
It must have in my voice, too, because Mircea looked at me narrowly. “Is there a reason you suddenly sound relieved ?”
“It’s not . . . relief exactly. It’s just that . . . well, it’s fly-by-the-seat-of-our-pants time, isn’t it?”
“And that is a good thing?”
“No, but it’s . . . sort of familiar.”
He closed his eyes. “Do you know, dulceață, there are times when I truly believe you are the most frightening person I know.”
I blinked. “Thank you?”
“You’re welcome.”
And then we didn’t say anything else. Because we spotted them.
Chapter Eleven
It wasn’t hard, considering that they almost ran us down. There were a lot of vehicles on the street—mostly small, two-wheeled contraptions with a covered area in front, a driver perched high on a seat in back, and a single horse. But there was only one being driven by a girl in an electricblue party dress.
And barreling straight down the middle of the sidewalk.
For once, Mircea didn’t have to pull me out of the way; the crowd was already doing that for him. It parted into two halves, surging into the road or back against the pub. Mircea and I ended up in the road, and then had to shuffle back even farther because the little carriage was weaving drunkenly all over the place.
I didn’t know how much my mother knew about horses, but I didn’t think her driving was the problem. That was more likely the two war mages in the coach behind her, firing spells that she was doing her best to dodge. She wasn’t entirely successful, which probably explained why the roof of her carriage was on fire, and why her horse had the walleyed look of the totally panicked.
