Embrace the Night cp-3

by Karen Chance

  It took me a moment to realize I wasn't drowning. The water came only up to my waist, but it was like ice and the cold shot right up my spine. Worse was the by-now-familiar billowing cloud of dust, trapping me in a choking haze. Instinctively, I sloshed farther away from the rockfall, trying to breathe, and found myself treading water. I grabbed a moss-covered skull that jutted out from the wall, my fingers finding purchase in the eye sockets. I held on, too grateful to be repulsed, gasping in great lungfuls of air.

  "Pritkin!" It was barely a croak, but a moment later the flashlight beam hit my eyes, blinding me.

  "Still alive?"

  I tried to answer, but my lungs decided this would be a good moment to expel all the foreign matter I'd breathed in, and I ended up heaving and choking. I lost my grip on the slimy bone and slid under the frigid water. For a long, terrifying moment, I was lost in an endless sea of black that immediately chilled me to the core. Then two broad hands were fumbling for a grip on my shoulders, pulling me back to the surface, reminding me where up and down were.

  "Miss Palmer!"

  I spat out a mouthful of limestone paste, the result of oily water mixed with dust, and gasped in some air. "Damn right."

  Pritkin nodded and flashed the light around, giving glimpses of a corridor where the floor rippled oddly and everything was suddenly shades of gray and pale, unearthly green. It looked like the entire lower levels had flooded. I can swim, but I wasn't in love with the idea of navigating a dark underground stream with barely enough headroom to breathe.

  "I'll deal with this," Pritkin said grimly. "Shift out of here."

  "And if they keep coming?"

  "I'll manage."

  And he called me bloody-minded. I took another breath to inform my lungs that asphyxiation would have to wait, and pushed back off into the flood. "Just swim."

  Pritkin didn't answer, unless you count a curse, although that could have been due to the spell that hit the water behind us, instantly raising the temperature from chilled to boiling. I screamed, and coherent thought fled. I didn't think, just grabbed his hand and shifted.

  A second later, we landed in the same corridor, but with no dust cloud, no mages and no flood. I'd been treading water in the other time, so I was only a few feet off the ground. Pritkin, unfortunately, had been floating, and he fell from a little farther. Like about six feet.

  He hit the rocky floor with a thud, a curse and a crack, the last from the demise of the flashlight. I tried to ask how he was, but a stitch was biting deep into my side and, for a long moment it was impossible to draw oxygen into my lungs. I slid down the wall to a seated position because my knees suddenly felt too rubbery to be reliable.

  "What happened?" Pritkin gasped after a moment. With no flashlight and no deadly spells zipping around, it was pitch-dark, but from the direction of his voice, it sounded like he was still on the floor.

  "I shifted us back in time," I managed to croak.

  I decided that it probably wasn't good that I was still feeling shaky and nauseated despite being this close to the floor and completely motionless. I couldn't figure out what was wrong. I'd shifted only twice today, once to get us to Paris from Manassier's cottage and once just now, yet I was exhausted. It looked like bringing another person along for the ride took a lot out of me. Too bad no one had bothered to give me the manual.

  "A little warning next time!"

  "You're welcome."

  "When are we?"

  I spit out more chalky-tasting dust. Now I knew why Lara Croft always carried a canteen. My body was dripping, but my throat was parched. I swallowed dry, while running through the mental Rolodex my power gives me. "Seventeen ninety-three."

  "What? Why?"

  "Because I didn't feel like being boiled alive?"

  "You could have shifted us back a day, a week! This is no bloody use at all!"

  Of course, I thought sourly, Lara Croft would also have some nice convenient techie thing to get her out of this. And a partner who wasn't a complete ass. I cautiously stood up and found to my surprise that I was only faintly dizzy. I strained my ears, but all I heard was my own harsh breathing and a faint drip, drip of water from somewhere.

  "Let's go," I said, fumbling around until I found Pritkin's hand. His skin was cold from the water, and his pulse was fast but not bad. Not, for example, like mine, which felt like it could burst a vein. I needed to make sure I didn't have to shift again anytime soon. Like for the rest of the week.

  Pritkin stayed where he was. "Go? Where?"

  "To find the Codex! I thought it might be nice to look for it without somebody shooting at us for a change."

  "An excellent sentiment. Except for the small matter of the Paris coven being one of the oldest in Europe. They may have abandoned this facility in our time, but in this era there are doubtless mages all over the place. Not to mention snares and traps. If we haven't already tripped a protection ward, we soon will!"

  "Do you have another suggestion?"

  "Yes. Shift us out!" Even in complete darkness I was positive I could see his glare.

  I sucked in a breath, more annoyed than I could remember—well, more annoyed than before John Pritkin, anyway. "Why didn't I think of that?"

  "You have shifted multiple times in a day before—"

  "And it wiped me out before."

  "You never mentioned that."

  "You never asked."

  There was a brief pause. "Are you all right?"

  "Yeah, peachy." I really hated his suggestion, but I couldn't think of a better one. "Let's at least clear the corridor first," I said in compromise. "Then I'll try to set us back a little early, before the fireworks start."

  It took forever to get down that corridor, not because of the darkness but because Pritkin was certain someone or something was about to jump us. But the only problems were the usual—heat, bad air and the fun of trying not to fall on the uneven floor or scrape off a little more skin on the wall. We finally came to a branch in the path and Pritkin stopped. "Are you certain you're up to this?"

  "What's your plan if I say no?"

  "Wait here until you say yes."

  "Then I guess I'm up to it." I don't suffer from claustrophobia, but I was getting really tired of those tunnels. I gripped his hand tighter, focused on our era and shifted.

  This time the world melted around us slowly, like paint dissolving in water, bleeding away in slow drips. I normally don't feel the passing of years, just a weightless free fall that ends with me whenever I planned to be. I felt it this time. Reality rippled around us in a nauseating, frictionless, gravity-free waver. I was suddenly grateful I couldn't see, because what I could feel was terrifying: For a long moment, I was a tearing stream of dislocated atoms, consciousness ripped apart, with a body that was so elongated it neither began nor ended.

  Then I snapped back into myself, only to have the whole process start again. There were snatches of conversation, a few notes of music and what sounded like another explosion or cave-in, all in quick succession, like someone flipping a radio too fast. And I finally realized what was happening. This trip wasn't one long jump, but a series of smaller hops, with us flashing in and out of other times as we slowly made our way back to our own.

  I could feel time, and it was heavy, like swimming through molasses. Pushing through the centuries was like running a marathon. In the dark. With weights tied to my legs.

  When we finally broke through, it felt like oxygen when drowning—shocking, unexpected, miraculous. I'd half expected to materialize underwater, but apparently we'd passed the flooded area, because I stumbled into a mostly dry wall. I sat down abruptly, tilting my head back, swallowing a relief so sharp it made me light-headed.

  Pritkin crawled over to lean against the wall next to me. "Are you all right?"

  "Stop asking me that," I said, then had to go very still to deal with the nausea. It felt like my stomach had been a couple seconds behind the rest of me, and when it caught up it wasn't happy to be there.


  "I take it that's a yes."

  I swallowed, still tasting dust, and told myself that throwing up would be very unprofessional. "Yeah. It's just…the learning curve can be a little rough."

  After a few minutes of sitting quietly with my eyes closed, I managed to relax and start breathing evenly. "You don't have to do this," Pritkin said. "I could—"

  "I couldn't shift out of here right now if my life depended on it," I said truthfully.

  "Your power shouldn't fluctuate this greatly," he told me, and I could hear the puzzled frown in his voice.

  "The power doesn't fluctuate. My ability to channel it does. The more tired I am, the harder it gets."

  "But it shouldn't be this difficult," Pritkin repeated stubbornly. "My power doesn't—"

  "Because it's yours!" Damn it, I didn't have the breath for one of our long, drawn-out arguments right now. "This isn't mine. I wasn't born with it. It's on loan, remember?"

  The power hadn't originated with the Pythias, who had once been the priestesses of an ancient being calling himself Apollo. I'd met him exactly once, when he'd promised to train me. So far, he'd paid that promise the same amount of attention he had my objections over receiving the office in the first place: none. Unfortunately, I didn't have anywhere else to turn.

  Unlike most Pythias, who had been trained for a decade or two on the ins and outs of their position, my intro to the office had lasted about thirty seconds—just long enough for the last incumbent to shove the power off on me before she died. And everyone else who might have given me a few pointers was under the control of the Circle.

  We sat there for a while in silence. I eventually summoned the strength to pull off my shoes and toss my waterlogged socks against the far wall, where they landed with little splats. It didn't help much because I just had to put the wet shoes back on.

  "Before you completed the ritual to become Pythia, your power controlled how and when it manifested," Pritkin said, as I dragged myself to my feet. I'd almost fallen asleep for the second time against his shoulder, wet clothes, hard floor and all. "Is that correct?"

  "Yeah. I was only allowed in the driver's seat after I bought the car, so to speak." Which was better than getting thrown back to another century every time I turned around, to fix whatever was about to get messed up—usually without having a clue what it might be.

  "Then you must start monitoring your endurance. Otherwise, you could become trapped in another time or overtax your system, possibly resulting in serious injury."

  "You don't say?" I started down the corridor, my feet feeling like they were encased in cement. "I'd have never figured that out on my own."

  "I am serious." Pritkin grabbed my arm, in his favorite spot, right over the bicep. I was probably going to have the permanent indentation of his fingers there someday. "You must begin experimentation, to discover your limits. How many times can you shift before you reach exhaustion? Does going farther back in time cause more of a drain than more recent shifts? What other powers over time do you possess?"

  "If I'm not letting someone piggyback along, three or four, depending on how tired I am to start with; hell, yes; and I don't really want to know," I answered him, in order. "Now, can we deal with the current crisis, please, and leave the twenty questions for later?"

  Pritkin shut up, but with a meaningful silence that said this wasn't over. I let him brood while I concentrated on not falling on my face. We felt our way down another dark, dusty corridor.

  We finally found the storeroom by the simple method of running into it. Or, to be more accurate, into the rusty iron-work gate that blocked the entrance. I backed up a few steps while Pritkin scuffled around. I heard a match strike and suddenly I could see. Watery yellow light filtered outward from a small lantern set in a niche, allowing him to check the area for booby traps. He didn't find any, which seemed to worry him more than the reverse.

  "What's wrong? Manassier said this place was abandoned."

  Pritkin ran a hand over his hair, which despite the water and the sweat and the limestone dust was still acting like an independent entity. "Can you shift yet?"

  "Maybe."

  "If anything goes wrong, you are to shift away immediately. Do you understand?"

  "Sure."

  Pritkin shot me a suspicious look, and I gave him my best bland expression right back. He'd asked if I understood, and I'd said yes. I hadn't agreed to anything.

  He smeared his finger across the door mechanism, cutting through an inch of dust and grime. Something clicked and he pulled back before cautiously nudging the door with his toe. It swung inward obligingly, but he hesitated on the threshold. "I don't like it. This is too easy."

  I personally thought easy was just fine. In fact, it was about damn time easy showed up. "Maybe our luck is chang—"

  Pritkin stepped into the room and disappeared with a strangled sort of sound. "Pritkin!" There was no answer. I knelt by the threshold, but there was nothing to see—only a small, empty cave, with no exit, and no mage.

  I got a death grip on the iron bars of the door and reached out. My hand encountered nothing but dusty limestone for about two feet, then disappeared into the floor. I snatched my arm back, but there didn't appear to be any damage. An illusion, then.

  I stretched out on the floor, closed my eyes and leaned over, to the point that my forehead would have hit stone if there really had been a floor there. When it didn't, I opened my eyes in blackness. After a moment, my sight adjusted to show me dirty fingers, white with strain, clinging to a shard of limestone three or four yards down. They were human, and below them, almost out of sight, was a familiar, spiky head.

  "Grab my hand and I'll shift us out," I called, hoping I could actually do it. The head snapped up.

  "What did I just tell you?!" Pritkin demanded.

  "Hi, I'm Cassie Palmer. Have we met?"

  Steel entered the suddenly soft tones. "Miss Palmer. Move away from the edge. Now."

  "I'm not going to fall in," I told him irritably.

  "Neither did I! There's something down here." I couldn't see Pritkin's face very well, just a pale blur against the shadows, but he didn't sound happy. Some people thought he had only one mode—pissed off. In reality, he had plenty of them. Over the past few weeks, I'd learned to tell the difference between real pissed off, impatient pissed off and scared pissed off. I suspected that this was the last kind. If so, that made two of us.

  That feeling amped up a few notches when he cursed and fired several rounds at something out in the darkness. The faint, acrid smell of gunpowder floated up to me as I wiggled forward, keeping my legs spread, hoping that if I distributed my weight over a larger surface I wouldn't cause a rock slide. I stretched until I heard something pop in my shoulder, but I wasn't even close. And if I couldn't touch him, I couldn't shift him.

  I bit my lip and stared up at the floor that wasn't there. It was kind of odd seeing it from this angle, as if the ocean's surface had been smeared with dirt and pebbles. It didn't help my concentration, so I pulled back up to a sitting position and stared at the top of it instead.

  Once upon a time, my reaction to scary things had been to run and hide. It was an effective strategy for staying alive in the good old days when all I had to worry about was a homicidal vampire. The difference between then and now was that once upon a time I'd had problems I really could outrun. Now I had duties and responsibilities, the kind of things that are always with you. There were about a dozen nightmares vying for the top spot every day, each of them spectacularly horrible in its own way. And right at the top of the list was the fear that I'd have to stand by and watch another friend die trying to help me.

  I was suddenly really glad I couldn't see the bottom.

  The rock felt crumbly under my fingers as I slithered over the side. Or maybe that was my hands shaking. A cascade of small rocks disappeared beyond the illusion and some of them must have hit Pritkin, because I heard him swear again.

  "What the hell are you—"

&nbs
p; "Sheer bloody-mindedness, remember? And can you see my leg?"

  I was holding on to the edge of the chasm by my arms and elbows, and still felt unbelievably unsteady. I carefully did not look down, but for a few seconds, I strained to hear the rocks hit bottom. I never did.

  I tried to feel around with my toe without falling off, but met only air. Damn it, what if I needed to be touching bare skin? Why hadn't I thought to remove my shoes first? I tried toeing one off, but the water had made the sneaker shrink around my foot. "Grab my ankle."

  A lot of less than genteel language echoed off the walls. "I can't grab anything without letting go!"

  "You have two arms!"

  "Listen to me." Pritkin's voice was low and controlled, the tone he used when he was pretending to be reasonable. "I can't let go of the gun. There's something down here. It pulled me in. It could get bored with me at any moment and come after you. You have to—" He broke off at the sound of shouts and explosions and booted feet echoing down the corridor. "Shift, goddamn it!"

  "Grab my leg!"

  I lowered myself down to the point that my head was barely over the top of the chasm, but still touched nothing. The damn rock was falling apart under my fingers and nervous sweat was making my palms slippery. My arms were sending sharp little pains up to my shoulders and there was no purchase on the side of the chasm for my feet. How the hell far down was he?

  And then it didn't matter, because a pair of booted feet stopped right in front of my eyes. I craned my neck enough to see an older man with salt-and-pepper hair and pale gray eyes smiling down at me. Manassier. Well, didn't that just explain a lot.

  "I didn't think you would get this far," he told me in his thick accent. And to think, only that afternoon, I'd found it attractive.

  Somewhere along the line I'd bitten my tongue hard enough to taste copper. I swallowed blood. "Surprise."