by Karen Chance
It touched me everywhere, consuming me from the inside out. And it had lied. It did hurt, with a horrible, draining sensation far worse than a vampire's bite. It felt like razored teeth were slicing into me everywhere, running like a blade between muscle and bone, turning even the air in my lungs to broken glass.
I was supposed to be protected from this kind of thing. My mother's only legacy was the pentagram-shaped tattoo on my back that was one of the Circle's strongest enchantments. She had once been heir to the Pythia position, before she ran away with my father and was disowned, and the star had been given to her as security. It packed quite a punch, but the geis interfered with it. Meaning that if I was going to get out of this, it would have to be on my own.
I tried to fight, but my arms and legs wouldn't move, all my strength pouring into the thing holding me so gently in its grasp. My body felt as heavy and lifeless as if the creature had already finished feeding. Only I knew it hadn't, because I could feel it gnawing through bone and into marrow, the lethargy ensuring that I couldn't even scream as it sucked my life away. My consciousness turned slippery and unresponsive, my body trying to shield me from what was happening, from what was coming—
And then it was gone, pulled off by Pritkin's arm around its throat. I stared at it, Pritkin's mirror image except that it glowed as brightly as flame, energized with stolen power. And just like that, the pieces fell into place.
"You're an incubus!" I was addressing the spirit, but it was Pritkin who answered.
"Only half," he snarled, wrenching the creature's neck savagely enough to have shattered a human's spine.
In a move too fast for me to see, the creature broke the mage's hold, spun and sent Pritkin sailing into the window. He struck it hard, knocking the colored glass panes out of place, sending them exploding outward. The creature whirled on me again, and his eyes were a flat, solid black, as if the pupils had bled out.
I threw out a hand, a scream rising in my throat, but I never uttered it. Because suddenly the attack just stopped. There was no sound, no movement. Nothing.
After a stunned second, I realized that the red spots in front of my eyes were a few shards of ruby glass, slung in my direction by the fight. They remained halfway through their arc, hovering in midair as if waiting for permission to fall. Everything else was also frozen in place, from the dark-eyed demon to Pritkin, caught halfway through the broken surface of the window, its sharp edges digging into his skin. In the entire room, I was the only thing moving.
Agnes, the former Pythia, had been able to do this, to literally stop time for short periods, but I'd never learned how. With an abrupt, white-hot spike of fear, I also realized that I didn't know how to undo it, either. I decided to worry about that later and deal with the problem I did know how to solve. I grabbed a bottle off Pritkin's shelf, uncorked the stopper and threw the entire thing in the demon's face.
Other than turning his hair slightly pink, nothing happened. I panicked a little after that, and started throwing everything I could lay my hands on. Vials of liquid, clear and odorless as water, were followed by others containing syrupy, viscous substances with odors that made my head swim. But despite the fact that Pritkin's arsenal was especially designed for battling demons, nothing seemed to have the slightest effect.
I emptied the entire shelf, all the while unable to look away from the potion-streaked face in front of me. The sensation of being watched from behind those glittering black eyes was more than creepy. The hairs on the back of my neck rose as my own stare began to waver, and suddenly everything started up again.
Pritkin crashed the rest of the way through the window, and the demon screamed. The sound mixed with the silvery ring of broken glass and seemed truly agonized. I guess the potions had failed to take effect because of the timeout I'd taken, but they were sure doing something now. Some set his clothes and hair alight, searing the air with the smell of burning leather. He tried to put the flames out with his hands, but that only blistered his skin. And the last potion I'd thrown, dark red with a thick, peppery smell, made his face begin to run like melting wax.
After a moment, he gave up trying to save himself and instead grasped at me. I reached for my power, but it was sluggish, the cost of that momentary hiccup in time tremendous. I threw the lamp at him, but he batted it away with a roar, half rage and half pain. His hair was almost gone now, burnt down to the roots by the fire consuming him with inhuman glee. But it wouldn't be soon enough.
I raised my right arm, where two glowing, gaseous knives emerged from the bracelet I wore. There was only one Pritkin in the room now, and I didn't much care what they did to this one. That was lucky since they tore into the demon with their usual abandon.
"Cassie!" Billy was waving at me frantically over the smoking skull of my attacker. "Over here!"
Like I didn't know where the weapons were. "What do you think I'm trying to do?!" My knives were flying about, sticking into and out of their prey so wildly that I could barely see them. I didn't dare move. "Get me something!"
Nothing happened for a moment, then a clanging avalanche of weapons hit the floor. Billy had managed to knock over the closet shelf. Most stayed where they fell, but a single knife slid across the floor and bumped my foot. I grabbed it, but the demon was thrashing around at my feet, not staying still long enough for me to use it.
"Finish him!" Billy was flickering in his agitation. "Do it!"
"I'm trying!"
The demon couldn't see me, being blinded by the acid that had almost completely eaten away his face. But he could hear, and he rolled toward me, hands outstretched. His skin was a cracked mess of charred black and red, and the leather coat had melted against him in patches. I stared down at him, feeling suddenly queasy that I had done this to anything, even something as vile as him. What the hell was happening to me?
He turned what had been his face up to me, beseechingly, and I hesitated. In less time than it took to blink, he had me by the foot, the raw bones of his fingers sliding against my skin in a slick caress. Immediately, the horrible draining sensation was back, my power flooding into him from that one small touch.
Pain made the world go white for a heartbeat. Then I screamed and tried to jerk away, but it did nothing except to unbalance me. I fell on my butt and kicked out at the same time, hitting the blackened face hard enough that crumbled skin fell off in a withered cascade. Stark white bone showed through, but the demon only bared its teeth at me in a parody of a grin.
"You'll look worse in a moment," it whispered, and upped the speed of the drain.
For a second, the world went gray. "Don't even think about it!" Billy said frantically. "I got nothing left, Cass. Pass out and it's over!"
"I'm fine," I told him, biting the inside of my cheek hard enough to taste blood. My knives were continuing to stab and pull out, over and over, but it was as if the creature had stopped noticing them. "The neck," I told them, my voice barely audible even to me. "Sever it."
To my lasting shock, they not only heard but obeyed. They set to work with a will, sawing away at the tendons and flesh, until I heard them hit bone. Blood roared in my ears and my eyes were growing dark, but I wouldn't let them close. Little pinpricks of light had started exploding in front of my vision by the time the knives finally completed their task, severing the spine with an audible crack.
The room was immediately filled with a hurricane. Clothes, bedding and shards of glass went whizzing by in dangerous parabolas that had me clutching my head and trying to shrink into as small a space as possible. I could feel everything spin crazily around me while my gut clenched and tried to force itself up my throat and my whole body seized up like a giant cramp. I wanted to pass out. I wanted to know what was happening. I wanted to see Pritkin's face and I didn't want there to be blood on it.
Dimly I heard yelling from somewhere nearby, but I couldn't even work out the separate sounds. Scream after scream of tortured air passed over me, around me, but I huddled into myself and refused to look.
Then, as quickly as it had started, it was gone. Utter silence descended, except for the sound of my faint, whistling breaths.
I rolled onto my back and stared at the ceiling. It was all I could do to heave the air into and out of my lungs. My hand lay open on the floor, fingers still slightly curled around the knife I'd never used. Even with solid concrete under me I felt dizzy, like I was going to fall right off the edge of the world. At least the creature's body was gone, I thought dully, right before I was violently sick.
It seemed to go on for a while, although my time sense was so screwed up by then that I really had no idea. My vision kept trying to go dark again, and cleared only spottily, black fading away until I could see the scuffed toes of Pritkin's boots and the pale skin on the inner side of his bicep as he held me. My head was pounding and my body was shaking in a way I'd have been embarrassed about if I hadn't been so busy trying not to give a repeat performance.
I got a hand on the floor, trying to get enough leverage to push myself upright, but Pritkin merely pulled me in a little closer. "Give it a moment." His voice dripped fury, but his fingers were warm and gentle against my skin. That was good, because I felt really odd, cold and light, like a frozen bubble.
Blood speckled him from where the window had torn his flesh, tracing winding trails from his forearm to his elbow, and his eyes looked like they were having as much trouble focusing as mine. I had no idea why he wasn't a smear on the parking lot, but then, it seemed I'd been underestimating him all along. I stared at him, speechless, but Billy Joe knew just what to say.
"So the Circle's best-known demon hunter is half demon himself," he commented, floating over from beside the closet. "I have to tell you, I didn't see that one coming."
I had to admit, neither had I.
Chapter 15
I spent the rest of the day in bed, hurting so much that even relaxing my muscles made them ache. It was hard to believe I could be this sore and live. I wasn't sure if it was because of the attack or the whole stopping-time thing. My predecessor had died shortly after pulling that trick for the last time, which maybe should have told me something. For whatever reason, my whole body felt like one big bruise.
My mental state wasn't much better. When I finally managed to sleep, my dreams were full of Pritkin's face, wearing a brilliant and unguarded grin, which alone was enough to weird me out, since it wasn't an expression I'd ever seen in real life. Then it began to sag, with waxlike rivulets of flesh running down his cheekbones to drip off his chin, eyes rolling in their sockets, the sunny grin fading to a skeletal grimace. I woke up in a cold sweat.
I stared at the patterns the bedside light made on my ceiling, consciously slowing my runaway heartbeat. This isn't me, I told myself furiously. My breath doesn't catch unless I tell it to. I don't think about things I don't want to. And I don't scream like a little girl over a freaking nightmare. I breathed in and out for a few minutes, nice and steady, until my breath was calm without my having to work for it.
Then the door opened and Pritkin was there, staring at me. There was a sudden rumbling, rushing noise and a soft rustle of air. I screamed like a little girl.
He leapt into the room, snatched me off the bed and threw me to the floor, covering my body with his own and tucking his head down. I waited for the sickening lethargy to settle in, for the horrible sucking sensation on my power to start, but nothing happened. After a minute, the whirring noise shut off. I started to feel my face burn, despite being pressed against the cold concrete floor.
"Not that I'm not grateful for being protected from the air conditioner," I mumbled, "but can I get up now?"
Pritkin released me, helped me back to bed, and vanished. Which was just as well. I still didn't have the faintest idea what to say to him.
I went back to sleep like a person falling off a cliff, and didn't dream. But by midnight, I'd slept as much as I was going to and had hit the point where boredom had overtaken aches and pains. I sat up, feeling thirsty, sweaty, and groggy. The mirror showed me a pale, washed-out version of myself, with an impression of the blanket's weave on the left side of my face. But after a very hot shower, food and four aspirin, I went to find some answers.
Pritkin wasn't at the scene of the crime. The glass had been swept up, though, and the opening had been covered with a sheet of heavy plastic printed to look like the once beautiful window. I assumed it was there as a placeholder, so that at least from the outside, everything looked semi-normal despite the chaos within. I could kind of relate.
I'd have liked a different perspective on things, but Billy was off duty, crashing in my necklace to soak up whatever energy it had managed to accumulate. The gold and ruby monstrosity, which was so ugly I usually wore it inside my clothes, was a talisman, storing magical energy from the natural world and feeding it to him in small doses. It was enough to allow him to remain active but was never as much as he'd have liked. I usually supplemented it from my own reserves, but at the moment I didn't have any.
I went looking for the only other person who might know anything and found him glaring at the slots on level two. I thought from Casanova's expression that someone must have just hit one of the big jackpots, but no. It was worse.
By then it was after one in the morning, but that's prime time for Dante's. So I'd thought it a little odd that fully a third of the main salon was empty, with row after row of forlorn slot machines silently begging to be petted, to be loved, and to be fed money. Then I'd rounded a corner and seen that there was, in fact, a good reason for their isolation.
Two of the three ancient demigoddesses known to myth as the Graeae were in residence. They looked harmless—short, wrinkled, and blind—except for Deino, who currently had the one eye they all shared. It must have been her lucky day, because when she grinned and gave me a little finger wave, I saw that she was also sporting their only tooth.
I'd accidentally helped to release the gals from their long imprisonment recently, which had made them my servants until they each saved my life. Considering how often I get into trouble, that hadn't taken long. Now they were free and able, as Pritkin had put it, "to terrorize mankind again" unless I could trap them.
It was something that I absolutely intended to get around to one of these days, only it had slipped farther and farther down the to-do list lately, displaced by more-pressing crises. Françoise had volunteered to take it on for me, as a way of saying thanks for getting her semi-regular employment. I'd felt a twinge of guilt from involving her in a mess that, no matter what spin I put on it, was all mine. But frankly, a powerful witch would likely have better luck dealing with the Graeae than I would.
Not that she seemed to be doing much at the moment. She was watching them narrowly, but making no obvious attempt to trap them. She caught my eye and shrugged. "Zey 'ave a bond."
"What?"
"A metaphysical bond," Casanova snapped. "It causes magic to treat them as a single entity."
I watched the gals while I absorbed that. Pemphredo was nowhere in sight, but Enyo was playing nickel blackjack and Deino was beside her, standing on a stool. She was gutting a poker machine, systematically strewing its mechanical innards all over the psychedelic carpeting. I guess she hadn't been happy with the payoff.
I decided I needed a little more information. "So?"
Casanova tapped the small black box Françoise held in one hand. It was a magical snare that, despite its size, was perfectly capable of trapping and holding the Graeae—one just like it had once imprisoned them for centuries. "The spell," Casanova repeated, less than patiently, "needed to get them in here and out of my hair?"
"Yeah."
"For some reason it sees the gruesome grandmas over there as three parts of a single whole, which maybe they are, for all I know. Unless they are all present, they simply don't register as being here at all, at least not to the spell. And they've figured out that we're trying to trap them."
"So they make sure that one's always missing." I finished for him. "But that doesn't expl
ain why they're here in the first place. If they know we're after them—"
"They're staking me out," Casanova muttered.
"What?"
"They were meant to be warriors, and I think they find Vegas a little tame for their tastes. Something it rarely is around here anymore," he said, shooting me a dark glance. "They know that if all Hell is going to break loose anywhere, it'll be here. So they Just. Never. Leave."
"Speaking of Hell," I said, but he brushed me off.
"Don't even start. There's nothing I can do."
"He trashed your window—he practically killed Pritkin!"
"Considering that your mage has been stalking him for more than a century with the same thing in mind, I don't think he can complain too much."
"We need to talk."
"Yes, we do." Casanova was the poster boy for "Not Happy." "How about we start with the fact that this is not a refugee camp? I already have a load of illegal immigrants in the kitchens thanks to you—"
"That was Tony's idea, as you know perfectly—"
“—and now I discover that they've been joined by a group of scruffy, probably lice-infested—"
"Hey!"
“—brats, who are also occupying two of my suites, probably planning to steal me blind!"
"They're just kids."
"Children should be seen and not heard. If possible, not even seen," he told me, unmollified. "I don't have security enough to watch the terrible trio over there, clean up your messes and also babysit!"
"No one's asking you—"
He pointed an accusing finger at me. "I'm through with you, do you hear me? You and your weird friends, corrupting my staff, ruining my casino, attracting Lord Rosier's attention—"
