Embrace the Night cp-3

by Karen Chance

  "I said we were reasonable men. It appears I overrated one of us," Mircea replied. His hands flexed slightly and his lips drew back from his teeth. I swear I could almost see his fangs lengthening. I felt like screaming at both of them that we couldn't afford a fight when it could end with one or all of us dead. But it wouldn't have done any good. So I went with something that would.

  While Pritkin stood glaring at Mircea, I shifted behind him and grabbed the small sphere from his hand. I threw it out the window even as he turned, shock on his face, and Mircea grabbed us both and jerked us out of the room. The door shut just as an explosion rocked the front of the house. The whole thing had taken less than ten seconds.

  "Are you quite mad?" Mircea asked me conversationally. "That was a dislocator."

  I didn't have time to respond, because Pritkin let out a roar of pure rage and threw himself at Mircea.

  They crashed backwards, through the railing and down the stairs, hitting the bottom and then rolling straight into a large mirror. It shuddered, but didn't break, at least not until Mircea grabbed Pritkin by the collar and threw him into it. The fracturing glass made a sound like crinkling tinfoil, cracking in jagged streaks of broken lightning that radiated out from his shoulders like wings. Then the mirror came crashing down, scattering glass everywhere, and Pritkin grabbed up a large shard and made a swipe straight at Mircea's neck.

  I didn't see what happened then, because they carried the fight into the next room, out of sight. I jerked up the blanket I still wore and ran to the bottom of the stairs, but had to slow down to pick my way through the shards of mirror. And, right at the bottom of the steps, my bare foot encountered something that wasn't wood or glass—a folded scrap of paper.

  It was a single heavy sheet containing a mass of scribbled instructions. A mass of very familiar scribbled instructions. I stared at it in disbelief; I guess I knew who'd been running the auction now.

  My head whipped up at the sound of an explosion, and I ran into the reception room to find a section of the floorboards charred black and smoking. But a broken vial lay nearby, so it had been a potion, not a spell. It looked like both men were too drained to try anything fancier than old-fashioned hand-to-hand, which meant that I had a few extra seconds before someone ended up dead.

  A candelabra had been knocked to one side in the impact, and most of the candles had sizzled out against the floor, but one continued burning. I held it to a corner of the map and yelled, "Take off the geis or I torch it!"

  The fight froze. Mircea looked up with a hand locked around Pritkin's neck, while the mage halted the knife that had been heading for Mircea's chest. "I already did!" Pritkin spat, face livid even in the almost nonexistent light. "There is no chance, none at all, that the counterspell would not have been sufficient, were you not opposing it!"

  "I didn't do anything!"

  "You lie! What was your plan? For your vampire to find the Codex while you distracted me?" I stared at him, speechless. I hadn't been the one doing the distracting! "Your intent all along was to find the Codex at any cost!"

  I felt my chest heave with something similar to the expression on Pritkin's face. "Well, if not, it pretty much is now," I said furiously.

  "It won't do you any good!" He watched with a panicked expression as a tiny flame started eating away at the corner of the map. "It doesn't contain a starting point—that was to be given verbally to the winner of the sale."

  "Then I'll look up the auctioneer. I'm sure he can be reasonable."

  "Perhaps he would be, if he lived!"

  Mircea opened his hand and got to his feet. "We appear to be at an impasse," he told Pritkin. "You have the starting point, but not the map. We have the map, but not the starting point. We can achieve our goal only by cooperation." It was a good speech, but he followed it with a smile that made the mage drop a hand to his belt, which contained its usual row of deadly little vials.

  I ignored them and watched the flame grow, consuming the artwork that someone had painstakingly painted at the bottom of the page. Considering how sloppy the rest of the map was, it stood out. Particularly because it hadn't been included on the version I would one day be given by a kindly-looking old man in a pretty French garden. It was a perfectly rendered, golden ouroboros, its tiny scales glinting in the candlelight.

  "What are you doing?" Pritkin demanded, as the hungry flames leapt higher. "If you burn it, you will never find it. Even if the vampire made a copy, it won't contain the starting point! And I won't help you!"

  "I guess I'll have to take my chances," I said, watching the bright yellow flame leap higher.

  "You cannot be serious!" Pritkin made a move toward me, but Mircea knocked him back with a casual blow that staggered him. The mage struggled to his feet, staring at me with anger and confusion on his face.

  "I don't think I've ever been more serious in my life," I said honestly.

  He helplessly watched the paper turn brown and crisp up, and I saw it the moment realization hit his eyes. If no one found the Codex, it would slowly unwrite itself, tucked away in whatever burrow the mages had found for it. And if anyone ever did come across it, it would be useless to them—as much so as if he had retrieved and destroyed it himself.

  The three of us watched the paper burn to a cinder. Pritkin looked at me, an unreadable expression on his face, as he carefully ground it to powder under his heel. Then he simply turned around and left. A moment later, a flash of blue lit the front of the house like a strobe light, and he was gone.

  "I did not make a copy," Mircea told me quietly. "I can attempt to reproduce it from memory if you like, but it was quite complex."

  "No." I stared down at the map, my head reeling. "It really wasn't."

  "Do you know, dulceata? most of my dates have involved rather less dirt."

  "Don't complain. You should see this place in two hundred years," I said, thrusting the relit candelabra at him.

  Mircea gingerly took the rack of candles while I got his knife under the gold ouroboros set into the line of skulls. It came out easily; the plaster had barely had time to set. Behind it was a small leather tube embedded in solid rock. With a little work, I got an edge up, and a second later it slid out into my hands. I stared at the limestone-dusted cylinder and could have cried.

  Whatever starting point the auctioneer—Manassier's grandfather, I assumed—had told Pritkin had been a fake. And the copies of the map that were floating around, say with his grandson, were useless to anyone who might stumble across them. Unless you knew the secret, they would just send would-be treasure hunters on a wild-goose chase. Like one of them would me, two hundred years from now.

  No wonder Manassier hadn't minded giving me the map; he'd known it was useless. The real clue had been the drawing at the bottom of the page, a drawing the copies hadn't had. A drawing the Pritkin of this era had never had time to notice.

  I fumbled getting the tube open, my hands numb with equal parts cold and excitement. I finally took the candles back from Mircea and let him do it. A sheaf of parchment emerged a moment later, golden with age but still perfectly legible. "I don't believe it," I whispered. All that time, it had been right here. I'd even touched the tiny symbol marking the spot. Touched it, and then run right on by. "I can't believe it's over."

  "It isn't," Mircea said, scanning a page. He flipped through several others, and his frown grew deeper. "Unless you perhaps read Welsh?"

  "Welsh?" I snatched the sheaf from him and a brittle edge flaked off and fell to the ground. The thing was practically disintegrating just from being held. I was more careful after that, but it was easy to see that Mircea was right: the pages were all covered in the same sort of gibberish Pritkin used for taking his notes. I couldn't read a word of it. "Damn it!"

  "It is not one of my languages," Mircea said before I could ask. "However, there are mages in this period who would be able to translate it, and possibly cast the spell for you."

  I watched as a small curl at the end of a letter slowly disapp
eared. It had been attached to the final word on the last page—a word that was already unwriting itself. Relax, I told myself sternly. What are the odds that it's part of the spell I need? I sighed. With my luck, they were actually pretty good.

  "We have to hurry," I said, carefully rolling the brittle pages back together.

  "That would not be wise. Engaging the help of mages is always dangerous. I will have to do some checking, to be certain that we contact someone who will not immediately betray us."

  "You're telling me they're all as crazy as Pritkin?"

  "If they recognized what they were handling, probably," he said dryly.

  I handed the pages back to Mircea and replaced the golden marker in the damp plaster. There was no need to worry about taking the Codex with us; the ouroboros had been undisturbed when Pritkin and I first passed it. All those rumors had been lies: no one else had ever found it.

  "I think I know someone who might be able to help, but I have to go back to my time to talk to him." I just hoped I had the strength to get us back. I grabbed Mircea's hand—there was one way to find out. "Hold on," I told him, and shifted.

  Chapter 25

  Dante's was as quiet as it ever got when I returned to my time after dropping Mircea at his. So nobody saw me collapse against a wall. Goddamn, I really needed to stop shifting for a while. It felt like my head was about to explode. The throbbing affected even my vision: for a few moments, the whole corridor looked like the inside of a heart—red and pulsating.

  But I'd ended up where I needed to be, in the hallway leading to the research room. And Nick was there, his nose stuck in a book as usual, looking as scholarly as I really hoped he was. "Cassie!" He stood up abruptly, looking alarmed, and it occurred to me that maybe I should have gone for a quick shower first. But that could wait; the Codex couldn't.

  Limestone dust sifted out of my hair onto the table as I spread out the parchment sheets, pushing books off everywhere in the process. "Can you read this?" I demanded, ignoring Nick's squawks. "It's important!"

  He settled down after a moment, scholarly curiosity taking over, and quickly scanned a few lines. "Welsh," he mused, "an especially antiquated, if not to say peculiar, variety."

  "But can you read it?"

  "Oh, yes, I think so. In time. It isn't one of my chief languages, you know, but I have had some—"

  "I need it now, Nick." I gestured at the scattered sheets. "Somewhere in there is the spell to lift the geis, and it would be extra nice to get it before Mircea goes completely around the bend." Or before it managed to disappear.

  Nick suddenly stilled, not moving, not even breathing, and for a second it was creepily like what a vamp could do. "This" — he stopped and swallowed—“this is the Codex, isn't it? You found it."

  "Yeah, only it doesn't do me much good since I can't read it." He just sat there, so I nudged him with a toe. "Now, Nick."

  "Right, right." He came back to life with a vengeance, sifting through the pages rapidly, looking for the right spell. "This may take a while," he muttered. "There are hundreds of spells here and I don't see an index…oh, wait."

  "You found one?"

  "Better." His bangs flopped in his eyes and he pushed them impatiently back. "I may have found the spell."

  "You're serious?" I stared at him, scarcely daring to hope. The damn geis had thwarted me at every turn for weeks; it was almost impossible to believe that I might be free of it in a few minutes.

  "This may take some time, Cassie. You can, uh, go get changed if you want."

  Yes, I definitely needed to freshen up. My hands were covered in small bruises, my nails were cracked and there was dirt pressed into the grooves of my palms. My hair was a frazzled mess and I was covered in dust from the brief spelunking trip. But Nick was just going to have to deal with me in all my witchy glory, because no way was the Codex leaving my sight. No freaking way.

  He got a good look at my expression and gave up, going back to translating duty. I sat down opposite him and peered into the ubiquitous little china pot. But only a vague floral scent remained. I put a call in to the kitchens for some coffee, figuring both of us could use it, and concentrated on not falling asleep until it got there.

  "How much do you know about the Circle, Cassie?" Nick asked suddenly.

  I yawned. "Other than that they want to kill me? Not a lot."

  "Yes, I am aware that you have had your differences in the past."

  "And present. Is there a point, Nick?" I wanted translation, not conversation.

  "Well, yes, actually. It's just that, I thought you should know—you're not alone. There are many of us who have been growing dissatisfied with the Circle for some time. Only we don't all agree about the remedy. Some of us see the whole system as the problem, not simply the group in power at the moment. We view the war as a chance to change old ideas, to remake it, in fact, into something closer to the type of government the vampires have. Then there wouldn't be little groups of megalomaniacs making crucial mistakes for everyone."

  Actually I thought that pretty much summed up the Senate. "You mean, with one person in charge?"

  "Not necessarily. Just a more centralized authority, with better oversight of everyone's activities and more checks and balances on their behavior."

  "There aren't a lot of checks and balances on the Senate," I pointed out. "None, in fact."

  "Yet it works! Instead of elections turning into popularity contests, you have the best people appointed for each position by a concerned, capable leader."

  "I don't think I'd describe the Consul quite that way," I said dryly. "She got her position by being the strongest and the craftiest, full stop."

  "But she rules well. People respect her."

  "People fear her!"

  "All strong leaders are feared by the ignorant," Nick commented, patently not listening to a word I said. "We could learn a great deal from the vampires, if prejudice did not stand in the way."

  I laughed; I just couldn't help it. The mages seemed to have a seriously warped view of the vamps. Pritkin saw them as evil incarnate, while Nick was determined to set them on a pedestal. He didn't look too pleased at my amusement, though, so I tried to explain while he looked up a particularly obscure word.

  "The vamp system works because of the bonds that force subordinate vampires to do the will of their masters and require masters to answer for the infractions of their followers. The mages don't have that kind of setup. And you can't expect people to—"

  "Perhaps if we did, we could coordinate our efforts and stamp out the dark once and for all!" he interrupted. "As it is, they stay one step ahead of us merely by crossing into another coven's territory, and by the time we get through all the debates and favors and bribes and finally get the needed permission to go after them, they're gone again!"

  He was looking pretty annoyed, with flushed cheeks under all those freckles. I'd have changed the subject, but something was bugging me. "I thought the Circle was the central authority. Isn't it in charge of the whole magical community?"

  "No," he snapped. "That's the problem. What we have now is sort of an umbrella organization. Not every coven worldwide belongs to it—we're especially spotty in Asia—and even those who are members joined at different times and with different agreements."

  "I didn't know that." The vamps always talked about the Circle like it was synonymous with mages in general. Of course, in this country it might be. I'd never thought about it being different anywhere else.

  "It's a total hodgepodge!" Nick said heatedly. "Some covens don't allow searches of their territory at all and others only after receiving definite proof that questionable activity is going on. And, of course, sometimes we don't have proof, just a gut feeling or a tip from someone they don't recognize as a legitimate source. And explaining that our sources wouldn't know the dark well enough to have information if they were legit gets us nowhere nine times out of ten. It would be so much easier if we all answered to one authority."

  "A dictators
hip, in other words." Pritkin had come into the room without my hearing him. I jumped, trying to stand up and whirl around at the same time, and almost ended up on the floor. He caught me, and I tore away as soon as I could find my feet, panting a little, glaring a lot. "I see you made it back safely."

  "It doesn't have to be anything of the kind," Nick argued, apparently not realizing that no one was listening to him anymore.

  Pritkin looked like he'd just come from a bath; his hair—short and pale blond again—was plastered down in wet strands that disturbed me for some reason I couldn't quite define. Maybe because it drew attention to his face, like the older, longer version had. Maybe because it made me remember the last time I'd seen it wet, slick with sweat and glistening.

  God, I hated him!

  "You!" I couldn't even talk, I had so many things I wanted to say. "You knew!" It was the only thing I could get out, the only words that didn't threaten to choke me.

  "No, I didn't. At the time, I merely thought you were a competent witch who was attempting to rob me."

  "Don't lie! You saw me shift!"

  "I thought you'd clouded my mind, you or the vampire. My defenses were down, my shields almost exhausted. It seemed a reasonable conclusion."

  "And when we met again? You didn't recognize me?"

  "After so long, no. Not immediately. I had wondered a few times, but I didn't know. Not until I saw the dress." He looked over the tattered remains. "It was memorable."

  "More than me, it would seem," I said tightly.

  "Nick, if you could give us a moment?"

  "But I'm right in the middle of…" He saw the looks we turned on him and gulped. "Or—or I could go see what's keeping that coffee," he squeaked, and headed out the door. He tried to take the page he was working on with him, but I held out a hand and he reluctantly handed it over.

  "You found it, then." Pritkin's voice held no emotion whatsoever. He'd learned a lot in two hundred years.

  "And I'm keeping it."

  "I'm afraid I can't allow that, Cassie."

  I laughed, and even to me, it sounded bitter. "Oh, it's Cassie, now, is it? So, let me make sure I have it straight. It's Ms. Palmer when you're pretending to be loyal, and Cassie when you're stabbing me in the back. Good to know."