Karen Chance - [Cassandra Palmer 04]

by Curse the Dawn (v5. 0) (html)

  Vegas was burning, fire leaping into the sky, shedding sparks like shooting stars. It was impossible to recognize anyone in the darkness and chaos or to pick out a single voice among the panicked crowd. Just screams and faceless, running people.

  Beyond, the desert sand was being consumed, mile after mile under a blackened sky. Long after all the scrub had burnt, it raged on. Like a forest fire without a forest, or what it was: a seemingly endless exclamation of wrath from a creature with power and rage and centuries of bottled resentment but no compassion. No compassion at all.

  The world had remembered the healer, the lyre player, the golden god, but had forgotten the other stories. The ones that whispered of brutal punishments, of rape and murder and a beautiful face that laughed as it flayed its enemies alive. They remembered now, for an instant, before memory was wiped clear in a rain of blood.

  The vision shattered as abruptly as it had come, leaving me gasping on all fours in the middle of the sidewalk. “—a little too much wine with dinner, you know how it is. Always was a drinker,” Dee was saying to someone. She reached down and pinched my cheek. “Come on, love. Up you go. You can pass out at home.”

  She dragged me to my feet and I did my best to keep my head down when what I actually wanted was to run back up the street screaming. My dreams had been warning me all along, but I’d been blind to what they really meant. And now it might be too late.

  A cold wire tightened around my heart. There was something wrong with my chest; I couldn’t seem to get a deep breath. What had I done?

  Dee and Pritkin started towing me back toward the lobby again. I gripped their arms. “We can’t leave.”

  “Oh, yes, we can,” Dee said. “I think I just ruined this dress. My heart can’t take another scare like that!”

  “We’ll deal with whatever it is later,” Pritkin told me, hurrying us along.

  “Apollo’s here.”

  He stopped abruptly, and we were almost run down by a harassed-looking woman with a kid in each hand. “Watch it!” she snapped, pulling the kids around. Pritkin dragged me over to the sidewalk.

  “That’s impossible!” he hissed. “The spell—”

  “He got around it,” I whispered. “I don’t know how, but I Saw it. He’s here!”

  He was shaking his head in disbelief. “That spell has held for more than three thousand years. Yet he suddenly finds a way around it now?”

  “I can’t explain it. I just know what I Saw.”

  “It could be the future, the outcome of a civil war within the Circle. What could happen if we don’t solve our internal—”

  “No!” I looked around, rubbing my arms as chills broke out all over them. “I’ve been Seeing the same thing ever since MAGIC blew up. But only in pieces, like my usual visions. But this . . . He’s here. I know it!”

  “He can’t be.” Pritkin was adamant.

  Dee had been looking at us out of the corner of her eye, and she’d started to edge away when I grabbed her wrist. “You told me once you can sense magic, right?”

  “Maybe,” she said warily.

  “Can you sense anything unusual now?”

  “Other than the battle raging upstairs?” she asked with understandable sarcasm.

  “I mean a single source, stronger than all the others. Like . . . like a supernova.”

  “Maybe. But it don’t matter because there’s no way I’m going back in there! Not for—”

  “A shopping spree at Augustine’s? Ten minutes, anything you can grab?”

  Her eyes narrowed and she looked me over. “You got that kind of cash?”

  “I’ve got that kind of credit.”

  “I’d think you were lying, but you did have those shoes. . . .” She licked her lips. “Half an hour, take it or leave it.”

  A war mage walked up. “There’s a mandatory evacuation,” he told us. “You’ll have to be moving on.”

  “I’ll take it,” I said.

  “Shit. I knew you were going to say that,” Dee told me, and slammed her gigantic purse into the mage’s face. He went down, and may have also gotten stepped on as 250 pounds of satin-clad fashionista ran over him and headed back up the street.

  We ran to catch up, battling the tide of humanity going the other way. Mages were converging on us from all sides—it wasn’t like we were easy to miss. I grabbed Dee’s train to keep it from getting trampled and she towed me along like a freight train, scattering tourists and roses everywhere.

  We passed the fake feed store that marked the halfway point with most of the mages on the street after us, and plowed into a dozen more. They’d formed a half-moon shape in the street, forcing the crowd to surge around them and re-form. As soon as we ran out of tourists, we barreled straight into them.

  Dee almost knocked a hole in the wall of leather coats, but they kept their feet. I looked behind us, but the mages had closed the circle, leaving us nowhere to run. And then one of the closest caught sight of me. “Cassandra Palmer.”

  The brown eyes searching my face still looked like they belonged to a mid-level flunky, but the snarl kind of ruined the effect. I didn’t say anything, panic and exhaustion closing my throat. But Saunders didn’t seem to expect an answer.

  His gaze slid to Pritkin, who had stopped beside me. “Or is it?”

  He looked Pritkin up and down, taking in the ruffled gold cape with a raised brow. “I’ve heard it whispered that the Pythia has more skills than she lets on. It would appear to be true. I’ve always been told that possession is impossible for humans, but either I accept that I was misinformed, or I have to believe that a slip of a girl threw me against a wall and almost shattered my shields. Which do you think I prefer?”

  Pritkin didn’t answer him, either. He fiddled with his cape instead, looking twitchy and almost nervous. Saunders smiled.

  “Of course, I could solve the riddle by killing both of you, but that would leave no one to put on trial. And the public does love the legal niceties,” he said, taking a few steps back. He glanced around, but the crowd had thinned and the few remaining tourists were being hustled out of the way by the mages who had been following us.

  At a nod, his men parted to either side, pulling Dee and me back, and leaving Saunders and Pritkin alone in the middle of the street. “On a count of three, I think?” he asked politely. “Wasn’t that the way things were settled in the old—”

  Pritkin threw out a hand and Saunders sailed off his feet, into the air and smashed against the side of a fake barn. Judging by the sound his skull made on impact, I didn’t think he’d bothered with shields. He slid down the side, bounced off a wagon and was speared by the iron spike atop a menu sign.

  I swallowed and looked away as his body began to spasm. No. Definitely no shields.

  The mage holding my arm twisted it painfully behind me. I cried out and tried to pull away, but there was nowhere to go. There was another group of mages jogging down the street toward us, as if the other side needed reinforcements.

  One of them, a tall African-American in a battered coat, pushed his way through the circle to me. “Hello, Cassie,” he said somberly. He looked at the mage holding me. “Let her go, son.”

  “They just killed the Lord Protector!”

  Caleb scanned the area until his eyes lit on Saunders’ still quivering form. “Doesn’t look dead to me. Don’t you think you boys should maybe get him down?” I suddenly found myself released as the Apprentices rushed to aid their fallen leader.

  “Caleb—” Pritkin began.

  His onetime colleague raised a hand. “Jonas called us. Said he challenged and Saunders refused.”

  “Yes.” Pritkin went very still.

  Caleb exchanged glances with the mages he’d brought along. None of them looked young enough to be trainees. Several had gray hair, and one or two looked like they might even be Marsden’s age. Their expressions ranged from sour to disgusted to war mage neutral.

  “Well. I guess that makes him an outlaw.”

  “A
nd us?”

  Caleb smiled slightly. “Technically, there are still warrants out for both of you. The fact that the man who issued them is currently under suspicion himself doesn’t negate that.” I licked my lips and started to speak, but Pritkin’s hand tightened on my arm. “So if I see you, I guess I’ll have to arrest you.”

  Pritkin nodded.

  “By the way, I liked the old coat better,” Caleb said, and turned away.

  Dee sidled off as soon as the group of mages parted in front of us, fanning herself with a hand. “I never thought I’d say this, but too much testosterone. We need to get out of here,” she told me, heading for a bank of elevators.

  “We need to find Apollo,” I told her, catching her arm.

  “Well, he ain’t down here! We have to go up.”

  “You can sense him, then?”

  “Oh, yeah. There’s something up there, all right. Although I’m not getting a who so much as a what.”

  “He’s . . . not exactly human,” I explained, not having time to go into it all.

  “I should have asked for an hour,” she muttered, and then started for the elevators again.

  Pritkin caught her arm. “We could get trapped that way. Saunders’ supporters are all over the place, and it’s going to take time to round them up.”

  She looked at him for a second, and then her eyes slid to the stairs. “You have got to be kidding.”

  He wasn’t kidding. Of course, I thought savagely, Pritkin was wearing his usual boots. Dee and I were in platforms almost as high as the steps. Navigating even one flight in those ought to be an Olympic event. By the time we’d made it up five floors, I was drenched with sweat and had small explosions going off behind my eyelids.

  I stopped in the stairwell, bent over and gasping, only my hand on the railing keeping me up. Pritkin just threw me over his shoulder and kept going, earning him a speculative look from Dee. “Don’t even think about it,” he told her. “I’m not carrying you.”

  “That wasn’t what I was thinking,” she cooed, and he flushed. I guess there weren’t any mages in the stairwell, because Dee’s laugh could have been heard all the way down to the lobby.

  By the time we got as far as the stairs would take us, Dee was no longer laughing. “I think I hate you,” she told Pritkin, who had all but run her up the stairs. She looked like hell. Her roses had mostly been lost on the street and the rest had fallen off on the stairs. Her wig was askew, her makeup had sweated off and a huge fake eyelash had come unglued and was clinging tenuously to one cheek.

  “Good for the figure,” he said, putting me down. He was also hot and sweaty after our marathon, with damp tendrils of hair stuck to his forehead and neck. His lashes had gone spiky dark, turning his eyes emerald. Grungy was a surprisingly good look for him.

  I didn’t know what I looked like. I preferred it that way. If it was anywhere near as bad as I felt, I’d scare off any mages we encountered before they could shoot me.

  “This is where I get off,” Dee said, sitting on a step to rub her arches. “The power is coming from the next floor up.”

  I looked at Pritkin. “The penthouse.”

  I didn’t have a key card, but Pritkin convinced the elevator to take us up anyway. The doors opened onto a deathly quiet foyer that looked a little worse for the wear. The gold flocked wallpaper had a big hole through it, the bronze sculpture had half melted into a Dalí-esque mess and the cow skin rug was covered in dirty boot prints. But the John Wayne posters had survived without a scratch.

  We walked into the living room. Wind through the broken balcony doors was blowing the curtains inward in a billowing mass that, for a moment, made me think someone was there. But nothing else moved, except for the chandelier swinging gently overhead, no longer spilling light onto the roadster still parked below.

  “Where did they all go?” I asked, looking around at the carnage. At least Casanova wouldn’t need to gut the place. The mages had pretty much done it for him.

  I breathed a slight sigh of relief. Dee had been wrong. There was no one here.

  Pritkin shrugged. “They took the fight elsewhere,” he said, crossing the lumber and glass obstacle course to the balcony. I followed, having to concentrate not to break my neck.

  Outside was a wreck of destroyed patio furniture, shattered glass and a pool filled with flotsam. And a body, I saw sickly. Someone wearing a war mage coat was bobbing gently on the surface. Pritkin fished him out, and then I almost wished he hadn’t because the face was mostly gone.

  I bit my lip and looked around. I wanted to check the rest of the apartment, but what if I found Rafe’s body? Had they gotten him out in time? What if I found—

  “We need to check the place for survivors,” I said, cutting my thoughts off. I wouldn’t think that way. I wouldn’t think at all. I’d just go look because I couldn’t stand not knowing.

  We didn’t have a flashlight, but the casino’s light through the windows was enough to see by, once our eyes adjusted. We found three more bodies in the dining room, none of them vampires. There was something to be said for masters, after all, I thought with relief. And then I wondered if they’d leave much of a corpse, with some of the spells the mages could throw. My stomach sank back down to my toes.

  I’d turned to move on to the kitchen when Pritkin caught my arm. He put a finger to his lips, and the next moment, I heard it—a shuffling sound, like someone walking through the debris and not bothering to be quiet. We reentered the darkened living room to see a shape outlined against the expanse of windows leading out to the patio. It took me a second to recognize it.

  “Sal!”

  She turned slowly, obviously not surprised to see us. Of course, with vampire hearing, she’d probably known we were there all along. “Cassie? Do you know what happened? Where is everyone?”

  “You just got back?” I asked, already knowing the answer. She hadn’t been here when everything went to hell. I imagined that it would be a little bit of a shock to come back to this. It was shocking to me, and I knew how it had gotten this way.

  “A few minutes ago. I didn’t want to interrupt if the meeting was—”

  She broke off at the sound of the front door opening. A moment later, Marco stepped into the room. Like Sal, he took a moment to survey the damage. “Well, I guess anything would have been an improvement,” he said, coming down the stairs.

  Sal moved a few yards back, keeping her eyes glued to Marco. “It looks like we’ll have to find somewhere else to sleep. It’s almost daylight.”

  He shook his head. “Won’t do, Sal,” he said quietly. “The master ordered five of you to stay away until just before dawn. And only you came back.”

  “And you,” Sal snapped. She looked him up and down contemptuously. “You can ape Mircea all you like, but the finest clothes in the world will never give you his power. And everyone knows how much you hate him for that!”

  It took me a second to realize what they were talking about. With everything else, I’d almost forgotten the trap Mircea had laid for the traitor. I looked at Marco, suddenly tense again, but his eyes never left Sal.

  “Hate’s a little strong,” Marco demurred. “But you’re right. I like power. I just got limits on what I’ll do for it.”

  Sal kept her eyes on Marco, but she spoke to me. “Cassie, think about it. Mircea told us the kind of person they’ve been looking for. Someone close to a senator, someone trusted, someone with resentment Myra might have been able to use!”

  “He did say that,” I agreed, as Pritkin shifted next to me. He was trying to keep Marco and Sal both in sight as she started backing up. I don’t know why; the only thing behind her was the balcony, and we were twenty floors up.

  “And Marco said it himself—I’m just a hick,” Sal reminded me. “Just like you. A nobody from a court so far out in the sticks, most people never even heard of it!”

  “Making you too powerless for Myra to have bothered about,” Marco agreed.

  I blinked at him, c
onfused. “Are you confessing?” I demanded.

  He looked slightly amused. “Would that surprise you?”

  “Hell, yes! Mircea made you my bodyguard! And he didn’t trade you out, even after he got Marlowe’s list of suspects. He would never have done that if . . .” I trailed off, belatedly realizing what I’d just said.

  “Sounds like she’s voting for you, too, Sal,” Marco murmured.

  “Just tell me where the Consuls are, Cassie,” Sal said, ignoring him. “We need to warn them that there could be trouble.”

  I was in too much in shock to reply, not that Marco gave me a chance. “Of course, there’s an easy way to settle this,” he told her. “We’ll just wait until the master gets back and ask him.”

  “He’s not my master,” she hissed.

  “He might have been, in time. He’s a good one, as masters go,” Marco said with a slight twist to his lips.

  “I wouldn’t know,” Sal said bitterly.

  He shrugged. “Master’s been busy. You should have been patient.”

  “Right,” she said contemptuously. “I should spend my time shopping, maybe getting my nails done, while the war comes closer every day. All Mircea knows how to do is talk! Rafe ending up like that . . . It could be any of us next! Tony may be a worm, but at least he knows how to act!”

  I’d been looking back and forth, trying to keep up, but finally something made sense. “Oh, God. Mircea never broke your bond. Tony is still your master.”

  “And still giving me little tasks to perform, all the way from Faerie.”

  I was hearing it, but I couldn’t believe it. Sal wasn’t some superspy. She wasn’t a traitor. She was just Sal. I’d known her all my life.

  “You told me once you’d kill him if you ever saw him again!” I accused. “How can you take orders from him?”