by Karen Chance
“Fanatics.” Mircea sounded disgusted.
“She called them utopians.”
“Same thing under a different name.”
“She said they could be dangerous—”
“They always are. Anyone who can only see their point of view is. Once a group decides that their way is the only way, it is an easy progression to vilifying anyone who doesn’t agree with them. And once someone has been demonized, has been characterized as opposing the good, killing him becomes a virtue.”
He sounded like he knew firsthand, but I didn’t get a chance to ask. Because we’d reached the middle of the room, where a dark red stain spread over the floor, like someone had dropped a bucket of paint. But paint didn’t simmer like the top of a boiling pot, with potion bubbles rising from the surface to spill into the air. They were sluggish now, like gas trapped in viscous oil, but they wouldn’t stay that way for long.
“What is it?” Mircea asked.
“It’s fading.”
“What is?”
“The spell. It takes a lot of energy, and no one can hold it for—”
“What spell?” Mircea asked sharply.
“The one I pulled us out of.”
“The time spell?”
“Yes.”
“You’re telling me that time is about to start back up?” he demanded.
“Yes.”
“When?”
“Now?” I said, watching a crimson bubble rise almost a foot before bursting with a little pop.
And then I wasn’t watching it anymore, because Mircea had thrown me over his shoulder and taken a flying leap over the puddle. He landed hard and I gasped, partly because it had hurt and partly because we’d hit a woman in a bright pink evening gown. I grabbed her by the hair before she could topple into the stain, and Mircea thrust her back into the arms of a mage behind her. And then we were sprinting over and under and through the maze at a pace that was definitely not safe.
But then, neither was this.
A spell flashed across our path, hit somebody’s shield and ricocheted back, striking the parquet floor in front of us and sending a hundred little wooden slivers whirling up into the air. Another brilliant beam slammed into the ceiling, causing a cascade of plaster dust to sift down like snow, and a third exploded through the French doors at the end of the room. And then we were bursting through what was left, into darkness and crisp autumn air and the night sounds of a city.
And the sight of a mage dragging a girl in a tacky blue dress.
They were halfway down the street and moving fast, probably because they were being chased by four war mages. The men must have been outside, sneaking a smoke or something, because they obviously hadn’t been caught in the time bubble. They were still half a block back from the running couple, but then they put on a burst of magically enhanced speed, blurring their figures as they tore through the night, hands outstretched, bodies leaping for the fleeing mage and his captive—
And then the whole group disappeared in a flash that lit up the surrounding buildings like a single strobe.
For a moment, I just stared in disbelief. Because I might not know everything about my office yet, but I damn well knew a shift when I saw one. And the entire group had just fled, not through space but through time, shrugging off the fragile grasp of the moment as easily as most people would walk through a door.
But while their bodies were gone, something else remained. I clutched at it desperately as Mircea cursed behind me. “What the devil . . . ?”
“I can still feel her.” My hand clenched on his arm, hard enough that it would have hurt a human.
His head whipped around, scanning the empty street. “You’re saying they’re hiding under some kind of glamourie?”
“No. I’m saying I can feel her.”
And I might even know why. The holders of my office had to train replacements somehow, and one method was on the job. But that required being able to locate an heir who had landed herself in trouble, no matter when she happened to be. At least, I assumed that was why I could sense where she’d gone, like a glimmering golden thread in my mind, tying us together.
A thread getting rapidly thinner as she moved farther away.
“What does that—” Mircea began, but I shook my head.
“Hold on,” I told him. And shifted.
Chapter Ten
We landed on the same street, but suddenly there were no electric lights, no cars, no milling crowd of freaked-out party guests. And no crazy mage and his captive. Just dirty snow melting in between cobblestones, the moon riding a bunch of dark clouds overhead, and a few dim puddles from gas lanterns placed too far apart.
Some dry leaves rattled along the gutter, but nothing else moved.
“Did he take her into a house?” I asked Mircea, who had his eyes closed and his head tilted back.
“I do not think so,” he murmured. And then he rotated on his heel and opened his eyes, looking straight at a group of three-story row houses lining the left side of the street.
They were painted some light color that glowed ghostly pale in the moonlight. Their windows were mostly dark, shrouded by heavy curtains, which wasn’t much help. But the shadows rippling across their fronts were more useful.
There was nothing to throw them—nothing that I could see anyway. And there were no soft-voiced commands, no sounds of running feet, no faint rustles of clothing to give anyone away. But Mircea didn’t need all that. He could hear their hearts beat, smell the sweat on their skin, feel the faint currents of air from their passing. Glamouries, even good ones, have a hard time fooling vampire senses.
“That way,” he told me softly, but I didn’t need it. The shadows had disappeared into the dark mouth of an alley, and I shifted us right in behind them.
Silver moonlight was sifting in the far end of the passage, lighting up the kidnapper and my mother disappearing around a corner. And the figures of three war mages, who must have been right on their tail, but who were now stumbling out of thin air, dropping their glamouries as they turned and tripped and staggered and ran—right back at us.
For a second, I thought that they’d mistaken us for enemies and decided to take us out before going after Mom. Except that they weren’t looking at us. Judging by the whites showing all around their eyes and the way they kept running into each other, they weren’t looking at much at all.
I’d never seen war mages look that unprofessional—or that panicked. I looked past them, but there was nothing to explain it, not even a rat nosing at the garbage littering the alley floor. But clearly, something had them spooked.
And then they blew by us, one of them shoving me brutally aside in his hurry. I hit the brick wall hard enough to knock the breath out of my lungs, and Mircea hit the mage. The casual-looking blow sent him flying out of the alley and into the street, but, amazingly, the man didn’t even try to retaliate. He just staggered to his feet and limped off as fast as he could, disappearing from view around a corner of the building.
I gazed after him for a second, confused, and then shook my head and started the other way, desperate not to lose the tenuous connection to my mother. Only to have Mircea jerk me roughly back. I didn’t ask why, because I hadn’t gotten my breath back and couldn’t talk yet. And because I knew him well enough to know that he’d have a good reason.
And because what looked like a piece of the night had broken off from the rest and was flowing our way.
It surged along the sides of the alley like water, turning the dark red brick gray and chipped and flaking, leaving a pale stripe on the wall like a flood line. It disintegrated a few pieces of trash that had been blowing on the breeze, turning them brown and curled and then dusting them away. It ate through a wooden rain barrel, sending a wash of dirty runoff foaming across the alley floor.
And it did all of that in a matter of seconds.
I stared at the path of destruction, knowing what I was seeing but not really believing it. Because this wasn’t a time bubble;
it was a time wave. One that had just engulfed the fourth mage.
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.
