by Karen Chance
Because I couldn’t manipulate time like that. I hadn’t known that anybody could manipulate time like that. And while I had to get only a finger on her to shift her away, I had to stay alive long enough to do it.
I also had to find her. But the light was lousy and the street was packed with people rushing home through the cold. Most were in dark colors—brown or black or dark gray—not electric blue. But outside the illumination of shop doors and gas lamps, pretty much everything looked the same. If she stayed in the shadows, she’d blend in perfectly.
But while I couldn’t see her, I could feel her rapidly getting farther away, the golden cord between us stretching like an elastic band. “She’s moving,” I said, and ducked out into the street.
Mircea didn’t try to stop me, but he looked less than thrilled. I didn’t say anything, because I wasn’t any happier. As if I didn’t have enough other reasons, I was freezing to death. Unfortunately, my coat was a century or so away.
He must have noticed me shivering, because he stripped off the jacket of his tux and put it around me. It was thin, but the wool was top quality and still warm from his body. I clutched it around me as we dodged a street preacher, a hawker selling roasted nuts and a seemingly endless line of wagons.
Despite the weather, it looked like half the damn city was out tonight.
And then I saw why when we came to a crossroads. Four streets, all of them busy, converged here. I was sure we were in the right area, but there was no way to know which road they’d taken. And if I guessed wrong, by the time we backtracked—
“Can you shift to her?” Mircea asked, as we stood on the street corner, trying to look four ways at once.
“No.” Spatial shifts had more restrictions than the time variety, and if I couldn’t see her, I couldn’t shift. “Can you track her?”
“I can try.” He did the eyes-closed, head-back-andmouth-slightly-open thing again while I huddled inside the coat and tried to be optimistic. But it wasn’t easy. Even in the cold, the place reeked. The streets were packed with horse manure, garbage rotted in the gutters, and the joys of deodorant were apparently unknown to most of the crowd. Add that to the smell of spilled beer radiating out of a nearby pub, and it wasn’t looking good. My only hope was that she would shift through time again, and I could catch up that way.
At least, I hoped I could.
The fact was, I was getting pretty tired. The stuff at the party hadn’t been fun, and then there’d been the small matter of shifting a century or so and taking someone else along for the ride. I didn’t know how many more shifts I had in me, especially of the time variety. And if I ran out of juice and she shifted again—
I decided not to think about that. Besides, she had to be getting tired, too. I didn’t know if she’d had anything to do with what happened at the party, although it seemed likely. But even if not, she’d just shifted herself and five other people more than a century.
I didn’t know how the hell she’d done that. Or, rather, I understood it technically—the mages had been too close when she shifted, and had ended up trapped in the backwash of the spell. That was what happened when I took someone along with me, only I usually had to be touching them to do it. But I’d accidentally taken Pritkin on a shift once without touching him, so I knew it was possible. But six?
Carrying just one person this far had felt like it was wrenching my guts out. I couldn’t even imagine doing five more. Not that the power couldn’t handle it; the Pythian power was pretty much inexhaustible, as far as I’d been able to tell. But the person channeling it was not. And then there’d been the time wave and the time loop and the haring across London and—
And I didn’t know why she wasn’t passed out on the damn sidewalk. But she had to be tired. She had to be.
Because if she wasn’t, we were screwed.
“This way.”
I hadn’t realized I’d closed my eyes, half dozing despite the cold, until a tug on my arm woke me up. I followed Mircea down the street, not saying anything because I didn’t want to distract him. But apparently he could track and talk at the same time, because he glanced at me before we’d gone five yards.
“Do we have a plan?”
“I need to touch her.”
“That is not a plan, dulceață; it is an objective.”
I frowned. “Okay, your turn.”
“If I get close enough, I can drain the mage and end this.”
He was referring to the ability of master vampires to pull blood particles through the air, without the need to do the Bela Lugosi thing. I’d seen Mircea drain a guy dry in a few seconds once, but while it was damned impressive, it wouldn’t work here. “He’ll have a shield up—”
“I can drain a man even through a shield. But it takes longer.”
“How long?”
“For the average mage . . .” He shrugged. “Thirty seconds to incapacitate; perhaps a minute to kill. But with stronger shields, war-mage strength, for instance, multiply that by five.”
I didn’t think the mage had that kind of shield, but what did I know? I hadn’t thought he’d be able to kidnap my mother, either. “So worst-case scenario, two and a half minutes to unconsciousness.”
“From across a room, yes. But if I am right on top of him . . . perhaps cut that by two-thirds.”
I didn’t stop moving, but I stared at him incredulously. “You can drain a war mage to unconsciousness in fifty seconds—through his shields?”
“It depends on the mage, and I do not know this one’s capacities. But normally—”
“Normally?”
His lips quirked. “Let us say, it is what I would expect.”
I decided not to ask what he was basing that on.
“Still, two and a half minutes isn’t bad,” I said hopefully. “We might be able to keep them in sight for that long.”
“Yes, but if I try it from a distance, he will almost certainly notice before I can incapacitate him. And then they will either shift away or attack.”
“And we can’t afford for them to do either.”
“No.” He looked frustrated. “Normally, I would call on the family to assist, but I have never cared for London and do not keep a residence here. And while I could borrow people from another senator—”
“We don’t have time.”
“No.”
“Then we’re on our own.” And for some reason, I felt the tension relax in my neck.
It must have in my voice, too, because Mircea looked at me narrowly. “Is there a reason you suddenly sound relieved ?”
“It’s not . . . relief exactly. It’s just that . . . well, it’s fly-by-the-seat-of-our-pants time, isn’t it?”
“And that is a good thing?”
“No, but it’s . . . sort of familiar.”
He closed his eyes. “Do you know, dulceață, there are times when I truly believe you are the most frightening person I know.”
I blinked. “Thank you?”
“You’re welcome.”
And then we didn’t say anything else. Because we spotted them.
Chapter Eleven
It wasn’t hard, considering that they almost ran us down. There were a lot of vehicles on the street—mostly small, two-wheeled contraptions with a covered area in front, a driver perched high on a seat in back, and a single horse. But there was only one being driven by a girl in an electricblue party dress.
And barreling straight down the middle of the sidewalk.
For once, Mircea didn’t have to pull me out of the way; the crowd was already doing that for him. It parted into two halves, surging into the road or back against the pub. Mircea and I ended up in the road, and then had to shuffle back even farther because the little carriage was weaving drunkenly all over the place.
I didn’t know how much my mother knew about horses, but I didn’t think her driving was the problem. That was more likely the two war mages in the coach behind her, firing spells that she was doing her best to dodge. She wasn’t entir
ely successful, which probably explained why the roof of her carriage was on fire, and why her horse had the walleyed look of the totally panicked.
Although the horse looked positively calm compared to the kidnapper, who was sitting in the covered area of the coach, hands braced on either side, screaming his head off.
“Those idiots! Are they trying to kill her?” I demanded, as another bolt of what looked like red lightning flashed between the carriages.
It missed her, but only because she’d jumped the sidewalk at the same moment, scattering pedestrians and overturning a vendor’s cart. Apples rolled across the street like oversized marbles, tripping people and sending them sliding on the icy road. Unfortunately, the mages’ horse managed to avoid them just fine, and thundered after her.
“It would appear so,” Mircea said grimly.
I stopped staring at the chaos long enough to stare at him. “What?”
“From what you know of the Circle, dulceață, which do you think they would prefer—a fully trained heir in the hands of a dark mage, or the same heir deceased?”
A finger of ice ran down my spine. Because I didn’t have to think. I’d just spent more than a month dodging the Circle of my time, who had been convinced that I was a threat thanks to my parentage, my vampire connections and a couple of dozen other things. And their solution had been what it always was—kill it, then kill it again.
Goddamnit!
There was a walkway over the road ahead, and I shifted us onto it, putting us momentarily ahead of the chase. It wouldn’t be for long. The light weight of the vehicles allowed them to zip past the larger ones lumbering down the road, most of which were trying to get out of the way, anyway. But one wagon, piled high with barrels, was too heavy to move fast enough. And a spell that missed my mother by a fraction didn’t miss it.
Whatever was in the barrels must have been pretty flammable. Because they exploded in a wash of light and heat and eardrum-threatening sound, setting the wagon ablaze and sending several of the smaller casks shooting heavenward, like wooden cannonballs. And if I’d thought the street had been chaotic before, it was nothing compared to this.
Horses don’t like fire, noise or unexpected events, and every horse on the street had just experienced all three. Pandemonium broke out, with bolting animals, running people and fiery barrel parts raining down from the heavens. One of the latter took out an awning over a tobacconist’s shop, which the owner hadn’t remembered to roll up for the night. The dark green material went up in flames, right by a couple more horses.
That might not have been so bad, except for the fact that they were hitched to a double-decker bus. It had been about to let off a group of passengers, only they had to cling to the railings instead as the spooked horses took off at a dead run. I caught sight of my mother again as she and the bus raced side by side for the bridge, and Mircea grasped my arm.
“Can you shift us onto her coach?”
I stared at him, wondering at what point he’d lost his mind. But he looked perfectly serious, maybe because he thought this was as good a chance as we were going to get. It didn’t help that I agreed with him.
“I’m not . . . I don’t . . . It isn’t so easy shifting onto moving things,” I explained. Particularly ones that were all over the road and on fire.
“Then we’ll have to do it the old-fashioned way,” he told me. And before I could ask what that meant, his arm went around my waist and we were running for the side for the bridge, and then we were—
“Oh, shiiit!” I screamed, as Mircea threw us over the side just as mother’s coach thundered underneath.
Only she must have moved again, because when we landed, hard enough to rattle my teeth, it was on the top of the bus.
Mircea managed to keep his feet, but I went sprawling into a big woman clutching a little dog, which tried its best to bite my nose off. And then I was pushed backward onto the lap of an astonished-looking man, who appeared less flabbergasted by my sudden appearance than by the brief outfit I was wearing.
“What? You’ve never seen a calf before?” I demanded, as Mircea pulled me up. Only to get us almost trampled by a crowd of panicked people trying to get down the stairs.
Several managed it by falling off, several more almost did and a lot of parcels and umbrellas and hats went flying. That included someone’s bicycle, which bounced riderless off the back of the bus and continued down the street, looking oddly steady. Or at least it did until the mage’s vehicle crashed into it, sending it sailing into a storefront and then careening into us.
The bus shuddered under the impact, and most of the people who had gotten back to their feet were thrown onto their butts again. But the mages hadn’t emerged unscathed from the crash, either. The light gray horse pulling their ride broke free of its harness, neighed in terror and then took off back down the road.
So they grabbed the next convenient means of transportation.
Which happened to be ours.
It was Mircea’s turn to swear as they jumped onto the bus, knocking people aside, and, in some cases, off the side as they vaulted up the stairs and onto the roof. And then flew off it again as Mircea grabbed the backs of two seats, swung up and kicked. A couple thousand bucks’ worth of fine leather left muddy imprints on their shirts as they rocketed backward, arms flailing and bodies flying.
They landed what looked like half a block down the street, which should have ended that. But they’d no sooner hit pavement than they were back on their feet. I saw them shake their heads, dart into the crowd and kick into enhanced speed—and then I didn’t see anything else, because Mircea was dragging me toward the front of the bus. “Did they have shields?” I asked, confused, because I hadn’t seen any.
“No.”
“Then how did they—” I began, only to stagger and go down when the bus suddenly swerved dangerously.
It was racing down the road like there was no driver, which was sort of true, since I didn’t think the guy in the driver’s seat was supposed to be there. A third mage had appeared out of nowhere and knocked the real driver aside, just in time for Mircea to vault down the length of the bus and do the same to him. Only when a master vampire knocks you aside, you don’t end up on the floor.
The guy sailed off the bus, flew through the air and slammed face-first into the second story of a nearby building. Which I’d kind of expected. And then he twisted, kicked off the bricks like gravity didn’t apply to him and jumped back on the bus. Which I hadn’t.
I had a second to think that the guy looked a lot like the mage I’d last seen running a marathon inside a time bubble—tall, dark hair, red face—only that couldn’t be right. And then he lunged for Mircea, who had turned his back to grab the reins, and I decided to worry about it later. I jumped after him, yelling a warning I doubted even vampire ears could hear over the galloping horses and the creaking bus and the screaming people.
But it didn’t matter, because some of the passengers had clearly had enough. One fine-looking gent with a monocle tripped the mage with his cane, a burly-looking guy in a butcher’s apron smashed him in the face, and a couple of other men helped flip him over the side and into the street. Which all things considered, probably didn’t hurt him much.
And then he was run over by a speeding coach, which probably did.
At least, I didn’t see him vault back on board before Mircea pulled the real driver back into his seat and grabbed me. “We aren’t going to catch up to her this way,” he yelled.
I nodded, feeling a little dizzy. The Clydesdales pulling the bus were already going as fast as they could, and they weren’t bred for speed anyway. We weren’t going to catch up to Mom on a heavy bus loaded with people, and neither were the mages.
“What’s the alternative?” I yelled back.
“This!” he told me. And flung us over the side.
It happened so fast I didn’t have time to scream before we landed in a mostly empty wagon. The lack of weight was probably why it was beating the bus
in the race to get the hell out of Dodge. But it wasn’t beating it by much, particularly after the driver turned around to shout at us and rammed into the next vehicle in line.
But it looked like Mircea hadn’t planned on staying long, because before I could get a breath, we were jumping onto another wagon and then into a four-wheeled cab, which had gotten close enough for him to grab the door. And then through the back, trying not to step on the occupants’ toes, and out the other side into—
Well, I guess it was a car. Except it looked more like a roofless carriage with no horses and a big stick coming out of the floorboard. It also had a huge, bulbous horn, a couple of foot pedals and a freaked-out driver who was currently dangling from the hand of a master vampire.
“You know, I could use a little more warning next time!” I told Mircea breathlessly, as he dropped the man gently into the road.
He shot me a glance. “Now you know how I feel whenever you shift.”
“I tell you when we’re about to shift!”
“When you remember.” He picked me up and deposited me in what I guess was the passenger’s seat, since it didn’t have a stick. “Fair warning: this is going to be a bumpy ride.”
Yeah, like it hadn’t been so far, I didn’t say, because my ass had no sooner touched leather than we barreled onto the sidewalk, slung around a bunch of people, clipped the side of a shop and then shot ahead.
“Are you sure you know how to operate this thing?” I demanded, trying to get my limbs sorted out.
“This is a Lutzmann. I used to own one.”
“Yeah, but did you actually drive it?”
He just raised an eyebrow and shot ahead, as I frantically searched for a seat belt. Which I didn’t find, because, apparently, they hadn’t been invented yet. Maybe because the car’s top speed appeared to be about thirty miles an hour, which sounds like nothing unless you’re in a vehicle with no sides, a high center of gravity and a stick for steering. I don’t think all four wheels were ever on the ground at the same time as we careened down a street littered with obstacles, half of them living and all of them disapproving.
