by Karen Chance
“And if we had told you? If we had said, ‘We have decided to hold the ceremony with a doppelgänger in your place for security reasons.’ What would have been your reaction?”
“What the hell do you think?” I said angrily. “I’ve told you a hundred times—it is not okay for someone to die for me!”
“And I have told you that sometimes it is necessary. She is a professional; she takes risks such as this all the time. It is her job—”
“And this is mine!”
We stared at each other, and Mircea’s face reflected the frustration, even some of the anger, that I was feeling. I was surprised he’d let me see it; his facade was flawless when he wanted it to be. I searched his face, wondering if this was a trick, if this was some way to manipulate me into feeling guilty for causing him more problems, for taking him away from his duties, for being a pain in the ass once again.
If so, it was doing a pretty good job. I did feel all those things, along with a nagging suspicion that he had a point. The problem was, so did I. And he couldn’t see that, couldn’t see anything but that little eleven-year-old girl cowering in her room. I wasn’t that person anymore; I hadn’t been for a while now, but I didn’t know if he’d ever be able to see that, to see me—
My thoughts scattered as something knocked me broadside. It wasn’t an attack, or if it was, my own power was doing it. Something like a fist knotted in my being, jerking me, tugging me, trying to drag me somewhere, somewhen else.
Mircea was talking, saying something that probably sounded logical and reasonable and charming all at the same time, and it might have been really persuasive, except that I was a little too busy to listen right then. And then the tug became a heave and the pull became a wrench, and it was like before I became Pythia, when the power had just tossed me around here and there, wherever it needed me to go. And it must be needing something pretty damn bad, because fight as I would, I was losing.
Mircea must have finally noticed something wrong, because he grasped my shoulders. “Cassie! Cassie, what—”
“Fair warning,” I told him through clenched teeth. Because his hands were gripping my arms, and if I went before he let go, he was coming along, like it or not.
“What?”
“Fair warning!” I yelled, trying to pull away. Because I didn’t know where my power was taking me, but judging by the intensity of the pull, it wasn’t going to be anywhere fun. “Let go!” I told him, but his hold merely tightened, fingers digging into my flesh.
And the next moment, we were gone.
Chapter Thirty-five
Time twisted, colors ran and the bottom fell out of my stomach. And the next thing I knew, I was bouncing on the lap of a tuxedo-clad man in the back of one of London’s iconic black cabs. I stared at him and he stared back, brown eyes big and astonished. After a second, I leaned back and checked him over.
His tux didn’t tell me much, but the wide-eyed woman clinging to his arm was wearing a cute bob and a flippy little piece of chiffon that practically required rouged knees. “Twenties?” I guessed, because for some reason my time sense was seriously messed up.
“Sixties,” Mircea told me, staring out the back of the cab as it crept along through a snarl of traffic.
I adjusted my position so I wasn’t actually straddling the speechless guy’s leg. “How do you know?”
“Because they didn’t have miniskirts in the twenties.” He nodded at a nearby giggle of girls in tiny outfits.
“Are you sure?”
“Believe me, dulceață, the advent of the mini is forever emblazoned on my mind.”
I scowled; it would be. But under the circumstances, I preferred some confirmation. I poked the girl, who jumped and gave a little screech. “What year is it?” I asked, but she only stared at me.
“Che anno è?” I tried.
Nada.
“En quelle année sommes-nous?”
Uh-uh.
“What are you doing?” Mircea asked.
“I don’t think they speak English.”
“I think it more likely that they are merely startled.”
“Okay. But they’ve had time to get over it now.”
“N-nineteen sixty-nine,” the woman finally whispered.
I frowned. “Then why are you dressed like that?”
“We’re on our way to a fancy dress party, if you must know,” her date said, finally finding his voice. “Now, who the hell are you and how did you—”
“There!” Mircea cried, pointing at something in the crowds outside.
“Thanks for the ride,” I told the partygoers, as we climbed over them to get out of the cab.
Outside, snow was swirling down out of a black sky, gilded by the lights that poured out of shop windows and glittered from stacks of multicolored signs. It looked vaguely like Times Square, except it was more of a circle, with a tipsy Cupid presiding over what looked like the Christmas rush. Hanging nets of illuminated stars hung across every street, swaying lightly in the wind. A wreath dangled drunkenly off a nearby lamppost. And half the people filling the sidewalks and dodging the street traffic were carrying shopping bags.
I looked at Mircea. “Is this—”
He nodded. “Piccadilly.”
That meant nothing to me, except that this was where my mother had dropped us off on our last little trip into time. And now, for some reason, we were back. And so was she, judging by the Victorian coach that was lying on its side across one lane of traffic, causing a major jam.
The horse was still in place, bucking and rearing at the smell of smoke from the burnt-out hulk behind it. My heart clenched; why I don’t know. I was still alive, which meant my mother had to be, too. But I didn’t see her or the kidnapper or anything else in the rapidly growing crowd.
But I guess Mircea did, because he grabbed my hand and took off.
“I think I left a shoe in the cab,” I told him, struggling to keep up as we wove through the human obstacle course at a breakneck pace.
“Considering how often that happens, perhaps you should consider ankle straps.”
“They’re dangerous.”
He tossed a disbelieving look over his shoulder. “That is what you consider dangerous?”
“You can break a foot.”
“And we wouldn’t want that,” he said, sweeping me up in his arms as we came to the entrance to a tube station.
I stared around as we were swallowed up by London’s steamy underbelly, but I didn’t see anything but coat-clad torsos, all of which appeared to be in a hurry. Finding one hustling couple in the wall-to-wall crowd wouldn’t have been easy at any time. But doing it while being buffeted by pointy elbows, harassed mothers and kids with the hyperactive look of the overly sugared was pretty much impossible.
“I’m not tall enough,” I told him, only to be hoisted up onto a strong shoulder. I put a steadying hand on the grimy wall and tried to spot a tall woman in an electric blue evening dress. The mage’s tux blended with the standard city uniform in any era, but that color would be hard to miss.
Only apparently I was missing it, because I didn’t see them.
“Did they shift again?” Mircea asked, as I desperately scanned the crowds.
“No, I’d have felt it.”
“Are you certain?”
“She’s the heir, but I’m Pythia. I’m certain.”
And a moment later I spotted her, wearing a shabby brown overcoat that wasn’t quite long enough to cover an eye-searing hem. The mage was by her side, a lanky figure in a tan trench hiding his formal blacks, but it was the right guy. I saw him clearly when he turned from the ticket counter, a panicked look on his face and that damned suitcase in his hand. And then he dragged his captive back into the crowd and down a hallway.
I hopped down and we took off after them, Mircea hoisting me over turnstiles and then forging ahead to clear a path. It was still tough going, but the crowds parted for him a lot better than they would have for me, and my bare toes got stepped on only
a few dozen times before I limped onto a platform behind him. And stopped in confusion.
There were maybe three dozen people sitting on benches or leaning against walls, waiting for the next train. But a quick scan showed that none of them were the two we were after. “They didn’t shift,” I said, wrinkling my nose at the pungent smell of pot and body odor.
They were coming from a busker in beads and buckskin who was standing beside the platform, shaking his filthy hair and doing an enthusiastic rendition of “Proud Mary.” At least he was until Mircea thrust a bill into his hand. “Woman in a brown coat and blue dress; man in a trench. Where did they go?”
I was about to protest the bribe—not in principle, but because you never knew what seemingly little thing could alter time. And there’d been enough done to this era already. But then the hippie smiled the smile of the happily buzzed and pointed at the yawning mouth of the train tunnel.
And my protest turned into a curse.
I started toward the side of the platform and the dropoff to the tracks, but Mircea pulled me back. “I’ll go.”
“And if they shift again?”
“I’ll come back and get you.”
“And if there isn’t time?”
“I’ll be quick.”
I shook my head, hard enough to cause my wig to slide over one eye. I threw it down in annoyance. “I don’t know how the link between us works. If I get too far from them physically, I may not be able to follow if they shift again.”
“That seems unlikely. If the power is meant to retrieve the heir, it couldn’t be that restrictive.”
“I can’t risk it!”
Mircea’s brown eyes narrowed, like a man who was prepared to argue indefinitely, but I didn’t give him the chance. I kicked off my other shoe and jumped down beside the tracks, feeling the collected muck of who knew how many years squelching between my toes. And a second later, he landed lightly beside me, a scowl on his face and a penlight in his hand.
I assumed the little flashlight was for my benefit, but it didn’t help much. Neither did the work lights set into the walls here and there, which did little more than stretch the shadows. I couldn’t see squat once the brightly lit station had faded behind us.
Not that there was much to see. The tunnel itself was claustrophobically small, to the point that it seemed impossible that trains actually ran through this. It was also warm and damp, and reeked of dust and mildew. I was kind of glad I couldn’t see details. I could hear, though, and it wasn’t helping my nerves.
There were odd rumblings of trains that shook the ground under our feet and seemed to come from every direction at once. There was a weird echoing effect that threw our footsteps back at us, making it hard to listen for others up ahead. And then there were some very suspicious squeaks.
“I think there may be rats,” I said, my grip tightening on Mircea’s arm.
“At least one,” he said softly, about the time I saw the dim glow of another light bouncing off the concrete walls ahead. It was surprisingly distant, considering that we couldn’t be more than a couple of minutes behind them. But if they got far enough ahead to break the fragile connection, that lead might well become permanent.
I started to run.
And almost bumped into the kidnapper booking it from the opposite direction. I hadn’t seen him in the dark until he was right on top of us, but suddenly there he was, his blue eyes wild, his hair sticking up everywhere and his mouth open in the O of Oh, shit. He almost knocked me down with the damn suitcase, gangly legs churning up the dark as he and Mother headed back toward the platform at a dead run.
“What the—” I didn’t get a chance to finish before Mircea grabbed me around the waist and flung us at the wall.
I hit hard, bruising my knee and smashing my cheek against the filthy concrete. But I didn’t complain. Because at almost the same instant, a bolt of red lightning sizzled through the tunnel, electrifying my hair and raising gooseflesh on my skin. Goddamnit!
“They’re supposed to be dead!” I said, furious.
“Perhaps this is a different group.”
“Jonas said there were only supposed to be five!”
“Yes, we’ll have to mention that to him when we return,” Mircea said grimly, as a bunch of pissed-off demigods blew past us.
I thought there were four, not five, but I couldn’t be sure. It was hard to see anything at all with bright green afterimages leaping across my vision. And then it was impossible, when so much spell fire lit up the tunnel that it looked like a sophisticated security system had been installed in there.
Laserlike spells bounced off walls and ceiling, crisscrossing each other in a deadly web of crimson fire. They turned the small, round space into something straight out of hell, and gave me plenty of light to see that the spells weren’t the kind meant to stun. Everywhere they hit, they blackened the heavy concrete, sparked off the rails and sent a thick layer of dust from the floor billowing into the air.
Mircea cursed and pulled me behind him, which would have been fine, except that a bolt slammed into the wall just down from us a second later. It must have hit an electrical line, because a great shower of sparks spewed across the tunnel, a few flaming out against my dress. Mircea cursed again and pulled me back the other way, near the stillsmoking blast mark from the previous spell.
“Get out!” he rasped.
I stopped staring at the fireworks long enough to stare at him. “What?”
“Shift out of here! Now!”
I shook my head. “We’ve been through this. If they kill her, I’m dead anyway! Why do you think my power brought me back here?”
“I’ll deal with it!”
“You can’t! Mircea—”
He pushed me against the wall, his body shielding me, his eyes reflecting the sparks. And their expression was pretty damn scary.
“Why are you doing this?”
“Because I don’t know how to keep you safe.”
“I don’t expect you to.”
“What?” He looked at me like he thought I’d gone mad.
“Would you protect the Consul if she was here?”
“Of course not!”
“What would you do?”
“Whatever she needed—”
“You would help her.”
“Yes!”
“Then help me.”
“You are not the Consul, Cassie! She has abilities you cannot possibly—”
“—understand. I know.” And from the little I’d seen of them, I was really okay with that. “But I have abilities she doesn’t. She can survive a direct hit from one of those blasts; I can shift out of the way and miss it. It’s the same—”
“It is not the same! You are this.” He gripped my arms, hard enough to bruise. “You are flesh, soft and sweet and yielding and vulnerable. You need protection, but I can’t—”
“Mircea! They’ve been trying to kill me for three days and I’m still here.”
“Due to luck!”
I stared at him. “Then I must be the luckiest person alive!”
He just looked at me, and I’d never seen that expression on his face before, like he was really going to lose it. There was something going on here, some issue I didn’t understand. But there was no time to figure it out.
“I have to fix this,” I told him, as clearly and calmly as I could. “If you want to help me, then help me. Don’t shield me, don’t protect me, don’t bury me alive. Help me.”
He stared at me a moment longer and didn’t move. The fight was escalating and also getting farther away from us, back toward the crowded platform. And I didn’t think the Spartoi cared much how many people they killed, as long as my mother was one of them.
“Mircea, please!”
“What do you need?” It was harsh.
“To touch her. That’s all I ever needed. One second and we’re gone—all of us—and this is over.”
He nodded briefly and let me go.
I pushed off the wall and b
ack into the corridor, trying to get a glimpse of my mother. I only needed to touch her for a second to shift her away, but I couldn’t just appear beside her. Spatial shifts required me to see where I was going, or risk ending up in a wall or a ceiling or part of a mage.
And right now, I couldn’t see shit.
Except for billowing clouds of dust, crisscrossing spells—and the crazy-ass kidnapper, erupting from the fray and screaming bloody murder.
He was headed straight at us, but he wasn’t running this time. Instead, he and Mom were levitating on something I couldn’t see, thanks to their flapping coats. But I felt it just fine when it slammed into my stomach, picked me up off my feet and sent me careening backward into the far reaches of the tunnel.
And now there were two of us screaming, me and the mage, as we pelted into darkness, him trying to push me off and me holding on for dear life, struggling to reach behind him, to grab her, to touch—
But either he figured out what I was doing, or he was the worst damn driver in history. Because we went weaving across the narrow space, bouncing off the sides and scraping across the ceiling, red bolts of spell fire following us into the gloom. And then he got smart and tipped over, dumping me ass-first onto the hard gravel between the tracks.
I cursed and scrambled back to my feet, about the time that a blinding radiance flooded the air. It sent wildly leaping shadows dancing around the walls, disorienting me almost as much as the deafening sound of a horn and the tracks vibrating under my feet and the dirt shimmering like gold dust in the air—
“What’s happening?” I screamed.
“Train,” the kidnapper shrieked.
I stared up at him. “Train?”
“Train!” Mircea yelled, flinging one of the Spartoi against the side of the tunnel. And then the guy’s friends leapt for Mircea and he leapt for me and I leapt for my mother—
And grabbed a handful of something soft and rubbery and gelatinous instead, completely unlike human flesh. That wasn’t surprising, because the bastard of a mage had flung a shield around the two of them and I’d grabbed a handful of that. It stretched, encasing my arms like thick latex as I tried to punch through, and Mircea tried to keep the mages from incinerating us all, and the damn kidnapper tried his best to kick me in the head.
