by Karen Chance
“Cassie!”
The sound was vague and indistinct, like my form, like everything. I wasn’t even sure I’d heard it, but then it came again, a faint, echoing sound, but stronger to the right. Was it? I thought so, and instinctively moved in that direction.
“Cassie!” It came again, nearer now, or so it seemed, maybe . . . I couldn’t really tell. I didn’t have ears; how could I hear without ears? Wasn’t sure I had much of anything now, and I had a feeling a coherent thing like a body might be too much for me to maintain at this point. I had a flash of a dim silver ball, a little twinkling light against a wall of clouds, bright, so bright, against the darkness. But I was probably just making that up. I couldn’t see, after all. I didn’t have—
“Cassie!”
I jerked, because that had been close. Really close. Close, close, somewhere . . .
There.
I felt a body, not mine, but familiar. Warm. So full of life. Hurt.
Why was it hurt?
“Cassie! Listen to me. You have to merge with your body. You have to do it now!”
My body. Yes. I had to get back to . . . but where was it? I put out a hand, or what would have been a hand if I had hands left, a tendril of power, anyway—
And then snatched it back, mewling in pain, after something took what felt like a bite right out of it. God, that had hurt. But it cleared my mind, or what was left of it, because I suddenly remembered. My body . . . was on the ground.
I dove, and something screeched in my ear, a furious, screaming cry, full of hunger and pain and desperation—
And then I was back, filling myself not in one quick rush as I had before, but in tiny trickles here and there. Funny, it didn’t feel that different, being back. It didn’t feel that different at all.
I stared up at the sky, at the rain falling almost straight down, highlighted here and there by stray beams of moonlight. It wasn’t enough to obscure the stars, which were winking with pinprick brightness through the trees. Or the moon, riding a sea of clouds overhead, silvering the landscape. Beautiful.
I wondered if I was dreaming. And then I knew I was, because he was there. Strong arms went around me, pulling me up. Beautiful, I thought, looking into clear green eyes.
He gathered me in, folding me under his chin, and I thought there was something . . . something strange about . . .
He had on a shirt too light for the weather, thin cotton with the sleeves rolled to the elbows, showing the tendons in his forearms. His forearms . . . that was it. I could see the arms he’d wrapped around me because he wasn’t wearing his old, battered coat. But Pritkin always wore . . . didn’t he? Some reason floated here and there, darting across my mind like a butterfly . . . but I couldn’t . . . couldn’t catch it. . . .
“Cassie.” Warm fingers trailed down my cheek, my neck. So warm, so warm. Was he healing? I couldn’t remember him being this warm. But it felt good. It felt . . .
A sigh leaked out like blood.
We sat like that for a moment, his chest hard at my back, his arms hard around me, so solid, grounding, when I felt like I could float away. My head lolled back against his shoulder. It seemed too hard to hold it up anymore. His hand came up, burying itself in my hair, clenching.
And then releasing as he carefully laid me down on the grass again.
His face swam into view over me. He looked different, and it wasn’t just the coat. His hair was a rumpled, silky mess. His eyes were hot, the lines around his mouth deeply etched. He was breathing hard. I watched it curl out of him, silver air on a silver sky. . . .
Maybe I’m dreaming, I thought vaguely. Maybe he wasn’t here at all, just some shade I’d conjured up because I didn’t want to die alone. But he looked real, sharply defined by dark shadows, highlighted at the curve of his neck, the breadth of his shoulders, by moonlight. Substantial, undeniably there. My fingers curled around his, and he caught them in a hard grip.
I thought I could write a ten-page paper, with illustrations, on all the ways Pritkin’s features differed from the usual standards of beauty, but that didn’t change anything about what I saw when I looked at the man.
“Beautiful,” I whispered. He closed his eyes.
Overburdened clouds broke open with a rumble and a sigh and rain fell like a veil across the horizon. I was watching it, mesmerized at how it blurred the distant mountains, at how it—
Pritkin’s hands framed my face. He bent closer, until his lashes brushed my cheek, until his lips touched mine. “Kiss me.”
Or, at least, that’s what I thought he said. But it was hard to hear. Something like voices murmured in my head, like a hive full of lazy bees, inarticulate and insistent, waxing and waning. I wished they’d shut up.
“Cassie,” his fingers tightened. “Like you mean it.”
And then he was kissing me, lips soft and slightly chapped on mine, the scratch of a three-day old beard against my skin, the smoothness of teeth, of tongue. He tasted like coffee and electricity and power, so much power. It filled my mouth like whiskey, like the best drink I’d ever had. It flowed down my throat, burned along every limb, snapping nerves back to life, filling veins, sending my heart racing in my chest.
Suddenly, I could breathe again, not shallowly, but fully, deeply. Only I didn’t want to breathe. I wanted him. My hands came up, burying in his hair, holding him, drinking from him, desperate and sloppy and greedy and ravenous. All warm and good and power and, God, oh, God, so good.
I groaned and rolled on top of him, so hungry, so hungry. His hands settled on my waist, not stroking, barely touching. Just holding me in place as I took what I needed. I could see it in my mind, like I saw the Pythian power sometimes, a glittering golden stream flooding out of him and into me, so good. And then his hands were clenching, holding me, bruisingly hard, for one last, brief instant—
And then there were people, people everywhere, running and yelling and pulling—on me. Pulling us apart. I tried to fight them and my limbs actually seemed to work now, to respond to my commands. But they were vampires and so strong and—
And he was gone. The hillside was spinning, people’s faces and the streamers of smoke and the rain all blurring together into a kaleidoscope of don’t care, because I didn’t want them; I wanted Pritkin. I struggled up, and someone tried to push me back down, and I snarled at them and they let me go.
I stumbled to my feet, naked and muddy and bloody and half crazy, but he wasn’t there, he wasn’t there. And in a flash, I knew why. He’d told me himself—human or demon varieties. I’d given him power to save his life, and now he’d returned it. And while that didn’t mean anything in human terms, except emergency and necessity and the only possible way out, in demon terms it meant—
It meant—
“What have you done?” I screamed to no one, because he wasn’t there.
I dropped to my knees, screaming in fury, and the earth shook. A time wave boiled under the soil, causing roots to fly out of the ground, pushing up boulders, sending a cascade of mud and debris spilling down the hill and forcing several vamps to jump wildly out of the way. So much power, I thought dully.
And it did me no good, it did me no good, it did me no good.
“Now zat,” someone said approvingly, “is a Pythia.”
And then blackness.
Epilogue
I woke up in bed to find a vampire in my room.
He was sitting in the chair in the corner, flipping through a newspaper. The front page was turned to me, and the headline was a little hard to miss. One word, in huge black letters: GODDESS.
I stared at it for a long minute, feeling empty, feeling nothing. The vampire turned over another page. “You’re not supposed to be here,” I told Marco roughly.
A pair of bushy eyebrows appeared over the paper. “You kicking me out?”
“No,” I said. And then I burst into tears.
He came over and gathered me up. He was big and warm and smart enough not to say anything. I cried his shirt wet. I
was hard on his shirts.
“I got more,” he told me, and gave me a handkerchief. It was big, like everything about him. I just held it.
I didn’t give a shit what I looked like.
“What happened?” I asked, after a while.
Marco’s big chest rose and lowered in a sigh. “Well, as I understand it, you showed up to your coronation naked, rolled around in some mud, dusted a dragon and then made out with the mage. Nobody really knows what happened, but it impressed the shit out of the senates. They signed the alliance early this morning.”
“Okay.”
“Also, they caught that thing that attacked you. You know, the Morrigan?”
“Uh-huh.”
“She claims she was forced into it because the Green Fey invaded and kidnapped her husband. Guess they’re working for the bad guys now, only nobody seems to really know. Anyway, she said she’s willing to let bygones be bygones if we help her get him back.”
“How generous.”
“Yeah. That’s what I said. But that Marsden guy is considering taking her up on the offer.”
I tilted my head to stare up at him. “Why?”
“He was here all morning, reading your dad’s letters. It turns out that that spell everybody’s been worried about—the one that keeps the so-called gods out of here?”
“The ouroboros?”
“Yeah, that’s the one. Looks like it wasn’t linked to you at all. Even if that Spartoi had killed you, it wouldn’t have done any good.”
“But something is keeping it active. And if my mother isn’t here—”
“I didn’t understand everything the old man said,” Marco told me. “But it seems she did something to merge her soul with your dad’s before she passed on—as insurance, you know?”
I sat up and turned to look at him. “But he died with her.”
“Yeah, but his soul stayed here.”
It took me a moment to get it. “Because Tony trapped it in his damned paperweight.”
“Yeah. And it’s still here. Or in Faerie, somewhere on this side of the spell. Anyway, Marsden figures we got to find the fat little weasel before he figures out what he’s got, and if he’s in Faerie, we’re gonna need help.”
I nodded slowly, but I wasn’t thinking about Tony. I just sat there for a moment, a couple of dozen emotions washing through me. But the one I finally settled on was pride—fierce and glowing.
She must have known they would never stop coming for her, had to realize they would find her, sooner or later. She was weak, possibly dying, because I couldn’t see her going to the Pythian Court in less than dire need, not knowing what stalked her. She’d had almost no one she could trust, for even at court there were those like Myra who would have sold her out. But still, she’d found a way. She’d found a way and beaten them all.
I wiped my eyes, got up and started going through my dresser.
“So Marsden said he needs to know if you got any ideas where to start looking for the paperweight,” Marco told me. “And there’s a lot more stuff in your dad’s letters he wants to talk over with you. Plus, Pritkin hasn’t checked in and he keeps asking if I’ve seen him. I told him what I could, but it wasn’t—”
I looked up. “What did you tell him?”
“That he came through here last night, covered in blood and ranting like a madman. He demanded to see you, and when I told him we thought you’d gone to the coronation, he cursed at me, ran for the balcony and threw himself into a ley line. That’s the last any of us saw of him.”
I thought I could fill in the rest. Niall had left Pritkin for dead, but he hadn’t counted on his demon blood—or his sheer stubbornness. Pritkin’s body had healed enough for him to swim back to consciousness, to realize that the necklace was gone and to understand what that meant. He’d come here looking for me, probably to warn me not to shift, but I was already gone. So he’d gone after me.
He’d gone after me and he’d saved me. He’d said he’d rather die than go back there, into slavery, into his father’s tender care. But he’d saved me anyway.
Like Mom, he’d found a way.
I grabbed a tank top and a pair of shorts and went to the bathroom.
“That was a couple of minutes before the master popped back in,” Marco said. “Only without you. Things got a little crazy after that, because nobody knew where you’d ended up. And we couldn’t reach the house by phone and we couldn’t even contact anybody mentally ’cause they were all in that portal thing. But nobody’d seen you here, so we finally went out there, only to find we’d missed all the excitement.”
I ran a comb through my hair and didn’t comment.
“The master wanted to keep you at the estate, but Marsden threw a fit, so they compromised and we brought you back here,” Marco continued. “The master’ll be back as soon as he can shake the senators, and Marsden said he’ll be checking in tonight. But he wanted to know if you have any idea where Pritkin is.”
“Yes.” I scrubbed my face and started to get dressed. Pritkin’s little talisman bumped my skin as I pulled off the pajama top. I put a hand on it, squeezing hard, and something greasy leaked through the material and onto my palm. I didn’t wash it off.
There was no question where he was, but Jonas couldn’t help him. As soon as he’d exchanged energy with me, the thing that called itself his father had jerked him back, “revoking his parole,” as Pritkin had put it. And I didn’t think it was going to be easy to pry him loose. I wasn’t sure it would even be possible. I didn’t understand much about the demon realms, didn’t know what, if anything, could be done.
But I knew who to ask.
“By the way, your dress arrived,” Marco told me.
“What dress?”
“For the coronation.”
I stuck my head out the door. “We already had that.”
“No, you had a mud bath. Seems they want to do it over, do it right, this coming Saturday—”
“No.”
“It’s gonna be here, instead of at the estate—”
“No.”
“It’s a nice dress.”
I pulled on the shorts and came out. Marco was standing by something that was a little better than “a nice dress.” It was a delicate, shimmering piece of art. A few crystalline lines sketched out the form here and there, like the ones connecting stars in a constellation. They delineated the soft drape of the skirt, the low-cut back, the plunging neckline. And between those was . . . nothing. Or, at least, what was there wasn’t cloth.
It was completely transparent, with a faint tinge of teal, like a dress made out of ice or glass—or the light that glimmered along fiber-optic filaments one minute and was gone the next. It was suspended a few feet off the floor and was slowly rotating, shedding softly glowing particles as it went. They lingered for a moment after the dress had turned, like a train of stars, before they disappeared.
I’d have been a little worried about the transparency thing if I didn’t think Augustine had done some sort of trick, like with Francoise’s ribbon. And if I hadn’t already gone full monty in front of most of the leaders of the magical world. And if I planned to wear it.
“It’s beautiful,” I said honestly, and Marco sighed.
“You ain’t coming, are you?”
“Let my double do it. She’s probably better at these kinds of things anyway.”
“And what are you going to do?” he asked, watching with disapproval as I shoved my feet into a pair of old sneakers.
“Raise some Hel,” I told him. And shifted.
BOOKS BY KAREN CHANCE
THE CASSIE PALMER SERIES
Touch the Dark
Claimed by Shadow
Embrace the Night
Curse the Dawn
THE MIDNIGHT’S DAUGHTER SERIES
Midnight’s Daughter
Death’s Mistress
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