by Karen Chance
I saw when it hit home, when Pritkin realized that he’d done what the article never could have and made me believe it.With a single look he’d shaken my entire foundation. He rearranged his features, but it was too late. Compared to the vampires I knew, he was a lousy liar.
“You told me once that my line was tainted,” I said, my voice sounding oddly wooden, even to me. “But I thought you meant my mother.”
“Yes, your mother. Charming girl,” Marsden said. “You remind me of her.” I stared at him as he calmly spread marmalade on his toast.
“You knew her?”
“Of course. She was always at the Pythian Court, whenever I had reason to visit.”
“And my father?” The word tasted strange in my mouth. “Is it true?”
“Hmm? Oh, yes. We had reason to believe that he was a leading member of the Black Circle for years. Part of their governing council, as it were.”
“We don’t know that!” Pritkin said. “The Black Circle doesn’t publicize its inner workings! The people who spread those stories were criminals hoping for a deal. They’d have said anything—”
“John.” Marsden looked at him severely over his glasses. “You aren’t going to protect her by denying it. It isn’t pleasant, I know, but if she’s strong enough to be Pythia, she’s strong enough to hear the truth.”
I wanted to know and I didn’t. Because some gossip rag’s allegations would be a lot easier to shrug off than anything Marsden had to say. He’d headed the Circle for years, had their intelligence reports at his fingertips. But he was right: I needed to know. And it wasn’t like anyone else had volunteered to tell me.
“What truth?” I asked, pushing away the sickness uncurling in my stomach.
“That your father was a powerful necromancer, capable of commanding ghosts to do his will,” Marsden said matter-of-factly. “It’s said he had a massive army of them, listening, prying, reporting to him about our activities. It’s how the Black Circle always knew when we were planning a raid. His ghostly spies acted as a counterpart to the Pythian Court, giving the dark eyes and ears everywhere.”
He munched toast, giving me a chance to absorb that. It was surprisingly easy. Mircea had told me once that my father had done something similar for Tony, although on a much smaller scale. I should have realized then—anyone with that kind of ability wasn’t likely to be content as Tony’s stooge. Information was power, even in the supernatural world. Maybe especially in our world, where glamouries and illusions so often helped to hide the truth.
Except from ghosts.
There had never been a ward invented that could keep a ghost out, not even that could detect one. Not to mention that Billy could slip inside people’s skin for a little short-term possession whenever the urge struck. He didn’t do it often, because it drained his power too quickly, and even when he did, he couldn’t go sorting through people’s thoughts, cherry-picking memories. But if they happened to think about a subject of interest when he was in residence, he would hear it. He’d done it before and reported back to me. And if someone had a hundred Billy Joes? A thousand?
But something didn’t make sense. “How would they have met?” I demanded. “A dark mage and the Pythia’s heir? It’s crazy!”
“He didn’t announce himself as a former Black Circle member,” Marsden said dryly. “He was in Gallina’s entourage when the vampire called on the Pythia.”
“Tony went to see Agnes? Why?”
Marsden shrugged. “Throughout history, people facing a difficult decision have wanted a glimpse of the future. Norms go to palm readers; members of the supernatural community—those with any pull, at any rate—request an audience with the Pythia. What specifically he asked about we can’t know. The records of the Pythian Court are confidential.”
“You said my father was at court once. How long are we talking about here?”
“A little over a week. Usually, supplicants are sent away if the Pythia doesn’t have an answer for them within a month, but Gallina received his fairly quickly. It was almost the only thing the court would tell us.”
“And in something like eight days, my father persuaded my mother to elope with him?” I didn’t bother to keep the skepticism out of my voice.
“Oh, no, I shouldn’t think so. Your mother was a bright, level-headed young woman. If she had decided to give up her position, she could have chosen an easier, and much less flamboyant, path.”
“Then why didn’t she?”
Marsden shrugged. “We always assumed he put her under some kind of spell. Clairvoyant ability doesn’t make someone proof against other forms of magic, after—” I don’t know what was on my face, but he cut off abruptly.
There was a hard edge to Pritkin’s voice when he spoke. “Could we have a moment, Jonas?”
“You know, I think I have a photograph of your mother around here somewhere,” Marsden said, and hurried off.
I picked up the newspaper and slowly, systematically, ripped it to shreds. But it didn’t help; pieces of sentences still shouted up at me: infamous, dark, unstable, dangerous. I swept them off the table in a sudden burst of anger.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked Pritkin,
“I showed you the paper—”
“I’m not talking about today! We’ve known each other more than a month.” I had to work to keep my voice steady. “I admit, it’s been a hell of a month, but there was never, oh, five minutes, when you might have mentioned—”
“I thought you knew,” he said quietly. “You never spoke about your parents or your childhood. I assumed this was why. And you told me recently that you had reason to be ashamed of your father, of the things he had done—”
“As one of Tony’s henchmen! Not as . . . as . . .” I couldn’t even think of the words. Everyone talked about the Black Circle as if it was the locus of all evil. I’d seen vampires shudder at mention of it, guys who killed without a second thought, for money or for pride or just for sport—they thought the organization my father had helped to lead was wicked.
No wonder every war mage I met looked at me like I was about to sprout tentacles or start breathing fire.
“Hey, Cass.” Billy floated over from beside the fridge, looking grave. “The mage is right—it could be exaggerated. You know what that paper is like—”
He reached for my hand and I flinched back, staring at him. I’d been able to see ghosts all my life and had never thought anything of it. Or of sending them on errands, asking them for information . . . The thought cut like a knife, giving me a quick stab with a twist for a good measure.
“Hey! It’s me,” Billy said, taking my hand anyway. The caress was as light as a kiss of wind against my wrist, soft, cloudlike and comfortingly familiar. “Faithful sidekick, remember?”
And my army of one, I thought sickly.
Everything had happened so fast, barely a month from some random clairvoyant trying to avoid Tony’s wrath to someone who thought nothing of slipping through time, changing history, possessing people. . . . Was this how it started? Just trying to stay alive, to get through each day, not realizing how much you were changing until one day, you no longer recognized yourself?
Until one day, you woke up a monster?
Chapter Twenty-two
I ended up in the garden on a bench—I’m not sure how—with my mother’s photo in one hand and a cooling mug of tea in the other. It was very un-British of him, but Marsden didn’t use teacups. He preferred heavy stoneware that held about half a pot, along with a healthy dose of milk and a heaping teaspoon of sugar.
I stared at the photo blankly, my eyes taking a moment to focus on the right face. And even when they did, there wasn’t much to see. The photo had been taken at the ceremony making her Agnes’ heir. It was impossible to tell if we resembled each other in the face, because it was a wide-angle shot, showing her surrounded by other young women and a bunch of men who I assumed were war mages.
She was tall—something I hadn’t expected—and she had
straight dark hair, not strawberry blond curls. She was wearing a high-necked dress with long sleeves and she wasn’t smiling. I ran my finger over the photo, a pit of loss opening behind my ribs. My hand tingled faintly where it rested on the surface. I was supposed to be a Seer, but I couldn’t see her. I’d never been able to see her, except in the moment of her death.
Pritkin was yelling at Marsden about something inside the house, but the walls were thick and I couldn’t hear him very well. Plus I’d fallen into a kind of weary numbness and didn’t care. A beam of sunlight was flirting with some clouds overhead, sending down intermittent watery rays. It was nothing like the searing, bake-into-your-bones heat of Vegas, but nice anyway. It warmed my neck, light and soothing.
I closed my eyes and eventually the sunlight started to leach away my headache. I thought about going back to bed, because I was still kind of sleepy. Part of me didn’t like that idea—it wanted to stay up and fret and worry and freak about what I’d just learned—but another part of me had had enough. That part wished Marsden had put up a hammock instead of the bench, because it thought a nap in the sun sounded really good about now.
The tea wasn’t bad. I’d never taken milk in it before, but it made it creamier, heartier. I sipped it and stared at an overgrown rosebush that was in a battle to the death with some type of vine. The vine appeared to be winning, not surprisingly as its stalk was bigger around than my arm. It looked ancient, almost primeval, not like something that should be hanging around a quiet English garden.
It had flowed over an old sundial, eaten into the crumbling rock of the base, twined around the pedestal and almost obscured the top. “I only show the happy hours,” it read. At least, I think that’s what the worn bronze letters said. They would have been hard to read even without the leaves. The slow, steady pressure of the vine had cracked the face almost in two.
I hopped up, deciding that a walk might suit me better. Picking my way down the overgrown stone and moss pathway took up most of my attention, forcing me to concentrate on not twisting an ankle. There were puddles everywhere and the air smelled wet and green. But no raindrops disturbed the surface of the pools; it looked like the storm had decided to retreat for a while.
Pritkin caught me when I was halfway around the house, trying to figure out whether it was safe to wade through a patch of waist-high weeds that had set up a roadblock across the trail. “Saint Patrick ran off all the snakes, right?” I asked.
“That was Ireland. And I was never much of a gardener. I’d go around.”
I decided to take his advice, stepping carefully through a random but healthy-looking garden that flourished next to the encroaching jungle. I met him at the point where the path started around the other side of the house. “What do you mean, you’ve never been a gardener?”
“I think the term these days is ‘black thumb.’ I let the place go to rack and ruin, I’m afraid. Most of that”—he nodded at the dueling vegetables—“is Jonas’ work.”
“Wait a minute. This is your house?”
“For over a century.”
“Then what’s Marsden doing here?”
“He lived in an assigned residence during his tenure in office. Rather like your White House or our Ten Downing Street. But after the last election, he had to vacate it. And having held the title for more than sixty years, he no longer had a separate domicile.” Pritkin glanced around at the genteel decay and a small smile tugged at his lips. “He decided he wanted to explore the bucolic life in his retirement and this was once a workable farm. I rented it to him a year and a half ago, when I transferred to the States.”
He paused while we relocated to a bench safe from attacking flora. It had a chimney on one side, a small, scraggly patch of forget-me-nots on the other, and a nice view of the river. A butterfly sniffed a flower nearby, its feelers twitching excitedly.
“I wouldn’t have left,” I told him. “It’s nice here.”
Pritkin’s mouth hardened for a heartbeat before relaxing once more. “I’m considering selling. It’s too large for one person. And the reason it was acquired no longer exists.”
I looked around. So this was the house he’d bought with his wife in mind. It suddenly became more interesting.
One of the few things Pritkin had told me about himself was his early—and, as far as I knew, only—attempt at the have-a-normal-life routine. Sometime in the nineteenth century, he’d met a girl and gotten married. Only no one had bothered to mention what might happen to a half incubus who took a wife. The result was the other side of his nature coming out on their first night together and draining the poor girl of life without Pritkin having any idea how to stop it. He’d had to watch, horror-struck, as she died because of him.
I could see him picking this place out in the months before the wedding. He’d probably expected years of quiet, happy normalcy. Only that so hadn’t happened.
I could relate.
“Are you all right?” he finally asked.
“I’m fine,” I said, because it took too much energy to explain all the ways I wasn’t.
“You don’t look fine.”
“Sorry.” I tried to relax against the hedge growing behind the bench, but its branches poked me like too-sharp fingernails. I couldn’t get comfortable and sat up straight again.
“There is something you should know,” he told me.
“Not now.” My brain was already overstuffed with all the things I hadn’t had a chance to think about, to accept, to find a place for in my self-image where they might not do too much damage.
“It isn’t more bad news,” he insisted.
I looked at him warily. He seemed sincere. “Okay,” I said cautiously.
“Jonas overstated the situation regarding your father. What we know about him was gained from interrogations of minor figures in the magical underworld—the sort of people that the vampire who brought you up once employed. The Black Circle uses such people for errand runners and cannon fodder but limits considerably what they are told. And their information came years after your father’s death. Much of it was likely not garnered from personal experience but from rumor and conjecture.”
“You’ve never interrogated a single Black Circle member?”
“No.”
“That doesn’t seem possible. You guys have known about them for hundreds of years. You must have captured at least one—”
“It’s a rare occurrence, but it does happen.”
“And none of them ever talked?” I couldn’t imagine anyone who did the kind of stuff that made vampires blanch having all that much loyalty to his partners-in-crime. It sounded more like he’d sell them out the first chance he got.
“They never lived long enough.”
“I don’t understand.”
“The Black Circle has a similar tattoo to ours but with a more sinister purpose. Every Black Circle mage we’ve ever caught self-destructed within minutes. It’s one reason most of them fight to the death. Capture, for them, is the same thing.”
It was gruesome to contemplate, but it made a grim sort of sense. “I guess their tattoo doesn’t come off, huh?”
“No. And as we have never captured one without it, I can only assume it is a requirement for admission.”
“Isn’t the Silver Circle’s?”
“Yes—for most people.”
“Why not for you?”
He smiled slightly. “Mixed-blood applicants need not apply. The Circle was pleased to have me around to hunt the more dangerous types of demons, but they preferred not to give me access to their power base.”
“I don’t get it. Wouldn’t you have been donating, not taking?”
“Power drains can work both ways. It’s the main reason the Circle cut off the connection to your pentagram—they were afraid you would reverse the flow.”
“Marsden seems to trust you.”
“Perhaps. But the Council as a whole decides most issues, with the head of the Council there to advise, to set up the meeting agenda and
such. He has only one vote unless there is a tie, and on the subject of my joining the Circle as a full member, there was close to a consensus.”
“Nice friends you have there.”
“On such a matter, they were wise to be cautious. But we have strayed from the point. Necromancy is illegal. It is grouped with other prohibited manifestations of magical ability, such as those possessed by the children you are helping. But the mere fact of someone being a necromancer doesn’t make them evil. The power can be misused, but the same is true for any magic.”
“You seem to have a different take on it than the Circle.”
“When I was young, the differences between dark and light magic were not as clear-cut as today. The only difference was the way power was acquired and the uses to which it was put. Magical energy is no different than any other—it can be perverted or it can be used for good.”
“Well, my father’s was perverted.”
“You can’t know that!”
“Yes, I really can.” I rubbed my eyes. I didn’t want to have to spell it out, but this was apparently face-up-to-crap day and no one had told me. Not to mention that the truth was pretty damn obvious. Pritkin wasn’t stupid; he’d work it out for himself soon enough. I preferred that he heard it from me.
“Energy is the only coin of the ghost world,” I said. “Once you’re dead, money, the things it can buy, prestige—all that goes by the wayside. Ghosts are only really interested in two things: revenge, or whatever reason they hang around, and energy. Mostly energy, because without it, they’ll fade away.”
“Not fade,” Pritkin corrected. “They transition to other realms.”
“Yeah, only most don’t want to go. And power is what they need to hang around. It can be generated by things like Billy’s talisman or gleaned from places that have a significant psychic residue. People in serious distress shed life energy like skin cells, and in an old house or a graveyard, there’s often enough built up to sustain one or more ghosts. Graveyards are particularly popular because more distressed people show up all the time. It’s kind of like a supernatural grocery store, always getting new deliveries.”
