by Karen Chance
“Official visits are cold and formal. I do my best work in a more relaxed setting. I cannot charm anyone on behalf of the consul if I do not even know them.”
“And yet these visits do not appear to be working,” Marlowe pointed out.
“Do not appear to be working yet,” Mircea said, finishing his drink. “Every Pythia is different—”
“Including the one you visited before joining the senate?”
Unlike Marlowe’s other comments, it was said mildly, almost diffidently, a rapier strike instead of a bludgeon. And unlike the others, it landed. Mircea’s eyes flashed amber, bright enough to rival the lightning outside, and Marlowe took a quick step back.
“You have been busy,” Mircea hissed.
Marlowe blinked at him, as if he wasn’t used to hearing that tone, either. But he recovered fast. “You have to admit, it looks suspicious—”
“It would not have, had you not gone looking for it!”
“It’s my job to look for it. And I have a credible witness who saw you—”
“Paying a legitimate visit in broad daylight! Else you would have had no witness to worry you.”
Marlowe blinked again at the implication. But then forged ahead anyway. “I wouldn’t be worried if I knew why you were there. It could hardly have been on behalf of a consul you did not even know at the time.”
“I never said it was.”
“Then why?”
Yeah, I thought dizzily, why?
And then the stones started to heat up again.
No! I thought, kicking my legs, trying to get Jonas’ attention. Not yet!
And got smacked on the butt for my efforts.
Son of a—
Another jerk, and this time, I was up to my neck. Which would have been an improvement, except that now I couldn’t breathe at all. There was some agitated grasping going on in a way that would have been overly familiar if I hadn’t been about to suffocate. And either the moon had just gone behind a cloud or the room was starting to dim.
That wasn’t a great sign, and neither was the blood suddenly pounding in my ears, or the heart fluttering in my chest, or the damned moving bricks, which felt like they were trying to behead me. But the worst part was, I couldn’t hear.
But it looked like Mircea had recovered, and was back to doing what he always did, soothing frazzled nerves, calming ruffled feathers, getting people to listen. And Marlowe was. The dark eyes were still sharp and still guarded, but his stance had relaxed somewhat, and the intelligent face was thoughtful. He looked like he might be buying it.
Whatever it was, I thought angrily as darkness flooded my vision, making it impossible even to lip read. Not that I could have concentrated enough with the rocks around my neck suddenly going nuclear. I’d have screamed in pain if I’d had the breath, or flailed around had my arms not been trapped like the rest of me. Only that wasn’t true a second later, when strong hands grabbed me again, and pulled and yanked and heaved—
And thump.
And rattle and crash.
And wheeeeeeeee, loud enough to threaten my eardrums.
What the hell?
I pried my nose out of a dusty stretch of carpet and saw Jonas’ grim face looking down at me for a second. And then he said something—harsh, guttural, frightening— and I decided that maybe I’d hit the floor too hard. Because it looked like the room suddenly came alive.
“Get up!” he barked as an armoire on the far wall threw itself across the room and slammed into the door.
And had a fist punched through it for its trouble.
A lamp hurled after it, barely missing my head as I was hauled to my feet, only to shatter against the impressive pile of furniture piling up at the opening. Another lamp lay splintered on the floor—the rattle and crash I’d heard earlier, I guessed—like maybe I’d kicked it when I came loose. But that still didn’t explain—
“Isn’t that a ward?” I yelled over the unearthly shriek as we ran through a connecting door into the next room, which was shifting and changing as much as the last one. And flinging its contents behind us.
“Yes,” Jonas said abruptly, flattening us against the wall as a four-poster bed squeezed past.
“But . . . I thought . . . you took care of them,” I gasped.
“I did!” Jonas said indignantly. “But when one is forced to exert enough magic to level a small town, one
tends to trip even the most inadequate of wards!”
“Sorry?”
Jonas didn’t even bother responding to that. He just yanked me through the middle of two overstuffed armchairs that were muscling past and out into the hallway. Only to abruptly jerk me back again.
I didn’t understand why until the furniture around us suddenly stopped trying to fit through the connecting door and launched itself at the one to the hall instead. We dodged out of the way and then joined the stream flowing out. Only to see a wall of heavy oak pieces, almost ceiling high, trying to bulldoze a path down the hall to the office.
Trying and failing.
Maybe because someone on the other side was quickly turning them to splinters.
We spun back around to see the same thing happening on the other end of the hall, alongside the fireplace room. Antique pieces and old bits of junk were working in a solid mass, twisting and dodging and trying to hold back massive blows from the other side, which nonetheless kept sending pieces flying back at us. A painting of a woman in nineteenth-century dress was getting batted around the surface of the pile, her comically open mouth looking like she was yelling for help as someone did his best to turn the mountain into a molehill.
And his best was pretty damned good.
The fat lady is singing, I thought numbly, right before Jonas grabbed me.
“What is happening?” he demanded, looking pissed that his impressive display of magic wasn’t looking so impressive, after all. “Who is back there?”
“Mircea,” I admitted, and Jonas cursed.
“A first-level master? You didn’t tell me one of them would be here!”
“I didn’t know. And . . . actually . . . it’s two. Marlowe’s with him,” I admitted, glancing behind us. Mircea must have ended up on one side of the hall, when the first wave of animated furniture flooded the corridor, and Marlowe on the other. Which left us caught between the ultimate rock and a hard place, with two furniture dams barely holding back two master vamps and us stuck in the middle.
With nowhere to go.
“I suppose it is too much to hope that you can shift, just at the moment?” Jonas asked dryly.
I shook my head, and he scowled. But he didn’t argue with me. He’d been the lover of the former Pythia, and he knew things about the job that most mages didn’t. Like that the power of the office might be inexhaustible, but the Pythia herself wasn’t. And that a shift, even a spatial one like to get us out to the road, required concentration.
Something that’s a little difficult to manage after being almost choked to death.
Instead, he dropped my hand and raised both of his, mumbling a long string of something that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up and his already wild mane go positively electric. And all the doors to all the rooms between us and the furniture dams to slam open. And the contents start to stream out, like reinforcements going to the front lines.
“The instant you can, shift us out of here,” he yelled, to be heard over the creak of wood and metal moving in ways the designers never intended, and the high-pitched shriek of the wards. “We’ll have to come back for the other!”
“No . . . need,” I gasped, trying to will air into my starved lungs.
“What?”
I reached up and yanked off the fedora, which was somehow still sticking to the crackling mass on his head, and fished something out. It was a smallish bronze sphere encased in glass, which glowed faintly when I touched it. “Spelled,” I explained breathlessly. “You have to know . . . it’s there . . . or it isn’t.”
Jonas’ blue e
yes moved from the paperweight to my face, going sharp and squinty along the way. “I assume there’s a reason you didn’t tell me about this before?”
I licked my lips. “Uh-huh.”
“Pythias!” He threw his hands up in a manner that reminded me eerily of Agnes, my predecessor, who would probably have had some trick to get us out of this. But the most I could do was to slide down on my heels, put my arms over my head to cut the noise, and concentrate on recovering.
I only hoped I did it fast, because Jonas hadn’t bought us much time. Two first-level masters redecorate quickly, and the rooms were already running out of things to shred. We needed to get out of here.
“Billy,” I whispered. “The train is leaving the station.”
I didn’t get anything back, even though I knew he’d heard me. Billy didn’t need ears to pick up on my call; whether he chose to answer it or not was another thing. But he’d sounded eager enough to leave before.
I started to try again, but Jonas grabbed my arm. “Change of plan. When you can shift, take us back to the office.”
“What? Why?”
“We have the orb,” he explained, less than helpfully.
“Isn’t that what you wanted?”
He looked exasperated. “Yes, but not to take it out of this time stream! The spirit it contains is the only thing keeping the world’s protective barrier in place. To remove it would drop that protection, exactly as our enemy wants!”
“Then hide it somewhere. Someplace where Tony can’t find it. Then we can look it up when we get back to our—”
Jonas shook his head. “We have no idea what Tony used it for between now and then.”
“To hold down papers?”
“And what else?” Jonas asked severely. “We don’t know; therefore we cannot risk removing a piece of a very delicate puzzle. We could inadvertently change history!”
I frowned. “If you’re not going to take it and you’re not going to hide it, then what are we doing here?”
“I needed to see it, to know what I’m looking for. ‘Paperweight’ could mean anything—”
“I described it to you!”
“—and to verify that the vampire Antonio had not lied about your father’s fate merely to torture you.”
Which he totally would have done, I realized. Tony and I had had what you might call a suboptimal relationship. “But he didn’t.”
“No. For once, it seems, he told the truth. Which means we must return this,” Jonas said, shaking the paperweight at me, “lest Antonio realize its importance and alter his actions in the future. Then we may never find it!”
I said something unladylike, which he didn’t hear because it was becoming impossible to hear anything. I felt like screaming right along with the wards, if I’d had the breath and if it would have done any good. But it wouldn’t—just like using the last of my energy to shift us to the office, where we’d be trapped all over again, because I wasn’t going to be doing this twice in close succession. Not the way I felt right now, and not carrying two. And that was assuming I could manage to do it at—
“Cass! Get ready to shift!” Billy’s panicked voice cut through the din.
“In a minute,” I said irritably, rubbing the back of my neck.
“Not in a minute! Now. Now, now, now, now, now, now, now!”
My head came up. “What is wrong with you?”
“You know how you said if I ran into problems to come back? Well, I’m coming back. And I got problems!”
“What kind of problems?”
“What kind you think?” he snapped. “I’m trying to lose ’em, but they know this place better than I do and I think they’ve finally found a reason to work together—”
“Wait.” I glanced around. Narrow corridor; isolated part of the house; nobody around but us and a couple of more-or-less indestructible vampires. “Don’t try to lose them.”
“What?”
“Just get back here—now.”
“You don’t get it, Cass. When I said problem, I meant—”
“I got it. Just do it.” I stood up.
“Cassandra?” Jonas was watching me narrowly. “What is it?”
“Um,” I said brilliantly, since explaining this sort of thing usually didn’t go well. But it didn’t matter because I didn’t have time anyway. A second later, a horrible wail cut through the air, making the shrieking wards sound like a melody in comparison.
I whipped my head around, but there was nothing to see. And Jonas didn’t look like he’d noticed anything. Until the air suddenly became thick and cold and hard to breathe, and the hallway started to shake perceptibly, and the light fixtures overhead blew out, one after the other in a long line.
“Cassandra?” Jonas said, a little more forcefully this time.
“I think it’s time for the midnight express,” I said, hoping I hadn’t just made a really big mistake.
“And what does that mean?” he demanded.
“It means choo-choo, motherfucker!” Billy screamed, swooping out of the ceiling. And right on his tail was a train, all right—of what looked like every damned ghost on the property.
Holy shit, I didn’t say, because I was busy grabbing Jonas and throwing us at the nearest door, just before the unearthly wind slammed into the hallway like a tornado.
We crashed into the floor on the other side as it hit, boiling down the hall like a freight train of fury. Merely the wind of its passing was enough to rip light fixtures off the walls, to puff a week’s worth of ashes out of the fireplace, and to send china figurines plummeting to their doom. Half a dozen books went flapping madly through the air over our heads, only to tangle in the wildly twisting drapes as I dragged myself back up.
Jonas lifted his head to stare at me. “What the—”
“Ghosts!” I told him, staggering for the door.
My ankle hurt, my lungs were still crying out for air, and my neck was on fire. But I didn’t stick around to assess the damage. I didn’t even wait until the storm was over. I stumbled out into the hall with Jonas on my heels, the two of us being buffeted here and there by late-arriving spirits.
And then I stopped for a second in awe.
Because there were no ghost trails here. The corridor in front of us was a solid rectangle of pulsing, angry green. There was no furniture dam anymore, either, just random bits of wood sticking out of the plaster like quills on a porcupine.
There was also no pissed-off vamp.
The one behind us was okay, judging by the renewed sounds of destruction battering the mound. But whoever had been on this end . . . well, I didn’t know where he had ended up. But I didn’t think it was a good idea to go looking for him.
Because the train was headed back this way.
“Run!” I screamed at Jonas, and sprang for the office door, just as the storm barreled back at us again, flinging a deadly cloud of debris ahead of it. He dove in behind me, damned spry for an old guy, as jagged shards of paneling whipped by outside like knives.
And then he slammed the door.
I stared at him incredulously. “Ghosts, remember?”
He looked a little shamefaced. “Right.”
And then they were back.
We hadn’t even made it into the inner office when Billy zoomed through the door, screeching something I couldn’t understand because an infuriated tornado was right on his nonexistent heels. Something tore through the outer office as we dove into the inner one, upending filing cabinets and sending a blizzard of paperwork dancing madly through the air. Jonas leapt for the hat rack, I leapt for him, and Billy grabbed me around the neck, still babbling something.
“What?”
“You owe me, you so owe me!”
“Did you get it?”
“Yes, I’m fine. Thanks for asking!”
“Billy! Did. You. Get—”
“Yes, damn it, yes! I got it! I got it!”
“Thank you,” I told him fervently.
And shifted.
Chapter Three
“Don’t,” I told Marco, a decade and a half later, when he opened the door to the Vegas hotel suite I called home. “Just . . . don’t, okay?”
Marco is my chief bodyguard. He’s about six foot five, maybe two hundred and fifty pounds, and built like a freight train. My legs aren’t as big around as his arms, which might feel weird except that most men’s aren’t, either. He’s a swarthy, hairy, foulmouthed, cigar-munching, example of machismo who is usually covered in weapons he doesn’t need because he’s also a master vampire.
Which is why it’s annoying when he decides to play mother hen.
Not that that appeared to be happening tonight.
“Hadn’t planned on it,” Marco said, and yanked me inside.
“What’s wrong with you?” I asked, because Marco was looking kind of freaked-out. That was worrying on someone who, I strongly suspected, had been assigned to lead my bodyguard because he was the oldest of Mircea’s masters. He’d seen it all and he didn’t rattle easy.
Although he was kind of looking rattled now.
“We got a problem,” he told me grimly.
I shook my head, letting loose a little cloud of Tony’s lousy housekeeping. “No.”
“What does that mean?”
I’d have thought that was obvious since I was dragging in at two a.m., covered in soot, plaster, and sweat, with a bruised ring around my neck and an all-but-destroyed T-shirt. But apparently not. I edged around him, balancing a cup and a bag of heart-destroying pastries from the coffee shop downstairs, because it wasn’t like I was going to live long enough to have to worry about cholesterol.
“It means I’ve had enough for one night. I’m tired; I’m going to bed. If there’s a problem, it can wait until—”
I stopped, because I’d just noticed the living room. It would have been called sunken if it hadn’t been on the twenty-second floor of the hotel. It was a tasteful medley of white and blue and yellow, since I’d had a say in redecorating after the last disaster hit. It was also usually deserted, the guards preferring to hang out in the lounge with the pool table and the beer fridge.
