by Karen Chance
Looked like someone else had decided the dress code was bullshit.
Acolyte? I mouthed at Rhea, who nodded grimly.
“I leave that mumbo-jumbo to you,” the man replied. “I deal in facts—”
“And what facts are those?” the acolyte asked witheringly.
“That a damned rush of magic just slapped me in the face!”
“Probably the wards,” another man piped up. “They’ve been itching me since we got here.”
“It’s not the wards. I know wards—”
“You don’t know these,” the woman cut in. “They’re not the pissant things you’re used to dealing with. The Circle’s top wardsmiths made them—”
“The Circle!” one of the other coats said contemptuously. “They’re not as good as they think they are.”
“Neither are you.”
“Then it’s too bad we’re the best you got,” the dark-haired mage said, coming back into the living room. “And I’m telling you, someone just did a spell.”
“And I’m telling you, it was the wards,” the smaller man argued. He was Asian, bald, and looked uncomfortable in his skin. “These things don’t like us.”
The tall acolyte looked like she agreed with the wards. “They won’t hurt you as long as you’re with us. Now get the safe open.”
“Where is it?” the small man asked, taking something out of his coat.
I glanced at Rhea and mouthed, Silence spell? Because I had a few burning questions. But she shook her head. Apparently, it was powerful enough that they might pick up on it, too.
“Do you know the combination?” I whispered.
She shook her head again, looking guilty. “I only saw it opened once, and that was years ago. I’d forgotten it was even there.”
So much for the idea of shifting back a couple hours and beating them to it. But I suddenly had a serious need to get in that safe. Luckily, it looked like they were going to be nice enough to open it for me.
Or not, I thought, as the smaller mage went to the sunflower painting and jerked it open, revealing a steel-colored block. That promptly shocked the hell out of him as soon as he touched it. “Shit!” He jerked his arm back, and I swear I thought I saw it steaming.
“Looks like it’s warded, too,” the bigger mage said.
“Of course it’s warded!” the tall acolyte told him. “What did you expect? Get it open!”
“You get it open,” the small mage said, still clutching his arm. “It likes you.”
“I don’t crack safes!”
“Is there anything you do do?” the bigger mage asked, and one of the others laughed.
It didn’t appear to faze her. “Yeah. I communicate with the master on a regular basis. And guess what I’m going to tell him next time?”
The big man’s grin faded. “Get it open,” he told the smaller mage.
“I can’t get it open! The damned thing won’t let me near it!”
“You heard the man,” he told the acolyte, who looked like she was wondering why she’d been cursed with incompetents. “You’re gonna have to turn the wards off.”
“Why didn’t I think of that?” she asked. “In case you hadn’t noticed, there are a dozen Circle mages downstairs who would notice if I do!”
“Old men.” A third mage scoffed. “Useless bastards.”
“Maybe. But those useless bastards could have another fifty war mages here in minutes if anything goes wrong. You think you’re up to dealing with that?”
The big mage didn’t answer. “What’s so important in there, anyway?” he asked instead, eyes narrowing. “Must be something valuable.”
“More than you know.”
“Like what, exactly?”
“Like this.” The woman held up something I couldn’t see all that well but that had Rhea stiffening beside me.
And then I was stiffening, too, when the mage said: “A potion? That’s it?”
The acolyte started to reply, and then stopped. “Yes,” she told him. “That’s it. We want the potion; anything else you find is yours.”
The mage said something else, but I didn’t hear, because my heart was suddenly pounding in my ears. It looked like we were after the same thing. But what did an acolyte want with the Tears?
“It doesn’t just help with shifting,” Rhea whispered, before I could ask. “It helps with everything.”
“Everything meaning . . . ?”
“Everything. The power becomes easier to access, so anything you want to do with it becomes easier, too.”
I stared at her for a moment, stunned at the very thought. The wonderful, wonderful thought of being able to use my power without wanting to throw up afterward. Or being so exhausted I was staggering. Or getting killed because I was tapped out at the wrong time.
Like when someone’s life hung in the balance.
“They probably want it to even the score,” Rhea said softly. “They’re not as strong as you. Or even as strong as Myra,” she added, talking about Agnes’ former heir, who, thankfully, was no longer a problem.
Unlike this group.
“So how strong are they?” I whispered, my eyes on the bottle in the acolyte’s hand. “Like right now, for instance?”
“I don’t know.” She bit her lip. “Without the Tears, probably all five wouldn’t even equal Myra’s abilities.”
“And with them?”
She didn’t say anything.
Yeah, okay. Now I really wanted that potion. Not that that was looking too likely.
“You’re war mages,” the redhead was saying. “Figure it out! Or I’ll be sure to tell the master exactly who it was who let him down.”
“Stop threatening me,” the big mage warned.
“Then stop giving me a reason! Open the safe and you’ll get what you deserve. Fail . . . and the same is true.”
The big mage said a bad word. And then he looked at the smaller one. “Go get that son of a bitch.”
“Which one?”
“What do you mean, which one?” He gave him a shove. “The one we left in the stairwell!”
“What are you talking about?” the acolyte said sharply.
The mage shrugged. “One of the old bastards they got guarding this place was going out when we were coming in. He saw us, so we had to put him out of commission.”
“Put him . . .” The acolyte looked dumbfounded. “What am I supposed to do when someone notices he’s missing?”
“That’s your problem—”
“I’m making it yours!”
“What do you care? You have to get out of here soon anyway. New sheriff in town, isn’t there?”
One of the other women cursed, but the redhead stayed on point. “We can’t leave yet! We won’t have everything in place until the end of the week!”
“Then say you don’t know. Say he went somewhere. Or don’t say any damn thing at all and let them figure it—”
The door slammed back open. “Will somebody fucking help me already?” the smaller mage gasped. “He weighs a ton!”
He was also fighting, a gray-haired old man with blood on his face and a great well of it blooming on his left side. He could barely breathe, but he was fighting.
Until one of the mages hit him in his wound, and he suddenly went white and limp.
Rhea gripped my arm when I jerked. “Lady—”
“I’m not going to do anything stupid,” I whispered harshly.
Rhea didn’t look like she believed me. “Part of an acolyte’s training is how to pull out of time freezes,” she told me grimly.
And yeah, I needed to work on my poker face.
“—not with war mages,” the big guy was saying. “They’re trained to resist that kind of stuff.”
“They’re trained not to give you the combination, too!”
The mage looked at her sardonically and then jerked the old man up. “Hadn’t planned to ask for it.”
He dragged his captive over to the wall, and I tried desperately to think. I could stop this—literally—but for how long? I didn’t know, because I didn’t know what the acolytes could do. And then there was the problem of what happened to me after I stopped time if I didn’t have Pritkin around to recharge my batteries. I did have Rhea, but one acolyte wasn’t likely to counter the massive drain of a Pythia’s greatest weapon, not when it had taken my whole court to power me up for a much easier spell. And if even one of the acolytes managed to pull out with me sitting on empty . . .
“What are you doing?” the redhead demanded as the mage shoved the painting out of the way again.
“There’s one way around any ward. Wear it out.”
“No. No!” The old mage had come to and was struggling again—and he was struggling hard. But the third mage got a spell off before he could, freezing him in place.
“Can’t you just use a chair or something?” the acolyte asked dryly.
“Wards can tell the difference,” the big man told her. “Maximum output demands maximum threat.”
“You’re the expert.” She shrugged and leaned against the wall.
The two mages hoisted the stiff body up, and the air forced out through his lungs sounded like a scream. My hands sank into the carpet in front of me as I fought to keep them still. We’re in the past, I told myself harshly. It’s done. It’s over.
But it wasn’t over. It was happening right now. And they were going to kill him, and then they were going to get the safe open, and if there were Tears in there . . . but there were four acolytes and five dark mages in the room and I couldn’t freeze them all, and—
And maybe I didn’t need to freeze them.
Maybe I didn’t need to do anything to them.
“Stay here. Stay low,” I told Rhea, who was watching me out of huge eyes.
“What are you going to do?”
“Something stupid.”
Chapter Eleven
The strain hit like a fist, immediate and terrible. Followed by the feeling of power pouring out of me, like blood out of the old man, only faster. This wasn’t going to last.
So I moved, jumping to my feet and then over the couch, praying that the time bubble I’d just thrown over myself would go, too.
Which it did, speeding up time inside the spell and my movements along with it, while it stayed normal everywhere else. But normal isn’t frozen, and I was spotted before I’d even cleared the sofa. The nearest mage jumped for me, probably lightning fast from his perspective—
And not nearly as slow as I’d have liked from mine.
I dodged him, but it was like avoiding someone strolling down a sidewalk when you’re running. Easy but not effortless, and there wasn’t just one of him. And all five had spotted me now.
I jumped over the remaining part of the sofa between me and the old man, hit the ground, and rolled like a hero in an action movie. Only they don’t usually end up running into someone’s boot, which was moving faster than I’d expected. But I managed to pull back at the last moment, jerking aside in what probably looked to him like a blur of motion, and turned a crushing blow into just another bruise.
Just as well I didn’t have that swimming pool, I thought vaguely. I’d look like hell in a bikini.
And then they were everywhere.
I twisted to avoid another boot, this one headed for my head, grabbed it as it passed and jerked, causing the owner to fall backward into another mage. That gave me enough time to get to my feet but not to get away, because the small Asian guy lashed out with a move worthy of Bruce Lee, fast enough to get an elbow in my ribs and hard enough that I almost lost breakfast. Instead I pulled away, bounced off the back of the sofa and sprang past him—
Into a flurry of fists that came at me all at once. The only thing that saved me was the fact that none of them were clutching weapons. I didn’t understand why for a second, but then it hit me.
The wards were up.
Wards that disliked weapons’ fire of any kind, magical or otherwise. Wards that were probably designed to hate it in the lady’s own chambers. Wards that could save my ass if I could only manage to—
Shit.
The mage whose weapon I’d been reaching for pulled away, although that wasn’t the problem since I was much faster than him. I just wasn’t faster than the bolt of something that sprang from the hilt of his gun when I got a finger on it. A finger that promptly went dead, along with the rest of my hand and my chances of setting the wards off, because I needed a damned weapon for that!
Or, as it turned out, an acolyte.
Rhea started earning her new status a second later, when the guy with the gun spun and grabbed me around the neck. And tried his best to wrench my head off. But he hadn’t quite managed it when she threw a bolt of something that sent him flying back against the wall like he’d been bitch slapped by the Hulk.
It was a less-than-perfect solution, since I went, too, slamming against delicate embossed wallpaper hard enough to leave me reeling. But I considered it worth it. Because the jolt caused his grip to loosen and I jerked away, and he got pissed and pulled a gun.
“Noooooooooo!” I heard someone yell, the time bubble distorting it into a single epic syllable.
That wasn’t epic enough. The mage let off a barrage of bullets that were still traveling too fast for me to see. But not, it seemed, for the wards.
Because the slugs incinerated midair, in a line of red heat against the dim light of the room, the last exploding right in front of my face like a miniature firework.
I was still staring at the glowing green aftereffects, still feeling the tiny stings of powder burning my cheeks, still cross-eyed and breathing hard, when the real fireworks began.
Little red dots suddenly appeared everywhere, at the ends of dozens of tiny streams of light crisscrossing the gloom, targeting anyone with a weapon. The mages cursed and shielded, except for the guy with the gun. Who took half a second to realize what was going on and to drop it.
It was half a second too long.
I flung myself back to the floor as a bolt of fiery orange painted the air above my head. There was a crack like thunder. There was a surprised yelp. And then there was a burning, shrieking mage.
His coat must have offered some kind of protection, because on fire or not he was still able to run. So he did, jumping and flailing and stumbling across the room toward the French windows—why, I don’t know. Maybe because it had started to rain, and in his panic he thought that the whisper-soft mist falling outside was going to put out a magical fire that burned like phosphorus and was already eating through his coat.
It didn’t.
He screamed out on the balcony, a wail of pain and fury that was cut off when another bolt hit him. And ripped him off his feet, sending him hurtling backward through the air, toward the line of buildings across the street. It was a weirdly beautiful sight as his coat flamed up around him, a bloodred ember among all that falling rain.
And then someone kicked me in the head.
It wasn’t a mage. They were huddled lumps under their shields, being wailed on by the bolts, which were hitting down everywhere now. It also wasn’t a ward, none of which appeared to be aiming for me. But the same couldn’t be said for the acolytes.
The wards were avoiding them, since they belonged here. Which was a good thing, as otherwise Rhea would have been toast. And a bad thing, because I was about to be.
Because this had just become a time battle, and oh, shit.
The auburn-haired acolyte was the first to show off and send a time spell my way. It was small and iridescent and flimsy-looking, like a kid blowing a soap bubble, and I dodged it easily. But then her buddies, a couple of brunettes and a blonde, got in on the a
ct, and suddenly the air around me looked like the kid had been joined by a dozen friends.
And while I ducked and dodged and avoided most of them, it only takes one, doesn’t it?
I saw it coming, the tiny harbinger of doom, no larger than a tennis ball, that one of the girls had managed to conjure up. But I was powerless to avoid it with another one streaming by on the other side. And I couldn’t duck because I had just been thrown to the floor again courtesy of the smallest mage.
And it looked like I’d been wrong; one of them had lost his weapons fast enough. And was quickly proving that he didn’t need them. He grabbed me from behind in some martial arts move I didn’t know and wouldn’t have time to learn because he was about to strangle me to death.
I tucked my chin as Pritkin had taught me, and beat him to the punch. But he still had hold of me where I couldn’t hit him. And speed doesn’t do a lot of good against strength when strength has you by the neck.
Until he suddenly started screaming. I jerked away and twisted back around in time to see his skin browning and shriveling up, his eyes being sucked back into their sockets, and his lips pulling away from his teeth. And then disappearing altogether, like his scream, which cut off when his vocal cords dried up and dusted away. But I could still hear it echoing in my ears as I scrambled back.
But not fast enough. Not to avoid the small, flimsy bubble that floated out of his open mouth a second later, and into my spell. And popped them both with a sound I didn’t hear, because I was suddenly hearing everything.
Furniture was crashing, glass was shattering, people were screaming. Including one of the brunettes, who was yelling: “I’m out! I’m out!”
It looked like that damned bubble had taken everything she had.
Luckily, that wasn’t true for me. Because she spied the flying mage’s dropped weapon a second later, and grabbed it. But nothing grabbed her back, because the wards still weren’t targeting the acolytes! So I had to—with a shift that sent her out the same window as the burning man, only she wasn’t burning.
