by Karen Chance
“We don’t need the demons,” Jonas said. “My people—”
“Can’t handle those girls! Not if they get the Tears first, and maybe not if they don’t. The demons probably can’t, either, but I’ll take what help I can get. Tell Adra—”
“All right! I’ll tell him—if you agree to stay here!”
The hand tightened on my bicep, and this time, it didn’t look like it was budging.
I stared down at it for a moment, and then up at him. And saw him flush, whether with embarrassment or anger, I didn’t know. But he didn’t move.
“I’m not going to lose you,” he told me, low and harsh.
And this is it, I thought. This is how we fail. Not because the other side is better, but because we won’t work together. Not even now.
And that was my fault, wasn’t it? The Pythia was the great unifier, or she was supposed to be. The one who got everyone to drop their stupid quarrels and work on a common cause. But I didn’t have the words, any more than I’d had them with Mircea. I didn’t know how to make Jonas let me go, not in a suite full of his mages. I didn’t know how to make him understand that we weren’t running out of time, we were out. I didn’t know how to get through to him.
“Not going to lose her?” Rhea said, from the doorway. “Like you lost the last Pythia entrusted to your care?”
“Stay out of this,” Jonas told her.
But Rhea wasn’t staying out. Rhea was already in and coming up beside us. “That’s what this is about, isn’t it?” she demanded. “Not Lady Cassandra’s age—there have been younger Pythias. Or her lack of training, which her blood more than compensates for. Or even her reaching out to the covens, which is far overdue. But you. Your grief, your pain, your constant need for—”
“Learn your place, girl!” Jonas snarled, pushing her away when she tried to come between us.
“I know my place!” she said, her voice no kinder than his. “I’ve always known. But you don’t, do you? The Lady didn’t tell you—”
“What are you babbling about?”
“—because she knew how you’d react, what you’d do. This! What you always do, trying to control everything, trying to control her. But not me. She wasn’t going to let you control me—”
“This doesn’t concern you!”
“My mother’s death doesn’t concern me?”
And suddenly, everything froze.
It looked like I’d stopped time. Only I could still hear the sound of the clock, see the dust motes floating in the light from the hall, feel the quiet brush of the air-conditioning.
And the sudden clenching of Jonas’ hand on my arm.
“Your . . . mother?” he asked, the words surprisingly toneless.
“My mother,” Rhea said, grabbing one of the photo albums, the ones we’d taken from Agnes’ safe, the ones I’d never had a chance to look through. And thrust it at him. “It’s all there, my whole life. How she had me in secret, how she sent me away as an infant, how I grew up with one of her old initiates, a coven witch, because she knew you had nothing but contempt for the covens, knew you’d never find me there—”
“I would never?” Jonas was looking at the album she was holding out. It was spilling over with photos to the point that they fell out of the side in great clumps. Many of them featured him, usually with Agnes.
But he still didn’t get it, I thought.
He didn’t get what she was telling him.
“She knew I would test strongly for the power,” Rhea said. “Knew I’d be brought back to court soon enough, to be with her. But as an initiate, no one would question my being there. And coming from a coven family, no one would try to use me as a political pawn, or force me into a position I didn’t want, just so he could profit—”
“No!” Jonas looked up at her, and I guess I’d been wrong. I guess that had been shock. Because it looked like he did get it, after all. “I would never—”
“But she thought you would,” Rhea said, twisting the knife. “And she knew you. She told me once, it was the hardest decision she ever made, and the loneliest. But she knew the number of times you tried to influence her—”
“For the good of the magical community!”
“For the good of the Circle—”
“They’re the same thing!”
“They are not the same thing!” she said, furious. “That is why we have a Pythia, to speak for us—all of us. And Mother knew this, but she loved you, and it tormented her, but she loved you—”
“And I loved her!” he rasped. “For fifty years—”
“Then prove it! Prove it and do what she would have wanted. Let Lady Cassandra go, before it’s too late. Let her do this.”
“She can’t do this, not without help!”
“Jonas,” I said, putting a hand over the one he still had on my arm. “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. I can’t do this. I can’t win this war for you on my own. But maybe I can win it with you.”
He looked from me to Rhea for a long moment, pain and fury and fear all there in his face, clear for anyone to read. He wasn’t going to do it. It was like my life lately: too much, too fast. Or maybe not, I thought, as his hand suddenly sprang off my arm. “Go.”
I didn’t give him a chance to change his mind. I grabbed up the mage’s coat, still smelling of nineteenth-century soot, and shifted.
Chapter Fifty-three
I didn’t have to ask if they’d found the potion. Marlowe’s office door was open, and curls and puddles of lethal substances bloomed bright in the darkness: red and deep purple and orange. A group of war mages, dark ones judging by the lack of insignia, remained frozen in a contorted mass in front of the cabinets, coats swirling and shields half raised as they fought to get away from the dangerous tide. Except for one who had landed in a potion puddle that must have been just outside the spell range.
Because it was busy sizzling through what remained of his flesh.
It looked like somebody had broken through the wards, everyone had rushed forward for a wholesale plunder—and then someone else had thrown down a bunch of lethal substances, catching them all off guard. And then frozen them where they stood.
And that included the competition, I thought, staring at a withered corpse caught halfway to the floor. The limbs were gray and shrunken and desiccated, the face unrecognizable. But the red hair was as vibrant as ever.
So it was the brunette.
I turned and went out of the office.
I didn’t have to ask which way she’d gone. The corridor to the right was a frozen tableau, with bolts of spell fire suspended in the air, unmoving. Explosions of plaster hung overhead like clouds, sprays of glass twinkled like stars, and potion bombs had detonated in what looked like tufts of cotton candy.
But I stopped anyway, grasping the door frame, indecision clawing at me.
Because I didn’t have to do this. I could shift back in time a day and warn everyone. I could tell Marlowe to move his damned potion. Could tell the Senate to up their security. Could—
Be ignored, disbelieved, and not taken seriously, just like I had been my whole life.
My name wasn’t Cassandra for nothing.
And I could almost hear the response, if I told Mircea to move a potion—one he knew I wanted badly—from Marlowe’s hands to somewhere less secure. “So that you can access it easier, dulceata?”
Plus, even if I could get them to believe me, I didn’t know who the acolytes’ contact was. A vampire, she’d said. Someone with access. Someone who might learn of the move, and then I’d be no better off—in fact, I’d be worse. Right now, I still had the remains of a full bottle of potion in me. Tomorrow, it might have worn off.
But if I stayed and failed . . .
If you’re ever going to talk to me, I told my power silently, help me now. Do I go forward, or do I go back?
For a long moment, there was nothing, except my own gnawing anxiety. But then the corridor behind me dimmed, ever so slightly, or maybe the one ahead brightened. It wasn’t a lot of difference, was barely any at all, to the point that I wouldn’t have noticed it if I hadn’t been looking for it.
But I had been, and it was there.
“So, lousy odds either way, but slightly better ahead?” I asked. But that time, I didn’t get a response. Which, judging from past experience, meant I’d gotten it about right.
I swallowed. And then I ducked under a pinkish red cloud, which would probably have eaten my face if it were moving. But it wasn’t—nothing in the whole corridor was. Including the line of bullets hanging in the air just ahead, on their way to obliterate a mage’s chest.
He was one of the Circle’s men, whose failing shield was down to a faint flicker of green in the air around him. I scooped the slugs out of the air and threw them down the empty hall behind me, hearing them explode against the floor once they cleared the area of the spell. They echoed loud in the stillness, but it didn’t matter.
She already knew I was coming.
She was waiting for me, she had to be, or we’d already have a vengeful god on our hands. But we didn’t. Because two bottles of potion were enough to allow her the luxury of time—all the time in the world. To play her games. To bring him through. And to deal with me.
I, on the other hand, had a seriously depleted power supply and an unknown time frame. Jonas would find Adra, of that I had no doubt, and he would send his people. But while they could take out almost any other adversary around, what could they do against the power of a god? Because that was what she was wielding.
And it looked like she was wielding a lot of it.
There was a row of bodies ahead, half skeletonized, where a time spell had eaten its way through a crowd. Some had died instantly, heads and torsos aged back to bone, or in a few cases to dust. Others . . . hadn’t been so lucky.
I put an arm over my face and tried to block out the pervasive stench of blood, so much blood, from people unfortunate enough to get only a glancing blow from the spell. One man still moved, slowly, helplessly, sticklike legs protruding from a normal torso. I wanted to help him, but even I could tell he was too far gone. And I didn’t have the strength to spare.
I left him there.
The next hallway was even worse, although in a different way. The walls looked like trucks had been driven through them. One explosion had been suspended in the moment it burst out of the walls, the jagged edges leaping out at me like a cluster of knives as I passed. While another, farther down, was exploding over and over again, caught in a time loop like an endlessly running replay, and shaking the floor underneath my feet every few seconds.
It looked like she’d just thrown spells everywhere, with many serving no purpose I could see. A painting on a nearby wall stripped itself back to blank canvas, then repainted itself again and again. A broken water main flooded through a fissure in the floor above, the shimmering veil hanging suspended in midair, like a curtain. A couple of spells had fallen on the same potted plant, causing it to wither and then burst back to life, flowering all over again. And draping the little table on which it sat in flowers, a decade’s worth or more, that fell onto the blood-strewn floor below like a funeral spill.
I passed through the glistening strands of the waterfall, only to stop abruptly at the sight of what had to be a hundred spell bolts, all converging on a single spot—mine. It looked like the people in the hall had finally realized they had a common problem, but too late.
The bolts were far too thick to find a way through, so I ducked into a hole someone had thoughtfully blasted in the wall. And into a small set of dimly lit rooms. Where a slow-motion battle was taking place between half a dozen fighting couples as a time spell slowly unraveled.
They looked almost like they were dancing, a dim haze of light from somewhere up ahead setting their shadows to moving on the remaining walls and floor. I threaded my way through, and finally realized why I could see them so clearly. The whole back wall of the last room was missing, allowing me to step out into a wide-open space where the collapse of the upper floor had included a good deal of the ceiling, leaving an area open to the moonlight.
It looked almost like a stadium, only instead of spectators, there were only more combatants, busy killing or dying or both.
And a wild-eyed girl in the center, helping them along and laughing joyously.
“Is this what it’s like to be a god?” she called to me from across the field of rubble. “Is this how they feel all the time?”
“I don’t know.”
“You have to know! Your mother was Artemis—didn’t she ever tell you?”
“We don’t talk much.”
“Why not? You can go back and see her whenever you like. You can do whatever you like!”
She threw out a hand, and the flesh of a nearby mage all but flew off his bones. The time spell stripped him of everything in seconds, leaving behind a skeleton in tattered leather that nonetheless continued to menace a leaping vampire. But which would fall apart into the dried-up bones it was as soon as the spell failed.
He was one of her own, one of the dark mages on her side, but she didn’t seem to notice. Or to care. The life-or-death battle going on around her had become her playground, the people her toys, the whole bloody mess there for her amusement.
Yes, I thought. That is probably exactly what the gods had felt like.
“Is that what he promised you?” I asked, picking my way through the rubble. “To give you the power of a god? To make you Pythia?”
She laughed again, a genuinely delighted sound. “Pythia. You know, I used to dream of that? Used to lie awake at night, in my narrow little bed, and plan for the day when I’d be in control. Of my life. Of my future. Of everything. I’d have the money and the fame and the title, and all those richly dressed people would be coming to see me.”
“But that didn’t happen.”
“No. It went to Myra. When the only good idea she ever had was how to get rid of the Lady! I was always better at using the power than her. It came to me easily, when she had to struggle. It liked me, wanted me—but Agnes said I was too ambitious. Ambitious!” She laughed again. “What the hell did she think Myra was? What did she think any of us were? What else was there?”
“What else? You’re true clairvoyants, from wealthy and powerful families—”
“Who don’t give a damn about them unless they get the top spot!” she said viciously. “Nobody gives a damn. My parents told me that, right before I left. It’s one of my earliest memories. There I was, all of five and clinging to my mother’s leg in fear. Before she pulled me off and crouched down, and gave me my first life lesson. ‘Do whatever it takes, but become Pythia. There’s nothing here for you if you don’t.’”
“Your mother was cruel.”
“My mother was honest! She knew how the world works. Get power, keep power, or grovel your whole life to those who have it. Like they did to me, when I was named an acolyte. There were only a handful of us, and one of us was going to get it, one of us was going to be it. And, oh, how everything changed!”
She flung a spell—at me this time—and she hadn’t been wrong. She was fast and deadly. I shifted barely in time, as a wall collapsed into rubble behind me, materializing on her other side—
Where she had already whirled to meet me.
“They sucked up to me,” she said, as if nothing had happened. “Fawned and flattered and bought me things, all kinds of pretty things: cars I couldn’t drive, clothes and jewelry I wasn’t allowed to wear. But I loved it; I loved all of it! Not because of the things, but because of why they bought them. How they hushed when I came into a room, the way their eyes followed me, the way they crawled.”
I darted out of the way of a spell, and it hit a column j
ust to my left, twining around it like a vine. And sending the plaster and bricks underneath crumbling and crashing and then scattering and dusting to nothingness on the floor beside me.
Apparently, nobody had ever told her that the villain monologues and then attacks.
“But Myra got the nod,” she said, “and all of a sudden, I was back to being invisible. I was never good enough, no, no. Not for my family, not for the Lady, not for anyone. But now look. Even the master himself, even a god waits for me.”
And before I could dodge, she sent another wash of power at me, one hard and fast enough that I barely had time to counter. The two time spells met in midair, forming a coil that writhed and twisted and seemed to be trying to eat each other. And then abruptly flew apart, into a thousand tiny spheres that sped away in all directions.
We hit the floor, both of us at the same time. Because the air around us was suddenly filled with little floating orbs of death, like mirrored bubbles reflecting the scene. And peppering the remaining walls of the area with holes from the faster-moving ones, like the blast from massive shotgun shells.
“Wow. Never saw that before,” she said, sounding awed. And then she threw again.
I scurried behind a group of filing cabinets that rusted apart as I passed, into a doorway that collapsed almost on top of me, and out into a room strewn with papers underfoot and muddy boot prints. Both of which sloughed away into nothingness as the spell ate along the ground behind me.
Until I threw a slow time wave over my shoulder, thick enough to be considered a wall, frantically trying to buy time. And it did—about a second’s worth. Until a fast time spell of hers came boiling through the middle like a concentrated dart, or like a missile launched underwater. And then tore out the other side, slamming into the same type of spell I’d just thrown on myself, shattering them both.
And sending me crabbing backward out into a hallway as the remnants of the spells flew over my head, barely missing my face. And then she was there, right there, and I did the only thing I could, the only thing in this whole Pythian arsenal that I’d ever been really good at. And shifted.
