by Karen Chance
But not me.
I shifted a cabinet, old carved walnut by the looks of it, jerking it off one wall and slamming into place right where she’d been standing.
And then just lay there for a moment, panting and exhausted, and hoping like hell that had worked.
And maybe it had. Because dust and bits of flaking wallpaper, now centuries old, fluttered down around me like confetti, but nothing else moved. And the staunch solidity of the cabinet gave me reason to hope that maybe, just maybe, nothing would.
Until the door opened and she stepped daintily out, her little slipper still Pythian white against the filthy floor.
“Good one,” she told me. “I barely had time to get up a shield.”
“Glad you liked it.”
“When we used to duel, that was Victoria’s favorite move.” She smiled. “Want to see mine?”
No, I thought, and shifted.
And that time I did shift me, because I needed a moment. And ended up on the roof I’d glimpsed earlier through the missing ceiling, since it was the only place I could think of where there weren’t other people around. I landed on hands and knees, panting, staring around for a telltale glimmer of white. But there didn’t appear to be one.
Which . . . was both good and not. Because I couldn’t risk her tiring of our game and running off to get her reward. But the whole keep-her-talking-until-the-demons-arrive-and-hopefully-shred-her plan did not appear to be working.
At all.
I gulped in cool evening air and tried to think of an alternative. But I wasn’t coming up with much. Because of course they used to duel. And they must have done it a lot, because she was damned good. Meanwhile, I had gotten my butt kicked by Gertie twice, and had barely managed a draw with the redhead—and that had been with Rhea’s help.
But staying up here wasn’t going to work. I had to find her again. I had to think of something—
“Pretty, isn’t it?”
I spun around.
And found her looking up at the big silvery moon floating serenely overhead, on a bank of silver-gray clouds. My hand twitched and she looked down, grinning. Like she knew how close to bottoming out I was.
“No offense,” she told me. “But I have a hard time believing your mother was a goddess.”
“So do I.”
She laughed. “I like you. You know, I don’t think I’ll enjoy killing you much.”
“Then don’t.”
“Can’t do that.” She shook her head. “The master is waiting—”
“Let him,” I said quickly. “Didn’t you say you liked that feeling? Because it won’t last. Not once you bring him back. Right now, you’re the most powerful person in the world. But after? He’s a god. We’re nothing to them—”
“Speak for yourself.”
“Aren’t you tired of being overlooked? Unnoticed? Aren’t you tired of being just that girl in white?”
“You have no idea.”
“Then what do you think you’ll be to him?”
“I think I’ll be his queen.”
“That’s what he promised you?”
She nodded. “A contest: winner take all. Whoever brought him back first would be his consort and a goddess. Whoever failed . . .” She shrugged.
“And you won.”
“Of course. Victoria tried to sell us on the idea of working together and sharing his favor. Share. Like she ever shared anything. But in the end, she wasn’t a problem at all.”
“And your other competition?”
“Jo’s off on a wild-goose chase, looking for some old relic.” She rolled her eyes.
“Relic?”
“One she thinks is strong enough to blast through the barrier. I told her she was wasting her time. If she ever finds it, the fey will kill her. They don’t let go of their toys easily.”
I swallowed. “No. No, they don’t.”
“And Lizzie—poor, dumb thing—still thinks she’s going to be Pythia. She doesn’t get it; we won’t need a Pythia anymore. First thing on the list is to get rid of all magic users, so no more threat of banishment. Afterward, the only ones with magic will be us—”
“And the other gods, once he lets them in.”
She laughed delightedly. “Who says he’s letting them in?”
“He’s planning to keep earth for himself.”
“And faerie, and the hells,” she agreed. “Why remove your mother’s spell when it would just let everyone back in, the whole greedy lot of them? He doesn’t need everyone. He doesn’t need anyone. He can take it all, and be master of it all. Just him and me and the children we’ll have . . . which is why I’m afraid you have to go.”
“He’ll kill me for you when he comes back.”
“Probably,” she agreed. “But I can’t take that chance, can I? Leaving him with a choice between a demigoddess child of Artemis and me?”
And I suddenly realized why she’d been willing to play this little game.
“I don’t want him,” I said fervently.
She grinned. “I don’t think you’d have an option. And I—I’ve been second once too often. What did they say in Blade Runner? ‘Time to die.’”
“Never saw that movie,” I said, and kicked out. And while I may suck at time duels, Pritkin had been teaching me all sorts of dirty fighting tricks. If I’d been in boots, I might have shattered her kneecap. But even in tennis shoes, she went down.
Only to get kicked in the chin when she looked back up, snarling.
“You know, being queen doesn’t sound so bad,” I told her. And shifted to the lower floor where I’d come in. Because I might not be a great fighter, but I was a pro at running away. I could teach classes on running away.
Or I could have—if she hadn’t followed right on my heels.
I whirled around at a sound behind me, and she sent a time wave that I somehow shifted away from, but not before it turned a clump of my hair old and brittle enough to crumble when I rematerialized. And threw out a hand. And shifted her—into the wall.
Literally.
I’d accidentally done something similar to myself once, getting stuck in a fireplace because I was shifting too fast to pay attention. It had taken ten minutes and a huge amount of magic from Jonas to get me out. She managed it alone and in seconds.
“You really are good with the power,” I told her.
“Thank you,” she said. And froze me.
It happened so fast, I never even saw her move. In fact, I don’t think she did. I’d always made some sort of gesture when shifting, even if it was only a small one. But maybe that was just me, the human part of me, who felt a need to move when I was moving.
But I guess it wasn’t technically necessary, because she never even twitched.
But something else did.
The frozen curtain of water behind her was not so frozen anymore. It glimmered softly in the light, like a fey waterfall, cascading sluggishly toward the floor. And behind it, just visible through the slowly moving stream, was every color of the rainbow.
Or at least the lethal, warmer shades of the aggressive spells war mages used.
I gazed at them as my rigid body tottered and threatened to fall. And remembered all those spells, that corridor’s worth of spells, the very last spells that all those dying mages had thrown. The ones she’d avoided once—but not this time.
And no, it turns out that you really don’t need to move to throw a spell, after all.
Epilogue
Half an hour later, I was sitting on what I guessed had once been a balcony, overlooking what might once have been a great hall. It was hard to tell, since it was mostly rubble now, but it looked like the consul liked to live well. You could still see touches of it here and there: the gleam of inlaid marble under heaps of collapsed walls, rich fabrics threading through mountains of broken f
urniture, the glint of what remained of a wall of mirrors shining in the firelight, because something over to the left was still burning.
Instead of the seat of vampire power on earth, it finally looked like what it was: a war zone.
But the fighting was over for the moment, and everybody was busy picking up. And licking their wounds. And planning their next move.
A vampire came by in dirty, wrinkled clothing, with a smear of blood on his nice, white tunic. But his silk sash was still straight, and he’d paused at some point to wipe the dust off his highly polished shoes. He had a tray with him—silver, of course—containing cups of coffee. I took one but declined the blanket he also offered, from a group draped over his arm.
He moved on.
I sat and thought about power. Specifically mine. Because maybe it had been talking to me, after all. Or at least listening. And I hadn’t been asking for one thing, had I?
I’d been asking for two.
All week, practically every thought had been about two things: finding Pritkin and trying to locate a weapon to fight the gods. What if my power, which wasn’t human and didn’t think like us, had decided to take a shortcut? What if it had decided to take me back to the one place and time . . . where I would find both?
I heard again Fred’s voice asking, “How did they fight each other?” Felt once more the smooth old surface of a staff of unbelievable power. Heard the brunette saying that my last rogue acolyte was after “an ancient relic” that could challenge the power of a god.
Maybe because it had been made by one.
Everyone had been looking for a weapon against Ares: Jonas thought I was one; Mircea wanted me to make him one. Everyone was looking for answers, but what if the ones we needed weren’t here? What if they were fifteen hundred years in the past, at a court still shrouded in myth and legend? What if the story of an ancient king’s return to save us at humanity’s darkest hour was truer than anyone had ever realized?
My hand clenched on the pitted surface of a tiny bottle. It was the one the acolyte had dropped when she hit the wall, the one she’d never had a chance to retrieve. It was the last one, the last full bottle of the rarest potion on earth, and my last chance.
To rescue Pritkin.
To find the answers we desperately needed.
And, possibly, to save a world.
But I had an errand to do first.
• • •
The hallways of the consul’s stately home looked a little different now, which wasn’t surprising since nothing had happened yet. The attack would be tonight, and when it came, a lot of people were going to die. Some of them would be ours, good people whose deaths I could easily prevent, except for the warning clanging in my mind.
I wasn’t sure why; I didn’t get details. Just that the battle, terrible though it had been, had had a purpose. But I could guess.
The little knots I’d seen of vamps and weres and mages, all battling together, were unprecedented. They didn’t fight alongside each other; they ignored each other or killed each other—except for last night. Which had caught them unawares, with very little backup, and with a mutual enemy that was threatening all their lives. It was the war in miniature, and taught the lesson far better than I ever could.
But it was still terrible, knowing that I could prevent it all, by a single warning. . . .
And in the process, leave us as divided as ever. Facing an enemy that was still hammering at the gates, trying to get in. Who wanted to kill us all.
And so I walked the halls silently, the weight of all those lives on my shoulders, and wondered what really aged the Pythias. Channeling the power of a god when we weren’t one, or this? Knowing things we could never say, seeing sights we could never talk about, keeping secrets our whole lives.
Like Agnes.
I didn’t doubt that Jonas had really loved her; the expression on his face had been eloquent. But I also didn’t doubt that he’d exploited their relationship as much as she’d allow. To the point that she’d hidden their child away, to keep him from doing the same thing to her.
Because she knew: it isn’t easy to say no, and to keep saying no, to someone you love.
Maybe that was why so many of the Pythias hadn’t seemed to have long-term lovers. Maybe that was why even those that had, like Agnes, had been forced to hide them away, to keep people from suspecting that they were being influenced. Maybe that was why so many had seemed to live so alone.
I didn’t plan to be alone for the rest of my life. But I also wasn’t going to be Agnes to anyone’s Jonas. I wasn’t going to have that kind of relationship, and any man in my life was going to have to understand that. Any man, I thought, and pulled open the door to the room where I’d been told I’d find Mircea.
And I did.
But I found someone else, too.
I stopped dead at the sight of Mircea, insensate on a bed, being guarded by a gorgeous brunette.
No, not a gorgeous brunette. The gorgeous brunette, from the painting I hadn’t remembered to ask him about. And not sitting. Lying. Under a thin sheet that did little to hide the ample, naked curves beneath.
She looked at me out of sloe dark eyes, and her mouth took on a contemptuous twist. “He doesn’t need you,” she told me dismissively.
“What?”
“He’s sleeping,” she said, as if I’d somehow missed that. “And I can give him what he needs.”
I bet, I thought, feeling my blood pressure start to rise.
“You can go,” she repeated impatiently. “Vamoose, amscray, make like a tree. Do you get it?”
“Yeah. I got it,” I told her, and reached for my power. And slid a question along one shimmering strand, receiving back an instant reply.
And laughed at the irony.
I could save this one.
Of course I could.
So I did. But I sent her to a pasture in the middle of nowhere, a particularly dung-filled pasture, because power has to be good for something, right? And then I gathered Mircea up in my arms. And I swear I saw a glimmer of dark fire under those too-thick-for-a-man lashes.
“We are going to have a long talk when you wake up,” I told him grimly.
And I shifted.
Look for Karen Chance’s next thrilling adventure in the Cassie Palmer series,
RIDE THE STORM
Coming Spring 2016 from Signet
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