The Cassandra Palmer Collection

by Karen Chance

  Casanova stared at him, a little awed at the arrogant irony in that statement. But he didn’t think this was the moment to point it out. Not when the fat demon—Sid, he assumed—suddenly jumped up and threw himself back into the fight, slamming into Pritkin and sending the two of them swerving and looping and diving around the space. And everywhere they went, the black cloud followed, buzzing around the war mage just as it had the demons who were now bleeding out on the ledge.

  “He doesn’t have much time,” Rosier said harshly. “If we don’t do something soon, he won’t—”

  He stopped on a gasp, a look of surprise coming over his features. Casanova didn’t know why until he looked down. And saw the gore-coated end of one of the picks sticking a good two inches out of Rosier’s middle.

  It was a shock, but not as much as who was holding it. “What are you doing?” he asked Cassie blankly.

  “Getting its attention,” she said savagely, and ripped the pick back out.

  Rosier made a choked sound, everyone in the vicinity got sprayed with hot green blood, and an ear-splitting shriek echoed around the cavern. Right before the cloud whipped about in a swirling mass of vengeful fury. And dove straight for them.

  “Thanks,” Rosier told Cassie, staring at it.

  “Any time.”

  He turned around and fled, and he must have figured out something about how his new body worked, because he wasn’t hitting any walls this time. Casanova felt a chill, deathly wind ruffle his hair as the cloud streamed past, ignoring the girl holding the gory pick in favor of the demon making off with its body.

  And then, for a split second, there was nothing. At least, not in the threat category. Casanova stared around, first at Pritkin, who was currently making mincemeat of the small demon, then at the three of them, all of whom were still more or less intact, and finally at the distinct lack of any enemies that weren’t running for their lives.

  And all right, he thought, straightening his tattered jacket. This was more like it.

  And then the cave blew up.

  Chapter Eleven

  E verything happened between one heartbeat and another. Sid’s body falling, broken and bloody and beaten, to spin away into darkness. His spirit rising out of it and moving, but not up, as Pritkin had half expected, in order to attack him. Not even out, toward one of the tunnels and freedom. But down.

  To where the biggest vein of brimstone ran in a glittering ring around the cave.

  Pritkin had no time to stop him, no time even to brace himself, before he was hit by a vast wash of air from the explosion. It sent him tumbling helplessly backwards, head over heels, with no way to right himself or even tell where he was going. Until he crashed into a wall like a bird hitting a window.

  He slid down to a ledge, body bruised and wings askew, in time to glimpse Sid streaming past, a faint outline against a curtain of silver fire. But he didn’t pursue. Not because he couldn’t have caught him, but because whatever spell Sid had used to ignite the brimstone had caused a chain reaction, exploding vein after vein, one right after the other like a massive firework pinwheel, all the way back to—

  “Cassie!” He hadn’t seen her before, hadn’t had time to see anything in the life or death struggle with not one but two ancient horrors. He would have thought he was hallucinating, but Casanova was there, too, screaming his fool head off as the ledge they were on cracked and splintered and—

  “No!”

  Pritkin saw them fall, saw Rian grab Casanova, saw her reach for Cassie—who was too far away. Rian stared up at him for a split second, horrified and apologetic, and then she and Casanova winked out. While Cassie fell into a pit straight out of a medieval vision.

  John dove, not knowing if she had enough strength left to shift, not betting on it because the damnable, damnable woman never held anything back, never once put her own safety ahead of anyone else’s, a fact that was going to get her killed one day, but please God, not this day. But he couldn’t see anything through billowing clouds of red dust, could barely breathe through the waves of fiery heat, and there was no hope of hearing her cry out, not with the roar of all that raw power being released, the crack of huge swaths of stone as they calved off the sides of the cave and fell, many exploding from the inside as they did so.

  “Cassie!” It was a desperate, stupid, useless. Because he hadn’t caught her, and if she hadn’t shifted, somehow holding concentration in the midst of an inferno, there was no chance left—

  “Over here!” He heard it, faint, so faint, that it might have been a figment of his imagination. But he turned anyway, banking left, barely missing a mass of burning stone with a few screaming miners still clinging to it as it fell, and then he saw her.

  She was half on, half off a ledge, one leg dangling over nothing, rivers of molten brimstone cascading on either side, the whole shelf ready to blow at any moment. But she was alive. Somehow, despite all possible odds—and then he had her.

  “I . . . tried to shift to you, but I landed . . . here—” she broke off, choking, as a stinging cloud of gas and debris showered them, seemingly from all directions.

  The whole place was imploding, with huge gouts of fire belching out of tunnels, molten brimstone dropping like silver rain, and falling boulders shattering off pieces of the overhang above them. Shifting back to Dante’s while surrounded by this much explosive was impossible; they’d be dead before he could finish the spell. But staying put was equally out of the question.

  A great wash of air boiling up from the inferno below buffeted them as he took off once more, launching them toward the only halfway clear air he could see. And then there it was: a piece of sky, blessedly dark against the searing light, just a crack far, far above his head. But a second later there were two, and then a dozen, and then the whole top of the mountain was cracking and fissuring and falling in.

  He pulled Cassie’s T-shirt over her nose and mouth, raised one forearm over his eyes to shield them, and strained upward. Sparks showered down everywhere; smoke masked the only way out after barely an instant; and the heat was unbelievable. He couldn’t reassure Cassie, even if he’d had the breath, because close as she was, she wouldn’t have heard him. He had never before been inside an explosion as it was happening, but it was deafening. It cracked and rumbled, whistled and roared, thundered and boomed, on all sides, as it consumed the mountain from the inside out.

  Even the knowledge he’d gained from the Irin was insufficient to chart a course through something like this. The demon had never done it, so there were no memories to plunder, no visuals to guide him, no anything but desperate clawing against air so dry, it had hardly any lift. John had the impression that the only thing he was doing was managing not to fall, while the headway they gained was mostly from the huge surges of air rushing up from below.

  He had been riding the edges of most of them, but one finally caught him full on, picking him up as if he was no heavier than the burning bits of ash glittering through the air, and then throwing him up, up, up—and out.

  They burst out through the remains of the mountaintop, just as what looked like a volcano erupted below them. The whole mountain breathed in for one last great gasp before bursting outward, the colossal explosion throwing huge burning pieces of rock high into the sky. But not as high as John flew, his borrowed wings beating the air in time to the rapid pace of his heart.

  He didn’t stop, didn’t even slow down, until they had put whole mountains between them and the smoking hulk behind. He finally set them down on a blessedly cold, dark hillside, far enough away that he couldn’t even feel the heat anymore. Only then did he sink to his knees, gasping for breath, the great singed wings falling around him and still smoking slightly.

  But he didn’t let his passenger go.

  For a long time, they just stayed like that, John eventually moving into a sitting position, pulling Cassie’s body back against him as they watched the awesome power erupting on the horizon. She kept swallowing, tiny little gulps that John could
barely hear, which could have been from a parched throat or too much smoke or a thousand other things. But he didn’t think so. Because she was also trembling.

  “Close your eyes,” he told her softly, and she did, tilting her head back against his chest, her breath hitching again. But she didn’t cry, didn’t go into hysterics, didn’t do anything. Except stay there, her hand tight on his thigh, her breath hot against his chest, until her own slowly evened out again.

  After a long time, one small hand moved, slowly, tentatively, tracing the feathers falling around her, stroking the black slashes along one huge wing. She didn’t ask where he’d gotten them, didn’t ask why they mimicked the marks on his shoulder, didn’t ask anything. Just kept running those soft fingers through the down, along the spines . . .

  “How long will they last?”

  “A few hours,” he said hoarsely. He should tell her, he thought, that the feathers weren’t just a projection. That for the moment, for however long the Irin’s essence held out, they were an innate, physical part of him. And that her fingers stroking along the marks felt just like they once had, moving over his scars.

  He ought to tell her, ought to ask her to stop. It’s what a gentleman would do, he knew that. But then, he was half demon.

  And tonight, he thought maybe he’d just go with that.

  “They’re nice,” she murmured, pulling one around her.

  “Yes.” One hand tightened in her thick, soft hair. “Yes.”

  * * *

  “It was epic,” Rosier said, as they watched Cassie sitting in her living room, opening more gifts. John scowled. His father was incorporeal today, not having had time to replace the body he’d lost in the explosion. John could barely see him, just a smudged outline against the gaudy wallpaper the casino deemed elegant. But he was looking smug.

  “You mean you got lucky.”

  Rosier looked offended. “Luck had nothing to do with it. I drained her during the whole chase back to the elevator, until her body bled out, and by then I was close enough to pop back into mine. And even Ealdris has trouble leeching a soul through the protection of a body. It gave me the few seconds I needed to finish the job.” The smug look spread. “I was awesome.”

  “You were lucky,” Pritkin repeated, not that it was likely to do any good. Nothing, to his knowledge, had ever dented his father’s overweening arrogance, and he doubted anything he could say was likely to do so now. And in any case, that wasn’t why he had asked to see him. “Are you going to tell me why you came after Cassie?”

  “Oh, yes, that.” Rosier shrugged, as if it was a minor detail. “The high council had a meeting a few days ago. After some deliberations to which they did not bother to invite me, I was summoned. They informed me that we were in mortal peril, and that your precious Pythia was the cause.”

  “There have been Pythias for thousands of years,” John said, his eyes narrowing.

  “Not one allied with a homicidal half-demon best known for killing one of the High Council,” Rosier said dryly. “They were convinced that you had seduced her with the intent to use her power against them.”

  “That’s ridiculous!”

  “Not at all. Your well-known hatred for our kind coupled with her ability to time shift—the one power we do not possess—makes the two of you a formidable threat. You possess enough information about our history to know exactly where and when to strike. With her power at your disposal—”

  “It isn’t at my disposal, and it wouldn’t work in the demon realms if it were!”

  Rosier shrugged. “Perhaps, perhaps not, but it is immaterial. It works perfectly well here on Earth. If she wanted to attack us at a previous point in our history, all she would have to do is to shift backwards in her own time stream, and then enter our realms from there. That would effectively put her back in our time, too, would it not?”

  John didn’t answer. His mind felt strangely numb. Like he’d been hit by a blow so hard, he had yet to feel it.

  “I can’t say I was surprised,” Rosier continued, sounding aggrieved. “I saw this coming some time ago. If you’d stayed out of the way I could have dealt with it before it became an issue—”

  “By killing her, you mean,” John grated.

  “I will never understand the attraction you have for those things,” Rosier hissed, leaning forward. “Time after time, you choose their side over ours, when you know perfectly well they. Die. Anyway. A year from now, a hundred—what difference does it make?”

  “A great deal to them, I should imagine.”

  “And none at all to us! We will be here when they are dust, when their civilization—or what passes for it—is dust. Do you have any idea how many of their petty little kingdoms I’ve seen rise and fall?”

  John couldn’t have cared less. “And how does the council feel now that this great threat saved their asses?”

  Rosier scowled. “You mean, after I saved—”

  “You wouldn’t have been on hand to do anything if Cassie hadn’t led you there!”

  “She’s human. We do not consider their actions worth—”

  “But I am not, as you so frequently point out. And she wouldn’t have led you there if she hadn’t been looking for me. So in a way, you could say that I saved their asses.”

  Rosier’s eyes narrowed. “Do I need to ask what your price is?”

  “I think you know.”

  “It appears you did get something from me, after all,” he said bitingly. “Fine time to recall it.”

  John smiled as his father abruptly winked out, and dropped the silence shield he’d had up. For the first time since this whole mess started, he allowed himself to unwind, relaxing back in his chair as Cassie finished opening her latest gift. And then sitting up abruptly again when he saw what it was.

  “What is this?” she asked, pulling out a length of gleaming lavender scales, fine as silk and far more precious.

  Marlowe, who had shown up a few minutes before searching for answers he wasn’t going to get, raised an eyebrow. “Lamia scales,” he breathed. “Now that’s a bribe worth having.”

  “Lamia?” Cassie said blankly, and then flinched back when it hit her, dropping the shimmering length in a puddle on the floor.

  “There’s no card,” Marlowe said, frowning, as he searched through the box. His dark eyes met hers. “Who would send you a priceless gift and not claim credit?”

  “It isn’t priceless,” Cassie said, in disgust. “It’s horrible.”

  The chief spy’s eyebrow climbed a bit higher. “Most people wouldn’t think so. You might not either, one of these days.”

  “I doubt that,” Cassie said, staring at it in revulsion. John was having much the same reaction, unsure whether this was his father’s idea of a gruesome joke or a peace offering. Knowing him, it was a bit of both.

  “Lamia scales are supposed to be good for—how should I put it? Aging skin,” Marlowe told her.

  “Aging?”

  “Not that you have anything to worry about for many years to come,” he added reassuringly, because her eyes had narrowed.

  But not at him. Pritkin didn’t understand the odd look she was suddenly giving the softly gleaming pile. Until a few days later, when he happened to be in the suite when Mircea burst in the front door.

  The vampire was looking less than pleased, and he had the glimmering lavender length with him. He held it out, his hand shaking slightly. “Cassandra! What on earth did you send to Ming-de?”

  Wide blue eyes met his, guileless and sweet. “Why, just a thank you gift, Mircea.”

  John turned away, hiding a smile. She was learning.

  Shadowland

  Author’s Note: “Shadowland” is the sequel to “A Family Affair”.

  Chapter One

  J ohn turned off a side street onto Las Vegas Boulevard, the early morning sun already hot enough to soak his singlet in a dark line down the front. He dragged the arm of his hoody over his face, ignoring glances from the few tourists sober enough to
be up at this hour. Most of whom were doubtless wondering why he hadn’t driven two miles to run the treadmill in an air-conditioned gym.

  He dropped his speed to a more pedestrian-friendly four miles per hour, and lifted a hand at a street vendor who had waved at him. He didn’t know the man, but he’d learned that it was expected. Like people asked him how he was as a casual greeting, despite not knowing him or giving a fig how he was. John felt it was too personal of a question to ask a stranger and didn’t like the insincerity of it.

  There were plenty of other things he didn’t like about Las Vegas: the otherworldly heat and arctic air conditioning, which seemed designed to give everyone pneumonia. The paucity of sidewalks and, especially, of crosswalks, which explained why his coworkers regularly took a car to go two blocks. The fact that everything seemed new. He’d never experienced a physical craving for old buildings before living here.

  Some old buildings, he amended, as his run brought him back to a new structure that had deliberately been designed to look old.

  Dante’s casino, hotel and generalized debauchery den loomed large at the end of the Strip, like a bad dream. Even in Vegas, a town not known for the subtlety, or indeed the sanity, of its architecture, the place stood out: a faux stone monstrosity with fake mold, fake turrets, fake everything except for the monsters. They were real enough.

  He should know.

  He was one of them.

  But right now, he was a hot and sweaty monster badly in need of a drink. And not of water. The hotel doors showed him back a flushed face, sweaty blond hair and somewhat evil green eyes, because he hadn’t had his morning fix yet.

  He jogged in between the writhing eight-foot statues that guarded the entrance and through an eye-wincing lobby intended to resemble someone’s idea of Hell. Which one? he’d almost asked on first arrival, before stopping himself. But at least it was mercifully clear of damned souls at the moment, being barely seven a.m.