by Karen Chance
“Get off me!” Rosier snarled, rolling over and trying to smash him the face with a boot.
John returned the favor by throwing him into the wall, which turned out to be lucky for more than one reason. It shut his father up momentarily, and allowed them both to roll behind the Dumpster and avoid the fight that had erupted between the bouncers and some of the patrons. The bouncers were bigger and better armed, but the patrons were more numerous and determined not to pay for a truncated good time. The alley was fast turning into a war zone.
And that included his makeshift bolt-hole, where John found himself hit with a paralysis spell.
It didn’t take completely, his shields still being up. But it left him sluggish and caused the knife he’d been planning to put through his father’s eye to hit the wall instead. It stuck in some of the old mortar, and his wrist was captured in an iron grip before he could yank it back out.
“Listen to me!” Rosier hissed. “I haven’t harmed that annoying child. I don’t know what’s going on, but you have to believe—”
John stopped his lying mouth with a fist.
He would have followed up the advantage, but a man with trousers around his ankles kicked him in the head on his way past, and then tripped and staggered into the nearest bouncer. Who sent him flying into the Dumpster with one arm, and in the process spied the two people hiding behind it. Bugger!
John threw a spell that stopped the creature’s spear all of a foot from his face, and then reversed it, sending it back into the huge, thrashing tail. It pinned its owner to the ground momentarily, and before he could wrench free, he was jumped by a bunch of disgruntled patrons. John didn’t wait around to see who won, but dragged his bastard of a father inside the brothel and slammed him against the wall.
“Are you a fool?” Rosier demanded wildly. “Why would I go after her again? What could it possibly gain me?”
That made John pause for an instant, since Rosier was entirely self-serving. It was his most defining characteristic. “She almost killed you once.”
“You’ve almost killed me half a dozen times,” was the angry response. “And yet you’re still alive. And she also saved my life, if you’ll recall. I believe that makes us even.”
“The council hates her. You said so yourself!”
“Yes, and they’d love a replacement. Someone more . . . sane. But they recognize that she did them a favor, and they’re willing to wait and see.”
“You lie!”
“Why? In the name of whatever you hold holy, why would I want to have anything to do with that walking time bomb? Every time I get near her, this,” he waved an arm wildly. “This is how I end up.”
“If you didn’t try to kill her, why are you injured?”
“Because you just slung me around an alley for five minutes?”
“Don’t give me that! You were hurt before! Why else would you be here?” John gestured around at the bare, unpainted walls, the chandelier composed of a dozen strings of bare bulbs knotted together, and the graffiti-covered bar. Even for hell, the place was a pit.
“You’d know why,” Rosier said heatedly. “If you’d bothered to go by my court before trying to kill me!”
“And what would I know?”
“That it isn’t there anymore! It was firebombed a few hours ago by the damned Alû. And no, I don’t know why. I was rather more concerned with getting out alive, and then eluding a few of my loyal servants, who decided to see the disaster as an opportunity for promotion! I barely managed to make it here alive.”
John stared at him, his head reeling, and not just because of the kick. Rosier sounded sincere, but of course that meant sod all. Like most of his kind, he had elevated lying to an art form. One he had long ago perfected.
John wanted to end him. He’d rarely wanted anything more. His head hurt; his leg throbbed with every heartbeat; but neither was anything close to the pain of knowing how badly he’d failed. Cassie’s death was his fault as much as his father’s, and it burned like brimstone in his gut.
“Emrys, listen—”
But John wasn’t. The image of another young woman he’d cared about, and also utterly failed, rose up in front of his eyes. And it was suddenly all he could see, her screams all he could hear.
“You expect me to believe that someone attacked you,” he rasped. “At the exact moment that Dante’s was also being hit? You actually expect me to believe that?”
“I expect you to use your head,” Rosier said, eyes flickering oddly. “Cassie has enemies; I have enemies. But we only have one enemy. Damn it, boy! I taught you better than this! Stop wallowing in sentiment and think.”
But John couldn’t. He heard the creature’s words, but the meaning hit the old well of anguish and self-hate and seething, simmering resentment he carried around like a weight. One that, right now, was threatening to crush him. He needed to throw it off, but the rage that had been building since he found that cracked and ruined necklace rose up with irresistible force.
And swamped him.
“You lie!” he breathed, and readied the spell that would end this. Finally, utterly—
And had a blinding pain shoot through his head, hard enough to drop him to his knees.
“Cut it a little closer next time, why don’t you?” he heard his father snarl at someone behind him.
And then nothing.
Chapter Eleven
H e’s coming around,” a woman said.
“Where is it?” a man’s voice demanded sharply.
“I don’t . . . give me a second,” another man said, sounding distracted.
“Damn it! Why don’t you have it ready?”
“Well, don’t blame me! He has the hardest head in existence. He should have been out longer than this.”
“You’re lucky he had the shield up, or he would be out permanently. And then I would be forced to gut you. Now give it to me!”
John opened his eyes to see something dangling in front of his face. It was gold and red, and glinting in the low light of a bare bulb overhead. And cold like everything in the Shadowland when it grazed his cheek. It was also hauntingly familiar. He tried to raise a hand to grasp it, but nothing seemed to happen.
“Give it a moment. The vampire almost took your head off,” someone told him.
John didn’t think he had much choice. The combination of two head knocks in a row on top of blood loss, a soul hit, and a stun spell had him swimming around in the realm of the barely conscious. But after a few seconds, his flailing hand managed to bump into the prize, and it swung closer to his face. Just about the time his eyes uncrossed.
And saw the impossible.
“It’s a trick,” he rasped, after a stunned second, and someone sighed.
John focused on Rian, in the form of a hazy outline of a beautiful woman. She was standing to the left of the bed he appeared to be lying on. It was Spartan and roughly twin-sized, and barely fit a tiny closet of a bedroom. One of the brothel’s, he assumed, judging by the smell. And if Rian was here—
“I told you so.” Casanova’s scowling form came into focus on the other side of the bed, standing in front of a small window. He wasn’t dangling anything, though, and neither was Rian. Which meant—
“Hold him!” Rosier’s voice said sharply, as John tried surging up. But Casanova had his arms, holding him down as Rosier shoved what John now identified as a gaudy necklace with a dull red center stone at him. “It’s real,” he said urgently. “Test it for yourself. The vampire brought it.”
“It’s true, John,” Rian chimed in, loyal as ever to the creature who’d spawned her.
“You lie!” John said, struggling against the vampire’s strength. “I saw the real one. It was broken, cracked, ruined—”
“That was only the first time,” Casanova said, and then glared as John got in a good shot to the jaw.
Some of the fog in John’s head seemed to clear, as the vampire’s words penetrated. “What first time?” he panted. “What are you talking a
bout?”
“If you’ll cease trying to murder everyone, we’ll explain,” his father said dryly, coming into view on Rian’s side of the bed.
He looked slightly more beaten up than before, with a dirty face, a puffy jaw and two black eyes that ran together, like a superhero mask. But otherwise, he was right as rain. John growled.
“Oh, come off it,” Rosier said, sitting on the bed, and tossing the necklace onto John’s chest. “What? Did I pull that out of my ass?”
“Bet it wouldn’t be the first time,” Casanova muttered, as John closed his hand on it.
There was no way to tell if it was real. It looked the same, but of course it would. Rosier had seen Cassie’s talisman more than once. Despite what he claimed, for someone of his skill, reproducing it would be easy.
“We don’t have time for this,” Rian warned, glancing out the window.
“Do you have an alternative?” Rosier asked. “We can’t drag him through the streets unwilling, and we can’t transition in the heart of the city.”
“It wouldn’t do us any good if we could,” Casanova muttered. “The damned casino is full of Alû, too.”
Rian looked at John, her pretty face worried. “Your father is telling the truth; we brought the stone, Carlos and I. Your Pythia put it in his hands herself. She said it would convince you. Was she wrong?”
“You do yourself no credit, Rian,” John sneered. “I know what I saw!”
“And you saw truly. But you did not see all.”
“Oh for—just tell him already!” Casanova said, breaking in. And then he did it for her. “Cassie did something at the last second, some kind of spell. It stuck us in a time loop with everything repeating every hour and fourteen minutes and twenty-nine seconds, including the bunch of maniac Alû going around collecting heads! We finally found a hiding spot they mostly overlooked and Marsden said—”
“Jonas?” John frowned. He wouldn’t have expected them to bring him into their lie. “What does he have to do with this? And why would the Alû–”
“I’ll tell you if you shut up!” Casanova said, a little wildly. John belatedly noticed that the vampire was looking almost worse than Rosier. His jacket was missing, his hair was covered in dust, and his face and shirt were filthy. And there was an odd odor clinging to—
Rian cleared the throat she didn’t have.
“It comes down to this,” she told him quickly. “Lady Cassandra is trapped in a time loop made of her own power. The only way for her to be free is to complete the spell. But she can only do that if all the people on whom it was inadvertently cast are once more assembled.”
“What people?” John asked.
“The ones in the damned room with her at the time,” Casanova said. “That’s why her Loftiness dispatched me to hell, in order to find you and whoever was possessing Marco—”
“That’s easily done,” John said, grabbing his father by the shirt front.
“It is no such thing,” Rosier said testily. “Let us try this again, and do see if that vaunted intelligence of yours can grasp this one simple concept, would you? I. Was. Not. There.”
“Then who was?”
“Sid, presumably.”
“Sid?” John stared at him in disgust.
“Think about it. Who thwarted his well-laid plans to destroy the council, and half the city along with it? I did, with some help from you and the girl. And, of course, he wants revenge.”
John didn’t bother commenting that, as usual, his father had managed to make himself the hero of the piece when he’d actually been a villain. Instead, he concentrated on the more relevant point. “If he so much as shows his nose here, he’s dead. How—”
“But he didn’t show it, did he?” Rosier asked. “He’s likely been on Earth, feeding up and plotting revenge. And somewhere along the line, he realized that he couldn’t pick us off one by one without the others getting suspicious. If he killed me, you’d know something was up, and vice versa. Therefore, he decided to take us all at once.”
“But he didn’t take us,” John gritted out. “The bomb was meant for Cassie—”
“And in the process, Sid no doubt hoped that you would die as well. But he couldn’t be sure that she would open the bomb in your presence, therefore he took back up.”
“In the form of the council’s own guards?” John looked at him incredulously. “Where did he get them?”
“From the council. He was pretending to be me, after all.”
“How could he possibly—”
“He’s an old adherent of our house,” Rosier reminded him. “It wouldn’t be difficult for someone who has known me for a few thousand years to impersonate me convincingly.”
“Except that no one goes around impersonating council members!”
“Which is likely how he got away with it. It would be a death sentence if caught, so as you say, nobody does it. But what if someone doesn’t care if he’s caught? What if all he really cares about anymore is revenge?”
Casanova shook his head. “If the Alû believed Sid to be you, then they’re your allies. Why turn on you?”
“Turn on you?” John demanded. “What—”
“They’re asking the locals about both of you,” Rian confirmed. “Searching the streets around us right now.”
“What? Why? They just went with him,” John hiked a thumb at his father, “to help kill Cassie!”
“We’ve discussed this before,” Rosier said, slipping back into the lecture mode that John especially hated. “Not all creatures think like you do. Your viewpoint isn’t the only viewpoint; your logic isn’t the only logic.”
“Then what is Alû logic?”
“To do the will of the council. And a council member had told them to come along on the assassination of a known threat.” He shrugged. “They went.”
“But you had taken an oath—on the council itself—not to hurt Cassie!”
“Yes, but that was my look to, wasn’t it?” Rosier asked, as if that were obvious. “It wasn’t up to them to keep my oath for me. If I broke it, they would kill me, certainly, as the vow demanded. But until then, I was perfectly within my rights to require their assistance.”
“But they didn’t kill you—or Sid or whomever—”
“Because he disappeared. Which is when they communicated with their counterparts here, instructing them to attack my court.”
John blinked, because that made an insane sort of sense. “Because you were then viewed as a traitor for breaking your oath.”
“It has a certain beauty to it,” Rosier said admiringly. “Sid assumed the bomb would take out the girl, but if not, the Alû would. He probably hoped the explosion would also kill you, and that the forces he’d prepped in the Shadowland would kill me, making for a nice, tidy operation. But he had an alternative plan, in case that didn’t happen.”
“To make me believe that it was all your doing.” John was beginning to see where his father was going with this.
Rosier nodded. “At which point, you could be relied on to do exactly what you did, and come after me in a murderous rage. Thereby ensuring that you broke your oath not to enter the demon realms without the council’s express permission, and forfeited your life in the process.”
“He thought that I would kill you if the Alû failed, and that they would then end me,” John said, fist clenching around Cassie’s talisman.
Rosier nodded. “He planned this perfectly, with layer upon layer of assurance that, no matter what we did, we ended up dead.”
“But we didn’t. Cassie lives, and so do we! He failed.”
“Yes, well. That remains to be seen,” Rosier said dryly. “The problem is to get him to show himself. We need him, and not only to break the spell. We have to—”
Casanova cut him off with a curse. “Details can wait! Rian already told you—we don’t have time for this. The Alû are everywhere in the streets below—to the point that we barely made it through. And there’s more of them now than before!”
“And too many people saw that display you two put on,” Casanova added. “Someone’s bound to turn us in. I’m surprised they haven’t done it already.”
“The Alû aren’t popular,” Rosier said grimly. “But it doesn’t matter; they’ll find us soon enough, and I can’t hold them off in the shape I’m in. I expended what little energy I had left in the fight—”
“You’re an incubus,” Casanova said impatiently. “In a brothel! Feed, for the love of—”
“Now, why didn’t I think of what?” Rosier asked sweetly.
“It wouldn’t be sufficient, Carlos,” Rian told him. “The Master was almost drained by the wounds he sustained at court. He needs a proper feeding, more than any of the workers here could provide, even if we could find them again . . .”
“Then what about you?” Casanova asked. “Can’t you loan him enough—”
She shook her head sadly. “I do not have a body on which to draw. And a spirit feeding will not be enough.”
“No,” Rosier mused. “I need to feed from a body, but a normal one won’t do. This calls for someone old, rich, powerful. Someone who has been storing up energy for centuries. Someone like . . .”
He suddenly looked up, and met John and Rian’s eyes. And then they all turned to look at the vampire. Who was still staring worriedly out the window.
“And how are we supposed to find someone like that around here?” Casanova demanded.
Rosier smiled gently. “I may have an idea.”
Chapter Twelve
I hate you,” Casanova said weakly, grasping hold of a roof tile.
“Which one?” Pritkin asked, grabbing his forearms. And hauling him roughly onto the roof.
