I didn’t even bother to look at Radella. I knew how she’d choose; the expression on her face had been eloquent. Besides, Françoise had me in a hug that was threatening to choke me. “No! I weel not leave you again!”
“I am Pythia!” I said, detaching her arms with a less-than-dignified struggle. “And you will do as I say.”
“Yes, do as she says, witch. You’re no match for us,” Rosier added helpfully.
Françoise turned on him, eyes furious, and uttered a single, harsh word. It wasn’t the liquid syllables of French, or any other language I knew. It was low and guttural, and the power behind it made my skin crawl. Something flew straight at Rosier, something I couldn’t see too well in the low light, but he turned it back with a tiny, casual gesture. The spell slammed into the stained-glass window above my head, sending a shower of brightly colored shards raining down all around me.
I grabbed Françoise by the arms before she could try again, shaking her as hard as I could. “He’s right! You can’t help me. But you can help them! Now get out of here. Go!” I gave her a shove toward the stairs.
She looked from me to the demon and back again, confusion and pain on her face. I don’t know what she would have decided if Rosier hadn’t flicked a finger, sending several dark shapes peeling away from the main mass. They didn’t bother with the stairs, but shot straight up through the ceiling. Straight toward the rest of the children.
I was going to point out that Rosier must be more worried about her power than he let on, to send reinforcements. But I didn’t get the chance. Françoise turned and ran.
Billy didn’t budge. “Billy!”
“I—this—you can’t seriously expect me to—”
“You can bring the cavalry back here once the kids are safe.”
“You’ll be dead by then!”
Rosier laughed. Apparently demons could hear ghosts, too.
“And how do you expect to prevent that if you stay?” I demanded. “Go where you can do some good!”
“Don’t ask me to do this.”
“Billy, please,” I stopped, not knowing how to convince him. If he refused to help, it decreased Françoise’s chances by a hell of a lot. The longer the kids stayed in the dark, the longer Rosier’s servants had to find a way to destroy them. And Misfits or not, they were only children.
“The Cassie and Billy show, remember?” he said, suddenly tentative. “Where you go, I go.”
“Except that doesn’t work anymore.” And God, didn’t I miss the days when it did. “Please, Billy. Do this one thing for me.”
His shoulders sagged and his face crumpled. “It better not be the last thing, is all,” he said, quietly furious. “Because if you end up dead, I’m going to make your afterlife hell!”
Radella fluttered in front of my face the second he disappeared. “If you die, how do I get the rune?” she demanded.
“Pritkin. He’ll give it to you, assuming you get the kids back safely. You can do that, right?”
“Yes.”
“And take the kitchen staff with you.” Miranda had said they’d defend a crèche with their lives. I wasn’t real keen on having her prove it.
“But…they’re Fey. Dark Fey,” Radella said, as if maybe I hadn’t noticed.
“What difference does that make? Just take them with you!” I didn’t know that the demons would attack them once the kids were gone. But I didn’t know that they wouldn’t, either. Rosier certainly seemed to have the concept of revenge down cold.
Radella was silent for a moment. Then I heard a softly spoken, lyrical sentence, almost like bells ringing. “What was that?”
“Nothing.” She sounded embarrassed. “Just…good luck, Cassie.”
I felt the rush of air as she flew past me, and Rosier smiled his ghastly smile. “A Fey blessing. So rare. And so useless, outside Faerie.” The black cloud had finished assembling minutes before and hung in the air behind Rosier, awaiting his pleasure. “I told you I’d trade you the lives of the children for your sacrifice. You should have made the deal. Now you die, and so do they.”
I was going to tell him that I preferred to trust my allies over his word. But I didn’t get the chance. The hideous, squirming mass suddenly froze, like soldiers coming to attention. Then it dove, straight at me.
Chapter 27
I screamed, too exhausted to even pretend I wasn’t terrified. The damn knights remained inert, incapable of detecting the creatures who were about to kill me. But a plume of fire, the strength of maybe a couple dozen flamethrowers, shot out of the other end of the corridor.
Maybe Casanova had installed some new security measure; I didn’t know. But whatever it was, it was effective. The cloud screamed with the sound of a hundred voices, and writhed madly in the air, a twisting, burning black mass that reminded me of the maggots working on Saleh’s headless body.
The glare of the flames glinting off the armor shed more light on the scene, although I might have been happier in the dark. Rosier dropped from the ceiling to land in the middle of the corridor with a faint plopping sound. Then something jumped me from behind, sinking what felt like a rack of small knives into my back.
I shrieked and staggered back, hitting the wall and driving the claws in that much farther. I lurched back into the room and let my gaseous knives loose, but they took one look at the larger fight going on a few yards away and deserted me. I looked around frantically, but although there were about a hundred weapons of various kinds in the knights’ hands I didn’t see any that would help dislodge something that high on my back that I couldn’t even see.
Another of the things latched on to my left arm, piercing deep enough to hit bone, while another attached itself to my right thigh. I went down to my knees, blinded by pain and shock, only to realize that the things weren’t continuing the attack. Instead, they forced me onto my back, pinning me down, waiting. I raised my head a little to look between my feet, and saw why.
Rosier was crawling my way, dragging himself forward with those spindly arms, his rudimentary legs trailing behind. His face turned unerringly toward me, despite the empty eye sockets, and over the screeching of the burning demons I could hear the soft sound of scales whispering over the floor. He looked harmless, a vague, unfinished creature with a toothless mouth and small, barely formed claws. But I so didn’t want him touching me.
He flowed bonelessly over my feet and onto my legs, long, too flexible fingers curling around my calves, my knees, my thighs as he pulled himself along the length of my body. And already I could feel a faint echo of that horrible, draining sensation. He was beginning to feed.
Despite my every muscle singing with tension, I couldn’t even turn over to try to dislodge him. My arms were pinned by the weight of his servants and my strength was steadily flowing out, what little remained of it. Curled on the floor at my sides, my hands lay still and useless.
He settled heavily onto my stomach, his little claws ripping at the seams of my skirt, pulling it apart to expose the unprotected flesh of my belly. That obscene mouth opened and I could see right inside it, right into the corpse-like hue of his gullet. He licked a clammy line across my skin. “You taste sweet.”
“Get off,” I said thickly.
He couldn’t have grinned. But he gave that impression anyway as he pinned me with that blind gaze. “Oh, I intend to.”
I felt a claw bite into my side, sinking deep. And without words, without him opening that obscene mouth again, I knew what he planned to do. He was going to slit me like he had the skirt, opening me up so he could feed on something more substantial than mere power. He planned to eat me alive.
A feeling—not quite pain, more like raw nerve endings firing on automatic—crackled upward from my stomach to my mouth. I swallowed it down, refusing to scream again. But my eyes rolled up into my head as I felt that claw start to move through my flesh.
He withdrew it for a moment, to lick daintily at his red-stained skin, letting me watch as drops of my blood ran down his arm.
One fell off his elbow onto my lower stomach, and he paused to lick it up, his tongue slick and cold against my skin. Then he inserted the claw again, and ripped me open a little wider.
He was deliberately going slowly, splitting flesh and skin a centimeter at a time, pausing every few seconds to lick the jagged edges of the wound, sending violent, sickened shudders through me. He wanted me to know that this was going to be a very long process. And I suddenly understood: he’d wanted the others to go after the kids so he could afford to take his time.
And he would have, except for the crazed djinn with the machete. “Saleh!” I was so happy to see him I cried.
“Hey, sweetheart.” He did a double take. “You look rough.” The machete swung, slicing off a rudimentary arm and knocking Rosier into the side wall, where he landed with a sickening crunch.
“It’s been one of those days,” I gasped, trying to strain my neck to see how much damage Rosier had done. It felt like a lot. It felt like too much.
“Tell me about it,” Saleh said. “You wouldn’t believe the trouble I had tracking this guy down.” He made another swing but missed. “Stand still, damn you!” he ordered, slashing at the demon. But the creature moved unbelievably fast, even without those skeletal legs, and dodged enough blows to keep himself in one piece.
Saleh might have found his prey, but it looked like he lacked the power to take his revenge. Even though Rosier didn’t seem nearly as interested in preserving his life as he did in ending mine. And Billy was right: there was no way the cavalry was going to get here in time.
Saleh did manage to hack the thing off my left arm in passing, although I would have preferred him to free the right, given the choice. But I wasn’t about to argue. I got a grip on one of the nearby window shards, one that looked a lot like a claw itself, red and glittering, tapering from a wedge base to a needle-fine spike. Pritkin had said that Rosier had to lower his defenses to feed. It looked like I was going to get a chance to test the theory.
Rosier jumped for me, a misshapen white blur against the dark, landing with enough force to knock the wind out of me. I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t see, but I could feel. Before the lethargy started again, before he could render me completely helpless, I reached out for the slick surface of his skin and drove the shard as deep as I could into his side.
He screamed, but there was little blood, little bodily fluid of any kind. And the spongy flesh closed up around the wound almost immediately. So I plunged the shard in again and this time I left it, while feeling around for others. Some were too blunt to use, but here was a nice blue one with a jagged edge; there a deep green with a fissure making it into a double blade; and over there, almost at the end of my reach, was a pearly white, so cracked and splintered along the edge that it was almost serrated—and cut about as well, too.
One of the black things was trying to grab my free arm, while its master screamed and thrashed about and tried to eject multiple knives all at once. “You will pay for that,” he told me, blood dripping from his mouth onto my stomach, mingling with my own.
“Maybe, but not today,” I gasped, as Saleh rose up behind him. I didn’t even have time to flinch before the wide blade took off Rosier’s head.
Blood spurted out then, a river of it, as if something much larger than the tiny body slumped across me had been killed. I lay in a pool of it as the whirlwind started up again, its sound almost immediately overshadowed by the familiar scream of air that signaled a ley-line fissure. Or, in this case, a portal.
“You better run,” Saleh told me, as the stream of fire holding off the demon cloud halted abruptly. But I couldn’t run, could barely crawl, and there was no time in any case. The cloud dove for me, a screaming mass of hysterical hate, only to be hit by a hail of bullets from the stairwell as a dozen vamps flowed into the room.
“Is this a private party?” Alphonse asked, crushing the black thing hanging off my thigh under a heavy motorcycle boot. “Or can anyone join?”
Sal pried the creature off my back and stomped heavily on its center. It screeched and writhed and melted away, leaving only what looked like a scorch mark on the stones below.
“You do know how to throw a party,” she said as she pulled the last creature from my right arm and slung it against the wall. She looked me over. “But you were right. Elegance isn’t your thing.”
I lay back against the fake stone of the floor, listening as the demons and vamps fought it out all around us. It didn’t sound like the demons liked automatic gunfire any more than they did fire. I watched the last of them being pounded into nothingness by Alphonse’s size twelve boots while Sal examined my various wounds. What was left of Rosier’s body was nearby, a wasted scrap of bloody white flesh. I thought seriously about throwing up, but decided it was too much trouble.
Sal checked out my thigh and shoulders and pronounced them only flesh wounds. The stomach was worse, wide enough to need stitches, but I borrowed her belt and bunched enough of the skirt under it to serve as a makeshift bandage and to keep me decent, all at the same time. Multitasking, that’s how you get things done, I thought, and burst into giggles.
“None of that,” Sal said reprovingly. “Have hysterics later. The Consul’s on her way and she’s gonna want to know—did you get it?”
“Hell, yes, I got it. And if she’s coming, maybe she can get off her ass and help with some of the dirty work for a change!”
All the blood drained from Sal’s face, and her eyes fixed on a point just over my left shoulder. “And with what ‘dirty work’ precisely do you require aid?” a husky voice asked from behind me.
God knows what I would have said, but before I could even turn around, Jesse ran out of the dark and jumped in front of me. “I got it!” he yelled, and sent a plume of flame straight at the Consul.
She met it with the blinding wall of sand, dry as a desert, hot as hell, that I had once seen eat a couple of vampires alive. Only she wasn’t throwing it outward at us, I realized after a moment, when my flesh stayed on my bones; she was using it as a shield. I got Jesse around the middle and screamed in his ear. “Cut it out! She’s a friend!”
The fire abruptly vanished, and he stood there looking a little sheepish. “Uh. Sorry?”
“Not strong at all?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Well, maybe a little strong.” I guess now I knew who had taken on a cluster of angry demons.
“Why weren’t you with the others?” I demanded.
“I was on my way down here when two of those things attacked me. I fried ’em,” he told me happily.
“Then you could have gotten into the kitchen! You could have gone with Radella and the others!”
“And leave you like this?” He sounded insulted.
The Consul dropped the sandstorm and Jesse did a double take, then just stared, trying to prove that “eyes as big as saucers” wasn’t an exaggeration. I guess he hadn’t gotten a good look at her before. She arched one eyebrow in a way that reminded me eerily of Mircea. “Friend?”
I smiled weakly. “Well, you know. Not an enemy.”
“That remains to be seen,” she said, holding out a jeweled hand.
I blinked at it for a moment until I realized what she wanted. She expected me to hand over the Codex. And I’d already admitted that I had it. I figured I had maybe a minute to fork it over before she had me strip-searched.
“Uh,” I said wittily. My brain was exhausted, my body was in serious pain, and I had nothing left. I couldn’t let her take it, not when Pritkin had been willing to go to such lengths to see it destroyed. I still didn’t understand exactly what it did, but I knew enough to think that maybe he’d had a point. Because no way was the geis the only reason she wanted it. Ming-de and Parindra hadn’t had a sick vampire, and they’d seemed pretty keen.
The Consul didn’t say anything, but she didn’t lower her arm, either. “Give me the Codex, Cassandra.”
“That wasn’t the deal,” I reminded her. “I agreed to save Mircea. That was all.??
?
“We will attend to our own.” She pulled someone forward who had been standing behind her. Tami. “Give me the book and I will give you your friend.”
“You’ll give her to me anyway. As soon as Mircea is healed, she is free. You’ve sworn it.”
Those sloe eyes narrowed. “But he isn’t healed. Not yet.”
It took me a second, but I got it. “And you have him.” I had the counterspell, but I couldn’t heal Mircea if I didn’t know where he was. And that left Tami under the Consul’s manicured thumb until she chose to release her. Or until she gave her back to the Circle.
“So you’ve decided what? That you want the Codex more than you want to save Mircea?”
“Once I have the Codex, our mages can cast the spell.”
How inconveniently true. “And if I refuse to give it to you?”
The Consul’s grip on Tami’s arm tightened slightly. “I do not think you will refuse.”
“And I think she will,” a ringing voice said behind me. The corridor was suddenly flooded with a blinding golden light. “Well done, Herophile. You have fulfilled your quest!”
I didn’t need to turn around to know who was standing there. The Consul’s expression, one of mild surprise, was enough. For her, that was practically a goggle.
I shifted my eyes, while moving Jesse and me back a few feet, toward the shattered window. “What do I get, a gold star?”
The ten-foot golden god in the too short tunic laughed, and it echoed off the walls. “Give me the Codex and you may have anything you like. It’s our world now, Herophile!”
Behind him, I could see a whole row of dark-coated figures, and the rotting fruit smell that accompanied them told me what they were. Dark mages. I guess they were there for bad little Pythias who didn’t do what they were told.
“Because I already have a gold circle,” I continued. “The Codex was hidden behind one. I should have thought of you when I saw it.”
“Gold is the alchemical sign for the sun, yes,” he said, still approving.