“Anyone willing,” I clarified.
“Oh, good. Because I’m not. Willing. In case you were wondering.”
“I wasn’t.”
“Good ’cause . . . I’m really, really not.”
“Okay.”
“I mean, not even a little—”
“Fred!”
“We have to find her,” Rhea broke in. “We have to give her that chance!”
“Myra is already dead,” I said, trying to think of a way to change the subject.
“Yes, but the others are not! They had to know! They were thick as thieves, all of them! There’s no way they didn’t—”
“Rhea.”
“We can find her! She can help—”
She stopped suddenly, probably at the look on my face. And it was times like these that I wished I had a tenth of Mircea’s diplomatic ability. Or even some of that weasel-out-of-questions-you-don’t-want-to-answer ability. Because this answer wasn’t anything she wanted to hear.
“Rhea,” I told her gently. “Let it go.”
“You know something.”
The pallor from before had morphed into two high red circles on her cheeks. It made her look like a kid who’d gotten into her mother’s cosmetics and gone crazy with the rouge. But it didn’t look funny to me. It didn’t look funny at all.
“Rhea, please.”
“I want to know.”
“Rhea—”
“It’s my right to know!”
And I wasn’t going to get out of this, was I?
But I really didn’t want to tell her. If she looked this bad, just getting confirmation that Agnes was murdered, how would she feel about the rest of the story? How would she like knowing that her beloved Pythia had died on her last shift back in time, had thereafter hitched a ride in the body of a young girl kidnapped by the fey, and had waited out the centuries in faerie, where time runs differently. Just so she and the girl could make their escape back here at the perfect time for Agnes to merge with a new host—her old acolyte, Myra. And to slit her throat from ear to ear, releasing both their souls at the same time.
Not for revenge, but as her last act as Pythia. She had been determined to free the world from the horror she’d unwittingly unleashed. And to deny Myra the chance to come back in a new body, in the only way she could.
By dragging her soul away with her into the afterlife.
I could close my eyes and still see it, the red, red blood spilling down Myra’s snowy white gown, the two souls entwined, fighting to the last, the small body slowly slinking to the floor, almost gracefully. I’d seen it in nightmares a few times since. I didn’t want to pass them on.
But Rhea was right; as a member of the court, she ought to know.
“It’s a long story,” I finally told her. “And I don’t know most of it. If you want to hear everything, when we get back to Dante’s, talk to a witch named Françoise. She works at Augustine’s,” I added. “She can tell you more than me.”
To my relief, she seemed to accept that.
“May—may I be excused,” she asked, “for a moment?”
I nodded, and she abruptly ran off. I watched her go, feeling crappy. And reminding myself to be careful what I said in front of the court from now on.
“Sorry,” Fred told me. “I didn’t mean . . .”
“It’s not your fault.”
“I didn’t know she was going to take it like that.”
That made two of us.
Fred retrieved his terrible toy and sat on the sofa, and I put my feet up on the coffee table, because it didn’t matter anymore. And for a moment there was silence, except for the scritch, scratch, scritch of Fred petting his hairy cup. And damn, that was disturbing.
“Stop that,” I told him.
“Stop what?”
“Touching that thing.”
“It feels nice,” he told me. “Like a fuzzy pet rock. Do you want to—”
“No!”
He looked down at it fondly. “It does seem weird, though, doesn’t it?”
“‘Weird’ is not the word I’d use.”
“Not the cup. Myra.”
“What about her?”
“That she left so much to chance. Killing someone like that . . . you know, when she didn’t have to.”
“She did have to. If an acolyte kills a Pythia directly, the power will refuse to go to her. It’s something to do with the conditions laid on the power when Apollo gave it.”
“Apollo,” Fred said, frowning. “You really believe that stuff you told Jonas the other night, about us fighting gods?”
For a moment, it threw me. Maybe because, for the last three months, I’d been living in a crazy world of gods and demons, myths and monsters, and Fred hadn’t. Well, okay, he’d been there for that last one, the demigod sons of Ares called the Spartoi, who could shift into dragon form at will. And damn, you’d think something like that would have woken him up.
But there were dragons in faerie, and for all I knew, maybe he’d seen one. He hadn’t seen a god. He hadn’t been there when Apollo died, hadn’t seen him glowing bright as a star fallen to earth, a boiling mass of power. And that was after he’d been seriously drained getting past the barrier. Yet I’d hardly been able to look at him. . . .
“Cassie?”
“Not gods,” I told him tersely. “Just beings powerful enough to make ancient people think they were.”
I started sorting through the stuff on the coffee table to give myself something to do. Maybe the girls would like some mementos of Agnes, if I could find a couple dozen that weren’t too horrifying. Which wasn’t looking like it was going to be easy.
“But why so powerful?” Fred asked, sitting forward.
“What?”
“The gods. Why were they so powerful here?”
“I don’t know. They come from another world—”
“The fey come from another world. And their magic doesn’t work here.”
“It works. They use Elemental magic, same as the covens.”
“Not the same,” he argued. “The same idea maybe, but the fey can’t feed from our world at all. The covens can ’cause they’re from here, but the fey aren’t. Their bodies generate some magic, and they bring talismans and shit with them to extend it. But when their power starts to run low, they hightail it back to faerie. They have to, or become sitting ducks!”
I blinked at him, because that had sounded . . . kind of vicious.
He saw my expression and grimaced. “We’ve been having some problems with the fey lately. It’s one of the things the master’s doing in New York.”
I nodded.
“But none of this explains why the ‘gods’ were so damned powerful here,” he persisted. “Shouldn’t they have run dry eventually, like the fey?”
“They’re not fey.”
“But they’re magical beings and all magic gives out eventually; why didn’t theirs?”
I shrugged. “They cycled out, went home sometimes. That’s why the old legends say they lived in places like Asgard or Olympus, not earth.”
“But the legends also say that they fought wars here,” Fred persisted. “Including some with each other. So, what did they do when their power ran low? Say time out and go home?”
“No,” I said, and tossed a ruby on the pile. “They fed on demons.”
“Demons?”
“That’s what they wanted with earth in the first place: as a staging ground for their hunt. Humans don’t have enough energy to bother with, but the demons had more, sometimes millennia of accumulated power, and it . . . fattened the gods back up.”
“Ah. I didn’t know that.”
“It’s why the demons hate them. The gods were using us as bait to lure them in. The demons came to feed off us, and then the gods fed off them.” Like lions hanging o
ut at the watering hole, as Pritkin had phrased it.
Hungry lions.
Fred frowned. It didn’t look like he enjoyed learning that he was low man on the food chain. “Are the gods like us in other ways? Can they pull from family? Share power?”
“Not that I know of.” I kind of got the impression that the gods didn’t share much of anything.
“But then, how did they fight? Each other, I mean?”
“I told you. Maybe they fed off any demons that happened to be around, if they got low.”
“Maybe.” He didn’t look convinced.
“Vamps do that,” I pointed out. “Tony’s boys did, in a scuffle. They used to drain their opponents to heal themselves.”
“A scuffle is not a war,” he argued. “And while that’s technically possible, it takes concentration. And losing concentration, even for a split second, with one of us . . .”
I nodded. The best way to survive a vamp fight was not to get in one. Sort of like with the gods, I thought grimly.
“Here, put these in your pockets,” I told him, scooping up the jewels. I’d decided against the amulets. The creep factor was high, and I didn’t need anyone else poisoned. But some of the raw stones might be pretty all polished up. Maybe the girls could get rings made or something.
“You can tell me, you know,” he said as I was stuffing his jacket pockets.
“Tell you what?”
“Why you’ve been running around like a headless chicken for two weeks—”
“I have not.”
“You have. You stumble back in, dirty and beat up and wearing seriously weird clothes. You throw back some dinner, grab some sleep, and then you’re off again. Everybody’s curious.”
“Then tell them to be less curious.”
“Some of the guys think Mage Pritkin has gone and got himself in trouble, and that you’re trying to help him—”
“They can think whatever they want.”
“—but I told ’em that you were probably doing something about the war. Trying to find us some advantage maybe.”
“Uh-huh.”
“So which is it?” he persisted. “War or war mage? I got a bet riding on it.”
“Can’t it be both?” I asked, distracted by the sight of one of the cups, which had ended up under the coffee table. I picked it up. They were really beautiful, some of them. This one had been carved entirely out of amethyst, like a single great jewel.
But it hadn’t saved her. None of them had. I was beginning to think that those sorts of precautions never did. Hunker down, play it safe, take precautions . . . and die anyway.
Because Mircea was right about one thing: how did you win a war playing defense? The answer was you didn’t. Not usually, anyway, and not this one.
But what other choice did we have?
What did we have that could kill a god?
“Cassie?”
I looked up to find Fred leaning back on the couch, watching me. And maybe it was a trick of the light, or my overactive imagination. But for a second, the too-round face was grim, and the big gray eyes were narrowed and shrewd.
And then he smiled again, and he was just Fred.
“Both?”
And shit.
I was just putting my foot in my mouth every time I opened it tonight, wasn’t I?
But this time I got a reprieve when Rico decided to rejoin us.
He was closing the little leather fold of tools he’d brought with him, and putting it back inside his jacket. The jacket was another leather one, which went with his bad-boy image better than the suits I’d never seen him wear. It also went with his somewhat checkered past as a “troubleshooter” for the family, which must have included a little safe breaking since he’d volunteered.
Only a glance at the safe showed that he hadn’t broken this one.
“No?” I said, because of course not. When was anything ever that easy?
“I can break it open or rip it out of the wall for you,” he confirmed. “But I can’t do it while those wards are up. We need a mage.”
“And where are we supposed to find one?” Fred asked. “We can’t just call up the Circle and ask ’em to send one over, or it’ll change time. And we can’t go back to our own time and snag one, because she’s already exhausted. And all the ones around here are—”
He cut off when the door suddenly hit the floor, sliding halfway across the room, while the opening erupted into one giant fireball.
“Dark,” I finished for him, as all hell broke loose.
Chapter Thirty-eight
The mages weren’t the problem.
I threw a time freeze at them at almost the second they cleared the door. It wasn’t quite strong enough to do the job, because I was tired and they were scattered, forcing me to spread the spell over a bigger area than I’d planned. But that actually ended up being okay. Because instead of stopping them in place, it encased them in a large blob of slow time, which left fire spells boiling out ahead of them and coats wafting out behind them and the mages themselves on what looked like might be a ten-minute journey to the other side of the room.
No, they weren’t the problem.
The acolytes were.
“Shit!” I heard someone say, and a spell tore through the room at the same time that I tried to shift my group out of it. But shifting without being able to touch someone is a new skill for me, and exponentially harder. And that’s without having to throw two spells within seconds of each other.
Fred winked out of existence, still clutching his hideous souvenir, but Rico knocked me back, trying to shield me. And in the process put himself out of reach. And Rhea wasn’t even back yet, and shifting people without even being able to see them wasn’t happening.
Especially not when you’re already shifting yourself.
I never knew exactly what happened. But either the acolyte’s spell or Rico’s elbow must have thrown me off, because instead of the suite, I ended back at the top of the hidden staircase. That was good, since I hadn’t wanted to leave with two of my people stuck here anyway. That was bad, because whatever had hit me hadn’t just frozen my power, it had frozen me.
Annnnd now I was falling.
I tottered against the wall, which wasn’t so bad. And then bounced off and hit the stairs, sliding all the way back down to the secret panel, which was worse. And which obligingly opened, spilling me halfway out into the room, because of course it did.
Goddamn it.
The awkward way I’d fallen had left my feet sticking out into the ballroom and my head inside the passage. And the pitch-dark stairs behind me and the wall of paneling in front of me ensured that I couldn’t see shit. I could hear, though, and a few seconds later my ears were being treated to the sound of boot heels hitting marble.
My breath froze as still as the rest of me as I stared at the dim outline of the gothic arch. The room outside was lit only by a little moonlight, but it looked bright as day compared to the gloom of the stairs. And my jean-covered legs and the gaping maw of the staircase were going to be hard for anyone to miss.
If the boots were coming this way, that is.
They echoed loudly on all that marble, making it hard to tell, but it sort of sounded like it.
Of course, I thought desperately, and stuck out my tongue.
It was the only thing I could currently move, along with my lips slightly. It wasn’t much, not even enough to keep me from drooling. More like the feeling a couple hours after visiting the dentist, when the Novocain begins to wear off and you start looking for your pain pills.
I didn’t have pain pills. But I did have a pain. In the form of a guy who crashed in my necklace when he wasn’t off ogling the casino’s hoochie-coochie dancers. Which with my luck was where he was tonight, because he was never around when I—
There.
My tongue finally managed to find something other than the fuzzies off my shirt. Namely the chain of the necklace I wore, which had slid onto my shoulder next to my chin when I fell. I grabbed it with my lips and tongue and started trying to pull the main cluster of ugly, consisting of a ruby red stone surrounded by a lot of tacky gold filigree, toward me.
But the damned thing kept sliding on its chain, and the footsteps were definitely coming closer, and when I tried to shift a little farther back into the stairwell, nothing happened.
Except that Bootheels finally came into view.
He was a war mage, all right, in black commando gear paired with steel-toed boots, and an incongruous floor-length cape. Like a soldier of fortune crossed with a medieval monk. The boots were familiar from Pritkin’s workaday wardrobe. Something else he had was familiar, too.
The elegant ballroom with its crystal chandeliers, velvet curtains, and highly polished marble floor was an incongruous backdrop for the crude creature standing beside the mage. Naked, taller than a man, and made out of dull orange earth, it looked like a piece of bad claymation that an artist needed to spend a little more time on.
It wasn’t.
When I first met him, Pritkin had had one of the creatures called golems by the medieval rabbis, who had been the first to make them. And who hadn’t bothered overmuch with looks, because that wasn’t the point. The point was to create a mobile prison for the malevolent creature inside it, one of the nastier demon species that were trapped by the crazier mages to be used as servants.
Pritkin had used his mainly as a decoy and an added layer of shielding. The clay body absorbed spells and bullets equally well, keeping them from landing on him, and was also useful as a pack mule for carrying extra hardware. But they could attack, too, with a liquid speed that I’d rarely seen outside of a vamp.
And they were virtually unstoppable, since, unlike us flesh-and-blood types, they didn’t feel pain.
I was so screwed.
Master and slave had their backs to me at the moment, staring out of the French windows. Because the only thing supposed to be over here was wall. But they’d see me as soon as they turned around, which meant that I didn’t have—
Any time.