Before I could figure out what to say, Billy Joe appeared in front of me. “Cassie! They’re in the Senate chamber. If you’re gonna do anything, now would be good.”
“Do what? I need to touch Louis-César to shift. And he’s not here!”
“Well, you better come up with something. The Senate’s wards are goin’ down like some first-year wardsmith crafted ’em, and the glamourie in the outer chamber ain’t gonna fool anybody if they already know where it is. They’ll be here any minute.”
“Why should Cassandra help you?” Mircea asked, sounding as composed as if he and Tomas were having a polite conversation over tea. “What can you offer her that we cannot?”
Tomas glanced at Rafe. “The life of her old friend, for one.” His eyes turned back to me. “I will guarantee Raphael’s safety, Cassie, if you aid us. Otherwise, Tony has requested the right to deal with him personally for acting as Mircea’s informant. You are aware what that will mean?”
“I don’t get it,” I told him honestly. “We lived together for months. If you were going to betray me, why not do it then? Why now?”
“I did not betray you,” Tomas said intently. “Think about it. Mircea almost let you get killed; why do you trust him? Did he keep you safe? Was he there when you were attacked? I saved you; not him! And I was the one who realized that Rasputin could be the answer for both of us.” He looked at me beseechingly. “Don’t you see? Once Louis-César is dead, I can challenge Alejandro again, and this time I will defeat him! As it is, much of my strength has to go into resisting my master’s will; it weakens me too much to do what must be done. But that burden will be lifted by the Frenchman’s death, and I can then save my people. And afterwards, you will never again have to worry about anyone harming you. As Consul, I can do more than merely promise protection. I can deliver!”
“You contacted Rasputin? When?”
“After your first vision, when I knew for certain what you can do. I called Tony and offered to hand you over, but only to Rasputin. He promised to guarantee your life in exchange for my aid. Since his plans coincided with mine, I agreed.”
“Rafe told you I’d go after Jimmy, and you told Tony.” I said it, but I didn’t believe it.
Tomas saw the hurt in my expression, and his softened. “I had to tell him you were going to Dante’s, Cassie. If there was no deal and they found you first, you might have died.”
“I almost died because they knew where I’d be, Tomas! They ambushed us.”
He shook his head. “I was there to ensure your safety. You were in no danger—it was Louis-César they wanted. When he is gone, Mei Ling will not be a problem.”
“Tomas!” I wanted to scream at his obtuseness. How could anyone live half a millennium and be that stupid? “Rasputin doesn’t need me! Don’t you get it? He already has a sybil who does whatever he wants. The only thing he wants me to do is die!”
“Very perceptive, Miss Palmer.” Pritkin entered the room with guns drawn. I had forgotten about him. I guess everyone else had, too. He kept his eyes on Tomas but spoke to me. “It would seem that we are allies—for the moment. I’ll keep him here, but I suggest you hurry. There are ten black knights outside. I have constructed a few surprises they do not have advance warning about, but they will not hold for long. They will be here in a matter of minutes.”
“Our wards will hold!” Rafe said proudly. “The traitor could not give them the secrets of the inner wards; he did not know them.”
Pritkin gave his usual sneer. “Believe what you like, vampire, but we have training exercises more difficult than your so-called defenses! If she does not act, the sybil will die and there will be nothing to stop the Senate from being replaced by one allied with the dark.” He kept his eyes and his weapons steady on Tomas, but again he spoke to me. “If you can do anything, do it now.”
“I don’t know how!” I ran a hand through my hair, wanting to pull some of it out in frustration, and met up with something solid. My fingers curled around the hair clip Louis-César had given me when tending my cheek. It had somehow managed to hang in there all this time. I concentrated and felt a faint tingle, a distant echo of the disorientation that preceded a vision, but it wasn’t enough. It had belonged to him, had been in contact with his body, so it should have worked as a focus the same way he had. But either I wasn’t strong enough to make the leap with only an object, or he hadn’t owned it very long and the link was weak. Either way, I needed help.
“Billy! I need something called the Tears of Apollo.”
“Okay, and this would be where?”
I looked up at Mircea. “The Tears! What do they look like and where are they?”
“In the inner sanctum, in a small bottle, crystal with a blue stopper. But if we enter the chamber, Tomas will know the way. These four hallways are the last barrier. Three are false and lead only to death. Only one leads to the Consul. Once she is dead, our cause is lost.”
Billy had drifted over as we spoke. “There’s only one real passageway, Cass. The others are just good glamourie. I’ll be right back.”
“Cassie, don’t do this!” Tomas looked daggers at Mircea. “He will never let you go! If you truly want freedom, help me.” I shook my head and his face grew desperate. “Please, Cassie, you can’t refuse! You don’t understand—Alejandro is a monster! I have begged Louis-César to free me. I have told him what atrocities Alejandro has done, what he will continue to do until someone stops him, yet he refuses.”
“I can’t believe he won’t help you. I could try—”
“Cassie! If I could not sway him in a century of pleading, why do you think he would listen to you? Alejandro has some sort of hold over him. He has something Louis-César wants and has promised it to him if he keeps me under control. I have thought about this for years and there is no other way. Alejandro must die, and therefore so must his champion.”
I looked into the fervent light in Tomas’ eyes and saw that he meant every word he was saying. He might want to be Consul, but he also really wanted this Alejandro dead. For all I knew, maybe the guy deserved what Tomas obviously wanted to dish out. But that wasn’t up to me to decide. “I won’t trade one person’s life for another’s, Tomas. I can’t let you murder Louis-César. I’m not God, and neither are you.”
Tomas gestured violently at Mircea. “Why can’t you see that he only wants to use you? If you did not have your powers, you would mean nothing to him!”
“And what would I mean to you, if I couldn’t help you gain the consulate?”
Tomas smiled, and it transformed his face, making him look boyish and adorable again. Like my Tomas. “You know how I feel about you, Cassie. I will give you security and peace. What can he offer?”
I was about to point out that he hadn’t answered the question, when Billy came streaming back, a small bottle clutched in one insubstantial hand. “I hope you don’t need nothin’ else, Cass, ’cause I’m outta juice.” He dropped the Tears in my palm, and the tiny bottle was surprisingly heavy.
I slid out the stopper just as Tomas lunged, not at me as I’d half expected, but at Rafe. Pritkin fired, but the shotgun blast was stopped by the heavy wards of the chamber and deflected back on him. His shields held, but his gun ended up a twisted mass of steaming metal and he was thrown back against the wall, hard.
“Give me the Tears, Cassie.” Tomas held out one hand; the other had Rafe in a stranglehold. “Mircea can’t protect all of you at the same time, but no one has to get hurt. Help me and I’ll let him go.”
I didn’t have to worry about finding an answer. Tomas had, once again, underestimated the mage. I guess he thought that, with the wards rendering magical weapons and firearms useless, Pritkin couldn’t be much of a threat. He found out differently when the mage jumped up, drew a cord out of his pocket and slipped it around Tomas’ throat. A garrote may be crude, but it works.
Tomas let go of Rafe and Mircea didn’t waste any time pushing him towards the doorway Billy had exited. Rafe had barely cleared it when the cha
mber’s wards failed and a whole crowd of people muscled in. Pritkin yelled something and let go, pushing Tomas towards them. Mircea clutched me tight and, in the time it takes to blink, we were inside another hallway, running full out. I felt the passageway’s wards slam shut behind us and got a glimpse of the scene in the outer chamber over Mircea’s shoulder. Tomas was slumped on the ground, a hand to his throat, gagging. Behind him were some humans wearing enough weapons to tell me as clearly as if they’d had it tattooed on their foreheads that they were war mages. I had a glimpse of Pritkin, face distorted in a snarl as he faced them; then we rounded a corner and were in the inner sanctum.
Chapter 14
It was a small room, maybe ten by twelve, with bare stone walls, floor and ceiling. The only light came from a pair of torches, one on either side of a rather mundane-looking metal cabinet. It looked really out of place, like something that ought to be in a modern office building, not sitting in the vault of a magical stronghold. The Consul was standing before it, as still as a statue except for her living costume, holding a small silver ball in her hand. The cabinet door was open, showing rows of shelves full of black boxes.
I didn’t waste time saying hello, but splashed the contents of the bottle all over Mircea and me. As soon as the liquid hit my skin, it was like a veil had been lifted. I could See everything, each image and sensation from that other time, as clearly as if I were leafing through pages in a book. Mircea put me down and I clutched him as my feet hit the floor. The images shifting through my head gave me double vision and I was afraid I’d fall.
“We have five minutes,” the Consul said mildly, as if discussing the weather.
“I know.” Mircea looked down at me. “Can you do it?”
I nodded. I had the scene I wanted. It was perfect—two people all alone with no one to see if they suddenly began acting strangely. It was a bonus that one of them was Louis-César. I figured he would be a lot harder to kill with Mircea in residence. “I’m going to try to jump us into a couple of bodies, since it’ll give us more time. We can feed off them as Billy does me. But I don’t know if this will work. I’ve never done it deliberately.” I looked at Billy Joe, who was hovering anxiously. “Come in.”
“Cassie, listen, I…”
“There’s no time, Billy.” I regarded the spirit I was trusting with my body, possibly permanently, and for a second I saw the man he might have been had he lived. “If I don’t make it back, do your best to kill Tony and free my father. Promise.” I didn’t know if he could do it, but Billy was amazingly resourceful when he wanted to be.
He stared at me, then slowly nodded. He dissolved into a cloud of sparkling energy and flowed across my skin like an old, familiar blanket. I took him in gladly, ignored the flash of his last card game, which he should have played to lose, and felt him settle in. There was nothing left but to let go. I concentrated on the scene I’d selected, saw again that dim, candlelit room, felt the cool breeze from the window and smelled the scents of firewood, roses and sex. Then the earth gave way and we were falling.
The jolt of impact felt like I’d hit the ground after diving out a second-story window. But I barely noticed it considering the other sensations flooding through the body I had borrowed. I looked up to see Louis-César haloed in candlelight for an instant, just before he plunged into me. I cried out in surprise, but not in pain. It didn’t hurt as Mircea had warned; it felt wonderful. I watched him pull out and tried to say something, but then he slammed into me again and all I wanted was for him to go faster, harder. My nails were scratching his back, but he didn’t seem to mind. I looked into his eyes and saw that they had turned a beautiful liquid amber, a color Louis-César had never had in life or death.
It was difficult to think, because my thoughts were confused with those of the woman whose body I’d borrowed. I tried to focus, but all her attention was on the fine beads of sweat trailing down his face and chest, and she overrode me. I reached up and ran a hand through his damp auburn curls to his neck, and drew him down to me. His rhythm didn’t falter, but the angle changed slightly and we both groaned in response. I ran my tongue over him, tasting him, and his face grew slack with need. I wrapped my legs around his waist and pulled, driving him into me even harder. The muscles in my lower areas tightened, wrenching a strangled gasp from him. I grabbed handfuls of his hair, pulling his mouth down to mine, bending him almost double. He cried out and, finally, lost his rhythm.
I laughed into his mouth as he thrust into me in ragged bursts, as if he couldn’t get enough, couldn’t go fast or hard enough, to satisfy some overwhelming need. I understood it, because I was also feeling two rising tides of desire, mine and that of the woman whose body I had invaded. She didn’t seem to care; at that moment, all she wanted was to be satisfied, and on that we both agreed.
I slid out from under him, causing him to clutch at me convulsively to keep our bodies together, and flipped him over. I smiled down in satisfaction. He was glorious, sprawled there among the soft, pale sheets, his hair glimmering richly in the candlelight. It should have seemed wrong, to see Louis-César’s body with Mircea’s knowing eyes, but it didn’t.
“I want to be on top.”
He didn’t argue. His hands moved up my body to cup my breasts and we both sighed as I slowly settled back onto him. I liked this angle better: I liked seeing him beneath me, although I still had to fight not to have that strange, double vision. It was Louis-César’s face that stared into mine, filled with longing, but it was Mircea’s triumphal smile as he began moving again.
“I told you before, Cassie,” he murmured, “anything you want.” Then the waves of pleasure caught us both, robbing us of speech, and I didn’t care. The world burst into perfect, liquid pleasure a minute later and I cried out his name, but it was not my voice and it was not the name of the body beneath me.
When the world coalesced again, I was wrapped in warm arms and soft blankets, my head pillowed on a chest that still rose and fell with slight tremors. A hand was running through my hair, soothing me, and I realized I was crying. His words were a strange mixture of French and Romanian, neither of which I understand, but somehow they warmed me anyway.
“Cassie.” A murmur in my ear brought me back the rest of the way, and I left the woman to enjoy that warm, wonderful haze on her own. “You can really do this.” He gazed around in wonder. “Can you choose which time to send us back as well? Can you do it before the attack, to give us time to prepare?”
His words finally helped me slam down a barrier between the woman, who was basking in the golden glow of sexual satisfaction, and myself. I glanced in panic at the door, but it remained closed, with no sign of the older woman, the guards or a crazed Russian psychopath. We seemed to be safe for the moment, but there were probably people on the way to kill him even as we lay around recovering.
“Mircea, we have to get out of here! They’ll come here first!”
“Cassie, calm yourself. There is no rush. The sybil and her assistants know where this Frenchman will be. As you said, they will be along presently, expecting him to be pleasantly preoccupied and unwary. But we will be waiting for them instead.” He slipped out of bed and walked over to the mirror. He touched Louis-César’s cheek softly. “This is a marvel!” He examined his borrowed body in astonishment. He turned towards me as he looked over his shoulder to check out the rear view and my mouth went dry. Louis-César was simply stunning; there was no other word for it. Backlit against the fire, his hair a reddish halo around his face, he might have been a Renaissance angel come to life.
“This is the famous mask, is it?” Mircea picked up a scrap of velvet that had been flung over the mirror and held it up to his eyes. “A piece of history indeed.”
“Are you going to tell me who he was now,” I asked impatiently, “or do I have to guess?”
Mircea laughed and tossed the mask aside. “Not at all,” he commented, unself-consciously perching on the edge of a low chest of drawers near the mirror. I wished he’d put
something on. The current situation wasn’t doing anything for my mental abilities.
“I will be happy to tell you the tale, if it will amuse you. His father was George Villiers, whom you may know better as the English Duke of Buckingham. He seduced Anne of Austria, Louis XIII’s queen, while on a state visit to France. Louis preferred men, you see, a fact that had long left his queen frustrated and childless.” He looked thoughtful for a moment. “So perhaps it was she who seduced Buckingham, hoping for an heir. In any case, she was successful. However, it seems that Louis was not pleased about the idea of having a bastard on the throne, especially not a half-English one. Anne had already named her son after the king, in the attempt, I suppose, to hint that a bastard heir was better than none at all, especially if no one knew about the substitution. The argument failed, and her firstborn was sent into hiding.”
Something was starting to come together for me, some long-forgotten history lesson maybe, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. Mircea didn’t wait for me to figure it out. “Eventually, the queen had another son, whom most said was sired by her adviser, Cardinal Mazarin. Perhaps she kept quiet about the deception this time, or maybe the king was becoming afraid that he would leave no heir, because the boy came to the throne as Louis XIV. He wasn’t happy to have a half-brother who looked a great deal like the Duke of Buckingham. That might call his mother’s virtue into question, and cause doubts about his own parentage, and therefore his right to rule.”
“The Man in the Iron Mask!” I finally made the connection. “I read that book as a kid. But that wasn’t how it went.”
Mircea shrugged. “Dumas was a writer of fiction. He could say what he liked, and there were many rumors circulating at the time from which to choose. But to make a long story short, King Louis put Louis-César in prison for the rest of his life, holding the threat of harm to his friends over his head to keep him docile. To make the point even clearer, he had him sent on a tour of France’s most infamous house of horrors, the leading castle in the medieval witch hunts, Carcassonne. King Louis used it as a place of incarceration for any who disagreed with him, but the torturers and the troops supporting them were all found dead one morning in 1661, causing the greatest fortress of the Middle Ages to be abandoned. It fell into ruins and wasn’t restored for two hundred years.”