by Karen Chance
Françoise, Radella, Billy Joe and I landed in Dante’s parking lot two weeks in the past. It was still a few hours before the sun, or anyone with any sense, would think about rising. In other words, high noon for the types I needed to see.
Radella’s big idea was to go back in time before everyone who knew how to summon the portal left, and get the incantation out of them by whatever means necessary. I had amended that to exclude beatings, knifings or anything likely to result in the total trashing of the timeline. Françoise had added a refinement by mentioning that she could probably erase the short-term memory of anyone except a powerful mage. So we had a plan—we just needed the right guy. And Casanova’s predecessor, a slimy operator known as Jimmy the Rat, was my best guess for man in the know.
“Je suis désolée,” Françoise said, apparently talking to the bottom of the chain-link fence.
I exchanged looks with the pixie, who merely shrugged. I bent over to get a better look and found myself handcuffed to the fence post. “What the hell?”
Françoise stood back and crossed her arms, regarding me with a fair imitation of Pritkin in a mood. “We weel go. Eet ees too dangerous for you.”
“Excuse me?”
“You ’ave not the skill in magique, n’est-ce pas?”
“What’s your point?”
“You ’ad to breeng us ’ere; zere was no choice. But you do not ’ave to risk yourself now. We weel talk to thees gangster while you remain where it is safe.”
“I can handle Jimmy!”
Françoise didn’t answer, but she got this look on her face, like she was perfectly happy to stand in the parking lot for the rest of the night discussing it. I tugged on the cuff, but she must have liberated it from Casanova’s storeroom, because it was good-quality steel. All my efforts did was rattle the fence and piss me off.
“Okay,” I said. “You go, me stay. Have fun.”
“You aren’t serious,” Billy said incredulously.
“You weel stay right ’ere?” Françoise looked doubtful. Maybe she’d expected me to argue more.
I jangled the fence again for effect. “Do I have a choice?”
“I don’t trust her,” the pixie said, eyeing me narrowly. “We should stick her in a closet.”
“I have a gun,” I pointed out.
Radella frowned. “She’s right. She could shoot the lock.”
“I was thinking of something a little more animated,” I told her, not entirely sure I was kidding.
“Eet is for your own good,” Françoise said, biting her lip. She suddenly looked uncertain.
Radella snapped her fingers. “We knock her out. Then we stuff her in the closet. A really small one,” she added viciously.
Françoise didn’t even bother to look at her. “We return soon,” she promised, then turned on her heel and strode away.
“Yeah, I’ll just wait here like a glorified taxi driver,” I called after her. Her shoulders twitched slightly, but I didn’t know if that was from shame or from not knowing what a taxi was.
“Okay, that was really—” Billy began.
I held up my free hand. Françoise paused by the back door and looked in my direction. Probably wondering why my hand was hovering in the air. I waved at her and after a minute she and Radella let themselves in through the employee entrance. As soon as the door closed, I shifted two feet ahead. Behind me, the now empty cuff banged against the fencing.
“I forget you can do that now,” Billy said.
“So do I, half the time.” I rubbed my wrist and looked around. There was no one in sight. It occurred to me that maybe I should have looked before doing my Houdini impression.
“Why didn’t you just show them that they were wasting their time?” Billy demanded.
“I figured we might as well get the mutiny phase of our relationship out of the way early.” Besides, I didn’t think Radella had been kidding about the closet. “Let’s go find Jimmy before he sells them the Brooklyn Bridge or some—”
“Speak of the devil,” Billy said, as someone who looked an awful lot like Jimmy ran out the back door.
I started forward after a surprised pause, hardly believing my luck. If I could get to him before he reached his car, we could talk without encountering anyone else or possibly being overheard. But then the door slammed open and a blonde ran out, looking around wildly.
“Wait, there’s some bimbo with him,” Billy cautioned. The blonde caught sight of Jimmy and took off after him, hiking up her low-cut black top as she went. Billy whistled appreciatively. “She’s gonna fall right out of that thing if she ain’t—”
He stopped abruptly, squinting across the lot, and I did the same, a vague feeling of unease creeping up my spine. The energy-conscious halogen lights didn’t help a lot with visibility, but I saw enough to make my stomach fall. “I think we have a problem,” I said numbly.
“Hey,” Billy said, eyes wide. “I think that bimbo is you! I can tell by the shape of your—”
“Do you realize what this means?” I managed to shriek in a whisper. I hadn’t figured out until that moment that I’d brought us back to the night I first saw Dante’s—not a time I was real interested in reliving.
“Yeah.” He glared at me. “Of all the times to come back to, why in the hell—”
“I didn’t do it on purpose,” I hissed. “Casanova told me the last shipment of slaves left for Faerie on this night. If we can’t get Jimmy to talk, I thought we might overhear the incantation being used!”
“If we were in the right place at the right time, yeah. But this ain’t it.”
“You think?” My first visit to Dante’s hadn’t gone well. In fact, it had gone about as spectacularly wrong as humanly possible. There had been too many near misses, too many times that I and a lot of other people could have died had things gone slightly differently. I needed to find the team and get out, fast, before any of us changed anything.
Jimmy and the other me disappeared into the lines of cars, and the back door slammed open yet again. Pritkin and a couple of vamps appeared, and I froze. My eyes might be having trouble making out the action, but theirs certainly wouldn’t be. And if they glanced over here and saw me, it could distract them from the task at hand. Which, among other things, included saving the other me’s life.
I didn’t move, didn’t breathe, didn’t blink. The black tank top and jeans I’d decided would be appropriate for the night’s activities would help make me harder to spot. But they could smell me from this distance, even in a parking lot filled with gas fumes and garbage. One of the vamps paused, lifting his head slightly as if scenting the air, and I swallowed thickly. It was Tomas, my onetime roommate, who had had six months to get my scent down cold. If he sensed me…
But he didn’t. The three men ran into the rows of cars and a few moments later all hell broke loose, with gunshots, screams, and someone setting a car on fire. I took off for the back door at a dead run. And skidded to a halt a couple of seconds later when the very last person I wanted to see appeared in my path.
I managed to catch myself before careening into him, but it was a close thing. I hastily scrambled back a couple of steps just to be on the safe side. “You’re not supposed to be here!” I said accusingly.
One perfect eyebrow formed itself into an equally perfect arch. “Then we have something in common, dulcea.”
Chapter 11
I stared at Mircea in shock. “You’re supposed to be downtown!” The version of me who’d just chased Jimmy across the parking lot had escaped from MAGIC earlier that night. And although its wards had allowed me to be tracked into the city, no one had been sure exactly where I’d gone. While Tomas, Pritkin and a vampire named Louis-Cesare came here, Rafe and Mircea had gone to Tony’s main offices. Or so I’d thought.
“I was. I left Raphael there, in case you made an appearance,” Mircea said, his eyes narrowing slightly. “May I ask how you knew that?”
“Probably wouldn’t be best,” I said, wishing hysteria wa
s a luxury I could afford.
Mircea just stood there, looking ridiculously model-pretty with his tousled hair and faintly amused mouth, his rich black suit perfectly showcasing his—objectively speaking—extremely attractive body. I didn’t know if he did it deliberately, but his clothes always seemed to run just a little snug around the biceps and thighs, drawing my attention where it absolutely had no place being. Not to mention that Mircea in black looked like sin. The only saving grace was that at least it wasn’t leather—and why was I even going there?
He held out a hand. It was a silent invitation, but it made my stomach flip. My stomach was an idiot.
I jumped back, almost stumbling over my own feet. “Don’t touch me!” The last time I’d encountered Mircea in the past, the geis had leapt from me to him, starting this whole mess by doubling the spell. Would I triple it if he got close enough now? Because I didn’t think either of us could survive that.
Somewhere nearby, people were yelling and Pritkin was swearing and a couple of terrified-looking wererats scurried past, dripping blood on the asphalt. “We must go, dulceata?,” Mircea said mildly.
The fact that he was still using the pet name he’d given me years ago, meaning “dear one,” was probably a good sign, but I doubted it was going to last. I needed to get gone, but I really didn’t want to shift in front of him—it would tell him a lot more than I wanted him to know. But I couldn’t exactly outrun him, and I sure couldn’t let him get close enough to touch me.
“Cassie.” Mircea looked at me reproachfully when I continued to ignore his outstretched hand.
But, I thought, desperately backing away, the screwup had come in an era before the geis was cast. That Mircea hadn’t had it, so the spell had leapt from me to him to complete itself. But this Mircea did have it, had both strands, in fact, so he should be immune. Right?
“Cassandra!”
“I’m trying to think here!” I told him as he started toward me.
“You can think at MAGIC, where it’s safe.”
“You know,” I said savagely, “considering how often I hear that word, it’s amazing how frequently I end up almost dead!”
“That will not happen tonight,” he said firmly, and took my hand. I stared at him in horror, waiting for the electric sizzle that would tell me I’d just managed to kill us both. But other than the faint tingle the geis always gave off, there was nothing.
Nothing except a sweet, cloying odor, like flowers on the verge of rot. Where had I smelled that before? Mircea said what I suspected was a very bad word in Romanian and abruptly pulled me behind him.
“Cass, you know the last time we were here, how a couple of dark mages showed up for the party?” Billy asked, his voice quavering slightly.
“Why, what does that have to—” I looked around Mircea’s coat to see a group of dark shapes silhouetted against the street lights. “Oh.”
“I’m thinking maybe I missed a few on the recon,” Billy said, looking freaked.
I did a quick count. “A few?” I squeaked. “Eight is not a few!”
In the distance, a blue cloud started to spread over the parking lot. I remembered that—Pritkin had employed some kind of tear gas in combat and almost choked us all to death. It had been no fun inside, my lungs burning for hours afterwards; of course, it wasn’t currently a thrill a minute on the outside, either.
“The seer goes with us, vampire,” one of the mages said.
I expected Mircea to try to talk him around, to use some of the famous charm that had made him the Consul’s chief negotiator. I guess the mages did, too. Because they looked really surprised when the speaker suddenly went flying through the air.
He landed in the power lines overhead, snapping one of the bigger ones on impact and getting caught on several of the smaller. A hiss of electricity stuttered wildly around his body for a moment, then he plunged toward the ground, only to be snatched back up again by a line that had gotten tangled around one foot. He bounced a couple of times before starting to swing slowly in space, dangling upside down by an ankle like the Hanged Man in my tarot deck.
“That was unwise,” the nearest mage told Mircea calmly, right before a wall of scorching hot air slammed into us. It lifted me completely off my feet and threw both of us back against the fencing. I missed the spine-shattering post, but it felt like some of the links might have become permanent additions to my anatomy.
Mircea was back on his feet in a blink, and two mages spontaneously caught fire. They put it out almost as quickly, however, and by the time I had crawled out of the metal net, they’d responded with a blistering ball of electric blue and white. It drove Mircea to one knee, but he caught it, hands sizzling audibly, then lobbed it back at the sender. The mages’ shields deflected it into the power lines above, causing a pulse of electricity to run along them like blue fire. The streetlights popped in a long line like firecrackers, and a pulse of energy exploded against the hanging mage, sending him spiraling the rest of the way to earth with a power line snapping and stuttering around him.
The electrocuted mage was twitching slightly against the ground, like he might still be alive. Then I got a good look at his face, which was slack-jawed, with open, glassy eyes and a blackened tongue, and decided no, probably not. One of his colleagues apparently reached the same conclusion, but instead of mourning his friend, he elected to use him. He animated the corpse with a gesture, raising it vertically until it looked like a scarecrow in a windstorm, all jumping limbs and dangling, jittering feet, hovering just above the ground.
I glanced from the dancing corpse to the widening blue cloud, but enough flashes, rumblings and muffled gunshots were coming from inside that I felt marginally safe from having our fight overheard. It was the only thing I felt safe about, especially when a metal trash can came flying at our heads. It stopped in midair, about a foot from my nose, then reversed course and flew apart, razor-sharp fragments peppering the line of mages like shrapnel. Shrapnel that did not, it appeared, make it through their shields.
The rusty tan Pinto that slammed into the mages a second later didn’t, either, but it did take their combined effort to throw it off. It went flipping away across the night, rotating three times before exploding against the nearest line of cars. Most of the mages were fine, if seriously pissed. But one was either younger or less well trained than the others, because for a split second he lost his concentration—and with it, his shields. And a second is all it takes.
A master vampire does not need to touch a person to drain him, a fact that Mircea took this opportunity to demonstrate. I think he was trying to intimidate the others into running, because he did not go for a clean kill. He extended a hand and the mage jerked to a halt, bloody tears suddenly springing to his eyes. But instead of streaming down his cheeks, they flowed outward, flying across the distance between us to Mircea’s palm, where the tiny droplets were immediately absorbed.
And then it wasn’t only his eyes bleeding; it looked like every pore on his face had ruptured, sending not a trickle but a flood twisting through the air, like a long red ribbon. In a few short seconds the mage crumpled, face now snow white, bloodless lips open in a silent oh. He was dead before he hit the asphalt.
If intimidation had been the object, it didn’t work. The mages merely scattered and mounted separate attacks. They probably assumed that Mircea couldn’t watch the remaining six at once, and while he was dealing with one, the others would take him out. I was desperately afraid they might be right. The animated corpse moved closer, and a cloud of glass fragments from the destroyed cars rose up from the ground behind it, glittering in the flames like deadly diamonds. As if that wasn’t enough, a group of burning tires rotated off the asphalt, looking like a squadron of UFOs against the dark.
I lost track of exactly what happened after that, as everything came at us at once—most of it too fast to see. I blinked and the next time I looked, a segment of fencing had jumped in front of us, acting like a shield to catch the various flying objects.
I realized why the corpse had continued to move even after death when it crashed into the fence and the whole thing lit up with sparks. Around its foot, the downed power line was still coiled like a long black snake, hissing and crackling, spitting fire as deadly to a vampire as to a human. But it couldn’t touch us, and in a moment, the body went dancing back across the parking lot like a demented puppet.
Mircea sent the segment of fencing flying toward the nearest mage, and it hit his shields with an avalanche of sparks. They held, ensuring that the hot metal didn’t touch his skin, but they couldn’t stop the fence from wrapping around him like a blanket. The links almost immediately began to glow with a new, more-intense light, melting into his shielding the way hot water sinks into ice.
The other mages had paused for some reason, and I didn’t wait to find out why. I dove for Mircea, intending to shift us out before they got their wind back, even if it blew my cover. But a solid wall of energy met my outstretched hand, searing a stripe across my skin that felt like a bad sunburn.
“Get out of here, Cassie,” Mircea said, as I snatched my hand back.
“Here’s a thought,” Billy said. “Shift both of you out of here.”
I gave him my “no shit” face. “I have to touch him!”
“What’s stopping you?”
Apparently, he couldn’t see the barrier any better than I could. But it was there. Mircea didn’t have shields—he wasn’t a mage and vamp magic didn’t work like that. It had to be pure power he was putting out, surrounding himself and the mages in an energy field that had them trapped as effectively as any cage. But in a way, he was as trapped as they were. He couldn’t drop the barrier without setting them free, and I couldn’t get any closer as long as he kept it up.