Tempt the Stars

by Karen Chance

  “I probably would have, too,” I told her, because she was white and shaking again, her voice barely above a whisper.

  “Yes, but the stairs are marble; everyone heard,” she said, looking at me with so much pain in her eyes that I finally got it; I wasn’t the only one feeling responsible for tonight. “And I was so upset . . . the adepts made me tell them, and at the time I didn’t realize . . . I couldn’t see any reason not to . . . until I saw. They were happy. They were pleased about it. Then they saw me looking at them, and changed their expressions. But I knew, I’d seen—”

  “And so you came to tell me.”

  She swallowed. “No. I should have done, but there were such rumors about you, they were saying . . . It wasn’t until the coronation that I realized—you couldn’t be what they said. The power had gone to you, the Circle had accepted you, and then at the coronation, you killed the Spartoi. You killed him!”

  And suddenly, I knew why she looked familiar. “You were there.”

  She nodded again. “I saw you, but I—it was obvious you were trying to be inconspicuous and I didn’t—”

  “But you knew who I was.”

  She looked surprised. “Of course.”

  “Even though someone else was pretending to be me?”

  She blinked again, like I wasn’t making much sense. “Yes, but I knew that wasn’t you. There was no power, no aura, no—” She waved it away. “It was obvious.”

  So much for my great disguise.

  “But the others didn’t see you, and by the time I got away from them, you had disappeared. And then when I saw you again—” She gave another graceful little hand flutter, maybe because she didn’t know a polite way of saying “you were battling a Spartoi in your birthday suit and almost getting fried.” “But then the vampires took you away, and I didn’t know how to reach you—”

  “So you went to the covens.”

  “Yes. My cousin—”

  “And the covens brought you to me.”

  “Yes.”

  “So you could tell me what? What are they planning?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know, I don’t know! I tried following the adepts around, to let them think I agreed with them, hoping to find out more. . . . But I’m not an actress, and they’d seen my face that night. They didn’t believe me!”

  I didn’t tell her it was okay, because it wouldn’t have helped. She didn’t look like a girl who needed platitudes. She looked like a girl who needed something to do.

  I knew the feeling.

  “I’ll go back,” I told Rosier. “I’ll stop the spell from being laid—”

  “You will be prevented,” Adra said gently. “That is why it was done here, to preclude such a possibility.”

  “Then give me the counterspell! I’ll go back in time, I’ll find his soul—” He just looked at me. “Pritkin did nothing wrong! If you have to hurt someone, hurt me!”

  “They won’t hurt you. They need you,” Rosier choked. “But my son . . .”

  Adra didn’t agree, but he didn’t refute it, either. And the worst part was, there was no hate in his eyes, no malice. This had been a policy decision to him, nothing more. A threat had been identified; a threat had been removed. But to me . . .

  It felt like the end of the world.

  “How many acolytes are there at present?” Jonas asked.

  “It varies,” Rhea said, looking at me. “Most of the court is composed of junior initiates, who have just been brought in—young girls who have been identified with unusual promise. And senior initiates, that’s most of us, who have training but carry none of the power. The adepts are only a small group, chosen from the most gifted of the senior initiates. After Myra’s death, there were only five.”

  I just looked at her for a moment, sure the state of my head right now was messing with me. But no. I must be hearing things. “Come again?”

  “Did I—was something not clear?” she asked, starting to look worried.

  “I really hope so,” I said tightly. “You said the senior initiates don’t carry the Pythian power. So by implication . . . the adepts do?”

  She nodded. “They have to, for training purposes. They all receive basic instruction in the Pythian arts, and the one who masters them the best is often selected as the heir. It also allows for circumstances when an heir dies or is deposed. There has to be someone else who can take over, who has been trained. They are also available to help the Pythia, in times of need.”

  “In times of need?” I looked at Jonas.

  He didn’t say anything, but he took off his glasses and polished them, despite the fact that he’d just done that thirty seconds ago.

  “If a mission is more hazardous than she feels would be prudent to handle alone,” Rhea explained.

  I continued to look at Jonas.

  “Yes, well,” he said briskly. “We already knew there was a problem with the court, thanks to Ms. Silvanus’ testimony—”

  “Jonas.”

  “You had enough on your plate as it was, Cassie! There was no reason to add more—”

  “There was no reason to tell me there’s a whole group of Myras running around?”

  “It is hardly that,” he argued. “The acolytes only have a small fraction of the heir’s power, barely enough for training—”

  “Jonas.”

  “And Myra was a traitor. Until now, there has been no reason to believe the rest of the court was the same, much less that they would attack their own coven—”

  “Jonas!” He stopped, and looked at me. And something on my face must have registered, because he stopped whatever it was he’d been about to say. “Never keep something like this from me again. Never.”

  I got up and shoved through the French doors, out onto the balcony. Jonas didn’t follow me, which was fortunate. I honestly don’t know what I’d have done if he had.

  It had been this way my whole life: people keeping things from me. Sometimes for what they thought were good reasons, sometimes, most times, because knowledge was power, and the less I had of the former, the less I’d be able to challenge them for the latter. Tony, the Circle, the senate, Mircea . . . someone was always working to keep me in the dark.

  But there were things in the dark that could bite you if you didn’t know they were there. If you couldn’t avoid them because you didn’t even know they existed. Knowledge wasn’t just about power; it was about survival, mine and that of everyone who depended on me.

  And I was heartily sick of the dark.

  Evelyn came out onto the balcony. She didn’t say anything. But her wrist was resting on the railing, not far from where my hand was clenching on it convulsively. And in hers . . .

  It had been a wand, I thought, watching her twirl it expertly, back and forth, between her fingers.

  Our eyes met.

  “I think it’s time the girls and I were going,” she said. And then she just looked at me, gray eyes into blue.

  I licked my lips.

  “I’ll walk you out,” I said hoarsely.

  Chapter Thirty-four

  The mansion was dark and quiet when we shifted in to the front hall of the Pythian Court. London is seven hours ahead of Vegas, which would make it somewhere around midnight, and I had jumped us back as far as I could. Which wasn’t very damned far, because carrying five has a cost, and it is high.

  I dropped to my knees, staggered at the power drain.

  “Lady—”

  “I’m fine,” I told Rhea, harshly enough that she jerked back her hand.

  I stayed down for a moment, watching the marble tile of Agnes’ front hall pulse in and out, wondering if my eyeballs were about to pop. And cursing inwardly, because my time sense had kicked in to tell me what I’d already suspected. I’d had to drop the time shift earlier than I’d wanted or risk rupturing something.r />
  At most, we had fifteen minutes.

  Which meant I didn’t have time for this, I told myself severely, and got up.

  The place looked about the same as the last time I’d been here. Shafts of what were probably streetlights, but which looked like silver moonbeams, slanted through high, neoclassical windows. There was lots of marble, some paneling that looked like it might be genuine mahogany, and a couple statues of Grecian-looking women holding jugs. A staircase, the one where Rhea had had her vision I assumed, ran up to a landing.

  A chandelier tinkled softly overhead, blown about by the freshening wind through a transom. It sounded impossibly loud to my straining ears, like the world’s most expensive wind chime. Nothing else moved.

  I found that less than reassuring.

  Rhea seemed to think the same. “There should be guards,” she said worriedly. “The Circle—it keeps people here, all the time.”

  “They’re here,” Evelyn said grimly, from behind me. I turned around to see her over near the main doors, where a figure in a leather trench coat lay slumped behind a potted plant.

  I’d been about to ask how he’d died, but then she rolled him over. And I didn’t have to. The skin was gray and papery, and crumpled into unrecognizability, since the flesh underneath had mostly withered away. It pulled back the mouth into a silent scream, left the eyes sunken into the head and the bones brittle enough that several cracked just from the gentle movement.

  A ring dropped off a wasted finger, to clatter against the floor, and Rhea made a small sound. “McClaren,” she whispered. “One of his granddaughters . . . She’s a new initiate. . . .”

  “Adepts,” Evelyn cursed. “I was hoping Marsden was wrong.”

  “Question is, are they still here?” Beatrice asked.

  “They shouldn’t be.” That was Jasmine. “A bomb destroyed the building, not an attack. If the adepts had any sense, they fled after setting it.”

  I swallowed. Maybe cutting things close hadn’t been such a bad idea. But Beatrice didn’t seem convinced.

  A streetlight was shining through a window, glinting off her chains and turning her Afro faintly blue. And highlighting the frown on her face. “Then why attack the Circle’s men? The adepts were already inside and free to move about. Why involve the patrols?”

  “If they were messing about with the wards, they might have been nervous,” Jasmine offered. “Wanted them out of the way—”

  “And speaking of wards, why didn’t we set any off when we came in just now?”

  “You’re with me,” Rhea said, but she sounded doubtful. “But that should only have kept the general alarm from sounding. There should still have been somebody here by now, to check. . . .”

  “Hence the attacks on the corpsmen,” Jasmine said.

  “All of them?” Beatrice demanded. “And how did a group of untrained girls manage that, Pythian power or no?”

  “Took ’em by surprise,” Evelyn said, fingering her wand. “Must have.”

  “And again I say, all of them? You know what they’re like: suspicious, jumpy buggers, every one. And yet—”

  “Let’s just get the kids out,” I said, glancing around. My skin was crawling. “Where are they?”

  I didn’t have to ask twice. Rhea had been vibrating, just standing there, and now she took off for the stairs. “Wait!” Evelyn called, and put a hand on my arm.

  “We have less than fifteen minutes,” I told her.

  But she didn’t answer. “Beatrice.”

  The little witch already had her staff up. One of the little indentations that I’d mistaken for hollows in the wood was glowing with a pale blue light, like a flashlight. Which I didn’t understand the point of, since we could already see—

  Nothing, compared to when she brought it down on the floor, hard. And a pulse came out of the bottom, like a wave heading to the beach. Or maybe like a stone thrown into a pond, because this one was moving outward in all directions, highlighting mop marks on the floor, dust in the corners, cracks here and there in the grout between tiles. Like a black light at a crime scene, it showed everything hidden.

  Including the feet of a bunch of men arrayed along the walls.

  “I hate when I’m right,” Evelyn muttered, and then shoved me at the door. “Go!”

  I hit the floor instead as the paneling bulged outward in the shape of bodies, dozens of them. And then melted away entirely as the spell ran up their legs, stripping off the camouflage as it went. War mages, and not ours, I realized, as they peeled off the walls and started slinging spells that sparked off the shield Jasmine had thrown up, barely in time.

  But one had gotten through, a split second before the shield snapped closed, strobing the room in poisonous green. It missed, thanks to a curse I hadn’t even seen Evelyn hurl, which hit the thrower at almost the same moment he moved. But it took out the transom and most of the front door with it, showering us with glass.

  And finally sent wards screaming through the house.

  “Well, the kids are up,” Beatrice said as Evelyn turned on me.

  “Damn it, are you deaf?” she demanded.

  “If I leave, and the adepts show up, you die,” I said, fumbling with the dead war mage’s coat. And trying not to breathe because it was covered in flaky white dust that flew up everywhere as I pushed and pulled and broke him to pieces trying to get it off. But I had to have it. The coats were spelled to resist assaults, and I was about to get assaulted unless I was way luckier than usual.

  “You heard Zara,” Evelyn said. “They’re probably already gone!”

  It took me a second to realize she meant the witch I’d been calling Jasmine. “And if they’re not? You may be good—”

  “We’re better than good.”

  “But you can’t fight someone who can manipulate time!”

  She started to answer, but the shield shattered as a dozen spells hit it all at once. And then Beatrice brought up her staff again. A different hollow glowed this time, a dark, bloody red. And all the lights around the room suddenly shattered, showering the floor with sparks and sending flames running up the walls.

  “Nice parlor trick, old woman,” a mage said, grabbing her.

  The staff came down again.

  And lines of flame tore out of every light, carving a pentagram of fire in the air and spearing half a dozen mages through with flame.

  “Glad you liked it,” she told him as the man collapsed at her feet.

  But while it cleared our general area, it didn’t do much else. Because mages were running at us from all sides now, rushing into the room from where I guess they’d been hiding, not knowing where we’d come in. But they knew it now, and we had to—

  Hit the floor again.

  Zara muttered something low and vicious, and the witches jerked me down beside them just as the windows all blew out. The curtains billowed inward and then broke off to fly across the room, and what felt and sounded a lot like a hurricane roared through the house. Mirrors shattered, the chandelier whipped about like a crazed thing, statues toppled over. And half a dozen mages who hadn’t gotten shields up in time went flying. But others just hunkered down, shield bubbles dotting the room, waiting it out.

  Because yeah.

  I didn’t think she was going to be able to keep that up for long, either.

  “If they planted the bombs, they’re not here,” Evelyn yelled, to be heard over the roar of the storm. “This was likely a trap. The old man was right—they’re after you!”

  “You were right, too,” I panted, still struggling to free the coat. “They’re willing to kill a few dozen children to get to me.”

  Evelyn swore. “I can’t protect you and help the girls, and they can’t take this many on their own!”

  “Then don’t protect me,” I said as the wind died and the coat came free with a sickening crunch, bot
h at the same moment.

  Shields popped everywhere as mages surged back to their feet. We were about to get overrun, and the witches couldn’t cast and shield at the same time, and letting a bunch of mages get to point-blank range wasn’t smart. Of course, neither was this, I thought, grabbing them and shifting all four of us to where Rhea was flattened against the stairs, halfway up, the thin bubble of her shield rippling in the still-strong winds.

  And then collapsing entirely as a bolt of purple flame hit it.

  I threw myself on top of her, the coat covering both of us, but it wasn’t enough. Another curse hit, and spelled or no, the coat had aged along with its occupant. I felt something lash my back, a thin line of fire along the weakened back seam, and screamed even as I shifted.

  And landed in the middle of a bunch of mages at the top of the stairs, who were heading down now that the hurricane had tapered off to a tropical storm.

  And then tripping and falling as we shifted into the middle of them.

  Literally, in Rhea’s case. She’d ended up welded to a mage through the skirt of her dress, which was now bisected by a heavy leather coat—and the leg behind it. She jerked away, and he screamed, which only made her jerk harder. And then she was grabbed by another mage and slung to the side—

  And the man’s leg came off at the thigh.

  Because flesh and bone don’t react well to being split by a swath of embroidered linen.

  Blood spewed everywhere, coating surrounding mages and splattering me. And sending Rhea, who had obviously not had this as part of her training, into a frenzy. She tore away from her attacker, kicked another into the railing and fled up the remaining stairs, none of the mages trying to stop her since she already appeared mortally wounded.

  Or maybe because they were lunging at me.

  And there was nothing I could do, because I couldn’t shift again, not right now, maybe not ever. But it didn’t matter because triple bolts of something red and lethal tore past me, one bolt close enough to singe my hair. And ripped holes through the mages left above me.