by Karen Chance
“Nor should you have. You are not vampire. It was an instinctive reaction when your distress woke me. But it didn’t work, leaving me no choice but to try to access you through the Seidr link.”
“But—” I stared around again. “It wasn’t like this before.”
Seidr wasn’t like anything I’d ever experienced, other than for being somewhere in the flesh. In fact, it was almost impossible to tell that you weren’t, except that people not in the link couldn’t see you. It was clear and perfect, not like a vision at all, while the room behind Mircea had become even less distinct than before, like it might dissolve at any second.
“It might,” Mircea said grimly, picking up on my thought. “Seidr is an expensive spell, powerwise—”
“But you have power,” I interrupted. “I can feel it, just sitting here—”
And then he opened his eyes, and I saw it, too. They were amber bright, startlingly vivid against the washed-out room around him, and flooded with power. “But you do not,” he said, “and you control the spell.”
“But I told you—I’m not doing anything!”
“But the spell still originates with you, Cassie. My people do not know how to do a Seidr spell. And remember what we were told? It was designed by the gods to talk to each other between worlds. But we are not gods. Even you are not, although you carry the power of one.”
“Power I can’t access right now,” I said, my lips turning cold as I finally understood. The Pythian power was virtually inexhaustible, but I wasn’t. And when I was too tired, I couldn’t channel it appropriately—if at all.
Mircea’s dark head inclined. “Without a good connection, I cannot give Rhea the strength she needs. I have it, but I have no way to get it to her.”
“Then send it to me! And I’ll—”
“That still requires a better connection than we have,” he said, patient with my panic. “Whether you or she is the intended recipient, I must have a stronger link. Otherwise, I can do little more than the witch already did, and slow down the process. But if you cannot strengthen the spell—”
“She’ll die anyway.”
“Yes.”
He didn’t qualify it, as a human might have, didn’t tell me it would be all right when we both knew it wouldn’t. He didn’t say anything else, for which I was grateful. He just gripped me tighter, although it was getting hard to feel his fingers anymore, like they were dissolving under mine.
And they probably were, because I was nearing exhaustion. I’d given everything I had left to that last shift, pulling a creature from another world, something I’d only very recently learned that I could do at all. And now I was powering the Seidr link, or trying to, but I wasn’t strong enough.
I never had been.
“You’ve done all you could,” Mircea said softly. “You need what strength you have left.”
He was right; I knew he was right. But it didn’t help. I lost people; I always lost people. My whole life that had been the one constant, the one fucking thing I could depend on, and I couldn’t—not again—
There was the ghost of a touch on my cheek, because he must have slipped out of my grip without me knowing. “You have to let go, Cassie.”
Yeah, people had been telling me that all my life, too. To the point that I’d started to tell it to myself: don’t care, don’t love, let everyone and everything that matters slip away. Let life take them, let it have them, because it’s going to anyway, because that’s all it does: take and consume and destroy. It lets you feel happy so the pain hurts more, lets you have hope so it can crush it, lets you have love so it can rip it away. You can fight against it, but it’s a trap, the whole damn thing.
Better get used to it.
But I wasn’t used to it. I’d never gotten used to it. I was tired of it, sick to death of it, and furious, so furious I could barely see.
I bent over Rhea, my tears dropping onto her face, my lips almost as cold as her cheek. But somehow I wasn’t kissing her good-bye. Somehow I was gripping her shoulders, shaking her, and then screaming at her like a madwoman. Or maybe it was the universe I was screaming at—I didn’t know; I couldn’t think. I just felt it, something hot and hard and furious welling up inside me, something I couldn’t seem to control because enough! You can’t have this one, you can’t take her—
“Cassie!” Mircea had grabbed me, fingers biting into my flesh, but I didn’t care.
“No, this one is mine! I’ve paid enough, I’ve lost enough!”
“Cassie!”
“No! This one is mine and you can’t have her!”
And then I was being knocked aside, hard enough to hurt, and for a second I didn’t understand what was happening. And I still didn’t, when I saw Mircea, clear and bright and there, as solid as if he was right beside me. Like the room around him, which was suddenly vivid with color and sharp edges, like Rhea beneath him as he thrust her back onto the floor, straddling her with both hands around her neck, looking for all the world like he was trying to choke her to death.
But instead of killing her, he was doing something that brought faint color back to her cheeks, that caused a small movement of her chest, that caused her eyelashes to flutter and her fingers—because at some point I must have grabbed her hand—to move—
“What—” I began, because even now I couldn’t keep my mouth shut. It seemed to be on a separate circuit from the rest of my brain, which was still screaming in denial even as I saw life flood back into Rhea.
“I should have realized,” Mircea said, looking at me wildly, through strands of sweaty dark hair.
“Realized what? Mircea, how—”
“She’s yours—you said it yourself!”
“But how—”
He suddenly threw his head back, laughing like a boy. And I just stared, wondering if I really was going mad. Or if he was.
“Mircea!”
“Your coven must work similarly to our houses,” he said, eyes bright. “And, as you saw yesterday, when I all but drained the family, the power exchange works both ways. I can send power to subordinates, but they can also send it to me.”
I blinked, suddenly remembering the small hits of power I’d gotten from my coven on a couple of occasions. I hadn’t thought of it because I wasn’t used to having a coven, which was what the Pythian Court actually was. And because the hits had always seemed so small.
But then, maybe I hadn’t needed as much before.
I stared down at Rhea, who was still unconscious, but also very much alive. “She’s powering the connection.”
“The link between the two of you is,” Mircea corrected. “And possibly your whole coven for all I know.”
He grinned at me, the dignified master vampire suddenly giddy from the power loss, from dragging someone almost literally back from the dead, and from the same euphoria that was finally hitting me.
And then blurring like a bad radio signal when someone else called my name.
“Cassie!”
A wash of sound blasted over me, a raucous, out-of-tune blare that made me jump—and realize that the wedge of neon behind me had widened and brightened. And that hands were reaching through, shaking me, and pulling me back. Pulling me away from him.
“Help is coming,” Mircea said, grabbing my hand, his voice strangely distorted. “Cassie—do you understand? Help is coming! Hold on.”
“I’m trying!” I told him, clutching his hand while feeling like a mass of taffy being stretched in two different directions.
And then my fingers slipped out of his, and like a door slamming shut, I was suddenly somewhere else.
I was suddenly somewhere horrible.
Chapter Nine
The quiet of Mircea’s mountain retreat shattered, replaced by a mix of shouts and explosions and screams. And a weird drub, drub, drub that sounded like Dubstep and made me want to cover my
ears, only my arms didn’t seem to work. Or my eyes, I thought, staring around at a world gone red.
I blinked, but the view didn’t change, except that Carla was suddenly in my face. “We’ve got to get out of here!” She was yelling at point-blank range, but I barely heard her. Because that weird sound kept getting louder.
I finally realized that it wasn’t a drum, or crazy dance music. It was a series of powerful spells—the source of the red glow—exploding against something that bisected the drag a dozen yards away. Something wavy and indistinct, a barrier so flimsy that it looked like someone had stretched a piece of gold plastic wrap across the room.
“Thought the wards were down,” I said thickly, trying to focus eyes that were still trying to see two places at once.
“They were,” a different voice said, sounding satisfied. It took me a second to realize that it was bellowing from the little black thing scurrying across the floor like a spider, because it couldn’t fly anymore.
“Grafton—the guy from the Oracle,” Carla panted, trying to haul me up. “He used to be a war mage, like a thousand years ago.”
“I heard that.”
“You . . . got the shields back up?” I asked, attempting to help Carla, but just making things worse. My limbs were all mixed up, and nothing seemed to work right.
“Well, in truth there was nothing wrong with them,” Grafton said.
“Nothing . . .”
“Other than the null the Black Circle had sitting on the controls,” he added, talking about a mage capable of absorbing all magic within a certain radius. “We knocked him out, dragged him to another room, and—”
“Who is we?”
“A group of us—reporters, photographers, errand runners—something like forty people in all. We’ve been camped here all week.”
“The second stories of these Wild West facades have actual rooms in them,” said Crystal Gazing, who must have gotten a new avatar, because it was fluttering around my other side. “But nobody used them—until we realized that they offered a perfect vantage point.”
“It’s become rather like a shantytown,” Grafton said. “With reporters from every major paper and most minor ones bringing in bedrolls and such, refusing to leave after your last escapade. We assumed something else might happen, and wanted to be on hand—”
“Be careful what you wish for,” Carla muttered.
“—and fortunately so,” he added. “Some of us know a thing or two about wards.”
“Yeah, only now we have to hope the damn things hold together until the Circle gets here,” Carla panted. “Which, in case you haven’t noticed, isn’t going so great!”
“That’s the trouble with shielding common spaces,” Grafton agreed. “You can’t use the strongest wards, lest they mistake a guest for a threat. But the everyday variety, even expensive ones like these, will only hold so long against this sort of—”
“Will you shut up?” she demanded. “We have to move!”
She was right; one glance at the ward told me that. It was starting to look like a threadbare blanket, with obvious gaps in the golden weave. But I still couldn’t seem to get my limbs to work.
And then Carla cursed and slung her purse over her head. And grabbed me under the arms. And started dragging me back toward Augustine’s, like Françoise was already doing with Rhea.
“Augustine thinks he can get his ward back up,” Grafton explained, spidering alongside us. “We’re pulling back to the shop for an extra line of defense.”
“Good idea,” I said weakly, staring at several dozen spells that were exploding against the barrier and radiating outward, like acid dropped in water.
And at the pterodactyl-type monstrosities, physical wards from the lobby, that had swooped in and started picking up mages, only to hurl their mangled bodies at the wall. And at the taco cart and its flower-draped fake donkey, which was burning like it had been doused in gasoline. And at the Graeae, on the other side of the barrier near the lobby, who appeared to be hemming the mages in, keeping them on the drag as if waiting for the scary thing inside to slaughter them all.
Which would have been great, except that the scary thing appeared to have left the building.
I looked around—why, I didn’t know; it wasn’t like I could have missed it. But there was no giant hound anywhere. Some of the mages must have gotten their shit together and banished it. And without it, there wasn’t much left to distract them.
As demonstrated when a mage taken by one of the pterodactyl wards managed a spell that set the thing on fire—and fell what had to be four stories when it released him. The dying ward then dive-bombed the group attacking the shield, exploding in fiery bits against their armor. But if it did any damage, I couldn’t tell.
There were so many.
“How are there so many?” I asked, staring at what still looked like a couple hundred dark mages, maybe more, silhouetted against the brilliant golden sheen of the ward.
“That thing you conjured up ate ten or so,” Carla huffed. “And stepped on another thirty or forty, I don’t know. It was exorcised with at least fifteen still sticking to its damn hide! And those old women—and what the fuck are those old women—”
“The Graeae.”
“—they killed maybe fifty more, before they ended up isolated over by the stairs—”
“Then why are there still so many?”
“Because they weren’t all in here before! They must have been afraid you’d freeze time on them or something, and had backup spread around the hotel that came running when—”
A massive explosion cut her off, and magic prickled over my arms, so strong it was almost painful. The floor vibrated beneath us, enough to send Carla stumbling to the floor beside me. And a flash exploded across my vision, so bright it whited out the room.
For a second—a wonderful, heart-gripping second—I thought the cavalry had arrived.
Then I realized the truth.
“Fall back! Fall back!” someone yelled.
But there was no time to fall back. There was a rush of wind and a clap like thunder, and I looked up to see the middle of the ward billowing in like a tattered curtain, leaving a gap big enough to fit a truck through. But a truck wasn’t using it.
An army of dark mages was.
And Armageddon arrived in an instant.
A spell hit the floor beside me, carving out a chunk of concrete the size of a wheelbarrow, and sending me rolling to the side. Another exploded just behind me, causing Carla to shriek and hit the floor again. More spells slammed through the air overhead, dug furrows out of the floor, and ricocheted off the building behind us, hitting a decorative light post and whipping it back at the break in the ward.
And at the mass of mages flooding through, right behind the barrage.
A few were tripped up by the post. More were lashed by billowing strands of the broken ward. But not enough, not close to enough. Because Françoise was trying to shield and also drag Rhea, and Carla was staring up in wordless horror, and I was on my hands and knees, trying to throw a spell I didn’t have the power for and only retching and seeing the world swirl around me.
And then another spell was thrown, this one too close and too fast to dodge even if I’d been able to see straight. Only I couldn’t. I couldn’t do anything but sprawl there, watching the bright orange curse come boiling at me, knowing I had no way to stop it—
But someone else did.
A violently purple spell came out of nowhere, big as a beach ball, and slammed into the smaller one, sending it twisting off course and crashing against the ceiling. I was still staring at it, and at the brilliant trail of aftereffects, when a dozen more spells lit the air. Offensive red, orange, and yellow; defensive green, white, and blue; and more of those weird purple ones were suddenly blurring across my vision.
But that wasn’t the weird thing.
The weird thing is that they were going the other way.
At least half of the spells suddenly shooting around were going toward our enemies, exploding against the advancing bombardment, or capturing the spells and sending them wildly off course. Some of the war mages ended up on their asses, because it didn’t look like they’d expected much of a defense. But they were getting one.
I managed to get my head turned around, enough to see a tall, distinguished-looking old man with a paunch and a three-piece suit standing in front of Dante’s, looking like a banker. And behind him was a crowd of people who didn’t look like war mages, didn’t look like a rescue squad, didn’t look like anything except a random sample plucked off the street. There were student types with piercings, older men and women in suits, and a biker chick with pink hair.
And an elderly woman in a dress covered in cabbage roses, her bun of silver hair falling around her face and her teeth bared in hatred.
“That’s for Celia,” she choked, and sent a spell ripping through the air over my head, so hot I thought my hair was on fire.
And it finally clicked.
The reporters, down from their perch for a last stand.
But despite their courage, and despite the fact that they’d just stopped a dark mage advance cold, it was about to be their last.
Because they might know some wicked spells, but the point of war mages wasn’t just what they knew, but what they were: magical freaks whose bodies produced many times the magic of a normal human’s. So yeah, three or four dozen regular Joes might be able to hold a narrow pass for a minute or two. But the pass was about to get a whole lot wider, and they were about to get a whole lot weaker, and this wasn’t going to work.
“Where are they?” Carla screamed. “Where’s the goddamn Circle—”
“It’s only been ten minutes,” Françoise said, staring at me.
“Ten.” The witch gaped at her like she was speaking another language. “What do you mean, ten?”
“I ’ave been timing eet.”
“No. No, that’s wrong. That’s impossible!”