Ride the Storm

by Karen Chance

  That had made sense.

  This didn’t.

  “They died because of me; they trusted me. Please . . .”

  Nothing. Not even the faint, glimmering strands that had shown up briefly in my mental landscape last night, much less the sparkling ocean of power I sometimes glimpsed when I concentrated hard enough. Instead, the ocean I saw tonight was dark and heavy, with storm-tossed crests above deep blue depths that seemed to go down forever.

  It didn’t want me going back.

  It really, really didn’t.

  I knew that in my gut, felt it in every fiber of my being, just like I felt the almost overwhelming urge to do it anyway.

  Because I could override it. Somehow I knew that. What I didn’t know was why it thought I shouldn’t.

  And that was a problem, since according to Rhea, the Pythian power used my clairvoyance to assess risks and outcomes. It was why I hadn’t been plagued with the terrifying visions I’d had most of my life since becoming Pythia. My power had co-opted much of my clairvoyance, using it to poke around in time and see what was going on.

  And for some reason, it had determined that today’s disaster had been necessary.

  But I couldn’t see it.

  “Show me, then. Show me something.”

  But all I got back was more of that deep, dark ocean, mysterious, infinite, infuriating. And alien. Maybe too alien to see a handful of human lives as important. To something able to see the whole span of time, the whole extent of human civilization, maybe they hadn’t been anything but specks on a map: just some old guy, just some front-desk flunky, just some pie-obsessed girl.

  But to me they’d been brave and resourceful and innocent, and they’d deserved better. They’d deserved a lot better, and I should have been able to give it to them. But I couldn’t and I didn’t even know why, might never know why, and I hated this job, hated having so much responsibility—for people’s lives—and never enough power or strength to go with it.

  “Show me! You can’t just say no and that’s it. I’m not your slave!”

  The words echoed off the tile box of a bathroom, because I hadn’t bothered to whisper that time. But it didn’t matter. The answer was the same.

  “Goddamn it!” I yelled, and threw a slipper at the door, because it was the only thing I could reach.

  And had it caught by a hand the size of a catcher’s mitt.

  I couldn’t see anything but the hand and part of an arm, because the rest of the body was still outside. But I didn’t need to. It looked like Lou Ferrigno and Arnold Schwarzenegger had had a baby—a baby that liked tacky golf shirts—so I was pretty sure I knew who it was.

  I supposed I should have felt privileged that Marco had left me alone this long to wallow in stupid human angst. Because that was how the vamps tended to view stuff like this, as some weird human habit. They didn’t angst. If something bothered them, they ripped its limbs off until it stopped.

  And they were right—okay, not about limb thing, but about the part where this was a stupid waste of time that wouldn’t help.

  I just wished I knew what would.

  “Is it safe to come in?” Marco asked, sounding muffled because he was still talking through the door.

  “Are you really worried?” I asked dryly.

  “Well, you have another slipper.” The big head poked into the room and eyed me. And the bone-dry tub. And the fact that I was still dressed in the rumpled T-shirt I’d slept in.

  Then he came in and sat down by the tub, too. “You okay?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You sure?”

  I didn’t look at him. I didn’t want to do this. I didn’t want a heart-to-heart or cheering up or whatever this was supposed to be.

  I didn’t need comforting; I needed answers. “I survived.”

  “That’s not what I asked.”

  “Marco, I’m fine. All right?”

  “All right.”

  We sat there awhile, the girl in the crumpled tee with naked toes peeking out from underneath, and the giant of a guy in Ferragamos, staring at our feet in silence.

  Marco was the loafer kind. Today’s had tassels, to match the golf theme. I hadn’t known they made them in size eighty-nine or whatever, but I supposed so. Of course, if you were having them made to order, I guessed they made them any damn way you told them to.

  “It’s just not every day that the Black Circle comes to call,” he said idly, looking at the ceiling.

  I closed my eyes.

  I debated getting up, but it wouldn’t do any good. He’d just follow me from room to room, like a puppy. A well-meaning, truck-sized, relentless puppy who was going to lick my face and make me feel better, whether I liked it or not.

  “The Black Circle didn’t do this,” I said.

  There was silence for another moment. “You sure you’re okay?”

  I turned to look at him. “Do you know why they’re called the Black Circle, Marco?”

  “A jab at the Silver, I always thought. Or maybe they’re not that creative.”

  “Maybe. But it fits. They work in darkness, in shadows; nobody knows who they are; nobody sees their faces. Tony’s mages—the ones I grew up with?” He nodded. “They used to talk about them all the time. One joked that he’d like to join up, but didn’t know where to put in an application.”

  “Rumor is, they find you,” Marco said, sounding amused.

  I waited.

  Because Marco wasn’t stupid, especially about war. He’d started out as a kid in ancient Rome, where it had literally been deified, then been a soldier for a while, and finally a gladiator. And as a vamp he’d mostly been a bodyguard for his various masters for the last two thousand years, fighting their stupid squabbles until he’d been adopted into Mircea’s crazy clan.

  And ended up with me.

  So yeah, Marco knew war. In all its guises and permutations. Which was why I wasn’t surprised to hear him continue after a moment. “Yet they attack us in broad daylight, when they had to know they’d be photographed a couple hundred times before they left the casino.”

  “The power of modern surveillance.”

  He shot me a look. “Did they start out wearing glamouries?”

  “Yeah, but they dropped them before the battle started. Not wanting the power drain, I guess.”

  “Better that than having every Circle roughneck in town on your tail an hour later! Unless they planned to level this place, and thought it didn’t matter.”

  “Or unless it wasn’t their idea.”

  Sharp, dark eyes narrowed on my face. “They looked pretty enthusiastic to me. We tried to get to you through the lobby before safecracking the hard way, but it wasn’t happening. They were everywhere. And throwing spells that forced the witches to waste most of their energy shielding, or we’d have all been puddles of flesh on the floor. Those weren’t flunkies, Cassie. They had some power behind them.”

  “They were Black Circle, yes, but they were foot soldiers. They weren’t leading this.”

  Marco studied me for a moment, frowning. “I know I’m gonna regret asking this—”

  “Ares.”

  The frown tipped over into a scowl. “I know you got him on the brain. After everything that’s happened lately, I don’t blame you. But Ares isn’t here—”

  “Not in the flesh.”

  “As opposed to?”

  I hesitated, because Marco didn’t like hearing about some of my . . . weirder . . . abilities. None of the vamps did. They liked thinking of me as the master’s little human girlfriend who just had really bad luck sometimes, rather than facing what was actually going on.

  Couldn’t say I blamed them.

  But I also couldn’t explain this without getting a little spooky. Luckily, Marco dealt with that sort of thing better than most of the guys. Marco dealt
with everything better than most of the guys.

  “I tried to possess a dark mage,” I told him. “The one in charge.”

  “You what?”

  “I was out of power and we were about to be overrun. I thought, if I could take control of the leader, I could make him order the attack to stop—”

  “And you thought they’d listen? A bunch of overpowered nutjobs hopped up on dark magic who were about to win?”

  “And who were about to be overrun by the Circle.” I saw his expression. “I know, but that’s what I planned to tell them. That the Circle had gotten here faster than expected, and they had about a minute before they showed up in force. I hoped they’d scatter—some of them, maybe all of them—and by the time they realized it was a lie, maybe it wouldn’t be.”

  Marco just looked at me.

  “It wasn’t like I had a lot of options!”

  He looked like he was going to say something, but changed his mind at the last minute. “But you didn’t get in.”

  “No, I got in. But it didn’t help, because someone had beaten me to it.”

  The big head tilted. “Meaning?”

  “Meaning it’s hard to possess someone when they’re already being possessed by someone else. There was another spirit in there.”

  “And you think it was Ares.”

  “I know it was. He was possessing that mage. Or doing something to that mage, I don’t know. But he was in there. The way he felt, what he did—it had to be him. Which explains the attack, why it was his style, not theirs. His impatience, his arrogance, not theirs!”

  “And now they’re dead, and he’s still out there smelling like a rose,” Marco summed up. “Is that it?”

  I nodded.

  “And doing what? Looking for a new body?”

  I hugged my knees. “I don’t know. I don’t know how much he can do, from the other side of the barrier. I don’t even know if it was a real possession. He seemed to have . . . limitations.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like it took him a second to see me, when I first moved inside. Not a long delay, hardly anything really, but—”

  “But more than you’d expect from a god.”

  “Yeah. And then he attacked, but Mircea confused him enough for me to get away—”

  “Wait. Mircea took on a god?”

  “He didn’t tell you?”

  Marco stared at me for a second, and then burst out laughing. “No.”

  “What’s funny?”

  “I called him earlier—our way, you know?” He tapped the side of his head. “And he told me to switch to a phone ’cause he had a headache. I thought he was joking!”

  “He wasn’t joking.”

  “Damn.” Marco shook his head, still grinning.

  And yeah, I supposed it would sound funny.

  If you hadn’t been there.

  Eating, he was eating you. He was—

  My hands started to shake and I shoved them under my armpits. “It, uh, it also took him longer to react to some of the things . . . that happened in the fight . . . than I’d expect from the god of war.”

  “Maybe he’s not so good at this possession thing,” Marco said, eyeing me. “You know it squicks out us normal types, right?”

  “I’m being serious!”

  “I know. That’s what scares me.”

  “Nothing scares you,” I said as one of his arms went around me, pulling me close.

  And damn, it was huge. I didn’t understand how some guys got so big. It was almost like they were another species.

  Of course, Marco sort of was, but it didn’t matter. He felt solid, strong, reassuring. I might have even leaned on him a little. Maybe I needed a bit more of that comfort stuff than I’d thought.

  “A lot scares me,” Marco said. “Anybody says they’re never scared is an idiot. But I’ve learned a few things over the years.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like, if you don’t want to burn out, you can’t live here.”

  I frowned. “In Vegas?”

  “No, not in Vegas! Although that probably doesn’t help,” he added wryly. “No, here. In this bathroom, huddled against this tub. Here with your hair falling in your face and your body shaking in memory—”

  “That’s not what I’m doing.”

  “—and from hunger, ’cause you’re punishing yourself for not saving everything—”

  “That’s not what I’m doing!”

  “—when you saved something. You saved a whole lot of something that wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t practically wrecked yourself!”

  I got up. I suddenly wasn’t feeling so comforted anymore. “So you’re saying what? Be happy I survived and just forget everything else?”

  “Not forget. Lessons won that hard you hold on to. But there’s a difference between remembering shit when you need to and living in it. You do the job when you got the job; then it’s done. Ever wonder why soldiers just back from the field are laughing and talking and playing cards instead of sitting in a corner reliving it all?”

  “Because they’re crazy?”

  “No, because that’s how you avoid the crazy. You do the job when you got the job; the rest of the time, you live.”

  I sat on the edge of the tub. Yeah, like I’d ever done that. Like I knew how to do that.

  I grew up at a vampire’s court, one of the ones where you didn’t live; you survived. And even after I fled Tony’s little house of horrors, it hadn’t been much better. I’d thought I was getting out of a cage, only to learn that I’d just exchanged it for a different one, one of my own making, one where I hunkered down every night and hoped I didn’t wake up to his boys busting down the door.

  And then one day they did, but thanks to a warning, I wasn’t there. And after that came the senate, “protecting” me as long as I did what it wanted. And the Circle, which was pretty much offering the same deal. And here I was, caught in the middle, still just trying to survive and to help everyone else survive, because that’s what I knew; that’s what I did.

  That was what I called living.

  “Cassie?”

  “I’m . . .” I looked up, and met somber dark eyes. And for some reason, found myself telling the truth. “I’m not sure I know how to do that.”

  “Then maybe you need to be reminded. Get some clothes on and come upstairs.”

  “Upstairs?” I looked at the ceiling in confusion. “Marco . . . we don’t have an upstairs.”

  He stuck his cigar back between his teeth. “We do now.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Marco left and I eased into shorts and a T-shirt, checking out the real estate in the process. Which wasn’t looking so good. Which was kind of looking like I’d taken up roller derby, and sucked at it. But the parts were all there and they worked, more or less.

  The less was an inch-long gash in my side, which was missing the concrete scalpel that had caused it, but had gained some stitches. It was not happy. And neither was I, when I inadvertently pressed too hard when rebandaging it and saw the room swim before my eyes.

  I grabbed the dresser and hung on for a minute, dizzy and more than a little nauseated. It wasn’t just the pain. It was the constant stress, the I-just-got-up-and-want-to-crawl-back-into-bed exhaustion, the utter insanity of the last few weeks but especially this morning. It was everything, and it hit all at once.

  Great.

  Perfect, even.

  “Armored warrior . . . canopy of stars . . . must unify . . .”

  The words would have been too faint to hear, except that my head had come to rest on the dresser, right in front of the source. I pushed around some clothes and found what I’d expected: a ratty pack of tarot cards. The girls must have been playing with them, before Tami found out and put them in here, because I never left them open.


  For exactly this reason, I thought, as one shot out of the pack and hit me in the face.

  It was still muttering to itself, as they all did unless the flap was closed. My old governess had a witch enchant them for a long-ago birthday present to me. I hadn’t needed the explanations in years, but the charm was still going strong. Meaning that they enthusiastically informed me of their interpretation every time I pulled one out, even talking over each other when necessary.

  Every time until tonight.

  Tarot cards can be read two ways—okay, more than that, depending on which cards are drawn in a reading along with them. But mostly, there are two: upright and reversed. Good or bad, yin or yang, a positive spin on upcoming events . . . or a warning.

  Or, in this case, neither of the above. Because the little guy in the fancy chariot had hit my nose and bounced off. Landing neither upright nor reversed, but on his side.

  It lay there, vibrating slightly as it wrestled with itself, its grimy surface almost managing to obscure a bunch of symbols I’d seen before, and seen recently. There was the moon, my mother’s icon, on his shoulder armor. There was the sun, Apollo’s emblem, emblazoned on his chest. There were stars on the canopy fluttering over his head, like the ones on the card I’d drawn at the beginning of the odyssey to find Pritkin, and which had promised a long, tough road ahead.

  I’d had no idea.

  And finally, there was the little warrior himself, mostly silent at the moment because of the conflicting meanings of his two natures.

  There are a lot of ways to interpret the chariot, and the card usually burbles on happily about all of them. But at its heart, it’s a simple contrast: victory or defeat. Or, as it was now, a battle undecided, hovering on a knife’s edge, able to tip either way.

  I flicked it with a finger, pushing it upright. And heard what almost sounded like a sigh of relief from the little dude before he started telling me all about victory. Yeah, I thought, staring at him. But was it mine, or was it Ares’?