by Karen Chance
I felt Mircea’s hand clench, and knew that, if I didn’t do something soon, he would. But we had to be careful. Broken bones could be mended; a broken time line was a lot harder to fix, as I knew from personal experience.
“The other wagon is moving off,” he said, drawing my attention to an empty cart that had just started trundling its way back toward the city, probably to pick up another load. A contingent of soldiers moved along with it, leaving just the one close by. There were other such groups, but they were spaced out, the concentric circle having gotten fairly large at this point.
And a time bubble might just cover the ones that were left.
“All right,” I told him. “Here’s what we’re going to do.”
But we didn’t do that.
We didn’t do anything.
Because, a second later, a soldier grabbed for a woman whose long, dark hair had fallen down, hiding her face. Even with Vamp-o-Vision, I could only see a pair of dark eyes glittering from behind the strands. But they didn’t look panicked or terrified or crazed like everyone else’s.
They looked furious.
A second later, the guard staggered back, his face a mass of blood, like the splatter now dripping down her chin. I heard his screams, saw the others look up, saw her spring out of the wagon with no ropes to bind her, and what, at a guess, was the guard’s knife in her hand.
I didn’t see much of anything after that, because she was a blur, savaging the squad so quickly that even vamp eyesight couldn’t follow it. And then she was gone, her naked body nothing but a pale blur before she disappeared into the thick tree line. Leaving two dozen corpses on the ground behind her, some of them still wearing the same shocked expression that I probably was.
Because what the hell?
Chapter Two
“What was that?” I asked—no one. Because Mircea was no longer there. I looked around, surprised but not shocked—not at first. Vamps could move like the wind when they chose, and he was definitely motivated. But that was not what had just happened here.
I felt the familiar magic of a shift swirl around me for a second, the kind that Pythias used to move through space instead of time. It dissolved into the wind, but it didn’t take me with it because I hadn’t cast it. Mircea had.
Son of a bitch!
“Mircea!” I yelled, furious.
And then I went after him.
A second later, I materialized in the middle of the dissipating trail of his spell. One that shouldn’t have existed, because Mircea wasn’t a Pythia. He could do a lot of things, but shift across space or time wasn’t one of them.
Or it wasn’t supposed to be. But he’d recently run across a spell called Nodo D’Amore, or Lover’s Knot, that our enemies had been using in the war to allow one magic user to “borrow” another’s skill set. The only catch was that the two people involved had to be lovers.
And guess whose ex-girlfriend happened to be Pythia?
It was partly the fear that he’d shift himself to the past if I didn’t take him, hijacking my power and causing who knew how many problems in search of his murdered wife, that had gotten me here. Because magic didn’t seem to understand break ups. Mircea and I had, until recently, been an item, and I guessed that was good enough.
“Mircea!” I yelled again.
But it wasn’t Mircea who came thundering out of the trees.
I just stood there for a second, staring at a party of at least three dozen fey warriors, their shiny black armor dappled with sunlight, their charging horses so light of foot that they almost seemed to fly, their silver hair streaming on the wind—
And then I was shifting again, maybe half a second before they ran me the hell down.
I rematerialized behind them, not having had time to think of another destination, facing the other way and confused and disoriented. And even more so when I spun in time to see Elena on the back of one of the steeds, fighting and clawing and screeching blue murder in some language I didn’t know. But I didn’t really need to.
Profanity tends to sound the same in any tongue.
And then, before I could even get my breath back, somebody was snatching me up, onto a huge fey horse that I wasn’t at all sure was under control, because it wasn’t a fey in the saddle.
“Mircea!” I wheezed. “God . . . damnit!”
“Hold on!” he told me, and pulled me into a seated position in front of him.
Which would have been a relief, except that the fey had started firing at us!
A white fletched arrow zipped by my head and would have taken me between the eyes, but Mircea had jerked the reins to the side at the last second, and fey horses had the reflexes of the gods. As it was, I felt the air of its passing, and saw several more fey turning around to shoot at us, because their horses didn’t seem to need hands on the reins. Then I was sending a time wave ahead of us, despite the fact that I didn’t want to waste the power.
But I didn’t want to be shish kebob, either!
“That’s it! That’s perfect!” Mircea said, as a whole volley of arrows disintegrated on their flight through the air, aging out of existence in the middle of my spell.
The one we were about to plow right through!
“Go around! Around!” I yelled, panicked.
He went around—barely. My headscarf, loosened in the fray, blew off and dusted away, fluttering like a dissipating ghost on the breeze as we plunged into a thicket. The denser forest slowed us down enough that I was fairly sure we’d lost the riders. Something that I, for one, was completely fine with!
“Tell me . . . you didn’t kill the guy . . . who owned this horse,” I panted, wondering how badly we’d just screwed up.
“No. Knocked him out,” Mircea said, way too calmly. “One of the others threw him over the back of his animal. Didn’t you notice?”
“No, I didn’t damned well notice!” I yelled.
And immediately realized that that might not have been the best plan when more arrows were suddenly vibrating out of the trees around us—and Mircea’s shoulder. He pulled two from his flesh and tossed them away, unconcerned, because for a vamp that was akin to an insect bite. But for me—
“Hold the hell up!” I said, grabbing for the reins.
And missing, because the horse wasn’t the only thing with good reflexes.
“We have to catch them,” Mircea said, turning the beast in the direction of the lethal weapons. “They’ll lose us in the forest, otherwise.”
“Good!” I whispered this time, not that it probably mattered with fey hearing.
And, sure enough, five or six more arrows sped by, one of them leaving a gash on the horse’s neck.
“Mircea, they’re going to kill us!”
“They’re not trying to kill us, else they’d have left some of their number behind to ambush us,” he said, with the lack of concern of an immortal. “They’re trying to slow us down.”
He thought about it for a moment.
“Can you shift a horse?”
“I can shift you—back home!” I said, furiously.
And the next thing I knew, my bottom was smacking down onto the hard forest floor.
“Mircea!”
I shifted back onto his horse as he plunged ahead, which had not been the plan. I don’t shift onto moving objects given a choice. Especially one that was ducking and dodging and fleeing through a thick wood with low hanging branches that smacked me in the face, and arrows that ripped through my curls, and a surprised deer that darted out in front of us and would have been a serious road hazard if we’d had a road!
But my power had sent me straight back to Mircea anyway, maybe because the damned spell had us linked. I’d ended up slamming into the back of his horse and then grabbing hold of him, both to keep from falling off and so that I could shift us out of there! But he shifted me first—high into a tree this time—so high that all I could do for a second was to cling to the upper, very thin looking limbs, and try not to scream.
And then I d
id it anyway, in a delayed reaction that startled a few hundred birds out of their perches. A ton of small bodies hit me from all directions, causing me to shut my eyes and cling tight for all I was worth. And when I opened them again . . .
It was to see the fey thundering across an open field, toward a rocky outcropping.
The tree’s height gave me a stunning view of rolling hillsides blowing with golden grain, blue skies filled with fluffy white clouds, and Mircea, bent low over his horse and riding hell bent for leather after the fey. He was actually closing on them, with no armor and no second passenger to slow him down, but they didn’t seem concerned. They weren’t even looking behind them anymore; I didn’t know why.
And then I realized why: they were heading straight for a sheer drop off, a rocky plunge into nothingness at the top of the mountain, as if the whole damned group was suicidal.
I didn’t have Vamp-o-Vision anymore, so I couldn’t tell what the hell they thought they were doing—
And then I could, because Mircea wasn’t here to lend me his abilities, but with Lover’s Knot in effect, I didn’t need him. The zoom feature had me crying out again, and clinging harder to the rough bark under my hands, as the sudden feeling of rushing forward almost caused me to literally go flying. But I held on, and sure enough, there was a portal there.
It was situated maybe half a dozen yards off the edge of the cliff, I supposed so no human accidentally stumbled into it. It was purplish gray and swirling, like a rotating patch of storm clouds, and increasing in size because the fey had activated it. Intending, I supposed, to take their captive straight through into Faerie.
What they wanted with Mircea’s wife, I didn’t know, but I knew one thing: he was absolutely going to take that leap right behind them. And that was a no-no for so many reasons that I didn’t even wait to count them. I shifted, grabbed him by the shoulders, and almost succeeded in pulling him off the horse.
But when you learn to ride from basically the time you can walk, and hone your skills by keeping your seat in battle, you don’t fall easily. He caught me, cursing. And then hauled me in front of him again, just as we approached the cliff. The fey must have already taken the leap, for they were nowhere to be seen. And neither was anything else except for the rapidly closing mouth of the portal, which no, no, no—
“It’s too small!” I screamed. No way were we making that.
And we wouldn’t have, had Mircea not shifted us at the last second, with our horse halfway through its leap off the cliff and nothing but open air below us.
We landed in the middle of a rain of what remained of our ride on the other side, because Mircea hadn’t shifted the animal, too. And the portal had not been large enough. Fortunately, I didn’t get much of a look at the result before we were rolling down a hill on a bloody slip and slide.
“Not . . . on your goddamned . . . life,” I panted, clinging like a limpet when Mircea tried to rise.
“Let go!”
“Bite me!”
“Another time, dulceață,” the bastard said, using the pet name he’d always had for me. Only, right now, I wasn’t feeling all that sweet. Right now, I was feeling fairly murderous. Not only had he co-opted my power, but he’d used it to bring us to the last place I wanted to be! Faerie was breathtakingly dangerous, and even worse, my power didn’t work here.
“Any distance . . . from the portal . . . and the Pythian power . . . won’t function,” I gasped, as we wrestled together.
“I don’t need it now that we’re here!” Mircea snapped, and then frowned, possibly because I had him in a head lock. “How are you this strong?”
“I’m not!” I snarled. “You are. Nodo d’Amore, remember? It works both ways!”
Mircea said something in Romanian that I’m fairly sure was profane, and then proved that six hundred years of dirty tricks trump strength any day. The next second, I found myself face down in horse parts, and he was gone, sprinting for a tall, rock-cut canyon like all the demons in hell were after him. Or one really pissed off Pythia.
Try to help someone, I thought furiously, getting back to my feet and shaking out my bloody skirts. And this is what you get for it. When we got back, I swore to God—
Well, actually, I didn’t know what to swear. I’d never figured out any method of dealing with Mircea that actually worked. Except for letting him have his way, and that was not happening here!
I held out a hand toward the now tiny figure of the fleeing vamp, because masters can haul ass when they choose, and concentrated. Standing almost right in front of a portal, my power still worked, something I guessed Mircea hadn’t thought about. And I knew a few tricks, too.
I grabbed him metaphysically and pulled, trying to shift him back to me. It should have worked, as I’d been able to shift without touching someone for a while now. And I’d been getting a lot of practice with my taskmaster of a teacher, a purple haired martinet whose sarcastic voice I could almost hear in my head.
“What’s the matter, girl? Still thinking about weight? The Pythian power doesn’t care about such things!”
Which was a load of horse apples, because shifting something like a pencil and shifting the Empire freaking State building were two entirely different things. But a hundred-and-eighty-pound asshole should be doable. Only he wasn’t coming.
Because he was fighting me.
“Son of a bitch!” I yelled, and that was another mistake. The effort of speaking caused my concentration to wobble, which was enough for Mircea’s spell to grab me. And to send me flying at him instead.
I hit hard, and we both went down, but at least there was no bloody horse carcass this time.
There was something worse.
“What is that?” Mircea demanded, looking up at the sides of the very tall canyon. Where somebody, probably centuries ago, had made some elaborate carvings in the rock. Dozens of them, ranked along both sides of the walls, maybe ten stories tall and looking like stone sentinels.
Their faces were cracked and parts were missing, with noses being in especially short supply. And some kind of vine, brown and lifeless now, had once flourished here, eating through gray stone armor and carved flesh alike. But most of the statues were still intact, and their weapons—massive swords, huge spears and heavy maces—seemed to have weathered the centuries just fine.
Of course they had, I thought, as a cascade of small pebbles started to rain down on us.
“What is it?” the bastard at my side demanded. “What’s happening?”
“Faerie,” I breathed, and grabbed him. “Run.”
“What? Why?”
“That’s why,” I yelled, as a giant leg burst out of the rock, sending a spray of hard little shards slamming into us. Because these were Svarestri lands, and their element was earth and all its various components. And they could do an alarming number of things with it.
Like that, I thought, as the canyon around us cracked and morphed and changed. And the huge sentinels that had been looking like ancient stone carvings a second ago, became an ancient stone army instead. One with spears the size of fir trees and boots as big as—
“Shit!” I yelled, and reached for my power.
And found nothing. Maybe because I was tired, and holding concentration is hard when massive boots are slamming down all around you. Or maybe because we were too far away from the portal, which I couldn’t even see anymore.
Not that I would have been able to, anyway. The heavy dust cloud raised by all those crashing limbs had blinded me, and the stabbing spears had me seriously disoriented. Not to mention freaked out, especially by the sound, which was beyond deafening. It ricocheted around my skull, making it hard to think, and the dust made it all but impossible to breathe.
But Mircea didn’t need oxygen, and his arm was about my waist, threatening to bisect me every time he jumped us out of the way. Which was constantly, his vampire senses somehow keeping us just ahead of the living avalanche. But he only had to falter once and we were toast.
&nbs
p; This wasn’t going to work!
And then I felt it: the glimmering stream of my power, like a literal lifeline, pouring through the portal. Like it was reaching for me, too. I grabbed hold of it, wrapped my hand around it, and then slung it about our bodies for good measure.
“Hold on!” I told Mircea, who had just slammed us back into one of the indentations in the cliff made by the now missing sentinels.
“For what?” he yelled. “I can’t shift!”
“But I can!”
“How?”
“Because I’m Pythia,” I snarled, and proved it.
My power swirled around us, far stronger than Mircea’s spell, because it wasn’t borrowed, it was mine. But, for a second, we still didn’t go anywhere. He whirled us out of the way of a spear, then through the legs of another assailant, while I wrestled with my power, pouring everything I had into strengthening the connection between us.
I could feel it, reaching for me as desperately as I was for it, like familiar fingers grabbing for the hand of a drowning woman. I almost had it, but then we moved again. Upward this time, jumping onto one of our assailant’s boots, because anything was better than being on the churning ground right now!
Although not by much.
The other sentinels converged on the one we were using as a perch, uncaring that they were attacking another of their number so long as we died, too. Rock cracked, massive limbs flailed, a head the size of a large house came crashing down to splinter against the ground. And my spell finally caught.
Only my power couldn’t seem to shift the two of us the normal way from this far out. What it could do was to pull us along at record speed back toward the portal. The glittering rope gave a yank and we went flying, speeding through the air like Clark and Lois, if Clark and Lois were screaming and being chased by several dozen huge stone soldiers who weren’t giving up.
But neither was my power, which sent us zipping between legs and under reaching hands, and then through a forest of spears, rock shards and billowing dust, with Faerie doing what it always did and trying to kill us. But not quite succeeding before we tumbled, bloody and filthy and half crazed—at least I was—back through the portal. Only to abruptly remember—