Shatter the Earth

by Karen Chance

  “Cassie!”

  Somebody grabbed me, which was just as well. Because I hadn’t put my foot down, and I was starting to get wobbly. Another second and I might have ruined a second outfit in one day. Or one day for me, I thought dizzily, looking up into clear green eyes.

  “Are you all right?” Pritkin had appeared out of nowhere to grasp my upper arm, and now his hold tightened in worry. But then he got a look at my face and visibly relaxed. “You are all right.”

  That must be some glamourie, I thought, feeling sick.

  I nodded, but glanced down, I couldn’t help it. And he followed my gaze. “Damn it!”

  He kicked dirt over the remains, whatever they were, and a second later, a glowing yellow dot appeared in the air above the pile.

  “Yellow means human remains,” he informed me, before I could ask. “Red is for unexploded ordinance. Green is a burst pipe or other minor issue.”

  “Is that new?” I didn’t remember a polka dotted corridor the last time I was here.

  “We’re trying to get things organized.”

  “Oh.”

  He led me away.

  I didn’t see any red dots—I guessed some things were priorities—but others were everywhere, now that I knew to look for them. Including some blue ones that I learned were for potions’ residue that needed to be cleaned up before it leeched into the ground water, and purple ones that indicated the buried entrances to tunnels or rooms. There were black ones, too, glimmering in the darkness, barely discernable against the rough and pitted walls. But Pritkin didn’t tell me what they meant.

  I didn’t press him.

  “Tough day?” I asked, because he was unusually silent, just answering my questions in short, two- or three-word sentences.

  “Busy.” He didn’t turn around, although he held my hand, threading us a way through the wreckage.

  “Are you sure you still want to get lunch?”

  That won me a glance over his shoulder. “Best part of my day.”

  I cheered up.

  Of course, Pritkin and I should have been eating back in Vegas, at the Pythian Court, where the food was better and the ambiance was way better. He had been assigned as my bodyguard by the Circle, and it was a little hard to guard my body from the other side of the planet. But Pritkin knew Faerie better than anybody, and since we were about to invade, the powers that be had wanted his advice.

  I wouldn’t have minded so much, except that they’d asked to have him “on loan” so often that it practically amounted to a reassignment! It was as annoying as hell, but I couldn’t really complain when the biggest risk I’d had in the past month—barring today—had been a papercut. Or possibly dying of boredom in some of my formal audiences.

  Nobody had told me that being Pythia was mostly about listening to rich people whine about their crappy little problems while trying not to yawn in their faces. Somebody had told me that war was a lot of serious tedium interspersed with moments of sheer terror, however. Which I thought described my job perfectly.

  It was why I’d come to terms with Pritkin’s temporary assignment, however much I wanted him home. It gave me a break from the tedium, or in this case, from having to explain my recent adventures to my other bodyguards, who had elevated over protection to an art form. Plus, the cafeteria had a bitchin’ butter chicken.

  We got some of the chicken, plus some naan bread, a basket full of crispy little poppadums, and some samosas that I thought were going to be stuffed with tandoori chicken, but turned out to be full of mushy peas.

  Pritkin laughed, a full-throated sound that had people at nearby tables glancing our way and then doing a double take, because that didn’t really fit their impression of him. As usual, he didn’t look like he cared, or even noticed. I guess a half demon war mage with bulging muscles straining his khaki fatigues, blond hair that defied gravity, and a temper that made drill sergeants run for cover was used to getting looks.

  I, for one, was wishing we’d taken the food back to the little cubby hole of a room they’d assigned him, even if it didn’t have a table. We could eat on the bed, and then we could do other things on the bed, if he had time. Which, considering that his demon half was incubus, was a fair bet.

  “You need vegetables,” he told me, eyeing the samosas, before I could make the suggestion.

  “I eat vegetables.”

  “Name the last time.”

  “Last night. I had a salad.”

  Green eyes narrowed at me suspiciously, because Pritkin is a health nut. “What kind of salad?”

  “You know, the usual.” The gaze did not waver. “Taco,” I admitted.

  “That’s not a salad.”

  “It had lettuce!”

  “Eat your peas.”

  I sighed and ate peas. They weren’t too bad if you piled on enough chutney, I decided. Pritkin looked like he was going to say something, and then stopped himself.

  Pick your battles, I thought grinning, and caught him checking out my suitcase. “Staying for a while?” he asked, and for a moment, it made me ridiculously pleased that he looked hopeful.

  And then reality set in, because shit. Of course, he’d think that; anyone would. That’s why they call it an overnight bag, Cassie!

  “Um,” I said, right before the tannoy came on. “Mage Pritkin, Mage John Pritkin, to training bay one immediately.”

  I felt relief, and followed swiftly by annoyance, because we’d just sat down!

  “What do they want?” I asked.

  “Don’t know.” Pritkin made a quick Indian taco out of some naan and a pile of butter chicken. And then quirked a blond eyebrow at me. “Want to wait for me in my room?”

  Now, why didn’t I think of that? I wondered, grinning again.

  “Don’t take too long.”

  Chapter Five

  I finished in record time, and not just because the food was good. The war had put me in the newspapers more than once, usually under weird or dangerous circumstances. Couple that with a father who was a well-known dark mage and a mother who was . . . out of this world . . . and there were bound to be glances. With Pritkin there, they’d been a lot more subtle, but afterward, a few people had actually been staring.

  I bolted my food and left, still hungry, but wanting to be somewhere else.

  I ended up in the library, because I doubted Pritkin would actually be back all that soon, based on prior experience. And because I had some research to do. The place wasn’t hard to find, being just down from the caf, with four stories opening onto a cavernous lobby and a big, half-moon desk right inside the front entrance. It was a little surprising, though.

  I belatedly remembered hearing that one of the main fights in the battle for HQ had taken place here, with war mages getting cut off from the civilian employees, who’d had to make a stand on their own. And while they were all magical beings, of one type or another, they weren’t trained troops. It had been a slaughter.

  It still looked like it.

  There were blackened sunbursts on the lobby walls, a stark contrast to the lighter, reddish stone, where major spells had hit. They were random, like they’d bounced off wards and ricocheted, with glass striations glittering in the centers and radiating outward, like dark stars. I guessed they might have been hard to clean up, with the fused sand making them basically permanent features, but the barricades of shelving were also still in place in some areas, from the librarians’ last stand.

  I stared at them, feeling a little off kilter. Outside, people were hustling and bustling, laughing and talking, and generally getting on with their lives. Inside there were huge holes in the shelving, with ragged black edges where spells had burned through the wood and books, and probably people, too.

  I wondered if it had been deliberate, leaving them like that. A sort of memorial to the fallen, made up of the things they’d loved best and had died defending. I didn’t know.

  There were more big burnt marks on the carpet, I noticed as I walked further in. Big pieces had b
een cut away; I wasn’t sure why. And then I figured it out when I spied the outline of a hand on one of the remaining bits, the carpet below fresh and clean and new looking, but that surrounding the imprint black and bubbly.

  I suddenly had to sit down in a wooden chair that had been left by a support column, my knees weak.

  It caught me like that sometimes, out of the blue. Not the reality of war—that had hit a long time ago—but the fact that I had somehow ended up as one of the main people fighting it. And that, if I failed, a lot more people were going to end up like the guy whose hand was now burned into carpet.

  Maybe all of them.

  The room grew swimmy, and I put my head down, my forehead touching my knees. I was physically nauseous, but mentally angry and impatient because I didn’t have time for this today. I didn’t have time for it any day!

  Get a grip, I told myself. And if you lose that butter chicken, you will eat salad tonight, and for the rest of the damned week!

  My stomach decided to behave after that dire threat, and in a moment, the weakness began to fade. That was about the time I noticed another hand, this one on my arm. And looked up to see a terribly old man in a three-piece suit, complete with a pocket watch and chain, like an old-fashioned banker.

  But bankers, even old timey ones, didn’t wear what looked like a hundred little watch fobs that glimmered or, in some cases, boiled with power. Charms and hexes, I realized, a crap ton of them, because I guessed if you survived something like this, you didn’t take chances. Although how he’d survived, I didn’t know, because he looked like he could have given Horatiu a run for his money in the longevity department.

  “Do you require assistance, Lady?” he asked.

  “Uh, no. No, I’m fine.” And then I remembered why I’d come. “Uh, actually, I was looking for information on a spell. Could you help me with that?”

  “I could try. It is not my area of expertise, but I am afraid that Mrs. Lantham . . . is no longer with us.”

  “I see.” I actually hoped I didn’t, and that Mrs. Lantham had died old, content, and in her bed. “I’m looking for information on a spell called Lover’s Knot, or Nodo D’Amore in Italian. Do you know it?”

  “I’m afraid not. But if you’ll come this way, I will attempt to look it up for you.”

  I got up, thankful to be steady on my feet again, and followed him through mountains of books—rescues from the ruined stacks, I guessed; the broken remains of the stacks themselves, piled up to form an alley through the clutter on either side of us; and jury rigged lighting overhead in the form of festoons of the pale spheres some mages liked to use instead of flashlights. They reflected the ambient light in an area, magnifying it many times over, although there wasn’t much in here to work with.

  That became truer as we went further in, which was probably why there were so many of the lights, each suspended in a bag of netting from ropes that seemed to scrawl all over everything.

  They laced the shelving, hung suspended over the alleyways, and highlighted mounds of junk: broken tables, half burnt books, task lights that had somehow ended up as melted sculptures after a spell came too close, and which I wouldn’t have even been able to identify except that some of their shades were bizarrely still intact. There were paintings, too, half burnt like the rest, of people I didn’t know but probably should have. There was one with just the top half of a face left, inside a melted frame, the serene eyes of some now long dead woman seeming to follow me as we moved along.

  I was starting to understand why this place was so empty.

  “—the Pythian library, such a wonderful resource, such a tragic loss,” the man was saying.

  “Yes,” I said, because I hadn’t been listening.

  “I had a chance to see it once, you know, when I was a boy,” he confided. “My mother visited the court and I, being a little scamp, ran off and found my way into the basement. I have to admit, I did not understand half of what I saw, but it was a formative event in my life. I think it was when I first decided to become a librarian.”

  “Really. That’s . . . interesting.”

  “Yes, indeed. A veritable treasure trove!” he enthused. And then kept talking, although if he was jonesing for another look, he was going to be disappointed. The library at the old Pythian Court had gone up in flames along with the rest of the place, in another attack a couple months back.

  But maybe he already knew that; he’d been saying something about its loss earlier. I didn’t know. I was having a hard time paying attention. This place didn’t just feel weird, it smelled it, too. I was being assailed by everything from the mustiness of old books to the staticky scent of spent magic, from the old campfire reek of dead ashes to the sizzle of roast pork—

  Stop it, I told myself harshly, and wished that my brain had an off switch.

  But it didn’t, and now it had new senses to play with. Vampire senses. And they were busy recreating the battle for me.

  A patch of carpet had been ripped out, but I could tell that a mage had fallen there from an invisible splatter of month’s old blood. The residue of potion bombs had been cleaned up, but I could still see them in my mind’s eye, splashes of peppery red, the fiery rasp of battle potions; spills of vivid ozone-laced purple, the remains of reflection wards, designed to send the attackers’ own spells back against them; the clean, coolness of protection spells, which my mind interpreted as the scent of rain. Some of the latter still functioned, having dripped down the stacks to puddle on the ground, leaving bright patches of untouched flooring and pristine books next to burnt out cinders.

  “After you,” the old man said, startling me, and I realized that we’d reached his office.

  Or maybe it had been Mrs. Lantham’s. Because the cushion on the hard backed, wooden chair was pink paisley, as was a mug being used as a pen holder. And the picture on the desk was of a grandmotherly type with steel gray hair, chocolate mocha skin and enough padding to have mostly avoided wrinkles, hugging a boy that I assumed was her grandson.

  The old man sat at the desk and consulted a sleek looking computer. He saw my surprise, and smiled slightly. “We’re very modern, you know.”

  I sat on the only other chair and waited. The office was untouched by the chaos outside, either because Mrs. Lantham had had better than average wards, or because of chance. I’d been in enough battles now to know how it worked. Someone could die right beside you, but you’d be fine, unless you counted having to live with survivor’s guilt.

  I found myself wanting to ask about her, suddenly, the woman who had worked here. But I didn’t. I just sat there until a big, white fluffy cat jumped into my lap, and the old gentleman looked up.

  “Did you want a cat, by any chance?” he asked. “I’d take it home myself, but my wife is allergic, sadly.”

  “I—we already have three,” I said awkwardly, because one of my new acolytes was a cat person, and had brought her pets with her to court.

  “Yes,” he said fretfully. “It’s so difficult to find good homes these days. Particularly for spoiled old toms. He doesn’t play well with others, I’m afraid, but Emma loved him.”

  “Emma.” So that was Mrs. Lantham’s first name.

  The old man nodded. “We’ve been letting him stay here, and feeding him scraps from the coffee shop, although I’m sure it is a far cry from his usual diet.” He leaned over the desk. “She fed him chicken liver, you know. Got it straight from the butcher. And albacore tuna. I told the wife, that cat ate better than I do.”

  He adjusted his tie. “She didn’t care for that much.”

  “No,” I said, noticing the collar around the animal’s neck, with a tag that had some etching on it. “Does he have a—”

  The world fell away.

  I was on top of stack of books, running fast along the hard, wooden ledge, trying to get away from the fire. It burned everywhere, a constant wall of death, but there was an opening up ahead in the flames, and I jumped for it. My hind paws caught and scrabbled on the boo
ks on my new perch, sending a cascade of them falling, more kindling for the bonfires below. But I made it, moving sleek and fast, too fast for the maniacal humans below, who were laughing while the world burned around them.

  I didn’t like the noises they made, or the looks on their faces. They were strange, twisted, wrong. Diseased in some way I didn’t understand.

  It was hard to avoid them, though. They were everywhere, cackling and tossing fire in strange colors. But I knew every inch of this place, had been born here, under my human’s desk, to a stray she’d taken in who hadn’t lived a day. But she’d had kittens before she passed, tiny mewling things, four of us, but only I’d survived. I’d been helpless then—couldn’t see, couldn’t hear, couldn’t understand anything but the hunger gnawing at my belly and the constant cold.

  Until hands, warm and careful, had picked me up, and filled me with milk, with life. Then put me someplace where it was always warm, until I was old enough to make my own heat. And to curl up on her feet beneath what they called a desk, in a nest of old blankets she’d made for me.

  She was human, but she was mother, father, and littermate to me. She was my world, and she was down there somewhere, in the darkness, among the strange fire. I had to find her. We had to leave.

  I leapt to another stack, and there she was, just below. But one of the strange humans was with her. He looked young, with yellow fur and pale, ugly eyes. They weren’t the jewel tones of my own, like sapphires she’d called them, whatever those were. Or the warm brown of her own. These were like water with nothing behind it. They reflected the hues of the fires, of the lights, of the strange substance the man threw that ate right through the barrier she’d made.

  It had been clear, too, until it ran with her blood, a strange, red shield that stayed in the air even as she fell, as the man laughed, as I jumped once more, but not at a stack, this time. And I wasn’t helpless any more. I cut his face, over and over, my tail blinding him as my claws savaged him, going for the ugly eyes of the monster who had killed my mother—