by Karen Chance
“I take it Hilde isn’t coming?”
“Hell, no. I can hear her snoring from here.”
My breath let out in a sigh I hadn’t known I’d been holding. “You’re a bastard,” I told him.
Fred grinned and ate bomba at me.
There was some leftover sangria, so I poured myself a glass and took it to the bath. If a combo of alcohol and warm water didn’t put me to sleep, I didn’t know what would. I added a lavender bath bomb, because I’d heard it was supposed to be soothing, and climbed in. It was nice.
I wallowed around for a while. It remained nice. And not remotely sleep inducing.
Damn it, I didn’t know what was wrong with me!
Okay, that was a lie. I knew exactly what it was, and until I spoke to Pritkin and verified that he was okay, I wouldn’t sleep. Only how was I supposed to contact him?
I was too pooped to shift all the way to Stratford, and anyway, I’d been specifically warned to stay away. Plus, that would require knowing where in the Circle’s labyrinth he currently was, and I didn’t. I did some mental math: Stratford was eight hours ahead of us, so it was morning there. He could be anywhere.
Damn it, I needed to talk to him! But I couldn’t use a phone thanks to Jonas, and Pritkin was probably underground anyway. This was just so—
“Cassie?”
I jerked and looked around, because that had been Pritkin’s voice. Unless I was starting to hallucinate from too little sleep. But after a moment, I spied a familiar pair of green eyes looking out of one of the mirrors over the sink.
Mages could spell mirrors, or any reflexive surface, to act like a magical version of Skype, although these days, just as many carried phones. But magic was harder to hack, so I guessed this was the work around to Jonas’s prohibition. Not to mention that it was completely unaffected by wards and being underground.
“Cassie?” Pritkin said again, because he couldn’t see me from where he was, the mirrors being too high.
“In the bath.”
The eyes crinkled slightly at the edges. “What are you wearing?”
I sucked on a strawberry. “Absolutely nothing. Don’t you wish you were here?”
“Yes.” It was emphatic.
“Bad day?”
“Before or after my lover decided to try to kill herself?”
“We’re not going to start that again, are we? Did I mention that I’m naked?”
“Prove it.”
I grinned. “Is this a secure channel?”
“As secure as they come.”
“Because I don’t need naughty pictures of the Pythia showing up in the press tomorrow.”
“At least it would finally knock the war off the front page.”
I laughed. With my skinny legs? Hardly.
But Pritkin had never complained, especially not when they were up around his ears. God, I wished he was here! But it looked like he was still at HQ, judging by the rock dirt-and-rock background behind him.
I pulled the little makeup mirror, which had been fixed to the wall on an accordion mount, away from the tiles. I never used it, because who does their makeup in the tub? But I guessed somebody did, because it had come standard, although it was all fogged up now.
I swiped a hand across it, and there he was. And this time, I got the full face. It looked tired and stressed, but also half cynical and half expectant, because he didn’t think I’d do it, but wasn’t sure.
“Okay,” I told him. “Get ready.”
And then I tilted the mirror—
Toward my knee.
“Look,” I teased. “It’s all sudsy and sexy.”
I waggled the mirror a little. And then turned it back to my face, to see Pritkin’s lips quirk. “I’m half incubus,” he told me. “I can work with it.”
“I wish you were here to work with it. How much longer?” I was whining; I knew it, but I didn’t care. Jonas had bogarted my boyfriend, and I was salty about it.
“After today? Quite a while.”
“Why? What happened now?”
“Nothing happened now. Unless you count the fact that we can’t discover how the fey infiltrated our base.”
I frowned. “What do you mean?”
“I mean that none of the wards were disturbed. We checked them three times, as some sustained damage in the recent attack. It was thought that one or more of them might be giving false readings. There was even discussion that perhaps the Black Circle had left themselves a back door in the attack—a compromised ward that they could use as a conduit back in at another time. Such a thing should have been detected during repairs, but with the Corps stretched as thin as it is, something subtle could have been missed.”
“Was it?”
“No. They’re on the fourth check right now, but I think it highly unlikely that we missed anything. As far as we can tell, no one unauthorized came through.”
“Then . . . you think you have a traitor?” I asked, struggling to understand how anyone could fool the wards at HQ’s check points. I usually avoided them by just shifting in, and for good reason. The one time I’d gone through with Pritkin, after lunch at a local eatery, it had felt like walking through a rain of burning needles.
“If he wasn’t fey, that might have been a consideration,” Pritkin said dryly. “As it is, it’s a mystery.”
“Which means it could happen again.” I was suddenly, fervently, glad that I’d sent Billy, and wondered if he was there yet. Probably not; he traveled along different pathways than humans, but Stratford was still pretty far away.
“That’s the worry,” Pritkin agreed.
“Pay attention to scent,” I told him earnestly. “Fey glamouries have a really strong smell, at least for the first few days.”
“And you know this how?” he asked.
“I . . . hear stuff. From the coven girls.”
He wasn’t buying it.
“We’re going to have a talk. Soon,” he promised.
“If it means you come back.” And in one piece.
“Mage Pritkin?” Someone called his name from somewhere off to the side, and he glanced their way.
“I have to go, Cassie.”
“Remember what I said about scent!” I said—to myself. Because the only thing in the mirror was my heat flushed face.
Damn it!
I got out of the tub. Instead of relaxed, I felt even worse than before, anxious and keyed up and worried and frustrated. And then it got worse.
I’d just finished drying off and was pulling my shorty nightgown over my head when what sounded like every hound in hell started howling. In a hurricane. Composed of fire trucks.
It was the worst noise I thought I’d ever heard, and came out of nowhere, almost making me jump out of my skin. I almost strangled myself fighting with the nightgown, finally pulled it down, and ran into my bedroom. Only to see—
“What the hell?”
I dodged back behind the bathroom door, and a moment later, something hit it like a fist, with an audible thump. Something that caused the new, freshly painted wood to crack and splinter and age. And a hole to eat its way right on through—presumably where the fist had landed.
“Cassie!” I heard Fred’s voice from outside, and my gut tightened.
“Stay out! It’s okay, just . . . don’t come in here,” I called, and laced my hand with the Pythian power. A lot of it, like a wad the size of a catcher’s mitt.
“What’s wrong?” Fred demanded.
“Nothing. Just a slight . . . ward malfunction,” I said, as what remained of my supposed protection ping ponged its way around my pretty new suite.Which was quickly becoming my pretty old suite, or at least pieces of it were, wherever that thing hit.
Damn it, what was wrong with it?
“I’ll keep ‘em out,” Fred said, and I sidled through the door, the mitt in front of me. And watched a golden ball slam into the carpet, where it dusted a hole in the custom blue and white swirl; into the ceiling, where a spreading brown stain ate it
s way over the plaster; into a chair that sagged and then crumbled into a pile of old wood; and finally—
“No!” I said, furious, as the ball of Pythian energy hit and then ran along my built ins, causing the books to explode in a storm of flying pages that disintegrated into nothing, like birds made out of dust. Right before finally slamming into my makeshift catcher’s mitt, where I squeezed and squeezed and squeezed, and choked it the hell out!
Maybe, I decided a few moments later, panting and winded and sweaty, I shouldn’t try doing any more wards for a while.
And then I looked up to see Fred with his arms stretched over the doorway, and behind him, a bevy of vampires, acolytes, and witches, with Hilde in the forefront.
She eyed me up—dripping hair, crumpled, backwards nightie, and boiling catcher’s mitt of power—and sighed. “Can’t you just play strip poker like everyone else?”
I threw them all out and went to bed.
Chapter Seventeen
I finally tore myself away from court the next afternoon, following hours of chair sitting and advice giving, the latter of which was useless because nobody cared. It amazed me how much the visitors to the Pythian Court were like the people I’d once read tarot for in a bar. They didn’t want advice, especially not the kind that required any work on their part. They wanted reassurance, or validation, or commiseration, or just to vent about things that they had no intention of changing.
It was infuriating.
It was also an example of the fact that Tami had been right, as usual. I didn’t need to spend so much time doing that. Not when I could be doing this.
I looked up at the giant, well-lit mansion in front of me, and smiled.
The Pythian Court in Vegas, where I’d ended up living because Mircea owned the hotel, was an aberration. For several centuries before me, the court had occupied a grand Georgian mansion in London, filled with marble and statuary and fine oil paintings and rugs, any one of which probably cost more than most houses. It was a gorgeous, if slightly intimidating pile, where Rhea had spent much of her childhood.
But it didn’t look all that familiar at the moment.
A horse drawn carriage clip-clopped by, threatening to squash us, and I pulled Rhea off the sidewalk and onto the front steps. It was night in London, with a typical Edwardian fog obscuring the landscape and making the streetlights halos of brightness that illuminated pretty much nothing. So, I doubted that the cabbie could see very far.
But I pulled up the hood on my cloak anyway, because I wasn’t supposed to be here.
“You aren’t supposed to be here!” a crabby voice informed me, after the front door was abruptly jerked open.
The woman who was silhouetted in a flood of newfangled electric light was a bit of a surprise, because she wasn’t supposed to be here, either. At least not answering doors. And because she was unusually disheveled, with her long brown hair everywhere, her cheeks flushed, and her usually perfectly pressed white lace gown dirty and torn down one side.
It flashed a glimpse of thigh that would have outraged her delicate sensibilities if she’d noticed—and if she’d had any. But Agnes had always been as tough as nails. As she demonstrated by trying to close the door on me.
But I had her number and had already put a foot in it.
I heard a small sound from my companion, and thought it was sympathy for my mangled foot before I glanced over my shoulder.
Crap, I thought, seeing Rhea’s expression.
Because I’d forgotten; there was one familiar item at the old Pythian Court, wasn’t there?
Agnes Weatherby, the girl in the doorway, was a tiny thing with a big attitude. Which was fair, since she was the current heir to the throne and future Pythia, and thus a fairly important person. Or self-important, I thought, as she glared at me.
“I know I’m early for my appointment—” I began, trying diplomacy while still looking worriedly back at Rhea.
“Three days early!” Agnes snapped.
“—and I know I’m not supposed to be outside. But I didn’t want to risk materializing inside of someone.” I turned back to Agnes. “You really need to establish a landing area.”
“We don’t need a landing area!” she told me furiously. “We know how to project the future out in front of us to avoid running into people!”
“Bully for you,” I said, and pushed past her.
Rhea followed me inside, looking more than a little gob smacked. Yeah. I probably should have mentioned that we might be meeting her mother. Her very dead mother who was, in this period, quite alive and fuming.
You could really see the resemblance, I thought, looking at them side by side. One had blue eyes and one brown, and Rhea was slightly taller, but they both had long brown hair that rippled down their backs, English rose complexions, and sweet faces. At least, Agnes’s would have been sweet if she hadn’t been looking at me.
I didn’t know what her problem was, but she clearly had one.
I also didn’t care right now, because I’d just made a mistake, the kind that happens when you have too much to do and way too much to think about. Things fall through the cracks, even important things.
Like Rhea’s feelings, which I had accidentally just crapped all over.
“I need a second,” I told Agnes, and pulled my acolyte into a small, side parlor.
It was the same one where I’d almost choked to death once, because my experiences at the old Pythian Court hadn’t always been stellar. But it had the advantage of a door that shut in Agnes’ face, and a green velvet settee that I pulled Rhea onto. And green velvet drapes that shut out the world except for a small amount of street light leaking in through the window.
Enough to show me that, yep, I was a dick.
“Are you all right?” I asked, since that’s what you ask in these cases, but the answer was clearly no. Rhea looked like, well, like she’d just seen a ghost. One who was currently pounding on the door, goddamnit!
I opened it again and stuck my head out. “What part of ‘I need a second’ did you not understand?”
“What part of ‘get the hell out’ did you not?”
“You didn’t tell me that,” I said.
“Consider yourself told!” And the bitch shifted me into the street.
She didn’t shift Rhea—fortunately. Because the Pythian Court seemed to be on some kind of nightly delivery route, judging by all the traffic passing outside. And which resulted in me almost getting run down—again!
I shifted back inside after narrowly avoiding a wagon full of barrels, and found Agnes with my tearful, shell-shocked acolyte. Who she was currently dragging toward the front door. It wasn’t by the hair, but she looked like she would have preferred it to be.
“Hold up,” I said, grabbing her shoulder, only to have my hand slapped off. Hard.
“It’s bad enough that you come here at all,” Agnes said, clearly livid. “That you can’t handle the basics of the position you occupy without someone to hold your hand. But now you’re also bringing your—what is she?”
“What?” I asked, because my nerves were still screaming “wagon!”
“What is she?” Agnes yelled, and thrust Rhea at me.
Your daughter, I didn’t say, because part of my agreement with the Pythia of the day was that I kept my mouth shut while I was here. Any little tidbit I accidentally let out could change history. And that especially included letting Agnes know that she would one day break the rules far more spectacularly than me, having not only a long-running affair, but a daughter to boot.
But my pause to think did not go down well.
“Get. Out!” Agnes yelled, and shifted me again, but I hijacked the spell and redirected it—right back into the little parlor. And since she’d thoughtfully thrown my acolyte at me, Rhea came, too.
The door was ajar—I guessed Agnes hadn’t bothered to shut it when she dragged Rhea out—but not by much. Just enough for me to see her look around in confusion and then fury, before stomping off. She’d pr
obably gone to get back up, which was fine, because I wasn’t trying to avoid a fight. I was trying to buy a little time with my acolyte.
Who had dropped onto the settee, pale-faced and big-eyed, trying to cope.
“I’m sorry,” I told her. “I didn’t think. I’ll send you right back—”
“No.” Rhea looked up. “No, I’ll—I’ll be all right. I just need . . . a moment.”
I nodded, checking out the sliver of front hall that I could see at present. “That’s probably about what you have,” I told her. “Agnes is nothing if not competent. Gertie—Lady Herophile,” I amended, using my trainer’s proper reign title, because Rhea was sensitive to such things, “has had me train with her before. She usually kicks my ass.”
“She was . . . always talented,” Rhea whispered.
I looked back from the door to see her hunched over with her arms wrapped around herself. I wasn’t a student of body language, but that didn’t look like a good sign to me. I’d brought Rhea along to use the Pythian library, because the banker-looking guy at HQ had seemed to think that it was the font of all knowledge, and I hoped it might have info on Lover’s Knot. The library had been destroyed in the war, along with the house we were currently occupying, but it still existed in this time period, and Rhea had said that she’d used it as a girl.
It had seemed like an easy way out of a problem, for once. But, of course, not. You’d think I’d stop expecting that sort of thing by now.
And, right on cue, Agnes was back. And this time, she had company. Specifically, a young, chubby girl with a flat, unattractive face and a boxy body that the traditional lace gown did nothing to improve. But what she lacked in looks, she made up for in talent.
A very specific talent.
“Crap,” I told Rhea. “It’s Ermengard.”
“Who?”
“She’s kind of the Pythian equivalent of a bloodhound. She can follow a tiny thread of the Pythian power virtually anywhere. They usually use her to help track dark mages violating the Time Rules, but she’s likely to be equally good at—”
Finding us, I thought, as she silently pointed.
Agnes stormed our way and I shifted—to my usual bedroom upstairs. And then shifted right back down again, and watched Agnes do a one-eighty as Ermengard called out a new destination. Half a dozen acolytes and a couple of war mages went thundering up the stairs, and I turned back to Rhea.