by Karen Chance
“That won’t fool them for long.”
“It doesn’t need to fool them at all,” she said, her head coming up and her shoulders going back. “I’m fine, Lady. And I don’t want to go home.”
“Are you sure?” Because, yeah, libraries weren’t really my thing, and it would probably take me a lot longer to find what I needed without Rhea, assuming it was even here. But she’d been through a lot lately. I did not want to put her through any more.
I thought, a little wistfully, of her joy at riding that ridiculous broom around with Rico. Maybe I should have left her behind. Maybe I should have left her all together.
Hilde’s voice suddenly came back to me: Do you want her in this position for her benefit, or for yours?
Good question, I thought grimly.
But then a gentle hand touched my arm.
“It is your choice, of course,” Rhea said, and this time, her eyes were dry. “But for my part, I would like to stay.”
And yeah, I thought. That’s what everyone always forgot about her. She looked soft and sweet, but while the sweetness was definitely there, she wasn’t soft. She wasn’t soft at all. There was all of her mother’s steel in that spine, and some of her father’s, too.
Hell, she was probably stronger than me, and she had a right to stay if she wanted to.
“Okay,” I told her. “Just don’t expect it to be pretty.”
Rhea nodded, and we re-emerged from our hidey hole into a still deserted foyer. It was a large, marble space designed to be impressive, and it succeeded. There was old world paneling on the walls, a breathtaking staircase with gorgeous old wrought ironwork leading up, and chandeliers that were both massive and yet tasteful at the same time.
It also smelled—a lot.
I wrinkled up my nose. I’d been too busy being yelled at by Agnes to notice earlier, but the Pythian Court smelled like wet dog. Or possibly a lot of wet dogs, because that was some stench. Maybe that’s what had Agnes’s panties in a bunch: we’d shown up on housecleaning day.
“Is something wrong?” Rhea asked.
“You don’t smell that?”
“Smell what?”
“I don’t know. But it’s nasty.”
And then Agnes was back, shifting in with a vengeance, because she didn’t like being fooled. For my part, I didn’t like being gassed. What the hell was that?
I leaned forward and sniffed her. Nope.
She reared back, and then flushed angrily and got in my face. “Get out!”
“Why?”
“We’re busy!”
“Doing what?” I asked, because I didn’t see anything important going on.
And then I found out what.
“Auuuggghhh!” somebody screamed. It might have been me. Make that probably was me, because something huge and fanged had just knocked me over and was bearing me to the ground.
I heard Rhea yell, heard Agnes curse, heard the blood roar in my ears. And then I threw the creature off me, all eight or nine hundred pounds of it, but not by using the Pythian power. That takes concentration and right then, I didn’t have any.
I did, however, have something else.
Son of a bitch! I thought, and my attacker—huge, fur covered, and snarling—went flying.
And since it looked like Lover’s Knot did work, even when the component parts were in different centuries, that was a literal statement. A body the size of a compact car hit the wall and hit hard, but didn’t crash through. The Pythian Court had seen its fair share of shit through the years, and they built sturdy.
Instead, the creature bounced off, taking a large amount of wood and plaster along with it, and stood there for a second, shaking its great, shaggy head and giving me my first good look at it. I guessed it was a Were, with possibly the last part of that word being wolf, although it was hard to tell. It was massive, plus I only got a split-second glimpse, because even stunned it moved like lightning.
All I saw was a huge mass of brown fur, evil yellow eyes, and what looked like foot long fangs coming at me.
And then I was crouching, ready to take it, stick thin arms and all, because physical strength doesn’t matter if you’re a vamp. Or borrowing the power of one, and a first-level master at that. Challenge was suddenly singing in my veins and blood lust was flooding my senses, rich and meaty in my throat and on my tongue, delicious.
No wonder Mircea liked combat!
He wasn’t the only one. The creature came for me in a blur of speed that I shouldn’t have been able to see at all, because human eyes don’t work like that. But vampire ones do.
I grabbed it halfway through its leap, in a liquid motion that I barely had to think about, and sent it rocketing in the other direction. Across the hall and into the grand staircase, where it crashed, turned on a dime and sprang back at me. Which brought a quick smile to my lips.
I didn’t know how I knew what to do, whether I was borrowing that from Mircea, too, or whether super strength and speed just opened up all kinds of new possibilities. I only knew that there was no hesitation, no doubt in my mind that this would work, even before I did it. And slid underneath the great beast as it lunged, jumped up behind it, grabbed one of its hind quarters and slammed it to the ground.
It didn’t like that, the great head whipping back and forth, the jaws snapping and snarling, and the massive claws trying to shred. But I’d jumped on its back once it was down, and gotten a grip behind the head. My arm was halfway around its neck, which was as far as I could reach, but that was enough.
To pull it back, to bare the huge throat, to—
“Lady!”
I snapped back to myself at Rhea’s voice, my heart racing, my mouth full of flesh that my blunt human teeth couldn’t quite seem to tear through—
Only to see a ring of horrified faces surrounding me.
The group from the chase seemed to have made it back down here, and brought friends. Or maybe they’d been drawn by the sound of the fight. Either way, the big hall had a crowd with more running in every minute: acolytes, mages, people dressed like old fashioned nannies in starched black and white, and children—the current crop of initiates, I guessed—all staring at me with big eyes.
I stared back for a moment, with two sets of instincts—human and vampire—muddling up in confusion. And then a flood of realization hit. I slowly pulled my teeth out of the Were’s flesh, which was harder than it sounds.
A lot harder, because they were buried deep.
Guess I had gotten through the skin, after all, I thought, as blood cascaded down my chin.
Then I heard it: somebody coming down the hall, her little Victorian heels click-clacking on the tiles. A moment later I saw her, the purple curls awry, the round face even redder than usual, and the gimlet-eyed gaze going straight to me. Gertie didn’t look pleased to see me, either.
“I might have known! Lady Cassandra! What the devil do you think you’re doing?”
I tried to answer and found that I couldn’t, until I spat out a gob of Were flesh. It lay on the matted brown fur of the heaving beast, yellow and red veined and hairy topped and horrible. It quivered for a moment, the focus of all eyes, before it fell off with a splat onto the floor.
Okay, I thought sickly.
This . . . really wasn’t my week.
Chapter Eighteen
I threw up again.
The basin I was bent over was full of chicken pot pie, which is what Tami had made for lunch, pieces of peach from the cobbler that had followed, and blood. A lot of it. It splattered the sides of the porcelain receptacle in little flecks, and then dripped back down, making red ribbons that didn’t help my already queasy stomach.
Apparently, I’d nicked an artery in my attack on the Were and had swallowed a bellyful of its blood without even realizing it.
I was realizing it now.
Rhea was holding my hair back from my face and refraining from comment. Any comment. Especially “I told you so,” which I really didn’t need to hear right now.
But I wouldn’t have blamed her. She’d been right about Lover’s Knot, and fortunately so. Mircea’s abilities had come in handy when I was attacked for absolutely no reason, because that had not been my fault.
No matter what Agnes said.
But that meant that the reverse was also true: if I could borrow Mircea’s skills in another time, then he could do the same to me. And go joyriding around the timeline whenever he chose. He didn’t need me to get there or to get back, and probably the only reason he wasn’t doing it right now is because he didn’t know that.
But the problem with an almost six-hundred-year-old master, especially one who hadn’t started out stupid to begin with, was that he figured things out. Fast. I needed to figure some stuff out, too, or I was screwed. Only now didn’t seem like a good time, and not just because I was busy decorating a bowl in new and horrific ways.
But because of that, I thought, wincing.
Next door, something crashed, something else roared, and Gertie’s voice rang out, authoritative and loud, because this was her court and she’d obviously had enough. Of what, I didn’t know, but somebody was getting read the riot act. Since I was probably next, I sympathized.
“Try to take some water, Lady,” Rhea said softly, and attempted to press a glass into my hand.
My stomach roiled, and I pushed it away, even though my throat was on fire. Stomach acid might have accounted for some of it, but it seemed that Were blood had a slightly corrosive effect as well. Vampires probably didn’t care, as they healed almost immediately anyway, but I was feeling rough.
Very rough, I thought sickly.
But the room I was in was dim, cool and calm, yet another parlor because this place only had about a hundred of them. This one featured a smallish round table, where I was currently coughing up my guts, a big round rug, and some portraits of past Pythias on the walls. It also had a lot of delicate little chairs where people waiting to see Gertie could kick their heels until she felt like getting around to them.
People like me.
She could take her time as far as I was concerned. Rhea’s touch was soothing and the room was mostly quiet, with shouting coming from several rooms away. Gertie’s private suite appeared to be even more extensive than my own. Even better, it seemed that her heir was needed for the process, otherwise Agnes would almost certainly have been here, telling me off.
Or maybe not, I thought, as she stepped out of nothing almost on top of me.
That was on purpose—she’d said she could see in advance—and would have been startling enough, but she was also holding a knife dripping with blood. So, I think I can be forgiven for rearing back in alarm. And then spewing chunks all over her when the sudden motion hit my fragile stomach.
Well, shit.
She staggered back, strongly resembling a murder victim from all the blood. Or maybe a murderer, because she was still clutching the knife. And looking like she was planning on lunging at me with it, only Rhea got in the way.
“I think we need to calm down,” Rhea said.
“Who cares what you think?” Agnes snarled, and shoved her daughter out of the way.
I shifted the knife out of her hand, because I didn’t like the look in her eyes, causing it to clatter against the wooden floorboards of the corridor outside and to scare a couple of war mages. And, since they all seem to respond to that sort of thing the same way, they rushed in surrounded by a cloud of levitating weapons, all of which were pointed at me. And at Agnes, I guessed, because she was standing beside me.
Which was why the weapons were suddenly gone, even though I hadn’t shifted them anywhere.
The mages were unhappy about this, and started their second favorite thing: shouting. Agnes shouted back, threatening to send them wherever their weapons had gone. I moved the basin so that I could put my head down on the table, and tried not to think at all.
Until someone new joined the party.
“Just what is going on out here?” Gertie demanded, appearing in the doorway.
There was a chorus of “Ladys,” but I didn’t join in.
I felt like crap.
“I asked you a question!” Gertie said, and now the voice was closer.
After a moment, I forced open a single eye. Yes, she was looking at me. Or glaring, to be more accurate.
“I’ve had a bad day,” I told her.
“You’re about to have a worse one.” It was grim.
Yay.
But I got a reprieve, as the purple haired dynamo took a moment to strut around, doing what she did best and ordering everybody about. The war mages were instructed to find their weapons on the heavily slanted roof, because Agnes was a bitch. The gory basin was whisked away by an acolyte with an expression of disgust on her face and a bucket was brought instead. Agnes informed the boss that the matter “has been taken care of”, whatever that meant. And I found myself being hustled into Gertie’s sitting room.
Which was looking a little different than the last time I saw it.
“Redecorating?” I croaked, clutching my bucket.
“If you are going to be sick again, you are going to make sure that it lands in there,” I was told by the lady herself, and she pointed at the receptacle.
“Does it matter?” I asked, glancing around.
The place looked like a gut job to me, with huge slash marks on the walls, knocked over furniture, and a broken mirror that had dusted the carpet with a thousand glittering shards.
“Yes! I have enough to clean up,” Gertie said irritably, as glass crunched under my feet.
And then caused me to stumble and almost fall when it suddenly disappeared.
I staggered over to the sofa, while all the broken pieces jumped back together again, melted into a huge, shining slab, and slammed back into place on the wall.
“What happened?” Rhea asked, flinching a little at the nails on a chalkboard sound of a mirror reverse shattering, and causing Gertie to glance at her.
“And who is this?”
“My acolyte, remember?” I said, because Gertie had seen her before. But it had been on a very fraught night for all of us, when a different acolyte had tried to tear apart time, so I supposed she could be forgiven for not remembering.
Come to think of it, that probably explained why Rhea was so freaked out at the concept of a vampire flitting around the timeline. She was thinking of the last time someone had tried it. It didn’t make me any happier, either, but this did not seem like the time to discuss it—or anything else. Not with a whole chorus of roars, yelps and howls shredding the air from somewhere far too close for comfort.
The sound shook the crystals in the sconces that Gertie had just repaired and reaffixed to the wall, sending prisms of light scattering everywhere. I watched the little diamond shapes dance and didn’t say anything, insulated by my burning throat and churning stomach. But my acolyte clearly felt differently. Recent events also seemed to have shaken her out of her usual reticence, and she had something to say.
“What is that?”
“Moderate your tone,” Gertie snapped, also clearly out of sorts, maybe because the wallpaper she’d just repaired had a bubble in it.
“Moderate yours!” Rhea snapped back, winning her a sharp look from Gertie and a pleading one from me.
“Rhea,” I began—
Which was as far as I got, but not because of Gertie. Rhea found herself being grabbed from behind and spun around, and then roundly slapped—by her own mother. Agnes had come in behind us and obviously objected to unwanted guests being rude to the boss. Of course, letting a guest almost be eaten counted as rude, too, but I was suspending judgement because I didn’t know all the facts yet.
And because I’d done most of the eating.
I shoved my face into my bucket and just breathed for a moment, while the girls shouted at each other.
Their tempers seemed kind of similar.
I felt someone sit beside me on the sofa after a while, and looked up to see Gertie th
rough bleary eyes. “You don’t look well,” she observed.
“Been better,” I croaked.
“I did not think your kind became ill.”
I wrinkled my forehead. “My kind?”
She pulled the collar of my old-fashioned gown, which had been designed to fit in with the times, away from my neck. And then sucked in a breath. “I thought so,” she said. “But it is still hard to see. I assume this is why you have brought your acolyte with you?”
“What?”
“For the ritual to replace you.”
I had a feeling that, somewhere along the line, I had lost the thread of this conversation. Assuming I’d ever had it. “I brought her to use the library,” I said.
This appeared to confuse Gertie.
“The library? What use is that to an Undead?”
“Undead?” I glanced around sharply, because that word could mean a lot of things, and few were good. “Where?”
Gertie frowned at me some more. “Is that not what you are?”
“What?” I looked at her in confusion.
She reached over and jerked my collar open again. “You’ve been bitten!”
It took me a moment. It had been that kind of day. “Yeah, a while ago. Nothing happened,” I said, flapping at her hand, which was threatening to strangle me. And which did me no good, except to be jerked closer.
“You call this nothing?” she demanded.
“I can’t call it anything if I can’t breathe,” I croaked—uselessly, because Gertie wasn’t listening.
“You call what happened out there nothing?” she continued, flinging a hand toward the entrance hall somewhere behind us. “You’ve crossed over!”
“I have not!”
“The first Pythia ever to be careless enough to—”
She stopped.
“What do you mean, you have not?”
I wrestled with her for a second, before finally managing to jerk free. And then sat there, glaring, my throat feeling bad enough without her trying to garrote me! “Cut it out!” I said.