by Karen Chance
But for that, we had to find it first.
I sat quietly at the table, probably looking much the same as a moment before, had there been anyone watching. But instead of trembling in fear, I was extending my senses, all of them, old and new. Searching for . . .
I wasn’t sure.
But I found something; hell, I found everything.
I was sitting all alone in a darkened room, yet the house suddenly glowed with life all around me. I couldn’t see other beings, at least not in the usual way. But I could feel them, as bright columns of heat and light against my mental vision.
They were everywhere: a cat in the kitchen, curled up near the stove, its little limbs twitching as it chased some small creature in its dreams; a line of birds on the roof, their feathers fluffed out, their bodies as close as possible to the hot air that blew out of the chimneys; a dog snuffling around the garbage cans behind a tasteful hedge out front, until it rousted out a rat and took off after it down the street.
But the brightest lights were the humans, glowing like beacons in the night. My senses widened and the house unfolded like an origami structure all around me. I had to keep my eyes closed, or the physical vision interfered with the mental, but I could feel my face turning in different directions, completely enthralled.
I could see the war mages that guarded the court prowling around on their patrols, with boiling masses of magical energy following them like clouds. They left trails of magic behind them everywhere they went, creating glowing pathways all over the house and gardens. And before one path completely faded out, another mage came by, renewing it again.
Leaving a solid wall of protection around the much smaller lights inside.
Most of them were sleeping, their little bodies curled up under layers of blankets, their breathing low and even. Young initiates in the creche on this floor, I assumed. All of them grouped together in their dorm-like beds.
Slightly larger columns of light were bunked up in rooms of three or four, scattered all over the house. Initiates still, but old enough to warrant a bit more privacy, a bit more room to call their own. They were mostly asleep, too, although some were awake and giggling with each other under the covers. I didn’t know why—
Until, suddenly, I did. Because Mircea was also a mentalist, something I’d long known, although it was shocking how easily his abilities dipped into those girls’ minds, retrieving the wanted information without any real effort at all. Three of them were perusing a fashion magazine under the covers, defying their curfew with a spelled candle, while a story below, another was reading a book of pulp fiction and sighing over the hunky hero.
The older girls presumably had their own rooms, but they weren’t in them. They were clustered together in Gertie’s suite for some reason, because she wasn’t asleep, either. Although somebody probably wished she was.
“—my house, my rules.”
The usually loud, almost strident voice came weakly to my ears from this far away, even with vamped up hearing. But I could hear her. And focusing on one particular subject seemed to enhance my abilities, because the Gertie-shaped column of light suddenly came into much better focus.
She didn’t look happy, from what I could tell. And neither was the voice that answered her. “Your house, your responsibility!”
It was a guttural voice, almost too much so to understand. But that wasn’t the problem. The problem was where it was coming from.
I tensed up, thinking that I might have just found my attacker, because Gertie appeared to be addressing open air. But then I noticed that her chin was tilted upward slightly, and my mental eye followed her line of sight. And widened, because not one, but two Weres were suspended in mid-air, their bodies almost touching the ceiling and backlit by the chandelier, which is why I hadn’t immediately noticed them.
That and the fact that I didn’t expect to see them levitating around like two huge, furry balloons!
They didn’t look like they’d expected it, either, and were snarling and pawing at the air, almost running in place. And going nowhere. But exactly why they weren’t, I couldn’t tell.
And then I got a repeat of the telephoto lens aspect of VampVision. I widened my focus, trying to see what was holding them up, but instead of getting a better view that way, I was sent rocketing ahead, through walls and stairs and more walls. Until it felt like I was suddenly present in that room, the ghostly sketches of the furnishings dimmed by the glowing bodies all around me.
Two of which Gertie was holding up through the Pythian power.
I didn’t know how—I guess we hadn’t gotten to that lesson yet—but I could see it clearly: glimmering, golden striations radiating out from her shoulders, almost like wings. Or, to be more accurate, since they had the two Weres by the throats, like extra hands threatening to choke them. But not enough to prevent speech, unfortunately.
“We hold you responsible, Pythia! Turn the bitch over or—”
“Or what?” Gertie asked, sounding genuinely curious. “You’ve already set the entire local population of vampires against you. Now you threaten a fellow Pythia—”
“That was no Pythia!” the larger of the Weres snarled. “I have a missing piece in my throat to testify to that!”
The other Were snarled and snapped in agreement, which appeared to be boring Gertie.
“You came to me for advice,” she said flatly. “Here it is. Go make your peace with the vampires. It was your people who violated the agreement, and your people who will suffer for it if you don’t back down off some of that stiff-necked pride—”
She was interrupted by twin roars of outrage, which were both cut off at the same moment. Probably because the Pythian power had just tightened, like a noose around their necks. Gertie gave them a minute, allowing them to feel the uselessness of their thrashing, and the sudden lack of blood flow to the brain.
Not that they seemed to have much to begin with, but they quieted down.
“You are also to leave my visitor alone,” Gertie continued mildly. “As she has demonstrated, she is perfectly capable of defending herself from sudden attacks, but I would also be quite . . . annoyed . . . at any violation of my hospitality—"
“Easy to say when the Corpsmen crowd the hallway outside!” the larger Were snarled.
“Them?” Gertie sounded surprised. “They’re window dressing. I protect the court myself. You should remember that.”
And then they were gone.
I didn’t try to see where she’d shifted them; I didn’t need a wild flight over London courtesy of strange new abilities that I didn’t even understand. I needed to find my assailant.
But I wasn’t going to do it this way.
“There was nothing,” Rhea said, coming back into the bedroom. She sounded out of breath, like she’d run all the way back up here. “The wards show no incursions, Lady, of any kind.”
Yeah, I should have assumed that. Otherwise, alarms would have been shrieking and war mages would have been swarming and Gertie would have been yelling. Instead, now that the Weres had gone, the mages who had clustered outside her rooms were going back to their routes; the acolytes were streaming up the stairs to their rooms; and Gertie was pouring herself a much-deserved nightcap.
Soon, the house would be dark and quiet, as everyone settled in for the night.
That was good.
I had an errand to run.
Chapter Twenty-Two
The great library of the Pythian Court sprawled across the entire basement floor of the grand old mansion, although it gave the impression that it dated a lot further back than a few hundred years. The light was dim, with just a pale wash spilling down the stairs from the house above, which was hardly any help at all since Rhea and I had had to come down three flights to get here. Guess electricity hadn’t made it to the basement, either, huh? I thought, wondering why we hadn’t brought a lantern.
I was also kind of wondering why we were here. It had sounded good upstairs: get some idea about what had attac
ked me, assuming I wasn’t just imagining things, or get info on Lover’s Knot and get the hell out of here! Either way worked for me. But now . . .
I wasn’t really feeling it now.
The light was just enough to illuminate a section of golden sandstone spread out underfoot, with what looked like ancient chisel marks still evident in places. Matching columns supported the ceiling, giving the place a temple sort of vibe, a feeling that grew as Rhea and I went further down the steps. I couldn’t see much, but the room felt big, a huge, echoing space with water trickling somewhere in the distance, like a fountain.
And it smelled . . . odd.
It wasn’t the musty odor I’d have expected from a basement, or the crumbly old book scent of an antique library. In fact, it seemed to be constantly changing. One second, I thought I detected some sort of exotic incense or spice; the next, it was the dry, dusty air off a desert that tickled my nose; followed by a cool, fresh greenness, like a garden full of flowers just after dawn.
The merry-go-round of scents made me pause at the end of the stairs and peer into the darkness. But all I saw was a jumbled mass of strange shapes, rising out of the gloom. They weren’t moving, so I didn’t, either, just held onto the wall while my eyes finished adjusting.
“Lady?” Rhea’s voice sounded confused, and I realized that I’d thrown an arm over the space in front of her, like a mother protecting a child in a car. Which was stupid, because she knew this place better than I did! But there was something that had me pausing on a step anyway.
After a summer full of terrors, I’d learned to trust my gut, and my gut wasn’t happy.
“Lady, is there . . . a problem?”
“I don’t know yet,” I said. “Stay here.”
She stayed there. I moved down another step, trying not to trip on the hem of the scratchy lace gown Rhea had lent me. And to identify some weird, hulking shapes in the gloom, which didn’t look like anything I’d ever encountered, human or otherwise. And which finally resolved themselves—
Into a bunch of old Victorian display cases.
Okay, I thought.
Hadn’t expected that.
They reminded me of the ones stuffed into the spare bedrooms and storage areas upstairs, along with the rest of the discarded furniture. Some were big, some were small, some had flat glass tops like coffee tables, others had rounded coverings like deli cases. A few even had strange, custom made covers, with towers that looked like bird cages on either end, or great glass teepees, because the Victorians collected some crazy shit.
According to my old governess, who had lived through the era, the cases could contain basically anything, from elaborate African masks to Chinese lacquerware, from European stamp collections to brightly colored butterflies, from ancient potsherds to eighteenth century painted fans. The main thing had been to one-up the neighbors, no matter the cost, which was why some social climbers even bought Egyptian mummies to unwrap at “mummy parties,” looking for jewelry that might have been buried with the corpse. And if there wasn’t any, they could just sell the remains on to artists, who made a fashionable “mummy brown” pigment out of them.
The Victorians were weird.
Of course, this was the Edwardian period, when people were getting rid of that tacky old stuff. Except for the Pythian Court, it seemed. I didn’t see any mummy cases stacked around, but who could tell? The place was packed.
“Those are some of the treasures given to the Pythias through the millennia,” Rhea explained, still obediently on the step behind me.
I glanced over my shoulder. “All these were gifts?”
She nodded. “Most were given in gratitude for a helpful reading, or out of respect. Others . . . well, the waiting list to see the Pythia was often so long that some sought to queue-jump by giving gifts to the temple.”
“And they were accepted?”
“Of course.” She looked slightly shocked. “A gift cannot be refused. It would be considered . . .”
“Sacrilegious?”
“Discourteous. Usually the offerings were gold or silver, or grain and wine for the temple staff in ancient times. But many more precious things were given by petitioners who wanted to make an impression. The outer room of the library is a museum of sorts, of the most interesting of these gifts.”
“Wait, did you say outer room?” I asked, because this thing alone felt like it ought to be larger than the house upstairs.
“Yes, the library is quite extensive,” Rhea said proudly. “You can see some of the halls to the reading rooms around the periphery.”
I assumed that was a joke, because I could barely see my hand in front of my face. But then VampVision helpfully clicked on, despite the fact that I hadn’t asked it to. And it didn’t have a problem with the dark. I could suddenly see a huge round room with a bunch of display cases clustered under a high ceiling, with a circle of columns standing guard around the outside.
I could see something else, too.
I didn’t know what was in those cases, but it sure as hell wasn’t stamps.
Many were as dark as the room, quiet and still. But a few glowed with light in my mind’s eye, spilling out of the glass and moving over the floor, columns and walls. It lit up a bunch of wide, square doorways under the colonnade—the halls that Rhea had talked about, I guessed. And large pieces of statuary, some broken, some gleaming whole and perfect in the low light, scattered here or there.
It looked like the museum was run by King Midas, because half the statuary wasn’t made out of marble. It gleamed a dull silver or, in a few cases, pure gold in the strange light, and must have been worth a fortune. But that wasn’t what caught my eye.
In fact, nothing the light showed me was more interesting than the light itself.
Most of the lit-up cases cast abstract shapes around the room, making it look like a seventies’ disco if there had been one that preferred sepia tones. Only they were less strobing the darkness than sluggishly moving around it, like the 2-D blobs that old lava lamps cast on a wall. That would have been weird enough, but some were doing something else, too, something I couldn’t see clearly until I went down another step.
And saw actual images, here or there, among the moving blobs. Because some of the cases were doing more than just putting on a light show. They were splashing the darkness with what looked like pieces of old-fashioned newsreels.
Really old.
A couple of Greek hoplites clashed swords on a pillar for an instant, the ring of metal on metal coming faintly to my ears; a pair of lovers on the floor clasped each other in a passionate embrace, while a torch-lit city glimmered darkly behind them; and several half naked gladiators wrestled on the ceiling, neither seemingly able to overcome the other.
I went down another step, confused but fascinated, and the images flooded with color, like that scene in The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy enters Munchkin land. They also sped up, going from slow motion to regular speed, which along with the color change, made them look much more real. Frighteningly so.
One of the gladiators picked up a knife off the ground and slashed the other’s throat, the arc of crimson blood causing me to flinch back, because it looked 3-D; a soldier with a spear jabbed at some kind of tentacled monster before being picked up and literally ripped in two, his head still screaming even as his torso was cast aside; a terribly old woman, perhaps a Pythia, sat under a tree, her face as gnarled as the rough old bark behind her, from what I could see of it under a deep hood. Until she suddenly looked up, meeting my eyes with empty bloody sockets, because hers had been gouged out.
“There must be three,” she said, cackling, as I stumbled back a step.
My heel hit a stair, causing me to sit down abruptly, and something about that seemed to alert the room that it had a visitor. Many of the cases that had been dark suddenly lit up, causing dozens of new scenes to bloom across every available surface. It was like watching a few hundred TVs switch on all at once, each tuned to different station.
And
, this time, the visuals were accompanied by surround sound.
“Lady?” Rhea’s concerned voice was distant, almost inaudible, and was immediately swallowed up by all the screaming.
Because the gladiators had given way to a burning city, a volcano spewing death in the background, ash flooding the air thick enough to make me gag. Women clutched their children and fled across a section of pillars, although I couldn’t tell if that was from the same scene or not. Meanwhile the floor had become a vast ocean, the churning waves wild enough to make me dizzy, and to cause me to clutch the stairs beneath me for balance.
It didn’t help.
It was like being inside a kaleidoscope of constantly changing colors and patterns, sounds and smells. Until I made the mistake of lingering on a single image a little too long. And, suddenly, I was somewhere else.
An ancient alleyway grew up around me, all terracotta brick buildings, dirt and flies. A gang of raggedy children with olive skin, masses of dark curls, and bright, mischievous eyes were playing outside a tiny temple that had been squashed in between an apartment block and a food stall. In front of it, some toga clad men were trying to kill a sheep on a small altar, only it wasn’t going well.
The sheep was struggling, wall-eyed and panicked, and sprayed urine all over one of the finely dressed ladies accompanying the men. The resulting commotion allowed the street kids to steal some sausages from the food stall, and I swear I could smell the sizzling fat. Along with the viscera from the now slaughtered sheep, its blood running down the altar stones to stain the street, and the sweat off the sausage vendor as he rushed past, chasing the little thieves with a club.
The image faded, but there was no respite, because there were plenty more to take its place. The ship I found myself on lurched and overturned, throwing me into the freezing waves. Lightening flashed, thunder boomed, and I heard the roar of the ocean as it closed over my head. And felt something huge and tentacle-like curl around my ankle, before jerking me down.