by Karen Chance
“And then there was you.”
Gertie nodded. Her hands stilled and she looked up, watching the storm clouds roll over the sky, hiding the watery sun. “This was the last day,” she told me. “The last one before they came, two of them, senior acolytes with no relationship to me at all, walking down the beach. I still remember seeing them from the window upstairs, the way their robes billowed out in the breeze. They still used those Grecian type things in those days, made of finely woven silk. They flowed like banners in the wind.”
“And they weren’t so easily fooled,” I guessed. Not that it took much of one.
She had become Pythia, after all.
“No,” Gertie said, watching the possibly brain damaged dog now. It was chasing its stumpy tale, very unsuccessfully, but it seemed happy. “They told grandmother that they’d let the family know the results soon, but she acted like it was a foregone conclusion as soon as they left. That’s why she made me this,” Gertie gestured about with the knife, “that very night, sitting at the table in the kitchen.”
“Made . . . what?” I asked, because I still didn’t understand.
But in typical Gertie fashion, she answered the question I hadn’t asked, not the one I had.
“It changes you, you see? This position, this throne.” She snorted. “Throne. It’s a servant’s job, Cassie, never let them tell you otherwise. And maybe those are the best bits, when you’re getting your hands dirty, when you’re on the chase, when you feel alive. Not when you’re sitting in some monstrosity of a chair, lecturing fools who ought to know better.”
It was my turn to sit back against the house, the tray of seafood on my lap, a rough stone wall behind my head, and stare up at the churning sky. I saw faces in the clouds, so many of them, all the people I’d met and loved and, in some cases, lost over the past summer. It felt like I’d lived a lifetime in half a year, the sum total of the time that I’d been Pythia, and maybe I had. I certainly didn’t feel like the old Cassie anymore, and I was still changing. Yesterday proved that.
But into what?
The breeze off the ocean was cool, and I felt a sudden shiver go down my spine. I got up, put the tray down, and walked over to the other side of the courtyard. The dog had stopped chasing its tail, and was now busy with a clam that it had somehow filched from the pail without us seeing. I watched its pink tongue work the white and black shell, and then squatted down to scratch it behind the ears.
You’re smarter than I am, I thought. Forget torturing yourself with metaphysical crap, and concentrate on the real issues, like dinner. My stomach grumbled as if in agreement, and I looked down at it in annoyance. You just ate! I reminded it.
It grumbled again in reply.
“Miss one meal and it gets jetlagged,” I told Fido. “Like it doesn’t know when mealtime is anymore, and thinks it’s supposed to eat constantly.”
Fido looked like he thought that was a good idea. He also looked, and felt, unbelievably real. I could see the individual hairs on his back standing up, whenever my hand got too close to his prize. Like I could feel the chill in the wind off the water, smell the sea, hear the soft sounds of breaking waves on the beach. Yet this place had an eerie quality to it as well, nothing I could put my finger on, more of a feeling . . .
As if, despite the softly moving leaves and churning sky, time stood still.
I blinked, and looked around again—with other senses this time. Not that it helped. The Pythian power was quiescent here, and my new, weird vampire abilities didn’t work at all. But something told me that I was right.
It felt like someone had done a Jim Croce, and trapped time in a bottle. Like this whole place was a dandelion caught in one of those little see-through paperweights, forever beautiful, forever unchanging. Or like the visions I sometimes received, when touching something very old, only those were usually—
I blinked again, light finally dawning.
“You’re a touch clairvoyant,” I said to Gertie, who had gone back to shucking dinner.
“Well, obviously.”
“And your grandmother?”
“Was as well. It runs in the family.”
I walked back over and sat down. The bench felt strong and solid, and I could feel the silky wood beneath my fingertips, any splinters having long since been worn down by the weather and a generation or two of butts. But it wasn’t just the realness here that was unusual; it was the peacefulness.
The visions I usually received were horror stories. Traumatic events that had etched themselves into objects, like grooves on a record, which could be played back by anyone with the right set of equipment. Like those last night, which I assumed was why Gertie had brought me here.
Touch clairvoyance didn’t usually trouble me much, because I wasn’t very sensitive; some people had to wear gloves everywhere, just to keep from going mad. And because most of the items I touched hadn’t had a chance to absorb anything. A comb was a comb; a glass was a glass, nothing more.
But what if the comb had once belonged to Helen of Troy? Or if the glass had been the chalice that poisoned Alexander the Great? I might have received something from those all right, and last night, I’d been standing in a storehouse full of such items.
But that shouldn’t have mattered, since I hadn’t touched anything.
“I thought it was just painful events that imprinted,” I said, as the dog came sniffing about, hoping for another clam.
Gertie picked up the pail and sat it on the end of the bench.
“When it’s done by accident, yes,” she agreed. “It requires extreme emotion, which is often tragically induced, I’m sorry to say. But this,” she waved the knife around some more. “Wasn’t an accident.”
“Your grandmother made this?” I hadn’t known that was possible.
She nodded. “She was a powerful witch who had just lost her son, and now she was losing me, too. She had emotion to spare.”
We sat there in silence for a moment, Gertie watching the clouds, and me watching her. The Pythian throne exacted a price from everyone, and it was often high. Whether in the form of a shortened life, because of the toll of using the power of a god in a human body, or of broken family ties, or of the constant risk of assassination—there was always something. And, weirdly enough, the power often seemed to settle on the people who wanted it the least, making the price that much steeper.
But, somehow, I didn’t think that was the point that Gertie was trying to make.
Unfortunately, I didn’t know what was. But there was something. She wasn’t the type to just sit quietly, watching the sky, unless she was waiting for me to catch up.
But to what?
What had she said, back in the bedroom? That the first and the third attacks at least were linked? But that didn’t seem likely. The first attack, by the Were, had been because I smelled like a vamp, thanks to Mircea’s spell. But downstairs . . .
Why would vampire abilities help me to see something that was only visible to my clairvoyance? And which shouldn’t have been visible even there, since I hadn’t touched anything? Or had I?
Was a mental touch the same as a physical one? I wondered. I didn’t know, because I didn’t have mental gifts when I wasn’t borrowing them from Mircea. But with them . . . it had sort of felt like my mind had brushed over items in the room, like ghostly fingers. Had that been enough to make their stories visible?
Because if so . . .
“I’m not just borrowing Mircea’s abilities, am I?” I asked slowly. “I’m . . . merging them . . . with my own, creating something new. A touch telepath without the touch.”
Gertie nodded. “The Pythian power always uses the abilities of its host, whatever they are, to further its mission. By taking on this vampire’s powers, you have given it a whole new skill set to play with, and it is busy exploring it.”
I pondered that for a minute.
And then I almost laughed, because what a freaking joke! A master vampire plus a Pythia equals what? A schizophrenic
clairvoyant afraid of her own shadow?
Typical.
“The challenge for you,” Gertie continued, “at least until you manage to get this spell removed, is to find equilibrium again. You must control your new abilities, or they will control you.”
“Yeah, but how do I—” I began, only to be cut off by the sound of alarm bells ringing in my head. Bells I’d heard before, damn it!
My power used to fling me around the timeline, throwing me at anything threating it. But, lately, it had switched to a new method: a clanging alarm in my head, shrieking a warning. One that was so loud it threatened my sanity!
“It seems your vampire is not done playing Pythia,” Gertie said, confirming my suspicions.
I abruptly stood up, and she grabbed my arm. “Remember, he may be a master vampire, but you are Pythia. His power will bend to yours.”
It’ll be the first time, I thought grimly, and shifted.
Chapter Twenty-Five
It was Romania again, of course. But not back at the torture palace, as I’d half expected. Instead, I materialized in a thick wood in what appeared to be the middle of the night, because I couldn’t see a damned thing!
Which was why I immediately tripped over a tree root.
I caught myself before I broke a nose, adding a few new bruises to the collection, then stood back up and looked around. My eyes slowly adjusted, which didn’t help much, then flicked over to VampVision, which did. But even then, all I saw was a gibbous moon combing silver fingers through the forest, but highlighting nothing of interest because there was nothing to see.
Smell, on the other hand, was a completely different story.
A wave of scent hit my nose, all at once, that was almost overwhelming. I staggered back against a tree trunk and held on, because the sensory overload was making me dizzy. Or something worse, I thought, not sure what was happening.
My enhanced eyes could clearly see the little glade I’d landed in, with motes of moonlight filtering down like falling stars. In fact, vamp eyesight picked up all kids of little details that even night vision goggles would have missed: a rabbit surprised by a hawk, judging by the tracks that stopped abruptly in the dirt, and borne aloft, but leaving traces of warm blood behind that I could read like a book; a spider’s web strung with dew or rain, glittering like a diamond necklace between two trees; the tiny, gleaming eyes of a bird, peering at me out of its nest, its yellow plumage so bright that it was startling. But my nose—my nose was detecting . . . more.
It was almost like having a second set of eyes, I realized. I could literally see the scent trails left by animals and birds as they scurried through the underbrush, or darted across the open spaces, eager to get back under cover. And not just as vague clouds of mist.
I watched a ghost deer slowly pick its way out of the undergrowth, a shimmering silver stag with horns that I could see as easily as I could the dark leaves on the bushes behind it. It looked like it was made out of moonlight, and disappeared in the areas where the moonbeams striped its body. Only to reappear on the other side, as if birthed anew.
And it wasn’t the only ghostly presence.
The little glade was teeming with life, everything from translucent caterpillars crawling along a branch, to ethereal squirrels chasing each other around a tree; from spectral birds swooping through the air, what looked like hundreds of them as the ones in the nest came and went, over and over to feed their baby, creating a starburst of silver striations in the air, to a pale snake slithering right under my feet. I pulled back, but of course, it wasn’t there. It hadn’t been there for—
A week, I thought, realizing that my new nose could “see” through time. The dimmer shapes in the glade were scent shadows of things that had come by longer ago, their outlines like fading ghosts. The brighter ones had passed more recently, including a set of footprints that glowed so brightly they were practically neon, because their owner had just been here.
Mircea, I thought, staring at them, and wondering why he was barefoot.
But I still didn’t move. Too many weird things had been happening lately, courtesy of my new blended senses, and this was a step too far. I needed a moment to process, to understand, but I didn’t understand, not anything!
I watched the ghost deer, caught up in wonder—and no little confusion. How was it here? Yes, maybe Mircea’s nose could pick up its scent, but I’d never heard of vampires seeing ghostly images of past events! The closest that I had heard of were people known as Hounds, vampires with super sensitive noses who could almost move around with their eyes closed.
It was said that they also carried a catalogue in their heads, the smells of thousands of things, maybe tens of thousands. And that they could kind of “see” backwards in time, some a week, the most gifted maybe two or more, detecting past events from tiny motes of scent left behind. But Mircea wasn’t a Hound—and neither was I!
I didn’t know what a deer smelled like. Or a snake or a bird, for that matter. I doubted that there was an animal on Earth that I could identify by scent alone. Okay, maybe a skunk, but that was it. So even if Mircea’s abilities were boosting mine, it shouldn’t matter: I shouldn’t know what I was smelling!
Yet I did.
The silver footprints were glowing on the ground, clear and bright, yet I still didn’t follow them. Gertie had figured out that Mircea and I were not just borrowing abilities but blending them, even before I had, but what if it didn’t end there? Because Mircea was a master vampire, meaning that he controlled a large family of other vamps, both the ones he had Sired and the ones he’d acquired from other masters.
And some of them were Hounds.
Was I drawing from their abilities, too? I didn’t know, because I didn’t know anything, and I doubted that anybody else did. Other Pythias didn’t do this kind of thing! They stayed in their lane, learned their craft, and kept the Pythian power in line at the same time!
But I hadn’t done that. Not deliberately; in fact, I hadn’t done a damned thing. But when Mircea put that spell on me . . . yeah. He probably did open up, not just his own abilities for my power to play with, but those of everyone else connected to him as well.
Mircea might only be able to draw power from his family, not abilities, but the Pythian power—who knew what it could do? It had originally belonged to a god, before Apollo shaved it off and gave to the Pythias at Delphi. And, over time, it had developed its own personality, its own unique way of looking at things.
And, right now, it was at freaking Disneyland!
I closed my eyes, concentrated, and gave my power a stern talking to, although I doubted that it understood. We had a hard time communicating, since it didn’t seem to think at all like a human and I didn’t think at all like a god. And nothing I’d learned over the last month had helped with that, since the other Pythias didn’t understand it, either.
But when I opened my eyes, things did seem a little better. The vision animals were still there, but blurred and less distinct. I mentally stuffed my new abilities back into a trunk and slammed the lid, and it got a lot better. I still glimpsed things occasionally, out of the side of my eyes, but for the most part, the forest was dark again.
I breathed a sincere sigh of relief, and finally started off after Mircea, not only because I had to get him out of here before he trashed the timeline, but also because he was the only one who could end this! He needed to get this spell off me, right now, before my power learned any new fun little tricks. And blew my mind, possibly literally, in the process!
But finding him was easier said than done, not least because I was barefoot, too.
Of course, I was, I thought savagely. I was supposed to be in bed! Not picking my way through a damned prickly forest, stumbling over roots and stubbing my toes on fallen logs, not that I’d be able to feel my bruised digits for too much longer since it was also freezing!
I finally figured out to step on top of his larger footprints to avoid any more pitfalls, and started making good time. Enough
that it was only a couple of minutes before the forest gave way to a large clearing, with a segment of dirt road passing from tree line to tree line along one side of a small village. The houses were small, log-cabin-like things with white plastered walls, rough wooden doors, and high thatched roofs, almost like they were wearing a version of the local nobility’s tall, fur hats.
There were some animal pens scattered about, but they were quiet, and no smoke threaded the night from the houses with chimneys. It looked like everyone had gone to bed a while ago. A single goat bleated a question to me as I passed his pen, a frog croaked somewhere nearby, and a pig turned over in its wallow of mud to show me a fat, hairy belly. But other than that, nothing moved.
Not even a man, suffused by a cloud of Mircea’s warm, masculine scent, standing by a house on the edge of the settlement.
He was peering in the gap between some closed shutters, still as only a vampire can be. He wasn’t drawing attention to himself, wasn’t even breathing as far as I could tell. But it was still not good, and not just because he’d come here again, on his own this time. But because of what he was wearing.
Which was not Romanian standard attire!
He had on a pair of modern sleep pants in royal blue and a matching robe. His hair was disheveled, the robe was open enough to show a stripe of muscular chest, and his feet were, indeed, bare. He looked like he’d also just rolled out of bed.
I paused, wondering what the hell, and that was a second too long. Because I guess he’d smelled me, too. The next second, a hard hand was over my mouth and I was being dragged back into the shadows of the forest.
I’d have protested more, but it saved me the trouble of doing the same thing to him.
“What are you doing here?” he demanded, when he finally let me go.
“What am I doing here?” I repeated incredulously. “What are you, and dressed like that? Have you lost it, like completely? Because I need to know—”