Shatter the Earth

by Karen Chance

  Jonathan should have looked vulnerable; most people would have in that situation, especially most people who weren’t much healthier looking than a concentration camp victim. His ribs were clearly visible, along with too-sharp elbows and knees, and ridiculously long toes which he was currently picking at. His cheeks were sunken, and his skin had an unhealthy, sallow cast to it. It did not compliment the greasy blond hair or the dark circles under his eyes.

  And that wasn’t even counting the pulverized mess that Pritkin had made out of his face.

  Yeah, Jonathan should have looked pretty damned pathetic.

  He didn’t.

  Maybe because he didn’t appear to be worried about his current predicament, which worried me. He had the air of a man waiting at a bus stop for a ride that was overdue, or somebody in line at McDonald’s wishing they’d hire more cashiers. Not frightened or apprehensive or anything that one would expect from someone in the Corps’ less-than-gentle hands, where “accidents” had been known to happen.

  The Corps was on the side of the angels, but they weren’t very angelic and everybody knew it.

  Yet Jonathan just sat there, looking vaguely bored.

  Unlike his guardians. The war mages were tense, and one of them had a hand hovering just over his potion belt, like he was trying to decide which concoction he’d like to use to end our problem. I found myself wishing that he’d slip up, make a mistake, have a fit and do it, which said a lot about my own state of mind, I wasn’t sure why.

  Okay, that was a lie; I knew exactly why.

  Jonathan wasn’t looking around at the moment, or at anything other than his overgrown cuticles. And I wouldn’t have been able to see his eyes from here anyway, especially with all that hair in his face. But I could see them in my mind, almost colorless, mad as a hatter’s—and hungry.

  Jonas had told me once that the crazy bastard was almost a thousand years old. That was something like five times the average lifespan for a mage, and at least four for the longest-lived ones, the kind who ended up on the news like humans did who passed a hundred. Yet Jonathan looked thirty, maybe thirty-five.

  It was an unhealthy thirty-five, sure, but there were no crows’ feet at the corners of those strange eyes, no sagging jowls, and no gray in the hair. Jonathan appeared ageless, but it wasn’t because of a glamourie. It was because of magic.

  Magical humans lived longer than normal ones because their bodies were like a hybrid car: they received energy both from the food they ate as well as from the magic they gleaned from the world around them. They were like fleshy talismans, which was one reason they didn’t fight effectively in Faerie: once the magic they had in their bodies dried up, they couldn’t obtain any more to replace it. Earth fed them; Faerie didn’t.

  But Earth wasn’t the only thing feeding Jonathan.

  Centuries ago, he’d started the popular dark mage habit of stealing other people’s magic and using it to enhance his own. It had worked, giving him more power and an enhanced lifespan, but it came with a price—and I don’t mean just madness. But rather the same one that every drug user eventually discovers: the high didn’t last.

  According to Jonas, Jonathan’s need for magic had grown year by year, especially once he surpassed his normal lifetime and was basically living off of nothing else. His body should have disintegrated into powder by now, even his bones gone cracked and yellow and brittle. Yet, there he was, picking at his damned toes.

  And using an absolute crap ton of magic to stay that way.

  So, yeah, I thought he was telling the truth when he’d said he didn’t plan to kill me. He’d come back for me, all right, but to capture not to kill. He’d started grafting souls onto his body, like adding apps onto a phone, and I was supposed to be his next upgrade. There to add to his power, but with none of my own, and no say in what mine was used for. Or any way to stop the process or even to die and make the torture end.

  I wondered if Jo had enough mind left to understand what had happened to her. I really hoped not. I’d had to kill her twice now—once her body and once her soul, or most of it—but I’d taken no pleasure in it. I’d even felt a little sorry for her, ostracized and excluded from the world despite her talent, simply because necromancy was feared by the magical community. But I had been relieved when she was gone; even in life, she’d been more than a little crazy.

  But not like that.

  Jesus, not like that!

  “Cassie.” That was Pritkin’s voice, and it sounded a little calmer.

  I turned back to see that he looked it, too. At least, he was no longer fritzing like an overloaded circuit. He didn’t look much happier, however, when he took a chair, put it in front of me, and straddled the back.

  “Talk to me.”

  “I probably should have mentioned this sooner,” I said, “but I didn’t want to worry you.”

  “Worry me.” It was flat.

  “And because we already knew that the Black Circle wanted me dead, so it didn’t seem like news . . .”

  I trailed off, because Jonas wasn’t looking too pleased, either. He’d acquired his own chair, although he sat in it the usual way. “Don’t mind me,” he said. “I’m just here to get caught up.”

  “You already know part of it,” I said. “You told it to me. Jonathan might have started out as a man, but he’s a monster now, driven by nothing but the unending lust for power. You said he has to have it, more and more each year, that his life literally depends on it.”

  Jonas nodded. “It is safe to say that magic—stolen magic—is the only thing holding him together, at this point.”

  “But for how long? I’ve heard people say that dark mages get ‘high’ on magic, like it’s a drug.”

  “It reacts much the same way,” Jonas agreed, glancing at Pritkin, who was just staring at me, like he’d like to bore a hole in my head and let all my secrets pour out.

  Only he wouldn’t like that.

  He wouldn’t like that at all.

  “It not only gives them an energy boost, it also produces a very obvious high, in sufficient quantities,” Jonas added.

  “Yeah. So, what if it acts like a drug in other ways, too? Dorina—Mircea’s daughter—seemed to think so. She came to see me a month ago, after that senate meeting that the covens crashed.”

  Jonas’s eyebrows went up. “Memorable evening.”

  Yeah, you could call it that. Trying to get everybody on board for this invasion had not been easy, especially when half the parties involved hated the other half. But we’d managed, partly because of a power play that had left me so drained that I passed out. And when I woke up—

  I’d found a dangerous predator sitting on my bed.

  She’d looked like her mother, although I hadn’t known that then. But the resemblance was striking. Same liquid dark eyes, same lovely features, same dark brown hair, although hers was straight and cut short.

  It hadn’t affected her beauty.

  “She wanted to ask me for a favor,” I said. “To leave Jonathan to her, or if I caught him, to bring him back alive so that she could have him.”

  “Strange request,” Jonas said mildly.

  I shook my head. “Not for a dhampir. They’re . . . touchy. Anyway, she wanted to give him to her lover, Louis-Cesare. He’s a senate member—”

  “We know who he is!” Pritkin said, suddenly speaking up. “What does he have to do with Jonathan?”

  “He was trapped by him,” I said simply, not beating around the bush because neither man was in the mood for it. “Vampires can draw power from their families, so Jonathan used him like a battery for a while, draining him almost to the point of death, day after day, to get the life magic he needed. Then, overnight, Louis-Cesare’s family would replenish him, healing him, bringing him back from the brink. Only to have Jonathan come in and do it all over again the next day.”

  Pritkin said a bad word, but Jonas nodded. He’d been at the meeting where some of that had come out. “That would explain why we have a formal
request from the senate to be allowed to ‘question’ the mage, should we ever capture him,” Jonas said. “Somehow, I do not think they plan to return him in one piece.”

  “You haven’t explained what all this has to do with you,” Pritkin snapped, staying on point.

  Yeah. Been trying to avoid that, I thought. But there was no chance of it now.

  “Jonathan captured Louis-Cesare a while ago,” I said. “I don’t know exactly when, but I got the impression that it might be a few centuries back. Yet he was already using enough magic to need to drain a master vampire, over and over again, to obtain it. I don’t know how much that is, but I’m thinking . . . a lot?”

  Jonas nodded. “Safe to say.”

  “Well, there you go.”

  “There we go—what?” Pritkin demanded, which said a lot about how upset he still was. Normally, he was a couple steps ahead of me, whenever I tried to explain anything, but he was too angry to think clearly.

  Which meant I was going to have to spell it out.

  “What if illicit magic really is like a drug? And, like a drug, a person develops first a taste for it, then a dependency, and then an ever-increasing need? One that, eventually, they can’t sustain anymore?”

  “Ah,” Jonas said. “You think he’s afraid that, one day, even all the Black Circle’s reserves won’t be enough for his needs.”

  I nodded. “Unless, of course, he comes up with a new source of energy, one far more potent than any other on Earth. The remnant of an ancient god, but still bright and alive after all these years. The Pythian power would be practically inexhaustible, at least for a human’s needs—”

  “But he has that already, does he not? With the acolyte, Jo, or what remains of her?”

  I shook my head. “That’s not how the power works. You don’t get an all access pass. An acolyte could let him channel a small stream of it, yes, but only a Pythia could really open the floodgates and let it all—”

  I cut off because Pritkin had just thrown his chair across the room.

  The two-way mirror shattered, and he was through the opening a second later, almost before I registered what had happened.

  Three huge war mages were quicker on the draw, and jumped him before he’d gotten halfway across the room, but he sent them flying with a spell that I guessed you weren’t supposed to use on your fellow mages. Because the yellow light abruptly went orange and then red when more mages joined the party and started fighting back. Pritkin broke free again—how I didn’t see—but the pause had given the other corpsmen a chance to get a barrier up between him and Jonathan.

  He slammed into it, and then slapped it with both hands, and if looks could kill . . .

  They wouldn’t have bothered Jonathan, I thought, who was still looking vaguely bored. He lolled at Pritkin drunkenly, but without any real fear. I guessed when you had other people’s faces sticking out of your stomach, your threshold for that sort of thing changes.

  Mine, on the other hand, had just about been reached.

  I walked to the door like a normal person, which several more mages were guarding. I hadn’t seen them from the inside, but I guessed that Pritkin had known they’d be there, which was why he’d taken an alternate route. They let Jonas and me by with no trouble, however, and I reentered the interrogation chamber, or whatever it was.

  Pritkin was being dragged backwards by—I shit you not—something like twelve mages. They couldn’t all get a hand on him, but I guess they were there for the principle. Jonas went to rescue his commander, but I went in the other direction.

  And stopped in front of the shimmering barrier that was now guarding Jonathan.

  “That fey you sent,” I said. “The assassin. You didn’t mean him for me.”

  Jonathan looked surprised. “No, no, course not. Came back for you, yes, once I knew where you’d be. So hard to find. Hop, hop, hop all over the timeline, never in one place for long. But I knew you’d be there then. Watched the whole thing from afar.”

  He frowned. “Didn’t expect two of you.”

  “And the first time? Who was the fey after then?”

  “Why, the mage of course.” His eyes took in Pritkin, who was still buried under a pile of Corpsmen. “Angry mage.”

  “Why him? What did you want with him?”

  Jonathan’s colorless eyes met mine, and he finally found something interesting, after all. Because he burst out laughing, and laughed, and laughed, and laughed some more, to the point that it turned into a cackle. “Still don’t see. Can’t see, won’t see—”

  “Can’t see what?”

  “There must be three.”

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  I took a nap.

  There was nothing else to do since Pritkin had gotten thrown in the brig to cool down and I couldn’t shift back to court. And probably wouldn’t be able to until tomorrow sometime. And since nobody had thought to offer me a room, maybe because there weren’t any extras right now, I ended up back in the hobbit hole.

  It didn’t look much better than it had when I’d fought a dark mage here, but that had been days ago now, and somebody had picked the place up a little. And changed the sheets on the bed, although they hadn’t gone to the extremes of actually making it up. Because let’s not get crazy here.

  But the sheet changing must have been at least a day ago, because they smelled like Pritkin. Fresh and clean, but with an overlay of magic and gunpowder, his signature scent. I shucked my pretty new coat, crawled in, wadded up a pillow and fell off the face of the Earth.

  I awoke an indeterminate amount of time later, with gummy eyes and a head full of whispers, and the impression that I hadn’t rested very well. I got up, feeling hungry and rumpled and sweaty and faintly ill. My body wasn’t happy with the care it had been receiving lately, and didn’t mind letting me know it.

  The mirror in the bathroom showed me back a cheerful, perfectly made up, well rested face, which was starting to seem kind of obscene at this point. I frowned at myself, and still looked perky. I scowled and looked like a constipated Kewpie doll.

  I gave up and decided that a shower might help.

  And discovered that the one in Pritkin’s bathroom was better than it looked. The water pressure was hard enough to count as a decent massage, and the temperature was hot. Plus, the pounding that my sore muscles were taking was helping to distract from the whispers, which were getting louder.

  They were pissed at Jonas. He wanted to question Jonathan, rather than kill him, and had promised that the mad mage would be kept drugged so that he couldn’t shift away. Normally, that would have been enough for me, since we needed all the info we could get. But Pritkin wasn’t happy and Mircea—

  Mircea wanted blood.

  A lot of it. Red and hot and dripping down his chin after he finished feasting on his enemy. Literally.

  It was extremely strange to have him and Pritkin agree on anything, but on the subject of Jonathan, they were not only simpatico, they were practically twins. It was . . . kind of creepy. And scary, with the voice in my head getting louder by the minute.

  Not that Mircea was usually so bloodthirsty, being one of the more even-tempered master vamps I knew. But he wasn’t emotionally stable right now, and it seemed like questioning Jonathan had done something to the tentative equilibrium we’d established. It was beginning to feel like I was possessed by a furious demon, trying to rip, to claw, to destroy his enemies—and mine.

  Because we were one, we were unified, and we were furiously angry at the arbitrary decision by the Circle to take our prisoner. His blood was ours; his death ours. We’d bled to capture him, risked our life to drag him back. How dare they take our prize from us? How dare they command us to do anything? We would teach them what respect meant, and afterward, we would teach him, over days, what pain really—

  I sank down onto my haunches, hands over my ears, but that didn’t help when the voice was coming from the inside. Mircea was strong mentally—so damned strong! I hadn’t realized just how m
uch until now, as the demon howled and raged. Until I started to be afraid that, pretty soon, I was going to be howling and raging right along with him.

  “It will break you,” I heard Rhea’s worried voice say, and for the first time, I thought she might be right.

  Which was why I shut the connection down hard. So much so that I actually felt it, like a rubber band twanging in my head. I hadn’t severed it; I couldn’t afford that, and neither could Mircea. But I had stomped on it, like putting a foot on a water hose. Turning the flood of emotions into a trickle and allowing me to breathe again.

  God, that was better!

  That was so much better!

  I staggered back to my feet and put soapy hands on the wall to steady me. I needed all the help I could get, because other thoughts were trying to muscle into the now echoing quiet. Thoughts of Jonathan, of the war, of heads on torsos where they had no business being, endlessly screaming—

  Until I shut them down, too. Because screw this, screw all of this! For a moment, I just stood there and tried not to think at all.

  It worked surprisingly well. The shower was tiled, I guess because the spray would have turned the thing into a mudslide every time you tried to bathe otherwise, and they were somehow still cool. They made a nice contrast with the water, and felt good against my too hot skin when I rested my aching head on them.

  I liked this shower, I decided.

  I might just live in here a while.

  And then somebody joined me.

  I looked blearily over my shoulder. “They let you out of jail already?”

  “Wasn’t in jail,” Pritkin said. “I was ‘briefly detained’.”

  “Ah.” It wasn’t a quippy comeback, but in my defense, a naked war mage pressed up against your back is quite a distraction.

  That was even more true when he commandeered the washcloth, and began sliding a soapy rag all over my battered body. The glamourie still covered my face, but the rest of me wasn’t looking so hot right now. I expected a lecture about that, but didn’t get one. I didn’t get any conversation at all, in fact, which was nice.