Shatter the Earth

by Karen Chance

  “I think it’s more likely that he is the one doing the possessing,” Pritkin said.

  “Do I want to know what that means?”

  He reached up, and one of those surprisingly long fingered hands—the hands of a scholar instead of a warrior—traced the outline. “I think he trapped it, as the Corps sometimes does to incorporeal demons, in order to make golems. But instead of forming the spirit a body of its own—a true golem—he trapped it in part of his.”

  I stared at the hunched little thing half in disgust, half in horror. It wasn’t moving around as much as Jo, who still looked like she was trying to eat her way through Jonathan’s skin. But it was very clearly alive. “Why?”

  “Likely to allow him to more easily access its power,” Jonas said.

  “What power?”

  Pritkin regarded it soberly. “Unless I’m mistaken, that is a rahkschalt demon. A world shifter.”

  “Which means?”

  “They’re used as messengers and delivery boys in the hells, as they’re considered harmless. They’re one of the few races that can travel freely between worlds.”

  Light dawned. “So now Jonathan can, too.”

  Jonas nodded. “That would explain how Aeslinn came into contact with the Ancient Horrors. We have been assuming a traitor on the demon council, but there may have been a simpler explanation.”

  “It could still be a traitor,” Pritkin said. Because he was under no illusions whatsoever about the council.

  “In any case, perhaps with two of us being of the same mind, I can get our so-called experts to listen to me. Although it would help if you have any ideas about what the last . . . modification . . . might be?”

  That drew my attention back to the other lump, which was slightly to the left and below the purplish one. It was maybe the size of a golf ball and was a crusty greenish gray. Unlike the others, it looked old—really old. There was no face in there that I could see, and no movement. But I was pretty sure that it contained someone—or something—anyway.

  Something horrible.

  And, I realized abruptly, I really didn’t want to know what. The men went on talking, throwing out different ideas, but my brain had just reached tilt. And I guess my nervous system had, too, because a bone deep shiver tore through me, a warning to stop looking at nightmares right freaking now.

  Pritkin abruptly cut off whatever he’d been saying. “That’s enough,” he told Jonas.

  “Unfortunately, it isn’t,” the old man said. “I am sorry if this is distressing, but we have a war to fight, and understanding our opponent is half the battle. But we’ve never seen anything quite like this—”

  “Then figure it out,” Pritkin said. “But you don’t need to do that here.”

  “You’re quite right. I need to do it here. Please report to the prison wing, section 15—”

  “No.”

  “—room 28A—” Jonas cut off. “I beg your pardon?”

  “I said no. I’m staying here to guard Cassie tonight, and will be returning with her to court tomorrow, as soon as she can shift. I’ve been away too long as it is.”

  “May I remind you that we are on the eve of invasion?”

  “Yes, we are. And I have done everything humanly possible to help you prepare for that. There’s nothing more I can tell you about Aeslinn’s territory—”

  “And if something should go wrong? You are one of our leading experts on both the fey and demons alike—”

  “Who you can contact at the Pythian Court as easily as you can here.”

  “Damn it, John!” Jonas stared at him. “What has gotten into you?”

  “What has gotten into me?” Pritkin’s voice had gone soft, which was never a good sign. “That,” he gestured at the monster still slumped on the screen. “That has gotten to me. Cassie faced that thing alone because of me. She needs someone to watch her back—”

  “She has someone. A whole court full of someone’s—”

  “Old women and children! Not good enough—”

  “You didn’t seem to have a problem with it all week,” Jonas pointed out, making Pritkin flush.

  “I had a huge problem with it, but convinced myself that she’d be safer at her court than with me, if a damned fey was stalking me!”

  “Wait, what?” I said, frowning at him. “You knew you were the target, all the time?”

  “The assassin was in my room,” said the most infuriating man in the world.

  I stared at him, momentarily speechless. “Then why in the hell—”

  “I didn’t want you risking yourself, trying to save me again! I wanted you back at court and well out of it for once! But I should have known—”

  “You lied to me?”

  “—that you can’t stay out of trouble for five minutes! I send you home, and the next time I see you, what are you doing? Dragging in the man at the top of the Circle’s most wanted list and bleeding like a stuck pig!”

  “You lied to me!” I said, in disbelief. “You stayed at HQ, knowing you were being targeted, like a—like a—” My eyes suddenly widened, as the truth dawned. “You were hoping they’d try again, weren’t you? You were offering yourself up as bait—”

  “If I may interrupt?” Jonas said.

  “—while knowing damned well—did you ever think about what it would do to me, if they killed you?” I raged. “How I would feel, sitting in comfort at court, listening to people’s stupid problems, while you bled out? Did you? Or was that just irrelevant as long as the job got done? Goddamnit!” I yelled, feeling my blood pressure skyrocket. “I thought we’d been through this! I thought you understood—”

  I broke off for a second, because fury had closed my throat and I couldn’t talk. I just stared at him accusingly, and watched him flush to his hairline, as he damned well might! I thought we’d gotten past the whole ‘your life is more valuable than mine’ bullcrap after I chased his soul through time for fifteen hundred years! But I guessed not.

  What the fuck?

  For a moment, we just sat there and breathed heavily at each other. But then Pritkin did the last thing I’d expected. Something that the contrary bastard almost never did, because he loved to argue.

  He agreed with me.

  “You’re right.”

  I blinked, caught off guard. “What?”

  “You’re right,” he repeated. “Every word of it. What do you think I was telling myself, whilst watching you drag in that damned mage? Exhausted, covered in blood, and alone, when I should have been with you? But I wasn’t, and not only because I was wasting time training men when the Corps has hundreds of others to do that—”

  “Not that know Faerie like you do,” Jonas said, because with age does not always come wisdom.

  “—but because I had warned you off, forbidden you to go back there, to that time and place, and accost a fey warrior. I wanted to protect you so much that I put you in danger. I know you; I should have known you’d do it regardless. It was the only way to find out how he got in and to discover whether anyone was with him. But instead of offering to accompany you—”

  “John,” Jonas tried again.

  “—I practically ensured that you would go back, and that you’d do it alone!”

  “It’s—it’s okay,” I said, my brain still trying to process the fact that I might have just won an argument. And with a guy who usually had the defense prepared. But he didn’t look very prepared right now. He looked dismayed, guilty and angry—no, more than angry. He looked furious, but not at me, I realized.

  He was furious . . . with himself.

  And that somehow destroyed all my anger at him. I instantly went from outraged to wanting to hug him, so I did, and he hugged me back as if it was the last time he’d ever have the chance. Because he’d also been afraid, I realized. Hell, if his grip was anything to go on, he still was, although everything had turned out all right.

  “I didn’t go back to fight him,” I said, rubbing his back. “That’s why I needed the suit. I
just had an idea that maybe I was dealing with a time shifter, and wanted to find out if it was true. I was there to observe, not fight.”

  Pritkin pulled back to look at me. It was surprisingly sardonic. “And your plans always turn out as expected.”

  I bristled a little at that, but there wasn’t much heat behind it this time.

  The guy had a point.

  “This will never happen again,” he promised. “The next time you decide to chase a madman through time, I’ll be with you.”

  Which . . . is when Jonas made a mistake.

  “The Pythia has plenty of defenders,” he said, flatly. “And would have more if she accepted a full contingent of war mages at her court, as she should do. Meanwhile, your presence is required here.”

  “Not when Cassie is in danger!”

  “She’s going to be in a great deal more danger if our enemies win,” Jonas pointed out. “All of us are—”

  “All of us haven’t been through what she has! Not you, not me, not anyone!”

  Jonas looked slightly surprised by the ferocity in those words. “I am aware,” he began, more mildly.

  “Are you? The fact that she’s still alive after this summer is a miracle, a testament to her strength, but everyone has limits. In less than six months, she’s evaded more assassins than I can count, including some of the Circle’s own—”

  “Under my predecessor’s watch,” Jonas reminded him. “Which was one of the reasons we replaced him—”

  “—fought two gods, killed two gods, rescued her court when you would have let them burn—”

  “In order not to risk her, as you very well—”

  “Why?” Pritkin interrupted savagely. “To risk her instead on that ridiculous mission into Faerie? You sent her to scout out an area that even the fey wouldn’t enter, and almost got her killed in the process! And I was stupid enough to say nothing, to merely go along to try to protect her. But that is becoming increasingly difficult as this war heads toward end game, and she is not going to be the sacrifice play, do you understand? She is not going to be the price for your victory!”

  The owl eyes narrowed. “I have never expected her to be. The Pythia is precious to all of—”

  “Bollocks!” It was practically a roar, and Jonas—who was one of the more unruffled figures I knew—blinked.

  For Pritkin’s part, his eyes suddenly glowed neon. “I’ve seen how the Circle deals with Pythias,” he spat. “How it uses them up, tosses them aside, and brings in another young woman to exploit—”

  “That’s enough!”

  “I agree! It is enough! Cassie won you back your position. She has gained you victory after victory. She’s done everything asked of her and then some. It’s enough!”

  “That is not your call.”

  “I’m making it mine. She is not going to be another Agnes—”

  Jonas flushed puce. “Damn you! You dare—”

  “Yes, I dare. I would dare a great deal to avoid burying a second Pythia inside a year!”

  “And you think I wouldn’t?” The blue eyes were now slits. Not a great sign in one of the most powerful mages on Earth.

  But Pritkin met them steadily, nonetheless.

  “If it gave you a win? Yes, I think you wouldn’t.”

  For a moment, it felt like time itself held its breath. I certainly did, freezing in place. And wondering how we somehow went from snow fights to this.

  “May I remind you,” Jonas said, in the flattest voice I’d ever heard from him, “that you work for the Corps, and that your loyalty—”

  “Is to the woman I pledged myself to protect,” Pritkin growled. “The one I have endangered by my silence and my absence. No more. And in case it needs to be said, I quit.”

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Pritkin slashed a hand across the mirror, scattering Jonas’s image and blurring the features horribly. The rosy cheeks smeared into bloody lines, the blue eyes popped, and the open mouth elongated into grimace territory. And then abruptly winked out.

  “Um,” I said.

  Pritkin shot me a glance. His eyes were still glowing, and his color was high. But he also looked a little abashed. “Sorry,” he said curtly. “That . . . has been building for a while.”

  “You’re sure you’re not just upset about today?”

  That won me another look, this time incredulous. “You think I made a mistake?”

  “No. I mean, I don’t know. I want you back with me, you know that. But . . .”

  “But?”

  “We’re at war. The Corps needs you—”

  “You need me.”

  “—and I don’t want you to do anything you might regret.”

  “What I regret is being away this long. I knew damned well where I needed to be, and yet I let Jonas talk me into playing his game.” He took my hand and grabbed the thermos of coffee. “Come.”

  I didn’t know where we were going, but I didn’t question it. It turned out to be a window in the bedroom, which faced the cliffside and should have been just decorative, but which let out onto a little path. We followed the trail around the side of the building and up a set of steps carved into stone. And then, after a longer than expected climb through the rocky hillside, we emerged onto a natural plateau.

  I was gasping by the time we reached the top, and Pritkin shot me a glance. “How many runs have you done since I left?”

  I wondered if running from the fey in old Romania counted. If so, the answer was one. “Plenty,” I told him.

  That got me a look, but it was true.

  One was plenty for me.

  But this . . . was almost worth it. I could still see the crossroads below, if I looked down from the very edge. But we were really high now, not three stories up, but more like eight, maybe nine.

  It left me with a completely different view than before. There were still a lot of people down there, milling about, but it was darker now. I guessed the Corps had the lights on some kind of timer, to better simulate the normal progression of a day for those staying long term. The stars had been out when we first arrived, but the late afternoon lighting had still been in effect, giving everything a weird, twilight glow.

  That was no longer the case. It was full-on evening now, with the blue-black darkness lit up by silver moonlight from above and golden firelight from below, the latter cascading through the windows of numerous pubs and restaurants. The snow glittering everywhere was correspondingly either silver white or golden, depending on which light source was touching it, and silver and gold tinted flakes drifted down from above or swirled like whirling dervishes in the air.

  It was beautiful.

  But that was only half of the story. Because Pritkin pulled me back against him, using the cliff face as a backrest and allowing me to do the same to him. And pointed up.

  It was like being inside a giant snow globe, I thought, staring up at the sky. The trees were now just dark silhouettes against the night, like curtains framing a stage. The real star was the moon, riding a raft of pale clouds, the stars twinkling brightly around her.

  For a while, we just sat there, drinking coffee from the thermos cup and soaking in the view. It was almost silent this far up, the crowd a distant murmur that might easily have been mistaken for the wind through the trees. And since I couldn’t see them anymore, it was easy to imagine that they weren’t there at all, and that Pritkin and I had somehow been transported to a desert hideaway.

  If only, I thought, staring upward.

  “I came here after my wife died,” Pritkin told me, after a few minutes. “I had some idea that work would help me deal with it. It didn’t, but during the time it took me to find that out, I stayed here.”

  I looked at him over my shoulder. “In the same suite?”

  He nodded. “The place was run by Tobias’s father in those days, and it was . . . less genteel. It was known as a hard-drinking establishment, and the rooms were a bit rough and ready. The sort of place they tossed you when you passed out unde
r a table.”

  I nodded.

  “Most people stayed here for a few hours to a few days, depending on how bad the hangover was. I moved in and just didn’t leave. Tobias ran the rooming house part of things, but he didn’t ask any questions: why I wasn’t going home at night, why I was working double shifts every day, why I looked like a freshly dug up corpse. None of it.”

  I didn’t say anything. Pritkin rarely talked about his wife, which was still an extremely sore subject. Which wasn’t too surprising since his incubus abilities had drained her of life, leaving her a dried-up husk in his arms on their wedding night, and traumatized the hell out of him.

  From what I understood, it had mostly been her fault. She was part demon, and had initiated the feedback loop that constitutes demon sex, hoping that the power they generated together would greatly increase her own. And thus, gain her respect in the hells, something that her family had never had.

  That in itself wouldn’t have been so bad, at least by demon standards, but she hadn’t told Pritkin first. Leaving him with no idea what she’d planned or any way to stop it when things went wrong. And they went very wrong. She had so little power that the feedback loop drained her dry before it ever had a chance to give anything back.

  Pritkin had blamed himself, of course. And his father, who she had told, presumably to find out if his half incubus son had inherited the family gift. Rosier had agreed to support her because he’d wanted Pritkin back in the fold, and thought that a powerful demon wife who loved the hells might do the trick. What it had done instead was to cause a massive clusterfuck that resulted in Pritkin being banished to Earth under a draconian interdict that had been lifted only recently.

  It had also hurt him, far more than Rosier had ever understood.

  “No, Tobias didn’t ask anything,” Pritkin said, his hands moving up and down my arms to keep me warm, because we hadn’t thought to bring a blanket. “He just gave me the keys, brought up dinner every night, and left me alone. Told me that if I ever wanted to talk, he was here.”

  “He was a good friend.”

  “That was just it—he wasn’t. We knew each other—I had trained one of his brothers—but we weren’t close. He had never wanted to be a war mage. Refused to even take the tests to see if he had the aptitude. Said that he wanted to cook and run this place when his father passed, and for everyone to leave him alone. Eventually, they did.”