by Karen Chance
They were coming from a busker in beads and buckskin who was standing beside the platform, shaking his filthy hair and doing an enthusiastic rendition of “Proud Mary.” At least he was until Mircea thrust a bill into his hand. “Woman in a brown coat and blue dress; man in a trench. Where did they go?”
I was about to protest the bribe—not in principle, but because you never knew what seemingly little thing could alter time. And there’d been enough done to this era already. But then the hippie smiled the smile of the happily buzzed and pointed at the yawning mouth of the train tunnel.
And my protest turned into a curse.
I started toward the side of the platform and the dropoff to the tracks, but Mircea pulled me back. “I’ll go.”
“And if they shift again?”
“I’ll come back and get you.”
“And if there isn’t time?”
“I’ll be quick.”
I shook my head, hard enough to cause my wig to slide over one eye. I threw it down in annoyance. “I don’t know how the link between us works. If I get too far from them physically, I may not be able to follow if they shift again.”
“That seems unlikely. If the power is meant to retrieve the heir, it couldn’t be that restrictive.”
“I can’t risk it!”
Mircea’s brown eyes narrowed, like a man who was prepared to argue indefinitely, but I didn’t give him the chance. I kicked off my other shoe and jumped down beside the tracks, feeling the collected muck of who knew how many years squelching between my toes. And a second later, he landed lightly beside me, a scowl on his face and a penlight in his hand.
I assumed the little flashlight was for my benefit, but it didn’t help much. Neither did the work lights set into the walls here and there, which did little more than stretch the shadows. I couldn’t see squat once the brightly lit station had faded behind us.
Not that there was much to see. The tunnel itself was claustrophobically small, to the point that it seemed impossible that trains actually ran through this. It was also warm and damp, and reeked of dust and mildew. I was kind of glad I couldn’t see details. I could hear, though, and it wasn’t helping my nerves.
There were odd rumblings of trains that shook the ground under our feet and seemed to come from every direction at once. There was a weird echoing effect that threw our footsteps back at us, making it hard to listen for others up ahead. And then there were some very suspicious squeaks.
“I think there may be rats,” I said, my grip tightening on Mircea’s arm.
“At least one,” he said softly, about the time I saw the dim glow of another light bouncing off the concrete walls ahead. It was surprisingly distant, considering that we couldn’t be more than a couple of minutes behind them. But if they got far enough ahead to break the fragile connection, that lead might well become permanent.
I started to run.
And almost bumped into the kidnapper booking it from the opposite direction. I hadn’t seen him in the dark until he was right on top of us, but suddenly there he was, his blue eyes wild, his hair sticking up everywhere and his mouth open in the O of Oh, shit. He almost knocked me down with the damn suitcase, gangly legs churning up the dark as he and Mother headed back toward the platform at a dead run.
“What the—” I didn’t get a chance to finish before Mircea grabbed me around the waist and flung us at the wall.
I hit hard, bruising my knee and smashing my cheek against the filthy concrete. But I didn’t complain. Because at almost the same instant, a bolt of red lightning sizzled through the tunnel, electrifying my hair and raising gooseflesh on my skin. Goddamnit!
“They’re supposed to be dead!” I said, furious.
“Perhaps this is a different group.”
“Jonas said there were only supposed to be five!”
“Yes, we’ll have to mention that to him when we return,” Mircea said grimly, as a bunch of pissed-off demigods blew past us.
I thought there were four, not five, but I couldn’t be sure. It was hard to see anything at all with bright green afterimages leaping across my vision. And then it was impossible, when so much spell fire lit up the tunnel that it looked like a sophisticated security system had been installed in there.
Laserlike spells bounced off walls and ceiling, crisscrossing each other in a deadly web of crimson fire. They turned the small, round space into something straight out of hell, and gave me plenty of light to see that the spells weren’t the kind meant to stun. Everywhere they hit, they blackened the heavy concrete, sparked off the rails and sent a thick layer of dust from the floor billowing into the air.
Mircea cursed and pulled me behind him, which would have been fine, except that a bolt slammed into the wall just down from us a second later. It must have hit an electrical line, because a great shower of sparks spewed across the tunnel, a few flaming out against my dress. Mircea cursed again and pulled me back the other way, near the stillsmoking blast mark from the previous spell.
“Get out!” he rasped.
I stopped staring at the fireworks long enough to stare at him. “What?”
“Shift out of here! Now!”
I shook my head. “We’ve been through this. If they kill her, I’m dead anyway! Why do you think my power brought me back here?”
“I’ll deal with it!”
“You can’t! Mircea—”
He pushed me against the wall, his body shielding me, his eyes reflecting the sparks. And their expression was pretty damn scary.
“Why are you doing this?”
“Because I don’t know how to keep you safe.”
“I don’t expect you to.”
“What?” He looked at me like he thought I’d gone mad.
“Would you protect the Consul if she was here?”
“Of course not!”
“What would you do?”
“Whatever she needed—”
“You would help her.”
“Yes!”
“Then help me.”
“You are not the Consul, Cassie! She has abilities you cannot possibly—”
“—understand. I know.” And from the little I’d seen of them, I was really okay with that. “But I have abilities she doesn’t. She can survive a direct hit from one of those blasts; I can shift out of the way and miss it. It’s the same—”
“It is not the same! You are this.” He gripped my arms, hard enough to bruise. “You are flesh, soft and sweet and yielding and vulnerable. You need protection, but I can’t—”
“Mircea! They’ve been trying to kill me for three days and I’m still here.”
“Due to luck!”
I stared at him. “Then I must be the luckiest person alive!”
He just looked at me, and I’d never seen that expression on his face before, like he was really going to lose it. There was something going on here, some issue I didn’t understand. But there was no time to figure it out.
“I have to fix this,” I told him, as clearly and calmly as I could. “If you want to help me, then help me. Don’t shield me, don’t protect me, don’t bury me alive. Help me.”
He stared at me a moment longer and didn’t move. The fight was escalating and also getting farther away from us, back toward the crowded platform. And I didn’t think the Spartoi cared much how many people they killed, as long as my mother was one of them.
“Mircea, please!”
“What do you need?” It was harsh.
“To touch her. That’s all I ever needed. One second and we’re gone—all of us—and this is over.”
He nodded briefly and let me go.
I pushed off the wall and back into the corridor, trying to get a glimpse of my mother. I only needed to touch her for a second to shift her away, but I couldn’t just appear beside her. Spatial shifts required me to see where I was going, or risk ending up in a wall or a ceiling or part of a mage.
And right now, I couldn’t see shit.
Except for billowing clouds of d
ust, crisscrossing spells—and the crazy-ass kidnapper, erupting from the fray and screaming bloody murder.
He was headed straight at us, but he wasn’t running this time. Instead, he and Mom were levitating on something I couldn’t see, thanks to their flapping coats. But I felt it just fine when it slammed into my stomach, picked me up off my feet and sent me careening backward into the far reaches of the tunnel.
And now there were two of us screaming, me and the mage, as we pelted into darkness, him trying to push me off and me holding on for dear life, struggling to reach behind him, to grab her, to touch—
But either he figured out what I was doing, or he was the worst damn driver in history. Because we went weaving across the narrow space, bouncing off the sides and scraping across the ceiling, red bolts of spell fire following us into the gloom. And then he got smart and tipped over, dumping me ass-first onto the hard gravel between the tracks.
I cursed and scrambled back to my feet, about the time that a blinding radiance flooded the air. It sent wildly leaping shadows dancing around the walls, disorienting me almost as much as the deafening sound of a horn and the tracks vibrating under my feet and the dirt shimmering like gold dust in the air—
“What’s happening?” I screamed.
“Train,” the kidnapper shrieked.
I stared up at him. “Train?”
“Train!” Mircea yelled, flinging one of the Spartoi against the side of the tunnel. And then the guy’s friends leapt for Mircea and he leapt for me and I leapt for my mother—
And grabbed a handful of something soft and rubbery and gelatinous instead, completely unlike human flesh. That wasn’t surprising, because the bastard of a mage had flung a shield around the two of them and I’d grabbed a handful of that. It stretched, encasing my arms like thick latex as I tried to punch through, and Mircea tried to keep the mages from incinerating us all, and the damn kidnapper tried his best to kick me in the head.
He gave me a glancing blow on the temple, but I stubbornly held on, as the rattling around us grew worse and the horn sounded again, deafeningly close, and my hand finally closed over one of my mother’s. For a second, I stared at her and she stared back, her wide blue eyes reflecting the approaching light. But while I could feel the fingers under mine, could trace the bones of her hand, could grasp her wrist, I couldn’t actually touch her. A thin membrane of the shield still separated us, and as long as it did, I couldn’t shift—
And then I couldn’t anyway because something smacked into us with the force of a Mack truck.
We went shooting down the tunnel like we’d been fired out of a gun, bounced off a wall, hit the floor and then went tumbling head over heels over head. I had the mage’s shield in a death grip and I didn’t let go, even as it careened around the small space like a Ping-Pong ball on acid. It absorbed some of the damage, and Mircea absorbed most of the rest, throwing his body over mine until something scooped us up and carried us along like a—
Well, like a speeding train.
The train must have been pretty much automated. Because the driver had been tipped back in his seat, reading a magazine and enjoying a cup of tea. The latter was now all over his natty blue uniform as he stared in wide-eyed disbelief at the knot of yelling, fighting and kicking people rolling around in the air just outside his front window.
And then Mircea grabbed the kidnapper, getting a hand around his neck despite the shield that still encased him. I tried to remember what Mircea had said about how long it took to drain someone through a shield. But my brain was a little busy and I couldn’t remember, and then it didn’t matter anyway, because the next thing I knew, they were gone.
I ended up with my butt half on, half off some type of levitating luggage and my face smashed against the train’s front window. It gave me a perfect view of the mage dragging my mother through the narrow cabin and into the next compartment. Damn it!
I grabbed for the door leading into the driver’s cabin, but my hand slid off something hard and glasslike. It took me a second to realize that the mage had flung a shield over the front of the train, and then another second to bypass it, shifting into the cabin right on his heels. Only to have the door he’d flung open slam back and hit me in the face.
That turned out to be kind of lucky, because I staggered back against the front window, and a glance up reminded me that I’d forgotten something. Namely Mircea, who was pelting down the tunnel just ahead of the barreling locomotive. I didn’t see the Spartoi, who I really hoped were the train version of roadkill by now, but he was using vampire speed to stay out in front.
Sort of. It actually looked like he might be losing ground, which would explain the expression on his face when he turned to look at me over his shoulder. Cassandra, he mouthed, and, okay, I deserved that one.
Sorry! I mouthed back, staring frantically at the buttons and dials and thingamajigs on the driver’s console.
There were a lot of them, but none that were all lit up in red and conveniently marked STOP. And I couldn’t just shift back outside and grab him without my added weight sending both of us plunging to the tracks. I grabbed the driver instead.
“How do I stop this thing?” I demanded, only to have him turn that blank stare on me.
I shook him as Mircea slowed down or we sped up, and he slipped within inches of oblivion. But shaking didn’t do any good. So I slapped the man, which turned out to be the wrong move, because it broke his paralysis, but then he started shrieking like a little girl. I cursed inventively and stared around, out of time and ideas both, and caught sight of the lightly bobbing suitcase.
It had shifted inside with me, maybe because I’d been sitting on it at the time. It was old and worn and vaguely trunklike, like something out of another era. But the spell the mage had cast was obviously still in decent working order, making it the closest thing to a life preserver in sight.
I grabbed it under one arm, shifted outside and grabbed Mircea with the other. And after a terrifying few seconds flailing around a hairsbreadth in front of a few hundred tons of speeding metal, we landed back inside in a heap of arms and legs. And as a bonus, we managed to trip up the driver, who had been about to run into the compartment behind us.
Mircea snaked up an arm and grabbed him, jerking the guy down to eye level with less than his usual calm. “Forget,” he told him harshly, and the man suddenly stopped hyperventilating. He docilely sat back in his seat, looking bemusedly into his empty teacup, as we scrambled unsteadily to our feet.
“Sorry,” I told Mircea again, only to have him smile grimly.
“We’ll discuss it later,” he told me, somewhat ominously. “For now, where are they?”
“That way,” I said, and we ran.
Chapter Thirty-six
It should have been easy enough to spot them, but it was the holiday rush, and there had to be a couple hundred people wedged into the next car, along with bags and boxes and a guy hugging a full-sized Christmas tree. It had the whole car smelling like pine, which would have been great if the damn stuff didn’t give me hay fever. I searched the crowd for my mother, shoving branches out of my face and sneezing my head off.
“Did they shift again?” Mircea asked, as we plowed our way down the car, through the connecting doorway and into the next one. Some people were looking at us like we were crazy, because the space between sections of the train was pretty open.
I felt like telling them to try the front seat for a while.
“No.” I shook my head. “I’d have felt it.”
“You’re sure? If they shifted in the middle of all that—”
“I’m sure.” The main reason I’d left him hanging was that every nerve, every sense I had, was focused on that tenuous link with my mother. I had it in a mental death grip, prioritized ahead of everything else. There was no way she’d shift an inch and I wouldn’t know.
“But why haven’t they?” Mircea demanded. “Staying in a limited, enclosed space when they know they’re being pursued makes little
sense—”
“Unless they don’t have a choice.”
He shot me a look. “You think she’s getting tired.”
“It depends. If this is the same day as the party—”
“It is.”
“How can you be sure?”
“I could smell the alcohol on him when he passed by—the champagne you spilled.”
I always forgot: vampire senses. “Then she’s tired. In fact, she should be passed out cold by now. I don’t know how she’s still able to do anything. Taking someone else through time is exhausting, even if it’s only once. And she’s done it—”
“How tired are you?”
“I’m fine, not that it matters. It’s not like we can stop for a rest.”
“It matters,” he said, gripping my arm. “Because it determines how aggressive I need to be. I am trying to be cautious and alter this time as little as possible. But if you are nearing the end of your strength—”
“I’m okay,” I told him.
He shot me another look, but I was telling the truth. If this thing was shaping up to be a race to see who ran out of gas first, then the kidnapper was shit out of luck. I would never stop chasing her. I would fall over with a fucking aneurysm before I stopped chasing her.
“I am,” I insisted.
And I guess it must have been convincing, because Mircea nodded. “When you begin to reach exhaustion—”
“I’ll let you know.” Although I really hoped it wouldn’t come to that. I kind of didn’t want to know what Mircea’s idea of “aggressive” was. His idea of “cautious” was pissing off enough people, as we pushed, shoved and elbowed our way toward the back of the train.
I had no idea what the mage’s plan was, or even if he had one. But we finally caught sight of him in the second-to-last car, where he was trying to get the connecting door open to the final one. But that wasn’t going so well, thanks to an enraged old woman. A shopping bag lay at her feet, with shards of some kind of porcelain spilling out the top. Which might explain the umbrella he was currently taking upside the head.