by Karen Chance
I told it to get a grip, and it told me no, no, no, no, and I screamed again, because it was do that or lose my mind.
And for some reason, it seemed to help.
For one, the barrage stopped, maybe because the Spartoi thought he’d got me. And for another, I could sort of think again, only all that came to mind was that my knives weren’t likely to be a big help against a guy who could walk out of a burning inferno. Among other things.
But I couldn’t let him get past me. I couldn’t let him get to my mother. And there was only one way to ensure that he didn’t. I was going to have to grab him and shift him out of here, and then try to shift back before he could kill me. Which was not sounding like fun for so very, very many reasons, including the fact that I would have to touch him, and I thought that that might just send me the rest of the way to Crazytown and—
And then Mircea walked through the far door. He strolled down the aisle like a guy looking for a good seat, despite the fact that the barrage had started up again. Half a dozen bullets hit him in quick succession, blooming bright against the white of his shirt. But he didn’t seem to notice any more than the demigod had, just held out a hand like that would stop the hail of bullets.
And then it stopped the hail of bullets, or something did. I peered around the corner in time to see the Spartoi slump over the window ledge, the gun falling from his limp hand. “You killed him,” I said in disbelief. I’d started to think that wasn’t possible.
“For the moment,” Mircea said grimly.
“What does that mean?”
“It means that these things don’t stay dead,” he said, giving the Spartoi’s body a vicious kick. “I killed the creature I chased in here, but within thirty seconds he was alive again.”
“Alive. . . You mean he was a zombie?”
“No, I mean he was alive. I just now drained him for the second time. It is virtually the only thing that works with these things—and it doesn’t work for long.”
“Then . . . then however many times we kill them, they’re just going to continue chasing her?”
“Unless you can help.” The quiet voice came from behind me. I turned to find my mother in the doorway, the mage behind her.
“This is crazy,” he told her urgently. “I told you—”
“And I told you, did I not? We can use tricks to elude them, as we did before. But they’ll keep coming. Or we can end this, now, once and for all.”
“But you weren’t there! You don’t know—”
She took his hand. “Hush now.”
He stared at her, obviously frustrated. And then he transferred that stare to me. And if looks could kill—
“Right back at you,” I said dizzily.
My mother had turned to look at him, but now those lapis eyes swung back to me. “There is little time,” she said simply. “Will you help?”
“I . . . there’s . . .” I had about a million questions, but looking into her face, I couldn’t seem to remember a single one. And a glance at the dead demigod showed that he was already stirring, flesh flowing along his body like water, jagged wounds pulling together, raw red flesh retreating, the whole turning into a seamless garment of pale olive skin. Any minute now, his heart was going to start to beat and his eyelids were going to open and . . . and I really didn’t want to be here when that happened.
I looked back at her. “What do you want me to do?”
Thirty seconds later, we were still on the Underground, still rocketing through a dark tunnel, but things looked a little different. There were plush bench seats of padded leather, posh lights overhead and shiny wood panels on the walls. And the passengers all looked like they were going to the same fancy dress party as the people in the cab.
Or they would have, if they hadn’t been shrieking in shock at seeing a group of people pop out of thin air in front of them. Or maybe it was more the fact that one of those people was mostly naked and completely dead. Again. Mircea pried his hand away from the creature’s throat, and he hit the floor like a sack of rocks.
I stared down at the man’s sightless, staring eyes, shimmering in the gaslight. They were blue. I swallowed. “What the hell is he?”
“Spartoi,” my mother confirmed. “Ares mated with one of the dragon kin long ago, and they were the result.”
“That’s why they can transform into one?”
She nodded. “Yes, but not here. The tunnel is too small; it would trap them. And without that ability, much of their power is lost.”
“That’s why you came down here, isn’t it? You knew—”
“Yes.”
“How?”
Those beautiful eyes met mine. “They have been hunting me for a long time.”
I didn’t get a chance to ask anything else, because screams and gunshots came from ahead of us. I looked up in time to see another red lightning bolt take out a connecting door a couple of cars away. I couldn’t see what was going on next door because of all the smoke, but there were more screams and more terrified people bursting through into our car. And then, over their shoulders, I got a glimpse of two more Spartoi tearing down the length of the train.
And then we were shifting again, sort of.
This time, it wasn’t so much like we went anywhere than as if the scene shifted around us. The train stayed pretty solid, except for the ads on the walls, which bloomed and faded in bright spots of color. But mostly the people changed, morphed, flowed into each other and then into new people, like they were liquid, along with the time stream barreling us along. Days, weeks, months of passengers spilled around us, flickering in and out as we were probably doing in their view as we ran forward, through space and time and back through the compartments.
My feet hurt, my body ached and I was half-convinced I had a damn concussion. And I barely noticed. I had a vague impression that I was staring around with my mouth hanging open, but I didn’t care about that, either. I’d never seen anything remotely like it.
Of course, that went for most of the stuff that had happened lately. I wondered if this was what training was like, real training, the kind I was never going to get. I thought Agnes would have liked setting me some crazy obstacle course, making me run after her, challenging me to keep up or have my ass left behind in some other place, some other time.
Only this wasn’t training; it was real. And getting left behind here wouldn’t mean an inconvenience or an embarrassing return; it would mean never returning at all.
From what I understood after all of a half minute of explanation, the Spartoi had managed to get some kind of spell on my mother that caused their state to mirror hers. That meant that they piggybacked along whenever and wherever she shifted. It also prevented her from using any of the tricks I’d seen at the party—stopping time or slowing it down—where they were concerned. She could still slow down time, but if she was immune to it, they would be, as well.
Until, presumably, she ran out of gas and they killed her.
I had no idea why they wanted to kill her, or where the kidnapper fit into all this, or much of anything else. But I knew the main thing. I knew how she planned to break their spell.
She and I weren’t using our own power to shift; we were borrowing it from the same source—the enormous well of energy left to the Pythias by Apollo. That put our magic on the same wavelength, for lack of a better term, and was how I was able to track her. My magic “felt” it whenever she used hers, and could follow it to the source.
The idea was to use that similarity to confuse the Spartoi’s spell. I was to keep up as she shifted, to stay right alongside her, until our spells merged, overlapping to the point that the piggyback spell got confused and latched on to both of them. Then we were to shift in opposite directions, ripping our spells apart in the process and hopefully destroying theirs, as well.
If we timed it right, if we did it in the middle of a shift, that should leave them in the same position I’d accidentally almost ended up in a few days ago—scattered on the winds of time
, never to be reassembled anywhere or anywhen. It wasn’t death, because these things couldn’t be killed. But it was damn close, and I’d take it.
Assuming I didn’t pass out first.
This was hard. This was really, really, goddamned hard. The shifts were so close together that it wasn’t like a series of them at all, but more like one long, continual slide back into time, one that was taking everything I had just to keep up.
It wasn’t helped by the fact that the maniacs behind us kept firing, even while we were in the middle of the shift. It didn’t look like it was doing much good—most of the spells and bullets vanished into the weird liquid time we were passing through, seemingly without connecting to anything. But not all of them.
Every so often, we were solid a split second too long and some of the barrage got through. Mostly, it hit the kidnapper’s shields, because he and Mircea were behind us at the moment. But they couldn’t shield us completely, and that left Mom and me in the line of fire more than once.
I felt a couple of bullets whiz by me, one of which took out a window somewhen and probably scared a bunch of passengers to death. Another must have been fired just as we shifted, because it raced right alongside my head as time sorted itself out, before vanishing like smoke. I didn’t care.
I didn’t care about anything, except—please, God—not falling over. But my hands were shaking and sweat was coursing down my face and I couldn’t hear anything anymore but my heart hammering in my ears. I think the only thing that kept me upright was Mircea’s hand on my arm and a healthy dose of pure rage.
Goddamnit, I was supposed to be good at this! The one thing, the only thing, that had ever come naturally to me in this whole, crazy job. Yet here I was, panting and swearing and falling through time, nothing like Mother’s elegant, effortless shifting, power boiling around her as she calmly walked ahead, as though this were nothing, just an afternoon’s stroll through the park.
And that is a Pythia, I thought, staring in awe and pride and pain and more than a little disbelief. Agnes had boasted of mother’s abilities, but I’d never understood what she meant until now. Until I saw how she made it seem so easy. How she made it seem like breathing. Commanding time, not being thrown around by it, not tripping and stumbling and almost falling as the room blurred around us.
A smooth white hand cupped my face, cool to the touch, unlike my overheated skin. Concerned lapis eyes stared into mine, and I cringed at the thought of what she must be seeing. Frazzled hair sticking to my sweaty face, filthy clothes and panicked eyes, as I fought what was rapidly becoming clear would be a losing battle.
“Almost there,” she told me softly, and I nodded, no breath to talk, nothing to say anyway, nothing that would help, at least.
Then the pace picked up, and what had been torment became impossible. I didn’t know how I was keeping up, or even if I was. I couldn’t think, couldn’t see, couldn’t even be sure that my feet were moving forward anymore because I couldn’t feel them. Days became months became years became decades, time flipping by like pages in a book, a book that was smearing and fluttering and shredding before my eyes, and I screamed in pain and fury. Because I wasn’t strong enough, because I couldn’t keep up, because I was about to fail at the thing I was supposed to be good at, and I couldn’t—
Suddenly, there was a horrible wrenching, like my body was coming apart at the seams. Only it wasn’t me. It was our magic pulling and tearing and ripping as she veered one way and I fought the current of her power to go the other. But she was so strong, so unbelievably strong, and I didn’t have anything left, and I felt myself stalling and flailing and starting to turn—
And the damn Spartoi saved me. They had started firing more wildly, sending panicked people scrambling away from them—and straight at us. It didn’t help that the crazed crowds usually disappeared before they reached us. I kept flinching back, expecting a collision, and the near panic made it impossible for me to concentrate well enough to keep shifting.
I felt myself falter, my grip on time shaking along with my concentration. And I suddenly—belatedly—realized that I didn’t have to shift away from her. All I had to do was remain stationary somewhere, and she’d shift away from me.
And then a big guy in an old-fashioned suit and a bowler hat barreled right into me, sending me sprawling. We went down in a pile of tweed and leather and outraged pink skin, and there was an umbrella in there somewhere, too, because it was stabbing me in the backside. And then Mircea pulled me up and I realized that something wonderful had happened.
We’d stopped.
Chapter Thirty-eight
I guess I passed out. Because the next thing I knew was waking up in a strange bed, in a strange room, with a strange city view outside a small balcony. But the man standing in front of the window, leaning on the open French door, was familiar. Mircea’s dark hair was blowing in a slight breeze, the same one that was ruffling the thin silk of his dressing gown as he turned his head toward me.
He didn’t say anything, and neither did I. He just walked over and sat on the edge of the bed, leaning to brush my sleep tumbled curls out of my face. “Are you cold?”
I shook my head. I wasn’t wearing anything under the comforter, but it was thick and warm except for my feet, which were sticking out of the covers. They were a little chilly, but also pink and whole and perfect, a gift from Mircea, I assumed. The rest of me felt pretty good, too; tired, but also warm and whole and clean and alive.
I decided I didn’t mind the temperature. It felt good to feel cold. It felt good to be able to feel anything.
Mircea must have thought so, too, because he pulled me in a little more, until he could rest his chin on the top of my head. I usually disliked that; there wasn’t enough hair up there to cushion the bone. But tonight . . . tonight I didn’t mind.
“Your mother was an extraordinary woman,” he murmured, after a moment.
“Hm.”
“Much like her daughter.”
I thought about that for a moment and then twisted my head around, so I could see his face. “I thought I was just . . . lucky.”
Mircea’s lips twisted. “I am not going to be allowed to forget that, am I?”
“Probably not.” At least not anytime soon.
He pulled me back against him and ran a hand through my pathetic hair. “I have never doubted you.”
“Mircea—”
“It’s true.”
“Then what was all that in the tunnel? What has been going on all week?”
He didn’t say anything for a moment, and I thought maybe he wouldn’t. Master vampires weren’t in the habit of having to explain themselves, except possibly to their own masters. And Mircea had never had one of those.
“We talked about my parents,” he said, after a moment. “A few days ago. Do you remember?”
I nodded.
“Did I ever tell you what happened to them?”
“I know what happened to your dad,” I said. “Sort of.”
Mircea’s story about his father’s death and his own near miss changed depending on the circumstances. When I was a child, he’d made it sound almost comical: crazy nobles trying to bury him alive when—surprise—he’d been cursed with vampirism more than a week before. Later, I’d heard a less amusing version, including a late-night flight barely ahead of the torch-wielding mob who had killed his father and blinded him, before leaving him six feet under.
Mircea had crawled out of his own grave and gotten away, still half blind, his newly vampire body struggling to heal itself with no food, his mind reeling from shock and horror. He’d had no master to help him, no one to go to for advice or shelter. And yet, somehow, he’d survived.
“I know all I need to know,” I told him, tilting my head back to look up at him.
His hand tightened on my arm. “No,” he said softly. “I don’t think you do.”
He drew the covers around us, probably on my account. It takes a lot to get a master cold. And then he told me
the whole story. The one I doubted he’d told too many people before.
“In 1442, the pope decided to call for a new crusade against the Ottoman Turks, who had conquered much of the Middle East by that time, and were making inroads into Europe. It was felt that someone needed to bring them to heel, and the king of Poland was elected. He had dreams of glory, but at barely twenty, little battlefield experience. He relied on the guidance of a soldier of fortune named John Hunyadi.”
I didn’t have to ask if Hunyadi was the bad guy. Mircea’s tone was the same one a devout Catholic would use to say “Satan.” “I take it you didn’t think much of him.”
Mircea’s hand ran lightly up and down my arm, causing a wave of goose bumps to chase his fingers. “Hunyadi did have military skill,” he admitted grudgingly. “But his ambitions often overruled his judgment. Such was the case when he and Ladislas—the Polish king—met with my father on their way east. Napoleon famously said that God fights on the side with the largest battalions. That was centuries later, but it fairly sums up my father’s opinion. Which is why all his diplomatic skill could not keep the horror off his face when he saw their ‘army.’ ”
“It was that bad?”
“It wasn’t an army at all. The idiots had brought a totality of fifteen thousand men with them. As my father told Hunyadi, the sultan often took that many on hunting expeditions!”
“I’m assuming this Hunyadi guy didn’t listen.”
“He informed my father that a Christian knight was worth a hundred of the sultan’s ‘rabble.’ Rabble!” Mircea’s voice was bitter. “When the Janissaries, Murad’s elite military corps, were among the best-armed, best-trained soldiers in the world. They were trained from the time they were children—Christian children whom the Turks took as devshirme, a sort of tax, on areas they conquered.”
“I wouldn’t think slaves would be all that thrilled about fighting for their masters.”