Embrace the Night cp-3

by Karen Chance

  "Why would the Circle want her, then?"

  He shrugged. "Beats me. Unless she was privy to important information of some kind."

  I shook my head. "Tami doesn't know anything like that."

  "But she knows someone," Pritkin pointed out. At my bewildered look, he sighed. "The Circle doesn't know where you are—the fact that they were willing to put a steep bounty on your head says as much. Perhaps they are attempting to lure you into coming to them."

  "You think they took her because of me?" The sandwich, which hadn't been great to begin with, was suddenly tasteless.

  "It's possible," Nick agreed, warming to his buddy's suggestion. "Half the Council was in attendance when you flashed in, told off the Consul, seduced Mircea and stole Tomas out from under her nose."

  "It didn't happen like that!" I said, appalled. And it hadn't. The Consul had been in the middle of torturing a friend of mine to death when I made a desperate attempt to rescue him. It had worked, a fact that still amazed me, but for a while there, I'd been in serious jeopardy—not to mention scared out of my mind.

  Nick shrugged. "Well, that's the story that's been going around."

  "If they are trying to persuade you to try another foolhardy rescue, they would need to find someone you would consider worth the effort," Pritkin pointed out. "But Tomas remains in Faerie, and is therefore unreachable. Your parents, as I understand it, are deceased, and your childhood friends are vampires protected by the Senate." He thought for a moment. "Or ghosts. But even the Circle can't harm the dead."

  For a minute, I just stood there, blinking stupidly. What did it say about my life, when even my enemies had trouble finding anyone close to me? I hadn't seen Tami in seven years. Had it really been that long since I'd had a friend vulnerable enough to act as hostage to fate? I guess it had. Except for Tomas, and that was anything but a reassuring thought. I vividly remembered the sickening twist in my stomach when I'd realized why he had been scheduled for such a horrible and demeaning death, maybe because I was suddenly experiencing it all over again.

  The Senate had had a lot of reasons for wanting Tomas dead, but the execution had been made a public spectacle mainly in the hope that I would come after him. And I had, right into the middle of a room half filled with their allies from the Silver Circle. Who had apparently been paying attention to the lesson. Had they immediately started looking for a replacement for Tomas? Had I doomed Tami the moment I freed him?

  "If the Circle has her, can you find out?" I asked Nick.

  "I can try," he said slowly, apparently just realizing that this might be a sensitive subject. "But if they want you to come after her, surely they'll publicize the fact that they have her."

  "Not necessarily."

  "But—"

  "Whatever memo they sent out about Tomas, I didn't get. I only stumbled over him by chance, after the execution had already begun." He'd still been alive because he was a vampire, and not easy to kill. Tami didn't have that advantage.

  "Be that as it may," Nick said seriously, "the Council was given an up-close view of the kind of power the Pythia wields. They aren't likely to forget it. If they are setting you up, they'll take precautions. Which would make any attempt to rescue her extremely—"

  "You aren't going to rescue her." That, of course, was Pritkin.

  "Not without some idea where she is," I agreed. When I'd gone after Tomas, the Senate had exploded a null bomb so I couldn't just shift in, grab him, and shift out. It was a good guess that the Circle had their own stash of the nasty things, waiting to ensure that any rescue attempt I made ended with me being the one needing rescuing. If I was going to do this, I needed a plan. And forming one required knowing where she was.

  "I'll do what I can," Nick promised. "But about the Codex, I still say we ought to check with Saleh."

  "Who's Saleh?" I asked, trying to keep the desperation out of my voice.

  "It's too risky!" The glare Pritkin sent Nick would've melted glass.

  "I'm Pythia," I reminded him. "Breathing is risky."

  "Saleh deals in information. Esoteric, hard-to-get, valuable information," Nick informed me, despite Pritkin's steadily reddening face. "The problem is his price."

  "I can come up with the money," I said, thinking about Billy and roulette wheels and big payoffs.

  "He doesn't deal in money," Pritkin snapped, cutting off whatever Nick had been about to say. "Only in favors. And you don't want to risk owing him one!"

  "I'll decide that!"

  "We could at least talk to him," Nick offered mildly. I kept hoping his low-key attitude would rub off on his buddy, but so far no luck.

  "If he knows something, I'll get it," the pixie said, fingering her tiny sword. It would have sounded comical, except that I'd seen what the thing could do.

  Nick shook his head. "If we make him angry, we'll never get anything out of him."

  "The fewer who go, the better," I added. "Most people don't like to talk in front of a crowd." Especially if one of them is waving a sword in his face.

  Pritkin looked like he was about to explode. "Did you hear nothing I said? The Codex is likely useless for your purposes. And I am not taking you near that piece of scum!"

  "You don't have to take me anywhere," I told him impatiently. "I'll take myself."

  "You're not going." It sounded final.

  "I already know his name," I pointed out. "How hard do you think it would be for Billy to locate him?"

  "Do you have any idea what he could demand? He'll try to trick you—"

  "Then it's a good thing we'll be along to make sure he doesn't," Nick said smoothly. He cocked a sandy eyebrow at me. "If you'll permit the escort?"

  I glanced at Pritkin's face, which was bordering on purple, and sighed. Until I got some training in defense, a bodyguard or two was pretty much a necessity. Besides, I wasn't sure how to get rid of him. I said okay, even knowing I'd probably regret it.

  Of course I was right.

  Chapter 8

  The room would have been elegant if it hadn't been for all the blood. The apartment's tasteful gold and cream interior clashed with the panorama of the Vegas Strip outside, but the view was less of a decor problem than the brown rivulets that had run down the embossed wallpaper and coagulated on the nice buff carpet. There was no body in sight, but there didn't need to be. No one could have lost that much blood and lived. Not even something not entirely human.

  My dress had turned to eerie twilight, with twisted black branches clasping a harvest moon like bony fingers. It was creepy as hell, and fit my mood perfectly. I glanced longingly back at the foyer, but I couldn't cut and run when this had been my idea. The only good thing was that I'd managed to leave the pixie behind. I wondered if she'd figured a way out of the file drawer yet.

  I reluctantly followed Pritkin through the wrecked living room while Nick stayed behind to check things out. We moved gingerly down a hallway, trying to dodge the worst of the blood. It wasn't easy. By the time I managed it, I'd decided that the victim must have taken at least a few of his attackers with him. No single body could have possibly bled that much.

  Sure enough, the door at the end of the hall was ajar due to the corpse lying half out of it. Or, to be more precise, part of a corpse. The top half was several feet away from the remainder, and I didn't see a right arm at all. Of course, I wasn't looking too hard.

  I carefully stepped over what was left of the body and immediately spotted the missing arm. It was affixed to the wall inside the door, courtesy of a large axe that had severed it at the shoulder. The arm hung by the remains of a sleeve that may once have been blue but was now a stiff purple mess.

  Swallowing hard, I stared around, sweat already forming on my upper lip. The air-conditioning wasn't on, and despite an occasional breeze through a shattered window, it had to be ninety degrees in the apartment. But that wasn't the reason I was perspiring.

  The rays of midafternoon sunlight seemed thicker than usual, clouded with dust and what I realized af
ter a moment were a couple hundred flies. They were hovering over what at first appeared to be a random mass of body parts atop a king-sized bed, but which I finally identified as the corpse of a man. To put it nicely, it wasn't fresh. I'm no expert, but I seriously doubted that the newly dead would look like a fleshy balloon about to erupt with fetid gases and decay. The sight was gruesome enough that it took me a minute to notice that he had skin the color of an after-dinner mint, a chalky blue green.

  "Djinn," Pritkin said curtly, before I could ask. "Do you see him?"

  I looked at him incredulously. "He's a little hard to miss."

  "The spirit!"

  I shook my head. If there was a ghost on the premises, he was keeping real quiet. Or maybe he'd passed out from the stink of whatever was seeping out of a gash in the djinn's side. At least the flies seemed to like it; about a hundred had congregated there in a working black mound. I gagged hoarsely and tried to breathe through my mouth. It didn't help.

  "Careful, Cass—you look about as green as he does," Billy commented. "Tell the mage that the only ghost around here is me, and let's get outta here. This place is giving me the creeps."

  I swallowed hard. "Do you sense anything?" If anybody could round up a freaked-out ghost, it was Billy.

  "No, but I'll check around, just to be sure. Sometimes the new ones hide." He doesn't get generous very often, so I must have really looked bad.

  "Thanks." I started edging toward the door, intending to catch a breath of comparatively sweet-smelling smog, assuming I could get a living room window open. But Nick was in the way.

  I hadn't seen him come in, and he startled me. I gave a yelp and pulled back so hard that I would have fallen if Pritkin hadn't caught me. "I doubt he's here," he said curtly, setting me back on my feet, "even if part of him survived. He'd be after the murderer."

  "What could a ghost do to anyone?" Nick scoffed.

  Pritkin and I exchanged a glance. He'd seen firsthand the damage a couple of pissed-off ghosts could do. But he didn't mention it. "I'm going to check the rest of the apartment," he said instead, and left.

  "He may be the Corps' best demon hunter," Nick said, scowling after his friend, "but I'll bet you know more about ghosts. Saleh could have left one, right?" He looked from me to the body, but it didn't answer. That wasn't too surprising, as it no longer had a head.

  "I don't know." I'd never met a djinn before, but I assumed that the same laws governed them as ruled other non-human magical creatures, none of whom left ghosts. Of course, neither do most people. It's actually a pretty rare condition all the way around, so whatever information this one had carried into the great beyond was likely to stay there. But I didn't feel up to giving a long explanation at the moment. "Billy's gone to take a look around. If there's anything left of him, he'll find it."

  "Anything left? He's either a ghost or he isn't!" Nick seemed a little stressed, with a vein throbbing insistently beside his right eye. He looked like the office type to me; maybe fieldwork didn't agree with him, either.

  "It's not that simple," I explained. "Not all ghosts are permanent. Some spirits linger around their bodies for a while before accepting things and moving on."

  "How long?"

  "A few hours, maybe a few days. No more than a week, unless they're planning to stick around for the long haul."

  "Based on the condition of the body, he couldn't have died more than four days ago. By your calculations, his spirit could still be here."

  "Maybe. But I don't sense anything."

  "Try harder," Nick urged. "He's no longer in a position to make demands. If you can contact him, he may be willing to tell us something."

  "If he's here, Billy will find him. If he isn't—" I shrugged. "I don't do anything to attract ghosts, so I can't ‘try harder. They just tend to show up when I'm around."

  "We can't afford to stay much longer." Nick spoke quietly, but there was a warning note in his voice that I didn't like. It suddenly occurred to me to wonder why the place wasn't overrun with war mages. It was their job to investigate murders in the supernatural community, and there looked to be enough bodies here to occupy them for a while. I'd just spied a foot—of a much more human golden brown—sticking out from behind the bed. I didn't look to see if it was still attached to anything.

  "How long before anyone else shows up?" I asked uneasily. Pritkin and his fellow mages weren't exactly on good terms, and I would just as soon miss the reunion.

  "There's no way to know. But Saleh was under interdict by the Council." Nick saw my expression. "It's like parole," he explained. "And when he doesn't show up for his weekly meeting, someone will be sent to check on him."

  "Crap." I started for the door, but Nick grabbed me.

  "What if you were to touch the corpse itself? Would that make for a stronger connection?"

  I stared at him in horror. "I'm not touching that thing!" The very idea made my skin crawl.

  "What about something he owned, then?" Before I could stop him, Nick crossed the room to tug at the dead man's shirt. I think he intended to rip a piece of fabric off for me, but the dead flesh peeled away with the cloth, flaking off the bone like a well-done fish. The shirt gaped open where he'd grasped it, giving me a glimpse of a belly that moved on its own. When I realized I was seeing maggots teeming beneath the skin, I gagged and almost lost it.

  "That's it. I'm done." I staggered through the door and bumped into Pritkin coming up the hallway. "Is there a bathroom?"

  "Two doors down to your left. There's no one in there."

  For a second, I didn't know what he meant. There were only three of us along on this crazy errand to interrogate a dead man—unless you counted Billy, and he hadn't needed to use the facilities in quite a while. Then I realized that he was implying that the bathroom was free of corpses. I got a mental image of the bloated body behind me, choked and fled.

  The dress seemed to like the bathroom better than the bedroom-turned-morgue. The mirror reflected back to me a hesitant pale rose, like the sky just before dawn. But although I stood over the sink for a long minute, trying not to heave up lunch, the sun didn't rise. I didn't blame it.

  I'd just finished washing my face and hands, trying to get what felt like a greasy film off them, when a fine mist floated up from the drain on a cold silver glow. It resolved itself into a face, wavering in front of the mirror like a mirage made out of steam. It was vague and indistinct, not almost solid the way I usually see ghosts. I blinked at it, but it didn't go away. "Is it safe?" a tremulous voice demanded.

  "Uh," I said stupidly. There really was no good answer. On a few memorable occasions in the past, I'd encountered spirits who weren't yet aware that they were dead. And no one ever appreciated being brought up to speed.

  The misty eyes started moving around the bathroom. They detached from the rest of the head to float off, poking into things. One slipped under the door, and I winced, only too aware of what was coming. A few seconds later, the mouth opened in shock, but no words came out

  "I know it's bad," I babbled, "but you're going to a better place."

  The sightless head turned in my direction. "I'm a demon," it snarled. "I don't think so."

  Okay, he had a point. The other eye returned from looking out the window and settled in the middle of his forehead. It gave him a weird Cyclops vibe, but under the circumstances, I didn't think that worth pointing out. "Who did this?"

  "Don't you know?" I asked, surprised.

  "I was asleep!" he said, sounding outraged. "I heard someone break in, got halfway out of bed, and then the lights went out." Permanently, I thought but didn't say. The eye focused on my face, really seeing me, for the first time. "And who the hell are you?"

  "Just visiting," I said, edging toward the door.

  "Not so fast." The face reappeared in my path. The wandering eye caught up with the other one and there was some jostling around while they fought each other for forehead space. When they finally settled, he looked at me accusingly. "You can see me!"<
br />
  "I'm clairvoyant."

  "Good. Then tell me who did this. Someone is gonna pay!"

  I had a sudden idea. "Maybe we can work something out," I offered.

  "Whaddya mean?"

  "I need to know about the Codex," I said tenuously.

  "Which one?" he demanded, suddenly businesslike.

  "There's more than one?"

  "A codex is a compilation of knowledge, babe. Which one are we talking about here?

  I swallowed. "The Codex Merlini. The lost volume."

  His gaze sharpened. "What did you say your name was?"

  "I didn't. Do you know anything?"

  "Possibly."

  I sighed. "I'm Cassie Palmer," I admitted, and the ghostly eyes visibly brightened.

  "Okay, then." Saleh's voice turned brisk. "The Codex was lost centuries ago, but that isn't the main problem. Even if you find it, you won't be able to read it."

  "It's in code?"

  "Better. Codes can be deciphered, sooner or later, no matter how good. He was a little more creative than that."

  "He? You mean, there really was a Merlin?"

  "No, they called it the Codex Merlini because it was written by a guy named Ralph," Saleh said impatiently. "You know that old story about Merlin getting younger every year, instead of older?" I nodded. "Well, the storytellers got it mixed up."

  "Meaning what?"

  "Meaning that it wasn't the mage who aged backwards. He spelled the Codex so that, if it ever left his possession, it would start aging in reverse."

  "Why would he do that?"

  Saleh gave me a look that said he was starting to suspect that my IQ equaled my bust size. "So it would begin unwriting itself, of course! In our time it's just a bundle of blank parchment."

  "But if someone was to go into the past…"

  Saleh slid me an evil smile. "Then that someone could possibly retrieve it."

  I felt my stomach sink. My new position meant that, among other things, I had the fun job of policing the timeline. But without some of those lessons I was missing, every time I went back, I risked messing up something I wouldn't know how to fix.