Touch The Dark cp-1

by Karen Chance

  The wind blew Pritkin against the wall, and the force beating against him caused his face to distort wildly. His vision was unimpeded, though, and the expression in his eyes made it clear that he hadn't guessed what lay under the perfect facade. What had he thought, that the Senate members earned their spots through charity work? I was amazed the man had lasted this long.

  "Cassandra is mine," Mircea told him in a voice that could have melted glass. "Touch her again and, Circle or no, I will bring you over and ensure that you spend the rest of eternity begging for death."

  "Mircea!" Louis-César did not attempt to touch him, but his voice cut through the storm like boiling water through a snow drift. "Please; you know the situation. There are other ways to deal with him."

  The wind slowly subsided and I found myself shaking from an excess of adrenaline. I got my trembling legs under me and walked to where Pritkin was still held against the wall by Mircea's power, although he no longer looked in danger of being forced through it. Several trickles of blood ran down my face into the collar of the robe, but I ignored them. Compared to Tomas, I had gotten off amazingly lightly. A very battered version of my former roommate was searching Pritkin for weapons. Tomas' wrist had already started to knit back together, tendons and ligaments reforming before my eyes, but his face was a mass of scalded flesh and only one eye appeared to be working. I shuddered at his expression, which clearly said that the only reason the mage wasn't already dead was because Tomas hadn't figured out which execution method would hurt the most.

  I glanced at Mircea, and his face was no more comforting. The man I knew had always been an even-tempered, almost gentle presence, who told convoluted stories and awful jokes, liked dressing up and didn't mind playing endless games of checkers with an infatuated eleven-year-old. I wasn't as naive as Pritkin—I had known the truth was far more complex. Mircea had grown up in a court where assassination and cruelty were the order of the day, where his own father had traded two of his sons for a treaty he had no intention of keeping and where he had been tortured to what would have been a horrible death if the gypsy hadn't gotten to him first. That sort of thing didn't allow for much compassion. Still, a softer side was there, wasn't it? I honestly didn't know anymore.

  I had never felt any kind of threat from him as a child. He had been serene, kind Mircea with laughing brown eyes that crinkled a bit at the corners. It was hard to reconcile that person with what I saw now. Was that terrifying aspect always there, simmering below the surface, and I had simply been too blind to see it? I saw it now, and it created a problem. As much as I disliked Pritkin, I didn't want him dead. He might be—make that probably was—crazy, but I needed him to explain what was happening to me, or to contact someone who could. It wasn't like I knew anyone else to ask. "Don't kill him, Mircea."

  "We have no intention of killing him, mademoiselle," Louis-César answered, although he kept a wary eye on his colleague. Tomas had finished stripping off the mage's weapons, at least the ones we could see. I had a feeling that a lot were still available to him, and my bracelet seemed to agree. It glowed warm against my wrist, feeling heavier than it had a few minutes ago. I would have liked to get it off—it was starting to creep me out—but this wasn't a good time. "As of this night, we are already at war with the Dark Circle; we have no wish to also fight the Light."

  "Be careful," Rafe said from beside me. "Make sure he's completely unarmed."

  "He's a war mage," Mircea said flatly. "He's never unarmed."

  "Until he's dead," Tomas added, and I noticed that he still gripped a struggling knife in his good hand. He moved like lightning—I guess he liked the irony of killing Pritkin with his own weapon—but Louis-César was a fraction faster. His hand caught Tomas' wrist a hairsbreadth from Pritkin's chest.

  "Tomas! I will not have you start a war!"

  "If you harbor that thing" — Pritkin all but spat at me—"you'll be at war with us whether you will it or not. I was sent here to find out what she was and to deal with her if she posed a threat. I expected to find merely a cassandra, a fallen sybil, but this is far worse than I anticipated. And what I know, the Circle knows. If I fail to kill her, expect a dozen, a hundred others, to come in my place." He looked at me, and if looks could kill, he'd have just saved his Circle the trouble. "I've fought one of these things before. I know what they can do and I won't leave it alive."

  He lunged for me again, but all it accomplished was to almost choke him, since Mircea's invisible grip had all the give of a steel glove. It was weird, because Mircea's face was back to its usual placid expression. The eyes were no more than vaguely interested, the cheeks were their normal color and a slight smile curved his lips. The incandescent anger was nowhere to be seen. I shivered. Acting skills like those worried me. I turned my attention back to the mage, and it dawned on me that the only person who I was sure wasn't deceiving me was the man who'd just tried to kill me. Nice.

  "I'm not an it," I told him, staying well out of reach. "I don't know what you think is happening here, but I'm not a threat to you."

  He laughed, a rather strangled sound under the circumstances. "Of course not. I'm too old for a lamia to take an interest. I tracked the one I killed over the bodies of twenty children it used to sustain its abomination of a life. I won't let that happen again."

  I fought down anger and turned to the window, parting the blackout curtain to see a flat, reddish-tan landscape and pale blue sky. Quite a group had gathered around the hole left by the grenade, but no one bothered us. I guess they figured we could take care of ourselves. I turned back to that hate-filled face. "What if you're wrong and I'm not some evil thing? Wouldn't you rather know for sure before killing me?"

  "I already know. No human can do what you did. It isn't possible."

  "A few days ago, I would have agreed with you. Now I know different." I found it hard to meet his eyes. I'd never had anyone look at me with that level of hatred. Tony wanted to kill me, but I was willing to bet that if he ever caught up with me his eyes wouldn't look like that. He viewed me as a royal pain and a way to seal a bargain, not as the incarnation of evil. Even though I knew Pritkin was wrong, I felt guilty, and that made me mad in a way his physical attack hadn't. I wasn't the homicidal lunatic here.

  "You said you've hunted these things before. Isn't there some kind of test you use, to make sure you're right? Or do you kill anyone you suspect on sight?"

  "There are tests," Pritkin said through clenched teeth, as if even talking to me was torture. "But your vampire allies wouldn't like them. They involve holy water and crosses."

  I looked at Mircea in astonishment, and he rolled his eyes. What the hell kind of stuff was Pritkin reading? Bram freaking Stoker? Demons might be afraid of holy items, but vamps certainly weren't. Mircea's family crest showed a dragon, the symbol of courage, embracing a cross, a sign of the family's Catholicism. It decorated the wall behind his seat in the Senate, but I guess Pritkin had been too busy glaring at me to notice. I thought about giving him the lecture on vampirism being sort of like lycanthropy, in that it was a metaphysical disease. But I doubted he'd believe that the legends claiming that a demon came to roost in every new vampire had been caused by the hysteria of the Middle Ages. Pritkin seemed to see demons everywhere, whether any were there or not. In fact, the only ones of Hollywood's arsenal of weapons that actually worked on vamps were sunlight—for the younger ones, anyway—stakes and garlic, and the latter only if employed as part of a protection ward. Simply hanging the stuff over a door would have no effect at all—hell, Tony loved it on bruschetta with a little olive oil.

  Mircea was no help; he only grinned at me. "And to think, I always believed that my least favorite things were bad wine and poor fashion." He smiled tolerantly at my expression. "Very well, dulceaţă. I think we can find a few crosses somewhere. And unless I mistake it, Rafe is keeping several vials of holy water imprisoned as we speak."

  Rafe came forward with his box. It sounded like a bunch of Mexican jumping beans were ins
ide, urgently trying to get out, and all of us looked at it doubtfully. "I don't agree with this," Tomas spoke up. "I was charged by the Consul to keep Cassie safe. What if he lies, and those things contain acid or explosives? You know we cannot trust him."

  "Never trust a mage," Rafe agreed, as if quoting something.

  "I will test them," Louis-César said and extracted a vial so quickly that I didn't have a chance to stop him. He didn't pour it over his own flesh as I'd half feared, but held the stoppered vial under Pritkin's nose. "I am about to spill this over your arm. If it is not safe to do so, it would be well if you told me now."

  Pritkin ignored him, his glare still on me, as if he was more worried about what I might do than a roomful of master vamps. He obviously hadn't been around them long enough to understand nuances. Louis-César had said only that they wouldn't kill him—that still left a lot of possibilities wide open. I'd have been worried, but Pritkin was so busy giving me the glower of death that he barely noticed when a few drops of colorless liquid were drizzled over his skin. We all watched as if expecting his arm to start to melt, but nothing happened. Louis-César reached for me, but Tomas grabbed his wrist.

  The Frenchman's eyes flashed silver. "Be careful, Tomas," he said softly. "You are not possessed this time."

  Tomas ignored the warning. "That could be poison—he could have taken the antidote, or be willing to die with her. I will not have her harmed."

  "I will take responsibility before the Consul if anything occurs."

  "I don't care about the Consul."

  "Then you had best care about me."

  Two tides of shimmering energy began to build, enough to raise goose bumps on my arms and to set my bracelet dancing against my skin. "Enough!" Mircea waved a hand and the power in the room faded considerably. He plucked the vial from the Frenchman's hand and sniffed it delicately. "Water, Tomas—it is only water and nothing more." He handed it to me and I took it before Tomas could argue.

  I trusted Mircea, and besides, neither the bracelet nor my ward reacted to it. "It's okay."

  "No!" Tomas reached for the bottle, but Louis-César knocked his hand away.

  I looked at Pritkin, who was watching me avidly. "Bottoms up." I swallowed the whole thing. Just as Mircea had said, it was only water, if a bit stale. Pritkin stared at me, as if expecting wisps of steam to start coming out of my ears or something. "Satisfied? Or do you want to hang a few crosses around my neck?"

  "What are you?" he whispered.

  I went back to my chair, but it was covered in brick dust so I opted for the couch instead. The window had shattered when Mircea tossed the grenade through it, so I had to brush shards of glass onto the floor first. Pritkin had better have some answers, because he was really getting on my nerves. "Tired, stiff and sick to death of you," I told him honestly.

  Mircea laughed. "You haven't changed, dulceaţă."

  Pritkin stared at me, and some of that terrible anger faded from his face. "I don't understand. You cannot have drunk holy water and shown no reaction if you are demon kind. But you cannot be human and do what I have seen you do."

  Mircea settled himself on the sofa after carefully dusting it off with his handkerchief. He picked up one of my bare feet and stroked it idly. I suddenly felt a lot better. "I have learned, Mage Pritkin, never to say never to the universe." He glanced at me, and his expression was wry. "It delights in giving us that which we declare most emphatically cannot be."

  Louis-César looked expectantly at me, and I nodded. "Yeah, I know. If people will stop trying to kill me for a minute, I'll tell you about Françoise, at least as much as I can." I quickly explained about my second trip, in as much detail as I could remember without mentioning that a seventeenth-century witch appeared to be wandering around Vegas. I didn't want my cell, if I ended up in one, to have padded walls. "That is approximately what Tomas said," Louis-César commented when I was done. "But that is not as I remember it."

  "Which leaves us with three possibilities." Mircea ticked them off on his fingers. "That both Tomas and Cassandra are lying for no obvious reason, that they hallucinated the same thing at the same time, or that they are telling the truth. I do not smell a lie on either of them." He looked at Louis-César, who nodded. "And must I point out the absurdity of a dual hallucination of that degree of detail, about events neither could have known had they not been there?"

  "Which leaves us with the truth." Louis-César gave a sigh that sounded like relief. "And that means…"

  Mircea finished for him. "That they changed history."

  Chapter 11

  "That's not possible." I felt that I was on pretty solid ground. "I see the past; I don't change it."

  "The Pythia's power is passing," Pritkin murmured, as if he hadn't heard me. "But no. It's impossible." He suddenly looked like a confused little boy. "The Pythia cannot possess anyone. She can't have given you that ability; she doesn't have it."

  "Leave that aside," Louis-César said almost breathlessly. He stared at Pritkin, his face eager. "Could the Pythia's power allow Cassandra to travel metaphysically to other places, other times?"

  Pritkin looked even more unsure. "I need to consult my Circle," he said, his voice slightly unsteady. "I was not prepared for this. They told me she was only a suspected rogue. The Pythia has an heir. Her powers should not come to this… person."

  "What powers?" I decided to press my advantage now that I was back to person status, however tentatively. Better to find out what he knew before he decided I was some other weird kind of demon.

  "No." Pritkin shook his head adamantly. "I cannot speak for the Circle."

  "You've been trying to speak for them all evening," Tomas said, grabbing the mage's shoulder hard enough that he would have stumbled if Mircea's power hadn't still held him. "But now that you can help us by doing so, you refuse?" Tomas' wrist had healed except for an ugly red scar; but his face was no better. His temper didn't seem to have improved, either.

  "I… these are dangerous matters. I cannot speak of them without authorization."

  "You said they know what you know," Tomas growled. "Contact them; get permission."

  Pritkin looked about wildly, as if searching for help. He didn't find any. "I will try, but I know they will want to meet to discuss this. And they will want her brought before them. It will not be decided quickly."

  "How long?" Louis-César had joined Tomas, and together they did intimidating really well. Hell, they did okay separately.

  Pritkin made the mistake of trying to cover his nervousness with rudeness. He was far too offhand to deal with a senator. "I don't know. Perhaps days."

  Louis-César's blue eyes abruptly flashed to a shimmering gray, like mercury, and his pupils almost completely disappeared. I held my breath, and I wasn't alone. The only sound in the room was Pritkin's harsh breathing, and it echoed loudly like someone had slipped a microphone on him. Mircea abruptly released him and he would have slumped to the floor if Louis-César hadn't grabbed his shirt and slammed him back into the wall.

  Seeing Louis-César in action at the casino hadn't convinced me that here was a predator's predator. He fought well, but I'd seen a lot of good fighters through the years, and I wasn't sold on the idea that a rapier, however long and sharp, was a substitute for a decent firearm. I'd spent too much time at Tony's, better known as Guns R Us, for that. I understood why he scared the crap out of me—he was my portal to the land of crazed ghosts and filthy dungeons—but other people didn't have that problem, so I hadn't understood why they seemed so afraid of him. Most of the time, he looked almost sweet, with his big blue eyes and his dimples. But I finally got the message. He was still handsome, but it was the splendor of a tornado right before it rips through a city. In that second, I believed that he could have made that crazy plan at Dante's work, that he really could have held off twenty vamps while Tomas got me to safety. "We don't have days," he hissed, and the blood drained the rest of the way from Pritkin's face.

  Mircea spoke, and his voice
was like a calm stream of water flowing about the room, quieting tempers and cooling cheeks. I felt my heartbeat slow down and I was finally able to get a deep breath. "Perhaps Mage Pritkin would like to contact his Circle elsewhere? I think he has told us what we needed to know, by implication, if nothing else." He smiled at Pritkin. "You might think to ask them why they sent you, their best-known demon hunter, after Cassie. You have something of a reputation for being—how shall I put it? — extremely single-minded? If I were the suspicious type, I might almost believe that they wanted you to mistake what she was, and remove a possible rival from contention." Pritkin stared at him, and his face slowly flushed an angry brick red. I hoped his heart wasn't getting as much of a workout as his complexion. I had the feeling that if he didn't give himself a heart attack, someone in the Circle was about to have some explaining to do.

  "He isn't leaving!" Louis-César and I spoke at the same time. He deferred to me with a graceful gesture, and I watched him nervously as I scrambled up to face Pritkin. The vamp's eyes were still silver, and I didn't want to find out what happened when he really lost his temper.

  "You aren't going anywhere until I get some answers. Who is the Pythia, why do you keep calling me sybil and what powers are you talking about?"

  Pritkin complied without even an argument. The fight seemed to have gone out of him for the moment, and his voice was slightly hoarse. "The Pythia was the name of the ancient seer of Delphi, Apollo's greatest temple. For two thousand years, the women selected for the position were considered the oracle of the world, with kings and emperors deciding policy based on their advice. The position lapsed with the decline of Greece, but the term is still used out of respect. It is the title of the world's chief seer, a strong ally of the Circle. She is one of our chief assets, since nonhumans do not have the gift."

  "What does this have to do with me?"