Karen Chance - [Cassandra Palmer 03]

by Embrace the Night (v5. 1) (html)

  “Are you all right?” I asked, but I knew the answer even before he smiled slightly and opened his eyes. Long lashes dipped over too-sharp cheekbones, but I felt the same weightless flutter in my stomach as always when that gaze met mine.

  “I will be.”

  Compared to all my problems, saving the life of one man didn’t seem like much of an accomplishment. So why was I suddenly grinning like an idiot? Maybe because, somewhere along the line, I’d learned to take my triumphs where I could get them. Tomorrow there would be trouble and danger and pain, and I didn’t know if I would be smart enough or strong enough or capable enough to handle it all, especially now that I understood what I was up against. But I knew one thing: today, finally, something had gone right.

  “The other you will be back soon,” I said, hoping he was lucid enough to understand. “And I told him too much. He can’t be allowed to keep those memories.”

  “No one can erase a master’s mind,” he said hoarsely. “I doubt even the Consul herself could do it.”

  “But if you remember, you’ll try to change things—”

  “I did. I searched for the mage, but never found him, and returned here only to discover that you were also gone. Afterwards, I reconsidered what you had said, and tried to break the geis before it had a chance to be doubled, but the war intervened. And once it did, there was nothing to be done but see this through to the end.”

  I stared at him in disbelief. “But you didn’t know what happened after you left! You didn’t know we succeeded!”

  “I knew you. I could not believe that you would leave without completing your mission. I had to trust that you’d found a way to break it.”

  “That’s why you sent me away,” I said, my head reeling. “Why you wouldn’t let Rafe bring me to you.”

  “I did not want to change this future,” he agreed. “When he went to you despite my orders, and you came to me…For a brief moment, I thought it was over. But then I remembered: I had not yet been imprisoned, your clothes were wrong, and there was no snare on the bedside table. It was too soon. It was the closest I came to breaking.”

  I couldn’t imagine it, that solitary, agonizing wait, not even knowing for certain that we would win in the end, that it wouldn’t all be for nothing. I didn’t think I could have done it. I didn’t understand how he had.

  Before I could say anything, the door burst open and Pritkin dashed in. His coat was missing, half his potions were gone and he had a gun in each hand. I wondered how he’d managed to get the door open. He kicked it shut behind him. “Did it work?” he demanded.

  “Yes, no thanks to you!”

  “No thanks to me? How else would you have gotten that creature out of here?”

  “You planned this?”

  “Of course!”

  “But…what if I’d listened to you? What if I hadn’t dared—”

  Pritkin gave me his old impatient look. “You never listen to me!”

  “That’s not the point!”

  Someone put a fist through five inches of Romanian oak and almost grabbed him before he could skip away. “We can discuss this later,” he said quickly. “Get us the hell out of here!”

  I gazed at Mircea, still feeling stunned. “You might have hoped I’d be successful,” I said, “but you couldn’t have known—”

  “I knew you,” he repeated. “Therefore I knew how it ends.”

  I grabbed both their hands, just as the door exploded off its hinges. “How it begins!” I said, and shifted.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1 A weeping angel shattered in a crack of gray dust, sending its wings flying off in two directions. It took a second for me to realize I wasn’t dead, and then I dove for the side of a nearby obelisk. I pressed flat against the ground, feeling the mud seeping into my already drenched clothes, while a barrage of shots struck sparks off the granite overhead. I was starting to suspect that this tomb raider thing might not be as much fun as I’d hoped. Of course, that was pretty much the story of my life lately. A chain of events that might very charitably be classified as disasters had left me with the position of Pythia, the supernatural community’s chief seer. The Silver Circle, a group of light magic users, had expected one of their tame acolytes to inherit the office since it had happened that way for a few thousand years now. They’d been less than thrilled when the power went to me instead: Cassie Palmer, untrained clairvoyant, protégée of a vampire crime boss and known cohort

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2 It took me a few seconds to realize that I still wasn’t dead. I was in a crouch, my hands protecting my head, expecting an attack, but the corridor was as silent as the tomb it was. The only people besides us were cemented into the walls or buried under the pile of rubble that their own spell had brought down on their heads. I collapsed back against the floor, breathing raggedly, and tried not to scream. After a minute, I felt around for the flashlight and my hand closed over a cool plastic cylinder. I clicked it on, relieved to find that it still worked, and saw Pritkin lying on his side. He wasn’t moving, and he had blood smeared through the stubble on his chin, bright and frightening. Murphy and his little law can go to hell, I thought furiously, shaking him frantically. “Would you kindly stop doing that?” he asked politely. I stared. I wasn’t entirely sure, but a polite John Pritkin might be a sign of the apocalypse. “Did you hit your head?” I tried to move closer to get

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3 Pritkin and I had landed at Dante’s, Vegas’ cross between a haunted house and a casino. It was currently what he referred to as our base of operations and I called our hideout. And, as hiding places went, it ranked pretty high. Not only was it a well-warded, vampire-run property, but we’d recently helped to trash a large piece of it. It seemed unlikely that many of our enemies would think to look for us there. At least, that was the plan. I was sitting in Purgatory, the lobby bar, the next afternoon, trying to scalp a shrunken head, when a vampire walked in. He was swathed in a dark cloak and hood that would have looked theatrical anywhere else, but the prickle at the base of my spine told me what he was. It looked like the plan pretty much sucked. I watched him out of the corner of my eye while I finished dissecting the head. The clump of matted black hair finally came off more or less intact. I put down the piece of molded plastic I’d been working on and picked up the real

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4 Rafe watched me in silence for a moment, then cleared his throat. “There may be an alternative.” I waited, but he just sat there, his jaw working but no sound coming out. “I’m listening.” “I can’t tell you,” he finally said, sounding defeated. Apparently Mircea’s command hadn’t been so flawed after all. I glanced at Billy, who sighed and shrugged. He doesn’t like possessions, but they do allow him to tiptoe through someone’s thoughts, gathering stray information here and there. And I doubted Mircea had prohibited Rafe from even thinking about whatever it was he didn’t want known. “Drop your shields,” I told him, “and hold that thought.” Rafe looked a little nervous, but since Billy slipped inside his skin a few seconds later, he must have done as I asked. I glanced around, wondering what the tourists would say if they knew that a ghost was currently possessing a vampire a few feet away. It made Dante’s staged shows look a little tepid by comparison. Then Billy stepped out of

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5 Crystal Gazing is not the supernatural community’s most respected journalistic voice. Its tagline, “All the news that’s not fit to print,” pretty much says it all. But, once in a while, its scandal-hunting reporters turn up a story that the more respectable papers reject as mere rumor. And even more rarely, that rumor turns out to be true. But so far, although there was a lot of speculation about the identity of the new Pythia, no one had managed to come up with my name. It was only a matter of time, but I was grateful for any reprieve. And the lack of new information had allowed juicier stories to bump that one to the back pages. Today’s screaming headline concerned an unknown woman who’d been raiding
the Circle’s facilities, although as usual, the article was short on facts and long on terms like “vixen vigilante” and “fetching fanatic.” I silently wished her luck. Her activities might account for why no one had yet managed to track me down. My break was over, so I stuck th

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6 Miranda took one look at my dress, which had shifted to an agitated swirl of autumn leaves, and her ears went back. It was convenient to have such an obvious hint to her mood, since I’d never learned to read her very well. The fur on her catlike face might have had something to do with that, or possibly gargoyle expressions were too different from human ones for me to decipher. The current group of Misfits crowded in behind me, leaving dirty footprints on her pristine white tile floor. I’d brought them to the room-service kitchens since I wasn’t sure where Miranda lived. She was the leader of the group of Dark Fey that Tony had been using for cheap labor, but I only ever saw them at work, chopping and dicing with preternatural speed or pushing laden carts through Dante’s halls. They rarely paused except to pose for photographs with guests, who assumed they were midgets in suits. I wondered if anyone ever noticed that their film always came out slightly blurry, the same way th

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7 Finding Pritkin wasn’t difficult. He and one of his buddies were where they’d been most of the week—holed up a storeroom in the lower levels of Dante’s, poring over ancient tomes. When I opened the door, he looked up from a giant volume with the trapped expression of a hunted animal. His hair, which usually defied the laws of physics, was hanging in dispirited clumps and a smear of red decorated his forehead and one cheek, courtesy of the book’s disintegrating leather binding. I’d gotten the impression that research wasn’t his favorite thing. Maybe because he couldn’t beat up the books. “What are you doing here?” he demanded. “Show was canceled.” Nick looked up from the middle of a ring of books, scrolls and, incongruously, a modern laptop. He appeared harmless, a bespectacled redhead with so many freckles that he almost had a tan, his hands and feet too big for the rest of him, like a Great Dane puppy. But the gangly young man was actually a mage, and since he was a friend o

  Chapter 7

  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

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9 Casanova had pointed out that it would be unwise for me to occupy a suite, in case the Circle had spies on the lookout for long-term guests. Instead, he’d stuck me in what had once been a small storeroom in back of the tiki bar. I still had several cases of cocktail umbrellas in boxes under my bed, and barely enough room to turn around. Pritkin had it worse, being stuffed into the dressing room once reserved for the club’s famous dead performers. It was larger, since it had once held their coffins, but he swore it still had a certain…odor. At the moment, that thought cheered me up considerably. I finished pulling the oversized T-shirt I was using for a nightgown over my head as Billy drifted through the wall. I brought him up to speed on my conversation with Saleh while he sat on the edge of the bed and rolled a ghostly cigarette. “We need a team,” I concluded. “We are a team.” I was tired and I ached, in more ways than one. I hugged my pillow, which had all the comfort of on

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10 That afternoon I was checking in the convention that the hotel staff had secretly labeled the Geek Squad, a couple hundred role-playing enthusiasts who had arrived with bag and baggage, and in a few cases swords and armor, when I caught Pritkin staring at me. He was across the lobby, leaning against one of the fake stalagmites that erupted from the floor, all beard stubble and mussed hair and strong, lean build. His body looked relaxed, but his face held the same hawkish expression I’d last seen when he was standing over Saleh’s headless corpse. I scowled and handed a name badge to a guy dressed in a long trailing robe and a pointy hat. He shifted his staff to his other hand so he could pin it on. I didn’t think it likely to help with ID much; he was the seventh Gandalf I’d seen that morning. “I still don’t understand why we can’t set up now,” the guy at my side whined. His voice was muffled by the mask he was wearing, but unfortunately not enough that I couldn’t understand

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11 I stared at Mircea in shock. “You’re supposed to be downtown!” The version of me who’d just chased Jimmy across the parking lot had escaped from MAGIC earlier that night. And although its wards had allowed me to be tracked into the city, no one had been sure exactly where I’d gone. While Tomas, Pritkin and a vampire named Louis-Cesare came here, Rafe and Mircea had gone to Tony’s main offices. Or so I’d thought. “I was. I left Raphael there, in case you made an appearance,” Mircea said, his eyes narrowing slightly. “May I ask how you knew that?” “Probably wouldn’t be best,” I said, wishing hysteria was a luxury I could afford. Mircea just stood there, looking ridiculously model-pretty with his tousled hair and faintly amused mouth, his rich black suit perfectly showcasing his—objectively speaking—extremely attractive body. I didn’t know if he did it deliberately, but his clothes always seemed to run just a little snug around the biceps and thighs, drawing my attention where

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12 “Billy! I can’t get it!” I looked at him desperately. “You have to do it.” He shook his head. “I’m too drained. It took everything I had just to roll it over to you!” I made another grab and trapped the ball under my hands, but it was too slippery. I had the impression that its surface wouldn’t provide much in the way of traction even if I wasn’t bleeding all over it. “Damn it! If I had more time—” Billy looked at me like I was crazy. “You’re Pythia! You have all the time you want!” “I can’t shift! I’ve tried.” It was probably the pain, but I couldn’t see past it. Maybe that was one of the things training taught, how to concentrate when your brain was fuzzy from blood loss and your hand felt like it was going to fall off and you had absolutely no time to get it wrong. I would have really, really liked to have had that lesson. But I hadn’t, so I had to go with what I knew. I stopped plucking uselessly at the sphere and looked at Billy. “Take a draw.” “Now?!” “Damn it, Billy.

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13 Sight down the barrel of the gun. Balance the butt on your other palm if you need to steady your aim. Squeeze the trigger lightly. You won’t have to apply much pressure to get it to fire. I breathed slowly and watched the paper target flinch as if the bullets were cutting through flesh. Almost all of them hit outside the target range, and not a single one was inside the circle that represented the vital organs. Ironic, that. The unused storeroom had good ventilation for an indoor locale, so Pritkin had set it up as a firing range. Daily practice was supposed to improve my aim—at least that was the theory. So far, the paper cutouts at the far end of the room hadn’t had too much to worry about. I released the empty clip and reloaded. The weapon felt the same as always in my hand; the weight, the smoky scent of the oil and powder, the almost-there smell of burnt paper, were all familiar after almost two weeks of this. When I’d picked the gun up today, that had seemed strange. L

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14 I slipped inside Pritkin’s room the next morning, on a mission to find that rune I�
�d promised Radella, and stopped dead. I’d expected it to be a quick search; for some reason, I’d assumed he would keep his belongings in military precision. Only this wasn’t it. The bed was still unmade from whenever he’d slept in it last, and clothes were strewn on the floor like a hurricane had just blown through. And he’d been right—it did, indeed, have an odor. But I was less inclined to blame its onetime residents for that than the vile-smelling potions that lined a shelf on one wall. The rickety-looking contraption was directly above the bed, something that would have worried me, since most of the substances he carried around were lethal. Still, I supposed he hadn’t had a lot of choice. The opposite wall was taken up with a closet, the one facing into the club by a door and the one looking out over one side of the casino by a huge stained-glass window. The windows were Dante’s trademark,

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15 I spent the rest of the day in bed, hurting so much that even relaxing my muscles made them ache. It was hard to believe I could be this sore and live. I wasn’t sure if it was because of the attack or the whole stopping-time thing. My predecessor had died shortly after pulling that trick for the last time, which maybe should have told me something. For whatever reason, my whole body felt like one big bruise. My mental state wasn’t much better. When I finally managed to sleep, my dreams were full of Pritkin’s face, wearing a brilliant and unguarded grin, which alone was enough to weird me out, since it wasn’t an expression I’d ever seen in real life. Then it began to sag, with waxlike rivulets of flesh running down his cheekbones to drip off his chin, eyes rolling in their sockets, the sunny grin fading to a skeletal grimace. I woke up in a cold sweat. I stared at the patterns the bedside light made on my ceiling, consciously slowing my runaway heartbeat. This isn’t me, I tol