Hunt the Moon cp-5

by Karen Chance

  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 l
ay 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.

  I could have kissed her, but didn’t have time. Because my mother was standing to the side, talking to him urgently, although the beating he was taking made it unlikely he was paying much attention or that he had shields up—around either of them.

  There were people packed all around her, and no place to shift closer, so I just started pushing forward, climbing or crawling or jumping over anyone in my way. Outraged voices rose all around me, and several people pushed back, but I barely noticed. Mircea had gone for the mage at the same moment, and if he could distract him for just a couple of seconds—

  And then the train rocked hard around us, sending people staggering left and then right as it almost left the tracks. I didn’t know what had happened until the back window exploded in a wash of bright red energy. And not just the back one. The metal body of the car must have acted like some kind of conductor, because window after window burst in a long line, like firecrackers on a string.

  Glass pelted the screaming crowd, which surged to its feet, people scrambling after bags and umbrellas and jostling me on all sides. Then the lights blew out, plunging the entire train into darkness. And that was it for the passengers, who collectively rushed away from the chaos and toward the only door out.

  Which happened to be the one we’d just reached.

  I jumped for my mother, but someone stepped on my instep and someone else elbowed me in the ribs, and then I was knocked backward entirely, shoved into the side of the car. My head hit hard enough for me to see stars, but I struggled back to my feet anyway, mainly to avoid being trampled. The people in the last car were pushing into this one, the ones in this one were pushing into the next, and the ones in the next were putting up the kind of fuss you’d expect with three or four hundred crazed passengers trying to stuff themselves into an already overstuffed area.

  But the commotion meant that I couldn’t hear Mircea, and the lack of light meant that I couldn’t see him. Or the mage. Or my mother.

  Goddamnit, I’d had her! I’d had her. If I didn’t get another chance, I was going to—

  Freak out at the sight of a man slithering in the missing window beside me.

  An emergency light had come on and was flickering dimly at the front of the car, giving me an intermittent look at his face. But for a moment, I didn’t believe it. Because it wasn’t a face I’d expected to see again.

  I had assumed that the Spartoi had ended up underneath the wheels, because there had been nowhere else for them to go. There was almost no clearance around the train, not on top, where the roof almost skinned the ceiling of the tunnel, and not on the sides, where the curved walls were streaming away maybe six to eight inches from the windows. It was physically impossible for a grown man to squeeze into a space that small; hell, I couldn’t have done it, and he had at least seventy pounds on me.

  But he was coming in anyway.

  I watched, torn between fascination and horror, as his body seemed to shrink, to elongate, to flow with an almost serpentine movement. He could have broken out the rest of the glass in the window, giving himself a bit more space. But he didn’t bother. He just oozed through the small opening like he’d suddenly gone boneless, an amorphous mass of skin and flesh and distorted, running features, including a patch of floating hair with no skull to give it definition anymore, and two round eyeballs swimming in the gelatinous mass of his face.

  Eyeballs that were nonetheless looking straight at me.

  I made a sound between panic and revulsion and stumbled back, and he oozed the rest of the way through the window. And as soon as he did, he started to solidify, bones and muscles and assorted free-range body parts all snapping back into place, like a balloon inflating. And I suddenly stopped worrying about losing my lunch and started worrying about the rifle he was aiming at the crowd.

  Or, more precisely, at the back of my mother’s head. I didn’t know why he was concentrating on her with me standing right there, but at that moment, I didn’t care.

  I could see her in the next car, her copper hair gleaming under the emergency lights as she looked around frantically, as if trying to find someone. She started pushing forward, calling out something I couldn’t hear over the sound of the screaming crowd and the rattling train and my own blood rushing in my ears. And then I grabbed the long barrel and forced it down, even as he fired.

  I didn’t see if I’d been fast enough. I didn’t see anything, because a vicious blow sent me skidding backward, until my head stopped me by smashing into a metal railing. In the next compartment.

  For a moment, I couldn’t move, too stunned to do anything but lie there as the car swam sickeningly around me. Two head blows in quick succession had me trying to decide between passing out and puking up breakfast, or possibly doing both at the same time. I rolled over, glass crunching under my hands, but some old clubbing advice about never passing out on your back got me onto my hands and knees. I looked up, dazed and disoriented.

  In time to see the gun leveled at my head.

  I stared at it for a split second, my eyes crossing, and then I tried to shift. But my head wasn’t clear enough, and even if it had been, panic makes shifting difficult. And nothing panics me quite so much as staring down the wrong end of a gun. I tried again anyway, but the mage squeezed off a shot at the same moment, and I knew I was dead.

  Only for some reason I wasn’t, despite the sound of the shot and the smell of gunpowder in the air. It told me I hadn’t shifted, but I couldn’t figure out how else he’d missed me from all of two yards away. And then I looked up and bumped my head on the suitcase, which was still bobbing about despite having had a smoking chunk carved out of its butt.

  I didn’t know where it had come from, since I hadn’t brought it with me. But I didn’t ask questions, just grabbed the thing for a shield I didn’t need because Mircea had arrived. And he was no longer looking so interested in caution.

  He snatched the Spartoi’s gun out of his hand, the metal squeezing up through his fingers like Play-Doh. The demigod looked from his ruined gun to the enraged vampire and back again, and for some reason, he seemed more perplexed than frightened. And then Mircea used the gun to thwack him into the opposite side of the now-empty compartment.

  The blow had looked effortless, almost casual, like someone swinging a golf club on a Sunday afternoon when he really doesn’t give a damn if the ball goes into the hole or not. And yet it sent the Spartoi far enough into a metal side panel to bow it outward in the shape of his body. And I decided that my estimate of the clearance must have been about right. Because we were suddenly treated to the nailson-a-chalkboard sound of metal being dragged over concrete, as his steel-covered ass scraped along the tunnel wall outside.

  He didn’t move, and I thought he was done for, was sure of it. To the point that I whipped my head around to see if my mother was all right. But the movement was too fast for my aching skull, folding my knees under me after a halfhearted attempt to stand. Mircea moved to help me, and therefore he also wasn’t watching when the Spartoi peeled himself out of the panel and jumped—straight at us.

  Mircea did sense him in time to turn, to get an arm up—which the Spartoi used to throw him the remaining length of the car. I stared as he busted through the shattered back window, twisted in midair, caught the bottom of the jagged windowpane and propelled himself back inside. Only to get hit with a spell that sent him sailing what looked like half a mile down the tunnel.

  All that took far less time to happen than it did to say, and then a blast hit the suitcase I was clutching hard enough to toss me back like a rag doll. I felt something scrape across my back and something else rip what felt like a chunk out of my scalp, and then I was tumbling end over end into almost pitch-darkness. Until my back hit a wall, hard enough to knock the air out of my lungs, to cost me my grip on my floating life preserver, and to send me tumbling to the floor.
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br />   My knees hit gravel and my hands hit steel and blood was cascading into my eyes and I couldn’t breathe. So it took me a second to realize that I’d been tossed back into the tunnel. But that somehow, I was still alive.

  I had to be. Death didn’t hurt this much.

  But I didn’t understand why until I looked up to see the Spartoi walking toward the next compartment as the train sped off. He didn’t bother to look back, didn’t even wait until I was safely out of sight before turning away. Like he hadn’t bothered to waste power disposing of me.

  Blood trickled into my eyes as I sat there, understanding flooding me along with something that made my hands shake and my cheeks burn. Mircea had been a threat, and had been dealt with accordingly. But in the Spartoi’s eyes, I wasn’t worth pursuing. I wasn’t worth killing. I was just some minor nuisance to be taken care of on his way to murdering my mother, and I didn’t think so motherfucker.

  I grabbed the suitcase and leaned forward, and the little platform shot ahead like a bat out of hell. Mircea grabbed me around the waist a second later, appearing out of the darkness and vaulting up behind me. He said a really filthy phrase in Romanian that I probably wasn’t supposed to know.

  I couldn’t have agreed more.

  The train had disappeared around a bend and we leaned left and followed, scooting around the corner at what had to be fifty miles an hour. We didn’t bother discussing a plan, because the plan was simple: find him; kill him. I actually wanted that bastard’s head more than the kidnapper’s, who at least didn’t appear to want my mother dead.

  Right after we took out the goddamned Spartoi.

  I leaned forward a little more, to the point that I risked tipping over, trying to milk every ounce of speed out of the spell. It should have been insanely frightening, rocketing into a pitch-dark tunnel with seemingly no end in sight, and no way to know if we were about to take a header into a wall. But apparently fear and fury don’t work together, because I didn’t feel anything but hurry, hurry, hurry thrumming through my veins and echoing in my ears, along with the growing rattle of the train up ahead.