by Karen Chance
She didn’t ask questions. She shoved something into my pocket and simultaneously muttered a word that caused a burst of light that blinded me. I felt her rip Jesse out of my grip and heard the sound of shoes crunching glass underfoot as they took off.
I decided that the best thing I could do to help her was to give the mages another target—one with a much higher bounty attached. Before the blinding light had faded, I turned on my heel and ran in the opposite direction. Right into Marco.
He caught me by the shoulders and shook me like a dog, obviously ready to rip me a new one. But then the light faded and he glimpsed the tide of dark shapes surging toward us. He snarled, baring a lot of fang, and shoved me behind him.
I bounced off his friend’s chest, which was thankfully back in one piece, as Marco turned the Shroud of Night loose on the mages. It flew straight at them, its deep, inky nothingness making the surrounding night look like high noon by comparison. But rather than being the size of a sheet, it now covered half the road.
Marco started forward, gun drawn, but I grabbed his arm. “Let’s get out of here!”
“Sure,” he responded as the darkness cut through the mages’ shields like they weren’t even there. Marco’s buddy tossed him an M16. “In a minute.”
I grabbed the muzzle of the freakishly large gun. “What are you doing?”
“Like shooting fish in a bucket,” he said with relish.
“You can’t kill them!”
“Wanna bet?”
“Marco!”
He raised an eyebrow in a way that reminded me eerily of Mircea. “And what do you think they had in mind for you?”
It was a reasonable question, but it also wasn’t the point. “I’m trying to keep the Circle intact,” I told him as the Shroud boiled over the ground like a black mist. I assumed the mages were fighting to get out, but there was no sign of it from where we stood. No sound, no gunfire, no spells, no light. Nothing.
At least it hid us from the traffic, I thought, as Marco stared at me.
“Are you crazy?” He looked like he was seriously starting to worry about me.
“It’s complicated,” I said, marveling at the understatement. “But you can’t go around shooting mages.”
“Why not?”
It was obvious Marco wasn’t going to give up on his proposed slaughter without a damn good reason. So I gave him one, although he didn’t seem to understand my explanation about the vengeful god and the portal to another world and the ancient spell that the Circle supported that was the only thing keeping it closed. To give him credit, he did grasp the major point though.
“You’re saying you got to keep alive the very people who want you dead?”
“That’s what I’m saying.”
“That sucks.”
“Which will be the title of my autobiography, if I live long enough to write one. Now, can we get out of here?”
“My thought exactly.” The voice came from behind me, and a gun was pressed to my rib cage.
I twisted my neck enough to get a glimpse of Caleb’s face. He’d said he was willing to die to capture me. It looked like he hadn’t been kidding.
Marco snarled, letting loose a barrage of bullets that ricocheted off the mage’s shields, threatening everyone but him. “Marco! Cut it out before you kill someone!”
“I got every intention of killing someone,” he said as Caleb pulled me back toward the limo. I couldn’t imagine why—that car wasn’t going anywhere—but we kept backing that way nonetheless.
Marco followed, but couldn’t get past Caleb’s shields. I felt around in my pockets, hoping that Francoise had shoved my gun in there, not that it was likely to help much against a war mage. She hadn’t, but she’d left me something possibly more useful. My hand closed over something hard, and I looked down to see the grinning face of Daikoku staring up at me.
Francoise must have grabbed it when the cabinet fell over. And if it worked half as well as the Shroud, it might be able to get me out of this. But did I dare use it?
I clutched Daikoku tightly, feeling energy radiate outward from the cool surface under my fingers. Whatever this thing was, it was powerful—and therefore dangerous. But I’d seen enough war mages to know that the Shroud wouldn’t hold them for long, and even if it did, Caleb hardly needed their help to take me in. I was seriously debating using it when the night tore open and Pritkin tumbled out of nothing.
Caleb threw a spell as soon as Pritkin left the ley line, but he had to lower his shields to do it. And Marco lunged for us the instant they dropped. Caleb had expected it and sent him flying with a muttered word, but the distraction gave Pritkin time to roll under a nearby car, out of view.
“Let it go, John!” Caleb called. “I’ll guarantee her safety, but I’m taking her in.”
A spiky blond head poked up over the car’s roof. “You can’t guarantee anything of the kind! Or have you forgotten what happened the last time the Council wanted a meeting!”
“Richardson was blinded by grief over his son. Nothing like that will happen again—you have my word.”
“Your word isn’t in question, Caleb. It’s your judgment I doubt.”
“There was a time when you trusted me with your life!”
“And there was a time when you used your brain instead of blindly following orders,” Pritkin said, coming around the front of the car. There was a raw red spot in the dead center of his chest, like maybe his shields had given out a fraction before his buddy’s spell did. “She goes with me.”
Caleb’s answer to that was to throw another spell. But Marco had been waiting on the sidelines, silent and dark, for exactly that. As soon as Caleb lowered his shields, Marco grabbed him and Pritkin grabbed me.
We started backing toward the ley line Pritkin had used to come in, but the mages had finished ripping the Shroud to pieces and were blocking the way. All eight of them. They didn’t immediately attack—there was just enough doubt among them about whether Pritkin was a hero or a psychopath to be useful in a situation like this. But it wouldn’t be long.
I needed to think, needed a plan, but they were coming for us and there was no more time. And even Pritkin couldn’t fight those kinds of odds. I clenched my palm around Daikoku’s cool shape, hard enough to hurt. “Give me the energy to shift us out of here!” I wished.
I hoped that was clear enough, and then just hoped it would work at all, as a long moment passed and nothing happened. I opened my fist and stared at the little thing, wondering if Francoise had stolen a dud. Then one tiny eye dropped in a tinier wink, and the world tore apart.
Chapter Eighteen
There was a sudden tumbling sense of vertigo and then a jolt that drove the air from my lungs. It felt almost like I’d shifted, but the pavement was firm under my feet and the smell of burnt asphalt and magic still hung in the air. I didn’t wait for the dizziness to pass, just grabbed the warm body beside me and got us out of there.
I immediately knew something was wrong, because instead of a short free fall, as should have been the case with a shift no farther than Dante’s, it seemed to take forever until I hit the ground again. I landed on my feet, but then someone crashed into me. I couldn’t see who—it was pitch dark—but the impact drove me back a couple of steps. That would have been fine, except there was suddenly nothing under my foot but air.
I fell on my butt and went sliding at what felt like sixty miles an hour down a steep embankment. There were no trees or rocks to grab, only slick, sparse grass and a lot more mud. My flailing hand finally grabbed someone’s arm, and I held on for dear life, tumbling and falling, until we finally slammed to a stop in—of course—a muddy puddle.
The impact tried to shove my tailbone up through my shoulder blades and made my teeth snap together. I stared up at the dim arch of the Milky Way while I tried to get my breath back, only to have a drop of water hit me right on the cornea. I wiped it away, dragging my muddy sleeve across my forehead in the process. Of course it would rain. Of course i
t would.
My usual post-almost-dying routine—and, God, there was an actual routine—mostly involved getting yelled at by Priktin and then going to get a sandwich. And a bath. And some aspirin. Since none of those was immediately available, I settled for rolling over to check on the source of the wheezing breaths coming from behind me.
I still couldn’t see clearly, with only a sliver of moonlight for illumination, but he was swearing inventively enough to make sight irrelevant. Pritkin’s grumblings are the soundtrack of my life these days, but my relief at knowing he was okay was immediately followed by the realization that there was something wrong with his voice. I fought to get free from the enveloping folds of the heavy leather coat I seemed to be wearing and the mud that had latched onto it with vicious suction.
I finally managed it and staggered over to the side of the puddle, dripping, filthy and exhausted, only to meet my own furious blue gaze. “What did you do?!”
I stared in complete shock. My voice wasn’t that high, was it? I sounded like a little girl. A very pissed-off little girl. I was struggling to absorb the fact that my body was sitting there, yelling at me, when a chill wind tickled my neck and wrists and tried to seep under my clothes. I started to tug my sleeves down, but quit when I caught sight of the hands sticking out of them. I stopped moving entirely for a moment after that, except for my ass, which abruptly made contact with the ground.
The cold knife of recognition twisted in my stomach. The things at the end of my arms were a man’s hands. To be more exact, they were Pritkin’s hands, only for some reason I seemed to be wearing them. After a few frozen seconds, when even breathing became difficult, I realized what that bastard Daikoku had done.
I’d asked to be able to shift, but that hadn’t been possible in my body. I’d also wanted to take Pritkin with me. Daikoku had granted both requests, but not by giving me some extra energy as I’d hoped. He’d switched our bodies. That had allowed me out of the body that was almost drained and into one that had enough fight left to get us gone. It had also ensured that I had no choice but to take Pritkin along.
Because I was stuck inside his skin.
“What happened?” Pritkin demanded, his clipped British tones sounding really odd coming out of my mouth. It occured to me that, with my eyesight, he probably couldn’t yet see the truth for himself.
My mind groped wildly for something to say. “I can fix this,” I finally got out, my voice unfamiliar in my ears. “I think.”
“Fix what?” The question was spoken in a low, controlled voice, which wasn’t good. Pritkin loud is in his normal state. It’s when he gets quiet that you have to worry.
I would have answered, or tried to, but the realization hit me that this body was in a lot of pain. I looked down at my chest, more than a little freaked to see a half-burnt shirt, singed body hair and an irregular red patch underneath it all. Caleb’s spell, I recalled. Pritkin’s amazing healing abilities had already given it the slick, shiny texture of a half-healed burn. Except it didn’t feel half-healed. It hurt like a bitch.
“You destroyed my fence.” The accusation came from the man with the black-framed glasses and the floaty Einstein hair who was standing at the top of the hill, looking down disapprovingly.
I realized that the hard thing I was sitting on was a fence post half-buried in mud. I pulled it out from under my borrowed behind and looked up at the farmer. “Uh, sorry?”
“Well, there’s nothing to be done about it now,” the man said rather charitably, I thought. “Come up here and I’ll make us something hot.”
“Answer me,” Pritkin ordered, and we were close enough that I could see past the naked horror in his eyes and spot the homicidal urge rising. I was trying to come up with a way of breaking it to him gently, but then the farmer pointed a flashlight at us, and I didn’t need to explain. Because Pritkin was staring not at me but down at his chest. Which was currently a lot rounder than usual.
“What have you done?” His appalled whisper grated on my already ragged nerves.
“Got us out of there alive,” I snapped. Okay, it wasn’t an ideal situation, but neither was getting shot, strangled or spelled to death by the Circle. “And at least you’re inside me. I’ve had to possess a vampire before,” I reminded him.
Pritkin seemed at a loss for words—pretty much a first—but his steadily reddening face flushed even darker. He was going to give me a heart attack if he didn’t cut it out.
“You need to calm down,” I said more gently. I distinctly recalled my first out-of-body-and-into-someone-else’s experience, and it had been a little . . . traumatic.
“I am calm.”
Sure. Which was why he looked like he was updating his hit list.
“Yeah, only that’s my body you’re using and I’m trying to make it to thirty before my first heart attack.”
“Are you planning to sit there all night?” the farmer asked. “Get up here before you catch your death!”
“How?” Pritkin asked me, grasping my arms. It didn’t feel anything like his usual iron grip. I swallowed.
“There’s a path to the left. Less muddy than the way you came down,” the farmer answered helpfully.
“It’s a long story,” I told Pritkin nervously.
“Give me the short version.”
“A Japanese god with a lousy sense of humor?”
Pritkin just stared at me. Dark circles crowded his eyes and my hair was falling into his face. It looked like my body hadn’t recovered from the fight yet. It had started to rain harder, and cold drops were running in rivulets down his cheeks and dripping off the end of his chin. He was obviously suffering and, to tell the truth, I wasn’t thrilled about getting back a body that had a raging fever. We needed to get out of here.
“Let’s get back to Dante’s and I’ll explain,” I told him, gripping his shoulder. It felt strange, like the bones were too fragile under my new, larger hand, but I ignored it. I gathered my power around us and shifted—all of about four feet. We ended up sitting farther back in the mud puddle, almost up to our waists in smelly water. Pritkin sneezed.
“What happened?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know.” I was listening to the sounds of steps getting closer. The farmer had apparently given up trying to talk to the crazy people hanging out in his field and disappeared from view. But I could hear him as he traversed what I assumed was the path down.
“You’re telling me you can’t shift?” Pritkin demanded, apparently unaware that we were about to have company.
I tried again, just to make sure, and the same thing happened. Only this time, Pritkin lurched into me on landing and I slipped, taking an unexpected mud bath. I sat up, filthy and steaming, and spat out a mouthful of truly disgusting water. “That’s what I’m telling you.”
“But you got us here!”
“And it looks like we’re stuck here.”
I looked around for cover, but even with Pritkin’s eyesight, there wasn’t much to see. Other than an open-sided, tin-roofed shed, which appeared to be busy falling apart, there was only a flat plain filled with soggy grass and more mud. There were some indistinct black shapes silhouetted against the dark sky that might have been a tree line, but it was too far away to do us much good.
Then Pritkin’s head jerked around and he threw up a hand. At almost the same second, something hit his shield and ricocheted back to explode against the shed’s roof. The crash reverberated across the field and turned a third of the roof into a sizzling mess. I didn’t have time to ask him how he’d managed to create a shield using my power, because it collapsed and he jerked me down beside him. Something else whizzed over our heads, more an impression of light and heat than a visual image, and then Pritkin pushed my face down into the muck.
“Over here! There’s two of them!” I heard the yell as I surfaced.
A spell shot by and exploded just behind us, sending a wall of mud skyward before setting the row of heavy fence posts alight, like candles on a nonexis
tent cake. It occurred to me to wonder if it was the farmer I’d heard approaching, after all. Then I dodged one way and Pritkin went the other, barely in time to avoid a third spell.
Goddamnit, I didn’t even know where we were! How had my enemies found me so fast? I didn’t have time to figure it out, because someone grabbed me from behind.
I used one of the maneuvers Pritkin had been teaching me—which worked a lot better with his strength behind it—and broke the hold. A large, heavyset man wearing a dark Adidas sweatshirt stumbled back. He lost his footing on the slimy soil and went down, but the slew of magical weapons that had been hovering around his head flew straight at me.
I screamed and ducked with my hands over my head—like that was going to help. Only it seemed to, because nothing happened. I looked up to see the line of burning pickets hovering in front of me, getting impaled by knives and riddled by bullets, and Pritkin with a hand outstretched and a face pale with strain. Then I had to dance back to avoid another knife, this one in the hand of an angry mage.
Make that an angry war mage. Levitating weapons are one of their favorite tricks, allowing one man to act more like a squadron. In his little hoodie, Adidas didn’t look much like a war mage, but he fought like one. Which meant I was in a lot of trouble.
“Switch us back!” Pritkin yelled as the knife ripped through the sleeve of my coat.
I glared at him. “Busy!”
The remaining pickets attacked Adidas while I sloshed backward, fighting to stay on my feet and to find a weapon, and then someone else came out of nowhere and tackled me around the legs. The new assailant was taller, whip-thin and wiry. We hit the ground, or what passed for it, with a splash and a squelch. I twisted and fought and somehow ended up on top, pressing his face into the mud with one hand while trying to locate Pritkin’s holster with the other, which had ended up at the small of my back.
Adidas jumped both of us. I got hit in the ribs and cuffed upside the head, but I managed to gouge someone in the eye and got an elbow in someone else’s neck. Then Adidas punched me hard enough to set my ears ringing, but the fight had taken us near the shed and I shoved him back under the dripping metal of the awning.