by Karen Chance
“I don’t have the right to steal part of someone’s life, put them in danger to protect myself and possibly traumatize them forever in the process,” I told him quietly.
“That’s overstating the issue,” he said stubbornly. “And it’s for the common good.”
“Which makes perfect sense, unless you’re the one getting screwed over for everyone else’s good.”
“It is not up to you to revise a system when you don’t even know what it is!”
“But Apollo does know,” Pritkin pointed out. He’d stayed quiet during our discussion, seated at a small table near the wall, systematically cleaning his weapons. But he’d apparently kept up, because his voice had a definite edge. “He’ll be prepared for the status quo and have a plan of action for any move we make based on it. If we hope to best him, we must learn to think in new and different ways.”
“Stay out of this, John!” Marsden snapped.
“Why?” I asked. “He’s right.”
Marsden looked at me in exasperation. “The rules are there for your protection—”
“They didn’t protect Agnes.”
For the first time, Marsden looked genuinely angry. I guess he wasn’t used to people talking back to him. “She was poisoned because of the Circle’s negligence! Of all the reasons I have to despise Saunders, that is by far the greatest! As long as I remained in office, she was properly guarded. As you will be once I return.”
I put a hand on his shoulder. His muscles were knotted with strain, with grief. He misses her, I realized. He wanted to honor her memory by helping to fulfill her last wish—that I succeed her. But he wanted to do it on his terms.
I exchanged glances with Pritkin. “About that . . . ,” I said.
“It’s perfect!” Marsden announced when I’d finished explaining the plan. “Better than I dared to hope for!”
“Don’t get too excited,” I told him. “We don’t have a deal yet. I can get you in, but I want a little more than confirmation in return.”
“Namely?” The old man’s expression didn’t change, but his usually bleary blue eyes suddenly looked a lot sharper.
“There are some schools the Circle has been running. I want them closed. Permanently.”
His forehead creased. “What schools?”
“The ones for kids with malfunctioning magic. The Circle has been locking people away for years who haven’t done anything wrong, and that’s including when you were in office. It has to stop.”
Marsden was shaking his head before I even finished. “The schools you mention are an unfortunate necessity. I don’t like them, either, but there simply is no other choice. We don’t lock away the harmless sort, but some of those children have very dangerous gifts!”
“There has to be a better solution.”
“If so, we’ve never found it. Unsupervised, they are a danger to themselves and everyone around them.” It sounded final.
“How many have you met?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“It’s a simple question. How many of them have you met? Because I’ve had nine hanging out at Dante’s for a week now and the place has yet to burn down or blow up or suffer anything worse than elevators with doors that won’t shut!”
“Then you’ve been very fortunate.” His tone was dismissive, as if I couldn’t possibly know what I was talking about.
“I also lived with a group of them for almost two years when I was a teenager. I’m not saying we never had a problem, but no one killed anyone or burned down any buildings. And the neighbors never noticed enough unusual stuff to bother calling the cops.”
“Forgive me, Cassie, but I find that very difficult to believe.” He sounded patient, and it pissed me off. I wasn’t the one being stubborn here.
“Like I said, how many of them have you ever known?”
“None. However—”
“Don’t you think it’s time you met some?”
He looked at me for a long moment. “Perhaps. But you understand that I cannot promise you anything? To take such a step, the Council would have to approve, and while I once had a good deal of sway over that group, that is no longer true.”
Oddly enough, I actually felt better that he hadn’t automatically agreed to my demand. If he had, I’d have worried that it was only to get what he wanted, and that the kids would be forgotten if and when he came to power. But even so, I wanted something a little less vague.
“I understand. But I want the issue discussed—seriously discussed—in front of the Council. And I want a good faith gesture from you before then. On the day you return to power, you release to my custody the children the Circle kidnapped yesterday.”
“I thought you had already retrieved them.”
“Only some. I want the rest. There aren’t many,” I added, because his face was still stuck on no.
“I will release the children taken in this latest raid,” he finally agreed. “And I will bring up the broader issue of the educational centers with the Council. But I cannot force their hand. The final decision will rest with them.”
I didn’t like it, but I respected him for refusing to promise more than he knew he could deliver. “Then it seems we have a deal.”
There was only one thing left on the agenda, but Pritkin wasn’t making it easy. “If you want this to happen, you have to drop your shields!” I told him, exasperated.
“You are certain this will work?” he asked for maybe the tenth time.
“Yes!” I put as much confidence into my voice as I could, but he didn’t look convinced. “This was your idea, remember?”
Pritkin had vetoed the idea of Billy possessing his body, even for a moment, so we’d opted for Plan B. The idea was for Billy to slip inside my skin and nudge Pritkin out. And as Pritkin’s body would be the only one in the room that wouldn’t be shielded, his spirit should have no trouble finding its way home.
It ought to work. It would work. But not if Pritkin refused to lower the shields he’d placed around my body.
“He’s afraid of opening himself up like that with a hungry ghost hanging around,” Billy said with a grin. He was clearly enjoying this. “He’s probably wishing he’d been nicer the last time we met.”
“Billy!”
“What? What did he say?” Pritkin’s head whipped around, his eyes wild. And, okay, maybe he wasn’t taking this better than me after all.
“You remember,” Billy said, “when we were in Faerie and I had a body and he slapped the crap out of me?” He was glowing with the power I’d loaned him and it was making him sassy.
“He didn’t say anything,” I told Pritkin.
“I mean, I could live with it if he’d punched me, but a slap—”
Pritkin broke and headed for the stairs. He’d have made it, but Marsden had been stationed there for just such an emergency and he blocked the way. “Drop your shields,” I said soothingly, motioning Billy over as casually as possible. “It’ll all be over in a second.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of,” Pritkin muttered, glancing around. His voice held the little crack it got when he was really disturbed and trying to cover it, the one that made me want to duck because usually it involved someone shooting at us. I glanced around nervously, but no one was there.
Marsden punched Pritkin on the shoulder. “You’re a war mage, man! Buck up!”
And to my surprise, after another moment, Pritkin did. Billy stepped inside and I breathed a sigh of relief. Maybe this would go okay, after all, I thought. Right before Pritkin started convulsing.
“John!” Marsden grabbed for him, but Pritkin jittered out of reach. A flailing fist took out one of the banister railings and knocked the phone off the wall before Marsden’s hands managed to lock on his shoulders.
“Take it easy! You’re in my body,” I reminded him. He obviously didn’t hear me. His eyes were unfocused, he was pale and sweating, and his knuckles were shining white where he’d dug his fingers into Marsden’s arms.
I’d never
seen him so out of control. Pritkin usually took things in stride that would send others into raging fits. “Billy—hurry up!”
“I can’t do this if he keeps fighting me!” Billy said, sticking his head out of Pritkin’s chest.
“He’s fighting the possession,” I told Marsden.
“John, listen to me!” Marsden shook him. “You have to let go!”
Pritkin didn’t answer, just thrashed against his hold like a man possessed by something a lot scarier than a failed card shark. And he was doing more than struggling physically. Portions of Billy kept shooting out of him at odd places—a foot stuck out of a thigh, an arm poked out of his chest and Billy’s head reemerged from a shoulder.
“Some help here,” Billy gasped. “I’m losing him!”
“I can’t leave this body until he’s free!” I reminded him.
“If you don’t he’s not gonna get free. Distract him long enough for me to push him out, and then you can guide him back.”
I didn’t like the idea, but I didn’t have a better one. And if we didn’t do this now, I had a feeling it would be a very long time before we managed to talk Pritkin into another attempt. “We’re changing the plan,” I told Marsden. “I have to help Billy.”
“I thought you said that John’s body will die without a soul!”
“Not in a few seconds. And I’ll return if it takes any longer than that.” I stretched out on the floor so that Pritkin’s body wouldn’t collapse when I left. “Ready?” I asked Billy.
“And waiting!” he snapped, struggling to hang on.
My borrowed head fell back against the floor. I concentrated, and after a moment, my spirit glided up and the face on the body below me went slack. I’d gotten a little better at this sort of thing in the last month, meaning that I no longer rocketed around like an out-of-control comet. So it would have been easy enough to drift over to Pritkin, if he hadn’t kneed Marsden somewhere sensitive and taken off for the stairs again. Damn it!
I floated after him and caught him as his foot hit the lowest step. But catching him and getting inside were totally different things. My body’s shields were back up and operating at a level I hadn’t known they could reach. I shield with fire, not water, but it was Pritkin’s spirit projecting the mental barrier, and I splashed down into an endless ocean of gently undulating waves.
I surfaced, sputtering and coughing, but Billy was nowhere in sight. And I didn’t know how to get past armor this advanced. Unlike with most shields, there were no rips or tears—no chinks at all. Just blue, blue water spreading to the horizon in every direction.
Diving, I discovered, only made things worse: now I was in a featureless indigo world with no reference points. Hovering blindly in the dark, I could feel the crackle of my spirit’s heat start to war with the ocean, churning up vast amounts of water that bubbled around me in a frothy tide. Then the ocean began swirling, a hard current took me and I rocketed back toward the surface in what I vaguely realized was a giant water spout. I tore through out into the open, thrust upward at a dizzying rate—and kept on going right back into the kitchen.
It took me a moment to realize that I’d just been exorcised from my own body.
“Got him!” Billy said. And the next moment, the pale, glimmering form of a man was pushed out of my skin and into the kitchen.
Most new spirits are hopelessly confused for a few moments at least, trying to depend on the senses of the body they no longer have to understand the world. And despite being half demon, it appeared that Pritkin was no different, hovering exposed and terrified in what probably felt like complete solitude. I tried to grab his insubstantial hand, but he shied back, horror passing over his hazy features.
He couldn’t see me, I realized. He didn’t know if the spirit who had touched him was that of a friend or a predator. I tried to reach out with my senses, to let him know who I was, to tell him to follow me, and a feeling of presence slammed into me that left me shaking. But it wasn’t coming from him.
Something was moving toward us, stirring up the spirit world with the force of a swift-moving storm. It shuddered across my awareness, filled with the spark of lightning and the hungry mutters of thunder. There were stray flickers at the edge of my vision, and a cold, brittle scent in the air.
A jolt of fear hit me like a punch. I froze, my entire form tightening in terror. Rakshasas. They had seen him, felt him, and they were coming. We had to get out of here, get of here now—
I grabbed for Pritkin, but his spirit form flitted off like a leaf in the wind. I followed, knowing what would happen if we didn’t get back inside the protection of a body. But before I could reach him, the tenuous membrane between worlds shuddered around us and something stepped out.
My first glimpse was of a red-haired creature maybe six feet tall that appeared suddenly out of the darkness at the top of the stairs. He’d assumed the basic form of a man, but the illusion wouldn’t have fooled anybody who’d been able to see it. Of course, anybody in that position wouldn’t have been hanging around for a second look.
Delicate bones underpinned a face with liquid black eyes and an elegant Roman nose. It was difficult to tell more than that because most of the features were hidden behind a mask of blood. It also gleamed wetly on the powerful, naked body, staining his golden skin in dark streaks, as if the blood ran in never-ceasing streams over his flesh. Gore was trapped under his nails, painted his lips and matted his long, tangled hair. And the expression in those eyes wasn’t human, wasn’t even animal. It was pure, ravenous hunger.
Another one appeared behind the leader’s shoulder and then four more in rapid succession. They were males and females with human forms but the smiles of beasts, all of them a nightmarish cross of wild beauty and absolute savagery. They spilled down the steps in a writhing tangle of bloodstained skin, fanning out around me and cutting me off from both my body and Pritkin’s.
“Here’s a pretty one,” the leader crooned, reaching out to me. A tender hand brushed across my cheek and I shuddered with revulsion. He smiled and his hand cupped my nape, drawing me close to that terrible face.
“This one lives,” one of the creatures purred. “I smell its breath.”
“Yes.”
“Forbidden,” another said. “Protected.”
“No.” The leader stroked a hand down my spirit form, and a clawed nail sharp as a blade tore into me. For a moment, I felt nothing. Until a writhing agony ignited my spine as every vein was traced with fire, burning and tearing and all-pervasive. “Like the traitor, this one is ours.”
“We taste its blood.” Parched voices cried from all sides. “We hunger. Give it to us. . . .”
“Mine first,” the leader snarled. And I knew without asking that there would be no dealing with these things, no bribes accepted, no pleas heard. I had only one thing they wanted—and they were already taking it.
I looked down and saw that he’d ripped a gash in my spirit, and that something pale and completely unlike blood was starting to seep out. Power, I realized through the haze of pain. He was going to drain me.
The pack mewled hungrily but didn’t move. The leader ran his tongue down my chest like a lover, licking at the spilled power. But it was the laughing hiss that followed that drove my panic beyond the bounds of reason. If I’d still had a body, it would have caused the adrenaline in my veins to congeal, turned my breath to ice in my lungs. As it was, I suddenly couldn’t move, even when the leader tilted his head down, closed his lips over the wound he’d made and sucked.
It hurt, oh, God, it hurt, like acid on raw nerves, like barbed knives turning into bone. But more than the pain was the first bitter hint of loss. The knowledge that some part of me had been stolen, lost like a drop of water dissolving in a cold, dark sea. Forever gone.
The leader looked up at me and licked his bloody lips. “It tastes better alive,” he said, and released the pack.
It felt exactly like having a body again as they bore me to the floor. The cold stone at my back
only magnified the hot agony as they tore into me. I screamed at the grinding bites, twisting mindlessly, trying to claw out of their grasp, but everywhere I turned was another leering face. Within seconds faint curls of mist were coiling up from a dozen wounds. They seeped slowly outward, flowing away from my form to cling to the pack’s hands and wind around their arms.
I watched, horror-struck, as they lapped it up, licking their fingers like kids with a half-melted ice cream. But it wasn’t enough. They were starving, and this was only a taste. They wanted it all.
“She is not lawful prey!” I heard someone call and looked up to see Pritkin stumbling into the middle of the feast, still half blind and probably extremely confused.
“Lord Rosier gave her to us,” the leader said, crouched over me jealously. “As he did you.”
Several creatures broke off the pack and started for Pritkin, but he avoided them and flung his flimsy, powerless form straight at the leader. For a split second, the pack forgot about me in the surprise of seeing someone running straight at death instead of cringing away. Then they released me to spring at Pritkin, and I threw myself backward, sending my consciousness crashing into his body lying so still on the floor.
Between one thought and the next, I was convulsing awake, my breath rasping in lungs gone tight and dry, starved for air. Red and violet spots exploded behind my tightly clenched lids, and I dragged in a ragged breath, coughing and gasping. Everything hurt. It was like the flu: no localized source of pain, just an all-over pervasive sense of illness.
For a second, I didn’t understand what was wrong with me. I’d been gone for only a minute; Pritkin’s body shouldn’t have suffered any damage in that time. And then I remembered: spiritual attacks manifest on the body once you return to it. If those things savaged him badly enough, it wouldn’t matter if we managed to get him back to his body. Because he’d die anyway.
Chapter Twenty-four