by Anna Windsor
The disgusted, pitying expressions of the other fire Sibyls around her made silent comments about that strength—or lack of it. Mother Keara was looking at her, too, and the old woman’s blazing green eyes held the same judgment.
Too little, too quiet, too weak.
Camille really wished she had her scimitar, just to draw the blade and stare down each of the women on the battlement, Mother Keara included, until they moved away from her and went back down to the castle. Without her weapon, she had nothing but matted hair, wet eyes, and freezing fingers. Paltry heat rose in her cheeks—embarrassment, not power—and she felt nine years old again, failing in most of her lessons, shunted to the side as a reject who probably wouldn’t make the cut to fight, and running for her life down endless, dark stone corridors.
On the fields below, the crowd began to disperse and head into the keep before the storm struck. Camille spun away from Mother Keara and her glare, and elbowed past the Sibyls separating her from the steps.
Retreat.
Why did that always seem to be her best option?
Ah, screw it.
She more or less ran down the steps before any of them could see her cry again and slammed open the door at the foot of the stairs. When she stormed into the dark, quiet hallway leading toward the main entrance, she almost crushed a tiny figure standing directly in the middle of the corridor.
The woman’s scarred, white face and puckered, empty left eye were as unmistakable as her pheasant-egg bald head. Camille almost cried out from the shock of seeing Ona standing there like a spirit straight from Camille’s past, from the childhood she didn’t really want to commemorate.
“Figured you would be the first one down, like all the times before.” Ona spoke as though no time had passed since their long-ago meeting near the tunnels under Motherhouse Ireland. She had no accent, and obviously, she still spoke so rarely that it left her voice sounding rough and hoarse.
“I hate that ceremony,” Camille muttered, processing what Ona meant—that the old woman had seen Camille fleeing from these ceremonies before.
“I hate those ceremonies, too, and most others, which is why I don’t attend.” Ona studied Camille with her good eye, which was a strange, shadowy shade of black. Her unlined face had no discernible expression. “Why do you put yourself through that torture?”
“It’s—I—” Camille fished for an explanation, but she was too rattled by Ona’s appearance and the question to find an answer. “It’s expected,” she said after a few seconds, then realized how lame that sounded.
“Expectations. Rules.” Ona raised a slender hand and gestured toward the stone walls and ceiling. Gold bracelets glittered along her arm. They seemed too still, fixed in place, not like bangles or normal jewelry. “The likes of us, we don’t do so well with edicts and pointless traditions. From this day forward, do what feels right instead of what you’re told is right.”
“Yeah, okay, like that’s so easy.” Camille’s shame and anger faded as she tried to absorb the sight of the barefoot enigma, who still wasn’t wearing the green robes of the Motherhouse. Today Ona had on a white tunic and black cotton breeches that made her look like a throwback to medieval times.
Who knows? She might have been acquainted with King Arthur and Merlin, too, as old as she is.
Had Ona’s mind finally collapsed? Was that why she had come out of hiding again to give Camille this do-what-feels-right lesson after leaving her hanging for all these years?
Movement disrupted the silence behind them, and Camille felt Mother Keara’s distinctive heat and energy roll into the corridor. A second or so later, Mother Keara walked past Camille and hesitated at the sight of Ona. The Sibyls behind Mother Keara stopped, too, all of them staring at the little woman with almost matching looks of shock.
“We’ve a lot goin’ on today,” Mother Keara said, irritation mingling with a hint of surprise and maybe even kindness in her tone. “What can we do for you, Ona?”
Ona never shifted her gaze away from Camille, and she didn’t bother with being pleasant. “You can move along. I have no business with any of you.”
Camille’s mouth came open, and her gaze darted to Mother Keara, who had been one of the worst terrors of her young life.
Mother Keara’s face turned a deep, hectic red. A cloud of smoke wreathed her gray braids. Camille readied herself for the blast of fire and temper, but Mother Keara didn’t ignite anything at all. It was almost like she couldn’t, like the fire refused to obey her will, form itself, and explode outward to express her anger.
“Fine.” Mother Keara stared at Ona another few heartbeats. “I was just bein’ polite, for all that gets a person with you.”
Ona gave her no response. She just kept staring at Camille.
Camille barely kept her mouth from falling open.
She had never seen anybody show Mother Keara such open disrespect except for Bela, who had an unusually close relationship with the old witch—and Bela was usually kidding or being affectionate.
Mother Keara sniffed, but she didn’t say anything else. Instead, she stumped off down the hall in the direction of the entryway, trailing curtains of smoke as she went. The other Sibyls from the battlement followed her, single file, none of them looking over their shoulders.
“Rules and expectations,” Ona said loudly enough to be heard by Mother Keara. “Pointless. By the time councils and kings get around to making rules, the trouble they’re set to fix has already happened. Why bother? I never saw rules teach anybody anything. Do what feels right, Camille.”
Mother Keara walked faster and smashed the corridor’s wooden door against the stone wall when she opened it. When the last Sibyl went through, she closed the door firmly behind her, as if to lock trouble away for good.
“You live in New York City now,” Ona told Camille, stating fact instead of asking a question. “You live with a … a water Sibyl.”
Camille felt her eyes go wide. “You—I—yes.” Her mind was still reeling from watching Ona take Mother Keara down a few pegs, and she couldn’t quite believe she’d heard Ona correctly. “Sorry. I’m surprised you keep up with details like that.”
Ona shook her head once. “I don’t care about details, girl. It’s you I’m keeping up with.”
If Camille had been surprised before, she was stunned now. She didn’t know how to respond, and Ona didn’t seem to have anything else to say, either.
Chills broke out along Camille’s neck and shoulders as Ona kept staring at her, and she remembered having the same reaction to her when she’d seen her as a child. Ona’s gaze was more like probing than simple staring, like Ona was reaching inside her to pry out—what?
And why?
“Okay, well.” Camille tried to keep her composure as she ran her fingers through her hair to tug out some of the wind knots. “I guess I should go find my quad. We have to get back to the city for patrol tonight.”
Ona’s expression shifted to something like sadness, but by the time she nodded, her scarred face had become unreadable again.
Camille moved past Ona carefully and slowly, wondering what the hell had just happened. It wasn’t like Camille needed any more stress, complications, or weirdness in her life. She was trying to work with a fighting group with a lot of issues, she’d just had her nose rubbed in her losses and failures and weaknesses again, she was dealing with the world’s only water Sibyl—and oh, yeah, Bela, the mortar of her triad, had gotten married and kicked Camille out of the bigger bedroom she’d had on the ground floor of the brownstone where they all lived, consigning her to the basement. That was quite enough for now, thank you.
As she reached the doorway separating the corridor from the main entryway, she heard the dull, distant thunder of conversations, lots of people moving, and rain beginning to fall on Connemara’s boggy land. She got hold of the door’s metal handle and gave it a pull, and from somewhere behind her Ona said, “I may see you soon.”
Camille let go of the wooden edge of the
door and whipped around to ask Ona what that meant, but Ona was gone, as if she’d never been in the hallway at all. A tiny patch of stone in the center of the corridor seemed to flicker and shimmer like a small pool of water in the moonlight, but when Camille blinked, the area was normal again, gray and solid.
Okay, maybe all that time she’d spent hiding out in the lower reaches of Motherhouse Ireland to regain her sanity after Alisa and Bette died hadn’t worked after all. This was definitely crazy. Sibyls worked with the elements, like all supernatural practitioners. There was no such thing as “magic” in the mythical storybook sense—only enhanced abilities to control, channel, and shape the natural energies of the earth. Way back before Sibyls started writing everything down, people used to call their elemental abilities “magicks” or “old magicks”—but those were just words, not reality.
Ona couldn’t have gotten out of sight that fast, and she couldn’t have disappeared.
Right?
“ ‘I may see you soon,’ ” Camille repeated, her heart beating faster as her words echoed into the empty hallway. “Was that an offer or a threat?”
She waited. That sense of things changing came back to her, just like it had when she was little, the first time she met Ona.
“Ona?” she called into the empty hallway.
Then she waited a little longer, but she got no answer at all.
( 4 )
September
John Cole’s knees hit stone so hard his teeth slammed together.
The growling in the back of his mind morphed into roaring, and he wished he could rip the sound out of his head. He’d had this body for a few months now, and he’d figured out a few things about how to put it to good use—but he hadn’t figured out how to unplug that godawful noise, especially when something was pissing him off.
Four massive hands shoved down on his shoulders and neck.
Yeah. That was pissing him off.
John jerked against the weird iron cuffs locking his hands behind his back, surprised they could hold him. His new body was super-strong, more powerful than five men put together, but something in the cuffs drained away some of that strength. He bit into his gag and strained to catch a glimpse of something through the thick black fabric tied around his eyes.
Nothing but darkness.
Wherever he was, the place smelled like shit. Well, shit and mold and water. And dirt and rock and sweat. He had a sense of people, lots of them, moving into position all around him.
Metal rattled on metal.
Swords being drawn?
Swords.
You gotta be kidding me.
He knew only one group of warriors who fought with swords, and the six huge assholes who’d jumped him tonight in the alley were definitely not good-looking women in leather bodysuits.
Sharp, cold steel pressed against the back of his neck.
Great.
He’d survived childhood in the rural South, seminary, the Army, a nightmare in Afghanistan, leaving the priesthood, then years as a black ops agent hunting demons—and now he was about to die in some New York City sewer, thanks to a bunch of sword freaks he didn’t even know.
Cloth rustled.
The space around him went grave-still and tomb-silent, and a new smell made him try to lift his head even though the blade bit into his skin.
Rosewood.
A trickle of blood flowed down his back, drenching his best T-shirt, but John ignored that. Rosewood reminded him of his grandmother, of everything regal and formal and really, really old.
Cloth whispered in front of him again, stirring against the stone where he had been forced to kneel. The sword at his neck moved once, slicing through the gag. It fell away from his face. Another slice of the sword, and his blindfold fell away, too. The blade didn’t return to his neck, and the hands restraining him turned him loose.
John Cole found himself staring at feet. Very small feet, withered and ancient, clad in sandals beneath a flowing silver robe.
He raised his head.
The first thing he registered was the fact he was in a candlelit stone chamber roughly the size of a football field, and it was full of silent men standing in straight lines, arms behind their backs like soldiers at parade rest.
After his time in the Afghan mountains, John didn’t much like stone chambers. Too temple-like. But at least he didn’t see any fire marks on these walls. As for the soldiers or whatever they were, most of them looked vaguely foreign, with dark hair and dusky skin, like they might have come from a desert nation. Each wore modern-day jeans and T-shirts, but their overshirts barely concealed scabbards holding broadswords. Arched tunnels led away from the chamber, and more men lined those tunnels. They were probably in some forgotten offshoot of the Old Croton Aqueduct. The masonry looked to be from the mid-1800s, around the time the aqueduct was built.
The second thing John registered was the small elderly woman staring down at him with completely white eyes. Blind, his mind told him, and he knew she had to be, yet he sensed she was seeing him more keenly than a sighted person might. She had dark brown skin and a cloud of short hair as silver as the strange robe she wore. The robe and her hair seemed to glitter even in the dim light of the stone chamber. Strange pinkish scars covered all of her that he could see, forming no particular pattern, almost like somebody had dipped her in hot wax or oil, then left her to burn. Supernatural power frothed in the air around her wrinkled skin, and his entire being prickled as he sensed her probing into his essence, his energy—and his thoughts.
“Fight me if you wish,” she told him in a clear, strong voice. “You won’t stop me from taking what I want to know, demon.”
“My name is John Cole.” John kept his gaze on her reflective eyes, forcing himself to allow her invasion into certain areas of his mind—but definitely not all of them. His new body had reflexive knowledge of mind talents, and John put that to use, protecting what he didn’t want anyone to see, yet careful not to push the woman’s energy away from him. He was outnumbered, but also he sensed the woman might be useful to him if he could win her trust. Something about her reminded him of every military officer he had ever known, and power like she seemed to command usually proved to be useful in a war.
In the depths of his essence, the snarling of his body’s previous owner never stopped. “I’m not a demon,” John said, ignoring that racket as best he could. “I haven’t gotten rid of the fuck—ah, sorry, the monster—who used to own this bag of bones, but I kicked its ass, and I’m the one in control now. Dig through my thoughts if you have to. See for yourself.”
The scarred old woman in the silvery robes moved closer to him, slow but supple as a year-old cat. The soldiers nearest to them shifted positions, just enough to defend her if John made some sudden move.
Don’t worry, boys. I’m pigheaded, but I’m not stupid.
John’s skull tingled as the old woman leaned in even tighter. Hot prickles lit up his brain like it was nothing more than a bunch of wires slammed into a wall jack.
Okay, maybe the not-stupid part wasn’t spot-on.
He breathed through the fiery jabs, flexing his fingers. Somehow he managed not to move any more than that, and to let the old woman do what he’d invited her to do—dig around his head until she found all she needed to know.
When she finished, she was frowning. “You say your name is John Cole, but you’re wearing the skin of our worst enemy. Why should I let you live?”
John reminded himself to watch his mouth in the presence of a lady, and he gave her what he hoped was a polite smile. “Because I slaughter Rakshasa, and I’m good at it.”
John sensed a fierce surge of approval from the woman. Whatever she was, she had no love for those creatures.
Good.
Killing the bastards had been his one purpose since he walked away from the first Gulf War.
The snarling in his brain got worse.
John ground his teeth to tamp down the noise in his brain. It distracted him. That’s why
six of this woman’s henchmen had been able to sneak up on him, club him stupid, cuff him, blindfold him, gag him, and drag him down to this godforsaken set of tunnels. Why the men hadn’t killed him in the alley, why they’d taken a chance on bringing him to what was obviously a hideout or staging area to meet this woman who was obviously their leader—those were questions he needed to answer.
The old woman backed off a step, then closed her blank white eyes for a few seconds. She seemed to be adding up everything about him and trying to come up with some description that made sense.
Yeah. Good luck with that.
The men protecting her didn’t so much as twitch as they waited, but their mistrust buzzed like wasps against the back of John’s neck.
Tiger, his overly sensitive nose told him, picking out the acrid musk from the old woman’s rosewood and the musty odors of the aqueduct. Yet not tiger.
“You’re a priest who gave up your collar,” the old woman said, her eyes still closed. “You’re a soldier who gave up your stripes. You’re a man so determined to complete your mission that you escaped death and stole a demon’s body to complete it.”
John kept his expression as friendly as he could manage, given the circumstances. “That about covers it.”
“You have the look of Strada, leader of the Rakshasa Eldest.” The woman’s puckered face eased into a semblance of peacefulness, and she finally opened her eerie eyes. “You have his human form, but not his energy. Mind and flesh are yours, John Cole, but the struggle for this body’s soul is far from over.”
How old was she? A hundred? Two hundred? John had a suspicion she was much older, and maybe some of her soldiers were, too. The Rakshasa Eldest had spent a millennium trapped in a temple in the Afghan mountains, in the Valley of the Gods, until a special-forces expedition—an expedition he had been part of—accidentally set them free from that bombed-out temple. Was it possible that the woman and some of her friends had encountered the tiger-demons before the Rakshasa had gotten ensnared in the temple’s containment?