Tempt the Stars cp-6

by Karen Chance

  He looked at me impatiently. “The theory is sound enough, but in practice—it’s like I told you. It was a failed experiment.”

  “It looked pretty successful to me!”

  “Well, of course. It was designed to.” He held the bottle under his chin and pulled over an ottoman, I guess so he wouldn’t drop me, and plunked down.

  “Designed to do what?”

  “To fool the Black Circle.” He saw my expression and made a disgusted sound. “Look, it doesn’t work, all right? But the Circle didn’t know that because no one had ever tried it. The demonologists who could create a proper binding spell couldn’t see ghosts, and you can’t bind what you can’t even tell is there! And the necromancers who specialize in ghosts can’t do a binding.”

  “Daisy said otherwise,” I reminded him.

  He rolled his eyes in unconscious imitation. “Do you know how zombies are made?” he demanded, putting the baby on his shoulder and patting her back. “They’re not like ghosts. They have no souls. So a necromancer must send a tiny bit of his own to animate his creation.”

  “So?”

  “So it’s not like you can spare that much! That’s why you don’t see zombie armies roaming about, despite what the movies would have you believe. A necromancer can only direct two, maybe three at a time with any success. Any others he tries to raise will be on autopilot—the lights are on but nobody’s home, all right? And as such, they’re sitting ducks. Useless.”

  “I still don’t see—”

  The baby interrupted me with an astonishingly loud burp. We both looked at her, me with shock, him with satisfaction. He wiped her chin and popped the bottle back in her mouth.

  “I told you, I modified the binding spell used on golems with the spell we use for making zombies. And it worked, more or less. But you know how it is with magic—it always bites you on the ass somehow. And in this particular case, I found that the new spell was limited in the same way the zombie spell is—I could only bind two or three ‘bodies’ at a time. I couldn’t make an army if I tried!”

  I scanned his face, wanting to believe him. His blue eyes looked guileless, and he sounded completely convincing. But then, he had downstairs, too.

  Roger scowled, I guess because I was taking too long. “Think, girl! Why do you think nobody’s used ghosts as a weapon before? I’m not a genius and nothing’s new under the sun. Somebody probably tried at some point, then gave up in disgust and went back to zombies! They may be disgusting, but at least they’re reliable.”

  “Yet you’ve done it, at least with two—”

  “Yes, two. And you wouldn’t believe the merry hell they give me, either. I mean, think about the logistics of it for a minute. If you could find enough independent-minded spirits, who weren’t obsessing over revenge twenty-four-seven, and if you could somehow find enough energy to feed them, and if you could convince them to support your cause . . . well, then you might have a force to be reckoned with. But do you know what the odds are on that?”

  He was right, I realized. And if I hadn’t been so busy worrying about him and Pritkin going for each other’s throats, I might have realized it on my own. Billy Joe was just one ghost and he gave me a fit. I couldn’t imagine controlling an army, or even managing to recruit it to begin with. No wonder nobody had ever done it. It would be like trying to herd cats.

  “Obsessive, chattering cats,” Roger agreed, because I guess I’d spoken that last out loud.

  “But Jonas—the head of the Silver Circle—told me your ghost army was watching the Circle’s every move.”

  Roger laughed. “Did he, now?”

  “You’re telling me that wasn’t true, either?”

  “Of course it wasn’t true. I don’t like the Silver Circle, but the Black’s even worse. I wasn’t about to help them, but they kept insisting. They’d gotten the idea that I had several hundred ghosts lying about, which I suppose they thought was a waste since they were feeding them! So I made sure that rumors reached the Silver Circle to make them extra paranoid and give me an excuse for not catching much.”

  I stared at him. He sounded so blasé about it, like lying to the two most powerful magical organizations on earth was no big thing. “And your army—”

  “When people hear the term ‘army’ paired with anything, they tend to give it respect. Ask Tony.”

  “You lied to him, too.” It wasn’t a question.

  “Well, we couldn’t stay at the house,” he said peevishly, looking a bit annoyed. Like he’d expected me to ooh and aah over his accomplishments. I was impressed all right—that he’d lasted as long as he had. I was also coming around to Pritkin’s point of view—there was a damned good possibility Daddy was nuts.

  “Why couldn’t you stay at the house?” I asked, not sure I wanted to know.

  “Your mother outright refused. I told you, she prefers the woods, and anyway, she didn’t like Tony.”

  Imagine that.

  “And in any case, the bastard bunch of ghosts they have over there kept trying to savage Sam and Daisy! I had to get us out.”

  “So you faked the demon attack so Tony would exile you to the cottage,” I said, because of course he had.

  “Fire spell. You know how vamps are.”

  “—and then you booby-trapped the forest—”

  “Well, we had to grow it first.”

  “—and built those things so nobody would come out to spy on you.”

  “I’m less worried about the spying than the dying,” he said dryly. “If the damned Spartoi show up, I need something better than Tony’s lot to buy us time. Something even a god won’t expect. And I still had the specs for the homunculi from when I was with the Black Circle, so . . ” He shrugged.

  I sat there. I had about a thousand questions I wanted—needed—to ask, and this might be my only chance. Because if Mom was anything like Agnes, she wasn’t going to be happy to see me. I knew that, knew I needed to seize the opportunity while it was here, but I was having a hard time with it.

  “You . . . you lied about everything,” I said, trying to wrap my brain around the idea of this completely ordinary guy somehow convincing everyone—the Black and Silver Circles, Agnes, a master vampire, everyone—that he was a force to be reckoned with. When all he had were some junky robots and a couple of smart-mouthed ghosts.

  “I prefer to think of it as creative problem-solving,” he told me stiffly.

  “And you got away with it,” I said wonderingly. Because that was probably the most difficult part to accept.

  “You sound surprised.”

  “I’m flabbergasted,” I told him honestly. He smirked. “You should have been dead years ago.”

  The smirk faded. “Thanks,” he said sourly, switching the baby over to the other shoulder, since that one had been sufficiently drooled on. “But maybe one day you’ll learn, people are gullible. Often they’ll just believe what you tell them, if you sound confident enough—and if it’s something they like. They want to believe, so they do half the work for you.”

  “But . . . but the Black Circle,” I said, trying to impress on him the type of people he had been dealing with, since apparently he still didn’t get it.

  “The maxim holds true for crooks as much as anyone else,” he told me. “Maybe more so. They get so used to everyone being too scared to try to con them that they just assume you must be telling the truth.”

  I just sat there and looked at him some more. “And that army you kept promising? Wouldn’t they expect to see it, sooner or later?”

  “Well, yes,” he said, more quietly, because the baby had fallen back asleep. “That’s why we had the falling out. They demanded results and I . . . well, I stalled for as long as I could, pointing out that ghost recruitment is a little more difficult than the usual kind. And then I had to build the prototype, and then work out the kinks, and then demonstrate it—they were happy that day, at least. But eventually they demanded to see more, and of course two was all I had.”

  “
But why make any at all?” I said angrily, because none of this made any sense. “What were you even doing there?”

  He frowned at me, maybe because I’d managed to wake the baby up, and stood to rock her. “I was there for the power, of course. I told them I couldn’t recruit ghosts without it, or support an army on my own. If they wanted results, they had to pony up. And they did.” He grinned. “Oh yes, they did. For years, I all but drained them dry—”

  “For what?” I demanded, wanting at least one true thing in this house of lies he’d built. “Why risk your life for power you didn’t even need?”

  He started to answer but then looked up. And his whole face changed. For an instant, he was almost handsome. He was looking at something behind me, in the doorway, and I knew even before I turned around what it was.

  Or, rather, I knew who.

  “I found a war mage bleeding onto the linoleum,” my mother said, coming in and taking the baby.

  “Bleeding?” I jumped up.

  “Healing was one of my gifts once,” she told me. “I have not completely lost the skill.”

  “Is he awake?” I didn’t doubt her, but I wanted to see that scowl for myself.

  “He will be soon.” She glanced at her husband. “Will you watch him?”

  “Of course.”

  “Without further incident?”

  He rolled his eyes but looked a little guilty. He left. Leaving me with a goddess I didn’t know, and a mother I’d barely met.

  For a long moment, I didn’t say anything. She was as beautiful as I remembered, and nothing like the legends said. She was a warrior—I knew that, and not just because of some old, probably half-mangled stories. But because I’d seen it with my own eyes. She’d turned a Spartoi to dust, trapped another in a time loop, run a third down in the nineteenth-century version of a chariot. And then, with a little help from me, she’d dumped most of the rest in time, stranding them forever in the fall of history, with no way to stop.

  But she didn’t look it. Her beautiful spill of coppery bronze hair was curling in damp ringlets down her back, her soft white dress was wet and dirty around the hem, as if she’d had on a coat that had ended just a little short. And her beautiful face was serene as she soothed her child.

  She smelled like lilacs, I thought blankly, the familiar scent circling my head like a caress. I remembered . . . from childhood . . . it was almost the only thing that I—

  “Cassandra.”

  Violet-blue eyes met mine. They were calm, like her voice. But suddenly, I wasn’t. Suddenly, I could barely breathe and my chest hurt.

  “Cassie,” I whispered. “Most people . . . they call me—”

  A soft hand cupped my cheek. I froze, not because the touch was unwanted. But because I suddenly wanted to turn into it, to hide my face, to tell her a hundred different things that I couldn’t seem to get past the swelling in my throat. I wanted—

  “You should not have come.”

  It was like a kick in the gut, even though I’d been expecting it. “I . . . I know,” I said, swallowing. “Agnes said . . . she didn’t want to see me, either. She said it let her guess too much, just the fact that I . . . I mean, she said not to come back. And I didn’t. But she couldn’t have helped me with this anyway. I needed to see you . . . to ask—”

  “I know why you’ve come.”

  “You do?” It brought me up short.

  “I am not what I was, Cassandra. But I am not human.”

  No, but I was. It hung in the air, unspoken, but palpable. I wasn’t what she was. I couldn’t see myself in her at all. I never had. I was a lot more like the bumbling guy downstairs, the one who dropped babies—hey, maybe that was what was wrong with me—the one who picked fights he couldn’t win, the one who stubbornly insisted on doing things his own way. It had gotten him killed.

  I wondered what it would get me.

  “I am glad to have seen you.” Her hand was soft, gentle on my cheek for another moment, before falling away. “You should go.”

  I stared up at her, angry tears obscuring the sight of her holding the now calm baby, and wondered why she’d had me at all. Why she’d bothered. Did goddesses get knocked up, too? Hard to believe it had been on purpose, when she clearly could do without me now. Well, too bad. I was here and I was staying here, until I got what I’d come for. I’d gotten precious little in the way of preparation for this crazy life from either of my parents. But I would have this.

  She turned away to put the baby in the crib. “You’re as stubborn as your father.”

  “Then you know I won’t just leave.”

  “You would do well to reconsider.”

  “Like he should have reconsidered, that night in London?” It came out before I could stop it, but I wasn’t sorry. A human—a bumbling, clumsy, ham-fisted human—had saved her that night, from a group of creatures who made the gods shudder. It hadn’t been pretty and it sure as hell hadn’t been elegant, but it had worked.

  Sometimes we mere mortals could surprise you.

  “If he hadn’t been there, I would have died,” she agreed, tucking in the child. “But his life . . . might have been very different.”

  “And mine would have been nonexistent. So forgive me for being glad he was stubborn!”

  She glanced at me. “You even sound like him.”

  Her voice had been fond, almost indulgent. It seemed impossible that she should have cared for someone so . . . not divine. I’d mostly been assuming that she’d been using him in some way. But it had sounded . .

  “How did you two meet?” I asked, because I’d always wondered.

  She didn’t answer. She also didn’t sit down, so I couldn’t, either. Maybe that’s why this felt less like a visit, or even an audience, and more like a bum’s rush to the door.

  Fine, I thought, angrily. But I was going to ask anyway. She could ignore me, but I was going to ask what I damned well liked.

  “It wasn’t that night,” I said defiantly.

  She still didn’t sit, but she leaned against the crib. She looked tired, I thought, and then I pushed it away. Goddesses didn’t get tired . . . did they?

  She smiled slightly. “We met when Agnes brought him back across more than three centuries. From a cellar in London, if you recall.”

  I remembered Agnes taking the furious mage he’d been away, but I hadn’t thought she’d planned to keep him. “Why didn’t she turn him over to the Circle?”

  “The Circle has no facilities for dealing with time travelers, however inept. Such is the responsibility of the Pythian Court. She brought him to London, and shortly thereafter, I met him—in jail.”

  “And fell in love with an inept, time-traveling jailbird?”

  It came out before I could stop it, but she didn’t seem offended. “No one knew he was inept at the time. I was designated to take him food, since he was presumed to be a dangerous dark mage and I could shift away on a second’s notice. Instead, I stayed. And we talked.”

  “About what?” I couldn’t imagine two people who had less in common.

  “The past, the future . . . a hatred of fate, of rules, of suffocating order.”

  “I thought order was a good thing.”

  “It depends on whose.”

  I blinked. That had sounded grim. “I don’t understand.”

  The lightning flashed outside, making her hair glow flame-red for an instant. “You do. You are the child of chaos, Cassie, of turmoil and mayhem and wild uncertainty. Your very existence is proof . . ”

  “Of what?” I asked, when she trailed off.

  “That hope cannot be chained. That fate can be undone!”

  I blinked again. She’d said it fervently, passionately, which was just as well. Because, otherwise, it might have sounded less like prophecy from the lips of a goddess . . . and more like the cheap babble some so-called clairvoyants used in a reading when they didn’t know what to say.

  Or when they were trying to change the subject.

  She smiled
again, as if reading my mind. “You wish to rescue this demon, then?”

  I nodded.

  “Why?”

  “I—what?”

  “It is a simple question, is it not? You are proposing to risk much for him.”

  “He would do it for me.”

  “Would he? They are self-serving creatures, demons—”

  “You could say the same about humans—or gods.”

  An eyebrow rose. “Perhaps. But we are not talking of them. But of a creature who is struggling against his very nature. Sooner or later, he will give in to it. Perhaps it is best if it is among his own kind.”

  “They aren’t his kind! They’re—” I thought about the demons I knew, from the mostly benign to the frankly terrifying. None of which reminded me in the slightest of the man downstairs. “He’s human.”

  “He is part human. It is his other half about which he has yet to learn.”

  “I don’t think he wants to learn about it,” I said dryly. Pritkin had been pretty clear on that point.

  “That is not his choice. We are who we are. All of us are governed by that, to some degree.”

  “And all of us choose to what degree—except him. The choice was made for him. He was taken—”

  “From you.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you resent it.”

  “Yes!”

  “Because he is yours.”

  “Y—” I stopped, suddenly confused. Until I remembered: the gods had always taken humans as their servants, or playthings, or whatever, without a second’s thought. Before her epiphany, Mother probably had, too. But I wasn’t a god, and that wasn’t what had happened here. “No. He’s his own person—”

  “Then should he not decide this for himself?”

  “You don’t understand. He wasn’t given a chance—”

  “But he was. To save you and be damned, or to let you die. He chose the former.”

  “No! He—that wasn’t a choice! It was forced on him by . . . by his father, by circumstance, by—”

  “By fate?”

  “Yes—I guess.”

  “And you wish now to remake his fate.”