by Dima Zales
“Leave. Now,” I order in a honey-laced voice.
He doesn’t.
Instead, he looks at his photo, then at me, then grunts and shines with energy.
I stare openmouthed.
His clothes rip into shreds, and the man is replaced by a giant wolf-like thing standing on all fours.
Oh, great. He’s a werewolf.
I back away again, my heart hammering in my chest with the primal fear inherited from ancient survivors of saber-toothed tigers.
Even before this change, the guy seemed big and scary. Now, he’s an obscene bundle of muscles, teeth, and claws—and bigger than I thought a werewolf could get. Even bigger than the beast who was helping Nero during the battles on the dragon world, and that guy was monstrous.
Growling, the intruder bares his dagger-like teeth and advances on me.
My fangs extending automatically, I dodge a swipe of his massive paw—so instead of my stomach, his claws disembowel the corner of the bed.
There goes that security deposit.
He swipes at me with his other paw—but I twist to the side with supernatural speed, and the dresser gets decimated instead of my face.
Desperate, I viciously kick him in the ribcage.
At least I mean to. But before my foot connects, the guy dodges the strike. Then, moving faster than something this size should be able to, he clamps his teeth on my thigh.
Crying out in pain, I lose my balance and smack my head on the corner of a nightstand. Stars explode in my vision, and when I recover, I realize the beast is dragging me by my leg through the room.
Flailing, I hit his giant head as hard as I can.
His teeth clamp on me tighter. Growling low in his throat, he jerks his head, throwing me into the air like a dog would a chew toy.
There’s a moment of weightlessness, and then my back hits the window.
Glass explodes around me, lacerating my skin as I grapple for the window frame—only to get my palms sliced to shreds with the sharp edges of the glass as the momentum carries me out.
I drop like a stone, and as the air whooshes past my ears, I catch a glimpse of the ground below me.
Far below me.
Like twenty stories below me.
Even with vampire healing, there’s no way I will survive.
Chapter Eight
Back in Rasputin’s apartment, I stare at Nero, Claudia, and Rasputin in shock.
Who was that guy? Why will he try to kill me?
Also—perhaps less important—why the hell was he dressed like that? And what was up with that hair?
I know some of the eighties’ fashion is back, but not to this degree.
And why was he holding a paper photograph? Is he the last person on Earth without a smartphone?
Before I can voice any of this, Rasputin’s face goes from contemplative to furious.
Opening his eyes, he jackknifes to his feet and smacks the table with his palm, all while muttering Russian expletives under his breath.
“What’s wrong with him?” Claudia asks, staring at him wide-eyed.
“Maybe he saw the same thing I just did?” I say. “Or maybe he didn’t see a way for me to escape falling under Lilith’s sire bond?”
“Worse,” Rasputin growls. “It’s Nostradamus. He attacked me in Headspace. I’m without power again.”
“That bastard.” I jump to my feet. “I wonder if he was also behind what I just foresaw? I mean, he already hangs out with one werewolf, so maybe—”
“Wait,” Nero says. “What are you talking about?”
As I tell them, Rasputin sits down in a defeated slump, and Nero’s face darkens.
“You sure you’ve never seen that guy before?” Nero asks sternly when I finish.
“Of course, I’m sure.” I cross my arms over my chest. “I’d remember him. Trust me.”
Nero drums his fingers on the table. “And you’re also sure he was bigger than Eduardo?”
I frown. “Who’s Eduardo?”
“He helped me the other day,” Nero says. “He’s the leader of his pack and a Councilor. I didn’t think his kind could get bigger than he is.”
“I think my attacker was bigger,” I say. “But then he was right in front of me, so maybe he just seemed bigger thanks to all that adrenaline?”
Nero’s jaw tightens. “And where was I in your vision?”
“I have no idea,” I say.
His eyes narrow. “Why were you by yourself? Which hotel was it?”
“No clue.”
His hands start to curl into fists. Noticing it, he takes a deep breath and uncurls them. “Fine. Now that I know what’s coming, we’re going to be attached at the hip. And you’re going to stay away from all hotels from now on.”
“Yes, boss,” I say. “Anything else?”
“You will go back into Headspace and try to learn more about this attack,” he says.
“Sure,” I say. “I was going to suggest the same thing.”
“Good,” Nero says. “What are you waiting for?”
He and everyone else stare at me expectantly.
I close my eyes to lessen the impact of all that pressure, then even out my breath and focus.
I end up in Headspace right away, surrounded by shapes that look identical to the werewolf attack vision.
Score.
I don’t even have to do anything.
My subconscious—or whatever—got me the shapes I need.
Before I get a chance to reach out to them, a new shape shows up between me and my target.
It’s an entity that radiates power and regret.
A familiar entity.
I’ve seen it—him—in Headspace recently, when I summoned him to ask for help from the chorts.
It’s Nostradamus.
And thanks to Rasputin’s experience, I can guess why he’s here.
He wants my powers.
Well, he’s not going to get them.
I begin backing away, figuring if I metaphysically touch myself, he can’t snare me into a Headspace battle.
Only it’s too late.
He’s already grabbing onto me with multiple ethereal wisps, like a hungry octopus latching onto a crayfish.
I strain to get free.
He sprouts more and more wisps, and his hold strengthens.
I resist for as long as I can, but then something gives and Nostradamus reels me into the joining.
Chapter Nine
I find myself in Nostradamus’s memory once more.
I/he is bound in chains and in considerable pain, but what’s interesting is that he still has eyes to see with—which is how I know we’re in some sort of dank dungeon cell.
What’s even more interesting is whom he’s looking at.
It’s Tartarus himself and one of his children—except I only know this because that’s what Nostradamus thinks as he looks up.
To me, neither Tartarus nor the so-called child look the way I’d expect.
The “child” is a grown man with wild eyes and a permanent-seeming smirk on his face, while Tartarus looks like a kind and wise old woman.
As if to answer my confusion, Nostradamus thinks, “Tartarus is not Cassandra. She died ages ago. Everyone sees someone sacred to them when gazing upon this monster. That is all there is to it. He isn’t Cassandra. He’s not worthy of wearing her face.”
Interesting.
I thought Tartarus just sucks energy out of humans—but I guess he also looks different to everyone.
I wonder who he’d look like to me?
“It’s unfortunate your wife and son died,” Tartarus says, and his voice also sounds like that of Cassandra. “I’ve long wanted to have a seer among my children. And now, instead of three seers to breed, I only have you.”
Breed a seer?
Wow.
That’s just like Baba Yaga—and she was the worst person I’ve ever met.
Nostradamus is also triggered by that phrase, but in his case, a bunch of disturbing m
emories flit through his mind, and I, being in his head right now, can unfortunately glimpse them.
All are based on visions he foresaw once it was too late, when he was already in Tartarus’s clutches.
Visions in which his family survived Tartarus’s invasion.
In those unlikely futures, his wife would’ve been raped and forced to have child after child. And if that weren’t horrific enough, when the offspring failed to have either Tartarus’s powers or seer powers, they would’ve been killed.
His son’s fate wouldn’t have been as dire. The boy would’ve been more willing to sire children with one of Tartarus’s daughters—the one with succubus powers. Here again, though, no powers in his offspring would’ve meant death for them.
When it came to himself, Nostradamus did not see a single future where he cooperated with the breeding program.
Instead, he found one where he could escape.
The price would be his eyes, but the benefits are that Tartarus will not have a seer in his army in any foreseeable future. More importantly, by surviving, Nostradamus will be able to stockpile power until he has enough to get his revenge.
“I think he’s ignoring you, sire,” the wild-eyed one says to Tartarus mockingly.
“He’s probably wondering why he didn’t foresee his capture,” Tartarus says to the guy, then looks down at Nostradamus. “It was all thanks to Lug here.” He nods at his “child.” “He’s the bane of your kind’s existence—a probability manipulator—and I had him shield me from you.”
I/Nostradamus narrows his eyes at Lug and mentally adds him to the list of people he’ll subject to his vengeance.
Seeing the look, Lug walks over, grins like a maniac, and savagely kicks me/Nostradamus in the head, ending the memory.
Another memory starts.
In this one, Nostradamus has already lost his sight.
I/He is standing somewhere, touching something on the wall.
Ah. His fingers are reading French Braille on a card that states: Plan Ultime.
Nodding, he focuses in a way familiar to us both, then leaps into Headspace.
Fascinated, I witness as Nostradamus does something I haven’t done before: instead of focusing on the essence of a person, he dwells on the essence of the room he’s in. I didn’t even think a room can have an essence. Additionally, he’s targeting a time period of a millisecond into the future—but this I already knew how to do.
A cloud of safe-seeming shapes appear in front of him, and he activates one.
In the vision that starts, he’s in a large empty room with corkboards covering every wall.
This is the place he was just in, the essence of which he was thinking about.
Marius—Nostradamus’s guide dog/werewolf—is here as well, slurping water from a five-gallon bowl on the floor.
This is when it hits me.
In this vision, Nostradamus can actually see.
He mentioned seer abilities still work for him, but this memory puts it in perspective.
By glimpsing such near future, he can actually experience vision again—which brings up interesting questions about seer powers that I don’t have time for.
Ignoring Marius, Nostradamus stares at the nearest board, which has hundreds of cards pinned to it, most of which are connected by colored string.
Each card has writing in Braille and regular cursive French, and the one that says Plan Ultime is the center piece.
What catches my attention is a set of cards to the side—cards that have my name on them.
Beatrice, says one of the cards connected by a red string to my name. Below her name is a drawing of a woman with black eyes and a heart-shaped face. Her Cognizant power is listed—necromancer—and the date and time she’s going to come to Earth and entangle with me.
A red string connects this card with another. This one has the date and time when Ariel and I battled Beatrice at the Bodies exhibit in Vegas.
Wow.
Nostradamus knew about my misadventures before they happened.
There’s also a card and a drawing of the pretty face of the dreamy-eyed Harper—which lists her as a succubus and Beatrice’s lover—and there’s a card for when she tried to kill Felix and me.
And the pattern keeps going.
There’s a card for Baba Yaga, and a bunch of cards summarizing my encounters with the witch.
A card for the deathly thin Koschei—Baba Yaga’s hard-to-kill minion.
A card for Gaius—Baba Yaga’s Enforcer ally and the person who got Ariel addicted to vampire blood.
There’s even a card for Darian—the seer who got me into my misadventures, with a note that states that Darian will be mistaken when he thinks he has a future with me. According to Nostradamus’s note, Darian has no future.
Wow.
How far into the future does this go?
Is what will happen to me later today on this wall?
I will Nostradamus’s head to turn more to the right, but he doesn’t. And before I can see how much more he predicted, the memory terminates.
Chapter Ten
The memory part of the joining is over, as I’m in that telltale emptiness that is the joining environment, and there’s a synapse-hologram of Nostradamus floating in front of me. As per usual, he’s attached to that uncanny shape-entity that is his Headspace representation.
“You.” My anger makes me drop a few feet. “You’re here to drain my powers, aren’t you?”
“I’m sorry,” he says. “This is the only way to make sure you don’t ruin everything.”
“Your Plan Ultime, you mean? I saw your memories. I know about that.”
He floats down, a worried grimace twisting his face. “All the more reason you have to be neutralized. This is the last I will say to you. I’m going to meditate, and I suggest you do the same.”
To punctuate his words, he folds himself into a lotus position and just floats there, a Buddha-like expression on his face.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I shout and float toward him. “You’re not just going to ignore me.”
He doesn’t react.
I shout obscenities at him.
His expression doesn’t change.
I fly toward him, reaching to strangle him, but my hands go right through his neck.
I resume yelling and cursing—all of which he ignores.
Eventually, I get tired and just float there. Instead of wasting time on venting, I might as well use this downtime to think of my next move.
Focusing inwardly, I relax.
With my mind calmer, I get an idea of how I can thwart Nostradamus—but I instantly banish it, in case he can somehow read my thoughts in this strange place.
Grudgingly, I attempt meditating as he suggested.
It’s surprisingly easy to do here, thanks to feeling weightless and having no external distractions.
Despite earlier anger, I actually feel serene in no time.
This goes on for a while, but then, after what feels like a weekend meditation retreat, the Headspace battle finally terminates.
Chapter Eleven
I’m back in the kitchen.
Nero, Claudia, and Rasputin stare at me questioningly.
“The bastard did it to me too,” I say. “Showed up and forced me into a Headspace battle.”
Rasputin smacks the table again, and Nero’s hands curl into fists.
Just to be sure things are as bad as they seem, I attempt going into Headspace.
Nope.
I can’t.
“No power left,” I confirm. “But at least I saw some of Nostradamus’s memories.”
Everyone looks intrigued, so I tell them about the encounter with Tartarus and what I glimpsed on the corkboard.
“The memories I experienced were not as useful,” Rasputin says. “In one, I saw how that trickster—Lug—blinded Nostradamus, which, ironically, opened a small window of opportunity for him to escape.”
“What about that corkboard?” I ask.
“Did you see it?”
“No,” Rasputin says. “All the other memories I saw were older, mostly of happy times when his family was alive.”
“I saw one like that too, another time,” I say, feeling a pang of empathy that the manipulative bastard doesn’t deserve. “He was with his son.”
“How much do you know about this Cassandra, the woman Nostradamus saw Tartarus as?” Nero asks. “Is that a lead?”
“According to Nostradamus, she’s dead,” I say. “So I doubt she can help.”
Grabbing the vodka bottle, Rasputin takes a healthy gulp. “Cassandra was Nostradamus’s Mentor,” he says when he stops grimacing from the burn. “He must’ve looked up to her—which is why Nostradamus saw what he saw. Rumor is, when you look at Tartarus, you see someone you respect and revere.”
“Right,” I say. “Nostradamus was thinking something along those lines. He thought he saw Cassandra because Tartarus makes people see someone sacred to them.”
“I thought that was just a myth,” Nero says. “They say humans see him as a god or some famous prophet—which is how he gets the worship on each world so easily, especially on worlds with mass media technology, like TV.”
“Wow,” I say. “So on Earth, people would see him as something like the Buddha or Jesus?”
“Probably,” Nero says. “And children might see Santa Claus.” He looks at Rasputin. “Or in Russia, Grandfather Frost.”
“Would that power work through TV?” I ask. “Would every single person looking at a TV screen see someone different?”
“It’s likely,” Nero says.
“So odd,” I say. “I mean, if everyone sees something different, it’s not shapeshifting, like with Kit.”
“He’s not a shapeshifter.” Rasputin looks at the vodka bottle, but doesn’t drink. “His power is more like extremely strong glamour.”
“Crazy,” I mutter as I picture the pandemonium that will result from his arrival on Earth. He’ll go on TV, and videos of the Second Coming—or whatever the media will call it—will go viral in a heartbeat.
He’ll be worshipped in no time.
“Even rumors never mentioned his children,” Nero says, bringing my attention back to our discussion. “Based on Sasha’s vision, it seems like he doesn’t take over worlds by himself, as everyone said.”