The Cassandra Palmer Collection

by Karen Chance

  “And this is very good.” Rosier placed the bowl carefully in his son’s hands. “I explored one of these as a child; enjoyed myself no end. They’re a sort of merpeople, for lack of a better term, in one of the minor water realms.”

  Emrys took the bowl gingerly, with both hands, and was surprised to find it so light. As if it contained air. As if it contained nothing at all. “But . . . how can you—”

  “A spell,” his father said easily. “It captures a being’s memories in the moments before death, preserving them for us to study.”

  “Then I can see through anyone’s eyes?” he heard himself ask, amazement in his voice.

  “It’s better than that,” his father said, putting an arm around him. “For a short time after use, you’ll retain their abilities. In a real sense of the word, you can be anyone.”

  Emrys stared at him, speechless, the possibilities spinning around in his mind like the colors in the bowl. His father saw his expression and clapped him on the shoulder, laughing. “What’s the matter, boy? Didn’t I promise you wonders?”

  John shoved the memory away, brutally enough to make the Irin flinch. “My apologies,” the creature said. “My people communicate mentally, and sometimes I forget . . .”

  John stood there, panting, so angry he could barely see. It hadn’t forgotten a damn thing. Like most of the stronger denizens of the vast network of realms that humans dismissed as “Hell,” it had simply taken what it wanted.

  But it wouldn’t take anything else.

  John’s shields slammed into place, and this time, he didn’t ward with his usual water, but with ice. The temperature of the room plummeted dramatically, enough to freeze the mud that had been tracked in the entrance and to send a frozen scale creeping across the boards. Sid gave a bleat of alarm over by the old cash register, and the Irin raised a single elegant brow.

  “It appears I have offended. Again, my regrets.” The words and tone were contrite, but it flashed him a knowing smile as it turned to leave. “Enjoy your purchase.”

  John stared after the creature as it swept out, wondering how much more it had seen. Enough to guess that its parting shot would hit home. “Don’t pay any attention to him,” Sid said, as John rejoined him at the counter. “He’s just jealous. The Irin can only take one kind of energy, and your line can absorb almost anything. Well, not legally, but you know what I—”

  John had pulled out a map from under his coat as Sid talked. Now he spread it on the counter and grabbed one of the pudgy white hands the shop owner was flailing around. “Just point,” he said harshly. He wanted out of there. He wanted out now.

  “I don’t want to get involved,” Sid protested, while he scribbled something on the portion of the map hidden by the cash register’s iron bulk. “I’m not a warrior. I can’t afford—”

  “I understand, although the council may not. You should expect to receive a visit from them shortly.”

  “They’ll have to catch me first.” Sid leaned across the counter to flip over the OPEN sign in the nearest window. “That was my last delivery and the rest can go hang. I’ve decided to take a long overdue vacation. If you’re smart, you’ll do the same.”

  John took the hint and the map, pocketing it before turning away from the counter. He stepped out of the smothering warmth and back into the blessed chill of the night. He didn’t make a purchase before he left.

  Chapter Four

  B oiled,” Marlowe said, nodding solemnly. “In one of his own pots no less. Henry thought it was fitting.”

  Cassie looked up from unwrapping another parcel to stare at the curly-haired vampire. “Fitting?”

  “Well, the man did try to poison him . . .”

  “Henry VIII boiled one of his own cooks?”

  “Alive.” Marlowe added helpfully.

  Her blue eyes narrowed. “You’re making that up.”

  “I heard it from one of the servants who was there. Said the stench lingered for days. Scouts honor.”

  “You were never a scout.”

  “True.” He grinned. “But then, I never had any honor, either . . .”

  She snorted and went back to tackling her gift. “See? I knew you were joking.”

  Casanova rolled his eyes. It wouldn’t surprise him if Marlowe had lit the match.

  Almost as if he’d heard him, that sharp brown gaze turned in his direction. Casanova quickly went to fix himself a drink, in order to have some excuse to linger. It was just his luck to have arrived at the girl’s suite to find the Consul’s chief spy ensconced on the sofa, amusing her with more of his gruesome stories.

  He didn’t appear to be in a hurry to leave, and he kept glancing at Casanova as if wondering what he was doing there. Casanova was starting to wonder the same thing. Counting him and the spy, there were no fewer than eight master-level vampires prowling around the suite, with two more stationed outside.

  Demon or not, no one was getting through all that.

  A brief exploration of the bar’s fridge turned up three tiny bottles of vodka and he used them all. They were too cold and there was no lime, but today was obviously about hardships. He turned back around to find Marlowe still watching him.

  “Can I get you anything?” he asked acerbically.

  “I was wondering the same about you,” Marlowe said mildly, as Pritkin entered pushing a room service cart loaded with gifts.

  Casanova was about to ask him what he was still doing there when he felt it—a familiar power prickling along his skin like a feathering of knives. There was no mistaking what it was—or where it was coming from. He started to shout a warning, but before he could so much as utter a syllable his vocal cords seized up, as if an invisible hand had suddenly clenched around his throat.

  “More of them?” Cassie moaned, staring at the cart.

  “Don’t you like receiving tokens from your admirers?” Marlowe asked.

  “They’re not my admirers,” she said, frowning. “Half these people were calling for my head less than a month ago. They’re only sucking up now because it looks like I might live long enough to be Pythia, after all. And the rest are trying to bribe me.”

  Casanova exerted enough power to punch through a wall, and managed to jerk his glass all of half an inch. A few drops of clear liquid spilled over the side and slid slowly down his hand, cool, cool, against his skin. But he couldn’t wipe them away. He couldn’t, in fact, seem to move at all.

  “So young to be so cynical,” Marlowe reproached.

  “Oh, really? Look that this,” Cassie held up a blue velvet jewel case with a family seal stamped in gold on top. “Some Dutch count wants me to do a reading, but not for him. Oh, no. It seems that his wife has found out about his long-term mistress and is threatening to throw him out, and she’s the one with the money. So, he wants me to tell her that she got it all wrong—he’s pure as the driven snow.”

  “I don’t blame you for being insulted,” Marlowe said, picking up the case and perusing the contents.

  Cassie nodded. “I know, right? I’ve never even met this guy and he expects me to lie for him!”

  “For something like that, he could at least have sent diamonds.” Marlowe held up a pale blue necklace. “I mean really. Aquamarines!”

  Cassie narrowed her eyes at her guest. “I’m serious, Marlowe! There’s like a metric ton of this stuff, and virtually all of it comes with some kind of strings.”

  The chief spy shrugged. “What did you expect? People have been attempting to bribe Pythias since ancient times. It’s tradition.”

  “And what did those other Pythias do?”

  Marlowe’s cell phone rang. He fished it out of a pocket and glanced at the display. “Took the gifts as their due and told the petitioners whatever they liked.”

  “That’s so wrong!”

  Marlowe rose to his feet and took her hand, kissing it with an ironic air that said he knew such things were out of style—and didn’t give a damn. “You’ll get used to it.”

  Casanova
cursed inwardly, since that was the only way he could do it. The damned creature pretending to be Pritkin was leaning against the wall, arms crossed, with a faint smirk on his face. He was obviously waiting for the chief spy to clear out, which it looked like he was about to do. Casanova didn’t know the details of what was scheduled to happen then, but he could make a damn good guess.

  He didn’t bother trying to appeal to the creature’s better nature, because he didn’t have one. He focused instead on the tight little ball curled beneath his rib cage. “Let me go, Rian.”

  There was no response.

  “Damn it, I know it’s you,” he thought viciously. “Demon lord or no, Rosier doesn’t have access to my body. I only trusted one person enough for that!”

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” His demon, whom he persisted in thinking of as ‘she’, sounded nothing like her usual polished self.

  “Then let me go!”

  “I can’t!” He closed his eyes to see her shaking her head violently, her long dark hair whipping about her panicked face. “He’ll kill you if he has to—he swore as much. But as long as you don’t interfere—”

  “Then Mircea will kill me!”

  “He can’t blame you if you’re not involved!”

  “What the hell do you call this?”

  “Is there something wrong?”

  Casanova opened his eyes to find Marlowe regarding him from barely a foot away. The chief spy was inside his comfort zone, sharp brown eyes steady on his, but at the moment it hardly registered. “Wrong?” he heard himself say. “What could be wrong?”

  Marlowe’s lips twisted. “Around here? Virtually anything.”

  Casanova usually found Marlowe’s suspicious nature a trial, particularly when his people were poking around the casino, looking for God-knew-what. But today he could have really used some of that perpetual paranoia. So, of course, Marlowe gave him one last considering look and turned to go.

  “Rian!” Casanova thought urgently.

  “Mircea won’t kill you. He . . . he’s not that vindictive.” She sounded as if she was trying to convince herself, and doing a poor job of it.

  “And you’re willing to bet my life on that?” Casanova hissed.

  “I don’t have a choice!”

  “Not a chance,” he thought fiercely. “He doesn’t control you. He can give you commands, but you decide whether to follow them or not. And I want you to remember that, when this is over, when I’m paying the price. I want you to remember that you chose.”

  Marlowe reached the door and “Pritkin” moved to Cassie’s side.

  “Could I have a word?” the fake mage asked pleasantly.

  Cassie looked up, obviously still preoccupied by her little ethics problem. “What? Oh, sure.”

  “In private? It won’t take a moment.”

  Cassie nodded and got up, starting for the bedroom. She didn’t notice, Casanova realized, his stomach sinking. She might have, under other circumstances, but she was preoccupied and her guard was down because she was in a place that she believed to be safe. And that damn demon would have her dead before she ever knew otherwise.

  Rian must have thought so, too, because he could feel her panic, like a tremor down his spine. “I don’t know what to do!” she said desperately.

  “I said the same to you once, do you remember?”

  “Yes.” Her voice shook slightly.

  “And do you remember what you told me?”

  She was silent for a long moment, while Cassie reached the door to the bedroom and a vampire opened the one to the hallway for Marlowe. “That you would never regret it,” she whispered.

  “Well? Will I?”

  “I hope not,” she said fervently.

  And then she let him go.

  What followed couldn’t have taken more than a few seconds, but it was blazoned on Casanova’s memory nonetheless. He sprang for the girl, screaming his head off. “Not Pritkin, not Pritkin!”

  Marlowe spun before he’d even gotten all of the words out and was across the room, leaping for the demon while the guards were still trying to figure out what was going on. He almost made it. Rosier flicked out an arm and Marlowe went flying backwards, barely missing Casanova as he hurtled across the room in his own leap.

  But Casanova wasn’t going for Rosier, because he’d last even less time than Marlowe had, and because he didn’t matter, anyway. His job wasn’t to kill the demon but to rescue the girl. So that was what he did, using the split second it took Rosier to deal with the chief spy to snatch Cassie and—

  The room shimmered around him as they tumbled forward, bursting through the bedroom door and hitting the floor—and then kept on going into the middle of a very hard, very cold street. For a moment, there was nothing but confusion—Cassie struggling and Rian screaming and a horrible stench flooding Casanova’s senses, making him want to gag. And then he looked up to see a huge, gelatinous blob of a creature bearing down on him.

  Despite vampire vision, he couldn’t see it very well, the edges going all fuzzy and vague as his eyes tried to focus. But that wasn’t such a bad thing, considering that what he could see was making his flesh want to crawl off his bones and go whimper in a corner. It looked like a man, if men were six hundred pounds of pale, jelly-like flesh that was transparent enough to show another creature crouched inside, surrounded by its host’s ropy intestines.

  Casanova stared at it in disbelief, caught between paralyzing terror and an absurd urge to laugh. It was ghastly and yet unreal, like something out of a bad fifties’ horror flick, its translucent skin gleaming in the dim light of a nearby streetlamp. But then the hunched passenger’s dark red eyes swiveled in his direction, and he suddenly found that he could move, after all.

  “Where the hell are we?” Cassie demanded, pushing tumbled curls out of her eyes.

  “Yes,” Casanova breathed. Then he snatched her up, threw her over his shoulder and ran like all the demons of hell were after him.

  Or one of them, anyway.

  Chapter Five

  T he shop looked a little different from the back, with the shades drawn and the lights extinguished. But Sid’s shiny bald head was the same as it poked out a crack in the door and stared around nervously. “Hurry up!” he hissed, catching sight of John. “Before anyone sees you!”

  John felt like pointing out that he’d just cut through a maze of side streets and across two marketplaces before doubling back, just to ensure that no one would see him. But he didn’t. Because Sid could have left him to find Ealdris on his own, instead of scribbling ‘meet me out back in half an hour’ on the edge of the map.

  He stepped through the door to find that the lights were off inside, too. But the softly glowing contents of the rows of apothecary jars provided just enough illumination to see by, throwing a watery rainbow over the walls, the floor, and Sid’s anxious face. “I couldn’t talk before,” he said, wiping his hands down his apron front. “If Ealdris heard I helped you—”

  “Tell me where to find her and you won’t have to worry about it for long.”

  Sid snorted. “Typical human arrogance!”

  “No. Knowledge she doesn’t have.”

  The little demon didn’t look convinced. “Such as?”

  John spread the map on the counter again. “If she was hiding in the city, the Alû would have found her by now,” he said, referring to the High Council’s feared enforcement squad. “But they haven’t, and none of the tracking spells they sent into the hinterlands returned anything. So, I know where she is.”

  “You think she’s camping in the middle of the desert?” Sid asked archly.

  “I think she’s camping under it.” John’s finger traced an arc across a mountain range to the north of the city. “Long before there was a settlement here, there was some kind of mining concern in the hills. I don’t know what they were taking out of there, but it was extensive. I came across a few of the tunnels as a boy—”

  “That’s what you were doing when no one coul
d find you? Exploring the desert? You might have been killed!”

  “But I wasn’t. And that gives me an advantage she doesn’t know I have. As do these.”

  Sid looked dubiously at the yellowish blocks of explosives John was pulling out of a backpack and piling on his nice clean counter. “And you think this lot will let you take her on?”

  “If she’s like most of the older demons, yes.”

  That won him a narrow-eyed look. “And how is that?”

  “Powerful but not resourceful.”

  Sid huffed out a laugh. “I’ve never known your father to have a problem in that area. And he’s nearly as old as our missing queen.”

  “The incubi are different,” John admitted. “They have to build relationships with their prey unless they want to spend all their time hunting. And humans are nothing if not unpredictable. Interacting with them requires the incubi to be flexible, inventive, even somewhat open-minded.”

  “Unlike Ealdris. You think she won’t expect an assault with human weapons.”

  John nodded, not wanting to elaborate and insult the creature. After all, Sid was fairly ancient, too. But as a shopkeeper, he also had to be flexible, at least to a point, to deal with so many different species. That wasn’t true of most of the older demons, who tended to turn more and more inward as the centuries passed. By the time they reached Ealdris’ age, they were virtually unable to comprehend any ways other than their own.

  It was what had John worried, because she should have done exactly as she had last time and headed for Earth as soon as she broke free. Demons gained strength through one thing and one thing only—feeding. She needed food, and quickly, if she was to maintain her independence. And Earth was by far the richest source available.

  But instead, she’d come here. It was like a starving man passing up a banquet hall to search for scraps in the Dumpster outside. It didn’t make sense, and every time an ancient demon surprised him, John got edgy. And when he got edgy, he tended to hedge his bets, which was why he’d packed enough C-4 to bring down a mountain.