by Karen Chance
“If you laugh,” he told her shakily. “So help me…”
“I assure you, I don’t find this to be funny.” A frown appeared on the lovely forehead as she stared after the Allu. “Something is wrong.”
“Wrong?” Casanova quavered, trying for heat but mostly managing a breathless sort of wonder. “We’re alive! I’d say something is very right!”
“We’re alive because they weren’t after us,” Rian countered. “If you had not run, they might not have chased you at all.”
“Well, forgive me for panicking a little,” Casanova said, regaining some of his indignation. “When suddenly confronted by a group of the things that just killed me--half a dozen times!”
“I was not assigning blame, simply offering an explanation,” she said mildly. “But they are looking for someone. I’ve never seen so many of the council’s guards deployed at one time before.”
“One guess as to who the target is,” Casanova muttered, struggling to get back to his feet. Trust Rosier to have the whole damned guard after him. Like his son, he seemed to attract trouble.
Rian didn’t comment, but her lips tightened. And her eyes got that faraway look that meant she was communicating with one of her own kind. “It’s worse than that,” she told him, after a moment.
“How does that work?” Casanova asked, honestly bewildered.
“Emrys is with him.”
Chapter Ten
“You raving lunatic!” Rosier said, diving for cover behind a stack of trash cans.
They smelled foul, but not as much as when John sent a fireball into them, causing a burning wash of overripe fruit, spoiled meat and who knew what else to cascade across the already filthy alley. It also tipped a crate of empty bottles over onto its side. Mostly empty, John amended, as the superheated remains of whatever poison the locals imbibed blew out the sides of their receptacles like a line of firecrackers going off. And imbedded most of their remains into Rosier’s shins.
“Son of a bitch!” he snarled, glaring from his bloody calves to John. “What the hell is the matter with you? I took an oath, remember?”
“After you posted the bomb that killed her,” John snarled back.
“Don’t be ridiculous!” his father told him, right before throwing a spell so bright, it looked like a flare had gone off in the alley.
John managed to get a shield up in time, but was nonetheless blown off his feet by the impact and back several yards. He flipped and jumped back up—and then had to throw himself down again as the deflected spell hit the side of the brothel. A blast of old bricks and mortar shrapnelled the alley, and the madam cursed.
“Hey! Hey, you gonna pay for that!”
But John wasn’t listening. He was too busy hugging the ground to avoid the trash can lids, which had flown up in defiance of gravity and sailed at his head. They came out of the dust cloud like so many burning UFOs, but mostly missed him, skimming by overhead. And his shields deflected the ones that didn’t.
Right into the group of bouncers, who had just muscled their way out of the brothel.
“Well, shit,” Rosier said, staring at them. And then at John. “Look what you did!” he said accusingly.
John didn’t answer, being occupied evading the huge tail that had just lashed out at him, lightening quick, and threatened decapitation with a single stroke. And then the odd shaped spear that came crashing down onto the stones, striking sparks off where his body had just been. And then the screaming mass of girls and their clients who started pouring through the now defunct wall, desperate to get away.
“No, no, no!” the madam yelled, wading into the fray and trying to direct her people. “They pay first. They pay first!”
John saw an opening and jumped onto the back of the nearest spear carrier, who was bent over trying to pull his weapon out of the pavement, and from there to the top of the Dumpster. His knee almost gave way again, but he managed a flying leap off the other side, tackling the slimy bastard who was trying to use the confusion as a cover for a quick retreat. And who didn’t make it.
“Get off me!” Rosier snarled, rolling over and trying to smash him the face with a boot.
John returned the favor by throwing him into the wall, which turned out to be lucky for more than one reason. It shut his father up momentarily, and allowed them both to roll behind the Dumpster and avoid the fight that had erupted between the bouncers and some of the patrons. The bouncers were bigger and better armed, but the patrons were more numerous and determined not to pay for a truncated good time. The alley was fast turning into a war zone.
And that included his makeshift bolt-hole, where John found himself hit with a paralysis spell.
It didn’t take completely, his shields still being up. But it left him sluggish and caused the knife he’d been planning to put through his father’s eye to hit the wall instead. It stuck in some of the old mortar, and his wrist was captured in an iron grip before he could yank it back out.
“Listen to me!” Rosier hissed. “I haven’t harmed that annoying child. I don’t know what’s going on, but you have to believe—”
John stopped his lying mouth with a fist.
He would have followed up the advantage, but a man with trousers around his ankles kicked him in the head on his way past, and then tripped and staggered into the nearest bouncer. Who sent him flying into the Dumpster with one arm, and in the process spied the two people hiding behind it. Bugger!
John threw a spell that stopped the creature’s spear all of a foot from his face, and then reversed it, sending it back into the huge, thrashing tail. It pinned its owner to the ground momentarily, and before he could wrench free, he was jumped by a bunch of disgruntled patrons. John didn’t wait around to see who won, but dragged his bastard of a father inside the brothel and slammed him against the wall.
“Are you a fool?” Rosier demanded wildly. “Why would I go after her again? What could it possibly gain me?”
That made John pause for an instant, since Rosier was entirely self-serving. It was his most defining characteristic. “She almost killed you once.”
“You’ve almost killed me half a dozen times,” was the angry response. “And yet you’re still alive. And she also saved my life, if you’ll recall. I believe that makes us even.”
“The council hates her. You said so yourself!”
“Yes, and they’d love a replacement. Someone more…sane. But they recognize that she did them a favor, and they’re willing to wait and see.”
“You lie!”
“Why? In the name of whatever you hold holy, why would I want to have anything to do with that walking time bomb? Every time I get near her, this,” he waved an arm wildly. “This is how I end up.”
“If you didn’t try to kill her, why are you injured?”
“Because you just slung me around an alley for five minutes?”
“Don’t give me that! You were hurt before! Why else would you be here?” John gestured around at the bare, unpainted walls, the chandelier composed of a dozen strings of bare bulbs knotted together, and the graffiti-covered bar. Even for hell, the place was a pit.
“You’d know why,” Rosier said heatedly. “If you’d bothered to go by my court before trying to kill me!”
“And what would I know?”
“That it isn’t there anymore! It was firebombed a few hours ago by the damned Allu. And no, I don’t know why. I was rather more concerned with getting out alive, and then eluding a few of my loyal servants, who decided to see the disaster as an opportunity for promotion! I barely managed to make it here alive.”
John stared at him, his head reeling, and not just because of the kick. Rosier sounded sincere, but of course that meant sod all. Like most of his kind, he had elevated lying to an art form. One he had long ago perfected.
John wanted to end him. He’d rarely wanted anything more. His head hurt; his leg throbbed with every heartbeat; but neither was anything close to the pain of knowing how badly he’d failed. Cassie’s
death was his fault as much as his father’s, and it burned like brimstone in his gut.
“Emrys, listen—”
But John wasn’t. The image of another young woman he’d cared about, and also utterly failed, rose up in front of his eyes. And it was suddenly all he could see, her screams all he could hear.
“You expect me to believe that someone attacked you,” he rasped. “At the exact moment that Dante’s was also being hit? You actually expect me to believe that?”
“I expect you to use your head,” Rosier said, eyes flickering oddly. “Cassie has enemies; I have enemies. But we only have one enemy. Damn it, boy! I taught you better than this! Stop wallowing in sentiment and think.”
But John couldn’t. He heard the creature’s words, but the meaning hit the old well of anguish and self-hate and seething, simmering resentment he carried around like a weight. One that, right now, was threatening to crush him. He needed to throw it off, needed to think, but the rage that had been building since he found that cracked and ruined necklace rose up with irresistible force.
And swamped him.
“You lie!” he breathed, and readied the spell that would end this. Finally, utterly--
And had a blinding pain shoot through his head, hard enough to drop him to his knees.
“Cut it a little closer next time, why don’t you?” he heard his father snarl at someone behind him.
And then nothing.
Chapter Eleven
“He’s coming around,” a woman said.
“Where is it?” a man’s voice demanded sharply.
“I don’t…give me a second,” another man said, sounding distracted.
“Damn it! Why don’t you have it ready?”
“Well, don’t blame me! He has the hardest head in existence. He should have been out another half hour, at least.”
“You’re lucky he had the shield up, or he would be out permanently. And then I would be forced to gut you. Now give it to me!”
John opened his eyes to see something dangling in front of his face. It was gold and red, glinting in the low light of a bare bulb overhead. And cold like everything in the Shadowland when it grazed his cheek. It was also hauntingly familiar. He tried to raise a hand to grasp it, but nothing seemed to happen.
“Give it a moment. The vampire almost took your head off,” someone told him.
John didn’t think he had much choice. The combination of two head knocks in a row on top of blood loss, a soul hit and a stun spell had him swimming around in the realm of the barely conscious. But after a few seconds, his flailing hand managed to bump into the prize, and it swung closer to his face. Just about the time his eyes uncrossed.
And saw the impossible.
“It’s a trick,” he rasped, after a stunned second, and someone sighed.
John focused on Rian, in the form of a hazy outline of a beautiful woman. She was standing to the left of the bed he appeared to be lying on. It was Spartan and roughly twin-sized, and barely fit a tiny closet of a bedroom. One of the brothel’s, he assumed, judging by the smell. And if Rian was here--
“I told you so.” Casanova’s scowling form came into focus on the other side of the bed, standing in front of a small window. He wasn’t dangling anything, though, and neither was Rian. Which meant—
“Hold him!” Rosier’s voice said sharply, as John tried surging up. But Casanova had his arms, holding him down as Rosier shoved what John now identified as a gaudy necklace with a dull red center stone at him. “It’s real,” he said urgently. “Test it for yourself. The vampire brought it.”
“It’s true, John,” Rian chimed in, loyal as ever to the creature who’d spawned her.
“You lie!” John said, struggling against the vampire’s strength. “I saw the real one. It was broken, cracked, ruined—”
“That was only the first time,” Casanova said, and then glared as John got in a good shot to the jaw.
Some of the fog in John’s head seemed to clear, as the vampire’s words penetrated. “What first time?” he panted. “What are you talking about?”
“If you’ll cease trying to murder everyone, we’ll explain,” his father said dryly, coming into view on Rian’s side of the bed.
He looked slightly more beaten up than before, with a dirty face, a puffy jaw and two black eyes that ran together, like a superhero mask. But otherwise, he was right as rain. John growled.
“Oh, come off it,” Rosier said, sitting on the bed, and tossing the necklace onto John’s chest. “What? Did I pull that out of my ass?”
“Bet it wouldn’t be the first time,” Casanova muttered, as John closed his hand on it.
There was no way to tell if it was real. It looked the same, but of course it would. Rosier had seen Cassie’s talisman more than once. Despite what he claimed, for someone of his skill, reproducing it would be easy.
“We don’t have time for this,” Rian warned, glancing out the window.
“Do you have an alternative?” Rosier asked. “We can’t drag him through the streets unwilling, and we can’t transition in the heart of the city.”
“It wouldn’t do us any good if we could,” Casanova muttered. “The damned casino is full of Allu, too.”
Rian looked at John, her pretty face worried. “Your father is telling the truth; we brought the stone, Carlos and I. Your pythia put it in his hands herself. She said it would convince you. Was she wrong?”
“You do yourself no credit, Rian,” John sneered. “I know what I saw!”
“And you saw truly. But you did not see all.”
“Oh for—just tell him already!” Casanova said, breaking in. And then he did it for her. “Cassie did something at the last second, some kind of spell. It stuck us in a time loop with everything repeating every hour and fourteen minutes and twenty-nine seconds, including the bunch of maniac Allu going around collecting heads! We finally found a hiding spot they mostly overlooked and Marsden said—”
“Jonas?” John frowned. He wouldn’t have expected them to bring him into their lie. “What does he have to do with this? And why would the Allu--”
“I’ll tell you if you shut up!” Casanova said, a little wildly. John belatedly noticed that the vampire was looking almost worse than Rosier. His jacket was missing, his hair was covered in dust and his face and shirt were filthy. And there was an odd odor clinging to—
Rian cleared the throat she didn’t have.
“It comes down to this,” she told him quickly. “Cassandra is trapped in a time loop made of her own power. The only way for her to be free is to complete the spell. But she can only do that if all the people on whom it was inadvertently cast are once more assembled.”
“What people?” John asked.
“The ones in the damned room with her at the time,” Casanova said. “That’s why her Loftiness dispatched me to hell, in order to find you and whoever was possessing Marco—”
“That’s easily done,” John said, grabbing his father by the shirt front.
“It is no such thing,” Rosier said testily. “Let us try this again, and do see if that vaunted intelligence of yours can grasp this one simple concept, would you? I. Was. Not. There.”
“Then who was?”
“Sid, presumably.”
“Sid?” John stared at him in disgust.
“Think about it. Who thwarted his well-laid plans to destroy the council, and half the city along with it? I did, with some help from you and the girl. And of course he wants revenge.”
John didn’t bother commenting that, as usual, his father had managed to make himself the hero of the piece when he’d actually been a villain. Instead, he concentrated on the more relevant point. “If he so much as shows his nose here, he’s dead. How—”
“But he didn’t show it, did he?” Rosier asked. “He’s likely been on Earth, feeding up and plotting revenge. And somewhere along the line, he realized that he couldn’t pick us off one by one without the others getting suspicious. If he killed me, you’d
know something was up, and vice versa. Therefore he decided to take us all at once.”
“But he didn’t take us,” John gritted out. “The bomb was meant for Cassie—”
“And in the process, Sid no doubt hoped that you would die as well. But he couldn’t be sure that she would open the bomb in your presence, therefore he took back up.”
“In the form of the council’s own guards?” John looked at him incredulously. “Where did he get them?”
“From the council. He was pretending to be me, after all.”
“How could he possibly—”
“He’s an old adherent of our house,” Rosier reminded him. “It wouldn’t be difficult for someone who has known me for a few thousand years to impersonate me convincingly.”
“Except that no one goes around impersonating council members!”
“Which is likely how he got away with it. It would be a death sentence if caught, so as you say, nobody does it. But what if someone doesn’t care if he’s caught? What if all he really cares about anymore is revenge?”
John shook his head. “That makes no bloody sense! If the Allu believed Sid to be you, then they were your allies. Why suddenly turn on you? There’s no reason—”
“There’s every reason—if you don’t assume a human mindset. We’ve discussed this before,” his father said, slipping back into the lecture mode that John especially hated. “Not all creatures think like you do. Your viewpoint isn’t the only viewpoint; your logic isn’t the only logic.”
“Then what is Allu logic?”
“To do the will of the council. And a council member had told them to come along on the assassination of a known threat.” He shrugged. “They went.”
“But you had taken an oath—on the council itself—not to hurt Cassie!”
“Yes, but that was my look to, wasn’t it?” Rosier asked, as if that were obvious. “It wasn’t up to them to look after my oath for me. If I broke it, they would kill me, certainly, as the vow demanded. But until then, I was perfectly within my rights to require their assistance.”